 Okay, Mr. Marshall, it is 631 Amherst media has joined us. They are in the attendees. You do have a quorum on the board. It looks like you have a full board. I believe we're good to go. All right. Thank you, Pam. Welcome. Welcome to the Amherst planning board meeting of January 31, 2024. My name is Doug Marshall and as the chair of the Amherst planning board, I am calling this meeting to order at 632 p.m. This 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 and extended by chapter two of the acts of 2023. This planning board meeting, including public hearings will be conducted via remote means using the zoom platform. The zoom meeting link is accessible on the meeting agenda posted on the town websites calendar listing for this meeting or go to the planning board web page and click on the most recent agenda where the zoom link is listed 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, unmute yourself, answer affirmatively and return to mute. Bruce Coleman. Yeah. Red Hartwell. Red Hartwell is present. Jesse Major. President. Janet McGowan. Here. Johanna Newman. Here. Aaron winter. Here. Doug Marshall. I am present also. Board members, if technical issues arise. We may need to pause 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 request and call on you to speak. After speaking, remember to remute yourself. General public. The general public comment item is reserved for public comment regarding items 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 deemed appropriate by the planning board chair. Please indicate you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited. If you have joined the zoom meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your phone. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute when finished speaking. All residents can express their views for up to three minutes or at the discretion of the planning board chair. If the speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds their allotted time, their participation may be disconnected from the meeting. Okay, our first item on our agenda this evening. Here now at 635 is approval of minutes. So we'll start with the December 6 minutes, which were distributed in our packets. Board members are there any comments on those minutes. All right, I don't see any hands raised. Assuming you all read them. Jesse. Yep, I read them. I thought they're great. I was going to move to approve the minutes. All right, thank you for that motion. You want to, you know, you got there second. I'll second the motion. All right. Thank you. Thank you both. Last call for comments on the December 6 minutes. All right, we'll go through another roll call. Starting with you, Bruce. Are you in favor of approving the minutes. I am approved. I approve. Thank you. Jesse. Janet. Hi. Johanna. Hi. And Karen. Hi. I'm an I as well. It is unanimous seven in favor. No abstentions or absences or. Nays. All right, we'll go on to the December 20th minutes. Likewise, does anybody have any comments or suggestions about those? Okay. Does anybody want to make a motion? Johanna. I move to approve the minutes. Thank you. And Jesse. I second. Okay. Thank you both. Any further, any comments at all before we go back. Through the roll. Okay. All right, I'll go. Reverse alphabetical this time. So Karen, you're first. Approves. Thank you, Karen. Hi. Hi. Janet. Hi. Jesse. Hi. Fred and Bruce. Hi. I'm an I as well. Again, it's unanimous with no abstentions or. Nays. Okay. So that's the two sets of minutes we have this evening. Time is 6 38. This point will go to public comment period. I see in the public. Attendees. In addition to Amherst media, I see David Somek, Elizabeth Birling, George Ryan, Mora Keane, and Susanna must brand. So any members of the public that want to make a comment on something that's not on tonight's agenda. Okay. I guess. None of the public in our attendance wants to make a comment at this time. So let's go ahead to item three on the agenda. Which is a continuation of a public hearing. Time is 6 39. In accordance with the provisions of mass general law chapter 40 a these public hearings have been duly advertised. And notice there have has been posted and is being held for the purpose of providing the opportunity. For interested citizens to be heard. The hearing is continued from December 20th 2023. This is SBR 2024 dash 03. Applicant is town of Amherst location is 191 West prompt Pomeroy Lane. Request site plan review approval to install to ADA universally accessible six foot wide crushed stone paths, accessible foot bridges and other site improvements, including boardwalks, benches, signage, kiosks, bike racks, shade structures and upgrades to existing parking area and a connector path under article three, section 3.335 and article eight of the zoning bylaw. Located in the RO, our N, FPC and FEMA floodplain overlay zoning districts map 19 D parcel 10. Okay, this as I said is continued from December 20th. Are there any board members who want to make a disclosure at this time regarding their relationship with the participants in this hearing. I don't see any hands raised for public disclosure. And I suspect that Dave Zomek is back in the panel so that you can make your presentation. You want to welcome back Dave. Thank you very much. Can everybody hear me okay. Thank you very much for having me. If I could, I'll try to launch right in and be as efficient with your time as possible. I certainly may defer or lean to and on Chris and Nate. As this is a town project and they have been as with many town projects are quite involved with the evolution of the project. But I think. Before I get started, I have, I did review the draft minutes, the draft conditions, the draft findings. I thought back on December 20th, it seems like a long time ago now, but it wasn't all that long. We did have a very thorough and robust conversation about this project. And just to remind the board, it is essentially as, as the chair read off a modest trail project with associated parking. That is really at this point, what this is all about, although Hickory Ridge is a much larger endeavor on the town's part that may include. Much larger elements. IE the future use of the clubhouse area, perhaps for another town building, perhaps for a fire station, perhaps for affordable housing. What the towns before you with tonight and in this application is really just some accessible trails and, and parking that will open up this beautiful area for hiking, biking, birdwatching and, and the like and make it as accessible as we can. And just to remind everybody, we do have some grant money pending. And our goal is to try to get the project done this summer. And in fact, we have bid out the project and, and our hope is to get bids in as early as this week and, and see where we are. So essentially after reading all of those materials and again, I will lean on Chris and Nate when it comes to any discussion of the proposed waivers. But I did just want to acknowledge that we are fully aware that we will need to go before the ZBA for a special permit for the bridge boardwalk and shade structures in the FPC. And our plan is to do that in the next, you know, word of six weeks as the ZBA schedule allows. I did want to acknowledge as part of the discussion, there was recommendations from the planning board that we increased the number of bike loops. And I think that's reflected on now in our plans. I think one of the major sticking points of our discussion last in December was. The parking plan as proposed. And I believe that you have all seen that we have revised that parking plan. We have acknowledged that the existing islands that are there already will, will remain. We have also asked the fire department and received a response from them. We have also asked the fire department to review the parking plan that was developed by staff. And they also visited the site. And they are. They came back with a very resounding confident. A acknowledgement that they can easily get emergency vehicles down in the eastern access. So that includes in speaking with assistant chief Olmstead. Staff confirmed that an ambulance or appropriate fire vehicle. Could easily get down that eastern access. The grades and slope. We're not. We're not a problem. And the turning radius was. Found to be adequate for their vehicles. So we confirmed that with the AFD. And then we also want to acknowledge that. As the project evolves in the future. We will need to come back through appropriate boards and committees, including the planning board, ZBA concom, et cetera. As the project. Evolves over time. But for now it is essentially a trail project with associated parking. And I think I'll stop there and. Look to Chris or Nate, if we wanted to go through any specific, any more specific. Details of the plan or the waivers. Okay, thanks. Take your questions. I do see Chris's hand. And I will comment that at least in the paper packet that I received, there was no revised. Parking plan, although I did see a parking plan in some of the. Email correspondence. That was forwarded to us. Parking plan was included in the email. It came after the packets were put together last Friday. So that's why we had to send it out in email. But I wanted to mention that the fire department also looked at the width of the driveway. And they felt that was adequate to get their equipment down into the parking lot and solve any problems that needed to be solved there. So I'm, I'm willing to go through. Conditions and findings. If you are ready for that or. Ask questions. Okay. Thanks, Chris. Janet. I thank you for getting that information from the fire department. I feel much better. Getting their advice and understanding that. I wonder if we might want to just put the parking plan up on the, if we can put it on the board to look at it. I looked at it very briefly. I just, and so I just to look at that, but the question I have, and I think it might have been answered at the last hearing. Is the design review board had made a recommendation about the handrails on the bridges. Having them sort of stick out 1 feet on each side. And the slopes, I think you took care of that, but I just, I just wanted to make sure that it was covered. We did. Thank you, Janet, for raising both those questions. And yes, that, that we'll be included on the design of the bridges. We acknowledged, yeah, that there, that would need to be an approach to each one of the bridges. That would achieve the, you know, the ADA status that we're looking for. And also, I'm not going to get the correct terminology, but extension of the handrails on those bridges. So that will be achieved in the, the construction process. I also wanted to just mention that. I believe there was some at our December 20th discussion. There was some reference to the western most access. So that would be closer to the old clubhouse. And essentially what we plan to do there since the eastern most access will become the, the trail, the trail access and parking. Our plan is to really. We want to, we want to. coordination off the, so according off the western entrance. So essentially that would be Ballard's with. With some sort of not gated, but it would probably be a cabled access only accessible by emergency vehicles, police and fire. So that we would not have people parking near or interfering with 20th, our hope and our goal is to bring that building down that building will not be rehabbed. We have done a complete assessment of the building. It is not salvageable. But we need to come up with funding to remove it and prepare the site for future uses. But in the meantime, we would work with the fire department on a simple cable to access bollards and cable there that the fire department and the police department could access. And that will also help with just safety around the building and also make it very clear that the public should park in this lot that you see before you on the screen. There was one other thing I wanted to mention. As you may know, the fire department has been using that building for training for months now. And they very much enjoy training in the building, but I don't want that to as much as that training is important for our fire department. We do want to bring that building down at some point in the near near future. So I'll stop there and one of one of our staff here can answer any questions you might have about the parking. Doug, can I talk a little bit about the parking lot? Sure, Janet. I went back to the parking lot and I did notice the vegetative islands, which I hadn't remembered. And then I also noticed what Christine Brestrup had pointed out about the parking lot being quite a bit down from the street. So there's not a need for some kind of vegetative barrier. And then the plan looks good to me. And I started to think about this parking lot more like the sweet Alice trail parking lot, which is super simple. And, you know, it's just like people pull in, you know, ride their bikes, stop, and then just go out and walk. So it's not, you know, so I think that I think this current plan is very good. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Janet. All right. Sounds like, or it looks like I'm not seeing any other hands of initial questions or comments. So, Chris, do you want to go through your findings and conditions and and, you know, I've got the list of the waivers that were recorded in the minutes from our meeting on the 20th. But that's, that's all I have. That's also what I have. Am I muted? No, you are not muted. Yeah, so hold on Chris, Bruce, your hand has gone up. Are you do you want to talk before Chris goes or not? Well, it's in conjunction really, it's just that with the plan that's up and I thought maybe I'd make this point while the plan was still up. The first waiver about to the steepness of the slope over five mentions in the waiver 30 feet, but the drawing here says five to 10 feet. So we might want to amend that waiver. I'm just, I'm into the waiver discussion, but of course, as I said, while the plans up, we might as well just verify that the waiver probably does need waiver number seven, probably item waiver number seven probably needs to be modified from 30 feet to five to 10 feet. Okay. Is that all? That's it for the moment. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Please proceed. Would you like me to read the waivers first and then go to the conditions? Yeah, I think that would be good. Okay. They've asked for we have asked for a waiver of the lighting plan because there's no plan for additional lighting here. We've asked for a waiver of the traffic impact statement because we don't believe that there's going to be enough traffic to have an impact. We've asked for a sign waiver from section 8.101 because signs in the residential zoning districts are normally limited to 12 square feet in area and here we will possibly exceed that. We've asked for a waiver from section 8.103 for signs over four feet in height again in the residential district because some of these signs will be higher than that. We've asked for a sign waiver from section 8.3 for more than one or two signs not exceeding a total of 12 square feet in the FPC zoning district. So those are the sign waivers that we've asked for. In terms of parking waivers, the first one is a parking request waiver from section 7.105 for lighting and 7.112 for screening. So the lighting is because we don't expect that this area, this conservation area will be used after dark and so there won't be a requirement for more lighting. And we've already talked about screening and Janet agrees that the screening that's there right now is adequate. Number 7 parking waiver from section 7.102. Again, we've talked about that the slope of the existing entry drive is over 5% for 5 feet. And so that we're asking for that waiver to be granted. There's another waiver of the parking requirement for section 7.106, which is the width of the two way drive. And I think Rob more went out and actually measured it. It's less than 18 feet. And what I've written here more like 12 to 13. I think. Again, we should substitute the actual numbers that Rob came up with, which is more like 14 feet 6 to 16 feet 6. So I will do that. And then it's actually a lot wider at the mouth of the driveway. I think it's 48 feet. Is that right? Right. Am I reading that correctly? And then there's a parking waiver from section 7.111 for landscaped islands, but I don't think we actually need that anymore since we have existing landscape islands. So we don't need that waiver. Do we need the screening waiver? I don't believe we need the screening waiver because there is a there is a mound. It sounds like the existing conditions effectively screen it. So, yes, we can take that off of number six here. Number six. Okay. Screening. Yes. There's a firm there. And there's also a lot of vegetation along the roadway edge. So that's it for the waivers. Does anyone have any objection to the waivers. So I wanted to ask about the signage and why would, I mean, Putting aside for the moment, whether we approve the waivers, we haven't seen the signs. We don't know how big they are. So would we put a condition on that they have, you guys have to return when you've got a plan for the signs. That's a good idea. Yeah, I would be fine. I feel like why should we even approve a waiver now just because there isn't any plan to refer to. And simply put a condition on that when you've got a sign plan, you come back and we'll either give you waivers or not. I think if you don't mind my saying it, we did have information about the signs and it was in the packet for December 20. I don't have access to that right now other than paper copies. Nate might be able to bring it up, but we did have images of Pam can bring it up. We did have images of those signs and they're similar to the ones that are at the suite Alice in terms of parking signs and also a sign that is, you know, meant to say what is this place and some of these signs are in here already. And I don't know which example kiosk and signs. Maybe you can try that. So the kiosk is, you know, something on its own that we're asking to have brought back, I believe, but this sign here on the post is six feet high. So that's taller than four feet high. And this sign here is actually 12 feet square, but we don't know if there is going to be another one. We see one, but if there's another one, that would exceed the 12 square feet that's allowed in the residential zoning district. So we want to be able to accommodate the height that's taller than four feet and an area of signs. That's more than 12 square feet limit. Okay. So would it be accurate to say that the plan for the signs is going to be consistent with what we're seeing on the screen? Yes, except we don't know. Do we know the locations of these signs? And we also have interpretive signs that are going to be put forward, and we haven't seen those yet. So I think it's a good idea to grant the waiver, but then also to make a condition that the applicant, the town needs to come back once they have their signs figured out and show where they are and what they look like. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we just, Doug, I'm fine with coming back. I will say on the plan, it does show the new plan that was submitted just recently. It does show the parking area identification sign out near West Pomeroy. And then the kiosk location as well. Closer to the trail. Okay. But we're fine with coming back. Okay, great. I'm not trying to make you come back. I just wasn't clear that we had enough information to know what was going on. It sounds like there is a fair amount of information here, but there may be more signs than we see on this plan. Okay, I see two hands. Bruce. I think your honor was before me. I was and then I went off, but then I realized. I'm glad to hear that we're having the conversation about signs. I do remember the conversation from December where we talked about how these signs weren't going to be consistent with the overall signage plan that I think we as a board. Kind of signed off on in concept for all the conservation areas in town. I remember having that conversation when we were discussing sweet Alice that this was going to be kind of the, the template look of signage in town. And I remember a conversation about the dog park and us wanting to get that signage and conformity with that standard that we had set. I'm satisfied with the kind of greeting sign and the kiosk sign. And then my one question was, I think I remember from December, Dave walking through the trail plan and de-marketing the locations for those signs as well. And so I'm feeling like, I mean, we could maybe check and confirm that those locations are on the map, but I'm satisfied with that and don't feel like I would need the town to come back. Okay. All right, Bruce. I'm satisfied with granting the waiver now for the, for the resident, the part of it that are in the residential zone. It seems to me very clear that this is not a residential zone and it also seems to be clear that these kind of uses really depend on need signs and we ought to be encouraging them. I would, for that reason, support the waiver now with a view to stop having any impediment to having the kind of interpretive signs and having them at the size where they can be seen and appreciated and so forth. And then having the condition that they come back and then we can be more specific if we choose, but I'm supportive of a waiver for this kind of project where signage is really quite important. Okay. Great. Thanks, Bruce. Janet. So, with the interpretive, sorry. With the interpretive signs be very similar to the ones that are on the trail near my house, Dave, I can't be blanking the bluebird tail. Are those the kind of interpretive signs because those are excellent. And they're not really that obtrusive. Do you know the signs I'm talking about? I do. I do. I was formulating an answer. Yeah, I mean, they would be similar. I appreciated Johanna's reminder about just about an overall sign plan and consistency and I think, you know, to be perfectly honest, I think the town has struggled with that. And, you know, I worked on the dog park and golf park and Kendrick Park and I think we're doing better than we were five, 10 years ago but I still think we need to do better. To Bruce's point, I think signage or signs, I don't like to use the word signage but signs are very important for wayfinding for place making. And for interpretation and education and I will tell you I can rattle off areas, conservation areas or recreation areas where we have empty kiosks and when I go there, my blood pressure goes up. So I think we need to do better and I think we're trying and I think if we have a standard like you saw earlier with some of those signs, I think that's a step in the right direction. To Janet's question. Yes, Janet, I think the interpretive signs, we are really planning. I think there, I think an area can have too many signs. I think there's something I think sign pollution really exists. So we're kind of going on the minimal track here out on Hickory to start off. If we add signs later that's that's well and good. But I think most of the signs to begin with will be simple kiosks at trail breaks and smaller signs. But I don't think we will have I think Bluebird Meadow has something on the order of five to seven signs. Something like that and they're low to the ground and those are wonderful we may go to that but I think initially these will be small kiosks two sided kiosks with trail maps and educational information. You know could be information exchange there to have you seen this bird or that animal wildlife sightings things like that. It is a big place it's it really kind of feels very much like Wentworth farm conservation area it's 150 acres and it feels bigger than that. When you get out there, the solar will make it a little smaller, I think to be honest, once it's fenced and up, but it's a big place so I think people will want some directional signage, but we don't want to put too many up. It's also very expensive. So, budgets will be a real consideration. Okay. Thank you, Janet and David, Chris. So, Nate might want to bring up the plan of the proposed work because it shows 11 sign locations. And Nate and I were talking about what these signs might look like and we were thinking that they could look like the writer's walk signs, which are very low key, and but really managed to, you know, have a lot of information on them. So, park and CDBG proposed grant work is the name of the plan that I'm looking at, but they probably knows or Pam knows which one it is. Was it in this packet, Chris, or 1220? Yes, it was in this packet. Yeah. Okay, hold on. I'm in the wrong packet. Here we go. There's no shortage of maps and plans. Can everybody see it? Little red squares with a person walking. And then sort of looking down and those little red squares represent the signs and on the loop at the, the west side or the left side, there are three signs. One at location one, one at location two, and then one at the first location that Pam pointed out to the right. Right. Yes, there. There's one. Yep. And then there's one up along what will be the connector at location four. There's going to be a sign there. And then along the north south trail. If you go all the way over to the right side where West Street is, there's going to be a sign at West Street. And one at the end of that drive. Number seven, there's going to be a sign there. And if you keep going down along the path, there's going to be a sign right there where someone is pointing. And number five also has a sign. And just up to the left from there is another sign. And then I think there are two more on the plan right there. And then just to the north. Yeah. So there are, I think I counted 11 all together. So there are 11 sign locations shown here and would there be a sign at the extreme north of this? Yeah. Yes. Yes, there will. That is a large kiosk location. So there will be a kiosk there. And there will be a kiosk at the parking lot where you get out of your car and you start onto the trail. Okay. And there's a star there. You can see that. Yeah. And to be honest, some of these, they may change slightly. I don't want to give the board the impression that these are the exact locations because honestly, you know, we will be navigating wetlands streams. We've looked at those things, but, you know, they may change slightly based on user patterns. If we find people, you know, not using a particular trail or segment of trail or getting lost at a particular spot, we might move a directional sign north or south or west. So I just want to put it out there that these may move slightly. I know in the upper right, you can see the small pond and there is a sign kind of interpreting that small pond way in the upper, upper central area there talking about, you know, what wildlife you might see there, reptiles and amphibians that might, you know, live there, those kinds of things. Another sign we planned was to talk about the solar project. What are the benefits of the solar projects? Why is this here? You know, some people are going to be surprised or some people may not be pleased. It's there a 26 acre solar project, but we'll talk about and we'll work with, with pure sky on some, some verbiage there to talk about the benefits of solar and what that project brings both the Amherst, but also to Springfield as the off taker. So, okay, great. All right, board members, other, other comments, other questions for Dave or Nate. And then if there aren't any comments, we will want to know how you feel about these waivers if there's any objection to the waivers that Chris read along with the numbers along with some of the numbers. All right, so I'm still not seeing any hands from the board. Why don't I see if anybody in the public wants to make a comment at this time. So, members of the public, this is your chance to comment or pose questions regarding this project at Hickory Ridge. I can speak for up to three minutes. I am not seeing any hands from the public. So we'll come back to the board. Any last comments before we start to try to make some motions or Chris, do you want to talk about conditions first. Yeah, why don't we read through the conditions and the conditions are listed in the minutes of December 20. So, I don't know if Pam can bring those up or Nate can. Pam looks like she's working on it. Where are they listed on that in the bottom of page eight. That's where they start in the minutes of December 20. Okay. And these minutes had or these conditions had been circulated to you. I think it was sort of last minute on the day of December 20th, but you had seen them before the meeting and then we talked about them at the meeting. There we go. Thanks Pam. So the number one condition. Down at the bottom of the page. Oh condition. I'm sorry I was stuck on waivers. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, there you go. So the project shall be built according to plans approved by the planning board on whatever date you approve them on the project shall be managed according to the management plan approved by the planning board on again, whatever date you approve this. Hours of operation shall be from dawn to dusk. To any approved site plans shall be submitted to the planning board for review and approval prior to the work taking place. The purpose of this submittal shall be for the planning board to approve the change and to determine that the changes are de minimis or significant enough to require a modification of the site plan review approval. Can you scroll down? Thanks. The proposed shade structure and sign design shall be submitted to the planning board for review and approval. After review by the design review board and prior to installation. And number six is the applicant shall obtain a special permit from the zoning board of appeals to locate structures, including shade structures, bridges and boardwalks within the FPC flood prone conservancy district under section 3.231 of the zoning bylaw. Prior to construction of these structures. And then we added a last condition during this discussion tonight, which was that the sign plan shall be brought back for review and approval. By the planning board prior to installation. Yeah, I mean, a number five already refers to sign designs. Number five. Yes. Number five. Yeah. Okay. So is that good enough? You don't need to have them. I mean, that, I mean. Should that be a separate. Well, let's see. Bruce, you've got your hand up you want to weigh in. It's I was going to move approval. But I'll move approval with the number five relating to the shade structures and say a new number six relating to the signs just for clarity so that the two items are separate and clear. So I would move approval of the application. Based on the documents submitted on the waivers and the conditions. As, as reviewed during the meeting. Okay, thank you, Bruce. You also want to say something about section 11.24. And just acknowledge that the project is the relevant criteria of section 11.24 as a finding. Yeah, we ought to do that. I think I would suggest option one. No, Bruce. Yes, I'll agree with you, Doug, and I'll add to the conditions and the findings. The project meets basically and the, and that the board finds and then the text of option one as part of the motion. All right. And close the public hearing. I'll do that too. Anybody go to the hamburger they want at this point. It always takes all of us to get through these. Okay. Okay, that's the motion. And then we're going to want to, we're going to list at least some of those waivers. We will list the waivers that we talked about. Which are. So we've got, we've got, we've down to eight waivers. Lighting plan, traffic impact. Three sign waivers. One parking waiver for section 7.105. The screening comes off. Parking waiver for 7102. For at least the first five feet. Parking waiver for 7106. For widths between 14, 6 and 16, 6. So it seems like we would want to grant the waivers. Impose the conditions. And close the hearing. And declare the finding. Yes. Yes. Bruce made that. Motion and Bruce has made that motion and now that we've hammered it into shape. Okay. Okay. I would like to second that motion. All right. Is that. A little clearer than mud for everybody to understand what we're doing. Mud seems an appropriate metaphor for this project. Okay. So we have a, we have a. Motion and it's been second. Second dead. Any members of the board want to comment or. Any questions or comments? If you have a question or amend that cumbersome motion. Okay. No, I don't see any hands. So in that case, we will do a roll call, I guess, to approve. To make all those actions that we've now. The Pam and Chris have. Consciously written down for us. Bruce, you can start. I approve. Thank you, Fred. I approve. Jesse. I approve. Janet. They approve. No, honey. I. Karen. I approve. And I'm an eye as well. It's unanimous again. We're having a unanimous evening. Okay. So Dave, thanks for your time. Thanks for coming back. Thank you. All the staff that contributed. Appreciate all of your time in your input and this will be, as I said, this will be kind of phase one and, and we will be back before you in the future. And as I said, also, we're hoping to have many of these trails done this summer and least phase one of the trail. So. We'll keep you posted and, and we'll keep you posted. We'll keep you posted. We'll keep you posted. We'll keep you posted. We'll keep you posted and other media sources for updates on that. So thank you very much. What, what's the schedule for the solar. The solar is, is going to be back on track. They just move forward on our next step with the conservation commission. So you will see a lot. We will see if you're out on Hickory. On the informal trails today and in the weeks and months ahead, they'll begin to clear the trees, which were felled some months ago, improve the road, the bridge access, and then they'll get going with the construction itself. So summer 24 is going to be a very busy summer at Hickory Ridge. You'll see a lot of activities. So we're going to have to manage the public. That will be one of our challenges is keeping everybody safe and also keeping some of the rare wildlife that makes its home out in Hickory safe as well. So a lot of traffic cops out there this summer, making sure people and turtles and other wildlife in the stream and in the Fort River and on the land are kept safe. So. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. So the time now is seven 20. Yes, we can go on to the next item on our agenda. Item four university drive potential housing overlay district. So. What's the worst for this one? What's that? Nate is the spokesperson for this one. It's the spokesperson. Okay. So Nate, do you want to introduce it? I know you printed some comments we did different members of the board had made and such in the packet. Sure. Thanks. Hi everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And there was some other comments. Janet Keller had sent some in and Suzanne and us Brad had. I'd send some, I think we're forwarded. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think Bruce had provided a nice summary. We could walk through that in a minute. You know, it's been a little while since we looked at this. You know, he had provided some ideas where we had some consensus and what needs to be worked on. And then geographic boundaries is another one. I think, you know, after the last time we spoke about this in person, you know, my thoughts are that we would consider this maybe like a housing and economic development overlay. And so, you know, kind of starting with kind of the bigger purpose, it seemed like a lot of planning board members wanted to also try to keep ground floor or, you know, a significant amount of space for non-residential use, as we call it in our mixed use building standard. And so, you know, I think, you know, just hearing that, you know, my thought would be that, you know, the title of the overlay would kind of convey that. And then the purpose and goals of it would also have that. So, you know, you know, to me, that's where the planning board seemed like it was heading, right? It's not like we're just going to kind of put apartments in here and really try to lose any, any, you know, commercial retail or other space. And so, you know, I think that's something that we could discuss in terms of the purpose. And then also kind of the types of housing, you know, you know, in Doug's comments, there was some concern in some of, you know, in some of the others about the size and scale of the buildings, the massing, what the streetscape looks like. And so, you know, I think that's also part of the discussion. It kind of, to me, it's, you know, I just want to make sure we work down to that level first. So, you know, what I, what I like to see is that that, you know, service drive on the West side, like I said, becomes a pedestrian corridor. We keep the street trees and the setbacks respond to the conditions along university drive in an amity or whatever, you know, what other streets may be involved. And so that the West side setback might be, you know, 15 or 20 feet, whatever it takes to have that, you know, the street trees in the corridor. And then on the East side, it might be a different setback. So, you know, it's really going to be something where, you know, it, the dimensional standards or certain things might be kind of qualified based on their location in the, in the overlay. So it could be that, you know, the East side has some things that are different than the West side, depending on, you know, setbacks or character of that. You know, and so I think that's, that'll be important. You know, I will say that, you know, this is to try to encourage development down here. Susanna had mentioned in her letter that, you know, we could try to, you know, we'd always said we'd like to present this to you mass. I don't, you know, I don't think that this is like a one-for-one bargaining chip, but I think that, you know, the UTAC had identified this area as a place for looking at redevelopment and some other areas close to campus. And I think this is something that we could show them and say, you know, you know, I don't think we can ink a partnership or an agreement, but you know, I think we could encourage them. I think looking at pedestrian access up to the northern party university drive into campus is important, biking. And so, you know, my thought is if this becomes an area where there is some development and, you know, we can really work on that connection to the university. Yeah. And so I don't know if we would want to, if we want to just take comments from the board dog, or if you want to, I could pull up a map or something, you know, spend a little bit. Well, you know, the comments that I sent to you and Chris were really intended to sort of help inform you as you drafted something more, more definitive for the board to react to. So I guess my first question is, is that a realistic expectation on my part that you would have time to, to in fact draft something? Yeah. Or are we going to be relying on one or more board members to essentially go away and do something and then come back? Yeah, I mean, I think that after this meeting we would, we could start putting more, you know, pen to paper. I think, you know, I feel like there hasn't been enough of a consensus, you know, I guess kind of around the purpose and goals and other things to really start doing that. You know, I feel like in general, the board seem like, yeah, this is a place for redevelopment, but really what is, what is the goal goals of that? You know, you know, there are certain styles of housing or types of housing or density, we're looking for. And so I think, yeah, I mean, I just, I mean, I think having that kind of conversation tonight will help us. Okay. All right. All right. Great. So Janet, you've got your hand up. So I agree with Nate that we need to talk about it more and get sort of clear on the goals and the concepts and the different ideas. And then I, it might be good to go through Bruce's, you know, summary of compilation and then maybe talk about next steps, which, you know, you know, putting pen to paper for what and so I have some ideas of next steps that we could do, but it makes more sense to me to talk about it towards the end. Okay. I talked about this whole project with a relative that I was with over the holidays, who's a planner in Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. And I described university drive and a lot of the potential. And she alerted me. She said, first of all, I would be careful of taking of making too many regulations such as requiring the first floor of the ground floor to be retail and commercial. She said, unless you're ready to have a lot of empty spaces, because in her experience, she said, and we've seen that. That is just a hard sell right now. And if you leave it open, it's much better. So she said, what you want to do is leave this to the designers to make a streetscape that's very welcoming and open and attractive and kind of let the market determine what really goes in there. For example, it's much better to have maybe a dentist or a real estate broker or someone with an office use it that might not qualify for something. So to be careful about the regulations. And then the other thing that she said is, so why are you limiting it to? Did we say we were, we were been talking about five, potentially five stories. And I said, well, that's kind of an aesthetic thing, but she said this is also something that the markets would play a role in. So they were just things that kind of opened my mind to what we were discussing are all of our requirements. We should really be careful, I think, in what we do. And yeah, I agree. Let's go through what we have consensus of and go from there. Okay. All right. Anybody else want to make any comments before we walk through Bruce's document from December 4th, I believe. Okay. Nate, do you want to take the lead or? Sure. Yeah. Let me just set the chair by screen. You know, a good story about Eugene Oregon, like years, years ago, when I was in high school, look, I was looking at driving across country and a friend who had done it years before and his Alice, you know, circle different places and Eugene he highlighted and he said really good pot. I'm almost like, oh, oh, okay. I'm like, I guess, you know, that's what he was. He highlighted every place across the country that had. Good marijuana. This is pretty funny. Is that visible for everyone? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so. Yeah, I think someone else. Well, I think the number of stories is really important. I just wanted to say, you know, I had said less than five. You said more than five. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some people have said five. And so I've been that goes to the density. And so. You know, here's Bruce's. She and it seemed like consensus was five stories, but I think that's maybe something we would revisit. I, I. Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't know. When I drive around and look at what is five stories now, it's a pretty tall building. And so I think that's something we could discuss. And I can, you know, this is a word document. So I could type as we need to. So I mean, number one is a preference for mixed use. You know, specifically requiring commercial retail on the first floor. And so we don't have a. You know, it's not, you know, I don't know if it's like all of the first floor or it's only mixed use. You know, at one point we had said. Could. Mix use buildings be site plan review and apartments be special permit. So it kind of incentivizes mixed use. I think in Amherst, the market is so heavily weighted to housing that. If we said, you know, we'll let the market decide. I think we would see just. A lot of apartments and not a lot of anything else. So it's. I understand what you're. You know, what, what you're saying is just, it's hard to. You know, to me, the market, the markets a little different unique in each spot. I think it'd be hard to say, Oh, let's just figure it out. I'm not sure we'd see a lot of mixed use otherwise. I think some developers might, right? I think some might, some owners might, but others might not. Yeah. I know in my comments, I've said, maybe just limited to 30 foot 30 feet depth from the front facade. But I see four sets of hands here. So why don't we. That looks like a lot of comment on this car in your first. I'm sorry. I'm. I left my hand up. Okay, Janet. So I, you know, I sort of envision this as 4 stories. I think 5 stories kind of, we kind of lose the vibe of Amherst and the, you know, the buildings that are most. Disliked in town are these kind of very big bulky 5 story buildings. And. You know, so. You know, I, in my mind, I thought if there's a 5th story. There has to be some extra benefit, right? So there has to be something. Maybe we require them to be condos to create more like owned housing, not just always rental housing. Maybe we require some community amenity. On the 1st, sort of like community space or build, you know, a park or some, you know, outside space that everybody can use. And then I had this, like, this. You know, law school thing in my head of slippery slope. So when I saw, when I saw 100 units put apartment, I thought, well, if you're allowing it here, why wouldn't you allow it in other parts of town? If you have, if you, you know, say 5 stories. On university drive or 6 or 7 or 10. Why wouldn't it be everywhere else? And so I was very conscious of. Like, if we, I mean, I would stick with the mixed use building, which allows you to do as many units as you want. But the idea is, you know, you're sort of building a shopping living area. People can walk to stores. They can. There's a park. They can get to UMass, which is our largest employer. They can jump on a bus to Northampton and go work there. So I think this idea of heights and, you know, the density. Is just a hot, really difficult issue in our town. Which is kind of why later I'm going to, my suggestion for next steps is like, let's take that to stakeholders. And see, like, we have a vision. We have questions about heights and density. What do you guys think kind of thing, but I do think. You know, it's like. It does seem like, and, you know, mixed use commercial could be a preschool on the 1st floor. Like I keep on thinking, I'm like, I'm obsessed with the North. Part of Massab in Cambridge, because I have been driving it for, I don't know how many years, 40 years now. And over time you see, like, there's a beer store. There's several preschools. There's an Indian clothes store. There's lots of different food stuff. And they're all small. They're all very, you know, easy. They're not very big buildings, usually, and people, you know, throng them and they seem to thrive. So I do think the heights issue is really tough. All right. It needs to be sort of a community decision. So, all right. Thanks, Janet. Jesse. I mostly agree with what Janet said. A couple of comments and one question really come on the height. At one point we had talked about five stories, but maybe requiring not five stories in the facade, I think that would be a good idea. I think that would be a good idea. I think that would be a good idea. I think that would be a good idea after some number of stories as possibility. So that it's not just a total five-story front. I think I also agree with the last thing Nate said about. If we let the market entirely decide it would be largely. Apartments and not commercial. And to me, that's a. The first floor. So I feel like if we don't try and encourage that now, it's not going to come back as mixed use. Without significant efforts at that point. And is it better to be not empty? I'm not sure. And my question relates to the buildings in town. What was the requirement there? And we talked. In the past about. How the protocol spot stayed empty for X number of years. The other. Was it. Prudentials in there is not. Really attractive commercial space. But I don't know what the requirement was on those buildings. Maybe one of you can educate me on that. Was, was that commercial space. Mandated by. Sony. Was. Yeah. You know, I don't know about Kendrick, but all of three of those buildings. Were classified as mixed use buildings. So there had to be some commercial space in them. And I think the most recent building that's just getting finished is part was. Permitted under our current zoning, which required a. Something like 30% of the first floor area to be. Commercial or to be non-residential. And I don't actually know about the previous two buildings, but Chris, you've got your hand up. Maybe you can remember. For one East pleasant and Kendrick play. There wasn't any requirement. It was just some of the building needed to be non-residential. And so in some cases, we ended up with very small. Spaces. Not, not in those buildings along. North pleasant street or East pleasant street, but in other parts of town, we ended up with, you know, a space of 200 square feet being considered the mixed use. So now we have. Criteria in place. It is 30% of the first floor. So that's, you know, any building that's coming forward now needs to adhere to that unless we change that for this overlays zoning district. Okay. If I can make one last comment on that. And I think Nate mentioned this at the last time we spoke on this project was ways to encourage. Potential for smaller commercial spaces. So like you mentioned, acquiring doors every so often in the first floor and stuff like that. I'm really in favor of that. Trying to not let it be one big. Commercial space. Yeah, maybe a door every third way as we can do that. Yeah. Okay. Great. First, Bruce, and then Johanna. That I mean, I initially put my hand up as. Nate started reading this list and then commenting immediately. And then of course, then everybody's hands went up and. And I, the reason that I wrote this was because I thought we could. Avoid having to have the whole bloody discussion all over again. And so I was immediately quite frustrated because I thought the thing would be to, to what extent do we agree that these items are. Consensus we could, we could, we could take comments. Peely on the basis of whether we agree with them because the intent was to continue to discuss stuff that we hadn't got to previously. My fear was being that we'll just go through the items of apparent consensus and by the time we get to nine o'clock, we'll be right back where we started from. So that was what I put my hand up. But I guess I should ask. Is, is, is, is my concern. Everybody else is concerned because if it isn't, then my concern doesn't matter. Well, I mean, I can say that I hoped we'd get farther than this document tonight. Yeah. So sure. I mean, you know, I, it felt like we were pretty much in consensus with the things that you talked about. Well, let me just say the one, the other thing that I thought that I could put my hand up for if it wasn't to, to just to make sure we, we were not stepping into a rabbit hole. We didn't want to step in. And so it seems like it's, it's not a rabbit hole and it's okay. So therefore continuing in the, in the vein. I think it's worth mentioning again, because it was mentioned last time. There's a reason for five