I'll call to order this meeting of the Liquor Control Board. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Deputy Mayor Jim Duncan. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. So we have one regular item. It is a first and third class liquor license for Capiche, Inc. Good evening. I'm just here to seek approval for a first time liquor license for Ryan Berganti at 348 Main Street, the space previously known as Juniors. So he's just gonna talk a little bit about his restaurant to you. Welcome Ryan, yeah. You wanna introduce yourself and tell us about your business. My name's Ryan Berganti. I have worked at Juniors for the last three years at this location. Previously I started at the Colchester Juniors when I was 15. So I've been there off and on for 15 years. The current owner expanded in Williston and he had to kind of focus his time in that one location. I didn't wanna see this location disappear because it's been such a staple in Colchester and in Winooski for the last 20 years. So I decided I was gonna buy it and keep it going. Keep providing good food and good service to our customers. Awesome. So continuing the existing business. Continuing everything the same. Menu's staying the same. Our staff is staying the same. It's just the ownership change. All right. There any questions from council? I don't know. Sorry. I just didn't have any. Any questions from members of the public? Okay. Hearing no concerns, I would entertain a motion to approve the first and third class liquor license at Sporkapish, Inc. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. All right, so that is the end of our liquor control board meeting agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? Second. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. So it is 6.02. I will call to order the Winooski City Council meeting. First up is agenda review. Any concerns about order of agenda tonight? No. Okay. Next is public comment. So this is space for, if you're here for anything on the agenda, please hold for the agenda item if you can. There's something you wanna speak to that is not in tonight's agenda and that would be the time. We will move on then to our consent agenda. We have our accounts payable warrant from January 4th and subsequent to pay out for October and November. Any questions about those items? No. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? Second. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. We are on to council reports. Thomas? You make it really easy. I do not have anything to report this week. Great, Jim. I do not have anything to report this week. Okay. I have two items. The state legislature finally set committee chairs. So I was able to distribute our legislative priorities throughout the state house. And I also had a meeting last week with Maryl Matthews from the Moonewski partnership for prevention. You may recognize she's been to several of our budget meetings and had also reached out about prevention advocacy. So I had a conversation with her about something we might follow up on later. Essentially more details around the, what she had shared about trying to limit density of cannabis stores in one location. Oh, I also had a meeting with two Moonewski High School teachers about potentially doing some student collaboration which is very exciting. We'll be talking tomorrow. Bryn? Just a reminder that the Municipal Infrastructure Commission is meeting next Thursday, January 19th, starting at 6.30 and we'll be in the community room at the pool. And welcome anybody to join. We won't have a hybrid option. So that will be just in person. And that's the only updates I have right now. All right. All right. The two items I have are we are going, we aren't meeting as a safe, healthy, connected people commission this month will be reconvening in February. This week though, on Thursday, the 12th of 6 p.m. via Zoom, we will be having a special meeting of the Inclusion and Performing Commission. Some of the items we'll be looking at for that include the Just Cause Eviction Charter Change, the draft info sheet, thinking about the pilot for stipend funds for commissioners. As well as general review and discussion of the equity audit. Thank you. That reminds me, I should also share Thursday, this Thursday at 6.30 planning commission is meeting to continue discussing the section of our zoning related to parking. That is a hybrid meeting. So you can come in person or via Zoom, but Zoom is encouraged because we do not have the Tom meeting TV support to make it an easy hybrid meeting. Okay, city updates. City updates for January 9th, 2023. As you may, as you know, we're continuing the fiscal year 2020 for budget meetings tonight. Community members are encouraged to get engaged in the process. The public safety budgets will be represented later tonight. Next Monday, January 17th, council will discuss any changes to the proposed budget. January 23rd, they will vote on the budget when you ski voters will vote on for March 7th, 2023. If you would like to share your input, please do so by January 23rd. You may contact staff at<PHONE_NUMBER> or budget at when you ski VT.gov. City counselors may be reached out to by email, which is first initial last name at when you ski VT.gov. You can find their contact information on the city council page of the website and Paul, if you would drop all that contact info in the chat, please. If you would like, if you need COVID-19 test kits, they are available for free at City Hall, the library and the senior center during regular hours. And finally, if you're interested in running for local office on town meeting day, note the deadline to file paperwork is 5 p.m. on Monday, January 30th. There are two city council seats up for election and three school district seats up for election. The two city council seats are for two two-year terms. The school district seats are the treasurer for a three-year term and two school district trustee seats, one for a three-year term and the other for a two-year term. To appear on the ballot, you must be a Winooski resident and file a consent of candidate form, as well as a petition with a minimum of 30 signatures to the city clerk's office again by 5 p.m. January 30. If you have any questions about this, contact the city clerk's office at<PHONE_NUMBER> or clerk at winooski-vt.gov or just come into city hall at 27 West Elm Street between 730 and 430, Monday through Friday. Thank you. Okay, we're on to our regular items. On for discussion approval, town meeting, TV trustee appointments. This is Matthew Smith, who I believe is with us in person as the recommended candidate for our county trustee representative. It's great news. Just a quick comment. The candidates are still a little longer than expected. So we're very thankful for Matthew's time. Mayor Lott, that I coordinated over the interview, so thank you for leading the way there, Mayor Lott. You think that Matthew's interesting experience making him an excellent candidate, so Matthew, if you'd be so kind, please join us at the guest table for an introduction and a few questions. I'm here, Paul, thanks. I don't know if you can see me, Paul. I just want to say thanks to Paul, thanks to Mayor Lott for considering my application and for the appointment. I'll just share. I work in Vermont Public, formerly VPR. We're all well aware of the displeasure around the name, so I'll save you your time there. I worked in Fort Ethan Allen. I live in Winooski. I've been a resident for five years plus, a homeowner for almost two years now. My wife works for the town of Colchester. And just thought it might be a nice alignment of personal interest and professional experience, so happy to be a board. Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited about the experience and interest you bring. I think it's a good contribution to that board. Matthew also has financial experience in his role, which is useful to the board discussions too. Any questions from Council? Sounds like a good fit. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the efficiency of business here. It isn't always so. After 10 more meetings. All right, are there any questions for members of the public? And if you're on Zoom, you can use the raise hand or chat feature. Okay, hearing no concerns, do I have a motion to approve the appointment for town meeting trustee? Second. Motion by Jim, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, so we are on to item B. This is on for discussion. We'll be receiving a presentation for the exit 16, Diverging Diamond Interchange. John, do you want to say anything or should we just have our guests join us? No. I was wondering why you were in the virtual attendees list. This makes sense now. There it goes. Good evening. Thank you for having us today. My name is Michael McCaroy. I work for my agency of transportation, the project manager and the traffic design section. Tonight, I'm actually joined by a couple other staffers as well. Annabel Dally is with me. She works for WSB. She's our project's public information consultant. And behind me hidden in the crowd is Chris LaVollette who is a V-Trans resident engineer. And we'll talk about what their roles are a little bit later in this presentation.  Mayor LaVollette, I was. The rest of you are fresh faces to me.  And this presentation will be the last one that I give prior to groundbreaking for this project. So this project's been in the works for a long time and the agency's really excited to actually have it started construction. So tonight we'll just talk about a project scope and where we're at and we'll just kind of dive into the construction piece because really that's why I'm here. We've gone beyond scoping 12 years ago. We scoped this project so much thought and energy has been put into this project. So we're not here to talk about anything else other than what we're going to construct. So that's what we're going to talk about tonight. For those who aren't familiar with the project, the project is actually in the town of Colchester. It starts at the Winnowsky City Line and it goes north along route seven all the way up to the center of the Woods Road. And even though this project is in Colchester it actually probably affects the folks in Winnowsky maybe even more so than the folks in Colchester just because of your proximity and how many residences and businesses there are in Winnowsky to this project site. That's not to diminish how many are going to be impacted in Colchester in any way but a lot of those as you're well aware businesses and commercial areas in Colchester there's no residences there. So there's not going to be people walking biking through this corridor from Colchester per se. So we really felt like it was important to come to the city to have your own meeting. We are going to have another one in Colchester later in a week but we really wanted to make sure we're targeting new folks directly on that. So the project is going to be essentially overhauling the corridor the route seven corridor. I believe there's seven traffic signalized intersections through the corridor. One of which is at Tygan Street or Teagan Street I'm not sure how you guys need about I've heard it called both ways but and so we were able to secure federal funding to replace that traffic signal as well. That was a part of this project and I can talk about that a little bit more later. It is now going to be part of the mainstream revitalization project. And so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be making improvements to the overall roadway. We're also going to be upgrading some modern infrastructure. We're going to be essentially bringing the whole roadway system up to current standard. We have new signs and paper markings and traffic signals of new roadway drainage and essentially the heart of the project is the reconfiguration of exit 16 itself. Right now it's what's called a tight diamond interchange and we're going to be converting it into what's called a diverging diamond interchange. Not a double crossover diamond, not a double black diamond.   Group seven is left to right. Interstate is up and down. Winooski would be to your left. Costco and Laurntower Hill would be to your right. So this is just kind of a zoom in on the current situation. As you can kind of see in this photo, you can kind of see the heavy left turning movement of the vehicles based on the tire tracks and the lack of pavement markings and stuff there. And the left turning movements are a key reason why we opted for the diverging diamond interchange. This is just kind of a colorized version of what the diverging diamond interchange looked like and I'll show you how it flows here in a moment. And then this is kind of a visualized version of what it's going to look like when all is said and done. So why a diverging diamond interchange at exit 16? Well, right now in the United States there's over 100 of them. I think we're pushing 120. It says 117 here, but to be honest, we do states are putting them in so fast that this number changes monthly. The reason why they're putting them in so fast because the safety benefits are just unreal. 37% reduction in crashes, reducing fatals by 54%. We're increasing vehicle capacity at these interchanges by over 50%. Which is really kind of crazy. We've never had an engineered interchange in the United States to have this level of benefit in decades. And why does it perform efficiently? Well, what it does is it eliminates the signalized left turn movements. And as I showed you in that first picture before we saw the heavy left movements, a lot of delay and capacity issues and safety issues at the interchange are because of all those left turning movements that are stacking up, waiting for a green arrow. The DDI eliminates that signal and essentially left turning movements can happen freely now. And that's the second bull point talks about how the left turning movements now become yield conditions instead of stop or signalized. And it allows movement during conflicting traffic phases, which you'll see in the animation. I'll show you in a moment. Currently, I believe this is, as of last month, there's 37 DDIs that are currently under construction just this year alone. There's another 157 planned. I believe they are now either planned or installed in 47 states, 48 states I think now. So states have really grappled onto this and have taken the bull by the horns by installing them. This is a quick animation as to how traffic is gonna flow at exit 16. Again, just for orientation, you're gonna see the traffic at first flowing from Winooski to Colchester left to right. And then at the end of the video, you'll see how traffic changes. So as you can see, cars are stopped on route seven. They just got released with a green light and they crossed to the left side of the road at traffic signal. As they traveled northbound on route seven under the bridges, they're on the left side of the road. And whereas the southbound traffic has a red light. So it's all, route seven traffic's always gonna have either a red light or a green light. And then what'll happen is you can see the southbound interstate traffic making the left turn onto route seven with a free motion while the southbound route seven cars can travel through the interchange with their green lights. And then finally, at the northbound off-ramp and on-ramps, you'll see here a car turning left off to the interstate. He can do that without having to stop because the traffic on route seven going northbound into Colchester is already on the other side of the road. So that's where we get the majority of our efficiency is we're able to move more cars during a regularly timed signal phase. So we're able to efficiently use time more, effectively use time more efficiently. Bicyclists and pedestrians. Bicyclists and pedestrians are not accommodated