 Comments from the chair. I heard from Mike that the housing task force canceled their meeting due to weather. So we're going to continue talking about city plan, the plan of the city plan a little bit today. But we'll need to wait and meet with them in the future. So hopefully we can have a fairly short meeting tonight. That's all my comments. That's what struck me that the meeting could be fairly brief. The only thing I want to add is the energy committee met. Just give us a quick update on that. Yeah, and what they have a very strong opinion about for the master plan. Okay, great. Energy committee. Let's put that under item five then as a sub part. I wasn't sure if it was. Nope, sounds good. Thank you for that. All right, so that's item three. Item four is general business. Anything from the public that's not on this agenda. There's no members of the public present. So we'll move on to the next item, which is the city plan update discussion. So first one that we have might give us a quick update from his end and then Barb if you want to jump in and explain about the energy committee feedback. That would be great. All right, so as I mentioned the agenda, the city, the housing task force was canceled. But I did take some time to talk to Seth, who is the computer person here city hall and talk to him about what we had been discussing. He pretty much came out. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but he came out and was like, oh, well, we just need to do a little drive. He would sit down and meet with us to kind of set up an access type database that we want to start to fill in kind of in the same way that you were talking about. So it sounds like he's on the same page as certainly with John knowing kind of what framework we're looking for or an idea that we can start to. Seth is our computer, our IT person. He runs the website and all of the computer programs. He's a city. He's a city employee. Who's office does he work at? Works out of the finance department, actually, because basically they were hired for the security to secure all the data. That's why they work for funds. We like security. But he thought this wouldn't be difficult to do, and a lot of the questions he asked were things that were talked about. It was going to be open to everybody in the public to be able to make changes or to restrict the access. He would recommend restricting the access to whatever group is working on it. So if we're doing housing, the housing group would have access to it. When it comes to the planning commission, the planning commission would have access to it, but he has other platforms that he could use to take public comment on. So it sounds like he knows some of the answers to some of the things that we're talking about. So I think it will be good at some point coming up in the, at a future meeting, probably in the near future, we'll try to have Seth come in and sit down so you guys can talk in the same way, especially John. I think we'd be ready to have him whenever it's convenient for him. Okay, I'll see what his schedule is. That would be great. Because the sooner we can get that him in. At least to get a shell together, because we'll probably adjust that shell as we move forward. So that was, I just had just, that was the one piece I wanted to get to take a chance to talk to him about. The other piece I'll mention in this window is May 9th is, I think, Jamie may have emailed you, Leslie, about May 9th, which is the council. Oh yeah, thank you. So the city council is, we've got a new council seated and so they want to meet with all the department heads and meet with all the commissions about things. And so planning is coming up on May 9th. And so a topic they have already talked about with me on the side through emails is they want to know what we're doing about the master plan, city plan. Very good. Getting to fill up the email right now. So they want to talk about the plan, what our schedule is for it. And I said, well, really, we want to have an opportunity to sit down with you guys to know, is this a priority for the council? I think it will be, which basically is going to give them the, you know, give us the green light to move forward on what we were going to be doing anyways. But we kind of dragged our feet a little bit waiting for the new council to get seated. So we would be able to kind of get their blessing to move forward on a strategy that says we're going to do this in an incremental way, building towards having a plan. And that sounds like from some of the other conversations that the council is very interested in having a strategic approach at the council level as well. So I think our idea of a strategic city plan will also kind of dovetail into their plans as well. They want benchmarks, they want, you know, a strategy, set some goals, identify ways that we're going to accomplish those goals and then kind of set everybody out to get some work done. So May 9th is when they're going to do that, so if we have some folks on there. I think, if you want to join me, I want to welcome you to that night. I'd be happy to appear, but I would encourage others that are interested in this room to feel like the chair should probably be great. Or at least get an opportunity to meet the councilor. We should probably figure out what our strategic plan is for making progress on the city plan over the course of the year before that meeting. I mean, as one thought is, I don't want you or me to get up there and us to have no clue of what we want to accomplish this year. We've talked a little bit about how we're going to start the process. It's the first time this commission has gone through it, so I don't know what's a realistic expectation of how much we can accomplish in the calendar year. I think certainly to start to know what we would try to get through in the first year would be good. I don't think we need to lay it all out because I think kind of the layout of three or four-year plan would, so much can happen between the first couple of, you know, the first year. You'll kind of have an idea of how far this is going to take. You know, our two-year zoning process took seven years. Not that we want this to take seven years, but you just never know what one thing is going to get thrown in there to slow you down. The scope of the city plan is equally broad as the zoning. I mean, we're going to be covering a lot of topics and having to balance when there's conflict between them, and it's going to be a long process. Or maybe it doesn't have to be a long process, but it certainly is a big, a large scope. I certainly think laying out for council that our goal is to come up with this first initial, whether it's housing, and I don't know what the Energy Committee was coming with. But our thought is if we come up with, you know, a first template which gets us our framework set up, our database set up on how we're going to do it, kind of sets up a process. We can work through that process once, you know, this works. Now we just got to start to run transportation energy, you know, land use. All these pieces start to get run through this same process over whether it's three or whether it's four. And some of this is going to be a little back and forth with the council because the more priorities they have, the