Isn't it great to be in the people's house? Thank you so much for coming. First, I just want to make note and recognize Paul can still work on flood recovery. Take more time than we have here to talk about just the detailed work that he did hours and hours right after the flood. But he was instrumental in creating the Montclair Strong Recovery Fund, which I'll talk about just briefly in a second. And Paul, of course, has spent a career as a facilitator doing projects like this, so perfectly situated to help lead us. And so I just want to see if we can all recognize and thank Paul for his work. The Montclair Foundation was created about 30 years ago to invest in capital projects that will improve the vitality of our community. The Foundation helped fund projects like the tennis courts, the bike path, our projects, most recently, the new Mount Bike Pass in the North Branch Park. And so our partnership now with Montclair Live is a new one. It brings the strength of both organizations together, our focus on brick and mortar projects with Montclair Live's focus on the business in the downtown vitality. It's been one that I think has been really helpful so far. Really, we came together to form the, as I mentioned, with Paul's leadership to form the Montclair Strong willingness of people to come together on projects. This, obviously, is much, much bigger than anything the community has faced in probably 100 years. I think if any place is able to come together to build on the fabric that we have with our citizens and our community engagement, this is it. And this is a testament to having all of you here to work on this tonight, so thank you for having me. The process initiated at City Council with the mayor, with the city government, saying there's a lot of discussion in the community on what's next and on the immediate crisis as well as on resilience. We need to bring this to a focus and with the approval of the city, they came and talked to me about framing the structure. I want to introduce Bill Frazier, the city manager of Montclair, to say we're welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. I don't have a lot to add other than thank you all for being here. Like John said, it's a fabulous community and the turnout here is really terrific. We can't do this without you. Also like to thank Montclair Foundation, Montclair Live for bringing the resources together to make this happen and for the fundraising efforts. It's really extraordinary. I think I've heard a very large number that they're up to all of them, say what that is, but I think they're doing really well on that front. Just the clarity for people, we as the city are here to listen to you tonight, to participate, all of our leadership team is here as they were on the last meeting. Could they just stand up quickly if you're a member of the city leadership team? So these are the folks. These people, we will be in all of your sessions as one person at each of your sessions, so we are here to help you. We're not here to tell you what your answers are. We're not here to tell you what you're doing wrong, but we want to hear from the public and we want to participate and come up with good solutions. So again, thanks to the organizers. Thanks to Paul, John stole my thunder on that one too, but that's okay. Let's give him another round of applause. Now I'd like to introduce Sarah Deffalese from Bailey Road on Main Street who's going to speak for her business, but also for Montpelier Line. I'm Tom Business Owner here in Montpelier. I own Bailey Road, which I opened when I was 26, 14 years ago, and I am so excited that I had just moved across the street and expanded a year ago. So it's very kind of refreshing in my mind how to re-put the store together as we're doing now. I'm also here as a huge fan of the Montpelier Foundation and Montpelier Alive, who they have just been a huge support for us businesses downtown. I was just talking to John Holler and he said that the foundation is currently at $1.6 million that they have raised for the goal of $2 million, which is absolutely incredible for business owners like myself where FEMA is not an option and we really don't want to take out more small business loans. It is a lifeline, these grants and the fundraising that they have done. I just wanted to speak to the feelings that I felt after the last meeting that we had and just such a support from this group. And I felt how everybody wanted a small businesses, our mom and pop shops to line our streets again. And just having and knowing that support is here in the community lets us continue our hard work day in and day out. I'm so grateful that everyone is here today to start thinking of resiliency and the big picture because a lot of my fellow business owners and I are still kind of in the trenches trying to get our doors open. So I'm grateful for all of you here. One thing I really want to press upon everyone is in order for us to come back, change needs to happen. And whatever comes out of these groups today, we're gonna have to be open to change because we want our streets back. We want to be vibrant. We want our doors to be open. We want our Sunday stroll to get our baked good, the bookstore, go to the toy store. We all want that back. But in order for that to happen, we have to be open to change. In the past, Montpelier has, the people have voted for a project. Let's just talk about quickly the big hotel and garage project that was put out a few years ago. The businesses were behind it, the voters voted for it and a small handful of people stopped it from going through. We need to be a full team in this rebuild and we need to accept the change that needs to happen. I see all the innovative ideas that come from this breakout session. I'm so excited to welcome everyone back into my shop once we can open our doors again. And thank you for being here. I think of the greatest disaster in Montpelier has faced in a hundred years. We're just beginning to face this tragedy. The tragedy it represents to those who are most hard hit, families and businesses in the downtown. It's not a day today for debate, politics, one-upmanship or making points or fighting for your corner. It's a day to think together. This building is a place that argues through issues, right? Today we're not gonna make the decisions that bind non-law. We're going to make the decisions on what we stand for together. We're gonna lay out in each of the working groups and this is a working session. We're not having another brainstorming session where the ideas just flow. We've taken those notes, the padlet, thoughts, every idea that we've seen in front porch form and we've tried to gather those ideas together into crystalline titles that we can start digging deeper. So this is about digging deeper, getting into what are the things that are practical that could be moved forward in these different issue areas? What are, let's build the big list. Well, let's also say in that list, what are the most important? What are the most impactful? What are the most unifying? What are the ones that are gonna make this a better place for the next generation of young Montpelier people? What are the ones within our power? And in that, we're gonna be able to come out with some key ideas in each of these working sessions that we'll bring back here to the podium at the end of the evening. And then the city, the nonprofits, the working committees of the community will have those ideas to look at, wrestle with them, see if some of them are in their boat house, in the work that they wanna do. And in others, what do we invent and how do we work together as a community to take power of those that need an extra push? So on the 7th, we'll be back here, September 7th, we'll be back in this building or somewhere else in the community. Maybe we could work in the high school where we can put things up on the wall. But we'll work that out, we'll let everybody know the next phase. So the steering committee that we pulled together, we're all walks of life from people in town. They come up with the idea of looking at emergency planning in the warning system that's currently in place. What do we need to do and how do we think forward about that for the future? What do we need to do and think about when we think about food systems and food security for the future? Not just agriculture, but what we do to feed people who are in poverty today. The idea of leadership, recovery and resilience, do our current structures work? Are there other needs that we need to address to be as cohesive and effective as we need to be? Both today in recovery, but also as we look at the resilience work that's essential in an age of climate change. Then financing recovery and resilience. How do we look at what dollars may be available? The money that's been raised by Montpelier Library, Montpelier Foundation is an incredible testament to how much people love this city. Over 2,000 people have made donations, but it's a drop in the bucket for the business loss that we've seen and the crisis that these businesses are going through today. Let's recognize that people are in a whole lot of different places in terms of their hierarchy of needs. Some of us able to philosophize and others who are looking at a very, very painful bottom line right now. And all of it is important. So we're gonna try to add some of that up today. We wanna talk about the riverine corridor. What is possible to do to make the river less dangerous to this community in the future? What is it possible for us to do to make our buildings and our downtown safer, knowing that there's going to be future events? Then what do we do today and into the future to support, protect our downtown? What do we need to do around city infrastructure? What are the needs? What is the, some potential next steps? And then long-term, what is our action? What's within our power as individuals, as families, as members of a community to do our part in the worldwide struggle that's gonna be necessary to defeat climate change? It's gonna take teamwork in each of these rooms. Please respect or facilitate it. We have resource people with expertise that we brought together in the room in that list is here with the longer list of topics. There's a room assigned for each group. You can look at that sheet and decide where you wanna go. You've got about an hour and 20 minutes in each room. In each room you're gonna take maybe 15 to 20 minutes to do a situation analysis. What's currently going on around this topic? What's our experience like around this topic? What do we need to understand together in this topic? Then we're gonna suspend a lot longer thinking what are the positive actions we could take that would be unifying and that are within our power as a community? And then finally, on those, we'll save them all. But on those, which are the most powerful and impactful and best leverage for our community strengths to move forward, okay? So this is a hard-working evening. We're gonna come out with a serious product of key ideas that this community stands for and wants to see move forward. And then those ideas will be digested. And on the seventh, we'll see where we can go with them. We'll have more on an action planning end of our board of directors. I have to read this evacuation notice. This is the one thing that the Sergeant and Arms think, let's have a round of applause for Sergeant and Arms. People's Council, there are people who protect it for everybody and they wanna make sure everything's done right. So please respect the place. But if there were a needed evacuation, I feel like a skirt is on this one.  