 We have a motion to approve the agenda. We have a motion from John. Do we have a second? Second. Second from Stephanie. Those in favor of approving the agenda. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Gender approved. Next up, we have comments from the chair. I don't have anything. Not a lot anyway. At the, at the end of this meeting, we're going to talk about whether we're going to be next time. So we'll save it since it's on the agenda. At the end. But. I guess I do want to throw out a reminder of some other things. Just let everyone know what I'm thinking about. With the city plan, like. Long-term plan. For us to do work. I do want to try to make sure that we have time. To do the arts and culture that we talked about. And I'd also like for us to. Do like a review at the end that's oriented toward. Social justice and equity. Maybe. Maybe I'll bring what we have to the. To the social justice and equity advisory committee. Before we take it on, see what their feedback is first. But those are some things down the road that. And of course we're going to have to do the land use plan and things like that. So. I think we're moving along nicely, but there are some of those other things that seem like kind of luxury things, but I would really like for us to try to try to get those. They're not going to be mandatory. But I'd like for us to do that. Which means we got to keep on moving. That's all I've got to say. So next is general business. And I don't believe there's anyone from the public to talk about anything not on the agenda. So we'll keep moving. There's no one in the room with you. Is there Mike? No. Just to go to me. Okay. So next we have to consider the minutes from July 12. We're going to take a look at those. We have a motion to approve the minutes. So moved. From Stephanie to be a second. Second. Second from Aaron. Anybody need more time. Okay. Those in favor of approving the minutes. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay. Minutes approved. And brings us to the room. The review and comment on compiled strategies for the transportation implementation plan. So in the. Google file. We share. There's a. Strategies. Is this working draft three? So we're working. I have to pull out myself to find out. In the transportation folder. There's. It should be under the transportation goals. And then there's the strategies tab. And I'm looking at the implementation plan working draft three. So. That is, is that the best document to look at, Mike, to look under the goals. Spreadsheet. And then under strategies. Opening up to see. Website. Yeah, it looks like there was a working transportation. And it should just say transportation goals and strategies. Yeah. Yeah. So the one that says transportation goals strategies. That's what that's what I reviewed for them. Before the meeting today. So please. Spreadsheet, not the word. Spreadsheet, the Excel file. Okay. Thanks. We have, yeah, but there's 20 strategies. Right now. So as a reminder. Last week, we went over aspirations and goals. The aspiration, the single aspiration, which we. Consolidated. Is Montpilers transportation system meets the needs of all users through safety, efficiency, attractiveness, quality, cost effectiveness, environmental responsibility and sustainability. And. We had talked about six goals last week. Sounds like Mike's in favor of actually breaking it down to five. The goals are to increase public transportation. Shared mobility opportunities and access through an integrated multimodal transportation system. Improved Montpilers transportation system through the safe and efficient movement of people and goods. Improve the appearance of Montpilers transportation infrastructure and amenities for non vehicular travelers. Balance quality and cost effectiveness to improve accommodations and safety for pedestrians and bicycles on all streets and pathways. And improve the transportation infrastructure to meet the needs of people on all streets and pathways. And improve the transportation infrastructure to mitigate storm water emissions and heat island effects caused by roads and sidewalks. And then the one that, that, and maybe I can hand it over to Mike now to talk about he's thinking of removing is the goal that said. Improve accessibility to downtown and with neighborhoods for all modes of transportation. Yeah, and I think that was, I think that was covered in what I found was most of what was in there for strategies is really covered under the other ones that were above. In some of these other, the other pieces, so there really weren't strategies that attached directly to that, that were unique to it. So really kind of fit into those other ones and wasn't necessary in my view, but. And that personally seems fine to me because yeah, once we look at the strategies, there's a lot of stuff in there that accomplishes this, but. I don't know what others think about. I guess the advantage of calling it out as a goal is that we're stressing it. Symbolically, but if we remove it, there's, and I think we had talked, we had talked in the past about, you know, there's some things that are that might be goals that appear in the text in the chapter text, really, I kind of thought this tied into, you know, some of the land use. It actually is a land use piece. And if you were to look at the strategies that were under that in the working plan, it actually was a lot of these, you know, this supports the land use plan for this and it supports the land use plan for that. So I think, or the housing plan. So it supported a lot of these other plans in the implementation of that. And so I think we can talk about it in the text as well, or we already did talk about it in the text as well. So we're not really losing it. Okay. Any other thoughts about that? So does that mean everyone agrees to just keep it at five goals and then move on to strategies right now? Yeah. We'll take silence. Anybody else anything. Okay. We will. Follow that recommendation, Mike. So for the strategies. Did you want to share your screen? So as you go through and make edits, it'll come through, or do you want me to share the screen? Okay. So. So. Members of the public who may view it. Yeah. Good point. Is it sharing? Yes. Okay. So, uh, the first one is to a policy that, you know what, I won't. Yeah. I did try to save time. I'm not going to read all the words underneath. I did read it, but just so everyone knows, I did read these personally today. I made a couple of. Uh, new things. I'm like a little, little worth missing correction things. Like just because like a word was out of place or something like that, but, and if anybody sees any more of those, we can fix it now. But. I'm just going to look at a more macro right now, and we'll just look at the headings. So the first is a policy to support shared mobility on public property. This would be a new strategy. effectiveness and medium effort and it goes to goal one, which is to increase public transit and shared mobility. The second strategy is to as an initiative to subsidize public transit and shared mobility for low income residents. This would be new. This is something that's discussed a little bit in the chapter. It's low effectiveness because it's not reaching a lot of people. I take it. Well, usually it's priority. It does effectiveness, but what it was in our conversations before was kind of the priority. How do we prioritize these that I didn't change the header on it. I just had been going through filling them in. I'll just take a quick second to point out that just so everybody is aware. What I did for these was to try to group them together into things that made sense and sometimes there's just one that just doesn't fit into a larger initiative it just kind of sits there on its own. I didn't pull things out that I necessarily disagreed with. So there may be things in here don't think that because it's in here it's something that I've, I'm advocating for. You know, somebody may may look at this and think, you know, is it really something we should be doing subsidizing shared mobility, you know, coming up with a way of getting money to in the hands of folks to subsidize public transit. And this was the recommendation of the committee. And so that was why it's on here and there are a couple of them that are like that and there's one I think I marked further down that I would remove that I think we can get to when we get down to the bottom but just wanted to give everyone a little bit of a preface of what these are. And how I tried to try to group like things together. Yeah, I think that's a that's a good point. These, these come mostly from the transportation committee. So something to keep in mind. Okay, so we were looking at. So the first one is, yeah, support shared mobility, which goes to parking spaces for like ride sharing stuff like that. The second one is to subsidize some public trans transit and shared mobility for low income residents. So that would be some like new funding necessary. The third one is a program to annually fund GMT, which is something we already do. Then the fourth one, which is a pretty big one is to complete the, there are the complete streets initiative, and to continue that. Mike, you did put, did you, did you write the comments underneath these though, like, like when you're saying one adjustment to consider includes a review of pickup and drop off locations. Yeah, so as I went through the, all of those, what was probably seven or eight pages of individual strategies that have been broken out. And this is obviously the big overarching one, which is we have a complete streets initiative, a complete streets plan that we currently have, and it's currently being implemented through the capital improvement program. So we take projects out of that and we identify East State Street needs a sidewalk. We put that money into the CIP, and it gets built out and that's how this is working and over time we will eventually finish our complete streets by doing this. But there were a couple of little pieces