 May 10th meeting of the planning commission, molecular planning commission. First, we have to approve the agenda. We have a motion to approve the agenda. I move to approve the agenda. Okay. I'm not sure if this technically just be a motion. I always second guess myself when I say that. But whatever it is, do we have a second? I'll second. Okay. Those in favor of approving the agenda? Say aye. Aye. Okay. Jim approved. Brings us to comments from the chair. Do have a couple of things to note. The first is that. It's kind of a two-part thing. Hopefully everyone's aware of the equity survey, the city's doing. And if you're not looking up and participate. That's pretty neat thing they're doing now. Hopefully it turns into action. And Marcel had raised an email, like whether we want to include the equity survey. So I guess I'd like to briefly mention that looking at it, it looks like the governance chapter would be the appropriate place, but I believe city council. Is in charge of that. What do you think, Mike? I was sorry. I'm not like, but I was more thinking. If I had read it correctly in the assessment, there was. A mention of like an equity plan, like they're, oh yeah, the equity action plan. This will help inform the development of the action plan. And that's the thing I'm thinking we would want to. Reference or incorporate. Less the survey results itself. Had I heard about it through work. So I, I don't know if I'm like, not on the right. Lists or what, but if everyone else heard about it, I'd be curious how and. Yeah, I heard about it from my old neighbors. Yeah, not through. Yeah. Yeah. I heard about it through, is that through work via surge central Vermont. Um, surge. I had not heard about it. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. I heard about it from a couple of places, but the, the biggest one was I'm on this email list with people who are interested in police reform in town and they sent it around. You should have sent it to staff and commissions. A lot of people. True. True, true. Yeah, so sorry for that. I got distracted there for a second. I just, but yeah, I mean, for where, where things can go once these get developed. I've been trying to focus on the core chapters that are necessary and required for us to be able to move the plan forward, but we can always add as many chapters as we want. So even the governance chapter has kind of an arts and culture have kind of been set off to the side. If we get the time to get to them. Great. And I think we could certainly have chapters about a number, a number of topics that aren't required, but you know, I've worked in communities that did a health public health as a chapter. But, and we've talked internally here about, you know, how we tie in the questions of social justice, equity, you know, should there be some kind of chapter that addresses those as its own chapter within the plan. And I think what we'll do is probably as we work our way through a couple of these are, they're doing their own work right now. So it almost doesn't make sense to wait until they're done anyways. You know, that's one reason we put public safety office. There's actually a public safety commission that's working on public safety issues and coming up with a plan. And so we're kind of letting that process run itself through, which should be done in July or August. And then I'd be able to kind of pick up where, what they've got to kind of build that part of the plan. And so at this point, I'm focusing on these six or seven chapters. Of the 10 or 11 that are required. There'll be a handful of them that'll, that'll be left. And then we can add other ones on as we, you know, as we see fit, you know, we may go through and prioritize them to go through and say, look, I don't think we have the time to do four extra chapters, but we could easily do one or two. And this is, these are the one or two that we think are the most important. Let's prioritize governance and equity or whatever we, whatever we decide to go with. Okay. So to, to remind me, who are we thinking was going to spearhead the governing governance chapter? Was it going to be the planning commission or someone else? I was going to probably work with the city manager and their, you know, assistant city manager to kind of go through because a lot of that comes through administration and city council. So having them kind of take the first draft at it would kind of set the table for the planning commission to then review it and integrate into the plan. Okay. We still as the planning commission have to do the land use chapter. So we still have that on out there for on our work to do list. Okay. If you, if you just do us a favor when you, when you go to do that later on, just pass along that there's an interest from us and including the equity plan. And in that chapter. Yeah. The other thing I was going to bring up actually this segue as well, because Mike brought up art and culture. And that was the thing I was going to talk about. I personally have not forgotten about our discussions about the art and culture chapter. And I had actually done an outline before, which is in on the website. So I'd be happy to, if Mike feels like he needs any more to do a draft of that later on, I'd be happy to help you with that, Mike. Just let me know. But it looks like that outline does have the, like a draft version of everything we need for it. So that's it. Just not any written chapter, obviously. Okay. That's all I have. So next year general business. And we don't have any members of the public. So we'll pass right through that onto approving the minutes from last time. So everybody could take a look at those. When you're ready, I'll take a. Motion for. Proving those minutes. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm late, but. Decision will need to update from the. CNS working group. A decision will need to be made. As to whether the policy standalone or a part of the city plan. Are they policies? Did we talk about that at the last meeting that it sounds, the terminology sounds wrong to me. Yeah, we talked about whether or not we could say it will be the city council or if we needed to. Say. Montpelier will implement a policy. Vienna, you know, whoever the administration or the. City council. Oh, okay. I don't believe we, yeah, I think it's right that we didn't land on something, but. Okay. Yeah. I guess I just, I have forgotten that to be honest and just reading it. Like policy sounds. Yeah, I think it's the words kind of misleading for what the discussion. I remember if it's more of like. Supplemental explanation on the website of what's in the plan. I mean, that's how I think of it. But correct me if I'm, if you think of it differently, Mike. I think it was more as Marcella was talking about it with. The discussion was really about whether or not. We should be phrasing our, when we talk about a policy, should we say the city shall it will adopt an appellate will adopt the policy about X. Or should we just say the policy is X. And when we adopt the plan, it becomes the policy of the city. And I know we had a conversation about that. I'm not sure if that's clear in the minutes that that's what we were talking about, but that. That's what was discussed in at least that was my recollection. It struck me like somebody else was reading it. Policies might sound more. Definitive or, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's loads of policies in the plan. So it's not like we're talking about leaving that out. Yeah. I mean, whether the policies should be adopted separately. Or adopted as a part of the plan. Adopted with the plan. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I don't know if anyone actually reads these. On the website, but I feel like if somebody did, they might be confused as to that. What that means. But I'm not sure I have a good suggestion for. I would suggest phrasing exactly as Mike and Marcella did then about. Like with the details and the nuance about. When, when we include a policy, will we. State it directly or will we leave it for later to be stated directly or. Elaborate it upon. I'm definitely not concerned about things like that. I think it's going to work itself out as we go through the chapters and. And when we have a context in front of us, I feel like we'll know what we want to do. Okay. So with those changes, we have. Let's try again. Let's get a, let's get a new motion since we have some changes. I have a little approval of the minutes. Change. Okay. Do we have a second? Second. Second from Marcella. Those in favor of approving the minutes with the state of changes. Say hi. Hi. Okay. Okay. I think that's approved. On stuff. Okay. So next we, we have, you know. The main course here for, for the night, which is historic preservation chapter and the implementation strategy. And we want to go something out. I'm thinking we start with the implementation strategies. Or implementation. Yeah. You know what I mean. I don't know if you do you want me to share my screen or do you want to take the screen or. Yeah, go ahead and share because. I don't have a set of opinion on which version we're looking at to start here, whether it's going to be the spreadsheet version or the other. So. Yeah. So this one. We can go over. I don't know how much we need to or want to talk about the aspiration for historic. I guess I can leave that one. Out if anyone's got comments on that. So I will, what I will say to open is that everything that I put in here for aspirations and goals. Is what was. Kind of finalized by the committees. Themselves. So I haven't made edits. And just to point out. You know, I didn't. Or don't 100% agree with everything that all the committees have put together. So don't, don't be afraid to point something out. If you think it's. Not. What you guys think we should be doing or they should be doing. But in this case, you know, as it applies to the aspiration. They were one of the first commissions to go through and they, they, they were the first commission, to maybe talk about the historic inspiration. And so in the case of the historic simple aspiration. They're really just looking at trying to have a community that understands, appreciates, and preserves our historic resources. So they're really the kind of looking at the three pieces. Which you then see. Written again. Here in the, in the goals. So the kind of. They want to improve the understanding. So I know there's been a lot of conversation about, you know, the goals and then kind of this, you know, applying benchmarks or measurables to these. And I think if we're going to, I think my, my recommendation or my thought is that we should keep the goals as they are, because I think the goals are reflective and break down. The idea of the goals is to break down the aspiration into bite-sized pieces. You know, the strategies to improve our understanding are going to be different strategies than appreciation or preserving. And so we really want to