 So I'm going to call to order the planning commission meeting for January 23rd. First week to approve the agenda so the planning commission is ready. I'll take a motion to approve the agenda. So moved. Okay, those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Aye. Okay, any post agenda approved. Comments from the chair. A couple of quick things. I wanted to remind everyone that we only have we only have four people don't have everyone here tonight but I want to remind everyone that in person meetings are available if you want to go to city hall and sit with Mike. And sometime in the near future we should probably talk about how everyone feels about that. But we'll wait for like the for the full group, or at least close to the full group before we have that discussion. But I do want did want to make everyone aware that there's at least the option there that anytime you want you do not have to do this by zoom. You can go in and join Mike and participate there. And maybe. One of us will do that in the near future. And also, it's kind of up in the air long term about whether the state is going to want or let us do this anyway. You know, this being using zoom for everything. Okay, that's one thing. The other thing is I also wanted to give everyone a heads up that as we start to work on this Congress for new urbanism report and we start to, and other things that come up for potential changes this into city council that I'm hoping to delegate to some of the work that's going to be involved with that. There's going to be outreach work there's probably going to be some other things like maybe a letter to the city council at some point explaining our points of views or the policy reasons for why we would like to do things. So as that happens, I'd like for us to spread out the work a little bit because there's going to be a lot of it if we want to do this well. So just a couple of things coming up for us to talk about further in the future. That's all I've got. Does anybody else have any updates of any kind or anything they want to throw out there. Okay. I see that Maria just joined so I will repeat the point that I made a second ago about, because since Maria just joined I want her to be aware of the fact that it is possible to go in the city hall and join Mike and go to in like if you if you prefer an in person format over zoom and that that we all have that option. So make sure everyone's aware of that. And then we'll probably talk about it in the near future whether like what the group would like to do as far as in person or or remote participation and meetings. It's it's available for people to do right now. And that's all I've got as far as comments. The next thing on the agenda unless anybody else has anything to share our comments is comments from the public. I'm not seeing any members of the public. The moment. So we're going to breeze through that. And get into the city plan web page. So this is just a check in to see where a couple of things are the landing site and the review or review of the energy page and where those things are. And I take it Julia, you are here to do that for us. So I will hand it off to you. Yes, thanks for having me. Aiden wishes she could be here but fortunately she has covered so it'll just be me this evening. And she did fill me in on the discussion from last time about the landing page and essentially today I'd like to review with you. A potential copy for the landing page, both the first page homepage that you might see logging on and also the about the plan page. Right now this isn't a word document form. This text looks good generally to you then we can look at adapting it to the website and I'm cleaning it up that way. But first I'll just share my screen and remind us all what the the hub site format looks like. If I can find it my. Oh, I see the zoom screen was just blocking it a little bit for me. Okay. I'll try that again. Great. Let me know if you can't see my screen, but this is just the hub site and how it appears when you first click on it. And right now this has not changed from our last meeting but this is a reminder where we are we have. Just some simple text about what this website is. And then scrolling down there are the icons for each of the chapters. And then right now the implementation information has a little home right here. So this is a just keep this in your mind of how it currently set up, and then we can compare that to the word document. And if there are no questions right now about the way this is formatted right now on the website I can start sharing the text draft text. And go for it. Great. Okay. So, essentially, I combined some materials that Kirby have prepared that I think you reviewed last time, and some materials that Mike have prepared and I think both of these sets of text were really useful and helpful. And they accomplished different things. Kirby's statement was more inspirational talking about the city's values. And Mike's statement was more practical and explain the format of the plan and would certainly be useful to somebody who's just looking to try to understand the contents of the plan and how it'll be used in the future. And then some additional notes about goals for this landing page. Definitely the about the plan page should explain why Montpelier chose to take this approach and have a digital city plan. A bit about the process and of course explaining the organization of the plan, particularly the implementation segments. So, what I've come up with is text for the landing page, which is here and then text for the plan description page about this plan tab, which is, you know, separate tab on the website. Just below it. So first we can go through the landing page. And I think Mike may have sent this over just a few minutes ago, but of course, that might not have been time to read this through fully. I won't read this through fully out loud right now, but I will just go through the headings and describe the purpose of this text. So the idea of the text of this, the draft text here is to have a first, you know, inspirational statement or just topic sentence, if you will, for each section. And that can be broken up with pictures or those icons and other media that we describe here to still make sure that this isn't just a block of text on on the landing page. There's a need to describe what's on the website and be thorough in that, but also make sure that we're not overwhelming visitors to the site with text and making sure that this is concise. So, hopefully that this, this draft text threads that needle, but let me know if, if, if there's room for improvement there. So, starting off at the top my failure has a bright future open to suggestions on that statement but I just wanted to start with something positive here that could is very easy for folks to understand. And sets the tone immediately as a positive, positive tone, and forward looking. And then this paragraph goes on to explain that the city plan is addressing multiple aspects of the city values strengths weaknesses and opportunities, and the most pressing issues facing the city the housing crisis climate change and social inequities. These are pretty broad terms but for an opening paragraph I think, you know, they, they're all encompassing. They also get at some of the specific topics that are going to be addressed in the, in the chapters. And then finally, the, the sentence describes that the plan is a roadmap. It sets a vision for a more equitable and sustainable Montpelier and provides a roadmap to achieve that vision. Let's just stop there. Any. Excuse me, any questions. Anybody have any questions. I do. Could we scroll back down to Kirby's language from last week. I felt like it was a lot more engaging. Like to pull someone in who just kind of, you know, just Google Montpelier city plan. So I kind of like the way that Kirby had written it. It seemed less formal. And just something that would engage your reader. And I think the information that you drafted after could come after, you know, get into like more specifics but I liked Kirby's language. Thanks for that feedback. And then going back up to what you just showed us. Yep, here. Yeah, so I feel like if we have something that, you know, like a short first paragraph that kind of just like lays it out there like Kirby did. And then kind of go into like the city plan addresses Montpelier's most pressing issues. And then, you know, I think you kind of added the crush when you read it out loud. You said like, the plan is a roadmap. Oh, the plan presents a clear vision. I actually liked your use of the plan is a roadmap for explaining to people what this is and why we are doing it. So I kind of so that the last sentence of that paragraph, I think if you could flip it around to say like the plan is a roadmap to achieve our vision for more equitable and sustainable Montpelier I feel like it's just like a very clear cut explanation of why this plan exists and what it's supposed to do. Great. Thank you. Yeah, thanks Maria I agree with that. With everything you said, does anybody else have feedback for right now for the draft landing language. Okay. Go for Julia. Okay, so moving on. There's definitely a, we've heard a desire from this group to have some infographic materials on the landing page and show some of the data, most relevant data that will help kind of draw people in and help people learn that they might not already know about the state of different issues in Montpelier and also set the stage for how this plan will measure progress on those issues. So, this next section. The topic sentence is Montpelier has made progress on key goals but there is still work to be done. And then there's no description there. But the main section main purpose of this section is to show this infographic. And one possible layout is to have a column on the left titled the problem and a column on the right titled progress to date. And for the problem, there would be a statistic illustrating how Montpelier is experiencing a particular issue. So, the number of experience individuals experiencing homelessness or statistics related to greenhouse gas emissions or the pandemic effects on the local economy. And then opposite each of those statistics would be an accompanying statistic about project progress to date on that topic. So as an example here for housing on the left hand column. There's a certain number of individuals in Montpelier experiencing homelessness. There's a certain column. Some statistic about the number of housing units that have been constructed in a recent time period. So, these, the exact statistics here are certainly can certainly take different forms. And these are just ideas. I don't obviously have these statistics at the moment. But this could be a succinct way to show people some of the type, some of the issues that this