 On order the April 10th meeting of the popular planning commission. First up to approve the agenda. So I'll take a motion to approve when ready. So moved that motion from Gabe. The second second. All right, second from Maria. Um, those of you who are approving the agenda say I. I, okay, to approve moving forward, comments from the chair. I don't have. Uh, I don't think I have anything. Um, that's not on the agenda. Um, I guess I do have one question for Mike, which is. Uh, maybe I'm not remembering, but. Mike, you had some zoning suggestion things to to bring. Um, are we going to be doing that soon? Was my question that will that be ready soon? Yeah, it's on my, it's on my to do list to get to clean that up and get it organized so we can start to. Have the discussion about getting through the list. Okay, okay, so just the next few weeks then. Yeah, I wasn't sure about yeah, we're expecting it. I was expecting to have it for April, but. I focused on getting these last city plan pieces done before jumping in. On the on the zoning change. Okay, yeah, that's fair already. Um, okay, I don't have anything else. Um, do we have anyone from the public? I don't think so. We just have a secret and thank missioners and staff. So, uh, with no comments from the public or general business. Um, we're going to move on to review and approval of final. The agenda, by the way says review and approval of final web page 10 plates. Um, I know that I have a lot of feedback, so I'm not sure about any final approval. For tonight, but definitely want to check in on where the historic resources page. And the economic development page are at and so with that, I will turn it over to SC. You have Aiden and Julia here. Yep, I guess I would just kick off to say our 1st. Uh, so that what we're looking at will obviously take comments that need that you have on them. Really, the 1 of the big things they want is they went through, we made some templates. We took some comments from you guys, you know, month or 2 ago. And then we went back and we've really started to put a lot more into, or SC group has Julia and Aiden have put a lot of work into getting it kind of fleshed out. Now we just need to make sure that certainly the template has started to reach what you guys think is okay. We may have wordsmithing, we may have some other things to change. But big picture, if they're going to make 12 of these, we really need to have, you know, some things nailed down that say, yeah, we like how this is structured, we like how the pieces are going together, we like how, you know, but if there's something that's not right, then we really need to know about it now or very soon because we need to, if we're going to make adjustments to the template, how the overall pictures look, then we need to start having that very, very quickly. So with that, I'll turn it over to Julia and I guess we'll have them run through things really quickly to show you where we're at. And then we'll open it up to comments, I guess. Yes, thank you, thank you. I will share my screen really quickly and talk through both our process of where we are, what we have drafted, what we don't have drafted, and how that process has looked over the last six weeks or so while we haven't been present on these meetings. Julia will give a little overview of how we developed the template and where we got to with that. And then we have some questions, but we'd love to hear comments as well. So this spreadsheet that you're looking at here, I'm sorry if it's a little small on your screen, but we've kept track of what chapters have been drafted by the Planning Commission and Mike, where those are at. We do our internal review to kind of fit the structure that we have been working with currently. So some information is removed or sorry, it's moved through the document. We then typically have some sort of a data request that includes photos, spatial data, any sort of information about partner organizations that we want to incorporate into the document. Then Mike reviews where we've gotten to with those text edits and changes. And then that's put into a draft story map. So we have these two, the historic resources and economic development, which you have seen are the furthest along, and there are some very different stages of different story maps. And Mike has reviewed these two or three story maps here. So this is kind of our process diagram and how we've been moving through as these chapters are created. Julia, I will jump to, are there any questions on this before I move? Okay. I will jump to one of the story map pages and Julia, go for it. Yeah. So there are some similarities to what we've shown before, but I just wanted to give an overview of what's changed and specifically what is a part of this, you know, we're calling a template. And when we say template, it basically means that, you know, it's the same headings for the different story maps, and the same general types of content at the beginning, middle and end of this web document. So just from top to bottom, there's this title page. We did reformat that a little bit to make the text more readable and consistent across the different story maps that we've created thus far. We did change up this introduction a little bit before it was, you know, we were calling bytes, just these like short sentences. But in order to reflect the chapter text that this group and Mike has drafted, we transitioned back to having paragraphs to open these story maps that are either exactly what's written in the chapter or very close to the text chapter. And we also added images to this first section to just make it a bit more engaging and break up that text. Do you want to go through the headings? Oh, yes. Thanks, Aiden. There are also five consistent headings for each of the story maps, the introduction, background, information, synergies is the section that talks about how this chapter relates to the other chapters in the plan, the aspirations and goals section, and then implementation. And then the implementation section is really just a link to, you know, the document that has those full strategies. They aren't listed in full here. We have this infographic, which each story map has an infographic piece just to make sure that we're getting a data snapshot and providing, you know, a fact that helps orient readers to existing conditions in the city. The background section is typically where we're going to have these maps. And this is the section that's a bit different for each chapter because the data is just a bit different. So for this economic development section, we have the designated downtown area shown on the map for the historic resources. It's point data for historic buildings. And this is one of the sections just because of the medium of the story map. This section doesn't correspond to, you know, a specific section of the plan chapter that this group has written and approved, which is a bit different than, you know, the synergy section, for example, which there's text right in the story map, or I'm sorry, right in the plan chapter about the way this chapter relates to other chapters. For this who's involved section, we played around with where this was located within the story map template to try to make sure that this information was front and center, but also wasn't interrupting the flow of the story map. But this section is basically describing the different offices, individuals, and partners that support this particular topic. I've mentioned the synergies already, but one thing that we've added for this template since this group has looked at the story map is this graphic just showing how economic development and each topic relates to other topic areas. So just highlighting those in graphic form as well. We've also just added more images throughout the document in places where there is more text just to break that up. For the aspirations and goals section, this, there were a couple different formats that we're playing with with the previous versions that you saw. And with this version, we have banked the text all on the left and played around with the styles of the text to try to make sure that we're clearly separating the aspiration statements and the goal statements. And also just making sure that this can be a very visually pleasing part of the story map, that it's not just a bunch of goals listed, but we're also trying to show some exciting images and pretty images here. And then finally, the implementation section. This is another one that there is going to be some variation from chapter to chapter because certain chapters have specific initiatives coming out of them that will that involve, you know, particular monitoring. So economic development is one of those chapters where there's just a little bit more text in this section. But this implementation section links to the full implementation strategy. And then there's a section or just a little sentence there that says that there's previous studies to explore. And then each chapter ends, the template ends with this set of three links to the previous or the other plan chapters, previous studies and reports, and about the plan section. And if you remember, those links will go to the landing page where all of this will live. So that's just an overview on the template. Any questions? Anyone have any questions so far about the template? What were you going to go through first, just so I know when an appropriate time to chime in will be? So we had just a couple questions that we had brainstormed, but we can take, if your feedback is more related to the structure of the template, we can jump into that now. Our questions had to do with how people felt about the balance of text and images and other media. And for specifically the background section, those maps, if they were intuitive and effective. So those were our main questions for this template. But jump on in, we can get the conversation going. Okay, I'll jump in and then anybody else just feel free also to do the same. So for the maps, that's one thing. When you scroll through it, I'm not sure it will be clear to people what each district that's kind of lit up, like what it is for people. So if our goal is to be informative with it, I think I'm just imagining that maybe at the same time that the map color changes, that some text on there might say what the district is. Something like that. Just so that people can know what they're really looking at there. I think it does tell you if you read the box to the side or something, but it doesn't pop out. You can definitely add a heading or something that makes it clear what you're looking at. Yeah, if it were more like instead of being in the box, because I don't, if people's eyes might not be drawn to the box, it might be drawn to the district that's being highlighted. So if it's somehow, if there was text next to that, I feel like that would help people know what they're looking at. And also, I don't know if there could be titles or something. Maybe that's what could change the title or something. I don't know. So that was one thing that I had. As far as the template order of things, I did want to have a conversation about whether we think that this is the right order. Because in my mind, let me pull it up. There it is. Okay, so yeah, so it's introduction, then background, then synergies, then aspirations and goals, then implementation. I'm wondering if