 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise Vs and generous donations from viewers like you. Welcome to the Amherst Planning Board meeting of March 17, 2021. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Based on Governor Baker's executive order suspending certain provisions of the opening meeting law, GL Chapter 30A, Section 20 and signed Thursday, March 12, 2020. This planning board is being held virtually using the Zoom platform. My name is Jack Jumsick and as the chair of the planning board, I am calling this meeting to order at 6.31 p.m. So this meeting is being recorded and is available via Amherst Media Livestream. Minutes are being taken. Board members, I will take a roll call and when I call your name and meet yourself, answer from the lead and then place yourselves back on mute. Rhea Chow? Sure. Tom Long? Here. Andrew McDougal? Present. Doug Marshall? Present. And Janet McGowan? Here. Johanna Newman? Here. All right, we're all here. Board members of technical difficulties arise. We may need to pause temporarily to correct the problem and then continue the meeting. If you do have technical issues, please let Pam know. Discussion may be suspended. While the technical issues are addressed in the minutes, we'll note if this occurred. Please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment. I will see your raised hand and call on you to speak after speaking. Remember to remute yourself. Opportunity for public comment will be provided during the general public comment item and other appropriate times during the meeting. Please be aware the board will not respond to comments during general public comment period. If you wish to make a comment during the public comment period, you must join the meeting via the Zoom teleconferencing link. The link is shown. Correct. There it is. And the link is also listed on the meeting agenda posted on the town website via the calendar listing for this meeting. Or you can go to the planning board web page and click on the most recent agenda, which lists the Zoom link at the top of the page. Please indicate if you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited. If you have joined the Zoom meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your telephone. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your full name and address. Put yourself back into mute when finished. Residents can express their views up for three minutes and that's a discussion of the planning board chair. If a speaker does not comply with the guidelines or exceeds their lot of time, their participation will be disconnected from the meeting. So our first item or review of the minutes of the March 3 2021 meeting. And I know Janet had some edits. And we're we can. What's that? I'm getting them. Okay. I was just bringing them up. Okay. So they should be viewable on this screen. They are you will you just have to scroll down page. Okay. The first one. You want to read it. Or maybe Janet could read it. Sure. Miss McGowan felt that the RG was appropriately zoned for density at nine units an acre. I guess she found that Amherst had almost met its 487 unit goals set in the housing production plan with 483 units permitted from 2013 to 2017 and more in 2018 and 19. But Amherst did not meet the goals for affordable housing. I'm sorry. I guess I left the word housing off. Okay. So I just thought that was important information to include. All right. Yeah, you can continue scrolling. So the other comments. I just added to I took notes on people's public comments and I felt like it's important that people are heard and know that they're heard and I know we're not doing a transcript. But I felt like the RG people who spoke were really feeling a lot of pressure from UMass students in their neighborhood, although they like having new UMass students. And so I added just some comments that I found in my notes. It wasn't everything I found in my notes, but I felt like these things reflected the pressure they were feeling and the concerns they had about increasing density and, you know, losing residents, you know, full time residents in the neighborhood. So do you want me to read those or can people just read them on the screen? I think they're short enough. I think we just read them all. I mean, I just, I just, I mean, I don't know, Pam did you check your notes and this is consistent. I didn't, I didn't check my notes against them. No, no. They're kind of consistent with, you know, they look to be consistent with the other comments that the public presenter provided. Just for verification, I tend to take better notes for public comment than probably anybody else because I just really listened to those. I agree with the comments, the amendments. I don't have a vote, but I'm just saying that it reflects my memory of what happened. Okay. Does any of the board members have any comments or a motion? Maria. I didn't have time to review all of them, but I will take Chris's word that it reflects what she remembers. And Janet, I don't know if you rewatched the videos or if it was straight from your notes, but if, if you can stand behind that it's what was said, that's fine by me. I don't want staff to review it or spend time reviewing it. And I certainly won't have time to review it, but if that accurately reflects what was said, that's fine by me. I mean, you could footnote all those, those last four changes and just said, you know, as, as recalled from Janet's notes and that might be a good way to go. I did listen to my comment. And so just to double check the numbers and stuff like that. So it wasn't, but the other ones are for my notes. Okay. Any other comments from the board? So, your honor. Sorry, I was just going to move to approve these minutes as amended. Okay. And I saw Andrews hand up to. Yeah, I'll second that. Okay, great. Okay. Do a quick roll call here. Maria. Doug has his hand raised. Oh, who? Doug. Oh, Doug. Sorry, Doug. I looked like there were a couple of words missing and maybe a couple of typos. So I think we should move to accept with edits as made by Pam. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Okay. Now, how do we unmoved the original one? I rescind my motion. Okay. All right. There you go. Can I offer a friendly amendment to the motion? Yes. Sure. That we move as Johanna moved, but with edits as necessary for grammatical purposes, as provided by our highly esteemed staff. Very nice. Andrew. I was just going to say that I thought that, you know, I missed the last meeting these minutes were super comprehensive. So I just appreciate how they're together. So thank you. Any further discussion where we take a vote? Okay. See none. So do roll call Maria. Wait a minute. Before you do that, I'm just a little bit confused. So did Johanna actually rescind her motion or have we just added on to it? I did say that I rescind it, but then Doug said, what if we just amend it? So let's, I... Okay. I can handle it. I got it right. Okay. Got it. So we're accepting the minutes with a few edits that Pam will make that are just going to be a strip. What's the, what's its term? Editorial. Okay. Any further discussion on these from the board? Okay. I see none. So we'll do a roll call. Maria. Andrew. All abstain. Okay. Doug. Approve. Tom. Abstain. And Janet. Approve. And Johanna. Approve. And I approve. Very good. Now we're, we're on to the public comment period. I see 10 attendees and have an opportunity and I see no hands raised, which is great because we have a long meeting potentially. So we have a lot to get through. So on to the first public hearing. We'll just pull on out the triangle here. So, so in accordance with the provisions of MGL chapter 40, section five C scenic roads and chapter 87, section three shade trees, this joint public hearing between the planning board and tree warden has been duly advertised in the daily Hampshire Gazette and posted in town hall. And it is 635 so we're all good there. This is entitled the scenic road tree removal for power reliability upgrade by ever source on the south side of Bay Road. The address 165 Bay Road map 25 B parcel 16 public shade trees impacted by this project include seven pine trees that range in diameter while there's 11 inch 15 and 17 18 19 21 and 26 inches. And do we have any board disclosures. None. I lost my hand thing. Okay. Alright, so and we can invite the applicant to present on the proposal. There are three represent or two representatives of the applicant Michael Rosenberg and Michael Cain from ever source. Very good. Good evening, Mr Chairman. My name is Mike and I'm community relations specialist with ever source I'm joined here with Mike. Mike Rosenberg from our engineering department at ever source and we're going to move over to Michael. But Michael is it safe to say that we're wishing to withdraw. We're going to withdraw our application or petition for this public hearing this evening but Michael if you want to go into a little more detail why we're going to withdraw. Sure. So thank you for the time. Thank you for the understanding. We are, you know, the intention of the the work on Bay Road was to install a three phase re closing device for reliability purposes for the customers. East of that location on Bay Road. Because of the complexity in the tree trimming because of the. Some of the hurdles and challenges at the moment, we've taken a second look and we have found a better suitable location to where the device can be installed on an existing pole that will not require tree trimming or tree removal. So it'll be moving slightly down, down the road. But we'll be able to mitigate the need for the petition and the poll hearing. So I do want to just talk about the the actual polls themselves outside the actual, you know, the trees themselves in the area, and just touch on it quickly. So, you know, the trees in question they are sort of encroached and engrossed into the utility power lines in that area. Under, you know, normal every day circumstances, we would drive by those and see those as sort of danger opportunities or reliability type impacts that could affect customers customers reliable power, if an event ever does occur. Our vegetation management group, Barry croak, who knows tree warden Allen snow. Barry's going to be looking at some other locations in town that location in particular and just trying to create a list of trees that you know we should really be looking at for reliability purposes, trees that are not will say the best specimens. And that could pose a danger in. And I personally have some of those white pines, like in that location in my yard as well, these kind of larger, four headed monsters that sort of branch off and grow up. I can tell you from personal experience and from professional experience, you know those trees do tend to pool water, where those branches are where they branch off where the crotch of the tree is those limbs and leaders do tend to break and that does create a large number of outages and things that we respond to over the year. So just bearing that in mind, obviously it's more informational than anything we are rescinding our petition but you know when we when we go to do the trimming or removals or we go through that process. We're really reliability focused, you know we have a very good vegetation management program they they understand the balance there so just just want to put that out there. It may be coming back through a different venue I may not be here but our veg management group may and just just be aware of that. Very informative thank you. Do you have any, any other comments. Okay. I think that so we don't really need to do much more Chris do we. I think you need to vote to accept their withdrawal to withdraw and I think Mr snow needs to also take a vote there to. Okay. Make do go has his hand raised. Okay, so let's have discussion Andrew. Thanks might'll be super quick I appreciate the update that Mike Michael. I was just curious when you mentioned the surveys that above and beyond what you normally do. Um, no we normally do right we do. We have a lot of different acronyms to our trimming program but let's just say we do sort of yearly backbone trimming we do storm management trimming so generally around storm time or after storms will drive circuits that were impacted and try to get the, you know the branches or the leaders that cause the outage or that were part of the tree that caused the outage. We do that normally in all towns to one level or another, knowing some of the complexities in Amherst with some of the tree removals, I think Barry just has some trees he really wants to make sure we can address before they become issues. So it's, I guess you could say it's a little above and beyond what we normally do but we want to make sure we, you know, continue to provide the reliable power and, you know, work, you know work efficiently between the two of us. Okay, that makes sense and then one super fast follow up it's just, would you would you put extra emphasis on removing or trimming back invasive exotics. Barry, would you put would you put any additional effort on removing invasive or trimming back invasive exotic species. So, I guess it depends the impact right the really the most invasive thing we really treat for is vine ivy and things like that you know because you'll, you'll find on a corner pole or a dead end poll that has a guy on it that's that's the the rail that grows up. We treat that if the invasive species. You know, if it was. I'm just trying to think of something that grows fast and is not the best right but if it was growing up and impacting the line the communications the utilities it's certainly something we could trim like a, like a certain or something right which seems to kind of grow and sometimes overtakes areas. That would be part of the tree trimming once it reached that certain height so. Thanks. Janet. Just in the storm concern, just a heads up that the pole that was west closer to Atkins the telephone pole was in really, really rough shape and it had looked like it had been attacked by, you know, 20 woodpeckers it just looked like it was about to come over so you might want to take a look at that in terms of replacement. So I will so in here's. And I know the tree or I'm sorry I know the pole and just I have to I guess I'll play a little bit of devil's advocate right so if we were to go out and replace that pole which we probably should and we'll write up a trouble ticket to that pole to meet current standards would need to be upgraded in height, which would just bring the wires kind of further into the congestion of the trees, which brings us back to the hearing today right. And I'll be honest with you we're not going to not perform a reliability type effort or a replacement of, you know, deficient equipment we're we're going to move forward with those no matter what town it is. We would more than likely bring us full circle because of, you know, we we'd set a taller pole, the cross arms that we use for the, at the top of the pole, the spacing's a little wider now than it was probably 5040 years ago when that went in, which just, you know, like I said, I need to create problems I just, I was talking about it with with one of the one of your guys and stuff like that so I don't want to create or bring it to full circle but just let it be a heads up. No, and it's it's perfectly fine I mean it's a it's we have this conversation with many towns, the balance there right. So, no problem. Okay, we've probably should let these guys go. We have a motion to to vote. What are we voting on accepting their withdrawal. Maybe you don't need a vote for that. Let's do a call. All right, Doug. I was going to vote or make a motion to accept their withdrawal of this application. Just a quick second. I'll second. Okay, Janet. Any comment. No, we have somebody in the public has put their hand up. We've, I think we've gone. Think we've moved past this but we will entertain it. I do have one question for Chris. So does the motion need to include close the public hearing because technically we opened it. Yes. So, so move. All right, thank you. And I guess in general what we'll take that public comment but someone we get a second on. Janet second. I'll re second. Actually, we're you second. All right. So we have the one public comment that we'll take. So this is show Shauna King and I will ask this person to speak. Okay. Yeah, so I actually been bad about not getting first, you know, people's we got their name but where they live. So, I show Shauna. Hi, this is Shauna King from rolling green drive in Amherst. And Michael Rosenberg was talking. I believe he mentioned a name Terry. I was wondering just who Terry is. Oh, but I can't hear him. It's Barry croak. He's one of our leads for our vegetation management group in Western Massachusetts. Okay, thank you. Very good. Just as a note, if you're asking because you're you have a tree issue, you have a branch issue that's impacting utility, our website does offer some kind of a online trouble ticket input ever source.com you can actually report that there if something comes up and it'll make its way and create a ticket for maintenance. Okay, so we're back on the board and Alan. Do you have any words and you, you can you can vote I guess at this time right. I do vote in favor of accepting the withdrawal. And just quickly I wanted to say thank you to ever source for looking at this issue and trying to find a work around for the time being. I look forward to working with Barry on identifying those risk trees that pose any hazard to the to their their infrastructure and ever source is a great partner in our community to do a ton of work for us in their pruning cycles. So I really appreciate their efforts. Thank you. Good to know. Okay, so that's the tree warden side of thing and I'll do a roll call. Maria. Andrew. Doug. Hi. Tom. Hi. Janet. Hi. And I am also an eye. So. And Johanna. Hi. What? I'm sorry. Uh oh. I felt delighted in the lease. We even went to the site visit. All right. Sorry about that. So on to item. Two. Or four. And four. Yeah, I'm just bringing up the preamble here. You have three minutes before seven, according to my clock. Oh, okay. Yeah, we do have a little time. I can tell you that there are no A&Rs. Oh yeah. All right. No. No. Scratch that. And you have something on the ZBA side. You can jump in with Pam. I am sorry. I have nothing to report in that area. Oh, good. Um, an upcoming SPP SPR. SB. Applications. We have a, uh, an application for a building in the downtown, which you probably all know about. It's a mixed use building. Um, on the site where the. Where the pub is located. So that's going to be coming before you in late April. I think I might have told you about that last time we met. And this isn't going to be like a preliminary thing. This is going to bring the full, a full proposal in. It's going to go before the design review board. And we're going to show it to the disability access advisory committee. And, um, And I think it's going to be, you know, I think you're going to get a lot of public comment about it. Um, So we will be probably fully accepting the application on, on Friday, I understand. And it's already hit the paper. So, you know, people probably know about it already. 