plan addresses, and then also get people thinking about some of the, the progress that's possible, coming out of this. So, any comments on that. I would really like to get the planning commissioners to give some feedback right now for SC about the infographic question. My, my, my memory tells me that in the past, there's been infographics suggested for this page and we've been open to that and find I don't know that we're just to be clear. I'm just thinking that that, you know, that's a huge important goal for us if it's appropriate to have infographics that it's nice to have those images that caps that capture people's attention. But I just want to be clear that like, I don't know, I think it's like aesthetics driven question and it just kind of depends. But what planning commissioners what do you think that if we are going to display something on the landing page like a bit of information using an infographic. What are the key things from our city plan. What are the key issues we think that that exists for the city that that that should be. I've got to say that I'm not, I don't think we need a prop a problem and a progress to date type thing and I actually am a little bit scared of a progress to date type thing because I don't trust that we are going to be super diligent and updating this all the time. So it wasn't the. Yeah, I that's not the intent here. So like a progress to date thing that's like statistics from like six years ago is like, I don't know kind of it kind of begs the question of like, why haven't they updated this. But so anyway, the infographics probably should say the date on them let me just with that thought in mind. So like in 2023. You know we have, you know, statistic blah blah. I just want to ask the planning commissioners like what are the big things I think housing is something that's come up a lot and things about housing. That we see, like for instance, I think one thing that came up last week, which is a huge issue in Vermont and probably what's really a big issue specifically for Vermont. Actually, I'm going to stop short of saying nationally, and that's over housing that is huge house with one or two people. So we want an infographic talks about that I think Mike mentioned that he does have some data about that. Is that something that we would like to see on the landing page, what are people sauce. My thoughts are if this is on the landing page. I think it should be a simple one that people can understand just like how many, how many housing units that we have we added and I do think that we can set it up to to just auto refresh. I did contact Mike about the permit software they use and email the developers of it who I don't think gotten back to me as to whether or not they have sort of an API that we can just use so that Mike and his staff don't have to do anything different than they already do. That said, if they if for whatever reason they can't, or there is no way for me to hook into it can set it up so that it could be extremely simple and easy for Mike or anyone to just, you know, punch in either the number of permits or CO's, we could also just grab the census building permits assuming the city is reporting already reporting to the census. And as housing starts there, I could set that up to to pull that up automatically and that would be going from the same source. So, I don't know that that's not that. And, and like, if we have, even if it if it's just one and if it's simple. And people can understand it that there would be be helpful. I think I think that's fine with what I'm understanding is. It's something that's just like a graphic that says how many housing units were generated where we're created in that year and the current year and setting it up in a way in which we can be certain that it will be updated every year. Is that is that what you're saying, or every month, even. So, yes, yeah, that's, I guess that's what I'm saying we could also put the census population estimates. If we wanted, they aren't always necessarily the most accurate, but yeah, I guess we could include those pretty pretty easily without that too much work. Okay, yeah, if you guys can make that happen, that would be that would be good with me. So what are the other planning commissioners think of that idea. So, do you have other infographic type ideas that would work for the landing page. I just want to weigh in on the housing starts. I think if I was given how, you know, how many houses were built or how many units were built in 2020. I have no idea how to gauge if that was a lot or a little. Is there data, like historical data of how many houses were built over time and I think that might be a more helpful infographic you know to have no idea what that curve would look like. But if it looks like a lot of housing used to be built, and now it has stopped. I think that would be a more, you know, informational. Or like a percent growth, which is kind of what you're like liquid that you think that would be helpful if it's like, it's more pure had 0.5% growth and housing this year. Right or even over the course of the last five years that I don't know, you know what period you have to look at for that to. I mean, as someone who's lived here for the past year I don't have there been any housing. Has there been any housing built there has. It's somewhere. There's been some and I think you make a good point about the total number of units because we're actually a pretty small town so for like 100 units was that would actually probably be considered quite a bit for us. But I think maybe some people coming from bigger places would see 100 units and think like, oh my God, there's not doing anything. So, so that's why yeah like a percent growth or or just the raw number compared with total units or something. What do you think what do you think between those two things what do you guys think. I think the total total number over, you know, the trend over time helps can help tell the story of how we're doing and I don't know you chat with Mike about either the reliability or how far back we have data that we're comfortable with. Otherwise, there are other the proxies we can use and then have more recent years filled in. Okay, I think that's that's a great idea and I think that's, you know, something for Julia to look into as a specific area. So we have any other areas that we think we want to call out for a landing page and for graphic that we think is, you know, a crucial part of the story this landing page worthy I guess. I do with sort of infographic so what metrics would use but I still keep coming around to sort of I think really the three core issues that we should be highlighting, not only the landing page but just as sort of the thread that blinds the city plan is housing economic slash business development and third sort of transportation as a proxy for sort of infrastructure development and maintenance. You know, I get sort of the proposals that are here for the infographics but you know I just feel like, like homelessness, global warming and pandemic. It's, it's, you know, while they are important things. A, I think it's kind of heavy duty for a landing page for a city plan those issues. They're just a little bit amorphous I think if we can kind of collapse down to like really core those three core issues that I think really. I think we hear from, you know, residents here time and time again about economic development housing. And I think, you know, I, again I use transportation but I think it's kind of, I don't know how we get to sort of the issue of like, we're paving the roads. We're, you know, we're doing those things that we're, we're making sure the water system is functional because I think, especially recently, there's some concern about infrastructure. I, I throw that out being, I want to be very clear like I don't know what metrics we can plug in and uses infographics that point those things out but that's just my suggestion. Yeah, I think that that's helpful. And you know, I wouldn't oppose the housing transportation and economic development as being three things that are brought out. I know in our economic development chapter discussions. We did kind of pin point some areas that we thought were important. I think you could help me remember. I remember you being part of this discussions I mean, just does this particular stat come to mind for you as an important part of economic development for us. What's that. I was asking you like a few recall from our discussions about economic development, we had kind of narrowed down things we thought were going to be important, I almost need to just pull up maybe those the plan and refresh my memory. I was wondering, is there an important economic development stat based on our discussions to the edge of my memory. Yeah, I think we were well we're focused on jobs and to the extent that it's reported we can get numbers on jobs that are, you know, over. And over X dollars in terms of that equates to for a monthly wage or we're talking about like the quality of jobs so that we just didn't want to measure an increase in low paying jobs as, you know, success, but yeah, sometimes simple is still good and nothing very few things tell an entire picture and they're in and of themselves so if we wanted to just measure jobs we could do that as well. Yeah, I think jobs. I'm going to look real quick, see if I can remember specifically about jobs we were talking about. And then, and then let's just go on with Aaron suggestion about the, those three pillars. What's the transportation area that we think would be an important thing to draw out on the landing page. That's the one frankly where I really draw blank I don't know how. I mean, where I would start thinking is we talk a lot in the plan and just in the plan Commission general about walkability about not having a vehicle centric city. So like a statistic about sidewalks or walkability or. Yeah, I mean, it could be, you know, it could be just sort of. Again, I don't know how to convey this information, you know the development of the bike trail, the, you know, sort of the amount of paving that's in, you know, paving repaving that's occurred in the last few years. It's, it's, I think it's a bit of a devilage sort of because I feel like, if we may be drawing attention, rather to the problem as opposed to drawing attention to the work that we've done to solve it by having on the landing page but I don't know, I'm just I was thinking that the, I mean, I'm kind of thinking of like what, what chapters lend themselves to having stats and are more tangible like I think that was what Aaron was saying some of them aren't certainly those like housing and economic development certainly do I mean, I think the presentation, you know, struggling a bit but maybe it's historical resources of more of an aesthetic issue than the other two which are pretty, you know, kind of substantive, not to say historical resources is not important but there are good stats on that you know we have the largest historical district there's 500 and something properties. I don't know what the infographic would, I guess it would just be about the importance of protecting this historic nature of my pillar I think that's something top of mind for a lot of people in my pillar too. Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a good question about this is something we want to focus about focus on the landing page. It is certainly something we can brag about. And that's what we want. I thought for the landing page said we're trying to capture and get people interested and so it doesn't. We shouldn't try to bend ourselves over backwards see I think the infographics will certainly appear within each one of our story points. Yeah. Your, your, your, your audience. Yeah, your audience. It's my only working. Yeah, you're fine Kirby it's just like. Okay. Yeah, oh maybe it's better when you lifted it up I could hear you. Some like this and better. That's a lot better. Not perfect. So I'll try not to move. So I was just, I was just saying, you know, maybe we don't need to get the point of the landing page to try to get people interested. And I'm kind of getting a quick, like, something to get them interested and looking farther. And so maybe that's the program. The three things. Sustainable infrastructure. Economic development. Certainly. The housing is probably the one copy. Sustainable infrastructure, certainly from a conscious standpoint. We've been in a close second and then whether it's. It's not development. Environmental quality or something like that. The third, but you can figure that out. Yeah, I think I think I think I can jump in. Sorry, Mike. Your, your audio is better, but, but I think I, if you can hear my audio, I'll just paraphrase what you said. Which is that this infographic on the landing page can be sure and should just grab people's attention and give them a taste of of what's in the plan. And that I think that we heard most of what you said, Mike, but just at the end there, you said that there will be other opportunities for infographics in the story maps. And I think that's important to keep in mind. So this infographic definitely doesn't have to have to. You know, say all that we want to say about data in this plan on this website. And there are certainly opportunities to have other statistics represented for the topic chapters, but identifying the most important things. Top of mind issues to, to highlight about the plan. So housing. Definitely should be there is a good role for this. Yeah, so Julie, I'd like to just, just for the sake of moving on and things just like give you some direction, which is to say that. What's planning commission would like to tell you is, we'd like to see a housing infographic at this point, have a place, you know, there could be placeholders for now because there's there's no reason to spend a bunch of time. Discussing this anymore for because the point is taken that we're going to develop infographics for each chapter. And we can pull from those later. So I think the only placeholder you needed to say now is economic development, transportation, possibly natural resources or energy. Possibly historic preservation are going to be, you know, what we plan to fill in later there, but we don't need to know exactly what it is. I think we did flesh out pretty well for you like what we would like for the housing though. So that's that's kind of what what we're asking what we think would be best for this. And then we can then from then up from there we can just move on and we can figure out the placeholders later. Okay, great. That's helpful. So just to make sure that I understand that so the housing infographic, we can move forward with that with having the total number of units divided by the trend over time. Roughly we can figure it out how exactly that statistical show up and I can reach out to John about that. And then listed below it just as a placeholder for now economic development, natural resources, historic preservation and transportation and we'll figure out the exact statistics to be used there later. And we don't necessarily intend for all of those. Okay, those are possibilities. Yeah, those are possibilities and I think what makes sense for, you know, the aesthetic here and for the storytelling aspect. It's like we don't have the set number in mind. Okay. Yeah, that's a perfect number. So, I think three is good for for presenting these these statistics and it shows, you know, three different topics can show the breadth of the plan so that would be my suggestion. But we can look at it down the line. Yeah. Yeah, so go ahead Julie with the rest of it if there was more you wanted to show us. Okay, so moving on. This is this next block of text here is more involved with the purpose of the plan so the topic sentence here is the Montpelier city plan identifies central initiatives for the city. And then this is short enough that I'll just read it. The plan asks and answers three main questions. One, what should Montpelier's future look like the plan identifies a common vision or Montpelier set of shared values and priorities that are characteristic to the Montpelier community. Two, how far are we from achieving our vision. Each plan chapter assesses existing conditions for a given topic. The chapters provide an overview of priorities progress to date important partnerships and more. Three, what must happen to make our vision a reality. Each plan chapter provides a set of policy recommendations called aspirations goals and strategies that are intended to guide and direct city initiatives. Just a list of links places to learn more about some of the things that are referenced in this section at the bottom. Any comments on this section. Suggestions. People feel okay about this as being part of the landing page. Yeah. I think I think I'll really benefit from actually seeing it like laid out. I think that's going to inform, like, do we have too much text or. You know, what do we need to edit and move around? I think that's going to be. I don't know for me to see it laid out. Mike, does this match you just give us a thumbs up or thumbs down considering graudy situations is this roughly match what you had in mind. Well, I actually plugged in a speaker is it working or microphone. That's great. Okay. I had a spare one. So it works. I wasn't 100% following because I was getting this set up. But yeah, I think that this lays out pretty good. We can. Julia and I can probably work on this over the next couple of weeks to get something, you know, Brian, as Brian says, we kind of need to see it on the page to see how it looks. Okay. Great. Was there more Julia, you want to show us. Sure. So this. All that we've reviewed thus far is for the landing page. The, the very first home page that someone would see when they click on the site. There will be a second. Tab that people can click on for to learn about the plan. So about this plan. And this is the section that explains the format of the document and the website. And also the aspirations goals and strategies. So. This paragraph opening paragraph describes that the city plan. Is no paper document. And it's summarized on the website through the story maps. It lists the 12 topic chapters. And there will be links to each of them. This next paragraph, I'd like to fill in, and I can coordinate with my to do this to learn more about the engagement process and be able to summarize that in this paragraph. Then the final paragraph here explains the aspirations goals and strategies. This is directly taken formatted from curbies and Mike's notes. And I provide an example of an aspiration goal and strategy for the historic resources chapter. This is just the first one that I pulled, but I'm happy to use another one that might be more representative. But it explains. I think it's just best to show an example here. Because these can see these three categories can seem very abstract, but looking at it as a whole it's it's pretty clear how they all fit together. I think I think if leaving an example there, maybe it would be helpful to put it into its own little great box or like a sure a box or something just to just to show that it's like. Like you like a quote box type thing just to show that it's this is not actual content. This is an example. Yep. Okay. Anybody have any feedback for that part. Okay. Is it this is it for the, this is it for the adult page. Yes. Okay. Yeah, I think that's it's looking good. I think it's what we had in mind. Yeah, I just want to say one thing about the infographics not to dwell on that, but just one note about it. I think the direction that we're ending up at makes sense to show the progress over time. And if live updating of the graphics is important, then we can certainly work to incorporate that but I think it's it's also important for for the plan to show where where we are and this may be more important for the infographics that we show an individual plan chapters. It can be useful for the, the statistics used to indicate where we are as this plan is is being developed. I totally understand the desire to have this web plan be a living document. But also, those statistics that describe the current moment can be really useful in providing context for the policy recommendations. So, that's just some food for thought as we look towards the statistics in the future. So, now I'd like to share the energy chapter, which looks. Sorry, the, okay. This looks pretty similar to the previous version that we showed, but I'll point out a couple key differences. We're now incorporating more narrative right up front to try to draw folks in. I'm curious to hear thoughts on this opening section and maybe this time I'll just pause and give folks a chance to to read this language. And I'm curious whether this you think this is an engaging start to this chapter, or if there are any other things that should be included in this opening section. One question for you is, are you are you getting some of the content from the chapter language that we provided. Yes, my default is to adapt chapter language. Great, great. That's good enough. Does anybody have any feedback for this. Yeah, I mean, I think it's good. I mean, I think it sets out the scope of the issue. I'm sure, you know, I, at the end of the day, you know, I think Brian's right, I think this is all going to be. It'll all be much clearer and we can start kind of really getting down to brass tax once we get sort of the complete set in front of us so we can really go through it. I mean, there's no use in sort of word smithing stuff right now, but nothing generally speaking, it's good. Great. Okay. So Julia, I don't know if you'll be able