 This is the. February 3rd meeting of the Essex Junction Planning Commission. It has been. Re warned as a remote only meeting so anyone who was at Lincoln Hall. You may not be getting in if you're. You may not be getting in. Online. I can see you on screen here. We do not have a quorum yet. The three of us. Here voting members of the planning commission. But we have our guest speaker and we have an agenda. So we're going to start going anyway. Item one is audience for. Excuse me. Go ahead. Item one is audience for visitors. I think we may not really have any. Maybe one or two names. I don't recognize, but I think they're related to the. Meeting. Officials here. Is there any member of the audience that I would like to say anything that is about a subject that is not on the agenda tonight. All right. Hearing none. We'll move on to item two additions and amendments to the agenda. Okay. Thank you. Robin, we don't have any, right? We've got everything. Yeah. So item three is review and approval of the. Meeting minutes from our last meeting, January 6th. I've read the minutes. I have no comment. Does anyone else. Have a comment on the minutes. They look fine, but don't we need a quorum to. Well, there was no motion made. So we'll just table those until we have a quorum. Thank you. Item four is to elect the vice chair person. To replace. I recently departed. If. Right. But we don't have a quorum, so we can't do that either. Quorum. Yeah. So we, you know, we, we wish Steve well and his. Expanded. Business capacity, I guess you would say. But we'll miss him terribly on the board. He was very valuable. So. I guess that brings us to the work session. We'll circle back to the minutes and, and, and to electing a vice chair if. Additional members of the planning commission show up. I just left a message for Andy. I don't have Patrick's number. You don't have Patrick's number. Right. If any of you guys have Patrick's number, you can try and. Grab them. Okay. So. Regina welcome and take it away. You've, you've prepared a lovely presentation for us tonight. And I'll let you have that. Okay. Thank you. Let me just. Get this going correctly. I think I have to share first before I. Somebody needs to make me be able to share my screen. Robin, can you do that? Well, as you heard, I was getting a. Tutorial on this 36 for the meeting started from Tommy. I do have a green button that says share screen. Yeah. So if you go to participants. It should pop up everybody that's in the meeting and like a list. Yeah. Yeah. No, I've got those. I've got y'all on the screen. So there should be three buttons. Next to my name. And if you click on those, it should let you. Oh. Yeah. So town meeting TV is having trouble because they think the meeting is supposed to start at 630. It's always six. So I'm going to make you host. It wasn't funny with my computer. It wasn't. Three dots. It was just, you went over to said more. But so I'm going to make you host. Yeah, that'll work. Okay. Super. That, that should be, you know, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. So does everybody see that? Like how you're supposed to see it? Yeah. Okay. Super. All right. So. So everything that we're talking about tonight are the things that we talked about at the last meeting where I just wanted to get a good sense of what are the other items. The planning commission wants me to focus on. And then. We'll go through the process of like we'll bring chunks of the chapters with all the edits track changed in there. And so you can go through them. After we. Ideally get through this tonight. So. One of the. Items to discuss on that list. Was residential density. And I think Phil, you were asking about this in the sort of R1, R2 districts, but it sounded like it made sense to just, let's sort of look at this across the board. So what you see on the screen right now. Are just some thresholds. The first two are thresholds that we use in the state of Vermont for various designation programs. So the first one is four units per acre minimum threshold. For the neighborhood development area. So you folks have that designation in your village. It matches the village designation perfectly. There are. There's a number of different state designations, but the other ones step up the density a little bit further, but that's not right. That's not right. Sorry. That slide. That second bullet shouldn't say neighbor. Neighborhood development area designation again. It's really the growth center that. Gets you to the eight units per acre. That's not to say that. It makes any sense for you folks to be thinking about growth center designation. It's just to say that there's added benefits when you go to that. And then. The last bullet is really sort of just like. A very broad kind of. National perspective on. If you want to get to a decent level of bus service. At the minimum, you probably need to be working with pretty decent sized areas with that minimum seven units, right? So those are just. Just just to give you a brief overview of the. At the minimum seven. The number of units per acre. You're thinking about the number of units per acre. In terms of the number of units per acre. In terms of the number of units per acre. In terms of the number of units per acre. You're thinking about whether the density as is today in the village zoning. Is in a relatively good place. So. Comparing to those two. Thresholds because that. That middle one is right in between the third bullet is right of these three. And you've got a few zoning districts that are calculated a little bit interestingly because you've got a base kind of minimum lot size and then you can add more units with just a smaller amount of square footage added onto there. So for the residential office, it easily meets the 10,000 square feet but it doesn't quite get to the 5,000 square feet if you were to think about trying to put four lots on a lot, four units on a lot. And, but it's really pretty close to that. So I don't think in and of itself, residential office probably doesn't really require an increase. Then your R1 and your R2. So those are the two zoning districts that only allow single family home plus an accessory dwelling unit, of course, in those districts. And the R1 district at 15,000 square feet doesn't meet either of those standards. The R2 zoning district does hit the 10,000 square foot threshold, but not the 5,000. But having said that, you do have the density bonus provisions in the PUD section and it allows density bonus in both of those districts. You can get up to 100% density bonus in the R1 and a 25% density bonus in the R2. So just in terms of comparing to these thresholds, there are ways already within the land development code that you can achieve these sort of base thresholds. Can you go to the village map of the zoning on it just so we can graphically see where these areas are? Because really the R1 districts are fairly remote from the village center. I mean, they're not, you know, but they're always the ways, but the R2 districts and it looks like the multi-families are pretty convenient to most of the types of, you know, the triggers, like the transportation routes and the walkability. So if we were gonna think about modifying something, I think we'd wanna follow the triggers and think about those before we worried about the R1s, my opinion. Yeah, so just, I don't know if anybody's listening at home. So the yellow is the R2 and you sort of see that kind of as John's saying, sort of all doughnutting, basically the village. And then the R1 is this lighter yellow that's mostly up in this direction. Phil, I think I cut you off. Yeah, can you clarify on the unit aspect on, because it's per acre and I'm assuming most of our lots are not, like they're not acres, right? So