If I wasn't so lazy, I'd do it by e-bike. But if you have a bad e-bike, you can do it by e-bike. Yeah. But I, you don't want to do it by e-bike. And tonight, I was at the Toulon. Yes. But otherwise, it's not home here. Getting back up your hill, that's not a good thing. Growing to a telecom guess. Better to get back. And it's still. Are there other people in the room right now that have something to say? No, they have something to say at public forum. Yeah. OK. Stu, what's your name? I'm sorry. My name's Sean Hul. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Be careful, though. The more you use them, you're going to say, I have to be careful. You box. So we have a pair of stand-up paddle boards now. That happens. Nice. Nice. Do you have anything to say? Yeah, the Rachel's, you know, taking her on. Like that. Where's Billy? Yeah, where did Billy go? He's off screen. He was going to start us off. It's not happening. I'm the pastor. We pinched him in trial. Thanks, ma'am. Thanks, ma'am. That's a really good point of that. Cleaner. He's back. He's back there. Yeah. He's coming out of there. There you are. Apologies for that, everybody. How are we all doing tonight? Good. Good, good. Well, we are three minutes past the top of the hour. So I think we can get things started. Welcome, everyone, to the Ward 5 NPA meeting for September. I'm going to try to share my screen to give a little introduction about what we do here at the Ward 5 NPA meetings. Shall we raise the volume a little? Can we pop it up for the old people in the room? I'm trying to do it. Raise your volume, Billy. I'm trying to bring your hearing aid up. I can also try to speak a little louder. We'll see if that works. I'm just overcoming a cold, so. It's not you, it's us, Billy. Oh, OK. All right. Somebody else can keep you. Billy, go ahead. OK, can you hear me now? Yes. Lovely, lovely. Look at that cutie. Yes, yes. All right. So welcome, everybody, to the Ward 5 NPA meeting for September.  Oops. Can you all still hear me? Yes. Excellent. All right, then we've been able to switch off the headphones and now Winnie can be a more active participant. All right. So at the Ward 5 NPA, these are our guiding principles. We are a safe space. We provide a welcome forum for all. Winnie, I need you to just listen up while I talk about the beginning of the meeting, OK? We are accessible. We engage with all community members and we seek to minimize barriers to participation that's impartially seen by how we continue this hybrid format going forward, which allows visitors of all sizes to join us at our meetings. We are respectful. We try to be aware of cultural and economic differences and we value diverse perspectives. We aspire to be vital. We look to add fun and creativity to our neighborhoods. And perhaps most importantly, we are non-partisan. We do not endorse political candidates. We are just an open forum for neighbors to come together and talk about important issues affecting us and our communities. So here are our Experian Committee members. Listen up on here when I can't really see. So could you possibly? There we go. Thank you very much to CEDO for helping with everything we do. And when OK, so when I'm in the middle of the presentation, if you want to if you want to stay, you're going to have to be a little bit calmer, OK? We use the Zoom webinar format for those of you who are participating remotely. If you haven't used the webinar format before, you should have a raise hand function that would allow you to participate when you're looking to participate. If you want to participate at some point, like, for example, in a public forum, which will be coming up shortly, we would ask that you raise your hand. I'll keep an eye on moderating virtually. So I'll keep an eye to see who's participating that way.  Nancy. Yep, there's lots of our friends there. So here's our agenda for tonight. We're going to start, as I said, with public forum. We're then going to get this is a theme that's sort of a back to school theme. I have a new student at Champlain Elementary right here who's been having a lovely time her first couple of weeks there. So we're going to hear from Tom Flanagan and a bunch of our school board members. And we've got Principal Joe coming on. We've got a great, great lineup. And then at 815, we have the South Bend Multimodal Feasibility Study. Oh, excuse me. All right. Now I'm just going to skip right in to just the brief public forum ground rules just to talk those through because we're about to go into public forum. We would ask that you identify yourself where you live in Ward three, just street or part of the ward. If you're speaking on behalf of a group, we would ask you to say what the group is and please be considerate of the time and allow others to speak. So I will model what we're looking for for introductions. My name is Billy Clark. I live in the five sisters neighborhood on Locust Terrace. And I am speaking on behalf of the Ward five NPA steering committee. So now with all those introductions out of the way, I will stop sharing my screen in order to be able to see all the faces of those participating remotely. And I will turn it over for public forum. Then we do the mouse. Billy, we do have three people here right now who will want to be in public forum. I don't know if other people online have already raised their hand. I see two raised hands online, but why don't we start within the room and then we can go from there. Okay, Stu, you want to start? Yeah, you want to come right out here? Where would you like? Let me just sit right here. I can take my seat. You start there. Hi, I'm Stu Lindsey from what we said. Okay. From Lyndon Terrace, the Bridgecliff neighborhood. And I worked with Net Zero Vermont on a project called Walk to Shop. And looking at the neighborhood, it should be a walkable, bikeable, livable neighborhood. So can we get more people to walk to the grocery store? We all live no more than 1,500 steps within this area. And one of the reasons that people don't walk is it's difficult to carry groceries. So what we offer is a little shopping trolley that will carry about 50 pounds, smaller version that will carry about 40. And my wife will walk over to the shaws. We weigh the cart when she comes back and she's got over 30 pounds of groceries and still fresh as a daisy. So EPA estimates we drive 10 billion miles a year of journeys less than one mile. So every journey that we can take by foot makes a more sociable neighborhood. Everybody wins. You get more exercise, not the fumes. So we'll be at the net zero, the VED energy fair this weekend, and you can pick them up. This one here, if you were to buy online, it's in excess of 100, we sell them for 50 and a smaller one for 40. So it's heavily subsidized to incentivize people to walk. Steve, do you have an online presence that where people can buy them? Yeah, you can't really buy them online. We do a lot of demonstrations of pop-ups. So we can always bring one around. I'll just deliver one for you. And maybe you could give Nancy our note taker your emails. Sure, okay, great. Thank you, thanks. Sean, how do you do that? Oh, okay. Do you like what you're doing? Come on up. Good evening, my name's Sean Foley. I live in Cherry Lane. I literally have a comment. I have a question. I have a concern about the bond or the school, high school. My question is, is how is it determined that we're gonna do a 20-year bond instead of a 30-year bond? Back to the envelope analysis shows that if you did a 30-year bond, the rain impact would be more like 12% than post the 15 or 16%. And I reached out to a couple of people and I really haven't gotten any responses back on why a 20-year was preferred over a 30-year. And there was a little bit of dialogue in the letter saying that the financial director of Burlington had determined that the carry costs were about the same. If you do a quick analysis, it's really not the same. It's 15 versus 12. Also the issue of cost, cause, or pays, which is meaning that the building is gonna last more than 20 years. And so high school people in town, people are gonna use it beyond 20 years, but we're gonna pay for it in 20 years. So that has another concern for me. So I'm thinking that I will last another 20 years if I hope I might last 30 years. But I think people who beyond that should also be responsible for paying for it. So if they could provide a little bit more detail, if anybody has any answer for that. You're in luck. You are in really in luck because we have a superintendent of schools here tonight. We have our two school commissioners. And anybody can answer those, they can. Thank you for your question. Billy, you wanna go with raised hands? Absolutely, yeah. We can turn it over to Jeffrey DeSena. I see you with your raised hand. Hi all. I'm Jeffrey DeSena from Arthur Court. Sorry, I am traveling this week, but I'm glad I was able to jump in. So I just had some questions about the multimodal project. Looking through some of the mock-ups, it seems to be mostly a parking garage with some frills, which I am getting the sense that a lot of Burlingtonians are kind of on the same page that I am of wanting to move Burlington toward a less car dependent city, which it is much better than much of the rest of the country already. But to me, it looks like this project only just encourages more people to drive into the city. So I would love to see if we have any other alternatives to encourage more cycling and walking and other transit options to get there and get from there. I love to see that there was a connection to the planned mixed use path along the Champlain Parkway. I think that's great. I did not see any planned bike parking. So if we want to plan for a future in which more and more of us are not getting around by car for just about every trip, then I would love to see that incorporated in our plans for facilities that are going to be around for decades to come. So those are my thoughts, thanks. Excellent, thank you very much, Jeffrey. I hope you're able to stay on for the discussion of that later on in the meeting. But if not, it's great to get those comments in now. I'll move over now to Ben, Ben Travers, recognize you. Thanks, Billy, I appreciate that. And hello to everyone. Ben Travers, I live on South Crest Drive and I'm the city councilor from Ward 5. Obviously any number of issues we could talk about with respect to our city here and not the least of which are the items you have on your agenda. Oop, Ben, you've slipped onto mute. Okay, I'm not sure when I made it. Did that just happen, Billy? Yeah, we only lost about five seconds of it. Okay, sorry about that. No, I was just gonna say that any number of issues we could talk about, not the least of which is the schools, so I'm excited about that topic tonight. With respect to the neighbor who just asked about the 20 year versus 30 year bond, I may have been one of the folks who received the email and I would just like to follow up with them that I've been in touch with. Nathan Lavery as well as Richard Goodwin with the city to ask that exact question. And if that neighbor is Sean, then I did get an email back today that I'm intending to forward to you and I suspect superintendent Flanagan may be able to speak to it as well. But the reason why I wanted to come tonight was with respect to the role that I have on the city council's Charter Change Committee. I serve on that committee with counselors Jean Bergman and Sarah Carpenter. We are again looking at placing a proposal on the ballot in March of next year regarding all legal resident voting. This would extend local voting rights to non-U.S. citizens. This is something that Burlington looked at in 2015 and voters voted it down at that point in time. Had Burlington taken that step back in 2015, it would have been one of the first municipalities in the state that did that. Since 2015, Montpelier and Winooski have both taken the step of changing their charters to allow for non-U.S. citizens to vote in their local elections. And we as a Charter Change Committee and probably as a council here shortly will be considering whether to take the step as Burlington to place it on the ballot for voters to vote