11 East. East pleasant street. Okay. And we got a little bit more time. I can speak to the, uh, We go into the planning board committee and lay us on reports, uh, Plano Valley planning commission. We have a meeting. Next meeting is early April. The, the. We actually had an executive commission meeting that was canceled due to. Just. Non-essential items to talk about. So we had a month break there. Um, The community preservation act. Committee, Andrew. Yeah. We had a meeting. I want to see maybe a week or two ago that unfortunately was, um, Dual scheduled with one of one of the only other zoom lines at the townhouse. We had to end it early. We're going to. Reconvene. I believe tomorrow, but I need to check my calendar. Um, and we're, we're really sort of talking through, um, Making sure that we're, we're set up for next year. So, um, Trying to standardize some of the mechanisms we have of evaluating opportunities, making sure that we're, um, Being really clear and transparent with potential applicants about what we value, what we're, what we're looking for in each of the projects, so that they can put their best forward in terms of their applications. So that will continue. Uh, and hopefully we'll have some, some clarity on some updated documentation that we'll be able to. Publicize. Thank you. Uh, Doug, do you have anything on the commission? Well, um, Let's see. We were supposed to have a meeting and it was canceled because we didn't advertise in time. And then we rescheduled and. It was canceled again because we didn't have a quorum. Uh, we're down to members. Um, so, uh, There is, Uh, Motivated to be an official voting member, which I am not of the agricultural commission. Okay, good to know. Uh, Tom, the design review board. Yeah, sure. We, um, Uh, we were looking at the North Amherst library project. We're about to look at it right now. So. We got a presentation. Um, From the architects at Coon, Reynolds, Chris Farley shared with us the design project. Um, There were a collection of comments that you can read in the memo. Um, I'm not sure if it got to you guys yet, but, um, But there are a few sort of just comments. Um, but it was approved by, uh, In terms of its aesthetic and how it's going to function. I think today we're going to be looking at the site conditions. Um, In a different way. Um, but there were comments about color and. When you go sizes and sort of some of those architectural details, but, um, More like suggestions or thoughts since there's still another development of that project. Um, And then we had another, um, Approval of a ramp edition. Um, behind the, um, And Chris maybe can clarify exactly which building it is, but it is, um, in the boltwood parking lot off of the boltwood parking lot up to the back of the, um, Which, what's the exact name of that? Bank centers. Um, The ramp goes down to the John Musanti health center. Um, And that was approved with some recommendations for, uh, Or concerns about lighting and safety in that area. Um, and there were some other, um, Potential budget opportunities for furnishings in the boltwood parking area. Um, That were discussed and, um, Tentatively approved. Um, based on some, um, More detail in the future, but, um, But generally speaking, um, You know, the focus was really on the, um, The library project we're about to see. Very good. Um, So we'll come back to that. I think the CRC, we want to give that a little detail so we can Move back. Uh, because it's a seven. I have seven or three. Um, And I do understand that Chris, You recommended that this would probably be a continuation. Uh, For the hearing because we're, we're waiting on some additional Information. Yes. I recommended that, um, where I am going to recommend that you hear From the applicants and hear from the public and make your own Comments and ask questions. And then you continue the public hearing. Um, I just sent out the development application report from The planning department this evening. You can skim through it and see some of the things that. Either I thought of or came up at the site visit, But, um, I don't know. You won't have time to really digest what's in there. Um, we're also waiting to hear from the historical commission Because they need to review, um, Demolition of part of the back wall that will allow the Connector to be attached. And the conservation commission is going to be, um, Reviewing a request for. Determination regarding whether any of this work will have an Impact on wetland resource areas. Um, And we're also waiting for the, uh, Design review board report. Um, There was a draft that came out today, But I don't think that you all had a chance to see that yet. So, So there are a number of issues that are, That we're waiting for. So that I would recommend continuation of the public hearing. But yeah, I just thought, uh, That. I probably should have waited. Just want to make sure that everybody on the board knew it. Um, But also the public, um, Before we got into it. So, um, We, uh, In accordance with the provisions of the mgl chapter 40 a, This public hearing has been duly advertised and notice there Has been posted. This hearing is being held for the purpose of providing an Opportunity for interested citizens. To be heard regarding SPR. 20 21 dash 0 6. Uh, which is the North Amherst library at eight monogy road. Uh, And they're requesting a slight plan review approval to an Addition to the existing building. Uh, And adding parking walks, utilities, drainage, And landscaping. And the sites located in that. Five A's parcels 37 and 38 in the, uh, The dash VC zoning district. So, uh, uh, are there any member disclosures? I see none. And We are now, uh, Invite the applicant to present the project to us. And we have. Mike. Yeah. Okay. Um, Mike Lou from the Berkshire design group. Um, Farley from Cune riddle architects is also. Uh, Attending and Guilford mooring as well. Um, So I guess I'll start, uh, And give a quick, um, Presentation of the site and Chris will talk about, um, The architecture, the addition. And, um, Then we can kind of open it up to. Um, Planning board comments. And anything that might have, I, I did. Uh, skim over your, the development, um, In, uh, action report. And, um, yeah. You know, there was, It didn't seem to be anything too major in there. Probably some points of clarification, et cetera. Um, but anyway, let me get into it. If I could get my screen. If I could be allowed to shoot. Um, Anyway, let me get into it. If I could get my screen. If I could be allowed to share screen, I can put up some images and, um, You know, the black and white plans that we can refer to. Like you, you joined as a panelist. So you should have that option down at the bottom. Great. So hold on. Let's see. Green tab there. Okay. Are you seeing. A color plan. No. Not yet. Okay. Hold on. There we go. Um, okay. How about now? There we go. Okay. Um, I'll use this rendering for, um, presentation. Let's see. I mean, pan this up a bit. Okay. Um, so. We're pretty familiar with the site. We, uh, some board, most of the board members. Um, came to the site visit yesterday evening and, um, we walked the site and discussed a couple things. But basically this is the existing library in the lighter, um, brown tan color. The addition is proposed to be to the north with, um, you know, that breakthrough of the north on the north facade here. But the connector piece. And then the addition is this, um, rectangular, um, building right here with a porch entry. Um, facing north to new parking. We have 10 spaces proposed. There's two handicapped spaces and eight regular or standard spaces. Um, and a sidewalk proposed here. That connects, uh, to the existing sidewalk at Montague road and Sunderland road. And, uh, would bring you into the entry, um, uh, entry to the addition. The existing south entry would remain. There's a set of steps right here that gets you into the library, but obviously that, um, isn't accessible. So the accessible entrance, um, is here on the north side of the building. Um, the existing curb cut. At Montague road, which is approximately right here would be closed. Um, we are in the process of preparing the, um, the MDOT, uh, for highway entrance permit or whatever it is to, you know, to, um, get approval for that work. Basically that would be putting curb back across the curb cut and extending the sidewalk, you know, uh, from, um, across the opening, the entry and egress, uh, exit into the site would be from Sunderland road. The existing curb cut is moving slightly to the north to accommodate the addition and, you know, parking layout. Um, so this is the extent of the, uh, new paving. You can kind of see it in relation to the aerial photograph. This is the former, uh, garage and I guess there might have been a gas station there at one point. Um, along the north side, we are proposing to remove some more of this pavement as well as this concrete pad here. And this would become a, um, a, uh, grass swale to catch, uh, the runoff. All of the runoff basically flows to the north and this whole, um, area that's currently impervious paved and roof, um, impervious flows from the north to the south and then over to this existing catch basin, you can kind of see it right there on the, um, gutter line. So we're basically mimicking the drainage pattern, but there's going to be a reduction in the amount of pavement that runs over to here due to the, uh, wide grass swale that's, um, going to be along the north edge here. Um, there's a, um, a small concrete pad resting area with a bench and a couple of bike loops here for bike parking. Um, it was noted that this site has a, uh, is on a bus route. The bus route is basically directly across the street here. It's just off the page. Um, the bus stop stops in front of, um, hillside plaza. Um, currently people getting to the, you know, using the bus and getting to the library kind of have to walk along this sidewalk and cross over here at this existing, um, marked, um, crosswalk and into the building. Um, there was some kind of talk about how dark it is over there. And, um, Montague road is a, uh, state controlled road, um, Mass DOT. So doing changes there, it's not impossible, but it would be an extra step. For instance, if we wanted to add lighting or, and or flashers or something to better identify, you know, the pedestrian walk, uh, crosswalk, um, or move it, um, but that's, that's not within the scope of this project. Um, on the Sunderland roadside, there's also a crosswalk. And it basically, you know, there's a little piece of sidewalk right here, but that basically would bring you southward and then, you know, toward the former, um, school building here. I'm not sure if this is really used for, um, any purposes right now. I'm sure it is from time to time. Um, some questions came up as to parking, the required parking for the amount of public floor area in this entire building with addition, uh, we calculated that 25 spaces that would be required. Um, we are showing 10 spaces. So, um, obviously we're, we're short of the required, uh, number by zoning. Um, but because this site is on a bus slew, uh, bus route, um, and very close to several apartment complexes that are, you know, basically across the street here, down this driveway and to the east. And then, um, a couple of, um, apartment complexes. Is it, is it Pine Street still or Meadow Street that goes over to 116. That's Meadow Street. Yeah. Okay. Meadow Street. Pine Street goes to the east and Meadow Street goes to the west. So we have that big apartment complex and a lot of residential down Meadow Street. That's, you know, in very close proximity. Um, you know, we are, uh, asking for the 10 spaces to be allowed. Um, historically this building doesn't get, um, a lot of, uh, people there at any one time, but we realized that, you know, the addition is basically housing a meeting room, um, with restrooms in there. And so, you know, there could be the need for parking for, you know, events that happen there. Most likely they'll be in the evening. Um, but there's the opportunity to use, there's, I think, either between 12 or 14 spaces in this parking lot here. There's also public parking that can be used in the Plaza parking and the, um, uh, the other smaller building to the, to the north that houses the bank of America building. Um, those are, um, pretty much unused a lot of the time. Um, the, um, we have some proposed landscaping. We're going to try to maintain as much of the existing plantings as possible. Nothing is proposed to happen on the south side of the building here. There are planting beds that extend down, um, on the east and west sides of the building. We're going to try to maintain those. Um, there are some shrubs that were in this area. We looked at those out in the field, um, within this kind of nook that's created by the addition in the existing building. You know, this, this will be a mechanical yard with a screen, a screen fence and some shrubs in front of it. Um, to shield that from sundaline road. Um, there's a, a large birch tree proposed to be in this area to kind of, um, screen, you know, the, the building here. We didn't want to plant it too heavily. I mean, over the years, I think volunteers have donated a lot of plants and stuff for the library that get planted here. Um, we're basically putting some foundation plantings around here, but because, because of the character of the building and the addition, um, you know, it's a very nice, um, um, uh, piece of architecture and Chris can present that, you know, we didn't want to have a lot of large plantings at the building that would, that would block, um, the building from the street. I think it's, it's rather a pleasant, um, view from, you know, or surround the surrounding areas into the site. We do have a couple of shade trees here at the corners and another birch tree proposed for this island, um, on the north side. So, um, oh yeah, this project does, um, would occur on two parcels. Currently, this red line indicates the street line. And then the existing parcel split is, goes right through the addition at an angle like this. We can see it, um, on the, uh, black and white plan, which if you'd like this, um, I can put that up, but we're proposing to move that property line basically up here. It would, it would cross through the proposed parking lot. And the reason why we did that was to kind of create this, um, a lot that was 12,000 square feet. At the time we thought that made a lot of sense, but, um, there's actually the, the minimum lot size here in this BVC zone for this uses is not applicable. The, the 12,000 square feet is applicable for residential uses, but nevertheless, you know, we can't have the building straddling a property line. So we're going to have to move that line in some fashion. So we might, you know, we're, I think we're okay with, um, uh, relocating the lot line over here. So we're going to have to go through the A and R process to describe the new lots, both on five a 38, which is this parcel and five a 37, which is this parcel. Um, the, this parcel to the north is, would still be a non-compliance in terms of the coverage. It's basically like 98 or 99% paved or impervious. So it's an existing, um, you know, non-conforming lot. Um, the, the library parcel itself is also would be non-conforming. Uh, if we apply the maximum setback, we're still trying to work that out. We're showing that this corner of the existing library building is 20.2 feet setback off of the street line here. Um, but when we, and that's a measurement to the foundation. If we measure to the, to the, um, wood siding, that's the dominant feature of the building. It, it actually turns out to be 99.9 feet. I mean, a 19.9 feet. Sorry. And so I think what we want to, uh, in a way formally request the planning staff to look to consider that to be the, the, the, the part of the building that we take the measurement from. Um, in order to get that done before we would comply with the 20 foot maximum setback, um, dimensional requirement in this zone. Um, That hasn't been exactly worked out yet. Um, it's in process. We've had been having, uh, conversations with Chris Brestrup and Chris has consulted Rob Moore on that. And, um, you know, we'll, we'll work through that. Um, but we need to do a special permit to get approval, uh, for this non-conformity. And if that's the case, you know, we'll do it. Um, it won't hold up the project. I don't think, um, schedule wise, um, From anticipated, you know, start of construction. Um, I'm not sure if I'm leaving anything out, but I think I'd like to relinquish control to Chris Farley to talk about the architecture. Okay. Well, thanks very much for that introduction, Mike. Um, good evening, everyone. My name is Chris Farley, uh, from Cune Riddle Architects, uh, 28 Amity street downtown Amherst. Um, And, uh, I'm the project architect for this North Amherst library addition project. Um, I'm going to share my screen. Um, Uh, can everyone, uh, see, see that, uh, the building plan? Okay. Well, first of all, I'd just like to say that there were three primary goals, uh, for this project. First, uh, that we provide full accessibility to the building, uh, primarily to the existing library level, since it is up about a half a flight from the surrounding grade. Uh, but also, uh, uh, provide full accessibility to the, um, to the addition, uh, the meeting room and, and, and the bathrooms. Uh, the second goal was, uh, to provide that new meeting room and new accessible bathrooms that would not only function as additional space for the library, but would also function as a potential community meeting room. Um, we have, uh, designed the addition so that the library can be closed off. Um, when the, uh, when, when, uh, when it's not open to the public, but the community room and the bathrooms can be, uh, still accessed from this North addition. I'm sorry. The North entry, uh, in the addition. Um, and then the third goal was to improve the existing systems, uh, in the existing building. And those include, uh, upgrading the lighting, upgrading the mechanical system, uh, and providing a, a fire alarm system for, for the building. So, uh, the building plan, uh, this as Mike showed, uh, this rectangle here to the South is the existing library. Uh, this is the existing entry, uh, up a set of stairs, uh, and, and through the front door to the library. Um, the proposed addition is to the North. And we are proposing a small narrow connector in the middle. Um, that allows us to offset, uh, the, the, the full addition from the existing library. And it really allows the existing library to maintain its integrity. Uh, and, and, and, uh, as, as much of the existing four sides of the library as possible. Um, the existing library is about 920 square feet. And the addition, including the connector, is about 1190 square feet. So we're a little more than doubling the, uh, the footprint, uh, of the building. Um, so the, uh, as Mike said, the new entry, accessible entry from the new, uh, parking area, uh, as well as the, uh, accessible parking spaces is on the North side. Uh, so there's a fully accessible path from the sidewalk and also from the accessible parking spaces to this entry. Uh, over here on the West side, there is a, uh, a book return. So that even when the library is closed, even when the addition is closed, people will be able to return library materials. Um, uh, through that, uh, that book return slot. Um, when people come into the building, uh, there's a small entry lobby. Um, they can either go to the meeting, the new meeting room, which is size to accommodate about 50 people, uh, to, to the West side is the, the two new, uh, accessible bathrooms, uh, storage space for the library and janitor's closet. Those spaces are not, uh, available to the public, but to library staff. And then through the lobby to the connector, there's a new staircase that goes up about four feet to the existing library level. Uh, just to the east of that is a proposed new wheelchair lift to provide full accessibility up to the library level. And then on the West side is a set of stairs going down to the basement of the library. Uh, the basement is not open to the public, not accessible to the public. It's only, uh, staff. The, uh, the lift will, uh, uh, go down to the basement to assist staff in moving, uh, heavy or large objects down there. Uh, but the public will not have access to that, to that basement space. The existing library, um, will remain very much the same as it is now with the, the stacks, uh, and, and, uh, the overall arrangement, uh, uh, as it exists now, this library and circulation desk, uh, will be replaced with a new, with a new desk. Uh, it will be, be fully accessible, uh, as well. And then, um, as I said that, uh, some of the systems will be, uh, uh, improved in the, um, uh, in the existing, uh, existing library. Uh, so the building exterior, uh, we've got a couple of views here, uh, uh, eye level perspective views taken from the north looking toward the new entry, which is in the center of the screen here. Uh, you can just see the existing library kind of peeking out, uh, behind, um, but there will be the, the parking spaces in front with a walkway, uh, uh, connecting the, the existing sidewalks from Sunderland Road and Montague Road, uh, to this new entry. Uh, this is taken just from, uh, a little bit east. Uh, the same, uh, the same northern view of the addition with the main entry gable here. Uh, this cross gable here, uh, this dormer is, um, uh, uh, uh, has the windows that look into the, the meeting room along with the flanking windows here. Um, and then we have a couple of, uh, exterior, kind of a combination perspective, uh, renderings. This is the Montague side, uh, elevation, uh, east elevation. Um, now one thing I will say is that the, the, the colors, uh, in these renderings are, uh, uh, not, uh, as, as, uh, as accurate as they could be. Uh, they're quite a bit, the colors are quite a bit brighter, uh, in this rendering of the existing library than the existing is. Um, but this shows the