 Call to order the July 24 meeting of the Popular Planning Commission, and I need a motion to approve the agenda from someone. Okay. Motion from Brian. Do I have a second? Second. Second from Maria. Okay. Those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Gender approved. Comments from the chair time. Well, first I want to check in to see how everyone's doing. I think I'm aware of where everyone lives, but is everybody fair, okay, on the flood? Yeah, okay. Does anybody have any flood commentary to make? Kirby, how are you? My place on Vine Street is fine, but my car got caught on Main Street and got destroyed. Yeah, so I have a new one now, and the claims process is working it out, and the other one's been hauled away at this point, so it's mostly done. Ended up indirectly upgrading my car. But wasn't ready for my old red jet, it'll be dead yet, but I don't know, if you guys saw any of the stock footage that was used in the news, there was a red car right there in the middle of Main Street that was like very easy to see. That was mine. It was on the weather channel and national news all over the place. I noticed the weather channel had to edit their footage to not show my license plate. It's funny. But yep, somebody also vandalized it, just like, okay, look on the next day. But yeah, that's the personal thing for me. For the comments from the chair part, it's not on the agenda, but I did want us to quickly chat about, obviously, flood management hazard planning is going to be something on people's minds, it's going to be coming up. I'm wondering if we should ask the city council if it would like us to look at something to do with our planning or if city council's planning to do something on its own somewhere else where we're not needed. I was just wondering if we should do that or if anyone has ideas for things we can do on our own. Obviously, I think the tone in the city is going to be that there needs to be some direct, long-term proactive steps taken. The question is how much of a part will play in that? Do you have thoughts, Mike? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've had rules in effect for a long time, and a lot of them really only come into play when something like this happens. We have a hazard mitigation plan, we have the flood hazard rules, and so, for example, any of the buildings that had flood damage where it damaged any of the utilities, our flood hazard zoning requires that they all be elevated. There are a lot of damaged furnaces, a lot of damaged electric panels, and those types of things, and those are now going to be required to get moved up to the first floor. And as I was mentioning to Kirby, we are working to try to see if we could come up with revolving loan fund money. In the past, we've always had a lot of these programs that have been very successful where we could get some funding to give basically zero percent loans that we put as a mortgage on the property. And we've done this for a number of things. We used to have a housing preservation program, and we used to have a couple other programs that would work this way, the first time home by our program. I think we've talked about this. We give you a loan, so let's say your basement was flooded, it's going to cost $15,000 to move the furnace and electrical panels up to the first floor. That'll make you more flood resilient for next time. Your basement's still going to fill with water, but you're not going to have that, you're not going to be without electricity, you're not going to be without a furnace. And those costs will no longer be an issue in the future. Obviously, the best thing to do is to elevate your house and fill in the basement, but that's not realistic for most people. But we can take big steps that would make a difference for a lot of people to try to go and either help them floodproof or move these utilities now. Everyone is going to be required to move these utilities up, and this is significant for a number of large property owners. Think of these some of these big commercial blocks in the downtown. These are significant investments that are going to have to be made, and we are going to try to find money that will help people. And as I said, the government sometimes has loans and sometimes has grants that are available. If you have flood insurance, sometimes flood insurance pays for it, but we are going to be trying to come up with some money to help people out. But going forward, hopefully, that will be a significant step in the future. We may have some structures that may need to be removed. We have at least two abandoned buildings that were significantly damaged, so we're going to have to go through and evaluate that. Obviously, it would make a difference in the future if those structures were no longer there. And then just working with people to educate them, and hopefully, as people move forward now, this is going to be for at least, we'll give it at least a year. People will remember this event. And as they do projects, hopefully, they work on building resiliency into their projects, and we can keep working with them on it. I mean, the big things we want, we like to, we're trying to work with people on this. Everybody who built something to flood stage, to base flood elevation, didn't suffer any damage, or their damage was very, very, very minimal. So City Center had water in the vestibule that was built to base flood elevation. The Transit Center was built to base flood elevation. It didn't have any damage. A number of projects where we elevated new air source heat pumps, we required things mounted on the backs of buildings up high in the air. Those didn't suffer any damage. So meeting flood codes means not suffering flood damage. And if we can get people to, you know, as people look at a project, they might go through and say, you know what, maybe it's worth elevating the building. You know, maybe my first floor is already above base flood elevation. For a lot of places that already is, if you, say, live on St. Paul Street, that's, or in the Meadow, you're probably, your first floor is probably above base flood elevation. Only your basement's in it. So if we can get people to fill in those basements, or somehow not use those basements spaces, that would make a big difference going forward and not having this massive pile of garbage out here for weeks. So that's our goal. It's just to see what we can do incrementally. But the rules are already there. It just may mean if we can get these grants is just a couple of new programs. We're kind of changing our emphasis. We had been talking a lot about accessory apartments and housing, and we still want to keep doing that. We don't want to stop doing that, but we may be able to try to add in also these other programs to help people become more resilient. Thanks, Mike. Looks like we had something. I was just wondering, Mike, if you had a sense of whether the people that would need to move like furnaces and other utilities, whether they were largely, are they houses or are they businesses? What type of building hasn't done that yet? A lot of them. We have a lot of most of the places that were flooded had stuff in the basement. The other big one that we do is tank tie down. So your oil tanks in the basement or your propane tanks, they will sometimes float. That's also expensive. They need to have engineering certificates in order to reinstall