 First of all, I want to thank Valerie for an excellent lunch, as usual, and Gladys for helping out. And though our numbers are diminished, I think we're looking forward to a very interesting presentation today. First, as a reminder, next month's lunch and learn is going to feature Zvi Jankalovic, who is on the staff of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is an amazing resource. He's going to be talking a bit about the center's history and its unique role in Jewish life and culture today. And we'll also be talking about some really interesting programs that the Yiddish Book Center has recently started up. So that's next month on March 14. There was also, I just wanted to call everyone's attention, to the 50-50 handout that should be on each table. So consider that event. One other note before the speakers begin. You'll be seeing a PowerPoint or PDF presentation that is fairly detailed. We are going to have that PDF available on the OZ website under the Lunch and Learn section of the website. So if there's materials you see during the presentation that you want to get a closer look at later, you'll be able to do that via looking at the PDF on the OZ website. So before I introduce our principal speaker, Megan Tuttle, have the honor of having Karen Paul, a longtime member of OZ, and our city council president here to say a few words relating to today's presentation. Does this one? No, it's this one. No, it's this one. Yeah, that's on. This one. Yeah. This is the one that works, right? Right. OK. We have very sensitive microphones at city council meetings, and we always say to people, if you think you're close enough to the microphone, you're not. So you basically almost have it in your mouth by the time you're really well heard. I just wanted to talk a little bit about where we were and where we are now before Megan gets up here and really tells you all of the nitty gritty facts. And there's lots and there's lots of them. One of the most collaborative and transformative projects that Burlington has ever undertaken as a real community effort was a comprehensive planning process that we undertook following a 2009 resolution that I sponsored. It was my first year on the city council and it was a resolution called the downtown plan. We didn't have really a plan for downtown. We didn't have a plan for where taller buildings were going to be. We didn't have a plan for where housing was going to be. And we needed that. We also needed a plan to link the waterfront with the downtown. Interesting fact that if you go at the top of Church Street and you walk all the way down Church Street and then you walk from downtown, say like City Hall, all the way down to the waterfront, it's the exact same distance. But most people will tell you that the distance between the top of Church Street and the bottom is much shorter. And the reason for that is because there's a whole lot more to look at. And so you get lost in the details and you don't pay as much attention to how far you've walked. And that was something that this downtown plan, which later became called Plan BTV, that was the whole point of that plan was to have a comprehensive planning document that looked at economics, housing, climate, transportation. And certainly housing was an incredibly important part of that plan. If we're going to be able to retain students who go to our institutions and be able to retain them staying here, if we're going to be able to attract others to live and work in Burlington, and we're going to be able to grow our tax base so that it'll become more affordable, and there will be others who want to live here and can afford to live here, we need more housing. And the limited housing growth that's in our downtown right now is directly tied to housing development. It's an interesting fact that between 2000 and 2012, there were only 130 new households that were developed in the downtown. And that's only 3% over 12 years. If you look at all of Burlington and the surrounding area, it grew by 10%. So what that's telling us is that we are not most, a lot of people want to live downtown, but there isn't the housing there for them to be able to do that. So in 2014, the city undertook yet another massive effort to look at housing. And from there, it was right at that time that the first buyer had come forward to buy the downtown mall. And we all know what happened with the downtown mall. It's very exciting that we are now finally at a place where there is the city council just earlier this week passed a resolution that will bring forward this project, hopefully to fruition in mid-2026. We also heard about the former YMCA, another 90 units of housing. The city place, which will have 350 units of housing, Cambrian Rise, that is well on its way. And we will be having a work session at our next meeting to talk about the gateway block, which will also include housing. So all of that comes down to the fact that we all know that housing must be a human right and we need to increase the number of houses downtown and along the Pine Street corridor in other areas of the city. And we also need to do everything we can to address homelessness. So you are very, very fortunate. I'll let Wayne do the introduction, but just to say I work with the department heads for the city, all of them. I think there are 17, 18, I can't remember now, a number of them and you are very, very fortunate to have Megan Tuttle here with you to talk with you about planning, about development and about housing. She is the expert and I encourage you to ask her lots of questions because with all the questions that I've asked her over all the time that she's been working for the city, she still has always seemed to know the answer. So whatever questions you have, I hope that you'll ask her. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Karen, for those remarks. It's a good way to start the presentation. Also, before I introduce Megan, I just want to reference Sarah Morgan who's on the planning department staff who is also here today. And I'm sure afterwards, if you have questions, she would also be able to help. So Megan Tuttle has been the planning director for the city of Burlington since November 2021. Prior to that, she served for six years as a staff planner for the city of Burlington and was responsible for among other things leading the preparation of the city's comprehensive plan. As is especially relevant for today's lunch and learn, Megan had a lead role in organizing the mayor's 2019 Housing Summit and in the development and implementation of policy reforms resulting from the 2021 Burlington Housing Action Plan. And I'm sure some of that's gonna be covered in her presentation. Megan received a master's degree in urban and regional planning from Ball State University in Indiana where she also received her bachelor's degree. And Megan was honored for her work in Burlington by being named planner of the year in 2021 by both the Vermont Planners Association and by the Northern New England chapter of the American Planning Association. As a planner myself and as a former member and chair of the Burlington Planning Commission, I'm very pleased to have Megan with us today. So thank you. Thank you, Wayne. And that would be a great start, right? Throwing the microphone on the floor. Thank you to Wayne and to all of you for inviting me to come and talk to you about these really important issues. And I really appreciate President Paul talking about a bit more of the history of the work that we've been doing in the city around this really important topic. And I just wanna say I appreciate that I started working here in Burlington right after Plan BTV, the downtown plan that President Paul spearheaded and I think we've done a lot of really important and great work for the downtown as a result of that plan. It was a very important vision for the city and has spurred a lot of really important work. Wayne mentioned that I've been involved in several iterations of housing plans that the city has been working on over the last almost decade, but today I wanted to share some updates with you about the most recent one that was put forward at the end of 2021. And I appreciate that President Paul touched on really the kind of big picture of this housing plan which is to fulfill the promise that housing is a human right by doubling the rate of housing production that we've seen historically in the city to address households of all types in terms of the need for housing and to end chronic homelessness in the city. Our team in city planning has been working closely with the CEDO office, with the mayor's office, with many departments in the city and a lot of external partners to forward 10 specific actions that were related to those two big goals. And as Wayne said, I'm gonna share this presentation with you. I'm actually gonna move through it pretty quickly today, but there's a lot here and provided some other links if you wanna dig in more. But really the foundation of this plan was recognizing that as a county, as Chittenden County, we know that we need to see about 5,000 more homes countywide in the next five years in order to address our housing needs on a wide range of issues. And the city identified specific actions that it could take to meet its share of that goal. We are about 25% of the county's population. And so we have identified a series of actions that could help us to provide about 25% of that needed housing growth in the future. It was also really important to recognize that within that goal, we also need to be making specific progress on permanently affordable housing and housing for people that have been experiencing homelessness. So in addition to kind of setting an overall target for new homes in the city, we included specific goals for those housing types as well within that. And as of about this time last year, we put a housing report together and identified that between homes that had been created, were in the permitting process or were currently under construction, we were about 90% of the way to that target. We have seen some challenges in terms of getting projects going given things coming out of the pandemic and other unique circumstances. We're certainly still trying to push forward the affordable and the homeless, housing for homeless individuals, but we're starting to make progress towards the bigger picture goal. The housing plan really included two sort of buckets of actions, I'll call them. The first was about resources and services and this is a big part of the work that the Community and Economic Development Office has been doing. The housing plan included investments of $5 million of the city's American Rescue Plan funding, which was a COVID era federal funding. There was a vote by Burlington voters to increase the level of the dedicated tax that funds our Housing Trust Fund, which is our Permanently Affordable Housing Fund. There was a special assistant to end homelessness that was a position that has been created in CEDO and has been really instrumental in the work underway around emergency shelter and helping to facilitate permanently affordable housing solutions. And a number of other investments that CEDO has been leading to help move the needle there. And one of the things that I thought might be important for folks to hear is this chart that's on the slide that you see is a chart that shows how much the Burlington taxpayers have been committing to on an annual basis, advancing permanently affordable housing through the Housing Trust Fund. Historically, around $200,000 to $300,000 a year through our tax bills. As I said, there was a commitment to increase that level coming out of a town meeting day question a couple of years ago. But in addition, some of the work that we had done through previous housing action plans created some new opportunities for funding for that permanently affordable fund, like a new