let's actually correct let's do the pledge of allegiance first yes president right i move to amend and adopt our agenda as follows first to know a revised version of the concern item four point three three communication from larry lackey director of engineering environmental compliance at the airport regarding the trash removal compost recycling oil and grease contract in the revised version of the memo and resolution for consent agenda item four point four three the resolution from the marketplace district commission authors authorization to enter into sidewalk cafe license agreements board of finance per council for city attorney's office for councillor bush or add to the consent of jenna item four point four seven a communication from the clerk treasurer's office regarding openings to burlington city commissions and boards with the motion to waive the reading except the communication placing on the file add to the consent agenda item four point four eight a resolution about the airline surplus budget amendment and critical improvements to the brilliant international airport infrastructure board of finance with the motion to waive the reading adopt the resolution note written materials for agenda item five point zero three the communication from the mayor regarding the appointment of its chief administrator officer with the motion to approve the mayor's appointment  and eighteen and to make a finding that because of the particular circumstances and her specific qualification qualifications bev anderson be compensated outside the limits of the city's compensation plan to section five point four and a of the personnel policies by placing her at step seven of the c e o place pay scale with n f y eighteen salary of one hundred thirty one thousand one hundred eighty seven different and rebecca sourav special advisor for finance and technology regarding response to resolution requesting evaluation of phasing out of the tax on business personal property so there's a corrected version of that item which is on our deliberative at five point zero four note presentation slides for agenda item five point zero six presentation about the twenty nineteen i would use your microphone city attorney sorry sorry sorry i believe the premature disclosure of the information that i would be sharing with you would put the city is at a disadvantage and i would also be sharing with you attorney client privilege communications and so again both of those would put the city at a disadvantage so and then we would you would if you make that finding make move to go into executive session thank you city block with their motion to go into executive so i'm going to recess the regular city council meeting and convene the liquor control commission meeting commissioner dean thank you commissioner right so i'd like to move  am on the agenda is the agenda we have motion to adopt the agenda thank you any discussion of those in favor adopting the gender has moved to say i mary will now reconvene the regular city council meeting at seven twenty seven and the first next item on the agenda is the public form at a number three and we have if anyone would like to speak to the council in public forum so far i have two people signed up there are sheets over here in the corner turn them in over here to the city clerk's office and i'll bring them up to us you'll have three minutes to speak  the plan is flawed undemocratic and ethical thousands of dollars have been squandered on it twenty six people from public works planning and zoning see though the police department transportation energy and utilities the city have tourney's office code enforcement public works and planning commissions and four consultants worked on the plan for over a year strong opposition to change wards four and seven voted not to install bike lanes yet we were rendered voiceless and ball boy vote with us by wards one two three five six and eight and here again it is wards one two three five six eight who were granted access that wards four and seven were denied does ward four and seven not have an investment in burlington's parking certainly if bike lanes warrant citywide decisionmaking street parking does to the plan states that none of the strategies propose removing existing resident only parking signs how could it have been otherwise the residents at the table oversee were representing themselves there are words in the plans like fair balance flexible in maintaining character of a neighborhood i'd like to know what's fair about forcing taxpayers home cannot afford to live in any given area and the city to maintain its character what's fair about private homeowners and greedy nonresident landlords controlling public streets some home owners stated that because they pay higher property taxes a personal choice mind you that they should be entitled to control the tax maintained streets even though they have ample off street parking other homeowners stated that their home value is tied to residential parking restrictions on their street so again how is it fair or ethical that taxpayers are a response to both for the value of homes on summit street or any street the plan accommodates nonresidents that is community can commuters and residents living within the eight miles of resident only parking streets but nothing that is fair to taxpayers living outside of those destinations this came from a public works commissioner one lesson i have learned from my years on the commission is that hell hath no fury like tinkering with local parking no elected official would dare support a parking change that did not have broad support and very unwise the challenge and this from a councillor looking at the  resident only parking outlay in the city it's pretty clear that it's been mostly enjoyed by wealthier folks so serving leadership that instant access to maintain streets and wards four the city council for hearing me today as a former charlotte resident and current u v i'm student living downtown i've always been near lake champlain and spent my summers for me in it with vermont weather the lake is one of the only reasons i ever enjoyed staying up here in the summer i can't imagine religion without it but a couple years ago i started realizing that beaches were opening later than usual due to pollution caused by the lake is one of the hallmarks of vermont's iconic beauty locals and tourists alike flock to the waterfront for the views water sports and boating however it's not only tourists and waterfront residents who benefit from the lake even those who don't live near water still benefit because we shop at stores in which products come from across the lake recreation and tourism supports hundreds of part time and entry level jobs property taxes will decrease as pollution increases a study m found that vermont stands to lose almost seventeen million in economic activity for every one meter decrease in the lakes water clarity i know that governor scott opposed the original act as to sixty on the grounds that additional taxes  fees will put a strain on vermont residents who already pay high taxes but it isn't up to responses was already in the minds and now the clean water work their clean water working group has had to go back and provide new potential funding plans to be reviewed again next year all this added even more time to the process while the condition of the lake continues to be poor a new version that has been approved by the house ways and means committee includes a very small portion of the necessary funding but it's likely to be vetoed by governor scott anyway because he does not want any new fees because it is being dragged out so much the conservation law foundation has given our state a d plus rating for its efforts although taxes in vermont especially in burlington are already very high it is important to remember that lake champlain is an integral part of vermont's of beauty and economic success the condition of the lake however is only worsening every year the more we deliberate propose oppose and started yet the twenty fi help provide some of the funding i don't think it's feasible to expect to be able to pay for the cleanup of the leak without implementing some type of small statewide tax and as we sit and think of alternatives the expense of the clean up increases if we want changes we can't wait for the perfect solution so i ask you to pass a resolution urging the scot ministration to approve the bill that will save our lake and our economy thank you mr judge shaped that and that is the final speaker we have for tonight so with that we will close the public forum and move forward on to the next item on the agenda item number four which is the president right i move to adopt the consent to gender as amended and to take the actions indicate it is there a second counter paul seconds so is there any discussion hearing none of those in favor don't five point zero one is an outdoor entertainment permit application for honey road one fifty six church street cancer dean thank you president right i'd like to move approval of the church park place during the times that they're open the committee discussed with them appropriate levels of how loud their music should be i think they were very receptive to our remarks and we supported this application thank you to move on time under five point zero two this is a communication from mayor weinberger regarding appointment of a chief the chief administrative officer mayor have found in the six plus years now in this role there really is no more important position within the city than the chief administrative officer role if they were very fortunate that beth is willing and able to step into this role this time qualifications that the understand be compensated outside the limits of the city's compensation plan pursuant to section five point four eight of the personnel policies by placing her at step seven of the c e o pay scale with n f y eight hundred salary of one hundred  hearing on all in favor of passage of that motion please say i any opposed it passes unanimously congratulations sanders you like to say a couple words or agreeable and we supported this application thank you thank you councillor dean a discussion council cancer mason thank you president right i guess if i may indulge with a question to the chair is it true that these committee with the hours of operation and a further discussion here none of those in favor of approval please say i any opposed passes unanimously will move on to item number five point zero four this is a communication from beth anderson and rebecca samara in regard to this is a holdover from the last meeting and is a report response to resolution requesting an evaluation of phasing out of the business personal property tax so this was as i said we ran out of time last meeting so we look forward to hearing from you so basically outlines options for attack so the business personal property tax is a tax levy levied on local businesses on their basically machinery equipment the assets that they have not the not that has the land property but they have there is an exemption for businesses that have less than forty five thousand dollars thank you in assets they do not pay this tax other businesses do so what we were asked to do was to consider options for actually eliminating the tax so what we laid out w hopefully have some potential for offsetting revenues in particular the district coming off line in two thousand and twenty six will provide tax revenues back to the city that could offset some of the losses but it would leave some gaps in the general fund budget that we would potentially to consider and we laid out options to do that increasing the tax the general tax rate or the the one hundred twenty percent factor that's applied to business property the fifth option that we've laid out is not an elimination of the tax but what it is an attempt to  make the tax a bit more equitable by applying the base forty five thousand or potentially more dollars actually to all businesses so it would apply as an exemption to everyone not just those that fell below that value in tot you all right let's open up to the council questions you president right i believe this came forward through a resolution that we worked on earlier in a few months a few months ago and this is a really nice memo i think it's just an example of the outstanding work that we're going to be seeing from our new c f o and in particular what i think is great is that the range of options that we are given different ways to accomplish the goal that i think we're going to be i feel confident after reading this memo that we're going to find a t have an economy with some businesses who actually make things that are useful for and that people use or drink so thank you very much i look forward to carrying on the conversation i think likely this will be implemented in the board of finance to come back to the council with an implementation plan within six months so referring this back to the board of finance for further work and with a plan to be forward to the full council within six months yes president right ok about the scenarios and it would be really valuable for but councillors who either can't attend the board of finance or anyways would attend the board of finance but to weigh in and let us know if you have some thoughts about the various scenarios because i get a very important discussion it would be good but to hear from every councilor on this so thank you question cancer heart and then cancer mason thanks so this is good news and i think the ministration worked hard i think we heard it on the campaign trail during the race going out to the businesses especially in the north and as well i think it's welcome news and we're also going forward it would be given the four options that we have it would be important