 All right, calling to order the City of Essex Junction Planning Commission meeting for Thursday, February 1st, 635 p.m. Any agenda additions or changes? Sounds like we want to add space to discuss the rental registry. Yeah. And I'll do it. I'll do an update of the strategic planning exercise and member. Is there a particular place we'd like to add that to? The rental registry. Yeah, the discussion on the rental registry after our business items, before our business items. I think you could do another staff update. Oh, sure. It's fine. Yeah. We can. Oh, why don't we do it right? You can do it right away. We'll do it as a first business item. Is that good? Okay. It's fine with me. Yeah, that's fine. Anything else? Additions or changes? Moving on to any comments from the public that are not for items that are on the agenda? There's nobody on Zoom. I'm going to zoom in on it. Nobody in the room. So, on. Moving on to the minutes from January 4th, we have a motion to vote approving the minutes. I move. Second. Right. Any discussion on the minutes? All in favor of approving the minutes as written? Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. Minutes are approved. I'll say I noticed every sign now in the city driving around after that discussion. All right. Next is our business items. So first we'll talk about rental registry. All right. So the city council held the public hearing on the proposed rental registry ordinance on January 24th. That was last Wednesday. Not sure who was here because I was actually remote on that. I was remote. Okay. I watched. Yeah, I watched. We both watched. I wasn't able to attend, but I've heard about it. Yeah, it looks. I heard about it a lot. Yeah. It looked to me like there were people out the door, basically. But ultimately, so okay, so leading up to that, the city council had made some minor tweaks, but for the, for the most part, what, what's the planning commission had recommended to council was what was put on the table. In terms of public engagements, we had mailed, we had done the usual social media and website posts, as well as a mass, a mail out to every single household in the city. You ready? If you've looked through your mail, you should have seen a postcard that looks like that, but it's not what that was for strategic planning. Yeah. But we went through, we went through the same vendor and the same process to send it out. And I did definitely get some feedback on that. People started receiving them immediately. Of course, some people just say they never received it, but it's also easy for these things to get tucked away. Yeah, so we started getting some feedback. The moments we had sent out those, those notices and on the 24th, there was a lot of feedback. A lot of interesting comments. We also got some emails from organizations, including Whitcomb Woods. I guess it's called Cathedral Square is the, is the landlord there, the nonprofit housing provider, and they had commented that they think they should be exempt from the fees. And also they think that ideally they should be exempt from the inspection as well because they were already under a lot of other inspection programs. And I think in the earlier version that that exemption was in there, but city council took it out because of the impact on the costs. They had an interesting point that the, they think their, their tenants experience inspection fatigue. And I think, I think there's an, that's, you know, if, if you are inspected very often, you might not feel as much agency over the place you're living as somebody else who, who owns their, owns their place or just renting a traditional direct landlord-detended relationship. There were also, there were a few messages of support, but just like the spread of people who came to speak there, there was a lot of negative comments about the proposal. Most of it, I think, centered around costs. And there was a point that's in addition to the cost of the, the annual fee itself, it's also the cost of the labor of coordinating the inspections because the landlord or so representative would need to be present. But yeah, I mean, in the end, city council decided not to move ahead at this moment. They asked for staff to do some, some more work. Partially that was to figure out if this program would be a better fit under, under the fire department. And I know originally we were not thinking about that because the fire department is part time and also the city council was interested in having this as a 50% enforcement, general enforcement, zoning enforcement, position and health officer. So, yeah, that's where we stand right now. There's no, there's no new date set for the next hearing. But I think the city council does intend to talk, talk about this, at least a little bit on the 14th, because there are some implications on the budget, whether or not this is going to belong in the canary development departments or the fire department and whether or not that changes the cost structure. So I have a couple of things to say about the situation. I think I put this, so I wasn't at the meeting nor that I've read minutes or the video at all so I don't know exactly the conversation that was had but I've seen, I've heard about some of the comments I've seen like the front forum comments I've seen all that and I think what is clear to me is that we really have a communication issue. And specifically a communication issue between our commission and city council. And I think if we can do a better job and now that it's back, and it's been tabled apparently and there's going to be more work on it. If we can do a better job on this and with other things in the future that have this sort of impact on the community, that if we can schedule. Co, or co meetings and time to talk about these talk these things out with the counselors, we probably can preempt a lot of these issues that come out last minute. And, you know, the counselors are the elected representatives so they're the ones that in theory are representing the community and so they should have a lot of these questions as well they know what, what sort of concerns that people are going to come to them with they should have more turnout at their meetings than we do at ours. But I think, like, once I saw all of this and thinking about all the things that we discussed in our meetings about the potential for a housing trust fund to help landlords that are impacted by this, and not seeing not seeing if that was ever communicated to the public or where that was at like I think just having those discussions with the counselors during that time would help address a lot of this stuff and make sure that things like that get put into the plan when this goes to them. And then, of course, just that I think also communication to the public as a whole just like no one coming to our meetings when you were developing this for a year. Right. And then seeing the turnout at the last minute is that we can if we can do something to better that when we're in our process so it doesn't get to the point where people feel like it's last minute when it's really. So if I could, you know, I want to add a couple of things. One is a conversation I had with Marcus Tuesday, I think it was, and I reiterated that we wanted to have joint meetings. And Marcus said that he's very aware of that. He's aware also that the council needs to have meetings but not only a planning commission with some of the other committees as well. But of course that puts time constraints on the counselors, you know, they already have a pretty large agenda, but he has he's aware that we and I think we said in one of the last meetings that we'd wait till the strategic plan was finished and then have a joint meeting. Well, now the strategic plan will be done till mid March, most likely. So that's going to be a while before we can have a meeting with the council. My takeaways just quickly. I agree with you completely on the communication. And one thing I think we could have probably done a little bit better is try to reach out to landlords at month five it's supposed to month nine or 10. That's just a little wish you would have done it might have helped might not help, but it might help. In my takeaways, I think there's a big deal of confusion about the level and responsibility for inspection. Everybody kept saying we're already inspected we're already inspected we're already inspected. State has this responsibility already inspected. They don't understand the difference between fire marshals and code environmental health inspections. I think there's a big communication gap there, just something for you guys to maybe note. I think it would be good idea to get a sense of exactly who does what with the mistake. I suspect they don't, they don't really do proactive they do complaint based. I think we talked about that. And, you know, they have, I think, I don't remember 12 and 12 fire marshals. That's the last time one per county. So you can't expect them to do fire inspection. Also, I think there's confusion about what a health inspection would look like versus a fire inspection. You know, they kept talking about egress and windows and doors and stuff. That's fire marshal. That's not health inspection, I think. I think it would be a good idea to get a better sense of who does what Chris, you know, in terms of talking about this in the future. The other thing I took away was, and I think we talked about this in one of the meetings is fees for large landowners are developers, the ones that have 200 300 apartments. You know, I think who was talked about $50,000 a year. So he was saying, you know, it's gonna cost me $250,000 for an inspection, because he gets them once every five years, not thinking about it's $10 per month per unit. It's $250,000 over five years. So I think it's again somewhere where we could maybe think a little bit about it. That's the staggered, what do you want to call it the split fee structure you had from Rochester wasn't might be something you guys want to look at again and see whether that makes sense to think about the large owners, especially if they're getting inspections and elevators and sprinklers and all that stuff on a regular basis. The cost of renovation if necessary against fire marshal stuff. But it's housing trust fund, you know, we talked about this several of the focus group discussions. But what we want to move forward on proposing housing just in the lack of contractors one person brought up that there are, you can't get a contract. So if you have a period