 Good evening, everybody. This is May 16th meeting of the Arlington zoning board of appeals. My name is Pat Hanlon. I'm the vice chair of the board, but on this night, which we are dealing with 10 sunny side Avenue, I will be acting as chairman. I'm calling this meeting to order at 733 p.m. And I'd like all attendees who are not recognized speak to please mute their connection until such time as they're recognized by the chair. So the first order of business is to confirm that all members and anticipated officials are present. So let me start with the members of the board. Christian Klein. You there. I am here. Good evening. Good evening. Roger Dupont here. Daniel Riccardelli here. Venket Holy here. Elaine Hoffman here. And Adam LeBlanc. Great. We're all here. Town officials. Colleen. Austin here. Marisa Lau. Yeah, good evening. Is there anybody else from the town that anyone knows that we that I should be taking account of? Okay. So outside council Paul Havity, are you here? That's good evening, Mr. Chairman. Good evening, Mr. Havity. Appearing for the applicant to marry when Stanley O'Connor is counsel. Mary, are you here? Here. And Erica Schwartz. Mary, could you go through the other people who are on your team and identify them? Sure. Gabrielle Geller, who is our affordable housing consultant. We have representatives of UTL Rachel Ains and Nick. We have Brian Zamolka from niche engineering. And that's everyone who I believe is here tonight. Great. All right then. So. This is going to be a remote meeting. This open meeting of the Arlington's zoning board of appeals is being conducted remotely consistent with an act making appropriations for the fiscal year 2023 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations. And for certain other activities and projects, which was signed into law on March 29, 2023. And one of the provisions, one of those other provisions of this act is one that suspended until March 31st, 2025. The requirement to hold all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Public bodies may continue holding meetings remotely without a quorum of the body, public body present physically. At a meeting location so long as they provide adequate alternative access to remote meetings. Public bodies may meet remotely as long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. An opportunity for public participation will be provided during the public comment period during each public hearing. And that is the procedure we will follow tonight. For this meeting, the Arlington zoning board of appeals has convened a video conference via the zoom application with online and telephone access as listed on the agenda posted at the town's website. Identifying how the public may join. This meeting is being recorded and it will be host broadcast. By ACMI. Although I'm informed actually that the word broadcast is no longer in vogue. It's like swell. And so we're going to continue with that. And so whatever it is that ACMI does with it, that's what's going to happen. Please be aware that the attendees are person participating by a variety of means. Some attendees are participating by video conference and others by computer audio or by telephone. Accordingly, please be aware that other folks may be able to be able to see you your screen name or another identifier. Please take care not to share personal information. Anything you broadcast that word again may be captured by the recording. We ask that you please maintain decorum during the meeting, including displaying an appropriate background. All supporting materials that have been provided to members of this body are available on the meeting's agenda or on the town's website. Unless otherwise noted. And the public is encouraged to fall. Follow along. Using the posted agenda. So as the board is going to be taking up, well, this isn't exactly new business, but I'm going to make the following land acknowledgement anyway, just an abundance of caution. Whereas the zoning board of appeals for the town of Arlington, Massachusetts discusses and arbitrates the use of land in Arlington. Formerly known as monotony and Al Gawkin word meetings with waters. The board hereby acknowledges that the town of Arlington is located on the ancestral lands of the Midlands. The tribe of indigenous peoples from whom the colony province Commonwealth have taken their names. We pay our respects to the ancestral bloodline of the Massachusetts tribe and their descendants who still inhabit historic Massachusetts territory today. So now we'll turn to the public hearing to, and I wanted to, there are a couple of administrative items that I wanted to start with. But probably the easiest one to say is to congratulate the applicant for their success at Tom meeting last night. Tom meeting generously. Well, not generously appropriately appropriated. Substantial CPA funds to this, to help with this project. And we're apparently quite happy in doing it. So that's the good side for the applicant. The bad side is, as I mentioned last time that we, the board will eventually be asking for funding to pay for a consultant of its own, plus potentially get transcripts. I indicated when we started the last hearing that we would defer that until today, until after we had sort of an introductory hearing to indicate what the issues would be and the, and something about the scope of the inquiry that we'll need. But we are at the point where we are ready to do that. I think as an initial matter and reserving the right to increase the, this later on, we have, we haven't taken into account the transcript yet. But as an initial matter, we think that $20,000 is an appropriate guess for the budget for a civil engineering and traffic consultant. That would deal with various subjects relating to the. To the site to placement of utilities to water and sewage and the whole range. Of things that make buildings operate like buildings. And so we'll have a moment in a motion to. To do that. Mr. Connard is. It's a statute, of course, but no, I just wanted to make sure that, that you had no questions about what it is that we bring. No, you're permitted to do that under the statute. Right. So the chair will entertain a motion to. Request from the applicant. Funds under section. Under section 53 G for the payment for the use of. Transcripts and also. The payment of a. Of a peer review expert consultant for the board. To examine civil engineering, traffic and related issues. Is there a motion of that kind? Move, Mr. Chair. Moved by Mr. Klein. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Mr. Dupont. All in favor of the motion. We'll get a chance because this time. I've got a little list and I'm not going to bollocks up everybody's name. And because I last time bollocks that Mr. Holy's name. So often I'm going to start with him. Mr. Holy. Yes. Mr. Klein. Hi, Mr. Dupont. Hi, Ms. Hoffman. Hi, Mr. LeBlanc. Hi, Mr. Dupont. Hi, Mr. Dupont. Hi, Mr. Dupont. Hi. Mr. LeBlanc. Hi. Mr. Richard Ellie. Hi. And the chair votes aye. So the motion carries. Thank you. Mr. Chairman. The only request I would make is that the board would use as best efforts to keep the costs down given the nature of this client. Of this applicant. Yes. I think it's fair to say that we've been attempting to do that as much as we can. And we've been trying to do that for a long time. And I've already, I think been doing that, but we will certainly try hard not to. Waste the applicants money to which some of us have probably contributed our own funds as well. Thank you. Okay. So. At this point. The present. When the hearing is over, we'll have to get to talking about what we're going to be talking about. And then we'll have to get to talking about what we're going to be talking about. And then there's a hearing that's focused on the subjects of. Of traffic. And parking. And I'd like to, to recognize. Miss O'Connor. To introduce the team that's going to report on that subject and. And say whatever needs to be said. So at this point, Mr. Connor, the hearing is yours. And then when Mr. Zamolka is done and all questions have been answered, then you teal will discuss the bicycle parking. They've done some revised drawings. And we will discuss the parking after that. If that's okay with the board. That order. I think that's perfectly fine. Okay. Then I would turn it over to Brian. Good evening board. I have a presentation that I want to share. Okay. I can. Mr. Ralston, can you facilitate that? I'll say. I think, yeah, I think. I'm okay. Here we go. Does everybody see what I'm seeing? Well, that's hard to know without knowing what you're seeing. Do you see the opening slide to my presentation? I do. Okay. That is what you should be seeing. And Mr. Chairman, thank you for having us today. My name is Brian's mode on the senior project manager and transportation department at niche engineering. And we are the traffic consultant for this project. The 10 Sundays I'd have project. Just a quick summary. I know the developer has been in front of the board multiple times, but this project. 43 units of affordable housing. 21 parking space garage indoor and outdoor parking spaces or parking spaces and single access off sunny side avenue. The butters are all month fuel, escar fitness centers. And single family residences to the north. And this is proximate obviously to the number 87 bus and the L. Way. Way like that. So the first step when we do our traffic analysis to do the data collection. Collect traffic counts. When we did our traffic counts was November 3rd, 2022. So this is not considered pandemic time. We are considered by it per mass dot out of pandemic. And this would be the new normal. Therefore, no COVID adjustments had to be taken into account. So what are the, what are the first things we do? We collect the turning movement counts. So you could see the turning movement counts are each individual volume through the intersection. We collected during the weekday morning, 7am to 9am weekday evening, 4pm to 6pm. So we're also looking at the number of buses and buses. So we're also looking at the number of buses and buses at L. Way. And Broadway Broadway and sunny side and at the butters driveways just to understand that trip generation cells. As you can see, sunny side avenue does not really produce much traffic. Entering seven in the morning, 22 in the evening and exiting only 26 in the morning, 40, 40 in the evening. So we're talking about one car every one to two minutes. And then we also collect daily traffic along Broadway to make sure that we have about 1,000 vehicles per day. And with about a 50, 50 distribution. And then lastly, we counted, we want to count pedestrians specifically where at sunny side, where they might cross, where pedestrians might cross to get to the 87 bus. Unsure as to what that may be, but basically what we found was, well, it was unsure when we started, but when we, what we found is there's only six pedestrians. Total crossing in the morning and six pedestrians total crossing the evening. And this is very low. It's a lot lower than I expected. So really what I, what I gather from this is there's not a heavy use of the bus stops at this location. So then what we do next, we looked at safety and psych distance. So we look at safety. What do we do? We look at the crash volumes over a period of time. What period of time that is, is usually the last five completed years. So when mass dot has been able to gather all the police reports and put them into there, what they have the impact