stories. And it relates to our mass building code. And so this is not an arbitrary thing. The first floors are typically built for a different use, which we're talking about mandating, which would be a retail commercial of some kind of use. There will be a concrete slab separating that from the upper stories, which if you build then the cheaper wood frame construction, you can build, I think three stories and, and if you use sprinkler systems, then you can get the fourth above the first, that adds to five. There's a pretty sound logic that says not just that we like five, but that the way the building codes are structured. That's, there's a strong economic driver to that number in conjunction with a requirement for a commercial use on the first floor. Let's keep that in mind. You get more stories out of your elevator. You do too. And you're not high enough that you're a high rise building, which has a new set of requirements. And, and if we do have five, as has been mentioned, the, the, the, the top floor could be set back. And Janet and I had a conversation earlier in the day, I think, where we were talking about, about what would be in the latter part, you know, after, after the stuff we haven't consensed on, which was in, in return for offering the owners of these parcels, this kind of up zoning, which clearly increases the developable potential of their lots, which clearly is an economic benefit to them. What can we get back? And one of the things that we thought, or I thought, or Janet thought might be a claw, claw back. That's not the word, but a quid pro quo was that the, that we might want to have a mix of for sale units and rental units. It's possible that we could ask for that. And if we were to ask for that, then stepping back, the top floor might be a good way of doing that because the step back would create open terrace space, which is probably going to create a higher, particularly with elevators, a higher cost, a higher value apartment or residential products or products which would be more likely to perhaps be sold. So this feels like there could be a synergy here around the five stories and the requirements, the design guideline, a design guideline type requirements that the top of story in the interest of street scape scale be set back. And as I said, providing opportunities for another requirement that we might ask as a quid pro quo for allowing this up zoning. Okay. Thanks, Bruce. I mean, even I mean, I guess we don't typically get into ownership and mixed, mixed ownership in an apartment building. I mean, as a, as a consumer or as somebody who could buy a condo, I guess I'd be a little bit leery of, you know, being a tiny little percentage of a big apartment building that had predominantly one owner. I guess it's also possible that that one owner could just buy all the condos and rent them out. In which case you haven't solved your, or advanced your objective. I don't know whether that is an objective. I'm just saying that we in consideration of things that we want. And it might be the question was, is the town threatened with an oversupply of, or a higher fraction of rental accommodations than it feels appropriate. That's a question. I don't know the answer to that, but it's possibly a question that we should ask. And depending on the answer, we might be looking for ways in which we can stimulate ownership and condominium type ownerships in these structures. That's all. Okay. All right. And, and I assume one of the objectives is to build more housing in town. Oh, yes, that's pretty clearly the objective. Okay. Janet. So, you know, the two items on, on this list, I agree with, with Bruce in terms of, I agree with almost all of them. We hash it. Except that the two items were me were question of heights. And if, you know, if it's a, you know, so. Do we, do we want to be there at higher? Do we want to be higher? The other one that really, I think I'd love to pull off the consensus list. And it could be a separate thing is the parking. Like. I would not move into a building where there was a half parking space for me. And so if you want to encourage working people that don't work at UMass or family housing. And there's not enough places to park a car. And I don't know anybody. I know, you know, very few people who don't, who have families. Who don't have cars and often multiple cars. So I think, I don't feel like the parking necessarily has to be at the building, but there has to be parking. Enough parking in the area, not just for commercial use, but also for people to use. And so I think, you know, if we could pull the, like how much parking is needed, maybe off the consensus list. And this is actually something we could talk to UMass about is, you know, maybe they have space for parking. You know, during the, during, you know, like down by their what do you call it their stadium, which is almost always empty, you know, or maybe they, you know, they would be their, you know, plans for parking lot, if they're planning to develop university drive, we might say to a developer, you don't have to put parking on site, but you have to contribute to a, like a municipal parking fund and will, you know, for building a parking garage in that area. Maybe there's a deal to cut with big Y who is not using your spaces at night. But I do think that, you know, half a car per apartment, which could be two or three bedroom is going to knock out most families. And so if we're trying to find housing where people could rent or buy and live, I think we just have to accept that there's at least one car per household. Maybe they don't always have to use it, but I find it really difficult to believe that many families can really function in the valley unless they just want to live along a bus line and, you know, their doctors and hospital and everything has to be there. Okay. Well, this is a minimum. So, you know, the developer could recognize that people need more parking and propose some to Karen. Yeah, basically, I agree with Bruce and Janet on this too. And I didn't want to necessarily start all over again. I do like the idea of mixed use. I do like the idea of encouraging housing for multiple kind of constituents, students, as well as as Susanna Muskrat said in her letter, there's a real need for people that want to live here to be able to perhaps buy. This is new to me, but you know, I actually, we have an apartment in Berlin, which is exactly like that. It's owned by people, but the ground floor is commercial. And just about the whole city where the commercial things are that way. The apartments above them are not just rental, they're owned and it makes for an incentive of having really a mixed group of people that live there. So, and the fact that you would then maybe have it be a place which has a kind of open terrace in the front would also perhaps from a design point of view, really help to make this an attractive thing. So yes, I didn't want to revisit that, but I thought it was certainly worth zeroing in that the height thing is very important. Okay. Thanks, Karen. Nate. Yeah. You know, I think it's important to talk about some of these. I agree. I was hoping to move a little bit along. You know, and I was going to mention in terms of parking. I mean, ideally I would have no parking requirement here. And you let the developer decide whatever they want to, you know, someone's a developer is not going to build a hundred unit building and have no parking if they think their tenants want parking or the occupants want parking. And so, you know, to me, this minimum is, you know, a nod to having some parking, but ideally it'd be no, I'd have no requirement. I think, you know, again, going back to the market and Amherst, you know, does that mean then it becomes, you know, students because they don't have cars. And so, you know, there's different ways to try to back, you know, back into this, but you know, we have other requirements that we could have other requirements in terms of open space or amenities or, you know, different things. And so, you know, I think as a minimum requirement, I think it's fine. I mean, often now in the zoning, we allow for a waiver if, you know, if an applicant can justify it. I mean, so I could go down this list. I do think, you know, mixed use is important. I guess the question really is how much do we require of, you know, for that, you know, and is that something we go beyond, you know, we can go to the next level here. So we agree mixed use is important. We, you know, we want to build some taller buildings. And then, you know, really, which we can start to look at is say items down down here, because, you know, we'll say that for this part of town, whether or not it's three or five or six stories, whatever it is, I think there's some ability to have density here and have it work. I think we have a pretty wide streetscape. We can have some wide setbacks. And I think height can be, can be managed here, you know, more strategically than another part of town or other village centers. And so, you know, if we are really talking about trying to have housing opportunity, you know, this area is going to identify by a few different studies as a place where we could have quite a bit of density. And so I, you know, I wouldn't want to miss that opportunity with a thought that other parts of town then could be examined for, you know, different types of housing. And so, you know, I think that's a, this is one piece in a larger kind of solution. Okay. Thanks. Thanks, Nate. Karen, your hand is still up. No. So I was going to just jump in. So items to, for consensus, I think the boundary is one we could talk about, you know, here, here, you know, I just asked that, you know, specific fraction of the first floor designated as commercial or retail. A cap or no cap on the number of apartment units. And then, you know, some subsidy or something for, to incentivize non residential space. And in the packet, I had shown a new boundary eliminating the property north of Amity. There's just one. It was originally included because it is actually his own BL. So it's a, you know, just to be consistent with that. And then I, you know, I removed Hawkins Meadow. And the, and the auto repair shop, but I kept in the properties around the intersection. And so, you know, I think, I think that is something we can continue to discuss. Is the boundary. Yeah. It looks, looks, looks like it reflects some of the comments from last time. Right. And then we've, well, I mean, I had a comment that I mentioned earlier about the fraction. Of the first floor. You know, I, I proposed a cap on the number of apartment units just to try to keep the buildings from getting too big. And to try to have multiple buildings that probably, you know, we'll give you a variety of facade treatments and materials so that you, you know, you don't end up with some of those really long facades like some of the images that you showed for us last fall. And then I'm not quite sure I understand your rental subsidy. You know, I mean, it seemed like if one developer builds the building and it's got commercial space on the first floor and they know it's going to be vacant for a while, or that it's, that the market won't pay them the full cost of building it. So I'm not quite sure. The subsidy is going to be kind of built into their economic models. Kind of what I'm. What I assume. And so I'm not quite sure how. Something else would work. Nate. I actually don't understand number four. Why don't you. Raise your hand. Sorry. Yeah, I was going to defer to Bruce. I think, you know, the point where I talked about, you know, are there ways to. Um, you know, have say smaller commercial spaces as opposed to, if we were ever, if we require a percentage with someone just have a huge, you know, vacuous space that they don't really care about feeling exactly as you said, Doug, because they're subsidizing it through the residential component. And so. You know, are there ways to. And try to encourage different types of, you know, first floor use. And so. You know, I haven't. I'll say I haven't researched this a lot. Um, you know, with that a little bit, I think it's really difficult. But I think that's really what this is talking about is how do we. You know, try to get the spaces we might want. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have Bruce, you're next. Yes, I, I put this in because I think I say that numbers may have. I realized at the time that it was difficult to imagine how this would work. And of course, one of the reasons why isn't in the consensus bunch is because it wasn't broadly supported or perhaps even understood. But I think I agree with you, Doug, and that this is something that would be too difficult to put into any regulatory language. So we should, and as you said, it may well be taken care of by the marketplace anyway. So. Well, you could, you could, you could try to guide the architecture and require a public entry door every, you know, 25 or 30 feet so that they can come back and subdivide when they finally get desperate enough to split it up and have small. Small enterprises. Yes. Space. I think that's a good way of saying it. The, the, the, the, the number four is it stands here talks about requiring some form of rental subsidies. That's the part that I think our, our regulatory structures are too blunt to be able to do that. And I think if we try the bluntness turns into it will be unwieldy and I, so I would suggest that we don't pursue this other than what Nate has been typing below about the making sure it's possible to subdivide the, the, the ground floor structures. That's a good idea. I think. All right. Thanks Bruce. Janet you're on. I think I understand the before a little better. I would, in terms of the overlay boundary, I wouldn't take any residential homes. And so, you know, university, the new university drives south part of it extends into what is now a commercial and a mixed use building. So that makes sense to include it, although I, I don't think they're going to want to redevelop it to hire. I wouldn't go across the street and take those homes. I think, you know, we should just leave the RN alone and just focus on, you know, the bulk of the thing. I just, you know, I think, you know, pushing out the people is going to be upsetting to people living along that street. I'm sure they all want to come and shop there, but I'm not sure that they're going to want to see their homes taken over or, you know, people along snail street will be, you know, you know, they've already, they're next to a quiet veterinary. They're next to a university drive south. They can get their eyes checked. They can walk across the street if they're lucky and go shop, but I don't think they want to see that all come at them. And maybe they do. And if we do some stakeholder meetings, people will be crying for that. But I just think let's leave the RN alone and not take any residential houses and really just focus on these open lots. The other suggestion I have, if we go back to that list of, I lost my list on my desk, is just two pieces of information. When we pick the 30% of mixed use for commercial space on the first floor for mixed use, that was the lowest percentage of any town that we looked at. And so we should think maybe it could be bigger. And then I think, I can't remember who rejected this. I can't remember if it was town council or CRC or the old planning board. I think it was the town council. They didn't want to allow apartment buildings in the downtown because they were afraid that people would just build apartments and we'd lose that kind of commercial retail kind of lively street and shopping. So I don't, I think, you know, we should just stay with mixed use. It can let you put as many units as you want in the building. But we need to keep that kind of vital, you know, kind of urban-ish feeling or, you know, this is a street that you can do a lot of things at. So I would say just get no apartment buildings allowed. And then if you do, and you're allowing 100 units, there's a cap on everywhere else in town of 24 units. And so again, I think people were saying, well, why can't we do that here? And anyway, that's it. All right. It's a lot. I guess I'll just say I disagree with you about the parcel south of route nine. And, you know, in terms of consistency with other parts of town, we can be inconsistent between different parts of town. It's not, you know, they're geographically different. They have different roadway systems. They're different proximities. So I wouldn't be constrained by that. Jesse and then Nate. Thanks. Two different topics. One. Janet touched on on the boundary. You just comment on also Doug. I think I agree more with Janet that I don't see the need right now to include the residential houses out of there already. I think the. The boundary is pretty clean just on the north side of. North Hampton road. I did want to comment on the commercial use. Can we go back to that? Let's get back up one night to the, to the text. So, so I totally appreciate what Bruce was saying about the difficulty in trying to encourage different types of commercial. Space, but I