or anyone here would like to address the council mack and mike meyers have both been petitions and then we have one candidate each for the two different school trustees positions smack macneil for the two your position and margaret passed for the three year position that will be our final ballot and we will be getting that sample ballot up on the website for the public to see and understand before coming we've had as the public probably knows and you all know quite two weeks of fire activity in the city we've had seventeen calls that the fire department has responded to with three official structure fires which is very unusual for us i think you've read about most of them but we just wanted to take a minute to have the fire department remind the council and the public that carbon monoxide and carbon and fire detectors really do save lives in which in two of these three cases they really limited the potential scope of the incident so if the public has have been so responsive as well as our mutual aid partners who have been on site a number of times in the last two weeks and specifically those were saved mights fire rescue center fire  air national guard fire department city of burlington fire department and essex junction they've all spent time in our city in the last two weeks as probably most people know as well the school is undertaking an extensive water main replacement project and as a result has had to close school for a number of days they are hopeful to reopen on wednesday in partnership with me services is doing meals at the library tomorrow for students who are looking for that also being done at the school take your pick those two services are available and public works of fire have also been partnering with the contractor as well as the school personnel on keeping the it's not sprinklered and watered and then public works will work once the final pipe insulation is completed build repressurize this instant and do that water testing is gold a few quick staffing accomplishment and we're really proud of him he put a lot of work into it that also means we've another big pile driver of the street during snowstorms which is great for all of us and then claudia brown started today is the recreation assistance and community services she comes to us with a master's of science and environmental science a public policy she's worked for the american forest foundation and the national park service submarines just a wealth of expertise and hopefully will be here at your next meeting and then one final reminder next week of february fourteenth there will be a joint meeting of the public works commission the planning commission to kick off the east allen street scoping study work that's being done in conjunction with janet county regional plan commission so if people are interested in providing their feedback that it's at six o'clock six thirty six thirty here next thursday february fourteenth that's why  administration there had reached out to the secretary of state's office to initiate some conversations around translation of the polls so it's my hope to talk with jessie and the folks here to see if we can proactively be a part of those conversations as the secretary of state make working to finalize our budget presentation jesse's pulled out of a lot of information together for me so our first presentation is at the senior center budget presentations or conversations over the last month and a half to tune in to either c c t v or join us at one of the other events that will be posted on the city's website and social media pages so it's a complicated budget there's a lot of moving pieces and so we really to encourage folks to get access all the information you can so that you make an informed decision on town meeting and i would like to welcome our new counselor or interim counselor corey maggette not sure if you have any  ok first of all we're very happy to finally be here in this position to speak with you a little background on us we have pretty much been at programmers everything everything about public space around arts and entertainment and exercise and worldwide not  just locally so we've got to see many ways in which public and private people treat public space and our approach is a combination of all of those that was that is the say we're not naive about any of them and we do consider all aspects weighed and we make suggestions and decisions  started out in our own neighborhood in the old north and wanting to have places for the people that we saw in the community that needed a place to  celebrate come together exercise whatever they wanted to do in a public space in a noncommercial way and since most of the people in our neighborhood there have traditionally been low income or new residents either to our area or to the united states with different cultures different points of view and so on and different levels of income and expenditure hierarchies based on their situation and we've tried to  consider their needs desires as well as the communities needs and desires and in developing our spaces so we started off in a commercial building  and currently run out of time in the buildings since it's being gentrified and we've taken it from our main space which was a laundromat and our secondary spaces which were the act facilities in the back and turned them into very comfortable very useful very flexible spaces that are pretty much full  within the last couple of years we've added space in the old north and community center the former st joseph school with champlain housing trust and it's coming along we've been there a couple of years we have a large event hall and community kitchen that that's used by people within the building as well as in the community and then we heard about witnessed in my town i also work with a to b and it's sounded like our cup of tea something that that we're very familiar with in terms of raw space community need and we were just talking about this before our unique ability to pull things together like this it's kind of like you know being a dog catcher nobody wants to do over the number of years we've kind of gotten good at it and by considering everybody's