 All right, let's call the meeting to order, then. Everyone had a chance to take a look at the agenda. Any adjustments to the agenda? We're going to deal with the plan at some point. The Esri Hub grant from Stone. I was curious if we want to add that, maybe, as the agenda item at the end? Well, why don't we just get some updates from that under or we'll ask about that for the Stone. Updates about it without needing to warn that. OK, hearing none, the agenda is approved. So comments for the chair? We haven't met in a little while because we had more weather. And I was away at the last meeting, so I want to officially welcome Aaron, our newest commissioner. And you had a meeting without me, I believe, right? Yeah. We met everyone. And I just want to take a moment to recognize Kim Cheney for all of the work that he's done. He was a commissioner for a long time, and he really played a critical role in helping us get the zoning amendments, the package moved on to city council, and ultimately approved. So I just want to take a moment to recognize Kim. And those are really my comments. We wanted to ask for some updates on a couple of items. So first, let's ask about the Stone grant. I think that's a little bit more discrete, and then we can ask about the thoughts about the city plan. So we did get awarded the Stone Environmental Esri Grant. So that's an ArcGIS hub, which is going to be kind of a one-way, two-way communication tool that the city can use for a number of projects. We already have a GIS person in public works. And Zach does a lot of work with it, but he just didn't have the background to teach himself all this stuff. So the advantage we have is that he's going to be learning a lot of how this ArcGIS hub works so he could be able to. It won't be a one-off thing where we do one thing, and then it gets put on a shelf somewhere. He actually wants to learn how it works so he can keep doing these going forward. The first one they're going to be doing is actually going to be a transportation project. So they're actually doing something with the snow plowing and tracking the snow plows. Tracking the snow plows, and people can get input on the parking bands and just a number of pieces along that. They also wanted to go and try to do some stuff on the pavement index, but they kind of put that off to the side. So the first idea was to kind of look at the parking. And then that will let Zach work with the folks at Stone to learn how to replicate this all this out. And then we will be able to use Zach's skills to help us as we start rolling out with the master plan update, or the city plan update, so we can do some of our outreach. And the idea is with these GIS hubs is it's an interactive way that you can push stuff out to the public and get feedback back from them. You can do storyboards where you can try to tell a story. So GIS has been so much about data, data, data, data, and maps that this was a way for them to try to contextualize data so it can actually help the public and help policy makers make decisions. And that's kind of the they're trying to take data to the next level and help be able to push it out and then let the public comment or ask questions back. And that's kind of the goal of the overall process. What's the time one? They told us they wanted to have the first one done by the end of the year. Stone Environmental works directly with Esri. They're actually like a beta tester for Esri products. They work and do a lot of stuff. So they've been wanting to do this for a while and it kind of got delayed. And now they finally are in a position to get it. And they want to try to get the first one done by the end of the year. But they're going to continue to be available going forward with Zac to continue to do more of these and to continue to develop and ask questions, answer questions. But the first one should be coming out hopefully in the next month or so. Dare I ask, is there any thought that this training will help Zac help us with calculations of slopes? No, it won't be able to do that. No, and we actually had a conversation about that. They made the comment that it's just extremely large data sets that just can't. OK, well, we can get more into that later. I was just wondering if that was in the scope of that grant. No, not in that grant. But as we start coming up with our plan elements, housing or transportation or something, we can start to build a storyboard about housing that then lays out maybe some of the statistics and the stories and the background of what the goals and aspirations are and let the data support that story and get that out and start to get public feedback on issues. Yeah, that's, I mean, we have sort of lost our momentum with the city plan. But I don't think it would be too hard to pick it up again with all of that input we received at a kickoff meeting. I don't know, Erin, how much you've been told about this. But we had this meeting a few months ago where we invited a representative from various committees in Montpelier to present the top three goals their committee has over the next five to 10 years with a view towards using that information in developing our next city plan. And the first thing that could help us is to identify if there are overlapping goals or goals that potentially conflict so we can figure out ways to deal with that from the start rather than finding them after everything's been written up and we feel a little locked in. So what we, we had a great meeting at the Pavilion Building Auditorium and we received a lot of helpful PowerPoints and just had a good discussion. But we haven't really done too much with that information yet, we, you know, Mike typed it up. Well, Bob took notes there and then Mike typed it all up so we have it in a digital form, which is good. And we had talked a little bit about creating a website or some sort of repository for all this information that people couldn't work within and the public would have access to you. And John started putting that together. But we just haven't moved forward with this too much so we should revisit it and make a plan for where we're going. I think everything's just kind of kind of sidetracked with all of the zoning updates that we're trying to get through because they're feeling they're a little bit time sensitive. And we had some discussion at the last meeting that we were gonna try to get through the zoning in the next meeting or two so that way we could resume or resume that but then we kind of missed another meeting. I mean, it's since June, we usually meet twice a month and June was the last month that we met twice. So we met once in July, once in August, once in September, once in October, once in November. And so that really starts to, holidays, weather, vacations. Just, it's set us back a little bit. Sorry, well, how do people feel about that plan to get through the zoning changes and then resume the city plan? Do you feel okay about that? Yeah, I guess I'm curious about hub and whether or not what we've done with, if that will be the sort of vehicle or tool for where we put the plan as opposed to its own website. Yeah, I've started putting stuff in there. Barbara and I met, I've taken what the energy committee sent and put it into a format that I think is more workable that we can start looking at in terms of giving guidance to the committees and some to try to promote consistent input that's useful for the plan. So, whenever we're ready, I guess there's some stuff. Did you pick any tags? I don't think I included tags at this point. I don't think we're there yet, but more creating the baskets by which people can characterize their input is it a goal or a measurable objective or an action or a policy? What does that mean and what do those look like? And essentially took what something that the energy committee had written up and tried to do my best at putting it in those baskets. Anyhow, we can, I guess, follow up with that. I can also maybe chat with those folks at Stone or with UNZAC if... Yeah, because I'm still waiting a little bit. I'm way behind the learning curve. I met once with Stone and looked at a lot of the stuff that was online for the hubs to kind of get an idea of what it is, but I'm still waiting to kind of see this first one start to come together to kind of see the process of how it's going to work. What information, what do they need from me, from us to start that process for the city plan? And so I'm kind of hoping to see where that goes, but the second meeting, so the first meeting was end of October, and then I think the last meeting was when I was at the housing meeting, statewide housing meeting, so I missed the second meeting and I have to get caught up on where they're at. Do you want to share, John, what you've done? Sure, you all have access to it. Oh, okay. Aaron, I may not have added you yet to the drive, but I'll do that right now. And then we can all just kind of take a look at it and provide feedback at the next meeting. No questions, we're probably more likely. So the last piece I will add on the plan is I have a meeting Wednesday, this Wednesday, two days from now, I'm meeting with city council and they, on their agenda, a while ago they had set that by the end of the year in December they wanted to have a meeting to kind of talk about the status of where the city plan is and where the zoning fixes are. So depending on where we get tonight, particularly with the zoning fixes, I will be meeting with them on Wednesday to kind of either hand a piece off to them or to let them know here's the status that we're at and we expect to get things to you pretty quick. Yeah, and we have a few zoning changes that are more urgent than others. So if we can wrap those up tonight, that would be ideal so that we can hand off a small package to city council. Anything else with general? Did everybody introduce themselves and give information on how long we've been on the commission? No, but you don't have to. If you don't want to. Okay. We did some. Yeah, I know. It was a... No, I didn't do that. I didn't do that at all. I am. You didn't do the full, like, share one thing about yourself. Well, I don't think... Two truths in a lie. Yeah, so, I mean, we should just quickly do that. I think that we should just say, obviously your name is in front of you and Aaron already has a nameplate, which is great. And how long you've been on the commission and what your background knowledge is in more specifically. So I don't want to call it expertise or whatever. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah, and then for fun, what district do you live in? Whether you want to say one, two, three, or zoning district, you know, that's your choice. But I'll start since I made this the requirement. So I'm Leslie, I've been on the commission since 2014, I think it was right after you started that year. So that'll be 2014. 