 All right, we're open to attendees and we're recording. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure none of our committee members were in the audience. Dave, I just wanted to let you know that Dave has another meeting now and so he's going to be late Dave so much. Yeah, he thinks he might be here by five, but thank you for that reminder. Okay. And I'll go back to Angela's noted that she might be late as well. Yes. So it is March 31 2022 at 432pm and seeing a quorum of the community resources committee present I am calling this meeting to order pursuant to chapter. This is the last time I get to read this particular one pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. This meeting will be conducted by a remote means members of the public who wish to access this meeting may do so via remote by zoom or telephone. No in person attendance of the members of the public will be permitted but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means in two weeks I get to read a different acts chapter version number and so at this time I'm going to make sure everyone can be heard and we can hear everyone. So I'm just going to call the roll to make sure that happens. Pamery. Here. Jennifer Tom. Here. And almond Jo, t 2pm, so for Athena to be looking, I will also look, but that's the thought for her and both day zoomack and with that we are going to just move into our agenda because as with every CRC meeting, it's probably jam packed. So we have our action items, which are the ZBA appointment recommendations, ZBA handout and the planning board appointment recommendations planning board handout. These handouts are. By the council. Policy on making recommendations need to be reviewed by this committee yearly. And before I put that they are both in the packet. They were modified last year. They were reviewed in March actually nearly a year ago today for both of them. And last year when they were modified, they were reviewed by planning department staff. And so they, unless things have changed between last year and this year regarding planning. Stuff there, the staff themselves have reviewed each of them. And so I can put each one on up on the screen if people would like to see them on the screen, they were in the packet or we can just talk about the one we'll start with since I listed ZBA first, I guess we'll start with the ZBA one. And, you know, and, and see if there are any questions, thoughts. Or requests for changes regarding any of these shallony ZBA we're talking about. Yes. So I probably know the answer, but I want to make sure I know the answer that what is the different purposes of these handouts? One is maybe for people who are applying. I imagine that so that they understand the scope of the work and all. And is that, is there any other reason for these handouts on, and how are they used and distributed? So they are both on, I believe the CRC webpage. And they're, I think both accessible from either the ZBA or the planning board webpage, depending on which one it is. And they are used in this recommendation process. They are sent out to the candidates. The applicants at the time the statements of interest are solicited. And so any current applicant who is in the applicant pool at the time we declare the applicant pool. And so that's, that's, that's, that's sufficient to move forward toward two interviews. At that point in time, then statements of interest are solicited. And when the statements of interest are solicited, this. For ZBA, the ZBA handout will get sent to them for planning board, the planning board handout will get sent to them and its intention. This was created. This. Item was started by outreach communications and appointments and the intention was to sort of have one place where. People could find information if they didn't know where to find information that we would actually hand them something that says, here's the website, here's when the meetings are, here's this to help give them all a sort of similar base of knowledge as they start filling out the statement of interest. Jennifer. I just want to note that Pat has just joined us. Pat, can you hear us? Yes. Excellent. Thank you. So I just had a question. This might be pre COVID, but it says, you know, under the links, I guess it's like. The fourth paragraph at this time meetings are not live broadcast nor video recorded, but our audio tape by staff. Can ZBA meeting still be zoomed into by the public? Um, So I believe ZBA Chris might be able to answer this, but I believe ZBA is still on zoom. Chris, do you know? Yes. CBA and planning board are still on zoom. And I understand they're not planning to change that anytime soon unless they're required to change it. Okay. And so these were done obviously middle of COVID since their revised periods are a year ago, but we tried to not make them COVID specific since we didn't know what would be the outcome of COVID. And things. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have comments on the content per se, but more the organization of it. And if you could just have, I made some arrangements around. Piece of paper, but basically it was like the overview had a summary of this is a quasi judicial board and under chapter this and they basically work on hearings related to special permit. So that paragraph goes up and then just breaking up with subheadings. Like, I just put the way I read things, but of course you all can make it more, but the idea being that it's easily accessible to people who are reading it. And so it'll be like, what is, what does ZBA work on? And that's all the part that says they, they, between meetings, they visit side visits, they do this, they do that. So like what is, what do they work on? Then how are the ZBA decisions made, which is about that voting things that are required. When do they meet? And where and how public can find out about the ZBA meetings. So kind of just took the same information, but group them together and put subheadings like. Does what Shalini just described as a possible change sound. Good to people. Was that something that people would like to see? Sure. I think that's something I can probably do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to the planning board one. Shalini. Were you thinking of the same thing to happen? The planning board one. Exactly. Yeah. You want me to just send you with the rearrangement. We have to vote on this. I think it was again, just review it every year to make sure that these are up to date. Right. When I did it last year, it was like, Oh, there's a couple of things that aren't quite up to date right now. So I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. Policy is to make sure we do look at it every year instead of just, I'll just send it out five years in a row without ever beating it ourselves. Chris. So would I have an opportunity to review them? I did not before this meeting. And it would be good if I could review them. Yep. Yeah, I will make sure they get reviewed. I think I did that last year. Chris has sent them to your office. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing after I regroup, I will do the same. I'm just going to interrupt to say that I am, I have a hard stop at six 30. Because my Jesse and his wife are here. So. You're taking your two hour break. We thank you for that. I plan on having us out before six 30. Yeah. I have the district slash office hours meeting at six 32. Yeah. Just last thing. I'm glad that Chris spoke up about feedback from her and I'm just guessing, assuming that planning board and ZBA have also offered their comments to these documents. Would you like me to send them to the chair of the planning board in the ZBA? Mandy. That would be great. Let me get you the revised regrouped one, although the regrouping will just be. I'm not going to rewrite anything. I'm just going to regroup. So if you'd, if you want to start now by just sending them the current ones that are in the packet. And if you want word versions. I don't know whether I put the word versions in the packet or not. Let me know. Okay. If they aren't. Andy, do you have a return date? So do you have some feedback by a certain time? So these won't go out until we've declared the. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good for each of the bodies sufficient to move towards interviews. So. If the planning board chair could get it back by maybe the April 14th deadline, the April 14th meeting. And at this point, ZBA by the April 28th meeting. Earlier is obviously better. But yeah, thanks. Thanks for that, Pam. I'm just going to say that the dates are. Whether those dates hold in terms of seeking agenda items for declaring pool sufficient. I don't know, but. That, that's a possibility for planning board on April 14th. But at this point, it's not a possibility for ZBA on April 14th. So. Okay. Anything else on the handouts. Excellent. We're right on time with my timing. So we're going to move on. Okay. Okay. Why did you say that? We're actually early, but I didn't say that. So I, I, I picked my timing where I'm going to keep to these, whether we're done or not. For some of these, because we could talk about zoning priority matrixes forever. And so we are going to spend no more than 60 minutes on discussion item zoning priority matrix. And then we're going to move on to the next item. And then we're going to move on to the next item. When I get there, but what I would like us to do is to. First, we're going to do this in a, in an interesting order. And again, as I said last time, this is more of a ongoing discussion item. Where we're hoping to be able to buy the time. The planning department might have additional time beyond what they're already working on. So we're going to have an idea of where the council's next priorities lie in terms of planning department zoning by law work. So again, this is a month's long process. It's not and, and it obviously will have to go through the council at some point too. We're just trying to get some information to be able to take to the council and all. And so what I'm hoping to get to today is I had asked Chris to. In one of our prior discussions about the comprehensive housing policy, we had asked that maybe it would be helpful for the planning department to bring forth five or six potential zoning. Changes or sections of the zoning by law that might be most useful to look at in order to accomplish the comprehensive housing policy goals. So first we're going to hear from Chris if she's got them to see if we need to add anything to the zoning priorities list that we have in the matrix based on that. And then we're going to talk to then I'll ask the rest of the committee if there's anything missing from the list that they thought should be on this list. And then we're going to work towards the impact on town council goals. There were four goals listed. At that point I'm going to ask us to add a fifth one or a set of goals, which is the housing comprehensive housing policy policy. So we're going to start filling in the matrix. But then we'll work our way through this list with a low, medium, high determination on each one of these zoning priorities on the impact on the council goals as a committee. So we're going to start filling in the matrix. With those impacts. We'll see how far we get in an hour. I don't