them. That costs money. But we have a lot of those that happened. I think they had in the downtown core, they had 25 oil tanks that broke loose, many of which then floated up and hit the domestic water lines. If you've been paying attention to the news, you know those domestic water lines are 200 pounds per square inch. We had these just fountains of water just pouring into the basements on top of all the flood water. It was making bad things worse. Again, that was 20 just oil tanks. That's not getting into how many electric panels, which there are numerous electric panels in the basement. Lots of almost every place. There are very few places that don't have their furnace in their basement. It's going to have an impact for multifamily structures and some commercial structures that may need losing a little bit of commercial space on the first floor because you're going to have to displace something. Maybe somebody's got an apartment building. Maybe it loses an apartment. Maybe it's just a bedroom. Maybe a three bedroom becomes a two bedroom or two bedroom becomes a one bedroom in order to make room for a utility room where you would put all of your furnaces and your hot water heaters and such. There's going to be an opportunity for people to hook on to district heat. We do have district heat. Some of these may find it cheaper just to hook on to district heat and we're working in giving people those numbers to decide whether they want to do that. I think it's going to be a mixed bag to see how we can help people get there, but hopefully we can incrementally make some good progress in moving people to being more resilient. We'll see how that works out. To catch us up, is that the main approach that he's taking right now from what you've seen is flood resiliency and doing the sorts of steps you're talking about sounds like basically changing the buildings to adapt. Is that the main approach or is there anything else going on? We are a CRS, a community rating system. We are a CRS community through FEMA, which helps reduce flood rates for folks. We do have some other open space preservation and things like that that we already do, but I don't think we have a large amount of opportunities for that type of approach. Some communities have a lot of opportunities to go through and conserve more land and leave it as open space. We already have a lot of it conserved. We're kind of behind the dam, so like the North Branch and most of the Winooski is significantly upstream from us, so those type of land conservation opportunities don't help as much. A lot of it is going to come down to these regulatory and making buildings more resilient going forward. It's tough. We've got a historic downtown, so we can't just go through and say, well, let's just go through and tear these things down and build new buildings and make them all flood resistant because then we lose all that historic character and that history that goes with it, so we kind of have to try to balance working in there. We're making those decisions with City Hall for people who didn't. I did let everybody know that we had 41 inches of water in my office. Thank you to Brian for stopping by to help chuck everything out. We had a lot of volunteers that came by and helped us throw away desks and computers and everything that was in my office. We sent all the files to be frozen, which is remarkable. Didn't even know you could do that. They're going to freeze all of our old zoning permits and they're going to then put them into a freeze dryer to dry them and then hit them with radiation to sanitize them and then send them back to us, so hopefully we will have at least some of our files. Not all of them will survive the process, but at least we'll have some of our files back that we can then try to scan into the database. We've got to decide what do you do at the basement of City Hall. It is below base photo elevation. Do we fill it in? Do we just leave it for utilities? One proposal is to move the council chambers, which some of you have been in once, to renovate the basement, but they make that into the council chambers and then move my offices into the council chambers. That way, if we get a flood, we're replacing council chairs and a few desks. We'll see what council thinks, what idea they choose. Okay. Well, it seems like things are underway and in that case maybe there's not a lot for us to do. Looks like the previously drafted plans are just in effect, and they're doing what they're supposed to do. That's what I think. We'll see if people want to push the envelope. We have some fairly aggressive regulations right now, and I think that we'll take this a step at a time. Requiring all the utilities to get moved up is going to have some pain for people, and I think going, pushing things too far, too fast, but we'll always continue to be there to help and support people who want to. If you want to do more, if you're somebody who's like, I never want to go through this again, I want my building elevated, there are funds. We can find funds to help people with those. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I should at least spread the word about that. Okay. Does anybody else have anything blood related to discuss before we move on on the agenda? Okay. In that case, we'll move on, and the next item on the agenda is general business, comments from the public about something not on the agenda, and so is there anyone here that would like to discuss any items not on the agenda? It looks like, yeah, Ginny Blair from The Bridge is in attendance. Hi Ginny, welcome. Hi, thanks so much. Can you hear me okay? Yes. I'm new to this beat, so forgive me if I ask pretty obvious stuff, but we were wondering to talk about, the plan is to talk tonight about density caps, if I'm not mistaken. I'm noting the article you guys put in The Bridge earlier this month, and the discussion of removing density caps, or did I get that wrong? Well, we're going to be, we have an item on the agenda to discuss preparing for that hearing, so yeah, we'll say that that's in that basket, sure. Yeah. It was, you did not misread it, it was originally scheduled for tonight, but it was going, but in light of the flooding, we had a number of people ask us to move it, so we postponed it one meeting, which I believe is August 14th, is when we're going to have the listening session for the density caps, but if you're here and you're interested in giving any thoughts, you're always welcome to, and then we can carry those forward, but we're going to hold off on that until we give everybody a chance to catch their breath from the flood. Gotcha. Okay, that's good to know. I will mention that. I guess we just were curious that whether, obviously, whether the flood is going to get you, provoke you guys to rethink any of these density cap suggestions. I saw your menu of options about removing density caps in the design review district, which kind of overlaps with floodplain, and we were just curious if that's changed your thinking on those recommendations, or is it too early to say? Yeah, we haven't discussed that yet, so this would be our first time talking about it, but if that's the topic you like to talk about, I think I'll just move us to the next item on the agenda, which is this topic, essentially, getting ready for the meeting next time, and we can go ahead and start to have that discussion. So, planning