on it in March. We're going around to all the NPAs as part of a large community engagement session with you all as well as with folks who will be most impacted by this which are non-U.S. citizens who would gain that right to vote in local elections for local candidates and on local questions. Wanted to let you all know that there's a website that's been put up which is at BurlingtonVT.gov slash all resident voting on that website. There's an FAQ document that answers a number of questions. It's been translated into multiple different languages who folks who would need that translation on the document and would invite you all if you have any questions at this point in time to either reach out to me, come to a Charter Change Committee meeting or stand by for this to be on the agenda for the full city council which time we would love to hear from you. So this is an intent to give folks a heads up to let you know that this is what we're talking about and looking forward to hearing from any of you who are interested in it. Thank you. Excellent, thanks so much, Ben. Andy, do you have any other people in the room who wanted to do public comment? I actually have a comment, but Jane Hindley does too. So online, maybe Jane, you could go next. Are you sure? Are you sure? I wanted to ask whether about recycling, whether any households or any homes any places where there are several homes, I mean, I'm sorry, like apartment buildings, I live in a housing cooperative that the city is enforcing, is enforcing the recycling rules or our people's bins being rejected or our households being told if they find a lot of trash in their bins or not. Are they just relying on people, just people to comply and not with no penalties attached? Jane, have you asked that question of public works? I could, I could. And I guess if there's nobody here to answer that question, I can, yes. Has nobody specifically here from public works, Ben? Do you have, do you know anything about that? I see you're from the electric department now, so. I'm excited for Net Zero Energy Fest this weekend. So I don't know why I'm standing for Broke's Electric. Andy, no, I don't have any information specific to the sort of enforcement mechanisms with respect to recycling. What I can mention is that, first of all, the city council recently issued a contract that allows the city to purchase a whole lot more of the Rollaway recycling carts, carts which will be subsidized for folks to purchase for their properties. Also the city council ordinance committee is going to be considering a proposal soon that would, if it were passed in the form that it's in right now, would mandate the use of a Rollaway recycling carts with lids on them for the purpose of both limiting litter that's blown away from recycling bins that don't have tops on them, as well as we've gotten feedback from DPW that folks who work on recycling trucks have some workplace injuries from using the bins as opposed to the Rollaway carts that are more easily put into the truck. But in any event, Jane, what I could commit to you, if you don't reach out to DPW otherwise, is when we discuss that recycling cart issue, I'd certainly be happy to bring up your question with DPW when they come before the ordinance committee, which I also serve on. That's okay, I will call DPW. Okay, thanks, Jane. So I do have something I wanted to say. I do want a screen share if I can, let's see. And are you muted? No, I am muted because I'm getting feedback, but I think I'm, okay, share. Yeah, we can hear you fine. I wanted to just say a word in commemoration of my friend and psuedic activist, Tony Reddington. He died less than a month ago. And he was somebody who really had an impact on Burlington. He was an NPA member of the steering committee in boards two and three for a long time. He spoke quite a few times in the ward five NPA. He was an incredible model of civic activism. And he focused on transportation issues but I just wanted to read really quickly something I wrote for seven days, a letter that I wrote to seven days because for me it kind of sums up Tony. Tony Reddington was indeed an outspoken transportation advocate. He was, as everyone has noted in their tributes to him, laser focused on the elegance and efficiency of roundabouts. However, underpinning his persistent work for safer streets, Tony's real obsession was for justice. Like his compadre, Representative Kurt McCormick, he knew that often the victims of Burlington-Thanger's intersections were residents who couldn't afford to own a car, kids who walked across town to school and people without the protections of wealth, powerful connections and oversized automobiles. When Tony spoke out, which was often and always with a twist of bitter humor, he was anchored in a belief that another better world was possible and that we, all of us, needed to bring it into being. I miss this guy. Thank you. Thank you very much, Andy. I think we all on the steering committee and I'll echo those sentiments. Well, excellent. We're moving on now to the next part. I think that will close public forum. I just want to make sure I didn't miss any other raised hands. Nope, I think that is everybody. So we will- My name's Rio Billy. I had a couple of slides that we flipped through at the beginning just quick, maybe one or two minutes total. Let me, I don't know, I don't have my internet on here. Can you screen share? Go back to pages six and seven. Sure, absolutely. Hold on one moment. If you could better move over by the microphone. Thank you. Okay, so the first one, it's real small in there. So we were asked by another steering committee member who's involved with the ad hoc reappraisal committee involved with raising and who knows, maybe lowering some taxes in town last year. There's going to be a public forum regarding that process on next week, on Thursday, the 22nd at 6 p.m. And that's going to be at city hall in the Sharon Bouchure, a play pronounced that right, room and there is going to be Zoom provided as well. It wasn't posted as of right now. And hopefully, I think it's going to come through in the videos we'll put in the minutes. You'll be able to go to those websites. It's slideshow button. Yeah, he has like a screen turned sideways or something like that. Basically on the city's website, there's a ad hoc committee page and you could probably Google that pretty easily. And that's supposedly where the Zoom info will be by next Thursday. And then there's also mentioned that you can send written comments to the sort of city employee that's attached to this committee, who's a Jay Dempsey at BurlingtonBT.gov. So that was the first announcement. And the second thing was several months ago, actually Dan Hill had asked us to announce that they were always seeking, I didn't say always often seeking crossing guards. That was probably in May. It looks like the recs still open. So still seeking crossing guards. The one at Pine did get filled like the third or second or fourth day of school. I'm not sure. There's been someone there. I'm sure there's some other corners that are less busy that are still empty. So it's pretty good to pay. It's not a lot of hours. So if interested, there's the phone number. And it is kind of on DPW's website under the careers button there. So if you're interested, go for it. So that, I also had one more since we're only like 10 minutes over, oops. And there was an update. There's gonna do, they're gonna do some drilling and blasting in this immediate area here over by city market, actually. Doesn't look like it in the picture because that's the old real world building, but that's gonna happen late in the month into all the way into November, I guess. I don't think it'll be every day, but there'll be some new activities that I don't think were previously planned. And just for fun, I threw in there because I get these updates every Friday that they've been working along Sears Lane for at least the last several weeks. So that's it for me. Thank you. Only three items. Thanks, Chair. Maybe Tom, do you wanna move over where you're sort of on screen as well? Or like right here? Wherever you'd like me, Andy. Let's just sit here, since you're gonna be... I think that you both slipped me out. I'll have them introduce yourselves to anytime and on the screen, but it's been a special video, so yeah, we'll just take one shot and then we'll talk. Great. I'm taking your chair. All right, good evening. It's great to see you all. Thanks for having us tonight here to talk about the school bond. And I'm gonna actually ask the... We have a number of people here who are with the team that's working on the bond vote and preparing for the bond vote. And also some friends. Hi, Andrew. And Mike. So anyway, Jeff, do you wanna start and introduce yourself and we'll kind of go around? Sure. Or we'll talk to each other. I'm Jeff Wick, you're a South District School Board member. I'll tell you about that with the German, French, German arguments. Jesse, back. Hi everyone, Lucia Cambriello, Ward 5 School Board Graph. It's nice to see everybody. I also live down on China and Latin to be our children and to be a champion of it. All right. So we're again, happy to be here. Grateful for the opportunity. We do have a PowerPoint. Do you have that too? Just like last night would be great. This has been fun going to the, I've done the MPAs virtually since I've been here. A couple of them, I haven't been in person yet. So last night I got to see a new space, the meeting house upon South Prospect tonight. I get to see, I've been in this building but never in this office. I'm a little jealous. I think we need to set up like this. What I'll do is I'll set, I'm gonna set my own timer for 12 minutes starting now. And I'll just talk through the slides and then that'll leave time for discussion. Does that work for folks? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we can keep roll. We can roll ahead to the first slide. So just brief overall kind of project history. I think it's important for folks to know why we are where we are and why we need a new high school. So we had a $70 million bond that the citizens of Burlington voted on to re-envision the high school which was essentially a major renovation of the high school. And through that process, what you have to do is environmental testing. And so we did environmental testing and found that there was PCB, there were PCBs in the air. That was the April of 2020 when, sorry, August of 2020, when we learned on the first day of school that the PCBs in a couple of buildings of the bigger building were high enough that it raised alarm among the Department of Environmental Conservation for Vermont and the Federal Environmental Protection Agency. And they told us, don't go back in the building. And then we subsequently received additional testing that came back for the whole building. And we then met again with the Department of Environmental Conservation and the EPA and a number of the people who had been working on the environmental testing and learned at that meeting that it was not safe to go back into the building with the level of PCBs where they were. We actually stopped and asked the question, does anyone in this room feel it is safe to go back into the building? And no one felt it was safe for us to return to the building. And that's including the EPA, the Department of Environmental Conservation and our own, not our own, but the folks who have contracted with us. And in fact, some of those people said outside of the factory setting, it was the highest level of PCBs they'd ever seen in a building. So it was a significant problem. And essentially what that did was it led us to figure out where they were coming from and how they were, how there were such high levels of PCBs in the air sort of aggregate across the building. And what we learned through that is that there were PCBs in the caulking around the windows in the glue tile underneath, glue that was sticking the tile to the floor and in the light ballasts. And in all of those places over the years they had spread out. So they were into the floor, they were two feet around every window, they were in the soil and they were in the ceiling. And