 All this January 8th meeting of the Immopular Planning Commission to order. And the agenda says that we're going to review zoom procedures. Do you want to do that, Mike, or are we good? We're good. Everybody, we know everybody here. So we don't have to have all the security settings up. Okay, great. So then we have to approve the agenda so I can get a motion from someone to approve. Wait a second. When you say all the security systems up, what does that mean exactly? Is there an issue with people coming in to the meeting? Yes. So it didn't happen to us, but it did happen to a couple other committees, including city council. I think historic preservation. So we were having issues at the city with basically neo Nazis would come in and start yelling about stuff at the meetings. So in order to control meetings a little bit better, we have when the zoom starts up, it's got more security settings. So they you would be unable to unmute yourself. And that's what they were doing is basically coming into meetings, unmuting themselves and then just talking over stuff. And then they actually had ways of making it very difficult to lock up the meeting. So by having security settings set, we kind of are one step ahead. And if we see everything is safe, then we can turn off the security settings and everybody can kind of take care of themselves. A lot has happened in the last seven years. That started that started about maybe two or three months ago, I would bet. Okay, that's a relatively recent piece of the change. No, no, I now understand. Okey-doke. So, approval of the agenda, we have a motion. Yes. Do you want to go? We have a motion from Carlton and that was the second area. Yeah. Okay, so those in favor of approval agenda say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Okay. And we proceed the next thing is comments from the chair. I've been very busy and have not thought about any comments to make. But I have a question and that is, Mike, are you aware of. The proposed zoning changes we put forward going to city council anytime soon. Yes, they are on I spoke to council and they're going to be on. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what the agenda for. February 14th and 28th. So. All of you not doing anything on Valentine's Day. You've got a place to be. Good. Okay. Let's, I will be, I will keep being in the doghouse for the next six weeks. I've already. I've already told my wife, that's it. Valentine. Okay. I think that's something stopping you from arranging a nice. Evening. Before that. Perhaps the weekend before. What are the serving public servant. So let's. That is kind of unfortunate for getting a turnout. But. We could always make sure at least there's like the, you know, the public hearing. So that's why they generally do the. The app on the 28th, most likely then. Yeah. Usually there's two, usually there are two, two meetings, even though it's only required to have one. They. Most ordinances change with two hearings. So that's why they generally do two hearings. So I'll probably do an introductory meeting on the. January 24th, but it won't be the public hearing. And then they'll be the hearing on the 14th and 28. So. Everyone know those are the big days to get to get a turnout out there, especially the 28th. And. I've heard if we can get. If you can get 50 people to show up that my full dress is cupid for. 14th meeting. That's what I heard. So, you know. That may, that may or may not be true. Okay. So that sounds good. Does anybody else have any. Announcements or anything? Okay. Let's move on. I'm general business from anyone. From the public. We don't have anyone in zoom. From the public. So we'll move past that. And. Go to a review and approve revised rules of procedure. So this is a project Mike has worked on for us and. I'm going to go ahead and review it. I'm going to go ahead and review it. The last little bit, then he's going to update us on. Rules of procedure for our meetings. Right, Mike. Yep. So I. So I was just for some reason it popped up on my. Thought in my head that was like. I should go and see when was the last time we had talked about the rules of procedure. And then after hunting around, it turns out we've never talked about it. So I thought it would be a good idea just to. Put these out. And let you guys take a look at them. You don't have to vote on them today. You're welcome to, if you want to. Every. Major committee is required under state law to have rules of procedure. So the rules were initially. Adopted in 2002 and. Just kind of roll back the clock before 2002. We would have, we had in Montpelier and a lot of places around the state. We had a planning commission and a zoning. Board of adjustment. And the planning commission actually reviewed applications under state law. And they would review site plans and variances and a couple other. Certain applications would go to the planning commission. And they would go to a zoning board. And there was a. A lot of work and effort to. Get the state legislature to. May allow what is called the development review board. To handle all reviews. And the planning commission would have to do all of this under the development review board. And conflicting decisions between these two boards. Having to go to two different boards. So an applicant would have to go to two different. Hearings. It made a much more complex process. So it was felt we could do all of this under a development review board. And let the planning commission just do planning. And so that's why the state law set up an option. You can still have that. And now the two other boards that have gone to a development review board. And Montpelier did in. 2002. So they abolished the ZBA in 2002. And created a d R B. And at from 2002 on. The planning commission no longer does any development review. It all goes to the development review board, which is a better way of doing it. Leaving the planning commission to focus on. Planning. Doing the master plans doing zoning updates doing a number projects, which you folks, yep. Can I ask you a question? Yep. So assuming all that, who are we writing this? If this has never been reviewed before, are you the only one writing this? I was just getting to it. So what you have in front of you is the rules of procedure for 2002. When they created the new DRB, they, DRB had their rules of procedure and the Planning Commission adopted their rules of procedure. So these have been reviewed and have been adopted and are in fact in effect. You guys have just never seen it. I've never sent it to you because I've apparently never looked it up. But these are the rules and we'll do a much better job of getting this out to everybody now that I've actually found the might to convert this from, I believe word perfect, or some old program that we used to have. But just to, since 2002, a lot has changed. So our members, I had to amend this to reflect the fact that the charter talks about we have two year terms that begin October 1st. So in the past, we didn't have this in there. Appointments to vacate, vacated positions shall run the expiration of the existing term. The majority shall vote for a chairperson in January. In the past, we now vote it in October. So after we've appointed a new, new members, we vote in October instead of January. So these are actually, yep, go ahead. Who determines when it's changed from January to October? Like, who's who's are you the only one doing this? I'm making suggestions. This is a draft. So officially, you guys are going to have to vote on these. These are my suggestions. Everything that's a strike out or my suggestions, although this is kind of amending this to meets our charter. So yes, are we able to suggest one here? Yep. Yep. This is your your your document to vote and change and make additions to. These are your rules of procedure. They're not they're not my rules of procedure. I'm just putting together what what you have existing is in black and what I've recommended for changing is in red. Are there other suggestions of recommendations that may not make this that you know of? Like, where will we can we make suggestions just as you make suggestions like that and and where would I look for? I mean, I some of the statues I've seen just because I you know, copy and paste them and I go to the actual Google and it shows up where I go look. But then it only takes me so far for like the elongation of the the root of that statue. So I'm just trying to understand, can are there are there other statues before that and after that we can look at too? So yeah, there are a number of state laws, whether it's the open meeting law or Title 24, Chapter 117. That's where the where these are kind of where Planning Commission. Rules are all laid out. The other thing is just to go through and make suggestions and I can go and do some homework and determine whether or not, you know, where where there may be issues. You know, there may be a suggestion. We should do acts and I might go out and come back and say, well, actually open meeting law won't let you do that. So so anything because I actually edited this files and I changed most of the I changed all of the administrative staff to administrative personnel so it doesn't show up on this. But in it, I'm not I just don't understand if this is a document that we haven't seen in 22 years. Um, shouldn't we look at it? Shouldn't more people be looking at this? So let me let me intervene for a second, Mike, and like try to clear up like what's going on. So, you know, these are the rules of procedure procedure for us to run the Planning Commission. We, you know, all of us, not just Mike, have not kept up on trying to update this stuff. It doesn't look like what we've been doing really conflicts with the version of things that existed, except in a few places where Mike's just updated that for us. So Mike's role in this is that he's basically he's our staff and he's trying to help us by pointing out the things that it's mostly technical things that he's changed here, just just technical clarifications based on just the current state of things. So from that from Mike's suggestions, though, we absolutely, if we feel like there's a need for additional rules of procedure or if some of these don't work for us, we absolutely have the ability to change them. So Mike's not trying to dictate or control anything. He's just I'm not I'm not I'm fine. Yeah, I just want to clarify that for him. I just I just well he can clarify for himself and I can speak to Mike