 recording something did that work out or not work out? No, it's still recording pending. So it's all on Amy. I am trying to troubleshoot it, but I may not be successful, just FYI. So when I'm in the town planning commission meetings there's this whole long preamble that gets read at the beginning of each meeting that indicates that we're holding it remotely under authorization from the governor and so on and so forth. Is that something you have, Robin, that we can just read or what? No. No. Nick, you can put your hand down unless you have something else to say. I'll try and really moderate things. I'll try and moderate this to some extent, but I will call the meeting to order at 610. I don't have an agenda in front of me, but I happen to know that the first order of business is to hear from members of the audience that may have something to say that's not on the agenda. Is there anyone who would like to say anything at this time? One. Nice to be able to get on finally. The joys of technology, I think the village should go to Zoom meetings. They seem to be relatively flawless. But I just wanted to make a couple of comments of, I walked quite a bit in the village and it pertains to the land development code and looking at setbacks of various buildings. And I actually went out sort of measured things today, looking at what was and often cited of kind of a nice landscape was the streetscape of Rara Avenue in terms of the width, the sidewalks and the trees planted on it. And then seeing the Maple Street project going up now, which is only 12 feet from the face of the building to the curb. And then the new Park Street building under construction is about 18 feet. And then for Pearl has got 28 feet. And I'm talking about these distances more in the fact that what can be done in that streetscape as you widen it a little bit more. And it also was in relation to what is happening with traffic. The Brown L Block and Rara Road Avenue have parking alongside. It's a narrower sidewalk, but it seems a little bit more inviting than some of these sidewalks directly off of Maple and Park Street. And there really aren't many opportunities to try and bring in pedestrian amenities in these locations. So I hope as you start reviewing the code, you will take a look at that and understand, now I'm gonna wear a tree hat for a little bit as our tree committee tries to wrestle with helping in the downtown area the limitations that are upon us. And the other one I wanted to kind of bring up was the new building next to the dollar store. And again, a setback issue, that's in the transit design area. And I thought there was a, and he was proposing a restaurant hotel connected as kind of a master application, but I never saw anything, any approval process for this particular building that is going up. And I also noticed, I believe that in front of the building, we have essentially a stormwater pond, sometimes lovingly called rain gardens, but I really think that that's not an appropriate place along the streetscape to have a rain garden of some sort. Unfortunately, many of the rain gardens that I've seen essentially just get to be weed patches. So I hope that in the future, we look at that. And if he needs to deal with stormwater on the site, it should be done behind the building and not something that we're gonna be seeing and alone driving Pearl Street as well as individuals wanting to go to that store. So those are just some of my comments and a lot of them come to from the design five corners and the charrettes that we did back then and what individuals rose to the top for a redesigned five corners. And certainly walkability, pedestrian amenities, some separation from the busy roadways or all things that lend itself to a really vibrant downtown. So that's my two bits. That's it. Thank you, Nick. That was a fairly scant mention of the tree action from you, which is rare, but I appreciate the rest of your comments. As you know, there are many ways to treat the streetscape in a increasingly village center, downtown urbanized location. And we're dealing with the codes as we have them, which I think at the moment probably almost require this tight to the curb setback in the village center. It's not uncommon, but it's not that well, it isn't something that we've seen here because of the design pressure over the last 100 years, just hasn't created that situation in the S-Extruction. So I think it's probably appropriate to examine our regs and make sure they're doing what we want them to do based on what is getting developed. But the buildings that you're seeing show up are a direct result of regional and local urban, I say urban and it's hard to really say that S-Extruction is urban, but at least the five corners area acts more urban than other parts of the village. So those pieces are following fairly well-tested design guidelines for these types of things. And it is up to us to review them every couple of years and say, is this really what we wanted? Are we getting what we wanted? Do we have the right mix of pedestrian activity and opportunity for amenities? And so I'll let Robin continue if he wants to, but for Pearl is an extraordinary opportunity that was allowed us to actually get more street space than normal, what you're seeing on where the sewing machine store was on Maple and what you're seeing further down Pearl Park, sorry, is more in keeping with what's actually in our regulations. So if we wanna modify those things, we're gonna have to, now's the time, we're looking at the land development code and we need to get into that. So thank you very much. That's great. Anybody else have comments that are not related to what's on the agenda? None, okay. So that brings us into additions or amendments to the agenda. Robin, anything? No, nothing. Thank you. Minutes from our March 18th meeting, do we have a motion to approve those? Anybody? I was not present at the meeting, so I don't know if I should always planning to not vote on them. Yeah, well, the way it works normally in these things is you are allowed to vote on them, you can choose to abstain if you want, but you are allowed to vote on them and you're certainly allowed to motion to approve them and after we get it motioned and seconded, then we're gonna talk about any change. Sure. This isn't like we're ready to approve them just yet. So would you like to make a motion? Yeah, I'll make a motion to open that up. All right, do I have a second? Second. Awesome. Is there any discussion and or corrections? I didn't see any corrections that needed to be made. Thank you, Diane. Anything from your end? Do you usually find at least the typos? I did not see any typos this time, but it overall looked like it was accurate. I did not check for people's names to see if they were spelled correctly. And the gentleman that's identified as speaking as was being Redmond or Redmond, he didn't really identify himself, but I'm sure that Amy got him. So I'll trust her. Or a Grubin, Grubin. Yeah, the Grubin's father and son, I think it was the father that spoke the most. Is that fair? Yeah, so it'd be Dr. Grubin. And his name I believe is Jeff. Yes. Any other comments on the agenda or sorry on the minutes? All right, I'm all in favor of the minutes with any corrections related to identifying Dr. Jeff Grubin. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstain? Minutes are approved, thank you. On to the work session. We're continuing with our land development code review on the docket tonight as design five corners and any design review amendments. Who is starting off tonight, Robin? I have a presentation if you want me to share it. Sounds good. I'll give an update on a major component of the design five corners as opposed to a major presentation as well. Okay, you might wanna chime in at any appropriate spot. Okay, let me see. What are you guys seeing? Are you seeing like? We see it but it's small. Can you zoom in or something? We're gonna go through tonight is just, so on your agenda you have Village Center District design five corners and the design review stuff. I'm just sort of thinking about those collectively all as one, because I'm not sure it makes too much sense to think about it too separately. So I've reviewed some stuff so far and I kinda wanna go through design five corners with you folks and my understanding of what's in the land development code right now and what you actually wanna see different in order to meet that vision. I got some clarifying questions that will help me understand what process most of these new developments are you using to come through the planning commission. And then just wanna bring some attention to the 2019 comprehensive plan and some of the specific objectives that were written in there about some potential land development code changes. So I only have 12 slides, just so you know. And some of this is just for us to discuss on certain ones. So just a reminder for folks, this is one of the images from Julie Campoli in the final design five corners study. And really the study calls for maximizing space in the Village Corps, calming traffic and reclaiming more space for people. Can we stop you when we want to? You can stop me whenever you want. I just can't see you or anything so you have to holler out like that. Yeah, I could. So the hand raising won't work either probably. Yeah, I can't see. I'll try and keep an eye on that because I can see the hand raising so if you wanna say something, raise your hand everybody. So just for our own reference and you may not know the answer to this but we get a lot of questions especially recently as people start to see these buildings going up on setback from the street. Now I'm guessing what I'm looking at there is about 12 feet and it might be 14 and it might be something but it isn't a lot more than 12 feet and what I'm seeing is maybe two feet of some strip and then I'm seeing maybe eight feet of a sidewalk and then I'm seeing maybe three feet of, okay now I'm up to the building but just so people are aware of what gets called out as not enough space between the building and the street, we wanna start talking about this in serious terms foot by foot by inch because it's part of our design vocabulary and it's very important for our pedestrian and our village experience and what that use is between the building face and the curb. So I don't know that you know the answer to this but I just want people to see based on examples that we are being given of here's what we want this one from Julie Campoli that 12 feet is not a bad number we just need to understand what we're doing with it. Yeah, great point John. I don't know what that distance is it's not that level of details not in the report as far as I know but yeah, excellent point and eventually I do have a question about what you actually wanna do with setbacks so this will be helpful. Like I see a room in there for street lights and trees and there's some bike parking there out with the cars and so we've stolen basically we've stolen the parking away from the five corner area because we don't wanna give, we have too many cars trying to go through there we could put it back in we have the space for a row of parking the problem is it would be make the traffic almost worse because you'd be squeezing it down again so we have to deal with some things with the vehicle side of five corners that we may not like but let's be mindful of where and when we can change that which happens farther down Park Street and farther out the arteries as you get away from five corners so remember how special five corners is as you're going through the slideshow and that's not for you Regina that's for the