of time to resolve the issue, you might not be able to get a contract in time and then you're penalized. And so, again, this came up to me. And then again, very, very much confusion over the difference between fire marshals and health safety. And the last thing is, this idea of putting it in the fire department versus city has put you guys in a bad situation, because you either put the code enforcement in the fire department, or you lose it. So how do we enforce codes, if you don't have a code, it's fine. So I these are things I took away from the meeting. And that was getting all the noise out. There was a great deal of noise. Angry noise. Yes. Messaging. Yeah, I'll say one more thing too is that when we started, when we started this process, we determined that health and safety was the number one priority for doing this. We also established that the registry would be really good for the city to have to understand the rental housing stock. And I think, you know, in having more conversations with council, I think there might be room to address all of this without having the redundancy of inspections. I mean, just something I floated was, you know, the idea that we could help facilitate maybe complaints from tenants, because that's one of the biggest things is that if a tenant has to complain to the state, that then they're, you know, that puts them in a precarious position with their landlord. But if we can somehow, somehow coordinate that with the state so that they're not they're not the person that's going out there and doing that. And we're doing that for them. Maybe we have a lower cost registry. And that is that we don't actually do inspections, but we work for it. It's like a floating idea of like how do we still accomplish the goals that we set out to do without necessarily making it so costly. But you remember, Phil, one of the things you talked about in day one of this was whether or not we wanted to have a rolling implementation of the program. I guess you might be exactly that indexing database management development and getting a sense of what stock looks like. Yeah. And then after one year, you can decide, okay, did we go for inspections gives a year to talk to the landlords and stuff. Yeah. But I think, yeah, I think that's something that would be like good to talk about with council. Yeah, as far as like what are other options where, you know, because we never did get to talk to them we never did get to present like this is this is where we're going from. This is the idea. This is what it's. Yeah. One of the things that I won't replicate what you guys talked about, but one of the pieces, I think, and it's not just the rental registry, but it's like all presentations is that when we make a presentation, or any of us make a presentation, the public, you got to realize the public hasn't been here. So we may have been talking about it for a year. They're at square one square zero. So we need to realize that when presentation, let's say to the council we have the discussion or whatever that is, if the public is going to be watching us, we need to start at square zero. Okay, and we need to say, here's, here's what's been accomplished over the last year and bring everybody up forward with us, because that was one of the comments I got was like, What are you talking about? Okay, I said, well, you could have kind of visited and we've been talking about this for now. And no, okay, they're totally oblivious. They just got these sudden like, they asked the postcard for they responded. And, but it was not a positive thing. But to make it a positive event, we need to bring people up to where we are and why we're doing it, whatever, because that's important piece. If it's going to be effective, people need to know why we're doing it. The other part I got was, well, you're picking on me. And it's like, well, I can't tell you about the apartments that, you know, are maybe triggering this. I can't share with who that is, but just be acknowledged that there are some out there. And thank you for being a good landlord. It's a very interesting discussion to try to do some active listening. The other thing to build on your point is that the last discussion we had on Tuesday at the community engagement is trying to figure out in the future, hopefully this will get into the strategy is how to how to target those groups for individual actions that are in the strategic plan for the next five years. So if you're talking about tree management, what are the groups you need to talk to you about that if you're talking about housing, where the groups that you communicate with, so that you have those sort of linkages and connections before you have to find out who they are, you know, start building those networks. So you can have people have conversations. Anyway, long way to go. Hey, you know, it's, you know, let me learn and we'll just keep moving forward and we know that we need to bring everybody else along. We'll just do that. Philip, if I may respond to some of those, those comments. Yeah, so I would say that I think it would be helpful for the city council to have a separate meeting with the plan before something big like this. For sure. But they have spent prior to this public hearing that they had spent two other meetings or at least parts of two other meetings discussing this and Raj and Amber have also been speaking directly with Regina and myself to understand the details. I think there's a lot that they know about, which maybe the members of the public who are present did not. But the city council did not have time to respond to there are so many comments that they were just listening to comments instead of responding to each one. So like, for example, which I think was wise, right? Quite honestly, right. It's way too much. You can't really have it. So it's a one-way thing. It's not really a two-way conversation at that point. Like, for example, housing trust fund, they knew when we were working through the budget and the price proposal, they knew there's depending on how the costs end up playing out if there's a surplus that could end up going towards the housing trust fund. And the confusion between about what the Vermont Department of Fire Safety does on a complaint basis and what's this position would do. I mean, I think it makes sense that there was some confusion because there were a lot of changes made by like implemented by the state recently. I mean, I tried to make that clear how the division of labor in that presentation that preceded the public comment time. I do think that the city councillors were quite aware of how that was, how that's divided. But yeah, the department's division of fire safety has taken over the rental housing health code. And now it's called the rental housing health safety code. In fact, over the next year or two, they're trying to integrate that more to be a part of their fire codes. But it is the fire marshal. If you file a complaint, which now they have a form online on the division of fire safety site, you get referred to them. Unless there's a municipal inspection agreement, which we had intended, which we still intend to, if this moves forward, enter in a municipal inspection agreement with them. So with such an agreement, our inspector would need to be certified fire inspector. There's a, it's like a 40 hour course to get the minimum certification. I feel like that's, it's not two owners to send someone to do that. And you get basically limited powers of kind of a power of attorney. We tried to make that clear, but I do think that there's some people that weren't. I didn't fully understand that, but also it is true that there is some duplication between what the division of fire safety now provides in terms of an inspection service versus what the city would do. Because previously, prior to the division of fire safety taking over these functions, this was, if somebody filed a complaint about rental housing property, it went to the town health officer. The division of fire safety only took a look if it was a fire, if it was a fire related issue. So now they've added a few inspectors to deal with the increased workload, but it's not nearly enough to be proactive. Mix fee structure that had been brought up before where the larger landlords because of the efficiencies perhaps don't deserve to have to pay as much. That was brought up and I'd come up with two separate proposals. But they had to balance out. The budgets had to balance and in order to have a meaningful reduction in the fees for the multi-unit buildings, the small land, the single unit landlords would have to have a significant increase in fees to make it balance out. A lot of this has to do with the fact that we think it would take half a person to do this inspection role, but we're trying to squeeze another half out of this to fill the health officer and the zoning enforcement organization. So I mean, I do think that that is a part of what makes it complicated. And if this is considered a part of the fire department, it may play out differently. If they think that it would combine with some existing work that they already have funded, maybe it would be different, but then we wouldn't have the additional enforcement position. Which I mean, I would also say having additional enforcement staff on the development department could be helpful, but also there is work to be done to determine what the deficiencies in zoning enforcement really are. I do think that a lot of the issues that have been brought up about zoning enforcement have to do with our bylaws. The whole sign thing, we have some ability to enforce, but we can't really enforce something that is not well read. So the first step is always cleaning up the bylaws. It's possible that it might not be so clear what the additional enforcement half position would deliver in the first. The idea about scaling the so that we do so that the city offers like helps with the complaints, but does not inspect ourselves. I think that might be a little bit counterproductive as to being proactive, because it wouldn't be proactive at all. Right. Just because there's another, I mean, it would help for someone who doesn't, you know, has like language barriers or something. But if the fear is that there could be, you know, retaliation or something, just because you click, like you complain to a third party who then complains that it's kind of obvious. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's those are my responses. Just in response to what you said about the council meeting a couple of times before the public hearing. It wasn't my intention that I did to say that they hadn't met about it before I just meant that we hadn't talked to them. And so like, I feel that we can put as much as much intention on the page like we did with what we what we had written. But then things might be missed and that doesn't really come out until you have someone else like questioning you about this. And then we might, we might realize like, oh, that actually wasn't our intention. We can, you know, it can be adjusted. So that's just, that was just my point about meeting them on things like that. We do have one member of the public on Zoom now. Any other discussion on the rental history program at this point? And we're open to comments from the public if that is something that wanted to be made. If you're online, if you would like to make a comment, you may mute yourself if you'd like. Hi, sorry, um, I just joined late. I didn't actually hear what you were talking about. No problem. We've just been discussing the rental registry, the current status of the rental registry program. And we were just ending our discussion on that and moving on to the next business item of the night. Just notice that you had joined the meeting so wanted to open it up if you had a comment. No, I think I'm okay. Thank you. Okay, moving on to the next business item, the sign regulations. I'll share screen. All right. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the last planning commission meeting back in January. However, Chris passed on your comments to me and I did my best to catch up with all of the changes necessary for the chapter on sign regulations. So this memorandum was just to call out specifically what issues I looked at, which things I tried to correct. And then every page that in that chapter and then the sections on lighting, minor sections here and there that have suggested amendments called out so that you could look at them. So, yeah. Any comments on this, I can, it's very long so I can, I can skip back and forth between pages if there's anything specific. Well, the only changes, correct me if I'm wrong, the only changes are the bullets that you have in the memo. Yes. All the other text that was in there is what we talked about. Yes. Which is based on the Burlington sign language. Yes, that's correct. So when you spoke about 714B-OB reorganized into two subsections, what are you, what are you talking about? Because I saw that the part, there are parts of a different page interjected into, I was kind of going, is this trying to go from OP and then down to M and then trying to go somewhere else? I was going, well everything seemed to make sense. I guess just eventually it was all getting in order. Yeah, that was one where there was a bullet point under it and it was like section O and then like A and then one and there was nothing else under it. So just restructuring that. So it made a little more sense. I think now it's section O and then points one and two. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's just a little cleanup, just a little format. It's, yeah, you put, well, when you pull things out, you pull the different part of another page of the previous section. Like why is this still here? Whatever. And it'll be accurate, it'll be eventually. I know. Yeah, there's going to be a couple of technical fixes. Yeah, yeah. Well, but the verbiage itself looked good. And then, and there's O, yeah. So I was just restructuring that into points one and two. Right. Well, yeah. So then if you go down another couple of pages, it goes back to M or something. Oh, that's right. Okay. So that's where I was, that's what I was asking about. I see what you mean. Yeah, I think an extra copy of that page got shuffled into here. So it wasn't quite sure it was going on there. I thought that was done. I had some issues when exporting the file and I tried to clean it up. I must have missed this one. But there is, there's no problem with the actual. No. No. I just had to. Yeah. Why is it there? Okay. It's to duplicate. Yeah. I had to export it in a couple of like sections and then combine those into one PDF. So. Okay. Copy and paste here. Okay. Just an idea for, you know, as we work through more of the land development code. We could, when we send out the packet, we can also send you the word documents separately. I think then you can turn on track changes. You can turn off track changes to just see the clean version. And might just be easier than that. That would be very helpful because I'm not even sure what the version looks like. Right. I mean, I have a hard copy at all, but it's months old. So it's completely out of date. Yep. I was at a question about the time limits on string lights. It was 9pm selected for a reason. No, it was rather arbitrarily chosen as if we need to have a time limit, that seemed kind of an appropriate estimate of when, you know, businesses such as dining establishments might be closing up for dinner. Around that time in the evening, but that's entirely flexible. So like, if you have a better time to suggest, we can, we can change it. It seems a little early to me just because you're going to be using those outdoor in the summer and the sun's just going to go down at 830 in the summer. And I don't know, it just seemed, it seemed early to me. Sure. Yeah, I mean, because he's got the lights on over there right now. I mean, I'm not sure is he. It's only 7pm now though. Well, okay. I do recognize a lot of our business roll of the sidewalk at 8 o'clock. Okay. Some of them roll it's 830 and then some, then there's some really late roller at night. But I'm not sure how many, I think there's some takeout places that are still open at 10. And after that, I'm not out and about, so I don't know anyone. Okay. So, you know, that's, that's the limit to my personal observation. But, 10 sounds reasonable to me. Personally, I like 11, but that's personally. Yeah. 10 sounds reasonable. I need to go for 11. Because in summertime, you're right. I mean, it's not like 830. Yeah. I think about like the outdoor space across the street. Summer outdoor space. I mean, there's a lot of outdoor space at the night. Yeah. I mean, the other place, the Lincoln Inn, outdoor space. Any other bar or restaurant that wants to have some outdoor space. There's a variety of bars and things that have outdoor spaces. I guess when does it become annoying? Like, how late does it have to be for it to become? five corners of Perlster. So, you know, how many residents do we have? Well, we do have them, we still have them. Well, we're putting more in every day. And I'm sure that there might be more occasions that, you know, especially when you have three-story buildings going next to a two-story business, that there might be, the lighting might be offensive to somebody at some point. And as I was coming here, I'm going this light into somebody's basement door and going, geez, here I am drawing and it's smacked me right in the eyes. Because it's just the right height to be at the same height as headlights. And it's walk. I was like going, great, but it's got to be slanted or something. So, two things just popped in my head. One, I would say noise probably becomes, probably would become more annoying before the light does. And I think we have a noise ordinance of 10, right? I can check. It's not important to check right now, but yeah. But then I just thought also that a lot of those spaces that might use string lights for lighting, that's the only lighting they have in those areas. And you'd want them to use that for cleaning up, for being able to clean up those spaces after they close. So, trying to give leeway to. Well, I mean, it's hard to like bro's feet as a target. Well, McDonald's and Wendy's. Actually, the lights, depending if they've got them all on, it's a limited. Yeah. That if you really are, you know, wanting to read something by street light, you can do it there. No problem. Which I think is why some of them have gotten down to already half lit, half the streets. It's just that, you know, string lights compared to the lights we already have, right? Is it really that much of a nuisance to have a couple places with string lights? I mean, writing this code for like the next five to 10. So I'm going, you know, having the allowance for somebody to come up and say, you know, I live on the third floor of someplace and it's staring me in the eyes. I can't. At least they have that room for discussion. I don't know. It all depends on what business moves next to what business. As, as housing changes on Pearl Street or Park Street. It's influx as things are moving. We, how can we forecast that at this point? I'd rather say, okay, yeah, like I said, the sidewalks get rolled up. Now, there's a lot of different places. So it's a piece may not be a problem. The bar around the corner for me, I'm sure, I don't know how long they go. All I know is that I'm not there when they close. So I don't. So is Tana reasonable thing then? I would. Ten sounds good. I think most of those places around here close at 9, 9.30. So most of the restaurants, I mean, McGillicuddy's is open later and the Hornets' nest is open later. All right. So Tana's okay? Yeah, I mean, I know Murray's used to have a spot out on the sidewalk, but I heard that place has been sold. But the next owner may want to have outside, especially in August. That's all curious. Again, 10 sounds reasonable to me. I would pick 11. I would also think I'd also like the other side of this is the, like what you mentioned, the teeth on the enforcement side. But also, I'm just thinking I wouldn't want, to me, string lighting is nice. I wouldn't want businesses to replace it, but something else that's more aggressive that is then allowed because of this. So I'm hard to know what the impact of that would be, but that seems like a rabbit hole. And the clock is up, like upping it from. Well, I'm sure that business could apply and say, I'd like to have my permit extended on it. That's gonna be open for discussion. Let's see if the DRB agrees with that. I mean, it's, well, for that to be a possibility, it would have to be written in that to have an addendum for moment, exceptions are available under. I would say let's, you know, we could have that exception there. I mean, I'd rather, I'd rather have the discussion than not. Well, this has to go to public hearing too, the LDC revisions. I would, I would, if there's feedback, whether they're at public hearing or later on in the