seats or we have lots of meetings so it's looking right now like the november six agenda is going to be pretty significant so just that in mind you also have a subsequent morant that we will need side between meetings so just a heads up about that i'll give you more information about that later two important updates on the airport that i wanted to bring to your attention tonight one that is the resolution that you are past in august is before the ethics select for tonight actually so the mare and represent sound committee is kind of morphing for the time being into the know it's compatibility program update technical advisory committee which is in the f a a required a group to advise the airport as they put together the next round of funding for the noise compatibility program so we sit on that group that's represented from the school district also since on that group the first meeting of that group will be tomorrow night at five it's open to the public if anyone is interest last week we had a long discussion about the main street in the pool just a quick follow up that we are working on both of those efforts to move them forward and lay out timelines to see how successful will be actually hitting the targets the founders are looking for it is likely that we will bring forward to you at the next meeting requests for funding for their engineering of both projects we are hopeful that we will have a variety of different funding sources to bring and i are in the middle of our our nine mill we just kicked off today are any audit the auditors are here all week in july has done an enormous amount of work and deserves huge credit for putting together the details and the auditors walked into a complete au feel of the narrative around the planning to which has been really exciting and i think really personalizing it through exploring the message in a very community focused way so it's a player for the people who live here not just cities resolution reached out to some of that six so for members individual it was really helpful to have those thoughts to frame some of the messages that i was sending them i missed the public safety commission meeting so i've got this week touch base with the folks that to my right over here and the chair of the commission to get caught up to speed so come back next council meeting with a better of an update for you all there i was actually down it brought up are a for the secretary of state's annual transparency tour and i bring that up because we're actually going to be here on wednesday so from six to eight here in this room we're going to be bringing the transparency tour it's a great presentation of things like open meeting law the public records act transparency in government so it's a really great opportunity for officials like us or municipal staff or members of the public who look i want to understand the tools that are out there just pull that excess their government to come and have a really of tech something coming up and there's a lot of it's great because we used to be able to sit in here and really cover every every event there was taking place in the community just can't do that anymore so want to take the opportunity to acknowledge through the great work meeting we got the quote from an engineer to do the work the engineer that has been working on the project so has some baseline knowledge already to do the environmental and plan engineering work and it came back about twice as much as we thought it was going to  our engineering is refusing that spec and trying to see if there is room to negotiate if we need to get other bidders into that process added a new engineering voice into that process and do that due diligence so we know we're spending the money wisely  this point because we have then i don't think it should be delayed anymore but that's the reason why it's not on tonight's agenda good question thank you excellent question of the public safety commission raise your hand volunteer for this show are so my husband and i have lived in one new ski for about four years and we absolutely love it it's a place that we can truly call home so when that's opportunity on the public safety commission opened up i thought it was a great opportunity to engage with my city but also help have a voice making sure that this is a while coming and include seven safe place for everyone mentoring experiences of cool thing bring to the table to those i'm sure interactions and people who maybe have had to work with public safety officials in a number of different capacities from the interaction standpoint as well that's great yeah i'm excited feeling to know that now we're in that positive financial position rather negative position which is a little bit disheartening as you can see the generals one by itself generated a sizable amount of surplus for  year to joel go in to try and get his collect as many delinquent taxes as possible and that's why you see over a rather large amount of the the revenue increase was attributable related to that delinquent tax collection and in of the city budget and how they keep in mind that it is taxpayers money that they are using and i think we sort of made that point quite clear and it's nice it's really heartening to know that people really take an interest it's you know it's not their money  increases the rest of it there that was an increase in the amount of grant money that was i brought in by the police department for special police details that of course was offset a little bit if you look at the expenses for the police department one of the only two and the rest of it is a fairly self explanatory the only other area in the express section of the general fund budget was the engineering department and that was the really all my new a little over three thousand dollars for some professional engineering work that was done  right community center all did as well so if you look at those those are those special funds in the life of the enterprise finals and the general fund everything went really well last year so we're kind understand and i would say this very seriously you need to understand she did it alone she's the only one to do it and it's just remarkable that this this this suddenly you can do those kinds of things even though she's got her head she's very very pro so you should end up with an audit of the year and a very strong financial position as we have with the last three or four years and i think that the city should be very proud of what's the who they hire who does the management and how how they handle appreciative of your work thank you well i think you're right and you know why should we have five items on the mantle of honor and i think without any doubt we've cleared up four of them probably to the auditor satisfaction and the one we did was something on the one that