 I call this November 8th meeting of the Popular Planning Commission to order. First we have to approve the agenda. So everyone can take a look and get a motion. Move to approve our agenda. Motion by John. We have a second. Second. Second by gay. Those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Aye. I don't think that was official. We'll let it go. Not a voting member. We're a package deal now. Sorry guys. Okay. Any opposed. Okay. Agenda approved. Well done. Erin and team. Okay. So the. Next thing on the agenda is comments from the chair. I don't have anything to call out now. I did. Yeah, I don't even call it out. Looks like we have a kind of a different. Agenda for the night. The city plan chapter we're working on is not fully set out yet. So it's going to be kind of some brainstorming on economic development. And then we have a couple of other housekeeping type things to take care of as well. Nothing's coming to my mind. Call out now. The next on the agenda is general business. I don't believe we have members of the public here. So we can proceed through that. And next we have to consider the minutes from October 25th. So everybody can take a look at those. Okay. Move to approve. Those minutes. Second. Okay. We have a motion from John the second from Aaron. Does anyone need more time? You just tell me where I'd find them. All the documents for the meeting are sent by Mike. The week ahead. Did you receive, did you receive the. Mailing list for the new and old planning commission members? It's possible you didn't receive it. I don't remember seeing it, but I'll search right now. Friday the 5th. 350. You're on, you're on the mailing list game. So. Yeah. Unless I have, unless I have your, your address wrong. And you want. No, you, you got, you're good. Okay. I just didn't really got it. I don't know what I'm on as attachments there. If you're ever in a position where you can't. I can't retrieve them. If you go onto the city website and go to the calendar. They're usually attached as a packet on the side. It's a little bit trickier longer way of getting there, but you can still usually track them down that way. Okay. I've got it. Thank you. You need a second game to take a look. So we had a motion from John and a second from Aaron. Okay. Everyone in favor of approving the minutes from October 25th. Say aye. Aye. Any abstentions. Okay. And it's approved. Move along. So. So we're still going to be working on this. So we're still going to be working on this. And we're going to be working on these. The aspirations and goals for the. Economic development chapter. And then from there. Mike can put together some strategies. So it's. So we're still, this is going to be a work in progress. We're obviously not going to get. Terribly far tonight. But if everyone can go to the Google drive. You can go into the economic development. Boulder. Hopefully people have had a chance to preview some of this information. So. I did. I didn't end up like changing anything. So we're just going to. Work from what we have. I can. Would it, would it help if we share it? If I shared my screen. Or can everyone just pull it up. Yeah, probably having one person share the screen is probably helpful. I just dropped the link to the Google drive folder. If anyone is kind of scrambling around looking for that right now. Yeah. I gave in Jeff, I would, and anyone who hasn't done this so far. I'd take that link and just make a desktop shortcut. I find that really helpful. We're in there often enough. That was specifically to the economic development one. I'll put a link into the plan in general by section. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, to the plan in general to the. Yeah. Yeah. I find it helpful. So I kick off really quick. So we just had a, you know, presentation from the assistant city manager on. The open meeting law and all the pieces. So one of the, the aspects that came out of, of that was. That there is apparently a dislike or a disapproval of. The use of Google docs. We can use it to store documents. So storing all the ones that we've approved is fine, but they don't want us having working documents. We've kind of been going around that a little bit by letting people putting in suggestions, but apparently they really are frowning on that as being a violation of open meetings law. So I think that's a good point. Because we're group working on, on projects. It's okay for us to work in it in this session, like in the planning commission. That is perfectly fine for us to go and, and have Kirby bring up the, you know, the share screen and us work on things. That's perfectly fine for us to do, but they don't really want us working on a single document on a Google drive. So we'll probably have to shift our approach a little bit until we can update open meetings law to kind of catch up with technology. I don't see why having a public Google doc. Is that that much of an issue because we're not technically voting on anything. We're not approving anything. People are merely making suggestions on things. And they are approved in open session. So for me, I don't see how this is much different than, you know, having everybody go back and mark them all up and then drag and drop them on to the shared drive. Just before the meeting opens and you have all the meetings, except they're in seven different documents and it's not really helpful and conducive to having a good conversation. So I think Google docs is a much better way of doing things, but I'm not the person who makes the rules. So just for the record, I just, just in case there's any questions or people don't understand. Our, our Google docs and our Google drive, literally anybody can access and see, and there's a limited group who can edit and change things with being the planning commission, but anybody can, this is all completely visible to the public. So, you know, I have a hard time imagining how this is against the, the spirit of the open meeting law at all, but so ever it is actually by far more transparent than any other process there is, but in case there was any question, these documents, all of them are readable by literally anybody. And not everyone can edit them, of course, because that would be a terrible idea, but everyone can see any edits, anything happening in this document. So I don't know, I thought it'd be worth making that, making that clear. Yeah, I mean, I've, I've, and I agree with John, I think, you know, as I said, I'm just following up with the meeting I just had and their concerns. You know, I think as a committee, you guys can, can make decisions as to how you want to handle them. But. The opinion of, of city hall is that we should avoid doing our group work between sessions. Now, if we have one person who's going to go and take it, you know, let's say the chair is going to go and make edits to it. That's one person and that's, that's different. And you guys can all view it, but you can't comment on it. We can't all be commenting on it, but we could have a Google doc where, you know, we're going to have a group discussion on things. And then we're going to, you know, we're going to have a group discussion on things. And then if somebody says, I'm going to go through and review the economic stuff before the next meeting. So we could certainly do that. And kind of meet, meet halfway on things. I think it's. You know, in general, I don't think we've had group discussions on things. You know, we don't have multiple people working on it at the same time. But. Like, is it the platform or is it the fact that. Offline conversations are kind of happening. It's the offline conversations that could, could happen. And they see it as, as a quorum of people working on a document at the same time or within a. A time period. I think like anything else, I'm not an attorney, but I think if you were to probably sit five attorneys down and debate this, you'd probably get. You know, a variety of opinions of whether or not this is or isn't. You know. A violation of open meetings law based on how open meetings law is written. Five attorneys would likely result in an eight to two opinion. Yes. And that's, that's. I think when we're following up on what has been the opinion or what has been the recommendation of. Of. Folks. In the manager's office. I think they're responding to some. Comments that have happened over time and they're using their legal. Following up with legal opinions that they've received. So. I think, I think we, we will, I'm not saying we're going to get rid of the Google docs. I think we just have to be careful how we use it. Going forward. So, so how about this in the short term. I'll continue to make some edits in there. And if other folks. Still encourage everyone to go and review things ahead of time, but maybe keep your edits. To yourself. Record them somewhere else. And then during the meeting. Bring those up. Also during the meeting, if you want to, like, if you have some word smithing stuff, feel free while we're in the meeting and while we're doing this, I take it that that would. That would be during the meeting that you can make those edits and you could do that while we're discussing things. So that would be obviously during the public meeting and not a problem either. So it's just if everyone else can just save their editing time for, for during the meeting. Again, you don't even have to like, if you're worth smithing and I have to tell us just be working on it. During the meeting. And, but for substantive things, yeah, save them. I'll do, I'll try to do a little follow up myself. I've, I've actually attended the, the attorney generals. CLE on open meeting law a couple of times before. And I can follow up with the people there. Yeah. I think it'll clarification straight from the AG's office. Got a good party going on here. Yeah. City Hall's place to be. All right. Is everybody follow that? Are you okay with that? Yeah. Okay. Or Kirby, if you want to, like, if. You don't have to do every single chapter, you know, we can farm it out amongst us too. We can take the initial stab, I mean. Sure. Yeah. I'm not filling up for it. That, that could be good. Yeah. And we did have work groups set out for this and. I know I was actually a part of this work group and we've never met. So maybe. Yeah. And we can like, try to. Try to re-energize that concept. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was part of that work group too. So. Also culpable there. I thought we might be able to proceed without the subgroup. I think maybe we can let's, let's circle back to this once we're done with this meeting to see how we feel about the need to meet or not. Does that sound good, John? The other person in our group was bar. I think we can do that. I think we can do that. Yeah. I'm glad to have one. I could circle back. If anyone's interested in joining us. Yeah, let's let's decide that later. See how this goes. All right. Do you guys want to share the screen or you want to share the screen Kirby? Just we can. Yeah. Why don't you go and do it? Like, is that okay? Yep. You'll be a plan to a plan to hand during is off to you anyway. You can walk us through what you have there. All right. I think that's enough because need me to get any bigger. All right. So what, what we've got on top here for a B and C. When I worked. So I started this chapter a long time ago when there was an MDC Montpelier Development Corp. And so they had staff at the time and we started to go through what would be the city's economic development plan. And then I want to say 2016. We hired a consultant to do an economic development strategic plan. And it was a, I thought it was a well done document. It was kind of laid out what our vision and our future for Montpelier should be what would make us economically competitive. And, you know, his opinion was, you know, we want it to be more of a premium destination because there's a lot of different ways cities can go about municipalities can go about defining themselves. You know, sometimes you're the low cost alternative. You know, you're, you're the place for business startups and, you know, kind of low cost places. You know, you can think of a little bit of Berry City like that. You can, you can rent space in Berry City for $2 a square foot for industrial space, a dollar a square foot for industrial space. And you know, in some of these old industrial buildings, you're never going to find that in Montpelier, you know, places in the downtown could be, you know, 18, 20, $22 a square foot. I mean, it's, it's a much, much more expensive place. So that kind of defines a little bit about what we can, you know, what we are going to be able to try to do. And so, you know, one option is to try to be more of the premium destination for things, you know, so we're not going to necessarily be attracting business startups, but we might be attracting businesses that are looking for looking to expand. So the perfect example was Caledonia Spirits was coming along. A business that started up in Hardwick and outgrew it space there, outgrew the sewer and water capacity there and really needed a bigger facility and a higher, you know, impact location. And so they chose to move to Montpelier. And that was kind of part of that. And so we were also looking, that's why we were looking at the hotel and the parking garage to kind of bring in more tourist traffic we wanted to fix up the downtown because if we're going to be if we're going to be a premium destination, then we have to do certain things to be a premium destination. So, and that was part of the reason we wanted to go and kind of do the downtown reconstruction was to kind of give the downtown a bit of a facelift and kind of make it a more of a premium destination. We felt we could just because we're the state capital, we get a lot of tourism based simply on the fact that we're the state capital and we could capitalize on that. So, so there was a lot of discussion about that. There's also the fact that we are already a business and finance. So, you know, the insurance industry has settled here for more than a century. And so, obviously, those are a key sector for us to, to take advantage of. So there are a lot of things that were kind of capitalized and captured in that report. And so, the MDC came up with a couple of different options for Montpelier to have a strong job market that pays a livable wage through creation of strong business climate. Montpelier will maintain a robust local economy by supporting quality private developments. And Montpelier's strong economy will be driven through a unique sense of place and high quality downtown in neighborhoods and being an affordable place to live. So, you know, afterwards that was kind of where, what they came up with, where they were going. You know, I sat down with some of my staff to try to come up with some of the things that, you know, what is actually kind of getting to the basics, what is economic development. And so, you know, we kind of thought of three different kind of headings, one being labor, you know, economic development, when you're talking economic development, we could talk about the labor, the people of the economic development, you know, job opportunities, livable wage, you get a lot of conversations when you talk about economic development about these types of issues. It's also business, you know, so economic development can be labor, economic development can be business and economic development. And this was a little bit of whatever it was trying to come up with, you know, what's the municipal, you know, piece in there. And so, I wasn't sure and I made some comments on the side of a little bit of what was going through my head. So, in labor, we can support and incentivize the businesses that offer livable wages and workforce training. Cindy can support additional workforce training and create great place to work with workforce services for businesses. We can help commercial, helping commercial landlord is a strategy to help businesses. And originally we had also split this and my staff and I had talked about having this in two groups. There's one that's the businesses and then there's another whole business of the commercial landlords. So, you know, you've got the Pat Malone's and the Steve Rabilini's and the Fred Connors who are commercial landlords. You know, they may have other businesses but they're also their business is providing space. So, that's kind of one element. We eventually kind of lump them back into the same group in businesses because sometimes you've got the businesses of actually being the restaurant and you have the business that is the landlord that owns the building that the restaurant is located in. Because it's not often, it does happen, Caldonia Spirits owns its own building. But for a lot of other businesses, they're leasing businesses. So, the quality of our space, you know, the quality of our economic development is dependent not only on the business that's in there but the commercial landlord investing in those buildings. So, these were all of the kind of the nuances of us when we started talking about economic development and what it means and economic development means different things to different people and that was really what I was trying to get at by breaking this into labor and business and kind of that municipal element of, you know, kind of a little bit and I think this may end up being a policy down here for municipal is really what are we going to be supporting? You know, are there certain sectors, state government, businesses that support the functions of state government, your non-profits and your lobbyists, finance is another sector, outdoor recreation has been brought up as a sector that we should be working on, professional services, specialty manufacturing, retail and tourism. So, that's kind of where the EDSP was looking at for the different sectors of what we should be working on supporting. And I think it might be a policy rather than an aspiration but I was trying to get in, trying to get my brain out on the paper. It's usually the first thing I do to start pulling these things together but I thought I would at least get this much out for us to start having a conversation of what people are thinking, you know, maybe we just end up with two aspirations, one that talks about economic development through the lens of labor, through the lens of the workforce and the other one being economic development through the eyes of the businesses and the commercial landlords. But I think there's a lot of ways we could paint this palette. And these are conversations I have with the committee. So, you kind of get a little sense of when you see the housing and when you see the energy and when you see the transportation plans that have come through, they all started out with this conversation. You know, some of them are a little bit easier to break into a set of pieces. This is the world that energy talks about and we can break it into pieces and I think economic development is a little bit more challenging to start to build an aspiration for. Thanks, Mike. I do like your ideas about making things industry specific. I do have one note about that. I had reached out to Alec Ellsworth back in May. People recall about his ideas to involve our parks as part of an economic development strategy to make a popular destination for these things. He hadn't gone back to me, but I did reach out to him again to see if he'll share his ideas with us that we can maybe involve with the strategies. Anyways, it looks like labor and business are the two ways that we could approach with aspirations. Then we could have maybe a goal within business or multiple goals that are industry specific. That sounds like that's where Mike was going with this. What are other people's thoughts about how to break this up for aspirations and then goals? As a reminder, the aspirations are really big, broad things that we're aiming for. They're not necessarily by themselves quantifiable. Then the goals are a subset of the aspiration. Those are more measurable things that we're trying to move towards. Then the strategies are the things that make the goals happen. The big, unreal aspiration