So I want to talk about being a generalist. See, the old way of doing things was you follow a very straight path. And being a specialist is not bad. It's not good. But the advantage of a specialist is when everything is perfect, when there is no variability. This is the advantage of a specialist. But in reality, if you look at civilization, and if you look at migration, you look at history as a whole, specialists fail because they lack the ability to adapt. They lack the ability to be versatile. And due to this lack of variability and versatility, they can adapt to the times, they can adapt to the economy, they can adapt psychologically. And so where we are heading right now, we're heading into chaos. Trillions of dollars being printed into the economy. There's two economies, there's the stocks and the real economy. You have all these new rules being implemented, maybe Cold War with China through taxation, tariffs, etc. Supply chains being skewed around the world, eliminated, disrupted, localization being more focused as opposed to globalization. And so we have all these different elements happening at once. And people think right now is difficult. Just wait and see. But in times of chaos like this, and we can substitute the word chaos for the unknown, there's a lot of variables out there.  They do horrible jobs at this because there's no blueprint for them. They're like, oh my god, I don't know what's going on. I don't have the blueprint. I don't have the map. I don't have the legend. And we see it happening with every industry, with every niche. And we can't really blame the people on this. Like people have been scammed into college, university, right? Everybody is thinking, well, if I follow this path, my life will be easy for me. If I follow this other path, I can do this and that.  Listen, the most important thing for you to survive anywhere in the world is this. Physicality is really important, but more or less is this, is the grit. And grit plus adaptability equals success, pretty much. And so we are heading into a massive disruptive period where there's many unknowns.  They have no idea what they're talking about. They may have assumptions of what's going to happen. They may have theories of what's going to happen, but they don't know exactly what's going to happen. It's not a science. But what I do know is, do not rely on the old status quo for your success.   No one cares. People care about results. People care about how fast can you adapt and learn a new skill. I made a video about this meta learning. In fact, one of my predictions, and I said this a while ago, I thought LinkedIn was going to do this when they bought Linda. I really thought they didn't.  There's a big acquisition too is a billion dollar acquisition. I'm like, Oh, cool.  I thought when LinkedIn bought Linda and merged it into LinkedIn learning, they're like, okay, but they're going to do meta learning, micro learning, because let's say if I give example, I want to hire somebody that does growth hacking, but just growth hacking for let's say, conversion rate optimization, I don't need them to know anything about else. And then I can go into LinkedIn learning, find conversion rate optimization, the latest course, I mean, as of yesterday, and get my new employee to learn that right away and implement it right away. Right. So it's like micro task learning. And you cross pollinate your skills this way, but they didn't do that.  I've always said it, the most successful people are generalists, but they have a very small specialty in one thing. We call them like T shaped people, right? And so they know, they like a polymath, right? They know a little bit about every single thing and they understand one thing very well. But the great thing about this is the generalization on top creates a polarization, right? You go from, I know a little bit about coding, to marketing, to sales, to HR, through human relationships, through scaling, through technology, et cetera. And these things cross pollinate together. And listen, man, I never went to high school. I did want high school. I got kicked out. I never went to college. I've been to many different industries. Hell, I might be going into the farming industry now.  I learned the first principles, I find the best people in the industry, find the best investors. Luckily for me, I knew a bunch of farmers back in the day as well. And I put these things together.    There's not a plan for me. There's unknowns out there.   There's no known there. For the most part, you'll come back with no food. And so we've been pampered, babied helicopter to think their safety. It's a, it's an illusion. It's Maya. There's no safety. Right. Safety makes weakness. It's really true. Like if you believe that your life will be a okay, with no bumps or hurdles or challenges, you're delusional. And if you think going to college university is going to solve your problem, well, you're part of the sheeple, definitely part of the sheeple. And we see the whole system eroding underneath us right now, because there's no answer out there. The answer for you, my friend, anybody watching this is do you have what it takes right now to start anew? That's it. And this is why most people are fearful, right? Like, Oh, I'm going to start a new, be humble, man. Starting a new is fun. It's new challenge. Remember what I said before, fail, first attempt at learning the analogy, right?    And this is where we're heading to the world is changing fast, extremely fast. Economies are shifting. Political entities are emerging, new and old.  Poof, forget about it. That's not going to happen. And you should be happy that's not going to happen.  What kind of living is that? Can you imagine like 30 years, the same office, and same people?  But yeah, guys, like, listen, being a generalist is where it's at.  And remember, the greatest freedom in life is realizing there's a lot of things that you can do and control.  Peace out.


Now, we shift to the company perspective. Please see previous videos on Data Axel and FactSet for two databases which provide company information including financials, products and services, and key personnel. A new key resource for public company information we will look at is InvestText. This provides investment analyst reports from analysts who research companies to make buy, sell, and hold recommendations. We will use the example of Tesla TSLA. Go to BC Libraries, Databases, InvestText. Type in the company name or in our case ticker symbol TSLA into the search criteria box. There are multiple listings for Tesla, be sure to choose TSLA. Hit submit, hit view. You may want to default to the last 12 months and then review titles, contributors, and report length. Here we can view a report in PDF. Then you get a detailed treatment about the company and industry itself. A special note is the executive summary, your pathway through the report. Look at sources for charts and graphs. The key takeaways further down the report back up the stock recommendations. Market share, market size, and company strategies will often be highlighted in the key takeaways. You will also start to learn industry terms, for instance in the automobile industry, battery electric vehicle, plug-in hybrid, autonomous vehicle, etc. Now choose a company that you're looking into and see what information you can get on it from InvestText.


What's going on everybody welcome back to another draw preview and the grass court season continues on the WTA with the WTA 500 event this week in Berlin And it's a new event it hasn't been around for the last ten years and there's a big names playing for this one But also some big names are pulled out so let's go to the withdrawal list the players that are pulled out of this one world number one Ash Barty, she's out Jennifer Brady, Kennan, Kovitava, Osaka, Sakari and Sfionsek is also out of this one starting at the top of the draw We have eight seeds in this one and the top four seeds get a buy in the first round Sabalenka she's the number one seed gets a buy in the first round She'll play the winner of the qualifier French and Madison Keys who are going at it in the first round Then we've got Vondra Soba versus the qualifier Samson over winner of that match takes on either Kudamatova Or the number eight seed Mukava, which is the very interesting first round match circle That one is one to watch then we have the number four seed Carolina Plischkova She gets a buy in the first round she'll play the winner of Pagola versus the qualifier Baptist We're going at it in the first round then we have Kerber versus the qualifier doi winner of that match takes on The winner of that match takes on either the wild card Peckovich or the number seven seed as a ranker The players I'm watching out for in this one obviously we're watching out for Sabalenka She had a great clay court season and her game should be suited to the grass with the big hitting So interested to see how she can transition onto the grass also Plischkova Watch out for her because she is a good grass court player and has won titles on this surface before and also Anjali Kerber playing in front of her crowd in Germany and of course she won the 2018 Wimbledon title so she can play on the grass as well So very interested to see how she does this week bottom half of the draw now We've got the number six seed Mugarrutha She plays Kastea in the first round the winner of that takes on the winner of right back in our versus Rogers Who are going at it in the first round then we have Anissa Mover versus Kornay winner of that match takes on the number three seed Bianca Andrescu who we're seeing on the grass courts for the first time in about three years So interested to see how she goes then we got the number five seed Benchich She takes on a qualifier name you in the first round winner of that match takes on either martich or another qualifier Muhammad in the second round then we have Alexandrova versus the wild card Kalinskaya winner of that match takes on the second seed Alina Svetalina the player that I'm most excited to watch out for this week is Bianca Andrescu She doesn't play on the grass courts for about three years and fun fact She's actually only played one round at Wimbledon in her career So she hasn't played much on the grass, but I expect that her game is a hundred percent suited to the grass courts heavy-hitting big returns I'm excited to watch Bianca this week also interested to see Svetalina as well She has made a semi-final of Wimbledon that was two years ago She definitely can play on the grass as well and also Rabakina She had a great French open making the quarterfinals beating Serena Williams along the way and with her big serve and hard forehand I expect that she's gonna be really good on the grass as well So interested to see how Rabakina does as well this week So there it is the German open in Berlin and like I said big names are playing. It's very stacked event But some big names are not playing. It's interesting that Barty's not playing probably still injured I wish you put out the French open Osaka still not playing I don't know if she's gonna be playing Wimbledon, but don't worry There's still some big names playing Andrescu very interested to see how she does this week Let me know down in the comments below. Who do you think's gonna win this tournament? It's a stacked event still early on in the grass court season Let me know down below. So the prediction for this one I'm looking at the draw and I'm looking at Carolina Plischkeva. I know that she hasn't had a great 2021 slipped down in the rankings But I think the grass court season is where she changes around as long as she doesn't play Pagula in the second round I think she can make a run maybe to the semi-finals and she has a pretty good draw If she can avoid the likes of Azarenka and Sabalenka and because it's so early on the grass court season It's still anyone's tournament. So I'm gonna go with Plischkeva to win this one Let me know down in the comments below who you think's gonna win So the German open one of the biggest tournaments on the grass court calendar for the WTA