audience here. Okay, so this is another one of the visuals from Julie Campoli in the background there and from the report itself several popular design elements were identified so central green spaces and pocket parks buildings lining the streets pedestrianized main street multi-story mixed use buildings and additional street trees. I put in red text here what you have control over in the land development code some of these things some of the big pieces of design five corners are certainly not something that is going to be addressed in the land development code it's going to be implemented in other ways. Robin I didn't know if that was a good point for you to mention what you maybe wanted to mention. It is good point and you can see even though there's just conceptual Lego blocks really in the image you're looking at that the buildings going up are not too different from what you're looking at. This also this is a question I have and I think we and John you just sort of alluded to some of this a little bit too so let's just talk about this. So when each of these buildings are coming up let's say this if this building comes forward someday or the owner of this building comes forward one day who is responsible for putting in the amenities in front of the building street trees all that kind of stuff is this is the village ultimately one day going to do streetscape work or is each individual responsible for that? We have asked for instance at the Fort Pearl Street building who pushed him back 15 feet from his property line and we asked him to put in the trees we also asked him to put in silver cells and he did it on his own property where the trees are are not actually village property it's his property. And I had a lot of implications that we weren't thinking that much about the time to nail shape building you take that much office property on Pearl Street and Park Street then he goes his 15 feet on the end of each building that has an impact on the cost of construction and what sort of return it's going to get. So the same person's also doing the 11 Park Street building and pushed him back from the front door the idea was that as you're walking up and Park Street's the one that we can work with the manager walking up Park Street from the tracks into the village center this space widens for you like the villages is up in its arms to you. The one that didn't go forward the old Domino's building just to the right of the entrance to Park Street School we'd asked them for eight to 10 feet if they're land which they didn't have to give us but they said they would. The other side of the street the building was approved won't go in for a while as part of a chipping in crossings. They said they really needed the space above the sidewalk for apartments but they would give us an arcade. So when you're walking the building would be set back from the street at the entry level which would have essentially widened the sidewalk and also enabled you to walk at least through the length of the building in a dry space if it was running around in a wet space. So that's negotiation that's not in the land development code. Okay. So my read on it is this is what your land development code includes. I could have missed things or misinterpreted so feel free to let me know if this is not right from your perspective but in the village district minimum of two stories, maximum of four stories no setbacks but I did see that there's room in there for you folks to basically negotiate what you've just described, Robin. There's no set residential density no specific minimum parking requirements. The location of the parking has to either be to the side rear or underneath the building. Historic building protections and then I'm calling this soft standards but that's not a technical term by any means but essentially there's a lot of the standards in the district are described as essentially trying to mimic and respect the existing historic character rather than saying very specifically brick built, brick facade, a gazillions of different things that you can put in there. So I guess I kind of want to just stop here before I go to the other piece of this slide and have a discussion. So we've talked about the setback thing a little bit. It sounds like we would potentially want to get a little bit more specific on the setback. This is John, I have just two comments. One is your overall take on this is exactly right and especially with respect to the soft standards. There's a danger to prescribing too much and I think we're trying to avoid doing that but we do have a number of historic properties that we would like to respect. So the way that that happens is intentionally trying to give the planning commission a little bit of leeway rather than force them to follow some secretary of the interior guideline. There's something like that. And then I just wanted to get back onto that setback thing. So when it says no setbacks that doesn't mean you get to build it right to the curve that there's got to be some number there. And I don't know what that is Robin. I don't know how we... Well, it's about don't know your property line. You can build up the edge of your property line. I mean... Yeah, it's a zero setback for each, it's front, side and rear, I think too, all zero setbacks. I mean, one of the motifs we talked about was the buildings on that short section of Main Street, the Brown Hill block and so on. That was urban as far as Vermont's going. Essex Junction, Winnowski, Burlington, they're more urban than most other places. And so we were looking at the Brown Hill block and the block across the street. And if you look what's going up, whether it's Fort Pearl Street, 11 Park Street or 3 Miple Street, they have at least that distance from the building front of the curb or more. And Burlington says that too, they say zero setback. But what that means is that it's written into their planning ordinance that it has to be at least 12 feet, but it can't be more than that when you talk about some of their downtown spaces. So they say no setbacks, but what they really mean is it's 12 feet. Right, and we got to remember, these are all individual applications that are part of a much larger jigsaw puzzle. And the connector road, close up Main Street, the space in front of the Firebird Cafe, they're all spaces. They're all spaces that are linked by sidewalks. If it goes up Main Street, you could actually get from Railroad Avenue to the Firebird Cafe without crossing the street. And then you cross Miple and you can get the whole way down to the connector road. And the intersection of, you know, call it four corners, food corners, whatever you want to call it. The intersection, there's much narrower. It's, if you have something going on Memorial Park instead of having traffic passing on the three sides of the park, you have traffic passing on one side of the park and it opens up that sort of space, short space north of Memorial Park to the TD bike. Have something happen there? It's a huge change. What you're saying is that we have these rules in place, but then we also have opportunities where the rules get broken to provide some kind of relief and some kind of a amenity space, green or gallery or art or pocket park or whatever. I mean, absolutely. When Peter Welsh visited, I sort of, off the top of my head, I coined the term put in the village back in Essex Junction. And that's exactly what we're doing. It's an urban village, you know, like Manhattan or anywhere else, but we're still putting the village back in Essex Junction. Diane, you have your hand up and then Phil, I see that right after Diane. Okay, so I think that at this point in time, I think we should actually put that 12 foot space in the village center as an expectation and not have the zero lot line on the front of the building anymore. Because our community has been letting us know that they want some green in front of these buildings. And the only way we're gonna get green in front of buildings is to have space for green in front of the buildings. I think that might, if we went to the plan itself, I think we might see that we do talk about green space. And I think we need to go that extra step now that we're rewriting this. And yeah, so far we've been successful at having the negotiations, but that doesn't necessarily mean we will always be successful at getting those negotiations. So why not be right out there and say that we want some space in front of the fronts of the buildings so that it is pedestrian friendly. And right now, as I'm looking at the building on Mabel Street that's going up, I kinda swore we had asked for a little bit of sidewalk space there and I'm seeing a lot less sidewalk space than what I envisioned, but I'd have to go to the plans as to what we approved and what's now being done. It's a little late, I think, because they pretty much set the footings for that building. So maybe we can get some amenities as opposed to getting some more green in front of that building. That's Phil's turn. Let me just comment that green in front of the building and grass are not the same thing, right? So I'm not looking for grass. In fact, grass is the last thing I wanna see there. Okay, I'm perfectly honest. Phil. Yeah, thanks. So I just wanna make sure I understand what's going on as this is my first time dealing with rewriting the code. So as I understand it right now in the Village Center, which is what we're talking about with Design Five Corners, we have design review, is that correct? And in that design review, we don't have a codified setback rule. It's pretty much up to the commission to decide if the design fits our needs, is that right? Well, I think, and going back a bit, sorry, Phil, going back to what John said, there's small lots in the Village Center District. If you say a certain percentage of the front of this lot shall be open to the sidewalk, you basically blight that lot. I think we need to have the flexibility. That's why sometimes I like the word may in terms of what the PC can do. John and I also, you'll hear us saying, we won't give designers the opportunity to blow our socks off, to come up with something that we could not have anticipated. And we're very happy about it. Saying a rigid rule can sometimes backfire and get you the opposite of it before. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking, is that if we do put into the code like this 12 foot setback, does that box us in to only accepting designs that have at least a 12 foot setback? You know, it's interesting. There may be, you know, I'm not looking at a map, but if you consider the connector road, what's been approved for Chittenden Crossings, what's been approved for Park Street and basically one of only two lots probably on Maple Street. We have, you know, the setback that shows in Julie's photograph or more in almost every case. Yeah, so I just want to clarify, especially for folks that are new. So for the most part, and I don't know where this line falls and it probably is different on every single one of these roads that we're talking about, but the village owns all of the road and probably a good amount of this public space here. So typically when we're talking about a building setback, it's how far the property owner can build their building from their own front property line, which is not way out here in the street or you might really think about it as the curb. It's not there. It's probably way back here someplace. So the setback is kind of the difference between their front property line and where their building sits. It seems to me that what also happens with given the good amount of flexibility in the land development code is you've really got a lot of leeway to talk with the developer about what you want them to do with the rest of this space. Is that what's going on or in the majority of these circumstances does the private property actually come out way further? No. You're right Regina. Yeah, you're right. You're 100% right Regina. Generally the village owns a foot behind the sidewalk on average throughout the village center. Okay. So just, sorry. So just to be clear, I'm in favor of flexibility for the commission, but with writing into the, it doesn't seem like the vision is written into the LDC right now. And so making the vision more clear of like what we kind of expect, I think, from developers. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. I think we need to be clear about telling them what the general vision is. And I know that can be done and still allow some exceptions or allow them to say, okay, well, we will have some review authority to grant, maybe not a variance, but you can propose something different and we'll look at it. But here's what we expect. I think the buildings are going in for Pearl 11 Park. What was approved for, I don't know, I'm going to guess, the old Domino's building, what's been approved from Chittenden Crossing tells anybody who's coming in to develop the Village Center, what we're expecting, we're expecting to get frontage from their development. That's the new normal, so to speak. And so far the design of five corners and the issues that we're talking about are really limited to the Village Center District right now, which has a defined area. It's not all the way down every street that leads to five corners. It's got a fairly short contained area. So do we want to keep talking about this, Regina? Do you have more questions or do you want to prompt us some more or do you want to get into the design review amendments? Because one of the things that we've been talking about and maybe you know this already is that we would, especially based on certain buildings that have shown up recently, like to expand our design review powers to a little bit more than the Village Center. Yeah, okay. So I'm going to get there, but let me just put what I have on the rest of this slide and you guys can tell me you don't want any of it. All of these are questions. And really, I think your system is working pretty well and I don't want to try to fix something that is a broken. So I don't know if you want any of this level of more standardization, but these are just the pieces that I was thinking about. One of the jumps out to me, Regina, is the reduced minimum lot width. If somebody buys a site that's less than 60 foot, they go to the zoning board and in my time here, if it's not a problem that's been caused by the action of the owner or even a previous owner, the zoning board will approve the fact that they can move forward even though they don't have a 60 foot frontage. So existing non-conforming lots are allowed to remain, existing non-conforming lots. Yeah, they just can't make them any more than that. Something in half and make smaller than 60 feet and get away with it. But if you happen to buy one that's already less than 60 feet, you get to keep using it. Yes. And generally, is that fine? I mean, I assume that's fine. You don't have anybody, and Nord would you want, I don't think, folks coming into the Village Center and, I don't know, doing something like a townhouse style where each could be 20 feet wide? Probably not as a single thing, but if you have townhouses often, you might have the tournament of row houses and all of a sudden you've got 200 feet of the 20 foot wide buildings, which happens and people love them and it can be really beautiful but I think that's not the goal of having multiple individual small parcels. It's trying to make sure we don't do that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, anything else on there that seems like it would be useful or is most of this not necessary? I like it all. I used the word massing a lot. I always so follow up with scale. I like it. I think it speaks to stuff that may be implicit in what we have but we haven't called it out like Phil said and I think it's a great thing to do. Okay, so maybe we can describe some of these things still with flexibility but use some of this to really help kind of flesh out and give some more, I'll say specificity but specificity with flexibility around what you're looking for when it comes to these sorts of things. Yeah, my opinion on this is architectural elements and some of the other character based things. I mean, the example that I would give you is that you have all these sort of older, possibly historic or actually historic buildings and Apple decides they're gonna build a glass box in the middle of it, right? Do you want that, do you have any way to prevent that? And what rules would you have that would say that's too different from what we already have and we're not interested or which would be a protection type of mechanism or would we say, well, if you wanna do that, here's how you do it. So that's usually the kind of thing that happens. Are you trying to maintain the basic character of your village or are you open to allowing things that are quite different to come in and mix with what you have now? Yeah, am I right in thinking that you folks are generally not open to something very, very different? I'm, it may not be my personal feeling, but I think in general, that's a very strong opinion throughout the village. Yeah, I think we should be open to looking because like I said before, who knows if somebody comes up with something for a while? Yeah, but it's, I mean, if the rules allow it, then somebody can come in and make it happen. And then you get into subjective decisions about whether that particular board feels, how they feel about some particular project. And that's the part of this we're trying to minimize. We're trying to say, look, we told you what we wanted and we want you to try and follow those rules, right? So we gotta pick something and stick with it. Otherwise we get what people can use the rules to make us accept. Yeah, okay, great, that is helpful. Okay, then these, I just have two more question slides and then actually, John, we're gonna get into the zoning district boundaries stuff. All right, Steve Shaw has a question. Can he answer? Can he answer? Oh yeah, no, I'm sorry. I can wait till the end, that's not to go. Okay, so this I was unclear on, looking through the land development codes. So if somebody wants to do a multifamily building, do they, what application type are they coming through for you folks? Can they just do a site plan or are they required to do a subdivision or plan to unit development? Yeah, probably be PUD. Okay, and how do folks generally feel about that? Do you think that's helpful? Is it necessary? Would a site plan be, I mean, in theory, you could do it just as a site plan. We could rewrite the land development codes, I should say, to be clear that it could just be a site plan. A site plan, since we have design review, I think they got to give us more than a site plan, but I think our rules are currently a little vague on the whole PUD thing, because in many of the sections that allow a PUD, a project as a PUD in their district, start out with something like a project may be presented as a PUD. And so now we're stuck wondering, well, is it being presented as long as it need to be, why would we do that and not have some kind of, just a regular one? And I'd love to clear that up a little bit, in some cases it says anything over so many buildings has to be a PUD, but I think it's a little vague. Okay. Yeah, and part of the PUD thing with the design in PUD, which is not design over design, if it's in the Village Center District, we've often run into trouble with a smaller site and seeing if they meet the requirements of PUD design, I think the requirements we have in PUD are better in places such as Autumn Pond, and I think that's proven to be true. If you've got a small lot in the Village Center and you come in and you wanna meet the requirements of the Village Center District, and you're doing it through PUD rather than site plan, it's very difficult, but because we've also got design review in the Village Center site plan we're automatically come under design review, I think that's probably enough for the Village Center District. We're not giving anything up, we're just understanding the possible limitations of the size of some of the lots in the Village Center District and what's possible. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense to me. And then same question, if it's a mixed use building, is it still, for the most part, it's gonna be a PUD, like if you have the commercial on the ground floor? I don't know why it needs to be a PUD. For any reason other than you're trying to, my understanding is it's a trade-off. You're saying I'm gonna give you something that breaks a couple of the rules, but in return I'm gonna give you something better. And that's been a little bit of a struggle for us in most of our PUD applications is we really haven't been strong enough in telling them what the trade-offs are. You know, why are we doing this and what are we getting? Because otherwise, if you're not getting something better that gives you more of what you wanted in your vision, then there's no reason to grant anybody a PUD. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and my, so my overall opinion on this, both for both of these questions, is that really, truly it's just a site plan. A PUD, the way it's originally intended, is a form of subdivision and none of these buildings are subdividing lots. They are, it's basically one structure and they're putting different types of uses, whether it's mixed use or all residential, within one structure. And there's really no reason to go down the rabbit hole of a planned unit development. And you can just be more clear in the land development code that the standards that you wanna apply to these buildings in the Village Center need to meet all of the things that you're talking about, including design review. But all of that can be done under a site plan. I would agree with that. Yeah, I agree too. I think we sort of broad brush approach when we put the PUD in. And I think in an area we really got design review, that makes sense to me. Yeah, okay, so we can take a look at that. Then uses, we've talked quite a bit about this over the last couple of working meetings and I am not clear. So on the ground floors currently in the Village Center, is it required that you do commercial on the ground floor or is there some flexibility there? There really isn't. It's retail commercial on the entry level. We talked about this briefly, just looking for Pearl Street. I think I've said this before, when you walk in and what should be a semi-private space for the people who are living in the residential units, it's basically a public space. People are coming or going to the restaurant, to the bar or inhabiting the same space as they are. Now I got to looking when I went into urban areas and it's not unusual if you have condominium or whatever that they have frontage on the street. And I think if McGillicuddy's and the apartment complex above it had separate entrances, if I was living in the apartments, I'd be much more comfortable. And it just makes sense. I think it's, yeah, it's great but I use this term of course, bit tongue-in-cheek, it's a bit suburban to say every entry level must be retail commercial. That's just not the way it happens in urban areas. You know, the majority of them are retail commercial