less, you know, I have the same amount of staff. So the more I get divided up, the slower this is going to take, unless they're going to allocate funds for us to hire outside consultants to do the work. So there's going to be a certain amount of what their priorities are beyond the city plan, and also what resources they're willing to kind of put to make this happen. Because it certainly obviously goes faster if you've got more people working. Well, let's hear what the energy committee thoughts are, and then maybe we can talk about what sort of timeline we want to aim towards as a group. We can think a little bit more about that. We don't have to come up with a plan that we're going to have to stick to, but we can... Barbara, what was the... Well, as you may or may not know, the energy committee has been working on this for several years. So we came up, and I just... I looked at my files in the last entry list. Revision was 615. So we sort of stopped when all the zoning and everything else was going on and the level of uncertainty in terms of how we were going to proceed on this. But we wanted to have a document that, in the energy committee, wanted to have a document that was... gave us specific benchmarks and specific goals over certain time periods. Now, I realize that the way we've broken it up initially may not fit quite into Mike's scheme. Because what we thought of as goals were probably more like strategies. But anyway, I'll talk about that in a minute. A couple of things came up. We talked about quite a bit. One of the concerns in the committee was how, as part of the master plan, which the ideas of the net-zero competition, particularly the five finalists, really not looking at anything else, how we were going to integrate some of those ideas into... And I explained that it was more of a mapping kind of exercise had more to do with land use potentially than the section that we're working on right now. But it's still that they were very anxious to make sure that something moves forward on that because there's sort of a bit in this lag. And I realize in talking with Mike about it that his department needs to get directed by city council in order to be able to take that on in any formal way. Is that accurate? Yeah, we just need to get some directions where we can start putting resources towards different projects. Right, right. So I'm going to sort of dive into that. I spoke with Anne Watson about it too and see from the council standpoint how they might want to approach it. Because if the council needs to act first before we do, before we can even talk about it as part of the master plan, then I think it has to start with them. My guess would be that if we were recommending adoption of various elements of... Right, but we can't... It's part of the city plan. It's like chicken and egg here. We can't get started until Mike has direction from the council that yes, we should look at elements of all of the plans. Right. Have we permanently... We know this for certain? Well, I think what we'll need is just... We were at a small pause because of where the last council left things. There was a... some members... there was never a vote, but there were some members of the council who didn't want... who had approved the master plan that was approved and didn't want the planning commission to spend more time working on a revised city plan, master plan. So that was the council that was here before. They've now been replaced. So because we had a council that was basically saying, don't work on the city plan, the planning department was kind of left saying, we kind of need to wait and see what happens on the elections in March and then wait for the new council. So we were pretty sure based on who was running and who was going to be elected as to the direction of the new council, but we really couldn't overstep where we were, even though we knew some of them weren't running for reelection, we still couldn't move forward. So this wasn't to do with the bridges net zero, I don't know how familiar you are with the... there was a contest. The design competition. Yeah, so I guess I'm confused as to whether you received... The last you heard was direction not to work on the city plan or not to work on the bridges proposal or not to do either. There was a little bit of both, but there was during the adoption process comments that were made by more than one member of council about not wanting the planning department to spend more time doing a new city plan or master plan, because they would rather have the planning department working on other priorities. Well, but that's what we're doing now is the new city. Yes, but we haven't really jumped in with both feet because we've kind of been waiting for this as January and February kind of rolling along. We really kind of need to wait, but then there was a discussion of well, let's wait till after the election so we can formally get to the new council so we can formally make a recommendation and we should as a commission, or you should as a commission make a recommendation we think you should direct staff to work on a new city plan because we think this will be a value. I didn't realize you were under this. Sorry, I wasn't clear about that. I didn't realize it went back and forth. No, Mike and I have a lot of emails back and forth where he's like, we're waiting. No, I want to move forward. So now it makes a lot more sense why you were saying things like that. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought that had been... I must have missed it. That may have been a meeting you weren't at when they had that explanation. Can certain aspects of the city plan be adopted as amendments to the existing plan, for example, an energy plan? If we did a full... it really comes down to this. It's going to be difficult to kind of amend this plan into a new plan just because of its format. But we can certainly go through and see how we could try to integrate it. We may go through and be able to selectively delete a section out of the existing master plan and then put an addendum on which as we take pieces off here and add pieces on here that we would eventually end up in a place where we've got it. But we'll have to explore legally and functionally how that would work. I have some optimistic theory that good ideas will drive out bad ones. So I would like to hear Barbara's thinking in her community's thinking because it might be something they might say, hey, council, this is something you could do. We could have some foreseeable results in the next... Well, we were concerned on the energy committee because we feel like we have a 2030 deadline. The clock is ticking and we're just sitting there being very anxious. So that's why we jumped into the energy plan in the way we did. Also because they originally wanted to integrate it with the regional plan. But that ended up not making sense. So strictly kind of an energy plan for the city. So just for background, why did the city council not want to... I think it was a certain amount and this is obviously interpreting other people's opinions. But my sense was they were pretty well tired of... I mean, they had... I met with them 20 times, so 20 council meetings in 2017. I met with them to talk about zoning. So the thought that I