 All right, good evening. I now call the December 21st meeting of the Arlington Redevelopment Board to order. This open meeting of the Arlington Redevelopment Board is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020, due to the current state of emergency in the Commonwealth, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, we have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings. And as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all public meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. For this meeting, the Redevelopment Board is convening via Zoom, as posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and that some attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that other people may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. So I'd like to confirm that all members of the board are present and can hear me if you could answer by saying here, Ken Lau. Here. David Watson. Here. Jean Benson. Here. Katie Levine Einstein. Here. And we have Jenny Rates from the Department of Planning and Community Development. Here. And Erin Zwerko. Here. And I think I saw Kelly Linema's name on there as well. Here. Hi. Do we have anyone else from the department? Nope. Okay, great. Oh, and myself. I'm Rachel Zembery. I'm present as well, clearly. The first docket on our agenda is docket number 364086 River Street, which is an open public hearing for a new, for a new proposed signage. Jenny, do you have anything that you'd like to state before we call the applicant? We, we actually don't see the applicant here. Oh, so Erin, do you see them anywhere? No, I'm scanning the list of attendees and I do not see the applicant nor the sign contractor's name in the list of attendees. I did notify them of the hearing and that their attendance should be they should attend last week. Okay. We could skip ahead, maybe do the meeting minutes. Up to you. We could wait. We will, we'll send a note real quick. Okay. Why don't we give them another minute or two? And then I think I don't want to take the next docket number out of order. But we That's a published hearing. Right, exactly. We can't do that anyway. Right. So I think we could do the meeting minutes. We'll give them Look at my clock here. We'll give them another two minutes and then maybe we'll go to the meeting minutes and see if there are any other administrative things that we can get done. So bear with us just another minute or two. Do you want to do the meeting minutes while we're waiting? We could. So why don't we bring up, we'll move to agenda item number three, the meeting minutes from September 21, 2020. Which was the joint meeting with the of the redevelopment board with the select board. So I will take a roll call to see if any members of the board have any additions or corrections to the meeting, starting with Ken. Ken, did you have any additions? Okay, I couldn't find my. Okay, thanks. I had one on page two on the fifth paragraph down. You got that Jenny or Sorry, I muted myself. Yes. I like to change the word performance to decisions. I believe that's what I was asking for. I want to get the feedback regarding the redevelopment board's decisions over the past year, not performance. Okay. Thank you, Ken. Jean. Um, I have just one, it's more a wording change the third paragraph on the first page, the second or the third sentence starts with the issues discussed were colon. And then at the very end, it shouldn't say discuss that outreach strategy, the word discussed should be replaced with the word and that's my only change so. Oh, got it. Yes, I see that. Thank you. That's the only change I have. Great. Thank you, Jean. David. I had one possible change. It's on page two in the third full paragraph that starts out. In the middle of that paragraph, there's a sentence that says Mr Watson said that the pandemic may have increased the urgency of housing development in Arlington. I didn't get a chance to go back and look to see exactly what I said, but it would make more sense to me if that was referring to the urgency of affordable housing development. Thank you, David. Do you have anything else? No, I don't. Thank you, Katie. No changes. Thank you. And the only item I had, which appears in the PDF version, which is on page four in the first paragraph, there are a few times where Jennifer Seuss, his name is underlined and I'm assuming that the emphasis was. No, I was probably correcting it at the time. Spelling, which is correct now. Great. Okay. That's all that I had. Let's see. So, are there any other changes before we call for a motion. Okay. Do we hear a motion to approve the meeting minutes from September 21 2020 as amended. So moved. Second. We'll take a roll call vote for approval. Ken. Yes. David. Yes. Jean. Yes. Katie. Yes. And I am yes as well. Great. All right, we've, we've tried to reach the applicant and so far no luck. So, for 86 river street. Okay. So Aaron is actually the one who was doing that. So Aaron, would you mind weighing in please. Yeah, of course. I emailed the sign contractor and did not, you know, I will email them on Thursday. And then just emailed him again, did not receive a response, tried the phone number and it was the office line. Being that it's 7pm, no one picked up. So I have not been able to get in contact with anyone at this time. Relative to this item. Nor do I see the name of the sign contractor or the owner. I do not have an email address for listed in the participant list. So at this point. We probably should continue. This, this hearing. Jenny and without them being here to weigh in on the, the date. I'm assuming that we could identify a date, then if they need us to push it further, we could always do so with that, that next state. I think we'll just, just continue it to January 4th is probably the best measure. Okay. Great. And then we will. Pause until 730 when we can hear item number two. So do I hear a motion to continue. Docket 3640 until the January 4th redevelopment board hearing. So motioned. Great. Thank you. We'll take a roll call vote to continue the hearing. Yes. David. Yes. Jean. Yes. Katie. Yes. And I am a yes as well. Okay. Given the published times, I think that that's all that we can. Do now. So we will take a break and reconvene at seven 30. All right. It is seven 30. So we will now move to docket number 3638, the continued public hearing for 400 to 402 Massachusetts Avenue. Thank you everyone for bearing with us during our break. As we did not have the applicant. In attendance for the first agenda item. Before we turn it over to the applicant. Jenny, I will check and see if there's anything that you wanted to. I would like to address the board with regard regarding this item. Thank you, Rachel. I think the applicant and their attorney. And possibly the owner. They're all here. The only thing I want to mention is that I had some correspondence from Stephen McCauke, the chair of the. Arlington historic districts commission. And we talked about how the applicant in their revision in response to the board's comments. Had incorporated sort of a, a new structure on the property. And that they wanted to remind us that that falls under their purview. To approve such structures. I will note, however, that the design guidelines from the historic districts commission don't say anything. It doesn't provide specific guidance about these types of structures for the board. So I would recommend and Steve concurred at least by email. Not as a vote of the board or the commission in any way, but that we would of course reference in any decision that we decide to make. If you do. That we would have the historic districts commission approve. They would need to review and approve that any. Exterior additions or anything that the board is requiring. That we would have the historic districts commission. And have a certificate of appropriateness issued before any. Anything could proceed. So I just wanted to make sure that that was, you know, this was something that the applicant was being responsive to the board. But just to remind the board that it isn't an historic district. It's not quite the same as the historical commission. Where we can, you know, we might, we might have a little more. We might do things a little bit differently in this case. But I do think that's a great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Thank you for the reminder, Jenny. Let's see, do we have. So who from the applicant? Do we have on the zoom call today who would like to speak on behalf? We have Bob and Essie. And I see. Ken. And I see Cynthia. I think Bob might have stepped away, but Ken is not in his When we talked earlier today, this is Ken File, the architect. Hi, Ken. Do you think you could get Bob back on the line with us? Yep, I will. That would be great. We look for two so far tonight. Yeah. So, yeah, let me, let me reach out to him right now. Thank you very much. All right. Can you hear me? Oh, yeah, we can. Okay, good. All right. Are we ready, Rachel? Please go ahead if you could introduce yourself and then please go ahead and make any opening remarks that you'd like to. Yes. So after last, the last meeting we had on December 7, I had a long discussion with my clients. And I had a discussion with Ken feel who is here as well, the architect. And we discussed the whole approach that we had taken with respect to the property. And I want to bring to the attention of the members of the board again. The size of the lot. Okay. I want to bring to the attention of the members of, to the members of the board, the size of the building. And by the way, the, if you look in the assessing record for the town, the building apparently, or portions of the building were built way back in 1791, according to the assessing record. So the building goes way back and the building has been used for mixed business and historical uses over the years. Now, one of the concerns on a part of the Pascotto family. And as you know, they have just done the a day to mass have property. And they invested and have invested and will invest. Substantial money in that project. And they have done that because they know that they're going to see a reasonable return. With respect to their investment. They know that there's a market for the residential units that they will be able to rent. And they know that they will be able to receive income. And they know that there's a market for the residential units, which will basically help them with respect to what they had to pay to construct the building. Now they also have other properties in town that are commercial like properties. And they have vacancies have had vacancies will continue to have vacancies with those properties. So the driving force with them. With respect to what they are trying to achieve. With respect to what they are trying to achieve. They basically do some things with this property. But they want to do it in such a way. That they're going to again. Have a return with respect to their investment. When we last met on December seven. At least three members of the board were of the view and may still be of the view. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The residential units we were seeking. Should be reduced to three. Now, since that time, I have done my own research with respect to. Office units. Whether in town and elsewhere. And I do, I do know. And I bring to your attention and I recognize the fact. That I cited an article in the New York times. In the New York Times. In the New York Times. And talks about vacancies in Manhattan. Now, Manhattan is not Arlington. I can see that. But the thinking process that is going to be. Gone through. In Manhattan. Is the very same thinking process that is going to take place. In cities and towns. And that is. That since the pandemic, I have been working in the New York Times. The world we're living in now is that. For the last six to seven to eight months. Employed many employees. Have not been going back to brick and mold our premises. But rather working by zoom. Offsite. Probably from home. The, the New York times article that I cited. Basically indicates that that is probably going to continue. And that many square feet. Of prior, prior office space in Manhattan. Is going to be converted to residential space. Why? Because again, even after the pandemic, a pandemic is over. That folks employees are not going to be going back to a physical plant. And employers are not going to want them to come back. Because the employers are not going to want to be paying. Rent for office space that could be utilized in a different way. That is by having employees working from home. The, the, if the employers own the building. They're going to be wanting to convert those buildings to residential space. Now. We can extrapolate that. And we have. By getting an opinion letter from a local broker. A broker from Andover. Who basically essentially has said the same thing. And that, that broker, you have a copy of the report. That I gave you from that broker. And basically he says. The ability to work remotely has become a major factor in incentive. To attracting a strong dynamic and tech savvy workforce. And the need for traditional office has diminished greatly over the last few years. And I think that has to be looked at in the context of. Who are the people who are going to be populating. The, the, the employer's so-called workspace. And I'm not talking about workspace on site. These are going to be younger people who are going to be very tech savvy. And they're going to have the ability to work remotely. Older folks. Like myself, for example. Don't quite have that ability, but I think the younger folks do. And the younger folks will as time goes on. So this particular broker indicates that. Companies both large and small. Have realized they no longer need a physical presence. And he further indicates that. That in fact, office space is going to be. Much more difficult to rent than residential space. And then again, that comes back to. What an investor forget about the Viscuto family. What is an investor going to be willing to invest their money into. With respect to. The Viscuto family. I'm not expecting a return. It doesn't have to be a killing, but a return so they're not losing money. And I think the, if you, if you read the New York Times article, I submitted. And if you read the report from the. Broker from Andover. I think the answer is that. Investors are going to want to. Investors are going to want to invest their money into. The Viscuto family. In the office. Now. We know that we have a bylaw. That is a mixed use bylaw. When this case was first heard by the zoning board back in 1980. There was no mixed use bylaw. And at that time, the zoning bylaws said. You can have two residential units and two parking spaces. And so that's the context again. Of the crisis we've had for the last seven to eight months, which brings out even a more significant change. About what's going to happen in the future. So from the point of view of an investor, whether it be the Viscuto family or some other developer. Again, why and why are they going to spend money. On. To basically rehab a building. And essentially that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to rehab a building. To rehab a building. And have an office space. That they probably won't be able to rent. Or if they are able to rent it, it'll take a substantial period of time to do that. Now, going back to the discussion we had at the time of the meeting. We talked about. One of them was the trash issue. And we have endeavored to address that issue. You can see from looking at the plan. By eliminating one of the six parking spaces and bringing it down to five. And having that trash enclosure area stand on its own. That's what we're trying to do here. And that's what we're trying to do here. On the life, what we had before. There was also discussion. At the last hearing. About the car parking configuration at the property. With respect to vehicles parking out onto the street. I'm going to suggest to you that that's what's been happening with the building. Over the last number of years. None of that has changed. Parking. The parking arrangement. Has occurred. And that's what we're, we're contemplating as well. Now, can we do anything about that? We can't. We can't because of the configuration of the lot. Okay. The way the lot sets up. There's no way we can change that arrangement. Change either the parking arrangement. Or change the backing out onto the street. I know that we heard a comment from Mr. Benson last time about the fact that there's a provision in the bylaw. That basically frowns upon backing out onto the street. And I agree with that. There is a permission. Okay. But in these times, and particularly with mixed use. I think that we need to be and the board does have the ability. To grant concessions in terms of what is being proposed under mixed use. So I'm suggesting to the members of the board. That they can in fact grant relief with respect to backing out onto Avalon. And they can in fact grant relief with respect to the parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking. The parking with respect to the parking. The parking is tandem parking. Go down into East Arlington, go down to almost any street in East Arlington. And you're going to see ample examples. Of tandem parking. That's what happens when you have. I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to see, we are really tight on time tonight. And I, and I just wanted to see if there are any other major points that you could cover them all. Let me just quickly. Thank you so much. All right. Okay. That was one of the issues. Okay. There was some discussion from kin about. A drainage and I think Ken will talk. I think we lost. I think we lost Bob. So Ken, I don't know if you wanted to go ahead and cover the, the drainage issues. Yeah. You can move into. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's where Bob was leading anyway. Yeah, so, you know, based on the conversations we had, you know, from the last presentation, you know, as we, I guess if you could, if we could flip to a one on one, the next sheet, you could use the same location up a right hand corner. Perfect. And Bob is muted. He's back. Why don't you go ahead and finish your thought here and then we'll ask Bob if he has anything to close. