Well, we heard from the creator of Linux this morning, and there are obviously more open source projects. Linux isn't the only one. How many people have here have heard of an up-and-comer project called Kubernetes? Anyone? So Kubernetes has actually, you know, been described to me as sort of the new Linux of the cloud, that Kubernetes is one of these projects that is just growing in terms of developer momentum. I think if you take, you know, sort of the number of developers times pull requests, this is an insanely fast growing project. I'd be curious to hear how the project is dealing with the amazing development pace, and maybe there was some things that Lena said that were inspirational. But Brian Grant is here. He's the primary architect of Kubernetes, along with Aparna Singha from Google, who is the lead product management, the leader of the project management team for Kubernetes at Google. To talk about this incredible new project, please welcome Brian and Aparna. Come on up. Welcome. Now is it working? Alright, maybe the antenna got buried. So yeah, we're going to talk to you about this relatively new open source project called Kubernetes. I will explain how and why we built the Kubernetes community, which is really what sets it apart from other similar open source projects, as well as from other open source projects at Google. Yeah, so application containers are an increasingly popular way to accelerate application development and employment. But containers alone often aren't sufficient to manage containers in production and scale. We need a container orchestration system like Kubernetes. I like to think of it as container-centric infrastructure for deploying and managing applications. Kubernetes was created by Google, drawing upon experience with Borg, the system that runs search and Gmail, but designed to run anywhere. I did a software engineer at Google for about 10 years. I previously worked on Borg, and I've been involved with Kubernetes from its inception. We open sourced Kubernetes in 2014 and created the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to host Kubernetes and also to foster an ecosystem of cloud-native infrastructure. As you can see from this graph of commits over time, Kubernetes has grown very fast. We've sustained linear growth in the main Kubernetes repository, which is what this graph shows, now with more than 43,000 commits. But changes to the original repository now account for less than half of all the changes to the project across all our repositories. It's been estimated that over 400 years of work have been put into Kubernetes over just the last three years. That growth has been fueled by growth in our contributor base from less than a dozen people to 150 active monthly contributors. Now we have more than 1,500 unique all-time contributors. We have contributors from most time zones of the world, including from countries like Brazil, India, China, Germany, many, many others. In fact, anywhere you go, you're likely to find an active contributor community for Kubernetes in your time zone. Okay, maybe I'll stay at the podium. The podium might seem short. So where has this growth come from? Well, Google has been dramatically increasing its investment in Kubernetes, and the rest of the community has grown even faster. In the first six months, Google was responsible for most of the commits to the project, but now we're responsible for less than half. And we actually worked really hard to achieve that and to grow and broaden the community. Google engineers spend a significant amount of their time helping others in the community become successful on the project. Why do we spend this effort? Well, we actually found that engagement with the community yields numerous benefits. Engagement with users provides rapid feedback that drives improvements to Kubernetes. And we also help those users become successful with using Kubernetes. And that creates advocates for the project who blog and tweet about it, and they talk at meetups and grow awareness, which attracts more users. In turn, more users and more use cases attract developers who build tools and create other projects that make Kubernetes easier to use, such as package managers and chatbots, platform as a service and functions as a service. And we see an empowerment to improve the project, increases their commitment to it. Users and developers in turn attract vendors. And the vendors try to fill those remaining gaps in the ecosystem. We help those vendors integrate with Kubernetes, and that enables Kubernetes in more environments, which again facilitates more usage. This virtuous cycle has made Kubernetes one of the most popular projects on GitHub with more than 20,000 stars. So we like to say that Kubernetes isn't just open source, it's an open community. The open community encourages direct contribution and also sharing of best practices, examples, tools and more. We find that not just vendors and developers are contributing to Kubernetes, but our users are as well. For example, a co-founder of Box actually wrote the initial version of our command line tool, and they're using Kubernetes internally on their own infrastructure. Many people may contribute for personal recognition or corporate recognition, or they may just do it because it's cheaper than building their own solution. Or they may do it for the greater good because making Kubernetes better actually benefits everyone, not just Google. The community is actually cited by our users as one of the major reasons why they adopt Kubernetes and choose it over alternatives. Some say that they prefer to be part of a community where others are giving back to the community as well. That's not to say that it's been without its costs and challenges. Patrick gave a great talk about the true cost of open source yesterday. Hopefully many of you caught that. The slides are also online. And he pointed out many of these issues as well. I don't actually have solutions to these challenges. So I'm interested in hearing from other open source projects about how they deal with these. First, engaging with the community can be extremely time consuming. We help new contributors ramp up. We review their proposals and their changes. We answer all kinds of questions and do a lot more. Just responding to Slack is more than a full-time job for one person. And more than that, it's not just a nine-to-five job. A lot of people contribute to Kubernetes not for their day job but for fun. So they work in the evenings. They work on weekends. As I mentioned before, they're all over the world. We found that GitHub, while really good for building a community, doesn't scale very well to large projects. It doesn't really have good mechanisms for managing large repositories. It doesn't have tools for managing many repositories. We found that decision-making within the open community, among participants with diverse set of opinions, can lead to better decisions that work for more people in more environments. But that also can slow down progress on the project. And finally, because effort is not allocated centrally as it would be if the project were just totally controlled by a single company, we found that it's really, really important to have effective incentives for people to actually work to maintain the health of the project. And that's very critical but also very challenging. So now I'm going to hand off to Perna. Is my mic working? Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. So what makes the project work? As Brian mentioned, there are many things that we haven't figured out. But there are a few things that have been working. In particular, he showed that our contributor velocity and the velocity of commits has been growing steadily over time since the inception. We found that the most important principle that has worked for us is the principle of inclusion. By inclusion, we mean that we are a welcoming community and we welcome all perspectives and have respect for everyone in the community. This has been encapsulated in our code of conduct and it's something that as we grow, we find to be even more important. It is a challenge at times because you've got so many different opinions and we do have the pressure of release deadlines. But that's where it becomes even more important. Another aspect of inclusion is cross-organizational teams. And we call these SIGs or special interest groups. These are collaborations between different companies and individual contributors that self-form to work on a specific topic of interest. These are two examples of SIGs. SIG cluster life cycle is focused on making the installation and life cycle experience, upgrade and life cycle experience of Kubernetes easier. As you can imagine, as Kubernetes has grown, it is being installed on bare metal servers. It's being installed in all different types of clouds. And there's a lot of sprawl due to that. Users started complaining to us last year about the project becoming more and more complex to install. SIG cluster life cycle kicked into high gear and within one release, they came up with QBADM, which is a two-command installation for Kubernetes clusters. And they have now built out a roadmap that quarter over quarter is resonating with users to make that process simpler. Another example is SIG service catalog. This is also a collaboration of multiple companies. And they have really shown what can be done quickly to benefit the whole when you get disparate companies and disparate perspectives together. This SIG works on creating a standard for Kubernetes applications to consume other services. And within a quarter, they have come up with a Kubernetes native implementation for the Open Service Broker API. I think there was a talk on that yesterday from someone from Cloud Foundry. In fact, one of the members of the SIG is from Cloud Foundry and was brand new to Kubernetes community. And the SIG helped them ramp up and become effective within one release. So these are just two examples. There are over 25 SIGs and they are constantly evolving. New SIGs are being added. SIGs are being collapsed into each other. And they evolve with the needs of our users and the interests of the community members. As you can imagine, this is a great mechanism for distributed leadership. And that's