commissioners, yeah. Sorry. I mean, Mike, tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think, I thought I heard you say, Jenny, that the design review district is the same as the floodplain, but I think the design review district is much bigger than that. I just want to clarify that. Totally. No, I just noticed that there was some overlap. Sure, there was some overlap, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the floodplain is, you know, our most of our residential downtown area, so yeah, that's going to overlap with any high-density area of the town. As you probably know, Jenny, I think as we, you know, as we all know, I think, the three neighborhoods that make up the downtown currently do not have a density cap, and those would be all areas that were hit by the flood. You know, so that's an interesting question, though, for us to look at how much taking those neighborhoods out of it, because that's kind of a moot point, since there already don't have density caps, you know, how much of the design review is in those areas. You know, a lot of things come to my mind, such as, for one thing, we want to make sure that the community understands with this density cap conversation that density just means people, how many people are allowing in places. I mean, it's, you know, residential units, which basically means more people living in these buildings. As Mike just said, we already, we have hazard plans in place to make sure that any new construction is done in a flood resilient way, right? So, mostly the density cap question is going to go to an existing building and how many units can go in there possibly. And so, in that case, I'm not sure that it overlaps much with flood questions, because this could be, you know, higher floors, adding units, and things like that, if we're talking about downtown area. For new construction, though, yeah, it would have to be elevated, right, Mike, if it's in flood, yeah. So, it's an interesting question, but yeah, when you start to think about it, I'm not sure where there could be a problem caused by having more people in these areas as long as it's being done the right way and it's done smart, which we already have that covered with the regulations we have. Does anybody else have any thoughts? I know we want, we also, we don't want to just crowd everything down around the rivers, like a lot of our planning discussions are about having maybe new neighborhood developments and other places. For us, it's like what's walkable to downtown, and we're trying to target housing in what's walkable to downtown, not necessarily down right on the river. But I think maybe Gabe, an email to me had mentioned, but I just want to give him the credit for, there's these things called NDAs, which we've discussed recently, and having these new neighborhood type places that are still walkable to downtown that we start to focus on for housing. I don't know, those are kind of my thoughts so far. Does anybody else have thoughts about whether the flood changes, what we've discussed about density? I mean, I guess the only thing I would add to it is just, sorry, Anilla, Ariango, was, is just the, you know, we're talking about, and many times we're just talking about infilling projects. So somebody has a large single family home in the average family household size. When these houses were built in the 1940s and 50s was four, four point something people per household. We now average 2.0 people per household, and, you know, 40 to 45% of all households have only one person. Single person households are the biggest group, and 40% of all households have only one person living in it. And so taking a larger house that may be a four-bedroom house and splitting it into two, you know, basically splitting it into duplex, you know, sometimes you can't do it because of the density. It's not really adding any more, even adding that much more people. It's just splitting the same space up into slightly smaller units because our household sizes are much smaller. We have fewer children, more single people. So a lot of times that's what we're looking at is the zoning rules start getting in the way of somebody being able to break buildings into smaller pieces. And I think that isn't necessarily inconsistent with the flood hazard rules, but obviously now, you know, following a flood, you know, you sit back and say, okay, well, we just have to make sure we double check, make sure those rules are all still good. And I think we have very good, you know, personally, having helped write the flood hazard rules, I think we have very good rules. They do a good job of protecting and making sure, as I said, all of the recent permits that have happened, all those projects that have been built, none of them sustained damage or at least those elements sustained damage. So if somebody went through and was going to renovate a building to do it, the requirements would be there that they would have to go and make sure that the new utilities and new services are all going to be safe. So I think those rules are good, but obviously we always can keep a good eye out for more. So in other words, just to like to put it in a simplified way, if we remove density caps and that led to that what's most likely going to lead to someone taking a big building and renovating and putting more units in it. And at the same time, they would have to comply, maybe previously, they were being grandfathered and they didn't necessarily comply with all of our flood mitigation regulations, but now they would. So it could actually lead to more flood resiliency when we're putting those new units in. So yeah, we're not thinking like it's going to lead to any kind of problem like flood problem or exacerbating. Is that seeing correct everyone? Yeah, okay. Did you follow all that, Ginny? Do you see where we're at with that? I do. Thanks. I'm just wondering, is the flood mitigation plan, is that that 1998 big fat 1998 PDF that I found online last night when I was trying to get ready for this as a recent version? There should be a hazard mitigation plan, which is primarily looking at flooding and that came out in 2021. That should be on our website. So that's the hazard mitigation plan. The river hazard area regulations were passed, I think most recently updated in 2020. You should be able to find those on the planning website under the permitting. 2022 actually was the most recent update. Thank you. And so we have the river hazard regulations and the flood mapping and all those pieces were mostly done. There should be a really big thing somewhere, somewhere, if you were to go to get into some of the FEMA documents for the Winooski River. 