right now. There's no sidewalks. There's no bike paths. People are walking in the shoulders. People are walking in what people call goat paths just off into the grass. We need to accommodate those users, particularly for folks that live and play in the new ski that do need to get to places like Shaw's or CVS or some of these other places that don't drive cars or can't drive cars. So this will accommodate those folks. That's that. A question I get frequently is, well, I'm driving on the left side of the road in the wintertime snow on the road. How do I know where to go? Well, the short answer is you just drive in the eye like you would when we drive any other interchange. You just happen to be driving on the left side of the road for 400 feet, which it sounds like I'm down playing it a little bit, but it's a unique thing for folks to wrap their heads around. So I can understand why I get this question. So DDIs have been built in wintertime snowy conditions, areas, geographic areas all the time. There's 117 of them right now where snow is expected annually. Snow plowing for the state because the state in Jesus Road is gonna happen normally. We've already talked to this, talked to our snow plow drivers about this. They have no issues with it. And actually for some, they're actually gonna think that this is better for them because they're not gonna have to go up onto the interstate necessarily and make U-turns so that they can come back the other way around. So this should benefit them as well. We're gonna have robust pavement markings when you can see the pavement because pavement markings and signage are gonna be critical for folks that aren't familiar with this interchange after it's built and giving them some direction. I've driven through six DDIs in the country and I can tell you four of them easily, I drove through without realizing I was driving through a DDI. I know this sounds a little strange because you're driving on the left side of the road, but it happens so smoothly and so quickly as a driver you just focused on trying to stay in your lane and go. It's very rare that you realize you're in a DDI. This isn't to slant the city of Winooski at all, but I do get this a lot. People can't figure out how to drive to Winooski Circulator. How are they gonna figure out how to drive a DDI? Well, one, I don't personally have a problem driving the Winooski Circulator that's difficult for me, but for some folks I guess they have a hard time grasping it and it does have a reputation of having some high number of crashes. But there's distinct differences between the two and I list them here and really it just comes down to the geometry and the different types of conditions that these intersections are at. 8 to 16, it's not nearly as condensed as the circulator is, there isn't businesses, there isn't on-street parking, the circulator is on a grade, there's some tight curves there, so site distance can be an issue. The DDI doesn't have those things, so they're different, but I'm very confident that people can figure out the circulator, people can figure out our DDI when it's built. Where we're at right now as we've been in this development for a long time, 2012 is when we first started, we're finally at the point where we're gonna get to groundbreaking here at the end of this month. So in just three weeks you're gonna see activity out in the streets up there. So the timing of us being here tonight is kind of planned in such a way that we didn't want to come too early because we want it to be fresh in folks minds, but we didn't want to come too late either because we didn't want to just drop the bomb on folks that we're gonna be working in this busy area. So at the end of this month we're gonna be in the road, not necessarily in the road immediately, but we're gonna be on site, there's gonna be some crews and they're gonna be working throughout 2023. Once they are done with this set of work, we're gonna come through what's called contract two or phase two of the work, which I'll talk about here. We ended up having to break the work up into two separate contracts because we needed to relocate some of the very utilities that are underneath the road before we could do any of the other work. So we really isolated that set of work into its own contract and that's what's gonna be done this year. It'll make the work, when we rebuild the interchange starting next year, a little easier because we will have some facilities for folks who aren't driving cars to be able to navigate the work zone, whereas right now there isn't. So, and then the other piece would be we got, there's a water line that needs to move, there's telecommunication lines that need to be relocated. So we're gonna get all that stuff out of the way so that when we come in to do the actual corridor work, that stuff will be taken care of. So the second construction contract I'll start with first, which is the DDI, it's route seven work, it's gonna be sidewalks, traffic signals, landscaping, signing, any of the big picture stuff that you would normally associate with a road reconstruction project. That's gonna happen next year. Drive accesses will be open and it's gonna be done primarily at night. Contract one, which is gonna happen this year, it's also gonna be done at night, but there are gonna be activities that are gonna be allowed during the day. So the three pieces of this contract that we're gonna be completing are gonna be retaining walls. So retaining walls underneath the bridges and that's gonna create space for those non-view users to get through the work zone. And that stuff can happen because it's outside of the roadway, can happen during the day. So you will see activity, but hopefully it won't slow you guys as you're traveling through the work area.  That's to do the water line, to do the duct banks, because of gas lines. We also have significant amount of lead removal that's out there that all needs to get blasted and get out so we can build the rest of the infrastructure. That's all gonna happen starting in the spring. Although I think some lead removal can happen probably in the winter time. Here's what I was talking about when I was mentioning the retaining walls. You can kind of see these visuals. The bottom one, we're gonna be digging out from behind the bridge piers and clean up walls. And it'll create the flat areas that folks will need to be able to get through without having to use the roadway, especially in winter times. And then this is just kind of showing you where the utility work is gonna occur. So the blue is the water line relocation that's gonna happen on the Whitcombe's quarry side of the road. And then the telecommunication duct bank in the corners in red are gonna be on the Hampton inside of the road. So what'll happen is there's gonna be a lot of digging through there, a lot of lead removal blasting. So your daytime, what we're telling people is that even though work might not be active per se during the day, the lanes are gonna be mush. So you're gonna wanna probably take that into consideration when you're driving, do they give yourself some extra time? Because we're not gonna be able to keep repaving it over and over again. And so that's kind of why we're trying to get ahead of this for folks. Blasting, I mentioned, because of the bottom lead removal, it's deep in some locations, it's shower and others. We're only gonna blast what we need to blast, but we are expecting there will be a significant amount to blast. For residents of Winooski that live near the core, you might already be a little pre-exposed to blasting and the vibrations involved.  They'll do the blast, clear the road, and then make room for traffic to get through. They'll probably do a couple, two to three blasts a day, is my guess, at their busiest. And then, you know, everybody will be notified ahead of time when blasting is gonna happen on a daily basis if we can, but we aren't gonna be able to notify people to the hour. So it's something we're just trying to make folks aware of as they're navigating the area. We've got, SD Ireland is our contractor for this project, and their subcontractor is main drilling, drilling at the last day. And they, everybody around here knows who Ireland is, so they're a pretty big firm, and we just completed a big project in Burlington around about there, so our staff and their staff already have a good working relationship with each other, so we're hoping that the smoothness of it will continue. And then, one of the last pieces that we'll talk about tonight is public outreach. I mentioned Annabelle is here from WSP. Annabelle's gonna run point on any time somebody from the public or a municipality wants to get in touch with somebody from the project staff. Annabelle's gonna be your first point person, so when you email the project or you give the project a phone call, she's gonna pick up, if she's not on vacation. But, she won't do it. So, she's kinda gonna be the one that handles all this stuff. This helps me out a lot, but she's in constant contact with the rest of the project team, myself and Chris, at almost all hours of the day, so. Oh, and actually, our primary point of contact for the city when there's heat is Paul. So, Annabelle, if for whatever reason needs to get in touch with the city, she'll start with Paul first. And WSP is in charge of developing all any sort of material related to the project that the public will see. So, that could be the kiosk that we have out here, brochures, flyers, they maintain our project website. They do the construction and traffic updates that we'll show you in a second, and they help me with events like this. And, it's super helpful. So, it worked really well on, again, on the Children's Street Roundabout Project. So, we're hoping this is successful here as well. So, email notifications. When you sign up for project communications, you're gonna get a series of email notifications. If there's meetings, you'll get them in advance. We have weekly construction updates that go out, and it just kinda tells you what the contractor did this last week and what they're planning on doing next week. So, you can kinda be aware of what's happening in the project at any given time. They also do traffic alerts. So, if we need to shut down a road down for an emergency or for whatever reason, she'll broadcast those as well. And then, at periodic times throughout the project, we put out public feedback surveys that helps us to see how our outreach is actually getting to folks and how it's being received positively and negatively. And then, we do some other outreach as well on a weekly basis. And also, we update our social media feeds and whatnot. And then, I think the last piece that I'm gonna talk about is this is something special that we've done for Winooski. Knowing that Winooski has a lot of folks that our English is not necessarily their primary language, we actually worked with the Winooski School District to see what language is their students and their parents speak and how they communicate with the members of the public there. And we kinda mimicked that as well for this project because we really need to make sure that our project information is hitting everybody. And so, we've done some translations on our website. You can translate our website into all of these languages. We've worked with AALV, I think, to do some of the translations or most of the translations. And so, this is something that we're excited about and we're hopeful that it gets to those folks and that they can absorb that information in their native language if they're not proficient in English. Or, guess I lied, I guess there's one more. So, a case study we did in Shelby Street Roundabout, this was the public survey that we've done. This is just an example of what we did and generally speaking, it was positive. We, I won't say we're perfect every single time and some people, you know, the project impacts them more than others. But generally speaking, we had positive feedback for that project and there was a lot involved with that project, maybe more so than what we're gonna experience at age of 16, but we're hoping for some more results. I said a lot real fast. So, if you guys have any questions, feel free to ask away. Thank you for the robust update. I'm excited to see this finally ground break. As you mentioned, it's been several years. You know, the bike and pedestrian access being really important to a new ski residence. Are y'all gonna be able to, during phases of construction, maintain bike and pedestrian access? Understanding that that doesn't technically exist right now, but people are going through there. Yeah, so that's really tricky, right? We aren't gonna have the real estate to do that. So, we're currently working with SDI and we're trying to come up with something to help folks through there, if they're on a bike or if they're walking. It might mean they need to have a worker escort then through the work zone. If, you know, depending on where the work crews are, I mean, if the work crews are on one side of the road, they might be able to get the folks to travel on the other side of the road, for instance. So, we're currently working with them on it. Once we can get this first phase built out, it should be a little easier for folks to get through. But yeah, I recognize it's gonna be tough for folks during this first phase. But at least we'll have somebody on site to hopefully assist if they need it. We're out right now, there's nobody, it's free for all out there, you're on your own. So, you know, we're just, we're trying to get this thing built so that we can get those folks through without any problems. Yeah, I'm glad you hear what you're thinking about it. Yep. Any other questions? Yeah, and a similar vein, once those walkways are built, will the state be taking care of plowing those walkways in the winter months? No, the state does not have the equipment or the ability to, but the town of Colchester does. And they are on the hook for maintaining those walkways sidewalks up to the town line. And then I'm not sure what you guys do now, what you guys probably plow up to the town line now is my guess or clear, I'm not sure. But I would imagine that that would still be the case. But the town of Colchester will have to be responsible for that. Hi, go ahead. I was wondering also relating to the crosswalks, what kind of signal there is going to be, is it going to be tied to the stoplight or are people just gonna have a signal to alert that they're crossing? Yeah, good question. So at two of the crossings where there are, it's the off-ramps, so off-ramps, those are gonna be traditionally signalized pedestrian crossings.  So those will be what you're used to. At the on-ramps, those are single lane and they're yield conditions for vehicles. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put out essentially the flashing beacons that you have at the circulator like that. So again, they'll be pedestrian activated, the flashers will come up and drivers are supposed to yield, that's the law. So that'll be the condition on the on-ramps. Thank you. Yeah, I had the similar questions thinking about the intersections on Shelburne Road and that those don't have beacons, those don't have stoplights and it's pretty dangerous for anyone crossing there. It's not even well lit for that matter. So that kind of leads to another question is will the walkways, is improved lighting planned as part of the project? Yes, absolutely. Yep, we're gonna be improving lighting at all of the intersections and we'll have lighting along the sidewalks and the shared use pass. And we're gonna install some lighting underneath the bridges as well. Okay, I was gonna ask that. Noting how important line striping is, what is your plan for maintaining line striping? So we're gonna build, when I say robust pavement markings, the pavement markings we're gonna install as part of the project are gonna be, there's gonna be a trench that's ground into the pavement itself and then there's gonna be, I think it's thermal plastic material. So it's a heavy duty thick plastic that'll get sprayed into that groove so that if traffic drives over it, it won't just shear it off like in the first year. And then because it's state highway, we'll come through every year and do our regular updates to the pavement markings. Okay. I've got a list so if anybody else wants to go in. I've got another question if you don't mind, sorry. And Annabelle, maybe this is more for you, but I just want to know a little bit more about the public outreach and particularly the education piece of it. Just kind of what that's gonna look like, timing and how aggressive you are planning on being. A couple videos on the website, we've been going some of the community events before we paused construction for a while on the Renoise and the Winnieski Wednesdays and the full checker's movie in the park where I can't point out there. So we've been trying to really get the word out there. So our state highway list is pretty robust at this time. There's also other ways to get information on the website once we start construction. We've got our interactive map, which is on there now, it's live. It has some of the existing conditions and what we're planning to do. But as we move forward, that will start getting updated weekly so you can kind of see in real time where we're working and what we're doing. So that'll be nice. But yeah, the best way to get information is to sign up for those construction updates or to check that website kind of completely. Okay, great. We do have a driving simulator as well where we took the model that we showed you tonight and actually put it into a video game with steering wheel with pedals. And we were taking it around before COVID. Couldn't run it through COVID, obviously. And we wanted to get that back out on tour again. So Winooski Wednesdays is probably a good example of where we could do that. I don't know if we would do it this summer or not because we're still at least another year for the actual change changes. But it might be something we could still pop it out check every time as well. Yeah, I think that would be great. I think the more you can get that driving simulator out though that are really good. Thank you. Following up on your question, Thomas. As far as outreach goes, have you had targeted outreach, like individual outreach to some of the businesses that are along that? So we had it and probably even a little bit further out from there. So those went right to every business, every home kind of in like a targeted area that we selected. And that was basically asking people to sign up for construction updates because we can't really force people to receive information but we're hopeful that those that are interested will sign up on their own. And then also need information on where to get information on the website. And then obviously come to our tour public meeting which has since been rescheduled. What is this week Thursday? Following another full question on outreach. Are you working with GMT or the other public transportation services to review any changes to their stops that might be needed for different phases? I know we've had to move a stop temporarily for some of our road work and just ensuring that there's enough advance notice because I think this past year that kind of came up like seemed to come up like day of. So just thinking about that. Yes, I'm sure we would be reaching out to them but I don't know if I need to add this comment. Yeah, part of it is also dependent on the contractor's phased construction plans. So we wanna know where the crews are gonna be so that we can let GMT know. We did coordinate with them on the roundabout project as well and they were good to work with and actually I believe this project is gonna be adding a bus stop at the end if you drive somewhere and coordinate with them on that anyway. One thing that came up during our recent the trans work over here on exit 15. We did, at City Council, we did hear quite a bit from the community. I'm wondering if your weekly notices or is there plans to post that to Front Porch Forum? Okay. But the CCRPC does additionally send out on like a kind of a work in X version of what's going on every week and their newsflash which I believe they post at Front Porch Forum. But unfortunately, since we don't like to lose their plans so we don't have access. Yeah, I wasn't sure if we had a statewide agreement. No, VTRA is down in front of Page Forum and we're not I guess technically allowed to post to that. So we ask other organizations to do it on their behalf if they have to post a while. Paul, do you want to comment? Yeah, just quickly. In America, I think a lot of the other products that we've done with VTRA has taken that in the past. I mean, in this case it's gonna be the first website and places for people to go to additionally but there's gonna be a split difference. We'll share this on the virtual channels and make sure that they land on our Porch Forum. There's no specific stuff there. I know CCRPC does do that and it was a lot of stuff. I'll work with them and make sure I get them. Great, thanks. Just one more. One of your initial slides showed a lot of the left turns, especially coming out from Mountain View Drive. So businesses on both sides of Mountain View Drive can be at times about as heavy as rush hour. So just thinking about potential backups because there's still folks heading northbound, coming off the northbound 89 exit and going left towards Winooski. In addition to traffic from those businesses heading towards Winooski, just thinking about the management and flow and how that will be managed because I could see potential for additional backups. Oh, for sure. And another reason why we're trying to get out here and trying to just warn people that, I mean, unfortunately road work is disruptive. It's just this nature. So we are gonna experience backups but we do work with the contractor to minimize them the best we can, try to get them to consolidate their work in one lane at a time. So at night, they'll have almost free rain in the road work just because the traffic lines at night are super low. During the day, they're only gonna be allowed to close one lane in each direction at any given time. And if it happens to be a dedicated turn lane, then they are gonna have to dedicate one of the other lanes to be a turn lane as well. So that's all in the planning that they do and that they submit to us for our review and approval at each phase. Okay, great, thank you. Any questions for members of the public? I'm not seeing any hands in the zip. Okay. Well, thank you again for coming in to see us. Thank you. Okay, we will move to item C. This is on for discussion. Our strategic vision area goal update on municipal infrastructure. Is there a, I know I'm not the main event and there's a lot of chiefs behind me, so I'm gonna have to, very brief. So this is a second infrastructure update for this FY23 fiscal year. There is a brief memo in your packet. We did cover a lot of this during the last budget presentation, so I won't be laboring any of that. So I think I'll just open up for questions if you have any. There are some planning items, so here it's here too, I'll leave it at that. I'll start, John. The ADA map that's linked in here. The ArcGIS link. I don't understand what this is, like how to read it. There's a bunch of red and green dots, can you eliminate? So the first task that we've done with CCRPC is we have their, in terms of inventory, all of the current, so those, some have the technical warning strips, the metal plates, and then we have them go through a, what is the proper design for these ADA ramps, slope, geometry, does it have a technical warning? And the red and green are, is like, red is no, it's not a compliance of green, it is, so we're like 50% or less. So the intent there is whenever we're doing a paving project, we're gonna look and try to update those ADA ramps as we're doing a paving project. So that's kind of the first step, and then the next one is we'll be looking at seeing how they comply with ADA. Okay, thank you. Aurora, I think you were gonna ask something. My question relates to the Main Street prop, Regalization Project, and this is something that I know has come up before, but I was wondering if, remind or clarify, it sounds like we're missing, you said, seven easements from one owner, and I was just wondering if we, is there a timeline, if we can't get the documents, do we have a different plan in place? And if so, kind of where that deadline is. So, good news, we chatted with that owner Friday, and it sounds like they just have to do it to their attorney for a whatsoever, so we're re-opening this, like. Awesome. Well, we're not gonna hold our rep until they actually execute it, but it sounds like that will be happening this week or so. If it doesn't happen, there is, we can redesign the project to put some of that equipment back in their own way, so it wouldn't be a project killer if we couldn't get those easements. I gotcha. I had a question about the tree committee. Is the draft language like template or pulled from another municipality or something offered by the state? The original ordinance that was passed was a template and kind of building off of what was done in Essex Junction prior to the tree warden statute updates that substantially changed how municipal tree management works, so there isn't, or at least when the tree committee was working on this, there wasn't a draft template for municipalities post those updates, however, since then, I think at least three municipalities have done it, and so we just haven't reconvened to look at whether theirs would be something we could appropriate or work from. The recommendations that we were working on were pretty specific to the way Vanuski had done both the tree replacement and then general tree management, so, and that has been many months since we've worked on that. Yeah, and I do remember seeing that draft. I mean, it looks like it was in pretty good shape at that point, and I think maybe I can reach out to some of the folks on the tree committee that could maybe get rolled into the commission one too. What's the frequency of those meetings? I think it's ad hoc. Yeah, it's been, we haven't met since before this summer at this point for, since the centennial tree planting has been kind of quiet. Okay, without you, we're gonna have to make a plan. I mean, I'll have more time.  I hope so. I'll say that the Urban and Community Forestry Program probably has some technical assistance from the recommendations they can provide there as well, having more to do with these other municipalities, so there's probably some resources we can tap at this date as well. Right here, thank you. Are there any questions for members of the public? Thank you, John. Please stick with us for item D on for discussion approval. The Brownfields Revitalization Grant Application. Sure. This one should be pretty easy and straightforward, so the state is looking to give us more money. So this is ACCD, agency. Commerce Development. Thank you. We submitted for a Brownfields grant to support the last 70 improvements, specifically our parking garage improvements to support some of the soil remediation work. If you remember, the site isn't, it has, I'd say, low contamination levels, but we still have to do what's called a contaminated action plan, and we have to manage the soils that are coming off the site. So the good news is this allows us into this program for grant funding. We did receive a grant previously for 78,400. We have recently resubmitted for the grant that incorporates more soil management work. The actual grant that we applied for was around 2.7 million, but the state came back with an offer of an additional $731,525.85, very specific. So this request is authorized to see managers sign the grants agreement for that. All right, and questions. I have a quick question. So the match, do we have adequate funding for the match? It is part of the full project cost, yeah. Okay, great. Any questions from the public? Okay. Do I have a motion to approve city manager signing off on this grant for us? To move. Motion by Brent, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so we're on to item E. This is the FY24 budget presentation for public safety. Who's gonna start? Okay. Come on up, Chief Audie. Good evening. Welcome. Thank you, Paul. Paul's running the slides for us. For those who don't know, Chief Palmer, appointed fire marshal, and also like to acknowledge Chief Spittle, managers of being here. I thought you're still sitting. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's my bearings. I'm sorry. Paul here. Yeah, so FY24 budget presentation for fire and code. Kind of the outline of what we're gonna do tonight is our organizational chart, our continued focus, our stats, budget, looking towards the future, and then end with questions. Our org chart hasn't changed structurally from last year, as far as the structure, the number of folks has unfortunately declined in our part time ranks. And we'll talk a little bit about that with our recruitment and retention. Pressure, it's not just us, it's a state, it's a national pitch point, if you will. So again, the structure hasn't changed all that much, hadn't changed at all. Just again, the numbers have reduced in the part time ranks. For perspective, under the part times, when I came here in 2011, although I wasn't part of the fire department right when I came here, they were 21 or 22 strong and we're shown seven. So over that, over this year. The next slide is just, we continue to be committed to the community risk reduction. As long as I do the budget every year, we'll visit the slide, it's super important. It's becoming more and more part of the fabric for Mooski, you all support it very much, we're very lucky, I'm very lucky to be leading these efforts in this community. There's not a lot of folks in the state that have this type of foundation. We've taken the fire department foundation, which is very strong over the years and we've been able to insert the community risk reduction and show the benefits of that. We show that daily and you'll see some of that and the work that we do and some of the outcomes. So again, the education, engineering, enforcement, emergency response and economic incentives are all kind of the fabric of community risk reduction and it's true, getting ahead of the call. We spend a lot of effort trying to get ahead of the call. Could I intervene at this moment? So I had a brief grocery parking lot conversation with the state Mike's fire chief and he said, he noticed that our calls have gone down a lot in somewhat recent years in part because of this approach. So that's a huge benefit to the community. Please jump in to have any questions. Kind of our year in review and this is on the community risk reduction side of the house. This just kind of shows what we did, really calling out the public building inspections. Again, getting ahead of the call, 1500 thereabouts inspections. The new construction inspections are way up this year. That's a lot of that's contributed to the school project. That was a massive project, multi-year project. The fire marshal was there sometimes multiple times a week. We became a critical part of that project. That's not unlike any other project here in Newsy. We talked to them when they're contemplating the projects right through until they get their certificates of occupancy from zoning and then they see us during the annual inspections if it's a public building. So we build those relationships from the ground up fuel from planning right through the life of