And if you're on the left, you're gonna go the other side. If you're in other parts of the building and the fire alarm goes off, some fire doors will close. Please look at the exit signs. You can exit the fire escape at the end of the small hall to my right. But the exit signs should show you where to go. If you cannot do stairs from this chamber or other rooms, make your way to the elevator in the center of the building. Capital police will come to you. If you cannot get the elevator, the capital police will do a sweep of the building and help you. So hopefully we won't have to go through any of these exigences. And that's all I have to say. I hope everyone has got a copy of that sheet with the rooms listed. If you don't, I believe there's still something left and you'll wanna go to one of the rooms that will be working and we'll see you all back here any day. About the river corridor and flooding. So if you are not in the right place, this is a good time to move into the room. But if you are in the right place, I would ask that you come, can we come a little as close as we can? You know, people can move up because we only have, I'm gonna be running around with this microphone for people to talk and there's only one of me. So I'm sorry I can get us the better for that. I'm just gonna introduce myself briefly and we're gonna get into this. I'll do some level setting before we start. I'm Alyssa Sherron. So nice to be here with you all. My background is about 20 years in the environment and also in organizational leadership and management. I used to run the Department of Environmental Conservation for a number of years under the Governor Shulman. It's so happy to have some of our staff here. And we have such a good conversation to have tonight. We have some panelists who are here today who are, this isn't gonna be a formal panel. These are more resource experts. We're here to have a conversation. But we have, and I'll actually just let the resource experts introduce themselves to just like 30 seconds here. So you know who's in the room to answer questions. So I'm actually a new City of Montpelier resident. Just moved from East Montpelier. Interesting time to move here. I live, sorry, I work at the Nature Conservancy. Prior to that I worked at the state. You'll hear from my old colleague then a little bit. I've been working on flood resilience, nature-based solutions of figuring out how to mitigate. Yes, sorry, Lauren Oates, O-A-T-E-S. Thanks. Good evening, everyone. I'm Lesley, I'm UP and I'm a faculty member in the Department of Geography and Geosciences at UPM. And I'm also the Vermont State Climatologist. Nice to be here. I'm Greg Gossin, 40-year resident of Montpelier. I'm the planner and an architect with GBA Architects. We do community redevelopment, which basically means we do a lot of work in flood plains and brownfields. I'm Nitz Walker, I'm the Regional Flood Plain Manager for Vermont GEC and I work with communities in Orange County and Washington County around being flood resilient. Thank you so much. I think I got all the resource experts. So just to level-set before we start our conversation. For folks who were at the recent conversation up at the Vermont College of Fine Arts a couple of weeks ago, there was about 550 people involved, 300 in the room, 200 plus online. And that was a very open conversation. That was just sharing people's thoughts at that point. We took those ideas, narrowed them slightly into eight different groups, which are happening all around the building today. We talk, you know where you are, we've already talked about that. But what we're doing today is we are doing listening on the topic of the River Corridor and flooding and we will work to identify some of the areas where there's energy in this room to focus more attention on. So coming out of this conversation, we're going to identify the one, two or three top priorities that there might be energy around that then we will move into a working group to explore key questions. So I say that because we're not here to debate, we're not here to make decisions, we're literally here to just pose questions and state opinions and then see where there's energy in the group. There's gonna be about, I'm gonna ask that you allow me to facilitate, which means that each of us, there's a lot of people in this room, I'm gonna give about two minutes. You raise your hand, I'm gonna keep the mic and go like this, that's a tip someone gave me earlier. They were like, don't let go of the mic. So I'm gonna try that. I hope that doesn't feel impressive. And after the two minutes, we're gonna make sure I'll keep coming back to you. We should have enough time that we can keep coming around. We have, this is also open to the public. So I want you to know like it is literally streaming, people are videoing you and I just wanna make sure you're well aware that there are cameras in the room. So for the conversation. So the first 15 minutes of this, the key question is what is going on now around the subject of rivers and our flood plains that we should know to level set. So we're gonna start with a state of the state. I'm gonna take statements or questions. I'll go to our resource experts if we don't have any. The couple is that we have a number of old dams that are just stones and one failed during cabinet, and the other is that we have been perhaps a little bit lax like turning the rice field dam which was intended to be a containment dam. A third of its capacity is actually being used for recreation. So there are some kind of big picture things we could look at. Thank you. When folks speak, would you also mind saying your name and where you live? I'm sorry, I should have said that at the beginning. Sandy Fitzgerald Street. Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Paul Beaufort, I live in Worcester, also used to go on a business here in Montpelier as of a few weeks ago. I'm seeing the problem in two ways. One is in terms of water is volume and speed. I grew up in flat New Jersey and also Rivertown. It flooded regularly for years when I was a kid. Army Corps of Engineers came in and dredged the river and to the problem. I can't say that that would be a solution here. This is a mountainous place, we know that really well. I live up in the hills of Middlesex and Worcester and the water and probably a lot of you had the same experience. The water came down furiously fast and caused not just washout but avalanche. So I think the other piece is containing the speed of water and not relying solely on the catchment of the rice field reservoir. I'll stop there for a moment. In order to plan or have any ideas of what we ought to do, can the climatologists or the meteorologists at this point give us any useful or somewhat reliable projection of what we might expect in the next 20 years? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm Carol Bassard, living in Montpelier 35 years. Would a resource expert like to answer that? Oh, I forgot, she double-ed me. No, no, no, that's okay. So in terms of projections out to the future, we know that there are gonna be more heavy precipitation events. I think one of the challenges for a place like Montpelier or many places in Vermont along the spine of the Green Mountains is it could rain four, five, six, seven, eight inches and it's not just the amount of rain that falls but was it wet or dry before, right? And where did it fall? Did it fall in the headwaters? Did it fall in the valleys? Did it fall in the urban catchment? So all of those pieces have to be part of the answer to the question and not just how much rainfall itself because it was almost like a perfect storm here in Montpelier, right? You had pretty much every kind of rain that fell in an urban area that's channelized like this and so it was like everything had just came together perfectly, unfortunately. I am Phil Dodd, I'd like to endorse the idea of looking at removing some of these old dams. We have one at the Shaw's, we have one up at the bike pathways. I know it takes time and money and permits but from what I've read they don't help things. One other thing, we obviously need more room for the river to spread out, we need more flood plain. And the last thing I'd say is I'd like to see us bringing some hydrology experts to tell us what's really wrong with the whole system. Can anything be done? Can dam be added anywhere? What's the status of things? Yeah, I'm hearing a couple questions about either removing or adding dams or judging or a couple different points that are coming up about a rainfall. Yeah, flood plains are really helpful to us and we're not alone, we're part of a watershed, we're part of a whole place with many communities and so having a place for the water to go is really important. So protecting flood plain functions and the room needed by the river is really critical before the water shows up in town. And then in the city it's really hard to build some more capacity to handle the water but it's still possible. We can set back some of the channelization, we can make some room. Even this morning I saw a place where the railroad had shut off a whole section of flood plain that no longer functions for the city. So there's places we can explore to try to build more flood capacity to mitigate the depth and the impact and the arrival of the water in the city. But we can't change the planet by ourselves. So in the context of climate change and moisture we can anticipate a lot of water calling. Okay. I'm sorry, I need to land, I live in Montpelier. I just want, I really appreciate the thoughts of thinking about the water, accepting the water in a manner that causes