 Welcome everybody, thanks for coming, see some familiar faces and some new faces in the crowd, so thanks for participating. Welcome to this first spring engagement session here about the physical growth master plan. I just wanted to give a summary of what a master plan is because maybe some people don't understand what a master plan is. It is aspirational documents that we can use as a community based on community feedback for future development. It's not a capital investment plan, it's not a zoning ordinance. It's a framework and provides roadmap for future analysis to achieve the vision that the community has laid out within the master plan. So that is what we're trying to accomplish here in this master planning on this site. So I just want to give you guys that update on what we're doing here and introduce Stephanie Clark from White River Real Estate Advisor to our consultant. So good to see everybody, thanks for joining us on such the only window of nice weather we're going to have the entire weekend. Thanks for being inside with us, we will get outside a tiny bit at the very end if you are interested in getting out there. But we really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us to get updated at the spring stage of phase one of master planning. And I'm Stephanie Clark with White Burke De Saladino from VHB and Mike Vini from Black River Design are also here from the consulting team. And Evelyn Prem, the communications coordinator for the city is also joining us today. We have the mayor joining us today, I think that's off Sal, another city council, there he is. So thank you all for joining and thanks for taking the time and being interested and invested and for the folks who are here for a third time. I really appreciate your continued investment and we're going to take some time starting with the presentation because there's a lot to go through. We've done a lot of work in the last few months and we've done a lot of work to get to this point. So there's going to be a fair bit of explanation here and I'll ask to hold questions to the end. There's a lot of time for questions as the thrust of today is not, we're not planning any exercises or anything. We're just going to try to explain what we've been doing and then get into Q&A and feedback to really get into things. So we're going to talk about the process that we've been through. We'll talk about what we heard in the winter sessions that we were all present to. We're going to talk about the data that we brought back to the city council and how that evolved into these concept plans. There are the full-size plans here to look at. We've got slides that will be, of course, harder to read. These are also all available online. So the concept plans themselves, some of the cost data is online and we're going to be updating materials online. So you have a chance to kind of get a preview now and then go check out the materials afterwards. So we are, and then yes, we'll talk about costs. We'll talk about some funding scenarios and talk about what the actionable master plan will look like as well as then take questions. So this phase one of the master plan started a year ago, really, when the city purchased the land. Then in the fall the consultant team was hired and we started a separate new public process. A lot of you were in attendance for that. We gathered input on the site concurrently working on the data of the site itself, new diligence on the actual property and the physical elements and natural resources. In the winter we took a new opportunity to look at the plans combined with the input and talk about what's called opportunities and constraints planning to kind of see what direction community wanted to go in relative to this idea of housing and recreation. The land was purchased for housing and recreation. That is what we are supporting here but what balance of that was really the question for the winter phase. In this phase we're working on the concept plan and the concept plan is what will be incorporated into the actionable master plan. The actionable master plan is not just a plan, it is a document that has the recommendations, has some guidance, has next steps baked into it. This is not by any means a final land plan. There's not a developable scenario here with design or anywhere near the detail that's needed. It is a vision and there are many factors subject to change but if you don't have a vision, you don't have a direction, how can you come up with a list of next steps? So there's a lot more steps required. One thing I want to acknowledge is that we know that there are immediate recreation and housing needs in the community right now. So it's a balance, it's a tension between wanting to have a very inclusive and transparent and thoughtful process while also taking practical due diligence steps to keep the process moving. Because this is likely a ten year project but you can't get to ten years without taking the three month steps and the two month steps and the six month steps. So we're moving forward with some urgency while still trying to remain inclusive. So where we are today, we had a meeting with City Council in March to bring them up to speed on the findings from the winter. We have these concept plans we released. We're having some public meetings. We've also put out a big campaign to the community for input because we recognize that you folks are here today to devote two hours to this but not everybody can. So there's a video online that's a short less than ten minute video to explain what we could in ten minutes or less. There's the survey to take and we've been a lot of fliering, a lot of education but it's going to rely on people who are invested to keep talking about it too to get a lot of input. And we're going to open the survey on Monday. So May 1st, how May is next week is beyond me. So May 1st through May 12th, the survey will remain open and then we'll close the survey, gather the data, gather our recommendations and put that out to the City Council for a meeting on the 24th. That will decide which of these three concepts gets added to the master plan document and that gets set as kind of our course to go forward. And in June the team will bring back the actual master plan and present that to the City Council of the community which will end Phase 1 and continue and launch Phase 2 with the next steps that need to happen which there are going to be plenty of. So what did we hear in the winter is where I want to recap because folks who weren't here or people who were here and wanted to know what others said, we had a ton of participation. We were really thrilled that we had a lot of people come to meetings. We had a lot of folks take the two different surveys. We had a high school survey. We had a public survey. We had over 12,000 data points to collect and try to make into what needed to be included and not be included. And ultimately unsurprisingly in a way, but what was so beautiful about it is that it was pretty clear that there is a desire for a balanced site. This is not an all rec site. It's not an all housing site. There's a balance of rec and housing on this property that will address the high housing need as well as the need for indoor and outdoor recreational opportunities. Everything from racquet sports to swimming pools to outdoor fields to trails to fields and multi-family housing, single-family housing. Across the board there was support. And the specific piece around housing is that there was a need and a desire really overwhelmingly from the community for a variety of different housing product which we understand will hit a lot of different affordability levels. And there's only so much of that that the city can control, but we've tried to address that and I'll talk about it. There was also strong support for conservation, balance of trails with developed spaces and impervious land. Incorporation of spaces for abnaki recognition and celebration and education. Gathering spaces, wildlife corridors and connection to the surrounding parcels and transit connections to other parts of town. So a lot of strong support for a lot of things and what we're trying to do is try to see how we can accommodate that. There was strong support for energy efficiency and minimizing impact on the climate. And strong support for minimizing impact to taxpayers. Easy, easy little wish list. So our job's been fun. So the concept plans that we've brought forward that we'll go through try to reflect a lot of these desires and a lot of the things we can control and the things we can affect, we can solicit from the developers. And that a lot of what has been heard will get incorporated, if not on an actual plan, because it may not be representable, but rather baked into the documents and into the recommendations which are, which is where the meek of it comes. And so there's some things not shown. And there's some things not shown that won't be baked into the master plan either because there are future steps. The developer, for example, will be in control of certain aspects. They will have more of a handle on the market and the market analysis at that time. Because again, if this is three years out, there may be different market demands. At the time the city partners with the developer, there's the opportunity for the city to have a conversation with the developer about that housing product. But that is not reflected. That level of housing affordability we can't know at this stage. The exact housing product, the exact technologies, everything from geothermal to a tiny house design isn't reflected here because that's going to be down the line as a future phase. There's things not reflected like neighborhood amenities like amphitheaters and playgrounds. Those are included here yet. That's a little premature that comes to future phases. We've also met with some representatives of the Abnaki community and have chosen with their collaboration not to represent specific locations where that would happen on this site because that needs to happen through a more collaborative process. So that will be part of our actual master plan is forming a working group with Abnaki representatives from different tribes to help figure out where the best uses of the site would be for celebration versus education versus recognition. And probably city-wide, not just a micro-focus on this particular site. Future plans will also refine infrastructure detail. This is high-level infrastructure detail. This is not down in the leads on exact engineering. We've also accommodated wildlife corridors. That was a concern that came up a few times, but they're not specifically called out. They naturally have been built into the flow of the sign and Dave can speak a little to that. And then most significantly that everyone's probably noticed and we've talked about in our