 August 23rd meeting of the Mobular Planning Commission. First, we have to approve the agenda. Since we don't have a quorum, should we just proceed informally, Mike, or? Yeah, I would pretty much go with that. You're gonna probably be working informally. Not really, you really can't call it to order because you don't have a quorum, so you really can't be doing any official business, but we'll continue to have a meeting. Act is a working session to kind of see where the subcommittee kind of report out on what they've done. Okay, so for anyone seeing this, this is a working meeting of the Mobular Planning Commission. We have three members present, which is not enough for a quorum, so this is not an official meeting. We'll not be voting on anything or doing any actual business, but we will be reviewing the natural resources chapter tonight and some of the work that some of the planning commissioners have done on the chapter, which is part of the city plan that we will be proposing many months from now for the new plan for the city. Bar may pop in later in the meeting. Since I don't anticipate us voting on anything, I mean, I don't think I'll need to call the meeting to order, although as another matter of procedure, will we have to do that since we have a quorum? Yeah, okay. Yeah, probably. I would think so. Okay. My guess is this meeting isn't gonna go long enough for Barb to pop in. If she does, it was gonna be about 6.45, so we're an hour and 15 minutes. Yeah, I don't need that much to talk about. Okay, well, with that, Aaron, you wanna guide us through the work you guys have been doing on the natural resources chapter? Yeah, I mean, this is pretty, just because there's so few of us, I mean, I think we can just do this really quickly. So, basically the working group took a look at both the aspirations and goals and back in June, and we tried to streamline a lot of that structure that the Natural Resources Committee gave us. And we did what we were really focused on was ensuring that the strategies that they put in place were retained. And we just sort of, we tried to pare down the aspirations and goals to streamline them. So we just had kind of a more, ultimately collapsed onto a singular aspiration, which we think just sort of lent itself better. It was just sort of a better structure for the strategies. But like I said, we wanted to make sure that those strategies stayed in place. And so we didn't do anything with respect to those strategies. And you can see what those are in the documents that are on the drive. And I think that there is, we can go into detail as to what those strategies are. But I think when you look at them, and I apologize, I was just looking at them for the first time in a while, if I can find the relevant tab that has them from my computer, I can speak to them. A little more authority. That was just like my last call. What's that? Oh, that you said. If you want to share your screen to show them, that would... Yeah, let me see if I can... I have it pulled up here, Erin, if you want me to... Do you want me to? Yeah, I've just got so much stuff on my computer right now. I'm just multitasking all day. I have like 12 times. Can you see the videos on the side or can you just see my screen? I can see your screen right now. Okay, good. I like having the videos up. But on Teams, you can see the videos and the screen at the same time it's awkward to look at yourself. Oh, no, you mean like, yes, you can see the videos as well. Oh, you can. So sorry to spare you. You can't spare you from the awkwardness. Okay, awkward all around. Okay, what do you want to look at the... I think that part of the template has the best approach. Oh, is it this one? I think the temp... Oh, no, that is the one. There we go. That's the right one. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it settled down. Okay, give it a second. It's moving. Yeah, I think it's got to load the tabs onto the bottom before you can switch over. Yeah. Yeah, so that was the one aspiration that we'd all agreed to put it down. Sorry, it's struggling. Three of all our lives lately, I think. It's having a Monday. Wait, did you want to look at goals or strategies? Well, let's just look at the strategies because I think we can just sort of talk about the goals a little more holistically. So yeah, I mean, just to sort of back up very quickly, we had put together an implementation strategy document that sort of reflected our collapsing down to a single aspiration. We sort of narrowed the goals down into about a half dozen that focused largely around mapping. Let's see, citizen engagement, maintaining partnerships with relevant organizations, water health, that sort of dovetails into water ecology. There's one to maintain a thriving community of native flora and fauna and to eradicate or control the spread of invasive species population, which I frankly think is a very good one and kind of an underrated one, but I think it has a lot of impact around the city. Sort of climate change mitigation and resiliency and soil resources, contamination and erosion and sort of the protection of urban ecology. And like I said, you can look at those things within the spreadsheet as well, but again, I think we wanted to make sure it is to sort of make sure that the strategies that were outlined by the committee were retained and we did that in our sort of restructuring of it. So you can sort of see, there's generally a clustering of different strategies that are consistent with those goals that are