 Okay. January 9th meeting of the mob healer planning commission to order. And first we have to approve the agenda. So I'll take a motion to approve. People have a chance. So moved. Okay. Motion from Brian to be a second. Second. Okay. Second from Gabe. Those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Aye. Second. Okay. Gender approved comments from the chair. I don't think I have anything. I wanted to clarify with Maria that we have the right contact information and that she's receiving. Emails, but I believe that she. Is just. Yep. I'm getting emails. Okay. Great. Great. Okay. So that was just. Just to make sure that we had straight. I don't have anything else. Does anyone else have any. Comments or. Anything on the agenda from the planning commission. Okay. Next we have general business. If there's anyone from the public who has anything that's not on the agenda. Now's the time to bring it up. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you from the public. So we'll pass right through that. First. Gender item is. We're going to talk about the landing page for the city plan website. I had some. Comments I threw out there. Mike had some things. Not. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I received. But. With that, we can get started. I mean, Mike, did you want to jump into. What you had in mind. Yeah, either way. I mean, we can go over what you had or what I had for thoughts. I mean, we kind of. Took two different approaches to it. So I don't know. It looked like it looked like yours was like a bigger scale. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So maybe we can start with that. And then because I think my stuff goes into other areas of the page also. Let me pull it up. Yeah. Good. I was just going to say, while you're working on pulling that thing up, I was just going to go and say that, you know, a lot of my thought was just to try to, and you know, maybe somebody else had a different or a better approach to doing it. But my. Thought was. You know, I just wanted to try to find some way of. You know, they're on the page. What are we going to try to tell them? How are you going to try to capture their interests? So they want to go and do more. And that was a little bit of what I was. What I tried to lay out was maybe one way of doing that. If somebody thinks they have a better way. You know, communications is not my specialty. But I tried to figure a way that might capture my interest. And I was like, Hey, you know, I'm getting a good opening paragraph in there. And then trying to use some of those infographics to try to grab people to try to go through and say, Hey, this, this is why planning is important. This is why your city plan is important. And then go through and say, and this is how you'd use the plan. You know, you can click on the tab. I know the one tab for Explorer was removed. I think we could put that one back. I think we could put that one back. I think we could put that one back. I think we could focus to get people go there to explore. If you're interested in the policies, go to the policy link. And if you want to know these other random thing, you can go over here to this about the plan. I don't think, I think at the end of the day, if we look at this eight years from now, how many people go to about the plane is going to be. You know, pretty limited. You know, I don't think there'll be a ton of people trying to get that far into it or the additional resources. I think most people are going to focus on. Explore tabs and picking through the 12, 11, 12 chapters that are there. So that was a little my thought. Of what I was trying to come up with. Yeah. Yeah, so let's let's take that like piece by piece. I'll share. I just created real quickly because I just put it in an email before, but I'll share. The language and this language, I guess we could talk about whether this is going to be like an about the plan type thing or actual landing page language. Okay, there we go. So this is what I've thrown out there. We had talked about from what I recall this has been a month. We had talked about just having some language that gets into a lot of people's attention on the landing page. And so that's what this intro paragraph was intended to do. It's something I threw together right after a meeting. It's not like a ton of work was put into this. So feel free to. Have loads comments. But that's kind of what this is, is touching on the big issues. So Mike, I have a question for you. I have a question for you. Is this what you're thinking of the intro page? Or the intro paragraph to the landing page would look like, or are you thinking about. Or just tell me what you're thinking about. Well, we can go and I can show you what, you know, I can bring back up the landing page so we can take a look at it, but the landing page had a header. And then it had a couple of a couple of sentences had, you know, you found or you're at the page and then it had kind of two sentences. So that's what I was kind of focusing on was that. You know, welcome to the Montpelier city plan. And then two sentences. That helped to. Explain to people where they are or what they found. And so that was why I was kind of focusing on two sentences. Mine came out a little more wordy. Than two sentences. So the one that was there, I think it's a little bit shorter, but I think the idea that that was the idea was that in the intro. There were those couple of sentences. This is what you're talking about. Yeah, we're not seeing it on the screen though. Oh, because I, okay. Yeah, okay, I'll share your document. To show up. And now you've got, yeah, you've got my, yeah, you've got my. So, so your, your idea, like, just make sure I get the straight. Your idea of the opening paragraph on that landing page is something about. About the plan itself, like, like describing. Is that what you were thinking, like, like this, this info here. Yeah, and that was going to be the opening paragraph. And like I said, I don't know if that's necessarily what it was going to be, but that's a little bit of where I was. Yeah, so that's, I think this, this is like, this is a good thing to get feedback from the rest of planning mission on. Do we think that the landing page, the main page, the. You know, the main, the main landing page. Should it go into like a summary of substance type stuff like. Like, what's the other thing I had before, or should it be like background info about the plan and go from there. And all of this is saying, like, like, yeah, we, like, like Mike was saying, we could have an about page. That's separate, right? Mike, that's, you were thinking that. Yeah. And I, and I think maybe this, this second. Though, right. Well, I guess it would be the third bullet, the second sentence. You know, that's a little less important. I kind of think, you know, actually, if you take a little bit of the first, my first sentence, and then add in your sentence, and we're starting to kind of get somewhere where we're starting to. To kind of grab people's interest. So this, this is a new city plan. This new city plan is no longer a paper document as it was in the past, but it is a series of storyboards and web pages designed to educate. So I don't know, maybe there's even something above that before it gets to this, to try to grab people's interest. But can I just add as the new person here? I like, Kirby, I like your intro in that if I was just like a random Montpelier resident and I'd heard someone say something about the city plan. I could, I could like Google Montpelier city plan. And then I would be faced with this. And I would read that paragraph and be like, okay. I understand now where we're headed. You know, I don't have a background in. You know, urban planning or government, but I can kind of see. I have a basis for understanding what, what a city plan is now. And then, you know, under that have more information about specifics. I mean, people may not even know that it should be a paper document. You know what I mean? Like. They may not know what this has ever been. And I think that's kind of the right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I agree. I think you're, you're opening. Let me go through and see here. Where is this? So this is where the plan opens up in city plan planning for our future. So I think I would say welcome to the Montpelier city plan. Not necessarily the hub site. But if the next paragraph, because we've got these two sentences here, if the next one kind of opens into what you're talking about Kirby. I might say this city plan rather than the city plan, this city plan puts Montpeliers values into action. Or this is. Montpeliers city plan where we put our values into action. As a city will provide housing to all people who want to live here. Our communities open to all people of all backgrounds. Circumstances our city will be designed. So our residents can live full lives without having to own and drive an automobile. By living in Montpelier residents will significantly reduce your impact on the world region. And local environments. So I think that would be an excellent starting paragraph. That would be. Do a better job of grabbing people's interests. Like I said, that was my thing is I wanted to grab people's interest. And I probably didn't do a good job with mine. But that was my thought. We could then, as we go down, maybe get into some of what I'm talking about. Or maybe not. And then the idea was, so I had my opening paragraph. Then I had, why is the plane important? And maybe, maybe we can skip some of my stuff and go right to that. Why is the plane important? And before we had. They had put in SE group had some infographics. I thought those were really good. And we should keep those. My thought was move this to the explore tab, which was in between about the plan and implementation. I would put. Explore. Implementation about the plan. And then additional resources. Would be. A little bit of how I would put them in there. But then we could go into why is the plane important? Why is, why is the city plane so important? You know. Think about big issues that surround us today. We've got some infographics to talk about the housing crunch. Or whatever we want to have. Pick. Pick the topics that we want to put an infographic on to try to capture people. Let them know. They're important issues. But then we could go into why is the plane important. Why is the city plane so important? You know. They're important issues that we all need to address. And. Okay. So. What are some people's thoughts about. Infographics. What, what topic areas do we want