 So we're calling us to order if we can review the minutes of April 18th and we're looking for a motion. I'd move approval with any corrections necessary. Is there a second? Second. Is there a second? Okay. All right. Page one. Page two. Page three. Page four. No modifications. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Those opposed nay. The ayes have it. Okay. Next on the agenda is public comment. This is a chance for anybody in the audience to speak on any issue. If you're here to speak about an issue that's on the agenda, you may want to wait and do that then. But you are free to speak about anything you want. Is there anybody in the room that wants to make a statement at this time? Eric, is there anybody online? No. No one on Zoom. Okay. Next on the agenda, the Green Mountain Transit Fairs. Amy? Amy Brewer? Brewer, yes. Brewer. I'm sorry. There's not much of a context, right? So my name is Amy Brewer. For those of you who have not met, I am Williston's commissioner to the Green Mountain Transit Board. And I came, I think it was October, November. We did a presentation with the general manager at the time. We talked about fares. You incorporated it into your budget, which is fabulous. I did some articles in The Observer kind of talking about how to take the buses. I've been trying to take the bus a little bit more myself. But it occurred to me that one of the things I've never asked you all is as we go through changes in fares and try to look at the most fair fare, it could have an impact on what Williston pays. For example, the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act Services, is currently paid for as a percentage of the residents in your community that use the service, right? Regardless of where people are going to. So Williston doesn't have that many people who use, who sign up and use the service. We pay a lower percent than, say, maybe Burlington, when we know lots of people are going to spaces all around our community. So as we look at fair fares, we might be looking at more of a regional approach. And that would have impact on what Williston pays for. And I wanted to ask, just kind of as a discussion, where this board feels there might be flexibility? Are there guardrails? Are there things you're very uncomfortable or more interested in? And I'm not bringing any specifics. I kind of just wanted to get a sense of where I can represent you. But also, you know, as your commissioner, I want very much the fair to be fair and not linked so much as to where you live, but where you go, or how we share the resources. I'll stop talking and ask. Thank you. Questions or feedback from the board? I personally love that, you know, these services are provided. I think that, you know, really the accessibility of our transit system is truly a highlight of GMT's services. And certainly something that, you know, I hope we can continue to foster and grow and that folks are utilizing. I know you all work hard to spread the word and make sure that, you know, everyone who has, you know, might need access to the services gets access. I personally support kind of, you know, a fair, fair approach. You know, I would love to obviously see what that would mean for our town. Right. And, you know, to see the data, you know, before, say, 100%, let's go do that. Certainly, you know, services are spread across, the county is spread across, you know, all over. And so, you know, to know more about that, but yeah. I ask, what would be, what's the worst-case scenario for, can you first of all explain a little bit more about how the ADA assessment affects the town's contribution? I've been learning about this for several years and I still can't. And what is, the ADA assessment is an assessment that each town pays based on the number of people. Residents. But is it, who are, who are under the ADA, who are disabled? Who utilize the ADA services. What are the ADA services? Who might have a disability that requires. So, my understanding is, if I require, I don't drive for a variety of disability-related reasons, if I'm near the fixed route, I think it's within a quarter of a mile, the fixed route can pick me up. If I live beyond that, there's an ADA service that will come and in Chittenden County, it's SSTA. They'll come, pick you up and bring you to where you need to go. And that's paid for in a different way than our fixed route service, right? That's the bus. When you think of what serves Williston, we have the number one bus which goes from the Transit Center, downtown Burlington, to the University Mall, to Taff Corners and back. It's the busiest bus route that we have. We also have the fixed route service, which is the number 10, which runs along 2A from Taff Corners out to Essex around and back along 2A. Those are fixed, so people who live just off of that can access that. ADA is different and it serves people in a different way. So we pay for them differently. The ADA's based, the price is based on my home residence, regardless of where I'm going to go. So Williston has a small percentage of ADA riders. We pay a smaller percentage than many of the other towns. When you look at how we, but we also have a fair amount of trips to Williston. So people are coming to Williston, maybe for jobs or appointments or for shopping or whatever it might be. So we have people coming to Williston, but we don't necessarily pay into it the same way as they're sending. But if I live here and I'm ADA and I pick up and move to South Burlington, then South Burlington, then the fee. So as we look at making it more fair, it would be interesting to find a regional approach to that, where we all pay a little bit more and it evens out. The challenge is because Williston has a very small percentage of people who are ADA bus riders, our increase would go much higher. And I do have a, as I, there is a proposal and I didn't share it with you and I can, because it's not set in stone yet. It's not the real proposal. But Williston, because of our small number of residents who use the ADA, we would actually expand our contribution quite a bit. And I'm all for fair, right? I want people to be able to use our buses not just because they have to, but because we want to decrease, you know, our climate footprint in a variety of, or we don't or can't drive. So I want to advocate for something fairer, but I also want to, I want to be upfront that Williston may have to pay more. And I wanted to know, hey, that's a big concern for us, or let's see where this might go, come back with numbers, or kind of how you felt about that with no numbers in front of you. And I recognize that that's unfair. I think it ties into our housing discussions too, that we're going to be having and talking to, you know, about our housing needs assessment and also talking to the folks, the DDHI folks here as well. Because, you know, I would love to see, you know, the number of folks that would qualify for kind of these ADA transit services versus the number of folks who are utilizing the ADA transit services, you know, and whether or not our town is, you know, encouraging folks with disabilities that this is to call Williston home and to, you know, again, is there fair and equitable housing for folks with disabilities here in Williston. And so, again, I think this needs to be part of a larger discussion too. I think I'm struggling with why it's not fair that the residents of Williston are paid for by the town of Williston. So, could you help me understand why that isn't fair? Yes. And I think, on some respects, it is fair, right? We pay the percentage of the people that reside here. The problem is that Williston receives a lot of the trips by people, all people, right, are coming to Williston for a variety of reasons. So, we actually benefit in a different way. Because they go to a doctor's appointment here. Or work. Or shopping or whatever it might be. Okay, I'm not sold on that. Okay. People are coming to Williston because we have amenities that they're willing to come here and shop. I wouldn't, I don't pay their gas. Right. But it also creates a disincentive to house people here. Oh, not at that. Right. I think I'm looking at it the other way around. If it was, if we hadn't were housing and you weren't able to serve that housing, they'd not be willing to figure out how to fund it more. But to pay for someone who lives in Burlington to come to Walmart, I don't really see why Williston residents would be interested in picking out that cost. And I think part of it is just, it's a regional service. And we rely on Burlington to pay for a lot. Because Burlington has a lot of the residents. And they're going to have limits. Plus people move all around. And it just, I think from my perspective, looking for a regional. The other thing about ADA is that the, whereas the fixed, we increase it 4% every year to the municipalities. The ADA is volatile. It goes up and down. And those are hard for municipalities to predict. So really what we are looking for is a more predictable approach that recognizes that people get up, regardless of where they live, they get up and move to other, they move daily within the region. So trying to find a regional approach kind of makes it more predictable, I guess. I believe you've answered my question about forcing any changes that should be made for future viability. If the usage has been increasing or decreasing, you know, and what, where do you see the cost of the service? If you see changes being made to that, what would you like to see changed? What changes would you like to see made? Your two advises. Yeah. And I think costs always go up, right? You know, when we look at what it costs, and that's true for the town as well, what it costs to employ people, what it costs for gasoline. And so, so costs tend to go up. We do need local contribution in order to grab, you know, state and federal funds, right? Sometimes we need a 20% match. So we always need a local contribution. We can't go without. Otherwise, we lose access to federal funds. So costs are going to go up. And now that I'm talking, remember the second half of your question, and I'm sorry for that. You know, what, what, what, what are the costs? How do you foresee, you know, this being paid for in the future, I guess? What would you, what, how would you advise us, you know, to think, what would you advise us to think about? I guess I don't have a proposal in front of me to, and when I get one, I will bring it. When we talk about it a little bit more at the board level. So I will, we can talk details when I get more details. But I think, you know, we're, we're reinstating fairs starting, I believe in January, which is one way that we add contribution, that local contribution. So we get that local match. It makes it harder for many people and it makes it less simple to ride the bus if there's a fair. But, you know, municipalities are definitely one way, an important way that folks can contribute. I don't have a great answer for you and I apologize. I'm stumbling. Yeah. Anyone else? Well, we have a great number of people who come to Williston, not just to shop, but to work in here in Williston. And I think that's important that we, they're able to continue to do that rather than drive. And perhaps they don't have the ability to drive as well. And if we looked at our projections down the road, we're going to see an increase in senior housing in Williston. And speaking as a guy who is a senior, it's not always convenient to be able to drive somewhere or maybe not able to drive somewhere. So I think the ADA part of it is essential to maintain. We all know that prices go up every year for everything. So I would anticipate that as well. But if you start riding the bus, then you have another rider and then our fees will go up and that'd be okay. I'd be okay with that. Right. Okay. So I guess what I will do is as we get more proposals or something to look at, I will bring it back to you recognizing that it's of interest, but you don't have any at the moment giant red flags that you want. You know, there are other municipalities are like, yeah, you know, like, don't go this way. Your expression says you do have some red flags. Okay. All right. Do you know if they track point to point data? So if there's, you know, like they're picking up in Williston but driving to Burlington or, you know, picking up in Burlington, driving to Williston, like if they have that point to point data, because I think that could also be helpful for to see the, you know, the important import of, you know, fair fairs and seeing, you know, how often folks are traveling here as well. Yep. Yep. And, you know, as we get proposals, what I can do is also bring those to you, but also bring someone who has more technical knowledge than I have, which tends not to be my specialty. So I apologize for that. I also appreciate that I don't know how the magnitude of money we're talking about here. So, you know, I feel lots of people are talking. I'm trying to remember how much... I pulled up our... Thank you. So our F-124 budget, it broke down a few different ways, but the ADA allocation agreement on transits, about $31,000. And then we have an E&D, Elevating Distance of Transportation, also with SSTAs, about $23,000. And I can work with A&E at a more commissioner level discussions and bring that package, kind of the financial picture to the board as a follow-up once your work gets over here. Yep. And please don't misunderstand that this is a super important service that I really value. I hear you. Picking up more money for the same services means we have to cut something else. So it would be a hard thing for me. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Keep going. Thank you. Next we have the Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative. Jen. Jen Tauley. And anyone else? So I'm Marla McQuiston, and I'm one of, my family is one of the five families that are going to speak to you here tonight. We're all from the Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative. It was started a year or so ago, and it's, we're working to, we're a group of over 100 parents, and they're statewide. We're working to develop housing for people with disabilities beyond the one choice that's available in Vermont right now, which is essentially a foster care setup. So most of our families have young adults that need a lot of housing support. They're not going to live independently. There are people with developmental disabilities in Vermont that are able to live independently, and they get services, and they are also quite often looking for housing because there's not much housing, as you all know, affordable housing. So most of our families, our young people are still living with us, and the reason it's a group of parents is because we're all getting older, and at some point, these young people that are not going to be able to live independently aren't going to have a place to live besides this foster care kind of situation. I would imagine many of you have sons or daughters or friends whose kids would like to come back and live in Williston, and it's not affordable. There's very little affordable housing even at the median income level. Our sons and daughters would also like to live in the communities they've grown up in. Just for example, my son went to CBU, and he's kind of a big personality, so he was on the first unified basketball team, and just everywhere you go with him, it's like, hi, Justin, hi, Justin, hi, Justin. And I don't know these people, everybody knows them. But during COVID, we were, he went out to ride his bike. We live right behind the school, and he went out to ride on the bike path and saw the kids doing tricks at the skate park and decided he was going to do a trick with his bike and tried to flip and of course fell and came up bleeding. And a girl who was jogging by who he went to school with her brother, so he's a few years older than her, stopped and went to help him and he couldn't remember his phone number to call our house. So she called her mom and her mom got in the car and came over to my house and knocked on the door and said, Justin's at the bike park and fell and he's bleeding. And by the time I get there, it's been 20 minutes or something and Alia was still there, stayed with him till I got there. And that's the kind of thing where people know him, he's known in the community, he knows people. That doesn't happen that often. And especially if you're not in a community where people know you. He doesn't want to live in Jericho. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with Jericho, he knows people here. He knows people in this area. So we want to see the creation of affordable housing committee in Williston. We want to see the changes that are being suggested for the bylaws to encourage building housing in Williston. It's affordable to people who are living at the 30% median income level. Because all of our children would like to continue to live in Williston. So there are a number of other families who are going to speak. I don't know who's next. Thank you. Hello. I'm Teresa Soares. My son Joe was the one that was a little over excited to see some of his friends here tonight. And my husband Sean is with me as well tonight. And I just wanted to share a little bit about my family and my son our thoughts about housing for the future for him. We've been Williston residents for 16 years and Joe was fortunate enough to go through the whole education program here. We're very vested in the community. I believe some of you may know Joe just by sight. We do a lot of walks in the community in the Tafts Farm neighborhood so other people might recognize Joe. He's pretty recognizable and loves to be around people. And he wants to stay in Williston as he ages. It's where he grew up. It's where he knows people and where people know him and talk to him and get excited when they see him out on the bike path. We don't experience that same kind of social interaction when we go into Burlington or over to Essex. People don't know Joe so they just kind of freeze and look at him and let him pass by without any interaction. And Joe's the kind of person who just really creates those social interactions. So being in a community where he's known and where he knows other people is very important to him. And we, as his parents, we intend to stay in Williston and we want to be close by so we can kind of help support his needs as he continues to grow. He's going to always need one-on-one support. And so we still want to be part of that community. I believe there's an objective within the Select Board to increase equity, diversity and inclusion. And I guess I'm here to just say that those three words are incredibly important to us as a family. We're here to ask for accessible housing options that will provide Joe with housing that fits his needs. And a big part of those needs is accessibility. He needs accessibility with affordability as he's going to be on a limited income. He needs accessibility to his neighborhood with walkable areas and access to transportation so he can get around the community. He needs accessible, stable housing. And he also needs a physical space that's planned from inception through construction that uses a universal design strategy so that housing will work for his needs and his mobility needs. So again, like Marla said, it's our hope that an affordable housing committee will be established in Williston that would assist in keeping those three important words, equity, inclusion and diversity as kind of a priority as you make decisions throughout that process. And I thank you for taking time to listen to what I have to say tonight. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Joe McNamara. I live in Williston with my two daughters. The oldest of whom is Caroline. Caroline is 22 years old and has Down syndrome. Caroline has lived in Williston her entire life and has had tremendous experiences at Allenbrook Williston Central School and CVU. Through school, sports and activities Caroline has developed a group of friends and peers who make up her community in Williston. As she begins adulthood Caroline would like to transition to housing beyond living with mom and dad but which is also able to provide support for her unique needs. For individuals with developmental disabilities there is virtually just one choice, the shared living provider which you've probably heard about. It's been this as adult foster care. These are great people who do great work but for some of the clients it's not the best situation as far as being around your peers and being with the community you're used to. Caroline currently works at Healthy Living in Williston which enables her to walk to and from home. When Caroline joins me at the grocery store it often takes me much longer. She seems to know everybody. Former teachers, coaches, friends and classmates. This is her home and community but like many she cannot afford to live here on her own. We as parents of these great young adults would like to see the creation of an affordable housing committee in Williston and creation of stable permanent and affordable housing at 30% of the average median income. Housing that is located within walking distance to amenities and employment or can be accessed through public transportation. Housing that allows these folks to remain in the only community many of them have ever known with their friends and peers. Thank you very much for your time. Caroline and I appreciate your interest and efforts on this issue. Thank you. Was there a fourth? My name is Donna Savage and I am a lifelong vermonter and my husband Patrick, daughter Shea and son Jack have been Williston residents for 20 years. Jack couldn't make it tonight but I did bring his picture. He couldn't be here with us tonight. Thank you for giving us time on your agenda tonight. I would like to share with you our family situation as well as my deep concerns on behalf of my son Jack who is unable to advocate for himself. Jack just celebrated his 22nd birthday and has significant and lifelong disabilities which require 24-7 support and care. He challenges his profoundly deaf, visually and cognitively impaired and completely nonverbal. Every day he needs help with all activities of daily living inclusive of diapering, he is incontinent, food preparation and feeding, communication, transportation and medication administration. He is currently enjoying his last six weeks of his public education at CVU finishing in mid-June. Jack has benefited greatly from the staff of Intensive Needs Pair Educators there who help him navigate his day. When Jack ages out of his school years it will create a gaping hole in the support and services he's had in place for the past two decades of his life. With the Howard Center facing the most serious staffing issues they've ever dealt with we his parents are trying very hard on our own right now to find and hire people to work with Jack so he can continue to thrive in social engagement, community outings, fun activities and yes, even work. Jack currently has part time one morning a week job at Shaw's right here in Williston. It's alarming and a little sad to think that all this peer inclusion and supports he's received as a student could abruptly end for him at the age of 22. If there's one thing we've learned about Jack it's that despite his disabilities he 100% knows his people in fact consistency of people places in routine is crucial to his well-being. Naturally my husband and I have begun to think more about what Jack's future living situation will look like once we're no longer able to care for him in our home. I'll be honest it is not an understatement to say that this is something that keeps me up at night. For the past 30 plus years since the closing of the Brandon training school Vermont has been overly reliant on the shared living provider SLP model also known as adult foster care particularly for those with higher support needs like our sons and daughters with IDD the SLP model does not work well at all and lacks the permanence our adult children need. Speaking just for Jack he is overwhelmingly dependent upon structure stability and routine in his life yet we've been told this is our only option and now Vermont is in a pickle one there's now a critical shortage of new shared living providers which only worsen during the pandemic and two even if we were lucky enough to have an SLP match identified for Jack if that person quits, retires, moves or simply changes their mind about wanting to continue to care for him these are not forever contracts it would be Jack could suffer the consequences of that arrangement and off he'd be shuffled to another home and perhaps yet another the person with high support needs and for whom transitions are the most difficult would have to bear the brunt of being uprooted and moved to another unfamiliar place we would not think of doing this to a parent with dementia or even with slight dementia why would we want to do that to our sons and daughters with IDD so all of this is the reason we are here tonight it's the reason we are asking you to please consider our urgent request for developing stable service supported affordable housing for this most vulnerable group of Williston residents a dream come true for us parents and one that would certainly bring about a better nights rest would be the creation in Williston of forever homes for our sons and daughters inclusive, accessible