joined us in person in Contoy's auditorium and online for the Burlington City Council meeting. The time is 5.40. We're running about 10 minutes or so behind. We're gonna begin our agenda this evening with item number one, which is a motion to adopt our agenda. I'll go to Councillor McKee for that motion. I would move that we amend to adopt the agenda as follows. Add to the consent agenda item 6.28, communication, Jim Lockridge, Big Heavy World, resubmission of a proposal for the adaptive reuse of Memorial Auditorium. Thank you so much, Councillor McKee. There's a motion to approve with amendments as listed. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Hightower. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have an agenda. I just wanted to note that we have Councillor Shannon who is joining us by Zoom. And I think that is all at this time. As the hour is quite early, even though it's dark outside, to be efficient with our time, we've scheduled a work session and an update, neither of which will require council action. And while no action is gonna be taken this evening, we do welcome the community to speak to either of these items during public forum. With that, we'll go to item number two on our agenda, which is a work session on south end planning and zoning. And we have quite an array of amazing people to give us this presentation. Megan, I'll go to you as the director of planning. And we've allotted about an hour for this if you are able to make the first half of the work session for your presentation and then we'll go to discussion and councilor questions. That would be ideal and as well if you can identify all of the people that will be helping you with this presentation. Thank you. We'll do, thank you. Good evening. My name is Megan Tuttle. I'm the director of planning and the other presenters here with me tonight are Charles Dillard who is our principal planner in the office of city planning. Samantha Dunn who's the assistant director of community works in CEDO and Chapin Spencer who's our director of public works. There are a number of others on our city team as well as many stakeholders external to the city that have really been helping us get to the point of being able to share this presentation, this update with you tonight. So let me see if I can navigate these two things at once here. A couple of weeks ago, we came and shared with you a number of us were here to share with you an update on the 10 point housing action plan, specifically the progress that's been made since last year at this time. So the intent of the presentation tonight is to dig a little bit further into item number eight that was on that, which is to look at the Plan B TV South, I'm sorry, the South End zoning changes. And I think we really wanted to start by saying that this presentation that we're going to share with you tonight is centered around the zoning changes, but there are many other interrelated activities that are happening at the same time to help us ensure that the zoning changes will be successful. And in order to help us really to move forward a number of goals that were in Plan B TV South End. This is a snapshot of the sort of future framework for the South End from that plan. And you can see that there were a number of goals ranging from infrastructure to development issues, questions of land use, open space preservation and enhancement, et cetera. The work that we're presenting to you tonight is actually, I hope, gonna demonstrate that the zoning amendment is tied to a number of interrelated issues to help us actually move forward a number of those high priority goals from Plan B TV South End. We also are here tonight kind of bringing forward to you a zoning amendment and many other activities that actually help us to move forward with many things that we heard in that Plan B TV planning process. We have embedded a lot of public engagement in that plan. We have enhanced and added to that public engagement with a number of individual initiatives that we'll talk about tonight that have also included some supplemental public engagement. But really this is all building on a body of our vision for the South End from Plan B TV. One really important aspect of Plan B TV that we wanted to talk about up front is that as many of you know, at the time that Plan B TV was adopted, it did not recommend that our land use policies allow housing in the enterprise zoning district. This was a really important and contentious discussion at that time and there were many discussions about the pros and the cons of potentially allowing housing in a portion of that district. Ultimately, while the plan did not recommend allowing housing in that zone at the time, it recognized that this was an important conversation for us to continue. And that's ultimately why we were here, why we are here tonight, why this was part of the 10 point housing plan. It noted that things change, that our communities needs change and that housing is a very important part of those needs. And put down a marker for us to continue to have these discussions about whether or not our policies around housing in the South End need to be revisited. So it's within this context that the concept of creating a South End Innovation District was included in the 10 point housing action plan. At the time there was an MOU that was included in the release of the housing action plan that was signed by the city as well as private property owners and other partners that would actually help lay the groundwork for a lot of what we're going to talk to you about tonight and really helped us grapple with some of the interrelated aspects of realizing housing in this part of the city. So with that tonight, we're going to share with you an update on the MOU specifically in a number of areas. We're going to give you a more full kind of summary of the South End, the draft South End zoning amendment as it stands right now. We're going to share with you our current efforts to help us realize public open space on the city owned land at the barge canal. We're going to share a current look at where we are with the implementation of the South End Coordination Plan and some of the other South End infrastructure considerations that we have as we move forward with thinking about redevelopment in this area and also share with you an update on the evaluation of a feasibility study for a multimodal transit center. So ultimately a lot has happened. This group as well as I said many others has done a lot of work in the year since the 10 point plan was announced. And we're here tonight because we want to set the stage for what we can see as a great opportunity for us to continue with more collaborative planning for some of the key sites in this area of the South End, really between Lakeside and Sears Lane to help us move forward with the implementation of these goals in a further way. So each of us is going to present to you a section of this outline that you see here on this slide. And I'll start with Charles who's going to talk to you more about the zoning amendment. Good evening. All right, so the, as Megan said, the South End Innovation District is the primary objective and recommendation of Plain BTV South End. And given that throughout the past year's planning process we very much made it clear to all stakeholders and the community and the planning commission as well that Plain BTV really is the sort of impetus and the foundation for the zoning amendment. The key question though, as Megan alluded to is how can those objectives from Plain BTV South End be carried forward with the more sort of more recent imperative to create space for more homes in the South End? And also as Megan alluded to, we've been careful about this conversation with the community and making it clear that this process really is a continuation of that housing conversation that was recommended in the plan. So the key questions again are how can these large, mostly vacant surface parking lots and other underutilized sites on and near Lakeside Avenue be re-envisioned to create a really dynamic, vibrant district that can be a place for homes but also a place for economic development and economic resilience and environmental sustainability going forward. So the district just very quickly as proposed and we did, should pause here just to say we did engage with the community on what the boundary should be and it has remained as it's shown here. Roughly from Howard Street in the north to Sears Lane in the south and Pine Street on the east to the lake on the west. Important to note that only those properties on the west side of Pine Street are included and nothing on the east side of Pine Street and nothing north of Howard Street as well. And also importantly the barge canal properties are not included in the proposed boundary. So again, won't spend too much time on this but the district really is meant to embody the plan BTP South End with the more recent housing as a human right action plan. We know there is still concern in the community about the potential for housing in a south and innovation district and just want to point out here we can sort of facilitate that conversation that the proposed district represents about a quarter of the existing enterprise light manufacturing district which is to say that much of the space that is currently reserved for light manufacturing and other manufacturing uses in the south end will remain off limits to housing if this district is created. So the intent of the innovation district again is to create an evolving vibrant urban district with a mix of uses, building scales and types. It should be a place for hundreds of new homes and neighbors and a place where arts light manufacturing and office can coexist in harmony with new residents and also goes without saying that any development of this kind of intensity in Burlington should embody the goals and vision of the community which is to create a community that is bringing emissions down, cleaning the water and creating a healthy ecosystem. So the zoning district itself has two sort of main branches. One is the way that it treats land use and the other is the way that it attempts to regulate urban form, sort of building scale, building type and the look and feel of the district. So that first branch, land use, is really the way that we propose the innovation district regulate land uses that there is a whole host of permitted land uses that really respond to those priorities from plan BTV south end along with the housing as human right action plan. So residential uses, multi-family and other types would be permitted sort of as of right. There's an asterisk here. Residential uses as proposed would only be permitted in new buildings or in additions to existing buildings. So just to bring it back to plan BTV south end there was a very clear recommendation from that plan to protect and preserve existing buildings in the south end that are being used for manufacturing arts and making. And we think that this proposal does just that and not allowing existing buildings to be retrofitted for residential use. Arts and making uses are permitted as of right as our office R and D and I should add light manufacturing as well. I want to be very clear about that is a permitted as of right use. And then community which is meant to include uses like childcare, adult care, certain medical uses that sort of thing, schools. In the limited use category are some other uses that are I would say inherent to a successful mixed use urban district but not necessarily the community's top priority as plan BTV south end and as our public engagement showed. And the way that we attempt to limit these land uses is to say that the sum of all of these land uses in this limited category can be no greater than the sum of the square footage of all these primary uses which is to say that if a developer wants to come in and build a 20,000 square foot restaurant which is in that limited use category they would have to provide an equal amount, 20,000 square feet of some of those primary land uses. So an office building, a light manufacturing space, art space, that sort of thing. Entertainment and amenity and hotels. Hotels are very limited as proposed to one per lot existing as of January 1st, 2023. And they can account for no more than 80% of any building in which they are located. So uses that would not be permitted under the land use concept are heavy manufacturing, logistics and single family housing and a few other residential types. So urban form, we did quite a bit of public engagement on this one and quite a bit of best practice incorporation from communities around the world really, North America and Europe particularly. So the, I would say that the urban form approach here is a very light urban form code approach. Nothing approaching the sort of specificity of the downtown form code, but greater than what is found elsewhere in the ordinance. So lot occupation and building placement, frontage build out and building set back, building and block form and parking, loading and service of the sort of categories of urban form. I'll leave it at that for now if there's specific questions about any of that, happy to take them. Building height and bulk, there's two issues we wanna talk about. Building height and bulk is proposed to be regulated as shown on this map. So those areas in red would permit up to eight stories. Bulk is regulated through a maximum floor plate standard which would be 15,000 square feet of floor plate and floor area ratio of 2.5. This is very much in line with sort of contemporary development at least in North America. The 15,000, just for reference, the 194 St. Paul development is, Champlain, no, the St. Paul development is about 30,000 square feet. The one just a couple blocks away from here. So this would be roughly half of that, 15,000. And additionally, any buildings that do reach seven or eight floors, those top floors would be limited to a 10,000 square foot floor plate. The other thing I wanna talk about here is a block perimeter, which is meant to guarantee a certain degree of mobility and permeability in the district. 