our lots, I'm assuming a general lot is, or average lot is a quarter acre. So when you look at the 10,000 square feet, the four units per acre, I'm assuming that's like one single family house on a quarter acre lot. Yes. Density, right? Okay. Yes, sorry, it's a little confusing. So technically 40,000 square feet is an acre, but most of our zoning sort of like just sort of averages that 40,000, you use more like 40,000 square foot is an acre just roughly. And so, yeah. What the hell is this? Regina, a lot, okay. So a lot, I'm looking at the, I opened up my book, okay, to get the map because it's a lot larger. Yeah. And quite frankly, I mean, the neighborhood that I'm in, you know, the Indian Acres, the Greenwood, Redwood Terrace area, you know, the area around LaMoyle, well, not pleasant, but LaMoyle, some of these places are at, I know that in my area here is one sixth of an acre. Some of them are a fifth of an acre, some of them are a quarter of an acre. Depending on the age of the development, some of these are, and I'm kind of going, can I, there's, okay. I walk out of my house, okay. I'm literally in standing in my driveway and I can touch my neighbor's house. So do I really want somebody that closer if I've already haven't done a multi-family sort of thing? I've already got that kind of going here. It's more of like a seven units, you know, with the bus thing, it really works, you know, in my neighborhood, but it's, you know, when you've got some of the newer ones, they've got larger, you know, they're in the, you know, the fifth, the quarters, you've got to go really old to have these one acre lots because they just, they don't exist except in some of our older areas. And in fact, even those have been chopped up. So things don't really get tight until we start getting multi-families, which of course are scattered throughout the village, but mostly on our arterial roads. I think, Robin, you'd have to correct me if I'm wrong, but countryside I think is at least a quarter of an acre, maybe a third of an acre each. Sounds right, Ben. Cause they've maybe even got some common space in common besides, I'm not sure how that, you know, that works for them, but it's when you start looking at some of the places around, it's, yeah, some of the larger lots in the center of, or just off the center, village center, that could have the potential of having two ADOs on it, as opposed to one, I can't imagine taking some of the houses down. People probably get all that out of shape if they did, but could you put two additional units? If two additional ADUs were allowed, possibly. So how does that work into the residential density, I guess, is my question. If it's just a bigger lot to begin with, you mean? Yeah, if you've already got like, like the development we saw at 41 Maple was almost an acre, it was 0.9 acre. We have a lot of 0.9 acres around here with one house on them, but cause that's how that this village was, well, these people had to have their own well. Okay, they needed some space. You know, this lot of them have those carriage houses, we're really carriage houses cause they had carriages in them. It's so new place for the horse and everything else to meander about when it wasn't attached to a wagon. Right, yeah. So I mean, the larger lots can be subdivided. If they're greater than 15,000 square feet, they can be subdivided and then they can get, you know, twice as however many lots they can subdivide, they can get that many more. And then you would also, I assume, most folks would try to sort of go the PUD route and see if they could get more density worked in there too. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, we could also definitely give you folks if it would be helpful, I don't know how necessary it is, but we could certainly give some statistics on what the lot sizes are now in R2 and R1 just to give you a sense of sort of the average size of them. But you could tell they're pretty, you know, like your neighborhood Diane and some of these other, these are, it's a good, great, dense village you guys got. Yeah. Are we close to or not close to the sort of the regional average for this kind of thing in, let's say, the transportation hubs? I mean, how do we stack up against what everyone else is doing and how do we stack up against what the recommendations are? It looks like we're sort of close but not quite there on R2. You know, we're not too far away at 7,500. Square feet for a lot. Yeah, sorry, give me a second. I need to figure out how to get back out of there. Yeah. Right, we're, well, that's residential office, we're 7,500. R2, we're 7,500. Yeah. So that's not that far off. Right. And if we've already got some protection or some allowable ways to increase that with the PUD, then I guess I'm not feeling like we're a way out there. Yeah. Am I reading the LDC correct that multifamilies are not allowed in R2? Correct. That's correct, right? Yeah. I'm assuming the ones that are in there were grandfathered in, but. Yeah, although I did have a question because the, I think it's the PUD section has a very interesting, the bonus density part has sort of an interesting discussion about how like the multifamily would be established on the outer edge or something. You guys know the sections I'm talking about that made that definitely made me like scratch my head a little bit and wonder. You know the section you're talking about. Yeah, so is that allowable in R1 and R2 that if you went down a bonus density track through a PUD that you could, you know, you could do it didn't have to be a detached structure. It could be like townhouses or row houses or have like a or more of an apartment style feel. I couldn't really tell. Yeah, I remember I'm not sure the way I ended up I think village walk. They proposed duplexes. I'm not sure if they ended up building them or not. Village walk has duplexes. They're not, you know, I walk through there frequently and the duplexes versus the singles are nicely mixed in. You don't necessarily notice the rhythm changing dramatically when you walk by. So, you know, that neighborhood is really seems to have it took hold immediately and it's just been great. So they did a nice job blending all that together. It's the, okay. Section 601 are multifamily residential ones. There's a single family home is allowed per lot unless reviewed as a plan development. So that one is slightly restrictive. It forces you to do a plan unit development to get more than one. Yeah, so the straight answer to your question is Phil that it can be done just not by right, you know, not like easily like you sort of have to go through another process together. I guess so let me say my intention for wanting to look at this is that if you follow what's going around the country it's being found increasingly obvious that single family zoning has affected the housing crisis greatly because I mean, I think California just banned single family zoning in the entire state. And so looking at how can we create infill or allow for more density? I don't know if we need to go at it through a density route. I'm open to like allowing duplexes, two units within some of our zones that maybe takes a little burden off of the, you know, a homeowner or a developer to make a single family home into a duplex. I know I think it was one of the very first meetings that I was in on the commission. We had someone on Church Street come in trying to get approval to change their single family home to a duplex. And we were kind of confused because it really wasn't necessary because I think it looks like they fall into the multi-family district, multi-family residential three. But that sort of thing, this kind of my intention of looking into this is someone wants to take their single family home, make