would be back in 2018 to start to meet with them about bringing them chapters and discussions of what do you guys think about this for an approach for housing and what do you think about this approach for energy? I think some of them were pretty much like, we don't want to see you. We think you should spend your time working on other things. I think there's a certain amount of that played into that approach. And I think it's this city plan opens the door to a lot of potentially contentious... This is where we work out a lot of rubber hits the road. This is where water quality is going to run into economic development. And this is where, you know, in your downtowns. So we have more or less development in our downtowns where we want less and pervious cover. So we're going to have to come up and make hard decisions and make those hard balancing decisions. And I think some of the council was just like, we've spent 50 hours with you working on zoning and we're about done. We need to work on other things. So that would be my guess is they were kind of just a little burned out from that. But at the same time, I do know that the certain members of the council have very direct goals, whether it's housing or energy. I haven't met the new councillors. I think if we go there with a presentation and with a recommendation that says, look, we can't move forward without your authorization, our recommendation is direct city manager and planning staff to move forward with the approach of doing a couple chapters a year and coming up with some quality and to start with, and we recommend starting with housing and energy as our two first chapters because those seem to be the two most timely ones for us to work on. And I'm wondering, you know, in reference to the design competition finalists, is there some way to integrate that into our land use considerations as well rather than waiting till the end? Because it sort of seems like some of the issues that were raised in those plans are front and center now with proposals that are coming up. I thought we discussed looking at that in our context of our land use map as an initial cut at priorities for the city. So we will look at the land use map. Yeah, the bridge's proposal could be a really useful start to our future land use map. That was my understanding of how we were going to... I think, well, not only that one, but the other... I think there were a lot of great ideas that came obviously from that project from some of the other proposals that we plan to... some of our ideas and thinking, reading into it. Yeah, the energy committee was certainly interested in looking at all five of the finalists, or at least the four of them. So I guess I hadn't heard before that we would take up the land use map early on or initially even. Yeah, it was a discussion that we started before we hit the pause button on the development of a new city plan. Remember when John printed out that large scale map and we put post-its on it of what we thought we'd want to change Yeah, that's where I hope we could maybe go or how the council, we could maybe present this to the council instead of an issue-by-issue approach. If they think of it as what's different about Montpelier in a decade towards it, a lot of those things will cover issues from... they're not different. So instead of being abstract, it would be on a map. Right, which I think is really a good idea and a good way to present it to the council. So I guess the only question I want to make sure is that those design competition finalists get their thoughts are included. And now that we have a new commission, we probably need to be able to sit down and take a look at those in a more concerted way. Could we get them to come and show and tell here? Well, there are five groups. Well, but you are going to try to summarize or at least draw some consistent principles out of it. Right, so I think one thought might be to have the five presentation boards up for each of the... Can you guys take record of their presentations? Right, yeah, so if people wanted to go on to Orca and see the videos, they could do that. I think the energy committee has specific aspects of the proposals that are particularly important to the committee. It would be helpful to know that. That's an area where you yourself wouldn't have to do all the work, but if the committee has opinions about these, we certainly would want to hear them. Yeah, I think that might be at a later phase. Right now, they just want to make sure that we're paying attention to it, paying attention to the five finalists as part of our process. I know it's there, and we will look at it. So we can set a date, right, or whatever. All right, so that was one of the points that they brought up that we discussed, because it does seem like that whole... Excuse me, did you just make a decision that we're going to hear from the five finalists at some point? No, I just said we know they're around. I mean, I don't know if we can pull out all the five finalists to give some presentation. I think that might be the most realistic, but I think if the energy committee and maybe the House of Task Force committee, if there are other, if the various committees that are working on chapters can make recommendations about these proposals and what they think are important to adopt, I think that would be really useful. Well, my knowledge of the competition was a little vague, frankly. I just didn't get to see it all for some reason or another. So I think that's the thing that the energy committee wants, is that the council and the commission actually has a chance to sit down and look at those five finalists. You can certainly go to their presentations on Orcas, as Mike mentioned. I'm not sure that that's going to be necessarily informed. We can, you know, I could have somebody come in from the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition to talk about the various plans. We could certainly get the two top plans that are Montpelier architects and they could certainly talk about those. If you wanted to have the actual people come in. Yeah, I would. I'd like to see some of the visuals. Absolutely. Does that bring us up to date? Yeah. You can watch the presentations and see the visuals online. I think the production quality is actually pretty good. Yeah, it's just not the same. It's not the same as seeing the board. I mean, the Bridges board is ten feet tall. Eight feet tall. It's huge. Yeah, so I think, you know, if we could set them up in the council chambers and just look at them individually as some of the other, in the past, those kinds of presentations. I hate to say it, but anything I see electronically has a certain in reality to it. I don't have a real human being with a poster saying, this is what we want to do. Maybe what we can do is set up the time projects, but as homework for that day, that would be good. Yes. We have a lot more background going there. And then just that way we could have just one visual, potentially, you know, from each team. The boards. Rather than, you know, they produced many more. Eight or ten. That would be great. Okay. So let me see if I will get the website, the link to the Orca video. Thank you. And I will get the boards. Great. And let me know who to reach out to. We can talk about