the purpose of the SIGs. The decision-making body within the Kubernetes community is the SIGs. But it also has its challenges. With so many different SIGs, how do we ensure coordination between the SIGs and communication between the SIGs? We have had cases where a feature was introduced and there were dependencies on a different SIG that didn't get recognized and weren't caught in a release. And then we had to do a patch release right afterwards. So that brings us to our second biggest principle, which is something that we are working very actively on, which is transparency. By transparency, we mean that everything has to be done in the open, everything. All of our communication is on open email lists. It is through open chat channels. And Sarah is smiling at me because she is constantly pushing us to be more and more transparent. And it's not a natural thing. It's something that we have to work hard to achieve. So transparency is something that we have tried to have in all of our communication. But most importantly, in our technical work, we do that all on GitHub in open issues. All the design proposals from the start, all the way through coding and code reviews, are done in GitHub, in the open. There's no do it inside and then open source it. We don't do that. And that leads to a lot of discussions. And that has its own challenges. But one of the things that the Kubernetes community is very good at is discussions. And in fact, it is rated as number one by the count of comments per issue. It's the most communicative community. One joke that I wanted to tell was that if you look at Brian Grant's laptop, it has no privacy screen. Because everything he does is done out in the public. This has been a harder thing for me to do. I've come from the Android side of Google. And that was a community that was much less communicative and less transparent. So the transparency creates a huge flow of information that is sometimes hard to consume. This is where some of our other mechanisms come in. Number one is our community meetings. They happen every week and are led by Sarah Novotny, who is here in the audience. She tries to bring sanity. She welcomes everyone to these meetings. And then there is a demo. Every week there is a demo of something that someone has created that's brand new. And this is always very exciting because it's cutting edge innovation that's happening. But it's also an opportunity for people to give feedback and to get recognized for their work. After that, each of the SIGs reports what they're working on for the release. And that's how we've been striving to get those dependencies recognized so that the SIGs can then go off and resolve them and we don't have an issue after the release. Also focused on the release, we have burn down meetings. This is where the community gets together and decides whether a release is ready to be cut. And Linus mentioned that having a regular cadence has been very relaxing. And just in 2016, we've also established a regular cadence. There's a Kubernetes release every two and a half to three months. And that has been, in fact, quite relaxing. But we will hold a release if there's a quality issue. And that's some of the things that the burn down meetings track. Lastly, we found that these mechanisms weren't enough. And so we've been experimenting with a more open roadmap process. And that's something that I helped to lead. So the heart of the roadmap process is actually a new repository called the Features Repository. This serves as our unified backlog. And it is a publicly open backlog. So anyone, you can go there and see what we're working on and what we're about to release in the next release and potentially the release after that. Features are entered into this repo and they must be entered within the first two weeks of each release cycle. After that, the repo is frozen. And each of the issues has to go to their respective SIGs to get approval and reviewed in terms of design. And then after that, they are labeled in terms of whether they're going to be beta or stable or whatever the designation is. And this provides a bit more predictability and visibility to the community and the outside world. It feeds directly into our release process for release notes and documentation. This has actually been a big challenge with a project of this size making sure that the documentation actually captures what has been done in a way that is consumable to users. And having a centralized Features Repo has allowed us to start making sure that the documentation is complete and timely. And that's been one of the gating factors for the release. And also that drives the PR and the blog posts and so forth. The community wanted more than just a release-specific planning process so we also meet on a semi-annual basis in an unconference with the SIGs and that's a time for us to do more top-down planning to talk about the overall problems and priorities of the project. For, as an example, in 2016 we met to decide the priorities for 2017 and the top three things then came up. Number one was scaling the project. How do we make sure that it is stable and scalable? So we agreed to experiment with every other release being a stable release, a stability release, where we move Features from alpha to beta to stable. The number two priority that was introduced was around API Federation. API Federation allows our users to build new objects and customize Kubernetes in ways that are useful to them. The third priority is actually related to API Federation which is conformance definition and conformance testing. So we're going to work on that very actively in 2017 to ensure that when a user has a release of Kubernetes it's compatible with any other distribution of Kubernetes that they might encounter. So all of the above, you know, transparency, SIGs and inclusion would not work if it were not for ownership. Ownership in Kubernetes has two meanings. One is that we encourage anyone and everyone in the community to take on a role and own the responsibilities of that role. The second part, though, is equally important and it's sometimes harder, which is the respect for the role that the individual has. Everyone else in the community has to respect and defer to the person that has the role. This can sometimes be challenging. We have a lot of very experienced senior engineers and senior people in the community, but ownership means and respectful ownership means that we defer to whoever takes that responsibility and this ultimately allows new people to grow and new talent to grow in the community and gain experience. So these are some of the roles, contributors, SIG leader. There are also non-engineering roles like project management and UX and document writing and marketing. Along with the responsibility, there are rewards. There are many rewards from the community. People who do their roles, the community thanks in the form of handmade awards, but also in the form of blog mentions and PR mentions. And finally, this is something that people put on their resume and it is a career builder as they progress in the community. So of course, we haven't learned everything. There are many problems that we haven't solved, but we think that if we continue to experiment and learn together, we will hopefully be able to solve the future challenges that our growth will bring. One of the checks and balances is the concept of a retrospective. We do a retrospective after every release, openly with everyone in the community to understand what we did well and what we could do better. We also do ad hoc postmortems when things go wrong. So one of the things that's very common in Kubernetes is to get feedback and ideas for improvement from people that you may never have met that give you this kind of direct feedback in a Slack channel or in a video chat and to take that very seriously. In fact, some of my best ideas for growth have come from people in this kind of community that you would normally consider external. In Kubernetes, the notion of what is external and what is internal changes. And you get the benefit of having a global family that is passionate about the change that we are bringing. As you can see here, Kubernetes is a passion for many people. They share it with each other and they share it with their families and their kids. For me in particular, I missed the chance or didn't have the chance to work on Google search infrastructure. And I think that working on Kubernetes is perhaps an even bigger opportunity to impact the way the rest of the world is going to use distributed computing. We hope that you'll join us. Thank you.


alent to the miles per gallon stickers on cars or the nutrition labels and grocery stores as well as saying that it takes no more than 10 or 20 minutes to fill it out it seems apparent to me that probably most sellers and buyers would find um and and would be incredulous to the idea that they should spend not more than 10 or 20 minutes to this presumably important factor in deciding on a transaction transaction of hundreds of thousands of dollars which in a consequence of which fundamentally alters the course of their lives and in a similar way I find the profile itself in its effort to produce a single global number which is based on lumping together every type of use of energy in a home really produces something that is inscrutable and not much value um for example you know the energy use of space heating or cooling clearly has a direct relationship to the energy efficiency of a building envelope but very little else of what we use energy for in the house does that and um I don't want to go into much more detail but I would just say that many of the thoughts and remedies that occur to me are in the written document that I've submitted to the council and then in general what I would like to see all of us do is to focus less on the aim of victory through an immediate adoption of the ordinance and instead really devote some serious brain power to creating a truly informative profile that could benefit both buyers and sellers thank you great thank you um all right uh Stephen go ahead um I almost want to give you a minute to put Ben's comments sink in uh especially his closing comment um I was trained as an energy auditor out at the Lawrence Berkeley