 Okay, Mr. Marshall you are a co-host we are recording the attendees have come on in and it's 630 we're good to go. All right. Welcome to the Amherst planning board meeting of March 16 2022. My name is Doug Marshall and as the chair of the Amherst planning board I am calling this meeting to order at 631pm. The meeting is being recorded and is available live stream via Amherst media. Minutes are being taken pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. This planning board meeting including public hearings will be conducted via remote means using the zoom platform. Zoom meeting link is available on the meeting agenda posted on the town's websites calendar listing for this meeting, or go to the planning board web page and click on the most recent agenda which lists the zoom link at the top of the page. No in person attendance of the public is permitted. However, every effort will be made to ensure the public can adequately access the meeting in real time via technological means. In the event we are unable to do so for reasons of economic hardship or despite best efforts. We will post an audio or video recording transcript or other comprehensive record of proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the town of Amherst website. Board members I will take a roll call when I call your name and mute yourself answer affirmatively and place yourselves back on mute. Maria chow. Present. Jack gem sec. Present. Tom long. Present. Andrew McDougal. Present. I dug Marshall and present Janet McGowan isn't. And Johanna Newman. Present. Board members if technical issues arise we may need to pause temporarily to fix the problem and then continue the meeting. If the discussion needs to pause it will be noted in the minutes. Please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment. I will see your raised hand and call on you to speak. After speaking remember to remute yourself. Public comment item is it reserved for public comment regarding items that are not on tonight's agenda. Please be aware the board will not respond to comments during general public comment period. Public comment may also be heard at other times during the meeting when determined appropriate. Please indicate you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited. If you wish to go into the Zoom meeting using a telephone please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your phone. When called on please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute when finished speaking. Residents can express their views for up to three minutes or at the discretion of the planning board chair. The speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds their allotted time. Their participation will be disconnected from the meeting. All right so the first item on our agenda this evening is review and approval hopefully of minutes. I believe we have two minutes available for action this evening. I think we have a couple of minutes from November 3 of last year. This was in our packet last week or last at our last meeting and I think it showed up a little bit late and short before the meeting so we decided to postpone it until this meeting. So I hope that everybody's had a chance and taken advantage of the opportunity to read it. Would anybody like to make a motion to approve it and then we can have some discussion. Andrew. I'll make a motion to approve. Thank you. Anybody want a second. You know how I see your hand. Thank you all second. Okay great. Is there any discussion of those minutes from November 3. They had a number of. Changes tracked on the copy I at least received. And they show the enhancements that Chris went through and did based on a list and an additional listening to the recording I believe. I think that was in response to some board comments that they weren't adequately detailed. If anyone have any comments about these minutes other than that I appreciate the time and effort that Chris spent to revise these. No comments. All right. Chris it sounds like you've done your job. All right. So no, no conversation. We have a motion and a second. Why don't we just go through and have a roll call vote. Starting with Maria. And Jack. Approve. Tom. Approve. Andrew. Hi. Janet. Hi. I have a question. I wasn't at this meeting and I think I can still approve it if the minutes look correct to me or I have the option to abstain as well. Is that accurate Chris. Yeah. Okay, then I will approve these minutes as well. I. Okay. And I'm an eye as well. So it's unanimous. The minutes from November 3rd are approved. All right. The second set of minutes is from our last meeting on March 2nd of 2022. Why don't we do the same order this time would anybody like to make a motion to have those approved. Okay. Okay. Okay. So nobody's putting their hand up. So I will make a motion to approve the minutes of March 2nd, 2022. Andrew, your hand is up. I'll second. All right. Thank you, Andrew. Anybody want to have some discussion of these minutes. Tom, I see your hand. Thanks. So I submitted a comment to Chris. About one of my comments that's on page eight. I'm going to stickler about these things, but it's, I wanted to be represented correctly when these go out. The comment was in regard to support of. Incentives for solar development. And I believe someone raised the issue of incentives and I, my comment was actually against. The use of solar incentives as opposed to encouraging solar. Incentives. So I wrote a short sentence that I sent to Chris. And something that I'd like to change my statement to Mr. Mr. Long does not generally support solar incentives and cautioned that incentives can exacerbate inequities. Given that the cost, even with incentives makes it inaccessible to many members of our community, which I believe if you guys can. Help me that that is my position as stated in our meeting. Okay. Okay, Chris. I didn't get to read these until this morning. So I sent it today. This morning. Did you send a copy to Pam? I did. And I can forward that to Pam now. Perfect. All right. So board members. We have a request to amend the minutes. Does anybody object to this amendment? All right. So, and I guess since I made the motion, I would accept that amendment as a friendly amendment. I don't know who the parliamentarian among us is Andrew. I was going to say, I would second the. Tweet amendment. Okay. Yes. Okay. So. Chris, do we have to have a vote to accept the amendment and vote on the minutes or can we just go straight to the minutes as amended? You can go straight to the minutes as amended. Okay. Why don't we do that? So. First of all, I'll just ask, did anybody else have any comments on these minutes? Okay. I don't see any. Any comments. So, so we'll go to a roll call vote to approve the March 2nd minutes with the. Added, or the amendment that Tom sent. And read aloud in this meeting. Why don't we go backwards? We'll start with Johanna. Getting sneaky, Doug. I got you off guard. Okay. Janet. All right. Andrew. And Tom. I. Jack. Move. Maria. And I'm an approved. So. Unanimous approval with the one amendment. All right. So the time is 640. We have completed item one of our agenda. And we'll go to item two, which is public comment period. I see that we have 10 attendees. All right. So this attendees, this is the time for you to make public comment on items, which are not on our agenda. So. I don't know if you all are familiar with what's on our agenda. We're going to discuss a project at 164 or 174 sunset avenue. FEMA flood insurance. And we're going to talk about what's on our agenda. And then we're going to bring legal ads and. The bids rapid recovery plan. So comments on any of those topics should be held until we get to those. Topics in the meeting. Otherwise, if anyone has anything else they want to comment on, this is the time to do it. Hey, I don't see any hands raised among the attendees. So we will move on. Okay. So the agenda is the concerns or review and recommendation to the ZBA. Of 164 174 sunset avenue. On behalf of faring sunset LLC. And we will have a presentation by attorney Tom. Familiar face. And at least in a little tiny square. I guess, Chris, is there anything you want to say at the beginning or should we turn it right over to Tom? I guess I want to just make sure we're all clear. This is not a public hearing. And our role this evening is to discuss the project and. And probably the comments we make maybe transmitted to ZBA for their consideration when they do the. Regulatory review of this project. Is that correct, Chris? That's correct. I would write a letter. And if you had any specific recommendations or if you wanted the ZBA to consider certain conditions, I would include those in the letter and send it to the chair of the ZBA and Maureen Pollock, who's the staff of the zone board of appeals. Okay. With that, I guess Tom, why don't you take it away. Perfect. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And could you Jonathan Salvon should be in the audience. If you want to make him a panelist too, he'll be doing part of the presentation. For the record. Thank you for the record. Tom Reedy attorney with Bacon Wilson. And Amherst here on behalf of fearing sunset. For the project at 164 174 sunset. Have. The corner of fearing and sunset. Right by the, the UMass dormitories. And I'm going to take a look at the, the towers and Amherst with me this evening, Barry Roberts from fearing sunset. And I've got Jonathan Salvon from funeral architects who. I think has done a really remarkable job designing this site. I've got some screens to share so that hopefully folks had the opportunity to look at some of the material that was provided. You know, we have just for a little bit of background. We started this project. We started this project. We started this project. We started this project. We started this project. So I went through many design iterations. To try to figure out what the best. What the best design would be. Is it, is it one big apartment building? Is it multiple smaller buildings? Are there townhouses? And so our initial. Submission was a. 17 unit. Townhouse submission. With a row of townhouses in the back of the parking in a row of townhouses. We had to go to the local historic district. We had to go to the local historic district commission. To receive their approval. To do what it is that we're ultimately looking to do, which Mr. Chairman, as you know, it's a zoning board of appeals special permit. For these uses, which, which are allowed on, on these lots. So we started that process with the local historic district commission. I want to say in August or September of last year. We had to go to the local historic district commission. We had to go to the local historic district commission. And redesign the project, frankly, to eliminate those long rows of townhouses. To what you'll see momentarily. Which I think fits into the neighborhood a lot better. Jonathan can likely talk about the length of the buildings, the materials of the buildings and how. We believe they do fit into the vernacular of the neighborhood. And so we did receive a certificate of appropriateness. And so that's what we're looking for. And so our next stop formally is with the zoning board of appeals. We've had discussions already with fire department, Mike Roy, Jason skills, town engineer, Gilford mooring and superintendent of department of public works. We've Barry's talked to Bill Laramie over at the crime prevention through environmental design. We've had some feedback from them. So the design you'll see today is, is pretty. Baked. I mean, it's something that we've thought about. We've talked to different folks in town. To get to the place where we are today. So. You know, without much further ado, why don't I. And I'm just, if everybody can see my screen, you should have just a PowerPoint with a title screen. And Pam, I can send this to you after it's a pretty large file, but I can send it to you. I'll send you the drop box link. Okay. It's Following sunset 164. 174 sunset. Just oorient everyone 174 is the yellow highlighted 164, sunset is the blue. You see UMass campus here football stadium here. You've got Kendrick Park the Emerson college football field and downtown is right here just to give you a sense of context, This is, I believe, a five-unit condominium. And then you've got single-family homes on relatively smaller locks, and it's a dense area. And then you've got the university just to the north. And then just some on-the-ground context photos, if you will. So this is at the intersection of Fearing and Sunset. This is looking in a southwestern-ly direction. You've got 174 and 164. You can see in the back, if you've driven by the site, it's a big open field further back in the woodlands. There seems to be a lot of invasive species. There are no wetlands on the site, no wetlands proximate to the site. So we've had a wetland scientist go out already and provide a letter to the Amherst Conservation Commission and Erin, suggesting that nothing more would be needed. And she accepted that. She had been out there, or at least had done the desktop review as well. And then this is, with your back to the north, looking south down sunset, you've got the Creamery building on the left. And then where the proposed redevelopment is going to be on the right. This is looking northwest. So this is looking at 174. You see the towers in the background. The Creamery is over to the right of the screen. This is taking that same position and just pivoting and looking to the southwest. You've got 164. This is a non-unoccupied rental as well. Interestingly, there's a strip of land between this property with the Yellow House and this property with the White House. That is, I wanna say maybe five to eight feet wide that is owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And it extends because the land, if I go maybe here, the land behind this property is all owned by the Commonwealth. As you know, the land slopes off and ultimately meets up with, I think it's North University Drive over there. And so this is just a little further to the south looking northwest. You've got 164 and 174. And then you've got the towers in the background. Most of it is cleared. There's some vegetation towards the back. There are a couple of shade trees and we're working our way through the public shade tree committee and working with Alan Snow, the tree warden. Part of what we had represented to the local historic district commission and which still holds true and will ultimately be submitting for a demolition permit in so far as we're looking to take down this garage and this breezeway and on, let me see if I can find it over here, this garage and then there is a porch on the back. We'd be looking to take those down or off and then looking to relocate these houses. You may remember Barry had moved an Amherst College house from South Pleasant Street. It's new location is now with the corner of Snell and Baker Street. And so Barry would be using the same building movers to move these houses. We haven't settled on a location yet. We've got a couple in mind. Once those become final then we'll let the public know because there's a lot of coordination that has to happen with the utilities, with the police. If we're traveling on any state roads, with the state police, mass DOT, et cetera. So we haven't finalized those yet but we expect one to hopefully be an Amherst and one to be in Hadley. So we're trying to save those houses. They're ones from 1921, probably from 1940. The older one is this yellow one. And I think this is called a newer one. I think in the 1940s. And then we've got the proposed project. So what you saw was what exists and here is what we're proposing. So we've got essentially three different building types that I think Jonathan will be able to talk about. The proposal is for 17 residential units of which two of those will be affordable. And the way Barry likes to work is you're allowed 30% of 80%. He likes to go lower than that. Typically following what's called the voucher program. And I'm sure, I know I saw Nate Malloy was on he could probably speak more intelligently than I could. But it's below the maximum of what he Barry could do as far as rents go. And so, I don't know if it's 70% it's probably between 60 and 70% if the board's really interested, we could let you know but it is below the 80% and there would be two of those. And so, the design really tries to do a couple of things. It uses an existing curb cut over on Fearing Street. So this is in the exact same location that it is currently. And it proposes moving the curb cut because there's one existing for 164 proposes moving that curb cut a little further to the north. So it's retaining the same number of curb cuts. These will be full access curb cuts, both of these. So entering and exiting motions at both of the curb cuts. And then it was fitting in it was listening to the local historic district commission which as I described before we had townhouses connected here we had townhouses here and then townhouses here and we heard from them and we heard from the neighbors to say that said we would like some more open space. We also had a detention basin back here. So what we've done is in those 17 units we've separated them into one, two, three, four duplexes a building with four units and a building with five units. So like I said, you've got 17 altogether. We would propose four two bedroom units one three bedroom unit and 12 four bedroom units wait, four two bedroom, one three bedroom and then 12 four bedroom. And the idea here is families, professors, athletic staff. And so you'll see when Jonathan starts to go through the floor plans this isn't bedroom, bathroom, parity. You're not talking four bed, four bath. You're not talking about the same size bedroom and across the board. You've got what I will all designate as a master and then you've got three auxiliary bedrooms. And the idea is you don't get a second chance to build. And so especially given COVID a lot of folks are working from home. We wanna have the opportunity for families, for home offices, for play spaces, et cetera. And so what you see when Jonathan presents is on the inside having that family idea translates to the outside because what you've also got is and I'll show in some of the further slides you'll have what's called defensible spaces in the front of these units. We're proposing a hedge with gates leading to each of the units. You've got backyards behind these rear units here. You've got a community garden proposed for this area. You've got a natural exploration area here. So think lumber stumps, tree stumps stuck into the ground and other natural playscapes, if you will. You've got a pergola seating area here. So for folks with children who are playing or attending to the community garden you've got a open or a pergola space. And then here you've got open grass area. And so really the idea is to invite families and to make it a community. We're sensitive to the density that exists just to the north of us. And then there's density to the south of us but they're in the nature of single family, two family, non-owner occupied home. So using this as a little bit of a transition space between the university and the balance of the sunset neighborhood was the idea. On the northerly edge, there are, we're keeping these trees that exist. This is on a fearing. We're keeping those trees. We're keeping the parking spaces that exist on the street. There are Arborvites proposed and immediately behind those Arborvites will be a four foot high, fake, full rod iron fence. There's a grade change. Everything slopes from east to west. So the grade goes this way. We've got 43 parking spaces here. 