this more. Okay. All right. So that was one piece. Sorry to drag that one out. I just wanted to make sure that was included. And then the second thing was this discussion about goals and how we proceed with goals. And there was a pretty strong feeling that we, the energy committee would like to hear about, at least initially, what all the committees are thinking about, all the committees that will contribute a chapter, I mean, are thinking about for their goals, rather than go through two by two. Because I think doing it that way is, I felt it was too disjointed and they sort of agreed. They really want the energy committee talked about, well, could we have a meeting where committee chairs of each of those committees that are offering chapters come into a common meeting with identifying five or six goals. These are the goals that my committee thinks they want to have. And so we could blend them together and see where there are overlaps. Because we don't want to go ahead with doing a lot of work on the energy committee. We're going to be overlapping with transportation. So that's the kind of interest they had in our process. Especially because we have identified so many goals and in some cases we're already working towards those. And I brought copies. I realize in looking at them now, they really don't fit into Mike's. It's the ideas that are important. So this was just a kind of, I didn't have copies. This was just sort of the very, and I think Mike's seen an earlier version of this, but these were some of the kinds of goals, the way we set it up. These are goals that should perhaps be more overarching. And I think the other thing that would really help as we talked about before was Mike putting together an example of the format to give to each committee in terms of here's the aspiration, here's the goal, here's the strategy. Which one am I reading now? Yeah, there's the aspirations, goals and strategies. Just the three. All right, all right. So I'm sorry to do this all in bold, my computer was going crazy. But these are the kinds of things that we've been looking at because we want to be able to, not all of these we can benchmark, but many of these we want to be able to provide, give ourselves targets to work against. But thinking about all the other committees, coming in with five or six goals on each of those committees would really be helpful. Particularly if you look at the transportation ones, we've got a lot of detailed ideas about what to do about transportation, including reducing it significantly. But that's not the transportation committee goal. Then we're going to be clashing. And we'd rather find that out now. It could be a good idea to have like a picture, set up with each committee gets time, like five minutes, times and five slides. Committees, would we be talking about that are actually contributing chapters? Housing, energy, transportation, I mean we've got a recreation, we've got natural resources, which would be conservation commission, I believe, and maybe it's not as many as we think. Six, there's seven right there. We said eight to ten in case we left somebody out. So can ten people work on a budget picture? Yeah, ten different presentations. That's fifteen minutes. I think that would be really helpful. I think we'll just have to get, I think once we get the digital piece, the online piece, that'll help the different committees be able to plug into their piece in a format that helps them make it so that way there's a little bit of consistency between them. Even though we're not really rating them or judging them or evaluating them right now, they at least will all be in the same format. We can go through it and say, okay, now we can start having more of a discussion about substance now that everybody's in the same format. So you could offer them a template on our Google Drive and then they could go in and put their goals and we could just say this is just the first step and some things will get reclined. So we'll work back and forth. I like the idea of having everyone in the room at the same time because I think that will help us not to overlap. Oh, Pechakooches are great. Pechakooches are great. I think it comes from Japan and maybe the architects world. The architects started doing this and it's actually like 20 slides and 16 minutes and you have like... They're timed, right? They're timed, yeah. Whether you want it to go or not, it's moving and the idea is to be lightning cocks is like... Yeah, it keeps people from getting off on a tangent and wandering off and getting behind schedule, you know... Once you hit go, your presentation is going to run for six minutes and you've got to get through all of your content. You're not required to have 20 slides, but I guess that's the max that they could recommend but there would be no discussion during this. This is just the presentation and it might be great as a challenge to the committees to come up with. I think it's a good way at the beginning of the process. We're going to start looking at these chapters individually to have some sort of pick-off, something that brings them together and then we need to be making sure throughout the process that we're coordinating all of that work because you're right, the transportation and energy things are really going to be... a lot of them are going to be related. So we can't... If we just work on one at a time and then if housing is first and then we're done and then a year and a half from now we're talking about transportation and we didn't change those goals and now they don't match. We have to... that has to be consistent. We need to do some sort of... position. At least a preliminary discussion. That would help to start and make sure that we're being consistent. And we're not overlapping as much as possible. So, I know you were going to write a... you and Kirby were going to write up a letter that was going to go to all the committee chairs. Yeah, well, we... with the delay and the meeting, right. So we can use this as the opportunity to invite everyone to that. I think, you know, it's going to take it... presenting them with a package of information like a sample and saying that we would like to get all of the... I hope we'd like to get all of the news together. I don't know if there's like a date and like a venue that we could have this in. It's not here. That could be followed up by like social time because after that it's nice for people to connect and go talk about each other's ideas and that's not like... I love City Hall, but... Nobody's grabbing drinks and talking about... Yes. And even if, you know, two people from each committee come and there's 20 different people in here, it's not easy. Is that something that could happen? I think it could. I think it's just going to take a little... be a little bit later and I say that because once we... Once we get the framework ready, I'm just trying to think, if we get a framework ready, I would have to meet with all these different committees to kind of give them the framework to explain to them what we're going to do. Give them a meeting. Some of these committees meet only once a month. So for them to come up with their five goals and to develop this, so they're ready to then meet. If maybe something happens closer to the summer, just