it into a duplex, should make that easy. I'll say I lived in a duplex in Buffalo that looked indistinguishable if I'm a single family home just because of the way they split them by floor and not, you know, kind of vertically. And so I guess our, you know, if our intention is that they look normal and residential and, you know, whether there's one family in there or two families, I'm not sure we really care. I think probably the biggest issue ends up as parking and how many cars are automatic, you know, like all of a sudden in the driveway and how is that managed? And does that have a bigger impact on the streetscape and the rhythm of life than anything else? So I guess I would be in favor of allowing it as long as it's not an obvious change to the neighborhood character. I totally agree. Those are some of the best duplexes you see in the village. And those are ones that people enjoy living in, I think too. I think there's character, it feels like a home. You don't feel like you're living in a box with a hundred other people. Yeah. Well, the broken up Victorians and some of the things on Pearl Street, I will say definitely are non-traditional and probably feel very homey because they've been made that way or reconstructed that way versus your apartment boxes that we've got. I'm sure that there's, if there was some way of doing that. A lot of them, if you didn't know they were broken up, you wouldn't know, some of them didn't know. Yeah, to be clear, my intention is not to allow people to just raise houses and put up apartment buildings. Yeah, and I think- That's how wrong we're going there. Yeah. I think if you just simply permitted duplexes as well in the two districts, you could, it's the same thing with an accessory dwelling unit. It's not gonna, it's unlikely to be like, all of a sudden a year from now, everybody's gonna put duplexes in. It's just, it's really why prohibitive for the few people that might actually wanna be able to do it. I will say that an accessory dwelling unit in the house, one of the spaces has to be occupied by the owner or occupant. The duplex both can be an investment. It doesn't have to be an owner occupant anymore. So in some ways you can get the same result with a single family home to duplex, but you keep a resident in one of the structures whereas with, they're all residents, but once one owns the property whereas in a duplex, they can both be renters. So- Are you sure about that? Sorry? Are you sure about that? I thought there was some restriction, I know in some towns there are some restrictions that even though with the duplex, the owner has to be in one of those duplexes. I'm gonna work that down, but- Yeah, usually that is not the case. Okay. And it's really sort of a slippery slope even in the state statute for accessory dwelling units because when you really think about fair housing law, the government body shouldn't necessarily be dictating whether it's ownership or rental, right? Because that is sort of discriminatory, typically discriminatory against renters, but we allow it in ADUs and state statutes. So it's a little bit weird, but typically for duplexes, yeah, there should be no government say over how those are, what the tenure of those units are. That makes sense. There is a disturbing national trend, which we heard a little bit about, that many housing units are being purchased by larger interests and then turned into rentals, which has the effect of making it harder for people who wanna buy a home or have home ownership able to do that drives the prices crazy because the stock of available for sale houses diminished. So I think in the spirit of trying to keep home ownership available at a reasonable price for people, we have to be really careful not to create situations that would make that situation worse. And maybe governmental, but we're fighting an amazing battle for affordable housing right now. And I think there shouldn't be any tools off the table. I might say we're past the point of housing being affordable in Chinden County. But I mean, one way housing is affordable is if you can buy a duplex and rent the other side out. That's what I did in Burlington, my first house, so. Yeah, but does it work the same for you? If you, I mean, you don't care which, you don't care if you're a renter, whether your other half is another renter or an owner, do you? I mean, it's just available housing at that point. I mean, I'm trying to make sure. If I'm a renter, I think, if I was a renter, I would, I think it would be nice if the other, the other side of the duplex was the owner. It's a little bit more of a. Well, I'm not taking a position. All I'm saying is if it's a accessory dwelling unit, then you know one of the units is gonna have an owner. If it's a duplex, then no control. And maybe that's fine. We're just gonna know that, just don't understand that. So my question is, is that could it, could we put in regulations that they were allowed to have to ADUs as opposed to, and I know that some houses get additions on them. I know that some additions have been turned into ADUs, but there are some properties that could have, not just that addition, but they could, quite frankly, they could turn something over the garage into an ADU also. But I wouldn't have a problem with that, Dan, at all. Well, I don't have a problem with that either. I'm just saying that, you know, if we wanted to encourage that density, but keep the neighborhoods looking like it's all residential as opposed to starting to be commercial rental, that, you know, that might be one fashion to do it, is to allow somebody to put addition on their house when they already have an ADU going on the property. So, yeah, from an enabling statute perspective, accessory dwelling units are laid out as basically the bare minimum of what you can do. You can be as permissive as you want to be about it. So I don't see anything that would be problematic if you wanted to allow two accessory dwelling units per single detached house. I know that just before I came on the board, that there had been a permissive environment because there were a lot of developers who were on the board, on the commission. And infill happened and people got upset and not putting it kindly. And so the rules changed because people were not thrilled with all the infill that happened very quickly. It was definitely taken advantage of. When was this? This was... 10 years ago. 10 or less. Yeah, somewhere 10, 15 years ago. The thing is some of the infill housing, I mean, you buy a house, everybody's in there, lots. All of a sudden your neighbor puts a livable structure in eight feet away from your side yard setback. And all of a sudden you have a brand new issue that you never had before. And it has a larger impact than other forms of development to the neighbors. And that really, it seemed like there was a lot of kind of shoe horning going on. And it definitely increased the density. It was good for some people and it was just horrible for others. And it's very hard for the planning commission to sort of regulate that and say, oh, well, it's okay here, but it's not okay here. It puts a lot of pressure on the process to be fair and still kind of maintain the character of the neighborhood, which by definition will change if you start essentially doubling the number of units on the parcels. So I think we're a little, anybody, you know, those of us who were there for some of that are a little nervous about getting into that again. Yeah, it's not an easy thing to do. I think we hear, I mean, you hear everyone talk about housing crisis, housing crisis, I think as a planning commission, aside from inclusionary zoning, one other tool, the only other tools we have to address the housing crisis is how do we create more