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On regarding the drainage. Around the entire building about. Two and a three quarter sides of the building is. Paved. Right up to the building. At the front left hand corner, the entire front. That's where we have landscaped areas and where downspouts currently. Discharge water into the landscaped areas. In the front right hand corner. But unfortunately around the back. And the shared. The paved driveway between the two buildings on the right hand, on the right hand side. And the rear of the building. There's no opportunity to redirect the water from what it currently. The way it currently is configured. The way it currently is configured is to. To the right of the building. And we are proposing to redirect that water discharge into the landscaped area. In the front right hand corner. But unfortunately around the back. And the shared the paved driveway between the two buildings on the right hand side. The way it currently is configured and discharges. Without significant landscape. Modifications that. As I understand, we're, we're just not prepared to do at this moment. And I think Bob was also going to get into. We were talking about bicycle storage. We are still proposing to have three temporary bike. Three bike racks for temporary use. At the side of the property by the walkway. In the upper left hand corner by. Parking spot number four. And we are still looking to put bike storage in the existing. Building storage location at the bottom of the stairs. We know there was. We understand that getting, bringing bikes up and down stairs is not the most easiest thing. But to even get into the building. Tenants have to go upstairs. And currently the, the upstairs, the top floor tenants. Bring their bikes all the way up to their. Up to their, to their units. And. We, we feel that bringing the bikes down a set of stairs after coming, getting into the building is less obtrusive. And there is already. Building storage in that lower level. Reconfiguring to put bike storage on the. Building storage. We call it the first level. Takes up incredibly valuable real estate. On that level. That's more highly you. It's the highest and best use. Would be for. For rentable square footage that is part of a unit. And so. We feel that the best solution for us to provide. Covered. Permanent bike storage would be at the lower level. And the only way we can do that is by the side. I mean, I know there's a lot of things that I'd like to do. But I love all the pieces that I know Bob wanted me to cover. And I'll, I'll turn it back over to Bob with that. Great. Thank you, Bob. Do you have anything to wrap up? Oh, he's still muted. Still muted. Hope. He's getting assistance from you. I want to help him. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Smuting. Am I unmuted now? You are unmuted. If you have anything. No, I think we've covered it. I think that we've had. consider what we've submitted and perhaps reconsider at least three members reconsider their determination, not their determination, but their thinking last time that that we should not have four residential, but rather three residential units. Great. Thank you, Mr. Nessie. All right, I'm going to turn it over to members of the board for questions to the applicants about the new material. I do want to mention to both the board and to those giving public comment that we will be starting the public forum at eight thirty this evening. So please make sure that you are bringing new questions rather than repetitive questions for the board. We will hold our discussion until after questions are posed by the board and public comment has been received. So we'll start with Ken. Thank you, Rachel. Yeah, on the lower level. Yeah, one of my comments was to flip the bedroom and in the living room so that the living room had three windows and the bedroom had one window. Your decision not to do that was for. Ken, can you address that for us, please? Yes, I forgot to change the layout. I can rework. You we are great. Yes, I could I could rework that. I apologize for not changing the plan. Yeah. OK, because I know Jean did speak up about having having windows in a bedroom, it would be nice and he enjoys that. But I think proportionally and being able to rent it that living room space having three windows would be much nicer. We'll do that. Ken understood. Yeah, my apologies. OK, I just didn't think I couldn't know what what you're not doing. I understood. I understood. I really don't have any other questions, except for the fact that I'm still supportive of this project. I believe that that you just taken a mixture in the existing mixed use building and just changing the proportions of the mixed use. And I like this fact that you're respecting this existing historic building and not tearing it down or making modifications to it. And I think that's a noble approach. And I will support you on this project, because I think this is a good way of doing this and still making financial sense because this is business. Thank you, Ken. David. Rachel, I don't have any questions, more of a comment than I didn't know if you wanted us to hold those after related to. Discussion that you'd like to have with the rest of the board. I prefer if we could hold that and get through public comment before we engage in discussion, if you don't mind. That's fine. Thank you, David. Jean. Thank you, Rachel. I have one question. Talk about the ease or difficulty of flipping the bicycle storage room with the laundry, because as I see it, there's an external door to the laundry, which would allow it looks like roll and roll out bicycle storage in what's now the laundry room. So can you talk about the ease or difficulty of moving the laundry to where you're proposing the bicycle storage and moving the bicycle storage to where the laundry is now? And sure, I'm currently in that laundry room. I mean, there's there's it's also a utility room as well. That's where the utilities for the building come into as well. And there is a few steps going down to that to that lower to that laundry room from the exterior. It would be less steps, absolutely. But I don't think we would get as many bicycles in that location if we move the dryers and wash machines from that unit to the building storage area. A lot of that lower level of the laundry room is taken up with utilities. What do you mean by utilities? Can you say what's in there? Oh, electricity, water, and I believe gas as well. OK, I know the questions. I'll save my comments for when we have discussion. Thank you, Jane. Katie, any questions? No questions. I'll save comments like the others for our discussion time. Great. Thank you very much. All right. We will now open this docket for public comment. So any wish member of the public wishing to speak, please use the raised hand function, which is in the participants button at the bottom of your screen. I will call on you in the order that the hands are raised. Once you have been called upon, please state your name and address for the record and you will have three minutes to speak. The first speaker will be Don Seltzer. Thank you, Madam Chair. Don Seltzer 104 Irving Street. I'd like to remind the board that it was just last month that you had before a very similar application for 1500 Mass Ave. Both proposals are in the B1 Neighborhood Office District. Both requests changing the use from two apartment units to four. Both are on lots that are far too small to accommodate four apartments under our standard zoning bylaws and are relying on the mixed use definition by including a first floor office space. A key difference is that 1500 Mass Ave started out with no commercial space and wanted to add an office. 400 Mass Ave, on the other hand, already has three office spaces and is proposing to cut it to just one. When the first hearing was held for 1500 Mass Ave, there were objections raised that the office space that was proposed was being included simply to take advantage of the less restrictive mixed use requirements. To quote one of the board members, I don't know that that's enough space to be viable. I'm just concerned that you're going to end up with vacant space on the first floor and the apartments above. The board requested a market analysis. At the next hearing, Mr. Inessie assured the board that small rental spaces were indeed viable in Arlington. In fact, even smaller spaces were feasible. Quoting Mr. Inessie, I spoke with one of the well-versed real estate brokers in town, Robert Bose. Our office space is being proposed at 475 square feet. And I'm given to understand in speaking with Mr. Bose that the rent we could get for that office space would be approximately $1,000 per month. So we think that it is a viable proposal to have that kind of office space in the building. This board rejected an option presented of having a first floor apartment unit and approved the proposal with the first floor devoted only to commercial office space, accepting the applicant's claim that this was economically viable and not simply a loophole to use the mixed-use label to build an apartment building. But now, less than two months later, a new applicant is telling a quite different story. They want to slash the existing commercial office space by 75 percent to leave a small token space to legitimize the mixed-use label. They have essentially declared that they have little expectation that it will be truly mixed-use. According to Mr. Inessie this evening, there is no future for the commercial market in Arlington and the applicants are filing the special permit request so quote so that they do not wind up with another vacant commercial unit. Mr. Seltzer, your time is up if you could wrap up, please. Certainly. I want to point out you did give the applicant three times their allocation if you could give me maybe 30 seconds more. I asked. I was very clear that everyone would have three minutes in the public to speak, so please wrap up. Thank you. OK. This is a disturbing pattern developing here. A major landlord of commercial properties in town wants to get out of that business is started with the gutting of the taraya block. It continues with this building and one doesn't need a crystal ball to predict what will occur next year. This will say the same applicant seeking permission to gut the heart of the East Arlington business. Thank you, Mr. Seltzer. The next speaker will be Carl Wagner. Thank you, Madam Chair. This is Carl Wagner from 30 Edge Hill in Arlington. I just wanted to address my comments to the board that it's very important to remember that the ARB functions for the people and businesses of Arlington. And as such, the people and businesses are served when you uphold the bylaws and laws of Arlington. This ruling and the ruling of the hotel earlier in 2020 are shocking in the potential that they could set for future businesses and developers like Mr. Andisi to come in and ask for favors and things that are not allowed by our laws. I remind the board and the developer that the purpose of the mixed use law as was originally set forth is to help provide additional accessory residences to businesses to help businesses. The ruling originally around this property went in many ways beyond what the law allows. And it certainly now is not meeting the needs of the mixed use law. I ask everyone in looking at this ARB, who's on this call today, as well as the public to consider that we only need to build what is legal in our town or allowed by the ARB. We only need to help our businesses and our residences. And in that regard, this would increase our property tax burdens by increasing residential. We need to add more business. We need to help business. We do not need this as it stands. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next speaker will be John Worden. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Thank you. I I've heard that I'm sorry. Could you please state your name and address for the record? Oh, I'm sorry. John Worden, 27th Asian Street. Mr. Nessie has again brought forward as he's had on previous occasions, the argument that that his client can't make enough money if he doesn't do such get such and such handouts from the from the redevelopment board. A, I would say it is not the redevelopment board's job with the job of the town of Arlington to provide profits to any particular developer. B, no one asked him to make a further investment in this building. He might shovel the sidewalk, by the way. If you wanted to do that, welcome. Take the final siding off and some of those signs. C, he talks about and he did this before. He won't make enough money because we figured out that he won't. The board, if he's going to rely on that argument and persuade you folks to give him favors because of that argument, he should provide some real numbers, not just say. I mean, I could say I don't make enough money as a lawyer. So I should charge twice as much money, but without giving you any any expenses or any reason why I deserve more money. So that that argument should not sway the board until you get some real numbers. And then if you look at the the last thing that was perpetrated, it's a rare block that there were four or five existing vibrant businesses in there. They tore them down or the process of tearing them down apparently without a demolition permit. They don't shovel the sidewalk. The businesses are gone. And they say, well, now we've got to have an apartment building here with one little shop in the corner. And that's exactly what I said in the 16 town meeting when they talked about mixed use. I said, this is if you don't have some guidance on this, some some requirements about the commercial, despite all the golden words that you're going to end up with a whole bunch of apartments in one little shop in the corner. And that's what you've allowed at 1500. I mean, at eight ninety two. I suppose you'll allow that 1500. And now he wants you to allow it here. And that's not just totally inappropriate. Let's do what mixed use was supposed to do with Mr. Binnell and Mr. Cayer promised us when they persuaded town meeting to vote this without appropriate guidelines. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker will be Chris Loretty. Thank you, Madam Chair, Chris Loretty, 56 Adams Street. Can you hear me? OK. Yes. Thank you. I'd like to echo some of the earlier comments. This proposal really seems like an abuse of the mixed use law as was passed in 2016. And it's quite clear what what the developer is doing. If if indeed they want to be entirely residential, the most units they could put there are two because that because a lot is so small. So what they're trying to do is get a four unit apartment building in by putting a token amount of office space in the building. And, you know, I fully appreciate that. That might be a higher in mixed use. Well, so would a 10 story apartment building. But neither a 10 story apartment building nor a four unit apartment building are allowed in this B1 zoning district. And therefore, the redevelopment board has no business granting a special permit for a four unit building. I suggest you take a very close look at that 1980 decision because indeed it shows a rigor in the application of the zoning bylaw. The very first finding is that the uses requested are listed in the table of use regulations. You will not find the apartment an apartment building listed as an acceptable use in the B1 zoning district that applied in 1980. It applies today as well. The other thing I would suggest is that the parking is excessive. There is alternative parking available and even five spaces is too much. The applicant seeks to increase the non-conformity by having this parking, you know, allowing or requiring cars to back into the street. That is allowed for one in two family homes. It's not allowed for anything bigger than that. And to the point, Mr. Warden raised about the exterior, your board really should be looking at the exterior of this building. It's tired. It needs help. And if they're going to be getting a special permit, a condition should be that that be improved and be restored to something that's more acceptable and in particular to the historic district commission as well. Finally, I just want to end with one request and I'll let you answer this question offline. I heard talk at the last hearing about plans for ex parte communications or perhaps even meetings between the developer team and members of the Redevelopment Board. I would like your the members of your board to report publicly. One, if any such meetings or conversations took place. And two, what the substance of those meetings or conversations were. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. The next speaker will be Colleen Cunningham. Hi, it's actually Stuart Morrison, Kensington Park. Colleen is my wife. Thank you. I'm using her computer. I just wanted to say a couple of quick things in agreement with what was said earlier. Zoning laws exist for a reason and they're to encourage certain kinds of development in areas in town. What we're talking about here is an area in Arlington, which is in the business district. It's right downtown and and, you know, the idea that the developer wants to put in residential properties is a short term interest. Yes, COVID has made office space less valuable now, but that's over the next year or two. Who knows what's going to happen in five, 10, 20 years. But we're talking about changes to a building which are going to be, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50 years long. And so therefore, it's really the job of the Development Board to keep the long term interest of Arlington in mind and not just the short term interest of the developer. And then the final thing I'll offer, and I think this has been said before, is that there's a really funny kind of socialism going on here, which is the socialism of, you know, the town being asked to guarantee the profits of a real estate speculator, a real estate investor. And I don't know of any other business where, you know, the businessman can come to the town and ask for changes to say health laws or other laws in order to support their profits. And so I would I would suggest that, you know, respectfully, that the board keep in mind that capitalism and business, you know, has risks and it's not up to the town to guarantee that businessmen can make their profits. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who wish to speak on this docket number? Seeing none, we will close public comments on docket number 3638 and we'll move to board discussion. Are there any board members who who wish to like to discuss any particular points? I believe David, you had one item perhaps you'd like to start. So I'm I'm not going to debate with with or in whether there's a need for for more housing in Arlington. We we certainly we certainly agree with that. You know, I obviously the pandemic has changed the way people are looking at at real estate today. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. But regardless of what may have changed over the last several months with the pandemic, we're still operating under the same mixed use bylaw that we had before. And I continue to have the concern that I expressed at the last hearing that we're looking at a situation where the amount of commercial space is being significantly reduced and replaced with and in my view is is leaving a token amount of commercial space in order to take advantage of the mixed use statute. And I don't I don't disagree that turning this building into into residential might be a better use for it. But I feel stuck by by what we what the mixed use bylaw is is intended for. And I don't feel that this project is is a particularly good match for utilizing the mixed use bylaw, regardless of what we think about about what the the proponent is is is is proposing for the space. The other thing I want to mention is I. I continue while I acknowledge that adding by parking where there is none now is certainly an improvement over the current situation. But, you know, the the reason that we're being told that that they can't comply with the bike parking bylaw in terms of the location of the bike parking is is purely cost. And I and I and I don't I don't know that I feel that that's a sufficient reason to allow a deviation from what the bylaw expressly prohibits, which is having to require people to carry their bikes up and down the stairs. So those were my comments. Thank you, David. Are there comments from other members of the of the board, Jean? I pretty much agree with what David had to say. Um, I will I will add that I think comparing small office space in Arlington to huge office buildings in midtown Manhattan is a really false equivalence and the market between the two is not at all comparable. And the people who will need these little offices are not the same entities that occupy large buildings in Manhattan or Boston, for that matter. There's also been a lot in the news about the impact of the pandemic on the residential rental market, too. And there's a significant uncertainty now, and I did a little research and there are a significant number of residential units to rent in Arlington at the moment, too. A lot of it has to do with the pandemic and students not being in town. You hear me like at the moment. So there's a lot of uncertainty in both areas. So I'm I'm pretty much in agreement with everything David had to say, you know, just to end those points that I made. Are any other discussion before we move to either a motion to continue or to vote? OK, so, Mr. And now see, given the the split here of the of the board, I will leave it up up to you. We can we can vote on on this. So I think under the circumstances, I certainly would be requesting Cynthia, if you're on and tell me if I'm wrong, but I would be requesting that the matter be continued so that I can have a further opportunity to consult with my client. Cynthia, would you agree with that? She may not be able to hear me. That's agreed. Agreed. OK. All right. So we're agreed. We'll be asking for a continuance so that we can further consult. Great. Thank you. So, Jenny, I believe that the next date is January 4th. Is there room on on that agenda to continue this? Yes, Mr. And Essie, would that give you enough time to consult with your client? Or would you like to look at the next date following the fourth? What's the date after the fourth? Jenny, the fourth is probably going to work. OK, but what is the date after the fourth? If you know what it is. Sorry, I'm it's the 25th. Yeah, the fourth. Why don't we go with the fourth? OK. All right. Thank you. So do I have a motion to continue the hearing to January 4th? I'll move. Is there a second? Great. We'll take a roll call vote. Ken. Yes. David. Yes, Jean. Yes, Katie. Yes. And I'm a yes as well. Thank you, Mr. And Essie, we will see you back on the fourth. Thank you. OK, so that closes agenda item number two. We will move now to agenda item number four, the final draft of the twenty twenty one goals, where we will discuss the draft that Jenny is prepared and vote on next year's goals. So Jenny, is there anything that you would like to say before as we bring these up? No, not at this time. OK, so I'll go through the roll again so that if there are any questions or any amendments that any of the board members would like to propose, we can discuss those at this time. So we'll start with Ken. No, I have no no questions or comments. Thank you, David. Oh, one or two questions or comments. The first question I had is at our when we were discussing this a couple of days ago. I guess I became a little confused in light of Barbara Thornton's comments as to whether we were considering drafting our own accessory dwelling unit proposal versus versus in a working potentially with with publicly introduced proposals like like the one that she proposed at the last special town meeting. So I I don't know whether we need to clarify that here. And I wasn't sure what our intention was. So I sorry, go ahead. Go ahead, Rachel. So I was just going to say that at the last meeting we we noted that we were going to revisit that on the January 4th meeting together, both have Barbara attend with what she had previously drafted along with any changes or amendments that she would like to make to her previously submitted article and the article that had been drafted taking into account the comments from the board during the public comment period that Erin had had drafted. So the what where we had left it was that was something that we would work out together on the on the fourth at that meeting. OK, that makes sense to me. And I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to add. Nope, that was it. I thought I had another question or comment, but I can't find it at the moment. So why don't you move on? Thank you, Jean. Thank you. My only comment, this is not to suggest any particular changes to the goals, but just so we don't forget that we're also going to be bringing forward a number of corrections and non substantive administrative changes to town meetings on. No, it doesn't have to be in the goals because they're not really substantive, but I just don't want those to fall off the radar screen. Those are those are noted and they will not follow up, follow up the radar screen. They are also part of the planning department's goals as well. Jenny, just that those were already filed for this year's town meeting in 2020, annual town meeting. So we were planning to resubmit those for the twenty twenty one with some updates with with the other notes that have come up. Yes, the administrative issues. Terrific. Anything else, Jean? No, that's it. Great, thank you. Katie, did you have any comments? No comments or questions? OK, great. So do we hear it? Jenny, did you have anything else before we take a motion to vote to adopt these twenty twenty one goals? I don't have anything further to add. OK, great. Do we hear a motion to adopt the twenty twenty one goals as submitted? Some motion to the second. Second. And we'll take a roll call vote. Can. Yes, David. Yes, Jean. Yes, Katie. Yes, and I am yes as well. All right, the twenty twenty one goals have been adopted by the board. See the time. Great. So the next item is a review of the draft redevelopment board rules and regulations amendment. So we will review this draft and then it will be posted for public comment in a future and a hearing at a future redevelopment board meeting. So as Jenny pulls this up, I will again go through a roll call to see if there are any comments or questions from the board. We'll start with Kim. No. David. My only comment is I still find it a little confusing to to parse through the timing, particularly where one or two of these one or two of the items in the in the chart of deadlines reference other deadlines in the chart. Rather than a specific. Day or number of hours prior to the meeting. I don't know if there's any way to further clarify this because we seem to introduce different confusion when we try to clarify it. But it's not to my reading, it's not perfectly straightforward. So, Jenny, I'll ask you to address the consistency with the way that this is discussed in in other town by law documents. Well, just, David, your question, I totally understand it. The way that I initially the way that this was first drafted was around Monday night meetings. But we clearly meet on more than Monday nights. Sometimes you meet on a Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, especially during town meeting. And so it becomes very challenging to just glom on to one particular day of the week. So the and then the that's one the the 48 hours piece is directly from open meeting law with and that's like a portion of the clause that relates to the open meeting law at that particular section. But I'm not really, you know, I don't think these are these are deadlines that I think are slightly softer than than this one. I mean, this is a hard deadline that we have to make prior to a meeting in order to post a meeting. The other ones, I mean, if you if there's some other way of clarifying things or you have a suggestion open to that, I just I deleted the day just simply because I didn't think that worked since I take your point with respect to the fact that we meet on on all different days, depending on the circumstances. I don't in light of that, I don't really have a better suggestion. I think it is parse it if you do take the time to kind of work through it and pay attention to how the different items relate to each other, you can figure it out. So the information there I I don't have a better suggestion. Thanks, David. Do you have anything else? No, OK, Katie, I don't have any additional questions. OK, and Jean. Yeah, I think it's fine the way it's set up and and in part because it conforms to the way we've all been doing business for a while. So it's not really cutting back on timing anywhere. It's just redescribing it a little bit. I do, however, have one concern and relates to what Jenny brought up. This works really well when our meetings are on Mondays, because it basically means that we get the materials on Thursday evening for a Monday evening meeting because you don't count, you know, Saturday and Sunday. My concern with the 48 hours is if we have a meeting on a Wednesday or a Thursday, not that we have them very often, but it could happen. Then we will only have a couple days to review what could be a lot of material. I don't know how to deal with that specifically, because I say this works really well for our Monday meetings or a Tuesday meeting, if Monday was a legal holiday. It does raise concerns to me if we're meeting on another day of the week, because then I think it might meet the letter of the open meetings law, but it really makes it difficult, I think, for us to do the amount of work that we have to do to prepare. Yeah, no, I definitely understand that. And definitely during town meeting season, in particular, Aaron and I often struggle to figure out the right way to post all the meetings, especially when they're successive meetings. It's very it's very challenging. It's also challenging when you've made you're having a Monday meeting and a Wednesday meeting, which sometimes happens. The only thing I can think of to address your point is maybe some sort of clause that when should time be additional time be possible, the department will work to post materials as early as possible prior to a forthcoming meeting. I mean, I just don't know exactly how to. You're talking about something very specific, right? So yeah, maybe we'd say when when a meeting is not on Monday, you know, the town will endeavor to post with more than 48 hours notice when possible, something like that. I think that's fine. Great. Did you have any other comments, Chief? OK, great. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I have one other comment. It doesn't relate to these changes, but it relates to something that I meant to mention earlier. If you go right up to the top where it talks about how we're having adopted them on August 6th, which is great. But we then adopted one other section later and now we'll adopt others. So just my suggestion that when we adopt these changes, that the paragraph on the page about when they were adopted would be amended to indicate both that we adopted. Rule, wait a second, rule, rule 19 or whatever date we did. And then when we adopt these, that we adopted those changes. I think that's a just good way to keep a chronological track in the document. OK, great. Thank you, Jean. So we will not be voting on these this evening. They will be posted for the final draft with the changes that that Jean suggested this evening will be posted for public comments and a hearing at a future ARB meeting, I'm assuming either the fourth or the 25th once we look at the agenda. Oh, it'll be the 25th. 25th. OK, thank you. You're welcome. Rachel, can I make one comment, please? I just want to thank Jenny and Aaron for the watermarks on the last one that that was quite helpful. Agreed. Very, very clear. Thank you for that to be a very easy thing to do. That's when I happen. Well, thank you. All right. And look at that. We're right on time. This never happens. Congratulations to yourselves. We are at agenda item number six, which is the public forum on the economic analysis of the industrial zoning districts. So before we turn this over to, I believe, Aaron, who will be introducing the speaker here for the board, I just wanted to note the process that I thought we could go through here in terms of after the presentation is is shared with us. My thought was that we would open this up for public comment first, given that it's a public forum and we really would like to hear from as many members of the public as possible. And then I'll open it up to the board for roll call comments and questions, unless there are any objections from the board members. OK, Aaron, I will turn this over to you. Thank you, Aaron. Do you want me to start the presentation first or later? No, you can start it. OK. Thanks, Jenny. So I have a short introduction for the presentation. Great, Jenny, so I'll just say next slide when I'm ready to switch the slide and I'll direct Eric and Emily to do the same. So thank you for joining the redevelopment boards meeting tonight to hear a presentation on the economic analysis of industrial zoning districts. I am Erin Zwerko, Assistant Director for Planning and Community Development. Joining me tonight is Eric Halverson of RKG Associates and Emily Innes-The-Parriman. Before I turn the presentation over to Eric and Emily, I wanted to share some background on this project. Next slide, Jenny. The purpose of this project is to position Arlington to attract new businesses and jobs in emerging growth industries to locate to the industrial zoning districts in Arlington. In addition, the project's goal is to create opportunities through which Arlington could realize increased revenue through strategic amendments to the zoning bylaw and potentially the zoning map. Next slide. The department, oh, project background is fine. Thank you. The Department of Planning and Community Development released an RFP just over a year ago for this project and selected RKG Associates-The-Parriman to perform the work. We kicked off this project last December with a zoning bylaw working group, the members of which you can see on the slide and joining us tonight are a few of them. I see Charlie, John, Ralph, and I believe I saw Christian join us as well. I apologize if I missed one of the other members. Throughout 2020, the economic analysis was completed which resulted in zoning recommendations. We released a video presentation and survey in mid-2020 to receive feedback on the recommendations to which we received over 100 responses. Later in 2020, based on the feedback received and further conversations of the zoning bylaw working group, zoning amendments were prepared. So next slide, Jenny. Tonight's presentation is the culmination of the work completed over the last year, as you can see on the slide presenting the timeline to date. Lastly, I just wanted to note that this meeting is being recorded by ACMI and the full meeting putting this presentation will be available via ACMI. With that, I'll now turn it over to Eric and Emily for the bulk of the presentation. Great. Thanks, Erin. I'm just gonna spend a few quick minutes just revisiting, reminding regarding some of the key findings that we discussed the last time that we were together pertaining to the industrial districts and just some of our market findings, which I think will be a good segue again into Emily's discussion on the zoning and then also a segue back to me toward the end to talk about some of the financial feasibility analyses that RKG performed over the last few weeks. Next slide, please. So just as a quick reminder, this map shows the location of the five different industrial zoning districts in Arlington, which I'm sure as you all know, by now are primarily located along Mass Ave and the Minutinam Bikeway. And from going from West to East, we typically have been referring to them as the Park Avenue District, the Forest Street District, the Dudley Street District, Mill Street District and Mystic Street District. And when we come back around both, I think to Emily's part as well as mine at the end, we'll be referring back to those districts one more time. And as you can see, the industrial areas, they're really interesting and they're surrounded by a pretty wide range of other zoning districts and uses, including both businesses and residential uses. It really makes these industrial districts unique from our perspective in their land use composition as well as their sort of built form and character. Next, please. As we discussed the last time, we conducted a market analysis