but not all of them. And I think it makes for a better streetscape, it certainly makes for a better interior plan. If you can give, even if it's the one building but you have 20 feet for the entrance to the apartment complex on either side of the street till commercial. I just think John, no better for me but from architectural terms, no way you use the space. It's just so much better. I never thought about it before until the Fort Pearl Street building went up. John? Yeah. Yeah, most of the settings I've been in where you have a mix of commercial and residential on the ground floor can be very successful. And what that usually means you're not talking about putting somebody's bedroom and living room on the first floor. You're talking about putting the collective lobby, mailroom, laundry, some part of the more commercial part of the residential space happens on the first floor and it's more open to people. And it can be pretty nice and it can be completely in keeping with the rest of the uses that are happening around it while all the actual residential space for families is probably not there. Absolutely. If I can sort of jump onto that a little bit. I think if buildings are in the Village Center District but they're not on a street I don't think we should require retail commercial in the entry level of a building that's behind a building that does have retail commercial in it. If people wanna put it in that's fine but I don't think it should be a requirement. Yeah, I would agree with that. What you're trying to do with the requirements for your first floor is address the major use that's part of the pedestrian experience which is along the sidewalks and streets. So a second building back unless it's some kind of a little cute arcade that you have access to like one of the buildings that's happening across the street by in old Flanders it's designed to create a little space for it's mostly for its inhabitants but I'm sure other people can walk through there that's got a little more going on than just residential. I think that's fine. You need to actually design some reason for folks to get off the main street and we've all seen it where there's a little opening and all of a sudden there's more shops and there's more activity and there's more stuff and people can wander back there but you gotta have a little something going on in order for that to be successful it can't just be a, it has to be really activated somehow. Yeah, you're right John. I think what you're talking about people are creating a sense of mystery and delight and surprise and I think that's a wonderful thing to have when you're walking down the street. It's very European but you see an opening for an entry as they call it back home for cars to go through to people and you sort of stick your head in and you look and there's something there that encourages you to go a bit further and all of a sudden you see some you didn't even know existed. I think that's a wonderful thing to do. So moving on to the comprehensive plan and this one we're gonna essentially get into the zoning districts. So here's one section of your comprehensive plan. There may be some benefit in extending the Village Center designation down Curl Street. Areas adjacent to the Village Center have been in transition, a whole bunch of mix of different residential. So and this is talking about a little bit of kind of the development pressure sort of bubbling out of the Village Center and going down those side streets and at what point or how is there either a transition or a strong end to what you want to be more more commercial, more village maybe with some higher density residential and then sort of preserve the existing neighborhoods as they are. And then these are kind of just the goals and the objectives that kind of came out from that section of the text. So similar kinds of things just in terms of thinking through what should be done here in terms of the zoning districts and uses. So I can't tell outside of the Pearl Street reference, I mean, yeah, Pearl Street reference. I can't tell what the thought is in terms of what zoning district changes might happen here whether we're talking about expanding the Village Center or we're talking about doing some other changes with some of these mixed uses that come out of the Village Center in each direction. So what are you folks thinking? This reminds me of something that's happened a few times. In the Village Center District in the land development code, it says you have, I'm gonna just put a number in there. You have to have 15 feet buffer between your development and a residential building. From my perspective, it would be better if it said from a residential building that is not within the Village Center District. Yeah. Because some building in the Village Center District that we're demanding 15 feet buffer from could itself become a multi-use building. It just, it makes sense to me if it's, if you're in a periphery of the Village Center District and you wanna give a buffer to somebody in a residential district, it doesn't make sense to require a buffer for a residential building in the Village Center District. Right. It did, you know, there's no logic to it. Well, what that means, and I think we've heard this from various people over the course of all these projects coming in, in the Village Center is that, you know, if you're in the Village Center, you don't have those buffers. It's district to district that usually gets you into, but I would look at some of the edges like along Iroquois Avenue there down at the sort of bottom left-ish, you know, where the Village Center stops and there's just, you know, a whole string of little tiny lots that are right there. You know, the first one, you know, there's no way, I mean, that sort of buffer that's trying to happen there is pretty tough to, you know, do anything about that's not an existing condition. And right along School Street, one side of School Street is Village Center and the other side isn't, you know. So it's a little tricky where those boundaries and the scenes in between those districts happen. So I don't know why you're really trying to say, but if you're in the Village Center, you don't get those protections. I don't think you can have them, you know, because you have a residential and older residential use that happens to be right next to some other lot that turns over and all of a sudden, I want to build a new senior housing building. You know, that's, I get to do that. Yeah, so was there, has there been any thought about adjusting the Village Center boundary? I don't know that we've thought about that. I think what we're really trying to do is to say there are other parts of, you know, those major arteries coming in and out of the Village Center like Pearl Street that we feel like we should have a little more control over. And I think all the trunk roads coming into Village Center and the ones that are probably gonna be affected most are Park and Pearl at the moment. And maybe we'd like to have a design review overlay. Okay. Every property is contiguous with the Village right of way. Regina, what's going on is that you've got a lot of people who own the old Victorians. If they haven't been converted already into apartments, they are still single-family homes and they enjoy their single-family home and they don't want to see anything happen to them at the moment. Now, unfortunately, the people in the Village Center District have seen development like they have never seen before. And they're having a little bit of development shock right now. And the fact that development has occurred for like five straight years is really put them into a little bit of shock. And I don't understand that. If you have some construction on your front of your street for five years, I can see how it might be a little sensitive. So, but when it comes to, yes, the trunk rolls, I mean, we obviously have Lincoln Street that goes out and it's already got its own little pale that we can't see here on the map that continues out with the multifamily mixed use. But when it comes to some of the Victorians, which are, of course, on Pearl Street and some of them have been converted, some of them haven't, so you've got some already pre-existing conditions of commercial development on corners, especially. But some of it is, of course, the corners, corners can be short, corners in between corners can be long in there. There is no, it's not all a standard block. So, there is no standardization in that area. In fact, we had a development for a, I think it was Foreplex that's behind the shopping center there on, was it School Street? No, it's a side street off of South Summit. That actually didn't make any sense because it's residential, but it's in a commercial area. And so by definition, they had to conform to all of the half to halves when you put in something that's next to a residential building, which of course was across the fence. So there's some pieces in there and it's how to reflect on that issue, which is what we are coming up against and probably will as the development pressure to commercialize a lot of what's currently there. Cause some people will have to make ends meet and I could see that development pressure happening. So it's how do we approach that and has some thought toward that cause I could see it coming. Phil, you have your hand up. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think I remember from a couple of work sessions ago, I think some of the talk of expanding the village center was specifically about incorporating that design review aspect of that we have in the village center. And I'm wondering if instead of expanding the village center, do we add design review to say the residential office zones that allow us to create different as we're talking about the village center and creating those kind of suggestions to the designers that we then can create suggestions for these buffer zones as we're talking about with different requirements or different suggestions. If I remember right, the residential office zones, you can't, the building still has to look residential. So it's not designed review as such, but you can't make a building make it look like an office rather than residence. Personally, I think that the link there, which is residential office between the village center and the transit oriented district is fairly, for the moment, it's fairly safe in that it's a pretty well-defined little section with a fair consistency of building types. But then you get to the transit oriented district, which is a major part of our community. It's kind of all has been a little bit different, sort of strip malls and fast food and so forth. But the buildings that are coming in there, you get some nice ones that kind of make everybody feel good like the new entrance to the fairgrounds, which it's just a delightful little structure. It's barely there, but it's very nice. And then you get the new building that Nick was talking about before that is a little bit different than what we saw when it came to the planning commission as the small part of a big hotel project. And now that's the only thing that's there. And it just, people are kind of wondering, well, what happened there? How did that, why is that the way it is that we don't quite get that? So I think we wanna be just a little bit more intentional about the kind of things that come in there. And maybe if we have a chance to really make them hit a higher bar, that would be a good thing. And I would say that it may be a little part of Maple that, well, I guess we're already village center until you go almost up to Elm Street. And then it's