expect us to finish in an hour. And then. We'll think about next steps at that point, you know, whether we bring this back or whether we ask at that point, the staff to indicate staff priorities, town resources, and all now or when we've gotten through other things. So that's the work plan for the next hour or so. On this, I'm going to share this, my screen so that. We can actually, I plan on. Editing this document as people talk. So I'm going to go ahead and share this with you. I'm going to go ahead and share this with you. I think this is the goal so that we can see everything. It might not look pretty as I add lines, because it's got some very nice coloring right now. So I'm not going to worry about that. But I want to thank. Shalini who provided it. I think she might have consulted Pam Rooney. In getting some of the information in this. So thank you guys for doing. The start of all of this work. And with that, are there any questions before I go to Chris? So. Oh, and, and Rob is not there. I just want to let Rob know when we finish this, we'll move on to the work plan for Rob. So I think this will take at least an hour. So we're looking at 545 for Rob. So that he has an idea, Jennifer. Yeah, I just wanted to ask so that the color key at the top, is that applied? Bad, good, neutral. Yeah. Yeah. Very. Oh, I see this. I have no idea. Okay. I mean, I guess we could. Or just ignore. I mean, I would ignore that. Yeah, I didn't even see that. So. So Chris. So let me. Preface this by saying. I was focused on the comprehensive housing goals. You know, trying to think about what kinds of zoning amendments would further those goals. I wasn't necessarily thinking about. Planning department goals. So I think that's what you asked me to do, right? And I think we've got some of the planning department goals already on here. So let's start with the comprehensive housing ones you were thinking at. And then once we've added them, because I know those, they're just missing from here. We'll talk about if there's any goals from the planning department that are missing as well as any goals. I think that's a great idea. I think that the next part of the process is to say that I came up with about eight or nine. Strategies. I forgot that you asked me for four or five. So I'll list. Eight or nine or great. A list of five of them. And then we can also list the other ones, but. I think among the ones that I think would be most useful in. Trying to reach the goals of the comprehensive housing policy would be. Creating new tiers of apartment buildings. And that would be in two different. What? Numbers, I guess. Scales. Scales is the word I'm using. Looking for. So. Different tiers of apartment buildings. So right now. Apartment buildings start at three units. And so one way to look at this is to. Peel off apartment buildings that are. Smaller. Such as. Triplexes and quadruplexes. And maybe even going up. Higher to five or six units, but just starting off with triplexes and quadruplexes. And permitting them. In a different way than we would permit larger apartment buildings. So that's something that we've talked to you about before, but those are things that could probably fit in. As infill. In. You know, some of the residential districts. And if we could permit them by site plan review, I think they're generally permitted by. Special permit, but consider permitting them by site plan review. In more residential districts. Some apartments are permitted by. Site plan review in the RVC zoning district. And. Not sure which others. Well. Anyway. That's one of the ideas. Another idea is to, do you want to talk about that? Let's list them all. Okay. And then as we get to the impacts on council goals, we can talk a little bit more about them. Okay. Another one is to. In on a different scale. Create. Tears of apartment buildings, such as. Instead of just lifting the cap on apartment buildings completely. Creating a class one and a class two apartment building. That's bigger than triplexes and quadruplexes. And those could be apartment buildings. That would go up to 24. Units in the building. So right now we have a cap of 24 units. On an apartment building. And if we could say. Well. An apartment building of up to 25. Units would be considered a class one apartment building. And then a class two apartment building would be. 24 units and up. And so you would have different. Types of. Permitting. In different zoning districts for those two. Types of. Apartment buildings. And I think, you know, that's one of the things that scared people. When we proposed to lift the cap on apartment buildings completely. They envisioned, you know, all kinds of munched monstrous buildings. So if we could be clearer about. Limiting the size of these. Class one is up to 24 units. Class two is over 24 units. That might help us to. Allow them to be located in the apartment building. And so that's one of the things that we did. And so that's one of the things that we did. And the last one is up to 24 units. Class two is over 24 units. That might help us to. Allow them to be located in more places without. You know, causing people to stress. Another one would be to. Allow. Small apartment and townhouse developments. Up to a certain size. You know, when people hear of apartment. Developments and townhouse developments, they might fear that these are going to be huge developments, but they don't have to be like, I'm thinking of two townhouse developments that I think fit in very well with their surroundings. One is the knickerbocker apartments. I think it's owned by Hilda green bounce family, which sits in the. District over by Canton Ave. It's in the RG district, but it's kind of on the edge. I think it's got either eight or 11 units. I'm not sure, but it fits really well in there. And that's the type of townhouse development that could fit in. Other potentially other residential districts. Another one is what not Watson farms, but the main street housing, which is on main street. It's just near where the, where they're doing all that work on the utility lines. But that's sale on place. It's not sale on place. It's south on the south side of main street. The buildings look like kind of Victorian townhouses. And they're kind of a group greenish color. And that type of development, that's 11 units there. And that could fit very nicely in a residential district. And that, along with a small apartment building, you know, you know, you know, you know, you could be able to be allowed in more places. Just because we have a limit on the size of them. Another one is. And I talked to Mandy Joe and others about this a couple of weeks ago. To allow owner occupied duplexes to be built by right. In more residential zoning districts. So right now. They're not allowed to live in the RG. But beyond that, in the residential neighborhood, residential outlying and residential low density. They're only allowed by special permit. And they're not, and I was going to do some research to find out, but they're not allowed. In the aquifer recharge protection district. So anyway, allowing more, allowing owner occupied duplexes to be approved by, they're not allowed in the residential neighborhood. And they're not allowed to live in the place where they live. So it's kind of a big issue in those outlying districts might make sense. And then another one is to reduce the lot size for single family homes and owner occupied duplexes in residential zoning districts. And. Right now, you know, we have pretty big lot sizes. Designated for. Our n, R o and R L D. and RLD is 80,000. So, you know, we could think about altering the lot size, reducing lot sizes in those districts for single family homes and owner occupied duplexes to try to get more housing in. So those were the five that seem to be the most doable, I guess. That seemed to make sense would be and we've talked about this internally in the planning department. We looked at chapter 40R a year or so ago for the downtown and we really weren't that comfortable with what we came up with. So we kind of put it aside. But after thinking about 40R and looking at the East Amherst Village Center, we thought maybe, you know, opening up that conversation again and looking at chapter 40R, which is a smart growth overlay district that might make sense for East Amherst Village Center. And there's a lot of activity happening there now. And I expect that there's going to be a lot of activity happening there in the future. And it's right on Route 9 in southeast street. So it's a place that's kind of at the cross section, at the crossroads. And it might make sense to consider a 40R in that location. And what that would allow is greater density than the zoning, than the underlying zoning allows. But it would also require that affordable units be included. And they usually require, I think it's either 20 or 25% depending on what the rest of the development looks like. So that's more than we would require with our basic inclusionary zoning. So that's one. We'd probably need to hire a technical expert to help us with that one. Another one that we've talked about a lot, but we've never really gotten it off the ground. We need to do some research on this. But there are such things as cottage developments. And I think those were referred to in the market study. And I believe they were also referred to in the Comprehensive Housing Study plan rather. But cottage developments are small houses on either small lots or all on the same lot. They're individual houses, small houses, but they either don't require a lot all by themselves or if they do, the lots are smaller. And those are usually found in or near village centers. So we could consider developing some kind of zoning to allow those to happen. And let's see. This is a hot button, but I'm going to say it anyway, allowing, potentially allowing or exploring, allowing more than four unrelated people to live in a dwelling unit. And I can see everybody's faces are turning red right now, but mine's not. Some peoples are. But anyway, it's not a student house. I was talking to one of the inspectors today, and he said that the the state is actually considering and he didn't think he didn't know if it was going to actually go ahead or not. But he said the state was considering a new use category. And I thought this was interesting. And I don't know if Rob is going to have anything to say about this. But and the new use category would be to recognize the fact that more than four unrelated people can live in a dwelling unit, but to treat it more like a hotel is treated. And it would be required to live up to certain standards, you know, health and safety standards, sprinklers, you know, and the kinds of things that you would expect to find in a hotel. So it would be more well regulated. And it could potentially be approved by a special permit so that it wouldn't be just allowed by right. But that might solve the problem of we know there are dwelling units that have more than four unrelated people in them. And why not try to get a handle on it and actually have a permit that controls it with conditions and then the inspectors can more easily enforce the conditions. Isn't that what four unrelated is? No, four unrelated is if you have a single family house and four unrelated people can live there, nobody really has any