lab helping the 80s and it's a it's an area that I care a lot about but I also care a lot about Montpelier and this really strikes me as more of the self congratulatory uh pretentious uh you know four million dollar bike path bridges and while we can't keep our garbage and our sewage out of the river or create public toilets or fix our sidewalks so I kind of resonate with a guy you know two two speakers back in the misplaced priorities um I have issues with the privacy of the data uh the secret proprietary algorithm are we doing this to make a particular you know algorithm owner group uh successful or are we doing this you know uh as a statewide initiative so possibly we should consider if if this is something the climate council is dealing with and looking to Montpelier as a leader we can probably find some state funds and and have our own public algorithm um but the and this is a good segue into your next agenda item too the the privacy of the data is the something I raised at the first meeting of the homeless's task force and they have yet to deal with the fact that people don't want to just build their data trust us we won't sell it we'll take care of it and the board that was supposed to protect that data for the homeless management information system has disbanded so you know data creeps over time and uh data creeps are after it so uh pardon the pause um I guess I think we have a lot of other priorities to deal with uh that we should weigh on I think there's a leadership role that Ben alludes to about how we could do this maybe over the next six or eight months uh develop our own profile and our own algorithm or maybe it takes a year um I think the state will wait on us to be leaders or we don't have to lead in everything let's let's lead on getting the same plastic and garbage bags boxes from hauling in the river that I told you all about a year and a half ago and no progress has been made or some public facilities or you know let's let's get our priorities straight and quit you know trying to be so politically correct it's repulsive thank you okay thank you uh Jeff there I've managed my technology so um it's an interesting discussion and I uh uh Jeff Fitzgerald I've been a resident in Montpelier for 36 years and I've been on the energy advisory committee for many years I can't even remember when I started but it doesn't make any difference this has not been one of the things that I have worked on a lot um but I just want to respond to a few things and first is importance I I think it's vitally important uh I I don't I just don't agree with anybody who doesn't think this is a matter of vital importance so whether the details have been worked out correctly is is certainly open to debate and discussion and I agree with that but this is vitally important um what our homes use for energy is of vital importance to not only the sellers and the buyers but to the public and so I think this subject matter is vitally important um I thought that there was going to be a lot of pushback on the idea of a mandate and I was prepared to say you know I grew up when my dad would curse out Ralph Nader because he mandated seat belts and now no one is is really saying that that was a bad idea I mean everyone now acknowledges that seat belts and cars are a good idea this is a little bit of ahead of its time the idea that sellers have to disclose how much energy their home uses is a little ahead of its time and we should all recognize that I I get that um but the idea of a mandate shouldn't scare people if it's a little ahead of its time the details as I said uh are open to discussion and debate um and on that I I just want to say a couple of things I tried this algorithm and we live uh in a home that uses no fossil fuels and uses uh we produce more energy than we use and it was impossible I will I will say that when we first tried it and I haven't gone back and tried it again since all of the tweaks but there has to be and and I hope that the people in charge of the algorithm will say that this is true you have to be able to override the algorithm with your actual data you have to be able to otherwise it it makes no sense because it could be in either direction my direction would be no they're telling me I'm using all this energy and I'm going to show you my bills and I'll produce them and I'm not using any of the energy you're saying I'm using or on the other side if you're underestimating you have to be able to say no that's an underestimate that can't be true because these are my actual bills and I can't disclose to the buyer that I'm only using this amount when I'm really using this amount so that algorithm has to allow for that and if it doesn't then it needs to be corrected in my opinion and um the the last thing I just want to say is uh you know I've really I'm not sure about this recording thing and I I've said this to Ann I've said this to everybody I really think this should be sort of part of this seller's property inspection report it should be something that the city is requiring that maybe the state isn't and it shouldn't necessarily involve a recording or anything other than this is my energy use you either go with the algorithm you go with your usual bills but this is what my house uses and you have to disclose it to the buyer um that's that's what I have to say great thank you um so we've got a peter and then Tim I see your hand there so uh go ahead peter hi uh peter talker I'm a resident of Montpelier live on north park drive um and I'd also like to let everyone know that I am currently the director of advocacy and public affairs for the realtor association um so we've been immersed in this discussion uh over the past 15 months on the state level with the uh building energy labeling work group um there are two components to that commercial and residential um you know what we're addressing here is is pretty much the residential discussion um you know one of your local brokers Martha Lang uh has been involved in that as well and on the commercial side Tim Haney um you know served in with that board and you know the discussion is is really exactly the same discussion we're having tonight and at the end of uh roughly 15 months uh in the report back to the legislature um the building energy labeling work groups recommended a voluntary approach to using uh an energy tool this same energy tool is what's being considered um so you know really the I guess the where I wanted to start was you know what what are we doing now and you know and then you know how is this going to fix it um so currently uh we provide an energy disclosure suggesting to a purchaser that you know understanding the energy performance of the home is is something that they should consider um you know where do they get that information and a couple of people have mentioned the seller's property inspection report and that allows us to provide actual information uh the the amount of uh of electricity you know the electricity bill and the amount of fuel used on an annual basis and I have talked with brokers in the Montpelier community um you know to try and and and elicit from them uh you know their opinion on on you know what the approach should be and you know I think that it's a situation where we look at this modeling system and and just our you know need to to approach it cautiously I guess you know we're providing actual details I thought the miles per gallon analysis is pretty interesting because you know from from my perspective miles per gallons a math equation um you know if you if you drive 300 miles and use 15 gallons 20 miles per gallon you know it's an actual uh specific data point the the modeling system that that the Vermont home energy profile is is based on um is an algorithm and it and it's a accumulating data and trying to accomplish a kind of the standardization process um you know through whatever that particular algorithm is so um I have heard from many brokers you know concerned that um you know that we're just not sure how accurate this is going to be um you know in terms of data security uh this this algorithm does have the ability to auto populate to certain um real estate websites um like Zillow and Trillia and you know these are these are organizations that we as realtors have difficulty working with if the if the information's inaccurate um it's almost impossible to change so you know we would prefer to see the the council consider a voluntary approach to to get this program up and running and uh and we can work with that um you know what's the real goal the the goal is to prove that higher performing energy homes are are are more attractive and and command a higher purchase price um you know that is that that is something that realtors can work with if it's a marketing tool you know we can use it as an advantage to help our sellers sell more quickly at higher prices you know the concerns that we have uh our privacy um you know if it is if the information is out there and all of our public information was provided to the new england energy partnership all the public record information so that they could start to to build this profile system um you know how does it get disclosed or where does it go um we are concerned about the liability for the seller um there there clearly you know could be misrepresentations um you know honest mistakes uh that could end up uh you know causing the the seller to be liable for misstatements um and then the the last part really is is the the the property values in the in the city of Montpelier um you know we do feel that there are many homes that are older um one of the discussions you know one of the slides that was presented tonight was about negotiations with the banks or mortgage brokers um to get better rates or or more favorable um terms but the negotiations that will go on are really between the buyer and the seller and if the seller's energy performance profile is poor the buyer is going to negotiate a better purchase price as a result of that as a matter of fact the statement of of this ordinance says to get the better resin for to allow purchasers to better assess residential properties fair market value um this has been a really hot market so it's you really can't look at the current market or the last couple of years and try and