to kind of bring the small business groups in right in maybe get their perspective and and kind outlook which they think might be too so certainly we can you know on the isn't here but it would be great to get the input of the small business owners and i think it's something that we don't do enough and it would be great to have them involved thanks thank you hopefully we'll invite small business owners and any others that want to  let us know what they think about it for a finance cancer patient thank you president right to sort of pick up on that i know a number of those who had been advocating did reach out were not able to come tonight i think it was a bit of a surprise that this was on our agenda tonight  but i do know that you know they intend to be more involved engaged on a going forward basis to also pick up on counselor shannon's question on solar panels if guidance to sort of the board of finance if it is determined that panels do in fact are included as business person property i would ask the committee to sort of fashion some potentially more accelerated phase out of it have a plan and i had a business reach out and say well we just spent a lot of money on solar panels and seems you know if you're taxing us on that it seems to be in conflict with the city's desire to get to a net zero so i don't know the answer to that but if that is i would ask maybe the board of finance to look at a more aggressive phase out or a limitation on solar panels thank you paula thank you of we will await that answer any because what you're i just i don't know rebecca or sam or off but i just wanted to thank you for the input that you had in this communication so i've since you're here and i think just a pipe that we were looking for which gave us options to consider so appreciate that very much thanks and he any final words thanks for shit all right we will move on and we will that's been we need to vote on a referral to the board of finance that's right so it's been moved and seconded and he i mean for the discussion all in favor of referring us the board of finance and with a plan to come back within six months  will move on to item number five point zero five and that's a presentation from meghan tuttle comprehensive planner and it's an update plan b t v yes we will actually you're right here we'll continue with that so the next one is actually a report on the proposed resolution that was passed asking for a report on potential for senior property tax relief as well as a couple of other things and the missile tax rate and and fees for programs throughout the city so as a cancer hartnett just indicated not as good news on this one but tell us what you have on this one i will give credit rebecca did a lot of the research on this also and her coming from the tax department was very helpful particularly the first section so the first question was to  dinners with the reduction in their property taxes and what options we can consider to achieve that goal rebecca did a lot of exploration about kind of the size of the population of seniors income within and their income levels and burlington then look at some of the state programs in the state has a number of programs that are available for both homeowners and renters as far as getting tax assistance to help those of lower income which many of the seniors in burlington would qualify for and potentially there's a concern at the state level that they do not take advantage to the levels they could so i think you know in kind of understanding what is available it also understanding from the state some of the challenges in implementing a program that's based on income levels really creates an administrative burden to collect the information from individuals to verify the incoming first shouldn't part of that we would add an additional burden to the city cost to do this so i think the the recommendation was was that this might be hard for the city to undertake but that you know encouraging individuals to take advantage of the state programs available to the fullest extent possible would be beneficial  not thank you and i understand there's assistance out there but this problem is real i mean it's it's too real because you go too many doors and you hear from too many people and so whether they're not informed about live in burlington to let them know what is out there and are they taking advantage of everything that is offered to them because they certainly don't they certainly don't know about them from knocking on doors as much as i do it's the number one issue that comes up i knock on seniors doors i think it's probably throughout the city broader than just not here in the new north and the new north and so it would be great maybe through somebody that we would have some workshops throughout the city to make sure that everybody is aware of some of the programs that they have out there and that they're not taking advantage of and see if that would make a difference i mean we have to do something and i would i would hope that we would concentrate in that  less promising in that regard but if this is really good information and i'm not going to give up i do think that the city needs some kind of in focus on on income constrained the kind of housing and costs that are facing income constrained elders just because when you are elder you are out of the labor force and you tend to have fairly fixed income don't have that many options terms of ways to kind of boost your income  are like that and maybe do a little more research to see how do they get around the administrative costs of of these programs there are state programs but i think that that folks are still allocating too much of their income to property taxes just across the board not withstanding all the efforts that we are making at the state at the state level so i'd like to see if we can do something with property tax relief can we prioritize building primly affordable have senior housing for people we we know that that your memo tells us that there are a larger proportion of the senior for seniors that we know is is in short supply so i'd like to have us somehow as a city continue to work on how we can better meet the needs of low and moderate income seniors in our in our community if not with  party tax relief perhaps in some other way in terms of number three i wanted to speak briefly about the fees and you noted that there we may be talking about the the fee budget within p rec in the budget process this year and i look forward to that conversation that might be an area where we can do more and i wanted to and you noted that if we were to reduce fees that that would be a revenue that would be a burd because it would reduce our revenue and just to emphasize our idea was as think more income sensitivity in the rate structure which would not which could be revenue neutral we know that some families qualify for scholarships maybe other families could pay a little bit more to do more in the sky in the area of scholarships so it's kind of a sliding fee idea which didn't get too much attention in this memo but hopefully we can keep that in mind as so thank you very much for your work culture tracy thank you i too feel like i don't want the conversation to a night especially with well with all of this but the senior program so i grew up in massachusetts and i grew up in a family that had limited income and i can give you the names of community and there was first people that are sixty five or older that meant income sensitivity you could if defer your property taxes and they would accrue and they would earn interest but when you sold your house you have to pay them back now one of the comments that you make he is that you know there'd be a loss of revenue and a shift to the other tax payers if you did some kind of program true but then when that property sold you'd get that lump sum repayment so i think people need to look at th but i can do the name of the community that i grew up then i went through the process with my mother and it was the only way she could stay in her house and so i would like to think that we can look beyond the state of vermont to try to figure  there other ways that we can help people stay in their homes if they choose to and i think you know what we have in vermont is we have home share which allows people to stay in their houses in massachusetts didn't have that so i'm not saying that we we do a lot but there are things that i'd still like us to explore and so the conversation for me needs to continue as to what we can afford to do and what that cost is administratively also and i appreciate that i'm only dealing with the home ownership aspect when i talk about a mass shooting so i'm not dealing with the rebel aspect so i just wanted to say that i'd like this conversation to continue and anything that i gleaned from my own personal experience of the more than happy to share with you all the other thing has to do with the fees and i was just i was hoping that in some of the scenarios you talk about scholarships are awarded at fifty percent now there are people i know that that would be wonderful but still that wouldn't allow them to attend and yet you make statements that no one's turned away but i think that when people see things some people just see that as a maximum and don't even bother to have the conversation so i'm not sure we're really getting at the issue when we say that you know because i think there are those who won't ask so i was hoping that in the programs that do offer scholarships if we could explore if they could go above fifty percent what that would actually would mean are there any and like parks and rec are there any that go to seventy five percent or one hundred percent and i certainly support what counselor and odell said about a sliding  where those that could afford would ultimately pay a little more for those who couldn't afford to pay as much so so anyways this is so much important information in these reports tonight that need more discussion really make such a difference for the people that we that are our neighbors and so i want to continue these discussions thank you for your work on this is well as those who initiated the resolution helping us to bring forward this really important conversation given the increasing increasingly aging population in burlington and like a council heard in this past election cycle heard a lot of people people who were in tears at their doorstep about whether or not they'd be able to stay in their home the old north and we talked a lot about gentrification that's been a conversation that's been going on in the old north and i see this is directly related to the conversation about gentrification and the ability of people to stay in their homes and stay in their neighborhood so i very much view it in that context and i think that we need to continue to do more to keep those people in their homes thank you thank you councillor tracy there seems to be some discussion that can continuing this discussion so we maybe need to quickly think and do we have any idea how many what percentage do not or is there a way to find that out the state program the state yes the information that there's there's an anecdotal impression at the state level that people aren't taking advantage of this program just because of the way we what we know about income in vermont and income of home homeowners and then what we see in terms of people you know putting in their claims for property tax adjustments and income sensitivity it seems like there's a gap there but we say hasn't been able to quantify that gap and it's largely attributed to like administrative burdens for people filling out the fairly complex housing  discussion on this on this resolution on this presentation and topic yeah i mean i do fink that we can do more before be fitting to anybody and i think he said mutation have done the groundwork of ready and already present it as a detailed presentation that i thought that you know we already have some ideas that if you want to take it on that we can do if not and again what i want to see is for us to take action instead of moving it away somewhere so i don't know and i have couple of wonderful point nd anyone is ready to take action on anything tonight in regard to this report but certainly you counter jang if this case referred to a committee and you have some ideas certainly you can go to that committee and let them know of your conversation there i will point out i do think that there's a lot the city is already doing that is directly on point with the issues that we've been discussing things with there it's finding ways to do more with seniors housing in terms of promoting low income family affordable seniors housing there is work going on right now and the inclusionary zoning committee that could potentially result in substantial new funds flowing to the city that could help with housing issues of that of that type we have a neighborhood project which is nearing the end of that study that if this council is willing to act on the recreations that come out of that could result in substantial additional supply of student housing which as we've started to see with the project that one hundred four st paul street is is having the fact that we hoped it would as a council of starting to reduce some of the pressures on various elements of this housing market we will have the opportunity to look at further parking reforms that is one of the drivers i have costs and also i think a lot of what  we are working on as a city directly goes to this conversation even in advance of these further explorations and i hope we'll see these issues as related as they come back to this council in different forms thank you are still there and remember as we vote on this that if we if we did nothing with this tonight right now the report at