 to 6.30 so we can start assuming we're ready. I will call the meeting to order at 6.30 p.m. I want to discuss, oh, there. Now I can discuss the meeting logistics. If you're appearing remotely, please change your name on your display to your first and last name. Anyone who wishes to speak must be recognized by the mayor and must be, please, we ask you to keep your comments to the point and indicate where you live. And anyone who speaks out of turn or discusses non germane topics will be, we'll try to rein you back in. And Councillor Bate will help us to enforce the three minute time limit for all speakers. And I will ask, since we have one council member appearing remotely, Councillor Cohn, would you let yourself be known? Heading call, District 2. Okay, thank you. First item is to approve the agenda and we have a couple of changes. One is that we're not quite ready to discuss item number 23, the city manager's report. So we'll be taking that off. 18 review. Oh, review, right, sorry. City manager's review number 18. We will take that off. We need the report out. Yeah. And we anticipate having a special meeting next Wednesday to do that. But we'll be, there will be an announcement for that. Also, we're switching the order of a couple of the items. Item number 15, the country club road work plan. We will move up before item 12, the zoning amendments because logically those two things are connected and one flows from the other. So we will do it in that order and I think that is about it. Does anyone have any other changes that we should be talking about? Okay, next up we have general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on any topic that is not on tonight's agenda. And as long as you're recognized by the mayor, you can step up and give us your three minutes and we will start with people in the room to see if there's anyone, any member of the public who wishes to address us here in the room. Not seeing any. I will check. Is there anyone on Zoom who's looking to be recognized? And as always, I appreciate help from other people in the meeting, letting me know if someone's trying to to get my attention because there's so much going on, I don't necessarily always see you. And again, not seeing anybody. So we can move to the consent agenda. I'll call the attention of the members to new item I in the consent agenda request to fly the Black Lives Matter flag for the remainder of the month of February for Black History Month and we didn't catch it early enough to put it on the agenda, but that's on now. And with that, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? And okay. Any discussion? All those in favor, signified by saying aye. Any opposed? Okay, we have approved the consent agenda. Next up, we have a series of appointments to committees. And I'll see if there's any of those applicants to any of those committees participating either in person or online. First, the ADA committee. We have an application for reappointment by Marty Roberts. And Marty, are you on there? Okay. I'll just go through the list of all the appointments and then we'll decide what to do with them. Next, we have Complete Streets Committee David Ory. Is David Ory either here online? Doesn't look like it. And appointments to the Homeless Task Force, we have Tori Rodin and Marty Roberts. And Marty wasn't here before, probably not here now. And for the Energy Advisory Committee, we have Peter Sterling and for the Tree Board, we have Jay Borland. For the Conservation Commission, we have Royce Meyer. Okay. What's your pleasure, folks, with regard to these appointments? We have a range of choices, including... We move to approve all these wonderful citizens who have agreed to participate in the Homeless Task Force. All right. Any discussion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Anyone opposed? I agree. That's right. We so much of the business of the city couldn't go on and couldn't be done as well without all the committed and able, knowledgeable volunteers to run all these commissions. So I really appreciate everyone who steps up to do it. And that brings us up to Item 15, Country Club Road Work Plan. Turn this over immediately to the Planning Director. Mike Miller. Voted everything onto the laptop that died. Excuse me, one moment. Well, that's laid plans. While Mike is loading, I'll note that the Mayor asked that we make sure everybody had copies. We weren't sure who did or didn't have copies of the plan. So we had a few more printed up and put on all your desks. And there is I think one or two over on the table. Thanks, Bill. So you can read it all and digest it in a couple of minutes. It takes Mike to set up. And for everyone out there in Zoomland, the the plan is also available on the city's webpage. Do you want me to manage it? So while Kelly finishes getting it ready, I am Mike Miller. I'm the Director of Planning and Community Development here for the City of Montpelier. And so the first presentation I'm going to go through tonight is the 2024 work plan for the Country Club Road site. So as most of you know, we've been working for the past couple of years on developing plans for on the Country Club Road site, which is out on Route 2, beyond the John Deere dealer. That's where the Country Club Road is if you're not familiar. There's a golf course that's up in back. So what we're going to talk about tonight is if we're going to advance this project, the city purchased this land 135 acres in order to do housing and recreation. Those are the two primary purposes and if we're going to advance this project, we need to decide on our next steps and how to fund these next steps. So tonight I'm going to quickly review how the public projects should be run, talk about what the preparation steps are going to involve. That's what we're working on now. And then we're going to review two options and then we'll talk a little bit about the funding that we'll eventually need, but we're not asking for any funding approval tonight. So plan, prepare, implement. Anytime I'm going through and explaining how to do public processes, public projects, I always like to go back and just give people just a background of what it is and how we do it and why we do it this way. We really, from a planning perspective, break things into three steps. We want to plan, then we want to prepare, then we want to implement. And the purpose of this is really to minimize delays. Sometimes people want to get out there and get a shovel in the ground and sometimes the best thing to do is to do things in a certain particular order. And I've used this for many years. The planning step, we are a public entity and public input is critical. So getting this upfront help from the public to determine what it is we want to do makes it easier for staff to implement later. We make the decisions and then we can act on those decisions. And our planning process for Country Club Road concluded last June and it kind of got delayed by the flood. Very much got delayed by the flood and it's now moving to council and staff to try to see how we start to move this project forward. So I touch one thing and everything goes away. So preparing. This is everything that happens between planning and putting a shovel in the ground. So this could include permitting, funding, finding development partners. In the case of what we're talking about here with Country Club Road, it also involves zoning changes, growth center expansion, which is a state program and TIFF. So the implementation step, we or more specifically in this case, our development partners are building the infrastructure in the project. And this could in our case here be something that we do in multiple phases and may involve savings pasture eventually because we might need to connect these properties. And how long each step takes depends on the characteristic of the project, but generally I usually tell people it takes about one year for each step. And we are just now starting the preparation step for Country Club Road. So we should expect at least a year's worth of work to get the plans drawn up, the permits pulled, financing in place for each of these pieces. And that's two sets of