at 7 p.m. on Monday November been together in a long time so this first item is the agenda review are there any additions deletions or changes in order of agenda items okay seeing or hearing none we'll move on to the next item item four approve the minutes from July 2020 um you skipped item three really pardon me you skipped item three oh i'm sorry i'm i always do that don't i comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda are there any okay but i still need to ask so thank you tom moving on then approval of the minutes from July 20th is there a motion to approve i'll move okay is there a second second all right is there any discussion okay all in favor um signify with a thumbs up i guess we don't call a roll okay and i and elizabeth you're voting yes as well i am okay so the minutes have been approved unanimously um so item five then is closing out f y 2020 and we're going to get the financial updates um from both the and have a council and board discussion regarding f y 22 budget priorities i don't know who wants to go first um it's either tom or david so so pardon me amity denton's going momentarily so city can go i'll let her know we're on okay great so tom hover okay thanks helen good to see everyone uh i shared with the council just a while back we kind of consider ourselves fortunate to finished in the black for f y 20 our records show us with not a huge balance but about 33 000 to the good the auditors are currently working on our audit for f y 20 and with that still going on we kind of feel like we're we're in three different fiscal years right now which i'm sure your finance team feels the same way um but we'll begin with uh with f y 20 and uh take a little bit more of a look at that even the challenges of the pandemic that we had several major factors for us really contributed to the budget coming in with imbalance and like i said even though small we're grateful to have finished the year with a balanced budget and the first thing that we did as soon as we uh found ourselves uh really understanding what was going on about mid-march we put a budget freeze into effect and that lasted throughout the rest of that fiscal year in fact it's still still in effect that was the first thing that we did the second thing that really worked to our advantage is that going into the final quarter of uh f y 20 our local options taxes for three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars at the end of three quarters ahead of where they were the previous year and ahead of what our projection was for the current fiscal year we knew that the fourth quarter was going to be difficult and it was it really presented a shortfall for us but there was enough with the extra money in the first three quarters to give us just a slight positive in our local options tax collections for f y 20 so that that was a huge piece for us in fiscal year 20 the local options taxes were projected at 3.7 million dollars we came in just just ahead of that and the third thing that we did that was a major factor uh for us in balancing the budget was furloughing as many as 44 of our employees for much of that final quarter of the year uh these three factors alone uh really prevented what could have been somewhere between a half a million and a million dollar shortfall in our budget so again we're we're grateful um things things came together and and I think we're fortunate in terms of where we ended up fiscal year 20 uh in terms of the current fiscal year we have several mitigation factors that remain in place with a a number of unknowns still ahead of us we continue to have the budget freeze in effect only essential purpose is necessary hey do you guys want to play Minecraft I want to play Minecraft well did somebody have a question I think you're in the wrong no we mute the callers Kevin can you yeah I want to play Minecraft bro well I'm not your bro and we're not playing Minecraft we're having a meeting I think whoever the whoever's the host can just mute the individual or yeah I just want to play though any you got Minecraft no you don't so can anyone mute him yes whoever's the host whoever's the host can is that you Kevin well he's muted thank you okay um so for FY 21 we continue to have the budget freeze in effect there were several positions that were approved as part of the FY 21 budget that have been put on hold as well as filling any vacancies that arise during FY 21 unless they're deemed essential and then all of our capital improvement projects are also put on hold the council did approve funding for about half of our paving budget that was done on Dorset street dude I want to freaking play dude so I think there's a way you can eject him from the meeting and I think that would be appropriate but you're the chair Helen really well I mean I would love to eject him I would like him to hang up um you may not be able to hear you that's the problem he's talking to somebody else I don't know I think we've got Elizabeth on by phone and I think that's um Elizabeth okay I think I think he's gone and Amity's on by phone Elizabeth can you hear us still I can hear you yeah and Amity can you hear us yes I am now able to get on by a computer sorry okay thanks and I'll just let you know Tim put a note in it not everyone reached the chat box but he turns his picture off so he's uh he's able to stay with us and not yeah Amity has a similar saying her strength isn't great either so should be yes okay oh I'm sorry keep going Tom sure um so I was talking about the capital improvement projects also being on hold with with the exception of the council approving about half the paving budget which was for the work done on Dorset street this summer we're going to reevaluate our financial position in the spring hopefully allowing us to make some more of those capital improvement purchases and be able to do some of those other projects but we want to make sure that we're able to balance the budget before we go ahead with many of those we'll receive the next allotment for the state for the local auctions tax sometime within the week so we're anxious to see how that comes in and that alone determine a lot of what we may or may not be able to do within the next year then in terms of fiscal year 22 we've had some conversations with council about budget planning and prepared our department managers to identify the things that are essential for next year more a matter of what they must have rather than what they need to have and we expect decisions to be made both at the manager and the council level with that in mind the department managers currently finalizing the cip they continue to work on the fri 22 general fund budget the council will begin discussing both the cip and the general fund budgets at their meetings in december and these will continue after the first of the year and then tentatively at both the council and the school board agree the steering committee will meet on january 20th to share budgets that will be presented to the voters in march so helen that's kind of a synopsis from the city standpoint are there any particular questions that school board members might have at this point okay seeing none um david are you going to present or is yeah yeah helen yes helen and yes and we yeah i'm not sure the exact date that we are going to approve our budget but it's going to be mid to late january so having a steering committee meeting in january might not you know we might have not have a budget to give to the voters well i think you have to have a budget pretty soon close to the end of january in order to have it on the ballot absolutely in two months but if the if the steering committee meets in two months then we will not have a budget to discuss at that time helen do you mind if i say something i'm so sorry yeah we have our usuals our i don't have our entire schedule in front of us but typically we have our first meeting um in january is a regular school board meeting and we try to get pretty close to a final budget then and then we have a special meeting scheduled for the second week in january that's always just about the budget and that's when we usually try to approve the budget that's going to go on the ballot so i'll just the meeting on the 20th of january would be pretty typical meeting that we have with the city so usually we do sort of approve our budget in the second week of january around the 13th i think it is this year and then usually about a week later we have a meeting with the city where we sort of trade budget so this has been our past practice um from the last several years right thank you so does that answer your question or concern palace so yeah it looks like the 19th at the latest of january is when we would have a budget right it still might be hard yeah to achieve that yeah so david are you gonna yeah if cavin or um tom can you give me screen share option i don't want all the controls but just to screech bro i just want to play minecraft bro think he's number eight yeah i've numbered your mom did it pretty easy let me play so david you should have it david you thought you would even have it now now if david is the presenter is he also in charge of turning off the um minecraft act i'm doing that holland okay good thank you there must be one digit off from some exciting spot david you're muted if you're wanting to talk i'm not here yeah it got i got muted i know you're trying to work to get this let me play minecraft bro i just want to see you guys are black so can you guys see my screen yes we can yeah okay i know we still got conversations in the background going on so i'm gonna let amity if amity's on wanted to give you a little bit of a kind of an unaudited fy 20 financial position as we said we would one of the things is again noted is that during the covid experience obviously we were education was marked essential and any furloughing or anything like that was not an option and so we kept had to keep people on march to june primarily to serve the students in in the hybrid function um or fully remote i should say um including uh nutritional services to all of our all of our families so we obviously have endured some covid expenses on the other end and i'm going to let amity just talk through kind of where we are today um with uh again our unaudited um financial position is black so this picture that you're looking at currently shows both our general fund and special revenue funds combined um our general fund in fy the end of or the beginning of the 2020 fiscal year or the end of fy 19 did end with a deficit but when you at when you combine the two funds together there was a small positive fund balance of 102456 and we're showing this today combined because of the covid expenditures things would look really askewed if we were