 All right, we'll call the meeting to order. I don't usually stand at a podium for our meeting, so just bear with me here. I'm Leslie Walts, I'm chair of the Planning Commission. And the first item on it, well second item on our agenda after calling the meeting to order is approval of the agenda. So members of the Planning Commission, there anything that you wanna change around in the agenda? Hearing none, we'll deem it approved. Item three is comments to the chair. So this is the welcome. I wanna just introduce the members of the Planning Commission. Have you all introduced yourselves? And I know it's gonna take a little bit, but we'll get through it. So we know who's in attendance right now. And then I'll talk a little bit about what the concept is for tonight and for moving forward with the development of the city plan, which is, this is the first of what I expect to be a long process, hopefully not protracted, but long enough to be comprehensive. So that being said, I just wanna introduce the members of the Planning Commission and our staff, our dedicated staff. I'll start with Mike actually. This is Mike Miller, he's the director of planning and development, is that the? Planning and community development. Planning and community development. And he provides staff support for Planning Commission and other committees, some of yours as well. And we'll start with Stephanie, who can introduce herself. And then after you're done, we'll hit the other two commissioners who are in the audience. And I'll ask the mayor to kick us off our introductions after that. So, Stephanie. Hi, Stephanie Smith. Hi, Kirby Keaton. Hi, I'm Kim Cheney. Barbara Henry. Marianne Casam. And I'm John Adams. And our members have been on the commission since Kim, when did you join? That long. Thank you. 1922. Yeah, so Kim has the most historic knowledge of the process and went through, he didn't go through the master plan process last time. So we're all new to this, I believe. That was a couple of years before we started the zoning. Right, right. Which was a long process, as you all know. So, okay. And then I would just like you all to introduce yourselves and say what committee you're affiliated with. And if you're not affiliated with a committee, that's fine. You're welcome, of course, just introduce yourself. So we'll start with our mayor. Sure, hi, my name's Anne Watson. I'm the mayor and I'm so thrilled that you're all here. This is great. Donna Bates, city council, and I'm a member of several committees. What is our James back then? James Brady, chair of the conservation commission. I heard you. I'm the director of Montpelier of I. I'm Laura Gephardt, I'm the director of the Montpelier Development Corporation. I'm Anne Seidman, I'm on the board of the Montpelier Family Board. I'm Joanne Triome, director of the Montpelier Housing Board. Yeah. I'm the co-chair of the Housing Task Force. Hi, I'm Jen Holler, and I'm the other co-chair of the Montpelier Housing Task Force. Hi, I'm Kate McCarthy, and I'm the vice chair of the city's development working board. Sarah Hoffmeyer, I'm on the Montpelier Tree Board. Kate Stevenson, chair of the Montpelier Energy Advisory Committee. Glenn Hutchison, city council, district three. I'm Glenn Sarawillo, I'm the creation department's advisory board. I'm the lawman, executive director of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority. Doug Hoyt, member of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority. Elizabeth Parker, interloper, sustainable Montpelier Coalition. Dan Jones, executive director of Montpelier, sustainable Montpelier Coalition. Dan Costin, I'm on the Energy Committee and the Transportation Infrastructure Committee. I'm in the wild with the Montpelier Tree Board. I'm also a Dan, Dan Dickerson of the Montpelier Park Center. I'm Tina O'Brien, the chair of the board of the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition. Mary Hooper, a member of the Housing Task Force and Stickwrap. Farmer Mayer. Good morning. Sorry. I'm John Roberts and I'm chair of the Start, Chair of the Grays and Commission and vice chair of the Design Review Committee. Yeah, I'm Laura Byron. I'm here with Sustainable Montpelier Coalition. I'm Ginny Cook. I'm an interested citizen. Great. Okay, we get everyone? Okay, I was trying to check off to see who was here at the same time, so I don't know how good I was at that, but we'll see. So, you all read my letter. I'll just sort of reiterate we're here to just kick off the conceptual topics of what we want to cover in our city plan. I thought, you know, we got the suggestion from the energy committee, I think it was, about we really be helpful to hear what other committees are thinking about so that we don't inadvertently have conflicting goals or duplicative processes, and so we birth this process. So, we're all kind of just seeing how it goes, and I think that we're really just here to talk very broadly, generally, what are the goals that your committees care about and are focused on, and we're gonna go from there. I think that the next step after this meeting is going to be for us to get a repository online, a website, as it's known, to collect information in a constructive and consistent manner from the committees, and that way we can start with this broad level and start collecting more details about that, and then we can decide whether another committee meeting after, all committee meeting after that would be fruitful and productive. We don't wanna waste your time, because you're already volunteering, going above and beyond, and we appreciate that. I mean, we're all here as volunteers, so we just figure out the best way to be productive and consistent and not have conflicting goals. I think Mike Miller's gonna get into more details about our idea of what the city plan, we're calling it city plan, not master plan, because we think it's a little bit more of an, it's a little bit more of a nuanced, accurate description of what this is, rather a master plan you kind of think of, construction or development, and although we are doing that in a way, this is, city plan is, I mean municipal plan is a statutory term that we're doing, so let's use the term. So that's where we were thinking, we're calling it city plan rather than master plan, as was previously the practice. So he's gonna talk a little bit more about what our overarching goal is for when we get further down the development of our city plan, so that you can have in mind where we're thinking of going. Tonight is not, we're not there yet, I don't want anyone to feel like they don't have enough information, it's really just about us all learning about each other's goals. So that's it for tonight. I am going to call up the presenters in order, we're gonna have Mike give a few comments before we move into your presentations, but once we start, I'll call up the presenter, announce who's on deck, so that you'll be able to position yourself, get some water or whatever you need to do. You'll have five minutes, and Ariane will hold up a little sign, you show us your sign, for one minute left. We're gonna try to stick to five minutes, because we don't wanna keep you here all night, and we only have the space for a limited time, so she's gonna hold it up for one minute, and when you're out of time, and if you are really going over at that point, I'm gonna have to cut you off, and I don't wanna do that. And if you really didn't get through everything, then if we have time at the end, we'll come back and get to you again. Donna has a question. I was just wondering how many committees you invited, and how many responded? I think we invited 17 or 18, and we have 13 or 14 presentations tonight. Well, we haven't gone through all of that list, but we'll certainly be following up with them, and we'll see where we go from there. We wanted to have a little bit more lead time before this meeting, in hopes of having everyone in attendance, but we did the best we could, and we're really impressed with the amount of turnout we got within a month of notice, so thank you all for making that happen. And not everybody who's here received an invitation, and you should have, so I appreciate everyone who reached out to me, identifying themselves as a committee that should be involved in the process, because we do want you involved. So it was not, it was inadvertent, believing. Any other questions about process for this evening before we get started? Great, well, you can interrupt at any time. So those are my comments, and I think that's it for item three, and with that being said, we're gonna kick it off with our Director of Planning, Mike Miller. Oh, one thing I should note, the Orca Medium microphone is on the podium here, so you can move from the podium, but don't stray too far, and if you do, you're gonna get a signal from John Jose back there, I think, about it, so. All right, thanks everyone. Again, I'm Mike Miller, Planning Director, I know almost everybody here, but a couple of new faces. I'll jump right in, I'll keep this short because I know we've got a lot of people who are presenting. So the community, the Planning Commission goals, we really kind of had three goals that we came up with when we started talking about redoing the plan. The first thing, when we looked at the old plans, we wanted to reorganize based on topics which have corresponding committees. So if you look at the current plan, it isn't organized this way, and it makes it more difficult to implement, so we wanna have housing chapter, energy chapter, transportation chapter, historic preservation chapter, natural resources, community services, so each chapter will have a plan that goes along with it, and because Montpelier has a lot of committees, we actually have at least one committee for every chapter that we're writing. So the second one was that we want the new plan to be more strategic in implementing. Some of the issues that we had with the previous plan is it was very well written from a goals plan and vision, but it didn't really help us define how we were gonna get there. So we really wanted to strengthen and be more strategic, and then finally we wanted to make this more of a 21st century plan, make it web based with more links to information, try to keep the chapters short so people can really learn stuff but not get overwhelmed with 500 pages. So today, as Leslie kind of introduced, we'll learn about the upcoming city plan process, the initial thoughts from committees on their goals and aspirations, and we'll talk about the next steps, which we already have a little bit, and we'll get into that. So what do we mean by aspirations when we're talking about that? These are really our long term visions. We want them to be clear and positive. We wanna, we want clean water. We