future, like we can always go back. It can always be gone. Yeah. So it sounds like 10 is the way to go for now. Yeah, send to get, yeah, get some feedback in the book. So I have a general comment, which is building on I think Phil's comment, which is when I look at the sign, it's called five laws of regulations. It's part of the LDC and the other things we're talking about, it comes back to this thing about code enforcement again. I mean, the signed, signed requirements are pretty complicated. So, you know, again, who's going to enforce these things that somebody's not in compliance. Obviously, they have to go, they have to get sort of remind me here. So for any sign that in here, all signs basically have to be approved. Not all signs. Window, what about window signs and Window signs would have to be approved. But you could put up like things in your window though. Scroll down to that section. I mean, you don't have to tell me exactly which ones, but So temporary signs do not have to be approved. And then their most, most permanent signs would have to receive a zoning, zoning permit. So they would all go through your office to the DRB? Not to the DRB, just staff, mostly staff approval. And this, I think might be written in there now, the one about the giants. Yeah, yeah, the really big, yeah, freestanding sign or not freestanding. The Flint theater one. Yeah, yeah. Marquis, Marquis. No, Marquis is a moving, you know, Yeah, and the one that sticks out. Yeah. Projections, that's the, yeah, that's the Burlington version of the project. Yeah. So here we have a section on temporary signs, which goes into some different categories there, including sandwich boards, real estate signs, election period signs, things like that, that like we don't have to approve it, but it does put on like slight limitations saying like, you know, periods of time in which like you can do that. If it's a real estate sign, then it's associated, you know, it has to be removed within three days after the agreement has been executed or anything like that. So yeah, temporary signs would fall into that category of things that we don't have to approve. But again, my question is, if somebody's not in compliance, you just wait for complaints or is this proactive? Does this depend upon whether or not you get to have time position? So it's not only this, it's everything else that's in the LDC. I mean, it's an enormous workload when you think about if you're proactive. Yeah, so I think that in four, so proactive enforcement would be more of a possibility when there if we have a half FTE person dedicated to that. At the same time, I do think there are some serious considerations to think about before going out and doing proactive enforcement because you could be digging up things that neighbors don't have a problem with. And of course, if it's an issue, that I think that's very much related to news. If it's something that a neighbor would find annoying, then doing proactive enforcement might find things, you might be uncovering things that nobody actually has a problem with, but then you're forcing somebody to make a change. I mean, you could argue that that is if we have a rule that's written a certain way, everybody should be in compliance, but it might not be a very popular decision politically. So I mean, I do think there is some, there's always going to be like decisions about focus and of course, anything that has to do with health and safety, that would be the first level of focus. But we have done proactive enforcement campaigns. For example, we tried with assigned campaigns to some success. I think the important thing with any proactive enforcement campaign is to start with information and to follow up. And we do have the ability to do that to a certain extent, unless it's a time sensitive kind of issue, if it's lights being off by 10 p.m. I mean, that's hard. It's hard to enforce, but also, are we going to spend, even if we had the resources, would you really send the light police out there to? Well, it's just like, you know, as the sidewalks get rolled up at 8.30, you know, on those sandwich boards are still sitting out there. Yeah, especially when they're still there at 5 in the morning, you know, you know, who's sandwich board of police? And I think that's kind of been the philosophy is who's, you know, I mean, there are sandwich boards up until just recently snowed that were covered in snow. So I know that they have not been transported inside for the night. But okay, you know, it's just like, you know, I guess until we get the regulation here, it's, you know, we get them new and people know that they're supposed to bring them in again. Maybe we can then say hi. You know, we really are going to enforce it now. No longer, no longer free for all on the street. And for things like sandwich boards, actually, we do have some ability to be out there to see it before business opens. So, you know, if it's open when we first show up before their business hours, yeah, that would be out of compliance. Now, taking it to the next level and actually moving forward with legal enforcement, that, you know, there's always like, we want to go towards voluntary compliance, you know, wherever possible. It's very expensive and perhaps not a popular method of using taxpayer dollars to enforce some of these issues. Perhaps we do enough publicity on that. It's changing people will step first. All right. Any further comment on signs? I had one quick question, which is under the seasonal lighting. There were two sentences there. One was seemed to apply to celebrations outside of the holiday season at the end of the year. Is that right? It was a little confusing to me. There was one that said, yeah, that one there. So the first sentence applies to other celebrations other than the holidays around December to January. Is that right? Yes. So it could be Diwali or something. Or like July 4th or something like that. So this would have to be removed within 10 days following the holidays. And then since there are so many back-to-back holidays usually associated with lighting displays throughout November through December and January, that's why we have that period relating to those winter holidays. I think that addresses my concern. As long as they turn them off, as opposed to keeping them on, they can bring them down at their leisure given the weather or whatnot. So, but, you know, just it would be temporary, as opposed to constant. Although, you know, people are still celebrating. So it's kind of nice with the snow and the lights. I think they might be doing it at the governor's request. Remember he had said something about keep the lights going. Keep the lights going. Yeah, well, it was, I think, part of the COVID thing. They're keeping people spirits out. Oh, yeah. I still have my Christmas tree up. That's fake. Well, if you look in the one of the windows over here, somebody has a lit Christmas tree. When you're coming down the street. I'm glad some of my neighbors are still celebrating. Are we moving on to the next items? EV charging review examples of charging recognition. So maybe I can just introduce this a little bit. I had also been speaking with the Chinden County Regional Planning Commission over the last few days about what they recommend as the best practices, and also what the current state of the law is. I think one thing that's quite relevant here, and I'm not sure it was in the packet, is the residential building efficiency standards, and also the commercial building efficiency standards. The commercial building efficiency standards applies to anything that is covered by Act 250, and the RVES residential building, one is for buildings, three stories, or lower residential buildings, and it covers everything. But it has no teeth. It says that every unit is required by law. One parking space per unit has to be level two charger cable. So you need to have the conduit through. You need your electrical box needs to be able to handle the current, but it doesn't go as far as requiring you to actually put in the chargers. Now there are a lot of state incentives now, which make it pretty cheap. The incremental cost of putting in a few chargers is not that high, but I think the code requires you to make at least one space per unit level two ready. The only enforcement mechanism is through private litigation, basically. It says you have to self-certify with the state's form that you meet the RVES standards, and then in the future, if somebody buys your property, or if someone rents your property and it finds out it doesn't meet that requirement, and let's say your house is drafty or whatever, and you can sue for the additional energy you had spent, or you can sue for the amount of money it takes to upgrade all the electrical panels to make it level two charger ready. But yeah, that's right now. The literal law is that you have to meet that, but there's no teeth. In theory, we could reference that at the land development code, and we could be a little more proactive in looking at plans and checking to see if they have drawn the conduit for the level two charging. So everything you gave us were bylaws from somebody else, current? RVES, this is the state. This is the state. No, no, I mean, but all the documentation you gave us is from Williston and then from the RPC. Yeah, there's nothing in there. You've drafted, correct? Yes. So this is only for new buildings. It doesn't apply to existing units. They don't have to retrograde. So you're talking about the RVES or? I'm talking about the number of charging stations you have to have per unit. Under the RVES, the state's standards, yeah, it only applies to new buildings. Actually, I've got that page up right now, I can share. Yeah, there was somebody on the weekend that asked about charging pieces. And I said, well, so a gentleman had said that they didn't see charging units out. And I said, well, you're not going to see them if they're people's garages in the first place. And second on, nobody can read them. Okay, is that, it only applies to new development. So, and I said, even then, even some of the new development is going to have the charging stations in the underground parking. So somebody who, unless they go into somebody's underground parking area, they're not going to see the charging units. Anyhow, well, and so I'm obviously, as people buy more and more EVs, which is going to happen, the 2%, 8% stuff, I was very confused about all that, what that applies to. But if you have 10, 10 spaces in the, let's say you