Okay now it says live. Now I need to turn the camera on though for for it to stay live I believe okay okay camera is on and we're on live can you check not yet no okay check check one two three one two three. We will have the people presenting over here when you're presenting. Oh sorry. Hello. Yep. Can you hear me now? Hang on I just got to get this plug in here. I'm going to plug it into a different port here because I've had that before. Yeah you did. Not to be nitpicky but that example of the room change is an example of a lack of attention to detail. I mean it's my it's minor it really is minor but you know like it's just. Yeah because now we're talking serious dollars. Right. I don't know. The computer she means. Oh I don't know. I stepped out. Check check. All right. That's nice. I just want to convene the budget hearing 507. First item on the agenda is the agenda. Is there a motion? Second. Moved to adopt the agenda by Councilor Rue. Second by Councilor Tracy. All those in favor of the agenda. Item number two is public forum. Anyone that wishes to speak in the public forum? I do. Yeah come on out. Thank you Kurt. Good to see you. Nice to see all of you. I am Gail Morrow. I am a board member at the Heineberg Senior Community Center. And I want to say that Beth Hammond who was our Executive Director wishes that she was here. But she had a concert for her daughter, a spring concert at Essex schools. But I do have a few words that she would like to convey to you tonight. Because of past support from the City of Burlington and the United Way, the Heineberg Community Senior Center has created many opportunities for older adults to experience a quality of life. Our gratitude to the city is great. With a sudden and unexpected loss of United Way meal and nutrition funding, we are looking for opportunities that will not only ensure our future success, but support a wide variety of center programs while increasing reach throughout Burlington's aging population. Years ago, the United Way grant was originally awarded to us for our congregate meals. However, we are now experiencing a great need for our many other programs and services. In just one year, all existing programs without exception have seen a 75 to 100% increase in attendance. We have made changes to our nutrition program including ways to accommodate the older, sorry because I'm talking about me right now, the younger older adult participants who requested gluten free or vegan entrees, all the while offering the traditional menu favored by our 80 and 90 year olds. This past year, our center has responded to changing interests and needs by adding 10 additional programs and activities to our monthly calendar. In total, Heineberg Senior Community Center offers programs to over 500 participants with an average of 300 unduplicated people in a weekly attendance. 26 programs and services within the following areas, physical health, mental well-being, cultural and education, meals, nutrition, creative arts and recreation. This year, we will investigate the following to bring about financial stability. We will investigate a merger with another organization such as the Champlain Senior Center, Burlington Parks Recreation Waterfront to develop our already valuable partnerships in order to consolidate operation efforts, reduce cost, and significantly increase what we are able to offer, both participants and our aging community members. Our space in the new North End could also support the Miller Center programs as needed. Our centers have been connected in the past and which allowed directors to focus on programming and participants. We will look into increasing our monthly rentals. We have recently remodeled both our upper and lower levels thanks to CEDO. Our building is a welcoming and accessible place for a variety of activities. Currently, we have four ongoing rentals, Jazzercise, Vermont Dance Tribe, North Shore Community Group, and Burlington Songwriters Group. These rentals total 13,000 annually in addition to our one-time rentals. We will increase fundraisers that bring the community together to raise awareness and essential funds. Examples of efforts already underway include our Walk of Ages fundraiser, Holiday Bazaar, Annual Appeal, and a Lake Monsters baseball game. This year, we are also introducing an international evening celebration with a variety of cultures in our community. To ensure fundraising success, we have developed fundraising committees for each individual fundraiser. Ongoing fundraising efforts include online donations and a planned giving bequest program. We will investigate and continue to advocate for city funding to help with our payroll. We have two part-time staff people, an executive director and a center coordinator. Our payroll for this small staff is $60,000 before Medicare and Social Security. Our ask from the city in this transition year of no United Way funding is $64,000, which reflects a $24,000 difference from last year's city allocation. It is imperative that we move forward to meet the changing demographics that we are seeing and not go backwards. In recent months, several community partners have noted how nice it is to see us thriving and we agree and are quite proud. We would hate to lose momentum or allow lack of funding to be the reason we can no longer effectively respond to our aging population's needs. As I leave, I want to leave you with this one statistic because it kind of caught me off guard when I heard about it this winter. This is, according to AARP data, loneliness has the same negative health impact as one person smoking 17 cigarettes a day. Every day at the center, that's what we do. We combat loneliness. Thanks for your time. Thank you, Gail. Thank you, Kurt. All right. Anyone else on the phone form? If none, we'll close out right between the phone form and three, the court form for all of the telecoms. Please. Please, please. Thank you. Good, thank you. So, Rich is just going to open up on the tab one. Yeah, that's good. So, tab one, although it's a 19 FY19 budget presentation, I always start with FY18 to give you some context. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time going through lots of detailed figures here. As you all know, BT had a few distractions this year and that was, if you like, impacted a lot of us. Having said all of that, BT the business continues to perform well. It continues an unbroken run of growth and improvement in financial results. It's about eight years long now. And although we didn't hit our revenue target for the year, which was $10 million, we did hit $9.7 million. And the $10 million included a $200,000, if you like, task because we just didn't know. We felt less when we ended last year. We added 750 net new subscribers. We thought there was a chance we might get to a thousand this year. We put it in as a task because we weren't sure we didn't make it. Having said that, we actually built in a lot more costs so that there was no additional profit in our budget from that. That task. So overall for the year, financial result wise, it's gone pretty much as we expected. We budgeted after all of our costs to scroll down, Rich. EBITDA of $4 million and $45,000. We're actually going to come in just over $4 million. So slightly below budget, but nevertheless up from $3.5 million, just under $3.6 million in fiscal 2017. We always look at the business in terms of cash flow and debt service. We'll have invested another $2.5 million in CAPEX in the community, largely in building out the BT network. We'll come in just under that, but nevertheless, our build-out plans have continued unabated. And from a pure cash flow perspective, even after debt service and the investment of that $2.5 million, we're actually forecasting just about half a million versus just over half a million. We'll come in higher than that because I do expect our CAPEX will come in $100,000 or $150,000 lower for the year. All in all, solid performance, even though we've had some distractions. Surprisingly, our subscriber counts for the first nine months of this year are roughly in line with last year. We had a record first quarter to the fiscal year. Our subscriber counts have continued to increase since the first quarter, but at a lower level than last year. Still on track, we have a peak period in June, July, August, and September. That's when we do two-thirds of our subscriber growth in a year. We're still on track to get to around 700 to 750 net new subscribers again this year. That's 18. Any questions on 18? Okay. For 19, key deliverables for 19 is again one of the drivers of BT for years now and will continue to differentiate ourselves through customer service, through going the extra mile. We do it every day and it brings us increasing results every month as we continue to build on that. Five years ago it wasn't part of the culture of BT. We talked about it and we kind of practiced it, but we didn't really believe it. Now I think it's part of the value system and belief of BT. It's part of our DNA, which is great, and I don't see that changing at all going forward. Our focus this year and our focus for next year continues to be the completion of the build-out of the city of Burlington now to BT's cash flow. We thought when we put the budget together that we'd be there by Thanksgiving this year barring unex-anticipated construction problems. There are always a few areas that say thank you, but no thank you. Looks like we've had a big breakthrough in one area of about 300 homes that have previously said thank you, but no thank you, but now thanks to help from Brian and others, looks like they're going to say thank you, please do. That'll take us into the spring of 19, but apart from that we will be done with the build-out of BT's network in Burlington, apart from 120 premises that are economically unviable for us at the moment. We'll be done by Thanksgiving this year. We'll be there. So I think that's a big deal to all of us at BT. We continue to grow market share. Our budget for next year anticipates another 750 net subscriber count adds. I think that's entirely achievable. We could do more. I don't think that's too much of a stretch. The annual revenues increased 10.5 million. We'll actually pass the 10 million mark for the first time. EBITDA is going up 10% from 4 million to 4.4 million. Capital expenditures are due to rise significantly, excluding capitalised install labour. There'll be about 2 million this year. Next year we've got 2.9 million, so that's a 45-50% increase. A couple of reasons for that. One, we've got a number of projects like Great Streets and Southern Connector that we've budgeted. We also have some aging infrastructure, and specifically by aging infrastructure, I mean the satellite dish, where the way satellite's broadcast to us is changing, and ours will reach the end of its life. We put it in for next year because we don't control how content providers broadcast to us, I think we're probably two or three years out. We've got a number of interesting initiatives for next year, which we're uncertain whether they'll pop next year or not, but we want to make sure that if they do, we're able to cover them. We're doing meaningful studies on a couple of communities outside of the borders of Burlington at the moment, and we're having some really exciting conversations on the idea with property developers of gig symmetrical bandwidth, 1,000 megabit symmetrical as part of the base rent of rental properties as an essential utility like electricity and water. We launched the first two of those this year, one in Winooski, the other one was the first phase of the redevelopment of Burlington College with Eric Farrell, and both have proved to be a great success for the developers, both have proved to be a real draw for attracting tenants there, and we have some fairly exciting discussions going on at the moment which are too premature for announcement and certainly not to our competitors at this point in time, but which could result in a program of several hundred more units actually being converted going forward as well as new properties, all to gig symmetrical bandwidth. If that happens, that'll be a game changer in this market. So a lot of things to look forward to next year in terms of the actual figures. Rich, as I said, have been through most of them, revenues going from nine, seven to ten and a half. Unfortunately, our cost of goods continues to increase. We had a crazy increase this year, driven by price increases from content providers that we have really no leverage on. Even next year, there's a 6.7% increase coming from them from existing contracts that we have nothing, no control over being able to modify or minimize. Our gross margin on video product is little or nothing, so we have nowhere to go on that. From a cost perspective, we're fairly stable apart from customer service. We opened a new shop front in the New North End this year as part of a major long-term drive to build customer service and reputation in that part of the city associated with the build-out of BT's network there. We've got the full year impact of that additional staffing cost in next year. Although customer accounts into that store front are low at the moment, it's just an amazing experience. We're able to give people a level of customer service that nobody has any interest in doing, and I think that'll all go well for both the customers and for BT over the long term and also act as a model for BT as it moves beyond Burlington's borders and opens more customer service centres in new communities that it enters. Operating EBITDA, which is a measure of profitability up from 4 million to 4.4 million next year, one new FTE included in that, a new hire in Q3 next year. I can't tell you where it'll be. We never budget for specific positions. We look at where we get particular pressure points and retain the flexibility to mitigate pressure points. So just one new FTE in there. Already been through CAPEX up significantly over this year, and a similar level of cash flow. In fact, cash flow post-debt service is going to be actually... Can you scroll back up a bit? Bit further. Keep going. Bit further. So cash flow post-debt service a little lower primarily because of the meaningful increase in capital expenditure year over year. That's it for BT's FY19 budget. The major increases in operating costs are really limited to the extra person. Our assumptions on healthcare costs increases, pensions, COLA, that really drives those costs. Nothing else in there. Do you have presentation questions? Yes. Yes. Yes. How does BT deal with that? Are you proactive in working with a developer? We always try to be extremely proactive. So, Baybury is SD Island. We worked really hard to try and convince them to make that a gig symmetrical development. They chose not to at that point in time. As you saw, we worked really hard on Burlington College and they decided to make it. We continue to work really hard on City Place, every new building in Burlington, and some beyond Burlington's borders, we are now in active and proactive dialogue with the developers to actually have us in there as an essential service. And if they choose not to, we'll still try and not try. We will wire every single new building in Burlington that a developer will allow us to do for the BT service whether they go 100% or not. Have you been able to at least notify people? They have. Yeah, we've had numerous conversations with them over a long period of time. And yes, they're very open to us offering service, but they haven't wanted to make that a 100% gig symmetrical development. Thank you, I just wanted to know if, you know, I figured you've been taking a manager every new large development. Very much so. Okay, thank you. Can you just describe your, the plan for the sale were to happen on schedule. You've got kind of a transition budget that we've been