 Hi, and welcome to What's Up, Williston? I'm your host, Eric Wells. We're back here for our September episode, and join me this month as Pl. Director Matt Belanger. We're going to be talking about housing this month. Townsend doing a lot of work looking at our housing bylaws, and I have a public hearing coming up on some transmitted amendments from the Planning Commission to the Select Board. So we're going to jump into it in just a minute, but the logistics here, the public hearing on these proposed amendments is going to be on Tuesday, October 17th at 7.30 p.m. in Town Hall. These are really focused on housing supportive amendments, including inclusionary zoning. So I thought with Matt here today, we can kind of get into this proposal a little bit more and talk about housing. Kind of to start, the town did a housing needs assessment earlier this year, and that really confirmed what we felt that there was a number of areas for the town to explore further in housing. Is that kind of on track there, Matt? Yeah. So coming out of a bunch of our rezoning work in the Taft Corners area, we identified a need to do more around the encouragement of the creation of affordable housing. And with all of the opportunity in our new zoning to create more homes in Williston, we did want to look at what the need was and make sure that any changes to the zoning that would encourage housing met those needs or fed into what those needs were. So we did have a housing needs assessment done. That report is available on our website to go take a look at. And in a general sense, it confirmed some things that we'd already been perceiving out in the community. There's generally very low availability of homes in Williston, resulting in higher prices than usual. And in particular, very, very low availability of homes that might be considered affordable, particularly for the workforce that we see coming into Williston every day to work the jobs that are available there. So once we had that data, the planning commission got to work last spring. We had multiple discussions with the select board to kind of unpack what that meant and think of some pathways for the town to consider moving forward. And from that work through the spring and summer, we have these transmitted bylaw amendments that are going to be considered coming up this fall. So I was thinking to start, if you could share with the viewers, kind of what's the overall theme of these amendments? What are they looking at the proposals look like here? Sure. So the theme of the amendments is to take what exists in the current zoning bylaws, which is an incentive to create affordable homes as a part of new residential projects and really elevate it to the point where it's its own pathway to approval beyond the way Williston currently approves residential projects. Williston's really unique in Vermont in that we have a middle step in our residential approval process called growth management, where we schedule out a limited number of new dwelling units that are created over a given period of time in town. And that schedule is by its nature limited and therefore getting on the schedule is competitive. So under the current system, providing affordable homes as a component of a project is one of many incentivized attributes of a project. Others might be trails or open space or neighborhood design, things like that, energy efficiency. So what the proposed amendments do is they set a metric by which a project that provides enough of certain kinds of affordable homes would follow an approval path outside of that growth management schedule. And so it would need to meet some pretty stringent commitments around the number and type of affordable homes and those homes would need to be affordable in perpetuity via legal restriction. But those projects would not compete as part of that growth management schedule and their units would not be part of that limited number of units on the schedule. So a question we've received is, okay, if you're going to remove these projects from growth management, growth management has allocations each year. We try to plan for a number of new units, new population each year. How's that going to impact the overall growth of the town? We think with the levels that are set in the draft bylaw amendment, mostly it's going to shift the proportion of projects that follow the affordable path out of the projects that would have otherwise followed the growth management path. In other words, fundamentally, we don't expect to see a whole lot more units per year created under these changes. We expect the projects that include affordable homes to increase and the projects that follow the growth management path to decrease. And I can talk a little bit about why we think that's going to happen when we get into the details of the revision. Sure. And I want to share too, the town has a wastewater allocation ordinance that really kind of serves as our check and balance here for development. That wastewater capacity has to be allocated each year, so there's only so much to sell for each type of development. That's right. Almost all new dwellings that are created in Williston need to purchase wastewater treatment capacity from that limited pool, which is connected to but another piece of the path to approval that all residential projects have to follow. So there's a limit there that exists regardless of how we handle this other part of the process. So kind of getting into the more nuts and bolts here, but first, you know, we hear us a lot, affordable housing and sometimes I feel like that's a mis-no merchant, all housing be affordable. But you know, we get into it from a public policy realm. What are we talking about with affordable housing? So the first part is what affordable means is that a household can meet their housing expenses, spending no more than 30% of their income in doing so. So if you think about, you know, taking a little bit under a third of your household income and having that if you rent an apartment going toward your rent and your utilities or if you own a home towards your mortgage taxes and insurance. So that number is different, of course, for every household because every household has a different income. So when we talk about it in a sense of a bylaw amendment like this, what we're talking about is, is a home affordable to the median household in the geographic area that surrounds Williston? Or is it affordable to a household making some percentage of that median income? So we talk about 100% median that literally means the middle household's income and then we might talk about 80% median or lower. In the case of this, we're talking about 100% and 80%. So there's a lot to this and there's a lot to unpack. And you know, part of why we're doing this outreach today and the public information session coming up is try to unpack it for folks. So there's a lot of housing discussion going on throughout the state and Williston, as it's government and community, we're kind of looking at this of how we want to approach it to start, how the select board is going to consider these regulation changes. So, you know, this proposal goes through different project