build something as 10, 10 units, sorry. And what does that code say? We have to have two per, or is it one? We're down to one now, one parking space per unit. One parking space per unit, unless you're in the VC district, in which case it's zero. Okay. So we have one parking spot allocated to you, but over a 10 unit building, you only have one EV. You don't have any according to that. 2% is less, you know, you don't have one. So you have 20 units. You have one, one for 20 vehicles. So one of four people have EVs. You run an extension core through your window. I mean, I'm trying to figure out how this applies to actually encouraging people to buy EVs. It doesn't work. I had a question of like, what is the, what is the ultimate goal of implementing this city? Like, what are we, what are we trying to accomplish? So then I have a number of questions after we slide up that. But it doesn't, it doesn't, unless you later on change the LDC and say, no, and now you have to have 4% or 5% or 10%. I mean, if you have two Teslas or a Tesla and a VW in that new place over there next to the tobacco shop, you're not going to be able to charge a car overnight. And most people charge the cars overnight, plugging it into their garage. I think you can argue that the RBE standards, if they are met, and if we're, if we are careful about making sure that the conduits are built, are put in at the time of construction, you could argue that even though there might not be that many chargers right now, if demand goes up, like many of the landlords may be willing to accommodate the building, like adding, adding chargers because they are at least under the, the the CCRBCs recommended bylaws, they recommend that there should be no prohibition on the landlord charging a usage fee. So I mean, they could recuperate the money or even make some money from having the EV chargers. And I think once the conduits are in there, the additional cost is just the charger, which you would have to pay anyway if you were single-family housing, you bought an electric car. So the conduit- Not necessarily. Electric cars come with a charger. You can plug into a standard outlet usually. Really? Just takes a lot longer. Right. That's level one. Yeah, I have a hybrid plug-in. It comes with a charger that you can plug into the wall. It takes a lot longer. Yeah. Cool. So actually, so I'll place just like throwing things out along these lines of like level one, level two, something a colleague who used to work in environmental regulations suggested something that we might want to consider and you maybe already have, but thinking about making electric vehicles more attractive, if that is part of our interest, like is it possible to talk, have a conversation, just invite our utility providers in to see like what would it take to do like level three? Like level two is significantly better than level one, but if we're really trying to create an incentive, like maybe are there, maybe there's homework, are there either within Vermont or other areas, are there projects that are like kind of trying to encourage level three charging? And if we're talking about like, we just need the conduit in place in order to like make EV stations more of a reality, are there other things we could do to make even faster charging, like kind of pre-work, I don't know, make faster charging more reality to make it more. No, I understand what you're saying. I wonder though, so the level threes are like half an hour to an hour or something like that to charge to 80%. To me, that's more like trying to figure out do we want to put something publicly? Like some of the parking areas and stuff, yeah, something like that. Yeah. And the level two would be minimum requirement I think for housing. Also, just my understanding, and I could be completely wrong, so I apologize, but my understanding is that so level three is sort of like the Tesla superchargers, and not every electric vehicle can charge via level three. You have to have a special, it has to be specially adapted to charge via level three. So what's over here and next to the fire department? Two. Okay. And what's up at Hanford's up in Lime Farm? Probably. Yeah, most of the public charging places are level two. Level one would be, I think, just a standard. Do you use the same cable for level three as a level two? It's the same like adapter into the car, but essentially the level one, like what I got with my car is it's essentially an extension cord. It's one cord plugging to the wall, other side goes in the car. I have a level two charger that I installed in the house, and that's on the wall of my house that I pull the charger. Right? But, but if you stopped at level three. I couldn't, my car could not charge at level three. So level, my understanding is that level level three chargers are mostly built around interstate highways. Like the Tesla superchargers tend to be spaced out along there and do it in order to allow for a kind of longer road trips and residential, in residential applications, even multi-family, I don't think level three is generally considered necessary. Although, I mean, who knows if that will be becoming necessary in the future, but at least the state's code seems to recognize the importance of level two over level one with the old, so the old 2020 version of this, actually referred to level one, as you need to cover all the spots with level one capable. It needs to be, every spot needs to be level one capable, but then they need to have a certain number, level two capable. The version of the residential, like the RVES that is coming, that's going to be in effect, I think in June, says all one space per dwelling unit needs to be level two capable. So let me ask you a question. So the conduit that you install or the one level two, those are automatically upgradable to more units, or do you have to specify, or do we have to specify in the ODC that the conduit that goes in has to be, what's more upgradable, it has to be able to add more, or is the conduit that goes in or is that just standard, it's, you can add more units to it? More stations, more stations. So the conduit, I think it refers to just have basically having a tube, like a pipe, an empty pipe that you can then, in the future, if you want to, if you want to use a thread, and you want to cable through. Oh, so they provide, so providing the path for a cable, in the future, you don't have to dig up the parking lot, you can just Yeah, this only makes it easier to get there, but it does not actually force anybody to build the spaces. So speaking as a half electric car driver, my, as I've thought about this a lot, actually, because I've thought about potentially putting in charger at my property in broke 10, because I've thought about what is it like to be a renter with an electric car? And the biggest, the biggest thing for me for driving an electric car is access to charge. And so in my opinion, seeing the numbers from this of like, one, one charger, two chargers at a multi unit property is like, to me, it's like, I would never, I would never get an electric car if I, if I had the access to a charger. No, it's one, one per unit. So, well, you know, for, for a building that has 40 residential units, 40 of the spaces need to be level two capable, capable, but not not installing, not installable, but not installed. Initially, they have to install whatever we decide the limit would be. I mean, the, the examples you provided are 2%, or I didn't understand the columns, but 2%, which for 10 units is less than one. So it wouldn't be applicable. Sorry. Yeah, I guess I'm not, not speaking at that. I think some of the other things that were written here, like maybe some of the existing incentives that we have were, do we have any incentives? Like I saw other things right now. Yeah, nothing. I don't think so. I think the only thing we have in our DC is that they've got to comply with whatever the state code was at the time. And of course that keeps changing. The only thing I could think of that it could be considered kind of an incentive is the fact that we are not very, we don't currently consider, we require a zoning permit to put in EV charging station, whereas I do think some other municipalities grappled with that before, and now are trying to amend their, their, their version of land development code to not, to make that exempt from a zoning permit requirement. But yeah, we don't have any other kind of incentive. I think when new seats was, I think if you put it, if you put in electric vehicle charging, that space counted as 1.5 spaces. Right. And something else was two spaces. But you can only get a 20% reduction. Right, right, right. So anyway, but in my opinion, like access is the key. Like, is there enough access for tenants? So if I'm hearing you right, if it's one per, one per unit, which means per space, there would be one. That seems like great access. Now, in my opinion, a level one access would be adequate and enough. In fact, I would even consider having an outlet at every parking space to do the job. That's what we're doing right here. Up here at this, I forgot whose, which town this is. This is not any kind of, this is the RBS. Okay, the RBS. So, so if for new construction, I mean, I was, my comment was like, why don't we put this in, just we have the signs, if we have to put, put, tell us the plan of what's going to be, just like, we're going to have a sign in the building or in front of the building, whatever. It's just, it's just there. Gotta have one of these. And this is one per dwelling unit or parking space. Well, then that's it. That's the new code. Then that's a new code. Now, are we going to require people to retrofit? I don't know. Are you guys saying that we're going to have one level two charger per every space? So this is saying capable. So then it has to have the, just, yeah, yeah. That's a new or, as long as we're, yeah, okay. And I'm suggesting going one step further and putting in, putting in a level, putting level one capability, even if that's just a standard electrical outlet. So, I mean, I, if I were to guess what developers would say, it would be, that would be very limiting for their layouts and also would, would significantly increase their costs with, you know, without many people using it. Now, I think, Wait, can I ask, but, but how would, how would that change with the level two? Like, you can put a conduit underneath the parking space. Sure. But if you ever wanted to install the level two, you need the space to do that. So how is