in, maybe that's a default to how to get back. I can tell you that a lot of times, people who fortunately are using illicit drugs usually have it in their house. So they'll actually tell us, I was like, oh, we actually administered Narcan before he got here. So it is available to the public, but I would kind of default to it. Sure. It's readily available to the Department of Health and if you go on the website, either the hospital or the Department of Health can tell you multiple sites where you can pick up Narcan. Awesome. Thank you. I was forgetting exactly where folks could get that. I appreciate it. We're ready for the next slide. I'll take over from here. So this strategic vision, I'm not gonna go down through every bullet point. This is a lot of what James has talked about already. Regional dispatch continues to evolve and take some twists and turns that were unexpected. It's the nature of this type of project and why it's been on the plate to have, consolidated dispatch for almost 50 years now. There's just a lot of moving pieces in part. So Elaine will be updating you as that continues, but there has been some unexpected issues. Retaining and caring for our current employees. This is a national, it's not, like John touched on in FIRE, it touches all public safety. It's just really hard to recruit and also retain individuals in this work. It's just very demanding. You're doing mental health work. You're doing EMS work. It's just different than traditional policing and retaining employees to me is so much more important than recruiting employees because by the time we have three years of an employee, you've been working the road and becoming a serviceable officer, tremendous amount of time and effort to get them to that point and understand our philosophy of policing, our culture within the police department of how we treat people, how we interact with people, a customer service mentality while delivering police services. So turnover is a big issue when you lose people. That hurts twice as much as when you're trying to recruit new people to train if that makes any sense. We're gonna continue to try and diversify our workforce. We've done a pretty good job with that. That's gonna be ongoing work. Four of our sworn employees are from marginalized communities to better represent our population here in Winooski. So we're very proud of that. It took almost two and a half years to reach that milestone, but we're not gonna stop. Professional development's going to be key. We're looking at a lot of change. And I can tell you historically, since 1996 when I started here, this has been a very consistent, every five years you lose 33% of your workforce for one reason or another. So this is nothing new. I think it's just, it's more highlighted now because it takes so much longer to get a new hire ready to do this type of work than it did 25 years ago. 25 years ago, we taught them how to go to the academy, do basic police work, detect crime and they were good to go, or now there's just so much more involved. It's a bigger commitment. Time, resources and money. James mentioned the strategic plan was updated, so we think it's vital to never have that document go more than three years without having a group of people to look at it just to make sure it's continuing to serve the residents the best that we can and embrace what the city and the police department find valuable on how we deliver police services. Quick question on that while you're on it. Is that something that goes to this State Healthy and Connected Commission to look at? They do, yes. We've reviewed it with them. We think we had a member sit on the last update. It's been a little bit of a struggle this last time to get somebody, the one member that was on that commission for a long time and was really invested in that work left the commission. So we do the best we can to include as many voices as we can. And the next update would be in 25 or 20s. So this goes from FY23, 24 and 25. So it'd be for FY26. Great, thank you. Next slide, please. Again, FY24, these problems aren't going away, so it's gonna look very similar to FY23, just a continuation of. We mentioned consolidated dispatch, the outreach team, I think there's been some conversations, they're going through a little bit of turnover as well as that team grows and takes on new communities. They're trying to add members. Whenever they have one of the members of that team leave, it takes a little bit of time to get back up to speed. So they're dealing with that as well. School resource officer, I fully believe that for FY25 will be on off-campus program. Disturbed liaison officer seems to be the catchphrase that we're going with. And that officer would still work Monday through Friday during the day, be available to be the first responder and a known face going up to the school, also doing education, drivers ed, dare training, all the things that they've done in the past. The only difference is they would be spending time when they weren't doing those tasks off-campus and available for patrol. So it'll actually help supplement some of the call volume, which is a good thing. And then managing staffing shortages and pending retirements is going to be big for us. And it's always the unknowns. You don't know that somebody's gonna hurt their knee playing basketball on the aisle for four months. People have babies and go on parental leave. People get sick and battle illnesses. So while we're at full staff right now on paper at 15, we have run with two or three people out for the majority of this fiscal year. And the toll that that takes on the people that are left standing and handling these calls is tremendous. I'm very concerned about burnout, lack of opportunities. I'll get into that later, but it has a ripple effect. It's not just the people being out, but now you have police officers working on their days off or being ordered in and ordered over for their shifts. And it just, when there's no end in sight, it's mentally draining for them. So it's just something we need to keep an eye on. Question. So 15 is full staff and you're still experiencing those. What number of staff, excuse me, do you believe you would need to not experience those burnout issues and difficulty covering and whatnot? If we could put a pin in that. I have a slide I can go into a little more detail down. A little later in the presentation. This might be something of our little later too, but I was wondering about thinking about that professional development and consistency structures being put in place to ensure the continuation of community policing, even with any changes in the leadership team. Yeah, so that's a good question. And what we really try to do and what I touched on before is this is why retention is so important because when you have a team that's been together for three, four, five years, everybody spends some of the trainings, they get the concept, they've gone to the calls, they've seen it work. Now you have a lack of supervision because the sergeant retired. And then on top of that, now you have three new employees who are trying to figure out, just being comfortable being police officers, how to respond to average calls, like we call them the grounders, the easy calls. And while also trying to grasp all these concepts, it's a lot to take in. And I think we do the best that we can to try and maintain that level of service and our mission vision culture downstairs to try and get people, you have to do it right away when they come in the door. And we even start in the interview process. We talk about the type of police department that we are and how we handle calls and treat people and interact with people. And that just goes right through the academy when their field training, their first field training and last field training officers are just constantly reinforcing that type of mindset with the new employees, but it takes time. So every time we have turnover and lack of staff to do that mentoring, it just takes a little bit longer than what we would normally hope. So it's a big lift, but it's who we are. It's what we do. It's what our residents are paying for. We take it seriously and we build it into our daily operations. Thank you. And we can go to the next slide. So I asked Angela, I'm very aware of the size of the police department budget in relation to the city budget. And this is nothing more than to call out over the past eight budgets, how we've actually tried to really remain as cost effective as we can. So I asked Angela just out of curiosity. I said, could you run FY 15? It was the first year that I did this presentation and then FY 23 and just take a look and see where these increases have come from. So she did that for me. And it's no surprise. Salaries and benefits are the two major drivers, but we have added some things. And when I say salary and benefits, like the city has made a huge investment in the FEMA's retirement system 20 years and now it's I can't tell you that's the best investment we've ever made. But as salaries go up, it's all based on percentages. So the city's contribution for that also goes up. So it's not just the salaries when we're negotiating contracts. It's all these other things that the salary touches and it doesn't take long. You know, medical insurance is always going up every year. So that's always an issue. What I wanted to present to you was the 10 line item roll up and just show that every single line item actually has gone down in our police budget. This is the operations, what makes us go on a daily basis since FY 15, tried to be a good partner, tried to help out the city and other departments as they have needs. And I felt there was a cushion there that it's hard to give up that cushion because it's so much harder to ask for the money to get it back than it is to give it up. But we have tried to be good partners and all that. The contract professional services line item has some and if Angela is in the cloud somewhere and I start to go off track here, she can correct me, but I believe there's quite a bit of one time stand up money that you folks had approved for the dispatch project in that line item, which is why it's gone up. But some of the other things that actually have gone up in that line was the community outreach team came into existence and we made an investment in that. Great investment, but it's money. Officer wellness program, where we have a mental health clinician available to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week for $6,000 a year. Another great investment. And the one other thing that I also forgot to put in that I was just starting to run out of room, but our animal control officers pay obviously goes up and also lucky puppies is the kennel that we use for all of our stray animals. And that's doubled in the past two years. So there's some things that are just out of our control. And I know somebody's gonna ask, have you looked around for alternatives? And yes, for the better part of a month, Colchester and when you ski both made multiple phone calls and there was just nobody that wanted to take that on for the type of money that we pay. So we were lucky enough that Colchester was able to negotiate a deal with luck. They were talking about retiring and not having the service anymore and they've agreed to stay open for at least this coming fiscal year. So we're good through FY24. After that, there's no guarantees. The slides a little bit cut off and you're probably wondering why is 28% sitting down on that bottom right corner. So in the same amount of time from FY15 to FY23, the police department budget's gone up 28%, 28.34. And I believe the city budget overall has in that same amount of time has gone up almost 51%. So we've actually gone up at half the increase rate as the overall city budget. I just wanted to call that out. If I may, can you go into detail about how you managed to decrease utility expenses by 90%. So utilities for the police department is literally gasoline. For the vehicles. Yeah, so there's a couple of things, right? The price of gas as we all know is really volatile. Three years ago, two bucks a gallon over the past year they hit four plus, almost five and now it's back down to the threes. One of the things