outlined in the spreadsheet here. I don't know how we want to approach a discussion on this. I mean, it's been pretty static. I don't think that there's a lot of reason to change a lot of the strategies at least with at least the subcommittee hasn't really seen any need to do it. We can have that discussion now if we want to. So there's that. And then the only other real piece that the subcommittee has been working on is, Mike is set out a draft of the chapter texts, which I think is pretty good and I think it's well-structured. So Brasile and I have just been going through that document, making some line level changes to it. We're almost done with it. Like I've been multitasking for the last couple of days. And so we've still got a couple of paragraphs left to go at the bottom, which is basically a reflection of the strategies that we want to put in place. And so we might need to take a little bit of time to make sure we tweak that the way we want to. I think we discussed as a subcommittee was to have the goal of sort of giving this document to the rest of the group to review leading up to the next meeting and then giving everybody a chance to comment or propose edits to the working draft that we've been working on. And then as opposed to going through line by line of the document, just be able to sort of pull out any of the comments or questions that have been placed in the document and discussed the document that way. I just think it's probably a cleaner approach. And it sort of, I think it will avoid an issue that I think we've had in some other chapters where I think people may be looking at the document for the first time during the sort of final read through and are asking sort of baseline questions and we kind of get hung up on that. And it sort of stalls the process out. So I think it's a way to try to encourage people to get eyes on the document prior to the discussion and hopefully make the last sort of read through fairly efficient. And I think it'll just help us guide the discussion, which I think you mentioned, Erin, but just to really point that out is like it will rather than just like starting on a blank or marked up sheet we'll have really specific edits and or comments to discuss and make a decision on. And then we'll be able to show what those decisions are in the document and it'll make for just quicker cleanup, hopefully. Yep. And I just, oh, and one last thing I wanted to say I forgot to say at the outset, which was my recollection from our meeting of the working group was, I think we all agreed that the, like I said, the strategies were in a pretty good place. And I may be wrong about this, but my recollection was is that we decided that, if we needed to make any changes to the strategies that outlined in the template, it might be best to sort of wait to get public feedback on that stuff. Cause I think, like I said, I think we just thought that they were in pretty good shape already. And I think this chapter is benefited quite a bit from a lot of hard work from the conservation committee and parks folks, you know, people that really have a good sense of these issues. So I think it hasn't been a particularly heavy lift on this chapter on that front. So I'm having a little bit of a hard time following like what you want to do differently when we go through this next week. I mean, are you still, do you plan to walk through the strategies section and the chapter? Yeah, I mean, I guess my thought was, if we had a quorum, we had a, you know, critical mass of folks at this meeting, we could have maybe walked through the strategies piece is outlined in the template document and sort of had that general discussion about those things, but, you know, unless you have burning questions, I don't know if that's a good use of our time at this one. So we could still do that at the next meeting, but I think what we really wanted to do was we were also focused on the text of the chapter that Mike had drafted and just sort of encourage folks to take a look at it. If you have questions or edits that you want to make to it, make those in advance of the meeting. So then as opposed to reading through the entire document, we can just focus on those questions, comments and edits that we think are, you know, sort of big stick issues, focus the discussion on those things as opposed to going front to back for the entire document. Okay. And Kirby, to facilitate that, Aaron and I and potentially Stephanie, you know, as the subcommittee, we will have taken a pretty serious spin through the document and we'll provide everyone with a cleaned up version with our edits first. So we're hoping that the overall like clutter of edits in the document will be cleaner anyways. Whereas we hadn't, we didn't, I feel like we tried to do that on some of the, once before, but it didn't quite get there. At least I know when I tried to do it on one of them I didn't quite edit everything. That was, it just makes for a tougher conversation as a group. I think I'll just have to, I'll just have to see what you guys do next week to see what's different. But one takeaway I have here is you wanna make sure that we tell everyone that they need to read the chapter ahead of time because it's not going to be read during the meeting. Yeah, that's what I planned. Like I said, we just kind of got a little bit behind April, we're close to having our comments done and we'll have like a new draft out for everybody with the next day or two, which we'll send out an email and just say heads up, take a look