 The appointed hour at six o'clock having been reached, I call this meeting of the Amherst Zoning Board of Appeals to order. My name is Steve Judge and as ZBA chair, I want to welcome everyone to this meeting. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021 and extended by chapter 22 of the Acts of 2022, this meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access this meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to make sure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. Additionally, the meeting recordings will be viewed on the town of Amherst's YouTube channel and the ZBA webpage. In accordance with the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws chapter 40A and article 10, special permit granting authority of the Amherst Zoning By-law, this public meeting has been duly advertised and notice thereof has been posted and mailed to parties at interest. We will begin with a roll call of the ZBA members and panel for tonight's meeting. Steve Judge is present. Ms. Parks. Here. Mr. Maxfield. Here. Mr. Meadows. Here. Mr. Gilbert. Present. Also attending the public hearing tonight is Marine Pollock Planner and Dave Westkevitz, senior planning, senior building inspector. The zoning board of appeals is a quasi-judicial body that operates under the authority of chapter 40A of the general laws of the Commonwealth for the purpose of promoting health, safety, convenience and the general welfare of the inhabitants of the town of Amherst. One of the most important elements of the Amherst Zoning By-law is section 10.38. Specific findings from this section must be made for all of our decisions. All hearings and meetings are open to the public and are recorded by town staff. The procedure is as follows. The petitioner presents the application to the board during the hearing after which the board will ask questions for clarification or additional information. After the board has completed its questions the board will seek public input. The public speaks with the permission of the chair. If a member of the public wishes to speak they should so indicate by using the raised hand function on their screen. The chair with the assistance of the staff will call upon people wishing to speak. When you are recognized provide your name and address for the board for the record. All questions and comments must be addressed to the board. The board will normally hold public hearings where information about the project and input from the public is gathered followed by public meetings for each. The public meeting portion is when the board deliberates and is generally not an opportunity for public comment. If the board feels it has enough information and time it will decide upon the applications tonight. Each petition is heard by the board is distinct and evaluated on its own merits and the board is not ruled by precedent. Statutorily for a special permit the board has 90 days from the close of hearing to file a decision. For a variance the board has 100 days from the date of filing to file its decision. No decision is final until the written decision is signed by the sitting board members and is filed in the town clerk's office. Once the decision is filed with the town clerk there is a 20 day appeal period for an agreed party to contest the decision with the relevant judicial body in superior court. After the appeal period the permit must be recorded at the registry of deeds to take effect. Before we begin tonight's agenda when we begin tonight's agenda we have three items on the agenda. Public hearing ZBA FY 2023-02 Michael and Tracy Holden requesting a special permit to modify the previously approved special permit ZBA FY 20-07-43 to allow the construction of one family detached dwelling as a complimentary principal use to the existing two family detached dwelling duplex under sections 3.01, 3.320, 3.3211 and 10.38 of the zoning bylaw located at 1147 North Pleasant Street, Map 5C Parcel 35 Village Center of Residence RVC zoning district. ZBA FY 2023-03 Fort River Solar II, LLC request a special permit to modify the previously approved special permit ZBA FY 2019-09 for the proposed modification to condition 23 and to request a permit extension in order to allow additional time to commence instruction beyond the September 12th, 2022 expiration under Massachusetts General Laws, 40A, section nine and section 10.33 of the zoning bylaw located at 191 West Pomeroy Road, West Pomeroy Lane, Map 19D Parcel 10 Flood Prone Conservancy District, FPC Neighborhood Residence RN and Outlying Residence RO zoning districts. Following those two items, the ZBA will consider in a public hearing ZBA rules and regulations to review the ZBA rules and regulations in order to bring them into compliance with the Amherst Home Rule Charter and to review other necessary updates including submission requirements, legal ad fees and ZBA procedures. After that business, we have a general public comment period during which any member of the public can speak to a matter not before the board tonight. Other business not anticipated within 48 hours. So before we begin, are there any disclosures on the matters we're going to discuss tonight from the impaneled board members? If not, the first order of business tonight is public hearing on ZBA FY 2023-02. Michael and Tracy Holden requesting a special permit to modify their previously approved special permit, ZBA FY 2007-43 to allow the construction of a one family detached dwelling as a complimentary principal use to the existing two families attached dwelling at Duplex under section 3.01, 3.320, 3.3211 and 10.38 of the zoning bylaw located at 1147 North Pleasant Street, map 5C, partial 35, Village Center residents are VC zoning district. The board conducted a site visit on this matter on Tuesday morning. We walked the site. We didn't go all the way to the back of the property because it was heavily forested and it would be difficult to get all the way back. We reviewed the property lines. We saw both existing units, the interior of both the existing units. We observed that current driveway, it's width, what was required under the old, the previously approved currently in effect of special permit. We looked at where the parking would take place and we observed for the drainage, rock garden will be located to care the drainage from the property. Mr. Gilbert or Ms. Pollock, is there anything else that we should state for the visit? I think that pretty much does it. We have the following submissions regarding this application. The applicant has submitted a special permit application, a management plan, a management plan with additional information required for any residential rental, a complaint response plan, a fixed term lease, site plan for special permit prepared by Daniel Solz dated January 26th, 2022, storm water plan prepared by Roger Bacon dated June 16th, 2022, A1 through 8, residents, site plans, floor plans, and a general view of the property, or items A1 through A8, also through also A9 and A10, a foundation plan and a street view prepared by the applicant. The existing of floor plan for the existing duplex, a picture for a sample of the horizontal wood fence, a light fixture spec called rectangles ADA outdoor wall scouts and the existing conditions photographs. We also have staff submissions which include a project application report, a ZBA FY2007-43, the current special permit decision that applies to the property, comments from the town engineer dated August 17th, GIS generated maps, a property map, a zoning map, an aerial map, a topography map and the map of land uses within 500 feet of 1147 North Plutton Street, which contains 25 single family homes and 12 two-family homes plus a hospice and 96 condos. We also have public comment from Derek and Natalie Shea at 31 Harris Street. I think that's all the submissions concerning this application. Okay, who is going to appear for the applicant tonight? Mr. Holden? I am. Yes, could you state your name and address for the record? Michael Holden and I reside at 1147 North Pleasant Street in Amherst. Okay, run, you can, this is your chance to run through the application and talk about what you're asking the board to approve. So my proposal is to construct a owner occupied single family home on the existing property on the rear portion. We purchased the property 15 years ago. There was an existing structure on it that was mixed use. I think it was zoned commercial or business at the time. There was a doctor's office operating out of it prior to our purchase. And there was the evidence of two used apartment, two apartments in the house, one in the rear and one upstairs, I believe the doctor used. When we purchased the house, we filed special permit application to legally divide it into two apartments to make it a duplex, non-owner occupied two family house, which we did 15 years ago and have rented out ever since then. My family moved to Amherst, well, we made the decision to move my family to Amherst back in September. So I can enroll my kids in the Amherst school system. I've got two kids that just started high school today and one that started fifth grade today. We've made the decision after moving into the house that we absolutely loved our change and moved to Amherst and wanted to remain in Amherst long-term. So we were looking for an opportunity to do so. And since we already own the property, the lot was, it's a fairly large lot for the area. Just I think it's 0.71 acres has enough area as far as the zoning requirements are concerned from Village Center residential to build another structure if it proves a special permit. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity for us to build our single family home on the existing property with the existing duplex to be able to maintain the non-owner-occupied duplex. It's currently owner-occupied because of the living in it, but I would go back to renting it out and then live on site in the single family dwelling in the rear portion of the property. So that's a gist of the proposed project. I guess as far as why I think- Can you just, tell us why you think it's appropriate and then just run briefly through what your plans for the house are? If you wanna share the, I think Maureen has the drawings if you wish to go through the drawings as well. Yeah, if I'm not being skilled at screen sharing and Zoom meetings, Maureen. Just give me one second. That is it. And while you do that, Maureen, I failed to mention that we did receive a letter from the planning board. Oh yeah, thank you. Which they reviewed this project. They have no opinion, no negative opinion on the project. They did suggest that one condition is that the new residents be owner-occupied, but that's the only suggestion coming from the planning board. I think they approved, they did not disapprove the project. I don't know what their process is, but it was a satisfactory result. Let me pull up their memo. I have that. Do you have that exact one? Yes, let's see here. So this is the memo from Christine Brestrup on behalf of the Amherst Planning Board. Says, Dear Mr. Judge, at its August 17th, 2022 meeting, the Amherst Planning Board heard a presentation from Michael Holden about his request for the special permit for the proposed construction of a single family house on a property that already contains a duplex at 1147 North Pleasant Street. The presentation was generally well received by the planning board. After hearing the presentation and discussing the project, the planning board recommended if the zoning board of appeals approve the special permit that there be a condition requiring owner occupancy of the property. Thank you. Yes, I wanna make it clear that this proposal is to build an owner-occupied dwelling unit that I'm not looking to add apartment units. The property was already approved for the non-owner-occupied duplex in the front. And this is an opportunity to build a owner-occupied home on the property. Getting into why I think it's actually, in my mind, it's the perfect project for this property. It's Village Center Residential. When the master plan, the new master plan was put in place, there was a goal to densify the Village Center Residential appropriately, obviously, but to increase density in that area. In the 15 years that I've owned that property, it has clearly, the neighborhood as a whole has clearly steered more towards non-owner-occupied rental units. Four houses directly to the south of me, two of which above my property, which were at the time I bought the property, owner-occupied, have since become non-owner-occupied rental units. And then the two properties further south on North Pleasant Street also became non-owner-occupied since I purchased the home. So there's clearly been an increase of non-owner-occupied homes in the area. And I understand concern from residents that are owner-occupied homes in the area, especially on Haristry. I did read the public comments that were submitted by Derek and Natalie Shea. So I wanna make it clear to them that this is to be an owner-occupied property. I think their concern centered around the idea that there was gonna be an expansion of rental property in the neighborhood. And I just wanna clarify that it's not. When talking to the zoning board, one of the things we talked about was the requirement for there being an owner-occupied dwelling unit on the property. One of the zoning board members, I'm sorry, planning board members, made reference to down the road, should my kids all be moved out of the house through college and moved on and we choose to downsize that we would have the option of moving into one of the two units in the front duplex, which seemed reasonable. We are certainly accepting of the requirement to have an owner-occupied dwelling unit on the property. So as far as the neighborhood goes, I feel like building an owner-occupied single family house on the rear portion of the property, which is the portion of the property that abuts the other owner-occupied single family homes, we'd actually be strengthening the property and protecting the abutting neighbors in a way in the rear because it would be occupied by a family, owners of the property. And obviously I would take a great vested interest in the property and maintaining it and protecting the abutting properties. Did you wanna walk them through your submitted materials? Yeah, sure. So what we're seeing here, I'm gonna let you scroll through morning. Okay, so what we're seeing here is the site plan. We had the property surveyed, the proposed home. Like I said, the property has more than enough area to build the proposed home that we submitted. There's a very minor expansion of the existing parking area, which you can see as proposed asphalt, which basically just gives, would give us two more parking places and a driveway access into the proposed garage. The garage would be street-facing. A couple of reasons for that being that it was gonna be our residents, I was looking for a little bit of a buffer between our home and North Pleasant Street, which is a high traffic area. So we put the garage obviously for ease of access, but also as a slight buffer to North Pleasant Street. The house is south-facing. So while the front, what would be considered the front side of the house with the porch faces the side yard. It is directly south-facing. Which that side of the house, as we go into the plan to see has more windows, more light area on the front side of the house. And we are also looking to do photovoltaic on the house. So we want to situate the roof lines appropriately. The next page is the stormwater management plan that was provided by Roger Bacon, engineer, which was sent to the town engineer and the notes came back on it, saying that the calculations were adequate to handle the new impervious surface runoff. So can you walk them through explaining what is the- What that is. So you see the existing proposed house. There's a basically a small swale that would pick up any water along the east and south side of the property as it grades down that way. And then go to a rock rain garden, which would fall directly alongside of the parking area. My