late but thanks everyone for coming out my name's alex our on the moderating the festivities this evening i'm on the work five and case study committee along with myself here on the committee with both you know trying to gross me joe darry homages far and we have appreciate it we do have our our open forum here the beginning of the meeting were as i mentioned the start of the elite but we should have time for everything on our gender if you haven't signed in yet at some point please do on your way out for back in or i always feel like we're doing our job as elected officials if we're bringing forward a bunch of issues for consideration and that's what's what's happened here i do since it's been raised here we'll just say briefly do you think it's important that the city council came in the ability to occasionally do it it is this time and say that i have used today to take a certain advisory about it into the valley think that's actually protecting the rest of our democracy and keeping our local democracy functioning if the areas of the where the city charter says it is the mayor and city councils job to figure this out if that discretion is retained but we can debate that more another time it sounds like this will be an ongoing discussion here are getting there are there are the four about it's actually before i exciting day in city hall when the new annual report comes out i only have one copy tonight but there will be dozens and dozens of them at the ballot boxes of course hundreds of them and this year we're doing something that we have not done before which is we have a equity report as part of it will be every department develops metrics and a commitment she's me last april as part of the state of the city that we would turn a significant part of the capacity of b t v stat towards examining measuring equity issues within every city department this is our first attempt that kind of collecting that off putting it into one document it's definitely not a perfect documents the first time we're doing this thank you so we look forward to hearing any feedback you have on how it comes out this year and my hope  the library that the general services that we think of as city services and this is just again the second time in eight years that we've come forward with a request for an increase that i record that i think city councils are proud of  have a challenge every year with the budget in that generally speaking our expenses rise pretty much with the cost of inflation every year we pay employees a little bit more and we pay last year every year most expenses go up as you're familiar with in the other time he he like i think the level of the twelve members of the city council i believe voted yes to put this on the ballot and he was excited about this as an attempt to cut what has been the gordian knot of operational challenges within city government we get more complaints about the city perming system then just about everything else anything else except maybe about potholes and and we do want to complain about  think we get those complaints even though we have outstanding very committed to the employees that are working on the system they that the system itself from our perspective after grappling with this we've had a bunch of people working on this for years we have come to the conclusion that the system itself too many people especially homeowners or small business owners that are not frequently coming forward to make this kind of improvement on their property contractors that are in there every every week they have course figured out but this is really geared at small businesses and homeowners who come in rarely our solution is pretty straightforward solution we are going to take the three different government functions zoning office out of planning and  department can be located right here on pine street in the d p w buildings you will not have to go to multiple locations within the city to get your permits we are really hopeful that this is going to be a huge step in and of itself and lead to further reforms of th system by bill ward is the individual who will be the department head of this if this goes through and he is already doing continuous improvement meetings he's already identified he wants to get rid of instead of having multiple portraits he wants it to be one building inspections  may take additional votes or you know changes to get there but he's already thinking big about how to make the system better i really feel passionately about this i know many see councillor said about you i hope you'll seriously consider supporting it i'll leave it there that may be questions it is a big try to hear tonight or otherwise we disagree on this issue and and i know there are others who disagree on that this is the creation of a downtown improvement just a question of before again maybe we can take some of the conversation  of the entire downtown we can see you have some confidence because the founders are still around bill bill tracks and power robins i came to city council recently to voice their support for this and say it was the mayor apparently way back then that got in the way of this being after management of the downtown from the beginning there are many many other downtown that have downtown improvement districts that cover the whole downtown it's actually quite rare to have an improvement district that is as as narrow as the one that we have thing getting their act together and strengthening their downtowns burlington's downtown as great as it is is fragile and is not as great as it could be and we see this expansion of the downtown improvement district as a key step and keeping downtown burlington strong even  item that is confusion we call the business personal property tax i say confusion really in that this is not personal property this is this is a property of businesses that is not real estate property as you know we we tax real estate  in this community and in most communities certainly from through what we do in burlington that is becoming increasingly rare is we are tax acquit me that is owned by businesses as is it as if it were real estate  so you know burton down the road here when they buy a three d printer and they put it here in the south and to improve their their their products they every year have to pay a tax on that is that if that  aren't real estate they can easily be moved someplace else and it happens businesses have pulled us they move out of atlanta and they choose not to locate in burlington because of this tax and the cities and states around the country have identified that and less and less of we think it's important move away from this tax it's not easy to do so because we've taken a significant amount of revenue over a million dollar from this what we're proposing here is to phase this out over eight years and doing it that way most of the phase out takes place at the end and we have time so that the final phase out happens when the waterfront district expires at which point the city will be getting the operating funds the city will be getting a substantial increase in that year from the expiration to fisher so we think we found a way to get rid of apocalyptic packs that it is that that is that that has really been lingering out there is a problem for a long time to do so in a way that has a minimal impact on you other other taxpayers with that if you sell time for