things. Go ahead, Aaron. I had a comment. I think both the labor and the business, if we just think about housing, we have in our plan, we've got this idea of 30 new units a year for every construction job, which are really good paying jobs, you create two other jobs. I think we should make some comment about that in terms of construction. I think that construction can really add value to the economy for local employees. On the business side of things, again, if you look at rental in particular, $7, $8 per rental unit is what comes into an economy. If we can increase some of those units become rental units, whether it's short term rentals or longer term rentals, it's going to add value to the economy. I think housing has a place in both of those. Would that be more under a strategy? Or maybe not. Maybe a goal. We could reserve a goal. That has to do with the housing connection. And then of course a few strategies, but. It's, it's one of these things that keeps reoccurring. When we look at almost every section of our plan, building more housing in and around our downtown helps accomplish like every single one of our goals. So it doesn't. Yeah, I think when we're talking about maybe it's our specific aspirations when I'm looking at these and we're talking about building someone who maybe thinks less, less is more. I'm not sure the municipal one, municipal one feels maybe a little redundant. And we could maybe even combine the labor and the business one because fundamentally there's they feel a little bit like the same. Like we want, we want our businesses to take advantage of an incredible workforce. And we want people to want to come back to their communities, right? Yeah, I just see that over time as once we start working our way down to the goals and the strategies that our goals to develop our labor would probably be different than our goals that for for the businesses, that was why I kind of broke them. But certainly we've, we have on a number of our chapters gone through and kind of combine them knowing that we can. And the development of, I don't know, transportation we may have the transportation committee may have come up with four aspirations that we collapsed down to two. But we can always in our first step start out with two knowing that we're going to collapse it down to one. Just because you know in our heads it's nice to I think that's the help of the labor. You know what would make Montpelier a great place to have a business. I think are two fundamentally different questions. And I think what makes Montpelier a great place to work is affordable housing. So yeah, I mean housing comes back and housing has come back in a number of times. If I talked and when we've talked to National Life, one of the number one things National Life had as an issue was the fact that they can't have a really hard time attracting executives to move here because there's no executive housing. There's no place for them to go. That's, you know, in town. They don't have these options. And so there's not enough rich people houses. What is executive housing? I don't want our plan to be like we need more executive housing, but I do know I was just pointing out that there has been a comment that we've heard. I mean, again, attracting, you know, we have 9000 just to put the numbers out there. We have more than 9000 jobs in Montpelier. And so we have more jobs and we have people. We have a workforce of about, I want to say, 4500. So a number of them 2000 or so to 2,500 or so work and live in Montpelier and about five or 6,000 commute in every day. So that just. Yeah, it's, I mean, to get aside, I do think like across the entire housing spectrum, having more of it would be a, is a great goal and a goal we have. And very zillion is jumping up here. And, you know, if our strategy is every, Montpelier is an incredible place to live. More and more people want to live here. And so we have a lot of, you know, we have a lot of people who are increasingly either affordable or there are opportunities to do that. That is such an incredible boon for economic development that they have a workforce across again from, you know, I don't hear too many complaints about like we don't have. I don't know, in the recent more recent conversations that executive leadership is like what the economy is missing. It sort of feels like maybe the other end of the spectrum is what we need more people doing here, particularly in Vermont, but I won't disagree. Like Montpelier in every sector of housing, we probably need more opportunity. Okay. Well, to bring it back to the aspirations for a second. It sounds like housing related goals is something that's on our minds. For the aspirations we're talking about possibly splitting it between labor and business or trying to combine it. I've jumped ahead and looked at the goals and I see that there's four potential goals for labor that are very labor workforce oriented and then there's two that are for business, which I think we could expand. And then two others that were kind of industry specific. It makes sense to split them up to me and to have two aspirations. But also I don't think it matters that much. What are other people's thoughts about that? I agree. I think it's a useful split, at least for now. I understand that we want to be efficient, but I don't think having two is inefficient. Any other thoughts? Jeff or Aaron or Aaron kind of puzzling it through, but I think for me in my mind, two goals make sense at this point. I mean, I do want to adjust the wording in the aspirations as they stand, especially for the first one, but I still don't, I still think the distinction between labor and business provides a helpful lens to get at the goals and strategies. Yeah, good frame as far as I can see. Okay. Yeah. Marcella, do you want to, do you want to? Just the nod to housing. Do we want to say something like a desirable place to work and live? You know, for labor. Can we just talk about our community somehow? I mean, I know we can go to those goals, but when I read those things, there's nothing in there that things we're talking about. It could be talking about anything, I suppose. Wait, where are you looking, Gabe? Are you on the aspirations tab? Or are you looking for a place to work and live? For example. Yeah, because I'm looking up top at like cell B2, three and four. C Montpelier, strong economy will be driven primarily through a unique sense of place, high quality downtown and neighborhoods. And being an affordable place to live. That seems to get at what we're talking about. I don't necessarily know if we want that as an aspiration, but maybe we could parse that one out into. One aspiration about labor and one about business. I think, I think looking at those top aspirations, we can, can we combine A and C and to a labor. Aspiration is that kind of what we're talking about doing. Yeah, because I think like businesses, I know businesses care about how they work and how they live. I think it's important that it's important, obviously national life example, it's important for their people to have housing, but like it's more important for the person that's working there to have housing, you know, like that seems like more under labor than it is under business. Like if business has to care about something. Or they have a long list of things they got to care about. And I feel like housing for their workers is probably not the top. So I would be, that is a long way of saying, yeah, I think we could squish. A just needs work. Like I'm not following it. But ANC, we could squish. Yeah. It's kind of hard to do this on the fly, but I can see how A and C can be combined into a good labor oriented aspiration. Yeah. Why don't we just use something like for, like in cell B. A for Montpelier has job opportunities. We can use that better than a strong job market. And a strong business climate. I don't like those terms. I think they sound, they don't mean. They're not specific. They're not, not generally saying much. I mean, the concerns I had with those that they had come up with is they say things without not really saying anything. Yeah. It sounds like to me, Marcella, what you're trying to get at is that like, what I'm really saying is, is we want to develop a strong, you know, we want to have a strong economy, probably in the downtown sector or something like that, that lends itself to like a robust job market within the city. It allows, you know, Yeah, like a diverse. I mean, I think all we just need to say is like, the jobs follow the economy. It's really what I think it sounds like we're getting out. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I think we just frame it that way to kind of get it all these issues that you're talking about. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. We're all kind of spitball. So a little bit of a fundamental question. And this has come up before when I've talked to the, to the city council. And I've tried to insert a couple of the keywords, you know, the, when I've talked with city councils in the past, they've talked about, you know, they, they focus in on livable wage and those types of, of keywords and, but another one that really came out was that there was less of an interest. And again, you guys are proposing the policies at this point, but there was less of an interest necessarily growing the number of jobs. So in a lot of communities. Job growth is, is a key metric. And we haven't, usually that's in the goals, but just thinking, putting it into your head now, you know, our benchmarks will be there. But, you know, are we thinking. Of growing these markets, you know, growing the number of businesses, growing the number of jobs in a lot of ways, our interest from the city council in the past has been less about growing jobs. We want to, we want, you know, we want to revitalize our, our downtown and revitalize, you know, and support businesses that want to come to town. But we're not necessarily growing businesses simply because we've got a thing for adding like we are, we do want 30 new housing units a year. That is absolutely a metric. We want more people living in Montpelier. If 10 years now we still have 9,000 jobs, but they're 9,000 better jobs. I think that's, you know, is that a success or is that a failure? Yeah, Mike, I just to sort of, and you can sort of remind me of this. I want to, in my mind, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this. I want to say that this was a few years ago, I remember you having this sort of discussion with us and remind me, tell me if I'm wrong, but I kind of thought that part of the city council's approach to this was sort of a focus on sort of maintaining high quality, like a certain quality of jobs, given the amount of sort of education in the town, which is generally higher than the surrounding communities, you know, making sure that we're supporting those types of jobs that lend itself well to the sort of professional and educational qualifications of a lot of Montpelier rights. And I don't know if city council has been focused on that piece, but I want to say I remember you sort of talking about that before. I don't know if that's still the case. Yeah, I mean, council has changed a couple of members. So, you know, I can say I know they're still in strong supportive housing. I think the livable wage piece will still be a key factor. But I don't think they are necessarily a group that is looking for, you know, economic development for economic development's sake. It's not a matter of, hey, we've got 9,000 jobs and our goal is to have 10,000 jobs. You know, that certainly was a goal when I was in Berry City. We, you know, we had, you know, 16% unemployment, we had high poverty, and the goal was we need more jobs and we need them in the downtown. You know, that that was an express focus. I don't see that as much of a, of a demand here in Montpelier. But we obviously want to see, you know, Fred Conner is working on revitalizing a, a granite shed. We don't know what's going in it. He hasn't got a tenant yet, but you know, anybody who's fixing up these properties and adding more jobs, you know, we're not going to discourage that. We think that's great. We want to support those, but we're not doing it because we want more jobs. We're doing it because we're fixing up vacant buildings. We're improving. We're improving our infrastructure. We're improving our built environment. You know, and we're adding in new jobs. If jobs grow over the next 10 years, great, but that's not necessarily our focus. I could be wrong. I'm just throwing something out. But I think that's where I would, if I were reading into the tea leaves of the council, you know, the more jobs we have in downtown, if we're not growing our housing, it just means more commuters, more parking, more traffic as opposed to necessarily, you know, they would, they would prefer to see us add a thousand new houses and, you know, 150 new better paying jobs. And that would be a victory, I think in their eyes. How do we talk about that, Mike, what you were saying about the granite shed being kind of proactively revitalized? You said he doesn't have a tenant yet, but like that to me is a sign of a healthy economy of like being able to do good work like that in with, you know, fairly secure knowledge that some things it'll pay off with a tenant. Yeah, that went a little bit into why we had initially split the business into two groups. One, you know, because I'm trying to think a couple of pieces down the road of when we get the goals and strategies, knowing that our support for commercial landlords is going to be different than our support for businesses. You know, how do we help businesses through COVID? You know, I don't know if there is much that we can do as government, there's some things we could do, but there's more that we can do to support commercial landlords, our tax stabilization programs, our sewer and water extensions. These are all programs that we can provide to help commercial landlords make improvements. And, you know, having, you know, if your goal is to have good building stock, you know, that's, that's, you know, we don't own those buildings as the city, those are owned by commercial landlords and, you know, how you're, you know, how vibrant and how attractive your downtown is depends a lot on how you're, how the people who own the properties keep up and improve those buildings. And so yeah, definitely there is a connection between them. You know, eventually we, we collapsed that or, you know, Kevin and I collapsed that down into just support for business, but we realized there are two kind of pieces in there between the people. And it's certainly you're right. It certainly is an indication that people are investing in their buildings. It is a clear sign that that, that, that your economic development strategy is working because, you know, that's really economic development. If, you know, it's easy if, if all people want to do is to come in and spend money fixing up buildings, then, you know, you're doing great. That was, that was the challenge of a place like Berry City. It was, you know, people weren't looking to invest. And so we had to come up with policies to get people to invest. And so, you know, I think we still have a number of buildings that could be improved, but it seems like maybe the other component that's missing. And I think this also supports both our housing and business goals is the notion of a return on the return on investment. And when we think about our, the infrastructure that we have and everything that we invest, you know, if we think of Montpelier, if we're farmers and we think of Montpelier as our farm field, right? And our infrastructure and what we invest in our community is, is like our fertilizer and everything that we're putting in. Like we want to make sure that those crops are, are more than covering what we're investing in the community, right? And that helps lower our property taxes for housing as well as makes it more affordable for business. So this notion of, of like getting the most for our, our investment that I would like to see, I think is important for us to keep in mind. It's again, it's like not, not like jobs for the sake of jobs or like any of these things for the sake, like we need, we need to be strategic about it and leverage what our strengths are. And some of that I think comes down to us being proactive about analyzing what, what is the, what are the outputs? Like what are we spending in terms of taxpayer dollars to either attract businesses or make it. Meet some of those demands, but let's think further down the line of what is the long-term return on that investment, because that helps housing and business if we make sure we're making the most of our infrastructure. Yeah, I think that's what you're saying as part of why I like that there's some stuff in here about infrastructure. I think that investing in infrastructure is has like it's a high, high impact for helping business, but it, it's not, it's not limited to just that. So I feel like the, the return on investments going to be good there. Okay, so let's, let's get back to the language of the aspirations themselves. Looks like we have over here in column C and column D, if you can move over, Mike, there's some, I threw together some stuff from C that I thought we were saying would be the stuff we would want to include. Someone else put some other things over a DMR sure. What do we, what do we want to include when we're talking about the labor specific aspiration? What do we want to, what's important, impactful things to include there? Living wage, workforce development, high quality neighborhoods, sufficient housing for all members, a little bit redundant with high quality neighborhoods, maybe. I do think we want more jobs. I know Mike you were saying, it's like maybe not necessarily a goal. I think that's kind of bizarre that we would want to attract a lot of people to Montpellier and not have corresponding job like we should to a place where people want to work and live, not just what do we want to become like a bedroom community for Burlington? That's not our goal. I think the hope is that there would be more, more people would work and live here as opposed to people who would commute. So us commuters would stop commuting and instead move to Montpellier and have less of an impact on transportation footprint. I'm just putting things out there to kind of go through and say I don't. It'd be great to improve that ratio, but what would happen, how would we feel if we improved that ratio, but we lost jobs, which is very much a possible reality given the ink, who knows what the new long-term reality is for remote work, right now where Vermont is at like around 25% under what the 2019 numbers were for people working in their workplaces, right? Like commuting to work. So imagine a long-term trend of having 25% fewer people going to work in Montpellier. I don't think that's what, what we're after. Does it, where are you saying, like in the, in the language we're looking at, John, do you see somewhere that's, that's suggesting that we're, that we're encouraging jobs for the sake of jobs? No, I mean, Mike was just saying we don't have this goal of having either an increase or even maintaining the number of jobs, right? We have an increase in a percentage that pay a living wage, sure, of course, but that's a percentage. So in terms of absolute numbers of jobs we have in Vermont, that's not like, like we could lose half of the jobs in Vermont and maybe meet all of these goals somehow. I mean, half of the goals in Montpellier and still meet these goals. Yeah, we do always have to be careful with, you know, what metrics we choose when we get to the goals. You know, I'd point out like last year, the average, average wages of people living in Montpellier went up 15 or 20%. Why is that? Because most of the service people lost their jobs. So a whole lot of, a whole lot of poor people lost their jobs. Therefore, when we averaged who still had jobs, the average wage went up. And that would clearly not be a positive, you know, if we're looking at benchmarking and things, when we get there, that's a different