intention would be to put a small berm along the east side with plannings for screening on the east side of the swale and then allow any water runoff to go to that rock garden there. All right, next one. So that's a proposed home, fairly simple. Call it a modern farmhouse style, colonial layout. Keeping it simple, clean aesthetics. I think it fits in well with the neighborhood and the property. The existing duplex is a Greek revival that was built in 1835. As far as finding architecture that would fit in with the neighborhood and the existing home, I felt like keeping it a fairly simple style. Wood mesh with the existing neighborhood across the street is a very large colonial. There's another couple of Greek revivals in the area, primarily white homes. Another bit of the story is that when we purchased the property, there was a barn. More closely tied to the house because actually it's slightly connected to the backside of the house, but it was dilapidated when we bought the property and we ended up getting an emergency demolition permit to take it down. But I always had in mind that there would be some sort of a structure, barn-like structure in the back of that property. And I felt like putting in a garage facing the street, which is the primary street view, would be looking up the driveway through the parking area at the garage. Would kind of give it the feel that the garage actually may belong to the front house. And the house itself, which sits mostly behind the garage, is a little bit more discreet from the street view. There's another aerial view showing the parking, proposed parking area, the layout of the house with a stone patio in the back, also showing proposed screening. And that included the six-foot privacy fence that I would like to install on the north side since that's gonna be our primary outdoor area with our patio. And I will add that the property that abuts that area is property that belongs to the Fisher Home, Hospice Home, and that entire section to the north of the house area is wooded and actually gives a pretty good buffer between our property and the Fisher Home. And this is the layout, first floor layout, basically set up for first floor living with a master suite, open concept in the main living area with additional bedrooms on the second floor and bathrooms. But the idea was that it had first floor living. So if I'm still living there in 20, 25 years then I'd have the ability to live on the first floor. Second floor plan, it's designed as a four bedroom home with three and a half bathrooms. As I said, I've got a family of five with three kids all in school right now. I've got one that will be graduating in a couple of years but I expect she'll be around quite a bit for a while. And I've got two younger children, one who, like I said, just entered fifth grade so he'll be around for a while. So we want to give our kids adequate space. Front view of the home from the south elevation, north elevation, the east elevation, should be the backside of the property and the west elevation from the street view. The basement plan. And there's more accurate street view. That's the existing layout when I submitted special permit application for the existing home. That was what I provided as floor layout. So can you distinguish between unit one and two? Yeah, so there's a clear, basically to the right side of the porch there's a line that goes through that separates with a full firewall from roof deck all the way down to slab between the two units. The front unit is a two-story. I think you'll see on the next page, the second floor. The back unit is a single-story two-bedroom. So there's four bedrooms in the front unit. Four bedrooms in the front. We're currently using what is listed there as bedroom one because we're a family and we wanted a bigger living area. We chose to use what's labeled as the living room as a dining room and what's listed as bedroom one as our living room which is also shared by my 10-year-old son much to his chagrin as a bedroom. Proposed stock photo of what type of fencing I'd be looking for for privacy fencing on the backside of my patio area of the house. Downcast lighting. Just dark sky compliant. And that's the existing, that's the east elevation of the existing home. Street view of the existing home and that would be the south elevation of the existing home. Another street view. That's it. Yep. Okay, great. Anything else, Mr. Holden, before we go to questions from the board? No, I mean, I'm certainly looking forward to hearing what questions you have but I just want to reiterate that, for us, this is a long-term investment in the neighborhood by investment, I mean for our family. When we made the decision to move to Amherst, we wanted to improve opportunities for our children and since living in the house since September, my kids have fallen in love with the town, they've fallen in love with the neighborhood. We have a bus stop directly in front of our house. My 10-year-old can ride his bike over to the Mill River playground area where they just put in new basketball courts. My daughter, my oldest daughter, who's just started her junior year at Amherst Regional came in last year as a varsity pitcher. She's an athlete and we go over to the Mill River and use their batting cages over there so she can practice hitting and pitching. We've just completely fallen in love with it. My oldest daughter actually got a job at Amherst House of Pizza because she could walk to work from there as well. So it's kind of an ideal setting for our family at this point. And I did speak to a neighbor across the street who I'm quite friendly with on the parkers and she had mentioned how nice it was to see a family back in the house and getting picked up by the school bus in the morning and dropped off in the afternoon. And that's what we've really liked about it is feeling safe in a neighborhood. I know there's a large population of college students there and some residents take issue with the number of college students, but we actually find it, I don't know, a little more vitalizing. I think just being in a vibrant neighborhood where there's stuff going on, we moved from the woods. We were living in the woods up in Barnetston on a larger amount of acreage. And I always thought when we moved up there, when I built my house there 16 years ago, that it was kind of an ideal setting to raise kids and then realized that I had the luxury as a child of living in a neighborhood. And I guess I took that for granted because when we moved up to the woods, my kids complained about not being close to friends and being able to go down the street to their friend's house. And so one of the things that we've really liked is that our kids have friends in the immediate area that they can walk to and ride their bikes to. So again, we're looking at this as a long-term thing. We love Amherst. I've actually worked and I know Dave Buskevitz who I see on this call quite well. I've done a lot of work in the Amherst area. So to speak to the quality of the house that I'll be building a little bit. Dave's familiar with a lot of my projects. More recently, I did the home at 16 Eames Ave which butts East Pleasant Street. I was a major renovation, addition, new garage. The focus of my work over the last at least 10 years in the Amherst area has been deep energy retrofits, net zero homes primarily. I did one on Beston Street a few years back, 20 Beston. I did the, one of my big kickoff projects in Amherst was 82 Cottage Street. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it by address but it belongs to Sarah and Gareth Ross and that was essentially a full tear down that we rebuilt and it's a net zero home, modern style three floor house. And that was working with Coleman Hartman Architects and I basically did a project with them every year for several years, a major project in the area. So I could easily show you six or seven homes that I've done just in that immediate area neighborhood closer to town. And this is gonna be a quality home going in. It's gonna be double stud walls, dense packed cellulose, super insulated triple glazed windows, all electric. I also raised the point that I'm looking to build a clean air home for my family. I've got two kids with asthma and so I'm looking to do an all electric clean air home. So it's gonna be super insulated, super tight and I think we'll bring a lot of value to the neighborhood. Mr. Holden, you're in the business and so you know there's gonna be, you need to have much more detail when you get to building plans. But right now what's, when I look at this, my first question is what's the siding gonna be and what's it gonna look like? Because there's no indication, it's a white, just a white. Yeah. I'm just doing, so I can't just right now. First to speak to some of the lack of detail is there's still a lot of time invested in that plan. Yeah. Even though it's somewhat simple, but until I knew that we could move forward to do with this, I, you know, at this point, I've already, I had already sent it out for structural to have all the structural calculations done on it as I get into providing finished details on it to submit for permit. Our plan is to primarily side the house in Boral and I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's a fly ash and resin manufactured product that recycles fly ash. And it basically lasts forever. It holds paint, cuts and looks like wood. And so it will look like a wood sided house, but will be made with a product that uses recycled material and will also last forever and not have to be resided and easy maintenance. And we're planning on doing what they call a nickel gap similar to, I don't know if you've seen the house at 16 Eames Ave, which is the house. If you're looking, if you know where Eames Ave cuts in, it's a private dirt road that cuts in off of East Pleasant Street. And it fade, the house faces East Pleasant Street on the left-hand side of Eames Ave. It's, they ended up painting it a dark, I think it's called iron ore, dark gray, but the boarding itself on the front part of the house that are the part closer to Eames Ave is a nickel gap Boral product. So it basically looks like barnboard cleaner looking, much cleaner looking cleaner lines and nickel gap because the space between it creates a space of a look of barnboard where it has the nickel space between the boards, but looks much more cleaner and more modern than rustic barnboard. And how about the roof? Is it a metal roof or is it? So it's actually, we were planning on doing a mix. I don't like putting a photovoltaic on asphalt roofs. I always like to have a metal roof put on if I'm gonna do photovoltaic. So the main garage roof and the main house roof will be metal. And then the lower roof lines will most likely be asphalt just to mix it a little bit. Okay, speak to me, just speak to the area, to the, I guess it'd be the east of the house where you said it's a grassed swale and then it goes to the property lines. Just talk about that. We didn't get to walk that area. It's very densely forested Yeah, there's a lot of low growth. So there's actually only a few trees. Are you gonna clear cut that or are you gonna leave it to some trees on the border? Talk about that. So what's gonna require is clear cutting because with that said, the actual trees are pretty much center in that area. There's a couple of very large butternuts. The largest tree in that whole piece of property is actually very unhealthy and needs to be taken down before it falls. It's already split at the base. It's a double trunk tree that's already split. And from my experience being at that property in the past we've had butternuts come down back there on our property and the property to the south of us. And those are very large trees and can do damage when they come down. So there's one, the largest tree on that portion needs to come down anyway. There's a somewhat smaller butternut a little bit further to the east. And then there's a couple of other smaller trees. But basically... Mr. Holden, I understand that they have to come down on the footprint of the property. I'm really just interested in the back, beyond the property, the back. Yeah, so I guess that's what I'm getting at. Any of the larger trees are more in the center and then anything towards the back. If there's anything of value, again, it's kind of hard to see clearly where the trees are located in relationship to the property line. I will say that we own the majority of the property to the point that it is wooded or grown in. The people, I believe in the abutting property have for the most part cleared to the property line. But again, it's a little hard to see back there. If there's any trees of value that we don't feel will put out the new structure at risk with the construction of falling, then we would certainly want to leave them. I just obviously can't leave anything that within so many feet of digging a foundation hole where there might be damage to roots and then eventually they would have to be taken out, which would be much more difficult to do after a house was in place. What I'm guessing is that most of, with the proposed arbor varieties, you believe that you're going to need a screen for the neighbors onto the east. Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah, that's what you're looking at. If I can actually find out if I can test out my ability to screen share. I took some pictures of when I was able in early spring before it was too grown in to be able to walk in the property. I took some pictures basically from the property lines to show what the view was from those areas and where the concern would be about the possible need for screening. And those two places primarily were that east property line because once that's cleared out, it does open up to the abutting neighbors property substantially. I think both for us and for them, it would be good to have added screening across that whole section. So it would give them a replacement of screening that they've had with the grown in area. It would just be new plannings. And then it would also give us privacy in our home. Okay. I have other questions, but I'd like to open it up to other members of the board. They have questions. Okay. Ms. Parks. So currently you're living in one, in the four bedroom portion of the house. Are you renting the other portion? Are there two people renting the second part of the house? There are. Okay. And so when you build the house, are you intending to have six people in the front house? There would be the possibility of four tenants in the front house, the four bedroom apartment and two tenants in the rear apartment, which is what the original special permit was approved for what we've had for the majority of the time that we've owned the house. There may have been a couple of times when there were only three tenants in the front. We actually in the first, I think five years that we owned the home, we had a woman living in the back apartment that had two children that shared a bedroom when they were very young. And then she was fortunately able to buy a home in Amherst and has continued to live in Amherst with their kids who went through the Amherst school system. So we've had a mix of tenants over the years, but I would like to leave the option open to have four tenants in the front house and two in the back, the back apartment. All right, I wasn't able to go on the site visit. Is there a parking for six vehicles for the front house? Yeah, the currently is, it's almost never used. We, with my family living in the front, we only have two vehicles between us. And then with the two tenants in the rear apartment, only one of them has a car. So there's only actually ever only three cars there. I've never in the 15 years we've owned the home had a problem with having adequate parking. One of the things the students who've lived there have loved is there's literally a bus stop directly across the street from the house. So it's always been attractive to students who don't have homes when we've had students living in the house. But currently there's five cars. I'm sorry, don't have cars. But