don't wanna not have pollution, so we try to be positive in what we wanna see in the future, and if you can't articulate that vision, tell us what you wanna see in 10 years or 20 years. We can always help work out what the vision will be. The key is just to get some time to start to think about what we wanna see going forward, and this will come up more, this mock-up that we did for a city filled with butterflies, rainbows, and unicorns, and it wasn't meant to trivialize this, and it wasn't meant to kind of marginalize anything, it just, it helped us to be able to formulate how would you go through and write a goal, and how would you write an aspiration, and how would you write the strategies without having to worry about the details because it's just made up, but it did help us to chart a nice clear path for how we would get from aspirations to the vision accomplished, and that structure really helps out, and it'll come back when we get to the next steps this fall. So framing goals, what we did, this kind of goes back to the maintain evil, goes back to our work that we did with the unicorns rainbows idea, was breaking the vision for the goals, break the visions into small bite-sized pieces, and what we wanted goals to work into was maintain, evolve, and transform. So maintain is your vision to work to keep something the same, maintaining the historic integrity of our national registered district. So sometimes our goals are to keep something the same, sometimes they are to evolve, what needs to change in an incremental way, increase rental housing development until 5% vacancy is achieved, and finally the transformative ideas, what won't happen without big changes. So net zero 2030 is transformative, it will require how we, to change how we live our lives. We could talk about the railroad transit oriented design, that's another big one that would require a kind of a transformative idea. So the next steps after we get through these, which I think Leslie kind of went over really quickly, which was the Planning Commission will review what's presented tonight, we'll work through and refine these goals and aspirations. And then I think we'll need to have a public hearing to review the goals with presentation to the council. I think the important part of this first step is because it's difficult to implement if we haven't all agreed on the goals. It's really hard. And I actually think that the planning step, this first step is actually the harder piece. A lot of times plans fall back on vague words because it's easier. And what we're gonna try to do is to kind of get away from the vagueness and really get to the important pieces of all of these goals because it'll make it a lot easier if we know exactly what we want to do to start coming up with strategies to say how we're gonna get there. And then the third step will, the second step is we would go through another round of these how to write implementation strategies with committees. And we have the five P's, which sounds all mysterious, but it's just really about different strategies, whether it's policies or permits or programs for how we would implement things. And then we would have another round of these all committee meetings in the fall where we can start to talk about how our implementation strategies relate before having a round of public hearings and council review. And then we pull it all together into a plan. So this will take a good deal of time. I'm hoping if we're done by the end of 2019, consider it a big success. It takes time to meet with all the committees and pull everything together. So, but thank you all for coming tonight and for giving us your input. And I kind of rushed through a bunch of things so we can try to save some time. But if you have any questions. Thanks Mike. So first, we have Kate and the energy advisory committee. We're gonna go till seven or 10 past seven and then we'll take a quick break. I'm just gonna read out the order so that you have an idea of where you are. So the energy advisory committee, conservation committee, Montpelier development corporation, Montpelier housing authority, transportation infrastructure committee, central Vermont public safety authority, sustainable Montpelier coalition, housing task force, parks commission, recreation department advisory board, tree board, development review board, historic preservation commission. And then we were, we received materials from complete streets group but we don't have a representative tonight but we'll put their goals up on the screen. So that's, so thank you. Okay. Oh, and as we work through we have some slides but we don't have slides from everybody. So Barb has graciously volunteered to sketch up some notes of the goals that are articulated by our speakers tonight. So if you could make sure that I'm getting these goals correctly as you're going through your process, that would be great. This is a test, Barbara, because you wrote our so. Oh. Oh. Barbara's on our committee also, so. Well great, hi everybody. Welcome from the energy advisory committee and we've got quite a few of our members in the audience tonight. I think our aspiration is pretty clear but also pretty audacious that Montpelier will become the first capital city to use a hundred percent renewable energy and eliminate fossil fuel use. And so in breaking that down into some more tangible goals we really kind of divided it into two transformational goals. One is by 2030, a hundred percent of municipal energy used for thermal, electric and transportation will be renewable or offset. And then the second goal is by 2050, community-wide fossil fuel use will be eliminated and a hundred percent of all energy needs will be met renewably. So there you have it. No problem. So we have gone into a lot of detail about the baseline conditions, the different timelines for different pieces of this but I just wanted to give you kind of overall bullet points of some of the strategies that we're considering and I think we're still working on a lot of our strategies. The first is really conservation, reducing electric and heating fuel use by 30 percent. Then one policy strategy is to require new construction to be built to net zero standards. Love to talk to the housing committee about that. Reduce automobile vehicle miles traveled, weatherize approximately 200 homes a year. Explore potential for co-generation through district heat and the wastewater recovery facility. Evaluate all existing buildings for rooftop solar potential. Implement fuel switching to renewable fuels, wood and heat pumps, district heat and ground source heat pumps. Introduce microtransit and public transit as one of the strategies to reduce vehicle miles traveled and switch to electric vehicles and biodiesel vehicles. That's all, yeah. So your development corporation on deck are before we start doing everything that you needed. Yeah, I guess. You're a fast driver. Kate's always a tough act to follow, so great job. We have the same exact goals and aspirations, no, she can't. So we were in a good spot to look into this at our last meeting. We finished up our strategic plan matrix about a year and a half ago, which gave us a list of everything under the sun that we want to prioritize as a conservation commission. And actually worked with Mike Miller back about a year and a half ago and we drafted up some of the language and it's actually switched a little bit since then as we start digging into these goals. So we're really excited that the process is happening now, we've got some good momentum going to add some good stuff to this plan. So based on our commission, our goals that came from that strategic planning, our geographic size, our location in the state in the region, we had our top priority land at stormwater management and planning and that's been something that we've been working towards and kind of trying to knock off some low-hanging fruit for stormwater infrastructure projects and we kind of our aspiration is to have no polluted water go into our watershed. Next, we've been working really hard to map an inventory, all natural resources that have high priority within the city limits and we've had some really successful studies go on where we've had our vernal pools mapped, which we just recently were able to use to help with the mountain biking trails going on near the North Branch Nature Center. So they were able to avoid a wetland area and buffer there, which was really exciting. So we want to continue to increase that inventory and our aspiration would be to map every single bug, animal and plant in the city and hopefully keep them native and bring in the natives. So that's our second big goal and our third big goal is to once we clean up all the water and map everything, we want to teach everybody where all the resources are and why they're important. So outreach and public education is our third big goal and we're really excited about implementing that strategy through either farmer's market or a better social network outreach program. So yeah, so those are our three main goals moving forward. I think I'll just look over here. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, public outreach education, yep, great. So I think that's, if there's any questions before me. Great, well, thank you. Thank you. How was the authority on debt? Hello, so we're doing sort of a joint presentation because our two organizations are very complimentary and collaborate on quite a bit. So my name is Lara Gebhart and I'm the executive director of the Montpelier Development Corporation and the Development Corporation exists to ensure the economic vitality and sustainability of the city of Montpelier and then we can get into how we do that and what we're doing. Go ahead, Dan. I'm Dan Groberg. I'm the executive director of Montpelier Live and our mission is to celebrate downtown Montpelier. Our aspiration is that Montpelier serves as the economic, social and cultural center for central Vermont with a thriving downtown and unique sense of place where existing businesses of all size feel valued and engaged and startups are encouraged and supported. So our first goal falls under Evolve. Montpelier has a wraparound system of support for existing and new businesses and just to provide some context of what that means that includes housing for our workforce, workforce development, business advisory services, strengthening the relationship between the city residents, city council, commissions and businesses. So that's really, it's a very comprehensive idea we have about that wraparound service. Our second goal, which we wrote down as transform but I don't think that gives enough credit to what we have already, so I'm changing it to Evolve. Montpelier is recognized as a destination for arts and