that different than having space for an outlet? That's true. Level of service to the building. Level of electrical service to the building. Well, they are supposed to, according to the RVES, it needs the, the electrical service has to be robust enough to, to take the current of all of those actually all of those charging stations actually being built. But it seems like from the bylaws of some other cities and what the CCIPC recommends, you could have the effect of having good access without having all the spaces with the, with the plug or charging station. If you make it so that those spots cannot be assigned to, to certain people and those are reserved for electric vehicle owners. Right. I, I think the, you would only need every space to have a plug if you expect everybody to have a, you know, a good vehicle. Right. No, I mean, I think what you're saying, I think what you're saying makes sense and it sounds great in a perfect world. But I've seen plenty of places where, you know, someone will park their electric car and leave it forever. And you're never going to get access to that. I just mean per like, and this was my opinion personally, if I don't have the access to the charging that I need, I'm not going to, I'm not going to go ahead and get the electric car at this point. Well, I think that we would want to try to be proactive that if this, this is the coming way of things. And if there's state regulation that we needed to, as we did state regulations last time, if this is the way of things coming, then why wouldn't we be proactive and say you need to, it needs to be the kind of what needs to be there. It needs to be capable to help you up. You know, if you want to do best practices, it would be all of them. You know, I mean, you can just do that sort of a thing and just say, this is, you know, this is where this went down. Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying putting that in there that says obviously of its state statute that you need to, you need to put in the infrastructure. That's what essentially it's saying. You need to put in the infrastructure that's available for the future to install the charger. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. I'm just saying if the goal is for us to want to incentivize city residents to be able to purchase electric cars or, you know, then, then you, I think it's important to go the one step further to make sure that the access, this is putting the access down the road. Right. I mean, it's, I mean, I guess in the parking spaces, parking lots, minimal parking lots that we do have, should the city be putting some of these in other than over here at the fire station? I don't know that the one over here has got, or the one that we're renting over there, you know, firebird has got anything. I mean, it's, I mean, we want to, you know, get the city to essentially, you know, put up, you know, if we really are behind this and we're going to, you know, be proactive and do these things and say, hey, now there's a charging piece here. Yeah, I think, I think there's maybe two separate related issues. Right. I think on the one hand we're talking about residents, and then this other one is like public space making chargers available so that if a resident needs it, they can, but that they're not depending on it, and rather it's kind of incurred, maybe we're doing it the second, as more of like. I'm thinking that if we have some residents, we require them. If somebody does bring, I know that I, a lot of times I will bring, I bring my car, I do all my shopping, let's say five cars that I bring my car, and it sits in one spot for a while. So is that, how is that, would that be different if I had an electric car and I plugged it in, did all my errands and shopping, and then, you know, so that person could be a resident here. They could be, they could be absolutely, but we wouldn't want to be setting something up where like we were, that was like, the residents had to depend on the public space in the town square, but it, but it could be like absolutely the resident could use it, but it could also be part of a, like in terms of like supporting like our downtown commercial entities, like like you're absolutely right. Like if I'm living over in Milton and I have an EV, you know, and I know that there's a couple of charging stations in that junction, like more likely to come here, plug in, go get a coffee, like walk somewhere else, do something else. So I think, yeah, I definitely think it's a great idea. Maybe, I think it's, if we could find ways to do both and they may, they may or may not be kind of connected in the same piece of, yeah, I think the our, I think the residential side of it is the access, like I mentioned, and it seems like what they're trying to address with saying, put the infrastructure in now, but we definitely, I think also address the commercial side, having, having any commercial development include those and retrofitting, I think would be important too. Retrofit is, well, okay, so the, if this is a part of the land development code, there's only power, there's only a kind of enforcement power when, when they come in for it. Sure. So it could be, it could be when there's a major site plan amendment or some level of site plan amendment where it makes sense that you could require a certain level of investment. But yeah, new, new construction is probably the most likely place where this will have immediate impact. So this, this would not affect those new plans, like the one over here on the rim that have already been approved by the DRB. They would not have. Yeah. This way. No. Not unless they came in for some kind of major renovation site plan amendment. Unless they tell us to pass the LDC last week, they're two weeks or a month. Yeah. My anecdotal evidence is that most people, like you said, it's got most people charge at home overnight because I think there's lots of studies out there that show like people only drive, like most people only drive like 20 miles a day, 30 miles a day at most. And so all that little bit you're driving, even my plug in hybrid gets 40 miles on a full charge. So I like almost never charge anywhere else but but I know when my wife goes to the office in Waterbury once a week, she charges when she gets to Waterbury because it takes most of the charge to get there and then come back. So like having, having the access at home, but then also having the spaces and commercial properties that I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's also a little bit of an issue if we have certain parking requirements. Let's say that, you know, if a multifamily building maybe has 40 units and it requires 40 parking spaces and they have exactly that number and maybe two residents or so would be, you know, driving electric cars. Yeah. So that's one of those things that I was, I was thinking about what you said with having those electric cars not be allocated with those. So it might be a situation where you require 40 parking spaces and then a certain number of like electric cars based on maybe proportional to the total number of units so that any residents who live there can charge at those spaces but then also park, you know, overnight if needed, you know, in their regular parking space. So let's just take one last scenario here. Say the city were to build a two-level parking garage. That wouldn't be included under this wood. If the city were to build a two-level parking garage which would require, that would require, that would be a structure. It would require a zoning permit for themselves and it would, if we require it, then the city would have to comply with its own rules. So it's not just residential, it's any new construction that requires a permit? Yeah, I mean, that's how it's written. Okay. The RBE standards are, you know, a separate thing. That's only for residential but there's also commercial building and efficiency standards which also, so there's like, yeah, there's a state rules that are already in place with varying levels of enforceability and then there's what we can put into the LDC and enforce ourselves. I guess I have several questions that maybe the planning commission can provide some feedback on as to how to move forward here. We've got a few examples here but like one important question is how, like, how far do we want to just look at the best practices or like the strongest policies around us and just copy or do we want to kind of go ahead, be stricter than that with the knowledge that if you're at the leading edge of something you can be on the leading edge sometimes. There's that and also how, what do you envision as some good policy that maybe we'll circle back to and see if something technically makes sense or if we have good examples that we could propose? So what's the energy standards? Something about something by 30, something by 50 or whatever, I forget what the going piece is, something that I think the state wanted a certain number of electric vehicles or trying to go in that direction. So if it, let's say if it's 30, I can remember something about 30 by 30 and 50 but I may not like the forestry but I don't know. Well then there's a town energy plan too. There's a town energy plan. Well, which we need to eventually have one for the city. So hey, I wasn't looking to see what Williston or any of these where these, I would say Chris why don't you draft something up and see what what what you think the good standard would be. So you're asking should we copy, I would say, hey, you know, let's go by the that level two thing that's up here. It'll look pretty good. There was another chart there about stuff. So proactive, well, you know, people will buy electric cars if they have as as Bill has said, if I can plug in my life plugs in, I mean, they might or have a chance to buy an electric car if they have and I've read that other places they'll buy one only if they know that they can plug in and aren't left stranded. So so so I think we definitely can put some draft together but I do think the question out there still stands that like should we just be looking at adjacent municipalities because I don't think anybody has very strong requirements right now. Is that right? Yeah, that's my impression as well. What would you what do you mean by strong? Like not many municipalities are requiring that electric EV chargers themselves be put in. They're just like meet the RPS standards and make them electric people ready. Most are saying that and I'm not even like there how is there anybody is