question said love takes a perfect timing when we do have a good ten or fifteen minutes for open questions as i noted before we love to focus the questions primarily at least in the beginning on the ballot items and proud of our record over the last over the last seven years and i have to say what i find to use your word absurd is the notion that al question number four somehow privatizing anything i know that is what opponents of it are suggesting but i challenge you to name a single public asset that is being privatized as a result of this passing  single public authority that is being transferred we are not privatizing anything about question number four and to a unusual degree we are ensuring that anything any authority that ultimately is approved and granted by future city councils can be  maybe there are some of these there are hundreds of these downtown improvement district has been seen as a good extraordinarily successful and positive public mechanism for improving our cities and down towns and many hundreds literally hundreds of them have been created and of course some of them have had some problems and you know what i like in this argument that i've heard others advanced you know being like going out and finding the worst lawyers in the country that are propose here burlington and the details of it which are huge and i think when you do that you will find that this no notion or privatizing anything is simply false so you think we should be  majority of its board members appointed by the city council and it will be a nonprofit that will not come into existence until the city council  the government structure and by what i think is the lack of our care and concern and therefore putting into place safeguards related what you're doing is raising tax dollars and they are probably taxing tax authority dollars that we are raising and we are giving them with the exception of the cost of collection to this private entity and the so the first example is the transfer of public tax dollars to a private entity and i totally appreciate the efforts to try soften the privatization but the fact of the matter is each and every one of those you live in board members over often do shiri duty to the private entity that they are a board member to not to that be appointing body and so we have this major contradiction you asked about the authority that we transfer i've heard it said i think by you but maybe i'm wrong i know by average on the channel seventeen reported on general ten that the current at the marketplace has no power but that's just not true what happened was that originally when we passed this the church street marketplace commission had all the authority to be regulating the the marketplace in two thousand in october of two thousand we passed a charter change that brought that power back to the city council and consequently the charter does talk about the city council how then that authority but that very same within months we passed a resolution signed by licensing of them over the vents and the licensing of cafes so i think that what you are doing and that authority explicitly is not being given to this new back to the city it is not exactly true because you give them the authority to program and that the argument that that there is two masters in our right is not solved by this as a result which goes to a point that i raised when i first spoke to the city council and pleaded to make specific changes and then two of them to not rush this thing off the ballot which is that you should take some time i do have two questions i'm sorry but i but you asked that specific video i know you're the consultant gave the d i d advisory committee three options and that included a public option and there are a lot of people who spoke up against privatization at the  public hearing that was held on this before it was placed on the ballot on december seventeenth supporters did not bring the options the all or none of the three options of the public hearings or the m p s or to public meetings and the question that i have for you is why so that's one question number two but the idea of it successful is likely to raise rents of both commercial and residential occupancy this and experience around the country is that gentrification of displacements intensified including in the three cities that are used as case studies and get picked up if santa monica and boulder and yet the city is perhaps a good for using any of the taxes that are say i don't think they're fair again with you know straining to find an example of some public authority that's being you're suggesting that taxing authority is being turned over and that's just not the case i mean the city council retains the ability to approve the budget from year to year basis any change that increase that might flow from this so there is no ability of this entity unchecked by public power to  indiscriminately on the way it wants to i didn't say i basically have the appropriation of both of those tax dollars is what i meant to say and so i mean this one mystifies me and i gotta say like we are creating  a basically the business community is inviting us to tax commercial properties and commercial properties only there was a proposal early on to think about taxing residential properties and that was excluded and it's going to be policed the even if you're if you're a mixed use building you're not going be able to play again or that you only be at the special session and want to be made on the commercial property businesses are basically saying we are inviting additional taxes on commercial properties to be put to spending that will beautified and improve our downtown and that there will be just broad general benefit to and the only people who be paying that will be these commercial property tax payers which of course flows through to a certain degree to the users of those properties but these will be commercial uses  to members of the general public i can understand how the years are a process that went into leading up until now may not have been you know not have been something that focused on the idea that you were in your position is a assistant city attorney where we hear your officer prove the contract that resulted in the end it consultant being hired and that led to the creation of this that you know dad act this is a prosecutory virtually none of them are organized in that way virtually all of them are organized as these independent non profits again he's not these have been seen as an innovation he studied in graduate school like i said in graduate school these are  have worked and made them have through downtown stronger throughout the country and all of them virtually all of them are organized where we are proposing except for the fact that we are layering on top of this far more public protections than almost any of the other ones half and half that's expand that it just you would if you had a whole different you would not have the people who are being asked to sacrifice by putting in additional fees i would be very much against it and i think there is a desire way they have here and they were not accepted the other way when it worked the final point about gentrification i find to be very cynical argument and i'm disappointed you're you and others are pushing it as hard as you are essentially here's what the people who are suggesting beautified them they make them more