2013 was the last time our floodplain was mapped and modeled. So that would be a pretty big text somewhere. Great. Thank you. Kirby, I just wanted to clarify something you said. I'm also seeing this like inflation with the design review district and density cops and removing them and what we've said in our article. But my impression is that everything that was flooded downtown is already, already does not have density caps on it. Is that right? I mean, I don't think everything that was flooded is are in those three neighborhoods. Mike, do you know off the top of your head how far, for instance, how far down Elm Street those neighborhoods extend? We'll be doing Elm Street and State Street tomorrow through our substantial damage estimations. But I know, for example, Franklin Street and those areas over there had flooding and that's not in design review. I don't believe Elm Street north of spring is not in design review. But I know there was flooding certainly up to at least the other end of the meadow. I don't know. I remember when I drove in, I was surprised how good everything looked down past the pool and the wreck fields. So I don't know where our Meredith, our zoning administrators, been going to go in and check those buildings on the river that are kind of between the pool and the meadow to kind of see, you know, did they suffer damage? Was it just a little bit of basement flooding? So I just don't know the extent in there, but it certainly wasn't what you saw from, you know, even even that stretch through the meadow, I think was mostly basement flooding. I don't know if it got into the first floors through there, but certainly once you got to the roundabout, then it's different. Now we're into first floor flooding and those types of issues. And then going in some of the other directions, I'm not 100% sure where the other directions went. Oh, great. Yeah. I know there was a lot of flooding out. If you see on the screen, Kirby put up the seven dash five out near Baldwin Street as you go farther to the left. It's just on the edge of the screen. There are a handful of properties out here. Yep. They're not in design review before you get to the cemetery. Those had heavy flooding in there. And I'll be going out to visit those tomorrow. I know in what we call Toy Town, which is the other side of the interstate, there was some flooding at, you know, there's a creamy stand out there. There are a couple of places that got some heavy flooding. That's also not design review. So I think what Maria was getting at, Mike, was the three downtown neighborhoods that don't have zoning caps right now. And there is a one, one, one, two and one, three. Yeah, the burgundy color. Don't worry about the cross hatch. It's the burgundy, burgundy brown color there. The slate gray two dash one and the kind of the orangey reddish color three dash one that goes out into the roundabout. Okay. So those are the three that don't have density, don't have density caps. So that is a substantial part of the worst hit. Yeah. So basically it goes from Baldwin, you know, that's the road out to the high school. So from Baldwin on State Street, all the way into Main Street and then across and goes part way up East State Street. Um, and then from Shaw's all the way to the, to the school is that one district. And then from the library to the roundabout is three dash one and two dash one is basically a big chunk of Barry Street out to Hubbard. So that's two dash one is kind of that Barry Street, Sarducci's that whole area. And there is design review and some other neighborhoods, as you can see, but that's the dark black line is the design review. So there are a few places that design reviews out of. Does that answer your question, Maria? Yes. And then so that brings up the next question, which is, um, so like seven seven up towards the top. So Elm Street as it goes north, um, except for that one bit within the design review district, we didn't suggest eliminating density caps there, right? We expanded density, but we didn't eliminate it. I'm just trying to get a sense of, um, you know, between the letter writer and Jenny's question trying to get a sense of exactly what areas of the city we're talking about. So it's like these oranges. Yeah. So what, so what would change if, if we did what we had suggested, which is making design review, uh, not have density, then we would be talking about that stretch in seven dash seven, which is from spring street, um, where the stop sign is down to, um, those major areas of development. So the rest of that would all go into, um, so if you were looking at seven dash seven, only that part that's south of the spring street intersection would not have density caps. The other part would, um, the parts of main street, those lime green area that extends out to, um, try to remember the name of that road, but it kind of goes out a little bit out to J street. So some of those, some of eight dash two would not have density. Some of eight dash three would not have density because those, you could see the dark lines on either side of main street. So if you're on main street past the school, you wouldn't have density. Um, but if you were deeper into eight dash two up Franklin street on pecs and mechanic, those would still have density requirements. Or if you're over an eight dash three farther south, you know, the ones along main, you'd still be in, but the ones that are on, when somebody's going to catch me on this loomis and maybe a little bit of St. Paul, um, there's, uh, would still have density requirements, because they're not in the design review district. So it's, it's going to basically grow it a little bit in places with the exception of nationalize. So if Kirby pans this over to the national life corner, you will see obviously that, uh, that pink area would also be in design review is also in design review and would also mean national life wouldn't have a density requirement. Um, a lot of that is land they just own and have never had any, uh, interest in developing as far as I know, but, um, some of the other ones to high school would be exempt, uh, Green Mountain power, the department of labor and the department of alcohol there, the alcohol 802 spirits, those buildings along Green Mountain Drive would also not have density limits, but they're commercial buildings, industrial buildings, anyways. So you'll see if you can see a few colors, a few spaces where all right, part of this district would now be not have density requirements, but they all still have design review, which was the number one concern that people had when we try when we proposed this last time, the number one concern was we're concerned about removing density and having big ugly things get built. Um, so the response is, well, we'll just remove density in places where we have very good design review and most people I think would feel that our design review rules have been very good over the years. And then just keeping on this design review district, the hazard mitigation regulations, do they apply to all of Montpelier or just to a certain part of Montpelier? So the, there's a hazard mitigation plan and there is a river hazard area regulation. So the river hazard area regulation applies, uh, anywhere there is either flood plain or river corridor. So the only place there's a river corridor is on the north branch and the river corridor differs from flood hazard. Flood hazard, I think everybody knows, it's the area where it fills up. We basically had a 100 year flood event. Um, so if you want to know where the 100 year flood line is for the most part, look for, look for the mud line. That's pretty much where it is. The river corridor is, uh, set up north of coming street bridge and it's an area that would allow the north branch room to move laterally left to right over time. And, uh, if you really want to get a good sense of this, uh, I'd invite you to go and drive out to Hardwick where I live. Um, the, the LaMoyle River in Hardwick moved tremendously in this storm. Um, if you had north or if you had east after you get into town, head towards Walden, um, the whole river moved about 60 feet, 