to answer this, but going back to the like the chapter language, which is, you know, something that we had worked on and voted out for each chapter. Like how, how much, like roughly how much is se using those materials like, like, should we expect like a lot of the same content or do you see it being changed a lot just so that we can set our expectations. Yeah, I think it, it does depend on the chapter. Certainly some chapters are much longer. So for those longer chapters, I find myself condensing a lot. And shorter chapters can be contained in full on a story map. So that's one thing to point out. I do capture at least something from every section of the of the plan chapter, as it's written. There's, there's several pieces of narrative in those plan chapters. For example, the overlaps between different areas of the plan. That's longer for some chapters than others. I do attempt to capture. You know, every, every overlap. Every other, you know, plan chapter that's mentioned there. But certainly the language is condensed. So there are some sentences in here that are word for word. And then there are, you know, some sentences that are really summarizing the plan chapters. So, I wish I had a neater answer to that question, but generally I'm trying to preserve the meaning as much as possible. And a lot of times that does involve condensing this and summarizing it for the purposes of the story map. Okay, yeah, that's, that's great. And it's looking, it's looking good. Mike, did you have any thing to say about this? Okay. All right. Well, thank you for the update. We appreciate it. Hopefully. What you're hearing from us is cogent enough to let you know what we'd like. We mentioned infographics before that there was other feedback before about the intro language for the landing page and it sounded like at least some of us prefer the, the attention grabbing stuff of the like draft that I had given you so I think we would prefer that. But it's, but I think that's, that's about it. Does, does anybody else have anything for Julie as far as feedback or anything for us to be thinking about. Okay. So last call for that. So we're going to have about three weeks before the next, our next planning commission meeting. So Julie and I are going to be working quite a bit over the next three weeks to start, because we're trying to get a template. We're trying to really refine that template so we can then build out the rest of the chapters quickly, because once you have a template, it's easier to plug and play. So that's what we'll be working on is over the next couple of weeks is to start to build some of these out now that we've got a better sense of the template. Great. And also, and I think I am speaking for and please planning commissioners if you disagree with this speak up. But I think that you know we're okay with waiting a little while before looking at this again like it like, because I keep hearing over from people like well it'll be nice to see once we actually see like a, you know, a prototype bucket, you know, fully fleshed out. So once you know we're I think we're okay waiting until we have a bunch of chapters developed and the landing pages is is caught up to to what we've been envisioning. So so we can wait for a while is what I'm saying I think to review again and when we do hopefully there'll be a lot to look at so I think that's our feeling about it. That sounds good. Good luck and thank you so much. Thank you Mike for working so hard with them to send our regards to Aiden to get better. Thanks. Thanks very much. Thank you. Bye. Okay. I move on. So, so the next thing on the agenda is to review the public safety implementation strategy so hopefully everyone got to take a look at those. I guess I'll hand it over to you Mike for for you to go through what's there and let us know what you're thinking about that. So while I'm bringing this up on my computer. So I will share my screen. So we have a public safety planes. It's one of our big plans one of our ones that kind of grabs a whole bunch of information. So one of the last pieces that I've left Carol is working on it right now with her board is to restorative justice so this piece is still being worked on there's actually more information she's got a separate document that she's been filling these pieces in on so we can kind of skip through this one. But restorative justice is one of the pieces of public safety. It's really quick it's police fire EMS emergency management dispatch. I think that's all of them. But if you go through you'll see, and most of you are used to seeing all of these in the Excel format and I haven't done the cut and paste so that at a certain point going forward I've been trying to finish up community services. And so that's the one I'm working on right now. But at a certain point I will take this one out of this format and put it into the Excel table so you guys can have it in that format. But I guess I can, I don't know if you want me just I can run through a real quick summary of what each one had and then take some questions. The police aspiration is built around 21st century policing. So, and this has been a foundation of the police department for a number of years. They're six pillars. So each one of their goals became each one of the pillars became a goal so they have six goals to go with the six pillars. And a number of we went through and listed out all of their programs and things and then collapsed them into initiative so there's like a community outreach initiative and a number of these if you're new to reviewing them. You will see things such as the community outreach initiative will show up multiple times. And each one of these strategies is designed to implement that goal that's up here. This one happens to be building trust and legitimacy within the community Montpelier community. So that's what these are about. Whether it's technology whether it's outreach whether it's bike and foot, whether it's the school outreach officer. And this repeats all the way through for the public safety for the policing basically. For each one of the six goals dispatch. Really, I'm trying to remember how many goals they had. But a lot of theirs comes down to having certified staff it's good staff good facilities and a reliable system. So they I think had three goals expand the police station and improve the reliability of the dispatching center. And so again, these were collapsed into We used to have a lot of strategies and we try to collapse strategies that are similar into different things like the tell of a upgrade project is probably five or six different projects in one. I kept fire and EMS together, mostly because the fire and EMS are the same people in the same department so even though really it's two separate jobs, putting out fires and doing ambulance. We kept them. We kept them the same every everyone who's a firefighter is getting trained for EMS and vice versa. So I think that was straightforward emergency management was really big and emergency management is really big because it has a lot of. There's a lot of things that we do. To be proactive on emergency management that includes disaster preparedness and emergency response so that could be everything from a flood to a terrorist attack on the Capitol. So it's it's a wide range of stuff so there's a lot of continuity of operations. Getting the public ready. And all the different projects that are involved in there again we've done a lot to try to combine them, but you can read through and just roll through and to see there's a lot of programs that we work on that are emergency management related. And I think that's actually it just those. But there's a lot in the emergency management. So I will get those transferred over but that is in a really quick nutshell that's what it has been discussed other than restorative justice which, as I said we're working on. Okay thanks Mike. So, so just assuming people have had a chance to, you know, review this in more detail. Any questions, comments, suggestions for anything in this chapter. I was going to ask is that is the can network still. I'm new to town to a new city too so I didn't know if that's something that's still around or not. I heard it lost funding or is it, I don't know if it still lives. It kind of it's in many ways from the city standpoint city government standpoint it doesn't really exist anymore. It was originally created the capillary neighborhoods was created in about 2008 for developing the previous plan and that was how they kind of did the master plan that we have today what's called the master plan that we have today was developed by the developing neighborhood and writing the chapters based on what the public thought we should be doing. We've taken a different approach, but can neighborhoods kept going in some ways those ones that were formed kind of tumbled along kind of self kept themselves going for a little while, and then about two years ago. Really spurred on by COVID. There was an interest in trying to make sure we got more public outreach and started working with the neighborhoods and so a group stepped up the sustainable Montpelier group stepped up and said they would be willing to host and take care of doing the outreach on everything if we gave them money. So the council did vote to put in I think $40,000 or 20,000 20,000 for six months or 40,000 for a year or something like that to help fund pay sustainable Montpelier to do the organization on those. And then coming up to this, maybe this December. They said at the end of December sustainable Montpelier said they weren't going to keep doing that. And they were going to focus on other things so there's really no funding and no organization to go with it. And so it's in effect there may be some can neighborhood groups that are still organized, but they're not working directly with the city we've tried to reach out to set things up but there has been, it's been. I haven't been directly the person working on it, but I know there's there was some interest in trying to keep it going, but it didn't seem to be working. So we've just decided to not not to do it within the city but there may be some individual neighborhoods that are still staying organized for other reasons. Okay. Anyone else have something. I have a question about the restorative justice section. What agency are those programs under. We actually have a community justice center. And we have a director who does community justice. In a lot of other places they're either done regionally, or they're done by a separate group. I don't think I live in Hardwick I know we have community justice center in Hardwick but it's not part of city government it's a kind of a separate organization here in Montpelier we have pulled community justice into so everybody who is in the community justice who works for the community