pieces, our infrastructure piece and our developer's piece in order to get them ready. So also timing depends on how we go about our preparation step and we'll get a little bit into that. So what are we talking about when the staff, the team we have here recommending, we really have three separate tracks that are all working at the same time. We have a developer track, we have a city track, city staff track and we have a recreation track. And we'll need a little bit of direction from on the developer track from Council and we'll go through that as we get going. Let me first talk about the cities track. So there are things we have to do as a city to get this site ready to move forward and one involves zoning changes. That's why we ask to have this move to head of the zoning changes just so we can kind of preface. We need these zoning changes. That's why the zoning changes are coming to you and that is needed for both the project and for growth center eligibility. We then need to apply for growth center expansion. That's needed for possible Act 250 exemption and for TIF. The growth center ends at Sabin's Pasteur which is the property to the west. So we would need to expand our growth center by one parcel, this parcel here, the country club road site. The city needs to plan, continue planning for infrastructure. So the roads, the sewers, the waters we have in the planning step gone through and put good orders of magnitude information and got what we believe to be the needs. And we're now going to have to put more work into that to start identifying the exact costs and locations. Where are we going to put that road specifically? Not a kind of, we're going to kind of put a road here. We really need to get to a point where we know this is exactly where we're going to put the road. And then we've got to start having a TIF application which is going to be needed to pay for that infrastructure. So the recreation track, if you remember back to the country club road project, we set aside 12 acres for recreation because they were not quite there. They had a number of studies going on. So they're continuing to work on it, the community services department. And they're going to continue to work on it as we are doing the planning steps for the city. And if these, if the planning, if their work results in a recommendation for facilities at country club road, then we can build them into this first round of implementation if they're ready at the same time as our TIF application is. And now the third track, and this is the one we kind of have, I expect to have a little bit more conversation on, is the developer track. And we really have two options and both have advantages and disadvantages. And this is what will kind of be looking to you for guidance on whether you have a preference or not. And we're, I'm going to go through a number of steps, and I just want to say up front, this isn't every steps, there are votes, there are permits, there are lots of things, but just to give an idea of the two tracks, the developer track number one, we would seek the development partner first. And I think I've talked about this a couple of times. We would run an RFI or RFP process to gain interest from a development partner. Then council selects one or more to complete proposals, outline their general approaches, we would, you would select our partner, they would work on their due diligence, their environmental and their financial side, they would be working with us, while at the same time, we design the infrastructure in a location that best supports their project. So we're basically working together to design how this project is going to move forward. So that would provide us very good estimates for increment and infrastructure. Those are the two pieces of information we need for a TIFF application. How much increment, how much new tax list, tax, new taxable property will we be creating? That's what we call tax increment, the new taxes and how much infrastructure cost there's going to be. If we're working together on what their proposal is and what our proposal is, we have good numbers for that. We can then apply for TIFF. After we've got TIFF, we can finalize development agreements and sale of land and move to implementation. Obviously, as I said, there are a number of other steps that are in there, but we can compare that to option two. So option two is to do TIFF first and this is the recommendation of our consultants. And so in this scenario, the city is going to put a little bit more money and time in up front. So we're going to pay for the due diligence on infrastructure improvements and create a likely location for utilities and roadways. The city will then project what we think are the likely development potentials and we would use those estimates to develop our TIFF application. And this TIFF tax increment finance application would go to VEPSI, which is a state board who does the approvals of these. And what VEPSI does is reviews it and if they approve it, we get a percentage of not only the local taxes, but a percentage of the state education taxes. And we use that money to pay the bond that is needed for the infrastructure to make that project happen. So that's what TIFF does. We take taxes. We're not getting those taxes now. We wouldn't get them unless we do this project. We take that and we help the pay for the infrastructure costs. In this scenario, we would get the VEPSI approval and then do the RFI RFP to identify the developer. They would develop their project and if necessary, we revise our plans. We then we are ready to send a project amendment to VEPSI to revise the estimates in final. When approved, the project can move forward. So a little bit of why one and two, the advantages, oh, now it moved. If I touch that, it takes off. So the advantages of the first one, I mean, some of it are obvious. There's less cost to the city. You can see by the track it would be faster. There's less revisions because we're working together from the start. The disadvantage is there's less certainty for developers. And the concern that our consultant has, and they're familiar with the development community, is that we may lose a number of good potential developers because they're not willing to take the risk. They don't know we're going to get TIF. And so they would be investing a lot of money on a certain amount of speculation. So the disadvantage to the first one is maybe we don't get as many good developers as we could have if we waited to do number two. The second one, number two, more certainty for developers. So we're likely to get more interest from developers, but the process is going to be a little bit slower. And there may be more upfront costs to the city because we're doing those soil borings, those preliminary plans. We can't use our development partner to go and say, hey, if you guys do this plan, we can help shoulder some of the costs, but they're doing a lot of the work. In this case, we're doing all the work ourselves. So those are a little bit of the pluses and minuses of the two models. And this is the last slide for what's next. Once we have a direction, we can do an RFP process for either consulting services to either get somebody to help us with the RFI RFP. We don't have the staff expertise to run a request for a proposal process like this. We would probably put that out, have somebody help us guide us through that process, people who have the connections with the development community to make that more likely. Or we would be doing a TIFF, which is very likely to be White and Burke. They're pretty much the only shop that does the TIFFs. So if we chose the second option, we would do the TIFF, get White and Burke on board, let them start working on that. These would all come back to the council for your approval. Either way, we've got an estimate from White and Burke that we're probably talking $130, $150,000 over the next year to go through all of the processes, whichever order we do them. So we should start thinking about reserving that amount from the country club road proceeds. And the city will continue to advance our pieces. So there's no cost for us to be doing the zoning