 Yeah. Okay. So welcome everybody to the Monday, February 22nd, 2021 edition of the month of your planning commission. First item on this is a call to order to the meeting. First agenda item is approval of the agenda. I think I'll just point out that we had discussed a change to the agenda, which is to remove number seven, the continued discussion of the removal of residential density caps and the unified development regulations. We had decided to take that off of the agenda, given the absence of a number of commissioners tonight. So I think with that change, I'd ask for unanimous consent to approve the agenda with that modification. Hearing no objection. Hearing no objections is passed by unanimous consent. Next is the comments from the chair. I think very briefly we just recognize that Kirby's had a loss of his family. And, you know, we appreciate his efforts as chair at the commission and continued efforts that will no doubt go on in the future. But I think we all understand that he has other things to focus on right now and wish him the best and certainly he has my condolences. I'm sure from the other commissioners as well. Next is general business. I don't see any, do we have anybody from the public on the call who would like to speak to something that's on Eden. Okay, then. Moving on to number five, which is considered the minutes of February 8 2021. Has everybody had a chance to review those minutes from the last meeting. I'm not very abbreviated, but we did have a pretty short meeting that time, didn't we. Was that a shortened meeting. Yeah, it was a little short. Well, I'm sorry, I, I broke up that you broke up there a little bit for me. I don't know if it was just my connection or yours, but I'm sorry I didn't hear you. Oh, it could be my connection. I'm just wondering if it was a short meeting because the, the minutes are are very short. I don't know if they're in fact anything more that we discussed. I just don't have my notes with me. I don't think so. I mean the, we had a conversation about the continuity and structure stuff, but it was just me. And so that took up some time, but I don't think it need, I don't think we need details in the minutes. Yeah, I think there was some, we kind of got like a more informative, like more information from Mike about the density cap. So I don't think we discussed much. Okay. Erin, are you looking for a motion to approve? Did we lose Erin? It looks like we lost him. We'll have to give a minute for him to hop back on. It was his connection. I think we should have a little song for the beginning of our like a little intro music for the beginning of our thing. Does Orca put intro music on her? I don't know. I haven't watched that. They don't. We could do that. Just the way Erin said like welcome to this edition of the Montpelier Planning Commission. I felt like you could have a little. Is he back? It's the only, it's the only pizzazz I could put on to the intro. Right. I was just saying, if we had a little jingle, it would be even better. Like some of the music from the game shows. Barely. My connection's real. Hold on just a second. I'm going to. You're already down to just audio. So hopefully that's better. Oh, maybe he could call. That's true. Did you see the chat, Marcella? No, there is intro music, according to Tammy. Thanks, Tammy. Well, this might curtail our meeting anyway. Yeah, we've lost him completely now. He's not showing up. And our participants any longer back. Yeah. Maybe he's trying to call in sometimes the call in stuff takes a little bit longer because you got to go and punch in the eight digit numbers and then. So we'll give him, give him a minute to see if he. Does he have all the information he would need? Yeah, that's in the minutes. Or in the item. Oh, all right. Yeah. Invite. Yeah, my problem was I couldn't get to the invite the time I had to call in. So I couldn't get the information. Well, we'll see. Sorry, everybody. I'm back. I apologize. We just have too, too many folks streaming stuff in my home right now. So. Well, it sounds a lot better. Yeah, I think, I think I'm, I think I'm in a better spot. Okay. Good. I'm sorry. Where are we? We were looking at the minutes. We were saying that they were brief, but I don't think anybody thought that there was anything missing. So we were wondering if you wanted to unanimous consent those or if you wanted a motion. Yeah, I'd ask for unanimous consent to pass the meeting. The minutes. That's good. Hearing, hearing the objections, they are approved unanimously. Next is to receive an update from the transportation subcommittee. Okay. Barb, I was thinking I'd hand this off to you. As you have done. The lion share by far of the work on this. This so far. Well, okay. Basically what we were trying to do was working within, within the chapter that M to gave us, but I think. I think that's the first part of the discussion. I think, I'm going to start by saying that there was a lot of overlap between Ariana and me. Determined that there was a lot of overlap between many of their sections. And they're, you saw that there was redundancy. And also. So there was that issue that we tried to clean up by. Essentially assigning strategies. that they were not also overlapping. So there's that issue. And then the second issue being aesthetic considerations, things like they said that they wanted to make sure that the streets were wasn't pleasant to look at, but it was something along those lines. So when we had questions about that, we talked about as to whether or not those should be left in. I think the biggest issue