crashed out of work. And the latest five years for this area, when we did the study was 2015 to 2019. And if you look at the table below, you can see that, but let's just focus on sunny side, having Broadway real quick. There's in five years, five years is only two crashes. That produces a crash rate of 0.1, which if you could see is well below the district and statewide crash rates of 0.57. So, you know, safe to say that it's a safe intersection. I want to also say that there was all, any, all those two crashes or all those two crashes, both of them were only property damage crashes. There weren't no damage to cars and definitely no damage or damage or no harm to pedestrians. The second, second intersection, the Broadway and ally, you will notice that this is above average. And the only reason this is not the focus is because DCR and Somerville already have plans to study these intersections and we'll come up with any improvements that are necessary to alleviate congestion or safety there. And then we want to look at a cyclist and cyclist. It's also a safety issue. And the cars coming out of the driveway need to maintain or need to meet a certain site distance based on speed and geometry. So when we went out to the field, we stood at the approximate location of the future driveway. The left, look right left, we were able to see 280 feet and right. We were able to only see 210 feet because trees were blocking the rest of the view. And by trees, I mean the other side of Broadway, and we couldn't see further. Regardless, these both meet the current requirements. So the driveway is considered to be in a safe location. In that regard. So then let's look at the future. What we want to do first is look at what the, what the volumes would be looked like in seven years. If this project was never developed. So what we use is a conservative 2% growth rate. And it's, I say conservative because it is just that. Usually we don't apply a growth rate this high. However, given the nature of the area, greater Boston being so developed recently and continually to be developed. We just said a 2% growth rate is conservative to just project, you know, enough. It'll probably, you know, I'll say that. And like I said before, non-pandemic volume, these are non-pandemic volumes as well. So no need to adjust in polar factor. So then let's look at now the build conditions. So what are these future volumes and how are they affected by our own project? So first we look at the trip generation. The trip generation is basically how many trips are, is going to be generated by the site. And we get that from the Institute of Transportation Engineers trip generation manual. It's essentially a culmination of case studies that produce average rates that can be used as a baseline to estimate traffic for different uses based on location, land density, and proximity to transit. And for this one, since the trip generation was so small, 14 in the morning, 18 in the evening, we just assumed they were all vehicle trips. And now this is a very conservative approach. Because applying a mode share would only, you know, a mode share being vehicles, transit, pedestrian bike, would only lower the trip generation, therefore producing better future operations than we're presenting in this report. Obviously we understand that there's transit accommodations and the presence of the electric bike greenway bike path will provide that less reliance on the single occupancy vehicle use. However, you know, like I said, we're taking a conservative approach here. I know there has, there was a comment, I believe that they want to be a request for mitigation at the Sunnyside Avenue and Broadway. There is no plan right now to do anything. However, there will be further discussions with the town regarding any mitigation measures requested. So then look, look at future operations. The methodology to use the, to estimate future traffic operations is using, doing a traffic capacity analysis using what we use the Synchro traffic engineering software. And what this software does is it measures the intersection operations based on volume capacity and allows us as traffic engineers to grade the intersections. Basically how you have on a report card ABCDEF and that goes excellent, great all the way to fail. So we did is we analyzed the study intersections for both weekday morning and weekday evening during the existing 2029 no build and 2029 build conditions at L life Parkway and Broadway. This intersection started off at a poor level of service only to then go to a fail during no build. So this is negative impacts having nothing to do with our project. That's just natural growth of traffic leading itself to it. However, like I said before, the summer road plans to DCR and summer road plans to study this intersection for improvements. And then if we look at Sunnyside Avenue and Broadway, this operates significantly better with the level of service a on Broadway, there's no conflicting. There's no stop sign. So there's no conflicting movements and level of service, see on Sunnyside Avenue, which is still considered, you know, good. So what you could basically surmise from these tables, which I'm sure you can't read anyway, because it's very small font, I apologize. But there is no significant project related impacts to either intersection. And then lastly, just look at future parking. So what is the, what is the developer providing? So they're providing 21 total vehicle parking spaces. As we understand it, 39 parking spaces are required per zoning for. And for affordable housing, it would be one per unit with a 10% reduction. So therefore the project developer is seeking a variance for 50% reduction in spaces provided. Or 54%. To add on to that though, they are providing a significant amount of indoor and outdoor parking space, bike parking spaces, which would be discussed further. And then let's talk about the Sunnyside Avenue parking really quick. The Sunnyside Avenue parking, it accommodates probably about 30 vehicles from Broadway all the way to the bend in the road with eight cars along the site frontage. And I know there was also a comment regarding eliminating parking on Sunnyside Avenue. But what I wanted to kind of express today is the fact that parking on both sides of the road is actually a good thing when it comes to safety. It's a natural traffic coming measure. It narrows the travel way and naturally causes people to slow down. So if there is any speeding, which we didn't find any, but any safety concerns will actually be improved by maintaining parking on both sides. And also the benefit to the developer is that there will be parking during the day for visitors. So that wraps up my portion. However, I think I will save, I have Q&A here, but I think I'll save it because I think UTL is also going to make the presentation as well. So I'll wait till the end. Mr. Connor, you want to go through everybody and have questions then to everyone together? Do you want to break it up by segment? It's whatever the board would prefer. I will say if the board wants the information on how we can reduce the number of parking spaces, I can provide that now. We are required to have 43 spaces, one for each unit under 8.2.4A. There's a 10% reduction because of the affordability to 39 spaces. And then under section 6, 6.15, this board has the ability to reduce the number of spaces down to 25%. We're looking for a 54% reduction. So I think Brian had that all in his report. So we come out with 21 spaces. Great. So let me just, we have the discretion to do that. Aren't there factors that we're supposed to take into account or things like traffic demand management measures or other sorts of things that are to be taken into consideration and deciding whether to exercise our discretion to, to adopt one of the. Yes. Yes. You can look at, unfortunately, the board may or may not know in subsidized housing, unlike in other projects, we cannot charge the residents for parking. I know that 1165R, there was a requirement that the residents be charged for parking. HUD does not allow subsidized tenants to be charged. So that's not a mitigation factor that we can utilize. We would say that with respect to the trend, transportation demand management plan that we have the, the public transportation there, we have the LWI greenway there. We have the LWI station and those would all be appropriate. I would suggest transportation management practices that would result in there not being the need. I would also want to point out and I've provided the board with a chart that Erica Schwartz put together regarding three comparable properties, 117 Broadway, which is 14 units with 13 parking spaces. At that site, only 11 spaces are utilized at 112, 114 Lowell Street up and down in square. That is 34 units with 22 spaces and only 13 spaces are utilized. And then we have 252 260 Mass Ave where there is 32 units with 26 spaces and only 15 spaces utilized. So you can see, and we, the reason we know what is being utilized is the housing corporation and its management company operates on a strict sticker system. So you have to have a sticker to park your vehicle. So you can see that the use at these, the parking use at these sites because they are transit oriented and public transportation oriented is very low. And we would suggest this would be in keeping with what 10 sunny side have will produce as well. Thank you. All right, so I guess then, just if the board would just, unless anybody would like to start asking questions of Mr. Simulka now, why don't we go to UTL and have them address their part so that we have a picture of the whole. Okay. Without objection. Is it Mr. Buren sir. I'm not quite sure who will take this one. I think Michelle is going to present the, the updated studies for the byper. Yes, I can do that for shell here. Hello. Good evening. Good evening. Okay. Can you see a. A graphic that says 10 sunny side Avenue and big font. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you. So this is where we left off in terms of the plans that the board has seen. After receiving comments and doing a further study. We have looked at the capacity of the ground floor to accommodate bike parking with the following. Especially in adherence to the Arlington bicycle parking guidelines. So what we're showing here are long term bicycle parking areas. We've got the long term parking spaces in three zones. Over in the garage over on the upper right hand corner here. We're showing 38 spaces. 