background is in things that have been done in the past. I think that the way we talked about this is we want this to be forward-looking. We want this to be about, because it's the plan for the future. So I do feel like the background, as in stuff done in the past type background stuff, is too prominent probably. And other planning researchers, please address that also. And then in the synergies, which is the synergies as they relate to other parts of the plan, I think that's really relevant and that's great. But as far as who's involved, like this Montpelier alive thing, I actually think that that's way too high up because Montpelier alive is not a big part of this plan. And it just seems too prominent. And so like other entities and things that are related doesn't seem like the focus again. So I'm thinking who's involved type stuff better at the bottom, the part of it about synergies of other chapters, great, should be higher up. Background stuff, as far as if it's informational background stuff that's really relevant to the goals and the strategies of the plan, great. I think the map's probably fine where it is, for instance. But there's, I think in historic resources, we have some background that's, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't know. I remember something about like, yeah, I guess I just turned to that one. That one's also in the who's involved and the discussion of the Sport Preservation Commission and all that stuff again seems like too high up because that's distracting from the plan, which is like, hey, this is what we're going to do. This is how we're being proactive. So that's my comments about those sections. And then aspirations and goals at the bottom, there's, actually on historic resources, I'm not sure if there is a link to the strategies. But in economic development, there is a link, but the link is at the bottom. And we do have a lot of people in our town that are interested in diving deep into substance stuff. And I feel like to make this useful for them, we talked about this before. To make this really useful for them, giving them much easier, more obvious access to the strategies, which is, you know, the meat of the plan. So if there could be a way to have a link to the strategies, like the aspirations and the goals and the strategies all together for someone to really dive into that substance, if I feel like a link at the top is going, a lot of people in Montpelier will find useful in having it. Because the way that I will now look through this, and I found at the bottom, it took me a while to find it. And I'm thinking, I think there's a lot of people who will go to this website, if this was how it is, they would not be happy because they were looking for a substance in there. They had to scroll through all this, you know, like, oh, okay, to read like five paragraphs, seven paragraphs of how people are talking about how great it is, before I could actually find what you guys are going to do. So I feel like that would definitely be feedback we would get. So again, I think having that at the top, somehow, would be important. Good job. It's my first time on a remote meeting here. I was just going to say, like thinking about this though, in the context of the entire plan website, it will have like a plan, like a planning page that will let people go directly to the implementation, like those sort of more direct things, as well as sort of like, I imagine like a map that will have these layers, the various layers and let people dive in. So my, I don't know, my reaction to it was like, I think this is good, and that this, all of this is actually background, you know, this is like the, for people who want to dive in and like go through like what the story is. And you also have, you know, you can dive like right up front, you can go right to those other sections and that, since that is a header, you can, you can like flip through, you know, this, from the, right from the beginning, like no one is going to start from any of the chapters, right? So the intent of this is not that it is an entire like, it's not a novel, you like read through something you can interact with. So I guess, I don't know, that was my like initial reaction that where I'm confined with more more of that narrative background stuff that orders maybe less important, particularly in these chapters that do like help tell the story, whereas maybe that initial homepage that is like a little more critical on how we communicate like what are the, what's like the big idea of this plan and how do people get directly to like some of that implementation stuff? Because there's going to be like, what, like 10 or 12 of these or something, right? So yeah, I don't know, that was, that was just my reaction and just like a tiny note on any of like the graphics or stuff like just to have sort of like make sure we're clear on what the source, source data is. Yep. So what I'm hearing, John is you don't think we need to try to have the implementation up higher on these pages because you think that people will have ample opportunity to access that given the whole context of the website? That's what you're saying? That would be my hope. I don't know what it looks like. Yeah, right, right. But I think like that initial landing page can allow people to dive right into it. Whereas these it's like, you know, I hope that's right. I mean, my feedback comes from looking at these pages as they are what's in front of me and reacting. And in that case, it was like, well, if I'm really into historic resources, I'm not, it's hard for me to find how to get really into it. But yeah, maybe, maybe the that will be resolved given the whole thing. I don't know, I guess we'll have to see later. The vision for the homepage is to have, we saw the ribbon, the green ribbon on the previous homepage draft, which will have implementation strategy, which will eventually link to this magical matrix that John is putting together. So people will be able to jump to that page and then can look at I'm assuming the strategies for each of the different sections. So yes, that will be incorporated into the landing page. The other thing is we have to remember like, I'm just thinking of this like, what would I be doing? I'm going to go in, I want to know, you know, from a developer's perspective, where, where does the city feel like they want to go? I'm probably going to get that through SEO, not through navigating the website. I'm going to go out and I'm going to Google it or whatever. And it's going to give me, bring me exactly to the page that I want to go to. So we have to remember there's going to be that too. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, I was thinking along those lines too about just making sure that on these chapter pages that we have good access to it from wherever you are. That's kind of what you're saying, right? Yeah, I think it's just going to come out in the search and it'll be good. One very nippy thing is in the, I think it's economic development page. The two maps are like, one is mauve and the other is coral. And I was wondering if there could be a bit more of like, a hue distinction between mauve and coral. I think mauve is the historical, the downtown. And then, do you see what I'm talking about? Just like having a more blatant color distinction. Absolutely. So I was very nippy. I think going back to what Kirby and John were saying, to me the introduction to both seems to be background. And I wonder, and Mike, I don't know, you have worked on more plans than we have, but I thought the introduction would have said more about like, this is what this plan is intending to do or like, you know, this is what we are setting out to do with this plan as opposed to, you know, Montpelier is made out of stone and brick, you know, like that's the Montpelier is made out of stone and brick seems to be a background or like what the percentage of, you know, private sector jobs are in Montpelier is also a background. That's just kind of informing the discussion. Whereas to me, an introduction to a section would be more about like laying out the point of this, what we are looking to do by it, and maybe just like one or two sentences about what the aspirations are. So someone has like a high level view of what this section is about to do. Then we can go into that, you know, be better. Here's the thing. What you're describing exists. And these chapters already had introductions. And so this was part of my like feedback also. What do you mean you already had introductions? We, well, so I wanted to know like, like the thought process I see group had and because the from what I can tell the language on these pages right now is like it's a lot of the stuff we provided through our chapter language, but it's all like mixed around. And so I was confused too. I didn't think the intros were great. Let me just flat honest about that. But I would do want to read what what what it could have been if we just use what's already there. So for historic resources, the intro that we had provided before was Montpeliers historic resources are important because they connect us with our past. Some resources are from a recent past invisible to all while others are from indigenous persons thousands of years ago, and still buried in the soil. Don't necessarily love that part of it. Historic markers, buildings, bridges and districts all represent a story of how we became Montpeliers. And it goes on like that. That's what you were thinking right for something that sounds like an intro? I just thought the intro would have more about what everything that we're about to get into, what the goals are, what the goals of historic development are or what are the goals of economic development. Just like a very broad brush of like, this is what we want to do with this chapter. This is what is important to us. And then then get into the background. So like a vision statement sort of? Yeah, just kind of like introducing what the aspirations are going to be, you know, as like a very high level summary. And then I think a lot of what's currently in the introduction could be moved to background. I thought, I actually thought I read through it all. And I thought it was great. It was very informative. And I liked, you know, after reading it, it was nice to know all the different parties that are involved, especially with historic development. There's a lot of different agencies going at it. So it was informative. But I could see what Kirby means about the introduction just needing to be more of like a high level actual introduction of the entire chapter and what it's going to say. Okay, I can speak to some of these things, but I would love to hear from other people as well if there is any more comment. So you guys saying like, it's, so I see that as like, those are context, right? The entry, whatever we're calling an introduction, that's context. Like it is background context. So you're saying this is, it would almost be like an executive summary ish type of intro. Yeah, top lines of here's, here's what we're gonna, here's what we're proposing. Right. And then before we give context, which is what I mean, it's a plan. The most important part of plan is what we're gonna, what we're planning to do. Right. That's what you're saying. Yeah. And that, yeah, what's there now is kind of just some random background stuff. It's not, yeah, we can do