pretty residential. That's probably fine, but we may want to allow residential office type designation for some of that street. Cause you've already got a handful of businesses down there that have moved into the old Victorian. So there's some things to think about, but I kind of like the overlay, the designer view overlay approach a little bit more than just flat out changing their districts. Yeah, and that's a bear of a thing to do. So it's best to avoid it, if it's not needed. Yeah. Okay. All right, on we go. On we go. What else do I have here? This was just another section of the comprehensive plan. I think basically we've kind of talked about this already too. So this is really what we were just talking about. So that looks good. So I, that's the end for me. I'm going to stop sharing this. How do I do that? Hold on. Did it work? Yeah. Awesome. So do we want to get into the nitty gritty of some, you know, I talked about changing land development code in relation to contiguous buildings within the Village Centre District. I just think that makes sense, especially you've got a small lot in the Village Centre District and we're saying, give us 10 for your frontage. And by the way, you can't build in the last 15 feet. It's like, well, okay, then it's a vacant lot. Also what components of the, did we just want to say the design review components of the Village Centre District shall be also the same design standards for the overlay districts and the trunk roads coming in. Do we want to emphasize the fact that Park and Pearl are the two that are probably going to get, see the most changes? I mean, there's, you know, there's that really nice section on Pearl till you get to the top of the hill. Then you've got the two Shopping Centre Districts. Then you've got CVE and you move to West Street Extension. That feels very different from coming down the hill after you just, when you're coming West, after you pass post office square from there on coming down. It's still the older buildings, it's your constructions in new building, but it's still the older buildings with their, you know, particular look. Do we want to have the CMO overlay from the five corners right up to West Street Extension or do we want to look a little bit differently in that short section? Park Street, there's not a lot left. There are ones that chidden across and development moves forward. There's the building in front of the Park Street School. The, and you know, people looking at you are going to be new owners asked if it could be four stories. My answer was the land development code permits four stories. I also told them I liked the building that had been proposed. I believe they did talk to the architect who designed it to see if he could put another story on top without impacting negatively the way it looked because I thought it just looked great. But now is our opportunity before anybody comes in for any more applications on those streets to sort of put a market dot and say, this is what we're looking for. Broke and build it for all properties that are contiguous with the village right away on these trunk roads. I'm not sure there's more pressure. You know, Main Street, you know, past the Village Centre District. There's not a lot of opportunity for anything to happen there. Nor on Maple past the Village Centre District. I mean, the Village Centre District goes basically to the pizza place, a park and it goes to School Street on Pearl. So it's after that in those roads and then it goes to Central Street as well. And we also put a line around the clerk's moving and storage to pull in the data into the Village Centre District. Diane? Okay, so I think since the trunk roads literally are our gateways and we've not necessarily done our best at making sure that it's all multi-family homes coming in. And that's literally what people see when they first approach. Now, I do recognize the historical context of literally the development that I live in was literally a farm and it literally was on the outskirts of next to the fairgrounds was literally out in the booties between Burlington and Essie's Junction. At the time that this was put in, I'm not in the booties anymore. And so things have changed and I think the Village needs to be reflected of that change that we just can't throw something up on these trunk roads and allow, and allow whatever seems to be fitting just because it meets the minimal code requirements right now, we have to allow it. I think we need to change that because these are our doors, they're the doorways coming in to the Village. That historical context as it is, yeah, I recognize, but I think we can overcome the fact that we're no longer in the booties at each of the five roads. So, the number of comments, and I have not gone out of my way, to hear the comments about the building on Pearl Street with the green siding right now, and yes, I had a lovely discussion with the contractor who told me that it's going to eventually going to be painted, which would be interesting, but, because I asked him if it wasn't going to be stucco and he said no, it was going to be painted. Okay, that's different, but in anticipation of what's going on with the rest of the lot, and I'd like to know what's going on with the rest of the lot, okay, is that how are things going to be planned out? The post office square seems to be thought out as to what's going on there, and they seem to keep it tidy and neat for the most part. I noticed that the other shopping center across the way did a lot of renovations with Planet Fitness. I guess it's what do we want to see as to what's going on here, because even the renovations piece is I kind of backhand kind of reflect on Stowe, which I think has a design review in the entire town. We aren't there, but on the other hand, it does kind of make some conformity as to their signs, as to what the expectations are going to be. Of course, my dear husband, okay, he says, you know, there's another four-story building going up, okay, and it's like, yes, dear, here's the plan, would you like to look at it? I have to justify a lot of things, not just to the general public, so I'm sure some of us who share things with our spouses may have to do the same thing, but I think I'd like to see this be the village that we expect, and the only way we're going to get that is not to just allow anything to go up, but to actually have some guidance. It may not be as strict as the downtown, okay, but I'm thinking we need to have some guidance going forward, and now is probably the time to think about that. Steven's got something to say, I just want to say one thing first, Steve, if I can, and that is that I want to also remind people about the railroad and main building, which we did have review of and we did think about it, and it's still not quite what we were led to believe it would be, and it breaks a couple of other key rules that might need to be in place after seeing that, which basically is that its front to the street is not active, the windows just doesn't really present. You can never tell if it's open or busy, or unless there's someone on the porch, and it doesn't really have that engagement with the street that we would normally expect something like that to have. So just because we have design review doesn't necessarily make the thing perfect, but it gives us some targets and some examples of things that we need to keep thinking about as we work on this. And that story's not finished yet, John. I know it's not finished, but it's weird now, and we got to keep thinking it's not finished yet, and it's kind of a struggle for people. Yes. Steven. Yeah, I think I agree. Like I would like to have us to have a little bit more control about how things look, especially coming in into the Village Center. The thing that matters most to me, and I don't know how we mandate this or regulate it, and maybe it's not possible, so I defer to the architects and others, but how do we prevent... I'm less concerned with exactly what a building looks like than that it looks cheap. And I don't know how you prevent buildings that look cheap. They can have all the right elements and all the right massing and the right windows. But if you get someone in there who just wants to slap it up and move on, you end up with really cheap-looking buildings that don't age well, and they look cheap. And I don't know how we get around that, but if we can find a way, I think we should explore it. And that's my two cents. Anyone else with a comment on this one? Well, I think that just doesn't go to design. It also goes to materials. I'm not sure if we want to start mandating that. It's something we can certainly take a look at. But there's always that balancing act between do we want affordable housing or do we want a housing that's mid-range or... And that's the trade-off she has all the time. I don't disagree with anything you said, Steve. How do we get there without either making it too expensive to develop or get to a point where a lot of people already in our community can't afford to live here? But it's a point well taken. I agree 100%. Just have to find some way to get there. I just want to say affordable housing doesn't have to look cheap. It can do what Steven's saying. It is expensive in general. Yeah, I used the wrong term. Have you tried to buy any cedar siding recently? No, I know it's expensive, but I just want to reiterate that to Steven's point, and I also agree with what Diane was saying, about the trunk roads and having some design review to make sure that things that are going up match what the vision is. It makes sense to have some design review over those. But I agree with Steven that if there's a way to make things not look cheap, and that doesn't mean that we're then saying no to affordable housing in the Village Center, it just means we don't want the building to look cheap. Those are two different things. That's all. Well, there's a phrase that I heard one of my fellow architects use recently, which is that good design doesn't have to be expensive, and bad design doesn't all as cheap. So there's some aspects to design that can be recognized and implemented that might be able to get us somewhere, but it's tough, it's a hard thing to regulate. And so where you have more development pressure, which I would say is as you get closer to five corners, but that definition could change, could be where you get closer to five corners, or one of the major arteries feeding five corners, somehow you have to be able to balance that design intensity, that design pressure with the ability to raise the bar, because if you don't have the pressure and you raise the bar, you won't get anybody to build anything. So we know that there's pressure out there right now, and we are trying to use that pressure to allow us to have a little more control, which is a good thing. Phil's got the hand up and then Diane, and if you have a response, go ahead. Yeah, I think with the trunk roads, I think it's important to think about what's gonna make someone wanna park further up the trunk roads and walk into the village center. This was brought up in one of our last meetings about parking and how people expect to just like park right in front of the store that they're going to. And I think we wanna create an environment that attracts people to park maybe a little further away and walk around downtown. And so I think having some sort of review on those buildings down the trunk roads would definitely help with that. And I think most people right now are just driving into the center and parking anywhere they can. I don't think there's a real desire to walk down if you're, unless you live down