interesting they make them places that people are attracted to and as a result i'm sure it is the case that many of these well rents have gone up and gone up to some measurable degree happening is to make sure we don't make our downtown group i i don't accept that argument as a good argument i think the way to avoid gentrification is to do what one thing is done for generations and make sure we have clearly affordable housing available to the need to be more as a community and which caressed the communities across the country are coming to terms with is what really causes gentrification is not improvement districts and it's certainly not development it is what happens when good don't it's when you don't create new homes to meet the growing need and supply that has built up over decades and which the opposition groups in our community that come out and fight every effort to build housing are responsible for frankly it competition for renters in this community a thing like that in decades and you have had so many landlords come in and complain i love it when i hear this complain about how you know they're having trouble filling their homes are having to offer discounts somewhat units are dropping as much as one hundred bucks a month others have dropped by more than that but they despise it through the scary make it seem like it's not happening this strategy is working it will continue to work and that's where we fight gentrification not through saying no to about council or the city council waves or through every single time there's very little oversight over that they decide they want to spend the money and you get a vote on it but it's pretty much we really this is an opportunity to kind of business people that had participated in this study and it saved back the poor rating like you know our is church street getting rid of traffic was you know brilliant stuff you know that but we are letting it get really shabby and i agree with him but i don't like this term and it's starting to be used a lot now that this is an extensive public process i went to that one meeting and there were twice as many people as we have here so maybe like seventy or so people and that was it and nobody i mean it was like a formation they're trying to like figure out what to work and i still don't really know even in your presentation i think it's still a lot of things to work out so why are we voting on this now glenn people are just trying to learn about it and we got a beautiful little blassie cousin card who's going to say you know this look at the flowers i mean this is winter and you know giving it a sales pitch and i want more substance i want information i like that there's another card i can read that has some information but you know they're going to budget these folks still so i mean we really need to look at these things and please stop saying it was an know increasing the downtown district and supporting the businesses on the side street it sounds like a great idea but you know we think you should wait a year and marketplace the staff is great but they're out there all the time and you know and so i've been trying to get a bench back on the street between being carried for like eight years and then they went away one determined here that is an intentional choice of the way this is being done you always have a choice about whether you charities are being considered so you want to get all the details and the charter and if any adjustment needs to it needs to be made that then you then have to go back to the voters for any any change or does it make more sense to kind of create that the the authority gives a breath to it and then leave it to your elected officials to be able to refine  i don't really have anything particular prepared for an opening statement i think you're probably going to get to your question questions but you know i believe that city government is intended to work for the people and should be responsi to people and you get what you want from city government now we don't always agree on what that is and so it's my job to kind of parse through the details of every situation that comes before the city council to get your input and do the best that i can to come to a well reasoned position and then come back to you and tell you why i voted the way i did and we won't always agree but i hope to at least gain your respect in my decision making process i think that you know my values are the values that are shared by my burlington i value the environment i question and i care about people i care about all of the people in our community and try to be responsive to all of the people in our community we all want affordable housing  we all you know we all care about our city and that's what's so hard sometimes we have we have difficult discussions but for as long as i've been here since the one nine hundred eighty s that is what makes burlington great far and i know most of you because i grew up with your children i am getting involved to address some concerns that have been around for forever and i am i'm really involved because there's a lot that just i don't think we're moving on housing is one of the biggest concerns for me having a big family and having lived here in the south district and right up on pine street for fifteen years a lot of the concerns that my parents have made throughout the years of me growing up has been the same childcare is another issue that i really really think that we should be able to figure out and then homelessness is another one that's personal to me because i do know a couple friends that are currently homeless i think it's really really concerning that we have a city with the amount of resources that it has and we still have an abundance of people that sleep outside in the cold i think that's really really incredibly concerning and for me i feel that the city council right now is not representing all the people i don't think everyone's voice is there and i'm getting involved because i find it very important to have everyone's voice that we miss a lot of perspectives when we we miss the the entirety of voices and so i'm putting myself forth to  say let's have a wholesome city council that does address the needs of everyone and not only a select few and you know specifically talk about new american communities we have a wealth of culture and we have a wealth of of diversity in our culture that i feel  we don't take advantage of and and there's both economic weight there that we could we could take advantage of and just cultural cultural prosperity that we could definitely take advantage of and i want to present myself as representative of all the people  everyone and as someone who has grown up here and you know played soccer with much of many of your children and watching a lot of you know those same friends of mine kind of leave the city of burlington and leave the state of vermont is also very concerning i mean i think we all know this but there just aren't opportunities for young folks and it's awful because we have state legislation that pays folks from out of state to come in here to try to robust make robust our economy in our city and we invest thousands and thousands of dollars just we just did on our high school and all those kids grow up become intelligent and they leave they go to boston to find opportunities because our city is simply not effective in finding a lot of those