make determinations think about the market in 2010 you know after the the economic crisis and and you know then we had plenty of inventory and and no purchasers um so you know so we are aware of that and then just in closing um you know I I just ran an MLS search uh for sales in in 2020 and 2020 is turning out to be a huge year for real estate and we sold we through MLS sold 62 homes in in the in the city of Montpelier so you know at that rate and to Lori's point on uh fire alarm you know time of sale fire alarm certifications um at 62 units a year it's going to take a long time to impact the the energy profiles of of the marketplace and so with that I think I'll just leave my comments at that point in time thank you thank you um so we've got Tim and then Nate I see your hand um before you go Tim I just want to um check in with the council just recognizing the time and we are scheduled to have um the homelessness task force uh give a presentation after this um council what is your thought on um on on keeping that and uh continuing on uh or or do you think um I mean I would like to be able to to have the homelessness task force uh present this evening but just also recognizing that we're we're we're running out of uh uh conscious time here um what is so sorry about that Tim if you could hold off for a second um what what is your thought on that council yeah go ahead Dan I'm certainly I mean because I know a number of the homelessness task force people have been sitting through all of this discussion as well and I'd hate to say to them halfway through wasting their sorry wisely using their evening listening to civic participation activities that they have to come back um I think we could probably um I would recommend bumping some of the the strategic planning and committee assignments um instead and just make the homelessness and the the the letters and resolutions maybe the last items of business and well when we do have a potential executive session um after that so I think we'd be good to check in about that uh Jay did you have a comment about that um no just I agree I think we should hear hear through this and and still include homelessness task force for sure but like Dan said I think there's a couple things we can push off that are just still in place and carrying on we don't have to worry about for tonight so okay other thoughts Donna I would guess like to ask the people that are the leads on the homeless task force because if they sit through another 30 minutes of this it really pushes us late so I would rather release them and reschedule but I'd like to hear from them first uh Ken how do you how do you feel um that's fine Rick left an hour ago um because he didn't want to engage in further civic edification um no but that that's fine whatever we're happy either way um this is very okay um Connor do you have another thought and then Jack yeah no I long the same lines mayor I think we could probably maybe even do the strategic planning the committee assignments and the executive session like a lunch meeting or something the next couple weeks those aren't items we'd necessarily get a capacity crown for anyway so I think that might be okay that's fair Jack hearing hearing what uh Ken said I would suggest we we release them and let them come to our next meeting at which uh the homelessness task force report would be the first item after the consent agenda that sounds good to me if that works for you Ken then I I think we should plan on that let my people go thank you okay thank you um all right sorry about that okay uh Tim go ahead thanks Ann so I think a good comments tonight it's been interesting I think probably um rather than repeat things that the council clearly has a lot of good questions I think a lot of members of the community do um it's not a new issue it's certainly a topic that's been on the table for more than five years at the state level Peter Tucker and I have both worked on that different levels over the years and truly with all these questions the devil's in the details you know there's getting this right and really doing it properly um there's just a lot to it and that's why it's taken so long at the state level to generate this program um at this point I strongly favor a statewide program for this then monthly you're trying to take it on I don't think as a community we have the um the ability to add more staff and just to take on one more important task when it's going to happen at the state level anyway uh and I really think supporting that and helping that to happen I think we've all worked on that for a number of years and it's going to work I did a study committee this summer legislative study committee and so did Martha Lang um there is a lot happening it's not a dead topic there and um so I really would encourage you to flush out these questions and feed them to the state level because I really I think that needs to happen so whether the home is an East Montpelier or Montpelier or Berlin or Middlesex or wherever it is um we'd all be on the same level in terms of disclosures and what needs to happen and I think that's how you're going to get some meaningful results so um without beating up all the five points like that'd be my quick point for tonight is um it is an important topic and I don't think anyone's saying it's not um it's it's really how we do it and getting it right it's important to me and and in terms of energy disclosures at the moment they really are happening a lot I know 81 percent of the transactions in our firm when I went through the files um are using seller property information reports and within that there's energy disclosure and most cases buyers come back and even ask more questions about energy use after they see the seller's disclosures so I think there's a lot of positive things happening already anyway so really what this will do is is fill in that gap where it's not happening hopefully so um thanks for your work thank you uh Nathan um thanks everybody for I've certainly learned a bunch this evening and to the committee that has generated this uh appreciate all that work um I think that you know I've heard this talked about in terms of uh you know marketing a marketing tool for for real estate transactions and a strategy to increase the value of homes and I think that speaking personally my goal for this kind of action would be about behavior change for homeowners like myself which is you know do I choose to do I choose to spend $20,000 upgrading my bathroom before I spend $20,000 upgrading my energy use or insulation and I think that as much attention as we can focus on changing our energy use as a as a community and as a you know as a nation the better I don't you know my understanding of climate change is that we can't move fast enough so uh I think I'd rather that we default to action uh I hear Tim's point about the you know the state is working on this and uh you know I'll I'll believe it when we have a result and I don't see any reason why we can't start here and then uh if the state goes up and does a good job then we can you know navigate that at the time um but I think that I mean I loved I loved a bunch of the points I think there's some complications I would prefer to see energy use reflected in volume or energy units as opposed to cash you know etc but I'm going to trust that that y'all are hearing that feedback and that that can be worked out so just want to give as much support as I can in terms of creating political space for the city council to be aggressive and move forward on something that I think uh if we lead on then others will follow and it may actually make it easier for the state to get to uh to get to yes so thanks for your work and that's it thank you all right I don't see any other uh hands either digital or um oh Martha go ahead hi those who know me will be surprised that I just have one comment um but I'm a realtor in Montpelier and I have investment property in Montpelier my one comment is just to reiterate and I don't remember who said it but it was with regards to um having it be in the land records and I think it's a fabulous idea to if this all goes through if nothing else matters just a certification gets filed um and not the report and my issue with that is that I'm also my husband I build houses but you do one change in that report and it will change the report so if you've got people going back and looking at old ones you're going to just it's going to be a cluster so people are going to compare so I think that not only is it private but I think it will confuse things so a certification like the smoke and carbon monoxide at closing I think that would be sufficient that's the only comment so everyone had some great points and I'm so excited you know for and against whatever you want to call it but there was some really this was one of the better discussions so um Dan Richardson I am your biggest fan great job great thank you all right anyone else I don't see any more digital hands um any physical hands okay um all right there were lots and lots of comments and particularly like really interesting comments um as as a part of that um um some of which I you know I want to I want to address and and you know bring some of these ideas into our discussion but before I jump in um I guess I want to open it up to the council thoughts comments reactions uh yeah what are you thinking go ahead Dan sorry um and I'm happy to go um last or second but no one else is moving so I think there's a lot of really good feedback that we've engendered in this conversation um I have a couple of concerns about the way this the ordinance is written and I'm happy to get into the minutiae of it I've had some conversations with people but you know I think there needs to be some tweaking um but let me throw out maybe the big idea that I would propose which is I think one of the concerns that I heard echoed in some of the commentary is um everybody is supportive and I actually brought visual aids to apples we want to make sure that if we compare them um we're doing a comparison of the same but if somebody does home improvements and sheets their house inside uh energy improvement we want to recognize that in a transaction um and we want people to ask these questions as they're buying I mean I think every