housing? That's the thing we have to look at is create more housing. And so ultimately we're deciding, are we going to try and create more housing or are we not going to try and create more housing or are limited to PUDs in certain areas or something like that? Yeah, and I guess what I think is some of these accessory dwellings where somebody had a garage or they had a garage attached to their house with a breezeway or something and the garage turns into an accessory dwelling, like nobody bats an eye that much about it because nobody built anything. But the next person that comes along and doesn't have the garage yet wants to build the garage and all of a sudden that becomes the ADU, that causes more excitement because all of a sudden there's a new structure and that new structure takes away somebody's view or it's a shadow or it's headlights or it's more noise or it's too close to the property line or it's close enough that you're bothered by it. It's a big change to somebody. And it's hard to say, no, you're not allowed to do that or we feel your pain but it's okay, we're trying to make more density. These are the same conversations we've had as we replace smaller housing with larger multi-families. It's a shock to somebody that this change is happening. And we need to look at how we handle that carefully because it's a village that has a particular character to it that is trying to get denser. We've been telling people that for a decade or more that the goal is to make it denser. And so that's gonna cause a little discomfort here and there, you know, so how do we manage that? And I'm looking at the chart here and I'm going, well, you know, the R1, by the time I'm that far away from the village center, I'm thinking, you know, okay, I need a little breathing space. Maybe it's not so bad, but if they have a way to increase that density by our regulations already, whether it's a PUD or all of a sudden the, I mean, we're gonna be asked on this accessory dwelling, you know, we've been charged with trying to improve or assist with modifying our regulations by the trustees and some agreement with the housing committee and others that, you know, they need us to help them solve that. So it's coming and, you know, maybe that's a nice way to do it. It's just, okay, accessory dwelling units, they're fine and by right in the following scenarios. And if you need more density, then you need to come in as in, you know, in a PUD and tell us what you're doing. So I agree with that, John, but I'm looking at the map and what would help me is if our map, instead of saying it's R1, it's told me that it was a school because our high school and our ADL are very large lots. Somebody didn't know that they were schools, okay? They would go, why do you have this incredibly huge lot? Okay, we have shaded the CVE property, but I think we need to shade our school property so that when you look at this and go, oh, look at all this, this is exciting, you've got all this property. No, we don't. Okay, it's already booked for education. Yeah. So I think some of that is going on. I mean, there's one lot, I think it was supposed to have a school on, but I'm not sure what its zone is now, open space. That, you know, it's, I think we need to have some truth in advertising here when you start looking at some of the stuff. And one of them might be to say, you know, maybe put in, it's a school property. Because Regina would know what we told her. That's all fine, but it's not really helping us with our, are you asking us to decide something tonight, Regina, or give you some direction on this residential density, like whether we want to actually change any of these numbers or whether we think our existing PUD allowances are sufficient? Yeah, and I think, you know, I think particularly it's, I wouldn't necessarily, well, I mean, there is a couple of different ways that you can do this to get to allow some more density. The easiest is to allow duplexes in both of these zone districts. The, and you know, you could still do that with some, with some parameters on it, as it is in both of those districts, it's only got a 25% building coverage. So you can't really, you can't like just max out those lots in any way. So you could allow people to have a duplex, but keep that 25% building coverage. Is that total lot coverage or just building coverage? Total lot coverage is 40. Okay. So you could still do parking and stuff. Right, so what I'm getting at is if you're 25% on your house, but you're 40 overall, you still gotta fit, you know what, four cars in there somewhere. And anyway, so the opportunity is there if it's well done. And it probably, I mean, I had four cars in my driveway for, you know, while my kids were at that age. And you know, that's just how it goes sometimes. So it didn't change the character of our neighborhood because, you know, now I'm down to, you know, maybe one car in my driveway, but my neighbor's out four. So, you know, because their kids are at that age, but you know, that's a rotating thing. I think, you know, we've all seen what happens when essentially too many cars show up in somebody's yard for too long. It's parking on the grass and, you know, that you get into some things that we've tried to discourage, but don't necessarily get permanently discouraged. Yeah, and those are hard, you know, there really are hard things and they're hard, they're hard things to balance and weigh because, you know, it will likely mean that there are some lots that are parking on their grass. But it means that, I don't know, however many more households are housed that aren't today, 20, 25, maybe who knows, I'm like making up numbers as to how many people will take advantage of this and do it, and maybe a tiny percentage of those would have a parking problem. Like it's just, it's hard to figure out how to weigh the issues. Diane, you and I have probably been on the commission longer than anyone and maybe Robin has some experience, but how many applications that we actually had for a duplex or anything of that kind? I can only remember maybe one or two. Not very many. I'm sitting here thinking, you know, we could cure a lot of these problems if we were back to trustees and say, there's a piece of land between Park Street and Billy Shoxons, whatever, Shoxons. Why can't we make that a six story zone or a five story zone? They're talking about 250 apartments in there. Maybe they could get 350 apartments in there. So getting a significant chunk of new housing without trying to solve it one parcel at a time or, you know, one, not trying to get 350 people that decide to add one more dwelling unit to their parcel. And it's right beside the bus station. It's right beside the train station. We've got bike lanes going in. It's right where the utilities are. I think I'll just say that I think anyone would be hard pressed to say that we're not promoting and allowing significant amount of apartment construction in at least the village center, which is kind of where we've had a goal of producing more density. It's coming, we've built more units than many other communities in our target areas. And it's impressive. And there's a couple more that have been permitted that haven't been started yet. So, and then, you know, there's all the housing that was in where behind Laredes was that's just crazy amount of housing back there now that many people aren't aware of, that we've been walking distance to all of those things. So I like what we've been doing. It's very, we have made a lot of progress. I think this is another, what we're talking about tonight is another opportunity in our other districts to make some allowances that we're hoping are only minimally noticeable and have a large impact, maybe not in unit numbers all of a sudden, but