resources that you know that we need in order for young folks to feel like they can be a part of this so i'm here to fight for new americans i'm here to fight for americans that have been here forever i'm here to fight for the the artists the yarra the young professionals that are coming up i'm here to fight for everyone and again as someone who has grown up with all of your children and as someone who comes from you know a community that is oftentimes left behind i'm here to bring that voice to the table and i'm here to make sure that that voice is for everyone so again i'm  think that's something the m p s have been eternally asking i think m p s are great at providing a forum to share information with the community and kind of exchange ideas it's not easy for a lot of people to get to meetings which we hear regularly when we're trying to engage in public process in the city we're often faulted for only doing it through through meetings but i think one of the things that we have done to make issues that community cares about them into the forum is probably the best thing that that we can do maybe taking more triple reaching out and soliciting more input from the public i know you like i do have access to front porch forum and i know i've had a lot of success when i reach out to the community and pose the questions are really interesting the feedback i i get back and so that think first and foremost defining the operational definition of earth and providing an operational definition of what the m p is and also the mode that we use to reach out to folks i'm certain that not everyone uses front porch for my parents  they don't know what twitter is and again that's a kind of mind saying it's because that you know that communication just has been missing in many compact you know in a great way i mean young folks should be involved in a think it's really concerning that the first time i heard about what a nappy it was was when i graduated in may and i came back here to try to get help in the community and i think what we could do is reach out to people and reaching out to people means you know creating and fostering relationships with certain communities with people that are already in those communities that have positions in which they're able to influence and communicate and having those people you know get the information about what an m b a is i now know what an m b a so i told my mom and then i'm sure she was at lunch with her friends say hey do you know what an n p a is and that in itself is really really great but that's not something that you know my family has had and that i feel that many families don't have that so i can make the n p s run better by simply reaching out to everyone and i think that's the biggest issues that we don't reach out to everyone and and of course we're living it in resources i'm on the steering committee for the board five mph so i know i know what you know what what it's like in one of the first questions i posed when i won during one of our first meetings was how do we reach out to people what exactly do we do to get this message out to folks and i'm happy to say this is i've joined i've had several of my friends come to a lot of these m p s and gave me some that weren't even in this ward and again just going back to that idea of getting people involved i mean i've really feel like more young folks should be involved in this more new americans more you know different communities low income you know one thing everyone everyone should be here every single every single to that idea of outreach and you know when we think of these meetings what do we imagine you know the imagine of a ray of demographics or do we really imagine you know a certain image so to  voting even is but also to get to know their legislators you know the very people that help and you know dictate some of the laws that they they live around so i think we have a very low voter turnout for the simple citizens within five years of coming to the u s and they still don't know how to vote they don't in a lot of people don't feel that their voice matters at all so i think it starts at this local level where we you know top people come to the n p a where you're able to make your concerns be heard knowing that the n p a its function is to you know assisting getting the communication between the community and the city council so if people don't have that information people are out voting people are you know involved because they don't feel that their voices matter and i think that's a concern as well you know like just know that it's it's not only immigrants that don't vote it's everybody across all sections of life we have low voter  turnout in this country and i think it's reflective of photographic baby and i would note that the november elections did actually we did see a substantial uptick in voter participation maybe because i'm november i forget what it was november eighteenth two thousand and sixteen or november ninth two thousand and sixteen people woke up literally and were very surprised and it's unfortunate that that would be the motivating factor to get people out to vote but i think it has been a motivating factor to get people out to vote i also as i'm going door to door i do register voters i think democrats have always been active in trying to register voters i believe my friend andrew champagne has registered more voters than anybody in the state of vermont he told me yesterday and i believe that because i have registered voters with a hundred champaign lot in vermont to make it easier to vote which is which is great and i support that i think it's probably more a function of political candidates than the council itself but i'm open to how will my personal life experience well i think we all we all bring different things to the table and i think when i first got on the city council i thought it be great if everybody you voted like me but i know that i learn a lot from everybody at the table and it's all part of the discussion so like like everybody else i've had my own personal challenges  certainly my health has been a challenge as many of you know for a couple years and when you spend a year or so on crutches i actually it as all time because i couldn't use crutches because i had two frozen shoulders but you certainly look at how a handicapped person would experience the city when you can't get around the way other people can get around when it's almost impossible to walk up a walk it just gives you a very very different perspective and during that time i also reflected a lie on my great fortune of having a place to live when i felt so awful and at times i was not sure i was going to continue to live but even if i were to die at least i was in a comfortable place and so many in our community don't have that in to suffer through so there are some new people hurting but you know i suffered with like disease pretty severely for a while and to have to go through something like that without a home is something that i really don't think a lot but everybody i think the thing to remember is that when we encounter everybody in in our daily lives people have all kinds of pain that you never really hear about and it's just good to to remember that we don't we don't all wear it on our sleeve but it's it's something we all carry with us and i try to appreciate that about  people so for me my experience and my personal