kind of break things into a couple of pieces that we can then implement with different strategies. And then we had in, within the office, we've had a lot of conversation about what I think John has brought up a lot and others have as well, which is how do, how do we get some benchmarks or some measurables in here? And, you know, I've had a hard time kind of picking things apart and I've been doing a bunch of reading over the past two weeks from other, you know, a little bit out of ICMA, a little bit out of some other different authors who talk about, you know, how challenging it is to come up with metrics for government goals because our goals, you know, a lot of performance measures and things work well in the private sector because you've got very economic ties for everything, but sometimes it's very difficult to have, you know, think of equity. You know, how do you start having, you know, measurable goals with equity or racism? And some of them are just, they're just inherently difficult to put these things in. And so they talk about a lot about internal and external, you know, in some cases you can measure them, in some cases you can measure pieces of them. So I kind of looked at it, initially we can look at, and they said this is a poor way of doing it, but it's an effective way of doing it nonetheless. And that is by using your benchmarks as an evaluation of your strategies. Say for instance, you can have a check box. One of the strategies is to do the historic scenic study. So basically where's the state house dome visible? We used to in our zoning have regulations that would say if the state house dome can be viewed in these areas, you can't build any project that would block the state house dome. So we no longer have that rule in effect because we just don't have the specificity in one of our plans. So we kind of need that plan replicated so we can re-adopt those rules. The benchmark is really a yes-no. Did we do this or not do this? You know, in other cases we can have measured outputs. So you can have these kind of yes or no, or you can have these measured outputs. So it's things that we do. Again, these are back to strategies. You're not really measuring the outcomes. You know, we're going to do 24 community outreach efforts, which is community appreciation. They have the, you know, the historic outreach program. If you're going to do three outreach episodes a year for eight years, you might go and have a benchmark that says we're going to do 24 of them. It doesn't really measure the output, which would be the best thing. If you could measure outcomes, you'd be better than measuring outputs. So your outputs are what we do. You know, we do the outreach and we do the training to the public. But that's not really measuring community's appreciation. That's measuring we're doing things to help the community appreciate it, but we're not actually measuring the appreciation, which would be the outcome. So measuring outcomes are things like, and I don't have any for historic, but if we were doing housing, we might have an outcome that says we want to have 150 new housing units. We're not going to build any housing units. I won't build any housing units. The city won't build any housing units. And yet our goal is to have 150 housing. You know, our benchmark would be to increase our housing by 150 units. That's an outcome. And that's actually very, very direct. And it's exactly what we would want to have as a benchmark and a measure, at least as from the books and articles I've been reading. That's kind of the gold standard, but it's hard. And what they point out is it's hard for government because a lot of what we do is not tied to these types of things. We can measure outputs. You know, as I mentioned, we can say we're doing 24 of these and we're doing eight of those, and we can have a box that checks off how many of them that we do, but it doesn't necessarily directly tied to, you know, how do you measure a community's appreciation. You can do a survey before and you can do a survey after, but it's a tricky one to do. So one thing I wonder is, what do people think of for the, it's like, yes, some of the goals are not directly measurable. Would people be in favor of wording them as such, like for goal number two here. I think it's a great appreciation very easily so to phrase it as create opportunities to increase the community's appreciation, which is something that's measurable, whether or not we created opportunities or not, or, or does it not matter that much and we should leave it. I don't hate that change to do. Well, increase opportunities. Wait, can you say it one more time. Yeah, I said create opportunities to increase the community's appreciation for its historic resources. Right. Okay, so it'd be like, that was sort of their education and outreach. I'm sorry. I'm late guys. I apologize. I'm, I'm in Nebraska right now doing some family stuff, but where exactly are we looking right now? We are just starting looking at the goals and strategies for the historic preservation chapter. And so we're talking about the goals and Mike was just talking about, he was referring to some of our previous discussions about creating benchmarks. And I think it was just measurables making things more measurable. He was just pointing out how some of these things are basically impossible to measure. This is the goals, measurable objectives tab in the spreadsheet. Yeah, can you see Mike's. It's really, it's really small. I can try to make it bigger here. It's more, it's more of my screen than anything else. I just have everybody's small screen. Yeah, we're just looking at the spreadsheet template under the goals tab. Okay, cool. Thank you. So what do you guys think? It is an idea to kind of do that. It would lend itself to doing that. Some of the other chapters will be easier. Like I said, when we look at energy, I think energy does have a number of benchmarks that we could do. My recommendation for there would still be the same. I wouldn't want the benchmarks to be the goal. I would rather have a goal and then have a benchmark that helps us evaluate our successor lack thereof of accomplishing our goal. I would see the bench, the benchmarks, but we can word our goals better to make the lend them better to a benchmark. As you said, I'm not against your idea to create opportunities. I think if they are more these feel more like part aspiration and part strategy. I think that's okay because it's a goal. I think if we, as long as the strategies, if I recall they do support a more kind of benchmarking type of goal that says increase the opportunities where the community can deepen its appreciation for historic resources. As long as our strategies back that up, I think that would be fine. I think they do. Yeah, I think the goals were intended to kind of be the what what are we trying to do. We're trying to improve the understanding we're trying to increase appreciation and then the strategies in the next tab are are how how are we going to improve that understanding. I feel like and maybe I'm looking too much into this but I feel like some of this, the emphasis on the appreciation and understanding comes from some of the pushback or the misunderstanding that was expressed during the last zoning rewrite that we dealt with the historic district and the changes that were proposed there. So, which is why I was, I was thinking these strike me more strategies. As a city, I'm not sure that the ultimate goal is having individuals in the city appreciate and maybe understand historic resources like we could meet all of these goals and actually like depreciate like we could lose our historic resources I feel like our goals should be increase it like increasing investment in have in our historic resources and having how much earlier be like we have the largest continuous state historic district in the in the state if I'm not mistaken right like this is a huge valuable asset that's recognized, you know, recognized at the state and beyond so I feel it seems like having people understand and appreciate them is a way to get them to be stewards of them in the future and to understand to lead to us improving our protection of our historic research is that that makes sense or is that resonating with anyone. I, yeah I think so I have a couple of things on what you said though one is that a goal number one I don't I think we actually can work that better because look like if you actually look at the strategies that go with it, what that not what goal number one's referring to is the city itself not the residents understanding what the resources are like like doing more surveys and looking at areas that have historic resources that we haven't focused on before. And so it's really like information based and the number two is the outreach aspect and like making people appreciate. And so if you're pitching to change. One of them, then I think you're talking more about what to is getting at. But one also I think maybe could be worded to, and I tried to think of something and honestly I could not think of the perfect way to get at what exactly one's trying to talk about which is again like information. Yeah, that makes sense I did. Miss read one to think more about the residents. I think Kirby Kirby Scott what the historic preservation's intent was as kind of, you know, the HPC's, you know, as the city government our understanding of the historic resources because we can't develop these other two and three goals without an understanding of the resources. Maybe something like identifying historic resources, maybe that's a better way to put what that's getting at. And number two, I'm open if john has some language to get to better get at the heart at what appreciation leads to which is what I understood what he was saying. My, my thoughts on your comments john or just I, I, I don't think you're the way you were phrasing them is is is wrong I think it's just different. And how we, how we word these really comes down to, you know, how we package these together just impacts how we are setting up the strategies because the strategies implement the goals and I don't, you know, I think you're just, you're just kind of a little bit differently, rather than, you know, looking at looking at how do we get members of the public to invest in their historic in their invest in the protection of the historic resources or invest in the maintenance of their historic resources is just a slightly different way of looking at it and the policies that the strategies we would use to increase investment might be different than, you know, focusing on the protection of the historic resources. So I think it's just either way I think would would work. I'm going to fit the format that you prefer my because you prefer starting with a with a verb that's, that's like an up or down type verb, or continue to be, you know, but you know, I think the number one. So I think what you're going to want to describe what number