reporting um as one fund the general fund and then our special revenues because the expenditures for our covid expenses have been generally from the general fund however the revenue has to come into the special revenue fund so there's some audit activity that will need to take place so in order to keep this as clear as possible i combine the two funds rather than showing them separately but this would be our total um financial picture irregardless if i had it separated or together so what this picture shows is that between the two funds we started our fiscal year of 2020 with 102 positive fund balance general fund was in a deficit the um special revenue fund was in a positive and it nets out to be a positive then we had a budget uh for new act uh new revenues which um when i say new revenues that's any new revenue that we had that we were bringing in in fiscal year 20 budgeted um and then our expenditures budgeted at the 51.746533 those were our f y 20 budget expenditures and the difference showing of a hundred and sixty nine thousand rb passports will rise again rb passports will rise again rb passports will rise again sorry that's very distracting the 169 thousand was a carryover amount that was revenue brought in from fiscal year 2018 to use in fiscal year 2020 so that's why we don't count that as a new revenue because it was already revenue that we had already received in year 18 so our actual column is down in the center our revenues came in at 52.4 million which was above our budget by 835 000 that does include a booked revenue for covid funds that we still haven't actually received but are anticipating receiving for our f y 20 expenditures and then our f y 20 expenditures of 51.8 million are over budget by the 117 thousand and that's strictly due to covid related expenditures so we actually did fairly well because we had frozen our budget prior to the covid situation taking place um so our ending fund balance for fiscal year 20 unaudited 110 and never again get rid of 151 thousand media they are just proportionally recommended and we have to subtract what we had already budgeted as a carryover revenue from our fiscal year 18 and so currently our unaudited f y 22 available budget um fund balance would be about 482 thousand dollars that's what this picture is showing giving you an idea of where we believe we'll be at very close to after on audit thanks amity thank you um can i just ask or just make a comment um megan said a chat is it unacceptable that we lock the meeting to further participants and i think this um minecraft crowd is rather disruptive so i would be inclined to just lock it out and understanding that that may lock out some of the public but i think we need to be able to hear each other is that acceptable to other people well is that work for you again i'm seeing that okay so kevin can you just lock out everyone yeah sir generally doing my best okay but yeah i mean i think you can lock it as if we were having an executive no you can't i can't yeah no i have to do it when they come on all right okay i'm sorry keep going david yeah so this again the amity gave you an overview of where where we are again with our um our ending balance as we move down i'm going to just share with you a little bit about where we are with some of our budget priorities again some of you are quite familiar with our plans dispositions for lifelong learning right academic proficiency you know these these are the tenants and what the board expects for our children as they depart our program personal development some of these are right on the flying on the collars that keeps bumping into us um and then some priorities for this year you know as we look at a 2021 2022 focus we've got and i kind of i wanted to put this kind of in this visual form um i'm going to share this problem man i'm in the planet if you want community too but you know our main area obviously as these three tenants you know safe and healthy school social emotional and academic proficiency on those three blocks obviously as you know particularly with covid we needed to make sure kids felt safe parents and guardians felt safe for kids to come into school the environment needs to be safe in order for children and children to learn and staff to teach social emotional help is critically important too because if there's things in the way of learning then we won't get to the academic proficiency and i put this visual model obviously it's maslow's hierarchy of needs and you know it's the same thing you got to take care of those basic functions or um you know engaged activities so um again just some visuals here on what what we're going to be working on as we look at budget priorities um again pretty given we look at enrollments our current and projected student enrollments for fy 22 i have to say that this past year you know we expected a slightly larger uh number of students and that didn't happen um i'll take a look at that in just a second with you um but obviously that's an important driver in our district cost and expense the staffing needs are directly proportional then to the programs that are in need to support the students also based on our white tower white tower also based on what we're finding that we need to provide to the students item three is district staffing over the years again and this this particular period from march to june and and to now you know we have we definitely have seen some increases in work capacity as a result of covid we've hired on some temporary folks to help us through that with health screeners and substitutes etc but we've also over the years we're when we look at redundancy and succession which is a big big part of our work this year in this budget is to make sure we have the needed redundancy in critical areas um and um continue to work on succession planning what i mean by succession is that we have opportunities for people within the organization to move through the organization and take on different roles and responsibilities if they wish that's area three then area four is facility stewardship needs we've taken our longer range plan we've consolidated it down into a 10-year stewardship plan and we want to make sure that we're allocating funds to ensure the schools can function in fy 2022 we want to determine the most appropriate avenue to do that and certainly as many of you know we identified some very significant needs which led us to the capital proposed plan that did not pass and so now we need to be looking at what are we going to do for the foreseeable future again the foreseeable future most immediate is fy 2022 um and so that's that's that's where we are and the board and administration are working now on that we do have budget forums uh that are going to start we have one our first one would be tomorrow some of the same information will be shared with them giving them an overview of enrollment and staffing and also the reductions that were made in looking at outcomes and expectations the best that we can we certainly have had a disruptive period um as i think most everybody has in in certainly vermont in our country but how we continue to move forward to make sure the students are receiving what they need um and then let me just go to crash at this you guys actually suck at this you suck at operating so i just want to say kevin i don't know if you're looking at the chat but thus it looks like brian and pasted some instructions on how we might be able to lock the meeting i don't know if you've seen those yet no so this is our enrollment i don't go terribly into it but we have a couple different slides the school board has seen this but um as of october 29th what we have for enrollment easy probably to look at these these boxes on the corners of each other's schools so here's rick markot central school pre k-5 395 this conference will now be recorded um and then moving down gertrude chamberlin sorry for my slow move here uh pre k-5 287 k-5 261 and then um um i gotta get orchard sorry orchard um 419 k-5 396 self-promoting high school and you see where they are and then um the title is above them district is over here again uh pre k-5 k-12 tuition students vtvlc and compared to expected i'll just give you that one here again i can send these all to you as well um july 23rd what we expected and then what actually happened that rick markot so here um you can see what we expected was 398 the actuals at 373 we lost some students there part of our concern is is you know we not a concern but our inquiry is to know what happened um same thing with gertrude e or actually gertrude chamberlin um rick markot and orchard and that's the high school sorry for the jumpiness here it's not great puddle so every single school had fewer students than you had anticipated yeah not uh let's see and then the expected uh yes in the ends were 42 students okay um bless chamberlin all in all now what happened which with the with the middle school just again as students migrate we had a large eighth grade class that went to um the high school you can see right 237 here you see where my pointer is ninth grade 193 so that that that was an attributed number pretty different you can see the class sizes as they happen and ninth graders also going to the high school that's typically where you may see some students go off to private schools or in the covid situation um also into some different places as well so again this is i think megan had a question if you're just curious if it was any tuition students if you were able to gauge whether the expected number of tuition students increased or decreased no our tuition students actually held held really strong um in in truth we thought that was going to be with our budget activity or non activity i guess um we thought we would lose a lot more of our tuition students while we were in flux you know we passed the budget on august 11th but the tuition students uh stayed solid um again hard to know if we didn't have the covid situation or the budget situation what we would do we are again running um with our demographer an updated enrollment piece i hope to have that in december which would which is a big part of adding into our budgeting uh forecast as well as again this is a hard year i think to use this particular year as a benchmark uh in comparison to others as we've looked at kind of in migration and out migration of grades um at the school so anyway that's an update on the on the kind of where we are with um those areas and as i said the facility needs uh was the was the last um bucket that we're looking at i don't know if there's any more questions on kind of those three priorities again the board has only had a brief overview we'll have another deeper dive here as we move forward to next board meetings with the school