those buildings. Buildings that were built many, many years ago. We continue to build those relationships with the property owners, the managers and the residents, tenants that reside there. Missing from this slide, just as I've got looked at as a property complaints and that should have a 61, sorry about that. I didn't catch it until I was reviewing this today. So I would say community risk reduction in this slide. Time of sales, property complaints, new construction, building permits and public building inspections are all community risk reduction. So if you were to look at that pie and just take emergency response, we can't control emergency response, right? But we know that our efforts, I can tell you without a doubt that the community risk reductions and the efforts that we do daily are creating very positive outcomes. If we did none of that here, I've spoken at length to other area chiefs and we sit here in Manuski and we say, how come this doesn't happen in Manuski? And this is the only thing that we can put our finger on and I say that that's the efforts of community risk reduction. I have a question about the public building inspections. If we do a four year cycle, correct? How is it 1500? Like that doesn't math out too. It's follow ups, it's not just initial inspections. It's follow ups. There's a lot of mixed in there. Okay, thanks. Maybe we may do it in inspection and we may do three or four follow ups with it. Yeah. And then at the bottom, I just try to give you a little bit of comparison, kind of how are we trending with building permits emergency response, parking planks, new construction and the public building inspections which is over on the right. The headers are kind of cut off on this. But again, the bulk of our work is the public building inspections. Are you pulling this data from your firehouse database? So it's now an ESO, I was like, I remember there was a change of platform but I can't remember what it was. Yeah, if you say firehouse, we're all talking the same thing. So the next slide, we go a little bit deeper. That 1500 and 14 inspections. I typically told you what the top five inspections are. And as I thought about that, as that's subjective for us to kind of pull out, yes, it's data. I can tell you that's the number one complaint but I don't want to dilute the fact that there could be one complaint that's as impactful for someone as those 30 that we do. So I want to get away from taking away from the possibility of taking away from the importance or how it affects different people and tell you that out of those 1500 or so inspections, about 2000 violations were issued. 1200 of those were in the National Fire Protection and FPA and that's life safety code. So that's your smoke detection, carbon monoxide, egress, that side of the house. 506 thereabouts was in the Vermont rental code. So that's the quality of life stuff, the screens in windows, the ventilation, mold, those sorts of things. The 222 authority have a jurisdiction of additional violations. Conversations with Chief Palmer the other day I was trying to figure out words how to describe this. These are things that really don't fit in the National, the NFPA or the Vermont rental code but it's where our staff is being very proactive. So we see something that is becoming a problem. It may not be a violation of the code yet and we empower them to write that as authority have a jurisdiction to say, hey, your ceiling pain is chipping, why has it, it hasn't proven to us that it's a ventilation or a water leak yet but we know something's going on so we want them to be proactive and say hey, you should fix that. And that's a level of the quality of life, the quality of housing that we're driving at. So we try to empower them to do that. And then 165 is a national electrical that's pretty straightforward. There's a national electrical code that says X, Y, Z has to happen with the electrical systems. Any questions on that? Can you talk to us a little bit about enforcement and like how you address landlords that are chronically in violation? Yeah, so we go and do these initial inspections and then unless it's a major violation or imminent life threat, meaning if you don't have smoke detection, we're gonna tell you you got 24 hours to get smoke detection, sometimes even a shorter window. So depending on the magnitude of the violations, typically you have 30 days to make a correction. So we go and do the inspection. We try to get as close to 30 days to reinspect that property. Through COVID, we did a lot of photos. We did some video stuff. We try to stay away from that. We try to do the in-person revisits. It is an extra step, but there's a level of accountability that we feel isn't there with photos or videos. A lot of times we're able to interact with the tenants face-to-face where the landlord's is sending us a picture we can't. So hopefully in 30 days, the violations are corrected. We're able to go do the reinspection, give them a certificate of fitness. If not, there's several different ways that it can go. We try to figure out why it wasn't done in 30 days. It may be a supply chain, maybe a contractor issue, it may be a landlord-tenant issue going on that we need to help mitigate. And the inspectors make a decision of what the next steps are. And the municipal code allows us to take enforcement action. We can cite folks with civil tickets for continued violation, which we don't do a lot of. We have a pretty high rate of voluntary compliance. Sometimes there's a little earn twisting, if you will, to get to voluntary compliance. But once people understand the tools the staff have, we usually get to compliance. For those who continue to be non-compliant, we do leverage the municipal code and how it allows us to do enforcement, whether ticketing or however that may be. Okay, thank you. Is that answered? And that could be a day, it could be another 35, 40 days, depending on what it is. Yeah. So those take a lot of time. I have a question. You might get to this later on, in which case you can just leave it till then. Obviously all these codes and standards are updated with a certain type of frequency. What's the training for you and the team to stay up to date on those codes? Yeah, so the city adopts what the state does through our MOU. And the state is about every six years at this point, six to nine years, seems like. They're still working on the 2015 code. So they're in the process of updating to the 2022 code. So there is a monthly staff is in trainings with the state partners. In any time that there's a big rewrite or an adoption, there is a series of training that happened that kind of bridges us into the new code. But if it's not a complete through the old code, it's usually sections of it that are updated. Yep, yep. So there is a piece that happens. The state does monthly trainings, so we attend those when they're available. Okay, great. And is that something that's offered at no cost to municipalities? Yeah. Okay, great. Emergency responses, 452, again, I'm looking July to June. This would be different calendar if I were to look at calendar. Our calls are up, obviously, here. They're up on the calendar year if I were to look at that. But this is, again, there's no false alarm. False alarms is our most. You would expect that with as many buildings and systems. I don't mind the false alarms. Those are the systems that are working for us 365 days, seven days a week, 24 seven, it's typically those systems. Yes, there's the burnt food, the human element that creates the false alarm, but that system is working. And I don't feel this is out of line for what our community is and continues to develop into. I'm just curious, what are the good intent responses? What do you want to take that? I wouldn't say cat and a tree, but sometimes we will get a call for somebody who either may smell an odor, and again, this might get categorized differently, that there are different responses based on what a person may be reporting. And sometimes they might see, for instance, one that we had during Christmas was somebody sees Christmas lights or a candle in the window that's flashing, and they think there might be a fire, so they get a call for that. And it's essentially we would categorize some of those under good intent because there wasn't anything malicious about it, but to them it seemed like a situation that was possibly a problem, so we investigated it to make sure that there is a problem. Thank you. So these are categorized under the National Incident Reporting System. So any call we go on, there's a block in which it needs to fit in. As you can imagine, sometimes we're three lines down before we get that call to fit into a category. We try to be very specific because we don't want a hundred report, we don't want a hundred report, right? So it's not like we're just picking these out of the sky, if you will. These are very rigid national reporting standards in which we follow, so. I had a similar question around an example for a natural disaster. I might not be able to be specific for that, Charlie, but. So the recent windstorm would be natural disaster. Ice, heavy snowstorm, that sort of thing. All the years ago, they were very severe flooding because of the leaves. So it doesn't. Plugging up drains and stuff. It doesn't necessarily mean we declared a natural disaster. It is how, again, how we categorize that call. Do you provide any service response or inspections? It might be two separate things, emergency response versus the inspection service from the previous slide. For elevators that operate within the city, I mean, we have, as we have more and more multifamily units, more elevators being installed. I don't know if you're involved with the inspection frequency of those. So it's a touch point in which we make sure the certificate is good, but that is governed and part of the MOU of the state, it's still in the purview of the state. It's done by technically qualified people. It's like the sprinklers and fire alarms in elevators. The state has licensed folks that can service those specifics and they control the licensing and they have state tags. So they go out and they inspect it. One little side note to that is one thing we do do is whether it's a fire alarm or sprinkler or elevator, the contractor goes out and it's a state system in which they're running in. So they put a tag on it and they may check violations, but there's no mechanism for the state that they don't have the resources. It's in a stack of thousands that the state gets whether it's fire alarm, sprinkler, or elevator. So there could be units with violations in other communities that that community would never know and the state isn't gonna follow up because they don't have it. They don't have the resources. We check those tags and if there are violations, we make the property owner follow up on the state tag. So again, it's another level in which we've drilled down. For the elevator specifically, anytime it's an apartment building which is three units or more, that is a checkpoint that we check on. Okay, great. It's great to hear, especially as we see our multifamily buildings continue to expand. So we don't do the inspections. I just want to make that clear. We do see them, which is kind of pooled during the construction, we do see the build out of an elevator, which is very, there's a lot of nuances to building an elevator from the ground up, whether it's drilling the shaft 80 feet in the ground, which people don't realize, or the fire proofing. These, on the final test, these guys ride on top of the elevator. So I'm pretty sure that we're pretty invested that the thing is gonna be okay. But yeah, we try to drill down as far as we can. Okay, thank you. Next slide, if there's no other questions. So this is just kind of a quick six year look, if you will, going back six years in those same categories, the fire over pressured vessel EMS has match service calls. Good intent, false alarms, that's a disaster and special event and kind of a visual on how we're doing. Again, nothing here jumps out at me. I think we're seeing the natural progression, if you will, and the service calls, good intent, false alarms, even your EMS, as this community builds out, we expect that trend to continue to go up. Service demands. Weekdays for the new counselors. You know, weekdays, Monday through Friday, 6A to 6P, we try to cover with the limited full-time staff that we have, knowing that our part-time on-call folks are gone. It's no small task, we call out to the staff, we're constantly juggling, others come in and help us when we're on much needed vacation or sick time, that sort of thing, holidays. It's really three of us trying to cover that timeframe. You know, one of us are in the city by 6 a.m. So, and you know, our staff just left at 6 tonight. So, you know, I call out to them, it works, we do our best, there are holes in that, and it takes a lot. The weekday nights, 6P to 6A, that's covered by our part-time staff, on-call staff, as they're available. And then the full-time staff are called back when first school irons are greater or when we don't have others responding. And as I talk about this, I wanna make sure that I am not faulting the part-time staff. You know, our staff does a tremendous job. They do a tremendous job for this community. You know, they're all working full-time somewhere else and they choose to do this on a part-time basis. And they're super proud of the work they do and can't do it without them obviously as we talk further about this.  So, I wanna put this in perspective. It starts 6 a.m. on a Saturday and ends at 6 p.m. on a Sunday. And we call that the duty weekend. So, they have to be around and available but not at the station. And you pay them, you pay the officer 65 bucks to be available for those hours.  It works. And we have some allocated money in the part-time line items this year that we're gonna try to up that sum just as a retention effort. It's a demand, right? To be available that period of time. And in fact, the numbers are so small. There's three duty weekends crews that cover a full weekend. And now they split the fourth weekend on a rotating basis. So, one of the companies gets a Saturday, the other company gets a Sunday while the third one runs it off. And then they rotate. So, we've asked them to do even more so that we can have coverage. The concerning trend in 21 that we started to watch is insufficient firefighters responding weekday nights. Again, this is a six P to six A. This is a very unpredictable time for us. Well, again, our part-time folks do a tremendous job. I just don't know who's available. Firefighting is making a situation predictable, right? Getting ahead of the calls, making it predictable. And we just don't know who's gonna show up. Could be one, could be two, could be 10, could be 20. We just don't know at any given time. And others that are running the same system in a specific conversation with a Colchester chief, they deal the same thing. They have full-time staff during the day. But it's the overnight hours.  