the recommendation is actually not to take any action so with that unless or further discussion of those in favor of the motion to refer this to thank you for that i just want to say that was a real honor and counselor no doubt before you run away also just want to give a special thank you to you for the kind words that you wrote in my nomination for that for that honor so thank you for that but you know when it's when you're surrounded by so many really good people planning is one of the least solitary things that there is it's real collaborative effort and you'll be seeing some of that tonight but it's again a real honor to get that and working with so many people it just makes it all the more fun to do that so thank you and we're here tonight though for plan b t v here is the chair of the planning commission this is a project that we've started working on and a little while ago and here with in office and just stepping back a little bit you know what we're working on right now is by definition the city's comprehensive development plan which is really the the foundation for all our different planning efforts in burlington it provides a basis for our our zone in a provides the basis for collecting various types of fees and provides the basis for so many different efforts that we do and as you know in the city we create a whole lot of different plans including this one and many of them while interesting are the most easy aren't the easiest things to always read or the easiest things to understand and as you know as many of you know a few years ago mom based on a resolution from this council we created plan b t v for down and out when we were doing and for the down down we really recreated the way that we prepare plans  present plans and that plan focused on the downtown was one that was really much more understandable much more comprehensive and much more user friendly and based on that we were able to develop our form base code for the downtown in a way that it was almost seamless from the downtown code i'll say on the regional planning commission we did much of the same thing several years ago taking the regional plan and rebranding that as that you cost plan making that a much more user friendly much more comprehensive document that you could actually work with as you're trying to implement some of the different initiatives that that sets out so here today we have our municipal development plan that expires in just under a year from now and so it's time for us for the planning commission for the main office and for all of you as well as the larger community to start working on the preparing that our new you know simple development plan to be adopted just under a year from now unlike in past efforts instead of just reformatting or rewriting some of what's in the existing plan and presenting it in much the same way we're we're taking the initiative that we learn from the downtown plan b t v from the cost plan and some other similar types rewriting it reorganise i reorganized it in a way that actually will be useful going forward the plan is not to make wholesale changes in the policy but to organize those policies and some goals from those policies that are already in there in ways they had to implement and a lot of the reorganization is what megan will be talking about and you know as we go through the process i'm sure they'll be some policy changes that will come up with going to be doing a lot of outreach to the community out and outreach to the council as well from that i'm sure they'll be issues that come up but if it's on the gecko the plan is is to really take a fresh look at it and make it something that actually works and with that i'll turn it over to megan i think and you gave the presentation for me but i'll try to elaborate on a few of the points that you made thank you and as commissioner montreaux mentioned plan b t v is our comprehensive plan for the city for the entire city  i've recently started visiting the n p a is and asking the question how many of you have heard of plan b t v and a lot of hand will go up most often people have heard of plan b t v downtown or the plan b t v south and effort i was pleasantly surprised when i was out wards four and seven last week the many of them knew that we had a plan b t v for the entire city and that is really the document that we're talking about updating here today frequently referred to as our municipal development plan so as andy mentioned our goal is to continue to maintain the focus of this plan on the long term vision of burlington our plan outlines a vision for burlington as a sustainable community at the core of our region with values as a distinctive community valuing our connectivity our inclusiveness and continuing to learn and grow and adapt to the changes that affect our community as we move forward and though is somewhat hard to do in the plans current format this vision is outlined over the course of hundreds of pages there are eighty policy statements and over one hundred action items that spell out how we will do this organized into ten different chapters by discrete topics like housing transportation or the natural environment while there's a lot of really valuable information in this plan it can be somewhat hard to actually understand what all of these issues mean and how how it means that we will move forward as a community our plan today and going forward is prepared in accordance with our state statute with the planning and development act it is something that our planning commission and our planning staff has worked to update every five years for the past several decades this actually be our last update on a five year six bill and we will start updating this plan every eight years as we move forward but that is something that our planning commission and our planning staff have been working on routinely for a very long time and as andy mentioned in the twentieth levin in two thousand and fourteen updates to this plan we began referring to it as plan b t v instead of the municipal development plan so that it gave it a face and a name that were more recognizable easier to roll off the tongue something more relatable for our community and began to outline a framework for implementing specific area wide or topic topical master plans such as plan b t v downtown or the walk by plan so i wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about why we need to update this and what we are planning to do  by the plan expires next march and while that's an important deadline i think that what is tied to that deadline is much more important and he already mentioned that having a plan in effect is the foundation for a number of the tools that we are able to use to actually implement our vision in burlington like adopting in amending our zoning ordinance assessing impact participating in programs that provide either regulatory or funding benefits to the community and to property owners within our community in order to help us move forward this vision so it's very important to us that we continue to move forward with this update and re adopt this plan before it expires so that burlington as a whole can continue to utilize these imputation tools were afforded continue to elaborate on the vision of what it means to be a sustainable core city in vermont there's a lot of really excellent information here but over the years through a number of updates we've created a situation where there is some duplication there are some elements that are out of date things that we've actually achieved that we never looped back to pull out of the plan things that are duplicate so we're hoping to as we move forward address some of those issues as well as addressing issues that are not in compliance with state statute this is a list here of all of the elements that are required to be in a municipal plan per that vermont planning and development act and in consultation with our planners at the regional level we've found that currently our plan has to be all of these topics not all of them are serious but it does require us to move through all of the elements of our plan and make sure that we're really giving it a thorough update and then finally as we move forward with this update we want to clarify what the relationship is of this plan to those neighborhood and topical master  plans a lot of times people ask us the question well what what is plan b t v and how does it relate to all of these other documents and through this update we intend to make that process much more clear both for how those plans that we've already adopted are related to our comprehensive plan and how any future planning efforts we do will be related to that plan sorry objectives for this update as andy mentioned we do not see this as the type of planning process that our community has invested a lot of time in in recent years such as the t v downtown and really creating a new vision for a part of our city we see this as a process to update and refresh the policies and actions that will help us to achieve the vision that's in this plan to bring it more up to date and into compliance with our statutory requirements but one of the most exciting things i think about this plan is just making it more readable and presentable to the public you can see at the top as i mentioned the current plan framework is includes ten chapters and there are a number of policy and action items that are organized into each of those chapters the goal moving forward is for the plan not to be organized around elements like housing or transportation but to be organized around a few it actually means that are the characteristics or values of burlington that residents can really relate to and understand being dynamic being distinct being inclusive organizing those policies and actions around those themes so that they feel more connected to one another and more relatable instead of just being organized by housing or transportation or in the natural environment so that will be one of our major efforts as we move forward with this plan is reorganizing and reframing how that is we are also hoping through this effort to make the plan much more accessible today it is the proximately a three hundred page document that's printed in black and white a lot of the maps can be hard to read and hard to find the utilize is a much safer version of the plan as we go forward but supplement that plan with resources that are interactive and graphically rich online so that residents can really dig into interactive maps and explore more information about the city and their neighborhoods as they learn about plan b t v and what it means for their community one of the  other objectives that we have for this process is to continue and really wrap up the process that we started with creating the plan b t v south and master plan as many of you know this was an intensive effort that the staff and the planning commission were working through that plan and rewriting a lot of the sections of this plan we got to a point where we had a nearly updated draft that was almost ready for conversation with the community but as you all remember in the past few years we've been very busy with a lot of intensive community projects and community discussions so we felt that the timing wasn't right for us to try to bring this forward then and the planning commission and the planning staff want to reengage the a little bit about what the process will look like just so that you're aware of it being that your neighborhood talking to residents about plan b t v the process again will look a lot different than some of the other processes we've u sed for updating plans in the past this will be an entirely staff and planning commission led effort we won't be using consultants on this project our first step will actually be next month in may tomorrow  beginning we'll start by holding workshops in all the neighborhoods of the city so that we can talk about what plan b t v is what its role is what it means to the different neighborhoods of the city and start to ask residents questions about what the important issues are that we need to make sure are captured in this plan as we move forward with its update the planning commission will work on actually preparing an updated draft of the plan a more transparent process by actually doing and discussing sections of the plan over the summer as we're preparing them instead of waiting for kind of a big grand finale reveal of an updated draft will be working on it and in a more iterative way throughout the summer and then once we have updated those individual sections we will bring it back in an entire package again to all of your neighborhoods for the specific purpose of talking to residents about which of the priorities among this plan among all of the priorities are all of the recommendations applied to each of the neighborhoods we really want this update to recognize the individual characteristics and priorities of different neighborhoods of the city and so those workshops that will hold in the fall will really focus on gaining that feedback from residents and then will begin the the adoption process includes what hearings both at the planning of all and at the city council level for several months as we move through the end of this year and into the beginning of twenty so again we're here just to let you know that we're kicking off this process let you know a little bit about what it will include i mentioned earlier that we've already started visiting your n p a is to share a save the date and let residents know that this is something that will be coming up soon i've listed the dates of the workshops that we'll be having around the city here and there also on our project website which is burlington v t dot gov slash play on the t v but we look forward to answering any questions that you might