board well i'm just wondering um where the the contract negotiations are and how they factor in well as far as the budget um you know what we need to do dependent upon where the where the board is with the the collective bargaining agreements we have to set an amount that we think is appropriate uh to do to resolve negotiations right now again the board is in negotiations with all three collective bargaining groups the teachers currently um and we have currently settled agreements with the with the administrators but i don't know either elizabeth or bridget can give you a little bit more if you wish or martin or brian i guess yeah i can speak to that um david um i think you knew that all the administrators took a salary freeze um for this operating year and um the one area that we needed to kind of go back and resolve was the fact that the new statewide health care plan goes into effect in january so that martin and brian are the two the subcommittee members who are working on that with administrators and then the budget which was approved by the voters um in august really indicated that what was in included in the budget was the equivalent of um step increases for any unresolved employee contracts uh or bargaining um negotiations so um it was made clear at that time that anything anything that was settled in those outstanding contracts for this operating year um would uh would go into a carry forward if it was positive and if it was negative it really would have to come out of some other area so um as far as the teachers go we did complete fact finding on the 26th of this month so we're expecting the fact finders report probably sometime no sooner than the end of november maybe early december so we'll easily be you know six months into the operating year at that point as far as teachers go and then i don't want to um steal martin or brian sunder on support staff but they um they are um uh continuing to meet with support staff and try to work toward a resolution there as well thank you so i don't know if there's any other questions um one of the things that we'll get to later on in the agenda when we talk with todd and the reappraisal and the cla calculation obviously that's significantly in play from the school side as a result of reappraisals um and the common level of appraisal as that number goes back closer to 100 percent then that will have a pretty significant effect on the budget um so um that will be a positive however the again it's neutral right it's neutral because of reappraisal some folks will pay more some obviously will pay less in the school side obviously we'll we'll see that difference we were at 89 percent before but we'll talk more about that in just a bit um okay let me let me get out of screen share here i can do it it's very different here help me out somebody you out of screen share it's not giving me control muted yourself david yeah i'm just trying to get out of my screen share it's not letting me get out don't know don't walk me don't leave the meeting because you'll be locked out yeah you might like that oh boy why won't let me out sorry everybody i can't get out oh said he left this is where we have to look in the waiting room that brian said would be visible yeah i'm just good just while we're waiting for david a couple of quick things i don't know if he mentioned specifically but typically any positive carry forward has to go to two two years ahead and the legislature i believe is allowing carry forwards to be used in the next operating year so that would be one positive thing with us offset the upcoming budget assuming that auditive result is about where amity is projecting it now and then the other thing is the coded reimbursement we've we've had a bit of a mix bag there and the the nutritional services has been reimbursed um fully at this point but we have programs like our enterprise program of schools out that the reimbursement was that 53 percent so um and we have unreimbursed expenses from last year's um from the the march to june timeframe so um that's you know there's a lot of caution on some of the expenses associated with um with covid response and and what the reimbursement will look like ultimately and you don't know when that'll be resolved is that something the legislature has to resolve actually i don't know if martin can speak to that i i think it's generally it's sort of determining where the aoe and the process that aoe is distributing the funds and then any additional funding that might be available but right now it's just the agency of education that is working on determining how to disperse the funds i mean if from what i understand the amount of funds that uh the legislature gave the aoe to disperse is sufficient to meet all the uh requests for those funds if it wasn't sufficient then it would be possible that the legislature actually would be the joint fiscal committee because we're not meeting till january would move some of the funds from elsewhere but that doesn't appear necessary from what i understand okay yeah i really don't know um and can't speculate on what what the holdup is i think allocation identification of key areas how they're going to reimburse the amount of money that's needed to reimburse do they have a valid uh information from every school or our district or su that has had the covid expenses you know we we hear there's money available um we've made some again as you heard in the um remedy you know we have made some assumptions on what we think we're going to be reimbursed but have not seen that the nutrition service fund did get reimbursed and but we don't see that in the any any sort of the cash flow carryover right it's it's part of a um fund seven um that is connected to the same funding mechanism uh enterprise fund is what i meant to say really okay so other i mean is there any further discussion it sounds as if you will be looking at a very tight budget as will we yeah i mean the board the board hasn't specifically i mean i again i can't speak for the board and they'll they'll be coming up with some directives but you know definitely enrollment and staffing enrollment you know if enrollment goes way way down or staffing goes or enrollment goes way way up then you know our staffing levels need to accommodate that um in addition um looking at some of the effects of covid and what we might need to what we might need to do in order to respond appropriately to serve students and ready them um and then as i said earlier that facility piece so we'll be looking again at um you know how we want to move forward um in what we know is a tough economic period of time um as people try to get back on track so we're sensitive to that at the same time we have a big obligation to right well that certainly was um i think the um understanding among the city counselors that we really wanted to be very sensitive to any tax increases and the ability or inability of the public to um support um higher spending and higher taxes so that was we'll have to see what it looks like but that that was kind of the direction we gave the administration is to be you know there's some things that go up and you have to um the operating costs that you cannot pay um but there's other things that we're really keeping it tight lid on no i think again i think that's um that's helpful information for us for sure as you know um again as i said earlier we have a major obligation to ready students for their next steps we also have had a major change in education delivery from you know march to june and to now so that's also in play and then we had a budget obviously that um significantly um you know we made some pretty significant reductions in programming of which we hope do not have major major effect but we know they will and we'll have to assess where we go from here with this next budget so it's kind of a it's kind of a big complicated bucket right now um but again as i said we're certainly sensitive to kind of our community's um view on funding and all of those things yeah okay any other comments or questions or thoughts okay so we'll move on to 180 market street progress and plans move in schedule is alana has she arrived i'll take that okay thank you the project continues uh recently on schedule we're still looking at a late june uh occupancy date um that could slip for a variety of reasons but uh right now we're looking to be pretty well on schedule for the end of june uh currently big projects um that we're involved in uh beyond just the original design phase are the um audio visual which is a big component of the of the cost for the um technology side of the building also the solar array we're trying to maximize the amount of solar that we're going to get off of the rooftop solar and um we've split what was a um a combined rooftop solar and battery system to uh do the rooftop solar immediately or at this point in time because the roof is is under construction and um and then spend some time looking at the best battery solution our goal is to run the building off of our own power as best we can um and to cut down on any demand um uh peak demand charges that we would get from gmp for the balance of the power that we need we're also looking at the uh furniture bids coming in shortly for the library and also for the rest of the building um the um building is reasonably closed in but should be completely closed in by um december 1st a lot of work is being done inside that you obviously can't see from the street a lot of room partitions going in uh sheet rocks starting to go in mechanicals and so on so um things are moving along pretty well and like i say we still hope to hit that uh late june uh occupancy date any question oh i'm sorry helen no go ahead are there any questions or comments yeah i just want to say so bridge it and then i guess tom um i just wanted to mention we've heard from a few other parents and um and i've experienced it myself um i just don't know what the the idea is um for the future of traffic control where school street meets market streets um it's really difficult um on days when all the parking spaces along market street are full uh to see traffic coming from the east as you're pulling out of that driveway out of well it's not driving where it's a street out of off of school street onto market street um and a lot of people have commented that it's just very treacherous trying to get out of there um and um i don't know if there's a thought behind putting potentially a yellow you know flashing light or some kind of something to let drivers on market street know that they need to slow down especially at drop off and pick up time because there's just no way for people to see them coming and i'm just concerned that at some stage there's going to be an accident there just