was that they are subjective. And so then the question comes down to pleasant to look at by whom. And the question also came up amongst us, I think, is whether or not things like the complete streets or the streetscape studies would already have touched on that. So as long as we make sure that the transportation section references those and some of their strategies are to adopt to those, then that would be accomplishing the same thing. And I don't know if you can speak to that, Mike, whether or not the streetscapes and the downtown master plan, the complete streets plan would also be addressing those aesthetic considerations. Well, they would be. I mean, that's really the implementation. You can have subjective goals and aesthetics. The reason why they felt the aesthetics is important is because you can look at a number of pictures of different urban environments. And the ones that are successful, the ones that are vibrant, the ones that have a lot of activity are ones that are designed with these pedestrian amenities and things that are attractive. It's not just blank walls. Yeah, you can have a sidewalk that goes up East State Street that goes up along city center. But it's really not an attractive, inviting public space that is going to invite interaction of people. So the aesthetics is important to the pedestrian environment. Cars don't care. People in cars, yeah, it's nice to look out the window and see stuff. But really for pedestrians, having an attractive pedestrian environment, something with the trees and those things is important. And how we would accomplish it, how we would implement that is going to be in a lot of ways through our streetscape plans and in our architectural and design review requirements. And I think that's how a subjective goal is OK and would get implemented through these other things. And that was where the Transportation Committee focused. And that's why they brought up the importance of starting to make things attractive. It does seem as if the things that make an attractive pedestrians is to have no cars. I mean, to take over the space as a pedestrian oriented rather than allowing cars in there at all. But that's just my editorial comment. That's not where they were going. I was commenting. I know, I know. But their comment was that the cars. That is ultimately that the conclusion is that you end up with Church Street if you want an optimal pedestrian environment. If it's just aesthetic, Barry has wonderful public art along the sidewalks on the main street. And Montpelier lacks a lot of that. So I think this could tie into the public art. I don't remember if that was going to be a chapter. I feel like we're going to have an arts culture chapter. But there's a plan. So I would imagine that had something to do with. I know that they were addressing alleyways. There's several alleyways on state main. I think that that is all very relevant and not have anything to do with getting rid of cars. OK, so we could certainly put those back as long as we had a clear idea, I think, of what the, as a goal, if we had an idea that the strategies relied upon the streetscape plans, adopting the streetscape plans or implementing them. And I don't know necessarily where we are as a city in terms of implementing the, for example, the scoping study that was done or because that had to do with some elements of that. But also the master plan. No, what did they call it's downtown plan? Downtown, yeah, the streetscape master plan. Streetscape master plan, OK. And where we are in terms of that, whether or not we're adopting it. That plan was adopted by city council as a plan for us to start to move forward on. So we could say that one of the strategies would be to implement it. Yeah, OK, fine. Yeah, we can certainly add that element back in. All right, so that answers the question about aesthetics. Are you satisfied with that, Erin, too? As the other transportation member, is he here? He didn't tell me. I'm here, I'm just struggling with the mute button. Yeah, that makes sense to me. All right, OK, good. Yeah, because we did have some question about that. Yeah, no, I think Mike's done a good job of tying it what the transportation committee's thinking was on it. I think that makes sense. OK. Yeah, and taking a step back to your original, your first point on reorganizing things. I am not opposed. Again, this is as much you, the planning commission's plan as mine is the planning director to try to help guide the process. I did find they worked six, nine months to put this together. But it does have some inconsistency pieces between the different aspirations that they had in it. So I recognize that. And if you felt you had a better way of fitting the pieces together that didn't necessarily undo a lot of what they did, now, we as the planning commission, or you as the planning commission, have the right to go through and say, you know what, you guys did this. We don't think this may be your direction. We don't think this is the direction the city is going to go. But I think it's if we want to try to keep the spirit of what they did, they spent a lot of time balancing between two groups, you know, the we don't want cars in the downtown group and the other group, which is, you know what, cars are a reality. They're going to continue to be a reality. And we need to better balance how we approach. It shouldn't be autos first, everything else second. It shouldn't be alternative transportation is this secondary piece that we need to put everybody on an equal playing field and that we want to maximize these other