experiences are why i'm involved in the first place the other day i was complaining about something to my mom i think it was she asked me to call some insurance company for some reason you know they do you have any idea how much work i have to do i'm stressed all the time i really can you just ask one of my sisters to do it and she says she just looks and means she says so i fled bullets the caves ran away from lions and you think making an insurance a call to insurance is going to be the biggest concern that you had to deal with and i sat there and it really you know he provided me a moment to just realize the magnitude of what my parents and a lot of families like myself have come through so for me personal experiences drive the very character that i put forth today the very character that i am because those things have shaped how i see the world and the perspective i haven't turned to my understanding so in terms of housing and say let's invest in our housing infrastructure in general and then our housing trust i know it's easy to say let's build but we can't build our way out of everything and i certainly do agree that there is some building that needs to happen but we need to figure out a way to pay people enough to be able to live in the homes that they live in and we need to be able to figure out how housing can actually be affordable and you know housing is considered affordable in some capacities and it's not even one we say it's affordable it's not because a lot of people don't understand what exactly people are dealing with when you have eleven children and as a single pay single job single person in the family is working it's impossible to see how much you're paying even if it's affordable to someone else it's impossible to think that paying for your house is actually affordable when you literally have absolutely nothing left after every mob so we try to say it's affordable but i really think we should reach out to late recalculate what we see as affordable and so you there are a lot of different things that are that are driving our affordability crisis one we could make housing cheaper in burlington if burlington were not such a popular place if everybody didn't want to live here there are more people who want to live here then we have housing excuse me housing available so that's kind of a baseline problem so we we don't want to burlington less desirable and just make it cheaper we want to make burlington are affordable which means increasing our housing supply and as a community we've been rather resistant to doing that there is  you know we don't want large apartment buildings going up next door to us in south bend it wouldn't feel right to us i actually think you know my own neighborhood does have a mix of of housing styles and some large apartment buildings and it works quite well but we have to find those opportunities where we can build housing and it's one of the reasons why i did support the city place project because the more housing that we can build the more we're going to be bringing market rents down and the other thing that affects our affordability our taxes and two thirds of our taxes are now on the education side of our taxes and i think we have to really look you know education is not under the purview of the city council but i really think we have to look statewide on how we are funding education and what are the cost drivers in education because certainly it's not that our kids are getting too much it's not that our teachers are paying too much yet our system is an unaffordable system so i do think it helpful to have the income sensitivity that we have but it continues to be it continues to be you know a major concern for our state ok next question  thank you for the question it was really hoping to talk more about that i think the issues that amanda raised were were good ones about residents not really having a lot of participation in the way the church street marketplace is structured now and that is one of the issues that is you know i don't know if it's solved we haven't gotten there yet but we certainly try to solve that problem because out of the  in voting members in the new downtown improvement district four of them would be residents so there are there isn't resident representation in the existing church street marketplace structure and i think that you might have a better chance of getting some benches with this downtown improvement district but i do think that i absolutely support the downtown improvement district i think that as they said it's an opportunity to use private money for public benefit and i think we see that in the church street marketplace how how private money is used there and how we can all enjoy the benefits of  street i think making our downtown nicer play place is not a bad thing and it won't cost the residential taxpayers of burlington anything to get  there also i want to point out that on the board there are i think three nonprofit positions on the board and that the downtown improvement district actually has a social mission so when you know when we talk about businesses in burlington we're not talking about enron we're talking about uncommon grounds and sherpa kitchen and you know small small businesses that are really struggling and we want them to thrive it was the downtown businesses that really brought us the street outreach outreach program and we do that while we just have four blocks of businesses participating i have participated in several trips that were sponsored by the business association and church street marketplace to look at how other communities are handling the same problems that we have in burlington and i went to boulder colorado denver colorado if and portland and none of them could believe that we somehow sustained sustained our business district with just forty properties paying into that business just like you don't have the economy of scale to make that work long term and there were a lot of federal dollars that went into creating the church st marketplace but it's now an aging marketplace and we need to reinvest in that and we need the economy of scale of bringing in you know the rest of the downtown and the businesses want it as as well you know the businesses want to pool their money to try and improve the downtown so i don't have the view that this is you know that there's a privatization scheme here there's a long list and for anybody who's interested but i have here is just two sides of you know two pages of the maybe nine page charter change that explains all the things that remain under city control which is really most of it and in some ways more city control because the city council is actually going to approve the bylaws we're going to approve the management plan we're going to approve the budget we're going to appoint the majority of the voting members of this new entity and i think that it will be a great enhancement internet into downtown improvement district i absolutely and completely disagree the downtown improvement district is incredibly privatized and in terms of accessibility again negates to address the issue of homelessness what do we do with these communities that we already literally speak almost in a derogatory form about when we say will we you know the community the we don't want to talk about it we know exactly what we're talking  about the downtown improvement district does not again