one means is to say to identify and understand more pillars historic resources, or, and if you want me better, I mean I can if people other people agree I can certainly make that change. The framework and I'll just go and just take a step back was that what we were trying to do is in the state's planning manual. One thing they were recommending for communities to look at is to try to identify whether you're going to maintain evolve or transform. And that would help to frame how you approach your strategy so if you're establishing a goal. If you if you talk about it in these boxes, then it will help you to understand okay we need to improve something and we're going to need to maybe do more than what we're already doing or we may need to, you know, how do we kind of look at those. But I think what I found is the historic resources working document that we have, it has already changed significantly and I think, once we've gotten to here we're talking about how we communicate this. How we communicate this to the public and I think we can go through and leave this structure behind, as long as we keep the, the thought so my thought is I think that's perfectly fine to go through and take it out of the improve the understanding if we if your way says it much better. But it says the same thing that we haven't lost the intent of what they're trying to do which is to increase the understanding or improve the understanding and, but it'll say in a better way so. What about improved documentation. Is that what we're talking about. We're talking like we're talking about learning more about what historic structures and and development exists that has not had a historic preservation focus yet, or at least that's part of it. And that would be presumably that would be documented somehow right. Would it be helpful if we skip ahead to the strategies then come back to the goals after everyone is familiar and under the strategies we have which goal is associated so if everyone remembers the one is about information identifying resources number two is about outreach and appreciation. Number three is about protection. Possibly go ahead to the strategies then come back to the goals to see. And you see over here in the right column. You know these three G one G one G one these are the ones that went to understanding. So this was based on the format we looked at this last time so I won't go into it a lot. Ultimately at the end, I went through and finished it. So we're talking about, I believe, 1011. There are 11 things that the city does to advance our historic preservation goals. And so the understanding they the HPC wants to do more historic surveys. So we've got a historic survey program. Separately we've got this historic scenic resources this is that that that dome, the state house dome survey that they want to do it's a one time study. The CLG program. We talked about the historic preservation outreach program this is where we had collapsed in all of their outreach efforts because they had talked about wanting to have walking tours. So we're updating the website identification of education material here in the office, their design review guide for applicants that's kind of all lumped into this outreach program. You know designated downtown program makes us eligible for grants and start grants there's a lot that goes in there. And then city, city owned buildings. Basically, we, we established a policy of maintaining our buildings in accordance with secretary standards, capital complex agreement. That's still out there. That would be a separate thing that's part of G three that's part of preservation so these are kind of tying into preservation. How do we preserve those things we can preserve our own buildings. And that's how the state does their stuff. Tax stabilization is a is another program. It is written in there that if you maintain a historic building, it makes you eligible for a tax stabilization. We, it's why we have the design review rules and the unified development regulations which is the zoning bylaws. This is a study preservation program for owner occupied houses. This is something HPC wants to do. Again, there are things in here I don't think actually will work but that's that's one of their goals, and then our grant writing and this is stuff that we do already. This study, what they want is in number 10 is really simply is that there is a lot to help any commercial property you can get tax grants all these grants down here are all eligible for commercial historic buildings. If you happen to personally own a single family home that's historic and the historic district you have to meet all of our design review requirements but you get none of the tax stabilization. None of these grant programs you're eligible for. So what HPC wants to do is to research some opportunities that that the city of Montpelier could locally come up with some options for owner occupied houses. So it's not establishing the program it's going to study options of creating a program. So that's that's what number 10 is. So this is really the 11 things that between HPC and city staff that we do many of these things we already do. A couple of them were expanding on them. And we're kind of, you know, making programs where we just have ad hoc things right now we're kind of saying let's group them together but these, this is how we would accomplish those three goals that we had just talked about. So, so a couple of things everyone make sure you see how the goals associated to each strategy because we're keeping in mind how we want to phrase the goals. But also I'd like to just open up the floor to anyone who has specific comments about specific strategies, especially if there's any changes desired. And if no one has anything if they still need time to think about it. I have one maybe two. Number 10, like, written in a way that we can do something about it. Does Mike I guess that's a question for you. I can read it for those who can't see it. So number 10 says many programs exist to provide incentives to offset some of the increased cost of meeting preservation standards for his. Commercial properties including grants tax credits and tax stabilizations owner occupied homes do not acts, do not access. Have access. Oh, yeah, it should have probably need some wordsmithing any similar opportunities but may need to meet the same requirements as commercial properties the HPC would like to conduct a study to see what options the city has to create a program to help those properties with some financial assistance. If it is viable to If a viable option is identified in the HPC would like to implement the findings from that study. Okay, so if you. So that seems like kind of non committal I just wanted to make sure we weren't going to commit ourselves to something that we didn't think we could do. Yeah, I, yeah, and I think all they're looking at is is the study portion of it. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, Kirby, go ahead. That's fine and I like that they're going to look at that. Mine actually goes to some for number nine. I don't love how it says limit development. The zoning regulations are perhaps the most well instead of local regulations and are used to limit development in order to protect and promote the health. I don't think our plan is about limiting development in many, many places it's very much about not doing that. And that's not how I view what the zoning regulations that we passed as something that's like the goal is to limit development in any way. Probably not the best word, probably not the best word choice there. But if you're in the historic reservoir preservation, I mean, you might want to limit development. It's kind of an arguably like a goal of historic preservation, like I said arguably. But anyway, I think to make it fit better. We can just make it say the local regulations are used to delete everything up into to protect and promote the health. It just says they're used to protect and promote health, leaving out the part about limiting development to do that. Is that a change that's okay there? It seems like the whole sentence is unnecessary. Like we don't need to explain what zoning regulations are. I guess it gives some context or some it's like an introductory sentence for the... How much do we want to focus on cutting out words, I don't know. Go ahead Mike. Yeah, I think there'll be a little bit of word smithing that'll come around later as well because we also talked about, you know, whether this, you know, ultimately you're going to see unified development regulations showing up in every single chapter. And the question is, should they all be referring to one singular? Should they all be going back? In which case you would want to have an introductory sentence to explain what zoning is, and then you're going to have all these bullets. Because eventually we've got to go back and connect when tax stabilization is here, it's going to have to be the same tax stabilization as economic development and housing and all these other places where it shows up as a tool. If we're going to make this a, you know, every, you know, a consistent list of strategies. You know, there's only one tax stabilization program and it's going to eventually include all places where it is, unless we're going to just have it different for each chapter which I'm happy with. I was going to write it this way, in which case the introductory sentence doesn't matter quite so much. But I think we can get to some of that. Details, a little bit of the details we can start polishing up later on to, I mean, I think we're still doing some shaping here. Well, I'd be in favor of just going and cutting those words out now so I'd like to see that not slip through and then we could cut it down even more later. So, is, is, how about, how about I praise it this way if anyone's opposed to taking out the limit development part speak up already deleted it so I think it's fine. Okay, well, does anyone else have anything. I have another thing I could bring up do it and bring it up. Okay. I'm not sure about the tax stabilization. So this is a bigger policy discussion and I know this is something that we do now. I'm not sure if I, I just want to bring it up, because it's a policy thing for us to discuss but I'm not convinced that there's much additionality here like this. And when I said talk about additionality and talking about when you have a policy where you're spending money. I'm not sure that you're actually changing behavior or you just paying for something someone's going to do anyway. And tax stabilization seems to be one of those. So I like this I just have that as a question, like, is there really additionality here and it also be interested to know what what it costs each year. As I worked on these what I what I did was two fold one was to look at what we are doing already so I would go to the HPC and sometimes they didn't even realize some of these were already built in. But I