to call out on this is I felt comfortable reducing that number because we had started to switch our fleet over to hybrid vehicles. So two of our four marked vehicles were hybrids. Now let's talk about the pandemic and the effect that's had on the world, right? We cannot, I ordered a hybrid vehicle 18 months ago and two months ago, our salesman called and said there's no microchips to build these vehicles. Ford has to bring them back to the factory, crush them and start over. So hybrids are not available with and he wasn't able to even give me a build date looking forward. So knowing that we've added, you'll see in the FY24 we actually included, I think it's a $4,000 raise for gasoline knowing that we're gonna be transitioning back to gas powered vehicles at least temporarily. What's the frequency you're turning over those vehicles? So as of right now, it is a five year useful life in the department where it's a marked vehicle and then traditionally as they get cycled out that the oldest one when it comes off the road becomes the chief's vehicle for one or two more years. So it's not a mileage, it's not like 100,000 miles. No, we never. So the one thing I'll say, like people are always like why do you need a new vehicle every year or why is it only last four or five years for useful life? What I try to tell people in the most simplistic way is that you don't drive your vehicle 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And it's as we all know, when you ski comes with some challenges with speed bumps and the bumps going in and out of the circulator and that's all that our vehicle see really takes a toll on that vehicle and being a safe and useful vehicle. So we try to maintain our fleet that year four. It's ending or it's starting to reach its useful life. What we did, what we're finding right now and why FY23 is a little bit higher in maintenance is two things. We had two accidents, officers involved, accidents that weren't major, as far as how much damage was done on the big scheme of things, $8,000 to a vehicle isn't a lot anymore, but unfortunately the league is trying to, because the way our insurance works we have a $5,000 deductible. So even if the other person is at fault, there's a $5,000 gap that we have to wait and the league has to try and get that money back from the person who was responsible for the accident. So we've had two unanticipated accidents. Also, forgive me, the years blend together, but the last time we were looking to buy the new truck for the fire department, we skipped a year buying a new police vehicle to help offset costs for that. So now not only is every vehicle one year older, but then with the pandemic shortage of the new vehicles coming in there, they're almost two years past their useful life in that life cycle. The newer ones, you don't see it as much. The ones that are just holding on towards the end, you're starting to see some higher costs to maintain those cars. That's really interesting. And so are, is it still two of the four that are in the Fleter hybrids? Yes. Okay, great. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Next slide, please. Okay, I've been talking about this for the better part of I think three budget cycles now. I think we're finally in a position that you'll like this because I'm not asking you for any money. I'm just asking you if you're supportive of the idea of this program. So again, creating and sustaining opportunities and assignments for our current force is really important. And this one, the nice thing about this is it doesn't take away from the basic patrol function. It actually adds to it. So we're not losing 40 hours of patrol coverage by giving somebody a specialized assignment. We're actually adding a resource both to the city and also to the county to be a resource and to help keep officers and people safe. And canines are also a force multiplier, which means a one person canine handler is now a two person team in that vehicle, which can be really useful. As far as the bigger costs of this program, the pandemic has created a very unique opportunity for us where we had minimum staffing for almost two years. So, and we were very reactionary. So we have, even with the pause, missing a vehicle and not making that purchase, we have a 2020 and a 2021, both with roughly about 18 to 21,000 miles on them. When the new car comes in this year, the one thing I would be looking or asking for as part of this proposal is going from our current fleet of vehicles, but to keep one more. And what we would do is take one of the hybrids and outfit that to be a canine cruiser, rather than cycling out our oldest cruiser that should have been for last July that's coming in hopefully this week. We would continue to keep all of those vehicles in the fleet and add one. So there is an add as far as insurance and maintenance for one vehicle, but I think it's very manageable because it's going to be a newer vehicle. It's not an older vehicle. And I think it gives us a minimum of three. That vehicle is also assigned to the canine officer. So it's not going to be used 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So I see no reason why that vehicle couldn't last three to four years before you even have to think about replacing that. So where's the money coming from? As you know, we started a DEA assignment about seven years ago now. We currently don't have anybody in there. We're still seeing, they're called DAGs, which are the paperwork, the asset for sharing that's coming in. As of right now, the last accounting that I had, we had roughly $90,000 in a bank account from that sharing. I also believe we have about 25 outstanding DAGs that are still working their way through the federal system and we'll be receiving monies from those outstanding DAGs. So what I think, actually what I know we need for a cost of a dog, outfit the car, we're looking at about $22,000. So it's not even a quarter of the money that I have set aside. And my intention when we did the DEA assignment was always to help supplement or improve service delivery here. And what we've done in the past is, these leadership trainings are incredibly expensive. And what I've always done is use that asset for richer money to send people to professional leadership trainings, but also in the back of my mind, I felt once we hit close to $100,000 that we would be able to implement this canine program, not have to ask you folks for money just for your approval of the idea, starting up the program and keeping the one extra vehicle and insurance on that vehicle, which is a pretty minimal investment to make considering to stand up these programs, can be pretty costly if you have to buy a vehicle and all the equipment and everything else. So I feel we're in a really good place to do that. And the reason I'm bringing this up to you is we're kind of on a timeline. Everything happens quicker than you want it to. So what the Vermont Canine Association recommends is that the handler have six months to bond with the dog prior to attending training. The next canine schools start in mid June. So we're at that six month mark. We have identified a dog in Colchester who supplies dogs to police programs. The dog is available, it's a $6,000 cost, which is part of that 22,000, but we need to move pretty quickly and get that dog, start to have that dog bond with the officer. The next part would be getting the vehicle that we've identified that we're gonna send to municipal headquarters down in Massachusetts who does all our cruiser prep and get that switched over to a canine. It's not a lot of change, but we need to get that work done and then the officer could start having the dog come to work and starting to get used to being in the police department and in cruiser. So we would need to start this fairly quickly. I'm hoping that at some point during this process, as this all plays out and if you're in favor of it, that you could kind of give us a verbal okay to start the wheels in motion to get this program up and running. And like I said, I'm very confident that with the 25 outstanding DAGs that we have that 22-ish thousand dollars will be replenished and more so before those run out. Chief, what is the public safety benefit? So the public safety benefit, let's start with officer safety. As of right now, if we get an alarm and there's an open door or broken window, officers are searching that and police canines, obviously their smell, their senses are so much greater than police officers. They can go in and do that more safely than just officers responding and handling those types of calls. I always like to try and find ways. When you ski, it feels like we need a lot of resources and we ask for a lot of resources, but this is a great opportunity for us to expand the resources that are available in the county. So we would have, when that canine officer is working, actually be able to offer that resource to other agencies. If there's a, let's say there's a person with Alzheimer's who wanders away from their home, that dog could immediately pick up a sent trail and find a person where we could be searching for hours if not a day, times of the essence, especially in the winter, things like that, there's that type of call, that's servicing the community. A canine is also an incredibly great outreach. Almost everybody likes dogs. It's a great way to start conversations and to have kids be comfortable coming up and patting the canine and talking to the canine officer. So it's a force multiplier. It's a resource we can add both to the department and to the county. It's a community outreach tool. It has great use and I think you get a lot back for your investment. So, sorry, are you gonna ask a follow up? Go ahead. So as a follow up question that I have, is there, what are reasons why we wouldn't want to? Why we wouldn't? I honestly can't think of a reason why we wouldn't want a canine. It was always the timing and money. If you're down three officers, it's really hard to send your officer to a eight week basic canine school. We're making the commitment no matter what that's going to happen. I'm really invested in this and as you'll see a little bit later, like my time is limited here and I would really like to see this happen before I leave and if I have to work patrol 40 hours a week for eight weeks to make that happen and offset the cost, I'm willing to do that. I guess to be more appointed, we have a great deal of English language learners in our community, all new Americans, thinking of the experience of a canine unit from a DEI lens and wondering how that would be received by our community. I think it's all about outreach and education and communication and those of things that we all work on on a daily basis. I think when you add any type of new resource, it's great to get out and tell people about that resource. So there's no reason why we couldn't go to the elders of our non-English speaking community and start to put the word out and explain why this is a good resource and it's not necessarily just a patrol function. It's also a community outreach and a tool to actually build some relationships outside of traditional policing. Thank you. I think you would have to do that. I see a lot of dog fear. Like I walk out of what I consider quite an unintimidating dog around. And I've just seen that a lot with folks or people who come near the dog park and stuff. I think there's value in if this is a way to help people who aren't naturally comfortable with dogs get there, but it would require like concerted effort. I agree. And I think it's something that is, it's gonna be built into the program as we stand it up that there's going to be mandatory community outreach events and to make sure that everybody is as touched as many people as we can within our community to make sure they understand why the dog's here, what it brings to the police department and especially for missing people, the value that that could bring in and possibly save a life. I also want to call out, there is a small impact to the CIP too because you're adding another car into the replacement cycle. Right. At some point, but I will tell you that I think, even if you have to look at