to try to highlight? I think Mike had pulled up some options for us. I'm having technical difficulties. The screen sharing plus trying to work on the documents made everything break. I'm not sharing and you're not sharing. So hopefully it's. I'm going to pull up your. Talking again. So the infographic that we're talking about is not currently there. Okay. What is. What is the purpose of the infographic? So in the same way that we had different icons. For each one of the chapters that were up. That was on the page. I just. Stop sharing. Stop sharing. They also had different icons, which were different infographics, which let you go through and. Attach. You know. Some, some statistic. And it was, it was a. A graph. I tried to remember how to describe it now, but it was, it was kind of an eye catching way of. Putting a graphic in there. Or a figure. A piece of data in there. And then you just have to get people's attention with a. Descriptor that's off to the side. But is there any specific. Is there any specific information that we want to. Give right there is. I'm sorry. I'm having trouble understanding. Yeah. So. The thought with the whole web based plan is to kind of tell a story and pictures and try to rely on text less. So part of that is, you know, we're going to just have a short intro. And then we're going to have a short intro. And then we're going to have some photos and infographics. And so for the landing page where we're talking. The landing page wants. We're trying to tell a story in a way. Or get, get a message across to people. In a simple way as possible. So we're trying to have a, you know, a short intro thing. Like we were looking at a second ago about what our main values are. And then kind of having some infographics there that also match those values. And, and there's aesthetic reasons too. And it looks like Aiden wants to chime in and she's. I think you, you. Maria, do you know, Aiden works for a C group in this part of designing this. Hi everyone. Sorry. I was trying to pull up stuff in the background, but I was also having some. Computer issues. So anyway. I did take the. Little charts infographics off the landing page. And I moved them to, I moved two of them to an energy chapter to like have, be a little bit more specific. In the last meeting we had talked about. If those 12 icons, but the chapters were on that landing page, then maybe having 12 little blurbs, infographics on the landing page might be a little busy. I do have an example. I think I'm allowed to share screen. Of what those looked like. Sorry, Maria, if you're getting caught up to speed on things. But they were, they were supposed to be. Interesting statistics that would help the help communicate the. What the city plan is sort of what the goals are trying to reach. So let's talk about energy. So if right now. There's like a flashy stat, 53% of energy use is offset by the city's solar array or something like that. I don't, I don't know if that's a fact actually, but a goal is by 2030 to have 100% of. Energy use municipal energy use offset by renewable sources or coming from renewable sources. Okay. Almost crashed you. Yeah, it did. So is it screen sharing or no. You should be able to, but. I know it really just. My screen went black and then it's really started. I can also send a picture in the chat if that helps my computer. Function. Oh, there we go. That looks like we got a few of the graphics, but not Aiden. All right. So I might have to just boot her off. Okay. I joined on a different. Yeah. So we'll leave you there if you're. I'm just going to take a picture of my screen and I'll send it in the chat. But anyway, those, that was the point of those graphics and. I think if we can pick one from each chapter and have them on the front screen. We can configure them in a way that's interesting and engaging, but that was the point of that home screen. And, and sorry, they're removed now. So we don't have the, the visual aid. I don't necessarily think we need to have one from every chapter. I just think we need to have enough to, you know, as Kirby kind of kicks it off with his paragraph, if we then shift into why is this city playing so important? And we, even if we have just two or three key facts to kind of going back up why. You know, why is this city playing important? And this is, you know, this is the place this is the document where we. Move forward to identify how we're going to address them. And then we have a brief explanation after that of how, how do you explore this plan? How do you use this plan? How do you use this document? I think if, if that were a thing. Catch them in the introduction, say why it's important and then say how they can move forward exploring the plan. And then if we've done our job, then they can have an opportunity to click on the next page and see what I'm talking about gets moved to about the plan as well. Right, right. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. We're just going to say the, I think between Kirby and Mike's intro, I think there could be some sort of hybrid approach. I liked the blurb about the values, Kirby, but I think also for that intro page, kind of a good in between would be something about. Maybe like the values that Montpelier is choosing by having this web-based plan and that they want something that's engaging. They want to be transparent. They want to have ongoing public discourse. About these goals that the city is putting forward. And that people can really see themselves and getting from A to Z on some of these goals and strategies. So anyway, I liked. Yeah. So about that, about that, my, my assumption is that people will be going. Here to get into some substance about what we're doing. And I'm not, I'm not assuming that most of them will care that much. About, you know, it's format or us talking about the format. You know what I mean? Like I'm not thinking that most users are going to, like if we had a paragraph about, this is a web-based plan. And this is why we have a web-based plan. And I kind of think, I think that most people aren't going to be interested in like, you know, they're going to say, okay, well, what are you, what are you doing with the plan here? Come on. That's my, that's my assumption, but I, you know, I could be wrong. So I was thinking that like info like that would be, would make sense for an about page, which is kind of when I looked at Mike's materials, I think I thought that was what he was talking about too. But what do other people think about that? Because I mean, that is kind of like a threshold question about what we're trying to achieve, which is what Aiden was getting into. Like, what are we trying to achieve with the landing page? Like what is the hook that we want? And if we want to have infographics as part of that, which I can see the appeal in that because it catches people's attention and gives them info in a, in a succinct, easy way. If that's going to be part of it, then what types of graphics do we want to put there? What do we want to put at the forefront? So that's what I'm throwing off the plankers right now. And what feedback do we have about what's important for the landing page? Well, I think I like, Kirby, I like your opening paragraph. I think we do need to say something in there about how this, I mean, it is a plan, but I mean, it's, it's a look forward for the city. And then the idea that you would have why it's important and then just tee up, I mean, to Maria's point, I, I'm, I'm new too. I, you know, the idea that there's 12 chapters, you know, kind of, you know, we've, I don't think it's too much text to kind of set some context for what they're looking at. I do think that like you said, we have to assume that people have never seen a plan like this and don't really understand what, what it is. And I think that, you know, very rudimentary description of to look ahead, your, your content about, you know, top big picture what it is and how it's a look forward and then why it's so important. And then, and then, you know, there's 12, the plan is broken up into 12 chapters addressing topics, blah, blah, blah, like you have here. I mean, I don't know if that's end language, I feel like that's kind of something that should tee up. And it's very quick language, it's not like it's this, you're looking at it and it's this huge, you know, novel of text and then I don't, the infographic, I don't, I can't, I'm not I think the icons. Are we saying that the, the, the, the icons on there, the 12 icons are something that are going to live on the landing page or they're going to go to another, another page or is that a decision to make for us? Right now, I think we have decided to keep them on the front page. I think that's a good thing. I get to good thing we just got to tee it up and say there's 12 chapters. Looking ahead on 12 issues and then I like, I love infographics, I think that is something that grabs people and they want to see quick snapshots of information. So the question is how do you tee that up? I mean, if there's 12 chapters and then you have three infographics, people are going to say, well, where's, where's the other nine? So I guess it would be a matter of how to incorporate the infographics after you've teed it up and said, here's the here's the format, here's how you get to the various places. And then I guess it would be kind of like, here's some interesting facts about some of the chapters. I don't know. Like you said, Mike, I don't know what the number is of infographics that you would have on there because then it starts to get, it does start to get busy. May I ask that I was out last meeting. So maybe this was discussed before, but can I ask why? What's the issue that we're trying to address by dealing with the landing page right now? Because I just say, you know, I grew up learning how to write, you know, one of the things my one of my writing mentors taught me was as you write your intro paragraph last, you know, once you get all the everything out on the page and you understand the scope of what you're writing about, then you can turn your attention to introducing the readers to that substance. We don't have the substance in place yet. And so I don't, is there some way, do you have a way to identify some sort of urgency in needing to outline the landing page right now? Because I just feel that we may be better served if we work on the nuts and bolts of the page, of the sub pages, we understand what's sort of the entire scope of the content and the pages and then we can turn our attention to the landing page. Yes. So the reason why we're working on