would try to take as big and a picture as I could have all the things that we do to try to implement this and try to find find these places and tax stabilization was one of the places where we do have an energy setup that and I think one of the part of it goes to if somebody's doing a project. You don't always get it's not an automatic thing you've got to get city council to agree to it. And so what are the things you need to do in order to get tax stabilization and most of them come down to economic things, but there are a lot of things that are that are policy related. So, if, if you want to get part of it, then you need to, you know, you could lose your tax stabilization by taking a historic building and tearing it down and replacing it. It could make you an eligible for tax stabilization. I think the question is, you know, as you say, in one perspective, you know, should we be doing it at all. I think that's a bigger, bigger question. You know, in the same way that you know should we should we should we not have zoning regulations is it how effective is it at accomplishing the goals that we want. I mean the reality right now is we have it. I think tax stabilization is. I think ultimately we would have to look at any one of these to go through and say are we, you know, also can a property owner gets tax stabilization by simply following what they have to do under the ordinance anyway. Design by laws anyway. These are above and beyond requirements, usually so a business. It's stabilized for up to 50% of the municipal portion, so you don't get stabilized on this on this education only on the municipal. And it's up to five years and then you've got a couple of bonus points that you could get that could get it out to maybe eight or nine years, I think. But providing salaries that are at a livable wage. So you have to have a demonstration and you have to provide a livable wage for the period of time that you're in tax stabilization, you need to. There's a bunch of things that are above and beyond what we require. And usually it's, it's important now I'll stick up for tax stabilizations I'm a big advocate of them. Because a lot of times we need them for larger projects that that take time to, let's say, to start making their money. You know, we've got, you know, a potential housing project that may go in that'll take a year, a year plus to develop. And the cost of the of paying taxes and doing everything during the development can end up affecting the pro forma. And these are, you know, you're not people don't make a ton of money building, building housing right now. It's expensive to build. It's going to take time to get those units sold and occupied so usually will stabilize the properties for a portion of time, so they can help to get their their pro form is in order. We've done a number of these and usually you make the money back pretty quick, especially if you're talking about a bigger project. I think that Malone got one for the Grossman's lot. There, there he had a large cost that he paid. He got some loans, got some things to help with the brownfield but a lot of that was a brownfield cleanup project so, you know, he got a tax stabilization for that. I think Fred Connor got one for down the granite shed on granite shed lane right now that's getting developed Caledonia spirits got one for their building. Yeah, so I mean obviously tax civilizations, much broader than just the store preservation but I was just getting at the store preservation part of it like if, if you're renovating and you. Yeah, but you're saying you have to, if you're if you're renovating a store property you, you have to go above and beyond the bylaws. Usually these tax stabilizations you've got to be putting in a significant amount of money to get into tax stabilization. Because remember you still have to pay the current taxes so if you've got it you know if you've got a historic building that's worth a million dollars you don't get that stabilized down. You have to keep paying on that million dollar property, but if you're turning a million dollar property into a $4 million property, then we might stabilize half of that $3 million increase in taxes. To help the fray the costs of, you know, and then we have to go through and say okay well if you want the tax stabilization you need to be doing these other, these other pieces. And for us it helps to be an incentive to get people to make investments in their properties. And if you're not as generous Barry city has a much more generous and there there's is 10 years 100% and they'll even cover your, your school portion, which is kind of remarkable. And that's for for renovated properties in addition to new ones. Yeah, I mean you have to be putting in, you know, the program is usually tiered based on how much you're improving the property. You know, it could be an improved it could be a new building, you know, technically Pat Malone's building was a was a renovation and addition. Okay, we don't need that. We don't need to spend any more time. I mean, that's a really big topic that's like beyond the scope. So, so I'm glad to learn a little bit more about that though but but I'm satisfied it's fine. Does anyone else have any strategies they want to ask about or propose changes to like in other words whatever is everyone fine to vote on the strategies as they are. We vote on the strategies are we going to take it all as a group like go back to the goals and I'm thinking well we're going to go back to the goals but I'm thinking we'll we'll do the goals and strategies implementation section as its own thing apart from the chapter. We won't we won't combine the vote with the chapter. Sorry, we're the goals and strategies implementation. Yeah, everything on this spreadsheet will do is one vote. Yeah, okay, okay. But but but the the narrative part will do separate. Sure. Okay, so would it make sense to go back to the goals then now that we've looked through the strategies. Yeah, so with the strategies in mind do we do we want to change the goals. I'm feeling like on the first one. If, if we're worried about confusion, being like Montpelier at large is understanding of its historic resources we could say improved the city's understanding or of its own historic resources or improved city governments understanding of its historic resources or something like that. Would we want to put in a historic preservation commission would we I'm just throwing that as an idea I mean what if improved understanding is what's misleading about it though. Knowledge of awareness of like as an institution the city does not have the ability to understand things or gain the anthropomorphized like the city here. Fair, fair enough. So maybe the documentation as much as I kind of wasn't sure about that that might not actually be. It's not a sexy word but it's probably accurate. That's why I was saying city government like if we actually call it a person city government stuff that's a that could be understand or knowledge. I agree the city itself can understand but we were confused at the beginning about whether it was the city at large or city leadership. I understand this, they are historic resources of the city at large, but, but not, not necessarily have everyone in the city understand it so it's like city governments understanding of the city's historic resources but city government itself cannot understand things, it can. Yeah, okay maybe it's documentation or roster or what's the word for the. I had said identify earlier I think knowledge and identify I think those, those words get at what those strategies are. So what were the words you had Kirby originally you hadn't I like identify. I had said identify and understand historic resources but we want to avoid understand I mean, it could be something like improve the identification and knowledge of popular historic resources, or identify. Things that haven't already been identified is that part of I mean that's kind of what we're talking about with the survey strategies right. Mike has document there I mean that's that's fine with me and document this document. Yeah, identify and document the city's historic resources. I think that that is a huge improvement in my view and like for clarity. Identifying documents to these historic resources. And that's not saying who understands it just saying we should identify and document the city's historic resources. And that's really what we're trying to do in a B and C, you know, in, you know, in the goal in the strategies we talked about. Does anyone have any more suggestions. What do you think john and Aaron. And fine with that. Okay. So I have a question. I think I'm kind of minds over, but are we really talking about sort of accurately inventorying the resources is that as opposed to, is that the core of like this understanding, not that we're trying to work around. Yeah, so Mike, could you hop over to the strategies and just, just say, you know, Yeah, I mean inventory inventorying isn't isn't a bad word either we just have to pick which word we want to use. Go ahead. Yeah we're just talking we're talking about I mean what the historic preservation thinks of is they want to have a historic surveys program where we do these historic surveys. We do the capital dome study. And then this is really just the CLG which provides funding to do these all these types of activities. So really this is what they plan to do to understand and this is basically an inventory. And those are the three, the only three strategies related to that goal. Yep. Yeah, I think it's just we assume that the list that we have now is good but not complete. There's polls we need to fill. So what we have surveyed in our national register is just our historic district we have a handful of individual structures. So we have our historic district but our historic district does not include the meadow, the college pioneer street cliffside. There's a lot of things that are not included in that historic district in that historic survey and what the HPC wants to be able to do to go out and start to inventory. Some of these additional neighborhoods that are historic. And then get them also to have their own nominations. Maybe I don't know if it's worth putting that in the goal but that's helpful to know that helpful to define it that way in that we have, we have identified and documented city historic resources within this particular zone and so we're trying to grow it from there like push that boundary out. I was thinking that if we wanted to stick with this that consistent verbiage like the evolve transform stuff. I mean we can use the word expand, expand the identification documentation that the city's historic resources. Yeah, beyond the district existing district or something like that. We'll use the word evolve, which is I know. Yeah, I don't know how to kind of work that in I mean I don't think that first one's necessarily too, too far off. We could probably explain the nuances of that in the chapter. Yeah there is the chapter does go into some of some of these and I think, and I think we had that conversation last time as well a number of times we talk about strategies. I can also point out, before I forget, we have the tab for reserve strategies. You'll see in the reserve strategies if you're interested, all of the things that got cut out. So, if anyone is interested there were a number of things that either we had all agreed to take out, or that we said, you guys are trying to bite off too much, we're putting all these into into the, I think we call the bike racket one time. We're going to buy school rack these guys. So there is, there are these other ones that either we cut, or we bike racked. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be against having at least one strategy by the way that that touches on the archaeology aspect that historic in Vermont does go back beyond white people. Yeah, I think, I think we have a number of reserve strategies and that they go farther back in time. Yeah, the survey of archaeologically sensitive areas they wanted to conduct a survey of archaeologically sensitive areas and map those resources. But that was again they're looking at this. This is something they do feel we need to do. But what you have here is the eight years. What we're doing between now and 2030. These other ones are ones that we'd like to do at some point but we don't think if we're going to be strategic, we don't think that fits in our timeline here. And again, this is their prioritization you guys have the right to adjust it their priority is that they wanted to do the meadow in the college historic districts where they're next to and they thought that would take the full eight years to get those two surveys done. And in addition to doing these outreach programs where they want to get more walking tours, which they used to do and fix the website. And there is and to do their design review guide which they're doing right now. And if they have time, they wanted to do this owner occupied thing. The rest of these we do already grant writing we already do unified development regulations we already do. So, is there any desire to add strategies or you guys want to just leave them. I'm leaving them I agree with you, Kirby, I mean I think just that what you just said kind of gets back to the equity part and diversity, and I would like that to show through every chapter. I also think we could. I also think if it's just too much, we can just note it note something that this is all in service of heading in that direction. And we'll get more specific next time. I also remind ourselves that we're a city of like 7,000 some odd people and there's also regional and state programs that do a lot of do a lot of good and kind of help us accomplish some of these goals and it feels like sometimes we try to take, take too much on unnecessarily. Like I can't imagine any kind of archaeology program that the city would run. No, I think if that went somewhere my my putting on you know, as planning director my hat would have been to have them do hire a consultant you'll get your CLG grant to do an archaeological survey of and really it's not digging in the ground as much as kind of doing what, you know, in a brownfield you'd call it maybe a phase one assessment you're kind of going through and looking at the books and looking at where you would expect these things to happen. Where would the archaeologically sensitive areas be in Montpelier, and then map them out then you move on to part, you know, these G3 programs, and we start looking at, you know, do we put that map in connection with something in unified development regulations where if you're going to be doing excavation, then you've got to, you know, in a highly sensitive area, and I don't know how big that is. You know, until you get the survey done you don't don't know how big it is maybe it's a relatively small area, which you document and say if you're going to excavation within this area then you need an archaeological X clearance, and I don't know what that is, and I don't necessarily agree that that should be this strategy but that's how I would be taking, you know, if we were going to attack it locally that's kind of how we have to do it because we're not going to have archaeologists on staff. But we do in our design review regulations say that if you're going to impact, you know, if you're going to demolish a historic structure anywhere in the city anything that's contributing. You have to have a section 106 report done which is kind of a federal report that documents the historic significance of the doc of the structure. So that way, you know, historic preservationist go it goes in and evaluates the building. And in some cases, it's just an old building and we get it documented as to what it is and what's there, and you know, sometimes the report comes back and says yeah it's okay to demolish the structure. But we want X, Y, and Z, as much as we can. In other cases it comes back and it says no this should not be demolished because of these unique features of this of this building but you know so we do sometimes kind of glom onto some of these federal things to kind of go through and say we want to report just like that. We want to section 106 report even though this isn't you know section 106 is a federal requirement. We asked for that if you're going to demolish the structure. And maybe there's a similar thing for archaeology. If there's a similar archaeology thing maybe we say if you're going to dig in a highly sensitive archaeological area then we're going to want an archaeological report of X. My thinking wasn't about what didn't go to a regulatory place my thinking just went to a if we're trying to identify historic resources and if that's like it's something we want to expand on doing then learning about where likely archaeological resources are could be part of that and it's not focusing on just like pretending like Montpelier started existing, you know, 200 years ago, but I'm not like dedicated to forcing that in. I mean, yeah, as others have said, our resources are limited, but I would be open to it if we wanted to include the archaeological survey, but also not a big deal. Yeah, I mean I kind of agree with my myself that I'm really interested in threading it through every chapter but I wonder if there's a way to do it, not so much through archaeology but maybe as we refine these like adding some focus or you know something more explicit in the in the focus about it. I think that makes sense. Like, like, sorry. Like, marker, sorry, historical, you know, something like that, which may not be. Yeah, I think that that makes sense. Again, these aren't final. We're putting these together and, you know, at some point when we go through if we do, you know, social justice and an equity chapter, you know, we're going to have a second shot, third shot, fourth shot at going through and saying, you know, and, you know, now that we've now that we put it all together, we want to see that that archaeological, you know, study done in there and we want to make sure it has that particular reference that, you know, we're not talking about getting it into G three which is preservation we just want it in G one which is understanding, understanding our resources. And yeah, in G two, I mean, yeah. Yeah, they may be outreach, you know, having people understand and appreciate the fact that there is, you know, and it really comes down to what you find once you find something it's kind of like, you know, high gates is a classic case because it's got Indian burial grounds and burial mounds and, you know, just understanding that that's what's there is one thing getting people the community to understand that that those that those mounds that you see are actually Indian burial mounds. And that's, you know, a second piece of getting people to understand and appreciate those historic archaeological, you know, because it's bigger than just archaeology. It's a bigger picture a bigger story that we want to tell. So, if I'm, if I'm following the discussion though, no one's proposing adding a strategy right now. I don't think so. Okay. In that case, let's go back to the goals and see if everyone's fine with goal to as it's phrased. Earlier we talked about how that could be made more measurable by adding create opportunities to the beginning of it so create opportunities to increase the community's appreciation for historic resources makes it slightly more measurable than increase. Let's at least look at the opportunities that we created, which is what strategies to scope strategy to our strategies related to goal to go to different opportunities for appreciation, such as neighborhood tours and things. Yeah. Do we want to do we want to add something about create opportunities or do we want to just leave it. Are we creating opportunities are we increasing the number of opportunities. I don't know really what exists currently, if any of that stuff. I mean the designated downtown program is in support of gold to and that exists already so. We don't have much though that exists now. Yeah, they're more trying to recreate some old written you know rehash some old ideas that they've had, you know they used to do these to have historic walks and they used to have a number of things like that. And so now they kind of want to bring it back and they feel if they formalize it into a program, then you've got somebody who can go through hey annually, you know, we're going to have our annual meeting for historic preservation commission this week what's our work plan for this year. You know how are we going to do public outreach and I think that's what they they that's how they plan to use this document is to be able to, you know, set, set, you know, benchmarks for themselves, you know we wanted to do at least three of these what are the three that we're going to do when they're going to do them who is going to do them. You know, most of them tie into things like the farmers market and stuff so that's what they're. That's how they'll they they look to use this. Okay, I would say like increase or establish new opportunities for community to appreciate its historic resources. I would say increase opportunities for community appreciation of historic resources. Yeah, I'm fine with that for community. Oh wait, we for communities appreciate opportunities for community to appreciate historic resources. No, it's just a increase opportunities for community appreciation for historic resources are of historic resources. So we're increase increase opportunities or increase. Yeah, that increase opportunities, you can delete what you have highlighted. Alright, increase opportunities appreciation of of its history of events are of ours. I would just say of historic resources. Yeah, I think that's good space in there. Okay, what about goal three. Sorry. My thought on goal three is it's more so it's not. I guess I'm having a hard time