at this, if you have comments or edits make them in advance of the meeting because once we have the meeting, we're not gonna kind of, we're gonna focus on what's on the page as opposed to like the edits and comments that people have made as opposed to sort of visiting the document for the first time for some folks. Okay, yeah, let's give it a try. Okay, so I have some questions. I mean, I don't think there's anything preventing us from like doing some work right now. I mean, so you removed some of the goals. What do you wanna look at the chapter or the? The goals in the template. I'm compared to the previous version with this version and it looks like you guys wanna, you were moved like three goals, just so I was curious about the thought process there. Yeah, I think we voted on changing these at a previous planning commission meeting. We kind of grouped these down to... Yeah. It was 10. I, when I was going through making my draft strategies for you guys to consider, I noticed that there really aren't any strategies for this idea of maintaining strong partnerships. And I think it's something that we do, but I don't know if that's something we necessarily would put as a goal. Everybody could have that as a goal, make partnerships with housing committee could make partnerships with housing groups and transportation and stuff. So I didn't know if that was, I don't know if I would consider that to be a goal that we would put in the plan. So I was, my thought was to propose removing that one, but that was made after you guys had approved the aspirations and goals. Okay, so that, all right. So that came from you when you were doing the draft. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. I don't recall that. Maybe that was a meeting that I missed at some point. It was the last, well, I think it was actually the last meeting we had. So four weeks ago is we, if I remember correctly, we went through the aspirations and goals and sort of signed off on them. And I think Mike and I think we agreed to pare it down to one aspiration, but we had restructured sort of the outline so that we retained all of the goals. And now Mike's suggesting we get rid of the, maintain strong partnerships goal, which I think Mike just said, I'm looking at sort of our document that we, the working group is using to sort of outline all this stuff as, yeah, it looks like a lot of the strategies that were contained under that maintain partnerships goal is pretty low priority stuff. It's pretty low priority stuff and it's pretty broad. So I'll, I think we'll take that back to the working group and sort of mull that over, but I see your point on that. Yeah, same. Well, our last meeting, we did housing and transportation. And there was a couple of meetings. Maybe there's a couple, yeah, maybe you missed. It was a while ago, yeah. Okay. Okay, so yeah, I think I missed it. You better have amnesia. You might have, Kirby, I feel like Aaron might have led that one. Yeah. It's all blurred. It would have made sense if I missed one that Aaron would have led on. The thing he's been, one of the things that he's part of the working group for. Okay. So the group decided to cut that stuff out, like the entire planning commission decided to cut that stuff out. Okay. And you're saying that the working group doesn't have a lot of feedback or suggestions for the strategies. So it's really like the chapter edits are the main thing you guys have done. Yeah. And I'm happy to have a broader discussion about the strategies and what we feel like, whether or not some of those strategies need to be reworked. But at least my thinking was nice. And I want to say that we sort of thought that we were in agreement on this with the working group. And tell me if I'm wrong, Marcel, is that we thought that, again, they were in pretty good shape. So it seemed to me that, you know, the best way to maybe approach it is wait until we get sort of general public comments on those strategies before we start to rework them. But we were kind of more focused on working on the chapter text right now, you know, to get that done before. Yeah, that was, because that was, sorry, Erin. Yeah, I agree, because that was the approach that we had taken with the other chapters was like focus on the goals, the aspiration and goals first. And then we were, and then focusing on the chapters and then collapsing down the strategies if need be. But I do remember thinking they were in pretty decent shape. Okay. I do plan to do that. Do you, I guess we should probably put something else on the agenda just in case there's not a lot of feedback or comments from the group if we're not going to take the time to walk through it. Mike, do you have any ideas for what else we could include on the agenda next week? I think we still have housing that's been somewhat ready to go. It just needs to get a committee. I think a committee is waiting to sign off on that. I'll, I think it's a good idea to put housing on there and I'll try to connect with Ariane and Barb. And I'll go ahead and do edits to the chapter for that and yeah, bring it up to speed basically to make it ready to go. Okay, so we'll plan to do that. Plan to do both of those. So do you guys have any other takeaways from your work on this? No, like, like I said, I think that this chapter really benefited from a lot of really good thinking from the committees that drafted this stuff. So like I said, I think this is in pretty good shape when we got it. And that I think it's kind of a light touch