that came up in other, in other strategies that said well the city should, you know, add features to help residents navigate the many hills in town. And that was a recommendation that they wanted to have more amenities like benches and rest areas on the hills to help pedestrians to be able to navigate the city. Because it's not in the CIP right now it's not in our complete streets plan the thought was the best way to do this is to build that into, you know, or a vision of the complete streets plan at some point we would probably revisit that plan. And when we do we should add in these other things that were talked about as features that are lacking. Who would, who would be in charge of revisiting the plan would it be us the transportation infrastructure committee or city council. It would probably be a combination of the planning commission and the transportation committee probably when we did this, the complete streets is everything outside of the downtown and downtown master plan filled in the donut hole. So those are the two plans that complement each other. So when we did it in the past we got funding the planning commission technically got the funding but most of the steering committee and the work that was done was done through the transportation committee, and probably a revision would be done in the same way. Although it, it always depends the more the planning commission wants to be involved, the more they could be involved as members of the steering committee of that update. What year was complete streets done. Okay, it's 2018. I think it was 18. Okay, a couple of these dates I have to go back and double check but I think it was 18 for that one. I don't, I don't remember personally being around when that was done the first time. That's, that's around when I joined. I think it was done in 17 and adopted in 18. And that's also the same time period we were adopting the zoning regulations 17 was all zoning regulations and then January of 2018 we adopted the zoning so playing commission was pretty much buried under zoning updates at that time. Okay. That's all, that's all helpful. Because that's a big part of this, the work that's going to be done in this plan is going to be that number four. And then, number five, the downtown streetscape master plan initiative. So this is something from 2019. It's called a medium priority and a high effort on here. So this is just the plan that's specific to downtown. That's it's a continuing thing. We also, we also have a mend on here is what what are you thinking of amending Mike. So they're in the middle of this it kind of goes into there will be now need to be a revised plan to accommodate more on street parking opportunities and some other adjustments. The primary issue that came up with this is that the downtown master plan was contingent upon the construction of the parking garage. So, the loss of the on street parking in the negotiations with the business owners and people in the downtown the negotiation was. I know you're going to lose on street parking spaces but that's okay because it's going to be accommodated in the parking garage. And so there was kind of a link made between those and now that the parking garage has officially been killed. We are also now left with a streetscape plan that will need it'll have to be amended, or at least go through another public process to go through and say, you know, let's not change the plan, and let's recognize that we won't have a parking garage and we're going to reduce on street parking. And that's a that becomes a question of policy for the public and for the city council, and the planning commission and transportation committee to all, you know, weigh in on but I think we have to have another public process to readdress what to do about the on street parking question from the streetscape master plan. Is this the only part in our strategies that addresses parking. There's there's other things right. There's a full parking initiative farther down. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean people, that's definitely going to be something that comes up when city councils reviewing this. Okay, does anybody have any, anything to discuss on that. So the strategy is the capital improvement program, which is something that exists that will be continuing. This is, it's a, it says here as a tool to forecast and budget for proper spending on maintenance and improvements on buildings and infrastructure. So the city reviews the CIP annually to develop work plans based on funding and project future costs. So, depending on how ambitious we get about completing all the goals in this plan, the CIP might need more, more funding than previously. The next one is the north south path initiative. So the east west shared use path was completed. Now in north south shared use path is would be needed to complete the trail networks or the path networks in the city. This is a priority of the transportation committee. It is a high priority. They do really want us to be working or really they want to be working on this to kind of identify and lay out where's that path going to be. And then to start to lay out, you know, us, you know, a path forward to actually getting it constructed. We spent 20 years building the, you know, when is the east when is the west, all the way out across town now they want to have a north south route to people who want to travel, at least up to say the nature center. From the nature center somebody would have to be traveling on street, but we could build wider sidewalks or wider, wider shoulders to accommodate bike riders. But they at least want to be able to have kind of a dedicated shared use path. The same like you see in the downtown but they want to have one running north south maybe along elm street. So that would be a number of routes but that that's been a priority for them, because they feel that's the best way to have kind of almost these bicycle highways. That would help from a safety standpoint. Does complete streets have stuff about bypass as well. So we're really looking at the, the street network so might talk about adding in bike lanes into certain areas, but this would be a distinct. In some cases it may leave the road infrastructure all together which has been discussed maybe if we cross the, you know, if we cross the Winooski, or across the north branch at some point maybe we could go up the other side, you know, coming up and go along the north branch park and build them kind of a shared use path along the existing path that's there. So there's some ideas like that that might be off off of the road network, but certainly it would be considered, you know, integrated into the complete streets plan, if a north south route is developed. So was it the downtown master, the streetscape master plan, the one that had some stuff in there about closing down some of the streets, making them one way so that there would be room for a bike path. Yeah, they were looking at that for elm street because they wanted their responsibility was only up to about Langdon or school street I think. So we tried to foresee that we would probably need a shared use use path going on elm street so that may require widening a sidewalk to become a shared use path, thereby losing on street parking or losing a travel lane so they kind of looked at a couple options. I think, I think you're right I think they came down to making part of elm street one way would give enough room to have some on street parking and a shared use path. But there was no envision as to what it would happen once it reached school street because that would be a separate plan but that would go into this north south plan that would be developed. And there's no timeline for constructing it. It's just at this point. They want to see what's the plan, where's it going to be. I'm partly asking just because I want to make sure that we have like really, really good options like that are still on the table with, you know, with the plan that we're passing here but it sounds like those things are all doable into this plan. Like if we do want to make some streets one way and be much more dedicated to non vehicle travel. So the next strategy is the integrated transportation study. So this is new proposal to identify where transportation modes connect to ensure facilities and modes can fully accommodate other modes. And it's I think this is useful to give some examples for what this means. So by cracks near the bus stop by cracks on buses parking near the transit center. So this transfer, this would be a study done by the transportation committee. Yeah, I tried to go and see, you know, as I went through these to try to see where they could lump into other ones I really just couldn't find a place above it really wouldn't fit into the complete streets so that's why it's it's its own study. I just couldn't find a place where where it fit into an above thing mostly because it's looking at integrating across modes, and most of the things above tend to fall into a single or some other mode or something different so that's why it's just a study. They identified as a low priority. Okay. So the, the next one is the satellite parking initiative. So this is high priority high effort strategy to look to look into doing satellite parking and to shuttle people out of downtown. Seems like that should just be part of a strategy to be. Or on that point. I was wondering if that wasn't part of for the complete streets initiative given that the garage is mentioned in both were, or maybe the integrated transportation study is the new or I don't know it's like the number four mentions that reimagining of the complete wait which one isn't the garage. Oh sorry number five the downtown streetscape master plan, like if this is a parking thing, wouldn't those be connected or not really. Well the shuttle parking lots satellite parking lots would not be in the downtown. Right I understand that. I understand that but the, the downtown development is contingent was contingent upon the garage and if this is a