updates, the growth center application, and those pieces because that's stuff that I will be doing in-house, maybe with Josh's help on some of those things. And we're going to continue to look for grant opportunities in state aid. So some of these have costs, but that doesn't mean we're not looking for grants that may also be covering some of these costs. And I think with that, I can take some questions. Thanks, Mike. I'll need it for the next question. I just noticed as I sat down at my desk that the date of this final report was June 28th. So we know what would happen 12 days later. So it's been tough. But people have raised the question about how is the city going to be a developer for a project like this? And the answer is we're not the developer, right? Correct. We are going to be finding a developer that's going to be doing the development. This isn't a city-built project. It's going to be a project that you as city council, when we do the RFI or RFP process, we're going to be putting things to you and you're going to help the guide what it is we're going to ask. We want a developer who is going to give us a certain amount of affordable housing or protect certain things or meet a certain threshold of housing units. And then we turn it over to the developer to then go through and say, bring us what your vision would be for this. That's why we usually narrow it to a handful of them. When I did this for Berry City's City Place, we had three interested developing firms. Each one of them invested a little bit of money to do sketch-up models of what they thought their proposal would look like. They're not final plans. They're not blueprints. But it gave a sense for city council to go through and say, we really like option B or option A, whichever that one is. And that was how they selected it. But it's the developer's plans and it's their vision. And the question is, does their vision match your visions? And we just have to work together towards finding somebody who helps us. And maybe somebody says, I can do this in four separate buildings. And maybe somebody else comes in and says, I would do it in one big building that looks like this. And you'd be able to look at the various alternatives to say, I like what this person does or this person has a better track record. They've been doing this longer. They've had $28 million worth of investments in their portfolio and they managed thousands of units. And here's somebody who hasn't done that with that much experience. We'd rather have the guy with or gal with the experience. Now, I would imagine that the number of companies that do this kind of thing and also the number of opportunities around the state for a project of this magnitude are both pretty limited. So are the firms that are out there to do this already conscious of Montpelier as a site that is wanting to go forward and if you're hearing from anybody? I haven't had that. I mean, we have Whitenberg. They have their ears to the ground on things. We have been in communications with folks at the state who've been contacted by developers who are looking for projects and they're trying to steer them towards the Montpelier project. So we can't go much more into detail into those, but there are folks who are interested in bringing new development to this area. And I think we won't know until we really get out and get the RFP and RFI out there to gauge that. Do we get only two people who are interested or do we get eight or 10 that we really have a lot of people, a lot of firms to choose from? And I don't think we'll know until we actually get the applications out. Or they may be interested, but not available for a year and a half, in which case, or two years. And that's a decision council would have to make to go through and say, this firm is worth waiting for if they're willing to do the project. So I think we won't know until we put out a proposal and start to see who comes in and what the interests are. Now with regard to the two choices you laid out about whether we do some of that work at the front end or we let the developer do that, either way, what you're talking about is not are we going to build the roads and put the wires in pipes in right away? It's really just are we going to do the studies that prove it? Yes, we're doing the preparation step. So we're going to be basically going from roughly where we're going to be putting the road to getting it exactly. This is where we're going to be putting the road because we know exactly where the buildings are going to be. And we're going to know we do engineers call it doing the 30-60-90s, 30%, 60%, 90%. We get everything nailed down and we know exactly how much additional fill we need, what the gravel is, what the paving is going to be, how much sidewalks they do the plans because before we can go to construction we need to get our permits. And so usually somewhere in the 60-90 range they're going to start going in to get permits because you don't want to finalize your plans and then have them changed. You'll come in, get your permits when you have a pretty sure project. I would expect we'll probably have two separate applications, one that would come in from the city. So there's going to be a certain amount of subdivision to create a parcel that the developer is going to build and the road is going to get subdivided out from the underlying parcel. It's going to be its own 50-foot wide property. And the city is going to be the one responsible for sewer and water. We may not be putting it in. We may work with our contracting partner. They may build it to our specifications. It just depends how things work out with the development agreement. We may put it in, they may put it in, and we just cover the cost with the bond to put in the infrastructure. But we wind up owning the roads. We end up owning the roads. Yes. And I know there's discussion in the plan about roughly how much we can expect the infrastructure is going to cost and where the money is going to come from. Could you talk about that a little bit? Josh has a better grasp of the exact numbers that we're talking about. But the last I heard of, you know, talking to Josh is putting in an application we were talking earlier today. And some of the numbers, it's less than $5 million worth of infrastructure if we go all the way back to, because in our preliminary study in the actionable master plan, what we, what our consultants did was to look at what were all the potential barriers that would say this project can't move forward. And one of the things that really wasn't a barrier, but it was noted that we would have to improve the infrastructure back to the roundabout. So water and sewer from the roundabout to country club road and then up country club road would all have to be improved. So that's new water and sewer lines back to that intersection. There is a pump station that needs to be upgraded. Now, some of these costs may be covered by FEMA, but just all the costs would be the pump station, everything up to country club road, up country club road and into the site. And that would be just under, you know, it'd be under $5 million. And so how that gets financed, I got into I mentioned a little bit with this tax increment financing. It's a very common tool that's used around the country and around the state. And really what you're doing is state law allows us to take the new tax revenue or 70% of the new tax revenue of a project and use that to help pay the bond that's needed to build that infrastructure. So you would take $5 million, you'd have a 30 year bond on it, that would come out to a certain amount of money every year that has to get paid, and you need a certain amount of taxes, new taxes that would have to be generated to cover that cost. And what is in the actual master plan with basically, if we looked at 300 housing units, there would be more than enough revenue, especially if we have state TIF to cover all of the costs for a $5 million bond. There's actually, there's plenty of money in there for that. But the total infrastructure cost was much larger when you went further into the site, right? Yes, yes. So $5 million just to get us, just to work