Do we have commissioner Boas on the phone? I don't see him at this time. Well, we are five, let's proceed. Good evening all. My name is Brendan Hogan and calling to order this November meeting of the Public Works Commission. Time check here, 6.34. Welcome all and thanks for joining us. The first item of business is the agenda itself. Does anyone have any comments on the agenda? Otherwise I would welcome a motion. Motion to accept the agenda. Second. All right, motion for commissioner Barr, seconded by commissioner Mutano. Any discussion around that motion? All right, let's go to a vote then. All in favor of the agenda. Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Agenda passes five to zero. Moving forward to public forum, I would welcome any comments from the public. I just ask that please keep your comments to three minutes or less. There will be open up targeted comments directed to the later agenda items, but if you have comments on things that are not an agenda or would welcome them up. And if you happen to have joined us online, looks like a member of the public is with us. Feel free to use the raise your hand feature if you want to speak. Sure, if you would like to make a statement. Please. Go for it, yes. Come on up. This microphone is for CCTV. If you don't mind signing in, we'd be happy to have you sign in. Thank you. Okay, so my name is Maureen Fry. I was at the October meeting. So I'm just doing some followup on the discussion that I came and presented in October. The only supporting documentation I have after the conversation I had with everybody in October was that I had a follow-on conversation with John Colo. He's a consultant for Hula. And I talked to him about the parking spaces. And so he provided me with a letter, basically that I can provide to you and to the director so that you all know his position on the seven spots on the south side of the street. So if you don't mind, I can just give you those to you now. Sure, all right, thank you. We'll certainly put this on file in our records and everything. Anything else you wanna call out regarding this? Can you say that again, please? Yeah, is there anything else in particular you wanna call out on this item? No, really, I just wanted to give you a little bit of supporting documentation and let you know that I'm in communication with my neighbors. And so we're looking to put together a group that we can speak to you if you'd like that. Otherwise, I know that the director, Spencer, is working on getting something done. But I just feel like it's an important enough issue for us that I will continue to follow it. And I'm passionate about it because, like I say in October, this is my retirement home. And so I really want to be community oriented, not just about myself, but the neighborhood. There was just recently an article that came out and it was in seven days. And it talked about what a gem the lakeside neighborhood is. The lakeside neighborhood is. And Joan Shannon, the councilwoman that is also our neighbor, she said it's a diamond in the rough. And so all of those things were playing into my head when I bought my home. And so I'm renovating it now and I've got a lot of money invested in the home.  Now the weather has helped that a little bit, but in the summer when I was there or the spring, you know, I mean the fall, people were rolling in and riding around and all that stuff I described to you in October. But it's just, it's a situation that I'm gonna continue to work with people, the commission and the director to get something done. The other article that just came out on seven days was about the whole rezoning of the south side of Burlington, this is my neighborhood. And they're looking at rezoning it and putting up housing and building hubs and doing all kinds of stuff. I get it, we need that, but it just seems like for a guy that doesn't even live here, he's really taken a keen interest in our neighborhood here. And I just don't want him and them to lose sight of the fact that this is our home, we live here. This is our home. This is just not another piece of real estate, which sometimes it can appear that way. So I just, that's the bottom line, honestly. So thank you again for your time. Thank you. All right, Mr. Goening, is there anyone else interested in speaking here? No, we've had a few other members of the public join us. So just a reminder to use the raise your hand feature if you do plan to speak during public comment. Chair at this time, there's nobody signed up. All right, thank you. So we'll close the public forum and move forward to item four, the consent agenda. Three items on the consent agenda, October minutes, Queen City Park yield sign and a parking removal at North Wheeler Street at Brooks. Move to accept the consent agenda. Second. All right, we have a motion and it's been seconded. Any discussion around that motion? Director Spencer? Yes, my understanding is that Commissioner Overby had some suggested modifications to the minute. So either they should be, the consent agenda should be adopted with Commissioner Overby's modifications or we should remove it from consent and discuss later. No, thank you. So for the motion or Commissioner Mutano, did you get the? I have received that communication and I move to accept the consent agenda with the edited minutes of October meeting. Everybody second. Stains as well. Friendly to the seconder. All right, thank you for that. Any other discussion around the motion here? All right, see none. Let's go to a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any post? Consent agenda passes five, two, zero. Item five, narrow streets for Catherine Street and Charlotte Street, Seasonal Parking Regulatory. Welcome, hello. I am one of engineers who was helping shepherd this request through. We came last month with an overview and kind of primed what we were going to do. We heard a lot of feedback from the neighborhood as well as communications from you as commissioners speaking on their behalf. And a lot of them had to do with traffic calming and concerns with taking parking away and that potentially allowing there to be speeding conditions that could come from that. So as a result of that, we edited the recommendation to switch at Caroline Street so it will flip from one side of the street to the other. We have vetted this with our plow and maintenance operation director Lee as well as the fire department. And we have heard some feedback. People are still concerned with parking being removed. We heard less concern about traffic calming. There were three additional comments that were brought since the packet was submit. So I have provided you all with those. Sure, yeah, thank you for that. So we've had quite a bit of internal conversation in the team about this particular street. And obviously there's a balance between trying to address these issues of safety on a narrow street, emergency access service and all the other things. And then there is this issue of once we install these or remove parking, what does it do in terms of consequence of speed condition? Is it, there's that process of two narrow or two broad and open and cause speed conditions. So this particular street is 26 feet wide. You have still a balance of eight feet of parking under this proposed parking elimination, which leaves 18 feet of available space for travel, two direction travel. And we think that that is certainly not, we don't believe that it's gonna cause a speed condition, but hearing from the public about this issue and concern, we thought it still would be reasonable to take the approach of at the stop controlled intersection, flip parking so there's an ability for people to transition within that space under a controlled condition, as opposed to no stop control. So I think we've responded to the public comments by trying to, I guess, reduce that concern with the public by taking this next step. So that's what we're proposing this evening is something a little different than the last proposed plan that the staff put together. Great, thank you for that context. So with that, I'll open it for commissioner discussion. Commissioner Mutano. No comments this time. All right. Commissioner Barr. Sure, so, and this isn't the first narrow street that we've discussed in this commission before. And I always tend to side with the side of safety and public services. So if it's too narrow, you know, who knows what we're gonna get for snow. I really think that we need to consider this for the public safety and I support staff's recommendation. All right, thank you. Vice-chair on the other side. So just to clarify, if I understood correctly, I appreciate the staggering in a response to kind of traffic calming. There are a lot of kids in that neighborhood and their safety is also important. So I think this modification will at least begin to alleviate some concerns. And maybe this may be for Lee Perry, the plowing, the plowing, it works better for the plow to be able to access down the hill, which is why the south side of your plow. Correct. All our plows make right hand turns.   And as you go around the corner, that width at that angle extends. So even though there's 18 feet of travel between the park cars and the curb on the opposite side, there's still a chance that we're gonna have to pick a wing up just to make it around a park car, even though there's only parking on one side. It's just that angle, that plow extends more.  That's their main route. When we can't fit through, we have to call that truck off his route, come down to this route, clear the snow. We can't clear because we can't leave a three foot pile of snow in between the cars because if something happens, there's no emergency vehicles that are gonna get through there. Right, and so when that does, when you are confronted with that, and you have to call the one ton, the smaller truck, that truck just can't come right down. Not right off now. And it also extends his plow route. On average, he's plowing longer than all the other routes put together.   