opportunities. And if that means, for example, cars have a slower opportunity, it's harder to get through the downtown driving, that's OK. But we're not removing the cars. But if it makes it safer to have a 15-mile-an-hour speed limit, then we should have a 15-mile-an-hour speed limit. And if the cars have to drive slower, then so be it. And those types of decision making, that I think was where the Transportation Committee got to and they wanted to make sure that it isn't a requirement to have a car. That's not to say we're abolishing cars, but it's not a requirement to have a car. So how can we make a community where you can live without a car, where it is walkable and it is bikeable. It's a bikeable for people of all ages and abilities. And that's really where the, I guess, the striving for peace is for them. And that's going to be here and harder. Downtown, that's one complex. But you also have places of, what if you're out on Berlin Street? How does that dynamic work? How do you get down Sherwood Drive? And those types of things. So they recognize this isn't just the downtown. We want to be able to live anywhere in our city. And it may be really hard if you're out on Gould Hill to live without a car. But we do want to have it as much as possible, that people have the ability to live in Montpelier and not just on Berry Street and not just on Liberty Street. And I think that was their goal. But I think if we can reorient this. I found that to be their most compelling aspiration or goal. And then the second one being safety. So where many of the things they said seemed to fall into that. And in fact, in the first one, it should be possible for anyone to live in Montpelier without a car because there are alternative transportation systems. So somebody could live out on Gould Hill and use my ride and be able to get wherever they need to within the city. So the support of public, I guess what we call public transit. I don't know if that's necessarily the best way to put it, but it's really critical. And I think that that seemed to have a little bit less stress than maybe it needed to. So there were some areas where we felt that, as you said, it was uneven. And I certainly, because I heard quite a bit about the discussions going on, that I know that they were balancing different opposing forces. So the way I see it as our role is that we can come in and say, yes, these are all really good elements of your chapter. These are very important pieces and sort of be the bridge so that it doesn't end up seeming as if there are some disparate, desperate differing sections that don't seem to quite come together. Anyway, that's sort of the way I saw it. What do you think, Erin? I know Ariane's not here, but. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head. This has been really helpful because I think we, to be honest, at least my approach when I was reading it is I was sort of looking, I was trying to figure out how to streamline things sort of given what we had gotten from the Transportation Committee. And because I think we were, at least I was probably more focused on the inconsistencies and trying to figure out how to reconcile that stuff. And I think maybe my initial reaction was just let's remove some things and figure out what sort of the core objectives are. We sort of strip away some of the stuff that didn't make sense to us. And I just think we probably need to go back and take a closer look given what Mike said and try to figure out how to integrate these things, these concepts into our outline and make them work. It's just going to take a little more elbow grease than at least I've given it, certainly. Yeah, they debated two different ways of framing stuff. So they went through, as I said, this was probably at least a nine-month process for them. And so one way they had started to group things together was in the modes of transit. So let's have, and I think that's what we end up with, was let's have the overall aspiration, but then we're gonna have a goal that talks about walking and a goal that talks about biking and a goal that talks about cars and a goal that talks about public transit and a goal that talks about shared transit. And so kind of going by mode, let's break down our aspiration into different goals by mode. And then there was another version that was really starting to look at the, I guess, the infrastructure of things. So talking about, you know, let's just talk about as the roadways or the road right of ways. And then we have some others, like we've got bike paths and trails that are, you know, so we could block them into different groups that way of, you know, talking about complete streets. You know, we really don't nail down complete streets in the version that the Transportation Committee has. They talk about the complete streets plan, but they're not really talking about them as three or four different uses in the same right of way. They talk about four different uses that happen to be all in the same place, as opposed to talking about the right of way where we've got all four uses. So there's kind of. Other than maybe in the safety, when they consider safety, because that has to be safety between all of the different uses. Yeah, and the integrated nature was another place where they had a hard time. They had a very hard time. When I kept bringing up the, how do we do it integrated? How do we get the word integrated? Because really we wanna be able to make sure we talk about the fact that somebody may take a bike to a bus stop and then get on a bus with their bike and then be able to go somewhere