that basically tried to place Arlington in the context of the larger Middlesex County region to try to understand what kind of demand potential there might be over the next 10 years for commercial and industrial space. And one way in which we sought to answer that question was by taking employment projections for Middlesex County over the next 10 years. And we applied what we call a fair share approach to see how much space might be needed if Arlington continued to grab about 1% of all the job growth in Middlesex County, which is about what the town has been achieving over the last five to 10 years. By this measure, there could be enough job growth in Arlington to sustain somewhere around 200,000 additional square feet over that 10-year period or about 20,000 square feet annually. Some of this, it's important to note, could be absorbed by existing vacancies or even additions to existing buildings. It doesn't necessarily always mean brand new built space, although it could. Much of that future growth is projected to be in industry sectors, such as research and development, higher education, computers and tech sciences, C-suite management of companies, those kinds of things. And these are very different than what Arlington's employment base looks like today, at least as it pertains to the industrial districts. Next. As we talked about last time, housing prices for both owner-occupied housing as well as rental housing continue to rise in Arlington, much like the rest of the immediate Boston region. Arlington's median home value has increased over $300,000 since 2008. People really want to live in Arlington. I know right now with the pandemic, trends are shifting a little bit, but the suburbs, and I know Arlington is close to Boston and Cambridge and Somerville, but I think it still has the residential feel that people are looking for. And people are moving out of the city to places more often like Arlington. So we think that that supply and demand equilibrium is really important to note, and it's driving up the cost of housing, it's driving up the cost of land, and it's also driving off the cost of construction in general in this region. Next please. The same is true when we look at the multifamily rental side. The median monthly rent in 2019 in Arlington was just under $2,500 a month. While rents here are lower than almost all the adjacent communities, it's still really high compared to median household incomes in the area. The increasing housing prices and the changing income dynamics, really in all of these communities are driving factors when investors are looking for, particularly in commercial and industrial districts, are looking for cheaper land. And that's something that we'll also come back to at the end of the presentation. Next please. So just really quickly before I turn it over to Emily, a couple of key takeaways that helped us inform the zoning recommendations, those include the existing industrial districts are very diverse in their businesses and their employment mix. And most of the jobs actually pay relatively well that are found in the districts today. At the same time, firms in these legacy industrial sectors in Arlington still struggle to justify the higher rents. And if they have to move out or they're displaced from the district, they will likely need to relocate much farther out in the region. As I mentioned, it's very difficult to find either cheap land or cheap space until you sort of drive till you qualify sort of thing. So you don't be continually going further and further out which pushes that employment further out or means that folks who hold those jobs locally might have to drive further. High tech and biotech might view Arlington as desirable in the future. And it's also less expensive than some of the other surrounding places like Somerville, Boston, Cambridge, even Watertown now but it's still further from the Cambridge, Boston hub. So recruitment could be a challenge from an employment standpoint. And lastly, the pressure from the housing market will continue, I think until a better balance can be achieved across the entire region, not just in Arlington, but across the whole region. And this is something to consider, I think as we discussed the zoning. Emily. Thank you, Eric. So as we started to figure out how we were going to put zoning regulations together, we wanted to keep our eyes on certain goals and Erin's talked about some of them already. But first of all, how do we keep industrial and commercial in this area? We did not want to lose that. We didn't want to lose the job creation, the economic development that both of those bring. And then also how do we respond to the fact that housing has a higher value and that the land value is so high in this area? So I'm going to talk about some of the ways we address that in the zoning. Next slide, please. So one thing that really came forward in our discussions with the zoning working group, what we heard from members of the public was this idea about having certain development standards. And in particular, making sure those development standards were tied to community goals for this area and for the town in general. So we knew about the net zero initiatives. The idea because the industrial area is really interspersed among the residential areas, the idea of making it a walkable, pedestrian friendly, safe area, all of which are things that you don't normally think about in terms of industrial development. And then thinking about the location of most of these near the Minuteman Bikeway, near Mass Ave. And can we reduce the amount of parking and encourage public transit walking, biking in order to get there? So all of these got went into the mix in terms of thinking about the zoning. And then we had to parse out what works with what? What is appropriate to request at which stage of, or which type of development, which stage of the process? So as we talked about development standards, we've talked about what is appropriate for a building that's being built versus renovated? What is something that a developer would do versus something that might be the responsibility of the tenant? Thinking about how the standard could actually be enforced and not just at implementation, but over time. And were we asking for things that had a temporary impact or a permanent impact? And we're gonna talk about this a little bit more with Eric at the end, the relationship of the cost of the benefit to the benefit to the community and the relationship of what a developer might get in terms of the development standard versus the public impact of that. So we looked at, again, what happens at when you actually start to build and then what happens in terms of creating a bonus for something a little bit extra, something that the market might not otherwise be willing to provide? And where we divided this was that everybody who meets a certain threshold must provide those pedestrian amenities and I'll walk through them, those that contribute to a safe, attractive environment for pedestrians and bicyclists. But when you got to something like a height bonus, that's where we required more. And so that really got linked to values around sustainability and goals for the net zero energy. And then finally for parking standards, I mentioned before this idea of encouraging public transit or multimodal transit, non vehicular transit, but also how do you take an area of asphalt and consider heat island effect and reducing that impact and critical because the industrial area is near to Brooks is how do you reduce or eliminate stormwater runoff into surface water quality? So next slide please. So as we started to think about the basic development standards, one is that buildings must be solar ready. And this is actually a response to something that we heard during the public comment process on the first round that yards, we reduce the amount that they were away from the front lot line and the ideas that you want the buildings to have a presence and find the sidewalk and the public realm but people called into question the earlier lot line where they said, look, we don't want buildings too close to want the ability to expand the sidewalks given the current pandemic and more people are out on the street and people starting to think a little bit more about how that pedestrian realm works. Also for the pedestrian realm wanting transparencies of the ground floor windows so that you could see activity that the facades all had equal treatment. So you didn't have one nice principle facade and everything else looking blank and unfriendly. And then making sure little things but you see sometimes where development only goes so far and then there's a gap before the next sidewalk. So making sure that the public sidewalk in the front entry are actually connecting thinking about dark sky friendly lighting but that's still appropriate for pedestrian. So next slide please. So you start to see how the standards work and one of the key things to this zoning is thinking about the setting up choices. So the developers aren't locked into requirements that they can't meet. And this is critical as you'll see from some of the work that Eric did when you're thinking about what resources developers have for doing the pedestrian amenities and also can considering that some of these projects are likely to be larger than others. So we didn't want to make this level prohibitive for a developer to comply with. So you can see that a developer can choose between shade street trees or plantings and then they can choose public art or seating or store integrated stormwater and public art. Next slide please. But for the proposed height we wanted to make it a little bit more stringent. And this is when we start talking about the net zero about creating energy efficiencies in the buildings but thinking in terms of what is a capital expense what is something that can be done at the time of development and not necessarily something that's going to be done by the tenant afterwards. So something that's related to operating efficiency of the building that's more on the tenant. So it really came down to the idea what can be done on the roof and what can be done in the parking when we think of a highly reflective surfaces. So they get to choose something on the roof whether it's the vegetated landscape, the solar power, a blue roof they also have to do full onsite stormwater management. So we're addressing energy efficiency but we're also addressing water quality and sewer system resiliency at the same time. Next slide please. And then finally for the parking standards the idea that the standards are we're trying to reduce the amount of asphalt. So pervious surfaces if they go above the parking requirement highly reflective surfaces to address the heat island impact, shade trees and encouraging but not requiring again because of that trade-off between cost and implementation, rain gardens, electric vehicle charging stations. We also reduce the number of parking spaces required for cars and increase the number of parking spaces required for bikes. Next slide please. And then after we met with you and heard some other public comments and met with the working group we changed some of the zoning that you had seen earlier. So we've added self-service storage facility to the mix of industrial and commercial uses that are there. We moved the standards by use to a new section which we had talked about and we kept them grouped in the original draft so you can see which uses were getting standard but then move them to a more appropriate place. We'd had some questions about screening along the Minuteman Bikeway and standards for solar readiness, accessibility, lighting, pedestrians. We've clarified those. Those were fairly minor tweaks. Now there was a question that came up about mixed use so it was interesting listening to your conversation earlier tonight. So we did actually change the standard on residential uses so it was a little bit more clear. So residential can be a component of a mixed use development. It is not allowed in the proposed zoning that you have in front of you. It's not allowed as a stand-alone use but it can be part of a mixed use development. It can be either vertical which means it's stacked on top of a building or it can be horizontal. In other words, you may have multiple buildings on one site. Your principal building or your principal ground floor use must always be either industrial or commercial. So you cannot have residential on the ground floor of a principal use. And then we wanted to limit the residential so you couldn't come in with a 500 square foot cafe and then have far more units than were originally proposed. So residential use at the time we had limited it to 50% of the industrial use on the space. We found that was too limiting when we started working with it. So the current proposal is that it is twice the square foot into the ground floor area of the principal industrial use. So it gets a little bit more flexibility. The way we had it before you could only have one story of residential on top of a say their full ground floor was industrial. You can only have one story of residential. This now allows two stories of residential above the industrial use but it is still limited by the amount of that industrial use. And this goes back to this idea that we're trying to preserve the industrial capacity and the commercial capacity of this area. So with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Eric to talk about some of the pro forma analyses that he did based on this new zoning and the implications that we saw as we were going through these options. Great, thanks Emily. So one question that arose during one of our recent zoning bylaw working group meetings was around whether development in the industrial districts would be able to provide enough financial return to essentially interest the private sector. And then on top of that, this question of would the mitigation requirements that Emily was just describing in the proposed zoning add too many financial layers or potential barriers on top of what may already be challenging development conditions in these districts. So to answer this question, we constructed a basic development pro forma model using data from a combination of sources including our market study for this project, some of our own research and then inputs from other projects in nearby communities. For the pro forma analysis, we ended up testing four different development scenarios based largely on the work that Emily and her team did earlier in this study around the build outs and test fits for different parcels in each of the industrial districts. We ended up using those test fits as case studies for the pro formas. And then these scenarios included a couple of things. So the first one that we'll go over is what would happen if you took an industry existing industrial building and you added up to two stories of office above. The second scenario is actually clearing a site or multiple sites and then constructing new industrial space basically from scratch. The third would be tearing down and clearing a site or multiple sites together and then constructing new industrial and commercial mixed use. So industrial on the first floor and likely office space, some of the two stories above. Then the fourth scenario is clearing the site and building new mixed use industrial residential as Emily was just describing. Next slide please. So the first site that we tested was in the Mystic Street area. And we took the Tetra genetics building if you're familiar with that. It's a one-story brick building right on Mystic Street as our hypothetical. And I just wanna stress this. These are purely hypothetical, each of these scenarios. There's no plans or anything at least not that we know of but we just needed to be able to test the development pro forma on a couple of sites to try to bring some reality to the scenarios. And a couple of these, not this one but a couple of the other ones match as I mentioned with what Emily and her team did from the build out. So these are just hypotheticals for our owner analysis. So we looked at this site and said what would it look like financially if the current owner of the site and building added two stories of office over the existing first floor of residential. And then so you go to the next slide please. We compared each of the scenarios to a general financial return of about 10%, 10% return on investment, which is fairly typical in this area for different developments of what you might expect. So under this scenario, we feel it's plausible that an owner might actually construct or want to construct two additional stories of office space if they were needed. And if they were to do that, we do believe that the return on that investment would exceed the 10% IRR return threshold that we've established. There's about a $200,000 sort of increase in added value, which we feel could potentially be used to cover some of the mitigation measures that Emily was referring to earlier. But I do want to know in the scenario that $200,000 is sort of on the margin or the IRR return is kind of on the margin. If construction costs went up a little bit, if different things changed throughout the development program, it could then impact that added value. So I would say given the mitigation, the potential mitigation as well as the returns, this is sort of on the margin, but it is plausible that someone would do this. The biggest caveat that I offer here is that this project assumes that there are no land costs and no acquisition costs. We assume that the current owner is the one who would be taking on this project and not necessarily doing it for investment or resale for a reason like we'll talk about and show in the other three scenarios. At the bottom of the chart on the right, we also added what the potential net fiscal impact of that new development scenario or the development scenario is. In this case, it's just shy of about $75,000 in total net tax revenue to the town from this scenario. Next. So the second scenario that we tested is using two parcels in the Far Street industrial area along Rider Street. For this scenario, we considered removing all the buildings on the site, clearing the parcels and rebuilding as just new industrial space on its own. We do acknowledge one of these parcels is currently town owned, but we use the market value of both