I think that we're going to have to get to 645 by award this first 645. So we'll have to what? Talk a little bit. Oh, okay. Well, this will take a while. Okay. So I'd like to call this. First meeting the city council meeting of January 22nd. 2024 to order people online. We'll notice that there's a few school board members at the table, but we're starting tonight with our public hearing on the charter change and hearing from the public on that. That's our only item of business and then we'll adjourn and go into the steering committee with the school board. But we invited them up to sit in these comfy chairs, but they won't be part unless they wanted to talk about the charter change. I guess it impacts them so they might. So I will start the meeting with our pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Instructions on exiting the building and review of technology options. Okay. Travis, somebody online is saying that the audio online is not working. Sorry. Yes. Mine is okay. Oh, so you can hear us. Great. Barb. Can you hear us? Thanks. So for those. Joining us in the room. Thank you for being here. In case of an emergency, you can go out the rear of the auditorium on the left or right and then turn left or right to go outside of the auditorium. Thank you for being here. If you would like to make a comment on an item on the agenda, please either turn your camera on or indicate in the chat that you would like to speak and I will have the chair call on you other than that. We are not monitoring the chat for content. Thank you. Okay. Item three agenda review. Are there any additions, deletions or changes in order of the agenda items on the, on just the hour council meeting. No, none. Comments and questions from the public, not real. Do we have to vote on this agenda? No. Only if we change it. Comments and questions from the public, not related to the agenda. Are there any in the audience? No. How about at home? Garrett. Gary Silverstein, your light is on. Did you want to do a comment on another topic or you just have your sound on? Okay. So that appears. There are no comments or questions from the public. You have a few more minutes. We have. Would someone like to give a skiing report or weather report? Everyone's furnace is working and keeping their homes. Warm. Thank goodness. Goodness, Tim, you always. Yeah. I actually took Vermont gas systems up on their offer to have an estimate done to put a heat pump on top of my natural gas, you know, burner that I already have. So I visited her coming to my house on Wednesday and took a look at it. Great. Yeah. So I'll know how much it is. We did that and it's working very well. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Let's see how many more minutes. We have 10 more minutes till we can open our public hearing. Well, we can recess. Talk amongst yourselves. Okay. Why don't we just have a recess till 645. And then we'll be back on to do our. Public hearing. Thank you. I'm out of recess and remind people this is the city council meeting. South Brownington city council meeting of January 22nd, 2024. That is preceding a steering committee meeting with the school board. So I wanted to just take a quick minute while we're feeling some time before the war and public hearing to mention to this, to the school board and the council on Thursday. On Friday afternoon, I sent around PowerPoint presentation. The superintendent, the school board chair, the council chair and I had talked about before the kind of collision of act 127 and the CLA. We had talked about doing a presentation with you all tonight about the history of the development that's happened over the last couple of years and what on the city side, what is coming in the next couple of years. So we can all be on the same page. Even though the agenda changed, we had started to put together that data. So we wanted to share it with everybody. So it's in your inboxes. If you haven't seen it, we really focused on how South Brownington has grown in the last 10 years. What we know is about what's coming in the future years, which is some things. We don't know everything. How we on the city side have been planning for that change and then pose some kind of key questions to you all about what additional. Really the intention of this being the start of a conversation between the two elected bodies. What additional data you would like to see conversations you would like to have into the future. So I just wanted to remind you that that's in your inboxes. Tom DiPiccio our public works director who's here in the audience and Paul Conner and Alana Blanchard our planning director and a community development director spent a lot of time pulling together that data. But it's just the same thing. But it's just the same thing. So it's in your inboxes. If it spurs any ideas or questions that you like us to consider as we move forward, we would welcome that feedback by email and we'd be happy to come back at a future steering committee meeting and have that joint conversation. Okay. Well, I think the witching out and be witching our who's just about here. So. I will move. Yes. We enter a public hearing on a cheddar change proposal to increase the number of south rooms in school district board members from five to seven. Second. All in favor. Hi. It's unanimous. Well, I want to welcome everyone before we actually hear from the public. Tonight we hold our first public hearing. On a possible charter change that would expand the number of school board members, a directors from five to seven. We will hold another public hearing on January 29th at 6. 30 PM as well. Two were required by state law. Prior to this evening, we've received an update from the charter committee on their work. Been prepared. Proposed charter change language. We've worn these public hearings and received process recommendations from the city's legal counsel. The purpose tonight is to hear from you. We won't be responding to individual comments. We'll just be listening to them. Except perhaps to ask a clarifying question to make sure that we're listening to them. We also won't have a dialogue amongst ourselves. We will take all that we have heard tonight. Together with any correspondence we received. Digest all those things and have a council discussion next week. Procedurally tonight, we'll have comments from folks who are involved in the discussion tonight. If you're in person, please walk up to the podium and I will call on you. Make sure the little green light is bright green. And for those attending remotely, please indicate that you would like to speak in the chat function. Our city manager, Jesse Baker, will keep a running tab of those wishing to speak. We'll keep a running tab of those wishing to speak. To be fair to everyone, I'll attempt to mix in both in person and remote attendees.  Lastly, I'd ask that everyone please keep your comments brief and succinct. And I'll ask you to try not to repeat comments made by others. If needed, I'll apply a time limit, although it doesn't look like we have a packed audience. So that probably won't be a problem. But let's start with everyone kind of self-monitoring. If there's time remaining after everyone who wants to speak has spoken, I will entertain a second comment. If it's new information. So if someone says something and it's like, oh, yeah, that reminds me. If we have time, we'll get back to you. So we've opened the public hearing. So I would turn it over to the public. And is there anyone in the audience or online who would like to comment on this charter change proposal? No. I don't think so. Good evening. Yes, it is now. Thank you. Peter Taylor. I'm the chair of the charter committee. And we did an extension. We did an extension. We did an extension. I'm the chair of the charter committee. And we did an extensive study over the. Past 15 months. On structure of the city. And one of our two unanimous recommendations. Was to expand the school board. And. And I just. Wanted to come up and make that clear that that was a unanimous decision of the charter committee. Be glad to answer any other questions you might have, but we've been over this a number of times. So. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would wish to make a comment. Even at home. No one. Jerry still has his light on, but I don't think he wants to. No. I don't know why I have my light on. Pardon me. Gary, are you trying to get your. No, I'm not. I'm not, I'm not sure why my box is lit up. Okay. Well, if you don't want to speak, that's fine. I just, since it was a lit up, I wanted to give you the. Yeah, I don't know why I don't know why it's lit up. I'm trying to figure that out. Okay. Well, if in the future and the rest of the. Okay. Okay. So. Okay. About your light being on. Okay. So if there's. Did you want to speak? Oh, okay. No, no, it just, I thought by doing that, you wanted to speak specifically. Okay. Well, if there's no other comments. I will move that way. Okay. Okay. I will move that we will close the hearing. Second. Okay. All in favor of closing the. Hearing. Say aye. Aye. So the. Hearing is closed. And that is all the. Agenda items that we have for the. Council. So I entertain a motion for adjournment. Second. All in favor. Hi. Okay. Now we're back to wait until seven 15. Do we need to know you don't know we can continue. You can continue. Yeah. Okay. Oh, because we're just doing presentations. All right. So we'll start early. Alrighty. So. Because Kate has a sore throat, she was going to chair this. And I offer to save her throat. And so I'm chairing the steering. This conference will now be recorded. It was kind of her turn, but that's fine. I'm not budding in. Okay. So I'd like to. Call to order the steering committee meeting between the city council and the school board. For January 22nd, 2024. And we'll start with the agenda review. Are there any additions, deletions or changes. In order. This conference will now be recorded. It was kind of her turn, but that's fine. I'm not budding in. Okay. So I'd like to call to order the. Steering committee meeting between the city council and the city council. And we'll start with the. In order. Of the. Agenda items. Yes. I think to add. Sorry. Under. Other business that we could return to our conversation about the safe routes to schools. Task force. And perhaps establish. Just the governance structure. For the task force. We spoke about it in November. Okay. Are there any other items to add? Okay. Thank you. Okay. Hearing none. I'd entertain a motion to approve the. Agenda with that additional item. So moved. Second. All and you guys get to vote too. So all in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Raise your hand. Aye. So that's unanimous. All right. Comments and questions from the public, not related to the agenda. Seeing none. We'll move on to the consent agenda, which is approving minutes from the November 2nd. 2023 steering committee meeting. I'll move that we approve the minutes. Second. No discussion. All in favor of accepting the minutes from November 2nd. 2023 indicate by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Everyone voted. Okay. They are approved. So we'll move on to the real meter tonight. And that is our half the meat. This is half one hamburger. And then there's another one later presentation of the FY 25 school budget and other votes. So I will turn it over to bun. Do you want me to share my screen? Sure. That'd be great. Thank you. And I think we mentioned this at an earlier meeting. It when we did have a leadership meeting between the city and the school board, which is the two chairs and the superintendent and the city manager, you had just gotten the numbers and the reality of what this budget looks like. And as we discussed that we agreed that it probably made sense to have give the public as many opportunities as we possibly can to understand these changes. And the thinking behind it and how as a city, both the council and the school board are really concerned with these. I'd like to think they're unintended consequences. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the consequences of some of the changes. So that's why this is one of the larger pieces of, or is an important piece of tonight's meeting. We also had planned to share the city budget. In the steering committee. Earlier in the season and not wait till kind of the bitter end of the year. So we had a lot of people printed and on the ballot. So this is our first, I guess, of many opportunities to really consider this, understand the school budget. And some of the challenges facing. I think our community. Thank you so much, Helen. And good evening, everyone. Thank you for all of those who are here in person and tuning in online. I'm going to start to say what a great sense of relief I have, but I'm not sharing with the council for the first time this. Significant impact of the CLA. So it's really wonderful to be sitting here today. With the opportunity to share more about why I think this is a really fiscally responsible budget. And how it's going to support the students in our community, which is really the goal of every budget presentation. We try to share the benefits to our school community. So that'll be the focus this evening. I want to thank our legislators who joined us second time. And I get to see some of you today. So thank you again for all of your time. You know, I said publicly at our meetings and in my written communication, I really value the partnership and the commitment that I see from our legislators. And I think that, you know, one of my favorite things over mantra at heart. And one of the favorite pieces of that is that I do really see and have my entire life seen a partnership between lawmakers and school systems and municipalities. And I'm hopeful that we can continue to work together to move forward to support our school budgets. So with that, I've invited Tim Jarvis, senior director of finance and operations to join me. Those of you who tune into our school board meetings get to hear Tim and I joke about how are the dynamic duo. So most of the time from here on out, we'll be delivering this solo because we've got quite a long list of folks that we want to share our school budget information with. So this might be one of the last times Tim and I get to share this together. So I've invited him to join us. And with that, tonight's highlights, we are, I'll share some of the budget information with you contributing factors. We'll walk through the budget worksheet, which shares some of our expenditures and how we got to our final percentage that will be bringing forward to the community in March. We'll talk a little bit about what beyond FY 25 looks like and some of the implications of that. I'll talk a little bit about the FY 22 audit surplus. Some considerations for staffing and the act 127 impact. Finally, we'll talk about the post CLA tax rate, our current status and then the timeline.  