control over it except for the police or the fire department. I think that's part of what the rental permitting is trying to get to. Yes. So that may be. Yep. So this idea may not fit into the zoning strategies that we're talking about now. Maybe it fits better into the rental registration that you're talking about with Rob Mora. But I'm just throwing it out there because it was something that I just learned about today. And what else? Oh, the other one was to expand our inclusionary zoning bylaw, which currently excludes standard and cluster subdivisions. And it excludes standard and cluster subdivisions because when we were developing the inclusionary zoning bylaw, we couldn't figure out how to make it easily apply to standard and cluster subdivisions. We thought it was just going to be too complicated. But now that we've, you know, we've passed the inclusionary bylaw, it applies to almost all residential dwelling unit developments. Maybe we want to look at, go back and look at, whether it should apply to standard and cluster subdivisions. It's probably not going to mean a great, a number of increase in dwelling units because there's not that much land that's available to be developed in subdivisions. But, you know, and we do see them now and then, like the Vista Terrace one in South Amherst that's near Atkins has been developed in the last, you know, five or 10 years. So anyway, that's something else that could be considered. So those are the things that occurred to me as I was reading through the Comprehensive Housing Policy. Thank you, Chris. That is a very thoughtful list. So now there's a huge list, I'm sorry, there's a huge list and sorry for all the scrolling. There's a lot of things on the list. The previous agenda looks like that's from the prior zoning priorities that were adopted or sent to the town manager there. And then some things from phase two, things that have been completed. And then some stuff up here in the top is things from the planning department's list when we first started this conversation is to where the status of some zoning updates were, I believe is where that came from. With this set one being, correct me if I'm wrong, Shalini, one was the first six months, what is currently being working on from the list you saw. And then two was potentially the next phase. Those came directly from Christine's list that she provided to both the CRC I think in the planning board. And I think the ones were the current ones and the twos were the futures, right? Correct. So are there anything, does anyone see in this column B something missing that has been mentioned in a document somewhere? Can I raise my hand? There are only five of us. I was going to make sure that we just mentioned that we put the rental permitting bylaw under the CRC permits. And I'm not sure that shows on maybe that's my updated spreadsheet. So it doesn't show. But we certainly would want to add on the newly assigned rental permitting bylaw to the CRC. And I'm really glad that Christine added all of the housing policy implementation ones because that was missing. That really needs to be a high priority. If I could speak just for a second on the ones that are on the list, I would love to just emphasize the importance of the solar bylaw and the design guidelines. Design guidelines have been talked about for over a year and a half. So getting those rolling would be a really, really good thing. And then the parking, assessing all of the garage sites, and the boat with capacity is also a very high priority. I think we're at the point where we really need to have that conversation. And then I think in the, your fate. Can I stop you for a second, Pam? Right now we're making sure we have everything listed. We will talk, we will get to priority thoughts later. I'm trying to organize this conversation so that we don't drift too far and we have things. So I appreciate you stating where you think your, where your priorities are and all. But can you hold those thoughts off for later and let's deal with whether we've missed anything. Was there anything else that you were going to say that we missed, Pam? Nope. Okay. Sorry for cutting you off. I'm trying to have an organized conversation so that we, we get through things in an orderly manner. Anyone else have anything they would like to add to anything in column B that they didn't see? Basically the list of priorities. See none, we're going to move on to Shalini. Do we have economic development here? So is that a zoning? We're looking at zoning. Yeah. I mean, is there anything really, I don't know. And that's, it requires an exploration whether there's anything we can do with respect to zoning. I don't know anything off hand, but are there, I mean, and that's the point is that we haven't looked at it to see if something can be done. Well, praise the time's up. Thank you. So I have no answer to that. So may I speak just for a minute? Yes. Yeah. So one thing that I keep hearing from people, specifically landowners who own land in the professional research park is that it's hard to develop there and that it's also hard to limit the development or I shouldn't say that it's hard to find tenants or developers who want to do anything in the PRP zone. But this particular landowner that I've been talking to seem to think that if it were possible to mix housing and other things in the PRP, whether it's housing in offices or housing in professional, I guess that would be offices as well. But just to make the PRP more flexible, because right now it's kind of limited and to potentially add the ability to have mixed use buildings there that could include housing as well as other things. We have a lot of PRP land and we've had it for decades and not much of it has been developed for anything except housing actually. Thank you. Seeing no other hands on the list in column B, we're going to move on to column C, D, E, and F. And what we're going to do is work our way down each of these lists to indicate a low, medium, or high impact on those four goals. And with your permission, I'd like to add a new column G, I think it would be under the impact goals here, comprehensive housing policy. I know we have affordable housing goals, which comes directly from the town manager's goals, but the comprehensive housing policy has five specific goals. I don't know whether this committee wants us to separate out those five goals or not, or whether we just want to put in comprehensive housing policy goals as a sort of fifth column in this impact on goals. And one of the things I thought we'd start with these impacts for, because as we get towards getting towards priorities, we all as a committee have our own ideas of which ones higher priority than others. But one of the suggestions in creating this matrix was to try and go about and actually before we get to name this one as a priority over this one as a priority, look at the impact on the goals that we've already had. So I thought we'd start with identifying those impacts on each one of these. And there may be no impacts, there may be high impacts on all four goals, so that we have something to look at as we've touched on each one of these as we get towards potentially ordering these into some longer priority list. So that's why I suggested we start with those. Pam and then Jennifer. Yeah, so the one, while we're on that topic, C, D, E and F, I had suggested that we say, are we, can we say, do these meet or support Town Council goals impact sounds like it's a negative thing. So do these, do these support Town goals? And if you want to add the comprehensive housing one, affordable housing is actually a subset, as you said, of comprehensive, but it might as well stay. Why not? In terms of community impact, while we're just talking about the headers, I'm not actually sure what that means. In addition to supporting the Town Council goals, I don't know what community impact means. And I think staff priority in this case, we already have some of the staff priority by number ones and two. So that column may not really be necessary, but we haven't had a chance to talk about the overall table yet. Yeah. So I think this isn't the most up to date version. So there are our goals. Affordable housing was threaded throughout the comprehensive housing policy goals. So I'm going to leave them both there since it's affordable housing in the Town Manager goals. And then there's the whole policy. We're not going to deal because I know we haven't talked about the other headings yet. And I also have questions about the community impact header. Jennifer. Yeah. So I also, okay, so community impact goals, for example, that can impact different communities, literally, physically, differently. And I'm thinking also like social justice and equity goals, I think we all would probably share them, but some like you might think low to medium density housing in duplex, I could see that we would say, oh, that advances social justice and equity goals. But the reality is on the ground that all the developer, privately financed duplexes, townhouses, is they are being rented for a very high dollar amount that are not advancing social justice and equity goals. So I think we have to, you know, so I may push back when someone says, you know, oh, yeah, that's great. It's, but when I know that in my neighborhood, they all the new development is renting for $1,000 a bedroom, it's actually in some ways doing the opposite. So I just want to say that not everything's as clear as it appears. That's a good point. When I start typing things down, it might not be a simple level of support, you know, high, medium, low. It might be low, if high, if, right? And we can certainly put some of that into this document as we move forward. So thank you for pointing that out because they may be at cross purposes, depending on who they serve. Chris. So I just wanted to note that most development going forward is going to require an affordable component. So the development on sunset and fearing, it's 17 units, but there are going to be a couple of affordable units there. So although most of the units will be renting for a high rent, a couple of them will be renting for an affordable rent. So that's going to be true of pretty much all the developments except for, you know, things that are purely for students that are in a, in an RF zone or, you know, something like that. I just wanted to remind people of that. Although, yeah, there'll be just two. So I've added to the, does it meet the affordable housing goals outside of the IZ required units? So, so that we're not saying, oh, yes, it does help because well, we have IZ. So in addition to the IZ that we've already adopted, does this do something else? And, okay. So with all of that, we're, I'm going to go down the list. And just start, and again, this is just the start of getting to some sort of priority conversation where we can reference things then. So flood, so flood maps and texts and flood maps bylaw text. I'm going to treat them the same. Climate action, yes. As if they are the same. So, hi on climate action. Chris thought. Yeah, they really reflect, you know, what's happened in the past, but hopefully they will hinder development in those areas so that things won't get worse as a result of development. Yep. Social equity, social justice and