Vision

To build a resilient future for Montpelier―its residents, its children, and its businesses―that is adaptable and responsive to shifting environmental and economic forces while maintaining a set of measurable operational goals that guide its management and financial priorities. 

Our citizens deserve to know how our taxes and resources are going to be used to preserve the city’s core functions and build a resilient response to a challenging future.

Context

Every rain has our citizens wondering if this time it will be the death knell of our small city. We need to address and prioritize ways our community and our government can prepare for and respond to the coming predictable challenges. This means having adequate emergency response readiness, and re-imagining our downtown, infrastructure, and basic needs.

Montpelier’s residents need to believe that our city’s government is prepared to do the hard work that the coming climate and economic changes will demand. Our challenge is to build strong neighborhoods and community, and strengthen our relationships with regional, state and federal partners to collectively defend our community from the changes that we can see coming.

The Challenge of being the Mayor

As mayor I believe I can help bring together key parts of our community to start emphasizing both the long-neglected long-term planning aspect of our civic enterprise, and the rapid actions we need to face the growing challenges we face. A newer, imaginative, and more focused approach to our future priorities will help us to begin to adjust to the climate and economic shifts we can all see coming but don’t know how to collectively address. This includes directing the attention and efforts of city administrative staff beyond day-to-day management towards finding and obtaining the federal and state support needed to fix our maintenance delayed infrastructure and prepare our city for the difficult shifts required by the climate crisis. 

This is tough stuff and we all need to build the will and the courage to face what comes next.

In our weak-mayor system of governance, the power of the mayor to make change is limited by the will of the City Council. I believe the current system is not making full use of the considerable talents of our councilors, who have the skills and imagination necessary to help build a new direction.  As mayor, I would see my role as one of bringing the council together with a focus on the long term, priorities to both meet both our current challenges, and to start preparing for those coming down the line.

The City Council could strengthen its role in defining local policy priorities and metrics that will define future administration actions and public communications. The role of the City Council is defined by the Montpelier City Charter which states that “all powers of the city are vested in the council,” and then lists various oversight duties. To me, the primary and most critical purpose of the City Council is to establish policies based on priorities stated in our ever emerging strategic plan. These policies would set goals and define how we measure ourselves as a city. The second role of the council, which necessarily follows the first, is to direct the city administration to operate within those policies, priorities, goals, and metrics. 

It is a time for a vision which recognizes the demands posed by our rapidly changing environment, and a time to express a commitment to the best civic prosperity we can leave to those who come after us.  We certainly have the intelligence, the learning, and the resources to build a more responsive and resilient local governance. Should we have the will, I believe we can manage our community’s future response to the mounting challenges.

Strategic Plans

The Council and Administration are currently operating under an old Strategic Plan with six lofty goals, and no meaningful, measurable objectives and no projected costs, timelines, or targets.

The current goals are:

1. Improve Community Prosperity
2. Provide Responsible and Engaged Government
3. Create More Housing
4. Practice Good Environmental Stewardship
5. Build and Maintain Sustainable Infrastructure,
6. Improve Public Health and Safety.

These can be improved. For example, rather than “create more housing”, we want an objective that specifies number and types of housing needed to fill the specific housing requirements of various groups: empty nesters, young couples, growing families, singles, currently unhoused, etc.

In the 24-25 strategic plan, some of the initiatives are specified by the City Council, and many span several years, thus incorporating input from several “sets” of councilors. Many initiatives are also proposed by the administration, some of which arise out of necessity (paving, water pipe repair), others through public input/planning/ballot (Confluence Park).  It is time to review those goals and determine which are possible within growing resource constraints.

One issue raised this year by Councilor Kohn is that the Council has little input on the timeline/deadline for initiatives. This is ostensibly because large parts of the Strategic Plan carry over from year to year regardless of council make-up. But this plan is, and should be a dynamic document that shifts with the needs and resources of our city.   That is why some longer term goals and targets are needed. 

Turning such goals into operational plans is often a bureaucratic process. I believe it is up to the City Council to require even more specified targets and work from our administration as an integral part of or next year’s budgeting process. In essence – NO BUDGET without specific goals and means to measure success.