And so, with this snow clearing then, we're measuring that the access will be available and greater for emergency service vehicles. Correct. Okay. Better we can push it back to the curbs over the course of a winter unless cars will keep creeping out and narrowing that 18 feet down. Okay, thanks. You're welcome. I think, I guess just one more thing is, just in the correspondence that came today, this is not a pilot. This is a narrow streets policy and it will be enacted as such. So not a pilot. What's the communication going to be like from the residents to public works as folks go through the growing pains of this shift? Will there be additional outreach or check-in? I don't know if that's part of the protocol to see about safety, traffic calming. I guess that's my biggest thing, the traffic calming. We have communicated many times of bullying from my contacts have been distributed. I think, you know, the front desk and customer service would also push them to the tech services team if we hear concerns. I know historically we haven't heard a lot of concerns from other streets that we have enacted this on. So I think it's kind of just a case-by-case basis. There's no check-in because there hasn't had to be thus far, but if we hear a lot, we can certainly reevaluate and discuss as needed. Thanks, I think it goes back to the construction that is pushing a little bit more traffic into that neighborhood, regardless of whether we were going to move towards the narrow streets. Okay, that's it. Thank you. All right, thank you. Commissioner Overby. I know we already worked on having a policy about narrow streets throughout the city, so we're not just penalizing any one street. We're working our way through them. So I will support this proposed plan, but I just wanted a question. Did I hear that there's gonna be an additional stop control at the intersection there? Okay, I know that one of the concerns was that there was some speeding up it, but I just, I wasn't sure if that's what I just heard now, but that's not the case. So I'm supporting this the way it is. I think it's an alternative to get the job done and accommodating that switching sides, I think will help people recognize that they don't wanna go speeding down. So I'll be supporting this change. All right, thank you. Yeah, at my end, I thank you for your attention to this. One question, Lee, can you on this map sort of walk me through the way the plow goes? The plow, are you coming up to the left there? I think I'm walking up in, yeah. So as I said, our wings are all mounted on the right side of the truck. So we would be coming up, Heyward, Catherine, do this loop, do this loop, come back down, come back, you know, and do all the other streets in between, catching both sides of the road as we go. Gotcha, okay, yeah. Most of the time, if I were to plow this, and I have before, I would do the big outer loop and clean everything and get everything and then just shift down and block, catch the other side of locusts, so on and so forth. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate the flexibility. Now, of course, it's a balance. We want to provide open access, but not too open in a neighborhood like where there's lots of people out and about and so forth. And I think this is a nice balance in the middle. This is our shared way. It's not necessarily a popularity contest of what any one individual resident or another wants, but we're looking at this objectively. It's sort of been in our queue of narrow streets we're not just sort of picking on the street. And I think it makes sense. Thank you for that. Dr. Spencer. Chair Hogan, just in case any commissioner is interested, we are pleased to have on the Zoom call Chief Locke from the Burlington Fire Department and Deputy Chief as well. So if there is any interest to hear from them, they're available to you. Great, good evening, gentlemen. Thank you for phoning in and thank you for, I know you've attended previous meetings this fall on the same item. Do you care to offer any remarks on this or on the proposed plan? I just think the team for working on these obviously narrow streets at times are challenges for us. So we appreciate the slow and methodical effort to address this over and still work within the citizens. So that's it, thanks. Hey, thank you. All right, with that, let's check in and see if there's any one from the public who's interested in speaking on this item. Chair Hogan, I'm gonna promote over Trina Bech. If I hopefully have gotten that right, you'll be allowed to speak early. Thank you very much. It's Trina Bech, even though it's spelled with C-H. Okay. And I live, thank you for hearing me. I live on 77 Charlotte and we much appreciate the work that you've done to limit parking on one side of the street. During the winter, it is rare that when there is a lot of snow, we don't get our street plow a lot of the time because the plow can just not get through when cars are parked on each side of the street. And last winter, for instance, I could not regularly get out of my driveway because of the number of cars parked on each side. So we much appreciate the work that you have done and I hope that you all will support just one side of the street parking. Thank you. Thank you. From online? All right. So with that, I'll bring it back to the commission. Welcome on motion. Motion to accept. I second the motion. The motion from Commissioner Barr and a second from Vice Chair O'Neill Ivanko. Thank you very much. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right, let's go to a vote then. All in favor if you say aye. Aye. Aye, for myself. Any opposed? Motion passes five to zero. Thank you. Thank you. Moving forward, a five-year review of residents from that parking. I will quickly tease this up for staff and just say that we were really pleased to embark on this process and we gave you a little briefing at last month's meeting. This was a very challenged process five years ago. A number of changes proposed that were significant and caused some deliberation and concern. I'm pleased to report that from what we have heard, especially from city counselors who used to have to help residents with tickets and guest passes and other concerns that they had, the counselors that we've checked in with say that there's many fewer complaints now and that that is supported by our experience here. Doesn't mean that there aren't improvements that are needed and what you have in front of you tonight is a common sense in my mind, revisions, tweaks to an existing program that appears to be working well. I'm really excited. Tech services and traffic are coordinating very well on this and many other upcoming innovations to further improve the program. But you'll hear tonight about just a few. Thanks. Turn it over to Maddie Swender. Thank you. So there's two major changes or I mean, the two changes that come out of this, which are pretty minor are the tweaks to the contractor permits, just trying to streamline that process and make it a bit easier for contractors to obtain and work a bit better with our updated parking services department. And then the other change is just allowing language so that we can continue to look for or look to a digital permit program. So just trying to make it a bit more, currently it states explicitly that it needs to be a sticker or a hang tag. So we're just trying to make it a bit more lenient. So it can. I think it's important to note that these changes are not functional changes. They're more administrative changes than anything else. So I know and there's been some back and forth with some of the commissioners in terms of questions about what we're doing, what we're proposing. So not functional changes of RPP. We already have contractor permits. We already have resident permits. We're not changing the function of resident parking. We're just streamlining the system and making the contractor system more fair for all contractors. All right. Anything further from Staff Encho? Should we go to a commissioner discussion? Good. All right. Commissioner Barr. Okay. Great. And I also noticed that you're making the changes that it's no longer police department. It's parking. So that's an obvious change. And I agree with you. So when we use the term digital though, that could also be switch with virtual. So is it a virtual permit? It's not something that's physically hung or put on a dashboard. The idea is that your credential is in a computer somewhere. Right. It's a license plate. Which is the same thing that happens when you park downtown in a parking meter and you use part mobile. Yep. You don't actually physically have anything. It's digital. It's virtual or whatever. Right. And I was just saying that so for anybody else listening so that they know digital as opposed to analog. I don't know. Just trying to make that clear. I think that this is great. I think streamlining it and making it more convenient is something that shows progress. We're getting there. I have nothing else. All right. Thank you. I'm going to start on the other one. So in the summary and conclusion just to kind of go back to the... This change will also improve parking services operations, simplify enforcement while making changes for a potential digital parking permit program. So it's a potential. We're not there yet. But can you communicate when we might be there? So this is not saying that we are moving forward with a digital parking permit program yet. So for anyone concerned. So right now. Right now. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so this is enabling basically that says that we can go from using a hard copy permitting process, stickers, hang tags, et cetera, to a digital version. And so what that opens the door to is exploring using something like Park Mobile. We can actually use Park Mobile to manage this process. I could explain it all, but the point is we can basically create a virtual permit in Park Mobile that the customer can manage their guest permits through online by themselves. They don't have to come here to get them. We have much tighter controls. We know we can tell in the system who is getting these guests and we can sort of suss out any sort of abuse or misuse or intentional or unintentional. There's a lot of benefits to having that digital platform. And then if we use something like Park Mobile, which is a vendor we already use for downtown, now we start heading towards a single platform for managing all of our parking, whether you're in a parking lot, in a parking garage, in resident only parking, or parking at 194 St. Paul Street, which is owned by St. Mike's College. So it get, oh, Champlain College. And that's far away. I didn't want to park there. So the point is having this enabling language allows us to more aggressively explore what it really means to expand our use of Park Mobile. Because right now, according to ordinance, we can't use Park Mobile to run RPP. We can't use a digital system because it says we have to use a sticker and a hang tag and blah, blah, blah. So that's what this is really doing. It's only enabling our ability to explore and possibly implement Park Mobile as an enforcement tool. And so would that happen overnight? No. No, because there's it well. What would be the processes for this to happen? Do we need to communicate out to the public if we change and go for a deep dive? Yes, we will. Yes, so I mean, not the least of which we'd have to communicate with all of our resident parking people and make sure they all understand what's going on.  