equity. So, Mandy, Mandy, I'm thinking that maybe we go through and do highs, you know, where something has a high impact. We could spend hours. That's true. We'll start with the highs for each one. And so flood maps and tests for these other five, are there any other highs? I am not seeing anyone. We're going to move on to solar bylaw assessment and citing. High climate. And social justice too, because it impacts people with lower income. So can someone indicate the impact? Can someone explain to me why the impact on those with lower incomes would be high on a solar bylaw and assessment? I don't. Shalini, you indicated you wanted it high. Yeah, when I was doing the readings and stuff, it felt, one of the things was that when we don't like the fossil, I mean, the fossil fuel industry is generally placed around areas. So we don't have any fossil fuel in Amherst. So production area. So that will not impact. But in terms of even affording the installation of solar or so forth, it's lower income people don't own their houses. And so they're not utilizing solar as much. And they certainly. Yeah. Okay. Chris has some answers. Well, I would say that people of lower income are more have more of an impact when the temperature is really high or when the climate changes, you know, based on flooding or based on just living in a place that's really hot. And maybe we can think of this broader than just Amherst, but if the temperature goes up and sea levels rise, then, you know, poor people throughout the world are going to be suffering from this. So I think it has a kind of a global reach in terms of social justice and equity. And it also is true that, you know, many poor people built their houses in not so great places in the past, which may be close to flooded areas. So, you know, they would not, they would have a problem if places were flooding. So and flooding is brought on by climate change. Yeah. So I mean, that I asked that question because it was one thing I was thinking of mentioning for social justice on flood maps is if we prevent development, you know, given historical developments of where things get built in these more likely to flood regions or more industrialized regions is when low income housing sometimes says it has historically been built near. And so regulating that away from building that can have a high impact, but I'm not sure it gets a high under our three thing for that for either of those two. I would still put it high. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Was that Pat? I just said that's a good point. That's all. Let's put it medium. No, I feel like that one's high. It's a floodplain that was medium. Oh, okay. Yes. Thank you. Okay, hold on. Okay. Are we ready to move on in terms of highs to design standards? Yeah. I'm just going to put climate action. I think it's part of our comprehensive housing policy goals. Also economic high for economic goals. Why is it high for climate action? Because the design standards can include required things like rain soils, rain gardens and stuff like that to address climate action issues. At least in the past, we've talked about including requirements like that into design standards. Right. And could we, I don't know, that's probably not design, but make apartment buildings net solar ready. So even though we're not asking them to put solar, but the roofs need to be stable enough, they need to have spaces. And so just when they're designing the buildings to be designed solar ready. I don't think that's on our list of, I see what you're saying. I think that would be a different change. Well, I think she's saying that it's part of, let's just include it as part of the design guidelines for now, because it's something to consider. Right. So changing some of the stuff in article 14 from temporary to permanent uses. High economic. Yeah. Given that it didn't deal with housing at all. I think that's about it right now. Preservation by law, I'd also say high economic. I think people come to this town to enjoy the historic structures and important. So I'm going to disagree. So I'm going to say high. High for three people and low for tourism. You mentioned it for tourism. Low, because if you're stuck under it, that might be massive amounts of costs to a person that it applies to. And that might be detrimental to their economic stuff. You can apply for CPA funds. Maybe, maybe not. Right. So I think that's one where there might be a mixed impact, depending on whether you're the actual property owner or not. And even for some property owners, it might be a high good thing, but So, yeah, okay. And I just clarify when you say economic goals and high. I mean, basically we're saying that this has high impact on the economic goals, whether it's positively or negatively. And it's in this case, it's both. But regardless, it does have a high impact. So we retitled this level of support or advancement of council goals. So not so aiming for high is in support of everything and low might not be. I think, because many of those things are going to involve competing goals, but as long as it has a high impact and requires discussion, but it's important issue. That's how I'm seeing it anyway. So I would leave it as high. Does it, does the preservation by law have advance any of our comprehensive housing policy goals in theory may depend if it's if it's related to preserving the housing structure, it could possibly advance some of the maintenance portions of the goals, but I'm not sure it's a high advancement. I think that would, and if we're only talking high, I guess it probably wouldn't be high. Okay. It might nominally support the comprehensive housing policy. And same with climate action goals because of potential reuse, right? And in truth, yeah. So I have to say, you know, I know like the local historic district commission, like they said, you don't have to come before them if you're putting solar panels that are flat on the roof, you know, they tried to actually, they went back and changed some of their requirements so that they would be more climate friendly, so to speak. They didn't want to be an impediment to a homeowner being socially environmentally responsible. Yeah. So should we make that medium at least? For sure. Because it could, depending on how it's written. And that might be something when that comes up at our hearing in two weeks, Jennifer, to think about as we're reading through the bylaw. Parking. There's a high economic goal. This is where the community, in fact, was supposed to. Right. And we haven't even decided what we're dealing with the council goals right now. Okay. Again, this is a multi-meeting, multi-step process, right? Chris and Chris. So let me see if I can get back my thought. You had put something about needing a technical expert further down in the list when we were going to talk about chapter 40R. I think we should put that same note for this parking that we would need technical expertise to evaluate this. Thank you. Thanks. And one thing I'm thinking is, Chris, is as we get through this, having, if the planning department is willing, taking at least J and K columns, staff time costs and consultants, and letting you fill those columns out on your own before it comes back to the council, because we don't know that. You know that. So, but feel free to mention ones you know would need that as we go through. But I'm thinking that can be done in a more full manner. Mandy, on my version, on my version, I transported all of the staff names into that staff time column. That column showed up and it's already redundant with what was done slash staff with column L. If someone wants to either take out column J or take out column L, but move the information over, that would be helpful. I've already done it, but apparently this isn't that version. Yeah. We'll talk after the meeting, Pam, to get some of that coordinated. So may I just say with regard to that, I think that what was done in terms of staff, that is related to who was assigned to it and who has been working on it. And that, in my mind, is different from how much staff time is something going to take. Yes. Okay. Yes. Agree with Chris. Yeah. Yeah. So low, medium density housing, duplexes converted, triplets, townhouse, tiered apartments, square footage on one part. Wow, that's a, Chris, that covers many different things. And you conveniently split them out down below. High on all, I think. High on. High climate, high social justice, high economic. High affordable housing and comprehensive policy. Probably high staff time too. Although again, with social justice, I'd say, yeah, I mean, it could be, but not necessarily always in the way we think it would be. Right. I agree. I think that's a good thing to put in brackets because is there a way to invite more housing developers and give some sort of incentives and like that could be a whole discussion. Like how do we incentivize developers to build more workforce housing and so forth because that's a specialty. Like it's not very profitable in the traditional sense, but then there are people who are doing that and how do we attract more of them to come and work in our town. So that could be a discussion. Okay. So this comment depends on and purchase price, purchase or rental cost could also be put to affordable housing too. Yeah. That side because it just depends on that too. Okay. Student housing, which is a very broad vague thing right now. I think it's called, Mandy, Joe, I think it's called Student Housing District is the way it was written. There we go. Yep. And I didn't see it on Chris's list of nine items. So I'm not sure. We're going to leave it here and things might get deleted eventually, but Chris. Right now we have deleted that one from our list because I think it would take a tremendous amount of effort to make that happen. And I'm not sure that it's worth it at this point. Okay. So if they've removed, Shalini. Yeah, please complete. I was going to say if they removed it from the list, we may not desire to fill in the rest of the columns, but we could still just fill in the level of support. And then if it's been removed from a list, it may end up at the very bottom of the priority list. Shalini. Yeah, I think it's something that we have to keep in front of us. I don't want to delete it. We don't have to prioritize if the town doesn't have the staff time to devote to it, but it is an issue that we deal with. So I think it's important to keep it there. And I've marked it as high on comprehensive housing policy goals. And it impacts economic goals too, because when you have more development, it brings in property taxes and like we have 800,000 or whatever coming from downtown or so it does impact. Right. Although it impacts it both ways. Right. It also costs more often to. Right. You know, and if it's displacing businesses, you know, so it. Displacing businesses. The businesses are dying. Okay, that's another whole. Some of us don't think they were dying yet. Yeah. Okay. Group living in larger homes. Chris, is this what you were just mentioning down here of this potential new state created use category? It's related. I'm not sure it's exactly the same thing, but it's certainly related. Yes. Okay. Just keep one or the other. I'm going to right now put. It sounds like it sounds like, you know, sort of assisted living kind