just, you know, it's gonna give that many more opportunities for people to do something. I agree with you, John. Yeah, and I would say that, you know, the, to speak on what Robin said, like that benefits big developers that are gonna come in and do a multimillion dollar projects. Some of the other things we're talking about empowers our current residents to do something on their own property, which is a benefit as well, I think, in my opinion. So I got one more question for Regina and Robin, maybe. If we took R1 and changed it from 15 to 10 even, 10,000, what does that actually allow? It doesn't act. I don't see that that really allows a whole lot all by itself. Most of those lots are built. There might be a couple of lots hanging out there that aren't developed, but that doesn't necessarily generate anything. Whereas, No, especially if they, yeah. Discussions on accessory dwelling units or allowing duplexes means that if I already had a dwelling, I could go in there and divide it up and end up with instantly doubling the number of residential units on that lot. Yeah. You know, and we can certainly look at some form standards for not going crazy up here, just saying some form standards that could just try to describe this concept that from an outside perspective, it still looks very much like a detached home, single detached home, but it can have two units. John, I think I agree with you as like with the R1 as you get towards the R1 districts and you're further out from the center, maybe the space, encouraging the space is better. I think maybe working from the Village Center out and seeing what can be done in those zones as well that are already more compact, just from historical lot coverage and historical density. So does that mean like maybe R2? You allowed duplexes, but R1 maybe not? I would be in favor for that. Yeah. I'm thinking that R2, because they're denser in the first place, might have more of an opportunity to be accepted as having that density happen. I'd rather try to encourage more ADUs in the R1. As time goes on, it might, because of that increased density, it might be acceptable to more in the next permutations. I'm thinking gradual growth here and trying to get the exception. I hear Robin and I feel that, yes, six stories down here in the Village Center, we'd probably make a heck of a lot of sense, but the trustees were lobbied pretty heavily and they capped development except for the industrial part of being under four or under. But I keep thinking and going, they have no clue that the light industrial across from ADL has actually allowed to have six stories there. I don't think they really, until we do a balloon study, I don't think they'd realize what would happen there if it suddenly had a six-story commercial building. It would change the character of Maple Street, I think way beyond what people would even think about. So which is why I'm saying, can we gradually phase this in? Okay, so that it gets, we don't have the infill thing we had 10, 15 years ago when people suddenly went, no more. I recognize that they already think this is a city, but we're gonna really make it a city, aren't we? It is a city, it's urban by Vermont standards beyond what people even think about it. It's just, I'm thinking gradual growth would be more acceptable. And if there's a means of getting that gradual growth in, I just think of the nefs, okay, who said, oh no, I don't want anything to go on, but they were willing to put in some condominiums behind their place. And now that they didn't do that, now that's not acceptable anymore. So it's kind of going, am I wrong? No, you're right, they had approved for 11 at the back. Anyway, there was a couple of things we should remember. Enabling people to have a duplex in 100 single family houses doesn't mean we're gonna get 100 extra apartments. If it worked that way, then every house that is able to have an accessory dwelling unit, we would have about 400 more accessory dwelling units. Looking at increasing the density by increasing the height, it's an opportunity that's more likely to happen until somebody down the straight grid, you can have a duplex one. So one's theoretical and the other one's probably actual. So we shouldn't mix those two up. I'm in favor of both. Yeah, we know I'm not saying we shouldn't do those, absolutely, so I didn't mean to imply that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the other thing I think about is like the, there are a bunch of homeowners associations in some of those R1 areas that probably went, they had their own restrictions, they're a homeowners association. And I don't know that they would allow, even if we said, hey, by the way, it's allowed, but they would allow that increased density since they've legislated themselves. I know that some of them have no fencing allowed. I'm pretty sure you're right then. Yeah, so there was a change last or two legislative sessions ago that put into some law, not zoning law because homeowners associations are in a different part of state statute, but it prohibited them from disallowing ADUs. Okay. And I wouldn't be surprised if over time that restrictions on what homeowners associations can do gets expanded. So I don't, I think probably eventually if a municipality allowed duplexes in their zoning and the homeowners association didn't, A, I think you could probably sue your homeowners association on fairly good footing or, and two, I think ultimately state statute will catch up to that. All right. I wanna move us along a little bit here. So there's only three of us. We can't really make any formal pronouns. Yeah, but this is good. This was good help. I think what you're hearing is support for duplexes in at least R2 and possibly R1. And the whole accessory dwelling unit question, we're gonna revisit or visit in more depth all by itself shortly. So we'll get to that, but generally we're all in favor of being more permissive. And I don't know that I heard anybody interested in changing the square footage numbers, the minimum lot sizes. Yeah. Super. Thank you. All right. Bicycle parking. So this, we definitely talked about this in sort of a, I think it started as bike parking, but sort of more broadly in terms of PDM measures a little bit more holistically, but essentially in terms of bicycle parking, this is what your LDC has in it today. So this is definitely gets at the kind of commercial visitor bike parking. So you've got relatively large size parking lots and if you're required to have at least 15 vehicle parking spaces, then you've got to provide a bicycle rack as well. It does not include some other things that some other towns are starting to move towards. So first thing we talked about is you do have a pretty great path, bike path, alternative path map in your comprehensive plan. And so we can definitely just sort of bring in some language to support that plan and those desired pathways in the zoning regulations. You could also, if you wanted to step up to an official map, you could do that. We can kind of talk about that another day because it can take a lot of attention in and of itself, but I think at the very least, we wanna bring some good references into the zoning regulations. Then second bullet, so definitely folks are starting to look at multifamily housing developments and how much resident bike parking should be provided. So what you see there under the second bullet is what some of the bylaws are starting to get to. Then I would also say that a decent amount of folks are doing a little bit more on the commercial visitor bike parking than you're currently requiring. And that's just to sort of more define that on average, it's probably more like one bike parking space for 10 parking vehicles, or sorry, 10 vehicle parking