doesn't involve everyone and what it indicates that is a lack of transparency in the entire process the fact that no one in here knows what the downtown improvement district is i still don't know what the downtown improvement district is i've sat down with several people to try to get an understanding of what it is and it's just quite clear that the process of it all was not transparent and when a government decides that it knows what's best for the people we get bright ideas like building wall so that people can come in fleeing fleeing things like you know violence so i think it's really really important to understand that our city council is a body that's elected to represent exactly our so if everyone out there is suggesting that the  process was not transparent i think it's incredibly wrong for us to be told that it is transparent who you elect should be representing you not nests and not telling you you know you are you're wrong about your your your your assessment of things so again go back to the adult on improvement district accessibility that expansion what does it mean for low income families what does it mean for my family that lives right up on pine street when we make that extension you know to subliminally just suggest rent might go up a little bit and pretend like that's all it is is also incredibly it's this encouraging and i think it's really important that we understand again there was no transparency in this process and it just doesn't it's we're not holding our city councils accountable for the lack of transparency in a lot of these and a lot of these developments and that's going to hurt us in the long run those that are that are renters homeowners taxpayers we you know we have to take on the burden of these in these developments that don't include any of us and it's quite clear that it didn't include any of us because again none of us still know what it is everybody thank you to be clear the downtown improvement district does not raise rents and it's not there are no fees on residential properties and as far as the accusation that the city council hasn't been transparent i really don't know what an example of that is all of our meetings are public meetings they're publicly warm to all of our discussions have been in public and you know i have reported here at the n p a about it so i'm not sure what  you know what is not transparent if you know there can be an argument that we should have had more public in gauge mint which i think is different than not being  transparent but i also think that the focus of the engagement was was more of the people that were living right downtown and it probably wasn't engaging a lot of people out in the in the south bend but particularly because it is it is kind of it's going to tax the businesses they were definitely more a focus of the engagement because they're the ones who are going to have to be footing the bill so that is where a lot of the of the focus was but it's a charter change so we are having the discussion now you all get to vote it and i do think that that is a transparent process we might not all agree on which way we want to go but i don't think it's fair to say it's not transparent just to clarify question maybe i heard the mayor earlier but did process which could potentially increase rents but there are also a realtor there are other factors that affect rent and when city place comes on line with all of the new rental units that they're bringing in that could definitely put some downward pressure on rent so it's not happening in isolation and it does not in another itself increase rents but to revisit that idea of gentrification isn't that exactly what it is if it just becomes a little bit nicer than when certain people are going to be able to afford living there anymore that means those people have to leave and find elsewhere to live well the alternative is it could become less night and senate could decay and it could become  downtown with a lot of vacant space and rents would be love but i don't think that that is what we want either i think we need to try to build more housing because building more housing in the downtown does decrease rents and i think that that's the alternative to high rents not to let our downtown decay so that rents will be l that process yes i do think that it should automatically on the ballot again just go back to that idea that we are elected to represent the people so if it's thirty five hundred people come up with a petition with the signatures i really think that it's really really concerning that we would just kind of swat it down and say it doesn't matter it says a lot when thirty five hundred people actively sign something to say we are against this that's not a small percentage of people folks that's way above the threshold that's necessary and it's all going back to that idea of transparency and go back to that idea that we elect our officials we elect our officials and it's important that they represent us thirty five hundred votes thirty five hundred signatures excuse me that's ridiculous thank you i think that this is a representative democracy and that we do represent all of you and we try and represent you we try and our job is to look at all of the details of everything that comes before us in ways that you probably do not want to on on all of these different issues and i had posted on front porch forum asking people do you want this question on the ballot or have we gone through there there's a lot of public process that happens other than a vote and should we respect the public process that it's gone before and really interesting to get the feedback that i received on the front porch forum which had over a hundred and fifty responses to that inquiry and more than two thirds said no we don't want that question on the ballot but there were also a lot of signatures on the petition which i acknowledge a lot of people who contacted me also said that they had signed the petition and they said they still didn't want the question on the ballot so i had to take that into consideration as well but my biggest problem with put it you know i really think that this this relates to the city hall park question and the problem that i have with putting it on the ballot was that we would not be getting i think that i don't think that people would have gotten what they expected or hoped for out of the process because if you put a question on the ballot and say well a project can be better better is interpreted differently by every single voter and we can always make it better but we may not ever get a project that can actually win a majority of the vote because you know john votes you know because he doesn't like the splash pad and susie votes no because she doesn't like that the farmer's market is out of the park for a year and sally votes no because she doesn't think the farmer's market should be in the park at all and another person votes no because they're upset about the  treats another person votes no because they think we're spending too much money in another person votes you know because we're not spending enough money and we're not putting enough elements into the pot so you can see how we could put it on the ballot but if you only ask a yes no question it's really not very informative and in this case it would have stopped a process that was there was a lot i mean we could argue about the d id public