needs and point of view so when we looked at the space and started talking with  y it became pretty clear that this is something we could pull together here as well yeah i feel that the building was kind of designed and created to do just the things that we we do and the parallels of course between our neighborhood and when news came here are quite dramatic you know it's just so so similar and a lot of people actually come from one whose being a user space is because they don't have a place that they can go to here and when you ski one of the big things that we need to make clear about what we do when we offer a space to the public is  offering them a room but we're offering them a fully equipped and atmospheric place where they can do their the thing that has brought to them so we bring in sound equipment that is not you know support them in a lot of ways i mean people come here from other countries they don't necessarily understand how we use public space the whole idea of finding a room in a certain way and putting it back that way when you leave so it's like an educational process of finding out what what these people that are our clients need to know to make their experience be the best it can be and we learn from them what they need and and they learn from us what what we think will help them be happy in the space and having been in the burlington space in the north and north of new space for twelve years i can tell you we we just started basically we were just open to whatever we had to learn from the people so that we could hear them and then design what we were doing and adjust what we were doing to suit what they need and of course we are it's not just off you know americans that come to us it's obviously everyone in our neighborhood and then beyond who don't want that hotel environment and can't or can't pay for it or above you know and so even after twelve years people still come in the door they rent it without even seeing and then they come in the book this is so nice you know this is just i feel so good here so comfortable here so that's a really great feeling that we have kind of gone along and made the adjustments  and kept our ears open to what they needed just tell one little anecdote of this is the thing that i was that was my pet thing people would come and say they wanted to have their parties go until like three hours of the morning and i said well as far as i'm concerned the bad stuff always happens after two am so i just want to say just figure out how to stop your party of two am and they looked at me like i was insane because they can't stop their parties at two am because their party has just started going at about one other aspect of it is that whether in the long term our president comes in and says the question how we can least day was there laughing i said well did you want to stay past two because i usually don't like people stay past t d prompting me to just ask a question when you say use of the spaces it ranges from it looks like it ranges from everywhere from group fitness classes that may occur on a pretty regular basis to  what people are interested in doing and be able to it's not a turn key event in the sense that we don't have a key and so you go at it we host everything and because of the breath  experience that we have within the time that they're setting up their events in the you know we do contracts with everybody and all of this we can continually suggest ways to accomplish what they want to accomplish without damaging the neighborhood of the space or themselves that they could have a good time with this thing and make it happen within their budget and so on some of the things we do are our bare room you know they come in there and they put four tables in the middle and they have a meeting and they go away some people want to turn it into las vegas you know and as long as they don't put tape on the walls we're fine but that's one of the things we don't we don't let them do anything to the space that's going to create any evidence of them being there beyond the time they were there we developed techniques i used to work as an artist in residence in the schools and we would go ahead and create a public display for two or three weeks of six thousand international artifacts without a single hole of the wall and so we've we've learned how to create an atmosphere  to create a meeting place for the community for the neighborhood and because we've been there for a while i think we've attracted a lot of interest of current residents and people outside the old north to that area to the point where our building on her feels like killing bin to lead us back in but yeah so the idea of not only having having the o'brian center function in and of itself but to have it be more of a gathering place you know beyond just having a bunch of events there but having meaningful lives for the whole town  and the other side of that is we're more providers of space rather than producers so we're not it's not like we're looking to run everything we just want to provide a place where people can run things effectively might because we really haven't learned the lesson that you can't take on all the roles of you know from the place through the final performance one group or one individual can't know enough to do all that and so because there is this kind of vacuum in the whole area of putting on events that are not you know  commercial since aren't very people doing that we're creating that space where we're concentrating on that and helping other people come to us and have all their excitement about what they want to do can all come together and bring this big poor excitement into that one place  even talked of the one commercial service that we use is an online booking place that's really very effective i mean we've got the only thing we do and we get a tremendous amount of people using this area and this is you know something they can search for specific characteristics that they want but we're just like several a day come and so we will expand and have a complete once we get some good pictures of the your help to get the word out of this community on a regular basis