spaces. Then I don't know if anybody spent any time looking into that Burlington regulation, but you can go a whole lot deeper down this whole road. Yeah, I've seen them there. They're pretty impressive. Yeah. I kind of like South Burlington. Is this section that you sent? I thought it was well done. Yeah. And I thought it might be the next step actually for us is in the direction that South Burlington went when it came to residential and commercial providing for bikes. Yeah, I would say they're probably in a good middle ground. Is bike parking defined? I was kind of curious like how they define bike parking or is it just, is it a rack? I know for Winooski they define it as a two-bike capacity rack, but I'm just wondering if it's defined. You can go so far down the rabbit hole on bicycle parking. I bet, because I've seen some cool bicycle parking. Is it secure? Is it enclosed? Is it, you know, it's amazing. It's pretty wild. Yeah, it's, they're typically in terms of like how it's defined at the very least, it sort of describes the rack itself and how there should be two points of walking that you can secure your bicycle to it. But yeah, you can, and then you can just go and go and go. I will say that, I like Diane's suggestion that South Burlington might be sort of a good, a good middle ground with, I would say a reference to the association of bike ped professionals of essential bike parking, sort of maybe like as updated or something because things will probably advance, but it might just be a good sort of reference point if that you can kind of send people to you rather than trying to dictate it. Yeah, it's all, we find in a lot of the things that we sort of try and follow somebody else's guidance. If there is an association or an entity that's done their homework and has, I mean, it's evolving so fast on what people who really bicycle a lot find as a useful convenience that you really wanna pay attention to what they're saying because just having a bike rack out there is bare bones of what's useful. And in many cases, it's not that useful for the, I mean, people have bicycles now that cost more than cars use to cost. And you're not gonna leave that just on a rack out in the middle of somewhere, you can't. So, if we're really trying to promote bicycle friendliness, there's a lot coming. I think the map that we have outlining, you know, okay, here are the streets that are friendly, it's still feel like you're a little bit not as safe as you wanna be on what we have available to us for bicycle traffic, but it is trying to get better at least on the route 15 quarter, they just put in a huge section just outside of the village, past the fort and on down. So, you know, we can be getting better where it will eventually get there. And I think our job is to see how that is coming towards us and make sure we take our own steps to engage with that. But the bike parking has been given a fairly small shake in the big picture of what we're requiring in our multifamily units, you know, most people, you'll see them take a bike up under their porch or they'll walk it up the stairs and leave it in their apartment somewhere, you know, and that's, you know, if we really wanna make improvements to that situation, we need to take some much bigger steps than we're seeing so far. Then we're seeing so far. Yeah, okay. So does that make sense that I'll kind of start with South Burlington's language? Well, I mean, all of what I said, you know, you're asking mostly developers because you're saying, okay, you know, who's gonna do this? Well, it's the next person that comes in with a proposal, you know, but you're asking them essentially to be taking up parking space size areas and devoting them to bicycles for secure storage, for indoor storage, for, you know, however many per, you know, however many parking spaces per number of units, it's, I won't say that it's painful, but it's, if you're not used to doing this, it's a big deal. But, John, we made, we've been tending in that direction. Okay, we had talked about it. We've asked the PUDs to go in this direction. We've asked some of our commercial providers to provide bike storage internally. Some of them have indeed done that. So why not take that next step? And I looked at South Burlington's rags and said, you know what, they've gone the next step. We're tending in that direction as we speak. Okay, with each application, the last one, I think it was either Phil or Patrick had said, hey, how about, you know, I forget what he was talking about bicycles. And, you know, you guys, Phil would have to tell me if it was him or Patrick, but it was, I'm going, we're going in that direction. Why not tell the developers we're there? So here, let's go there and we're going to tell you right off that this is what we expect. All right, I'm just saying, if you start with South Burlington, you're starting, you know, with the goal, with a goalpost pretty far up there. So that's all we can do. I didn't pick Burlington. I picked South Burlington. Come on. All right, let's see what we can do. I'm all for. Okay. And by the way, I think the Essex ETC plan, also had, you know, a more advanced thought process related to bicycles and the kind of improvements that they're talking about making in the overall bike ability along the major routes, especially is significant for us to consider. Okay, awesome. Thanks for that. I'll take a look. Okay, plan unit developments. This is my last slide. I did also send the two chapters that kind of go along with this, which we can look out if we need to, but I'm not sure that we necessarily do. So try to look at some of your kind of key things that have been struggled, that have been struggles in the plan unit development world. And certainly, like we've talked about before with other sections, you've got the chapter 500, you've got the chapter five that says some stuff and then it's kind of confusing. It doesn't say the same stuff as the chapter seven. So that can be pretty easily corrected. And in both places, it should better align with what 723 says, which is you don't just get waivers because you asked for them and flexibility because you asked for them. A, you're coming to the table with the design and that's why the planning commission might consider waivers. There is some use of the term modifications, which should really be referred to as waivers instead. You talked a little bit about how in some cases it's been tricky when you just see the conceptual stage and then they come back for final and it feels so hooked that it's hard to get them to adjust. So right now the preliminary stage is just at the applicant's own option. We could reword that to just give the planning commission the option when you're looking at something at the conceptual stage, you could say, you know what? This is something because whether it's big or small but there's certain things going on here that we really wanna see a preliminary stage before final. Well, that would be something that we would put in there that would allow us at the sketch plan stage to make them have two more steps, not just one. At our discretion, like if it's iffy. I guess I would be happy with that. I think it's the language that we're using to describe what we want and whether that actually needs a list, like, okay, pick three things from this list or you know what I mean? Like we kind of suggest a few things and then the applicants come in and they don't really have anything and they wanna know what we want. You know, well, we're tired of that. We don't want that to be the process. We want the process to be and staff should have something very clear in their hands that they can say, look, here's the list. You know, you gotta do this stuff. You gotta do at least, you gotta at least