based on the amount of time it may take. Yeah. The committee that meets once a month, like a housing committee or a transportation committee that meets once a month, that might be tricky. Well, the energy committee was hoping that you wouldn't have to meet with each one individually. And maybe there would be... maybe that means that there would have to be two group meetings. The first one to present the format and give them examples for the kinds of goals that I'll be looking for. And then the second one to actually present their goals. I would... So you've met with various committees previously. So they all should have been thinking about goals in one way or another previously, right? So I'm wondering if it makes the most sense to pick a date a month and a half or two months out from now. Put together a package that would go to each committee that would say, you are invited to this event to send a representative or as many of you can attend, great. And I think I would put this together for me and I would put this together, particularly in light of my new knowledge about planning departments' direction. And it would invite them to this event. It would then have some sort of social aspect after it. It would introduce the online components that we're going to try to use so that they could... Here's where we're going to have these Google Docs and you can edit your doc, your doc. And then once you sent that recommendation to Plant Mission, they would have the draft... We would have the drafting authority or that document. So there would just be a single committee with custodian over each document at a time. And we would also ask for their recommendations about from net zero and whether there were any aspects of those projects that they thought as a committee were particularly important. That could kick off this discussion and it would be... I like how it's... both you and both John and Barb have explained how we think that... and Stephanie, this is harmonizing all of these committees from the start is really the most important thing. At least as the commission that's going to ultimately be bringing this together, we might as well start it that way. And then folks will feel like they're all part of a team. They can go off and make more specific proposals based on the goals that we've discussed. So you're thinking that this meeting where the frameworks introduced, we would still ask them to bring a general sense of their major goals. Yes. They're invited to this meeting and present their... present the goals that they have that they've discussed within a five-minute presentation. Great. Maybe not as formal as an education. It takes some preparation, I think. I don't know, John. Have you participated in it, Jim? Yeah. I failed miserably. Oh. No, they can be fun and I think 20 is a lot. So when you limit it to five it becomes much easier and I think if you let people know that it'll let perfect be that, the enemy of good and that this should be fun, something that you'll be judged on or introductory to. Explain who you are and maybe a general idea. What their goals are. Yeah. They're just trying to count. Well, they're 20-some committees. 20 or 30? Yeah, there are a lot of 20. Is there a whole 20? Yeah. Well, there are a lot of them that we're trying to combine. So we've got, I mean, you have a housing task force and a housing trust fund committee. You've got, you know, we were managed to combine. We used to have parking bicycles. Road. Pedestrian. Pedestrian. Pedestrian, right. Pedestrian parking and transportation were all separate and we combined them into one and then got to pull it back out to two anyway. So. I think we compete with separate. So we've got to it. I think we probably beat them. They're pretty good. We have a committee for everything. Oh, okay. We even had a appointment for a committee of committees. How about historic preservation? Historic preservation would be another committee that would be. Okay. I wasn't sure if they were fitting in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think this would be a great way to move this forward and if we can do this soon, we'll use this. She was suggesting the next six weeks. So, Mike, are you waiting for that May 9th meeting of the city council to really know whether we should be moving forward with this? We would probably want to have it happen after. I mean, we could certainly send out a letter or start having the discussions, you know, late May. I was thinking late May, early June. We would have the kickoff meeting, you know, the social kickoff meeting as Leslie was saying. Introduce the online components of this. Introduce the goals, concept, presentation of that zero Vermont. You know, this is the kickoff of a process that leads to a second meeting later in the, well, by that point would be in the summer where we would have the committees all show up to kind of present their five goals. Oh, I was hoping that would happen at this first meeting. So, they're going to have in the next meeting? So, that's why it would be critical to have the kind of communication with them presenting, you know, that we'd like you to identify at least some initial goals. And as Leslie said, they've hopefully been thinking about this for some time. You're hoping to have the goals of that one. Right. And I don't know about the presentation on the competition by finalists. We'll think that would be a worthwhile thing to present to the committees. But you're going to get a week, so we can at least look at that. Right. I would definitely think that we want to discuss it here. I just don't know in the format of this committee. I'm not sure that that fits. But it's hard. Yeah, I think we would need to, I think we should look at it first and then decide if that fits. I'm not sure what I mean. During the competition, their invitations went out to, I send invitations to all of the pertinent committees to come. And several did, I'm not sure, transportation with natural resources, housing. So they sent, at least took a kind of individual look at it with that lens, with their committee lens in place. It could definitely go out maybe with some background and invitation material. Sure. For those who are very involved with it, they've already attended a lot of it. But a lot of people have forgotten about some aspects of it too. So, okay. So I mean, if they're going to be doing some presentations of goals that just may push a little bit farther, maybe to June. As I said, a few of these committees only meet once a month. So we got to get this invitation out soon. Yeah. To get them and have them have an opportunity to kind of talk about things. At least one meeting prior. Yeah. I've been told that the Conservation Commission's chapter has dropped it. Oh, okay. Is it? Yeah. So they could have an annual. Yeah. Some of them may be farther ahead than others. I know historic preservation isn't, but they're working on other things right now. Right. So, so you're thinking, is it possible to do it late May then? At the point at which the committees might be. So this is because the energy committee is anxious to move forward. Well, yeah. And it sort of sets the whole. Yeah. Groundwork for our work too. Yeah. So, I mean, it's as I see it. Yeah. The challenge is going to be coming out