homeowner can tell the story I can tell the story of when I bought my first house at 28 and how foolish I absolutely was um in not asking about energy efficiency um but part of this is real estate is perception and it's it's what we perceive the value to be and I think we have to be careful about how we tread into this and what I would propose is that um you know I think finding a middle ground here might be to make this voluntary for at least a year um to allow some of this testing to go forward for people to opt in and then say if they want to participate and fill out this form um and and work through it they can but if somebody has these issues they don't have to for the first year we gather data um you know we work through it and then we have a way of um you know if if in a year you know people say this really doesn't work you know we can revisit it but the ordinance itself would would obviously envision a uh a mandatory effect down the road and I I throw out a year but I don't know if it should be longer than that um but oh I think it might be a way of getting this onto the books and getting people trying this system and buying in to it if in fact it is effective because I think the point I heard from the realtors particularly was that if if this was an effective tool they'd be the first to use it because it would give that benefit to people and because we're talking about perception and because we're talking about what people believe in you know and giving it value and not seeing it as a punitive measure but as a positive one to allow their not not cause an apple to drop in price but cause a sheathed apple to to rise um in value it it might be something where um giving that time to sort of test it out would give people confidence in it and to work out some of these algorithm issues that's my big general comment I'm happy to go into the minutiae but I don't know it this night you know some of some of my smaller tweaks to the language we're not doing a line by line of this yet so I'll I'll hold my power on that thank fair enough other comments uh Conor go ahead just want to start off by thanking everybody so much for speaking um I think it was a really good conversation tonight um I think it's important to assume everybody's coming with the best of intentions here right like nobody's saying global warming's a bunch of malarkey and we don't have to address it um that's not what I heard anybody saying today but you know like okay your house is a very personal thing it's probably the biggest investment you can make right so needless to say there's going to be some anxiety over this and I think people are raising some good questions um that said I I support moving forward um I think the community has been very clear over the last few years making a commitment to getting net zero by 2050 and uh I think to do that uh you need to take some bold action um an action that actually does put people outside their comfort zones a bit you know if you look around the country um plastic bag bands plastic bag incentives um it didn't work when you offered somebody you know a little bit off their grocery build to bring their own bags or something uh you needed to ban it you needed to have fees attached to it and I think with climate change um it's often the case where you need to have somebody who's saying the stick versus the carrot the stick needs to be a part of it and I don't think that precludes us from looking at grants looking at different incentives um to to move the ball forward um but but what it comes down to is you know yeah now in a year we're not going to be a blip on the radar on this if it's 100 houses sold or something but we're not looking at the short term we're looking at the long term and over the course of 20 30 years what I think it does is it it gets a conversation going right it makes people think about this type of stuff I often think like ah I'm a good I'm a good environmentalist because I recycle right now it's more than that and when I use the tool I could see all the things that I needed to do uh to be better in this regard I can't afford putting solar panels on or something but can I can I replace a few appliances yeah I can take that step um so again I really appreciate people's concerns I think we have a lot of uh suggestions that we can use to make this ordinance the best it can be uh before we have the next reading of this for example I I think you know Dan raises some good points I think whether it be a few months maybe a year of having this voluntary that gives you time to work on the tool if there's mistakes you're not penalizing people over that time um but but I definitely think we have to do it I also think you know we do have to make the cap explicit if that's going to be the case so people aren't afraid that they're spending thousands and thousands of dollars on this but at the end of the day I think what this ordinance does is it gives buyers it gives everybody all the information they need to make an intelligent decision about these matters so I think it is very important that we move forward but really appreciate everybody's comments um yeah I also want to oh gosh there's a bunch of hands um so we'll go uh Jack then Jay then Donna but before you go Jack I also just want to echo um your thanks Connor thank you to everybody who came to speak to that thank you for sticking around uh to to make your comments we really appreciate that um it's it's really important and and helpful uh Jack go ahead okay thank you um um I want us to move forward on this and I think it's going to take some work to do it I have a couple of observations one is that uh you know who knows what the quality of the algorithms that this product uses is but um I looked at my my profile and it showed that I spend $1,310 a year on electricity and then I looked at my bank records and it turns out that in the past 12 months months I paid green mountain power $1,283.89 so that's that's damn close based on the inputs that that I made and it didn't take me more than 20 minutes to to create my profile probably 10 I think people uh did some did make some good points and points that should be addressed um before we're ready to adopt this ordinance and uh I know we tentatively have this on our agenda for our next meeting on uh March 20 or April uh 14 whatever it is 14th 14th um it's not clear to me that those answers can be those questions can all be answered and this can be redone in time for our for our next meeting so it might make sense to have it at the following meeting rather than at the next meeting to give you get some legal opinions get some detail work done on the on the product um I think Peter Kalman makes a good point about incentives for people to do energy improvements um I was one of the uh people who uh worked to create efficiency Vermont when when we did it during the time of electric industry restructuring back in the 90s and um and I think that the city of Montpelier it's hard to hard to imagine picture that we're going to have a lot of money to provide incentives but we do know that efficiency Vermont is a large operation that provides energy incentives in in many areas including space heating and electrical appliances and so that's one of the things that where people can go to get funding for for improvements insulation we had an energy audit and got a lot of benefit from efficiency Vermont for that um so and and the last and I really want to give great credit to to Anne especially for pushing this for many many years from the probably the first meeting when you were mayor and and on from there and uh and Lauren and and Kate Stevenson and everyone else who's been working on this I think we're moving the city in the right direction um I'm open to considering the idea of this being voluntary for a temporary period um and I do not want to foreclose uh discussion beyond me but I at this point I will make a motion that we uh schedule the second hearing for on this proposed ordinance as it's now written for two meetings from tonight all second okay so that just to be clear I think that would put us at the April 28th meeting um and I'll I'll just uh you know I'm not well I've found that's Lauren or uh I'm not sure if Kate is still here um so I guess uh Lauren do you have any thoughts on having it be on April 28th I think that's fine I mean I think there were great questions and I think you know making sure that there's really good answers which I think there are but making sure they're compiled and that um any suggested changes to ordinance language could be you know ready to go I think having extra time I think a lot of what we heard tonight was let's get this right and we are you know wanting to do this in a way that you know if we're going to move forward that is creating a good model and it's going to be as effective as possible so I think I think taking time makes sense yeah and I think I would agree you know having because the the energy efficiency working group is going to want to meet again to debrief this and tweak language and if we need to go to back to the city's lawyer at all I think that extra time would be helpful so I think that means good to me as well um I uh so let's go Donna and then Jay you had a or actually uh Jay you had a comment obviously if it's okay uh just to keep with the original order Jay and then Donna go ahead right yeah um yeah I don't want to be redundant I do think that um uh and yeah taking more time on this is fine as Lauren and Kate are okay with it I think that for me um if we move forward with this the it will be successful if the report that's created by going through the process is accurate and what I'm hearing from folks um from Jeff and from Ben you know we all got the the very detailed email from Ben is that you know the way we heat our homes in Montpelier and in Vermont is very nuanced we invest a lot of our time and energy and money into finding the most efficient and often um uh and not only financially efficient but also energy efficient ways to heat our homes and what what I'm hearing I heard from them and what my experience was in filling out the form was that while the you know and I don't want to I don't want to just write it off to algorithms because a lot of it is about how the the questions and how they're