to Mike. I'm not I'm not implying that you're dictating it. I'm just simply saying this is something that I love words and I'm looking at this and the the the idea that we have an opportunity to make this procedure into something. I'm trying to determine whether or not this this creates any more teeth than what we have. What like and who and who determines that? Do we or is this voted on on a higher level just because we vote on this? What what is this achieving for us as far as making it different than what it was 22 years ago? These are I'm going to answer just as the chair here. Thank you. These. So these are our rules or procedure that we have to have under state law. You know, the the legislature passes a lot of laws that cities have to follow just to make sure that all the cities are doing some bare minimum of what the state expects cities to do. Herbie, hold on. Let me let me stop right there. This is what I want to know. Who would I if I if I didn't like what we're doing, who would I talk to directly? You guys are making these. You guys are going to make these rules for yourselves. There's the city council will not adopt these rules afterwards. Then actually it's in it's in little it's in letter C and under one. You guys can vote by a majority of the commission to change the rules. And the idea really big picture and I think we're what you're trying to get to an understanding of is these are these are rules that are that go above and beyond. Of course, we have to meet the state statute. And of course, you have to meet open meeting laws. But how we meet those laws. You have a lot of flexibility. Obviously, you can't do anything. You can't break state law, but you have a lot of flexibility in how you get there in your rules or procedure. So let me give you an example. The city council, if you've been to a city council meeting, they will tell you, you have three minutes. If you're in to respond, if you're a member of the public, you you're capped at three minutes for any discussion point. That's in their rules of procedure. That's not under state law. That's just, hey, in order for us to have a lot of people. These are big meetings. These are long meetings in order to be fair to everybody. People are limited to three minutes under the previous administration. It was two minutes. So it can change under different different things. We don't have any time limits here because it isn't something that the planning commission has felt is necessary. So we just have some basic rules that we're laying out for everybody to say, this is how we, the planning commission, are going to operate. And we make that decision. You make that decision. I will have no vote in that other than to advise any law changes that you should be aware of. But these are how you're going to handle yourselves and you guys just click, we're established in the personality of what we're doing. This is our personality and that's what we're setting. Yep. So you could put in their personalities or three minutes. It depends on what I got you. OK, thank you. Your rules of procedure could state at the start of every planning commission. We will state the Pledge of Allegiance at, you know, your rules, whatever you want to put as this is how our meetings are operated. You could move, we have a standard agenda that talks about having comments from the chair and then general business. General business could be moved to the end of the agenda. For the sake of like, let's move them forward. I apologize. I just wanted to make sure that it and. OK, once we do this, when when do we talk about this and actually solidify it? Like, I just want to know timeline as far as that's so that's up. Yeah, that's up to us. That's up to us for we can if the if if people can want to review this and they feel satisfied with the state of it, we could vote on it tonight. If people would like more time, I'd be happy to push off any kind of votes. If people are interested in. Proposing any additions or amendments to it at a future meeting, we can we can do that. You know, if anybody does have things they want to change here, you know, then. We would all have to vote. There would have to be a majority of. There have to be at least four people that voted for those changes. But we've been as far as when the vote takes place. That's also up to us. Okay. Okay. All right. I didn't I didn't know whether or not we had to bounce somewhere else. Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's what most of the stuff we do just for future references. You know, we were where the people who are. I understand that. There's just such a I'm so used to such a like this. No, this is recorded. Never mind. So yeah, this is just, you know, just don't worry about asking questions, Carlton. Any questions you have are questions members of the public. They're going to be members of the public that are going to have the same question you do. So don't don't worry about asking questions. That's it's, you know, these, like you said, these are recorded. These are on orca people. There may not be anybody here watching this, but there are people that are going to have an opportunity to watch it. And they may have the same questions. But I've, I've gotten emails from the bridge. About planning and planning commission meetings are like, I watched the planning commission meeting and I have these questions. Clearly they weren't at the meeting, but they watched the tape. So if you've got questions, other people are going to have questions and it's good to get them answered. So it's clear. Okay. Okay. So Mike, you want to continue the run through of. We're looking at. Yeah, I don't think there was really a lot of changes. And again, we can. Review these at another meeting. Some of these were a little just the election to be in October and not in January. That was just more of a. Suggested changing just for grammatical purposes. Wait, why was that? Why was that the suggested change for grammatical purposes from January to October, if I may ask. Not that one to one after it. The vice chair shall perform all of the duties and it should just say all the duties. So that's why there's that strike out there. Okay. Why was, why was January in October? Why was that changed? Because we do our appointments in October, everybody's terms begin October 1st. Historically. City council. Well, they still do get elected in March. And the first meeting in March. They used to do appointments. And we have Montpelier being Montpelier. We have an appointment. We have committees for everything. So they have, I think we have 24 committees. And so we've got to go through all the appointments. And that's a lot of appointments. A lot of people applying to be on board. All at once. And so what we did through charter was to spread them out. So I think the DRB and DRC are appointed in. May. We got moved to October. Well, basically September, we have to get appointed in September for October 1st. So that way when October 1st comes, our first meeting in October becomes the meeting that we elect our chair. You could elect the chair whenever you want. But typically though, it would be after, after new people have been appointed, we would have an opportunity to elect a chair and vice chair. But you don't have to. You could still keep it in January if you want to. It's just typically done after a new board is seated. Okay. Because your chair may not have gotten reappointed. So. We would therefore need a new chair. When you say our chair, that's you or Kirby. Kirby's your chair. I'm I'm staff. But Kirby is Kirby is leaving early, right? So don't have that. Don't we have to do that earlier than October? And if that does that affect the October vote, because we were already doing it earlier. There would be a vote and that would that chair, that person would take over as chair until October, when there'd be another vote for a chair, because October we would be seating a new board. Some people would be leaving some people would be coming on. So we would have another vote. Typically. My experience here is that. People who have been chair, usually our chair for. Six or, you know, five or six years. So usually they, they stay on for a while. I think Kirby might be the. Third. Maybe the fourth chair since I've gotten here 10 years ago. So that seems unusual to you for in your, in your opinion. I've seen boards turn over very quickly from time to time. But it's been good to have consistency. They've been on people have been on the board. They've it helps to have a consistency over time. Okay. So that was why it's been suggested to be October. Keeping minutes. We don't typically keep the names and addresses of all the witnesses. Usually we just keep the names. And. It was also for some reason left in this. And shall include in minutes the names and addresses of all witnesses and a summary of the facts on which the decision is based and the decision rendered. That seems to be a leftover phrase from when the planning commission. Issued decisions, you no longer issue decisions. So. Our, our minutes should reflect a summary of the discussion points. If we did and feel like we have more teeth, right? That's the, that is that was taken away. For decisions on individual permits. Yes. You will no longer see individual permits. Okay. But you get to vote on the zoning, which basically says what. The rules are the development review board gets no say in what the rules are. You guys lay down the rules. They have to enforce the law. Well, the powers in great enough permit. Yeah. Um, so, um, for some reason, I think what may have been in 2002 when this was written was that the administrative officer and the administrative officers, your zoning administrator was apparently the staff person for the planning commission. So the rules are procedure kept mentioning that. Uh, these will be given and put into custody of the administrative officer. Well. I'm not the administrative officer. I'm the planning director. So we just said administrative staff or if, um, Carlton, you were mentioning maybe you had a better word for administrative personnel, we can put whatever word in there. But it really just should not be administrative officer, because the administrative officer, I'm not your administrative officer and you'll probably never have, um, the administrative officer as your staff person. Uh, that would be right now, um, Meredith grand. And she runs the DRB and the DRC. So there are a bunch of changes there, staff, staff, staff. Uh, staff. Um, So, uh, one