materials, but we've called out this zone. It's called the Recreation Community Zone, which is a 12-acre parcel. And what has emerged is the need for the city to be doing a much more comprehensive and immersive process on that planning and programming. And what that means is that there's a concurrent, but separate, like a parallel process happening between the city, the Rec department and other Rec stakeholders and we'll be ramping up in fact more to determine what that programming should look like, both indoor and outdoor recreation. It became apparent that we don't have enough information about the exact needs or the exact desire of the community for those needs at this site right now. So let's take this as far as we can. That process will unfold and the two will run together concurrently. So that's part of phase two and that's going to be called out as well. Okay, I've talked as much as I can for the first part. Dave's going to go and tell us a little bit more about each of the plans. That's just 12 acres. Yeah, it is. And that was determined, I should say, that was determined with help from the Rec department and Rec advisory board to determine what would be kind of the maxed or either kind of optimized area to accommodate this. Under that, if you remember from the first, from the last round, we had three test sketches and there was a zone that kind of emerged for that that showed this kind of layout. These 12 acres out of 136. For just outdoor indoor Rec, not considering trails, open spaces, etc. All right, so with that introduction, I do want to go through the slides. I realize you cannot see a lot of the detail here. Hopefully we'll have time afterwards if you want some folks have a chance to look beforehand. We want to just kind of frame the big picture differences between the three different concepts. Before people doing that, they're just sort of stepping back, you know, as we started to look at this parcel in general. I'm not saying anything you aren't aware of, but this is a fairly unique terrace, you know, along the Mnuski River. There's a lot of circulators, very steep, right? And not a lot of level places that are unpopular. And so this is a very unique site from that perspective. Obviously the golf course designers recognized that and took advantage of the terrace in here. So as we were laying it out, we really wanted to take advantage of the natural layer of the land and minimize, you know, earthwork and reforming the land to suit the development. Also obviously are on a hillside here, so the natural flow of water is heading down towards the rivers. We've got all of the streams and existing culverts and waterways that are here before. So we want to play into that, kind of listen to the context of the water flows and the terrain. And then obviously we've got some nice views from the advantage points right up here from the top of the hill, looking at that camel sump. We also want to kind of take advantage of those things as well, really play up what the amenities are upon the site. So as Stephanie alluded to, we've got three concepts. These were developed, these were refined from the winter stage where we had three different concepts. At that time we were looking at a range of, we had maximum housing from one end to maximum recreation. So the idea of the winter was to look at that range. We took the input and developed these three. And so the main variable across these three is the number of housing units. So the one that we're looking at here in concept A has the most number of units. So here we're at 294 total units. And so just to kind of walk you through the overall, because most of these kind of fall in that general, the same general main access road. So you can see here, we're sitting right here under this green area in this building. And so as you arrive in this concept A, we've got this first cluster of multifamily housing. This is seen as five-story, so one-story parking underneath and then four-stories of residential. And it's clustered around a community green, a community garden area. Coming back here, these orange are multifamily. They could be duplexes, triflexes, quadplexes, again, depending on the market at the time. We see here as a potential gathering spot for community uses, playground, and other amenities here. And then you do want to know, you can see the purple line here. This is the proposed U32 trail. But then a little bit harder to see here, these dash lines. We do have a network of trails that both connect to the U32 trail and then down here to the trail along the river. So I also want to note on here, you can see a little bit here, the green. I just want to note the green trees that are noted are the existing trees out here. We didn't take the extra step of showing additional landscaping, but did want to show that we're taking advantage of the existing mature trees and don't want to affect those. So those are all noted here as the green circles. Also just a note, in all three, about 80% of the property in total is preserved as natural space. So we're really just talking about 20% roughly of the parcel for any of these concepts. So this has got to be, it looks similar from the overall M spine road alignment. This one has a similar high density five story buildings here, but just out going the parking lot here. We've got our multifamily units here, the community garden space here. The big difference here is that we have a cluster of single family homes out here. These could be smaller homes, tiny homes who want to go in that direction or just kind of typical single family homes. And then concept C, stepping down. So this is 184 units total. And so this is a slightly different concept here as we arrive. This is a five story C shape building. These are two three story buildings. So a little bit differential in height, a little bit less density right at the entrance, still keeping the community garden potentially in this area, community gathering space. And then we have the multifamily units here. This cluster here is retained in this four natural uses for trails and outdoor uses. I think that in total covers kind of the range. So again, we're going from most dense most number of units down to least number of units, but close to 300 to just under 200. Yes, thanks. And we will have obviously more time for questions on this and digs around for that. You know, the test sketch C when we met in the winter was for this balanced housing approach. So we stayed within kind of a range of the type of density that was supported throughout that winter process, which is this range that we're talking about here. And again, all of this is subject to change that the actionable master plan is a living document. As Josh said, you know, it may evolve and the housing needs may change within the next three years in a way that a developer can come in and propose something that's really creative that stays within, again, a plan kind of sets out a vision that the community has. And then when you find these partners who can bring innovative ideas in, maybe there's a way to do a higher density still minimizing impact. And so we want to leave the door open for that. We're going to talk a little bit about cost and we're going to talk a little bit about financing because it's important at this point. There's a lot of numbers and we will be putting materials on the website. But they're also small to read. I'm sorry about that. It's just the nature of presenting. I also don't want anyone getting too hung up on numbers because I get really focused on a number and then it's in my head. But truthfully, this is very high level. This is an order of magnitude. We've got the entire scope of our work, phase one work, was to come up with high level order of magnitude for folks to start putting that together. Forgive me for interrupting. Could you stand to the floor for that chair? Thank you. Yes, I can. Absolutely. Thank you. So I do think the important part here is to understand scale and theory of how you get this built and how the city could go forward in the process of the development of these units and what kind of partnership opportunities there are, what kind of funding opportunities there are. There's a lot more new buildings to be done, so we are intentionally doing this at this point in time because it's hard to conceptualize this without numbers. Quantitatively, it's important, but you have to balance that with the fact that it's so early. One thing that I will mention, it's April now and by the time we present this to council, we will have new debt numbers that we could use, new interest rates we could use. We are continuing to refine estimates, so the numbers that get presented to council in May, that get put into the actual master plan may differ even from what we have here. But in terms of order of magnitude and differential between the three concepts, that's not going to change. So let's start with cost and then we'll talk about how it might get funded. Infrastructure cost here is based on the city's perspective. That's really important because this assumes that the city is going to actually, it's a very conservative estimate, the city is going to build all the infrastructure. That a developer would do their own individual buildings and driveways, but they wouldn't build all of the streets that you see here would be built by the city. And that's a conservative estimate. That may change. You may do a partnership with a developer who's willing to put in for that. We may require as part of the RFP that they put in purchase their parcel for a certain amount. We haven't assumed that here. We're doing really conservative numbers. And this is what the city would be investing in order to catalyze the vision we want. Keep in mind, a lot of what we've talked about for the last six or eight months here has been housing is incredibly difficult to build right now. It's not because we have just hundreds of selfish developers. That's why we're in a housing crisis that numbers just aren't making sense right now. It's really hard to build housing. So the incentive is the whole point of economic development. How can we, the city, roll out a plan that makes it desirable and achievable and feasible to do the type of housing we want? So this assumes the city doing the infrastructure. It does not look at the community in rep zone. As we talked about, that's going to have to follow a separate process. There will be another number that comes out. But we'll talk a little bit about that more. So these are high-level estimates. On-site infrastructure, those two numbers represent what's within the city with the parcel limits here. It includes some things that are listed here. It excludes others right now. Those numbers continue to evolve. We also look at the one that says the new signal around about, which is technically an