of my office is how much I can try to be able to get through. It's the last week. Today's the last day for taking applications for the new zoning administrator. A new person on with the new zoning. Oh, I mean, the good news is this stage doesn't require heavy lift from your office because we're asking the committees to present goals. And they certainly have background enough that they can do that. Whether they have, you know, so goals to include, I could just send something that says we're interested to hear what your top goals are for our inclusion in the next plan. And we want to discuss them as a group. And I don't, I mean, I think it's always nice when you can attend their meetings to that end. If any invitation I could say, if you need help understanding how that would fit in the city plan, remember. Yeah. Like so. Yeah. Yeah, but you certainly shouldn't have to. And we could, and the letter could tell them that there will be the, basically the format that we're looking for, the template of the format that I, so they can understand how all-encompassing goals might be, would be on a Google. So I think I should identify a location, a venue. And then I will, I think all of us should be at that event. So I might send out a beautiful figure out the best date. I don't think that having the event on any time is going to be the best way to get people involved. Except that it may be conflicting with the fewest other, I don't know. Well, I was thinking a weekend, actually, might be the least inconvenient. Weeknights are challenging. Breakfast. Make the lobby challenging. They're all going to be challenging. I wouldn't do it. I don't think weekends will be better. Provide food. 7 a.m. Yeah, on Saturday. That's your time to shine, John. Oh, boy. Oh. Probably a little first. At 7 a.m. on Saturday? Yeah. No, I don't think so. Well, I'll be up. Yeah, I know you will be. Who will you be up to? I will have been up for at least an hour. Kirby will be up. Yeah, yeah. All right. Okay. Well, why don't you and Mike select some dates and we'll give them a fair amount of warning because two months is a pretty good amount of warning about this meeting and how important it is that the committee be represented. This isn't just if you want it to be necessary. For the planning commission as a body that's do over, kind of the overarching effort. Well, they can volunteer one of their members. Sure. Okay. So the May 9th meeting with the council, I'm going to attend. And Mike, your sense about that was just, it was like a overview of what we plan to do this coming year. Yeah. So like this Wednesday, they're talking with the city manager and finance departments, I think, about, you know, it's really kind of an education opportunity for the new counselors, you know, who's the city manager? What is finance? What do they do? Another meeting they'll bring in the police department and the fire department. They'll talk about what are the emergency services and what are the big issues for them. And we're up on the night to talk about what is the planning department? What do we do? What are our needs? What are our goals that we do? It's usually just a, it's an opportunity to educate. It's an opportunity to make sure that they kind of end up understanding, having them understand what, how we fit into the bigger picture. Because we like to point out when, when the council finally puts out their goals, they'll usually come out with this list about 10 or 12 goals. And usually about eight of them come back to the manager and the planning department working together on something. And although we're one of the smaller departments and have one of the smaller budgets, it's one of these ones where a lot of the routine things are done by a place like DPW. There isn't a goal to plow the streets. It's just part of having a city. But usually when you're talking about trying to change things and move things and solve the parking problems or that zero 2030 or whatever the goal is, it usually is going to end up coming back to the planning department. So I'll try to have Seth at the next meeting because obviously we're going to try to move this forward. We'll have to have some, we're going to point people to a Google Drive watch to actually have one set up. Yeah, so I can grab something that we can discuss at the next meeting. Yeah. And we can add in whatever Seth helps us with. Yeah, the more ideas you have on what you would like to see on this shared drive and how you want it laid out. As I said, this is really outside of anything I have. I can make any recommendations on it. Not my specialty. I lean on other people. And your format is what we're looking at. So that's just the technology. Yeah, and my format really was just kind of lay out a starting point and not really to be an endpoint, but kind of a place to start to have the conversation where and how we want to organize our goals and strategies. And then planning commission and committees want to take it to a different direction. You're welcome to. Anything else on the city plan? Move on. It's upcoming zoning amendments. Okay. We'll see if we can come back to that. Yeah, this won't take too long because I don't actually have the amendments drafted up. So what we, what I did want to do is just kind of start to point out where some of the things have started to show up. It's ugly heads a little bit. So you saw a picture here, a little thing with Google, with a little Google picture and a map behind it. So this is just a for instance. So the for instance, for the map, this is Berlin Street. This is Wheelock Street that goes down. So this showed up on our national resources inventory map as a stream. And under our Ryan Perry and zoning rules, you must set back from the stream and you can't build and you can't do these things. And you can see looking at the map that it actually is running pretty close to buildings. And the irony of course is if you look at the Google view, there actually isn't any stream there. So it's one of these. It's underground. It is buried. It's been channelized, which is our, which, you know, just certainly is just one of the things that we think we would just go through and edit this map to make a recommendation to change the natural resources map to take this stream off and not regulated as a stream because it's actually in a culvert. So you shouldn't have a 25 foot Ryan Perry and set back from a stream that's buried. We did catch one, yeah. This is just a much longer one that happened to somebody was doing a project on Berlin Street and we noticed, oh, you actually can't because it's in the right period, set back. So, and we figure we'll find these periodically because we changed the rules as much as we did. That's just one example. Another one, larger one deals with landscaping requirements. So we had some questions. There were set backs for parking areas was one that came up. So parking areas have to be five feet from a property line and we had a proposal on the parking lot that is behind the drawing board behind where we're going to be purchasing the M&M beverage building we're going to be tearing it down while according to the new zoning that parking lot would have to stop and have a five foot buffer from the rest of the parking lot because that's where the property line