15 of them are. Are you racks that doubling. Doubling to 30 spaces rather. And then we're also showing two stackers each. Accommodating for. Bicycle spaces. So that's a total of eight. In the garage as well. We've got some more you racks near to the entrance to the garage here. And recall that the garage has a rolling door. It's a secure garage. So these bike, bike spaces are within the enclosed space. And there are three racks for six spaces. We're also having additional. Bike parking over in the building portion. With entrance from the lobby and then a double door out to. Egress over on the left here. And that's showing. A stacker for four spaces. And then eight you racks for 16 spaces. So in terms of long term parking. We're seeing. According to the guidelines that were required to have. You know, nearly 65 spaces were providing 69. For short term parking. We have located. You racks over. Along the sidewalk here to, to the left and two to the right of the main entrance. Right along the front. So it's within the 50 foot zone. We're required to provide nearly five spaces. And what we're providing is eight spaces. We presented this close up view in our, in the presentation of the project previously. So I do want to say that in terms of the, the layout and dimension, this is going to be further developed with the landscape architect and in conversation with the, you know, with the board. So just, just kind of putting that in the back burner for that discussion. So we're going to go ahead and. And then we're going to move on to the next slide. So just, just kind of putting that in the back burner for that discussion. But I did want to show in a close up. The street short term bike parking in relation to. The ground floor street presence. The, the way that the building. The entrance to the building, the, the office area. And entrance to the parking garage. And then a word on the stacker. There's got to be a lot of them. Each stacker accommodates four bikes. It is a tiered system. These that were proposing to use in the project are. Quite user friendly. There's no, you know, lift or, you know, required that's got an incline that you can roll the bikes up to. And then there's like, like a lever mechanism. To bring the bike up to the second tier. friendly. I know that a few folks on the team have used them and so they can comment on their personal experience with them. We're proposing 12 spaces among the 69 that's long-term parking, which means that the other 57 would be for would be the URAC ground floor mounted bike spaces. I can bring any slide back up but thank you very much. Thank you. So just as one note, one of the practice we usually have is when you give a slide presentation we ask you to submit the slides for the record so it's easier to go back to them and see it all again. Okay. So if you'd be willing to do that we would appreciate that. Absolutely. So Connor, how are we doing? Is there anything else on the subject? I don't think so. I don't think we have anything to add at this point. Great. Thank you. So are there any questions from the board? Mr. Chair? Mr. Klein. I have a few questions. So just for reference from ditch engineering, did you do actual pool site counts of traffic and when was that done? I'm sorry, you broke up a little bit there. What was that? Oh, I beg your pardon. So when you were doing the traffic counts, when was that done? You broke up again but I'm thinking you said when were the traffic counts done? Yes, please. November 3, 2022, which was considered non-pandemic times by MassDOT. So it's the new normal. Okay. And do you remember what day the week that was? I think it was actually a Wednesday. Okay. We as traffic engineers only take counts Tuesday through Thursday unless it's specifically requested for the weekend or other days. Okay. Can you speak at all to the nature of the accidents at Broadway and A.Y. for Parkway? I know you had said specifically Broadway and Sundayside it was limited to limited property damage. I'm more sort of concerned for their pedestrian accidents within that data for the Broadway and A.Y. for Parkway intersection. So the Broadway and A.Y. for Parkway, I looked to that there's 56 accidents if you need me to bring this back or 56 crashes, if you need me to bring this back up. But none of them were pedestrians. Sorry. It was only cars or property damage. Okay. Then one of the things the board had been considering and I think you had addressed this. So the number of people who are crossing Broadway at Sunnyside to get to the student bus station across the way, you had said that was about six people in the morning, six in the evening. Correct. Correct. So like one every two minutes or 10 minutes, sorry. Okay. And they were just crossing, just waiting for traffic to break. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't do on-site observations. We had the counts, but well actually, I'm sorry. We didn't do on-site observations at the time the counts were conducted. However, our own site observations that indicated that people only crossed when the signal was backed up, when traffic was backed up from the signal at A.Y. for Parkway. Okay. And then was there, did you notice any sort of pattern to the bicycle traffic from Sunnyside? I'm kind of curious how people maneuver from Sunnyside to the bike way along A.Y. for Rook. We didn't have any specific observations for that in terms of how bicycles cross. However, I think, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to say it. I didn't observe any. So I can't really say how they access. Okay. And then the only question, because I had some stuff for the bike parking that's on the ground level of the building, how is the entry door to the garage triggered? I mean, typically with cars, it's not like, you know, they have a clicker or something inside the car to open the doors. I'm curious how residents on a bicycle are going to open the garage door. Rochelle, do you have an answer for that? I think it would be a conversation with Erica, but yeah, I think it would probably a clicker would be. I'll say I think the answer is probably that they're not going to go through the garage door, most likely, because we have other access points into the garage for people to bring bikes in, and as well as the interior bike parking room has its own exterior door. And I think we had talked. You might bring that slide up to show where those are. All right, excuse me. We have the one bike parking area has the double doors off to the side, but the other areas, I'm not sure if they're using the single side door just past the bike parking, or I don't think they're supposed to be going through the egress stairwell. I think we have a separate pedestrian access door on the left-hand side of the plan there, in the service alley, so people could bring their bikes in and out of that location. Okay, and so the bike parking that's adjacent to the roll-down grill that's not accessed from the grill that's accessed from the on that backside. Yeah, I think that would probably make the most sense. And then, that's a question from last time, so I won't come back to that yet. I think those were all the questions I had. Thank you. Mr. Chairman. So I think this question was broached at the last meeting, and I think at the site visit as well, and I don't know whose purview this would be, but I know we talked a little bit about sort of what happens in terms of deliveries, and I didn't know if there's some sort of standard in terms of the number of deliveries that you would expect for a project of this side, and I understood the comment about having parking on both sides, having a traffic calming effect, but I was in Somerville last week and I got behind on a one-way street, I got behind a FedEx truck, and traffic calming was not quite what it was. It was like I waited 10 minutes to go a block because they stopped like three or four times, so I'm just wondering in terms of where deliveries would be made, would there be spaces that were allocated in front of the building that would suggest that those during certain hours of the day would be reserved for delivery or how would you handle that because I can see that street getting plugged up pretty easily if you get a UPS truck that stops and runs in to the building? Attorney to Pontette, my client raised that issue, we would like to see one or potentially two spaces dedicated on the street push short-term parking for DoorDash, FedEx, Amazon type deliveries to the building with signage, and I think that would probably have to go in front of the Board of Selectment, but designating the 15-minute parking type situations. Okay, thanks. Anybody else from the Board? Mr. Chair. Mr. Rickardelli. I had two questions. First on the traffic study, I'm just wondering, we spoke about the intersection at Sunnyside and Broadway and the intersection at Elefbrook. Is it anticipated that none of the cars will sort of go the other way into the neighborhoods, maybe just snake their way through to Mystic Valley or the other side of town? So there's no guarantee that everybody will go towards Broadway. However, we like to study the areas that are going to see the most interactions and where we're going to see the greatest impact and through a neighborhood that are generally quiet streets, it's not generally within the study scope. So we just, for another conservative measure, just assumed that all traffic was coming out of Sunnyside onto Broadway. Okay, understood. The reason I'm asking is just because those streets are all pretty small and low volume. I imagine they don't get much traffic now and I'm guessing. It's exactly it. I mean, you might get the local people that know the best ways to go, but for the most part, everybody's going to probably come out. Okay, understood. And one other question. On the interior of the garage parking plan, I'm just wondering at the sort of dead end aisle that we don't have to plan up again, but if you come in and take a left. Oh, thank you so much. Are you anticipating any problems with, you know, not having the hammerhead at the end spaces in terms of getting in and out of that last space for residents? Sorry, you're referring to this area here? No, sorry. The parking space that striped all the way to the top left of the plan. At the end of the aisle, Risha? Yeah. On the left. I think we have a couple extra feet there. And I think we need to, you know, continue to go through some refinement of the structural layout and the striping of the parking spaces. But the idea is, you know, it's obviously a tight parking spot. We'd like to have a little bit of buffer there to facilitate turning around, but we're not going to, you know, fully extend the full car length, obviously, in the back there. Yeah, you know, usually we see, you know, three feet or something just to allow the maneuvering of backing out and getting, you know, the other direction without hitting the wall. So yeah, I'd say we have two feet now and we'll probably try to adjust that to get as much as we can out of the structural grid. Okay. Thank you. That was it for me, Mr. Chair. Are there any other questions for the board? Mr. Chair? Ms. Hoffman. I have a question that's related. I think it's for Mr. Zamocca. With regards to the traffic study that was conducted, it came up on our site visit that there may be some nighttime activity with some of the trucks coming and going from Aromont fueling. And I just presumed that the traffic study was conducted during the day and not through the night. And I'm just wondering if the team has any sense of the volume of activity. And I guess I'm just not used to having those two uses right next to each other. And I'm wondering if there are any sort of special considerations for having kind of large trucks coming and going right next to a spot where there may be now heightened pedestrian activity at different times of day, most especially at night. So we did not collect truck traffic at night. We only collected it during the peak hours, which is the focus of the commuting times. I cannot really speak to how much truck traffic is generated by that other development at any time throughout the day. So I really don't have an answer for you, unfortunately. I don't know if anybody else can answer that question. Well, I apologize. Well, I would say, Ms. Hoffman, that the Aromont trucks at night would only be going out on emergency calls. It wouldn't be like the nine to five that you have the trucks going in and