one of the trunk roads. So I think keeping that in mind as well and what's gonna make people wanna park up there and walk in. Thanks. Diane? Well, I will say that I try to leave my car at home and I take my bicycle or I walk. So, and I live a good mile from five corners. So, but I'm finding that I'm unusual. So I guess my concern is that there are buildings that I understand have turned over in hands and that some of the buildings on Pearl Street could eventually be consolidated with their neighbor making a much larger lot. And I think now is the time to talk about what do we wanna see? And the other comment I have is when, okay, in the last time, have we had anybody take us up on the offer to do something special to provide affordable housing? We have some incentives, but I haven't seen anybody take us up on it. So obviously the incentives aren't working. I mean, I was at Regina's housing meeting, which was what, last, was Monday? Gosh, time flies. Monday, yeah. Monday. And so, the discussion with the crew there is, you know, I guess I could say, you know, I heard some frustration, I expressed some frustration, but it's now, you know, what can we do as a Cali to provide for affordable housing? It isn't just us, it's everybody, but on the other hand, if that's our goal, then we really need to step up. And as John said, there's good design and there's poor design and it's flexible as to how much it costs to do. So I think we can get a bunch of people who are into design, maybe challenge them a little bit. Everybody loves a challenge sometimes and they can surprise us, true. But I think we need to guide them that that's what we're looking for. And I think land development code and eventually the village plan will address both of those. But at this point, since we're at the plan, I think we need to lead with the plan because that's where we're at right now. The code, you mean, not the plan? Yes, we have to lead with the code. I think we've heard, we've talked about the plan and we've heard pieces of our talking about the plan, Regina and it's, in fact, we've talked at it, geez, for the last two years as to what are we, knowing that this was coming at some point, you know, what do we wanna see? So, which is the, do we wanna expand the design review area? And so, we're only gonna accomplish that with the code and we need, and perhaps we need, at this point, need the code to lead the plan. My, I've worked in places that have requirements for affordable housing and I've worked in places that have incentives and, you know, we're currently on the incentive side and we don't have any requirements. It's kind of a tall, it's a lofty goal and it's actually pretty expensive to build a housing unit and know you're gonna lose money on it. You know, it changes the dynamics of how you have to make a project, you know, how do you create the project so the development is reasonable and works and it's tricky, you know, so we could have a requirement and then give people incentives to fulfill that somehow or to give them, you know, certain breaks to fulfill that, but, you know, even in Burlington where that has been in place for quite a while, it's hard to get some of these projects together and it doesn't actually lower the, except for the housing units that were made to be affordable. It doesn't make the rest of them any less expensive. They actually make some more expensive. So it's kind of a tricky one. I don't really know how to come down on that one, but what I'll say is that Essex Junction has the luxury right now of several developers who have shown an amazing ability to create affordable housing. It's still market rate housing, but it's way below some of the other housing prices that are customarily seen in the marketplace. And maybe down, you know, maybe the five corners of the village center area isn't the place for that to happen. It just can't be, it's too high, you know, the density issues and what we're asking people to meet there is too high, but the rest of the village could provide locations where you can get less expensive housing all by itself at the market rate. And I think, you know, we've seen that going in from some of our developers and it comes in day after day after day at a much lower rate than some of the other housing opportunities. I'm, you know, the way that we can put what is it, the accessory apartments in, saying, you know, relaxing the rules for accessory apartments, providing more creative ways to allow people to have housing units on their property all helps. Every last one of those housing units helps. So let's see what we can do, but it's a pretty big step towards, you know, going from incentives to requirements. Yeah, John, I'd mentioned some before doing people looked at it and yeah, I did it. Quick broad search and New Orleans, they changed the requirements for affordable housing. They didn't require a new build because they talked to developers and done the research and said new build was quite expensive. They encouraged it in existing buildings and they found that that had good return. I have something to look at over here, but sorry. Do you know if there were tax credits or historic tax credits involved in that? No, I didn't go into that much depth, but they actually picked, I think they also picked areas of the city, you know, that had older buildings that they thought were appropriate. They'd found that even when they gave incentives for new build, nobody wanted to take it. But when they started looking at the older buildings, you know, the foundation's ready there, the utilities are ready connected. It seemed to be a spot where people who were renovating them could make it work. Regina, in the Chittenden County information, what was the, do you know if they had the average cost of developing or building a new one bedroom or a new two bedroom apartment? The last time we looked at that, which is a little old pre-COVID lumber materials pricing, you can't build anything for less than 300,000 for the most part. So just think about that, you guys, because that's an amazing number. It to say that even the desk lines and all of the things that we're trying to build out there and multi-family housing and how can we do it, they can't build anything for less than $300,000. So where in the world are we gonna incentivize anybody to build affordable housing where somebody normal could pay for that? You know, that's just an outrageous number. But that's why this is so hard. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, people who work in the affordable housing arena and work with, kind of maybe in housing Vermont, I happened to know because I worked for the model housing partnership for three years. They get a 20 to 25% developer fee right off the top. No other developer gets that sort of fee right off the top. And there's a lot of tax credits and so on that based on a lot of the good work that Andy Broderick did before he left, they have access to normal developers who don't have access to that sort of stuff. So maybe we should be bringing in the affordable housing guys and working with developers and say, look, this is a site, you affordable housing guys build it because you're the ones with the tax credits, the experience and the know-how are hard to get a build. Yeah, it's a little strange. There are numbers and I'm thinking my numbers are even four or five years old, but they will come out and tell you that their cost to build a unit at the time it was like $230,000. So whatever they're doing, it isn't because they can make the buildings cheap, less expensive. That's still costing them the same amount of money to develop a unit. My point is it's a staggering amount of money to say that in order to go through the whole process and build a unit of housing, it costs that much. That somehow we got to fix that. And I'll tell you that some of our local developers are not gonna, they're not paying that much for a unit. So I think we've got some people in the community already that have been doing a good job of doing this. And to incentivize, we're still going back to whether we incentivize or whether we require. And if you require it, somebody's losing money. And so it's really more of a, on a particular unit, then the other ones will have to cost more. Can I ask though losing money on what respect? I mean, the whole building, like if you build 30 units of housing, you don't have to have 30 affordable units at an affordable rental rate. And what we're talking about in terms of affordability, it's the rental rate, it's not. Right, but they're still making well over, the market value probably on those other 28 units. So you need to convince them that it's still worth their while to build the whole project. And that's where the tricky part comes in. Cause we're saying, if you want to do it, then you're gonna have to give up this stuff. And if it still works for them, I mean, many of the developers like Housing Vermont and those types of people, their whole goal is to provide as much housing and as much affordable housing as they can. Yeah, and they're built almost entirely with public dollars. Like it's not, there's no private, there's very little private investment in a lot of those affordable housing. I think it might be in the avenue we should look at about talking to these developers by going to Housing Vermont or Champaign Housing Trust and working with them. Yeah, I think that would be a way to take a risk away from the property owner and at the same time, get us what we're looking for. I think so. I think that's part of what the housing committee is also supposed to be trying to do for us as well as trying to provide some of those. I'd be curious to know, as you guys have been speaking, these incentives that have been put out there that aren't working, you know, should we look to maybe try and change some of those incentives? What are those incentives? We can try to strengthen those. That's certainly an option. I don't know what they are cause I didn't see them. Is it just a density bonus essentially? Density bonus, it seems sort of bonus is really for manager bonus. If you do solar, there's a few bonuses there. I will say, I'm sort of digressing, but Irish mind, one of the buildings that's being built at Chilling and Crossing is going to be 100% affordable. Great. So all the rents will be at that affordable? What does that mean 100% affordable? Because the definition of affordable is usually based on some percentage like 70% or 80% of the mean income. What does it mean in terms of how much it costs to build it? So what you say Robin, it's 80%. The rents are equivalent to what you make at 80% median income. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it changes all the time. But you know, it's more of a call and says every property is affordable to somebody. It just depends on how much you earn. But yeah, well, I don't have all the details yet. I have been told that it's the building in the back behind where this swimming pool is shown on the plan, if anybody can remember. And that's going to be affordable housing. I didn't want us to wait until the last building came in front of the planning commission. I wanted to know we had the affordable housing before it was built out. So the next one's going to be affordable housing. And is somebody managing that building for them or they're just keeping it? It's very, very early days. Very early days. The owners of the property are bringing affordable housing developer in to do the project. Okay. So they won't actually be doing it? Yeah, so the majority of the time that's really how it works if you're talking about a significant number of units. You get the non-profit housing developers at the table. The other types of regulatory tools, inclusionary zoning being the main one, is one of many tools you can put in your toolbox, but it's going to produce a very small amount of units in the grand scheme of things. And it's just because it's very difficult on the private sector side of things who don't have access to public dollars to really make that work. And so in order to make those programs work, at best you're requiring them to do 10% and typically you're giving them a lot in return which could be totally fine in terms of the grand scheme of things for housing. So they get a very big bonus density for that. So, but that's my understanding is that the housing committee, they are over there working away, thinking through all of these different options that make sense for both you folks and Essex and then we can work with whatever they bring forward. Bill, are there other types of bonuses that are available that we could put in? Are there like lot coverage bonuses, parking bonuses, other things like that? Because obviously the more units a developer can put in, the more they'll make off of them which means the more they can do affordable, right? Because essentially that's how the economics work. Bill, you said it's difficult. You know, we've got full lot coverage, there are only a lot of four stories that used to be they could have six with the waiver, the trustees took that out. So there's not a lot of flexibility in the Village Centre District, more flexibility elsewhere. Yeah, but the strategy is fine. So in many cases, those are the options and we've done projects where you know, you get a whole nother story, you know, go another story. You know, if you meet the requirements for the incentives, you can go another story, you can increase the density and not buy a small amount. I mean, Regina's right. I mean, that density bonus is significant. You know, you might be able to go from 30 units to 45 units or something. You know, it really helps. Your lot coverage can go up. Those are all in play. So yeah, good. Yeah, and it does the density bonuses. Well, to answer your question, Patrick, traditionally density bonuses are just not that helpful. We all have them in our zoning regulations, like these feel good things, like, oh, we want more energy efficiency. We want parks to be given to the Village. We want this, we want that, we want this. Partially they don't work because everybody puts in a laundry list of like 12 different things that they want. And so you really have to be much more tight and specific about what you want. But also what you're asking for in terms of what you're giving the developer for it is usually not matched up correctly. So you definitely can tweak those programs to try to get them closer to actually making it an option that a developer would even consider doing. But typically you're asking for way more affordable housing for what the developer is actually gonna get in return. So they typically can't make that pro forma work at the end of the day by using that incentive-based system. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd be interested to hear what people would think of in terms of requirements. I mean, I mean, as you guys have probably all seen, I'm a huge advocate for affordable housing. And, you know, if, you know, out of 30 units, if somebody's building too, I mean, I just think there's a disconnect out of what that potential developer might be trying to do, which is maximize their dollar and what we're trying to do, which is make a very diverse community, both in ethnicity and also incomes and housing styles and housing types. And it's not just efficiencies, but it's one bedrooms, two bedrooms, three bedrooms that are available to anybody in the economic scale. And that's what I think we need to be promoting is that diversity of all those things and not just allowing somebody to come in and say, hey, I can't do two, three apartments out of 45 because I'm not maximizing my profit there. I guess that's where I'm looking at it from. Yeah, for sure. And that's, you know, that's always the balance and the understanding of that and where it's coming from. And I've listened to Eric Kochstra many, and many, and many a times to try to understand really where the breakdown is and why it doesn't work. And I think, if I can summarize him, but don't quote me, it really just comes down to the fact that they could invest money in a way easier way without risk. And there are a thousand other things that they would do with the money than build housing is if I could sort of summarize where the world is on the private sector side of things. And that's not to say that, you know, from a government perspective, we shouldn't be pushing the envelope for things that we really, truly need in the community for the long term. But I think that's, that's kind of where the rub is. It's by no means to say that they aren't, I think, I don't think it's that they can't make it work. It's just that they could make money so many other ways than housing development when it comes down to it. And they would just certainly do that instead. I think the answer might be public-private partnerships. Comes down to us talking to the person who owns the land and wants to develop it and saying, look, we want this, you're telling us, you can afford it, these people can. Let's bring them together and get it. You know, they're bringing in the champion housing trust to the world or whatever they're calling on and they're bringing in public money. The picture looks very different. Yeah, and that, you know, on the one hand, if you put an inclusionary zoning ordinance in place, you kind of force those partnerships to happen if they aren't happening naturally. That's essentially what ends up happening in Burlington is, you know, Cathedral Square, Champlain Housing Trust, all those folks come to the table to do and fulfill the inclusionary zoning unit role for the private developer. And then they maintain and hold those buildings for forever. But it's also a matter of scale. Like CHT, I've spoken to them a number of times, they're not gonna take on two units in a building out of 30 units. You know, that's just not the way that their system can work either. So it's tricky. Sorry, I wanted to say that I agree with Patrick. I'm a big proponent of affordable housing as well. And I think like, in some ways, if the whole reason is that they're just wanna spend the money somewhere else, then this is kind of where we have to take the stand and force them to not spend the money somewhere else and say, this is important to our community and we need to have affordable housing going forward. So I think that's something to consider with inclusionary zoning and writing that into the code. The other thing I wanted to bring up was, we talked about it a couple of meetings ago was accessory dwelling units and incentivizing home owners, single family lots to invest and build accessory dwelling units and including some sort of affordability there as well as part of that incentive. I think it was at a presentation almost, well, it was almost a year and a half ago, I think Diane and I were there and they talked about the ability of writing into the code of zoning for accessory dwelling units and allowing for residents to kind of subdivide their own lots in certain ways. And I'd be really interested in figuring out ways to utilize those ADUs. Yeah, we really have accessory dwelling units in the code and it can be approved administratively, but I'm glad you brought it up because one thing I'd like to change at the moment, our code says that the accessory dwelling unit is the only one that can be rented out to demand house has to be the primary resident of the property owner. I'm thinking about it and maybe these houses of three or four bedrooms, accessory dwelling units, one bedroom, maybe there's one person living in the house, maybe there's two people. I'd like to give them the option of flipping that and saying that the property owner can live in the smaller unit, which opens up the larger house to a larger family. Yeah, I think Burlington has that in their code. Yeah, they do it, it'll be easy to add that to the code, but thank you, I thought about it and forgot, but thank you for reminding me. So state statute just changed and you have to make that edit. Great. Easy for you. Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback real quick on what Phil was just saying and thinking about that affordability aspect of an ADU. I mean, is there anything that we could do in terms of existing rental units, like say there is a three or four bedroom home that is looking to rehab themselves? I mean, this might be more for the housing committee or something to that effect, but how do we also stimulate the rehab of those units as well? I mean, I also understand too that we're talking about the village center too today, so this might be a conversation to be tabled for a different evening as well, but just wanted to have that thought ran through my head about. That's a big, big conversation. If you're talking about changing R1, R2 districts to say that every building in that district can become. It's not every, but to create incentives again. Do you have a pushback on that? Yeah, I mean, again, not every, but to create those incentives for if somebody wanted to create affordable housing out of a rental unit. And again, affordable housing too is oftentimes they are mixed. It's part market rent, part affordable. That's some ways the only way they can make them bankroll too and have revenue in order to maintain. So it's not, when I talk about an affordable building, I'm not talking about 100% affordability because that can also be hard to maintain and also isn't the best practice for all the residents that live there as well. There should be interactions of all sorts of socioeconomic scales. It's not what's actually happening in a lot of the ways rolling out when the affordable housing folks are building there. Taking on the projects and building them totally in their own building. It's like, it's the hardest, not so many of these housing pieces are so hard to figure out. It is all a balancing act. Well, I would like to suggest that we go on record as saying we're all in favor and support affordable housing. And we're looking forward to seeing what the housing committee brings back to us and try and respond to it that way because the demand is great. The request is admirable and everybody supports it. It's just a really tough one. We're not the only community that's struggling with how to make this better. Just the sheer number of housing units that our county is short is one giant problem and the supply, the amount of money that it takes to build these things is in our area is ridiculous. And we're just, we build, I don't know, Regina maybe have the figures, but we've been building like five to 800 housing units a year in the county and we need 4,000. So we just never get there. We averaged 700 between 2016 through 2019. And that was our goal, but our goal was also to do 20% of that as affordable and we fell short of that goal. I think we actually only got to, I think it works out to be 13% affordable. And I'll just point out that in the two years that got us even 13% affordable, 2018 and 2019 is largely because of the housing bond that was passed for the state. And that's really the main, main thing that's either gonna make affordable housing happen in a big way or it's not. It's government dollars. And passed another bond, or they're trying to pass another bond. Is that, I heard they were trying to add another large