it for the first part is because SE Group wants to feedback from us about how like how they should go about their work. So they want to get some big picture ideas from us so that they can start developing that other content. That's the biggest reason. The reason why the landing page could be important and why I think it's arguably appropriate to start working on it because the landing page is supposed to encapsulate the plan itself. Well, as far as how we're working on the landing page, we're working on it. We're working on it. We're working on it. We're working on the plan. We are pretty much done. We do kind of know the story that we've been trying to tell through the chapters that we've been doing. The city council is going to change that. So maybe. I don't know if we, I mean. We don't know exactly where we don't have a way to know for a long time. How that's going to shake out. But just assuming that's going to be basically what we're going to do, we just want to know how we need to tell it. The story is the chapter we've already done. Yeah. And I guess my concern is, is we haven't, you know, we have conceptualized what those chapters look like, but we haven't fleshed those out on the page yet. And once we do that, I think it will give us a better direction for how we want the landing page to go. And I, this is maybe a minority view, but I, it's just difficult for me to really weigh in on what the landing page should contain. Because I think once you do that, and you sort of agree on what the landing page is going to be that, I think that oftentimes artificially constrains the folks who are working on the substance of the document to try to get what they're doing, you know, to get the substantive parts to fit within that narrative on the landing page. And I think it's oftentimes more fruitful to do it the other way around. But I guess, you know, to the extent that, that SE group wants feedback from us. In terms of, I'm not quite sure what the scope of what they're looking for, but. Is there other, other larger issues that we should be addressing outside of just the landing page? I can, I can jump in just a little bit here. I think that the text itself. I think. I think doing writing by committee may be. Maybe slow going. But I think the reason that we've kind of gone to this point is that in the last meeting, at least that I attended, we had talked about, you know, what, what really is the through line for this plan? What is, what's the vision? What's the goals of this. The planning process and if we could summarize that in two to three hard hitting sentences, that would just be an amazing opener to this website. Awesome. And I, and I think. We've gotten a little bit in the weeds. On this for now. I think. Part of what you're saying, Aaron is. Is right. Like, you know, do it at the end, but I'm not sure what you're saying. I understand that a lot of that writing has been done on as far as content goes. So anyway, for as far as your last question about what, what else can we be providing feedback on right now? I think if that structure of the whole landing page, those four tabs, the content on each page. How much content we want to have. So that would be, would be really helpful. And then we can always leave a placeholder for text as it, as it comes together. But I think what we've generally talked about is. Having. Having some sort of opening sentence that tells people why. Why they should kind of explore about the plan more. Where they can provide more feedback and how they can engage with them and then point them towards those other chapters. Which is why those 12 icons are there currently. So we can, we can add stuff to the landing page. We can add an infographic. We can add photos. We can add whatever we want. But I think it would be helpful if we kind of. Corraled in. Okay. We know we want text. We know we want icons. And those will kind of get formulated. That's helpful. Thanks. Yeah. So, yes. I mean, one point I'm taking from your area is like, yeah, we don't plan to spend a bunch of time on this. This is, we have several things to kind of go through at the meeting tonight. And this was, this was, we were going to have a discussion with the landing page in order to get a secret, some. Conceptual feedback about how to proceed. And that was, that was pretty much what we're doing. And in fact, I mean, look, this entire conversation, I guess I should have probably says beginning. The way I see it is we were having a conversation and Aiden was, was kind of eavesdropping on that conversation for her benefit. And that was the point of the conversation. Was for Aiden to hear us. I mean, I hope you're taking lots of notes, by the way, because, you know, I guess. Well, okay. So, so it sounds like we have. Just to, just to kind of. Put it all together what we've got so far. We, we do have, we do intend to start the landing page with some discussion of what our overall values are. And follow that up with some, mostly the stuff that's there. You know, it sounds like the, the icons are staying. We want to touch on. A brief description of what the plan's about. That's what I call like the end language. I just called it that because I thought that would go on the bottom of that first page. We want to touch on describing telling people what an aspiration is what a goal is what a strategy is right there on the landing page as they use the plan. And we plan to have the about page where I think it's appropriate for the background info to go. Like the background about. Why we have this web plan and stuff. And then the other categories of things that Mike was talking about, I, I think are fine. I don't have any objections to incorporating that stuff either or just the city. The planning commission have. I'm assuming everyone got a look at Mike's document. So I think there's, there's good stuff in there that was that also kind of jives with I think the ideas that we've had in our heads. About this. Is there anything else you need Aiden is this as it's been beneficial for you to hear. Yeah, it's good. And my last question here would be where for the aspiration and goal definitions, do you want that upfront or do you want that more in the about. Page. I think I've heard people say that it's good to have that explanation up front, like what when Brian was talking about and Maria two were touched on. Assuming the people don't have a lot of background knowledge here. So to explain some of the jargon up front, I think is, is what we were thinking. Yeah. Yeah. I think you know, if I'm just the average person coming to this website, what would I want to take away from it? And where would I want it to point me? I think planners can get caught up in the, trying to explain everything about. The planning process and the plan. But you're right that this is. For. Interested members of the Montpelier public. And trying to really frame it up for them. So yeah, Kirby, I, this has been helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I think we have a lot of background here if there's more conversation. Okay. I'm comfortable with moving on. Mike, did you have anything else you want to make sure that we. Touch on before we move on. No, I think we captured most of. Most of the, what was on that page. So Aiden and I can work on. So we can start building it out, even if, you know, even if we're only building it out to 80%, we still need to have an idea of where we're building it out to. You know, and as Aaron said, that's a good point. It is helpful to kind of do your introduction last. And, but if, if we at least have it framed out, we can always come back when we're done to go through and say, now that we've done our 11 chapters. 11 storyboards are now written. Let's go and look back at our introduction and make sure we've. Set the table for this. The way we want it to be set up. Yeah. And some really good, like, infographics and or materials might be developed over the course of that, that we might want to like page. Definitely think that that's a possibility. Okay. Well, we'll move on to the next item. Except that my. Computers broken now. So. I'm going to, I'm going to drop off. We'll be in touch tomorrow. Okay. Yep. Thank you, everyone. Have a good night. Thank you. I think next on the agenda was your CNU ARP discussion. Yeah. Yeah. Pull that back up. So. This is what I was thinking about kicking things off. On this topic. I'm going to actually give some background now that I. For the sake of. The last few minutes. I guess that's what I was thinking about. I guess that's what I was thinking about. Look, gave him Maria and Brian. Weren't around. When this, when this all started. But. Back in the spring, we received. The city received a, you know, contact from the Congress for new urbanism, which is a think tank. For planning. That's, that's well regarded. And it's progressive. And it's, it's a good thing. And it's a good thing. To, I guess they were partnering because. You know, senior housing is a big issue. And they, they. Kind of on their own reviewed our zoning by-laws and. Other planning documents. For the city and. Gave us some feedback about what we could do to. Change those documents to make housing. Easier to develop. So we are completely on board as a planning commission and. And I believe I think it's safe to say the city council is, has vocalized many times that it's on board with, with producing more housing and increasing housing. But at the same time. In the spring also this, the planning commission had some recommendations for changes to zone. And. And I think that's a good thing. Which is what we do from time to time because we get, we get feedback from the public and we just respond to it in real time and kind of adjust the zoning as a kind of a living. Legal document. Over time. And. We made something like 12. Suggestions at that time. The city council ended up rejecting a couple of those suggestions from us. And one of those. And we want to revisit both of those things. But we wanted to bring it back to the city council. So. And then we had to do a solar shading, which is not. Involved with this Congress or urbanism thing. And another of our recommendations was to sort of test out. Removing density caps. In a couple of our neighborhoods. And. It turned out that as far as the members of the public, who. and City Council backed away from it and said, Planning Commission, look at this again, and come back to us with a really well-developed idea. Well, that density recommendation coincidentally actually overlaps with the Congress for New Urbanism recommendations, because in their