justice center works for the city. So we're a little bit different in that and that helps us get a much closer relationship between the police department and the CJC. My other question was about just the topic heading. The public safety plan. And this is just a suggestion because public safety such a huge umbrella of things you know it could happen. When I worked in transportation we would, it was safety and security, so we even broke out safety into two different arms because they're not the same thing. So, but looking at this plan involves all of the agencies that work in public safety specifically, as opposed to, you know, transportation or other areas that deal with public safety but not as their exclusive purpose. So, to avoid confusion. Could we add something about how this is like the public safety agency plan as opposed to just a public safety plan because I feel like they're adding in that these are agencies within the government that are providing their plans to kind of just makes the chapter clear, and maybe it will be clear once it's drafted. However, the planning commission wants we've we've talked about as a public safety we've talked about it as public safety and justice or public safety and community justice. Yeah, it is tough because it's emergency management. It's, it's a lot such a wide range. Unlike the other big chapter which is community services it's pretty clear everything under it as a community service and, you know, there may be some other community services that are in other chapters but for the most part those are the big community services. This one, I agree and and we can, which whatever the planning commission would like to have as the title of this one it could be public safety could be justice it could be public safety agencies. What do we have thoughts about the suggestion for public safety agency or something else. Any thoughts would. You know, what do people generally think about about making that change so it sounds. Like a good idea to say public safety agency plan. I'm going to throw 2 cents in on 1 part of it. I don't think I like calling pulling out. Public safety and community justice apart from each other because it suggests that. That community justice isn't an important part of public safety or something. You know what I mean, I wouldn't want to like make a reference like an inference that that minimizes restorative justice. But. So, so, but first things first, I mean, what do we think about public safety agency. And. Maria, you said you would prefer that right like that you think that would be better. Yeah, I mean, just because when I got to like, especially at the police section. It was, I was expecting something more focused on public safety, you know, like break in. You know, like actual concerns that I have as a member of the community, but it was really more about the operations of. It's kind of about what the police want. Right. So it's like the needs of. These public safety agencies rather than what's actually being done for us. So, you know, I'm I'm making this distinction. I'm not sure if anyone else cares or sees it. I see it. I see your point. And I like it. I think the only thing that give me pauses is are people going to be confused about what public safety, the safety agency plan means. I think that's a lot of words. Maybe agencies plural public safety agencies plan. And that does kind of more specifically get out of what exactly it is. Just just for purposes of like, of moving on real quickly informally, those in favor of changing it to public safety agencies plan. Say I, I. Can I also public safety services plan? Maybe it's kind of splitting the data a little bit more. So I thought I saw a gay mouth it. But I didn't hear from John. Yeah, I can hear you a little bit. It's a little low. Okay, well, it looks like I don't know people are lukewarm. But we can, we can leave it for now, I think. And, and think about it. Think about it. And if people like the idea we can, we can come back around just moving on momentarily. Do we have any other questions or feedback about aspects of the plan. I don't know if it's, but I don't, I was going to be patient. And if I'm not hearing anything else, I'll have a couple of things. Just, just things that came to mind looking at it. For the, for the, both of these are under the police section. Under the CIT that crisis intervention training section. I was wondering if that could even be expanded. So it's, yeah, it's under training. I think. Yep. Yeah, there we go. So the goal there is maintain the current level of training for the police officers. And then there's the police officer training program, which is a kind of discreet thing. And then there's crisis intervention team program. And this is continue to train officers and CIT. The goal itself actually suggests that maybe there'll be other trainings to consider, but those, that's why I was thinking of expanding maybe the CIT strategy. To say, you know, something to the effect of and consider or research or maybe consider as the best word and consider other training opportunities. You know, something like that, just to, just to imply that, that. Where I'm coming from is like more crisis intervention, the better we can get at that, I think the better. You know, it's, it's a major area for public safety. That is just a huge part of what police do when they respond to calls. And I feel like, you know, over time, it's not something that policing in general has, has focused enough on, which brings me to another thing, which is maybe a bigger question, which is also in this section. The possibility of modular actually using social workers for this stuff, which I know is like a big area, big can of worms to possibly get into. But I don't know what, what do people think about having a strategy here or including in the strategy, you know, consider the possibility of having full time social workers. Do this kind of work. What are, what are people's reactions to us. Putting it in there and seeing what happens at city council. Kirby, what is the current status of using social workers? I mean, I don't know any of the. Yeah, so my understanding, my understanding is what's kind of done now is like the officers get some training and let the CIT type thing, which is not nearly the same thing as like being an actual social worker, right? And then there's this program where they work with Washington County mental health for certain types of calls for social work type stuff. But this relationship as I understand it is sort of, it's, it's sporadic and it's not consistent. Like sometimes Washington County mental health will participate and help the police. But it's kind of when, when Washington County mental health has a chance, like when they're available and for calls that they feel comfortable with, it's not a full proof situation. And I'm not even sure the current status of that partnership, but I'm assuming this is still use some. So that's what I understand is kind of what's done. So, so yeah, I think having something in the plan about having like a real long-term workable social worker type approach through the police department is very much worthwhile. It's just a matter of do we feel comfortable as a planning commission talking about these things? Because I am fully aware of like what I'm talking about right now is like a little bit out going outside our lane a bit. Yeah, I think, I think it's, I think it's outside our wheelhouse. Yeah. I just want to say, I feel like I don't know enough about it. You know, someone, someone would ask me like, why, why was this included? I cannot speak like very intelligently about it. And so all of that to say, I'm happy to go along with whenever the planning commission. Other commissioners. Yeah. Yeah, I have the, you know, same thing. Like I don't want to, I don't want to be going outside the lane, but because it's, it's not planning policy per se, but you know, it's a thing. Well, I'm going to move on from that. Just, just to, just to put that in, just throwing that one there. Another question I had about the police section was about staffing where the term full staffing was used. And that had to do, I think with, yeah, it's right below. And I think that this goal is something to do with retention. If you can scroll up a little bit, Mike, so we can see the goal for this, for the context. It's like emotional support and work life balance to officers. And then there's police staffing level policy. And I thought that the strategy to reach and maintain full staffing to ensure the department has enough officers. That's a subjective phrase in my mind, like what is full staffing, because like that goes to how much police presence we're going to have in the city. And the way it's phrased is kind of objectively like, like there's a number that we know, but. I don't know. That's something that I, that I wasn't super comfortable with. I feel like if we're going to talk about staffing as it relates to emotional support or work life balance for officers, then there's issues like decreasing the number of police that we have on shift or decreasing the workloads, you know, and then there's a number of other things that we're going to have to do. And then there's a number of other things that we're going to have to do, like the idea responses to calls and things like that. Like, and. Yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't need to dwell on that one either, but that was another one that's out to me. Well, Kirby, what is like the appropriate avenue in which to push back on some of this stuff? That's, I don't know. It's, it's tricky for us. I mean, because we're supposed to be offering, you know, a lot of the time we're not offering the appropriate avenue. So, you know, I don't know how these go to like land use type issues. So it is kind of out of our wheelhouse, but then again, it's also part of the city plan. So. Yeah. I don't know. This is, this is a, it's a weird one. It's a weird chapter because it's, it doesn't obviously relate. Mike, do you maybe want to just back up for a second and tell us the process by which these goals were gotten to you? Because my understanding is we had, you know, a lot of conversations and there's boards and there's, you know, people have really thought about this. We've looked at it for a while before, before it's come to us. Can you just talk about that a bit? So for the way I developed this was to work with Brian Pete before he left and Eric, the new chief. When he came on board. So. The primary approach was to work with them, but they've been working on this. And, you know, as we said, the focus, we could have, we could have focused and we can, you know, arrange this chapter to focus on, on safety itself. And they kind of looked at it from the standpoint of having a good. Having a good police system is, is, is how we're