We should really think about linking voter registration information to that as well. So as we, I'm going to give you the big scary number at the onset. This is, you know, bad news early and often, right? It's an important act of transparency, I think. And so this has been sort of the first slide in a lot of our presentations. Following, you know, the mechanics of budget development early on that we shared in board meetings in October and November. This is saying here's where we've ended up today. We're introducing the board has approved an 18.26 tax rate to bring forward to our community. And I'm going to just, I'm going to give you all of the big, the big ticket items that you'll hear me repeat time and time again until March 5th. But a few factors here, you know, pre-CLA this number was 5%. So this was a really dramatic piece of information after months of budget development to get on January 2nd. When we were, you know, at the point where we were at our third draft of the budget. So this was a dramatic impact to our, our board and our community. And again, I want to thank all of those who've sort of just listened to how we got to this point. You know, I will say that about two thirds of our residents in South Burlington pay income sensitized taxes. And that means that those who are making for FY23 anyway, it was $125,000 or less per household. And there's a sliding scale with a maximum relief of $8,000. So I want to, I want that information to be shared in conjunction with this 18.26 figure. I'll say here too that, you know, after several votes, if the budget doesn't pass the community would, we would be bringing forward ultimately the fiscal year 24 budget. And that would only yield a 16.5% tax rate to the community. I say only that, that means that it's not even 2% less than the 18.26. But it would come with an $8.6 million reduction. So for, and the, I'll give you the quick fact here because I just like this number. The difference between these two votes, again, rolling over the fiscal year 24 budget, which would be the ultimate move should the budget not pass at 18.26. The difference for the average homeowner in South Burlington with a home price of $438,000 is an additional $9 per month. So those are all the big ticket items that I wanted to say at the onset here. And we'll continue to pull those threads throughout and share more on the what and why. I also have to say before moving on that this budget prioritizes student facing positions. So those who work most directly with our kids. And it focuses an elementary literacy program, which is research based. It prioritizes math and literacy specialists. It supports our multilingual students. And that's a growing percent of our student body and our community. It also supports our special education students. And it includes facility upgrades that we, we came up with after working with some of our partners with police and fire folks in this room. And those were related to a safety audit. So improving school safety is something that's really important. And it's also part of Act 29, which is a new act pertaining to school safety. So that's always our number one task is keeping our students safe second education. So getting into some of the nuts and bolts here, I will share with you some of our main expenditures and talk a little bit about some of the factors on the revenue side. For expenditures, much gentler inflation this year than last two and a half to 3%. Really the greatest impacts on our budget are the union negotiations. So these are about a 10% increase year on year from fiscal year 24. And those are non-negotiable, right? So regardless of, you know, what happens with the budget, these will not be reduced. The other significant challenge we're facing is health care. And health care is negotiated at a statewide level. And it's costing both employees of the district and the district as an employer significantly more money this year. So finally we have the ZEMs, the principal and interest payments on our ZEMs. We're seeing greater than anticipated revenues coming from these impact fees. So while this is a expenditure, it's also going to be realized as a revenue on our budget. So that will come close to breaking about 91% even. So most of the fees associated with the ZEMs will be covered by impact fees. And we're coming in ahead of schedule on that so far. So thanks again to our city partners. Again, you know, we support development and we want to be able to provide a high quality of education with the increase of students that we're seeing. So on the revenue side, we did have a $2.27 million surplus from our fiscal year 22 audit. So that's our 21 and 22 school year. And still COVID year, right? So a lot of the things that we do in person, everything from professional development to special ed services were not drawn down on. So we will be bringing forward this question to the voters on town meeting day, which is, shall they allocate this $2.2 million surplus to our badly needed facilities reserve fund? And the reason that we, Tim Jarvis and I decided to make this recommendation to the board to consider was because we were looking at the structure of Act 127. And this would not have if this $2.2 million surplus were added to our revenues, which is one option. We would not as a community have realized one cent of value for that. So it wouldn't have changed the tax rate. It would have remained at 18.26. It wouldn't have reduced it like it would in a typical year because of the 5% cap associated with Act 127. So it was the only way that our community could realize the value of this money. So we've got the impact fees we discussed and then state factors. So on December 1st, we got the tax commissioners letter announcing the yield, which was down significant significantly. So it was 9452. And we have just gotten a new yield and it has reduced further. And so that drives the tax rates up. So that's the relationship just as the CLA. So the CLA was 100.99 just two years ago. And we received a pretty significant dip last year about 92%. And then this year we're down 11% from that. And this factor alone overnight brought our homestead tax rate from 5% utilizing that tax cap associated with Act 127, delivering this crushing 18.26%. So for us, that was a really dramatic impact. And again, I appreciate all those in the room who have listened to us talk through this and talk through it together and think about, you know, how to share this information with the community. So I'm going to turn it over to Tim now to walk us through the budget worksheet. This is the mechanics of how we got to this tax rate. And you'll see how Act 127, the mechanics of the act shook out here as well. Welcome, Tim. Thank you, Violet. So slide five is really a walkthrough of the math. I'll just go from top to bottom. At the top, you'll see our budget expenditures of the 71.2 million, increase of 13.86 versus fiscal year 24. Without the allocation of 1.9 million to the capital reserve fund, which still keeps us under the 5%, or at the 5% cap, the net increase would have been 10.82%. But the number that's going to be on the ballot in March is the 71.2 million dollar number. The offsetting local saying federal revenues is a number that is comprised of a variety of different sources. State, federal grants, special ed money, tuition that tuition students pay us, which is about $2 million a year. The impact fees would also be in this category. So these are revenues that come in to the school district outside of the education fund. So if you subtract the revenue from the expenses, you see this net education spending number of 57.8 million. That's a critical number. That's the number that needs to be financed by the education fund in order for us to have our budget. When you think of it, we raise the 13.42 for the revenues. The net ed contribution is really just the difference between our expenditure level and our revenues. So that's the money that we ask the state to contribute to our overall budget. The big difference this year, or one of the many big differences this year is the way that they count pupils. I think that most people probably think the pupil count means how many bums are in seats at our five schools. And if it were that easy, then I think we'd have a different kind of conversation. But the way that the state has decided to change the equalized pupil count, which is what this used to be called, is a number of different impacts on South Burlington. So they've added certain weights to give rural school districts and small schools a heavier weight to give them a higher pupil count. They've changed the way that English language learners are measured. They've changed the way that low-income families are measured. And basically redid the calculation to decide what would be a quote-unquote equalized pupil count. It has a long, complicated name, long-term weighted average daily membership. I like to just call it the pupil count. Be sure to get that because many people get very confused by LTWADM. And what it really means is how the state accounts how many pupils are in our schools. So you take the 57, 750 million, you divide it by the 4,123, and that gives you a critically important value, which is the net education spending per pupil. And why this is so important is that according to the terms of Act 127, if your increase in this particular value was over 10%, then you would lose the opportunity to have the 5% cap on equalized spending, tax increases. So the biggest factor that we had throughout all of our budget development was to keep this number under 10%. And some people have asked, what are you measuring it against? Because if they've changed the whole formula and you have this percentage increase, like what's on the other side of that percentage? And what the state did was to look at our equalized pupil counts or our demographics of our student population. It's probably better to say it. For fiscal year 24 that we're currently in, and they applied the new weights of Act 127 as if Act 27 was already in effect for this current school year. And that's really the only way that you could compare it, because if you just took it, if you looked at last year's budget book and you saw how many equalized pupils we have, the numbers have no relevance to each other because they've changed the formula so much. But this increase had to be under 10%. And I'll show you in a slide that's coming up why that's so important. But if we had exceeded it, we would have been subject to a tax review for one thing. And the tax review concept is that a group of our peers of superintendents and business officials such as myself would review your budget and decide whether or not it was egregious or not it was appropriate, depending on the factors of each town. So that's a very important figure. And my laptop is just rebooting, so now I have to squint and look at the screen up there. So that's the net net spending per pupil. You then take that number and you divide it by the yield. And as Violet said, the yield that is set in the December 1st tax commissioner's letter has already changed once. And the yield is actually subject to change right up until the legislature finally approves it towards the end of the legislative session. So while it's a critically important number to use at this stage of the budgeting process, it can still change. And they're already talking about should it change as they start gathering all the data from all the towns around the state and seeing how their tax situation is shaping up through these exact calculations that are done in every school district. It could change again, but we can only use the numbers that are available to us at the time. So that's what the current number is. So that gives us a tax rate on a calculated basis of 1.5271. So if there was no 5% cap, then the notional increase even before the CLA would have been over 21%. Because we satisfied the requirements of Act 127, we kept the net net spending per pupil below 10%. That gets capped at 5%. So the 1.3172 you see is really last year's equivalent rate with a 5% increase. So up until the CLA was released on January 2nd, all of our presentations, all of our discussions were talking about a budget that would increase the resident's home set tax rate by 5%. Continuously with a caveat before CLA, before CLA, before CLA, before CLA, because we knew that CLA can have a very dramatic impact on this notional tax rate. So when the common level of appraisal was announced, and it went from 92.97% to 82.54%, suddenly the whole game changed. And it was not overly surprising to a certain extent. For those of you who don't understand exactly what the CLA is, it's an equalization study done by the Vermont Department of Property Assessment or taxes, which looks back at the sale prices of properties in South Burlington and every town over a trailing three-year period and it compares it to what is the assessed value of that same property on the grand list. So in a situation where houses were selling pretty much exactly at their assessed value on the grand list, that percentage would be 100%. And that's why right after our assessment in 2021, the CLA was 100.99. So there's actually a little bit above that. But it demonstrates an equilibrium between what houses are selling for and what their value is on the grand list. To the extent that homes in South Burlington have been selling at higher values than what is their assessed for on the grand list, every time that happens, the CLA is going to go down because the ratio is no longer in balance. And for anyone who bought property during that three-year period, including myself, I recognize that what I pay for my house is certainly more than what it is on the grand list. Today you say, hey, that's pretty good.  But in the grand scheme of things, when that happens across the city and becomes a chronic part of the real estate market in South Burlington, we're all suffering because of it. And this is the evidence of that suffering, which is instead of if it had, I'm not even saying if it had gone back to 100%. We would have had a 5% homestead tax rate increase and our presentations would be a thousand times easier to try to explain. But because the CLA went down so much, we're faced with a situation where we are today because that is just simple mathematics. You just divide the rate, the equalized tax rate that you see on this page by the CLA and that's how you get your tax rate, which is 1.5959. I'll pause there. I've explained this a number of times at school board meetings, but it's a very complicated situation and I just want to make sure that everyone understands or has any questions before I continue. Are there any questions? Just two quick ones. Would we care if the estimated yield changes because the 5% cap are we kind of indifferent? We care because if you walk through the calculations on this slide, you're dividing the net net spending per pupil by the yield. So to the extent that that keeps getting lower and lower and lower, the notional tax rate is going to go up before CLA. But we're capped. I'm sorry? But we're capped at 5%. Well, we're within the 5% right now. I haven't really calculated how far will the yield have to go down before we lose the 5% cap. That's what I'm saying. We have a lot of margin there. We probably don't care much about the yield. We care if it goes down to change that 5%. That's fair. The second thing is just about the CLA. Presumably the real question is how the value of South Burlington's homes have increased relative to the rest of the state. Like if the properties across the state all increased whatever the 11%, then everyone's, it would not matter, right? Everyone's, it's just that our, I guess, properties more valuable relative to the rest of the state. That's probably what's causing the problem. I mean, it's good to pet, right? I mean, it's good to the extent that you could argue that the homeowners in South Burlington who have not sold the property are enjoying a boost in equity of their homes and are paying, but are now paying a tax rate as if they had gone up considerably. So there is a lot of different ways to look at it. Like when the CLA's were first published, we did a quick snapshot of our neighbors in Chippin County. Most of them were hit by the CLA factor at similar levels or slightly lower levels or slightly higher levels, but Chippin County as a whole got hit pretty hard. Right, and it gets presumably hit harder than the rest of the state and that's why it makes, and that's why it's an impact. If the whole state appreciated at the same rate, that probably wouldn't be an impact. Can I jump in on this? I do think that this is going to be an interesting question and what I'm glad our legislators are here to hear. So South Burlington CLA dropped 74th on the list of CLA drops, meaning 73 communities in Vermont had bigger CLA decreases than we did out of 251. So I think the average when I calculated those statewide was about four point drop. Ours was significantly more than that. So I think it depends on how big those towns are. If you have an average 4% just listed by denominator 251, that's one thing. If it's all the Stoes and Killingtons and whatnot, that's a different thing. So I think as the budgets start coming in to AOE and they start understanding what that full impact of all of those 18% increases are going to be, I think that's where we may see some opportunity to make legislative adjustments in the Ed funding formula this year. We don't know right now. I don't think what those are, what that impact that you're suggesting is going to be statewide yet. I'm going to add to that. So Jesse mentioned where we are on that list and she also mentioned our 11% versus the average, which I didn't do that. What did you find the average to be 4%? So that's not percent change. That's drop in the ratio. Right. So one of the points I was going to make and some of you, we've discussed this a bit, but there's a critical shortage in appraisers. And so many towns in our state have been a great long time without a reappraisal. So some towns and cities have been waiting a decade. Right. And I think one of the differences that we're seeing here is we're an incredibly desirable community and we have development and real estate values are only going up. And so for us, I mean, this dramatic dip is pretty significant where my understanding from colleagues in more rural parts of the States is that their CLA is more predictable and steady. So again, the significance of the 11% dip is pretty startling, especially off the back of the 8% dip last year. And so for us, as we look forward to FY 25 and beyond, I mean, we cannot continue to sustain drops of this significance, but the further from reappraisal we are, the more likely the dips will continue to be more significant. So that's a concern as we look ahead. Yeah.  