here to a new owner of this enterprise. Brian, no, we haven't. This is a budget that assumes ownership of BT by the city for a full year. We've actually built the budget monthly and split it into two halves because we do expect, you know, we're hopeful of completion of the sale by the end of this calendar year. But this does not include any of those costs of ownership under a different tone of this. This is purely assuming the city continues. Then a second question is just, can you describe the work that BT's engaged in regarding sort of bridging or closing the digital divide and some of the efforts you've undertaken in that area? I think by and large what we try and do is clearly we offer a number of programs for people on low-income, one for schoolchildren who receive subsidized meals. They can get BT's internet for as little as $9.95 a month. We also became the first ISP in Vermont to offer Lifeline, which is a program for low-income families. Again, that can provide a subsidy. We offer the service for $9.95 a month, but they can actually get a subsidy of over $9 a month towards the cost of that. And we offer 25 megs symmetrical to those families. The reason it's only 25 meg is that we have a lot of equipment that we've deployed elsewhere as we move to gig-symmetrical throughout the city. That equipment becomes available, which means that we can cost-effectively provide an outstanding level of service to those families without investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. The equipment quite well works very well. We do that. We're a major supporter of BTV. Ignite and continue to be so and will be going forward. And we do public Wi-Fi in a number of spots, and we're always open to any opportunity that's presented to us where we can actually provide BT services for public good that can help address the digital divide and the digitally disadvantaged. And again, nothing's going to change on that going forward. Thank you, Councilor Fein. Other questions? Hearing none. Thank you very much. Thanks for all the good work. Item number four is water, wastewater slash stormwater and presentation from Megan Moore. Hi everybody. Happy to be meeting with you guys again. So today we're going to go over the water resources budgets. It is three different budgets, our enterprise water resources utilities. So first slide. Sorry. Oh, no, I wasn't there. Sorry. Just quickly, you know, we share the same mission statement as the rest of DPW stewarding Burlington's infrastructure. And obviously we're really focused on the environmental piece. Next slide. We are unique. I think, you know, particularly in Vermont and even across the nation that we are truly integrated being with water, wastewater and stormwater sitting under one house. A lot of times stormwater and wastewater utilities with one leader, you know, is something that I do think provides us opportunities. There is a lot of cross and overlap. They do have three different sets of rules and regulations and that is a challenge sometimes for us to keep up to speed, especially with the changing face in the legislative environment. It has been a challenge to try to stay on top of it all. Next slide. You know, ultimately, I always say Burlington can't exist without Burlington water resources. You can't have a dense urban environment and be able to, without having clean drinking water ample opportunity for the sewage to leave the buildings and then also, you know, important drainage. And these are just a summary of some of the services, the important services that we do provide. We have a huge roster of assets. I've actually grown it from past presentations because there's some that I forget about and it ranges from the horizontal, which is a system of pipes for the sewer and for water distribution. But we have a number of vertical assets, our water plant down on the waterfront. We have pump houses. We have the two reservoirs that hold 7 million gallons so that if we ever can't produce water, we have enough water for a day's worth of storage. We have the water towers, which I'll talk a little bit about because those are some assets that need some help. You know, and one that we hadn't really thought a lot about until this year with the water billing issue, we have, you know, over 10,000 water meters. Those are assets. Those need to be dealt with as assets and invested in as assets. Next slide. We've got a lot of great things going on as you guys are probably aware driving around on the street. We're certainly digging into things and replacing our very age, aging infrastructure, particularly on the water side. You know, while that's happening, we are continuing a level of investment on the water side, the wastewater and the storm water side. There's a number of plant things that we've done to improve upon. We were able to install an infiltration system at the bottom of King Street. So before that paving project happened, we took that opportunity to keep that storm water from ever even getting into the combined sewer system. You know, and along with our actual brick and mortar capital planning, we are really diving into our capital planning, which is going to help us better develop what our project looks like. I think we've frequently been in the mode of just fixing things as they break, right? And we're trying to be more proactive with asset management, which then gives us all the numbers that we can then use to hopefully work with you guys to come up with what our financial picture looks like in the future. Next slide. So for those of you who don't recall from your review of the packet, we are looking at an overall 4.95 increase for the typical single family customer. We're going to talk more about how we're going to go into some of our high level goals and some specific details about the revenue and expense side drivers for this year's budget and the proposed rate increase. So starting with, you know, it's been a balance of sort of what do we need to do now and making sure we're looking out far enough in the future so that we're not making decisions that are going to make it really hard for us to do what we need to do in the future. So on the near term, sort of operational and capital need for the future. So, you know, safe water, I'm not sure where I got the word smooth. I'm not sure where that came from. Smooth and safe water, not just safe but it's smooth. Sorry, that's a totally untitled. I have to figure out what word I meant. Waste water and storm water. I think it's smooth storm water operations. And to meet regulatory compliance, but now I know I'm going to be known as the smooth water operator. Well, I won't go into the song. So, our other big things, as you guys all know, we had to figure out how to deal with the revenue shortfall that came about because of the meter billing issue and then figure out also how to come up with sufficient resources that we're going to be able to invest in the solutions that are going to help that sort of thing never happen again. And while we're doing all that, we're also still trying to invest in this infrastructure and keep up with everything else great that the city is doing. Next slide. On the long-term side, we need to be looking ahead and making sure that no matter what we choose to do this year, we're going to be able to meet debt service requirements for both our existing bonds as well as the future water bonds that we know we're going to pull under our existing $8.3 million authorization and likely for wastewater and maybe even storm water bonds. And again, we'll talk a little bit more about why I think that may be in our future. We're also trying to maintain neutral or surplus oriented annual budgets. In the past, we have used our cash, but because we're going to be doing the UVM repayments, we have to be very aware that we can't be letting that cash trickle down too much. The other piece that the mayor and we all talked about a lot and we don't have the exact answer for, but we want to start looking more at balancing how much we're spending out of our annual budgets on capital versus what we're doing with that finance. There's probably some blender portfolio given the things that we need to do where we can maximize what we're able to get done and also spread it out over the future rate payers. If we're building something that's going to last 25, 50 years, we don't necessarily want today's rate payers to be paying for it all in one big chunk. We want to be spreading it out. So in that light, we're maintaining sufficient capital funding to make sure that wastewater and storm water needs are met, but we are postponing, particularly on the wastewater side perhaps one to two years, a few things that we in a perfect world would have done this year, but with the budget pressures and with knowing that we're kind of getting to the bonding point anyway, we did make the decision to go ahead and push those out and really focus our efforts on okay, what does our financing plan look like. We're also leveraging our existing bond authorization for a long life asset, the reservoir roof that we really need to replace. Next slide. So diving down a little deeper, the key drivers on the revenue side are certainly that loss of volumetric revenue. It's not just about repaying UVM. It's the fact that we thought we had all that water to build and now we don't have it. It is offset mildly by some positive corrections. As you guys know, we did find some people that we had under-billed, and so it's not as bad as it could have been if it was just UVM, but we still are dealing with that loss of revenue and that alone is responsible for 55 and 52% respectively of the water and wastewater increases. On the wastewater side, and we did mention this, I believe, last year, but South Brillington is taking back some of their customers. They're building a pump station and that's going to result in additional revenue loss. On the stormwater side, fortunately because we're doing the reassessment of the impervious surface our revenue is actually going up on that and we are really lucky to receive a huge grant from the federal highways for an outfall repair and also 25,000 sort of, it was just a happy day where somebody says, hey, I've got 25,000 for you just because you're a stormwater utility. VTRANS is giving that out to all the stormwater utilities. I didn't ask given how much time you I am, but I know we started late, so I'll continue to try to go fast. So on the expense side I mentioned that we want to make sure and we actually got the statements of qualifications back from two folks. We did an RFQ for our meter to cash billing improvements and so we're in the process of reviewing those and really excited to get somebody on board who's going to help us continue with the revenue assurance process. We because we anticipate that they may make recommendations that are going to require some additional expenditure, we do have some placeholders in there so that we're going to be able to implement those as quickly as possible. On the personnel side, the main personnel shift is that we continue to evaluate our staffing resources with regard to our engineering and planning team. We are doing so much work and I'm still playing around with exactly where the resources are and this particular year we are finding that water and wastewater because of all the projects and because they're sometimes more emergent we're taking up a lot of the resources and but we want to make sure stormwater is getting its needs met. So we did shift some resources more directly to where it had kind of already been going water and wastewater and we're going to look at meeting our stormwater engineering need which is a little bit more specialized than your typical sort of water resources engineer with bringing in a consulting engineer, sort of on call somebody who's immediately available within two weeks that can be as much part of our team as possible and kind of see if that might work especially to bridge the gap to maybe a future time in which we might have to bring on more resources. I'm not prepared to make that decision right now which is why I'm kind of trying out this opportunity. We've added some money to our safety equipment to purchase safety equipment specifically on the wastewater side for confined space entry and then on the water side particularly for excavation safety. We struggle still with external costs that are increasing our biosolids contract so that's the contract to actually haul out the solids that come out of the wastewater process did go up by $40,000 and then we did have to increase our debt service line in order to meet both the $2 million series that we just sold as well as we are anticipating selling about $1.8 million this fall to get ready for next year. Just a reminder of why we're even doing those projects, this is a list of the streets that we are working on for this particular contract in addition to last year streets and this work that the voters have funded is so timely. There's an interesting report that just came out where they looked at water break rates and just if you look at all pipe materials water break rates have increased 27% in the last six years. Everything's getting old so we're not alone. The really important thing is that 82% of cast iron pipes are experiencing a 46% increase in break rates and guess what 75% of our pipes are cast iron so we are hopefully preventing us from having an exponential increase in breaks. That's what people are seeing everywhere else. Again, thank you for being willing to allow us to invest in this. Even though we are dialing back just so slightly on wastewater, overall we are still spending so much more on capital than we have prior to FY16. Really proud of the city for dealing with the infrastructure deficit and letting us do our job which is fixing the stuff that we need to fix so that we can keep maintaining that smooth water. That's not, that's comments that slipped in so I'm glad we didn't have anything about it. Why is smooth in there? I don't know. So we're going to come back to the future piece but I wanted to draw your attention specifically to the red box. There's a lot of information there. Those are the monthly amounts of the different portions of your water resource at the source rate. The blue is approximately how much a single family home would spend on their water. The brown for wastewater and green for storm water. And then the triangle is the percent increase overall. So that 4.95 and it's a dual access so you have to look on the right for the percent increase and on the left for the overall amount. So the total bill is looking like it's going to be about $67 $3.18 approximate increase per month and a $38 increase over the year. Again this is due to increases on the water and the wastewater rate about a 6% increase in wastewater and a 4.9% increase in water. The math if you're trying to do it in your head doesn't work out quite so well because of the magnitude of the wastewater generally being more dollar wise. There is no increase in storm water. However some commercial customers may see an increase or a decrease in their overall storm water bill not due to the fee but because we've measured their impervious or re-measured it and if they've added impervious or if our previous measurements were wrong that's going to be corrected. Next slide. So that gets you to the numbers themselves. Next slide please. So you can see in the past years as I mentioned we did run a planned deficit and this year we are not running the deficit. We are having neutral or positive surpluses at the end and if you go down to the very bottom we are continuing to track days of cash on hand and you see that wastewater is getting lower and we're keeping our eye on that and trying to figure out how we're going to mitigate that this is based on the most conservative possible estimate of days of cash on hand that