have about this update and we look forward to communicating with you and working with you as we actually up the plan over the next year broad it says things like you know we will aspire to be more connected and provide alternative transportation options a plan like plan b t v downtown or plan b t v south and really zooms in on a particular part of the city and provides more detail for how we will actually do that so this is the new framework that the any and of apartment launched when we actually began working on the downtown plan is to zero in on the different neighborhoods of the that one of the things that we as i mentioned one of the things that we want to do with this update is to better recognize the different characteristics and priorities of all of the neighborhoods of the city within our comprehensive plan  through conversations with residents we might be able to identify that there are three or four issues that are really priority issues that we need to focus on within a certain neighborhood we may alternatively here we do feel like we need more specific and targeted neighborhood level plan like the downtown planners out then but that's one of the things that we're hoping through this update and through our communications with residents that will be able to identify as an action stop coming out of this process neighborhood needs a plane or a specific neighborhood don't need a plane and lastly which one of these planes have a plan including the electric w done on the ground is it but that specific issue is something that we touch on in a very loose way in the comprehensive plan we do have it a chapter that talks about utilities and community infrastructure and i do believe that there were some recommendations in that plan about bringing utilities underground in certain parts of the city but as far as i don't know if you wanted to speak to determining what city and when we were done with that we realized this was a really good effort that we did it was a really important project to undertake and soon after that was created or even during the process of being pleaded south and rising up and saying you're with with the enterprise this district with changes on pine street with the champlain parkway that really rose up to say this is an area that that we really should start focusing on to develop try to develop a more comprehensive plan for that particular area and as we were doing that we realized likely the new north and may need the old north and may need you know the different areas but we could really as practically only work on one at a time and the one we're on right now is the larger one for the whole city because the deadlines coming up for that because of all the work that we've already done with the south and one we want to try and finish that up wrap it in and i'm pretty confident when this process is over we'll start looking at the other areas and and start prioritizing both parts will be prioritizing what carol just on next if i could just add to that it really comes down to them through the public engagement process beginning that month in talking with different neighborhoods to understand what really are their needs what are their principal concerns and is that are those things that we could perhaps effectively address through a neighborhood specific plan and isn't it a part of the city that is experiencing significant change or significant challenges that again a more focused land use and development plan could could provide more targeted strategies in order to be able to dress those things we hope that that will come out of the process and to be clear this plan and the updated this plan's not going to provide answers to every question but it's going to outline what are our sense of priority how do we development plan as it currently is from two thousand and fourteen and i have some reservations about the direction we're going in and it's really funny a person that used to truck with which and so what has been plan b t v by any means not even in two thousand and eleven i don't remember when kevin got off the council but you know i still have conversations with him about that  so my concern is the loss of detail i understand it might be more user friendly but my concern is that leaves more to interpretation and i find that concerning i find that that as a resident then i am left to the planners to interpret for me as opposed to me having a say about what i want and having that written down in detail and a plan now i understand that an ordinance is part of this whole process and the municipal development plan that is the ordinance it is something subordinates but it is it is what sets the stage is the vision for the ordinances and so i am a little concerned about that level of detail i'm also  i also want to make sure that we still need to have a municipal development plan or whatever we call it in order to access impact fees from the state correct yes you a set assess but access the money to we wouldn't get the money if we didn't meet the five year limit i mean if we didn't get a plan in place by april or whatever two thousand and nineteen is that true we actually assess the impact of selves so it's not money that comes from the state but there  funding i just want to make sure that that's still true and so i guess my last thing is as you go around talking to all of the neighbors i want to understand how we will bring the community together i support understanding that the south end has different needs in the north and the hill section and i applaud you for trying to focus on that and bringing that into the plan but who is going to make sure that we our vision and our goals are really achieved in all of these different sub bands have some concern about that i feel like if i only talk to people in my ward i'm oblivious to maybe what what councilor shannon councillor mason have that that would mean something to our ward so besides just having the neighborhood specific meetings at the end in the fall will there be some citywide meetings where people from different sections of the community can hear each other because i think there's great value in that and the last thing i want to say is years ago mr mayor the n p a is used to select or the city would select a priority and they take it every n p a in the fall there'd be food i know some n p s always provide food but there'd be food and they'd be a focus it would be like street and the fire or consolidate would be another year to me this is such an important topic that it would be really nice to have that be a prominent just that approach in terms of how they organize their policies and action items around big ideas but provide a statutory cross reference so that it can be clearly demonstrated that all of those requirements are still being met and outlined in the plan  so that's something that we fully intend to work through as we update this plan i just want to add i understand the concern about the details and the change from the current format and all of that but you're just reminded many councilors will remember ten years ago plus when the city was engaging in the city wide zoning rewrite at the time that with the foundation for that rewrite was the municipal development plan that offered very very little guidance about that but it was to keep trying to do the rewrite and it created a lot of tensions of a lot of unknowns and when they when disputes came up when issues came up there wasn't a place to go to to ground that to say well here's what the plan says so let's follow the plan when we were doing the downtown rewrite the form based code rewrite on our committee that was that was working on that as we went through it we were using in the downtown plan all the time any time questions came up we would always go back and refer to that and we were able to understand more alas what it was guiding us to do and so helpful in that it's really not very useful and so that's really part of what the goal is with with the reformatting the reorganization to make it a document that you can actually go back to and say you know when you're working on something to go back and say we're doing it because of this in the plan and it because it provides you that anchor provides that kind of grounding for you which we don't have or didn't have when we did this morning rewrite ten years ago i could just add to that there's no way that we can provide that level of specificity in a city wide plan we wouldn't have the time and energy of the constituents in order to have that detailed conversation which is why we break we break the details out into either a neighborhood specific plan or topical plan like like walk bike and be and it's great it helps you blunders is all part of the city's master plan but it is either broad focus which is the comprehensive plan neighborhoods together because i think that that's something that's really important from my perspective as we go through this update today we get a lot of questions you know some of the residents in your neighborhood will ask the question what is plan b t v have to do with my neighborhood i don't see how it relates to me so through this process we want to be able to identify how t v really it's to the various neighborhoods and through this update each neighborhood will be able to see not only their priorities but the priorities of other neighborhoods as well  completely concur with commissioner montreaux lls reference to what we did ten ten years ago trying to develop the zoning rewrite and feeling like a rudderless ship when you know our guidance was our municipal plan and that was very much in contrast with from the way we worked in developing form base code and and consistently referencing plan always will be but we developed plan b t v downtown in large part because we had a disagreement about what that downtown should look like should we have taller buildings and if so where should we go and so we create created that document to give the guidance and i think that it did that though there was still a lot of disagreement about what the what it said and two sides looking at it came up with different answers so we're never i don't think in planning documents like that going to have all of the details worked out it's a visioning document it's the nature of it and the devil is in the details and will come in the ordinance but our community but i also want to say that what we know is plan b t v south and i would not say that that is a plan for south and neighborhoods really a guiding document we found it to be highly controversial and our vision is maybe we're not all on the same page with exactly what that vision was it was a very difficult process but as you ask for the same thing in the north and of it's not something you really want to jump into when it didn't get into the neighborhoods or at least most most of the neighborhoods that are only dealt with the corridor i think it's really interesting that  you're taking a different approach to public input here and i know for ever struggle with public process we haven't found a perfect one yet and i appreciate the efforts that you're going through here but i think that one of the challenges we always have with the public process is the public is not of one mind the public who comes any given meeting might be of one mind because sometimes you get kind of a pack mentality and one person says something in the other is kind of jump on board with that but how in your process do you have any discussions about how you deal with it some times people coming to a meeting with one viewpoint  evaluating is that a lot of people the vast majority of burlington isn't going to come to any of the meetings so how do you weigh what you're hearing in the meeting and what gets processed into the plan and whether or not it makes it into the plan is kind of reflected as input that you heard which i think that's where a lot of our public frustration comes from is that a member of the public can come to a meeting where everybody in the meeting is saying the same thing but that doesn't necessarily make it into the plan so i'm actually really glad that you brought up that point because it made me realize i forgot to mention one home  workshop so we do recognize that there are a lot of people who can't make it to a sixty eight pm workshop on one night in their neighborhood so we're currently working on and will be launching soon the same activities that we plan to have at the workshop and online format so that individuals who can't attend or who don't feel like they have the opportunity to share all of the ideas that they wanted to share in a workshop still have a method and a forum for sharing those ideas in a public way so that we can vastly expand the voices that we hear and the ideas that we hear i think as far as hearing different viewpoints in the public process david mentioned earlier that one of the things about doing a plan at this level is that the diversity of opinions might point out an area that we need to study more a future effort and i think that you know this process could highlight some of those that we might want to explore either through an additional planning process or some other kind of study or community conversation but certainly looking for those opportunities to identify important issues that might need more work as we go forward and just how do you justify the you know not everything everybody suggests necessarily gets into it but you're saying that those are the things you would put for discussion another day we would certainly want to make sure that those continue to be represented in a public forum so that all of the ideas that we hear make it into you know a summary or into on the website so other people can see those ideas and if that idea becomes something that a lot of people there are people have discussion around