So that's what we're calling out here. Just watching that, it's a flag for us in the futures. How accelerated that gets. This is my first year of having a comparison to really look at it. Yes, our calls are up. But on the bottom, you can see, in 21, we did 48 calls with four or less during those hours. In 22, we did 77 of those calls with four or less. So, it's a concern. And we're gonna talk further about supplemental fire coverage and how we get, and what resources are available to us to help bridge that gap. So, there's no other way to tell this community that eventually you will need to have 24-7 coverage here. Just by virtue of what this community's become and the risk that's here. I'm not saying a crew of four or five, six. I'm not there. It needs to be right-sized for Wienewski. But it's super important to have that consistency and that predictability of having somebody here. And not the guesswork. Chief Spittle could speak a lot to it. He's a lot of our nighttime coverage. He lives on the right one street. And we're super lucky, this community's super lucky to have him and others that, again, they're super committed to going. But it's not a duty weekend. John is available almost every day of the week when he's home. I heard you of what he feels is important to do for this community. And that's super important. You have that leadership, it's predictable. Yeah, it's not a crew of 22, like Broenton has going to the building. That's not what I'm saying. But getting, starting to build the foundation of having some predictability and removing that vulnerability is super important moving forward. Put it in perspective, the other duty weekends, when people are assigned, cover about 20% of our calls. In the daytime and on-call folks, we're covering about 40%. So again, that pay on-call 6P to 6A piece that I'm worried about is about 40% of our time. So it's not insignificant. Questions on that slide? Next slide. Auto-aid received and given, mutual aid received and given. This is important for us to know how much help we're getting and how much help we're giving. And as much as I talk about the vulnerabilities of staffing, auto-aid received is, right now we're running side by side 24-7 in St. Mike's College. And you call them when you see gets St. Mike's College just because of our vulnerability and our low numbers. And that's not going to change anytime soon. It's happened for quite a few years, whether it's Colchester, previously Colchester, and really St. Mike's College. Auto-aid given is us going to other communities on auto. So we do quite a bit of that with South Park Drive for town of Colchester, we're the closest fire truck. Doesn't matter what town you're in, the closest fire truck should come I fully support that. Yes, it is a cost, yes, it is a burden to us as Winooski, but as you can see, we get quite a bit of it back and that's an important piece for us to be able to keep that balance. When you get an imbalance in the auto-aid received versus auto-aid given is a huge indicator of you're relying on your neighbors way too much and you really need to think about your delivery system. So I'm glad that that number's pretty balanced. Mutually received, that's when it's above a regular call and the East Island fire, we're calling in multiple departments. And again, it's pretty balanced with the mutually given when we go to Burlington or Colchester or Williston, we're helping our neighbors when they have a big answer. And again, it's that give and take. I feel that's pretty balanced. Calls by day of the week, there's a spike on Tuesday. I believe this would hold true across emergency services here. There's no said day that's, there's no day or days that we can really point finger at and say I need to put a lot of extra staff on those days, it's pretty consistent. Same as time of day, it's kind of this, I wouldn't be real happy with this graph, but again, if we look at the six to the 18, that's when our full-time staff is here on that bottom right hand, if we can make sense of that. Again, that is an indicator that we're covering the busier times of the day, which is a good thing, that's what you want, right? I mean, that's, so. Do you get, how much aid do we get from the National Guard Fire Department? So on our call, we have what are called alarm carts and they're part of that auto aid received. So any reported smoke in the building, any reported fire sprinkler with water flow, car accident with extrication, we get the air guard. Okay. Yep. So they are an important partner for us. Do you need more from them? I'll let you think about that. Yeah. I certainly can tell you that I understand that they are available, I don't want to speak for them. They are more than willing to come to Winooski if we need them more under a structured kind of response model. Awesome. Thank you. And I believe they will become part of our list of auto aid going to the airport and phases. You know, right now if there's an emergency at the airport, Winooski's not part of that response. And there's a lot of historic thought process behind that. My thought process is we should be. That's, you know, God forbid if it happens, they call an emergency and it happens in Winooski. They've assembled however many resources and we may not know that they've already assembled those. So my thought process was working with them closer on airport emergencies is we would be in the know and we would be able to partner with them much faster on a response in Winooski and have a much more collaborative, unified approach on what's going on. So the leadership, fire leadership changed there a year or two ago and with our continued forward movement here, I believe that that will happen. Thanks. Yeah, it's interesting. The incident command wouldn't involve Winooski for, to the point where they might mobilize services but you might not know about it. Certainly, right. And if something happens in Winooski, we're gonna know. But there's, in my mind, I would wanna, I wanna be in the know. I don't wanna be trying to. To become part of that, whatever's, because when someone calls an emergency, unless it's an incident, more times than not, an aircraft just call them in an emergency and they assemble and that's when we wanna be a part of that. And again, I wanna reassure you that that leadership team over there is wanting to make that happen. Is that something that would have to come up with the Airport Commission? Or would that fall outside? No. Okay. No, this would be through an agreement. We have a standing agreement with the Ramat Air National Guard for their response in Winooski. Gotcha. And it would just be an update to that agreement. Thank you. Strategic vision accomplishments to date. You've heard me say this before, I think. We've transitioned to a two truck set with ordering the new ladder truck. We are now running essentially an engine and a ladder. We historically have run two engines. The engine that left was a 1995 needed replacement. We didn't use it. It's not good for a fire apparatus to sit. And we just weren't utilizing it. Couldn't staff it. That truck's gone and serving another Vermont community very well. There's still a lot of life in that truck. But Winooski no longer needed to maintain it. Again, we were maintaining it, ensuring it. It wasn't getting run. And even if we could, we just can't staff it. So, secondly, developing the plans to understand the feasibility of the station. Again, as we look at having to do 24 seven eventually, our firehouse is limited. We don't have sleeping. Our firehouse is not sprinkler. That's a risk factor for us. So there's some pretty big pieces there to understand with our current facility. Chief, is this something you've heard from people that have left or that you haven't been able to recruit that this would make a difference in their availability? Yes. So we have a person that lives here in the community that left and went to Williston because he can go do a 12 hour shift instead. Certainly I can have someone come do a 12 hour shift but I can't have them overnight. And we know there's models where I am certain that I can recruit outside of our response area if you will. We like to see people within three to five minutes of the station. You don't want to wait much longer than that for a fire truck, right? So I know I can recruit from outside of our response area if we have facilities to keep people here. Or to keep them here and have space for them to be here. We know that would likely expand or prolong the model that we're currently running in before we have to get to 24-7 staffing. Meaning I could have someone come do some overnight shifts not necessarily to be here 24-7 but we could have per DM shifts come do 12 hour shifts that sort of thing. So that's the importance of understanding the feasibility of doing what we're doing and then understand what that may buy us buy this community for future going to 24-7. I'm going to discussion with the state to expand our MOU to include plan review. As you know, part of the budget is including plan review. There's a process in which we have to expand our current MOU memorandum of understanding for those that don't know the abbreviation of MOU. It is a longstanding document that the state has had with the city. MOU allows us to do our public building inspections, building inspections, that sort of thing. So we're looking to do and expand that to include plan review and do that locally. Municipal infrastructure, obviously the fire truck. I've done a couple of fire trucks but this one was a big lift. It was a very specialized piece of equipment. So we're through the obviously the spec, the bid, a couple of us went to Florida and did line by line as dry as that was, bolt by bolt, you really got to go out and just really apply some very specific stuff to the truck that they're going to build for us. So it's now in production. When I say production, we won't see that truck until 24. So just with supply chains and that sort of thing. So very happy that that's kind of just cruising. Completed a year plus of weekly site visits at school.  And we became a critical part of that design build team. If you will, the project team there and often we're up there several times a week just to keep them moving forward and try to keep them on schedule or to try to save them money by finding alternates and alternative ways to do things that sort of thing. So again, who knows the staff? That was a big one. Yeah, and I think, and many things to add, it sounds like the school is actually able to come under budget for that project pretty well. So that's huge for our community. So thank you so much. We're a small part of that team, but yes, there were some pretty hearty discussions. I figured it all out. Next slide. The housing, we're working with the housing commission. We've done one chapter of the building. We're queued up to do the housing the 19th. So looking forward to that, the housing piece will be a bigger lift than the building. You know, these are our opportunities. We don't like to rewrite these all the time. Again, it's consistency for us, the training, and more so for our property owners and tenants. So to the extent, you'll never get a 100%, I'm not saying that, but we need to do as much as we possibly can in those lifts. Try to get the distance in between the rewrites for consistency. I would continue to support some other projects that listed three of them here.  They had a couple pre-significant water breaks due to plastic pipe, and they chose to do a complete upgrade of steel. Again, appreciative of their proactiveness. They could have just patch that old system up and kind of hope that nothing else happens. They wanted to, again, make it predictable, and they felt by going back to steel that they could make that. So that's no small project for them or us. It's across 270 units over a year and a half. Another one is a housing association with several structural issues. This is at Cascades. There's some rot on their exterior balconies that we are aware of and you just kind of monitor them. Again, they're being very cautious, very proactive, doing what they need to do there, and they will get through it. And we're really trying to learn 15 years in why are we seeing that significant amount of rot. I'm very interested in that. Again, that's that community risk reduction part of me that wants to understand what happened in the construction or the design that accelerated that. Yeah, would that come up in some of the design plan reviews? So it's not, I'm not at a point where I can say that that's a design flaw yet. They don't know how they need it to, but there's probably methods, which is different than requirements. How it was weather-proofed or materials used together, that there's something we can learn there. And do some education, so our next developers don't do the same thing. Would that level, I guess to rephrase my question, would that level of detail come up during the design review? So through the requirements of the plans review? Plans review, sorry. No, but what I would tell you through the process of Winooski's plan review, yes, if we can educate ourselves on why this happened, it would be a place in which a point in which we would say to that developer, hey, they did this at this place and this was the outcome. Gotcha, thank you. So see what I'm saying? Yep. And at the state level, we don't ever get to see that. Yep. That's a great question and a great example of how we can bring some of the things we're learning locally and prevent it, possibly from happening again. Thank you. So safe, healthy, connected people actively engaged in the fire and EMS dispatch discussions. I did not finalize the hazard mitigation plan. See, manager did. Thank you. And developing the MOU for supplemental fire coverage. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that. And then the recruitment retention of staff. What are we gonna do in 24? Again, kind of the same spinoffs. Implement the planning review process and fees. Finalize the feasibilities pieces at the fire station, under housing. Once we're done working with the housing commission, fully implement the changes. Important piece of that will be educating ourselves, educating tenants and property owners of the changes to the public building registry. You know, it's no good to make those changes in that, then not do any education around it. So there'll need to be some public outreach, probably some sort of structured public meetings, landlord meetings or tenant meetings that we can try to educate people. And obviously, if you want, we want to continue to support both new development and renovation projects in the city.  That's a big lift on training-wise. It's a much different piece of apparatus than what we have today. Excuse me. Under State Healthy Connected People, Transition Fire, MMS, Dispatching to Immunified Entity. Finalize the MOU for supplemental fire coverage. I'd like to do and participate in a strategic vision plan for fire and MMS delivery models. That's an important next step for a ministry to do some strategic vision planning around that. And then recruitment, retention of paid-on-call staff. What's included in this proposal are full-time salary and benefits, the $16,000 add to part-time salaries. And it says here for support for additional part-time coverage. And I think this is better stated to cover like minimum wage increases. So our incentivized pay plan starts with minimum wage. So every year, minimum wage goes up. We adjust that pay plan. So what just started January 1, was a $0.63 raise for the paid-on-call staff per hour. So that covers that and then we will do, we're always looking for additional part-time coverage, whether it's covering one of us is out on vacation or you think of a city holiday, Bruce and I get those holidays. So that leaves one person at the firehouse. So we try to hire somebody in to help supplement that. That's what that's about. Chief, last year's budget or chart had 16 firefighters for part-time and you're showing seven now. If there were 16 budgeted in, are you budgeting for, how is it that we need an ad? Right, if there's fewer people, can you not just reallocate from that existing line item? So again, this is evolving and we've been very aggressive in backfiring, meaning covering while one of us is out. We haven't always done that. Previous years, we kind of hope that nothing would happen for the day and I'm trying to get away from that. I'm trying to make that predictability that, so that money has been kind of moved into that cover. So it's about hours, it's hours, not people, yeah. Absolutely, hours. We also anticipate additional firefighters coming on, so we do keep some plots that are currently making budgeted or so that if the roster gets filled, we have money available to pay them. Okay. And I would have to look, we've, in years past, we may have included what we've been authorized for, because we certainly didn't have 16 people last year. Okay. So that may have been what we were authorized for. Yeah. And this year, I'm showing you what we actually have. Okay. So I wanted to call that out. I'd have to go back, but that's my, we definitely didn't have 16 people last year or down the seven. Yeah. So. Further? No, go ahead, I'll ask, when you finish this slide, I'll. Am I understanding that we're paying our part time firefighters minimum wage? Yeah, so we have an incentivized pay plan. So it starts with minimum wage, and then there's a class, it's called county class.  