clear, that's to get us to the first area. Yeah. So it gets us to the first area. Yes. And that's what the, so when we talk about that the TIF has a lot of extra money, some of that extra money would be going to those next phases. So we want to run that road up the hill so we can build townhouses on that second level. We want to run that road potentially across into Savins Pastures so that way we can have two forms of egress to this neighborhood. That's going to cost money. And we don't have those exact numbers yet. That's got to be one we've got to work on in the next year to get more studies in that area. We're looking, talking to the state now about seeing if we could get some grant funding to help cover the studies of where would that road go? How much would it cost to build? There's a lot of questions that are out there with that. This first part, this phase one that we're talking about is just what it would take to get into the bottom of the site. And I know other people have questions, so I just have one more for right now. Is it possible to estimate at all the likelihood of getting one approval for the growth center expansion and two approval for the TIF designation? I'm very comfortable about the growth center and we've had a TIF before so I don't see any reason why we wouldn't. We've got a lot of support, a lot of support from the administration. And so there's obviously a recognized need around the state for housing development and the need for housing. And our new TIF application would be much more specifically targeted to Sabin's pasture and Country Club Road as well as a parcel that's owned by Casey Ellison and we might need to cross VCFA if there was a connection to College Street. But again, we haven't had that discussion. We haven't gotten that far yet but there would certainly be at least those two parcels, probably the third parcel that would be put into the TIF application. And I'm confident we would be able to get through those. And that's a substantially smaller TIF district than we had before, stretched from Sabin's pasture all the way down to Capital Plaza area. And for legislators or for people who are concerned that this is too big or this is really very targeted towards here's the site, here's the infrastructure needs, here's the increment they're going to be developing. I remember years ago when Whitenberg was talking to us about the previous TIF project that one of the things they said was when you're doing a TIF, you don't do it just to in the hopes that it'll attract development, you should have identified development and tailor the TIF to the identified development. It's not if you build it, they will come, doesn't really work in this environment. Okay, anyone else have any questions or did I exhaust them all? Lauren? Yeah, it's just continuing with the TIF thread. It looked in your options that one of the bigger X factors for a developer if they don't know if we're going to get the TIF, but it sounds like you're pretty confident. Is this the kind of thing where if we meet certain criteria we should get approval or just how much unknown is there really in it? And mostly I'm just thinking from a developer's perspective how much is that? Obviously you want all of your boxes checked so everything's certain, but if it's like, yeah, we've got all of the right criteria, there's no reason we shouldn't be approved, we just haven't gone through. How is that going to be weighed? Because if that's the biggest difference then that seems like an important factor. Yeah, and I don't think I can answer that question. My sense was, boy, I would think if I was a developer I would be getting on board, but I'm not a developer. So I think I would see this as pretty obvious. The administration, there's a lot of discussion, the city itself owns the property, there's just a lot of stuff that says this, there's a very good chance this project will move forward if I put in the capital to build housing here. Their advantage as a developer, this could be it's up to the council how much they pay for their parcel, it could be they pay a dollar for their parcel. So they're looking at it, hey, I don't have an upfront cost, I don't have an infrastructure cost, I'm getting new infrastructure and new all these pieces here, and that's how I get the TIF to pay for any other needed infrastructure. So there's a lot of advantages to getting involved in this project rather than say buying a piece of greenfield and doing the project on your own. You've got a lot of advantages, you've got administration. The White and Burke certainly has the opinion that was their recommendation was that they felt stronger that we would have a better, get a better pool of applicants if we went and waited to do it. It's just a little bit more as you could see from the process, a little more redundant process, but that's not necessarily something that can't be overcome. Along those lines, if you actually decided to just go with option one and let the developer take the lead, could you find out pretty quickly how that was working and then switch to the TIF if you needed to, or the TIF is so time-consuming and has specific deadlines, you really don't have that flexibility. You either start with the TIF or you don't. If we had the consultant, we would probably be working with White and Burke very quickly thereafter to be starting the TIF. There's a lot of preparation work. It's just the application for the TIF can't really go in. We're basically at that point committing to the fact that we're going to be going in with one TIF application very clearly defining what our needs are. The TIF application has to wait until the developer has got a pretty firm idea of what their project is going to look like and we have a pretty firm idea of what. I was thinking if you actually started with one and you found that you didn't have as much interest from developers or not the interest you wanted, could you shift to the other? You could. If we put out an RFI or an RFP and we didn't get any interest or the ones that came in, the council looked at and said, I'm really not seeing anyone here that really excites me. It's nice to have some interest but they don't have the experience or I'm not confident they've got the financial backing or whatever when you look at their performance and their applications that you feel we'd be better off waiting. Then you can shift the B and start doing that. Again, that adds a little couple of months of delay because it takes time to go through an RFI process. That's what I was wondering. Is that two months, three months, four months? Be honest, my God. The honest answer is it's what the consultants, I was going to say, that was what I put in mind was that if we're going to go with an RFI process I would be putting out a quick bid to hire somebody to do that process. That is not something in-house that we we're not land brokers. The questions and the information they need to be helping you develop the RFI and they need to be helping you. What is it you would want to know about the developers so you guys can make an informed decision of which firm we want to go and hire to be our development partner because that's going to be an important first step. Just to that question, just follow up what Mike just said, it depends on the breadth of information. The more we ask for from them to present the longer time they're going to need to prepare it, so I think that some of it depends on us and how we go about that. I also want to clarify, I think you know this, but the way you asked the question was a little confusing so I want to make sure the public was clear. We have to do a TIFF no matter what. It's just a question of when it falls in the sequence so just so we're clear. I think the conflict is do we get someone, get their plan and say this is what the TIFF application looks like or do we have a TIFF that says it's going to be these types of things and then the developer says okay that's a short thing, they've already got the TIFF, they've already done soil borings, now we're coming in. Then we'd have to, what's it called, substantial change. You have to then go and make another application, not a