 That would be my first I feel like we better get started. We don't have a lot of time. I'm John. I live up on I'm just volunteering tonight to help out and our task this evening just to try to clarify that a little bit with these breakout sessions is we are going to develop sort of two lists. One is a list of actions that we think should be taken in this area of work and then resources that are needed to move to move those actions forward and just to remind folks so everybody is hopefully in the right room. My understanding is that we are talking about investing in an adaptive downtown. Do we all agree that that's what we're here for? Okay that's good first step check. So I actually think before we start it would be great if somebody would go ahead and read again that description just so that we all have it fresh in our minds. Is there a volunteer who wants to read that for us? Yeah go for it. Invest in an adaptive downtown. With more floods likely in the downtown flood plain, Montpelier should do everything possible to protect public and private property, homes, stores and downtown buildings. Currently steps for building apartments, elevating buildings, appliances and inventories, mitigating impacts and adapting to the downtown options for moving some businesses and inventory space are being led by individual homeowners, merchants and building owners who often lack access to public funding resources and or the capacity to navigate the existing financing options. The task force to gather and share best practices, raise money to help businesses afford transitions and work to leverage resources like those in efficiency Vermont to replace appliances and home and business utilities. All right so we're gonna spend we've got 30 minutes total. We're gonna spend about 15 to 20 minutes thinking through some potential actions and I think this may be too hard but maybe trying to decide on a couple that really rise to the top as key things to focus on and then for the last 10 minutes we'll think about resources. You know what what this is not as a group just to be clear is that as was talked about before there is now this commission that's gonna convene to really work and support a lot of this. I think what we heard is the goal is to hire somebody to sort of lead those efforts and so this group I think you all may well be involved in that effort you may well want to be involved in the effort to sort of do this task of investing in an adaptive downtown but like this probably isn't the task force right tonight that's gonna set another meeting date right but the but what this will be is input that the commission then uses and there may well be further convenings of of people to do to do this work so are there any sort of questions before we just sort of launch into what are some potential action steps in this area and it's Matt right yes Matt your role you were for the city in what role awesome Matt is our scribe tonight so that's great these notes will get transmitted I may do some scribbling on the board I may not well we'll see how it goes so I guess with that what are some potential areas of action when we think about this overall theme go for it so those experts just to see if I understand what you mean those experts would help to define sort of what the adaptions are addressing is that is that what you're getting at okay great other areas of action yeah the obvious is that one of the major threats is water I'm sure there's other threats that we come up with but at the moment that's what I'm focused on and I have some vague image of an elevated downtown and so I'm not sure exactly what that means or how that would be facilitated or whether it's even vaguely possible but it seems like that part of that vision is that it would be almost like a park like adaptation of the downtown in a way that would allow the river to be the river but that the downtown could still stay where it is and and it could be a demonstration for others similar locations I don't know how that is elevating out of harm's way work businesses and and housing just a clarification because I think it's helpful like do like one scenario is fill basements like essentially eliminate basements in downtown buildings and maybe sort of like move inventory to the second floor let's say does that meet your definition of elevating downtown or are you thinking more ambitiously in the actually physically sort of I just think it's talking about Phil okay stilts or whatever you envision whatever engineering wise words to actually but you know have there's elevated highways there's elevated walkways everywhere so move businesses to the second floor I don't know about filling basements I'm not even sure either but I'm sort of trying to get a sense of I draw the sense but yeah yeah so yeah so there's a lot of opportunity I think to reconsider those spaces as green stormwater infrastructure and provide areas for the river to flow into when it overrides banks capture and you consider some of our you know the city that you have as part of that so more green stormwater infrastructure and park spaces downtown capture that where it makes sense and if that means parking downtown is harder we now God forbid you have to walk three blocks get downtown that's one so repurposed parking essentially to perform that underutilized impervious areas which is often parking lots I'm just trying to write some because maybe we'll prioritize you had your hand around that in that moment that we get that calling so I'm just gonna say sort of actions in existing space which seems to be a little different from elevate okay another here then here then there yeah go ahead yeah and one way to think about that is something called wet flood where basically we're writing hard yeah basically providing a barrier on the outside of the buildings that would exist water up to at least the base what so like the M&T M&T bank example right there was blood get bang yeah yeah oh it's a boiler plant okay great okay well so it doesn't always go ahead so are you suggesting specifically a parking garage is an alternative to so much impervious space because you're going up as opposed to okay I'm gonna get in some new voices in before we go back so yeah I would love to see us do everything we can to address mitigation within this and so for example if businesses downtown structures lost their reading systems can we do everything possible to make sure they transition off a fossil fuel when they rebuild you know so just thinking about that embedding that in the resilience and recovery process so when you say mitigation what you mean is sort of addressing the root cause climate mitigation is what you really mean okay I'm just gonna sort of write that as the okay thank you you and then you are you you have to be separate building and that's that's a problem for approaches I know well I have that mandatory are you coming back tomorrow