 Okay, everybody. Thanks for bearing with me. I'm sorry for the delaying. Start getting this started. Is everybody ready? Okay. Welcome, everybody. This is the February 8 meeting of the Montpelier Planning Commission. First order of business is called order. Second is approval of the agenda. Let me take a look at the agenda unless there's any comments or changes that ask for unanimous consent to approve the agenda. All right. It's approved by unanimous consent. Next is comments from the chair. Kirby is not here tonight. He's attending a family emergency. We wish him the best, but we will move forward. Fourth is general business comments from the public. I don't see anybody on the Zoom call that looks like they're from the public. If there is, please speak up. No. So moving on, consider the minutes from January 25th, our last meeting. Everybody take a look at it real quick. Unless there's any comments, I've asked for unanimous consent to pass or to approve the minutes from January 25th. Erin, do you care about typos? If I guess if you do, we all do. Well, it's only because it's in the bold and underlined section at the end of the minutes. I just noticed it right now. Discussion. New discussion. Discussion is misspelled. Minor point. Okay. So let's we can change that typo from this discussion. Unless there's any objections to approving the minutes. I had a question, sorry. On the removing parking minimums discussion, I wasn't there. But there was a vote that failed. So we are going to keep discussing it before we get to the land use chapter. Was that the end of that conversation? Yes. Okay. So unless there's any other comments, I'd ask for unanimous consent to approve the minutes with the change to the typo that Barr pointed out. Approved by unanimous consent. Erin, you muted yourself or somebody muted you? I think he muted himself. There we go. Okay. So next is receive an update from the continuity and structure subcommittee. I should say continuity. I don't know if John, did you want to go through the pieces you had kind of put together or how do you guys want to try to kind of go through this summary real quick? Could we the committee discuss two points? One was to look at how to structure the implementation strategies and how that would look and what the tables would look like. And John did some work and then we had some brief discussion of what I had attached to your agenda on what a draft chapter would potentially look like. So yeah, before John, you go real quick. I just wanted to let everyone know that I made some changes as we discussed last time to the template. So if you pull the template already, but you haven't filled it out, go pull a new one. It's the same document. We've added a couple things as discussed. So was that attached? It was the new one attached to what you sent out? I sent a link to the Google Drive's place where we all have access and you should be able to grab it from there. Okay. But that is the most updated one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. John, go ahead, or Stephanie. Yeah, I guess. I think the upshot is that the template that Marcella sent around is what people should use and if people use that our plan or what we had talked about is I take those and just bring them into a very simple database that we could then use to populate any an application or sort of our final version, pulling off in the same place, but allowing a number of different views like you could look at it from the perspective of a committee, you could say, okay, you know, we're on the transportation committee, what are all the different actions and strategies that we're responsible for or partner in or you could sort from by theme and you could look at historic resources or you could sort by priority. You could say show me all of the high priority or strategies. And then, and the idea being that, you know, those a lot of these strategies are going to have overlap. So if it is, you know, you could have a strategy that applies to historic resources, land use, transportation, etc. But having it all in a central database allows us to view it in different ways. I can share my screen to make this like maybe less abstract. So John, do they have to have certain keywords so that they will read across? So they'll sort that way? Yes and no, I wouldn't worry about it too much. For example, if they're, since we're working on them thematically, just add a column and put that theme for that whole page, right? You know, historic resources. The ones that might, we might try to have some kind of normalizing like just create a dropdown would be like the responsible parties. So we don't have like HPC, historic preservation committee, historic preservation and design like eight different flavors of that. We could clean it all up at the end and it probably, you know, wouldn't be a huge lift anyway, but it might be possible for us to take care of that on the front end. And then for the other thing we want to draw links to is for each strategy, draw a link to the goals. And there again, we don't need to worry about consistent theming or wording at the beginning. Each one will just assign like an ID, basically a unique number and then add them to whatever strategies, but maybe if, again, if I show you, and this isn't really how, you know, it would present no one, we're saying no one, you know, just wants to go read a database, but they have, there's a number of different applications of services like this that really don't require any coding or are pretty easy to use. And this is, you know, I took the historic preservation one, just loaded the CSV up, you could see there's goals and