we're go and just the other piece i want to ask about is given the  surplus is six hundred twenty one thousand dollars and your memo indicates that a large majority of the surplus was due to vacancies so i'm just wondering just proportionately speaking how much of that surplus can we i think we've worked hard on budgeting around parking revenue is that his fan a source of the surface in prior years sort of trying to do more accurately sort of predict although that's difficult to do it's also difficult to predict vacancies and whether or not we're how quickly will be able to fill vacancies so i think it's just important when we're ending a year with a surplus this large that we're really clear with folks why why that happened so can you give me a sense of the math the order of magnitude of the large majority of these are  numbers by my interpretation is that the revenues the increased revenues make up the majority of the surplus so that's the four hundred sixty two thousand temporary the difference between those two there was sixty number is all of the under spending essentially we did on the expense side in the city on a percentage of that is vacancy savings my estimation in the forward is sixty sixty is probably about right we ha the meters will do for some were collecting but so on a percentage basis even if you said you know if you say sixty thousand even if you say one hundred thousand that's still not the majority of the surplus right we're brightest the majority of the expense and you'll see an item later on about the use of those funds specifically because we are you know right now we're building that number from one thousand so we're building so far ahead of the development community we're building the budget so far ahead of the development community that that that mine will often be concer appreciate the memo it's really helpful especially for for us but for folks in the river people watching at home they see in big budget surpluses a year and to know the reasons behind that so they can feel confident we can feel that we're  row in the space of between ninety and one hundred seventy thousand dollars of the general fund surplus and it was it was like that like clockwork now we're seeing a little bit of an illusion of the number and i think given what we're going through in terms of growth and different staff different departments and you knows i don't i don't find the numbers to be surprising  and i think the harder part is going to be the next year the same a lot of the same hole in the states but the same assumptions you know we're maybe altered a little bit but maybe you know this is really information should inform next year's budget so we're always wondering what what are the process might be this year that would either deal with this or last question first or after i mean what your thoughts  and just to take people back you know the question has always been you know what happens a lot of time to general fund surplus or fund balances that it's in the past it's just been set aside because it was a i don't want to say  inconsequential bit of money but it wasn't enough that it really just screen you need to invest in right away that change and the dollar figure him out and there was a lot of discussion last year about whether or not we should pair the fund balance conversation with the budgeting process there's pros and cons in doing either way but what we recognize is disingenuous in general is to  really separate without knowing each other because then we might make cuts or expenditures during the budgeting process that could have otherwise been addressed by a balance waltzer taking note that we cannot use to fund balance is a consistent way t fund the year to year needs because there is no promise it's going to be there and it should never be we have a strictly said it should not be used towards operational work so you know last year the philosophy  and talk because he's trying to get out of here for a very important take so what you see in front of you is the same template we used before so the boxes i apologize now a little bigger than this one and the last one just so there's a lot of content here you see the boxes on the second and third page these are as i say there's a lot of work here and we did indicate that the top two are new things are proceeding that's more slowly than planned specifically that was around those two required staff to  the continued use of that so it's better really effective tool for us to try and identify people that are high risk in our community and try to do some intervention with so that's been really productive i think some of the other things that the leadership team could tap into over the next year is reaching out to the adult protective services our mental health first call on all those agencies as well trying to build some better relationships you'll be seeing that a number of formats we're struggling a little bit on how we can turn the electronic version into a workable paper version for people that don't have internet access that's the only thing that's kind of slow us down a little bit but it's going really well we're going to do a other internal survey as well with the police department employees to try and figure out what our points are and places that we can improve over the next couple of years so hopefully my timeline that i think is very doable is one when you see one brought to the now we're starting to connect those dots of what's going on with those people they get at these koran on the spreadsheet that they had to police contacts and then it's up to us to decide whether it was anything to do with substances or other issues all these people come to the table at the same time talk about oh irish people not only talk about successes but about failures that we happen to have an overdose fatal that somebody was that we're trying to identify and work with and how we can avoid that in the future   stand up a program to burlington street outreach team program so we're calling it the community outreach program office and the idea is that the communities would partner with howard ethics so for humans for six communities who would have an office at the police station and would be the primary point of contact for almost probably for law enforcement referrals and other community for referrals for people who are experiencing some kind of mental health issues with the idea being that we intervene as early as possible at the lowest level of intervention instead of having the officers be kind of that first response to people officers are seeing on the street and how where were we as municipal employees are able to provide an adequate level of intervention and so we believe and we're still in the final stages of kind of putting together the agreements but we believe that h s and specifically the department