a lot better. The intro and planning section, what I'm hearing is have a more punchy introduction that covers what people are going to learn about in the somewhat of the background, but also especially the aspirations and goals. Why this chapter is important and what they're, and what the hope is for the future here. So I think that's doable. For background, to your point, Kirby, we could, if it's just the title background, that, you know, it feels like a step back before we really go forward into the goals and aspirations, we could absolutely change that title to like planning context, which incorporates some of that intro language as well. My comment just went to, generally the language that was chosen there. So again, you know, we provided this chapter language, which I have gone through and edited each of these and spent a lot of time doing that. And I would advise, generally, to stick to that more, because right now, like it, those things aren't perfect, I wouldn't claim they are, but they do follow, I think, there is a real introduction that brings you into the topic. And then it goes into the other relevant parts. And so right now there's a lot of language in there that provides, it's not an issue with the title background information, it's an, it's an issue of like what was chosen to be included and what wasn't from the materials that we had worked on before. A lot of the stuff that was included focused on, like, we've done this and we've done that. And, you know, we put that stuff in the chapter language or, you know, it's in there. But it seems like more of a focus in the current state of these pages. And I just, you know, I feel like our vision is we want to do some things in popular, we want to, in some cases, do some big new things. And this is, everyone in town here is, when this comes up at city council meetings, it's like the planning commission is rewriting the plan. They're a brand new plan. So if our plan comes out and we have a webpage that's just talking all about what we've done in the past, well, that means we don't have a big new plan really, like in people's eyes. I think it's going to be that, oh, they're just talking about all the stuff that Montpelers done before. So we want it to be forward-looking. We want it to be about, you know, a vision. So, I mean, I would say, you know, look back at the chapter language and use the parts that are about looking forward and that stick to what this plan is about as opposed to the backward-looking stuff. That's what I mean by that. So that type of text, it wouldn't necessarily come from, like, the start of the chapter text, but it might come from other places, but just any language that's in the plan chapter currently that speaks to this forward-looking vision for that topic. Is that the starting place? Yeah, because I mean, this is, from what I could tell, comparing the two documents today, looking at them. I mean, it looks like you did most, like Essie, mostly pulled from that chapter language, but it was from different places within. And when I was working on that before, the decisions that you guys made to pull, like what you chose to pull out, were things that I would have considered, like, possibly thought about cutting back then, because I didn't feel like they were the, you know, like what we're really trying to say and do in this. But I did, I mean, I compared the intros, though, and I do feel like the intros that are already existing in the chapter language are quite a bit better. So that was one place. And then when it came to referencing other, like, background to context stuff, like, I wanted to be about, like, what the forward views of the plan are, as opposed to focusing on what was done before. Yeah. Okay. So just to, that last point there, confuse me a little bit, for the background, do you want to look at... When I said background, I don't mean the background section. I mean, just when you think, because there's all of these sections on the webpage right now, reference or have some background info. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's just all of them. So yeah, I don't know. Sorry to bust in sound so crumpy, but... You're fine. I just wanted to clarify that. For your comment about who's involved, that's definitely a section that didn't easily fit in many sections. We think it's important, I think, politically to kind of speak to who else is doing work in this area and to not drop that information. It is, in some chapters, there's quite a bit of that. We could explore moving it to the implementation section, as you know, who's bringing this forward and also include a reference to some previous work. But I understand it kind of breaks up the flow and it's just another thing to read before people get to the exciting goals and aspirations. So there is some movement there, but part of the reason why I was included is definitely for that political cover. I think it makes sense in implementation. And if implementation stays at the bottom, then it makes sense there, I think, yeah. It makes a lot more sense as implementation than it does synergies or something like which I think is what it's currently under. Yeah, it's right before synergies, but it's in that same area. So visually, it can be connected to that. Julia, what do you think about that movement? I think that makes sense. Yeah, I second what Aiden said about making sure that we just highlight those folks who are going to be implementing some phases of this that have already been involved. But yeah, I think implementation is a great spot for that. I think in general, by the way, there's, I mean, there's so many people involved in this stuff in our community that we're not going to give all the kudos that actually we probably should. So I got, so I'm not, I'm not that worried about trying to fill out credit because if we did, then we would need a lot more, I think. For the volunteer, a live section of the economic development, I agree that photo really makes it seem like it's a big player. I'm happy to drop the photo or if we have other organizations that we want to add to that and just show. I didn't, I didn't know if we wanted to add Caledonia Spirits or Timber Homes Vermont or something to that list. So I'll just go. Yeah, no, I don't think we probably don't want to use city resources to market for private companies. Yeah, absolutely. Does anybody else have any of the stuff they saw? Are we getting into the content yet? Or is this just, are we supposed to be reviewing the content? I mean, I started getting the content a little bit, so. Mike has reviewed the content and that's part of the process that Aiden showed there. So that's just to make sure that the judgment calls that we're making about the different texts that we're using from the chapter and are condensing still remains accurate. So. The one heading or the one goal, I guess, that caught me off guard was in economic development, the first aspiration, that my career will be a great place for people in the workforce to live. That's, and maybe I'm just not used to talking about economic development topics, but limiting it to the people in the workforce. You want them to have a nice place to live, but of course we want people throughout Montpelier to have a nice place to live. And is that just because this is the economic development section that we're just focusing on? You want the workforce to be happy? Yeah, I mean, there's going to be housing chapters. We divided economic development into two chapters. One, if you want to go back to the classics, discussing the labor force. So the workers, a lot of times economic development, if you look at an economic development plan or an EDSP, a lot of it will focus almost entirely on the business side. What can we do to encourage and work with business and business owners and that whole side? And there's very little discussion of, well, what about the workers? Economic development is more than just the people who own the businesses. It's also about the people that work at the businesses. So we split economic development into two aspirations. One, that talks about what can we do to make it a great place to be a worker, to be a member of the workforce. And that involves, according to this plan, focusing on three things, transportation, childcare, and housing. Those are the three major barriers to people entering the workforce and staying in the workforce is the ability to get to work, to have childcare, and to have a place to live. And then the other half is talking about the business side of things. What can we do to help bring Caledonia spirits to Montpelier, to bring timber homes to Montpelier, to make sure we don't have a lot of vacancies in our downtown? How do we get more, remove those vacancies in our downtown and those types of things? And that's focusing on business strategies, tax stabilizations, downtown designation program, all those types of features. So that's why it talks about making Montpelier a great place to basically be a member of the workforce. And maybe it needs to be written better to kind of get that point across. I just want to piggyback on the context for Mike though. Our process in developing it was the Planning Commission decided to split this into workforce and then business needs as two different things. And we wanted to make workforce prominent. And the first draft of the aspiration was a really long, like when you said what you said, Maria, I see that immediately or it's like, oh, unfortunate phrasing. That's because that used to be a lot longer where it was in context. And now it's not. And so now it does read the way that you said, so we might need to rethink that. But that was a Planning Commission decision to do that. But that does dovetail into some feedback I would have for SC, which is about things from our chapter language to focus on. And Planning Commissioners, please, like, you know, if you don't think this, this is the direction, but my takeaway from what we did on that chapter was we wanted to make a big part of our plan when it came to economic development about connecting people to their needs, workers to their needs. And we have language in there about that. And we also drew a big connection between housing and workers. And so right now the current state of it is there's a lot of bragging in the webpage about how Montpelier has all these jobs, and we have more jobs than people. But for us, that was in our chapter language, not because we wanted to celebrate Montpelier on the back. It was about kind of connecting it to, hey, we have more jobs than we have residents because we're not providing housing. We wanted to have a connection between other, you know, and that is in there in the website language. But it's, but I mean, my takeaways from what that chapter, a lot of what that chapter was about was connecting workers to the things they need. We didn't even, we didn't even, I don't think we even talked about education as one of them. We had, we talked about childcare, we talked about transportation, the other stuff. So I don't know if it, like, I feel like that was the vision that was there, at least for the, at least for that first aspiration. If that gives you context of what I would expect, and less about how we're great because we have all these jobs, like connecting that to, again, connect that to the plan about what we are trying to do moving forward. We're