the properties test to meet the land value and test this scenario. Next slide, please. So here based on the build out Emily performed earlier, we estimated a single story industrial building of about 26,000 square feet. And we also estimated top of market rents for flex or sort of R and D or sort of a more creative use than the straight industrial. The straight industrial rents are pretty low. They're in like the $7 to $9 per square foot range. The sort of R and D flex based rents are closer to 15 in this market. So to be a little more aggressive with our scenarios and see what was possible, we took the sort of upper end of the rent threshold. But even still under this scenario, it's highly unlikely that someone would purchase these parcels, clear them and then construct new industrial development. The return on investment is very low, leaving us with a potential financial gap of almost two and a half million dollars. The biggest driver of the negative return here sort of circling this, bring this whole conversation back around again is the land value and the construction cost in combination. The rents really don't justify the land cost and the construction cost. The only exception that I would offer to this might be if someone was purchasing and redeveloping the property for their own use, their own business, their own company, and didn't care as much about turning around and selling the assets they have for five or 10 years as someone who was investing in this and looking for a return might. They would be at this site for the long haul and they would likely just pay that debt down over time, probably over 20 or 30 years, as long as their business was successful and continue to operate in Arlington. So under the scenario of the fiscal impact, if the scenario were to play out and it was to be constructed, the fiscal impact of this development would be estimated at somewhere around $65,000 in tax revenue per year. Next. The third scenario centered on the Dudley Street industrial area. And we focused this scenario on the five or six parcels at the corner of Dudley Street and Grove Street. This scenario looks at clearing those sites and constructing a new commercial industrial mixed use building with again, industrial on the first floor and two stories of likely office space above. You can go to the next slide. And for this scenario, we estimated based on the build out of just shy of 20,000 square feet of that flex industrial space on the first floor and about 34,000 square feet of office split on the two floors above. For this scenario, similar to what we described in the last one, it doesn't provide the returns necessary, I think to encourage the reinvestment of this. Although it does perform better than the industrial only scenario, mostly because we're talking about a more intensely developed site plus the office rents are quite a bit higher than the industrial rent. So that helps the pro forma. Again here, the primary driver of the lower returns is the land cost to assemble these five or six parcels. The land cost is close to $5.3 million. And all of these, you know, mostly because all these parcels have active buildings on them plus the land values in Arlington, as we mentioned before, are quite high. Construction costs also play a role in this too as the cost to construct office space is quite a bit higher than just your sort of standard industrial space. If the land costs were happened to be cut in half, this project would probably work financially. We tested that in the pro forma. So that land value really is one of the key drivers of whether a scenario is going to work or it's not. So it was kind of interesting. And under this scenario, the fiscal impact of the development is estimated to about $210,000 per year. The impact here is a lot higher because the assessed value of the land and those new buildings ends up driving a higher overall tax bill with minimal town service costs given that this is an industrial and commercial scenario. Next. The final scenario looks at the two large parcels in the Park Avenue industrial district where the Gold's Gym currently resides, those buildings over there. We use this site to test a mixed use scenario with one story of industrial flex on the first floor. And then we limited in this case to one story of residential above. And as Emily mentioned before, we were sort of playing with is it 50% of the first floor for residential or is it more? In this case, we just kept it at 50% given the overall size of the building. This, and you can go to the next slide, please. This scenario is likely to perform well above market expectations. And the primary driver here is the really high achievable rents compared to the overall land costs and the construction costs for the project. So here we almost see the opposite because the residential rents in Arlington and throughout, as we mentioned before, throughout much of the region is quite high and it'll likely carry the cost of this project. And the interesting thing is it will likely also carry additional mitigation measures as proposed in the zoning. I think it's worth noting that also that the residential rent prices that we assumed in our model, we actually lowered them a bit from what the market rate rents are for other similar projects, say at like Brigham Square, for example. And we lowered the rents a little bit because honestly, we weren't sure if residential over industrial flex space would be as desirable as if you're putting it say over retail or if you're putting it over office or if you were just building just a completely residential development like Brigham Square, for example. So even though we did lower the achievable rents a little bit, this still appears to work quite well. Under this scenario, the fiscal impact of this development is estimated to grow just shy of $88,000 per year. So in summary, we think it could be feasible for an existing owner to add onto their building and still create that return on their investment over time. And we also think that the mixed use residential scenario would also likely provide positive returns. The other two scenarios will be more challenging. As I mentioned before, mostly due to the achievable rents of industrial development coupled with the really high land costs in our length and the fact that in most of these districts, the parcels are relatively small. The existing buildings are relatively small. So in order to sort of make it work your while you're gonna likely have to purchase multiple properties together and aggregate those in order to get enough development intensity to make the project work. And then just in terms of next steps, I think that's just the last slide, Jenny. So we do have one final meeting with the Zoning By-law Working Group scheduled for January 6th. And then I believe, Jenny, if you wanna just talk quickly or Erin about that last bullet. Yeah, thank you, Eric. And thank you, Emily for the presentation. There, as you might have noticed on the goals for the 2021 year for the ARB and as discussed during the goal setting meeting on December 9th, we did talk about advancing this to the annual town meeting. So that is why we decided to make this presentation at the Redevelopment Board so that you all would receive the information as soon as possible. Of course, it is up to the Redevelopment Board if you do plan to advance this forward. But with that, thank you, Rachel, for the time this evening and thanks to the Redevelopment Board members. So I was totally remiss that naming David as one of our Zoning By-law Working Group members, and I do believe a couple more had joined. So I really appreciate the participation from those members. But at this time, Rachel, I will turn it back to you or let me know if you'd like me to handle the Q&A at this point. Sure, Erin, if you did wanna field the Q&A since most of the questions will be coming to you and Eric and Emily, that would be absolutely fine to me. I'd be happy to hand that over to you. Great, and right before we launch into the Q&A, Jenny, do you have anything to add at this time? Okay. No, nothing at this time. Thank you, looking forward to hearing from the people who are participating in the questions. Great, so we'll open it to some public comment. I do see a couple of people with their hands raised and if any of the members of the public or the Zoning By-law Working Group members have comments, please feel free to use the raised hand feature. And then, so I'll just call on the order that I see in the queue. So John Warden as a member of the Zoning By-law Working Group. Thank you, Erin, and members of the board. Just a couple of comments. Oh, John Warden at 27 Jason Street. The Zoning By-law Working Group was going to have a meeting at nine o'clock in the evening on an early Wednesday in December, but that was canceled. So the draft that's presented to the board is, you should understand, this is not something that the Zoning By-law Working Group has endorsed, approved, or voted on or anything. We've been working on this project, the industrial project for about a year now. And it seemed kind of furniture to lay it all in front of the redevelopment board when our work and coming to a consensus on what it should contain has not been completed. I guess maybe we've got to do that on January 6th or putting the card before the horse. But the second point I should like to make is that when this proposal for this appropriation for this study was before the town meeting to be taken out of CPA funds, I believe, there was a lot of grumbling on the floor and people saying, well, you know, what do we need all of these consultants for? Is do we have a very fully staffed planning department? Why don't they do these studies? And there was a good deal of grumbling and people say, I'm gonna vote against this. Then Mr. Tosti, then chairman of the finance committee, got up and gave a very strong speech and encouraging town meeting to vote this. And the thrust of his speech was that the industrial and commercial uses in the town were those that produced taxes as opposed to residential which costs us net money. And he emphasized very strongly, no residential. I'm so glad we're gonna do this to deal with our industrial, commercial uses and not our residential uses. And on that basis, town meeting to vote the appropriation. And then, and I've reminded the committee of that, working group that is, as we've gone along. And now we see this latest draft they put in mixed use in this residential and we know what, we know how the redevelopment board treats mixed use. The statement of Mr. Bonnell was, we're the redevelopment board, we can do whatever we want. And I was strongly urged before the working group and I'll urge you town meeting that the mixed use and any residential references be totally deleted from this. If you wanna live in the industrial zone, there are some houses, there are some apartment buildings there, fine. But to start allowing the industrial zones to be exploited by developers to build, as the gentleman just said, it's a lot more money to rent apartments than it is to provide commercial space. But we've got 95% of the town is devoted to residential zoning. We use this little 5% alone and let it be commercial and residential. That's what that's, I mean, commercial and industrial. That is what Mr. Tosti proposed. That is what persuaded Tommy to vote for this appropriation. And if the folks who are now talking about all this residential, we're not gonna do that. I think they had a moral obligation to stand up in town meeting and say, well, we're not gonna, you vote us the money. We're gonna do whatever the consultants say or whatever we think. We're not gonna be bound by any anti-residential thoughts that you've expressed, Mr. Tosti. That didn't happen. And I think in fairness to the town meeting that was persuaded that this is the way to go. I'm sorry, we have to not allow additional residential areas. We've already lost in the biggest one of these zones. We've already got, so MyRex decided to plunk a huge 40B apartment building in the middle of that industrial zone. We've already lost all that territory because they've decided instead of coming to the town like their father, Mr. MyRex did, John MyRex and asked for a zoning change. They take the sleazy 40B route and cram it down our throats whether we like it or not. And there's a big loss in that district. So as Tosti said, we cannot afford more residential. It's costing us money. And there are bogus figures in here about the cost of education, which John Selzer has presented to the working group and to the planning department. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you, John. I will point out that residential uses currently exist in the industrial zoning districts and mixed use, including residential has been in the draft of the zoning since the earliest version from earlier this fall in September and October. But I wanted to see if Eric wanted to add in a little bit of information about how the fiscal analysis was developed and why we presented tonight at least an example, including residential uses. Yeah, sure. So at the very beginning of the project and which was part of our charge with the scope of work, we were asked to develop a marginal fiscal impact model for the different use types that were under consideration the commercial industrial as well as different types of residential single family condos and apartments. Not that all those would be necessarily allowed or would be proposed at that time at the beginning of the project but we wanted to try and cover all of our bases in working with each of the town departments including the school department. We came up with our net fiscal impact figures either on a per unit basis for residential or on a per square foot basis for industrial and commercial development. And we thought it would just be useful for the scenarios this evening, those four scenarios just to share with you all what the potential fiscal impacts would be because I know it's very important and has been a point of conversation throughout this process so far. I'm sure it will be continuing even after tonight. I will say that residential does create tax revenue for the town. I know that sounds counter to what you may hear but working with the town's latest budget and accounting for revenue for each unit as well as the expenditures that the town has to undertake to serve different types of development. Most residential does come out quite positive from a tax perspective. Again, that's driven primarily by either the fore sale values and the assessed values of fore sale units whether they be single family houses or condos or the high rent levels which then end up driving high assessed values for multi-family units. Thank you so much, Eric. So moving down the list, I have Carl Wagner is next and keeping with the direction of the meeting, please so that we can hear from the most amount of people keep your comments to about three minutes. Thank you, Carl. Thank you, Ms. Zwicko. I was in town meeting when this $70,000 study was approved and I recall specifically the words of Al Tosti and I think everybody here should go back and take a look at that or remember that we have a town that has about 5% industrial use in the tax base and the rest is residential. That's much less than many of the towns around us and that affects us in the residential areas. We have to pay more to fund the same police fire and schools that other towns have to do. So I was pleased when this study was put forth over the last two years I have been less pleased to see that this study has been going away from the idea of adding more industrial use and getting more tax value out of that for the people who live here. It's been very frustrating therefore to see the RKG consultant present to us now that this study is no longer about improving and increasing industrial uses which are the only ways we cut our taxes but now including one and two floor residential units and in a throwback to 2018 which we saw the planning department come out with a bonus which means a way to get around the bylaws to make buildings bigger and they're gonna have residential use. So I'm not sure what was just said about how residential use has really helped taxes. He's wrong when he says that. We all know that when you add a residential unit the property tax value goes up and worse yet for anti-racist action and affordable housing the average cost of living in Arlington goes up. So I ask you to go back and look at the first page of this report where you had two goals on the page. One of them was bringing new business and helping business and the other one was something about bringing in revenues to the town. If you allow the mixed use to increase in the industrial zones you will increase the tax burden of the people who already live here. You will hurt the town's finances. Do not do this. Go back and rewrite this plan so that it is only for the improvement of industrial tax base. Thank you. Thank you for the comments. Emily do you want to speak to the way that the bonus is formulated? I think Eric has explained why we included residential. So rather than continue on that point Emily do you wanna talk about the way that the zoning is based as an incentive to encourage industrial uses primarily to get that larger ceiling height needed? Yeah so there's a couple of things in there Erin that I think they're important to think about. One is the fact that we are not... The zoning is designed so that residential is not going to supplant industrial. And by that I mean that we are requiring that industrial be the ground floor use the principal ground floor use because if you look at the vast majority of industrial buildings they only have a single story. They only require that single story. You see very few industrial buildings go up to a second story unless they have some sort of office component with it. So the idea that we looked at is that the ground floor is reserved for primarily industrial use maybe some commercial depending on whether or not the flex spaces is used in there. So residential should not supplant industrial. And that's a direct response to the desire of the community to have these job producing industries there. So then when you have industrial as a ground floor then what do you have above it? You can have office, you can have residential. So in order to do that you need to