It's kind of a baseline for us. You get a bump and pay.  If you get certified in driving one of the trucks, you get a bump and pay.  So our average, Angela will correct me, I'm sure if I'm wrong, our average pay for part time staff is 18-ish dollars an hour. And do our neighboring communities also pay starting at minimum wage? So there aren't a lot of departments that pay under the same structure we have. We run a very different model. A lot of people pay a stipend, an annual stipend. So they may get $1,200 for the year to be a firefighter. So we pay hourly for training. A lot of departments pay five bucks for a training. We pay the hourly rate for training and calls. It calls a minimum of one hour for us to prepare. So I feel we're ahead of the curve with those around us that are similar to the model we're running. It's good to know we're ahead of the curve. That just seems really wild. And what I would say is we've, this community, you, we have this leadership team have invested in that. You know, I use duty weekend as an example. That used to be $20 a day for us to board for the Saturday to Sunday coverage. It's now 65. Doesn't seem like a lot, but we've tried to incrementally. Again, we're part of a larger group here with the city. You're all trying to cover a lot of bases. So I would agree it seems low in some instances, but I would also say you have made some serious commitments. And I think overall we would agree that we've done very well in making forward move out. Thanks for that insight. So folks get paid to attend the trainings and are the trainings themselves offered here covered by the city or the state? So great question. So a year ago we committed to paying for the county class. We never used to, you used to have to go get your own training. So we now pay for that, say 80 hours of training. So you're paid your hourly rate for that. The one we don't yet is fire one. We don't require fire one. We require the county class. Our goal is to get to fire one as a state certification where your pro board state gives your certificate, your tested, but that's 240 hours. So for us, for you to pay that is huge. Again, our budget constraints haven't allowed us to get there. So that's why the incentivize pay plan. If you go, we'll give you a vehicle to go to those classes. We'll give you the gear and give you a vehicle. Do everything we possibly can to help you. And then you get that bump and pay when you're done. Our goal is to pay for that training. Thank you. You just mentioned the, like an hour by, I'm trying to understand the reference for, so part time an hour by rule per call. Is that for all calls received? Yeah, so if you come into a call and it's a good intent call and we spend a half an hour, 35 minutes and a half an hour, it's a minimum of one hour. So you're gonna get paid one hour for that call. If it's an hour in change, we have a system, it would be an hour and a half or two hours. And it keeps you there six hours, you're gonna get paid six hours. Yeah, because I was looking at between the false alarms and good intent. That's a significant percentage of potential calls. If we have multiple calls, so we have two or three calls that come in at the same time, they don't get paid three hours for they only get paid for the one hour. See, okay, all right, it's helpful. So if we're on that one call on the windstorm, the recent windstorm, we had like four or five calls like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They got paid the one hour and then when we exceeded that one hour, it started to pay. I see, okay, that's helpful, thank you. So we have a system in which we want to do that. And can you talk to me about the St. Mike's coverage? So my initial reaction to this is we're paying for 24 seven support, this adds capacity. How is this not helping our coverage? Like why do we still need to increase PT capacity on top of that? Thank you. So again, great question. There's, the part with St. Mike's, St. Mike's has run with us, has been part of an automatic aid response when it was Colchester, Malis Bay, St. Mike's and Wynuszki. We used to call it Winchester Bay. Everyone would respond. We would go to Colchester, they would come here and St. Mike's is part of Colchester. And we have come to rely on St. Mike's through our numbers and quite frankly the risk factors. When we go to Hawkeens building, six-story building with three people and you've got a fire alarm on the sixth floor, that's a lot for those people. It's not safe. National standards would tell you you need triple that on scene to operate safely. So for us to go there and operate with those numbers is not safe for our staff. So we've become very reliant on St. Mike's crew, which consistently gives us four plus all the time to come into Wynuszki and give us the extra numbers so that we can operate number one safely and efficiently and effectively. We just can't do it on our own. Even daytime, if there's three of us here, the full-time staff, yes we're comfortable with three of us being here because it's predictable, right? If you know what I can do, I don't need to drive. I know Erica, you know each other's abilities. But again, when we go to that six-story building, we're still only three people. So it's a numbers game and we deal with numbers. It's again making that predictable. So part of the pressure with St. Mike's is they historically have been part of Colchester and when the Colchester merger with Malice Bay and Colchester merging and then becoming the town of Colchester, there's become some ownership over St. Mike's by virtue of they fund St. Mike's, they provide them equipment, the gear, the SCBA, hose. So rightfully so, there's some ownership there as far as what they can and can't do or what Colchester wants them to do. And that's a risk for Manuski. We need access to St. Mike's. Unless around another emergency, it is critical that we maintain access to St. Mike's fire to continue what we're doing safely and effectively. Unless you want to go to 24-7 staffing, I don't think any of us want to do yet. So this is part of that bridge and anticipation of a continued conversation that's happening between Colchester and St. Mike's, which I'm not part of. And Manuski won't be part of that as far as how they figure out that relationship. Whether they continue to be one or whether St. Mike's becomes independent, this anticipates St. Mike's becoming independent and this is about a third of the budget that they would need to operate because we're about a third of their calls. I hope. Essentially, if John correct me if I'm wrong, we're buying our continued access to what we're getting now. That's more a question for us. I would just, one more question is if there's ever been any serious discussion into purchasing service altogether versus Manuski having a standalone department. So I've never been instructed to go have that conversation. I'm not sure what you're referring to whether we contact the city of Burlington and ask them to do fire coverage. I would anticipate that it would cost you more but I don't know that factual. I say that from knowing some conversations from my previous life in the center of Vermont where a community had the same thought process and said, hey, we're just gonna ask the neighboring full-time department because what happens is, it seems, 500 calls from Manuski doesn't seem like a lot but when you apply that to someone who's already doing 10,000 calls and they have a staffing model, your unions get involved and before you know it they gotta hire six people, seven people to build that buffer again. So more than willing to entertain that conversation, if that's the will of the council, I certainly have my reservations of that conversation. Manuski is unique and there's not a fire chiefs that hasn't come into my office and started to understand what we do and they're just in awe of what we do and you would not get the same service by just handing the service off. There's so many nuances that we do that are part of, in my opinion, part of the fabric and what is just lost for words about what that means but what we do is just a quick example of a water break at Hawkeen displaced 64 units. For three days we did food shopping, we went and picked up medicine, you're not gonna get that if you fry that out. They're not gonna be there for the 18 hours with those people making sure they're all housed, calling them hotels and making sure they got housing.  So again, understanding is not just about that fire call. It's really understanding what the staff does and what you've supported and it would be a huge unraveling of some really great things that you've done, in my opinion. But willing to have that conversation for sure. I have cautious optimism about regional dispatch and services and that costing less. We're waiting to see that pan out but I'm in terms of cost and utilizing that model to help save money. I'm still waiting to see that pan out. I am curious if you know of any other municipalities where there's been any emergency services impact fees. You know there's transportation impact fees, how Burlington is looking at education impact fees from their development. Do you know of any other municipalities that have had emergency services impact fees? And this kind of came up when we were talking about capital funds for the truck. Yeah, I don't. I know, you know, for you back from my zoning days here we talked about impact fees and the transportation fees and whether there could be, emergency services impact fee as new developers came in. And I think that is something that is worth trying to look and see what else is out there around us and understand that. But off the top of my head, I don't know. Yeah, okay. And I know you haven't gotten through the slide yet. I do have a rental registry question, so if you want to cover your summary of that before we get to it. Yeah, the rental registry budget, there's really no changes other than the full-time salary that is there. So one thing that I had chatted about with the city manager and Angela were an incremental increase to the registry fees. And I believe it's like $100 now and incrementally raising that to like $115. Yeah. $115. And that being a reasonable incremental increase that could provide a pretty significant bump in funding. And Angela, do you want to provide any additional estimates that you had from that? When I did the math out of the number of units that we're currently building, billing out $115 per unit every year would fully fund the rental registry budget as presented. And so right now, that fee hasn't been raised in 10 plus years. And I think it went from maybe one in four years to annually and that being the only change of late. Other than that, there hasn't been any incremental increase. And that seeming like it should be a self-funded program and being such an incremental element, I wouldn't ask the council to consider that as a potential change for the budget. And knowing that that was a question or something that was getting researched, you know, so Burlington, which is a similar program, they're $110 annually and they do offer some owner-occupied duplexes. They do give a break for the owner-occupied unit but charges full for the other unit. And it's my understanding that we're not charging a full inspection fee or registry fee for some of the properties. I could have that entirely wrong. That's true, we're working on that, but yeah, still in progress. Okay. So there's a correction in play. Will that correction lead to a self-funded budget? No, no. Because that's been anticipated since before COVID. Okay. So we're three years, Angela, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe in four years into that discussion of this inequity kind of correction across the system. I mean, I tend to agree with Bryn that we are putting all of our inflating costs on property taxes when there are other user-based fees that haven't been raised in long property taxes and water sewer, like the two things you can't get away from paying when there's other user-based fees that we maybe haven't raised in a very long time. Maybe we don't need to be higher than Burlington, but. I don't know that this program should be self-funded because that just shifts our tax burden solely to renters whereas property taxes distributed across renters and property owners, like the renters pay the fee, not necessarily the landlords. The landlords pay the fee, but they pass that cost to renters. So I think we just gotta be cautious about seeing this as a fully self-supporting budget when this is a service that we, in concert with other public safety investments, gets us to risk reduction and better health and safety outcomes. So I just, I support increasing the fees if that's appropriate and timely, going to every year from every four years is also a significant increase, that we have to be made. But I don't think this has to be fully self-funded. The rental registry doesn't have to be fully self-funded. That's fair. I do think, well, when did we go from it before to every year? Here's your problem, I'm sorry. I would have to look back. It was prior to my doing the billing for the program. It was prior to 2011. Okay, so that was a long time to do for it at least. Yeah, yeah, we've adapted. If you do not increase this enough to cover its cost, this is a program that is currently, the deficit needs to be covered by general fund reserves right now. So I just wanna make that very clear that if it doesn't support itself, it has no more reserves available and the general fund would end up supplementing it anyway. If we haven't touched the costs in 11 years, I think it's fair to have an incremental increase, like even $5 or something. And I wonder if there's other permitting fees that have been stagnant for a very long time that we should be thinking about. We did look at the other ones and the amount that it would raise was not significant and there were some costs to that in terms of whether we would be, people might be unwilling to apply for a permit if it was prohibitive and then, so there was a, there's an offset there. But if you wanted to, we can add the public building registry fee to the spread sheet if you'd like to consider that for next week. Consider that a vote, we also, yes. Sure. Okay, thank you. Is there a number you want in there, five, 10, 15? Yeah, I think Angela, when I met with you and Angela running for self-funded, I think it was $113 and I think to round it out, we said 115, so. But I can't. For clarification, you're asking to see this number and see it presented. I can't put that on that spread sheet that you guys are using for the general fund because as of right now, the rental registry is not included in the general fund or you wanted to consider integrating the rental registry into the general fund with this increase? That's my mistake, sorry, thanks, Angela. I would say no. But if we know the math on it, that $13 is what covers it, I think. Is that accurate, Angela? Was it, was it 113? I think it was 114 and change. That's why we got to 115. We rounded up to 115. Yeah. If it was 113 and change, I would have said 114. So, well, the other thing is too, we will be opening the fee ordinance. Since this isn't affecting the general fund too much, you might just not pay too much attention to it during the budgeting process and then address it during the fee ordinance review. Let's bring it back then. And then one question follow-up. For the rental registry, do you collect email addresses for contact information for those landlords? Yeah, we have a very robust property address, contacts, all that. Okay, all right. It is a voluntary completion of form to collect that information. So, while I do have it for the majority of landlords, there are some that do not return that data. Good to know. Thank you. When we do the inspection, we meet with the building contact, whether it's a property manager or owner. First thing we ask is, are you the contact for the building? Is this information, phone numbers, emails, correct? There's a couple points in which we can gather that. Okay, wonderful. Thank you very much.  