types. So maybe that's a good place to start, kind of how that affects different project sizes here. Right. So one of the things about including affordable homes in a project is those homes are sold at a price or rented at a price that's below the market rate. They need to be balanced by the homes in the project that are going to be sold at market rate. So as project sizes get really small, that gets harder and harder to do. So we have some thresholds in the draft bylaw amendment for when affordable homes would be required as part of a project. And when we're under five dwellings, we're just calling that a small project. It would be exempt from both the growth management process where we've not had a lot of luck gaining the incentivized attributes of projects in those size projects anyway because they're small. And we're including an affordable home would be very challenging. And then requirements from there, we start to require units on projects of sizes between five and nine units and going up from there. So if a project is following the affordable inclusionary path, any project over five units is needing to include a unit and, you know, starting off with five to nine include one unit. So that's the inclusionary side. And then there's also the side of somebody who does choose to build a project that's entirely market rate does not include affordable homes. This bylaw amendment includes an added requirement that they pay a fee instead of building those homes and that money would be paid into the town's affordable housing trust fund. So we think about inclusionary. It's really talking about including including units that are designated for affordability based on these thresholds. That's correct. And we look at I guess if you think about the paying into the affordable housing trust funds, there's different fee structure. So it seems this is tiered based on based on quantity and the per home fee based on the size of the project. That's correct. So it looks at it kind of a quantity of scale for for how much if someone is not going to create one of these some of these units that you have to pay more into the affordable housing trust. That's right. And the larger project gets the larger that fee gets not just linear but you know very large projects where we think there's a lot more opportunity to include affordable homes. You pay more. So we have a one to twenty home tier a twenty one to fifty and then everything over fifty. The fee goes up. And you know really that is meant very much to encourage especially large projects to be inclusionary rather than be entirely market rate. So that gives us someone puts a project together. They have to look at the economics of that project and you know what you know the cost to build and the cost to rent out potentially units cost to sell units. So they're they're trying to make the math work. That's right. In a lot of these cases it seems like and if we can put these tools in place to encourage it then we have these fees that also help if someone decides to not move forward with it. They have to pay the fee. We put into this affordable housing trust. The town has started this. We've seen it with some money. I think it may be approximately sixty thousand dollars or so there. Just last night the town established a housing committee. Seven members of the community were appointed by the select board where their roles is going to be determining uses for the trust. I know planning staff had some preliminary discussions about what that may look like. If you could share just some ways these trusts are used in public policy. Sure. So what one big use of money that's in a trust fund like this would be to help offset the cost of providing affordable homes in qualifying projects. What we're talking about in our zoning reforms here is is projects that might include what we might think of as workforce housing. These would not be requirements to require to include what we might call deeply affordable housing. You know homes that might be affordable to somebody making less than half the median income for the area. Those projects are going to come through nonprofit partnerships and things like that. And that's a great place for the town to invest some of its trust fund money to make those projects that just cannot happen with outside funding to help those go. So number one just using the money in a trust fund to make really affordable projects happen in town. There's like those types of projects too have my experiences been you've got to get these stacks of funding sources to make it all work. There might be grants out there there might be some private equity but it could be the town's way of giving some municipal support to get these projects over the top and help make them happen. Yeah. Yeah. That would that would be a great way to use that money. There are other more sort of bigger or more challenging things depending on what you want to do you know actually purchasing a piece of land that could be deeded over to an entity that would build homes on it. Another one we've seen is in zoning districts that have rigorous design standards helping a project that needs to come in at an affordable rate meet those more aesthetic standards. It looks more like everything else on the street is a use of trust fund money. So we've seen that happen in some neighboring communities as well. Lots of potential a lot of excitement here is where the town is really positioning itself more to take an active role in working on housing. We've we've built more staff capacity with addition of a senior planner focused on energy and community development including housing. So we we've got the energy committee and housing committee established so we've got legs of the policy stool established as advisory boards the select board to help work through these these big questions coming up here. Yeah. You know a lot of work was done by the Planning Commission to come up with how to formulate this proposal. Other towns have been doing this some longer than others. Kind of what that research and what that what that process looked like because there's a lot of different ways this could go with these variables and how do you where do you find the starting point. Sure. So we always start by taking a look at our neighbors and you know we compared our possible inclusionary requirements to neighboring communities mostly in Chittenden County. So we're thinking about what is the proportion of affordable homes that's required in a new project and at what level of affordability to those homes need to be made available. There's some other nuance in there. You know which communities look at just a median family income versus a given household size. How does how are perpetual affordability requirements managed other things like that. But the basic thing is how many affordable homes and how affordable are those homes being required. And you know we're lucky to be in a county where City of Burlington has been doing inclusionary zoning for over 25 years and they've had some research and reporting done on the effectiveness of that program. We have performance to look at in a couple of other communities too and we're we're