replacement for the garage. So it's what it is at this point and I think, I think where I would go with this I mean it could certainly be merged up one with the integrated transportation study. Really, I kept it separate because it's always been a controversial idea and it's never been a fully. It's an it's an idea that that people have always pushed certain certain groups have always pushed it. The question has always been, are we or aren't we going to do it and if it ends up being one that we do I think it's easier to start to roll it into some of these. issues but I kind of kept it separate until we could kind of get an idea that, in fact, we're making a decision that this is the path we're going to go forward. It's always been either a parking garage or the satellite parking and most people said satellite parking is not going to work, nobody's going to do it. Don't we already have like several of them. I don't think we have transport in anymore, since that capital shuttle doesn't run now. Right. There's also no problem finding parking anywhere. Yeah, true. That makes sense to me is to why to keep it separate. Mike, thank you. I want to take it's it really comes down to a two piece thing so this was really looking at, especially looking out, say root to root 302 finding a finding a piece of land they've talked about the the Jacob Davis house, or where the, the, the antenna is next to the john dear, you know there's a little field there maybe we get that build a big parking lots people can park out there and we can take and shuttle people in but that's going to mean spending money to a choir land and to develop a parking lot and to then, you know, make sure that the microtransit of the transit works. So it's, I think it's a big conversation. And in a big solution we had also talked at one time about, you know, using a rail shuttle, if we got one next to the rail line. And that was what the, if you remember, all the way back to when they did the sustainable month pillar project. That was what they had envisioned we're going to build in the downtown. And then we're going to have a rail line that connects very to my pillar. And we're going to be able to develop that rail line and how we get cars out of our downtown is by having these remote parking lots next to these shuttle lines where we've got the trains that run all the time but it the rail idea has since you know, fallen off. I think it's mentioned in here somewhere. Yeah, transit to move people out the commuter rail has also been considered but the train so far has been one unwilling to consider the option so really kind of takes off the table. I think their, their last study showed that the capital costs per rider were like well over $300,000 and then they're very large operating costs and it would primarily accomplish getting people out of the buses that cover the same same area. In terms of like the satellite parking and integrated transportation study, I would be maybe a proponent of merging those. It seems like I'm not sure the satellite parking is a foregone conclusion or a solution, particularly given that our new new reality that is uncertain in terms of where what people's commute to work patterns are going to look like how many jobs we're going to have in our core at National Life and it feels like what we're really trying to do is understand how different modes are integrated and how we make things work so that not everyone needs to, you know, use a single occupancy vehicle to go from point A to point B. Yeah I feel, I don't know if we're allowed to do this at this point but I feel like that strategy is not useful. It might be useful as part of that integrated transportation study but I think we should, I would, I don't know, I don't like that one. Yeah well it sounds like sounds like that's the direction we're headed here is maybe mention looking at different parking alternatives in number eight satellite being one of them, maybe, and keep the it's it's a number eight if you notice is low priority. So, it's also not a lot of emphasis on rushing that one. We also have a 13 which is a parking initiative so we may, if we want to we can kind of mark this one note this one and then when we get to 13 we can always kind of decide whether or not we want to roll the satellite parking into the the greater parking initiative. Why is that I think we can just delete it, and we can add the word satellite parking to number eight somewhere. What is that satellite parking priority high. So, these were prioritized by the transportation committee. Oh got it. So, yeah that's, it's high because they, it's an idea they really, they really like. So, sounds like we can remove. We're talking about removing 13 and number nine and then just making eight. I think it's probably more of a completed. I think 13 is different eight nine we can certainly merge together. Because parking is more than just the study of parking. Okay. So, 13 is different in that it's actually it's calling for action to create a parking plan for the downtown area. it's really the fact that, and we've pointed this out, our, so our parking, parking is a enterprise fund. So it's its own thing. And it is basically an $800,000 business. We generate $800,000 in parking passes and in the parking meters. So it's a large thing that nobody's in charge of. There's nobody making policies. We kind of wing it as we go along. And it's one that we've said for a long time, we really kind of need an overall plan and strategy with better management of our parking. Maybe that becomes a million dollar without much, without going after people. It's just a matter of, we may better manage that we might make more money on it. So that's really what the parking initiative was trying to get at was how do we, you know, and we've been doing some new things. Obviously we now have that you can use your cell phone to use the app to go and do that. Those are some new things that we've put in, the credit card, now that's new. But there's a lot of things that we could do to maybe get better management of our parking. So that's really what the parking initiative is looking at. Don't those all go hand in hand with those other items though? And I guess, you know, it's a slippery slope to saying all these things are interconnected and maybe that lumping in the parking plan into that will sort of overshadow what number it was trying to get at. I think eight and nine both kind of work on the theme of being integrated. So it's, you know, eight's looking at how these things integrate buses and bikes and these other things. The satellite parking is really integrated parking. It really part of that integrated system. You're going to park and take public transit and making sure that we have the right thing. So I can certainly see eight and nine very easily merging together under the theme of integrated transportation system. Yeah, I understand what you're saying about the difference between 13. I mean, since we're already talking about how do people feel though about 13? Everyone feel like it's a worthwhile strategy to start acting on the issue of managing the parking downtown? Given that the garage is no longer, that makes sense to me. Yeah, and for 13, I don't know about this, you know, managing to 85% occupancy. Maybe that's like a accepted standard. Maybe it isn't, but I'm not sure it needs to be like a policy that's included here. Like I think it makes sense to adopt some policies, but it says here, you know, the city should adopt some policies and here's a policy, but I don't know enough about it to know whether or not. How about if we removed adopt and put consider that would at least take out the, I think that's what we did on some of these other ones was we weren't, because we had that conversation of are we adopting our policies through our plan? Are we adopting our policies after the plan is adopted? And it's a separate action by the council. And I think that's what we had agreed on was, we were gonna go for this separate action. We really wouldn't be adopting, we should probably just have that say consider. That's a develop. The 85% occupancy, did that come from a preference? Well, from the transportation committee or was that you? It's part of, so folks like Donald Shoup and the high cost of free parking, that's the number and the target that municipalities work towards now. And they find a few, so if you've got higher than 85% occupancy, you increase how much it costs that shifts people from high use areas to lower use areas. And so more of a economic way of moving people around and the idea is you would eventually have some areas that are either lower for free. And then, so it might be less convenient, but it's gonna be free and you're gonna pay more for the convenience of parking downtown on street right in front of the store you want, you're gonna probably pay more per hour than you would parking on Stonecutter's way, for example. But right now all of our meters all run at the same cost. So what we have proposed to city council is that we start to monitor these and start to adjust them. So maybe State Street would have a higher rate than Stonecutter's way, for example. But that comes down to. I think this makes sense the way it's written. With the change from adopt to consider. Also said you should also adopt. I don't think that. It means the same thing to me, but I'm not the- We can keep getting fuzzier with it. Well, it sounds like Mike was in favor of changing it from adopt to consider just like he said, because we're trying not to declare too many policies in this thing, because for one it raises the question. We've discussed this before it raises the question of like if we're gonna do that, why don't we just do the thing instead of plan to do it? So okay, that sounds good. And so we're gonna cut out to the satellite parking initiative, but we're going to mention it in the integrated transportation. And I went ahead and wrote the word parking into that study. I guess we don't have to actually include parking in that study. What do you think, Mike? Because as you were saying, integrated transportation, satellite parking, it's just part of integrated transportation anyway. Yeah, I'll add it to the text. We can, I'll make it work. I'll just merge those two together. They're both mostly studies at this point. Okay. So that brings us to toward zero deaths initiative. This is something new, national movement that's taken up locally to better design and regulate vehicles to try to achieve zero deaths from traffic accidents. This is a goal that all the other things are trying to accomplish. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. What I had as my issue was, we have a whole section on, you can see this is getting to goal two. Goal two talks about safety. And so yeah, there was an awful lot that is in why we build complete streets, why we do these other things. But there were also a set of strategies that were specifically proposed. And so I kind of needed a header to put them under. And if you think you've got a better way of doing it by all means, but it really came down to how we manage our speed limits and how they tie into the street typologies, the complete street plan. So we shouldn't be adjusting our speed limits without first adjusting the streets. There's a proposal, which I'm actually in favor of because the downtown master plan did not call for bike lanes in the downtown. The transportation committee said, well, we're allowed to go down to 15 mile per hour speed limits. We should do that because bike riders, asking bike riders to ride 25 miles per hour doesn't make a lot of sense. So if we're not gonna have bike lanes in the downtown, we should take the downtown core speed limit down to 15 miles per hour in order to safely accommodate bikers. So that's one of the proposals. So you can see there are a number of these that kind of go in, tied into that. But yeah, I absolutely agree. There's obviously a lot of overlap with the structural pieces that were discussed above in the complete streets plan and the downtown master plan. But this kind of covered some other topics. I'm okay with emphasizing it though. Make sure it doesn't get lost to have its own strategy, seems fine to me. I have one question, Mike. Through complete streets or anything else, has there been talk about speed bumps in addition to the lower speed limits? No, generally not. There was some conversation in the downtown master plan report about speed tables, but not necessarily speed bumps because of the issues they create with plowing and with stormwater runoff and other issues. But the speed tables were discussed in front of, I think, especially in front of the senior center, the Rialto Bridge and another one in front of City Hall. They were all meant to have some speed tables put in. Yeah, I can tell you anecdotally that I'm on Vine and Elm over here and there's a pedestrian sign that's often in the middle of the road. And like every single day a car hits it because people come down Elm so fast. So that seems like there's more speeding there than on Main Street. Yeah, and some of it comes down to the design. Yeah, some of it comes down to the design. Having some bump outs for the crosswalks helps to make people more visible. But yeah, there's a lot that goes into it, whether it's speed enforcement, proper design of the streets or there's a number of ways of getting at that. But part of this is also to make sure we understand where the unsafe areas are and start to make adjustments. Yeah, I think Elm, as you leave town, especially if we're gonna use that as a north-south pathway for bikes, needs definitely needs more safety measures. I also know that I'm stepping out of my lane a little bit. Hopefully that stuff will all be considered and towards zero deaths. Does anybody else have anything on that? Are you okay with it, John? Yeah, my preference would just be to remove it. I think it adds, there's a ton here. So I'm just looking at this a little bit on how do we, is there any, there's a lot of redundancy and a lot of things for us to do. And I don't think this necessarily adds anything. It does talk about the speed limits, which I guess I submit I'm not a fan of speed limits. I think it's just an easy way for people, for us to feel like we've done something when we haven't addressed like the design speed. And so I don't think it adds anything, but also at the same time it's not, so I don't care that much. It's just saying do all the things that we're doing. And then after you do those lower the speed limit to 15 miles an hour, which I think cyclists will be breaking that speed limit by the way, that's pretty slow. Mike, do you think it's redundant with the other plans? I don't think so, not the way it's worded, but, and as I said, a lot of these were specific strategies. There are about five or six specific strategies all that kind of tied into these speed and speed limit questions. And so that was where I really just, I just tried to wrap them up into that and noted that we would wanna have, getting to John's point about having streets that are built to their speed. And that's what the complete streets plan does. There's it's a set of typologies. And the idea is that the typology is set for a specific speed limit. So, the slower the speed limits, the narrower the lanes and there's a number of factors that I'll go into it. And so what we wanna make sure we do is that the design speed matches the speed limit and that if somebody does wanna propose a change in speed limit and we occasionally get those requests, we had a request two years ago up on Berlin, Berlin street heading up the hill. They wanted to lower the speed limit. And part of it was, well, if you lower the speed limit then we need to start making other adjustments to the road. Or if you wanna increase the speed limit you're gonna have to make adjustments in order to be safe because right now the street, the design speed does not match the speed limit. So we wanted to, if you're gonna change it then you've gotta make changes to both so they're aligned better. In terms of like, is there anything, if this wasn't here, is there anything that we would do different with this being here or not? And maybe that's the miles per hour. Maybe there's also this education program to teach users the rules of the road, which I'm not sure is the great use of our municipal resources. I'm sure plenty of people on front porch forum will yell at each other around how to ride your bike or walk down the street. I don't know if sending Mike around to tell people that's gonna change anything. But again, it was in the strategies that were in the transportation committee. So it was lumped in with these because I kind of felt that was, you know, it was a completely separate strategy but I felt that probably fit best into this one. That's not to say that all of these are good ideas. You know, I think that downtown speed limit of 15 miles an hour is good, but other people may not. It's just an idea at this point. The educating people, that's great. If it happens, I don't know if I would consider it a high priority of our public works department but, you know, if the complete streets committee wants to volunteer time to do it, more power to them, that's great. It seems to me that, yeah, design is much more effective than making drivers behave a certain way than the education plan could ever hope to be. Okay, so one way to resolve this could be to include some of these details in our discussion of complete streets to make sure they're covered. Is that something that could work for you, Mike? It's gonna cross over both because like the policy to change the speed limit is really in the downtown master plan portion. So I mean, we can either keep it as a separate initiative or we can break the pieces out. It would make these other initiatives longer. If people don't have issues with that, I can certainly break those pieces out. Okay. I mean, maybe I'm ignorant about this, but it seems to me that like as far as like where I let my kids ride bikes, there's actually not many places that are popular that I would, but I would be more comfortable downtown because it does seem slower and safer. It seems like anything outside of downtown is really what's dangerous, but I'm not an expert on this. But we could possibly include something in both of those other strategies. What do other people think about that? Moving some of the pieces from the bike safety strategy into those instead? Anybody have an opinion or thought or something to add? I'm waiting to design elements as a strategy. I'm not sure if that makes it more complicated, but that would be my hope too that if we moved it into those other things and those are like design focused initiatives that that would happen. So merge 10 with four and five? Yes. All right. I can do that. Did you have something about that, John? Did you have something to say about that? No, I mean, just that again, it's maybe doesn't make a whole lot of difference and I've probably taken up too much time talking about this, maybe we should just move on then. All right, no problem doing that. So strategy number 11 is the maintenance programs initiative. So this is a high priority. This is just, is this different than the CIT? It's some of the pieces are in the CIP, some of them aren't. Mostly this is just where a lot of the transportation committee came up with the fact that a lot of safety issues are the fact that we aren't doing a good job in our maintenance programs. So, you know, filling potholes, sweeping streets, making sure the crosswalks have their lines. These are all important for safety, whether it's safety of the bikers, safety of the cyclists, whether it's safety of the bikers, safety of the pedestrians. So they outlined a number of them. I just lump them all together into one thing called the maintenance programs. So as it said right there in the list, potholes, trip hazards, following streets and sidewalks, streets sweeping, line striping, these are all annual things that we do. They've got their own line items in