existing library on the left, uh, the connector, uh, the narrow connector here in the middle and then the addition on the right, uh, this gable, uh, and this dormer also looks into the meeting room. Uh, these are the foundation plantings, uh, that Mike, uh, referred to. Um, so our goal with this design was to, was to design a, uh, uh, an addition that, um, that complements the existing without overwhelming it. Um, the, as I said, the connector allows the existing building to, uh, to remain unchanged as much as possible. Um, the intention is that the, the, the, uh, the addition, uh, takes its form from the existing library with similar roof pitches, uh, similar volumes, um, uh, uh, uh, similar, uh, material pallet, uh, painted wood and natural wood, uh, the gable dormers and the projecting bays. Uh, we've also, uh, taken the, uh, the dominant window module, uh, directly from the library so that, uh, most of the fenestration is really quite similar, um, and, and, and proportion and detailing. Um, uh, this again is the, is the north elevation, uh, with the main entry here, uh, entry gable. Um, and this is the, the western, uh, facade, the Sunderland Road, uh, facade. Um, the idea is that the detailing of the, uh, the addition really does follow the lead of the existing building, but we have tried to simplify it, uh, and, and, uh, to, uh, allow the existing library to remain dominant and primary and to have the addition be secondary in nature to it, uh, but complimentary to it. Uh, the standing seam metal roof, uh, is meant to convey the same sense of permanence as the, um, as the existing slate roof, but again, a different material, uh, to signify that this addition is, is something that has been added to the original. Um, so, uh, I think, uh, Tom Long, uh, alluded to this week, we're currently showing, uh, a natural, uh, cedar shingle, uh, siding with painted trim on the building. Um, but I will say that we are, uh, planning on, uh, revisiting that decision, uh, in the next design phase. And so we may in fact be looking at some alternatives, uh, for painted trim, um, excuse me, because we have received a number of comments from town boards and committees, as well as others, uh, asking, uh, you know, why, why we haven't done that. So we will be looking at some alternatives for that. And if we do propose something different, we would, we would, uh, clearly come back before the board, uh, and present whatever those final, uh, materials and colors, uh, colors are. Um, so, uh, a little, uh, word about signage. Um, this, this presentation and this package doesn't currently have, uh, any exterior signage associated with it. I will say that we are exploring the idea of, uh, a, uh, a ground-mounted monument sign for the project, and that we will be presenting, um, uh, that as part of, uh, our, our presentation and our submission to the board, uh, prior to the next hearing, the continuation of this hearing. Um, and, uh, I think that's about it, uh, at least for the overview. Uh, I'm happy to, to take any questions or make any clarifications, if anyone, uh, would like me to. All right. Well, uh, thank you, um, Chris and Mike. Uh, I think we can, uh, move on to the site visit report, and then we can give you some, some questions. So, uh, who would like to provide the site visit report? Any volunteers? Uh, Doug. Mr. Marshall has his hand raised. Well, um, I guess not seeing other hands, I'm happy to take a first pass at it. Uh, although I thought I saw Janet's for a second. Um, I think all of us, uh, met out there with the exception of, uh, Johanna and Maria. Uh, yesterday afternoon, it was rather cold and blustery, but we, uh, took a walk around, we started in the parking lot and, uh, there is a, I guess a former filling station to the north beyond the site plan that Mike showed. Um, we talked a fair amount about the parking and the fact that the meeting room could probably hold 40 or 50 even people. Um, and the, the, where overflow parking might be located, especially since they're not able to provide as many spaces as the zoning would require. Uh, we walked along Sunderland roadside and saw where the mechanical units would be. Uh, Chris described where the addition would, uh, meet the existing building. Um, and it looks like it would take out a section of solid wall and a set of maybe four transom windows that are kind of all across that. It would also require the removal of a fire place on the inside of the existing building. We walked around the front. Uh, there was a conversation about all the plantings and, uh, the many volunteers who helped keep the landscape, uh, looking nice. Uh, then we walked around to the Montague roadside. Um, there was talk about some of the crosswalk locations and how you might get to the bus stop. And then we ended back in the parking lot. I'm going to stop there at Janet or anybody else if you want to add to that. Um, I would just add that we looked at, um, the west side where the swell would be, and that was in front of the former garage. Um, behind the parking spaces. I think that was to the north. Yeah. And yeah, and then I think its purpose was partly to, um, I think it was described that the water would run off towards that swell. Would it be helpful if, uh, for me to stop sharing so Mike can share the site plan again? Yeah, that's a good idea, Chris. Thank you. See, I'll pull up, um, maybe it's this one. Oops. It's trying to open. Okay. There. Oh, let me flip down to. This is the grading plan. So yeah, if you, you can all see that, right? Yes. Okay. So yeah, this is the edge of the parking to the north. And this dashed line indicates kind of like the limit of work or where the pavement would be cut. Here's where that concrete pad is, is located at. Um, they, you know, the town wants to remove as part of this project. So all this area within that, uh, dashed line to the edge of the parking would become a grass, uh, swale. And as I had mentioned. I'm sorry. I'm going to interrupt. I don't think we're seeing your screen because we're not, we're not seeing the things you're describing. Yes. Thank you, Chris. Okay. Hold on. Um, I mean, we're, we are, we are seeing a site plan from your screen, but not the one I think that you're just hearing on. And I'm not seeing your cursor where you're pointing. Oh, I'm, I apologize. Let me try this again then. Oops. That's weird. I'm seeing it on my screen. Um, and you scroll down and move, move it down so we can see more of the north side. Are you seeing the color plan right now? No. No. Okay. I don't know what's going on. Let me, um, it looks like we're seeing a log me in screen. Really? Okay. Yes. Yeah. If you try unsharing and then sharing again, it might update what we see. Oops. I can't get my, uh, my zoom screen to open back up again. Hold on. Do you see your zoom screen, Mike? I see, I see, um, the attendees. Okay. So when, when you hit share screen, um, some of the documents can sort of like sit one on top of the other. If you, if you can see one that looks like it should be part of this series and can click that if they're labeled up at the top. Let me, um, okay. I'm trying to open that now. Oops. I don't know if Chris could even annotate. Like I see the black and white. I think can we use sort of the annotate function and that's enabled or not. But can you like just write like draw on there? Another possibility. I see some green lines on top. I just threw that on. Yeah. I wonder whether, whether Chris might be able to just annotate through the zoom as well. Gee, I can't even get my, um, I'm not able to even open up my zoom screen. Mike, let me try to, let me try to share the planning boards packet. We have some site plans in there. So I'm going to choose share screen. Andrew, thanks for a, I never knew that existed. Yeah. Yeah. It might actually be really useful to use that function here instead of the cursory and just mark it up. Yeah. Does this help because it's. So, yep. That, um, There's, here is your swell. If we go to, um, L, 104. L 40 or fourth. The grading plan. Um, I'm going. How about next one? L 103, I believe. Yeah, that one. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. You're welcome. So, okay. Let me repeat that then. So on the plan, this is the north edge of the proposed new parking. And this kind of heavy dash line indicates the limit of work. Where we'd be cutting, um, and removing the existing pavement that's around the former, uh, gas station. So this whole area would become. Um, Green a grass swale. And as I had mentioned, all the, all the runoff from this site flows from north to south to the west. So that swale is capturing the runoff from. The existing, um, pavement here as well as the new parking lot, uh, diverting it or, or, um, carrying that runoff to a catch basin here in the. Um, That's basically the drainage, uh, pattern. That, um, Is proposed at this site. Well, of the two parcels. So currently this whole thing is paved from, you know, up here all the way to the existing parking lot, which is approximately right about here. It's at an angle, the existing parking lot. Um, So we're taking this existing pavement here. And as I said, turning it into a grass swale. Am I the only one who doesn't think he, I can see Mike's cursor. I still can't see it. It's me trying to move my cursor. Oh, right. That's right. Sorry. So I'm doing the best I can. Um, Do you want to, can you, can you, can you put your cursor on that heavy dashed line to the north? Up up a little bit more. Right there. Yep. So that heavy line represents the, um, The, the saw cut line through the existing pavement. So the area between that heavy line and the north edge of the parking lot, which is no, go up a little bit panning. Um, Do you want to, can you put your cursor on that heavy dashed line to the north? Which is no, go up a little bit Pam. Sorry. Yeah. Right there. So that area, it's kind of L shaped a backwards L. Um, would become the grass swale. And catch the water from the new parking lot, as well as the existing runoff that's coming off of the, um, gas station parcel. But it's a couch basin on the south side. The catch basin is to the, to the south side of the road. Um, in the grass swale, it's indicated by a little square. Um, With an X in it, tiny little. Yeah. Yeah. Right there. That's the, that's the proposed. There's teamwork going on here. Yeah. Great. You're more, you're more familiar with the plan than I am. And then, and then from there, from that new catch basin, it's piped to the existing. Um, and then from there, from this site or from these two sites, virtually all the runoff, uh, flows to that existing catch base in that Sunderland road. And which we are maintaining, you know, as part of the drain system. Um, I have a question. Um, I think we're, we're into the questions from the board section now. I did not make the site visit. So there's no existing parking or the parking is being borrowed. On the adjacent. Um, it's not marked. Um, I'm, you know, I count that. Well, when we were out there yesterday, in fact, there was, I believe there was two cars that were there. Prior to our arrival. And then an additional seven. People can't, showed up there. Was it. Five of the board members and myself and Chris. Farley. And, um, so. There were approximately nine cars parked there. And that's what we were estimating, you know, how many people could pull up facing, you know, and facing the, um, The existing library. So, Hamela, could you, could you scroll up a little bit to the existing site plan? And I think that may be helpful to, to see what the existing is. Yeah. If we go to the demo plan, that would show the existing conditions right there. Um, So right there. That shows that that, um, the shade, you can see the addition. It's, it's has a diagonal hatch dense hatch on it. Yep. That's the addition. And to the north of that, that diagonal line. And is the existing. There's a curb there actually the existing curb of the parking. Oh, the paving now. Okay. So that's basically straightening out and moving to the north. To define the new parking lot. Very good. Um, And then, um, I'm just going to ask my questions and I'll get to the others. Um, are you going to, uh, Is there a stormwater report that you're going to provide or necessary for this? We are not because of the fact that we're reducing and pervious here. We're by definition. We don't need to. Okay. Provide stormwater. And I confirmed that with Jason and, uh, skills and Jason skills further said that the town has a, um, what do you call the, um, Um, Swip that covers the drainage, you know, from the municipal system. So he felt that was adequate that we, you know, we're basically reducing the runoff. And then, uh, but my last question is how, um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, The future. Uh, Intersection. Right. Right. Upgrade that's going to happen. And. And does this project interface with what's with. With what's going to happen at the, you know, the, the main, you know, the five way or six way intersection. Right. That. Um, That is planned for further north. Obviously the former gas station would be. Demolished. Yeah. And then there's another property between. That parcel and, uh, the mill river. I don't recall if that parcel is proposed to be used at all or, or acquired by the town, but the idea is that Sunderland road would come from the north to the south and then take a, take a. A turn to the east toward Montague road. Okay. Either. And then come in at a tee. There's been talk about perhaps a roundabout or we, we don't know what's going to happen there. So basically we were given the instruction just to kind of ignore that. But at some point in the future, some of that land would, would, you know, obviously be taken for the, for the new right of way alignment for the road. And then maybe whatever's left. Would be. You know, form aid or whatever A and R, you know, and given back to the library parcel. We don't, we don't know yet. Okay. Yeah. Just not really part of your projects, but just wondered if that was going to intersect much man. Yeah. But yeah, there is, there is room to, um, reroute the road and, and provide additional green space. I think. Okay. Um, so other board members, Johanna, please. Thank you so much. And thanks for the presentation. I'm sorry. I couldn't make it to the site visit for this one. Um, Let's see. I have. Okay. I have questions about stormwater, um, the accessibility and then also. Just how this renovation fits in with the town's net zero energy bylaw. So I know. Um, things that are kind of peripheral to the planning boards per view, but I'm interested. So my first thought is, um, it's great that you're reducing the imper, or the impervious surfaces on the site. And I'm excited about that. But it does seem like we're missing an opportunity to potentially do even more. And when I think about the degree to which the volunteers manage the gardens on the south side of this building, I can't help but think about that. You know, I wonder if the ability to do more of a rain garden, to just capture even more of that runoff on site, rather than just directing it to the catchment basis and would be possible. So that's my first question. And, you know, whether the, the, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the question and, you know, whether the awesome volunteers who do a lot of the groundskeeping there, whether that's something that they've considered and would be interested in and able to commit to. Um, my second question has to do with, um, it's unc, who actually owns the land to the north? Cause we've talked about moving the property line, but does that actually mean acquiring more land or like, the town, the town does own both parcels right now. Okay. Um, yeah. Great. Thank you. That's helpful. Um, my third question has to do with, um, you know, just the, whether there's, whether how much you explored the ability for onsite generation of renewables. Um, I'm just thinking that the south side of the addition kind of faces up against where the old library is and whether there's the potential for rooftop solar there or whether canopy solar on the parking lot was considered at all. Um, so I'd be happy to address that. Um, we, we, we talked about that early on in the, uh, uh, early stages of the project. Um, just a little bit of, uh, clarification. This, this project is anticipated to cost just a little less than about a million, a million dollars. So it's not subject to the zero net energy by law. However, uh, we and the town are committed to trying to make this as, as efficient as possible. And so the intention is that the addition would be what I would call a zero net energy ready, meaning it would have very efficient systems, a robust envelope, good air sealing, et cetera. Um, the town, um, basically told us that if they're, if they did want this building to be zero net energy, uh, it's likely that the photovoltaic panels would be located off site. Yeah. So we didn't really explore, uh, uh, onsite locations for the panels with the understanding that they would be located off site. If they were used. Okay. That's helpful. And I know for the central Jones library renovation, it's a similar thing. Like I think they're thinking some onsite generation, but in order to actually get in that zero, they would have to do some off site. And then my last question was just, um, about the accessibility. So, you know, it's obviously great to have the addition and the existing library accessible to everyone who wants to access those resources. Um, would, would the. Does the addition itself trigger the required upgrades for the eight, like to make it ADA compliant in the rest of the building. Or is that, you know, just kind of like a, I don't know, an added benefit, or is it actually required? It is required. Um, because of the cost of the renovation versus the assessed value of the, of the property, uh, we exceed the threshold for full compliance with, uh, the architectural access board, uh, regulations, the Massachusetts regulations as well as the ADA. So the intention is that, uh, all the public spaces in this building will be fully accessible. Yeah. And that is the requirement. Yep. Excellent. Those are all my questions. Thank you so much. Uh, Johanna, did you get your first question answered? With regard to the rain garden? The rain gardens. And yeah, just the, you know, I don't know. I guess we can, I'll take that one. Okay. So this is kind of, this is Gilford mooring. I'm superintendent of public works. Um, the project is set up so that we have the least amount of disturbance on the northern part of the property. So we do have the minimal, minimal requirements for stormwater at this time. Because as we bring in the new intersection and bring in the new roadway, we actually will be making more green, like the whole section of sundrial and road from the intersection with Montague road back to the driveway with the new library. So we have the green section, the main section, and the parking area. So it's a little bit of a transition. That could be all green at some point. And some changes would be maybe done there. So you're going to see much more green coming about. And as the. It is kind of controlled by how we do the intersection alignment. So everything north of the building besides the parking area, we've laid out is subject to completely be changed by the intersection addition and rearrange that. Take care of some more stormwater stuff to give more information. We did look. We are looking at more. Permanent nicer stormwater improvements, but they're actually tied in with the intersection work. So it's almost like right now it's just a placeholder of sorts. Yes, we're trying to meet the requirements of the, of the anonymous donor who donated money for this project and get this project rolling and not have it impact. So, but I think it's a good idea to have that. So I do have a couple of questions. We'll go ahead and find the intersection work. Thank you. Thank you, Gillesford. Thank you, Hannah. Next is a Doug. Thanks Jack. And thanks, Mike and Chris. I had a couple of, couple of questions about the site. First of all. You talked about moving the property line between the two parcels. I don't know enough about. I'm curious why you don't just combine the parcels and call it a day. There were two trains of thought on that. One option was what you just mentioned. And then the other option is what we did is recreated the lot line. Either way, when the future roadway project happens, there's going to be another shift in the property. It could be, as I mentioned, some of that will have to be taken for the right of way of the road