gonna probably still have the jobs, but how about having, you know, more of the people in those jobs be able to live where they work. And, you know, that kind of stuff being the language of like what we would, I thought that we were expecting to see with the chapter. As we reword introductions to really show that vision for the chapter, I think that's a really great thing to focus on here. And if there's other opportunities within the planning context or the background section, whatever we end up calling it, that we can also make that relationship stronger. Yeah. And is there anything else anyone else who was here when we worked on economic development that you, that stands out about, you know, some of the important values we were trying to make sure we're included in the plan? Anybody else have anything that comes to mind? Or for the historic resources, either one? I think it's good to have, like, fresh eyes, like Maria's on these because this was, like, designed by committee. And you can imagine, like, things getting whittled down to a point where something may just look awkward, but you don't realize it because we were just acting away at something completely different. And then the problem is something sounding really awkward. Yeah, it was way too long. So we were trying to solve that problem. Then we shortened it and we were happy that it was nice and short. But then it sounds like we think only workers matter, which is not the goal. I don't know what the process would be for us to change the wording of that aspiration if we would need to vote. But maybe it's something we can put a pin in. But we should formally change the wording so that we're saying the same thing in a short way, but not phrasing it in a way that we're trying to exclude people who aren't working. Anybody have anything else? Or Essie, did you have more questions for us about clarifications? I think we just wanted to listen to what people's reactions were. And it seems like we've gotten some great clarity on both some wordsmithing and some template movement, which is helpful as we go into refining these and making the other chapters. So if there, I think Mike and Julie and I have a meeting on Thursday. So if there's other comments or anything shakes loose over the next few days, we can send that to Mike and we can discuss internally. But I think this has been great. So thank you, everyone, for taking the time to look at these both in detail and more broadly. I think the key is to make sure we're getting places, getting close on the template itself. We can always send these back to you. It doesn't take much time, I think, for them to go through and adjust if we wanted to reword that opening paragraph. That's just switching out text. But for them to be able to develop all 12 chapters, they need to know this is what the opening and your input Kirby was helpful. They're just going to say try just taking the opening paragraph and plugging that in and just try to use the opening paragraph as the opening statement before we moved into what is labeled now as background that maybe is playing context where we try to really compress what we're trying to say. And that's really a lot of what we've been talking about. And I've been trying to say is we're trying to tell a story. This is a storyboard. We're trying to tell a story. What's the story we want to tell because we're not going to have a lot of words and I can have a lot of whatever to be able to do that. So we really need to know exactly what we want to say so we can say it as concise away through the plan context, which are mostly in those map formats. So we can then move out of that into the synergies. How does what we just talked about relate to other chapters and then it moves into the goals, policies and aspirations, which is just a summary of what's in those tables that'll be in the other pages. And then we would have who's involved. Assuming that gets moved all the way to the bottom and says, all right, well, who's actually going to be in charge of making this happen? And then we know, okay, now we've got an order. Now we know what we're doing. We can always go back and adjust how we've talked about housing in the economic development synergies section. We haven't captured that. Those are easy changes that we can make between any time between now and when we hand it off to city council. But what we can't do is start moving things up and down because then we've got to move it up and down for 12 other chapters. So if we think we're starting to get pretty close in that template, then I can work with Julia and Aiden and we can try to hammer this out. And we'll try to send these things out. If we get a close chapter, we'll send it back out to you guys. And then you guys can really nitpick on the words. You know, we like to make that word. So about that, I mean, I'd like to know the people's thoughts. I mean, one thing that I'm considering is delegating to planning commissioners, you know, down the road to really go at the language, you know, and, you know, we have our chapter language that we've drafted and we have more importantly, our aspirations, goals and strategies. And just really to see like if we can get at the heart of these chapters. Is that something you guys think that we might want to plan to do later is just have like, I'm thinking like, I don't know, go in pairs and then each pair has a couple of chapters they look at, you know, and go through and really like just write it. Basically, hopefully it's mostly written, because that's what we've been doing. My concern about breaking them into pairs is we also want to have a uniform voice as we go through it. And if we have two chapters that are written by Kirby and two rat chapters that are written by Gabe, it's not said that one's better, one's worse, they're just not going to have a uniform voice, which is what we're trying to consistent. Yeah, I thought I thought of that too. I mean, it's just that the problem that's in front of us is like, SE wasn't there for the context of all of the discussions. And so we need to make, and since we were not taking just the chapter language that we all agreed on, we're doing a shorter version of it. I don't know, just figure out whatever the right process for that so that the real intent and the real vision shines through. If we don't delegate, I don't know, maybe we could do it ad hoc as they come in. I'm a little concerned about putting off the language though, like you're talking about Mike, like too much, because then we're going to get busy, we're going to do other stuff, and we're going to maybe have an inferior product. I don't want that because we have a lot of high hopes for this web page. We can continue to think about how we're going to deal with the language stuff. I did have one more structural thing, and there's been a few structural things in this conversation. It's not just been worth anything, obviously. The under each of the aspirations and goals on these pages, we have a description, which was a description that Mike drafted, and I don't think we ever edited. It was presented in a way in the chapter language that was not prominent, but the way that this is put together right now, those descriptions of what the aspirations mean are quite prominent. I even think that people will read them thinking that those are part of the aspiration that they basically have the same legal force, so to speak, as the aspirations, and so if we're going to have the descriptions, I think we need to review those to make sure that that's what we were all thinking when we came up with that aspiration, like do some more scrutiny with those, or alternatively not have descriptions, which comes with its own cons. I can pull these up to give you guys an example, if you want, if people are confused. I think you're right. I think if we shouldn't, and we have in the storyboards, restated the aspirations, and I think you're right. Restating them is probably, we should be careful about doing that, because people will assume the restated aspiration is the aspiration, because while I read the historic resources plan, and that's the aspiration, it says it right there. Well, it's not. That's actually a restating of what the actual aspiration is, which is in the plan, which is different, and I think we should. What I was talking about, I see what you're saying, but what I was saying about was if you look at the historic resources page, and then click on aspirations and goals, and go straight down to aspirations and goals, it tells the aspiration, which is the aspiration that we've passed out so far, and the goal, which is the goal that we passed. But then under that, there's additional language that says, so for the first one, the aspirations, what pillar will start to be a community that understands, appreciates, and preserves our historic resources, goal, address gaps of what pillars of knowledge and records of our historic resources, and then the description language of what that means is it's fine, and it was fine as an example of ways to address gaps in what pillars of knowledge, but it has like some suggestion type sounding things when it's when it's set up the way it is now. I don't think this was a problem before, but based on analysis, there are some neighborhoods where additional historic districts may be appropriate, such as the Meadow, Hall Street, Pioneer Street. So now we're in a place, I feel like with it being so prominent, that in the future, someone who wants to stop development on Pioneer Street or whatever is going to say the city plan calls for this to be a historic district. You can't do this, and that's not the planning commission's intent there. So that's what I mean about making sure that we have descriptions that match our intent. What do planning commissioners think? We should be cautious of making like perfect the enemy of good enough. We need to get this planned down. Well, I mean, yeah, it's not much effort to remove these descriptions. I'm not making perfect enemy of the good enough. I mean, it's a simple thing. Good, Maria? You're muted. Good. I'm muted. So as like a person on the outside reading this for the first time, the goal and the description don't necessarily seem related to me. I thought the goal was to this one, address gaps in knowledge and resources, and then the description is not about going back to the read on my computer, addressing gaps in our knowledge. The description seems to be like what else we could be doing to preserve our historic structures, but I don't know that it's about addressing gaps in our knowledge. I do think this inventorying and mapping piece does speak to that. This addressing gaps in knowledge, I think, is about where the historic resources are. That's part of it. So I do think it speaks to that, but it is in the second sentence here, not the first sentence. So is it saying Montpellier? Do you mean like the city's knowledge or the people of Montpellier's knowledge? The city's knowledge. So, yeah, I mean, I think the intent was to go to for us to learn more about some of these things. So I feel like the description should be a neutral tone that's not... Again, this is not... I think Mike drafted this with the chapter originally, and this was what Mike thought would be some good examples of this kind of thing to help somebody kind of get it, which is good, but I think if we're going to have it in a