i'm hoping that we can count on you to also spread the word about what's been what what starts to happen and how people can reach us to do that to help them do what they want to do everybody we do generally generates one or two additional events so obviously the more you do more gets use d it was interesting to me i came in to the air to the community of the or bryant center one time there was a birthday party and this woman said i had no idea this place was available but you know i've been doing this at home it's been crazy this is fantastic and i said how did you find out about that other totally random way of finding out that this place is spinning you and i was just going to say that we we have several of our current tenants over in the building on north when you ski are very excited about actually just moving lock stock and barrel over here and that you know it's very comforting to us because that's a part of you know we know exactly how much income we get from them every month and that makes us feel more comfortable about this you know five thousand feet is a lot of real estate so you know we'll have we have some stability in the fact of what we're bringing over and it's like three clients of ours will pay half the rooms and then it's just those hourly things and all that are going to come together and make it so we have enough and that you know that takes a little while it wasn't the first year wasn't that great for either of the other two spaces and the first year is going to be the time when you have to just be spreading the word and pushing and pushing and pushing to get people and that really settles down once you're two or three years into it so that's what we see is good i think i mean i'm excited that you all are here at the table with us because i think in a lot of the discussions we've had around tendency in the building a concern has  been in getting new tenants in the loss of a community room and an affordable community space for individuals and groups to gather is something that probably child i know challenge myself and likely challenge others and to have that still be an live like you're speaking to your reputation and your work in a region be able to do to get individuals and groups more aware of that space and into that space as well as providing other different program a opportunities or space for programatic opportunities for the community come to come together i think is really fantastic and fits the character and the intent of the building in a lot of ways and we were quite conscious of the fact that it's going to be more expensive than it is now and that's always some people are going to really not be happy about that but what are are what we have to do is to x get them to understand what's different about it  you know what's different about that experience and all they have to do is do one thing here and they will see a distinct difference between this package that are offered versus what i mean i had two young somali women come over to that hollow room older than community center and they were really sharp about the whole thing she was planning her wedding and she's going to do it in the summer she started calculating the numbers i was throwing out to her and then she said to her friend if we do this at the it was the sheraton at the time we do this at the sheraton it's going to cost four thousand dollars if i do it here i could do it probably for like twelve hundred and it's b m requirements like you know security or you know depending on what the post you said is right well we just need to hear from from you guys about what what are the possibilities because you know for the people who have these parties without this that's going to be a deterrent if they don't have if they don't have that possibility at all and because we're monitoring everything we've never really had that and live music or imagine being something that happens pretty the there is there was a change the ordinance made when we wrote it to allow for alcohol use on city property which had been allowed at all prior to that rewrite and so we have had a little bit of recent conversation just about some of those restrictions and how to continue to altogether we're estimating at the top that will be about twenty one thousand dollars as i mentioned i think in my cover sheet to you all and we expect we can cover most of that if not all of that our operating money for the building which we have budgeted to out in this year so that's not new money to do any of the budget projections that you've seen or the budget that we've been over the last few years really being very discerning about what we've spent on building maintenance and i think unfortunately with the budget time frame to be able to adjust it does occur you know i think all of us sitting up here are told that by won't be the case and that we're going to have a glowing success out of the gate and be you know you're one super to that we haven't asked intentionally for anything that isn't general you know there's very little specific to our already in use it's just our experience with buildings and inspections know we're very much a two to that side of operating you know the owner side of operating that every time you get inspected electrical inspection fire inspection any of those things it's meeting regional international standards and the things that came to our site when we looked around to different things it was like no matter what you do these things need to be addressed and no matter what you do this can look like it used to be a shopping center kind of thing so that anybody going into a space it needs or fresh coat of paint it needs to have other electrical upgraded to meet standards and we knew about the the rebates because we've done that and we know about the shirt breakers because that's a national standard biggest capacity is the event hall and that is to forty that's enough yes that's it that's really there some people think they're going to get three or four hundred people there that but out and i think you know there was a time maybe six months ago that we were all just really just never and for you to come back to last with a