less damage further up the watershed and the way that we would need to all work together. I just want to reinforce the need to work across disciplines about how do we have less impervious surface? How do we think about what to plant in different places? How do we keep all of the different elements of the state working together? Thank you. I've got a ribbon and I'll come over. Corby Griffin, Liberty Street, Montpelier. I'm just curious. It seems to me that what we're really needing and looking for is a combination of things. For me it seems like dredging might be an issue, might be a positive, but I'm wondering if we can build up, if it's feasible to build up walls along the North Grant, especially. I don't know if that's feasible, but if it is, would that, you know, how high would they have to be? Would they really be a serious mitigation or not? I'm going to come to a resource person about that in just a minute, so think about that resource people. John Snell, been in the city for 45 years. Vegetation along the rivers is a lot less than it used to be. And many of the areas along the rivers are now plowed fields. We really need to increase the permeability of all of the river areas. This one had a lot of water in it, this storm. I would be interested while we're close to what happened to really document it carefully, how high did the water come up, where didn't it go? I know it won't be necessarily the same next time, but I think understanding what happened down to the inch is important. Thank you. I'll show you this. Everybody's seeing this. When all water comes in the downtown section of the river and goes out, it's gonna flood. So the water has to be able to go out on the river, pass something like this, which is, you know, where this is behind motor vehicles.  It's gonna make it easier and have less rain to actually flood us. And we have things like this. It's my opinion that this should have been removed from the Wynn School River the first week. I have a lot more information, but this is what I'm saying. The basic idea is, the dam I've been up there, and I've got all kinds of pictures of the dam, is working properly right now. As long as it's working properly, you can't ask that dam to do more than it's doing right now. So if for that end, I don't know what you can do, but what you gotta do is be able to smooth it, smooth the way out so that water can get out quicker and we can prevent as much as I have right now. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Bill Day, and I live in a pie in the apartment, which is in the flood zone. And I have pictures I took all of that place that happened. And there's 60 people living where I live, and there's 40 people that the Montpere Housing Authority has in the land shops. That's at least 100 people. There's a whole lot more that will be without a home. If this, things like this come to correct. Thank you. Hi, my name is Carlo Albedo, I'm a positive pie. I'm downtown State Street, I'm from Plainfield. So I've been here since 2005 downtown and I've been through four floods now. And I say that because we use our basement for prep kitchens, offices, whatnot. And we've had eight feet of water, three feet, five feet, two feet in all those floods. And so I just feel like I've been spending a lot of time observing and dealing with water in my restaurant.  So what I keep noticing is the problem I see is that it comes up in the back parking lot of positive pie and on the Julio side it comes up there, rises up, goes around the front of Julio, starts to flood all the State Street and starts to take over the whole town from there. I also noticed that during this flood, places like Sarducci's and the Gin Shop, all those were fine, they were still capacity left in the main river. So I too had an idea, why don't we build a giant concrete funnel that funnels the North Branch into coming into the city and then a concrete tube that runs all the way out to the Winooski and we build a park on top, I don't know. But just somehow contain it. So that water coming down through the city, if it has to be 50 feet deep, it has to be 50 feet deep. But make it so that water cannot come out of that tube until it gets out to the main river. And I realized it's a multifaceted solution. Probably the dam's flood plain's gotta be figured out. But that's an observation I had and I just wanted to throw that out there as an idea. Thank you so much. That's okay. Hi everybody, my name is Gil Johnson. I live in Ismaquilio, but I live in the same river corridor as everyone else in this room. And I got flooded out of my apartment because I live 40 feet from the Winooski. This is a really multifaceted problem and it doesn't just involve Montpelier, East Montpelier. It involves everyone who won the corridor of us and what we do and I think we're gonna have to work with other towns. Yes, we've got to slow down the spew of that river. We really have to slow it down, at which it can be done in many different ways. I am not an expert. My background is I'm a naturalist. One of the ways I think we can slow it down is to make more wetlands upriver and we can have an animal help us do that, beavers. Have any of you ever read this beaver land book? It goes into this. She, Layla Phillips says, our rivers looked a lot different years ago when the Native Americans were here and no other groups were here. Native Americans generally channel rivers a lot to my knowledge. I don't know for sure on that, but I know beavers did and beavers do today. And I actually run a small wildlife refuge up north. It's called the Johnson Wildlife Refuge. It's named after my father, not me, a father's side of the family. And there are beavers there, it's mostly wetland and when I go in there, I'm amazed how complicated they make that flood plain next to the Clyde River. There's pools of water, there's little dams. It changes every year it seems. There, they do so much. They help the access to the flood plain for the river. And you don't have, we have to pay to move them, but once they're established, and sometimes you have to make it comfortable for them with the right plans and what it is. But once they're established, they do it. They know what to do. And they provide that conductivity from the river to the flood plain and they make the water spread. And it's a natural thing and our rivers are much more like that. Now they're more like channels because we've taken at least some of the wetlands. And we need to bring it back more to what a river really is. And we have to find out about that. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Pat Hinkley. I live on Redstone Ave. My wish is that we could ask help from the people who have worked with water for hundreds of years, the Dutch people. They have lots and lots of engineers and smart people who are figuring it out. That's it. Thank you. I am Sarah Norton. I am in the flood plain, but in Marshfield. And I'm really interested in what the last couple of speakers were saying about the flood plains and developing the flood plains. And I would love to hear from the flood plain expert how you are, if you're mapping the areas where you're talking about increasing the space for the river to spread out in as people are saying. And I would love to hear about where those places are in your thoughts. Thank you. I'm gonna do a couple more people over here and then I'm coming back to the resource experts and then I'll do another loop around. Hi, I'm Eve Jacobs-Carnahan. I live in Montpelier. So I have a two part question again, kind of for the experts. And one is, is there some mapping that can tell us where the flood plains are in Montpelier itself that could absorb more water? And if those places have buildings, can we look at the feasibility of somehow changing them in some way to allow them to absorb more water? So that's the first part. The other part is, what about the other parts of the river either upstream or downstream and can there be... So what do we need to do to either talk to those other communities or have a statewide effort because Montpelier itself can't directly affect the expansion of the river in the upstream or downstream communities? So what do we need to do to turn that into a larger effort that's effective that we can help convince people that it's to everybody's benefit to allow the river to expand in both of those places? Thank you. I'm hearing a real theme of how do we get this water away from here and what are the key strategies? Are they natural? Are they wetlands? Are they changing the property? Are they channeling? Are they damning? Like we have a lot of questions. Hi, my name is James Ray. I live on College Street. I'm gonna put another point on those same comments which is essentially, at the request of the experts, I think it's really sort of after this meeting and for the folks organizing these meetings, the city government, the state government to make accessible and easy to easy accessible and easy to understand way, the maps that I'm sure already exists, which is when one of the experts spoke, where did that rain come from when it fell and it comes into the city? So that as everyone here and everyone who's thinking about how can we handle the vegetation, the permeable surfaces, the flood plains, that people have a good sense of what are we talking about here? Are we, which cities, which counties, where, sorry, where are the problems happening so that we can all be thinking as productively as possible towards where the solutions need to go? Yeah, where's the most strategic place to do this? Yeah. I'm asking for like graphic visualizations that would be widely, and as someone who's set my life in communicating science, I would emphasize widely accessible to the lay people and understandable to the lay people and clear. Yeah, and we are gonna take these ideas and actually do that. I think that's the next step. Like how do you then get more granular and tactical people? Hey, I'm Steve Inchin. I live on 12 up north of the ball fields and all that towards Worcester, I guess, below the dam. And I'm on the, on Grout Road, which is where the, some of you might notice there's a temporary bridge where they're rebuilding, and we're close enough to the dam, we were fine, right?  