I mean, the deficit is because of the staffing we've had to do with the development. And obviously, the number of units hasn't fully supported, funded the staff needed to do the current level of inspections we're doing. So, in the future, as we develop and we add 200 units, you know, you do the math, a hundred dollars a unit, you know, I would caution you that it's not gonna keep up with the staff demand to do those inspections. So this problem is gonna continue to click as we continue to add units. We're not, you're not gonna build enough units to fully support us. And what I've said to the manager is, I just don't want staff to feel like quantity or quality of inspections because we're worried about trying to make it whole. You know, just, that's not how you run a good program. I can assure you the council is concerned about housing quality. I'm concerned about both, right? We all are. And there's a balance. I don't know what that balances. And it happened quickly, right? I mean, it's, but if we look at the number of units coming, I would tell you right now we don't have capacity to be taking on hundreds of more units.   But let's get to the table and have those creative thinking moments. Yeah, you might recall my, when I first presented the level services budget, it was to include it to relieve some of that emotional pressure from the staff. But for the sake of this year's budget increase, we did take it out again. But that was the context for the initial thought. We'll see you next year. Next slide. Yeah, so this is just showing the salaries, benefits. The, you know, for me, really, get done the contracts professional services. You know, again, that includes the St. Mike's increase. There's some software increases in there. But that's the bulk of what that is. The 47. I anticipate the St. Mike's to be in the 45,000 range versus the 47. But that's where the bulk of that is. Vehicle equipment maintenance, and we continue to be pretty flat there. You know, there will be some cost savings with that vehicle leaving. But keep in mind, we're still keeping on the road a 20-year-old, you know, truck. So it's not like we have an all-new fleet. It doesn't take long, especially with the changes, with inflation and that sort of thing. You know, a recent repair bill was 4,000 bucks. So it doesn't take long with the big truck stuff to be going through that money.  Chief, this is like a 30%-ish increase since FY22. Is that primarily like wage and benefit inflation and then the St. Mike's truck? Yep. Yeah. I can't remember any of the, like, significant. Yeah, Angela, correct me if I'm wrong, but really our line items really stayed almost flat. I mean, knowing that the supplement of coverage, I'm going to try to be very mindful. Probably the biggest change from FY22 to FY23 was actually the creation of Bruce's position. Previously, Bruce's position wasn't equivalent to Erika, so it was lower paid versus now an off-level position that can approve budget items, invoices, and has sign-off authority, which Erika did not, and Leah did not. So it did increase because we didn't make a dose of justice substitution, which came before council for approval. Yeah, thank you. Other questions on the fire side? And just to confirm, this is your level funding request, not a stretch request? The proposed middle one. Yes, I'm considering this level because it's paying for what we're already getting now. Okay, thank you. Again, this is mainly wages, benefits, there's no other changes to the line items. And then last but not least is the emerging issues, recruitment and retention of our part-time staff. Again, they're tired of me saying this. This is not just the local, state, national trend. Anytime you're reading the news, it's a big example of it is the town of Williston. Ended up hiring nine after they did a staff study, coming up, South Burlington's proposing hiring seven because of call demand, albeit they do EMS. I will equate to you our inspection work is equal to a lot of that EMS work, call volume and workload-wise. Obviously we don't have to be here 24 seven to do those inspections, so there's your difference. But even at 500 calls, we still need to be, we still need to make it predictable. You know, our six P to six A is not predictable. Again, this is not a fault of those who are part-time call folks, but I need to know, John needs to know that someone's, we're gonna have some sort of numbers and St. Mike's is working like that for us. We know there's gonna be four people on that St. Mike's truck coming in. You know, so again, this is buying us, someone use that stretch word. This is stretching our model some more and making sure that it's predictable. And when I have the experience leadership, combined with our part-time staff, and then times when they're not showing up in that experience leadership with the sometimes inexperienced folks that will get on the St. Mike's truck, because they're just four-year kids, students. There's not a lot of experience on that truck, but when I can couple that with experience, Winooski's good, Winooski's covered. You're in good hands. So that's where we're trying to get and that's why we keep highlighting that recruitment, retention, and then the supplemental fire coverage. I don't know, we just word for word, but we've talked through some of those pieces. A question I have, and this might be more to the room in general, is we have this, or hopefully we'll continue to see success with the training of bus drivers at the school, which is another place that has nationwide staffing issues. I know this is not exactly the same, but it has training requirements and stuff like that that might be hard to get interpreters for. Might this be a place to explore doing something similar to see if folks in the community would be interested in stepping up to do this work if they had the access to the training of materials? So yes, on many levels. What I would tell you is, I'll start with our staff. Are we prepared to take on that challenge? No, I don't think we have that expertise. When English is not your first language in your inner system that is driven and structured such, it's very difficult. And again, I started local, right? I figured out myself as chief, we're experiencing that. We've experienced some new Americans, residents coming into the firehouse, some of them have been very successful, some of them have struggled. So we're a very structured, how you're trained, the commitment level that's demanded and you have to make 25% of calls, we're very, very structured because someone popping in and popping out, seeing you in a month, doesn't work. It's very structured and there's a lot of accountability to that. I'm not sure that's the focus and that's a challenge in which we have to overcome. So committed to it, but we don't hopefully have the expertise or resources to face that challenge. And I would tell you, even at the state level, they don't. I would rely on these guys too, with their education, certainly with Vermont Fire Councils and the New York Academy, they're not structured to help us through that endeavor. I will say that it is something that John and I have been discussing since almost our first one-on-one and this is where the rubber meets the road. If we can, you can hear how much the staff is dealing with now and how much they're covering now. Even though we should think of it as an integral, it is a new skill set. So we have to be careful and thorough about how we roll it out. So it is something that we're committed to but it does take some finessing to get it to work. We don't want to set anyone up to fail. Right.  A new staff member recently went through our interview process. All seemed to line up, meaning it seemed like a good fit for him. Seems like a good fit for us. Still is. But we sent him to county class. Right. That's our first step. Yep. And two weeks in, I think, yeah, Chief Spittle was going to teach the class and he sees that individual walking up the street, walking to St. Mike's because he doesn't have a car. And it never came to us. He never mentioned it. We just, through our interview process, we were like, you know, we would never think that someone's running from their residence trying to get to the firehouse, right? We've never experienced that. We've never had to deal with that. So we tried to, you know, supplement that need by providing one of the city electric cars and days he had to get to training but he still had to get to city hall. So he was still walking blocks to get here. You know, just those are the pieces that we're not prepared or resourced for. This is what equity work looks like. We have to figure these things out.  It's not like they live across the street. They're blocks away, you know, and just what that looks like and how can I say, right, that's the level of service we're gonna provide. I'm not saying it doesn't have a place. Just those are pieces that we need to learn and when we're doing all that, that needs to be on our front burner but there's a lot on the front burner. Thank you for that. Any questions? Any public comment questions? Any final questions? I'm good. All right, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm sorry to our PD but I'm gonna call a five-minute recess. We'll reconvene at 8.27. 8.29, we will reconvene. Welcome. We have our police department presentation now. So Lieutenant Charcalas or Chief Haber, please kick us off. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for giving us the time to go over our budget with you this evening. As part of our succession planning professional development, which we'll get into a little bit more later in this presentation, I've asked Lieutenant Charcalas to help co-present tonight. So if we get to the outline, he'll be taking you down to the community outreach events and then I will be taking over from the general fund budget on through. And depending on what the questions are, you may get an answer from one or both of us. All right, let's get to the next slide, please. And again, thank you Chief Haber for the introduction. Thank you, City Council Mayor and City Manager. So this first slide brings self-explanatory. This is our organizational chart. The two things I'd like to highlight on this slide in particular is the detective slot. With the pandemic and some staffing issues, we were kind of forced to bolster up patrol, a little more, because that's where I'm focusing to be. So we had our Perling detective went to the road and about six months ago, we were finally able to refill the position of the in-house detective. And it's already paying dividends with a lot of the war involved cases we had. So I want to point that out that we're back to having a full time dedicated detective for more intense cases. And the second part I want to kind of focus on on this slide is just reassuring everyone that we still have the CJC, the Community Justice Center, or SOAR Justice Report. Years ago, we had one in-house. So it's easy for people, it's very tangible that, okay, if we have a case that we feel falls into this realm of needing alternative justice that it was here that was dealt with, I just wanted to reassure everyone that those needs are still being met. It's just, we're partnering with Essex and Burlington. And so if a case goes to the state's attorney's office and they feel that it's best served in an alternative justice arena that is still an option for the people that we deal with on a daily basis. Okay, next slide, please. Okay, so this is really like the foundation of what we do or been trying to do. So a little background in 2015, Foreign President Obama established a task force which had some of the most respected minds and law enforcement and other professions to kind of figure out what's the best way going forward to kind of overhaul policing. And it's certainly the 21st century policing model and it's the foundation of what we do. It's the basis of what our strategic plan outlines. Best police practices and how to best interface with the communities that we serve. So after these meetings, they came up with these six pillars. And really what that comes down to is promoting effective crime reduction models while building community trust and also keeping in mind a safeguarding like the well-being of officers as well. So that's kind of like what a nutshell this is trying to accomplish. And our biggest thing is, with our strategic plan in particular, it's called the Community Policing Strategic Plan. So everything that we do as an agency is community oriented based and it's also aligned with the city's vision. And it requires a little extra work and it's been something we've been building towards but with our outreach events and just our de-escalation tactics. This is really the foundation of what we tried to do to, like I said, kind of interface with the community in the best way possible. And next slide, please. Okay, so kind of feedback on the last slide. And for those who have seen this before, I apologize but nothing's not much has changed in the last year or so. But this is, again, with the 20% policing model, training's a big component of that. And we've been trying to make sure that we're keeping up to speed with the national narrative of what's important in policing. As you can see up there, we have a fair and partial police that we do every other year. A huge emphasis is now on de-escalation training where in the past, we would maybe go into a situation and resort to using some type of force. Now we're taking a breather, time's on our side and we're trying to figure out the iPad trainings and other de-escalation methods to get best results with other tactics to have a more positive outcome with people not getting hurt unnecessarily. Also, with our training, we're trying to emphasize the future leaders of the agency and we've invested a lot of time specifically in the mid-level management level of our sergeants and setting them to nationally recognize leadership transitions that galida class, which is a trilogy, and also the Roger Williams Leadership Series as well. And our school resource officer was just at the NACERO school resource officer program, which was beneficial as well. And these things do take time. I mean, can you please me? And these tactics aren't reactionary models, so it does require a lot of energy and investment in the members of the PD. And that's something we're trying to continually build in NACERO as an agency. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is pretty self-explanatory. These are our top 10 call types from July of 21, July 1st of 21 to June 3rd of 2022. And I just like to focus on a lot of the calls that we deal with are community-based. So a lot of them don't have necessarily criminal component to them, but as you see the public assists are our most common call. That can be anything from like a landlord-tenant issue, you know, civil issues, but a lot of times us as police officers, we are kind of like the first line for people to call and say, hey, what do I have here? And we can either say this is what we can help you with this or we can at least get you in point in the right direction. I'd also like to point out that our agency assists are a little up and that is just kind of also with the staffing shortage, it's not only in Manuski, the county, the state and the nation. It's just been more imperative to have these partnerships with our neighboring agencies to make sure that we're providing the residents with the services that they're expecting. So we have usually like a two-office response for any kind of incident that would be maybe a little more volatile. We also only have a two-person minimum, so a lot of times it's only two people in the city. So one person's tied up and we have, say, we have to go to a domestic, you know, we're gonna rely on Colchester to help supplement us. And vice versa, Colchester's tied up with something they have to go to call, you know, we're helping them. So that's what the agency assists come in. So again, this is just something that we're dealing with and this is the reality of where we're at and policing with some staffing issues, so the agencies are also up. But I do really want to emphasize that this is, most of our calls for service are community-based, community care taking, non-criminal, however very vital and also allows us to be exposed to people who maybe aren't, who traditionally wouldn't see the police where we're out there in the forefront more. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is just a five-year snapshot of what we've had for a call volume per year. And I'd like to point out a couple of things. As you can see, pre-pandemic, so in fiscal year 19, we had 8,000 calls for service. We were almost at 9,000 the following year. Pandemic hits. Our numbers have gone down. That's not a surprise. We went to more of a reactionary model, instead of a proactive model and that's just what was expected. And I think it's what people wanted too. They didn't want to unnecessarily expose people. We could hand out something over the phone. So we're doing, you know, traffic stops are down. You know, involving ourselves with foot patrols, maybe we're a little less due because people just didn't want to be around. But I would like to say that that last fiscal year, 20 through the 3, 8, 5, that's the six months. So as you can see, post-pandemic, we're, it's in the rear view more. Our numbers are going to be pre-pandemic numbers again. And that's happening with that number. And we're also going into the warm months and not right now, but I know it's only January. But eventually, we'll be into the warmer season.  So I'm very confident that we'll be well into the eights again for our instance for the year. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is the time of day of week analysis. Just want to emphasize that our busiest time, maybe no surprise, is 0700 to 7 in the morning to 0100 the next morning. And again, we've been trying to staff those hours with the most police officers and most coverage as possible. And so like I said, that's, it's pretty level, but like I said, 07 to 01 the following day is definitely our busiest timeframe. And the bottom chart is the days of the week. So pretty steady money through Friday. Just like the fire chief said, it's really pretty consistent to work with you when you see a community that on a Wednesday, if you're just as busy as you are on Friday night, very, very consistent call volume. And that's what I think that kind of demonstrates. Next slide, please. Could I ask a couple of follow-ups? Sure. One of them was, and sorry, this is going back a couple of slides. Was I was wondering if you could give an example or a couple of examples of what the, the bar in there which I think is cut off in part on Zoom is the suspicious event. I was just wondering if you could give some examples of what those calls are like. Those are, it's kind of like a catch-all for some stuff that we just don't know exactly what the complaints may be asking. So I heard a loud noise at this intersection, but I don't see it, I don't know anything more. It's just a loud noise.  And a lot of times we don't find anything, we just label it as such. Okay. Yep. Thank you. And then another one I just noted on the, for the back to the call volume, it's like when is it around four and five o'clock? There seem to be a spike. Is that traffic related? It's everything related. Yeah. It can be traffic. You know, we still don't have offices in the evening shift who do focus more on traffic work, but that's just a really busy time. People are coming home from work, you know, accidents. It's like I said, we're very consistent during these hours and it can be anything from a domestic to a traffic accident to, like I said, the loud bang on the intersection, just not knowing where it is, but that if they are, you know, the evening shift hours early evenings is always gonna, it's always been very, very busy for us. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So just gonna kind of touch upon the school resource officer for those who aren't familiar. There's been some chatter over the last couple of years of seeing if we want to continue with the SRO program the way it's been for several decades now. So there were some conversations that were had between school council members and members of the community to see if we wanted to have a full-time embedded SRO up at the school. And I can tell you for fiscal year 24, that's, there's gonna be no changes right now. So we are gonna have a school resource officer up at the school full-time. He'll be in the uniform. You can see there is a soft uniform and an unmarked cruiser, but there's no changes for fiscal year 24. I'm being told from the chief that there will continue to be conversations to see if they are gonna make changes for fiscal year 25 or that's like a hybrid or liaison. But like I said, for fiscal year 24, nothing's changing. Just for full disclosure too, you know, the school's struggling like the city with their FY24 budget. Superintendent Mannan did share with me that his recommendation is to keep the SRO as is, but it may not be his decision as the school gets to their final budget meeting to get to the number that they want. They may come back to us with something that's an alternative. Thank you. Next slide, please. Okay, so kind of the same time that I became a lieutenant, we're fortunate to have this community outreach team. We welcome to all of the communities, almost all the communities in Cheney County. I just really wanna highlight the work that they do. If you go back to, we don't have to go back to that slide, but one of our busiest calls for services and mental health issues. And a lot of times it has no criminal component to it. It's just a time consuming endeavor for patrol officers to have to deal with. The outreach team has been fantastic. They are part of Howard, but they're embedded with Townsville, Newsy, Colchester, Essex, Willis, and South Burlington. And they just provide us the ability to offer more optimal services for people who are experiencing mental health issues and also freeing up officers who maybe don't have the skill set or the time to adequately deal with that. So it's been really a good partnership for us. I can see, you can all see that the calls have gone down and I'll try and explain why that probably is the case. So we've got from 646 to 212, it is significant. Again, that's pandemic related. They were just like us more reactive, not getting out in the community doing extra ways of kind of like networking and doing outreach, outreach stuff. Also, it's a very transient population of mental health issue people. So a lot of them don't have homes and one month these individuals could be in Manuski and then three months from now they're in South Burlington and they've been in South Burlington for a while. So they are probably dealing with, I'm guessing Calvon about the same. It just, right now we're in a little lull from Manuski and that's just kind of the nature of the work that when you're dealing with a very unpredictable population that I think these numbers fluctuate. And also it's a few years into, so some of the services that Ryokai have worked and maybe there's a little bit of a less need because they have been out there doing stuff. Go ahead. Did you already say why Burlington is not on here? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't. So Burlington has their own outreach team. So they've had one for them. They're not part of the Howard. Okay. Yep. Thanks. Next slide please. Okay, I just want to kind of focus on, it's a really good deal for the city from what you're getting. So, that outreach team works money through Friday and I believe the hours are 8 a.m. to at least 8 p.m. So again, at least 12 hours of coverage, five days a week. We account for 9% of the total call. We contribute 7% of the cost, which I believe the chief was telling me is about $16,000 a year. So for $16,000 a year you can get more than a full time social worker, not health worker at our disposal for the community. So for $16,000 to have at least 12 hours of coverage five days a week, it's just a really good investment I think for the city to continue. And like I said, it has big events for us and it helps, like I said, really good partnership for us. Next slide, please. Do you know if there's any plans to extend their hours or does that really depend on their time? They've had conversations. You know, obviously we always want more. Yeah. And again, staffing's always an issue and turn over, I don't know for sure. I just know that we've talked about if we get some weekend coverage in there as well. They do as much follow-up as they can through email come Monday morning, but I do know there have been conversations. It did start at just 8.30 to like 4.30. So they've already extended it once into the evening hours, because obviously again, I don't know if it doesn't sleep. So they had at least extended into a good portion of the evening part, but I haven't heard anything concrete. It says, you know, we're gonna go into the weekends or anything more at this point. Thank you. And now for the fun part for me. So I'd be remiss if I can at least acknowledge some of the success stories that we've had in this past fiscal year. I'm not always the best. I do some of the press releases. We don't always put out all the good deeds and work that a lot of the officers downstairs do. So we're gonna take a quick moment just to kind of highlight some of the things that we thought were exceptional work. And again, a lot more community-based and de-escalation. But this first couple kind of focused on the drug issues that unfortunately plagued many of the communities in Vermont. As you see, the first one was a search warrant that it was a suspected drug house for a while. And finally, one of our officers was able to initiate a traffic stop, which connected to this house. They put this officer put that effort in until you get the search warrant. And as a result of the search warrant, you can see 6,600 bags of heroin. We'll see seven ounces of cocaine, we'll see six grams of crack and six grams of methamphetamine. So just a really good proactive job by the officer and it makes a difference. And I can tell you that that residence is no longer occupied by anyone who's in the drug trade. So that's certainly a quality of life issue improvement for that neighborhood. Another one is this domestic assault, which again was at a suspected drug house. And sometimes you have to be creative about how we can get to the end, but it was actually a known drug house where a person admitted to buying a firearm illegally for the resident of that house, which doesn't sound like the worst crime, but it's a federal crime. And because it was a federal issue, our federal partners got involved and was able to remove that individual in the house and now that house is also not occupied by anyone suspected of doing anything illegal as far as drugs go. So a little more like a different approach, but same as a result, quality of life for the neighbors. Like I said, we're probably getting at least three or four calls a week about this house. So it's always comforting for us to be able to say, hey, we've made a difference. I'll just go down to this dorm robbery. There was a food mart. These are tough cases. It was a violent crime, but through the good work of a couple of our officers, they were able to actually locate the weapon that was used, track it to a hotel in the area of Colchester, actually able within a couple of hours to apprehend the suspect and get a confession from it. So that's a rare thing, but obviously a violent crime that has a good ending where we help someone accountable. Next slide, please. Yeah, there's so many. I don't want to talk, because I know you were at a long evening. But we had some daytime burglary issues in the last, I guess it was probably like two, three months ago. And thank you to our community members who are alert and aware of this thing. Of course, form was very involved. We were able to find this individual based on a tip from the community member and apprehend and those daytime burglars have stopped for now. And then we've had a couple of employees do some life saving measures, a couple of working the fair and perform CPR on an employee saving that employee's life. We don't always go into all our Narcan deployments. We probably, I'm just guessing, but I would say at least probably, maybe once a week we're deploying Narcan. So it's not getting the same recognition just because we do it so often and it becomes almost normal. But I do want to just let everyone here know that we are actively going to overdoses multiple times a week and deploying Narcan and probably saving many lives in the process. And just also just want to reiterate again at the end here, this focus on the de-escalation is paramount in what we're trying to do for this 21st century policing and just our community policing in general, that we are able to now take a deep breath, take time and usually have successful outcomes without having to use force. And that's something that we deal with daily. Talking to people is our most important weapon, being able to communicate and de-escalate situations. And yeah, that's pretty much all I have for now. Actually, do you want me to do one more slide? Paul, can you go to the next slide please? Yeah, and again, our basis of what we've been doing is all community outreach, community policing. And these are, we're finally able to post pandemic, get back into some of the things that Chief Hebert has been implementing for years now. We were finally able to do some coffee with the cops these last six months. We've reintroduced the block parties. We will start the public safety camp, hopefully this spring slash summer with SRO. And just really just trying to get back to normal saying getting that origin and being able to connect with, again, members of the community who traditionally probably wouldn't see us because if we're reactionary, and if you're not doing anything, Ryan, I can know your police force. This allows us to at least be able to build these, again, these partnerships that are vital for us going forward. Thank you. I ask a question related to Narcan. Yeah. I'm forgetting a couple things. So I was just wondering, is that something that could residents get Narcan if they needed, or is there a way for them to do that with out engaging with the police officer or through the police department without, I don't know. Aga