factor. But again, I was just thinking, you know, getting back a little bit to your statement, you know, I think there, we can, when it comes to the jobs, jobs can, we can have a policy or have a policy on whether we want a number of jobs to increase or just not. I know when I've had this discussion with others and other boards, you know, we could grow, I used to say like, if our goal was to grow the grand list, if our municipal goals to grow the grand list, I can grow the grand list and not add jobs and not add to our GDP. I can also increase our number of jobs, but not increase our grand list and not increase our GDP. And I can increase our GDP. In other words, we get more money cycling through, but we haven't created any more jobs and we haven't invested in any of our buildings, which is our grand list. And again, City Hall operates on our grand list. So for most communities, growing the grand list is usually their benchmark, usually they're marked. They don't really care about the other pieces, but again, it's just, just to help you kind of frame in your head that they're, what we target as our metric that we want to push towards helps to then define what strategies we use because we're not a big enough city to go through and say we want to grow our grand list, grow our jobs and grow our GDP. We usually have to go through and kind of decide what's going to be our priority? What are we going to really kind of focus on in some communities that's growing grand list because they have higher taxes, because they have lower quality building stock and a lot of opportunity to grow the grand list and other places, as I said, Berry City, it was to add jobs, you know, 16, 17% unemployment when I was there in 2008. The only way you're going to do, fix that is by bringing jobs when you've got a large community that doesn't have a lot of cars, a lot of driverless vehicle-less households. So you've got to bring the jobs to them. You can't expect them to go to the jobs. So you kind of have to look at each community in its own way. And that's the hard part. It's trying to figure out piecing it apart as to where exactly we think we want to head. I think it's an interesting moment. If you look at having a vibrant downtown and whatever that might mean, you know, for our purposes, what we're trying to design, if we have, you know, state employees that say, you know, 15 or 20% of those are not coming into the office every day on a more permanent basis, right? So that drives the, I think we're probably going to need job creation if we want any of that downtown, those downtown businesses to be open. Okay. It seems like we could put some, sorry, Kirby. Yeah, I was just, I was just going to bring us back to the aspirations to get those, get those hammered out because we jumped ahead to goals for a second there. And we don't currently just for clarification, we don't currently have a goal of creating jobs. And in a sense like we maybe will decide not to add one either. And we'll focus on other other things. For now I would like for us to try to, to pull out the parts of a labor aspiration that are important, that we want to have goals around. Like this, this discussion has been helpful in that we're probably not going to put add jobs in there, but what should we have in that aspiration? What are the, what are the key things about labor that we want to call out? We have a lot of options here and all these different potential proposed aspirations. Can we, yeah, people just tell me what you want to make sure we have in a labor aspiration. I think the two next, like in rows, columns, C and D are getting there. Maybe we could dump high quality neighborhood and just do sufficient housing or high quality housing or something like that. Okay. What else do we, is there, is there anything that's missing here? We have a strong job market. I could take, we could, I don't know, we can take strong outfits and then necessarily. Unnecessary adjective there. Job market that pays a livable wage support workforce development provides sufficient housing for all members of the workforce. Is there anything else at labor that we want to get at? The, the goals, the potential goals we have right now are maintain and educate and train workforce, maintain and enhance the success of local businesses through retention expansion programs. And I don't know how that's labor related necessarily, but anyway, continue and improve our business and economic climate such that encourages support to business and increase the percentage of positions that pay a living wage. I don't know if that's helpful for you guys to know that that's what the goals are, but. Anything else to include here? Hold on Kirby. Is the job market. The one that's providing sufficient housing for all members or like the economy is providing all of these things. Well, I know, I know the cutting and pasting that I'm thinking about is that labor will, I think, have a job market that pays a living wage. Yeah, that's, that's a good point. I guess I'm, my brain is having a hard time. Like, so we're talking about an economic development chapter and labor is a big part of it, but it's not the only part of it. Right. How about, how about we work everything off of providing a clear job market that pays a living wage workforce development and sufficient housing for all members of workforce that more readable. Can you move your cursor? It's not. Thank you. I think it's the point, though, workforce development is professional development, right? Yeah, I mean, in again, back today, so if you, you know, went back a generation, there was a much bigger connection between businesses. So, you know, you know, a car manufacturer moves into a community. And so the community invests a lot of money in workforce development to make sure that the people are skilled in the trades necessary to get those jobs. A lot of that has, you know, skipped forward a generation. A lot of that has mostly gone away because, you know, we don't train people to work at national life. We don't even have a, you know, we, we have VCFA, but we really don't have a college that, that teaches that, you know, people move here to take advantage, you know, people get educated somewhere else and then move here. So workforce development is, is much less of a, of an issue, of a topic except from the standpoint of equality and, you know, trying to get more equal opportunities. So folks that, you know, have, have come here with few skills and are in needs and some skills. We have some basic workforce development skills out there, but you know, we're not going to be training people up to work for the state of Vermont and we're not going to be training people up to work for national life. And so that's, that's where it's, it's, you know, in a classic sense, yeah, we, workforce development used to be one of the big keys. I didn't want to cut it out because I think it is important and I think from an equity standpoint, it's important to, to remember that not everybody is, is coming in, you know, not everybody reaches adulthood in, you know, with the same opportunities for education. So we just need to recognize that as a, as a factor. But it's, it's tough because, you know, we have such a high paying job workforce. You know, none of us were probably educated in Montpelier from a, you know, from a professional standpoint. We all came here from other educations. So that's a little bit of workforce development. That's, it's a little bit of the trick to that one. Well, I'm good leading workforce development. I do think like, and, and this might be the risk of us just doing this all here, you know, brainstorming without necessarily much expertise thought or building, building off of very much, but I'm just looking at some numbers here and we've had like a pretty big drop off of private sector drop jobs in Montpelier. And, you know, not, not acknowledging that or setting any goals around that feels like we're saying like we're, we're perfectly fine with that. And I don't know if that's a good idea or not. The number, the number of jobs in Montpelier going back to 2010 have declined from close to six thousand down to like 5200. And that was before the pandemic. So that's like not an insignificant number. And, you know, the state, the state will do what the state does and we may have limited control or impact there, although maybe we do have more than we, we think, you know, I think, I think Mike might acknowledge Barry city's mayor playing a good role in making sure that state offices in very city are have a strong presence there, but I don't know. I think I want to make sure that we're being we're making, making comments and recognizing maybe what the existing conditions are and what we want the future to look like. And if we do, if we do not say anything about it, it does feel like we're totally, we're saying it's okay that we've lost a lot of private business and we're not over the past decade and we're not going to do anything about it. Is there like, what would you like to do, John? Would you like to address it through the aspirations or goals or like what do you, what do you have in mind? I think if we have a goal similar to housing that's nice, clean and measurable, which this is, you know, something that annually we can look at and be like, here's how many homes we built. Here's how many jobs we have and here's how many jobs that are paying more than, you know, here we've got, I'm looking at numbers broken out by over $3,333 per month and is there a net increase in those, I guess we could look at the percentage and maybe, maybe the top two numbers are like homes and jobs, like how are we doing compared to last year? I think most people in the city would want to see both of those numbers going up. We've all agreed on housing, but it sounds like on jobs there's, we're unclear there. Well, to me, I mean, it's city, Montpelier has a little bit more, I guess, control over housing, developing housing than bringing in jobs. I don't know. I just, I don't want to, I don't have a problem with like measuring jobs numbers. I think that's a