full process, but you just say okay now we have the actual thing and they approve that, but the district itself can be formed ahead of time, which is what we did last time. Carrie. Thank you. So the presentation talks a little bit about the advantages and disadvantages to the city of these two different options, but what would they be like from the developer's point of view? Why would a developer prefer one or the other? I mean if a developer has the bandwidth and capacity to be getting started sooner they might want the first one. They may feel confident in the city and the state to go through and say, you know what, that bit of risk doesn't bother me, I'm willing to get in early because I may have a little bit less competition because other people may not be as comfortable as I am with this process and so they may want to come in at that earlier process. The later one, I don't see why anyone who is interested in a project of this type would not want to have everything laid out in front of them. I've got all the eyes dotted, all the T's crossed. We've got the TIF district and the infrastructure and a city and a state that are willing to move on this and at that point we will also know, I didn't mention before, at that point we'll also know what's happening with the legislature. So there's a lot of conversations right now about whether properties in the growth center will be exempt from Act 250. It's a question, it is a proposal that's out there that these Tier 1A communities would be exempt. This property, if we moved it into the growth center, would then be a Tier 1A property. There's a lot of time between now and May to see what happens with that current bill but if it were adopted as it is written today they also would not have to go through Act 250. So that would be a huge advantage for a developer who's interested in doing a project. They only have to go through the local permitting process in order to start moving their project forward. Lauren? Are there any other factors? So if we're looking at putting together the RFI or RFP and we want to be setting out the various criteria, obviously there were a lot of concepts that the community and the consultant developed in terms of like number of units, multifamily versus single home combination, you know, and I think we're just talking about Phase 1 at this point, but just like you know energy efficiency or other things like if we move quicker do we kind of forego some of that and leave more to the developer to come back to us with a proposal or do you think it would be we'd end up with a similar kind of level of detail of you know this being a public project, it gives you the opportunity to really get something that benefits the public in a different way than a private development. So I don't know if my question is clear, but like do you think it would end up with the same kind of product for an RFI or would it be a kind of shorter, leaving more to the developer's discretion potentially if we did option one? I think you guys would be putting most of what you want in the either the RFI or RFP and I don't know if one will be more general than the other if there's the same amount of specificity. We didn't do an RFI when I worked in Barrie. We just went straight to the RFP. In that case they had three requirements that Council put in theirs. We wanted it to be of historic character and consistent with the downtown. We want to see what you're thinking of. We don't want to see something that's really out of character. It was going to have to be multi-story that was part of the first one. It was going to have to have some public benefit was the second one and there was a third criteria that they had in there, but they pretty much had three things and then they kind of left the rest up to the developers. We had three very different looking buildings, different sizes from 40,000 to 80,000 square feet, and then they had factors in it such as your experience and your background in development because they wanted to make sure they had somebody who had the ability to build the project. We didn't want to have half a project get built and having them run out of money or financing. So we wanted to be... So we had a certain number of things and those are the types of things you would kind of look at in the RFI, but mostly you'd probably go through and say our plan called for five-story buildings. We're looking for something a five-story. We'll look for something around 200 units. There could be more. We're looking for energy efficiency, affordable housing, and you put them in there and then you kind of leave it to the developer to come back to you and say I can do this as long as I have a mix of 40% affordable and 60% market rate. And then you guys have to decide is that enough? Is that good enough? And you guys just make the call on that. And then they work on the plans. It's nothing as final until you sign a development agreement. And that doesn't happen after the RFP. You do the RFP, you select. They're going to do a lot of work. You guys are going to work together. In the end, we're going to reach a point where there's a development agreement that gets signed. And that's when it's like you guys are signing on. This is good. We're going to agree to these things. At that point, no sewer pipes are in the ground. We're just going to be agreeing. We're going to be doing all this. We've got the TIF financing. You're agreeing to do all this. You've got your financing. And here's how it's going to go. And here are the protections each of us has. So thinking a couple of things, Lauren mentioned phase one. And that's what I've been thinking about, too. It's really a big enough project. We really never, this isn't the master plan, although I guess you keep calling it that. But when Stephanie Clark left us, it was a concept plan that people hit through a public process, knowing there'd be a lot more work in refining that had to happen to bring it around. So how do you feel about facing the project versus one developer? It seems like it's really big to me for any one developer, especially if it's anyone who's around here. Yeah, it's going to be big. I mean, we're probably looking at a Chittenden County developer. I mean, honestly, I don't know if we've got developers of this scale up here. Certainly, people are welcome to come up and make those proposals. It could be an out-of-state. There could be a New Hampshire. There could be Canadian firms. There could be other folks that might take an interest in a project of this size. My thought when I'm talking about phase one, so sometimes people will have been thinking maybe it's just the first building we're building. And certainly, when they build, they're going to build just the first building. My suggestion to you is that we try to find a developer who is going to build out the lower, call it seven or eight acres. We have 12 acres reserved, but we've got seven or eight acres. So all of those big buildings would all be built by the same person, by the same organization. We're not just selling off one little piece of that lower area. They're going to take care of that whole area. That would be my recommendation. We get one builder in who can come up with a consistent master plan that would say, here's how we would make 200 housing units happen down here. It doesn't look exactly like you guys put in your actionable master plan because here's the model that we've used in this place. In that place, it looks better. We think it works better. And that's really the strength of getting that development partner on. That's what they do. And they make sure it looks good. Just play it through a sec. Just looking at projects, just probably like you, I geek out and go to see what other people are doing. It's way bigger than what I do. But so if you go to Chittenden County and you look like Cambrian Rise, clearly big project, creating housing. It's very successful. It's kind of exciting. But each piece is broken out as a separate phase by a different contractor developer. And it looks good. It has character. It's not like it doesn't look like a federal housing project where all the buildings are the same and all