asked and what you know how that whole process works was it didn't really leave a lot of room for nuance it felt kind of obtuse in terms of the questions and just wanting to very be very general and to be able to create a report that was understandable and something that could be um you know just easy to digest and to work with and so I think that part of what we need to when we're thinking about is beyond just the language of the ordinance itself is listening to folks who have used this and you know Jack I wish I came in within like 50 bucks of what my actual costs were but um that wasn't my case and I know hearing from other folks that wasn't their case as well so I think that trying to be able to add add some depth to the questions that are asked to you know help develop more accurate answers so that um folks who are filling it out and they're selling their home are you know feeling like they're being acknowledged and recognized for the work they've put in to make sure that their home is uh heated is heated and you know the how they're keeping the lights on and and all that so that's recognized so I do think that that's just a really important part of this process that ultimately that will make this initiative successful thanks thank you and thanks for waiting on that's right I just had a question about Jack's motion but I'll do my points and then I'll ask the question about Jack's motion so first to me I think it's really important that the app for the home audit will take an override otherwise you're going to really not have very much accurate data for all the exceptions and I think it's important to Dan's point about we better understand the public record aspect so I would be preferred that it is voluntary for a while but that we build in some incentives and that we work with efficiency Vermont and have them maybe link people to us that there's a way to give a benefit built in that helps people do what they want to do and also start this data bank and I think if we go mandatory I really would want a cap that and so I was very uncomfortable when Jack says he made the motion to accept the material as read today versus just making the motion we move forward with the second hearing I'd be much more comfortable with that motion and allow some tweaking maybe for some of these points want me to answer that yeah go ahead Jack yep I think that I could be wrong but as I understand the process if we're scheduling a second hearing it's going to be on a particular proposal and this is the proposal that's before us now but I we've always changed stuff from one hearing to the next that's why we have them actually and I that's what I would expect to see but what you're saying is that you would ask the committee or to come in with the redraft and that's what we would see at the second yes that we would take in the comments we heard and then apply them to the second hearing that's why I was surprised you restricted it okay I think bill has an answer yeah I think it's a matter of process you know you have an ordinance before you you haven't amended it so you're going to hold a second hearing on that ordinance you may come in with an amended version which you could move to amend at the second reading you can you can hold you know you can make amendments at the second reading you can hold the third reading so so the fact that you're just moving this to a second reading doesn't preclude you from making any changes in the future if somebody drafts a change in advance and circulates it you can just substitute this whole one for that whole new one so I think you haven't given up any flexibility from a process point of view bill sorry go ahead go again we we would want to go pass the first reading which in other words if we wanted to to tweak this but not go pass the normal process would be to put it past the first reading because we can always have a third or additional reading if necessary but it's the idea that we've gone through this particular first hurdle even if it's not in a form that anyone's ready to vote on for final approval is that right bill yeah yeah I just don't remember us ever restricting it before I just always heard the motion that we move forward to the second hearing that's all so my miss Donna Donna and not to belabor this but when you move forward to the second hearing that's exactly what you're doing you're moving the the ordinance has drafted this again I think Jack Jack just phrased it differently but it's yeah that concerned me thank you I think we're I think we're on the same page though um okay any further uh comments on this yeah Lauren go ahead yeah thanks um just wanted to start like I'm so grateful for the participation and the really thoughtful feedback um and you know we've heard it echoed by all the counselors but I just thought it was really productive and I appreciate that everyone came in with really kind of concrete and um really helpful feedback um and you know I mean to me I just come back to you know as a as a community as a council as a state we've declared a climate emergency we've established a net zero goal as a community and to me this is a modest step but a valuable one towards that goal and we have to be willing to to move forward with actions that are different than the status quo and actions that are not voluntary um we've seen from decades of evidence of voluntary climate measures they do not work I'm totally happy to you know do a trial period and like work out the kinks and all that but that can't be our end goal here which is what I'm hearing um but I I think it you know you will not get the same result from a voluntary program over the long term um you know the a test run it could make a lot of sense for some um some period of time um but I hope that's not where we end up um for the longer term um you know I do think that a lot of I think the issues that we heard tonight can be worked through I think it was great feedback um you know the the positives of where we can end up where we're helping people have better information when they're buying homes um and pointing people to incentives and to other ways they can make investments that are going to actually save the money over the long term they make homes healthier more comfortable like these are all good things that we want for our homes you know well also addressing um the climate crisis so I'm eager to move forward with this and appreciate the hard work that a lot of people have been putting into it and the really good feedback um and and I do really want to also look into how the city can be um helping promote the the incentives that are available and there's a lot right now and um have been getting even more information from some of our our great team as this hearing's been going on um but I think you know as a as a community we can also make sure that that's front and center so people know you know what's out there because there's a lot of really good programs to to help make this really affordable and for low-income people there's things like free weatherization programs and so on so making sure that people know what's out there um so we can be kind of spurring these these conversations and knowing that that's out there so I I guess I'll just wrap there but again really really grateful for the the dialogue tonight um yeah and I just want to add I took three pages of notes on all the comments that people made and uh I thought people had some really good things to say I want to just call out a couple of things um well just one uh so someone addressed that uh they were worried that we were spending tax dollars on this on getting to this point and I just want you didn't everybody to know that I was a volunteer committee with the exception of our department of public works director who spent some time with us but we're otherwise um I did not have spent any um taxpayer dollars getting to this point um and uh also uh yeah I well I guess there there's some some great questions that people raised and I think we can incorporate a lot of them into um some of the the tweets to the to the language and um add some um either some information or clarity or um uh or or just getting more information about the accuracy of of the the tool I I should note also there is one other way that in which we did spend some money which was um in consulting with our lawyer so um anyway so that's I just want to make sure everybody has has that information um all right any further comments on this okay um so there's been a motion and a second uh to have the second reading on April 28th um any further discussion okay all in favor please say aye hi hi all right and opposed okay all right well thank you everybody and thanks everyone uh for um for showing up for this and um we'll uh we'll continue the conversation on on April 28th uh all right so just want to check in um with uh council we have so we're not doing the homelessness uh task force uh presentation one of the things that we did say that we were going to do uh was the letter to support Disabled Montpelier Coalition and um uh after the homelessness task force um Donna do you want to speak to that yes I'm going to go right to it I'm going to make a motion that the city council supports the application of the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition to National Life Group Foundation to get money to support CAHN's efforts I'll second this okay we have a motion and a second any further discussion and thank Anne for a great letter uh no no further discussion all right all in favor please say aye hi hi and opposed all right so we have approved that um strategic yes uh so the strategic planning process um we were going to punt some of these things uh Bill how long do you think it would take to talk about the strategic planning process um you probably asked the person that's going to actually be doing the talking what she thinks well it honestly depends on if y'all feel comfortable with my recommendations or not but my presentation won't take longer than 10 minutes at most um I am game what do you think team where should we put it off to them to the 14th we go go ahead did I was just gonna I'm I'm I'm all set to go to keep going sure other thoughts jack go ahead that's fine I'm I'm already comfortable with the with the recommendation