of mental health will come up with half the fine need to support this program and then the other half will be split between the six communities so if all of that comes to fruition and of course i would need to you and get approval to enter into this contract and allocate these funds but if all of this comes to fruition as we're currently investigating it would mean about a twenty five or thirty thousand dollar cost for the city when you ski to essentially have you know almost a full time mental health professional here in the city working directly with the police department and the services all the time and so we think it's we think it's exactly aligned with your goal of meeting the basic needs of our residents and freeing up our actually trying to decide between three humans and fourteen minutes and decided in the first year to start with four there we think also it's going to be a bit of a ramp up just staffing up and and getting people acclimated  i mean that the trick is having it's not enough to have a person you need to have services that you can refer these right folks that you know i guess there's there was an announcement today about him increasing streamlining  licensure process for drug and alcohol abuse counselors which i think would be a really good thing but i think one of the issues we run into as a state is there's no services for people are there services are over taxed so i think this is a really important first step and i think we also need to continue to advocate for a mental health system that is a patchwork is one that's you know has  level of professional services that functionally need in order to confront some challenges that they face so thank you for this work and keep up the pressure on the state i'm concerned about continuing to back really which is i don't think people realize how rare the way things are done here is it's you can provide a perfect storm of the resources are really carefully balanced and you know what i think we've seen is a intervention the lowest level intervention that's necessary i think that's really for people are actually getting services of the ground level that will have the greatest impact for the whatever fans want to highlight about this model that i think it's special and i was some of our other conversations is the regional approach in this is something that individually our communities could have stood up you know we could hire a social worker to work with the police department but when you think how residents are moving between our communities and how you have so how you provide services outside of geographic boundaries and how you provide services in a regional way to enable people them great conversations about how they take great care of their property and how they may have different feelings about those beside them and what that means to the city role so there's a great conversation hall there were a lot of their members the students went and had lunch and did some interaction with the folks so again you know under that one lenses including them deserve a great partner and certainly want to help us with our with our mission and be a part of our community in the private sector employment this fits in a little log for me but we are going to pilot a fire then i hope that that if we're successful with him and certainly it will be at this point we have fifty plus people signed up to do the initial about to be able to if we need to do it there again but hopefully move it around the city throughout the year and i think it's a great it's a great way to stay connected with our folks in them the easiest one to have the access departments and just i think part of our own assessment is understanding what's around us and developing a strategic vision of what the fire delivery system here  and how we respond to the fire department can be connected to our neighbors we're not alone we're not an island we're part of a very close knit mutually it system and that i hope and intend to fully up properties that have been the long term issues you know and i wrote with confidence to a resident who had some concerns about a couple properties saying that we know more about the conditions that the people living in this community are living in  point in our communities history because you guys are are doing that work and making sure there's a system for tracking and giving feedback on the quality because we've the housing that's available ensuring that you know she chief also points of some very specific things for any questions or follow ups for him on those items counsel the questions are fellows from all the gues paper and has depended on time constraints we haven't been able to rely on that data and we're going into hundreds of inspections but at the end of the year never been able to tell you what those inspections the number one violation was that the same property without going through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper so we now have a software program what's called fire all over inspections or electronic or removing to that  so any property we're starting with rental properties but that's property complaints come in on the private side we enter them in so i can now run a monthly report on property complaints and i can tell you if it was you know trash or landlords it's not fair to the taxpayer from going back to the same property of the people living there even more so we're going back to the same property the same violations over and over and over and again the system's going to be really allow us to it's a great thing to be public about not due to the shame anyone but it is as we gain more allies if i communicate to the public what the struggles are and have that understanding and no one wants to be in there and that life just makes it a lot shorter road in frankly the amount of time spent in your properties is i don't mean to make this sound insulting anybody but people don't know a moving quickly enough there is usually more there so it was encouraging for getting frustrated to reach out and get whatever story came from some folks in city hall requests from other questions and naturally here within the city i'm not you know for as a human service guy that feels really good that's where we want to be and so i just think for people at home to understand that it's easy to look at the chief jobs as sort of more punitive me in some ways and i think it's just to be does fall into our shop i think one thing i do want to preface there's there's a lot here there's a lot about here too there are a lot of priorities below these highest priorities that we're continuing to move and work on so  i think that's worth mentioning that this is sort of the tip of the iceberg for us as a department just you mentioned early on just the first section about setting up some strategies around the