the windows line up the same. And it's not that one developer would end up making it look like a federal housing project. But it could. Somebody just had this concept they wanted to build and build all the buildings to be simpler. I think it'd be worth looking at both models because it's a lot of thoughts. But look at city place. You go with one developer and look what happened there. It tanked badly. It sat for years sorting it out. And that developer was a partner with the city of Burlington. Both Burlington probably. Project, yes. Yeah. But it's taken years to get a new partner and to build it. I think this is a multi-year project. We're building a neighborhood here, not one building. I think we should look at a phase project. And as we master plan it and plan it out, that might give an opportunity for some local developer like a down street to take apart where maybe they can't realistically do something bigger. Maybe they could. But I don't know. I'd like to at least keep the option open to phase this. And as you all know, I've been a proponent of doing the up front engineering and the homework. So I like option two a lot better. I think it makes more sense to the way I've seen business work. I don't. I think the problem with the first option is you'll get tied to someone too early. It's like getting married before you're ready. I just think you really need to get the facts, kind of know what you're doing, have a package on the table that they can react to intelligently. And it will really give us more control in the process. I know there's some investment up front, but I really feel strongly that that's the best way to go. And certainly to follow on your thought, if the idea was to kind of take that route, we could, in that case when we were talking about that subdivision process, we could consider subdividing the lower area into two or three or four parcels, making each parcel available to a separate developer. You just need to have, we would probably have to have a little bit more of a conversation about what is the theme that we're going to have in here so that way we don't end up with pieces that don't match. And I don't know how that one, some communities, certainly if you were in Florida, Texas, they would go with form-based codes and then they would let, then they don't care because the separate developers all have a playbook that they have to follow. They can't go off script and make something that's not going to be consistent with the neighborhood. But we've left these rules generally open to work with you, the city council, and they will still need DRB approval. It won't be design review, so there's not the design review element. You'd probably be covering those pieces. Could we, just to that point, could we, we haven't talked about this, but could, you know, I would assume that one of the things we could put in the request would be, you know, we'd like to see a variety of building styles. Just, you know, what would you, what would you propose to give a mixed look or something like that so that it doesn't all look the same? Burlington and you look to the left and all the buildings that Ireland built, yeah, they all look different. But they use the same architect and you can tell Ireland built them. You know, it's like, where did you go to Canberra and Ryder and different projects where there's more variety of the team. It was different architects and, yeah, they look different. But I think that makes it a more unique, interesting neighborhood to me. That's what I'm saying. We can ask for that. How would you achieve this variety and have them propose to us how they would do that? So. So this is the same question that I had about phases. I mean, you've mentioned phases and subdivisions and it's a, it's a large property. So is this an iterative process? I mean, the TIF extends for a certain period of time, right? So you, one of the examples you gave was, you know, separate a parcel, subdivide a parcel and, and put an RFP out for that, for example. And wait and see what happened. And then if that works, you start to build it and then you do it again. Is that, is that how the process goes? I mean, it seems it's, it's going to be iterative somehow. I doubt that anybody's going to say, yeah, we'll do the whole thing. But you know. Yeah. So I mean, certainly the, the lower areas, what we're talking about this phase one, you know, the, that the lower eight, 10 acres would be the area that we're, we're talking about. Now that could get divided up, but the idea was we would eventually need to do a phase, a phase two that would involve the upper part. I think we would be probably planning out all of this lower part in phase one. They're going to, they may build it in four years because they're going to build one building in one year. And if it's four different buildings, they may break it into four different years. And we're all going to have to look at it. And, and Sarah, finance director is going to be probably the one who's most concerned about looking at it to make sure we've got all the increment coming in that's covering all the bonds that we've put out to build those $5 million. And once we've gotten enough increment, in other words, we have enough buildings built that we're generating enough tax revenue, enough water and sewer revenue that we're now putting money in the bank. And then at what point do we move to phase two where we've got those upper hills where, again, we can talk about subdividing into big blocks of, hey, we're going to sell this 10 acres or six acres, or we can go up, lay out the road, break it into 28 different lots and sell the 28 different lots to 28 different developers. And they have a requirement that they have to meet in order to get that property. You know, you can't build a single family home. That was one of our requirements. So you have to build a town home style, or it has to be this style, or that style. And we would have that discussion. We can sell those off to individual builders, or we can sell them all to one builder. And then we've got that second pod and that third pod. So there's going to be multiple phases. And it really depends how quickly this goes. This could take 20 years to fully build out. So is the TIF flexible enough when you design it to factor in phases like that over a period of time? And in other words, the increment will be smaller first and then it will grow. Presumably the TIF is designed to handle that. But is the term of the TIF flexible? Or is it a fixed period? And that's it. And you've got to squeeze everything into that. The minute details of the TIF, I will leave to Stephanie to answer those questions. But there is a window. Once you get the TIF, you've got a window of five years to have your first money spent. Issue your first debt. So for anyone who's in the public, we can't spend any money on TIF until the public votes on it. So just so everybody knows, eventually that will be on the thing. When we all say we've got our TIF approved, that still doesn't mean we can spend money. We have to go back. We've got to get the bond in the same way that we were talking about that with the parking garage. So there'll be that piece. So we need in five years to spend money and then there's a window once you've spent money of a certain number of years to conclude your increment. So whether it's five or ten years and then you can ask for extensions if you need it. If it's a project that's taking some time, you can collect increment for 20 years. You can collect increment for 20 years. But you only have so much years before you can only spend between I think five and ten years. So you kind of have to do the city's work because you don't want to go too close anyway because if you don't want to be outspending the TIF district you. So regardless of the size of the project. Right. So to the extent that we can front load as much as we can, the more increment you get. If you only have 20 years to do it, you want to get as many buildings as we can. As much increment as early as we can. Because then that gets us more money into the pot and we are also still looking for other funding. I mean don't think that this means we're