And I want to say to help anyone understand how these are factors outside of the district's control, if you were to take our 60, you know, $2,528,000 budget for fiscal year 24 with our current 7.06 tax rate, again, under the new mechanics, that would have been everything identical to the cent, a 38% tax rate for the community. So last time I was here, we talked about a 28% tax rate and then we got the yield change and it brought it to 38%. So the yield is a factor to watch. And if the yield is bankrupt by, you know, districts doing what South Burlington did and put money in their capital reserve funds, that is going to continue to decrease the yield, right? So it's a revenue for, it's a factor that is a revenue for the yet funding model. So again, if we rolled over everything equally, our 7% tax rate this year, same exact budget, 38% for fiscal year 25. So, I mean, that gives you all an understanding of the magnitude of the adjustments we've seen with the ed funding formula. I think the- I'm, Larry indicated he had a question and then I'll go to Tim and then back to Andrew. I think the question really has to do violet. You mentioned near remarks about house value in terms of understanding. Think of, we should make sure we say the appraised value. Right. As opposed to what people thinking that their houses are worth. That was my only comment just so that, because it's all on the appraise that this whole structure is on this appraisal issue that's- Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, Tim. I think that the state's use of the CLA model may be broken at this point, and it's not their fault. It's just that times have changed, right? I mean, a lot has changed since the pandemic, right? We have this increased amount of remote work, right? And we have changes in the demographics and the politics around the country. So there's a lot of demand to come live here, right? And in Chittenden County, there's not always- I mean, we're building in South Carolina and in other towns too, but, you know, it's a supply and demand issue. So, but the other problem is that people who are in their homes, who've been there for a while, if you're not going anywhere, you can't sell it because there's nowhere to go, so you're not going to sell. So the CLA model needs to take into account whatever the static rate is of turnover that doesn't turn over. And I don't know how they, if the way they're calculating it is even, even takes into account the fact that most cities and towns can't even get appraisers to do it anyway. So it seems like it's a broken part of their model, and it just ends up amplifying the cost per student, which then amplifies the tax rate. So I think that's where the problem is. However they're, whatever they're doing, they probably need to cap it every year, whatever it is, right? And some of those smaller rural areas probably have much more relaxed, you know, real estate markets that, I mean, typically what happens, right, is that we were a two-thirds, a 66.6% appraised city for years and years until 2006, I think, or 99, something like that, and we changed to 100% appraisal, right? And so then there's a fair amount of turnover that's nice and easy, and, you know, there's this huge out-of-state influx of people with cash bidding up, you know, 40 offers on a house that goes in three days or less, you know. This just doesn't account for that at all. And you still have tons of people in their homes that can't go anywhere, and they're not going to go anywhere. So why should the, that incremental bidding up of these other home values affect the people that aren't going anywhere? Back to Andrew. And then, is there anyone in this school, you've heard this so many times, and probably got your questions answered, but you might have some comments for clarity. So when Andrew's done this, yeah. So just one last question. So the state is going to be giving the city $57 million, et cetera. Do we know, can we calculate how much money we're giving the state? Yeah, we looked at the cash flow statement every year from the state, which shows how much money did the state give us in terms of the $57 million in this case? And how much did we put into the fund? And it's a combination of the homestead taxes that residents pay, plus the non-homestead taxes that businesses, vacation home owners and things like that pay, of those companies that are based in South Burlington. And last year's calculation was that South Burlington paid in about $5 million more than we got back. The way they show the cash flow is they take the homestead property taxes first and then the non-homestead second. And so in that sense, we didn't need all the non- I shouldn't say the state education fund did not need, or we're not giving it to South Burlington. It was put into the big pot that then gets distributed. So that's why we're considered to be a net giver as opposed to a net receiver. Now, other people have argued and they have a point that the homestead, I should say the non-homestead taxes that university mall pays or hotels or whoever, that's non-resident people who are spending money at those establishments or whatever. So it's not necessarily on the South Burlington back. However, and I always, I respect other people's views and perspectives about how they look at this. I do, but I'm just reporting the facts. And the facts are that South Burlington and the way the state calculates this is that we gave about $5 million more than we received. And do we have a sense of what that might be the next physically or is because of the cure? Too hard to tell. I don't know what our non-homestead tax collection is going to be. That's a chunk of money. Okay. Sure. And then Alex. My turn. Yes. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Going through this presentation, I have to feel sympathy for somebody who only has the time to hear it once because if you hear it only once, it's probably going to be overwhelming to you. And I think in particular, the talk about the CLA and as I've thought about the CLA, I think it could easily be replaced by real estate inflation. And I feel that if we use the word real estate inflation as opposed to common level appraisal, it puts the responsibility or it helps pinpoint where these tax increases are coming from, not necessarily from the school district, but from the fact that the real estate market is going wild in South Burlington. So I think if you were to take a transcript of what we're talking about here tonight and if you were to do a word search replacement where you take CLA, you put in real estate inflation, it would be a little bit easier for a person who is only going to see it once such as the day before town meeting day or perhaps at a PTO meeting or some other place and our message would get across a lot better. And just for kicks, I have a short anecdote about my neighbor who sold their house last year. It was on the grand list for 380, 380,000. They offered it for 495. So in three years since our appraisal, it went up by $115,000 per, at least as so they thought. It turns out they got 505 for it. So they had a bidding war of some sort. So this property is worth roughly 25% more than it was three years ago. And, you know, when we talk about CLA and formulas and stuff like that, we sort of get lost in the fact that our real estate portfolio that any homeowner has has really done well. And that's where the hit's coming from. It's not coming from the school budget. I mean, some of it's coming from the school budget. But a huge part of it is coming from the real estate market. And I think when people hear the word CLA or Common Level Appraisal, they don't think real estate inflation. And it takes a little going home to think about that. And so I just want to get that across is that this budget is a lot of real estate inflation with a little bit of education in it. It's mostly real estate inflation though. Thank you. Thank you. Jesse. No, go ahead. Well, I think we're kind of wending into the last agenda item here. So just to throw this out, because it's an interesting point Tim, you made about the non homestead property tax payers in South Burlington supporting the entire state. And I think that that is a logical argument. I think an idea for the future again, given that we're all here and our legislators are in the room, is that that also includes all rental properties. So those are homes that our neighbors are living in and sending kids to the school and maybe a recommendation that the elected officials want to think about over time is how do we take that into consideration differently? So if we were going to cap the CLA impact with the cap, would there be some kind of factor for non homestead associated with renters versus non homestead associated with commercial properties? And how we give out to other communities. That's a good point. Megan, yeah, I was curious one way we would know the non homestead rate, because you said we don't know that currently. When does that? We know the rate, but I don't know how much money is going to be collected. How much money is going to be collected? The rate was declared in the December 1st tax commissioners. That's the same letter. And it's the same for the whole state before CLA. And why is that more difficult to calculate versus the homestead rate? I don't know in fiscal year 25, how much revenue is going to be generated by that? That's really, let's, yeah, finish the slides. And then maybe if we could take questions at the end, just knowing what's ahead in the deck, I think we'll hit a good number of these, but and maybe we could just, the conversation will absolutely run into our final agenda item. So yeah, very good. Thanks back to you, Tim. Yeah, so slide six, we've included this slide. It's got a lot of numbers on it, but just to guide you. So if you look at the budget difference about two thirds of the way across, that's the 8,664,862 expenditure increase last year, which was the 62,528 number. So this just shows you by category, where those increases were. You'll see probably clear on the next slide, but it's probably easier to explain this on the next slide because all I did was sum them up and put them in the category. So what this show, what this slide shows is not what percentage of these categories increased from last year, but what percentage do they constitute for the overall increase? So with salaries and wages and staff insurance and benefits constituting about 80% of our budget anyway, you would expect that those would be the drivers of the increase as well and they are. Primarily because of the new negotiated rates and the collective bargaining agreements, both for licensed staff as well as support staff. So all other things being equal, that's what those salaries and wages and staff health insurance and benefits would take up. Debt service is about 11% of it, but again, as Violet mentioned, the increase in our principal and interest payments on our bonds is largely offset by the impact fees that the city so graciously passed earlier last year. So although we have to include it as an expenditure because we're paying the Vermont Bond Bank, the principal and interest that we owe them, we do have the inflow from the impact fees to help offset that. One decision that the school board made at the last meeting was to transfer 1.9 million to our Capital Reserve Fund. And again, the Capital Reserve Fund is sort of our savings account for future facilities needs, which we know we have many. We have an aging infrastructure, things break regularly, unfortunately, HVAC systems and heaters and boilers and whatnot. And as recently as a year ago, we only had something like $35,000 in this Capital Reserve Fund, which is nothing. Other school districts regularly budget to add money to their Capital Reserve Funds, which is a smart move. And for whatever reason, South Burlington had just not done that historically. So we didn't put this number in originally, the 1.9 million as part of our recommendation because we were trying to keep the year-on-year increase as manageable as we could, right? We didn't want to have to go to the taxpayer and say, hey, you're going to have a 13.86% expenditure increase. It was 10.66. But as we discussed in detail, the mechanics of Act 127, and this kind of gets into the... This is really one of the most important points that we can make and is impacting the whole state. Because we had cushion in our 5% cap that whether we spent $69 million, whether we spent $71 million, it didn't matter to the South Burlington taxpayer because their tax rate increase was going to be 18.26% no matter what. And so the discussion was if we have this cushion and if it's not going to change the tax rate and if we have a very, very well-known need for infrastructure spending in the future, why wouldn't we put in the 1.9 million in this expenditure proposal in this budget? Because it's advantageous to the South Burlington taxpayer. It's advantageous to the school and it's advantageous to the city. The problem is if every town in the state does a similar thing, and this is really where things have exploded in probably the last 7 to 10 days across the discussion, if everybody does, and not everyone can afford to and not everyone has to do or whatever, but to the extent that a number of school districts have done the same thing that we've done, that's putting further stress on the overall education fund because somewhere, if the state is going to approve us having this budget, they have to find the education fund component of that somewhere. But anyway, that's where we are today. I mean, that's the final decision that the board made before we went to warning and I think there's a... It's really, are you looking at this with a narrow focus on South Burlington or are you looking at this with a