of a situation. Maybe we'll need that when we're 70. I don't think we were considering it that way. We were considering it as allowing more people to live together in a unit. And, you know, some of it has to do with large homes that exist in Amherst and they're either being carved up or they're, you know, being lived in by four people, but they could house many more than that. So it's, I think it's worth looking at. So, so it's a, I, if I had to say, was there a high impact on any of these, I would say on the comprehensive housing policy goal. Maybe. Yeah, I also wonder about, I do wonder these infrastructure in these, I'm sorry, the infrastructure in the neighborhoods wasn't necessarily meant for four times as many people to be living on a street. So I, you know, the impacts in terms of climate action, you know, there's, there's two sides to all of this. I mean, if you take a house that was designed for six people and you have like 12 or 15, that that's going to have impacts. Well, if it's closer to downtown and there are more people now living than walking. No, I'm just thinking of just literally the sewer system or the, you know, yeah, so that's not climate, but it's more, well, it would require an update of, it would require an upgrade of sewer infrastructure. Right. So that could be another column, right? Which is the infrastructure. How is it impacting? Well, I think any increase in housing anywhere might impact infrastructure, right? You know, so so we're trying to, we're trying to be able to create something that allows us to differentiate and talk about different things and which ones might accomplish our goals better than others. Which is why I'm struggling with how to deal with the climate action goals there. But it doesn't sound like anyone would think it's got a high impact. So and since we're dealing with highs only right now, we can go back and deal with mediums. We'll move on to breweries, wineries, distilleries. Can I have one question? I do have to add this in terms of climate action. I'm sorry. It could have a high impact in a, you know, harmful way. I know of one street where 40 trees have been cut down because of there may be a potential development. So that wasn't really a positive thing environmentally for the street. This is group living in the larger homes. But wouldn't that be for any development? Yeah. Yeah, there that idea of community impact. I know you didn't want to deal with it, Mandy Jo, right now, but it is a pretty important column. You know, and we can keep going the way we're going, but let's keep going the way we're going and we'll deal with the next time we bring this up, we'll deal specifically with community impact instead of trying to fill in the medium and lows on the goals. Does that sound good so that we can address that column as well? We've got 10 minutes left before we're moving on. So I never expected us to get through this. This is a multi-meeting process. Well, wineries and breweries could have a high impact on economic goals. And that's probably it. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, climate. And marijuana use, buffer zones on site consumption. Probably economic goals. And social justice. It could be social justice. It could be social justice. There's been some talk about who owns the marijuana businesses as a social justice thing. It's true. We also, and I believe that in terms of climate action goals, we need to run this list by eCAC. Yes, absolutely. Instead of us sitting here fiddling with it, maybe. Right, agree. So maybe we can run it by Stephanie. Okay. Residential rental bylaw. Economic, I suppose. I think it protects and supports social equity goals too. Economic, the goals are to increase economic development and all. And I'm not sure the rental registration bylaw has a high impact on media. I would say media. Yeah, that's true. So, and then PRP, zone. So it does have a high economic, I do think it has a high economic impact in terms of ensuring that it doesn't, you know, negatively impact the surrounding neighborhood. Yeah, there's a huge economic impact if I can tell you there's four streets that are all student housing and the economic impacts pretty severe. Okay. Let's name them. PRP zone flexibility. I think that would be economic goals. Dave has his hand up manager. Yep, Dave. There you go. Oh, sorry. I know you probably don't want to go into the details. I was just curious. What is the economic impact of such housing? Do you are saying there was negative economic impact? If there's, if you didn't have a residential rental bylaw, and that's why we have it, because we were having a whole lot of houses that had a lot of deferred maintenance rented out to more students than, you know, than they, that were allowed because there were no consequences. I mean, yeah, you've been to Nutting Allen and I was just curious, what's the economic impact? I didn't under... Well, if you're a homeowner on the street and the value of your house does... Yeah, we need to look at it. We need to look at that. So the economic goals are economic development goals for the town manager. They're not, you know, and so I think Dave's asking. Right. I do think the residential rental bylaw is important for helping to keep neighborhoods intact. And yeah. Absolutely. That community impact? Oh, sorry. Would that be... I think that's more of a community impact. Yeah, and not... Dave was trying to speak and he got cut off. No, that's okay. Because we know better than Dave, that's why. Maybe two in the weeds. Yeah. No, I thought Dave was asking a question, so we were responding. Yeah. No, I definitely agree with where you were going on that. And the rental bylaw has been hugely positively impactful on so many things we do. And yeah, I co-chaired the group that that bylaw came out of and went to town meeting. But no, the economic impact thing is a little... It's not crystal clear. I mean, the value of homes really doesn't suffer. I don't think there's a lot of data on that. So we just need to be a little careful in jumping to conclusions on economic impact. There's definitely a static... Let me just say this. Jennifer, Jennifer, please do not interrupt the speaker. Okay, sorry. Yeah. Anyway, so maybe two in the weeds for today, but we can talk about that one. Jennifer. Yeah. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm sorry. No, but I did want to say, I think for the whole community, what has happened in some other college towns, and I think we have been very proactive on that not happening here, but where whole neighborhoods start to look really rundown because they're owned by absentee landlords who don't put anything into maintaining the home. So that and the residential, as Dave knows, the rental permitting bylaw has helped to keep that from happening, which is what has happened in some other college towns. Yeah. It's definitely that conversion when a whole neighborhood goes or a whole street goes. Yeah. So yeah, we should look at that for sure. Okay. We've got five minutes till we move on to our next agenda item. Let's see if we can get through the ones that aren't previous agenda until see if we can get through those. And then next time this is on an agenda, and I can't tell you when that will be, we'll deal specifically with community impact for everything. I have a comment. These are these are terrific items that Christine just brought forward. I haven't had time to think about. I don't really know how they impact or support some of these goals, except categorically, they probably support the comprehensive housing policy goals. Yeah. We don't know if they're good, bad or otherwise yet. We haven't studied them. And so for now, it just, you know, it appears to support comprehensive housing policy. So why don't we put high on comprehensive housing policy for all of them? Because they came from our planning department as a specific request for what would be the best, the sort of top ones to support those goals. And then we will figure out how to continue this conversation and this matrix and getting it filled in so we can then have a good conversation as we try to truly prioritize these to help the planning department. The whole goal is to get to something that helps the planning department and the council figure out where to spend their staff time in a way that is productive and something supported by the council, which is where those conversations get tricky because as this committee knows, there are different views on very many of these. So when we continue this, I'll work with Pam, Vice Chair and Dave and Chris to figure out how best to continue this conversation. I think we've had a good start to it. And again, this is to me a long term, hopefully process we can get through by June as things start coming off the planning department list that they're working on. Pam. One more item that again, none of us have really discussed much, but I would put it out there as Christine has put her list out there. And that is to stop the erosion or loss of family housing. And we don't know exactly where this conversation will end up, but we all understand and are acutely aware that the town is losing housing access or access to housing that is in the range of affordability for people. Right. It's actually not increasing affordable housing. It is stopping the loss of accessible housing. I'm not sure what you mean by accessible because when I hear that I think about ramps and so could you just affordable with a small a. Thank you. Yeah. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you all for bearing with me as we start this conversation. These conversations can get messy and they can be long. And so I appreciate you going with this plan. I will work with as I said, Pam and Chris and Dave to figure out how best to continue this conversation as we move forward with a matrix we can actually all view together. Shalini. Yeah. I feel that even if you don't get into very specific things, but just the broad picture of just looking at that matrix, even like there's certain items that are already starting to surface, you know, which have a lot of highs across them. And so we, you know, it just gives us at least some way of a big picture view of what it what where we should be instead of each of each of us coming from what we are really committed to because of the residents or people who voted for us who we speak for, of course, but we also have to look at the bigger town picture of all the different town council goals that we have. So I think doing something like this is already helping me to look at some of the things. The second thing is of course looking at community impact. And I think we didn't talk about what that would look like. But that could be a column where we could say, okay, this is impacting the immediate community, you know, communities that are living like the parking garage was negatively impacting the community that's living around it. But then the people who come down to a need to parking, it's positively impacting the rest of the community. So just having that kind of looking at how is it impacting, it's, it's definitely impacting the community, right? So just coming to a shared understanding of what community impact looks like. And we will start with community impact next time. Okay, we're going to move on to the