how much would be stored, how much has to be put out for... Accessible, right. And how would you manage that kind of storage basically warehouse? As a shared, are you thinking of it as a shared resource? Okay, great, yeah. I have two things, one is building off of what you said about the kind of the shelf concept, something that was mentioned in the weeks after the flood creating something like shelves that, you know, you have, think about the hurricanes, the buildings in the South where you cover windows with boards and you lock them down, something like that for shelving, but that moves. So you can literally just close up shelves and drag them, put them on, you know, so they're on wheels and you can drag them out again into higher ground. That was one, that 13-year-old idea. And I just want to bring back something that I mentioned on the floor was re-imagining our schools. We really needed to think differently about, we have very small schools in Montpelier and we have a lot more population that we can join together with to think differently about our buildings. Nathan, yeah, and then, yeah. Nathan, yeah. Thinking for me about the idea of a garden garage which is stacking, the more dense the better I think if we can find a way to come straight and housing outside of the flood level and then recognize that the retail spaces in a walkable downtown is a premium and if we can accomplish the sort of flood-hardening offsite storage, we can keep people safe, right? If this happened in March and people were without heat and then it makes a thousand, we would be really in trouble. So keep people safe. This is, I think we can sort of react, help move stuff, put it back, sorry. I would like to see us really, really focus on density, allow taller buildings, allow housing without parking in more zones, et cetera. I just want to see us, we can draw a line, right? We know what the projected flood is. That number might not be real anymore. We can add three feet to it and say, well, it's any new housing or we can try to buy out in Northfield, bought out, low-level housing, that just wasn't a threat anymore. And that could become retail space or it could become business space that's for people to lose housing for floods and people to leave out. So just to be sure I understood, like do not develop new housing within the flood plain but have that housing that's outside of the flood plain be higher density. Is that, am I getting that right? Still close to the core, but I think close to the core. To me, a lot of what defines this community is how well it is and how compressed the retail and leading and letting me experience part of it. And so let's let that core be that and about some of what Greg and Barbara are saying about, acknowledge that we're gonna flood again over and over. Let's build for it and let's make it a quick recovery. And then you, sorry, yeah. So I completely agree it's gonna flood again and we should build for that but I just want to urge us that we're talking about building an adaptive downtown and we may not just flood, we may have interruptions or snow. We're not that far from the community, forest fires and we're surrounded by forests. We put up a forest fire so I'd encourage us to broaden our thought as to what we need by adaptive. So I appreciate it, I'm Pij, I don't know exactly how we've been graphing the buildings and doing that sort of convention before. I will say I've splashed the wife from right through the basement before I leave the night side as you go through the right door because we had sand bags, my pile, got the virus already coming through. So I need to hand like those faces because really it just needs to be off limits and shut up all of the buildings because we just heard from people from daddy who's getting so much splash four hours before it really hit. We just got friends and we ran and drilled and put shelves around to get like great people handing boxes and then we had those shelves in place and they would look beautiful because we would do like art work or something. That would be a really great way for businesses to just happily complete, to get things up and then those figures saying to like right now we're thinking water is fine. Great. And just to like reiterate, to come back to it, what you're talking about is actions that you can take in the existing space to sort of really to do what Barbara described as sort of like wet flood proof and hardening. I mean, some of that's exterior stuff, some of it's interior stuff. Go ahead. So a couple piggyback thoughts. One is that the ideas that Kelly's mentioning and that other people are mentioning require some kind of collaboration to make it possible for all businesses. So, it's not just the actions to see investment, right? So how do you create the kind of collaborative funding structure or is that external investment that enables businesses to adapt? I feel like that. And can I ask a question back, which is, is that collaboration both about funding so that there's some common sense of where, how we're gonna finance it, but is it also about strategies themselves so it's both sort of information and funding so that there's a common set of practices that are deployed, am I? Yeah, and I just, I know you have that commission meeting down there, but I think you can lay everything up with the commissioner. You can say, okay, there needs to be a big tank and a money bank for the individual businesses to make. So, it's decisions about the actions. Yeah. And not just have it be, you know, each one to their own devices, because that's not equitable for business. But the other idea of investment that I just wanna, because I think we're called investing in an adaptive. Invest in an adaptive, yeah. I wanna think about not just the concrete needs of the downtown businesses, but also our youth. Investing in our youth as the future of our town and our future of our economy. So that means both creating resources in that youth that are flood resilient and disaster resilient. Currently, we have no youth center at all. And also thinking about our schools in an efficient and emergent and generative way. So I also support a collaboration approach to our youth, both youth and education. Got it. Behind you, Dayton, first, because it's a new voice. Yeah, and then you go for it. So I'm not quite sure how to frame this. I haven't thought this through, but I would like to hear from business owners, potential business owners, what they would need to make them feel confident in doing business that they're not doing. And I don't, like I say, I'm not quite sure how to frame it, but my theory is that people won't really have businesses in the future. Okay. I'd go ahead and Dayton. Yeah. I'll be real quick. So I think two things that I'm in the screen, we're off that. I think when we talk about adaptive downtown, the economic side of it and providing businesses and