broader focus on the education fund and how education funding of public schools is done in the state of Vermont, which has a lot of different attributes and viewpoints. But anyway, in our budget, we do have this 1.9 million transfer. I think it's a good idea, certainly from a local perspective. And then the other things, there's a lot of... 3,000 accounts in our budget and some of them are impacted by inflation, transportation costs and materials and supplies and things like that. And then we have still allocated a slice of the increase for some school safety initiatives, which comes up to the total of the 8.66 million. So that's what the difference is from this year's budget. Are the enhanced school safety issues mandated by the state? Is that in a piece of legislation? The specific line items are not. The Act 29 is the new school safety law with requirements that are going into place for the next fiscal year. It's more to do... The requirement is more to do with school boards adopting policies around access to schools, behavior threat assessments and things like that. They're not saying you have to do this or you have to do that. So some of the line items that we have in this and it's depending on what it is, it's split. Some of it we're going to allocate to the bond that was passed last year because they really are long-term capital investments. And some of them are in the operating budget. We did a tour of all five schools with our Officer Breed, our school resource officer and others and really just kind of kicked the tires on the schools as we did a tour and said, this exterior door really needs to be repaired or replaced. A fire door, window shading for the ground level classrooms. The intercom systems are actually a big ticket item. We're using the same intercom systems that we've had probably since I was in school 50 years ago. You have an emergency in the school and you hear this it's like you're on a subway in New York City. You can't hear them as clearly as you would like to. Maybe that's an extreme example, but it certainly should be improved and enhanced. We kind of noticed that when we built the ZEMs, the additions at Rick Marcon and Orchard, trying to integrate the ZEMs into the overall intercom system, the existing intercom system was proving a little problematic. So we've got money in that in the budget for things like that. We're looking at, one of the big issues that we had this past spring was the classrooms were like my 80s and the degrees because only Chamberlain school and the middle school are fully air conditioned. In the case of the middle school, I think it was because it's, I understand that it's also a shelter, a public shelter, an emergency shelter. And Chamberlain benefited from money they received from the FAA for the F-35 noise issues. So thankfully, we're able to put air conditioning in that school, but Rick Marcon, no air conditioning or limited, I should say, some rooms are, but not the whole school. Orchard not and the high school not. So we are looking at the possibility of putting in heat pump air conditioning units that are working well. You could call that a facilities upgrade or you can call it a school safety thing, but certainly the teachers were telling us that it was a safety issue because it was really, really hot and students were and teachers were not able to deal with it very well. So those are some examples of what we're calling school safety. I think it's the point that families and teachers are making about the school safety and the air conditioning is that the solution when you're in a really hot classroom is to try to keep the windows open and that's potentially a risk, a safety risk. Okay, next slide. Looking beyond fiscal year 25. So this is sort of just a textual summary of a lot of the things that we've already been talking about. So I don't want to spend too much time on it. Tim, I can grab these next few slides and take us into some of the budgeting pieces here. So last time I was here we discussed this particular slide with the council. This is an Act 127 provision where when it was designed this 5% cat was put into place to cushion districts like South Burlington who would be negatively impacted financially. So it was designed to give a 5-year period where we could reduce funding to a responsible rate. What a legislator said on a Zoom with the superintendents today was we didn't know that the impacts and the combination of Act 127 and CLA would have. So when we hear and when I say to the community that this was a design to again cushion you can't say that when we would have a 38% tax rate on the same budget that yielded a 7% tax rate this year. So that was something that was unanticipated when this legislation was developed. So it's not really for fiscal year 25. I do want to share though that this will be a big problem for South Burlington should nothing change in the ed funding formula for fiscal year 30 because if the CLA continues to drop and the yield continues to drop and we would be introducing without a 5% cap a 38% tax rate to the community there's no possible way that we could pare down. So we would be closing multiple schools and we'd be unable to perform the simple task of educating students. Period. So given that approximately 80% of our budget is allocated towards paying the staff and the health care and benefits for that staff our main lever here is staffing. So we would have to cut $8.6 million. So I want to contextualize that if we think about staffing and programs for the community right now we're having conversations with the administrative team about the amount of funding that we would have to cut $8.6 million. So I want to contextualize with the administrative team about preparing a list. So should the budget not pass how do we get from this artificial 38% homestead tax rate to a real functional 16.5% so again the community could best case scenario 16.5% tax rate per month for that average $438,000 home. But what that would look like is really dramatically different programming at the elementary level. We're having conversations about eliminating things like math specialists that we wanted to add with the structured literacy curriculum. The structured literacy curriculum is something that we would be modifying classroom sizes so increasing all classroom sizes district-wide to the maximum state capacity. Our ability to deliver multi-tiered systems of supports which are required by the law would be significantly diminished particularly at the elementary level which would have significant impacts on literacy rates. And that is the most significant indicator of success for all students as they matriculate through our systems. We're talking about re-evaluating our middle level model would we move to a junior high model rather than a house system that we have in place right now with our teams which is really critical for social-emotional supports. We're talking about the removal of large-scale supports in the district as well as all instructional supports. We're talking about massive reductions to programming and curriculum, athletics, co-curriculars, field trips, arts, languages, drama, all visual and performing arts to achieve significant staffing reductions. The district employs 518 people which is not including our nutrition services or our schools out program which are enterprises and also have staff that we support. So with that I mean we're a pretty significant employer in South Burlington and I think the ripples of having to roll over our fiscal year 24 budget so eliminating 8.6 million dollars yielding a 16.5% tax rate for our community would mean significantly diminished quality of programming and the loss of quite a few jobs for our community. So wanted to sort of just share a picture of what that looks like. We're finalizing, you know, we're going through the process of developing these lists. Obviously we just got this CLA impact on the second and so, you know, we'll share with the community more details as the administrative team comes to consensus on them. As you can imagine, I mean we're not talking about numbers and facts that don't have an impact so the deliberations are pretty extensive as each one of these decisions will have a significant impact on certain groups of students and people so trying to prioritize them is extremely difficult and we want to give it the time and care that that should have. So I want to, I'll shift from that bleak note here to highlight a little more about the second question that you'll see on your ballot. So the first question that you'll see will say you know this 71 million dollar figure and would you like to vote yes or no. The second question is this question of the surplus generated by the fiscal year 22 audit. So would the community like to allocate this toward the maintenance reserve fund and by law, by statute we could have introduced option one so we did share this information with the board and we'll share it now with the community. This option would have given no tax relief to the community so because of the mechanics of act 127 and that tax cap we would not have been able to recognize this as revenue that would have modified this 18.26 tax rate whatsoever. So option two it is and this would instead of not positively impacting the tax rate it could give us an opportunity to add to this pretty much non-existent savings account. Many of us have savings plans for everything from I'm looking at Colin is kids car insurance right because kids need braces and they need to drive and thinking about what do we save money for so the district has not had this rainy day fund let alone an intentional savings account needs so this is an opportunity for us to take advantage of that this is separate from the 1.9 million that the board decided to add to the budget for the maintenance reserve fund again also not impacting the tax rate that the community will be seeing at all. Violet can I ask what caused the surplus of the 2.266 million in fiscal year 2020 was that left over from the pandemic so this was the 21.22 school year and a number of in-person activities were dramatically modified so when and a lot of this was I think one of the biggest buckets of surplus funding was in special ed so a lot of special education services for instance are delivered in person so speech and language pathology services occupational therapy I think of a few off the top of my head professional development was significantly modified so these were budgeted expenditures that weren't realized in actuality and the audit timing was late which is why this wasn't brought forward to the voters sooner and so this is a you know a really atypical year this is not a surplus that we will be anticipating going forward but again from the 21.22 school year so fears back so this 2.266 will be added to the 1.9 from this proposed budget right the the 1.9 is at is inclusive included in that 71 million dollar figure that's going to community so you will not actually see that figure on the ballot and you can think of that 1.9 as intentionally budgeted in they are they are but because this is right and because this is a different fiscal year and it's an audit audit surplus the question has to go to the community whereas the 1.9 is is built into a budget which the board approves and then brings to the voters in that lump some how many previous bond debt service do you have right now you have the athletic field and what what else is there besides no it's very minimal mostly I don't have a number in farming but other than the 14.55 million that was approved this past March there was very under it was I can't remember I'm not going to say a number that I don't remember but it was not significant it was for a school district our size to have had so little debt at that time was surprising which is why we really needed to raise that bond last year to pay for the exams and a number of other capital improvements that we just had it was all maintenance deferral we just had never really had bonds that were going to address the condition of the bathrooms that's the roofs the floors the elevators the elevators for both schools the elevators were put in that was several years ago I just pulled up the number from last year's budget presentation it was 0.6% of the proposed FY24 budget and so we're talking extremely small figure here I don't have a dollar amount with that I'd just like to add another argument that made me in favor of adding this 1.9 into the budget is that if the CLA is a status quo and Act 127 looking down the road it's going to be even more challenging to put a bond out to voters and ask the voters to support a bond on top of a tax rate that is increasing just for the budget alone so thinking long term having some reserve now at this opportunity with the 5% cap is a way for us to hopefully plan for potentially smaller bonds in the future with no bond at all thanks Kate we can follow up with that figure so folks can have it so considerations for staffing we are seeing and with development are anticipating continued growth we did reduce FTEs by 20.5 last year really thinking about the intentional phasing out of ESSER funds the elementary and secondary school relief funds that came from the federal government we were pretty effective in doing that last year and that was tied to a lot of model changes thinking about special education delivery wanting to ensure we have our most trained and highly qualified staff supporting students who need the most intensive supports so this year you're going to see when I walk you through the proposed reductions and addictions what those models look like we're also thinking about Act 173 to support students using multi-tiered systems of support and the budget you see here the staffing shows this prioritization of early literacy and structured literacy program with the staffing that would be required to roll that out and support that in function so I'll walk you through a number of positions and the schools together if you get a good number of the same positions in a row which we will in a few of these cases so at Orchard School we have a proposal here associated with a model change in special education which is reducing some of these hard to fill positions and unfilled positions and some of these are interventionists and some of these are paraeducators and we're replacing them with paraeducators so you'll see this at Orchard and at Rick Marcot is we're reducing interventionist and paraeducator positions and we'll be adding special educators in those positions at the middle school we are reducing a universal design for learning coach some of you know this position as an instructional coach we are for the first time title one wise a school-wide program and that means that it isn't just Chamberlain and isn't just the middle school anymore that have a poverty rate that gives eligibility for additional title one monies which are meant to support students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch so district-wide all schools are eligible now and this is a huge change and so with this we have to reappropriate some of the positions that have been title one funded so this is an example where the middle school coach the funding is it's 100% grant funded title one and that will be shifted toward a literacy specialist at Rick Marcot who will help support the layered model of literacy delivery at the elementary level you see here also the paraeducator is the same shift of reducing two paraeducator positions and replacing them with one special educator busing has been incredibly challenging we have had four unfilled FTEs for bus driver positions open now we are proposing the elimination of two of those and I have said many times to the board and I'll say it again should we have the ability to fill those we certainly will and with 518 positions I would anticipate no going over