50 feet laterally left to right. Um, just took out all the trees, took everything out, um, took out the hotel. That was by the river, in by the river is now the in, in the river and, um, and so the river just took off and moved and that's the lateral moving. It didn't flood, it just ate, ate the bank right out. And so that's what we have. So you can't build anything in the river corridor, uh, in on the north branch and there's a certain width that's put in there. It's on the map. So, um, that's those are the two river hazard rules. The hazard mitigation plan looks at things from a programmatic standpoint. What are the things we could do to be more flood-resilient? Uh, we could, um, we have ice jam issues and they've actually run a pipe from the wastewater plant up to the Bailey Bridge and then put the effluent at Bailey Bridge instead of down at, um, the Dog River and it's warm water. So it melts the ice and it works really good. So we just, but Ann R says we can't do it until we put a permanent pipe in the ground. So there's, there's a hazard mitigation plan that says here's what we could be doing to help mitigate against ice jams. We could do this project. We can look for fun to get this project. We can, um, so there are a number of these types of proposals that we could do to make us more resilient that doesn't involve regulations. Now that's what the hazard mitigation plan looks at are all the things we could do that aren't regulating, but are what can we do a little bit different that would help make things better. I tried pulling up some of the maps, but they're actually quite complicated. Um, so I don't know how helpful they'll be. I do have this special flood hazard area map that I guess is the most helpful to share that. So the blue on this map is the flood hazard area. You can see along the north branch is where most of it is. And some of it extends into the meadow. There, but not all of it. Um, all of it has very shallow flooding. It does flood, but it's very shallow. This doesn't give any, any sense of depth. Right. Then, but the main street side is, I guess it, as far as extending the farthest from the river, it looks like the main street side of the north branch goes out pretty far. Um, I guess that's to, to Loomis. Yeah, that's school street. So the elementary school, that was good. Yeah. Yeah. So the water basically goes out that far in a 100 year flood then, which it did. In fact, yep, this map's pretty accurate. We tested it in real life. So then my other question, and I think like you may have already answered this is that I mean, there's nothing really that mob pillar itself can do to prevent these floods from happening. It's all coming from upriver. Like all we can do really is build better. And then is it up to the state to look at like the hydraulics that are going, that were going on behind the storm and see if they can anyway prevent future floodings. Yeah, there's not a lot we can do at this point. Um, we can do some small amount of stuff by regulating storm water and makes it a little less flashy. So it can push out the peak a little bit. But what has been done, we're waiting to get all the full final sets of numbers. So we can really kind of take a look. But pretty, I don't think these numbers are going to be that far off of what was the 1927 flood. The 1927 flood was, you know, I want to say like 10 inches of rain. And this one was eight to nine inches of rain or something like that. So it's going to end up being a pretty similar number in the amount of rain. In 1927, the flooding on Main Street was almost 10 feet deep and reached the first floor of City Hall. So much, much, much, much deeper. But in the 1930s, we went through and we built the Wrightsville Dam. We built the Eastbury Flood Control Dam. We built the Marshfield Flood Control Dam. And so mostly everything we can do, we did do. And it basically saved us about six or seven feet of flood water, because we had basically a 1927 flood two weeks ago. And we ended up with six or seven feet less of water for the same amount of rain. So we pretty much have done everything we can do on that avenue. And now we just need to go and work and do a better job of elevating buildings and incrementally making ourselves better and more flood resilient. That's probably the most appropriate thing to do at this point. There's not that much more we can do with flood control. Okay. Well, does anyone have any more about flood stuff, or should we talk more specifically about getting ready for the August 14 meeting? Ready to move on for that? Okay. Let's do it. So, Mike, what are your thoughts about preparing for that meeting? Well, I think the big, the big thing is going to be, I'm just going to, I'll put together a quick PowerPoint, I guess, and just lay out a few of our ideas. I mean, the point of this is to be a listening session. So we're not really here to debate people. This is your meeting, you're always free to do that, but we do want to make sure we do the best we can to go and give everybody the opportunity to listen. And I think we'll see how many people we get. If we get a handful of people, we can have a lot more dialogue. If we get a lot of people, if we got 40 or 50 people, then maybe we've just got to sit back and work our way through and listen to people, ask questions if we need clarification. But really, if we want to get through 30 or 40 people commenting on what they think we should be doing, then I think we've got to make sure we give them an opportunity. Because this is our chance to hear what they think the public thinks we should be looking at when it comes to housing. And we'll go, we'll take it from there and see whether our ideas, because part of what we'll do is I'll lay out in a thing. Here are some ideas that we're thinking of. We haven't decided what we're going to do. We have made proposals in 2021 and 2022, and some of them were accepted and some of them we got kind of beat up for. So let's hear from you, hear from the public. What would you guys think would be good ideas that we should be working on? And here are some of our ideas that we've either floated in the past or here are some new ideas and see what people think. And then we can go back in September and sit down and say, okay, which ones are the ones we want to put into the zoning amendment that we're working on? Because we've got most of that zoning amendment ready to go. We really just need to nail down those last few things that we want to put in the proposal before we go to public hearings. And I think that's the message of this one is we really want to hear from the public. And I think it's a little bit of wait and see. If we've got six people, let's have a conversation, let's have a discussion. And if we have more, then I think we sit back and we listen and we hear what they have to say and we meet in either later in August or in September. I know we were going to try to have only one meeting in August. So it might be September that we sit down and say, what did we hear? What do we want to do? I think that's great for this. The way we've decided to couch this is that we're just looking for info and we're not trying to defend a particular position at this point. This is just going to give us info to decide what position we want to take. So I think that sounds great. And you also raised a good point, so to remind everyone, we were planning to possibly