we have gotten from our auditor. There's a lot of different ways of looking at cash and this is the hardest or most conservative way. It does also include the estimate of, it's an estimate of the net impact or the impact of net usage decrease so I've tried to model what I think maybe the end of the year is going to look like and that's your estimated cash on hand at FY18 and then FY19 includes an estimated repayment of that UVM so should we come to agreements on how we're going to repay it and ideally pay it over six years I've calculated that in as an impact to the cash so it's in our expense line yes so challenges we'll talk about challenges and then we'll talk about all the positives and opportunities because every challenge gives an opportunity so we've got the water debt you guys already know about that we were successful in maintaining our A1 rating we want to maintain that or increase it in the future and we've got to maintain that 1.25 coverage ratio which I can't remember what the number was but we were good on that looking at water we've always talked about the fact that that 8.3 million authorization is only going to replace a certain percentage of our pipes and we may need to replace more we also with all the work that's going on and the new streets the additional streets that happened we're having to spend even more than we kind of thought we were going to have to spend in this time period so we may need to go out for authorization for continuing that work maybe sooner than we had originally anticipated and also just to flag it the high service tanks that I mentioned UVM tank in particular Redstone which is the 1934 tank Redstone was already planned for some maintenance in 2021 and our recent inspection indicates that that might have to get moved up and the UVM tank maintenance in particular painting that tank it has lead based paint on it which means we have to do a lead abatement on a 150 foot tall tank which is going to be very, very costly looking into whether or not even though it's maintenance it could possibly be bonded for or even through the stake get some money so more to come on that but just know that that's looming literally over your head on wastewater we we're coming to the end of useful life on some of our some of our assets that are in the wastewater treatment plants and our pump stations and so to collectively if you look down at the graph down below this is based on our capital plan what more or less what we should be spending in those various years we're spending less than what is listed here on FY19 right I said we're dialing back a little bit and what we're looking at is aggregating all of those costs sort of through FY23-24 and potentially looking at a wastewater bond to try to address that at the same time our collection system our sewer pipes are also challenged and sometimes costing coals and we're looking at about a one million dollar need per year for at least the next five years on the sewer side same thing on the stormwater side even though stormwater is younger we made or somebody made the decision of putting in corrugated metal pipes which are corroding due to the salt so they're very holy the pipe that collapsed I believe on Kilburn was a corrugated metal pipe where the dump truck was rising up in the air that can happen and will happen if we don't start giving attention to our stormwater pipes we also have about eleven of our outfalls are in really really bad shape and we're looking at about three million dollars to fix the worst of the worst okay so looking ahead as we model it now in twenty and twenty one we are still looking at between a four and five percent rate increase certainly we're going to be doing everything we can and that's what the next slide is about to try to figure out how we could even potentially temper those those increases and just to pause briefly since nineteen eighty nine and I know some of you were here perhaps back around then you know this is this is what the chart of our rate increases look like and you can see that we've kind of been all over the place and in particular you know ninety six through two thousand eight except for one year we had no rate increases so we are in essence kind of dealing with what happened back then and the fact that we should have been making investments if we had been making investments in our pipe infrastructure back then we would not be dealing with some of the large infrastructure deficit that we have and for bigger perspective you know there's been there have been numerous studies but consistently the the CPI for water sewer if you compare water and sewer rates is not track regular CPI it's usually around five and a half percent so for us to have a four to five and a half percent increase is not sort of abnormal compared to what people are seeing in the data across the nation and there is more information at the end of your packet because we probably won't get to it I have a couple of other links to information about why we're normal you know why the cost increases that we're seeing are not not necessarily something to be worried about from a perspective of doing something wrong next slide so why is it all going to be okay hopefully okay so all of my estimates are as conservative as possible being that we know there are these big projects that are about to be built I have not put those big projects into my revenue stream because you never know what can happen with one of those big projects and I don't want to be basing our financial decisions and our financial health now on the mall and then something happens with permits and all of a sudden they're delayed multiple years not that that's going to happen right but that example I guess I know that example there's many examples where you expect something to be built right we all think something is going to be built like this and it takes two years instead of one year we don't want to rely on that but as it comes online we're going to be putting that into our model using that real data and hopefully see the future look a little brighter in the insurance program you know we think long term that is also going to pay dividends there could be some modest initial investments we may have to pay a little bit but we're going to be doing that so that we can hopefully get a lot more revenue better meters better technology etc one of the things I'm most excited about is finally having a robust financial plan where everything is rolled up and I can put run a whole bunch of different scenarios and see all these cool graphs if anybody ever wants to check it out with me come by my office I'll show you but with that it's now gives us the platform so we can start looking at potential alternative rate structures which in particular could reduce the impact on the residential customer we're already looking at that we weren't prepared to bring that to you but it's something that I highly anticipate we'll be looking at for FY20 through that we're also going to be exploring opportunities for full cost recovery a lot of towns charge for fire services we don't we're making water and we're when we dig up a street we're having to pick up people's fire services and reattach them so the rate payers are ending up subsidizing potentially people who have direct fire services and it is fairly typical across the nation to charge for that it's one example of something we could charge for and would be coming back to you with a proposal on as I mentioned before we're going to be focusing on a lot of our planning efforts on that balance of pay go versus financial debt finance capital and overall I want to strive as a rate payer myself to strive for predictable modest increases versus the crazy train that as you can see we've been on you know certainly in the 90s and prior to that where you'd have no rate increases and then big rate increases that doesn't make a lot of sense to me financial capability assessment as part of our ongoing future planning for the Lake Champlain TMDL we're going to make sure that we the state works with us so we don't get put on such a crazy schedule that we're going to blow the bank for everybody there has to be a consideration of how much people can pay for all of the work that we have to do and on the asset management investment piece I'm just going to put my plug in we're water resources is ready to go we are doing asset management the best we can with spreadsheets and we want a program and we want software and you know we're waiting for the general fund to complete their ongoing asset management assessment but we really need to do that so this last slide this is the overall request these are the proposed rates storm water is not changing wastewater is going up to $5.82 and water is going to $4 and 31 cents a few faces including mine get confused you said some property owners get direct fire service and in some places we charge for that what did you mean I meant some places in the nation but did you mean sprinklers sprinklers yeah so like especially big buildings will have a domestic service that they use for their tap and they get charged for that but their fire service is just there and we're maintaining it and serving water to it but they're often called ready to serve or standby charges and then the other question is about efficiency and efforts to encourage it kind of works against us in a way to get customers to be more efficient about their water use but do we do anything the way VED does to help customers be more efficient about the way we don't directly at this point except for we do have high reed so we track people's water usage and if it comes across as being more than double the previous month people get a contact a letter a phone call to say hey something's going on at the at the BTB block party we're going to have leak detection tablets that you can toss in your toilet and if your toilet bowl fills with red color then you know that your toilet is leaking because that can be a cause so we're starting a couple of things I 100% think it's going to come in the future and I think we may through that model I talked about one of the things is you can actually zoom in on neighborhoods that are going to be more burdened by a rate increase and then target your efforts efforts there so it's definitely in the back of our head we just we don't have any official programs per se right now one quick note on that too that we this 2030 district conservation yes reduction by 50% yeah it's regulated for electricity that they offer incentives to purchase more efficient appliances but maybe we as a utility would look at the idea of low flow toilets as incentives yep and that's what's probably one of the first steps in an affordability program before we actually start offering people discounts a lot of communities have actually just focused on sort of plumbing efficiencies and targeting it that way and getting people using only the water they need to use particularly low income folks because they may be in a situation where they're not able to counselor Tracy then follow that thank you presentation a lot from members of the public concerned about storm water dumps in the lake or just sewerage going into the lake wondering if there are any of the capital investments that we're making this year or in future years we'll do more to prevent that from happening and then sort of more broadly how the statewide lake cleanup legislation does not act in our revenues like the mandates in there how do you see that kind of playing out for us in the city? yep so on the sewage dump piece the storm water projects like the king street infiltration system anytime we're able to take storm water off of the wastewater system which is what that project does and I believe we're doing one at park street as well this year that helps manage the volume the particular incidences that happened this year weren't necessarily due to the storm water piece or to a lack of investment though we certainly are going to be looking at how we can build a better mousetrap and create more redundancy but a lot of the sewage overflows are driven by the storm water piece and so it's all about how we make those retrofits how we figure out with private properties when they're redeveloping a property like them all that they take their water off of the combined sewer system and if they can't take it fully off they put it through a system of tanks to slow it down your other question was the statewide legislation well I'm not aware currently of any defunded there's lots of unfunded mandates but as far as like the money that we're currently getting from the state part of our biggest challenge is that it is so bricks and mortar oriented and that you have to have these shovel ready projects and so thinking back to what I talked about the engineering planning team and making sure we have enough bodies to be just cranking on those projects and looking out ahead is a really critical piece of grabbing the current money that we have we are very interested in the bigger statewide funding because we do think that all people need to be contributing you know to that and I'm not sure exactly what's going to come out of the years to come the time is now and I can't remember if s260 did get passed or not it did get passed right? it hasn't been signed right so we're waiting and seeing if that moves forward thank you very much so I just had one question way back in the beginning when you were talking about the road so I'm just trying to understand how long have you known about this obviously they've been building this I assume this is not something that happened overnight no I think we definitely mentioned it last year which was my first budget year we said that it was coming in FY19 the half of it and then the rest of it will go away in FY20 because it is going to be online as of December so you had said that that was 22% of the rating increased in wastewater another 52% for the issue that's 74% for just two banks yep so is the 210,000 that no I mean that's the revenue that we typically get from them so what's the next there won't be if you're trying to see it's hard to say it's not like we get to decrease our number of pipes or we get to decrease our energy costs like you could maybe allocate out what their what I don't know if I'm understanding your question if you're asking if there's a there's a cost to doing service for them not I mean there is but like it's so minuscule because we still have to have the same size plant I have to have the same size personnel it's not like I can reduce my energy costs because this is the challenge of being in a small city is I have so few people to spread my cost over I can't shrink anything just because somebody doesn't you know somebody gets more efficient with their water I still have to have the same number of pipes the same number of people et cetera it's very challenging because of the economy of scale and that's why well depending on what people believe going up and being vertical is very helpful on the water waste water side from having more of a user base you know I can't I think there is still some remaining parts I don't have a good map in my head of the wastewater area but that's that's the only one that was sort of easily grabbed off by them because they're they have a pump station so instead of a gravity draining to us they're putting a pump station at the bottom and pumping it back to their plant I mean I guess you know one of the things that and I haven't seen this so I'm not really sure maybe I haven't maybe I missed it by resolution several years ago we were getting given projections three and five year projections on budgeting while resting used to do that and so I think I'm going to talk to you about by literally 2021 I'm talking about further out when you're given what is scenarios so it seems though these are all what if scenarios that we have no guarantee that they aren't