currently there's five parking spaces permitted on the property right now. There's six. The linearity of the property. Yeah, I'm sorry, there was six permitted based on the original special permit. The, we didn't do anything with repaving the driveway or parking area when we purchased the house and did the separation into two units. So I think technically we were permitted to have six, but it really because of the layout, even though there's the depth to have six cars, the layout and the shape of the parking areas as it is now is more adequate to five. But with the minor expansion of the proposed parking area, it would then make it five, six, seven parking places total. Plus what's in the garage. Plus two, yeah, two bay garage, correct. So we're talking a total of nine parking spaces for the property. Correct. Okay. Other questions? I have one. You've had this property rented for a while. There's no rental permit on this property. Can you explain why that is? Nothing with the town of Amherst. And one of the conditions that we have is that you need to have the rental property registered with the town of Amherst. So can you speak to that for us? Yeah, I mean, all I can do is I guess apologize that was an oversight. I guess it had been some time. Honestly, I don't know what the, I know that I can go online and do it. I think if there was some way, I don't know. I don't recall ever getting a reminder from the town of Amherst or something in an email or a letter to do it. If we did, I think I remember several years ago getting a notice. Honestly, I just think it was an oversight on our part. And for that, I apologize. We certainly don't have an issue doing it. I think it was just one of those things that fell off the radar because I didn't have a reminder in front of me. All right. So as a condition, we generally in this case we certainly would require rental registration for the rental property. Yeah. Then on the one area that I thought there might be insufficient screening was at the parking where you, those trees are, I'm not sure that they provide the kind of screening that may be the best for those neighbors. I don't know if they haven't spoken up, but it's, is there a possibility of putting some lower shrubs that would grow up to the three, four feet to screen for the parking area on that, on the north side of the property where you see the existing trees. I can see where the fence does a good job of screening you, but the existing pine trees aren't particularly thick down at the height of the car headlights. Yeah. Would you be interested in and open to putting some kind of shrubbery there to or something there to reduce the light trespass onto that property from car lights? So yeah, yes, absolutely open to that. Not being a tree expert or I don't know what would best suit growing under a large pine tree. Certainly open to recommendations for what type of plantings would thrive underneath large pine trees that drop a lot of pine needles and pine cones and sap and provide quite a shade over that area. Shade. Yeah. Well, the other possibility is a screen of some sort too. Yeah, that's fine. I will say, if I might, that there has never been an issue with car headlights with the abutting property. The people that live in that home, so it's a two family, there's an apartment in the back. When cars pull into that parking area, they're not actually shining directly at that home. They have, I'd say half of that space in the back is yard and then it kind of turns into a grown wooded area. There's never been any issues with it. I will say their parking area with those existing maple trees probably causes more light cast on our parking directly into bedroom windows on that side of the house than our parking area ever would. That's not saying I'm not open to screening it off, but I can just say from the time that I've owned the house, that's never been an issue. Okay. Thank you. Those are the questions I have. How about questions from other members of the board regarding this application? Oh, I quit question. Where do you, I did have other questions I noted here. Currently, so you're planning to have the trash and recycling for the new hop, the new structure in the garage. What about trash and recycling? Where is it currently housed or? So it's currently housed on the back edge of the parking area in front of those pine trees. It actually moved a couple of times over the years because when we originally separated into a duplex and hired, I believe at the time it was Amherst trucking when they were in existence that was doing the trash removal. The contract I had with them was that they would actually drive into the driveway. And then at some point they stopped while we weren't living in the home stopped driving into the driveway to pick up trash and required it to be brought out to a street side. And at some point, I believe tenants moved it forward. I've since returned it to the back parking area. I understand there may be a need for screening for those trash cans, but it isn't a rear portion of the property. I'm not sure we need screening for it, but I think there should be provision and they're saying that it'll be kept back from the street. So it's not, trash cans aren't left out on the streetscape out in front. So your management plan could be amended just to say that the trash cans for the existing building are kept behind the front house. Okay, perfect. Okay, that would satisfy my concern. Okay. And lastly, where are you gonna pile snow in the winter? So prior to the home being built, the way it's being plowed now is as snow was being pushed for the most part to that rear east side of the parking area, which then would put it in my driveway and on the walkway. Now, depending on if I'm being asked to put in additional shrubbery or screening along those pine trees, I would think that pushing snow off to the north and northeast side of that parking area behind the corner of the garage would make the most sense, given that's where the space is. But that might be affected by if I would need to put in any kind of fencing or plannings there. Yeah. And where does that, when it melts, does that go back to, will that get picked up by the drainage system or is that gonna go? Well, for the most of that is already existing impermeable surface. So it melts off to the side. There is some runoff down the driveway because it does slope down towards the road. There is a storm drain directly in front of our house in the tree belt. So there is obviously some water runoff towards the front of the house, but if we were to push snow actually to the northeast corner of the parking area, it would probably do a better job of just going back into the land there because that's a very heavily grown-in area just above that. And I don't see any through with water getting into the ground there. Right. And it's, the property is higher in the back and lower in the front and it would probably run onto the, if it runs on the asphalt, it's gonna go into your rain garden. So, rock rain garden. All right. The last question is much like this, similar to what Ms. Parks talked about. Are you comfortable having a limit of four tenants in front and two unrelated tenants in the back unit? Oh, absolutely. In the front part of the house, the way the flush problem is written out. Yep. Yes, absolutely. Okay. So that would seem to be a condition that we can apply. And then lastly, we need to get some thought from you about the limitations on guest stay and the number of guests on the property, the rental property. Yeah, so I did, sorry. Yep. Go ahead, tell us what numbers you're comfortable with. We tend to wanna have a limit on the total number of people for an event on the property just because of neighbor's concerns. So if you can speak to that and speak to guests, overnight guests. So I believe, and I just kind of piled up the papers here, but I believe my lease is worded that there is no more, and this is the lease per unit, no more than eight people allowed on the property at any given time. That was sort of a general condition that was written in for any apartment. And then I read the, in one of the documents that was posted online where that meant that there was a total of 16 people allowed on the property for the front house, assuming that both apartments had eight people at any given time, which sounds excessive. I can tell you that has never happened and I don't see that ever happening, that there would ever be an incident where the tenants in the front had eight people over, or had eight people on site and the rear apartment had eight people. I don't know how to write that into the lease to make that number any smaller. I mean, when you have an apartment with four people living in it potentially, the idea was that if they each had a friend over, you've got eight people on site. And I think that's very reasonable. With the back apartment, to restrict them to one additional person per tenant seems unreasonable to say that they can never have more than four people on site at any given time. So if the board was comfortable with it, I would prefer to keep it the way it's written as far as eight people per apartment on site at any given time. Given the fact that I am gonna be living on site and I gonna hold them to very high standards as far as what activity occurs on the property. You know, in our occupant, yep. And then how are you comfortable with the seven days? How long for guests to be overnight? Yeah, so that was written in there really to avoid somebody having somebody sort of like move in short-term without my knowing. And so seven nights seem reasonable if they had a friend visiting from out of town that they could stay over for up to a week. If they had a friend visiting from out of town that might be in town for two weeks. And I just would be requiring them to ask me if that was okay. So at least I was aware they were on site. All right. We tend to go ahead. Morning. So how many people though? So you said the seven consecutive days. So the maximum number of overnight visitors per unit shall be how many people with the maximum number? I mean, I guess honestly I've never thought about adding that into the wording of the lease. If you have a recommendation or anybody on the board has a recommendation certainly open to it. In the past, we typically want to defer to them to what the land owner is comfortable with unless it's outrageous. But it seems to me to be that if you had a limitation for overnight guests of seven days the limit to the number of people doubling the number of people in the unit makes sense. So one per tenant. So I'm sure we could find a way to write that into the lease or we could certainly put that in the conditions but there'd be four, no more than four overnight guests in the front and no more than two overnight guests in the back and for a limited total of seven days. And if you're comfortable with that we'll put it in the conditions and then you'll have to reflect that in the lease. Yeah, that's, I'm very comfortable with that. All right, seven days, one per tenant. Okay. All right. Ms. Parks. So I'm looking at the letter from Jason Scales that says there's no plan showing the water or sewer utility connections. And I'm wondering at this point, do we need to see this? Is this something that needs to be a part of whatever we could approve or not? You know, Ms. Parks, I think that in the case of this if we impose a requirement that says that before a building permit would be issued this has to be provided to the town, to the building department and they have to approve it as well as the public works departments has to approve the connection. As long as we make that a condition I think that we probably don't need to see it ourselves but I'm confident that they will require city water and sewer before the, before a construction permit would be given and approved. Okay. I would just concern that, you know that those conditions would be in there since this it also says that the property may not be built in two years, there's, I thought there was something about maybe an extension. Not for this one. He has two years to complete this, it's substantially completed typically. I think the extension is for our next one. Okay. I know there's an issue on the extension on the next one but I don't remember that there's a condition here. Typically the building has to be done a substantially completed within two years of the permit being approved. Okay. And is that your plan, Mr. Holden? Yeah, I certainly that requires hiring an engineer to do and so obviously not knowing if this was something that was gonna move forward. I was obviously trying to keep out-of-pocket expenses somewhat restricted before going through this process and certainly that would be the once approved if approved that would be one of the first things I would do would be to get an engineer on board to do the drawing for the water and sewer tie-in. Okay. Okay. Mr. Judge. Yeah. I just wanted to clarify. So the permit is valid. If approved, the applicant would need to start commencement of the construction within two years of it being filed with the town clerk. So, I just wanted to, yeah, to start construction. All right. Not complete, but to start construction. Okay, thank you, Maureen. I have no other questions at this time. Any other board member, if not, we'll open it up to the public if they have any public comment. If member of the public wishes to comment, please raise your hand. I think we have one. When recognized, please give your name and address for the record and then let us and then give your comment and try to keep it to around three or four minutes. Looks like we have somebody there. Hi. My name is Jessica, Mix Barrington. I live at 39 Pine Street. This is the second time in 15 years that I've commented on Mr. Holden's plans for 1147 North Pleasant. Too bad that 15 years ago, he didn't retain the single family house zoning that was on the house already that he could easily build his accessory dwelling with no problem. However, I have two concerns. I don't know that the picture that was shown of the house plans is in any way reflective of reality, but I would like to point out that the homes on North Pleasant Street and around the corner onto Pine and down a bit are in the National Historic District. The homes on North Pleasant Street are all colonial or Greek revival, as Mr. Holden said, and they are all clabbered and they have windows that have panes and divided into panes. I would like to see the exterior style of this house reflect the architectural qualities of the other houses immediately around the proposed dwelling. I would also like to say that, and I don't know if this is possible. If it's not possible, then I'm against this variance, but if it is possible, I would like the property to be forever designated owner occupied, that there always has to be an owner on that property in order to make it a legal holding. There's, because we're going backwards here, going from a duplex to a single family home instead of following the zoning requirements of having a single family home that is owner occupied and then putting an accessory dwelling on it, on the property, if the person wants to, there's no owner occupied requirement that I can understand on this property. And I would like to see that made part of the variance so that from here until eternity, this is an owner occupied, required property. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Barrington. We have other comments from the public. Kathleen Carroll, I think you're muted. Ms. Carroll, you take your mute off, you're currently muted, and we can't hear you. All right, hold on. We hear you now. There you go, we got you now. Now we got you. Okay. Thanks for naming an address for the record, please. Kathleen Carroll, 11 Fisher Street. I have a couple of questions and one of them is, is the new building going to have its own property line and is it going to be a separate piece of property that can be split apart from the front building? Just thinking out of the box that perhaps down the road, the two buildings would be separated and sold separately. And are they going to be titled separately? Are they going to be taxed separately? How does that work? That is a couple of questions I have. The other question is, is the new building going to be titled in the LLC and what type of homeowners insurance is going to be on the property? Is it going to be owner occupied or is it going to be tenant occupied? And what kind of homeowners and policy is on the front building currently? And that building is currently titled in the LLC, is that correct? Okay, thank you. Do you have other comments, Ms. Carroll? We'll give the applicant a chance to respond to all the questions at one time. So they're not going to respond to you directly in this time. Okay, I am very concerned that the same as Jessica that this will remain a owner occupied building. I have been in this neighborhood and area and unless there's some type of requirement written into the permit, I don't feel confident that this will remain a owner occupied building, maybe for about five or six years, but then it'll get reverted to a student rental. Thank you, Ms. Carroll. Other comments from the public, if you have a comment, please raise your hand on use the raised hand function on Zoom. I don't think I see any more in do you. This is an opportunity for the applicant to respond to some of those questions. Please keep your response to the board, not to the public commenter. So all comments and responses should be directed to the board. I guess there's a couple of things that I would say before you do that. Number one, regarding the planning board looked at this property and had no problem with the design. And I think they tend to have more interest in the outside thing than you. They, did you go through with them the nature of the outside design of the property? And did they comment on that and question about that? It's a meeting, Mr. Holden. So they were very receptive to the design that I provided. Obviously there are some details missing type of sighting we were planning to use and so on, but my impression was that they felt that the design of the property fit very well into the neighborhood. It's, like I said, it's fairly simple and clean and there is a mix, although primarily Greek revival and colonial in the neighborhood. And one of the people from the public who commented that a lot of the houses are historical homes. She's correct in my knowledge in the sense that our house is actually in a Massachusetts registry. The front home is, I don't believe it's in the national, but regardless, the response I got from the zoning board was that the design architecture style and plan fit well into the neighborhood. And Mr. Wosewicz or Maureen, that typically is that the purview of the planning board and or is it the local historic district who looks at those issues for the town? We tend not to do a lot of that in the ZBA. Well, I mean, the planning board, so here's the distinct difference between the ZBA and the planning board. The ZBA reviews special permits primarily for uses that you need to decide whether or compatible to the neighborhood and fitting with the neighborhood and that's so on and so forth for each particular zoning district. The planning board mostly reviews site plan review applications which are for by-right uses. So they're not sort of indicating, they're not really discussing whether that particular use is compatible to that neighborhood in a particular zoning district. Their sort of focus is on the exterior layout and design. So it can certainly include architecture. And then of course we have the historical commission. There is no demolition being proposed here. So this did not go through the historical commission and this is not located in either of the two local historic districts in town. So they too did not get a chance to review or comment on this because this is not within their jurisdiction. Mr. Holden, do you have any other comments and responses to the public comment? Specifically regarding the architecture and style, I think having a more of an aesthetic background with my building and I think there are people who would agree that just because it's in the proximity to a Greek revival that was built in 1835 doesn't mean you should build another Greek revival next to it. I think just finding a simple architecture that will fit comfortably in the vicinity and not stand out like a sore thumb is sort of the point here. So that's specific to that. Is this my time to address other concerns that were expressed? Sure, yup. So I think I said early on and they might have missed it that we are certainly open to making it a requirement of a special permit that a dwelling unit on the property be owner occupied. I have no intention and I know I can say this today and then change my mind five years from now of making this an owner occupied home and then renting it out later on down the road. But I'm certainly comfortable with putting that in as a requirement for the special permit that to be an owner occupied dwelling unit on the property. One of the things like I mentioned earlier that the zoning board had suggested, sorry, the planning board had actually suggested was that it not be specific to the house but that it be specific to the property as a whole. In other words, if at some point down the road 20, 25 years from now, I decided to move into a portion of the front house that that is an option and that I'm not required to live in the rear house. I will say in addition to that that if they were to look back at the plan that I provided it is not conducive to student housing. If it was being built to be student housing it wouldn't have a master suite with first floor living an open floor plan on the first floor. It's just not conducive. It's really, it's built for a family of five and that's why I designed it the way I did for my family and would expect that even down the road 15, 20 years from now if we were to choose to downsize and move into the front portion of the property that it would be a family moving in. I believe with the colleges and universities in the area there's a demand for housing in faculty as well. People who are in the area short term whether it's one year or two years. So I don't have any concerns down the road of it being rentable to a family. And again, I'm certainly open to putting the requirement in that there'd be an owner occupied unit on the property at all times. Thank you, Mr. Holden. Ms. Pollock, your heavy hand raised. Yeah, I just wanted to point out that one of the list of possible conditions in your project application report, it's condition six as one of the dwelling units on the property shall remain owner occupied at all times. And so if the board goes, you know does approve this permit and that particular condition if in the event that Mr. Holden would like to request that that condition be changed or removed or modified in the future that would require a modification of this special permit meaning that a legal ad would be placed in the local newspaper and the butters that live within 300 feet of the property would be notified of regular mail, just like tonight. So butters that received a letter in the mail would receive that. And so that would again require a amended special permit requiring a public hearing process. And then another possible condition that's listed which is a requirement of the zoning bylaw, duplexes in located in the RVC the Village Center Residence Zoning District specifies that the permit shall expire upon change of ownership. So if Mr. Holden decides to, hey, it always needs to be owner occupied but if he and his family decide that they now wanna live somewhere else this permit actually will expire. And so any future owner would need to submit a new special permit for sort of continuing this use. Thank you. Or requesting a new use. All right, any other questions from board members? If not, I'd like to move to the part where we discuss Mr. Holden, you have something you wanna say? Yeah, sir, I just wanted to respond also there was some questions about how the title would be written and insurance is and will be considered one piece of property. The title for the property, the deed for the property will be as one property with basically I would assume as a multi-unit which has two separate structures on it. The insurance, so when it was non-owner occupied it had rental insurance on it. I should say non-owner occupied insurance which was basically fire and I think fire and water. When we moved into the house back in September we changed our policy to be a regular homeowner's policy. And frankly, Mr. Holden, I don't know that that's applicable. Yeah, I don't think it's relevant. I'm sure it has not applicable to our consideration. So I hope the property is adequately insured but it's not something that we have to worry about. Okay. All right, if there's no further questions from the board I'd like to move into the public meeting portion where we discuss the possible conditions ask any other questions that we may have and then decide whether to approve the special permit with conditions or not. So. It looks like there is a member of the public that wishes to speak. Would you like to take any other comments? Ms. Barrington, you've already spoken once. Please keep it to three minutes. Two things. North Amherst Village Center is in the National Historic Register. It is all of the houses on North Pleasant and down to Fisher Street. The houses on Pine Street, Two Harris, are in the National Historic District. So there is that. The other thing is I didn't understand Maureen's explanation about the owner occupancy requirement whether it extends to new owners or whether it does not. If she could just say that, I would appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so because the zoning bylaw says that this permit shall expire upon change of ownership that there would be a new special permit application for someone that would like to buy this property. And the future ZBA that would hear this new application would then consider making it owner occupied or not having that particular condition. But so under the hold in this special permit application in front of you, there is that condition that would say that under this use for this owner, they would have this owner occupied condition. Again, if they know basically one day say we're done with this permit and we're moving, then there'd be a new special permit application which is it's starting all over again. So I hope that clarifies. I still don't know. In short, we can't find future ZBAs. But for this owner at this time, the special permit would require owner occupancy. Thank you. I oppose this. I oppose your brand experience on those conditions. Thank you. Thank you. All right. The first question that I have, I'd like to move to the hearing portion, the public meeting portion. And the first question I have is really for staff. And I'd like the clarification of what complimentary use means as opposed to accessory use or everything else. I tried to look it up in the definition of what complimentary use is, which is really what we're proposing, what we're approving here. And I don't really know what that is. In plain language, I understand it. I understand what complimentary is, but is there a legal definition as to what complimentary use is for these two buildings? Can you help us out with that? Either Maureen or Dave? I don't know if there is a definition that I can put my finger on right away. The way I've heard it used, it would be a similar use, a residence for the residence, complimentary, something that would be in the residential realm is complimentary. So if there's not a specific definition that comes to our decision as a board as to what is complimentary to the current use and what is not, it really comes down to us determining what complimentary means in this case. And we can probably take the plain language usage, meaning of that word, if that's the case. Correct. And while you look that up, we can see if anybody has any questions or comments about this application in general before we go into conditions. So it's not indefinite. Not indefinite. Okay, so complimentary is something that we can use our discretion and I would encourage us to use the plain English meaning of the word complimentary then. So generally I'm in favor of this application. I think that it seems to make sense to me that it's with the existing, that we're adding a family into a neighborhood, owner-occupied property. We are not adding additional renters to the front. If we do this, it would be capped or in two as it currently is. The project seems there is enough room, it matches, it meets all the dimensional requirements that's required by the town. And it seems to me that in general, it doesn't pose, it doesn't disrupt or it's not to the demerit of the neighborhood to have an additional single family home on this large property. So that's where I'm coming from. If people have certain concerns that they'd like to address with conditions or something, they could raise those here. But I think we dealt with a lot of those possible concerns by the conditions that are proposed by staff and we can put additional ones on. Ms. Parks. I'll just make the comment that a family of four is different than four unrelated adults. And so I do think that it adds to the density of people and cars on that property with a family and six unrelated adults. Just want to make note of that. And it is good to rent two families as well. Okay, I'd like, if there's not other comments, I'd like to proceed to the conditions, run through the conditions. And as we have done before, what I'd like to do is go through these conditions and then we'll get to the, then we have to make our findings. So to the extent that you have a problem with any of these conditions, the time is to raise them is when I mentioned them. The first is the possible condition of approval, which is that it has to be built according to the documents that are presented and that's standard. And those are all specifically laid out. The second, the third condition is what we're, is what has been a new standard that we're applying to rental property, whether owner-occupied or not, about maintaining records regarding complaints filed with the property. We first did this a couple of applications ago and we tended, we're doing this, at least we have been doing this for other properties going forward. Fourth condition deals with submitting that log when the residential rental registration comes up each year. Number five has, is a function of the bylaw is in this zoning district, the permit expires upon change of ownership. Number six is one of the dwelling units on this property shall remain owner-occupied at all times. The question is whether we wanna require that this built with the new building be owner-occupied or just one, one dwelling unit be owner-occupied that's up to the board to decide numbers. And if you wanna discuss that, does anybody want the new home to be owner-required to be owner-occupied? Mr. Maxfield. I'm sorry, that's requiring specifically the new home to be owner-occupied or just a house on the property? Does anybody want that specific new structure to be owner-occupied? Right now the condition does not require that, but that was discussed in the public and was discussed here. So, and the applicant expressed their desire that it not be applied to the new property just to a unit on the property, any unit on the property. I'm in favor of a unit on the property, first one. All right. Yep. Thanks. Anybody else? I would second that as well. I don't, I don't see any justification for simply the new unit to be owner-occupied, especially with the justification given by Mr. Holden. I think a unit on the property is more than sufficient. And I also think with the design of the property, it's unneeded. It's not likely to be student rental with that kind of a layout, I think. Number seven, we've talked about the number of nights and the number of tenants. And so Maureen, when you do the conditions, they'd be seven days and a total of four, seven days for guests, overnight guests on the front and two overnight guests in the