There are front end work that needs to happen. I think we have something like 52 or 53 zones. So just like what I assumed. So we would have to build all the zones. We'd have to communicate with all the people in all the zones. So it's a bit of a lift to get in. But once we're in, it provides a lot of continuity in our system. So just one more question, which doesn't have to do with any sort of digital parking permit. In section K, Street Stakes designated for resident parking at all times except between the hours of 8 and 5, then between the hours of 8 and 5, non-residents shall not park a vehicle for a period longer than four hours. Does that mean that I can park my car on that street for four hours and then I can move it half a block down on the same street for another four hours? So technically, according to parking enforcement, in order to park in a new spot, yes. You can move your car and park somewhere else. OK. I don't think we're making any proposals to change that. OK. All right. That's just existing ordinance. OK. That, OK, I wasn't sure. And if we were going to make that change, then we're going from this administrative change, which we're recommending tonight, to a functional change, which would mean we would be doing a way larger net of public outreach. OK. No, this is fine. I recognize where these kind of pinch points are. And these are folks who don't want to pay for Jim's parking on campus, maybe. Maybe. OK, no, that's it. Thank you. I really appreciate the background on the digital parking. That's all I have. Thank you. Commissioner Overby. Hi. I had significant email communication with some questions, which I think it would be, I don't know what the most easy way is to go through your sharing of the answers that you gave. You sent me information. And I'm still not persuaded that the proposal for the contractor permits. I don't understand how it's going to work. So could you just for the sake of helping other people understand my question and your answer? Yeah. I'm trying to be efficient here because I tend to be verbose. And this is trying to speed things up a little. Contractor question. OK, so your question is really about whether it's clear or not. So a contractor gets a permit. And then that contractor drives and parks in a resident-only parking zone. But they're not working on somebody's house. This is the scenario you're presenting, basically, if I understand it right. Is there an abuse opportunity for a contractor who has a permit to just park anywhere in any resident-only zone for any reason they want? And the reality is that's the way that ordinance is set up right now. It says that they need to be there doing service on someone's house or needs to be scheduled service. But we have no way to enforce that. So there's two ways that a contractor can park in a resident-only zone right now. They can either put a logo on the side of their truck and park there for free. Or if they don't have a logoed vehicle, they can come down here and buy permits. And this is part of the reason why we revamped this, because the likelihood that someone who has a vehicle that doesn't have logos on it is going to be a start-up contractor, a one-person operation contractor.  But the big contractors with the logos on the side of their trucks, they get to park in a resident-only parking for free right now. And they can park as many vehicles as they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. So part of this program is creating a scenario where all contractors are created equal. You don't have to have logos on your truck. And you can still go and park in resident-only parking whenever and wherever you want, just like is the scenario right now. Now, we have a crew of five or six people that are out in the neighborhoods every day. And if we start tracking like, oh, it's contractor row. Every day, there's 20 contractor trucks parked on some street. We've got to start looking and we've got to pivot. But we don't have that. We're not creating a scenario here that's different than the scenario we have today. And we don't see an abuse problem today. What we see today is contractors that have vans, that don't have logos on it, that don't understand why they can't write, I'm a contractor on a piece of paper and stick it in a windshield. This is the problem.  So we're trying to create a little more structure to this and make it more fair across the board. Anecdotally, if someone was abusing this program to the point where residents are being affected by it, we would hear about it very quickly. And I think the important piece is to be clear that we have recommended change language. The revised language here adds, the permit shall only be used when the contractor is providing service to a resident on a street with resident only parking. Good guess. That's fundamentally actually much stronger than currently exists in ordinance. I'm still, this still doesn't make sense to me. What you said about just putting a note in the window of a contractor with a label on their vehicle. The current thing that we're getting rid of is, it says a resident may request up to eight contractor permits valid for 30 day increments for construction purposes. The cost of each permit shall be $10 per 30 day period. So the only way a contractor is going to be on the street working there is by. Go up to the preamble, go up to the paragraph in the beginning, the very first paragraph that says no one shall park in a neighborhood unless they have a permit, or they are. They are identifiable service or delivery vehicle while conducting delivery or performing a scheduled or requested service. That's the language that screws up this whole thing. So you're saying that's been abused at this point? That's what is very. That's what's being abused? And that's what you're getting around? It creates a very uncomfortable position for everybody. It creates an uncomfortable position for the contractor, for our enforcement folks. It creates confusion. What is an identifiable contractor? That's just too vague. So actually, this is one thing we caught today as we were reviewing this, we forgot to strike that. So actually, we're going to ask in your motion to include striking in that sentence or service vehicles. We want deliveries to be fine. Delivery trucks should be able to drive up a party. That's fine. It's the service vehicles scheduled or forgot the rest of the language. And I happen to have been part of the Public Works Commission when this residential parking policy was implemented. And in no way was that intended to be used for contractors. That was intended for the FedEx driver that stops. So if they're abusing that as a contractor, that's a different matter. We very specifically wanted the contractors to use the one that we're changing, the people proposing to change. Right. So I didn't understand that was of being abused by the contractors to use themselves as a service vehicle, not like a FedEx delivery. Just historically, I'm sharing that. Yeah, I understand. OK, but my questions that you haven't, I'm going to just start them again. So what documentation, well, first let me just read what the proposal is. That's the change, which to me is just not going to work. The language instead of the homeowner is going to get the permit and give it to the contractor for 30 days to work on their home. The new language is that a contractor providing services to a resident located on the street with resident only parking may request a permit valid for any and all designated resident parking streets throughout the city, not just for that street. The cost shall be $5 for one one month permit, $30 for a six month permit, or $50 for a one year permit. And then your question, your statement about the permit shall only be used when the contractor is providing service to a resident on a street with resident only parking. So the question that I had relating to that was what documentation does a contractor need to provide to establish entitlement to a contractor residential permit? And so right now, we do have requirements for a homeowner to get a permit. We've limited that, so we don't have lots out there. We've really improved that. But your answer was there isn't any eligibility criteria in the ordinance, so currently there isn't. Right, so right now, if I decided to be a painter, I could just go in and pay $50, and then I would have a permit to park in any residential parking area across the city, residential only. Just hypothetically. Yep, that's an abuse case, absolutely. So my next question was, how is it anticipated that the contractor permits will be enforced to ensure that permits are only used when a contractor is providing service to a resident on a particular resident only street? And your answer was this will be administered by Park Mobile. And that brings in a separate issue with the Park Mobile that I will discuss later, which relates to a communication we received from a resident about the privacy issues of license plate readers. But OK, so the Park Mobile was how you are proposing that we make sure that people are just working on a house. They're not just visiting friends. No, no. Park Mobile is how we're enforcing the parking. We have no way of knowing if someone is there doing legitimate business.  And I think this is what I was alluding to earlier, is if our team starts to see Summit Street is contractor row all day, every day it's a parking lot of contractors, we got a problem. And we're going to have to figure out a way to solve that problem. We don't have that problem right now. The bigger problem we have is our process is a barrier for contractors. I mean, I've been on the phone with contractors for an hour with them talking and complaining about how hard it is to park legally in resident only and just deal with the permitting process. And all these things, they're just blah. So this is what we're trying to streamline to make it easier for them. It's going to be fine that that's going to be great. I'm just looking at this. Of course. I tend to be, my legal training tends to put me in a position of always looking for the problem so that we can make sure we have adjusted a way to make sure we can prevent them. But that makes you be the string on the helium balloon, which is what I'm doing right now. So I apologize for your willingness to put up with my doing. So that was one of the questions I'd ask you about the labeling of the contractor's vehicle so that we know that it's actually a contractor. But there isn't any requirement for any of that. And then would it make sense that the contractor puts in their windshield the residence which they're working on to make use of that so it's clear that they're not just visiting friends. License plate numbers will be used via Park Mobile. So the enforcement of the contractor being there to work on a residence, it sounds like there won't be enforcement, except if there was an abuse over the whole city. Is that what we're saying? That's in essence. We don't want to build. And that may be completely fine. We just don't want to build a system for something we don't know how bad the problem's going to be. That's the worry. And then is there any kind of limit? I'd ask about a limit of the contractor permits issued per contracting firm. Because any answer was no, if there's an obvious problem, we'll deal with it when it arises. So I think the answer that I'm hearing is that the contractors are frustrated with dealing with the method that we have where you get a permit to park on the street where you're working. And it was just more convenient for them to just pay the $50 for the year. And they can park in any resident parking across the city whenever they need to park there, for whatever reason, for whatever reason. And we'll never know why they're parking there. And we're going to just, that's a philosophical improvement into our way of dealing with the parking in resident only. They obviously, everybody can park there for four hours. Anybody, as we just learned. So we're just saying contractors don't have to just stay in that kind of limitation of that, correct? Yeah. Right, yeah, we're streamlining the process for them. One of the other issues we have with contractors is remember, if a contractor has a trailer, they don't just get a $75 ticket, they get a $150 ticket. So we see this as really helping to lower the exposure. This is where, to me, it's a concern that a contractor can just park anywhere in a resident only parking or anywhere, frankly. And we do have things about encroachment on sidewalks. And so construction is problematic wherever it is. And so if somebody's on a resident only parking and they've got a truck with a trailer, and I mean, it's going to be a problem. So in some ways, this is favoring the guy with a tractor that's just going to park in the resident parking. And the residents are going to just have to work around it. So I