recommendations, they state that ideally, Montpelier would not have zoning caps. With that, we thought that by getting back to the City Council about that idea, and at the same time addressing formally the Congress for New Urbanism's ideas, then we'll just do all that stuff together, and we'll go through these recommendations from CNU and develop if we want to, which I'm assuming we will want to, develop some suggestions for the City Council for some changes to the zoning based on all of this. Does anybody have any questions about the background after that? Okay. Mike, could you try to share? Because my technology is not going to allow it. If you could share the CNU report. Just as a nutshell description of what this report's about, they identified three coding areas, or when they say code, if they mean our bylaws to work on, but within that, they have multiple suggestions. I think they have seven suggestions basically. One of them was to either decrease density caps, either city-wide or in selects neighborhoods, or if not, I mean increase the caps. Either increase the caps or get or do away with density in a lot of places. They also talk about, if Mike pulls it up, we can just walk through. Thanks. Really the first, they give us this intro stuff. There's a lot of good think tank-based reasoning for a lot of this. The density section under the current bylaws, they framed it as overlapping housing standards because density and lock coverage and building footprint all get at the same things. That's one reason why they suggest to do away with density because it's redundant with other things we have in our zoning that do a better job. In general, in the past, this planning commission has not been happy about density because it's just arbitrarily stops development. That's their first thing. I think also in this section, there's the discussion of lock coverage, and Mike, feel free to jump in on your interpretations or your ideas for any of the stuff as I'm summarizing. Lock coverage, their suggestion that I took away was that they want us to only count the buildable part of a parcel for lock coverage, which is just, it's a way that we are regulating development. If we count only the buildable part, that's more accurate so that parcel to parcel, there's not different treatment. Mike, I'm not seeing how this is going to lead directly to a lot more housing, though. It's more of just equity issue. If you happen, like if you happen to have a property that has some cliffs on it you can't build on, then our zoning kind of favors you in a way because we let you build on a lot more of the other part. I don't know. What are your thoughts, Mike? We'll stop there. Yeah, so they wrote just for background. So they wrote this report and sent it out and really there was not a lot of conversation back and forth. So there really was no opportunity for us to provide from a technical standpoint rebuttal on some of their points. So if you have questions or if you think something is of concern, you can always let me know and we can talk through it because, for example, the lot, the building footprint, there's waiver provisions. Now the waiver provisions are not in the same place in the regulations. So you see there's a building cap of 1,500 or 2,500 square feet, but don't realize that in another section where they talk about dimensional requirements, there's a waiver that says you can build a building at whatever size you want. You just have to go to the DRB to get approval for anything above that number. So they didn't really reflect that in their comments and didn't really seem to get it. And I never got, I talked to them directly about the lot coverage thing and I could never get out of them. How using buildable area was helping, buildable area would make it less possible and I couldn't really get out of them because we'll take a bit of a parcel. If you've got an acre of land and half of it's a wetland, how is then going and saying you can only use 50% of the buildable land? Because what we've said is, well, you've got to conserve 50%. If 50% of it's a wetland, you couldn't build that in any ways and you could build entirely on the one piece. And what they said is, well, that's not equitable and I couldn't figure it out. I was assuming, just to try to interpret this in a way that makes sense from being pro-housing, that they also wanted us to maybe change the amount of buildable area needed as urge or the amount of lot coverage needed to make that a really low number. I think, but then to offset that by making it buildable only. That's the way I interpreted how this could make sense. Yeah, but our numbers that we developed, whether you're talking density or lot coverage or building footprint, for each neighborhood, they were calculated because we wanted to maintain the character of the neighborhoods. And so we broke the city into 54 neighborhoods in our zoning regulations. And within those neighborhoods, we looked at how big are the parcels, how big are the buildings, how much lot coverage. So that way, if we required people to meet those standards, we were helping to maintain the character of the neighborhoods. So that was why we kind of developed those numbers. They, in a lot of communities, they're just arbitrary. They just pick a number and they don't really know. In our case, we actually were very careful to make sure that these don't become barriers, but we don't wanna have lot coverage that's looking at the amount of impervious cover. Once you start getting above 50% impervious cover, stormwater runoff becomes a significant issue. You really have to treat it. And single family and two family are exempt from a lot of the stormwater rules. So if you have a lot of single family homes that are built with 80% coverage because it's all driveways and porches and roofs and everything, if you've got a large amount of those, then you're gonna have a lot of stormwater runoff. And a lot of these residential neighborhoods are the higher land, so you wanna put a lot of runoff. So the reason for the 50% and numbers in that area are really trying to get to the fact that we're addressing stormwater runoff. You wanna have green space. You wanna have that there to help absorb some of that runoff. And that's why we have that. Now, obviously as you get down to the more commercial areas, you have stormwater requirements that you have to get state permits for and you've gotta treat and capture your stormwater. So we have 100% coverage. If you're in the downtown, if you're in the urban core, you have 100% coverage. So a little bit of background on the lot coverage pieces that they were talking about. So of the three that they opened with, the three arguments they opened with, one was density, which Kirby accurately mentioned, we are trying to get away from density for a little bit of background again. Urban center one, two and three don't have any density requirements. So we already have part of our downtown that doesn't have density requirements and does what we would like to see. And what we have from there are our densities from a political standpoint, it was very difficult. Kirby was here, John was here when we passed the zoning in 2018. That was a battle at city council because people didn't want the densities. The densities had been set much higher, well, technically lower. Lower densities give more people. So we ended up with having to go with really adjusting things and doing what we could. And when we went with what's called the 90% rules, so 90% of the densities are conforming in every neighborhood. What that did was made a number of places that may have been four units an acre became seven units an acre. And that was very unpopular, but we had to argue that your neighborhood already allows seven units an acre were just changing the number to match what's on the ground. So density was hard to go to zero would have been impossible in 2018 and it's still very difficult uphill climb right now. I would pick a few neighborhoods. I just wanna throw some background info for the new folks too on this. It's like just so you are aware that there's for a lot of people in Montpelier who get uncomfortable with zoning changes or changes to their neighborhoods. Density I've noticed in my long time here and it's always been confusing for me but it's absolutely just something that always comes up is that for a lot of people, density is a proxy for how their neighborhood is going to look or be. And that's not actually what density regulation is about at all, but in this town, it's become the proxy. When people hear density, they like that's what they always fix on whenever there's zoning changes. And like that's the word that gets them thinking that if there's a change, then that word is the one that means of changes for their neighborhood. And so for me, like Mike mentioned like a political thing, I mean, I don't know there's a communications element here. One reason that we wanna move away from density I think is we can have a lot more productive public dialogues if people don't get fixated on that word. And if we're actually talking about like literally what our neighborhoods are going to be like and look like as opposed to just this word that has a number. And I think the fact that density has a number to it is part of what's attractive to make it a proxy for people. Cause they can wrap their heads around a density number. Like, you know, how many units per square feet is like literally what density is about. So yeah, so that's part of the background and sort of interrupt you Mike, but I thought people wouldn't hear that. Yeah, so yeah, and maybe we just stop here. I don't know if you guys had a chance to take a look at it. But as I said, at least this first section where it goes through these three issues of building footprint, these are abstract standards. And do they put the suggestions there? No. So what I'm thinking, but I'm definitely wanting like so this is like our preliminary discussion about what we're gonna do about this. One thing that seems like a typical way that we might approach something like this is to create a document of our own for city council where we kind of number all of CNU's suggestions and then we give our suggestion in response for city council. Like is that like an approach we wanna do? For instance, if we do that, you know, number one could be what do we do about density caps? Because CNU was the least ambiguous about that where it's not good. And then lot coverage, do we, you know, do we go down a list like that and then building footprint correction? And if we do do that, then there's an