And I, knowing that part of the North Branch, and I know the North Branch was not, you know, the whole problem here by any means, but there's still a lot of the Army Corps dredging. The Army Corps is left with a lot of mess behind in terms of the walls of the river are still like levies, right? In some areas, especially as you go up further, and there's a lot of land along that river, above and below the dam that is not being used for, let's say corn, it's mostly being used for hay. And in some ways it's a reservoir, but it didn't get used too much. And I think that part of that may be the way those banks have been controlled and rebuilt. And then I was thinking about the way we use current use. And we ask, you know, we value through incentives, farmers to use the land for agriculture. And there's no reason we couldn't apply that same kind of economic system to allowing those fields to be built in a way or kind of reclaimed in a way that they could be used for water storage during peak events through, in the same way we use agriculture, we do that with agricultural land now.  But if that was compensated along through the years, through using a current use type of system, that could be something people had opt into to allow their fields to be built that way, basically. No, that's all. Okay, I'm doing two more, and then I'm gonna come over here to the resource folks and then Loverty. Hi, I'm Michelle Hill. I grew up in Montpelier, but I currently live in Worcester. I wanna echo what others have said about how it's a regional issue, it's a watershed issue. My husband is a weather forecaster and five days ahead, he said, oh, wow, Montpelier's gonna get five inches of rain. Might have ended up being more than that, but. But I wonder if, with that kind of lead time, that if it's possible to let water out of the right-spill dam in advance of the weather. And then also, I know my front lawn, even though I'm at 1,400 feet, my front lawn is still a wetland, and it just occurs to me that there might be things that we can do in the rural areas, maybe as provide catch basins in addition to right along the river flood plains. Hi, I'm Lauren Parker. I've lived in Montpelier since 1988 and my own the North Branch Cafe. Sadly on the North Branch. We do also use our basement for refrigeration and freezing and supplies and have no space to not use that. We had about 12 feet of water for 24 hours in the basement, but it never made it into a cafe, so we are open. As we watch the North Branch at our windows, we judge how it rises and falls and that helps us to figure out what do we have to worry about. And we were talking about every flood we've experienced from 92 on has found its route down Elm Street and Main Street. And so in addition to working with the flood plains north of Montpelier and also in Montpelier, if we could look at ways to direct the water under the road instead of over the road and into the businesses, that's the thought that we had. Okay, resource experts, how are you, what are your reactions to this? Anyone? You want to hold it? All right. Ned, you can fact check me. All right, I wrote down while I'm taking notes too, so I'm hoping I'm capturing everything accurately. Yeah, can we give Lauren a round of applause for taking notes for us? Because I strung this on her two seconds before this and she's going to real champ about it and she's going to at the end hopefully be able to tell us our top deems that are coming out. Just kidding. I'll try to do that once I look at her note. That was sprung upon me in this moment. Okay, so a couple of themes that the other experts will be able to answer too. I'll try to cover a few of them. A couple of discrepancies between whether or not we speed the river up or slow the river down. All of the science that we have to date, all of the lessons learned from Tropical Storm Irene are that we need to slow our rivers down. They are moving too quickly off of our land too unnaturally that it is causing these highly erosive, very, very strong river flows creating significant damage. We have a tendency to want to move water off of our properties as quickly as possible. That's like human nature. I was like, oh, we're flooding, like get it off of my property. But that actually causes a great deal of water going downstream. A former colleague of ours, Medin9, always said, we all live downstream, our upstream neighbor's decisions. And so we really need to look at those areas for floodplain restoration. We have dams, Wrightsville performed exceptionally well. It did its job for the city of Montpelier, but there was just so much water. It only could hold so much back. We need to look for those areas that create wetlands, create floodplains all the way up into our headwaters, our forests to catch that water before it comes down to our river valleys. Those areas exist in the state. We have a couple of really strong examples. Middlebury effectively was spared from Irene because of the floodplain restoration and SWAT work they did on the Otter Creek. Brattleboro has invested significant funding and work on the Whitestone Brook in the city limits to actually spare it from downtown flooding. We have those opportunities in Montpelier and in our neighboring communities. And we need to kind of look at the watershed scale, the reach of the where we have opportunities for down and upstream restoration. I was gonna come back to you again. I do. So first of all, say hi to water for me. And the other two things I wanted to really highlight, it was listening to I think the last of the comments with if the same place keeps flooding and it's going below the ground, it makes me think of places in Burlington where that happens because there used to be a ravine that flowed through the city. And once you identify where the lowest point is on the landscape, even if it doesn't look like the lowest point today, it will always continue to find that. And so I really wanna echo James, your comment about that mapping and visualization because once you see a 3D of what it looks like from headwaters to wherever we end up, that will give us a sense of where the water will naturally flow regardless of where the buildings are from a topographic perspective. So hardly echo that. I'm gonna basically echo a lot of what's being said. We need to let our rivers breathe. And that is a larger question or problem than just not clear. But that being said, that's land use policy and land use kind of, egg land use policy. Looking for the Dutch, I think it's good. That was a great suggestion because the Dutch have been living with this for years. They have retooled their entire agricultural industry around flood plain agriculture. So they forgot that. Now, if you get into Montpellier, but our title of town, there still are some opportunities for us to treat our flood plain properties better than we have that. And I think we should start instituting flood plain issue policies towards development and saving our flood plain properties. This community, we've got a lot of them on the North branch. We've got a few of them only on the runuski, but there's still some significant properties that we can do some better jobs with. I wanna recognize that I said we were gonna do 15 minutes on the state of the state and then move into talking about solutions. We are doing both of those things, which is totally fine. I just wanna recognize that we're looking at also short-term and long-term solutions in this conversation. Yeah, there's been lots of great discussion, lots of great ideas. And one of the basic things that the state strategy has around flood resilience is to try to protect the functioning of flood plains and rivers where they still exist. So leaving room for the rivers to adjust laterally slows them down and allows them not to become too deep and to be able to flood in many smaller places before it all piles up in the village or in the city. So that's the best thing we have working for us. When we create walls and block it in, we end up pushing the water on our neighbor. And that's the problem because we're all in a watershed, we're all here together. So we're trying to take the walls down. We're hearing a little bit about the berms that have been created. That's a project that is splendid. A lot of groups like Friends of the Winooski go through and take those berms down, point them out and we can pick away at them, get more money at it, they go away faster. One of the biggest berms we have around are the railroads. The railroads, when they came in, were all set up to follow a nice, straight, flat path and block the river in and make it straight and too fast. And we're still suffering from that. That's a big issue all the way down to Stevens, all the way down to Dog, all the way down to Winooski, down to White. And again, that's a big issue. A lot of times they don't have culverts, they lost flood plain function. A much harder process to get the railroads to talk to us, but that's a place where we can gain some flood plain access and help out a little bit. Other places, I just walk the top of my head, I used to live in Dayton, Ohio, which is a flood prone city on the Miami River and they eventually, after having put up multiple huge dams to control the flood problems, they also started removing big sections of downtown and creating space, recreational space to walk by the river that looks like it can be and there's a little bit and create capacity even in the urban environment, massively expensive and usually only after tremendous tragedy. My name is Kasia Rangio, I'm one of the co-directors of Vermont River Conservancy and also live here in town off of Elm Street. I wanna welcome you all to the historic banks of the North Branch of the Winooski if we were to all stand up from a step. You see the river flowing across the Capitol Lawn. That is the historic path before we took the river and said, no, we would prefer that it went in this dredged channel that goes straight through town, not here and so that's one of the big things that we've done in the past, to dredge and wall off and straighten our rivers and it hasn't really worked. I want everyone to know that we are in the process of looking into the feasibility of removing four dams here in Montpelier. We've been working with the city on this for several years. We have feasibility funding, the RFP for choosing an engineering firm is out. They're going to be studying the value, how to take these dams out if it's possible. I want everyone to know that that's in process right now and we'll have those feasibility study results probably in the next year or so it will take to determine a path forward for those dams but I think that's an exciting step forward. My organization restores flood plains. Tomorrow in the city of Brattleboro, there are going to be dump trucks on site for 12 acres along the West Stone Brook. It's an area that didn't flood during Irene, like you all have been talking about areas that should have flooded and didn't and we're gonna be hauling out 200 years of industrial