because you can't see traffic and there's a lot of pressure to get off of school street because everyone's piled up behind you trying to get out of there so it's just a concern that's sort of arisen as people have started to use that street but um yeah i don't know if there was any thought behind that do we need to suspend some parking spots well that would probably be the likely thing to do i think tim the first two or three through the east of the where the street joins market street uh to allow better visuals around that uh down to the east as bridgett points out um that might be something we can do recently immediately um the light we have not planned for a blinking yellow light there are any traffic lights uh on market street not even at the intersection of garten and market but i will i'll see what we can do to block off those um those parking spots to allow for a better better visual yeah i think any any parking spots would be helpful and it may be that for a period of time you know once things are settled down a little bit at 180 market street before snider braverment really picks up there may not be as much in terms of parking on that street right now it feels like a lot of contractors that are parked there um in their trucks and so the trucks in particular kind of hard to see around so maybe it won't be such a problem after a while but yeah anything that could be done with those first couple of parking spots even if it's just a temporary thing would be pretty helpful i think great thank you i'll look into that right away bridge it hey david yeah i just i do want to you know put a positive plug in there justin rabbit it has been working hard with gary marquess almost on a regular basis and they have and their early morning meetings and they have resolved a lot of issues of which some of what bridget just talked about that northeast corner um of market streets uh market and school street has been a little has been that tight turn and so justin has his folks walk putting a watch on that to see if that ought to change um and all of the all the other concerns but been very responsive engel berth and their project management have been you know very responsive and helpful and so we really do appreciate that too we you know it's it's it's definitely transformed over the years last couple of years but again we are we are concerned as always about driver decision-making and i think bridget points out that well is that we've got some people that are going fast and they should and there's as you know when you're driving through parked car areas around the school you should you most of us you know drive with extreme caution and that's not always what happens with some people just passing through and it creates major scares so it's we're certainly concerned about it thank you thank you any other comments or questions all righty let's move on to item seven the airport the f a a grant award update for dr chamberlain school yeah so again another you know well now we're in a success story with all of the grants we did get the grants and we've got a timeline i could pull it out but i think i'm going to save you the anxiety admit my screen sharing it doesn't seem to be working so so well on david i can connect you again okay do you want to share yeah i just share the timeline and not the school board members have the timeline but but the council might like it coming up okay you got it everybody getting dizzy so this is the overall plan let me try to reduce this a little bit so this is just the timeline of the building and so those of you who are unaware we received the f a a grant to soundproof chamberlain elementary school and so as a result of the grant funds it will then provide inside ventilation both heat and air conditioning to create an environment where windows do not have to be open and it's throughout the end pretty much the entire building with the exceptions of a few interior spaces that are already you know either don't have the windows or you know fully um soundproofed so what this does is it has you know design obviously you can see where we are with design um and then the the bidding process will when it will start in january and then construction here will start in march um and actually tomorrow they have some engineers on site just to be looking at the electrical components so that's construction and then you can see the end date is september one obviously that will be the end date and they have a few other things that they need to close the process out by september 30th all of this of course has to be done in the manner in which it does not disrupt school so um that's obviously the challenge anytime you do something in a school building and anytime you do something in a school building in a covid related experience so we we have some challenges there but um that's all part of the process and people are all all aware so that's where i'm at great so again a little bit of a timeline on curtshire chamberlain it's a it's about four about four point one million dollars i believe i think is that right in as you know off the top of your head the grant award i have not seen that grant that's just it's it's right around four four million or just a tad under um on that grant um amount with no local match required there is no local max the airport again has been helpful i mean it it's been it's been a it's been a tough process you know just trying to figure out how to move through it um but i do want to give a shout out the airport gene and nick gene richards and nick longo as well as gary doing a majority of that work as of late for us we have a positive outcome so again just wanted to share that with you great tim barrett you had a question yeah quick question uh david what kind of discovery process is needed for or what you might find if they need to break into walls and ceilings and stuff like that i are you confident that there's not going to be an issue with materials that need uh any kind of mitigation or something like that or yeah the type of unit that they're doing obviously doesn't require a major amount of of that work so um the units that they're putting in our do not require a lot of moving or any of that but again anytime we do touch things again that's part of the cost estimating that's in there too as they do need to check anytime they put a drill into a wall or anything of that nature so that will be part of it will this also improve ventilation for covid conditions absolutely yeah absolutely and and what we have done uh today is as a disparate we you know change filters um and upgraded the filters to murk filters and we put we have a blue light filtration in a standalone devices in every classroom in the district that has been you know very significant so we have a layered approach around covid but to your point the the new system comes at a great time actually um we do have good boilers but they're older boilers at at chamberland there are two units um they have you know one that is a lead boiler and one that's a lag boiler and and these units will um we will make it so that those those boilers do not have to supply heat to those rooms or air conditioning so it does provide us with some pretty significant flexibility on a going forward basis we still will have to heat in some rooms but very very few and obviously the unit that will put in as a replacement to those two big units will be much smaller and a lot less expensive thank you great thank you um moving on to status of the reappraisal in the C CLA calculation process and that's Todd LeBlanc welcome hello everybody hear me we can that's good uh reappraisal is is back underway uh we have inspections uh for the residential properties that had remained undone are back in process uh there's a gentleman by the name of Darryl Woody who has been doing the inspections uh so far i've heard no um comments back uh in a negative way uh i've had a couple people who have been concerned about letting uh anybody into their house and i simply told them you you don't need to i sent them a form uh that we usually use for if you want a revaluation of your property it asks about your physical attributes um betters bathroom finished basements fireplaces stuff like that they send them back uh so it's been it's been really good so far um blaine bowlin who's the project manager for tyla tech is on i believe uh with us i see his name anyway um i don't know if he has anything to add or wants to add anything i don't i don't see him clicking his mic so i'm gonna guess no um so the process of getting inspections back on track could keep us on task to have unofficial values in january um once once the all the inspections will be done they will take and start evaluating the market the sales and whatnot um they'll do the analysis to come up with the new values uh and then january we will send them uh probably out and call commander call commander and everybody can see him and then have the ability to uh meet with somebody remotely most likely uh from tyla tech to review their property uh attributes uh to see if there's any discrepancies uh that's not really the time to argue value um we're just trying to get things straight at that time and then come um may or every late may um we'll sign up the official values and then that'll that'll begin an official grievance period like we have every year okay any questions for Todd now this this is blaine boulder metallur technologies i was having some issues with my with the uh audio on uh on the computer so i was on my phone so can everybody hear me okay yes yes awesome all i guess i would like to uh contribute if i may is um i was kind of reiterate some of what Todd said we do have daryl woody up there daryl has completed 253 inspections to date um so add that to what we've already inspected and we're about 85 done with a data collection we had a gentleman um named david boast who i believe finished all the commercial properties and a lady named mariah brushway who was able to remote in um to salt burlington and she data intervals properties so we're about 62 percent complete with the data entry portion of all of this so once the residentials are completed we'll get that information to this mariah brushway and she'll data enter that information as well okay thank you any other question we also have uh blaine is able to log in remotely as well as um the commercial appraiser and i'm drawing a blank on his name right now um there you have to say it again blaine his name's john valente don't yeah i forgot his name uh they're able to work remotely uh with our system to continue the process even though they're not physically here good well that sure helps with coca doesn't it okay um i think i think is important um around that as i said in our in our budget piece