objective, I just put in a placeholder, this is a goal here, and then here, for example, it will pull from the goal sections and then you can just create a bunch of different views, you know, you could sort by priority and create some cards that way and low, medium and high. We could even eventually use this if we wanted to have a status, you know, if it's in progress or completed, people, you could just drag them in between the different places where those, whatever those strategies are at, and if we wanted to keep track of the plan, or if we do like an annual update of the status of all of them, that could be an option. But using that, using these different views, we'll just be able to create tabs in our plan website that people could just click on and then it'll pull up all of those plans and strategies as however we define those views. John, what we're looking at under policy action are the strategies. Right. Those would appear as strategies. So the goal is one step up then. Can you show us that tab too? Yeah. So that tab... I noticed it was on the other one. Well, anyway... It's not currently populated yet. Right, it's not currently populated. Okay, so it doesn't want to come up, yeah. But in this, for example, you have the, if you were to open up an item, and this isn't helpful because these don't have goals on them, but let's see, these three were linked to that first goal. So if you open up strategy one, you'll see the related goal or objective. So it automatically numbers them. It's not like we have to put any of that in. Right. Once they're done in a good place, I'll just go assign them numbers or values. It's easier not to have people worry about that. I guess that I think the upshot is we'll just use the template that Marcela sent around, but the hope is that we'll just take those and then feed it into a structure like this and sync things up. So that'll give us, I think, a lot of opportunity to create some interactivity and have a plan that's functional and allows people to find things quickly. And again, this was done within a few, this only took a few minutes. So the design and functionality of this isn't, doesn't maybe quite convey what I'm trying to do, but yeah, I think just understanding maybe that we'll go from those templates, feed it into this and then basically create views from it that allow people to interact or see things from different perspectives. Yeah, really the take home is just to use the link that Marcela sent out. Because as we populate that, even though it's not very fancy, the whole point of it is just to get everything into cells and columns and blocks, and then we can grab them later on. When we figure out exactly what format and exactly what program we're using, then we can grab those and pretty readily make things match up. So if there are any other comments on the implementation strategy, we can take them. Otherwise, I'll just go and quickly show you what was attached to the agenda. So this was the other piece that I had sent out, and we talked briefly in the subcommittee about, so what I did was just to put together, the goal is to eventually have this as a web based plan. So this would be the text of a web page that we could give to somebody with graphic arts to kind of start to make it look pretty. But to get the text in, we were looking for, at least my goal was to have chapters be between a thousand words and maybe 1500 words. That's kind of a bite size web page and then have links to other things. So maybe this is too long, maybe this is too short, but the idea was I would put together a quick historic resources chapter. So I wrote a quick introduction. I had a section on how do historic resources relate to other chapters. Quick discussion there. I summarized some information about Montpelier, and this was one question we had talked about is, you know, how do we set this up? Do we actually do something like this with links to all of these? Or do we put a single link to a web page that might have all of these? And that's just a format, and that's what the subcommittee will kind of discuss over time is, what's the best way of putting these together? And I think there's some support to try to build all these actually into the city plan web, you know, the overall plan. So that way people who are in the plan can actually access these documents, and we would PDF, we would scan these documents and have links to them directly in here. So we would have obviously a map. So some map layers that we had identified, what are the capital complex boundaries, location of historic markers, location of the design review district boundary, the location of designated downtown district, and location of National Register District. So these are all just a number of related files that we would put in and either a single map that would let you turn on and off layers. And then we would briefly introduce aspirations and goals. So this is our aspiration for that. And this is how we came up, you know, a quick paragraph. So somebody who wants to understand why this is our aspiration or what we're doing it for, they could kind of get a quick sense for it. And then an outline of how we would implement the plan. Now, I just put these in different sections and we can, you know, grab one of these and move it up. You know, this should be talked about first, that should be talked about last. There were, you know, kind of just meant to be a list of possible topics. Maybe there's a topic we should talk about that I didn't include. So I really wanted to kind of leave it a little bit, open a discussion of what people thought or what they think or if you guys want to take this home