2014. And I've been chair for a year and a half, almost two years now. And I know a little bit about environmental law, but more like water quality law than land use. And I don't use any of those skills in these meetings, they're more of a policy person. And let's see, I live in district three, which is, I think I'm the only member of the commission who lives in district three. And I, it's my zoning district, it is. Oh, it's me, was it? Is it? No. She's really quizzing people now. I know, I know. I think it's, I would bet your residential 3,000. No, I think it's, might be river foot, no, it's the Prospect Street. I know Prospect Street. I don't think people are going to be able to figure it out. It's high density, I can tell you that. And there are steep slumps. But it's kind of, I should know this. I'm checking. You have a map. It might just be Prospect Street neighborhood. Prospect Street is yellow, which is residential 3,000. Oh, residential 3,000, you win. Well, you are the planner. I did make a map, I get extra credit for it. So the character of the neighborhood there is hillside buildings, I would say. Yeah, so, anyway, John? So I joined same time as you did, so 2014. We're a recovering planner and current map nerd. You were a map nerd before too. Yeah, I guess. No, he just gets paid for it, yeah. And where, what's zone? Ah, zone, I have Ward 1 mixed use. You're probably right. Yeah, and Mike, you've been on since earlier in 2014. Earlier in 2014, I'm the staff for the commission, something that was not a commission member. And my background is in actually natural resource planning and originally I worked in science and ecology and then transferred into planning. And so I've been doing this. Certified floodplain managers, certified planner. Been doing this for 18 years now, so. When you came from, you were working in Barrie. I was working in Barrie for five years before they're here and then a bunch of regional planning commissions before that. Is that right to you? That sounds right, yeah. So, I'm a newer before you, I'm a planner, so I work for the state doing hazard mitigation planning, but mostly flood prevention, future flood prevention. And I'm in district two, but I don't know which, so I'm on Charles Street, on a very steep slope. Oh, Charles Street. But Pilton Street. Charles Street is off of Barrie Street. It's off of Barrie Street. Yep. Just to put that down a bit. Yeah, that's another one, same district, residential 3,000, yep. Do you like it's a good sign when you're planning commissioners don't know it's on there? I was thinking that too. Because they're not here for their own interest. That's how I was characterizing my ignorance. Well, I can't post-map, so I'll post it. It changed so many times. This changed so many times, who knows where we are now. All right, Barb, your turn. Oh, I'm Barbara. I was a licensed architect for district two, Liberty Street slash College Hill neighborhood, which is, and I do know that, because I've been looking at it for a little bit. Yeah, unfortunately, you guys have to look at it, too. Because that was one of our examples. And, oh, thank you. We're in 15, then. That sounds right. I was in 16. Oh, I was in 2014, you were in 15. 14 was in 15. Yeah. I'm in Ontario, and Kirby. I think I've been on a funny business since 2016. And I live on Elm Street. I'm pretty sure I'm down town. Like, one of the downtown categories, so. I'm very urban. And my background is in law, as you know. So Kirby, Aaron, and I all went to law school together. We talked about it. We talked about it. Okay. Yeah. Same class, if there's a problem. I had an interest in law school and language and stuff, but, you know, all of it was hard to follow. Urban Center three. That's why he's here. Hi, so I'm Aaron, and Mike Kirby. Because a couple of jobs ago, I worked for a public service and part of what I did was scour and I had a couple of companies. He's up in the Terrace Street neighborhood. Over park drive. Yeah, I'm there. Sorry. I'm over there. He's a representative of various places. Yeah, Res Nine. Oh, Townland. In various lands, just. Yeah, some of us. To that field. No, I. Where do you work at the state? That's a good question. I just get my notice and I'll do it for the second time. You didn't know if you didn't want to do it all the way. No, no, I didn't. No, it's fine. I was thinking about that, I was like, who knows about it? Yeah, right. And hopefully things so close to the chest are so long it's hard to go pump on it. Yeah, you just pump on it. Congratulations. And I'm currently here. District on Town Street. Res National 9,000, I'm guessing. There are no good things. All good. Yeah, Res Nine. To do it with a minimum of what size. Yeah, well, Res National 3,000 types won't hold it against you. You're definitely not a beginner planner, by the way. I mean, it's, there's a lot of word and jargon that you learn when you're here, but you already know all of that. Yeah, you know a lot about affordable housing, which is really nice. Okay, well, thanks, everyone. I appreciate that. I think it's good to kind of remind each other of our backgrounds, too. So the next item on the agenda, item four, is general business. Comments from the public about something, not on the agenda. We have some members of the public here. I don't know if you wanna, if there's anything you want. So if you'll just introduce yourself. So I'm Laura Rose Abbott. I'm in district one. Yeah, near you and Hubbard Park, so probably the same zoning. I was at the October 22nd meeting and John Snell was in to discuss the ISA A300 standards. And in under view with your law background, we're kind of concerned about requiring something that we don't have on file, that we don't know what it contains. I myself was concerned about that, so I called them and I talked to a rep and they sent me a catalog, but they said that for cities, because that's like saying that we accept all engineering manuals as what we require in our zoning, like you really can't just say like we require it all because they could be pruning to a standard, but doing the wrong pruning, it doesn't lead the public in a meaningful way, and it doesn't protect the city in that you're requiring something that you don't know what it is or have. So what they were suggesting is really the best management practices. There's a combo of two volumes that for members are under $30, but maybe even without it would be less than $100, but they're saying that like, I'm encouraging you to maybe talk to a rep because I think it would be maybe erroneous to put the ISA as the standard. So I do have this catalog and you are interested in it. I could provide it to you. And I think at least the phone number. Sure, I mean, I just, I called the ISA at area code 217-355-9411 I mean, the whole thing took me 20 minutes and I got lots of information. So I'm encouraging you to do that. You know, and then they'll set you up with a contact person or whatever, or maybe the tree board would like to join. It's not very expensive to be a member and then you get your manuals at a greatly reduced rate. My other concern arose during the October 22nd meeting, just about the landscaping and screening proposed changes. You know, it's just been mentioned a lot that it's really coming up in current projects. There's a few very large projects that are of interest to the public. And I've heard various things about the changes in these standards, how they would affect, for example, a parking garage that was maybe proposed prior to the change and when they were adopted. And Mike said that the changes would affect the garage, but not the hotels since that plan had been accepted. But then when I spoke to the council, the city manager said, no, no, we never look back. So the garage would be the old regs. So, and just changing them at this time is a concern to the public, just because the screening on a structure is large as the garage to go from being a perimeter requirement to being less than that. Also with the street trees and the parking lot trees no longer being distinct trees, double counting of trees is a great concern for me and many members of the public. I wanted to bring that to you. Can you elaborate on that? Do you think you might double the double counting? Sure. Maybe Mike spoke on that at the October 22nd meeting that for example, if you have street frontage and you have to have so many trees out there, but behind it is a parking lot. The parking lot had its own distinct regulations for how many trees had to be in there in the asphalt or whatever. But now he's proposing that if you changed or you are, or I'm not sure about how you've been considering changing it and the executive interact in this commission, but that the trees would no longer need to be both. You could just sit them on the street and count them as parking lot trees even though they're not in the parking lot. And also it was concerning that in a time of climate change that the parking lot trees who could help pull the cars and keep things, you know, are not required to be where they're going to cash shade and various other things. But I know that these are still in your draft stage and it will be going to the council and it wouldn't be adopted without public comment. Yeah, but we always appreciate having the public comment early on the process. It just means it easier for us to incorporate changes. And I'm also, I guess I'm concerned about which projects are driving these changes and I would like more information about that. Well, we are coming to that on our agenda. We're going to talk about them in tomorrow's lane. I'll sit down and keep taking notes. Yeah, and I'll invite you to come back up and give more comments on them. I appreciate it. I appreciate your hand if you hear something. Thank you. I'd like more information. So the next item on the agenda item five is to review the draft landscaping and screening standards. Mike, would you mind just giving us a quick summary of the October 22nd meeting? Well, maybe not of the whole meeting, but of where we are now in the discussion about landscape because we talked about it at a meeting before that too. And how the way that the regs are written right now is fairly draconian as far as there's not a way, there's no point system or anything like that that would give some flexibility. And so that was the concern that we're trying to address. Yes, so there were a number of big picture concerns. And so one clarification from Ms. Abbott is these do not work going backwards. So while we use these to, we may use the garage or these other projects as demonstrations or examples, the garage is under the rules that are in effect, either under the rules that are in effect today or under the rules that were in effect before January 3rd, depending on the timing. I believe all of the parking garage is under the new rules, but any specific questions on the garage need to go through Meredith who's the zoning administrator, but any changes we make here will not affect any ongoing applications. They only go into effect once they've been adopted. And any applications received after that date going forward will have to meet whatever changes we make. But a lot of them, a lot of these current projects have informed where our zoning have issues. So some of the issues like the counting the tree, one question we had was simply whether or not you can count a tree to meet two requirements. And we just had a discussion at the last meeting that said, well, if a tree meets the definition of a street tree and also meets the definition of a parking lot tree, that's okay. You can count that tree both ways, but it has to meet the definition, it has to meet the definition of both requirements. And we had a number of things under the current zoning that just were either left unsaid, unspoken, were confusing, or we just had no way of making them workable. So what we tried to do, which was with Meredith and myself was to start to go through and try to come up with some changes to the rules. We restructured them to try to touch on as many of the important questions that needed to be answered. The purpose remained the same. There were two versions, one's a red strikeout and one was a clean copy. I didn't make a lot of the clean copies because we had some. I do have a couple more if somebody wants. And