going to go into all of that right we don't have that much I can I can get back to you with what exactly how much more of our revenue it would be due to South Burlington it's it's not it's not that much so like I'm just saying I'm not worried about it having looked at how many accounts are left this was the big chunk that could be be taken back I mean I'm just concerned because people very well be because there weren't investments made years ago but in the minds of consumers they don't yeah they don't care about that yeah what they care about is what their rate is now absolutely as we all know there's a lot of people and this is a considerable 5% is not what their their income has an increased 5% absolutely so we just want to be mindful thank you councillor Busher and then councillor Odell so so you had in your presentation you talked about the hikes that distribute the water yes but we didn't really talk about that we didn't I don't see the information about wastewater yep so though I went I was going quickly if you go to the looking ahead to FY 20 and beyond challenges I don't have a graph yet of what the age of those are or what our predictions are but the stars when I say collection system capital needs those are the pipes so there's 5 million on wastewater side and about 5 million on stormwater so that get interested in that overall but so in my opinion there's a lot of unfortunate sewer line breaks and so people came to me understand to try to figure out why the city can't help the private laterals yep private level and so like with water you can get a loan or something from the city there's some because we do the work we're able to give you a payment plan $15,000 sometimes more and people they don't have it one person she's 90 years old yep and so I'm just trying to figure out what we as a city can do to provide something to the resident I'm not looking for the city to pay for it but a way that it's either a lien on the property or a loan that can be paid off I really think that this is really important and so the age of the sewer pipe and the sewer lines and the connection which I've learned is like one pipe just slipping into another one they're not really used to I've learned a lot about this I started in 1980 something on the DPW commission with wastewater and sewage and I never thought I would go back to where I am again so I mean this is really important stuff it is I really would like the department I'm not even spending anything to have it this year obviously but I'd really like some creativity around I mean Chapin can attest the fact that we've had numerous conversations and have some ideas yes but I mean I think for the past two or three years we've been talking about that specifically and what it looks like and how even if we're not going to do the work we're not going to be able to facilitate because it's also to our advantage when somebody has to cut into a brand new road like East Ave because their sewer line broke we would rather incentivize people to be proactive if they can with their own their own infrastructure and it's hard to do when it costs $14,000 nobody has that kind of money sitting around so it's the same issue just we don't have as much of an impact right now and I understand the difference is we don't do the work I'll get that Thank you Chancellor Bushett Chancellor no doubt Thank you President Meister so I think I understand the the need for the is it for 4.5%, 5% increase for 19s the making up the lost revenue it is to the it does because you're paying it out of your cash so if you want to keep your cash I am at this point and I'm also in my model is that future bonding in wastewater and storm water how much it's not it's not authorized borrowing it is projected borrowing given what our capital needs are so I'm presenting should we get authorization for storm water and wastewater so there was authorization for water for water so how much of that that we are up to we've used now 5.25 and so we have about 3 million left so you're assuming in terms of your projections for 2021 you're assuming that the rest of that is issued and what else are you assuming which one is additional borrowing I would have to look at my model and give you that an exact number but I have projected out what I think we need to keep spending and assumed potentially some additional borrowing but I don't think that would hit until FY22 anyway so in all three areas that's additional borrowing so the authorization that we already have potentially authorizing if we could get an authorization for more to meet our what I think our capital needs are on the water side the storm water wastewater we're going to have to be coming back to you with even the request to bond I'm just saying that when I look at my capital plan there is a infrastructure deficit we do not have enough money to do the work that we need to do and so we would have to bond the number okay yeah yep yep absolutely absolutely yep yep and a lot of that will be tempered by the additional development as I said I'm trying to give you the worst the worst case scenario and next year I can give you a different case scenario but I'd rather tell you how bad it could be and then hopefully with all of our creativity and with the additional developments that number is going to look a lot better that is my intent I share the concern as somebody who has a family and uses water and wastewater I can reference it but to just shed a little more detail on it we may be able to shift some of that bonding we may be able to pay for it by less pay as you go basically spread that the cost over a longer period of time I think for as much on an ongoing basis as we have done a little bit to some extent in the budget before you to keep it under 5% and there may be an opportunity to do more to me it's intellectually appropriate to spread it out and we can so there's nuggets in there still of Pago Capital that you could drive down further and help with the rate but it's until we get into what that looks like it's hard to quickly inclining block rates with electricity successful yes that would be the alternative rate structure it would actually we look at a two-tier rate structure with a fixed cost and bringing some of the cost more back into fix and when we model that impact for a lot of I think for all single family home customers even with the rate increase their overall bill went down but it means it's going up somewhere else and so we have to have a larger conversation about what we're okay with and so FY19 is about doing that work and working with you guys to figure out what a different rate structure might look like that everybody can get on board with because there's definitely ones out there yeah yeah yeah so you're looking just okay I'll figure out what exactly which pages essentially absolutely President Ray I just I apologize I have to step out for just a couple of minutes I'll be back thank you thank you so we are here to talk about our capital improvement program budget and I just start by saying that one of the things that's key to this capital improvement effort is that we are understanding that the public has entrusted us their funds to advance a number of initiatives projects that the mayors made commitments to and we were staying focused on that the challenge of course is as things come up we will encounter things that we didn't anticipate when we developed this plan but we are moving ahead and making great progress on many of these projects and things are gearing up so I'm going to try to be as brief as I can because I know we are behind so as I've said this project this capital investment follows our plan to communicate to the public in their expectations, meeting their expectations along that path of course we encounter new problems new challenges that the city has with their capital systems that need evaluation and we have actually a committee form to evaluate new challenges that come in in order of priority and how it still achieves the objective of meeting the expectations of the public that on set of this capital investment approval of bonding while still trying to solve the problems that sit in front of us today so moving to the next slide is here's kind of the snapshot of all the asset classes that we're focused on in improving and maintaining and taking care of on the left side of the list and the right side is the funding resources itself in this it's really become a collaborative the capital improvement plan works with all the departments and over that time you know it's a building collaboration we've been working on the fleet analysis that includes BED it includes the airport it includes the schools as well as all of general fund we've done the door and video systems that go to all the municipal buildings we joined the 2030 district and so we're working with BED on that I've been working with UVM on the collaboration from the agreement that we created with them this year that provided some of the funding for this capital plan so we're really working with everyone to create a relationship to build a rapport but to understand the big picture and work on that big picture and what's the best strategy long term for the city for our capital so giving you a status of what we've had in the past and really gearing up for what is the big important piece to at least public works is improving our streets improving our sidewalks and being aggressive in pursuing getting into the city and getting into the city and getting into the city and getting into the city and getting into the city and getting into the city and being aggressive in pursuing getting a lot of this work done and so in 18 we've got a lot done but in 19 we anticipate we're going to go even further and harder to try to achieve these objectives while keeping in mind that we are going to coordinate that effort with Water Resources and Megan who done a presentation earlier so it's not wasted effort that we encounter some problem later we've put money into a street and it blows up we don't want to see that happen as much as possible um fleet maintenance facility renovations and then Martha maybe you can speak to the fleet analysis so the fleet analysis is almost complete we're waiting for the report they've done a utilization study or in process of utilization study our hope is that the plan is that they will come back and show us from this utilization study do we need less vehicles in a certain department do we need more are we using them the right way is there a way we can share them and then also provide a financing strategy to us of how can we pay for this fleet going forward with 350 vehicles if we were to turn them in a timely manner it would be about a million dollars a year so how can we finance that on an ongoing basis there were five years I believe that we had no financing on vehicles catching up now to having vehicles that are being maintained in a timely manner and hopefully we can turn them in the right manner in the future which aids in our trade-in value it also aids in the time that's spent in labor in our fleet maintenance so there's operational savings as well as capital savings by having a good strategy moving forward so as I mentioned there are new products that came on the horizon since last year's presentation and we've done a lot to complete the tasks that were listed but we've also encountered new challenges moving forward and here's basically a list of the most a rock point bridge particularly is a bridge that's on the bike path itself we have an obligation under the lease agreement to maintain that bridge we are doing an assessment and we're examining alternatives and putting daily costs we've secured I think a million dollars overall for a project to address those needs there is a responsibility of the city to maintain that bridge to allow access on the opposite side for rock point school and so we are taking that diversity and acting on that as it is some measure of responsibility and liability to the city those are the types of things that kind of drive us moving forward and of course we have a list of other products but that's an example of a new challenge goals and milestones for FY19 we are going to deliver on expanded capital investment both water, streets sidewalks, bike paths, buildings, fleet you saw this spring that we were doing a lot of work on Pine Street we are doing coordinated effort in that regard water resources doing their water relining they are doing storm water improvements in advance of the parkway we are doing repaving it's all an coordinated effort it's a lot of work part of that is there is a great so because of all this work there is extreme disturbance in the communities and neighborhood and people need to be informed we need to be aware of how we are proceeding with our work and so we have a public information officer who has done a considerable amount of effort to kind of tell the story so people are aware and not surprised and I think that's made it much easier for both the public and us as public works doing that work so that's worth noting along with that also is the improved collaboration between departments and enterprise funds we have to coordinate our effort with water resource who has limited funds so we pull that off it's an extreme challenge given there is some latency in storm water being positioned to be able to fund projects that support doing work underground before we complete our paving and sidewalk but we are making it happen one big expense within this coming years will be the Champlain Parkway is a major project I think construction alone is around $27 million along with various other costs our standard 2% local match will likely be much more than that given the soil liabilities that we are negotiating with state so we are watching that very closely and putting together estimates and numbers to inform you as we go forward but it is going to be more than the 2% that people reasonably expect then we have all the details of these budgets in general do you want to go into that? the overall budget is about $38.5 million of that $12 million of it is Champlain Parkway this year it was a $22 million budget so we are still increasing the overall budget this year from last year the previous year it was $11 million so we are in the midst of a huge initiative in capital work so I think that we just have to recognize that that takes toll on everyone from the people trying to drive down Pine Street to everywhere else and to the resources that it takes to get the work done as well so we did balance the budget it shows a surplus of $236,000 sorry and $200 of that goes to the permit reform to be carried forward so in reality it is a balanced budget I have two sheets so I corrected the correct one is the one that has a $9 million bonding not the $10 million bonding X off the other one I'm sorry so in reality we bonded and Rich just completed the bonding for the $9 million the $6.1 for the institutions and the annual is usually done in November so there is a $17 million worth of bonding in the fiscal year $19 uses of funds that leaves on the overall bond that we approved in 2016 $10.5 million so that is the correct page so the next sheet is talking about expanded paving and expanded sidewalk as I've noted our teams are actually expanding their effort to do more sidewalk work I think we've reached a limit of what we can in-house complete on our initiatives and so we've gone out and hired contractors to do the balance of work and obviously that requires a little more field inspection and involvement with them and having more hands-on work with them closely Preventive maintenance part of our sidewalk program is we want to have good investment and not replace entire sections of sidewalk for one failed slab so the preventive maintenance program of diamond cutting sidewalks I think has worked very well to at least an immediate future