and kind of talk about it or think about it for a little bit. But the idea was to find out what we would need for a template because then I can go back out and start going and writing a quick historic or a quick housing chapter and a quick transportation chapter and a quick energy chapter and we could start building out the plan. And then the idea would be once we've got the text and once we've got some of these other pieces, we can start working on actually developing the web pages because then we just need to get images and start to build out what the page would look like. And I think that piece I would hope would go relatively quickly because I think the hardest part is, you know, the implementation strategies which we've been working on and then the text of the plan. So I'll throw that out and see what you guys are got questions. So you would go ahead. I'll just add that from our continuing structures working at meeting on Friday. The other piece that we were interested in and I'm throwing this out to the committee for discussion. But the other piece we talked about was adding benchmarks for each chapter, something we could make a little more visual. That would be not just benchmarks for the sake of benchmarks, but finding something that's actually useful to help us quantify each of these sections and determining what that is. So I don't know if that's something that the working groups, the subgroups should be thinking about if we're interested in including that on each page. That would be my recommendation. So those benchmarks would fit within the strategies? Is that what you're saying, Stephanie? So within strategies or goals? They need to relate to the strategies. Yeah, they need to relate to the strategies and what we're trying to accomplish. But I think they fit within this overview page that Mike is talking about for each chapter. Could we have them in both locations just so that they're clearly associated with the strategies as part of the database within the template? I mean, some of the chapters do have benchmarks, but their benchmarks are directly related to at least specific goals, if not strategies. Is it possible to include those in the template? I think it depends on what it is. We certainly can. I can add in discussions on any item, really. I just put together those, because I suppose we're kind of the basic ones. And if we wanted to have, I think we should have whatever it is, it'll probably be a very short discussion. If we're talking about aspirations and goals and we're talking about how we're implementing those goals, we can also have a discussion of an introduction to the benchmarks. You know, the energy committee will continue to track these metrics as they are important in determining. So just an overview. Produced from certain things. So the the benchmarks discussion within this section, within this what you're calling the chapter then, is it would just be a general overview. But the specific benchmarks would be entered into the template and then into the database. Because that's how we came up with the benchmarks. I mean, we don't have them all for energy, but that was it was a lot of effort. Yeah, I think it's going to come up a little bit depending on where we get to in developing. I mean, if we use, say, the R-Cov, those are really kind of designed to have some of these links. So it could be more of a live, and this would be a question from a legal standpoint, whether you can have live links in your plan, because your plan is supposed to be more of a static document of a point in time. And you have these goals, but I don't know, I don't see why we couldn't bend the envelope and put in something that says, hey, here's our benchmark. And it's automatically linked to the VEIC tracker for certain metrics. And therefore, if you were to go to the energy page and scroll down, you would see the energy benchmarks, and it would actually have over time, are we, how many houses have been weatherized every year? If that's one of our things, our goal is, if our target is we should be weatherizing 100 homes every year. And we can get data that automatically uploads every year from efficiency per month, and we could just link to their dataset, it'll automatically download into ours. And we would automatically have these targeting across that would go through and say we did 65 this year, and we did 110 next year or whatever. That would be really helpful. In the template and the database, I think is where we describe what the benchmark is, or maybe highlight what we want the goal to be, but in the actual plan overview and section, that's where we could try to have the dynamic updating the actual measure itself rather than say what we want to measure and then not measure it. Yeah. And I think it'd be interesting to hear from the state and some other folks as to, you know, I would love to see us be able to do the dynamic measuring within the plan. I just don't know. Is it possible? Yeah. In a city full of lawyers, it's always suspect to get ourselves in a position where, you know, we aren't making this a PDF plan. So we don't, you know, it's not a fixed in time document. And so I think some people may have concerns about that from a legal standpoint, because it is adopted by the city council. And if it's adopted by the city council with a dynamic link, doesn't that change the adopted plan when that gets, and that's that I think is just a legal question. And could we put a line in the sand that goes and says here's the adopted plan. And below this line is the dynamic benchmarks. Therefore, there's a clear delineation. I think there may be ways we can play with things, but