off-site improvement, but has to do particularly to these concepts. With the first two, A and B, the quantity of units would trigger the need for a development of a roundabout or a signal. But the C would not. So we show that as the differentiation between the three. And that's important as you try to wrap your head around do I want A, B, or C. And then the remaining costs, offset costs and sum costs, those are actually all the same for all three concepts because we're at a level, consistent level with all three plans that would require this amount of investment by the city. Starting with the pump station and off-site water sewer upgrades just to get the water up to the site at 1.5 million. The purchase price of the property doesn't change whether or not we do 180 units or 250 units. It was a $3 million purchase price. So that's already been bonded for and invested from the reparation fund, but it's important to be included in it because it's already being, when we want to think about it, we want to think about the whole cost. And then due diligence, there's consultant fees. By the time you get through more of the engineering, you're looking at usually it could be even more than a half million, but that's the kind of due diligence cost you're going to look at regardless of which scenario. So roughly, if we say 19 million for A and B, they're the same because you can see, as Dave explained, the two concepts have the same road infrastructure, water and sewer infrastructure. And C is where you see a difference with 15, around 15 million for the fewer units. So we're going to talk a bit. I'm going to come back to a few slides, but I want to take a moment to talk about how this hypothetically could be funded or financed. This is not, this actually wasn't part of the scope of phase one that City Council gave us because there is so much speculation, there's so much hypothetical, but as the process has evolved, it kind of feels like half the story to talk about the cost without how you could possibly fund it. So we're going to talk about some possibilities here and focus on a few sources and give you an illustration of how this might work and how it would affect your tax rate because as you talk to your friends and neighbors and constituents, that's going to be a question. How much is this going to cost me? And I understand that. So these are some hypotheticals. For example, we know a million from the Recreation Reserve Fund has already been invested here for the purchase price. That's a source. And we know there are grants available. How much grant month funding? We don't know because in two years it could look very different. There's a lot of ARPA money out there right now that may not be available in two years. Probably won't be. But there are many new sources. Then there's also the developer piece I mentioned. If the developer were to contribute, we don't know what that looks like exactly, but we acknowledge it could be a source. And then there's TIF, which is tax increment financing, which I will explain a lot more in a moment. But there's different ways to do a TIF. The municipality can do one itself and just choose to finance through their own tax revenue, or you can go through a state program and if you're qualified and you're eligible, have a state TIF designation which would allow for more funding. And then there's water and sewer user fees based on the quantity of units could help fund the debt service here. So lots of different ways we could structure this. We have not done all of them. We've done a couple to try to illustrate how this could work. So bear with me. I know there could be a lot of questions on this. There's a lot of numbers. But this is thinking theoretically. So concept A, we said the total cost there was about 18.8 for the first two concepts, and then 16 for concept C. If that's the total infrastructure cost, then we've already got a million in from the REC fund. And then let's assume about 1.5 million. That could be Northern Borders Regional Planning, original commission grants. It could be trail grants, congressional earmarks. You know, we don't know exactly. But let's make an assumption. These are the numbers to look at, the remaining to be funded. 16.3 or 12.8 million depending on the concept. And two possibilities are TIF, municipal only or state. So let me explain what a TIF district is. The city of Montpelier had a TIF district. You might be aware it was a TIF district in the downtown TIF district. It has since been dissolved, but that doesn't mean that the city could come back for another one. But how TIF works at the state level is that, well, it's actually at both levels, the city invests in the infrastructure and takes out a municipal bond. The taxes as the residual new taxes, anything new built after that point, go to pay down that debt service. So it's a nice loop that helps fund the actual investment that has helped make the project work. There's a key phrase here called Buc4, which is Buc4, the city making this investment, the development wouldn't have happened. It wouldn't pencil. It wasn't possible before that. There's great examples statewide. Barry's done it. St. Almond's done it. Burlington's doing it. Kellington's doing it. I always say I wanted to be a ballerina when I was growing up. Somehow I became a TIF expert, but I spent my time on a lot of infrastructure and it's been used very powerfully. It's very effective. The cool thing is that there's a state program that allows, if you go through and get a state designation, you can retain not only a portion of your municipal taxes that are generated, but a portion of the state taxes. So anything new on this site or in your district that would otherwise go to the Education Fund, 70% stays in your district to fund that infrastructure for 20 years. And then at the end of 20 years, all of that new revenue goes to the Education Fund and your general fund again. So it's the only way a city can actually invest in itself and grow itself. Again, these projects wouldn't be happening otherwise, so it's not foregoing any existing revenue stream. So that's TIF in a nutshell. I'm sure you're all super psyched about being experts on that now, but the difference is that you can also do a municipal TIF. So the state TIF, you have to get state designation. The municipal TIF, the city could decide that all the revenue generated on this site could go to pay down the debt service for the infrastructure of this site for a period of time for the term of the bond, let's say. And that's a really powerful mechanism to be able to pay down the infrastructure debt until it's fully built out. So we looked at that and we said, okay, assuming again, conservatively that you use a flat tax rate, never seeing an increase in your taxes for 20 years at the fiscal year 23 tax rate, you generate based on the number of units, that many taxes for the municipality, municipal tax and state tax, those are large numbers over 20 years. That generates a lot of taxes. And if you could split those up and use them to pay for the debt service, how much could you afford to build here based on that revenue alone? So we looked at the municipal only to start. Again, remember we said the amount to be funded after you take out the amount that's invested from the rep fund and the grant funding about 6.3 million or 12.8 million per concept C have to assume cost of financing, your interest cost. And then you take that third line here, this municipal only revenue. This is the revenue from just the taxes generated on this site municipally. And you get closer. You cover about 60% in concept C and more so in concept A to cover the cost of the infrastructure just using your municipal taxes. Well, you also have water sewer fees. Sorry, this is a really busy slide. And I thought of at 11 o'clock last night rounding these up to whole numbers, but this is all from a model. So these are direct from a model that I built that has precise numbers. So the top is what we just saw in the last slide. So if you've got this line here, that's the remainder to be funded, there's a, of that amount that you couldn't fund above, you've got to pay, this was just the cost of the interest to pay what could be funded by the TIF money. Well, the additional cost of financing, if you take the eligible water sewer fees, which water sewer fees can only be used to fund water sewer infrastructure. They can't be used to fund the road infrastructure, for example. So eligible water sewer fees, you see that concept A actually pencils out completely. It covers the cost of the infrastructure because you've got the most units and paying the most user fees, the most taxes, of the three scenarios. And then so on and so forth. You've got remainder costs that would have to be covered in another way, but you see how we can start closing the gap using just tools that the municipality has control over. Then we wanted to look at state TIF. And the moral of the story is a state TIF is very powerful. It has, because you're retaining 70% of what would, of the education fund piece, that's very powerful and very, there's a large quantity there. So you've got the remaining, going back to that remaining amount, the total amount to be funded, interest cost, and then what you would get from the state TIF, which is a combination of your municipal taxes and a portion of your state taxes, then you actually have a surplus. In the case of the surplus, and actually if you added water sewer fees, you could actually even increase the surplus because you'd use those water sewer fees to pay for the water sewer infrastructure and then you'd use debt capacity with your TIF to help fund the REC component. So now we have that REC zone over here that we haven't been talking about. We don't know enough about it yet for costs. But now you see how maybe a state TIF could help offset those costs and you're going to see the most from concept A with the most units because it's going to generate the most taxes, generate the most user fees. So let me get to the takeaways so that we can go back to bigger picture and then if there's specific questions, we can come back to those slides. The cost update, you know, the takeaway on the cost is that A and B are pretty comparable in terms of cost, even though there's fewer units in concept B, the infrastructure requirements the same. So that's a comparable gross cost sitting for the infrastructure. In concept C, you see about 20% reduction in cost because there's not this road system out here, there's been some changes in the infrastructure, but you also see fewer housing units and so what that means is a quick number here, I'll read these out, but it looks like total gross cost is 47,000 per unit in concept A. It goes up to 51,000 per unit in concept B because you have the same infrastructure cost but fewer units and then