is that as you know the common level appraisal has an reappraisal it's common level pay appraisal has a pretty significant effect on the school side ellen yes and so we do know i mean we're again and folks have been helpful giving us kind of where we're at but we have sought out you know both from todd and his group as well as folks uh in proper evaluation review director which is i think christie right and so they provided us some some additional information around what we can expect uh for our the cla calculation and what they what they're saying to us is that we should we should expect somewhere near near 100 percent with only minor variations i remember this is set just on just on kind of the reappraisal process in some cases um what has been reported to us by our own brad james uh at the agency of education has said that sometimes that undergo reappraisals the cla will come at over 100 but there are times when it's not this year um this is quoting brad james 11 out of the 15 um communities that did reappraisal um 11 out of the 15 uh came out over 100 but st johnsbury came in at 97.3 last year 13 out of 22 communities came in over 100 with the most urban uh town being middlebury that came in at 103 so again a little for us um on the school side looking at you know uh that particular calculator that's important for us to pay attention to on the on the school side as it sets that tax rate so again i think between um what todd shared and kind of the update and reappraisal and then what we believe we're we're going to have is going to be near that 100 percent and so um again just wanted to update okay the steering committee on that and that doesn't affect the rate until 2023 correct is that one that this is this would be for the 2022 budget this would be for the 2022 budget so we're in we're in 21 oh okay this will be the budget that we're working on for next year now for 2022 yeah talk and then someone else wonder just the back of what they said our last reassessment in 2006 uh the resulting the CLA was 103 and the next year was 101 that's so it balances out makin has a question yeah or comment let's hope i did read in the paper that uh property values went up 23 percent this year in the state is that something that uh would perhaps i don't know mean that we would do a reassessment much sooner in the future i mean 23 percent is a huge jump in one year it is a huge jump there's several factors um inventory so low they can't build properties fast enough um and then you've got people moving in to remont from the ind uh the bigger cities um they come in with cash they can pay more than the asking price um that's happening a lot uh in most every sale it's going into a bidding war uh days on the market or sometimes less than one so the values right now are high we don't really know the impact of how long they're going to stay high that's just unknown but that will affect where our property values end up for the reappraisal results as the property values get higher the tax rate will obviously get lower accordingly um and then the higher they end up the lower the tax rate will be Tim Barrett so that begs the next question Todd which is is commercial going to dump on residential again that's a really tough question overall um some commercial properties are doing well some aren't um you hear a lot of complaining about um you know my business is just suffering and we don't assess businesses we assess the property so the impact of the property is unknown and because we use sales to determine that um in a case like right now if the sales that are coming through are higher or even or lower it's something we will analyze and uh figure out for the new numbers but the people that are you know hanging their hat on you know the businesses are suffering it's it's not the businesses we're dealing with um rental properties for one which are considered commercial uh are in the same boat as houses right now there's very little inventory the prices are really high so it's really hard it's really hard for an owner of an apartment house to say hey my value's gone down when they're they're full at higher prices than they normally would get any other questions or comments for talk okay thank you very much we'll move on to item pardon me thank you you too uh number nine discussion regarding re-establishing school impact fees so david take it away yeah yeah so um we we this is not the first time um some of you have heard this and we've we've had this conversation um city and school um obviously established in 1995 the the re-establishing or or having impact fees obviously came to be in they state they were in place through 2008 and it was recommended to the city after you know conversation with a variety I would say developers etc that because of slightly decreasing enrollment it did not make sense and so we had that study that was done um and then it was it was recommended and so it phased itself out and so in 2008 it had a schedule to phase out impact fees um and again um as I look at um the future currently in South Burlington and I think Todd and others appropriately indicate um what we would say the surge our enrollment that based on when the assessment was done on the forecasting of enrollment we have we're been we've been over those enrollment projections pretty significantly uh we have two of the two of our five schools above capacity now that's orchard and the high school um and so that's an important component to that but one of the things I think is just fundamentally part of this is that we do have increasing enrollment projections as well as on you know in school again albeit it was lower than expected but we do have increasing enrollment and we also have what we know is a pretty significant number of units or planned units that are coming on or have come on in the city or will be coming on in the city and so the factor of those two things just as you would you know citywide with water um and other assessments we think it's also a part that should be further studied um around where we are um so again I think the next step would be to um dig into this a little bit more as we did back in 2007 and eight and look at some of the metrics that are in play both city and school I think it it kind of behooves us on behalf of the school board and the city um council to to look at this um as we move forward to be a prosperous city for you know people to move uh move here work here and have their children educated here I think all of you know that we're in we're in a bit of a predicament certainly in some of our schools with the age and the infrastructure some of which I alluded to earlier but um again I think this would be an important analysis to redo as we look at the as we look at that look at the future okay comments from council I mean I don't have I'm not opposed to relooking at this if it's important I mean let's use science and facts to guide our decisions okay I I agree with you I agree with you Helen that it makes sense to look at this yeah I see Tom nodding so and David so that's four of the council so is the process then Kevin and and Tim so we all want to look at this is it a joint process do you hire someone to do that kind of analysis well it'd be a school it would be a school initiative the the enactment of impact fees itself is the responsibility of the city council but it would be a school initiative to take their enrollment and the projections for growth in the city and whether or not it meets the requirements for impact fees there is somebody local now who has who is an expert on impact fees who we we're working with on our transportation impact fees and is very good and can work as a consultant on this if this is the direction the school work wants to go so yeah so I guess and of course our resources are available to Paul Connor and our buildout resources and the things like that are certainly available and we would help in any way so it sounds like David the the city is suggesting that you move forward and Kevin has the name of the you know specialist to help so I think we'll encourage you to move forward Tim you had a comment or you just question Kevin how many impact fees do we have now and how are they spread out among new construction is it even across all construction or is it different for commercial versus residential or um well it's um if rec we have transportation recreation and recreation uh impact schools roads rec um I'm looking at and we have a impact fees for uh for the police department too or the bills they're all done differently Tim um but um school or for um transportation impact fees they're all pretty they're done differently each of them but they both affect uh residential and commercial I think pretty much the same way school would be different because commercial doesn't send students to schools uh homes houses send students to school so that would be different but transportation we all use the roads so um um some of the projects like um FedEx project are pretty are very big fees and uh part of that's being used to do the intersection at community drive and um and uh Kimball to include a traffic light there which is very expensive so I don't know if that answered your question or not it would just be nice when we start this process it might be good to see a layout of all the fees and how they're applied and how they're calculated and and whether or not if a commercial property is recycled into residential property if those fees still would be applied like a change of use or something like that so right because isn't there a big hotel that's turning into apartments yes so that would be a different use I don't know that it would be it's still residential but if you're renting a hotel residential they don't send kids to school wouldn't that be a isn't that a commercial property for purposes of our impact fees oh school would be different I think yeah again my my our fundamental you know bringing this up is is not fees but to recognize the need and and um as I said earlier from 1995 to 2008 impact fees were part of that and again because of diminishing enrollment during that period it came out but what we're experiencing now or from 2008 to now has been increasing enrollment and as a result we we think that it's worth looking at again and again it was part of the the impact the ordinance that was in play and back in you know the mid 90s through 2008 school was one of those components along with roads recreation water line you know those types of things back and sure yeah well I sounds like everyone's willing to have you look into that and come back with the data and we'll make a decision going forward yeah it's good to know there's another main because you know Michael Munson and Dick keeps probably aren't doing this