residential rental bylaw. I have drafted a work plan. So let me pull that up. Which by the way, thank you is very thoroughly thought through. And I will, I will summarize once I find this work plan. Thank you for doing that. That was so good. I will talk about it as I bring this up. There's a couple of things before we dig into the work plan. Actually, before we dig into the work plan, I want to bring up one thing, two things. And then, and then we'll dig into the work plan. The first one is Shalini will remember that when CRC was tasked with creating a comprehensive housing policy, John Hornick suggested that we bring in Tom Kegelman as sort of a resident consultant that could participate in the discussions as, as sort of a resident non-member member, panelist of the committee during those discussions to just bring us some extra expertise on housing. And so I want to venture and potentially propose to this committee that when this matter was referred to CRC, there were four cosponsors of the memo and of a very working draft bylaw, three of whom happened to be on this committee, but the fourth is not. And so I wanted to broach the topic of potentially what this committee would think of as the possibility of including that fourth cosponsor Michelle Miller in as a, as long as we're on Zoom, a panelist, as sort of a person allowed to and brought to the table for the discussions whenever residential rental bylaw is on our agenda for discussions. Is that something this committee would support in doing so, so that that last cosponsor is not left out of these discussions as they move forward over the next nine months? It would not violate it as long as there's, there'd be only six of us, it'd be six, not seven, so, because it's five members of CRC plus one additional counselor. So there shouldn't be any open meeting law violations or anything to worry about with that, but I wanted to broach that possibility and see what this committee thought of that. Jennifer. Yes, is that what we did with the solar bylaw that the sponsors came on when that was being discussed as panelists? Did that happen? So I'm thinking there's precedent for this. So the sponsors came on to ask questions, but not to make substantive comments. Okay, but I would support this personally. Michelle participating as a panelist. I was thinking we had done that before. Thank you. Shalini. Yeah, I have no problem with proclaiming for this particular discussion as a panelist. It would be only for any time the residential rental bylaw is on the agenda and for that agenda item. I am unsure, she's not here today, she had conflicts, so I'm not even, I don't think she's even in audience at this point. But she was aware that I was going to be broaching this and she is excited about that opportunity if the committee supports it. Pam and Pat, thoughts? I'm very happy to have Michelle participate. And Pat? Yeah, I'm okay with it. She's not a voting member and that's important, but I think that since she's involved so much, it would be important to have her here. So when Tom was here, he did not get a vote. When we did finally do the vote at the end for the recommendation, I asked him if he had a vote what his vote would be just like in finance committee. I took Andy's example basically from that and reported that out. And I would be in any report I send to the council. I would make known that the committee has supported this and that we will be asking her to join us. Okay, thank you. And then the other thing I wanted to talk about before we get into the true work plan is, as some of you may know, Shalini and I and mostly now Shalini have been working with a couple of research groups at UMass regarding additional ways to participate in public feedback on various items, I guess is the way. And TSO in the past has used one of those items, community click, which is an in meeting sort of clicker where while discussions are happening, people that are attending the meeting can choose to say, oh, I agree with that. I don't agree with that. Write some comments or not. And sort of interact in a way that we won't necessarily see during the meeting, but we can go back afterwards. And because this is a research project, grant funded research project from UMass, they do most of the analysis. They present us stuff that says, oh, during that meeting, agrees were so many during this part of the conversation and everyone disagreed during this part of the conversation. And I thought that this process going over nine months might be a good time to explore and potentially use those two items. The other part is called small town, and that's more of a Facebook online interactive think engaged Amherst, similar to engaged Amherst, but run by and moderated by the UMass team with documents on there and all. And that this process were starting now might be a good thing to use or offer up for use for their research project for those community clicks at certain points of the discussions. And then small town is an ongoing conversation somewhere to engage Amherst of things people can contribute to, questions we can ask and stuff like that. What are people's thoughts? I'm going to ask Shalini to explain a little more if she has anything to add. And then I'd like to hear people's thoughts on that or questions they have Shalini. Yeah, the two advantages I want to highlight in using these technologies. One is that it provides anonymity to people. So the certain topics that select the rental bylaw, for example, if landlords want to come and say something, they may feel that they're going to be hated on or kind of judged or whatever, or students might not feel comfortable coming and speaking like raising the hand and speaking. That's very intimidating. So community click allows people to post comments in the chat box which nobody can see other than the organizer. But that's all of these are optional tools. But anyway, the main thing is that people who are generally afraid to speak in front of, it creates a safe way for different people to be able to share their perspectives. The second thing is that the timeline and I'm working on that in TSO is to create sort of a timeline where we have like different phases of any bylaw being worked through and at different phases of the bylaw when it's being presented. So we want people to know that, hey, we're talking about this, we want your feedback. And then who is this impacting? So the different committees, different residents. So we get it gathering feedback. So all the different points, different points, we want to create a process where we reach out to different people and get everyone's perspective on it. So the the other technology that which is similar to engage will allow people at different points to come and share their feedback if they're not able to come to the meeting. So they kind of work together in that way. And there are many other benefits, of course, but we're just testing and trying and want to get feedback from people like what would make them feel safer to come and participate. And yeah. Thank you, Shalini. Pam. Yeah. Well, first question is do you get extra credit if you apply it to something that we do here in Amherst? Second, second. If it is something that is appropriate, it would be interesting to kind of see it in action, to kind of feel it out a little bit. But I could see the downtown design standards being another application for that kind of thing, if it works. And then, lastly, I guess, if we were to structure something like that, would we have to have some pretty specific targeted questions that they could answer yes or no to in order to, you know, very specifically not sort of ask ambiguous questions and get a lot of bad data back? How much and how much work would that be to do that? So for community click, no. No targeted questions needed. Community click is basically as someone's watching our meeting. I'll even give the example we just did, the matrix. They would have essentially a click of smartphone clicker or a web browser in front of them with options to click as we're discussing it to say agree, disagree, I'm confused, I need more information, and we can pick what those options are. And so while we're discussing, they just can click buttons and then there's also potentially for a comment part of that where comments are submitted. So questions and comments are submitted that we could see. So it runs sort of while we're doing our meeting for people who are watching the meeting. TSO did this once last year, and so I can hunt up which meeting that was. You won't see much other than a big QR code and web address at the beginning of the meeting that says hey, go here if you want to try this. But we had the charts that were produced afterward in one of our council packets, I believe, so we might be able to pull that up for people to look at. But so for the in the synchronous portion, there's nothing really for us to do other than set up those options. And those would probably be the same as for any of the synchronous portions that we do. For the asynchronous portion, which is the small town similar to engage, it depends on what we want to do with that one. There's a lot of options and I don't want to get into all those options, but some of the first ones would be probably to start with the questions we had in them that were in the memo from the co-sponsors to the council that has now been referred to us. Some of those questions as we're going through, we might get more questions or there might be drafts. And so those might automatically sort of pop up of as we're discussing something, oh, I'd really like to hear what the people think about X. And that's just the question we've now written down for them to put on to small town. So it might require a little bit more work, but it's an ongoing thing. But it could be a very interesting way for us to be able to get a lot of feedback on an issue that probably has a lot of interest in town outside of just our meetings, but also within our meetings, too. Chris and then Jennifer, and then I'll let Shalini speak. I want to then move on to the work plan to assume. So, Chris. Okay, I just had a question about, is the clicking related to the transcript? In other words, usually in the Zoom meetings, you have a transcript, and would the clicking be associated with different things that are said there? Yes. Okay. Jennifer. Is it possible to do, do they come together or we could decide to do the community click and not the small town? Or is it? So the research group would really like to do both is my guess, because there are actually two different research groups, one that's dealing with the synchronous community click, one that's dealing with the asynchronous small town. And, and there again, these are research groups, research data, essentially, in some sense, they're testing out their their theories, their their modules, all of that on Amherst, which is fantastic, because we get to go back and say, you know, that didn't really work that one, add this to the program. For the next time, we try it and all. And so they don't have to come together. They are two separate programs. But they both might, they both have different intended audiences, which is one for those who can attend our meetings, and one for those who cannot, or cannot or don't, because one is offline to give