18 of those are proposed to be compact along this side. You've got your parking, sorry, you're loading a dumpster area here. And one of the nice things is the internal, at least I think the internal site circulation. So you've got sidewalks, ADA accessible sidewalks, and then sidewalks in the back along with, switch back to get, so it's accessible all the way to this patio area. So, it was one of the things that we tried to make it as kind of community friendly as possible. I'll show you some additional rendering. So this is from the Northeast looking. Again, you've got community gardens and you've got, these are all relative to scale. You've got another top down look. You've got those Arborvites on that north side. You've got the fence enclosed, trash enclosure. I've got the site plan if folks are interested in seeing it. It's, you know, compared to the colored renderings it's with all due respect to the engineers who I know are here. You know, it's a little blasé. I'm happy to dwell on it if you like. We also have the landscaping plan where you can see the volume of plants that rendering. I think really does a good job of capturing the number of plants. I think there's over 400 plants. I think 79 trees altogether that are proposed to be planted specifically. You know, you've got five red maples to be planted here. One of the things that we've talked about with the public shade tree is we're calling for them to be one to two inches. I think based on some of the public comment we're going to increase those to three to five inches. So you're talking about a 20 to 25 foot tree right off the bat, up on the street. We've got a photometric plan. You know, some of the lighting that you'll actually see in the rendering and you've got no light bleed here. We're also adequately illuminating that amenity space as well. You know, it's finding that balance of not making it, you know, inviting off hours but safe. So if a family wanted to be out there, they could. And then I'll go through, you know, some of the ground level renderings and some of the other renderings. So this is, I think this is south, south-easterly looking to that five unit. And so you would have, I think it's a four bedroom here, a four bedroom here, a three bedroom here. And then as you enter from the rear there are two bedrooms, which are at least one of them is accessible. And Jonathan could correct me if both of them are accessible. But as you'll see, you know, we've got that planted hedge. We've got gates in front of each of the units. And then the sidewalk penetrations leading to the units. I'll let Jonathan talk about, and I don't want to steal his thunder for the trim, the shingles, et cetera. But really here, what you see is what you get. Here's a view all the way to the west, looking back east, you've got that natural play area that we talked about, the Pergola sitting area. You've got community space. You've got the fences in between these units. And then some outdoor play, outdoor grass play area, and then the backyards. And you can see to the north the Arbivide and the fence, that wrought iron fence. You've got one of the parking area, the loading area. Again, you know, it's a retaining wall that you'll have here because the site dips down from the surrounding grade. Another photograph of that natural play area in the context of the towers in the background. Again, in this one is at the southerly side of the property, along the parking area. So the duplexes are proposed to have four bedrooms in each of them. And Jonathan, again, we'll talk about that a little bit more. I talked about that five unit up along sunset. This one here has four units. It's got a two bedroom above a two bedroom in the middle and then four bedrooms on each side of it. And then the duplexes that flank at each have four bedrooms. Again, this is from the North looking south, the community garden. And these are the types of lights that we are proposing. Again, looking out towards the rear there, community garden, pergola area, fenced in area with the plantings being proposed. This is a long sunset. And so you see the duplexes, the hedge rows with the street trees and the gates. And then again, looking, this is that five unit. This is one of the entry driveways. And then last but not least, the creamery building is over here. It's that white blob, respectfully. And then you've got the five unit and then those duplexes there. And then you obviously see the towers in the background. So process from here, we're hoping for a positive, we're obviously open to listen. We've put, hopefully, as you can see a lot of thought into this design, it's gonna come down to marketing. We've already tried to talk to UMass, Tony Meruel specifically to reach out to try to see if there's something that this would make sense for university to have professors, administrators, et cetera, be residing here in such close proximity to the university. And then, like I said, it comes down to marketing and marketing to families. And we hope the amenities and what you see the floor plans that those influence who's gonna reside here. And then also the materials. And they're gonna be higher end materials. And I think, when you put that whole package together plus the management that Barry's gonna manage it, you really got yourself a nice project, especially with some affordable units. It's gonna increase the tax base. It's gonna provide housing, which is obviously much needed in town. With that, I'm happy to go back through any of those slides. Ask me any questions that there are. Otherwise I can turn it over to Jonathan and he can walk you through the floor plans if you'd like to go to that next. All right. Well, would you, do you want to go through the floor plans or your... Sure, yeah, we're happy to. It might as well give you the whole... Yeah, I guess I'd like to get through whatever you wanna present. I don't know if you wanna, if Andrew wants to. Actually, Andrew, I see your hand. Yeah, thanks, Doug. And thanks, Tom. I'm happy to wait. I just had some questions relative to Tom's presentation, but yeah, it was fine. Yeah, I have some questions too, but I think we're probably better off seeing what you wanna present and then going through our questions. Dive into the next piece. Some of this will be repetitive, but I hope not too overly so as I try to pick the right thing from my screen here. Do you see some images of the existing houses? Yes. Just to, yeah, and since Tom went over some of this, I'll try to be really brief, but just a couple more images of the two existing structures at 164 and 174 on Sunset. Just, and here I'm kind of thinking about the scale of them. These houses are very common when it comes to the scale in this neighborhood, but there are also some larger homes which we'll look at in a second, but this is very typical for this neighborhood. And we were encouraged strongly by the local historic district to work as much as we could in this kind of size and form and level of detail and architectural expression. Just a couple more shots. Obviously the creamery is across the street, it's a larger building, but there are some larger homes and these are gonna be more comparable in scale to the two larger buildings that we have proposed. The ones that are kind of one bay bigger than the duplexes. And again, this last row at the bottom, just some more typical kind of character images for the neighborhood. And I'm gonna go through this slide really quickly because it really does completely repeat what Tom was just saying. We have four duplexes, that's these building types here, two apartment buildings, and with one at the back and one at the front, as Tom was noting, this building has a four bedroom, a three bedroom, another four bedroom kind of off the street with accessible flat type units accessible from the rear. And then this structure, again there's a four bedroom, a four bedroom and then two flats stacked on top of each other here in the center with the first floor, one fully accessible. This really is just kind of another image of it. I will walk through these quickly because they're very similar, but at an earlier stage of the landscaping, don't have the trees and whatnot. But again, we're trying to evoke a kind of typical streetscape form and language that corresponds to the neighborhood. So that this is obviously at the corner of Fearing and Sunset, and this one is that Southern end of our project area on Sunset. And that's that larger unit, that's one of the two sort of apartment type units. Just to kind of look at them in more of an architectural elevation, I have full sets, but because of that color, these read better. So I wanna kind of quickly walk through folks through the level of detail and architectural expression, but we're trying to do a nice higher end architectural shingle on the roof, traditional double hug windows. We're gonna vary the light pattern. Some buildings have a sort of a six over six light pattern. Some have a one over one. We're gonna vary the color, obviously, and we may also do some variants in the style of the clabbered as well, but final materials for some of these things haven't been picked yet. But we're trying to pick up very traditional kind of porch and bay elements and entry elements. And even though this is a duplex, have it read as the form and the kind of scale of a single family home. Just a close-up of one of these because that last page was a little far away. Again, a clabbered, cornerboards, a water table kind of trim band. This particular unit has a six over one light pattern. So now I'm gonna switch, if you can all bear with me for a second, to the full architectural sets. Right one here. So I'm gonna start with the duplex units. For us, this is building type A. There are again four of them. One, two, three, four. Folks can see that small rendered image. And to the floor plans, over here on the right, we have the ground floor plan, the first floor plan. This would either, you know, they'd be either entered from the sunset kind of street sidewalk or they'd been entered from the parking lot. The basements are mostly unfinished. There are small sort of laundry areas. The ones that have the parking lot down slope could also have mudroom and a back entry, which we thought would be a very attractive kind of thing. But once you enter into the building, there's closet, there's an open eating living space, an open kitchen at the back. There's one bathroom at this level. And then moving up the typical second floor plans here on the left with a larger bedroom here with a walk-in closet, a second bathroom for the building and then three bedrooms that are similar in size. And as Tom said, some of these may be used as nurseries or as office space, but it gives people flexibility. Unless I'll have these, if people want to come back and look at them, I think the color versions, the elevations kind of tell more of the story. But again, along the front, whether that be sunset or the parking lot, that's a kind of typical elevation with an entrance for each units and a rear entrance off the backside. And you can kind of see the slope and the amount of grade we have to work with on this site. It basically drops off about a full story level between front and back. And that's typical whether we're on the street on sunset or on that back roofing. So I'm gonna put this one down and pick up the next unit type. So this is the B units or the B building, which is that unit right here in the back. As we were talking about earlier, there's a sort of townhouse style unit at either end and two flats in the middle. Again, not much development at the basement level. Again, laundry room for the two townhouse style storage base for the flats. So the flanking townhouse style units are really almost identical to the duplex units, but the units in the center are what's different in this building. So there's a common entry point with a fully accessible flat type unit, two bedroom unit in the center. Again, an open living dining, eating area, laundry, two bedrooms, and a fully accessible bath. Moving to the second floor level, again, the townhouse type units have a large bedroom and with a closet and an additional bath and the three accessory or additional bedrooms. In the middle, we have the second of the flats up a flight of stairs. Again, another open living kitchen, dining space, two bedrooms again, and a bathroom. This unit obviously wouldn't be fully accessible as it's on the second floor. Again, from the sort of parking lot side, that's the entry into the, the common entry into the accessible flat at this level and the flat above it and then the two flanking townhouse type units. Put up our last building type here. This is building C, that's this building at the sort of southeast corner of our project area. At this level, they are townhouse style units. This is a three bedroom unit at this end and then two four bedroom units. And, but at the back entered from the back are the two potentially fully accessible whether they're both be fully accessible. We'll have to sort out as we move it forward but we have the potential at least for two fully accessible units at this level entered off a common entry with a common hallway. Again, that sort of open living kitchen, eating area, two bedrooms, accessible bath and laundry facility. And then entered from the street side. Again, that common sort of townhouse type layout that we've that we're using throughout the development with the open living dining kitchen area, a bath at the first floor level because we're occupying the basement with additional units. The laundry is in this building is at the first floor level for all three units. And again, a combination of a larger bedroom and smaller bedrooms. Here's that three bedroom unit with a larger bedroom kind of off the bay that's on the front of the street side of the building, walk-in closet, two additional bedrooms in the back. And then elevations. This is the street facade with the primary entries for the townhouse units. And then viewed from the back, that's that common entry for the two flats that are located at that ground floor level. That was fairly quick, but and I can take this down or leave it up as folks want or bring anything back as questions come up but maybe I'll take it down Jonathan, why don't we, thank you, thanks. Why don't we go back to the site conversation and get that, get those comments taken care of and then we'll come back to Jonathan's. And Tom, I guess you should be prepared to put some of your materials back up. Andrew, why don't you kick start us off? Thanks Doug, thanks Tom and Jonathan. I just want to say to start like, I love this. I think this is like a great project and I think a wonderful sort of transition between high-rise and the sort of the almost boulevard of just beautiful houses that you have along the sunset. So with that, a couple of quick questions. The Arborvites, those are like normally really big, like 40, 50 feet. So what's the plan for keeping those, you can just have them like trimmed down to what height? You're talking about along the street here? Exactly, yeah. So when we had met on site, I think it was with the local Historic District Commission. There was some discussion, I know Ben from the planning department was there, there was some discussion just about how the dorms act as, sound reverberates off the dorms. And so, and it comes this way as well. And so really to try to get something as a vegetative screen that grows up so that there is not only like a physical separation and maybe a subconscious separation from the university and from the dorms, but also an auditory separation. So at this point, the plan is just to let them grow up. Okay, cause they'll grow huge, right? And I guess just they wouldn't fit certainly under those maples. If those were maples there, I think you said these were. And these are existing over there. These are existing trees over here. And the text message is a wonderful thing. Our landscape architect just texted me and said, the ones that we have proposed max out at 20 feet. So those are the ones that he's called for, the ones that have a 20 foot height maximum. Okay, but so still a pretty big visual barrier. Correct. Okay, the other sort of quick questions I had. I noticed you specifically did not mention anything about students. Is the objective here that you will not allow students in? No, we will. I mean, one of the things that I've talked to Barry about is the dangers that come with trying to prohibit students, you know, kind of carte blanche and saying, no, students aren't allowed. I mean, anybody who's responsible is welcome to be here. I think there's just, when you've been in this town long enough, I've been working in this town long enough to know that people's mind, they see something like this, and they go, undergraduate students, oh my gosh, it's right next to the university. What are you doing? This is going to ruin the neighborhood. And I think what we're trying to say is, we're sensitive to that. That's not this intent. We could pack down, you know, four bedroom, four bath units or propose at least, who knows how far you get, four bedroom, four bath units and say, yeah, it's going to be undergraduate housing or tongue-in-cheek say it's going to be family. Here, there's an earnest effort, and we're going through those other mechanisms like talking to UMass, talking to the athletic department at UMass, building it with that natural exploration area, et cetera, to try to invite families so that you've got to hit that tipping point or that threshold where it starts to self-regulate because it becomes easier to manage. The investment in the asset is a lot better because you don't have people destroying it. And you know, I mean, most of you know Barry and what he's done and he's earned his reputation and it's something that he'd like to keep and not be getting calls of, wow, I can't believe, you know, the Roberts property went to, you know, crap because of, so yeah, I was careful not to say because I want to say, that's not the, those aren't the occupants we're targeting. If somebody, if a student comes or a group of students come and we feel very comfortable that they're going to fit in with what else we're doing here, that's a different story. We won't prohibit them, but that's not the market that we're going for. Okay, I mean, I certainly hope you can get some traction with the university and athletics. I think those are just wonderful opportunities if you can make that work. And then the other, the final question I had may be more for Jonathan. I was just a little confused. So I think building one is the Southeast one unit, the units in the front, what I heard you say, Tom, is that those were accessible from the street? Are they also accessible from the parking lot or do people need those units? Yeah, for this building only, yeah. Okay, so they're going to park in the parking lot, then they've got to walk up that driveway. Unfortunately, yeah, that's, you know, that's the one drawback with this particular building is those folks don't get a back door. Okay, is there, can they access from the driveway? Is there like a walk on the other side as well or are they just walking back up the driveway? Tom, can you bring that back up? Yeah, I think it's right up the driveway. Yeah. Okay, yeah, wondering whether it would make sense to have a little path on the other side too, so they don't have to, you know, just imagining. Yeah, bags of groceries and everything, yep. Yeah, you know, just if there's something on the southern edge, perhaps as well, so those folks don't have to walk up, you know, a roadway to get to their unit. And these folks, these