fee that short-term rentals pay that has helped to create new resources for permanently affordable housing in the city. So you can see this bar all the way on the right is fiscal year 2023, so last year. How significant the increase in contribution to that permanently affordable fund has been through this work. Yes, so the blue, the bottom part of the bar is that's the dedicated tax. The green is what we call program income, so that's things like we have policies where if somebody demolishes a house, they either have to replace it or pay a fee so that we can help facilitate the replacement and then the red piece is income from the short-term rental program. The other bucket of work that was part of this housing action plan was the longer term work. So the things that I just described were more immediate investments of resources and funding. That was paired with longer-term work through zoning changes. And there are three zoning changes that our office has been working with the Planning Commission and the City Council on since 2022. So this is what I'm gonna give you a quick update on today. Many of you, especially if you live here in Ward 1, I'm sure have heard a lot of conversation about campus growth issues, campus housing issues, and the zoning for the campus. The 2021 Housing Action Plan included a goal to change the zoning just for the Trinity Campus on Colchester Avenue to help facilitate more on-campus undergraduate student housing on that part of UVM's campus. The goal to see more on-campus housing has been a long-standing goal. Wayne mentioned our comprehensive plan, Plan BTV. It's been a long-standing goal of neighborhoods and the community at large, and has been included in more targeted ways in many of the City's Housing Action Plans for years. We have right now a series of specific kind of zoning districts that apply to different parts of UVM, Champlain, and the Medical Center's campuses that help us more closely regulate growth and development issues in those specific locations. And so this effort, again, was really initially focused just on the Trinity Campus within that. Throughout 2022, the Planning Commission and the staff held engagement sessions and conversations to explore some recommended, or some requested, I should say, zoning changes, and talk with many people about what that might look like, formulate a recommendation. And ultimately, the Planning Commission forwarded some zoning changes to the City Council. But a really important piece of what we were hearing in that process is that while we agreed that having more on-campus housing was really important, the dynamics of how the institutions were growing their enrollment and managing that housing was a really important factor related to those zoning changes. So I think many of you know we've had long-standing MOUs with the City and UVM around housing and growth issues. The most recent one was adopted by the City Council in 2009. While it would have originally expired in 2015, it was extended and was in place until 2019. So as the zoning amendments were coming forward, the Council felt that it was really important and hearing feedback from the community that it was really important that we don't take action on zoning changes until there was an MOU in place that defined responsibilities around housing and enrollment growth with the institutions. So since the spring, President Paul and many of the folks that are at the City have been very deeply involved in conversations with the institutions about, or with UVM specifically, about a new MOU. And we're trying to make progress on a new MOU right now. You may know that there is a draft MOU that was presented to the City Council in late December. There have been some iterations to that since as a result of further public meetings and conversations that have been happening. But I wanted to just quickly note here that, again, this slide will be shared for all of you, but we are currently working to identify a series of commitments that UVM would make to housing, creating housing on campus that would help them stay ahead of any future enrollment growth and also identify ways that through zoning changes and through increased development on UVM's campus, we can try to positively impact the off-campus demand for housing, for specifically undergraduate housing as well. This includes consideration of not only coming back to that discussion about the Trinity campus, but also evaluating other locations on UVM's campus that could be suitable for housing and significant amounts of undergraduate housing, including around the Rugby Field area of campus on East Avenue and Main Street and behind the Waterman building, that parking lot behind the Waterman building on Prospect Street. This is something that's actively under discussion right now. There have been a number of community meetings. I think some of you have maybe been at recent Ward 1 meetings or special meetings that we had to talk about this MOU, but this will ultimately be something that the council may be considering in February or March about whether or not an MOU is something that we will be able to agree on and approve. And if so, our team would begin to work again with the Planning Commission on some zoning changes related to that. And I didn't say this at the beginning, but I'm gonna move through three big issues and then I'm happy to take questions on all of them or anything else at the end. So switching gears a little bit from the institutions, another major area that we've been working on is the south end. I don't know if any of you live in the south end area, similar to the context that President Paul provided about the downtown plan, we also did a major planning effort around the same time for the south end as well. And we have been doing a lot of follow-up work as a result of that planning effort to identify particularly around the area of Lakeside and Pine Street, where there are a number of really large surface