good thing to, you know, talk about or publicize, but I feel like it's less, I don't know, how much does the city, can the city really do about it as, yeah, or, I mean, the city obviously can do some things, but not, doesn't have control of a lot of macro factors. Building off of that, I guess a word I would use would be resilient job market. I mean, we have all these exogenous factors throwing things around, whether it's the choices of state government, federal funding, broader trends, climate change, who knows. But ensuring that resilient is just the best adjective I can think of. Good quality and resilient. Yeah. I agree. I think. I think what. Sorry, I just, I think just what John is saying is like it's nuanced and we probably aren't going to be able to figure it out tonight. So like, since we have a working group for this one, maybe we can write down these ideas of like, just like we don't just want more housing. If it's all crap housing. We don't want more jobs if they're all, you know, we don't want to have one type of job or, you know, there's no, like it's just nuanced. And so I think we can. We can be articulate about that. I'm just not sure we're going to be able to do that tonight in a group. And, you know, without seeing the data like John was just saying, so maybe that's something we just note. Hand this to the work group. Get a little bit more detail. And then come back. I think that sounds fine. I think, I think for my part, I just want us to have some general agreement over the aspirations and so that we know. What direction we're trying to tailor the goals. Yeah, I mean, I think where a. Is in column C is good enough for right now. I think it's got the points. Of workforce development, living wage, housing, resilient, like that's good. Let's move to the next one. Mike, do you have anything that you think we're missing in? The column C aspiration. I was trying to compare it with what you wrote. You mentioned some like desirable place to work some support things like childcare opportunities. I couldn't think of a way to like squeeze that in. Yeah, I think just knowing the types of services we provide. You know, what makes Montpelier a great place to work. Was how I had was was thinking about things in my head. And, you know, having, you know, having some of these other pieces, you know, having job opportunities that offer a livable wage is great, but if you don't have any childcare opportunities and you don't have affordable housing. Or it's a, you know, I had great downtown, but I think someone else had great neighborhoods. I think, you know, either one is a good way of looking at it. You know, the quality of your neighborhoods. You know, it can be great. So we've got, I've got a good livable wage job, but I can't entirely take advantage of it because I don't have childcare opportunities or I'm burning all of my extra income on my unaffordable housing unit. So that was why I kind of looked at it from a, from a worker's perspective. These were the things I kind of see and I think they've been shown up in to see and some of these other ones they've kind of worked through. They have a lot of the same elements. And I think, I think the subcommittee kind of has enough pieces there to put something together. And I think that was all I was hoping for out of this conversation was, you know, I reached a point where I've thrown ideas out, but I can't draft policy without hearing something back from, from you guys. And if a subcommittee wants to sit down and try to hammer out the next piece, you know, I'm willing to sit down with you guys, or if you guys want to sit down on your own either way, we can try to work on what's the best way to word the labor and what's the best way to word, you know, what, what our business, what would make Montpelier a great place to have a business or to be a landlord. Okay. Thanks. Well, okay, it sounds like it sounds like aspiration A is in good enough shape. Aspiration B, I had, I had just, I actually cut in pieces and moved it over and I haven't changed anything with what was originally there. And I'm just trying to compare it with what Mike said. But let's move on to that. Do folks have any changes they want to make to aspiration B there? Which is Montpelier will maintain a robust local economy by supporting quality, private developments and by ensuring this projects have access to ample infrastructure. They, it touches on the two big ones to me. Is there anything else we need to include or change? Are people, what do people think of this idea of a return on investment? I mean, there are some neighboring unnamed communities that have given, you know, tax breaks to some large big box stores that end up being a net sink on when you look at the services that they demand and what they pay, particularly on a per acre basis. I don't think we want jobs or development for the sake of jobs or development if they're not contributing more to our community than they're taking, right? And that's actually, it sounds like it sounds kind of like out there, but it's very easily measurable in terms of if we look at the value per acre across all of our businesses, if we start developing undeveloped land at a rate that's lower than what it is for our surrounding developments and we're putting new infrastructure in there, then, you know, they will be paying less than what their infrastructure is worth. So this notion for me that we have to have some, the idea of fiscal responsibility sometimes gets lost in these things and we're just like we want more jobs and we want more housing and we don't think about like, well, what are we, what are we putting in in terms of public dollars for to get those things? I feel like acknowledging that in our economic development or jobs that we want more, but we also want to be smart about it and we don't want more for just the sake of having. I'm right there with you, John, it comes up in my day job all the time and I'm always looking at this through the same lens you're talking about making sure. Could that be reflected in a goal though or rather than like for purposes of the aspiration, can we just leave it as quality private developments? That's what it's about to get to the aspiration currently says quality, which I think is an important word there quality private developments which captures in a way what you're saying John. So we can have a goal that's along the lines of what you're saying and and that could be built off of quality private development. Or do you want to go more specific in the aspiration? It's a question. I think it's fine for now. I think that's a good thing to add but it can be more fleshed out in the chapter. And in the more specific parts of this. I just wanted to clarify development means. Housing business just kind of broad development in the broadest sense that correct. Yeah, I think when it was written it was it was targeting a little bit more towards the businesses but I think. You know, in general, yes, if someone was coming in with a. It mean parks to or like natural areas of development or. Or like. Do you want to change the word like right. Development gets like such a bad rap, right? And we're probably not going to be able to totally rebrand it, but sometimes we're just more specific. When we're talking about supporting quality, you know, growth or. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what else to call it. But yeah, like we don't want to end up with a strip mall development that doesn't ever fill up or. You know, I'm finally leaving it as development for now, maybe we can get some input later on a better word for development. Yeah, I can't. Yeah. I mean, it's not to belabor it, but are we saying attracting quality private employers? Because I would think we don't necessarily need them to. Create new developments, but we want. Employers. Supporting and attracting. What about, yeah, but what about, um. Like park and recreation development. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, to me, that's. To me, like the housing and the. You know, but yeah, I. I guess that's confusing to me because to me, that's all infrastructure housing. Recreation, childcare, all that stuff is kind of like the infrastructure that's supporting employers. I think the distinction is that the first, the first thing mentioned here is getting other private. Entities to build things. And then the second part is the city building things. For people. Oh, okay. Well, I didn't understand that from this language, but. Yeah, I think development is a little tricky and the word there, even though it is also the most appropriate for what we're talking about. So I don't know. Any other ideas for. That aspiration. Sounds like we're all in agreement about what we're trying to get out there and then we have some ideas for the directions of the goals, but. Yeah, I think that's fine. It's fine for now. And then look good to think of these things that you've clarified. I like to, I like to feel like 90% confident on things for moving on, because when we say for now, like, I know we're going to revisit some things later, but we'll be time limited. So there's a very good chance this is going to end up with the aspiration. I think when you, if you flipped over and you looked at some of the goals, I mean, you can see exactly how things tie in to what was written on this page. Yeah. The goals were set up without the advantage of having the, these goals were set up to implement a B and C. Which is again, this is what MDC came up with for their goals. And so I guess, what did I have down here? Yeah. I think that increasing the percentage of positions that pay livable wages continue to improve business and economic climate. Such that encourages that that one was kind of a little bit. Saying something without saying anything. Maintaining and enhancing success of local businesses through retention and expansion programs. That goes a lot to the, some of these downtown things. You know, how do we keep some of these small businesses going? Small business support. Maintain educated workforce, improve building stock, making more