back unit. Okay. Number eight is a total number of people, the 16 is what the owner has said they're comfortable with. And unless we feel that's outrageous, I think we should defer to, we can defer to an owner-occupant to police that well. The property management and complaint plan has to be followed. The management plan shall be returned to the, any changes have to come back to us at a public meeting, the ZVA all exterior lighting shall be designed or installed, these shielded or downcast. I'd also like to add to this that if any new lights are put on the light fixtures are put on the old building that they have to be downcast. I don't know if you intend to do that or if you're just gonna do it anyway, but if you add any new light fixtures or change the light fixtures in any way on the old building, I want them to be downcast and we would like them to be downcast and dark scar compliant. So we'd have to modify that condition according to apply to any new light fixtures on the old building. You've got to register this number 12 requires it to be registered with the rental property by-law program. The street numbers shall be clearly marked with reflective signage invisible from the public right of way. Parking shall occur on improved services only. We did note that in the site visit, it shall be maintained as needed and the parking driver shall be constructed in accordance with Article 7.1. So that means they have to be there improved surfaces. You can expand it and the property shall be free of litter, the foreign issuance of any building permit. You've got to submit a site plan to the showing the water and sewer connections. The Department of Public Works and they have to be, I think that has to be approved to just be submitted, but I will leave the specific wording to the staff, but the intent here is that they have to be approved site plan for the water and sewer. Oh, that's the next trend. I got it, the next one does that. That's 17, 18, no more than four unrelated to individual. So I would say occupy the front unit, no more than two in the back in the second unit. The east and west side of the parking shall be delineated by large stones or a low stockade fence. The driveway shall have a minimum of 13 feet. We did not talk about this. That's kind of an odd requirement, but I've not noticed on other applications. Normally we look at 10 feet on both sides or 10 feet driveways. This one has, from the old permit, it has 13 feet plus a foot on each side of the driveway. Before we do away with that, because typically we do 10, why would that be the case? Is there any guidance from either the staff or from Mr. Holden as to why there would be a minimum of 13 foot wide driveways? Mr. Holden? I don't know exactly the reason for it. I would imagine, so I went back and I read the driveway requirements. It was my impression that it was 10 or 11 feet for a one-way driveway and 18 feet for a two-way driveway. So the 13 feet really didn't make a lot of sense to me. Unless it was taking into consideration the need to get a fire truck back there, I'm not sure. Oh, that's a good point. When we did the original division of the units, we didn't do anything with the driveway, so it was left as is. I think the narrowest part of it towards the front near the street measured 11 and a half feet when I actually measured it out. It's clear on both sides for several feet, so it's easy to maintain a driveway of 13 feet. I'm just really not sure what the reason for it is. We haven't done anything with the driveway. Once the project, assuming it's approved, was completed, we would be happy, because we were bringing construction vehicles in and utilities are gonna need to be run underground. My expectation is the entire driveway and parking area will get repaved, at which point we can meet any requirements needed for the wooden driveway. I'm just not sure what the specific reason is for 13 feet. You know, what makes sense to me, Maureen, is just to move it to 10 feet unless the fire department has a need. If they could review it and they find that 10 feet is insufficient, or for some public safety reason to get to that rear house, there's some need for a wider driveway to get to the rear house. Unless they show a need for that, I think a 10 foot wide driveway is probably adequate. Just to chime in here real quick, I believe that, I'm trying to think back to a project I worked on years ago, where I had to provide a fire access road. I think the minimum was 12 feet. So, you know, Mr. Holden's comment is probably accurate. I don't know why that would have gotten lumped in. You know, to this at some point in history. Although it could just be the depth of the building and or the lot itself. So my presumption, I mean, I think what you're suggesting is a great idea in that you receive confirmation, of course, from fire. My presumption is that with the construction of a rear unit, you will actually need the wider driveway. So, you know, with that being said, we have about 11 and a half. It sounds like Mr. Holden, you know, measure that to, you know, we might have to just bump that out, which from our site visit didn't seem like much problem. We just, you know, taking out a little bit of the grass on the side to my expectation, be 12 minimum. But those are my thoughts on it. So, Mr. Gilbert, are you willing to leave that up to the fire and police departments, public safety, or do you think we should just, are you advocating for just 12 feet and leave it at that? I would advocate for 12 feet and get the feedback of fire because my expectations that fire will request 12 minimum. From what we saw on the site visit, it appeared as though, you know, truck had to get back there. There might be adequate, you know, turning distance, but, you know, my concern would be the width. And because I know that that can be accomplished, I would recommend 12 feet plus feedback from fire, which should just be correct. So let's write. So then I, unless there's any objection to this, I think of condition that states 12 feet wide driveway, unless a public safety player and police believe that something wider is needed. No, in my part, we try to accommodate what's required. Great. All right. So then lastly, you're gonna amend the management plan to have the trash contained in the back of the front unit for the front unit, two units. Trash will be in the back of the unit hidden from public view. Yes. Okay. All right. We've done dark sky compliance. Any other conditions that people are interested in imposing on this application or think are necessary on this application? All right. Or any other discussion? We should go to findings we have to make based upon those, assuming that those conditions would be applicable to this application. Let me have applicable to this application. We have to make certain findings. The first finding is that this is a complimentary to the principal use of the current property. And as we discussed, there doesn't seem to be a legal definition of the word complimentary. So using the plain English definition of complimentary, it seems that adding a single family owner occupied dwelling unit to the property that contains two rental units currently is a complimentary use. So the first finding I think that we have to make seems to me to be one that we can make unless there's objection. Secondly, we, so that's for section 3.01. We can make the finding required under section three under section seven parking access regulations. It seems to me that we've viewed that this proposal meets the requirements of section seven. And if we have the fire and safety fire and police assessment of the width of the driveway we meet the parking requirements and the driveway requirements for section seven. Slope all the different areas of section seven I think are met. Yeah, so I think section seven parking we have made the finding that it meets those requirements. We've meets the dimensional requirements under article six except for those which are pre-existing such as the building area, the lot frontage which are pre-existing and non-conforming and can't be changed. Everything else in terms of lot coverage, building coverage, et cetera, meets the requirements of the dimensional requirements. Now to 10.38, 10.38 zero and 10.38 one is the proposal is suitably located in a neighborhood in which it is proposed. I believe the construction of a single family home is complimentary principle use and is suitably located in this neighborhood. There's a mix of housing in the area including condominiums, single family homes, duplexes and a three unit building. 10.382, 383, 385 and 387 all deal with being a nuisance to air, water, flood, noise, odor, vibration, et cetera or being a substantial inconvenience to your butters or pedestrians, does it reasonably protect adjoining properties to provide convenient and safe vehicular movement within the site? I think the proposal provides those things and we can find that it does not constitute a nuisance. It does not constitute a substantial inconvenience or it does protect neighbors and it's convenient and safe for vehicular traffic. 10.384. Mr. Judge. Yes. Mr. Dave Buskevitz has raised his hand. Yes, Dave, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, all right. This is going back a little bit from the conversation about driveways under the section for common individual driveways under 7.71, it says an individual driveway shall be constructed in accordance with same standards but not be less than 12 feet in width that do not provide clear shoulders. So that may be at some point in time why it was built the way it was and but it is looking for a 12 foot wide at least for an individual driveway. Thank you. And that fits with the condition that we've talked about having a 12 foot wide and less, right, 12 foot wide on the driveway unless the fire safety requires more. Okay. Yep. Thank you, Mr. Wosiewicz. 10.384 adequate facilities would be provided for the operation. I think that utility services will be provided and that is also contained in the later 10.38 article. The proposal meets 10.386, the proposal meets the parking requirements and the utility services in terms of 10.384, they're gonna have to submit utility and have them approved by the town before building permit would be issued. Off street loading is not applicable. 10.390, 10.389 again is the condition coming from the public works. And I think we'd meet the requirements of 10.389 regarding disposal and storage of sewage, refuse recyclables and having their trash in the garage for the new building and the trash behind the old building away from the street. 10.390 deals with the protection from floods and water runoff. The town engineer has reviewed the drainage plan and has been satisfied with it. So that meets 10.390, 10.391 protects, the proposal protects to the extent physical, unique or historic, scenic features, the architectural style of the proposed house keeps with the architectural style existing to family home on the property. I think that in our view that that is the case. 10.392 deals with adequate landscaping. The one thing there we did not have a specific condition on is that additional screening between the property of the parking area and the neighboring property. But I'm going to assume that you've, you have heard the board's desire here that you look at what's reasonable to make sure that you're not having light trespass on the neighboring property by the parking lot. As opposed to saying that you have to put shrubs or a fence in, we'll leave it up to you as soon that you will do that. And you'll analyze that and do that, okay? Mr. Holden. Sorry, I had to find my mouse. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, good. And we also are requiring darkside compliance including any replacement of any existing structures like fixtures, there's no wetlands resources. So 10.394 does not really apply. 10.395 does create this harmony with respect to the train and use and scale of architecture and buildings in the vicinity. No, it doesn't. It seems to be within scale and use of other homes in the area. 10.396 screening for storage area loading docks. We've seen that on the condition. So I think we meet 10.396, 10.397, adequate recreational facilities, there's sufficient open space, meets the open space requirements of the dimensional requirements. 10.398 is in harmony with the general purpose of this bylaw and the goals of the master plan. The proposal is in harmony with the master plan, section four, objective H three, which encourages opportunities for proper infill development. The board needs to determine whether the proposal meets these applicable zoning bylaw sections, including 3.0, 3.320, 3.3211 and 10.38. So I think we feel that it does all those things up to 10.398. And I think it does meet the general purpose and intent of the bylaws, which is 10.398. So unless there are any other comments regarding this application, I would entertain a motion that we approve the special permit application with the conditions. So stated and based upon the findings we have made pursuant to those conditions. Do I have a motion to do so? Mr. Maxfield. So moved. Do I have a second, Mr. Meadows? Second. Any discussion on the motion? If there's no further discussion, the vote occurs on the motion to approve the special permit application with conditions based upon the findings that we have made. This is a roll call vote. The chair votes aye. Ms. Parks. Aye. Mr. Maxfield. Aye. Mr. Meadows. Aye. Mr. Gilbert. Aye. Motion carries. The motion is unanimous. Motion is approved. Special permit is approved. Mr. Holgen, congratulations. Make sure that you take a look at that property the fencing and the screening for the additional parking. We did not put that in the conditions but I'm assuming that you'll do that. And good luck with the project. Thank you very much. Thank you. So fellow members, we're getting on towards eight o'clock. I want to take a like a three minute break if I can. Is that all right with everybody else? Because I'll be a much happier chair and I think you'll be much happier as well. So let's come back in less than five. All right, everybody. Everybody back. You got myself, Mr. Maxfield, Mr. Gilbert, Ms. Parks. Good, and Mr. Meadows. All right, second order of business we have tonight is ZBA FY 2023-03, Fort River Solar II, LLC. Requesting a special permit to modify the previously approved special permit ZBA FY 2019-09 for the proposed modification to condition 23 and to request a permit extension in order to allow additional time to commence construction beyond the September 12th, 2020 expiration. Under Massachusetts General Law 40A section nine and section 10.33 of the zoning bylaw. At 191 West Pomeroy Lane, map 19D parcel 10, flood prone conservancy, FPC, neighborhood residents, RN and outlying residents, RO zoning districts. We had a site visit on Tuesday morning where we walked. We entered over by the old golf shop. We walked, met with the representative of the applicant. Walked along the property from, the applicant walked along the property from golf shop and north to the river, observing the various plants that have grown up and the vegetation that have grown up since the golf course is not in use since the town has taken over the property in the intervening two or three years. We then had a discussion about the types of application of the type and application of herbicides that would be used, where they would be used. I would clarify that they'd be used within the colored areas of this map, not just along the purple areas of this map, but they'd be used where invasive plants do occur. We walked along, then we walked over to the bridge section of this property where we looked at a bridge that has to be at least repaired if not replaced at some point to allow access back into the solar fields. We also observed where the solar fields are going to be and they're not going to be along this area of where the herbicide is going to be applied. And this is mostly for the elimination of invasive plants and the protection of the wood turtle, which lives in the Fort River. That's pretty much the nature of