going to end up getting good results because it's more than just reducing crime. It's also about all of these other objectives that people have for their police departments. And so, and one of the pillars, as we said, we're focusing on 21st century policing, which was an Obama initiative. You know, focused on how to rebuild trust with community, how to engage with the community. And one of the pillars, you know, using this one as an example is to provide emotional support, work, life balance for officers. And that a lot of that comes down to officers that it's better for the officers and it's better for the community. When you have officers that work and work and work and work and work and work and show up and they're tired. And that's when accidents happen. That's when mistakes happen. That's when things happen is when officers don't have that opportunity to have those, that time off. And so we do have a, you know, a full, full staffing for Montpeliers Police Department is 17 officers that includes the police chief. We have a working police chief. We don't have an administrative police chief. So it's 17 officers is full. And the reason for that is it allows for a schedule that can be fully built out, allowing everybody to work regular shifts and still have time for everybody to have time off to go and take vacations. So there's not going to be 16 officers on it one time. There may only be three or four. And what it allows for is people to go to training every time somebody goes to training, you need to have somebody come in. So that means somebody coming in on overtime or somebody coming in on not being able to go on vacation because somebody else is going on training. When we're fully staffed, people can go to training and we're not calling people in off on their vacations or their days off. That's why they want the fully staffed is it allows the department to operate and give people their time off, their time to spend with their families, their time to decompress. It's a very stressful job. So that's why they emphasize the staffing policy so much is they really wanted to make sure that council and the public understands the value of the fully staffed department. It's not just to have more officers. It's not to have more on the street. It's actually not adding any more people on the street. It's just giving people time off. You're going to have the same number of people if you have 14 as you would having 17, except that those 14 don't get vacations and they don't get time off and they're getting called in a lot. So that's what the 17 officers and that's why the fully staffing and that's why it's so important to them and they like to make sure that that conversation comes up with city council because it's always an easy place to cut when it comes time for budget. So that's why they're always like that's why they want to emphasize the need for that full staffing. So that's a little bit of a little bit of the answer to that specific question. But a big picture how this all came together is to working primarily through the police department. There was a review when Brian Pete came in, the first thing he did was do a full evaluation of everything of all the departments of all the things and wrote a report. Then there was a police review committee that came in, reviewed things and made some recommendations that also was incorporated into the into the next plans going forward, including this plan. So we've reviewed a number of pieces to kind of to build this together as to how to how to move forward on the six pillars. And as as I said, that's why it's focused as an aspiration and goals on the six pillars as opposed to say having a public safety goal of let's reduce crime or let's do this. It's it's more focused on an agency plan. And I think that's a good good analysis as public safety agency plan because it's getting the agency. This is how this is how to operate this one to get the best results for the community. Thank you. So I mean, I'm comfortable like letting some of these little criticisms go. I mean, I do want to make a note, though, that they like to rebut the full staffing thing real quick. 17 officers East Montpelier has zero police officers. So their full staffing is zero. Like the 17 number is still a policy judgment of this is how much police force we're going to have. It's not about training. I mean, they could have fewer people at a time on shifts. So there's still like, like in just do less have less presence. So I just want to throw that out there. But I do think it's probably appropriate to leave it to like the public review process. And maybe that's what we say about this chapter. And it sounds like people would be comfortable with us saying, you know what we didn't, we're not really going to touch this with a very heavy hand at all because this is maybe outside our house and just let city council know that that's the review process done by the planning commission for this one. Aside from changing it to public safety agency plan. The people are people are comfortable with that approach for this one. Are we annexing East Montpelier? I tell you, you know, if like the press is watching these. Are we annexing? I mean, it's certainly, it's certainly a policy, certainly a policy question. You know, whether we have or need a police department at all is it's a policy in a personal community decision as to what level and what, what amount of service you need. I mean, I live in, I live in Hardwick. I have a police department, but everybody around the communities around us, I pay more in taxes in order to have a police department, but a couple miles down the road is Walden or Greensboro or Woodbury, none of which have police departments. And so if there's a response, they have to wait for the state police. So if there's a shooting at their house, they got away for the state police to come in from middle sex. And that's a, that's a policy decision that communities make. Montpelier has decided to have one. The level of service that's been requested has been this. Now we could go to having less service. That's a decision for the public. Yeah. See, I mean, I, I'm completely aware that I'm like on a bit of a soapbox about this. And so letting it, letting that go and letting, letting the public respond to what they think of the plan, I think is, is probably the most appropriate thing without planning commission trying to put his two cents in because it's outside of our house. But I think that would be the calmest we want to pass long city council on this one. So if everybody's okay with that, we can do that. But before we totally move on from the review of this, like to check back in, just, just a straw poll vote. If you, if you would be in favor of changing the title, say, yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. Changing it to it. Well, probably to the public safety agency plan instead of public safety plan. Or services, public safety services. Or public safety services. Make sure that it's there. I think that's a good plan on the silly. You know, my question is just like, if, is, is there any iteration which you would like to change it? If so, say yay. Okay. So those who don't think that, that a change is needed, say, nay right now. So did we have four years before? Sounded like we did. Yep, probably. Okay. So, okay. I was, that was just a straw poll thing. So, so to see if it was worth a motion. Do we have a motion to change it? And if we, and if someone does have a motion, propose what, what we would change it to. In your motion. So if can I, I don't know. The exact. You say, I move, I move that we change the, the, the title for this chapter to. Okay. I move that we change the title of this chapter to. Public safety services. Plan. I'm sorry. Let's go back and look at them. So, so your, your motion is to change it to public safety services plan. Right. Do we have a second to Maria's motion? I second. Okay. So we have a second from Gabe. So now we can have a discussion. Okay. Okay. Okay. Would anyone like to discuss this further before we move to a vote? Yeah, I, I never would have picked that up until Maria brought it up, but it's, it's right. You know, like it, we're not talking about our end state, what we want to see Montpelier in terms of our safety. Right. This is really the executives of these departments and the things that they feel that they need to provide the services. So I think it's a, you know, I think it's a, it is a useful distinction. Okay. Anyone else have anything to discuss about it? Okay. I'm going to move on to the vote. Those in favor of Maria's motion. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Those. Not in favor. Say nay. Okay. And any abstentions. Me. Okay. So Aaron abstains. So that was a. Four. Four. Oh, one. To change the. Title of the chapter. Okay. And I, and based on our discussion, I don't think we have any more changes that we want to make. And so we're, we're, we're good for now, Mike. And, uh, you know, assuming you're going to put it into the Excel spreadsheet and all that, but that's. I mean, since we, I don't know. We don't even really need to see that. That's just going to be for purposes for the, uh, to put on the website. Okay. Do you, Mike, do you want us to go back and look at this again when, when restorative justice is done? Probably don't need to. I mean, I'll let you know when it's done. So you guys can look at it. If you, if you feel like it, we can bring it up. I mean, all these chapters, everything we approve is going to end up on the website. And we're going to end up looking at it a second time. So. But I can let you know. Okay. Okay. That's, um, I'm comfortable with that. It's everybody comfortable with that. Just, we, we know that we didn't review everything at this point, because we're sort of justice. We're sort of the, the community justice center will be developing that more fully. And then your future. Okay. Well, if we don't have anything else for this, I'm going to move on, on our agenda. And we have 30 minutes left. But we do have the CNU ARP recommendations. Issue next. Um, we had left this off last week with, uh, Gabe having the suggestion that we look at the, um, Uh, design review district boundaries as a possibility to start with for, for, if we want to start phasing out zoning caps. It's like, um, Mike, are you able to pull up those district boundaries? Yeah, I'll just give me a second. Okay. Yeah, that might be the best way to go about that. And then we'll take a look at what that boundary is. Um, and, and then Mike can also show us on that map where, you know, the three urban core. Uh, Zoning districts are our neighborhood zoning neighborhoods are all, they already don't have a cap and they're going to be in that design review district, I assume. So, so we'll be looking at the other places that could be impacted. And