nobody's done this before. So I think we'll have to work through a few potential areas where we either clearly recognize that this this is a dynamic benchmark and therefore is not technically part of the plan. That would be it's be so incredibly useful to be able to have it be dynamic like that, especially when we have tight, tight limit timelines for the energy plan, for example, that as to know how we're doing as we're going along would be incredibly helpful if it can be done. I mean, it sounds pretty complex, but you can do anything, right, Mike? I'm just yeah, I mean, in certain cases, I'm just trying to make a great plan. And if the more ideas we can come together to make it, you know, this web plan is going to be new and different. And if we can come up with good, good, good ways of doing things, you know, we'll make it happen. And I think for some of them, we can be probably really easily automated. Others, if they're just being updated once a year, and we know where those data sources are, then it shouldn't be a big deal as long as we make a point of it to update that as simple as putting creating a Google sheet that we pull from updating that every year. Somebody has to do that. Yeah, just have a calendar reminder that pops up for probably me or somebody in my office to go and start to go through and, you know, whether it's unemployment data or, you know, whatever, whatever the metric is and whatever the chapter is, we just have to know to go through and make that addition to the benchmarks. Or, like, our first meeting every January can be one where we update everything and take stock or something. So, yeah, we'll leave the, as I said, I'll leave, then, sure, everybody hadn't really had a chance to go through the historic resources chapter that I wrote, but in some cases, yeah, I mean, read through it and see if it looks good, but does it, you know, is it too in depth, not in depth enough? Because what I really want to do is just to get a feel for, you know, not necessarily going through and correcting punctuation and stuff like that, but just kind of getting a feel for, are we going in the right direction? We got a good idea. This is what we're looking for, because I don't want to write out 12 chapters and then delete the same section out of every single one of these. We're kind of looking for a template, so I know what to build, and then we can all review that and make the edits and changes, but the goal is to come up with a chapter of about 1,000 to 1,500 words, and it's going to cover these headers, these topic areas, and that way it'll be consistent throughout each web page. We'll have those same headers, those same things we'll kind of transfer across. All right, is that it? I think so. Okay. Moving on. Continued discussion of the removal of residential density caps and the unified development zoning regulations. So I do know this was a bit of Kirby's one that he was kind of putting out there for people to consider, and I know when he sent me an email yesterday, he mentioned that he wasn't sure how much everybody wanted to get into this if he wasn't going to be there to kind of direct it, but we certainly, if we are all here, if we've got questions or ideas or thoughts that have come up over the last two weeks, certainly would be open to start hearing them. I'm trying to remember, I guess I could check the minutes. So we just moved the parking further on. That wasn't on, it's not on the agenda for today. Right, parking was just moved on. I guess John and Stephanie and you guys weren't there at the last meeting. So do you guys have questions or do you want a quick update on where this was coming from and going to? A quick update would be helpful as long as that's not annoying for those who were here last time. Yeah, so the new, yeah, the new discussion on the residential, removing the residential density caps. So this, Kirby kind of brought this up to discuss whether or not it made sense to start looking at the idea of, you know, if we've got the good, and he had the links to those documents that he had sent around. And that was one of the suggestions, which was if you've got good bulk and massing requirements, does it make sense to start to remove those density requirements? And this kind of especially dovetailed with the parking discussion, because really, if we didn't have parking requirements, that's really the only external impact that a change in, you know, if somebody had a single family home and went to a four unit building, if it was all within the same box, it really would have no impact on the neighborhood. But for potentially parking, there could be, you know, four additional cars. But the idea was we would be able to open up more possibilities potentially in our downtown, in some of our neighborhoods, if we didn't have these requirements, because in some cases, it may be an artificial limit on things where somebody could fit more smaller units, rather than going with, you know, two or three bedroom units. And some of this came out of a conversation actually in South Burlington. They were talking about this exact idea, taking out the density, because if you had, you know, say a building that you could fit 10 studio apartments in. And that's really where the market is. The market wants to see studios and one bedrooms. There's not enough of them in the market. So we could fit 10 of them in here. But the density requirement in that district is only allows us to have six or seven. Well, then you may go in and put six or seven two bedroom units, because you're going to get more money. We're going to still maximize our bulk and massing when we build this new