of our, one of your duties is to prepare what here said the municipal master plan. Kirby and a couple of others, Aaron and Ariane, you've been here long enough to know we had the debate. Um, just as a matter of words, uh, what we make is not actually a master plan. Um, it's actually a municipal plan. So, and that's why we've changed our, this was a debate. This was a debate, uh, because since 1940s, since 1947, the city of Montpelier has had the Montpelier master plan. And that has been our planning or our, our city plan was the Montpelier master plan. And it was readopted and amended and changed it, but it always kept the same title, the Montpelier master plan. Um, but it really isn't, you know, as a term of art as a, you know, planners that as, as a planner, I see that I'm like, this isn't a master plan. This is a city plan. So we voted and decided we will be now calling our new plan. When it gets adopted, it will be the Montpelier city plan. And so that's why we've made this change here to say. City plan. Um, Yeah. But you'll be, we'll be surprised. We'll probably have whole meetings to debate whether or not it's a good change. Um, There's another city plan change, another staff change. And I think that might be it. Um, so that is all of the changes I made. I think everything else we've been doing in compliance with everything. We do still meet on the second and fourth Mondays and the calendars, but you're welcome to read this, review it, highlight, ask questions. And when you're comfortable with whatever it is, again, these are your rules. You can add to them. Requirements if we want them. But it's a framework and really it's just to help in the event that you end up in a sticky situation where. In a public hearing, there's. Issues. Right now we have a very loose rules of procedure. We're not. We're not. We're not. We're really running running a tight ship because most of our meetings are about policy. So we don't have a lot of people coming in from the public. Um, and so we can operate. With, you know, more flexible rules, but. In certain situations, city council, they have a much thicker. Um, Rules of procedure, but these are your rules that you guys say, these are the rules we're going to follow. And somebody can call you out on it to say, Hey, this is a new rule. Okay. If those new rules are good, chances are good. That's not going to happen. But. Um, and if that's the case, then we vote to change the rules. We adopt a new rule that says. People only have these rights. So yeah. Um, as Mike is saying, we don't have a lot of. Rules right now. As far as. As far as, you know. I think everyone has probably gathered that I'm not the world's biggest stickler for procedure considering even basic things I normally stumble through. And that is based out of preferences, not just skills. So I am fine with having this particularly light version of rules of procedure for the planning commission. But this is for everyone and it's also for the future of how meetings will be run. So I'd like people to give feedback about how they feel about it. What are your thoughts about? Now is an opportunity for us to talk about the amount of procedure we want to apply to our meetings. I mean I'm trying to understand when are you leaving? I mean I haven't set an exact date but you know whenever I can get things lined up in the next couple months. Okay. But I'll probably talk about it more specifically after the hearings on zoning. Okay because I'm just trying to understand the urgency or the bandwidth for looking this over. I mean I appreciate your curve and this is urgency, not anger or any, I'm not pointing any fingers, I'm not saying anybody's a dictator, nothing like that. This is just culture meeting the commission at this point as far as understanding things. You're not going to be here and so it's one of the things where if there's going to be an incoming person and when that incoming person comes in, how do we then, like are you going to input, how heavily is your input on this and for what reasons if you're not going to be here? Because it's for the people who are. Yeah that's what I was just saying. I didn't hear it that way and maybe you did but I didn't hear it that way. Yeah what I was just, I mean I did put my two cents in there and that's in my, so my opinion in general is I don't think the planning commission needs a ton of procedure. I don't think we need, you know, if we had a bunch of rules that everyone had to follow then those, we would be using a lot of time to enforce those rules and go, you know, it would in my mind cut down on conversation, cut down on collaboration, cut down possibly on consensus building. So I just, I think for this planning commission, this is based off of me, you know, my experience on it over the years, is that it works better without a lot of procedural rules. If you go around to other town boards around the state, you will find some of them are actually run more rigorously where the chair, like the person who's me, because I'm the person who is supposed to be making sure the rules are being followed all the time, where the chair is, you know, people have to raise their hand and be, and be called on by the chair before they can speak and whenever there's a vote. That's a worst case scenario though, right? I mean I've seen, well I'm not saying it's necessarily a worst case scenario, some people. I've watched Richmond, I've watched Waitesfield, I mean I haven't seen necessarily that rigorously. No, so my point is, my point is some, some, some prefer it that way. So those are the choices that, you know, so I threw my two cents in, but I also said a minute ago that I'd like to hear from everyone else because it's true, everyone has to live with these. Very quickly, I just, my two cents really quickly, I, for all the reasons that we've discussed, I mean, I think given our limited sort of jurisdictional scope and the fact that we do spend most of our time just debating sort of more ethereal policy matters, I agree with Kirby and Mike and generally that light touch in terms of revisions on the rules of procedure is probably appropriate. I think what Mike has sketched out here makes a lot of sense. I don't see a need to really kind of put a lot of meat on any of the bones that are already here. It does provide us with a level of flexibility that I think bodes well for the kind of work that we want to do. Just a quick question for Mike though, and maybe you answered this already and I apologize, but is there is something specific that prompted the sort of looking back at the, at the rules of procedure and putting forward some proposed changes? I just can't remember if there's something that prompted this examination. No, it actually was just, I was, you know, we're going through a whole bunch of stuff because we're in temporary offices and so I happened to notice that, you know, in like 2006 or 2007 there used to be a planning commission binder that all the planning commissioners got and it had rules of procedure and it had copy of the master plan and it had a copy of the zoning regulations and it had, you know, how, you know, how to be in a, you know, something for a company about how to be an effective planning commissioner. And so it occurred to me, I was like, well, you know, we haven't done those binders in 15 years, but I also haven't remembered seeing the rules of procedure and I didn't remember us having a conversation on it. So I said, let's look it up. Let's find out, you know, I was thinking in my head, I'm like, oh, we must have looked at this and revised this probably, you know, in 2016 or 17 or something. And then when I started looking for it, I couldn't find it. The only one I could find, only copy I could find was from 2002 in the word perfect file on our server. So I was like, all right, well, we all should have this, we all should be aware of it. It is a requirement that we have it. So let's get it out. Now that I know that we haven't talked about it, let's put it on the table. We've got a lot of new members. Just everybody knows this is what it is. And that that was kind of a little bit, it was just more a matter of happenstance that I happened to find that old binder that they used to have. And it was sitting in a pile of stuff that was rescued from the basement. So relying with disaster, I guess. Thanks. That's helpful. Yeah. So I mean, I would just say that, I mean, I don't know if anybody else has any more substantive comments about it, but I'd be willing to put forward a motion shortly, unless there's a lot of want from the group to slow this process down. I think the changes are fine. I guess I would just add one thing, one example of making things more complex, which is not what I'm asking and not what I'm suggesting. But you will see many boards will go and put in their rules of procedure that we will operate by Robert's rules of order, which is a parliamentary system. And it really makes things much more complex. And some of them will use a certain version or a certain light version. But it's not something we need, you know, people, you know, calling points of order. And I mean, we are required to have motions in seconds and vote by majority. And that's part of the open meeting law. But beyond that, we don't have to call points of order and have motions to table these and have a much more formal system that you might see in a parliamentary system. But you will see towns and getting to Kirby's point, you will see some towns that will adopt Robert's rules of order, which means, you know, I don't recognize so and so or, you know, you can't speak, you haven't been recognized yet. And, you know, we just usually don't get into those formalities because if people have questions, they put their hands up and they ask. So anybody else have any input or feedback about the rules of procedure? I was just trying to look it up, by the way, I'm trying to look at the law around this. And I don't, since we don't do development review for what I can tell Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think we have to even have rules of procedure. It looks like only bodies that we're doing development review, but that was based off my cursory searching just now. Thank you for that, Kirby. I appreciate that because I'm not looking to slow this down or anything. All I'm trying to do is from a focal granular level understand it with people in the room that know it better than me because it just, you know, this is interesting. And that's