out. So it would only be emergency type deliveries. Just following up on that, I thought that the, so when we had our site, our site walkthrough last week, the owner of the fuel business next door was there. And I thought he said that they start bringing vehicles in around one o'clock in the morning to start filling them up so that they're ready to go first thing in the morning. That may violate the town bylaw, but we can check that. Yeah, that's what I remember as well, which is part of the reason I was asking the question, but I think it would be good to get to the bottom of what some of that nighttime activity is. I should remind you that the owner of the Aromont station was planning to put something in the record either by appearing tonight or by something in writing. And when we have that, rather than just the conversation to go on, we might be in a better position to get to the bottom. I have a question for you, if I may. I'm sort of interested in the in the number of people running across the street at the 87 Bastan. And the thing is, is that if you look at the nature of Sunnyside Avenue now, it's mostly commercial industrial auto use in the area that is immediately next to Broadway. It turns to residential, maybe I guess maybe 100 feet or so past this development, and then sort of snakes its way back. But the people who live on summer, the residents who live on Summer Street are fairly much further away from the bus stop. And many of them much, much further away because that it goes back fairly deep. And so you wouldn't necessarily expect that to generate a lot of crossing crossing the street there. It's not a heavily used bus stop. But if you put 43 units with what 100 people, something like that, about what 30, 40 feet away, suddenly it's a wholly different situation. And I'm not sure what to make of the observation that the current residents in this area don't run across that very often. When this project, unlike what happens with traffic and so forth, could make such a large difference in the number of people who might be tempted to do that, particularly since, you know, the parking is low. And we assume that many of those people are going to be taking transit so that it's more than just a normal amount of traffic generation for that mode and for that reason. I wonder how Mr. Zamolka has any insight into how we might grapple with that. So there's a couple of things there. First, let me just address the first one, which is, you know, the six people crossing the road. I would say it's fair to say that, you know, anybody within a five to 10 minute walk that's commuting to the city or ever that wants to take the bus, that's a very reasonable walk to utilize that bus. So I think the desire from the neighborhood would be the same as for the residents at this 43, the 43 unit residences. I don't think that being slightly further away is really going to impact that. So any crossing, any legal crossings, a percentage of legal crossings, I hope that we continue to be, you know, that kind of trend would continue with the affordable housing development. There's no real way to, you know, honestly say where people will be crossing. However, you know, I don't think that the project in itself is going to create a situation that is going to cause now 30 people to cross that road. I mean, we don't get the trip generation is 18 maximum. So, you know, say there's even 10 people using that bus stop. You know, if it's hard to say how many, but if the trend continues, like I'm saying, most people will use the crosswalk. That's basically kind of what I'm saying there. Was there anything more to that? I didn't address. I apologize. When you say use the crosswalk, I take it you mean we'll go down. Sorry, at LA. At LA. At LA. And the bus, to do that, the bus, the bus doesn't stop again in Arlington past Somerside. So you'd have to go down to Clarendon Hill or get back. But what I'm saying is, you know, it's not that very, it's not far to, if you're coming down sunny side, make a left, go to, you know, make the safe crossing at LA and then come back to the bus stop. I think that's a safe maneuver along a heavily used road. And the trend to keep doing that, I assume that there would be a lot of, like I said, a lot of people in the neighborhood doing that, that a lot of people would choose the safer option. Point of order. Can I just, as a resident, the other thing is. No, no, you cannot. There will be a public hearing and you'll get a chance to say whatever you need to say there. But that's the next stage in the, in the, in the proceeding. Are there any other questions from the board? Mr. Chair. Mr. Holy. Yeah. If I understand that the traffic study was done on November 3rd, is would there be a significant difference had that be done during another month? Would you expect that or would there be something that is already accounted for? So are you referring just because of the month of the year? We apply seasonal adjustment factors with each month. And don't recall right off the top of my head, but if, if it was considered a less, a month where there is less traffic volume than our typical month, we would apply a seasonal adjustment factor to grow those numbers. However, that was not needed for here. So that is built into the engineering guidelines. Right. I can't tell you right now it's top of my head exactly what that number was, but there is an adjustment factor for that. Mr. Zmolkin, do you have any idea what DCR and summer bill are cooking up for the 16 probably intersection? The only thing I know is they plan to study it. So I don't know if they even even started yet. Yeah. And they would certainly intend to make it better, I suppose. If I understand your argument, I mean, essentially the argument is that that intersection sucks today and it's going to suck even more in the future, but this project isn't going to affect it one way or the other. Well, I would say that it's, I would say that the intersection doesn't operate favorably today. However, you know, the DCR and summer bill are going to put their best efforts into doing, you know, what they can to that intersection. I don't know for sure what they're going to do, but options could be, you know, timing, infrastructure, what have you. I don't know, I'm not part of that. So all I know is there is a plan to study it to improve. So I don't think it's to say it's going to be terrible in the future. I think whatever they do would hopefully accommodate the demand. And what you have for the future in your projection is way beyond what you would get just from considering natural development and growth, right? That was around 0.31 and you added in quite a bit more in terms of deterioration factors for Correct. We added in a lot of factors that led to a very conservative analysis, but there's no hiding behind the fact that that intersection is not very good. And if no improvements were made that it would still continue to operate poorly. Would it be fair to say that actually, in some ways, having a big queue there and backing things up makes it easier to run across the street at Summerville at Sunnyside, because now people are basically looking for their chance with the traffic backs up and if it didn't back up as much, they wouldn't have as much of a chance and so they'd have to take more of a risk. Is that sensible? I would say that I can't really climb into the minds of other people, but if I was with my kids, there's no way I'd be running across that street queuing or not. Are there any other questions for the applicant? Okay, so now is the time. We're going to turn to public comment. Before we do, I want to review some of the ground rules for effective and clear conduct of tonight's business. Public questions and comments will only be taken as to the matter at hand and should be directed to the board for the purposes of informing our decision. The matter at hand tonight is basically parking and transportation. We'll have other meetings that will address other things, but we should try to stay within the scope of what you've already heard rather than venture out into new territory. Due to previously demonstrated interest in this project and to provide an orderly flow, the chair strongly encourages individual speakers to limit their content, their comments and use their time to provide comment related solely to this hearing. It would be especially helpful to hear what aspects of the project should be the focus of specific review and discussion that later here. Those calling in, excuse me, the chair encourages the public to provide written comments to be reviewed by the board. It is a lot easier sometimes to remember what you've read than it is to remember what you've heard. The chair is first going to ask members of the public who've previously identified themselves by logging in through Zoom, who wish to speak to digitally raise their hand using the raised hand function, and several of you have already done that. You'll be called upon by the meeting host. You may unmute yourself. You'll be asked to give your name and address for the record, and you'll be given up to five minutes for your questions and comments. All questions are to be addressed through the chair, and please remember to speak accurately, clearly and concisely, and in a way that helps to generate an accurate record of the meeting. Those calling in by phone, please dial star nine to indicate that you'd like to speak. When called upon, you may unmute your line. Please identify yourself by name and address for the record, and you too will be given up to five minutes for your questions and comments. Again, all questions should be addressed through the chair. Once all public questions and comments have been discussed, or we've reached the hour, I'd say about nine o'clock, the public comment period for this evening's hearing will be closed. As noted previously, there are multiple hearings scheduled for this project, and each hearing will have an opportunity for public comment. The board, the applicant and staff will do our best to show the documents, show documents being discussed. If you'd like a specific document to be displayed during your comment, please ask us to do so, and we will do our best to accommodate your request. So I'm just going to go in calling people in the way you appear on my screen, which may or may not have any relationship to when you raised your hand. But the first speaker, Ms. Fontenot, has had her hand up for quite some time, so she gets to go first. Hi, thank you so much. My name is Calda Fontenot. I live at the Broadway Downey Square, particularly Downey Square Development, owned by HCA. Their most recent development at 114 Lowell Street. So from that perspective, I had a few questions. First of all, I understand that there is a request for a larger than normal decrease in parking spots. I was wondering if that has factored in the fact that, you know, this being a lottery system like the Downey Square Apartments were, and low, completely low income, there will be a higher need for cars for people who, for example, aren't as mobile and have a family who are traveling farther from work because they're not from the area. These are all things that we've encountered here. So I'm really concerned about decreasing the number of parking spaces more. I also would like to know if potential tenants will be informed of the fact that they may not have any parking at all and aren't allowed to park on the street overnight. When they apply for housing