realignment. And the remaining might be combined with the library parcel and the library parcel might ultimately become a little larger or something, or the lot line we're creating now might disappear and or be moved to the north further. So we don't know what's going to happen, but at the time we thought it would be, we talked to Rob Mora and we were thought, if we have to move the lot line, we're pretty close to 12,000 anyway. Why don't we just go ahead and move it another, whatever it was, six or eight feet to the north and make the lot 12,000. At the time, we thought that was a great idea. We didn't really need to be at 12,000 for the minimum lot size because that's a non-applicable requirement for this use in this zone. But I guess either way, if we had combined both lots into one big lot, it would have had to be cut down in the future anyway. So no matter what happens, that lot line might end up moving again in some fashion. Okay, so my second question, I guess is related to something we talked about yesterday, which was how landlocked this parcel is currently. And if we get more than the nine or 10 cars that could be accommodated in the new layout, we're gonna have people parking either across Sunderland Road in the town school lot or across Montague Road in the commercial lot and having to cross either of these streets potentially in the evening, that kind of thing. So I guess the question really is for Guilford and maybe Chris, what is the, is there an anticipated timeline for the reconfiguration of these intersections? Yes, yes, there is. We're trying to decide whether to start the public process of regrouping where we are with this intersection either this fall or waiting until next spring to do it. So the actual discussion will probably start within the next year. And then under that timeline, when would the new road layout occur? Be ready. If we keep with that timeline and we'd be two years out from starting construction. So it'd be another six months before, so we're talking maybe about three years. Anywhere from two and a half, the three years being done, yes. Okay. Complete. All right. And then a question for Jack and Chris. You know, it was nice to see the building addition and the building design. Is that really part of a site plan review or should I leave my finicky architect questions about the addition for something offline with Chris? May I answer that? Sure. So anything outside the building is your purview. The exterior of the building, the site work, drainage, anything like that. So you're certainly welcome to comment on the building design, exterior building design. All right. So then I will simply, I'll conclude by saying, I would support further study of the color of the addition and how much it relates or is integrated with the original building. Thank you. Thank you. And Andrew. Thank Jack. Also, I wanna say, Doug, thanks for stepping in and giving the site review. I was looking for my notebook, which I found. The only things that we had mentioned, and I don't know if there's a whole group, I know Mike and I had a couple of questions on the side was, I had asked whether there were any plans for noise attenuation. One of the things we noticed was just how loud the site was with, you know, the traffic on both streets and with it being there a lot. I'd love to know, I think Mike, you said, Chris would be the better person to answer that, but I'd love to know if there are any thoughts or plans relative to noise attenuation. Chris, do you wanna respond to that maybe? I would be happy to. I'm assuming, Andrew, you mean inside the building? Well, I think inside now, so this actually started with, I was wondering whether there might be some opportunity to put outdoor seating for people to be able to enjoy the space. So yeah, I think both angles, so like from an outside perspective, but then also relative to the new envelope of the building is how will that, you have a meeting space in there, how will you be able to manage the quite loud noise that seems to be in the area? Okay, well, so starting with the outside of the building, I think I would go back to what Guilford was saying about the realignment of Sunderland Road and what I would say are fairly substantial changes to the surrounding site. I do think that if, well, when that realignment occurs and the section of Sunderland Road just to the west of the proposed building, when that section goes away, certainly that side of the building is going to be less subject to the traffic noise because all the traffic will be going on Modigy Road. So there will be, I think, a substantial change in the noise from that direction. That might be a suitable area for seating because it would be on the quiet side of the building, but I do think that that's something that is beyond the current project. But I think my guess is it will be looked at as part of the larger project, the realignment project. And when it comes to the inside of the building, I think the envelope that we're intending, as I said, it will be very energy efficient. The air ceiling will be very good. We'll be using triple glazed windows. And I think that that exterior assembly will provide a fair amount of sound attenuation for that exterior noise. We will certainly, as part of the next phase of design, we will certainly look at what sort of a noise reduction coefficient that wall has and try to take into consideration the exterior noise to make that interior space as quiet and comfortable as practical. Very good. And then I had another question, which was just around the overall, the condition of the site in terms of the environmental impact, I'm just wondering from the way this project is being funded from an anonymous donor, which is fantastic. I guess how clean do you feel that the current site is, the current parking field, which had been a filling station in the garage? Are there any concerns about cost overrun? I'll take that question. So when the town purchased the gas station, we made sure all the environmental investigations were done and it came back with a clean bill of health. The gas tanks were removed probably six or eight years ago and that was cleaned up. There was no spills found when they took out the gas tanks. So except for the machine of oil on the walls inside the actual gas station, it's a clean site especially the site we're working on right now. Excellent. And then the one other thing that we had just commented on and during the site visit was that the area can be particularly dark and that there were some questions around what the lighting plan might look like to ensure that this is a safe location. Yeah, I forgot to mention the lighting. We touched on that at the site visit, but along the new sidewalk that runs east-west, we do have two pedestrian scale lights proposed. They are 15 feet tall. We're using one of the town standards for pedestrian lighting, 15 foot tall with an acorn style fixture on top. So we have really good lighting along the walkway and entry to the building and that light does spill out onto the sidewalks at Montague and Sunderland side. But I think you were right that it seems like there's not many street lights. If you're traveling southward toward Pine Street and Meadow or whatever, it seems like it's rather dark and we've heard people comment that it is dark there. So I think that eventually something should be, I don't know if it's flashers at the crosswalks or that type of thing, but ultimately something might happen at the roadways to further illuminate this area with pedestrians potentially being attracted, more pedestrians being attracted to this site. All right, anything further, Andrew? No, okay, thanks. Like Chris, you have your hand up. Yeah, I wanted to respond to Johanna's question about the property line and where it's set. And I think it's kind of a floating issue and we won't really know for a while. Until the ANR plan is done and then eventually another ANR plan is gonna be done. This is a moving target, but one of the issues that we've been looking at is preserving the non-conformity of the lot to the north of the library. Right now it's not conforming us to lot coverage and that could be important depending on what's proposed there for the future. So I just wanted to mention that. All right, that's good to know. Tom? Hey, thank you. Yeah, I was gonna respond to, in regard to some of the lighting and safety issues that I think Mike covered. I mean, but maybe it is a question for Guilford and Chris in terms of what we can do at those intersections, those crosswalks and whether flashing lights for pedestrians or something can be done because there are fast moving cars there. There's not a lot of sight line around the building. So people do move through there. And again, there's not a lot of overhead lighting at those places. So until the change in the road, I do think we need to really consider ramping up visibility beyond just the signs that are there and whether they're blinking signs or whether they're pedestrian interactive lights. But I do believe something needs to happen. If we are not accommodating what I believe to be enough parking on the actual site, I think we need to go above and beyond that to make sure that there's a safe passage across that street. The second thing is just to follow up with Doug's comment. This is something I raised at the last meeting from the design view board. The black and white elevations of the building, Doug, if you take a look at those, speak to a kind of aesthetic and architectural consistency that doesn't present itself in the actual renderings due to those kind of color changes. So there was a conversation about how those seem to render a kind of, I think they're in our packet, aren't they? The black and white elevations. But anyway, if you can take a look at those, it's helpful as a reference to how those two buildings relate to each other. Yeah, I have it in my packet, but... Tom, I'm scrolling through. Is this the one you mean? No. It's a few sheets before that one. Yeah, it might be. But anyway, you can see the scale of the shingles and how things line up and the moldings and it works really well. Keep going. It does become a color issue. And so, yeah, there's the drawings. It's a side view. So 822 is what we're looking at, the one before this. So that's just in response to Doug and I'm kind of on the same page with him in terms of how we explore that. And another comment I brought up at the Design Review Board meeting, so I just reiterated here since we're talking about it. It was my opinion that the two oversized windows that exist on the West facade here in the lower right window pane, or the sort of double windows in the lower right, and they also appear on the North facade, felt out of scale compared to the other windows and they didn't feel, I felt like there was enough geometry in the building to make large windows without making oversized windows that feel proportionally incorrect. So it was a comment to sort of re-explore that. Anyway, those are just exterior design notes that I had brought to that meeting, so I figured I should raise those here as well. But otherwise, I think everything is great. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Janet. Thank you. I think this is a lovely addition to the library and the neighborhood I think is gonna really enjoy the new building. I think the new building really matches the original building and enhances it. And at the same time, it feels very current. And so I think you pulled off a neat trick with that or maybe a trifecta. So I have concerns which have just been voiced about there not being enough parking and also about just how people are gonna move, get to the building and the safety of the different crosswalks and things like that. And so I wondered, so one of the things is the speeds on Montague Street are pretty fast. And then there's this little crosswalk that I think was put there because of the old entrance of the library. And I'm wondering if that crosswalk could move to kind of near the lighting and then the new entrance. So or using raised crosswalks as a way of slowing people down. On the other side, I just think those two crosswalks are really hard to see to begin with. And if you're in a car, that is such a flunky intersection. There's so much going on. You're really looking at where your car is, what cars are coming at you and different things like that in two or three streets coming at you in cars. It took me a long time to notice there even is a crosswalk, those crosswalks. And so I just wanna, my question is, can we get some more parking on the site? Could there be some parking spaces on the side where you're closing off access to Montague Street? Could you move the swales closer to the garage and put some parking there? And just to have more safer and more on site parking. I think about people in strollers crossing those things, crossing the street to get to the library. I think, and I have a question. I think that the schoolhouse, the old schoolhouse still has a headstart there. So there must be people, little kids crossing into the library. So I would love to see more on site parking. And if the parking, the missing parking is at the headstart or the old schoolhouse, I'd like to see a really safe way for people to get back and forth there. Like people who don't walk quickly and Doug had pointed out during the site visit, that community space will be used by lots of people at night and seniors. And so 10 spaces for a building, a room that can take 40 or 50 people is just not gonna be adequate. And so I'd like to see some more parking somewhere and a way for people to safely move back and forth. And so I'd love to see some different options when we come back and talk about this again. But I think it's a fantastic ad. I think it's gonna really be a great community space for people to use. I just want them to use it safely. Thanks. Mike, do you wanna respond to the parking? Well, I think that- Other than what you've said. It wouldn't be difficult to add parking to the North and basically create what would be a double loaded parking lot. I think that within the budget, thinking about the budget and how things have progressed and there was an initial estimate done during the DD phase or a schematic design phase, I should say. And we're kind of, we are a little bit conscious of that as every project has to face, budget concerns, but it would not be difficult to remove more of the paving that's at the filling, former gas station now and add some parking. We could certainly look at that and- Can you just move this well? Can you keep this well? Right. This way I would move to the North. Okay. But I think that the safety on the streets is, I understand your concern. We did kind of have a brief conversation at the site visit about that. And that they, we were kind of looking at and trying to see if there were any street lights on both sides. And I don't think there are any until you get up to, toward Meadow and Pine, for instance. And then going in the opposite direction, there's like the plaza, Hillside Plaza has some lighting that faces toward, away from the street. I don't think I really noticed any street lighting on Montague Road to the North. It might not be until you get to the bridge. So that's quite a distance away. It is a tough thing. Montague Road is a state-controlled road. So changes have to be, when the road realignment goes through too, there's gonna also have to be DOT permitting and perhaps there's an opportunity there to make improvements for traffic calming and things like that in this area when that, as part of that road realignment project, I would hope Sunderland Road is town-controlled. Ultimately, that road might disappear or to the North of the library and become green space or something. And I think that's an opportunity to really create some more pedestrian-oriented access back and forth, et cetera. And you'd kind of end up with another sweetster park scenario in this location. I have a question. It might be for like Guilford Moring. So my kids used to use that, what is now the Korean church for Boy Scouts. And I didn't, you know, so we were parking in that parking lot at the library. I didn't even realize there was a crosswalk there and I was using it at night. And so we were just crossing the road, you know, from the parking lot across the street. It seemed really dangerous to me. And so I'm wondering, is there a way to move that crosswalk and make it so it's kind of, it's not just painted, but it's like fluorescent at night so people could see that more. I mean, is there just some way to, you know, make them more visible at night and maybe move that one a little further north? I mean, that might be a Guilford Moring question because I know that's one of these. Yeah, well, Guilford has his hand up or did have his hand up, but Guilford, okay. Yeah. So two things. One, making the crosswalk lighter now, we have to talk to Mass DOT, and it is Mass DOTs. And they actually, when they resurfaced Montague Road, they came back in and they put in ADA compliant crosswalk or ramps and crosswalks and every one of the existing, this was an existing, like you say, it was an existing crosswalk. We can talk to them and ask them what they can do. And in our plan, when we do the intersection work, you're gonna see lighting improvements that go between the two intersections, which will be the new Central and Montague Road intersection and the intersection was Pine and Meadow and, or Pleasant Street. So that whole corridor will be actually relit and readjusted when we do that. And yes, that's two and a half to three years away. But we can talk to Mass DOT about what they can do now. In the parking situation, there's only one little piece of the parking lot that's going away right now, the asphalt, we're putting the swale in, there's enough room and people actually do when they have meetings and stuff, they park all over the paved area of the gas station. That area is gonna stay until we start doing the road work. So for the next year or year and a half, two years, that'll be available parking for people who are coming to the library at that time. So you're gonna have 10 designated spaces and you'll have a bunch of fill-in spaces which people make quite well in Amherst. They make their own little spaces all over the place. So that will stay until we actually start doing the road project. And then the road project will add more lined and designated spaces to the parking lot when we're done. That's the goal. Okay, so that, okay. That's helpful. Maria. Thanks for the presentation. That was really informative. It looks like a great project. I'm really amazed that the budget, you're saying it will cost because I have houses that are approaching that, that should not be right now. That was really helpful to hear about the paving who's staying and so that kind of ties to my question about lighting, I know you touched on it and I cannot find exactly where the light poles are located that you're proposing on L107. I can see, you know, the numbers. So I'm trying to find the highest numbers and see where they are. Is there another drawing that shows exactly where the light? Yeah, it would be the last drawing in the site plan package. No, I'm going the wrong way. Yeah, right there. If we can zoom in. Yeah, I know these photometric drawings are kind of hard to read because there's so many numbers all over the place. There's a number 15 next to each light pole and it's kind of a double circle. Yeah. Oh, where the letter at is the sort of A and at. Whoops. Okay. Is that too big? Even bigger. More bit, okay. One more time maybe. So if you go, if you are at the porch entry of the addition and you walk out directly to the left side towards Sunday road, you'll see a little double circle along the edge of the, oops, along the edge of the sidewalk. Let's try to draw something on that. I think Chris is. Whoops. My screen got shifted, it looks like. Is it where the little at symbol is? There's an at and a 15 foot. Yes, it says yes. That's it. 15 foot. There's only two of them right now by the... Right, there's one to the left and then one over toward where the benches are located. And then are there any in the soffit under the sort of entryway? Chris, I believe that there's probably some type of porch light there. Downlights? Yeah, yes. We do have some downlights in that entry porch that will illuminate that entire entry out to the new sidewalk as well. Because I just wonder, I mean, I really hope that during the night meetings, maybe most people are parking in that spillover sort of town property to the north. And then that