culture and some of what we were thinking includes public art, downtown events, a streetscape and downtown beautification. And our third goal is transform and that's Montpelier is transformed by new development that maximizes existing assets which include our rivers and historic character and really embodies our community values. And so again, just to provide some context to that, that's to activate our rivers, actually utilize those in our development plans. Utilize land to meet housing and commercial needs so we can get to vacancy rates that are above 1%, have inclusive development, sustainable development and really engage the community in those processes. And that's it, any questions? Yes. Can you give us an example of utilizing the river better? Yeah, so even just having river access, we have these beautiful assets and you only really get a great view when you're in the middle of a bridge. So can we have amenities that are along the river that can tap into economic development that's driven by our natural assets? You can spur recreational tourism and a lot of really impactful things by utilizing a natural asset, yeah. You're doing any thinking about development and floods? Yeah, so that's part of how do we, we can't develop in areas that have flooding and we have the 100 year flood plain and floodways that we have to think about, so. Which is now 20 years. Yeah, so we have to be conscious of that and that impacts any development that occurs. Can you give me a little outline and what it is that you're thinking about as a goal for that? For in terms of flood areas or? I mean we have downtown and it's hard to develop if it's gonna be flooded, right? Just wonder if, I mean it's early in this planning but have you got any general directions you'll develop in that? Think anyways to mitigate it and that's where I'd look to the planning commission or the planning department to help advise and really other commissions that have some specialization in these areas and we have a great architect throughout the city who can help mitigate some of those issues. We have the rules that require certain elevation for development to, I mean it's something about. Two feet, two feet above the. Yeah, so we have that and then but it would allow for parking underneath because you can move the cars or move the cars and then property isn't damaged so there's lots of things like that using the river hazard area rules that we have. Yeah. I think there's also opportunities in the work that the conservation commission is doing for example to do stormwater management and flood mitigation management that can enable development. Yeah, and our idea with utilizing the river it doesn't mean planning a building right on top of it it means how can we utilize that asset to the best of its ability. Any other questions? I do. Just because I don't understand economic and social development that well to be honest. So how the first goal that you outlined me I wrote at EpiCenter, maybe that wasn't the word you used but an economic center, I mean what's the vision like what's the region that you're thinking of? The economic center that's our aspiration and we said economic, social and cultural center for central Vermont is what we said. But our first goal was a wraparound system of support for new and existing businesses. So piggybacking on that a little bit. What have you identified as some of the most important milestones to get us towards that aspiration? Is it? Not that I'm just talking about you guys, like yeah. So feel free to pun me. I'm gonna say it, it's your problem. But just as a brainstorming thing because that's what we're here for, like what are some of the things to get us there such as we need a convention center we need whatever. Well, hi, so many ideas here. So a big thing that we like to, we focus on in a lot of areas we're moving towards is really lifting up your existing industries. We have some really strong employers in our area. They need to grow, they want to grow. Do we have the amenities to help them grow? So simple as that, we have National AI, Vermont Mutual, some big heavy hitters. Do we have the ability to assist in their expansions? Do we have the space to accommodate that, let alone the housing to accommodate their workforce? So can we make our strong employers stronger? And that's, there's small things that we can put in place to help that. It's not necessarily a convention center and that helps us get there. It's where we play off a lot of these committees of we need more housing to accommodate the workforce. We need to think about development in a different way to best utilize the space we have available because we have employers busing at the seams that we don't want to lose them because those are well-paying jobs, those are people are eating downtown during the day if they're not living here. So there's a lot of things that we just want to build on that are already existing here, but how do we make those pieces stronger? Does that kind of get to your question? Yeah, I think that's wonderful. I think that is a way to work this with so many other things. I'm hearing housing and then other secondary business services. Business services and something that continues to come up in conversations we have is just resources for existing businesses, especially small businesses and startups. There's a bit of a gap in resources that are available, not just in Montpelier, but in Vermont in general. So if we can bridge that gap, provide mentoring programs, any sort of programs that provides resources that get to small businesses' needs. So some of that as well. Do anything, Dad. Startup incubator is a more specific, if you're looking for a more specific idea. Looking for physical spaces in incubator. That would include training and mentorship services. Hi everyone, my name is Katie and I'm here tonight representing the Montpelier Housing Authority. And hang on, I'm just saying anything. Let's just describe. Fair enough, fair enough. How much more do we already have? Yes, since I didn't get slides together tonight. So career teaching. Yes, housing authority. So the Montpelier Housing Authority promotes and provides affordable housing in Montpelier. The target populations for housing assistance are the elderly, persons with disabilities and family with children. Although income limits apply to all of the programs. Single persons who qualify for Section 8 vouchers can also apply for assistance, but all families, elderly and disabled persons must be housed first. We have a few, so we're technically not a city agency. We are a city-appointed board that oversees the work of the MHA which is an independent local agency. We, their budget is, or our budget is funded by federal subsidies and fees paid directly to the MHA for managing other subsidized buildings in the area. Subsidized housing buildings. So the MHA does not receive state or local funds but we do pay for services used and property taxes. So we have a few goals for the next 10 years or so. And most of it is about keeping the status quo, to be honest, because we feel that the MHA has been doing a very good job of meeting its mission. So the first is to continue to promote cooperation and communication with members of the community, with city officials and with all of the agencies such as the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the USDA Rural Development Department. So for this one, in particular, where the MHA has an easily accessible office and pioneered apartments down on Main Street and the board's meetings are always publicly available. The executive director, Joanne Toriano, is a member of the Housing Task Force so she's always in communication about the housing goals and she also sends annual reports to the mayor. And we just aim to continue that. The second goal is to promote the maintenance of Montpelier rental housing and to determine what need will be, there will be in the future. We facilitate, the MHA facilitates the use of Section 8 housing in small and large buildings in Montpelier. They work with landlords to meet the HUD standards to have a Section 8 voucher applied to the use. There's also a program for homeowners to use Section 8 vouchers towards their own mortgages so that they can kind of keep it local. Our third goal is to mobilize resources to improve existing housing of the MHA owned buildings in particular, the MHA owns two buildings in town and then there are another three which are owned by the Capital City Housing Foundation which is the 501C3 arm of the Montpelier Housing Authority. And we have a strong record of keeping these buildings maintained but we sometimes need to take a particular, a new path and there's one building that we are managing or that we own that needs a little bit direction so we've kind of asked for a needs assessment on how to move forward with that. So that's our three goals that might not be the most useful to the Planning Commission they're more focused on what we need but that's where we are. Mobilize resources for existing housing of the MHA buildings. So I have a question, why don't you think they'll be useful for the planning ministry? We care about this too. Well, true, yeah, I guess so. I don't know, I just, because we're a little bit more self-directed than it might be helpful to know but that's what we're doing. I don't want to under-account here this counter, this is why we wanted to hear it because I think that this does play into other things that are, the maintenance of rental properties I'm seeing across over the energy community there. There's a lot of this. Are you glad to hear that? Oh, I'm glad to hear that. Is there an opportunity to expand the boundaries that you have? Yes and no. Right now, the housing authority has 122 vouchers kind of allotted to it but we can only, we typically have about 110 in use at any given time because there are too few properties in Montpelier and the, sorry, that's what I'm going to hear. Mostly due to lack of federal funds. The fundings have been cut back. Right now we're having a problem because a lot of our voucher holders find housing with down street because of renovating three buildings. They empty the buildings and put them in other apartments so they have very little in the way of vacancies and the vacancy rate in Montpelier in general is very small. I mean, we need apartments. Rentals evolve, rentals, sizes, not sizes. What am I thinking, my brain is dead. Crisis, crisis. Crisis, thank you. Arrange. So we anticipate that a lot of people will talk about housing and we plan to be active in housing. If we're successful in increasing the housing stock, how will that interplay with what we may change doing? Would that be an opportunity to increase subsidized housing or do you think the levels would