opportunity to the places where like what Mike was talking about how maybe CNU didn't understand the process quite right. And so if there's like a technical explanation that addresses and kind of sweeps under the rug that issue, then we could address it there. I don't know what it, so that's one question I have about how we wanna proceed. People can think about that for a second. We can, I'm just gonna like just briefly go over like the other things I see as what their suggestions are. One of them is design standards. They want us to have a lot more design standards and that's something that would replace lot coverage and building footprint and density. We currently have design review in certain neighborhoods and there's a design review committee that helps people in certain situations when design review gets triggered. The city council thinks of it as something the public doesn't like. That's their experience. I'm not, I don't know, like personally whether a lot of people don't like it, but so city council probably does not want us to come in with a bunch of new design review regulations and especially they don't think they want us to expand the neighborhoods in which design review applies to even if like, so that's kind of some of the context there but that's something that CNU was having us look at. I think one thing Mike that we would really help us from you is to help us figure out what are some things we can do in lieu of regulating through design review but still get at preserving the character of neighborhoods in a similar way, but one that might be more palatable. Like that's, I think that's one of the big brainstorming things we're gonna have to do with this is we probably politically can't do exactly what CNU would like, which is to have a big robust design review and not try to regulate in these other areas, but that may be some kind of compromise in the middle. So that's gonna be something that we're gonna need to work through. There's, and then at the bottom, Mike, these didn't seem like big things to me, but you tell me, they suggested that basically allow us to do administrative approval for changes to residences when that involved three and four units. Right now we're pretty lenient with what people can do with one or two units, but if you have a property that's more than two, so CNU wanted us to start being more kind of lenient with three and four units, as far as what kind of regulation of bureaucracy that people have to go through. That seems, I mean, I don't know, that seems good on its face to me, but what are your thoughts about those suggestions, Mike? Yeah, they had a couple of them that, this was another area where there were things that I had some disagreements with and it would have been nice for them to have kind of passed over a draft of their proposal to our zoning team, so we could send back comments before they published it. Additionally, units requires just a zoning permit while adding a third and fourth unit triggers major site plan. So we have, this is, so the number one under the suggested improvements is one that we've talked about a little bit. John has certainly recommended it in the past is under state law, site plan requirements require that you would, single and two family is exempt from site plan and site plan is where you look at the internal workings of a parcel. In other words, where's the parking, how's the driveways, how do they interact with the sidewalks? Those types of things, usually it's used for commercial properties. So if you're building a business and you've got a parking lot, you've got a building, what is the lighting like? What are the signs like? How does, are there any sidewalks that lead or any pedestrian pathways that lead to the sidewalks? Those types of questions are addressed. So that's what site plan looks at in a lot of cases. And so we've had the conversation of whether three and four units, we could exempt three and four unit properties from site plan approval because a lot of that is less needed. I wasn't sure if it technically was as big a deal as they were making it out to be because we have under the 2018 zoning changes, we created administrative site plans. So not every proposal would necessarily have to go to the DRB. It may be, you may have to put in a site plan if you're putting in a quadplex, a four unit building, but if you put in your four unit building, you submit the site plan and we will evaluate it internally as an administrative site plan and issue a permit. So you still have the requirements, but you're not going to a DRB hearing and you're not going through the added costs and times. So that was, that is a recommendation they have to exempt those. John Adams has talked about doing that. We've talked about it, but it's never kind of moved forward yet. It's one we can put on the list of things to consider. I don't think it's necessary entirely, but it certainly is something we can look at. The second one, the second point here, the change of one unit to two unit. The reason that language was put in there was because the table of uses gets a little legally wonky. That's the table of uses. So if you're changing from one use to another use, you need to get a permit, kind of a basic zoning thing. Well, because so many uses were the same and we had all these lines, we started to combine some of the residential uses. One and two unit is put on a single line. Three and four unit is on the same line. And we started to realize, well, that means because they're on the same line in the use table, they are technically the same use. So if you go from a three unit building to a four unit building, you don't need to go in and get a permit. And if you don't need to get a permit, you don't need to meet any of the requirements. So if there's a requirement that you have one parking space for every unit and you go from a three unit to a four unit, you don't need to add a parking space because you don't need another permit, literally. If you don't need a permit, you don't need to follow any of the rules. So as long as you don't build anything, as long as all you're doing is internal work and you're converting a three unit to a four unit, you don't need to go and meet any zoning requirements. So we were like, well, that shouldn't be thing. You should come in and get a permit. It'll be an administrative permit. It'll cost you 30 bucks and we'll give you the permit because you're gonna meet all the requirements, but you should come in so we can make sure A that you have the density because you could violate the density. You can only have enough density to put in three units, but according to the table, it's three and four units. So you can just go in and put in the fourth unit because you don't need a permit. So what they're talking about is just really bad. So number two, we would argue is a really bad idea. They also had a big fit about, you know, the fact that we, all these are acceptable, but to get a zoning permit, to obtain a zoning permit requires public notice to be placed on the property for 15 days to advise interested parties. Those are legal requirements and to be upset that we have to go through and require a permit means somebody has to wait 15 days to start working on their project. That's not too much to ask. So I think most of number two is mostly bunk. And I wouldn't put much weight behind it. And yes, there's ground for appeals. Everybody's allowed to. That's our legal system. If we issue a permit, there's a 15 day appeal period. That's how state law is written. That's not up for debate now, except to the point that they were making, which is if you require people to get a permit, then the neighbors are gonna have a right to appeal. Yes, that's absolutely true. If we exempted people and said, you don't need zoning permits anymore, then yes, there would be no way people could appeal it and therefore no delay in the process. But you also don't get to go and say, you have to elevate it. You've got to meet any of these other requirements that we think are good ideas, like good design. So two, I think mostly you should, I'd advise you to throw out. Can I just ask a question on two? Because I'm not sure I agree with you, but maybe I'm missing something. So you're opposed to not getting a permit if you change an existing building from three to four units, because is there something legal about that or you just feel like that's a, because there are density requirements in our zoning. I guess I'm not sure why it's so important to get a zoning permit if you're not changing the look of the building or the footprint, but you're changing from three to four units. And an example. Yeah, so it is part of it. Part of it is the density at this point, but the reason that line, we have that line in there, like I said, was because just for a legal reason, if somebody changes from a single family home to a duplex, the way things are, they recommend it, you wouldn't need a permit at all. You can just go in and put in a duplex without getting any permits. And I think that's, that I think is an issue when we have these other requirements. Like I said, going from, if we would eliminate, now if we eliminate all the other requirements and we're not looking at anything, there's no parking requirements. And during the process of doing these things, we also go through and make sure all the other requirements are met. When somebody comes in to do a permit to go from a single family to a duplex, we will advise them of the fact they need to get their wastewater approval. And we send that over to the DPW so they can get their wastewater approval. So it's generally that's why it's there. There is also the, as we said, if we've got the density, if we don't have any density requirements, we don't have any parking requirements. And there's really no reason for us to be looking at it, then yeah, we could have that conversation of just saying anything that's approved for one to four units is a use. And until you reach the fifth unit, then you become multifamily and you've got to get a permit to go from one to four units to five. You could have that as a policy. You know, I think that's worth having a conversation about, right? I mean, allowing, I mean, I think that's a really good conversation. Why do we not want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like that's my like dream is to, I think if I'm understanding correctly is to just move towards more design standards and less focus on density and parking. But like I said, if we don't have density, we don't have parking standards, then it starts to become more than the, then there