self Wellington? It's possible that it's there but a lot of the zoning bylaws have been tweaked to make it easier to put put in electric vehicle charters but have not gone as far as requiring which to me is a little bit surprising given you know the the likely exponential curve of electric vehicle adoption but at the same time if we're be if we go beyond what many other municipalities are requiring that would probably be an outcry and and that maybe not necessarily because if I read what you shared and what you were talking about before is the landlords can take the opportunity to propose and and get approved a charging fee or some cover of their investment just like they would pass off their improvements to the rent. So I don't think it's a lost leader for them. I think there's an opportunity if you build it right. It's the thing about field of dreams if you build it but you know I think we should be as proactive or as activism we want to be and to try to encourage it. When you were talking about the number of EV charging stations I had just assumed that you meant that they had to build one so no I mean I'd like to encourage it make it so that they have to build one but make it clear that there's they're not going to lose money on it because they can charge a fee. I mean that's for commercial but for let's say that we had somebody put up a single-family home should we incur I would say we should indeed encourage the capabilities of having an EV charger in a new newly built single-family home or duplex or whatever we should just do it and just say this is the new standard. First comes the worst it's the you know it's electric cord and somebody has to replace the plug in their vacuum cleaner a lot closer to the car than the house. It's like putting in a dryer connection in your glass it's a 250 volt or 240 as opposed to 120. I think deciding on what the goal is of implementing this legislation would is for would be a good starting point place I think at the bare minimum the requirements to have access make sense. I think my opinion is adding requirements for commercial development makes sense so actually having requirements for EV chargers in commercial parking makes sense and then you know if we're gonna if we're gonna have new builds put in the infrastructure maybe having having coordination for getting grants to landlords for adding the for installing the chargers so like we can help promote those sorts of things I think and again also new and new builds for single families duplexes should include should include them as well. Yeah I mean it's it's that's the easier access it's got to be yeah I mean it's I mean it's like putting in an electric dryer our electric stove I mean seriously I mean it's it's the same it's the same thing um it's mostly that's you know the way to go again um so what I don't see why we went prescribe that in in new construction that it definitely happens that there's a minimal standard if it's one per or or capable of of you know having all of them with at least one or two you know putting on the size and just say that's that's the standard we're requiring. I think yeah I think the cost to new build and even retrofitting is probably negligible because they will they they can they do get the service fees from it yeah and I think residential is a little more fuzzy there I'm not sure my experience in Burlington with my property is that any common space electrical must be paid by the landlord so I wonder how I don't know the specifics of how charging fits on that because it is a common electrical um or maybe there's a well you could try to do such fees for when or if you charge yeah yeah you might have to put a bunch in a code to show it's you and yeah yeah I don't yeah I don't know how that will work out but you know or something but I think the cost to commercial owners would I mean three mountain power has been having all kinds of incentives to do wonderful things with lighting and all other stuff I would find it hard to believe that they wouldn't have some kind of incentive to do electric car charging well the thing that the thing that I don't really understand because I haven't looked into it is the inflation reduction that's supposed to have all kinds of incentives for charging stations now most of that's the 500 000 I want to build on interstates and state highways but in addition to that I don't even know if there's other incentives in there for other installations I mean and I don't know how that passes down if it passes down directly if it has to go through states or whether or not that's something that could be applied for separately but the idea of doing some looking for potential grants and stuff I think it's the same thing we talked about with landlords and you know what kind of grants or subsidized loans can you look at because obviously as soon as you start mandating this electrical load on the property that is increased costs and even just for the installation the there are currently a lot of grants like there are currently grants from the state to cover like something like 50 percent of the installation costs it's a good deal right now don't know if it's always going to be there and also I would be hesitant to take on the additional work of offering like a coordination with the grants we could advertise it but you know in terms of actually helping coordinate grants I'm not sure where it would be ready to take that on no no I'm just being making it aware of what grants exist for people to access or rebates if you want to call them right um so am I hearing that that the commission is interested in in in a draft uh of some draft amendments to land land development code that would require you know first of all um meeting rbs requirements for port making the spaces electrical ready and also adding in some kind of requirements for multi-unit buildings to have actual chargers installed even if that is more even if that is a stricter standard than our surrounding municipalities is that what I'm hearing yes for me yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean it's for the draft yeah yes I think so yeah and this is essentially what you outlined so in terms of the rbs that's a baseline just putting it as the baseline but then consider something yeah additional it's starting with commercial okay be creative well I think I think that means looking beyond for mine really all right got some ideas all right I mean the difficulty here is that I don't think that these are impediments to people buying like EVs I think the impediment is that they're expensive and the costs are coming down from bolts and other ones but that your middle of the road EV is still 40 000 plus and then rebates take it off but I mean it's it's expensive and then the inconvenience of driving across the country so it's got to be a second car for most people I think that's to me that's the impediment that that would face it's got cars are expensive right now I know that so 40 grand per car is unfortunately it's expensive to buy a home too that's starting to be less expensive to rent yeah so it's interesting because I talked to a dealer when I bought my car which was 40 000 because it was during the pandemic and it was the only outback available in the entire state but when I talked to him he said they they target their populations they target their market that's 23 to 26 000 that's what they try to sell I'm sure that's not electric no no no these are these are every gas goes like I'm saying for EVs you're you're lucky if you can get one for less than 40 you're lucky my sister bought a bolt and she paid 35 now they're coming down but still I think it's more costly than people kind of forward anyway I but I think but it's all that taking consideration I think to your point earlier Dan like this this is the way of the future like this is coming the curve it's it's still very expensive but like things are moving in that direction and if we're talking about like building like buildings and setting them up you know that are going to be here for the next 30, 50, 100 plus years like setting them up so that like they are we're not doing a whole bunch of digging to put the conduit in you know when you know in five, 10 years when the prices come down things have shifted and uptake is higher than what we're seeing currently I mean I think that yeah this is something I can appreciate people being hesitant about I like the idea of being aspirational and maybe more aggressive about what might we do in addition to what municipalities around us are currently doing in terms of like actual chargers etc but I think again to your point there's like getting the baseline in place making sure that that basic infrastructure so that whatever form it is the the commercial space or the residential space can accommodate it like as a baseline like absolutely we should be at least there. Sounds good. Do you need any more direction? I've got it all written down yeah I've been writing as we're talking. She's looking forward to it. Yeah. We can actually use this as another incentive for promoting as an extension as a destination. Yeah because if anything it's an extra kind of utility if we have a lot of EV chargers and not a lot of people with EV you know electric cars it will kind of create the ability of like okay well I live in a city where this is accessible to me now maybe I can consider making that transition you know for longer term residents but also people just visiting being like oh well this is a convenience this is a nice thing to have whereas if people don't use it there's no harm to having it anyway so yeah I think it's really beneficial and will become a lot more prominent in the coming years especially as we're trying to transition to more renewable energy systems. Great. Do you think it makes sense for this this whole land development code efforts to do at what point would it make sense to put in effort to reach out to to land large and developers? We I certainly don't want to kind of fatigue them with with a with a many separate asks but also I do think their input is you know would be beneficial for the whole LDC? Well or just like it should is there some kind of strategy that would that would make sense in terms of when we reach out or should it be right now for for anything about EV charging or lights or anything or should we wait till we have a kind of draft and then do it at once? I don't know if you take Phil's comment to start out the rental registry you've got a how long is the LDC 200 and some odd pages