that feedback, and one is during the meeting. So they have two different sort of intended purposes. You know, my only concern about the anonymity, I get that this year, more free to speak. But I do think, you know, when you're talking about something, if it's like development and zoning, it's important to know whether it's who it's coming from. So I will do one more thing before I move to Shalini. So that anonymity is by name, but we can before you get signed into the system, there are certain questions that need answered. So we can tailor those questions to our own interests, because this is rental registration. So we could tailor some of those questions to things like, are you a property owner who rents property? Are you a renter? Are you just a resident of Amherst and have those, some sort of data that comes before? And I think Shalini, they can equate those answers to the agrees, disagrees to eventually in that data, I think. So we could obtain some of that even if we don't have names. It can get very complicated in terms of there's a lot of data and you can sort it a whole lot of different ways, including things like, oh, the same person always agreed with that and did it 12 different times in 30 seconds. So really those 12 agrees were only one person. So they can actually see that information to Shalini. I was just going to say we're going to try it out today in our district meeting at 6.30 if you all want to come and just check it out. Because in today's like office, it's not a district meeting, it's like office hours. So we're not expecting a whole lot of people. But one of the people from the UMass team will be there to run this program. So if you all want to come and check it out and we can just play around with it and have questions, we can address them to the UMass team member. Thank you for that, Shalini. With that, I'm going to share my screen on the work plan and try to summarize it very quickly. So every CRC meeting between now and December 15th or 14th or whatever the last one is, 15th is on this list. I based this on my experience as a charter commissioner where the consultant basically said, take these in chunks. Don't try to discuss the whole thing. Focus on one thing, then another, then another. Get done one thing, then don't see it for a couple months and then bring it back, which is why you see it this way. And I tried to organize it in a way I thought was a flowing way, meaning we need to have this decision in place before we can get to X decision and Y decision can kind of happen anywhere. And so that can be saved to the end and stuff like that. So I attempted to organize it that way. These were obviously some guesses. You can see some other things. I've put meeting dates in for other committees. I have no idea whether they agree or not. That's more of a suggestion at this point, right? The council meetings and the committee meetings as to when we would be going to them and saying, hey, we want your feedback. I've put in suggested timings. Obviously, we're going to have other stuff we have to deal with during most of these meetings. The only, sorry, we'll say the only meeting that does not have anything on it is the next CRC meeting April 14th because I expect the hearing on whatever we've got the hearing for on April 14th, which I can't even remember right now. Preservation by law. I expect the hearing and the input and the recommendations to take mostly that whole meeting. So that's the only meeting that is not on this list. So thoughts, comments. I think Rob is probably here now. I'd love to hear from Rob on not just invitees, but the whole thought and the whole work plan too. I just kind of want to hear from everyone on what people think about this. So Dave and then Rob or Rob, then Dave, Dave just took his hand down, I think. Let me just jump in here before Rob because he won't say anything, but small, but important thing. Could you change building inspector to building commissioner? Sorry about that, yes. It's going to be Rob and not one of his inspectors and just so it's accurately reflects his title. Thanks. I completely apologize, Rob. And I defer to Rob on other content. Thanks. Could you change building commissioner to building inspector please? No, thank you. So I think the work plan looks great. I really like the approach where they've broken down and focused on different areas. Just some thoughts though. Looking at invitees, I definitely, and I thank Dave for his comment, but there will be times where I think I would probably suggest or maybe others would even already be looking for input from some of the inspection team. I think that will be useful and enlightening for some of these conversations, whether it's the code enforcement officer, the help inspector, the fire inspector, the police department. I know you have the chiefs listed in here, but there might be earlier times in multiple sections where that might be useful. I also thought looking at the schedule that there might need to be either gaps built in or expected additional agenda space available for things that will come up that might not be anticipated yet. And in the invitees, I don't see landlords at all there, but there is definitely a component that's really valuable from a landlord that say manages a large complex that we could spend a lot of time on understanding how a property that size may be regulated by HUD gets inspections. And that can be something that I could help with, but you might want to hear it directly from a professional management team that works with that every day. So I just thought that there might need to be some spacing either available or built into this for things like that that will come up along the way. In a similar way, the UMass representation, the Greek office staff will certainly be able to help understand some of the, maybe why we're doing this, responses to why we're doing this along through some of these sections. So information from outside agencies would probably be useful as well. I think that that's about all I have for comments at this time. You start this off really quickly, looks like in an upcoming meeting, but for me, I saw sitting through the Safe and Healthy Neighborhood Working Group, it really did seem to be useful to establish that list of why or what we're trying to accomplish with the rewrite or the amendment to the bylaw. And, you know, at least in that process, it was a document that when, you know, was maintained along the entire process until the end when the bylaw was written, constantly updated and constantly checked to make sure that what we were producing in the document responded to those issues that were raised. And so I thought maybe spending a little bit of time of, you know, what does the bylaw currently not do that we'd like to have it do and make sure that we're working towards that. Thank you, Rob. That's very helpful. Jennifer. Well, I took it down. No, I think it's helpful. We did try to do that in what we presented at the work session of what we were hoping it would do. But I think that's a good suggestion to look at what's not in the current, you know, that what, so our goals are there, but maybe what it's looking to address that's missing now. I can try to add that into the April 28th item as a separate sort of issue for discussion too. Other thoughts. I know it's an extremely tight timeline. I don't know whether we can stick to it. We may need to add more meetings or make a decision at some point to report back to the council in December that we're not quite done. You know, that that we'll have to check a work plan occasionally to see whether we are or are not done, whether we stay on track or not. I don't know whether we can. It all depends on what else we get assigned to us to in some sense. These November 17, one and 15, you'll see that the minutes get lower every single time. Yeah, and so those are some of our built in leeway. If we're running a little bit late, we can take some of the final by law review and do something that's not quite done and concentrate on that till we get to some other thing. So that's where some of that leeway is built in. It's obviously not a lot. Pam and then Jennifer. Yeah, again, thanks Mandy for putting all of this together to even grapple with. If you could explain perhaps just a little bit more detail as you go through week by week, it appears that we try to tackle a certain couple of chunks of the text and we have the people that are there that maybe would deal most actively with that text chunk. Is that the way I take it? Yeah, that's what I tried to do. And to Rob's point, I know Rob's not the only person we need to talk to. And so I'm going to be relying on Rob to tell me, hey, that's your topic. We need these X people there or they can't make it this meeting. Can we push that off to the next meeting? Because that's what we need Rob to tell us or the chiefs to tell us. I recognize for violations, we probably need to have a whole bunch of people there. It might not be the chiefs we need, but it's just sort of my reminder of who do we need to be in touch with to make sure we have the right people at those meetings. But yeah, so the way I did this was, I'll take types of licenses and license exemptions, including student homes in terms of definitions and all as this first chunk as an example. A discussion not related to actual language to start with. Yes, there is a draft working draft bylaw that has language that I based sort of these chunks on in terms of that might be the section we're dealing with. But starting with that discussion as Rob was sort of indicating that overall, what's our goal for this section? What's our goal for that? And then the next meeting coming back with some draft language to say, based on that discussion, here's what the language would look like. Here's what say inspections would look like, or here's what the licenses would look like. The committee said they favored one license or they favored three. Well, here's the three or here's the one. There's the language. Let's discuss the language and see if there's any changes. And then for some of them, I said we might only need two before we can basically get the language done and then not deal with it for a couple weeks or months. Others we might need three or four because they're much more involved. There are longer sections and all. So that was sort of my thought, a sole discussion. And then a review of language or if I thought it was a big chunk, discussion and review of language for the second meeting and then review of language for a third meeting again, things like that. And so that's how I thought it would be. And so I put the limited period of public comments on the initial discussion sections. Thank you. I completely, by the time you finished, I forgot what my next question is. So I'll let somebody else talk. Okay. Jennifer, then Shalini and then Pat. All right. So I just wanted to ask is the fee structure now all with TSO? It is still with us. And so you'll see down here that at the beginning, I said, go to them and see what they think who should be the fee authority, who should set the fees. Because that should probably be a TSO at least input on who should set the fees, as well as obviously others. And what the application process might look like. And then down here, what the fee schedule