development. And we'll put in the two bedroom units, which really isn't what the market wants, but you're going to get more money. And therefore, it pays for itself. The development pays for itself better. And so it kind of artificially pushes to less units with more bedrooms rather than maybe what the market wants, which is a number of smaller single units. But what matters for character of the area really is how much, you know, how big the building is, the bulk and the massing and the amount of setbacks and all of those other requirements that we already that we already regulate. So that's a little bit of where Kirby was kind of pushing, why don't we head down this, this avenue? Mike, I had a question. So by taking out density does not mean that we would take the FAR out, right? Floor area ratio would still be part of it, because that's a big part of the massing. Right. Okay, fine. Yeah, because that's, that's how the non non residential is regulated. Right. Right. And again, there's an FAR value in the residential as well. So to some extent, it controls the size of the building if it was a new building. Footprint. Footprint. Yes. Footprint and FAR together. Yeah. Well, I'm just for reference, I after our meeting last time, I did look at some hypotheticals using all of the requirements in a, I think it was our 3000 zone, using all the requirements except for density. And it certainly did seem clear that more units could be added in. I certainly feel a lot more comfortable about this with existing buildings. But I think the reality of the construction market is that we're looking predominantly at existing buildings anyway. We don't have very many open sites in Montpelier. And what I, what became clear from my discussions with multiple developers was that the cost of construction pretty much precludes new construction at this point. No matter how many units you put in it, apparently. And I learned a lot about ADUs as a result of this too. So the opportunities for us to put ADUs into existing buildings certainly helps us to add significant number of units. The real issue that came up, which may end up being a limiting factor, which I think we should know about even though it's not something that we regulate, is what our current sprinkler codes is. Which is that if we put multiple units in an existing building, each one of them has to have a separate entrance and exit. So it's, it becomes more complicated in terms of that. You know, they have to have their own stairway. They have to have their own entrance door. And they have to be separated from other parts of the building with a fire resistance rating. So when you start looking at that, it does become more complicated. But it doesn't really have to do with the, with the density necessary, necessarily. You would still need to get a permit, right? It would just, it would just be approved. Yeah. Yeah. And the part that really surprised me, because I've been over the sprinkler, I was involved when they changed the sprinkler ordinance, and I've been over it a million times, and I still can't quite find this, but Chris Lumber says that any number of units could be added to an existing building. That was his latest email to me, Mike, if you saw that, without having to sprinkler the building, existing residential building without having to sprinkler. So that's huge. That certainly makes it more, much more affordable to work within an existing building than, than necessarily adding a new building. So I, in other words, I've softened my position on this, if you couldn't tell, because I was really pleased to see that, that the other requirements really did control scale and massing. Yeah. And I think that would be the key that we would have to look at. We've got good standards because the thing we got kind of beat up on a little bit when it went to public hearing the last time was the argument of the tear down. Of course, we can argue that there's nobody who can afford to tear down and rebuild. But that was the argument was that people will find, you know, maybe a property or two properties with a, with a small ranch and they're going to tear down that house and they're going to build the giant monstrosity. And that's, you know, I just think the reality of the market is it's, you're not going to, you're not going to buy a $300,000 house to tear it down. I mean, it happens, but I don't think our market is such that you could afford to tear that down and build something new and make money. And the other requirements would keep you from building some large building that was out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood, which I think was a big concern. A lot of the, a lot of our beating up had to do with putting buildings that were not appropriate into neighborhoods. So, yes. So it's going to be really critical in terms of how this is presented to the public. And I think examples would be really helpful. You know, the kinds of graphics that, that Randy, Randy put together when we were doing the zoning were really helpful for people to be able to visualize. So if, if we decided to do that, we couldn't just sprint it. Yeah, I think another thing that could be powerful or helpful is, I'm going to attend this in talks before. So I think I actually have photos from around Montpelier, but it's the show of a photo from the street of, you know, a home or her structure and then ask people to guess what the density is. And I think I have maybe a dozen or 20 examples and, you know, it can range from, from like, half of, you know, one unit an acre to 40 units an acre and people can't tell the difference. And I think that like really illustrates the point