it. Yeah, I was just going to say that I was seeing this as kind of like a kind of administrative like housekeeping. Mike, you had to purge, unfortunately had to purge a bunch of stuff. And then while you're in the middle of that, you decided to take it upon yourself to do some housekeeping. And it turns out they needed to be updated, but kind of the rules of the road, I think we are at the end of the day an advisory policy developing board commission. And so I think it does make I'll echo what you're saying, like the lighter touch, the more less formality, we're still take our work seriously, but we don't need to be that formal about it. And it does seem like this is kind of just like the rules of the road being updated to be in compliance with states and state statute. And just after 20 years, we'd love to be perfect and have our rules updated every six months. But, you know, democracy is messy, and we're all busy. And I think these look fine. I'd be willing to move ahead with voting on them tonight as well. Isn't that deep? No, I think you bring up some good points. It's a good reminder. I mean, I like the context that you provided, Mike, at the beginning about the DRB and what the kind of history and the development of how this commission came to be. I think I told you guys I had experience with planning commissions where they made decisions, discretionary decisions that and that's not what this board does, which is kind of a nice, we're kind of left to do our work, which is planning, which is fantastic as opposed to getting into the controversy. But that's a necessary board as well. We need the DRB and the DRC as well, but we have a very specific mission. And there's no punitive, you know, and I'm asking this question for just curiosity state. There's no punitive issues. Should this not be updated or adhered to or given to, you know, do you know how we have like if two or more gather, you know, it becomes, you know, formal or what, there's no retro backlash for this for not following the procedure the way it should have been or not following. I'm not trying to make it as controversial as it sounds. I'm just trying to get to the point of the question ending. True. There isn't. It's not like an open meeting violation. I think it's more of a being taken to task in the press or in the whatever to go through and say you have adopted these rules and you're just ignoring your own rules. You know, these are rules you can change and you just, you know, I can see certain, I know certain personalities that will come to meetings and just beat you up on the fact that you don't follow your own rules. But legally, yes, you don't break, you're not breaking any laws by not following your rules of procedure. But okay, okay. Yeah, it's it's think you think like the legal way to this is like guidelines for us. You know, it's just a little guide for us. Okay. The the real like legal rules for us is the open meeting law is probably the biggest that we cannot break those rules. Right. I thought this was along that line. That's all. Yeah, no, no, I would also be in support of voting on this today, especially because it seems like it's easy enough to make changes if anyone decides that, you know, there's a change that we would like to see. But I think the way the meetings have been running so far seem good. And so I think there's a need for a change. I'd be happy to vote on this. I'll vote on it too. I, as long as there's no punitive issues, I'm good with it. I just, I didn't panic for us. It's okay. It's wait, you know, we all have to learn stuff. So happy to happy to give background. So, okay, it sounds like a majority of people are interested in voting this out tonight. The vote would be to pass the updated version as Mike has provided updated version of the rules of procedure as Mike has provided. Is there any interest in any more discussion before I entertain a motion? Okay. So do we have a motion to pass out the updated version of the regular planning commission's rules procedure as Mike has amended for us? Or make your own motion? You can go to my suggested language? Yeah, sorry, I was busy there. I would move to approve the revisions that Mike's made in the rule of procedure and adopt them. Okay, we have a motion from Erin. Do you have a second? I'll second it. Second from Brian. Any discussion before we move to the vote? Okay. So no discussion of the motion. Those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstain? Okay. So the vote was one, two, three, four, five, six, zero, six, zero. In favor of updating our rules of procedure, which clearly is something that we've cared a lot about because we've just found that it exists. Okay. Someone did it at one point and then, you know, it waxes and wanes. That's all. I'm interested because I want to learn it. Okay. So the next thing on the agenda is to review and possibly approve changes to the economic development storyboard text that Erin had updated for us more than a month ago. Um, should we, Mike, are you able to share that language real quick or I can do it if you'd like? I don't have it queued up. If you have it queued up, I mean, I can find it, but... I don't, but I can get there pretty quickly. Oh, okay. Erin, correct me here. Did you make the changes in the Google Doc? I was just going to say very quickly. Unfortunately, when I made those changes, I was having problems with Google Docs. I had some technical issue. I had to create a new document. That's what's, Mike attached that in the agenda. So it's not in the Google Drive and I was hoping to sometime between then and now figure out if I could merge that document with whatever we have in the Google Drive and I haven't done that. So what the composited that I have are in the document that Mike forwarded is part of the with along with the agenda. There's a lot of red, I guess in this case blue. Long story short, it's just an effort. I tried to keep all of the concepts that Mike had laid out in the draft. I think all of them as usual are all very well taken. I think they have a lot of, you know, a lot of good purpose. I was just trying to tighten up the language a little bit. And that was the only thing I was doing. So nothing really of substance that I try to do. It's kind of difficult to see with all the red and all that, but it's in there. Anybody have any comments on Aaron's version? I would like to thank Aaron for taking those on because I thought he did a really good job of taking our discussion and translating it into something that, you know, can be put into the city plan. I thought it was great, Aaron. Yeah, same. Same. Looks wonderful. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to turn off the review on this one. I think if you go to the review tab up top and then not to the side up at the top of the bar. Yeah, I've got a bar in my way. There I go. I can move it this way. There we go. The review tab. You could accept all change. No markup. There we go. Yeah. So I think the only thing I noticed in my review was, and I can highlight it here, this sentence just kind of came to an end. There are a couple of typos like fixing the space in there, but this was the only thing I found workers need a place to live that is near or commutable to their just saying jobs. Sure. A workplace. That's near or commutable to the place that brings them joy in life. That's what I was thinking when I wrote it, but that's why there's source of happiness. Yes. Other than that, that was the only, there were a couple of these little ones that you don't pick up on and track changes that show up afterwards. But all right. That was the only thing I found. I thought it looked great. And this is probably a chapter that's been beat up and worked over more than any other that we've had. So Yeah, there have been a lot of iterations. It was an early chapter. We did it early on, and then we've probably revised it substantially multiple times. So it's good to kind of have it in form now. Okay. Everyone good with Aaron's version here? Yep. The storyboard. Okay. I don't think we really need to vote unless Mike, that makes you feel better. Nope. I can pass that on to SC group. Okay. Let's do that. So the next up, close my agenda. Next up is the community service storyboard, which I have not, unfortunately, I did not have the time this week to to review. Has anyone else had a chance to look at that before tonight? I have, but if no one else has, I'm not contributing to it. I mean, we can put it, put it off till the next meeting if we want to. Yeah, how about we, the whole thing with Aaron works so well that other planning commissioners are going to be the victims of his success. I think you know where I'm going with this. Who would like to be delegated the task of reviewing the storyboard before the next meeting for us? If you guys aren't brave, I'm just going to do it myself. I can do it. When you say review, what are, what are we looking forward to do? You got to bring up the speed as this is the first time I'm seeing something that needs to be reviewed. So I need to understand. I'm willing to. This is not the time to explain it. Just some other time. Let me know. But if we have to have that decision here on camera, I'm going to say no. That's, that's fine, Carl. The Aaron, Aaron just volunteered. I was, I was just in a, you know, in a flippant kind of way. I was seeing if we, if someone would volunteer to. So this was prepared. I guess this was prepared by Mike based on a, on the language from a chapter plan that we have had previously worked on. But it's, so it's based off of our discussions and our work and what we had written before, but it's a new document though that's taken partially from that other one. So just to make sure that it's written in a way that, that, that we would like to see on the website because this, this is going to be the content that's going to be on the city plans website eventually. So to make sure that we, that the language is in a place where we like, it's basically editing, proofing type work. It's not changing anything that has meaning or substance, but just, just doing like written editing stuff. And you know, I often do that, but I'm trying to delegate a bit more. So Aaron said he would, he would do it for us. So that's great. Did that clear everything up? Yeah. And everybody can take a look at it. It's not just, yeah. And actually in this case, nobody has taken, this one is not from, because this was developed after we've done the storyboards, there is no chapter that