this hasn't changed since the last meeting. It was short one. This is the clean copy. I put the red strikeout over there. I like having the strikeout. Some people like strikeouts and I saved a couple extra. Can I use this as a quick question about the red lines? At least on the copy that I have, there's three line changes in addition to red lines. I said red lines, but green meant it was moved. Red means it was added. And on the right hand side, it was where what things were deleted. Did you say that the strike through version here reflects the changes we discussed last night? Yeah, this should be the same as that. Just one as a. Is this the date though? Yes. So the previous one that was sent out would not be up to date that had track changes? I guess the question is, the track changes version that was discussed at October 22nd, sounds like there were some other changes requested in that meeting. Were those incorporated into this latest draft? This one does talk about the A300 standards. I'd have to go and look and see if there was a specific change that I can look at. It's dated November 7th. Yeah. So that's how it's been incorporated? Yeah, so that would have to have incorporated the changes. See what I've got on this one, just to make sure that my, these who are, they look like they're the same. It's just tricky. This does, we'll consider the November 7th version the most up to date for them. I want to say these two are the same. All right, well, as we walk through these, if anyone notices changes that needs to be made. The slight difference then we'll know that the clean copy is the outdated one. But the idea was to go through and have purpose, applicability, some application rules and administrative rules. I put all the planting specifications into one area before they really weren't in one consistent area. So we put them all in one area. And then starting in point F, we started to have the actual requirements where we talk about the general standards which say all planting shall meet specific standards, shall not reduce planting areas. And shall protect plants as well during construction process. And then we start to get into a couple of different standards. So the street trees being one, the parking lot landscaping was two, screening was three, and total site landscaping was four. And then there were some last things the end for non-conformities, waivers, conditions. And then on the last page when it gets to planting specifications, that's where some of the context things have changed quite a bit. We moved where the mature maintained height is so that way it becomes a definition. A large tree is defined as the mature height so they're right next to each other. What's a large shrub? What's a medium shrub? What's a small shrub? How you measure the height? The minimum planting area required. So if you're gonna plant a large tree, it has to have a hundred square feet of rooting surface. And that also works in the other direction as we start to calculate how much planting material you need. So as opposed to using the border of the building as the size will come up with another factor that would tell us, because before it would tell you for every linear foot or every five feet of building perimeter you have to have a tree. And so depending on how big your building is depending on the number of trees you would need but it's not necessarily how big the parcel is or anything else. So we tried to come up with some new ways of calculating the amount of vegetation that would be needed. And that was I think what Stephanie wanted was for me to bring a couple of site plans which I did bring just to kind of go and work through what this would look like. So I grabbed a couple of projects, three of them just so we can kind of see how it works. Can I ask a quick question? Sure. Under figure three dash 20, the minimum planting area, is that a whole new column? That is a whole new column. Oh, same, the space that we're gonna allow for? It, yes, somewhat. So you need to have 100 square feet but you can't make it any narrower than five square feet. Than five feet. Than five feet, yes. And the reason for that is we didn't want somebody to be able to go and play a game by making a planting a large tree in a two foot by 20 foot area to go through and say well it's gotta at least be five feet and that standard, which surprised me a little bit, that standard five foot, four foot, three foot actually appears in a number of larger cities. I look at Portland's and a couple other places which had some things and they actually were okay with these five foot by 20 foot tree wells for a large tree because the roots actually would expand out to fill to take in that moisture. So the tree board's okay with those numbers? Yeah, I did review these with John, John Snell. Those seem small. It's, well it would be five foot diameter, it would be five by 20, yeah. Minimum of five. We can certainly go to make things bigger and the tree requirements I did find were bigger in other communities. A large tree in some places would be required, would be required to have 250. The issue that starts actually coming up is it could start working against you because if you don't have enough area to plant a large tree, then you don't have to plant a large tree. So you actually could end up coming in and getting less trees because in a built environment like we have, we may have only a 10 by 10 area in the front of the house that we can officially designate for the tree well. Yes, yes, the area I'm concerned about maybe that this doesn't pertain is that this may, eventually that's going to be, I was just surprised. Yeah, I think there's going to have to be a certain amount of flexibility in working with the rules. We need to have some objective rules, but I think we have to have some subjective judgment that goes in because I did ask John directly, should we have a setback requirement for certain trees? And he didn't feel like that was an important, he didn't feel that was as important as these other factors that we were looking at. Well, he's not, he's not the architect so he's thinking about the tree health and you're thinking about the tree. He's looking at the trees health. Yeah, you're thinking about it. You're looking possibly at the foundation. Yeah, he has other areas, but eventually it will. It's not true that for a large tree that essentially the diameter of its crown is the area that you can see. As a certified blood plane manager, I'm hoping you can answer. I did, I've done some work. I mean, I have my degree in ecology, reaching back into that. Yes, but it's going to, it will fill the box that it has. And as I said, I was surprised to see that other communities, you know, the New York cities and these other places were okay with these five by 20s, or four by 20s and you're just, yeah, but to think that they were talking about trying to get larger trees in there. I think it kind of goes back a little bit to the subjective side of it. You have to look, as John was pointing out, to me, so much of it depends on what's there, what's the context of that tree is being planted and is it a single story cottage, or is it a three story brick face on the south side? Your tree is going to interfere differently and is going to react differently. A single family bungalow, the tree is just going to grow up and expand over. Its roots will look for its where it can have its material to bed. I think one of the big things to keep in mind about this is we currently have had, certainly before January, no requirements at all for this. You just would be required to have a tree, or not even have a requirement to have a tree. You just had to meet certain landscaping and screening standards. So we've moved to a point where we've started to require a certain number of trees and now to go through and say, if you're going to have a tree, you're going to have to have a certain planting area and we're going to require that it meet a certain standard. Now, whether we've got the right numbers in those boxes, I think I'll rely on the tree board and other experts in the field who go through and say, if they think these need to be better or different, by all means, I will recommend changing them. But this was, these were what I pulled together from some of the research I did and I think it's an improvement. I think we should require a minimum planting area, whether that's 100 square feet or 250 square feet, whether five feet wide. In fact, there were no requirements for widths. I added that in because I felt we need to at least have some widths. There has to at least be something and whether it should be five feet or whether it should be, if it's 10 feet then it's requiring a 10 by 10 square. I have a request for a change back on in part 3203.e, which is page three dash 58. This is the planning specifications section or provision. This planning shall meet the following standards. Three is the one that we're receiving comments on from Laura Rose. I don't come back to that. I want to ask your thoughts on this, but four and five seem to be saying the same thing. So four says use of invasive plant materials is prohibited. And five says use of native plant materials is strongly encouraged. So I would just request that we just strike out. Number five, okay, okay, nevermind. And on number three, I think there's an issue with, it says planting should be in accordance with the standards and policies of the Montpellier Tree Board, but they don't have any standards and policies. I thought we changed that language. This was our compromise language, I think. This was the compromise. It's really weak. And just to update you, it's saying that it will meet the requirements of the Tree Board. Which roughly follow ANSI, which does not give guidance to the public very well at all. If this was coupled by something maybe on the city website that I should have the Tree Boards adopted standards, that would be one thing. But without that, then yeah, I'm not comfortable with this provision either. So a lot of us weren't last time. I thought we'd stop in a little more than that though, even, and included, there's a note in here that prompted me about my memory. But we were gonna have a reference that they could consult with the Tree Board if they were interested. I don't know where that ended up, but I thought that that was part of this particular update. That we may have to... Or was it something like they had to meet a standard and then they could consult with them to determine whether or not they met that, or I can't remember, but I don't think they have standards or policies adopted so we can't require them to follow something that's not a thing. I think we could keep three and we could say, if formally adopted or something like that, at a qualifier, if the Tree's meaningless or without the English, unless the Tree Board actually adopts real standards itself, it doesn't just rely on the requirements. Yeah, that's true. We could just strike everything from which to the end and put if adopted in there, plantings. And then you actually could change the should to be a shall, because it obviously would be then. Plantings shall be in accordance with the standards and policies of the Montpelier Tree Board if adopted. Yeah. What if we don't know what that is? Is that a little...? Seems kind of odd. If nothing's adopted, when and once the Tree Board does adopt it... But do they have plans on adopting anything? Like if they're not going to... Seems like a bit misleading to allude to something that no one has an attention on creating. Sure, but I think it serves it. We wouldn't be able to... It serves as a place for me. Well, it sounds like Laura Rosemont hasn't made an add to that, so let's hear what she says. When I talk to the ISA rep, that he had just spoken in his experience that he's worked with a lot of municipal people who are doing their planning, zoning work, and that the best practice does... It's not... It's for lay people the manuals that he was recommending. I think would be a low-cost investment, but it would actually give people the ability to come and see a resource that could actually make more successful plantings. John Snell talked a lot that people put in their trees to meet the requirements, and then they just die. And then there's no trees. Like you don't go back in five years and see if that tree's alive and say, hey, we let you put on your porch, but you didn't keep the tree alive, so we want the trees to live. So it's like a low-cost guide that could even help the tree board, because I was kind of like, he didn't know the standards or have access to them, but he was sort of following them, but I couldn't tell that he was because he didn't have them. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely outside our area of expertise. I don't think we can come up with the standards for the tree. I mean, we could, but we probably have to... But it does sound like the ISA already has developed the best management guide. It's for municipal use. It's for the public to interface with the municipality for guidance, and it's just for people who have home gardens who wanna do it and work with the planning department on their application, and it's something easy that they can actually use. So I got my materials pretty quickly, but I mean, you could also leave it vague and there's no guidance, but it doesn't solve what John was suggesting that we want better results in the process. So there's language that the tree board generally follows this manual or the standards. The standards, yeah. That implies that there can be some deviation. Is there deviation we wanna build in there? That's what he said, Brian. I think he wanted to retain that but he wanted, as she said, to make sure that people take care of the plan at the right way. Ooh, we're getting into the J.A.M. Gulf Void for vagueness issue here. I think this is important for vagueness, as it's written. Yeah. But we can set it up where the tree board could then come in later and fill in what the standards are. I think that's a pretty good approach. Yeah, I agree. I think the approach of saying, you know, the planning shall be in accordance with the standards of the tree board and then making a recommendation to the tree board that they adopt the best management guides rather than the ISA standards or the ANSI standards. Or that they adopt a both or a combination of both because if the best management guides are much easier and a much simplified way of doing it then it makes sense that we wouldn't. There's no sense adopting a big fat manual of guides of requirements when we could get away with a much more straightforward process. But I would leave that up to the tree board to make a determination of what their standards are. You know, I mean, we can make a recommendation that they explore the best management guides, but if they think they really think it's in the best interest to have a technical, very technical guide that they wanna do the ANSI 300s, then... Are you thinking that we would just make a separate recommendation to them that's not in the zoning, right? Well, it depends what we do for number three. We can remove, if we remove number three then we have no review of the planning standards. So we would need to have some standard. If we choose, we could insert the best management guides for planting, but we would probably wanna get a copy and take a quick look, make sure it is what meets our needs, you know, I'll order up a copy and have them get it shipped here and we can take a look at it and see is this doing what we think it, that we want it to do? Or the other possibility would be to reference it and then simply, you know, reference anything that's adopted by the Montpelier Tree Board and then make a recommendation to the Tree Board that says, you know, you guys have been kinda doing things, your way of doing things. And if we're going to be official and we're gonna require people to do things, then we have to be much more formal. And I think sometimes these ad hoc groups aren't used to having to meet a legal requirement where we can go through and say, you must do this. You must do it this way. And if they want us to be able to do that, they're gonna have to go and step up and say, these are our rules and you're gonna have to meet these rules and hopefully there's, hopefully that best management guide kind of fits that purpose. Because we're not New York City Parks Department or Montpelier Tree Board. I think even if we have a provision here that says, plantings need to be in accordance with the standards and policies of Montpelier Tree Board if the standards are adopted or however we want to word it, it's still a little bit unclear because we're not referencing a specific set. I mean, we're just sort of referencing a document that may or may not have that title. So that's a little bit concerning to me. That's a little bit vague. And then we don't know what they would put together. So- That's the purpose. Right? If we don't know what the set is, we're saying they have to follow something you don't know what it is yet. So I think that's fine. So if it sounds like a thread that you're talking about and why to provide the Tree Board, give the Tree Board deference in terms of crafting the standards by which this would appear to you, that's fine. I think the language that it serves as a placeholder once it's talking about it does just that. So I think there's a benefit to applicants. First off, I think it gives the Tree Board deference to craft standards so long as they're reformally adopted by a rule of the rules. Then I think if we're okay with giving them deference to trust them with that, then that's good. More importantly, it puts applicants on notice that this is the standard language we're gonna use. Like you should consult the Tree Board to determine what their standards are. If there's nothing in place at the time of the Tree Board just that we don't have any standards right now, if they're fine, then you don't. But once their standards are operative, then this document is already anticipated that and you don't have to revisit that issue later on. There's a standard in place and the applicants are already on notice. It's just a time to issue really after. Well, we could, fine. I was just gonna say, like wouldn't the public process for adopting a policy or standard be the same as what we would have to go through? And isn't it our job to adopt those regulations? So, deferring to the Tree Board, which I'm not even sure if they can, if they have the authority to adopt a standard or policy that would be used in some quasi-judicial hearings. And if they can just adopt them without a public process, well that has other issues because then they could just change it at will or on some random Tuesday night and then change it back for another property owner. So I'm just wondering, I like the intent of it, but are we just getting, wouldn't it be simpler to say, hey, come up with some standards, give them to us, we'll put them in the zone, hey. Yep. But I think they need more guidance than just come up with some standards. That's the issue we're running into because I think that they may be under the impression they've given us some standards to include already. Well, I can certainly get back to John and give him some of the additional information on the best management guides and certainly we can order up a copy of those so he can take a review with them on his end. Can we look at like a few places that what have other places done or can't be the first? Yeah, I mean, we could adopt our own, we could create draft standards. The advantage of some of the, that, and this was what John pointed out, the advantage of some of the ANSI A300 standards is that it's the standard. It's anyone who comes in from Burlington or Platsburg or anywhere else, New Hampshire, if they're in landscaping, they would understand what those standards are and what their requirements are. And it's not a unique set of standards. This sort of implies you need a landscape architect. Well, you do for any major site plan that require landscape architect. But it gives a certain, if we had this shortened guide, then that should be able to help with, if they adopted the best management as opposed to the A300s, then that would be the change. It would be just a stricter set of standards and we would have to buy a copy, have it down in our office and we would have to learn how to enforce the A300s. And I think that it sounds like it's a much more complicated set of rules and requirements. But John's concern was right now we're just planting trees and because we're not doing it right, they're not thriving. And if we're gonna start to require trees, we should make sure that they're in a condition that they can thrive. And so we should have the proper soil. We should have the proper depth. They should be planted at the proper time. They should be staked properly. The best approach for us to take with these are the standards not referring to an outside document. Even if it means that cutting and pasting something outside the document would then be a good idea. I think it would be okay to reference an outside source. If they adopted, we could go through and say, let's say for example, it is the best management guide for planting. We could put that in as our standing planting shall be in accordance with the best management guides for planting produced by this group. I don't think there's, because we reference a lot of those in other regulations. The flood hazard rules reference, if you're gonna be elevating, you need to meet, or if you're gonna be flood proofing, you have to meet the flood proof standards of technical bulletin 1.01. And that's just, we don't have to go through and reprint the technical bulletins back into our zoning by-laws. I guess part of my thought was that if you wanted to generally follow those standards and only adopt part of them, then I think that would be the way to do it. I think that the requiring, I mean, if we require a licensed landscape architecture to fight toward a cultural list, that's something to keep in mind for, and these are, this is site plan review. So if we're dealing with a sort of a professional in this industry, and just like we do for engineers and require them to meet a certain standard that I'm sure your office doesn't understand whether the structural integrity of whatever's being proposed in this spec, they rely on that seal, right? Yeah, in certain cases we'll, and we'll spot check those with the engineering department if it's there. Right, you could ask for an independent technical review if it's the stakes are higher. Yeah, we had geotech studies for various projects for solace stability and so I don't know if the ASLA has, the ASLA has standard data. Right, or if we tell them, hey, meet this, if we understand it, what does that mean to you? Like is that something people are asking you to do or is there something else or? Right. I mean, at this point, if we were to go back and ask the truth, were it to come forward with a standard, some kind of a standard that they would use, what happens to the subsections? Right, do we want to name it? Yeah, I mean, we can