solve a problem while not doing a full reinvestment on a street that potentially could have good slabs of sidewalk so that's good investment on our park and managing our costs as I noted Champlain Parkway is slated to start in June of spring of 2019 there is a significant cost with that project and you can see there's a $12 million listing there but that is just for one year Martha you don't know if you want to talk about the renovation of buildings and the bike path I know that Cindy will speak to the bike path so I'm happy to move forward so then there's multi-year projects the parkways in example is going to be many years in the making and still has been many years in the making already great streets we have a number of streets we're working on we're working on St. Paul we'll be working on Main Street we've been working on Cherry Street and Bank Street as you know City Hall Park Shelmer Street runabout that is a state managed project that we are participating in that we are local and make sure our community is satisfied with that work by the state rail enterprise project is the connection I don't think I need to go any further on any of those lists of projects you can read those and follow them along really this page the grant funded is just showing how we're leveraging our dollars so it really is just showing that we're trying to do the best we can at being as efficient and leveraging wherever possible looking for grants everything else so it sets us up for the coming years we are spending that 17 million in this year we leaves us 10.5 million we still have permit reform that we're working on hopefully in Chapin's budget there was making the project coordinator a full-time position and that would allow me to continue doing more intensive planning so that this capital plan moves forward as smoothly as possible and we just continue investing all the way around and there will be challenges such as Rock Point Bridge there's always going to be new challenges that come forward and so we will have to be talking about those in the future as they come up. I mean our hope is that with all this investment we'll start to deal with the backlog of projects that are in the field of unpredicted problems will narrow and start to be able to equalize and be less of a challenge for the public and for our funding resources so we really look that we're a partner with every other department and so we're helping with project management support we're doing the security across all the municipal buildings we are bringing asset management planning across all areas and we're coordinating and collaborating as much as we possibly can integrating some preventive maintenance not only on our infrastructure but on our facilities as well which will decrease our long-term costs as we implement that more and all of that means that we have a better relationship and as we said our strategy people can buy into the strategy and feel that they're a part of it moving forward. This might be for Rich more than you guys but I want to at least ask are we using municipal lease financing to do any of these projects to sort of approach it from that angle Rich in financing as opposed to bond issues so we do a little bit and we're going to explore the find the balance and the reason for that right now our rates for leasing have been very attractive the last deal we did was 2.36% which is typically less than what I'm paying on bonds, my bonds have been a little less, a little more than 3% based on the current market condition so as we get ready for the next round of borrowing we'll look at both you're welcome so you mentioned that you're trying to deal with sidewalk work in terms of higher consultants will they be using your materials or will they all get their own materials? Well for sidewalk work there's two pieces of one we have contractors that are building renovating or replacing sidewalks and then you have inspectors that inspect the work that are private consultants working for us so there's two pieces of that puzzle they're using the same materials we use they're doing the same process we're doing we have inspectors in the field they're called resident engineers that are consultants who are familiar with the work and do all the proper testing make sure they're meeting the specifications and requirements so I don't anticipate we're going to have any of those types of problems because we've spent the money to have them and their work inspected and make sure that we're getting that quality this happened like within a year there was problems who knows I mean you have to point out the specifics I think that we're doing all the right things to protect and make sure we're getting that quality we deserve for the money we're spending yeah but not only is she efficient in getting that out fast but she's efficient in getting it up on board so I'm going to make a change thank you it's a team it's right alright so should he know me wow thank you alright so we're going to go ahead and get started Nina Sabavi our first comprehensive planner has joined us and then Diana Wood and John Adams Colts from our planning team are also here if anybody has questions as we go along so I'm going to do kind of some overview a little bit of storytelling so starting out with Penny for Parks so Penny for Parks funds really help us stay on top of our capital needs in our parks and tipping from fiscal year 13 to present as of May 22nd we tipped over into 101 projects have been completed as far as Penny for Parks really making a difference in Burlington and allowing us to stay on top of our our parks our playgrounds and some examples of things that we replace with that is you've seen us at the courts and so for example right now we're out at Schmanska Park replacing those courts the courts are always very deteriorated and the money for Penny for Parks has allowed us to really do a full replace of those playground picnic tables grills all those pieces we're able to keep on top of with the Penny for Parks program there's money budgeted every year for Penny for Park requests and any emergent needs and so emergent needs might be something that happens all of a sudden something's happened in one of our parks and the example was the enhanced entrance at Smalley Park because we had some erosion happening and so with Penny for Parks funds and that money we were able to get right to that and fix it up a small little project that was a Penny for Parks request was horseshoe pits at Pomeroy Park so if anybody was at Pomeroy for the police barbecue you would have a chance to see those so that's like just a little piece that somebody asked for and we're able to make things like that happen we're anticipating I don't know if we've seen it yet but we're anticipating an application at Schipoletti Park the girls softball program has been growing and they're looking to have that field skinned so we're anticipating that we'll see that application coming in and then we can help the community out with that and the way we get to choosing those besides what comes in for the community is our parks planning team does a 10 year plan that they continue update to make the decisions on what we're going to be doing for Penny for Parks program alright impact fees I just want to share a short little story because I think we're more than numbers this was shared with us the other day on our project that we had done using these is as dear friends if you want to put a smile on your face stop by the new softball field at Smalley Park around 4pm on an Edmunds middle school game day next one by the way is June 1st or during any waves game for that matter and be sure to bring your camera you will see a beautiful park being used by dozens if not scores of people you'll probably also see EMS lose although they've somehow managed to win two games they're made up almost entirely of 6th and 5th graders playing mostly 8th graders twice their size no matter the girls are having a lot of fun the coaches are upbeat and enthusiastic and the neighbors are thrilled that the park is being used again by someone other than junkies all in all an incredible turnaround that should make all of you very proud sincerely Tom Simon so that was just a neat story about how impact fees being used in our park and really making a difference in the community 2019 we have a classic park impact project I think a classic in that Shemanska Walkways there's a large project that was built across the street is it Baybury Commons I believe is the correct name on that and so we would receive park impact fees for that we're improving the walkways there as part of 2019 next up is our Greenbelt Capital the big piece that we're going to be starting up right here is that Emerald Ashmore plant implementation if you've been to any of the MPAs we've been going around doing our spiel and we'll really need to start doing some tree plantings one of the ones that VJ is most excited about is it in the neighborhoods where the trees are spaced further enough apart that we can start putting a tree in between so that tree will have time to grow before we end up maybe having to take many of those trees down in our community so that's a big one that's an expense coming up that way we are looking to try to get to that 50% tree canopy that's our goal for Burlington and so that just takes very intentional planting to get that way that's getting Greenbelt Capital next one is our open space conservation legacy fund so the focus of that is acquisition 70% of the funds have to be spent on acquisition but I also want to touch on the fact that we also have incredible volunteer opportunities that we're able to do as far as our staffing around our conservation program we've landed 850 trees with Audubon I think you probably might have seen that recently in Facebook and social media so we had 120 volunteers that came through that some of them are businesses many are individuals they're able to get co-op credit for some of these projects and we finished the last 150 of them off with our staff so not only do we get businesses that reach out to us wanting to volunteer projects but we were able to as a staff go in there and finish those last 150 trees as part of our full staff meeting in May and I have to say my work pants came out they're my dress work pants I really should not have worn dress work pants in a day that you're doing a project like that let's just say they may become work pants now and for Earth Day in April 22nd Heady Vermont Heady Vermont Heady Vermont and Fall Raven each brought 20 volunteers for a tree relocation project at 311 North Ave so again businesses that are looking to make a difference in the community they're looking for a project that helps their staff on with our conservation program and our support through the conservation legacy fund we're able to do projects like that so bike path maintenance and improvement fund has all the words up there for what we're doing but I want to talk about an upcoming pilot that we're doing with local motion that I am super excited about I think all of you know that I love to go anywhere on a bicycle we're borrowing for two weeks a fat tire electric assist bicycle with a trailer to try to replace some of the vehicle trips on our bike path so with our bike path maintenance person when they're doing the sweeps of the path throughout there with a vehicle we'll be getting that electric assist bike with the trailer to be doing that and Paul who's our main bike path person is very excited about testing that out so we're I was really thrilled that when I sent that email that there was no resistance it was just excitement about trying trying this out and local motion was right there ready to help us out special project this is our capital bond money that Martha and cheap and a norm I just can't I mean actually all of those I couldn't imagine not being in the same building with these guys that's been the power of sharing a building with parks and public works Martha's been so supportive I'm not sure how many times I've asked her questions where I just walked down the hall I peek around the corner and she's there and she's never once rolled her eyes or side as I asked her one more question about capital projects and norm the same and cheap and very supportive with us using their staff so thanks for public works for helping us out with that so our main piece with the special projects is obviously the bike path and we're almost done with section called it phase 2 we're almost done there with a big very expensive part left that it will be working on late fall through into early spring and that's the overpass at north beach but otherwise they're just buttoning things up fixing the pieces and it's beautiful I get to commune on it every day and there's just so many people that are out using it so I think that's obviously one our community is very proud of and we'll be moving out to the south end starting up while the design work is happening now through the summer then we'll be going out to bid and then going under construction heading out by Oakledge next spring and then our final one there is TIF and donations we're working on trying to close out our TIF money for waterfront park with the soil work out there and electrical work obviously with most projects they come in really high for what you want to get done and then you value engineer it down to the money that you have available so we are working to get that wrapped up because that TIF money needs to get spent we've got donations for the pause places on the greenway also for Cambian Rise all the way down to the greenway path and then working with the group at the Oakledge Universal Playgrounds that's another hope I say tentative donation because they're still working on it so that's pretty much wraps us up for oops capital if anybody has any questions thank you question about the green belt capital actually two questions about that how are areas decided on for where to invest that money I know that there's a particular focus on the downtown core to be noted in your dock where else how else I know that one of the areas that VJ look at part of it is the tree canopy where everything is put into GIS is it tree treeworks is the name of the program that we use and it allows us to see where our trees are and I know VJ has talked about the new north end is one of the areas that we want to try to increase the tree canopy out there so it's using GIS to see where our challenges are and then also some of it's where if we've had some damage like if trees have come down we need to replace them in neighborhoods we're looking at that and the tree program also lets us know on the age of the trees what the condition of the trees are so the staff can go through and look to see which trees are in the I shouldn't feel sorry to say in the worst shape but because obviously they're not hazardous if they're hazardous we're taking them down but then we can start replacing so that we have varied ages of trees along streets okay what's the name of that tool treeworks and the second small question is the emerald ash borer okay so maybe share a little bit if we can definitely share the plan with you and then so it's basically the emerald ash borer is a bug and it's hitting all the ash trees and so the ash trees will eventually all die or you can infuse them with a herbicide over two years to keep them alive and so that emerald ash borer is looking at we have I think 1,200 ash trees in the city and so we're having to do a really very systematic approach to what we're going to do with those trees because they those same parks so Roosevelt what was the other one you noted okay okay so on our website max is a form for parks request form and it's right down at the bottom is that form if you don't find it just email me I'll get it to you and that's where they just fill that out and then it comes to when they were filled