through that lottery, we were not informed of this. We were never told about the sticker system. In fact, that didn't even come up till seven months into our residency. We were told that it was first come, first served parking in the parking lot. There was no limit to the amount of cars. So I just, I hope that any potential tenants will be notified that, you know, and a lot of people don't know that there is a town-wide overnight parking ban. So, of course, people do inevitably park on the street because they need some place to park and then walk, you know, a very long way. So I was wondering if people will be notified who might be living there that, you know, this is a potential thing that's going to come up. I also wanted to point out that deliveries we were told were barred in our building when we moved in because of the delivery truck. So I hope that that is a sincere statement that deliveries will be able to be made at the new location because since there is no plan, deliveries, of course, are still made out of necessity. So I'd like to know more about what is the plan for street parking, which is inevitable, you know, if people are going to be informed. Also, what is the plan for the trash cans? If you're planning for more people who are pedestrians or riding bicycles, that has been a huge barrier here. Our trash cans are out about five days a week. There aren't enough trash cans. So they're largely open. They stink in the summer and they're in the way. They block part of the sidewalk. So hold them, Ms. Fontano, let me see if I can't begin getting some answers to your questions. I think maybe once we get to trash cans, we may be out of scope for tonight's meeting. But we have a number of other questions. Let's see what people have to say. The first one has to do with just questioning the decrease from the statutory parking spaces and whether or not those are too large, given the demand that you can expect to come from there. The applicant sort of began addressing that before. And I wonder if Ms. Conner who? Sure. Mr. Hanlon, we gave you the statistics for the buildings. We gave you the two most comparable buildings are Downing Square and Mass Ave. And if you need me to repeat the information, 34 units, 22 spaces, only 13 spaces used for Downing Square. Capital Square, which is on Mass Ave, 32 units, 26 spaces, only 15 used. Ms. Schwartz will speak to the issue. So clearly there is ample parking. The building on Westminster has no parking. Ms. Schwartz will speak to the issue of advising tenants that parking is limited. Yeah. And I think that's that's a very important point that for this project, when we market the project, I think we'll make clear what the parking situation is, including the sticker policy and and the policy that we employ, which is that every household can get one sticker. So that people understand both when they're applying, but then also people apply, they go in a lottery. If they're selected for that lottery, then they have a chance to sort of see the unit before they sign the lease. So there's sort of an even closer touch at that time for them to really understand what they're signing on to. And for us to make very clear that no household has more than one one sticker. So this is, you know, you're gonna have this is one car per household max. So that'll be that's an important part of the marketing. Ms. Schwartz, I wonder if we're we basically are having one space for two units. How is it that everybody could have an opportunity to have a space? That's just that we found from the from the numbers that the populations who come to live in our units around 50% don't come with cars and and don't have cars. So we have to navigate that if it got really tight and close. We have to navigate how we'd work that. But that's what we find that depending on which development, it's it's, you know, even fewer than that and some it's a little more it averages out to oddly enough, the same percentage we're proposing here that on average, that's the percentage of households that actually request a sticker. This is 49%. But if you did what would you do if this was an outlier and more than that number of people requested a sticker? I think we'd have to talk with property management about how to accommodate that. In this in this development, it's actually a literally this week I thought I'd like to talk to property management about it. It's not a situation we've had in any of our other developments. But we'd have to figure out a plan for accommodating someone either. We've talked about this. It's not a guarantee. Are there spaces in adjacent properties and where we can rent a space like the large parking lot behind us? It's never full, not guaranteed or finding some other solution. Another question has to do with deliveries. How are you planning on handing deliveries? Again, you spoke briefly about that, what your hopes were for the situation, but maybe you should summarize that. Yes, we would. Deliveries would definitely be allowed and we would want to, I think we would want to make a request to the town to have some kind of, you know, 15 minute, one or two drop off spaces in front of the building. That would be ideal. If not, I fear we might run into the situation that was mentioned where a truck could sort of clog up the road. But yes, deliveries would certainly be allowed and expected. They're very so common these days. All right. Ms. Fontano, is there anything else? We've gone quite a while now on your questions and I'm wondering if we can get to someone else. Thank you. Thank you very much. Move on to the next person. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Acosta. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. So a few comments. I think, although I do like biking, biking in the winter is, can be kind of tough. It is New England and not having a space for a car would be difficult for those situations. I also think that not having a space for a car would limit your access to Arlington, not so much a suburbilt, but taking a bus into Arlington or taking the kid to Boys and Girls Club and then for swimming and then like a field in the afternoon. That's kind of where I use most of the cars that we drive into Arlington. So I think that would be a little bit isolated from the facilities of the town itself. It takes about 40 minutes of public transportation to get to Arlington, the other edge of Allington, and you can probably get to downtown Boston in 40 minutes with the subway, right? That's just another point of why you need a car in this town. Fortunately, it is the U.S. As far as a bus 87 stop, that is stop is half the time unusable. It doesn't get a lot of attention in the winter by the town. It's at the edge, so it's usually covered in ice in both directions. There is no shelter. The snow bank can be pretty high, so it's difficult to get to. And on this traffic, you can actually most of the time beat the bus by crossing over to Clarendon Hills and catching the bus there if you miss the bus stop, actually. So those are a few things to consider. I mean, the traffic there can be so bad you can actually catch the bus in the next stop if you miss it. And if you come back from a second shift, that intersection, which I don't know if a lot of people in this building will do, that intersection, the bus service will probably stop at Clarendon Hill. The walk between there and this, I mean, it can get very icy and dark crossing that highway. And my last comment, it is kind of in a buffer zone, so I will continue to advocate for a smaller project. This area of Arlington has the, you know, the flights going over it because we're a low density zone and we're next to the highway because we're a low density zone. And we're next to probably the worst quality river in the metro area on the Brookside. So I do think a smaller project fits better in this area with people having a car that they can access all the facilities of the town. Otherwise, I think we're creating an area where people are just going to go and live their life in summer building. And I am for affordable housing, but I want it to be high quality and I want it to be integrated into the town life. I don't want it to be low quality and isolated. And I think this project, by the size and all the things that it's giving up in terms of the ordinances is kind of becoming that. Mr. Acosta, I wonder if you could, I forgot to ask you to identify yourself and give your address for the record when you started. And I wonder if you could do that now. Yeah, I live on Michael Street. And I commute most of the time by either walking or biking into town. And I commute most of the time into Arlington by Macar, just to give you an idea of what being on the edge of town on Arlington is like, right? And I like having a car for the winter and, you know, in case there's an emergency and you need to make a quick run to 24 hour pharmacy or to access all the facilities in Arlington, like the meadows that are not easily accessible by a public transportation. So that's kind of like how I use my car and I really use it to go into town. I really use it into the city. I really use it to go and use the facilities in the town. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Our next speaker is Leah Broder. Hi, this is Leah. Can't hear me. Yes, we can. Leah Broder, 44 Michael Street. I live a block from less than a block from the proposed development and have been following it closely and attending most of the meetings and appreciate the opportunities there have been to get feedback from the residents. I want to make a note that this particular meeting was not publicized to the abutters. So unless we happen to be on the housing corporations email list like I am, didn't know that the meeting was taking place. So that might affect what kind of participation and feedback you get. Mr. Broder, one thing I would be useful to say for others is that it is not ever going to happen. I mean, the only way to find out, I mean, there are ways of finding out because the BCBA agendas are set up. But we'll be at the end of this meeting be scheduling the next one, but it's not independently noticed each time. This is just one hearing that's continuing from time to time. So you need to, obviously the HCA website is helpful, but you can also get all of this from the ZBA website as well. These things are publicized on our website. So go ahead. I just want to make sure that people understand. Sure, I'll just follow up with a comment about that because it takes about three or four pages to actually be able to register for a meeting. And so once you have the ZBA's page, you need to go to the calendar page. You need to find it. It's not always listed. And then you need to go to another page that gives you a registration that sends you to another page where you actually register. So I appreciate the opportunity to have these Zoom meetings, but I think the way the interface has been designed is actually pretty unfriendly for users. And I can, and I know for myself, especially if you're in transit or trying to hustle between two activities, which at this time, if many of us are, it can be an extreme challenge to just get here. So the members all feel your pain in that regard because exactly the same system you do. So anyway, it'd be a nice time to address the transportation aspects of this proposal. Okay. So first, I would like to say that in the year 2022, there were a thousand working hours, peak hours, and we're looking, we have a study based on four of those. So I think it's important for the group here who's making the decision to really take these numbers in this analysis with a grain of salt and to actually rely pretty heavily on residents and shared experiences of life here. So as one, I can tell you that crossing a couple of things I want to bring up. One is crossing a Broadway. I wanted to ask a question too about the data and how that was gathered. So there were no on-site observations taken. So was that, how was the data gathered on pedestrian crossings? Mr. Schumacher? Yes. So we have a count vendor. There are multiple count vendors. Their job is to set up equipment that typically cameras that record video throughout the entire count period. Actually, they record for a long period of time, but they only analyze what we are paying them for, which is the four peak hours, because these are the hours of community concentration. So basically what they do with cars, the same way with the cameras is they do pedestrians. So they just focus on that specific intersection and count how many pedestrians are crossing at the location. They basically count the east side, the west side, and then across sunny side. So they capture all, I mean there's no crosswalks across Broadway, but if you can envision crosswalks, they capture pedestrians going along both sides. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. It does. You're getting to what I was wondering, because what I have seen and, in truth, done is crossed from areas that would be not where the crosswalk is, but mid-block crossings. And so I guess I'm raising the question if all the people who do that same thing, which is more of a mid-block crossing, are getting captured in those numbers. Yeah, so they are. The pedestrians that are crossing at that location were counted, and it's six and six. Okay. So the other thing about commuting that I want to mention, and this goes back to the, I think, limitations of the study, the traffic volume, and as a resident of Michael Street, the traffic impacts to Michael Street and to Sunnyside Avenue as you go north to Mystic Valley Parkway have been completely excluded from this. And the truth is that Sunnyside is a throughway, and people, many who commute in cars to Highway 93 or to Mystic Valley Parkway on points west, or if that's northwest, I never really know, come through Sunnyside. And I think it is important that there is some account taken for the impacts of traffic going in the other direction. So we've talked about the kind of quiet residential neighborhood and the low streets, but I think what you don't capture when you record four out of thousands of hours is the actual, the high speed cars that go on Sunnyside making a cut through or on their way home from Mystic Valley Parkway. So I think that's something that it's important for the board to consider. I also, let's see what was the other question. I had a question specifically about bikes and the bike parking and the, if we could look at that plan quickly that showed the bike parking and it shows access through the double doors to the interior bike parking area. I don't know if we can get that on the screen. Because one of my other concerns that I want to speak to is pedestrian safety on Sunnyside Ave as a commuter, as a public transit user who walks Sunnyside at night or in the dark in the winter. I have lots of safety concerns about just the existing condition, but also the proposed. And so one of them is these two kind of alleyways that go plan north-south on either end of the property on the left and on the right. And I'm curious what the edge condition is between the adjacent properties and these shown sidewalks. Zane, is that? Yeah, sure. So on the on the left side, the adjacent condition is the driveway, like the access drive to the adjacent building that's on the corner. So it's not as if there's a wall or a building right up against the property line. There's a lot of visibility there. Similarly, on the right, we've got another driveway condition. What we're showing here is some planted area along the access path, but then to the right of that is a fence and a driveway for the Aramont fuel company next door. Yeah. And the T is what? There's a box with a T at the bottom right corner. That's a planned location for a transformer. And is there a sound associated with that transformer noise impacts? So, Ms. Broder, this is a little bit out of scope at this point. You have a lot to say, and we appreciate that, but it may be helpful for you to sort of summarize all of that in writing. Sure. Give us something a little bit later on, but there are people waiting to speak. Yes, thank you. So I guess I'll just say that the dispensary to the left, so that's a driveway that's heavily used by the dispensary, and the visibility there is not great. So I feel that that is not a very safe passageway, that sidewalk that's being drawn there. And then on the right, Aramont fuel is completely parked with trucks that are tall. I'm not. And so I know that it creates a very dark and kind of ominous corridor there. And so I just want to draw attention to the theme to consider those two things. Because I think this is about not just cars and bikes, but also pedestrians and pedestrian safety. Thank you, Ms. Broder. We appreciate your views. Ms. Chaplin. Hi, thank you very much. Monique Chaplin, 35 Michael Street. Thanks for the opportunity to communicate my lived experience using Sunnyside. I understand there's been a study, but the actual lived experience can feel very different. It's extremely in the current setup where there can often be cars parked on both sides of Sunnyside. It can be extremely hard to make turns in either direction on to Broadway currently before there are potentially 21 additional cars or 46 additional households trying to use that path. And sight lines can be obscured. It's difficult to have currently because the turn is tight. Cars going in both directions. So often people have to pull to the side to be able to get through, to have oncoming traffic get through. Currently, it can feel both frustrating and unsafe already. And so I have some hesitation and anxiety about the thought of adding a lot more traffic to the area. I was going to ask whether there will be any consultation with the town traffic department to look at possibilities of limiting parking on either side of Sunnyside if this project goes through so that hopefully it'll feel safer for cars going in and out of Sunnyside. Mr. Connard, can you address that? I believe that the town has already, the Transportation Advisory Committee has already given its comments. We were just going to request that the spaces outside the office be set aside for short-term parking. We were not going to suggest that there be no parking on either side. I mean, frankly, you know, we all live in town and this is not unique to Sunnyside. If you go up Highland Ave, if you go up Jason Street, if you go up any of the streets in town and if there are people parked on both sides, you have to pull over and wait until somebody pulls out. So, I mean, this is not a unique situation. Right, but respectfully, those streets aren't having a five-story building put on narrow street at this time. So, I'd just like to note that. And I guess that's all I have to say at the moment. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Chaplin. Mary McCartney, please state your name and address for the record and then it's your turn. Yes, thanks. This is, yeah, I'm Mary McCartney. I live on 35 Michael Street, which is right around the corner from this development. I'm a little confused about, we could clarify something because I thought at one point somebody said there was going to be some on-street parking reserved for the residents. Did I misunderstand that? Is it only, is the only thing or is it the only thing that's going to happen on that street? Is there's going to be a couple of 15-minute parking spots for delivery trucks? Can someone clarify that for me, please? A ladder, the couple of spots for 15-minute delivery vehicles. And that's all. There's not going to be on-street parking for the overnight on-street parking for the revenue. No, you can't do that in the town in any of that. Yeah, okay, okay, I just, okay. I thought you were asking for a variance. I misunderstood. Oh no, no. Okay, thank you for clearing that. I appreciate it. I also want to reiterate what some of the other folks have said, which is that transportation study is kind of different than actually living there. I can tell you that from sunny side, the left onto Broadway is impossible during any kind of traffic time because the red light on Broadway backs up and there's just not enough room. I mean, unless it's, you know, Sunday morning or something, there's not a lot of cars. So I think that it's unrealistic to think that people are just going to go down Broadway. I think that this is going to add a lot of traffic to some of the smaller side streets. It's just not possible to take a left there even now and it'll get worse. Yeah, it really, I know the traffic engineer said, well, crowding is a good thing because slowdown is safer, but it's just, it's not a pleasant street to drive down. It has bad visibility. So I definitely have concern about that. And so if there's more backups, there's not only is there all more fuel, there's also the Latchford trucks, the Latchford landscaping trucks. I think that'll end up rerouting through some of the small residential streets. I wonder if there's something that could be done, for example, I know that like for example, on Route 60, there are some streets that like if you're going down Route 60 in the afternoon, from like Belmont into Arlington Center, there's signs that say no right turn during rush hour so that it doesn't redirect all that big back up onto the side streets. And I just wonder if there's something like that that could be done to protect the smaller residential streets from getting a lot of unwanted traffic. Another question I have is, and it's maybe hard to tell from the drawing, but it looks to me like the garage of the building. The exit looks kind of narrow and you know, maybe the scale isn't quite right or whatever. But if that's like a narrow exit, it will and it could mean that the cars have to exit the garage go way out into the middle of the street. And I just wonder if you know, maybe the sidewalk there could be trimmed a little to allow the cars to not have to go out in the middle of the street and cause some trouble. Is that something that could be looked at? And you know, I might be off base there, but that's how it appears on the on the drawing is saying that's probably in your department. Pardon. Oh, you're asking. Yeah, Michelle. Sure. We were looking, we were considering the pedestrian use of that space and having, you know, a wider sort of curb cut for the driveway as less of a pedestrian friendly approach. So definitely had discussion and response to the ARB comments about you know, safety and, and, you know, intercommunications between vehicular traffic going in and out and pedestrians, you know, warning signals and texture on the cut to kind of slow cars down to help manage ingress and egress. Okay, that that actually makes a lot of sense. Thank you for answering my question. I just in general want to just again advocate for, you know, I know the town needs affordable housing. I, I support affordable housing. I, I support having this space used for