stay the same or? Something. I think that there are always opportunities for housing who's different needs at different times. And we're always open to hearing what the community feels that they need for additional housing, what types, whether it's transitional housing. I know years ago there was a, maybe not that many years ago there was a, it's not fair, Barry has a shelter in Montpelier isn't doing anything. And so when the opportunity came, the grant came to Good Samaritan. They did the temporary shelter at Bethany and the housing authority contributed funds because they required a walk-in shower. And so even in small little ways, trying to cooperate with other agencies. And right now between French Block and then Taylor Street, there's some new housing there's been. Steve Romolini just did six units down off Barry Street that are I think opening now. So I think we do need to increase the stock. There's talk of, whether it's new housing inspections and registrations and that's, we've been talking about that. This would be the, probably the third iteration that I've been involved with, inspection programs. Montpelier does a pretty big job of moving up the stock. I don't think we have the huge problem of Darrell's buildings or a big, there's almost no way to go with pressure community. Okay. I'm from the Transportation Infrastructure Committee. I was expecting Dan Gordon to be here next week. Yeah, I didn't hear, that's the one check I didn't have on here. I don't know if you want to say anything. I'm happy to talk for a minute and maybe Donnie can help as well because she was at our last meeting. Okay. I think it's fine, we might just have to edit later when Jen gets here. But so I'm Dan Costin. I'm on the Transportation Infrastructure Committee and just for background, there's some funds that come from the parking meters. It's an alternative transportation fund. It's maybe $40,000 a year or so. And we have authority to spend that money on improvements to infrastructure within the city. And some of the goals that we talked about in our last meeting were to implement some of the plans that are existing that we have for transportation in the city, in particular the Montpelier and Motion Plan. It's a very detailed plan, it probably has 75 goals in it. So trying to break it down to three was quite difficult and we had some time in our meeting trying to narrow it down. But from what I remember in our meeting, we really wanted to work on some of the new plans that we're developing that are more detailed than the Montpelier and Motion Plan. And one of them is our Complete Streets Plan which is in process and also a traffic calming policy which is not necessarily infrastructure directly but it's a process where we can get community input. And if there's a problem in the community like, for example, the four-way stop at Elmond Spring Streets which was recently implemented, something like that can be done to help reduce issues of cars traveling too fast and pedestrians not having a chance to walk through streets. Another aspect that we mentioned in our meeting was we really wanted to create a safe and inviting city for pedestrians and bikers. And so it goes beyond just putting paint on the roads to try to say the cars and the bicycles should share traffic. But we really need to put infrastructure on the ground that makes the routes that people use for transport safer and create the network of easy paths for people to walk and bike through the city, north-south routes and east-west routes to get to the center of the city to do the things they wanna do to have bicycle parking in the city so they have convenience when they're using their bicycle and closing the gaps that exist that are barriers to that transportation. So that's only two goals and I'm not sure exactly what the third was, but I think we did talk about transit as well. Transit's very important to the committee, although it's not the most major focus. Our major focus is for bikes and pedestrians to get to those transportation resources, such as the new transit center that's going in. You don't have to have three goals. Okay, do you have something else you can add, Donna? The short end of it. We started out with a vision and so when Dan mentioned the studies, the one that comes to mind is the Green of America, but also we had the Main Street Scoping Study looking at all the intersections on Main Street and then we've also had the study of the complete streets and that's looking at how we reduce the amount of pavement. It increased the amount of greenery, stormwater treatment, rain gardens, and that we start proportioning all of our streetscapes more to the human dimension instead of the auto dimension. And it's a real beautiful picture of which Jen will be sending you from these studies that really that's what we're working towards. So any way of increasing pedestrians, increasing cyclists, wherever they're going, whether it's on the street or in their trails or in the path, that's what our real goal is and our strategy is behind that, but it's a real pretty community when we get done with it. So I want you to have that vision. Great, thank you. To accommodate, encourage. Yeah, and encourage. Oh, hi, question. I do have a question for you, Dan. In looking at your goal for safety and inviting city pedestrians and bikers, is there also a conversation in your committee about educating cyclists on how to follow the vehicular laws so that it's same? Yes and no. There's actually two, there's two bicycle committees. There's another committee that has exactly that goal. We're mainly the infrastructure and there's another committee that's really dedicated towards education and policy. Okay, thank you. Is there another question? Okay, all right. I just want to say that as a pedestrian, my question would be more to how do we educate drivers to respect cyclists and pedestrians? That's just one of the lifer point of view. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, if I may, I think something you said earlier, Dan, about transportation infrastructure and what it can accomplish, we answer both of those questions. So those streets are designed in a way that makes it really clear who's supposed to be doing what where and how fast that can help solve a lot of those problems at the interface that they're going to travel in an ideal world. Yep, great, thank you. Take the authority and then sustain a little more for your coalition, I'm right. I think they're visual for both of these, so please, please. And then after the sustainable development of Montpelier Coalition, we'll take a chat candidate break. Hello everybody, thank you for having me. I am the executive director of the Center Vermont Public Safety Authority, which was legislatively chartered in 2014 as a union municipal district after a vote of joining the membership of the city of Montpelier and by the city of Berry. Since that time, we've also grown by adding the capitol fire mutual aid district as a third member. I'd like to take a moment and introduce Donna Bate, who everybody knows, she's one of our board members, Doug Hoyt here and Kim Cheney on the planning commission. Our purpose has been to work towards trying to consolidate, integrate and regionalize public safety services to make these services more efficient. Just imagine, and we have focused the last three years on trying to do this by starting with dispatching as a singular function to consolidate. But imagine if you will that you are in or there's a traffic accident, you're in a traffic accident at Berlin Four Corners intersection of North Payne Turnpike and Route 62. It's a fairly serious bodily injury traffic accident. So of course the phone, you pick the cell phone up and you call 911 and a very efficient system, the 911 call taker answers the phone and is not only dealing with you, giving emergency medical instructions if needed, but also in the process of transferring that dispatching call to the emergency service providers that need to respond to that accident. Well, emergency service providers that need to respond to the accident is kind of the key to this little story because Berlin receives an ambulance service with a contract through the town of Berry. So Berry receives its dispatching services from Lemoyle County. So that 911 call taker to get the ambulance to you in Berlin has to call Moyle Sheriff's Department to dispatch the ambulance. Meanwhile, Berlin Fire Department has a fast squad. They have to respond as well. And oh, by the way, they are dispatched by the Montpelier Police Department because they're part of the capital fire system. So that call handler is responding by sending Berlin Fire to the accident through the Moyle. And the police department has to go there because they have to investigate the accident and oh, by the way, they're dispatched by the state police so the state police gets that call. Very inefficient system. Now you're probably saying, but that's in the town of Berlin. We have a very good dispatching service in Montpelier. Yes, absolutely, you're correct. What we're asking for is to think beyond the traditional paradigm that exists. We're trying to break down political boundaries, if you will, because we live in a highly mobile, highly technologically advanced society right now. And as I started that accident could be involving you, the Montpelier citizen. We believe that standardized services need to be a choice for everybody across central Vermont. And so we are working hard at trying to develop a unified delivery system of public safety services. We're trying to get our members to play leadership roles and trying to promote a better mousetrap, if you will, for public safety services. We're trying to influence the legislature to take a look at this from a systemic perspective, this being dispatching and delivery of public safety services. And so our primary goal for our mission, if you will, is to develop a unification or unified public safety services throughout central Vermont. We wanna do that by expanding and developing the services, focusing on employee-focused employment and customer service. We would like to regionalize or consolidate management and administrative services and leave the delivery of services as they exist now within individual communities. Thus, we'd like to achieve the benefits of economies of scale while still focusing on local control and local service delivery. Did I make my five minutes? Yeah. Okay. Unless there's any questions, thank you. If you're in the Montpelier coalition, then we'll have a quick break. And after that, we'll have the housing department. Hi there. We're the Sustainable Montpelier coalition. And I guess we fall in the category of sort of transformational big think for this. Our mission is to