and accessible which would allow our kids who have known each other since childhood to live in the community where they grew up with or near each other our kids are all friends so specifically we are advocating for affordable housing at 30% of average median income in locations walkable to amenities and employment or can be easily accessed via public transportation for essential staffing needs we also ask the town to please move forward with the creation of the affordable housing committee ASAP to help make the dream of inclusive housing for all in Williston a reality thank you for listening thank you for remembering our exceptional young adults with unique and unmet housing needs as you expend housing opportunities for our town thank you very well we're sharing that sorry we thought it would be great for you to hear directly from one of the kids great hi my name is Bennett Townley and I'm here with my parents Jen and Ed who I live with I am 25 years old and I've lived in Williston since coming to America in 2001 from Romania as an individual with unique abilities to advocate why staffed affordable housing in Williston is important to me and my uniquely abled friends that are here tonight like Joe Cool in Caroline and others who aren't we know each other well because we attended school from kindergarten through high school or have participated in special Olympic events it is important to us that we continue living in Williston because this is the community we know and many in the community know us and have helped us when we needed help most importantly I feel safer in Williston than I would be in other places in Chittenden County my friends and I want to have choices about where we live who we live with and how we want to live we would like stable permanent inclusive and accessible service supported housing so we can live together we want to see affordable housing as soon since many of us are living with aging parents including me and my friends and we can't afford housing on our own none of us can drive currently so we would want to live in a community that is walkable or near public transportation and have amenities and work close by I also want to live close to nature because quiet walks help me regulate and help me with my anxiety we ask you to please create affordable housing in Williston that is stable accessible, safe and as close to amenities for my friends and I to live in since that would make us feel more competent in ourselves and we will have a place to call home that is not our parents place thank you for your time this evening I'm Jen and this is my husband we've been 30 year residents of Williston and like many of the other parents who have spoken people know me as Bennett's mom not so much as Jen because you know so many people in the community on behalf of the Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative we'd like to thank you for the opportunity to advocate on behalf of our children with developmental disabilities please know there are other Williston families unable to join us tonight who also desire stable permanent service supported affordable housing 30% average median income for their children with disabilities we support the options open to the town as outlined in the presentation that will follow specifically the creation of the affordable housing committee in Williston perpetual funding of the affordable housing trust consideration of potential changes to town bylaws to encourage the development of housing in Williston that is affordable to people who are at the 30% of median income level and other levels and the development of partnerships with both housing trust and other non for profits this will allow for our young adult sons and daughters to continue living in this town where they grew up where the community knows them and they know the community and where they can have a place to call home please know that the Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative is just a very small subset of a much larger group of underserved populations that also desire the need for affordable housing to live in Williston we look forward to working together to support Williston and the development of inclusive housing for all thank you for your time and your consideration tonight thank you very welcome you're welcome thank you you're the isham farm guy yes sir farmer Mike can I just say thank you to everybody who presented and thank you for everybody who for your interest and your education of us tonight these things like this are absolutely critical so thanks I'm not quite sure if we the board has any questions or comments for the people who presented it's not exactly set up for that but if you do maybe we could take two three minutes before we go on to the next housing needs assessment agenda otherwise we'll move on I would just like to thank everyone for sharing your stories I have a nephew with some difficulties and I also have aging parents helps me understand them a little bit better thank you very much it's tough it's scary when people start getting older I see it I see things in my family too thank you I think it's sort of unpractical and it wouldn't expect an answer right now but really sort of the next step to get my head around is what this housing would look like I know what it doesn't look what you don't want it to look like kind of what it would look like that would be sort of some information that would be interesting that would be is it a group home is it individual apartments with support living support that would be perfect for me to kind of get my head around how to make something like that happen is that something maybe I shouldn't be asking this off the cuff but is that something that we would bring to the planning commission or that we would have town staff be the focal point for it you know there's a lot of ways that the town could participate in helping these folks find solutions to this challenge we're going to talk a little bit tonight about just general changes to zoning that might be more supportive of creating this type of housing in a location that makes sense certainly the programmatic things I talk about related to budgeting and funding and partnerships that might find their locus with a newly formed housing committee could help as well but at the at the core of this the real solution to the things you're hearing about from the DPHI group is a project and it's one that the town can be supportive of in a number of directions but that is going to require some other partnerships as well my department are happy to be a point of contact for that we tend to connect a lot of people from a lot of different worlds along with you folks and we're happy to do that in service of something that happens for this as well okay so if it's okay with the board I think we would move on to the housing needs assessment continuing our discussion and this does dovetail with the developmental disability housing initiative you're welcome to stay I do caution you that a lot of our municipal issues are not nearly as exciting as this we do have a liquor license approval later tonight so so anyway no but we let other people okay so Matt yeah well Melinda is getting started she's going to take you through our presentation tonight just a brief summary of where we are we spent our last time together going over the high points of the needs assessment itself tonight is mostly to talk about some potential policy responses these are things the planning commission has been thinking about and working on a little bit with us since they reviewed the needs assessment over a month and a half ago but it's new to you we've brought the planning commission here tonight to hold this as essentially a joint meeting again and I've asked the commission especially to listen for the feedback questions that they hear from all of you on the select because the hope is to bring a bylaw amendment through the process that there's some general consensus on before we hold a planning commission hearing and before it comes back to this body for review and hopefully approval we want to be in alignment we want to do what's possible now understanding that there may be larger policy moves that happen informed by a town plan but that's really the purpose of tonight and I'll just say thank you to the DDI group for coming and presenting to you they've given a similar presentation to the planning commission as well and we go from a very unique and really challenging component of the overall housing picture to a conversation of a much broader housing picture about many different levels of affordability many different types of housing but one thing that really came to mind to me tonight as I was sitting there listening to the presentation again is a lot of planners are essentially frustrated architects in school we get excited because we see a neat looking building and we serve architecture adjacent sometimes and a lot of us go to school somewhere or go abroad somewhere and we end up in a really neat place that's walkable and near services and affordable and provides a lot of opportunity for a lot of different people and you know I did that in my college years and found myself in a place where I said wow this is a really cool place I wonder how a place like this comes together happen to be Copenhagen and then you get into planning and we work on trying to create those places for the communities we serve sometimes because they're cool when you come to a presentation tonight you hear that it's really not just about it being a cool or interesting or a Instagrammable sort of place but it's the kind of place that levels the playing field for so many different kinds of people when you don't have to drive a car to have full access to society when you can walk to work when you can be in a community where you know people and they know you when you can be in a community that provides amenities that are available to everybody and you don't have to create all those amenities for yourself and when you can be in a community where you can find a home that meets your needs and is within your means and so I apologize for coming to planning from a place of wanting to create cool places like the ones I saw in college and college that there's a far more important mission behind some of that stuff and really throws a lot of the work we've been doing in the last couple years into a whole other perspective and I think we've been doing the right kinds of things in our land use reforms. We've talked about that before. I think the things we're going to talk about tonight lead us further down the path of not just being an interesting and good looking town as it is but one that's more equitable and more welcoming and provides opportunity for some of its longtime citizens so I'm going to stop there and let Melinda jump right into policy. I'll stay up here if there's questions but really this is Melinda's show from here on out. Yeah so the last time we were here you got a sense of the need for housing and you got you know you heard the saw the data and tonight you got to hear some personal stories from the D.D. H.I. folks and so now the next step really is to clarify what the town's goals are what does the town want to do about housing so in order to sort of inform my own history of Williston I took a look at the 2016 town plan and there's a chapter called growth management and housing and there's two essential objectives in that chapter and one is residential growth management how to use residential growth management to manage growth and the second objective is to expand housing opportunities so you know as I'm kind of reading through these town goals realizing that these two goals really have an inherent tension between them and you can't do both of them really well at the same time so while we are going to talk about small steps that we can take now to address housing through bylaw amendments and other programmatic changes there is a broader conversation to be had with the next town plan update in what the town wants to prioritize and how it wants to how it wants to prioritize between these two goals okay so in the residential in the goal of implementing and refining the growth management system there was this recognition in 2016 that the current growth management system is very complicated and often places major constraints on proposed housing development so there was this stated goal to take a hard look at the growth management system and try and evaluate to what degree it's serving the town's goals and to try and see if some of the existing regulations and growth management could be maybe modified and if other regulations could address the town's goals more simply and so this there was this also a stated goal for