process but the public engagement and city hall park was extensive and even a donna i know you have come to us several times and said i want to more than forty meetings i forget exactly what the number is but there was a lot of public process and unfortunately our community doesn't doesn't speak with one voice and we have to take in all of the different information we get and create community priorities and i think that the process that we went through there was fair and it was very extensive and it came to this n p a many times so i don't think that we can you universally say and what i have heard from voters knocking on doors is that they do not universally wa work i have personally never been a fan of the champlain parkway and before i was elected living in lakeside there are a lot of people in lakeside that are  you know have great feelings about the champlain parkway the champlain parkway is going to bring all of the traffic into lakeside avenue which is our only access out of the neighborhood but in my first election i actually thought well if i don't get elected fine i'm going to spend my time fighting the champlain parkway because that's in my personal interest if i do get elected i have to represent both the people that love the champ people that hate the champlain parkway and many of those on either side feel that their basic livelihood depends on either it getting built or not getting built and so i my approach has been to try to make this project better and back in two thousand and six i think we had a real opportunity to make substantial changes to this project and i went to mayor kiss and i he was new in office and i tried to get him to understand some of the problems with the project and how we could make changes and he was uninterested i went to steve good kind many times who is now one of the you know primary promoters of the idea that we can make all kinds of changes and steve told me time and time and time again no we can't and i will tell you in two thousand and six we could have made some of those changes but there wasn't a willingness there wasn't a political will and today the project is permitted and we have through there is a little opening there that says we can make safety improvements and through that the city i really give shape and spencer a lot of credit have made improvements to the project and made it a road that's going to integrate better with our neighborhood streets but we have gone through we have done everything that we can do at this point i think the project has definitely improved over the last eight or so years and i somewhat reluctantly i do support the project going forward now  so my understanding is that the proposal for the project in itself was initiated a while back and it did not account for a lot of obviously the changes that have happened since i think that much like anything else it's important that we understand who has access to me not access but what the accessibility of this this project is i mean it doesn't account for pedestrians it doesn't account for you know bikers so i think it's really important that if we are going to move forward with this which it sounds like we are moving forward with it i think every step of the way it's important that we understand that we we do make it an inclusive project that actually does see to it that there is safe walk and bike paths and that's all i'm going to say about it i don't support it right now in its current form of course because again i don't think it's accessible to everyone but if we are able to make those changes there's a drone junction and suggests i think it's absolutely something that that would be viable and that would that would be good for our community but in its current form no chance to just make a couple points the project definitely takes into consideration pedestrian and bikes and it has been supported by local motion i believe and i think that one of the really critical things that i have been fighting for and i believe i have confirmation that we will get it is that you know the that it is a little absurd that this champlain parkway is supposed to improve access to downtown i don't believe it will do that but i do believe it's going to better manage the traffic in the south and particularly the truck traffic in the south and which is our neighborhood streets now it's going to get that off of the neighborhood streets and that's important for people in the south and but to bring potentially to bring more traffic into the king street neighborhood i am very concerned about that and the way that that's expected to be managed is by putting a traffic light putting traffic like king street and maple street i am not confident that that's going to work and so i have asked that the first phase of the project start at that end and let's put the traffic lights in and let's see how we're able to manage the traffic with the traffic lights and if we can get the improvements there and it might i don't think it's a yes no answer i think it might take some working with the traffic lights to figure things out down there and i don't want to do that after adding more traffic i want to make sure we're managing the existing traffic that's that's there now before adding more traffic and i would also advocate for dead ending one of the other elements of the project is to deaden the side streets here like morse place and  linemen because having this facility really impacts that neighborhood but deadening those streets is part of the project and we weren't allowed to do it in advance of the project so if we can do that as a next step dead end those streets then we could pave briggs street which a lot of people complain about but that was actually a concession to the neighbors when this you know city market was built here it was to deter cut through traffic so we should concerning for me especially because i have a lot of young siblings that do run around often too much energy another you just reminded me actually you would be dead ends another aspect of the project is that it deadens pine street over there which is troublesome because when traffic is or if something happens on children road people go have anywhere else to go once we did and that pine street space there's nowhere else for anything for traffic to go so traffic is stalled  there i don't know i'm not sure if people are familiar with with you know exactly what i'm talking about but that right out right after south meadow the south middle neighborhood if you did and that where does everyone go and traffic is backed up well the up turn it is a parkway switching for everyone and to be honest i think the city should be involved in a lot more so one of something that i've been recently working on is addressing the issue of massage me and sexism  something that i've struggled with in my past as a young kid i came from kenya as a seven year old coming from a culture that was explicit and clear and it's sexism and misogyny and then coming here to a society that was a little bit more hidden about it and it was more insidious you know it took me a long time to figure out how to navigate that space and figure out you know who i am first and foremost but also how do how do you know figure out who i should be and so i think that the city in itself could probably play a role in creating some sort of some sort of i don't know if you would call it a committee or something