either pros or cons around that might rise to the level of something that we would include in the plan one of the things that we did talk about when i came on board when we were updating the south and plan is that  there are many different ways that the use of the devil is in the details there are many different ways that we can come and ideas and a lot of times in my experience we find that people if they don't see that that really minute detail that they shared in the plan then they feel like their idea isn't represented so part of this process will be educating people on what the level of detail is that's appropriate for a plan like this and what the future forums are for fleshing out the details of how something actually  appreciate your presentation and but i do have one concern it's presented as as that you know we're taking what we have that has worked in the past we can look and see things that don't apply anymore and things we've accomplished and and just  you know we're going to put in a better format and it's not a fundamental change but i i think there has been a fundamental change in my opinion and that is that we are we've made it a commitment to be a twenty thirty talk later tonight about district energy system as well district heating system those are all fabulous initiatives that are going to take us forward but it seems to me unless we make that part a central focus of our comprehensive plan and  recognizing that change we won't be able to achieve that so perhaps you can say a little bit about how we address that happy to certainly over the last many many versions of this plan there have been a lot more work that's going on built on the kind of the framework that was created by the legacy project which really define our objectives as being as is the city since then we've evolved significantly in the doctrine of a climate action plan new transportation plan variety of things that all kind of brings a lot of these these climate and energy concerns to the forefront the current master plan talks about you know district energy is a really cool idea and we have to think about it well i think you'll as you all understand and our colleagues from d d will explore more we're way beyond the idea that this is a fun idea and could could really address a lot of our carbon emission questions so now it's  to incorporate all of the work that's been done since since the last plan was adopted in really in package it as that vision for the future and identify what are the next milestones in order to carry astound that opportunities for the future that we ought to be thinking about next and ultimately be up to the council to decide how how far down that road we go but but certainly establishing that vision as a on board and began learning about what was in our comprehensive plan and i shared with these two that you know the vision of burlington is really spelled out and dozens of statements about what we will be in the future over three or four pages and if you read what they are they really are about us being bold and dynamic in continuing to adapt and find creative ways to address these major challenges around climate demographic shifts technological shifts and so by reframing this plan will be able to bring that idea into a much clearer focus as part of the vision and then update what those specific actions and recommendations are for how we will continue to do that going to the point that the commitment to sustainability and to our future really and it affects what we do everywhere else in the plan so every decision that's made about transportation every decision that's made about  density of building in the downtown and and all of the decisions that are affected by that goal so i think it to me it just needs to be a stronger more clear definition that's that's overarching for all of the other decisions that are you know or the prescriptions that come out of the comprehensive plan thank you cancer gene cancer pine and i think we're ready to move on to the next item i'll try  quick having been involved in this stuff for a while it's fun because you have some plans that you were involved in actually implement that into it wipes our pet and to do there's three vital is ation planned twenty something years ago and that project actually went forward and has been a huge benefit to the businesses in the residents of the neighborhood so i think there is a way and that was an incredibly inclusive process we involve the school you know every kid in the school had an activity or something around it we had focus groups of seniors and new americans and small business people and we took it to a level that maybe you can't do this time but i want to just say that in my campaigning i heard a lot of people say they don't really feel that that emphasis on that neighborhood in particular the north end has been there for quite a while and so the people felt like there's a little bit of the glass going on and that may be true in other parts of the city i'm just saying from where i come in from where i knocked on doors i have quite a bit much for the presentation the slide show and we'll be hearing a lot more about this i'm sure with that will i move on titan five point zero seven this is another holdover from our last meeting that we were unable to get to it's a communication from eileen blackwood city serious city attorney justin st james regarding the annual report on the little wage ordinance city attorney blackwood thank you we present we gave you a written report that is set out by the ordinance but i wanted to really emphasize one aspect of that which is last year one of the things that came to us as every year we do what we have that the case that they need accountability on the better that is the vermont worker center and each year we meet with them and evaluate how are things going are or do we think we're getting at the livable wage where where are things can we do this better and last year when we met with them essential there have been very few complaints over the number of years that we've been paying someone to be our designated accountability monitor and and we sort of said well we want to test that and we made a decision that we would start doing random compliance checks this year so our office and you'll see the results of that in in this report and our office conducted three random compliance checks this year and is in the middle of a fourth one right now and we started with an entity that has had had violations i think productive meeting with with them to really emphasize to them what they needed to do and they responded very positively but we had actually imposed sanctions upon them for the first time so we've really gone pretty far in our enforcement we do we're doing compliance checks and we're actually imposed sanctions we issued municipal tickets against them and we said they couldn't work for the city for a period of time there  responded very positively and said ok we're going to increase to not just the livable wage but we're going to make sure everybody in our organization even if they're not working for the sin of making sixteen dollars a that was their response and really trying to get their attention so we are really trying to step up in force minute we are we are looking at continuing to do these compliance checks and and where we need to impose further sanctions so just wanted to let everybody know that's kind of where we are and where we're we are going with a livable wage because we really are trying to take it seriously and and be sure that folks are complying with it one of the things is it does get a little bit technical and there is some confusion about it so we are hoping in the next couple of months to try again we've tried have a few educational sessions and and they have not been well attended we're going to try again and hoping maybe that the word gets out sure so there are a lot of we have a lot of outside contractors that the city uses and this the what you just mentioned certainly got my attention in terms of the results of the investigations yes there was only one of the three that you put sanctions on however there was another one that there were concerns with and  just don't do it again and then the matter was closed which is fine and i have no issue with that the the thing that i'm concerned about is that of the literally dozens of outside contractors of the three of the ones that you chose and you chose i didn't know that there was a fourth one that you're working on but of the three that are in this report two of them had there were issues with two of an auditing point of view that is statistically significant that is not good that means that if you extrapolate that that means that there's a lot of other things out there that we don't know about if you're picking them if you are picking them randomly if this was randomly selected no it was not randomly selected so we selected the first one hundred eight contractors as one that had had a year before so we were follow up with them and that's why we got to the sanction level with them and then the second one we picked s t erlend because they are by far the largest contractor that the city does business with the third one was janet tech which is who has the maintenance contract at the airport which is was another one that we kind of target as being a large provider of generally lower wage positions i mean one of the things is we you know we have a whole host of of the contractors that are that have professional level folks and they have people are not being paid even close to the way of of little the livable wage numbers so for example all the lawyers that we contract with the engineers the architects there are those kinds of folks tend not to so we're trying to work on the ones they are paying people a lot of folks who are at would so that's really what we've been trying to focus on i'm sorry i did say random but i it's not really random ok well so it's hard for me to really actually even evaluate a man i don't know how many outside contractors there are for whom would this would be a concern obviously not professional firms but others so i it's hard to know whether or not that's just this just a statistically significant or not  i guess the only concern i have is just simply that you know when you only pick when you only pick three and two of them have issues that is a concern to me a concern to us as well that's why we're trying to continue to  problem and some of the problems for example is the will have people who work on another project outside of the city at one wage rate and then they come and work on something in the city for a short period of time and then go back to the other project and somebody misses getting their wages up and then one of the other issues is that they have to have a certain number of paid days off and they calculate that oddly some times and the third one is that there's been a lot of questions around do we do they offer health insurance or not what does it mean to offer it so some of these have been technical issues and we've been doing a lot of interpretation and education around it so in of represents to me although i appreciate it's not wonderful news it is a positive step forward from where we were which is you know really there was no reporting there was no certification there was nothing you know we have put in place a number of these protections  and i do appreciate the commitment sort of to the educational component moving forward so that hopefully you know next year's report and following will continue to be and move in the right direction thank you thank you  will continue that process meeting who are was on this list and name them that we would be and i think that should be over a period of time right maybe they should be kept on the radar for you know whether it's three to five years whatever it might be but we should be consistent with this because if we're not consistent really kind of you know doesn't doesn't look good long term for us and we certainly don't want to get the reputation that we're just you know going after certain companies and so i think being consistent is as well as we can be random i think random is good because i mean then everybody's you know really in the same you know same playing field and i think that's i think that's important i just right kind of things same with the landlords that we should do with our business so i think i think we should you know keep this and maybe work on you know coming up with a permanent solution you know plan moving forward thinking thank you you know with this i feel like for for almost a couple decades we had a livable wage ordinance that turned out to be mostly in name only and you've really turned that into something with some real teeth and i appreciate you going after the violations are there more out there probably but we've started a process whereby we're finding and taking action  that is really going to be sending a message to all of our other contractors and i just want to say thank you for your work on this thank you for taking firm action when you found violations that i think this is going to make a real difference the cancer center cancer bush or just quickly did we anticipate that the city attorney would dedicate some hours and give you some compensation for this we didn't specifically build anything into the budget to for the city attorney's office and the heart of why it had to we're back to the rest of the workload how many of these we can do in a year but but i did counsel her and we absolutely contractor you know with the city do you any think about our leave a bill greed ordinance so they'd read and understand it they have that yes they they do and we have language that we require to be put in written contracts and we require them to sign a certification and in the