creating this walk in the dense place that we all want to be, it's huge and that really needs to be a focus of it. And one thing I think that we really look around for is we're not the only city that's flood, right? There are cities across America that are power-sized and bigger, smaller, the Indiana, Florida, low-lying areas. And it flooded numerous times in the last 20 to 30 years. And I think we've learned a lot from those weekends that we should look at the best practices, whether that's how to adapt the store or adapt the ability to flood or whether that's building big infrastructure ideas for the city. All right. I feel like we should start to actually bring this to a close because we've got to think about resources. I guess what I wonder about here is I, like I'm given a task, which is in 30 seconds I need to report out to the big group what we've talked about. And what I feel like I hear as a recurring theme kind of fits under this sort of defining a set of actions to do this wet flood proofing and hardening of those existing spaces in that downtown core as an emphasis of this. And I would say to dovetail on what you said, really trying to define not just individual business by business or building by building, but collectively what do those strategies look like and how do they get financed? Is that, I'm seeing a few nodding heads as like that. Yeah, a couple of hands to respond. Yeah. So the time span piece is an important element to that. Yeah. All right. We're getting some reactions. And I see Emily and then Jack go. Yeah. Yeah. And I was just going to say John, that I've heard a lot about the difference between allowing people to recover and taking more in that short term, you know, the floodgates active thing and maybe some of these more longer term ideas and really responding to the climate crisis in how we're looking forward. I just wanted to throw, you know, all those impermeable parking surfaces that we're talking about along the water. I think that's really important. A lot of those are owned by the state. And so we're really going to have to figure out a way to work collaboratively with VGS on that. I mean, one thing I think about is we all know those, this was a big flood, so lots of places got affected. But I think someone's the very first thing that he said, you know, ask the experts and I would love in the short term to like identify those areas downtown that are most at risk and the things that we can do in the immediate future to help those most at risk. Okay. Jack. I think this kind of goes without saying it's a theme that's going through a lot of comments, but I think I want to say it anyway, which is that I think we need to be clear that we are committed to preserving and defending and rebuilding our walkable downtown where it is. It's our downtown, and that's the center of our community. And that's where it should be. That's where it should be. Is that a point of common rallying? Yes. That's I think actually a worthwhile thing to note. Yeah. I just wanted to make a point that I communicated to Evelyn Primm after the last meeting, which was I heard two different speakers use the same phrase short term. One said short term, we must. The other said short term, year. Yes. And I asked her, I said for meeting number three, could Paul at the beginning please clarify what is meant by short term, and that didn't happen. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, maybe we could ask you, like when you define that for us a little bit, when you think short term, are you thinking a few years, or are you thinking sort of in the space of a year? In the space of a year. In the space of a year. So. So it's sort of the immediate. Two weeks. So you can just sort of run into the gas flow going right away. Yeah. And we know a lot of the short term solutions are unconstrued to a long term scenario. Yeah. So just to understand about where there's some conflict. Yeah, yeah. That's why we need to think, I think, bigger than just hardening our buildings. We also have to look at how we can make our downtown, which is a whole long term, so we'll make it easier to harden our buildings. Okay. Yep. I'll do it. We quickly Gretchen, and then quickly Barbara. Yeah. I just want to say, that's the long term point. Right. Can I build back them? Yep. Noted. Barbara, yeah. And as we build back, I mean we're dedicated to the immense rural communities, right? So it's, yeah. But the optimal heating systems may not be what we're putting in right now. So we've got short term, we've got long term. Great. And finally, and then we're going to resources. Okay, I'll be quick. I just wanted to say that most of the downtown is because they're very close. They're more than great together. We are committed to being where we are. I kind of love our country so much that we're not going to aim or our confidence to be there. Yeah. Yeah, resources. Quickly, with four minutes to go. Yep. I've been thinking a lot about, it's not like we can just make decisions about everybody in downtown. You have individual business owners who don't own their spaces. You have private property owners who have to make infrastructure decisions about how to build back. When you have a city, I would love to see a public fund. This is for housing as well, but a public fund that says, okay, Tim Heaney, you're about to redo a bunch of heating plants. We'll give you, we'll underwrite a lot of a really green heating choice. With some, you know, some fair deal about getting some of that money back in the future. If you can, if you can collaborate with your business tenant, I mean, I just feel like if I'm a property owner and I'm not, it's lush. Making those decisions in a way that's long-term, healthy, can be more expensive. And I would love to have those resources, something that we provide correctly. So, some sort of community bank with some defined goals and resources to hook in on those goals. And it's collaborative. It needs to be collaborative with the property owners and it needs to be collaborative with the business owners. And knowing that not all property owners will remain the same, not all business owners are the same. Okay. That's helpful. Yeah, go. I'm going to echo what you just said, that the resources need money. Often it takes more resources to retrofit the historic buildings that we are into than to go in and we need to recognize that. Okay, great. Can I just say another one that I've heard you all also talk about a sort of expertise and best practices? That feels like a resource that is also on the list. I just got the frantic look from out in the hall. Are there any last resources to add to this mix? This, the state, okay. Yeah, that's, thank you. State of the T. All right. I think. Watershed management. Yeah. Yep. And I think the good news is that's one of the other ones tonight, for sure. So, yeah. Okay. Let's wrap with that. Thanks everybody.