the budget, but they're also critical and they also felt that in some cases these needed to be done better in order to increase safety for the users. Okay. Strategy number 12 is the unified development regulations. Zoning regulations are well known for other things. Traffic is a key consideration in conditional use review and for new subdivisions. So we might remove off-street parking requirements for neighborhoods that walk in the sense of downtown require bike parking facilities, major side plans. Anybody have anything on that? Just one thought back to the, since we're resurfacing that parking requirement. Earlier there was in the parking, oh sorry, in the parking strategy there was something about discouraging private parking in downtown areas and I would wanna make sure we talked about how the dose two things can coexist because if you don't give people parking, there will be parking, private parking in downtown. So I just wanna flag that as something for future harmonizing. Well, I think the number 13 that's coming up that we talked about a bit is supposed to, I think it's supposed to be part of that, right? Yeah, it says number 13. It says you consider the policy of discouraging private parking in the downtown, but if we remove people's parking, there will be more of that. Like those two things need to be, I would just wanna make sure that we figure that out before we make decisions and maybe that's later down the road, but. Two things could potentially be problematic. If we remove people's parking, there'll be more of what? If you take, if people live near downtown, I'm just thinking about Court Street, which is where I live now. There's lots of folks that live on Court Street that don't have parking and they park on Court Street all the time, which is a key area for people to park close to downtown. So if you take, if you gave people off-street parking, that would free up Court Street for more downtown parking. And then I think that's the case in a lot of the nearby neighborhoods. So I just wanna make sure that we're not saying, we're gonna both take away parking requirements at residences and then also discourage private parking downtown and get ourselves into a situation where we're really blocking out those people. So this is one clarification for Mike. When I read the discouraging private parking downtown, I interpreted that to mean to potentially increase the cost of the meters. Is there something else to that? Well, it was initially part of a larger idea of trying to make sure that we encourage public parking. It's the reason, although a lot of people misinterpret my support for the parking garage and why I think a parking garage is important. It's public parking and it lets you park once and shop many. The more everybody has individual parking lots, when you don't have enough public parking, people in the private world will start doing is, they'll buy up the property next door, bulldoze it and turn it into a parking lot because they want parking or they need parking and we don't want to get more private parking. I kind of look at, you need to go to the grocery store, drop off your dry cleaners, pick up some burgers and go to Guy's Farm and Yard. You would literally be within walking distance of Shaw's, DeNoise dry cleaners, Buddy's Burgers and Guy's, but you would literally have to get in your car and Guy's and then pull out, pull over, pull into Buddy's, get out, pull out, pull over, go to DeNoise, get out, drive down the road to Shaw's. You'd have to literally drive four times because each one you're not allowed to park and leave the property and that's the problem. That's what happens when you have these private parking lots is it just exponentially expands and blows out your downtown. You lose all your density. If you're gonna have downtown parking, you want to have public parking. So you have an opportunity to park once and shop many. We don't really want to have private parking lots in the downtown. I recognize there's always going to be some, but we definitely don't want to get into a system where it's all private parking lots because it's gonna, it'll destroy the core. Over time, people will start. Now when I was in Berry City, we had a number of cases where property owners would simply buy the building next door, bulldoze it and turn it into a parking lot and it was really starting to hurt the downtown. That's what happened on Court Street. Yeah, that's what happened on Court Street. Yeah. We're replacing housing and tax revenue with private parking and her recommendation here is to require private parking lots. No, no, wait, what? It's to discourage private parking lots. But this is a parking requirement, which is a requirement for a private parking. Yeah, at a residential. Well, we don't need to rehash this entire discussion because we've really been through it, but there are parking lots that are made for residential buildings around town. There's one out on Berry Street. There's one on Elm and School or Court. Or Court. There's at least a couple where people are diverting high-identity housing because there's no parking for those places. And those are downtown areas. So I think Mike's example is a good one. I don't want, I mean, I want the same thing here. I just think that those two things are leaving a particularly vulnerable set of people at a disadvantage. And I tried in that last sentence of number 12 to really just put it in there as without, without setting the policy in it. You know, and this is absolutely true. There has been a consideration to remove off-street parking requirements for neighborhoods within walking distance of downtown. Yeah, I thought that was, I think that's written. It does keep it as a consideration and we'll review it when we get to whatever planning we do to figure out where is that line? Because currently there's no downtown, there's no parking requirement in UC123 or residential 1500. The question is whether that grows to other neighborhoods or not. Right, right. Yeah, I think it's fine the way it's written. I just wanted, my main point was just to flag it as something that seemed like it could be problematic to me in the future when we're trying to harmonize all of this stuff and I just wanted to point it out. So in my mind, the, we have stuff in here where we're going to look at and act on finding more public parking solutions. That's, I mean, that's what I think is going to happen. It's like we're going to continue to pursue like public parking opportunities. Is that correct, Mike? Yeah, it's discussed briefly and I didn't put a lot into it but just put it into the parking initiative that the city needs a comprehensive parking plan for downtown area, especially with the parking garage being canceled. You know, I didn't get into a lot of details to what that would be, but I just figured we've got, we're going to have to revisit it and whether it's a decision that the community says don't do anything. We just need a decision so we can move forward with making everything else kind of work in the same direction. We could revive the parking garage ideas. Still, you know, there's stuff we could do and I expect that we're going to have to do that. Do something, but it's in the plan to do that. One thing I don't want to get lost is John made the point that by in number 13 here, by discouraging private parking in downtown, we are forcing that need over to private land near the downtown. So it's in some ways defeating some of our goals. So I don't know if everyone caught that, but was that a fair summary of one point you made, John? I'm not sure I followed. Like I thought I heard you suggest that in number 13, how it says discourage private parking in downtown that that's going to like push the need on to create private parking elsewhere, which is like in what we kind of don't want to create private parking. Well, discouraging, but discouraging doesn't mean anything. Like it doesn't, it's not going to change anything. People are going to, unless it's like a specific thing that we're going to do or not do. Maybe I was reading into it a bit there, but that is something on my mind that like, what can we do to not have places near downtown, have any of that valuable land turned into parking lots? Yeah, yeah, like private parking is just very inefficient. It's an inefficient use of land. Okay, so we can move on. Is everybody good? Moving on. Okay. Number 14, streetscape improvement initiative. So this is in addition to the downtown streetscape master plan initiative, it would be this new initiative relating to signage and policy and maximize street trees and green space. So streetscape stuff. So there were a bunch of random pieces and I thought about rolling these all into the downtown streetscape plan. I didn't know if I was going to make that too big and clunky and cumbersome. So I kind of left that one out, but it's up to you guys if you want me to roll 14 to five, I guess. Like I said, it's getting pretty big. Anybody mind that there's this other supplement type initiative? I'm going to move on, bike parking initiative. So this is, there's a proposed policy to have bike parking every 50 yards in the downtown core. This is another way, this seems like it could be part of the. It's also one I put in, I mean, again, this is something that came out of the transportation committee. It was one that I feel we could remove. I found it strange that we talk about being able to walk up to a quarter mile and having that be a walkable distance, but bike riders have to be within 50 yards. And so it was kind of like, well, I don't think it, I don't think we need to go through a planning effort to identify how every 50 yards we've got another set of bike racks and kind of have such a very specific plan for this. As I said, it was in the transportation committee. This is one I think that we could lose and it would still be captured in, when the downtown streetscape plan is built, these types of features would get captured in that plan. It's like it falls under the integrated