our FTE count and I would certainly bring those to the board the minute we had the chance and in the meantime retaining lots of unfilled FTEs is not a good way to stop schools when staffing and employees have really changed as far as categories and who we can hire so mentor coordinator we've reduced and we've reappropriated this 0.5% funding toward a multilingual coordinator who would do these same sorts of connections and there was an art physician at the high school that was Essar funded we're proposing that reduction and are looking at class sizes to look at how we can support students in continuing to take art classes combing through a lot of enrollment numbers seeing who's registered in which class so at the high school we are proposing keeping the student engagement coordinator this was a position that was Essar funded and we're going to move that into local as well as the special educator positions that we talked about with the model change swapping out para and interventionist positions for licensed special educators you'll also see the health and wellness positions here that were Essar funded rolling those into local funding we know that with the social and emotional needs these positions and the 11 health standards that are taught are critically important for social and emotional health of our students so in the kind of net understanding of this the first page had almost 11 positions cut and then some of these will replace that but with a different title or we can't model changes absolutely yes so this is 1, 2, 3, 4 if you go to slide 13 just advance one more so you see that the the net add is 0.6 here and so we would be doing a lot of reappropriating so multi-lingual coordinator for instance we're going to bring some title 2 funds some local money and reappropriating some consulting work that we're doing for a multi-lingual coordination as well as that mentor coordinator role so thinking about needs of students and how to fund that in the best ways pre-k coordinator grant funded right so we're looking at some options here really of just maximizing the funding to support students so again total add of 0.6 FTEs now we've talked a lot about Act 127 so I'm going to kind of just I'm getting the time check reminder here too so Tim if it's okay with you I'm going to breeze through some of these and then move us along Act 127 this has been a flow chart that we've discussed quite a bit so the question that we had to answer from the beginning was are we below a 10% increase in per pupil spending so no we were not and so thus we would not be subject to tax review we we ended up actually at a 9.6% so that's where we are today and that's not out of alignment with others in the area so we are in this range with the 5% cap with the tax rate here and that's everything in the range if we then walk over to slide 15 this gray area here is depicting the 18.26% tax rate and I would encourage you all to think about this as a 38% tax rate because that's what the community would be getting so to step outside of that you can see the figure at which the community would receive a tax break would be bringing it from this artificially inflated 38% rate down to 18.25 but you would lose many millions of dollars of equity so far number to the left the 62.528,000 is the current fiscal year 24 budget and to get here we would no longer be taking advantage of the tax cap and this is really really incredibly significant because it means we would never be able to take advantage of the tax cap so if we lose the tax cap this year we will not be able to have it next year or the year after so we would have no soft landing as was designed by Act 127 this would also create that 8.6 million dollar reduction in order to achieve that target and if we shift to the next slide here this is a new graphic that we're still kind of working on here this is designed to share that every budget from 71.5 million all the way to 63.25 million will generate this tax rate of 18.26% so to get below that even a little bit you can see the reductions that would be a budget cut so all of the positions that we've discussed tonight would of course be eliminated there would be no the conversation is looking around the table like in the numbers far more significant than what we've discussed complete with many programmatic changes so at the very bottom here you see this figure of 9.99% and we put that there to show the reductions that we would need to achieve a tax rate of 9.99% which is double what many historic tax rates are and we wanted to just share these factors are just simply out of the district's control so you see our current fiscal year budget fiscal year 24 budget of 62.528,000 and we did add an arrow there and we'll add it in for these slides to say this year's current budget so again 7% tax rate for fiscal year 24 and with a new ed funding formula it would be 38% brought down to 18 so it's just factors that are out of the district's control if we shift to the next slide 17 I want to share the tax rates with folks so that you all can have an understanding of the costs associated with these changes so you know up until 4pm on January 2nd we were thinking that we were going to have about a 5% tax rate and we got the CLA and that brought it to 18.26 and so I thought okay great I'll call Tim and then we'll reduce and we can get below but there is no reducing unless there's massive impacts on education because of the 5% tax cap range so essentially what this means is instead of about a $300 annual tax bill it would be about $1000 annual tax bill and you see the monthly rates and then for the average condo which is about $300,000 that would be looking like about $730 versus about $200 annually so when I said earlier that the difference in this proposed budget yielding this 18.26% tax rate and the rolling over the current budget and should the budget not pass the difference is about $9 from this $90 a month for the average home which is about $438,000 so other big highlights here 60% of homeowners do receive homestead tax relief and are eligible so that would be some relief on the numbers that you see above on that sliding scale the other highlights I think we've mentioned everything on this slide multiple times but I think just the stunning piece here that from this $63 million number all the way to $71.5 same tax rate and again if we had a 0% increase rolling over the same budget it's going to be 16.5 so not a big relief for the community either way so this is how we get to our $71.192 million figure it was a 10.82% increase before that 1.9 additional allocation for the capital reserve fund so that changes the percent slightly to about 14% increase again with the exact same tax impact and up next January 30th we'll have our budget books available so you'll see more information about what's included in the budget March 4th we have our pre-town meeting day and finally March 5th town meeting day where community members have the opportunity to vote on our school budget and we're doing a lot of grassroots efforts to share information about the budget partner with community members and legislators city counselors to share this information and we've got on our website linked here a lot of folks have reached out and said like I want to endorse your budget so if folks want to do that they can send that to our communications coordinator she'll pop it on our website folks are like hey I love this graphic the tax slide 16 that's on our website there's social media things that can be downloaded and folks can share those so if you want to share information it's available on the website and with that we can take any additional questions I know we've got you know after the city's presentation continued conversation so up to you if you want to take questions now we're happy to do that or if you want to save them for that final agenda item let us know unless there's some pressing question you got one pressing question okay because well why don't you ask it so it's really a question I'm thinking about 2030 and thinking broadly about the state and how kind of Vermont and includes out in funds education and is a system sustainable so I'm interested do we know if we take our 71 million total spending divided by our actual number of students get that number how that number compares to other states like how do we do like how efficient are we at funding education do we know that I think we're the second highest in the country so that I mean that's a fundamental issue right that thinking about how we get to 2030 and how we and the state together make our education system more sustainable right why are we so high right do we know the numbers it's on the I think it's on I've seen them can try to find them so I wouldn't say that I don't think necessarily comparing that number alone tells the whole story I think generally Vermont compared to other states has good education outcomes and I think that I think that there are states who are under investing in in public education and I would not like us to see the solution to this being that we invest less in our students and I think in South in particular so in South Burlington in particular we've gone a long way with the amount of money that we've had we have a very thin administration in Central District we have you know two HR staff for staff of what 500 we have two people in the business office we're doing a lot right now with the money that we have and I think it would I worry about the focus being on sustainability and the conversation we're having in our state falling to our students rather than the larger conversation about affordability okay we've got someone online who would like to speak Jerry Silverstein can you hear me we sure can okay so the figure that people are asking for that was just asked is 28,557 dollars per student that's based upon projected spending in FY 25 divided by the current number of students as defined by the October 2023 demographic report by McKibben associates 28,557 dollars per student is more than twice more than twice what 16 other states spend per pupil only New York state spends more money than we do now you're right you can't always put a dollar figure on how much you spend to get quality education but when what you're spending is more than twice what 16 other states are spending many of them with high quality academic achievements and then you look at sustainability and if you have some problems with sustainability I'll give you an example I don't know how many legislators are there tonight I can't see there's five okay to those legislators and to board members and council members how many of you know what the unfunded liability is of the teachers pension plan does anybody know that yes it's about the 52 52% but the that was the worst of the state pension funds at this point so so in you may remember two years ago s286 the state transferred 200 million dollars from the general fund to the pension fund to try to minimize the continuing growth of the unfunded liability the message I'm trying to get to you is nobody's looking at all the pieces of a complex puzzle and asking the very important question where are we going and how we get there in a sustainable manner I don't think we're moving in a sustainable direction and unless you pull back and say is our spending level going to lead to a sustainable conclusion you're going to arrive there in an unsustainable fashion and from a chemistry standpoint you're dealing with an unbalanced equation the reactants on one side are not balanced by the products on the other side and that's a prescription for disaster the last thing I'll say is to everybody who's there tonight I don't think you've heard everything you needed to hear about all the pieces of the puzzle Violet is very committed Tim is very committed they've been on this program for two years I've been involved as Elizabeth Fitzgerald will tell you for more than two decades I've learned a lot about education and I'll tell you I am greatly concerned with the trajectory of spending and I don't want to arrive and let me just back up and give you if we had approved the new super school I call it the super school sorry the new middle high school the cost of that would have blown through the 5% cap we would no longer have been eligible for the 5% cap with the increased cost of the building and as a result my temporary assessment I have to do the final calculations the increase in the education tax rate had we approved that bond for new construction the increase in the tax rate this year would have been between 15-100% okay because the cap would have been thrown out and the increased costs per year of the bonds for the $354 million project would have really supercharged the cost of the budget so again okay there's a lot of pieces to the puzzle I don't think you've heard all the pieces and I think you should take the time and find out what all those pieces are thank you any other yes Martin I'm not going to be able to respond to Jerry I had some comments before Jerry spoke but certainly where we are at the state level is definitely getting a lot of conversations going that we have to do something different statewide I'm not the one to figure that out I'm the Judiciary Committee I'm dealing with Public Safety but there are a few things I just wanted to point out that Violet you keep on saying the 18% rate and I think that that's not quite the story that's the increase in the rate but the last two years because of funding ARPA funding, ESSER funding and the like we paid down the tax rate the last two years were actually much lower than historically and I was just looking at the tax department and I thought I'd remember this right as far as rates that we've had in the past rather than the buck 59 that we're talking about here I was $1.60 in 2019-20 $1.63 in 2021 so your 18% is off of a figure that was artificially suppressed because of federal money and I think that's an important point for people to understand yes 18% is pretty big but it's lower than a number of years as far as the tax rate that this budget would bring and I think that's a pretty critical point to hopefully get out there to the public I have $1.34 $1.29, $1.32 and then prior to that $1.63, $1.60 that is the tax rate that we've historically had in South Burlington for years, a number of years again I think that's an important point to get out there to the public that this is going back to a kind of pre-Covid pre all that additional funding that we had so that 18% scary but the bottom line is it's still actually less than for a number of years that's one point the other point I just wanted to make is I it's a question and that is I'm curious how much the concept is that we have homestead taxes and then we have the non homestead residential I mean not residential non residential taxes except I love the idea about looking at the rentals I think we need to look at that but the concept is that the businesses and the money generated from businesses that goes to the pot or have been counseled over the last 10 years to look at the giver or taker is you really have to look at the homestead property tax and my question is how much money are we sending for just the homestead property tax how much are we getting from the other component and I'd say that we're not paying for our whole school through our homestead tax for our budget and that's maybe that's the way it shouldn't be but that's the way that it's been understood for years as far as that's concerned I think that's all I have at this point but thank you for the presentation it's very helpful thank you Marks any other questions or comments I can answer and then know you want to come up know about but why don't you answer the question if you have data it's an earlier question about what was our bond balances earlier before last year's 14.55 million dollar bond our balance and this