expanding housing opportunities using the residential growth management system to encourage a range of housing choices and different densities of dwellings and housing that is affordable for residents and the workforce and also exploring other means of promoting the provision of more diverse, more affordable housing so I wanted to show you this timeline because it shows the work that the town has been doing over the last decade whoops to address housing issues so the select word beginning in 2012 at the select board's annual retreat where one of the main topics of discussion was affordable housing in Williston and the town's approach to supporting the development of affordable housing and the select board raised the question of as to whether the town should be taking a more active role in supporting the development of affordable housing so in October of 2012 the select board created established a task force to examine issues of basically expanding the availability of an adequate supply of housing across a broad spectrum of income levels the task force was charged with developing a full understanding of the need for building housing in Williston and the challenges in providing affordable housing so the task force over a course of a year or so developed a set of policy recommendations which was submitted as a report to the select board and then in 2015 the growth management system was amended to reserve 25% of available dwelling units in each growth management area for affordable housing and adjust the scoring criteria to support the provision of affordable housing and then in 2016 the town established a housing trust fund task force to consider and address issues related to the establishment of housing trust fund so they worked for about a year and submitted a report to the select board on end of 2016 and in 2017 the select board adopted a housing trust fund ordinance that established the housing trust fund and an advisory board so an advisory board has technically been established but members were never appointed and it wasn't never started up basically so in 2019 there were further amendments to growth management whereby there could be up to four dwelling units a year exempt from growth management as small subdivisions and exemptions were also made for units that would be affordable at 80% area median income or below provided an exemption from transportation impact fees for affordable housing and child care and then in 2021 more amendments to growth management were made parking minimums were reduced parking requirements for accessory dwelling units were reduced and this is important because that also will reduce the cost of building those developments and then also the bylaw was amended so that to give the select board authority to waive all impact fees for certain affordable housing developments and established certain criteria for those affordable housing and fee waivers and then most recently in 2022 TAF Corners form based code district and regulations were adopted providing opportunities for the creation of affordable housing in the growth center and in 2023 housing needs assessment was conducted and now we are considering policy to address that need okay so this chart just shows you the recommendations made by the housing task force report back in 2014 the town has implemented some of those recommendations but could do more such as reducing fees for reducing water and sewer connection fees for affordable units further incentivizing to reduce and establishing housing committee and this just shows you what's resulted as far as housing creation in the last decade or so and what's striking to me about this table is that without Zephyr Place which was a development that was entirely affordable at 80% AMI was developed by Champlain housing trust in 2022 it was built in 2022 so without that the percentage of affordable housing relative to the total number of units in Williston developed over the last 10 years would have been about between 6 and 7% but that one project raised that percentage to 13% so that just tells you the difference that one project can make and in particular a partnership with an affordable housing developer so the town didn't actively seek out this partnership, CHT saw an opportunity to convert a hotel into affordable housing and worked with the town to get it done the town implemented a bylaw amendment fairly quickly to enable the refund of all impact fees and this along with the provision to bypass growth management because all the units were affordable at less than 80% AMI allowed this project to move forward successfully so if the town could take a more active role in seeking out such partnerships there is a lot of potential to achieve similar success so that's one goal to increase the amount of affordable housing in town through these big projects but another equally important goal is to integrate affordable housing in projects throughout town and that is going to require regulatory reform such as inclusionary zoning so what we're proposing here are some amendments that make it a little bit easier to develop housing that achieves the town's goals of equity, affordability and inclusion and as you saw from the timeline that I showed you the town has been making some progress on that and has been kind of chipping away at this a little bit slowly over time and what we're proposing today is not a radical departure from the changes that have already been made throughout this past decade so one of those proposed changes would be an inclusionary zoning policy the way we sort of propose this is as an alternative to growth management so projects that include certain percentage and that percentage would need to be determined of affordable units would not need to go through growth management projects that don't include affordable housing would still need to go through growth management and also pay a fee a fee in lieu of affordable housing such a fee could be one way to fund the housing trust fund but the other side of that is we wouldn't want to see that option being used too often the object would be to have developers choose to do inclusionary zoning as an alternative and to get more affordable housing that way and to get it integrated into projects okay so another proposal would be to exempt certain basically low impact projects from growth management and such projects would include some adaptive reuse of commercial properties to housing some small missing middle projects two to four unit projects conversion of barns to farmer workforce housing in the ARZD so basically this would incentivize housing that would minimally impact town services I'm sorry can you tell me what missing middle means specifically yeah so missing middle housing is housing between the single family detached and a large apartment building so duplexes triflexes, quadplexes that kind of thing so then another thing that we're considering is to revise density requirements from small projects such as conversion of hotels to affordable housing developments on existing lot smaller than two acres and the reason for this hotels are already there the land use and service impacts would remain the same they're already hooked up to water and sewer the roads are already there so that seems like a way that an easy way to encourage the conversion of hotels to affordable housing would be to exempt those from growth management and then density or I'm sorry to relax the density requirements for those density on small lots is already limited by many other things like setbacks, parking storm water supply and sewage disposal so it seems like rather than have this other sort of artificial constraint of density it would seem like removing it wouldn't wouldn't you know wouldn't create a big impact to the town also relaxing permitting requirements for ADUs making it so that owner occupancy is not required relaxing some of the dimensional requirements and then not reducing the parking requirements for ADUs accessory dwelling accessory dwelling I'm sorry I should have said that a long time ago accessory dwelling units ADUs so those are some of the regulatory recommendations that we're making just briefly I was going to go through a few programmatic recommendations that would support housing needs including basically moving forward following through on the housing trust fund creation leveraging partnerships with nonprofits and investing in infrastructure and I'll go through them one by one so the first recommendation is to appoint the housing trust fund advisory board we already have staff I'm hello I'm here and so we would actually recommend that that rather than just being a board to oversee the housing trust fund be more sort of a broader housing committee to kind of look at housing policy more broadly and look at other ways that the town can support housing in addition to using that housing trust fund but it could also help direct spending priorities report on progress in the use of the fund and also we would recommend considering setting up dedicated funding source for that housing trust fund you know there could be an annual amount set by the select board in the budget or it could be some other it could be through payment and lieu fees could go to the housing trust fund and there could be other ways of funding so then the second recommendation is just to really start to reach out and try to strategize ways to partner with nonprofits to get housing built in Welliston so we do have you know we have had great partnerships in the past with Champlain housing trust continue these expand to other nonprofits and this could also be part of the work of the housing trust fund advisory board the housing committee but also to really try and get more specific in the next town plan about programmatic elements that the town could implement in support of housing and then you know connecting with landowners connecting with developers and trying to partner with them on developing affordable housing and then finally investments in infrastructure will really be of immense help in jumping jump-starting some of these affordable affordable housing projects if the town were to find a way to fund building a street like Trader Lane building parks and public spaces through you know through different mechanisms of funding such as TIF district a special assessment ready district state federal grants or loans so these are some of the things maybe acquiring and developing municipal land for housing or donating it to a to a nonprofit so those are some of the programmatic things that the town could do what is ready for you Darin Darin Darin Shibler the county regional planning commission have been helping support Wilson staff in this housing project ready district is rural economic development infrastructure district it's similar to TIF the difference is it doesn't have any tax funding it can't take sort of serve as almost like a development corporation, specifically for infrastructure, to support economic development. It's laid out in the statute. It's generally more for rural areas that are looking to develop partnerships, but certainly an option for Willis and Namang, some of the others on the slides here. Thank you. Yeah. I just drove through Philadelphia this weekend, we're pretty rural compared to that. Yes, most of Vermont is considered rural, except for Burlington. Right. And then another thing would be to apply for neighborhood development area designation for the growth center. And that would bring some benefits to the town, some related to Act 250, and maybe there, and maybe you could speak to some of those too. So this overview shows some of the state designation programs and some of the benefits that come along with those designations. You're familiar with the growth center already. There are a few that are not included in the growth center benefits, but that would be available if Williston got a neighborhood development area. That includes, let's see, trying to read my own slides here, yellow would be all the tax credits. So state historic rehabilitation, facade improvement, code improvement, and flood mitigation. These are for developers to take advantage of when they're doing a project. It helps reduce their costs when they're actually investing in a building. So that would be something that's available to them simply by the town taking an action to say, we want this to be a neighborhood development area. And these are for residential projects primarily. Others that the town does not have yet would be an active 50 fee reduction. So that fee can actually be in the thousands of dollars for a developer just to apply to the state active 50 review. Having it be waived or reduced is a huge benefit. And it could add up to one extra affordable unit