brings to mind, is there enough lighting in the parking area for people to safely get from that zone to the door to the building entry rather than deal with the state road on the right and Sunderland, which might change in the future. So if most of the people are gonna be accessing the site from on the same block, basically, I would just, yeah, I wanna make sure you guys have considered safety and that way as far as lighting. I won't touch on the other things that people already mentioned. So my other point is kind of silly and small, but the screen fencing that's around the mechanical system, those two rectangles that are at the west side of the building, is that just for like sound or are you gonna tie those? It looks like it's just sort of standard screens. Are you gonna tie that into the architectural language later or just use that? It's on 0105, the screen fence. Well, right now it's a standalone. It's not tied back into the building corner or anything like that. Oh, it's not like an L-shaped fence, it's just like a single- No, I think it's just this, I have to hold on a sec, let me, I'm looking at my- I'm not going the wrong way. Whoops. It's hard to tell, it's really tiny. You have to zoom my- I can speak to that a little bit. And the- Yeah, there's the fence, yep. The intention is that it would be a wooden fence with plantings in front of it. So I think our concept of this is that the fence would provide screening from the outdoor mechanical equipment. It would also contain some of the materials for mechanical noise which shouldn't be too bad. But then in front of that fence will be some plantings that eventually will be the dominant feature, not the fence. But we can certainly look at the possibility of tying the fence design into the language of the existing building and the addition as well. Okay, yeah. So I'd say the only sort of more bigger issue is yeah, the lighting for any kind of nighttime events. I don't know if we had any information about the library's events. Everyone keeps talking about nighttime events, but do we have any indication of like hours of use or anything like planned programming or when it would be open or is that for later as well? I think that there are ongoing discussions about that. To be honest, I don't think we've gotten far enough to really know what the hours would be or what the protocols would be if people did want to use that community space outside of the library hours. Okay. But Guilford, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that that will be a discussion that will continue as we move into the subsequent design phases. Good. Christy, I have your hand up. Yeah, I wanted to note that somewhere on the plan, it says that that fence is white vinyl. And that would probably be something that people might not like, so. Right, we'll square that away. You might say that on the detail or something. Thank you. Any other comments from the board, questions? Again, we're gonna be meeting on the project when more information comes along. I see none. So we can open up to the public. Yeah, three minutes. So if you can state your name and your address, and I see Ken Rosenthal. Ken Rosenthal. Hi, Ken. Hi, everybody. Hi, everybody. I'm Ken Rosenthal, Sunset Avenue. I have three quick ones. One is that south-facing roof on the new addition of the standing steam roof, is that compatible for possibility of future solar panels there? Unless you tell me that the existing library would block out the sun and not permit any sun there. It might be a place where the town would wanna put solar panels. That's the first one. It's a comment and you don't have to answer. Just think about it. The other one, I'm a little concerned about the connector being a flat roof if it really is a flat roof, because it looks like a collection of snow they're waiting to happen, sliding down from the new south-facing roof of the new building and having the existing building blocking the sun from melting that snow and ice that collects on the collector roof. I suspect that they're at the joints between the new building and the joint between the old building of the collector, the future leaks that would be coming. And I just hope you could think about that. And the third thing is the property line. Why not move the property line since it has to be moved anyway to the far side of the parking area and just be done with it now? I hate to say this, Guilford, but we know that sometimes things don't happen as planned and we don't know for certain that we know we almost 99% certain that you're gonna have to be doing something in the future, but what if it doesn't happen the way you plan? We might as well have an integration of library and parking lot and be done with it now until such time, maybe in the long-distance future as you do make the changes. As long as you're gonna make the change, move that property line to the far side of the parking lot. It's gonna be an integration anyway. Thank you for listening to my comments and I appreciate very much what you're doing. This looks like a terrific project. Thank you. And I'm sorry, what did you say your street address was? It's 53 Sunset Avenue. So we'll let Guilford respond after the public comment period here. Thank you. And Mary? Hello, Mary. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, I'm in address. Okay, good. Mary Sarah, I live on Pine Street. I'm a great user of the library and I think the thing that I wanna especially stress is safety. We had to really push to get the stake to put that crosswalk back in. Kathy, Shane, our district one counselor really pushed to have that happen because they had completely neglected to put it back in. It's not in a good place. But so I want everyone to understand how many people use that library walking to it and riding bikes. North Amherst neighborhood is very filled with people who walk and ride bikes and push strollers and people going to the survival center who are also walking along that road. So I want really good attention to lighting and also attention to plantings because right now, as you drive up Montague Road and you're crossing that intersection to get onto Sunderland Road, often the bushes grow up to a point where you can't see down Sunderland Road. And last year, we spent quite a bit of time trying to get those bushes hacked back. And I think Nancy D'Amato does a wonderful job on the garden and I'm not questioning that. She said she put the bushes in so that children who were visiting the library would see it as a barrier and wouldn't run into Sunderland Road. So the purpose of those bushes is a very good one. They're just too high. I drive a Honda Fit, there's no way I can see until I get right out into the intersection if cars are coming onto Sunderland Road. So that's just safety should be a real concern. And I love, I love everybody, pretty much everyone I've talked to in North Amherst loves this idea of this addition and the way Cune Riddle has thought about it. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Northy Piamp is next. Hi Dorothy. Hi, how are you? Just want to say I love the plan for the library expansion. I think it's wonderful. But I think a meeting room which is extremely important for the North Amherst community which has up to 50 people at a meeting needs to have 25 dedicated parking places in a well-lit lot. People come at night. There's no way that I would ever want to even walk across either of those crosswalks at night. I find it challenging driving through there. So I think if you just bite the bullet and put the parking lot in now so that it's clear and people can really enjoy coming to visit this beautiful library and feeling safe. Thank you. Great, thank you. Kathy Schoen. Hi Kathy. Hi, I just want to, I think Gilford is still on. I just want to respond on parking because one of the things with this rerouting of the road at some point, there's also been a suggestion. There's the old school building across on Sunderland that there might be parking off that edge and you would be able to walk to the library across the green space. So just in terms of maybe there's a short-term solution because there is the whole gas station parking lot right now. That has a lot, but just trying to think of this is, there's a building and North Amherst has not had a community room. We haven't had a bathroom and we haven't had a lift that would get us up four steps. So this is such a big change from before. It's, I wouldn't want to halt this with just cars because a lot of people walk to the library. It's the other thing about up here. I mean, they're coming from the apartment buildings they're coming coming from co-housing. So just there is this in the future something is going to happen to change Sunderland road and there'll be green space. And at one point, Gilbert, one of your diagrams showed some parking up there. It was never clear to me what was going to be up there, but I just want to offer that. That's it. Great. Thank you. So we can go back to the response. Sounds like Guilford, if you want to. I think you answered some of these, but maybe another time will provide more clarification. Yeah, the parking is really beyond the scope of the gift that was given to the town. And so that's why the concentration is more on the library, the building. Yes, we know there has to be some work done in the area and there needs to be lighting work done, but the gift kind of leaves that to the town to do and to make the project keep moving for the donation, we kind of have to separate the two apart right now. So Chris, with some of these things that are coming up, is this maybe a situation where we can put a condition and revisit, revisit, you know, in future years? I think that the, you could put a condition on it. I would have to think about what the wording is going to be, but this public process for the intersection is going to be really public. So, you know, everybody here will be able to participate in it and have comments about it. You know, I guess you could put a condition on that says something like once the intersection is designed or installed or something that we would revisit the design of the parking lot, that's a possibility. You'd have to think about that. Yeah, I see one handed Hilda Greenbaum. State your name and address, please. Hi Hilda. Yeah, Hilda Greenbaum, Montague Road. I just wanted to say that one of the last things of town meeting did as I remember was put in parking and et cetera at the cow pasture across the street. And so that's another place where people can put their cars on tundle and road is in that cow pasture. You know what I'm talking about? Where people used to play baseball and then I think it became a cricket field to the north of the North Amherst School. Did that actually get installed? I don't know if it got installed but we voted for it. So that's another option for more cars. And that was pretty big because it had to fit a couple of baseball teams. Okay, thank you Hilda. I think we're kind of can wrap this up and it will have to, will any other responses from the applicants? Okay, all right, we're good. So we just, someone would move to, are they gonna propose to continue the hearing? How are we gonna do this, Chris? Someone needs to move to continue the hearing and then we need to decide what date we're gonna continue it to. And that would be, I guess a question for the applicant. When do they think they can get back to you with the questions that you've asked? Okay, Mike or Chris? There's some minor things to change from the development impact report, I think, but those, there's not much there, I don't think. There's the park. Some of these questions, there's been a lot of comment about parking lighting and safety and to be honest with you, I'm not sure what we can do right now. I mean, I agree that it'd be great to provide more parking. It'd be great to be able to provide some lighting on the roads that's kind of out of the scope of the project, you know. So I'm not really sure how to respond to that if we have an answer for you. I think this is kind of like little steps at a time as kind of Guilford alluded to. I'm not sure. I mean, if this were continued in a month, I mean, we would be able to bring the plans, I think, up to the level that we can and to a reasonable stage. And I guess I'll let Chris Farley comment. He felt that was adequate time to address some of the architectural comments that came out. That's exactly what I was gonna say, Mike. I think that in a month, four weeks, a month's time, we will be able to address some of the comments and questions that have been asked from the board and also by the public and then be able to provide updated drawings, updated documentation. Well, I guess to be clear, I think we could provide those updated documents and drawings for a hearing that would occur in a month. Maybe we can meet with Guilford or some representatives and I don't know if there's some discussion we can have about possible ways we can address some parking. Guilford did mention some things tonight, but maybe there's some other things. I didn't know about the town meeting thing with the parking in the old baseball field. It seems that's kind of like a expensive proposition because that field is down four, five, six feet from Sunderland Road, I think, isn't it? There's quite an embankment there. So access is an issue. But maybe we can develop a list of potential remedies to some of the parking issues by that within a month also. Okay, so we're looking at the April 21st, Chris, is that? Yes, I would caution against that meeting because I think that may be the meeting where we have a big new building for the downtown and that would be hard to have this meeting and that meeting at the same time. So you could try for May 5th or the board could meet on the 14th. You could add an extra meeting on the 14th if you wanted to or you could meet May 5th. Of April? 14th of April, you have a meeting on the 7th of April which we've already got things scheduled for and then the 21st of April is probably when this big new building is gonna come in. So between that, there's the 14th of April, there's also the 28th of April. Those are not typical planning board meeting dates but you could do that or you could wait till May 5th which is the first meeting in May. Chris, do we need to hear from any other boards before our decision? Yes, you do and those are gonna be, they'll be holding their meetings in March. There's one on the 24th and one on the 25th, the Historical Commission and the Conservation Commission. So by April, we should have comments from them. So... Jack, Mr. Marshall also has his hand raised. Oh, sure, Doug. Well, part of what I was gonna ask Janet just asked but in the context of that, you know, it feels like the reason we're, the primary reason we're continuing this is because Chris Brestrup has told us that there's some other boards that need to report back before we should close the hearing. So I don't feel like we heard a lot of public or board comment that the design team can really respond to just mostly because it's kind of related to the town's initiative to reconfigure the roads. And so given that that's really not the design team's problem, are there, I mean, did I miss something or are there issues that we as a board have and that the public raised that the design team could, in fact, address? You know what you could do, if you're gonna... It sounds like we could, you know, tell the design team thanks and come back, you know, on the 7th and spend a fairly short amount of time with the reports from the other town boards and town engineer or whoever and just address any issues they raise and do it on the 7th. Thank you. So Chris, do you have anything else to add? And, but we're still looking for a date. You have two things on the 7th. One is the bangs ramp and work around the bolt woodwalk which isn't a big deal. And the other one is a tree hearing on Flat Hills Road. So you could do it on the 7th if the design team feels that they would be ready by then. I think that given the discussion about dates thus far, if we could schedule it for the 7th, you know, we will provide some of the modifications which I think are fairly straightforward that we've discussed for that meeting. And Doug, thank you for kind of pointing that out. I appreciate that. Very good. So this April 7th it is. Pat, Jack, Janet has her hand right. Oh, she did. Oh, you're on mute, Janet. So I think I'd like to see some parking options. I just think there's not sufficient parking. And I want a parking plan that, you know, gets people, the people, you know, is enough parking for the people using the library and they can get there safely. So if it can be on the site, that's better. If it's in the other parking lot, that could be a plan too. But I just, I feel like the parking isn't really quite satisfied for me. Chris Brestrup, I mean, I think we could look at the former gas station parcel. I mean, since it is town owned and attached to the library parcel, you know, we could take a look at that and figure out how many spaces we could get in there and even line it or something if, you know, need be. That would certainly help bring more marked parking closer to this, you know, this facility. And, you know, we'd hate to see anything kind of hold this up in, you know, this, I think that as people pointed out, this is a really wonderful project. And, you know, I think it was a real boon to the, you know, North Amherst neighborhood here. So, you know, I concur, I'd like to come back on the seventh and hopefully we have enough information that will, you know, address the parking concerns. And, you know, certainly in the future, there's gonna be more studies and, you know, concepts and ideas related to the street, road realignment. So, you know, there's gonna be further evaluation and investigations into, you know, parking and so forth. Kind of dynamic aspects. Yeah. In the future. So. Good to me. All right, so the seventh still is good. Mike. Yeah, if I, yes, I feel that's good. Okay. All right, Doug. I'd like the move we continue this hearing to April 7th. Very good. Any seconds? Second. All right. That was Tom. And any further discussion? Do we need to say what time, Chris? You could say 6.35 because the other things haven't been advertised yet. All right. It's 6.35. Any further discussion? I see none. Okay. Let's do a roll call. Maria. Yes. Andrew. Hi. Doug. Hi. Tom. Hi. Janet. Yes. And Johanna. Hi. And myself as a yes. So thank you very much. Right, Chris and Guilford. Thank, thanks for your comments. Yeah, thank you very much. Yep. Really appreciate it. We'll see you on the 7th. All right. Have a good night. Thanks. Thank you. So at this point, we do have a few more items. It's 8.45. I'm going to discuss the conference of housing policy, the Palmer Art Village intersection, and then Chris is going to update us with the CRC. So we got those three main things. I'd like to take a five minute break. So they also see Mr. Marshall as his hand raised. Is that just residual? I think it's residual. My apologies. Okay. So 8.40. When are we coming back, Jack? 8.50. I'm just sitting on the other side of the room. But I'm okay. So. It's 8.53. Okay. So we're back from a short recess and we are onto old business. And the first item is review of the comprehensive housing policy. Chris, you want to give us a little update on that? And I think they're meeting, CRC's meeting next week or town council? CRC is meeting on Tuesday and they have two main topics. One is the housing policy. And the other one is the zoning priorities, some of the zoning priorities. So I think they're going to be discussing the housing policy for one hour. And they're hoping to kind of get to the end of their review. I don't know if they'll get to the end of it by Tuesday. But anyway, we've put the comprehensive housing policy on the agenda for the planning board a few times and we haven't really had an opportunity to discuss it in public. So if you would like to discuss it tonight, you could do that. If not, you could send me your individual comments and I can pass them along to the comprehensive, to the community resources committee, CRC. So I would think that we at least have brief comments from the board. I know I have some, I'm losing here things. Okay, back up. All right, Doug. Yeah, the last time we met, I thought you wanted comments by the end of March. And so I have procrastinated, I suppose. But so do you want comments by next Tuesday? And if so, I'll meet that deadline. No, I think the end of March is okay. The CRC said, I think they gave us a target date of April 2nd for us to submit comments. So