approach from us is probably best. So we'll see where it goes. Okay. One clarifying question, Mike. The North Branch of the Winooski River. I've always heard it referred to as the North Branch of the Winooski River. Is it's proper name, the North Branch? I think the proper name is the North Branch of the Winooski. But most people, just the colloquial is just to call it the North Branch. The North Branch, okay. We really got hung up on that for a minute. We really did. I was making like deep changes. Contacting the libraries of... I mean, that's the kind of thing you do not want to screw up, you know, the document. So Marcella, you said you wanted to do a clean copy of the chapter after the group's done its edits and that's what you want the Planning Commission to read before the next meeting. I believe, yes. Is that correct, Erin? Cause we, it's right now it's, we did a lot of like cutting and rearranging. It's just kind of ugly. Yeah, it's a red line mess right now. Yeah, so, but well, you know, we kept, obviously we kept the core structure and kind of topics that Mike put through. We just like rearranged things here and there. There's a couple of outstanding questions about like the maps and things. And then like Erin said, the stuff at the bottom. Erin, to be honest, I just got to this point and was like, I really need to go back and revisit the aspirations and goals. Yeah, I was sort of in the same side. I need some more time to really think about it a little more critically when we put the paper on that. But like I said, I think we can get this done in the next day or two. I definitely want at least like 10 days to take a look at it and, you know, go ahead. You have ample time to carve out an hour or two of their lives to take a look at it. And I think we can sort of communicate it to the rest of the group as like, you know, the subcommittee took the close read on this as the other subcommittees have done on some of the other chapters. And so, you know, we've done a first pass at edits and this is to help call out anything that's unclear or perhaps not complete or, you know, just sort of the bigger sort of the bigger, more important rather than words. Yeah, I think I would just say make sure that it's like the clean copy version that you have is like clearly marked and then Mike can include that document when he sends out the agenda. Yeah, well, I think we plan on sending it out well in advance of whenever Mike would send out the agenda. I mean, I think we want to get this out the door like the next couple of days. So we'll make sure it's, you know, we'll have a nice clean copy and it's clearly marked and everything, so. Okay, does that sound good to you, Mike? Yeah, that sounds perfect. Okay. And just so, you know, just so, you know, like, I think Mike's structure of the chapter text is spot on. So, and I think he did a good job of teaming up all the relevant issues. So again, it's just for just kind of sentence level stuff that we've been focused on. And I think there was anything significant way to do in terms of structural changes to the text. So. Perfectly fine with those types of edits. Like I said, it's that type of, this type of writing is not my strong suit. So I always just try to get stuff out there and hope we've got somebody who's a little better, a little better writer to clean it up. Well, if you put enough cooks in the kitchen, you'll end up with some kind of cake, you know. It's helpful. And really, I find your guidance on what, where to focus and, you know, what's important to bring up in the chapter really helpful make, you know, the sort of once, once that's there, I feel much freer to like massage the language and make sure it's reading really excessively to, you know, anybody with non-natural resources degree, et cetera. Okay, that sounds like a good plan. So we'll plan to do that. We won't do the full walkthrough for natural resources. We'll ask people if they have any comments. I anticipate that there will be people who may be only skimmed it or something and that they may not be comfortable voting, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We'll see how people react to that approach. And then we'll plan to do housing if we can get through natural resources pretty quickly. And I had forgotten that we'd already started work on this as the full group. So that should help things go quickly, I think. Do we have anything else to talk about? Mike, well, not in terms of the natural resources chapter, but I was wondering if what's the zoning review subcommittee that you want to put together, Mike? So we usually get a lot of changes once or twice a year. You guys have had to deal with them. What I didn't want to do is to have the planning commission get bogged down too much, getting distracted with another set, because we do have another set of zoning changes. We've had a couple of housing proposals. We have a couple that need some zoning amendments. So I thought if we had a subcommittee to kind of review them, that we can get through some of the details, kind of get through it and then bring it to the planning commission. So that way just at least shortens a little bit of the planning commission conversation on it, maybe. So if we have folks that are really interested in kind of getting into the weeds, that maybe the whole commission doesn't have to get into the finest details, but we can kind of go through and say, this was the proposal, kind of makes sense to us. Here's the second proposal that kind of makes sense to us. Maybe