so essentially if you look at the building, the old DHS building up on the hill where there are windows, if you took out two feet around each window you would have no more walls left. And so essentially the building is totaled if you think about a car. That's how I think about it. So that led us to make a decision that we needed to build a new high school. We had already bonded for $70 million and knew that we needed significant improvements. And then we learned about this massive problem with chemical contaminants in the building materials and in the air. We did not use or we borrowed part of the $70 million bond and we only utilized four million of the $70 million to get to the point where we stopped. And so we have either not borrowed or given back the additional $66 million. So we did not utilize $66 million of the original bond. And so that is essentially as if it never happened. It's not impacting taxpayers in any way and won't. So this is a separate set of dollars that we're talking about for a new building. So we'll keep going. That led us to a decision making process where we needed to figure out what the best place was for the building and what the best kind of building design would be for the building on that place. We ended up choosing Institute Road, which is the location where the current high school sits because it would be less expensive than any of the other options. Number one, and also be able to, it would get us into the space sooner. And it also has the campus feel connection to the bike path, the lake, the farm's forest and that sort of campus feel. So it was by far the most, and we did a bunch of community. We asked the community what they thought and across the board, the top picked site was Institute Road. So after that, our design team designed six options, or five and a half options. There was one sort of point five option for buildings that we could build on that site. And we ended up choosing option C. Option C was the least expensive of those options and also the one with the most compact design that would be the most energy efficient. And again, it and also was the most straightforward and would take the least amount of time. There were a couple that were pretty interesting but had us building new roads and just would have been much more complicated. So we chose the least expensive location and the least expensive place or building on that site. And throughout this process, we've been really trying to think hard and plan for how to build an amazing building for our community and for our students and also how to be really mindful of the impact of that building on taxpayers of Burlington. So as we've gone through the process, you can see sort of the evolution of the process. One big piece of information that I think is important to know is that we have a technical center. So it's Burlington High School and Burlington Technical Center. Half of the students in the Burlington Technical Center are Burlington residents. And so we decided to remove half of the Burlington Technical Center program space from the building and keep half of it in. And something really fortuitous happened that led to that decision, which is that we learned that we received a $10 million grant and we applied for and received a $10 million grant from Senator Leahy. It's an earmark federal grant to build an aviation center, build out our aviation program at the airport. So these two things happened at just a perfect time and allowed us to continue to offer all of the programs that we're offering in BTC but have them be offered in two sites. So one site at the airport with our two aviation programs, our advanced manufacturing program, our pre-tech program and probably our auto program. And then back at the high school offering our Health and Human Sciences program, our another health related program. And we have a number of design and arts and music programs that we offer at the high school. And the citizens of Burlington will only be paying for it through this building, half of the Burlington Technical Center which we think is appropriate because half of the students are from Burlington. The other half will be paid for by the Leahy grant and also some other grant funding and support that's available for that project at the airport. And so we, you can see the timeline ended August, August 15th is sort of the most recent part of this timeline where the city council unanimously approved that we can place this bond question on the ballot. So that led us to, and that was after we kind of went through this process of ensuring that we were doing everything we could to be really mindful of the impact on taxpayers and also creating a really strong program design. So the next slide please. So we have the updated site plan which you can see here. The last one didn't talk about a lot but it sort of, it highlights where Burlington Technical Senator is, Burlington High School. One of the things that people really, students really cared about and teachers really cared about and actually community mentioned are outdoor learning areas. So we have, if you can see, yeah, that circle over there and then there's another sort of partial circle over on the west side. Those are outdoor learning areas. You can see how it's connected to Arms Forest up to the north. The entrance is off of Institute Road but there's also accessible entrance ways in the back. Accessibility is a really important thing because the last high school, the current high school building on Institute Road is very inaccessible for individuals with disabilities and who may have mobility related disabilities. So it's extremely challenging and not ADA compliant building. And so this new building does that as well as it being seated on the land really well we think. Next slide, this next couple of slides just show you some images from different vantage points. This is Institute Road going down toward the lake and so you can see there's pullout so you don't end up getting backed up. Cars don't end up getting backed up out on the road and there's an accessible sort of entrance way there. There's also a lot of accessibility for multimodal transit. There's a lot of bike parking spaces here. I think it was 300. Close to close to 300 bicycle parking spaces. So we're really being very mindful of the future here. That's the south entrance, keep going. The north entrance, this is the backside, the north side of the building, where much of the parking is and where the buses will circle around. You have to have circling so buses can go in there. And then you can see here the north entrance that also sees through to the south entrance so you can see the light on the other side of the entrance, that's the south side in the fields. And that brings you into a commons area. So that's sort of a central area in the building that has spaces for students to collaborate, to socialize, to eat, and to create an entrance that feels like a place for students to learn and also for the community. I mean, I think one of the things that is really important for us in the design here is that this building is open to the community and has space and that we've planned for accessibility and openness to the community when school's not in session and in some cases when school is in session. That is a big part of the design process. Keep rolling. This is an example of a classroom so you can see the natural light. Oh, that's my 12 minutes right now. Keep rolling, okay. The commons, so this is the commons I just mentioned, lots of space, lots of light, lots of flexible spaces for students to be together and to work, to collaborate and to eat and do the things that students do together in schools. Keep going. Here's the auditorium and you can just kind of keep rolling. Learning center, this is the library media center. And so we wanna be really clear and transparent and I also wanna acknowledge that it's a little challenging to explain the exact tax impact of this project. And so what we're showing you is the tax rate increase which is 15.67% on a $370,000 home. We do have another slide that shows you a breakdown across home values. And so that's about $805 per year, $67 per month. And then you can see it, $190 per year for the income sensitized payer. One of the thing that's really important for you to know is that we've been the Burlington School District, the Burlington School Board. Mike Fisher was a part of the board during this time too, had been really aggressively seeking equitable funding for our district. And we threw really intense advocacy. Unexpectedly, the legislature decided to create and to create an equitable funding model. The funding model prior to this, what will be fiscal year 25 is when it will start up to then has been inequitable. It does not fund students who are English learners and students who are living in poverty and students in high school appropriately. And so what's happening is the districts around us are essentially able to provide a higher level of service for a lower tax impact. And that's what we've been referring to as the weighted pupil. So we've updated the weighted pupil, which is essentially how many dollars a student is worth, or it's costs to educate a student based on their level of need. And we have been inequitably funded for many, many, many years. This fixes that. And so that is gonna do two things for us. Number one, it's gonna allow us to provide better services to students. And number two, because the citizens of Burlington have been paying for a high quality education for students, it will also reduce the tax impact on doing that. So it won't, and if you look at the most recent estimate, it estimates that the offset of the weighted pupil, if we budgeted the exact same way, would be minus 15%. So that would be a direct offset. This is not gonna be a direct offset. We don't anticipate because some of that has to go toward better programming for English learners, for students who are learning English, but it will be some offset. And so that's where we're struggling a little bit to explain this in a way that's really transparent and clear and not misleading. But so it's 15% at this point, but I don't anticipate, none of us anticipate the actual impact would be this. Just to be clear, absent this, it's a 16% impact. Absent the weighted pupil, but the weighted pupil is happening, beginning in fiscal year 25. I understand how you're trying. I don't wanna, yeah. But it's gonna happen anyway. So this is a 15% impact. It is a 15% impact. And the weighted, yes, but it won't, I do not believe it is gonna impact individual taxpayers 15% when we're at full bonding capacity because of the weighted pupil. Because it's changing the way we're finding it, but it's not gonna offset it 100%. And that's why we keep saying, that's why the 15% is there clearly. And I'm happy to take more questions about it. Truthfully, it's been a little harder. So what has a decision already been rendered by the legislature, by whatever decision making body exists, that we are gonna get a different weighting formula? Yes. And that's a guarantee, so this rate's gonna go down. So the weighted pupil, the way that our pupils are weighted will change so that we don't have to pay as much for individual students services that we're currently paying essentially. So the Vermont funding formula is also extremely complex, which doesn't help in sort of explaining this, but yeah, that begins in fiscal year 25. So in fiscal year 25, the weighted pupil will shift. What it shows is that in places like Essex and CVSD and South Burlington, there are plus 10 to 15% meaning that their budgets are gonna go up in terms of their spending per pupil will go up, ours will go down. So that will have a tax. Just a couple more slides and it went over in probably 15 minutes. This shows by, oh, this is posted online. We have this on our website and it's all posted so you can see it. So we'll just keep moving. So this shows the borrowing over time. You mentioned, you asked about the 2020 year bond. We've been working with the city, with Rich Goodwin at the city to determine what the best duration of borrowing should be. When we look at the market a few months ago, 20 years was the right number. It could still be 30. We will look at that when we're going out to borrow. So I have a question about the borrow.  