in a project, depending on how big their project is. And similarly, there is an exemption from the land gains tax. I'm not totally clear on how that works. At this point, I think that might be getting changed. But it does help, again, incentivize investment in properties that are already planned for growth. And then the loss or mitigation, no mitigation fee for primary agricultural soils, again, it's just money to offset or extra money that helps with this development offset its costs in an area that's already planned for growth. I'm not worried about the ag soils and tax corners where it's already developed and planned to be. Yeah, and then there's A&R wastewater fee is capped at $50 in applications. Yes, so normally those fees can be, again, in the thousands of dollars per connection that A&R is reviewing, the state's reviewing in addition to Williston reviewing. So it just helps reduce those costs. And again, some of these benefits are already in the growth center. But NDA would help take it a step further. And one other thing I'll mention on this slide is that some legislation, recent bills and pending legislation may be talking about delegating some review authority to municipalities for Act 250, which could, again, help move projects a little faster through the process that they're already consistent with town regulations as long as those are also consistent with state goals. So stay tuned for that. And then I'm going to end with a couple of these are the last two slides. But I want to say that Williston's not alone in dressing, in trying to address housing needs. So I mentioned the Building Homes Together campaign during the last presentation, where the goals are to increase the total new homes, increase the new affordable homes, and achieve, get to a 5% rental vacancy rate, which is considered a healthy vacancy rate. So this slide is just showing you, over the years, Williston market rate is in orange. Williston affordable is in dark blue. And then market rate all of their towns is the light blue. And affordable is the maroon part of that bar. So it just shows you that other towns are working on this, too. And we're not alone. Did you have something? And then finally, I'm sorry, but I can't help myself, being the energy planner and community development planner. There's definitely an intersection, and I did want to point out the intersection of housing goals with energy goals. 25% of the workforce is commuting from outside Chittenden County into Williston. 92% of the workforce commutes from outside the town, and 25% is commuting from outside Chittenden County. And so if we could house some of those workers, it would provide some benefits, including reducing carbon emissions, lessening cost burdens for low-income households, reducing stress, improving health, when especially when people could commute short distances to work or even walk or bike, and reduced traffic impacts. It would also increase worker retention for local businesses, the town and the schools. So I just would like to end with that, that Williston stands to gain a lot from this regional effort and the efforts that the town is making. And if anyone has questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Questions from the board? I have one question. I can't pronounce the word here. Inclusionary zoning policy. What exactly is that, and how does that affect the zoning? Yeah, so an inclusionary zoning policy, what that means is that you require developments to include a certain percentage of affordable units in their development. Like right now, we don't have that requirement. Affordable housing is incentivized in growth management, but it's not required. So it would be a requirement for a certain percentage yet to be determined somewhere between 10% and 20% perhaps. But there's some decision to be made around that, around the level percentage of affordable. But that's essentially what it means. And what we're proposing is, because we're proposing it as an alternative to growth management, it's not strictly a requirement. But we're hoping that most developers would take advantage of that with the benefit of going through the lengthy, complicated process of growth management. So our hope would be that from here on, all proposed developments have some affordable integrated into them. Where would you suggest that we place that regulation, that wording in what doctrine? So it would be in the zoning bylaw, and we're proposing that it be within the current growth management chapter, and that that chapter be changed to inclusionary zoning and growth management, basically. Could that include like Habitat for Humanity homes? Those are very important, I feel. So it's not really looking at how the affordable units get built. I mean, theoretically, they could be built by Habitat for Humanity. And I think the town, that is one partnership that would be great to try and pursue. But who builds the homes is not really integral to the regulation itself. And one other couple of things about inclusionary zoning, it generally works best when you're looking at a target of sort of that middle income housing, somewhere between 80% and 120% of the median income, not necessarily the deep affordability that the nonprofits can really provide because they can leverage other resources. Because it's a requirement in addition to other requirements in zoning, you have to make sure that there are offsets for developers to be able to make their projects work financially. And the other benefit of it is that it is providing that housing throughout the community, throughout the area that you've designated to be inclusionary, so that it's not just all of the whole affordable housing in one project in Zephyr Place, it's scattered throughout each of the housing developments so that it's not just one area that's seeing all the lower income, moderate income housing. And that's why, another reason it's inclusionary, it's making sure that the whole community is integrated rather than segregated. Good question. Are these changes in the bylaws or changes in the growth management? Is that something that goes into effect for projects that are already submitted or is that something that goes into future projects that are submitted? It would go into effect for future projects, projects that have already submitted an application for a discretionary permit would not be subject to the requirement for inclusionary zoning. There is a period of time during which there's, say we notice a public hearing for inclusionary zoning and then someone submits an application for discretionary permit to build residential housing. They would have to meet both bylaw, basically the existing bylaw and the proposed bylaw. So there is a period of time which is a little bit transitory, I guess. But projects that have, as of today, projects that have submitted applications for discretionary permit would not be subject to inclusionary zoning requirement. You've given us a lot of information. We've only had a few minutes to digest it. Thank you. You're welcome. Good job. Oh, I was gonna, oh, okay, I promise, David, we'll get to you. My question, historically, I wasn't on the board when, in 2017, when the Housing Advisory Board was created. Why wasn't it appointed? Do we know why that never came to fruition? As I recall, I was initially seated to fund for five or six budget cycles right now. I'm not sure from the policy or operational standpoint why it wasn't stood up then. We started to look at it maybe in early to mid-2020 when the pandemic occurred. But I think now the Townsend have a much better position to staff that effort with the creation of the new plan or position moment as it fills with energy community development and housing. Those are intent with creating a role in that way that it would have a means to have the capacity to staff energy committee, potential future housing committee, where really I feel for these policy committees to really do a lot of in-depth work, you know, good staff support for those committees. So I think the Townsend has a good position now to touch the new board with that committee at the select board's purview and description. Great. And then my next question is kind of about timing. So obviously, you know, say we implemented, you know, all of these recommendations and we're going to go forth. You know, what is the timing look like for, you know, if we are going to go ahead with inclusionary zoning, if we're going to go through with exemptions, obviously some of the non-regulatory things, it's a matter of just getting those in place and doing those and seeking the partnerships. Sure. So yeah, so the bylaw amendments, the ones that, you know, we talked about tonight, could happen fairly quickly if the select board was in support of us, you know, going ahead and discussing more, getting more specific language with the Planning Commission. You know, we could review it sort of a nearly final draft middle of May and then, you know, you could start looking at it in early June. We could have potentially, you know, looking at a final draft towards late June and possibly Planning Commission hearing sometime in July and a select board hearing sometime in August or September. So that's kind of the timeline for bylaw amendments. I think for the more programmatic stuff, I know that that's going to take longer and, you know, our recommendation would just be to establish a committee as soon as you can and then have that committee work on developing some of the, you know, programmatic initiatives. In terms of like, obviously, your speaking is from the Planning Commissioner, but in terms of the commission itself, are there priorities that like, like, what would you all say would be, you know, you're like, if we're going to like, target one thing immediately, what's the, you know, the thing that you most want us to see, like, get done right away? Thank you for that great question. Hi, I'm Megan Cope, I'm the Chair of the Planning Commission. I would, I think that Melinda's timeline really suggests that we have tried a lot of very small or incremental attempts to make some changes and we have not seen a lot of success with that. The fact that our affordable housing provision now was majorly boosted by a project that we really hadn't had any particular role in is kind of frustrating. And so my perspective at this point is that I feel like we really need to be bold and if we take this seriously as an issue for our community, then we need to actually, we need to implement things as quickly as possible. I think that the affordable housing we've been hearing, you know, ever since I joined the Planning Commission in 2011, affordable housing has been a big issue. As you saw from that timeline, we had our first task force was in 2012. And so it's obviously a pressing issue. It has become more acute recently because of the national affordable housing crisis, the statewide affordable crisis and then our region. And so I would really encourage you to take these, direct us to take the next steps, right? Like to go ahead and be bold, our incremental small measures have not resulted in much change at all. And we have a lot of, you know, a lot of other kinds of knock-on effects that would be very positive for the town and for the broader community if we had greater affordable housing. I mean, the DDHI folks here tonight are one great example. I think the energy piece is another great example. There are a lot of really beneficial outcomes to having, to having affordable housing be a constant, very meticulous commitment from the select board. And so I would say like from my perspective, it's like right up there on the top to get a very long answer to your question. But I also, I don't wanna think, I don't wanna forget about the energy crisis that we're in and the climate emergency and so that is obviously extremely important as well. But to some degree there are kind of again this sort of intersecting benefits of addressing housing and energy together. Thank you. I hope anybody else wants to stay. Keep it always. Okay. Devan and Baderan and Megan said two of the things I wanted to say. I'm Chatepe Canaryall in the Planning Commission and I just wanted to emphasize a couple points that were just said, maybe hearing it in someone else's words will be helpful to you, I'm hoping. Deran's point about the value of inclusionary zoning in that all the other measures we could do, we might wind up with some affordable housing in one area or in one building and you can wind up with sort of a slum effect if you will, where there's an obvious disparity. When zoning for more affordable housing is integrated with projects, it is enriching to all the people involved in that and in general a much healthier