400, downtown Burlington blocks are about 400 by 400. And so we attempt to replicate that here, which is to say that a block can be 1,600 feet. We don't say it has to be 400 by 400. It could be 800 by 100 by 800 by 100. And we also don't prescribe street locations or designs. We leave that up to a developer and ultimately it is you as city councilors who accept any street designs that might alternate from that typically proposed. Real quick on public engagement, we did have two public meetings, one in person, one virtual. We attended five NPA meetings, a whole host of stakeholder meetings with property owners, advocates of the arts community, affordable housing providers as well. And really engaged on these themes here, land use, district scale, public realm, district boundary. This is just a snapshot of the type of engagement that we put forward. There is a summary that we can provide to you. There's also a summary provided on the website. And we think it was a really great effort on the public engagement that made its way into ultimately the recommendations. So with that, we'll turn it over to shape and just talk about infrastructure. Great, thank you very much. I have five or so slides that I can get through really quickly. Infrastructure underlies the ability here to transform parts of the south end. We can rezone, but if we don't have the infrastructure to handle that, then the developers will find the permitting process very challenging. We, as you know, have been working well to advance a number of projects in the south end under the south end construction coordination plan. I'm pleased to report that all of those projects made good progress this year, and we're expecting another strong year next year. I won't go into the detail as you've seen this before and happy to discuss. There are three main areas, I think that are gonna require our intense effort together to ensure that any rezoning here in the south end has the foundational infrastructure to allow it to blossom. The first is traffic management. And while there are increased investments in connectivity and in capacity in the south end, one intersection in particular, which is the lakeside and the new lakeside and south Champlain Parkway intersection, is under a condition of Act 250 and it requires us to monitor that intersection and it address any performance issues that may occur. In addition with sewer management, we have one main trunk line connecting the south end to the main wastewater treatment plant on the waterfront and we need to do more study to fully understand its capacity, both in dry weather, non-rainy times and wet weather events. And significant new development in this area will likely require either onsite detention tanks or a financial cost share with the city's planned sewer storage tank at the Pine Street and Callahan Park location that we have talked about with the parks master planning for Callahan Park and in other forums. And then last but not least, stormwater at Lakeside Avenue is also a critical item that needs further study. Lakeside Avenue is low in the elevation of the city close to the height of Lake Champlain and it's periodically overburdened. So this MOU that's being discussed today that Samantha will touch on is a forum that DPW is very supportive of to help us do some long-term planning such that each developer doesn't have to come in trying to address this incrementally but that we can do it in a coordinated fashion and provide a clear path for the developers. So quickly just to summarize each of those, traffic management, the Lakeside and Champlain Parkway intersection has the yellow star there in the middle of the proposed south end innovation district. This is you'll see in the yellow circle here there's a rectangle there which is the proposed location for a storage tank for abating the combined sewer overflows that occur periodically at Pine Street. And then lastly a picture from last July of Lake Lakeside Avenue where you're seeing the results of after a storm event here where this does drain in 20, 30, 40 minutes but you can see that the capacity of the system is periodically overburdened in its current condition. Thanks Chapin, hi everybody. I'm gonna back up a little bit from Chapins we're gonna jump around a little bit just to talk about the barge canal for a moment because the barge canal was an item that was talked about when Megan was talking about plan BTB south end this area was identified by the community as a important project to move forward to create public access and this was addressed again in the MOU that we put together last year when we began looking at the zoning amendment. So while as Charles described the actual parcels in the barge canal are included in the zoning amendment the efforts in this location have been part of our ongoing discussion so just wanted to provide an update. Just so a quick brief on what's happening at the barge canal and what it is. The barge canal is a super fun site and has institutional controls that surround it so the actual super fun site regulated designated and regulated by the EPA as the red dotted area with institutional controls on the parcels surrounding that area that prevent on-site drinking. Right now those institutional controls prevent land use for residential or childcare and most excavations below five feet and prevent or limit migration of the existing contamination. There's lots more information about the super fun site and the remediation that's taken place on the link. So this area has land that's owned by quite a few different parties and you can see in red there is the parcel owned by the city of Burlington. It's about 11 acres and that was the area that had been identified in plan BTB south end as the potential future park and you can see surrounding that several parcels owned by Rick Davis and others around that property. So just wanted to give that with DPW down at the bottom there give that context of ownership. One of these parcels is 453 pine and I'm just gonna touch on this briefly. This is a site that is planned for redevelopment. I think this took place in May. This was an announcement made by the governor of investing $6 million into the redevelopment of this site of Barra funds, recognizing that brownfields are expensive to move forward and that has kickstarted a process of bringing in exciting development on a site that's been vacant for decades. Jovial, Kang and Larry Williams are the lead developers on that project and they were here but then they had to leave to get to the conservation commission to talk about this project and they will be presenting a DRB tomorrow a sketch plan review and are planning a fall 2023 construction start. This is an overview of what's being proposed there. It's flipped so the north is to the right but pine streets at the bottom and I think people have heard that there's plans for a Scandinavian style bath house, a bowling alley and another small commercial building on the site but to hear more go to DRB tomorrow night. I'm focusing on that project also because as part of their redevelopment plans those developers are proposing to take the adjacent land to 453 and work with the city to expand access and publicly accessible open space for the barge canal park. So these parcels that you see outlined in blue are currently privately owned and are being proposed to be added to a potential park in this location and that's showing, putting all those parcels together you get about a 20 acre open space area. This is just the images pulled from Plan BTV South end of what has been imagined by the public in this location previously. So the next steps, the first thing is that the city owned land has restrictions on it right now that land was purchased with federal transportation funding because it was originally part of the Southern connector and we have formally made a request to do something different with that land than have the Southern connector on it. We had previously believed that we couldn't make this kind of request until the Champlain Parkway as it's currently designed was completed but we have the door cracked open. So we've made the request and we hope to hear back in the next month or so if that request has been granted. And the second thing that's moving forward on this site is we have been sort of awarded access to the EPA's super fund reuse planning support and technical assistance. So over the next six months, the CEDO and the parks department will be working with that team to provide technical assistance necessary to understand liability around taking on additional ownership potentially of contaminated parcels and then having public access on these parcels and really understanding what is possible. The images and plan BTV South end are beautiful and exciting but we don't know yet of those or actually something that's possible to happen on the land. So this six months will help us have a better understanding of what's possible so we can kick start a new public process of getting input on what should happen there.  Also, I would say six to nine months and it was focused on 68 Sears Lane because it was returning to a 2006 study that had been done in the same location. It included several months of extensive public outreach and it looked at a standalone transit or multimodal center sort of assuming that there was no zoning amendment assuming the zoning as we have it today and then looked at a second option with a center that included housing and other mixed uses and this study you can see the draft cover is up there should be final next month. It also included sort of some of this intersection capacity analysis, cost estimate and information on funding and feasibility and you can get the details of this study on the website. I think bringing it up, one of the things and the main reasons that we undertook this work is alongside this zoning amendment if redevelopment of 125 Lakeside is to happen, that surface parking lot which we know is not the highest and best use does have over 900 parking spaces in it that is currently serving the hospital, Champlain College, Green Mountain Transit as well as Hula and so those parking spaces are an important part of our community right now and we need to figure out the best way to replace them. And then the final piece that I'm gonna talk about before we take questions is an MOU that we have been working on with the owners of 125 Lakeside. You'll see here the landowner of 125 Lakeside is an LLC called Ride Your Bike. It's very closely related to the owners of Hula so I might talk about them interchangeably. You can think about them. The same, I think ever since the MOU was signed last year thinking about the zoning amendment and then through the transit center there's been a recognition that we own these two adjacent parcels of land and there's the potential for them to bring greater value to the community if we can look at them together as opposed to separately and so that's what this MOU has been contemplating. So here's just a little bit of the history. I think that I just went over but this document we've worked through a set of mutual goals and series of actions that we would like to take place over the next nine months to again take advantage of those opportunities and to address the constraints that Chapin was talking about together as opposed to waiting for an application to come in and then trying to say hey this one's not going to work. The main goal of the MOU is to facilitate quickly and efficiently a conceptual design and development framework for coordinated phased redevelopment of the parcels resulting in a vibrant sustainable and accessible mixed use neighborhood with a significant amount of new housing units. So this MOU is really building off of Plan BTV South End, the 10 point plan to ensure housing as a human right and the new zoning amendment. Right now the MOU envisions a scope of work to help move us towards those goals. It's up on the screen looking at existing conditions, working through some development framework scenarios which is really shared planning across the parcels, understanding where it might make sense for streets, pedestrian paths, things like parking, things potentially like stormwater holding tanks to occur to make the highest and best use of these parcels to serve the community and the landowners. Right now we're working with the CCRPC to secure grant funding to support the majority of the work proposed here through a transportation source of funding as a dense, what is the source of funding for, yeah. It's something that's called their PL funds. It's basically how they help us fund transportation and land use projects throughout the county. It's federal money, thank you. And so with that I don't know what time it is. We did go through a lot of slides pretty quickly so we want to take an opportunity to answer questions and I know I think set aside some time, some of the, because the MOU is still being developed, there are some of those questions that would need to be answered in an executive session but happy to answer any other questions now. Thanks, Megan, I don't know if you wanted me to come back to you or if you want to, okay. So thank you very much. We'll go to the council for questions or comments and thank you very much for your presentation. Councilor Hightower to be followed by Councilor Travers. Thank you all. It's exciting to see such a well-fleshed out plan come to us with kind of all the departments coordinating. I don't have too many comments. I'm gonna first have the same ask. I don't know if we ever got the housing plan PDF either so if we could get this presentation, I don't know that it's on, yes this will get posted as soon as we're done with the presentation tonight, awesome. And then I think my only, and I didn't totally catch the timeline so apologies if this was on here and this is maybe more of a comment than a question but just, or no, I'll phrase it as a question. Is it possible to have the plan for the park come to the council at the same time as the change in zoning ask? Because I think that would be a great package and I understand it's kind of presented as a package but I don't remember timeline-wise if they're coming at the same time. I'll let Samantha speak more to the details. I think the plan for the park, we're trying to advance a lot of the kind of technical assistance and exploration of legal and brownfield type constraints that would help us to eventually get to a park. So we don't have enough work that has advanced in order to bring a fully fleshed out plan for the park at the time we would deliver the zoning amendment. Our intent is to deliver a zoning amendment to you in January. Yeah, I would just say, I think it's important to note that all of the land that's been identified is already zoned conservation so there's not other development that can happen on the site. Being able to add the additional privately owned parcels is gonna be linked to once the developers of 453 Pine get their zoning permit. That's the time in which they would be moving that forward. So we're definitely moving it forward the concept but it's not on the same timeline as the zoning amendment. Great, thanks. That's helpful and that's all for me. Great, thanks, Councilor Hightower. We'll go to Councilor Travers and I believe then may go to Councilor Shannon. Thank you, President Paul and thank you very much for that presentation. It's incredibly exciting to see. I appreciate all the work that has gone into this. I went to a number of the community meetings that you ran and I wanna say a particular thanks for your engaging the community in that way. It was great to be down in the generator space and to see the boards up with neighbors having stickers being able to place stickers on what they were looking for and what the priorities are and just a glance at those boards. It looks like we've come up with a plan here that both from what I've seen in the public sessions as well as speaking to my own constituents in Ward five which is where this is. It seems to really align with what I understand many and the majority of folks in our neighborhood are looking for here. I suppose just a couple of questions that I would have is I know that in the proposal that's currently before the planning commission that there's some discussion in there about residential only being allowed in new buildings and not in existing buildings. But when I look at the overlay map it doesn't appear that there's very many existing buildings in there. So I'm wondering if you can speak to sort of what's the intention behind that? I mean, what are we really looking to save? And what I will say is from my perspective what we are looking to save in the south end is its character as a space for artists and for makers and for other entrepreneurial small businesses more so sort of what's in the structures less so at least within this overlay district some of the structures themselves. So I'm wondering if you can sort of A speak to that first question of what are we looking to save here and then B as we look towards what's actually operating out of these buildings if you can speak a little bit more to exactly how this plan is really looking to preserve sort of the tenants of those buildings and the folks who are in there. Sure. So the first question about residential uses in new buildings and additions. So given the choice, if there's an existing building, let's take the innovation center. If a developer was offered that building to purchase the building and they could develop it into residential uses the rents that they could garner from a residential use redevelopment would very likely be greater than what could be generated through office use as it's currently designed or office or artists or maker space. And so that was one intent. And yes, there are not many existing buildings in the district. There's a few located on Sears Lane, smaller industrial buildings, auto related buildings. But that's really the purpose. I think there have been some very good ideas about additions to existing buildings and that those could reasonably accommodate new homes in a way that does not threaten the current use whether that be office or artists space. And so that that's really the intent there. The second question about the artist and sort of maker and light manufacturing character of the district. And so that land use approach that we outlined that seeks to essentially calibrate those prioritized uses to those more sort of amenity uses I would call them, restaurants, hotels, pharmacies, that sort of thing by calibrating them on a basically one to one basis. We are essentially saying that we do prioritize artists and makers, spaces, makers, which are in light manufacturing which is in that primary use category. I would say the other answer to that question is about the boundary. Early on, there were a lot of discussions about whether the boundaries should be expanded. There were some folks who came to the meetings who said, why not include the entire enterprise light manufacturing district? And the reason not to do that is to protect a lot of the artists and makerspaces and light manufacturing spaces that exist on Pine Street. And that's why the boundary has not jumped over Pine Street. That's why it's not gone further south and sort of crept closer to downtown. That's really it in a nutshell. Great, I appreciate that. If I could ask just one additional follow-up question and then a point. So one is that generally speaking, I'm thrilled with the concept of our replacing parking lots with housing. I'm also mindful of the fact though that there are hundreds of cars that for various purposes use those parking lots at the moment. I'm also mindful of the fact that a project like the Multimodal Transit Center is probably something that will require public resources and with the passage of the recent school bond. I'm mindful of the fact that a project like that may be something that's pretty far off down the line at this point in time. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to, given the fact that developing additional housing there will replace quite a bit of parking and will because of that, displaced number of cars that are down there currently is in your opinion, the zoning change in the Overlay District dependent or contingent on any way on the Multimodal Transit Center or are these two things that can sort of exist on their own tracks? So Samantha can speak a little bit more to kind of the consideration of what opportunities we have for parking in this area. I think with regard to the zoning amendment itself I think these two things can move on parallel tracks particularly because the zoning amendment doesn't in any way preclude parking from being created. We've been talking about parking in our zoning before this body already, which would offer, if that passes, would offer some greater flexibility for new developments to determine how to incorporate parking within those or alongside those developments. But I think what we would probably more likely see in this area is some sort of phased redevelopment that would allow only portions of that parking to be replaced at a time and could give us the opportunity to plan appropriately for how to make sure that those resources are available. Yeah, and I would just add that I think everyone's aware of the city's current bonding capacity and that's part of what's being addressed in the MOU are working together to understand if there are resources available to the municipality. There's still a lot of federal funding available and flowing. So what resources might be available to the municipality that would result in a shared construction of a multimodal center with a private developer, just looking at all of the different options. If I may just say one other thing, thank you very much for that answer. So the last point I will make and I know we may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here with respect to the park and park development, but I do appreciate Councilor Hightower's points with respect to further understanding how that public open space may fit in with the development here. And it would be remiss of me to not bring up as I believe many folks here, including yourselves know, there's been a group of very dedicated neighbors who are interested in conserving that barge canal public space as really open natural space. And to the extent possible, I hope we can sort of keep that in mind that as we think about planning for that area, how does keeping that as natural open space to the extent possible fit in with what we're discussing here? On the whole, incredibly excited about the work that you're doing, looking forward to seeing what comes from the planning commission. I believe their next meeting is on December 13th with respect to this and whatever they pass out, speaking on my own behalf as Chair of the Ordinance Committee, very excited to see what comes forward and looking forward to getting to work on this sooner rather than later. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Travers. We'll go to Councilor Shannon to be followed by Councilor Bergman. Thank you, President Paul. And thank you very much to the team that has been working on this for so long and so diligently. And I appreciate all of the public engagement and thoughtfulness that has gone into this process. I have heard from a few constituents who have had various questions. And I would say, you know, I'm hearing everything from build it, no questions asked to reservations, both about losing the industrial space and reservations about the allowable height of buildings, while at the same time a cognizance about our desperate need for housing. So one of the questions from a constituent was, will the additional height mean more affordable housing with the floor area ratio component? And I believe what he's saying is, if your limiting factor is the floor area ratio, then you could build either an eight-story building or a four-story building and have the same number of units. So, and also with an argument that if you allow up to eight stories and you require structured parking, you're gonna be increasing the cost of this housing for a couple of reasons. One is the upper stories are going to be more desirable. They will have lake views and they are going to be awesome for the people that live in them. But taller buildings can be more costly to build and I don't know that that necessarily is true at eight stories, but structured parking is most certainly more costly to build. And I appreciate the land use arguments for structured parking, but people have cars, they need their cars to get to work, which is not always within walking distance and particularly lower income people can't always bank on being able to walk to work. They're reliant on their cars, they need a place to park them. And if the only option is structured parking, that's a much more expensive option for them than surface parking. So I wanna ask that question again, with the cognizance that there's always trade-offs between these things, but is there any analysis in terms of affordability with regards to the height? Thank you for that. Yeah, taller buildings do not necessarily mean more affordable homes, but given the inclusionary zoning requirement, if more units are created, that inherently means that more affordable units will be created as well. Analysis on the site, we've done analysis of probably each of the parcels in the district and some of them, the larger properties could probably accommodate anywhere from four to 600 units. And so if the inclusionary zoning is established at 15% and maybe developers offer more, then I can't do the math on top of my head right now, but that's potentially hundreds of affordable units. So to the extent that taller buildings mean more units, yes, it could mean more affordable housing. Structured parking is expensive. The most expensive type of parking to construct is underground parking. It requires expensive engineering and much more concrete and potentially steel, which adds to the cost and which, yes, could get passed on to residents. And for that reason, the zoning approach does try to prioritize detached structured parking that could be built in a centralized fashion that could be shared. This is a recommendation from Plan BDB Southend. But like Megan said, I think given the large sort of scale of these properties, if development can be phased in such a way that current surface parking could be utilized to sort of keep costs down, I think that will provide for more affordability. And FAR, I think the combined FAR floor plates and building height standards are meant to provide flexibility for developers and their designers. They're gonna be the ones who spend the most time looking at these sites in detail. And that's really the way that the, and this is reflected in the community engagement, the way that we think a district can be built with a range of building types, scales and heights. And the last thing I'll say regarding height is that looking back at the map, tall buildings up to seven and eight floors are only permitted as proposed on Champlain Parkway, south of Lakeside Avenue and a portion of the property just surrounding the Innovation Center on Lakeside Avenue as well. And one kind of sub question that I think I heard you asking, Councillor Shannon, is maybe, can the allowable floor area ratio be achieved maybe in only four-story buildings? And I think that's something that we could definitely follow up with you on. I know that Charles has looked into how all of these regulations layer together in terms of what you could ultimately see as a sort of maximum amount of square foot of development on these sites. So I think with regard to that question, we'd have to look at whether or not that potential could be reached without that extra height. Thank you. I was about to follow up with that, Director Tuttle, so thank you, because I think the point of the constituent was that you could have just as many units with the FAR in a four-story building or maybe a six-story, something lower than the proposed eight-story building. So is there an advantage? And I hear you saying that there is not an advantage that you don't get more affordability as you go up. But of course, there's a trade-off at some point because affordability is related to the number of units. Right. I have a couple other things here. Is there anything that will require other than the park? It seems to be a human value to have some adjacent green space or outdoor areas, like balconies. You look in other parts of the world and it seems like a unit is never built without a balcony where you might be able to put some container plants and vegetables as well as courtyards and some maybe shared private space. It's not necessarily public space, but for the benefit of those living in the units as well as having the public benefit, we're now hearing that Burlington's climate or temperature is literally rising. One of the highest rates in the country and that urban green space can really contribute to lowering that. And so are there requirements in this that address that in an integrated way with this streetscape and plan? Yes, there's a few ways we propose to address. I'll just say the sustainability, the sort of greenness of the district. GSI is not technically required, but we do propose a sort of bonus, if you will. So currently in the Enterprise Light Manufacturing District and many others- I'm sorry, what's GSI? Sorry, green stormwater infrastructure. So rain gardens, even pollinator gardens, bios, whales, wetlands, that sort of thing, constructed wetlands. The St. Paul Green Streets Project has great examples of green stormwater infrastructure along the street with the stormwater collection system. The lot coverage standard in the district today is 80%. And we propose to retain that 80%, but the district would allow up to 90% lot coverage if all of the pervious surface in the district is composed of green stormwater infrastructure. So this is a way to collect as much stormwater as possible and filtrate it. This is also intended to take pressure off of the Barge Canal, Lake Champlain, and Inglisby Brook. And we think the MOU process will determine the potential loads that these bodies of water will be forced to take on, given the intensity of development and provide some rationale and some tools to combat that and retain as much stormwater as possible on site. Additionally, regarding the sustainability, there's a couple tools that we propose to incentivize the construction of mass timber buildings. So you might have heard of cross-laminated timber, that sort of thing. That is an approach we propose that taller buildings, if they're constructed of mass timber, would receive a sort of floor plate bonus or not be limited to the 10,000 square foot bonus. There's also a provision to... Sorry, what's that bonus? Bonus of what floor area height? Yeah, so as currently proposed, building floor plates are limited to 15,000 square feet and floors seven and eight would be limited to 10,000 square feet. So at some point, if a developer decides to go up to seven or eight, they would have to step those top floors back. But if these buildings are constructed of mass timber, which is one of the most sustainable ways to build and those floor plates could reach back to 15,000 square feet. Mass timber, I would just say, is an emerging technology. It's well established in other parts of the world and it's gaining traction in North America. There's some tall buildings being built out of mass timber. The carbon emissions in a mass timber building are significantly lower than a building constructed of concrete and steel and we're trying to incentivize that. And we're seeing more and more of these buildings across the country and we hope to see them built here. I think Vermont is a great place and the Southland even symbolically would be a great place to see mass timber given the history of timber in the area. There is the last provision I will say is that the district is intended to be mixed use which implies that ground floors of buildings should be active with store fronts or with commercial or community services. But we do acknowledge that it can be difficult in today's climate to fill those spaces. Mixed use development across the country is being hampered by a sort of abundance of vacant space. Retailers or developers are simply not able to find tenants for ground floor space. And so one way we propose to sort of potentially head that off is to say that if a developer will construct publicly accessible open space with minimum dimensions to guarantee accessibility and things like that, that they can reduce that ground floor non-residential use requirement. So let's say if we require, if the plan would initially or would at its base require a developer provide 20,000 square feet of ground floor space. If they build a public park adjacent to the building they can reduce that down to something like five. I don't, that's not exact according to the standards but you get the intent. So that's the goal of that bonus. Thank you. Lastly, several people were concerned about whether or not the units would be owner occupied or rental. And we are increasingly a city dominated by rentals and very few home ownership opportunities with near zero vacancy in both categories. But to have community, people feel that it's important to have that kind of investment in the community as well as to stabilize one's rent. The best