so I I'm thinking it shouldn't take too long yeah agreed with yeah agreed I I'm comfortable with Cameron's recommendation for for the change of timeline based on what we're you know how we're looking ahead at this year so let's move forward okay Donna well I'm comfortable with it as long as we can tweak it as we go along and we that's a live document so I'm comfortable with it so presuming that folks have read it um sorry I guess I'm gonna stop my my comment there Lauren go ahead I I agree I I mean I think revisiting it makes total sense for this year with the same council and given the pandemic and where we are I could see if you've got new people coming on that you would have to probably rethink or offer or you know they might not agree with the priorities or want to make sure the other thing so I think you'd have to adjust it but I think for for where we are and sinking it up better with a budget um makes total sense for for this year certainly Donna I'll make a motion okay we accept the proposed new strategic planning timeline and process for 20 2022 to 2023 strategic plan thank you Cameron that presentation would buy super quick you can give it another day I was gonna say that's presentation for action ever good I I do really appreciate that I think I think that a change before y'all vote just to just sort of flesh that out just a bit is is really changing the timeline of this really does help staff and I think the community align the strategy and to help y'all align the strategic plan in your priorities along with our budget it makes it easier I think for all of us to understand the budget timeline sinking it with our strategic planning timeline I think we'll clear up a lot of how it works together for folks not only for staff but for the community as well I think it really aids in y'all's conversation with folks about what your priorities are so I really do appreciate um sort of the vote of confidence on that absolutely um so I did see a second from Dan and just want to verify that okay and uh there's been a motion and a second uh accepting this uh plan to be forward for the strategic plan uh any further conversation okay all in favor please say aye aye and opposed okay so I think we are good with that thank you Cameron it was so clear he didn't even need to present it oh gosh okay um so the next thing theoretically that would be on our our list is um committee assignments uh do we want I kind of feel like we can punt that right like we can punt that for another time is that okay team okay all right we'll put it on the 14th and then maybe we'll actually do it um and then uh all right other business we were going to do um the talk about the uh resolution that Lauren put together uh do you want to talk about that Lauren sure so did everybody receive it the email yes um so I guess I would just say if if people are okay with it we could read it for the record and adopt it or if people had changes that we'd want to discuss and then we could just read it once and say people um so I guess was there any feedback people had before spending time reading it out I'm sorry again for the not being able to get it together ahead of time I think it looks great I had a chance to read it through to make a motion Connor I'd move to pass the resolution uh condemning attacks and discrimination against Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities I'll second okay any further discussion hey all in favor please say aye hi hi and opposed I guess we have a very high density of motions no last 10 minutes uh all right so the last thing is a possible executive session do you want to do counseling and put this stuff first okay uh I do want to let you know that Alec um had heard your conversation earlier thought his agenda item was being tabled it is not time sensitive it was an update for y'all um if you went into executive session for that so he is not on the call but if you want me to get him back on the call I will so no worries no pressure just letting you know as long as he doesn't it was not um a time sensitive matter then I think it's okay we can put it on the 14th yes Donna I just have a question about the meeting next month I don't know if you want me to do it now or in my council report the April 14th meeting I'm going to be out of state and I it's a school break for my granddaughter so I don't know if anyone else has that issue but I thought I'd bring it up do you mean like is anyone else going to be anyone else going to be away or okay uh Jack I will not be physically present in the city of Montpelier but I don't have to be to uh to appear at this meeting so I intend to be here I'm going to the ocean I don't plan to be on wi-fi very cold Cape Cod fair enough okay um I suggested to Donna that we might want to check just to make sure we have a quorum fair enough um and no one else is planning on not being present um so we will we'll just have to carry on uh without you Donna I'm sorry and uh we'll just hope that that because you're the you're the our our vice president is that right so we'll have to make sure that both myself and Jack are here okay um all right so uh all right so I think we're on to council reports um and if we can go in the regular order that would be great I'm passing I'm talked out okay um all right who's next uh Connor yeah no I I think I can pretty much pass but I just had a question I think Donna's off um are we set on parklets uh April 1st or everything's good great well everybody should get out and have a pint or have lunch at a park list next Thursday April 1st great thanks okay Jay you're muted I know I missed that but um just one very quick thing is uh good luck to the boys varsity basketball team and the playing in the state finals on um uh at the barrier auditorium I think on Sunday this weekend um and and I I do think it's it's probably worthwhile mentioning that Leo Ruby Williams um will is 12 points away from reaching uh a thousand points in his his basketball career um and and I think it's also worth mentioning that beyond his athletic achievements noting the the impact that he and his his siblings have had on Montpelier schools his older sister um and his younger brother and and more to come you know in generations uh or as the years go on I think is is the the political fans and the willingness to uh be out front of social issues I think is um worth acknowledging beyond something a thousand points is great and um and the state championship would be great and all but what what he and his family have meant to to our our schools and our city is really um I think worth noting so I just wanted to point that out thanks for you thank you uh Dan thanks just a couple of quick points one is uh Jay and I are actually hosting a district three zoom meeting on friday this friday and noon um and if anybody wants to join they're welcome to email me and I'll give you the zoom link just to avoid unwanted zoom bombers uh from coming in but uh we're hoping to have a good opportunity to talk with constituents and talk through some issues to bring back to the council um the uh other is uh I'm starting to hear from constituents and maybe this is uh something to pass along to Donna and and Bill is just about various potholes that are forming particularly on colonial drive in that neighborhood um a woman uh wrote to me about falling into one um and anytime somebody talks about falling into a pothole that that uh suggests there's probably a need for that repair to happen pretty quickly but you know it's the season for that but um the last thing I guess I I want to say are two sort of related notes and and one is um you know the governor has talked about adding inviting immigrants to vermont um and I think as a city we should invite them as well um in the sense that um you know I grew up um with a parent who taught english as a second language and so we grew up with a lot of immigrant communities and the vibrancy and hard work and benefit to a community that groups bring um that are pursuing the american dream um that have fought to come here and fight and to live the american dream make a community so much better um and you know it's not proposing any sort of long term you know specific concrete steps but to the extent that we can um you know I think these uh new americans and people who wish to become new americans um you know are really people that can improve who we are as a community um and I certainly support the governor's uh push for that and it would be nice to translate that into some some action and and I think we should think you know this is really a good discussion that we had tonight um but it would be good to see um new housing um energy efficient housing um and I was reflecting as I was preparing for tonight on the fact that you know for 13 years we sat on a drb and we did not have a major housing development proposed in the city of Montpelier during that time that wasn't um something that was um publicly subsidized um and it will be nice when we're on the other side of this um to be thinking strategically about what we can do um to add um you know towards those goals because those type of new homes that um give people an opportunity to join our community um our benefits to us so that's all thank you yeah thank you uh jack thank you I uh I was thinking the exact same thing that Dan thought the other night that we would love to have I think it would be great benefit to the community to have uh the doors open to refugees and immigrants and I feel it's uh it's indicative of the problems we have getting the shortage of critical shortage that we have of housing we have in Montpelier that it's hard to responsibly say well more and more people should come here because we we want to have people to come here we need to develop the housing to for people to live in because this is a great place to live and we can uh and we want to encourage people to live here so we need to be moving forward on our on our housing goals um I want to uh just report briefly on the on the police review commission if maybe Lauren was already planning on doing that but we're working hard we're making our meeting every other week we're doing outreach to many different segments of the population um targeted outreach to make sure we're hearing from everybody and and our next