help catalyze our community to reimagine the land use downtown and then foster the community engagement necessary to transform that support into a sustainable future. Our three main goals for the downtown of Montpelier are one, to create green spaces with access to the river. Two, to see over a thousand new housing units in and near the downtown by 2030. And three, to transform how we get around so that our downtown will be freed from the demands of the single occupancy of them. Now those goals arose from the Sustainable Montpelier 2030 design competition that completed a year and a half ago. This picture here is the winning design which won the majority of the votes in the 700 cast in the final round of the competition. It's the template which we're using for these suggestions. And we look forward to working with you, the commission, so that these ideas can be incorporated into the new city plan. It's our hope that the city will adopt this vision for diversifying its land use so that Montpelier can become the durable, vital, and beautiful community and one that benefits all of its citizens. Now many of you have seen this visual. It shows the current state of our land use downtown. So over 65% of that land is dedicated to parking lots. Yeah, if you ask the average Montpelier right, what's the biggest problem downtown? It's lack of parking. National studies have consistently shown that paved over parking lots are the source of economic loss for our downtown and detract from the quality of life. They take up space that could have higher and better uses. One of our board members kind of put it this way. We need to move towards more uses of the same space for more people, more of the time. Now many of our citizens buy into that need of rethinking our land use around the river, which gets us into the first of the goals, which is open space, reclaiming our river. As you saw, that winning design had a really good idea of how to recapture the green space along the river. We know from other cities around the country that who practice smart growth, that it's best to plan for the open spaces first and then site new business and housing. In this way, the beauty and benefit of the landscape can be featured in those plans. This is a vision that came with the design competition of a riverfront park at the confluence of the North Branch. Now we can and should access our river so we can picnic and stroll along the river and even maybe find a place to put in a kayak. These are all activities that would boost our economy, our livability and our quality of life. The next area is in new housing and commercial space. Can we go back one or do we go? Oh, yeah, sorry. Once the green space is determined, energy efficient zero carbon housing and commercial space can be built and from them new neighborhoods can emerge. Building on the work of the bridges team and other designers, we'd like to create a framework for the redevelopment of land to increase housing density and then to support a walkable downtown. This plan, you can see how it fills in all along the river here and even back up in Court Street, et cetera. Okay, provides a thousand new units in and around the downtown. We hope to partner with the city in finding new ways of supporting a variety of housing developments and with the idea that mixed use is crucial. Next we get to transportation. We cannot manage any of these good ideas in a future of our city unless we can find the ways of getting folks in and out of town to workshop and recreate without their cars. Otherwise the default transportation priority is to use our land space for parking. This image of a downtown station suggests that real multimodal transportation means. It's trains, it's bus, it's cars and walking, it's bikes. We have already started working with the city to reduce the number of vehicles in the downtown by building a plan for concentrating the parking in remote lots. We will next be looking at how to create microtransit options. We urge the commission to make sure that concrete forward-thinking transportation transition is at core of the next city plan, not as a periphery. Montpelier has been doing city plans for years. Okay, we've been and we've gotten any good ideas and they're all on the shelf at the planning department. So our question must be how to turn those plans into living, breathing facts on the ground. Just like you tonight, bringing together the various committees here to ensure the next city plan reflects the energy and imagination of our public volunteers, we're planning on bringing together the community stakeholders and to round tables on the three priority areas, transportation, open space and housing and through them, coalesce solutions and an action plan. If the city plan can hopefully reflect these visions, we hope that we can work together with you for a long time. Thank you very much. Any questions? 15, we're gonna have the housing task force come up and ask you there done the parks commission. We'll be next. Thanks Leslie. Hi, I'm Jen Holler and with me is Holly Nickel. We're the co-chairs of the Montpelier Housing Task Force and we would like to start by thanking the planning commission for bringing us all together. It's a great way to hear what the many, many commonalities between all of our aspirations and that's pretty exciting. It's also really inspiring for me to see all the people who love our little city enough to donate their volunteer time and I think there's a lot we're gonna be able to do together. The role of the housing task force is to make recommendations to the city council and we're a volunteer group to make recommendations around policies, programs and projects that increase the availability and the affordability of housing. And this includes particularly the uses of the Montpelier Housing Trust Fund and which supports the creation of new housing and the French Block is the most recent example of that. So there's the Montpelier Housing Trust Fund and the city dedicated funding to that project. It was a very small part of that overall many millions that went into that project but by making funds available that the city commits, it helps attract all the other resources so it's an important piece. Another thing that the Housing Trust Fund has supported lately is a down payment assistance program which helps folks with just moderate incomes who might not otherwise be able to buy into Montpelier, afford their first home and be part of our community. So over the last few months we've been developing a set of aspirations and we plan to add goals and actions to them with the hope of informing the city's housing strategy and also to sort of guide our work as a task force. And here they are. So this is really at the butterfly and unicorn level. Very much aspirational but they're essentially, the first bullet is essentially just making sure there's enough housing and people can afford it. And we want all types of housing for Montpelier does actually a pretty good job of having a variety of bedroom sizes. I'm a good mix of rental and owner occupied and condominium options. There are, and they fall in a variety of types of neighborhoods. And what do we want that housing to be like? That's the second bullet. Primarily it needs to be safe and healthy so lead free, no asbestos, those kinds of things, safe egress, really important that it be energy efficient. And this is clearly one of those areas where our aspirations overlap with other committees. We want it to be resilient in response to disaster. A lot of our housing is in the flood zone and potentially in harm's way. So we need to think about that both in terms of our existing housing and any new developments. And we want it to be designed for all users. We want it to be accessible. And where is that housing gonna be? It's gonna be within different types of neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods can be like the housing that's on Elm Street, it's really concentrated, really dense, or it might be neighborhoods that are like those that are up off of Berlin Street around Stonewall Meadows or on the upper parts of Townhill Road where the lots are much bigger and that's much more spread out. But the goal should be for those neighborhoods to be accessible to pedestrians, youth cyclists, strollers, wheelchairs, and we really would hope that they all could include a mix of uses, access to open space, and allow people without too much trouble to get to work, shopping, recreational, and community resources like the Senior Center, City Hall, and other things that they need to be active parts of the community. And then finally, it's really important that the housing be available and open to everybody and that we create the most diverse and welcoming community that we can. So this includes protecting people from discrimination, maybe it means trying to make our programs accessible and our city government accessible to people who don't have English as a first language. In many of the affordable housing projects here in Montpelier, they've welcomed new citizens and created different communities over time, and we would hope that that continued to be the case. So, Polly, is there anything you wanna sort of add to that? But those are kind of the highlights. Those are the highlights. And as Jen said, we're gonna be working on goals. We are, and yeah, and we'll figure out how to interact with your process in doing that. And then at the same time, we're doing other pieces of work too. We can do and plan at the same time, but we're working on an update to the guidelines for the use of the Montpelier Housing Trust Fund. We're thinking about how to help the Good Samaritan Haven when they do the second year of the warming shelter. And we'll also be advocating for more funding for the Montpelier Housing Task Force. Because right now we're just, sorry, trust fund. Thank you. We're just able to support the down payment assistance and there's not money available for rental housing at this point. So happy to take questions. Yeah. We're on this area. So whatever you can bring us about implementation, goals, so like next steps and college steps, I think would be really well received by the community. Great. Yeah. I'd like to do that. You welcome the invitation. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Education department advisory board. Hello, everyone. I'm Dan Dickerson from the Parks Commission. Unfortunately, I don't have a slideshow for you. Usually just use sticks and write the dirt at our meetings. So. You know, that stuff just doesn't have the staying power of computers, but anyways, so I guess to lead off, we have a nifty little document called the parks green print that's available on the parks website and some void somewhere. If you search hard enough, you might find it. I don't know for sure, but it is there. So anyway, the goals that I have for you are taken directly from that green print. The first one is to provide park and trail access to all neighborhoods and residents of Montpelier. And one, I think one action that sort of the parks commission indirectly took in trying to meet that goal was there was a working group convened by the previous mayor that sort of sought to create connections between Montpelier neighborhoods, sort of like the trail system in Middlebury, if any of you are familiar with that. There's one trail that goes all the way around and sort of everybody is within, maybe not spitting distance, but reasonable distance from it. And I think the group really made some good progress. It'd be great to see the new mayor reconvene that. And I was a member of that group. There were a few other members of the community that were there and it was sort of a little think tank. And we accomplished a few good things, but we haven't met in a while, but that's one area, increasing trail access and park access that we have an interest in as the parks commission. The second goal is to enhance outdoor recreational activities for residents of all ages. One big step that we recently took to work towards that is we authorized the creation of new multi-use trails in North Branch Park that would allow for some mountain biking use other than the one trail that just goes straight uphill and never ends. So this will hopefully be a great way to sort of bring some of the mountain bikers back to Mount Pilier that maybe go to Stowe currently or Waits-Yield currently and also allow people like me that don't mountain bike, but run or walk or just look for wildlife to use some new trails and see new areas of North Branch Park. And then our third and final goal is to protect and preserve existing and unique natural areas. And one area that really takes up a lot of this category as far as our time and resources is trying to eradicate the invasives that just continually come back year after year. It's just an ongoing battle. We have volunteers come from other countries for blocks of time, not specifically to eradicate invasives. Well, I think that's what they end up doing a lot of, but they come and help us do that. And we have volunteers from the community to do that. But that's a big part of this category is one of the most important ways to preserve existing landscapes is to keep the craft that we don't want out. So anyway, that's my presentation. As I've been sort of contemplating this, I think there is another goal that we can come up with, but we'll have to discuss it as a park submission and we haven't really gotten that far yet. But I think something that we've talked about is we really exist to help manage the parks. We don't have a group that's really sort of advocating for the parks or really thinking of great new ideas for how the parks can bring in new funding or new activities. And so I think whether it's a goal for the Parks Commission or somebody else, so I think it's most important for us to contemplate this is, is there capacity for a group like that to exist or the people that are interested? Is there funding out there that we could bring in to sort of help this group coalesce and do great things for the parks? Because I think the parks are a really important part of the economic and social construct of any city, but most importantly, Montpelier, because we have such great parks. But that's my presentation. Any questions? Yeah, I have a question. Does the Parks Commission discuss the position of our city within the broader region? I mean, I know that we're trying to be this economic and social center of the region, but we also want to preserve open spaces and parks and figuring out how to work all those things together. I mean, I think that our positioning within the region may play a little bit of a role of how much we want to advocate for a large connected open space versus I think somebody else. It's a discussion that we as the Parks Commission don't so much have because we deal with very specific, very cute issues at our meetings that are once a month and they're never long enough to get everything done that we want to. But I will say that the group that I was talking about this working group that was convened by the mayor was thinking sort of outside of the community as far as if we're talking about building connections, I mean, there are these really great resources that exist just beyond our borders or maybe a little ways away. You talk about Wrightsville, you talk about Morse Farm. If any of you read the Times-Argus a few months ago about the possibility of the individual off-terrace street that just owns a huge chunk of land, talking about creating a connection all the way to the Worcester range, I mean, that's incredible. So it's a discussion that's happened beyond the Parks Commission, but I think going back to the need for some group that's thinking more strategically in big picture, I don't know that we have the capacity to do it the way, given the other issues that we normally deal with, but I fully agree with you, it's an incredibly important issue. And I love discussing it, but the time is limited to discuss it. We have three boards, very special buzz, Jay, Mr. Willow, and then we'll have the tree board followed by the development review board, that you can leave on the right there. You were over there. And then Eric Hill did some after that, all reminded. Thank you. Thanks, Leslie. Again, buzz Sir Willow with the Recreation Board. Our board meets monthly and we take a summer vacation in August, so we haven't had a meeting since July, so we haven't talked face-to-face about what our goals would be in context of this meeting. We just had a flurry of emails over the weekend and so I'm just gonna have to ad-lib what I heard from my fellow board members. And we, in theory, are a five-person board. We've been stuck at three for years, so it's a shameless plug if anybody wants to join our board or has friends or family. We can certainly use the help. And that being said, we are an advisory board to the Rec department, so we tend to focus on the nuts and bolts of the operation of the department. Should the Rec department buy a new plow truck this year or milk it out for another year or how do we mediate conflicts between the pickleball players and the basketball players who want to use the court at the same time. And so not exactly heady topics we get involved in, so long-term planning for us is coming up with a budget for the next year that the city council will approve and the voters will approve. That all being said, certainly our number one goal, the council knows this, previous councils know this, is to come to some resolution of what to do with the 55th Street Barry building. I don't know if I should be embarrassed or proud of my stick-to-it-ness, but I was part of a Recreation Futures Committee, I think back in 1991 that grappled with this issue and actually came up with a report and recommendations and budgets for a new building. So here we are 25 plus years later and we're still have that question out there. So as we see it again, let's either keep the building as it is, maintain it as it is, keep on plugging away status quo, put a lot of money into that building to upgrade it, make it accessible, make it more user-friendly, just bring it up to code, and then thirdly, do we sell that building and cite some new facility and that there's a whole range of options there, where do we put it? Would it be Montpelier-specific or regional? What would it encompass? How would we pay for it, of course? Would it be public or private or quasi-public? So a whole range of issues, all of which need input from the community. It's nothing that we as a board can ever come up with. We've tried to gauge people and do surveys, but it's been really difficult. So if that's our number one goal, then number two, there are just a bunch of niggly little infrastructure problems and upgrades that are needed. If anybody's used the pool house, that's a pretty tired building. If you use the bathrooms, it's not pleasant. Yeah, right, if 55 Barry Street is up here in the pool house down here, it's a seasonal building, but of course, if we put enough money into it and upgrade it, it could be used for other things, it could be used year-round, and so that's something we've considered. And then sort of the overarching goal, I'll just say kudos, I think our board would be unanimous in giving kudos to the city for assimilating the parks and rec and senior and cemetery. We think that's been a great move and really has been effective and efficient and programs, I think of blossom because of that. And so continue that assimilation would be great. And again, our mission basically is to continue to provide recreation opportunities for all of Montpelier. And we have a changing demographic and changing tastes in recreation. We try to stay ahead of that curve and that's what we want to continue to do so. That's it, question? After the tree board development review board. Tree board. So I'm Sarah Hofmeier again on the Montpelier Tree Board and I wanted to start before I got into goals, just saying that I've been on the board for about nine years and what's so exciting is the last year to two years we have had just this surge of energy and Lynn is also on the board and just the people that we have on the board right now and the regular volunteers. Lots of different pet projects going on and the biggest thing is follow through which is always a wonderful surprise because it's so easy to come up with ideas and be like, yes, and then you leave the meeting and you know, it's like, life happens. But we've had a lot of follow through, so it's been great. The other thing I wanted to point out before I got to goals was all the housing and energy wanted to relate it to tree board a little bit was John Snell, our chair went out one day and he used to have an infrared company and he went out with an infrared camera on one of those blazing hot days when it was like 95 degrees and he took an image right in front of bear pond books of the street and the asphalt was 124 degrees and under that ash tree that's in front of bear pond books it was 74 and so just to show how important it is to have mature street trees which gets me into my goals, our aspirations and this one was written by Lynn that we all fully support we hope to have, the tree board hopes to have a city of people literate about trees and their multi-layered value to the health, beauty, prosperity and sustainability of Montpelier and central Vermont. I think anyone can kind of get behind that. Whenever John Snell brought up goals of course our overachieving board just sent him