way to stabilize your rent is to own it so that the rent will not go up, at least not up more than the taxes which you get a vote on. My initial response to that was that zoning doesn't really get at home ownership. However, then I thought a little bit about our zoning code and I realized we actually have prevented home ownership in our zoning code by preventing rental apartments from converting to owner occupancy. And that kind of made me think while generally it's not part of the zoning code, is there something that we can do to encourage the development of individually owned units rather than landlord owned units? That's a good question that comes up a lot of times when we're talking about adding new homes, especially through these policy changes. And I will just note that you're right, we don't typically regulate whether it's owner or rental through zoning. I think the policy that you're talking about that limits the conversion of rental housing into condos is actually a separate standalone part of the city's code of ordinances, not inside our zoning ordinance. But I think with CEDO's involvement in this and the further planning work that we hope to do through the MOU and the collaborative effort with the other property owners in the south end, we hope to explore some of the options that are available for us to think about home ownership as well as part of some of these forthcoming developments. I mean, from a developer perspective, I know that the biggest barrier to actually building condominiums that could be affordable for people to buy is the requirement that financing puts on them that if you want to build rental units, they will just loan you the money. If you want to build condominiums, you have to sell 51% of the condominiums before they will give you the money. And this is a conundrum that I wonder if a financial program from the city might be able to help the developers overcome that for the benefit of the community. And I don't know if there are federal funds that could assist in that. If there are local banks that could team together, local banks should have an interest in the health of our community. So I'll just put that out there. Thank you. Thanks very much, Councillor Shannon. We'll go to Councillor Bergman and then go to the mayor. Well, first I want to echo all the praise that you've gotten and it's well deserved. And secondly, I want to appreciate the time that we are taking. This is incredibly important because it's not just about housing. As important as housing is, it's also about the economic health of the city. It's a manufacturing base. It's enterprise base, if you want to call it like that. And you have heard me in the past talk about my concern for eliminating or not making sure not to eliminate the ability for us to expand our enterprise uses so that we're not a bedroom community. And I'm just wondering whether there has been a study of the land that's actually open throughout the rest of the district, not the overlay, but the rest of it for enterprise expansion. And if you have that, I'd love to hear it. If not, I'd love for you to get that and put that out in a document. That's a great question and I'll try to be brief just because of the time. So Plan BTV Southend actually did do an analysis of all of the properties within the enterprise district and looked at their potential for growth at least from a lot size perspective. How much more building area could fit on a lot? I think as part of, personally I've been involved in my tenure with the city in probably almost a dozen zoning changes in the Southend that have been initiated at the request of business owners in the Southend who are really interested in finding ways to continue to have a vibrant business district in the Southend, but recognizing some of the evolving market demands without us doing anything from a policy perspective. So as part of a number of those conversations, we often will look to things like current market research about the industrial market in Chittenden County. And I think we have definitely found that the market is not non-existent, but is weaker in the Southend than it is in other parts of Chittenden County. So I know that there are some efforts underway right now with some businesses in the Southend. I think Rhino's expanding. So it's not that it never happens, but we don't have kind of a comprehensive assessment of the full demand for new light manufacturing space, for example, in the Southend because we usually rely on kind of triangulating those other sources. I appreciate that. I think it would be helpful for me, I don't know about anybody else here at the council, but for me to evaluate this dramatic change with that information. So I'd ask that that be as robust as possible. I appreciate your answer. You know, the form-based codes deal with not, they're not very prescriptive. And, you know, you've got this tension between non-residential and residential uses, you know, just in terms of noise, in terms of hours of use, and et cetera, you all know that. So I'm just wondering, it would be helpful for us, I think. I don't know that I need so much of a detailed answer, but what the protections are that will exist in your form-based codes and what you were talking about, that will allow us to feel comfortable about the compatibility of what could be conflicting uses. And that way we can avoid some things like noise complaints that we just had a hearing on, something like that. So that wasn't sort of detailed there. I think that would be helpful for us to get. Yeah, we're happy to talk to you more about that as this comes forward to the council. I think just briefly, I'll say, this is a form code very, very light. We, and actually the question that you're asking is the precise reason why we decided not to go for a full form code in this area. Obviously, because we're talking about such large sites and the potential for the complete re-envisioning of these sites, we care a lot about what those buildings look like, how big they are, how they relate to streets, et cetera, but we knew that there would be much higher level of sensitivity to the interrelatedness of the uses themselves in this district. So we're trying to implement kind of overall form standards within our base zoning code rather than totally flipping it for this area. So happy to talk more about the details of what that looks like. I think that will be helpful for us to understand more granularly. The same is true of the definition of heavy manufacturing and those other uses that we're gonna prohibit as to what that means. And I also think that it would be helpful and this starts to segue into the DPW aspects of it. It would be also helpful to just get a real understanding of what, and I know that it's ballpark because things can change, but the maximum number of units, the maximum square foot for the other unit of the other properties that would be developed, some sense of what could we see if we are successful in that area. And I think that that's critically important as we start to look, even as we phase at things. And I'll go to a question to Chapin to make this, I think, more specific afterwards, but. So yeah, initially very high level we have looked at what the capacity might be at least on the housing unit side. And right now we're kind of generally working with a number of around 500, but the purpose of the MOU planning process is to help us get more into the specifics of what a more real number could look like. Great. The reason I ask is because for example, the TUC had a conversation about the sewage retention tank at Callaghan. And so the question I have for you Chapin is, I'm sorry, I just don't recall whether this plan and such a large development in that area requires then for you to reevaluate what is an essential but very expensive project. Yes, the current conceptual design of the sewage storage tank is for current demand. So additional sizing and design work would need to be done with this, which is again the value of the MOU and having the RPC pay for 80% of this work so that we can do it holistically, hopefully on the front end and not chasing our tail. That makes a lot of sense. And I know that we were looking at moving forward with that pretty expeditiously if my recollection is correct. So the timing of all this and the coordination is critically important for us not to build something that has to then be replaced. And maybe I will just end with a question related to impact fees. You've got all these impacts from development. And so we've got a study that is gonna be happening. But currently, right? And the sequencing of this becomes critically important. Is our current ordinance in your estimation sufficient to have the developers cover the impacts from the infrastructure, traffic, sewer, stormwater that we're likely to see here? And if not, then the timing and the interrelation of them become critically important. I think the question you're raising about the appropriateness of our current impact fees is actually the purpose of that study. So I think we're at the point where that assessment hasn't been updated in several decades. And so I wouldn't wanna prematurely comment on that because that's what our goal is to do to look through that study. But I will say in the vast majority of cases for many communities, the cost of impact fees alone would never cover the cost of all of the demands on infrastructure. We just couldn't probably ever get away with a policy that would charge that much on new development. And so again, this is part of the reason why we're interested in this MOU process is to understand especially where there are efficiencies that could be gained by looking at this area, its needs upfront, its constraints and its needs, what some of the creative solutions can be to help us meet some of those needs and how we could bring other resources to bear, especially through potentially through outside grants and funding that we can bring to the table as a municipal partner, what some of the potential partnership opportunities could look like to help us just move this forward in a much more cost-effective way. I will look forward to that and I would just end by saying all of the traffic related impacts that we are seeing reinforce my tripling down on the support for the TDM that I believe will get back and how important and essential having that will be to making this a success. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. We'll go to the mayor and then to Councillor McGee and then if we can wrap up that way we can get to the next item before public forum. Thank you. Thank you, President Paul. This has been a great discussion and really appreciate the level of engagement and attention from the council. Thank you to this team and the others who've been involved in this for working very hard for a year now to advance all of this south end and planning. Of course, some of this goes back even farther than that but since the announcement a year ago of this new 10 point housing action plan that really helped launch a lot of this work and it's all been advancing somewhat, some elements of it in the public but a little bit behind the scenes I really thought it was important that the team come and share this kind of comprehensive big picture view now so that the council understands how all these different initiatives fit together and that the public understands that as well because after here as Councillor Bergman sort of referenced this is going to accelerate and there will be a number of decisions coming to the council relatively quickly. The first we hope is coming as soon as next week which is this initial MOU agreement which is still I hope is understood as a preliminary conceptual agreement. It's one that really just allows this coordination work to continue move forward and to move forward quickly and for us to access these planning funds that are available from the RPC. If that is successful and that initial MOU results it could well result in there being a much more detailed, more substantive development agreement to come on the heels of it down the road but that is farther out but the first of these decisions could be in front of you quite quickly and then as you heard the zoning process we are hoping is concluding at the planning commission stage this month and will be before the council early next year which I'm sure the council will wanna dig into the details that you can sense to that in the conversation tonight already there will be a lot of details to review. It is my hope that we are going to be able to work through those with some sense of focus and urgency in that we're off to a good start with the kind of numeric goals that we have laid out in the most recent action plan. We went through that together last time we gathered. It's also clear from those numbers we're not gonna get to this doubling of production. If I don't see really how we do that without getting the zoning in place for this important really dramatically underutilized section of the city currently so that housing can begin to advance in 2023. It's gonna be key I think if we're serious about addressing our housing and homelessness goals with a significant increase in production. So thanks again to this team, great team for laying this all out thank you to our partners some of whom have been here tonight and looking forward to getting into the details with the council in the weeks ahead. Thank you Mayor Weinberger we'll go to Councilor McGee. Thank you and thank you all very much for the comprehensive presentation. I'm supportive of these efforts overall and grateful that we're having conversations about putting housing on dramatically underutilized land currently. That said I just wanna make sure that we don't forget kind of where we started a year ago with this conversation and the removal of more than two dozen folks from Sears Lane who were residing there and so that in having these discussions and moving these forward we're remembering that any housing that goes up on that site should be made available to folks who are transitioning out of houselessness and that there is a solid mix of affordable housing as we look to develop that land. I just wanna make sure that we don't lose sight of where we started a year ago, thank you. Thanks very much and seeing no other comments thank you Megan, Charles, Samantha and Chapin for all being here. We trust that you'll be able to post the PowerPoint that you just, yes. We'll share that so that it gets posted. Wonderful, thank you and we'll look forward to next steps to come which it appears will be coming pretty quickly, thank you again. We'll move on to our next agenda item which is item number three, an update on district energy. For this update we have Darren Springer, the Burlington Electric General Manager, Neil Lunderville, President and CEO of Vermont Gas and Michael LaHerne of Evergreen Energy who are with us. And I see that there are also two more people whose names appear to be Darren Springer who are sitting on our Zoom. So I'm not really sure if they are other parts of, I'm not really sure who they are, you can certainly let us know. And we're here to welcome your remarks. If you could possibly be able to limit yourself to the first 15 to 20 minutes, we'll try to be able to get this in perhaps before public forum. So thank you all for being here. Thank you, good evening. So I have joined on my computer so I can share my screen and we also have Michael LaHerne from Evergreen using my Zoom link to join us and he's got his phone and his video separated. So hence the multiple versions of me that are on Zoom this evening. But we're excited to be here to talk about district energy, provide an update to the council. Glad to be joined by Neil Lunderville. Colleagues at VGS have been critically helpful in this effort and Michael LaHerne from Evergreen who has been the consultant