that reaches out to communities that already feel very very very you know marginalized in a lot of ways so i think the city plays a pivotal role in all that we should protect everybody's rights including transgender people and yes everybody ok fighter jets but what i have become aware of is that every contract the city has signed with the federal government since at least since the one nine hundred fifty s has allowed them access to our air but it's a condition of those contracts that we give the federal government in the military access to our airport and i've often wondered why do we have this fabulous airport in burlington vermont and it turns out a lot of the reason is because of the federal funds that we get because we allow the federal government to use it as about the f thirty five s carrying nuclear weapons i certainly would be as concerned as anybody that we would have nuclear weapons and in burlington i contacted senator s senator leahy's office first and i was assured that that is not the case i then contacted senator sanders office and had several back and forth before finally getting some official confirmation that that is not the case in burlington so i don't think that it's not our decision actually whether or not we get a thirty five  here personally i'd prefer we did not it's the decision of the federal government and they have made that decision so that's that's what i am i don't support  though we do have a system itself is that it's not really effective i mean buses are running late if you have a doctor's appointment or and you're an elder and you need to get to the grocery store and i mean buses that aren't effective is is problematic having to take several buses to get to your doctor's appointment or to your to get to the grocery store is also problematic and the role that you play in impacting our auric or our environment is that we're if we get a better better better bus and system we're able to take a lot more vehicles off of the road if people are walking biking and using look transportation that is provided by the city in the state again which have a lot less vehicles on the road which means a lot less carbon going out into the air  going into our earth so i think transportation is going to be a big step that we should and need to take in order to address climate change and that's something that we can do quickly of course with it's complex it's very complex but it's definitely something that we do have the resources for so that's where i would go first thank you i also i certainly support more bus transportation but we actually need more buy in from the  the regional area i think one of the problems is that when a lot of people who live in burlington mildly like to have a job in burlington oftentimes they end up with a job well listed and they need to get to that child and our bus system often doesn't work or if you live in the south and you work at the hospital but the buses just run at the same time that your your job shift does so you can get to your job but you can't get back from your job  but all of that is you know i would really like to see at the state level better commitment to regional bus systems because it's not something that can really be solved just inside of burlington we need these other communities to actually pay into the system so that you can get to a job in willesden and not be limited to two jobs in burlington that being said we also need to attract more jobs to burlington so the people who live in burlington can also work in burlington and that's something i think we all highly value is having off having work opportunities within the city but in addition to transportation there's also i think we often forget that our all of our homes are being heated mostly with fossil fuels and there's an initiative called the twenty thirty challenge trying to get buildings to be upgraded and  become more energy efficient and working towards a net zero buildings but the the other thing that i have done as a city councilor is improve the the standards by which new buildings are built so that they're meeting higher energy efficiency standards and higher environmental standards and that has been very important to me and i have pushed very hard developers don't always want to do that but i think that that's the i think it is a privilege to build in the city of burlington and with that privilege there are certain expectations our community have has and one of them is certainly energy efficiency prerequisite to running people come to this position in a variety of ways i i hadn't served i don't think i had served on nonprofit courts but i hadn't served on the city board prior to running but i was very active in my community it was actually before we had front porch forum and i actually used to run around my neighborhood printing newsletters about what was going on and i had been  president of preservation burlington had been on the board of the lake champlain committee and so through that work i think there's a lot of different ways you can be engaged in the in the community other than the you know such a specific prerequisite i think the voters have whatever prerequisites they want for who should be a city councilor and we should leave it to that and so i serve on th youth another youth advisory group that i started with my friends it's a peer mentor ship group with that said i am agreeing again with counselors and i don't think there should be any prerequisites i really think people should be able to vote for they feel is a viable candidate who they feel is someone that is going to respect their needs and tend to the things that are concerning to them so i agree with you absolutely think that there should be a prerequisite to run if you like that we really really do have a very very very very rich city in terms of culture diversity our economy burlington itself in this latest economy over mark i just want to remind everyone that with an inclusive society we really are able goals for having an inclusive community and in fact i had met with mohammed before he was running when i heard he was interested in politics and we had coffee together a couple times and i really enjoyed that and through that process we put together an event at the king street neighborhood care i'm sorry king street youth center that was really trying to bring immigrants to the table which i had suggested when mohamed had mentioned that his parents were not comfortable coming to city meetings which i completely respect and understand so i suggested we have a meeting at the king street center where which is a place where they would be comfortable and it was a huge success i really enjoyed meeting that community and i will acknowledge that prior to that i did not have a you know i knock on the doors in the king street neighborhood but there are some neighborhoods that are literally you know the doors are locked you can't get into the buildings and it's hard to access and the more that we can bring people to the table through a variety of means the better we are lucky to have a rich culturally diverse community and i want to represent all of our community from you know from queen city park road all the way to mean street and i look forward to continuing to engage with all of you and maybe people who are watching on t v and maybe people who are behind locked doors who want to reach out to me i would love to hear from