report that we gave you there's a there are columns in there that indicate that when we're where and we're updating those certificates each year for those folks who have multi year con contracts so that we make sure that we're bringing it back to their attention but regularly and the other question is in terms of the penalty if you find one use not respecting it what are the penalties and the legal and who the patients that so this was the first time we impose penalties in this case and what we did was we issued municipal tickets which is how we have it set up so that's what we write them for ok neither one of us remembers exactly what the dollars were we can do it up to five hundred dollars per time i can't remember exactly how much but i think they ended up paying in the thousands because we issue one ticket for each employee that they didn't pay the rate for so it's not it's obscene plus they have to pay the employee their back wages or give them additional time off if they haven't done it and we require them to provide us proof that they've actually pay the employees have the next item five point zero eight communication from chief and spencer director spencer come on up will give us a report paving of the construction season overview with a slide presentation as well thank you which i think is supposed to go five to ten minutes cracked that's right thank you thank you president right with me this evening is rob holding our public information manager thank you president right for the suggestion for us to come up and speak briefly to what is underway this year thanks to the council and the administration working together on the ten year capital plan we have been undertaking a large increase in the dollars reinvestment in the general fund twenty one thousand a little preview of the budget you'll see for f one nine hundred we'll be looking at approximately forty million dollars in other words doubling the amount from this year appreciate the public's patience and safety as we embark on this increased level of work and tonight we hope to share some resources that may be so you'll see in front of you here a summary of our asset classes on the left hand  moving quickly through let's go for water rehabilitation work we have three point eight miles this is both realign and full replacement the map on your left are the locations of that work the more replaced and we have even on parkway of note last year we did half of the parkway while school was in session that was due to project delays and challenges we have written the contract this year to require the contractor to do it during school vacation to avoid that conflict is so in our paving work as you all know we had a difficult winter we last year were able to do five miles of paving that was about double what historically we do around two and a half miles this year including some patching and additional paving we're hoping to surpass seven miles some of that start of our paving season has gotten underway we used to not have significant paving funds and we didn't start paving until the beginning of the fiscal year july one each year we are now in the ground in april this is a fundamental difference to our approach so we are pleased obviously with the winter to ration to get in his early so this is the original paving list for twenty eighteen you'll see it's the length of each street that we're paving and the type of the work on pine street you'll see we had specially requested a greater to come in this morning after the rains this weekend we know a number of people complained about the challenging conditions of pine street was then over the weekend but came in early this morning to  balance in the street and sidewalk fund re prior ties ing paving over some other items in our capital plan for this year and were able to add substantial mileage  sidewalks we are proposing to do three point seven miles of sidewalk across the city and we have one hundred thirty miles in our system and the actual streets are in our construction portal you can zoom in you can look at the names of those streets if you have specific questions we're happy to answer them we know the commission and council has asked for a specific names of streets for this work and that is all on the p l and then these are the numbers for sewer lines and storm water lines we traditionally had not done much work and repairing these facilities the storm water lines in particular many of them are corrugated metal  city councillors for the opportunity to be here and like that and said i will be brief trying to find different ways to reach people early and often is a priority of ours and we tried to start as early as possible in the construction season and well before that  did try to meet with as many community and business stakeholders as we could as you can see on a pretty comprehensive list there might be one or two that are missing from there but we met with all of the m p s to try to give a brief overview of our construction season we hosted  public meeting for the folks in the maple pine corridor where obviously there's a significant series of projects that are going on and we brought some temporary parking options to the commission and try to do some outreach around those neighborhoods to ask people for  we're not finished we're trying to be pretty robust and keep an ongoing and gauge me strategy throughout the construction season to let people know when things are going to happen when impacts were delays are you know a bowl in schedule of all that we can let people know about and it really just in communication with the community with businesses and with residents to let them know about what's going on in their name it was you'll see here this is the work at the maple and battery intersection this is where water line is being replaced to upsize the water line we're also replacing all the signals at that intersection with pedestals so that pedestrians will have signals that intersection as well as into the season but we blew it up so you could see how we are coordinating the various projects on top of one another we're trying to get in and out as fast as we can and cordon it work wherever possible the dark gr having significant traffic detours yellow street at the top is main street as you'll see two streets down is maple street with local traffic only that's this first phase from april to june while we are live on the once june comes the traffic pattern will shift pine street will be back open to two way and say the st paul street will become one way south bound for our work with the great streets a project that this council has supported in the past and we will be then moving into a paving phase on maple street which will have intermittent open and close cycles with this further down on time street we have to water work to maintain two way flows on pine street we'll see how we are phasing it we have lines in two different locations but we'll be able to maintain two way flows we do have a period this week with the paving say that your crew is no more the winner they receive probably hundreds of calls to go out and fill potholes which i think we all knew during the winter that was going to make a difference they're going to be right back there the next day but the crew still went out and did he answered all the calls  appreciate that and they worked hard but that being said this is without a doubt the worst these roads have been and i can remember from the north and to the south and all north then hill section i have never seen the roads in this worse shape and i'm not sure what the reasoning is it's certainly my travels around shooting county i didn't see the culture didn't see i me the paying project that you just presented isn't even enough it's not even close to being enough and he projects you have that can wait till next summer put them on hold we should be paving twenty four seven we should bring in lights  we should get it done at night whatever it takes we owe it to taxpayers after putting them through the last eight months of the streets it's embarrassing it's not right and i'm not saying it's anybody's fault it's got to be a reason for it though  not sure what that reason is to have those roads in that condition we had cars actually coming down going in the offset lane to avoid the north avenue so they were going in north going south and just so they wouldn't be in these and ruin their cars and that is unacceptable i'm soria and there is no reason so for us not to get just about everything that we need to get paved this summer would be needs to be done and and like i said i don't care if it's done at night should be twenty four seven maybe creates a new job here we can put people to work with it and hopefully they'll be local people but whatever it takes the paving should take top difficult winter reasons for the asphalt failure relate to either inadequate subbase we have the freeze thaw cycles the drainage systems that need improvements so we can get water where it belongs keeping the seal coating going with our cracked ceiling we didn't crack seal prior to two years ago when the water gets in the road it creates damage and we need to help create a impervious impermeable barrier for that water in the wintertime so that it does not freeze thaw in and under our roads we are looking at some of the concepts of how we can push this faster night work is a challenge it is expensive it is difficult for our teams is a safety issue we are looking how we can actually projects which is why we're coordinating a lot of them but i'm happy to receive any ideas as we're moving forward all right thank you you thanks they'll be done i would agree that it's expensive but i think we ought to tax payers so any cost for me anyways for this counselor at any cost these roads should be done and i hear your concerns but i want to know six junction many times over by the fairgrounds you fifteen they were paving no problem and i am sure they have the same safety concerns that we do i'm sure i'm sure it's the same issues but if you look at the project in the work they done over that they did over a new fifteen a for the fairgrounds a one zero problems at all so i always hear i always hear reasons why we can't do things in burlington i never hear why we just  is frustrating especially when it comes to our streets and sidewalks i hear about all these great plans tonight plan b t v t v great that's great but let's just take care of the basics right now let's just take care of our streets and our sidewalks we owe it to the residents of burlington and the condition out there and they're just not acceptable so we can make excuses we can say things are expensive we can say it's unsafe and i understand that to some regards but you know today let's paving costs a lot more money i would breathe make it something that can get to and anticipate for future bug budget years you know should we be expecting to do some night paving when we have major road work that we have to do you made major arteries like pine street and north avenue and it would be good to have a better understanding of the conditions that led to this because it doesn't seem like something that happened because of the maintenance in the last year or two but rather something that goes back further and if something that goes back further where else do we have these problems that are about to bubble up or bubble under as it may be because it is clearly it's a i know that you drive these roads as well and you're no less frustrated than any other taxpayer in the city and probably much more frustrated than your average taxpayer in the city i wondered if you could explain your terminology in  of the slides showed winter deterioration paving and pavement patching you have one section of pine street being reclaimed and another being modified mil and fil and you know you covered a lot of maybe you said it but i missed it but what what do those things mean reclaiming is a complete removal of the asphalt grinding it up regrading the base and then laying down substantive rehabilitation of the roadway i know i expect that things are going to get worse before they get better and that we're all going to be suffering a little bit through this process and hopefully at the end of the day we'll all be glad for our efforts and thank you for getting the work done earlier in the year and for really bringing it down to ok so basically what i'm saying is i want to say a special big up to rob because your community engagement plan that you will put together incredible and on top of here for you i think i want to give you a special thank you great work for that but at the same time i do believe that d p w what we need to work on is not to react but we just kind of like you feel like you're not in burlington anymore and i think the tourists are coming we need to make sure that our roads come back to normal people are coming this you talk to people in winter ski they kind of flay what are you going to do with this i was going to go to a performance i swear on saturday before i go on the stage someone pulled me i turned around he asked me about when you going to make the road under new not fence i mean i do believe that we need to work more on preventing things from happening instead of reacting to that because right now i believe it's too late and i totally agree what  what it will also take to put some speed bumps because it will be it now people will be complaining about speed when the roads are nice in clear people going to speed and we've been hearing feedback around it and if we think think about that way and well that is what you know the speed truckers looks like the city has on the one the only one at the radar speed feet x i mean looks like we have one and two we have two yeah so if it's needed we need more because most of the time they don't stay to