anymore um um I'll check in with Kevin to get a name thanks okay great okay item 10 COVID-19 update for schools and cities um Kevin do you want to do the city part yeah I think pretty much steady as she goes so to speak um we did have a incident where we had a cups uh up to nine firefighters and police officers who were um possibly um um exposed to somebody with c19 but that person's test uh we just found out was negative so our firefighters and police are back on their normal shifts or will be great but you just open our eyes to the need to follow protocols um in this case an individual did not follow the protocols and um this is what resulted Tom and I are feel very fortunate that this was the first incident of this nature to affect the um city employees fortunately it turned out well but we are going to re-emphasize to our entire team the need to follow the governor's directives and to um be careful that being said all of our staff that had been furloughed as Tom had mentioned earlier in the budget discussion came back in august 3rd uh we have a a couple of people working from home on their computers but besides that we're all back in our offices and we're all practicing uh safe distancing and masks in the offices so um we got behind on a number of um public works projects as you might imagine um things like potholes and and all they accumulate over the winter and it just it takes a while to catch up and line striping and those sorts of things um but we're getting back to our normal um so we're we're very cautious I have to say very optimistic about the news that Pfizer has a um a a effective vaccine at phase three um with the what I have heard is a possible distribution of up to uh for up to 25 million people before the end of the year um we're hoping that's first responders of course um because um obviously we need those folks in place we're hoping they're in that group so anyway any uh questions about that no okay thanks yeah i'll give you a quick update um it could be a very long long one but it won't be um and I'll ask amity in just a second um to just do a quick overview of what we spend today and so in general obviously you know really proud of our community self-reliance and parents guardians and students most of all um and adhering to what I would say very different a very different environment um we obviously are guided by you know the health department folks as you are but trying to carry on essential functions and education first in a fully remote from march to june um and what that does to your system of wanting to have children in person when you can't to then um walking into the start of the school year in a hybrid um we started out in a hybrid version two days on and and um then the students obviously flip flops are two cohorts two days on and the one day in the middle was to do some connected activities but really to allow the building to rest and be cleaned so that we could cut down on infections uh so far so good it seems to be working we do have we've had about three staff members currently um amongst five of our schools so three in total who have come down with it none of it has come from the school but have come individuals who've been exposed and have tested positive I have to say the department of health and the contact tracers have done an excellent job so they come on very quickly our staff develop a line list where you were who was with you students all of those locations all the way to buses and activity and determine whether you are a close contact to an individual that was exposed in one in most cases we've had an exposed uh individual but has only had developed close contact with about four or five other individuals in our community our school community so a real testament to our students and staff's adherence to the standard I think to Kevin and and Tom have said too but you know for us it's masking physically distancing hand washing you know dividers air filtration as I said both in our big system air filtration and these portable devices that we have that are turning the air and filtering the air and purifying and then you know all of the health screening requirements that we have to do daily with every student I think has has been attributed to to some of those conditions and we hope that stays there that is not without some expenses and I want to let amity just give you a quick overview of what we spent in 20 so we went march to june and then we've obviously started july 1 to where we are today so um anyway we're not sure what will happen after december 31 we're not not quite certain so amity go ahead and give a quick overview of what we spent sure so um from the march through june on the general fund expenses we had 298,784 of covid related for PPE additional stuff that might needed might have needed to be hired but mostly PPE and supplies for classrooms to ready ourselves for the school year as staffing wasn't at that point we were not in school so we were doing all remote learning we didn't have to hire additional substitutes or you know monitors for health screenings etc those staff staff salaries were mandated by the governor for us to cover as if they were at work even if they were not at work so we as a district have actually applied for this cares act fund to cover even budgeted expenses so that might actually save a little bit in the education fund because they'll use the cares money to supplement the ed fund money to hopefully bring down the deficit that is uh expected within the ed fund dollars so that was for f y 20 f y 21 through october 31 we have spent $515,786 on covid related expenditures and that includes staffing substitutes we've got teachers for the vtvlc program the PPE and dividers etc that we had to install upgrades to the nurses offices to have quarantine rooms so all of those are um in our application for the crf funds from the agency of education we still have yet to see the actual grant award as of um sorry today's monday so as of last week we did hear from the agency of education that the final um grant um applications were being submitted so that means we should be hearing anytime about what our um likelihood of reimbursement is as time frame goes it does seem as david had mentioned there will be or maybe it was martin i'm sorry that there will be enough funding to cover all of what we as all districts around vermont have asked for we did have to estimate through december 31 what we thought we'd be spending on covid you know that's a really tough uh number to know because we have no idea what might be coming down the pike even in this last couple of months but we've done our best and we have put in for i think between the march and december timeframe over 1.6 million in what we anticipate for expenditures for covid related items um and staffing and we also did receive final approval from the efficiency vermont that we have grant funding to cover the expenses that we um endured for purchasing the environmental cleans air purifiers for each classroom and offices for the district all around every school as well as the upgraded filters the mirv v 13 filters for our ventilation system and there were some exhaust fans at some of our schools that did need to be replaced or upgraded to also meet standard so um that total was 203 000 a little over 203 000 from efficiency vermont that we will also have grant funds and as david mentioned we did get our food service program did receive funding for summer and even during uh june uh meal delivery expenditures that we endured for our buses being on the road to deliver students or not even just students but all all children in the city of south brawlington from the birth to age 18 were eligible for lunch and breakfast to be served to them and so we delivered those meals so there was cost associated with packaging and delivering and um distribute distribution of those meals so um we did receive a grant approval and we've applied for those funds and that uh that should be any time received now so and that was about a 500 000 expenditure between uh june and august so that's pretty much where we're at with covid at this point in time it still seems to be kind of a moving target we still don't have final dates on monies but we're we're playing there slowly but shortly great thank you amity so yeah that's where we are with covid and again every day is a new day um we hope you know we hope things stay smooth great i just want to give a call out to the city clerk's office too and um i know tim and i worked at the polls but the whole process and i'm assuming all of you voted um but you know the the system at the polls was better than the summer and um you know i think it we had no incidents that i'm aware of um at tuttle middle school for seven two and seven three and so i think it um you know it's another testament to sort of how vermont does things and how our community we had just an enormous number of volunteers to um work the polls so you know you really had we had a person opening the door at um turtle so no one had to when they exited so no one and and came in so no one had to touch the handle so it was really um it was really good um final item is capital projects update and the with the for the tiff so kevin do you have some thinking yeah i just wanted to um you have some level of notice we have not uh from the administration we have not talked to the council about this in detail but there is a possibility of um two items uh we may be seeking for which we may be seeking tiff approval in march one being the extension of um of garden street the other being the possibility of connecting the um market street area to the city center park um a walking facility a pedestrian facility to do that these are not large projects probably combined us well under three million dollars but um the tiff clock is ticking we're very pleased and martin's on the line here i think i want to uh suppress my appreciation to martin and the rest of the legislature for extending the um the uh tiff the eligibility to incur debt for tiff projects for one year nonetheless because of the lag in time it takes to get on the bond schedule for the vermont bond bank uh it's timely would need but uh we'll be talking to the council probably in um december about the possibility going to the voters uh with it with these two tiff projects again pretty small both of them 100 percent tiff eligibility okay so any other business yeah i have one i have one just quick announcement and uh i wanted to uh just let the steering committee know the board knows but amity denton our long time 31 year employee will be leaving us um and um she's on right now so i just wanted to give a moment of appreciation to her for her 31 years it doesn't seem possible but for her good work and we're going to miss her and um we're sure the best i just wanted you to know that thank you amity congratulations amity yeah time flies man thank you tom titanen one an item uh similar to how you applauded the way the bowls were conducted in this pandemic i just as a parent that talks drops kids off to two of the schools the teachers the staff and the school district is doing a phenomenal job with all of your processes and controls greeting us the principal outside every morning making sure it's safe and the police officer is also coordinating and after school just you guys are doing a phenomenal job through extremely challenging times so thank you for everything you're doing thanks tom i'll pass that on ditto ditto from another parent yes very much and we certainly should congratulate the two legislators who were reelected one neither of them really had a whole lot of competition i guess and tom you did extremely well for first time out of the blocks i guess having the same name as the county helps huh click what i can get they've heard it somewhere i'm the first governor so is there any other business all right so i would entertain a motion to adjourn and we determined that the next meeting is in january whatever the date is like the 20th or something okay so we have a motion to adjourn a second second okay all in favor thumbs up thank you all for joining thank you thank you everybody have a good night i hope you go back in vermont soon