fill and restoring that flood plain and wet land right in the heart of Brattleboro and giving the city a park downtown. That's the kind of project that I think we can do here in Montpelier as well and we need to be looking both upstream and downstream of our cities. When we rest at wetlands are a huge piece of the puzzle. We, my organization Vermont River Conservancy, we hold easements upstream and downstream of town. A landowner sent us photos of her easement in Worcester and those beautiful wetlands the day of the flood and she looks upstream and it was a raging, raging fast, gentleized river where the road was closed because it was too fast and jeopardizing the road and she turned her body 180 degrees and the river across her easements stopped. The water turned into a lake. You could have a hair and fishing there. It stopped the river and then it's channelized again and it goes super fast and to continue on. But when we do those kinds of projects both upstream and downstream and look beyond or within our borders and beyond our borders, we can actually slow the river and it's the natural function and restoring the natural processes that can do that. So thank you. What she was saying, I wanted, I think we have to look at, because we are a mountainous, silly area, we have to look at what's happening down because the water always goes to the lowest point and so we have to do things up high too, to build ponds and things to slow it down before it even hits the river. Kind of like what you were talking about but even higher off of the river, right where the river is. My name's Barb and I'm Barb Alford, I live on Barrett Street for 18 years. I'm Jill, I live in Montpelier on Redstone and I'm just curious about what is going to come, I guess probably moving fast forward in a little bit but what so many brilliant people here, like how are these engineers and river people and climatologists and environmental engineers going to, is there a way to come together and come up with a comprehensive plan and suggestions for, then we can look at it and say, oh, that makes sense. I mean, I think it's great to get all of our input but I know for me I'm not smart enough to figure this stuff out and I wanna see a comprehensive plan from the experts and just I don't know how that's gonna happen if there's a plan for it. I think that's actually the next step so the vision here is that the next meeting would be with the experts who ahead of time considered the questions that we put forward and came with some suggestions, like these are the top five most strategic areas, you should have wetlands or buyouts to slow the river down or things like that. Thank you. I wanted to pick up again, Barb, a couple chairs down for me and others in the room have talked about the upper part of the watershed, that's where I live and the thing and bless the towns is because they're working so rigorously and furiously to build back these ditches and culverts but it's all rocketing in a downhill, linear high speed direction and the thing that's missing are these diversions too and I don't know the hydrological terminology but some kind of catchment ponds that would divert water and hold it at much higher altitudes, 500 feet to 1,000 feet, 1,500 feet above the river plain. So I just wanted to respond to Jill for a sec and I think meetings like this are the most important for us as scientists because if you live this and walk this then you are the expert and so it's science meeting experience and lived experience and so when I watched the stream two weeks ago I was just blown away. I was just furiously typing everything that everybody was saying. I think I got up to like 10 pages and there were another 21 pages on the padlock itself which just blows me away because it's all of the lived experiences and all of the observations that are so critical and so I just wanted to lift up all of the things that are being said not just here tonight but was said two weeks ago because those are what are going to help us to move forward tonight. Hi, my name is Diane and today I set up off Terrace Street and I just want to reiterate what other people have already been saying that we need to be talking not just about the riverine corridor but the Wynuski River basin as a whole. I live off of Terrace Street here in Montpelier. There's a brook in my backyard that on July 10th overflowed the banks, overflowed the culvert, covered the yard. This was happening, I don't know how many dozens and dozens brooks all over the watershed and that's where obviously the water starts and that's where we need to start. Just wanted to address your question which is a great one because this is a complicated subject that's going to take decades to deal with. Luckily tonight, one of the categories somewhere in the state house is just talking about that very thing. What body, what kind of leadership do we need to take all of these disparate ideas and bring them together and actually come up with an action plan? So what they come up with tonight should be pretty interesting. All right, coming back here. Yeah, I'm Tim Murray, I live in Montpelier for most of my life and a lot of great ideas but I also think you just mentioned decades, right? I don't think our city has decades so I don't know what the answer is but all of our great businesses in town is going to happen next year, right? So I'm sure we can't do all this stuff in a year, I'm sure but I think we do have to get really organized and have leadership on the community to work with the state government, the federal government to really start looking at this. We're going to do a lot more watersheds. These are all watersheds that aren't in Montpelier. We don't have enough watersheds in Montpelier to stop the Moose River from flooding. So how do we coordinate that? How is that possible to create watersheds in Worcester or in Morrisdale or wherever, right? So that's pretty complicated but I do think we have to be very focused and try and move things forward more quickly than we have. I'm not sure historically what happened after Irene and I'm sure we, I don't remember having this much energy and community and this much discussion but and I'm not really sure what we did. Watersheds and how much we got in place in 10 years but it wasn't enough obviously, right? So I think we should be looking in a shorter window to try and move everything forward. Are there things that we can do in short term? What are the short term solutions to? Hi, I'm Thomas Weiss. I live in Montpelier and I've done hydrology work and one of my observations is that the flooding on the North Branch is caused by the Winnuskie. The Winnuskie rises so high that the water in the North Branch backs up beyond the Spring Street Bridge and so what little water is coming down the North Branch which is only about 10% of what's in the Winnuskie at that point has nowhere to go other than Elm Street and Main Street as well as its River Channel. And so I'm thinking that it don't ignore what's going on in the North Branch Basin but that in order to really reduce flood levels in Montpelier we have to work upshad in the entire Winnuskie River Basin and not the North Branch Basin in the shorter term. Hi, my name is Lynn Wilde and I live in Montpelier over on School on St. Paul Street and our house was one of the very few houses on St. Paul Street that did not take on three to five feet of water in our basement and it was because of a number of reasons. One, we have a giant cottonwood tree in our yard and it fields about 200 gallons of water a day. It's surrounded by hazelberts which are taking up more water. The soil is healthy soil, it is mulched, it has got deep rooted plants in it that also take up water and the soil has become a soil water sponge. The neighbors that we have were amazing. They put sandbags by the driveway to divert the water from Loomis Street away from the back of our house. We have downspouts that direct water to the street and we have a sub pump that could not keep up with all of the water coming in till our neighbors put in the sandbags in the back but all of those things were required to keep our basement dry and it did. So what I would like to highlight are two things. We need to look at the plants on the ground that we have around the flood plains and around our homes. We need to plant plants that take up water and that can hold the soil in place and that can make the soil healthier. The second thing we need to do is have a healthy soil and we can have soil that has roots one or two feet down and it doesn't take 10, 15, 20 years to create healthy soil. This is being done all around the country right now and there are experts here in Vermont who can help us with this. So I just wanna say our neighborhoods can also be flood plains and recharge zones. We just have to look at our grasses and lawns a little differently. I just wanna point out those are some short term ideas right there. Some more green spaces, some more plantings, deeper roots, those are some shorter term. Hi, my name is Chris Piatik. I also live on St. Paul Street. In addition to the up-water shed improvement of flood plains and riparian habitat, I'm also very interested in increasing our riparian habitat through downtown Montpelier. One of the questions that I have is about the choke point when we get to the confluence of the North Branch and the Lewinowski. And so I'm curious how much upstream improvement of habitat would help if nothing is done about that choke point. Another question that I have is about if there's any engineering benefit, I know there's a wildlife habitat benefit to a bottom release dam for keeping water temperatures cool at a consistent, a fairly consistent temperature year round. I'm wondering if there's any flood mitigation benefit to that as well. We could look at comparisons on how the Waterbury Dam and Waterbury Reservoir did during this most recent event versus how the Wrightsville Dam did during this event when it came, I guess, within a foot of going into this bill light. Yeah, I just had a thought occur to me. I really like the idea of flipping plain improvement. But I'm also, as the gentleman over there was concerned about, I'm also concerned about short term immediate, how can we make sure if this kind of rain happens again next year. And I'm wondering, I know we don't want, I get it, it makes sense to me now that dredging or building walls is probably not the best way to go. But I'm wondering if we actually lowered not main street, but state street and used the actual street as an avenue for water to go with that actually held in the form of a flood. Interesting