it goes up even further to 56,000 per unit in concept C because even though you have a lower overall cost, it's higher per unit because you've got, you're spreading that out over fewer units. Again, ranking community zone component is still unknown at this point. So just to put that, to go back to that financing hypothetical and just the exercise of looking at how it could be funded, the city will look for grants, I mean that's the intention, is to continue to look for grants always and there's lots of sources, we don't know what they may be yet but we know that municipal only tip is within the city's power and using that plus water sewer fees can cover a lot, probably most of concept A and not all of it, using the state program would be even more powerful to cover the infrastructure needed for housing, maybe have some left over for recreation and community zone. We know that there's a lot more due diligence, this is only phase one, this is high level starting to get vision and direction and use and scale and massing and that there'll be more work done in phase two and beyond to get clearer on the design engineering and permitting. Specifically permitting could uncover issues and in general any of the further work could increase our costs but it could also expose other funding sources too if you got creative with doing some sort of creative design using mass timber for example on a community facility that would get more into a rep part of things but mass timber has a lot of funding sources right now, that could be an interesting funding source so we keep that door open in phase one and as the partnerships evolve with developers who bring innovation and resources in capital to the table and with the recreational programming, there's a lot of further work to be done, a lot more to discover. So what this means for right now, for phase one, here we are in the spring, stage of phase one we're closing out phase one in the next month and a half and we know the city will continue to need to look at the costs and funding streams ultimately this will come back to the city for the city voters for a cost vote, this is not a cost vote right now at all, so this is when you talk to your neighbors especially if anybody is concerned well how much is this going to cost me right now nothing, like we are the due diligence being done, that's an economic development cost but this is not a vote on ADRC is not a vote for a capital expense or bond at all this is a focus on the vision of what you want for this site so that the due diligence can continue in phase two that's really the important part so the survey that comes out in on Monday is going to ask that you rank choice vote on one to ADRC it's also going to ask to have your rank your support for a community and recreation and community facility on this site that has been a question that the rec process has come back to multiple times, they really need the data and so to keep that process moving we're asking that in our survey so we can keep these two things tied together moving forward and almost lastly that I'll be done is talking about the actionable master plan, what to expect in June it will encompass a lot as I said the plan itself is not the plan, it's one piece of it but we intend to talk about the process with the rec zone hit some of the recommendations which is to explore rezoning this property, right now the zoning is not does not support these explore rezoning, explore the growth center expansion, this is not within the growth center this is, there is no TIF district anymore, this wasn't in the previous TIF district so exploring that working with permitting due diligence setting up the abnaki working group addressing transit issues starting those conversations those partnerships that needs to happen all of this has to happen concurrently in this mix and then really getting into subdivision planning as those permitting conversations and design conversations advance because how do you subdivide the property to be able to put this out to an RFP eventually so the developer can come forward and start paying taxes on those pieces, so you need to sketch those out the right way so what we'd ask of you is to please go to the website review those concept plans take the survey, tell your friends to take the survey and review the concept plans there is a short video online of me as a talking head for nine minutes and it's fine but it gets the point across of some of the messages we've hit here we weren't able to go into this level of detail so his email is on the website, Josh's sending people his way easy for me to say just go to Josh with questions and comments and he's happy to answer them and I'm for the moment so what we're going to do is ask for Q&A and Josh's going to kind of cue people in to you can speak to a question or a thought or a feedback for us and I'm going to get a pen so if I could have you say your name where you live or you ask your question and I'll go to you first in a while I look in more clear and I'm wondering when the recording of this meeting goes active online and will this slide presentation also be on the website I have friends that are not in town right now who want to be involved in this and they need this information really good question thank you I was hoping I meant to mention getting this online Evelyn when would that most likely be available or guys here filming for us so as soon as they have the footage ready and to be loaded up on the website I'll get that up there I assume by the end of next week it's the very latest and this slide presentation will be on Monday as well so we are going to put the slides up on Monday and yes please do tell your friends and there's also two more meetings there's a meeting Wednesday night at City Hall from 5 to 7 it's also available hybrid so you can be online or in person for that meeting and then on the 8 which is on Monday it's a all online version so this exact presentation two more times so there are people that want to queue into that pop on for that I also meant to mention that at the end of this we're going to wrap close to 10 of and invite you to go outside and provided it's not super rainy by that point we're just going to kind of orient you instead of doing a sidewalk which is not super accessible for everybody and we didn't know what the weather was going to do stand out and look at where these things are while you're on site give a little bit of orientation because I think it can be a little confusing if you've not been on the site before gentlemen in the back thank you question and a half this the survey seems to me to be A, B, and C is really about balance my question is what are the conclusions or assumptions to be drawn by the planners including City by the survey results because there's a lot of detail that's not there I assume none of the above isn't an option where exactly the housing is is an option it's really just about balance recreation versus housing so you get this survey response what are the assumptions that you're going to draw from moving forward and the half question was about the recreation facility are we talking about an actual building versus just facilities this is why we're opening the survey after today we should add that because it is the building we're talking about when we say facility we do mean building so we can clarify that my question I think is worthwhile making that clear first part of the question was conclusions and assumptions from the survey do you want to say that at all or yeah well I think your question is getting at what are we getting from the community selecting A, B, or C right part of the winter survey was to get a direction of what the community wants and they clearly said they wanted a balance of housing and recreation which all three of these really represent so it was really just trying to get to a balance that the community is gravitating towards within sort of like this framework including housing product is a particular question while we can't guarantee that this is the housing product that would be developed you know if we adopted that one that has single family in it in three years by the time we get to that parcel that node a developer comes forward and says you know I can actually do some really cool built-in housing to the hillside it's not single family it's got this pivot and that's more appealing to the city of the time that may be the way it goes but this is trying to get some of the nuance between the feedback we heard in the winter specifically these there's one thing I wanted to mention that's not exactly an answer to your question but the beauty of the winter process what it came out to and as we talked with the city council about is that there was so much consensus that we actually got to this point we thought we had more variation by this stage actually between the three but there was so much consensus that it led to this style of variation so now we're really into the nuance of housing product layout density this here and that is what we're going to be then focusing our action planning around and getting to those quantities the quantities matter relative to the next due diligence steps so this is the favorite with the lower quantities we may put into the actionable master plans and different recommendations thanks Jack McCullough one small technical question the post on the city's facebook page said that one of the meetings this week is Thursday, May 3rd so the day and the day don't match up so someone raised that with me so well which is it Wednesday, May 3rd but we will update that thanks Jack the survey is there a way to verify residency on the people coming to the survey well I think this survey you will have to register for a poll co-account which is the platform that we use for all of our surveys so we put in our address so you would be registering I think address is required so we can ask we could have people register to account and ask them for evaluation or we can have them register for an account and still ask a separate question of do you live in Montpelier or an outside neighborhood community but either way we will draw up demographic data so we will be able to align that with the survey results I just would like it to be the community Montpelier that's making the decisions anyone else we haven't decided that yet that's an interesting question because we haven't launched the survey yet we have another meeting Monday to do that working out some of the questions we wanted to see how this that might come from this meeting you know one of the big things that's come from this process is regional support we've heard from a lot of regional groups and a lot of regional representatives who see the value and merit of a site this substantial capacity of the site to support regional one of the big recreational outdoor recreational