mean, as long as we know what we're doing and everybody thinks that's a good idea, then maybe we should go there. Jumping to the parkmobile thing, I do think that the added thing about the sort of future digital permitting without us actually knowing the current contractual arrangements for the parkmobile contract and the way they handle the license plate numbers and how that's going to work with license plate, automatic license plate readers and enforcement using that, I do have a concern that is similar to the one that was communicated to all of us. And so I think that I cannot, I can't support that generic language in this proposed change until there is very clear information about the contract that the city has with parkmobile, particularly if your goal is to privately convert to privately managing all of our parking resources using parkmobile as a vendor. We already have it. We don't know exactly what's going on right now, but if you wanna go there, I really think the public needs to have more information about the terms that we currently have and what the terms would be for the future. Were we to go into more digital versions? So I would not support that being part of this proposal. I'm fine maybe going along with your contractor change and see how it goes, but I really, knowing what we're doing, we're just opening it up in a lot of ways. We're sort of chipping away at the resident only parking, which I think in some ways is not a bad thing to do. Some ways it's privatized in some ways are certain street spaces, but the parkmobile thing, I cannot go along with having that extra language in there that sort of generically allows the city to, I think you can research it and you can do a great job of telling us why they're a good company to work with, what the terms are, how they deal with the license plate reader technology, what our mechanism is, and that would be very helpful for us to make a decision about that part of this proposal. So that's my take on it. So I appreciate you recognizing we're going into this eyes wide open. We understand that we're maybe opening things up a little bit and making things a little looser. That's kind of the intent and there may be some unforeseen consequences with the contractor thing. And we're, I think I come here just about every month. If we have problems, we'll come back. Important thing with the digital permitting is to understand that that does not enable license plate reader technology. It doesn't. All it does is it says we can take somebody's physical hang tag permit and put it in the computer, which is what we do now with parkmobile. We do it with T2. We do it with CalA and we do it with IPS. We do it. Parks does it. UVM does it. It's just a digitally, all we're asking for is the ability to do in the computer what we're now doing in hard copy. And that's it. Now, a logical extension is LPR is a technology that can expand digital permitting but it's not digital permitting. LPR is merely a mechanical eye that reads the plate. You wanna explain what LPR is? I'm sorry, license plate recognition is LPR. So it's just reading the plate. It's how that data gets to parkmobile and cause parkmobile is where all that data sits right now. When we write someone a citation, we're reading whether they've paid through parkmobile and then we tie into T2 and we figure out who that person is by connecting to the DMV. And we actually have a secure connection almost. We're in the transition. But we have a secure connection to the DMV and we're certified by the criminal justice information system through the FBI. So we have a secure office space with secure certified personnel that have access to that connection between the plate and the name. So that's where that happens. And it's happening now. That's how you get a bill after a month if you don't pay your ticket. So LPR is a completely separate technology than digital permitting. Digital permitting we're already doing. And parkmobile, just to give you some anecdotal evidence, right now in the downtown core of Burlington and downtown on the meters, 60% of our revenue is coming through parkmobile. So it's a well-received, well-adopted technology for digital permitting. So that's all we're asking for is to take that digital permitting concept, put it in our PP. I just think it's very generic language which is not clearly specified enough to make that clear. And it would be great if you want to come to some other meeting and present how the parkmobile app works for people and how the revenue stream is and the contractual privacy issues with their collecting license plate information and sharing it with the state, ignoring the license plate recognition portion of this. But it sounds like some of your future plan for enforcement of things like the contractor passes or the park, just generally resident parking is for some technology that's gonna be easier to do than it's gonna require a license plate recognition in order to make use of the amount of things that you wanna do. So I don't think the language in here is specific enough to make it clear what you're trying to do. It's gonna be confusing for people. I know the difference between license plate recognition and the fact that you're just digitizing the information about people's parking passes, but so that's just me. This is not enough information for me to be willing to support this on that element. I might be willing to go along with the contractor part, but that to me is also problematic, but we can always undo it if it goes to be a serious problem. Thank you. All right, thank you. Commissioner Mutano. Yeah, thanks so much for this. So I have a question actually kind of going back to that. So you mentioned, so in like five years, do you envision both a actual like medallion thing, like an actual physical thing and the digital parking system, or are you looking to phase into just the digital parking for the residents just going forward? The Holy Grail would be a fully digital process where you run off of the license plate because the license plate uniquely identifies that car, so we shouldn't have to have another tag to identify that car. So that would be the Holy Grail. However, that said, we can do a hybrid approach in the meantime, so we could do, if this is enabled, we could do the contractor parking on in a digital permitting format and recognize those benefits and keep the current resident parking sticker and hang tag method going until we get all the bugs worked out. So this is not like an all or nothing. We can move in, we can have a hybrid approach, but I think the Holy Grail end goal is to have a continuous platform across all of our parking so that we can use the same technology to enforce all of our parking, whether it's meter parking or lot parking or PPP parking or parking at Letty Park. You know, we can run the parking program at Letty Park using the same platform, so that this is sort of the Holy vision is a one-stop shop with one platform managing all of our parking. All right, well, with that vision in mind, I definitely think learning more about the Park Mobile platform will be good. Just not just us as a commission, but sort of the public in general to know sort of that's the direction the city wants to go in. And this is the kind of information that this company is collecting, yeah. So to be clear, we're already on Park Mobile. Yes, no, not much. We have a contract that goes for another 18 months or so. That is all? Thank you. All right, thank you. Yeah, no, thank you for all this. I think it makes sense as a modest administrative changes in the direction of flexibility for some of our customers and for our staff maintaining it. Question, I mean, one of the more substantial changes this commission has made in the last few years regarding this program is the institution of fees three years ago this time. I'm interested in whether that sort of a separate topic and if you want, we can sort of look at it as part of our, I understand we have an annual review of parking stuff in the next couple of months time we could take a day for dive into it then sort of just tangentially related to this. Has, do we know if those fees have had the desired impact on oversubscription in some places? We're talking about that today, I think you can speak to that. You know, ultimately, as we discussed, the permits were just being handed out. Just anyone and everyone that lived on a street could get them. So that's why we instituted the restrictions and that's why we instituted a very modest fee. But as far as whether it's working perfectly or not, we haven't collected data on that. And once again, anecdotally, if something wasn't working, if there was this oversubscription of parking on a street and people were concerned about it, we would hear about it. Fair enough, I would say again, I am interested in knowing whether that's happened. I mean, I gather you'd be hearing about it if it was a consistent lens. And just a point of clarification, there was discussion around four-hour parking on residential streets. There's only two RPP streets where four-hour parking to the public is allowed. That hasn't changed and there's no four-hour parking allowed on every single RPP street. There's still only two streets and that's South Prospect and the South Side of Bradley, that's it. And the remaining 50-something parking areas, what's the restriction on all of the other ones? Resident only. Resident only. 24 hours. Having said that, we did bake into the changes a few years back that if a street was willing to allow for four-hour public parking, then their fees would be waived. Aren't some of them seasonal too, like by Oak Lodge? Yes, there are seasonal ones, but the four-hour parking is not something that's... And I would say there are some streets that don't have residential parking, but it's still open for everybody. Those are the two streets I walk on. That's why... That's why. Back up the Y and then Prospect. It's all my world. There you go. I'll direct your permits in language towards the digital permitting. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Thank you. I don't have anything further on my end. Check, Mr. Goulding, is there any... Anyone interested in speaking and public comment on this item? Chair Hogan, I'll promote over Barbara Hedrick. She'll be allowed to speak. Hi, everybody. Good evening. Good evening. We're allowing this public comment time, and thank you for considering the email I sent earlier today. So the thing about Park Mobile being used downtown is, I understand that it's a pay-by-app system. So, is an enforcement still done by the parking enforcement person looking at the meter to see whether it's turned red or green and then they give a ticket? No. The advantages is that the driver can pay remotely to extend their parking there. And that's very different from... That doesn't use license plate reading technology. I don't think... My impression is the city is not using license plate reading technology downtown. And so, when I had to ask Chapin to explain what he meant by this digital parking permit system, the explanation I received from Chapin was, oh, this is going to replace the stickers and the tags that when you buy a new car, you don't have the hassle of taking the sticker off your old car bumper and put it on your new car bumper. And so, the illusion is that this is going to replace those stickers that will make the city more efficient. I'm all for that. It will make parking enforcement more effective. I want that. But it's going to involve license plate readers. And I think there are so many issues with the license plate reader technology. There's state law. There's ACLU issues. There's information that has to be conveyed to the public so the public feels comfortable with it. And that's really an engagement issue, not just an informing issue. So, to be fair to the public and really for DPW to meet their duty of engaging the public and getting input and having the best thing planned going forward, I really think that the language about digital parking permit system should be removed from the text that you want to approve tonight. I'm okay with the contractor bit staying in. But then, back up and start engaging the public and this is what we want to achieve. This is why, this is how we're going to be responsible with your data. These are the constraints for going to live within. Explain what you're going to do and how you're going to be responsible both before asking us for a authority and approval to go forward with something that we don't know how you're going to use it. The other thing I want to mention in general is that the easier you make it for people to park on the street, the more SOV driving you're going to have. So people, commuters come in and they'll park on the street for free. And rather than taking a bus or you're using a parking ride from their remote town to Burlington. So really, you should try to make parking on the street very difficult for commuters so that they'll use public transportation or parking ride instead. That's for the residential areas. Downtown, we want people to park on the street because we went to the shop. There are two different situations. So please try to discourage SOV driving and try to make, I don't like the idea of park mobile being used in residential areas where commuters can then still stay in their office and extend their parking by your phone. You can't, that's not part of this. That's not part of it. It just encourages their polluting SOV driving habits. Thanks so much. Thank you. Mr. Govac, to what we discussed, there's no functional change to resident parking. No commuters will be allowed to park on RPP streets. Now there are no functional changes to RPP. Yeah, an important point on the data also is when you do park mobile, you choose to join park mobile and you forfeit your name and your license plate number. So your name and your license plate number are connected because you allowed the company to do that. And we have a strong contract with them that ensures their data security. Now, T2, the citation software, it's very different. T2, so that data security is between us and park mobile. That's all they know is people that have volunteered their information. So now, and we use park mobile to do enforcement. So if we go to a resident parking zone and it's zone 5800 and the enforcement officer types in the license plate number and that car is not authorized to park in 5800, it goes to the T2 system, which is the Seegis certified FBI protected behind locked doors with certified people connected to the state. It's a whole big security process governed by the federal government because we as the government are taking your license plate and connecting it with your name and address. So park mobile, we're focusing on the park mobile part, but park mobile enforcement in RPP does not expose those people to their personal data does not get exposed unless they're in violation because then they've been pushed over to the T2 Seegis certified FBI protected database. So I don't want people to think that park mobile is a loosey-goosey thing because it's not and the only plate name connection we have in park mobile is by choice if you've paid for it yourself. So I just want to make sure we understand that. That's a lot of detail. I think what we're prepared to do is if you all would like more time to discuss the mobile pay platform, we won't use a vendor name, but our mobile pay platform strategy in the future, the staff is fine to cut that out and do advance just with the contractor only permits. Before you do it, can I make a comment too? Well, and we are in public comment. Let's close out public comment and then we'll bring it back to wrap up this item. Mr. Golden. That is all for public comment. All right. Comment. Thank you, thank you. So I guess I just wanted to offer experience with this because we're using it now on campus. We've gone to a completely virtual permit system digital. That's why I asked it was digital, the same as virtual. The benefits from that means that we've saved a lot of money on purchasing plastic which has to be recycled or thrown away and it's done virtually and it's saved a lot of angst from our constituents, our customers because if they forget to put up their hang tag in a lot of cases, they get a citation for that after a certain period of time. So that piece. We already have everything in our system as far as somebody that's authorized to park on our campus. So what the mobile payment system does for us is for visitors who come to campus, now we have access to their vehicles because they're authorized to park on our campus by paying. So when our enforcement goes through, whether it's license plate recognition which by the way we are using or the old fashioned way when we just go through and type in license plates which is what the city does right now. License plates are tied to our multi space meters. You use CalA, I think we use CalA now too. It's tied to our parking software management system. You use T2, we use something else and it's tied to the park mobile. So what it does is it puts everything in one place and it only tells us if they're allowed to park there or not. For us, we don't get any other information on it nor do we want it and we went through the state to get approval for license plate recognition. We went through our legal counsel and everybody with a fine tooth comb went through everything. And so it's purely, we've already got the information, it's just an ease a way to get things more efficient and less paperwork. So I don't know if that makes anything clear or worse but I just wanted to say that it's working for us and we have not infringed on anybody's privacy. We haven't done anything of that nature and that's why I support keeping the language in. To Chapin's point, we do have a city-wide mobile pay concept that we are fleshing out and we see this as enabling language that would give us the confidence to move forward with such a program that would certainly come to you for, you know, you would be involved in that because that's a big vision but this is, we see this as a building block. So if we need to take it out for tonight to move forward with the contractor, that's fine because we are moving in a holistic way but that's forthcoming. So I'm gonna make a motion to accept staff's recommendation and then wait to hear. All right, we have a motion from Commissioner Barr. Thank you for that. I'll second the motion. Commissioner, is Chair O'Neill Ivanka with a second? Thank you for that. Is there any discussion around that motion? There's an overview. I will just, you know, continue to one of the things that I realize it's easy for people to like digital things that make it easy for you to do things without plastic hang tags but when you're dealing with a private company who's basically has other reasons for doing things besides just providing the service, it's a bit more of a challenge and we've sort of been becoming more as a society more comfortable with letting these kind of privacy things just sort of go away because of the convenience factor. So the Park Mobile is a private company and yes, people are supposedly voluntarily giving their license plate in order to use it because there's no other choice. It's not like they have three choices of who they might want to deal with. The city has decided to use Park Mobile as the private company that's serving a very helpful thing to take load off of the city because they didn't want to bill it themselves. It's the same sort of thing as EasyPass. It's a monopoly of services that the states don't want to spend the money on for collecting, they just get their cut and you can be penalized as a private person not using EasyPass for your parking but so you're coerced into using the private service. So I would like if we had the opportunity to have this better explained to the city residents or if the commissioners just are fine with it then that's the vote. But I just do not think it's a good idea without educating the people in this community about what's happening with privatizing of services that the city wants to provide or UVM or a state when you go there without really knowing what else is going on in the contract. And that's where to me I would prefer that we have separate out if the contractor part of this is very supported by everybody we'll just go there. But the digital part of it is too amorphous and I don't think anybody really knows about where they're going with this and maybe people are just fine with it and they don't care. But it's an important consideration, privatizing delivery of services and that to me is a concern about this. That I always. Quick point of clarification. You mentioned that Park Mobile is the only way to pay or mobile pay in Burlington right now you can pay with coin or credit card or the app at all of our parking that we managed. Just to be clear we're not trying to drive the monopoly. The benefit of this extending and you know you are coerced into putting your license plate in there in the membership of the Park Mobile application. So we haven't provided multiple opportunities for we might not want to go with the Park Mobile method. Other cities use different products. Well that's, you know, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying I would like to know more. I'm that's my concern. I can be the one of five, four, whatever. So I'm fine with that. I just wanted that to be registered as a consideration that I have that will keep me from. I'll clarify again. There's no language on vendor in this. This is an administrative change to allow some flexibility in how things are managed. I was going to just say point of information before any kind of digital permitting program is implemented for residential parking. Will that come back to the commission or is this our only chance to, you know, basically give consent to this in our roles as commissioners? This would an expansion of either the existing mobile pay vendor or a new contract with another mobile pay vendor would need to go to the board of finance and city council because it's a contract. If approved of language here, my understanding is that the authorizing language would then be an ordinance and then it is merely a contracting issue that would go to board of finance and council. Thanks for that clarification. Point of clarification also. We need to also amend the motion to include the modification to the text in, what is this, 27, 3, that the clear identifiable vehicle language to remove. We wanted to get that up on the screen here. I think I've got you, but it would help if we could be looking at the same thing. 27 item three. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, if you're ready to go. First paragraph, subsection four. It's the paragraph that talks about clearly identifiable service vehicles. And we just, I'd like to strike out the, the strike the service and strike the scheduled or required service. So basically that sentence says delivery vehicles are allowed to come on to residential parking and park while they're doing their delivery, but service vehicles. Because service vehicles has been interpreted to be plumbers and contractors and electricians. So if I'm reading it correctly and listening to you, then since I made the motion, what you're suggesting is under appendix C, section 27, parentheses three, a clearly identifiable service or delivery vehicle while conducting a delivery or performing a scheduled or requested service. And what you're suggesting is to just strike the second half of that sentence. I'll strike the references to service. Delivery vehicles, it would still be allowed. Just delivery, okay. I'm okay with that, with that strike. And at some point if I can make another comment. Sure. Yep. Yeah, that's it. Well, we got this up now, thank you. Item three here reads a clearly identifiable service or delivery vehicle while conducting a delivery or performing a scheduled or requested service. And if I could restate what I'm hearing as the suggested modification is to, for this to read a clearly identifiable delivery vehicle while conducting a delivery. Correct, that's it. Thank you. Correct. Made a lot of changes and we missed one. Just as far as you have another. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify about the use of a mobile payment system and the multiple options that anybody in the city has, that one of which you don't have to give your license plate for and that's if you actually use coins or credit card into a system, you don't have to use your.  And also I wanted to suggest that none of the information is retained by us other than just for enforcement, at least, and I'm pretty sure that's the same with the city once you're in the system for using it. But the other piece too is that the contract with them clearly states that we still control what that mobile payment company does within our city. So, and I believe that all the money comes to us and they take a small transaction fee, but it's still, it's basically a convenience factor, just one more option available. And I use the system in multiple cities when I go there. So it's just, it's just a convenience factor. But with that, my motion still stands with the amended language and item like up there. All right. Is that amended language friendly to the seconders? Yes. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I'll besides what Mr. Bar said from my standpoint, I feel like this is, as David said, this is not a substantial change to how we're doing business. This is an administrative change. And I feel like if my car was parked illegally, blocking a fire hydrant or something, I would hope that that vehicle would get a ticket. It would somehow eventually be traced back to me through digital means, regardless of whether I have signed up for some app on my phone or not. It feels similar from a privacy standpoint to where we're headed here. Yeah, no, that's my bad. Is there any other discussion around the motion? I feel like we've covered it well and we should go to a vote at this point. Christian Mutano. Yes. Mr. Bar? Yes. Vice-chair O'Neill-Vanco? Yes. Commissioner Oberbe? No. And an aye for myself. So the motion is passed forward to one. Thank you for your honor. Thank you very much. Pay attention and work on this one. Yeah. That's the floor. All right, with that done, we're cruising along item seven on the agenda is director's report. All right. It's been great having shorter and efficient meetings. So I will hit a few of the wave tops for my director's report. One piece to note as we head into the winter season, DPW is not immune to some of the hiring challenges that others have had in the community and beyond. We currently have 30 open positions in our department. 17 of those are school crossing guards and the remaining 13 are various seasonal and full-time positions. We brought to the board of finance and city council just two days ago a suite of recruitment and retention strategies as we head into winter to try to bend those trends. Interestingly, in the packet in the director's report, it shows how many applicants we've had per open position and we've had fewer applicants per position than most, if not all other city departments for openings. We do have jobs that are specialized that require CDLs or certifications. So we were very pleased to get council approval to offer three incentives. One is hiring bonuses for full-time seasonal and temporary workers, an opportunity to expand our on-call program so that our existing staff, if we are short-handed in the storm or water main break is bigger than we expected, we have the opportunity to pay on-call pay, a $40 supplement to staff if they come in outside their normal working hours if they are not already on-call. And lastly, reflecting that one of the big challenges is getting recycling staff to join our team. We have reclassified that job up from a grade 12 on the pay scale to a grade 14, the same as our street maintenance workers, and to add one FTE for the recycling team. We have three trucks and three routes, but only three employees. If any employee is sick, out on personal leave, injured, then we're purling from other team members in the city that would otherwise be plowing and doing street maintenance during our critical winter season. So we were really pleased to have AFSCME support and management support walking together. We got a unanimous vote of board of finance and a city council. So stay tuned if you know of anybody interested in working for DPW. In the crossing guard roll, up to street maintenance worker, fleet maintenance technician, water distribution please, forward them onto the city's website where all the jobs are listed. The second update is on the Rail Yard Enterprise Project. I'm really pleased to report that we have now an executed contract with our design engineering firm, StanTech, and we've already had a kickoff meeting. We'll be engaging the public in the coming weeks as we move quickly to evaluating the... I don't think people really understand now or are fearful of making use of that space, but I would hope people can understand now that it's available. I'm not sure how we get that word out, but we're gonna see that we can maybe reach out to the individual business so they're aware. Great, thank you. Let's go to locations at this point. Christian Overby. I'll just, two things. I sent a document that really relates to the shortage of the jobs, and I had shared this before, but I don't know, I know this was shared before as well, but there's a very interesting book by a guy named Robert Ford. Why Jobs Die and What to Do About It? And I provided that a couple months ago, maybe a couple of years ago, and I don't know if you all get it eventually because I shared it to be shared on the... Well, it's real important besides the money, there's some things in there, some ideas that are really worth considering, and I really, I think it's worth thinking about some of those, and I'll just generally, the idea of the kind of work the job needs to be such that it is gonna actually have a kind of work that people have some sense of responsibility and some pride in, and he's got sort of four different categories of things that he talks about, pride in the work, the way the module of the work is designed, consistency in the work situation, control that people have a little bit, and actually feedback at the level that you're working at, so it's not like feedback where somebody reports to your boss and says that you've screwed up something. So I just wanna share that because it really is an important thing that I think people think about the nature of the jobs that people have, and this guy's book is very clear that money and dress down Fridays and all those kind of quirky things that people come up with to try to get people to do jobs and signing bonuses, it really doesn't work as well as actually having a job that people feel good about doing and that they have control over and they actually can feel responsible. So I want to share that with you guys again. And with other people that are dealing with all these challenges of getting people back to work and people not wanting to start, go back to a job that they didn't like and they're not wanting to go back. So I want you to have a way to think about some of that and hopefully we can improve the vibe in the department of public work so that people wanna work in these jobs that you're having trouble getting people applying for. And one comment that I wanted to just say, the WCAX story about the need for crossing guards apparently wasn't clear that you can actually have crossing guard jobs that just do the morning shift or just do the evening shift. And I just wanna make sure for people that are watching this that in fact, if you're a college student or somebody that just was willing to do the morning shift for the crossing guard, that would be great or just the afternoon shift if you can't do both. That wasn't clear apparently in that story and I just wanna make sure that people are aware of that because that might get some more people and up to apply for positions. So thanks. All right, thank you. Commissioner Mutano. Yep, just really quick about the Main Street University Heights. I thought we had a really good meeting back on November 1st and it was great to hear about all the projects going on on the UVM campus and the collaboration that's been ongoing there. I've just been paying more attention to the intersection after that meeting and it is quite clear, especially at the class change over times that there is a severe need for more capacity for pedestrians there. I witnessed some close calls and I feel like every person I speak to is speaking to that same issue. So just with that same collaboration with the university place project between the university and the city, I definitely think there is a need there to increase the capacity either by widening the intersection or changing the actual structure of the timing to make it safer. That said, yeah, I would just love to hear sort of what direction the city could go in and just with the actual traffic volumes alone, it's clear that the percentage of the road that's available to pedestrians there to cross is inadequate, especially at those busy times. So that's my communication there. Thank you. April and Willard and Lenny, who was on Main Street and Anne, she was down on Union and Maine and Mo who was on Pearl and Willard. These folks are all people, my kids and many kids who go to Edmunds have known and trusted. I don't know how to elevate that and I would love to find a way because it really is, they are like such a foundation of trust and to allow our kids to walk and bike safely. So I'll get off my soapbox. You know how I feel, but anyway. Well, we'd welcome and maybe this is where Mr. Goulding and you could work on some innovative outreach strategies and messages either on Front Porch Forum or other avenues. Now that we have the hiring bonuses in place, we want to amplify the message now. So some of your enthusiasm, I think, would be well appreciated as we try to fill these slots. All right, otherwise Jim's going to have to get out there, huh? I see that. I wear bright clothes all the time here. All right, now thanks. And I appreciate the challenge with them, the hiring. All right, thank you. On the crossing, I think I want the one, maybe a little known perk. I know a