is from 2005, 2016, 2018, 2022 four different general obligation bond issues the balance was 5.2 million so it was low thank you I would like to bring out the point about education spending for people I know that the United States as a whole in the United States it's very high but we've had a race to the bottom relative to the rest of the world as a percent of GDP we're not even in the top 50 and I think that I'm proud to serve for Martin have such high education standards nationally I agree with what Martin said about historical averages for our taxes and we're running into this part of the state, not just in our education spending, healthcare costs the opera money is gone and the budgets are getting tight and we're getting back into a new normal and it is painful to see numbers like this but again, relative to last year and the year before I would like to go back to all the difficult times I've heard about in the legislature when there isn't a lot of money, you have to make cuts when there is more, you spend more and so we're all feeling it in every committee and I just wanted to give voice to the fact that just because other states in the United States spend so much less that's not necessarily something to try to achieve thank you any other comments or questions I'd just like to make one comment if we're thinking about Alex's point earlier about real estate inflation and the representative LaLonde's historical context about the 1.6 tax rate, I think the issue that I see it is that 1.6 tax rate when your home was assessed at 300,000 is a lot less money than the 1.6 tax rate that you're paying when your house is now assessed at 500,000 and if your wage hasn't changed that much and your home is just assessed at a different value that's where the affordability issue comes into play for me and I want to really encourage everyone at the table here and with our legislators looking at this from the statewide level we've already tied our housing crisis in the state with our education and so if they're going to be tied through the CLA through affordability then I think there needs to be some sort of acknowledgement of that and think of solutions that work if we're investing in housing in South Burlington and in the state then I think that it should be tied to investments in education and you know we are my understanding of how the CLA works it's really not even factoring in or incentivizing new development and is there a way that we could find a calculation where cities and towns are incentivized through getting more education spending when they have new housing developments and that would sort of reward South Burlington for doing the right thing by developing and investing in our community and housing which we all need more of and it would help our schools manage the impact of having more students come in but because of this very complex bumps and seeds as Tim so I'll go into the skies for us we don't really actually the development actually just feels like more students that we have to educate with the same amount of money rather than feeling like we are able to grow at the same pace as the city's housing just acknowledging that type okay thank you alright so we'll move on now to item 5 which is the presentation of the city budget and our bond vote and some possible ballot items did you want a little break at all? pardon me? did you want a break? I don't need a break but just asking if you thought maybe we do does anyone need a break it's only 8.30 it's up to you pardon me? no just asking oh okay why don't we finish our budget presentation then we can take another little break and then get into the rest of the conversation the rest? well I mean we've gotten into part of 6 but there may be some more okay I wouldn't want to cut it off with what we have already heard okay so Jesse wanted to sorry do the budget good idea Tim so thank you this is one of those nights that I am so thankful that municipal finance and summer guard is much simpler than education finance so hopefully I will present this pretty quickly so with me tonight my name is Jesse Baker I am your city manager I have the privilege of presenting the city's FY 25 budget and ballot items but it is the culmination of a huge amount of work from our city's leadership team Tom DePietro Public Works director Martha Machara our finance director Steven Locker deputy city manager and a lot of other folks so I am going to run through the budget portion Tom is going to run through the bond item portion and we will wrap it up so our FY 25 citywide budget as approved by the city council is almost $65 million that is broken up across a number of different funds primarily tonight we will be talking about the general fund which is the fund that the property taxes primarily fund our utilities and our special funds special funds include primarily our tax increment financing fund our energy fund impact fees and about 25 other small funds in the FY 25 proposed city budget we are achieving three primary things we are continuing our commitment to our current level of service delivery to do that we are making strategic investments in the second year of funding for our housing trust fund we are adding a high position we have about 20 miles of roads in the last decade and we need an additional position to maintain them this budget does increase funding for sidewalk maintenance as part time library position and increases funding to our housing trust fund additionally this budget makes a significant additional investment in school safety as the superintendent mentioned as well on her side of the equation so with this budget we are adding we are reinstating our south brolington police department youth sergeant position right now officer bree is the only police officer dedicated to school safety across our public and private schools so we are reinstating that sergeant position the council has included funding for 50% of the crossing guards required citywide as well as $100,000 in our capital improvement plan to fund anticipated improvements on dorset street at the middle school and high school campus and we are also taking our first financial steps to implement the adopted climate action plan so we are including staffing in the general fund budget for climates one climate staff person as well as consulting funds we are funding the increase in green mountain transit so we will double down on public transportation in our community and then the council made the decision to allocate $417,000 of one time ARPA money to do the FY25 required capital projects associated with the implementation of the climate action plan so this was a decision that the council made in order to use those one time monies to buy down the property tax impact this year for the community so in addition to those investments we also as the superintendent and her team made a series of assumptions to build this budget so we are assuming some increases in our total grand list and our TIF grand list we are assuming increase in our local options taxes those have performed very well coming out of COVID this does include all of our contractual increases for staff as well as for healthcare it includes the new child care contribution payroll tax that is going into effect on July 1 that is a $48,000 impact for our taxpayers and then we are seeing similar increases in health insurance and property and cash insurance on the city side so all of that in a very simple equation three factors that is it leads us to a 5.8% increase in the tax rate the estimated tax rate or almost three pennies so the impact of that for the average condo owner for the year will be an increase in $85 in their property tax bill and about $125 for the average homeowner I do want to call out that while our expenditure budget is increasing 13% our non property tax revenue budget is increasing 21% so we have the ability to leverage funds into the general fund that are not property taxes and we are really trying to maximize the potential of that to decrease the impact on the property tax payers as I said the general fund is only one portion of our total city budget we also have our utilities budget so I while those rates are approved by the council want to always call attention to those those rates are also going up primarily associated with salary and benefit impacts as well as needed capital expenditures that we have been planning for for several years so the total impact to the average homeowner is $64.29 of those increases across those utilities that's per year right per year for the year yep we want to provide you again back to the general fund a quick summary of where those dollars are going so 22% funds police 19% funds fire and EMS 19% of those general fund dollars fund public works that's a little undercut underestimating the total cost to provide infrastructure work because many of the utility all the utility funds also fund public works as well and then you see how the funding spreads out across the rest of the departments and that's when the funding wins out with 0% of the budget get what you pay for what you propose a stipend increase for next year so that is my speed through the FY 25 budget before we get to bond vote items I would be happy to answer any questions are there any other questions I would like to explain more about what the role of the reinstated youth services police officer will be doing and whether or not this is aligned with the district and cities and racism and equity planning so this is reinstating a previously in the budget youth services sergeant position so it's a leadership position within the school safety obviously had somebody retire out of and we are looking to provide a promotion opportunity and more leadership for school safety I believe officer B is involved in the anti-racism work so I believe that this person would be welcome into that conversation as well any other questions so we have two other exciting potential well one definite bond vote on the ballot on how many day potential ballot items I will turn over to Tom to walk us through the bond vote good evening everybody Tom DiPetro director of public works just a couple of slides here on the ballot item related to the water tank expansion this is the tank folks are familiar with on dorset street near the golf course and so what the plan is is to build a second tower of the same construction in size as the existing tower if you go to the next slide very quick system overview so South Burlington gets our water from Lake Champlain specifically Shelburne bay the Champlain water district draws water out of the bay treats it pumps it up to storage facilities in South Burlington and around Chittenden county and we use our own the distribution network the pipe distribution network the city owns to bring to everybody's house and business in the city just a couple of very big picture benefits of an additional water tower we'll talk about the need in the next slide so having this additional water tower will make sure we have enough water for everybody in the city for the next 50 plus years it'll be a size to accommodate growth what we need we think we need going forward it'll allow us to meet some regulatory requirements when you reach a certain point of usage in your tower 90% you are required to start looking at options to construct a new tower and provide more water and then it provides more water storage in the events of an emergency so we talked about this at a previous meeting we had some low pressures in the city having additional tower could have helped a little bit with that it would have extended the period of time before those pressures dropped lower as folks saw on the night of Christmas on December 25th this allows us a little more ability to maintain tanks so if we have two tanks next to each other we are able to redo coatings or do maintenance inside one tank we are able to fully offline and still use the other tank and just wanted to make a note because it's commonly asked this will not increase the pressure of the system it's just going to provide more of the storage capacity for around the city and so this slide really tells the story of why now is the time we need to build the additional water tank so the city has broken up into two service areas the high service and the main service the main service is doing well the land point is about 68% of that tank is utilized right now this the last time we added it all up was using about 98% of the water in the tank so you can see the large piece of the pie there is sort of the average daily demand that's the water that South Berlin can use in the high service area every day the allocated capacity so those are allocations for projects that have gone through the permitting process that water should have been set aside for their use we have some water set aside the little gray slice there is the excess water we have available and then some fire flow requirement again by state regulation for firefighting purposes what the project would be is again it's just a second tank on the same piece of property you can see it's kind of set back Dorset Street would be to the right of this image the existing tank is the circle the circle with the diagonal lines there that is the new tank it's connected into the piping system it's already on the property it's quite affordable in that way we don't have to run a lot of new pipe to connect this new tank to the system it's same height, same diameter same capacity, same construction welded steel tank is what's there now so it will look very similar talk a little bit about project costs so total project cost you can see the breakdown there is about $5.75 million we have been awarded half a million dollars already through the community recovery and revitalization of the RRP and we are looking into applying for an additional grant right now actually on northern borders regional commission grant and those are up to a million dollars so those deadlines are coming up and we're starting to work on those right now and if you go to the next slide Jesse this is the estimated impact on rates the last week there as I've just assumed kind of the worst case scenario here as far as funding goes and project costs this is the most expensive no grant funding so assuming this the loan term we've been looking at recently is 30 year term at about 4.4% that means our annual payment would be around $350,000 so that would mean our rates would increase by $4.82 per 1,000 cubic foot of water and so that would be about an annual increase of $38.66 for the average residential user which we define we say average residential use that's kind of on the higher because we've talked before about how a lot of our folks use the minimum water billing system but it would be worst case scenario here would be a $40 roughly $38.66 annual increase comparison of rates around the region so I just like to put this up there as well as we looked at rates this is from fiscal year 23 House South Berlin campaign compares there on the left to some other neighboring communities we are the lowest in the region and perhaps in the state for our water rates and a note about the project schedule so again this is the most aggressive schedule this is what I'm working on right now we are currently in the design phase working to get permits in place with a positive bond vote that would allow us to finalize everything and advertise for bids so we could begin construction potentially as early as the fall of this year for financing purposes and related to when loan payments are due we might decide to push that forward in 2025 also depending on some grants that might become available that can impact the project schedule quick question will you have to do any blasting for the base of the second take I don't believe so no oh good the chipping would be okay the chipping or blasting is a higher up to him that's a joke and I