opportunities here is to host regional events things that would bring people to Montpelier that would help Montpelier's economic development in other ways so and there's a lot of people who I think it might that Matt who might have mentioned it at one point before which is a lot of people want to live here and can't afford to and want to live in Montpelier and this site is the legacy that would allow for people to increase the population and quality of life for a lot of people in Montpelier so I'm not, I hear your point and I'll make note of that but I don't know if it's been decided it will be exclusive to Montpelier residents or not at this stage Steven Seats from Montpelier and if there is a recreation facility here and it would attract kids after school and so forth has there been consideration of a regular bus service back and forth in downtown there's been talk of it it's definitely one of the pieces of that actual master plan is to look at transit issues and opportunities because it would it would necessitate that exact question which is not just the kids but also seniors because this would also facility would also have a senior component to it the senior center and transit would be an integral part of for any program that we would have here so we would have to take that into consideration it's part of the ongoing planning it's also accessible we've got the bike path here too so driving is one way to get your certainly walking or biking too it would be pretty easy I just wanted to follow up Dede Brush I live in Montpelier I just wanted to follow up on the comment about the Montpelier residents versus when you get the results of the survey it would be helpful maybe to delineate x number of people who are out of towners and x number of people yeah I'm thinking of that now that's possible yeah Rob Apple Montpelier Stephanie question why wouldn't you or shouldn't you include paying off that bond that Montpelier voted on as part of the part of the cost you're beginning to kind of say well that's being carried separately oh no no no I'm sorry it is included it is yeah so it's I was saying it must have been stated it's it's on here because we've already put the money in and so it needs to be reflected in the picture we didn't and so it's included in what would be bonded for even though we already have bonded so it would be included yes yes because we wanted to look at it comprehensively we started by we had included it and we said well that's being paid for now but it eventually could be paid for but most of us voted if we voted for against this thing the exception was that bond would be paid off quickly because now we're covering whatever it was $2 million so it's going to be a long time if something happens here right and I mean that would be true if nothing happened here I mean this scenario conceives that the taxes would go to that bond first or you know part of the bond package to pay that down that would be reimbursed basically to the general fund out of these taxes I mentioned to Josh earlier there was some talk about trying to incorporate this personally the city so that it could be exempt from Act 250 review because when you go through Act 250 on this process this project is going to be potentially a very issue a lot of ways so if you can get this into the into the city downtown somehow I don't know I think the growth center is part of what we're going to try to do it for that growth center designation and the growth center legislation around exemption for Act 250 in a growth center is coming we think yeah exactly but duly about it because you're right and it has to be great but we've not assumed that we've assumed Act 250 is going to be required here we're over here thanks hi Jeremy Bowdenberry I live in Montpelier on Elm Street my question is with the three different concepts here there's a range in terms of the housing type housing unit number and I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about how you came to those parameters was it about what the site could accommodate any kind of demographic or trend information about the housing need sure absolutely yeah some of this came out of the process in the winter so having starting with what the site could support so if you ask that so what's the natural resources Dave can talk more to this probably better than I can anyway but the natural resources are limiting factor or constraining factor that you want to accommodate and then product was really selected and designed based on feedback we heard around product interest resounding response was not a lot of single talent just really high density here look at opportunities for affordability because there's no less impervious that's reducing impact on climate and natural resources so those were some of the considerations one of the big thing we if you recall were taking part we had these clusters of zones we were asking to rank what you preferred in each of those zones but came through a lot of clears the density would step back as you go further back so the highest density would be up in this red zone and then step down so we tried to compare that as well and I'm saying with a lot of trails a lot of conserved space so again 80% is open space on all three plans at least 8% this one has more because of such a big desire for that but also because the land supports it and if you can get this amount of density on a smaller amount of percentage of coverage you hit some other goals of course yes I'm curious about where you might stand with the roadway access plan in particular the railroad right way it's just my experience that's always been a real sticky point in the past so I was wondering about that yeah thank you that was one that I hit on that list of actionable master plan recommendations but it is one of them that's going to have to be one of the very next steps to engage with the railroad because it is it consistently becomes a barrier with certain development projects we don't see it as being a sort of deal breaker kind of thing that could halted the project so we cleared that hurdle in terms of being able to say that's not likely to be a deal breaker but the conversation has to happen now once we know density we didn't have a density to tell them until now so you know maybe we'll have a little bit better sense after this but in the last stage it was anything from zero housing units to 500 housing units and that would have made a big difference in having the conversation with the railroad that's one form of access you talked about other roadway connections that's also on the list of due diligence is to look at how and I thought maybe Rob's question was going to get to this but a big question that came out of the last phase was how does this connect with other parcels like savings pasture any development to happen there the intent of the city is the integration of this within the existing planning efforts as well bringing a road network from the west has always been an intent to get that over to savings pasture and then eventually now over here so that's on the list you can see this is one that we've shown to potential connectors we don't know which way will be feasible financially, physically or legally with the conversations and negotiations but eventually with this level of density you probably want two forms of egress and access so there's other types of connections that are also going to have to be explored in phase two yes so what's are there limitations on state graded tips? oh I'm sorry Barbara Henry are there limitations on state tips? I understand in the past you have to apply for them what's the likelihood that Montpelier would get one? being courted ok so now this is a you're absolutely right Barbara this is a the state program requires a designation requires a huge application process there's a limit to the number of tip districts that are allowed for county and a total limit on the number of tips for state in the whole state so the likelihood is hard to predict but Montpelier has gotten one before and showed good due diligence, showed good planning and closing the TIF district is also a prudent move I mean the district was approved in 2017 and then there was a pandemic we're 2017-2018 and then there was a pandemic which halted so much of the development that could have happened so there was a lot of reason to say we're not going to make it there are certain windows you have to do debt with TIF district the five year window we weren't going to hit so it showed a lot of prudent administration and the state has been very respectful of that and very appreciative so we would work to get that designation but I would say it's far from being a guarantee there's a lot of steps to doing it and a lot of criteria that need to be hit including being part of a growth center so getting that growth center designation is required before you get the growth center designation you have to have the right zoning so it's all these these consecutive steps it makes sense to start that process now I mean even before the plans were finalized and all that shouldn't you be going out to the growth center going out to the TIF designation so you know you've got it because I think the concern I know I have as a local resident I don't want to take on another pond they were 13 or 18 million dollars we can't do it the city is taxed to the limit now so we can't we can't go for TIF until we have a growth center and we can't really go for a growth center until we have some sort of visions of property but I would say the answer is yes now like as in following the spring phase one completion start that rezoning because now we know there's going to be housing here we know there's going to be dense housing here in the winter because it could have gone either way now we know that start that then once you have but they're all the requirements so the growth center they without a plan you can't do a growth you can start to do growth center but TIF you can't do until you have a plan that has to be much further baked but the other piece is that we wouldn't go for a bond until we know financing mechanism so you're not going to do the TIF the TIF bond you can't do a TIF bond without knowing the plan and the project you can't do it TIF district is there's different TIFs across the country and some of them have historically and tragically failed because they do that if you build it they will come model and they would run a water sewer line out to their interstate interchange in the Midwest hoping that a Walmart or a Lowe's would come and then it never did and they're stuck with the bill Vermont does not allow that on any level you can imagine there's like zero support for that model completely you have to have a development agreement in place you have to have your financing very clearly locked and loaded and that's why they've