think anything we think could work. We should do very much in favor of. Of really encouraging that mixed. Use first floor. And I'm thinking more about. You know, 10 years from now when the demographic might be different, according to all analysis, then. In three or three to five years when they get filled, assuming these get built. Okay. Thanks, Jesse. Nate. Yeah. Sorry, I was just typing. I think the. I'll go back again. The, you know, the residential pieces. I think this is where. You know, you know, you know, tailoring setbacks or dimensional standards to different pieces of the overlay could work. So if we're, you know, if we want to keep a buffer here, you know, we could have different side or rear setbacks and really encourage development along the street and all on the corner here. And so. You know, that's, that's the thought. You know, to include these, you know, you know, you know, there's wetlands and possible some other things here. So there could be limited development, but really, you know, we could have some setbacks or dimensional standards to encourage development along the street there. And then in terms of. Yeah, the apartments, I think, Doug, you know, you are capping the number of units to me is, is tricky because you could have, you know, an apartment building with. A hundred studios or an apartment building with, you know, three and four bedroom units. And so the. The number of beds or the actual, you know, the occupancy is drastically different. And it, you know, you had mentioned it. And I think we could say it that. And if we're really, if we want to regulate facade length, maybe we just say it that, you know, a facade over 80 feet in length needs to have a step back of 10 or 15 feet or a break in something. And that has to be clear to the sky or have a, you know, some, I think there's probably ways we could. You know, do that. I, you know, I think that trying to cap units is really interesting. I feel like they're, you know, the market changes. So the cap, you know, that it's really the number of beds can, can vary. But I understand what you're saying. I don't, no one liked the store's images where, you know, it was just a wall of five stories. And, you know, you could tell that it was really all maybe, you know, concurrent development. And there wasn't really any, any relief in the architecture. And so, you know, it is different when you have one building with some open space and then another building and it, you know, as opposed to a, you know, something that is just really reads as a wall. And so, you know, yeah, and I think, you know, we're working with Odson and Flinker. Hopefully that will become a little bit more active in February. You know, you know, we're asking them to look at things like that. You know, I think we could have a few of the kind of standards here if they sort of move faster and then apply what, what they come up with, you know, here as well. And so, but I, yeah, I mean, I don't want to put this out there and have, you know, some way that we're, you know, we're, we're missing something like all of a sudden we have a 200 foot long building that's just really massive. All right. Okay. Yeah, Hannah. All right. Thank you. I'm really appreciating tonight's discussion. And I had a couple of thoughts. The first is that we likely won't get to consensus on all these provisions. And so there's part of me that is interested in starting to figure out what are the things that the majority of us agree on. And maybe it makes sense to chunk it out and let's see if we can, you know, get to a larger proposal. And then, you know, we'll have an up or down vote on that. And then on, and I think most of the, I think, I appreciated what Bruce put together as like proposed consensus things. I think there are still some things there that probably need to move back into the discussion topic. But on one of the things that's currently in the discussion topic, I wanted to address was the boundary and I spoke to this in our last meeting. But the way I see it coming back to our overall goal, we want to add housing and increase vitality in this part of town. And the smaller we make it, the fewer opportunities we create to do that. And so I would be interested in keeping the scope of, like opportunity bigger. I see intersections as really like important nodes. And when I look at, in particular, the properties that are kind of closest to town, there are, I believe two, and I'm talking about route nine, Nate, I don't know if you can bring up the map, but there are, there are two houses, they're not in great shape. And then there's a property right next to the bike path. And to me, that's just like, I just see tremendous opportunities to accomplish our goals of creating more housing and doing it in a way that minimizes driving by leveraging the bike path. And I would just, I just think it's a shame if we leave that on the table. Okay. So, Johanna, are those properties within the boundary now or outside of it? As drawn there in the boundary. So there are those on the lower part of the drawing, the two purple. Right by Snell and university. Yeah. So she's talking about these three right here. Yeah. That's visible. Okay. Good. Thanks. I think we should have a little bit of a chat. Maybe questions like. The boundary that we should just. Have a straw straw poll on right now. And see where people are at. And then Nate knows how to proceed. I'm glad. Janet, you're next. No, I'm Bruce has dropped out of the meeting and can't get back in. He just called me. Oh, I'm sorry. I missed what you said. So. There he is. Looks like he's coming back. He said he tried all the links that didn't work. Here he is. Okay. I'm back. I don't know what happened, but I haven't been here for 10 minutes. Okay. Okay. Don't worry. Let's come back. We'll forget about it. I guess you can watch the video. I could be. Well, let's see the time is. 10 after eight. So if you start watching about. 90 minutes in, that's be about the point where you. Cut out. All right. Let's see. I see three more hands here. It is 10, almost 10 after eight. So if we want to take a break, we can do that whenever people are ready. I realized Bruce just took a break. So. Jesse, you are next. Thanks. Thank you. Just one more thought about this boundary and that corner spot. And Nate, I totally appreciate what Nate said about. The possibility for sort of gateway. Entering. Amherst. And I think that's actually the objection of having. So when I think about town currently. And if you drive up. The hell to enter Amherst. At the main intersection. Versus. Entering Amherst from the north or from UMass. Coming in from UMass versus. Coming in from. And I would like to keep the character of coming in from North Hampton. Meaning it's a lower scale. Smaller town the way. The planning board and the town has kept the town. Until these bigger buildings. And I would not be in favor of having. Okay. You enter Amherst. And then we have an every corner. And then we have a space type building. As what. Your first impression of town is. And I kind of like that. This potential new zone is. Is not a direct. Required experience as you come into town. It's sort of tucked away. Off North Hampton road. And you're going there with intention. So I just wanted to share that. That thought on. Janet and then Chris so just I'm glad you said that because when I drive through Hadley and route nine, I find it unbelievably depressing. And it's just all this trip development. It reminds me of everything I left behind in Long Island. And then when I hit that intersection and go up the hill, I start feeling good. And I, you know, and I, it's like, it's just, you hit your, you're back in New England. It's a beautiful town and it just, that's where I start to enjoy, you know, getting off or part. I enjoy route nine. So I do think it's kind of. You know, to fill that up with other development is just extending that kind of strip zone. I would love to think it's beautiful. It's a beautiful new building going in. I just haven't seen much of that that is appealing to me. So I would like to keep that feeling. I think it's, it says, like, you're an Amherst, even though you kind of have been an Amherst for a while. The other thing I worry about in that intersection is, is traffic. That's like a really crummy intersection to make a left hand turn. Like, if you ever going to put in a very small rotary, that would be it. And I think that putting, you know, people pulling in and out on the other side of the road and then people pulling into the, the, the medical area. It's just going to become another area of congestion congestion and cars pulling in and out at every spot, which when you're on route nine, you really have enough of, you know, enough of that. And so I would say, just leave that there for now, maybe add it later. If you had some great design standards and the buildings, you know, get you a feeling like, oh, we're in New England again, not in some strip development in anywhere, USA. All right. Thanks, Janet. Chris. I was strangely enough going to say exactly what Jesse and Janet just said. I really appreciate driving along route nine, coming to that intersection, and then driving up the hill and having it be a starkly different experience. You know, whatever happens to those little houses, I don't know, in the future, but I think it's really, it's a lovely way of entering Amherst, even though those buildings aren't all kept up as well as they could be. And, you know, providing a place where you can have density and five-story buildings, a long university drive, I think, is a great idea, but trying to at least, you know, for the next little while, preserving that entry into Amherst is really something that a lot of people appreciate. That's okay. All right. Thanks, Chris. I'm not seeing any more hands at the moment. Shall we take a five-minute break? Seeing a few heads nod. Okay. So the time, at least on my clock is 8.12. Yeah, let's come back at 8.17. Please mute and turn off your camera while you're away. All right, my clock says 8.17. If anybody's behind the black screens wants to turn their camera back on, all right, but you still need Fred and Nate. I'm here. I'm just eating my ice cream. I'll be a moment. Well, I'm listening. All right. Yeah, stop making me hungry for ice cream. I'll show my screen, Doug, just so that Nate doesn't think you're waiting for me, rather than me. And then I'll go back to eating my ice cream when Nate arrives. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Well, I would like to wait for Nate to come back. Chris, would it make sense for us to tick off a couple of our later agenda items before Nate comes back? You are muted. All right, I said short that he may be dealing with some family thing. Okay. For those to next week, because we're going to meet again in a week, right? Yes, we are. Yeah, that's true. Well, it shouldn't take long. I mean, do we have any old business that's not reasonably anticipated? Old business. No, old business. Do we have any new business that's not anticipated? No, new business. Do we have any form A and R subdivision applications? No, no. About ZBA applications. I have nothing new to share. Okay. Any SPP, SPR, and SUB applications? There are things coming in, but we haven't received them yet. So we don't like to talk about them until we actually receive them. All right. Okay. All right. But I will tell you that the town council is going to be going back and looking at Amherst Hills. So this is in a matter of a subdivision. Amherst Hills has finally been finished and they are coming to have the town accept their roads. And so town council will be considering that on Monday night. And we believe that town council will be referring that acceptance to the planning board, which has a role in accepting roadways. So the planning board will be needing to talk about this at one of its upcoming meetings. And you have 45 days from the referral to make a recommendation to town council as to whether you think that the roadways should be accepted or not. And so I just wanted to make that announcement. We also have a request from the Meadows, from the residents of the Meadows, but that is not in as clear a situation. So there will be more to be said about that. But for now, I think Amherst Hills is in good shape. Okay. All right. Great. So we ticked off maybe five items there. Nate, welcome back. We jumped ahead and just went through a few of the routine items in our agenda while you were away. So do you want to bring up or should we bring up Bruce's list again? Or I mean, we haven't even gotten to the items that were yet to be discussed. I know I threw out some dimensions and things in my email to you, but we really haven't had a conversation about most of them. Yeah. I guess we could talk about the boundary. I think a little bit more. It sounds like there's some discussion there. You know, I think the map was hard to read. I was just going to mention that those residential properties are in the RN zoning district. And, you know, I agree that there is some point where Route 9 transitions. It seems like at that intersection where it becomes more residential or a different scale and character as you're coming up the hill. You know, is it okay though that that corner could be something different? Or, you know, if this was part of the overlay, you know, we could incentivize, say, townhouses or something other than apartments, right, something that's not sale out in RN at some density. And so it could be that, you know, we get kind of specific in this area and we, you know, we could do something. We could, you know, we could, I don't want to say we can do whatever we want, but we could, you know, try to incentivize things here that instead of a five story building, right, we could have like a sub area of this overlay. So I think that's, you know, I think the boundaries important. I had the property map pulled up, you know, the other area is now one university drive south. So, you know, it's in the PRP zone. I mean, is it worth it to keep it in the overlay? It's already been recently developed. There's the five college realtors across the street. That's, you know, it's in a residential building, but it's used as an office space. And then there's, you know, the ginger garden there. So, you know, I think the zoning, I will say that the zoning we're trying to, you know, with, you know, with zoning or providing opportunity for things to happen is not as if it, you know, we're not requiring it. So I do think that if say this were an overlay, I do think that some of the property owners would redevelop, you know, I think that there's been, you know, since this discussion has started a few months ago, some property owners have asked the town and I think there would be some interest. You know, that might be a few properties. That could be, you know, three or four properties and it could be a start, but it, you know, doesn't mean that it'll happen, you know, right away. And so, you know, I think for the boundary, we could always change it. I think that is a point I'd like to just, you know, try to work on. Because I think that if we, if we feel comfortable with the boundary and kind of the purpose, you know, it's typing notes up top saying, you know, expand housing opportunity, you know, a live work, shopping area, you know, encourage mixed uses, you know, those are kind of some broader goals. And then, you know, if we can say, okay, here's the area, we want that to happen in and then we can start going down and dug on that list. And so I don't know if we, I can pull up the map again and. Oh, well, do you want to just get a straw poll on whether to go south of route nine or not? Yeah, I think that'd be a good one. All right. All right. So I guess I do see Janet and Karen's hands. Are your comments concerning this boundary issue? So Karen, you're saying yes. So go ahead and say something. I just have a question. Is it, I mean, this is something that could, I so agree with Jesse and Janet in where we want to encourage, you know, vitality, but we also are trying to preserve the character of our town and the approach to our town. And I'm just wondering this boundary does, if we leave that out that corner, is that not something we can come back to easily? I mean, wouldn't it be just safer to just not do that now and wait and develop that later? Well, I think the answer is, sure, we can come back later. You know, for any of this to happen, it would need to go through town council and probably CRC. And so it's not a completely simple thing to have any of this happen. And the more times we chip away at it, you know, just the more time it takes on other meeting agendas. And so I just, yeah, I was going to say, you know, if we, you know, we eliminate everything south of route nine, I guess the question will, sorry, I don't know if you can hear the dog barking or the other, here's five college realtors right here. And so do we, you know, eliminate something along here? And so I think, you know, to me, that would be two parts south of the route nine and also this area. Okay. All right, so why don't I just start by