distinguishing between improving upon city's protection to me like improving our protection of historic resources means like we need to do a better job at what we're already doing but I thought it seems like they're looking for new and different ways to provide opportunities for people to protect or protect historic resources. So it's less about like we just need to do a better job and more about. Let's be creative about different ways to incentivize or provide opportunities for people to better take care of historic resources whether their businesses or homes. I agree with that I don't have this the sense that that we need to do a bunch of things a whole lot better so in the places where it suggests that seems to be kind of I don't know with what we're actually doing. So maybe can continue and establish new methods of continue existing. Just cut out and prove upon just continue the city's protection of historic resources. Yeah, but isn't there also trying to find new creative ways like the number 10 study preservation program options for owner occupied. And I would say that grant writing is kind of trying to look for new opportunities. We're already doing that. So what if we tried to tack this on this idea on to the end so what if we had continue the city's. I'm so I personally wasn't a big fan of how, you know, cities protection of historic resources that kind of like it seems a little. I mean, yeah, continue to protect historic resources is a few. If brevity continue to. Yeah, continue to protect. But I thought that the updates. To protect the city's historic resources. And, and this is where I thought maybe if we wanted to, you know, and identify object and throw something out new new incentives for new protection strategies. Right. Continue and create new means to protect historical resources. And we can put it in either side I was just thinking if we shifted it to the end but we can, we can keep them in the front. I think we know what we want to figure out how to say it. What was that one you just said Aaron was continue continue and create new means to protect historic resources. I was saying continue and improve upon the city's protection of resources and identify new incentives for investment or identify new methods of protection. If we don't want to get specific about investing money or want to keep it to protect. That's a new means of protection means of protection. Yeah. So yeah yours is probably clear like more concise. I'd be fine. I'm fine with that. I think we should move to move to use errands. I'm good with errands. Yeah. Identify new methods for protection. Is that what he said. This one down here. Continue and create new means together. I'll switch if you guys are. Yeah, I think I don't hear anything now. Fine by me. Okay. John, do you have an objection. Nice and concise. You have to write it out. Super long and before you can put it into that super concise. That's my. You have to write it. Let's go over to energy and see how far we can. Yeah, we should. Yeah. For the for the chapter portion of this I went ahead and did a little stroke and white with it. What are the two words you're saying? He's referring to a legal writing book, Shrunk and White. Oh, I know that. Shrunk and White is not illegal. It's just the style of life. E.B. White and unofficial legal writing book. Yeah. But their whole thesis is omit needless words. But before we actually move on to the chapter, let's go ahead and vote on the implementation strategy. Does anyone have any? I'm sorry, what are we voting on specifically? I apologize. On the goals and strategies here? I vote to approve the goals and strategies for now and move along. Yes, I'll second that. OK, so we have a motion from Marcella and a second from Marianne to be specific to approve the aspiration goals and strategies that we have here in the template and to not include the reserve strategies. So those those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? OK, so we've done a thing, an official thing with the city plan now. Feels pretty good. Now I got a decent idea of how you guys are thinking about this. So that will help going forward. Happy to help. Yeah, so earlier today I went through to sort of speed things along here and put in some suggestions. So you'll see I wasn't overly picky. I just really just in places where I felt like it needed to be more succinct did that. So you see the first sentence is changed to mob healers. Historic resources are important because they connect us to our past. Some resources are from our recent past and visible to all while others are from indigenous persons thousands of years ago and still buried in soil. So so so many of these changes I don't need to walk through all of these. I don't know how does everyone want to do it? Do you want to walk through it like I just started and change and like do more worth smithing as we go or do we want to read it individually and just point out places that we would want to make changes? What do people think is the most productive? And if we don't have it, I don't know if we if we don't have feedback. Let's just let's just walk through it then. Maybe we won't do this for all of them, but this is our first one. Let's just walk through it then. OK, so so I'm going to I'm going to just read through it. It's OK with you, Mike, do you feel like you need to do any intro explanation or anything? So yeah, I'll just I'll just walk through it. This is the text of the chapter itself and stop me anytime anybody wants to or you can wait till the end, either one. So we get to the first two sentences and then it says historic markers, buildings, bridges and districts all represent the the story of how we became a peeler. It makes who we are today. We are more likely to recognize a picture of a peeler, not by the people on the landscape, but by the particular buildings and bridges that make up our city's built environment from the state house, the granites, so obviously this is just. Yeah, you know, lead in. Background, we'll have some pretty photos, right? Yes, yeah, the whole point of there'll be photos and those maps that are talked about later, which will be inserted as appropriate. Yeah. Sheds to the downtown commercial blocks, Montpelier's pride and sense of place shines through its historic architecture. The next one I didn't make any changes for, I just left it. Montpelier is one documented historic district and 535 contributing structures for official historic markers, a handful of individual structures on the National Register of Historic Places and one national landmark, the Vermont State House. Montpelier Historic District is the largest in Vermont and is one of the most intact districts anywhere. We've maintained our district over the years through a little luck, the dedication of building owners as well as efforts by the public at large to fund preservation efforts. I would probably change as well as to and actually. Yeah, it was better. And there's two efforts there. So and the. And maybe just and by. Sure. Through a little luck through the dedication and by supporting and by the public at large supporting. Funding of preservation efforts, we don't have a complete sentence anymore. Actually, we could just think off to fund preservation efforts there. We've maintained our districts, blah, blah, blah, and by the public at large. And by public support at large. We're public support. Through our through our preservation efforts. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So as the state Capitol Montpelier has unique arrangements with state government where the Capitol complex commission manages an area around the state house and is charged with protecting the historic character of the district. The historic structures that surround the Capitol complex are part of the city's design overly district and are protected locally through special rules and unified development regulations. Should it be the unified development regulations? Yeah, probably. Despite the well documented nature of the downtown, much of the rest of the city needs additional study and protection. Some older state surveys are incomplete or outdated and the design review rules and various preservation programs mostly do not apply to these areas. The city's historic preservation commission is working on three fronts to improve the documentation of historic resources to increase the public's understanding and appreciation of historic resources and to continue to improve our protection of these resources through financial programs and fair regulations. So I didn't have anything there. And so the sub one thing that we can keep in mind when we go through these is Mike's wanting to and correct me if I'm wrong, Mike, but I take it that you want to keep basically the same subheadings throughout. So all of the chapters will have these same subheadings. So the next one is how do historic resources relate to other chapters? In the same way that we had templates before, I will write it in this way, but when we actually make the chapter, it may not word for word always say the exact same thing. We may put a different header, but really this is talking about how this resource and maybe how the energy plan relates to other chapters may not specifically say that. But the idea is these are the context, the chapter, the little sub chapters that we want to have talked about. So as I developed the next one, I'll put that header in, even if we don't use headers at all, or we change those headers to different words. That's the idea. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a nice thing to do with someone's trying to, if they're trying to read every chapter, then they'll get, they'll get to know what to expect, which seems like a good thing for this kind of document. I have, I have some suggestions further down. You'll see for some of these subheadings though. The success of our historic downtown district and structures have a direct impact on a number of other chapters in this plan. For example, approximately two thirds of our residents live in historic structures, the housing plan, and the historic buildings of our downtown provide the foundation of much of our tourism economy, economic development plan. Additionally, historic character is found as defining term. This is found as a defining term in many of the neighborhood descriptions in our land use plan and district and zoning districts. When it comes to the energy plan, our, I want to make sure that every time we refer to the plans capitalized than it is. Okay. When it comes to the energy planner, historic buildings offer both challenges and opportunities. Historic buildings were not built with modern energy efficient materials, so the city must be careful to balance efficiency upgrades with loss of historic integrity. There's also a great deal of energy saved in restoring buildings rather than tearing them down and rebuilding. According to the Vermont agency of commerce and community development, approximately 11% of global CO2 emissions can be attributed to new building material construction. Maintaining and rehabilitating existing buildings will extend the life and cycle of these materials and reduce the growing carbon impacts of new construction. Extend the life cycle. Okay. Some final historic resource challenges involved the, I'm not sure if we need to say his final there, but it's a new picky thing. Some final historic resource challenges involved the health and safety of many historic buildings built before codes were in place. Many historic buildings contain lead paint and other hazardous materials, lack access for persons with disabilities and were built in flood plains rather than proper mitigation or without proper mitigation resilience to damage. This has challenges and costs to future innovations, but with proper preservation techniques, these buildings can be brought up to code and still provide all the value described earlier in this plan. So one substantive thing that I proposed to cut out there when I did my edits was the sprinklers. That's partly to acknowledge that we've gotten rid of the residential sprinkler requirement. I understand that there's still a commercial ones that are building codes, but I don't know. I just thought it would be better to not try to emphasize sprinklers as as important as these other things. One of the state programs, and the reason why it was in there, some of the grants that we apply for, especially for commercial buildings, is that historic buildings in the designated downtown qualify for the sprinkler tax credits, which are to help historic buildings get sprinklers added to them if they don't have them. We don't really talk about that too much elsewhere, but that was why it was there. I don't think it's a big loss if it's not included. But the state grants that come through include accessibility, sprinklers, hazardous materials, and facade improvements. But, you know, not there, but I'm not, I'm fine with your edits. I was just explaining that's where it kind of came from. Is anybody feel compelled to throw sprinklers in there? No, I got two little things though. Go ahead. Historic research challenges involved the health and, involved health and safety considerations. Of many historic buildings. I don't think, I mean, health and safety of the buildings doesn't make sense. And then. True. Good point. So take, take out the V after involve. For health and safety. Yeah. There's a. And then I'm thinking. Yeah. So, instead of on the third line and we're built in flood plains, we could do or we're built in flood plains. Just noting that or and or noting that buildings can have a. Smattering of these things. Yeah. It's good. Anything else. Anyone else. Okay. So for the next subheading this summarize information about Montpelier. I mean, I take it that was like a placeholder type thing, but I don't think it's a typical one. So I had suggested here that we put summary of past efforts, which is what I think this is. If anyone else has another idea. But again, this is going to be, I'm expecting that these are going to be the same subheadings more or less than every chapter. So. Yeah. So we talked a little bit about this. And you know, I don't know if we finally nailed it down. But I think it's going to be a good idea. I think it's going to be a good idea. Whether or not we should kind of make the plan. And the website. A bit of a clearing house of, of, of data. You know, we certainly don't have to keep. This all in here. We could certainly put it in a, in a web. In the city website separate from the city plan, in which case we may not need. All of this, but. I think it's going to be a good idea to put it in. But it's, again, it's an option to consider. I mean, most of what I've been trying to do is to keep the focus on the future. And not to spend a lot of time talking about, you know, patting ourselves on the back and all the stuff we've done in the past. It is good to note the things that we've done. But. Again, it's just. I was just wanted to get that thrown out. So we. I think it's helpful for people who are interested to note some of the background. I think it's. It's worthwhile. And I like that it's at the end, basically. Yeah, we can rearrange the paragraphs at any point as well. If we decide, hey, we want this. Goals and strategies to be above this and then have the summary of past efforts last, we can, you know, it's just a cut and paste later on. We changed the order. Yeah, I'm personally fine with the order. But if anybody else has thoughts about it. Okay, I'm going to continue reading then summary of past efforts, much of our modern historic preservation efforts can be traced back to the historic preservation act of 1966, which was passed. We should probably have a column after 1966. Which was passed in response to the destruction of historic buildings from highway construction urban renewal projects. The most popular historic downtown was mostly spared from highway destruction and major urban renewal efforts. It did suffer the loss of a number of stately buildings during that time. This includes the pavilion hotel and the popular post office building in response to state and city started a number of historic preservation efforts to continue up to today. I'm not going to read through this entire list, but it looks like staff is going to like polish this up. I see there's things in brackets and question marks and so. There'd be a lot of stuff we've got to populate. So yeah, I didn't focus too much on this. I did highlight this. One thing that we're wanting to make sure you guys know to change that when when was the sign of review added to zone. It looks like an internal question kind of. But I want to have and capitalize some things and reword a little bit there, but. I just want to make sure that you guys know that. I just want to make sure that you guys know. Mostly acknowledge that there's going to be some more. Updating there. And then the maps and tables come after this, which is another thing that it looks like it's going to be filled in later. So I didn't really focus on this either. Yeah. And these are probably the maps and tables are probably not going to be separate. I just put them separate. Just so everybody remembers. The maps. Every plan has to have a transportation map and land use map. So the reason why it's kind of separated out is just to make sure we recognize what ones are required. But we probably wouldn't have a maps and tables section. These maps and tables would then be incorporated above in the introduction and throughout the document. I've just pulled them out to go through and say. Here is here the maps that will be integrated somewhere. Sounds good. Yeah. So at the bottom here or near even, even farther down here. So, so maybe the summary of the past thing could be moved down because I've forgotten that we have these. Aspiration and goals. So, so there's a section explaining. It really explains just the aspiration though, right? I mean, I guess in a way, the paragraphs explain the goals too. But I don't know if we're going to have a blurb about this. I do wonder about where it could be located. In the final form. Like, would this be help a helpful blurb to have. In whichever form the final implementation, like at the top of the implementation strategy, even. Yeah, I didn't know if this was going to survive. I mean, my, my thought was I put it in here as, as a thought, not knowing if it was going to survive. But I think it has some value. To a reader. For people who want to kind of have an idea without getting into that whole document. And, you know, as John had put together, we could have this displayed as cards when we get to the implementation strategy or different ways of presenting that. That's why we're doing it in that Excel template. So that way it can get drawn into a better display format. And, but people may just want to have an understanding of. That conversation is why I did it, but I didn't know if it would be something you guys would want to keep. If it's helpful. I think it would, I think it would, it provides some helpful context to if. If it's located where people are looking at the implementation strategy. Yeah, I agree. I think. I think we should keep them on the shorter side, I think, but I like having a little bit of a blurb. So if we have a separate page for an implementation strategy, maybe this is at the top of that page before we get into the. Let's say there's a separate web page. We've got one web page for the chapter. And then it kind of links to another page for the implementation strategy. And at the top of the implementation strategy, these two pieces could be kind of dropped in the tops. So. I don't know what the rest of it's going to look like. I don't know how those. That format will look. That makes sense. Yeah, I think that's a, I think that's a good use of this. John, did you have, I know you had. A lot of the vision for, for this stuff. Does that match. What you thought. Yeah, I think we can work with that. Okay. So, so what we have here is aspiration and goals. We have some neighborhoods where additional historic districts may be appropriate. I changed. Wood to May. That's I think the only other substantive change that I made. And because I don't want to be presumptuous about whether at the end of the day. We actually do want to expand historic districts. And we have to use the resources and resources. So that is the aspiration. Literally. Well, pillar has a number of excellent reports and resources are understanding of our resources remains incomplete. We have some neighborhoods where additional historic districts do want to expand historic districts and I imagine that will be at least a somewhat controversial thing to do if we did it. So may that may be appropriate such as the Meadow College Street and Pioneer Street. There are also many individual structures outside of districts that should be inventory to map. We therefore are hoping to improve our understanding over the next eight years. Next paragraph, I just changed that to knowledge of our structures will only protect these resources if the community appreciates and values them. We believe that we need to do more to educate the public regarding the special character of Montpelier's historic environment. For example, our downtown and surrounding neighborhoods continue to be remarkably intact compared with other communities around the state and country. Overall, Montpelier has done a good job at protecting many of our historic resources, but we are always at risk. Once lost, they cannot be replaced. There are risks due to neglect, fires, poor redevelopment and floods. We recognize that while we are doing a good job, there are gaps in our strategies. We will continue to improve not only our regulations, but also our programs that help property owners afford to maintain their homes and make improvements. Do we have any feedback for this section? Okay. It's fine. Move