been so successful in the state My question it sounds like in the voting between the concept part of what we're voting for is kind of this total unit number and my question is like as things move forward are there any constraints to the density so say if a developer were to say yes I'm interested in this piece of it but found that they needed more density or a higher unit count to make it doable are there any kind of limits where it's like if we got to 400 units then that pushes us into some other category and how much leeway would that developer have in terms of that design a really good question it's like you work in this field yeah so a lot of that is to be determined by city council by a future process so when the RFP goes out there needs to have a very clear process of how the decisions are going to be made and we don't know that right now it's a real tough balance of trying to make sure we're respecting the original intent and integrity of a plan like this while still leaving the door open to evolving needs of a community that you know the state, the levels of housing may change in terms of demand and then also evolving an innovation and possible innovation that could yield better results and hit so one of the things that's baked into the actual master plan are the goals qualitative goals like minimizing impact on climate minimizing impact to tax payers. Can that be achieved with higher density? That may need to be a consideration left open to hit those goals so there's different ways of getting there and I think we're going to try to build that framework as well as we can in 2023 but also reserve the right that the council at the time and whatever working group is doing RFP review has some ability and then ultimately it goes to a vote you know with the municipality voters getting a or an A on the infrastructure and if you see the volume of density of the housing it's way higher than what was wanted but it's going to bring down those numbers and it's going to make it free to the taxpayer and achieve these other goals that's where the group would be to test it out and some of them will also get back into the zoning right how it ends up in your zone there's going to be limits built into zoning yeah that's good. Go back here remember to state your name please Sarah Brock East Montpelier my family owns land north of that that is developable I guess I think and I have a pretty good idea that it's going to be for sale in the not too distant future and so I'm interested, we're all interested in the particular connection and I can't figure out from the map what land that connects to do you know? well, this parcel in particular, Josh, do you know which parcel this is? I don't know I can't remember but we did meet with I know it's to the left of that field if you don't take a break further right that field to the left of that to where the property line is so this is the property line here talk about to the left of that line right down to your line do you want to come up? no this area here you had a road in hers the last time she's right there that's hers, it's right there see this line with golf course comes up she borders that and then a little over to here right to this screen right here that's Sarah's land? no, it's not mine that's her family that's her family I'm sorry that's my name and we met with some folks from well yeah you don't know whose land that is that it goes to I can figure it out we figured it out at one point these are completely conceptual because there could be as we said this is like it could possibly go this way it could go over and then over it very much depends this was illustrative only to show that we need to provide the resources the one you have drawn going north it goes to the the dales property so that's to the west of use there is that definite? no no all illustrative just hypothetical showing how we need to it says potential future vehicular connection location TBD because it's showing that we need to accommodate some other actions but that's going to require conversations with butters it's going to look at the natural resources that have feasibility seems to be the only one that I see on the map there's two yes there's one to say then it's over in this direction and one more inevitably a bridge of some sort or go north of the green bridge I know hi I'm Steve C. so I live on North Street I'm not the same guy as that Steve C. so over there I would just like to say that I think that I personally have a very hard time responding to the survey at this point in the absence of any real hard engineering we have really no idea of the technical feasibility of these pods of development at the meetings and whatever was earlier this winter you heard people asking for slope analysis to see what the slopes are like top of graphical limitations and for other engineering details the western pod in particular is very steep and I just can't respond without knowing whether anything out there is anything more than just a nice picture at this point thanks over here I just want to follow Sarah's question I think out of the right place but the access to her property probably would be feasible for an access to this property but my question would be could be a body of hand owners tie into the infrastructure that's going in the road access and water and sewer can you identify yourself please I have the property to the east of Sarah yeah that absolutely though is one of the considerations would be one of the desires of the city is to see everything integrated you know in order that's one of the best practices in planning to integrate your infrastructure make it so that you can use users over the entire network and it does increase the potential potential of other properties in that area but yes we know that these are not precise locations of access and that there would be a lot of challenges to get to it's not shown on the map but they have a road network that comes in here and challenges from physical feasibility as well as legal and about trying to come up with the right way which is not a clear solution but you know showing it on a plan with like you know about 10 arrows going in 10 different directions didn't seem like the answer either so for right now it's really a next step and just to get back to Steve's point I just want to say that we understand that the engineering is a big piece of the next phase and it has to be but again we can't get to that level of engineering in a phase one of a master plan it's just not what we're planning at this point getting a vote on A to your C allows us to proceed with those next steps proceed with the next level of analysis to start doing more of the design which truthfully may alter what's feasible and we know that but that's why it's a living document that's why you advance concept plans it's very different from private development if you've ever done any private development you have a vision for what you want to build you go in you do the analysis of the site but in that way it's not much different because then you respond to what the site can and can't do and what the permitting can and can allow and that's what we're doing it's just a much bigger process because it's a public process and we have to be transparent and keep releasing iterations of things that in a private development process happen actually a lot more rapidly maybe I missed this when you were doing your financial projections were you assuming that the city would put in the infrastructure and then basically they'd get available or give the site to the developer and that there wouldn't be any kind of cost per unit coming from the developer yeah it's a good question I think what I was saying is that from this what the numbers represent the city is an assumption that the city has done everything and yes there's no contribution from the developer that's a very conservative because we're trying to show what the highest end of this might look like because economic development wise what communities do often these days especially in the last five years we've seen this in a major uptick is what can the city do what's within the city's capacity to make housing or the housing you want to see more peaceful so what can we put in what's prudent for the city that the city owned instead of just giving a stipend to a developer of a pure handout of money but rather city owned infrastructure an asset that would then act as a catalyst for the property you want the development you want to see so in this scenario yes it shows all city investment but in reality we might want to ask them to pay for the property we may have a purchase price we may do an impact fee they may opt to want to build their own infrastructure and that's okay too it's kind of going to have to be a negotiation depending on the developer and the development plan Peter Kalman I just want to thank Stephanie and Baby for being here I think your contribution to this process has been fantastic and I think the opening comments that you made are really important putting it into context where this kind of community discussion fits in the beginning of the process because it's a public the owned property it's not a private development it's a very important distinction that I think needs to be better understood in the public community even to here today questions that sound like people aren't quite getting that point that's the reason why we're here today and not out there breaking ground like we could be if it was a private development but just a couple points of clarification what happened to the 500 plus model of buildings out there I know some people are going to be definitely asking that number two I think when you are explaining the difference between here and saying we're looking for some direction in the answer to the question back there the choice between some of these actually relates to your cost estimates because it's very clear the concept seen with the fewest houses is the least expensive it's the most expensive per unit it's the most expensive per unit so if your priority is building housing then it's kind of a choice between I think people need to be clear that's what you're looking for here you're not looking at something that requires engineering you're not looking at something that requires a deeper due diligence that will come once you are clear about which of these concepts you want to choose and I hope people when they fill out the form will be clear about that I think we haven't been broadly clear about what this process is and one other question which is I know people are concerned about five stories and I think you ought to say something about that and check with the fire department they've got hook and ladders but if we're looking for density and density brings down cost and density creates more housing then that's the reason for five