flexible. Maintain improved the quality of our, of necessary utilities and facilities. You know, a lot of our things like including. Caldonia spirits required us to extend and run sewer lines to make that project work and then to work with them on their wastewater treatment, because otherwise they weren't going to be able to hook it into our sewer because they would use up all our BOD out of our sewer plants. So they had to go and put in these special systems. So again, these are all utility things that we can do to facilitate and make businesses be able to come here. Maintain improved our sense of quality of place and built environment, increased the quantity of affordable housing, blah, blah, blah. New list based on revised aspirations. So I had a list here that I had kind of started to come up with continue to ensure the labor force has equal opportunities for employment, including being universally accessible. I felt those as one that hadn't really been reflected and I know we'd had a large, you know, kind of social justice component. So I just wanted to make sure, you know, part of this is making sure that our, our buildings and our jobs are equally accessible. Maintain or increase, you know, that was a question. Are we maintaining the number of jobs that offer livable wage? A lot of them do. Most of them do. But, you know, usually in our goals, we're talking about maintaining, evolving and transforming. Maintain workforce development opportunities. I don't think we're missing them. I think we're doing a good job with those. Continue to improve upon Montpelier state state of status as a great place to work. Maintain the quality and supply of our necessary utilities. I think that could be improved. Vibrant downtown commercial industrial spaces, fair and efficient permitting process, skilled workforce, increase the number of small businesses and startups in Montpelier and continue to have the variety of sectors. So. Okay. How about we, we do this for a plan. We have the aspirations tentatively set. It seems the subcommittee will meet. That's as of right now that consists of John and I. And we'll work on. Coming up with taking these goals and then working them into. Something for the city or for the planning commission to consider. That are tied to the inspirations. That's a good view, John. Before next meeting. Works for me. And. Usually these are groups of three. So. I don't know. I don't think that we'll. We're fine doing it. The two of us. But if there is someone who's interested in becoming the third on that, it will mean that we'll, we're going to meet some afternoon in the next two weeks. Is there anyone who's interested in being the third again? It's not necessary. Okay. I'll join you guys. Okay. Okay, sounds good. And so we'll, we'll. Talk offline about getting together. We can't, we can only have three though, because. Any more than that would be a quorum. And it would be in violation of the meeting law. So, okay. Sounds good. So we'll plan to do that. We'll plan to work on the goals. I think it'll be, I think it'd be great. I think you have awesome ideas, John. So we can turn those into some goals. And with that, I think we're probably good for now on this topic. Is there anything anyone wants to. To talk about with the aspirations and goals before we move on. So we have to talk about the scheduling some zoning hearings. I'll just let, I'll just let Mike explain it. Okay. All right. So we have, um, I have all the documents put together. We're currently getting them onto the website. So we have a couple of options. One of which is, um, Not really going to fit into for the next meeting on the 22nd. So I could, we do have five Mondays. So we've got a couple of options. I'm just throwing them out. I don't know what you're saying. I'm just going to go. I'm just going to give you a couple of options. I've got a couple of recommendations. The 22nd, it's the week of Thanksgiving. The 29th would be the Monday after Thanksgiving, which would be the fifth Monday. And then we've got December 13th would be the next meeting. So. Um, by way of. Um, background. A number of these, you know, impetus behind some of the zoning changes are getting some organized opposition and including some folks that have gone so far as to say that you know they they plan to kill the project by killing the zoning so I really have to absolutely make sure that every i is dotted and every t is crossed on everything that we do so I'm trying to be a little bit overly deliberate on on doing things because if I'm going to get dragged into court I don't want to get dragged into court because I you know missed by day on on some requirement so that's not your problem that's my problem but one thing in talking to city manager he thought it would be helpful to make sure that we maximize our opportunities for public comment so he was thinking you know if we could if we could do two meetings that's great we could always do one meeting and do it a little bit longer so when I emailed Kirby I was like we could you know maybe warn a special meeting on the 29th as a possibility and have a hearing on the 29th and then a meeting on another hearing on the 13th we could just have a longer meeting which we used to do with the zoning so back when we did the other zoning because it's really tough to get a lot of public comment in in two hours we would have like a three-hour planning commission meeting so we'd go 530 to 830 instead to kind of give people more of an opportunity to comment and so I could warn it for the 29th in the 13th we could just go with one meeting on the 13th that's a little bit longer and I'll get the public notices out everybody and then they'll have lots of time to think about it I have gone so far as to make sure that the 13th as you know from religious holiday standpoint it's between holidays so Hanukkah is early this year and Christmas is obviously the 25th so it falls between the holidays so it's not really ending in anything that should be an issue so I think the 13th is a safe date for us and I think I just wanted to see what you guys think if you guys want to go with one three-hour meeting and if nobody shows up awesome but my sense is we're going to get you know a zoom room we're zoom room full of people for the zoning so the options in a nutshell are have a really long meeting on the 13th or have a normal meeting on the 13th that devoted to the hearing and then also have a hearing on the 5th Monday of November the 5th Monday of November at least has the advantage of we're not going to be having plenty commission meetings three weeks in a row that way because we'll still have the first Monday of December off does anyone have any preferences let's do the online meeting on the 29th or we think it's just not enough time for everybody to go the long-minute meeting on the 29th it's an option I suppose that would all that would do is free us up to do the city plan if we felt like we were behind on the city plan maybe that'd be a good option but I'm not aware of us feeling behind on the city plan what do you think Mike no I mean we've got obviously we've got the 22nd you know any other options cancel the 22nd to have one on the 29th if you guys are getting burned out on meetings but if we think we can be ready to continue with economic development on the 22nd and I think you know we'll have a couple of these that we can keep working on and we got we did get our our MPG submitted so we'll see how that grant application goes and I'm really kind of waiting a little bit to see how that pans out to help us you know moving into next year okay so okay so what are what are other thoughts Aaron you're going to say something I'm in favor of doing two only just because you run the reduced the risk of just like having a burnout you know three or four hour marathon that might happen on the front end anyway but and plus if the concern is is you know we want to be able to create a deliberative process you know that process is deliberative as possible having two meetings is helpful to that I know that it's kind of a pain for everybody to do two meetings instead of one but I just think that breaking them up and giving the public two opportunities to weigh in it's just going to be more efficient for everybody in the end and it's going to help us sort of uh kind of take stock in the comments doing it in two different sessions as opposed to just one marathon one what what do other people think I like to as well yeah ditto and if we were going to lengthen one I think we should lengthen the one on the 13th for my own selfish more available that day reasons but also because of the holiday because the 29th is the first day of Hanukkah second day of Hanukkah first full day of Hanukkah I think maybe we could play a by-year on the 13th thing uh well unless Mike you have to like if we run over the meeting without violate something no I mean it can it can run longer I mean I like to make sure everybody's aware of it ahead of time so the 13th could run over if people are still like we don't we don't in case there's extra people need you know we won't shut down their comments or anything I mean that's that's a pretty bad worst-case scenario isn't it though that like we've already had one hearing and the second hearing runs over that will mean a lot of probably not great things so let's hope that is that that was the way it works Kirby we get energized the first time and come back the second with all their friends yeah uh yeah I I hope it goes better than that um you know I there's probably gonna be some maternity show up right and that's always pretty good in my experience because they will point out things that we'll make sure we want to avoid so that we'll be welcome uh okay so is everybody okay with us planning two meetings and for Mike's schedule in the hearings that way we'll try to avoid burnout on the first hearing and so we might if there's extra people we might ask them to come back on the 13th if they want to talk more but then from the 13th we'll let it go over if we need to yeah and a lot of cases I mean this would be a little