out who is it because so it goes to Diana yeah and then yeah and we take I mean it's we enjoy getting them because I mean obviously we think we've got a good idea of what hats to happen but it's nice getting the communities ideas because there's things that we don't always think about you're welcome great thank you cool I don't have anything here sir pop that in all right well rich is pulling that up thank you all very much director public works system director and we have Derek writes in in the back here who is the special projects manager for BBA involved in the parking partnership with us so we are going to make this fast let's cut straight to the point no rate increases are needed to make this budget work and we have a balanced budget all right I think it might be the smooth operator but yeah exactly all right so we'll pull it up there's four divisions in public works one of the divisions is parking and traffic as you know here and so why don't you talk about our accomplishments for FY 18 first of all as as Chapin already mentioned we have a projecting a positive that income for the fourth straight year which is really good considering all the construction work and everything and all the improvements we've been handling within our garages we reduce enforcement hours as council knows back in December utilizing data data driven decisions so as you know we reduce downtown parking enforcement hours from eight and the other sections from eight to six to nine to six and within the core to nine to six of nine to nine from eight to ten which has been received I think very positively by our users we're establishing reduced seasonal rates we have accomplished this partly in our last DPW commission meeting our lake street section of lake street is currently a dollar an hour and then lake street extension where I have 88 spaces plus six handicap we'll have kiosks installed that will be a dollar an hour but between November and April during the off season it will be reduced to 40 cents an hour to encourage longer term use of these spaces as well we completed the phase two of the nine million dollar garage repairs in college street garage lowered pay-by-sell service rates that's a renegotiated fee with park mobile at one time it was a 30 fee additional 30 cents to re-up to extend we got a 35 we got rid of the 35 extension fee and then we were able to convince park mobile to offer that same deal to Champlain college which has park mobile, UVM which has park mobile and Winooski just signed their deal with park mobile and they wrote on our deal so when you use park mobile in these areas other than the city it will be the same rates which is nice, it's convenience we procured upgraded revenue control system we just had our first direct operations meeting with them the other day with parking soft we're expecting our system to start being installed after Labor Day of this year we're investing in enhanced communications did study parks coordination through BBA we're continuing our downtown counts on Thursdays, Saturdays and every quarter on a Sunday we're also counting not only our public on-street and off-street spaces but our private off-street spaces as well so we get a good count of what a space is available we're installing upgraded signals at battery maple that's ongoing right now sidewalks have been put in place the upgraded ADA acceptable sidewalks are now in place on all four corners now we're just going to do the light system and then we're going to go after that our plan is to go to Colchester Colchester out Colchester out I can touch on this one which we'll get to in the next slide we've taken one great budget and turned it into two budgets and we'll talk about that in the next slide we're using to pay down some of our existing garage capital debt by using some of our fund balance which will reduce our operating expenses next so we used to have a traffic fund based on guidance from the city attorney and the charter change from 2017 we needed to split into two funds one as you'll see is the existing traffic fund which ordinance language says is for controlling and regulating traffic but we have a new fund called the utilities fund which is municipal lots and garages you'll see the activities that are in each fund next so we have a number of goals I won't read through them all they're building off of FY18 successes let's see I think you all have seen a number of these I'll jump down to support bike share operation you've seen the green ride program around town we are a sponsor of that operation with a contribution from the traffic fund as part of controlling and regulating traffic so we are a sponsor of that operation in addition down towards the bottom another interesting public-private partnership we will be bringing with to you an agreement to manage the 53 public spaces in the eagles landing project at 194 St. Paul street so that we can ensure consistent signage consistent costs consistent pay on foot stations and really have it seen as one united parking system downtown next alright so we have a number of goals and to improve our operations the new park system in the garages will really enable us to take our attendance and harness their talents as ambassadors they will no longer be limited to the booth and can circulate for visibility, for safety for janitorial work for service to our customer we'll be able to provide online options for obtaining our monthly passes that is a major revenue component of our cold street and lakeview garage and managing hundreds close to a thousand monthly leases can be very cumbersome so this will help us and help the customer so if you can just go back just to finish the bottom there there are a number of pieces for the downtown parking plan the validation program that we want to offer for downtown businesses the new park system will allow overnight garage leases and we'll have dynamic signage outside the garages thanks so getting to the numbers now we've split a five million dollar program into a surprisingly two and a half million dollar program on each side so for the traffic fund this is mostly funded by the on street meters and has spent supporting signs signals and the crossing guard program has a net income of $61,000 for the parking facilities fund 2.6 million dollar revenue and the expenses are split between the marketplace garage college and lakeview garage and parking lots this is a new fund that was set up as we discussed and we're proposing in order to make the budget balance is to use half of our four million dollar fund balance to reduce our annual debt payments for the garage capital work which would still leave us with 140 days of cash on hand patrick started out by saying we've had four positive years of net income in this program which allows us to pay down some of our debt and reduce our annual payments for debt service so while we split one budget into two we mash them together for you here to see what it looks like just as a comparison so if you were to mash the two budgets together this year for FY19 you would notice that our revenues are proposed to go up 5% in our expenses up 1.6 you will see on the net on the bottom line the last four years as we've been trending from a highly deficit budget towards a much more positive budget next it's important to note while the budget is not dependent on any rate increases we are constantly evaluating our systems and our rates in enforcement based on data you saw that we reduced rates in the core and outside the core based on data this last year and that we just implemented a lower rate on the waterfront for the winter but we are constantly going to use the data to inform policy changes going forward next alright so key drivers for our fund we are projecting really similar utilization rates that said we are looking to do more traffic impact work more signal upgrades and that comes from impact fees we are looking for more parking revenue from our partnership with the Champlain College Eagles Landing project we are paying for the bike share support and continuing our BBA support next so that's on the traffic fund on the parking facilities fund again projecting similar utilization to our current year we are looking to add those kiosks at lake street extension we are seeing a reduction in the DID proceeds because of the mall redevelopment so for the next year or two we will not have as much of the special assessment revenue that comes to support to our free next alright so for future years there may need to be a discussion FY20 depending on how well the park system works for enhancing our revenue we may need to discuss rate changes in 2020 that is still TBD we do have all the operational improvements will continue to roll out with the park system we need to do about 2 million dollars of garage repairs to marketplace garage it was built in 76 but we are waiting for the city place burlington garage to open before doing most of the repairs there questions thank you I added in the page where I mashed everything together because some people were asking what is the kind of year over year comparison we'll share the updated presentation great so my question has to do with and I believe since you addressed everything that I can conclude that you are not considering or implementing any change in parking for parking in meter blocks on Sundays at this point the budget does not depend on it we're still collecting data we're going to look at the data but anything that we do in this realm notify you as the council there is no firm plan at this point sure that's fine through our management of the garages and the on street system we have been able to turn a traffic fund which was on the edge of not being able to pay its bills to having a 4 million dollar fund balance so we're proposing to pay down half of that to reduce our ongoing borrow it was and we each year have beat budget significantly and that has enabled us as you saw in the projections year over year we started with negative net projections moving towards positive but each of the last four years we've actually delivered positive and results and that has built this 4 million dollar fund balance over the last four years we have existing debt out for the garage capital work we've done about 4.2 million dollars is currently borrowed and we are transferring that line of credit into a termed note and we want to make sure that we're not paying 4.2 million dollars out on a termed note if we can pay down half of that now with our fund balance and be able to have a smaller note into the future we're paying down that technically it's not considered debt it's a line of credit construction loan that's outstanding that we have the ability to pay down that LOC prior to it actually being termed out long term as debt I know we need to continue to invest in the LOC but marketplace being that we're 18 to 24 months out it doesn't make sense in my mind to be holding a fat fund balance and paying it is possible with our park system and our management we're continuing to deliver higher revenue every year without rate changes so we're seeing with this park system we're going to have nighttime leases in the garages we've never had that before we may be able to continue to trend that revenue positive we talked earlier about why you wouldn't want to necessarily do pay as you go this budget to be completely candid this budget is coming together late this budget than some of the others and I have some similar questions as possible as we come back for final approval on this that we may shift this a little bit yeah sure yes there are a lot of people who don't have access to parking in the wintertime and they can get that free if they get in for a certain time is that going to continue I mean is there more to this story than I should know about it's still a work in progress given that the garages are so underutilized at night our goal is to have it be a discounted product it is certainly not the same rates that we would imagine during the day exactly it's an affordable off-peak rate especially what it would be we have this resource policy questions that flow from this and how it interacts with our zoning policies it has the potential I think to be another kind of force for affordable housing if we have late and unused nighttime spaces that can be the traffic fund can make some money invest it properly but it also avoids the need to spend millions of millions on building new parking spaces it may make it possible for downtown housing residential housing to be built we don't have absolutely I think on the June 4th you know I mentioned the June 4th meeting let me make sure I understand what you want to see but the June 4th meeting any changes as a result of the input we've gotten over the course of these meetings or things that have emerged we will explicitly present on June 4th including if there is changes here but specifically do you want to see over the course of the year together I see yeah absolutely alright thank you very much thank you thank you what are you doing you're very do you want to join we can do you want we still no we're good sit okay Darren and Jane join me no sorry we're over here We will do what we can to keep within that window. First I want to thank you for having me in today and excited to present the budget I am joined by Dara Springer, our COO, Manager of Strategy and Innovation, Jim Reardon who is our Director of Finance and James Gibbons our Director of Power Supply. Today we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on at Burlington Electric, a little bit about the power markets and some of the challenges we're seeing. We think importantly it is important to start that although this is a challenging year for us we are very pleased to report that we will be able to go into our 10th year without a rate increase. I would argue that when you look at the entirety of all the work we're doing at Burlington Electric all the innovative programs, all the efficiency efforts, all the capital spending that we're doing there are hard pressed in another utility that's been able to do so much without adjusting rates. It's an amazing story and it's due to the work that our team has put into it year over year and that means everybody from the men and women who work at McNeil on the front lines and the plants are doing distribution to our teams that do finance and power supply. It's really a great story for Burlington and something we're really proud of. We don't think and I'm going to talk about this more that we will be able to get to an 11th year. At this point it is unlikely given a lot of the trends that I'm going to get into but we're obviously going to work at it. It's important for us right in our mission is to keep our rates low and stable and have affordable electricity for our customers which we believe we've done. There's some moving pieces here we'll talk about. On the income side we're seeing continued degradation in the direct market. We're actually seeing a kilowatt hour sales drop which might come back up. We'll talk a little bit about that and some weak energy prices overall. On the expense side we've done I think really all we can short of some really draconian methods to keep our controllable costs down. But we are seeing pressure on things that we don't control, transmission costs and also some normal labor costs through the contract and other things. But despite all these challenges we are making investments that we think will continue to make BED one of the preeminent municipal utilities certainly in the state but I think in the country. We talked a little bit about the rec revenue. The rec revenue is what has allowed us on the revenue side to have some flexibility over recent years. A few years ago you can see our rec revenue peaked at over $12 million annually. That's money that we went right back in to keeping our rates low. Over just the last couple of years