stories and we have to say well why not if people really are allergic to them or what thank you part of the idea to cite five stories down here is elevation purposes so that you do minimize the visual impact versus up on the the dense the slope and the terrace up there so that it doesn't have quite the same height and scale did you want to say anything more about that that's good and what happened to 500 units is a very good question it has come up already but that is really a result of the winter process we wanted to put it to the voters and the residents and from feedback in individual meetings feedback in stakeholder meetings and from the survey it came back pretty resounding to keep it under that number that highest number was not highly supported because it didn't allow for the range and scale of the recreation so we have to be responsive to that and again I think to your point these show how you can get at certain densities for a certain price point generally I'm concerned once we get the engineering studies that how are we going to find out from the public what they want to do if we can't do those houses up there I don't want to still say we still have to have all these fields down here when if this became the major place where we could put housing does the community want that instead if this happens what do you want so iterative that's exactly what you're getting at which is because it's a public process how do we come back and talk about it differently do you have a comment? it is an iterative process this allows us this is the vision to work towards and so we are going to uncover different things as the process unfolds and so we learn and we adjust from those new moments and most likely we build houses pretty much as Rob knows going up at Spruce Peak we've got houses on cliffs it just costs more money you may have to engineer the foundation so it may just add costs but I don't think there's any question you could get some housing out here I don't know what the city my contract is through phase one so I'm not going to speak for the city beyond phase one but there are services where it may require another public input session of some sort we're going to survey to talk about some various options it's not going to be an endless public process because eventually it's just let's put the the price out there like he said this was the vision this is the price and if that gets turned down or we haven't been able to fund it because that's the other thing it goes up the cost goes up for it there might be other ways to fund it so let's just see if we can fund that vision and push as hard as we can on that and then if it ultimately were to fall completely apart there's always an opportunity to come back to do more public process also there's really importance to getting this master plan done is because this is what's used to then talk to funders about this is what the community has said that they want it from this huge process and we need some more free development money will you help us and they will be really open to that process that we've had with the community and they'll know okay the community has bought into this yeah maybe we can open you up for a half million dollars or a quarter million dollars just for engineering so this helps us get to that next level of analysis with the funding sources gentlemen in the back procedural question what's the how and the when so let's say we have a 3 4 5 story building near the entrance privately owned condos mix it's rental the city runs it down street runs it where the process to those decisions get made I think that will come down in the next phase when we start talking with developers and talking with our partners we know that we need affordable affordability right but then it comes down also as Stephanie pointed out the time of when construction is happening what the market is willing and able to to do with that moment so we can't predict it now we can work towards achieving affordability at a certain level but there might be that some of these multi families are rental they could be condos it just doesn't matter at the time but we can't predict process so in the actual master plan one of our recommendations is going to be to in the near future could be summer could be fall but start conversations with specific types of partners so down street is one co housing partners are another you know different partnerships different types of developers who might have interest because one of the things in structuring the rp and we've got to do a lot of this because we've got push this is owning and the growth center does a nation forward diligently on the same path as the further due diligence permitting engineering track as well as these partnerships but start the conversations with those partners to gauge their interest and start to look for part what about these plans do they like or not like potentially be attractive or not attractive that help us frame out the rp to to get at that answer to start seeing the kind of results we want to see from that rp so I would say you know the who is a variety of partners we'd also we're also probably not in the actual master plan itself but one of the steps will be the city creates an rp shortlist you know not shortlist it's a long list it's a list of the types of players you send the rp out to not just blasted generally the you know paper but rather seek out developers who've done some really innovative projects in this state in New England and try to get it in their hands make sure they've seen it so really be really strategic about getting out the rp so that's a who that's a step and that's going to happen over the next you know six to nine months of starting those partnerships we're not going to put it out to rp particularly I don't think because we have more due diligence and engineering to be done and then the subdivision plans because we wouldn't go out to an rp until we have a pretty clear delineation of where those parts would be I just have a question about the recreation part I see Arnie just walked out the road goes right through part of that 12 acres so the way I look at it it's down to maybe nine acres and my question is is that enough for potentially into the facility fields into our natural recreation because this clearly would be a lot of traffic on that road it would give me a lot of kids outside I'm answering the mic needy from Black River I think the short answer is yes yes one yes the road will go sort of generally in the middle but there is room to do excessive recreation on one side and partial recreation on the other okay so that 12 acres I don't know as a road in the middle and that's an overestimate of size okay it's a little misleading well and I don't know I mean we also don't know if the existing building is going to be retained I know and you know so in terms of the orientation of the road that could change too so it may be I think the other thing to consider is that that may you do need particular access to different points in it you can't just have parking in front and have people walk you know a mile and a half to get to wherever they're going so some division of that area with vehicular traffic is to be expected and is not unusual you also have some parking in that zone too which is not entirely recreational but it supports no I know that and that's what I'm saying so you really don't have 12 acres for recreation that's all it's quite a bit smaller Catherine geothermal would you do your infrastructure estimates can you incorporate some of those we can't generally it's really hard to do that estimating we try like we kind of tried that has been an interesting and like exciting prospect and the modeling of that financing is really complicated because of the way it's done with a developer partner and using not just the infrastructure itself but also not user fees just usage is factored into it so it was too hard to calculate at this stage but again and that may not be a city investment like it may be a city partnership with a developer to do geothermal so that was one of the specific funding sources we did there's a lot of different ways to slice it that's I mean now when I put that slide up there's tons of different possibilities there's grant funding that could be available for that type of technology there's grant funding for there's grant funding for all these different other technologies that those things are going to have to come out in addition to in combination with the developer themselves further analysis we've had about the feasibility of geothermal on this site we've had conversations and we know that that is a technology that is not well known by developers in this state and I know that there are trying to ramp up that component to educate them so more conversations about that and the utilities themselves are getting involved and that in two years that technology is advancing and there will be more and there may be bigger partnerships with the utilities themselves to make that possible so there's a lot of different ways that could come out in the financing and we have about 15 to 20 minutes left for questions could you please define mass timber sure mass timber is a technology that is emerging, used more and more but you've been nodding do you know if it's been done in Vermont yet? there's a project right now is it? okay you might be better in describing it than I will be but it's the same thing I'm sorry it's using typically like lower rate timber smush together attached together into large panels so to build either large large scale structures typically it's used in multi-storey buildings in lieu of concrete and steel where does the timber come from? it can come from wherever right now there's no mass timber production facilities in New England but they are there's actually someone in Northeast Kingdom that's working on developing something there's some folks in Maine so right now it is actually it's hard to source the I could take that conversation offline and answer lots of questions but I don't know it's just an emerging technology and construction methodology that brings down costs and is more sustainable as is using resources that are a lot more have lower fossil fuel impact and have a longer life span have high safety rating and we're trying to at Vermont is trying to get some buildings done using this to prototype it so that it can be used in commercial standard applications but right now it's being used at a lot of like public facilities at least nationally I've seen it's a lot of like welcome centers and some public facilities and they're really trying to make it so that you can see how financially it works for mainstream uses as well so there's some funding opportunities for that reason it's really cool but I'm saying it's just a possible one of many possible technologies that might