not looking for grant funds or there are grant funds out there. Especially as we start talking about how we're going to get that road across the top through Sabin's pasture. Because they're part of this and we're going to count on certain amount of increment that may come from them as well. And that will be a different conversation in a different meeting. But the concept is if we're going to have a connecting road through so that emergency services and people who live there, we don't need everybody going back down to route two to go into town if they happen to be going out and can shortcut over to Berry Street or shortcut up to College Street or East State Street. And we'll have to come back with whatever plans those are. But we've talked about those in the past. People have asked what about connecting through to Sabin's. That's going to be in the discussion that would also be paid for with TIFF. If we get enough development on the combined increment generated on both sides. So Don I saw your hand up. I want to just mention to people this is the plan that's out there and it's on our page. And there was discussion way back last year before the flood about what the what it was going to be called. And it is called the actionable plan. We decided not to call the actionable master plan because there are people who thought well this isn't a master plan for whatever. This doesn't match what a master plan is supposed to be. This is the actionable plan and this is what the council approved last June. Donna. I'm going to take where Tim was and sort of leap. I don't know if you or CC on some of the articles that have been passed around with the image of different kind of public housing with multi partners not just multi developers but multi finance sources. So I really like option two because I think we really need a round table with a lot of different minds around it to really really think about it in a really broad broad way so that we're looking not only for developers but nonprofits and banks and realtors and state agencies and federal agencies and look everywhere for little pots of money because we really want to make this more affordable in a way that's way beyond just down street. So that's what I'm looking at is trying to be a little more imaginative during that time when we're working on the TIF that we're not doing that we're making sure that we're stirring up the pot with these kind of ideas. I agree. I mean I kind of feel like if we did option one we wouldn't know what we wouldn't know about the possible developers and opportunities that we'd be forgoing and it's I mean it's such a big housing opportunity for the city. We want to do it right. I do have the kind of nightmare of the Burlington City place in my head of like we we don't want to get down a road there. There are a lot of a lot of projects you can talk to Newport you can talk to Burlington. There are a lot of successes and a lot of failures. I would rather us be doing the due diligence and getting the best possible developers you know single or multiple that we decide to move forward with but you know giving ourselves the best foot forward to have really good options seems better than just trying to do it more quickly which seems like the benefit of option one. Pelin. Undo it yourself. Okay excuse me. You're going to be unmuted and then we probably can stay unmuted. Okay yeah so I heard like four years right if we choose the first plane to complete the project so is there any way we can talk about how long would it take for each options? I am closer to the option two for all the reasons like other city councilors listed but at the same time I am curious about if we can talk about some kind of timeline for each option like oh source option might take I'm just making this up like six years to complete this project the other is takes four years something like that and second question is is there any way to look at how much residents will pay in their task taxes to support this project in each option? Thank you. Thanks. Okay so the first question on how long this would take so just talking about the preparation the preparation steps that we're talking about right now Whitenberg put together a rough timeline of what they felt the process would take and their option was option two which it seems like that's where the board is kind of gravitating to they were looking at potential infrastructure groundbreaking in the fall of 25 so we're talking about the fall of next year and so we're talking maybe you just never know what's going to happen but fall let's just put fall of next year or spring of 26 we would be having these projects going forward because we need we obviously can't start the infrastructure if we don't have also somebody who's starting to build the project so it does create a little bit of financial deficit because we start spending money before we have increment coming in that was one of the reasons we had wanted to hold a portion of the country club road funding because we're going to need a little bit of money we will get that money back the TIF money will reimburse the money that you put forward at the start so it's not money we're just losing we just need money that we can pay the first year of the bond because we'll take out let's say a five million dollar bond and we're going to have to make a couple hundred thousand dollar payment well we already have that in the bank at the country club road money we can make those first payments the house gets the first project it's built they start paying a lot in taxes and very quickly we end up back in the black so but that's their timeline was starting in 24 that we would be targeting trying to get some work going in the fall of 25 but you know everything you never know what's what's that thing that comes up that gets in the way so maybe we're talking about the spring of 26 but that's the timeline we're not talking about a long time when do projects get done you know if it depends what you're kind of thinking about at the end we could have one building open and ready to go by 27 is that all the buildings in the lower area how long does it take to build out all of the 200 housing units I we won't know till we have a developer in here that says this is you know we've got a we've we've done our estimates here's the what they would call the absorption rate we can't just build these things they're going to be vacant so we have to build them at a rate in which they're going to get absorbed and get filled in and they'll build them at a correct pace in order to make sure that as they're building them they're filling them and not having big empty buildings not that I think that would be a big thing but that's it's their money they're going to make sure they know they're going to have people there to fill these buildings so how long does it take to fully build out that bottom area that could take a couple of years I I'm saying I independence green freedom drive 132 units the only bigger projects in the history of this town that was over 10 years Murray Hill over 10 years and those are a third of the number of units you're talking here you get also look at what the market will absorb in terms of reality somebody can come up with an absorption rate from wherever they live and that's a good guess but you'll know when you build them in terms of how fast and that's the risk yeah and that's what and that's what we'll find out is how long does it take it that's really going to be up to the developer it's their money they're going to know whether this is going to take 10 years 20 years 5 years they're going to be the ones who are going to they're going to give you that information I don't give you that information what I'm saying is how do we get the developers to the door and get them started this is what the preparation step is supposed to get us to get us to that shovel in the ground get us that developer they're getting their shovel in the ground and we're going to be ready to go in the pace of how this implementation happens is going to be determined by the market by our developer by their ability to get financing interest rates could go up there could be plenty of people