it'll make that process go a little bit faster. We will still have to have public hearings. Yeah, I visited Mike. I mean, that sounds like a good idea to me, but I was just kind of curious like what you envision the sort of scope of the subcommittees of work would be. Would it be like when some sort of request comes in, it goes to the subcommittee, they review it, sort of look at what the relevant changes might be to facilitate that change or, you know, and then kind of make a recommendation to the larger committee or commission or. Yeah, I mean, or I was even thinking maybe, even if it's just an ad hoc group for this one that I'm working on right now, we're going to have a proposal for September, either the last meeting in September, the first meeting in October, where the planning commission is going to be reviewing this next set of phoning changes. And even if it's just a group that we throw together two or three people to talk about this set here and the next time we have another zoning proposal, we'll put together another group. I don't know if it has to be a standing committee. I don't think we get them often enough to need a standing committee, but we do get them, I do have this one coming up. So I do know we'll have three, basically it's like three map changes, a couple of per planned unit development proposals to change the language for PUDs and then some other technical stuff. So there's a lot of little pieces and then a couple of big ones, but so even if Mike. What do you think about just us? Like I'm thinking that we would have a group of people spend extra time to work on this, but then they'll bring it back to the next group and then we'll still use meeting time for it. What if we just warned a full meeting of the Planning Commission and then have people show up and it's just about that and so that our regular meetings are still used for the city plan and then we just- Warn a special planning commission meeting? Yeah, it would be about the same amount of work as a subcommittee and but it would then take up no time at a regular meeting and then everyone could get their two cents in fully. Certainly an option, we could do it that way. Now, usually we have a meeting before the hearing. So I don't know if you wanna have that as the meeting before the hearing and then warn a hearing and basically hope that at that point there's not a lot of comment through it. If we all vote and agree on changes at a special meeting and then we hold the hearing during one of our normal meetings, the work would be done on our part and we would just see what the public has to say and respond in that case. Yeah, I can look to see if we've got, usually it's tricky because we've got Mondays that are, every Monday that's not one of our meetings is a DRC meeting unless we have a fifth Monday and I guess I'll see where our next fifth Monday shows up. We've got one coming up. Well, there's five in August, but that's- Yeah, we just missed that. Yeah, but there's not five in September. Yeah, all right. Well, we'll just query the board and see what everybody's schedules are like because it's difficult to schedule it on another Monday just because of the- I mean, a Tuesday or Wednesday might also have people available if you are. Yeah, I'm usually okay on a Tuesday. Wednesday can be tricky because that could be a city council night. So I sometimes get pulled into those. So yeah, that's one we can, it'll be on the agenda for the next meeting and we can kind of talk about it and have everybody make a decision what they wanna do and we'll have some proposed times or days to set up a special meeting. Okay, yeah, let's come to the next meeting with some dates and so people can check their calendars and see when they're available. I mean, if we did a subcommittee, they would also have to figure out when they're available. But yeah, I just, I feel like wanna try to reduce redundancies. So it just seems like if we just have a special meeting where we knock it out, we'd only need four people. The subcommittee had three and it wouldn't be that much different. Is that okay with you Marcel and Erin as a tentative plan? If it becomes unworkable, we can- Yeah, I kind of- I mean, it kind of sounds like you just mentioned, it kind of sounds like a subcommittee, but it would just be a public meeting rather than a subcommittee. Yeah, I think that would save time in the long run. Yeah, as long as we have time to prep, if we wanna try to knock it out in a meeting, depending on the details, I just want a little bit of time to prep. Well, there would be the hearing, the quote, hearing afterwards, which would, so it wouldn't, if we did it this way, it wouldn't be like you only get like one evening to consider it like, you know what I mean? Yeah, and I'm trying to put together a memo right now that really lays out what the proposed change is. The only things that will be somewhat big would be the two PUD changes. It's generally what we don't have right now or just standard general PUDs. We have all these special PUDs. And what we've had interest from developers is just, you know, I don't need a density bonus, I don't need anything special. I just wanna cluster my development to protect open space or to avoid some environmental thing. And that's what we want them to do, but they caught up in the special PUDs and they just wanted a plain old average PUD, no density bonus. And so I wrote up some language for that. So that'll take a little bit more time to review, but I think most of the other ones