just strike it out and then four, five, six, seven, just jump up in number. And then once they have adopted, we plug it in or we just put it in as a placeholder. We put in a placeholder that requires consultation with a tree board. Not sure that's gonna, like requiring a certified NINSEA fire-connected consultant with a tree board. I'm just trying to think creatively here. I don't even know what's under the purview of these A300 things. Like what are we talking about? I have no idea at this point. If you pay $100, you can find it as well. I mean, it's just, this is not, not all of it, but it's just like every little tiny kind of. So this is the ISA though, that's different from the A300, right? The A300 standards are there. Oh, are there as well. So there's like, there's a gazillion manuals. It's like everything under the sun in the plant world. But they also have things that are more urban-minded, but this is not an extensive kettle. Like the best thing to do really is to talk to a rep because once I said it was for municipal zoning, he said, well, what you really need is, simple, it's, you know, not so, but it's, you know, utility pruning. I mean, it's everything under the sun. The tree board doesn't know this stuff. They didn't have them. I think John, I think you made a good question. You could recommend the city council. Oh, yeah, they could. They would adopt them through the city, through the city council, yeah. Yeah, the tree board's responsibilities, their jurisdiction is within the city's right away. So they've been appointed to manage the city's trees that are within the city's right away. So even on your private property, if you own a tree that is actually on the city's land, you can't cut down your tree without first contacting the tree board and because it's technically a public tree. So the tree board's responsible for managing those. And there also will take down damaged and trees that can fall on power lines or other things, they'll take down trees. So the property owners don't have to. Sometimes, yeah. Okay, so what do we want to do with number three in the meantime? Going back to the beauty board and asking, yeah, some national standard, that makes the most sense to me. Okay. So we've got, with the wording, the number of the standards and policies that are on the tree board. I mean, I think we could just say the planning should be in accordance with the standards and policies of whatever standards it is. If it doesn't have, we don't have to imagine a tree board in here at all. Actually, we could just reference the. But we don't know what that standard is right now. Right. Well, we wait for the tree board to make a recommendation, but then we just plug in. So, I mean, the language, I think we could just strike the Montpelier tree board, which generally follows the, we just have the standards and policies of the A300 standards. If that's the one we want, they recommend we follow what we have in here, or ASI, whatever the municipal one is. Yep. So right now, we would just say in accordance with the doctor's standard. Because we can't reference a standard. I know, but I mean, I think we would just have to leave it blank, that it would just go and say the planning should be in accordance with the following standards and policies. And then it's just blank until we fill it. And I mean, we're just going to have to come back to it. I think we're going to come back to it, but don't we just remove it if it's a whole one piece. Okay. Because keeping in mind that we don't currently have planting standards in our zoning. So it's not like we're, we are taking a step backwards. We try to take a step forwards. And we're now going to kind of revisit that and go back to where we are, which is that we didn't have any trees, we didn't have any planting standards. And it was a recommendation from the tree board that we should have these standards. But until we get it right, we really can't make it, we can't make it a law until it's ready. All right. Does everyone agree about that? Okay. Motion to buy a consent. We are going to remove 3203.E3. Are there any other small changes to the language here that we want to discuss before we walk through the site plan? Slide these to the site plan. No. All right, Mike. All right. See how these work in the second. So you can see from the red lines that we're in the red line document that most of what you have now is new. We had to kind of make stuff that would work because so much wasn't working. And really the big things that Stephanie pointed out that we really kind of wanted to look at was how, when we get to the total landscaping and we get to these J2 and J3, I really kind of had to come up with this weird three dash six one and three dash six two. So how, the mental games we played downstairs, we went through a bunch of different options for how to go and say, how much landscaping do you need to have? And we kind of looked at things like, well, if it's a small lot versus a big lot, if it's a district that has a lot of required open space or doesn't have a lot of required open space, I mean, it just changed so much. So what we tried to do is to come up with, and if you don't follow it, it's okay. If you're allowed to have 80% coverage then you're allowed to have 20%, then you have to have 20% open. How much of that 20% should be landscaped? And so we kind of came up with, we'll make it a third, just threw a number in there and said, we'll make it 30% of that has to be. And then if it's a 70%, it's a third of the 30% remaining. So you can see how we just went with these factors and then we took a bunch of applications and we ran them through and kind of tested them and it kind of worked to a point until it got to be big parcels and then all of a sudden everything started falling apart. You started ending up needing thousands and thousands of square feet. So we came up with two which says if a lot is one acre or less, then you have to follow these factors. And three says if the parcel is greater than one acre then these are the factors that you need to have. These are the minimum landscaping. And we've started to, as I said, work through some of these and it certainly is a lot better. These rules now have more flexibility. They have non-conforming rules. They have waiver rules. So we have ways of short circuiting it. If this doesn't work, the DRB will have a chance to short circuit it. Under the current rules today, there is no short circuit. So we end up with rules that just have some odd outcomes and there's nothing we can do about it. So the first application, and again, none of these applications actually have to meet these standards. Quick question? Yep. So if you were looking at 3213J2, you know what kinds of areas for parcels are coming to really want it to be in size, then what you're saying is that, how does this translate into what the same case has been open? The district, if it's 70% maximum. Maximum coverage, then by the inverse, 30% of it has to... Oh, okay, uncovered, not necessarily open space. Not necessarily open space. Okay, open space, I was getting confused with that requirement. Okay, so we're not setting up a specific requirement? Yeah, and then it turns out that a bunch of things actually ended up canceling each other out when you did the math, so it made the formula rather unique. You just take your amount of impervious cover and you multiply it times this factor and it'll tell you how much landscaping you need. And if somebody really wants to see the math, I can go through and show it to them. But, so the first one I'll show you is Caledonia Spirits. See where our microphones are. We try not to cover our microphones, because it makes things pretty awful at home. So this is Caledonia Spirits. We have Berry Street. We have the railroad tracks. We have the access going in. You see the new skeleton of a structure getting built right now. So this was their proposal and they came in with a landscape plan that looked something like this. So this is something we would get, whether it's us or the DRB members. So the question comes up, okay, is this in compliance with our landscaping standards? So this is 116 Gin Lane. It's in the riverfront district. It has an 80% coverage requirement. So you can cover it with 80% impervious cover. It's exempt from the street tree requirement because it's not on a street. So the first one that would come up that we would be looking at as a standard is the parking. We roughly measured out the size of the parking, which has a little more than 20,000 square feet of parking, and by the way, this is like a four acre parcel, roughly. So 20,000 square feet is a half an acre of parking. And we have to cover as a requirement in here, which is the same as under the rules passed in January, 40% shade. And we kept the shade requirements the same. A large tree would be worth 1,200 square feet, and a small tree would be worth 600 square feet. These guys here are birch trees, river birch. So I don't know if those are technically a medium tree or a large tree, but if it's a large tree, they would be worth 14,000 square feet of shade or 7,200 square feet of shade, depending on whether it's considered a larger medium tree. We'd have to figure that out. One of our staff would have to figure that out. The requirement is you need to shade 40%. 40% of 20,000 is 8,000, so it would mean this if river birches are in fact large trees, then we have 14,000 square feet of shade for the 8,000 square foot requirement. But those were shrubs. So those were not big enough to count shade. But they did count for screening. So depending on whether these were larger mediums, so if these turned out to be medium trees, they don't have enough to meet our requirement and they would have to plant some more trees, which if it were staff, we would probably have suggested somewhere in this area that they could go and add some more trees that would add some, not only benefit to the shade, but would also provide some benefit to water quality to the river. So that just gives an idea that, well, the numbers weren't impossible to meet. Are they too easy, too generous? These rules were the same rules that Brandy had proposed and were adopted in January. So I didn't change these in this new draft. If this is four acres, the way I'm reading this is it would just have to put in 2,100 square feet of landscaping. That's, you're up at the total landscaping. I was working my way through. So the first one I did was the parking lot landscaping. They didn't say, they had the planting size, but they didn't have what would be the full height. I would probably have asked them to include the mature height of the tree in their report that they submitted to us. We would probably not do the work ourselves. We'd probably ask them and then confirm that information. We're also going to maybe help you, too, to see that illustrated potentially on the plant. If we assume that what they are actually indicating is the planted diameter of the crown, wouldn't it help you, too, to have an idea of how big that crown might grow in terms of shading? As our rules are written, all we care about is that it is a large tree that has the trunk of the tree within 10 feet, because under the current rules that Brandy had proposed, we didn't have a distance. So as we were enforcing her rules that we had adopted, we had a question of, we'd have a tree over here. Does that count as a shade tree? Does it count as a shade tree? Because we've got to follow the logical rules. The detail you're getting at is what would be under the standards that the tree board doesn't have