and more sustainable environment. And so I think the Planning Commission as a whole has a really strong value on inclusionary zoning because although we hate to regulate anything, it's the only way we can sort of require that projects have a certain percent affordable. And then one thing that we haven't said is that there are other ways to get more affordable housing and to relieve housing pressure such as the number of homes in Williston that have three and four bedrooms but the children have moved away and they could be reworked into more housing and more ADUs et cetera and more infill and so we are looking at those things as well. Can I ask you a question on inclusionary before I forget my thought? I'm with you on inclusionary, in fact, most of these, unless I'm misunderstanding them, are most effective if you do them in task orders, right? That's essentially what the rest of them, you're not gonna put in roads in rural Williston to support up. We're looking at all but the easier road is. So inclusionary is one that seems to be like a way to spread it out but then we give developers a way to buy it or a way out of that. Is that? Yeah, I sort of don't wanna go into the mechanics of whether we're gonna have a way you can, we haven't decided that. Okay, that's on the chart. I guess I would just say that's one of my concerns. If you're serious about doing it, it's the only lever we have to spread out affordable housing then giving somebody a chance to buy their way out. If you, yes, but if that buying their way out can fund a housing, affordable housing fund, that the town can use rather programmatic ideas that they have. It's better than nothing. It's, yes, it's shifting where the benefit goes. Right. One more this thought on that. When you're developing inclusionary zoning policies, it's really important to have off-ramps for the situations that you can't predict. So let's say there's a developer and you set a threshold of 10 units to trigger this requirement and that developer can do 10 units, but they can't do nine units market and one unit affordable. They just can't make the finances work. But you still want that 10 unit project to happen because that's missing middle housing and that's housing where it needs to be. And maybe they are able to contribute to the inclusionary and affordable housing goal by doing that offset and doing that fee in lieu. Better than if you had no housing from that project. So that's a reason to consider that, but it is very important to consider the different lovers and the different, you know, balancing points in a policy. So I'm glad you're asking those questions. And in terms of balancing, if we are too strong in our requirement for inclusionary zoning, projects might not get built or they might have to have multimillion dollar homes as part of it to help underwrite the cost of the more affordable components. And we might accentuate some disparities. And so that part is tricky. I at least feel that we are not obligated as a town to supply all the housing for all the jobs in our town that sometimes things don't work out that way. And it's not always a bad thing. But the concept of bedroom communities with people commuting to work does work against all sorts of our current social and town goals, including carbon reduction and affordability because it means you have to have a car or so forth. And I know I had one more. Oh, Megan's point, I just wanna emphasize Megan's point that we have been trying for years to incentivize affordable housing without success. And so that's brought most of us on the planning commission the point of thinking we need to regulate something. And then we're trying to look at how to balance that regulation to be successful. If there's not an immediate follow-up question, Greta, I wanted to go back to yours really quickly because I perceived that you might be asking of the policy elements that are under consideration by the planning commission, is there a prioritization there? So to summarize really briefly what Melinda went over was inclusionary zoning as a requirement for new development with the trade-off being that that development does not go through the growth management system. That's really the largest policy shift that would most change the way development is reviewed and approved in Williston in the hopes that most if not all new projects are inclusionary projects. That doesn't mean that Williston would stop managing growth. Williston manages growth in a lot of different ways. The zoning bylaw is 318 pages long and contains high standards for any number of things, the provision of infrastructure, building and site design, provision of open spaces, neighborhood spaces, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a pathway and a trade-off. It's essentially taking two very large break pedals and lifting the foot slightly off one of them in service of the creation of more affordable housing. So policy point number one would be to come up with an inclusionary zoning provision, however that might look, that provides a pathway to approval that's different from the traditional growth management pathway, which is where the affordable housing incentive has lived and had the effect it's had as shown by the slides tonight. The second package of policy amendments are, as Darren mentioned, where is the threshold for an inclusionary zoning or growth management project? Usually both of those systems are easier to apply in a project of some size, either 10 or 15 or 20 or more units, something like that. And what Melinda showed you tonight was the idea that there would be some projects that wouldn't be subject to either provision. These would be conversions or adaptive reuse of existing commercial structures or barns for workforce housing or projects that are on a parcel that's already two acres or smaller. In other words, small infill type, missing middle type or adaptive reuse or conversion type projects would have a path that would be made much easier for them than they have now. So to remind everybody where we are right now in Williston is any project that creates a separately conveyable dwelling unit in Williston is subject to the growth management provisions unless it is a project that is only creating affordable units at 80% median or below. The only way to create a project that is entirely comprised of units that are affordable at 80% median or below is through subsidy and creation by a nonprofit like Champlain Housing Trust did with the creation of Zephyr Place. So it's a fairly narrow exemption right now. And we have had some examples of somebody who wants to add in one case an office with an apartment upstairs and the gentleman wants to add a second apartment to the upstairs of that existing office building. Today that's a growth management project. Thank you for your pre-application. We will see you next March. You can continue the permitting process then. It's a very lengthy review timeline and level of scrutiny, not to mention for staff a really mind-bending project to score in that incentive-based system for growth management when you're looking at the scoring criteria that were really designed to incentivize the creation of mixed-use projects on 50 plus acres like Finney Crossing or Cottonwood Crossing. And you're trying to apply that to one apartment upstairs in an existing building that's been there for 30 years. So the second package of amendments would be some level of small projects that would not go through either the inclusionary zoning requirements or the growth management system, but could just simply happen as a matter of DRP or administrative review and permitting. Finally, we talked about ADUs, accessory dwelling units as a part of the picture, being a little bit more flexible on those. They're a small but meaningful component of the creation of affordable and flexible homes in Williston. I think we see right now between six and eight new accessory dwelling units a year created in Williston. So it's, like I said, a small component of the solution very meaningful to those property owners who are able to create them. They're often created to bring a family member into the home, whether it's a child or an aging parent, or to bring some income into the home to allow the homeowner to stay in their home. And things like being able to be flexible, even on parking requirements, are really helpful. I've reviewed a few of these where you're kind of looking at the site plan and you're looking at that garage being converted into an apartment for somebody and you're asking yourself, boy, can they really fit that extra car in the driveway and get the whole thing behind the setback? And the person is standing there telling you, well, we can accommodate that, that that's gonna work or we really don't, we really don't have a car and a half per person here the way you guys were originally regulating this. So building some flexibility around that really helps for those small projects. So inclusionary zoning is an alternate path around growth management with a lot of things to be worked out about what size project, how much inclusionary, at what level of affordability, is there a way to pay and loo to buy out of that requirement in certain circumstances. Second package of review, what set of small scale infill and adaptive reuse projects can simply be exempted because it creates housing with very little added impact on the town. Thank you. And I just, I mean, the small, except for just creating Airbnb's that probably wouldn't make me happy, but if the small projects I don't think I have a big problem with, but if we got to a point, and maybe a misunderstanding where we approved a 300 unit four bedroom houses, but we want 10% to be affordable so you get 15 duplexes tucked in the middle somewhere and you're gonna skip all the growth management so that it can be done in a couple of years. I think that would not be acceptable. I just think that this town from, this one I was shaking a lot of hands for the last couple of months. People are very scared about the amount of growth going on. And I think one bedroom studio, something affordable in Tafts Corners is probably people, you could wrap your head around, we need affordable housing. A fast pass ticket to skip waiting a couple of years because you throw a couple of townhouses in, I think that would be a problem, at least for me. Okay, one thing I'll throw out for the board members to think about and maybe give us some feedback on is, the growth management system as it sits takes this sort of very top down, there are this many units that can be built in Williston in total and everybody who wants to develop must compete for them. And that's one approach to phasing. And another approach might be for those larger projects to make phasing of that project a bylaw supported condition of approval managed by the DRB and cognizance of the town's resources particularly sewer. So it's not uncommon in our neighbor communities for someone to have a large subdivision like that that comes with an approval either that's only for phase one and says, you need to get through phase one before we'll even look at phase two or that simply says, this project may be built at a pace of so many units either per year or per five year period, et cetera. That's not something Williston has typically had in its bylaw because it's had this other system but there's no reason there couldn't be provisions allowing an individual phasing schedule to be assigned to a project as part of its approval that's aligned with the town's need to provide concurrent services and manage demand. Smart as you are. I wasn't really asking you for a solution right this second. I just want to tell you there is one. I was expressing my concern over some of the things as I think I understand them but I'm sure you could figure those out. I thank you, Jean, I agree with you. I like the small project plans they include more units in current residential spaces. This is where current residents in the town already were helping them. I think that's important to help our current residents make a long story short. I think that's more fair than one specific developer. I had to refer to it as the dog wagging the tail along the other way around. I am strongly in favor of inclusionary zoning. I will say I do as with Jean have concerns that there would be a high percentage required affordability. I'd love to see phase development for it. I would love to see a high threshold for a fee if that's something to do. I mean, obviously this is all something you all need to work out and present to us but I would love to see that that process begin. I think that this is imperative. I think that housing, this is a true crisis. The lack of housing, the lack