question. Hello, Donald DeVile, won't be a resident. I just wanted to throw out a more long term thinking idea because this is not a short term thing. And it's not to suggest a lot of the other ideas aren't also important, but I want to suggest that given where, given how climate in the Northeast has already shifted and what the projections are telling us moving forward, I think we need to be able to come to terms with the reality that we are probably not going to be able to stop flooding categorically. So what does that mean? Well, I think it means that again, we turn to other examples like the Dutch who've been mentioned here a couple of times. And I think a lot of people know the Netherlands as this country with this long history of being able to keep water out. But what maybe isn't as well understood is what the Dutch have been doing more recently. And in many cases, they've been giving some of the land back to water, even though it's one of the most densely populated countries in the world, lowline, their projections are telling them that they cannot keep the water out in some places. And so what they're doing is they're moving through zoning and things like this to these long-term strategy of saying to people, you can live here, but understand you are periodically going to get flooded out. So you have to learn to live here in a way that it doesn't devastate you when that happens. This is not an easy thing to do. I think it's a really big long-term change, but I feel that we might benefit from adopting some of that mentality here as well. Coming over. My name is Bob Robertson, formerly of Deerfield. I found a solution about 10 years ago. I bought an old seal boat in the Keys and lived there in the winter and an old seal boat up here in the summer and lived up here. Now I'm here permanently. I'm going to be building a small tiny house in Montpelier, looking for a site to put that. But I'm listening to a lot of things here. One of the main things you're going to come up with is make sure that we have a good relationship with all these agencies that we're working with, particularly the Corps of Engineers. And they're the ones that have the deep pockets and are able to pull together this thing. They've been doing this all over the community, all over the country. And I've got some further information that I'll be sharing with you later. Leah and I live on Hort Street in Nampang, Montpelier. And I just wanted to add the name of the program in the Netherlands that's been going on for the past decade. Plus, it's called Room for Rivers. So if you want to look it up, please do. And I'll just read a little bit here. The main goal of the program was to manage higher water levels in rivers by lowering the levels of flood plains, creating water buffers, relocating levees, increasing the depth of side channels, and the construction of flood bypasses. And they have videos and text that just great content for all of us to educate ourselves on. Thank you. Here you come. You're doing a great job. Yeah, I'm Elizabeth Courtney. I live on Clarendon Avenue, where it's high and dry, but there's still a lot of rot going on in the plant life all over the city. I'm sure you've noticed. What's occurring to me in this discussion tonight, and it's great, there's a lot of good information coming in, I think Jill expressed an interest that I'm interested in too, which is long range planning. All these good ideas are going to cost something. And we need to figure out a way to sell what it is we're doing before we do it. After we do it and while we do it. And what's occurring to me is that we sell, Vermont is very good at selling ski areas, recreation, biking. Inviting tourism is high on the list of areas where we make a profit. So I think while we're doing this work, we should, I think how we're going to package it. How are we going to document what our process is right now because I think there are many people who would be very interested in knowing what we're doing, who are having similar problems or even very different problems, but problems nonetheless, with the rapidly changing climate. So I look to places like the, yes, the New York City dilemma of what do we do with the High Line? And that was a resource, which was a built resource, not a natural resource that was threatening the city, but the city took that problem and treated it as an economic problem at needing an economic solution. So while we're looking at nature as part of the solution let's look at the economics at the same time so that we can pay for the good work that we're about to do. Thank you, come down here. And at eight o'clock I'm going to start summarizing, attempting to summarize a couple themes that are coming out of this conversation because we have one, two or three themes. We can share back with the big group and I feel like it's going to be a bit of a challenge. So start thinking about the themes you're hearing too. Vora Jonas, Loomis Street, and I guess you didn't know that. Okay, so what I was thinking is that we need to think about impervious surfaces and where they are and which ones we can get rid of and that we might have to do that through zoning with our landlords, some sort of a financial incentive to get people to be willing to remove parking lots, possibly laws, depending on what the rules or laws are in the state. And that could be a short-term solution too, removing a parking lot or two and making it a green space. Our climatologists here brought up the perfect storm situation that helped produce this flood of two weeks of water rain that left all the ground saturated so the ground itself couldn't absorb the water as a result, there were 74 landslides in Vermont. And this, I don't know, and the question is, do we need to do something? There was an article saying we need to reduce the speed of all the streams in the mountains. And I'm wondering whether we also need to do anything with the vegetation to allow it to have more water absorption properties than what is normally in our forest now? Tom Stearns, State Street. This question of the river as our adversary is something that really strikes me as a sad perspective. This whole valley was made by this river. The farmlands that have been feeding people here for a long time have been fertilized by this river. As much as we can not be limited by the imagination of the people who have built and designed this place with eyes closed to the truth of the river, we don't wanna be limited by those mistakes. And so thinking creatively about how this amazing creature that we live with is an asset to this town an asset to this community. And in the face of climate change where much of the world is burning and is drying, how incredible that we have clean, mostly clean water coming down from the sky. And how can we use this as an asset to build, attract, and model how to finally live with this place that we love so much? We've gotten into this mess by not listening enough. So I hope we can listen. I'm Howard Michelson, I live on Sunset well above the flood plain, fortunately for me. For weeks, as people have said, the water was coming down in the ground. Everywhere that I walked was saturated. I couldn't keep my feet dry. When we had this massive rain event, of course having areas to absorb more water would be helpful, but in my mind, the reality is that we're only gonna get wetter, at least that's what we're being told. And so the water is gonna come. And it doesn't matter how many different ways we try to mitigate it, that we're in a valley here and it's gonna flood. And so I think the long-term solution, there's plenty of things to try to do in the short term but I think the long-term solution is we have to figure out how to deal with downtown flooding and whether that, I mean, the unimaginable of moving the downtown is always talked about. But if there's ways that we can learn from other places for dealing with flooding and maintaining the business district in the same place, it seems like that has to be the long-term solution at least in my mind. James Ray, I wonder if the landowners, the farmers and, sorry, the farmers and landowners who are throughout the watershed, we've been talking about slowing the rivers down and the work the Vermont River Conservancy's doing. I wonder if there's an opportunity going forward to say you have a tremendous service to offer and you should be compensated for that service. And that service is will you landowner, will you farmer, work with the experts at hand to allow a certain part of your land to flood when nature wants it to? Recognizing then that we as a state will say thank you for this service and we will pay you for this service so that when you have a farmer who loses his or her crop, they're not losing a crop, they're actually gaining an income from providing the rest of the state an incredible service of a field that's absorbing water or a landowner who has woods to offer to this service. I know it's, this melds with the finance committee next door but I think there might be some answers there. That the water the rivers, honor landowners, slow the water down and recognizes a resource to be offered. Thank you. I am going to go back. Okay, you want to clap? I think clap, clap. A lot of participation, I appreciate everyone's perspective, thank you. We're going to, I'm going to read back given the time some of the themes that came out of today. All right, well some of the things that I, well first up Lauren, thank you for taking notes for us. Really appreciate you. So some of the things this is going to be really hard to do in that way. Okay, so some of the things that I was hearing as I was walking around is how do we slow the water down through giving the river some room to move both upstream and downstream so that we're not experiencing that same flooding. And we can do incentives or we could do plantings in the short term but, or we could create wetlands and pulling up parking lots. But it's all about like slowing that water down in a way that it's not going to overtake the town. That's one primary thing. I'm also hearing a lot of engineering questions about when engineering either removing or adding dams or different engineering steps would be helpful here. Heard a lot about it, you know, a lot of those questions particularly early on. Those might feel intention actually, those two topics but those, that is the tension in the conversation. There are other things that we're really popping up for people that you heard many, many people say. I like to say that we heard people saying I want to, I want to see the data but some of us, like lots of people in the room know their Angelo