if you get your comments to me, your individual comments to me before then, I can put them together and send them to the CRC by April 2nd. Thank you. So I have no comments this evening to share. Okay, I'll go through mine real quick. I mean, just very briefly. And I think the policy needs sort of definitions section early on because there's a lot of terms that, wait, what examples I got? Adaptive reuse and just the supplemental dwelling units, cottages versus congregate housing. So there's kind of some parochial terms there that they just, and some of them are covered in footnotes, but it just seems like a little definitions section might be useful. And probably the biggest one is the term affordability, because I know in the past, I think, Maria's been very good about affordability with the big A and then affordability with the little A. And they do speak to that in footnote one on page three, kind of explaining that, but it's just not clear. And I looked and there's a market rate affordable housing versus affordable housing that meets affordable housing laws. So for me, I just found that kind of confusing throughout the document. And I wondered about vacancy rate in town. It seems like an important metric. Is that measured? If so, how and how frequently? And then I think climate sustainability resiliency is so important, but for this document, it just doesn't seem to rise to the level that it has been presented in there. They should be in there, sure, we can't forget about them, but I just think the priorities should be at a lower level compared to all the other big nuggets that the policy is trying to take care of. And I just figured like a lot of the codes, zoning and building codes kind of will take care of that. By organically. And yeah, and that's those are main thing. And I didn't really say a concept of market supply demand being presented in there. If we get more housing, does that not affect the affordability in terms of having too much supply well, the demand decreases, the cost should decrease, but is that a concept that actually works or not? And I didn't really see that, I didn't see them speak to that. So I think, and then they didn't mention habitat for humanity, I know you have mentioned that. How does that, it's a main program I wonder how that would fit in there. But that's pretty much all I had and I will send it to you. Maria. I kind of like Doug thought it was toward the end of March. So I didn't come through, but I did read it briefly. My only question is, who are the comments on the red in that side? Is that someone from CRC or town council or I think it's both CRC and town council. And is it like, is it just one person's train of thought or is it something they've commiserated or talked about together? I think it's things that have come up to either board members, council members or CRC members and they have shared those ideas with the chair of the CRC who is compiling all of the comments. So some of the questions and comments came from Kathy Shane. I remember that, I think there was something Dorothy Pam and others. And so they're kind of taking all of those in. So I gave you the redlined, what is it, track changes version. Yeah. So is that the kind of stuff you want from us? Those kinds of like, sentence by sentence? No, I think, well, I mean, you can do that if you want to, but I would like to have a kind of overall reaction to. Okay. I mean, I think I didn't actually read those just to get through it. I just kind of gave it my own look, but so there's probably some redundancy and maybe none at all. Anything else Maria? No, okay. Tom? Yeah. I did give it a read through. I read through the old one and then I read through this one just in the last, I guess, 24 hours or 48 hours. One of the things that just keeps coming up and I'm gonna raise it here and I'm gonna sort of, I'll put some notes together and something that I think we need to be cognizant of is there a lot of situations in this particular document where the things that we really need to be doing are recommended, but even in the comments that says I'm on page six of this document for a more diverse home ownership opportunities and it says any policy or regulation ideas for achieving this question mark. And there are multiple occasions in this document where statements like this are being made, utilize policy, regulation and such and such to do such and such, but there's actually no mechanisms to do those things and that also comes with particularly the areas that we're talking about funding. We should support this, we should have funding sources for this and funding sources for that, but we don't and what is our mechanism to get those funding sources and how do we raise that money? How do we actually, how do we enact these changes that we think need to happen? And so I guess that my biggest concern is that there's a lot of words, but there's not a lot of commitment behind those words and that's really problematic if we actually wanna make the kinds of change that we wanna make in this particular place. So we can change zoning, but if we're not getting the right people into those houses because they can't afford it because we don't have the funding behind it, that's problematic. So I think we can't do one and not the other. So we need to make sure that this document includes actual solutions to some of these bigger problems than just the zoning issues that we're dealing with. And in that case, Jack, just increasing volume will have an effect on supply and demand, but again, who are the people that are first in line to get those houses when they open up or to own them or to rent them and how do we get them into those places in the first place? So I think we need to find those kinds of solutions in here that aren't here now to bring that to the, in my notes, to the board. And you are working on policy, right? Shalini and I are ad hoc, trying to put together some longer term strategies for what a community process would look like. And again, these are things that we're just trying to work on in the background. And then obviously documents like this raise those specific questions about, what equity means if we're actually talking about equity. It's not just about being inclusive. It's about making up for lost equity over generations. It's about recognizing people's current position and future position. So there's a lot of moving parts to it. So I don't think there's an easy answer. And I think that's why part of it is community engagement that Shalini's been trying to, we've been working on a questionnaire that's gonna go out to the public and things like that to try to gather information about people's real world experiences and see how those can actually inform the decisions we make in the future in adverse. And not just assume that we understand those positions. It's a really difficult nut to crack, so to speak. And we're not the only... I mean, the easy nut is that we're asking for dollars and we don't know where the dollars are coming from, right, that they haven't been committed. I think we want to make that change. The easy question is, well, let's put the money there. Let's figure out where that money comes from and how it gets applied. And that's not complicated. How it delegated and provided to people is a whole other process. But actually finding that money and putting it isn't super complicated. It's just making decisions to do such a thing and make that commitment. Thank you. Doug? Whoop, you're muted. Okay, now I'm off. Yes. I wanted to see if Chris could provide us with a clean copy that doesn't have all the red lining on it. I find a clean copy a little bit easier to wade through and react to and realize what I'm thinking as I'm reading it. I will ask Mandy, Joe, for a clean copy. Like a Word document versus Adobe? Well, you know, if you give me a Word document, I'll do the line by line thing, which I probably shouldn't, it sounds like. You can do the line by line if you want to. That's what I did when I went through it. Yeah, well, so, I mean, a Word copy's fine if you want to do that. Or a clean PDF would probably be adequate too. And then, Jack, I was puzzled by your comment about the sustainability and its relationship to this, because I view the distribution of our housing as a fundamental sustainability issue in that probably a third of our carbon emissions as a society are related to vehicular transportation. And if we want to reduce that, one way is to live closer together where we can all walk or bicycle or take the bus. So, you know, I'll be looking for that when I review it. Yeah, I knew I'd get in trouble for saying anything about that, but it's just, you know, they have high priority, medium and low. And I just, and again, for me, the priority, but you're no doubt. And I think that's where the zoning codes and the building codes would be taking that into consideration. Well, maybe one thing that I could ask then is how does CRC or the council view, what is their view of the purpose of this document? I thought it was sort of a policy statement that would guide their support or not support for zoning changes and other sort of closer to the ground changes. I don't, I am not able to answer that question, but I can try to find out. Yeah, I think we should all be aware, we should all be pretty clear about what it's for. I mean, they do say at the charter, it was something that was built into the charter. And then I'm sure that, you know, John Hornick and the housing trust, you know, want the backup and guidance as well. Okay, if the charter requires it, we shouldn't spend very much time on it unless somebody's actually gonna use it. It can get created and shelved and we met the charter requirement and we can move on. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a five year thing. It's supposed to be a living document. I think that's what I read, but Janet. So just to answer Doug's question, usually policy, like if a government agency has policy, you gotta follow it. And so, you know, you have your statute and you have your policy, you follow your statute, you implement your policy, and then you might have guidance and that's a little vaguer kind of thing. So I've a sort of assumed that it's a good question because I wondered are they thinking that once they adopt this housing policy, all the town has to follow it, the town hall departments, the boards and the committees. And I don't know if that's clear. I'm looking at it sort of as like you're a federal agency or this is the policy and the statute and you just implement it. And so I don't know if they're seeing it that way. That's an excellent question. So I had like a bunch of things and part of it was like, as I was thinking about this policy, I think that you could kind of almost read this and not think like, I think the fundamental issues for Amherst is that we're a college town or a university town and that when John Hornick and Steve Judge is a judge from the ZBA, they made some comments in December and they were saying, the elephant in the room is students because the students drive the housing market. A lot of us are here because of the academic things and it creates a lot of huge richness in the community. It creates a lot of housing problems. And so I think that the document needs to focus on the fact that we're a college or a university town and really that should be the focus of a lot of the analysis. And then I also agree that, like I thought nothing in the document really addresses the housing demand and it just assumes there's this constant demand and then we're just gonna keep producing units, but it's not clear that we're gonna achieve the goals that we want, either lower prices or more diverse opportunities for people to buy homes, especially groups that have been excluded. And so I think that has to be kind of addressed head on and kind of related to that. I was hoping to see like a goal or an objective to talk about how to increase the utilization of existing housing with or without small scale production. And so there's lots of ways people, they have a accessory unit on their house, like how do they use a section A voucher? How do they rent rooms? There's all these online services that can match senior citizens with students and kind of build community and also some income for the, and help for the seniors, information about accessory dwelling units. So there's lots of ways to add housing or have people live in your community without actually doing a big apartment. And I'd love to see a goal focusing on how that's done, like how do people build in the RG and how are you a landlord? How do you get the loan and things like that? I love the goal of reducing the wealth and home ownership gap for BIPOC people. And I thought it was very laudable but I didn't understand how you would get there. And so like, how do you close this gap of income and assets and homes? And I just didn't see how the policy would direct you and how as a community, we close that gap. And then a big piece I'd like to see is a goal and objective of collecting data. I think on the rents, we're building all those new housing who's in it, the costs of land comparatively, the condition of rental housing for college students, I think is a big issue. Just like, so we really understand where we are in time and space. And like the housing production plan had fantastic data but now it's kind of at a day. And so we need to keep collecting that. And then I think, let's see. Number six is kind of the opposite of what I think Tom was saying. I was wondering, I was thinking the policy could be more general and not to include specific strategies because we have strategies in the master plan, in the housing production plan, in the Amherst housing market studies. And I'm sure there's a ton of great strategies that other college towns use and those can be utilized. And I didn't know why the policy was, I could think of like four dozen strategies in those three documents and I couldn't understand why they were picking some over others. And I don't know if they should make a pick. But then that also raises Tom's question of like, how do we get from A to B to C without clear guidance? So I also thought it was kind of long but my comments were long. Can you send me your comments? Anybody who's giving comments now, I'm trying to write them and everything you're saying. Oh, okay. You don't have to talk to me. Yeah, I can send it to you. And to me. Yeah, I'll go ahead and send it. Thank you. I think this is a good conversation to have but you kind of, you want to like fix it and it's not always clear. Great, thank you. Any other- Quick comment to Janet. Like I don't necessarily think I'm looking for more specificity but I'm looking for actually what are the mechanisms that produce these recommended changes, right? Cause I don't think that they exist yet. So I think it's really thinking about where, how funding gets from one place to another or how it's allocated or who manages that or how we get more of it. Like there aren't necessarily clear avenues to answer those questions or mechanisms for a board like ours to have any input on how that works. So I guess I'm just looking for like some more specifics in terms of like we need to do X in order to do Y and not just we need to do Y, right? Because doing Y is like a big idea but like what do we need to do to get there? I didn't get there, yeah. And also the funding issue is always hard. Good Chris, you have your hand up. Yeah, so I wanted to share something that I am thinking about every time I read the housing policy which is and it started off when I read the first housing policy that was produced by the housing trust. And they had very what clear goals and one of them was to produce 250 units of capital A affordable units every five years which meant producing 50 units a year essentially. And what they came up with was I think they said something like $50,000 a unit and it would be like 12 and a half million dollars over that time period. So I have concerns about how much can the town afford given all the other priorities that the town has you know, resiliency, climate change, schools all the things can the town really afford to spend 12 and a half million dollars in five years on affordable housing and maybe we can but that's a big number. And the other thing is that we need to think about resources and the town staff gets very involved with affordable projects, 132 North Hampton Road the planning department and the building commissioner spent lots and lots of hours on that and that's producing 28 units. And you know, we did have an investment of I think the town ended up contributing $750,000 but we also contributed a ton of time of staff time. So I have a concern about what's realistic what can we actually manage? And if we have these goals to produce this amount of affordable housing, is there a thought to adding to town staff in order to manage this because you know, many of you have gotten to know the staff in the planning department recently and you know, Nate Malloy and he's our housing guru you know, he knows all about affordable housing and how to get it built and how to manage it and all of that. So he's one person but he also has a lot of other responsibilities. So I think the town has to get realistic about you know, how do we manage this? How do we administer it? Do we need to hire people to be on the town staff in order to do that? Or are we going to you know, kind of farm this out to an organization that knows how to do it like you know, Valley Community Development or somebody like that. It's just a question that I have because I feel like the current staff of the planning department and the staff of the second floor can't reasonably accommodate the goal of 50 new affordable units in every year for five years or 10 years or whatever it is. So I just wanted to put that out there that the amount of money that the town is willing to contribute and the amount of staff time that is required. And that's both of those. Well, the second thing is definitely separate from you know, how much money is the town gonna pay for building these places? And I think it's all really good. And I agree with all of the goals but just need to be realistic about what can actually be accomplished given the resources that we have. Doug? That's a really good point. So Chris's comments remind me of two things. One is some of you may remember getting a link to Cambridge's new affordable housing overlay from Steve Schreiber a couple of months ago. And you know, I looked at that very closely because at the time I was trying to work on 40B and ended up corresponding a little bit with the planning director in Cambridge about that because it turns out that's not a 40B overlay. 