transportation. Yeah, bike and walk. Could we just include bike, parking, generally an integrated transportation study? What do people think of that? I think that makes sense. We should connect this one to the art chapter, like Barry, they have cute bike racks. Nice, yeah, write that down. We get to the arts and culture we can have a strategy to make some of these things artsy. Yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna move on. Do we wanna, do you want me when I move that over to keep that the 50 yard request in there? Or what's your? Maybe a general, like to, you know, to consider how much parkings needed. Consider the placement and location of those types of facilities. Yes, everybody okay with that? Okay, the next one is the TIF. So to continue the TIF, TIF is a state program that allows new tax revenue to be used for public improvements. Vermont or Montpelier has a TIF district, as I'm sure everyone knows. Next one is the designated downtown program, another state program that we're already part of. The next one is the capital equipment program. So this is different than the capital improvement plan. The capital equipment plan is a budget for vehicles and other capital equipment. The next one is the street engineering and design initiative. This is new, medium priority, low effort, DPW has a number of programs and policies around engineering and design that ensure quality. I don't think it's about costs, cost effectiveness. Yeah, it just captures a number of the things that they are kind of already doing, some of which they're just, you know, they're getting to. The PQI is something relatively new maybe three years ago. So it just balances quality with cost effectiveness. So you manage to a certain pavement quality and that's how you decide when to pave. If you wanna hire a quality street, you gotta pave more often, it's gonna cost you more money. You wanna lower quality street, you pave less often and the PQI is really your target. Your road goes from a zero to 100. And then the computer programs tell you which roads to map next based on the amount of traffic and the amount of, and then you can adjust the engineering. If you're putting down four inches of asphalt, that's gonna last longer than putting down two. So it's just the same idea. So you've got a set of policies and a set of programs that you implement in order to balance efficiency and quality and that was one of the goals. Goal four or five that's in there that talks about the quality and cost effectiveness of the system. So this mostly captures DPW stuff. Okay. Sounds good to me. Who goes to that goal? Number 20 is the Goverment Outreach Program. Goverment is a ride share and trip planning program to help residents and visitors save money. Who wants to do this outreach? Is it transportation or MEAC or what? Yes, the Transportation Committee that wanted, felt the city should be doing this. It's one that I've suggested in my note on the column that I would remove this. I really don't think this is a job of the local government but this is one where the committee felt that the way to fix the parking problem is to encourage businesses to have their employees carpool. And so my response was, well, that's something they do. That's something businesses do. What is the task for the city to do? And so that was what they came up with was that we should advocate and be advertising and trying to push the Goverment ride share program. Isn't it already a thing though? It is a thing, but they want us to do our own, have staff or volunteers go door-to-door business to business to try to drum up people to use it and encourage it's using the ride share program. It's there, what we would be as an outreach. What do people think about leaving the strategy or dropping it? I mean, I'd understand if it was like the city employees should participate in the program, but I don't understand why we would also be doing the same outreach that others are doing. Maybe I'm not understanding this. No, I think you are understanding it. As I said, I don't think it's our job to be also doing advertising and outreach for a program that the state is running. I think that they should be doing the advertising for it, but initially they wanted us to create our own and eventually they settled on the fact that the state already had a system, so we should just do marketing for the state to our local businesses to use this program. Kind of demand management for parking instead of supply management, what's their approach? So who would like to drop this? Just a... I think we've got a lot of stuff to do and someone's already doing this. That makes sense to me too. Okay, anyone in favor of keeping it? Okay, so let's cut it, Mike. With that, we are done reviewing the strategies. So I know there are a lot of strategies and there are a lot of goals in there, but transportation is also pretty big. So hopefully we'll get it down to 17, maybe once I'm done merging them all. So it looks like I got to merge eight and nine, merge number 10 with four and five, strike number 20, and then add number 15 to the integrated transportation, which I think was either eight or nine. So we'll have a couple. Are people comfortable with voting on this now or would you prefer to see after Mike's made the changes we've requested? No, I think we can vote. Okay, I'm good voting. Is everyone else okay with that? Okay. So do we have a motion to approve the strategies as amended during our discussion? I will move to approve the strategies as amended during our discussions. Do you have a second? I'll second. Okay, so that was a motion from Marcella and a second from Ariane. Those in favor of approving the strategies of the motion? Say aye. Aye. Can you oppose? Okay. So there you go, Mike. You've got that to work with. And there's a few sections of the transportation chapter that we're gonna revisit. It's a few paragraphs. I'll share screen again. Okay, so if I'm correct, the new stuff started with the summary of past efforts. Yeah, we still haven't populated the summary of past efforts completely. So a bunch of stuff to do there over time, but it's mostly aspirations, goals and implementation. Yeah, I just did a little rephrasing for the summary of past efforts lead in, but we still don't have all of the projects and things that information filled in there. That's something that Mike and his staff will do. But we have this summary of the aspirations and goals. And so the heading is listing the aspiration. I don't need to read that. We know that. So the text will say there are many elements to an excellent transportation system. We want a system that is safe, efficient and attractive while also cost effective to maintain. It is essential that our system achieves those things while having a minimal impact on the environment so that it does not degrade other aspects of our quality of life. One thing I added here with the end, I added that last part at the end is like a reasoning for why environment is an emphasis and transportation chapter. There's other reasons, but I thought that that was one that's pretty broad and a big part of why we want to do that. And this next thing I added in, it's a little bit of being self-congratulatory about calling ourselves forward thinking, but I thought that as a policy thing, it was important to emphasize that that's what we're trying to be. So that's why that's like that. I mean, if you guys hate it, we can change it obviously. So as a forward thinking city, we think it is crucial that our transportation system allows people to live and work in Montpelier without owning a car. Accordingly, this plan seeks to make all modes of transportation equal. It attempts to meet the needs of all people, including pedestrians, bikers, users of public transit, and those who share transportation resources. Montpelier has moved toward these goals over the years and we wish to see further improvement through accomplishing the goals set out in this chapter. Feel free to jump in anytime if anybody has anything. The plan breaks our aspiration into five separate goals. Each of the goals are currently in progress but require additional investment to finish. One theme throughout these goals is to ensure pedestrians and bicycles are given equal footing with vehicles and that the safety of these modes be a primary consideration. For most of the last 100 years, investment infrastructure supported cars at the expense of other modes, today we recognize the need to emphasize the improvements in active mobility to achieve our vision of a community where car ownership is not a prerequisite for living here and that active mobility is safe and efficient option. Anybody have anything? And so the next section is the outline of the implementation approaches. Most transportation infrastructure is publicly owned and managed, which means improvements can be done through changes to city policies. This city can control how we use our roadways and how we prioritize spending. New and continued policies are found throughout the 20 strategies. We'll need to change that because there's not 20 of those. I'm just gonna remove the word 20 and it will be accurate no matter what. Throughout the strategies and initiatives that are outlined in the implementation plan. This includes for example policies on how we should design our roadways, how we manage parking and how we support new transportation options like shared mobility. Establishing policies and then building them into our plan is key to achieving the vision over time. We also have major programs to improve the system, the capital improvement program and to maintain the system, maintenance programs initiative. Much of the work in the near term will be to convert plans such as the complete streets report and downtown streetscape master plan into actionable items and then include them in the CIP. New projects like the North-South path will also eventually plug into the CIP when planning is complete. While most of our goals will be achieved through policies and improvement programs, there are a