So the vote just allows you to borrow the money doesn't actually set the right parameter. Exactly. The borrowing is. Yes. You should really, I mean, kind of do this for a living. Yeah. It's very confusing. But you guys just say, hey, it's better. You need to say, hey, we're gonna get three and a half versus 3.75. And that we borrow for 30 years, because you divide 1.65 million dollars versus 30 over 20. This is significant impact on the rate, on the tax impact. And so you need to explain that while you're doing the 20, just not say it looks better. You need to say it looks better because this is the rate that it wants and this is the rate for that one. And this is the borrowing cost. Okay. Yeah, I think we can certainly do that. And I appreciate that question because it is something that's, it depends on the market at the time of our bond. I just looked at Moody's today and the difference, the basis differential between a 30 and 20 year was about 30 basis points. And so that's not really much to say the switch between the two. And this is on double, you know, double A bonds. And I think the city's a little bit better than that. So when I look at it, I'm like, this does not make sense for a rate impact, no tax. I may be the only one that's interested in this when I'm interested. I doubt it. I doubt it. Thank you. And this helps too, because we have FAQs out. We're really trying to make sure we're taking questions, learning from them, making sure we know we're thinking about everything. First of all, that's out there that we may not be thinking about, but also that we're able to explain to people, you know, why we're making decisions we're making. Thank you. You're making a long time investing, but the rates are just going to go up. Yeah. All right. So we can go, I'm basically done here and just maybe one more slide. Thank you. And so this slide shows the funding, which I think it's important just to know that we have brought significant funding to the project already from the $10 million congressional grant from $10 million in an existing capital bond to update buildings that we're going to be able where we will be able to utilize funds of $10 million from that bond. We have $10 million from the American Rescue Plan funds, which is a fortuitous time for us to get the American Rescue Plan funds. We're able to get those funds toward the building and then $5 million in surplus over five years. We are continuing to aggressively pursue state and federal funding, working with the consultants, researching current fiscal year grants and that we are eligible for, that we believe we're eligible for, have partnership with Brown Students Foundation to bring philanthropy to the table and also gearing up for the fiscal year 24 legislative cycle, where we think we may be doing the same type of advocacy that we did on the weighted pupil for construction aid. Currently there's no construction aid in the state. There needs to be the bill and the state is gearing up for that. They've developed a study. They developed a commission to look at that study and make some decisions. So I think we'll probably be asking the citizens of Burlington to sort of help mobilize around the advocacy for construction aid because I think that will help here as well. We are committed to doing everything we can and we have an MOU with the city that we've agreed to work together and we've committed to be accountable to continuing to aggressively fundraise that we don't have to borrow for the whole $165 million. So with that, we can take questions. I had a question about the PCBs. You said that the PCB levels were in excess of I believe the EPA standard. There have been some confusion about the health department standard for PCBs versus EPAs that we were wildly out of sync with the EPA. We had a much more restrictive level. Are the PCB problems located in the entire building or is it just located in one part of the building? There are PCBs throughout the building. The highest levels of PCBs where they're in the thousands in some areas and it's thousands of nanograms per cubic meter, those are in building F and they sort of get lower and lower as you go through the building. But each of the buildings has high levels of PCBs. And it's important to note that what we flagged the problem through airborne PCBs and the state action levels relate to airborne PCBs, whatever particles are floating in the air. But once you flag those based on being at a certain what they call action level, the action is you've got to investigate more. And what we had to do was look at building materials. And so we've learned that they're in the air and that's how we flagged them but they're also throughout the building materials. And so while when we first got into this conversation with the EPA and the state, are the levels of the action levels for the state were much, much lower than the action levels for the EPA. We sat at a table with the EPA and the Department of Environmental Conservation from Vermont and they both said it was not, they did nothing was safe to go back and build it. Let me just ask it a little differently. So it's my understanding that the health department's standard was like 15 PCB nanograms and the EPA's was like 350 PCB nanograms as reported by Vermont Digger. There was also identification and I'm just saying what I think I read. And all of you would know far more about this. Where I'm coming from is, are there any of the buildings that can be preserved? I understand there's an ambient level of PCB everywhere. And there's an ambient level that unfortunately was at perhaps the level that the health department had established as an actionable level, 15 nanograms of PCBs. Are there once again, any of the buildings that are salvageable that don't have actionable or worrisome levels of PCB? We don't believe so. And that is based on two things. One, the amount of PCBs that are in the air and the building materials, much of the reporting has been about the airborne PCBs, but those PCBs are also in the walls and the ceiling and the floor, right? And so we have to take action on those. So you get down to a point where we were already in a building, when I walked the building in April with Dan French, the secretary of education and he said, this is one of the worst buildings in the state. And so we're already working with a building that is sort of widely viewed as not a good building. We already had a 70 million dollar bond to renovate and upgrade the building. And then we have this massive health chemical issue in the building. And so at that point, it's important. We all believed that the best decision was to build a new building. Yeah, I'm not arguing about people's motives. You know, I don't get people working with good faith. It was my understanding one more time that there are separate buildings in Burlington High School. I'm not aware of the campus well, but there's F building, there's a building. It was my understanding that there were specific buildings that were at very high levels and other buildings that were not. So my question is, is that true? And if so, why aren't we preserving some of the buildings that are not at dangerous levels or at levels that are not for children? Yeah, and I think I can take a start out and then maybe the design team can help answer that question. There are buildings that are very high levels of PCBs. F building is one of them. There are some with much lower levels of PCBs. A building is one of them. We're currently using A building for some of those for some activities at this point because you can be in there for a limited amount of time. But when we were making a decision about the best building to make to build and the type of building that was accessible and offered the types of program spaces that we felt we needed, preserving individual buildings didn't make sense. And that was a decision that we collectively made. I see so. So the decision really is about upgrading really the quality of the building, not with respect, with that respect to the PCBs in some instances. So some of it had to be replaced because of the PCB levels and the others you wanted to replace because of the inadequacies of the buildings. Let me chime in a little bit. Not wanted. Infeasible and uneconomic. It's like if I'm gonna tear down my house in my garage because most of it is not very good. I'm not gonna leave the garage because where I'm putting the new house might impinge on that as well. And also the cost of remodeling the garage. I mean, maybe it's not a great analogy but the point is there were other problems. You can't just keep C building hanging right there because that's where the footprint to the new school is going to go. And I'm not an architect. These guys can address it, but it doesn't seem economically wise to try to keep any of these buildings because each of them also has PCBs in the materials. And the cost of getting that out is, well, it could be infinite because you can't totally get it out. So you're gonna be left with in your hypothetical C building and then what do you have this high school built around it? It just, it doesn't make a lot of sense plus C building probably is going to have to be forever monitored for the airborne PCBs and that kind of thing after you've attempted to get it out. At some point I'm just using a broad brush but it doesn't make sense where we were to say, well, let's pick and choose. Let's keep C building. The other thing is these buildings were built on different levels for, turned out very poor as you know, from an accessibility standpoint for people with disabilities. My view is that it just wouldn't make sense to, I'm not even sure what buildings we could keep but to keep one or two buildings and then try to build a new high school around it, it just doesn't make sense. And we looked at, so the study is of individual rooms. So the gym in A building doesn't have high levels PCBs in the air, but A building does have spaces, other parts of A building do have spaces. So it wouldn't make sense to tear down most of A building, leave some of A building. So that was part of what we've into the decision making. And also the, again, the building materials and the, are another piece in building C, you have lots of windows and the PCBs are in the actual concrete in between the windows and you'd have to remediate or remove all that. And Tom, I think you made this point when you talked about the choice that we made around the conceptual design was that it was a timeline that was going to meet our needs from the perspective of where the current students are learning in Macy's is a lease agreement that we have that ends. And so we are on a very tight timeline. So in addition to the cost being insurmountable to leave some of the buildings in place while trying to build around that, we also have this really important timeline that we've got to maintain. And so that was the other choice with that building was that it could come down and be erected on the timeline that we needed to be to move the students to the new site when the lease is up at Macy's. And there are connected systems like the HVAC system we needed to replace, right? So there are a lot of the, it's really, there are connected systems sort of throughout the building. You know, I just, you know, the analysis was important to me to hear what you were thinking. Just a great deal of money. And I'm a taxpayer and, you know, I just want to make sure there's good stewardship around money and that's it. No, we appreciate that question. Billy, are there questions online? I see one hand raised. I see Tiff, is he your hand raised? Yeah, hi. I just, this has been very helpful to see. I serve as the districts, one of the district's representatives to the house. And I guess I wanted to say something about the state. We have, or the Burlington Democratic delegation is meeting next week to talk, among other things about this issue and how we can really advocate strongly for a state commitment to this project. And, you know, there was $30 million that was set aside at the end of