are pretty quick. That sounds awesome by the way. Like that sounds like a great improvement to me. Okay, so yeah, and yeah, so if we hold the special meeting, anyone can attend and they'll be able to have, participate in the full discussion. No one left out unless they wanna be. So what are the other things besides the PUD? We've had three requests for map changes, all related to housing projects. And most of them make a lot of sense. You know, they tie into a couple of non-conforming things. They kind of, if you know where Harrison Ave is, Harrison Ave's off Loomis. So Loomis is res two, or res three, and Main Street's res three, and they're a little neighborhood that's kind of tucked behind it. Harrison goes over to Whittier, and they're res six, and they're like, well, we'd rather be res three, or at least the residents that contacted me, because then they'd be have the ability to do, you know, maybe a tiny house or do a little bit of stuff like that. They also have some conforming lots. So it's kind of one of these ones that's like that makes sense. Heat and Woods is another one. They want a higher density. They want a higher density, Harrison. Okay, okay. Yep, and Heat and Woods is a non-conformity up off College Street, the old hospital building. And so there's another property that's up there, Heat and Woods, and Washington County Mental Health. They're non-conforming structures, non-conforming uses, and so they would like to get shifted as well, from res six to res three. And so it's kind of another sense. Is it too much to bite off to entertain the idea of in the community surrounding the downtown core to just get rid of the density requirements? It's, I think it's going to be a tough one because there's so much that's tied into it, but it's one that we can always talk about. I mean, we've certainly increased the densities to make them, you know, to provide plenty of room for infill. You know, we want some infill. We've got the bulk and massing requirements to make sure that structures don't get too big. And I think, you know, that's always a possibility to go strictly bulk and massing requirements, but I think, I don't know. So that was two of them. There's a third one that's up on Northfield Street, where the proposal, they want to extend sewer and water. We've got a rule that says, if you don't have sewer and water, you're in rural. Well, there's kind of an internal parcel that's between Northfield Street and Hill Street. It's currently zoned rural because it doesn't have sewer and water, but there's a proposal that said we'd be willing to run sewer and water into this area, but we want to have the, so, you know, we would need the zoning to adjust to rez nine, which is the typical density for sewer and water. So they were like, we're gonna run the sewer and water, then we need to build to a certain density, which would be this. So we'd have a discussion about that. So there are a couple of those types of things. And then there's just a lot of these little things where people have come up and said, I don't like the way the fence rules are written. Can you tweak the fence rules? There's a question about Eastern Gateway, the setbacks in Eastern Gateway District. There's just some unique stuff where there's an old rail line, all the properties are all right on that old rail line, except that under the zoning, there's like a 10 or 15 foot setback. And they're like, well, none of the buildings are 10 or 15 foot setback. Can we get the zoning adjusted to reflect what's on the ground, which is a zero foot setback to the rail line, even though the rail line doesn't exist anymore, the rail is still owned by the state. So that's a question, you know, makes sense. If everything's non-conforming, we might as well reflect what's on the ground. But that's a question to change the zoning to make that happen. So there's a number of little things like that, that people kind of come up and say, oh, this is a problem, can you fix this? Yeah, okay, that sounds like good stuff. Yeah, I don't think there's, in my view, I don't think there's anything controversial, unless we get neighbors who come out and say, oh, that zoning change in my backyard is gonna be a problem. From a professional planner standpoint, I think the requests that we've received are pretty reasonable adjustments that would kind of remove barriers for reasonable projects. Okay, yeah, I think that's gonna be of interest for a lot of people. So that will motivate people to go to a special meeting if we do have one. Okay, well, does anybody have anything else, or do we want to just call it? I got nothing. Okay, well, it looks like we have a plan for next time. Plan for next time, get natural resources out of the way, talk about this meeting to do the zoning stuff and maybe move on to housing too. So we'll plan for all that. All right, well, you guys have a good rest of August. Great. And on the housing, just to be clear, what are we gonna look at the, we haven't started housing, right? So we're gonna start looking at the aspiration and goals. Don't we have? We dabbled in it at the end of the last meeting, but we just barely put our toes in the water for housing. Oh, and yeah, we just started aspirations and we never really nailed it down. Okay. But yeah, I'll put some work into it and consult with the other working group people to make sure it's in enough shape to tackle next time. But it'll probably be the last thing in our agenda too. All right, guys, have a good one. Thanks. Thanks. See you guys.