yet. Oh, well, that would be great. That's what it sounds like, I mean, because having the space for the roots system is probably something that keeps the tree alive. Oh, were you asking about the roots, or were you asking about the crown? I was asking about the crown, so that we could have a shade tree. Because a maple tree would have a bigger than an elm. An elm tends to grow up in little tufts at the top. The square footage requirements are here. The square footage requirements are here. This hasn't been measured out yet, but under the new rules, under the rules adopted in January, we wouldn't be looking at whether each of these trees has 100 square feet or 49 square feet. If these are medium trees, which I actually think they are medium trees of, each one of these trees would have to demonstrate that it has 49 square feet of rooting area. So we would want to go through. You're going to have to space these things out, and they're going to have to demonstrate to us. Show us the breakdown of that. And that may mean this has to get bigger to accommodate more roots. But as this was adopted, there were no requirements for that. Under the new rules, we would be requiring it. I think these are mediums. I think they would have to have that much rooting area. So you'd want each tree to be indicated with the rooting area allocation dashed in or something? Yep, dashed in or something for that effect. So they can share, as long as there's enough, as long as these two have 98 square feet, because the two trees can share root space. But the physical planting of these trees is what we were just talking about. When I go to plant this tree, what should the soil mix be? How deep does this tree have to be planted? How big is a root ball do we expect on it? Do we leave the burlap on, take the burlap off? Whatever the rule, I don't know this stuff. That's for that branch. But my guess is that that's how we would be evaluating this from our standpoint. Then when we get to point J, the requirement that we were just talking about for total landscaping. So we had the screening requirements. As I said, screening requirements, you have to screen parking lots. I would have said this is a screen parking lot. What about screening of the delivery? That would be a question. We now have very specific things that we have to screen for. We must screen, we can use landscape buffers, we can use fences and walls, and we can use berms. We have three things we can screen with, and we must screen the parking lots, utilities, service areas, building mounted equipment. So we have four things we must screen for it. That's an existing document. These were reorganized and kind of put in there, but yes, they were mostly in there. Just moved into different places to make it work a little better. So in fact, under a new proposal that came in, they actually revised this plan in 2018 and they put a generator over here and we've required them to put screening and so there's actually now cedars over here because this is 2017. So any of these things here is what Meredith would be looking at in order to either approve it if it's a minor site plan, or to put it into a staff report for the DRB to consider, she would go through and make the evaluations of these different things to go through and say screening has been presented and it would be up to the DRB to determine if it's sufficient and it would be up to the public to make a comment that's not sufficient to protect the views. In fact, I think it probably would be okay, this is an elevated site compared to Berry Street so probably that would be good. As we get the total site landscaping, we now are to that calculating area where we would need to find out how much because this is more than one acre and that means we would be talking about number three because this is riverfront, it's 80%. So that means they must provide a minimum landscaping of 2,178 square feet. So those little, that table that we had, every tree needs 100, now we're counting every tree is 100 square feet of planting area and we need to reach that 2,000 square feet. They had the table over here, very helpful. I could go through and calculate that, that's 192 square feet for Aronia which I don't even know what that is, 588 for the birch, that's assuming it's a medium, 25 for the crab apples, one crab apple, the 162 for the cranberries, 294 for elderberries, 348 for wintergreen, winterberry, for a total of 1,609 square feet. So using these new formulas, it comes out, I believe what did I say, it's gonna come out low. So it is gonna come out almost 500 short under the new system. So actually this new rule would have required them to plant more trees. If you look at the site, it's five acres and there's very little planting out here. So the fact that we would have required them to plant five more trees, five more potentially larger trees, they could have very easily dropped five trees. We also pointed out that they were probably deficient on their parking for shading. So they probably, we probably would have recommended that they go one, two, three, four, five, get some large trees south side and it probably would have very easily, it's not something that would have been a burden for them to have met that requirement for this. And those square footages that you were assuming were the minimum planting areas? The minimum planting areas. So 100 square feet for a large tree. 100 square feet for a large tree. So when we'd say they're 500 square feet short, I quickly just can. Five large trees. They're welcome to put whatever they would like if they want to put 10 medium trees. That's the flexibilities in their control to decide how they want to landscape it, but we would be requiring them to have a little bit more in this plan. And you could make recommendations as to where to place them. And we could make recommendations as to where to place them. Although I think we could require them to do the parking because I do think their shading is not sufficient. I'm gonna make a question to Shane. Yeah. Why do we get rid of the relationship to impervious surface? Seems a bit arbitrary to say once a lot is greater than this, you need this much trees. The planting area. One to get over an acre, you mean? Right. And we're doing that a lot size. Yeah, it has to do with as the, and again, I came up with a way that I thought might work. So were there many ways we could attack this issue? What happens is once things start getting bigger is because we've been working on the inverse, so what percentage of the rest needs to be landscaped, then when if you end up with needing a percentage of, a very large parcel, you can end up with a very large landscaping requirement. So I tried to kind of move away from that and come up with a factoring. But for these, since they're flat numbers, and now a factor, if this is only a two acre parcel, they have to have, if it's only this piece, they have to have way more trees. Yes. Right, if you're like 1.01 acres. Because this is four acres, multiply that number times four. Basically it would be your answer. Why wouldn't? Because you'd have to have 8,400 square feet of plantings. I'm just saying that. If we continue that same factor forward, that's where it caps out at one acre. So at one acre, it's not multiplying by the amount of impervious surface. It is, but if you only used the factor that's in J2. Right, and you said I've got a factor, I'm gonna make this work. When you apply that factor to a large parcel, like in this case, that factor works good for all the small parcels on Berry Street. That factor number in two. But as you get bigger than an acre, that factor number starts not working. Because as in this case, we would have to have 8,000 square feet, which would be another 85 more trees planted on this site. But you're multiplying it by the site size, not by the amount of impervious surface. Yes. Because it's not just. I see what you're saying. Yes, if they met the, if this were 80% coverage, then they would need 80 more trees. So they probably don't have, but they're not maxing out their coverage. They're not maxing out their coverage. They actually have a coverage of 79,000 square feet. So shouldn't we just, shouldn't we use that? Right, because if it's a much smaller, it's only a two acre parcel, but the lot more trees on the left side. So. Well, it's the same amount of trees, but in a much smaller space for two acres compared to five. Right, we're going from something that's like closely tied to what's being built to something that's kind of like, well, what do your 2,000 square feet, whether you have 50 acres or so. So this would be. Site size. In this specific case, using the coverage of the buildings that are there, the result would be 4,937 square feet of landscaping. Including the parking lot, so all impervious. That's all impervious. Yep, that has 79,800. So it'd be actually a little bit more. So we could round that off to almost to 5,000 as opposed to what did we say it was 2,100. So you'd be doubling, doubling the landscaping if you wanted to kind of remove number three. Or we can come up with another mechanism, but I did know when we did, when we tried these figures earlier, they worked for small lots. And then as we got to bigger lots. So how did you know? How do you mean when you say they worked for small? How did you know? We would take projects, we would take a project which we could get to if we get some time for Elm Street, which is, some of you guys might recognize, like 187 Elm Streets across from the cemetery. And they had a proposal. And the building covers a big chunk of the lot. They have a carriage barn in back. They've got very little green base. So when you look at a 5,000 square foot parcel with a 3,000 square foot building on it, can you still meet the landscaping requirements? Well, you can, because these factors don't require inordinate number of trees and shrubs. But once you get to larger parcels, or yeah, or not, I mean, we just gave the figure. We were assuming we, so the first question is, I converted from a system, the old system said, we're gonna measure the perimeter of the building. And for every five feet of perimeter, you have to have a shrub. And for every 30 feet, you have to have a tree. And they can be anywhere on the site. So buildings that jog in and out a lot and have a lot of context have more perimeter than just a big square box. So if you wanna avoid landscaping, make a big square box. Probably not what we would like to be encouraging. But it ends up with weird things because this building lot could be just this big, in which case they have a building and they have no place to plant their 87 trees that they're required to build or plant. The standards that Brandi had proposed with this work well in suburban model proposals, which is why it would work for this. And her proposals would work for timber homes, which is the next example that I have, which is out on Elm Street as well. Same standards apply, you've got a nine acre lot. All right, how many trees do you need and how are we gonna handle small building on a really big parcel? But what I did was we're not gonna take building perimeter, we threw that out and we replaced it with these planting areas because we felt that was gonna be, what we really wanted to do was to say, impervious cover, for whatever impervious cover you have, you're gonna have to have a percentage of landscaping. Mitigating it and we're gonna let you double count. So you can count your trees, you can count your street trees and you can count your parking lot trees towards your total landscaping. But if you