saying, by asking about south of route nine. So maybe let's use our raise hand functions here. Members of the board, if you are in favor of the boundary extending south of route nine, please raise your hand. Okay, so it looks like we have only two members who are in favor of that. Nate, so we probably have five who are opposed to that. Okay, we can put our hands down. Doug, if I may interrupt, I wouldn't have put my hand up for either option because I don't feel strongly either way. Okay. Okay, so then how many members would support, including the area that Nate has outlined in blue, that's north of route nine with the real estate office and maybe one other property. So if you are in favor of including that, please raise your hand. All right, so that's one, two, three, four members, five members in favor and one member, two members opposed. All right, thank you. We can put our hands down. All right, Nate, so that gives you some feedback. It looks like there's very weak support for going south of route nine and there's pretty substantial support for going all the way to route nine. All right, Nate, are there other straw poles we need to take yet? You are, yeah, there are. Yeah, I think the number two here, the kind of fraction of first floor commercial. And I think the discussion could be, yeah. So, you know, I won't probably talk about what could we allow apartments without a cap on units here and make those special permit, have mixed use buildings be a site plan or a view. I mean, heck, if we have some design standards, are they just by right? No, I don't know that's too radical. But oh, come on, this is our chance to be radical. This is our chance. You know, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I feel like if we really worked on this and we said, okay, this is where we want this, could we have a by right use like a mixed use building? Because if we have some prescriptive standards and dimensional standards, it's like, you know, what, how much do we need, why would we need too much review? But I think for now, if we're focusing on number two is really about the kind of requirement of first floor or non-residential space in a building. I think that's really important. You know, I agree with Janet that when we propose the 30%, a lot of other communities had 50% or 100% on the ground floor, you know, the whole facade facing the street. You know, I think it's a difficult thing to, to know what's right, you know, and markets change and uses change. I think that, you know, as many people mentioned that if people design apartment buildings, they probably wouldn't do a podium build. And so you lose that ability to convert it though in the future. And so I think having some requirement is a good thing. I just don't know, you know, what that is. And I will say just quickly, you know, I was talking to another planner, and he said, you know, look at Greenfield, right? They've done a lot of investment in public buildings, courthouse, you know, the YMCA library, they're putting a fire station, you know, Wilson's might be changing, but you know, there's a lot of kind of underutilized storefronts in downtown there. And they've been trying for years with the bank and different things. And we're just, right, we're trying to talk about what, you know, what is the answer there, right? Is it, you know, how could, you know, they have a lot of building there. How come that could become like a retail ground floor Mecca, right? I mean, there's parking, it's walkable. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, it's just, you know, is there ways, as we've talked about, to incentivize it? So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess I don't really have an answer, but I like the idea of having requiring mixed use buildings. And I think this could be something that we discuss a little bit more. Okay. Do you want to have some conversation about it now? Okay. Yeah, I think that would be good. I mean, you know, at one point I was saying, have this overly be just apartment, and then, you know, I think I was persuaded that it can be other things. And so. Okay. Well, I mean, I'll just say I had thought if we required the architecture of the building to be configured for commercial use and retail on the first floor with a lot of glass, frequent entries, strong horizontal at the top of the first floor between the first and second floors with, you know, they can serve as a sign band or as a place for awnings. Then you've built in the architecture so that the building can function for retail and commercial behind it. And then, you know, even if the glass got papered over and used as a, I don't know, massage parlor because they don't want everybody watching the massages, at least the architecture is there so that it's flexible and it's commercial. You know, maybe somebody would blank out the glass and put their apartment behind it or leave the glass open and, you know, just be on display. I don't know, but, you know, I thought the architecture was the place to start and make sure it was configured for a commercial retail use. And then some amount of that facade, if we can require it to be commercial behind it, that would be great. You know, I just picked 30 feet as a sort of minimally viable depth. And I think that's better than doing a percentage because the, you know, the floor area is going to vary depending on the size of the building. That was Doug's thoughts about it. And I haven't seen any other hands go up yet. Are there other board members who wanted to comment on number two here? Jesse. Doug, if you, oh, I was just going to say Bruce and Janet both have their hand up. And then I also, oh, I, I, I'm not seeing everybody. Okay. Thank you. Janet. So, you know, I've worked in Greenfield a bit and I think Greenfield's problem isn't a lack of desire and they have beautiful buildings is that they're not next to the work the region's largest employer. And so UMass is the largest employer of Amherst and the region. And it's the largest employer of Northampton. And so, you know, this area is right next to North is right next to UMass. And, you know, even though it has those like funky little strange buildings, they're almost all filled with kind of small shops. And, you know, so I think is it's definitely like a, if you build it, they will come. You know, look at Hadley, they have built tiny building at your tiny building. People have built buildings on spec. They filled it with people who are doing dental work and this and that and the other thing. And so I think, and then Hadley itself has become a huge kind of shopping draw for the region with its big boxes. So, you know, and then, you know, I think we recently heard that the, you know, the bid that we had almost very low vacancy rate in, you know, Amherst center. And so I think that I think that we should be confident that something will come in. And we also know that the rental or the housing market is so strong that it could support those, you know, kind of spaces being empty for a little while. But I do think if we build it, they will fill up because they're so convenient to UMass and they're so convenient to, you know, all parts of town as well as route nine. And so I just think that, you know, there's, it seems to be no end of small businesses moving into Hadley and, you know, what seemed to be sort of, you know, little buildings that people wouldn't even want to go out of their way to go to, but there they are, you know, so I think we should be confident that if we build something that's really attractive, Zona really like for attractive stuff, it will, it will bring people in. All right. Thanks, Janet. Bruce. I agree with everything Jan said. All three of those points, I think are well made. But in addition, one of the earlier conversations we've had was that we really should in pursuit of the variety of housing types that this was mentioned the last time we had this discussion that it would be good to require or somehow encourage some housing to touch the ground as well so that it can have outdoor space because small family or families would prefer that. And whether that can be done or not, I'm not sure, but as a goal, yes, an aspiration and ideal vision. So some sport, some, so some first floor space should be, I think ideally that type of housing. So back to the fraction. So I think the in agreeing with Janet and with you, I think the fraction should be high. I think more than 30%, although I know you were not supportive of percentages, but not 100%. So I would think that it should be probably at least 50%. I mean, the bulk of the first floor area should be designated and should be expected to be used for the vitalizing activities associated with retail, commercial and community uses. So I think a higher than 50% floor space, but not 100%. 50 and 75 arbitrarily would be my sense of what might be ideal. Now, the other thing we could do, I suppose, as we do with parking is that having made that declaration, we could say that this ratio can be varied at the discretion of the board for reasons of the same kind of three words that describe the basis on which we can vary parking. We could come up with three words that describe why we could, it would be in the interest of the town for us to vary or allow a variation of that designated percentage. So that might give us the flexibility, but certainly by declaring the percentage as the requirement, we express the intention. Okay. Thanks, Bruce. Jesse? I'm thinking about, if we can record the whole facade, but not the whole depth of the building, I would think that to me is a pretty logical way to go, which could also accomplish some of what Bruce was just bringing up about some apartments towards the rear touching outside space. But it also, to me, ties back into the parking issue a little bit if we're going to try and encourage all this commercial activity. I think there also needs to be reasonable parking to accommodate that, not just some of the people who are living there. But again, maybe the developers would recognize that and put in enough parking. I'm not sure how to handle that. Okay. All right. Nate, there's some input. Yeah. I was going to say the, sorry if I could just jump in quickly. We had talked about that a while ago when we looked at the mixed use. The new, the current standards, as Bruce mentioned, like a waiver provision, but it's tricky because the developer would come in and say that they can't fill it or that it could change and it's early on in the process. And so to me, I'd want like a rigorous review, like a budget pro forma or reasons why, or how have they actually tried to market that space or find a tenant? And so I feel like typically when they come to planning boards or site plan review, they might not even have tenants in mind other than they might have some ideas for a general size of space or something. And so I don't know. I find it would be, I feel like it would be hard to ask for a waiver unless we're asking for more information as to why they can or can't fill that space, which, you know, might not be kind of in sequence for the, how the permitting typically goes. Right. Chris, I'm going to call on you next. Yeah. So that waiver doesn't have to be granted at the time the building is built. It could be something that's flexible that could go on into the future. So when the owner of the building has a tenant that can fill, you know, 30% or 50% or whatever the requirement is, that's fine. But then over time, it may be that he can't fill that space and then he could come in for maybe it's a special permit to be allowed to reduce the amount of commercial space and turn that commercial space into residential space. So that, you know, I guess what I'm saying is it doesn't have to be decided at the outset of the project. It can be decided later on when we know whether these spaces can be filled or not. Thank you. Okay. Bruce, I had my hand up to say something like that, but couldn't figure out how to say it. And I took my hand down. So thank you, Chris. That was great. But I was going to say that in the, I think the words that we've used in the past are for compelling reasons. So whatever the driver of the granting of a waiver is for compelling reasons. So, and then reasons of whatever. But we have to have it, it would have to be compelling reasons. And I think the way Chris structured it is one way of one way of establishing a compelling reason. It's on the basis of some recent history. I think that's good. I like that. So, you know, that would say that the, you have to build the building to the percentage that we are calling for. And then say within, or not sooner than say, I don't know, two years, five years, the owner could apply for a special permit to allow some of that space to be used for residential use. Is that where we're headed? I was thinking that to some degree, yes. But as we've seen with some of the houses downtown, a Wiley developer could design it and build it, analogous to the construction of these apartments that have large bedrooms and no living space, which are clearly not intended for family. And then when families don't come in, because the design is not suited to them, you then go and ask for a special, some kind of a subsequent permission to not comply. So I can see how that this could be gamed by Wiley developers. But on the other hand, I, maybe we just have to try, we're trying to get what we want and we're trying to figure out ways in which we can achieve that. So I think the goal is laudable. I'll shut up. Okay, Bruce. Karin, you're next. I think the problem we all were hoping that we wouldn't drive all the mom and pop shops out of town when we took down all the little cheap buildings. And so the problem is that you can build it. But unless the rent of a place like that is compatible with the shop, it's not going to be there. And so that's the reason why we entertained the thought of having enough with five stories, enough residential space, so that somehow the developer could charge less perhaps for the commercial. And if we just open it up and say, well, you know, he can come and apply again, because it's empty, then that's that might very well happen. So this is what we're doing. We're trying to put our head together to figure out how can we, if we have enough places where a developer can make money, how can we incentivize him to have commercial or public just the kind of businesses that we would love to see. Okay. Thank you. Nate, you're next. Yeah, I've been meaning to do this. And I started it was to calculate the kind of the gross square feet of office and retail on university drive or in the overlay now. And I guess my question would be, do we want to maintain that number or some proportion of it? So it's kind of we're saying that if we allow this, are we actually losing space? And I thought is we'd actually be gaining it, but I'd want to have kind of that sense, right? So if we, if there's so many square feet now, and we allow a certain build out of the overlay, you know, is 50% going to get us what we have at least now, or more than what we have now. And so I don't know if that would help with the decision. You know, I mean, I don't know, I kind of, I like the idea of maybe requiring it and they design it and they build it and then, you know, maybe a separate permit if they can't fill it. But we'd have to have some pretty good reasons why that's the case. You know, I, yeah. Okay, thanks, Nate. Janet. So I'm concerned. I'm concerned, like, I mean, so just looking around town now, and it's, I don't want to look at this moment of time because life goes on and the economy changes and everything, but the mixed-use buildings in town that have had, like, you know, the open spaces, a lot of the owners are actually people who've owned rental property and maybe aren't really that familiar with the, you know, commercial market or retail or, you know, renting professional offices, or maybe they don't need to to make a profit. And so there's a few mixed-use buildings in town that have open spaces and they seem to be thriving and the people have owned them have gone on to build other mixed-use buildings. So, you know, I think it's, I hope I get my numbers wrong. Right. I mean, one East Pleasant Street had protocol that came in after five or six years and you could say, you know, they couldn't fill that space, but they were obviously making enough money to build two more buildings in town, right? And so, you know, the same thing is true on Main Street on, I can't remember, Mr. Woblowski's building has never filled that small space and then he has some empty spaces now where they previously were some offices. So, part of me thinks is the rental market is so lucrative. It's subsidizing these empty spaces. And so, and then part of me thinks, you know, it's just, you know, retail has taken this big hit because of COVID and we're not sure where retail or commercial is going right now. But I think if you're going to get an exception, it should be not that, oh, I couldn't fill this building, this space is I'm not making any money in this building anymore because of this empty space. If you're making enough