parking lots and some older industrial buildings that have been transitioning into new places for business growth. We've been talking about how this can become a new neighborhood that would help us advance the vision from that plan and be a vibrant place to support that economic growth. So over the summer, the city council, last summer, the city council actually approved a new zoning framework for about 80 acres in the center of the south end enterprise zone. These are a couple maps that I think you'll probably be able to look at a little more closely on your own computer, but this was a big step in the direction of helping to facilitate the creation of that new neighborhood. These are not anything here in Burlington, but these are just a couple examples of the kind of environment that the zoning is intended to help facilitate. That includes a mixture of small and medium buildings that include both housing and space for businesses, whether that's a coffee shop or a cafe or even an office building that might support some businesses that are growing out of the Hula space on Lakeside Avenue or those types of things. And this is also intended to be a place where we can increase the environmental sustainability of the area. These are large surface parking lots right now. And through redevelopment, we hope to be able to help create new solutions for stormwater management, to bring street trees and sidewalks and bike connections through an area that right now is not as accessible, kind of along the new Champlain Parkway that's being implemented. So in addition to the zoning changes that the council approved last summer, our team has been working, again, collaboratively with CEDO as well as with Champlain College and the folks that developed Hula who own one of the big parking lots down in that area to do some further planning. We wanna make sure that as a new neighborhood develops here that we're very coordinated around what private development could look like, the city owns some land down there. So we wanna think about what the potential could be for the city-owned land to help us meet some of our goals as a community for particularly permanently affordable housing, how we implement infrastructure in a way that is careful and meets the needs that we have in that part of the city. So we've been doing some additional work planning in that area and one of the things that we anticipate that the city council will have at one of their upcoming meetings, maybe the meeting on February 26th is a presentation about some of that work and kind of a proposal for what we're calling a pre-development agreement which would outline a number of additional planning studies and additional planning work that we wanna do in collaboration with Champlain College and Hula for that area that would help continue to guide redevelopment that may occur there. And the last thing that I wanna share is the neighborhood code which again, you may have heard about the neighborhood code. This is the third of the three zoning changes that were a part of the 2021 housing plan. So far what you've heard us talking about both in terms of President Paul's context and the other campus areas and the south end have been part of the sort of major areas of the city where we expect to see more intensive redevelopment, more the vast majority of the new homes that will help us meet our goal, that housing action plan goal. But one of the other things that we recognize is that not all of the people who need homes in the city of Burlington or are looking for places to live in Burlington may wanna live downtown in an apartment building or a condo. So the neighborhood code is about how we introduce more opportunity for other types of housing throughout the city's neighborhoods. And specifically this is about duplexes, triplexes and four unit buildings city wide, as well as other buildings like townhouses or other small multi-unit buildings that could be allowed in some locations in the city. This is again something that has been part of our comprehensive plan goals for quite a while, but is an important compliment to some of the other housing work that we're doing in terms of how we see new smaller homes in areas that already are served by infrastructure that increase access to neighborhoods across the city and help us address some of the opportunities for multi-generational housing, aging in place, helping us expand our tax base in a more incremental way than some of the larger projects throughout the city and also help us meet some new requirements that were included in a bill at the state legislature last year that requires introduced new zoning requirements statewide for duplexes, triplexes and four unit buildings. So a whole range of issues that we're looking at through the neighborhood code. These are just some maps that I shared that actually I should have flipped to this already that visualize what I was talking about where a lot of the stuff that President Paul talked about and the previous zoning changes are really in the areas of the city that are reflected in that map and gold on the left and we're talking about the neighborhood code which is these areas in blue on the right. And I think one of the other things that's really important when we talk about the housing work that we're doing is to reflect on the fact that as a community one of our values is our commitment to open space, to parks, to natural resources, the intervail. And you can see in the map in the center that about 40% of all the land area in Burlington is in those natural resources, is in those parks and open spaces. So that means that in order for us to continue to preserve that and protect that, we need to think really carefully about where growth happens in these areas kind of in the yellow and blue on either side. When we talk about the neighborhood code, we know that we have some examples of the types of buildings, these small multi-unit buildings in most