of affordable housing in our town, in our state, in our country right now. And I agree with Megan. I think that a big solution is needed. And I think that inclusionary zoning is something that I think could really benefit that process right now. And the step, a bold step I think as Megan said, I would also love to see a housing committee formed as soon as possible to advise, to work on the funds, to create partnerships, to write grants, to attract developers and different partners who can build some affordable housing. I really see that as a priority too. I wanna make sure you all in the planning department have the bandwidth and capacity for all of this. I mean, you just came off a very huge project with the task corners zoning. But yeah, I mean, I'm hopeful that that's something you all have the capacity for currently. Yes, and we'll continue to work on building the capacity for this as it comes online for sure. And the last point I wanted to make tonight was that we're talking about some changes the select board could be considering over the summer and fall. That would be the summer and fall of 2023. I'll be coming to you soon to talk about the beginning of our 2025 town plan process. There will be some time to think about how all of this is going before that plan is adopted prior to August of 2025. And certainly I would expect that new comprehensive plan to say a lot about housing and affordable housing and about monitoring performance and taking up additional bylaw changes as needed. So as big as that document is, and as much as is in it, we are always tweaking and refining and monitoring and keeping it in alignment with all of the town's various goals. And we're in a cycle right now where we go town plan to implementation and monitoring bylaw changes, monitor. We're going back into a town plan and we're going to keep being in that process. But you may have things to say about this that go in the 2025 town plan that direct this staff to then look at these regulations again in 2026 or 2027. So we would expect that in this process. Anything else? I'm just interested if anybody from the planning commission has any follow-ups or questions for the group? Yeah. Jason. Just going to interpret what Matt said is that we don't want to wait for the 2025 new town plan to act on this. We think we should act sooner and then revise through the town plan process. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for a lot of work. I'm not staying for the liquor license approval steps. No, I know. They never do. As riveting as that would happen. They never do. I'd say professor of liquor. Sunshine Patriots. So next on the agenda, ARPA funds community outreach plan. Eric, you had information. I can walk forward through this. So it was last December. For numerous of the boards, we've been working with the ARPA funds the town has for a couple of years here. The town, so we're at $3 million in ARPA funds. We have about 1.8 million that have not been allocated to date. The town must decide how it wants to spend that money by the end of calendar year 2024. Those funds must be spent by the end of calendar year 2026. So the board tasked me, chat about this maybe in January or February with working on community engagement and outreach on the ARPA funds over the coming months here. So I've tried to outline for the board this evening my kind of draft approach. I've been inspired a bit by our outreach with the community center and library project with some of the thinking here. But my thought is I would work to have some informal conversations with community drop-ins, outreach to our town policy advisory boards and time at a select board meeting for general comments from the community about ARPA. In addition, we can put a survey instrument out there that's more open-ended that has similar questions. I've put just a rough idea together in your materials. Try to get people's ideas. These funds, we took the loss revenue calculation last year, it allows the town to use these funds for anything general government related or capital related. So it's really, there's not a lot of restrictions here. It's a lot of opportunity here to use these programmatically capital-wise. I'm moving forward for the community. The towns use this. Includes our updated tracking sheet. We decided to do an ARPA report last week. So towns use this number of capital projects last couple of years, including new year for our firefighters that we hired a couple of years ago. We've also looked at just ways to balance the general fund operating budget the last couple of years, kind of stepping that down 300,000 in 22 to 125 and 23. And we're looking to step that down further in 24 as we enter the budget process as the board looks at those options here. But all that to say, what we could do is I could work, kind of gather this initial feedback and ideas. Staff shared with the board last year just some general capital ideas. There's certainly a number of infrastructure projects that the money could be spent 10 fold pretty easily on. But your task ahead of you is decide how you wanna appropriate that remaining funding and how you wanna put in different areas in the community. So what I can do is get some community feedback and ideas, kind of take that more qualitative feedback. We can follow up with kind of developing a firmer shorter list of people at some point too if the board wanted to go in that direction. But I could see this as this next step of a call for community ideas and thoughts, bring that back to the board, kind of include that with what we've identified as some possible capital projects at the staff level. And then ultimately the board's gonna need to make a decision making process and model for how to appropriate these funds moving forward. Talk with some of our neighboring communities. They've done some similar approaches. They've thought of ideas with kind of a scoring of brick potentially, but ultimately I can help the board kind of work through those ideas and decide what process you wanna use. But as we think about this funding, we have to decide by the next year to spend it by the end of 26. We're talking a larger kind of infrastructure project that might take some years to permit whether it's a water sewer highway. Those things, decision may wanna be made sooner rather than later due the runway there a bit. So I think I'll never say never, but I think for the foreseeable future of the town, getting a $3 million federal allocation for funding is probably, it's very much a once in a generation or more opportunity. And we've been fortunate to have some of the reactions to the pandemic with our operating budget. We've been able to use this funding to assist with to a certain degree, but now there's just about two thirds remaining and some of those decisions are more to make moving forward. So pause there for feedback on the board. Okay. Eric, my only comment when I looked at it was, how do you get voices on this that don't normally have voices? I can see putting this out there and everybody says community center and we move on, right? But then there could be some really, like the group that was here tonight, maybe helping get that project started or do we have helping people of color in our community feel more welcome or pulling them in. There are voices that aren't always at the table if you just send out a survey. So that might be just one thing to think about how to make sure that we get that. And the other is I like the numbers. I was like fascinated by the last page, but I'm not good at the creativity part, but are there other, what have other towns come up with that are interesting and that may not, and people may like, well, that's, hey, think about that. That's a better idea than a swimming pool. Maybe if there's anything just to ask around your peers and kind of just develop a list of 25 different things that are just a little bit different than just an infrastructure project that people start going, cooking faster, I think. Yeah, I think that BLCT has been taking a good tracking list. So that's, I can follow up and kind of see where things have gone the last year. So we've had, I've seen it kind of both ends of the spectrum where some towns spent it, I think Colchester spent it all on their sewer line project, $3 million and other towns have been taking incremental approaches as well. And I think we've waited a little bit and we're seeing opportunities to potentially leverage some of the ARPA money as some of the state has its own ARPA funds that it's gonna be granting out. So I was thinking about these project ideas where we might have some opportunities to leverage those additional state funds to help broaden the project or maybe spread it in some different areas. So, all that sounds good. Okay. Are there comments or feedback? Well, I think when we first started talking about this when we were new we were gonna get the money and we sort of said, let's bring this to room with as many people as we can to see if we can spend the money on something that we ordinarily wouldn't spend it on. Some kind of a new idea or a new project and hopefully we'll come up with some good suggestions on this. We already know we have things in the works that we'll be looking at spending money for perhaps a library expansion for a community center and other things which would far exceed the amount of money that we already have. But it would be nice to know, are there other smaller projects that we ordinarily wouldn't do if we didn't have the money? I think Jeff is obviously not here anymore. But I know that Jeff and I were in agreement about this, that we would also love to see, and I think Ted, you would also talk about money going towards some of our energy goals and really kind of funding, some of that, those projects and really getting some of those plans underway. I don't have any specific feedback on how you're going to go about getting information from people in Williston. It looks fine to me. The only comment I would make is that I always get concerned at moments like this that we're going to fall into the trap of the 1960s model cities program from the last Johnson administration great society thing, and it didn't work. And the reason I didn't want, number of reasons, but one of the major reasons it didn't work is it was inadequately funded. And the reason it was inadequately funded is because by the time you got it through Congress, everybody got a little bit. And so it never really said, okay, this is what we're, this is going to be the model city and we'll do it stepwise after that. And I always get concerned that if we spread this money too thin, it will have a diffuse impact, but not a significant one. So I don't know where any of that takes us, but I wanted to get that out. I'm worried about your reading last week. Last week it was a cold war. What happens if there's no select board? Yeah. Back to the... Yeah. That was the 1950s, so up to the 1960s. The 60s, okay. Yeah. So I was one year old. So we'll soon be getting into stuff that I'll actually remember. I think one thing we all, everybody now appreciates is open land, you know. Is there any way we can take some of that money and put it into the other conservation, so you'll keep land open? Yeah. If there was an appropriation to the environment's reserve funds, I think it's a possible use just with a caveat. It would have to be spent by the end of 2026. So it'd have to be some parcels for acquisition or purchase of development rights or whatever mechanism was appropriate, but we'd have to get, I think part of my thought was reaching out to the board's policy committees, conservation commission, energy committee planning commission. They can recommend some projects on that level that can fit within the timeline we're talking about here, because we don't want to try to, great to be able to put some of this funding into potentially a reserve, but you can't wait too long to spend it. So kind of just making sure there's a plan to make sure it's spent by the end of 2026, so it will be really important. I understand that. Just, I think we all have open land and it's kind of geared to all of us in the town, but we need the opportunity to all. What's your mechanism for this, I mentioned in your memo that you're going to maybe have some open sessions with you and a time that folks can come here specifically to present to us, and then you have the survey. What's your mechanism for distributing the survey? Yeah, I think first trying to get out there, similar to what we did with the other committee, be around town a lot of different places to just sit and listen to people. We found that's been very effective to give people just that platform and make sure you don't go to the same place