the site visit. It took a long time because we tromped over much of the area, but in general, it was all a discussion, basically a discussion of the type of herbicide and the method of application of that herbicide and what is required by both the Conservation Commission as well as state law. Mr. Gilbert, did you have anything you wish to add to that site visit summary? Good. No, I think that's a good question. I just want to go through the conditions, I mean, the submissions that we've received. For this, we've received a special permit application. The applicant has submitted a special permit application, an amendment to a special permit, exhibit A, B, C, D, E and F, all of which deal with special permit extension requests, conservation management permit, memo to the Conservation Commission, compliance conditions related to the special permit and the estimated construction schedule. But also, we have a submission regarding bridge number nine, which is that bridge that we talked about, a load rating prepared by Northeast engineers and consultants dated August 1st, 2020. So it comes from the applicants. Our town submissions include, or the staff submissions include the project application report dated August 19th, special permit decision, ZBA FY20 from 2019, as well as a public meeting summary from FY2021. Also comments from the wetlands administrator dated July 14th, 2020 and dated July 16th, 2020. I don't think there are any other additional, Maureen, you had some email conversation with, but none of that needs to be submitted. Did email conversations regarding the two or five years of the requirement to maintain the property after construction is substantially complete? Does that need to be included in the public record? We can certainly include it. Yes, I corresponded with AMP Energy clarifying and confirming that the permit holder would be responsible for providing the invasive species management, including hand pulling, cutting and the use of herbicides and routine maintenance during the first five years once the plan is implemented. And then in that five years starts at the end of the construction of the solar project. And then at the sixth on them, and then beginning in the sixth year, the following completion of the initial habitat management actions. And thereafter, the property owner, the town of Amherst will be responsible for maintaining the habitat management area, including the invasive species management and routine maintenance. And that's important because during the site visit we thought it was two years and it's been corrected to five years. So that's important and needs to be corrected for the record. So with that being said, I'd like to turn it over to the applicant. I think who is going to represent the applicant and make the presentation? Please identify yourself for the record. Thank you to the board. My name is Lawrence Cook. I work for the applicant for River Solar. I am English. I do have a tendency to talk rather quickly. It is difficult for me remotely to gauge people's expressions. So if I talk too quickly or I pronounce something and or maybe you don't understand, please feel free to interrupt me and I'll do my best to make myself understood. So. Mr Cook, I would say that your volume is low. So for some of us old ears and especially for us mid-westerners who have a little, who always turn up the volume when I listen to an English detective movie on TV or to show. So anything from BBC. Sorry, is that any better? Turn up the volume and speak a little slower for these mid-westerners if you would. I'm having some technical difficulties now. I don't know if you can hear me. Can somebody raise their hand if you can hear me? Yeah, we can. We can hear you. Okay. Thank you. Sorry, I've been waylaid from another meeting. So I'm having to do this from my truck. So I'm not in my technical office. So yes, thank you for correcting that original mistake. It was five years. What we have is this management area and a habitat establishment that goes to the north of Fort River Solar between our farm and the river. That is subject to a separate permit that has been granted. And within the operations and maintenance plan we have these three establishment areas. Now, the ones that say invasive species management, the current flora and fauna will remain and we just deal with any invasive species in those areas but all the native species will remain. Then we have the two establishment areas, one forested and one as a meadow. And both of those areas are also subject to the same invasive species management. We're looking at a little over 18 acres in total. It's broken out at 7.2 acres of meadow, 7.5 acres of forest and about 3.8 acres of existing habitat that is going to be enhanced by the invasive species management. The operations and maintenance plan calls out the invasive species to be managed which is the list there. And the method to deal with it is included. So it's a combination of hand pulling, cutting and herbicide. There are some species that cutting and herbicide or just herbicide use is going to be suitable for. And so this is why we've come back to ask for a variation on that condition that was placed on us. Once it is completed that is when the time starts. So it's not necessarily connected to the solar farm but it's to the completion of this habitat establishment. So once that is completed, the first two years will be subject to two inspections where they will be highlighting invasive species that need to be removed. After the first two years that turns into an annual inspection. So the plan is not that we will be there constantly spreading herbicide around dealing with things is based on those inspections. We would propose using an aquasafe herbicide and also limit its use to the correct weather. There'd be a forward look at the expected weather to make sure that we're not doing it ahead of any rains that might wash anything in before the herbicide itself is neutralized and dissipated. Applications will only be done by a licensed contractor with the correct accreditation. And that's kind of where we're at. So I'd welcome any questions. Sorry, I'm unable to hear you. Yes Steve, we can't hear you. Yeah. I have a microphone, my earplug. Can you hear me now? We can. We can hear you now. All right, great. So that deals with the invasive plant management and the herbicide application. Also speak quickly if you would about the need for an extension or your request for an extension of the commencement of construction. Yes, so obviously the site was given its permission in 2019. Then 2020 COVID hit and very little progressed. There were day-to-day extensions provided which is why the two years special permit date runs out in September 12th this year despite the permit being granted in 2019. The, our involvement as amp solar was project owners we acquired the land earlier this year in early spring. We dealt with the land donation to the town and we're moving forward with the final designs. And unfortunately, two things have hit us. It will come as no surprise to anybody that there are supply chain issues. We're dealing with some fairly sophisticated electronic equipment. It needs computer chips. Those computer chips have been hard to come by and the inverters were going to be later than needed. There's also a court case, a federal court case that was going through that was relating to solar modules. And it unresolved, it had the potential to have 200% tariffs applied to any solar modules because we couldn't select the solar module because we were trying to find inverters to meet the time. We were unable to commence designs until those two issues were resolved. We are in a position now that our electrical designs are going to be completed within the next few days and ready to, oh sorry, next few weeks to start the permitting process. But for us to be able to get those permits approved, mobilized to site and commence work by September 12th is not possible. So that is why we're looking for the extension of just one year. That's great. Thank you. Any questions from members of the board regarding this application? What I will say is that I don't know if any of us are experts in plant management, invasive species. We, as a board, we rely more upon the experts at the state and at the CONCOM, the Conservation Commission to make a decision as to whether this is environmentally a safe and effective way to deal with the problem of these invasive plants. And in both cases, the CONCOM and the state believe that this is the correct way to do it. The original special permit had a limitation on the use of herbicides and that I think is proven to be at least in terms of the experts, it's not an effective way to do it without herbicides that you need some herbicide use. So, and we have a plan for doing that and that plan, they have a plan for doing that and that plan has been approved by the relevant agencies. It comes to us because we're the ones that granted a special permit if there's gonna be a modification of a special permit, we've gotta approve it. So I'm comfortable with the herbicide plan that they have and I'm comfortable with the people that have blessed it knowing what they're doing. And in terms of the extension for another period of time so that they could get started on this without losing the, well, without defaulting on the project. I can see where the pandemic has caused real problems and probably Craig, you know, Mr. Meadows, you know more about this than any of us on this panel that that probably seems to be a reasonable thing. And even if it wasn't reasonable, there's a bond and other, the performance bond, the surty bond placed that had been filed by the applicants in order to ensure that they will eventually do the work. So not only do I think it's a reasonable delay but we have a protection on the backside that we're not allowing them just to continue to extend this with ad infinitum. So, and the extension isn't forever, it's just for, I think it's two years. So for those two reasons, I think that the two things that are requesting are reasonable but I was at the site and I had a chance to ask the questions and anybody does have questions to ask. This is the time to do that. Just as a correction, Steve, we're only asking for a year. We would, we are entitled to ask for two for an extension but we are only asking for a year because we're only looking for a couple of months delay from being able to start past the date. You know, as soon as I said a year, I knew I was wrong. And I thought I didn't see Maureen's face kind of twitch so I knew I made a mistake. So yeah, thank you for correcting me. All right, any other comments, questions? All right, I will say that I've got a project that we were supposed to have completed last October and because of supply chain difficulties we are just about to finish it this month. So I think one year is a minimum amount that they might want. If I were them, I would probably push it to 18 months. So the equipment that we have has been ordered. We also have other deadlines to do with the statement of qualification under the SMART program of which we get a year plus six months as a paid extension. And so both of those would elapsed within the time. So yes, we could ask for additional time from you but we'll have bigger problems than an elapsed in permit if it's not done by then. Wish you good luck. Thank you very much. All right, any other questions, comments? Mr. Maxfield. Yeah, I was just gonna comment that this seems pretty straightforward. Only questions as well are the ones I can't answer necessarily about herbicide. So I trust the people with the expertise in the Fish and Wildlife DEP and the ComCon to get that one right. So yeah, I'm in favor of this project. Maureen, are any public comment, any other board members? If not, I will turn it to public comments. Do we have any buddy raising their hand? I don't see. We have Michael Lipinski. Yeah, Mr. Lipinski, can you please identify yourself for the record? Yes, I'd like to. Michael Lipinski, 167 Shoot, Spray, Road, Amherst. You mentioned the bridge on your tour and I see a bridge load rating supposedly prepared on August 1st, 2022 in one of the packages. I was wondering if you could explain what you saw and what you think that bridge needs because to me it looks like that's a major obstacle to keeping this project on target and on schedule. Thank you, Mr. Lipinski. Mr. Cook, could you explain what you did and went into depth of what you were planning to do with that bridge both temporarily during construction and permanently? Could you please explain that? So if you can still see my screen, I'm just running the cursor over the bridge crossing that we have here. There is an existing bridge with 18-inch steel I-beams across with a concrete deck and a wooden handrail along the side. When the bridge was initially assessed two years ago, the recommendation was that it had a sufficient bridge weight rating for the proposed construction traffic. However, the concrete pad that goes across it was degraded in some areas and the remedy was to cut out the affected area, install a head wall and then add additional concrete at the front. Because that was two years ago when we're moving into the construction phase now, last month we had Northeastern update their report. They reinspected the bridge to make sure nothing had changed in the two years since they did their last report. And there had been, because there's a crack that runs across, there'd been some water go in, it's washed a little bit further away, just patching it wasn't going to be suitable. So now the proposal is that there is a brand new timber deck that will go across the bridge using substantial timbers, which also have the added benefit of it being easier to have a more effective guardrail running along the side. We are discussing with our contractor at the moment about the possibility of using a temp bridge that would just lay over the top of it. So that once we do the bridge repairs at the conclusion of the project, that it hasn't been subject to all of the construction traffic, which it isn't a problem, but it would just obviously leave a nice, brand new fresh bridge that will very rarely, it will quite a year see a lawn mower or a landscaper going across to cut the grass in the solar farm itself. So yeah, that's the plan at the moment is to repair the bridge, but we're waiting for a proposal to possibly use a temp bridge in the same place, as long as the concom approved that as would be on the wetland there. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cook. All right. If there are no other questions from the board, I don't think we have any other comments from the public, do we Maureen? That was it. I think not. I'd like to move to the public meeting portion of this, where we make our findings and discuss conditions. Since this is, you know, is an amendment to an existing, existing special permit conditions, all the existing conditions are going to continue to apply to those which we have modified or changed in some way. So the conditions proposed by staff, which I think are reasonable as first that everything has to be built as per the plans that have been submitted, that the herbicide treatment shall be limited to the application and use under the conservation management permit. That's the one that's on file. That's what they've been working under. The construction is permitted, which shall commence no, and that should be no later, not no latest, but no later than September 12th, 2023. So that's the one year rather than two for the commencement of construction. And all conditions under the previously approved ZBA, special permit shall be followed at all times with the exception of the two modifications that we have here. The only, I think those are all the conditions that we need and the only finding we have to make is under 10.394. The proposal avoids to the extent feasible impact on steep slope, floodplain, scenic, used grades, changes in wetlands. The herbicide application is proposed to eradicate invasive species established or restoration areas required by the National Heritage and Endangered Species Program for work proposed in rare species habitat. Conservation management plan is a requirement of the project from the MA Division of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. As such, the Conservation Commission recognizes that this work is essential and in the benefit of such resources and species on the site. The Conservation Commission is aware of the CMP and the CMP is part of the order of conditions approved for the work on the property. All other aspects of 10.38, I think are not applicable for this application. So I guess also 10.398, is it suitable in harmony with the general purpose and the bylaws in the master plan? And yes, it is, it's already been approved and this does not change that suitability and harmonious nature of the project with the master plan. So unless there's any questions or any other additional conditions that people wish to discuss or propose, I would entertain a motion that we approve the special permit request with the conditions outlined in the staff draft with the minor modification made at this meeting. Do I have such a motion? Don't move. Do I have a second? Mr. Maxfield seconds. We have a motion from Ms. Parks. Mr. Maxfield seconds it. Is there any discussion on the motion? If there's no discussion on the motion, the vote occurs on motion to approve special permit application. 