is. There's no exemption for a parking lot that actually connects to another parking lot to simply have a continuous parking lot. So I believe they gave a waiver of variance for that but it's one of the ones that there should be either some express discussion about what happens if, you know, John and I have two commercial buildings and we just want to have the parking lot connect between the two. We wouldn't be allowed to do that. We could have a road that connects between the two but we actually couldn't have parking spaces that just keep going. So that five foot setback is in all districts then including the urban core so would it be enough to change that for the two urban core districts? It could be. We just need to come up with some solutions and that's just one case that came out. We'd want to get rid of the five foot setback. We've put it there because we wanted to have it for the street. I think some of these, yeah, certainly we could exempt it from the front setback because you would never obviously have a parking lot joining another parking lot on the front setback. You shouldn't be able to put in a front parking lot. And you can't put in a new front parking lot. Right, but it makes sense from other even side yards in terms of dealing with runoff from your paved parking area. So we had, but there were a couple of questions like that. What is channelized? That wasn't an issue. That was yours. That was a problem created by the city council when they decided to keep. They decided to enforce riparian buffers in the downtown. They said, well, anywhere that's channelized you don't have to use that requirement. First application that came through DRV didn't know what channelized was and didn't know how to enforce it. We've had a number of issues with signs already, which we knew when we did our sign rules that we were going to have problems with them. So we're going to probably have to come back with something. They're just different issues, particularly with things like price signs for, you can have signs, you can have price signs but you can't have the digital price signs and it's just where they're allowed and where they're not allowed. But the big one that's come up on a number of these has been landscaping requirements which just are very specific and that was why I handed out you'll notice some of my notes that are in the other pages of 320. So there are a couple on point H how far for trees to count so for parking lot landscaping it says you need a certain amount of landscaping for a parking lot but it doesn't really say where the trees have to be so it's a tree that's five feet from the edge of the parking lot does that count what about eight feet, what about ten feet doesn't really tell us where a tree has to be to count as parking lot landscaping and then I have a note on the next page for point G1 trees to shrubs so there's very specific in G1 that says a minimum of one shrub is required for each five feet and one tree is required for each thirty feet of exterior principal building perimeter what if I have eight trees and fifty shrubs and a project has ten trees and forty shrubs what about flowering beds what about other options for landscaping your only landscaping options you have are trees and shrubs and there's no definition of where those trees or shrubs can be planted or need to be planted for every foot of building perimeter you need to go and plant so many trees so we actually had a proposal on Route 302 that had maybe half an acre a lot but a portion of it is up on the forested hill so they're like well I mean how many of those trees count towards our trees it's on the property and there's no requirement here that says this is where and how you count the trees so this is where kind of the general parts of zoning the reality hits of okay how do I count a tree how do I count a shrub and what if I have if I have more trees can I count a tree to a shrub does one tree what was the overall intention that we had you wanted to put trees in to lower the heat effect of the parking lots right in this case those were just general landscaping requirements that said for every building you had to put so many but that's what I'm wondering can we more clearly identify what the goal is which would help us to determine where they should be when I saw the plan in figure 3-19 I was a little surprised that you hadn't gotten the work pushed back from the tree board because some of those islands the trees are not likely to fly very well in those islands and then of course you don't really want to put trees up next to your building because that's going to destroy the foundation so you know some of these other ones are potentially problematic too so I don't know that we want to be as specific as saying you know it has to go here and here but what's the goal what do we want yeah and can a tree be counted twice so if you're required to have 17 trees as a result of your building size and you have 14 trees as shading for your parking lot do those trees count towards your can you are they additive? the goal is screening I mean it's right here so it's a parking lot landscaping and screening and the aesthetic value of that I would assume is the point of it given that the word screening so so that you have a little bit of screening when you're looking from the building cars but our example doesn't exactly show them as screening trees and then the other one that we ran into is just how to handle pre-existing pre-developed lots we have just rules that come in let me give an example there is somebody wants to put an outdoor deck and expand and they don't meet the landscaping requirements but because they're going out and doing an expansion they have to meet the landscaping requirements because it's requiring a site plan we don't have anything that grandfather says as long as you don't do this or if you make a small change you need to make a small amount of change if you want to build a deck of your commercial building you're going to need to first convince compliance which is going to require you to put in $25,000 worth of trees and shrubs and vegetation because we don't have a pre-existing condition that says if for pre-existing pre-developed sites this is how we're going to handle it in some communities what they would do is to put a cost thing that would say at no point will the city require more than 2% or 5% of any project to be required to spend on landscaping so if you did have a project which said we're a restaurant we'd like to expand our deck we're going to put a new deck on here it's going to cost us $10,000 we couldn't charge more than $500 improvements to the landscaping even though it would take $25,000 to fully come into compliance $500 or you just need to have some kind of factor that gives you an out otherwise you're going to end up killing a lot of redevelopment proposals on existing lands those decks would fall under minor site plans, right? they can sometimes but minor site plans are not exempt from landscape requirements right, yeah, so I mean is that a cost to start? they just don't we just need to have some way from our office because this is the number one issue we have is landscaping some of these other ones outdoor lighting has big standards but it has an out clause at the bottom that says