folks have. They have a back door. They have a back door. So this is fully enclosed, fully enclosed, but to your point, it's the folks coming in through here. So yeah, we'll think of, that's a good suggestion. We'll, let's let it roll through our brains a little bit. Yeah, again, great, great project. Thanks for presenting it. Thank you. All right, thanks, Andrew. I have some comments, but does anybody else have some comments that wants to go next? I'm the board, Janet. So I think this is a really beautiful project and I think you really captured the New England look and it's a great fit in the neighborhood. I love the recreational space. I think that's fantastic. It's, you know, obviously people have a lot of space to spread out in. I like the sidewalks and then I love the family's idea. And that leads me to some of my concerns or maybe suggested conditions. One of the questions I have is what were the rents that you're seeing for these properties? Like, you know, the two bedrooms, you know, that I guess the different, different bedroom counts. Yeah, it's a great question. The answer is we don't really know yet. The way that we're looking at the two bedrooms, you know, you're probably in the, I don't know, 2,500, 26, 2,700 range. The four bedrooms are gonna be more expensive, not double, certainly. You know, maybe 4,000, 4,300 a month. You know, when we thought about it, if you were to buy, you know, I don't know how much is we've ever worth, let's say 600,000, $650,000, if you were to condominiumize them and sell them, which is not what we're looking to do. This is going to be managed and rented. But when you take into account something at that value with the mortgage, so you're paying principal and interest, you're paying taxes, you're paying insurance, you're paying maintenance, you know, exterior maintenance, lawn care, snow plowing, et cetera, you're probably paying interior maintenance. You know, when you total all that up, and I have it somewhere, I don't have it here, you're over $4,000 for a four bedroom if you were looking at a four bedroom, and you're probably over 3,000 for a two bedroom. We just thought going above 3,000 for a two bedroom, and that just pushes it too much, frankly. So that's probably the range that we're in, something like that. The affordables will be, like I said, less than the 80%. So I think 80% might be, you know, what we're thinking about. So we've done research into what units are needed. We've talked to wayfinders to find out what units they're finding get filled the quickest, and those are the two bedrooms. And so for that, I think we're below $1,000. I think we might be at like $800, $900 per unit for those affordable units based upon that voucher, whatever that voucher system is, that's what Barry's gonna follow. So that's, I mean, we've also got, you know, supplies, everybody knows, like look at inflation, look at supply chain, labor, materials, et cetera. But we think that, you know, those numbers probably make sense, given how much, you know, the package that you're getting. So. So I think the two bedrooms, the affordable one, that's a fantastic number, because even on North Hampton Road, those studios are close to, I think, 800 for the studio. So that would be really a great deal for a family to get a two bedroom at that price. I guess my concern is, I mean, probably, and it's not, it's obviously something you could deal with, but also the whole country is dealing with is, that's a lot of money for a family. And if you could afford 4,000 a month, would you be buying a house? And then if, you know, and then even if it was affordable here, would you want to live across from the Southwest towers and things like that? And so I think, you know, because I went and looked at that and I just, those towers are really big. And I have been around them after Celtics games and wins and it's, you know, it's hard for me to picture thinking this is like really a family friendly neighborhood, but it looks like you've done a tremendous effort to try to make it so. I would suggest for the ZBA and for you is, I don't think it's bad to limit and say either, you know, only 25% undergrads or none because I think these will be attractive to people and they can be attracted to people in their twenties and thirties under, you know, for graduate students. And, you know, so I think that, I think you have to limit the undergraduates just in terms of the behavior because we know what that is. And so, and as much as I respect your goal of this, these units are gonna be here for decades when we're long gone and without a condition that limits the number of undergraduates in it, they will fall in, they could fall into disrepair just like those houses that you're replacing or moving have. They've just become sort of these, you know, grungy undergraduate houses with, you know, crummy backyards and the backyard is basically a parking lot. And so I would recommend to the ZVA that there be a limit on the percentage of undergraduates or just a requirement not to have them. And then I really hope your project works for families and for older people. The other change, I would, is a quick change is I wonder when I looked at the doorways why there isn't universal, they're not universally accessible. Like I do love the stoop and the steps, but I wondered why they were there because why not just have people, you know, be able to get in every doorway in an easy way? And that will be, you know, better for people if they wanted to have an older relative living with them. Or as we all know, Andrew, sometimes it's really hard to get around no matter what age you are. And so that would be my recommendation that people be able to just step into the unit without those steps. And you can still have some very attractive like kind of granite entry ways. And then my last comment is, I kind of picked up something from the local historic district. I think these are really attractive units, but they all kind of look the same. And I have two friends who have moved in kind of the Minion projects that look a lot like this. And I can never figure out where they live because all the buildings look the same. And I wondered if there could be some variation in terms of like one building has shutters, some scallops, you know, or, you know, maybe some shingles instead of clabbered, you know, just a little more differentiation. I also wondered if the building could be, some of the buildings could be white because it seemed like almost every house in the neighborhood was white. But I just thought maybe a little more uniqueness for each building just to differentiate and kind of fit the kind of New England style where things just kind of, every house looks a little different. But I do think these are really attractive. And I just, it's a very appealing project. I just hope it works being so close to the Southwest towers. All right, thank you, Janet. If I could, Doug, one thing, you know, as I was listening to Janet speak, I misspoke as far as the affordable rents. I was thinking of one bedrooms for that amount. I'll get you what the two bedrooms would be for affordable, it's going to be more than 800. But I just, for the record, want to make sure that I'm being accurate. Cause once I heard you say it back, I thought, oh shoot, I just said what the one bedroom would be and there aren't any one bedroom proposed or one bedroom affordables proposed. So I'll get you what that number is. I'll send it either, I think through probably Pam. So I'm sorry about the misspeaking. If Doug, if it makes sense, I could just kind of respond to the question about accessibility a little bit. Sure, Jonathan. So we have a mixtures. We have some that are obviously wheel in accessible. Some of this may come from the fact that we were really trying to listen to what we were hearing at the local historic district. And one of the things they know, because the first version of this plan that we went in with, things were a lot closer to grade. There was still maybe maybe one step up, that sort of thing. It didn't have the same kind of presence on the street that you get with a stoop and that kind of two foot distance between grade and say a porch or something like that. What we're presenting certainly meets the requirements of accessibility based on code. But depending on comment we get back, we can certainly look at having more units that would be at least have the first floor roll in accessible. Okay. Thank you, Jonathan. Andrea, it looks like you have your hand up again. It's just like 30 seconds. I know, Johanna, it's up next. But just, I'm sorry, just back in the Arbor Bite set that I think it was page 12. I would, I think it would probably be useful to know the aerial street view. Maybe not, yeah, there, I'm sorry, page 10. It might be useful to actually show those as 20 foot if that's your intent or like a street view of it. Because that's like a pretty intimidating wall. And that may be your design intent, but I think like it's definitely not clear to me that it was. Okay. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Andrew. Johanna. Great, thanks for the opportunity. It's exciting to see this project. I worked in the Creamery Building basement for many years and have walked this corner many, many times. And I think especially the streetscape on sunset I think it just really works. And I can imagine, you know, those sidewalks kind of just seamlessly flowing into the rest of the neighborhood. My questions have to do with sustainability. So I think the things that I like about this plan is, you know, the relative density of housing. But I'm curious just how much you looked at on-site solar production, rooftop solar, whether parking lot solar was something you had talked about or considered it all but then scrapped as well as EB charging infrastructure. And then I'm also just curious about the fuel sources for the heating, space heating, water heating and cooking in the buildings themselves. Because we got problems in this world and the stuff we build now is gonna be around when, you know, it's just, it's easier to start from scratch than it is to retrofit. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Sure. And Jonathan, I'll have you answer about rooftop solar, et cetera and the heating systems in a minute. I'm just gonna talk about parking lot solar. And yeah, we look at it for all our projects. The problem is that the cost of that steel to raise, I mean, you see it at UMass and UMass has done, I mean, those are the Cadillac of parking lot canopies. The problem is they're really, really expensive and you're not getting necessarily a real appreciable solar footprint here. And it's not necessarily oriented in the right direction because so this is North-South. You could have panels, but, you know, we have not done an analysis. I know that there's programs where you can say, okay, on December 21st of any year, what do you have for sunlight actually hitting? And that's where like solar developers look to see this is what at the weakest day it's going to be. You know, I would bet that given the surrounding vegetation offsite that we can't really control plus the orientation of the parking lot and the cost of it, it's not gonna work. So we looked at that EV, we are gonna, we're not gonna provide a charging station yet. Barry has one at his 70 University Drive property and he can probably tell you nobody uses it or not many people use it. What we're gonna do here though is prep the site for it. So we'll have conduit and I think an electric meter. So when it's time to and when folks, once that comes, we'll be able to have a separate dedicated meter to the EV charging stations. You know, we thought about in that amenity space doing cause that's probably where the community garden is is a great space for solar panels but the trade-off is either community garden space or solar panels. It may be something where we see community gardens are never or not used or minimally used and then we pivot to that. But if I were to put it somewhere that's probably where I would put it. And then Jonathan, if you wanna talk about rooftop and heating sources. Yep, I can do that. You know, I would have loved it if the grades were like 90 degrees to what we actually have on site so that we could have oriented this project in another direction. But we do have some opportunities. These are South-facing slopes and with the efficiency of the panels today even the West-facing slopes would be an opportunity but it is not as ideal as I would have necessarily liked it. But I do think there is an option or an ability to put PV on these buildings and be able to generate some electricity. While Barry and I have not set down to like go through each building and say categorically what our different systems are. I do know that based on past experiences it's likely to be an all-electric system. That's what the two projects most recently we've done with Barry are. So that in all likelihood there's probably not gonna be any fossil fuel for space heating. Water heating is tough. I would like to find a way to get us to a point where we could be all electric on that as well and move away from fossil fuels. But at least for our most recent project it's still been a little bit of a stretch and we're still looking at gas. But we have not gotten to that level of detail for these buildings yet. But basically it'll be a series of mini splits and with condensers outside which we're gonna have to go through in the process of placing. What have I forgotten? As Tom said we have talked about being EV ready and where those are gonna go on site I don't think we'd necessarily chosen the spot for but I did something that we would be working forward towards as the project develops further. Did I miss something Johanna? Don't think so. I realized I had two more questions on my list that I didn't get to. I think you addressed, yeah all my questions. Okay. All right, thanks. Thanks, Jonathan and thanks Johanna. Maria. Doug, could I ask my other two questions or you wanna come back to me? I thought you said the answer does, okay. Sorry, no, no, no. The other question that I had had to do with pedestrian connectivity to the community space. So it seems to me like the way that the layout is right now that community space is highly accessible to the residences in the back but pretty separate from the ones in the front in the sense that, you know, like, I don't know. I was imagining like, what if I had a three-year-old and I was like, go play. Where would that three-year-old walk if you live in the, you know, building in the lower right? And I was like, wow, I'd be sending her across the parking lot. Like, I don't love that. And so I wonder if, so in addition to the idea of, you know, making sure there's a sidewalk along the driveway to the parking lot on the sunset side, I wonder if there could just be a little bit more thought about where do pedestrians from the front, how do they access the community space safely? And imagine a three-year-old on a scooter, I think is how I'm thinking about it. All right, is that, that's both of your comments? Yes, that's it. All right. Jonathan, I don't know if you need to respond to that, but that is, this would be a good chance if you want to say anything, otherwise we can go on to Maria. I think that's something we should give a little bit more thought to. You know, I do think that we, while we have provided pathways, it is for if you're in this corner unit, you can't see my mouse, thank you. If you're in that unit, you do, you do have to cross, you know, certainly a parking lot and maybe a driveway to follow the path that we've kind of designated. And as we all know, three-year-olds don't necessarily do that. And it looked like in the description that you actually have more parking spaces than are required. So you could potentially lose a space on each side of the bay and, you know, have a little more connectivity. That's true. We didn't really talk in, I mean, Tom sort of talked about the numbers, parking spaces, but we didn't kind of talk about that parking density. I don't know, Tom, have you and Barry talked more internally about what the right number is likely for this development? No, I mean, so frankly, part of it is to see what the feedback is, like planning board feedback, zoning board feedback. Sometimes we've been through this enough to know, some people say one thing, other people say the exact opposite thing. So if we design it with the parking that we can fit, and then we hear, you know, hey, on balance, this is really important to us. Why don't you get rid of two parking spaces? I think we could see our way clear to eliminate two parking spaces to have that thoroughfare. You know, I don't see that as being an issue, but if I hear from the ZBA, we want every parking space that you have, then to a certain extent, we're the pawns in this. Right. Well, I think our purpose tonight is to vet, to air some comments, and you know, you can do what you want with them before you see the ZBA, but you know, this is just feedback. Maria. Thanks for the presentation. And I just want to start with big picture stuff. This project really shows you, like, how effective our zoning and how the various sort of department and developers and planning board and building department all working together can come together and create this great project because we so need housing. And this is that sort of missing middle sort of flag I've been carrying for my term on this board is this is exactly what we need. We need this sort of starter home, this sort of like missing sort of economic sort of community that sort of has to move, you know, outside of Amherst in order to work in Amherst. And I think this is just the thing we need and we need more of it. And so it's great that you found this parcel such an ideal location and could do this number of units that transitions between, you know, the scale of university to a neighborhood. So I think it's conceptually fantastic. I won't comment on the architecture because that's so subjective, but I think it fits the neighborhood just as you've designed it. And I'm glad we're talking about this sort of issue of pedestrians and cars because I do feel like the project is very car-centric. It feels very much about like, you know, we have enough parking and in fact, here's more parking and in fact, here are two ways to get in and out. And it does feel like there's a lot of accommodations for cars and like you've heard from the planning board members, how do people move through the site, you know, from their front door to their car or how does a child get from their front door to the community space? So I think those are all really good feedback to think about like how a human, you know, from each front door occupies it and walks down a street whether they're going into town or going to their job somewhere or to the green space, that really great green space you've provided. So I guess those are sort of big picture questions which don't need to be answered just to think about but the more detailed ones are, well, I know you've gone through so many boards and reviews, is there a reason for the two access points by cars? Is that a code thing or the fire department asks? You know, as far as I know. So fire department circulation. Yeah, they'll come in and then they'll be able to come out here and so they'll be able to circulate the site. Okay, all right. And then the other site question is all those little gates you have in the front yards on Sunset, is that Sunset referring Sunset? Are those just like a visual barrier? Because there are certainly people who just step over the bushes, right? They're not really a barrier