right? You got a lot of stuff in there some of it and there's a lot of revisions from the last one. Question is do you want to have a public hearing where you've got people coming in and talking about 287 pages or do you want to have that communication outreach now and have to go back and revise the LDC after you have a public hearing? I think my my suggestion is the more people more stakeholders you can engage in the process now the better off you're going to be later on. I'd be interested to understand like how the residential model like functions so let's say that there's a new development and they put in level two chargers at every single parking space like how I know how commercial chargers function like you put a credit card and it charges you a fee and you charges you for the electric and etc but how does that work in residential so I'd be interested to understand that model because I think that gives us an idea of like what the cost to property owners would be because I think I could see this being property owners landlord saying this is going to make my costs go up a ton but we can understand and bring people to the table to actually say actually this is how the model works you can charge fees based this way I don't like that's what I'm trying to I would like to understand that before we put anything to law sounds good I can do some research in that direction try to get a better understanding and have that information available so that whenever these questions arise I can point to it or connect people to the right contacts right people to ask but coming back to your question I think it'd be useful to have a conversation with landlords and developers on this particular issue but the question for the council is how much pre-consultation do you want to do before the public hearing on the whole court maybe maybe you don't maybe you just have a public hearing I don't know I would say that quite frankly we're having this discussion it is here should we possibly let the landlords know that we're discussing this now and love to see them then chat with us about you know what EVs might be doing for them it's we encourage people to do EVs that might be a good thing I love to talk to I guess some people energy people to see what the trends are and when that sort of thing because I'm a little bit away from that right now so you know is it going to hurt to invite the landlord committee since we are talking about them again and it's like hi I'll miss you you weren't here to have a chat with us you know but why not I mean worse comes to worse maybe if you people show up you know maybe they maybe some of them have actually looked at it you know are informed about how EVs work with renters we can try to I think we can try to organize something maybe perhaps when we have some kind of draft yeah and also I think there there are the landlords but we can also try to see if there's like some you know EV encouraging non-profit or something you know like I don't know if it's like there's got to be some organization some some some organization that can advocate for or someone who has experience with the installation of these things Vermont what is it called efficiency Vermont no no no essentially national resources council Vermont forget the acronym but they do they do fairs they do EV fairs there was one in uh was a waterberry well Dr. Berry recently that I went to this summer where they get private well well Austin has one as well they get private owners to bring their vehicles in and then they open it up to the public to come and look at the vehicles and to have discussions with owners and stuff and they're very much into EVs what what were they called it's the Vermont what's it called the Vermont environmental it's not natural resources council you can you can I'll find I'll find the I'll find the email and send it to you Chris but they're very active in in promoting EVs and they hold these fairs all over the state in fact one of the things that came up the uh where the focus group was trying to connect with them to have a a fair NS extension you know you could have it right in the parking lot behind Firebird there is there is drive for mom it's yeah there's a number probably a number of organizations I'll find it these are locally sponsored so when I went to the one they had everybody there from Volkswagen to Hyundai and Keon and they even had a Ford F-150 okay so we can try we can try to find somebody somebody you know with experience or expert knowledge in this to attend one of these private commission meetings if if they're willing and so yeah I think that might help with understanding costs and implementation you know if they know of successful implementations multi multi-unit buildings where who has good policy yeah all right moving on to uh members updates updates from the members Scott you wanted to you wanted to talk about last few days yeah I'm sorry there's there's beacon which is a Romano energy and climate action network yeah I just want to talk about the strategic plan vision and strategic plan so there was an open house on Saturday coupled with the community meal we had a fairly good turnout because there were about 60 or 70 people at the community meal budget discussion so we corralled them to put up things there's now six pillars for those that haven't been involved housing and density transportation economic development services and facilities environment and community engagement so each of the pillars were up on the wall and people were able to put sticky to sticky papers up there recommending actions out of that was for there were focus group discussions on Monday and Tuesday I think Diane's the only one that went to every single one that I know of you know the joys of being retired and flexible schedule I went to three and they produced a lot of good discussions and the consultants are pulling things together and there's another steering committee meeting on the ninth to discuss the results um there was supposed to be uh I think it was in February on February 14th meeting there was supposed to be presentation to the public of the draft but now it's been postponed until I think the March meeting of the council yeah I'm not to say I thought I thought it was like the 14th but okay whatever the March meeting is there might be an update at the council meeting on the 14th but I know that it's now been moved to March to give everybody more time there's going to be a second community survey online survey but yeah I thought that that was going to be out by the 14th what the survey yeah it's going to be on it's going to be designed and put on lines and and that will be more detail based on the six pillars so good progress a lot of good ideas came out um yeah you might not know this but has there been based on the initial survey and the uh the lack of very limited regional representation across the city so has there been anything has this the team they have any ideas on how to get more survey response and orders a very responsible a broader swath of the city no okay um what you're dealing with is he's dealing with the existing situation which is very difficult to to mobilize um I did canvassing all around five corners all the businesses everybody said they'd come and I sat down with Jake Tron and at the nest for an hour and a half because he wasn't supposed to be here but then he was going to be here but he didn't come anyway so unless you go to some of these and unless you have the connections like the engagement groupings you know the stakeholder groups it's very difficult right now to to spread it out and try to get more people yeah we could go house to house um everybody got a post card oh they got postcards okay I mean they had flyers okay and it took the initial survey results and started out with some kernels of things up at the top um and which is you know here like community engagement I think is it was very popular day um there were some people came in that they got these phone calls hey we need you to come in here and voila so some some of our local community engagement people were bringers that came in and have chats so that was nice it was anywhere from a dozen to 18 people I didn't think at any point in time and so hopefully there'll be some process and philosophy and what not to have a reach I mean there was a lot of dialogue that went on about how do you reach certain segments of the population and what methods are you going to use I mean we did get granular um not just the big philosophy state so I don't know what was on the other group but I mean it's uh if we take the suggestions that people were telling us how to reach them or reach others maybe we'll be more successful next time it's clearly a challenge just just just just to back up a second here is that I think the steering the selection committee for the consultants and the council at some point I think it was in October meeting discussed that it probably would have been beneficial to build the stakeholder networks first and then hire the consultant to do the work because the stakeholder networks are in effect they're not there they're there but they're not there I mean their groupings are all over the city but they're not connected to to what's going on and people are busy and then as Diane and I noted the meetings are on Monday and Tuesday people work I mean both both sessions were during the first shift work hours so okay and yes you needed to be present to play the game and so there was no you know over online zoom you couldn't you know peek in you couldn't watch you had to participate that was it um so that was you know yes there was zoom on Saturday but there wasn't a zoom on Monday or Tuesday would the different with things have been different if people could zoom in maybe maybe that's something that should happen you know another time you know conducting a zoom survey so sort of interactive thing I don't know um but what you're going to find for the online survey coming out this time we should probably get somewhere between 300 and 600 people to respond that's a historical average is here and it'll be interesting to see how the council proposes and publicizes it and bring them sort of launches it so the answer that's going to happen this time hopefully next time yeah all right moving on to staff updates any staff updates uh I don't they have anything to know other than what so we already know right and I'll take a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second all in favor all right motion passes meeting adjourned