then we'll, then the discussion will be about, you know, we phase out over time, we phase out based on geography. It's just a lot of, a lot of policy possibilities. And Mike, you can tell us your thoughts too. And does anybody need catching up about this discussion? You know, this is, this is us taking up that Congress for new urbanism. Report from last year about the suggestions. We kind of went through all of those suggestions last week and sort of summarized. Like where we were on those. And then as far as things that we can take action on, one of the biggest was the suggestion to form a pillar to get rid of its. Using density and in its zoning. Okay. So the, we're looking at the dark black line is the design review. So the areas right now, just so everyone kind of gets a little bit of an update. This, these dark. Red. Areas in here. Are urban center one. Just orient people, you know, this is the downtown. The little hatch lines you see here is the capital complex. So the capital is sitting right where the little hand is. Here's the intersection of state and main. City hall. Barry. Shaw's. This is Memorial Drive out to the highway. So this area already does not have this dark red does not have any density requirements. And the same is true for this area of Barry street. This goes out to about Hubbard street. And includes. Like Sardinia cheese over on the stone cutters way. And then if you start going out main street, you get to urban center three. Which is out to the roundabout. So all these areas currently do not have any density requirements. It is whatever the number of units you can fit into those areas. So when we have this discussion with CNU about removing density, we already have some places that do it. The conversation we had. Last. Last year, probably about this time last year. Was about trying to expand that district just a little bit to go through and say, maybe we could get residential 1500 to also. Not have that requirement. And I think. I hate to move to go and find the thing. I think this is reds 1500, the light green. And the concern. I think it's a little bit that I had a little bit. The city council had was the fact that not all of it is in design reviews. You can see some of it is in design review. Some of it is not in design review. And so they felt. What Congress for new urbanism was saying was you need to have robust. Design regulations if you're going to remove density requirements because. You know, and there are arguments. Foreign against that. But that was the thought was we could, you know, for some of those. So the theory or the idea now is rather than. Tagging it to a density. This was the next highest density. These have high density 1500 is. One. Unit per 1500 square feet of land, which is. 27 units an acre. So that's a fairly decent density of development. So that's what the light green, I think is. And then. The other idea would be that if we, you just used the. Design review district and said, if you're in design review, then we could remove the density. Now, some of these are varying different amounts of. Density. So, you know, that's 1500. This is 3000. That's 3000. There's a little touch of blue up here, which is res 9000. And this was a little bit of the area that I was talking about last time that I thought these are some of the areas that might be difficult. Or where people are going to make some comments. And I think even Brian may have mentioned that, that he lives out here. This is out. This is out on the Tarris street and. Bailey. So this is Bailey terrace. This is root two on its way heading out. So this is mixed use. Probably isn't a big deal as big of a deal. That's. You know, one unit per 3000 right now. But this is one unit per 6000. So this is getting a little bit more residential. I think these are the ones that would be the case that people would come up to push back on as this is a residential. Lower density district, but it's in design review. And the reasons in design review is because it's all in the historic district. We. We matched our design review line in this area. To the historic district line. So everything inside is in the historic district. So that's why that line is where it is. So that's that I was just pointing out. That's where it is. As a piece of fact, some of these probably won't make a big difference. This is Barry street. This is a relatively high density area. This is North field street. You'll probably get some, maybe push back from neighbors surrounding it to go and remove the density from the. Econolodge property. But I don't think much is going to happen in national life. I don't really think that's an issue. If we remove density from national life, I don't think it'll have an impact. But those are just some of the facts. And then I guess I'll open it up to folks. And this is the college campus up here. We can include or not include that. That's the VCFA campus. We have questions for Mike about this. So Mike, I think one threshold question is, do you think that our. Design review. Process as it stands is. Strong enough to. You know, safeguard appearances so that, so that, so that doing away with the density cap is. Not an issue. What's your opinion on that? I mean, I. I know John has pointed out a number of times that. And I can't say he's, he's wrong on it that. It hasn't happened and probably isn't going to happen. My issue is when I have to come in and. And I get put in a position of having to make a staff recommendation based on. Whether we have enough safeguards in place to make sure it can't happen. And I don't think we have enough safeguards in place to mean that it can't happen in the design review. We have enough safeguards in place to make sure that it's fairly safe outside of the design review district. We have a lot of, we have a lot of rules. It's not, it's not like it's a free. Wheeling design, whatever with somebody's outside of the outside of this. Design review district. We have rules to regulate. Design. But when push comes to shove and we have. Folks and they've been very vocal. They've been very vocal. They've been very vocal. They've been very vocal. They've been very vocal to come out and make a push that says, you know, do we have safeguards to make sure it can't happen? I don't think our rules are tight enough that we. Can. Make it that it can't happen. And when you say it can't happen, the it is a development occurs that the neighbors are unhappy about. They'll usually bring out some extreme cases to go through and say, you know, somebody could come in and do X. And then tear this building down and put in another building in its place that's, you know, and for some, for some reason, it's, it's, it's four stories and it has flat roof or three stories. And it has a flat roof for some reason. Some people have a real thing with having flat roofs. But it's a, it's a thing that routinely comes up. And so in some cases, I think we've got a lot of good rules, but we don't have strong enough rules that if somebody really wanted to, and the truth is most people haven't in the economics aren't there. And you know, I'm sure John could go and speak to that too. The economics just aren't there to go and buy these things and to do those types of deals. But if somebody came in with enough money, could they really go in and screw up a neighborhood? Yeah, they probably could if they had enough money and really had their mindset on it, they probably could. So probably wouldn't happen. Let me ask a question to 10 for, because I think what we're talking about, you're going to have those, those people are going to show up and they're going to say the things that they say at all of them. Right. On the positive side, let's just say, what would we be trying to accomplish? So 10 for let's look at 10 for. There's a lot of big, beautiful Victorian homes. Right. What is it currently now? 6,000. Yeah. One unit per 6,000. Okay. So what are some of those homes? Let's say one of these homes could be converted into efficiencies and you could have eight units or something without be allowable today. The way it would work today, and I guess maybe that's helpful for everybody to understand how the system works today. I'll just zoom in here. So probably let's go and say where my little hand is here. That's probably about a 6,000 square foot lot. Yep. So if they had a 6,000 square foot lot, the most that person could do at their house would be a duplex. They could put, they've got the right to have a single family house because they've got the 6,000 square feet. And because of the rules we have in place, anyone with a single family home, anyone with a parcel big enough for a single family home is also allowed to have a duplex. And I understand the state is actually looking at duplicating our rule and passing it force requiring it statewide. So that's what the limit would be right now. They could only have the two units. I mean, if we look at conversion of housing, some of these areas inside of the design review, and they could be beautiful. They could be, you know, like all you got to do is try, you go to Boston or Newbury port or Portsmouth. They've maintained these homes. They protect the homes. They're, they're gorgeous, right? But you have multiple people able to live in them and may and therefore make it affordable to maintain. And based on the conversation that the doubt, I don't know if you have data, it's anecdotal, Mike, but it sounds like the biggest need is for a single individual households, right? That's the biggest housing demand that we, that we're not meeting. Yeah, I mean, it's arguable as to, you know, how many bedrooms, one bedroom, two bedroom. But, you know, as we said, most people right now, 40% of our population are people living alone. And we don't have that many studios and one bedrooms. And now with people working from home, maybe a single person would want a two bedroom. But again, we're looking at much smaller units compared to the past when, you know, you'd have much, much larger families. Yeah, we had average household size, I think was close to five in the 1950s. And now we're less than two. So, so Mike, did I hear you say that you did feel comfortable saying that not having a density cap within the design review district is something you could say is you don't like think that, you know, development that people are scared about could happen, like that you, that you were comfortable with that. I think we, I think we have enough, you know, our, our design review regulations have been in place since, you know, we made changes to them, obviously a couple of years ago, but that really was to clarify and to refine them and make them much, much better. We've had them in place for almost 50 years. And I think if we were to look within, you know, let me zoom back out, you know, if we were to think about these areas in here, this, the