are tuned in to in the studio here at Davis Media Access. Thanks for joining us. My name is Autumn LaBeirano and joining me today is Dr. Michelle Hawkins who's the director at the UC Davis Raptor Center. Thanks so much for joining us Michelle. Hi, thank you for inviting me back Autumn. It's good to see you again. Likewise and last time we chatted we were actually in the physical studio at Davis Media Access and you had a really big bird. Unfortunately we can't do that today but we're really glad to catch up on some recent developments at the Raptor Center. So first and importantly you have a big anniversary coming up next year. So tell us a little bit about how and when the Raptor Center started and and what its trajectory has been kind of to this point. Yeah so in 2022 we will be celebrating our 50th anniversary of the California Raptor Center and so we're really excited about that. I'm working on all of our celebratory things right now. Hopefully if COVID you know is kind to us we'll be able to get back in person very soon but over these 50 years there's just been such dramatic changes throughout the California Raptor Center from 50 years ago when Franca Gasalora and Elita Mora-Zente were the first directors and were falconers really interested in helping birds that they found that were sick and injured. Two four directors later I'm the fifth director we've had directors that have brought all kinds of different strengths to the programs. Some brought new facilities to the program some brought new groups to the program that we didn't work with in the past and and and today for my time as director I've been director since 2013 we've concentrated a lot on education and in building our educational programs even more than they were before so not only do we rehabilitate sick and injured birds of prey but we also provide educational programs to the general public to K-12 and also to agencies, zoos that need training and handling these birds so we try to provide as much as we can to our community and our surrounding community and it's just been a it's been a great 50 years and I'm so just so happy to have been able to be part of it for this long. I bet so the Davis Enterprise recently did a very nice article on you on on the center and some of the challenges you're facing and we'll get to those a little bit later but one of the comments was about the generational impact that described parents who had been there and I wanted to say that that's my story too I first visited the Raptor Center many years ago as a student at UC Davis and then I raised my children here in Davis and and we visited several times too so it really is a place that sticks with you and and you know that it'll be a good experience you know to take to take your own kids there so that that's a pretty powerful thing and and congratulations on helping to foster and kind of create that kind of environment. This is one of the satisfying things about my job is to hear stories like that autumn. Nice nice I want to ask you how birds come to the center I once my husband and I once had an experience on a on a road trip somewhere down on I-5 where we saw an injured red tail hawk and managed to get it in a box and find a local local place down there by calling around where we could take the injured bird. Do birds come to you in this way or what's the process for that? Yeah absolutely you know the our you know great citizens or general community is out and about in nature in the environment and they find these birds down and so we often get calls of I've found the bird can you come and get it which unfortunately we don't have the capacity to do but people can then if they can get the bird and we can talk them through that and get it put into a box and bring it to us and that's the start of the process. Once the animal gets to us and if the bird could either come prior to COVID the bird could either be dropped off directly at the California Raptor Center or during COVID they're all going to the veterinary medical teaching hospital first and so if it went to the Raptor Center first the the team out there would assess the animal would see whether it needed medical care direct medical care from the veterinarians and if so they bring it over to the teaching hospital. There we have faculty, residents and students who are all working together to as a team for these birds and so we just have the luxury at the hospital of having specialists in every field and so if I have a very complicated orthopedic procedure my orthopedic surgeons often will help me to figure out what's the best way forward with them or if we have an ocular injury an eye injury our ophthalmologist can really help us to make sure that that bird's vision is perfect before we go to release it. So once the medical care has finished or has at least the initial part of it is completed and a plan has been made for the treatment of that animal then the bird goes back to the California Raptor Center which is out Old Davis Road and it's really on the just the south periphery of campus and it's a very beautiful open space quiet for the birds to be able to continue their rehabilitation and our volunteers out there will provide the medical treatments that we've laid out for them and then once a week the veterinarians go out and check on all the patients at the center to make sure everybody's progressing well. Also at the center we do a lot of physical rehabilitation and so that's if you've ever had a fracture an orthopedic injury you know how long it takes to come back from an injury like that these birds have to fly for a living and most of them come in with wing injuries and so they need a tremendous amount of physical therapy which we have an integrative medicine faculty Dr. Jamie Payton who comes and helps us doing not only physical therapy with our hands but using ultrasound and using laser as needed to be able to really help to get soft tissues the tendons and all the muscle surrounding the bone to also get conditioned and ready for that bird to go back and then finally we can check that bird condition that bird make sure it can really sustain what we needed to sustain out there and then we release the bird back as close to the territory as it was found because these birds are territorial and so if we know that it was found at the crossroads of two roads well we can take that bird back to that area and if it's a safe area we can release it back into a territory it came from. That is a well coordinated and intensive effort there's a lot of cooks in this kitchen we have a lot we have a big team. Yeah so about how many birds come to you each year and about how many of those are you able to successfully rehabilitate and release? Sure so in general we see several hundred birds a year it could be anywhere from a hundred birds a year to 400 birds a year depending upon the year we also take birds in sometimes for other facilities as well they excuse me if they have for example an eagle and they need to condition that eagle they don't have a flight that's big enough for an eagle they may transfer the bird to us and allow us to do the final conditioning and then we'll work with that team and take that bird back as well so it so it can be anywhere within those numbers in general there are a lot of birds that come in and as soon as we open the box and see just how bad their injuries are they they may need to be euthanized right away and so the birds we kind of take the birds that we we euthanized right away out of the numbers and out of the numbers that survive greater than 24 hours we're at about a 60 success rate which is very very good for wildlife rehabilitation yeah that's a great metric and you know I know raptors are important in our overall ecosystem they they help keep vermin down they I mean they they have a lot of benefit they're also very at risk I would imagine from cars from rat poison from you know all kinds of things what's the most common type of injury you see or or you could guess at how they were injured yeah sure well the injury itself is very commonly some kind of trauma and so collision and we just use collision as one word because collision could be colliding with a car colliding with a glass window colliding with a wind turbine you know we that collisions are probably the number one reason that they're there the question is is why did they get into that particular situation at that moment in time and a lot of times there's underlying problems for example as you were talking about rodenticides have been a huge problem for us and are still a huge problem all over the country we're really happy that we've got a moratorium on the use of them right now in the state of california and they're we're trying to move a bill forward to actually have a ban on the second generation anticoagulant rodenticides they are really not available for the public use anymore but there's still a lot of it out there and unfortunately we see that as an underlying reason that birds sick and maybe it's just its brain isn't functioning the way it should be functioning and it ends up in front of something or colliding with something so we but the anticoagulant rodenticides have been a big big problem for us even with the ban on lead in the state of california we're still seeing lead cases mostly in eagles and in carrion eating