not meet in August. So since this got pushed back, we are going to meet this on the 14th. But this, that'll be our only meeting in August unless we really feel like there's something urgent to meet for. But I don't think we're going to get that place. And I'm guessing Michael also want the extra time to work on flood stuff that's being at a display. So okay, so that's our plan. Does anybody have any more thoughts about August 14th? Is it supposed to be a Zoom meeting or are we meeting in person? So it's going to have to be a Zoom meeting because City Hall is closed. It has to be an ADA accessible building that we meet in. And usually that would mean the senior center, which has been pretty much booked up now because we're here City Hall, the high school, both of those are flooded and closed. And we don't have elevators in those other places in some other places that we've looked. So we could try to book a place. We've met at the Pavilion building that's also flooded. We've met at, I can pick a bunch of them, the regional planning commission elevators down. I think we might be able to get some space at the league, VLCT maybe, but I don't think that's big enough space for a public meeting. So I think it will just be by Zoom, which I think is disappointing. I was going to recommend everybody be there for in person for the listening session. But now that it's virtual, we're kind of stuck in this format for a little while. Yeah. So Zoom, it will have to be also before I forget to mention it, I think we will plan to vote at that very next meeting in September on what we want to do so we can get the ball rolling. So if somebody happens to miss the meeting, just you could try to watch it just to catch yourself up on what was said. But yeah, we want to take some notes and be ready to go ahead and vote and move forward after this listening session. Ariana, did you have something? I'm just going to say I am going to miss the meeting, but I'll try to do, you know, watch it later. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, you know, we're not going to be taking any formal action there. Obviously just we want to make sure we have some critical mass of people so that the public doesn't think that they're not really meeting with the planning commission. But yeah, there's, you know, there's not a strict number. We need any more thoughts about August 14th or we just, by the way, there's, I have a lot of stuff up in the air for August, by the way. I'm going to try to move things around and make sure that I can make it. But there is at least some possibility that I won't end up making it and I'll have to like a note to be ready to run the meeting. And if for some reason he can't, then I'll probably be turning to you, Erin, as another person who's had experience running meetings for the planning commission. But I'll try to make sure I make it though. Anything else on August 14th before we move on? Okay. So move on to the agenda then. Next item is to review the public safety word storyboard. That's one that I have looked over, but I didn't touch much. But I noticed that Maria had some comments there. So if, yeah, I'll just turn it over to you, Maria, just to walk us through the comments you've had. I can pull it up. Everybody see it? So it looks like Julia had some ideas for maps, showing locations of firehouses, police. That makes sense to show infrastructure stuff to me. While I'm bringing that up, does anyone else have ideas for maps related to this that we want to pass along? I'm not sure if you have this map available, but when I worked in transportation planning, we could show times for how long it would take to get from any origin to kind of like a destination. It looked like, kind of like a topology map. But that might be a good, give a good sense of like the coverage of our fire departments and other emergency crews, just how quickly they can get to most places in Montpelier that map exists. Yeah, I made a note of that. I'll see what either what's available or what we already have or what we might be able to generate. That's not the right place for that. Does Montpelier have a goal that they should be able to reach any building within 10 minutes? Are there any benchmarks like that? Don't think they've adopted any specific benchmarks. Because we're just geographically so small. It's never been that much of an issue, I think. But I know for larger municipalities, that's why they have multiple fire stations is because they have a response time that they're trying to meet. So if you can't make it to, you know, you can't make it to the north end of Burlington, then maybe we need to have a separate fire station for the north end of Burlington. Montpelier doesn't, doesn't have that issue because our geography is so much smaller. Well, people can jump in there with with map ideas later if they want. But I'm just handed over to Maria for the for the things that she brought up on here. This was a while ago that I did this. So I'm looking at my own comments. I guess I would remind everybody while she's reading through her comments that we did make a note that this this chapter tends to run a little differently than some of the others. It, we actually kind of called it a public safety agency plan, because really, it's less about a focus on, say, public safety than it is about the police department, or, you know, it's more about the fire department and their goals and plans. That's why we kind of, it was more an agency plan. It doesn't have it in this title, but that's, I'll remind them of that, that it's a public safety agency plan. Okay, so it looks like your first comment, Maria, was just to like specifically call out other chapters. And do we go on to discuss housing development? Oh, so yeah. I mean, it's funny. I looked at this, I think a month ago, but now it's like relevant for hazard area regulation. So these are regulations that live under other chapters of the plan, with like the planning department. Yeah, they're, yeah, they're operated out of so the public safety agencies aren't doing these. We are. Yes, yep, they all come out of the planning department. So river hazard area regulations, building codes, building codes is kind of with the fire department because the building inspector works with the fire chief in enforcing the building codes. But the health codes, sprinkler requirements, those are all in the zoning. Well, the health codes are separate sprinkler requirements are in ordinance. Does that answer your question? That's the question you posed here. Yes. And then the next thing, the two aspirations below for community justice and for police. Yeah, that, that looks wrong. Okay. Yeah, that's the first one is the six pillars as police. Okay. And they're actually the same, they're actually identical, aren't they? Yes. Yeah, so the community justice one must be wrong. Okay. Yeah, so that needs to be fixed because there was, there was a separate, we did provide a separate write up. Not, not, not we really, I think community justice wrote it, but it was and what we passed along. Okay, a separate summary. Sorry, I didn't get a chance to review these before we put them out. I just went with what they had put together. I mean, I'm assuming like that when I leave comments on the storyboard documents that we do pass those on to SE group, right? Okay. Yeah, yeah, either, either they'll, they will get passed along or I will go through and incorporate the comments before I send it back to them. Okay. This would be a bad time for me to learn that I've been doing this for my health. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. Maybe, maybe that's why it was bolded, Maria. Maybe it was bolded because they knew that it was something that needed to be changed. I don't know. So we resolved that and that's it for Maria stuff. So I want to go back up to this top one. I think my thoughts about calling out housing or if I don't tell them anything that we should only do that if we're going to follow up and speak about it. I mean, we did, we do talk about the housing plan in the next. Do we talk about economic development? So, so, and was there a river hazard? What chapter just did we, do we put that stuff in? It's, is it natural resources? I mean, some of its natural resources and some of it is actually just right here. I mean, we're talking about public safety. And this, the reason why we have river hazard rules really comes down to keeping the public safe, safe from hazards. I mean, we certainly, if we're looking at synergies, we certainly could talk about natural resources. I'm trying to go through in my head, the various chapters. I don't see a big, I mean, you can kind of tie it to transportation. It's why we have traffic, you know, policing of traffic and stuff like that. I mean, there are a lot of these ones that you can go, yeah, that, you know, there's little things there. But I think we're trying to make some bigger connections where there's big overlaps like, or big conflicts between two things. And not necessarily all the small ones. So really, it's just quick decision for us. Do we want to, in this opening sentence, do we want to throw in the chapters that are touched upon below, or do we just leave it and then cover them below? I think it's just like a style question of what you think will be useful for people. I think it, to me, it matched what we do in other chapters, you know, we kind of like lay out where the intersections are and then give some examples of them. So it seems consistent for me. That's good enough for me. I just did accept. So everybody else okay with that? Anything else? This is, you know, one reason why I didn't go over this much either is that, you know, we, in the first place, we edited this very lightly. And, you know, in the first place. So it seems fine. It actually does seem like SC did use the content pretty much exactly how it was before, from what I can tell. Which I think is good to see. Okay. If you don't have anything else on public safety, we'll move on to the next storyboard. And that would be utilities and facilities. I went through this one a little bit, but it was really just briefing. Yeah, these are the less of the fun and exciting ones, not like housing or transportation or energy. Now we're done. Now we're done to sewer pipes and wrecked fields. I don't know the exact correlation here, but there might be, I mean, there just wasn't a lot to like change around or that I thought was off. Like it's easier to write more plainly, I guess, when you're talking about this stuff than than this stuff that more of the stuff that evokes feelings, maybe, I don't know. Okay. So, you know, just little stuff here. I thought the city always is vigilant. I just changed it to the city is vigilant. It means the same thing just succinct and through an Oxford comma, I think somewhere or comma before the word which Oxford comma over here. I changed this like this hyphen to just a parenthetical. And I think that's it for my review. Did anyone else have any other thoughts about utilities and facilities or did anyone want some time right now to look at it? Let me know if you want time right now to look at it. I was talking about the district heating because we were just talking about it. And this document says that they actually want more customers. You know if the capacity is that it could heat all of downtown. It's always a question that depends on how well the buildings are insulated. So early on there was a big push to go and, you know, make sure people were all energy efficient before they hooked on. And then all of a sudden all the oil prices changed and became really, really cheap. And then nobody wanted to hook onto district heat because it was cheaper to be on oil. And so we were a little less stringent about making sure everybody was super energy efficient before hooking on because we can hook on more buildings if those buildings are energy efficient. I don't know how much of the downtown we can get. It's the state plant. And it was a project that was done before me. My predecessor Gwen, that was kind of her maybe her project that she did. And I don't know the details of how much square footage we could basically absorb. But I do know we have capacity and we need customers because we pay for the capacity whether we use it or not. So getting more people to hook on means making it more efficient for everybody who is on. So but a lot more people could go on. Right. Was there any evidence that the people who are on district heat fared any better in the flood than those who weren't given what you already told us about the oil cans hitting pipes and yeah, I don't I don't know. I don't know what the correlation would be in some cases. Some people didn't have to fill their oil tanks. So they these are commercial buildings that had large oil tanks in their basement and being on district heat, they didn't need to fill them anymore, which made big empty buoyant tanks in their basement. So I don't know how many of these empty tanks that floated were correlated to people who were already on district heat and were empty because they didn't need to have them filled. So that's interesting question. We'll have to go and look and see if there's any connection there correlation there. Mike, do we need to get the word out more about like I don't think I wasn't actually aware that I don't think I was aware anyway, maybe I've forgotten, but that individuals could try to make use of this. Mostly commercial blocks that are hooking on. And that's what I think of and I thought maybe it was just exclusively for that, but it sounds like you said some things that suggest that maybe a residential building could hook up. I don't know. I guess it's possible that they could. I think some of the issue that comes up is that the lines are only in certain places. So usually you need to be a big user to and I don't know in the past. We used to have to figure out how to get the lines extended to certain places. But I'm sure if there was a single family home where the district heat pipe was running across the road in front of their house. I don't see why they the city wouldn't entertain that, but I don't want to go and promise something that that there's a certain minimum use requirement. But certainly I think if somebody was in a in a bad spot and was had access to it, I think they would allow a hookup. But gentlemen, Chris Lumbra is our building inspector or as our used to be our building inspector. He is now our facilities director. And he is the one. If you look him up online, Chris Lumbra, he's the guy who knows it. So if there's anyone out there who's interested in district heat, he's the he's the man. Okay, I was just checking in to see if there was this outreach need that I wasn't aware of, but it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like