provide a way for us to tell that this is superior design, that you've done something in your application that shows us it's not regular, you know, or we're not even gonna accept it as a PUD, you know, like go away, you don't meet the mark yet. And that's not happening yet. You know, we're still getting, you know, the applications and they get all the way to final without anybody having made that decision. Like, okay, is it a PUD or not? Well, we're telling you it doesn't match the normal, you know, it doesn't, you know, have the right setback. So we're telling you it's a PUD. Well, that's not why it's a PUD. It's a PUD because you wanted to do something special and then you got to trade that off against some of the normal requirements, right? So I think the threshold for determining that it is in fact allowable to come to us as a PUD needs to somehow be in there. And then making that determination that should be clear what they did that makes this a PUD. And if that's strengthening our list, you know, you've clustered your development so that open space is meaningful and has a purpose, you know, instead of, oh, well, I've got a bunch of open space. Yeah, well, it's on the side of the hill, nobody can do anything with it anyway. That doesn't count as open space. You know, we've already got the wood lawn trails in there. You didn't give us anything we don't have already. You know, so there's gotta be a way to phrase this so that it's a clear, you know, product of their development that something special has happened. Okay, that makes sense. And I think that sort of list is under 723B. So I see that in there so we can strengthen that. Then I think I mentioned this question before. It just was like a little bit confused in terms of how, I guess more confused, how often PUDs actually get come before you and are they mostly in R1 and R2 or are they really like across the board? You see them in all districts. Yeah, I think we're seeing residential, we used to even call them different things like the residential PUD and a commercial PUD. Yeah. And I'm not sure that we need that distinction anymore. I think we can maybe dispense with that but you need to trigger yourself to say at the PUD and then, you know, that gets you some of the bonuses or the special attention that the PUD is designed to allow which I think is how we wanna handle that. But I agree that having it split across a number of chapters has been pretty confusing. And you know, the number of PUDs, PUD like things have been happening on Pearl Street and not in the TOD section, okay? Where they could be happening in TOD, but they're not. It's actually in multifamily. I have to look at it. It's either use one or two or something, it's blue. Okay. The other part that we're getting PUDs of course is, you know, it's back behind where a Loretta's used to be. It's back in there, but they put together master plan to put that all together. So I would say that, you know, we pretty much have an idea of what they want to do. It's the ones that just like the other day with the one on Maple Street, you know, they needed the PUD to do something created. Yeah, they needed something to get to maximize that site. And so that's where, when it's coming in. Okay. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, I think I can, I can just get that cleaned up. So we'll see it when we start looking at the chapters. So then the other thing particularly that came up a lot as a challenge was specifically the landscaping last time around. Yeah, just kind of just one more thing on PUDs. There is language in some of the sections that say something must be reviewed as a PUD. And if you remember to go and find those and just decide whether or not that's really what we're trying to say or not. If it has more than two units on it, it has to be reviewed as a PUD or something. I'm not sure I'm unhappy with that, but it just might bear a little scrutiny. I did see that it's in the chapter six associated with the various zoning districts. And I did find it a little bit interesting. So yeah, I'll flag those. So we can see. Yeah, because what that does is it creates the split between the developer seeking to do a PUD because there's an advantage to them for that versus you have to do one because we say so. And I don't know if that's what we're trying to say, but that's the way it reads right now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, generally speaking, I don't like PUDs at all because it's a very subjective process. It's not clear cut. It's, you know, you can get yourself around in circles for all the reasons that you've said tonight, even if we clarify the language as best we possibly can, there you'll still be tied up in circles. So I would lean towards not unless it's really for some good purpose, so I'll take a look at that. And it's been suggested that clustering and leaving a lot of open space is enough. And I've struggled with that concept. Like I'm not sure that's enough all by itself, but there could be, I mean, in general, that's a good thing. So the question is, is that superior to something else? Like if you just applied the normal development requirements, you'd end up back in the so many thousand square feet per unit, but if you say, well, you could be denser on the same lot if you clustered these and the remaining open space is now usable for something better, you know? Like just there, you know, like what is it? And yeah, yeah. There is, sorry, this is maybe a little bit of tangent, but the other thing that I wondered about, under the multifamily dwelling PUD, it's pretty clear that each multi-unit has to have a private yard of not less than 750 square feet. So that kind of eliminates the so-called footprint lot, which is by definition, basically, what a couple feet outside your foundation. What is it they call that? Is that the footprint? Yeah, footprint lot. Okay, is that why that's there? Yeah, so somebody could go outside and actually put a chair out there and not have somebody walk past them and on them. And, you know, maybe they want to expand and put a deck out there or something, you know, they have at least a little bit of space to, you know, do something that's at their control and not the general control. Yeah, and that's definitely, it's not for like an apartment-style multifamily, because that would be tricky. Yeah. But anyway, okay, we can get to there. All right, all right. Landscaping, so also your other thing. So this is my suggestion, hopefully it's clear in here. So again, talking about the two different places where we have your PUD standards, 511 or 723, it's not a clear enough standard for what you have to do for landscaping. So I'm recommending that you require a plan developed by licensed landscape architect. If you're coming for a PUD, so you're coming for a PUD, trying to get waivers, you're trying to do, you know, something a little bit different and unique. So in that case, no matter the size, no matter the cost of construction, you got to get a landscape architect design landscape plan. And then the cost of the landscaping that you're going to put in is the same as your threshold that you have now, which is 3%, if it's under 250, 2%, I think if it's over a million. Landscape architect licensed in the state of Vermont. Landscape architect licensed in the state of Vermont. I'm, yeah, I guess I've heard recently of people that have had really good experiences working with some of the, I don't know if they're nurseries or other vendors of landscaping that actually have a significant design ability to come in and lay something out. And I don't necessarily know that we're trying to say it has to be a licensed landscape architect, but I think the concept is it's got to be way better than somebody