chunk of money to that. I think with all this federal stimulus money, it's on the table for sure in lots of different ways. So I think it's gonna be super, super helpful. Good. And definitely, even if your land development code doesn't require affordable housing, courting housing developers when you've got a property that works for them is the way to go. Non-profits, I mean, to do the affordable housing piece. Absolutely. All right, it's getting late. Anybody have more comments or are we ready to shut down for this meeting and pick it up again next time? Well, I have a couple of things I wanna say, but it's not German to, well, directly German in the conversation in a minute. So I'm ready to talk about something else. All right. So I could just let you guys know what my strategy is if that's helpful. Yeah. So I will do my best to try to actually go in and make some text edits at your next meeting to try to address some of the things that we talked about tonight. I don't think I'm gonna be able to get to any of the housing stuff, but we'll attempt to do bring some language around the concepts of all the other pieces that we talked about. And then generally the way that it'll work is we'll have a conversation about a particular topic at the next meeting. I'll bring you draft edits. You give me comments and at the next meeting, I'll give you the changes based on the comments that we got from the first meeting. Then we'll introduce another topic and we'll kind of just keep rolling like that. And the topics that I am aware of that we're gonna be working on is this downtown design review concept is one sort of bucket. Another bucket is really from the storm water world and what those folks need to really try to match up better with all of the state permitting. Then we have a bucket of state statute changes since the last time that your LDR was made. I don't think there's a ton of stuff, but the accessory dwelling unit was a good example. And then any other housekeeping things, if folks have had stuff that you just want cleaned up, we will address those. And then we'll kind of do a time check situation. I know you folks were really wanting to get something done in the fall. If the affordable housing folks are not prepared with their recommendation by then, we'll have to just sort of see where we're at. And depending on what their recommendation is, like if they are to recommend an inclusionary zoning ordinance and that's what you folks wanna do, it's not easy. So I'll just put that out there to manage expectations in terms of how long of an effort that might take. In South Burlington, we worked on it for probably year and a half, two years. So we don't have that much time available to us. But we're happy to have the expertise available for those communities that have gone through this already. So I look forward to seeing how that shakes out and maybe the materials that you have ready for us next time. Yeah, sounds good. Awesome. And for homework on our end, Diane had put together a long list of things that we wanted to talk about, which I think you have. To that, we've kind of, we'll try and add things as we go along here. But let's see what both of those things look like when we bring them together. And it'll be great. We haven't done this update in a while. So it's gonna be helpful and a lot has happened since we did it last time. Yeah. Fantastic. So anything else on this topic or are we gonna let Rob and Phil listen on other things? Rob and you're on. Wow. Well, I just want to say thank you, Regina. I mean, right across the board, CCRPC, we couldn't do half the things we do without them. And I don't think they get enough credit. Every single staff member, they, yeah. So now she's gonna go off the tell-tale, no. So a couple of things, anybody who's on Facebook will know in the last two weeks, big changes for the connector road. We signed off with the last property owner. So we have all the roads we need to build the road and do the railway upgrades. That includes every crossing in the five corners. It's a nice, smooth, concrete surface between the tracks. So you won't be going bump-a-dee-bump and spilling your coffee, Phil, as you drive to work. Also, all the crossings will get gates, which we haven't had before. So that's quite exciting. You may know this, but I'll say it. When the project does go through at the moment, when the train comes through, every light and all the roads in the five corners go through it. Now, when we finish the project, it'll only be the roads that the train's crossing will have a red light. And of course, the connector road, that's everybody going north, south, east, continue going even when the chip train comes through. So that's a good thing. After that, we couldn't do anything last year because we had right-of-way clear for the railroad work but not for the road work. So we had to go to VTrans and they give us right-of-way clear for the road work as well. So the railway have to go back and re-bid. I've asked VTrans for permission to have the railway do that. If that happens, we will get the railway work done this year. We will bid out the road in autumn and we should start the road as early as possible in spring 2022. So that's good news. Also, you're going to see some work happening in front of the Firebird Cafe in the not-too-distant future in terms of remediation. We've been negotiating with the people on chip and crossings. There's stockpile soil there that they'll be taking out because they'll be taking out soil. You get it, the contaminated soil, which is 12-foot dog. Then they'll be putting that soil back in again. So they've agreed to let us do that verbally. We just have to get an agreement with them. Also, I think I bumped into John to ask him about this. I approached the trustees about a month ago about having what I called master classes for village residents. They had summer early autumn. I talked to the police chief. He's going to give a class to teach people how to take good photographs with their cell phones. I'm going to ask Raj to do the same with SLRs and normal cameras. I approached Jake at the Firebird Cafe. He's going to do a little class and teach people how to make hot sauce. Garrel at Mark Barbecue is going to give barbecue classes to people. Chris Kessler from Black Flannel is going to do a homebrew class. So I've been going about trying to collect people. I'm going to ask Nick still here if the Trade Advisory Committee could give classes to people about trees and stuff like that. I asked Evan if his wife could give an art class. So public works, rock and roll on from public works is hopefully going to give a couple of classes. He's going to show people how to fix a running tap and how to stop a running toilet. Little simple things like that, different things. I did it once before in the National Museum of Ireland and people really liked it. It's also, I find it's a marketing and promotional thing for businesses because people come and somebody shows them how to make homebrew beer. They think this is great, they go home, find out they don't know how to do it, then they go and buy the guy's beer. Same with the barbecue, you know. Darrell at Mark's Barbecue, I just think he's a great guy and it would be nice for him to get some promotion in that regard. I'm going to go to the seamstress up Pearl Street to see if they'll work with this. See how many people I can get. Maybe the running shoe place will do a running class or something. Evan asked me to do garden design and small space planning for residential buildings. I think John would be much better at the ladder. So I'm going to try and mug him to do that. But I think it'd be nice if we could one, get elected officials and staff to be there to give some master classes to people. It'd also be nice if we can get some of the planning commission members who have experience or expertise in a certain field to put their arm up and say, yes, we can do something. The library, Wendy at the library is fantastic. So I really said the library will do something. So I'd like you guys to think about that. Think there's any little master classes you'd like to give where they're going to happen, how are they going to happen? To be decided, nice to know we have a group of master class people who'd like to do that. That's the hard bit, easy bits working at where it's going to happen. Hopefully, mid summer, early autumn, we won't have the restriction, let's say half an hour. We can free a lot of space up. Any questions? Nice work. It's a fun thing to do. I mean, I have, I did read a memo. You can all get back out there and do things together which should be fairly soon. I think this, and especially with the warmer weather coming, it's going to be great. Yeah, I did write a memo. I don't think it's made at the trustees yet. A few months ago, actually, I was with Ricky Jones at Public Works and he's assigned his office to tell us, smile, you're an S-extraction. I don't see why we couldn't have that in every road in the S-extraction. Why can't we have signs that say, smile, you're an S-extraction? It sort of goes along with our new design overlay for the trunk roads. And I think Diane hit the nail on the head. When people come into the village, we want them to say, wow, this is a nice place. Let's go a bit further and stop. I think it all comes down to that. Any questions? No. Okay, as you were. Thank you. As you were, thanks, Robin. Thanks. I don't even want to know if there's a question or an answer out there related to merger or not merger. I'm just going to wait to see what happens with the revote. And then what I would like to request, Robin, is that on behalf of staff and the village governing entity, whoever that might be, maybe they can give us some kind of update after the next vote. Is that fair? Absolutely. And before I forget, I didn't mean to leave Patrick, Phil and Steve out of the masterclasses. I'm sure they've all got exceptional skills they can bring to the table and help their fellow residents. Of course, Andrew is clearly going to be showing people who are doing some cartel retreats. He was busy today. Dave texted me during the meeting, said he'd be stuck in a client's meeting and he couldn't get out. So he said to his apologies. All right, unless anybody has any last words, I will entertain a motion to adjourn. A motion to adjourn. Excellent. Do I have a second? Second. Beautiful. All in favor of adjourning for tonight. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That concludes the meeting tonight. Thank you all for coming. We appreciate every comment. And we will see. Do we have another meeting scheduled from? Well, it's first Thursday of every month and we're going to do horn in some others if we don't have applications coming in. There's an application coming through. I'm not sure if it's going to be ready or not. But I'll let you guys know. I'm off to eat some chocolate. Excellent. Sounds good. Good night. And don't forget to email me with your master class ideas. Much appreciated. I don't know. These days, all I can do is keep my 10 month old son alive. There you go. You can teach people how to change as they send the whole country. As a new parent. Yeah, how to get some sleep. I wish I could figure it out. What's funny, when I first heard that Stevie Wonder song and he was singing about a nappy-headed boy, I was going, why would you put a nappy on your son's head? It didn't make any sense to me. Keep the son off him, right? I mean, protect him somehow. Yeah, I realized it was actually called a diaper in America. I had no idea. It was a bit stinky. Nappies. Nappy, yeah. All right, good night everyone. Good night.