prominent place, then the examples could be taken with a lot more weight than intended. So just making it more neutral. There are some neighborhoods where... Even Montpellier could add or remove some historic districts, like keeping it neutral, where either one could be the case, based on... And then for the other one, that one's, I think, mostly fine, but a bit more neutrally phrased, like Montpellier could create an inventory of... Whatever that said. And then, you know, Montpellier could survey... I don't know. I think just more neutral so that those things aren't taken as... It's pretty prominent on here. I feel like people will take those as like our main priorities or something, and that's not the intent. Maybe that first sentence could be dropped to under, you know, so that we're going to inventory and map out individual structures and then do a survey of archaeological sensitive areas, and then, you know, if appropriate, there may be some more historic districts, appropriate based on what we've just learned through the surveying and mapping, you know, kind of make it seem related to... And put them in the correct order that we would be doing them. Yeah, I think that's what you're thinking right now. Yeah, I mean, the goal of the historic resources is to understand our resources, to get the community to appreciate them, and then to have strategies that help us preserve them. And so, this is just meeting the first of our three aspirations, which is there's so much that we don't know. You know, we know a lot about our National Register Historic District, that's great. We know everything about our downtown, but we don't know anything about anything that's around our downtown, and we don't know anything about our archaeological resources. We don't know anything about where are the Abenaki sites. We don't know. We haven't even looked for them. We haven't even tried to look for them. So, you know, these are all the things we don't know. There's a lot we know in the downtown, but there's a lot we don't know. And that's what the first goal is trying to get at. And the second one is, and this is a little bit for the benefit of those of you who weren't here before, there's been a lot of proposals to protect our historic resources in our downtown and around our downtown. And every time the Planning Commission has proposed or the Historic Preservation Commission has tried to propose something, it gets bombed out. It gets shelled. And what Eric Gilbertson and the Historic Preservation Commission basically have come up and said is, as long as this community does not appreciate the historic resources, they're never going to vote to protect it. We're always going to have our historic buildings getting torn down because people just don't understand how valuable these resources are. So that's that, you know, from the Historic Preservation Commission, you know, we've got to understand it. We've got to get the community to start to appreciate it. And that's, you know, two different strategies, sets of strategies, before we can really do an effective job at preserving it, which are sometimes regulations and sometimes programs to give people money to help them take care of the buildings. There are a lot of different ways of preserving it. That's the third piece. How do we protect it once people appreciate it? So that's what that's really the story we're trying to tell here is, you know, here's what we know. Here's what we don't know. And this is what we're going to do to learn more. This is what we're going to do more to get the community to appreciate it. And this is what we're going to propose to help preserve and protect them going forward. So my general feedback about this for SE was I can see the point of having these descriptions on the page like this. But I would ask that you make like make sure it's neutral sounding and that it's not suggesting specific things. If we want specific things, that's going to be in the strategies. Like we don't want to accidentally, I mean, I definitely have my lawyer hat on here, but this is real in this, in the town we live in, this is real people will take this and they'll use it. They'll try to use it. So just neutral. Give the examples but make them like neutral of like, if you could scroll down a little bit, just like we just discussed with this one, each of the three sentences can be kind of shortened and they'll give you the gist of what that aspirational goal means without sounding like it's suggesting a specific action unless we've really called out that action. But I think you get it. But I understand what you're saying about making this more neutral. I do think just as an educational tool for the public about the plan and since you have done so much work already to identify what those strategies are going to be, I think just in terms of using this as an opportunity to share that with people in an accessible way, this description could be replaced with just a bulleted list of these are three strategies that relate to this goal. That would be great. I think that could be great. Potentially. I mean, of course, doubles in the details would have to see how it looks and reads. I think that could be great if you wanted to take that approach to other people. That would probably have to take out the implementation. The implementation, so the aspirations and goals were trying to explain what are the aspirations and goals. Implementation was trying to give a summary of the strategies. So if we were to kind of merge these together, that may mean implementation either goes away or otherwise gets adjusted as well. Well, currently, the implementation sections from what I have seen only link to strategies. They're not actually there in any on this page. That's correct. We don't necessarily need to do that, though. We don't need to have strategies. I think if SE is looking to redo these descriptions, though, looking at the corresponding strategies is a good way to get info about what we're getting at. This goal is going to have some strategies that tell you specifically how we want to meet the goal. Yeah, I do think it's possible to just retitle this aspiration goals and strategies and then say selected strategies or summary of strategies and list some of them and then say for the full strategies, click the link in the implementation section below or link directly here. That is one option. We can change the title to implementation summary and then it's an indication it's not really intended to have all of the strategies. We just call implementation summary. I mean, one thought here is that when we throw around the terms aspirations and goals, I mean, I know in the landing page, we explain that, but on each of these pages, we're not... I'm just a little wary of people looking at this without looking at the other page and not knowing. I mean, I don't know. I don't think we need to lean on that lingo too much. What are other people's thoughts about whether we have a description here or give some strategies as examples? I mean, I found it to be pretty benign, but I don't have the context that other people on this call have for the context for the original development. We use the word may in there. I feel like the people that are going to weaponize any part of the plan are going to find ways to weaponize parts of the plan. I should clarify my comments about that. I mean, that's not the only... It's just misunderstanding in general is a concern, not just the weaponizing. I'm sorry, Brian. Go ahead. No, no, no. I don't know how much distance there is between what you guys originally said as the goal versus what this is saying. I feel like this is meant to be kind of a snapshot of... But you don't want to do a disservice to what you guys articulated as goals, certainly, but it needs to be... This seems fairly approachable. I don't know what the word is, approachable or... It's easy to process what you're saying here. I think anytime you talk about adding or removing historic districts, either way, that's going to be... I could see how that could be volatile. But I guess you could smooth that out by not naming specific areas of town if that's what you're looking to kind of smooth it out a bit here and not make it. But I kind of like the way this flows. I mean, the implementation stuff is the deeper dive. That is the more detailed... I mean, I'm not saying the goals and aspirations aren't detailed too, but this makes it very approachable. It seems to flow right to me, but again, I don't have the context for there being a lot of distance between what you guys had decided in all your conversations and what this snapshot shows. Yeah. I actually am with you, but yeah, I don't think we need to list the strategies, honestly. I feel like in the descriptions, I think actually are useful as Brian's saying. I just want to edit them down a bit and make them more neutral when we do it and don't name specific entities or streets or neighborhoods when we do that. That's really the gist of my feedback on it. Is everybody else okay with that approach to the descriptions? Yeah. I'm just going to say, I have the same concern that you do, Kirby. I think what you laid out sounds like a good strategy. I was just going to say, I love that. I really like the templates. I like the maps. I like the synergy graphic that's helpful for someone like me who wants to understand how it's all interconnected with all the 12 chapters or some of the 12 chapters. And I like how dynamic the pictures are. It's interesting. I mean, it's not just which is the goal, right? Not to make it some static thing that's boring to scroll through. So I mean, I think the temple looks great. I know there's certainly some editing to do here, but I'm impressed. So that's fresh eyes on it. And I really like to do like the maps on the storyboard with the, I agree with labeling them as much as possible without making them too busy, but it's very educational for me. Let's put it that way. Thanks, Brian. And thanks, Kirby and Maria and Ariane for the discussion on the description here agreed to make sure we're not getting into any hot water or confusing people in any way. So I was going to say, do you want to roll down to implementation and see if there was stuff we wanted to keep on? So we kind of touched on the goals. Oh, that one doesn't have anything. The other one did. Right. That's right. Yeah. So if you looked between the economic development and historic, some of them have a description of implementation and some of them just have a link. Did you want any? Well, I guess if we had some mention of strategies, we would move them up into the implementation summary. I guess we'll just take them on a case by case and see Yeah, I think, you know, we're trying to make sure that the chapter text that was related to implementation appears here, but there were some chapters where there wasn't that type of text. So I think we can try to add some sort of description, certainly about like what is in this link, why somebody might visit it, without trying to, you know, create a whole new description. That isn't something that this group has reviewed. On who's involved might be right section as well. Yes. Yeah, this one had this chapter with that we wrote did have stuff on implementation. Okay. But it talked about that's where the context for the who's doing it. So actually, if you look at what was in our written