tenant that i think really has the ability  to take a minute to introduce that team and then i'll ask eric to arizona administrators to give you an overview not of this project but of your rule as the reviewers of projects in the tiff district and then walk through this project specifically and then take any comment from the public as well so to start i'd just like to introduce our big development team introduce themselves so our downtown core zoning district the the downtown core of the downtown core zoning is unique in the fact that council is responsible for approval of any projects that are proposed in that area the whole downtown core zoning is is regulated by existing actually through the permit that what it is that was issued when the when the redevelopment proposal was put in place so there is a master plan for all of the lots and all the projects that go into the downtown core to go along with that actually fifty per member she general design guidelines to have to assist counsel on how this process should be reviewed and perm they are not very detailed so that there's a lot of design flexibility for council to to look forward to really as you look at this project and discuss this project you really do have a lot of control in how the  design ultimately ends up for for the community so that you are are responsible for for that part of the staff unlike other other zoning districts where we have either the development review board or the planning commission or project review committee do the design council is responsible for all of the design review specifically related to that from a zoning perspective as the zoning administrator there is limited aspects that i look at as well so specifically building height some of the dimensional standards of the building the uses that are in that are incorporated into the into the specific district parking requirements and then any science or some general guidelines again a for science but ultimately the goal of the downtown core district is to create the kind of guy that could just be oriented feel and really to kind of to focus on that we focus on a feeling of i'll say  downtown rather than a specifically prescribed use and material concept so that's kind of the process forward for what your role is here i think in the past when projects have been proposed in downtown  some of the other communities have provided input but that's totally at the discretion of council for and just a few other words about people saying you know i think it's important to remember that that was that was historically put into place in the downtown core very intentionally to give the council is part of this master redevelopment plan for the tips district that ultimate authority to have the redevelopment happ to be able to happen within the communities vision and so your rule in that is really the articulation of that community vision is that if impacts the design before we get into the specifics of this project do you have questions about that is is in the audience and one of the planning commission members amy holmes in the audience as well so they are both here but we so we have had some discussions right now but we haven't gotten to a lot of details specifically about the project as it's been proposed and they those groups don't have any formal role in terms of providing input to the council other than being being here tonight correct bring their input that way yeah i must i must counsel specifically invite slack that you know her interaction that dialogue between the groups that really there's no formal role identified in our process for it ok thank you for clarifying certainly welcome input later on for tonight so as we transition from process into this under state statute implementing zoning in our city he is therefore considered the regulator and it's not necessarily part of the development team myself john rusher and others for a team that really played that development part so eric has the freedom of the regulatory authority to say things that maybe there are potentially different so i also want to put this project in the context of other of some of the last years of history in the tenth district so as you know we're about three quarters of the way through active district it's performing very well we have plans to retire the debt by twenty twenty four i'm having said that the hotel and vision in the downtown was always part of the master plan and the master negotiations with all the property owners including the who didn't tell developer in the downtown to come to the solution so we believe that this the utilization of this last big undeveloped parcel in our tip district that the city currently owns is part of that grander solution and ultimately has a much stronger location for in the hotel than there at the bottom of the rotary on the right kind of the public's use of the r riverfront so i want to give that very grave context and i will pass it over the highly components grade just walked through there is universal support some questions and clarification but overall universal support for the location of the hotel specifically as well as a lot of support obviously for  negotiated to get in the ground quickly i'm so certainly permanent through act two fifty is an involved process and we would like to move that along and quite frankly we have you know about to have a brand new city council so i think this council has seen and heard a lot of these discussions and we are interested in bringing that to you because you've been part of those discussions in the past but it is always you or your prerogative  two parking spaces in front of the proposed otel and one of the ideas of again just trying to unify the space was perhaps a limiting those and that's what the current renderings indicate so i think that's still open but it does jump that you will that when you go in take the very busy area away from the parking spaces needed to the public space so called as far as though the walkway jumps out you know something we're not used to seeing there's a couple places where there are islands that are that wide but it's not a continuous as what's depicted in the roadways so