was written that I had to pull from. So what happens Carlton as we're, as, as we do any of these plan chapters is I, I put together a chapter in some cases, goals and policies, whatever it is I, I put together using my professional opinion, what I think is appropriate and or would be suggested language. And then really it's up to you guys to go through and make sure that either word smithing or the, whatever the, the, the story that's being told is what is the story you guys want to tell. This as much, even though I'm the planning director for the city, the planning commission is the one tasked with coming up with the city plan. This is a chapter of the city plan. So I will make a suggestion. You guys then have the flexibility to change it to whatever language you want. So this is my recommendation for the community services chapter and every single chapter has changed. So if you go in there and think this looks good, that doesn't look good. When you say does this look good, I understand that it's, it's more, it's changing like editing, but I mean, if I'm looking at the word by the city government, if I wanted to change that to my the city government, per say, there is opportunity to do that within the editing, correct? And so therefore, yeah, okay, I'm, yeah, I'm not interested in this. Thanks. Yeah, the only thing I would say, the only thing I would say that you, and this Aaron probably already knows this, but if you're going through and looking at it Carlton or Maria or whoever is the implementation summary, we have all already talked about. So the, the aspirations and goals, we already had meetings and talked about each of these. So you don't have to review these. These are already approved. These have already been things we've talked about. So that's why they're actually in a funny font, but font doesn't matter. So, Mike, remember when I, when, when I first came on my first meeting, you said there were things that you guys made decisions about that I wouldn't be, I wouldn't have to be concerned about. I'm just trying to determine at what point does it start where, like, I'm in the beginning of something, if ever. Oh, you're asking, like, you're, you're joining the process of us adopting a new city plan light. That's what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. So when, when's there going to be a project? So that's why it's probably like, I'm here, like, you guys are like, this is into the novel for you. And I'm kind of like just now picking the number two pencil to like find the eraser to, you know, yeah, the learning curve is steep in the subject matter that we're subject matter that we cover here. It is steep. There's a lot of law. There's a lot of planning. I mean, it is, it is steep. So, yeah, up for it. I mean, it'll take, yeah, it'll take a while. It must be your weapon. Believe me. Everybody, everybody, I know when I joined, I like, I was lost. I joined right in the middle of the major, the major rewrite of the entire zoning ordinance, like the entire thing was being revised all at once, like from scratch. And I definitely sat through some meetings where I comprehended maybe 50% of things. And that was, and that was actually the person, you know, I have a lot of degree and master's degrees. I'm not speaking to my comprehension. I'm speaking more to, I'm trying to comprehend the, like this website right now we're looking at, like I'm trying to understand at what point do we say we've been taking too long for it to be made and we can make it easier, but we've already spent the money. Who, like, we've looked at these pictures. This is Langton Street. We're determined about on the overview page. We, like, I'm just trying to understand like the, are you guys calm through frustration or am I just, I need to get calmer or something? So this, this is, so our, our city plan, we're, we're moving from a paper-based to a web-based and you'll see here that there are nine tiles. One of the tiles you don't see is community services. And that's because we haven't approved a storyboard for them to build it with. So we, the Planning Commission, has gone through and adopted a storyboard which has been inserted in for housing and for arts and culture. And so that's where, that's, that's what happened before you got here Carlton was each one of these pieces has been put together. Now these still are going to be revised. You still have some work in progress and we're going to eventually, hopefully in the spring, we're going to be ready to go to the public and start showing this to the public to say, what do you guys think of this as your new housing chapter? And what do you think about this as your, your new arts and culture? The two chapters we have left that you don't see a tile for. One is community services because we've got it here in front of you. Whenever you're ready to approve that, we can get that over and they can start building it. The other is land use. So there's two tiles that are left to get built. These other tiles are in various states of construction. I'm trying to work with SE group to kind of knit them up and fix them up, but you guys have done your work. Now it's a matter of SE group who's our consultant to finish putting these together. And then there's another page. This is their temporary page for the tiles of the storyboards. There's another page to talk about the implementation strategies. And then there's a main page that is out here somewhere that I'd have to find. This guy. Yep, this one. So this is the front page. So when we're done, we'll have this is the front page. And then we'll have an implementation tab and, you know, a set of playing tiles. And so we're going to hopefully have it all knitted up. It's going to look all pretty. We've got that's what that's what we hired SE group to do. And you guys will be the ones making the decisions on the final thing to say, yes, this is ready to go to the public and we'll get there. So that's what that chapter was that I put in front of you is the draft language to build that next page. And just to maybe this is an effort to be helpful. Just for a way of context, Carlton, we've been working on this for four years. This is we're getting towards the like final stages of just sort of I wouldn't say polishing it, but there's just been a lot of deep discussion. So this is sort of just we're working on kind of the final presentation as to how things go out to the public. So I appreciate that, Aaron. What I want to understand as well is how long does the public have to make a decision? If this has been a painstaking process for you all on this leg of the game, when you launch it to the public, you know, there's going to be the exercise that we do. And so how long does that go? And then if there's revisions, then when it comes back, if it comes back, how long do we hold on to it? And, you know, how long is the ball volley? And the answer to that is it takes as long as it takes. I will, these can go really quickly. If we are pretty close to hitting the mark and the community is comfortable, these can be adopted in four or five months. I'm not expecting that. Just by way of example, the Kirby was on the planning commission in 2016. In the fall of 2016, I think in September, the planning commission was wrapping up their, the draft of the major zoning rewrite. It went to public hearing in the planning commission in November and December and got sent to city council. And that same question came up, you know, how long, how long, how long, it's like, it's going to take as long as it takes. It's going to go to city council and they're going to have hearings and they're going to have hearings and they're going to have hearings and they're going to hear from the public. And it's not going to be adopted until city council is comfortable with the document and all the language. And in that case, we had 22 hearings at the city council and it was adopted in January of 2018. So it was in city council's hands. The zoning took five years of work at the planning commission level and then it took another 15 months of hearings at the city council level before it was adopted. So this could take equally long to go through that process. If city council sits down and it's like, no, we're going to take this page by page section by section and we're going to debate each and everything that can, it could take, it'll take as long as it is, we can't rush it once it goes to city council. And prior to us getting the zoning ready, we went to public hearing in 2015 and had such bad pushback in the zoning in 2015 that planning commission never sent it to city council. We actually kept it and did another round of revisions, which is why it took till 2016 was because we heard from the public, they didn't like the proposal in 2015. So it went to 2016 before it got finished and sent to council in 2017. So we're hoping this will be close. There's a lot in there. It's a city plan. It's got everything that's in the chapter where we're trying to tell a story about housing. Why is housing important? What are we going to do? And then there's a second piece which has all those implementation pieces. That's the nuts and bolts of how are we going to accomplish our vision? What's our vision? How are we going to accomplish it? What are the tasks we're setting out? And so there are a lot of places for people to disagree, a lot of places for people to think we're not going far enough or doing too much. And we're just going to have to see what the public says and roll it forward. And then city council with completely fresh eyes, they haven't seen any of this with completely fresh eyes, they're going to take a look at it and they're going to want to walk through and take time. And I would expect at least six or eight months of hearings out of council just for them to be comfortable. And they might send it back. They might say this is not good enough and we're going to send it back to the Planning Commission for revision. They have that right. But we're ultimately building this forward to reveal to our, let's call them stakeholders, which are people. And then, but we're not asking for any input while we're building it. Because couldn't we save an extra step if we already asked them to come in and get involved so that way they don't have to worry about rejecting something they've suggested? So this was, is that a procedure policy that isn't? Yeah. So this was built most, so all of the, we put our focus on not necessarily going to the public, but going to the other