else or be able to ride a bike because everybody eventually becomes a pedestrian. So even if you ride your bike to work, unless you're keeping your bike in your office, you're usually gonna probably find a place to park the bike and then become a pedestrian. So everybody eventually becomes a pedestrian, whether you take public transit or bike or take a car. So there's just, making sure everything is integrated is really important because if we can't connect people, if everything is dependent, then you end up getting places, almost getting places, I guess, would be the better way of saying it. So that's the section on an integrated multimodal system. Yeah, we did try to bring, to touch on that as much as we could. And then part of that too had to do with access. It seemed as if we should have, they mentioned making things accessible to everyone. But I think we're lacking in some strategies on that, but not really knowing, because there are access issues in terms of physical ability, but then there are also access issues in terms of economic, so that all of those kind of come into it, but their goals seem to be to make sure that all the systems were accessible. Does that seem fair? Yeah, and in the way they structured, it did create issues. And I think I pointed out in an earlier meeting that when they talked about having walking, biking, driving as their modes, and that's how they broke it out into their plan, automatically saying walking, as opposed to talking about the facility, if we were talking about the facility, we would be talking about sidewalks in Montpelier will be safer, easier, and more attractive. Well, that sidewalk can be used by people with disabilities. We're not just talking about walking. I mean, when you put your box and say, we're gonna have our goal to be, people can walk places. It's like, well, wait, what about people who can't walk? And it's like, well, we assume them when we're talking about this. It's like, well, we shouldn't be. We really should, you know, if we talked about the infrastructure, if we put it in that box, that gets this easier, but then some other things become more difficult. So I think there are challenges to how we organize this. My hope would be if somebody finds a better way to organize it, awesome. I think if we captured their spirit and reorganized it in one piece, and then in a separate piece, we say, here's how from a policy standpoint, we as a planning commission disagree with the Transportation Committee and would make these modifications. So I think if we kind of break it into two pieces, I think they would feel better about making sure they're being heard. And that this wasn't a bit of, as we would say in planning parlance tokenism. Would you acknowledge that what is there, including the sections that we say were removed between what's written and what we say is removed, that that covers their entire plan? Yeah, the goals may be different because we've reorganized them or the aspirations may be different, but the spirit of what they had is here. We just put it in a different box in a different way. We've reorganized it, but we think what you guys talked about is here. And again, they went through different models. I think they're better or worse. And I think that's what we tried to do, but the questionable areas became the ones that were removed. And some of those too had to do, there was some question about whether or not those would fit into a policy chapter. I mean, I guess I'm not totally clear about, for example, one of them was enforcing speed limits in the downtown. They had to do with enforcement issues. And it seemed to me that that wouldn't be part of the plan necessarily, but it would be part of a policy that the city should adopt as if we haven't already. But that some of those issues didn't fall into a planning document. Some of the sections that were removed, if you look at those and see that there's a question about should those be in a public policy chapter. Yeah, and then we won't have a separate chapter on policies really. As I was saying, in my email back to each piece, we kind of want to have a goal. And then the strategies are the policies and the programs and the projects that help us achieve that goal. And we kind of want to, if we do all the strategies, do we achieve our goal? If we achieve all of our goals, will we achieve our aspiration? So it's kind of meant to work that way. So to kind of remove a whole bunch of policies over there, it kind of misses some of the key pieces of how are we going to be safer in the downtown? How do we, maybe somebody on Berlin Street, that'd be a perfect example. People on Berlin Street don't believe it's safe because there's insufficient enforcement of speed limits. Or just ask, why do we have speed limits? We have speed limits because it's part of our transportation plan to make a safe transportation network. So even in, okay, so yes, we have speed limits, but the enforcement is also part of the plan in your view? Well, we just, I think in a lot of cases, it talks about the administration and enforcement of just the traffic rules that are in effect. Right. And I think that's, I think a statement to that is perfectly fine to go through and say, that's part of how we make a safe transportation network is by establishing rules and regulations and enforcing and administering them. Okay, all right, so it's something. We could put that all together into one. Yeah, I see what you're saying. You know, and as you were talking about that, I'm thinking, you know, there are some that we could add in. For example, it