the legislative year in the budget that was specifically for this kind of remediation or building in light of what schools were already beginning to find out. And, but that money cannot be per the legislation committed before the next legislature. You know, I think a number of us had hoped that some portion of that money could be committed to Burlington given the sequence of events that ended up closing the school and then shifting the, well, changing the thresholds kind of midway. At any rate, I just talked with somebody who chairs her school board on the other side of the state is more closely connected to folks on the Ed committee. And she, you know, she said that she believes that there will be federal aid that is available to schools in general and would be available to Burlington, either through recovery funding that remains or infrastructure funding that comes through the most recent federal infrastructure bill. So I guess I just wanted to say that I am, I regret that the state can't make a commitment prior to the bond issue, because I think that would make it a lot easier to stomach. But I, we are working hard, those of us in the delegation to make the case and try to address this sooner rather than later. Yeah, we really appreciate that. Thank you. I did make a direct ask of the Secretary of Education for $30 million, which was the price tag at that point for removal and remediation and for $20 million for the tech center knowing that was a big ask. But we have been working with the state since then. And what one of the things that they told us was that it's a local issue. And so we appreciate your support and that of your, those are the support of your colleagues. We know you're there working for this. I gotta say, I mean, really, Frank, I mean, I think that's a ridiculous statement because this is a, you know, we are not the only school that is facing this. There are gonna be buildings all across the state that are gonna need funding to address the same issues. And we haven't funded school construction for a number of years and that's, we need to face that music. This is Tiff Blomley's position, you know, only I don't speak for the Appropriations Committee or anybody else, but I just, that I think is, I don't understand the rationale for calling this a local issue, especially when it is a shared statewide by so many buildings. And I'd say, and I didn't, you know, it's a state issue because we're meeting the state's levels from two years ago, right? That was the scientific threshold that we were measuring ourself against. And that wasn't a local setting. That was a state setting. Right, yeah. Thank you very much for all the work that you've been doing to scramble to figure this whole project out. When was the high school built? The current high school? 1964. 1964, okay. In 1964, we were using, they were using state-of-the-art architectural materials, state-of-the-art knowledge. Obviously, they didn't know about PCBs or they wouldn't have put all those in there. I have a question for the design team. Are we in our hubris as modern people in 2022? Are you absolutely certain that we're not making the same kind of mistakes with materials that we don't know about? Easy question. Well, currently, luckily everybody is more aware of the past and what problems have been caused in materials. So we have now product declaration sheets. Most all of the products that we use is part of our design that tells us what's in there and that they don't have contaminants in them. But there's no guarantees that there's gonna be a new discovery, 10 years from now that says something might be creating a problem. So you can't predict the future, but what we can do is say that we are in this new design looking at product declaration sheets and making sure that known contaminants aren't being reused again. So forever chemicals that we're just now discovering are in so many different things, so many different consumer products. Are those a potential culprit in 10 years from now or 20 years from now? I'm not a product scientist, so I couldn't tell you. Andy, you and I can have a lovely conversation at some point about the Monsanto tests that were done in the 1930s related to PCBs and how there actually was knowledge done before 1964 and how by 1970, I believe it was what Congress banned the use of PCBs in general. And there's been a great deal of litigation about this, which at some point we'd love to hear what the city has thought about on that. But that's a separate conversation to be had. The one point that I just wanna make on that sort of theme is that I do worry that we are taking on a problem that is gonna be a national problem sooner rather than later and that we are the tip of the iceberg of this PCB issue because so many schools were built in the 1960s and so many schools were built with this caulking. This is not a one-off thing. And one question I guess I would have is, I know there has been some investigations done to make sure that other buildings in the city do not have this problem, but could you speak to those efforts, the efforts to make sure other schools don't have this issue? Sure, yeah. One of the, we actually had some testing done here before the high school was tested. We were part of a pilot before I got here and we tested a few buildings, Champlain being one of them and Champlain would be one that I'd be worried about if we hadn't tested it because it's built right at the same time, looks similar. Right, so I figured it may have similar materials, but it did not have any level of PCBs that were of concern given the old action levels, which were extremely, extremely stringent. And since our finding at the high school, the state has started a testing program where they're testing all of the schools in the state for PCBs, all the schools where PCBs could have been used. And they started with the schools that were most, they were most, or had the most likelihood of having high levels of PCBs. And so they've tested a couple of our buildings and they've tested throughout the state. And I think it's actually good news that we've heard from about one school, Cabot in Cabot, where they had to shut their gym because of the PCB levels in their gym. They're scrambling to try to figure out what to do much like we had to, but it was just their gym. So I don't know, I mean, it's hard to say. It could be that VHS is really an anomaly or we could see these issues popping up across the state, but we've investigated the majority of our school buildings and those buildings that are of highest concern and haven't had any issues other than at VHS. So that investigation continues and will continue and will continue across the state. So hopefully we don't have those really pervasive issues across the state. And then we can get all of that $30 million for PCBs that's sitting in the state budgets right now and that'll bring the taxes down. Yeah, and we're not the tip of the spear, Billy. There are other schools. I'm trying to find it. I think it was in Springfield, Mass. Western Mass is a number of schools that have had some issues. But the point is well taken, I think, because it's possible that much of the rest of the country hasn't done this yet. And maybe who knows if our timing is good or bad, but it's unfortunate because the students have found a place to go. We were so lucky to have Macy's. People keep asking me, what would you have done if you didn't have an empty Macy's? I don't know what our high schoolers would be. Wilds, where they would be learning. Actually, we were gonna do trailers. Trailers was the other option, but that was much more expensive. And the state did give us $3.5 million to build out Macy's. So they have supported us, yeah. But we need more and we're gonna fight for more. Well, this is an incredibly interesting conversation that I don't wanna cut off, although, but we are running a bit over on time. And I have a five year old here that I desperately need to put down to bed. So Andy, I'm gonna moderate over to you for the in-person and just to check, see if there's any final questions for this group before we go on to the next topic. Lucia, I was just gonna jump in and offer that for those of you, obviously you're all Berlintonians, you're here, we would all love to invite you to vote yes on November 8th. And you'll probably receive your ballots, I think, within the next couple of weeks. So you can vote yes even sooner than that. And if you take care of your own vote, you can also talk to your friends and neighbors about their vote. And so as you are contemplating this decision, if you haven't already made the decision to vote yes, please feel free to reach out to any of us. If you have additional questions that we can answer, we would love to move you into a solid yes before November 8th, this is a huge deal. We don't have a high school, it's a really important investment for this community and it will, for sure, shape the future of Berlinton. And what we didn't have time for, and I don't wanna absorb airtime from the other important agenda items, but there are a lot of really exciting aspects about this building that will benefit the entire community. And so I think opportunities like the fact that we can't host certain athletic competitions in our space because we have never had adequate space and the theater take a look at it, it's pretty awesome. And so there are some really wonderful ways that I think the community will benefit in ways that our current old building clearly can't accommodate because it is not a great building at all, but hadn't been able to accommodate a lot of those things. So there's a lot to get excited about and there are a ton of really wonderful materials on the website. So vote yes on November 8th. And if you have additional questions, let us help you get to yes. Now let's go out September 26th. In mail box since the 28th, we're predicting. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We're happy to talk. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So we're on to... Thanks. Thank you. I'll be back in a minute. Okay. We are on to our discussion of the multimodal transportation center feasibility study. And we have this Joe and Joe joining us. He's gonna give us a few minutes. Sorry. Good to see you. I'm here. Oh, Joe. Yeah, I'm here. You got two minutes, no. I forgot. I can get it done in 30 seconds, but you might not catch it all. Thanks for having me, everybody. And I am here as much as an ambassador of Goodwill as anything else. But I am, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Joe Restigini. I am the principal at Champlain Elementary School, white man and position of authority, educator, father, husband, son, he, him, pronouns, and also former Ward 5 resident. I lived at the Champlain school apartments while I was back in college to get my teaching license. So proud to hear how things have kind of grown since my time living in your neighborhood and now serving your community. I have three real touch points that I'd like to just highlight as we open school this year. And I'm happy to stay for questions as well. The first and most important one in my mind in terms of being a community asset for Ward 5 is Champlain Elementary School has opened a preschool classroom in our building for the first time. And we are really proud to announce this opportunity for families and really the expand programming that further meets the needs of, and also establishes another location and reason for why people would wanna choose to live in the south end of Burlington. Four-year-olds have entered the building and we've got two great classroom teachers in there, a paraeducator supporting 16 students at this point. And it feels really good to me to be able to expand that opportunity to families. I look forward to us expanding our pre-K opportunities further and even seeking other chances for birth to three and three to five as another reason for why people would wanna move to our lovely community. The other piece that is notable for taxpayers here in terms of your investment in Champlain Elementary School is that we have invested our budgetary rise allocations for a special educator that is now common at each grade