in a way. All those little private sort of geeks you have there, the black ones. Yeah, so I mean the intent is for these to be actual gates, you know, impediments to folks entering and the landscape will grow over time. These will be hedges that will be maintained and so ultimately, you know, they'll grow up and to think of it, I think I might have Googled like English cottage. That's kind of the idea that you're thinking about here with those hedges with the gates in between. So yeah, to give, and I think we had heard at the local historic district commission from one of the butters about a term that I didn't know but defensible spaces. And that's really what we're looking to do here where you have that sense of ownership over that portion of the space. I see, okay. Yeah, cause it felt a little like formidable, like do not enter, but I see what you're saying. You're just trying to provide like, you know, here's our yard and, you know, it's private but it's not saying stay out necessarily. I mean, it is saying stay out but it's not in a way that's like, you know, stay out. And I mean like, right, right. But yeah, I know I think this is, we need more projects like this. This is fantastic. And I'm glad that it's gone through iterations and you've really responded and taken input for the various boards and department staff and whatnot. And I, yeah, I think the only criticism I would have is really think about how people of different ages, different abilities move through the site, you know with their feet, like literally like, and I would definitely be pro reducing parking considering the location and proximity to university into downtown. Yeah, more green space, more sidewalks, less cars. I mean, the more you sort of pushed toward that as far as a trend, the more, you know, we as a community can think that way too instead of, you know, predominantly relying on the car. But overall, yeah, I kind of echo what a lot of other people have said about the project. I think it's great and really well thought out and hope we see more like this. So, but thank you. Thanks a lot. All right, Maureen, Tom. Thanks Doug and thanks guys for the presentation. I'm not gonna have too many comments because I really appreciate everyone else's comments. I do think circulation is a big issue. So, I think that's something that I was gonna comment on. The other thing I wanna comment on is about the architecture, but not so much as a critique. But I think that what makes these attractive in the way that we're not attractive, but what makes them not unattractive in some ways and fitting maybe more in with the district is the architectural detail. And I just get concerned that those things get value engineered out. And that's the plantings, that's the pavings, that's the window details, the box out for the sort of white box outs on the front. So, I wanna make sure that that's a priority to preserve those architectural details, even if they have to become vinyl or whatever it is to keep them there. I'd like to see that maintained because I do think they can really start to feel institutional if we strip away some of those things. And that's just my concern. But otherwise, I think, great project that we're fitting this many units into this site with this much green space, that's super pleasing to me. So, that's all I've said. Thanks so much. Okay, Tom. Just to respond to that, Mr. Chair, I'll say it simply, what you see is what you get here. So, what we're proposing is what we'll ultimately, assuming we get the approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals, I would expect from them a condition that says you have to build this substantially in accordance with the plans and the plans show what they show. So, what you see here as far as the plant things, I mean, we've gone through a lot of cost expense, thought, detail to get to this place. So, hopefully, once we get the thumbs up, that's what, you know, then we just release folks to actually order the materials and to do the work. So, it's a lot of upfront costs, but if this is approved, this is what you're gonna get. Thanks so much. Thank you, Tom. Janet? So, I just have a few extra things. I think you're gonna need a lot of EV chargers, maybe not this year, but so when you're putting in the electrical works, I've already had problems, like when I've tried to charge my EV, my hybrid EV, that there's no spaces. So, I think that time is coming closer and closer and you're gonna wind up having a lot of competition. And so, I would think about putting them so pretty much anybody, you know, at least half the cars would be charging. If they're level two chargers, they'll go faster, but if the car is all electric, it's gonna take a long time. So, just looking to the future, I would really think about what's coming, which is good. Another idea, just from hearing Johanna and people talk, is maybe thinking about paths. And so, maybe on the side, the south side, there could be like a little path is someone from the front buildings could walk around to the back or, you know, across the middle of the parking lot, having a crosswalk or a raised crosswalk and making a designated path between the buildings. I don't know if it has to be concrete or it could be, you know, woody or something like that. But just so people say, oh, this is where kids are crossing or people are gonna cross to get to the backyard. And the other thing I'm just worrying about is families in price because if it's $4,000 a month, that's like $48,000 a year. I know that teachers are underpaid and UMass professors aren't probably making that much money, but I just hope that, you know, in order to get the families in, you know, that's a heavy lift for somebody who's working at the university, unless of course you're the UMass football coach who seems to have a phenomenal amount of money. But I just, you know, again, the cost and the family has to be sort of met somewhere. But I do think this is a very attractive project. So I appreciate the local historic district and everybody else putting in there in the effort of the architects and Mr. Roberts. All right, thanks, Janet. So I'll go ahead and just read through the comments that I had and you don't, you know, you don't particularly need to respond. I know we're getting close to eight o'clock when we usually take a break and we have some other things. These are not really in any order except the order of the sheets as I saw them. On your verbal description under the parking section, I did wonder why you had more parking spaces than required. Conversely, farther down in that parking section, you talked about the parking registration system, which caused me to wonder about how visitors would be treated. So I do, you know, I mean, obviously these people may have visitors and you need a way to make sure that they can park in the lot. So maybe you do need a few extra spaces, but I just questioned whether you really needed, you know, as many as you showed. Then the next comments were on the site plan. When I look at the path that goes next to the dumpster down to the western edge of the site, I saw some steps right before you get to the, whatever it's called, it's got a bike rack. And so, yeah, it's those steps right there. First of all, as a bicycle rider, I'd rather not have to ride my bike, carry my bike up and down steps. So maybe the bike rack ought to be on the top of side of the steps rather than down at the bottom. And then in addition, those steps are an obstacle to any person in a wheelchair who wants to get to some of the amenities that are out west of your building. Oh, is that a ramp? Okay. There is, yeah. So there's stairs and there's a ramp that goes around that little planted area. Okay, good. So that takes care of that. And I had not picked that up. And then on the next sheet, the grading plan, I noticed that the retaining wall along Fearing Street is probably 10 feet high by the time you get to the west end of it. And that seemed awfully high, even with Arbor Vides in front of it, which I guess leads to a little bit larger question I guess I was a little disappointed that all the buildings, that you didn't have some buildings facing Fearing Street and addressing both streets. It seemed like the project really does turn a very blind eye to Fearing Street. And I understand that there's the university across the street, but certainly Fearing Street has some units that are some houses that front it farther up the street. So the height of that retaining wall seemed pretty daunting, first of all. And second of all, the existing street trees along Fearing Street are very substantial trees. And I did stop there on my way home last, this evening. And I do wonder whether the construction of the retaining wall and maybe the planting of the Arbor Vides might irreparably damage the existing trees along there. So I believe Fearing Street is owned by UMass in this section. And I'm seeing nodding from Tom and Jonathan. I hope you've been in conversation with somebody at UMass about the actual impact of some of this construction on the trees in particular, because I know UMass keeps pretty close watch of particularly their larger trees. And then along Fearing Street, there isn't any sidewalk at the moment. And I know that those trees are large enough that they would really obstruct any, the creation of a sidewalk. And I guess I just wondered, is your retaining wall and your Arbor Vides set far enough back that at some point there could be a reasonable sidewalk along Fearing Street? All right, so that was another question. If you scroll up on this particular page toward the west edge of the site, actually, I guess it was on the grading plan, which was sheet number five. And I don't have that in this set. Okay, all right, well. But we can talk about it. Well, there was a riprap discharge from the water collection system. Yes. And I just wanted to question whether the amount of discharge would be causing significant erosion or whether that is likely to be a problem with your, a butter to the west. Doug, so maybe just let me hop on a couple of these because you're asking, I mean, some really, really great questions. As far as the retaining wall, it's more like five to six feet, not 10 feet. As far as the discharge, so there's what you see with this like grade out haps area, that's a subsurface infiltration system. And the overflow is what's gonna go to that riprap area over here. So based on the calculations, I don't think we anticipate that being used too often. And we'll go through, we'll talk to Jason to make sure that he's okay with the amount of riprap that we have at the bottom so that that water, the speed and the volume dissipates. And so it doesn't scour or cause any erosion down gradient. This is your civil engineer. Jason's skills, but yeah, I mean, our civil engineer has certainly looked at it. And it's, so it's Phil Henry and Matt Leidner from Civil Design Group. We've used them on 70 University Drive, University Drive South. So they've, what they design work. So we've been very pleased with what they've done. All right. Well, I'm glad to hear the retaining wall is not as high as it looked like. I was squinting at the grading numbers and it certainly looked like it was higher. And then I guess the only, then the last comment was about the sort of semicircular grading at the West edge of the site, which, you know, Jonathan, I realized that this is a very steeply sloping site. And, you know, ideally it would be flat and you've sort of tabled it, stepped it down toward the West. But the, just looking at the number of topo lines on that semicircle, you know, it feels like almost the prow of a ship jutting out to the West. So it felt like, you know, between the retaining wall and this grading to the West, I think there was some mention that you were doing a lot of fill. And I can imagine you're trucking in a lot of material. But it felt like maybe- I think on balance we are a fill, I believe. Okay. Well, it just kind of felt like maybe it wasn't as, I mean, you know. Could we soften it a bit? So it wasn't- Yeah, it felt a little bit heavy handed in terms of the treatment of the site. And I think part of that was my thought that if you had a building or two that stepped down Fearing Street, you know, you wouldn't feel the need to have it flat quite so far to the West. But, you know, I realize you've been through a lot of hoops already. I do think that it's an attractive project. And, you know, take my comments for whatever help they can be. So I'll stop there. I don't know if I'll be very brief just to respond because I want to give the folks over at Civil Design a lot of credit for designing the site. And when they start designing these, they look at, you know, the roadways and making sure that they match with what the existing grade is because that's what's fixed. And then they kind of build the site off of there and then they have to make the stormwater work so that the stormwater is going in the direction that needs to go. And so you've got catch basins in the parking lot and then that subsurface infiltration system in the rear and what you have to do is you have to maintain a certain separation from groundwater. And that's really one of the main reasons why we have to lift the site so much is because you've got groundwater. And so then I think you have to keep it four feet so that you don't have to do what's called a mounding analysis to make sure that when that water is in the subsurface infiltration system, it's not hitting groundwater because the groundwater is already there. Then obviously there's not the storage capacity that you would have thought it was. So that's why the site is elevated the way it is. It's to meet the existing grade, keep those grades reasonable. That's why you'll see some switchbacks over in that area by the bike rack. And then also over here you'll see so that we can meet grades so that we have accessible paths throughout the site. So there was thought behind why we have what we have just to really again balance all of those different kind of competing provisions. Right, well, I figured there was a reason. You know, it's just not obvious at first glance. Couple of last things, Jonathan, when you talked about building C and the two units on the ground floor of that building. Yes. I didn't see it for very long but the entry sequence looked frankly kind of unpleasant. Like you went into a shared corridor and all the way to the back and then turn left or right. And it did make me wonder whether you could just have an entry off straight from the sidewalk into each unit. That's such true. We don't necessarily need to do that. That just looks like you could easily make use of that space for some other purpose. Yeah, that's a fair point. Okay, great. Great. And then kind of on Johanna's tangent about the sustainability, I wondered if you do have a target energy use intensity and EUI for these buildings and whether they are insulated only to meet code or in excessive code? We have not established an EUI yet for this project. Okay. Well, obviously... Yeah, we haven't set down with the energy rating company yet. There are some other steps we need to kind of walk through. Okay, well, I do agree with her that the more sustainable and low energy use we can design into them at the beginning, the fewer solar panels we need to put on them to make them net zero. Okay, so, Janet, you have a couple more questions or comments? No, okay. That was a legacy hand. Legacy hand, sorry. All right, well, thanks. Thanks, everyone. I really appreciated the graphics in particular for this, Tom and Jonathan. This is a higher level of modeling than I think we've seen, I've seen on the board. And it really helps you to kind of get a sense of what you're trying to do. To that, Doug, let me just give credit. Place Alliance, Andy Bone, Local, Amherst Guy, South Pleasant Street, they've done a terrific job. They're our landscape architect. And so between Jonathan at Cune Riddle, Phil and Matt over at Civil Design and Andy at Place Alliance and his team, I mean, we've got to thank them so you can, you're seeing what you're seeing tonight. I can't take any credit for modeling those gardens in the back, that would have taken me forever. Buildings I know how to do, getting the plants to look natural and beautiful, that's why we have help. All right, so Chris, actually Janet, I see your hand again. I was thinking if anyone in the public had questions, I don't know if you're gonna get to that. Okay, well, sure. Any attendees wanna make a comment? Dorothy Pam, please state your name and your address. Hi, Dorothy, you're on mute. Right, Dorothy Pam, 229 Amity Street. Well, I have been on the Shade Tree site visit and on meetings about this project and we've seen it change and grow and really, truthfully get much better as it goes along. So there's a lot of pleasure in that. But when you showed your early pictures of the existing neighborhood, I noticed that the tree that we're trying very hard to save on the corner of Fearing and Sunset is just an incredible presence there. Almost all the pictures have the tree or this branches which reach out quite far. If you look at it from the south, you see it kind of blocking the towers and there's been great fear because the Fearing Street corridor is one widely used by students, particularly on weekends at night and I gather a lot of drunken students do walk up and down and the universities walk this way program concentrates on that street, in fact. But we were hoping that if that large tree could be spared that it would be a reminder that this is a residential neighborhood and kind of a demarcation because we know that at some point, all trees fail but if this moment, this tree is putting out new growth and is doing well and as I did point out at a meeting, I think last night, I'm pleased with suggestion to plant larger dimension trees but they will just still look like sticks for a number of years. They will, it'll take them a long time to look like the renderings of the picture. Now, I did have a couple of other questions and comments. The question about the parking and children safety, there is an alternative that the parking could be in the back where the common areas are and the area which is now the parking lot between the buildings could be a common area green. If in fact, the building is rented as a lawyer Reedy is suggesting to families and responsible people, that would work out fine. I do know that a large common greens are not wanted if a building is primarily undergraduates because it becomes just an incredible party space. And then in answer to Johanna's question about canopies if the parking were in the back and canopies come down or it's less expensive to build them in the future, that's a possible source of energy there. I was also very interested in about the affordable units and I'm very pleased to hear about all the accessible units and I'm wondering if one of the affordable units will be an accessible unit and if there's a possibility of seniors as well as young families, if I were a senior living alone, I would want to live in a place like this that would have varied ages and would have children. It would be very attractive. So the question about that, question about the laundry room, I couldn't quite tell whether each unit had a shared laundry room or was it individual laundry rooms? And I also want to know about the dimension of the common space. I just couldn't get from the plan, that could be really great or it could be a really small, suffocatingly small room in which you're trying to do too many things in it. So I'm just curious if you could tell me the answer about the laundry room and the dimensions of the common space and any comments about the tree. So thank you so much. Thank you. Tom or Jonathan? I guess Jonathan just confirmed accessible will be affordable. Yes, that's my expectation that at least one of the accessible units will also be an affordable unit. That's been a common request that we've accommodated. And I believe each building has their own laundry either in a basement space or within the main living space in some form. Okay, shared, that was very good. No, I don't believe it's shared, Jonathan. No, no shared. Everybody's got their own. Each unit has a laundry space, not each building. Yes, each unit. So each duplex unit, for example, has two laundries, one in each basement. Each of the flat type apartment units has the laundry, kind of in a laundry closet. So each unit has access to its own laundry facilities. Okay. All right, thanks. Thanks, Dorothy. I don't see any other, any other hands among attendees. One last call for comments from anyone. Chris, do you have, have you got enough comments to put together a letter? Yes, I think so. Pam and I can put together a letter and then send it to Doug for review to make sure that we've included what you wanted to include. Is it satisfactory? That's satisfactory to me. I think the one comment that I would wanna make and is that I think the comments should be, it should be indicated that the comments were individual comments because we haven't really had enough discussion to have a sense of which comments are shared by the board as a consensus. So, these were the comments from individuals on the board. Okay. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you, Tom and Jonathan and your teams. This was, it's great to see and certainly a pleasant, happy project to look at and sounds like you've been to enough of the other boards that you're well on your way. Thanks so much for the recommendations. Good luck with the ZBA. Thank you and have a good evening. Okay. So long. Thank you. All right. So that concludes item three on our agenda. The time is 8.09. I assume we'll go ahead and take a five minute break. I'm seeing some knobs and thumbs. So why don't we reconvene in six minutes at 8.15? And in the meantime, please turn off your cameras and mute yourself and we'll be right back. All right. It's 8.15 and I'm seeing people's cameras came back on. So Chris, let's see. It's 8.16. Are you gonna be presenting the FEMA flood insurance? I'm Nate Malloy is going to be presenting it but I have a short introduction that I'd like to give before Nate starts his presentation. Okay. I don't see him in the panel. Just to let you know, I just got a message from him. He's restarting his computers. So hopefully by the time Chris gets done doing her opening, Nate will be with us. Okay. All right. So the time is 8.17 and we're reconvening and continuing our meeting. We'll go to item four, the introduction of the FEMA flood insurance study maps and proposed bylaw. So Chris, why don't you take it away and we'll see whether you can make it long enough that Nate can get here before you're done. There he is. I see him coming in now. Okay. It looks like Johanna has an extra guest in her house. There he is. Anyway, okay. Hello. I'm Christine Brestrup, planning director and I'd like to introduce you to our flood mapping project. And then senior planner, Nate Malloy will give you a more in-depth presentation. We presented this project to town council in February of 2020 and February of 2022. But this is a first look for the planning board. Although some of you may remember previous presentations at public meetings of the planning board and the conservation commission. The project will be going to town council on April 4th with a request for a referral to the planning board and the CRC for public hearings. The town of Amherst is a participant in the national flood insurance program which is administered by FEMA. This program provides information about flood insurance for property owners whose properties lie within the hundred-deer floodplain. The adoption of new maps and accompanying zoning regulations requires the vote of town council. That vote needs to occur sometime in the next six to eight months. Town council will be seeking a recommendation from the planning board because this is a zoning amendment. The town has been working on this project on updating the flood maps since around 2012. That gives us a 10-year jumpstart on you. Been working on it for 10 years. The purpose of the project is to create accurate federally approved maps for land affected by flooding in order to provide information to banks which grant mortgages to landowners, to the conservation commission, the planning board and other interested parties. Amherst flood maps have not been updated for decades. Town meeting appropriated money to work on new flood maps and the town hired a firm of technical experts called AECOM or ACOM and they frequently work with FEMA to prepare new flood maps for municipalities and regions. In September of 2017, the preliminary flood insurance rate maps were presented to members of the planning board, conservation commission and the public. But at that time, the town became aware of a new method of analyzing flood data and determining flood boundaries. This new method had just come into use in the spring of 2017. So town meeting appropriated an additional sum of money to update the maps using the new 2017 method. The new mapping has now been complete. The mapping project has been presented at public meetings several times in the last four or five years, including twice at town council meetings. The maps have been through three appeal periods during which only one appeal was received. Most of the maps have been available for viewing by the public since June of 2019. Three of the panels have been revised recently and these have been available for viewing by the public since July of 2021. We've issued press releases and put information on the front page of the town's website each time new maps became available for viewing. We're now initiating the process of having the maps, the zoning amendment and the flood insurance study adopted by town council. Senior planner Nate Malloy will now give you a more detailed presentation about this project and we'll be happy to answer any questions after Nate's presentation. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Hey, Nate. Sure, thanks everyone. I'm Nate Malloy, a planner with the town. I'll share my screen and I'll go through a presentation. I was in the packet and then also go through draft language of the bylaw. The, Chris covered it pretty well. So, the town is part of the flood insurance program and it has been for since the 80s and this allows property owners to purchase flood insurance on their property. It's different than disaster loans or other things. The current project, there's three things that the town has to adopt. It's an updated flood study, the flood maps and then the zoning bylaw. So there's a few pieces there. There are benefits to being in the flood insurance program, residents, whether or not you're in a flood hazard area. So even if your property is not mapped as part of a flood hazard area, you still can purchase flood insurance because the town is a member or participating in the national flood insurance program. The town may also be eligible for some relief because we're in this program. And then as part of the new update, the state and FEMA really want regulations to kind of guide development away from these flood hazard areas. We have that in our zoning now and some of our regulations, conservation commission, and that has to be bolstered with the new zoning bylaw. And really the goal of the project was to have more accurate flood maps to determine if property owners are required to purchase flood insurance. So right now, this is dealing with the flood insurance rate maps and then the flood hazard area will become a zoning overlay and there'll be regulations in the bylaw. We're not changing the FPC zoning right now. And we're not changing other regulations the town uses. So the conservation commission regulations are not changing. They may reference these updated maps. In essence, they already say the flood maps of the town. So the way those regulations and bylaws are written it will, they can already use the updated maps. And so really it's about getting more accurate flood hazard areas. Chris went over the project history. Really it's been many years in the making. So really we're at the final step. We're, the maps we are using now that are adopted are from 1981 to 1983. And they use data that was from the late 60s and 70s. So really we're using flood maps that are decades old and we'll have new ones that are much more accurate. And there's a few reasons why the preliminary maps are a lot more accurate. They use much more detailed contours. The previous maps were 10 foot contours. They're digital as opposed to hand drawn on a map. The analysis uses 40 years of data. So the updated regression equation Chris talked about essentially used 40 years of stream and peak flow and storm data from the Northeast region of the US. And some of that was in-stream gauges to measuring flows versus data from the 60s and 70s. It shows actual locations of structures. It's based on the data's overlaid on aerial imagery. So you can actually see the structures. The current maps are the ones from the 80s. The structures were hand drawn. And so it was really hard if you were a property owner to determine where exactly was the flood boundary on your property and does it actually cover a structure? And then the update process did involve field surveys from the 2000 teams, right? So when the consultants were out here, they had engineers and surveyors on the ground looking at a lot of structures, culverts and things just to make sure to field verify that the elevations were correct. And here's, there's just a few examples of what the new maps look like compared to the old maps. So this is showing Puppers pond. The old map's a bit distorted. The new map isn't much, but you can see it's based, there's an aerial image in the outline of the flood hazard area is much more refined following accurate topography. For each, there's usually cross sections done. Sometimes it's noted about what are the actual flood areas. So what are the elevations? And so if a property owner has questions, we could zoom in and look. Here's another area in South Amur. So this is showing the, here's the West Pomeroy 116 intersection and you can see all the cross section lines giving elevations and just before over here, you can see that there's kind of a nice curvilinear boundary to the flood area, not really following topography. And here it's quite accurate in terms of where the flood boundary follows topography. It's also showing the floodway, which is the area where there's an actual water course and where that, there's some elevation in the water here. And as part of this, because it's a digital map, we're able to combine it with our other GIS layers and know more accurately what structures are in this zone here. And so as part of this process, when we had preliminary maps, we did notify all the property owners whose properties were impacted by this to let them know there are preliminary maps and that they could review them. So the current timeline, this has been previewed with town council, so these preliminary maps. The next step in the process is a letter of final determination from FEMA, which will be issued in late April. And that begins a six month compliance period. So within those six months, the town has to adopt local regulations and that's zoning and an overlay map and the flood study and the flood maps. And the town has to do this probably a month before the six month compliance period ends because the state and then FEMA have to review the local regulations to make sure that they're up to standard. So we can't really wait till five and a half months and adopt the regulations. We should really adopt them with four or five weeks before the compliance period ends. This really is the final phase. We've already reached out to the state for their floodplain coordinator and so we have a draft by-law. Before you've got spent, we've met with the state twice now and we can continue to meet with them. Just so that by the time we get to an adoption time, they're familiar with what we're proposing. So in terms of what's happening next, the town council will see this in early April as a zoning amendment and then refer it back to the planning board and CRC for public hearings to actually have an official zoning amendment process. So we're starting it before the letter is issued knowing that it will be in late April, hopefully giving us a bit more time to review the language of the by-law. And there's a few components of the local regulations. The flood zone that was shown on those previous slides in blue becomes an overlay zoning district. And so it's not a base zone, it's an overlay district. The FPC is a base zone, right? So this zone would go on top of it or other base zoning districts. It would be considered a new section of the by-law is an easiest way to accommodate what the state and FEMA are asking as opposed to trying to fit certain sections and regulations within the existing by-law were proposing a new section. It uses standard language. So the draft that will be looked at tonight and that was in the packet, 97% or most of the language is really standard language that can't be removed. It can be slightly modified, it could be made more stringent, but that's the standard language provided by the state. And the by-law really needs to have a structure of an intent and purpose, definitions, a floodplain administrator role, regulations and enforcement. And so those sections are required. And the definitions that came with the by-law that are in there are straight from FEMA. So that's that presentation. I can stop there for now if there's any questions and then go to the actual language of the by-law. So if this process is pretty much prescribed by the state and FEMA and there's not very much opportunity to change anything, is this gonna be, is this controversial in any way? I mean, do we really need six months? Well, I think some communities may not have started working on a by-law until they've actually received a letter of final determination. And so they might actually need six months to develop a language. Some communities decide not to create a discrete section of the by-law, but try to integrate it into a by-law. And then it becomes more complicated because where do you put filling of water courses or a few regulations and where's the rest of it? So, Waitley was going through this process last fall and Hadley has gone through it recently and they did mostly a consolidated section of their zoning in terms of what could change. For instance, Hadley says, no new single-family homes in the overlay. And FEMA doesn't prohibit development, right? So they're saying that it has to follow standards, there's compensatory storage, there's also permitting with the conservation commission. So it may be that in the floodplain, the 100-year floodplain you could develop, you might have to maybe costly and may not be allowed depending on where it is too, depending on wetlands and other resource areas. So some communities may have put a few more conditions or standards in their floodplain, right? So FEMA allows the storage of vehicles as long as they're highway ready with certain conditions. Some communities might say absolutely no storage of vehicles in this overlay area. And so, I think those are the changes FEMA also requires that there be some type of permit or checklist for any development or project in the floodplain. And so, our bylaws proposing a checklist. Most of the work is probably gonna be covered by the conservation commission anyways. There may be some projects that really don't need permitting by the conservation commission that may not require a building permit, but say there, people are stockpiling material or moving things around, it may require some review by the town. And so, we're proposing a checklist. So that's something that the planning board could discuss. What is the best way to do that? Is there, we wanna issue a separate floodplain permit for every project or the state and FEMA aren't saying that. They're saying that as long as you have some permitting process in place to guide development, that's satisfactory. So we're relying on our conservation commission, the building inspectors and building commissioner also have to follow FEMA standards when issuing a building permit knowing a structure is in the floodplain. So, there's probably areas where it could be modified, but Doug to your point, a lot of it is what they provided for us. Right, and then by adding this chapter 16, if that's the approach we end up with, is there a current process that needs, that the regulations for the current process needs to be removed from the zoning code? Or is this a brand new thing in the zoning code? So this would be, this becomes visible. This would become a brand new section. So nothing needs to be removed. This is an entirely new process. And there's no old regulations to remove. So, within the bylaw, there's, in various sections in section two, there's a few sections in three, where we have the floodplain conservancy district, where we talk about certain things like land disturbance in a watercourse area or certain things. And so in those sections, we may need to cross-reference and just say, see article 16, what we've done here, what we're proposing, I scroll down here to the regulations, we're just saying that this section should apply, regardless. So basically, right here, the floodplain management regulations here shall take precedence over any less restrictive or conflicting parts of the bylaw. And so, we're hoping that language allows us not to go in and tweak some sections. So for instance, in our FPC district, which is a base district, we have standards and conditions in the FPC floodplain conservancy zoning district. We're not proposing to change any of those right now, because we think that this language right here, allows that to remain unchanged. And so, we could tweak that language a bit, but we're not really trying to go in and change what we say in the FPC or in other parts of the zoning right now. Okay. Andrew, I saw your hand for a while. Do you wanna make, have a question or a comment? Yeah, I guess so. Thanks, Doug. It's not process related, just on the outcomes. When the floodplains were redrawn using the new technology or the new methodology, I should say, what was the change to the old one as it didn't get bigger, smaller, more structures impacted, less structures impacted? Yeah, I think in the end, I think a few hundred structures were taken out of the flood area. So I think it was almost 300. But in some areas it was expanded and in some areas it was reduced. And so we had a map online that showed what was removed and what was added. And so it varies, but... That's good enough. I can look online. I wasn't sure if you know, tap your head, but thanks. Chris. I just wanted to reiterate what Nate said before about that we're not touching the flood prone conservancy zone. That is a base zoning district. And if we were to touch that, we would have to decide what goes in its place. And so we may in the future want to look at the flood prone conservancy district, both the zoning aspect of it and also the mapping aspect. But right now that is overly complicating this project. And so we're not going to do that at this time. I think people get a little confused about the