40B or 40R? I'm sorry, 40R is what I should have said in this statement. It's not a 40R overlay. It's just a town-wide housing overlay of the whole town that prescribes if you're building affordable units, this is how you do it. And so, I'm not sure whether that particular bylaw meets with what I'm gonna say, but if it in fact is as of right then it shouldn't require a lot of town-time, town-staff time, you know, in other words, if our process for permitting affordable units was more streamlined, maybe we wouldn't need as much staff time to allow that to happen. And then the second thing I was gonna say is a lot of communities, they end up with affordable small A, but somewhat low-cost housing is housing that was built longer ago and has gotten run down or has aged out of the higher priced market. And we're in the situation of really having not developed a lot of housing in the last 50, 60, 70 years. So we don't have an area that has kind of aged out of modern new construction standards. And, you know, is where people that have less money can live. Thank you. So Chris, I mean, doesn't the town have to monitor like inclusionary zoning that the, I mean, somebody's checking on that process, right? I mean, that's the town staff. Well, to some degree, I mean, it depends on how the units are created, but in order to create the units, I'm gonna use Olympia Oaks as an example. It's got 44 units of affordable housing. It was a purchased property and the town provided part of it as open space, part of it for affordable housing. And it took several years of staff time to figure out, how are we going to develop this property? Who is going to develop it? It ended up that it was HAP housing that developed it, but there were a lot of negotiations with the university about the use of the roadway to go in there. And then in designing the development, which was really well designed by Cune Riddle, I think it's absolutely beautiful, but there was a tremendous amount of staff time trying to figure out what was good, what was bad. And then also putting that through the zoning board of appeals as a 40B. So there are ways that you can achieve affordable housing in small increments by having a really good inclusionary zoning bylaw. And we do have some of those units. We have 11 units at Aspen Heights that are being put online. We have other units that Barry Roberts is developing or has developed. And so incrementally, we can provide affordable housing using the inclusionary zoning bylaw. Then there's other 40Bs like North Square at the Mill District, which gave us 26 affordable units as a result of a 40B comprehensive permit. But so those things don't take a lot of town time because they're private projects, but something like Olympia Oaks or this new project out on Belcher Town Road that we're launching into in the East street school. Those are town owned lands that the town is heavily involved in getting a developer to develop them and then following it along. So when the town is initiating development of affordable housing, it is a huge amount of staff time. And I'm not saying that anybody doesn't want to put that in. It's just that you have to kind of set priorities. Well, if you wanna work on this, then you're not gonna have time to work on that. So people have to be realistic about what can be accomplished. And it might be a good idea to consider adding staff or creating some mechanism in the town government to manage these things and to promote them and encourage them and help us to do them. Because I think that given our current resources, it's a struggle. And no way am I complaining about this, but the current state of affairs is very labor-intensive. So if we're gonna add to that, it's going to be even more labor-intensive. That's my concern, I think, is the level of the aspiration that we have and whether we can actually manage that given our current resources. All right, Maria and then Tom. So I think, yeah, all this talk about affordability of housing is exactly why I've been really excited about all this zoning to sort of allow more property owners to get involved in creating more housing because it's kind of like economics 101. When your supply is low, no matter what you do, the prices are gonna be high. And in particular right now, the demand is very high and our supply is low. I'm talking about housing. So as we increase the supply with all these various ways that we're trying to create, whether it's infill or big multifamily, medium-sized multifamily or changing existing housing, all of that's helping with bringing the supply up so that the demand would still be high, but the costs should be coming down. That's sort of just supply and demand. And to everyone's point about like, well, the demand we wanna promote is more affordable that the sort of people who are sort of needing affordable housing, that's the demand we wanna sort of work towards applying. Well, the way we get there, as Chris said, it's really time-intensive and staff-intensive to do the capital A affordable right now. So let's work on what we can incrementally with making our zoning, which is something planning board works on, zoning allow more supply housing in various ways, not just there's no one solution. And I think that Doug's idea about that comprehensive overlay district, that would be wonderful and that would take years of planning and work to do, but that would be so wonderful to create something that our town can stand behind as far as here are some design guidelines. If you follow them and you provide this number of affordable units, you can do it by right. And that's that the 40R is trying to do that. And we just haven't been successful with it. So to do one that's town-wide, that will take a lot, but I would love that idea to happen. But for now, I think the sort of chipping away at our zoning to allow more housing to happen is one of the first steps, which is increase our supply of housing. And obviously we're trying to get more affordable use with the capital A by working with Valley CDC, unlocking zoning when they ask, we have this particular project for this particular site. We've done that in the past. So people who are working toward providing more of that affordable housing like Habitat for Humanity and Valley CDC, we made ourselves accessible to them. So that we can work with them to actually get projects they have in mind built because we change to allow for those things. So I feel like we're already on the path and we have a lot of people who are very excited about doing this work. And yeah, I really appreciate you, Tom and Shalini, just taking the initiative and trying to, like everyone's saying, it's a huge thing to figure out. So the only way you can do is by starting somewhere and working toward it. And it'll take a while, but I think that finally the CRC and town council giving us these zoning amendment priorities to work on is the first step to sort of put that like, well, let's figure out other things first. I feel like we're there, we're at the precipice of getting things done that are gonna lead toward an answer, not solve it, but just get toward that sort of increase in our supply. And that's sort of the first, I think low hanging fruit in a way because to do something that's sort of a inclusionary zoning for the whole town for every development, that would take so much juggling or figuring out that it would basically not provide any kind of change. And I feel like, yeah, that housing is something that really should be providing change to allow more of it in town. So I don't know what I'm, I don't think I'm offering any, just for putting it out there. That's just my two cents. Well, I think the whole supply-demand thing is, it's tricky because I think, developer will build a building and they have a cost that they wanna get out of it. And then you see like, people are willing to leave vacant, you know, this is more retail, but, you know, that perhaps, but it's complicated. And I'm not sure I understand it completely, but that's why I was asking about the housing policy, just addressing that. Does that work? And, you know, what works? Tom, and then Jenna. Joe, let me see for a brief. I think Chris, your comment was right on in terms of what I was getting at, because my question is, if we wanna get to this place where we can have a significant impact on this problem that we see, and you're saying that there, obviously there's not enough staff to do this, or we need to focus staff to support these kinds of projects, or we need funding to do, my question is still about, okay, well, what do we need to do to make that happen? So what is the mechanism by which we get more bodies in your office to do this work and to support people and to bring stuff to us as possible solutions or opportunities to research this stuff? So I guess that's what I mean in terms of how do we, how does Amherst do this? What are the mechanisms in Amherst to make these things happen? And what do we have to do to promote that, to advocate for that, to make that change happen? So I guess that's what I keep coming back to is, I wanna figure out what those things are that you need and these other groups need to make sure that we're doing that work, as well as the zoning stuff that's gonna bring about new opportunities and address the supply demands. So I guess that's what I'm asking, and that's a longer term question, but that's how we get systemic change in the community by making those kinds of more large scale changes to those mechanisms. That's my thought. Thank you. Janet? So one quick thing, which is, I'm glad to hear that inclusionary zoning requirements are a light lift for the planning department. And so I would encourage us to pass a bylaw that covers any development with 10 or more units. You have to include affordable housing with the big A and that will produce, if it produces 10 or 20 a year, it's, you know, we don't bear the cost of that. And it's not gonna be a pressure on the planning department, but getting to the question of managing demand. So when you read the market study and the housing production plan, they don't see growth in the Valley. So a bunch of, I don't know if it's eight years ago or five or six years ago, the population was gonna stay flat. And Amherst does have housing pressure because people like to live here, but in that, they didn't see how many more students were gonna come to UMass. And UMass hasn't built housing for those students. And so I think, you know, we can forget, forget the horrible situation right now because of the pandemic. There's very little supply, the demand is up, prices are going up. But if, you know, like, I look at like the 4,000 students that UMass had in the past 10 years, and there was like an extra 800 that showed up in 2019, and all these freshmen said, yes. And I thought, what if UMass had built 4,000 dorm beds or, you know, apartments? What would our situation be in Amherst right now? Like, if UMass can manage its demand, it could be, you know, tax paying, you know, high end student housing on campus. They certainly have the space, they have the people. Like if they had done that, wouldn't Amherst housing be more affordable for more people? Like, the pressure that we feel is partly because Amherst is very attractive and, but also because UMass has expanded without providing beds for its students. And so in the master plan, they talk about that and ways to work with the university on that. Strategies for having taxable properties on campus, you know, but it's like, we have to understand that the biggest driver for demand is the largest employer in the region, which is our greatest strength, but it's really makes a lot, we can't, you know, so I think that we have to address demand and the only person really can address it with the university and sit down and, you know, talk to them about it and sort of say, you know, listen to the people in the RG, the impact that it has on them. And we're kind of scrounging everywhere to find, you know, to build, you know, I could build three apartment units in my backyard and consider being a landlord, but what if those students were on campus, you know? I mean, that's what the housing policy doesn't talk about and it's the elephant in the room. And John Hornick mentioned this, Steve, judgment is like, why can't we surface this discussion and have it openly and talk to the university about, you know, if you're adding only students, you're adding to a lot of, you know, problems in Amherst and a lot of positive things, but still it's, you know, the people who can't buy houses are people at the lower and middle and middle income because they're competing with students over the same houses because four students or five or six in a small house can pay more rents than a family. Just a quick comment on that. Just, I don't want to belabor this. I think we could be done talking about it. It is just that when students don't live on or live off campus, they don't use businesses downtown. They go to that amazing dining hall on campus. And so Boino Bob is not gonna have people eating burritos and that's gonna be a problem for the businesses downtown. So I do think we need to get those students off campus if we actually want them to go on that business to actually affect our community. So I do think that I agree with you on some level that the university needs to take responsibility, but I think they're part of our community in terms of the economics of it. And to push them onto campuses is gonna let them go get some gorgeous burrito down in the UMass dining hall, which is amazing food and it's killing our community. So I think that it's kind of- That's service. We gotta do it the right way, I guess. Yeah, but I think the conversation has to happen with the university and just, you're adding students by the thousands. Yeah. And we met the housing production plan goals, but it's like we built all the units we were supposed to or it gave the permits, but it didn't go to the right people. All good comments. So we probably should move on and how long is your Pomeroy Village presentation, Chris? I can kind of whiz through the presentation. Okay. The main goal of this is to, eventually the town council is gonna have to decide whether they want to encourage a roundabout or a cross-signalized intersection at Pomeroy Village. The goal right now is to elicit comments from various boards and committees about what is good, what is working in that Pomeroy Village area, what's not working, and what do you think would make it better? So I can kind of quickly run through the presentation that we gave to the town council. I think we gave it to them on January 25th, but have you all read it already? It's kind of long. So if you've all read it, I don't really need to make this presentation. So my question to you and you can do it tonight or you can do it the next time we meet, which would be, let's see, what day is today? Today's the 17th. 17th. The next time we meet would be April 7th. I think TSO was hoping to get some feedback from boards and committees by, sometime in the beginning of April, but that doesn't mean that we have to have a definitive recommendation to them by then. But so if you have thoughts, comments, questions about that project, about that intersection, things that you like, things you don't like, things you think would make it better, you can offer them to me tonight. And there's going to be two more opportunities in the near future for individuals to participate in this outreach. On Thursday, March 25th, the TSO town services and outreach committee is devoting half of its meeting to the Palmer and Lane intersection and they're seeking public input. And the other opportunity is a two hour meeting on Saturday, the 27th of March, that's going to be in the afternoon from two to four. And we're going to be talking to people about the Palmer and Lane intersection and trying to elicit their comments at that time. But if the planning board either individually or as their body wants to offer some recommendations, comments, et cetera, that would be, I would appreciate it. And if you want me to flip through that slide deck, I can do that. Oh, I found that email where you're speaking, where you didn't know you were speaking. It's April 1st, six to eight. Oh, I didn't know I was speaking then, yeah. Yeah, the district five meeting. District five. Yeah, I'll forward this email to you. Well, I don't know the project. I mean, I looked at it, but I think, I guess I'm a little confused that, so they just want, this is not officially coming to the planning board and it's more just a public input process. It's a public input process. This is all in the public right of way. So it's not, it doesn't require planning board approval. But obviously the planning board is a body that is concerned with planning in town. And so you are among many groups. I think the TSO has reached out to the design review board, the disability access advisory committee, the transportation advisory committee, the planning board and possibly others to, illicit comments about what works, what doesn't work in that intersection. I don't know if many of you use it, but do you have any, have any things you wanna share tonight or do you wanna write to me individually? Mr. Marshall has his band based. So Chris, a couple of thoughts. One is, I think I find roundabouts to be a little more of a suburban setting than an actual right angle intersection with corners. And so, I don't know, I haven't thought a lot about that. I mean, certainly there are, there are rotaries that I've bit seen in Britain that are very small and allow the buildings on the corners to be pretty close to the street and kind of define an intersection. But what the town has been building and what UMass has built is pretty large in diameter. And so it really pushes the buildings away from the intersection. And so I find that sort of unsatisfying from an urban point of view. So my knee-jerk reaction to your question is I would probably try to stick with the signalized intersection unless I had a compelling reason to do otherwise. I guess the other thing that and I could be wrong about this, but my impression of that area is that the roadways don't have granite curbs and the sidewalks are kind of haphazard and maybe not very well marked or else they're deteriorated. There's not a very clear median kind of between the sidewalk and the roadway. So I would encourage all of those things are improvements that you typically see in a more developed and more urban area, more clear definition of zones. So just kind of staking your claim to the sidewalk width and the edge of the roadway and that kind of thing, putting in the accessible ramps at the corners, maybe putting in a walk signal at the intersection rather than right now you just look both ways and pray. So the kinds of things that make it a more pedestrian friendly and more definition of the intersection is kind of where I would start, thank you. Thank you, Andrew. Yeah, I'll put some thoughts on paper and send over, Chris. I have sort of an opposite view of roadways, although it's really interesting hearing your perspective because I hadn't considered some of that. I think that they can serve as landmarks and that they can really help define the identity of the location. So I think that there could be some compelling opportunities there depending on how the actual dot and the circles manage. I was curious just a little bit about the scope. So the 1.5 million plus the match, what exactly would that cover, given we've got two scenarios that are at least floated by here and then tied on to that scope. I totally agree with the need for sidewalks. I guess I'm just wondering, is this gonna get a sidewalks like 50 feet in any direction and then it essentially only helps you cross the street or is the intention for using those sidewalks to help actually penetrate into some of the neighboring uses, the residential or some of the commercial? Where would it actually stop? What would we get for the money? May I speak to that? Yes, yeah. So our initial plan that we started developing back in the early 2000s was much bigger than what we're currently proposing. It went all the way to the streams at the north and the south end of the intersection. I think it's muddy brook to the south and I'm not sure what it is to the north. But anyways, it went pretty far in both directions and it went somewhat far in the east west direction as well. That project, when we actually put a cost estimate to it in 2013 was about $2.8 million. So that was seven or eight years ago so obviously that project would have been even more than 2.8. So this time we said, well, let's scale it back. We actually applied for a mass works grant back then and we didn't get it. We had, it was too much money and they had other priorities that year. So this year we really scaled it back and we think we can get sidewalks right where there is already development like by the Mission Cantina area and the place where the hoop business is and across the street at Valley Transporter and up the street to Ron Laverdeer's property across in front of what does he call it? Amherst Office Park. And then there's also across the street, Zhang's Kitchen and the little place that used to be Dancer Computer. We think we can get sidewalks and roadway improvements and turning lanes north, south bound on Route 116 or West Street for this amount of money in either case, either with the roundabout or with the cross intersection. And now the cross intersection is possibly gonna be more expensive because it will have signalized signals, obviously. But the roundabout may have signals as well because we've heard a lot from the disability access community around here that people with visual impairments have a hard time with roundabouts and they really need to have some sort of pedestrian activated signals where they have control to stop traffic. So we may end up with signals even with the roundabout. But I think we all think Planning Department and DPW thinks that we can get a decent project done. It's not gonna be as grand as our original idea but we can certainly make improvements to that intersection for $1.5 million. Does that help? Yeah. So I'm thinking, I live right there basically. And I'm wondering how the traffic flow works cause I know sometimes there just would be a lot of traffic when the light turns green and you're, and it's a whole train. And then so with a rotary, how does that work with the side streets beyond the subject intersection there? And also, do we