various committees. As I joked earlier about the fact that the city has 24 different committees, we have a committee for everything. So we didn't go to the general public and ask them what the housing goals should be. We went to the housing committee, which is made up of not professionals, but volunteers from the public. That's a, that's a public committee appointed by city council to ask them about what the housing goals should be. We went to the energy committee for the energy. We went to the transportation committee for transportation and so on. All these different committees went to the arts council for the arts. And so we went through each one of these working with them to develop the basis of each of these plans. So we aren't developing the housing plan for the housing committee. The housing committee actually developed most of their plan. And then they gave it to us and we did some tweaking and moving around with it, you know, combined a few goals or aspirations. And, but generally, if you were to compare the two documents, the spirit of both documents are pretty much developed by the committees. And that was how we did it. You're right. It could be done many different ways. And in fact, the plan we are trying to replace was developed in 2008 by my predecessor. And it was really built a lot with the public. It went out to the public and had lots of public input and asked the public what should be our goals on this, what should be our goals on this, what should be our goals on this. The criticism or the critique of that is that you end up sometimes with a lot of people who don't have background in something. And so you tend to think, oh, this is what we need to do to fix the housing problem. But you're not talking to any of the housing experts. You're just talking to people on the street and they may be telling you things that aren't legal or have been proven not to work. But when you work with the housing committee, they are still members of the public, but they're members of the public who've taken the time to understand each of these issues. So our hope is that by working with the committees first and then taking it to the public, eventually when we go to the public, we're going to say your housing plan was not developed by the Planning Commission, it was developed by your housing committee. And this is what they came up with. And this is the plan. And the public has every right to say that's not good enough or that's wrong. But we hope that they'll look at it and say if our housing committee has looked at it and they have taken the time to study and understand housing and they think this is the right thing to do, then, you know, but again, I will have no idea. My expectation is that when we go and we put these out, we're going to have 11 or 12 chapters. The public is going to see it and it's going to very quickly get narrowed down to that chapter is fine, that chapter is fine, that chapter is fine, that chapter is fine. And then we're going to spend a lot of time on two or three chapters that people think we want to continue to debate whether or not cars should be a part of Montpelier's downtown in the transportation plan. Or we're not transitioning out of fossil fuels fast enough and what we should be doing more. Those are, I think, the debates we're going to end up with in the end is that they're going to focus on a few key big areas of stuff that we typically hear about when we have council meetings or those types of debates. That would be my expectation and my hope is that it doesn't get thrown back and says no, start all over again. My hope is that this new format will help and we'll get us into a better position where we can make. And then in the same way, like we did with our zoning, we did a big update to the zoning in 2018, now we keep incrementally coming back to fix this, fix this, fix this, fix this. My hope is that in 2024, early 2025, we've adopted a new city plan. Then we can come back and go and say let's go and take a look at this one page, this one chapter and let's talk about how we can make our housing plan better. And then we can readop just the housing chapter. And it gives people more of an opportunity to really focus in on one issue as opposed to trying to amend 12 pages or 12 storyboards. That's going to be very hard for the public to absorb. But once we've got that adopted, then we can go back and do these smaller amendments that are much easier to have those conversations about. So I got to say this because I think the public is going to appreciate me saying this because you mentioned that the engineers are part of the community. So that's why they, that's a trickle down type of mentality. And what I mean by that is I've worked in software. I've also worked in renewable energy and wind turbines. I've worked with engineers. But the most intelligent thing I've ever heard was at a truck stop where he said Roman roads and cobblestones are still here. And before we had engineers, we didn't have potholes. And now we have potholes. So I think some of the answers need to be probably seen from a larger scope of people because I don't have an engineering degree. And I don't also, I don't have a, let's see here, why I understand the the issues of housing. I'll say it like that. And you know, it will probably be who those who may see it to study to involve other people. Thanks. And if I could just add one thing, and this is just more for context for the rest of the group that has come on more recently, the one thing I just add onto what Mike said was while we wound up adopting, we looked at, you know, what the other committee's priorities were. We did divert in certain ways from what the other committee's priorities were. So we sort of had to do a weighing of kind of competing interests. And we had to synthesize all these various concerns in a way that made the overall plan sort of palatable and streamlined. So this isn't just a peer reflection of kind of other committees like a wish list. So to the extent that we, it's not that we can sort of pass the buck on to the committees if there's outrage about it. But at least we have a basis. We've done the consultation piece with those other committees. And I think it's going to be helpful when we have sort of public discourse about it. It's baked in. Yeah. Good point, Aaron. And to clarify when Aaron's talked about the new people, Maria and Brian are also quite new. Yeah. I mean, look, I think I'm a barely a year in and I'm, I just love that Kirby said the learning curve is steep because there's a lot of work that's been done and a lot of deliberation on it. And so you read, you listen, I've met with Mike, I've met with Kirby, I've talked with a lot of you, you know, so everyone's really helpful filling in gaps as I play catch up, but it's going to take, it's going to take a bit for sure. But it's a little frustrating, but it's also like you just got to let it wash over you and chime in where you can. But well, we, we did plan some informational, that's a good segue, actually, because we plan some informational content for tonight, because at our last meeting, I had remembered that some questions came up about the DRB and the DRB being the Development Review Board and the DRC being the Design Review Committee. I think it's committee. Yeah. And so I had asked Mike to prepare to give us a quick presentation about what the DRB is about and what the DRC is about. And before turning over to Mike, I'll just put it in the context of the DRB and the DRC and the Planning Commission. We all do like parts of the planning work for the city. Those other boards in some towns in the U.S., there's a board like ours that does all of those functions. And in Montpelier, we've got to split up where the way I think of it is we are like the, I mean, we don't actually have any kind of real legislative power. That's the city council, but we are the legislative policy suggestors. And so that's, we work on the legislative side for the city. And the DRB in particular is like the judicial side of the planning part of the city. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mike to tell us more details about what the DRB and the DRC do. So yeah, I don't have any big power point or anything. I just figured I would go through and have a general discussion and kind of take questions if you've got them on how it works. I mean, we kind of kicked it off a little bit right at the start with the discussion of the fact that we used to have these combined things. Now you just do the policy side and we have a development review board that handles all the reviews for the permits. That said, they only do a part of it. So the way the process kind of works, somebody would come in with an application for a project and most projects in the city are, most of the projects are all handled administratively. So what that means is somebody comes in and says, I would like to put a new sign up at my business and we say you have to fill out these forms and they fill out those forms and then administrative staff reviews them and either approves or denies the application. Usually we're working with applicants throughout time over time as they're developing their application to say, well, you got to make sure your lighting is downward facing. It can't be facing up and it's got to be shielded and it's got to be of this size. So usually 99.9% of all applications that come to the planning office are approved because we've been talking to them. We don't sit back and just help people put in your application and we'll prove or deny them. We work with them cooperatively. So for the most part, most of those applications come in, they go right back out administratively. There's no DRB review, there's no DRC review. I'll start with the DRC. The Design Review Committee is a special committee that is appointed to review design work within mostly, we'll call it the downtown area. It actually covers part over where the high school is out towards the interstate and up to national life. So they're actually, national life is in design review and it comes all the way down through the downtown. And then there's another little cutout, little cookie cutout for the college up on College Street. So there's a little pod up there. So most of the area that's in design review, those people who get appointed to it are generally people who are familiar with construction and architecture and historic preservation. There's not a requirement, but usually we end up with a couple of people who