happen to say, aha, I'm exempt from the street trees, aha, I'm exempt from parking lot, you're still gonna have some landscaping and you're gonna have to put it somewhere and these are the requirements that we would like to see. I just don't understand why we changed them at one acre. And it could change at a different number. As I said, this particular proposal at four acres would require an additional, what did we say? So I don't know that that's right. So for a four acre parcel, that makes sense. But I'm worried about like the one and a half acre parcel. Oh, whether the break should have been at one and a half or two rather than one. So if this parcel was half the size, but it's still required more trees that are currently on here, I'm not sure what that looks like. I'm worried that might be asking too much of a parcel that's just over the one acre. Or I just don't see why we need to break the relationship with the amount of impervious surface. It seems- It's per foot inch and not per acre. I guess the question is why did you guys buy lots over an acre before the other two? Right. It was mostly just doing some trial and error on some of these. Like this would require double, but this is a huge plot with a bunch of impervious surface without a whole lot of landscaping. I think it wouldn't have been hard to add more trees here. They've got a ton of space to work with. So if porno doesn't make sense, can you get square footage of the impervious and I think there's some justification. It's not as big as it seems. Yeah, and I think the issue comes up is the ability to meet those requirements based on the amount of available space that's left. I mean, if the impervious cover data is too, the number is too high, then maybe we should be lowering that that would help to create more green space. But in this case, they've made 79,000- the multipliers you have work with all the max coverages, right? So presumably you're gonna have enough space by definition to put all of this. And they don't seem overly, I mean, they seem fairly attainable, right? Yeah, we can review a couple more of these. And if that's the answer is just to go through and say continue to do a straight formula, we can do the straight formula. So as we said, this one here would have required, we already knew it was a little bit deficient because it came out at 1,600. And they're gonna need roughly 5,000. So according to that, they would need 34 new large trees to meet the standard for this. And then with the draft version here, how many did you say? I think they were gonna need five more. What if the factor was just modified somewhat for larger parcels? Maybe one acre is not a tipping point, but we still had some factor in a specific defined square footage. It does seem somewhat arbitrary. We can make it, it's a little bit complex, but I can see how it would work in my head that you could have a factor that's like, if it's more than an acre, then it's this number. And then we're just using a slightly different factor. That goes and says, we've got a kind of a steep factor. Think of it as your tax code. You've got the low, you've got the 18%, and it just keeps stepping up as you're going along. This would be kind of working the other direction. You've got a very high requirement that kind of steps down a little bit because once you get to these large parcels, as we said, adding 34 trees starts to become, it didn't seem like a lot. In addition to the trees that they're already planting, I mean, they're already planting 160 shrubs and 20 trees. But we're talking about two acres of impervious surface as well. Yeah, yeah, 78,000, so it's almost 50% coverage. In a district that's allowed to have 80% coverage. So you think you could work up some? If you think that's a direction to go, I mean, I can certainly see your point. If we were to then double the size of the parcel and double the size of the building, they would still only have to have 2,000 square feet. As things continue to get bigger, he's still parking lots on big lots. Right, and losing the effect of this. Although you still have to meet the... It's less of an impervious. Although you still have to meet the parking trees of the department. Because you still have to have the same amount of undeveloped land. Land, but there's grasslands. So instead of based on the district with the maximum coverage, can you based on actual coverage? Right. So if it's, you could have 90% coverage, but you only did 50% coverage, then you don't need as many trees. Something like that. The factoring, the reason why the factoring is in there is because everything else, or the 90% is in there is because it's how things cancel out. So I don't have to go and ask how big is the parcel. Otherwise you end up with a formula that says how big is the parcel and how much is this and how much is this. And you're multiplying three things and by doing it this way, you're just going to go and say I've already canceled everything out. And I can explain the math if somebody really wants to get into the math of how if you put it by the 90%, it actually cancels itself out and you don't have to worry about what's your parcel size, multiplying anything else. I think we do want to get into the math. That's what I'm hearing. Well, I think there's a concern that, I mean, so first I just want to say this is great work. We should just stop back and recognize that because you've basically written a whole section. So what we're doing is we're getting nitpicky now about one aspect of it, which is an important aspect, sure. But the reason why I'm hearing a lot of concern is because we don't want to be recommending a policy that could be viewed as arbitrary or one that's encouraging a lot of. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, I think, I think John's comments were on point that certainly because if we cap it and just flat out cap it, then that becomes an issue. So, but I do think I'm trying to, I don't understand a lot of this stuff. I don't understand why the district is a necessary variable for trying to. I think that's the same question that everyone's trying to ask in different ways. And so the issue that I'm hearing is why does the default coverage, the maximum coverage allowed, cancel out the variables of what the loss size is and what the coverage being proposed actually is? Why don't we use that as the calculation? And that's why getting into the math I think is needed. I mean, the reason why math would go out of the district maximum coverage is why that's necessary is because all of these factors would be couched against that. Yep, so it'll allow for the maximum coverage of the district basically will determine what the likely available open space is. So if you were to have a factor of point one in a 90% district, you'd end up in a situation where you'd have to cover everything with planting. Or potentially not be able to build because you need to take out building in order to plant your required landscaping. So it's the minimum available space. So this is saying, I think if you do the math, it works out to basically 30% of your required open space is gonna have to be planted in every district. Yeah. So what we're looking at is if you had a parcel and we pushed all the impervious cover, all the buildings and all the parking lots up front and we put it all in back, we'd have so 20% of the parcel has to be left open. Okay, so that makes sense. Now the question is how much of this 20% did we have to? Yeah, that's the point. It's okay, it's helpful for me. The percent for the lower ones is about 30%. So what we said was of the remaining 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, a third of it will be set aside as landscaped and managed. Now the other issue that comes up, not to get everyone to leave, is your setbacks automatically start to take out. So this is just taking your required setbacks. So you end up with these five foot that become difficult to plant trees in. So sometimes you're gonna have landscaping that you're required to keep five feet green on the outside. So you could count the street trees along that. You could count the street trees in the front, you can count some of the stuff in the back. So some of the stuff is automatically covered for in your setbacks. But you might not be able to plant a tree in your setback if there's just not enough room or if there's a shared driveway or if there's something. So if you can't meet those, you can talk to the DRB? And if you can't meet those, you can talk to the DRB. But that's why some of this, I said, we can't say 100% of your impervious. We couldn't do 100% because in a lot of cases you can't actually plant. You have to have some lawn somewhere that's just lawn or... So that was why we picked 30% just as a number to start with because we wanted to go and say, let's pick 30%, let's run a couple of models, see if it works. Kind of worked at 30%. So that's why we kind of kept it. And then when we ran in on different size parcels, that was where we started to see some discrepancies that started coming in, whether it's the four acre parcel here. And I've got some copies. We all need to have a copy, but I made enough copies for people to grab. Thanks. We can share over here. So you can use that one and we'll just share here and they can share there. Walk us through it. So Timber Homes is a nine acre parcel in the rural district. So it's, on the second page, this was their landscaping plan that they put together, which included 10 to 13 more trees, 75 shrubs. It's in the rural district. Anyone who's driven up Route 12 can see the new building that was going in. So my notes that I put together on this one. So this only has a requirement for 20%. Maximum impervious coverage is 20%. And it wasn't even close, although it doesn't look like I wrote down. Wonder if the 43.56 was the requirement for the trees that were on... 43.56 is based on all other districts. 