is a legitimate question of, is it worth even getting the permit for it or, and do we define the uses differently? I think until we get that point, we really can't follow their recommendation because the parking requirement makes a difference when you've got places where you've got on-street parking. And that's always been a thing because somebody could go ahead Gabe. When we were looking at the one that was rejected by the city council, we were going to the 1500 square foot, right? We were trying to expand into that area. Does this recommendation, does it have certain limitations or is this throughout, like we're saying anywhere in the whole city, duplexes, you know, triplexes can become quads. Is that anywhere? Yeah, this would mean anywhere. What they're saying is, so if you have a three-plex, you can go to a four-plex. Now it doesn't do the in-between, it doesn't do two units to three units. It just does one unit to two unit and three unit to four unit. I thought a change here would affect going from one to three or two to four. I mean, it could if we grouped them together differently on the use table. I'm just going specifically how they were looking at the use table. Yeah, I think it's something for us to mark as to review when we go through. And it will be contingent on some of our other recommendations. I mean, like you were saying, Mike, like it starts to make sense as policy better if we do a lot with removing density or do, and we weren't planning on tackling parking, but that's also perpetual. But if you have a design requirement and this is looking at the bottom, I guess second to the last sentence, this was probably the one that had the biggest issue with the current process for obtaining a zoning permit creates an unnecessary hurdle for anyone who wishes to provide additional housing in accordance with all the established requirements. If you don't require a zoning permit, there are no requirements. That's, there are no requirements. If you say you don't need a permit, you can do whatever the flip you want. And that's where I'm basically like you can't have it both ways. You can't say you have to build to all the requirements, but you don't need to get a permit. It doesn't work that way. So this goes back, I think to Kirby's recommendation after discussion in the first one, right? I mean, we could go, I think it's actually a good way to get back in front of the city council. We were given these recommendations. We go through it. We explain why some of these don't apply to us or we don't want them to apply to us, you know, or they didn't take into consideration some other things, but we can, it allows us to go back in and say, but we do agree with these things, all of which help us get at our housing issue. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely the goal, I think. Yeah, Mike, did you have any other feedback? Like what about their ADU? Like they were talking about just opening up the definition for what's an ADU. I think it, I mean, at first blush, it made sense to me to basically want us to open up and accept what counts as an ADU and take away some of the rules that we have that might prevent people from building them. Yeah, I think this one was another one that went a little bit to some differences of how things are read. So an ADU currently must be distinct from the primary dwelling. ADUs are often distinct from the primary dwelling located above a garage, however, this should not be a requirement. Many large homes provide an ADU completely within the primary residence, blah, blah, blah. A distinct from is, can't, does not mean it has to be a separate dwelling, a separate structure. ADUs must be distinct from in that they have to have their own entrance. They can't be connected internally to the other unit. So you can't have an ADU that is just a bedroom or something that has to have a lockable door that separates it. You could have a door, but it has to be a lockable door from both sides. So it operates distinct from the primary dwelling. It can't rely on the other dwelling for any of its five required things. So that's what the distinct from is getting to. And do you, so the question for us when addressing this will be about whether we think that the zoning regulations are clear about what that means or should we add in a clarifying sentence or two? I mean, there could be, but certainly the way it's understood and interpreted, it hasn't been an issue. If you're going off, like if you're going off of like, what's the practice of your office right now, but it's based on an interpretation, maybe it would be in like your office's best interest for us to kind of codify what you're doing. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if it's necessarily needed. I think they were making a, making a, you know, I hate to use distinction from, you know, they're making an interpretation of this that I don't think, I just don't think other people would make. If, like I'm just thinking, like if there's like an NB type lawsuit and like challenging a decision to allow someone to build an ADU, maybe it would be better if we had, if we were very clear that no distinct means these things not has to be a separate building. Yeah, we use distinct from, we use distinct from because under state law, the word that state law uses is appurtenant to. And so pretty much, you know, getting into the legally whatever's, we remove the word appurtenant and replaced it to distinct from. Okay. So yeah, that's, I mean, you know, we'll probably want to address this when we get to it. And yeah, I think that's the question, whether we think that a clarification might prevent a lawsuit and unneeded litigation or whether you don't think that there's a chance of it. Sounds like what's going to come to you. Yeah, and then the other piece that they don't, they didn't note here or recognize here, and this again for people who are new is that we also changed our zoning to say that anyone, regardless of density requirements, if you have a single family home, you can have a duplex. And that really comes from the fact that we were talking about how can we expand ADUs to be more available to people. And so people said, well, what if we have an ADU currently under state law, it's 30%. We said, well, how about if we make it 50% and I said, well, if you turn 50% of your house into an ADU, you're a duplex. And John Adams said, well, then let's just say everybody can have a duplex, and we did. So the rules really, and a lot of people come in and say, I wanna put in an ADU and we'll advise them to say, the ADU has some restrictions and has some limitations. 90% of the properties in the city are conforming and can have a duplex. The only ones that can't, you have to have a conforming lot to get that extra duplex rule. But for the most part, most people do. And only people who have small lots, in other words, if you're on a lot of 5,000 square foot requirement and you only have 3,000 square feet, then you're forced into using the ADU because you don't have enough land, but that's the only requirement. So we really didn't get any credit for that. But for the most part, most, because our zoning is so good, our maps are so accurate, our neighborhoods are really well-defined that any most people can put in a duplex, which means most of these requirements go away anyways. And by duplex, we have two units. So you can put two single-family homes separate, you can put them connected, you can put one in front of the other. There are a lot of ways of doing that because we don't, we're very generous in how we define our residential uses. It's just the number of units that are allowed on a parcel. So. Okay. Sorry, I have a question about the ADU. Is there a reason that, I mean, why are there so many rules about what is an ADU? Like why does it have to have a separate entrance? Yeah, so it has to have, it can have a, if it has a, if it comes into a common lobby and then the single-family home has a door into its unit and then you have a door into the ADU, then that's different. It's just there are two things. One is building code. It's kind of where a little bit where building code and zoning overlap. Somebody can't have an independent, you can't move, you can't have a requirement that you have to go through somebody else's property, like through somebody else's apartment to get to your apartment. You should always, each unit has to have an individual access to the outside. Okay. And that is because of building codes? And yeah, that's for building and fire codes. And it's just generally kind of the way it is. Otherwise, you might rent apartment A and then somebody rents your landlord rent apartment B and they go and they tell you, oh, by the way, this guy, he's just gonna walk through your apartment because that's the only way to get to his apartment. I actually lived in an apartment like that in Brooklyn. But I had to walk through my landlord's house to get to my studio apartment. And yeah, and I also live in a large house in Montpelier and could easily convert one of our floors to an ADU but it wouldn't satisfy all of these requirements. So I'm kind of wondering why these rules would be in place but that example makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, and certainly people can change the rules. A lot of these rules came, there is, Vermont was one of the first in the country to require that everyone who's got a single family home is allowed to have an ADU. We've had that since the 1990s. As long as I've worked in Vermont, we've had that rule in effect. And it was really kind of forward and on the cutting edge of things. Some states are still trying to get that rule passed and we've had it for decades. But it came with restrictions. So every single family home in the state, regardless of how big the parcel is or where it is, if it's a single family home on its own parcel and it's owner occupied, it can have an ADU and it can't be larger than 30%. You have to meet the parking requirements and there's another requirement in there but we eliminated a number of those requirements. Yeah, and then there's the, it must be a pertinent to and sub-servient of or something like that, some requirements but we went through and eliminated a lot of those requirements. We eliminated the owner occupied requirement. And so we got it down to just some of the basics but then we also went through and said, well, then just make it a duplex and that eliminates the 30% requirement. So. So I think when we go to do this, we could mark this as one where we could at least think about, okay, maybe seeing you wasn't