10 FY 2023-03 for River Solar to approve with conditions as identified during the meeting. This is a roll call vote. Chair votes aye. Ms. Parks. Aye. Mr. Maxfield. Aye. Mr. Meadows. Aye. Mr. Gilbert. Aye. Motion is unanimous. The motion carries. Congratulations, Mr. Cook. You've got your special permit modification. Good luck with the invasive species. Thank you very much. And if any of the ZBA has any comments or questions post this, feel free to reach out to me at any time. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next order of business is a public hearing regarding our rules and regulations. The instant reason of doing this is the desire to re-evaluate the legal fees, the fees that are charged for legal notice to applicants for special permits. And that's something that's been done by the town in several respects with several boards. And so we have in our bylaws the fees set out. And if you wish to change those fees we have to vote on that as a board and to change the bylaws. The concern has been and Maureen and Dave can go into more detail. The concern has been that the town is effectively subsidizing these application fees and other fees, whereas now we charge $75, I think it is for a legal notice and can run the averages $500, $600 can vary, but it can be easily $500 and normally is something of a $500 range. So at the present time it's the desire on the part of the town and the staff and the planning department to have a more consistent and right now boards do various different things. So the desire right now is to have something that's kind of consistent across some of the boards so there's not a hodge podge of different fees but to try to recoup some of the money that is being spent by the town planning department that should be coming from the applicant. And as a result, the suggestion from the town staff and the planning department is to raise the fees from $75 to $300 effective this year. So that would be a significant increase but it doesn't cover all the costs that is incurred by the town. Those items are, and so that I think you have from you a memo from Chris Brestrup to Maureen and Robert Mora talking about what other boards have done. The planning board moved from 75 to 300. The historical commission basis that on square footage, I don't know if they're gonna be re-evaluating and the historic district doesn't require as much as we have as much work as we have that they're only having $50. But this is appendix B in your rules and regulations. So page 32 of the rules and regs of the current fee structure. And we would be looking to a man of those, they're asking us to amend the fee structure to put to require a $300 fee as opposed to a $75 legal advertisement fee. Now I looked at this and I thought, geez, we really ought to, in the ideal world, I would think that if we bifurcate this in some ways, but I want this kind of consistent across the planning board and us, that if you have a for-profit, a large project of a non-owner occupant that they ought to pay the full cost of whatever it is, that they're gonna go out there to make money, that's the whole point of this, if they ought to pay the full fare and if you have a homeowner, an owner-occupied, single or duplex, and it's just what they, I'm not as concerned about them paying the whole freight. I think if we have a set amount for them to pay you $300 or something, it seems to me that that's not awful for the town to subsidize its own residents to do something as simple as a changing offense or do other things that require a special permit. But I think if you're looking at for-profit operations or non-owner occupant rental housing, there's no reason for the town to subsidize the legal requirements for them. But that right now is not what's before us, and I think we should probably try to coordinate that with the planning board. And so I would seek to talk to the planning board about doing something so that we're harmonizing our requirements so that there's not what difference between us and the planning board and other similarly situated boards. But for the meantime, I think we ought to try to get as much money as we can to the coppers of the city, and the proposal from the staff and the planning department is to raise this to $300. That's the big change in the rules and regs that are before us today. The other changes are clarification, number one of some pronouns. We used to have he, she's, we've become more specific to generally say the chair or the vice chair or whatever it is, whatever it is the person is as opposed to he, she, and we also have a clarification that if you have a change to a variance, a special permit or a comprehensive permit, those changes require the same kind of vote to approve it that was required in the first instance. So there's no confusion that if you're amending the special permit, the final vote meets four out of five members to vote for it. If you're doing a comprehensive permit, it requires three out of five. And that is just clarifying what we, was a question that we had at one of our meetings of most recently and that clarifies it. So those are the basic changes. I think, Maureen, is there any, that other things that you would like to identify as changes in the rules and regs? Well, first Craig raises hand. I simply want to know, does it have to be a specific dollar amount? Or can we do essentially what Steve is suggesting, make the amount equal to whatever the cost of the legal fees are for submission to the local papers? Which seems to be unreasonable. And we could make exceptions for minor things, as Steve was saying, but it seems to me that if anybody is applying for a ZBA permit, that they could then pay for the submission of legal fee to the local paper. Maureen, does some of the boards now require they pay the, sometimes I know, require that they pay full amount. The planning department recommends that we have a flat fee of $300 opposed to finding out what the exact amount is. So we did reach out to the Daily Hampshire Gazette and they charge per half inch. So every legal ad is slightly different. So it could be like for the average cost could be, there could be a difference of a few dollars per legal ad. So it could be for $289 versus one, the next one could be for $311. So we would prefer just to have a flat fee of $300 and sort of call it a day, if you will, because it would save a step for both the applicant and for staff. So we would want to take the average and require $300. So the answer is it could be done, but it requires more work to do it differently for each application. You have to have a different calculation for each application. Yeah. Okay. Is this a change that is probably going to be happening annually as the fees increase from the paper? It could. And so actually that's a nice dovetail of the other request, which is shown here on page one of the rules and regs, let's see here. So the first change is just to add another clarify that it's four associated members. And then here it says the regular members shall also adopt and or amend these rules and regulations including appendix A, C and D. And hold on, let's take it. And those would require a vote of at least three members of the five member board at a public hearing. And appendix A, just to refresh everyone's memory, is the traffic impact statement. We have an appendix on that. C is relative to project review fees. So those are in relation to requiring a peer review under master law chapter 44, section 53G. And then D is in context of dark sky compliant lighting. So those, if the board would like to amend the rules and regs, including appendix A, C and D, we would need at least three affirmative votes at a public hearing. And a public hearing again requires that a legal ad is placed in the Daly Hampshire Gazette. And so we would like to ask that the board consider allowing that any amendment to article B, which is the application fees, require a vote of at least three members at a public meeting. So the playing department is in the red by a significant amount of money for legal ads. I think it's over $10,000 that we're in the red for this year for not having enough money for the legal ads. And so even holding tonight's meeting, we had to put a legal ad in for this item, which was kind of stung in a way because we really don't have the money to place these legal ads. So in the event that the playing department wants to revisit the application fees or the legal ad fees, we would like to do so at a public meeting so we can reduce the amount of money that we have to do for advertising. So if I may create one of the, Mr. Meadows, one of the things that I was going to ask is that we consider the request of the staff and the planning department for this first bump that you empower me to go to the planning board and other boards, especially the planning board and say, let's see if we can coordinate this and let's see if we can reduce the subsidization of the town taxpayers for these applications. Maybe we should think of something, an exception for minor or owner-occupied, see if we can come up with something that makes more sense and just this flat number that doesn't really solve the town's problem and maybe more expensive than it should be for a minor application and see if we can come up with something consistent that works across the boards and come back with that sometime this fall. That's what I would like to do but and move on this for the time being and then get something better and have a meeting on that. So that would be my request. Make sense to me, you've got two other hands raised. Yep, Ms. Marshall, welcome. Nice to hear your voice. Thank you, happy to be with you but Mr. Maxfield had his hand up first but on the other hand, you're the boss. So, go right ahead. Okay, I just wanna make sure I understand these two documents. Ms. Pollock sent us a memo that had gone to the or about the planning suggestions made to the planning board about what they do with their fees. And if I understand it, the planning staff is suggesting to the planning board that their applicants pay the full fee, whatever it is but they are proposing that applicants to the ZBA are paying a flat fee, is that right? I'm confused about how these are relating. Yeah, so the planning board recently increased their fee, their legal ad fee from $75 to $300. And so that memo I think was part of the discussion of when they rebued the legal ads and ultimately approved them. So right now we're consistent or no, sorry what you're suggesting would make us consistent. Correct. Okay, but can I ask one follow on to that? Is there any change in when this process of when the applicant is paying the fee, whatever it is like they're paying it up front and then the town cuts the invoice that was all very confusing. And I don't know that we need to work it out right here. Yeah, so for both the planning board and the ZBA when an applicant submits their application materials they're also submitting a check and that includes the legal ad and the application fee. And so we won't accept the application, we won't file the application with the town clerk until we get this check as well as other required submissions. And then when it is filed with the town clerk we schedule the public hearing and we will write the legal ad and staff will email the Gazette the legal ad and the town of Amherst has an account with the daily Hampshire Gazette. So it's sort of funneled that way of receive the check the check it's deposited in the town account and then the town then pays the Gazette with our money. So the applicant doesn't need to reach out to the Gazette the town staff is. And I would add that sort of having making the applicant go through the Gazette. Personally, I feel that for me that that creates more of a headache in some ways because I would have to make sure that the applicant goes and does it and there's a lot of deadlines that I have to meet and the applicant forgets the legal ad then we have to cancel the meeting and there's a unnecessary sort of burden on staff to sort of have to hold at times maybe hold the applicant's hand to make sure that they do something. So our approach of them giving us a check and then we will handle the rest is more smoothly and more time efficient. In addition, it is not the applicant's responsibility to file the, but it's the town's responsibility to file this for the meeting. So the staff really has to be in charge of filing this legal notice because they're the ones required to do it. Mr. Maxfield. First I have a question. When we continue the hearing to another date so that when it comes to us and we don't make a decision then do they have to pay another 75 for the legal fee for that meeting? Or no, it's only the one time fee. And then- Well, yeah, so that's a good question. So if the board, if an applicant is agreeable to continue a public hearing because A, B and C that more information is needed, more testimony is needed, whatever the scenario is. So the board would then make a motion to continue the public hearing to a date and time certain and then therefore you wouldn't need to create a new legal ad. However, there are some exceptions to the rule. So if the board by accident didn't continue to a date certain, they kind of maybe blanked and didn't say the date or the time. A legal ad would actually, you would have to do a new legal ad. So that's a rarity, but for nine out of 10 times you would need to do a new legal ad. All right, so when somebody comes to us, they only have to pay the 75 once. We're looking at that to 300, which I don't necessarily think is incredibly steep but the idea of, yeah, somebody coming here for a fence issue or something like that, that it costs $300 to come before the ZBA, seems a bit much to me. And I really, really appreciate what you said, Mr. Chair, on how to go about actually creating two different systems for for profit enterprises versus just, you know, somebody wants to get a dwelling unit for there and an additional dwelling unit for like their mother-in-law or something like that wouldn't have to pay the whole thing. And I like the idea of trying to figure out how to do that, but I don't want to raise our fee to 300 in the interim. While we work that out, I would feel more comfortable keeping it at 75 just because if that's something that takes more time for us to get there, does it end up being, you know, do we get it done in two months, three months, does it end up being something that we don't get taken care of for a year? So the entire next year, do we just have people coming in looking for their fence? They're now out $300 just to come and talk to the ZBA because we didn't get around to, I think coming up with a better system. Thank you, Mr. Hockfield. Back to you Maureen. So the planning department does