bit for more for Kirby but it's good for everybody to know um in certain cases when we do these um big things we we certainly want to ask questions if there's things that are unclear but a lot of times we want to listen and hear what they say um and if if we're not engaging in a dialogue with each person as they come up then it just um it gives more of an opportunity to make sure we get through everybody's comments everybody's thoughts um and then you know we can go through say you know where we're gonna take notes we're gonna listen to everybody's comments and then at the end um if if on the 13th you guys want to have a deliberative session you know you guys can talk about comments in open session what happens usually in the in the hearing is we'll reach the end of the hearing we'll close the hearing and then you guys have an opportunity to talk amongst yourselves about what you've heard and you know I think a number of you have been through this before um you know we take comment we hear what people have to say and then we sit down and deliberate about what do we want to do um do we want to vote to move this to the city council do we want to make an amendment um and and we make motions and you know sometimes we sometimes if we don't have a quorum or we're close I think the last time we did this for Pioneer Street it took us three shots um because we kept ending up with three to one votes um until we could get a bigger quorum of people there but I think that's generally the way it works is is um it's not really a matter of debating and um with each each one of the folks so we can usually get through a number of public comments we just have to make sure Kirby and I will have to be attentive to making sure one person isn't using all the time or you know talking for too long and we just have to make sure that we try to hold them to the two minutes and maybe we have to remind them of that at the start that you know due to the number of people that are commenting we want to try to help you keep your comments to two minutes or less um and we can make exceptions to for people who have specific sets of comments but helps us to get through managing managing the hearing um and hopefully we've had we've had somewhere we haven't had a great deal of people come out um and we'll just have to go and see um I'm going to try to send out as much information as I can targeted to each neighborhood um that's what I'm hoping for is my letters I'm sending to every single one of the members of these different ones is that I can get as much information out there as I can so hopefully for example people are less concerned about Heaton Woods um you know people know that there's a covenant protecting that area and that it can't be developed then people who are concerned about changing the zoning it's going to allow for development in Heaton Woods people can recognize that no uh no matter how you change the zoning Heaton Woods is not being developed there's a conservation easement in the fact um it'll only affect where the Heaton Woods facility is and where Washington County mental health is and hopefully that allays at least a percentage of the people who are concerned about that um but um so again that's a little bit of the why and so I can get these out as much as I can hopefully we will see who shows up and how it goes okay yeah so uh we'll see each other again before the hearings we'll we'll have that um November meeting so uh people don't have to be completely prepared quite yet for it uh definitely want to go into the meeting rereading Mike's memos um on the on the topics and be acquainted with it because yeah these hearings are going to be about people's getting opportunity to speak out it's not going to be information gathering for us uh and you'll want to keep your notes of what people say and so that you so that you can bring up things you want to bring up when we discuss it at the end um okay sounds like a plan Mike knows what to do does anyone have anything else before we adjourn so I I did just want to mention really quick before we cut out um which I had sent out to you guys which was this was a little bit um of what I was um talking about when we were talking about trying to have this plan get put together and I sent this link out and if you didn't get a chance to take a look at it and I can send it out if you guys need me to again this is different this was what um SE group they helped me put together the the grant this is what they had done this is what the these GIS hubs these GIS hubs and John too bad John has left this is kind of up right up his alley um this is what they did to make a digital plan um and this is what we were hoping to do so what you end up with with our storyboards um you know an introduction the planning process how they did it um you know so as you know the plan for conservation kind of gives you know it's this is the written stuff we were just talking about and then it leads into you know integrating into in some maps and stuff in this case you know obviously you set them up differently but I just wanted to point this out if anyone didn't get a chance to kind of grab that that this is really a little bit of where we're trying to go is to um be able to put written words with pictures and maps so in our case this would be housing for example and we would be able to have some maps in here that show maybe where the location of housing units are where the high density housing is um you know whatever we're whatever story we're trying to tell these are what what are called when I when I'm referring to storyboards this is a storyboard and this was instead of having a written document or a pdf plan what we wanted to be able to do is to have these come up in more storyboard format that would be able to communicate to the public what you know what the city's goals are with with housing maybe this wasn't the best one to grab for conservation but it certainly goes through what they had for their um let's see if I can find it here kind of hiding under things for me now um but that's that's what they've you know been able to put together for their for their plan and this is a little bit of what we were trying to get to and I just wanted people to know as we're working on our transportation plan or in our economic development plan that you know you know for additional information you can see these links and we could you know link to existing plans um so that's a lot of what we would be hoping to get a you know somebody to work and help us develop these storyboards and the idea just being that we want to have more of a digital plan something that's that kind of works and communicates a story to people so well it looks like Aspen's really laid down the gauntlet there like I I think we can beat them I think we could be in Colorado we could do it there it's a you know in that case that's a that's a gigantic plan just on recreation so um we we're just doing a city plan so but they did they did do it I still think we could do a better job yeah no there's a couple of these that I've I've pointed out um even the ones like um you know Plano Texas uh and OKC Oklahoma City are two famous uh award-winning digital plans for municipal plans again they're big communities um with a lot of a lot more money a lot more resources and an entire you know army of planning staff working on them but even their plans I could go through and kind of go and say you know I I don't I think there's a lot of room for improvement in those um so you know I think it's not all about the money um there's a lot of it's about making sure we get the content right to make sure we're telling the right story and that's why I try to focus so much on what are we doing uh what do we want to try to see as our aspiration breaking them into goals and breaking them into strategies because really the key is you know it doesn't do us any good to make a pretty plan if it's not actually going to be actionable and getting us there so so thanks yeah that's yeah that's good stuff and yeah yeah people should check out Plano and Oklahoma City and I think there's isn't some North Carolina City that has a good one uh yeah there's yeah there's a couple of that are out there I'm trying to think of the other one that was yeah gives you an idea of what the what the vision here is for what we're doing yeah we're just trying to get away from the the typical piece the paper PDF plan um that every municipality does we think these digital plans and you know Plano and OKC did not do storyboards they just did more of a web individual web pages for each chapter so there are different ways of us getting to that digital plan but I think that it provides many more opportunities for us once you're in a digital format then you can you know put a line in the sand and below that we can actually have changeable things um you know if you want to mark the number of jobs created or the number of things we can actually benchmark um different things you can allow sections for public comments rather than having public comment just before the plan you actually can have public comment during the eight-year lifespan your plans are good for eight years so entirely during the eight-year lifespan someone can go in read the plan and provide public comment in the chat section below and then that gives me and you guys the insight of you know where where was stuff that we weren't clear on or where our policy is wrong at least according to this public input this person just thinks we're completely wrong and that we should be doing more to do x that's important information and if we're getting it all along the way it's it provides not just public comment at the start or during the adoption but gives us comment all throughout the life of the plan which you don't get from a piece of paper thanks um okay uh does anyone have anything else before we adjourn okay do we have a motion motion to adjourn second a second it says second from Jeff are you okay is that a motion from Aaron a second from Jeff is in favor of the adjourning say hi hi hi hi see you guys in two weeks thank you thanks