on. Approaches to implementation. So yeah, this is a basic explanation of the strategies. Right, Mike? Yeah. Can we just call it implementation? Fine by me. The city has appointed a historic preservation commission, HPC, and assigned staff from the planning department to assist in the planning and implementation of the city's historic resources plan. As the commission is also a certified local government, this allows the city to apply for funds annually to continue to study local historic sites and structures and to develop applications for the national register of historic places. That was a long, it's a pretty long sentence. I feel like it's, anyway, the work of the staff and commission using CLG funding is the foundation of the city's efforts to improve the understanding of our city resources. Outreach to the public is driven by, this is one I've struggled with changing. Outreach to the public is driven by the HPC efforts to coordinate, collaborate and sponsor educational events, including developing a speaker series and hosting walking tours. The planning and community development staff will help the commission develop educational materials and to improve the city's website on topics related to historic preservation. Finally, the city has a two-prong approach to preservation of historic buildings. The first is by providing incentives and part and participating in programs that provide grants like the designated downtown program. The community development specialist, also part of the department of planning and community development provides grant writing assistance to property owners who qualify for these grants. The second approach to protecting historic structures is through administration enforcement of design review regulations that are part of the unified development regulations, also known as the zoning regulations. The planning and zoning administrator can assist with applications for projects in the design review overlay district. I'm just confused on the second sentence too. Is the commission, is the certified local government? It's kind of both. You need to have an HPC in order to qualify as a CLG, but officially the city is the CLG. Should we change the formula? The city's CLG designation allows us to apply for funds or something like that. Montpelier's certified local government designation allows the city to apply for funds. Yeah, that sounds fine to me. So we'll, I don't know if somebody else already is in the system. There you go. Go ahead and type it in. I'm going to let you guys, I got to quickly take care of something, but I'll be back in two minutes. Okay, so I think we're done with the chapter, right? If you scroll down real quick before you leave, Mike. Oh, yeah, I just threw in a couple of benchmark ideas that were in there. Okay. That I didn't know where they were going to go. And again, I think my thought on benchmarks is I would, I think we should wait till later to try to work on the actual benchmarks for these. Like I said, I'm doing some more work on them. I'd like to get a better idea of how to make them effective and not just have benchmarks for the sake of benchmarks. I really want to have effective measureables. Okay. So does anyone have any, any thoughts before we vote here? As far as the only comments I have about benchmarks is that I think it's fairly obvious which of these things are measurable and have benchmarks and I'm just kind of trusting the staff to to put those in. Yeah, these are the things we were thinking we would like be able to update over the eight years and people could kind of see in real time. What was happening, right? And that was that discussion. This is the non-plan static plan portion, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. We can push those off. I don't have any. I think that's kind of what we got. Outreach efforts and I don't know if we, I don't know if there's a number of new districts that's actually a part that's a goal here. I don't think that might be structured. We may decide the zero is the right number. Right. Right. So maybe it's zones considered. I don't know. That's not something that we need to decide. We're voting. We should just figure, like whoever's going to do the work, we should just have them tell us what the best way for us to measure what they're doing is. If it's, you know, if they're going to consider, if there's a survey, we can, some, some, there's some way to break up and show what they're doing that will allow us to land at zero new structures if that's what is appropriate. So do we have any discussion about the, the chapter here? And if we don't, are we ready to vote? I feel ready to vote. Yeah, I'll move approval of the chapter. Okay. With the, with the edits that we've made here and that I made earlier. Okay. Do we have a second? A second. Okay. So those in favor of approving the chapter with all of the edits displayed here, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. We've approved the chapter, Mike. Thank you. Let's see what happens when you leave. Make your thanks. We finally get some work done. Okay. So what time is it? Okay. So we don't have time to get into the energy, but I think we were nonetheless productive. So we'll plan for next time to do the energy chapter and the implementation strategy. Does that sound good? Yeah. And I think as you guys go, I'll just, if we've got a couple of minutes, I'll just really quick go through and say, I think there's a lot of things going back to the original statement I said of not everything is exactly the way I would do it. I think there's a number of things. I think I can see compressing our aspirations into two and there are 19 goals, which I think it's tricky, but I think there are probably ways we can compress a number of these. And then again, as I mentioned before, I won't populate the strategies until we've approved the aspirations and goals. Just because if we do make substantial changes up front, it may significantly change how I write the way the strategies are worded. How should we review the strategies, the other documents? I wouldn't worry about the strategies right now. I would probably, and so I did kind of start to think about how to approach these. So I'm going to go through as many of these chapters as we can. And let me just go back to here. So as many of these as I can, I'm going try to populate all of the aspirations and goals. And as we go through them, we can approve them. And then I can plug in the strategies because those strategy tabs, if you remember, there's a lot of text that goes into them. And there's a lot more work to do the strategies. This stuff here that I just did for energy, those were just cut and paste. This took an hour. Well, it just took a little more than an hour to do all these. But this doesn't take long to cut and paste in. And then I think the rest will kind of go. Once we approve, once we all agree, hey, this is our aspiration. And these are our goals. How we do it will be the next conversation. But if we don't agree on this, talking about the strategies is really moot. So that means we'll be voting on the strategies later. Yeah, we'll just focus on this. And I would pick it in probably in the next meeting. So if we had we done these today, I would probably have the strategies ready to go for the next meeting. Okay, so we'll plan to do that. Will the chapter be ready then? If we don't have strategies, do you think you will build a part of it? You actually have the chapter already. And that's one that Barb has edited previously. Barb has an edit here on the left. So her energy plan BC is Barb's. And energy plan chapter is what I had written. Okay, so I have a question for the group then. Was everyone, did everyone like the pre edits that I did today to try to save some time? Yeah, and I am going to try to make a goal to do that myself. It just didn't happen for me today. Okay, well then, do you want to commit to doing pre edits on I guess Barb's version of the energy chapter? Yeah, can we, there's a way, forgive my ignorance about this, but there's a way to just like track changes, right? It's suggestions. That's what I did today so that you could see what was changed. Suggestions. Okay, I can do that. Yeah, it'd be good if we just did it all in the same document. Yeah. And but don't don't feel like you can't touch Barb's stuff. Do it if you want. We can talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy. I will commit to looking through this for sure. I feel pretty overwhelmed by the number of strata of goals and aspirations and the specificity of them. Yeah, it was, I mean, they have big, they have big goals. So if you want to be net zero by 2030 and 2050, we're taking something really big and breaking it into a number of bite size pieces, some of which I think can be collapsed, but they're still, you're still talking about, you know, electricity thermal and transportation. And you're looking at that among existing and new and, and doing conservation energy efficiency and doing some, you know, new switch to renewables. So there's just a number of different goals and they've got a number of benchmarks for those. So it really, it was tough because you break into so many small pieces to try to understand, okay, well, how do we tackle this slice of the pie? So hopefully it makes a little bit of sense as you look through it. It's like, oh, okay, I see how they broke this into different slices. And don't worry about the strategies at this point, we'll, we'll get those, but just understanding the big picture of how they were trying to take them. They're trying to eat, how do we eat the elephant? You know, one spoon, one bite at a time. Okay, so let's, let's plan it, let's plan to do those things next time. If we're not going to be going through strategies, we might have some extra time. So we might, if you, if you can, Mike have like a, if there's another one that's on deck too for us to go through to just look at the goals and aspirations on as well. Yeah, like I said, I'll be plugging in a number of them over time. There's a lot in this, you know, we have natural resources. I can, I'll have that in plugged in there into the template. We've got economic development. I can get plugged into the template. Housing has all of it plugged into the template. Transportation, there's another one that we can put into the template. The housing groups, the housing groups, we're going to meet tomorrow, I believe, just so you know. Oh, okay. And whatever product we have, we'll send around. Okay, so that seems good. It seems like we have got things lined up for next week. It's 729. So do we have a motion to adjourn? We do. Okay. Aaron has moved to adjourn. Do we have a second? I'll second. And Aaron, I have a question for you after we're done. Okay. He's already agreed. You want me to stay on the line? Yeah, it's one second. Okay. Okay, if that was in favor of adjournment, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Have a good night.