for this project and has been engaged for a number of years with us. First, I just thought given that there's been a long timeline for this project that we would just walk through a little bit of the context just to start off with. District energy has been a long held goal obviously relative to the McNeil plant really since the beginning. It was literally written into the permit for the plant that was issued in 1981 that we would try to connect excess steam from the plant to customers like the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont Medical Center. There's been a variety of studies over many decades looking at the project but it had been unable to advance and the current version that we're talking about started in late 2018 and is based on a steam system that would connect the McNeil plant to customers like the hospital and the University and we've worked on it with Evergreen and VGS from the start. We had three phases of feasibility work each that took roughly a year and that we provided substantive updates to the council after each of those. And then this past summer we visited with you to share a couple of substantive items. First that we had reached a letter agreement to determine kind of future work for the project with our key partners, Burlington Electric, the city, VGS, Evergreen, the hospital, the university and the Interveil Center. All were signatories to the letter agreement. We brought to you for approval a resolution that supported the creation of a 501C3 nonprofit that would be managed by Evergreen and that the city and BED would serve on the board of to help manage the financing and design of the project which you approved and we brought to you approval for over five million funds from Senator Leahy that had been secured at the federal level for the project which you also had approved. So the work that's taken place since the letter agreement was signed has been significant. We've been working and we'll get into more detail but we've been working to get actual construction bids from four local construction companies which that process is underway. We've been working with the state, with VEDA and other agencies of the state relative to financing for the project, looking at interest rates and financing. We're working with the joint owners of McNeil which is Burlington Electric, GMP and BEPSA on the pricing for the steam and we've been working with our colleagues at VGS and Evergreen on the overall kind of system financial design. So a lot of important work has happened. We'll share some additional substantive news a little later in the presentation. I did just wanna highlight that this really is important for us from a net zero 20, 30 perspective and the McNeil plant's really important to us as well. McNeil is playing a really unique role right now because we are seeing historically high winter energy prices in the region. I just went down to Holyoke where the headquarters is for ISO New England which is our grid operator. We're seeing prices that are causing double digit and in some cases triple digit rate increases for other utilities in the region. Burlington Electric as you know is only raising rates 3.95% this year. If we didn't have McNeil to run during these high winter times we would be looking at something like a 24% rate increase just this year. So economically it's been critical for us. It's also really important when you go down to the ISO New England you see that in the winter time there's not enough renewables on the system. It's primarily natural gas and fossil fuels, some nuclear limited amount of wind and hydro. And so McNeil is one of those renewables that can run in the winter time and we really focus on trying to run during that period not only because it's good from an economic standpoint but it's displacing fossil fuel use on the grid. And we've had good run last year. We're hoping to have another good run this year. What district energy would do is take waste heat and additional steam from McNeil and use it to provide renewable thermal energy in the city. And this could potentially reduce emissions for the commercial sector, natural gas emissions by between 11 and 15%. It's definitely the most significant step we can take single step to help reach our city's climate goals in a particularly difficult sector to reduce emissions. So we're really pleased to be able to be working on this it's important for the McNeil plant it's important for our net zero 2030 goals. And we think we have a good structure in place. So I'm gonna turn it to Neil and I'm gonna share my screen here. We're gonna walk through a little bit of the the kind of structure for the district energy project. Then Michael is gonna update us on the routing and the design for the project and then we'll share some additional news. So over to Neil and I'll share my screen here. Great, thank you Darren and good evening everyone. It's great to be back with you. Maybe before I get into the schematic of this maybe just talk a little bit about VGS and maybe the first question thing is why is the gas company here doing a district energy project with renewable steam? And I want to answer that question. So some of you may know that I was before Darren I was general manager of Burlington Electric Department a great role, wonderful role starting in 2014. And one of the very first projects that Mayor Weinberger put on my desk was district energy. So I've been working on this project one faster than other since 2014. And one of the early things that I did when I was at Burlington Electric was I got VGS involved to be a partner because even then we saw the need to be thinking about how we can be more proactive to fight climate change. And now that we see what's going on everywhere in the world, we know that that time is of the essence here. And indeed that's how we feel at VGS. I arrived at VGS in 2020 and VGS had already started its transformation. The first part of that transformation is just an acknowledgement that the core product that we have, the product that we've served our customers with very well for almost 60 years now 55,000 customers, that's natural gas. It's a product that also impacts the climate. It is contributing to climate change and the methane being one of the most destructive greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon dioxide emissions that come from the combustion. And so as a thermal company, a thermal energy services company, we recognize the need to do better and to make sure that we are making a positive impact on climate change. In fact, fighting against climate change with all that we do. And our climate change sets out three important things and the last one ties in to district energy. First, we need to use less energy overall. This is about energy efficiency, it's about weatherization and making sure that simply we are using less wherever we're using it in our homes, in our offices and large buildings. And Burlington Electric has been a great partner in that and Darren and I work very closely weekend and week out making sure that we are delivering efficiency services, thermal efficiency services for Burlington customers. The second thing that we're doing at VGS is we are pioneering in-home innovation, in particular heat pumps, electric heat pumps. We are the first gas-only utility in America to sell electric heat pump water heaters directly to people's homes, displacing fossil gas use and helping us meet our climate goals. We're doing this across the board, we're moving into spaces like geothermal as well that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and displace fossil gas. The third piece is expanding our portfolio of alternative supply options. This means directly displacing fossil gas in the pipeline. This might be RNG, renewable natural gas, it might be green hydrogen, but it's certainly gonna be district energy. So this district energy project that we've been working on here in Burlington where we are using renewable steam heat will ultimately serve the hospital, the hope, we hope the university and other larger customers to displace fossil gas right on our system. The project itself will displace about 170,000 MMBTU of fossil gas. This is a significant amount. And as Darren said, one of the largest things Burlington can do to meet its net zero energy goals. Let me show you a little bit of how it works here. I'm gonna attempt to walk you through this schematic really quickly. So you see here on the, if you see the cursor on the screen, there's the McNeil plant. They're actually, it's a little hard to read here, but there are three lines. There are two lines moving toward the right. That is the steam energy and the renewable energy credits. And so when McNeil generates that steam, ultimately that steam is sold to the nonprofit, the Burlington district energy business. This is what's run by Evergreen. Michael Ahern will talk about just a minute, the routing of this pipe. This is ultimately sold to them. They turn around and deliver it up the hill to us at VGS. And we turn around and immediately move it out, the steam energy out to our customer, who is the hospital. Then you see them here in the lower right hand corner. So it could be the hospital, the university and other area customers that can use steam heat. This is where the natural gas is displaced. There's an additional move that happens here. So that's the physical delivery of energy. But also there's what we call a renewable energy credits in here, the district, the DES renewable credits. All of those are sold to VGS as well from the nonprofit. We in turn sell them back out to the hospital, to other area businesses, residencies, the city itself. And importantly, credits that are not sold to any of those organizations will also be backstopped by VGS. So we're gonna be buying some of those credits ourselves, blending them into our overall portfolio of energy and sharing the cost among all of our 55,000 customers. So taken together, this system provides a really unique way to deliver the steam energy, the renewable steam energy from McNeil to the hospital, displacing the fossil gas and then sharing the cost of the renewable energy credits across both customers in the city and across our entire network. This is the real magic of how this system works is one that we've been, you know, the initial kind of conceptions of this project where did not work like this. This is something that we've worked on over time with our partners at Burlington Electric and the customers and Evergreen Energy. But it's one that we believe has a lot of promise and that will ultimately be the keystone for making this project come to life. Darren, back to you. All right, and just to kind of put some additional points on that, this really builds on kind of a community solar model. This is very much like a community solar project where even if you're not connected to the solar project, and in this case, even if you're not connected to the district energy system physically, if you're a VGS customer, you'd be able to buy renewable credits and the renewable credits represent essentially the premium cost of paying for the infrastructure, of putting the pipes in the ground and building them and paying the debt for that project. The steam energy is actually relatively inexpensive. It's the infrastructure that's expensive, that needs to be financed, needs to be paid for, and that's what this structure really gets at. I'm going to move my screen share over to a different item here in a moment. I'm gonna ask Michael Ahern if he'd be able to walk us through this map here, which is the latest routing for the project and then we'll close with some additional kind of next steps and updates. Michael, over here. Thanks, Darren. Yeah, thanks, Darren. Thank you to everybody for allowing us to speak again tonight. As Darren mentioned earlier, we've been going through a fairly extensive design and development process to get to the point of what you see right now. Generally speaking, the routing that you're looking at on the map isn't all that different than what we have put forth before. However, there are some nuances that are very important to touch upon. As Darren noted, we are in the process of bidding, receiving lump sum pricing from contractors, from local contractors for all of the work. We broke the work up into two different packages. The first package is the work that has to happen at McNeil as well as the work that has to happen up at UVM and UVM MC to interconnect to the existing systems at each facility. The other package is the distribution, the steam and condensate distribution that will deliver the steam from McNeil up to the customer buildings. And that's what you see on this map here depicted with the red line. The biggest nuance that we have now is really how we get from the McNeil facility itself out onto Interveil Road, and then ultimately on the prospect up to North and then Mansfield and Colchester and then ultimately to the two primary customers. And through a very extensive archeological and wetlands and permitting process leveraging the expertise of a number of local consultants to get us to the point that we're at now, we've identified a path that gets us off of the McNeil property through a previously cleared, previously a routing that had been previously cleared archeologically, which was very important because that eliminates one of the risks that would be attributed to the project of, obviously it would be very bad for us if we ran into an archeological site that then would have significant, could put significant delays on the project. So our local consultants have spent a significant amount of time putting together all the necessary documentation to show the routing that you currently see on this map being one that we feel will be able to work through the permitting process. We have a series of permits that we were gonna have to submit on here and sometime very soon to be able to allow us to construct in this as shown on this route. And that this is what this routing here is what is actually being priced out in the market today. The other significant difference from what you've previously seen would be up near the UVMMC site. If, Darren, if you don't mind scrolling down so that we can see the connection point. And our connection at UVMMC is on the, now on the west side of the hospital by the new Miller building there when the Miller building was constructed a an underground utility corridor tunnel was installed to enable us to connect to the hospital steam system very near to where you see us going into the building there. So it's a some more cost advantageous solution. It also is a less disruptive solution which keeps us off the sledding hill and keeps us being a bit more of a good neighbor to the community up within that area. We also altered a little bit our connection at UVM going into Perkins Hall. We worked very closely with UVM facility operation staff and identified them the least disruptive connection point there with each of the, with all of the routing that you see here that certainly initiates a need for us to be submitting various permits as well as working with UVM and UVMMC and McNeil around their existing act 250 permits. We have been collaborating very closely with all of the stakeholders. They've been fantastic partners in helping us get to where we are today. And as Darren will mention in a little bit and team us up for some time here in December to start to initiate the full permitting process for the full list of permits that we need to be pursuing for the district energy system before construction can commence. Thank you, Michael. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and come back to the main screen. So there are a number of significant items we're still working on. We are still waiting to get that construction pricing. We're still working on the financing rates. We're still working on the steam pricing with the joint owners and BGS. We're still working with the federal government on the reviews to bring in the five plus million that Senator Leahy secured for us. So there are some caveats to say that this project has some additional work to go before we are definitely able to move ahead. However, we have a significant milestone to share with you tonight, which is as Michael just alluded to, the project is ready for the first time in its history to move to State Act 250 permitting. And we, and by we I mean in this case the Burlington District Energy Nonprofit in coordination with all of the various partners are planning to submit that permit application in mid December in just a couple of weeks. So we're very pleased to be at this point. We express our thanks to the Medical Center, UVM, the Intervail Center and all the partners who have been involved to get us to this point. And we're very happy to be able to share that news with you this evening to be able to take this step for the first time with District Energy in its 40 some odd year odyssey to get us to this place. So we'll pause now for questions that you might have. And thank you again for having us this evening. Thank you. Thank you for the informative presentation. We'll first go to Councilor Hightower and if there are other Councillors who wish to comment or ask questions, please let me know. I have a few questions. Do you want me to hit you with them all at once or go one at a time? Sure. So the first question is, it looks like this will be more connecting on the West side but I just want to check because I know a lot of the residents on the East side have had issues with low frequency sound at the UVM Medical Center. So I guess I'm curious, Steve doesn't sound that loud, do we know anything about frequency of noise or anything else that could be associated with this project that could disrupt nearby communities? I'll pause. I'll do it at a time. I'm gonna ask if Michael wants to address that one. Yeah. So during construction, you'll hear typical construction noise, street construction. So some digging and some earth compaction and things such as that. Once the system is operational, nobody will know that it's there. All the pipe is underground. It'll come into the building's underground. It does not have a noise to it. Great. Thank you. And then the community solar model component of this project, not that it's solar. And sorry if I just didn't understand this part of it. So folks can buy the renewable energy credits. Does that mean that UVM is not purchasing all of the renewable energy potential of this project or what is that agreement looking like? So yeah, and Neil may wanna add to this. The way we've structured it is really that the premium for the project would be shared among a variety of potential partners. So we envision that the city would participate with some city buildings, that UVM and UVM Medical would participate, that BGS would participate, and that other customers in the city who might have their own carbon goals might wanna participate. But I think that's the way that the structure works is not to put the entire premium on one or maybe two customers, but to really try to share the premium and the benefits accordingly. And then my last question is just coordination with DPW because I did see that some of the streets that we're going through are ones that I know just got long, long paving. And so just future disruption that folks can expect on those same streets. Yeah, Michael may wanna add here. We definitely have been coordinating with DPW about our timeframe for this project. Hasn't always aligned perfectly, but Michael, do you have any specific thoughts? I'm sorry, I missed a little bit of the question. Just in terms of coordination with DPW and disruption on streets that may have already just been worked on. Yeah, so we've been working, collaborating very closely with DPW and we were really hoping to get ahead of the work, the work that recently happened on coal chest firmware, unfortunately, I'm not able to do that. So when a final schedule is set for the project, we will be working very closely with DPW to see if there's any shared work that can occur. At the moment, we've not locked down on any of that just because it's not 100% certain exactly when construction welcome ends. Thank you, those. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, Councilor Hightower. We'll go to Councilor Barlow to be followed by Councilor Carpenter. Thank you, President Pollan. Thank you for the presentation. Councilor Hightower asked my question about the roads and the disruption and potential for conflict with some of the paving work that's going on. But I did have another question around the connection points. I'm assuming that the Perkins and Miller buildings are just connection points and there'll be further distribution either onto the UVMMC campus or onto the UVM campus from there. Is that the intention? That's exactly right. So for UVMMC, the connection point is at the Miller building, but then that distributes out into the entire hospital complex. For the Perkins building, it's a small list of UVM buildings that we will be serving off of their low pressure steam system. And that was a logistical decision just from a cost effectiveness perspective as well as an operational decision because there's only a certain amount of steam that we can deliver to them. And their concentrated system in that area, it operates under different pressure which made it really conducive to connecting those buildings. So it's a handful of UVM buildings in that area. Okay, thank you. And my other question was around the steam capacity. Obviously there's a finite capacity of steam that's coming out of McNeil. Is this intended to use all of it or is there still additional steam that could be generated from the excess power? No, we're essentially using what we can pull off of the fifth port on the turbine to be at the pressures that we need. And so when we size the piping, we've added some capacity in the pipe sizing. So we've sized it up just a little bit for very small incremental costs so that we can connect some other buildings. There's, we've had good discussions with the folks at the Interveil food cooperative. We'd like to connect them. There's a potential that possibly we can serve the Trinity campus at a future date with some lower grade forms of energy. But generally speaking, we're in the realm of what we can deliver just because of the pipe sizing that we're gonna install on the initial construction. As you can imagine, you could go bigger and bigger and bigger, but that just comes with excess costs. And then you're asking the initial customers to bear that burden. So we have to run a little bit of a balance to make sure we can still be cost effective for the initial partners with some contingency for growth. Just in terms of McNeil, we really are using all of the waste heat that's available and some additional steam as well. So it's a 50 megawatt plant, roughly. It's capable of running at 54 megawatts. District energy when it's on, will be about four megawatts worth of output just to give you a perspective on that. Okay, thank you. That's all I have. Great, thank you, Councilor Barlow. We'll go to Councilor Carpenter. I think that answered my question. I was just curious if you would have additional capacity as buildings get added. Doesn't sound like that's the case, but... We'd have, I think the Interveil Center, we're very much hoping to be able to connect to the project. There might be some additional at UVM. What we learned through many feasibility studies, including some that Neil undertook when he was general manager and from this process is there wasn't as much excess energy at McNeil as may have been thought previously. So this route and this design really captures it and moves it to the closest possible loads. And we'd had different iterations looked at going downtown and at one point, but this really is the most economical way to capture that waste heat and additional steam is what we've learned. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Carpenter. Are there any other Councilors seeing none? This is an exciting project. I'm glad to know that it's been 40 years going on. I'm only familiar with the last 20. But it has been, I think your term is appropriate. It has been quite an odyssey that hopefully will come to fruition soon. So thank you again and thank you, Michael, for joining us online. And we'll look forward to next steps. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. So we are now close to the 730 hour and we'll move on to public forum. There are a number of people online that are on Zoom that have asked to speak during public forum and there are a number of people in contois. Just a few items of information. If you're in contois, there's a system on the table in front of us that has three green lights. A green light that will shine when you begin speaking. A yellow light when you have 30 seconds left and then the last light is red and that will shine when your time is up. We ask that you complete your comments, complete the sentence that you might be in the middle of when the sound and the light indicates that your time is up so that we can give everyone equal time and keep the public forum moving. We have a hybrid system for public forum. If you wish to speak in person, there are forms to my right in the back corner of the room, please fill one out and bring it to the clerk who is to my right in the front of the room. If you wish to speak via Zoom, you can go to burlingtonvt.gov slash public forum and when you do that, there will be a form that'll come up. Just complete the form, submit your answers, press send and those answers will come into a spreadsheet that I will see and then I can call on you in the order in which you submit a form. It's been our practice that Burlington residents will have first priority. We'll go to Burlington residents in contois who've submitted a form, then to Burlington residents online, back to Burlington residents in person and then back to our online Burlington residents. The only request that we make of you other than limiting your comments to two minutes is that you please do your best to use respectful language. Please direct your comments to me as the chair and not to anyone else at this table and please do not personalize your comments. We wanna hear what you have to say and it's a lot easier to listen if you do so respectfully. We'll begin public forum. It's now 7.27 and just give me a moment. So we have a number of people who wish to speak who are here in person. The first is Carolyn Bates to be followed by Pike Porter and if you can just come up and join us at this table. And for those who have not done this or do this regularly, just take your time in the sense that just gather your thoughts and then the time will start when you start speaking. It's all right, take your time. If you could just make sure that the green light is on in front of you, on the speaker, on the microphone, Carolyn, right below you, right there. Thank you. Sure. Mechanical, sometimes I'm not. Anyway, I'm Carolyn Bates. I've had a house here since 1978 on Caroline Street, so I'm in the Five Sisters and Preservation Burlington, which is a great organization, found out that I used to be a cement mixing factory. And so I was on another piece of property which is now divided and I own half of the same garage they do. But now on to this eight stories. You're gonna take all of the daylights on off of Lakeside by building something eight stories high. I don't think that's very fair. No one around this area has anything more than two stories or maybe three, maybe there's a four-story building, but eight stories is just way too high, all right? And especially since we're not getting any bonus for going to eight stories as Joan Shannon found out, let's keep it at four. Also, I think since there's gonna be almost no green space about any buildings, it sounds like there could be 80 or 90% filling the lot. I propose that you get the park at the barge canal ramped up and going so that there's at least some place nearby to walk. Yes, they do have a bike path, but I don't know whether they're gonna have lack access to Lakeside because the Sears Lane, I think it's Sears Lane, but anyway, there's a street that's blocked off, so there's only one way to get into Lakeside and the beach. And have you ever been at Pine Street and Maple Street at five o'clock in the evening, all right? You may wait at that stoplight for 20 minutes because the traffic is backed up all the way to Howard Street. So how are you going to manage any more cars? 500 people, does that mean I'm all finished? I've only talked about one minute. Is that all we're allowed? No, it's actually two. Well, anyway, I just want you, with my one sentence then, since we're allowed, you wanna take 25% of the enterprise zone and it's only 4% of the city, so that means it'll only be 3%. You should think very carefully, thank you. Thanks so much. Our next speaker is Pike Porter to be followed by Carol Livingston. Good evening. Earlier today, I sent you all an email suggesting that BED and by extension, the city of Burlington claims that McNeil is carbon neutral. This suggestion is incorrect. What I should have said is that BED general manager, Darren Springer, implies that McNeil is carbon neutral in a February 24th Vermont digger op-ed piece. And he writes, our understanding of climate change, biomass carbon cycle has increased since McNeil was built. The USPEA currently treats emissions resulting from the combustion of biomass from managed forests at stationary sources production as carbon neutral. Darren Springer suggests it again in a Vermont digger op-ed piece dated July 27th when he cites a BED commission study which concluded that McNeil station reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 85% compared with natural gas. This wildly misleading VEIC study assumes that burning wood is carbon neutral and it only calculates non biogenic derived CO2. If the study included biogenic CO2, the results would indicate that burning natural gas is actually less carbon intensive and creates less CO2 than burning wood does. Mr. Springer doesn't explicitly say McNeil is carbon neutral but the BED commission study assumes it is true. So my apologies for the inaccuracy of my earlier email. However, the last CO2 emissions data on the EPA website indicates that McNeil generated over 381,000 tons of CO2 in 2012. Compare that with a Vermont Agency of Natural Resources 2018 estimate of over 731,000 tons of CO2 produced. That's almost double the 2012 EPA estimates. Why the dramatic increase over the last decade? I don't know, maybe wildly, wildly inaccurate estimates. Maybe because Burlington is pushing everything to become electric using McNeil. Thank you, thank you, thanks so much. We need to calculate the emissions coming out of McNeil. Thank you, thanks for those comments. Our next speaker is Carol Livingston to be followed by Jonathan Chappell Sokol. Good evening. I'm Carol Livingston. I live on Calarco Court off Cold Chester Avenue and it's in Ward 1. I came here a couple of weeks ago and talked to you at that point, read the resolution from the Ward 1 NPA and so I come on my own voice today. I know you're looking at final maps and it's been an uneven process. It seems like to me, and I'm sure it's been pretty tedious and difficult for all of you and I appreciate the work that you've invested, particularly by my counselor, Hightower, who's worked really, really hard to try to manage all the different challenges as well as a working group of Ben and Joe and Mark. Thank you very, very much. We trust that you're gonna come up with a decision that balances the needs of all the wards as you try to do with many of your decisions. It's important to understand as we look at the maps, we've heard a lot about the balance of on-campus students but not a lot on the off-campus and I don't even know what the data is that's available. I think I wrote that to you, Ben, today. I just, how we can make that decision without knowing really what the numbers are of off-campus students. I live on a short one block street, eight houses, two of which are owned and managed by people who live off-site and they are filled with students with their parking and sometimes they're lovely and sometimes they're a pain in the neck and I guess it's true with a lot of neighbors but these neighbors, we have to sort of reconnect every year or every six months about this is sort of the mores of being a good adult neighbor and I love the students but they also need to be factored into your decision-making and I'm not sure they really are. The other issue that I think I brought up before too is it's really important to have you connect with the university and their role and the impact that they have on housing in this city is you well know and I feel like the MOU is an opportunity to do that and I hope you really pursue that beyond the redistricting conversations. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Jonathan Chappell Sokol to be followed by Steve Goodkind. Thank you, good evening. I really appreciate your work and I don't envy your work, I'm so glad you're doing it. As a follow on to Carol, with redistricting maps we have usually been shown population by ward and percent of ward comprised of dormitory residents. As I've learned from my neighbors in ward eight that really is insufficient. Any proper assessment of balance at the ward level or among the wards has to include an accounting of residents in owner-occupied property and rental residents as well as the number of dormitory residents. I don't think the people who are upset about ward eight are upset because there are so many students. I think they're upset because there are so few owner-occupied residents. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Steve Goodkind to be followed by Robert Bristow-Johnson. Good evening. Thank you, President Powell. Is it two minutes or three? It's two. Okay. There seems to be something not quite right with the yellow light. I don't, not really sure, but we are timing it so it is the full two minutes. Go caution and stop. Okay, let's go quick. Tonight the city council, I guess you've already heard one of the proposals, is gonna be hearing about two projects in Burlington designed to reduce the CO2 footprint of the city. One's a change in the building code, the other was the energy project you just heard about, the Waste Energy Project. Both those projects were well intended, have one common Achilles' heel and that is they rely on the continued operation of the McNeil Woodfire Generating Plant for heat and or electricity. And I think you heard one of the other speakers talk about this. I think it's really time before you start adding commitments and extending the life of that plant, maybe indirectly, that you begin to question what Burlington Electric actually is telling you about how much CO2 is produced by that plant. They seem to be counting any of the emissions as neutral as they don't exist. But as you heard the other speakers say and some information I've seen says that EPA estimates between 400 and 500,000 tons of CO2 or emitted by that plant every year. And the number I guess recently was even higher than that. That's 150% of what Burlington reports is their total CO2 footprint. This is above and beyond that. I think it's time you, SBD, to show their cards and to show what they're thinking and why and find out how much actually comes out of that plant because there is an actual number. They may declare a neutral, but that doesn't make it neutral. It's hundreds of thousands of tons and you don't have to count in your report maybe, but it's happening. I think what you ought to be doing is asking some very simple questions of Burlington Electric. One would be how many tons does a plant actually produce? Forget about netting this out or netting that out or giving in terms of CO2 per kilowatt used by Burlington. Just how many tons does that facility put out? Easy number for them to get. The next thing you should ask is how long will it take for the CO2 that is emitted this year to be uptake, and by the regrowth of the forest that were cut down to produce the wood for the plant? Let me just give you two more seconds. Do the same thing for 2050, a crucial year in most of the world's planning for climate crisis activities. Do the same thing then, get the numbers and then look at that and see if you really believe that plant has any place in our electrical future and any reason why it shouldn't begin to be phased out immediately, thank you. Thank you. Robert Bristow-Johnson, please have a seat. We're just gonna go and reset this so it'll take a second to see if we can't get the lights working correctly. You're done? Okay. Well, they're very efficient over here. Please, go ahead, Robert. So, ad hoc committee on redistricting, there was one takeaway from that that was unmistakable and then there was maybe only three or four other things that I can remember. The unmistakable one is we hate Ward 8 as it is. We don't want Ward 8 where it is. We don't like Ward 8 like that and that is the unmistakable takeaway. The other things they didn't like was they didn't like the district counselors versus ward counselors. Some of them wanted us to go back to seven wards. We got at least two or three, three or four folks that said that, and this really was inexcusable of me. They didn't like the line going down King Street. They didn't want the King Maple neighborhood divided and they pointed out that Bob and Mill Apartments south of Maple is really part of that neighborhood. So, as bad as the line is down King Street, you really don't want to do that and you don't want to put a line down Maple Street at least west of Pine because you'll be dividing this neighborhood where these folks have a half a mile of industrial whatever barge canal is to the south of them. They're attached to the downtown neighborhood, not south of them. Then the other quick thing is there's a map that is a downtown, the last thing was there was a downtown ward that people ask about and if we go with either the version 1.3 or version 2.3 that popped on the website, I saw it first at about five o'clock. We're gonna be hitting zero for four on any of those requests. We're not gonna give these folks anything that they ask for and they might legitimately wonder if we were listening. Thank you, Robert. Our last speaker who's here in person is Erhard Monke. If there is anyone else who wishes to speak in person, we'll go to the online, the people that are on Zoom but please feel free to fill out a form and we'll come back to you. Good evening. Hi, thanks. Thanks for your time and thanks for your work on what is really a thankless task. So I come to this and I don't want to repeat but I will second much of what Robert just said but I come to this as I think most of you know I've been a Berlin resident since 1976 and used to represent Ward One. I'm passionate about the city. I'm very passionate about our neighborhoods and very passionate about Ward One. And the first thing I want to say is Robert just mentioned these two maps popped up at, I think we're at 430 today and for you guys to do a final vote on them tonight, I know you're up against time issues but it just seems like you ought to get a little more with all the back and forth that's happened you ought to get a little more input on the maps that you just posted. I do as I've said before do want to emphasize that I think it would be really great if you could maintain the Ward One boundaries to the extent that you can to be the ones that are the historic boundaries. I think that one of the mistakes that's being made here I understand that you're not looking at off-campus student housing. As I said in my email to you folks I think it's like the elephant in the living room you're ignoring something that's really obvious and that impacts our wards and our neighborhoods. And so that really needs to be factored in as part of the equity issue around making sure that students not that they're undesirable. We all love what UVM and the institutions do for the city but they need to be equally distributed. And if you don't consider all the units that are gonna be built on the Trinity campus I know it's not in the census yet but it will be soon. That really creates a disproportionate impact on Ward One. I sent you a map V24. I think it does a lot of things that folks had asked for. It creates a downtown district. It changes Ward Eight. Although it keeps a lot of the student on campus students in Ward Eight. And it also takes some of the longer term homeowners that are in the Buol Bradley Street neighborhood that used to be part of Ward Two and puts them back into Ward Two. I hope you can consider that. The two maps that were posted obviously the one I like the most is 2.3 because it preserves Ward One the best. Thank you. Thanks so much. So we'll go to people that are online and give us a second to put the timer up. Okay, so the first Burlington resident who is asked to speak is Dan Castragiano. And Dan, I have, oops, enabled your microphone. Please go ahead. Thanks, Castragano. Thanks, Councilor Fahl. I'm resident of Ward Four and I just want to comment on the ED's work this evening.  That's what Bill McKibbin says. This includes trees and fossil fuels. The roadmap as it stands is inherently flawed because it relies on the burning of trees. It's not carbon neutral for a lot of reasons. But I'd like to spend the bulk of my time on the inclusion of, quote, renewable gas as part of the, quote, broad definition of renewable on slide five of the slideshow that will be presented later. This has to be removed. Renewable gas is usually called natural gas but both of these terms are used by the fossil fuel industry to greenwash and to mislead people. It's a gas mostly made of methane.  There are many reasons why fossil gas is not renewable and I can't name them all this evening. The first is we can't be installing new fossil fuel infrastructure. It's almost 2023. We have to be removing fossil fuel infrastructure from buildings and electrify everything and we have the technology. Second is that fossil gas leaks. When the gas leaks in the pipelines, it releases methane which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks of 4% or more would make fossil gas worse than coal in terms of climate change and the 2011 study found total leakage was between 3.6% and 7.9% for gas from fracking and 1.7% and 6% for conventional gas but it doesn't matter if it's coming from landfills or fracking or dairy farms, it leaks. And finally, burning fossil gas in our homes is terrible for our health. It poisons our families. It releases carbon monoxide and benzene. Even when the appliances aren't running, there are carcinogens. Children are more likely to develop asthma and that's why I don't burn fossil fuel in my home because I don't want my son to be unhealthy. So please stop burning things. Stop burning things for electricity and stop burning things in our buildings. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dan. Our next speaker is Sheryl Green. Sheryl, I enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Thank you very much, President Paul. I'm speaking about the redistricting issues that are in front of you and all of us and first want to acknowledge the tremendous complexity as others have in your diligent work. I'm here to speak about the idea of compromise. So my understanding is that there has been compromise going on behind the scenes and that some agreements have been reached and that makes good sense. And then also some changes have happened after that process. What I'm asking is that in your discussions tonight, later in the meeting about this, that there really will be some transparency about who counts at this redistricting table and what that looks like. I should say that I live in Ward 1 and have been very involved here politically for the last 15 years. And as you know, we have counselor Hightower as our sole counselor at this point. We do not have a counselor from Ward 8 and we do not have a counselor from the East District. And so that puts additional pressure not only on one person, but also on all of you about how do you wrap us all in to make this work as best that it can. So as you, and I've been looking very closely and put V2.3 and V1.3 final and Earhart's all next to each other on my screen. There still are lots of differences as you know. Thanks for working to keep as much intact for Ward 1 as you can. And that's all I have to say. Thank you. Great, thank you so much. The next speaker is Ashley Adams. And Ashley, I believe that I found you and your microphone is enabled. Hi, thank you. I'm here because I'm concerned about McNeil's contribution to global heating. A 2018 letter to the European Parliament signed by 784 scientists as well as the subsequent letter this year urged the EU to stop considering the deliberate cutting down of trees and burning them for energy as carbon neutral. They stated that the fate of much of our world's forests, climate and biodiversity are at stake. A letter sent by 200 scientists to US congressional leadership in 2020 stated, scientific evidence does not support the burning of wood and place of fossil fuels as a climate solution. Current science finds that burning trees for energy produces even more CO2 than burning coal for equal electricity produced. And the considerable accumulated carbon debt from the delay in growing a replacement forest is not made up by planting trees or wood substitution. It takes over a century for a forest to grow back, decades to over a century for a forest to grow back. We don't have that time nor can we afford the loss of biodiversity in the face of our biodiversity crisis. In direct contradiction, Burlington Electric's website claims that it is dispelling a mess by stating that McNeil has a smaller carbon profile than fossil fuels. Burlington Electric's net zero roadmap will fully ignore the science on biomass and it does not report CO2 emissions at all from the combustion of wood at McNeil. Moreover, McNeil is Vermont's largest polluter and its emissions endanger the health of the predominantly low income ethnically diverse communities that surround it. Yet the fact versus mispage would have us believe that it is no more than harmless steam coming out of the stacks. As a parent, I keep coming back to the notion that pretending something doesn't exist is childlike and almost comical. On the other hand, most children easily recognize deception. They can be painfully honest and they demand the same in return. If we don't demand the same, if we continue to dance around the truth and tolerate deception and lies, the world will continue to burn. I urge you to not continue to enable this deception. Please stop Burlington Electric's efforts to deceive the public and act immediately to put us on a real path to addressing the climate emergency. Start by honestly counting emissions from all sources. Start planning for a phase out of McNeil. It won't be easy.  