and there's really rich data out there. There's the A&R river corridors, there's vitrins work on resilience planning and repeat damage, there's municipal, there's a lot of stuff out there that's not, maybe not visible enough or hooked together enough. It doesn't have to all be in one place so much as I think we need to improve our communication. And I think that's a short-term step. We should be thinking about how we communicate with each other about these great programs that exists, about the data that exists, that this doesn't have to be quite as intimidating as it might sound because there is so much data and science and plans underway already. But maybe we could in the short-term figure out how to communicate that. Yeah, so we have an engineering, we have slowing the rivers down and we had a lot about show us the data so that we're doing the right and the strategic thing. I'm gonna come here, I'm gonna come back there and see if there are other people that have themes. Do we have your hand up too? Oh, you want that, yeah, no. Thank you so much, okay. A theme that I haven't heard a lot tonight, I think Ned touched on that briefly, but I think I've heard lingering in the community that I wanna bring into this is that as we envision the future of our river, this opportunity to re-envision our green space along the river and parks, I think that's, we haven't heard that a lot that tonight, but I think it's in the community and I think it speaks to what you said about our relationship with our river to reconnect and embrace our identity as a town and as a space, as a river town. And so I think that's a really big opportunity that is maybe not something that we've heard a lot, but I think it's really important and it's lingering within the community. I wanna make sure that gets into this space. Yeah, and we just captured that in the notes. And these notes are going to be synthesized and made public and looked at by the experts. Three things that I'm hearing are to understand the climate, the river system and the flooding. What would happen in flooding? Number two is to slow the flow, both short-term and long-term solutions. And then to look elsewhere and see what others have done that has been successful that we can learn from or mimic. Thank you. That's a great point about learning from others that I wasn't capturing in the thieves. Yeah. Lauren, I'm gonna love the ending of these notes or maybe we're captioning those top things. Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot about the upper reaches of the watershed to the wetlands that aren't in the flood plain but are far up our forests and pervious surfaces in towns far away. And I think kind of like married to that, the needs for I think really thinking watershed wide regional wide from the top of the watershed all the way down. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna tackle people who we haven't heard from. Hi, I'm Harry Cambo and I've lived here all my life. And one of the things that I think we have an opportunity to do here is we've got a lot of stuff that's already been developed from an engineering and scientific standpoint. We have studies that are underway six weeks ago or just maybe disjointed or maybe had a specific purpose. And maybe one of the things that we can do is to take the engineers or the engineers whoever those people are and saying, okay, so what have we got going on now? What information have we already developed? How do we use this event to flesh out scopes that we wish we could have done when we started a non-going study that we have going now so that we get a comprehensive list of data and choices or alternatives and future studies that we can then put to work. Thank you. I'm gonna go here and back there. You're gonna close this out and we're gonna take a breather because everyone is gonna be coming back into this room. My name's Eric Ogurg, I'm North Franklin. I had a few ideas. I heard about the railroad berms. Well, they could be perforated in places so that water could spread onto the other side of them. Could reservoirs be kept at lower levels so that when they start to fill they can slow the water that way? Can we allow beavers to live in the upper uplands as they like to do and not persecute them so much? So catch bases, I heard about that and all these ideas in concert would probably do a lot. I also wanted to say that the Dutch don't live with mountains, they're trying to make land out of ocean side and so we're like having a roof above us and our rivers are like the eaves trough and the downspout and once it gets there if we hurry it through our town it will flood the next town worse. So at every step we have to slow it and that's what I've heard all around. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, coming back for our last comment about the night. No pressure. No pressure. Hi, my name is Cherie Smishow and I live on Mountain Dew Street and the one thing that I've heard many people say that I do think is really important and I'm thinking for tonight is that this is not just a mountaineering problem. This is a regional problem and there's no way my failure is gonna solve this. I'm at someone that we have to be working in concert with the Watershed region. Yes, thank you. Give yourselves a round of applause. Thank you so much for your participation and just take a break. You have like one minute. You can either sit here or stand on the stretch and we'll all get back together in a moment.


So I think with the ingredient for, I hope, a very interesting session and without further ado, I hand over to my friend on the left. Please do the introduction. Thank you. Thank you, Patrick. Welcome to the UAE, first of all, and my name is Amar Algafri. I'm the head of the Space Engineering Department at MBRSC. In general, the UAE looks at space as an important and critical sector driving the bigger goal, which is science and technology here in the UAE. We started back in 2006, so in a very short, maybe 16, 17 years time frame, the goal of the UAE in the space sector was always to make the UAE a leading nation when it comes to space and space projects. We started with Earth observation satellites. We moved into space exploration missions, and then we had an astronaut program, and now we have a robotic system that will go to the moon. So tomorrow we have a launch. I hope people will be able to watch it. It's a very unique mission called the Rashid rover. It's a very small rover. Nevertheless, it has a lot of scientific implementation of instruments flying tomorrow and then hopefully reaching the surface of the moon within four months. So looking at this specific mission and then going back to the 60s when the US decided to land a man on the moon, that's how far space has gone and then that's how fast the UAE has gone with its own project. So the direction from the UAE and the UAE government is, let's make sure science and technology is the aim and the strategy behind this project, and then we added other elements to our strategy, which is economy. So we must have economical growth linked to space projects and space activities, and beyond that, let's ensure that the private sector is involved in our project. So as we go with our projects, we try to localize technologies that we eventually, I mean, typically we would buy from other international partners, but we will try to make sure that there are local private sector that is involved in our projects, that is investing in our projects, and as well as making sure that the economical growth of the space sector will shift from fully dependent on government funding and backing towards self-dependent with private sector being involved providing solutions that can find, let's say, the partnership between the government and the private sector. That's on the journey that we have taken so far. Of course along the way, and the beginning was focusing on the human capital. So we have to have engineers, we have to have scientists involved in these projects. It's easy to come and say we're going to buy a satellite, we're going to launch it, and then we'll have services or, let's say, applications on the ground. But this key focus on the capability of building the human capacity, human engineering skills and science, this is the focus that we wanted to make sure is implemented, and that's how the number of engineers and scientists involved in our space sector have grown rapidly in the past few years, so we move from 15 up to thousands now involved in our space projects, and that's what we want to focus on as we go forward. In general, you cannot do space projects alone, so we try to also, as one of the main pillars of our strategies, to ensure that international cooperation is key, and within the different geopolitical alliances that are there, the turbulence that are happening globally when it comes to economies or policies of international partners, we try to ensure that our focus is the clear science and space exploration, and that's what we do with our projects. So we started back in 2006 working with South Korea and then Russia for the launch, and then US for the launch, and then we found partners, very strong partnership with France in our existing projects, and then we expanded when we did our human space flight to Japan, Australia, and many other, and Canada, so many other international partners who are now involved in our projects, and we don't do that because we just want partnership. We want to make sure that one thing is we don't want to reinvent the wheels, so whatever has been achieved by others, we can benefit from it. The second thing is sometimes international cooperation is essential to make successful space programs globally, and that's what we want to stress on. So if we have an instrument that we can put on another mission that is launched by the US or by Europe, or vice versa, that's what we need in our global space community and space sector, I would say. Maybe I can conclude by saying that one of the directives that we want to do next is making sure the UAE is a hub where international partners can come in, where global players can come in and take the chance that the UAE has this, let's say, diverse, very accepting, as well as strategic thinking towards the future of space. We have a program called Mars 2117 where we hope in the year 2117 there will be a city on Mars, and that cannot be achieved without international cooperation, without enabling the youth, without making sure that whatever we do, we do it in a very transparent and very clear scheme. For example, in the UAE, we have a very clear project for space focused on the military and military application, and that's what our armed forces have done in the previous project, and we have a very clear, transparent, civil program where MBRRC and many other entities are involved. We have a very clear commercial space sector where Yasat and many other players are also involved in. So transparency and clearances is what we believe enables the UAE to have that very good relationship with all international partners around the world. Thank you for the welcome word and for setting the scene very clearly and notably the tensions between the public and the private agenda. That won't be an easy one.