where it's, or it becomes less abstract when you're just looking at a building and, and you, it becomes when you go through 20 of them, then you realize like, oh, this is really a meaningless or this measure does not mean as much as maybe I thought I did, you know. Yeah, actually something that could be contained within the, the document itself might have, you know, more to do with comparative drawings, which is similar to some of the stuff that we have in the zoning right now. So I think both would help, you know, your, your formal presentation to would be really useful, John, from that standpoint, and then to kind of carry that on into the actual document because of all the people who won't see that presentation is going to be important too. I think even if it's not something that ends up going town or citywide, it may be something that starts to roll out and starts to grow. I mean, currently, that's what urban center one, urban center two and urban center three, they don't have any density requirements, they only have bulk and massing, and they also don't have parking requirements. So that's pretty much the start of what we're talking about. And if we started to grow that out a little bit, we know residential 1500 doesn't have parking requirements, but you know, whether these are two, two of the same things that we're doing or whether we're just doing the density, it's something that we can certainly keep rolling out neighborhood to neighborhood to kind of kind of grow that out to some other places where we stop regulating density in some of these other other neighborhoods. But I think it would be more challenging to go and not have a density requirement out in the rural district. Or, maybe in a couple of the residential 9,000 areas, it may be a little bit more challenging because the houses were bigger. So the bulk and massing requirements are bigger. So it's actually easier to put an eight unit building out on terrace street because the bulk and massing would let you do it. Now that may not be a bad thing. That's policy question, but that's what we would have to kind of consider and whether the public would support something like that. But I think the public would support certainly in these closer to downtown areas, the ability for a developer to go through and either convert, you know, I've got two, three bedroom apartments and I think I'd be having easier time renting them out if I had five studios or six studios. That's, you know, that's up to the developer to decide what's the best way for them to subdivide that building. And I think the public would support that. Well, maybe. I'm not guaranteeing that one. No, I can probably find a couple of people that I know for sure. I have this vivid memory of some of the comments that were made at zoning. So I can imagine exactly who would probably not really feel it same way. Mike, I would guarantee I would, as long as something is changing, I will get, I will, I will get an earful from, from certain people and the irony would be that they would be defending the, the bylaws that they didn't like the first time. They don't want those to change now. Yeah, they worked out okay. So. Isn't it like the only thing that, that like brings like Democrats and Republicans together is their hatred of density? I'd say there's probably. They're changing zoning. Yeah, zoning and bring everybody together. Yeah, I think, I think it would, you know, in, in, in the same way that I think last time there was, there were opponents to the zoning changes when we went to the 90% density rule, there, it wasn't universally supported, but at the same time when it got to city council, the idea kind of went through pretty, pretty handily, even though it did get a lot of comments from the public and in the paper. But I think the same concept would have the same thing. It would get a lot of people concerned. Bad things could happen, but really they're pretty low chance of those bad things happening and in exchange you have the opportunity for good things to happen and that's what we hope is that the changes would result in good things happening. We'd have to really focus on hypotheticals for the good things to happen because people can visualize in their own heads all the bad things. So let's have some good examples of this could work really well in order to, to mitigate that. So what would be the next step for considering this? Like would we go through which, I mean, does somebody have a proposal for which zoning districts or, or an idea or do we go through them or? I think it was Herbie's kind of his, his idea and I don't think he was necessarily making a proposal that he wanted to see, you know, making a zoning amendment right now. I think he just wanted to start to have that conversation. He thought it was important because we're going to be heading into conversations. You know, it just like John's conversation for parking is going to affect how we write our transportation plan and I think Herbie was kind of thinking ahead to the land use plan and thinking land use housing plan. Let's think about what we want to, you know, what changes we would want to make not necessarily that we're going to put those zoning changes in effect right now, but that we should start having them and having those conversations in the context of our land use plan and these other plans going forward and then hopefully in his view maybe in the fall or the next time we have the zoning opened for amendments, we'll bring back up the parking and we'll bring back up the residential densities and see where, where we end up. So would we want to include goals in the transportation and housing