neighborhoods around the city. In a lot of cases these were homes that might have been allowed to be built many decades ago in previous versions of our zoning. But for one reason or another today are not allowed or where they might be allowed can be really difficult to actually realize. So through the neighborhood code, we're aiming to make it more possible for these homes to be created across the city. And we're doing that by changing some of the rules that govern what can be built in residential areas and we are making some changes to the map of the different zoning districts that apply to neighborhoods in the city. I promised that I wouldn't get into the weeds on this. So I'll just say here that while we have about a dozen or eight different kind of rules that actually regulate what can be built in residential neighborhoods, we're looking at a couple in particular. One of the things if you've heard conversation in your neighborhood about the neighborhood code that's most notable is allowing multiple units in a building in every neighborhood in the city. And so that's one of the important takeaways here for you to just know about the rules that would be changing. We also have a number of residential zoning districts that apply across the city. And so we've been looking at these first to try to streamline. Some of these districts are very similar and we wanna make it a little bit easier for people to navigate how zoning applies to their neighborhood by streamlining some of those. More notably though, we have been looking at proposing some changes, particularly for some areas that have been zoned for low density development to medium density development, including the kind of immediate neighborhood around where we are here today that will help us to overcome some of the barriers to implementing those neighborhood or those housing types across certain neighborhoods. We're also looking at proposing a new zoning district that would apply right along North Avenue, Shelburne Road and parts of Colchester Avenue that would allow for small multi-unit buildings and maybe more, if people would like to add it, neighborhood kind of commercial uses. So think like the coffee shop, the dry cleaner, maybe a bank, those types of things that could be walkable to your home. So this would allow for a mix of those building types as well as those commercial uses. And ultimately, these kind of all come together into a new proposed map of the residential districts in the city. So there are links here where you can explore all of this more fully. We have been having conversations about the neighborhood code since the summer of 2022 in a couple different iterations, first at a really high level and then talking with folks about the sort of scale of buildings that they would feel would fit within their neighborhood to help inform the recommendations that we brought forward. We then had a joint committee of the Planning Commission and the City Council's Ordinance Committee that met over the fall and into the winter, into January. And ultimately, this draft code was presented to the City Council at the end of last month, just a couple of weeks ago. So we were just at Ward 1 last night to talk about this a little bit. We have a public Q and A session coming up next Tuesday night. If any of you are interested in hearing more about this and wanna talk more about questions you might have, the City Council will actually be having a formal public hearing on this on February 26th. And then after that, the Council may consider this. They may consider taking action, they may make changes. Ultimately, it will be up to them about what they wanna do with this if anything at this time. So as I promised, I tried not to get too far into the weeds, but give you a quick overview of the things that we've been working on. This presentation includes links to where you can find more information about all three of those zoning changes that I was talking about. And I think if any of you are interested, one of the other things that our team and City Planning did in the last couple of years is create a new housing dashboard that includes really important information about new homes that are being created in the city, the cost of homes in the city. There's information about rental housing inspections and some other reports that help just provide a bigger picture of what's actually happening in the city related to housing. So there's a link here to that too in case any of you are interested in diving into the topic of housing more. So I think that's all I have. Thanks. And yeah, happy to answer questions. From CCTV's perspective, is it okay if people ask questions from their seats? Okay, Basha. Let's move to the fellow housing. Is there gonna be parking for them? Have parking, I mean, finding parking is huge. Having more traffic is even more crazy in Burlington, outside of Burlington. Yeah, with the buses, CityBus is being able to do more routes to where these new developments are so people can take the bus to go within the city or right outside the city because of traffic safety and I can tell you that pedestrian, that's an injuries this year when we're way up across the country, across the state, certainly in the big major city of Montelier, and so I'm always worried about crosswalks or pedestrians that we have more traffic that's gonna be in the city. Yeah, that's a great question and if folks didn't hear it, yeah. The, I appreciate your background and did you say you work in transportation safety? Traffic safety, yeah, thank you. So the question was just about as we see new development, how will we make sure that traffic and pedestrian safety and accessibility of those new developments to things like transit are factored in? So it's a really good question and a big part of the reason why we're looking at the locations we are have to do with those factors in particular. Obviously, you know, as we talk about downtown that provides a lot of benefits