To this end, I believe we need a new strategic plan that is more concrete in its goal statements such that, along with this year’s priorities, we might have longer but more focused goal statements. Again, this is an area which our council would need to address as its collective priority.

Here are some examples of strategic goals, which could have more immediate call on administrative actions as well as laying a basis of reality for our long term goals.

Instead of Build and Maintain Sustainable Infrastructure, I would like to see

Find the resources necessary to Rapidly Repair failing water and sewer infrastructure,

 Develop plans and projects to either protect our business district from flood devastation or coordinate it’s movement to less fragile sites.

Remove code and administrative barriers to the creation of denser downtown housing

Create an Administrative budgeting system that takes account of 5- and 10-year city goals, and provides the city council progress report on movement towards goals and associated budget needs, quarterly. 

We have professionals running our city, but our department leaders are too often focused on the short-term. With the current strategic plan, managers can attach a very wide range of actions to the soft goals. We need management who will give the long-term needs of our city equal billing by operating strategically and offering departmental plans that are framed within the context of 5-10 year plans. We must pave the way for the current administration to both manage the day-to-day operations of the city and also  ensure that work done today accrues to the long-term benefit of our current and future residents.

Building a New Strategic Plan

Since all municipal priorities grow out of the “Strategic Plan”, I believe we must drive changes in that plan and therefore administrative goals,  To start, we can frame a number of questions from which the strategic priorities can be stated and then followed.  Questions we should make part of the administration’s priorities before future budget and management decisions

1. What is our commitment to robust emergency response planning and what code and infrastructure metrics do we need for future resilience?  Can this include creation and support of a robust neighborhood organizing effort through multiple departments (see previous CAN efforts).  Such an effort could provide more immediate local responses to future emergencies.  Also, we need a viable emergency shelter at the middle school to prepare for future flooding when key roads out of town are flooded.

2. What is our strategy for maintaining our water, sewer, and stormwater systems and to ensure their future functioning?  We can ask that such plans show the reasonable projected cost to replace utilities and a schedule by which it will occur. This opens a pathway towards identifying and reaching out to funding sources to help accelerate it. The city has so far failed to aggressively reach out for external funding support, even when help was offered by the State Agency of Natural Resources. I believe our system is still in jeopardy of reclassification to something unsafe and we have to attend to that.

3. What is our strategy for maintaining our streets? I would like to see that detailed with the expected costs and life of the work estimates. This is especially critical in a future when many streets must be torn up for water and sewer repair.

4. What is our strategy for management, operation and promoting our district heat system in such a way as to remove the city’s current $200K annual liability?  Of course we need extensive cost benefit, but with the addition of what are the goals of this public enterprise and how do we decide to abandon it, expand it, or otherwise increase its value to the City. 

5. What is our strategy for increasing housing? We bought a $3M plot of land, have done $500k of planning work. Are we having any inquiries from developers who wish to build from the city’s plan? How much do we expect the developers to commit to the work such that we can justify utility infrastructure development.  In a broke city without any actual prospects for use of the land we would be irresponsible to do development prep without such guarantees.  Can we specify the kind of housing we need and put our administrative focus on creating that?

6. What is our strategy for police/fire? What are the ideal staffing levels and how do we balance those with the needs of the community? These are questions the council needs to ask.  Are we charging groups, like the state, back for the use of police overtime? Should we require protesters to hire the Sheriff’s department to provide security? 

7. State contribution to city coffers. Who is in charge of negotiating the state Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT)? What formula is used and how can it be modified?  Perhaps we should try to change the nature of the question from what should the state pay to the larger question of its relationship with its capital city.  Perhaps our sate government would like a capital city that showed off the best of our state rather than one that is ravaged by increasingly destructive economic and climate events. 

These hoped for detailed plans on the nuts and bolts should help drive our long term budgeting process — are we going to accelerate or decelerate such core operational duties? Right now the budget is approximately 75% personnel, and 10% debt service but offers little transparency in terms of what we gain with such a large budget, and what we would lose if the budget were cut? Such operational effects on our citizens should be detailed. 