two. So we're going to have these two things existing at the same time, but we're not touching FPC. Thank you. All right, Tom. Thanks, Doug. And thanks for the presentation, Nate. I guess my question is, you know, as I was reading to this, I'm just curious, what do you need us to do, want us to? What are we doing at this time? And I'm looking at your timeline and trying to like fit planning board into there. What are the things we want to be discussing? Can they be highlighted? The things that are flexible that we need to be concerned with? Like, what's helpful right now or in the next weeks? Sure, that's a really good question. You know, when this bylaw was, you know, when we first drafted it, staff first drafted it, you know, there's a few questions. So for instance, we have a section that defines the roles of the floodplain administrator. And, you know, we can add in and subtract some of those. I think, you know, it's also important to determine who is that position in town. I think right now we, you know, Chris and I said it could be the planning director or their designee or, you know, or in their absence, the senior planner. So, you know, I mean, minor things, but, you know, what happens there, you know, if you look at the map showing the overlay area in town, you know, would there be other conditions or regulations you'd want in there that aren't in the bylaw? So, you know, would you want to prohibit certain activities beyond what the bylaw would, you know, I think, you know, I think that's... So are there places in this that we, that can be highlighted, like with questions or prompts for us to like have discussions in the future, like where we can debate some of those? Because I feel like I read it and I kind of understood what it was doing, but I wasn't sure what our role, like where we can actually start to make evaluations. And I think if someone, maybe it was Doug, he said, is this really controversial? And it's, where would it be controversial and how can we address that now? Sure. Yeah. No, we can do that. I think some of it was just to make a plenty more to where that this is, you know, will be brought forward in the next month, just so, you know, it's not a complete surprise when you hear that, you know, there's a zoning amendment to add a floodplain. Well, but can I, you know, frequently we talk for months about proposed bylaws before they ever go to town council. And when they go to town council, it starts a timeline for a bunch of things to happen. Should we be starting that timeline now? And is this purely to make sure we hit the six months deadline? Chris? So what I would say is that this is the opening of a conversation about this project. And I think it makes sense for us to bring back refined drafts of the zoning bylaw. Nate had a number of questions that we need to answer internally and with our advisors from the state and from AECOM. And we didn't want to bring those questions to you because that would have complicated things. But certainly as we revise this, I think it makes sense to keep bringing it back and perhaps at some meeting to show you more about what the maps actually show with regard to North Amherst or particular areas that might be developed in the future so that you really get a feeling for it because it is a big project and it is complicated. I don't think it's that controversial although a question has come up recently about why the center of town is not on the map. And if you look at these maps online, you'll see that there's kind of a carve out in the center. And we've talked to AECOM about that and they've told us that that area doesn't rise to the level of needing to be mapped according to FEMA because it's, I think it's below, what is it, a half mile watershed? I think that's right, Nate may correct me, but in any event, that is something that people are gonna be asking about, especially people who live in that area. Those people are able to buy flood insurance now and they'll be able to buy flood insurance in the future whether or not their property is mapped but they're gonna have questions about that. So we wanna be able to answer people's questions. So I think it makes sense to not just put this on a shelf until it's referred to you for a public hearing, but to continue to talk about it and continue to answer your questions. And perhaps there will be questions from the public as well. Okay, thanks Chris, Janet. I have a couple of questions and I think I need sort of like to step back and to understand the flood prone conservancy district and where it is in Amherst, the relationship between that, the FEMA flood overlay zone. And then when I saw that map from Janet Keller and it's on the Mitchell farm, it said floodplains. And I don't see Mitchell Farm as a flood play, flood conservancy district on this big map that I have of the town. And so I'm just kind of lost a little bit like how do all these things relate to each other? Like if Mitchell Farm is a floodplain but it's not in floodplain conservancy and doesn't show up on the FEMA map, I just don't understand that. But I'd love to know a little bit more about the flood conservancy district and how they all relate. Then when we get to the bylaw, I would love to see how Article 16 interacts with our current bylaw where there's overlapping points or maybe points of how that works. So that's kind of my first thing. Like why are these things different or how are they different? And why is Mitchell Farm listed as a floodplain and doesn't seem to show up anywhere else? I also know that map, I think, I don't know if that came out of the conservation commission or it came out of the developers or I don't know. So that's my first question or comment. I was going to share a screen. So if this is visible, so what's shown in blue here is the areas that are mapped as the new flood hazard area. And that's, so there's say, there's 25 miles of stream and air immersed. 10 of those were detailed study in the 80s and there are detailed study again, which means there are field surveys to verify structures, road crossings, elevations. 10 miles were re-delineated using the new regression equation and automation and computer modeling. So they weren't field surveys and then five miles were, they never were detailed studied and they weren't now and they were just redrawn again using accurate topography. So interestingly, the FPC was adopted in the early 70s and it was based on a number of things. It was also somewhat based on flooding, but it has other purposes. So in some areas, the FPC is broader and bigger in geographic extent than the flood hazard area in some areas it's smaller. Sometimes they say it's just 75 feet from the bank. And at the time, I don't think Amherst hadn't, it predates the firm, it predates the flood maps. And so really the FPC was Amherst being progressive at trying to say, okay, we have a natural resource area, let's protect it. But some of the boundaries look like where they were drawn, they were political, right? Or maybe a property owner didn't wanna be in it. In some areas it goes uphill and clearly flooding doesn't reach there. So I think it was done using the best data that was available in the early 70s. And this is more accurate. Staff did look at it and the difficulty is as a base zone, if we were to, there's overlapping here, but there's so many areas, so many small areas where the FPC and this don't align, it'd be very difficult to change the FPC without changing all the adjacent zoning districts, right? So to make this an overlay works, but we can generate a map, but I think it's gonna be, the real reason is the FPC is a base zone that to change that is really complicated because it touches so much else. So is it right to say that you're, for right now, you wanna just get this in place so that we have met the state and federal requirements and that paragraph that you put in said, this thing supersedes any other conflicts. Right. So that you just get this done now and then whether it's in a year or five years you come back and fix the FPC? We could, right. I mean, what if you just threw it out? So right, so if that's a possibility, so I'm just gonna zoom in quickly here to North Amur. So in this area right here, right? So the FPC might, it comes a little bit over here, right? In this U shape, this area is FPC. Well, this side of the road is one zoning district, over here it's another zoning district. So if we were to move FPC and there's this little gap here, what does this become? What zoning district, you know, there's two different zoning districts that are encompassed by the FPC right here. And so does one half of the road side become commercial and the other half become residential? I mean, there is probably hundreds or thousands of that where this new boundary and FPC don't align very well. So I think it becomes a much bigger project to say, well, let's get rid of the FPC. The FPC also has some conditions and regulations in it that might be more strict than what FEMA does or doesn't allow. So then we'd have to consider would we wanna take some of those conditions and put them in, you know, this FEMA overlay? Also, may I say something? Oh, sure. So I wanna look at this map and go up north a bit. And I'd like to say that I did not, how can I say, curate what Janet Keller sent to you. I just sent it to you. So there may be some misunderstandings on her part about what is and what isn't shown on maps. This map clearly shows that parts of the Mitchell Farm are in the floodplain. So the floodplain pretty much goes all the way from, you know, very close to Coles Road, very much, you know, near Coles Road. And it goes all the way up to the Sunderland line. So, and Mitchell Farm is somewhere in there. Mitchell Farm is actually just east of Sunderland Road. You can see Sunderland Road going up north and then intersecting with Route 116. And if Nate would move his little hand or whoever's got this little hand. Yeah, that's the intersection of 116. So Mitchell Farm is to the east of that. And you can see that this whole area is blue. So it's clear that Mitchell Farm is included in this floodplain. So I'm not sure what point Janet Keller was trying to get across. I felt obligated to send you the information that she had sent me. But as I said, I hadn't curated it or looked at it or figured out what she was actually trying to say. So I would encourage planning board members who are really interested in this and wanna get into the nitty gritty details to make an appointment to come in and meet with me and Nate. And we would be happy to meet with you individually or we could probably meet with two of you at a time. And we would be happy to scroll through the maps and go through the process that we went through to get here. It's really important to get this set of maps approved by the end of the six month period. If we don't, the town will be out of the flood insurance program. So we've been working on this since, as I said, for 10 years, we think we've got a pretty good set of maps here. And if people are really interested in getting into the details, we're happy to meet with you and talk to you about the details. We can also, we will be calling in our AECOM technical expert or consultant to attend the meeting with the town council. And then again, to attend the CRC public hearing and the planning board public hearing. So she'll be able to answer questions. As I said, we're not trying to change anything about the FPC. We understand that the FPC is a near and dear to many people's hearts. And so we felt that it was not appropriate to try to change that at this time. We're just adopting these FEMA maps to replace the FEMA maps that we've had since 1983. So I don't want anybody to be fearful that we're somehow trying to change something in the FPC zone because that is not true at this time. And again, I encourage you to call us and come in and meet with us and we'll show you the maps and go through the process and try to make things as clear as possible. Thanks. I think just quickly to Andrew's point of seeing what's changed, we had an interactive online map that show what's being added and what's being removed compared to the old maps. And when we've gone a few years of getting updated preliminary maps and so IT hasn't done that. I guess it's a fair amount of work. And so there's been discussions about getting that back online again just so anyone could go there and it could be part of a presentation too to see, okay, these areas in red are being removed, here's in green are being added and then here's what stays the same. And so we had kind of three categories and it was a really great visual to see the changes around town. And it was an online map. And so that's something that we can talk about trying to get going. So I think it would really help the presentation to see that. Well, even if you just had a map that had the two boundaries, one in blue and one in yellow, then people could interpret what's removed and added themselves. And your IT people would just drop in the two layers. So Janet. So I would appreciate sort of piggybacking on what Tom said to know, what are the key issues for us to discuss? And I'd also like to have, I don't know, a chart or something about how article 16 would interact with the flood current regulations. And I read it that we could have regulations that are more stringent, but if they're less stringent then the federal rules reply. And so it's not like it supersedes it. It's just sort of like, it's making sure you're not going below that threshold. So I would love to see some way to understand how they interact with having to like hunt and pack. And then getting back to the draft because I've never seen this before. I remember going to something about these flood maps like two and a half years ago that were super detailed with the consultant. But this draft is like based on the model the state is giving out and other towns have adapted it and uses as sort of a template. Is that where it comes from? Yeah, the state office provides it. So this is actually their newest template. And I said the draft that was in the packet has a little bit more detail, section on local permitting has a little bit more. So this really is, has everything that they've asked for and a little bit more. So I don't, in terms of communities adding more detail and maybe that they wanted to put a lot more in there but this really, this is everything that the state's provided in terms of a template. And then another question. So if I was, if I had a house in the flood plain or near and I wanted to put a garage on or something like that I would have to go through the article 16 process and an FPC process or a doing both at the same time. Do you know, is there, am I getting one kind of permit and then also getting a special permit or a site? You know what I mean? Like what's- So the flood maps are, you know, it's in zoning in part because that's what, I think the, you know, it's, there's some land use there associated with it and the overlay is a geographic overlay but the flood mapping themselves, there's, you know we have our permitting in place. So whether it's through the conservation commissioner FPC that would guide what happens with say that garage. And so we're not trying to add another permit step we just have to have some documentation that any project that happens in the flood plain follows permitting. Okay. And then, you know, what it would mean though is as a homeowner or property owner do you need flood insurance on that structure? So, you know, then that becomes a discussion with, you know, if you're taking out a mortgage with the bank or the lender, you know, are you required to get flood insurance? And so, you know, right now and maybe that the maps are so old if your property is somewhat close, you know, if there's the flood boundary somewhat close to a structure or they could say you're required to have it and now you might be able to go to the bank and say, look, these are, you know, updated using, you know this newest technology is going to be out of the flood plain and you could kind of make the case that you don't need to have, you're not required to purchase flood insurance and you still could do it optionally and it would be much cheaper because you're not required to. So. Okay. Thanks, Nate. So I guess you don't really need any action from us tonight. So we could just say, thank you for giving us a preview of what will be coming back to us with a request for a public hearing at some point in the not too distant future, right? Yes, and I think that the town council is going to give us, you know a long time before we have to schedule a public hearing. I don't think they're going to ask you to schedule a public hearing very soon. They're probably going to give you the full 90 days that they often do give, but I think it would be worthwhile for us as we work through this and talk to our state rep that we bring it back, you know, when we make changes and it's worthwhile to talk about how this relates to the FPC, but again, we're not changing the FPC. One of the things that is going to be different about this is that the FPC doesn't allow you to build a house in the 100-deer floodplain. FEMA would allow you to build a house in the 100-deer floodplain. You just have to put it up on stilts. So, you know, the differences are pretty noticeable and we can talk about that if you want to talk about it, but the FPC is pretty strict in some ways. And, you know, it's probably stricter than the FEMA model bylaw or the state model bylaw. And, you know, and that's part of the, what should I say, difficulty of trying to do both at the same time. We don't want to do both at the same time that would really stall us in our tracks, but we're happy to talk about what the differences are. Okay, thank you. And thanks, Nate, for the presentation. I guess we're finished with that item. So the time now is 8.58, and we'll go on to item five in our agenda. Can I make a suggestion? Sure, Chris. I have Gabrielle Gould on her laptop and she's willing to talk to you about rapid recovery plan, which she helped to develop. And I think she probably doesn't want to stay through hearing about fees for public hearing legal ads. So I wondered if we could have Gabrielle come on and I'll send her a text and say that you're ready for her. How about that? Okay, we can jump to item six, rapid recovery plan. Okay, so the last time you saw the rapid recovery plan was two weeks ago, I think. Yeah. Isn't that right? And you saw, or do you have part of it? We saw the executive summary, I think. That's right, yeah. And then you asked for the does and flinker portion of it to come back. And let me see if Gabrielle is coming into the, nope, she's not, in any event. Well, you had sent the entire document to us back in late February, I think it was the 24th. So we've all had it for a while and you brought the executive summary to us last meeting. And then I had found the Dodson and Flinker comments to be interesting just as, you know, another person who's reading the bylaw. And so I thought it was worth discussing here. And I wondered whether Chris and you and your staff had discussed it just because there were some sort of opinions about the legibility of some of it and the complexity. And, you know, Tom, there was some discussion about how the DRB requirements are kind of vague. So, you know, would we want to suggest that they be tightened up? And are any of these observations something we would want to act on? It's really all I'm kind of wondering. So you probably know that some of these things have been acted on already, right? I mean, you could probably glean that from reading the Dodson Flinker section. Well, they certainly did allude to some of the things that were in process when they were doing their work. Gabrielle is logging on now. She didn't want to attend the whole meeting because she had to deal with things having to do with her family. And I totally understand that. So do you want to bring up the Dodson Flinker section on the screen and start talking about it one by one? Or how do you want to manage this? Sure. I mean, there's probably five pages of it. You know, I mean, we could scroll through it and just see if there's things that people want to talk about. Has the board looked at it sufficiently to have things that you found interesting and wanted to talk about or not, right? So I guess I do want to make sure I'm not the only one that thought this was interesting because if I am, we can just keep going. Andrew. I also thought it was interesting and I was generally encouraged from it, right? Like I was expecting something that would maybe have been a little bit more critical, but it seemed like, you know, the general tone was, you know, it's pretty well organized. We seem to be pretty systematic, but there are some areas which could use some clarity. You know, I think that's not surprising. Okay. Excuse me. I noticed that Gabrielle is in the attendees and I wondered if Pam could bring her over. Excuse me. I can, but not at the same time I share my screen. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Okay. Do you want me to do it? Yep, that would be great. Promote to panelists? Correct. All right. Gabrielle, we think we've made you a panelist. Good evening, everybody. How are you? Well, thank you. Thanks for joining us. Yeah. So maybe Gabrielle could give us a few words about how this came to be, how this report came to be and what the bid intends to do with it. And then, you know, you could ask her questions and we could talk about what these zoning changes, you know, how we can manage these zoning changes for what we've already done and what we still need to do. Absolutely. So the bid applied for this grant through the state and was awarded the grant opportunity to work with Civic Moxie who put this lovely package together for us. We worked with them for several months. They came to Amherst several times. As you can see, if you go through, they worked with Town Manager Paul Bosselman, some of our major stakeholders, some of our major cultural and art directors and community members to bring us a pretty comprehensive and remarkable package here. They were really a joy to work with. So much of this, especially when you're looking at the Dodson and Slinker notice in front of you has already been addressed and we are accomplishing and the town has accomplished and your group has accomplished. Our hope is to continue working with this plan and to continue growing with this plan. Again, to second what one of you said earlier, there was a lot of positive, an incredible amount of positive and then some really great constructive criticism. Where we intend to go with this is looking at all the project recommendations and seeing where we've come, what we have left to do and how do we undertake these and try and make good on all 10 projects, which would be fantastic. There's going to be funding out there that we think that we and alongside the town can go with. We've already been awarded a grant and from the redo grant, the town of Amherst and the bid co-sponsored that grant. We were the only town to be awarded exactly what we asked for because it was so comprehensive and strong and followed these recommendations. So we're looking forward to seeing how we can keep going forward with this. Okay, thank you, Gabrielle. And I hope you'll stay with us while we talk about the Dodgson and Flinker. Absolutely. Okay, all right. So Pam, do you think you could scroll down just a little bit to the bullet points? Yeah, that, whoops, whoops, whoops. At the bottom of the first page there. Just, there you go. All right, so, all right. So mixed use buildings, challenges of obtaining a special permit, music and entertainment in particular, lack of specificity of some of our requirements, parking garage, apartment units, CAPS and the BL district. Chris, some of those things we've worked on, the mixed use building that, and we did the overlay for the parking garage. We've talked about apartment buildings, we've talked about the BL. Do you think any of those things are likely to be coming back to us this year or they're not really on your priority list? I don't know, but if I had to guess, I would think that the apartment building might come back. We don't yet know what the CRC and town councils priorities are. It wasn't on our list, but it might be on their list. We've done, we've taken a step towards eliminating a barrier for the parking garage. We are still asking for money from the capital fund to look at the Boltwood garage to see if it can accommodate a second or third floor. But no one has stepped forward to say that they would like to pay for that. So that may be a concern there. The design review handbook, we know that that needs to be redone. In fact, Nate worked on redoing it, I think back in 2009, I believe. So it's about time to redo it. And some of the challenges with regard to special permits have been dealt with in the short run, the article 14. There is a proposal to make some of those changes permanent so that some of the things that have required special permits in the past would no longer require special permits, but that's something that Rob Mora is working on with Maureen Pollock and will be bringing to the CRC at some point, but they haven't really drafted anything yet. So, and then in terms of the first bullet here with regard to ground floor commercial requirements for mixed use buildings, I think when that was initially proposed a number of years ago, we had a percentage of 60% of commercial space in mixed use buildings that was proposed. That amendment wasn't adopted, but more recently we have adopted a proposed zoning amendment that required 30% of the ground floor to be a non-residential use. So I think we've taken care of that at least in the short run. So that would be it for the first page. We're not really looking at BL right now unless the CRC or town council asks us to. Okay, Maria, something you wanted to do. Yeah, first, so we're very funding or ongoing form-based zoning study for downtown that was happening and I wonder if some of this could bolt into that. Was that something I imagined? No, we do have $100,000 to work on either form-based zoning or design standards, which is what we're calling it now. And we're pretty well along with writing an RFP for the design standards and we will be bringing it to the planning board for review once we feel comfortable with it. I think Nate and I have met with the town manager and the assistant town manager about it, but we want to make some tweaks before we bring it to the planning board. But that will certainly influence what would be allowed, what can be done in the downtown, but I think it's going to make it a more cohesive place once we have those standards in place. It'll be easier for people to figure out what it is the town wants before it gets into a permitting process. Right, I think at $10.1 and maybe $3 and possibly the last one, those might be part of that study, the sort of more specificity for the design review board because they only covered the downtown, right? And then the BLBG might be in there and as well as the ground floor commercial. So maybe some of this can be covered by that sort of study. Yep. All right, thanks, Marianne, Janet. So I have a question for Chris and one for Gabrielle. Chris, is the town moving ahead for an RFP on the North Prospect Street garage or is it going to wait to look at other sites or answer the questions about the bangs garage? That's question one. I would say at this time the town is not moving ahead with an RFP for the garage. That decision has not been made, but we are asking for funds to look at the Boltwood garage because I think people keep bringing that up. So we need to answer that question and either put it to bed or decide that Boltwood has some merit and we should look further. That's really more of a structural study rather than a feasibility study, but at least it'll answer the question does Ken Boltwood actually support another floor or two? So the answer to your first question are we moving ahead with an RFP is not at this time. Okay, and then my question for Gabrielle was about the challenges in obtaining a special permit, especially related to uses in live entertainment and music. So I'm always interested in what problems people are having and so I was interested in like, has that been a problem? Was it a problem like in the past? Cause I just don't know. Yeah, right. Oh, sorry. And Article 14 has definitely helped address a lot of the struggles that businesses have when they are coming into a space that needs to be rezoned or looked at differently. I think the biggest issue with going from a quote unquote normal restaurant to more of a music venue or a nightclub venue was that it is considered a zoning change. So it had to go through all of the steps. When really, when you think about it, it's adding two hours to an existing liquor license or business and basically if it's in a non-residential area like the lit space or what is going to be the Drake soon, it becomes cumbersome to do all of that extra paperwork and all of that extra. It can take three months and for a small business owner or someone trying to start something from nothing with their savings account and their dreams, that can be the end of any small business. So again, Article 14 is addressing so much of that and if the town council continues to go forward with Article 14 and some of the things that have been put forward during the pandemic, it'll be a really great step into sort of recouping the reputation that Amherst is the hardest place to do business or to open a business. All right, Jack. Yeah, since we have Gabriel here, I just wanted to like give her so much credit and kudos for everything she's done for Amherst, downtown area, her vision has been amazing and the proposal for the Drake and making that happen is just what Amherst needs. And I just wanted to thank Gabriel at this time, since I can. Thank you, Jack, really appreciate it. Okay, Jack. Chris. I just wanted to clarify something that these music venues don't really require a change to zoning, what they require is a special permit which allows them to do something that's not ordinarily or normally allowed in the district and that is by the zoning board of appeals takes a look at it and decides what kinds of conditions need to be placed on things but it's really not the same as a zoning, a change in zoning because that requires town council vote. And so I just wanted to clarify that. Thanks. Okay, thanks, Chris. All right, Pam, maybe scroll up to the scroll, scroll to the top of the second page. All right, anything in here anybody wants to talk about? I thought the zoning map PDF file observation that it was difficult to interpret. It might be something that planning staff might wanna think about. So may I say something about that? Sure. Yeah, so we rarely use that PDF map and I'm thinking maybe we shouldn't even have it. It is very hard to read and very confusing. What we rely on is the GIS web map which is referred to in the second sentence of that paragraph and that map is actually pretty easy to read and pretty user friendly. So we might wanna just ditch the PDF. The reason we have it is so that if somebody wants a map to go along with their zoning bylaw, they can carry it away with them in their briefcase but it really isn't that helpful in determining exactly what your zoning situation is particularly with regard to downtown. So that's something maybe Nate and I can talk about that offline with the building commissioner about whether we wanna keep that PDF map. All right. Well, I think that was the map that Janet sort of picked up and flashed earlier in the meeting. And I know I have a copy and I do look at it every now and then. So I think there is some value to being able to print out a complete picture of the town and its zoning districts. Andrew. Yeah, I was trying to remember that PDF. Is it? I wasn't sure if the, I guess one is it black and white, right? No, that's okay. And then I just wasn't sure if that cartography was like ADA compliance or something like that, right? I guess not that it's necessarily ADA but if it's designed in a manner for site impaired but if not then yeah, I agree it's pretty early. Okay. Why don't you scroll down to the lower half of page two? That's good. I thought the comment about the 55 foot building height and the five stories. You know, I think most of the recent tall buildings that are on the North end of town, we have given them zoning variances for a couple of extra feet. And so, you know, it might be worth adjusting that 55 to 58 or 60 or something just to reduce the number of special permits that we have to do that we think we wanna do. And Nate. Sure. Thanks Doug. You know, previously with the bullets, you know, as Chris mentioned the RFP, we're hoping to have, you know, a team look at, you know, the downtown and come up with the design standards. And so, you know, as part of that, you know, I'm hopeful that they would come up with what are the right heights? You know, what are the right setbacks? And you know, even for instance, we don't define mechanical equipment and other things on a rooftop as being part of the height of the building but then people put screening on so the effective height is taller. So, you know, I'd like to think that during this downtown design standard process, you know, all those things are discussed. You know, do we redefine the height of a building to include those or not? Or if so, are they stepped back from view and what is the right height for a five-story building? What is the right setback on a sidewalk? You know, I'm hoping then it addresses density maybe on a per acre or per square foot basis. And then they say, here's what you'd want in the BL areas and maybe it's no longer BL but it's something else but it really does get into all of that. What does it look like? What is the density? What, and then, you know, then it's really the town's response is how do we adopt it as zoning and do we then change, you know, the permitting path if it complies with these standards? So, and then one other thing is the zoning map, you know, a number of years ago, the town meeting officially adopted the online JAS as our official zoning map. So the paper copies are, you know, for reference and for people who may want them there, they should be printed on 24 by 36 sheets to be even somewhat legible. And then, but really the online JAS is our official zoning map. So if people do call the second floor and ask, we direct them to the web JAS just so they can zoom in more and get a better picture of a property. That's it. Great, great, thanks. All right, maybe Janet. So I don't know how this fits in, but I think that I'm not sure that we'll be able to address it through a design or a form-based zoning process, but we're a college town and, you know, downtown we have some, you know, subsidized housing and, you know, we have low income people, we have elders and then most of the people living downtown are students. And I just, you know, I kind of felt this way with the rapid recovery report is, you know, that the impact of students positive and negative and, you know, where should students go? Do we want the downtown to be primarily for student housing? What impact that has on businesses? Do we want to encourage more year-round residents and maybe people with a little more cash in their pocket? You know, so, you know, a year-round resident who, you know, will spend, you know, 12 months of the year, not seven. And so I don't know, I keep on wondering, like, you know, we have people, you know, students come in and party every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, you know, and when we're talking about that really lovely housing development that Barry Roberts is doing, people are drunken students, hundreds are walking down Fearing Street at night and is that going to be a family project? You know, like this issue, good, bad, you know, I wonder how we can address this issue in our zoning code. And so to me, a lot of the downtown issues are, we want the downtown for everybody. We want to broaden the retail base, what people are, you know, bringing tourists in and not just, you know, students living downtown. I was at a meeting with a bunch of people who all lived in homes and, you know, older women and they all wanted, would love to live downtown and get rid of their big houses, freeing them up for others. But there aren't places to buy downtown or places to rent downtown and, you know, the large buildings that have come in have primarily student housing. And so do we want to continue on that path or do we want a different mix? You know, as the master plan calls, all the neighborhood should be mixed. And so that issue is in here, but I feel like it's sort of like the elephant in the room. And I wonder how we can address it, maybe not through this process, but we need to address it, I think, in a planning process. Okay, Janet. Community consensus process. Yeah. I guess I will comment that it's not clear to me what the mix of students versus 12 month people is in the large buildings that we have, that have been erected in the last few years. And I suspect it varies from year to year. And I think it's primarily students. Well, I know, I hear you. I just don't know that I know where you get that information. And certainly when we've asked the developer, he was like, this is available to anybody that wants to come in. He also said it was students. In one. I don't remember it that way. But anyway, Gabrielle. Yeah, thank you. I just, I wanted to address a couple of things, Janet, that you said. I understand that you think it's primarily students. I don't know many people in this area because we moved here and it went into a lockdown. But I do know three young families with children who are living in that building. And I figure if I know that many of them there have to be a lot more. Right now part of our mission is to build downtown as a destination, a driver with arts and culture that bring people to this area as tourists, as people who spend money. But I'd also like to refute the idea that bringing people downtown who are year round residents and who have quote unquote money in their pocket. I can tell you right now, Hanyan Bakery and Paul Shoe Repair would not be there if it weren't for those two buildings down at the North End. I think it's North. They, a lot of these students and especially the students and graduate students that I know that are living in some of the departments, plus the families, plus some of the professors, faculty and community members, they have plenty of money in their pocket and they are downtown and they are spending money. And one of the only silver linings that I can really point to of COVID is that it showed us what our downtown looks like without our student population, without our faculty and without our college administration and university administration. And it's an 80% loss. I kept shopping, I kept eating out, I live here year round, I have money in my pocket and it still does not equate to a thriving, vibrant and vital downtown. We are a college town and if we have apartments that students want to live in and are part of our down community, I see them as part of our community. I see them every day