most of the potential customers are aware. It's a big outreach now. For the past two weeks, it's been a very big outreach because so many furnaces, especially these big commercial blocks with really big furnaces with really expensive needs. And we're telling him you've got to move those big furnaces up to the first floor. For them, we've been trying to do much more of an outreach to these big building owners. And we're going to continue this outreach to go and say, maybe the best thing is not to move your big furnaces up to the first floor, but instead to hook to district heat. And before he said there might be funding available for this to encourage people to get on district heat. I don't I don't think we've got necessarily funding for that. We're I think we're trying to where I was thinking of the funding was trying to figure out extending the lines. There's where we haven't trenched, you know, an area, you know, certain streets, you might be like, Oh, there's already district heat on, say, maybe Langdon Street. So it's easy to hook onto Langdon Street, but Elm Street, they only ran it to where people had agreed to hook up. So there may be places on main street. In fact, I know there are places on Main Street across from City Hall. You might think, Oh, there's a perfect place across from City Hall. There's no access to district heat because nobody wanted to hook on. We never extended the line. So now if somebody showed up and said we want to hook on, you know, we in City Hall have to sit down and say, Okay, well, are we going to make those people extend the line? Or are we going to pay to extend the line in order for them to hook up? And I don't know the answer to that question because, you know, in the past, it used to be, you know, we leave that to the property owner to extend the line, but I'm not sure how that's going to work this time. Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, the general, my understanding, which is very limited, is, you know, cost, cost, or bays. And that seems like a pretty significant hurdle interconnection to district heat, unless there's some significant funding in place to subsidize that interconnection cost. I just can't imagine that connection to district heat is a cheap interconnection. Yeah, it's always trying to set things up for good business success. And sometimes it doesn't work out that way when, you know, we give people a big upfront cost to hook on. And then they kind of like, well, maybe I'll just put my furnace back in because it's cheaper. So I know we're always trying to, you know, it's better for us in the long run if we get people to hook up. And it may be one that we can go through and share the cost, if we can get five people who are interested on the same street, maybe that's, that goes one way. But I have no idea that district heats its own utility. You don't really think of it that way, but it's got its own enterprise funds. So it has to operate under its own bonding capacity and everything else. So that'll be a question for Chris to work out with the public works department and that utility fund to decide how they're going to help get more people hooked up. But we're always always looking for opportunities to, you know, grab some federal funds that might be able to help us to, you know, because it really is it's climate change, it's resilience, it's getting people off of fossil fuels. So there's, there should be, you'd expect that there'd be some money somewhere that you can tap into. We just don't have it right now. And so we're going to have to, that's another thing we're going to be looking for. I don't mean to lead you too far, but this is an interesting conversation. And maybe this has been answered. I'm sorry, I've been trying to curl my trial for a little bit, but you know, what's the delta between the district heat capacity and what its current usage is? I don't have that number. I know there's a lot of capacity. They've been trying to get more users on for a long time. And, you know, I think I mentioned to Maria's question that the big factor is really how efficient the building is that's getting hooked up. So, you know, the transit center, we always thought would move would hook onto the district heat plant, but it didn't. The building was actually so energy efficient that they heated the entire building with heat pumps. So, but if you had a really new energy efficient building, or you had taken a historic building and done a significant retrofit, you could probably hook onto district heat and, you know, it would, you know, it's not going to use very much of the capacity, but you know, a handful of very inefficient buildings could use a lot of our capacity. We only have so much thermal capacity to sell. Okay, anybody have anything more on utilities facilities? Are we, we're good with these two storyboards? Have we been, I don't recall, have we been voting the story? We haven't really voted the storyboards out, right? They're just, it's just, I don't think we voted. Yeah, agreement. Yep, seems, seems so. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm going to move on from that unless we have something else. Okay. All we have left is to approve the minutes from June 12 and June 26. So folks can take a minute to look at those. And when we're ready, I'll take either edits beforehand or or a motion to approve them. Realizing I haven't, I didn't follow up to ask how the discussion, I wasn't there for the discussion about the housing storyboard, but I take it that that went smoothly. We have a motion to approve the minutes from June 12 and June 26. I move to approve the minutes of June 12 and 26. Okay. We have a motion from Arnaan. Do we have a second? A second. Second from Maria. Any discussion? Anyone need more time or have anything to change? Okay. Those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. We have posed. Okay. Minutes and approves. And I'll just point out reviewing them the minutes. There was a note there. We went through and discussed the signing of S 100. I'll just follow up that after they signed it and after we went through and reviewed everything and got all of our legal opinions on everything, the legislature came back and changed it. Even though it wasn't vetoed during the veto session, they changed the bill that had been signed and then reapproved it. I have not gone back to check that version because I was going to wait to make sure I wasn't going to review it and then have the governor veto it. So I will at some point when I get some time go in and see what the new one says. I think it just moved some deadlines of some things that we're going to be not going into effect until 2024. They moved up to 2023. So I will figure that out and at some planning commission meeting, probably the one in September, we'll have a conversation. I'll probably try to figure it out before the 14th in case we do get questions from the public because there was a bill about housing. I'll try to have the information ready then. But if we want to have a discussion about whatever it is, if there's something important that changed, we can have a conversation about it in September. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate that. Yeah. Looks like we're done for the night. Thanks, everybody. Hang in there. It's a hard time. I'm up here right now. We'll see you in August. Come on. Thanks, everyone.