we've seen that slide to just above $8 million. And that $4 million drop that's a big chunk of change. We continue to see the rec market being soft although stabilized. We are watching that closely that's something that we assume that is going to be stable this year. But if it does continue to dip that's something that could change the equation in future years. One thing that's important to note with recs, we have instituted with the work with the help of our Electric Commission a forward selling policy for recs. So we're one of the reasons we're not seeing a bigger drop here because the rec prices themselves have dropped quite a bit is that we've been forward selling the recs so that we are selling part of our portfolio today for future years. So fiscal 2021 and the out years. That's allowed us to not feel the full drop of the rec market which was say at $50 a couple of years ago down to this year trading at less than $10. So those forward sales which James Gibbons and his team have done have really helped us stabilize that. We also seen kilowatt hour sales very soft. I mean this is sort of a good news story. We are always working to reduce the amount of electricity that we're selling. Historically we sell less electricity today than we did in 1990 because of our efficiency efforts. But in the near term it does have an impact on our budgets. We were the green sort of dots on top were where we were forecasting and the bottom is the re forecast and you can see it's quite a bit lower. That's direct kilowatt hour sales to our customers. That affects our revenue and that's something that we're looking to deal with that in the coming years. We have a couple of big customers including one big one here in the downtown it's not taking a lot of electricity. When that comes back online that'll help a little bit but it's still we're not projecting it to be a big jump in the future. It's going to be a little bit lower. We're also dealing with some energy markets that are volatile. In the wintertime we have excess energy that we sell back into the market from McNeil because of the way our power supply works. We want those energy prices in the winter to be high. We've counted on we've had high prices historically that yellow dot is the five year average but you can see over the last few years we've had very low energy prices so we're not able to sell that that also impacts our revenue. And you can see I just want to note in this that the five year average is the yellow dot. We've budgeted conservatively in this so we're budgeting below the five year average because we want to make sure we're not being too rosy. Generally we tend to use modest assumptions rather than rosy. We don't use rosy ones because we want to make sure that we are doing it conservatively. On the expense side we are seeing transmission costs that have doubled since almost doubled, there will more than double since our last rate increase. Again totally uncontrollable from our perspective. This has to do with what's being done all across New England and the costs that are just coming back to us to be part of the grid and supporting that we are. There are some things we can do to control it but we can't wildly bend the curve of this rising cost. That's cost that we just have to fund the money for. For the controllable cost things we can control we have a great I think a real good success story. In the year prior to our strategic transformation and in the 10 years prior to our strategic transformation efforts the budgets grew annually at 5.8% during the periods of fiscal 7 to fiscal 16. After our strategic transformation efforts which include our voluntary buyout we have seen those controllable costs basically flat line. We are just barely above our fiscal 16 controllable cost number for fiscal 19. When you couple this story with our investments in renewable energy and our power supply, the ingenuity around how we've done power supply this has really held off a rate increase for at least three years. But we can't stretch that forever. So we've been able to do well but this is a good story but it's not going to hold us forever. So getting into the budget we bring, we look at our budget from an income statement perspective and I should mention that our electric commission has reviewed this budget in detail and have approved it and asked for your approval unanimously. And we do make some assumptions in here. Obviously I mentioned before we are budgeting for stable rack and energy prices versus our forecast. We don't think they're going to swim wildly. We have budgeted them modestly. Same thing with the sales to customers. If we were to see a big customer drop off then that could impact it but we have a lot of institutional customers with the hospital and UVM so we don't see a lot of those wild swings. A few other things that are important we are asking for an accounting order for a big turbine overhaul that we do at McNeil. This happens about every seven years. We've received these accounting orders in the past. This will allow us to amortize that cost over a seven or eight year period so it doesn't hit us all at once. It smooths out our cost overall. We are going to be coming back to the board of finance to ask for approval to sell our share of the high gate converter station. I won't get into this in a lot of detail here. But the really quick version is that there is a piece of equipment that sits up at the Canadian border that we really don't use for our purposes. We do get some revenue off of it but we've had an offer to buy it for a premium and we are proposing to sell it. We'll come back and talk to you more about that when we have more time but that is also embedded into this budget. It's piece of equipment that you can't touch, feel, see and it doesn't really provide any real meaningful value other than the revenue value which we'll get some return on it with this sale of our share that we own about 7%. Talk more about that later. Happy to answer any questions tonight. We've also assumed a new EV charging rate which we think is a really exciting change. We're going to come back and propose that we file an EV charging rate that will allow for almost 40% less cost of electricity for charging your EV overnight. We don't think it does much of a hit on our revenue but it does provide a really important incentive for people who want to buy an EV and working with them charge it overnight when we have a lot of capacity. Those are things that we've put in our budget. So despite these cost pressures, we have got a great budget this year. You'll see on the next slide that we have a very robust capital plan. It's the most robust one that we've done certainly in the last 10 years and that includes a big slug of money for a major IT upgrade. We have an IT system that was born in the 90s and it's really outdated and it's getting to the... I would say it's on life support. So we've been over the last year working on an IT, what we call IT Forward to get ready for this major IT upgrade. We're budgeting for the first phase of it in fiscal 19. We think it's really important to provide a platform for all the future innovation and especially the customer component of what we do in the future. We've also budgeted for a $2.4 million investment in Delco equity. I think we've talked about this before, but this is a really great investment for us. We're able to invest in Delco, which is the state's transmission system. We get a 12.5% return on this equity. We actually get more... Last year, we started collecting more in Delco dividend income than we pay in interest on our outstanding loans. So any chance we can to invest in Delco equity, we make an investment. We do that and then this budget accounts for that. We've also continued to make strong investments in employee safety training and education. This has been consistent over the last few years, something that all of our employees... We ask our employees regularly what they look for, what they want, and they've said, we want more... We want training and education by an overwhelming margin. And we've put in this budget $230,000 for training and education and have somebody that works on this to make sure every employee has an individual training education plan to allow them to grow in their career and be more value to growing the electric and our customers. Also, we built in tons of energy innovation. Our efficiency program is going strong. That's fully supported. District Energy is supporting part of this. We're looking at a half a megawatt battery. It's bringing in a half a megawatt. How big is it James? The battery of the airport? The proposed one is just shy of a megawatt of discharge capability with a four-hour discharge length. At the airport. So it'll combine with our half a megawatt solar at the airport with a battery to provide them better reliability but also to allow us to use it to peak-shave. So it brings down some of our other costs. We budgeted for a net-zero roadmap to make sure that we are seeing how the path that we get to being a net-zero energy city in Burlington. I mentioned the EV charging rate. We still have money in here for our electric vehicle incentives for our e-bikes, which are absolutely taking off. We're talking with Megan Moore. She's walking out. She's doing an e-bike lending program for her and her daughter trying to figure out how she's going to buy an e-bike. Within the first week of that program, we announced just a few weeks ago with the mayor. Within the first week, we had 15 people that have filed for e-bike rebates. And I think that number has been probably growing. We're going to do our solar shop with 2.0, a community solar program focused on how we can get solar especially to renters who don't have the opportunity to take advantage of solar because they don't own a building. And finally, I wanted to mention that we are proposing to do an employee net-zero benefit. One thing that we think is important is that our employees are personally committed to being net-zero in their own lives. And we're proposing to provide them with an opportunity to get a rebate on energy innovations that they do in their own lives. So if they buy an EV, if they put solar on their house, if they do weatherization, if they buy an e-bike, providing them a benefit to be able to make that more affordable. We think this is important because we want everybody really bought into what we do. Capital spending. I mentioned before, but we have a $7.6 million capital spending. This is net of any customer contribution and net of any money we're putting toward Delco. You can see that we have steadily tracked higher on our capital spend. We think this is important. So we don't want to artificially hold rates down by starving our capital program. That is a bad bargain. And so we are continuing to make big investments in our infrastructure to keep that going. And this also assumes that we get a continued $3 million portion of the city's general obligation bonds. We've been doing that the last few years. Our commission recommended and they asked for the council's approval for moving that forward. So I want to just mention that's kind of fiscal 19 in a nutshell. I want to mention fiscal 20 because I think it's important. We are given the market challenges that I kind of laid out. I do think it is likely for us to see a rate adjustment next year. It's not certain because there's a lot of moving pieces in the market. If we get a colder winter or if we get a positive movement in the rec market, this could change. But I kind of want to say before we wrap this up that we've had 10 years of it. It's been great, but we'll need to do something if we want to remain fiscally prudent. One thing that we look at is, of course, we look at all of our Moody's metrics regularly. We do well on two of the three metrics. These don't comprise the whole rate. They comprise each of them as about 10% of the overall Moody's rate. Two of the three, we do extremely well. Cash on hand, which we've managed to keep our cash reserves at a good spot. Our debt service coverage ratio is above the benchmark. But we are lower than we need to be on adjusted debt service coverage ratio. This is one that looks at the available revenue to cover our debt coverage. We have kind of squeezed what we can out of the expense side of things. This is sort of fundamentally a revenue problem. And it's most likely that we are going to have to make some adjustments to revenue or see a bump in some of our other revenues to materially move this back up above our benchmark rating. Like I said, this is one of many things that Moody's would look at, but I do flag it because we look at it every month and the things that we do. And I wanted to say that is one of the things that we want to move that back above 1.5. We'll likely need a rate adjustment to be able to do that. That shouldn't be the only reason that you want to do a rate adjustment because there are a lot of factors in play. But it is one thing that we like to flag every year where we are with those metrics. Finally, I'm going to go through this slide, but we added it just so we can see all the things we're doing. Now, we're having a great year in fiscal 18. We want to continue that great year in fiscal 19. We believe this budget does that without a great increase for our customers while maintaining a strong fiscal discipline, strong financial metrics, but still advancing toward our goal of being in that zero-energy city. I know I went over, but there's a lot in there. Can I just want to mention one thing? And I might need Richard's help with this. Is there's a resolution that would allow us in fiscal year 2019 to extend our line of credit when it expires May of 2019? Not that we've used it, but it's good to have. Thank you. I give the credit to a great team of BED and just does an outstanding job. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then there were three. And so we have Mayor's Office regional programs to help retirement. Okay. And is there really information about Mayor's Office? We did just post this afternoon. I have a presentation. I'm sorry. So this is like a Richard. We wanted a little more information about the positions in the Mayor's Office. Who does what? Oh, this is that. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it was your self-insurance. I'm looking at you like this is not. Well, I'm out of nine now. Yes, we did. So we tried to respond to the request from last week. And so this person is the consumer charge. So I think that's great. Thank you. Charge of course. And then we have a short break up on each of the three positions. You know, in each case, there's a lengthy job description for each of these positions, but we tried to kind of pull out the highlights and the ones that have a, you know, in particular that I thought would be an interest to the council and that, you know, may not be fully transparent to the council, certainly the public, how much sort of Katie and Jordan and Liz do to support the efforts of city departments, you know, all of which you've been hearing out from. So I know this. I'm happy to go through these slides here so you can review them. I apologize. We weren't able to get them out until today. But what would be helpful? I have to walk through. Exactly what I was looking for and understand what each, but trying to understand, you know, we look at every department. We look at their positions. You have a vacancy now, essentially. Do you or don't you? Brian, MIT? No. We have named Jordan to show the... But then who's doing Jordan's position? Okay. So sorry. Yes. The front desk position, the assistant, the administrative coordinator, Jordan left the city, of course, way back last October and we filled that temporarily. So we've been operating at full strength with Liz Amler working in that position. Right. And we thought it made sense for a variety of reasons to keep that a temporary position. It's always clear that I would still be in this position and that we are moving forward and have advertised that position and started here and moving forward and are planning on filling that permanently. So my point is, Mr. Mayor, I thought with the movement, there was a vacancy in your department, a position that was there but was unfilled. And so I thought that like every other department, we would look at what each person does and make sure that that position was still needed. So that's really my focus. There's no secret about this. I'm just trying to figure out who does what and is the structure which we enhanced, is that structure still the one that we need for the mayor's office? So that's really where I'm coming from and why I wanted the org chart is I wanted to look at how it worked and then I wanted to understand just with bullets, just as you've done, not the whole job description, but just the key points of what people do to understand that so to better understand your organization. Because I thought that when you made the presentation I felt that was missing somewhat for me. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We'll go back to the previous slide. The communications department. Can I just ask you a question about the organization? So in terms of, there's two parts of it. There's like a special organization, special projects where you can work in the department and then there's the communications department. Just say that's roughly 50 or the sense of the division of time. That's a fair question, an interesting question. I would say when we created this position and tracing back the various evolutions, if you recall, I think we've had basically stable structure since Mike Canerick became the chief of staff and we set up this position. Actually, I guess we probably... Sorry, that's not accurate. But what is accurate about that is at that point Mike, the chief of staff, handled almost all the media communications and then we had a project person that this was originally a project position. As things have evolved over time, we found that very unworkable, frankly, to have the chief of staff also be the media person because the nature of the media work is that it is unpredictable, that we can have 10 media inquiries in a day, all of which we feel that's our job to respond to promptly and quickly. Or we can have days where we don't get any, of course. We have many days where we get just a few. It was difficult for the chief of staff to push forward sort of sustained initiatives while also being responsible for the media stuff. So when Brian Lowe became chief of staff, we really tried to make an effort to shift that and this position became much more of a media-focused position. Brian Lowe took on much more of the project responsibilities and that has worked better from my perspective. And so I would say, I didn't quite answer your question, I would say that this is probably 80-90% communications related as opposed to project related at this point. It almost was a surprise to me in reviewing this for you that we still call this a project coordinator and that it's not all media but there's a lot of communication activity as is represented here that is really the bulk of QD stuff. I think that the communications is important for sharing information, right? So what's the idea of this little bias towards the better news that is happening that things are happening that may not be so good that it's still in harmony? It's a public information function, right? It's not necessarily the auto function, it's a public information function. So I would just ask that you kind of stay aware about the suited women that can see it and edit standard communication. Oh, that's actually, I think that's an interesting one to raise. So I was working with the Department of Public Works to put out some information about that. So it didn't come from the mayor's office but they worked on an update for their website which they found is most effective to share through social media. That tends to reach the public in the media more quickly. So they then use that language to reach the public. When there's, you must get a lot of calls just from the public. Some kind of call it, but it says there is a system. So what happens with those? Do any of those problems get solved with the mayor's office staff or is it all sent to someone else or does that work with that function? Certainly. Yeah, if we kind of do it on a case-by-case basis, it depends on what the inquiry is. Some complaints we can resolve quickly in the mayor's office. Some need to be referred to another department. And we have a, having been recently in the administrative coordinator role, I have a pretty good understanding of which person in each department might resolve each type of question or complaint. So I'm, I have a pretty good understanding about which person might be able to answer which question. However, I do think that there is room within the city for more streamlined customer service communications and that's something that we've been thinking about in the mayor's office. But when someone does call the mayor's office, the administrative coordinator role usually picks up the phone. I pick up the phone sometimes and I have been working with Liz to make sure that things get followed up on. That's great. Thank you very much. Just a real quick... I have Tracy next, but the mayor... Sorry, just a quick additional point on that. I just, one of the things I mentioned briefly the other day and we are going to propose to you as one of the options for some of the capital or the assigned fund balance spending is this study to look at the way in which customer service, constituent services are performed and some of that came out of a sense that we do receive a lot of that in the mayor's office and we have a sense that we do our best and we have a sense that maybe there could be some improvement there as collectively as a city. Also, as we are considering hiring for this next position, once we are, Jordan has made the observation that it can be... Whereas we have approached this position as being someone who is an entry-level person in the past, we're going to be weighing and considering this, whether someone with more experience, because of that, it can be a different role to thrust someone who is in their first professional job into handling some of these difficult constituent request responses. We're considering that as we're out there hiring again, having learned that over the last six years, if you will. I think that might be a good idea. Yeah. So that mediating group piece is helpful context to understand. One of the things that I've complained about on the council floor and other times has been just the timely flow of information and at least information. I know it's not completely reliant on the mayor's office as an issue, oftentimes information, relevant information, is needed where the council comes from departments specifically. But just wanting to see information, having the resources needed to get, to facilitate that information flow to the council such that we have enough time to digest it, especially if it's a complex thing, like for instance the UVM capital agreement, which, while I think there was a lot of good stuff in there, I just felt like I didn't have the time that necessary and so I felt like I had responsibility not to support something that I didn't have a chance to bet. So I don't know how that seems to be represented in this, but given some information sharing, I know that this is going to frustration on some issues and I just wanted to see that better dealt with such that we have at least a couple of days or even weeks to deal with information that's particularly weighted or challenging. Yes, point taken, Councilor Trichy. I think we have acknowledged that what happened with the UVM agreement was driven, it's not the timing we would hope to achieve and work to achieve. It was, we felt, it was a function of difficult negotiations and unmovable deadlines with the bond vote and certainly I hope that I want to believe that that's the exception to the rule and not how we try to communicate with the council. I certainly respect and the same way that I've voiced at times not wanting to be surprised when those surprises could be avoided. I don't think it's the way we work best with each other. We try to hold up our end of that relationship and give you as much modus as we can while so juggling a huge number of balls and issues at all times we certainly really try to have it run our checklist before putting anything out in the public that you get at least some notice and certainly it's in days or weeks in many cases but it is something that we certainly aspire to get out to use so that you're never put in the position of having to respond to something that you haven't heard anything about. What a difficult position that puts you in and we try to avoid it and we'll keep doing our best there. It is something we know is important. Thank you so much. You're really appreciative and that's not a commentary at all on the demeanor or the professionals and the people that you've had in your office. I think that Brian and now Katie and Jordan and Liz as well bring just a great sort of communication set in terms of council interactions at least in terms of interactions that I have with both of you with Brian and Liz I'm impressed with the way that they handle themselves and the way that the communication just doesn't feel pressured or slimy or bad in any way so I just really appreciate that. I appreciate that Councillor Tracy. I'm proud of them. I think it's a great team and we definitely aspire to have a level communication with the council and with everyone that works for a communicator. Thank you. I just want to ask a question. When you get outside of us calling someone a resident do you track that? I know this goes to how you want to spend some money Mr. Mayor on just communicating but do you have a list or a tracking mechanism so that you know you got back to somebody? How does that work? That's what I just wondered. It's not a perfect system and it's a frustration of mine. We have tried various methods. We have spreadsheets. We have we do have a very good system now with the Chief of Clip Fix that we've migrated a lot of responses over to and some of the stuff that comes into the Mayor's office gets put into that but it is a system we've had we've talked to the congressional offices and we continue to try to innovate and make that system better and I think we have a pretty good record of not leaving things that you know just dropping balls and failing to kind of follow up on things but certainly I don't think we have especially when we hand things off to other parts of the city knowing that the loop gets closed we don't have a great as good a system as I'd like something to have and part of this 9-1 3-1-1 system is thoughts that maybe that becomes the system 3-1-1 because none of us have a perfect system but I have to let you know that I get called I call the Mayor's office but they never got back to me now you might have referred it to someone else you know and I can't even give you but I mean this is a comment and so I wonder what that process was like thank you thank you okay thanks a lot for that we appreciate the additional information thank you understood we're close we're looking at your programs health retirement etc Beth is up thank you so I will start just to let you know for retirement today as you know we have a new actuary we got the first version of the report last week we've been working with them to make some corrections and changes so I'm not able to come to you with a good budget it would have been guesses and I don't want to do that so yeah so quickly the first one you have is the fund 175 which I'm sorry I'm lying it's 150 which is self insurance which is the health and dental insurance we are looking at a total budget of 12 million 650 this year as I mentioned last week I think when we were talking about the budgets we are we continue to have a good year for claims for health and dental so we are not budgeting a huge increase of course health care costs just go up so what we're looking at is a claims increase of about $150,000 we budgeted in there for next year our rates for all of the insurances are actually committed through this fiscal year so we will be coming to you with that proposal but we had negotiated rates already next year we will be going out to RFP for new rates for 20 and forward fund 175 which is liability insurance and the workers comp so the first part is liability insurance it's things like property or you know things like that you'll see it does look like we have some increases we do have just cost increases that we have what's happened here is there's a bit of a consolidation of insurance so where BED or airport may have been paying individually for their policies now it's all showing up in here so the increase is not as big as it appears just on the dollar figures but there was an increase in the insurances partially because of our experience partially just because insurance goes up 3-5% a year learning we do work very closely with our brokers to kind of evaluate it each year we have the correct coverage but not over coverage one thing we are contemplating going into the new year is cyber security coverage which we have not traditionally have but it's becoming more and more of a risk and we think it's prudent to be considering now and it's not a significant cost how much will that cost we don't have an actual quote they've estimated at about 20 to 25,000 it's no not considering how bad it could be yeah then I'm sorry so if you look at the workers comp you have heard me say a couple of times this year we are not having as good of an experience with the workers comp in 18 but I will continue to say as we look carefully at it it does not increase experience in workers comp claims it is older claims being paid out people have decided to have surgeries this year so we are predicting a bit of an increase in claims but not a significant increase again because we're not feeling like there's a systemic issue here one thing I will be raising with you though what we do want to do with some of the surplus in the health this year is look at creating a reserve fund for both health and workers comp so we don't have to budget worst case each year it's not great for a budget it ends up in operating surplus it's also particularly with the health where employees pay a portion we end up maybe overestimating we like to create these reserve funds with not significant amounts but 300,000, 400,000 maybe cap it at 600,000 where we know we have a cushion so if we have a bad year somebody gets sick we have a couple of injuries we're covered but again so we don't always have to just assume the worst case we don't want to use this as a crutch to not budget appropriately it just allows us to be a little less worst case thoughtful in there reserve fund so do you want me to jump to regional programs or okay so that would be the next page counselor no change would you like to add anything I would like to add something on this budget yes you know this is an eclectic part of our budget this regional programs budget so the which we have made some changes to over the last six years but very quite limited you know we have created this emerging projects budget I think it's been helpful for us to be responsive to things and I appreciate that there's been counsel support for that and that continues here we also changed the way we funded arts groups we used to fund a number of different arts organizations out of this budget and you may recall several years ago I think three years ago we took those out and created a and put the money into a competitive small arts grants program that BTA manages annually