think this is my last slide this is just the example ballot language that South Berlin voters will see I think it's pretty straightforward it asks if we're going to support the installation of a 2.1 million gallon water storage tank it gives the project cost and authorizes the city to take out bonds for the project any questions just a couple of really short questions I just want to say first of all as a resident here for 25 years I appreciate the water we have I grew up where we had well water and I got to tell you turning the tap on here is a joy just logistically I'm just curious I never realized this do we purchase the water and then we just store it here we don't have our own treatment facility is that correct is that that's correct we purchase both water from the Champlain water district they do all the treatment and they pump it up to our storage facilities okay thank you any other questions I can't see online if there's any okay yes thank you for doing the graphic showing where all of the funds go I'm curious who's included in the administration is it all the department heads or is it the city manager's office so the administration go back to this so people know administration is city manager's office legal HR finance IT planning and zoning tax collection and assessing city clerk so it's everything outside of the major public safety public works and community services departments okay thank you it's definitely not just me no I didn't think so okay sorry Helen if I thank you Tom I do just want to because this is if folks are watching in the future there's also a potential charter change ballot item the council is going through that process now as folks heard at the beginning of this meeting to consider the expansion of the charter committee to include two additional for total of seven the next public hearing on that is January 29th that's 6 30 that evening the council will decide whether to put this on the ballot just as a reminder to the community that if the council decides to put it on the ballot the end the voters approve it it will go to the legislature the legislature will then need to consider it and approve it if they approve it it will go to the governor and so it would likely not be in effect until 2025 if taken up this session or 2026 if taken up next session this is the proposed ballot language as required by stat statute it is quite complex and is required to be included just want to highlight that again as Violet said we have several fun upcoming events where folks can learn more about our budget and ballot items all of this information additionally is on our city website either at this link or if you go to the finance department page it's linked there those links are also in your council agenda your steering committee agenda tonight as well as the link directly to the superintendent's landing page for all of her budget information as well if we didn't make a good case and sales job for some additional city school board members tonight I don't know how else we could so I hope if there's anyone listening if they have some good ideas they'll think about if the charter change happens that will happen before this whole issue is resolved probably so we'll be looking for some new good people with ideas to join the crew we have is there more discussion item six is you know talking about other we identified some ideas I guess for the legislature in terms of how to how you might approach a resolution or addressing some of these consequences of the language in the various bills are there any other thoughts that people would like to share no we sort of had that yes Larry thanks Ellen so I was interested in in the headline in from from our public today not intended as free money lawmakers scold schools over spending and just get your reaction from if you had a chance to see that that letter from our take a five minute break before we get into discussion pardon me can we take it just like a two minute break before we get into sure thank you so we're going to have more of a conversation why don't we have just a five minute break because then we'll also come back to the safe routes to school task force thank you we're having tonight about the impact locally versus statewide education equity and I just wanted to you know get your response to this if you have a moment to do that thank you sure thank you so much I appreciate the question I I might have a response that potentially could be a little bit of a let down it's like not a juicy response it's not one of anger I I read this and I think we are all in this budget scenario together and I truly think that those who worked really hard to craft Act 127 and I know it was an incredibly difficult task to take on the funding formula is extraordinarily complicated there's a lot of levers when you press one factor down something else bubbles up and rises and it's this constant balancing act and I think that this letter says to me which a legislator that I was on the superintendent's call with today said is that they just didn't anticipate some of these impacts and so when to me from this letter the biggest takeaway is we've already seen a yield reduction and when business officials and superintendents received the act 127 information this fall we all got together and we tried to determine what the impacts would be to our district of course we couldn't just plug in a number because we're looking at equalized pupils being a factor that is more in the Ed funding budget and of course it's tied to yield and CLA right so ultimately we all had an idea of where we would land based on the new long-term weighted average daily membership rather than the equalized pupil we determined we would be some of the givers in that ultimately we thought hey it's a good thing we believe in increasing equity statewide right what we all talked about at that time this this group of mostly Chittenden counties who were going to be negatively impacted to varying extent by this legislation thought okay we're all gonna come in at 9.9% to avoid this exceeding this 10% threshold for the net Ed spending per pupil and we said the resulting impact will be that the yield will be bankrupted and we just kept repeating that to ourselves and we talked about it that was not something that the legislators who we've communicated with and again well intentioned people trying to improve the Ed funding formula they didn't anticipate that and that was the message that we've received this week in varying degrees of communication this letter I think was saying hey folks you're gonna bankrupt the yield if you continue this trend the problem is with timing I mean most of the districts in Chittenden county who will be those who are taking advantage of getting close to the 10% threshold some of whom will be over it even if they do nothing or make reductions right it's the timing of the letter that Larry's referring to is so late that many many boards have either finalized or will be finalizing this week budgets and so I don't know that the there's not really time for actionable space and I don't know of any boards in Chittenden county who are making modifications off the back of receiving this Laura went to a VSBA meeting today VSBA has been the Vermont school board association has been really vocal and working with VSA all the V's the Vermont superintendents association and the Vermont business officials so I'll pass it to Laura because I want to hear this update because I was at this meeting today so we had an emergency meeting today from 5-6pm can you move a mic sort of close to your mouth thank you is that better VSBA meeting from 5-6pm today and so it was the school board members in Chittenden county and yeah school budgets have already been done I think school boards would like to be allowed to remediate rather than just being penalized because some school boards are going to go over I do think there was a lack of accurate modeling if there had been accurate modeling we probably wouldn't be where we are right now yes the Y of Act 127 is really important and I don't think it was thought all the way through so there is that the other thing is I think that for legislators that need to hear we can't keep blaming schools it's not our fault this is really the real estate and what did you call it Alice estate inflation it's the real estate inflation aka CLA I just think about someone like my mom watching this she would have stopped watching a long time ago just bottom line me the real estate inflation that has got to be under control that is huge and I know Andrew is talking about why Vermont education is so high well we have universal free meals a lot of states do not we have PCB mediation what is the word thank you remediation a lot of states do not and we have no school construction funds so we are really up against it and that's why we made the decision to vote for the budget that we voted for but I really do want to impress all those board members and they are asking the SBA to advocate pretty strongly to get the CLA under control get the real estate inflation under control because schools just can't that's just not fair to blame the school districts around and when I think that Violet and Tim have demonstrated unbelievably well this is just even to present the budget takes like three times what the city council has to do and I'm not saying that you're not working hard I know you are but this our presentation requires a lot more time just to explain it all so that's what I would say have any of the school boards thought about not having to present their budget to the legislature is done so you actually know the numbers ahead of time you spent months as everyone else did putting a budget together and then at the 11th hour or the beginning of January it's like oh by the way we're changing this and you're almost back to square one we used to vote on budgets I think in May May 25th or something this was quite a while ago but makes sense it was supposed to be after the legislature had completed their work so you knew what the numbers were it makes sense that we would have our per pupil counts the tax commissioners letters of the yield and the CLA before we started developing a budget because we went through all this intentional work of like reviewing student assessment data both qualitative and quantitative to develop a budget that was responsive of the needs we're seeing with our students we was tied to our continuous improvement plan so it was based in data we connected funding to it we wrote grants associated with it it was this really meaningful process and then overnight it was undone so yeah I mean that is definitely something that we would love to do obviously there would need to be you know statute changes with that I had Tim Warren wants to jump in here just going back to the conversation he's a he's you know new to our group and so I told him he's politely pressing the button I'm going to give him the floor here am I there oh wow I said earlier I said next time I have to wear a colored shirt because I'm just going to be a floating head in the recording you know I just want to follow up on something Violet said and you know when we considered adding that 1.9 million in I just want to say that I think the administration did a very good job of presenting us with a with a very you know good proposal and I think originally when you first started presenting you were up close to 70 million and that kind of kept coming down and coming down so we spent a number of meetings and weeks looking at this and analyzing and they kept coming back with more and more you know better figures and stuff so we did get it going and I think if you look at the actual budget increase it was around six and a half seven percent by the time we were done if I'm not I'd have to go back and look at the numbers but to me that was well within what the spirit of act 127 was trying to achieve was was trying to control the budget and I think there was a lot of effort done there and we did that but at the last minute you realize okay you know we are struggling in some of this other stuff and you know I said this in the school board meeting I think we would have been remiss had we not tried to obtain that extra money for the district so it is an issue of what's good for the locality may not be good for the state and vice versa but at the moment if we could bring in an extra two million for the capital reserve at no extra cost essentially to the taxpayer that was sort of and I felt we had met what act 127 was trying to have us achieve but again I think it's you know at the state level there does have to be something done so I do agree I mean I agree and your presentation was great and all those numbers are mind-boggling for sure how do you how do we how do we present this to the public and it just reminds me I mean so a set rate is 18 percent increase whether it's this number or this number how could we justify not going for this number to the to the vote so I really appreciate this line of questioning there I think it's really thoughtful and it's something I've spent a great deal of time contemplating myself so I'm going to answer this and link it to your initial question this letter I think is a direct result of I think the pretty significant amount of communication has done regarding our concerns and I think every person at this table is to thank for that I mean I think a lot of districts have been contending how to deal with this and you know our approach was to take stock and to share figures early and often and I think we have done that really effectively as a team I heard from folks here tonight our concerns are being heard and evaluated and so I think this response is a result of some of the communication that you know they're receiving communication and I think it's saying hey you're asking for help and we know you packed 1.9 million in that budget again not changing the tax rate so I think it is in the spirit of communicating as well so to this piece about how are we going to communicate it to the voters I mean I was making notes to my Tim and I have given this I don't know 40 times and I watched everyone's reactions and basically I was making notes and thinking about what to cut out so for me I think the staggering factors here are ultimately the tax rate is the increased homestead tax rate of 18.26 and we can slash 8 million and that won't move and the best case scenario the community will get is 16 and a half and that is only $9 more per month for the average home and we're not going to have athletics or arts or languages or things like that and I think to me that's the one the most simplified way of sharing just the major concern I think there probably is a misconception in the community created by the fact that historically every single year there's ever been a budget voted down the administration has had the ability to reduce the tax rate associated that's not the case here and so we have to undo however many years of voting practices to help the community understand you can vote this down and vote it down and vote it down and worst case scenario by statute if we roll over our current budget you will only save that whether you own a condo or a home or the cost of your home it's going to be around $10 per month on the increase and that isn't saying that this isn't a significant increase I want to just give that ample time and attention this is a significant burden it's part of what I would categorize as an affordability problem that goes across the board it's healthcare it's cost of education I think that it's going to be a significant impact on the community I think that's a significant impact on the community and I don't know how to fix that I do know that the CLA has been a factor that's negatively impacted about 90% of the budgets in our state and so I would say regardless of where folks fell within the 