few regulations and bylaws that also address transportation. The zoning regulations regulate development to ensure to intergrace with and does not negatively impact the transportation system. There are also a number of ordinances that promote safety including speed limits and on-street parking rules. This plan proposes some additional studies to look at some special topics like the feasibility of using satellite parking lots. Maybe we want to cut that since we minimized that a review of how well we've integrated our transportation modes and a consideration of funding programs to subsidize low-income residents who use transit. What if folks think about the satellite parking? Should we remove that from the chapter? Was that Mike? You didn't think it needs to be removed? So what you were saying? I think it can stay. I think it's going to be in the integrated transportation plan as a consideration as something to study. Okay. Anybody else have any thoughts? I'll take silence as your, I don't know, consent. Maybe not the best wording. So anyway, where were we? Overall, the plan proposes some additional studies to look at. Okay, yeah, we did do that. Overall, most of our strategies are ongoing. The challenge is in how quickly we complete the build-out of our plans. So far the city has not adopted a target date for completing the existing programs which would help determine how much money would need to be devoted to the CIP. That would be a key decision to be made during the lifetime of the CIP plan. So this second draft version that Mike put together for us, he accepted all of our changes from last week so they're not showing up here, but this also includes everything that we have already worked on. Does anyone have any more or anything to talk about relating to the chapter? No, thanks for the edits, Mike. Thanks, Kirby did a great job. I just throw some things together and he goes at it. Okay, so do we, should we vote this out? Is that what you're thinking, Mike? Do you need us to? Yeah, that's fine. As I said, everybody's gonna get, we're just putting these things to bed for now and once they get integrated into the website and we'll all get another shot at looking at them. So this is just to put it to bed for now so we can move on to the next thing. So do we have a motion to approve the chapter as amended? I'll move to approve the chapter as amended. Give a second. A second. Second, second from John. Motion by Arion. Those in favor of approving the chapter say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. The chapter is approved which brings us to just a review on the aspiration and goals for the draft housing chapter. So it should be the template. Yeah. I do want to, before we look at this note that this is from the housing working group discussion. I had mentioned this before, I think when we were working on transportation because there was talk of leaving it to transportation to cover access to downtown and improve neighborhood accessibility and then new existing housing related to energy. So with that in mind. And I also think some of those can be captured when we do the land use plan. The land use plan really is where we're gonna have a lot of these kind of how does transportation and housing and energy kind of overlap and how do they fit together in our land use plan? I think some of these may fit better in there just as an idea for people to consider. Are you keeping some notes about things that we're putting off for the land use plan? Yeah, I have a list. Of course, I'll hopefully have everything. Okay. So just for us to, I don't, we're not gonna do anything with housing but this is just to get us thinking about it and get started on it. The aspirations as they are now are first aspiration is not people will have a healthy housing market provides adequate supply of housing in a mix of type sizes, occupancies and levels of affordability. Neighborhoods will be in close proximity to open space and recreational resources. Walkable and Michael to downtown with the mix of uses within or having complimentary neighborhoods close by to allow for a live work, learn shop, plane, all a short walk. Housing and neighborhoods will be safe, healthy, energy efficient resilience, assigned for all users. My pillar will have a housing for all and will affirmably further fair housing in order to protect people from discrimination, promoting economic opportunities and create a diverse inclusive community. Mike has some notes down here about moving things around. Can I move this thing out of my way? I can, yay. This is the housing subcommittees notes here. So in some ways, I apologize because I'm, it's a little bit of stream of consciousness because I didn't review this stuff as much as I should have. I wasn't sure if we were gonna get to it. It looks, and I'm not trying to remember what we did. This is Arion and me and Barb. It looks like we've written this aspiration A. Does this look familiar to you Mike? This mob pillar will have sufficient housing for everyone who wants to live here. I mean, I've reviewed what you guys had sent. I had already put together my notes. So I didn't amend my notes with yours, but I figured we could have that conversation. Looks like you guys went with sufficient, basically as the keyword for the first one, sufficient housing, enough housing for everyone who wants to live here. What did you have for be safe, resilient and design for all? So I hate to be the person who has the same comment every time, but I do think this could really be one thing. What are we talking about? We're talking about having an adequate supply of safe affordable housing in Montpelier. Yeah, it looks like when we had worked on it, and this was before the planning, before we got into the theme within the planning commission of cutting these down even to one aspiration, it looks like we had cut it down to three from four. What are yours, Mike? Are they, do you have newer ones you were thinking of? So there were generally two, so there is the idea adequate supply of safe and affordable housing is does capture a number of strategies that we do? I had suggested B would go away all the way, so that's fine there. Safe and affordable, safe and healthy, energy efficient, resilient. Did we put our, because this doesn't look, I wasn't prepared either because I didn't think we're gonna get, I didn't see this on the email, but this doesn't look familiar to me. Did we not put our updates in the spreadsheet? No, we definitely didn't put them in the spreadsheet. I think that this word document I have pulled up though is where we had put most of what we talked about. Oh, okay, because that looks longer to me than what we talked about, but I don't know, it was a while ago, so. Yeah, I know. Yeah, this is, because this Barb was the one who was using this word collapsing. So this is, I think, first written by Barb. I think about collapsing and housing doesn't feels wrong. I know. Yeah, so this is what we had. I know we also had some other documents we kicked around, but I think this was the last thing we looked at. Got to echo Stephanie's comment where it seems like the aspiration is more homes for all types of households. We could, unless someone else has like a, like some wording already in mind, interrupt me if you do. Montpelier will have sufficient safe resilience. It's hard to fit design for all users in there. Housing for everyone who wants to live here, that is fair, diverse, and inclusive, and that needs more polishing. I think it's a few too many commas, but we're getting there. I think it's Montpelier will have a safe and adequate supply of, or diverse supply of housing. That's not even there, but something along those lines. I think you can assume diverse and adequate supply. If we talk about adequate supply, we're not talking about one type of housing. I think it can be inferred that it's a diverse type of housing. I mean, it's sufficient supply of diverse, sorry, it's sufficient supply of, now I forgot what the other word was. Safe and adequate housing. Yes, and adequate supply of safe and affordable. There you go. Do we want to set a minimum sort of goal for a number of units? I think one of the benefits of doing that is you can avoid the arguments, whenever there's however many units proposed of people saying, this is too many or the plan wanted more housing, but we already built more housing and it didn't say we wanted this much housing. So if we're like clear in saying like, we want at least this much housing, it sort of makes it clear that the community has said like we want more homes and we're explicit about it. I feel like just saying like, we want adequate supply is maybe technically accurate, but if we were just to go out there and say, hey, we want a minimum of like 1,000 homes in the next eight years or whatever, we're being like pretty clear and direct and saying like we're gonna get some more homes and not clear and that's one of the goals of this. Are you saying that the using is important to have that in the aspiration or would it be okay to call that out in a goal? I think it could be in a goal, but I also think it maybe it's like an important one and potentially one that could be front and center for the plan. So it feels like what we have here is maybe a little bit, I wanna say like safe, but like everyone could sort of agree with this, but it also doesn't necessarily, it can mean very different things to different people. I agree with that. I think, yeah, like Barb's been uncomfortable with doing, I'm actually careful not speaking for her, but my perception, she's been comfortable with like doing like grand big things with housing, but she was comfortable with this. And I think that, I think that my interpretation was is because it's ambiguous enough, maybe taking some of that ambiguity out of it would get with strengthening it a whole lot. So I'm with you. Yeah, I agree as well. I think we just couldn't get to consensus, but I agree with John and I would love to have a number in there. Or at least in the aspiration