getting, wasn't barking at the right trees but if there's a way to open up ADUs, we could at least consider that as an inclusion as a way to respond to that one. Sounds like people will be okay with us doing that, at least looking into what we could do to make ADUs easier and more popular. Yeah. Okay, so just to sort of cap off this discussion, there's really two big areas I'm seeing that are gonna take a lot of discussion for us. The first one is what to do about density. There's many options. If it's, if we're looking at incrementally, like phasing out density caps altogether or whether we'd rather approach it by just being more lenient and increasing the density caps for the policy reasons that CNU points out that we seem to agree with. There's those questions. There's also the questions of where are there places in Montpelier where it might make sense to keep this density regulation? I think for the most part when it comes to housing, our policy has been to try to put as much development housing that is walkable to downtown. So if we wanna make, try to focus on the places that are walkable. So those are the things that we have to keep in mind. We're not necessarily planning to make any decisions tonight, but I wanna put that stuff out there. I also wanna put on Mike's radar that if he wanted to come back with ideas for things for us to consider that that's a possibility. And then at the same time, there's the design standard question that's gonna be, that's gonna be the second big issue for us to think about what do we do, if anything, if we make changes to density to make that something that's not gonna prohibit development as much, we heard about lot coverage and we heard about building footprint. Those were two other things. I'm not anticipating that we're gonna do a ton with those other areas, but so the question is, if we change density, are we going to try to offset that and try to regulate character of the neighborhood type issues to offset that? Because again, density is not intended to even regulate how neighborhoods look. It's just regulates how many people can be there, but the public has a different perception. The city council might have a perception. So the discussion becomes, are we gonna try to offset through regulating design appearance in some way, or are we comfortable going to city council and saying, you know what, we actually think that changing the density is not gonna hurt a thing, it's only gonna help, and we don't need to do that stuff. So that's kind of part of what we're gonna have to do too. And that goes to the design standard issue. Can I just throw out, and I don't know, I mean, I know it would pick up some areas that are even beyond what we were talking about before, but what if we just looked at, and this is again, not for deciding tonight, but just to think about, if we just said, we're gonna get rid of density requirements where there's design review, right? If we just take that footprint that's already approved and say there are no density requirements in that area, again, I know it goes further just looking at some maps than we were intending to go, but then we would, you know, we would free up a lot of space and we'd be complying with the recommendation as well. I think that's good, that also overlaps largely with what we might consider walkable, although not entirely, there's walkable stuff that's not gonna be in design review. Yeah, that could be an approach. I think that the report here, everyone should probably take a good look at what the report says about the design standards and what their reasoning was for us to beef those up because we'll need to address that. And I think what they just published was so well done, right, the recommendations. I mean, I know it's not rules, but there's some really good ideas about what you're doing if you're inside that design review district now. Oh, you're referring to the guidance that we were looking at recently, that was historic preservation guidance. But it was design review, that was part of a design review. Oh, okay, because design review looks at historic preservation. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap between the historic and the design review. So there may be some other ways of kind of skinning the cat on these. You can, you know, one option is to, you know, I talked about the use table and we talked about density. So density would go through and say, you know, it's one unit per 1500 and I have a 7,500 square foot lot. So I've got, what, five units. And so then the use table tells you whether those are permitted or conditional as to what I need to get for a permit to build that. We could make the argument of just eliminating the density altogether and still keep it in the use table, which would then go and say, you still need to get a permit, but, you know, maybe, you know, you might, you were before because you had density, you were limited to five units. But because we don't have density, you could apply for 10 units or whatever, but it's now still on the use table and we would be able to go through and maybe some things that we currently have as permitted uses, maybe we shift them the conditional. Now that's kind of going in the other direction, but you're basically eliminating density, but if you're gonna be above five units, then it's gonna go to the DRB to check for character of the area issues. So if somebody comes in and decides they're gonna put 22 units, you might go through and say, you know, the DRB would evaluate that based on, you know, some of them, if it's low, it's permitted. If it goes above this mark, then it becomes conditional. I think something like that could be good as long as we don't actually use the D word, as long as it's in the use table based on numbers of units. It's based off of what we would currently consider as density caps and things, but I think we can do that without actually using the word density, because that's not, as I got to before, I mean, that word alone is enough to get people worked up in ways that causes misunderstandings. That's achievable, right, Mike? Yeah, but we'd still be regulating the number of units and we'd still be looking at the project. It's just gonna be, it's not gonna look the number of units per acre, which is what we're caught in. And, you know, so everybody who's new might understand a lot of what comes up with the density, it's the number of dwelling units per acre or square foot of land. And so you might have a building, you know, one of these old Victorian buildings that could have, that's really big. And we might be able to put eight units in it and make them all studios, or we might be able to put three units in it and they're all two bedrooms. You know, it's not a lot of difference. It's just how we cut up the building because in the end, there's still so many bedrooms in the building. And so, but sometimes that decision gets forced upon the owner because they're only allowed to have three units. So they're gonna make three two bedroom units. But the market, and I always use this statistic, I point this to stick out all the time. So hear me say it again. 43, 42, 43% of all of the people living in Montpelier live by themselves. People living alone, 43% of people live alone, 43% of the units. So that's, you know, we have a lot of two bedroom and three bedroom houses, you know, and apartments and things that are in this city. So our city is built for people to live in family units, even though almost half of the people live by themselves. So it makes it very expensive for somebody who does live by themselves to go through and say, all right, well, I just need an apartment and, you know, a one bedroom or a studio. And I'm forced to really rent a two bedroom even though I don't necessarily need the extra bedroom. It's nice to have the extra bedroom. But as you repeat that over and over and over and over for about half the population, we start going and saying, I could have, we could have broke this house up into eight studios and had a lot more units, but not necessarily more people. So it- What you're saying right now, Mike, just to support that more, I don't know if I've mentioned this before in these meetings, but, you know, my colleagues in the Department of Taxes who work on data have run the numbers. And what you're saying is true statewide. I mean, the biggest contributor to the housing problem is people who are overhoused, people who are one or two people living in large houses, like multiple bedroom houses. Like, there's like, they've done like a lot of research into that and have the tax data to know who lives where and it's absolutely true. Of course, maybe the dynamics now changed with work from home. Everybody wants a bedroom in an office, so maybe having a two bedroom isn't so bad, but that's a little bit of the, some of the demographics that helped explain what we're talking about. It would be useful though, to think about those large Victorians, right? Like whatever would be in that design review area that already exists, because we know it's gonna be, we're not pulling anybody else into that or probably not, it's challenging to do that. But how do you get the eight units if somebody wants to do that versus the three, right? Like how do we make that easier to do? And I think that should be part of this conversation. I feel like that stat about how many dwellings only have one or two people in them would be maybe a good thing for that, the plan infographic. Yeah, I agree. I go straight to housing and how our housing works. Everybody always likes to disagree with me until they actually run the numbers and figure it out. When I used to work in more rural places, we used to talk about who's gonna wanna live in a city, who's gonna wanna be, get married and raise their family in a city. And I was like, well, tell me how many people are two spouses and at least one child? And statewide, that number is about 8%. And so everyone's always like, we need to build more single family homes so we have more places to raise families. And you're like, you're building 90% of your housing units for 8% of your people. And that's why we have such a housing imbalance. That's why we have so many single people living in housing units is because, well, I can't find an apartment or I can't find a condo or I can't find... You can have a single family home. We just have to build more of them that are not necessarily tiny homes, but much more modest homes that would be our cottage cluster type units where people can buy a unit. And it's relatively small because they're probably gonna live by themselves. Yeah, you wouldn't wanna live there with three people, but that's not who it was built for. So yeah, the statistics are always very interesting to help to get the public to understand why we want more units. It's not because we're trying to cram more people in there. It's because the average household size in 1960, 1950 was five, between five and six people per house. Now it is 1.99, it's basically two people per house. And so, big huge houses with half the people in it. And I'm serious about the infographic. I think that's a good... That's a good one. That says a lot. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a good number. And like either in the housing chapter or somewhere else, definitely a good one. Okay, so that's what we have up ahead. My inclination is that we're gonna revisit this probably the next meeting and maybe start getting into the real weeds that may be the density thing since it's number one. But I mean, and just go down the list, but if people think that we should handle it in a different order than that, then I'm open to that. Just let me know. But unless there's a reason just to take a different approach, we'll just go ahead and go down the list and start talking about density and actually coming up with what we would like to propose to city council in our response for it. I've never prepared a document and at some point it may be helpful to do so to kind of have some of the pushback, some of the conversation here about, there's requirements for no parking lots between the front of the building and the sidewalk. We have that requirement. Facades should always contain windows and doors rather than blank walls. You remember Kirby, maybe you don't, maybe that was just before you came on board. We have architectural requirements for each neighborhood and they talk about these things. So anyone who has to go into a major site plane would have to meet these requirements. I just, I also don't, I mean, I don't know. I live in the Meadows and it's a mess. Buildings are thrown all over the place in the Meadows. There's buildings behind buildings. Some are sideways on a lot and some are straightforward and it's a lovely neighborhood. So I mean, I just don't even honestly, I'm just not inclined to like, want us to regulate things like that more because I can think of like neighbors in mind that would like break some of this as far as like facades and things, but anyway. Yeah, so I was just pointing out, oh, sorry, go game. I was just gonna say, is it possible to get, I mean, I know Mike's probably wicked busy but to have some kind of draft, I mean, the drafting by committee comment earlier. I mean, I think that's true. I think if we had a baseline to work off, we'd be able to have better conversations. Yeah, that depends on the timing. Right now, I'm trying to kind of crush through the last of the stuff for the city plan. Maybe when we get into February, I can get some time to kind of put into this. I will point out before we leave that I did get a request for a zoning change. So we will in my office start to put together again. So for new people. Once occasionally twice a year, we'll go through and do a zoning update. And it's just to go and clean things up. We made a major change in 2018, completely revised the zoning. And since then as we use it, we find technical things that need to get fixed and sometimes just map things that need to get fixed. In this case, it's a piece of land that was subdivided and is now more appropriately should be associated with the other neighborhood that it's in. And so they've got a zoning request and we'll put that together. We'll also put together a bunch of other zoning changes and bring that forward. So if we're talking about putting something together, we may consider thinking about this in that same context. We may, I'm not looking to push it right away, move theirs forward. It's something we're gonna work on through the winter. I also know that we're gonna be doing country club road project, that property, the old golf course, we're gonna be making some zoning recommendations based on what comes out of the master planning process, which should be, we should have good information by the end of March as to the direction that we wanna go. So I may basically put everything, if we've got some stuff for the end of March, April, May, we can maybe work into a zoning update at that time where we can, if we wanna bring some of this forward along with country club road, along with the Northfield property that needs to get re-zoned, we'll have a set to kind of look at. So just to give you a window of time, otherwise you'll have to wait maybe another year before we do another zoning update. Okay, well, yeah, well, what I'm hearing you say is we should just combine this project with the zoning update. Yeah, it would make sense if you wanna do it sooner. We'd have to make some decisions faster. Okay, as far as getting, like as far as prepping for this, assuming that Mike's not gonna be able to put a ton into it for the next meeting, what do we think about taking the zoning map and starting there and looking at the density questions? And then if we have, like, Gabe, did you have like specific info for us to bring to that discussion? I'm sorry, what are we referring to, what? Well, about starting the density discussion. I mean, so they're recommending, I mean, the basics would just be overlay, since they've written their report, we've got this new design recommendations for that design review district that has a lot more detail. And so my position would be why not lift all density requirements from those areas? There's some challenges because you could look and you could like, when I look at the map, it's actually pretty encompassing, but when you think about, well, big chunk of it's actually national life, right? I mean, of course, that's on there for a particular reason. It's mostly kind of the riverfront district and it does go up, I think it goes beyond 1500, you'd have to look at it, but I'm sure it'll be somewhat controversial, but it goes in line with their requirements, right? So if we, based on what I had heard the last time there was a discussion about the design review district, that was incredibly contentious. Nobody wants to be added to it that is not currently in it. Why don't we just use the current and say, that's the baseline? I don't know if there are people strongly opposed to that at this point or if we just should look at the map, but that would meet exactly what they said, right? They'd say, oh, you can remove density if you have proper design review, what we do. I thought you were asking for info. I think I misunderstood, I think I summed up for a second there. We're asking for info for the next meeting. I was saying we should rather than just have a bunch of conversations, we should have a draft. That's all I was saying. Oh, okay. Well, let's start there. I mean, let's start looking at that approach next time. Are people okay with that? And then, and go from there. Do you have a response to that, Mike? I guess I would just throw out, it's worth the conversation. And I think I would just point out areas on a map. If we had a map to pull up, I would pull up a map and just go and say, what do we think about? The area I would probably focus on would be over by Bailey, where state and Bailey start heading up towards Terrace Street. That's an area that's in design review and we would be, that's really the fundamental question. Some of these other places- Those are the perfect units to be the eight-unit apartments right there, actually. Yeah, and the question that I know exactly who would ask is Sandy Vitium's gonna ask it. Why, what's gonna stop somebody from coming in and bulldozing that building and building in a gigantic building next to this existing single family or two family home? And that's gonna be the question. Because it's too expensive. Yeah. I know that, you know that, that's what is gonna end up driving people to scream at the city council. So yeah, we'll be prepared for that, we'll be prepared. We should, I think make, what we think of as the best policy decision and I think we should definitely put work into being ready to defend our conclusions and position. Yeah, and I think the best thing to start. Yeah, to have that conversation would be, as I said, if we look at the use table, if we remove the density and then look at the use table, then that might be able to go and say, yeah, somebody can't put 22 units in there, it would require a conditional use and they'd never get it or something to that effect. We could certainly buttress one with another adjustment. So yeah, we can talk about that more. Okay, so let's plan to just, we'll start the conversation by looking at the feasibility of doing what Gabe's suggesting and then going from there. And we'll just start tackling these things with the density because we'll start with the biggest one first. Okay, I don't know if we have time to go over the next two items, we were going to review the goals and aspirations and strategies for a couple of the chapters that smaller chapters not terribly substantive, but we'll, let's just plan to pick that up next time because it's getting close to 730. So everybody's, if you can go into the next meeting having looked at those things ahead of time, Mike, do you need that said, you don't need like an instant turner up. Public safety is closer to being done. I just met with community justice today. So there's a section right at the front of the public safety one that's not done. I'll be filling that in with help from Carol over the next couple of weeks. So that will change, but it's considerably long. I mean, public safety is not a small chapter. That is pretty long when you include all six parts of it. Okay. Police, fire, EMS, dispatch, community justice and emergency management. Okay. Well, sounds like we know what we'll be doing next time then. Yeah. And community services I'm still working on. So that one don't waste your time working on that. So I've got work to do. I'm still getting pieces put together. I've got a lot of work done. It's just pulling together. That's good to know. So maybe public safety is more ready. Maybe at our next meeting, we can go over that and possibly vote it out and start this density discussion. So that's what we'll plan to do next time. Okay. Does anybody have anything else before we adjourn? Oh, I moved to adjourn. There you go. Motion from Ariane, do we have a second? Oh, a second. Second from Brian, thanks. Those in favor of adjourning, say aye. Aye. See you in two weeks. Thanks, everybody.