127 continuum of being greatly benefited from the impacts of CLA I understand the ed funding formulas levers so I don't know what the answer is I think for me it is absolutely looking at the CLA I also know there's discussion today the BSBA that's what everybody asked him today is to get this messaging out precisely what you're saying I've heard discussion recently about the CLA and Larry you mentioned this to me earlier too that the grand list and using that rather than the CLA so those documented home costs of what they were appraised at a moment in time again most districts most cities are not being impacted by the CLA like we are and they don't have the development we do we're also the only district in the state that is extremely unique we're also I would argue a huge economic engine somebody used that term when we were here and it's so true so I think the Champlain Valley we do have the ability to significantly impact the yield and given how we've all approached this Act 127 CLA budget season and thinking about protecting our communities with bond money we all have significant facilities needs and rather than asking the community for two million dollars later the board made the decision to ask for it now I will add I heard discussion today with our legislative zoom and superintendents Jeff Francis of the Vermont superintendents association discussion with sports gambling monies the potential of allocating some of those toward the fund right so there's there's lots of levers and taxes that can be applied and so for me you know I think about actionable space and maybe I'm not the best person to be deciding whether revenues from sports betting go to schools but I am the right person to say here's the impact and all factors remaining equal the same budget yielded a 7% increase one year and the next what would have been a 38% so that says there is there is an ed funding problem and that isn't adding a single soul to our staff right well I think the challenge or the question is I mean the more times I hear this the more data points I absorb and understand acronyms as well but it's really an important conversation with the public and I'm sure you're you know working with PTO's and I mean I know you're giving a budget to the SBBA I assume you're doing the same thing so I think it's as many times and as many groups as you can get to listen is really helpful it can't be quite as long a conversation so I think maybe using some other terms would be helpful yeah could make it understandable to more people because it's very scary to me that people will just say you know heck no I am not I cannot vote for that budget and then where will we be I mean not in a very good place I mean even if we had to roll back to the current budget I mean it just is is crazy so I don't know how you get the craziness out to the public but we need to and you know really think about you know there's public TV CCTV and I don't know how many people watch that but a lot of people do but it's a numerous conversations I think in terms of we did have the one presentation at our council meeting so that's I don't know how many people listened in but that is some and you keep doing that tonight is another we can do it again I guess on the 30th but we got to keep plugging along with sharing the information and you know I think appealing to the legislature for more of a conversation about how do you do this I mean I think just funding the ed fund to a greater degree sort of helps in the short term but I don't think that's possible year after year to increase it to the extent that the inflation on our housing is happening so there needs to be some other other fixes I don't know what does the governor say I don't I don't think that we we should listen tomorrow well that's right is budget is tomorrow the budget is addressed so I don't think that Phil we talked about that tonight too Phil Scott is not a friend of public education so I think like we have I'll just sorry I'm just blunt I'm a teacher so I am very blunt anyway I think we just need to keep talking toward our legislators and make sure they hear us and that they understand yes the ed fund is in danger it's absolutely true there needs to be another revenue stream and that is something that we can't fix on the school board that has to come from the legislature I think another strong ally is that we should be the business community because they need educated people to work in their businesses or to get people to want to move here to work in their businesses and to have a labor force available whose kids are in school right like we employ so many people in the community yeah we have quite a lot of upcoming presentations will be reaching TTOs all the staffs South Burlington Business Association we will be on public TV I wrote a I emailed on Friday this is like I'm going to admit I you know love Google so I Googled you know top 50 employers in South Burlington I sent them all a letter and just sharing some of the information that we've discussed tonight so that's a strategy that you know is new so we're trying to really communicate some of the issues here certainly when we talk to you know give our community presentations we won't be sharing the same deck that we shared this evening and absolutely it needs to be acronym free and it needs to really just hit the highlights of you know to maintain programming here's the cost and here is what is at stake for you know not very much money difference so I think those are the main points that we'll be sharing appreciate that feedback and again I appreciate this team's support and you know just the ability to have this conversation with what I think is a lot of people in the room who are allies and interested in solving the problem so it's nice to feel like we're not going it alone it gives me the energy to wake up every day and say alright we'll keep communicating and moving forward again I do believe that we can make some change here and I'm also I am not willing to throw in the dowel in the community understanding the situation passing the budget so do you think it would be helpful you know if worse comes to worse let's just say people don't get the word and they you know cut the budget before that happens to actually be able to say we'll hear areas that we might have to look at and you put this is the you know athletic budget this is the art music and whatever budget this this is the transportation budget I mean you mentioned maybe we don't bus kids anymore whatever and sort of make it pretty graphic that it isn't or this is how many teachers we would need to and the class sizes would be yes so it's a little more I mean I think you can get it too scary so that's people will understand that perhaps but it might be helpful for some to understand really what we're talking about to get it down to saving two percent of the impact this is what you would cut I think I want to make just two quick points I think we've done that exercise and you continue to do that exercise with the illustration and the issue here is that the sorry my brain fog because the majority of our budget is made up in people we are in the business of education and so we have a lot of educators and you know that the health insurance is locked in at the state level more or less the biggest levers that you have are reducing staff which does increase staff sizes which we've talked about but I wanted to bring up that when we went through the negotiations for our teachers and support staff last year we were in really an unprecedented inflation time you know we're talking inflation at nine percent and it's typically at three percent we're now at the other end of that but where the collective bargaining agreements that we had for the teachers and support staff in South Wellington were not unique they were pretty on par with the rest of the state and the affordability and the inflation that we're talking about our schools are not immune from so you know of course our teachers were asking for a raise because their mortgage their rent is going up their grocery bills are going up the job is becoming more difficult but also a lot of this budget reflects our own purchases and the gas in our buses going up so Larry when you flag the Vermont Public Headline about spending and free money to me the spending that word is the issue because it really feels like we are just trying to keep up like everyone else not doing anything above and beyond the rest of the state and just finally when we had our legislators visited in the fall we were talking about school construction and potentially having fun for school construction and that money would have to go from somewhere in light of this conversation to me it seems like using the education fund is our only mechanism at this moment to start to address deferred maintenance and keep up with the enrollment challenges in our buildings and the changes of our schools in our buildings so just wanted to make those two points that aren't so much reckless spending as they are trying to keep up with inflation and address our facilities needs without holding our breath on the state school construction fund. Just a follow-up point to what Kate was talking about one of the pressures on our budget is our collective bargaining agreement that we reached and that is a lever that on the school board since we negotiate those contracts we do have some control over but in the support staff negotiation for just for example we did go to mediation and it was the opinion of our legal council our mediator and just generally that even if we went to arbitration over the contract it would be in favor of the support staff so we negotiated a fair agreement and I don't think that we could have spent time and money going to arbitration and it still probably would have been the same result so that I think we did a nice job with those contracts and agreements. Yes. You're talking about the support staff contract got me thinking about our bus drivers and how we cannot hire enough of them and that is with the newly negotiated contracts so we're still under pressure to increase wages which will increase the budget and that's tough and we're keeping within what we've negotiated and what our budget is for them but it's still for some parts of our labor force it's not enough. I'm going to add that if anyone has a CDL and is listening we are absolutely extremely I'm not as as as truthful Kate I remember the way you laid this out when we the board approved the support staff union contract I think you could make a good argument that we are the best paying district for school bus drivers because of the way we categorize them so no joke this is not just an advertisement I mean we are extremely attractive employer for anyone with a CDL called Tim Jarvis Any other thoughts or comments? I just want to make one final comment because I think I hear the term free money thrown around and that is shown up in the paper and I just want the public to understand that because of the mechanics of Act 127 as a school district we're caught between a rock and a hard place it looks like we can ask for a lot more money and get that for free without raising the taxes right but I think the flip side of that and what you're hearing is that we can't cut the budget and reduce our taxes either so we're sort of caught because if we try to reduce the budget that has no impact on the tax rate until we get to such a low point just to reduce to the tax by one penny would be millions of dollars of cuts so we're sort of it's this no win situation for a district right so I just want everybody to be aware of that yeah sounds like maybe hey we're going for that extra 1.9 million but there's no benefit to us to try and carve out a lot from the budget because we just end up carving and paying as much in right last comment Andrew yeah thanks I just so Kate more I'm a product of the public school system and there's nothing more important than a good education but there is an elephant in the room here that over the next few years we all need to figure out and talk about why we spent so much money right we're spending $28 thousand dollars per student in the U.S. on average is 14,000 in our peer developed countries around the world is 10,000 so we spend almost three times more than our peer developed countries to educate each student it's something we need to think about right what are we doing everything efficiently and and why why is it costing us so much more because ultimately that was affecting the conversation this year right indirectly that's why right because we just spend so much money to educate our students and why are we doing that why is that the case already well let's move on then to other business the safe routes to school task force so I wanted to bring this conversation back up since our last hearing committee meeting on November 2nd where school board and city council agreed to establish a safe routes to schools task force and that is facilitated and coordinated through our excellent resources at local motion and we've met a couple of times so I thought it would be good for us to have that revitalize that conversation here and then talk specifically to make sure that we're all on the same page about the vision and the sort of mission statement for this task force and then also I think having some steering committee members or appointed members where we have regular attendance and some agreement about governments so Jesse and Andrew were there at the last meeting we had a week or two ago and so you can fill in here wherever you'd like but we have sort of a compromise proposal of a steering committee with three members from the city and three members from the district and just a very brief mission statement that I could share if you'd like so I probably can't take action on it but share it please and we could have it as an agenda item if we need to vote on it or maybe we just say that's that's okay I mean I don't know how formal it needs to be I'm not certain if you're asking for a more solid support or recognition of this or you just want to share so if you want to share now would be a good time we just can't vote on it so the question of governance was raised at our last meeting because you know I think that we all want to address our concerns around traffic safety I'm sorry traffic safety and school safety in a flexible way to be able to respond sort of ad hoc but also stay the decisions in the conversations that we have recommendations we want to have on the record so that they can be transparent with the public and referred back to at a later date the same way we'd have any other public record so I think there's a tension about how formal to make this task force and we could have that conversation now and make it more or less elaborate and formal as we would like it we are in charge of the make up of the task force the city is certainly much more well versed than I am or the school board in having committees and getting feedback that we don't currently have any active committees and so you have a process and staff that I think are more familiar with this than I am so I'm just trying to move this conversation along my goal here is to have an effective efficient task force that brings some recommendations to these bodies that are so we can all be on the same page and have some clear recommendations around school safety so do you have a mission statement as well that the group has come up with so will you mention it yes draft language that I would propose for us to adopt the city council and school board is a mission statement that reads the south Wellington safe routes to schools task force aims to make it safer for students to walk and bike to school and encourage more walking and biking where safety is not a barrier and the steering committee as I was mentioning earlier there are three seats from the city an