birds such as vultures this is the still the biggest plague for the california condor outside of fire unfortunately but for them the lead intoxication is still a huge problem fortunately they don't get into the collisions that these birds in the urban setting get but there are many other diseases that are underlying and so sometimes they'll come in with a fractured wing with a collision but we'll know that there's something more that's just not quite right about that bird right and so we will then go in and start to investigate further and that often takes us to the reason they were sick to begin with you mentioned covid earlier so let's touch briefly on on the impacts obviously you can't offer you haven't been able to be open to the public and offer as many programs as you usually do i'm wondering how you've programmatically pivoted and then we need to get into the the fiscal impacts you're you're dealing with and and how that affects operations so let's start with programmatically what how have you navigated through the pandemic yeah i mean you you used the word right the word of the year was pivot and so we did have to close our gates to the general public uh university of california data still has a nonessential personnel rule for campus and so for areas like ours that do have a fence they've asked us to remain closed to the general public because they are quote nonessential personnel on campus we can't close the arboretum but we can close the california raptor center for example so we have been closed to the public um we did the pivot and try to develop virtual programs as quickly as we could um we did some fundraising to be able to get some new equipment which worked really well for us and so we've got a very professional setup now to be able to do virtual programs and we did a number of live programs for schools but we also did some recorded programs that we hope will be able to make available as a library in the future so actually some really good things did come out of of us having to do things this way um some of the hardships were of course schools that were that are underfunded title one schools for example that often didn't have the technology to be able to have us come into their classroom and so those are areas where we struggled a little bit to be able to reach some of those classrooms but the hope is is over time as they get some hopefully some of these things worked out um we may be able to provide programs where we don't have to go to the schools but we can still give them some educational information it's not the same as having a live bird right when the last time we met autumn you know we were there we brought a live bird into the studio and there's nothing like a student's face or a child's face when they get up close and personal with that great horned owl they've been hearing hooting in the backyard you know since they were two years old right so um so so pivot was definitely what we had been working on um we also unfortunately had on top of that you know fires and smoke and that's been a big issue for us um we have we develop protocols so that we bring in all of our resident birds when the smoke gets too bad because there's a lot of smoke inhalation injury they could get even though they're not in the density of the fires so we had to work on that last year and that was a real challenge for the birds um and then finally people were desperate to get outside in the summertime last year and so everybody was out trying to find a trail where they could walk and feel like they're in nature and not feel like they were in a disney world line or something and people found a lot more birds and brought more birds into us last year our nursery we had twice the number of birds in the nursery as we usually have and that requires twice the manpower to feed all those little mouths you know some of them need to be fed every two hours at a certain time of their life so we put lots of energy into things like that into training our volunteers um and to working on new programs for volunteers as well and so that was really you know the time that we had that's kind of downtime um we were able to utilize some ways like that that we really think that all of our educational programs really have benefited overall we just really want to see that face again seeing that live bird and then the other part was that our birds went just a little bit feral on us um the the birds that are trained with a glove that would come into your studio that would go out to a school that takes a substantial amount of training with that bird for it to be comfortable standing on that hand in an environment with lights like in the studio or in a classroom where there may be a lot of loud noise um we have to kind of quote bombproof our birds and so um we we had to do a lot more work on them last year and uh when we were able to bring back our volunteers which we had to send our volunteers away for a while too they came back and that was one of their big projects was to really work with our education birds uh to keep their training up so so from that end of things we stayed busy you know just like everybody else we thought downtime no we we really worked and and worked very hard during the whole year for covid yeah um but it was it was a substantial impact on us financially because our programs we we do charge for our programs they cost us money and time and effort to be able to do and so that money didn't come in likewise we didn't have open house events we generally have three events per year uh now that each usually bring about a thousand people to the center we get a lot of donations during those events but um we also sell a lot of merchandise during those events and we make some money off of that as well and so you know all of those things went to zero last year for us pretty much and um so we already kind of went into things with a bit of a deficit for our standard operating uh money and i could tell you just right off the bat you know even prior to budget cuts which i know we're going to talk about um you know we we do have a lot of administrative support from the school veterinary medicine uh there's no doubt about that every single day we get a lot of support from them but when it comes to paying from the medical and the rehabilitative care of these birds you know i have to fundraise for that and so yeah some of the money that would come in from these events were part of that fundraising and and so our fundraising was definitely much lower last year even though we did a couple of big online facebook things to try to get more funding we're also more different than other programs i can't just go out and do a co-go fund me for example um i'm just not able to do that within the university guidelines and if i were in another program outside of uc davis if i needed money to do something i could put up a go fund me site tomorrow so we we are challenging those ways that that other centers aren't yeah it is a double-edged um sword here you're you have support and and resources at the university but you're not a non-profit and you can't you can't do some of the things that non-profits do i do uh understand a lot of the challenges you just mentioned all too well running davis media access myself um as we begin to to wind down to add to all of that the university has cut a big chunk of funding and i know from uh reading online about this that um that affects your your paid operations manager position which is essential for training volunteers so um i i understand it it is what it is that everyone has had impacts from covet and a decision was made so how do you plan to um chart a path forward from here apps and that funding i mentioned that puts a lot more uh of the fundraising onus on your plate directly it does um yeah it pretty much doubles the fundraising efforts that we need on an annual basis and i only have a single paid employee um excuse me so the that money was basically to pay the benefits and the salary of that individual and yes they do all the training of the volunteers but they also oversee all of the rehabilitative care of the birds and make sure that those birds uh get the care that they need and so um we do have an interim operations manager right now off of some funds that i had raised that i thought i was going to place in another place but they were general support funds so we're using those for this current year uh to be able to pay for an interim position but my goals and and what i've set up are an endowment for at least this position and if i can get this one in doubt then i'm going to try to get an education program manager position in doubt as well um an endowment meaning that the money generates interest enough that it pays for um whatever the need is for for that particular year every year in perpetuity and so you know but it takes quite a bit of money to be able to get enough interest to be able to pay the salary and benefits even for a single person so we're greatly appreciative to the davis community with the davis enterprise story a lot of people reached out to us and donated to us probably in numbers that they wouldn't have donated in the past to us and a lot of it went to the endowment a lot went to general funds and so the ones in general funds are going to help me get through this year but my goal is by our 50th anniversary is to be able to get this position in doubt i'll be fundraising for the medical and rehabilitative care probably for a long time that would be another great endowment to have but for right now my my biggest need is to be able to end out this one position and um we do have an endowment fund uh if you like to donate to us you can find us on facebook instagram and on our website and it will take you to it to show you the different ways that you could help us out all right we've got a graphic up too with your the url for your website which has recently changed and it is california raptor.org and i want to thank you for joining us today i've been speaking with dr michelle hawkins director of the uc davis raptor center i want to tell you um i appreciate your all the work that you do to protect these apex predators of the bird world especially in a heavily agricultural county such as yolo they are very very important to our overall ecosystem to our agricultural system we really can't get by without them so thank you for the work you do and thanks for joining us here today and to our viewers i'm really appreciate it to our viewers you can find many more interviews and programs like this by going to davismedia.org click on the dc tv stands for davis community television icon you can also subscribe to us at youtube at davis media access thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you next time in the studio