buying a newer used vehicle the next time around that asset for if your money is robust and will still be there and it can support these types of initiatives for a very long time. A question I have about it is about the training of the K9 unit and the dog itself, especially considering how the training can making the dogs bias especially. So thinking about community policing and ensuring that we're not bringing what is dangerous if not used and not trained properly into our community. So kind of thinking about the biases that can be put on dogs from people and just how we wanna ensure that isn't happening in our community. Sure, so I wish I had Marcus in the room, but he's looking at a particular breed of dog. It's a smaller dog. It's not a German Shepherd. I think it's a Malinois is what he's looking at. Tend to be less anxiety, more friendly than the traditional German Shepherd. So we're looking at that. We're also limiting what its scope is going to be once it gets here. This is a good point though. Like, whatever this training this dog gets though like dogs very often respond poorly to people that don't match their owner. And I would be, I would wanna know that however this dog is being trained is somehow mitigating that. Well, we're always gonna be limited, right? Because there's, I will tell you the one officer who has shown interest in this is a person of color. But then you have that it's a person of color who owns a dog and when it interacts with somebody that's white or somebody that's Asian or anything other than what its owner is. I think you're gonna see the canine association of Vermont is very good at, they don't wanna put dogs out there that are gonna scare the community that are going to be a liability for being vicious or overly aggressive. They really focus on and we're going to focus on tracking for safety and clearing buildings and being a patrol asset but not necessarily a white dog, a traditional white dog. That's reassuring. It would also be beneficial at some point in the near future since time of the essence to have some data around the number of other municipalities in Vermont that have canine units and any other data points that that were kind of set our questions or anxieties a little bit. I can tell you, I think everyone in Chittenden County Wilson has a therapy dog. I don't believe they have a traditional canine and every other Chittenden County agency has at least one or possibly two. This is also, I think the third time I've seen this proposal and I think this has often come as that you don't have a training budget because you can't take, you alluded to why this type of training is really one of the only ways you have to enrich current officer positions without creating gaps for yourself. So I'm personally happy to see that this is finally coming to fruition because you've been trying to do this for years. And I think it's important for officers to have outlets to advance and grow so that they won't stay here. Because I do think you've invested a lot of particularly unique energy for Winooski and our officers. So I think this seems like a no-brainer. I do want to remind the council of this. It's in our 2023 priorities and policies or policies and priorities, you didn't answer the voted recommend. So I personally have no need to see additional material to support this program. I agree that people raise good points, but I think if you are training your officers in all these ways that you've outlined, I would expect that to transfer to another member of the force and that's K-9 unit. So I'm personally comfortable with this moving forward. Thank you. I've interacted with the K-9 dogs in South Burlington, a community event. And there were people of many, many ethnicities there and I didn't see the dog interacting differently with anybody. I think that from what I understand, the K-9 training that we have is far superior than any other regular dog training. I've never heard of a dog turning out to have a bias towards a certain race or another after doing that training. It's eight weeks full-time for the patrol certification and there's other schools on top of that and then they have two training days a month where they have to go and continue to show that these skills are up to par to stay certified. So they receive a ridiculous amount of training to stay certified in the state. So as far as the budget impact, it sounds like you can pull from existing funds and the anticipated impact would be of a newer vehicle. So keeping one extra vehicle on the books that normally wouldn't be any insurance for that vehicle.  I wouldn't say that I need that to inform my decision tonight, but I just like to have it as grounding as a baseline for what others are doing. Sure, whatever you feel better about, let me know and I'll get it for you. It might be helpful to when communicating with the community if we can. I would like to know the ongoing operating costs that we can expect. Sure, but do you want to know that now? I can tell you- If you know it now, but if you don't know it- I've read the proposal and I didn't include the entire proposal because I didn't think you were gonna want that type of detail, but I can tell you that a majority of the services that you need are readily donated by both vets and don't like dog food warehouse type places that will donate for a working canine. So we estimate $2,000 would be the max for veterinary, any upkeep of the animal and for like a kennel to have the proper equipment to outfit the officer at home. So 2,000 is the average is what we've been told from other communities that have had these vets. Thank you. You expect to cover that plus insurance out of the asset forfeiture? Yes. So not property tax funded. Right. Either existing budget if we have room or through the asset forfeiture, but I wouldn't be asking for additional money. And usually you're working on a somewhat tight timeline given the amount of time that the officer moved the dog. When would you need to hear from counsel on a decision? It sounds like some counselors with some data before that. You know, in a perfect world, if we could have an answer by the time you finalize your budget, since it's not, I understand completely that it's not an approved budget and that you may have to come back and look for monies elsewhere. So if that's not, if you're not comfortable or you're unable to do that, it's totally fine. But we are running out of time because they only have the school one time a year. So if we miss this June deadline, it's going to be June of next year before we could get somebody to the class and have the dog certified. Elaine, want to add this as an item to vote on on the 23rd? Yep. Thank you. You're welcome. So this really is just laying the groundwork for if consolidated does move forward as planned. At some point we've talked about, you know, we've kind of put it out there that our dispatch team is different than other police departments in Chittany County is they do 100% of our administrative work currently downstairs. We don't have records people. We don't have administrative assistance. They just fit that into their workday. They split it up amongst the four of them. They do a tremendous job, dispatching calls and also handling this, this ask of them. So that would leave us with a major problem, right? Like with everything that there's an improvement, there's an unintended consequence. So regional dispatch comes along and can strengthen the dispatching function with the police department, but then that leaves a huge hole for having all of this administrative work done. I don't feel great about trying to shovel all this onto police officers that should be out and patrolling and already doing their duties. It's that's not even an option. There's been discussions in the past about the clerk's office taking on some of these roles. The one thing I will tell you is that some of these tasks are very specialized. They also have to be done in a secure environment where computers can't be accessed or viewable by the public. So that rules out a good portion of the clerk's office to be able to do that work. Next slide please. I'm just gonna highlight some of, I didn't wanna do a laundry list of everything that they do.  This isn't including all of just the basic administrative work. This is the highly specialized work. So we're expected by statute to report, it's called NIVERS National Incident Based Reporting System. It's crime statistics that reports to the FBI which in turn makes an impact on what both the state counties and cities get in federal monies in a whole bunch of different areas. So that's something by statute, by law we have to do. National Crime Information Center. Currently our dispatch supervisor is the terminal agency coordinator. What that means is they keep all of us, they give us our annual tests. They are in charge of we're actually having an audit. We just got our notification, it's every three years, our audit's coming up this year so they're gonna be coming soon to do that. Hot files or anything missing, wanted or stolen, whether that's people or property. We have to maintain that hot file and it has to be accurate and entered and removed from the system and the terminal agency operator or community coordinator is in charge of maintaining that hot file and making sure it's up to date and accurate.  So there's quite a bit of responsibility that comes just with that job. Court case file preparation and submission, again very time consuming. Accident report requests, I think we get upwards of 400 to 450 accident requests a year from insurance companies where we have to print out copy of all the reports, any body cam footage, give them everything that they request. Public records request, the dispatch supervisor is the first point of contact for that. They do all the redactions, then I review and make sure that it's what it needs to be and then they send it out but they do 99% of that work. Intake and return of court subpoenas. So every time there's a case, either a Winooski police department case or it involves somebody living in Winooski, the court will send subpoenas over that we have to tell them that there's a deposition schedule, that there's a jury draw. It's constant flow of paperwork. I'd say we get anywhere from 15 to 20 subpoenas a week that the officers have to then go out and serve and dispatch has to both intake and then return those back to court showing that it's been served in a timely fashion. Recent data reports, Sharon, my dispatch supervisor also built a spreadsheet to do that quarterly reporting that's on our website showing our traffic stop data. Incident mapping, Eric Forwell has been instrumental. I can't think Eric enough. The company that had been doing that for us, our incident mapping, went for, they canceled their free program and they quoted me a price of $5,000 a year to do that. I'm like, as much as I love being able to provide that, we can't go ask for $5,000 for that and I brought it up to Eric and he's like, I can do that. He's like, I have the software to do it. He's like, it'd be pretty easy. So Sharon and Eric have talked and Sharon has a spreadsheet that gives Eric everything he needs and now we have incident mapping on our website again. That's just an internal cost to the city but no external cost to actually provide that service. Processing all the traffic tickets, city ordinance tickets, parking tickets, the dispatchers, I don't know if this has come up since some of you new counselors are here but any winter parking ban tickets after hours are dispatchers actually go into the parking ticket program and fill out the vehicle and owner information for that for the parking team. So that's something that they're doing as well. Audio and video duplication for both records, requests and court cases is pretty time consuming. And then Valport records management system, SuperUser, again, they maintain the system. They are in charge of any updates to all of the programs. They also are in charge of certifying our new hires that they not use the system and can follow the rules. I do just want to call out that the need for this, like this gap in the need to fill this has been known since the vote as well as changes, physical changes downstairs. So just for context, it's helpful to see the actual details of the role, like what the gaps are. So this new admin person, are they dedicated to this task or do they have capacity to support other city stuff? Or is this, you believe that like this is a full-time role for an admin person to take all this on?  