affordable housing. I just think it's way that the it is way out of scale for what's in the neighborhood. And I would really like to advocate for a smaller project. I just think it's too big for the area. But again, we'll look forward to having our new neighbors, but we just like a smaller project. Thank you for considering my accounts. I'm all Thanks for sharing your views. And I'm sure we'll see you next time because we did last time too, as I recall. And yes, you will see me. Welcome. Thanks. I welcome Mr. Capri. Whoops. Yes, Mikhail Munoz Capri. If I've said your name right. Are you there? You're flashing it off. Why don't you hold on? Hi, can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you now. Sorry about that. And thank you for saying my name right. I'm Mikhail Munoz Capri and I live in 44 Michael Street. So my question for the board is also in the same line as Mary is if you could study the traffic impacts on Michael Street in particular, since I live in Michael Street, in particular, any effects on loop traffic derived not so much from the residents of the project, but from the residents of the project clogging Sonny site and therefore many of the truck traffic and others coming down from Sonny site redirecting via Michael Street to avoid that traffic clock. So that's a specific question. Also reiterate the concerns about scale, which insofar as they are pertinent to traffic since we're talking about all these additional cars, which are likely to park in the street. I just want to point out as a resident I was very surprised to see the pictures of the developers used. I share one picture, which is in the record now, which everyone can see, but that's how the street looks like about three times a day when they have the classes in the gym and all the gym users come and park in the street gets basically clogged. That is without this development. So I think that the traffic at the parking space situation and the narrows in the street is a very serious consideration that needs further assessment by the board. So those are main points regarding traffic. So I keep it short there, but also on the issue was mentioned about notification to about others or to people in the affected area. I just want to confirm my understanding was that we should be notified for every meeting there is if that's not the case. And I think countless here, but my understanding is for the public meetings regarding a development, all the affected residents should be notified. It's not the case. Everybody was not notified when this hearing began, but it began on May 2nd. And the practices when the hearing is continued from time to time, new notices are not set out and are not legally required to be sent out. So to follow what we're doing, you'll be here at the end when we pick out the next date and you need to follow our website. And if you get the town notifications, the town notifications come out before our meetings as well. But there's no separate mail notice or publication notice that happens for each session of the hearing. Thank you for clarification. And one last thing I forgot just to add on the Arlman Fool, they also want part of their business, they do certification vehicle inspection for trucks. So that's an additional truck traffic that there is there in case the board is not aware of that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Capri. Mr. Hanlon, sorry, Mr. Hanlon before you go on, just as a general reference to everyone, to Mr. Hanlon had referenced being on the town notification list. So the town has notifications that you can sign up for through the town website. If you go to the town website and in the search box, if you just enter email list, the first thing that comes up is the subscription service from the town. And if you scroll down, one of the last sections is on boards and committees. And if you look for the zoning board of appeals, you can sign up there and then you will receive an email notification every time the ZBA has a meeting. And that's another way to keep track of the meetings that are going on. So if you just go to the town website in the search bar, put an email list. And you can, the first thing that comes up is the subscription service. Thank you, Mr. Hanlon. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Klein. Mr. Mongold. We're going to do Mr. Mongold and Mr. Cadley next. And then that'll be the end for tonight. We'll save whatever is left over. Nobody else has their hand up right now. But we can save that for the next time we all get together. Mr. Mongold. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Neil Mongold. My address is 12 Gradle Place in Arlington. And I am a board member of the housing corporation of Arlington. I have two questions. One, I also am a year-round bicycle commuter. And I was interested to hear Ms. McCartney's comments and that she mentioned she lives at 35 Sunnyside Street, I think is the address she said. Excuse me, it was 35 Michael Street that I live at. 35 Michael. Okay. Well, that's pretty close. So you may know the answer to this question also because I frequently use, for bicyclists, it's quite easy to get onto the bike path by going on, there's a little driveway that's next to 35 Sunnyside Street. It's between, I think, 25 Sunnyside and 35 Sunnyside. It's only, it's about a half a block from the 10 Sunnyside building. And to access it, you go on what appears to be a common shared, like maybe a private way that serves all of the parking behind the houses from, I think, 35 to 133 Sunnyside Street. And what my question is, is that little access point onto the bike path there? Is that a legal access point? Does anyone know, is that public, I've done it myself. So if I trespass, I guess I trespass, but it appears to me that it's a public access on that little short driveway to the bike path. I can tell you I use it all the time, but I don't know it, what, what, if it's legal or not, but people seem to use it. Yeah. Yeah, that would probably be good to clarify with the town. Don't clarify it with the town until you're, unless you're willing to accept the really answer. Well, it was a question because it doesn't make getting to the bike path really easy from the 10 Sunnyside. So my second question is, I guess, a question for Ms. Short Schwartz and Ms. O'Connor, which is, as a board member of the Housing Corporation, I feel drawn to advocate strongly for the town to consider putting in a crosswalk at the Sunnyside Broadway intersection. And I'm not sure if there's opposition or is there, if anyone knows that there is some likelihood that between the support of the Housing Corporation and the residents that a crosswalk, a legal painted crosswalk could be installed across Broadway there. Well, one of the issues is that it just can't be Neil, it just can't be a crosswalk. It would have to have handicap curb cuts and things. I see. So that's part of the reason why the Housing Corporation does not have the funds to do that type of thing itself. But of course, we could ask the town, I don't know how receptive they'd be. Okay, thank you. I should point out, Mr. Mongold, that the report of the Transportation Advisory Committee, while it doesn't go as far as to advocate putting a crosswalk in there, advocated doing in connection with this project in some way, doing a bunch of preparatory work, things like putting in curb cuts and handicap stuff so that it facilitates doing that down the way. So you may want to take a look at that and see what, because tech advice would be involved in any further discussion of that issue. So you may want to take a look at that. Okay, thank you. Okay, if that's it, Mr. Mongold, our last speaker for today is Mr. Tadley. Yes, thank you, Chairman. My name is Frank Tadley. I am attended at 114 and also a member of the Board too. I just wanted to bring in a little reality here. At 7 o'clock tonight, there were eight parking spaces and one handicapped space still available. And after the last meeting at 9.30 at night, there were two parking spaces available. So chances of it always being full is not strong, I would say. And also, I've lived here for 13 months now, and there's not a lot of bicycling people here. Most of them are actually toddlers and young kids being supervised by their parents. And so the numbers of spaces are probably more than sufficient to carry the needs for all the bicyclists. The bicycling booth right here in my building right now is incredibly small, and it's still not full. Anyway, that was... Thank you, Mr. Tadley. I appreciate that. So before I close the public comment hearing, I wanted to turn back to Ms. Janowitz. She had made an effort to catch my attention earlier on, and I wanted to make sure that either questions been answered or at least she's been given a shot at it. Yeah, I just wanted to add in terms of whether you cross the street opposite Sunnyside or go down to the light. If you go down to the light and cross there, it's about the same, I think, to walk up to Clarendon Hill where there is seating, although just a little bit. So when I used to take the T, I would do that usually. So it's another good reason to go up to the crosswalk. But there are more lines that go into Clarendon, right? It's not just the 87. I've forgotten what they've done now, but it used to be the 88 and 89 as well. Yeah, and I don't know what they've done now. I think they've cut back, but I'm all car these days, so I don't know. I'm sorry, that's too bad. Basically, it's the 88 and 87. Okay. And then if you walk 15 more minutes, you're down to Davis Square. So it is pretty dense there. Okay, so with that, I close the public hearing for tonight. Ms. Kavanaugh, you're just under the wire. Sorry. This is my first time using the Zoom. I apologize. Do I have a couple minutes? Yes, please. Thank you. Evette Kavanaugh, I live at 32 Michael Street, and now I know how to hear about all these meetings. Thank you, neighbors, for telling me, because I wasn't aware this was going on this evening. I will be participating from now on, but I wanted to speak about the traffic. I am home most of the time, and to let you guys, the board and the rest of everyone know, I often complain to the landscaping and the other commercial companies that are currently on Sundayside regarding how much traffic and how much trucks come down Michael. All the employees who work for those companies also park on Michael Street during the day. And we have a lot of little kids and a couple of senior citizens who are on the street, including one who's going to be 104 this year. So the traffic that flies down Michael Street is crazy now. And I am concerned about those people who do drive, who will be living at 10 Sunnyside, coming out of their garage, attempting to make that right-hand turn, coming out of the garage, and then make a left onto Broadway. It's going to be impossible. I myself never go down Sunnyside during any morning traffic at all. I have to go down Silk because I know, and sometimes I can't even make a left out of Silk, excuse me, a left from Silk onto Broadway. And there is a lot of cut through traffic that comes through Michael Street. So I am also a proponent. I have a lot of friends that live in housing. We need a good place. And I am concerned about the height of the building. I know that's not part of this this time. But the traffic does need to be looked at at Michael. And I hope that we can find a way to cut back on more traffic coming down for the safety of those of us who are here, the little kids who ride their bikes up and down the street during the day. And I particularly my one neighbor across the street who comes out of our house. And I have to go out in the street sometimes and tell the trucks to slow down. And I'm concerned about more traffic coming down that way from 10 Sunnyside. Okay. Thank you very much, Ms. Kevin. I appreciate hearing your views. I'll do better next time. Oh, you did great. And everything else. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So now the public hearing is closed. Mr. Conner, is there anything else that you'd like to add in response to what you've heard? The only thing I would add is our affordable housing consultant reminded Erica and myself that the subsidy providers look to the applicants for a comprehensive permit for affordable housing to reduce parking. So that is what, in keeping with what we've been directed to do as well. So I would only add that. Okay. Are there any questions from the board? Mr. Chair? Mr. Klein? The only other thing I wanted to mention, there was a question about those rates about overnight parking of cars on the street. I did just want to clarify that, you know, this, because these will be residents of the town of Arlington, they would be eligible for the overnight guest parking program that the town has, where you can request up to 14 nights of parking on the street through the police department. And so the residents would still be eligible for that. But otherwise there is no, no on-street parking at this time. There's a pilot program that the town is talking about, but I do not know the status on that pilot program. Are there any other questions from the board? Mr. Chair? I think I lost your audio. One small question. I'm just looking at drawing C2.00. It has an access aisle next to a handicap parking. I think there are two handicap parking within the garage. One has a van access, and the other one has just an aisle. There are columns in the aisle. So is the intent, well the question is do we need two accessible parking spots? And if the aisle has already columns, does it mean we're going to lose another spot to accommodate for the aisle? So I guess that's probably Ms. Aimee. So you're referring to the, there's an ADA and van, and there's sort of the open space between them. Right. There is a, I see a column shown on C2.00 and also on the architectural drawing. Yeah. I think, you know, to Nick's point, Nick Biren's point earlier, you know, there's further refinements in terms of structural framing system and where things land, but we can certainly shift parking spaces around to clear any obstruction that might be in the way. So the two are needed to access, you know, handicap parking spots. Okay. And then the aisle will be adjusted to clear. Okay. Thank you. So I have a question for Mr. Zamalka. One of the things that you've done, and I understand why you've done it, is you, but by not doing a mode split, you've essentially exaggerated over what the real thing it would be, the traffic generation that's attributable to the site, because given how heavily dependent it is on transit, given the information you've already told us about the relatively modest need for parking spaces, using something that is nationwide and is based on more car-centered communities than we do, probably overstates the amount of parking generation there is. And while it's conservative in figuring out the numbers are for the burden on the intersections, it may give a misleading impression for other reasons about how much parking generation is genuinely thought of. So when I listen to the conversation about parking spaces being only half as many, but nevertheless, you've got in other places, you've got empty spots. I keep on thinking that, well, those are people who are not going to be generating automobile traffic that's going to be causing kind of the problems that we've heard tonight. And I'm wondering if it's possible to just, I don't want you to do it the second actually, but for you to sort of go back to your office and just think a little bit about what, if you did a reasonable mode split, what the actual traffic generation is likely to be given, given the site and given the nature of the development you're proposing, that might provide us with a better sense of a number of other issues that don't end up being in the bottom line that you've studied, but are still going to be important to people. Okay, yeah, I don't have that answer with me right now, but it is something that I can provide. I think it would be helpful to have that in the record. Mr. Handling, can you clarify what you mean by, would you say road split? Mode split. The traffic generation from this site, with the IT, the basic document has in it involves both vehicle trips and pedestrian trips and transit trips and various kinds of ways of all of trips and they're all added together. And what Mr. Zamolka has done is assume that those are all vehicle trips. And he did that because he doesn't think, he thinks that that's a very conservative thing to assume and if he doesn't show any substantial impact on the intersections with that, then if he does the mode split, it's not, it's going to be even less than that. So basically he'll be okay. The thing is, is that what many of us have been talking about during the course of the afternoon or this evening has related not to how they all fit into the situation at Alewife and Broadway, but in general, how much more traffic there's likely to be in the neighborhood. And to do that, it's helpful to actually go through the extra complication of figuring out what trips generated by this site would not be vehicular trips. And so they would take into account different modes of transportation. So the fast way of saying that is mode split, but that's what it is. Mr. Zamolka, did I get that basically right? You hit the nail on the head. Very impressed. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that. Mr. Hanlon. Mr. Dupont. Yeah, just a quick follow-up question. So I did hear some of the neighbors suggesting that they had concerns about traffic not going out to Broadway, but actually sort of tracking through the neighborhood on Michael Street, heading in a different direction. And while I don't think that the overall trip generation was very great anyway, I was just wondering if that's something Mr. Zamolka took into consideration as far as if people came out of the building out of the parking lot and instead of taking a right to Broadway, took a left to go the other way around. Because I realized that a lot of what I think that the neighbors are concerned about really doesn't relate to the building that we're talking about directly. But they do have a concern, I think, about what more traffic they might be seeing. And so if that's something also that you have data on or could make an educated sort of guess on, I'd like to hear what that would be as well. So I don't have any data on that. But just to put it in some context here, we have 18 cars exiting, I think, whatever it was. It was 18 and 14. That's one car every three minutes. And one car every three minutes is not all going down Michael Street. That is even if 75, even if 25% of that one in three minutes went down Michael Street, we're talking traffic that might not even be noticed. That's helpful. Thank you. Any other questions from the board? All right. One last one. Yeah. Again, I'm not trying to get into two weeks at this time, but I'm just so focused on the parking, which is concerned for some of the residents' neighbors here. It says 23 feet wide aisle for parking there. Is that what the zoning bylaw does it meet or has it been reduced? Mr. Question. I don't think that's a zoning issue actually, but there is a standard. And I think this is a little below it. Mr. Stain, I think that you're probably the one who would know that best. Yeah, I think, you know, again, through further like refinement of the pieces, the assemblies, that dimension would get more settled, but also that it would sort of, they're the umbrella of the variances being sought. So we did ask for a waiver as to drive aisles. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Sorry. Of course, we provide as much clearance as possible, but yeah. Sure. Understood. All right. So with that, we've come to the end of of our session together. And I think that we've got lost to go back and think about. And one of the things, the thing that we have to think about right now is when we're going to do that extra thinking. And what I would like to, I've talked to Ms. O'Connor about trying to gather together for another session of this on the 13th, where we would deal primarily, I would say with architectural issues. But by that time, I would hope to have our consultant on there to give at least an overview of his thinking so that we could get busy and deal with that. As far as I know, nobody has vetoed that yet. So I'm waiting with bated breath to see whether anybody will. But is June 13th an acceptable day to you all? Yep. All right. And let's do that. And as Ms. O'Connor will set up the thing that I think that that'll be the things we will then have by that time out on the table, a whole lot of stuff. And I will spend the time, especially once we have a consultant working through what the consultant has to say, who will work with the HCA team on resolving various issues and will carry on during the summer. So we'll be gathering together, I hope, because there's a motion yet to come. Gathering together, we will continue the hearing until date certain of June 13th at 7.30 p.m. Is there a motion to that effect? Sure. So moved. Mr. Klein moves. There's a second. Mr. Dupont. So we'll take a roll call vote. Mr. Holy. Aye. Mr. Klein. Aye. Mr. Dupont. Aye. And Softman. Aye. Mr. LeBlanc. Aye. Mr. Riccardelli. Aye. And the chair votes aye. One question I have, one date that is a possibility for getting together again, and it's a little bit too early to say whether this will be right. But if we, July 11th is also a Tuesday, it is the week after the 4th of July. And when people whom I know are going away are going to be back, and I don't think I don't necessarily need, is there anyone who knows they couldn't make the July 11th? So if you can maybe keep that open on your calendar, it would give us some flexibility and further scheduling. All right. Is there anything else that we should discuss before we go to adjourn, Mr. Klein? I have nothing further. I did not get an opportunity to post the final version of Mr. Dupont's written decision that came out early this week. So I apologize I didn't have that on time for us to vote on that tonight, but we could vote on that next time. Okay. So we have our next meeting today is the 16th. Our next meeting is the, is it the 20? 23rd. The 23rd at eight o'clock for 10, 21, 10, 27, Mass Ave. I think Tuesday the 23rd is our standard meeting. That's the standard meeting. So we have another meeting. On the 26th, we're meeting at 8 p.m. for the other one. So I had it headed around backwards. So if anyone wants to check in on any of those, you're all quite welcome as you always are. All right. If there's nothing else, the chair would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Seconded by Mr. Dupont. Mr. Holy. Aye. Mr. Klein. Aye. Mr. Dupont. Aye. Ms. Hoffman. Aye. Mr. LeBlanc. Aye. Mr. Riccardelli. Aye. And the chair votes aye. We're adjourned. Thanks for everybody. Thank you very much. Good night. Good night. Good night.