crossing guard who's received valentines from students. And honestly, he describes it as like, this is like a pretty young guy around his brother in his 20s or something. He's the best part of my day. He's getting the high-fives from kids, doing his things, guarding the streets. I mean, yeah, it can be a nice... There are some benefits. Let's see here. Comment on leaf pickup. I don't know what the... If it's like historically always been the same side, obviously, no, we probably had the same conversation this time last year. This is a historically warm fall. In my area, the leaves were maybe 50% done on our pickup day. I'm just suggesting perhaps on warm falls or with climate change in general, we keep an eye on the dates. The dates of that maybe. Nudge it. Nudge a little closer. We've already talked about it, Rob. You want to hit it? Sure, yeah. I think one of the main challenges that Lee's team would be able to speak more particularly about the operations here that the challenges are. The last few years, which are ends of two, we had significant challenges with snow and ice falling in the middle of November, which prevented people from getting leaves up, prevented the teams from being able to kind of physically get over snow banks to get leaves. They were busy plowing. It added a real operational challenge with the leaf drops that were kind of on time the last few years we had one significant snowstorm and then I think we had a significant ice event during another year. Additionally, we're trying to balance a lot of the different competing needs that the department and the city has with respect to why we pick leaves up. One of those is the water quality challenge. So we try to time it and have been trying to time it more aggressively so that we can get the leaves right when they're dropping, preventing the leaves from clogging catch basins but also from the nutrient pollution that eventually gets washed into the waterways, which is a contributing urban factor to algae blooms, which again, we're a small role in that, but that is our role and those are our obligations to manage. So those are some of the challenges we've had. Lee also is trying to be aggressive with building his work plan and it's always hard to kind of make sure this week is fit into all the things we're trying to do as the weather starting to turn and then their preventative maintenance efforts on their tractors and plows are kind of getting stood up, but I think Lee is clearly thinking about how that fits in given the fact that we had a late leaf drop, a warm fall. And so one thing we did add at the end of the kind of process here was to make sure, it was at the end of the process. So I think a lot of our communications effort didn't perfectly capture this, but Oak Ledge and Leggy, which occasionally have not been open to residents for leaf drop, especially in more recent years, we opened those to give another option for residents to have a slightly more efficient, easier drop off if they got to their leaves late. And CSWD did their part by having some extended hours. Clearly, this puts the onus back on the resident for these situations where we have a late leaf drop, but we've gotten quite a bit of missed pickups, which potentially were people who kind of got leaves on the curb late. And I don't think we're kind of challenging any of those assertions by the public. We're just going out. If we've been told we've missed somebody's bags, we're going out to get them. So I think there's a lot of things underway. And Lee and his crew are always thinking about how to be better when the weather kind of dictates how their work happens. Yeah, no, thank you for that. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I'm trying to thread a needle with a lot going on. And it was also, it was impressive to also see the same, by the same time sort of coordinated, street sweeping, and I saw them out vacuuming the storm drains today as well. Which I imagine maybe you can clarify is that I'll sort of prep for winter and sort of getting things cleared out. Ready to go? Great. All right, yeah, nothing further on my end. Then thank you for all of that update. With that, I'll go to item nine, adjournment next meeting date, December to adjourn. Motion to adjourn or par. I'll second the motion. Go ahead. Second from Vice-Chair O'Neill-Bavacco. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right, all in favor if you say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, we are adjourned, 8-0-8. Good evening, all.


Hi, rhai am y Lluweus Waine. Rwy'n gwrthod ddechrau'r cyfgareddau mewn cyfagor iawn ar gyfer teis y technol. Dydai, rydyn ni'n gwneud y cyfagor, yn ysgolio'r cyfagorau cyfagor a'r cyfagorau cyfagorau cyfagorau cyfagorau cyfagor. So, fel y cyfagor, rydych yn fawr i gydag llyfr o gydag llyfr, gyfagorau gyfagor, Capp extraf hexshift, toticost of ownership, optimisation in the cloud, licencing considerations, the value proposition, and all of this will support the business case for public cloud. The intended audience are finance and IT professionals who are involved with compiling the business case for cloud. So let's start with some background about public cloud. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. So some public sector background, the government introduced a cloud first policy back in 2013, and with cloud first what they mean is public cloud. In 2017 the approach turned to being cloud native so software as a service models were encouraged. Also in 2017 the blue light services were given the green light to move to public cloud. And what we're seeing is that cloud is now mainstream in private sector and there's increasing adoption in public and third sectors. So in public cloud market there's three main players, Amazon web services known as AWS, they were there first and they've got the greatest market share. There's also Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. All of these offer superior technology so you're running your systems on the same world-class infrastructure as global corporations, they're highly secure. The cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud whereas the customer is responsible for the security of what they put in the cloud. These systems are reliable, scalable and offer high performance. There's global reach and cost optimization. There's flexible pricing categories and support. But using public cloud isn't just about the technology. It's enabling organisations to be better positioned to achieve their objectives. You're able to quickly deploy new applications instantly scale up and down. So it increases your speed and agility. You benefit from the pace of innovation. So experimentation is easy to do at little cost allowing businesses to change course quickly. So you can treat it as temporary and disposable which is something you wouldn't consider doing when investing in your own infrastructure. The cloud economics, there's two main primary cost drivers. So you benefit from lower unit costs and this is the result of the major public cloud providers having increased scale, the latest technology, best practices, improved operational efficiency. And it's a competitive market. They're all out there to try to win your business. The second cloud economic advantage is from significant drop in capacity hoarding. So when you're running your own data centre, the average rack runs at 75% capacity to allow for scalability. So the other 25% is wasted and often it's more than 25% that's wasted. In public cloud you match cost with usage. So you just pay for what you use. Here's an example. So if this was running in your own data centre, you would run at the capacity of the orange line to allow for the peaks. And you would be investing based on estimated demand. Whereas in public cloud, if you were only to use your infrastructure at 8am to 8pm, Monday to Friday, that's less than 40% of the full week. So you would benefit from turning it off. You can elastically respond to loads in an agile manner. Now what this means is that there's tools available to help you auto scale. So you're adjusting capacity as needed based on configuration and auto scaling policies that you can set up within the cloud environments. So that's a really high level view of what cloud is. Now the main purpose of the webinar is to talk about the accounting implications for public cloud. We often hear that the finances and accounting concepts around moving to public cloud can be a blocker. It's a huge lack of understanding. And what we want to do in this webinar is increase people's understanding both within IT and finance of the accounting implications of moving to public cloud. So let's start with some background about what is CAPEX and what is OPEX. So CAPEX, this is capital expenditure. This is usually where you're buying an asset that's going to last over a year and has a significant value. So organisations have different policies on what level the CAPEX threshold would be. Many organisations, it's if you're buying something that's over £5,000 with the useful life of over a year. And what you do is you put the cost of the balance sheet and then you spread the cost across the assets lifetime as depreciation. So you see that in the profit and loss account as depreciation over the assets life. Some examples on premise, this would be the hardware, storage, networking, software licensing and implementation costs. So there's a lot of CAPEX involved with on premise. Within public cloud, there's a shift from CAPEX to OPEX. There really isn't much CAPEX. Operating expenses known as OPEX. These are the ongoing costs of running your business and the cost is recognised in the month, the benefit is received. So on premise, this is the annual support and maintenance, power and cooling of your data centre, facilities costs and staff costs. Within public cloud, this will be the infrastructure, the cloud services, software licenses, because all of these are on a consumption basis. You pay monthly for what you use and the staff costs. SAS, so software as a service within public cloud, this is also treated as OPEX because it's treated as a service contract due to its rolling nature, auto upgrades and the responsibility. Then there's cash flow, so the cash in and out of a business. On premise, this is spiky due to the unpredictable nature of hardware purchases, often as a result of something breaking down or a forecast peak in capacity and there's annual licences. Within public cloud, it's much steadier. You're paying monthly based on consumption. So what is the appeal of CAPEX? We often hear that it's easier for companies to spend CAPEX than it is OPEX. Well, this will be because you're spreading the cost of CAPEX over the lifetime of the asset rather than in the one financial year that you're in, which is where you would see OPEX. Also, when you're purchasing CAPEX, you're adding to the value of the company, you're adding an asset to the balance sheets. Let's see what that would look like on profit and loss accounts. It's an accounting recap. So you'd have net income and you see the costs, so some IT costs, other costs, which would be staff costs, facilities costs, marketing costs, et cetera, to give total OPEX.  