ultimately that's why we're here and also whether we introduce green space or try to basically create you know more public space that allows for that communication  what that particular site plan shows great if you can read a line that shows the hatched area which would be the alignment that goes from the gravel portion that's within the wetland itself the causeway south surface parking for their particular street grade access into the building so we're always trying to reflect the previous commitments of the city had made up that particular location with respect to an old place how that entry the site onsite i think it is a good question about how does that kind of sidewalk friend to carry around the edge of the hotel in order to to connect to not going to be kind think is the expectation that the planning commission has a body will have a separate meeting review the materials and provide us with a different recommendation in time for next meeting be a little bit clearer and i would be to take all the comment tonight because we're about the areas sounds to me like you're pretty clear about what you're hearing from folks but we may hear some new and  we can have staff reflect this conversation back to the planning commission and invite them to come members to come to the meeting on the nineteenth and see the revised plans and if at that to see if there are other members of the public that want to prevents that i don't know but it seems to me the window treatment can be more creative more innovative and more interesting to create a better surface of light and shadow area from west to east and i really like to see the hotel make a statement that makes it more interesting both architectural and perhaps with some rearrangement of forms to create li absorb the i think we're missing a huge opportunity for our solar panels on the roof of the building or some other creative use of the roof of the building and other ways in our tennis courts or a service that could be flooded in a gentle kind of way to create a skating surface on the winter and tennis or some other activities we don't have any anything else anybody  i think i don't see the reserve at for a project like this it's line for me and three so you know the modeling that was shown to you in the projected rate increases for the survival we were in dogs we're not looking at any changes in that luckily you know we do have a resign so then you do feel like with what's left over would we don't have water meter break issues all over the place over and over we still be an ok place with what's left for reserves yeah i mean luckily  speak a little bit to the go through visions that were there were those just determined to be necessary changes to the project based on well you keep going and actually that's probably good for for influence side of the way streets are where the ground the sewer comes in from the town so we have to intercept that gravity stream to predict through the new building so some of the additions that were there were put in through the final design process were to with a lot of the electrical components in these buildings and some of their locations you got some sensitive equipment dead because it's important to really protect walk terms so through code some of the code changes that we've been seeing recently pos purchase order for purchasing equipment you can't get or you can't get a reliable price so we've been seeing a lot of fluctuation in pricing per quittin over the anteater and i think another thing that john mentioned was a mechanical electrical sub contractors that typically work for the she sees there i don't know where they're working but they're incredibly busy area and they're putting out pricing to reflect how busy they are so we've been seeing a lot of higher more on the two hundred ten thousand dollars that you're considering transfer from capital reserves to the private it isn't up to two hundred ten thousand dollars so for the project to move forward with funding through the clean water of program the city needs to demonstrate that financing is whole the reality this phase of the project with the bids that we have we're looking at the project being around one point four million dollars more to breathe which brings about t hundred ten thousand dollars if efficiency in the total project cost we are carrying a fifty six thousand dollars contingency which is money that is not allocated where it's work and there certainly will be change order but you could end up with some of that money still being with me at the end of the project there are some other costs being legal fiscal short term interest and may not end up being where they are in the top five or cost currently and it edition to seems eligible for free now currently through the funding program thirty five dollars thirty five thousand dollars in loan forgiveness which is not taken into account in the like this just something to think yeah it's a good point so what we what we try to do with you know projects like main street the wall you know we're not looking at what twenty seventeen  what the twenty nineteen twenty twenty one construction so we build a little bit of contingency i think the other deal or point with those two projects which is much more hopeful as we have some leeway to the scope so we can carried second second by how all those in favor say aye aye motion carries thank you very much now i think i don't either is related  hundred and twenty seven thousand two hundred eighty four dollars in the other information we need for this any questions counselors questions from the public none i would entertain a motion to approve or to award the bid to nicole of wakefield in the amount of one million one hundred twenty seven thousand two hundred eighty perspective it's always interesting to look at these numbers this number doesn't change over time of the original taxable value of the district was twenty five million the current tax will barely it was almost one point three executive session matters the first is executive session pursuant to title one section three thirteen one the labor relations agreements with asked me to place in the second topic is