43.56 is the all other districts. So that was the requirement. They would have to have 4,356. And that number is artificially low because it's a nine acre site, but... How much impervious is that? It had, and that was what I was looking for was, I don't think I grabbed the number for the impervious cover on this one because it was over an acre in size. Because the parcel was more than an acre in size. So maybe that actually would be an interesting number to look up. Try to remember off the top of my head, what was... Was there a legend that... Oh, this is two pieces of a much larger document. So the impervious that we're looking at is the building, the driveway. And then what is the orange? The orange is another, that's the three houses. So that's another set of impervious, including the three houses, proposed. It's actually already approved. It just hasn't been constructed yet. But that's part of the same... It's part of the same parcel, so it would have to be counted. So yeah, I would have to get all of the impervious if we wanted to go and kinda look at what the total impervious on this one would be to multiply it out. I didn't write it down on my list because it was more than an acre, so I wouldn't need the number. So in this case, if you added up all the trees they were doing, it's 1,176 square feet of materials. They have a requirement for 4,356. So in this case, they would be well short, but what is now can be taken into account is the natural square footage of natural coverage, which along the shore, there was about 5,000 square feet of natural coverage. That's not indicated here. That's not indicated here, but if we had this as a rule, we would have required them to map that out, which you get a two to one, so they would have gotten credit for 2,500. Still short, but again, I don't think in this case, if we were looking at this, this is a huge open site. If we were to require them to have put in some additional large trees, I don't think it would have her proposal. Are you assuming that the ones that are specified are a large tree? I assume those were medium trees. Yeah, because they're apples. Because they were apples. But again, I guess once this goes down, then you would ask the people and their plants to indicate. Yeah, you would have to determine, and we would also then also require on their site plan what are the planting areas. In this case, they're pretty well spaced out, so chances are good they could just go through and get a uniform circle. I would go through and say, as long as there's no tree within this circle, I've got a rooting area that's sufficient. Right, yeah. But then they also need to just give you a calculation for this. Yes, and I do have that. It's just, I didn't write it down on my cheat sheet. No, but they gave it to you or you had to? They gave it to me. They had to for impervious cover requirements. So it is written in the document. Can you give us some comparison of what the proposed version would look like in terms of just using J2 for the tariff and... Could you just use the factor under those two? Yeah, if I could have, yeah, if I knew the impervious cover, so let me... 18C60. If that other one was, I'll pick it's after all of that. All right, let's choose first one. So, right, let's go down there. I want to say it was a, it's just a 5,000 square foot. No, it's not. No, it's not. Oh, so it's a little bit like this. I mean, if we call that, let's call this another 80,000 square feet. If it were right around 80,000 square feet of impervious cover between all of these buildings times, what's our requirement for that district? They're multiplied by 0.1. Times 0.1 equals 8,000, which is divided by 100 would be 80 large trees that would need to be added. They already have some, what is this? So that doubles the requirement under? That's if we use two, we use them as far as under two. Well, what is this? Oh, what is that? The orange, these are, these are home, but including all the roads and everything in the building. So, all of this. It's a production facility, right? Yeah, that's timber home. Is that what you're asking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's timber homes is for constructing timber frames. I didn't know if they were homes or if they were. No, no, no, this is timber frames where they're going to build timber frame homes. And now here's where they're building, where people live. Makes more sense. Are these other rectangles that are dark or are those impervious? Those are the stacks. The stacks. So that's not impervious. Okay, more or less. Yeah, they're elevated. Yeah, they're elevated off the ground. Yeah, they have to be because they're bundled. Right, so we're allowing them to be penetration. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, underneath it. So, are we making any headway on this? But it was, these were some of the things that we ran into when we started to run some numbers as we started thinking, you know, is it appropriate that these guys would be required to have 80 more trees or 75 more trees? Total. Total. They would have to plant 75 trees in order to get a permit to build that facility there. So. And right now they are proposing. They had 10 to 13 new trees and 75 new shrubs. But isn't the reality for these large rural sites is that they'll likely just meet the percentage based on the existing vegetation. And it'll all be driven by meeting whatever subdivision or site plan standards that are asking them to screen or design-oriented stuff as opposed to doing them. Yeah, this is probably more of a unique site, right? This is probably more of a unique site in that it's nine acres and it is almost devoid of any trees. Which is in a character with being along the river, though. Yeah. So this is a prime example of where a waiver might make sense. Yeah, as opposed to probably the other side of the road where 90% of the similar sized lot is trees. And they're gonna meet their requirement by simply stating that we meet our requirement because we. So what did you, I didn't understand what you said. You said they'll be meeting a different standard. If you have a large lot in the rural area, odds are you're gonna meet whatever percent we come up with with the trees that are- Oh, with the existing, yeah. Yeah, because you're gonna give us all you want. You get half the value, but you're still- Half the value in square footage of the system? Yes. That happens to be a large rural, but not a large rural area. Do we want to credit the existing more than just half? Is there a reason you want that? Does it just exist? Is it just before us that not just not exist? Or just existing when you cover it? As for what's the requirement, right? No, how has it decided that half of what the existing coverage would be allowed without counting? I just- Is it just- I just made up the number. I don't know if there was some standard. There was no standard, and it was actually a question that has come up in actual applications. People have come in to go through and say, hey, I'm building right up here on River Street, but my lot actually is backs up, and I actually have another two acres of trees behind me, so I don't need to meet any of your landscaping requirements. Technically, as the zoning is written right now, yes. At least now we're factoring it in at two to one. We don't want to penalize it too much. We don't want to penalize it too much because we don't want to incentivize people to actually start to cut down the natural trees. We actually want to give them a certain benefit, but we're- It seems like it should be more of like a qualitative issue than a quantitative one. Yes. Which is why you have four requirements. You still have to meet the street tree requirements. You still have to meet the parking lot requirements. So even if you only had to plant three trees, but you have a parking lot that requires you to plant seven, you have to plant seven. And you automatically are way past your total landscaping requirements that you have to meet because you had to plant street trees and you had to plant parking lot trees, or you had to plant screening, and you may already be above and beyond your total landscaping before you get there. The total landscaping is your catch at the end that goes and says, you didn't have to meet this, you didn't have to meet this, you didn't have to meet this, but every project should have some landscaping. And we're going to require you to meet this minimum amount of landscaping, and this project is a perfect example of that. You don't have any other requirements in here. You don't have to meet street trees. You do have to meet the parking lot. Shading. Shading. But- Some screening, but it's- Some screening, but you're kind of tucked away. Yeah. That you have to- Yeah, on the streets. So, I know we're running out of time. I don't think we're gonna get there tonight. I wish we could, but I don't think we're going to. So what I think makes sense for this section, for next time, Mike, would you mind reaching out to John Stell again and talking to him about our concerns, about referencing standards that haven't been adopted? I'm happy to do it if you would prefer. Nope, I can do that. It's not that we don't want to include standards. We just don't want to reference ones that aren't in place already. Yeah, we're, I should at least give them a heads up that we're probably not going to have a requirement in there for them until they adopt them. And if they're interested in moving forward on adopting some standards, or recommending some standards for us to adopt into the- Yeah, either way works. We can do it. And I think actually that was the preference was that to adopt the written standards into- Yeah. If we're referring to the best management practices of this company, then let's state that in here, because then there's a public process that goes along with the adoption. Right, right, exactly. Zero requirement to use as much rendering as possible. That's not how that was the proposal. Yes, that's what it was. And then would you like me to try to come up with an adjusted factor for number three maybe? Yes. Okay. Other than that, does it seem like we're generally- With adjusted factor for number three, and then see if we can come up with any sort of way to change the metric for counting what's already there. Meaning? I mean, so the existing trees sort of giving them a discounted rate. I think it's only for forest land though, right? That was my understanding. So there's like a big oak tree right next to your house, that's different than- Yeah, a tree, yeah, an individual tree that's next to your house we would count as, in the same way that- Like it's coming full. Okay. You don't want to like have someone cut it down. Yeah. Put up two trees. Yeah. In the same way that this is the Elm Street project, Elm Street's right here. And if you happen to know this property, it has two prominent trees in the front yard. Very large trees. And, you know, this was where the joke came in before that we were talking about the fact that technically, the owner of this parcel would have to cut down one of these giant trees to plant more shrubs because he met his tree requirement. He wasn't meeting his truck requirement. And so we were like, well, that's just silly to have rules that would tell us to cut down these two street trees. Can you flip it over and let me see it then? See the picture? Yeah. That's the, this is the front of the house. So it's got a porch on the front. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yep. The proposal in this case was actually in back to convert the abandoned shed into two new housing rooms. Things you still have. So that was, as I said, that was a little bit of. So you get full credit for those. You would get full credit. What these guys would be able to do, it would be to come through and count the number of trees when we go through and say you need to have seven or you need to have so many square feet. They can say I got one, two, three, four, five trees. You know, we can determine whether these are viable trees based on, obviously if you count them, you can't cut them down. Okay. Okay. Right. All right. Save the trees. Yes. So we'll take that up at our next meeting, which is December 10th. We're going to skip over item six. Sorry, Barb. We'll get to that at December 10th. Let's quickly go over the minutes from October 22nd. Just as a final thing, so we can get these posted. Do I have a motion to, oh, we have to. We have to fix the May due date for Stephanie. I'm doing early March. Oh. Oh. Since it made the minutes, that's a, it's not just a sale. Congratulations. Thanks. Future generations. I guess this is sort of. Okay. I don't know. Since it happens to be in there, it should probably be right. Early March. Yeah. Aaron's name is misspelled too. That's okay. Well, it's correct on the flag. Oh yes, it is. So just for her benefit is K-I-S-I-C-K-I. Oh, K-I-S-I-C-K-I. Because she writes the minutes based on the video. So. All those in favor, any, well, any discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. All those opposed? None. Motion carries. Do I have a final motion for adjournment? Do I have a second? Yes. Non-debatable. Does anyone? Okay. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Okay. We are adjourned.