You may not have heard of EBITDA, it depends what industry you work in. So EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation. It's a key profitability measure, it's also known as operating profit or loss, because this measure is deemed to represent the ongoing trading activities of an organisation and whether it's therefore profitable. You'll notice this is before depreciation. We then take away depreciation to arrive at EBIT, which is earnings before interest and tax. So what you notice is when you're spending OPEX, it does impact your operating profit. When you're purchasing assets that are then depreciated, the depreciation features after operating profit. So accounting for cloud, let's put some figures in. This is a really, really basic model, looking at the shift from on-premise to cloud. So keeping everything simple, we're just increasing IT costs by 100, and this is because of the consumption model within public cloud. We'll keep other costs the same. So therefore your total OPEX is going up by 100, and that means that your EBITDA, your operating profit, is going down by 100. And as we said before, this is because when you purchase cloud, you're increasing your IT costs, but you're decreasing your depreciation because you won't have so many assets depreciating. So that goes down, and therefore your EBIT stays the same. So EBITDA, EBIT, does it really matter if you're spending OPEX or OPEX? Well, in some industries, like they said, it's easier to spend OPEX, and also in some industries and countries, for example, in the USA and in large PLCs. So there's a huge focus on the EBITDA measure because it represents the ongoing profitability of an organisation based on its trading activities. So analysts and investors use EBITDA to measure the trading performance and remuneration schemes, so bonuses are often linked to this. So we need to ensure that this doesn't lead to any inappropriate procurement behaviour. We can do this by communicating the CAPEX-TOPEX shift and remembering that cash is key. All finance teams would rather have steady cash flow as opposed to these spiky peaks that are involved with on-premise. So let's look at some real accounting for cloud specifics. We often hear that there's some confusion around how to treat reserved instances. A reserved instance is where you commit to purchasing from a cloud provider for one to three years, and as a result, you get a discount. These are treated differently by the different cloud providers, but basically you would receive an invoice upfront for the period you're committing to, so say three years. This cannot be capitalised because it isn't an asset. You're not purchasing the underlying infrastructure, but what you want to do is match the benefit and the cost. So you'll put the invoice to the balance sheet and then release it monthly over the period of the reserved instance, but you'll release it back to IT costs on the profit and loss account. So this means you're treating it as a prepayment. You're not treating it as an asset that you're capitalising. Dedicated hosting. This is where you are dedicated a set part of public cloud, but again, you're not owning the underlying infrastructure, so you cannot capitalise it. So consultancy, project management and training costs relating to cloud migration again cannot be capitalised. It isn't attributable to acquiring or constructing an asset. So here's some tests. So is it attributable to acquiring or constructing an asset? An asset must be owned and be able to be turned into cash. Also, there's some accounting policies around software and how that must be treated and there's some tests, sir. Now this is a complex subject, so for more information speak to your accountants. So the accountancy bodies are talking about making some changes to accounting for leases and there's IFRS 16 coming in January 2019, but from what I've seen, that won't change these fundamental things about accounting for cloud. But again, watch this space and speak to your accountants for more information. So that wraps up the accounting for cloud. Next we're going to be looking at total cost of ownership, licence considerations and optimising within the cloud. So total cost of ownership. This is a method that identifies the solution that provides the higher value over time. It looks at how organisations can change the way they do business. It's often done for a three to five year time frame and the benefits increase over time due to the learning curve, innovation and optimisation. So let's look at some of the components. You compare on-premise and co-lication with public cloud. On-premise you've got the operational costs and acquisition costs, whereas in public cloud the storage and compute and data transfer out. So with on-premise it's important that you include the cost of servers, storage, networking, IT staff, power and cooling and facilities. And this is probably easier than it really is to achieve. We're often hearing from our customers here at Edgyserv that it's difficult for them to identify the costs of what it's costing them to run their on-premise servers now. And what are the IT staff costs relating to that? What would it look like in the future? It's really worth trying to identify these costs because you'll never know what you're going to save in the future if you don't know what your costs are today. And then within public cloud there's some optional extras. So you could use a managed services provider, that's what Edgyserv is, and that comes with benefits of having a main point of contact, billing flexibility, other related services and products. This is migration costs because these are the one-off costs of migrating to public cloud. So it would be an internal project team. So migrating to public cloud isn't business as usual. You will need a project team. This is the cost to consider. So would you use an outsourced partner with the migration expertise? And then there's tooling. So there's paid for tooling and there's free tooling offered by the cloud vendor. Again, this will depend on the applications you're moving to cloud. Some will be easier and you can use the free tools. Others may be more critical and therefore require paid for tooling. Then once your infrastructure is decommissioned, your finance team will need to write off the net but value with redundant assets. So what does that mean in English? What that means is if you've purchased some storage, say one year ago, but you expected it to last three years, you will have depreciated one year, but you'll have two years left on the balance sheet. So that will need writing off because it's not going to be part of running your business in the future. Migrating to public cloud is just the first step in the journey. There will be further savings to be made once you're in the cloud. And these will come from rightsizing, storage optimization, serverless architecture, other optimization methods, and the cloud service models, which I'll talk about later. And cost optimization is achieved through a continuous cycle. So ongoing monitoring, measuring, and optimizing. Ongoing monitoring, measuring, and optimizing. This needs to be continuous. So what do we mean by cloud service models? This next slide shows the shift from on-premise right through to software as a service. You can see the orange blocks are the things that you manage and the pink ones are things the vendor manages. And as you move through this, the vendor manages more. Allowing you to focus on your core activities. Something else to include in the business case is license considerations. So I'll just give a very high level overview of this. So there's several options. So the simplest is licensing included within public cloud. I say this is a simplest because you can purchase it within seconds like you can any of the servers within public cloud. So you select your license, windows, Linux, et cetera. And then the public cloud provider manages all the license compliance. It's a pay-as-you-go model with no upfront costs or commitment. So you benefit from turning it off. It's a consumption-based model. So like I said earlier, if you're only running your infrastructure 8 a.m. till 8 p.m. Monday to Friday, that's less than 40% of the week. Whereas on-premise, you'll be paying for your licenses 100% even if your servers aren't in use. There's license mobility. So this varies between public cloud provider and software assurance is required. It's available with certain licenses. But what this could do is you could benefit from any existing license that you've got for your on-premise software. And then there's bring-your-own licenses which is available on certain cloud environments and there's no need for software assurance. Now, I must stress this is very complex and it varies between cloud provider. So seek guidance. So finally, we're going to look at the value proposition and some key takeaways. So a business case should highlight that it's difficult to compare like with like as the past and the future won't be that comparable and the business benefits are often non-financial. Therefore, it's important that the value proposition is understood. Businesses will no longer have to manage their own infrastructure. Instead, they can build sophisticated scalable applications and have resources to run any workload from a platform that offers extensive services, features and geographical locations. So it's about the business outcomes. You're better positioned to achieve organisational objectives, enabling innovation and increasing agility. And this is through platform breadth, global reach. Superior reliability. High performance. Sustainable and scalable IT. Favourable economics. Operational efficiency. Improved agility and pace of innovation. And what this leads to is a focus on your core organisational activities rather than running your infrastructure. Experimentation is easy to do at little cost. Allowing customers to test and fail quickly at a low cost. So really the risk of not moving to cloud is the opportunity cost to the organisation resulting from lack of speed and agility. So what does this mean for IT leaders? So we need to communicate the strategy to help explain the shift from CAPEX to OPEX. I mean to raise the financial implications or raise the understanding of the financial implications across the business to ensure that the right investment decisions are made. So always be led by what is best for the organisation. And encourage closer working between finance and IT, which is something that we are seeing now in the markets. So some key takeaways. Public cloud is increasingly the norm. There's the move from CAPEX to OPEX and this requires some robust business modelling. It's good to have the awareness of EBIT and EBITDA, those profitability measures that we mentioned, and how the CAPEX to OPEX shift impacts them. And also be aware that TCO and the cost journey, so you never know what you could save if you don't know what you're spending already. And to understand that migrating to cloud is just the first step. And the full value proposition should really be understood because it's about the business outcomes, not just the technology and the money. It's important to involve finance from the outset on all your business cases. And external consultancy is available, which is a great segue into what does EDGE serve do? So here at EDGE serve, we help to cloud migration and management, cloud application and development, and cloud optimisation. And we work with AWS Azure, Microsoft. So EDGE serve also conduct research and provide learning opportunities both independently and with partners, for example Socketim, CFG, and SIPFA, the accountancy bodies. And we do webinars like this. So stay tuned for more. Thank you for listening.