Council needs regular budget updates that include not just reports on line items and payments but a narrative on how the budget is being managed and implications for changed priorities. Right now every two weeks, we see too much data and not enough information. We need connections between priorities and the reported expenditures so that the Council can make really informed decisions throughout the year.

Perhaps more lead time is needed for information going to Council on key issues and some condensation (2-3 pages) of critical decisions and the needs behind item requests. Council needs to be part of ongoing budget discussions, not just handed a budget 3 weeks before it is to be passed.

To move beyond these basic nuts and bolts into more lofty goals (homeless housing, complete streets, energy efficiency, etc.) we need to balance the core of what the council does to move beyond the every 2 week manager’s agenda.

Now What?

Montpelier is a city that has great quality of life as revealed by the initial results of the National Citizen Survey conducted for Montpelier by Polco. However, its core functions of infrastructure and key services are considered below average. The question we now face becomes whether we can bring together this community, which exhibits such  notable spirits, to find, within itself, the energy and the resources needed to ensure our future resilience.

Such commitment will require exploring a number of challenges that the shifting climate and economy requires us to begin discussing:

To deal with challenges of flooding and other climate crisis events, public education, planning, and transportation may require a shared governance with our surrounding communities, all of which depend on Montpelier continuing to be “Downtown Central Vermont.” 

Are there municipal priorities, offices and financial commitments which need to be revisited in the face of growing financial stresses?  We need to take a hard look at all our desired services, including recreation and welfare to see what is manageable in a more constrained economy. 

What is the cost of being the downtown destination and shopping center for our rural sprawled region doing to our city’s roads, services and infrastructure.  Since we now are the repository of the region’s people with special needs, how can we be humane but manage within our declining resources?  I believe we need to take the lead for negotiating more support and services from the state and for finding new ways of sharing our burdens with our whole region who assumes we have the capacity to care for everyone.

So it is time for vision, for recognition of the changing environment, and for commitment to the best civic resilient prosperity we can leave to those coming next. Should we have the will, we certainly have the intelligence, the learning, and the resources to build a more responsive and resilient local governance which can coordinate our community’s response to the mounting challenges.

Instructive Results from National Citizen’s Survey

Montpelier City Council’s FY22-23 Strategic Plan Adopted October 27th 2021 Updated October 12, 2022 Page 12 of 12 Adopted City of Montpelier FY22-23 Strategic Plan https://www.montpelier-vt.org/DocumentCenter/View/7915/FY22-23-Council-Strategic-Plan–Adopted-Plan-10272021?bidId= 

Reading through the 22 strategic plan and I noticed this at the very end:  National Citizen Survey: Concurrent with Strategic Planning, the City Council has received a survey prepared by Polco for Montpelier. (Polco is a data aggregator billing itself as “a community engagement platform”).  While recognizing that a closer look at the survey data is necessary, the City notes areas where our residents’ rating is significantly higher or lower than residents in benchmark communities. 

Rated Lower than Benchmark:

• Cost of Living (much lower) 
• Variety of housing options (much lower) 
• Availability of affordable quality housing (much lower) 
• Street Repair (much lower)
• Overall quality of utility infrastructure
• Ease of public parking 
• Well planned residential growth
• Overall quality of new development
• Availability of affordable quality childcare/preschool
• Economic Development
• Garbage Collection
• Yard waste pick up
• Recreation centers or facilities 

Rated Higher than Benchmark:

• Montpelier as a place to visit
• Resident’s connection and engagement with their community
• Vibrancy of downtown/commercial area
• Ease of walking
• Preservation of historical or cultural character of the community
• Availability of paths and walking trails
• Community support for the arts 
• Opportunities to participate in community matters 
• Watched a local public meeting
• Carpooled with other adults or children instead of driving alone
• Walked or biked instead of driving
• Public Library services

The full report is available at https://www.montpelier-vt.org/DocumentCenter/View/9558/The-NCS-Report—Montpelier-VT-2022pdf