would be a lot safer for crosswalks if there weren't people parked on both sides of the crosswalk, you know, that's not something necessarily that they touched on, but that would certainly make it safer. So I guess the question is, how much ladder do we as a planning commission want to take in terms of adding sections? And you'll see on the document that there was some, there was at least one section that we added because it seemed as if there weren't strategies to go along with it. And I don't have it in front of me. Yeah, I saw that you had added some in and that's fine to add some in if there are things that are missing. I would hate to throw out, but I could or I might if you guys want, I can send you some of the earlier structures of how I had structured the chapter because I gave them, you know, as I did with all of the chapters, I write a mock one out. And, you know, they kind of didn't take that structure, they wanted to do their own, but it might give you another idea of how to look at the structure. Not that I want everybody to go back to mine, but. Does this one resemble one of yours? What you have in front of you, in terms of looking at the aspirations, the goals. With yours or with? Yeah, with ours. I mean, yeah. Well, I think there are a couple of. I guess I'm looking for what are the issues here? Are we satisfied with the structure of it as we've produced it, but we need to add in more sections that seem to have been removed that shouldn't have or do you have a problem with the structure itself? So I thought we were going to use the template that Arcella had created. Well, we can fit this within the template. Yeah, but we haven't even gotten to that point yet with this and we had done this over the past few months, I think, before we saw the template, but I don't see necessarily any problems with fitting it within the template. I guess I'm just asking, because Mike seems to have some concerns about the structure, about the way it's organized. I guess I would have to look more at it through what we have in front of us. If you have examples of structures that you proposed to the Transportation Committee before, feel free to forward those on, I think that'd be helpful, just to at least have some reference to what you were thinking about. Yeah, sure, Mike, you could send those on to us. And I guess it would help if the rest of the Planning Commission took a look at the document and flagged any areas where you think things are missing or maybe we included things that shouldn't be, because ultimately, we all have to own each one of the chapters. So, Erin, do you want to try and organize a Zoom of the Transportation Committee to get back together and go over some of the things that were brought up here tonight? Yeah, I think we can do that. Yeah, Mike's given me some stuff to think about, and I think we can figure out ways to incorporate some more of the concepts that the Transportation Committee wanted in there, and we just need to get a little more creative about how to structure this so that we can incorporate those things and figure out ways to address any of those concepts that we take particular issue with. So, I'll be honest, I mean, I think that the big hang-up I have just for me, because I've just gotten very good at this sort of thing, but the structure piece has always been a struggle for me, so that's especially why, if Mike's willing to forward on some examples of what he was thinking, it'd be helpful, I'm just not my wheelhouse, to figure out how to structure something like this. And feel free to send the invite to have me join, and if I can go to the subcommittee meeting, I'll go there to kind of help lay things out, answer some questions, might be a little bit easier to have me there than not there. Yeah, that'd be great. So, I will get something set up with the group and we can take a fresh look at this stuff and figure out how we want to move forward with it, so. Yeah, because... Great, yeah, I think that will help us in terms of the work on the housing section to have a little bit better idea about this structure and the setup. So, I think just in terms of action items, I'll hold off on setting up a meeting until, Mike, can you just forward on some examples? And once we have those, I'll set up the meeting just so we have something to, I'll attach it to the invite to make sure people have that at their fingertips when they're with the meeting, so. Okay, sounds good. So, I guess while we're in this conversation, I'll mention which I had forwarded today, the city council sent out new board member packets and the reason why they sent those out, and I thought upstairs that they had sent them out to everybody, maybe they just sent them to Kirby, just to department, just to chairs. So that's why I didn't forward them to everybody when I got it. I assumed it had gone to everybody, but there were a couple of highlights that they wanted to make sure, and the big one is that boards and committees cannot use Google Docs or similar online platforms to edit documents because it's a violation of open meetings law. And so you guys can use Google Docs to store documents, so people can have access to them, but you can't actively manage them. But that really kind of works at the planning commission level. When you guys are working in a subcommittee, you've got more flexibility, so you guys have a little bit more ability to sit down and talk with the three of you to go through and massage and put stuff together in your committees of three, because you're not in that same pocket, you're a working group. So