boundary hasn't changed much in 50 years. It's, it's a little bit, you know, 50 years ago, national life wasn't in it, but we added that in, in the 19 late, late 70s, early 80s. But for the most part, the, the boundaries stayed pretty consistent. And I don't think we've had development within this box that has been anything that we would go through and say, boy, you know, that should never have happened. And these areas in here don't have density requirements already. And the sky hasn't fallen, nothing bad has happened. So I think certainly within the design review district, I think the only policy thing that would be a drawback from, from our standpoint is when we try to cross that line, we're going to make it harder for us to try to cross that line in the future. I don't know if people follow what I'm saying. Once we've pegged it to it's, if it's in the design review, then, then if we don't have a density requirement, it might be more difficult to cross that line. But what if we, I have no idea where we're going to go with this. So, so, you know, this is, I'm throwing stuff out there as like guesses, but what if there was a proposal, something like no density caps within design review district, maybe it's phased in, maybe it's not whatever. And also at the same time, increase the density caps by one step for all of the neighborhoods touching. So, so with the idea of by increasing them by one step for the one for the neighborhoods that are touching the line. It is looking ahead a little bit to the concern that the line is going to become a permanent like Chinese wall or whatever for, for density, you know what I mean? Like, like, so like, so, so a different kind of phasing out instead of like when you hit that design review line, it goes from, because some of these neighborhoods, you know, we're like, I don't know what red 6000 or, or even even requires even more land per unit. So it would be, it would be a, it would be a cliff, you know, and this is what I'm saying is you go from, you can't have much units here at all to your neighbor can have as many units as they want. So instead of having that cliff, maybe we phase it out geographically too. I don't know. Or what if what if we just raise that minimum allowable, like, like, if we say, you know, four units, you can't have a lot of anywhere, right? Like there's no, you get away from like, focusing on the area and those calculations and it's just like, if it's a lot, like you can, you can put four units there. It doesn't matter. It's your unit is still bound by the other dimensional requirements and things, but that like simplifies it. It gets away from the like, you know, those small lots where people are doing this, this impossible math of like someone could put 600, you know, units here and it's like, well, that doesn't, it's not going to happen. But now at least like, if it's just like four units, it's four units, anyone could put convert a unit structure to four units. I don't know. Right. And so the four units thing was a, that was a different CNU suggestion, right? What's that part of it? It was, there was a CNU recommendation. I think that one was tied to site plan. The exempting site plan up to four. Okay. I don't think that one. I was just going to say, I don't think that one matters quite as much because we now do administrative site plans. So we can still do the site plan requirements. It doesn't have to go to a DRB hearing. We do it administratively and it's not. I don't think we need to. Do that one necessarily because there's a lot of value in doing the site plan requirements. But because we're doing administratively, it doesn't add any more time or much expense. So I, I like, I like the suggestion, John. There's one issue for me that I would really like, and maybe that this is just me being way too hopeful. One reason why I'd like to see us move away from density is just that it's so unhelpful period for no matter where you are. Because when these discussions happen, people fixate on density and, and to the point of that they're not even getting. You know, whatever changes being proposed really, because they're just fixing on the density thing. And I don't know. I think that's, that's like a factor. There's like, do we want to come up with something here that, that is incrementally moving towards mob healer, just not using density anymore. Or are we just going to look for a solution that's more practical in that we're just going to lighten things up. You know what I mean? I don't, I think that's something for us to think about. We're running out of time right now. So obviously we're not going to be solving anything tonight. But I think this was hugely helpful. Maybe with that. I'll just say that. When we take this up again, if people could keep thinking about it and thinking about. What makes sense. For a change. And. And, you know, Mike, I'm very conscientious of like what, what you're comfortable with and what you feel comfortable. Telling city council, because I, I don't want us to have to come up with something that you're not comfortable with. I really think that this is a. Possibly big paradigm shift for the city. That's really important for housing and planning. So I want to make sure that we come as United front. If we can all just think about. This, it looks like this was a great place to start. So thank you, Gabe, for. Suggesting this is a place to start. Yeah, I'll just say too, and I'm sure people have all seen it, but if you pay attention to the discussion that's going on in the legislature, I mean, there's really powerful things, you know, being talked about as it relates to, you know, equity and social justice and, you know, what, how discriminatory this really is. And so I think, you know, we would all be, you know, paying attention to those discussions and debates. I don't think they're going to go as far as the four flexes. I think that's, that's for another day, you know, but maybe we could go that far. But I think, you know, being able to combat some of the dialogue that we know will come up in a city council meeting. It's important to, to really dial in and pay attention. They're good discussions. Anyway. Yeah, thanks. Good. So yeah, that's what we should do before, you know, before we take this up again. I'm not positive that it's going to shake out for the next meeting, but it might, you know, there's a good chance we'll be talking about this again at the next meeting. So if everybody can spend the next couple of weeks, thinking about, you know, how we would like to evolve this density question. And come with some concrete ideas for us to start seriously considering. I think that's going to be really helpful. And I think I could just leave it at that. Does anybody have anything else? Yeah, I might just jump in just to go and give a little bit of background. So the Congress for new urbanism for, for some of the folks who are new is, you know, it's an organization and they, they have a way of doing their zoning where it's, it's what I call form-based codes. And, and so really some communities have done it. Winooski is probably the, the, the biggest one that's done it where they, you basically, we don't regulate use. We just regulate what the buildings look like. And fundamentally it's a really good way of doing things. It's just a fundamental shift in how you do things. And that's for us to have, you know, a lot of, you know, 80 years of zoning under our belt in one way and now it would require a fundamental shift in how we do our zoning. And so that's kind of where they would want us to go is to kind of get into more design. Don't care about the use, you know, set the bulk in the massing and how you want things to look. And it's a very visual, the regulations are very visual. We can't have this. And so it's, it's a different way of doing things. And it works very, very well, but we don't have those rules and it would take a lot of work for us to kind of develop those rules. So there's a question of, of timing. Do we go forward and adopt an adjusted form-based code, which would probably take three or four years to put together? Or do we just keep this incremental approach that we're doing and keep loosening the belt and see how things go? And that I think is, is some of the policy questions. And there are people, you know, we've had these public hearings. This is not the first time we proposed to do things. We had proposed to expand the historic design review district. This design review district had been proposed to kind of follow that green, yellow, and then out to the brown line here. So this whole area would have been in the design review district. And, and the opposition was tremendous from, for the idea of expanding that it would have, it's everything that's within the national registered district would have been within the design review district. And it was really strongly opposed and almost brought down the zoning update. So we've been doing this. We've run into this same group of people over and over again. And they're, they're, they're well organized or they can be at the last second. And so that's, it's mostly this arguments about, it's a political discussion. And what people want or don't want. And so, you know, that's been the trick of getting, getting a hold and figuring out how to make these changes. And I will stop sharing. So I know we've got two seconds left. The committee stipends link you guys have. I'll just go and mention that really quick. I didn't want to have a discussion on this. I just wanted to mention that city council had passed a resolution or put money behind a project. That they wanted to make sure that people, this came out of C. Jack social and an equity committee. Folks can't always volunteer to be on committees because they can't afford or they can't afford the childcare. They can't afford to go. So there is a program with stipends. If you go on the link, it'll tell you all about it. If there's somebody who, even if it's to be virtual, if there's a reason why you need some financial assistance to attend the meetings, you're welcome to apply for them. Just let me know and we can. I think I have to file the. The monthly stipend for you because I need to go and sign off that you actually attended the meeting. So if you're in that position and would like to go and participate, look at the, look at the criteria, look at what's in there. And get in touch. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Thanks. Yeah, glad to get the word out there about that. So check it out if you think you might qualify or, or something you're interested in. Okay, everybody. We're out of time. So do we have a motion to adjourn? I moved to adjourn. Okay. Motion from Gabe. We have a second. Second. Second from John. Thanks. Those in favor of adjourning say aye. Aye. All right. Thanks so much, everybody. Thank you.