same time of day, every day. Make sure we can talk to folks who kind of meet them where they are, make sure we're able to meet lots of people from different schedules, different backgrounds in town. I think the survey too, and kind of our steering committee is going to meet Thursday night and think about survey distribution. So part of me is being inspired by that process and what we can learn from it, but important as well to make sure that it's accessible. It's online, it's also hard copy that we think of ways to make sure that gets out working in partnership with other groups and other ways to reach people and making sure not just the same folks who may be more active in local government are people that are being heard from but people who can understand. And this can be explained to them in a way that's digestible. It's your opportunity to share ideas of how you want us to be town used by this funding. So I think a lot of that is in the messaging and then being proactive and forming to make sure all those happenings are possible. I like that you have a scoring, Rubrik. More numbers. Okay, we should move on to the next item. Personnel policy amendment, appendix. So this is an appendix. So we have an ongoing effort here for staff recruitment and retention made our challenging job market. Our non-represented employees and non-unitized employees, pay bans. We review them periodically referencing marketing data. We work with our consultant, Hickok and Borman to assist us with this at the end of 2021. We did a project to look at all our pay bans and our staff wage compensation study. Best practice probably to do a refresh on this every three to four years. It'd been a number of years since the town had done that previously trying to make sure our pay is competitive. So in the interim, we've been looking at this recently and should back up. When we made that change a couple of years ago to the pay grades, the town used to I think have maybe 12 or 14 very, very small prescribed pay grades. And what we did with our work with the consultant was to make these four pay grades instead. So it was kind of much, much broader. So we're finding after working with that for a couple of years and some of the conversations recently, a member for the board to consider is kind of adding back in a couple of pay grades just within the existing structure. This would provide a couple more bans. What we do is keep an eye on market analysis and if there was a need for the manager to reclassify a position, it provides some more options as opposed to these really broad bans. There might be most appropriate to move up a grade but not as much as it is right now and in the way the grades are structured. So I feel in my conversation with our consultant, they've come up with this structure kind of looking at where we are. We've also included typically your cost of living increase that we budgeted is three and a half percent for FY24. We essentially move these bans by three and a half, by that COLA percentage. So the ceiling and the floor are both increased by that on the pay bans. So what happened before the board this evening is to consider amending this appendix O and personnel policy with these band changes that we proposed. Questions? Is this gonna cost us anything? I assume you're not moving anybody down a band. You're probably moving people up a band? Potentially. Trying to, looking in the budget overall and looking kind of where our compensation lies with other positions and departments. There might be a few folks that might need to have some movement coming up over the next year or so. I've looked to make sure that the budget can support any changes like that. Other questions or comments? If not, we'd be looking for a motion. I'll move to amend appendix O of the personnel policy as presented. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed, nay. The ayes have it. Okay. And the much anticipated liquor license. We're here. Eric. So in addition to your agenda, so first we have Moe's Southwest Grill. This came in to the clerk's office last week. Boards asked to consider a first class license for Taft Boos, that does business as Moe's Southwest Grill. They had a liquor license in the past. They haven't served liquor for the last couple of years or they're going to do it again here in the, moving ahead. Then we also had come in, I think yesterday, we're going to include this for your consideration of the Marriott up on Hurricane Lane renewal, their first, third and outdoor consumption permit is the same licenses they've had for a number of years. They've just missed the earlier deadlines. So they currently do not have a license right now. It's the Marriott operate. It's a chain specific thing. Can't place it. Business has Vista-Wilson hotel, but I think it's right behind the semest on Hurricane Lane. Court, oh, it's a courtyard. Court yard, okay. Just trying to visually place it. Questions? Questions, comments? No idea that Moe's had a liquor license. So there's no, there's no recommended motion, but well, if there is, I'm sorry. If there is, there's only for one. Okay. So chair would look for a motion. I move to approve a first class liquor license for top foods LLC doing business as Moe's Southwest Grill through April 30th, 2024, as well as the Marriott hotel on two and held orders. Is there a second? Second. Discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed nay. The ayes have it. Okay. Managers report. Mr. Chair, if you want to take up the other renewal tonight for the Marriott, that requires separate motion. Oh, okay. Well, actually- We just voted both. You just, it was part of the motion. It was included in- I'm sorry, I was not. Pick up again there, I was looking ahead. My apologies. I won't forgive you. They sneak through sometimes. So, okay, actually then manager. Yep. I think we'll start with the finance report. Chair, if you want to have anything you'd like to highlight. We saw last time there only a couple of highlighted sections that were significantly different than the December numbers. I'm going down to your first highlighted item. The town received $31,850 for some really tiny parcels of land in order for the state to do their projects along Mountain View, Loop 2A and Industrial Avenue projects. Tiny land purchases. Is that a technical term? That's a technical term. I laughed as I read that. I'll figure out from Bruce how small the parcels were because they were just along the side of the road. And then under the capital, there's capital budget and I actually changed the name to capital budget and other transfers. There was a transfer in there for 175,000 and that just has to do with the muddy book grant and how we record it because we're really not moving money between those. So it just goes through the P&L instead. So that's not nothing new. It's just we received the dollars this year for that TAP grant. And that was it. Questions for Sheridan? Is it normal that we, I mean the, I'll never find it in here. We only had like one collection for the first quarter collection for the 1% sales tax or something. Yeah. So the first, within our fiscal year, the first payment comes in August, but it's really through the end of June and then it's November, February. So we have a second. Yes. The second payment. So good. We've ever seen it though. We have received that. These financials are through January, still be on the February report for the next meeting. Yep. Do we have to wait? Was it as good as the first quarter? Yeah, it was. Okay, good. I think we got it right before a town meeting. We're gonna keep you in suspense. Yeah, I can. Don't tell me. I want to, I'll have something to look forward to. We're on very, very good track. More of a try to project it to come. Other items. I remind you, our green up day in town fair is this Saturday. I look, the weather looks good again. It's sunny in the sixties. Can I? I'm sorry. We're looking forward to this early. It would be kind of helpful for me if it was just somewhere in here, maybe like in the first paragraph, things are looking on track overall or we're concerned about like two, like just really short. I don't know, I'm not gonna ask to do a full blown forward projection, but there was a lot of stuff and I couldn't quite keep track of if we were in good shape or not. Okay, I will do that. Okay, that would be great. Thank you. So Saturday, we'll be doing green up, distributing bags on the town green. We've got a tech coming in again this year. We'll have some committees there, some departments planning to start doing a little outreach for the town plan. Just to let people know that's coming. Other number of activities too, I think there's like a yoga stretch to get ready for town meeting there, town bands playing, the story time. So we had a great turnout last year and then courage folks, if you want to stop by to, I think we'll have some snacks too and let me make sure I get the start time right here. It's the schedule on the website, eight a.m. to noon. Mostly sunny, high years 67. Good job, Aaron. Last year was like sunny in 70s. Wow. And historically they like, people have signed up for areas to green up. Is that still how it's operating? Can they sign up that morning when they pick up their bags or? Yeah, the planning office, they've got a couple different ways of people picking up their bags. They can reserve areas, but if someone comes by to pick up their bag, they've got the map there and they have an online map and they can, people can ask and say, what areas need it that aren't signed up for and they should be able to point in the right direction. Awesome. Cleaning up after you clean up on the same road. Look, there's no cash. Look at that coming up. I just want to recognize the end of their staff retirement. Jeff Smarten retired for 10 years of part time service in our buildings and grounds departments and I think in town, there's a number of positions like unsung heroes. There are things happen and there's people that make them happen. You don't always see the people that make them happen. So Jeff was able to pick up and repair a number of things in our town hall, our town buildings. He would plow snow in the winter in the pickup truck and the sidewalk plow and eat him too. Just ready willing to do anything the town needed to. So he worked here for 10 years. We had a nice lunch reception a few weeks ago with the public works department. So looking to fill that position still if anyone has someone interested in the part time buildings and jobs position, a lot of variety to do. So we really thank Jeff for his service to the town and some good news to share. We've promoted to firefighters. So Kyle Tillinghouse and Eric Martins have been promoted to senior firefighter rank earlier this month, or last month rather. So very rarely by them. That's all I have seen from, okay. Any questions for Eric? Any other business? We have another permit. So this is the Ice and Farmers Market coming up. It's a wildheart distillery and this is called a special event permit. And after consultation with the State Department of Liquor Control, they said it needs local approval and they can't grant a farmer's market permit. So those regulations are gonna change after July 1st. There's a statewide pool of these and they've been run out for this year. So they're suggesting to make this be able to be offered is for the local liquor control board to grant the permit. They plan to have 0.2 ounce free samples and unopened bottles for sale. The sample size is allowed by Department of Liquor Control. The dates are June 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th. I'm sure, Mike, you must know about this. I think I left it out. We don't allow drinking during the farmer's market. We just have that one micro distillery who sells alcohol in bottles. People aren't allowed to drink them there. This is, our market does not allow open beverages. What I'm drawing is... So strike the two ounce free sample, 0.2 ounce free samples just for purchase. I think he does give out. Sometimes when people ask, he'll give them a little sample, that's it. Question for the board, would you consider approving these four special events or for those days? We'd need to make an official motion on that in the Senate. No, we'll approves the special events permit. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor? Can I just... Oh, sure. Just on the school board, this would be a situation where Mike probably shouldn't vote. Yeah. Is that appropriate? So you should recuse yourself from this. So don't vote. Okay, now I'm ready to vote. All those in favor? Hi. All those who vote? All those abstaining? That's you. Me. All right. Okay, anything else? All right, okay. We are adjourned.