where we needed most of that out but again i like you i like your work but let's  given that that is that preventative maintenance that would prevent us from getting into that and then on a separate different topic what elements you know we talk a lot about the roads and that's certainly been an element of concern but another constituent today raised the issue of bike and pedestrian safety and so i'm wondering what specific elements of this construction season are really are really being done with an eye towards improving pedestrian and bike safety in the city so on the first question about crack sealing we don't quite know how many miles we go it's basically the the target is laid down does ferry in terms of how bad a street is and how much it takes last year we thought we were only going to get four miles or so down we're able to do five and a half we're hoping we can exceed that the year we just finance approved the contract earlier tonight and then the council tonight so we can look this is this is more than the city has historically been spending we didn't used to do it at all and last year we were able to go much further than we thought based on  the the cracked ceiling going further street per street than we expected so hopefully we'll be able to beat those numbers this year it's not the only preventative maintenance activity we're doing we're doing the sidewalk cutting that just started two years ago  as a cheap way of kind of maintaining and a surface without having to rebuild as it relates to by compressed rain safety we're doing a lot of quick build efforts this year will be putting planters out painting bollards at a number of intersections narrowing crosswalks providing kind of and so if people are interested in that for streets heard council jang talking about plattsburgh we can look at some of the tools there we can look at lowering the speed limit is the limit i believe is thirty plattsburgh it's twenty five in most of the city so there are options and the public works commission be happy to engage in these conversations for that for  specific suggestions that the team can look at it and we will go back to it as we have through the process this spring that is all of that as rob pointed out quite a bit of communication activity and you know what the coun a paving will be following up and understand and if there are opportunities there again the cracks you know contract just got approved tonight by you guys but you know i think it's great to hear the interest in that and we can look at  further expansions i have to say the the idea that what you heard tonight was excuses is to me quite unfair and you just had a group come out and say that we are paving at and i'm press and rate we are repairing sidewalks impressive rate we're doing preventative maintenance as has never been done before and frankly i think it's been communicated as never been done before and a lot of positive feedback coming from the bulk of it are doing  summer then we are now and it's quite stunning that this worked and even used to start until july and they're out there in the first weeks again it can take place and so this is a squad that is working hard they deserve our support is not that you're not working hard and not that you're not investing money but that as we start off partners are the conversation with the state of the street the condition of the streets that we find now after this winter and that it is troubling because they are in worse shape than we've seen them in a long time and so i think that that overshadows all of the good stuff because we don't totally understand it when you referenced a couple of things that could be at the basis of some of the reasons why some of the streets didn't where as well we don't know whether it's because of the extreme change in temperature which used to cause frost heaves and all others kinds of disruption i don't know the answer but i think that you know i don't want to i don't want to have a statement about the state of st in the need to have as much as we can last in this conversation i don't i'm not pointing blame at anyone but i think that we really need to focus on what can we do this year is there a way to augment what you already have here which is a very good plan even though i want to say would i'm here for you and mansfield avenue sidewalk is not in the plan and i'm working on it as hard as i can but having said that i i want to say that you know this is this is serious and and so i want you to understand the message because i think you are seeing frustration and not understanding why we have inherited the streets this spring that we have but i do want to want you to understand that thank you earlier in the season i always used to get so frustrated that it was like almost fall and we're starting to pave so thank you for doing it when spring arrives if it ever does thank you and i would welcome the opportunity to do a forty minute description of how we are working differently regarding pine street just a quick example when the street failed this year we did an investigation of subsurface excavation of what is the base on this road before we decided what the best approach was and we had to come up with an approach that was consistent with the champlain parkway design concept we worked with many engineers with lawyers to figure out the approach found out avoid urban soils issues deal with the repaint in the way the parkway and it was to be doing was boring that we realized that pine street did not have sufficient enough asphalt thickness and just putting another layer on top of that was not going to give us a long term investment we had to take it all the way down to the dirt that is smart work and the team is doing that every day just like the way and it's it's too bad because it's how before it's too bad when you get accused of attacking and we're just trying to ask for accountability and i think that's what we're here for and i think the taxpayers of borrowing tin deserve accountability can do given the condition of our streets so it's not an attack in fact i was as i said no we worked hard to pass those holes but and when i talk about excuses i meant it that's what we hear we hear excuses why we can't do  and i think after the winter that we've just gone through and the damage done to these tax payers cancer she had to mention it's very expensive the night paid i would bet if you were told the taxpayers i'm going to and they would say pay that night that's how frustrated they are that's how much the car damage has been done and it's just it's really been frustrating and i take it personally that i going to cuse of attacking when i'm asking for accountability and that's unfortunate th rulings and approval and we have a report on the district's energy system from the team  and so this is a district resolution we have in front of us and for our viewers and viewers on channel seventeen who are watching who may not understand what district and or g is fle put into explainable terms for the springer chief operating officer of burlington electric i'm joined by nick leddy who is counsel for us on the district energy project and other projects for burlington electric and i just want to also mention i'm joined by my camera and sam swanson who's here representing the birdies citizen group that's been supporting district energy thank you and we should report i think that general manager of london bill is under the weather tonight and he is unfortunately regrets that he can't be here  so we're here following presentation on april sixteenth about district energy district energy has been studied for a number of years in burlington and it's the idea that we can take from me at the currently generate  capture waste heat capture steam from that plant and provide it through underground pipes to customers particularly large commercial industrial customers around the city to expand renewable heat and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and hopefully do so in a way that is cost competitive with their current heating system and happy to speak to the resolution if that's helpful sure give us a little overview so again so that for the listening audience until seventeen is well and we have been going through a process to study the feasibility of whether we could after years of study actually bring a district energy system forward in burlington using waste heat from mcneil and using the steam that we could extract from mcneil as well as natural gas back up and over the summer last year they determined through the feasibility work that there was a cost competitive district energy system that we could build in burlington that would have a significant greenhouse gas emissions benefit in the heating burlington city place project other buildings downtown hotels state government buildings and following that feasibility work we've been working with chorus to develop indicative pricing for customers which they have now received and we're at the point at which it would be helpful to advance the project for us to be able to make a couple of filings one from burlington electric and one i believe on behalf of the city to clarify with the state public utility commission that this could be a locally controlled project not a project regulated by the state and also that the mcneil biomass plant would not need a permit modification in order to move forward with district heat and so i believe the resolution would provide the authority for them make those filing make you know seen what this can do in other cities like st paul like vancouver this is truly a game changer when it comes to the energy portfolio of a city and its ability to provide cost ability as well as really a making a true dent in not a not just a dent but really having a transform a transformational impact in terms of the the greenhouse gas emissions of a particular city this is the single largest thing that we can do to address climate change that's identified in our climate action plan it's been studied and looked at for many years we haven't gotten to this stage before and that's why this is so exciting because we're happy and calm safe you know with potential customers where we've we've engaged an entity that has the skills necessary to  only take us from this conceptual stage but to take it to reality in order to and in order to do all that we're going to need to take a whole lot more steps but what this resolution does is it lays out in the whereas causes what district energy is while also providing some of the background forward with this and then it also really is a signal from us as a city council that we like the direction that this is going generally specifically however recognises that we understand that the governance structure an agreement with  so we're going to a whole lot more to talk about really important to recognize that whole lot more public engagement whole lot more public education and that's where i think the birdies team comes in in a big way so i look forward to that i hope we can have a unanimous vote tonight to really send a strong signal that the system design finance build the system we would have a city ownership structure a long term city ownership structure horrocks would run the system for a period of time and have a return to pay back the initial investment that they would make but we want to have not only trying to get a sense of what are we committing from a dollar perspective as and is it city dollars or is it repaired dollars so in terms of the work on behalf of burlington electric you know we don't we're not requesting any specific funds for this i don't know i can't speak to so you turn in black widow and similarly it's all within budget at this point but we are going to be expanding some general taxpayer dollars from on the city side probably to get this project underway and the idea is that once we get through hopefully we get the ruling we want from the public utility commission that's going to speed us on the way to getting to a place where courts is involved is handling most of the costs and and that the system begins it gets started then the idea is this is going to pay for itself so while it will be a short term investment for a long term goal i can just follow up on that is that there is a minimal amount of money though i mean in terms of because we we know that but other checkpoints where the couple have proved and i would be curious how much of an investment in case we didn't go forward because i know what the work session we had recently there was also discussion which i'm interested in hearing more about which is the risks that could come with this so we will probably have to check in with you if the public utility commission tells us that we have to go forward with getting their approval but if what we're doing is this the way we currently have it set up i would say that that it is within a few thousand dollars probably is what we're spending on the city side of it if we get where we think we want to go but we have not worked out a budget because it's kind of a decision tree set of things if this happens then this happens if this happens then that happens thank you and if you actually take  or maybe will will be identified further out of the checkpoints that week that's correct it doesn't you know i think that action that you would take tonight would allow us to better define what the project would look like we would need to come back for a number of further discussion or questions from the council cancer jane thank you and you know i want to ask a question about because what i what i don't want to see and i'm totally going to put this is an amazing  d s role really is you know we're the electric company we're not the heat company we don't sell heat we would have a couple of different specific roles in the project the first of which