level from pre-K up to grade five, so that this gives us a more innovative look at the way that we deliver education, really putting another skilled teacher in each grade level classroom to support students with individualized education plans as well as those without. And the other piece that is also important for me to note here with you tonight is that Burlington School District, the elementary schools across all of our elementary schools have invested in a new literacy program for K to five. And this is the American Reading Company program. They have sent and have modeled teachers that will be at our schools once a month. Today was the first time that Champlain was visited by the American Reading Company coaches. And the reason why this is important and me to bring this to your attention tonight is simply for the fact that it's the first time in my 20 years of education where all teachers and staff are learning a program that is really gonna meet student needs in a way that's really improved and all learning it at the same time on a level playing field. So I think just knowing that and appreciating the fact that across Burlington School District, the elementary schools, there's going to be consistency in curriculum and consistency in delivery of curriculum. This is just an important thing for you to just be aware of and to be thinking about as we're talking about, you'll hear American Reading Company for the next few years to come as it starts to become more a part of just how we implement education across all of our elementary schools. So I thank you for having me tonight. I know that you've got other agenda items but I'm happy to take questions if you've got them for me. Questions for Principal Joe? Joe, thank you very much for being with us tonight. All right, let's move on. So we have, as I was saying before, Jeff Dooby and David Saladino from VHB. It looks like Samantha Dunn from CEDO is here and our subject is a report back on the multimodal transportation center feasibility study. And we did have a question earlier. I don't know if you were on, we had a question during public forum about the design that had been public before and whether this was really going to point us toward a future with fewer cars and more less car orientation in Burlington. So if you could address that question as well, that would be great. Okay, well, thank you. Samantha, do you wanna say any opening comments or we jump right in? Yeah, I think you can jump right in mostly here to offer support and answer questions and just thank the MPA for listening again and providing feedback as we sort of finalize this feasibility study and begin to move forward on next steps. Let's see here. Okay, is that coming through? Yeah. Okay, thank you all for your time tonight. And I know we've got a full agenda so we'll try to keep things moving along here. So the project, this multimodal transit center in the South End, what we're looking at here is a feasibility study and so we are, apologize, my phone is ringing at an inopportune time. So we're looking at the feasibility. So are there any major red or yellow flags associated with building a multimodal center in Burlington, South End? And so our task in working with the city and the Regional, Chittin County Regional Planning Commission is first to look at the feasibility any red or yellow flags associated with the center, estimating parking demand. And this kind of gets to that question and we can touch on that a bit later about what the demand is today versus going forward into the future. We looked at two different options, one with residential uses, one without and you'll see those sketches tonight. Developing a construction cost estimate which we have in hand, we'll be presenting those. We have a set of funding streams. We'll be talking about those tonight and our last task was doing things like this so communicating the information out to the public. So to get into the project and some of you or maybe many of you have been involved in this project in previous meetings, but for those who haven't, the site that we're looking at here is 68 Sears Lane. We've got two images here, both the same site. So this is off Lakeside Avenue, well off Sears Lane between Sears Lane and Lakeside Avenue. And this parcel, it's about a little over three acres. It's owned by the city of Burlington. It abuts directly adjacent to the 125 Lakeside Avenue which is owned by a private entity. And you can see on the right-hand side, same image just showing what the site looks like with the Champlain Parkway. Hopefully in not too long of a time period we'll start to look like that. And so what we were looking at here from a development program, looking at a transit center so an opportunity place for buses to stage for people to wait and board on the buses. The parking garage, and so we did do some work. We've worked with Katna and other folks within the city to identify what the parking demand, an estimate of parking demand. We got somewhere between 500 and 550 spaces. About 350 of those spaces are utilized at the lot just to the north, so in the background here. And so that is private property. And so once, if anything were to happen on that property, those 350 cars, so 250 from the hospital, 100 from Champlain College would be looking for a place to land. And so this would make a logical location for those cars to land. And then there's an allocation for some additional general public spaces. In addition, so some bicycle accommodations, you'll see some housing that we've included in one of the alternatives, as well as some other other uses, which we can touch on as well. As I alluded to, we have had quite a bit of public input so far. We are on a two month schedule here. So we were first at the, with the word five MPI back in May. We then went to a public workshop. We had a generator together with this, the office of city planning. It was a kind of a joint session along with the innovation district overlay. I was kind of presenting on both of those at that public workshop. We're back here July 7th. Following that meeting, we went out for an online survey, got just under 80 total surveys collected. And then a little after that, we were at the farmer's market for the full day and got lots of input there as well. And so with that, I'll pass it off to my colleague, Jeff Dubey to walk through the latest iteration of these concept plans. Awesome. Thanks, Dave. Again, my name is Jeff Dubey. I've been helping out Dave on this project. So if you recall, last time you saw us, we had three separate concepts. We had one concept that did not introduce housing on the site, sort of following the current zoning regulations for the district. And then two concepts, you wanted to be two that did introduce housing on the site, sort of two different ways you could treat that and handle that on site. Concept A, again, that was without housing, that sort of had the transit center and bus functions separated from the garage itself, sort of anticipating that a lot of the bus traffic would come down from the north and circulate around the site. That way, concept B1, introducing housing, but again, keeping the transit center and then the housing itself separate from the garage. And then B2, introducing this idea of the wrapped parking structure where housing was actually wraparound the perimeter of the garage and sort of looking to screen it that way. With this concept, if you recall, we had that idea of the transit center traveling under two levels of the garage and traveling north to 125 Lakeside Avenue. Actually, all three concepts had this idea of connecting to once 25 Lakeside Avenue directly. I will mention that concept B1, we ultimately decided not to move forward. We had a lot of feedback thinking that it didn't really make the best housing. There was concern over the adjacency of the railroad tracks and the housing and maybe a conflict between the buses and the housing just one level above. So we ultimately decided to leave that one behind and really move forward just on two concepts. Next slide, Dave. So this is concept A, again, no housing. We heard a lot of feedback from people thinking that it wasn't really the best to have the transit center separated from the garage. Folks thought that it didn't really make the best pedestrian experience traveling to the garage, parking your car, hopping out and then having to travel across multiple driving lanes, thinking of cold, cold Burlington winters and whatnot. So we ultimately decided to move the transit center integrated into the garage, sort of consolidate those functions and improve the pedestrian experience and visitor experience by sort of commingling those two uses. And then also introducing this idea of dedicated space for like Uber drop-off or pickups or maybe your friend just giving you a quick ride to the transit center. Again, really looking to enhance that user experience for visitors of the transit center. If we jump to the next slide, this is- Just one other note and the change here moving to the second alternative is to keep the circulation all within this lot. So not relying on development to the north on 125 Lakeside. That was an important comment that came from round of input. Can't assume that the private developer will do something to the north and so we can't rely on that. And so this integrates that turnaround to keep all of the movements on site. Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Dave. So here's just a bigger zoomed in look at it. You see in red in the center, the transit center being better integrated into the garage structure itself. You see in number five, the introduction of that dedicated lane or space for the drop-offs short-term pickup and drop-off. In six, this concept preserves the idea of the long-term EV charging stations for buses and also preserves this idea of creating that shared use pathway connection from the Burlington bike path through the southern portion of 68 Sears Lane and connecting to the Champlain Parkway. This concept also introduces the idea of a roof covering for the garage of solar panels. This could certainly help offset any electricity usage for the site, but also sort of help mitigate some of the maintenance of snow plow from snow removal from the top deck of the garage. If we wanna hop to the next slide, this was concept B, again that introduction of housing. Again, we started with this idea of a wrapped parking garage. Again, where we would have the transit center function pass under a few levels of the parking garage. We heard comments again that wouldn't really create the best and most user-friendly environment down there. It could certainly feel a little uninviting, a little dark, a little, if you will scare you to enter that space. So we moved away from that idea, but we did hear a lot of positives about this concept as well. People were responding positively to sort of the urban walkable block that was starting to create. Folks definitely liked the introduction of housing on site. In fact, they wanted to see more than the 65 units that we were proposing. But with that, there was a lot of comment that the wrapped housing that was being proposed isn't really the best, most quality housing. There's definitely concerns that's not the best air ventilation. The layout doesn't really create the best units. It's hard to accommodate larger units in there. Other folks that it didn't really, other folks commented that it didn't really create community with the housing type that was being proposed. So we took a different look at what that might look like. With this concept that we're proposing, we're sort of changing how buses travel through the site. So they're coming in on Sears Lane. They're making that 45 degree parking in front of the transit center in red. And then they're actually taking a turn west to go back onto Sears Lane and exit the site. But with that, we are still integrating with 125 Lakeside Ave and proposing on the western side of the garage, a driveway connection that would again have that short-term visitor parking sort of for that drop-off and pickup. And that would wrap around to 125 Lakeside Ave and start to connect to some active uses on the