on downtown. I see them eating, I see them getting coffee, I see them going out for dinner. And yes, we do have the students who come in to go to the bars at night. Nobody else is downtown from 8.30 to about 10.30 on. So that's probably the only livelihood that's coming into the town. And I also wanna put a shout out to UMass for their Walk This Way program and all the programming that they're doing to sort of help staunch that late night loud, rowdy, you know, flow that you were talking about. Thank you. All right, thanks, Gabrielle. Jack. Hey, I don't know, I feel like we need to elevate the status of the students again in what they do for our town. And again, my daughter, you know, goes to UNH and Durham, New Hampshire and the way Durham integrates with UNH, you know, in that locality. They welcome students and, you know, characterization of the drunken students really irritates me. I think we need to welcome, you know, our colleges and, you know, ask them to do, you know, more Amherst College, you know, UMass and bring them closer to downtown and make it more accessible. I mean, it's just common sense. And I'm done with, you know, like, you know, making students a lower class as, you know, it's been depicted by some, some of the people on the board. So I think we can do better, you know, and I think we need to welcome, you know, what we have and integrate what Amherst has. It's amazing. We've all, we have all these colleges and it seems like we're, you know, putting our hands up blocking and saying, no, no, no. And, you know, the fact is we need to integrate that culture, you know, into our downtown better. And again, I have to, you know, commend Gabrielle with all her efforts in the bed and making, you know, progress in that area. So thank you. Okay, thanks, Jack. Janet, one more comment about page two and then maybe we'll move on to page three. So the elephant in the room is controversial and it's the majority of our residents in town. And not only do I like college students, I had to. I had an Amherst College student staying with me for four years over holidays. But I think that it's obvious that, you know, they need to be in the conversation too. And so I don't know, you know, like, you know, what do they want? What do they want to see? Obviously there's issues of student behavior. I actually have talked to somebody who lives at One East Pleasant Street who was a graduate student who said it's mostly undergraduates. I would never have lived here if I had known that. I'm just staying on because my thing is over a year. So I think that our downtown planning process or a consensus process has to include students and it has to include residents and the people who, you know, there are people who live downtown and next to it. And let's like come to some agreement about what we want the downtown to be. And this is what I think Flinker is saying that I found so encouraging. And I just felt like the voices students was missing as well as, you know, the people who live with students and work with students. And then definitely we need a year round economy downtown. I mean, if it's empty when everybody leaves, if we had more people living downtown or residents, then we'd have more, you know, vitality for the missing months. So I do think we have to talk about this issue and with the people who are directly involved, you know, including the students themselves. All right, thanks Janet. Pam, why don't we go on to page three? I saw the one in the third paragraph at the end, the suggestion that maybe townhouses and apartments might be encouraged in the BL area. So that seemed something for conversation. And then there was the conversation in the next paragraph about the apartments and the cap on those. And that's certainly been in conversation already. Why don't you go on down, Pam? This next one is mixed use and we've talked and acted on mixed use. This was a point of lack of clarity. Chris, do you think we've, is this any clearer than it was when they did their review? Yes, we've totally redone the mixed use building bylaw. And so the difference between the way it is in the comm district and other districts is no longer there. Okay, all right, great. So Pam, go on, go on down. Site plan review. And then we've talked some about live entertainment already and how that has evolved special permits. Don't seem onerous design review. Tom, have you found the design review handbook to be lacking or in need of more definition or do you think it would be helpful? I do, I think the form-based design process that we're going through is gonna be really helpful. I mean, I think the issue we're running into is that what we're being asked to look at are sort of hyper specific, this little sign and that little sign and everyone has a little opinion about this little sign and that creates a kind of bottleneck. It's not so much that there's no rules for what would be approved or not approved like the way the zoning specifies a sign size. You can have a maximum of this and so on. There's nothing in the guidelines that says a sign has to be this or say this or look like that. So I think what they're getting at is that you're just getting launched opinions and therefore there's revisions from those opinions but there's not clarity about what the objectives are for that. So I think some set of standards about what we want to see downtown and again, it's gonna be aesthetic. It's gonna be something that might be controversial but I do think we need to find a way to make it easier for some of these projects to kind of breeze through as long as they check certain boxes as opposed to people commenting on type styles. And I love to comment on type, that's what I do but I also can see how it just holds up the process. So anyway, I see both sides of it. I mean, where we are now, that's the standard. That's the process but I would like to see something a bit more structured in those design guidelines. Okay. All right, Pam, why don't you scroll on down to six. We'll try to get this done. Go to the conclusion there. All right, it seems like we've talked about most of these things. All right, anything else people wanna highlight about these? Gabrielle. We wanted to follow up with Pam on the BRB. When it's a great, when it's a strong group and it is opinions and that can work and it's almost like an hour of free small business advice for the small businesses. But when it becomes an opinion on set design or font or word mark versus this, opinions of one or two individuals shouldn't dictate someone's ability to do business or have a sign or create something with their ideas in mind. So I think the design review board, if they had, I don't wanna say more stringent but more, okay, I don't particularly like that color but it's within our color wheelhouse. Oh, I like serif fonts but you're doing a sound serif and that type of thing would be really helpful for small businesses because you can picture that if you have three people who just don't like something they can vote something down and it really isn't supposed to be just a certain person's opinion. It should be something that is tangible and something that you can check the book and say my signage or my this meets all of these standards. I know what I'm going in for and yes, I can hear opinions and it's great to hear people say I don't think that can be read from here and that's an important thing for small businesses to know but when it's just opinion based that can get really cumbersome and especially when you're a small business and you're trying to build something and you're sitting there listening to like an hour and a half of like commentary of opinions. So I really actually appreciate what the design review board is doing for small businesses. I think it's a really great service in a lot of ways but I think there can be tightening of it so that there is that checklist that says this is where we are. Okay, thanks, Gabrielle. Nate. Thanks, I think I was gonna say a few things. In the memo that you mentioned parking and we have the municipal parking district and I think at some point that staff has said do we need to re-examine that in terms of what's necessary for resident parking or visitor parking, what are the standards for parking? We have changed the bylaw a little bit but I think there's still the municipal parking district. Number four that's visible on the screen, staff looked at article 14 and then there's been some discussion about trying to make some of those things permanent. When I see number four here, what we don't have is definitions for certain types of uses. So right now if you wanna be a nightclub or something maybe you're a class two restaurant but what the building commissioner and staff have said is maybe we need another use category or two for certain things, even what they're showing here indoor commercial amusement or theater. So right now, building commissioner has to find what's the most reasonable place for something like that to be located in the bylaw. And so if we're thinking, okay, we need certain experiential uses downtown or we want certain things it may be that the board and staff could look at, well, what categories do we have now in the zoning and in the use chart and do we need to add that sum or change them to allow these? And along those lines, what staff has found with article 14 is that there haven't been a lot of complaints. And so when a restaurant comes into town the zoning board might have now kind of their standard 50 conditions. And so if an applicant follows those then it's approved but it still can be kind of a complex and expensive process for an applicant. And so there's been some discussion about whether or not those conditions could just become part of the use table or part of zoning so that maybe instead of being a special permit it can be a site plan or view but we have these conditions that are has to be met, right, or referenced. And so those are things that staff has discussed a little bit and it could address some of these comments here. And it would just take a little bit more research and some exploration of, okay, what exactly do they mean by it's kind of confusing or complex? And is it that if we have a standard set of conditions that are always issued is it just easier if that's somehow part of an application process so people can see it and they understand it? Okay. Thanks, Nate. Janet. When we're done, I wanted to talk maybe to Gabrielle or just about her idea for like an economic development person, is this the time for that or can I? That's not really a zoning conversation. Okay. I think maybe you contact her directly. Maria. Thanks, Doug. These are all really great little notes about like small shifts of how we can help the economic recovery and development in our town. Like the thing about whether we make the DRB make it upfront to the people, the applicants saying these are just recommendations. You are not required to do these or getting a new category for entertainment years or like what Nate was just talking about application process and how to make it clearer to applicants. All these little shifts, these are gonna need to be zoning changes, right? I mean, I'm wondering how do we get all of these great ideas we are talking about into reality so that more people can do things in Amherst and be applicants and not be afraid of the process in Amherst because I don't want it just to be a discussion and then like, oh, those are great ideas. I mean, how do we implement it? Like Chris, do you know like, is the next step that the staff does more research and brings it up at a next town council meeting or like how do we get these things we're talking about into reality and try to implement them? Because I think these are great points. And I think these would be, they seem like small fixes, but they're probably not. They're probably like a whole long process to get these, you know, implemented. But I'm just wondering, yeah, Chris, do you know what could be real next steps for us? You want me to answer? Sure, Chris. So the planning department has sort of stated a list of zoning priorities that it thinks it wants to work on. We have some zoning priorities that we absolutely have to get done sooner rather than later, but other things that are kind of in our phase two. And then we know that the CRC and the town council are going to be coming forward with their zoning priorities. But if the members of the planning board want to send us what they think would be their zoning priorities, I think we could, you know, benefit from that because, you know, if Maria had, you know, three or five things that she picked out of this list that she thought were really great ideas that we should carry forward, we'd like to know that. And other, you know, if other planning board members want to do the same, that would be helpful to us to get our, you know, to refine our list of what we're going to work on. We kind of have a work plan for, you know, sometime into mid-summer or maybe into late summer, but after that we're going to be, you know, open to working on things. So send your lists. All right. I guess the other thing we could talk about is whether the zoning subcommittee would want to reconvene and generate zoning, you know, proposals of its own. Janet? So I have a, when I, nothing excites me more than a checklist. And I've kind of wondered sometimes like when we have the permit application, it's very general and people fill it out with almost no useful information. And I wonder if those permit applications could be more specific and include a checklist. So it'd be permit application to open a restaurant. And, you know, if the ZBA is always looking at 50 things or putting 50 conditions, maybe the application itself could present questions or, you know, layout. Here's the information we're going to want to know. And even if the ZBA is no longer handling those applications and the building commissioner is, it still seems super useful to me that your permit application, if it's for, you know, a horse farm should look different maybe than a restaurant versus, you know, a professional building and a way of cluing people, you know, and tying that into sort of the different bylaw requirements or site plan review or special permit. So that your checklist is actually helping organize you. Because I feel like way back when I first got on the board, we had some applications where it seemed to me like the information being coming at us could have been better presented. And every meeting was kind of like, oh, you know, we didn't have the information we asked the last time or we were kept on asking for more stuff that maybe we knew we needed, but they didn't know. And those applicants also didn't have attorneys. So I wonder if the application process itself could help create some order and kind of give the applicants a heads up of what they need to provide us to move it all, you know, and get more organized on their side or more of a clue, a heads up at what we're going to be interested in. Okay. So more tailored applications for specific use types. All right. Pam, I think you can take this off the screen. I think we're done with that. And unless anybody else wants to say anything more, Gabrielle, thanks for joining us. And thanks for using some of your grant money to generate these comments. I think it was helpful. Well, thank you. All right. So the time is 9.44. We're at three hours and 15 minutes roughly. Another short meeting so far. Chris, do we want to go ahead and talk about fees for public hearings? I think we can save that for a future meeting. Okay. So we'll postpone that. Yep. Old business, do we have any? No old business as far as I know. All right. How about new business and not anticipated? No new business. Form A, A and R, subdivision. None. None. ZBA applications other than the one we've already looked at? No, no additional. All right. Special permits, site plan reviews, subdivisions. We have some things in the wings. Oh yes, oh yes. We did receive an application, although it hasn't been reviewed and it hasn't been put into our system, but we did receive an application from Archipelago to build a new set of apartment style dormitories up in North Amherst on Olympia Drive. So we'll be bringing that to you at some point. But right now, as I said, I haven't even really scrutinized the application. Of course, if anybody's interested in looking at it, they're welcome to come into the office and look at it. All right. Well, we'll wait for you to bring it to the meeting. Planning board, committee and liaison reports. Jack, anything on PDPC? You are muted. Yeah, I mean, nothing significant. We did have a committee meeting, what on February 24th, but yeah, I don't think anything significant. Okay. Thanks, Andrew, CPAC. You know, we haven't met, but I will note that one of the proposals that came that was pulled off had to do with the track realignment at the high school. And I know that that went to the school committee last night. They had expressed support to do one of the options and one of the things that they had in that budget proposal was referencing CPAC funds. Our chair had invited the school to come back to the committee and represent. So maybe we'll hear back, I'm not sure yet, but that's the only update I have. Okay, thanks. Tom, DRB. Thanks. So we met, I guess it was earlier this week or last week, my God, what week is it? And we reviewed a few building projects or let's say exterior projects. One was for Jews, which will become the Amherst Oyster Bar which had some facade treatments in terms of color change and lighting structures both on the front and on the rear that were approved with some notations about preserving some historical architectural features in their current state. There's a quick review of a sign for Amethyst which is next to the lingerie shop which is next to Bueno and so on in the corner right downtown. I think that's 40 Main Street or something like that. And then there's a new cafe that is going to be opening where Bart's ice cream was. And so we'll read some of the signage and storefront signage for that. Minimal changes to the facade or anything but the, you know, just signage tweets. So that was approved as well. Okay, Chris, CRC. So the CRC is meeting tomorrow and one of the things they're gonna be talking about is the demolition delay or preservation of historically significant buildings. That one came to the planning board a couple of weeks ago and the planning board felt that it was ready to move forward. So it's actually moving forward rather quickly. The CRC is taking a look at it tomorrow afternoon and then it's going to be referred to town council for Monday, I think. So that's really quick, but they, you know, I think they just wanna get started on things, so yep. All right. Item 13, report of the chair. I don't have anything to report tonight. Chris, report of staff. I don't have anything to report at this time but I was serious about if anybody's interested in really diving deep into flood mapping, we're happy to spend time with them looking at the maps and, you know, talking about it, okay. That's clearly your number one priority for the next six months. So you'll drop everything else to make sure that happens. I will. Okay, all right. So anybody have any other things off the agenda they wanna talk about it here at 949? Okay, so thank you all for hanging in there. We don't seem to be able to have a really short meeting and see you in early April. This was a short meeting. This is like record time. Yeah, well, good. Let's beat our record next time. Time is 9.50 and we are finishing the meeting. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye. Goodnight. Goodnight.