coming in and saying, I'm going to put up a couple of trees here and a few bushes over there. So it's possible that maybe there's some, some flexibility around that, but I think that's a pretty good place to start. You know, it sets the bar up pretty much where you want it. And if somebody can come in and say that their landscape design has been done by a professional of some kind, maybe we have a way to allow that. I don't know what that is yet, but maybe there's a way to allow that. Yeah, and it just seems to me like in a urban setting, a more like city urban setting, like this is so critical. And particularly if you're trying to do something a little bit unusual, like it's really important that you get this part right. And we're seeing a lot of designs that are trying to spend some money, but not all of it. And then they want to donate the rest of the money to whoever we tell them they can donate it to landscaping allowance or something. And I don't, you know, that's also been used maybe too many times or by people that haven't really wanted to bother thinking out a landscape plan and presenting it. So, you know, I like to maybe discourage that. There are places where that's highly appropriate. You just don't have enough space to put a lot of greenery. And, you know, we also allowed hard scaping to count in the dollar column. And that's not inappropriate in the more urban location. So, you know, as long as we can capture those types of possibilities, I think that would be really helpful. Sorry, Diane, you were going to say something. I'm not to say it. We had one developer who thought that he was doing us a favor by putting in grass. I don't consider that landscaping. So, but you're right. There are individuals who have trained. So, if it's, and they are professionals that's part of their bedding plan and whatever else they put together a plan. I don't know, perhaps we can ask what our locals here as to, you know, those individuals who are doing bedding plans and that sort of thing are, you know, to what level of training are we asking for? License, you know, does say exactly where it's at. But there could be people who are indeed trained to do. It's not just slap a tree in. Okay, because we've had people come in and say they're just going to slap a tree in. Thank you very much. And then they pick something off of our list if they go that far. It's, that's not what we're expecting when it's a PUD. I do like the notion that this gets tied to a PUD though. I think that's a great idea. Yeah, so then you're not, oh, go ahead, Phil. Sorry, no, go ahead. I was just going to say then you don't, you're at least taking off the table at least in a PUD scenario, the situation of somebody coming in with a $999,900, whatever project costs. And I was going to say, we're also trying to incorporate the Tree Advisory Committee in these areas as well, right? So making sure that they get some sort of review or recommendations on the landscape plan. I know in that last one on Maple Street, we had a lot of people comment on the tree selection and their plan and so making sure that the landscaping is appropriate and the selections are appropriate for our environment. Awesome. Yeah, and they made a lot of good suggestions to the landscaping section itself. So I'll see if it makes sense to sort of do a cross-reference to just to make sure we're still capturing everything that they want, want to change over there, no matter the review process. Okay, I think that's all I have. Great. So we're tasked with reviewing chapter five and chapter seven, which you think are ready for our next round of reviews, right? I mean, you could look at those if you want. Like if you know stuff you want me to take a look at already, feel free. I wouldn't say they have everything in them that they will ultimately have yet. But those are the chapters that we're focused on right now. So we should... Yeah, that's definitely got the PUD stuff in there and a whole slew of other things that we've already talked about it. You'll see marked up and comments and everything in there. Regina, I had started to look at chapter five and discovered that some things that we asked for like formatting and because we had added a section in the section got added but the letters didn't change for the rest. Oh yeah, there's all of that. Like what we've talked about when you've seen those sections before, they have not been done. Okay. All right, come on, wait a minute. Yeah, like other nights that we've seen some of those track changes and you guys said, okay, change this, change this, change that. Haven't been done yet. Okay. Good. We still don't have a quorum so we can't talk about any more of the official business. Any parting words for us, Regina? I don't think so. John, you did want me to share the Eco's Housing Draft chapter with folks? Well, let's just talk about housing kind of, not to solve anything, but just offline here. Housing, there's so much going on with housing right now. It's crazy. The AIA Vermont has a housing strategy and some design sure it's actually being offered to communities right now. And I know that's underway. Eco says their own thing going. We've got every group out there is trying to solve housing and it's very tricky. So having just a general awareness of what's going on so that when our own housing committee comes to us with more than, I mean, we gave them a pretty interesting recommendation last time which said, you know, let's take as big a bite as we can right now on this affordable housing and other similar initiatives. But to get a big picture view of what everybody else is doing and where they are in their process so that we kind of know where we are in our process relative to all of that would be wonderful. In terms of the other municipalities, you mean? Yeah, I mean, there's other municipalities and there's regional work happening and statewide initiatives with the AIA Vermont. So I'll try and stay on top of that. It's my subcommittee that's kind of spearheading that and I know where, you know, we've presented to a few people here and there but when we've reached out to the Regional Planning Commission to help with that. So it's ongoing, we don't have any answers that we're still developing issues and trying to actually reach out to communities and dig right into what their specific concerns are and how they might take a piece of their community land and do something, you know, what do we want to do? What do we want to design something? We've got to draw something, right? So we're going to be doing that as the AIA Vermont but many others are doing things and I think the more we're aware of what those things are, the better. Yeah, and the legislature is surely talking to me. So it'll be interesting even but, you know, we may have more changes to make in the LVC by the time they're done in May. So we'll see how it goes. We, you may be putting duplexes in there whether you want to or not. Yeah, that's right. And there's a fair amount of money involved with incentives and at least weatherizing and energy improvements. And I'm sure that any opportunity that somebody has to try and, you know, achieve some of the goals that the state recognizes are significantly in their favor whether it be sheer quantity of housing or energy improvements to housing will probably have some pot of money that's available to them. Just before we go, I need to say I'm going to be away February the 13th to the 20th and also March 30th to April 14th. Thank you, Robin. Glad to see you tonight. All right. Anybody else final comments? Last minute announcements. Stay safe, get your snow shovels out. I'll take a motion to adjourn the meeting, please. I move to adjourn. And those few of us present will say aye. Aye. Seconded. Aye. Yeah.