you can go to the DRB and get a waiver there's no waiver requirement for landscaping everybody's got to meet that requirement so there are no outs there are no dollar outs so we kind of got a number of these applications that have come in where people have pretty much walked away because I got a small project I'm a non-conforming lot and I can't these are the types of things that I'm going to try to draft up some rules for you guys or we may if you want and this was a little bit of a today's conversation I was just going to have this how would you guys like me to put together a proposal do you want to just kind of talk about each issue individually and meet up to just kind of collect up the issue bring the issue to you and then have you kind of say this is how we think this would be best issued and then I can write something up I like your tables we recommend it even recommended boarding so that we stay consistent how much this can be fixed for the waiver I mean some of these minor kind of oddball things you recited it would be nice if somebody could just say hey wait a minute do get as close as you can with the goals that are in the let it go because it isn't going to have a huge impact on the city to help it's going to have to go to the development review board but the question is still going to come back to be you know they're going to need a certain amount of guidance to know what should be approved when that goes back to the goals we need to have a certain amount of specificity so they know this is where it's okay for us to say the waiver idea makes most sense to me because I can't imagine a regulation that foresees all these little dodges so would you offer us some suggested language yeah certain of them make a lot of sense and certain of them I think are going to be easy it'll take us about five minutes to go and say the varied streams we can take the varied streams off the map and in some others we had a couple that are just that I didn't mention that are just one word changes that say changes can't have to may have and it kind of makes certain problems go away that those require amount of due process right everyone I think you got to have we got to have a public hearing tell everything and then warn a public hearing to go through my hope is that these will be the most important changes that really have to be done to make this work well as I said this landscaping issue is a big one this one kind of stops just about every commercial project in the city that's on a pre-existing line because we don't have it out for a property that doesn't we'd have to have a public hearing we'd have to have two yes so this is a more of a process it'll take some time to get through but I'm hoping it's not as much time of our time I think we can get through a lot of these you know we'll be back we've got another proposal I'm hoping it'll be short the cottage clusters another one that's that we found as a mistake because it's allowed in residential 9000 and it's allowed in rural it's not allowed in residential 24 and we've got somebody who wants to put one in residential 24 so we're like alright we think that's just an oversight it's a pretty easy process for us to have a conversation and say yeah it's allowed here it's allowed here certainly it's going to be allowed in the district in between but yeah we make that decision that still takes us three months four months to actually adopt and make that change happen with that no one would ever use the cottage cluster imagine that there's still rules they still have issues with the rules themselves but at least they're so you're saying that we could make these changes you could do your run of your matrices we go through it those changes we would bundle them as a package and process but could you use them before that time probably not I mean once it gets warmed by the city council they're basically effective but I think we're if we got in a real bind we could go to this city council under an interim zoning change we could make it short circuited go a little bit faster but I think it's a little bit of a slow process so we aren't looking to make this a really big thing because we know how once these things get open they just take on a life of their own and so we really want to take it in a bite if we have to do another one of these in September or October to take another bite of small zoning fixes I'd rather do that because it ends up with the dynamics that we had a couple of quick fixes so signs may end up actually waiting because signs is probably more is a bigger discussion but we'll try to keep it as I'll come up with some recommendations so that's the examples are helpful too the examples are helpful too what these technical points are oh yes the examples are easy that's how we found out item 7 I move approval into the minutes can it move? any discussion? you were here last time yes I was just missed that one all those in favor of adoption in the minutes simplify by saying aye all those opposed we got a new minute taker nope same still tam I did make some edits because she had some questions on stuff yeah it was a little more in text as she was saying we kind of got running around so I took a look at some things I did want to just before we forget mention that anyone who welcomed to grab the card from April 4th Historic Preservation Commission is having a bigger meeting we wanted Sarah's last meetings unless she stays on to finish this project which she might we have to figure that out to see who the new person is that's a regular city council meeting nope this is it's actually it is on Wednesday but it's not a council meeting it's a public meeting for historic preservation about updating the city design review regulations learn about the city design control districts the importance of historic preservation share your thoughts and stories so they are looking for input especially from people who live in downtown but anybody is interested in historic preservation or how are they getting this about this information publicizing it she's been doing a lot they actually sent an actual card to every person who lives in the district probably I'm trying to remember if it's a design control district I brought extra cards here to take one I'm trying to remember who got sent whether it was just the design control district or if it was a historic district but they sent it out to everybody that's great to try to make sure everybody understands this is going to go on now the district may be proposed to get bigger the design control district they're referring to not the national registered district we're talking about the design review district the part that goes into zoning and whether do we keep this district the same do we make it bigger do we make it smaller what types of things should we be looking at and I think what historic preservation wants to do is take an opportunity to talk to the public and talk to people about why this is important why is historic preservation important what makes Montpelier unique is not just people but it's buildings so that's on April 4th April 4th 6 30 p.m. in this room in this very room and that being said I have a motion for a German I could make that one second all those in favor those opposed no okay no one opposed we are adjourned thank you