basic needs of the most vulnerable  i think i've shared with this group led to love like three nights of me not sleeping quickly seriously that's a huge lift and a huge task it tells me that i'm in the right community this is where i want to be and for the council to know so he put a finger on that  what they want to spend time on that's huge that's also a huge ask and so i think we're trying to really take our time to mirror the process that council went through downstream and look at the work that we're doing identif purdie areas and then i think importantly too and this is one of the things that slowed us down set up some metrics and some outcome measurements to know that we're actually accomplishing something it's really easy in human services to do something that feels good and not have any idea that you're actually making a difference for anyone so i expect when we come back next quarter you'll see not only kind of a mirror process with those priorities but the ways that we're checking on ourselves to make sure that we're moving the needle on these so again but that's a slow process  again when you're dealing with a scope of mental health substance abuse homelessness child care etc there's a lot there yeah yeah so one of the conversations we've had a definition of how to meet their communities basic needs is what is the role of local government in doing that work and what are the role of our park and so i think what raise really specifically talking about is how do we push out on the edge of that role of municipal government and not just you know honestly my my initial instinct was to come to you and say well providing clean water and providing paved streets and writing sidewalks and writing twenty first please  me that's what municipal government does to me our residents basic needs and we're really proud of the quality at which we provide that we will continue to do that and continue to talk about that as providing basic needs but i think what ray his team is doing is really of what the city's going to do but i think it is important to acknowledge that there are many many ways in which through our normal course of business we are providing for basic needs and we did have agreed and engineering department retreat back in early september we started this process as a department so i think the other thing for all of us as we're kind of learning through this this new approach passing this downstream is taking some time getting everybody up to speed down the line as the process so a couple pieces that i want to highlight within the next section which is for working towards a more representative community and that sort of marketable access to decision making couple really exciting meetings that happen during this quarter that i think are starting to already lead to some develop some recommendations but really great meeting with stuff from association of our friends living in vermont so his son jesse rick myself and how they're how to lunch with  it was just a really wonderful opportunity to sit down share a meal talk about challenges talk about opportunities and i think really establish a relationship in a way that hadn't been done before i think we do the very transactional business type relationship and i think th really broke down some walls there and allowed us to develop some partnerships which have already started to bear fruit we've had several job opportunities that we've been able to son to suffer dale the we're getting uppity and started to come in which is really exciting so i think we're starting to say you guys are are doing really well here if you're asking the right questions you're pushing in the lady areas but i think it's still fair to say that there's i think everybody around this room would like to do better there so it's a really interesting observations on his part anything some recommendations and some things we're going to start to develop moving forward so i'm just exciting to know that that's out there and that stuff we're thinking about quite a bit of access piece going to jump down to  whole support piece just quickly touch on it so we're working right now with the school around a rewrite of the twenty one c grant which is a grant that funds out of school time services for school aged kids we have run that grant in partnership the school runs it better opportunity for services for kids and families so really exciting work there possibly looking out here into the working bridges model which united way has put in place to some success idea there being you're providing services directly to an employer is actively committed to employing folks in lower socioeconomic status categories of higher need so instead of making people run around for services try to bring the services to where they're going to be and if you can do that at a place where their kids and care all the see in particular some of the ways that they are planning around open space and recreational programming so again stated but i think some really interesting things coming there to really nice rack is not an area where i have a lot of formal background i could do a lot of work with youth but not specifically through iraq i mean so really great for me to do some learning and connecting with partners and then in a chapter capacity we continue to to work on this initiative i think it's it worth mention we did have a closure of the r p m friday we ended up with only one applicant and the committee met today to review and is going to be exploring kind of next steps i think obviously when you get an r one applicant that's not quite where you want to be in your house and some ability to look at some comparative so you know i think there is it's interesting we've had a couple state wide partners at the table who are very complementary to the process and i think there's some general concern that it may be more reflective of the systemic issue within early childhood where a lot of the partners that in the expects might be ready to expand are struggling with quality stuff being able to make the business model work based on subsidy rates and so i think we are we are in an interesting environment there but there's we left the meeting today with some good next steps and again expect we'll be back to you all with some updates at the next meeting  reporting those and some exciting work around professional development actually that again i think is a little bit premature for prime time but looking at doing some community wide trainings that person from the school has been doing with their stuff exciting pieces on the horizon and i think those those are the big the big ones that i want to highlight there are specific things that i you've heard about several times the last couple of months ago details just as a quick update the district agreement which is the document that