have a assessment of how the East Pleasant Rays Street rotary is working? It depends on who you talk to about the East Pleasant Triangle Street rotary. Some people think it's very good and they go through it all the time and no problems. Other people think it's really a problem area and particularly for visually impaired people, what I've heard from them is that they avoid it. They'll do anything they can to stay away from it. So again, it's like, who do you talk to? The traffic engineers seem to really think that the roundabout is the way to go because it produces a continuous flow of traffic unless there's somebody who wants to cross the street. You're not gonna have backups and queuing with the roundabout in the morning when you have a lot of traffic northbound trying to get to the university or in the evening when the university is emptying out and people are driving south. It's gonna be a smoother area for traffic but then you have to weigh that against how do pedestrians and bicyclists fit in there. And you get various different conclusions from those two groups. So all of this is gonna be discussed in public. We're talking about it now. We're gonna talk about it on Thursday night and Saturday and then town council. TSO is going to have a meeting where they're bringing all the ideas together and then town council is going to try to make a determination. And then in the summer, so Gilford Mooring who's the superintendent of public works would like to have a direction to go in by June. So he's really asked the town council to give him guidance about which kind of intersection they want developed there by June. And then he's gonna hire a consultant, an engineering consultant. And that's when he'll get the money in July is really when he's gonna get the money. And that's when the project starts. So from July until December they're gonna be doing design and engineering. And then in early 2022, they'll put it out to bid. Hopefully start construction in spring of 2022 and finish, they have to finish by, I think it's June of 2023, whatever we decide to do there. So I forgot the question that I was responding to, but anyway, that's an information. Well, I mean, like there haven't been any accidents there on the East Plus Triangle Street to mention. That is correct. There haven't been any serious accidents. There have been some, but nothing with serious injury and I can get you that information. That came from Gilford from Deans Hills and it's in my email somewhere. Yeah, and then pedestrians haven't been hit. No, only very gently, hit very gently. Right. So, Janet. I, when I was reading through this and I looked at this project, I had this like question, which is always a good question to start anything with, which is what is the problem you're trying to solve? And what are your goals? And so I was wondering, is it to make people move more safely through the village center? Is it to slow cars? Is it to make it safer for people to cross or move? People are gonna be crossing at different parts of the road anyway. Is it to bring more people to the Pomeroy Village to kind of stop and shop and eat at our good restaurants? I know when the District 5 people, people were talking about this, they wanted it to be more of a destination, like the Pomeroy Village, like to create a sense that like a community, like they wanted it to be more attractive and have people feel like, this is a place you'd want to stop. Do you want to get cars through more quickly? Is that the goal? Do you want fewer car accidents? Like to me, the intersection is fairly, functions pretty well. There's a little bit of traffic backing up in the afternoon. So I just wondered like, what's the primary goal? And it seems to me that roundabouts make life much easier for cars. And unless they're very small, they don't really, it's harder to be a pedestrian in a way. So if it's to get cars through more quickly with fewer impediments, that's not the same thing as making it quieter and more walkable or more of a sense of a village center. So I just kind of wondered about the goals of the project. And is that kind of what you're looking for? Or is that what DPW is looking for? Like if your focus is let's build a village center where people can safely cross and it's really attractive. And the signals are working well, but you can press a button and go across and there's some nice benches and sidewalks. And there's another crosswalk, you know, say from the USDA over to the shopping center so people can move, don't always have to go. What are you trying to do in a way? Well, I think you're capturing it really well. I think that, and again, it depends on who you're talking to. There are a lot of opinions in town, but from the planning department standpoint, I think we're trying to create a village center there. We're trying to make it safer for pedestrians. We're trying to make it easier for people to cross the road. There aren't any crosswalks there now. There aren't any curb ramps. There are very meager sidewalks. The sidewalks are in really bad condition. They're very narrow, bumpy, you know, just not well maintained, no fault of the DPW. They've got a lot of other things to deal with, but, and then there's, you know, traffic is backed up north and south bound. So from a planning department standpoint, fixing the signalized intersection would probably address many of the issues that we're concerned about. And we want to make it a place where it's possible to develop property on the four corners. And so that sort of gives away my viewpoint. Let's build the beans, which is that I would like to be able to see development on those four corners. And the property is really undeveloped right now. It's kind of a, you know, there are parking lots that meet the road rather than buildings that meet the road. And we did start to establish some of that streetscape. There's a building down there that's, I think it's just north of R&P liquor and south of Nishantina. And it comes forward to the road. It provides a nice streetscape. The parking is behind. And that's kind of what the planning department would like to see in the Palmer Village Center. And this, you know, there's a lot of people working there. There's a lot of professional offices. There's a lot going on there that, you know, it seems really quiet, but there's a lot of businesses and things. There's a lot going on there. And people on one side of the road, on the west side of the road are all about working. And then people on the other side of the road are all about providing services like haircuts and lunch and gas and, you know, convenience stores. So there's a lot of desire to cross over at lunchtime and other times for pedestrians. And also people, you know, commute by bicycle through there. So, you know, there are a lot of different goals that we have for this project. But if you were to ask the planning department, I think that one of the main goals would be to create more of a village center feel to that intersection instead of just be a place where traffic moves through. That's what the district five people were feeling like. And, you know, I feel like every conversation I have is like me darting across the intersection at night. But, you know, I've gone from Mission Cantina to Mona and Dub and it's just, you're just thinking like, what's wrong with just having a blink, you know, a crosswalk? You know, what's happened here? You know, what I find interesting is the age of the development there. It's not all that old, but it was kind of built during that strip shopping center stage of architecture. And that, you know, it's kind of interesting. So I don't know, I don't know how you improve it. That'd be a long view to kind of, I think, in the immediate area of the intersection to do, you know, much with, but I know there are a couple of old buildings, but I was just shocked to see how new some of the structures are that are in the immediate. Listen, not Amber's office part, but the slow body. Sometimes it just takes one property owner to start something. And there are a lot of properties there that are ripe for development. There's a property behind the slow body building where the valley transporter is, that's a big open field. And that could be developed for housing, mixed use buildings, whatever. The property where there's an old Apple storage barn, which is just north of the Speedway gas station, just north of the Mona and Dub. In fact, Mona and Dub is actually in it, I think. But that building is, you know, many decades old and it's really not necessarily suited to the uses that it's being put to. And that could be redeveloped into a mixed use building. So there are a lot of opportunities for things to happen there that could benefit, I would certainly benefit from improvements to that intersection, whether it's a roundabout or a signalized intersection, but I, you know, as a planning, as a planner, I feel like the signalized intersection gives more opportunity to develop the properties that are available for development. I kind of agree with you and I'm not a planner, but it just seems like the roundabout is more for cars than people, I don't know. And it's just a little less pedestrian friendly. Great, Johanna, please. Thanks. It's really interesting to listen to all this. I, as somebody who regularly cycles through intersections in town, for me, the roundabouts are so much easier to navigate on bicycle than the lighted intersections. Like with the lighted intersections, you're just terrified about people turning right and cutting you off, you know, because we don't have boxes at the top of our intersections for the bikes to kind of jump in line. It's always unclear whether people see you, whereas in the roundabout, because things are kind of moving, it feels way better. So I guess I just wanna kind of challenge that notion that the roundabouts are for cars. But it is true that I have not walked around, I mean, I've walked a little bit in North Amherst around Kendrick Park, but I've spent more time navigating it on bicycle than on foot. But yeah, if we're gonna do lighted intersections, you know, there's a lot to be done for bicycle infrastructure too. Yeah, now, as I think about it, in terms of being able to enter onto the, you know, West Street or Pomeroy Lane, that people are already kind of like paused by a rotary, they're not, you know, gunning it. And maybe they'll, you know, they'll be more entertained, you know, let someone, you know, in on the road there. But yeah. The other thing is there's less pollution with the roundabout because you don't sit there idling at the stoplight, you just keep going. So. Doug? Yeah, I will say that my earlier comments about the signalized intersection preference, I hadn't taken into consideration the apparent need for adding left turn lanes. And so as the width of the signalized intersection gets greater and the curb to curb distance for pedestrians increases, I feel like my preference becomes a little bit less and maybe a little more balanced with a rotary. I think part of what I don't like about rotaries is it really pushes the pedestrians out and away from the intersection in a way that, you know, doesn't encourage you to see somebody's face as you cross one direction and they're going the other or they're on the other side and, you know, you're so far away, you never even noticed them. So it's that kind of intersection or the interface that I'm feeling like the rotaries just really discourage or, you know, impede. But, you know, as the signalized intersection gets huge, you know, that gets harder too. So that's where I am right now. Great, any other comments? If you all individually have comments that you wanna send to me, I can incorporate them into what we've said tonight. Okay. Well, you know, it's getting late and I think we hit it, you know, adequately. And I did skip over for old business topics not reasonably anticipated. Oh, no, no old business. And then new business not anticipated. Well, we have the possibility of a moratorium that's been suggested. So that's new business, I don't have much to say about it, but I think that the Town Council is going to be, it's going to have that topic on their agenda for Monday night's meeting. And the idea would be that what's being proposed is a six month moratorium on building permits, the new buildings in the downtown area, new residential buildings, new buildings that contain residential use. So it's kind of unclear how that fits in with our zoning amendments, you know, we're moving ahead on what we're doing. And I hope that the CRC and the Town Council are also moving ahead with what is being proposed and not letting that kind of slow down the movement on the zoning amendments. It's unclear how a moratorium would affect new development because, you know, there's a timing issue as far as, you know, when things get published, when things get sent for public hearings, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, there's a lot more to be said about that, but I just wanted to make you all aware of it. And I think it's been written about in, at least in the Amherst Indy, if not in the Gazette. And tune in. So this would be a temporary bylaw that we'd have to approve or just recommend for approval or how critical are we? Well, it's a temporary zoning bylaw and it would be the Town Council if it decides to move ahead with this. There are different ways that this could be moved ahead. One is that the Council could decide, yes, we're gonna move ahead with it. One is that a group of citizens could propose it. Anyway, it's probably going to be sent to you. If it gets to the Town Council and the Town Council decides to move ahead with it, then it will be referred to the CRC and the Planning Board for a public hearing at some point. And then in the ordinary course of events, the Planning Board and the CRC usually hold their public hearings together as a joint public hearing. So that would most likely happen. I think it also needs to be referred to GOL and somebody else, but I can't remember who the other group is. So anyway, it's something that's on the horizon and it's going to be the topic of conversation. And you should probably pay attention to what's happening. Okay. Does anybody have any on that, Janet? I have a question about like when do we, the next iteration of the zoning by-law? Like are we gonna, are we stop meeting weekly or is what's the next? We're gonna cover that. She's gonna do the, Chris is gonna speak to the CRC report. And, Doug, oh. Doug is down now. Okay. Okay. So, okay, we can move on to the last item, which is what Janet was asking was in the Liaison report. So, Chris, tell us what's going on with the CRC and speak to the zoning. I can't remember. It's 1007. I hope I can remember. The planning department and the planning board made a tremendous effort in late February and during March to put together, maybe it was all of February. Anyway, many, many weeks of meetings to put together a series of zoning amendments and those were presented to the CRC on March 9th. There was a very long meeting. Well, it was two hours, but an hour and 40 minutes of it was really presentation by the planning staff. And what we presented was many of the things that you've seen, plus a couple of additional things. So we presented the proposal for the BL Zoning District, an overlay that would focus development towards the front of properties and have the back of properties be less developed with lower buildings and parking and other things. So that was presented for both the Triangle Street property and the Triangle Street BL District and the North Pleasant Street BL District. We did get some feedback about that. Some people wanted, thought it would be more appropriate to look at it a different way to maybe, how can we say this? Look at the lot area and an additional lot area per dwelling unit rather than having the overlay. I think that was a comment. But in general, it seemed like CRC was interested in this proposal. I think they wanna study it more and that's what they're gonna be doing. So the idea is by presenting these five things to the CRC that those things are now in their ball court. And they are the ones who are going to be proceeding with discussing them and carrying them into the public and doing public outreach about them. So there was the BL District. There was the footnote M where initially it was proposed to eliminate footnote M entirely. And then as a result of studies that we did in the planning department, we can clear that that might produce too much development in the RG zoning district. So we backed off with that and we said, well, maybe we could eliminate footnote M for smaller developments. So that was presented to them. The idea for accessory dwelling units, changing the wording from supplementary to accessory and then changing the way these things would be permitted that was presented. And I think that was probably the most positively received of the things that we presented. And then what else did we present? We presented mixed use building standards where we talked about what types of uses could go on the ground floor of a mixed use building and those uses would include parking and other uses, but we would try to make the streetscape be more people friendly, more streetscape friendly. We talked about design guidelines for mixed use buildings, varying the facade, different things that we could do with entryways and fenestration, et cetera, and the requirement for public space, whether it's courtyards or plazas or whether it's a widened sidewalk area. And then we also presented an idea for inclusionary zoning, which was really the simple idea. And Janet's been talking about this for years, which is to say, any development that has over 10, that proposes over 10 new units will be required to provide affordable housing as part of the development. And I think it's kind of clear cut. We would still have the provision that some of the units could be provided on site and some could be provided off site and we would still have the provision where a payment in lieu could be made for up to 50% of the units. And the payment in lieu is, I think three times the, what is it, three times the average, the median income. So it's around $192,000 or close to $200,000 per unit. So those are the five things that we presented to the CRC and now they're gonna be discussing them on Tuesday, discussing three of them on Tuesday. And then I think they'll move on to discussing the other ones. And at some point they'll decide whether they wanna move those forward to the town council or not. Meanwhile, the planning department hasn't really worked on zoning now for about a week. But we have a list of things that we do plan to get back to like the definition of apartments and several other things. So yeah, so thank you so much for all the hard work that you all did and all the feedback we got from you and also from the public during planning board meetings for those, at least three or four of those. Proposals. I don't think we talked a lot about the inclusionary zoning with you but that was something we presented to CRC. So I think that's all I have to report on that. Yeah, thank you. We'll talk to you with more. Yeah, I think personally I was not clear on that our job was done or that we hadn't really concluded anything but I guess the schedule's changed and we're not meeting, we don't have a charge with the zoning priorities moving forward. You do, you do. You're gonna be all those priorities that the CRC and the town council gave us. Those are, we're gonna bring those back. Oh, the rest of them. Okay. Yeah, but we're just not ready to do that yet. And when the CRC decides to send the things that we've already developed to town council, they're gonna come back down to you for public hearings. So you'll see them again. But on each of the priorities, we had a discussion, but I thought that we were gonna kind of bring our opinions together, but that's fine. I mean, it's, CRC is the drive-in-the-bus. CRC, that's where the action is gonna happen. Yeah. Good. Any questions for Chris on? On that stuff. All right. Report to the chair. I have none. Or to staff. I have none. And it's a late St. Patrick's Day, but everyone make them. Home and enjoy yourselves. You're right. Have a great time for the rest of your evening. Right. Thank you. The meeting is... Next meeting is April 7th. There are eight people. Okay, so we get a break. You couldn't meet on the 31st of March if you really want to, but I think the 7th would do it. Right. No, that's great. And that's another break. So... All right. Thank you. Good night. All right. Good night.