So like a full-time person who is task oriented, not easily distracted and not easily overwhelmed will be able to do this work and keep our heads above water and keep us functioning and meet deadlines. They're just gonna have to get creative like all of us do, right? Like if public records request comes in and you have to answer within five days, you drop something and take care of that and just, you know, reprioritize your tasks constantly. Thanks. Any other questions? Okay, so staffing needs, I don't put this up here. I'm not here advocating for a certain number of officers tonight. I just wanted you to better understand what it looks like with the people that we have. So by contract and also for officer safety reasons, as long as I've been a police officer when you scan it, it predates me is that there's a two officer minimum staffing per shift in Winooski 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nobody ever works alone. Three officer staffing, and the reason I have this in here in this analysis is the difference in three officers on duty compared to two. With minimum staffing and two officers, each officer is responding to every single call for service. When I say every single call for service, 99% of calls for service. If we're gonna go verify your VIN number on your car, we're not sending two police officers. But for a lot of unknown things that could be something else, the majority of our calls take two. So when your entire staff is responding to every single call, it doesn't leave a lot of time for them to do their follow-up investigations to do the administrative duty. Like James is a lieutenant in the police department and he's assigned to patrol 40 hours a week and he has to put up with me on top of that, trying to give him administrative tasks. So he's constantly juggling his time because he's as our staffing has worked out with some unforeseen things. He's been the second person on duty, the majority of the past three years. So it's about officer wellness as well. Not only do you get to take a break every second or third call, you don't have to get up and constantly leave when you're writing an affidavit or doing something and go to every single call. So the mental break that that gives the officers knowing that they're not gonna have to go to every call and they can continue, take something to the end and finish it is a huge benefit having three officers on duty. So what I've put in here is when James went over our call volume, the majority of our calls become come in between seven in the morning and one in the morning. So in a perfect world, we can have three officers on duty during those hours and then two after that is what our goal should be. A couple of things have changed since I've been here. In FY 19, the school resource officer position was always and traditionally staffed by a part-time employee that worked the school year, kind of as a contract employee, as a part-time police officer. That got switched to when Deke was city manager and money was really tight, we tightened that up to it being one of the 16 officers on staff. So we lost a position there for nine months of the year. So we felt that. And then beginning in FY 23, as you know, COLA came in way higher than anybody could have projected. And knowing that it's not only a this year problem, it's a next year problem that you're kicking down the road and knowing the challenges you all we're going to have this year. I had some in-depth conversations with Elaine and we had a sergeant who had left law enforcement altogether, we had a vacancy. And what I told her, what I envisioned was, I didn't want to have to come to you and ask you for more money mid-budget year. That's never a great look. And we had an opening. So what I thought might work. And I'm still confident that it will, is that my suggestion, and I make it really clear that this was my suggestion, nobody came and asked for this, is we contract to 15 officers instead of 16 temporarily. And then with known retirements and other unforeseen things when I, if two experienced officers leave, I believe at some point we'll be able to hire three new and get back to 16 with again not having to come and ask for you for more money. I do believe that will happen in the next year. So with that being said, I brought up the idea to contract down to 15 knowing it was going to be temporary and that we would eventually get back to 16 for the same amount of money. So that's what happened. So that being said, you can see to cover the hours for a year with the coverage that I have outlined, is 29,120 hours. And at a 2082 week work schedule, you need 12 and a quarter officers to do that. So let's just round it up to 13. The only problem is life. Nobody's available 2080 hours a year.  So what I used as a fair average was 1,780 hours. So to cover that same amount of time, you go from 12 and a quarter or 13 to over 16 to almost 17. And what I told Elaine when we made the decision to go to 15, it's not about when you're at 15 or 16 and you're down a person, where this really comes into play is when you're at 15 and all of a sudden you have three openings or two openings where you really start to feel that. And it's such a long process to fix this. Once you have openings, it's 12 to 18 months, best case scenario, and that's if you're hiring process lines up with the, when the academies are to get people trained and then an additional 10 week field training after that, it's a long process to get somebody on the road and serviceable. So what I'm trying to do is get us to think about, okay, let's just say we're at 17 or 18, okay? It's not about ever being at 17 or 18 because I don't think that'll happen in the next four or five years. There's just too many things coming at us, retirements, people leaving the profession. It's about when you're trying to get to 18 and you're at 16 and then all of a sudden you have two openings and you're at 14 rather than 12 and the impact that that has on your last remaining staff. I don't know how many years it would take to get to full staff if we even added positions where we're actively trying to get out in front of retirements now and it's just a long tedious process. When I use the staffing analysis, it wasn't to try and pressure you and say, oh, we need 18 police officers or 17, it's just to understand, yes, the schedule says 12.25, but that is not an accurate figure of what you need to actually have people be able to take their days off and not have us hounding them, hey, so-and-so's out sick, can you come and call? Can you cover half the shift or all of the shift? It really gets old for the guys and girls downstairs to be getting text messages seven days and that's kind of where we are and where we have been. It's just a fluid situation where between the current vacancies, people out on long-term illness leaves and then people getting sick, COVID, whatever it is, it's just, it seems like every week we're trying to piece the schedule together the best that we can. And I'll point out that the three includes leadership, so like James right now. Right. So it's not just who's available for patrol who's available to do leadership or supervision or administrative tasks. Yeah, we're ready for the next slide. So what's included in the proposal, the proposal is the general fund budget. As I've touched on before, it's the contractually required increases in full-time salaries and benefits line items that you're going to see. And as I mentioned, as I've already previously one time and I think future funding, I'll have to have Angela finalize this for sure, but I think she included the admin position and nine months. Well, when this was being built, I think it was included nine months of dispatch being at the consolidated dispatch center and an admin being included in our budget. So it may look a little different. That was when it was on a timetable of starting in October of 23. All right, next slide please. I'm in a little bit of denial about reading glasses. That's why I brought you coffee. So as I mentioned, salary and benefits, if you look at the actual salaries for FY23 compared to FY24, that number's gone down. But again, that was taking into consideration the savings with the consolidated dispatch project and absorbing that one position from 16 to 15. Everything else remains unchanged, except for, as I mentioned, gasoline, we've added $5,000. I don't know that we'll need it all, but I'd rather have a little bit of a cushion than not have enough and go over. So that's the one line item that has gone up. And then the professional services line item has that continued money contribution to the consolidated dispatch project. So that brings the grand total up to $2,984,233.79 compared to a little over 2.7 million for last year. So for the office general supplies, obviously the 23 year today was pulled a couple of months ago. But in FY22, you only used 10,000 of the 23 requested. So is it necessary to have 18 for office and general supplies? So what I will tell you is that there's a couple of things, and this is not, Angela always scolds me for doing this because it's not good budgeting, but when I know that we're running way over on overtime and other things that I can't control, I really try to be fiscally responsible for some of the other things, other line items to try and absorb some of that impact. So that was part of it. Also another part of it was, during the pandemic, we didn't use as much things as we normally would use. So I will tell you that this is the year that I'm glad that she's kind of like, I always think Angela's on my shoulder, like whispering to me once in a while about these things. We just recently had in one of the windstorms, our repeater got blown over on East Spring Street. So we just had to do an unanticipated $6,000 repair to the repeater. I have the money in those line items because I've under spent them to not come and ask for money for that. So what I'll tell you is the money isn't needed until you need it, if that makes any sense, for these unanticipated things that happen. You know, if we just replaced our server, now we've replaced our repeater. So like all these major things are being taken care of. We're still spent, I'm quite joined too, and I don't think that that's gonna continue. We are trending to spend that full line item this year. Okay. Are there any questions from our public attendee? You can use the chat or raise hand feature. Any final questions on PD Budget? Oh, sorry, it disappeared. I thought you were done. Oh no. Keep going. Are you sure? Yeah, yeah. We can go back. I didn't expect to get through that slide that quickly.  