go up to a higher story level. And this is where the bonus comes in is because industrial buildings used to be fairly low line but what we're seeing now as more distribution uses come in as different types of industrial happen that the ceiling heights on the ground floor need to be a lot higher than older industrial buildings are. And so in order to get that second floor of office or that second floor of residential or even a floor of industrial floor of office a floor of residential, you need to have a higher height but we did understand that the community was worried about having higher buildings near the residential. And so the idea of the bonus incentive is to give something back if the person developing the building comes forward and wants that higher height they have to be able to give something back. And the most logical thing from what we were hearing is to tie that to the net zero which was a community value for sustainability and energy use. So they have to meet that higher standard of the sustainability and energy use in order to get the higher height. We did also put some restrictions on the production of shadow in there. I understand there have been some questions about that as well and it's certainly something that could be revised but the idea was to minimize the impact on the residential, the residential abutters immediately around it from the increase in the height and to produce community value. And at the same time, use the floors above the industrial to help create an incentive for that industrial use on the ground floor. Thanks, Emily. Eric, do you have anything to add to that? I think Emily hits on almost all the points that I would have made, especially the one about us hearing loud and clear that we don't necessarily want to displace or supplant businesses but try to also encourage new development and may end up bringing additional businesses where there might be one today if we are adding additional floors, say of office space or maybe making the base floor a little bit bigger, there might then be room for additional, not only additional businesses but also if there's a business that is there today that wants to expand and add more employees sort of adding to the employment base of the town. So I think we've tried in coordination with staff and the zoning bylaw working group to come up with different scenarios to try to make added investment over time in the industrial districts attractive by making these changes to the zoning bylaw. One thing that I always think about is if changes aren't necessarily made in Arlington or in other suburban communities similar to Arlington that have these older and they usually tend to be smaller industrial districts in terms of their overall size and parcelization then things sort of stay the same and they don't necessarily change over time and that might be okay but if we are trying to encourage additional investment we've tried to do what we could on our end working with everyone together to figure out a way in which we could try to enable that. Thank you Eric. So the next person I have in the queue is Steve also a member of the zoning bylaw working group Steve Revelak. Hello Eric, good evening. Steve Revelak 111 Sunnyside Avenue and speaking as a member of the zoning bylaw working group but not on behalf of the zoning bylaw working group. One is to just set the first remark I'd like to make is to just set some expectations about what we might do with the industrial district changes should we adopt them. So about 5.5% of Arlington zone acreage allows commercial and industrial uses and just by coincidence those commercial and industrial uses generate about 5.5% of our property tax revenue. Now this study and what we're talking about here is just the industrial zone which is about 1% of the total land acreage in Arlington and by coincidence it also generates about 1% of the tax revenue. So just like on a tax top line way of looking at things we're talking about a very, very skinny sliver of the pie. I mean, we can try to make it wider but a little wider but you're really talking about when it comes to revenue we're really talking about changes to a 1% contributor it's really small. Now on the other hand one of the things that we might be able to or that might come out of the industrial zoning amendments proposed are some different types of businesses in Arlington. So I think there would be a decent shot at getting a brewery which I think that'd be great. And also having different kinds of forms of employment in that sort of thing. One of the things that I like about this proposal the most is that it does have at least something of a value statement behind it. So and specifically I'm talking about the bonus provisions where if you would like an extra story you're going to have to do a high albedo roof a blue roof passive solar 50 or solar ready half the roof covered with solar you'll need to plant trees and add pedestrian amenities. So the idea is you're taking things that we believe the community wants and we believe the community would benefit from them. And we're essentially using it as a bargaining chip. I think that's a reasonable way to get what you want. But I'm looking forward to seeing how the proposal shapes up over in the coming months. And thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. I will note that related to breweries other changes toward to Arlington's alcohol rules might need to change to fully support the addition of breweries. But it is something that can be done hand in hand with this or after should this zoning proceed and be adopted something that could be handled afterwards. So I just wanted to make that note that there is some intersectionality with other rules and regulations relative to additional uses in the town of Arlington. Emily or Eric, do you have anything to add from based on the comment that we received? Okay, great. Thank you, Steve. The next person on the list, I apologize you had stated your name earlier but it's the gentleman under Colleen Cunningham. Hi, Stuart Groerson. I am at 73 Kensington Park. And Colleen is my wife and she's here with me. Just two comments. One is I like this idea a lot. The, you know, I think that it's great that we're considering sort of supporting bringing industrial and commercial uses into Arlington. And if you look at the work bar which is up there next to the new Schwab Mill, the Brick Schwab Mill. That place is oversubscribed as far as I know. So there's evidently demand for, you know, office space. So that's a good thing. I followed the conversation about, you know, costing out the different kinds of development scenarios. And it was very interesting to me that several of them failed based on the land cost issue. And that says a lot, but the question then to be raised is well, okay, you calculated based on a land cost that land cost is based on the notion that a developer could put basically whatever the heck they want in that place. And therefore the land cost reflects the possibility of building residential. And so that's why the land cost is probably so high. So the question becomes, if you exclude the ability to build residential, the land cost will go down. What will it become? And how will that affect the profitability calculations that you performed? Thank you. Thank you. Eric, I think this one is in your camp. Yep, yeah, no problem. Great question. Thank you very much for raising that. So the way we calculated land cost today, we just assumed that the current assessed value, that's what we used as a proxy for land cost or acquisition. So whatever the land cost is in the current tax roll for FY 2020 is what we assume. So right now, you, as Emily mentioned before are limited in what you can do from a residential perspective under the existing zoning, not the proposed zoning. So this would be based on what you could do as of today under the zoning bylaw. I would say that if the change to then increase the value that someone can derive from their property based on different uses added or subtracted, that could potentially change the value of that piece of property over time. It wouldn't be immediate, but you may see some catch up a couple of years down the line, depending on what changes are made. Yeah, so just this is Stuart again, just to follow up on that, thank you for the answer. So in a sense, the price that got cost or the cost that got priced into your analysis is potentially based on what a developer might have assumed they could have gotten for the property, even though they're currently sort of limited to commercial or industrial use. It's very clear that developers come to this board and then sort of find ways in order to build residences instead of commercial or industrial use. And so that's probably part of the reason why the land costs were so high. The other thing I wanted to offer is that taxation is usually used by governments as a way to help make these economic decisions. So one could for example, say, look, if you wanna turn this into a residential development, we're gonna charge you a surplus tax, which will then bring a benefit to the town because part of the reason we want residential or rather industrials because we want a better tax base, it'll bring more taxes to the town and we'll also serve to sort of discourage the conversion to residential, which is really the whole point behind this study as I understand. So just do things to think about the taxes and the potential that developers, things are priced based on what people think they can get as opposed to what they actually are worth. Thank you. Thank you so much. So next on the list is Don Seltzer. Don? Thank you, Erin. Don Seltzer Irving Street. I've been following this project since it began. I guess it was probably just about a year ago today or so that the first presentation was made. And one of the things that really stood out for me, the best takeaway from that first presentation was this slide, 93% of Arlington's working residents have to commute out of town. There aren't a lot of good paying jobs in Arlington. Most of the jobs are low paying and they're actually filled by people who come from other towns where they can afford to live to fill them here. And wouldn't it be great if we could use our industrial districts to bring in high paying jobs? And that was one of the other takeaways from that presentation, that industrial zones offer the potential for high paying jobs. And something where Arlington residents could actually work in their town. They don't have to commute into Boston. They don't have to use the red line. They could walk or bike to their job. Now as far, I watched the evolution of the recommendations and back at the end of May, the recommendations from RKG and Harriman were that mixed use in the industrial district shall not include residential uses. And it was further emphasized in their suggested table of uses. Again, mixed use shall not include residential uses. The project then sort of went into a quiet period. I think it was five months without any meetings before the zoning bylaw working group. There were no other presentations to other town committees as far as I know. It was simply a survey of residents in which they were given a choice of 11 possible uses for the industrial district. And last on the preference of that was housing. And among the comment section, there were grouped into nine groups of types of comments. And one of those was housing does not belong in the industrial district for a number of good reasons. It limits the kind of industry that can move in there because certain things are just incompatible with residential. And if you put residential in there, you're going to limit the possibilities of what businesses can locate there. So it was very surprising to me at October when suddenly in that presentation, this idea popped up of, well, we're gonna start allowing residential mixed use. It wasn't given in the main presentation. It's something that was buried down in a footnote of the table of uses. And it says that mixed use could have up to 50% of the gross floor area. Now we learn for tonight's presentation that this has been upped. Now we could have residential use can be twice the gross floor area by the principal ground floor industrial use. And that means that residential, our definitions is now the principal use of that building. And this is simply an invitation for developers to follow the path of lease cost, highest revenue and build structures in which the ground floor is a very inexpensive commercial application, maybe just the storage facility, even a parking garage and the upper floors are residential. And that's what we're going to see happen in places like take the Myrack track. That's 12 acres of the most develop industrial in our town. Two acres already been taken over by 40 B. You put in a wall like this, a change like this and you can bet that the rest of the Myrack property at 11.95 and the adjacent properties are gonna beverted into essentially purely residential of some type of commercial on the ground floor. And that's what I foresee happening with it the way it is. Let's go back to the basic idea, which is by the way, what this says here is completely inconsistent with what the master plan says. So I think we should abide by what the master plans intentions are and not start introducing large scale residential into our industrial districts. Thank you. Thank you. Emily, would you like to clarify the comment? Yeah, can I clarify just on the table of uses in particular, there was a lot of confusion over that May one and that's because the proposed table of uses in the draft zoning had two columns in it. One was the existing zoning and one was their proposed changes. So you can see them side by side. Under the existing zoning, there was a footnote D that said that residential was prohibited from the area, which is true under the current zoning. There is then a footnote E for the second, the proposed that said we are going to allow it as part of the mixed use component. What I should have done was I've left the footnote D in there so people could read it. What I should have done and what I did in the next draft was cross it out because there was so much confusion over the first one. So I admit it's a fine point, but the idea was that people would read column A, the existing zoning, see the footnote D, as you know, footnotes are very small, say, okay, in the existing zoning, it's prohibited. And then next to it, it had footnote E, okay, in the new zoning, it's not prohibitive. It's not prohibited. Unfortunately, that got to be a mess of confusion, which we corrected in the next draft. And then I'm sorry people then thought it was introduced for the first time in the second draft, but it wasn't. It was actually just simply not clear in the footnotes. So I didn't want to clarify that. Thank you, Emily. So next I have Chris Loretty, Mr. Loretty. Thank you, Erin. Chris Loretty, 56 Adams Street. First, I just want to make a few comments about the economic models that were presented. And I'm having a little bit of trouble swallowing them because I don't sure they correctly considered the lot sizes and the floor area ratios and what could be built. In the first case of the tetra genetic site, I don't think you could put two floors on that building because it's a lot so small you'd exceed the floor area ratio. On the second example for the Lollicata site, you could build way more than in the adjacent land, you could build way more than was indicated. And then on the third site on Dudley Street, I think one of the reasons that lot is so valuable is that it already is residential. And the valuation is based on the fact that they collect good rents from the apartments there or if they're condos, they're priced to account for that. And I think what's going to happen, I have to agree with Mr. Salser is basically you're converting two thirds of the buildable potential of the industrial zone to residential. I mean, that's what it says. And forget about all this talk about the footnotes, the relevant text is in section 5.9.10. And it says two thirds of the building can be residential. As I read that, it doesn't even have to be in the same building because it says you can have mixed use in multiple buildings on the same site. And what you're comparing to is the principle use or the flurry on the first floor of the principle building so you could build houses and then have a single industrial use building as I read that. And the other thing that I think is ridiculous is it says residential uses must be a component of the mixed use development. Well, currently you can have mixed uses and you can't have residential. So now you're saying you have to have residential as part of the mixed use. That makes no sense at all either. So basically you're going to be driving the cost up in the cost of, you're actually making it much more expensive to bring in industrial and commercial uses that are currently allowed by putting this residential component in there that's going to drive the cost of the land. You're raising the land price considerably. Final point is, I think the way to approach this is the way that was done in the economic development study that I think was done about 10 years ago when I was on the Airbnb and I think RKG might have been the consultant for that as well. And one of the sites that was considered then was the Gold Gym site and the proposal was to rezone it. And as Mr. Warden said, that I think is a more appropriate way to go about these changes. If you want to introduce the residential component but two, I think you also have to look at what the limitations are of the industrial zone. You can't put large-scale commercial in the industrial zone. And you may want that in a place like the Gold Gym site which is right next to one of the major commercial districts of the town. So I think I'm not 100% opposed to allowing some residential and more commercial uses or different commercial uses in the industrial zone. But I don't think trying to sneak it in as part of the mixed use is the way to go about it. I mean, we're seeing what's happened for mixed use in other parts of town where there's simply all residential. And even if it's only two-thirds, it still takes away that other non-residential component and the potential for it going forward. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you. Emily or Eric, which there were a number of points made would either of you like to respond? I'll also see if Jenny has anything to add. I'll respond on a couple and then you guys can jump in and add. I think the residential must be part of the mixed use development. I think I could clarify that in the next round by saying residential can only be part of a mixed use development because the idea is not that you're required to have that residential, but that residential can only happen if it is part of a mix of uses. So I'm happy to make that change if that clarifies that. I think again, just remembering that we're not, I think there's an assumption that by allowing twice the amount of industrial space that we're trying to push the industrial space out, the industrial space is likely to only ever take up the ground floor. So what we're really saying is you can have an industrial on that ground floor and if you have that industrial then you have basically the air rights of twice that square footage can be residential. You're still gonna be limited on parking which is going to create a limitation of how much residential that you can develop there. You've mentioned FAR, there's some other limitations in there that's going to drive down the size of the building and there's the height limitation. So yes, there's a bonus for height but it's only going to take you up so far. And in fact, depending on the type of industrial that you're doing, you may only be able to, you may not be able to have any more than two floors of residential. Again, if it's a, and we did the multiple buildings on the site because we've seen that before in industrial areas, your principal use is that the largest building, the principal building has to be industrial or commercial and therefore the residential is going to be limited by how much of that building exists. So it's not that it's a mandatory twice the amount it is that is your ultimate limitation. So just to clarify that a little bit more. Eric and Jenny, I don't know if you have any points on the other pieces. I'm sure just in terms of the site collection those are great points. Thank you for raising those. Just on the tetra genetic site, I actually was thinking about that exact point when we were looking for a potential building and I wanted to use it more as a hypothetical. I think the point about the FAR and maybe more importantly, the parking the site is quite constrained from a parking standpoint. But I was thinking more from a hypothetical example, that's a business type and even a sort of building footprint where you could potentially see that scenario play out in existing building and existing business and somebody chooses to go vertical with it. That was more the reason why I thought that was an interesting example. And I agree with you about the delby street site that I do think that the land value there is driven by those by I think it's three sort of L shaped residential buildings that are taking up some of that parcel area. As I mentioned during the presentation if you were to cut that land cost about in half maybe a little more or a little less than half the project would likely pencil as that mixed use industrial commercial development. So land cost again does play into that. The reason why I chose that one was just to try to be synergistic with what Emily and her team did from a build out perspective in previous iterations as we were working with the zoning bylaw working group. And Jenny really quick. Yeah, just really quickly the park avenue lot that was mentioned and the questions that were raised about it. I will just also note that we've looked at that lot as part of the Arlington Heights neighborhood action plan and there were other zoning proposals and suggestions that were made for that site. So we have been looking at and trying to understand what is economically viable in these areas. That's one thing I wanna note. The second thing I wanna note which I've heard a few times is how this connects to the master plan. I think sort of that's the underlying message or question. And I wanna just say that back when we developed the RFQ for this whole proposal back in 2019 last year seems like a long time ago, we noted that and I noted this two town meeting as well. The whole point of this project is because the impetus is from the master plan which noted that today's industrial users have different needs now than in the past including space needs and configuration as well as supporting business uses. The master plan recommended removing the minimum FAR requirements for certain uses, allowing restaurants, allowing smaller retail spaces and promoting flexibility and redevelopment and allowing residential uses to be built and mixed use structures where the industrial commercial uses comprise the majority of the space. So that might be the only thing that is in question but the point of this project is to figure out what can we do with these spaces? What would spur some redevelopment or any development at all? And so if there are any changes that we do need to make or recommend making of course as part of that I think that's what we're talking about here. We're hearing some of the recommendations now but there will be further time to discuss these things. This is not a final proposal to the board by any means. So I definitely appreciate the questions but I just wanna make sure it's also clear that it is part of the master plan to study the industrial areas and to make them realize their full potential if you will through any vehicle possible. And I feel that that's what we've provided here. So I hope that there's, I'd like to hear from the additional people who have questions. Thank you Erin. Thank you Jenny. So Rachel just a quick check with you. There are three new comments and a second comment. So I just wanna make sure it's okay to continue getting the feedback from the public. Please do. I think it's very important that we, that everybody has a chance to speak at least once. So thank you. Thank you. So Len Diggins, select board member. And resident at Eighth Windsor Street, East Arlington. This is exciting. You know, there's so many possibilities here. And I'll channel Mr. Bernal and say that we can do anything. Me, we as a talent can do anything. You know, we just have to decide on what we wanna do for me. It's like, I could imagine me that Gold's Gym, that Gold complex having a gym on bottom be a couple of floors of lab space. I mean, as someone who worked at a lab, I would then love to go to my apartment or whatever on top of it. We just have to build up. We have to zone up for it. But we as a town have decided we wanna do that. We could have a one seat bus ride, mean to Kendall Square in Boston if we could get the M.B.T. to sign on to that. Just some possibilities. But really my question, and this is perhaps to the working group is, do we have a target for the amount of growth in industrial space that we want? Cause I think if we don't have a target for what we want, it'll be hard to really get there. We can still get there. But I find generally if you have a goal or target for how much more industrial space or how much we wanna raise from industry in terms of revenue, it'll be hard to get there. So that's it, thank you. Thank you, Len. Eric, real quick, do you wanna talk about the analysis that you completed early on in this project about target space, commercial and industrial space? Yeah, be happy to. I guess I just wanna make sure that I answer the question properly, at least the way I understand the question. We didn't necessarily come up with a target where the town said we would really like to increase our tax base by X percentage or shift the balance of residential and commercial by X percentage. Or we wanna be able to attract 500,000 square feet over the next five years. So what we did just from an analytic standpoint was we just looked at how many jobs thereby estimated commercial and industrial space the town has been able to attract over the last five to 10 years as a share of the county's job growth. And then we projected that forward over the next 10 years assuming that the town would continue to capture at least that share of the county's growth. And that resulted in that approximately 200,000-ish square feet over the next 10 years that the town could potentially attract. So if we wanted to use that potentially as the floor of the goal, I think that would be good. And then whatever's achieved above that I think would be great. It's just interesting also thinking about some of the shifts that are taking place too. I think we're starting to see some of the R&D biotech tech push sort of out of Somerville, Cambridge, Boston where a lot of the development's been happening and it's starting to percolate its way into the suburbs. Right now a lot of that is taking place in larger scale manufacturing facilities that are supporting pharmaceutical companies as well as biotech. I'm not sure maybe outside of the Gold's Gym site that Arlington has a kind of big enough site to accommodate something like that without some pretty serious parcel aggregation. To your point, what does the town want to encourage and what are the lofty goals to achieve? I would say it's not out of the realm of possibilities and something that the town could potentially shoot for. But I see sort of Arlington's industrial districts being a little bit more smaller scale development more incremental in nature but I still see it being able to attract companies that are operating in that space if that makes any sense. It does and thank you very much. Thank you, Len. Next up is Christian Klein. Hi, Christian Klein, resident at Newport Street also on the working group. I just had a couple of quick questions in regards to that paragraph 5910 then a more general question. So the last line of residential use must be no more than twice the gross floor area of the principal ground floor industrial use. Just wanted to confirm that you could still do residential over commercial. It doesn't, you don't have to have industrial it could be industrial or commercial on the first floor. Go ahead, Emily. Yeah, that's correct. I think an earlier draft had just industrial we were shifting it to industrial and commercial. Okay. And then when it just talks about twice the gross floor area of the principal ground floor use just wanted to see is that the, would that be twice the ground floor level of the building or just the portion of it that's devoted to the industrial or commercial use? Obviously, if it's a mixed use development that includes residential a portion of the first floor is going to have to be devoted to the residential use as well. And I just wanted to clarify how that was going to be treated. It's the sorry Aaron to jump in but it's the commercial and industrial use. So in other words, say you have a 2000 square foot lobby mail thing on the ground floor for your residential and entry. You don't get to count that in terms of creating your residential use above. It's the commercial and industrial use. Great, thank you. And the last sort of a more general question is are there any sort of industrial or commercial uses that would be excluded from a building if it was mixed use with residential? Would that possibly affect the future leasing of that space? That is a good question. Again, Aaron, if you don't mind me jumping in we did not exclude the specific industrial use from being in and included with the residential. We have altered some of the industrial uses that were allowable mostly by adding new uses. I think there's a couple that we removed but we did not put any prohibitions on if you put this industrial use and you can't use residential or if there's residential in the building you can't then move this particular new industrial use in there. Great, thanks. Those are my questions. Thank you. Thank you, Christian. Elizabeth Dre. Hi, good evening. Thank you, Elizabeth Dre on Jason Street. This is more, I just wanna acknowledge I'm totally new to all this and I more have sort of a question about the presentation. Why, I guess you showed us four different sites. There were four sites, different sites that you showed and there was four different sort of scenarios but each site had a different scenario which it made it really difficult for me to understand if you had chosen one site for example and apply it all four scenarios to it to see whether it would have been financially positive or negative. So I guess, it's obviously a very beginner question but why was that approach chosen in this presentation? Thank you. Thank you. Eric, do you wanna talk a little bit and maybe Emily as well about the initial question initial sort of build out scenarios that were done and how that informed the fiscal or the pro forma analysis that was presented? Sure, if we wanna start with the build out, Emily, I'll turn that to you first and then I can talk about the site. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. So we did several build out fit studies and when we do fit studies, what we do is look at the parcel that exists now and we test what we're looking at for zoning by kind of trying to fit in the maximum amount of program. And so we've done them for several sites throughout the industrial district and looked at sites of different sizes. What happens if you assemble multiple parcels together? When you're doing a fit study, you don't think about who owns what because what you're doing is you're just simply trying to test the rules. So we tried to get several different configurations within the different parts of the industrial district. So we could see how the rules and the proposed rules would apply to each. We tried to make sure that there were some along the Minuteman bikeway so that we could test that. And then we pushed it to sort of the maximum allowable under the rules that we were testing. So that's where we kind of figured out, okay, you can have X number of square feet and maybe the FAR is too low and the parking ratios are too high and et cetera to figure that out. Then we turned them over to Eric and his team. And from those, Eric, I guess you chose some that we had done and some others that were more representative. So I'll let you talk about that. Sure, yeah, I think the only one that I chose that Emily, your team didn't do was the initial one with tetra genetics. No one reason I had picked that one as I mentioned before is it seemed like I guess from my perspective, at least a likely candidate that that sort of development scenario could potentially happen given that business and that building, you know, your point is well taken. We definitely could have tested all four of them on one individual site or an aggregation of sites. But I was both one trying to identify sites in the different industrial districts to try to test different scenarios and see how they might play out and also trying to follow on with some of the work that Emily had just mentioned on the build out. So those were the reasons why I chose to do it that way. But to your point, we certainly could have picked a singular site and tested for all four of those scenarios on one site. May I ask a quick follow up question? Erin, is that okay? Yep, sorry, I was on mute. Yes, please go ahead. So in the two scenarios where they were not financially positive returns, were those financially positive in different scenarios? Yeah, right? So yeah. Yeah, I think I understand what you're asking. So without testing the industrial only scenario on other sites, I think in order for that to be more financially viable, I think number one, you need to be putting up considerably, we tested a building that I think was about 26,000 square feet. Two, I think a person's point earlier in the comment, we probably could add a little bit more to that build out. That site is a little bigger than maybe what we tested there. One of the challenges with that site is there's an MWRA sore easement that literally runs down the middle. So if you were to do a little bit more development, you'd have to sort of do it in two buildings on that site. So you couldn't fit a little bit more. So I think that earlier comment was a point well taken. But I do think you'd have to scale that development up even bigger than probably what could sit on that parcel. So that's one thing or the land value itself would have to come down in order to, I think, make brand new industrial development at current levels financially viable. As I mentioned before, with the commercial industrial mixed use where you have say industrial on the first floor and two stories of say office above, if we had tested that potentially on a different site where the land values were lower than the sites that we happen to test it in, I do think that that is a possibility and that could potentially work. So I do think that the adjustments that have been made to the proposed zoning from a mixed use perspective dealing specifically with the industrial in the office for a second, I think that may actually allow a viable mixed use commercial industrial mixed use product if it was the right site at the right price and the rents could achieve what they would need to for the project to come out to be financially viable. Thank you. Hopefully that answers your question. Well, I just don't want to take too much time. I'm so confused, but I mean, so I guess the second scenario was not financially viable, but would it have been financially viable with, sorry, the second site, would it have been financially viable if you had done any of the three other options to it? I would have to go back and test that to answer that question. I don't want to answer it on the fly. Okay, thank you very much. Sure. Thank you for the question in the comments. Mr. Tassie, you had put up the clapping hand. I'm just curious if you're trying to ask a question. Yes, I was hoping to ask, well, actually not ask a question, but just make a couple of statements. Absolutely. Thank you. New to this. I guess my main concern is with allowing residential in the industrial commercial zone. My rec project is such a huge disappointment to me that it's actually eliminating an office building and substituting residential right in the middle of the industrial zone. And I'm afraid, see, residence is easy in Arlington. Everybody wants to build residential property. Commercial and industrial is harder. And I'm afraid that if you're allowing for residential, then the developers will