sections regarding this? I mean, do we feel like we want to go that far because that certainly shows our intention and it's not in there now? No, I think these would be strategies, you know, and I think it's a strategy for accomplishing a goal and, you know, if if it makes sense, you know, going back to John's proposal for the parking, we wanted to remove parking from some or all the zoning districts, then it's a, you know, it's a strategy towards accomplishing the goal of not, of having a community where, you know, having an automobile is not a requirement. And, you know, if it's not a necessity, you know, if we're trying to have a community where it's, you don't have to have a car, you can live in Montpelier and not have a car and, and that's okay because our community is set up for alternative transportation and public transportation and you can do all these things without having that car. And if that's our goal, then why should we have a requirement that every house have a parking space if our goal is, you know, so, so here's a recommendation in our, in our strategy to, and it may just say consider. Yeah. It may not be as hard as going and saying in the, in the city plan, we will remove the parking requirements, may go say that the city should consider removing the parking requirements for some or all zoning districts in order to facilitate this objective. We just have to make sure that all of the other strategies do in fact make it possible to live without the car so that we haven't, you know, pulled one, one end up being the ends up being dependent upon the others. So we have to make sure that in fact that's true. But yeah, I would be in favor of saying consider just because we don't want to throw a wrench into this process of the city plan. Kirby was saying something different that he was saying, if we can move on something now, let's move on it. That's what I heard him saying in previous meetings, but you know, and I don't want to give a broad update to Stephanie about the parking discussion from last meeting, because I don't know that I can encapsulate everyone's perspective, but I felt like it was pretty, we were pretty divided and on that discussion. And there were some about strong feelings. So I would definitely not, you know, I would like to bring that up again, but I don't think we're ready to move on that. But it seems like, and I guess it is intertwined with this, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of, I don't hear a lot of negative feedback from other commissioners about this. So it seems like it's potentially a thing we could move on now, which I think would be, I mean, I'm in support of Kirby's, what I heard Kirby say, just if we can move on something, why wait and why put it, you know, in the city plan, just do it. I'm just, I'm just really worried that if we were to go ahead and get it open up that Pandora's box, then, you know, it may sidetrack the city plan. You know, it'd be great to get the city plan done and then move on to these, you know, potential zoning changes. It's, we could be another eight years doing, doing this one city plan. And I think Mike would not be happy about that. Yeah, I mean, I think Kirby had, I think you're right. Kirby did mention it, but it does require us, we would have to go through and re-warn and redo things. And I think we would be wanting to wait a little bit, but we can wait till Kirby gets back. Certainly it's not my call to make. If you guys wanted to warn another public hearing, that's certainly within your authority to do that. So we can wait till Kirby gets back and see how he wants to move on it. But if people are generally positive towards this idea or at least worth exploring it further, then I guess that's, that's, that would be something I think Kirby would be looking for. If we've got general positivity towards this, then it's something that we can start looking at. What are the consequences? What are the other things that we would have to consider? Like I said, we could still require a permit. We can still have a parking requirement, in which case anyone who complains that, well, this is going to have, you know, go from two units to four units going to have too many cars. It's like, well, we still have a parking requirement. So you still need a permit. We're just not going to regulate whether you can go two to four as long as you can show you've got, as long as you show you've got the parking spaces, then you can internally subdivide it and get the permit. As, yeah, as long as you can get a building permit, which is, yeah, not it, it's not going to be easy. That's not going to be easy. You know, I have a question about that, Mike, in looking at the ADUs that, isn't it every time you add an ADU, you have to have a sewer hookup fee? So if you went from one unit to four units, would you have three additional sewer hookup fees, even though there's only one sewer line from the house? It's complicated and I don't have all the answers, but I do know there's a state rule, it's either a state rulemaking process that's going through right now, or it's a state statutory change that's going through right now, because that, that has been brought to the attention of the state that that has been a barrier, because it's the state that takes most of those fees. It's not, it's levied by the city. Yeah, there's a city one and there's a, then there's a state one. Yeah. I mean, the city one is pretty substantial. So that's why I thought maybe that was the one that goes to the state. But anyway, regardless, those are some of the issues that come up. Yeah. Yeah. And we, those are pieces that we are learning as we're doing