are involved with it. And we have special design rules for that area. And design rules can be one of two things under state law. They could be historic design review or they could be a design overlay. We have a design overlay. We don't have a historic design overlay. But within our design overlay district, we have rules, one set of rules for historic buildings and one set of rules for not historic buildings. And we just updated these rules in, gosh, 2019. I think at least four of you were here. I don't know if Maria or Brian were here for the design review updates, but we updated those rules because they were really thin under the old rules. And those rules took a lot of debate. Actually, we had proposals in 2016 that were removed. And in fact, in the 2018 revisions, we left them exactly the same because it was so controversial to change the design review rules. So we gave it to the Historic Preservation Commission. They came up with new rules. We revised them and brushed them up and then we put them into a package and we adopted them. And what the new rules did was made a bunch of things much under the old rules. They were much, they were not much vague. They were really vague. You had like five rules that were like new development shall not have a negative impact, undue impact on historic properties. And that was that was the whole rule. There are no guidelines. That was just the rule. So we said, that's not constitutional. So we, it's a much more detailed. There are now 10 or 15 rules. There's now a design review guide that you can look at online. So there are a lot of things to help make decisions on in that design review guideline. So, but it primarily is focusing on the downtown and is primarily focusing on, you know, good, good character and protecting the historic character. And that gets a little bit to that question. And how is historic preservation addressed? That's most of where historic preservation is addressed is in those historic rules, because if you start impacting a historic building, then you can't, it's a little bit clearer now under the new rules, obviously, as I mentioned, but you can go through and fix things and replace things under the old rules. It wasn't clear. I've got to replace my windows and I'm in a historic building. Do I need to, you know, how do I replace those windows? Now it says, you can replace those windows with modern equivalents, as long as they're the same material, and they look the same. And then there are rules that basically get into, you know, if it's a three over, if it's a four over four, or a two over two, then it's got to have those you know, separations in the windows. If it's a wood window, it can be replaced, but it's got to be replaced with a wood window. But you don't have to take that old window out, send it to a historic preservationist to fix it and put that same old window back into your house, which is the way it had been enforced previously. You know, can you fix wood clavards on your outside if you've got, you know, wood clavards for your siding? Can I replace them? Can I take those old wood clavards off and put new wood clavards on? It wasn't clear in the past. Now we've got very detailed rules of what you can and can't do. And they work really, really well. And I think the public is, you know, usually when you hear a lot of complaints about the historic preservation or the design review, it's from somebody who used these rules prior to 2019, because those rules had a really bad reputation. And these new rules really seem to work well. So that's where we do most of our historic preservation. Protection is for historic buildings in that design review district. Now just to point out, there's a large portion of our historic district that is not in design review. And there's also a large part of our design review district that is not in the historic, like the high school and Green Mountain Power, and all those industrial buildings going out to I-89. Those are all in the design review district, but they're not historic. They're not particularly special, but they are in design review. So that's a little bit of the design review. The development review board, the design review is only going to make a recommendation. That was the other piece. That was why I wanted to start with them. They have no power to approve and deny. They're going to make a recommendation. In some cases, if it's an administrative permit, they're going to make it a recommendation to the administrative officer that says, we recommend you approve the application provided it meets these requirements. And if the people agree to them, then we can issue that permit. And they also might make a recommendation that goes to the DRB if it's a DRB application. So they don't have the power to approve and deny. They have the power to make a recommendation, but usually their recommendations are given a very high weight. It's very rare. It's happened three or four times in my time here where the DRB has disagreed with the DRC and said, no, we're not going to do that. But it does happen. But again, the DRC, just an advisory board, the DRB is the one board that sees most big projects. If you want to do a subdivision, it's going to have to go to the DRB to get approval. And things that go to the development review board need public hearings. We send a notice to the newspaper 15 days in advance. We send a letter to every single person, certified letter to every single butter that says, I don't know if that one's certified, the decisions are certified. But letters go to all the butters to go and tell them, here's the hearing, here's the application, here's when it's going to be, here's where you can show up. So the process is much more inclusive. And it's really meant, the DRB hearing is meant to look at projects that are going to have an potential impact on the neighborhood. So usually, as you were writing the zoning, when I was talking to you about writing the zoning, we talked about what should be a conditional use and what should be a permitted use. Permitted uses are the things we can administratively issue. Conditional uses are bigger things. Somebody, if somebody wants to put in a gas station, well, that's probably something we should make a conditional use and ask the neighbors if what their impacts are. Or a large development, 30,000 square foot retail, certain things are going to trigger these hearings. And it's in the zoning what things go. Major site plans, which is part of a big project. So usually, usually if it trips one, it's going to trip another and you're going to end up going for conditional use, major site plan. But that's what the development review board is meant to be a board of reasonable persons who are going to go and look at these applications and make a decision of will this have traffic impacts? If it does have traffic impacts, is it an undue traffic impact? Or is it okay? And those are the types of things. We'll have an undue impact on our facilities or resources. And so there are a number of questions. Subdivisions are going to look at all these technical questions, but usually it's big projects. So a little bit by the numbers. On an average year, we do about 140 zoning permits a year. It's been pretty consistent. This year is different because of the flood, but about 140 and about 20 of those applications will go to the development review board. So a smaller fraction of them, they meet twice a month. So pretty quick. In the past, before 2018, one of the big things about the 2018 update was streamlining these permits. It used to be half of all projects went to the development review board. It used to be 70 applications a year went to the DRB. So they were very busy and the zoning administrator was very busy cranking out decisions and approvals, because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of notices, but we've cut that way down and really just focused on those important things. What's important that we should send this to the DRB otherwise? Let's just write good rules and administer them fairly. And we haven't had a lot of complaints from butters. We haven't had a lot of complaints from the developers about this shift from making things more administrative. So these DFA and those projects still go to the DRB because they're big projects. But small signs. It used to be we'd get signs that would have to go to the DRB. If it was a sign in the design review district, signs would have to go to the DRC. All DRC went to the DRB and therefore every sign application in the downtown had this big long process to go through with a lot of fees because they had to go to the DRB and the DRC. So we've made more of those administrative. So they kind of go through. So that's a kind of big picture of the process. Once permits are issued, there's a requirement to get posted on the property and people can appeal them within 15 days. If it's a DRB, all the neighbors will get copies of the permit when it gets approved. So and really the zoning is our regulatory arm. We can accomplish goals by a number of ways and one of them is by using regulations. We can achieve goals through regulations. Sometimes projects, sometimes programs, sometimes policies. But regulations are a key point and the land use rules zoning is a big one. So I guess I'll stop it there. Maria? I have a question about why is the design review district different than historically? What is the reason for the design review district being different than the historic district? Ah, because we got beat up really badly when we tried to make the match. And that's really the reason why that was the initial proposal in 2015 was to make them match. But in order to do that, a whole bunch of people who are not in design review were going to be put in design review. And that because of design review having such a bad reputation, everybody was like, oh, heck no, you are not putting me in that mess. So our hope is our hope is that when we change the rules, which we did in 2019, that people will see, oh, it's not this big, bad, scary set of regulations anymore. It's actually reasonable and works very effectively. And now maybe they'll be a little bit more comfortable with the with the idea of being put into the district. So it was historic preservation has been trying to work on it. And that's what they're hoping for is that we'll be able to make them overlap a little bit better. But right now they they mostly overlap, but not entirely. The initial, the first design review district was in like 1970, I