be used here thank you thanks again I was just a pair of eggs yesterday and I've never seen anything like what they're doing it's really cool I want to go back a couple points um in the narrative we often talk about kind of a monolithic developer which is kind of scary when you think about single entity kind of controlling all this but what I've heard really was more about partnerships, multiple partners um talking about Downstreet maybe even the UVM health network which is now building housing for employees so I'm thinking about communication and really emphasizing that we're all partnerships, developers um with even examples because I think that starts to bring in kind of more of the excitement of the possibility so yeah we've got Downstreet partnering here we've got other organizations that are focusing more on affordability issues here rather than kind of leading it to this kind of market force because that's a new thing that I haven't thought about and kind of gets me excited for actually what could that occur? I mean Habitat could be a partner here yeah that's helpful feedback Capital B developer Black Hat developer but the different partnerships because also it could be one developer a development company, development entity that does it it could be the re-different, you know we don't know and that's the exciting part because there's a lot of different opportunities there thank you My name is Marnie Abramowitz in concept A based on your financing it's said that there was a surplus of money over the 20 years so it wouldn't have made sense to increase the number of units by 10%, 20% to get the money quicker and use some of that money for the recreation development or to pay back the bond earlier or to use it for future housing development elsewhere there's actually two questions you have in there you may not have attended but that's a good point so the financing snapshot looks at everything over a 20 year period of gross and cash flow wise that may look very different it may be that development takes a while to ramp up and so it may take longer to pay it off and if it happened faster you could pay it off sooner and that's part of what we can't control relative to the market so that would be something when it goes out to a developer the speed at which they can do it is to be determined that's not something we can necessarily control for the increase of units though is where we're at right now based on the process we had in the last four months, five months is to say this is pretty much the higher end of the density that was desired by the community and so yes you could either increase your amount that could go toward reg but then you're adding height and adding height is something that you know the community, this was the scale the community at the max kind of said was desired Hi, Davey Brush again it's sort of been touched on a couple times it sounds as though it's more than likely that there will be more than one developer there may be nonprofits etc etc my question is who maintains and controls each of these pods if you've got three or four developers will there be any kind of uniform expectations or I'm trying to think of the right word like design design or maintenance or other issues that need to be thought of over the long haul because it's not the city who's developing these units and it could be as many as two or six developers and I wonder how coherent it will be so part of that is going to be zoning the zoning that gets put into place here will dictate some of that in a lot of ways it's no different than creating a new neighborhood you're creating a new part of town with a neighborhood vibe that may have different character to each section for different reasons and that may be perfectly valid so the beginning of your question I think was how do we maintain that or guide it I guess and there's development agreements that will have to be put into place at the private entity or public private whatever the public private quasi entity would be and some of that could get baked in about restrictions you could put in some restrictions if the city is building infrastructure and giving this pretty significant gift that could be put in but that's all to be determined and it very much depends on again what is proposed we're just not going to predict that right now because one developer could come in and do the whole thing ok, thank you at some point the developer leaves and you've got just homeowners that are left really managing oh right, ok, thank you you can tell I'm not in control of the room I'm sorry I was just wondering how did you get to the numbers of one bedroom units versus two bedroom units I can't remember if that was part of the survey or not but it seems like in all the proposals there's more one bedrooms than two yeah well there is there was an overwhelming response for multi-family and a lot of one-bed rooms that was I think a big comment back in the feedback that we heard and demographically that traps what a lot of what non-pilliers population is but in terms of the mix precisely, did you want to talk to the design well certainly we have single-family homes or one family and we went and the increase I did there's more two bedroom units in the 5-storey buildings as opposed to the duplexes and triplexes which are more of a mix of one and two but you know as kind of maybe the theme of today all of that is really insplexable so before but the assumptions that were made did factor to Stephanie's kind of model calculations for what the tax benefits are or even you had to make some assumptions yeah Jess a lot of that because right now the population is not clear maybe one thing and in five years it may be another thing and the developer who comes in again lowercase de-developer someone who's got the best interest at heart of the community work has a sense of the community that does their due diligence they have to figure out what's the demand and so they're not going to put together a product that isn't in demand right now they're going to put something out that the kind of partner that the city would pick that is well-bedded that's clearly in demand because there may be more of a demand in a few years for apartments that are suited for families of four or five people with older relatives and so forth as these families as we all get older where we're consolidating families you probably answered this a couple of times but is there any reason that the recreation and community zone is 12 acres that is one piece as opposed to separating indoor and outdoor recreation and shrinking the amount of infrastructure you need to go across the property and just creating more of a housing and the recreation facility on the front end of the property and the back end is outdoor recreation and maybe having a gravel road that goes to it doesn't mean you know a city street that needs to be paved in the winter because you know the only thing people are doing out there is cross-country skiing right a couple features there and I think they can speak more to it one is that there's kind of outdoor rec built into the whole site though so we call it the recreation zone you know there's trails and fields and open natural area for everyone around it but also thinking about bringing people that would be going for specific rec fields if they were in the backers 20 cars are coming up through the site through the housing neighborhoods to get to those A that assumes that there are fields people send out their recreation and you haven't defined what that is yet they just want a balance and nobody said hey I want soccer fields and I'm not sure whether there's a shortage of soccer fields but if there was could one be because they're all the same flavor really it's an option that you could say well you know I really prefer and I don't know what it would do to the cost too because it would change that as well because you wouldn't be building a road all the way across the property or water and sewer line well in the survey from the winter it went node by node we could talk about what held rank these nodes and these nodes came back clearly for housing so that was part of why that was done that way I thought you certainly came back there was a conservation on the far side and it was the same for single family homes so it was like there was no more progress to housing than there was to keep the unit concerned but in order to then also have to meet the total amount of recreation needed that was the trade off and the unit accounts too I was curious if you could input from the ever improving Monterey High School cross track routine who now springs up the hill, comes around and comes back around and is a tremendous force out here are you working to keep that incorporated within the overall design as anybody can you input on that? well the trail network has also been vetted by the parks department and the city I don't know about how that does when you're looking at the plans and you see the recreational trails on there we don't know if those are going to be the actual routes of the trails those have not been yet designed but they're there as an illustration that there will be trails throughout so we have not talked to the people this winter there were races going on out here did you talk about cross-country running or cross-country skiing? yes we have definitely talked to them before and they have said that they didn't want to have roads on here because they didn't want their trails to go over roads so in that context what are we prioritizing? a three month recreation activity over I think the intention is to work with them but I think the intention is to prioritize housing first then a three month recreational activity I could just say there have been little school cross-country running races out here as well raises some of the same issues it does strike me that good land use planning can incorporate ski trails as well as roads and they don't necessarily have to cross if you do your planning right well you are aware of the U32 trail that's going to be connected I know it's on the plan that is a project that's separate that is funded that we'll have what kind of trail is that? walking trails? it's a multi-use thank you I think there's a component here of collaboration while I say that the Wrecking Community Zone process is on this parallel path it doesn't have to be exclusive it's not exclusive to that only that node it would look at the site comprehensively too and parks is involved in that process as well and that's to bring together all these elements and talking with the schools is an important stakeholder in that same process we have time for one more question before we want to step outside and show you the orientation further questions can all be directed to Josh after this more in the survey any follow-ups we'll post the slides online