the ADU pilot program that we're doing is all of the barriers to doing these. And we're lining them all up and we'll probably make a presentation at some point to the housing task force, so they can start to identify what, you know, what are the parties that we need to address this with. In some cases, in some cases, it can be complicated. So there may be a hookup fee if it's a separate, in a separate structure, as opposed to a subdivision within the structure itself. Yeah, structure itself. Yeah. Well, yeah, I had a long discussion with Taylor Moss from the House State Housing Authority about the ADU program. So he was kind of filling me on some of the federal regulations, which are certainly very limiting. So something else that we might want to be considering is if we want to have incentives that we might not necessarily go through the federal government to get those incentives. Things like that. Almost guaranteed not to use federal funds ever again on those projects. It sounded nice, you know, $20,000 unit. That sounds really nice. But $20,000 in unit, then we'll use $15,000 of it to go through and do all of the lead abatement and historic preservation and study. Environmental assessment. Environmental assessments and phase two assessments. And even though it was in the same building, but even though it was inside the same building. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you got to put a new door in on the side of your building, then it's going to change the historic character of the historic building. And therefore you need a section 106 report certified by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Let's find other incentives. Yeah. All of that felt a little too real to me. Funding that I deal with constantly. I bet. Archeology. Yeah. And these were people, we were just trying to do these small little projects to put in it, you know, hey, we'll give you $20,000 to do an ADU and we're doing archaeology and you're like, oh. $3,000 archaeology. Yeah. Yeah. $7,000 for the EA. Yeah. Not worth it. Yeah. Yeah. So that was our determination was that we just need different funding. And so we're hoping that if the state does a bond that maybe we can get a portion of that bond allocated to not only Montpelier, but all communities because state money then wouldn't have all those hangups to it. And we could maybe be able to provide these either grants or, you know, we like our system of doing the 0% mortgages. Those work really well. The state doesn't always like those, but those work really well locally. Why not? Why does the state object to them? I don't know. It's different. It's not something that they're used to. They're used to either doing grants or loans. And I think doing a 0% mortgage is just not something that they're used to doing, but it may be just one that they've got to learn the advantages of and maybe they'll come around to the concept. But somebody has to own that mortgage and track that mortgage and that becomes part of the, you know, it's easier for the municipality because we've got all this stuff tracked and it's all in the land records. And when somebody goes and sells a house, we're right here to go through and follow up with somebody. But even anybody putting in an ADU under the federal program would still need financing. So it seems like they shouldn't really care what the interest rate is. But Oh, ours is, no, what we do for a lot of ours is we'll do a 0%. Like if you do a first-time home buyer or you do a housing preservation loan, those we will give you $10,000. And what we do is give you a 0% loan payable upon sale of the property. So you could live in that house for another 25 years and not pay a dime on the mortgage that you owe the city. But when you sell the house, then we're going to get our $10,000 back as proceeds of that mortgage. So it's a way for a lot of people to, especially if you don't have the money or you can't afford to pay the money back, it's a great way for energy improvements or first-time home buyer or a number of programs to help people out because it, you just owe us the money, but you know, we're giving you free money for as long as you live here. And if your house, if it appreciates in value, you still just owe the city what the amount of money that they put out. Yeah, the risk for the city is only in a depreciating market that we would end up being second in the mortgage. And so if somebody short sells their property, then we're SOL, but it happens very, very rarely in Montpelier. Totally, yeah. I can't think of any. Well, sorry for that aside, but that was really interesting, Mike. Thanks. So we'll just, we'll pass this along. We'll, you know, when Kirby gets back, we'll put this back on the agenda again to just talk about and we'll see when we work that, work it in. And we can have a conversation about when, if we want to start having those conversations, but we will have to start looking and thinking about what some of the other implications could be because we don't want to jump into, I mean, it's a substantial change to go through and say we're not going to regulate density. And we really have to make sure that we've thought about all of those unintended consequences that might be out there that we don't trip over something inadvertently. So we'll have to think through, but I think it's good. All right. So is there anything else anybody wants to talk about? Looks like a short meeting, everybody. As for unanimous consent to adjourn the meeting, we're adjourned. Thanks everybody. Good job facilitating chair. Just read what's in front of me. Thanks, everyone. Have a good night. All right. Thanks a lot, everybody.