this slew of 100 different ideas and what we're gonna maintain, evolve and transform so we have three main goals and then I'll just touch on a few of them because it would take me an hour to get through everything. Our first goal is to increase the size and diversity of the urban tree canopy. This is particularly important right now with the thing that's gotten the most attention is the emerald ash borer but there are a number of pests that have come through and as long as you have different types of trees and all different ages of trees you will have a more resilient landscape. Things that we're doing to maintain that are we work closely with parks and public works and we I think would be a fish out of water if we did not have Jeff Beyer and Alec Ellsworth who support us in not just our pet projects but really get to the trees that we point out to them that are hazardous, that need to be pruned, that we can't do, that we need somebody that has the equipment, big plantings. They also have the resources with volunteers like you were saying with the parks that come from the AmeriCorps volunteers and then other volunteers that come from different countries and I just can't imagine what we would do without them. We get a lot done. Our second goal is to educate citizens about the value of trees as well as their care. Lynn actually started neighborhood plantings a couple of years ago on St. Paul Street and we've continued that effort every year. It's really easy to put a tree in the ground but I think it's a lot more difficult to properly plant the tree and then also maintain it so that it's successful way down the line and it's those first couple of years that to plant it correctly and then prune it the right way, water it and it takes education and we hope too to educate people about the tree board. I think I just saw from porch forum posting is there a tree board? Like yes there is, we're here. So hopefully we'll get the word out that we exist. And then our third goal is improve the health of our urban forest and that kind of goes back with the first and second goals and we're gonna continue to do that just with monitoring the spread of diseases and making sure that we're working as a group to research and address them because luckily, unfortunately, they've hit usually states before us. So Massachusetts, New York and so we can learn from actually the other states and what's worked and hasn't before it hits us. Anyone have any questions? Talk a little bit about what the definition of the urban forest is. It's not street trees that you were referencing before. That's true. Our urban forest we kind of view as everything within the city limits of Montpelier but in particular, we kind of have these little classifications of our urban forest. So the downtown is one section and then we go out to kind of neighborhoods and then we do consider parks part of our urban forest. So we have kind of those three areas but that's all of anything that has a canopy I feel like falls under our urban forest and even small trees. So not just like the big majestic oaks but those little service berries but they're a really important part of adding to the health of the ecosystem in total. Yeah. The urban forest and we're on the state house it's the only state house in the country that has a backdrop over the forest. My great, glad I live here. Thank you. Thank you. Review board and then historic preservation commission slash design. All right, my name is Kate McCarthy and I've been the vice chair of the Montpelier Development Review Board for one week and about 33 minutes. It's a new role. I want to make sure you know a little about the development review board. It's function may or may not be familiar to everybody. So the planning commission as you know looks at the future of the city with help from the residents and another function the planning commission has is to create the zoning. So in a way they're like legislators, they create rules. The development review board in a way is like a judiciary where we look at those rules and apply them to cases or where quasi judicial is a way of looking at it. So we're a little bit different the DRB than a lot of the folks in this room and the committees that you serve on which are more issue or topic based. We are a review body. So I just wanna let you know that we may have a slightly different view and engagement in this process. The other thing I want you to know about the DRB is we're a seven member board and as of last Monday's meeting we welcomed four new members. And so it's an exciting time. We have new zoning in the city. We have a relatively new board with people learning that zoning. So as a result that actually brings me to my disclaimer which is that we have not as a board brainstormed and identified three concise handy goals for me to hand you this evening. But I did consult with our chair Dan Richardson and we brainstormed some things that we thought we can pretty safely bring to your attention even if we are not per se representing the view of the DRB. So I'll tell you what those are. There are three of them. So in that sense I followed the rules. But the first idea is the first thing I bring to your attention is just an overarching value which is to provide consistent fair and timely review of applications in a way that serves the applicants to people who wanna build the project but anyone else who is interested and that might be neighbors or business owners or just other interested citizens. This may seem pretty obvious like isn't that the job of the DRB. But I think if we're talking about ultimately achieving our land use goals about what we want to happen where and how and our city's goals for good governance it's very much worth stating that overarching value. I would mention a couple of needs that we see as not things to do tomorrow but kind of ongoing conversations and things that are important to discuss and keep in mind. And one as the group who administers the bylaw there's always that art and balance of having flexible but clear standards so that when someone is applying to do a project they know what is expected of them and when we are reviewing a project we know whether that project meets the criteria or not. At the same time being too black and white can be a challenge and not leave room for the types of projects or innovations that we want to see. So we'll keep walking that line and hope to do that in conversation with the planning commission as we get used to the new zoning. Another thing that I've been asked to mention is to sort of like, let's just continue to look at how parking works under the new zoning and to make sure that any changes are data driven. And I'll explain that. We think, I'm gonna speak for myself now. I think it's very positive that parking requirements have been eliminated from the new zoning. It's positive change. It's a best practice for sustainability. Now speaking for the DRB. As we administer the zoning I think it will be our responsibility as a board to keep an eye on how that works and whether it's leading to any unintended consequences or people gonna pay over their lawn so that they can provide a spot off the street. We don't want that to happen. So we just wanna keep an eye on that. I'm not suggesting any changes right now. I am suggesting thoughtfulness since we know parking provides community benefits and challenges. We would just advocate that. I would say the DRB advocates for any changes to parking being made in a way that is very much comprehensive based on studies of the big picture so as to provide a realistic view of how much parking we do in fact have before we go making big changes. Thank you. And then with dedication to our future sustainability goals. And when I say data driven I think that means big picture look, not just anecdata, not just the needs of any one individual group. It's gotta be big picture, community oriented. So I'll close with just kind of a general statement or desire from the DRB. It may fall outside of the town plan but I wanna highlight that we have a lot of interest in building connections with the planning commission. This is an excellent start and I'm meeting a lot of other groups as well. I know many of you as individuals but not as your other functions. So of course the nature of our respective commissions is that the DRB has this quasi judicial role whereas the planning commission has more of a legislative one. So we're not suggesting that we bring the planning commission in to review applications with us. We have a separation of powers thing here. But I do think there is a lot to be gained for each body understanding where the other comes from. And so with the new zoning and a new board we're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. We can come on up and present on behalf of the historic preservation commission and the design review committee. And then after please stand. Do we have anyone else who did an RN2P that joined us on a way home tonight? Can we come on up and present? Okay. All right, I don't think so, but you can take it. After Eric we'll just take a look at the goals that were provided to us by the complete streets group and then we'll be down in the prison station portion. Eric. Hi, I'm glad to be here and thank the planning commission for doing this. I've been working on trying to integrate these things for a while. I think one of the points that I wanna make is historic preservation and historic resources in Montpellier are really key to the city, its activity, its economic health. And the goal really of the historic preservation commission is to be an advocate. And I go back to the root of that word to speak for to look at that and that's what we're looking. We were defunct for a couple of years and we're back going and in the process of drafting some new guidelines for design review because I would say the vast majority of the design review applications deal with an historic building because the design review district at this point is concurrent with the National Register District which the commission just worked hard and got updated so it was first done in 1977 and now it's updated with current inventory. And the 86% of the buildings in the district are historic which is very high and I can tell you from talking to people around the country I used to be active in the National Historic Preservation stuff that people are very envious of what Montpellier has in the way of historic resources are intact downtown are walkable downtown and neighborhoods. I brought a bunch of people here for a meeting and I said don't bring your car you don't need one in Montpellier and some of them didn't believe me and they let their car sit for three days they didn't need it which it goes with the Transportation Committee