in terms of providing access to homes that are in a walkable place. We have the core of our transit system that is right downtown to provide that access but even places like with the south end we are absolutely a big part of the planning work that we have been doing has been looking at the traffic and parking issues that would be factored into a development of that scale. Absolutely planning for parking. Maybe not at the level that we used to require in the city but certainly a very good amount of parking but more importantly looking at how through new pedestrian and bike connections, transit access and other improvements that we could make that a much more car light neighborhood than what we have seen in parts of the city in the past. Really emphasizing that as a core part of the planning and then similarly with some of the work on neighborhood code and on campus like these are all locations where having more homes in parts of the city that are already developed that can access transit, that can walk, that can bike rather than kind of on the edges of Chittenden County is a big part of how we can contribute to helping with pedestrian safety and traffic volumes in this area. Other questions? Okay, yes. So regarding parking, I know something got passed for people building new that eliminated requirements for parking so is that part of this and also what about why I had a permit for a project in my house side was all about permeable land and non-permeable land. So what about that in regards to this new neighborhood code and other people have talked to other meetings about water runoff? Great question. So what Deb asked about recent change to our zoning rules about providing parking and new development and about storm water management and its relationship to zoning. So Deb is right that in 2023, I'm trying to remember if it was 2022 or 2023, we've been doing a lot. The council did pass changes to the zoning rules that said that we no longer require a minimum number of parking spaces as part of new development. That's a big part of the sort of housing picture that we're talking about in terms of the space that's dedicated to parking and or homes, the cost that parking can drive, no pun intended for new homes. But ultimately I think one of the things Deb that we have looked at as a result of that policy is to look at new developments that have been proposed in the city since that change happened. And we found that many of them are still providing parking. They may be providing fewer onsite parking spaces than they would have in the past, but I think it was about 75%, they were providing about 75% of the parking that they would have otherwise been required to provide. So we are seeing that given the dynamics of our community and our state in particular, that new developments do still want to provide some amount of parking. And so we're actually working kind of as a follow on to that on other tools that would help incentivize transit utilization and other we call them transportation demand management to increase the uptake of those. In terms of the neighborhood code and stormwater, this is something that we've been getting a lot of questions about. There is one of the rules that I mentioned of zoning is there's a all of our zoning districts in the city talk about something called lock coverage, which is basically about how much of the land that you own that's covered by buildings or parking or other impervious surfaces that rainwater can't get into the ground through. We have been working closely with other departments in the city to think about areas throughout Burlington that if we were to see new development happen in residential areas, what would that mean in terms of our capacity to manage stormwater and serve it with other, wastewater for example. And I think we have good tools in our zoning right now to help at least the folks at DPW and Water to be able to look at specific projects and determine is there a potential for if a new building gets added on a site to add something that's called green stormwater management or like managing some stormwater on a property in a different way. I know we've also been talking about ways that we could expand our planning coordination to think about the sort of bigger picture. But ultimately, the neighborhood code changes would preserve a significant amount of lots that are dedicated to open space to help with stormwater management and have room for vegetation and other landscaping on sites. So it would definitely introduce some changes. But in some areas of the city, we already know that lots are developed more intensely than our zoning would allow today. So we don't expect that, especially in some of the neighborhoods like this area, that the changes from the neighborhood code would cause significant increases in lot coverage as a result. Okay, so I've got two questions for you. One is narrow and one is a broader question. So the narrow question is this neighborhood where OZ is located. I remember back years ago when the Macaulay Square Development was proposed, there was a lot of neighborhood opposition. Are there any plans in the works for the sister's mother, the sister's and mercy's mother house? Since that's a very large building. Yeah, that's a great question. Not that I'm aware of at the moment. I know that it's talked about from time to time, but I'm not aware of an active project. There are other folks that look at development review, so, but I don't think that I've heard anything about that recently. The broader question is, I know you're involved at the state level with planning issues also through the Vermont Planners Association. If you're to step back, what are in your view are the one or two hardest issues for overcoming to get more housing built? Yeah, that's a really good question. So if you didn't hear Wayne, he asked about as part of the Vermont Planners Association, I get a chance to talk with planners from all over Vermont. And