Welcome back folks. I am your host SK Gytonga. Do not forget to follow me on all social media platforms This is unfinished where we finish all unfinished parties today We're talking about marriage and dowry payment onto our next question Do you think dowry should be refunded if the couple breaks up? Let me know what you think in the comments section Why is it going to be refunded? Why the time we were together was it not worth it? I guess it was worth it and Who's going to refund it? My parents or me? I don't think so. It's not supposed to be refunded Do the time we were together it was worth it. It was worth the time So now come we are putting ways kinder kinder. I can refund happen. Mm-hmm.  Yeah Yeah, we're gonna refund your time younger to make one of ever If if my time should be refunded then we'll refund your dowry because We spent time with you. It's like I wasted my time due to my part to my pathways It shouldn't Unless you need to do it at the same time you don't need to do it at the same time you don't need to do it at the same time It depends the answer to a Because it depends If they separate I think What needs to be done is that the two families come together. It's not the man Refund the lady really refunding but the two families they laid down they laid down some Agreement on the mode of payment how they're going to repay it when Yeah, at times the marriage will be so it will be Too bad to like you can't really in my ribca-cabissa. You can't really You can't really mend it. So The two families can come together Sit down I'll lay down the foundation for the payment. Yeah, I think it should be repaid Especially so that it's just totally the link the two people. There are circumstances that dowry would be refunded And these who are basically not traditions who are basically due to adultery All others but how do you prove adulter the threshold of proving adulter was so hot So it was so hard to get even those marriage breakages but nowadays Marriages break up because so-and-so refused to serve breakfast so I don't subscribe to returning dowry because If you gave out, okay, you know, let me say you married me to make another four years or five years You know, this is my time invested in you. You appreciated my parents. Okay? I'm to gift at a come on what a cousin I am to next time You are like I would have bludged like I'm gonna show you to give that thing willingly sit. I look for scope And so I'm gonna see will end the dowry negotiation. I can negotiate with someone. It's like a 300,000 Okay, so I'm gonna show you to compare so I'm going to do it a chance and you'll it out willingly So maybe come okay, maybe okay. No I'll have what you expect to be sure that that's I know I'm gonna put you on call. You open such a spence on the couple in our places Once you get married that is you pay in terms of cows go to ships like I've said before you don't pay all of them Let's say that maybe if the if the family wants to pay if the family wants around maybe 15 cows We pay half Then the other half is comfortably paid. Let's say 30 years later So the other half now in acts like a collateral Later that I've had an issue with you then my wife goes back to their home I'll be fine now from there the remaining cows later. I was supposed to pay 15. I've paid eight now They'll add up to be nine so for me. I don't think you should be it should be refunded Yeah, for me it can be refunded where I come from unless otherwise unless otherwise that one you have had very very many Many triangles and stuff but in very rare cases can it be refunded how even some places the ones who made it in terms of money I think they have they have sticks to say give us our man. Yeah, but however if they were cows or stuff and stuff Don't have any stick. Yeah. I know No, because I think Dowery nearly I think Pia was as warm shana shukrani. Yeah, thank you. It's appreciation by the way So come I'm appreciation. It's not be refunded I don't come to Kosa and to break up a bucket was as because we look like I know I'm too We'll come on what happened. I'm Kachana. It's not be refunded. I know country fund our You can't just simply can't I always it I was I was I don't have a reason but My belief is you should it shouldn't really find our Yeah, it may lead it may lead to It may lead that's like breaking a taboo Shouldn't be refunded because what's done is done I can give an example Like when you buy something You've already paid the money. So once you're done with it or it's broken. You cannot take it back It's yours. You already bought it. So I'm not saying that the man is buying the woman but What is given is given.   Yeah No, I don't think it should be refunded Because from my own point of view Ah You you you shared something but then later you you have separated I Don't think it should be refunded. It's very funded. You sasa Omelipa hija work, then what next? So see who did you show if they separate it would issue here Personally, I don't think dowry should be refunded because it is a token of appreciation Once it gives someone a gift, I do not expect you to ask for it back However, in some African countries, it is considered appropriate for you to take back the dowry because for as long as you don't You still belong to that person And also if you decide to make matters legal then that depends on what the court decides onto our next question Do you think paying dowry has a negative effect, especially on women? Let me know what you think Paying dowry has no negative consequences It is just an act of appreciation. I go back.  They paid one hand. They paid what and what they bought me So that commercializes it or essentializes the commercialization where you think if they pay 10 million for me So I'm better off even with a hundred million. You are still an object Somehow it has brought some negative issues. You may be most of the women feel like they're now So entitled to the wife You know pattern me I'm trying to pay you you paid you I paid for the dowry So I'm your husband you have to respect me and do this and do this and do this So like somehow pay or me take advantage of it because I paid a lot of cows a lot of money Maybe I give my car to your parent at your society.  Maybe the lady will feel like there is no need to pay the dowry because Maybe you talk about So entitled to me. So it's a that you pay maybe direct dog.  It's an African thing. You have to pay the dowry You don't have to be entitled to entitled to your wife. Yeah I I don't think there is any consequence because you know as I said earlier that you are appreciating my family for investing me and at least they brought for you like you know someone you saw me know that if you see something good in me it means you appreciate it so I don't think I'm going to get the consequence very traditionally or traditionally is a form of appreciation yeah it's appreciated the family so it should be something that's that say that I'm buying you it should be really that way it should be viewed as a form of payment really but also form of appreciation so it I don't think it has negative consequences because for example my father did pay Dari and as never I've never seen any negative effects on how he treats my mother in fact he treats her with respect so I don't I don't really think it has negative effects on the woman it doesn't have by one or the other now try to fit yourself in in such a show you're getting married and your parents don't demand for anything from your from your husband's side it simply means that at least you're not being valued so for me I can say it gives that lady at least I'm being valued try to assume yourself you're getting married then your parents just say let's assume maybe the request for cows they say give us one how will you feel yourself so I can say it doesn't have a negative consequence in fact it's uh it's like a bonus because try to imagine yourself getting married then your mom just mom or dad say for you for for for you to get married to you to you better have the only only request for one cow how will you feel yourself so for me feel it's like a positive thing it can't be negative thing negative consequences no no no no no it's a negative consequence is because I'm not a mom I'm not true I'm not true enough you're time you're telling me my mother so like I said I'm not sure I'm not a money queen yeah I'm a negative consequence is true no no hey I'm not a money queen I must appreciate her evil no okay the pain of dowry doesn't affect a woman in any way because it's it's dowry is like dowry is bedwell there so it doesn't affect a woman in any way because it's it's for your foreign culture the only thing that dowry cannot cannot tie a woman to someone if they don't even when she doesn't love love the man so when it reaches them for divorce it's okay so it doesn't affect the woman I don't think it has a negative effect I think it's tradition it's been there for a long time so people have been doing it but you know the world is evolving and so are people so whether they pay or not it doesn't have a negative effect oh no you mean yeah true because I'm a demon you know but you're just as easy kind of complications but you only live for dowry I was here at home so you know be the above me liye in a lead to death so I'm not casque easy kind of best violence no one can talk I think it has some negative effects because to me I think paying dowry is like purchasing the lady it's like you're purchasing a commodity you bring a commodity to your house so yes because nowadays when someone pays dowry in a little less sense your ownership in my opinion I feel like in some cases it it does have a negative effect when the man does pay the bride price because men tend to look at their wives like possessions that they own and we also have parents that look at their kids as investments which leads to forced marriages you might get your parents just pairing you up with a random person just because they are going to earn from it we have come to the end of the show I am your host eski see you then