implementation, it starts with the city as an appointed historic preservation commission, CLG has the the capital complex commission. Perfect. Yep. And then finally, the city has a two pronged approach to preservation of historic buildings, blah, blah, blah. So there is a little bit in there. I think that's just exactly what's in the or very similar to what's in this who's involved. So. Yep. That first paragraph was first paragraph was moved up and then the second two paragraph outreach to the public blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I don't know if we need that. If we just focus on the aspirations and goals and then tell people, you know, we can put a summary of the types of tools. But in some cases, there's a lot of them. So I don't know how we would necessarily break them down. Historic is easy. There's only 11, but other chapters have as many as 60. So right. So we can keep the focus on aspirations and goals and then just reference implementation, which of course now would have who's involved. I wish there was a way to summarize the implementation strategies, you know, because if I was a person going to this website, I think that would be like the one thing that I would want to see was like, what are they going to do? Right? Like, that's, that's like the question of the hour, I think, if anyone's actually looking at this page. So. Yeah, so talking about having a link at the top of the page. So I think by the time like you've gone through all this and you've seen like the goals, and then you get to implementation, like you want to see something, you know, like, and so I appreciate how difficult it is with how many different strategies there are. I think most of the chapters that we've written have a fairly good summary. It doesn't talk about every strategy. It really tries to group them into themes and topics of these are the types of things that we will look at in the specific details are here. And there wouldn't, it's not an all inclusive list of everything, especially lower priority items have been taken off, but it may just focus on these are the three big things we want to do. And so I can go through and make sure we've got, you know, a two sentence piece to plug into each of those. And I think they're probably already in most of these chapters that we wrote. We'll just have to go through and make sure there's a quick summary that helps people understand. All right, what are we going to do about it? And for all the details, click here. Because when you get to that thing that, you know, the spreadsheet, it's not as clear. It's a pretty clunky piece that's there. Once people want to get to that implementation sheet, it's not going to be as straightforward. Although I think we're going to have one that's straightforward. I mean, we'll talk a little bit about the legal advice we got. And one of the legal recommendations is we're going to have to have a way that we can, especially with the implementation strategy, have it be downloadable to a PDF. And so for a number of people, they may rather than go through the widget that John has thought out. Hey, is this what you're calling that what you're saying is going to be clunky, Mike? I'm not going to make it clunky. Well, it's not like opening a PDF, which is just going to list them right out for you. You have to go through kind of a searchable function to kind of get you what you're looking for. I do want to get Mike's back in this, though. And there's another thing, different people have different brains and they want to look at or digest information in different ways. So John's thing is going to be really cool, but also just a plain old list that can be printed on a piece of paper. I like John's thing. I want to use John's thing. I just don't know. The people who are going to knock on my door are going to be like, I don't help me get this. I don't get this. Right. And then some people would prefer it just to be an old-fashioned list on a piece of paper. And since we legally should do that. Well, I think we're just right, though. We want to articulate the action, I mean, or memorialize all the action. So I like the summary stuff. I mean, it's basically like aspirations like deep thinking goals or the concrete goals. And then here's the action. We're not just sitting around thinking deep thoughts. We actually have a plan. And then Kirby, is your, so the ribbon that's below the, let's say the intro graphic at the top that has the title of the chapter. And then the implementation, I mean, there's those things along the ribbon, you know, introduction background, blah, blah. And then implementation is right there. That would take you right down, obviously to the same page on the same page, but then you would be to the link. So you're saying you want it even more accessible than that. Yeah, like something that just plainly says link, you know, click here to go directly to the implementation strategies for this chapter. I, you know, but I'm not, I mean, I'm not dead set on that. What I continue to be insisting upon, though, is that people who are here for that reason can easily find that stuff and navigate it. And if it works, that we have that link on the landing page and we, and we have it accessible. That's fine. I just want to make sure that those people are being catered to also because the, you know, that these, these chapter page, these web pages for each chapter that we have right now are more oriented towards the more casual user. Just want to make sure that we're, you know, getting everybody. So that's, that's my concern about that. And I also just, I don't know, I'm just like a big into, I have strong feelings about good government and good government is transparent and getting to the important legal info is should be easy, not hard, you know. I can just write as we end here. I can just show again what the, just reminder for folks of what we're hoping is people's first, first thing they click on when they Google Montpelier city plan. And we're seeing this implementation right here would open right now. It just goes to this landing page, but we're hoping to embed John's things into this page here. And if there is a PDF that's created, that link could also be embedded here. So people could explore it in a more interactive way or just download a PDF that has a plain old list and, you know, 200 strategies if they want to absorb it that way. So we're hoping that that's how people get to this. If people do want to dig into the nitty gritty plan chapters, there are two, there are some linked here, which then would take you through that link tree that we just walked through on those pages. So we're, we are absolutely trying to strike that balance of catering to the casual user or someone who needs the city plan for research in the future and who wants to really dig in and see what's going to be done over the next couple of years. So that's how it's currently set up. If that gives any more information and context, but you're right, Kirby, that if you do go to these pages, you have to click here and then follow this link and it'll then should take you back to that first page. So not everyone will know what implementation means, what we mean by that. It's not like a common enough, you know, it's not going to be entirely to people. So that's another reason why just having some link that's labeled as very plainly linked to the strategies. Link to, I don't, I mean, yeah. So it could be like implementation strategies shows up here and here as well. So people are understanding that it's more than the goals and the aspirations. Yeah, I think so. It's almost like it's a card for me to answer because I'm not sure how other people are going to interpret it, but just wanting to make sure that they know what it means to get because there will be people who are like, well, I know that this plan has specific actions they plan to do. And that's what I'm trying to find. I don't know what all the words mean, but I'm going to, that's what I'm looking for. So as long as the process gets on there. Right. And that reminds me of another process point that I was going to just recap with this group at the beginning is that our next steps as this website is drafted is that there will be a review committee or a couple volunteers that we ask to sort of do what we're saying, go through, experience the website as a layperson and give us feedback on what makes sense, what's intuitive, what doesn't make sense. So this group's feedback is super important, but you're also very involved in this sort of work. So having just sort of the average Joe look at this as well as part of the process. Yeah, it's great. Well, I know that this group has other things on the agenda today. Thank you so much for your time and feedback and thoughts. Again, Julie and I have a meeting with Mike on Thursday. So if there's anything that comes to mind in the next few days, please send it over. Thank you both so much. Don't take my grumpiness as too much of a disheartening thing. I'm just, I'm trying on the, I don't know, maybe I've been watching too much this session, maybe. All good. I didn't drop any bombs on you, so went pretty well. No, we have other people in other lands that are like, I'm so sorry to give this feedback. It was, it was great. And I just want to add this one thing. And you're like, don't apologize. Like, it's all good. That's what we're here for. So no worries whatsoever. Very helpful. One quick question or move on. Do you, in terms of like photos and graphics and stuff, do you have enough stuff? And if not, because I know it's can be like hard to pull some of those. And especially with like photos of like people sometimes, like some other people like really bring things to life and it's hard to see photos of people. But like as a planning commission, we're, we can provide you with photos of people in Montpellier because we are people. And you know, mine will, will probably have too many photos of like some very small children running around there. But so I was just bringing that up to ask if you need any. And if so, I would guess I would ask the rest of the planning commission, hey, if we have any nice photos of the city that we'd be willing to show up and plan, can we send them over? That's a great idea. Yeah, we do have lots of photos that we can also always use more. This platform is really dependent on having lots of photos and high quality photos. Yeah, Mike's done a great job in getting us some thus far, but maybe we can create a folder and then the planning commission can add their photos to that folder. Okay, that sounds good. That sounds good. Especially as we start moving forward, we can always go through and have, once we start to get close, it's very easy to go through and say, I think we could do a better job with that picture and find, and then it's plug and play. It's just switch one out. That's not, those aren't a lot of work to be able to do after we've got a pretty good plan to go through and say that one picture just is taking away from the rest of the story. So let's find a better picture and we can switch those out. But they do have access to all the Montpelier live photos, which is an extensive library, as well as Montpelier had a library of photos that had been developed when we did the website in 2018. So we've got a number of photos there as well. But yes, I agree with John. If there's photos that you have that you've got that you think are great, it can pass them along. With face masks, so we're just pretending the pandemic never happened. Everything is from 2018, things will look like a bit different. Would cell phone quality pictures be helpful for you, though? I think that's important. Yeah, I think, you know, they probably won't be the the largest, largest photos on the screen. But, you know, if we're looking for a very specific photo of like, oh, this is somebody in a crosswalk and you have that type of photo, just as an example, you know, that's a great photo that could be an inset. Okay. Yeah. Thanks so much for all your feedback this evening. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much to see group. Anyone have anything else for them? Or we let them go? Okay. They're off the hook. Thank you. Thanks. See you Wednesday or Thursday. We actually only have one little thing, which is to consider the minutes from March 27. So I'll mention, because we've got a second that, you know, I did finish the public safety chapter. So Kirby, I know you sometimes like to go through and do a quick run through before we take it to the planning commission. So that one, that chapter is ready if you want to read through it. We can get it on an agenda to approve that. I did send out the legal opinion from David Rue. He is okay with us in our pursuit of making a web-based plan. Good for us considering we've already spent so much time and money working on it. But at a certain point, we felt we had to make sure we had a legal opinion because someone's going to push us. And he said, yeah, it's fine. And you saw a few of his qualifiers that he was concerned just making sure we've got easily PDFed items. So that way it can get, go through legal review and we've got a way of, it has to be a fixed document that, you know, we can't have items that update in those types of pieces. So we're good with how we've set this up. And then the last update I wanted to give, I've been working with the Regional Planning Commission on, I'm now on the Regional Planning Committee and they are, they mentioned that the state is going to be coming through with some rules on land use plans, I guess. And I don't know if John, if you know anything about this, they're trying to come up with a consistent format for towns in coming up with land use plans. So that way, if you knit them together, you'll have a little bit more consistency between the various communities. So we don't have that guidance yet. But fortunately, we haven't started our land use plan. But apparently there's going to be some guidance that's coming out. It was supposed to have come out a couple of weeks ago. So the Regional Planning Commission expects it to come out soon. So we'll be able to use that guidance to help us lay out our land use plan in a way that the state is hoping that we do. Is this, what agency is this, like ACCD, putting out some regs or what? I don't think any, I don't think it'll be anything like required or regulatory. I think they're just trying to paint a statewide picture and having a challenge doing so. So it'll be a more guidance, same thing for the Zoning Atlas project, which is a national one. But there's an effort for folks to knit that into a statewide one for Vermont. But yeah, I don't think any of those things, anything like we need to spend too much time thinking about right now, it's more about how do we just translate it to whatever standards they pick. Yeah, some places used to just grab their zoning map and put it in. Some of them, some communities would just go in and kind of make a dumbed down version of their zoning map to kind of go through and say these are the village areas. These are the neighborhood areas and these are the rural residential, these are the agriculture, these are the forest conservation, these are in towns would kind of lay out their plan that way, avoiding the zoning designation. So some would, like I said, some would just grab a zoning map and just adopt that as their land use map and others would kind of, you know, like we have res 1500, res 3000, res 6000, you know, we might just go through and say, you know, these are the urban core, mixed use district, neighborhoods, you know, maybe high density neighborhoods and low density neighborhoods. We want to avoid density, we'd probably just say neighborhoods, then we'd probably have the rural area. And, you know, then we have some designation for those commercial like route 302 in those areas. So I think we would probably have just a generalized map that kind of groups some of our zoning districts into larger entities would probably be how I would see us doing it. That's just a suggestion we can have conversations about how detailed we want to make it or how generally we want to make it when we get to it. I'm just trying to wrap up the last. So as I mentioned, public safety chapter is written. The only chapter I have left to write is so we have the second half of the implementation strategies for us to approve, I think, did we do them all last time? No, we did the first half last time. And now we have the second half of those implementation strategies to approve and to write the community services chapter. After that, all the chapters, all the implementation strategies have been written except for land use. So that puts us in a pretty good place, I think. And that's what I'm trying to focus on right now is getting that last implementation. It's the last chapter written for community services. And so that's what that's what I'm focusing on right now getting getting through that. And then we'll get to land use later. And that's it. That sounds great. That sounds really great. That really close to the finish line. Okay. Do you have a motion to approve the March 27 minutes? Do people still need a minute to look at that? Take a motion whenever you're ready. I'll move to approve the minutes. Okay, motion from Ariane. Give a second. I'll second that. Give a second from Brian. Does anybody need more time? Those in favor of approving March 27 minutes? Say aye. Aye. Okay. Minutes approved. I'm going to float something out there even though I passed my opportunity at the beginning with the comments from the chair thing. But we've talked about outreach and stuff and I have one idea. I'm wondering just wanting to see what feedback would be for this. When it comes to when it comes time for the hearings for the city plan what if we plan to before we do the official like legally required hearings which have a certain process to them that's required. What if we also posted advertised a something that's like a community conversation about the city plan with the planning commission where we actually just walk through and talk about our process because that's not what we do with those hearings. If before we actually have those formal hearings if we actually had a meeting where we just talked about our process like this came from other like city committees and then we did this you know this is how we put it all together and like this is what the different terminology means that's in the plan like this is what an aspiration is and a goal and a strategy and then have people ask questions at that informally but meant to be more like a conversation thing. It may still turn into like angry people showing up but what do you thought Brian yeah yeah you're an expert in this stuff. No I'm not no well not an expert in my failure but my cynical side of me says although well meaning it could be hijacked by the angry crazy you know well meaning crazy people but I think that it'd be better to do as like you had talked about like you could do it as a series of short videos that you know here's our thought process here's the format here's you know here's what an aspiration is here's what a goal is here's how we approached it and that way not to hide from the public at all but but I don't know and I want to be too cynical about how productive but I can tell you that in my world I would never do what's called the town hall meeting because when it's not the town hall because then you don't have control over at least with a public hearing you're able to call somebody well you know you don't lose you hopefully don't lose control of the room so I just I hate to think worst case like like you said it's just taken over and then our process is lost in the mayhem of the loudest voices so I I will be cynical and I agree with Brian well you you are the wrong guy it's too the wound is a little too fresh for you I don't know if you oh you got there you got there I am I'm not allowed to say that no you're absolutely giving a hard time what if what if they don't what I don't know what if we don't call a community conversation what if we call it a presentation on our thought process and we don't get to let them talk is it is it if it's not a sanctioned town meeting then we don't have any you know what I mean like I don't know if it would be a an official notice the town meeting or anything like that I mean anything that's unofficial you know we don't I don't know we kind of lose control of the if we lose control the room we've lost control I mean I don't know what you're saying I guess we go we go home if the pitchforks come out I suppose I guess but I mean then then then it's like then it's a loss you know yeah let's uh I mean I wasn't yeah I'm so I mean I'm sorry I don't mean to try I don't have a phone so I was just thinking of instead of having some type of like town hall or presentation like what if it was just called like a launch party you know um and at this so at our studio we have I think Ariane has been to all of them we have like art is showcased where people just come in and there's the art is there and we have these casual conversations one on one with people to explain where like where this all came from like what was the purpose behind all of this like let's describe like what was the thought process behind the stool challenge here are the children's stools you know and so it's kind of it's very casual so you're not going to have a pitchfork mob because you're just having these one-on-one conversations and like telling people what the process was as opposed to giving this like power point about like and then we did this and then for the next three months we did why like yeah it can bring that into our perspective on what this is and what we wanted to accomplish with it without it being like this group mentality well you know like people are separate as I talked to you about all the absolutely like the open house format is way better than the town hall format the issue with the issue with open house format is staffing so I guess then you would have people at each you know you'd have 12 stations let's say and you'd have people at each station they would come by that way you don't have critical mass of like you said the mob mentality the issue is staffing and then do you need an expert at each do we need Mike at each kiosk to do it so I there's always a risk I would I would respectfully submit that the the environment for your your launch party is you know a safer space than perhaps what would turn up at a public meeting about and maybe I'm being too cynical but I mean there's been a lot of conversation on in these meetings about how delicately we have to tread we just had one about we don't want to put anything controversial in like a summary so and we know the the