part, we could, our current city council has their strategic plan goal is to have more housing. And even so, rather than Montpellier would have adequate supply, Montpellier would have more housing or it doesn't necessarily have to have the benchmark in there, but our goal is to increase the amount of housing and how we work in the safe and affordable aspects. And ultimately also population too, like if we wanted to, if it's easier, if we'll have X many more households living in, and I think we want like to replace all of our homes Montpellier to become like an Airbnb community. Like we built a thousand more homes, but 2000 of them are now rentals to seasonal rentals or something, not that it would happen, but if we just like Montpellier will welcome this many more people in the next eight years as like members of our community or something like that. So do we have, so we only look like a few more minutes talk about this, but do we have like an aspiration a consolidated aspiration idea of all of these different words and discussions coalesced into something, Mike? I see you writing something, I mean, I've been trying to draw a picture. I've been trying to jigger things around to come up with all the pieces. I do know there are two big kind of things that we look at, one of which is the amount of housing private developing, so our regulations and pieces, and we have a second piece, which is kind of what we do through our programs for our affordable housing and that those elements of making sure that we have that inclusive housing and that housing for all. I think like every committee kind of came up with a thing that was really key to them and being able to live in Montpellier without a car was to transportation committees and kind of this housing for all idea was really where the housing committee was going. And whether we capture it here, whether we eventually pull all of those little nuggets into our vision statement that we put together at the end, that was really what got them was, it's not just about making sure we have housing for the people that are here, it's really enough housing for anyone who wants to be here. We should have sufficient housing. People want to live here, we've got low occupancy and a lot of people wanna live here, we should make sure we've got enough housing to accommodate those people because we have the services that can support more people. Our schools are asking for more people. Our fire department doesn't have to get bigger to accommodate them, our police department wouldn't have to get bigger to accommodate them. We've got sewer and water to accommodate them, we just don't have somebody building more housing units. And so I think a lot of the housing committee is just interested in getting more housing whether that's high-end housing, affordable housing, they wanted it all, single family, multi-family. We really, we have a mix and we wanna just keep growing that diversity. And I think that's where they were looking for. So how that all kind of squeezes in there, the idea of more housing, safe housing, affordable housing. Some of these terms I gotta say are like they're ambiguous themselves. I mean, diverse housing, are you talking about the people or the house? Like I'm- In this case, we were talking about the structures themselves. It hasn't been a big issue here, but it has been. I know when I worked in Lamoille County, I think Hyde Park, 85% of the housing units are single family detached housing units. So when you start talking about wanting to have a diversity of housing, you wanna have some multi-family housing. You wanna have some single family homes. You wanna have some rental, some owner, some condo, some, you just wanna have a number of opportunities out there because which you'll see when you get the housing chapter to read, it talks about everybody goes through life changes and your housing needs changes as you go through life. And if you wanna remain in Montpelier, we have to have a diversity of housing and housing choices so people can go from renting an apartment to buying a condo or buying a house and maybe downsizing later to some senior housing opportunities. We want people to be able to live and grow and stay in Montpelier and not have Montpelier be a place where you stop because you're in a certain age, certain people in a certain age group can stay here. And that's what they're looking at, that housing for all idea. And I think there's an element of this of lowering costs for everyone, housing costs for everyone by making better use of our existing resources. So efficient type, it gets maybe more to the land use issues but that moves into the area or the justification really for a lot of like, this is why we don't have all of these density requirements and huge frontage requirements and setbacks. That makes for really inefficient use of public resources and then other people end up paying the cost of that. But when we do build sort of like how we used to, that is very efficient. And then everyone, housing costs go down by way of lowering our property taxes. Well, for just a working aspiration, we have Montpelier will have sufficient housing for everyone who wants to live here that is safe, resilient, fair, diverse and inclusive. I left the design for all users part because I thought it was a little bit redundant with some of these other things like inclusive. One of people will think about this one. We can, if people are okay with it, we can just like, this can be our working one and then when we revisit housing properly, this is where we'll jump in and start talking about it. Does that sound okay to people or would you rather start from scratch than start from this monster? I mean, I don't need to leave it in here as a placeholder but I do feel like we're missing something with, I don't know, just thinking about diversity and fair housing, it's not really about the housing that's diverse, it's about, I don't know, advertising, marketing, you know, it's a little bit more complex to me and I don't have the words right now but I guess I'm just noting that. I think that should be a separate goal or aspiration in some way. I'd be okay with that. I don't think we need one aspiration for every single chapter but maybe that's something we can talk about next time because I think you're right, there's a lot of conceptually, it's gonna be hard to cram that into other things. Does anybody else, I thought someone else had a thought before we move on from this, no? Okay, so this is where we'll pick it up next time, at least people, at least we got a taste of it so we'll know where our discussion is kind of headed next time. Unless anybody has anything more on housing to talk about, we can move on to the last item on the agenda. Anyone have anything? Okay, so I'm not going to be here on August 9th. Are there other people who will not be here on August 9th? I'll be here. I won't be here. Anybody else will not be here on August 9th? I had originally stated I was gonna be out but I was off a week, so I will be here. I'm not organized enough to know. Okay, I haven't heard from Barb. She's missed her last couple of meetings, like my check in with her. Mike and I had asked her earlier if she had any thoughts about this topic but I hadn't heard back before the meeting. I didn't either. Well, if there's only two of us out then maybe, I don't know, one of the people. There'll be three out. Oh, who's the third? Yeah, Arianne and Steph, Stephanie. I thought Arianne said that she was gonna be here. Okay, what do you guys think? Do you wanna, those of you who could be there, do you wanna have a meeting without us or not? Let me do this. I mean, John, Marcella and our, and who's the other person here? Let's just cancel it. Okay, we have one vote to cancel. Mike, unless you're feeling like we could move a few things forward for you next time. If we're not gonna have a quorum, we might as well. Just, if everybody says they're going to be here and we're gonna have all four people then we can meet. Otherwise, I'll take a week off. It'll give me some chance to get caught up on some things. Okay, that's fine. And that may support what we wanna do with the Natural Resources Chapter, a little bit more homework and so that I'd be fine with canceling that too. Give everybody a little more time. It's not a comment on Arianne's skills at facilitating our meetings. I think he's done a great job in the past. You know, the mere fact that you brought it up makes me think that you do question it, but that's okay. That's okay because you wouldn't be wrong to question it. Did it get my mouth shut? Yeah, it's exactly. You do attention to the issue. It's not you, it's me. It's like, okay, so, okay, it sounds like we're not. It sounds like maybe Natural Resources will get some work done. That sounds like, yeah, anybody who's gonna be around and wants to use the time to do some of the subcommittee work with that would be super. But it sounds like we're not gonna meet. Okay. Do we need to vote to not meet, Mike, or? I mean, it can just be by consensus. I mean, I'll be just. Are you saying that we need an official act though, or can it just be that we don't show up? I don't think, I mean, if you guys just, it's really as the chair, you can just go through it. I just decided we're not gonna meet. We're not gonna meet, you're the chair. You can say we're not meeting on the ninth and we'll see you all in the. The onus is noticing a meeting when we have it. There's no sort of obligation. We don't have it, I don't think. Okay, well, as you're. I'll put in the weekly report to the manager and some other things. It'll get out there that is canceled. I decree that there shall be no meeting on August 9th. Okay, well, with that, we can adjourn. Anybody have a motion for that? So moved. Motion for Marin, do we have a second? Second. Second for Marcella. Those in favor of adjourning, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Good job. Okay, well, I'll see you all in a month. Thanks, everybody. Thanks. Enjoy your time off.