grab onto that and any industrial and commercial parts will just be an afterthought. We'll basically be allowing more residential. And I'm looking for the town to do the harder thing. Not the easy residential, but the harder looking for commercial industrial uses. I just assumed see the land state as it is, then go for more residential on that. I think the commercial in the office will help with taxes. As one person said, not a great deal because there's such a small amount of it. But I'd very much like to see Arlington offer jobs as well as bedrooms. And if we allow, I can't say I'm totally against some residential here or there, but I'm afraid if we allow for any residential, it's the camel's nose under the tent and everything's gonna end up that way and the commercial industrial will just be an afterthought. And we would have lost whatever chance we have to add some diversity to our community. So thank you. Thank you so much. Rachel, we have one more hand up from Stuart unless it's actually Colleen that has a comment. But I'm just looking at the time. You've been very gracious with the amount of time you've given for the public comment tonight. Can I take the last comment? Yes, let's take that last comment and then we'll close public comment for this particular item there and then move to any questions that the board might have. Great, thank you. Stuart, please. Thank you. Yes, thank you for indulging me. I'll be very quick and thanks for the extra question. Stuart Morrison, 73 Kensington Park. So what I'm hearing from a number of people and expressed very lucidly by Alan Tosti just now is that there was a strong desire for industrial and office development in the remaining few parcels that we have. The problem I saw from your analysis is that the land cost and just the economics don't always work out as much as we would like it to work out. And so that's why people started looking at putting residential into the mix and that seems to make things work better. But as Alan pointed out, residential is easy. So if I was to give this, I'm not the person giving anybody any charge, but if I was to give this organization the charge as to where to move forward, my suggestion would be that rather than looking at residential, seeing that that's how you make money in these projects and throwing up your hands, the thing to do is to figure out what tools are required in order to tip the balance in favor of industrial or office uses. And again, I mentioned earlier, maybe too briefly, but taxes or incentives put in by the town or zoning changes, strengthened zoning changes. The question should be addressed in the final report is how do you make industrial work in Arlington without having to do residential? So that's my thought here, my suggestion. I thank you for your time. Have a good evening. Thank you so much. Rachel, I'll turn it back to you for comments from the board. Great, thank you. And thank you to Eric, Emily and Aaron for the presentation and for your thoughtful answers to everybody's questions and comments who posed them this evening. I really appreciate all the time you spent with us tonight. I'll just go through our list of board members for any comments or questions that you'd like to share or any clarifications that you'd like to ask. So we'll start with Ken. Well, thank you for what you've done here. I think this is good. I like the bonus structure with the height and so forth like that. And I wanna stay away from right now the mixed use because I think there was quite a bit of talk about already. I wanna address a few other things. If we want to encourage industrial or commercial space in these areas here, let's think of an owner of a company or a developer. What is, why would they build here? And I think one things we can't control is the land value because it is what it is. But what we can't control is maybe transportation to a certain degree. So I think what we have to look at is maybe having carpooling from these workspaces to parking structures elsewhere where they can commute in earlier or all the areas where we say, hey, we have a resource here in Arlington. We have a bunch of very smart people that live here that could potentially just walk or bike to these areas. And there's a pool of desirable employees. I think that's those smaller things we should look into that could actually encourage someone to pay the premium to develop or operate space here in Arlington. I think we have to look broader than just, we can build more height or we add houses. I think we have to look at the actual desire of people working here. They can work here, they can walk a park during lunchtime, easy access to restaurants, all those things that would encourage employees that would wanna work here as opposed to in an industrial park somewhere else or an office park somewhere else. There's a quaint community here that people wanna work here because they wanna live around where they work. I think that's something we have to actually look into a little bit more. And that's what I was seeing as comments. Thank you, Ken. Erin, did you want to address anything there? Do you want me to just take, I'm happy to just take all of the comments from the board and have you address at the end unless there's something specific that you'd like to respond to. I don't have anything specific to respond to with Ken, but I'd be happy to hear the compliment of comments from the board and then give a response. Wonderful, thank you. Thank you. David. I really appreciate the work that Emily and Eric and their team have done on the project. And I think the economic analysis that we saw tonight from the performance scenarios, I think was illuminating, but I think as we've already discussed, you could spin out more and more scenarios to try to dig into that even further. I really appreciate the input from the public and I share some of the concerns that have been expressed. Arlington has lost one commercial or industrial parcel after another over the last several decades to purely residential development in many cases. And I think with the scenarios that we've looked at, being somewhat pessimistic on doing purely commercial and industrial redevelopment in the industrial zones, I certainly see how that creates an incentive to want to allow some level of residential development alongside the commercial and industrial, but I really do feel strongly that we need to make sure that we are guarding against the residential components becoming predominant in our quest to spur development in those zones. Thanks. Thank you, David. Jean? Yeah, good evening. Yeah, thank you for the good presentations, great questions from the public and really good answers. I think that the consultants and the working group have done really great work on this and I think what we're going to get out of it, I hope is a new structure of how things can be built and developed in the industrial zones and then it will be up to the town to do what Ken and some other people have suggested, which is apply other tools that are available to try to attract the right development to the area. But really the first step is to figure out what the zoning should really look like in the industrial zones, so we can move on to use those other tools to get in industry, commercial, et cetera. So I think this is a necessary first step and I'm really looking forward to seeing the actual proposed zoning changes that come out of the next zoning while a working group meeting. I like the bonuses and incentives. I think they're absolutely what's done these days in lots of places, so we're not sort of inventing something new but using something that's good and that has worked in other places. I'm not opposed to residential in the zone. I understand the reasons why some of it will help round out the zone and might help with finances in some place. I think I'd share everybody else's concern that we don't want it to become a residential zone with token industrial or commercial and I think one of the tasks of what comes out of the zoning while a working group is to have a proposed regulation that will not not allow residential to overwhelm the commercial and industrial. I think one of the nice things about allowing residential here that nobody's mentioned is that there's gonna be enough residential to spark the inclusion of Arizona by law and we should get some more affordable housing here which is something that we sorely need in Arlington. I think that would be good. I'm just wondering, I saw our comments but I have a question I'll sort of put in here now. I'm interested in whether there was some thought about having artists working living space and if there's a way to incentivize that because that's often a nice thing to have in these sorts of areas. So I know that's encompassed by residential but was there any thought of any way to perhaps incentivize it? I guess we can jump in right here. It is an allowed use for artists live workspace as part of the zoning. Emily, anything in particular that you wanted to mention related to artists live workspace? No, it's not incentivized. It is allowed, it's not incentivized and there would have to be a separate structure that's instituted so that it could be confirmed that the people who are using the artists live work are in fact artists. We talked about a couple of different ways, different communities do it differently. Some have the requirements within the zoning itself which seemed not only onerous but unworkable. So we've proposed an alternative in this draft zoning to take care of that. The idea of incentivizing is an interesting one. I'd have to think about that one a little bit further. Okay, thanks. I'd like you to think about is there a way to do that a little bit? I like the emphasis on the environmental issues. In this, I think that's really terrific and it's clearly the way the town, the state, the world needs to go in a lot of ways. You know, last time you did a presentation, I was a little concerned about the definition of solar ready because it was only photovoltaic and yet that's still here. But I'm gonna quote to you from the Solar Ready Buildings Planning Guide of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in which they identify three types of solar ready, photovoltaic, solar hot water and solar ventilation preheat systems. I'm not at all familiar with the third. I'm familiar with the first two but it sort of seems to me that our definition of solar ready needs to be big enough. So it's not only solar voltaic but also solar thermal and maybe solar ventilation preheat. Although I'm not sure what that is. So I can't comment about that one in particular. I would also prefer the electric charging stations or cars to be mandatory and not optional. They're not very expensive, you know and if they're mandatory they happen and I don't see them as being the breaking point for any particular development. Yeah, I did like the proformers. I don't know some of the details that people mentioned. It was really helpful and very instructive to see those. One of the things that I'm concerned about here and I don't know if it's come up or if you've talked about it is the potential for site contamination because most of these old industrial sites have some level of site contamination. And I wonder if that's come up and has been part of the discussion in terms of sort of the finances because it sort of seems to me that if it's there somewhere in the background the town can sort of start thinking about how to work with whoever the developers on Brownfield's tax credits and all those other sort of good things. So I'm just wondering whether that's been part of the discussion. It has come up but we have not done a parcel by parcel analysis to understand what sort of contamination would be on each site that would be and that's in the industrial districts. It's also typically the owner or the previous owner's responsibility to address those issues and not necessarily something that the town would would be a party to other than perhaps some overseeing. It would be permitting through the DEP primarily. Right, and we probably don't even know the contamination on the sites because they might never have looked for them but if they start doing construction or if they need construction loans they then might have to actually get that and find out. So yeah, I don't know what to do with it other than to say it might affect some of the financials that you've looked at for some of those things and I don't know whether it's worth mentioning that somewhere in the report or not. I'll leave that up to you. I'll just sort of put that out there or something to consider. Yeah, I think I'll sort of close up with, you know, I think we need to do this although what this is I think we'll probably be tweaked a little bit because if we don't, I don't think the industrial zones can reach a potential where it creates more workspaces for people in the town and more tax revenue for town. So we clearly need to do something about this. And then the town is going to need a process once this is in place to be able to do all the things of lots of people have talked about to make them happen. You know, one of the disappointing things that just happened was the tea cutting back on a lot of the bus service into Arlington and we just hope that that will be reversed when the pandemic's over but the last thing we need in town for our industrial zones is to eliminate the 79 bus and to combine some of the other buses. So I think that's just another thing for the town to work on but thank you very much. This was great and I really appreciated the presentation and all the work. Thank you, Jean. Katie? Like my board members, I just wanted to share my appreciation for the incredible work that's gone into this this really clear presentation that I think outlines a lot of really sort of exciting regulatory steps for our industrial zones and I'm really excited to see sort of the next steps and the specific proposals that you guys come up with with the zoning bylaw working group. So my comment is primarily, you know, in line with some of the conversations we've already been having during this meeting to say that I do really see and I think you guys made a compelling case for why we need residential in these industrial zones and I very much see my colleagues perspective as well as that of members of the public that we don't want to let the residential overwhelm but I think also acknowledging both broader economic trends our communities desperate need for housing. I think taking those things in concert it makes a really compelling case for including housing. And so one thing that I'm just encouraging you guys to think through as you start, you know thinking about the public process for these kinds of zoning bylaw, these zoning bylaw proposals is thinking about sort of other models for other communities that have implemented these kinds of proposals and this kind of mixed use zoning in industrial districts that were not the only place to consider these kinds of changes. This is pretty typical given that Arlington is hardly alone in facing these kinds of economic constraints. And so I think really clearly outlining sort of why this is necessary and why, how this can be possible actually I would say enhance sort of the industrial districts and a lot of ways to have that kind of mixed use development. So anyway, that's my only comment. Thank you for this. Great, thank you, Katie. And I'll just add that following whichever, whatever the final format of the zoning recommendations are recommended and potentially adopted I agree with Ken that as a next step creating that value proposition for incentivizing and attracting commercial and industrial development by really identifying the highly desirable workforce from a recruitment and retention standpoint and all of the other items that go into that type of a value proposition is a really important step for the town in terms of marketing this. And I too, in addition to what several numbers of the public have indicated as well as several of my colleagues and very much in favor of more limits and restrictions on the amount of residential that can be included in these developments as well. I think it's really important for it to be primarily commercial and industrial in its final format. Any other questions or comments before we close? Great, well, thank you very much. I really appreciate all the time and effort and again, especially the really thoughtful responses that you've given to all of the questions and comments that have come up this evening that's been very helpful. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Rachel for the time and thanks to Eric and Emily for joining us this evening. We appreciate their work. I think we have a good understanding of what the conversation needs to focus on with the working, excuse me, the zoning bylaw working group coming up in January. So I think we have our marching orders. Jenny, do you have anything to add at this juncture? Just to thank Erin and Emily and Eric for all of your work on this and also the work of the zoning bylaw working group really been helping to give a lot of feedback and input along the way and sort of grappling with some of the challenging issues of what we have left and available that's industrial and commercial and what we can actually do with it. So very much appreciate the conversation and the presentation and all of the comments. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Great, thank you all. And with that, we will close agenda item number six and move to agenda item number seven, which is the open public forum. So for tonight's open forum, any member of the public who wishes to speak, please use the raise hand function. As a reminder, you will be asked to identify yourself, your name and your address and then you will be given three minutes to speak with any comment that you would like to make to address the board. Okay. And I do not see any right now. So I will close open forum and that is our agenda for this evening. So do I have a motion to adjourn? So motioned. Is there a second? Second. Take a roll call vote. Kim? Yes. David? Yes. Jean? Yes. Katie? Yes. And I am a yes as well. Thank you all very much, everyone who attended and for all of our speakers this evening. Good night, everyone. Good night. Happy holidays. Have a nice Christmas. Happy holidays. Good night. Happy holidays.