at being an advocate for transportation. The other thing, I'll do the goals last. One of the things I'd like to do with and this isn't an official goal but is the idea of working with some of the other committees. I think if you look at the Energy Committee it doesn't seem like well maybe that doesn't have much to do with historic preservation but if one thinks about the embodied energy in historic buildings, if you tear them down you're using energy, you're filling up the landfill and you're using a lot of energy to build a new building. In terms of the development corporation, I always, when I worked for the state everybody said why is historic preservation in a development agency and because we're responsible for the development of Vermont's historic resources one way or another and I think that same thing is true here. I mean the development of the Abishan's building I forget the name of the building. But, the French block, that's been sitting vacant and people have been tackling that but that's a good example how an historic project can not only get funding through the tax credits and saying buy because it's historic but it meets housing goals and meets energy goals. It meets a lot of goals in the community, housing downtown and all of that. I would like to work with Montpelier alive to help and promote the historic downtown and the historic resources in Montpelier. So, in the design review committee and as I said in the beginning and the historic preservation commission are really work a lot together. So, okay, one minute sign here. We want to, one of our goals we just have finished developing a very rough draft with some new regulations and we want to finish that process and then really provide some public information so that people can understand the resources, have some guidance when they're doing a project is the right way to do it to meet the design review standards and the historic preservation standards. The other thing is that Montpelier is very historic. The National Register District only covers a small part of it and there are many historic neighborhoods, the Meadow College Street and we want to develop a plan for survey and adding to the National Register over the years because Montpelier is a certified local government so we can get some funding from the state to help with that. And the other thing we want to do is advocate for incentives for owner occupied historic buildings because they, the National Trust has identified those as the most underserved, so I'm done. So we received these goals from the complete streets group. Unfortunately, nobody was able to attend from their group. There was a family emergency for the representative who was planning to come but I'm seeing a lot of overlap. I think we've talked about all three of these already. So you can write them down, Barbara, if you want, but they're gonna be duplicative. Just want to make sure they're represented. No, that's good, that's good. Explain the difference between the transportation infrastructure group, the complete streets group, and the bicycle group. It seems like there's a lot of overlap. Why are they increased every day? They're not three to two, there's a bike even. There's not, well, there's a mountain bike. What I heard was, there was infrastructure and then education to... Donna, can you walk us through the committees? Other people can add. There was a pedestrian, a bicyclist. We had parking, there we go, parking that meant a lot and energy came in. But over time, we got to the place where we really needed to focus on infrastructure and education and outreach. And people were not interested in both. So we formed two groups and this group calls themselves the complete streets after the study we were doing at the time, dealing primarily with pedestrian, but more with education and outreach, whether it's pedestrian or bicycle or transit. And this group would love every group that overlaps with them to join their public events. That's when I really would like to see a lot more energy of us getting together and making public events that one group is planning to fit another need for another group. And so that would be really important. The infrastructure is dealing with how do we put a sidewalk in here that really accommodates? How do we get flashing signals that make crossings more safe? They're really dealing with more than mortal concrete. Okay, I just wanted to say that this was the same as the outreach and the community. No, no, no, it's a good question. But it's, is that clearer? Yeah, yeah. And that's recent. This change is fairly recent, right? Yes. Two years? Yeah. Relative. Four committees previously. So, thank you. I had that question too, Kate. Okay, John Adams. So John had some good ideas about how we can work together and continue the collaborative process from the convenience of our computers or devices. So I asked him to just give a few comments about that. We're running low on time, so you'll be succinct as you always are. And then we'll just wrap up. Great, thank you. I'll be quick. I think I know most people in this room, but for those who don't know me, I'm the nerdiest member of your planning commission. Therefore, they tasked me with setting up a website for this plan, which will be, our goal is to have it be more accessible to reach maybe new audiences with the plan and not only to communicate the plan, but afterwards we want this to be a place where we can continue to use to track progress, to collect a lot of these resources, these documents so that they can live on and that we don't lose them. We also want to use this throughout the process as a place where people can go to find out what's happening, to provide input, and for our committees to participate as well. And it's not only the website, so the content for it will be housed in a Google Drive that we've set up. We have a Google Drive folder and we'd like to make some for all the different committees and pre-populate them with templates that provide some guidance on the best way to provide us with input for the plan. If you have no idea what Google Drive is or don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine. It's fairly simple and hopefully someone on your committee does, but otherwise we're happy to help you out. But the goal is also to break down some of those silos between a lot of these committees so that, yes you may, your committee may have the only access to putting things in it, but it'll be transparent. Anyone from any other committee or the public can go in and see what different committees are working on within this one folder for our CD plan. And I'll stop there, but happy to answer any questions. John, the information will go out to each committee once they're all set up in terms of how to access it. Yes. So two things I think specifically. One, this is a repository for a lot of these plans that have been done in the past. Like we don't want to reinvent the wheel and this could be one place where everyone can put these in. And then second, there'll be a very specific template within terms of how the plan will be structured with our goals, our objectives, our measurable objectives, our actions, what information we need from those, how they should be sort of what to include and what not to include. And if everyone can fill those out in a consistent way, then we can bring them together in a more cohesive plan. At least that's the goal for now. I understand that there are certain chapters like housing, transportation, energy. What happens to the chapters where there are multiple committees involved? I can just, I mean, from the presentation tonight, I'm anticipating there are some chapters that it's not just one kind of point of contact. I don't know. I think that's exactly what we're hoping to identify tonight. So we'll reconvene as a commission, identify where those overlaps occur and strategize a way to facilitate further collaboration. It doesn't sound like an insurmountable problem, but I'm not gonna try to just make something up here. I think there should be multiple stakeholders for all of the chapters really. Yeah. Just because there's a housing task force and that's like meeting, doesn't mean there's not gonna be a lot that they put from everywhere anyway. So it'll probably be the same for every chapter where there's just multiple input from many people. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about whether we wanna have folders that are based on chapter with various committees with access to that, or if we wanna have folders based on committee and then try to redesign that. So I think we just need to have a little bit more of a conversation as a commission now that we know more about the goals that the committees have. And we'll get back to you. But for now, I don't think there's any immediate need to put in any information here. As we develop this website, we will call on you to, if you had slides or notes for tonight, then you wanna upload there, we can do that, and then the public will be able to have easy access to that information. We will also be posting videos and links to other city plans. The videos Ed McMahon has given some talks recently, gave a talk here recently for those who weren't able to attend. We have access to, there's links to a TED talk that he provided. We could do, and it could also be a place where we could perhaps link to the Orca Media YouTube videos of tonight's meeting or the Ed McMahon presentation. So, we're thinking of it as a resource for just everybody can contribute to it, and the public can easily see what's going on as we're working through the process. Is this meeting gonna be posted on Orca? Yes, yeah, I would assume so. I think if we're sending out to the committee members at some point, for those that couldn't be here, they would be interested in it. Sure, yeah, I could ask Jamie Granfield to just send a link out to everybody on the list that we sent the invitation to. But that was my summary and wrap up. And so, I think if we have any other questions about process, I mean, if you have any ideas about process, we would love to hear them. So, please. Yeah, ideas or wanna help out with this. I don't wanna give you the false impression that this is a fully-baked, which I think I've done successfully. So. Yeah, so that's, yeah. And I don't think we have any members of the public that are here to talk about something not on the agenda for tonight, but I will ask now, because we have that on our agenda as I made. Okay. Anything else? Plenty of commission, we were so grateful. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. We really appreciate it. Great. Well, do I have a motion to adjourn? Stephanie, do I have a second from Kim? Okay, all those in favor, say aye. Okay, we are adjourned. Thank you.