money on your rentals to subsidize an empty space, you're doing pretty good. You know, hopefully you'd want to bring in some small businesses just to keep the street thriving. It's probably not going to put you into profits. But I think that, you know, when we look around town, everybody who has had an empty space has gone on to build more buildings. And so it's not like people are going bankrupt because they had some, you know, 50% or 30% of commercial space. So I, if you're going to do an exemption, put it on their economic profitability, not I just couldn't find anyone to fill this space. Because I think it's, I've actually read this in the small towns thing, it's sort of a phenomenon where the owners often don't really want to deal with commercial tenants because they're more work or the spaces are too small. So you have more tenants, they rather just build a big space, leave it empty and have apartments upstairs. So I think we have to put that exception, exemption or, you know, the permit in a way that really says like show us your numbers. And I also know that everybody hates to show numbers, but at least say, if you are losing money on this building, because this 30% commercial space on the first floor, then we'll give you the exemption, but you had to show that to us. Okay. Nate, oh, that was not a hand. Okay. All right. You want to move on in the list? Yeah, yeah, I think we can work on that. We haven't talked too much about the cap on number of apartments or size of buildings. I think that could be under number three. I think there's a few hands raised. I think that's another important piece. Do we, you know, if we're not looking for massive buildings, is it, you know, it could be both through unit counts or through, you know, building law coverage or other things that we have built into this. So. All right. Looks like Janet has a thought. I have a possible add to the list and I'd be interested in Nate's thoughts about her other people. I can't remember where this is. I think it's in the apartment section of the zoning bylaw where there's a requirement of a mix of unit sizes. I don't know if it's two or three. I can't remember. Or you can have 50% of any one kind. And I wondered, you know, we have a bunch of mixed buildings that are like all studios or, you know, all one bedrooms. And is there a negative to that? Or do we want to say we want a mix of bedroom types and, you know, you can have your studios, you can have your one bedrooms, throw in a three bedroom or two, like what, what, like Nate, what's your impression is how are those buildings working? Are they good? It doesn't matter, you know, the unit mix. Yeah, I think, you know, I mentioned that, you know, for affordable housing developments that they use, you know, a tax credit program requires 10% be three bedrooms or larger. And so, you know, what I, what I've heard is that the developers will put, you know, we require no more than 50% be one bedroom size. And that's fairly new. And we, we applied it to mix these buildings and apartments. Okay. Unless, unless they're all affordable. And then it could be all one size. But what I found is developers, you know, will put, you know, right now, studios ones and twos, they usually put the twos and corners where they can find the space, maybe between stairs and elevators. And then they, you know, will work the, the proportions to meet our, you know, the requirement. You know, I don't, you know, I, when we first did this, there are a few property managers that would say, well, you know, we, we don't want to have a lot of three bedroom units because we have trouble filling those, you know, or, you know, they might say it might be, have difficult filling certain sizes. I don't, you know, I think that's a preference. I think that, you know, I've seen more developers that will have different bedroom counts. So, I don't, I don't think it's a bad, I don't think it's a bad thing. I, you know, the quite, you know, I guess my question would be, are we trying to get different tenants, you know, different end users by having different bedroom sizes. Yeah. And maybe that, maybe that's okay. It's really hard to have typically that kind of the internal control. So, you know, we could have something like that proportion of bedrooms or 10% the certain size. I don't know if we could do much more than that. I don't, I don't know if it's a problem. I think that, you know, might, it actually might make a developer, you know, think about it a little bit more. But, you know, if we're, if we're providing enough incentive in this overlay in terms of development potential, is that, you know, right, is that enough to deter it? Right. So, you know, we put some of these controls in here in this overlay. And wow, it doesn't get used for two years. Maybe we're missing something. We could revisit it. But if we think we want that, we could try it, right? We could have kind of a no more than 50% and at least 10% be three bedrooms or something, right? And we have some conditions in there. I think that's okay for now. I don't, I haven't heard enough to say no. What about like two bedrooms? Because it seems to me a one bedroom, you know, you can, you know, a friend of mine had two sisters and she had a family of five living in a one bedroom apartment in New York. They all were, they're intensely close as adults. But it strikes me that at least two bedrooms for a family. And I wonder if everything's a studio or one bedroom, is that going to just push families out or just not, you know, like, what's the minimum to get a family in? Yeah, I mean, we'd say a two bedroom, right? You could essentially get, you could have four 10, you know, four users, four people in that four persons in a two bedroom. And, you know, when you calculate, say rent, rental amounts, you know, you can take the average. So with a two bedroom, it could be anywhere from two users to four, you know, person. So then when you do a second affordable rent calculation, you would say, you know, you take all those number of persons in a household. So a three bedroom even, you know, gets you a lot more potential persons in that unit. So, you know, I agree. I think a two bedroom would be allows the flexibility of having, you know, multiple person household more than a studio or one. And at least based on some of the large, larger buildings downtown, you know, they at least one of those has a number of four bedrooms without very much living space, which is clearly geared to students. Right. So, you know, would you want to not allow four bedrooms or would you want to limit it to studios ones and twos and have a few threes? I think, I think, you know, my experience or my impression or my memory of the old North Village at UMass was that we had, there were some three bedroom units. And there wasn't a lot of demand for those by the graduate families and undergraduate families. The families tended to live in the two bedroom units, even if they had three generations living there. So that, you know, those were young families by and large and two bedrooms was preferred. At least that's my my memory. So I don't think there's any three bedrooms in the new complex that replaced North Village. Yeah, I'm not sure there is either actually. Yeah. All right. You want to move on? I guess, you know, we're still having time on kind of the capping the number of units in an apartment or in a building or, you know, I guess we haven't really, I guess I still want to talk about that is that is capping the unit count important or is it more about having some massing and design guidelines? You know, I think we could, you know, because we do have this unit type mix, which I think something we can work on as well. Well, I mean, I kind of picked 100 as an arbitrary number. You know, if you think about it in terms of massing, I guess I was hoping to have facades that were not longer than say 60 or 65 feet wide on the street. And the building could go back from there, however far it needed to, to get to 100, you know, at five stories, four of which are residential, say four and a half. You know, you probably have 20 apartments on each floor. So from a sort of hallway point of view, that's not super long, but it's kind of medium. And so whether they're small units or big units, you know, that certainly would have a big impact on the actual mass of the building. But I don't think it's bad to have a mix of some smaller buildings and some bigger buildings. That would be fine. I think it might even be desirable. So if I had a hundred unit studio building next to a hundred unit three bedroom building, that might be fine. I don't know. But I don't know how to sort of do a massing criteria for the depth of the building. To me, that's starting to get into the lot area. And then you get into how much of the, how much, you know, if you have 100 units and you need a half of parking space per unit, that's 50 parking spaces. You know, how much of those parcels is a 50, you know, it's a 50 foot or 50 spot parking lot. I don't really know. And then you need to get back there. So you need to get back there. So is the access off of University Drive? Or is there a sort of service alley that runs parallel to the University Drive farther back? You know, that tends to be a, is that a private way? Then you need to have multiple owners who are coordinating the location and easement access and that kind of thing. So the access is probably off of University Drive. And then you've got a 15 or 20 foot vehicular drive between buildings. Janet? I'm actually starting to fade, but I do love this discussion. And I do think there, what you're talking about is really interesting to me because I, you know, I look at the lot sizes and think what's possible there. And that's way beyond my wheelhouse. But I wonder if maybe you could dip into that or the facades and the treatments because I do think the variety is really key to something that's like an exciting place to live or to shop at. And so what the facade and the width of it I think is really important. I wonder if we want to get some public comment for people who have sat here patiently if they have anything to add. But I wouldn't mind ending the meeting like in the next 20 minutes or so just as a personal. Okay. Yeah, I was kind of thinking about 930 as a good time to stop. Let's see. I don't see any other hands. Chris? I was just going to suggest that we look at, and I think we can do this in the office, but look at the buildings that have been built downtown and think about what their facade lengths are like. Because, you know, I think some of the buildings like say one East Pleasant. Well, you may not like the fact that it's right up on the street, but I think the massing of the building is pretty good and its configuration is pretty good. And it's, you know, it's got a fairly long facade against the street that I don't find oppressive. I find it oppressive that it's so close to the street, but not the length of the facade itself. On the other hand, there is another building that's going up now that has a facade that is really long. And so I was just going to encourage people to think about the various buildings that have been built recently in the downtown. There's Spring Street. There's one East Pleasant. There's Kendrick Place. There's 11 and 13. It's pleasant. And think about what you, I would say like, because not everybody likes those buildings, but kind of like think about the proportions of those buildings and what works and what doesn't work. And that might help to inform this discussion because just saying, you know, facade length is less than 60 feet, that doesn't mean anything to me. And 60 feet isn't that long. So, you know, just think about that a little bit. And maybe we can come back and have a little bit more about richer, more informed discussion about this next time around. Okay. Fred, Fred, you are muted. Sorry about that. I clicked on it, but I didn't click it on just the right place. Yeah, I'm wondering how we're doing in town with the staff knows in terms of commercial occupancy, because those are supposed to be commercial on the first floor. Are they just standing open or are they starting to fill those? Fred, Chris or Nate, do you want to comment? Well, I think Gabrielle has done a really good job of trying to fill a lot of the spaces downtown. I don't know what's going on with 11 and 13. But I know of the smaller buildings downtown, she's really worked very hard on getting those places filled. So I'm sorry, Nate, I didn't mean to cut you off. No, I'm going to say, I think we had mentioned that some sat vacant. I feel like it's been an awkward few years, but it seems like they're starting to fill up. And so, you know, yeah, I think it's a, it is a really good question though. I mean, for instance, you know, there's some upper floor vacancies for non-residential space in older buildings downtown that have been vacant for years, but some of it is, you know, it's not accessible or it's, you know, maybe difficult to access. You know, there could be other reasons why. In terms of facade length, yeah, I looked at what's there. So like, you know, Athena's pizza in that building, you know, that's 130 feet, right? And charter is like 120 feet in charter commercial. You know, and, you know, then there's big Y and the post office is pretty long. So, you know, if you, I mean, to me, the, where the Hampshire bike exchange, you know, if that's 130 feet, it's only one floor, but that's, you know, that's over 100 feet. Is that okay? I mean, Doug, I do like the idea though of breaking up facades even on a property and having two buildings. And so I think having an entry drive is okay. You know, if we require, you know, if we try to get some plaza space there, rather than, you know, if we have a property that could have a 300 foot wide building, I don't really think we would want that. Yeah, I had, I had site used 65 feet because most those buildings downtown that are apartment buildings are sort of between 52 and 56 feet wide. That's sort of the optimal depth for an apartment with a center double loaded corridor. And so, and I was just talking about that as the dimension of facing, facing on the frontage facing the street in terms of the depth going back. I wasn't terribly worried about that actually. I know that the facade of 11 and 13 East Pleasant Street is very long heading back. And right now it's highly exposed on the north side, and you really do see it. But on the on the south side, you basically don't notice it because it's kind of obscured by by one East Pleasant. So, you know, if we expect things to kind of fill in even along that stretch, you know, maybe the where that M&T bank is the next piece to get built, you know, that long facade is likely to get obscured. So I was, you know, the dimension I threw out was about the frontage. And, you know, I mean, 130 feet, that may be fine also. But it's, it's starting to, you know, I mean, I mean, it's fine that Athena's. But if we took Athena's and went for five stories that we might feel differently. Yeah, but I mean, I'm not adamant about that particular dimension. I agree. I do think that at some point, you know, we have to, if you know, I think the is cheaper to build a box than have some articulation or stepbacks. I think at some point we would actually want to require that, you know, in a break in plane more than, you know, when we did our BL overlay, I think we said, you know, like a foot or something to me, I'd want more than that, you know, I'd want, you know, so anyways, there's sort of two scales of breaking on that facade. One is some interest within the building so that it's not just a box. Right. And then there's the scale of how big is the box. Right. So, you know, I could say, yeah, a 12 inch step within the facade every 20 feet. I mean, you know, so that you don't get a flat box. Anyway, I'm talking too much. Bruce. In the interest of wrapping this up around 930 or so, I think I'd like to hear we've got a number of people still on our attendees and two of them at least have got their hand up and I'm ready to hear because I know some of these folks have been thinking about this probably as much as we have. So why don't we stop talking and listen to what others have got to say and then continue it at another date. All right. All right. That's two members in favor of public comment. And Janet, I assume you dropped your hand so we could go up to public comment. All right. So we have two members of the public. We'll start with Pam Rooney. Please give us your name and your street address. And you have three minutes. Pam Field Sadler, do you have the timer? I'm working on it, Nate. I'm going to have to put your screen down. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. So let's bring over Pam. Hi, everybody. Pam Rooney, 42 Cottage Street. I really appreciate the conversation and I'm loving the depth of the conversation. These are very disparate points, sort of an accumulation of what you've talked about over the evening. The first item might be the capacity or the cap on number of units. I think that's probably not a problem. I think it's really the size of the building, the mass of the building, and let the developer build what they can within that box. Let's see. I think Doug mentioned that, you know, having the small end of the building toward the street, a little bit like the example of 70 University Drive, that building seems to work because the gable end is narrow. It's facing the street and you don't get a sense of the size of the building. So the actual length of it is almost immaterial. So I like that that capability. I like the use of using the secondary road or whatever we're calling it and taking advantage of all of that land mass, which is buildable, by the way, in that wetland, and taking advantage of that. That's good. The commercial aspect of it seems very important because this is really our second tier of commercial development in town. It is, you know, besides Route 9, you know, with the car repair shops and everything, you know, as you go toward Delta Town, it's really our only other commercial area. And I would love to see it emphasize at least the presence of, oh, and by the way, I have no longer the liaison to the planning board. At least they haven't voted me in as such. So I'm speaking as a person. Let's see. Yeah, the commercial aspect is very important even if they can create temporary spaces that are used. I think that's very important. Having the fact that University Drive is really a fairly low speed zone, multiple curb cuts to me seem totally okay. As long as we retain a sense of a strong alley, a strong sense of street, with street trees, I think that's terrific. All right. You're down at 20 seconds. Oh, okay. Sorry. The mix of units, I think somebody mentioned, I think maybe Janet mentioned, the mix of units that we currently have for mixed use development may not be a bad thing, but it could be lifted if in fact it were an incentive to create something else in this zone. And I would, I lost my, I forgot my last point. You're out, you are out of town. I'm out of town. I'm out of town. Okay, thank you all. Okay. All right, thanks. Next, we will have Susanna Musbrat to bring her over. And Susanna, give us your name and your street address. And we did, we did receive your, your letter this afternoon. Susanna Musbrat, 38 North Prospect Street. Yeah, thank you for looking at my letter. I'm, I was really distressed to hear you just, Nate sort of tossed out the window of the idea that this needs to be a kind of reciprocal agreement between the town and the university. That is where you all started when you started thinking about different areas in town where there could be more development and how that could be used to incentivize the university to do something. And we don't have the bargaining power after we've already changed the zoning that we have now to open those discussions with the university. It just can't go on that they keep adding more and more students and we have to provide the housing for them. And I think we've reached a breaking point. But the other thing I want to emphasize is what I said at the end that this is a good time to let the community in, get people together in a room where we can all see each other and bat around some ideas. Why not hear from more people? And then the final point. Oh, I hope Nate will try to calculate the current commercial and make sure that we keep at least that amount of commercial space in the new plan. Thank you. Thank you, Suzanna. And the third hand is from Janet Keller. If we could bring Janet over and restart the clock. Janet, you need to unmute. Janet Keller. My street address is, I do have a street address. And I'm obviously very anxious. Let me come back to it. I live on Pulpit Hill Road, 120 Pulpit Hill Road, up in North Amherst. Thanks. Thank you. So I too appreciate the richness and the thoughtfulness of the planning board discussion and the comments from Suzanna and Pam. And I want to say what's probably obvious to how much I love university drive between Amity Street and Route 9. And a lot of the things that we've all talked about tonight would, if we do them right, preserve what makes that a special place. The greenness, the setbacks, the size of things in the care and placing them as Pam noted with the Barry's building at 70 University Drive. So I would say keep up the good work and kudos to for the discussions tonight. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Janet. Is there anyone else in the public that would like to make a comment? Okay. All right. So I'm seeing it's almost 20 after nine. And maybe we'll have a few more comments. We've got a couple, we've got the committee and liaison reports to still do before our meeting ends. So if you absolutely need to say something, raise your hand. And we've got Nate and Bruce with their hands up. Nate? Sure. Thanks. I was going to respond to Suzanna. I didn't throw out the idea of working with UMass, but I don't think that we can, you know, I think we can tell them we're looking at this, you know, we already have and that we encourage them to think of, you know, how they could respond in terms of development along northern part of University Drive or, you know, Mass Ave. But I don't see it as us saying, well, we're going to enter into an agreement, some binding agreement or contract with UMass requiring them to do something because we're doing this. So I see it as actually a great opportunity for the town to look at this section of University Drive, whether or not UMass, you know, takes advantage of it. I think we can take advantage of it. And I think we can encourage them to, you know, to build upon it, but I don't think we can require them to do something or get into a contract. So I still think that, you know, the planning board had a conversation with Tony and Nancy, and I think we'd like to have it again. And I think we can continue these discussions about how we can partner with the university and have that, you know, a reciprocal relationship. But I don't see it as a kind of a contract or a requirement that they do something. So I don't want to belittle that. I think it's a really important piece you brought up. So I just think that, you know, we're trying to keep the dialogue open and collegial. And I think that's where I'd like to go with that. All right. Thanks, Nate. Bruce. I just wanted to ask Nate, I purposely kept this to the end because I sent you, Nate, an email later in the day. I know where you saw it, but I'm prepared to put some time and effort into doing some kind of build out studies, just basically I might need guidance on and so forth. But, you know, I'm probably able to do this sort of thing with some reasonable guidance, like take some of the load off and so forth. But I would need to get the documentation. Is it possible that I give you a call? I can produce some hopefully useful numerical studies or whatever we call it. I mean, I think Doug, you've been doing this and I haven't seen it. But I think it could be helpful. And if I've got some time, I could probably spend a few hours on this over the next month or so. Yeah. Yeah, Bruce, I saw your email. So, you know, I think we can talk later this week, early next week, and you know, whether it's taking the GIS and making it into like a, you can put it in a CAD file and have it be scaled to a certain size, whatever, we can talk about it what you would want. So, yeah. Yes. I've got the software to do all this sort of stuff. I can do it. I just wasn't able to download the basic files in a way that would, I could import them in a way that was sensible and a few other things. So with a small amount of briefing and support, I think I could probably be, I could probably be helpful. So I'll try and be so. Okay. Janet, last thoughts on this topic? For this evening, I think this is, I think that this is an opportunity to start talking to some of the planners at UMass. And I, you know, we need to open that door. We could open that door and start working together because they're going to have all sorts of information about what the university's plans or major's ideas, what they think students want or, you know, what's going on with the different dorms and things like that. If there are plans for university drive, but maybe it's not university drive, maybe it's Mass Ave. And so I think we should just sit down over sandwiches and just have, you know, meet with some planners and just say, hey, we're working on this. What are your thoughts? Because you guys, you know, we all live here and we're all working with the same population. So I think we should just take this opportunity to just start talking and picking people's brains and seeing what's going on. I totally appreciate Nancy and Tony coming, but they're really, you know, it's, they're kind of communications liaisons and not to disinvite them because I'll have a sandwich really with anybody, especially if there's coffee. But I just think it'd be a good opportunity to sort of sit down with some of the planning staff and just say, hey, this is what we're looking at. Are you guys looking at this part or do you have ideas for a university drive? Because a lot of us live here but just staring at it and thinking about it. So I hope you can think of some way to open the door and just chat. All right. Maybe Chris and Nate, that's probably a conversation for you guys with Dave or Paul, I suppose. Okay. All right. So time is 9.24 and we will conclude this conversation for this evening. Nate, I hope we've given you at least a head start on where we want to go. And then Chris, I hope you and Nate will come back to us on when you want to schedule this on our agenda next. Okay. All right. Why don't we move back into the rest of our agenda? We were up to our planning board committee and liaison reports. Bruce, PVPC. Nothing to report though. There is a meeting next Thursday. So on the 6th, I might have something. So actually, no, it'll be the night before the next meeting. So we won't have that. But there is a meeting coming up shortly and I do see there notes and things that are circulated and I read them. But it's fairly dry and there's nothing that I think I would pass on from what I've seen that's been circulated that's useful here tonight. Okay. I don't have anything new to report on CPAC. We haven't had a meeting in the last couple weeks. And I don't expect us to have very many meetings for quite a while. Karen, design review board. We met on Monday. Christine was there. Two very positive things. There's going to be, we approve the taking down of the awning and of a really exciting new little shop market, Aster and Pine, which is on 189 North Pleasant. It's kind of where that Vinci care salon was. So they're going to have wine and cheese and local produce. And they're very wonderful young couples. So it's very exciting. It's something that's really needed in town. And the other thing was 55 South Pleasant, which is where Hastings was. That's kind of an ongoing thing. But that's also, I think, a wonderful development in the center of town. They're going to take down the wooden, and we approve that. They're going to take down the wooden structure that is now kind of dilapidated and hasn't been used for a long time. And there in that place is going to be the Amherst College store in the old Hastings store. And then in the space where the structure is coming down, there's a bit of an arcade and open space, very beautifully designed, I think. And going back to a tower, which is five stories, by the way, and hidden a little bit behind it is a five-story apartment building, which I think Barry Roberts is developing and owns. The whole thing is very attractive. There'll be less cars going into that very narrow space because a lot of parking behind there is going to be gone. Instead, the building will be larger. And it just looks inviting. We talked a lot about the design, the different colors, the way that it's structured. It's going to be fine tuned and they're open to advice. But both of those, I think, are going to be real additions for the center of town. So, yeah, it was nice. Okay, great. Thanks, Karen. Um, Janet, your hand is up. Karen, could we get some pictures of that? Because I just saw a picture in the Gazette that I could hardly see. But I'd be interested in seeing the changes. Could you send us those docs or? Are the design review board packets on the town website? That's what I was just going to say. Go on the town website, look at the design review board page and go to their packets. And you can see all about this project there. It must be the late hour. I should have thought of that. Sorry. Okay. All right. Next, we will have Chris, CRC, anything? So, the CRC is still dealing with the rental registration by-law that is slowly moving through. They will be taking on the solar by-law soon. I understand they have been wanting to be in touch with me about that. And so, we'll be hearing more about that. They, I told Pam and Doug that the CRC experienced Zoom bombing last night and it was very unfortunate and ugly language. And, you know, so we discussed a little bit about how to handle it. Unfortunately, there's been a recent court case that kind of says that we need to let people say what they want to say, but there are obviously limits on it. And the limitation that we were given by Dave Zomek who was at the CRC, he said, well, you know, if there's hate speech involved, then you can cut it off. And obviously, the chair can cut it off if it doesn't have anything to do with the subject at hand. But for general common period, it's difficult to limit the speech unless it is hate speech. So, just, you know, bear with us as we try to learn how to deal with this. Chris, is it true that we don't really have to have public comment period? Well, public comment period is required by the charter. So, everybody who has a board or committee is supposed to have a period of public comment. But, you know, there's nothing in state law that says you have to have public comment if that's what you're asking. Well, and does the charter say how frequently we need to do that? I think you have to have it at every meeting. Okay. Okay, so we're up to the report of the chair and the chair has no report tonight. How about staff? Any report from staff? Are you going to have another staff member soon or not? Hopefully, we just were able to post the planner position. HR put it up, I don't know, Monday, I guess. And so we're hoping that we get some response to that because we didn't have a very easy time of it the first two times that we saw another planner. But we really need another planner. So hopefully we'll get one soon. Well, maybe there are some planners graduating this spring from UMass who want to stay in town. Yep. Okay, is that it from staff? That's all I have for now. Yep. Okay. And so our next meeting is next week, right? That's right. Yes. And that's a continuation of the Port River School public hearing. And we haven't received any new information, but I did send an email to the architect today to ask if he was planning to include anything in your packet that's going out on Friday. So hopefully he'll be responsive to that. Okay. Thank you, Chris. Bruce. Doug, I tuned into the zoning board hearing on the school last Thursday just because I was curious to see how they would handle it and so forth. And in the conversation that Tim was, Tim Cooper was orienting the zoning board, he and on the subject of the PV arrays, he mentioned that the array that the mounted array that was close to the Western property boundary he mentioned, I think is kind of a sentence said that the planning board wasn't very pleased with this. Some version, something like that. And that he suggested, I think if I recall, that they were intending to do make some revision to that. So Chris, I think we would definitely want to, if they're going to have a revision to their array arrangements so far as diminishing the intrusion into the setback, that would be something to look forward to. I may be wrong, but that's what I heard. Okay. Chris. Yeah, Bruce reminded me that the zoning board of appeals did approve the structures in the FPC zoning district. So that was the result they gave a special permit for those structures in the FPC. And they were puzzled about why we have an FPC if we already have a 100-year floodplain, no FEMA floodplain overlay district, but in any event they did approve it. And so that was good. Okay. And is the existence of the FPC something we should talk about in a future meeting? Yes. So we can put that in our list of things to talk about. Okay. All right. Anybody have anything else to mention? If not, I see the time of Nate. And just quickly that the project, Karen mentioned 45 and 55 south pleasant, that's coming to the planning board for a site planner review. So it's expected that in March, that would probably be, you know, the opening of the public hearing for that. So, you know, you can look on the DRB packet and then, you know, just knowing that it will become, you know, a planning board application as well. Okay. No other hands that I see. Time is 9.34. And thanks for hanging in there. We are adjourned. Thank you. See you next week. Bye. Thank you. Goodnight.