recommend that the ZBA increase their legal ads to $300 in keeping with the planning board. The planning department is in the red by over $10,000. We do not have the funding to make up the cost for these legal ads. Someone needs to pay it, pay them. And I will say that the planning board and the planning department recommends that these legal ads be increased to $300 as a starting point. The legal ads on average cost about $500. So we're actually not increasing it to the equal amount of it, but we feel that this is a starting point, but we do not want to keep this at $75 because again, the town does not have the finances to sort of subsidize these legal ads for the newspaper industry. You know, one of the things that I think is instructive is what other towns were doing. And I'm looking for, I saw that earlier and I don't have that paper, but I seem to recall that many of the local communities, South Hadley, Hadley and others have a charge much more than the $75. Some of them, oh, here it is. Hadley says, they set the fee high enough to cover mailing and publication of legal ads. Sunderland charges $150 for legal ad and mailings. Money goes into general fund. Deerfield advertising fee paid directly to the Greenfield recorder by the applicant. South Hadley public hearing advertisement applicant pays actual cost bill directly to the applicant from the newspaper. So, you know, we are the lowest in the area but current Sunderland has got one, charges 150, we're about half of that. We'd be twice their fee if we go to 300 at least temporarily without some kind of a break for small or our owner-occupied properties. It seems to me that a lot of, not everything is owner-occupied and minor. I think that the $300 is something the town needs the money. Either pay it by people who use the services of the town and the ZBA or we just pay it through higher taxes and post upon everybody. And I guess in my thinking, Dylan, is that this is probably is not too much to impede somebody or inhibit somebody from going to ask for a special permit for the time being. Especially if they think that we're gonna be looking at the type of person that might inhibit would be a small single family owner-occupied person who needs a minor change, a minor change that doesn't cost very much. And if they know that we're looking at some kind of a bifurcated system, maybe they wait for a couple of months until we come up with that. But in the meantime, the need for the money is real and we either all pay for it on taxes or we ask those people who are using the services to pay for it. That's really where I come down at the time being. I mean, I certainly agree. I don't like the idea of us subsidizing, especially deep pocket developers who wanna come to us. But my only issue here with raising fees is it does further a system that I'm, something like the ZBA is a, it can be a very costly undertaking for people. And the idea of just increasing costs that will be negligible to the people who have the deep pockets to pay it, but might not be negligible to the people who don't, I mean, is there a way even tonight that we could say that we're raising fees on non-owner occupied applications? If we do that, I'm 100% on board with that. I think we could even just do that for a starting point and leave it for 75 to owner occupied. And at the end of the day, if people really disagree with me on this one and that 300 just isn't such a bad cost, I can see it, but I personally am not on board with raising the fees, increasing the costs of coming to interact with the earth to coming to the ZBA. I personally don't wanna do it. I hear you're saying, Ms. Marshall. Is there any precedent in any of the various fees that the town charges for a hardship waiver or reduction? I mean, I don't know what kind of application someone would be making if they could afford to do whatever the work is, but $300 is, I mean, I don't know if there are some applications that are maybe for like paper changes and don't involve any actual construction of something and in which case $300 might be a lot of money. If you're undertaking a $10,000 project, it's pretty small. So, but again, is there any kind of hardship system? Well, we do have, Maureen is showing us that there are additional fees that are based upon types of their impact upon the community. So these are their high impact or the impact fees that are scaled based upon the type of project it is. And they range from $500 to $50 depending upon the nature of the applicant. So there is some, if it's not a hardship, it's not exactly applicable to your question, but it does show that there is a, for us and the ZBA, there is a, and I don't know, Maureen, if this is only, if this is for the whole town, if this is just ZBA fees, there is a differential. There's a sliding scale already in effect that we may be able to work off of to come up with some more a scalable fee structure that we could use this as a starting point. So, Mr. Judge, so yeah, these fees as shown on the screen are only fees relative to ZBA applications. To perhaps this, hopefully I'm answering Ms. Marshall's question. The board, so from time to time, there are applicants that will state that they have a financial hardship and that they ask that the board consider reducing their application fee or waiving it entirely. And so there is a process for that. They would have to submit a request to the ZBA. So it would be to your discretion to approve an application like reduction or waiver. But these are the impact fees. So starting at the top, a high impact fee where non-residentialist for $500 and those are related to sort of institutional uses, government and public service uses and research and industrial uses. And then there's sort of higher in residential, it's $300 plus $50 per dwelling unit for residential uses that have more than six dwelling units. And then there's a moderate impact use of $300 for non-residential and then $150 plus $50 per dwelling unit for six dwellings or less. And then for owner-occupied properties, it's a low impact fee of $50. So if there's an owner-occupied family that wants to put an ADU or a fence or a sign, that fee would be $50. They still would have to play the legal ad because A, because there is a legal ad that's a requirement under a master of law and the Gazette is charging on average about $500. And so we're asking to increase the fee from $75 to $300 to offset the cost of the bill to the Gazette because someone does need to pay for that. So unfortunately, I guess the real part of this is it should be the applicant or should it be the town of Amherst paying for the legal ads for applicants on their behalf? So if we look at tonight, tonight we had three issues. We got $225 in fees for the legal costs. And I don't know what it is, but let's say that it's $500, the average. That's $1,500 of costs for this town. It's offset by $225 with fees from the applicants. I think that that means that there's significant laws to the town and I think we should be looking at a way to try to reduce that. And I know that you also wanna do that too, Mr. Maxfield. We may disagree on exactly how we wanna do it, but I think that if that happens every week, that adds up and it means that it adds up for taxpayers. So what I'd like to do is, I feel like we had a good discussion about this. I wanna separate this issue from the rest of the changes to the rules and regulations and split the question and have the rest of the rules and regulations, modifications approved or defeated and then come back and discuss this separately and make a decision on what we wanna do just so we don't get two things confused. I think they're separate. The other ones seem to me to be all pretty much just non-conforming changes except for this one that Marine has up right now, which I referred to, which clarifies when you need four votes for approval of a change to an existing special permit or a comprehensive permit needs three or a requirement for public meeting on matters or other things that doesn't require a public hearing, you need three votes, not four. So for the final approval of that motion before the body, that is just restating what we should be doing anyway, but it makes it clear and makes it in the rules. I don't think there's anything else in here that aside from the fees that are controversial or raise any questions that I think need to be brought to your attention. Can I've gone through them with Maureen today? It looks like Craig has raised his hand. Yes, Mr. Meadows. There is one other that I was, I have a question about that was in 2.14 where it calls for, I'll wait until you get there, gone by it. Yes. 2.14. 2.14, sorry, yep. All right, 2.14 calls for a unanimous vote. 2.14? Yes, I think it's two, in the absence of any appearance without due cause, I'm gonna have to have the board may act, et cetera, board may decide by unanimous vote that the petition, now everything else we're doing by a majority, three or four. Why is this a unanimous vote? The absence of any appearance without due cause on behalf of the applicant. Whoops. Sorry, I just wanna see the title. An applicant may present an application. You know, that looks to me like that's a holdover from the three, I'm guessing this Maureen, that that's the holdover from the requirement that all the decisions be made by the, by three members, ZVA had to be unanimous. Cause this says that when somebody doesn't show up, we can deny or continue it, but it would be. So I will say that, well, let's, let me think on that. I will say the 2022 rules and regs was carefully reviewed by attorney John Winton. So I feel pretty confident that that language works, but let's think about that. And I'll get back to, in a few minutes, I wanna look something up, just a double check. And possibly I understand the motivation for splitting up the vote. And yet at the same time, it seems as though we need to take action on everything tonight. And I understand what Dylan is suggesting. It is reasonable to consider that, but I think what we need to do is vote to make the changes that are in here, including part B and give the chair the authority to go and negotiate with the planning board on and set a date for a follow-up meeting on these things again in the fall. Is that reasonable? It is. And is that a motion, Mr. Meadows? It is. Is there a second? I'll second. You know, Ms. Marshall, I hate to say this to you, but you can observe, you can talk, but you can't vote and you can't second. Oh, I thought I could on this one. I beg your pardon. No, not on this one, not on the rules of rights. I will say that the planning department strongly encourages the ZBA to consider approving the legal ad increase tonight as we are financially having difficulty paying for these applications. And there's a lot coming in. I'll second that motion. So we have before us a motion from Mr. Meadows that we approve the changes that appear here from the staff that we moved to $300 as the legal advertisement fee that we empower the chair, we authorize the chair and instruct the chair to go out and try to harmonize with the planning board and that we report back, let's say by the, it's gonna be tough to do it in a month. Let's say we report back by October 15th to the committee with a report on what we're trying to do for a harmonized and perhaps bifurcated fee structure. Is that the correct summary of your motion, Mr. Meadows? Yes, it is. That motion is made in seconded discussion of that motion. Mr. Mathew. All right, I don't wanna bog us down so I figure what I'll do, I'll just propose an amendment to the motion. If we like it, we'll vote for it. If not, we'll get shot down and we'll all move on with our nights. The only amendment I wanna make to that is to raise that it will be raising the fees from $75 to $200 on I believe what was already defined as high and moderate impact. Am I correct about that, Maury? Would that, would that the title for the two of those? Sit, sorry, say that again. We have it defined as the different types of applications where we'll charge $500 for a high impact. Yeah, yep. So, yeah, that the fee will be raised from $75 to $300 for a high and the moderate impact or remaining $75 for low impact. That's my amendment that I'm moving. Anybody likes it, let's see what we got. All right, amendment is made. Is there a second to the amendment? Second. All right, Ms. Parks, second the motion. So now we have an amendment to this as stated by Mr. Maxfield. Is there further discussion? I would say one thing quickly. I like the notion, I like the concept and I hope that's where we get. My goal would be to have as much flexibility going in and talking to the planning board, maybe coming up and not have something that we already did that we have to undo. I just think it gives us more flexibility to try to come up with a scale of some sort and gives me and gives us more flexibility to talk to them. So I think we'll probably get to something like you want Mr. Maxfield, but I would just prefer to have more flexibility to negotiate with the town, the planning department and the planning board, then coming in with a proposal of a bifurcated fee structure already. That's my feeling on that. Any other comments about that motion, about the amendment to the motion? If not, the vote occur. Mr. Maxfield, do you want to say something? No, there's no further comments. The vote occurs on the amendment to the motion. It's a roll call vote. The chair votes no. Ms. Parks? No. Mr. Maxfield? Aye. Mr. Meadows? No. Mr. Gilbert? No. The amendment is defeated. The question occurred, now we return to the original motion by Mr. Meadows. Is there any further discussion on Mr. Meadows' motion? If not, the motion before the body is to approve the rules with a $300 fee, changes to the rules with the $300 fees and I would add a friendly amendment if you accept which is to authorize the staff to make technical and conforming changes if we find grammatical or misprints and sometimes that happens. So with that friendly amendment, if Mr. Meadows agrees, I put the question to the body. It's a roll call vote. The chair votes aye on the motion. Ms. Parks? Aye. Mr. Maxfield? I assume my vote isn't needed for the staff so I don't vote no on this one. You can vote, we only need a good clarification. We only need three votes on this. Mr. Meadows? Aye. And Mr. Gilbert? Aye. All right. So with that, the rules are approved. I will get in touch with the planning board as well as the planning staff. I'll try to have some kind of a discussion with them and report back as quickly as possible but certainly before October 15th or our meeting or our second meeting in October whenever that is. Great. I don't think there's any other business before us except for public comments on matters which are not before the board tonight. And do we have anybody and the attendees that wish to speak? Doesn't matter. And do we have any new business or the other business before the board not noticed in the last 49 hours? I guess the one we would have is Maureen, when is our next meeting and what's? I think it's, let me double check. It should be Thursday, September 8th. And we have items for the agenda already? We do. So South Point, which is called Renew Amherst located at perhaps 266 East Hadley Road. They need to amend their previously approved special permit for a variety of different items and conditions. And so that's a public hearing and there may be a public meeting but I'm unsure of that. So. All right. We have that one. Okay. Is there any other new business from any members of the board? We're gonna get done just before nine o'clock, which is our goal. Things speed up between 8.45 to nine o'clock. You know what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set o'clock and we're gonna start this at about eight o'clock at night, we're gonna be at 8.45 and things gonna go really fast from now on. All right, folks. Thank you very much for all your effort and work and your hours put into this. I appreciate it. We all appreciate it. And I hope you have a great end of the summer and we'll see each other in a couple of weeks. Thank you. Thank you all. See you later.