meeting which is going to be April 12th is going to be a public hearing for anyone in the city to talk to us about their their thoughts their wishes their goals their experiences with Montpelier police there will be notices going on the city web page and front porch forum um so it will be a zoom meeting of course but we hope to hear from from a lot of people um I I don't have any of the details with me now but that that will be coming and then the last thing is Connor reminded me that Connor and I are also doing a zoom session for constituents tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock so anyone who wants to email either Connor or me at our city council email addresses we will get you the link and that's it for me uh Lauren go ahead yeah thanks um so one thing just wanted to to flag so one of the things that it was great having um congressman Welch here and there is this community project opportunity but applications are due March 31st I don't know if there's um what's the what the city's thinking if there's some potential projects that might be a good fit for getting Montpelier in the queue I don't know if it would be helpful to try to get the lobbying committee together to just think through what we learned from um from the congressman and we're at the crossover point in session so maybe we should check in soon um and see I just want to make sure we're we're being as helpful as possible um in that and I know there's a lot of state funding discussions and how we're kind of positioning our city as well as possible in those discussions um so maybe maybe the lobbying subcommittee can set up a time um through email would be great to do that um and yeah other than that just wanted to kind of in the vein of jack's update um the social and economic justice advisory committees also have been doing a lot of outreach to to various community members and just really grateful a lot of people are taking time and sharing really thoughtful input um on you know their experiences and you know suggestions and ideas for um how we can improve as a community so really looking forward to we should be getting um a kind of set of recommendations sometime in the next Cameron would probably know month and a half or so um but there's going to be a community survey going out and some other steps as well so um we'll keep people updated um but kudos to to Cameron who's kept the staffing um of that committee going really well um and looking forward to some really um hopefully tangible recommendations coming out of that process and just grateful to all the people that have participated from the community to help shape that um and similarly for the police review committee and the public hearing is April 5th um and we'll put the details out so just to make that just looking that up um but I think that's being posted yeah yeah but I believe it's posted in all kinds of places so hopefully people can find that uh that info and that's it for me thanks okay um I just have one uh thing which is the mountaineers are hoping to have a season this summer uh and but it is at least one part of the things that depends on is them finding host families so if you I know that is more complicated with COVID uh but particularly if you're in a household that has space and you've been vaccinated uh they are looking for people to to host uh players so please get in touch with them actually if uh if you don't know how to get in touch with them you can get in touch with me and I can connect uh you with the right people uh if you're willing to host a baseball player for um for the season this summer uh so that's that's it for me I think also I'm so thrilled that you that multiple uh of you are hosting uh zoom meetings just to chat about stuff that seems like a great idea and um I think I'm gonna have to do something like that myself I love it it's great uh all right and so John hold him I'll pass okay um Bill and or Cameron because you've turned your camera there you go go straight to the boss so just a quick report uh you know councilmember Hurrell just mentioned the federal money we've been working this week um to put together uh well lots of lists but specifically taking a look at uh the so the first thing we did was take a look at the projects and equipment and types of budget uh deferrals that we've done you know at the end of FY 20 and in this current year and then things that had been wrecked you know sought in the FY 22 budget that we couldn't even recommend so you know thinking is and that didn't include positions and those kinds of things this was sort of you know one time money one time you know projects um and it was well these are the things we would have budgeted for had it not been for these revenue shortfalls um so we have those then we you know looked at some of the bigger projects the bond projects we've got to you know those put together one of the one we were planning to sort of share that list with the council one of the things we wanted to hear first was tonight's conversation you know get some a better sense of what is isn't eligible and while you know the car next to me I thought was very helpful you know obviously he doesn't know all the specifics so this still leaves us wondering about a few things but I think we have a better idea the one area that we're still he kind of gave us the answer and I realized he doesn't know I'm not faulting him but you know sort of how big are these these grand things for next week so we have you know we've talked about the C state street project which is you know it's got water lines through lines paving it's a CSO outfall you know it's a good environment olympic but you know all together it's seven million dollars so is that something we could apply for or not you know I mean it's so you know we've got the rec center at five million dollars or six million dollars or something you know is that something we can apply for uh or is it more like the confluence park is it more like the berry main intersection so they you know it's really all about scale or do we throw in a bunch of these and say you know here depending on how you want to divvy up money here's so any any feedback you have and I realize we've got to have this done by Wednesday so I mean I think what we would probably take a staff to a recommendation send it out and um and I realize you can't have a discussion or decision by email but at least if somebody says hey I don't like this then maybe we can arrange a quick you know short meeting just to talk about that if if you all really want to weigh in I mean you know I I do think and then so then our plan has ended an upcoming meeting now that we know the amount of money and all those things that we would have on the agenda this you know sort of the use of the funds and all these lists that we've talked about we've also done we've also put on things like the public bathrooms and some of these other things that people have mentioned at these meetings and tried to get a pretty comprehensive list of ideas and if nothing else it'll be really helpful for our capital planning you know going forward because now we you know we hope we've got every everything that's on the table until the next good idea Donna go ahead I'm glad to hear you mentioned public bathrooms I think it needs to be right up there and on the list priority wise okay um any other comments or questions about that if we need to call a meeting after you send out that list filled then we can deal with that as as we need to we need to be before Wednesday so before Wednesday of next week right the 31st right that's when the that's when the applications do so if the council really wants to weigh in on this then we'll have to be probably Monday or Tuesday of next week okay all right um well I think that is the end of our our business for this evening thank you everybody uh for your patience and sticking through this I want to apologize to Donna because we didn't take a real bathroom break and I said that we would and I I thought anyway that's that's that's on me I do think it's unfair do you have to leave the discussion in order to go to the bathroom so I would like us to have a policy that we have a break no matter what policy yeah at how do you all feel about that sure sure I'm seeing some okay so so maybe like regardless of what we're doing we like you know as we'll interrupt the public hearing we'll interrupt or you know as soon as this you know the present presentation's done or whatever it is then maybe like the very next thing is we take a take a break um I I want to yeah I'm seeing some is that okay with folks okay okay thank you sorry about that but having had this conversation now now I will interrupt people so that we do um okay thank you everybody have an excellent evening and we'll see you in a couple weeks probably okay it's not my day or Tuesday good work folks see you next time have a have a good evening


array of services. One of my favorite services that I like to utilize is called a touch of key. It is an integrated service where you may end up, you get a range of different things. I stretch you, you get hot stones as well as maybe cupping, whatever it seems like your body needs at that time, that's what I address. Getting a massage is not just one of these, it's a luxury. It's really a necessity. We have to take care of our body. We will go and get our cars aligned, but we won't do the same with our body. So working with the Office of Business Opportunities has been really good for me. I've learned about a lot of different things that the city offered to help entrepreneurs, small businesses, so it's been a great learning experience and definitely a pleasurable experience. The advice that I would give to another female entrepreneur is to dig deep, see what's within your soul, be passionate about what you want to do. Because when passion meets purpose, it's divine. You know, do your homework, research to see what benefits are out here that can help and assist because they have a lot of things that are specific to women entrepreneurs as well. So I just say go for it. I have a contactless information station outside, so at any given time if someone passes by and I'm not here, they can actually interact with me through all my social media as well as they can book online.