Thank you. Thank you so much. If you have comments that you have in writing, you're welcome to submit them and we will enter them into the public record. Our next speaker is Carter Newbezer. Carter, I have found you and have enabled your microphone. Welcome. Thank you all so much. Just wanted to quickly touch upon the McNeil plant to start and natural gas being included in our energy roadmap. Yeah, I mean, natural gas and biomass just are not renewable. And so if we are actually going to get off of fossil fuels like we need to, we need to start by actually counting emissions accurately. So I would encourage all of you to do that and I would rather the city communicate that we're not going to meet a goal by 2030 than have the public think that we are meeting a goal that we're not actually meeting. And we can just have a bunch of citizens not understanding the state of where we're at on climate. The other piece I just wanted to quickly touch upon was redistricting. I think it's off the table, given the maps that are on board docs, but I just wanted to voice my support for moving to an all wards model and eliminating districts. I think districts are inherently more undemocratic than wards. You have larger districts that cost more money for folks to run in, takes more time, more constituents per, for that counselor to report to. And so it makes it a lot harder for working class people, for young people, folks that aren't traditionally in power to participate in the democratic process. And so the smaller the wards, the better representation for different neighborhoods, as well as more democratic because you have more voices that are able to effectively participate. So I did want to voice my support for eight wards with two counselors in each and that's all I have. Thank you so much. Great, thank you so much. Our next speaker is Maddie Pozig and Maddie, I've found you and have enabled your microphone. Please go ahead. Good evening. I'm a resident of Ward 8, having lived on Hunger for Terrace for over 40 years. My neighbors and I would like to first thank the council for all their hard work on redistricting. This process has been long and difficult for all of you on the city council, as well as for the residents of Burlington. I have spoken to you several times before on this topic because throughout much of this process, Ward 8 has had no representation on the council. Why is this? It's because this ward that was created 10 years ago is primarily comprised of a disengaged electorate. All we in Ward 8 are asking for is a ward that has a fair and balanced population like the other seven wards in the city. My neighbors and I feel it's a reasonable request to adjust some of the boundaries to create a diverse electorate in Ward 8. Yet each time we think a final fair and balanced map will be approved, a new map suddenly appears that basically recreates the current problematic Ward 8. My neighbors and I are therefore appealing to your sense of fairness and asking you to endorse the map, version 1.3, which we all support, contrary to some of the statements made earlier during public forum, we in Ward 8 support 1.3. The map version 2.3 basically recreates the current Ward 8 with all its many problems. If you approve this map later this evening, Ward 8 will continue to be problematic for both its residents and consequently, a problem for the governance of the rest of the city. Thank you. Thank you so much. Our next speaker is Sharon Busher and Sharon, I've enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Thank you. So it's time to vote, I guess. And redistricting has been a challenge for this city every time we've had to address it. I was waiting for the last two maps that posted around 430 because I was hoping that there would be an opportunity to have side conversations with residents from Ward 1 to discuss them, but that didn't happen. There wasn't enough time for us to do that. I think that the arguments that are made for one map versus another have been constant. I think that the number of people that live on campus are a factor, but the number of students that live in each person's Ward that are off campus students are a real significant factor. Also, they are not long-term tenants. They are revolving door people and they aren't engaged in the community. They are here to go to school predominantly. And so therefore you end up with what Maddie was talking about. You end up with people whose priority is school and not becoming engaged or involved in their community at the level that award needs. I favored obviously a map that keeps Ward 1 more intact. Both of these give the same percentage of both maps that were posted late, gives a high percentage of on-campus students to Ward 8. And really the difference is how many on-campus students live in Ward 1 and Ward 6. I appreciate how much you've listened to people in Ward 1 and that the maps that you're considering tonight do not gut Ward 1. And I hope that your final decision will resonate for most people that live in this city. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Ann Brenna. Ann, I have found you and enabled your microphone. Please go ahead. Thank you. I'm Ann Brenna. I live in Ward 8. I'm speaking tonight regarding redistricting. I was the Ward 8 representative to the ad hoc redistricting committee and I'm well aware of the community inputs regarding the redistricting of Ward 8. I support the V1.3 map because I believe it addresses the issues that Ward 8 faces, which were described so well by Sharon Buescher, Carol Livingston and Maddie Posig. I don't support the V2.3 map because I feel it just recreates another Ward 8 even if we're not personally part of it. Thank you. Thank you so much. And our last Burlington resident who's asked to speak online is Keith Pillsbury. Keith, I found you and have enabled your microphone. Thank you for your work. Thank you, Councillor Powell. I'm speaking tonight to speak in support of the letter that you received from the Ward 8 residents. We know that we don't have a counselor to speak for us during the real meeting, but we wanted to make sure that you knew that we were united. And I think I'm very proud that we have, I think we have presented a compromise. a large number of students on campus but and we still have a large number of students living in our living units. But I think it's a solution that can work for our district and I speak from the experience of being the ward clerk since the beginning of ward eight. And I think that the new way that ward eight is configured it really keeps ward one pretty much the same. Ward six has always had previous to I guess 2013 Redstone campus. So I think that 1.3 that map really gets to the things that we've been talking about and we really appreciate all the work that's gone into developing this map and appreciate all the work of the city council. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. We'll go back to in person. We have one non-Berlington resident who'd like to speak and that is John Bosange. Good evening. Good evening. Counselors, I'm John Bosange. I lived and worked in Burlington for 33 years and I still spend time here in the city on a daily basis. Even though I've moved to South Burlington I consider Burlington my hometown. Right now the city feels very, very unsafe. And I've lived in major cities. I was raised and I've worked in major cities all up and down the East Coast. So I know what unsafe feels like and I know what it means. And right now the environment here is scaring city savvy people like myself to stay away from events here in the city. 35 years, I've never felt like this. Now I understand this a complex problem. I was a middle school principal. Substance abuse, mental illness, poverty, affordable shelter, guns, support systems are all compounding factors. But none of these problems are excuses to allow the creation of an unsafe hostel in an intimidating environment where there are few officers visible and present. Make no mistake about it. Police presence and visibility are strong deterrents to prevent opportunities for crime. The city council needs to immediately appoint Acting Chief Mirad as a permanent chief. Without this sense of stability and leadership talented recruits will be hesitant to apply for a position for fear of an uncertain future. The funding is there, but the workplace climate must be stable and supportive for the force to grow with talented officers. Time is of the essence. Thefts are up, shoplifting is out of control and drug dealing in our city parks is continuous. Councils who voted to defund the police need to act now. Thank you. Thanks so much. We, John, we do have your comments and writing. Thank you very much. And are happy to enter those in the public record as well. I did, I did want to thank you for taking time to read my full comments. I appreciate that. Of course. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. We have five people online who are non Burlington residents who wanted to speak. The first is Cheryl Joy Lipton and Cheryl, I've enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak now. Hi. Thank you very much for hearing me. Biomass is being you questioned and the people at McNeil and BED do know that they're ignoring that fact. And the biomass task group of the Mont climate council that has been addressing the issue of biomass specifically at McNeil and Rigate. Burning wood is one of the worst things that we can do. Burning forest biomass emits more carbon dioxide than coal. In 2019, 0.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide were emitted from McNeil. Health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Long Association sent a letter to senators and representatives saying burning biomass creates proven harm to human health through direct air pollution impacts. They urged the ending of using biomass. So hundreds of scientists state that it's essential in a letter to President Biden and members of Congress stated that it's essential to remove climate harming, logging and fossil fuel provisions from reconciliation and infrastructure bills. Greenhouse gas, I think you heard this already. Emissions from logging in the US forest are now comparable to carbon dioxide emissions from coal burning and annual emissions from the building sector. Burning biomass for energy increases carbon in the air just like coal, oil, or gas. Calling it carbon neutral is ignoring both the immediate release of carbon and the continuing and continuing carbon sequestration of the forest if left unharvested. So in February this year, last year, scientists and economists sent a letter to the leaders of the US, the EU, Japan and South Korea saying that trees are more valuable alive than dead, both for the climate and for biodiversity. To meet future net zero emissions goals, governments should work to preserve and restore forests, not to burn them. And this past week or a couple of weeks ago, European lawmakers voted to phase out some wood energy subsidies. Thank you, thanks so much for those comments. Again, if you wish to give us written comments, we're happy to enter those into the public record. The next speaker, thank you again. The next speaker is Zach Porter. And Zach, I found you and have enabled your microphone. Thank you, Council President Paul and members of the council. My name is Zach Porter. I'm the executive director of Standing Trees and we're an organization that works to protect and restore forests across New England. I'm based in Montpelier and grateful for the chance to visit with you all tonight. You have an incredible opportunity as the Burlington City Council to help Vermont lead by example and get off of biomass electricity. Right now, world leaders and experts on forest management are converging just a short distance away in Montreal, where they are making the case that the world must get off of biomass electricity. Massachusetts, you may know, just recently ended subsidies for biomass electricity generation. Surely, Vermont is going to soon be on its heels and it makes no sense to keep sinking additional public dollars into a really dinosaur of a power plant. I think you all know better than to kind of follow the greenwashing that has been provided to you this evening and has been for 40 years now. I hope it doesn't take another 40 years for this council to figure out that it's being led along by those who would rather burn Vermont's and New England's forests. More than half of the wood burned at McNeil comes from outside of the state. Just today, 650 scientists submitted a letter calling for us to get off of biomass electricity for action to be taken at COP 15. And just today as well, we see that the Rygate power station in Vermont will very likely soon close because of problems that it's having. This is the destiny of McNeil as well and it would be better for this council to seek other ways of generating electricity and conserving electricity than to keep sinking public dollars into McNeil. So thank you for your time this evening. Look forward to visiting with you maybe in the future about this topic. I hope you'll use me and Standing Trees as a source of information as you make decisions in the future. Thank you. Great, thank you so much. Our next speaker is Judy Dao. And Judy, I found you and enabled your microphone if you can just unmute yourself. Thank you, I'm pleased to be here today. As someone whose grandchildren have lived 15, this is our 15th generation living in Burlington. However, I do live in Essex right now. I for the last two years have been on the Ag and Ecosystems Subcommittee of the Climate Council. And for the last eight months on the biomass task group committee under the Climate Council. And I'd like to quickly run through some of the recommendations that we have currently have drafted and hope to finalize this week to send to the Climate Council. Number one, new electric lead generation biomass facilities in the state of Vermont should not be used. Number two, the Rygate Neo facility should not be expanded. Number three, the Vermont Climate Council recommends that the state plant and prepare for a phase out of wood biomass. All adverse impacts to public health from particulate matter and impacts to quality of life and cultural research should be assessed and quantified. An investment of just transition for Vermont's forest economy that plant coasters shouldn't assess. The Vermont Climate Council should further explore the roles of heat from biomass at the residential and commercial scale as climate solution, the impact on Vermont's forest and others, other and public health. Engagement must occur within residents of Burlington's Old North End, Winooski and other neighborhoods exposed to ambient emissions. I'd like to also make a couple of comments to what Darren Springer had to say. When he spoke to our committees, he told us there would be an increase of greenhouse gases and wood use. Also, the archeological reports that they spoke about that were completed were completed before this site was placed on the state historical register. And to my knowledge, nothing has been done up the hill, only on the land they currently own. Thank you. Thank you so much. Our next speaker is Daniel Batten. And I don't see anyone, Daniel Batten. However, I do see someone who has just identified themselves as Dan. So not sure if that's you, but I've enabled your microphone. That's me, thank you. Sure. I'm coming to you from Bristol tonight. McNeil is the largest air polluter in Vermont, so this plant affects those of us across the state and beyond. According to the US EPA's latest National Emissions Inventory in 2017, out of the 151 industrial air polluters in the state, McNeil is the state's largest industrial source of global warming pollution. They're also Vermont's number one industrial air pollution source of each of these chemicals, acrylene, ammonia, anthracine, antimony, arsenic, benzene, benzopyrene, beryllium, cadmium, carbon monoxide, chlorine, chlorobenzene, chloroform, chromium, cobalt, ethyl chloride, ethylene dichloride, fluorine, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, manganese, methyl bromide, methyl chloride, methyl chloroform, nickel, nitrogen oxide, phenanthrene, propylene dichloride, pyrene, selenium, styrene, and vinyl chloride. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Our last speaker online is Amy Demetrius and I have found you and enabled your microphone. Please go ahead. Hi, I