It continues to be recruitment, retirement, succession planning. That is our number one focus. I would say when we're not answering calls for service, the leadership team to include mental management is trying to brainstorm, how do we get currently certified officers to want to come and apply here? And if we can't do that, how do we identify as quickly as possible people that wanna become police officers and get them in the pipeline to try and get them through that entire process and into that next academy? So that's going to take a tremendous amount of our time over FY24 for sure. As I alluded to earlier, the FY23 separation by one of our sergeants who left law enforcement hasn't been filled. And that was basically because we had the demographics of the police department. You need five years of experience or more. One of the officers that qualified is out battling a long-term illness. Another one was just under that five year mark. I anticipate being able to fill that in the next year, but not immediately. So we'll have that supervisor position filled, it was a lack of people in that timeframe of their career that had interest in that position. And then sometime in FY24, I do anticipate you'll be doing a police chief hiring process, reaching the point where I'm gonna hit my needed years in the VMware system. And that is why you put it in place, that you want turnover and turnover is good. I will tell you when I applied for this job, one of the things that I thought back then, I think now is that I feel the chief's position is a three to five year position and it's very demanding. And you also, it's great to have a good new set of eyes running a department and trying to take it in a new and different direction. So I'm in year nine, we'll just finish it just under 10. So that'll be something that you folks will have to be doing in FY24 at some point. Regional dispatch, we're just gonna continue to explore and as it takes each twist and turn and partners change, does it still make sense for us or not? I don't think I can give you that answer tonight, but it's something that we're gonna continue to look at. Building- Do you wanna answer that question that was posed last week about future calls? Oh, future calls, yeah. So I wanna apologize. In our records management system, when we were building these reports, they were switching over to a new records management and as great as Valcor is for doing what we want, which is CAD and capturing reports and doing all the things, extracting data is terrible. And if, I'm gonna complain in person, I'm actually gonna do this on camera because I've actually approached Valcor. I cannot believe that we have such a good records management system and when you run a report, it can't total anything for you. Like literally no report that I can run can tell me how many calls we went to in the course of a year. So between that and then them switching the records management, they entirely built a new portal and some of the reports that we're using stopped working. When I did the budget overview and came up with that number of 9,700, I thought it was a little high and I have since gone back and left and there was some errors in that report that I didn't catch. So I apologize for that. I do believe, as James stated earlier, our sweet spot for call volume is gonna fall between 8,000 and 8,500 around any given year. So it will be slightly higher than the pandemic numbers that the dispatch project has been using. And I had had that conversation with Jessie Baker when she is here and I've also had that conversation with Elaine since then that those are numbers that aren't going to be maintained. What that all looks like with the different number of partners and funding, I have no idea, but I would plan on 8,000 to 8,500 calls is what you're going to be paying for in the future. Building improvements, we're just in need of a facelift downstairs. It's not a huge lift. You want to track and keep it in place. Part of that is having a clean, nice facility. Our facility is just very dated. Our flooring is worn out in places where you can see concrete. It's just very dated. It's a basement as a fixed floor plan that probably never should have been used for police departments. So it comes with some challenges but not here telling you I need a new facility or that we need a new facility. But it's in major need of some upgrades and we're not talking huge amounts of upgrades but just a bathroom in the holding cell so we don't have to transport people that are in custody back and forth out of cuffs, in cuffs. It's just not good business to do that. An eye wash station, some new flooring and possibly a renovation of both locker rooms as they're very tiny there. I think they're probably about six by 12. For 15 people, it gets pretty tight in there.  It's just, it comes with some challenges and we're just gonna have to put some money into that. If consolidated dispatch does move forward, I will call out that door access is going to become an issue because our system's very old and if we're not gonna have a person in the building, we need to make sure we're limiting access if somebody is able to get to the point where they're wandering around the building. Phone system, same system that I, when I was hired in 1996 is still there. So I think that's enough said about that. That it's just reached its useful lifespan and I think that's City Hall and PD can say that. So like I said, these aren't huge upgrades, but they are gonna be one-time capital costs to make an investment to bring that police department back up to a point where I think it would be usable for another 10 years before you start having a conversation again about the building. And then again, career development, it's just minimum staffing. I can't stress enough as I end the presentation that the dedication of the people we have downstairs is tremendous and they bring their best foot forward every single day and they are dedicated to, working for Winooski and they're dedicated to be here. What cannot continue is them working in a constant state of emergency because our staffing is just constantly in a state of emergency. I don't know what the answer is and I'm sure that this year isn't the year to find long-term solutions, but you do need to keep it in mind that we will not retain people if we continue to have two-person staffing and they're running from start to finish and getting called in other days off. With that, I'm ready for any further questions. So is that the good news? All right, thank you both so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. We'll make some space here for any other general budget asks items. Questions. So part of that is asking for staff to present. Yeah, if there's someone you want to sit on the 17th. Oh, like an alternative budget. I would like to put forward, not quite, I'm not sure how to put it in emotion, but I would like to see a budget with that 5% with the equity director position, the youth interventionist and this potential new DEI outreach. I think it's really important that these are positions that I think can be filled. We've heard a lot just now from the chief on how this is a national trend that it's hard to recruit and keep police officers as folks leave the field, having more equity work both on connecting with the community and having someone who is able to do the kind of high level stuff. The equity director has having that kind of expertise, I think is really, really important. And I think that will help make the police work and all of the other work that we do in the city easier if we have the intervention, we have that community connection and we have the structural expertise to kind of get three specific areas. So I would make a motion to see a budget with that 5% with the equity director, the new outreach program and the youth interventionist with whatever cuts need to be made to keep those three. So you're saying you'd like to see us get to 5% with those three? Yes. If you have any specific cuts in mind that you wanted to apply? I think the two that come to mind is the taking part in the dispatch, the regional dispatch, take that away and take away the police administrative position would be two that come to mind, I know. I can't support that because voters have asked us to do regional dispatch. I'm one of five. I agree. I'm also having a really hard time trying to justify other positions when we've heard today that our fire department, which protects us from one of the most dangerous things that could ever happen, isn't fully staffed and we're paying people a minimum wage. I'm not asking for additional positions. I am specifically the equity director in the youth interventionist, this one that we are both that we have and it's so dangerous to even remove them for a year because it's hard to bring that back. It's also a commitment to our community. I think fire is a huge commitment to our community as well. And one, I think, is a service that we're fully expected to provide as a local government. I agree with you in the fact that we've had this conversation. I think that an equity director is something that we should have, but it's extreme with the other, with what Lane has presented and the path that the city is moving forward and the place that the city is in, I have a really hard time saying that we should pay for that position from knowing what we heard tonight. Especially as that position was brought to the city paid by a grant and we knew that we'd have to find another grant to pay for it to continue moving forward. Or raise taxes. Or raise taxes. So I want to put forward another request. Not of that nature to add some context here. So I, I don't know if you've seen this yet, Elaine, but I emailed you this weekend. Something that I am asking for for the next discussion is we've got this spreadsheet, this workbook from Angela. I've seen the stretch list items in the budget. We just saw in the DPW budget $14 million of water main replacements and we're hearing additional needs across the board is actually seeing a list, all of that in a list format. So we have a sense of like, there's a huge big picture of need. And I want us to see that before we make the decision about which, which ads cuts to make. And can I just pause for a moment of order? Procedurally, emotion was presented. Do we need to? Is somebody could second it? Yeah, yes. Just to close out the motion. So I think the question that came up from Sarah is, is it enough of emotion to ask for a 5% budget including the equity director, new outreach and youth interventionist? Is that enough direction or do you need more? So we've scraped the budget and I, you know, I want to balance what I'm going to say with the idea that we moved mountains recently for development projects. And I think we've done our best to move mountains for to recover some funding for equity out of, you know, for those particular positions separate from what the staff have already tried to commit to through their ongoing work. For example, in police and community services and fire. And I think we're talking about cutting existing positions that predated those in order to get to 5%. I don't know how else we can get there because salaries and benefits are such a huge part of the increase. So I would strongly, I would ask you to propose something because this is my, what we gave you is our best recommendation without cutting existing staff that predated. Nitpicky, can I get? That's a fair question given the history. You can be as nitpicky as you're willing to go on a limb to nitpick. So are we waiting for a motion to be finished? It hasn't been seconded. Emotion was made, is there a second? It was not fully made due to staff needing additional information. So. I think what you could do is ask for them to present you a budget that retains those roles. I don't think you can ask for it also to be at 5%. I think you would need to be prepared at the next meeting to say like, here is what I would propose removing instead. Okay, I'll work for staff. Yes, we need ideas and input because I've already said what I, why? So if I make a motion for staff to present a budget not necessarily keeping to the 5%, but a budget that retains the equity director position, the youth interventionist considering the new outreach. Why would you make a motion to do that? Well, so you could do that in the next meeting because you would be contemplating the, I don't know, we haven't come up with a name for that tool yet. Next cell document. Yeah, the spreadsheet that Angela put together with the yes, no. So you could do that next. I think I just need to add the next to the tool with the potential increase rule of law for staff to send a revised version out to council. Okay. Right, since you're not requesting a new cut right now, you could do that live next week. And if there's something that you want us to include in that, you can do it by email before next week. Sorry, did you make the motion already? No. Okay. Does that require a motion? That's why I don't know if that required a motion. Okay. Unless staff needs. No, you can just withdraw that and we'll go with that. Okay. Thank you. The votes are more for if you want us to consider something that you need data for before next meeting. And given the, where we are in the process, having your vote to require that extra work is appreciated. So I am seeking a motion to support my request to staff to put, to update. How are you presenters up to you? Essentially it's this list that's in Angela's tool already, including the additional ads of those water mains that we saw, any other estimates that we have. Yeah, so what I'm asking for is not about property tax increase specifically. It's a big picture of the looming costs that we know are coming in the next five or so years. So that's general fund, also water. Yeah, that's fine. Does anyone want to make a motion to have a list of future, looming future needs estimates? Some of them. I'll second. Motion by Thomas, second by Jim. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? I think I heard aye. Okay, motion carries. And just for clarification, will that include the anticipated property change at the National Guard location at the Armory? Yeah, that's something I can follow up on. Okay. Right. Okay. We do have a call scheduled, so hopefully it's in time. I can include a cost estimate of how much having a youth interventionist might prevent future. How much which? How much a youth inter, having a youth interventionist position helps reduce police and other burden. As much as we can do. Yeah. Which I mostly mentioned just so that's in our awareness too is there are things that we, it's very hard to put a number two and a lot of those are key to being the kind of people we want to be. So you're looking at avoided costs. Yes. Essentially, like a hybrid vehicle will save money on fuel. Yeah. Having that additional support. I understand the point that you're making and you can see my face going through some proportions. Not about the concept, but how to calculate that. Yes. Which is your point. Yes. And I understand that. I believe that's a point you brought up too in the first presentation of the overall budget. So, especially with that position. So I would say I would support exploring a forecast for that so long as it does not exceed more than like two hours worth of staff time. So you don't support it. I just think that it's a forecast, right? It's an estimate. Right. I think we need to pull from what data we have. I'm not certain that there's going to be like a cost savings or might be like a workload savings, but there's not the ability to reduce staff hours. We're still going to have to pay the same staff 40 hours a week that are already working. So I'm trying to think of what other variable costs are associated with cases going through PD. And then I'm having a little trouble having any time, but I'll check with Rick and see if he has any ideas. Property damage, probably workers comp. I think we know that prevention has impacts, but that's something for us to think about. I don't think we can ask staff to produce data on it. Like there's no good model for this. And there's a whole bunch of value that we produce out of the hours that we pay for that we don't account for, aside from the trees that we don't account for. And the value added of that program either. So if we were to go down that road, I think, to weigh that against all, to then try and weigh one number against budget choices, it's gonna be hard. I guess I just see it as it'd be hard to use whatever was produced in that. Yeah, it would be something that you could actually cut out of the budget. I have just one more statement I want to make regarding the general budget. So at the 5% tax increase plus the water and wastewater increases, we're looking at a total of $259 a year or $21 a month. Doesn't sound that significant. However, our median income in Winooski is around $50,000 a year. Regular person probably got a 3% raise last year, which is a negative, in fact. That only raises an additional $1,500 in income. So $259 might not seem like a lot, but compared to what folks are making, it can matter. If there are no more data requests, 117, we'll have to leave a lot of time in the agenda for manipulating spreadsheets and scenarios and debate. I just thought that was a good question. Elaine, I've posed a quick, so I was going on for a great presentation, and I posed a question about the pool, extending its possible hours. Do you need, I think, I guess, that's kind of a data request. I don't know if you need to vote on that. Yeah, there's a few questions at Brins and your email that I need to respond to. I think we have what we need. I just need to carve out the time to respond. No, that's fine. I don't want to make sure you have the tool. Increased revenues, significant. Most of the revenues from the pool are seasonal passes, but we would then have additional costs for lifeguards, and it would actually negatively impact the budget to extend the hours. Okay, that's what I was curious about. The pool is always in the red, though. Yeah, and my anecdote had just been like, I knew people who get out of work at five o'clock and would buy a season pass, but it doesn't make any sense for them because the pool closes at six, but if it doesn't balance out the lifeguards and all of that stuff, it doesn't make sense to stay open like that. Yeah, it stops feeling like December and June, and June and December, maybe we can extend our hours. Yeah, I mean, we could open the pool a couple of weeks to go. Okay, shall we move on to item F? Just to clarify, we still have a, we're expecting on the 17th the information about the ESER funded positions. Yeah. You should have all of the ESER funded positions in the pool already. Right, but there was analysis of what the programs, the base program impact of removing those would be that we were still waiting for. Right, Ray gave us the thumbs up. And then, okay, some more, awesome, thank you. Okay, item F, on for discussion, American Rescue Plan Act Community Survey Results, much anticipated, Paul will introduce. I have this in the hand and in the pool tonight. If you are joining us, to the meeting, as I said, we have a recommend reading through all of the contextual points included in the items cover sheets, I'll take my best to summarize. So just very, very quickly, for anybody who hasn't heard the term, I'll give you two points on the end of the panel. Funding, the American Rescue Plan Act, those are all with community impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, right? So, so far, in ways, those are responsive in order to small businesses and nonprofits that was through the ESER Council of Processes were approximately $1.8 million remains. So, to get into a little bit of the community feedback pieces, the feedback for this project was collected by an online survey, right? So, the online survey had about 66 total responders. We had interpreted listening sessions with multi-level residents, WSBE library, that was about 15 participants in total, with my major is Arabic social community and Nepali, that was where we facilitated by the WSBE school district with a little bit of songs. We had a senior listening sessions at all of the WSBE housing authority buildings here in WSBE. We had a special event at the senior center. We've also been able to join a bigger social gathering. And then we had an absolutely proper turnout of students through listening sessions and surveys of the WSBE school district and SA Francis and SA Bureau. So, if you take a peek at the document I'm sharing now, you'll see that all of the themes sort of completely fit into WSBE strategic visionaries, right? Unsurprisingly, I think you'll find that the SAFE healthy connected to people here had the most feedback across all the sources for our surveys. For the online survey, the most common responses were sort of grouped as loss of social connections, isolation, not getting a lot of this stuff is not a surprise to anybody. For the long-term legal session, most common responses were grouped as need more slash improved adult educational opportunities. So tech courses, age, language courses, lots of positive feedback around the need to improve those without more of those programs. For the youth sessions and surveys that went out, most common responses were grouped as couldn't socialize with friends or family, isolation, simulation, lockdown. And for our senior listening sessions, the most common responses were grouped as fix the sidewalks and increase accessibility access. Below this summary page, you'll find all the talent responses as strategic vision area. We're basically showing you here all the responses with three or more. I definitely encourage you all to take a look at these individual responses. Again, there are some prizes, definitely plenty to relate to here. In the online survey section, some of the other points of interest included affordable housing, lots of mentions of renting and home ownership, loss of income and employment, access to childcare, which I'd say access to and cost of childcare, increased stress and impact on mental health. Continuing down to the multi-label listening sessions, affordable housing, obviously a concern and I think that was pretty much across the board. We also heard quite a bit about the school buses of the Bootsky School District about transportation, the need for more culturally appropriate food shelf, lots of things around access as well. During our news sessions, there was no shortage of comments about not liking masks. There was definitely a lot of that. But I think more importantly, or at least what was striking to me, certainly having difficulty with people online learning and then because of that, we've heard a lot of comments about missing out on educational and social development and we even heard from a few teachers that was sort of still a lingering thing, this sort of kind of post-candidate kind of stone-in-it situation we're in. And then as for our seniors, we also heard a lot of people request the return of being transit-in that we used to operate for shopping and activities, I think, and you can give a slight update here if it's possible, I think we're making good progress on that front, so it was nice to offer some potential good news while we're in those sessions. Just roll down the map really quick. Lastly, I think I'll just add a personal note that I think after you've put this data into consider, I think doing this work had a tremendous added benefit of making really good progress on our equity goals, right? We need people where they are. I think community members really appreciate having all the staff and their work and officials make time to reconnect after one physical distance thing. That was really tough. And then probably more importantly, even to give so much needed direct access to all of us in the local government, right?  