would essentially become the organization starter is at the attorney general's office for review which is the step before provide all things to all people you dilute your effect of this that way i am very encouraged by the work that we've done to bring other voices to the table to really think through how do we leverage the assets in the community and  the region to to ensure that we you know meet needs are being met or there are ways for for people to start to think differently about the relationships that exist is highlighting that that that's a that's important and that's not on you yet right now that's on all we provide i think as a society that's on all know i think to speak to that one of the things for me that was a really good take away from the wreck conference last week is to really as we develop programs start operating around some cost recovery goals so looking at programs across a continuation saying for for some of these programs are cost recovery goals zero rate when you see wednesdays we're not trying to make any of that money back we were putting that money out for goals zero percent cost recovery that's a great community event that pays dividends in the back and you know for a program that a more specialized individual program try to think of a good example of a blanket i don't want but you know something that's more of a fee based part sailing is a great one where there's a particular cost to get that boat out to have that sailor care that's  my have a pretty high cost regret recall maybe it's one hundred percent so that we're trying to make sure that we're subsidizing some programs and being clear about the fact that we can't subsidize all ram so i think that is worth it if we need to do and i think that's an drop but i think the reality of our budget is that that's not feasible and so i think we are going to have to have some different ways of approaching now but again i think through the commission we're going to be trying to have a conversation around some goal setting in the near future which if we welcome was for people of all income levels and also that program isn't segregated and if you can afford a certain level of of cost to go then this is your program for this income bracket and this is a program for this separate  come back so there was some thought we went into changing some of the the fee schedule that went into our program director and i think you scholarships would be part of that cost recovery percentage so if we were able to run a program with the percentage of d site but the reality going into the winter is that we only have four people who have commercial driver's licenses and to deal with winter operations in a city in a small city like that's we are four operators is not enough when you think and staff sat down and did some creative thinking about how to manage with this even if we brought on a c d o driver tomorrow they would need some time to train with our quickly and training on our current successor to get up to speed and they came up with the proposal hiring two different contractors one specifically dedicated to the schools and then one dedicated to all the other lost those two contractors will focus on that we're all our employees focus on the streets in the sidewalks and we believe with that coverage we can get the work done in the summer or this winter we made a very specific decision to hire two different contractors because we believe it's important to give the school kind of their own dedicated service here so this is obviously wasn't unbudgeted contract because it is very much connected to not having people on staff to do this work we can reallocate the vacancy savings this thousand four hundred eighty seven dollars so we're asking for in fact proactively and again this gets back to kind of the surplus conversation those dollars in f y seventeen were allocated to step two staff such as this that we never felt so we this paper so we will have enough money to fully staff and execute these contracts in addition what we are seeing right now is we are seeing applicants for an equipment operator one of which is an employee without trained on our route so they could operate alone on friday night on a ship is pretty unlikely we don't feel confident that they could do that they certainly could go out with another operator do plow routes that require the smaller trucks et really appreciate i living for the folks here of the folks at home that this is a short term solution so i think by and large we do want to do it at all possible avoid privatization you know civil services i do also know the reality that if we don't arrive at this intelligent sure sir short term solution of that and we will not be able to pay for sorry plow our streets so i really appreciate the thought that also went to figuring out quite frankly was their idea on a short term basis only and i think that a lot of credit goes to them to be willing to think creatively it's great to raise or questions or concerns from counsel parking spaces in the garage the second said we're not using our whole lot but we'll give one hundred of our parking spaces to spare for their use this amendment continues that and agreement for another this is a contract to the city you know that it is in if there is a desire to get into terms that could involve asking for any sort of negotiation steps or instruction through as an american the additional steps outside of what's being as we came out of those two conversations we have all of those interest of the public was basically for those people to go back and work together and try to come to a solution that involved both instances one being the university of vermont and the other up to that either will or could involve contract negotiation discussions around real estate purchase release of which to discuss in public of course it would be put the city at significant disadvantage council that our solution to take action which would happen in open session so as opposed to a lot of executive sessions where we say there's going to be a conversation no action will be taken and you say the cameras can shut down with all of you coming back to a development or at some time ago on that property has continued to work on all the details around it which is included quite a bit of contract negotiation so this is the continuation of the frustration with the whole the public would be but this is the significant in potentially having only one tenet we asked both bodies to continue to work together and are continuing to reaffirm that desire to there what is being proposed is that the city have the opportunity the potential terms of that was discussed in executive session and now that action is up for consideration for the city to potentially authorize the city manager and or community services director to sign a letter of intent