is, my thoughts on that are that we have a discussion that we come up with some sort of draft. We send that draft off to TSO and to finance. They get back to us with comments and thoughts on those drafts of what that structure looks like. And then we propose an actual based on all of those discussions, an actual fee structure. And that would happen at the very end of all of this when the bylaws fairly well set. So I've been a little surprised. I mean, how much I've gotten a bunch of emails about the fee structure. I've been forwarding them to the TSO chair. Should I be, I should do that. And but we might also discuss it too. Yes. Okay. The plan is for us to come out with when, when the bylaw revisions are whenever we come out with a measure to recommend or whatever recommendations we have, if that is a measure that that measure includes a fee structure, whether or not that's the council that adopts the fee structure or some other body to propose something. Pat, and then Shalini. Yeah, a minor point. And I know it's sort of been covered before. John Thompson needs to be listed in here on any of the inspection things. And you know, I understand, Rob, that you represent him in a certain kind of way. But he's the person that's actually been doing the work. And I think his voice is critical. So I would like to see him list. I don't know his title off the top of my head, Rob. But I think he needs to be listed. He has it's, it's like going to DACA to disability access advisory committee, when you're going to be dealing with something that's going to affect them like a crosswalk or something. And we have a tendency not to do that. So I don't want him. I think it would be respectful to include him. Rob, may I do that? And if so, what's his formal title? Yeah, absolutely. And I was suggesting a similar thing, you know, with all of the inspection team at the appropriate location, you know, points throughout this. John's title is Code Enforcement Officer. I will add him specifically in. And I will figure out some way of putting in and other designees or other inspectors. Yeah, Mandy, can we just keep, can we just keep Rob as sort of a placeholder for all of that now? Yeah, that's what I'll do. And I'll figure out a way too. And these other ones put and other inspectors as designated by the building commissioner or something. I'll do that later. Shalini. Yeah, and two things. So one is identifying like that you just did who should be in this conversation. And so if other people have other people or groups or committees that you think we should be inviting at different points in this document, that would be really helpful to get. Because I want to create a template for community engagement using this as an example that we can then replicate in other committees and all that we can adapt them to our needs, but just kind of how to have a template for how we're having these conversations. Who are we including when and how and what channels are we using and kind of try to create a streamline that. So that's one thing. And the second thing I think the red, the parts where manager has them in red is our opportunities where we can use the community click technology to engage with people. That was my plan was for the at a minimum of the items in red to not only include a public comment portion of that meeting specifically on those issues. In the middle of our discussion at the beginning at the end of the discussion somewhere during that discussion 75 minutes or 45 minutes, but also that then the community could be used during the whole discussion then. And but maybe not for every meeting. So it's 618. We don't have too much more to do on the agenda, but I would like to it sounds like the committee is in general in support of this work plan in terms of the timings and all with the addition on April 28 of an initial discussion of general goals as as recommended by Rob and all, which means the time will probably increase on that one. We'll see if that's a goal for this committee then to get through potentially the preservation bylaw all on the 14th. I'm going to say that to give us time on the 28th. At some point in May or June, we have flood maps to fit into this work plan. I'm just going to say that right now, which means we might be off the work plan pretty quickly when we are will have a discussion as to what to do, whether to add a meeting or just move everything a meeting later. We'll do that depending on how things happen. Any other questions before we move on to the rest of the agenda? Pam? Yes, I was going to ask earlier about having some additional meetings if I don't know if those would have to be a I'm sure they'd have to be a publicized extra meeting to discuss some of these. I was also going to volunteer to take a stab at sort of the problem statement so that we can work through that and have that ready for the April 28th conversation, obviously with input from others, but I'll take what we've already done and beef it up. Take the memo that was referred to the committee that had that goals in there, and that would be great if you could produce a document for me to include in the packet on April 28th for that. And I might add into this if we're adding extra meetings, I might put some potential dates that those might go. I'm thinking at this time they might be some of these discussion meetings instead of the review of language meetings and that they might be pushed to a Monday non-council meeting night might be the easiest time to find time we're all available if that's possible so I might look at the council meeting schedule to see when those periods are and sort of put in a placeholder of potential extra meeting if desired, if needed somewhere a couple times in the schedule. With that, thank you all for your comments on this. I will work and we will I'll probably add a column about done, not done things like that so that this just continues on in each meeting so we can keep track of where we are. That brings us to general public comment, public comments on matters within the jurisdiction of CRC. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at this time. If you would like to make a public comment, please use the raise hand button to raise your hand at this time and I will recognize you in turn and okay I was just going to ask Pam you still did your hand up so that was lingering. And Athena, since you're the host, can you please allow Kitty Axelson-Barry? Hello. Hi Kitty. Axelson-Barry at 89 Stony Hill Road up in Echo Hill South. So I think that the CRC has been mentioned as the group that's tasked with creating a master plan implementation committee. Lynn Griezmer has referred to it. At some point I looked up the charge of the CRC and it included the master plan seeing to it that it was implemented I suppose. So where and when will someone look into doing this? Oh right I can't have a conversation. Okay so I would like to comment that the CRC should put that on the agenda or certainly research it and explain why it should not be put on the agenda if you think it should not be. And the same might go for creating, since the CRC is so involved with zoning and zoning priorities, maybe having a work group that is studying what other college towns are doing, what's working, what's not working would be something that the CRC could take a lead on and I'm hoping it will do that. And then the other thing that as Christine was talking about the priorities for zoning and the priority and you were all talking about how to get more housing here in Amherst and I was just wondering whether there's been any movement on not only focusing on the downtown area but really focusing considerably more on the village centers. Right now it's like yeah and also the village centers but it's not a real focus and maybe even in some of our outlying residential areas that are essentially suburban areas maybe some of those would be good places since they already have sewers and everything else to consider having more infield. I'm thinking about tennis courts being divided into four for pickleball but that is my comment. Is it possible to study changing the zoning laws while you're changing things downtown to also focus a little more on the village centers and consider the suburban areas? That is all. Thank you very much for doing all the work you're doing. Thank you for those comments Kitty. I've made note of them and you may hear from me later when I get some answers to some of those. Seeing no other hands I'm going to close public comment off and we're going to move to minutes. We have the March 17th 2022 meeting minutes to adopt tonight. Are there any requested changes to them? Seeing none I'm going to make the motion to adopt the March 17th 2022 meeting minutes. Is there a second? Second to your Angelus. It was a tie between Jennifer and Pat. I got there first. I don't care it doesn't matter. Having trouble with my mute button. Seeing no hands we're going to move to a vote. Shalini? Yes. Pam? Yes. Pat? Hi. Jennifer? Hi. And Mandy is an aye they passed unanimously. I don't have my announcements are basically the same as the next agenda preview which is on April 14th at 4.30pm we will be holding our hearing on the rescission of zoning by law article 13 demolition delay. There will be if the agenda the agenda may change but the agenda a draft an agenda is posted because you have to post one when you post the hearing. I will go look at that to see what needs to change on it because I was just guess beyond the hearing stuff what should be on it. But the hearing is on there you will see on the agenda that I have included a public comment discussion and recommendation item regarding the proposed preservation of historic structures general bylaw. So the public comment portion is essentially meant to mirror the required hearing portion on the rescission. And then there is the discussion and recommendation on the rescission of zoning by law article 13 as well as the discussion and recommendation on the proposed preservation of historic structures by law. So I'm hoping to keep the hearing to solely the move to general not any substantive on anything but that and then move into an actual public comment period on that would be similar to a public hearing on the general bylaw substantive matter of what has been proposed and I will explain that at the hearing but I intend to have full public comment specifically on the bylaw itself even though a hearing is not required. And that's in the agenda. When I figure out what we can do regarding planning board and ZBA appointment recommendations I will modify the agenda accordingly. So we'll see whether we put any of that on there those would probably be the only other things I would add to the next agenda because that those items need to keep moving if there's anything we can keep moving on them. So any other announcements or items regarding next agenda? This is very unprofessional but my daughter just had a baby. I'm literally just glad. Congratulations. That is an announcement. My daughter related to CRT. He takes precedence. No, it does not. Go, go, go. It sounds like there's nothing else which means if there's no unanticipated items I'm going to adjourn the meeting at 6 28 p.m. Congratulations to your daughter. Congratulations. Thank you. Have a nice dinner with your son. Bye-bye. Thanks.