north side of the garage. This concept changes the housing scheme a little bit where now instead of wrapping the structure, we're actually putting it on top. We'll have a closer look at that later on. But if we wanna jump to the next slide, Dave, this is a closer look at the ground floor. So again, we see in red on the bottom, number one is the transit center right up front. And we would have again that improved circulation where we're not mixing as many vehicles coming through the site there. So we have the buses traveling back onto Sears Lane. A big change was the introduction of the retailer or community space or maybe even studio galleries in number nine on the north side of the site. That would start speaking to interface with 125 Lakeside Ave to start to create this retail environment just north of Sears Lane. With that, we did hear a lot of comments about the desire to connect to Champlain Parkway. We are showing on this concept. We think it would be great to see in the future, but we're just really not certain if it's possible until the Champlain Parkway is actually complete. So we're flagging it for the study, but yeah, it's not set in stone by any means. If we wanna jump to the next one, we'll get a closer look at the upper levels. So this purple bar that you're seeing, that's actually the housing on top of the parking levels. We are proposing to do one level of parking underground, two levels of parking, and then this housing on top of that. We're proposing three levels of housing that gets us to about 102 units, mostly one bedrooms, mostly one and two bedrooms. This is a big improvement from the 65 units we were proposing previously. And we really feel that it just makes a better housing type for folks. With the housing that we're proposing in its arrangement, you'll see it sort of frames these two amenity courtyards that could be really great spaces for people to host community gatherings, small private parties, or just have a nice quiet afternoon at the side. We're also showing around the perimeter this idea of creating the small private patio spaces as well, really speaking to that idea of creating the best housing that we can. Next slide, Dave. This is sort of a section, two different sections through the site. This first one, section A on top, sort of going north-south. So here we'll see the different levels, one parking underground, we've got the transit center on Sears Lane, and then this idea of the retailer community space on the northern side of the site, interfacing with 125 Lakeside Ave and the development they're sort of working through now over there. And then we'll see those three levels of residential uses up above, and then sort of the amenity courtyards that it creates in that space. Section B goes from the railroad tracks over to Champlain Parkway. And again, you'll see sort of those amenity courtyards that are framed by the housing areas, and this idea of the courtyards sort of capturing that morning sun or capturing views to the lake and really becoming wonderful spaces for the residents, and perhaps the public even. Another comment here is, if we jump back, you'll see sort of how the arrangement of the housing allows us to step back to those taller residential floors from adjacent uses like the railroad and the housing beyond. Next. So with both of these concepts, we think it'd be really important to treat the garage level sensitively. We think that there's many ways to do this. And all of the concepts we are proposing, natural vegetative screening through shrubs, taller shrubs, and of course shade trees, but we think the garage structure itself could lend itself well to an architectural treatment. So here you see a number of different panel type treatments, more of an architectural approach, but certainly there's different ways we can do it with more of a living wall as well. So it remains to be seen, but we do think it's an important aspect of the project is to make sure that it doesn't read as your typical concrete structure from the 70s that we're all thinking of. So it could be a really beautiful structure. Next, I'll pass it back to Dave to talk through some other considerations. Okay. Thanks, Jeff. Nearing the homestretch here, just a couple of final slides and we'll open up for thoughts or questions. This, try to encapsulate kind of the feasibility assessment for the two concepts that Jeff just talked through. So the two columns here, one on the left is the first concept without the housing, on the right is the one that Jeff just talked through with the housing. The individual rows are certain indicators that we looked at throughout this feasibility study. You can see concept A has lots of green checks, really except for the public support metric, which as we were engaging sentiment from the public meetings and from our online survey, we found that people really, really felt strongly about having integrating housing, particularly I think given the current housing shortage today. So that's really the one kind of yellow flag for concept A. And you can see the cost estimate of roughly $30 million for that concept. And concept B, it may look like there's lots of yellow flags, but these are truly yellow flags. These are, we didn't come across any kind of fatal flaws with the concept. Just a couple of things to note though. So concept B in terms of accessibility, it's an unknown or kind of outside of the city's control what happens on 125 lakeside. So no guarantee that there will be that connection. And similarly, as Jeff noted, that connection out to the Champlain Parkway, that's still an unknown and won't be known until federal highway can render a decision after the construction is complete. In terms of zoning, there is the Innovation District Overlight District that is the city will be looking for voter approval towards the end of the year. And so that will allow the height and the residential uses here. If that doesn't pass, that wouldn't allow concept B to move forward because this doesn't integrate housing into the concept. In terms of soils, we did find relatively shallow groundwater depth. It's not a showstopper, but it would just increase costs as we talked about going down one level for one of the levels of the parking garage. And then under utilities, there is some limited wastewater capacity along the Pine Street sewer main that heads out to the wastewater treatment plant. We did have some good discussions with the water resource team in Burlington and came up with a good solution storage and pumping solution. That just adds cost to the bottom line. So that's again, not a showstopper. You can see here, the cost estimate is a good bit higher, about three times concept A, getting close to 85 million, but this doesn't integrate many other features, including the housing retail and some other uses as well. And then lastly, here's just some financing and funding options. I won't list through this, but there are quite a few sources out there over the last year or so, as many are aware, there's been a lot of dollars made available through the federal government, lots of them looking at ways to create smarter connected communities. Probably the most attractive here are the FTA funds. I won't go into the detail about the differences here, but as long as the bar on the right, as long as GMT is operating out of this facility, this becomes eligible for the kind of formula and the grant funds through FTA. So that's probably the most likely there are a number of other sources that are listed on here, including kind of discretionary grants, earmarks, Northern Borders Regional Commission, and then a public-private partnership, some kind of relationship, which would be very likely in the concept B, if there is an integration of some private uses as well. And then just to wrap up here, where we go from here, so after tonight, we've got a final advisory committee meeting, we'll be looking in about two weeks, meeting with that group, and then we'll finalize our feasibility study next month, so in the month of October, we'll wrap up this assessment. And then as I alluded to, there will be a vote sometime late 2022 or early 23 on the overlay district. And then following that, it will be up to the city to make a determination of the highest and best use for this parcel. It may be this multimodal facility, maybe something different. And then pending that determination, if something like this multimodal center is the highest and best use, the design permain construction could start as soon as next summer. And so with that, I will yield the floor and happy to answer any questions. That's a lot. And I'm sure there are questions. I know I have a list of about six of them, but yes. Yes. Hi, I'm wondering... Would you identify yourself? Oh yeah, I'm Andrew Gertin. I live in South Meadow. And I'm wondering if you've identified where the people who would park in this parking garage are likely to be going after they park. There's a number of different ways to answer that. One of the key uses of this lot, one of the things that prompted this assessment was the concept of an intercept lot. And so the idea with the Champlain Parkway nearing completion that anybody who works in downtown or at the Hill institutions could come in on 189 Champlain Parkway, park in this garage and then take a shuttle into downtown. So kind of removing some of the parking demand from the institutions, from the college and the hospital. So that's one piece. And then I think as I alluded to there, the Champlain College and the hospital already have 350 cars parking here. And so that would take up a bulk of the parking. If there is residential uses, they would likely have some portion of that parking. And then the last component is really, if you take a bird's eye view of this area, there's a lot of asphalt, right? There's a lot of innovation center, the 125 lakeside all around here are lots of surface parking. And so there may be an opportunity to consolidate that parking, basically put that to better use and put those cars in this garage. And if I can follow up, is the transportation that would be available so that bus station and other like bike lane connections, is that already there for where those people are going? Or would there be other pieces that should be built to help make that happen? It most likely is there where will it happen? Most likely those, the shuttles or the campus buses will drop off at locations that have accommodations. So whether it's the downtown transit center or up at the university or at the hospital main entrance. So those places would have facilities at the other end. Gotcha, thank you. Yep, thank you. Any other questions? Hi, Mike Fisher, Birchcliff neighborhood, Cherry Lane. The cost differential between A and B, B would be expect to generate revenue from rents for those properties? Or are those, okay. We didn't dig too much into it. We thought a good bit about the mix, whether we have what portions is affordable, portion is market rate. We got a lot of feedback from the public that skewed more towards the affordable housing mix, but we didn't spend a ton of time kind of breaking those apart. But yes, presumably there would be some revenue coming in and that's where that public private partnership can come in to offset some of those costs for the residential component because there will be revenue coming in. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? I have a quick question on a note that you mentioned as you were wrapping up on that timeline. You talked about, sorry, my name is Lucia. It's nice to see you and thank you for that presentation. It was super helpful. Great, great. There's a bullet point on your timeline about a decision in early 23 about the best use of the space. Are there other proposals other than this one for that space right now? Or would, once that is the decision like this or we're back to the drawing board? I will pass that off to Samantha. She may have some thoughts on that. Sure. Yeah, there's not any other like specific proposals that are being compared to this. I would say that with the zoning amendment moving forward the city is working towards an agreement with the owners of the private parcel at 125 Lakeside to best understand how these two parcels can work together to serve the community. And so there's a chance that there's an alternate proposal that would come out of that collaborative work. But this is, this feasibility is really important step in understanding what's possible. Thanks. Other questions. Got one right here. Okay, all right. Hi, Stu Lindsey from Lyndon Terrace. And you alluded to that there would be bicycle parking but they don't even see an inverted U in the diagrams. So what are you thinking of in terms of using the bicycle because you're right beside the bike path? Yes, Jeff. Jeff, do you want to speak to that one? Yeah, so it's there, it's on the drawing we have represented it. We haven't gone through the process of actually quantifying how much we would need or want to see on site but we are anticipating that it would be there. I apologize, it didn't read. It's just the graphics rather small but we are definitely thinking that there would be some amount of outdoor short-term bike parking but then also introducing this idea of a bike hub or longer-term indoor secure parking for folks that want to use that to sort of wrap up the last mile and say if they get off the bus they need to go to their destination maybe two miles away and are looking for that more secure spot. So it's definitely at the forefront of our minds.  So thank you. Joan, you had a question, Joan Shannon. Thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation. That's really helpful to understand what's happening. I was wondering if you have a link that you might be able to put in the chat so that we can send people to that link? We do, yes. The Chittin County Regional Planning Commission has a project page with all of the information, meeting notes, drawings, yes. And we'll drop it in the chat. Great, thank you. Then also, I wondered if other locations are being looked at rather than a location, it's always been a problem in the south end. Traffic has always been kind of the number one complaint in the south end until more recently when we have bigger problems than traffic but I wondered why would we want to drag all the traffic through the south end neighborhoods to get to this transit center as opposed to build it, if you want to build a parking garage, why not build it on the edge of the highway? I mean, I don't think Amtrak is, I don't know if you're expecting like hundreds of people using Amtrak on a daily basis. It doesn't seem like something that actually needs to be by the railroad for commuter traffic because Amtrak is not a commuter train. So why put this transit center? I have always seen the problem that we have in Burlington as we have an enterprise zone that is separated from the highway by neighborhoods and the traffic through those neighborhoods getting from the highway to the enterprise zone has always been problematic. And now you want to build this additional thing just to attract traffic through the neighborhoods is kind of how I see it. So what are the other considerations that would avoid bringing traffic through the south end neighborhoods? That's a very good question. I guess one note is that 350 of those spaces, those people are already coming to the 125 Lakeside. So the medical center and Champlain College. And so they've got a lease for those spaces at the 125 Lakeside.  And so those cars are already driving to this destination. So those wouldn't be new trips necessarily here. But to your other point about the other trips that would be coming here, the idea was really that the Champlain Parkway would be that kind of access so that people aren't snaking their way through the neighborhood streets to get to this location. It'd be 189 to Champlain Parkway and then just turn left onto Sears Lane. That it is a good question though. I think if the idea was purely an intercept facility and intercept lot, I think you're right. I think being further out between City Park Road or further, it's south on the Champlain Parkway would be the right location. But I think this is looking to solve multiple issues. So intercept lot, commuter lot for the institutions and also potentially a lot to take up some of the parking that's already being used to allow infill development and density to occur down here. Well, I would say that the, attracting the commuter cars there today is problematic. So I don't see that. I would hope that if we're building an intercept lot should intercept them before they get into the city not bring them through the neighborhoods of the city and then intercept. That's not very well intercepted in my view. My other, and I'd also like to just bring up the point that the Champlain Parkway connection has not been approved. And I don't know if it will be approved. What we're building now does not connect to that road to the highway and it may not ever. So yes, we are building a piece of it but what we're building so far is not going to do much at all to take the traffic off of the neighborhood streets. And so I would be concerned about building this with the expectation that we're going to have the Champlain Parkway relieving the traffic on the neighborhood streets because that remains to be seen. We know that this is a project that has met resistance all along the way. That may not happen. And lastly, I'd like to know if there has been any discussion about security in the garage. Right now we have prostitution, drug dealing, drug use going on in our downtown garages and what will be done to assure that that is not what is happening in this garage, which will have fewer eyes on it. It's remote. It's going to be a lot easier for that stuff to happen than it is downtown and it's happening downtown. Samantha, do you want to try any of those? I'm happy to respond unless you wanted to. Sure. I mean, I think they're good points. I think the point that you're making Joan about not wanting to pull additional traffic through the neighborhoods is one that we all agree with. And I think the feasibility, looking at this land was originally purchased for a transit facility. There's been new, and you probably know the history of that better than I do. There's been new interest in that concept, I think for two reasons. One is the, although we don't think Amtrak is going to suddenly become a commuter train, I think there is some forward future thinking and hope that there might potentially be light rail that would be accessed from this site and with the opportunity to bring housing into sort of this portion of the south end, I think as David has mentioned a number of times, there's a lot of surface parking lots right now that could potentially have housing units in them instead if there are places for people to park or a central place for people to park. So those are some of the things being considered. I think as you saw on the last slide, the city still has not determined that this is the right or highest and best use for this piece of land. It was just, as we've said many times, a feasibility to say, is it possible? And there are reasons why it might make sense, but there are also reasons why it might not and that those still need to be considered. I think the question about security is an important one but not one that was addressed in this study which was really much a higher level feasibility study if it doesn't make sense here. I'd just like to point out that we don't have to build three stories of parking in order to build housing which we do need. There are unmet parking needs right here in the neighborhood, Hula does need that parking and having it in that location makes sense. Having parking at this location for the hospital and UVM, that does not actually make sense. It would be much better to have that parking not coming through the South End. There's no reason to bring all of those cars going to Champlain or whatever institutions, they don't need to come through the South End other than going to the Miller Center and Lakeside. Thank you. I think there are a lot more questions and I think that we will have to schedule another time to ask them in their way that people can ask follow-up questions. What's the best way to do that where we can point people for further questions? Is there a way, I don't see a chat feature. There really isn't a chat function in this format. There is a Q and A. Can I drop the URL in there? We're gonna have to put it in the minutes, David. That's our best option, I guess. Okay, I'd be happy to send you the URL. It's the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, CCRPCVT.org and then there's a link from there to the project page and it has contact information, all of the presentation information, but I will make sure it gets into the notes as well. Okay, yeah, that is a kind of weak point in the NPA in the CEDA format that we have is that we don't really have a way to drop things in a chat, but we will make sure to get it in the minutes so that people can follow up. Thank you very much for all of you for being here tonight and for all the information. It's a lot to absorb and to understand. So I think that, you know, I'm sure there will be follow-up questions. Fantastic. Thank you to everyone who's been meeting tonight as participants and as panelists and our next meeting is October 21st and I hope you can come. Thank you very much. Right? Thank you.


Rob Winger reporting live from the Stevenson University Mustang Athletic gala joined here by Stevenson legend emcee McFadden emcee Thank you for taking the time to join us on the show Rob. Thanks for having me So just talk about the gala. First of all, it's something that's brand new to the university Something that you now have a chance to be a part of right. It is pretty exciting I have been through so many have sat through so many athletic banquets I have been here for 20 years, but I've sat through more than 20 athletic banquets because Brett invited me prior to actually Hiring me here at Stevenson. So but this is really a great turn of events. It's really exciting that gymnasium looks amazing Like the student athletes look beautiful and handsome and it's really really fun to see everybody dressed up and excited about this event Now you mentioned you've been coming to the athletic banquet for over 20 years, which has to be tough when you're only 24 years old It's yes, you're right. I was a child prodigy. Let's all get that straight When you first came on campus and saw what at the time village Julie was correct now what Stevenson's become Could you ever have imagined having an event like this in a building like this on a campus like this? Never never so I did start at village Julie College. We didn't even have a gymnasium on campus So could I imagine an event in a gymnasium? No, I could not so literally have seen every change here at Villa Stevenson and it is really exciting and you're right that our growth of facilities is amazing and they're gorgeous and We have just changed in so many ways Now to have been here for that full time. It's a big commitment What has made you stick around and believe in this Stevenson philosophy this Stevenson family and sense of community That's made you want to stay well I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the Stevenson family and the sense of community So I think that I work with great people Otherwise, I probably would not have been here for 20 years now. My boss just happens to be standing right over your shoulder So he is the best boss in the United States of America. Maybe the world, but Actually, it is true like I love working with Brett Adams and our entire staff We have great people here at Stevenson that we work with and I am so lucky in what I do And that is to get to work directly with the student athletes on a daily basis Well emcee as a student athlete who you certainly worked with on a daily basis whether you always wanted to or not We appreciate everything that you've given back to this University and its community and you certainly are one of the people who makes it such a special place for all of us here So, well, thank you, Rob. I appreciate that and thank you for taking the time to join us Of course, thank you Bob Linger reporting live from the Stevens University Mustang athletic gala