slotting right in kind of kind of middle of the pack in terms of those requirements. And one of the things that's really challenging about doing something like this is requiring private development to include affordable homes makes it harder to build the homes in those developments. It makes it more expensive. And as was reported on in Burlington looking at the performance of their system over those 25 plus years. You can make the requirements so stringent that you reduce the supply of homes in general. And so you when you're thinking about wanting to increase the abundance and affordability of homes. You can require more and more things but at some point you just won't see new homes come online at all. So the Planning Commission was very conscious of that. We want a system that is usable for the sector that's going to produce the homes. Yeah it seems it's the benefit of being able to analyze this and look at the performance measures over time. And it's a starting point. And it's good we've had that data to look at and kind of see how that plays out from policy to implementation moving ahead. Should these bylaws be be adopted moving up moving ahead here. So kind of next steps here I shared at the open that you know there's going to be a public information session coming up on October the 12th on a Thursday evening in Town Hall from 6 8 p.m. Planning staff will be there they'll be going over these items taking questions want to make sure everyone's informed if you want to participate in the public hearing or you can also come share any comments you have ahead of time either. You can email to myself or planning staff to share the select board. We're doing the show today we'll have this post that we have materials posted online. Any thoughts on outreach Matt ways people can get their questions answered things. I'm sure you're asking direct email to myself or senior planner Melinda Scott in our office would work just fine we'll happy to answer questions one at a time as they come in. We do have a lot of resources out there in the planning commission and select board websites on the nights that they've looked at this. Recently this this memo we prepared to answer some of the frequently asked questions is part of the managers report of last night's select board meeting with September 19th meeting. We'll be also producing a set of slides for that October 12th meeting and making those available ahead of time as well. So really would encourage folks if you haven't to take a look at the needs assessment document that's out there on the planning department web page as well. And and the bylaw hearing notice for the October 17th meeting which includes the the nuts and bolts the draft bylaw text that would actually make all of these changes happen. But just calling us and talking to us works great too because we can really we can really drill into how this all would work. So shifting gears a little bit you know that's everything coming up with with housing right now this fall but a big effort from the planning department right now is getting ready for the next town plan. And it's kind of looking toward seven years in the future and this work is being called Wilson 2050 thinking further out as well. So I want to share kind of what that process looks like and how people can get engaged coming up here. Sure. So like all Vermont municipalities that have a comprehensive plan or a town plan. Williston has one and it will the current plan that we're working under will expire toward the end of August of 2025 which means it's time for us to start thinking about how to write the plan that will replace it. We are calling that effort Williston 2050 functionally the new comprehensive plan will guide the focus of the town from 2025 through 2032. So call it Williston 2050 it's a nice round number some of the things we do over that eight year time frame you know will really start to become evident around 2050. So you know it's very forward thinking town plans are long range in nature. We start with a vision and then we have a set of goals and objectives and policies that fall out of that vision across a number of state required categories that the plan needs to address. So where we're at is we are between now and about Thanksgiving really entering into our really big public engagement push where we're trying to interact with members of the community through a series of both in person and online events. Those are now scheduled and you can you can reserve your slot at them or sign up to come. The website for this effort is williston2050.com and you can stay in touch with us that way as well. But really between now and the holidays is when we're hoping to put the planning commission and the planning staff who will be working together to write this town plan directly in touch with the citizens of the town to make sure that we know everything that's important to people as we as we put that in. As we put that into a document. That's great. It's you know we want to hear from everybody you know it's planning for the future of the community and you know this is the vision for Wilson's future. So it's opportunity for people to get engaged share your ideas share your thoughts some early on here in this in this process. Yeah one of the really terrific things about Williston is it really uses its town plan. So I've been working in Williston long enough that there's been a couple different versions of the town plan in effect and you know we keep that document with the to do list that comes with it. Really prominent in our office and we're we're looking you know every quarter do what did this plan say we needed to do and what have we accomplished and what's the next step and that's very rewarding to do and I want to help the planning commission in the community develop that next to do list for the next eight years so that we can go to work making it happen. Yeah we see the adoption of form based code in Taft Corners that was a town plan item it's been in the plan for a couple iterations as I recall it was you know something we're able to cross off the list this past couple of years here. Yeah you know town plans they they address things for communities as diverse as education transportation housing design all of those things you just mentioned and you know there's things we're working on right now because they were talked about in town plans going back as far as probably 2006 and before so this is a chance to set those priorities going forward. I think that's all I had for today anything else you want to add Matt before we wrap up. I'll just mention the website address again williston2050.com please please go there to find out everything you can about the town plan effort or stop on by our office. We have postcards business cards bumper stickers with the Williston 2050 logo on them and you're going to see us out in the community as you may have in the last couple months. We love to talk to people about the town plan it's it's the kind of thing planners really enjoy working on. Great well thanks everyone for joining us this month on what's up Williston I'm your host Tom Andrew Eric Wells and I'll I'll see you around town take care.