did a thing on it. And it was like 1976 or something. And it was just Main Street, State Street, Langdon Street, a little bit of Elm Street. And that was it. It was just the downtown. It was just the commercial block. And then over time, something would get added on national life would get added on. And then a little block over here would get added on. But for the most part, they were more commercial areas where they either don't have a right to vote because, you know, Green Mountain Power can't come in and fight us putting new regulations on them in national life. But but you try to go and put Loomis Street in and all of a sudden you're going to get a whole bunch of people on Loomis Street and Liberty Street knocking on your door to say, Hey, we we don't like this. So those areas of residential areas never got moved in. But these other places, more commercial places did. That was a little bit of the just the evolution over time of, you know, 1980, this phone would get added in. And then this little three parcels over here. And then this one, it really, it wasn't drawn out all at once. It was kind of this over time evolution of a map. So piggybacking off that question, when we reviewed like the zoning changes a few months ago, I think, and we were talking about history, like the historic structures were defined as being part of the historic district. But were we just talking about historic structures within the design review area? In that conversation, I think what we were talking about was with respect to demolition. So the only other rules we have that affect historic buildings is that you, no matter where you are in the city, whether you're in or out of the design review district, whether you're in or out of the historic district, historic buildings that are on the national register or on the state registers are protected from demolition unless you go through a special set of rules. So even if you're out on Elm Street, which is, you know, there are state registers for buildings in the meadow, so you couldn't just go into the meadow and bulldoze a building that's on the state register. You might be approved for it, but you're going to have to go through and demonstrate these other requirements are met, and you might be denied. You know, it would have to be something, for example, there was even historic preservation agreed. Yeah, there was a part of a carriage barn that somebody wanted to demolish, but because it was on the historic register and it was a part of the thing, they had to go through and get approval. And the historic preservation came in and said, yeah, we support the removing of that shed because it's part of the overall project to restore the rest of the carriage barn. But it was demolition of part of a historic structure. So they do get approved. And we've had applications in the past, but there was Cedar Street, the famous one, there was a demolition. There are a couple up on Court Street, these are all before me. Court Street had a number of them, but sometimes just buildings just sometimes they're just old buildings. And there's a distinction between an old building and a historic building. And if it's on the register, then we're going to look at it and make a decision. Is this just an old building? Or is this a building that we should deny and say, no, you need to actually maintain this building? I think the part that we were looking at referenced, you know, building additions or it was about new construction. It wasn't about, I think we also looked at demolition, but we talked about this one section that just involved additions to historic structures or any type of new construction. And remember, there's like that overshadowing language. Do you guys remember talking about that? So I'm just curious whether that was- I wasn't not picking up. I'm not remembering that specific one, but it's possible we've had some rules. I don't think we've got any specific rules changing the design review, but there may be some other rules that we've looked at that were in that. I think the shading issue is maybe- Shading issue. Yeah, shading issue is not mentioning historic. I'd have to look it up. That's okay. And then my last question is, so the DRB, are their decisions ever reviewed by city council or do they just have like carte blanche to like go? They are delegated authority in the same way that the zoning administrator. So the zoning administrator works for me. And even though, you know, Bill signs the checks and I'm her supervisor, she can do whatever she wants. She has a delegated authority. She is appointed to administer the regulations and I can't tell her what to approve or not to approve and city council can't do that either. The same goes for the development review board. Development review board is a quasi-judicial and they are handed the rights to approve and deny applications. And council is not supposed to intervene and get involved. That's not to say it doesn't happen in some places at some times, but they're not supposed to. It's supposed to be delegated. The only place, the only exception where this kind of comes into play is in the event that somebody appeals a decision of the DRB to go to court. Then the application goes to the city council to represent the city. And so there are times and it's happened once since I've been here where the DRB denied an application. It was appealed to environmental court and then city council negotiated with the developer for a settlement and then basically city council overrode, you know, in the agreement it went to the judge, the judge agreed and then it went back down. So basically in that way city council can have some peace to play if it's felt that it's in the best interest of the city for us to settle this appeal, then for us to fight this appeal in court. And so they settled that appeal. But in general, DRB is, should not be, it is inappropriate for any councilor to talk to DRB or suggest to DRB that they vote any one way or another on a project. Thank you. Anything else, Mike? No, that was a, like I said, and if anyone has questions on the DRB, it's, you know, permitting is a complex, you know, there's a lot of little moving parts. So I tried to just kind of hit as much of the kind of the big picture things, but there's certainly a lot of things where people are like, what about variances, or what about waivers, or what about these, or what about those? There's a lot of little things in there, but big picture, that's how things kind of work. And I guess the other piece I would say is the other role the DRB can play is as an appellate board. So if Meredith were to deny an application, somebody could go through and say, I'm going to appeal your decision. I think you're wrong, Meredith, my project meets the zoning rules. It would first be appealed to the development review board. So that three times, I've had that happen three times here in in the city so far since I've been here. Not always a Meredith's. We've had other decisions where people have disagreed and decided to take it to the DRB as an appeal. So that's another role that they do play. And then in those cases, because the zoning administrator is the appellant, I sit in as the administrator because we need an administrator to be the zoning administrator for the DRB to help the DRB. But obviously her decision is being appealed so she can't be staffed and be a defendant. So she just sits as defendant and then I go into staff. That's why I know there's only been three because I can remember off the top of my head all three appeals. People make me work and earn my money. Super helpful, Mike. Thank you. That's really helpful. Yes, definitely. And if you don't take anything else away, take away the fact that DRB does have a boss, but it's the judicial system. It's the courts. They're the boss. They're the boss of all of us, really. So, okay, if we don't have any, does anyone have anything else to say before we adjourn? Do you want to do minutes? Oh, it was minutes on the shore. Let's do minutes real quick. So one question. When it says you're looking for, who is the secretary at this point? Ah, so our secretary is Tam Furry. She is somebody we hired. She usually will take our videos and she'll just go online and watch them and she will transcribe our, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say transcribe because she is a court stenographer. She could do this all really detailed, but we don't pay her to do that. She just paid to do minutes. So she's the person who does our minutes for us. She's the secretary. Okay. Thank you. We pay her? Yes. Okay. So I'll take a motion to approve the minutes. I reviewed them. I didn't see any issue. I'll second that. They looked okay. Who is the first? Maria? Oh, I thought, Brian, a second name. I thought, I'm sorry. I thought, were you asking for a motion or making a motion? I'm sorry. I was in the middle of reading. I was, I was asking. So, so I will move to. I will move to approve the minutes. I will second. Okay. Uh, those in favor of approving the minutes say, I, I, I, minutes approved. And so for our final act, because February is coming up and president's day, I'm going to need the person to motion to adjourn who has a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in their house. Do we have any of those? I know. Do you see it? I just grabbed it as soon as I saw it. It was fantastic. And it came from the library in Philadelphia. So even better. Whoa. Great history. It's very historic. I know. Did you get the, did you get the historic preservation in your house on, just on that? I think they're all over my house. Someday, someday she's going to be on, she's going to be on television someday with the story of, I bought this thing for so much and it got appraised for. I, I just can't believe it. You know, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. If it, if, if it wasn't for him, I might not have been here. Yeah, I know. And I was just like, awesome painting, awesome person. And it was not, unfortunately it did not cost $35, which is what I was hoping. Still good. But I'll make the motion to adjourn. All right. Motion, Tammy, who takes our minutes, note that Abraham Lincoln is the person who did motion to adjourn. And do we have a second? For all to stay. Second. Don't make me beg. Oh, I'll second. That's fine. Sorry. I'm not doing it as I was made. Okay. So we're just going to consider ourselves adjourned and everybody have great night and we'll see you in two weeks. Thanks, everyone. Bye.