would be as one of the owners of mcneil plant we would  sell thermal energy to core x to the district energy system so we would have a new revenue source of potentially for the mcneil plant and be able to make that plant more efficient be able to get some greenhouse gas emission benefit from that also has a role potentially providing incentive we have we actually have legislation and i feel your that this session that authorizes us to use some incentive funds that previously weren't available to us for this project in particular so we may have incentives that we can bring to bear at the right stage to make this economically viable and help the city and burlington electric reach some of our fossil fuel reduction goals but those are the key roles that we would have and consistent with i think the conversation around the city's budget at a certain point when this becomes  to get the clarification there and the city would be going on its own behalf to get clarification that the city can have local control and not have the state a certain troll so it be too filings one for b b one for the courts would not be making i think you and that was just very briefly i'm also very excited that we're here at this point and i also wanted knowledge this citizens of burlington who have carried this vision literally for thirty years and without them keeping the flame alive i don't think we times when it was extremely discouraging it looked like there was no hope and no way but they didn't give up so that's i just want to acknowledge that to thank you thank you cancer no del with that i think we are ready to vote on the deserved the administration deserves a huge amount of credit for taking on an incredibly challenging shift in public policy around how we take care of young children before they reach school basically and you know try to improve outcomes for those who are who are often on the losing end of the achievement gap that we're also aware of i think there is recognition that the focus on increasing slots if you will which is in this regard is called sort of raising or increasing the capacity of the providers at the exclusion of going for research versus to go to scholarship funds or funds that allow these centers to operate in a more profitable way so they can take better care of their people who can then take better care of the children and provide them with a better learning environment was something that is the committee felt really should be shifted so that it be more flexible more  allow for more in innovation from the providers and so that going forward the committees sense was that that want to be provided to the providers through the requests for proposals that they ought to be more flexible the funds ought to be treated that way pack meeting on tuesday at five thirty if all goes according to plan will be at city hall park n c all park with a meeting weather permitting if not will determine but it will be important meeting we have a lot of dates no well us obviously you know and amaze coming soon and shell out a lot of dates on the new marina and hattori it would be anyway interesting coming to the pac and it would at the report from the flock on the new update to the local emergency management plan an important plan for our city will also be looking at what the committee will be hoping to set as priorit for the year what we're coming in with as an initial conversation is a calm discussion about the warming shelter and the city's role and in that shelter because it's been something that is timely in our community vast the members of the public safety committee to come with any items that they would like to prioritize but i'd also like to extend that invitation to other counselors as well and the administration of course to send me e mails or purchases or literally right throughout the city and those are going to happen on saturday and sunday i think in the south and it's on saturday in center city it's on saturday and in the new north and it's going to be on sunday so you know take some time walk every park we meet about nine o'clock in the morning but it's a great day it's going to be great weather this week and it's finally going to feel like winners gone so i hope everyone gets out and enjoys the festival festival festivities this weekend thank you thank you thank you president right well on sunday this coming weekend i'm going to be doing a clean up with pontiac or so i think we will together take care of about six six treats it will be all driven by bonnie her i wanted to update the committee on the inclusionary zoning workgroup and also on the new avenue corridor study committee that i see what we are we are a little late but we're not going to be very late we are continuing to work towards a consensus plan to bring back to the council we have a public hearing tentatively planned for monday june eleventh which is one of the mondays and in june that we don't have a council  meeting we are required by and we would want to do this anyway to have a public hearing will present our proposals our reaction to the various recommendations in the report and then depending on what we hear we may do another meeting to amend our report and i'm hoping that the report will get to the council by the end of june and be ready for the dispatch council to dispose of it as it we'll right there is a renew ski ave corridor study and the first meeting is this wednesday weekend saturday is probably one of the first warm days and it was also spring festival v m and i gotta say that it was probably the worst weekend that i've had in our neighborhood in probably since maybe st patrick's day of two thousand and twelve or tw absolutely horrible two hundred kids in the middle of a cock setting off fireworks i had to call the police three times twice for that one occasion it got worse and they were setting off fireworks i have to say they however that  phenomenal they sent cruisers they were there they sent one of the sergeants and they were on the scene they stayed on the scene they were there patrolling they were responsive when i called again later on in the evening when kids were on roofs jumping off of roofs it was it was out of control and so i think that if you d m is want to have spring fest which is a nice celebrate tori's sort of spring day they got to take responsibility for the impact that has on the neighborhoods and those of us there it was it was a scene and it was a bad one so but i have to say p was phenomenal and their response and their dedication they're there for their continued follow up so kudos to them thank you to the dispatchers and the and the officers who responded but you know spring fest can't go on like that thank you for that report counselor tracy cancer jang you well as you probably all know our streets now are so beautiful because i was in new york city with my family when i came back our cities when we talk about quality of life you have to come to bloomington vermont beautiful clean because of it's not the snow dragon but the people cleaning the street does much and they're doing an incredible job and one of the problems janko bush so this is for the administration so i feel disconnected from the university of vermont i live in ward one i represent ward one i went to the university of vermont and a representative comes to the ward one in a n p a but when i hear things like what councilor tracey just stated and in ward one where i live in ward one saturday was a day of very loud music which was coming from the campus i just feel like i didn't feel like i was well aware of what was going on completely and i i feel that there is less involvement with this council and the ministration oversees the university than there has ever been and i know that they came to us and there was a budgetary question and prioritization to get them to agree to the budgetary contribution they made but the quality of life issues i think really need to be looked at again and and discussed because i think that we aren't we aren't going in the same direction and i'm more worried when i hear things like as i said counsellor tracey mentioning that if we don't address this and be proactive we could find ourselves in a situation that is more out of control and of and so i'm looking to the to see if there can be some way to really have a more positive productive conversation about how we need to understand each other better and we do this occasionally and i'm hopeful just like lucy and charlie brown in the football i'm always hopeful and sometimes it makes a difference for a while so looking again to have it make annual event that planned actually from v m champlain college other young people in the city called toward a burlington it is not a regulated or official event but it's something that spawns up through social media rapidly through  social media you just need to i invite you all to search the hash tag toward a burlington on instagram and you'll see all of this all this stuff so it's i think something that universities should have a role in but from a background  in kind of social media in organizing this is very hard to see coming they organize it rapidly it's interesting social experiment but what results in this case is that really tough for neighbors many students as you council president of dates a couple things one just reminding the council that don cynic's his office has put out a notice to everyone and they've only gotten a response from one councillor and that's me just in case anybody is able to miss to make the meeting in his office where he's going to show us what the demolition looks like it cetera i think it's a great opportunity i told my would be there from back from a pillar in time so that's four o'clock this wednesday  then they may seventh and that is at the water building which is fifty three le valley lane from six thirty to eight thirty and that will be we'll be talking about city council operational issues rules basically anything like that we have a will be an agenda put out a basic agenda one of them that will cover anything that we want to talk about regard to how we conduct our meetings rules etc ther e will be food provided so hope everyone can make that the city council commission committee to review applications that will be coming up soon and councillor mason is going to chair that committee this year i will serve on that committee again and councillor tracy will be serving as a third member and i believe jordan from theirs will be on the committee as well correct about that mr mayor  city hall park committee is i am serving on that per the resolution council hartnett council or bush or mr mayor you're serving on that as well and i believe you also have appointed the city  two citizens are monique fordham and donna walters and there is a doodle pull out now on proposed times for those for those meetings lastly and we've already appointed the mirror old task force or someone is only watching the mayor's remarks later i will just repeat that the city hall park ad hoc committee has been formed with three city councillors a couple members of this administration and two members of the keep it green  group the good news since the last time we got together is that especially since you know we spent quite a bit of the last meeting talking about this all of this was conditioned on there not being an unanimously by the council last monday the administration has already pulled together start to pull together the people who are working on this project to start developing the options for this committee that are due under that resolution by mail eleventh and i think we're in good shape for that so the idea is that options will be submitted to the committee before may love it and then sometime after that this committee will meet for the first time and at the june twenty fifth meeting as contemplated again and in that resolution which is that all unfolds properly and we're able to move forward with consensus i think i would put us in good shape for starting this exciting project  by him in two thousand and eighteen another committee also on boards and commissions so every board and commission in the in the city will have  seats that are up for renewal or in many cases open seats for this upcoming fiscal year and anyone who is interested in looking at what the opportunities might be king go to tonight wrong that the applications are due on may twenty third if you are interested in serving on one of those boards or commissions and you can find the application right on the city's reaching out not just this way but other and other venues to make sure that people are aware of these opportunities and wanted to make the public in the council aware an event that is coming up  police department is an opioid crisis related book group discussion on the book called the unbroken brain this also is on may twenty third you can finish your application for for a commission it's a book that has gotten very positive you know important reviews real contribution to understanding of this terrible epidemic and the last item i did want to just add the council hart exuberance about this saturday truly is one of this weekend really is one of the best weekends of the year in addition to the opening of the little league which i'm going to try to get through as much as i can i've got men's baseball league opening as well as we got rained out this past weekend it's also been day for the greater burlington girls soccer league and and on top of all that we do have the kids day parade in green up day new looking for the kids are great this year it started in the morning at the corner of college street and church street which is like a whole new wrap so lots to look forward to this weekend hope everyone will get out enjoy it let's hope we have great weather to accompany it thank you president right thank you m