we've got a little bit more flexibility that you guys can work on those, but as we get to here, we really can't go and say circulate the transportation chapter and have everybody comment on it in the planning commission. So that's really what a lot of that information was, sent that was sent out, was for everyone just to be aware that to be careful about the Google Docs and to which we've talked about a couple of times and we've put things out a couple of times to go through and say, what do you guys think of what Marcella did for this outline? Well, what we really can do is say, hey, here it is, but we're gonna either send all your comments to Mike or send all your comments to Kirby or everybody review this and at the next planning commission, we'll talk about it. And those are all perfectly fine and appropriate. Okay. Did you end up sending that out, Mike, to all of us? Was that one of the attachments? Yeah, it should have been. Yeah. Okay. I know where somebody couldn't open. It wasn't with this meeting, it was sent separately. It's not. Detailed, it's pretty minimal. It's pretty minimal, but. When did you send that? Oh, this, okay, today. All right, I see. All right, that's probably why I haven't seen it yet. Okay, great. Thanks. Only pen and paper. That's right. You can make scratchings on your own copy. But we just have to talk about it. No exchanging ideas or communications, except for the hour and a half period every two weeks. We see each other on the street, no eye contact. No signaling, anything. If you're just pen and paper. Signaling? No twinkling. No twinkling. Signaling. No twinkling. I think there's, I think there'd be, there's a real generational divide amongst the commissioners. Those that remember carbon, like real carbon coffees and those that do not. Mimeographs. Oh yeah. I remember those, those smelled great. Oh God, yeah. I remember taking elementary school right up through that. They had all the blue, the blue ones. Yeah, you put them on a cylinder. They cranked the handle and the blue thing would shoot them out. I was so thankful that by the time I started teaching that they, you know, copiers, also by the time I practiced architecture, copiers were in mode. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, okay. So yeah, we should take a look at those and review them. And hopefully they'll amend up open meetings laws at some point to catch up with, you know, with a new generation. Yeah. I don't even understand this guidance. I think my brain just doesn't even, I don't understand what this means, but I'm not going to worry about it. Like, I don't understand. That's not a good thing to be great, that's all. And, and anything that's less than a quorum is you can have discussions. Isn't that correct? Yes, I mean, I think there's been different legal opinions going either ways, but my understanding is that when you operate as a working group, as long as it's less than a quorum of the board, that you've got more flexibility to be able to meet because otherwise work would never get done. I think there's certainly just a recognition that if you, you know, had to warn every subcommittee meeting and have minutes of every subcommittee working group, and you can't actually talk about stuff that it would just take forever to get any, any drafts done. So it's really from the board levels on up. And that's the purposes to bring drafts to the board level so that we can. You can't make any, you can't make any decisions. Right. And therefore, because you can't make any decisions, you get a little bit more flexibility. When it goes to the commission, you're making a recommendation to the planning commission to say we've reviewed the draft and we've made a bunch of edits and we've made some changes. We're recommending that we drop this policy and we add these two policies. And then we have a public open discussion of it. I see we've got the whole family there, Erin. Yeah, this is like my day to day. Like anything I do, everybody else has to come and see what's going on. Wasn't the dog streaming too much? Yeah, well, my dog Juan here, he loves a good Zoom meeting. Does he like to stand on the keyboard too? He's very close to the keyboard, he's not actually on it, he's close. My cat always wanted to stand on it. Well, that's a definitely a female. That's a cat specialty. Oh, I see. Oh boy. Okay, so with that, I think unless anybody has anything else to add, I'd ask for unanimous consent to adjourn the meeting. So we'll just, we'll give this some look, a look and Mike will send examples and then we'll rediscuss. Yes. The sub, not subcommittee, the task force working group will meet and make some revisions to it to bring back to some future planning commission meeting. No guarantees about the next one, but hopefully the next one, it'd be nice to kind of get this moving along. Thanks for tackling it guys. It's a complicated one. Sure. Heads up for Wednesday there. That is the city council meeting on the zoning. So if anyone is curious, that will be hopefully the public hearing, maybe the first, maybe the last to adopt the zoning changes that we had proposed. What time is that meeting? Starts at 6.30. We'll probably be early in the agenda. So probably at 6.40, 6.45, if everything goes well. Yeah, I cannot attend that. So hopefully other people will be. That's it for my end. Okay. You're still muted, Erin. Yeah, no. Okay. So I guess we'll put it to a fuller vote just to see if anybody has anything to add, Ken. Those in favor of adjourning say aye. Aye. Those opposed. We are adjourned. Aye. Say goodbye, Rose. Bye.