he asked about at the state level, what are some of the biggest issues that are affecting housing statewide? I'd say that two things immediately come to mind. One is just the infrastructure constraints that a lot of communities are facing. We know that especially in smaller towns that may not have as robust water and sewer systems as we have in Burlington, that can often be a constraint and a lot of communities are struggling to find the money that they need to actually upgrade their systems even when they want to have more housing in their villages or in walkable places. That can often be a really big challenge. And I'd say the other piece is just this, the transportation question that you asked about. Ultimately, we are a very rural state and people don't often or don't always have access to a job that's close to their home. So that continues to be a major issue in terms of how do we provide more opportunity for people to get around the state that doesn't just require a car or parking a car. So I'd say those are the two big things. Yeah. Anyone else have a question we haven't gotten to? Jess. That's not a question, but this other congregation knows we owe a tremendous gratitude to Megan for helping us as we imagine what we're going to be doing with the fact property and conversations are continuing. Megan, so you know, Fertile is coming to us with an architectural plan for the additional 40 units on their facility that likely will approach properties of the tables and lines and we're continuing to think and envision something really good in the back that will both satisfy our mission and satisfy the desire to create more housing on the property. Will that be in partnership with OZ? No, they'll basically sell some property to us. Anyway, thanks for that update. Yeah, yeah. Great. Jess. I've been wondering about, and I don't know if this is something the city or government can have to focus on, but a Jewish center, senior or multi-generational housing environment which it seems that in my experience in senior housing by default, it becomes really very Christian oriented, which I don't know if you feel that or felt that in any of these housing, maybe not specifically identified as Jewish senior housing, but something that's a little bit more Jewish centered than what they are by default Yeah, great question. And I guess I would maybe not to put you back on the spot, but would imagine that something like the vision you're talking about would probably happen through a collaboration between communities like OZ and either a private developer or a non-profit developer. In terms of the city's role, the main way that we get involved in helping to support housing, particularly like age-restricted housing like what you're talking about is by providing grants from our affordable housing trust fund to organizations or developers that are building housing that's going to be intentionally provided as affordable. So things like the new, I think it's called Juniper House at Cambrian Rise that was built by Cathedral Square is an example of that. So I think that would be a major way that the city could help with something like that is by maybe supporting it through a grant. Yeah. In particular regarding the MOU for UVM, I know you said that it's going to go before the city council on the 26th of February or more of that, no. I don't know when the MOU will go back to the city council. We're still working on that. It may go in February or March, but that is very possible that we'll be back in front of them in their next few meetings. Is that in the talks with UVM? I know Trinity is a big thing in the talks, but this is the first time I've heard about those two in a possible location. Yes, so that is one of the things, when we were first working on the zoning changes as part of the housing plan back in 22, we were just talking about the Trinity campus. We took a pause, we came back to work with UVM around the outlines of the draft MOU that we have right now, and that's when the ideas about Waterman and Rugby came into that as well. So they are both talked about there, and so it would build on Trinity as well. In terms of when the zoning would be considered, is that what you mean by a deadline? Oh, oh, oh. I mean, I think that they would have liked to have it done a long time ago. So yeah, we're definitely actively talking with President Paul and the council as well as UVM about bringing that forward as soon as we can. Yeah. It's housing, but how can they ensure that the students will choose to live there? Yeah, it's a great question. If you didn't hear the question was about how will UVM ensure that students who would prefer to live off campus might want to take advantage of housing they might build? This is a huge issue, and one that has been at the core of the feedback we've been hearing and the questions we've been hearing. I want to be very careful. I think Lonnie just left. I don't want to speak for UVM, but I will say that one of the things that I have heard Richard Cate, who is their VP of development, say is that they're carefully considering the kind of housing that they would want to build as part of this work. If you have not heard about the Catamount Woods Project that they're proposing behind the double tree on Williston Road, that is about 550 beds in an apartment style project, not in a dorm style project, which they have said is primarily going to be focused on junior and senior housing. So I think what we've heard from them is that they would be trying to pursue projects like that for these other sites. They may not 100% be junior and senior housing just because of the dynamics of how they house across a whole system, but they'd be looking to provide it in more apartment style housing that would be attractive for folks to live in, not like dorm rooms. Well, I think we're going to wrap up now and want to thank Megan again for being here with us. Thank you. And thank you, CCTV for filming.