lay of the land I mean again video you have complete control of your message and it's very accessible okay Mike you go through this a couple times what what have you seen in other successful rollouts yeah I think I think you need to and want to have the public input and we I think the important thing I think the education piece whether it's for council whether it's for you guys is that you don't have to react and respond to every to every voice that's there you don't you know we've already tried to develop a plan by committee you know and that's that's hard enough we don't need 8000 to try to accommodate 8000 people at a certain point we're going to put this out to get public input and we're going to hear nos and we're going to hear a lot of negatives but the question is going to be do we change it in light of some negative input that we fee that we hear because there's going to be some positive and some positive comments that are made as well and usually you're going to hear 100% of the negative comments and you're going to hear you know maybe 10% of the positive ones because if people support it they don't always come out and say so but I think you know my vision is you know a little bit like Maria's idea and maybe a little bit like Brian's where you know we may break this plan into a couple of sections so let's say the first time we've got five five kiosks we we have a meeting we we call it to order it's a planning commission meeting it's not the hearing yet this is the meeting we want public input we want to hear from you what you like what you don't like this is how the plan was developed this is how it's laid out these are some of the key definitions and now we're going to break for an hour and you guys have five stations or six stations and we're going to have the first ones on the the historic page and the second one is on the economic development the third one's on housing and the fourth one's on this and the fifth one's on this and we want you to go to each one and and there's going to be somebody there who's going to guide you through it and we'll have you know a laptop with some will get computer screens and we'll put the computer screens up and we'll go through it and we'll describe it for people we'll give people little cards that gives them links or qr codes that'll take them directly to these pages so they can view them and then after the hour we bring everybody back we have comments what did you like about it did you like the format are there specific things you liked or didn't like about it what about the implementation strategies did that make sense to you you know because we really we've got the the chapters and then we've got the implementation strategies so it's going to be a lot for people to take in but I think for the most part people are going to be looking at a surface and for the people and I can probably name the names of the people who are going to be you know uh whatever you say look here's the qr code look at look at it and get back to us with the with you know if there are some specific things I don't like this strategy this one here you've labeled this as a medium priority that's not a medium priority that's all we've talked about for seven years and we're going to get 25 minutes on why that medium priority should be a high priority great we can we can take all that but I think in the public meeting we want to give people that the big picture of this is what it is this is where we're going this is how you can navigate this and then you know maybe have some computers that are there for people who want to just go through on their own you know we've got the stations and we've got some individual computers that the city has laptops we can just pull them in and plug them in get people to to review it and I think we could do this in two groups you know the first section of you know the landing page and the first five chapters and then the second five second six chapters because there's actually 11 chapters I think so we'll go I like that and then and then there's like the city council has a whole another there's a whole another set of hearings that go along with city council right and this would be the public meetings because when we were in the public hearings then we're going to do it all over again then we're going to tell people look you've already had the opportunity the first time around to go and look at them you've got a second time to look at them we now have to have a public hearing where the planning commission hears official public comments then we'll probably hear from some folks that says I told you to make this change and you didn't do it that's fine we discussed it and for the people who've been here Kirby John who've been through some of the zoning changes we'll propose zoning changes and hear from folks who don't like the proposal and then we just make a vote and says yeah we're going to still go forward with it we know we heard a lot of people who don't want us to change the zoning on northfield street planning commission still believes this is in the best interest of the city for us to change the zoning in northfield street we vote to make the change and we move forward and I think there's going to be a lot of that with the city plan and again with a big city plan the hope is that we very quickly crush ourselves down to everybody is talking about two chapters nine of them are done now we're down to talking about debating these two chapters are we doing enough in housing and are we doing enough in community services or whatever the two chapters are I won't know ahead of time which are the ones we're going to get beat up on but they'll probably be one or two that they are going to take more time than than the others the others are just going to fly right through and we're going to be done it's good to get the I mean I've been pitchforked a lot and it's good to just get them out of the way or not get them out of the way but it does seem like you know folks come and we have a good chair like Kirby it can be managed in a constructive way and oftentimes there are little bits that are are helpful and we can incorporate some of those and beyond that when when it comes time for or when those those folks come to city council and repeat that you know we can say we've heard that considered it and this is why we didn't you know adopt that change so as much as it's it'd be nice to just like steamroll through some of those things it is something that we have to go through also wonder you know think zoning is different than plan zoning tends to bring out more folks in terms of folks that are zeroed in on very specific things and and the climate maybe is also changed in terms of the housing needs compared to where they were you know a few years ago and there is a lot more at least and I guess we'll find out but I think there's a lot more or taking measures to increase the housing supply so you know I brought it up to to get us thinking about it sounds like lots of thoughts there didn't didn't know Mike actually had such a detailed plan in mind so what I was saying was actually kind of in line with kind of what you describe Mike so that sounds wonderful that if we're going to do these meetings like you were saying so sounds like like the meetings are a plan and just want to throw it out there for other people to brainstorm too about how to approach it I also want to say that I brought it up because doing just the hearings I feel like is like our bare legal minimum and people don't always feel heard and I'd like for people to feel heard going into this I think in the long run it will help us because people will maybe not have so much victory all if they feel heard going into it and also it's also you know a good thing to do so that's kind of where I was coming from but the last thing I'll throw in on that is the number one thing that you'll hear from city council is that if they're if it's perceived that there wasn't enough input then that's they'll they will vote things down the the design some of the design review things that got voted down and some of the density pieces that got voted down really voted down because they felt that this hadn't been taken to the public and addressed well enough with them and so in some cases I think council agreed with planning commission on what was being proposed but just didn't feel that it had been properly gone out and I've we've gotten beat beaten up and it's been a thing somewhat we you know we go above and beyond in a lot of our public hearing notices and then it still is like well you know but you didn't you didn't hand deliver notices to you know you know we mailed like literally with the design review rules we mailed copies of the design review rules to every property owner in the design review district and they said yeah but what about the renters the renters didn't get them and so it's like yes if you're a renter in a building that's in the historic district you didn't get a copy the landlord got the copy and then it's like well do we need to just redo this whole process all over again because renters should have gotten a hand delivered copy like well we put a notice of it in the in the bridge every part every everyone who has a mailbox gets a copy of the bridge and we put a description in the bridge so I don't know how much more we can do to help get people involved but it it is a thing so you know there's certainly nothing coming out of the planning office that we'll be trying to steamroll the public process because I'll be the one who's going to sit in hot seat from council and explain why we didn't maximize the opportunities for the public to get involved so and it's just like I said most of it is listening and taking listening to the public and being able to go through and say you know asking them questions if they have a negative thing it's like well thank you for your input we appreciate your comment we'll talk about it later do you have more suggestions do you have a do you have a suggestion for a different way of doing this and trying to kind of pull out some stuff that way we've got away and if ultimately it's like you know this is this is somebody who's being a nimby and he doesn't want to change or she doesn't want to change there's it's just you know thank them for their input and decide whether or not it's it's a change that we want to make or not and there's no obligation we don't have to argue with them we don't have to debate with them we don't have to convince them that that they're wrong or that they're doing it's just this is their opportunity to provide input we take their input and occasionally we've had to back off you know I think John has been there when we've had you know a room with 65 people saying there's no f in way you guys are going to move this forward and we kind of all know this this proposal isn't going anywhere it's it's toast as much as we like it and so we've withdrawn some some projects just for that reason but hopefully we're constructive we hear good things and we can vote to make changes move it forward and this doesn't have to languish for you know 18 months of public hearings yeah let's be optimistic I don't think I don't think it's going to be one of those we'll find out all right do we have a motion to adjourn motion from John second second second from Gabe all right we are adjourned everybody have a great night we'll see you in two weeks