So, a huge thank you to everybody who helped make that happen. Want to stop there just real quick, maybe that time to look over the same initial questions as we're looking at any of us? If I could comment on that. So, there's a lot of data in here that may or may not feel relevant or timely anymore. So, I want to just draw out the fact that they do fit contraband into the vision goal. So, that's the type of guidance that you could take away from this. Also that the, you know, again, the safe, healthy, connected people piece with that may be not necessarily being completely rearview mirror. That's something to consider. Social connection being the primary sub theme. I think with the equity, if you combine that with the equity audit results, that's going to continue and with seniors too. Like that social connection is just a needed piece through ARPA but also beyond that. So, I'm venturing into in a research paper what will be the discussion section where I'm drawing some conclusions and of course you're welcome to draw your own but just trying to lay through some of these feedback types. And then given that this is not a representative sample of the community, you can't take, you don't want to take the quantities to a much at face value. And you do want, but you do also want to consider how marginalized communities might, you might want to consider their input in a more qualitative way. So for example, the interest in more English learning opportunity and computer skills, for example. And then of course with seniors too, that the comment about fixing sidewalks was so common. So those are some of the comments I'd like to add on top of just the raw data that you have here. Well, I think the themes are super relevant. Masks, unemployment, maybe not as pertinent as they were when we started this, but a lot of it still is. And I think isn't super surprising either. Right, so like, well it was really hard during the COVID. And then what do you think we can use this money for? I mean, can't tell you enough, the other note I just wanted to make was that the school just helped inspirational some of those youth responses for the kids who really just have big hearts and they just, you know, so many of the kids were like, we should support, you know, our neighbors who are having a tough time right now. And that was really inspirational. And also again, you know, the method was pretty much the same with asking people what was tough about the pandemic, what was difficult, and then, you know, how could we potentially spend this money? And I think, you know, without a direct staff recommendation on how to spend the rest of the funds, I think, you know, in conjunction with all the success of getting out into the community and meeting people where they are, I think it's a chance to continue to do that, right? So we see that, we've heard so much about, you know, the sidewalks here, where I live, but it used to be housing authority building or in disarray, and I have a lot of accessibility issues. It's another chance to come back out to those locations and to connect with people, you know, specifically on those items, which I think is a huge promise for us. I find this data actually timely as we're doing this budget process. And I think about where we're investing in this FY24 budget versus what we're hearing as meets. I do want to call out though, we did have way last spring to English language listening sessions too before your time of learning. I have the notes from those. I don't think it would substantially change, like the key themes in here, but just to note that like, there was that, there was an additional listening session for not just for multi-lingual learners or seniors. Feel free to share it with me and Paul. Yeah, absolutely. And then we're gonna come up with a cover sheet too about, we were thinking about how to include all the feedback at the commission level. So, you know, pouring over, you know, meeting minutes and talking with some of the liaison and trying to basically summarize what happened there. It was definitely, you know, a separate approach, an individualized approach. So those notes were also there. How much money, given that there's a proposal to apply the one-time federal funds, really funds to the FY24 budget, how much would be remaining of that 2.1 after applying some of those funds to bring the budget down to 5%? Angela? I think that 1.8 number represents after budget, right? Before budget, if you use the 409 that's being recommended by staff right now, you'd have about $1.4 million of work that we're meeting. My dad would say that's not enough. Any questions or comments from our public attendee? Any more questions? Just because of the way that our bill was restructured, that money can or cannot be used to pay for a position. It can be used for anything you would pay for with your general fund. But I would suggest it's one time. Correct, yeah. Right, so the surveys, yeah. I agree, I was just, get yourself in the same situation again. Exactly. That we are currently in curling. Paul, did you read all the surveys at once? Cause I've been going through them for a time over like a year. That's a really good question. No, not at all. Okay. So, it's hard to have a partner, right? People really kind of open themselves up to their experiences and I'm thankful to the community that they, you know, we did respond to them comfortably enough to do so. It's tough, you know, it's tough to hear, you know, even if it's a smaller percentage right up in the total community, it's tough to hear that, you know, that volume of feedback and how people were affected. But a couple of times during the process, you know, a couple of teachers pull this aside and said it's a good problem to have. You know, essentially, maybe they don't want to help people out, so all of us have pretty much volume of feedback. I'm feeling optimistic when we get to about what we did. How many trees can we plant with 1.4? Oh gosh. People at the state sweat about that question because they have that same problem. And this might be, I've just lost access. Do we have access to, I think the last responses I have from the online survey was put, Christine, you sent out in May. Can't have, were there additional responses? There have been, what did I send you? I feel like May might have been the, the lot, Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the only substantial new entry since then and what you see there pretty well represents. Okay. There's just a lot of like, I, yeah, I won't go into it, but. The themes are captured. Okay. So not that there were many, but for instance, you know, I love being in a school, so it's like, well, it's a good thing, but you know, I don't know a lot of other. And so the question, which you may remember, it was a one-question survey and it was how has COVID impacted you? Not, not anything else more substantive than that. I do want to say to you though, the listening sessions, I think we did add more context to there's this money, there's other additional money, like this, what you share with us can inform not just ARPA, but I'd love to recreate this process in the future as needed, right? When this level is needed for interaction with community members. So if we have a document in. Paul, yes. Paul and I have been thinking about it as a best practice type of method where you're, you know, direct outreach is important for communities that are not used to interacting with government. That procedure would be helpful for the community engagement procedure because we do have that kind of initiative focused component. We could just reference to that as more of a joint city, staff, city council endeavors instead of a city council only endeavor, which that procedure envisions. Yep, agreed. Anything else? All right, thank you very much. Well, and I'll just add again, Paul learned a new skill in doing this and did a great job. So I appreciate him stepping up to this new way of business. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. We have reached the end of this evening's agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Motion by Jim, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, council. Thank you. Thank you.


Item number SCP-1093 Object Class Sape Special Containment Procedures SCP-1093 is to be kept inside a sealed 5 meter by 5 meter containment cell. The cell is to be encased in a 30 centimeter thick lining of lead. Personnel are prohibited from entering the containment cell or making contact with SCP-1093, unless instructed by level 4 personnel assigned to the object. Those staff are permitted to enter SCP-1093's containment cell or make any contact with SCP-1093 without first being suited to the proper radiological protection. SCP-1093 is to remain deactivated, unless the designated staff have instructed its activation. Description SCP-1093 is a Caucasian male, 1.68 meters in height and between 30 and 35 years old. The head of SCP-1093 is composed entirely of a bright light, measuring approximately 1600 lumens. SCP-1093 has no physical cranium, and there are no known sources for the light emitting from the head area of SCP-1093. The light of SCP-1093's head does not emanate any sort of heat. No causes for this abnormality have been determined. SCP-1093 is highly radioactive, emitting radiation levels ranging from 3500 rad to 4000 rad. It has not yet been determined what causes SCP-1093 to emit these lethal doses of radiation. SCP-1093 itself does not appear to be affected by this radiation, and will constantly emit radiation regardless of whether or not it has been activated. On the back of SCP-1093, attached to the base of the neck, is a switch labeled with on and off, resembling that of a typical household light switch. Light only emits from SCP-1093 when the switch is activated. When deactivated, 1093 appears completely headless. When not activated through this switch, SCP-1093's upper body will remain limp. Upon activation, 1093 will lift its upper body, standing stiff and motionless until deactivation. Biological examination of SCP-1093 has shown it to be, externally, a living and healthy human from the neck down. SCP-1093 displays a stable heartbeat and steady constant breathing. How SCP-1093 is capable of respiration is unknown, as there are no visible openings to allow any form of inhalation or exhalation. 1093 does not appear to require food, drink, or sleep. All bodily functions immediately cease upon deactivation. For information regarding the internal anatomy of SCP-1093, refer to surgical report F-224-B-slash-1093. When activated, SCP-1093 is entirely dormant. SCP-1093 does not respond to any staff attempts at interaction, and is completely unresponsive of the all-external stimuli. In this state, SCP-1093 does not appear capable of speech and does not display any evidence of sapience. Under these conditions, SCP-1093 will continually stay stationary, locked into a single stiff, upright position, until deactivation. Personnel who have been within the immediate proximity of SCP-1093 have reported experiencing auditory hallucinations that promptly desist upon exiting the chamber. Extended contact with SCP-1093 appears to cause these hallucinations to persist for longer periods of time, typically spanning several days before abruptly ceasing. In a number of cases, the sounds have continued for excessive spans of time, which have caused significant distress in the afflicted personnel, though the eventual sudden desistence has remained in nearly all cases. The most commonly experienced sounds produced by SCP-1093 include a high-pitched ringing, a loud drilling sound, and a low pulsation similar to that of a heartbeat. These auditory anomalies will appear to occur exclusively when SCP-1093 is activated, and all seem to emanate from an indiscernible source. Surgical Report F-224-B-1993 Date ██-██-██ specimen, SCP-1093 Surgical examination conducted under the supervision of Dr. ██-███, SCP-1093 remained deactivated during the length of the surgery. As of the writing of this report, no internal observation on SCP-1093 has been performed while it is in an active state. Radiological protection was worn by all personnel engaged in the operation. Upon the first abdominal incision, when piercing the dermis of the specimen, all agents in the immediate area reported a sudden, high-pitched ringing emanating from an indiscernible source. The ringing continued until the incision was completed, and the abdomen of the specimen was fully opened. This ringing process repeated for each subsequent incision made upon the subject. Once the internals were exposed, no organs or skeletal structures could be located. The entire interior of SCP-1093 appears to consist solely of a pale white opalescent substance. The material has a gelatinous consistency, and is filled with many branching red and blue vein-like protrusions. It seems to be very durable and resistant to damage, as none of the tools used during the surgery were capable of piercing or scratching it. This substance remains unidentified, and no samples were able to be extracted for testing. One abnormality of note is that, when handling the exterior portions of SCP-1093's body, all agents can physically feel internal, bone-like structures. The rib cage of SCP-1093 is visible when viewed externally, but no skeleton appears to be present within the interior of SCP-1093. In addition, prior tests have indicated the presence of several functioning internal organs within SCP-1093, but none could be identified during the length of the examination. Further investigation of this matter is requested. All incisions made upon the specimen healed at a normal rate over the course of several months, subsequent to the surgery with the expected scarring.