there and they just can't get financing or any number of things that could come up but we'll learn that as we as we get to those pieces Mike you said something about the increment of of the land values I would think and you should correct me if I'm wrong but once once development starts like even before there's a building on the ground is it fair to assume that a piece a parcel that has permits and has plans for being developed has a higher market value than just the 135 acres the way it is now has and so does that does the increment start building up before the project is complete probably a marty question right now it's got a value of zero because we own it so that's what's market value right now or that's it's taxable value so the increment will be starting at zero that's one of the nice things about a project that's a municipal project is that it starts with a value of zero so anything when we sell the parcel I mean the minute we sell the parcel to somebody even if we sold it to them for a dollar it would automatically have a value of a couple hundred thousand dollars because it's now privately owned even if it doesn't have anything on it and it now has increment and that increment would go 70% of it would go into the into the fund and then as they build the rest of those questions when do they start assigning tax value that's a marty question he would go in and decide on April 1st what's the value of the project and the property with a foundation in the ground but but so each year there's each year it has a certain value based on what what's on the land at that point yeah I want to make sure people members of the public bill looks like you're about to say something if not no okay I want Donna I guess did you answer oh Palin's questions because I said she wanted you to compare the two options okay questions were about the difference in the two and I think we kind of got off into the whole project I think the difference between the two approaches is probably two or three months the rest of the time is going to be the time so you know we still have to we still have to get the growth center we still have to get the tiff it just might take us longer to get our development partner and we you know then we have to do the development agreement so once that happens everything else moves along at the same kind of time rate so it's not there's not years difference between the approaches it's months and then the question about how much were we going to have to pay again the project would be designed to be paid for by this tax increment financing which would mean that it would pay for itself we would probably have to carry I mean we have carrying costs now so we're paying on the bond now we might have some upfront costs that got reimbursed through the tiff but the idea and I think presumably one of the things we would do one of the things we will do not even presumably is to figure out how much increment we will need to cover our costs and that would be part of the ask of the developer you know we need this is the value how would you propose to create housing that is x number of dollars worth so we know we have that amount and and obviously if the if that project isn't there then we don't do it because we you know unless unless we make a policy decision that we're going to pay for this because housing is worth it but that's a that's not what we're talking about right now so I hope I answered your question there on that so we we're not planning to upfront any of this or or pay for this out of the general revenues of the city with the exception of the transition costs to some to be reimbursed any other members of the council who want to be heard Lauren mentioned and I know you all are kind of combing for state federal grants I mean just knowing that the state has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to housing in the last couple years it's just hard for me to believe that this couldn't get on some short list of priority projects like what do you know of any opportunities at this point or like what we could be doing to get this higher on the state's priority list if there's some elevation do we need a big event up there invite the governor like how do we get this on on the short list or is it already so a lot of okay I was just gonna say a lot of the funding is targeted towards affordable housing providers so the down streets the in those organizations these most of what we're talking about down here probably beyond the scale of those types of entities but what I see and what you see around the state in some of these projects is you'll end up having people that go in and partner on a project so you'll have developer acts that will come in and a percentage of the property will be affordable so they're going to build one big building 85 units and 30 of them are going to be affordable so down street applies for the affordability funds and those funds go into the pot which goes into developing the project so from a developer standpoint they get some cost they get some relief some help in building their project and they down street don't have to build the project and get a turnkey operation so it's kind of it can be a win-win but those are relationships that developers build with their partners and around the state you'll have different ones that are customarily partnered with different ones and that's kind of what I would expect is that that's how those housing dollars would end up finding their way into a project like this is that it would end up being you know buying in a percentage of affordability that's going to be managed by one of the housing partners ever north down street or the like we got a call you know a couple weeks ago from the secretary of commerce and community development and the governor does have his eye on this site and thinks it's a very viable site for development and is it anxious to assist us we then had a follow-up meeting with Josh and Mike and I and Lindsay and her staff and then I actually had a call with her today yesterday or today one recently just following up you know we did ask them for help coming up with five million dollars for the initial infrastructure investment they can't promise that but they are looking for grants and they did advise that you know we might want to keep the FEMA money that we had available in case we needed to match grant applications they did point us to the northern borders grant and I think would assist us to get on the priority for that so there is a lot of interest we're still working with them to see what help they can provide but they are very excited and focused on this site they actually are trying to find a way to even accelerate the timeline and get some housing even sooner and you know we we had to walk them say well we need the growth center that your agency does we need the TIF that your agency approves we need permits we need so if you can if you could speed any of that up great but you know they seem very willing to help and we're maintaining a pretty open dialogue and she actually told me it was okay for me to tell you that in public so well you know you don't want to you don't want to commit somebody to something you know they're not writing checks yet but they are interested in at the table with us so that's good okay I want to get members of the public an opportunity to be heard I want to are we okay with the council members for the moment okay anyone in the room who'd like to be heard on this for starters and there's also I know plenty of people online yeah come on up my name is Jesse Harper I'm a resident of Montpelier I guess my thought was around the question I believe that the mayor posed around folks thinking that the city is getting involved in development I think it's probably hard for a lot of residents to distinguish infrastructure development from other parts of development so I think probably for a lot of people that's still development so just like maybe keep that in mind that you know that's maybe how the public feels about that that's a pretty big project no no real comment on that just that thanks and actually it might be worth talking to CHT Champlain Housing Trust they're pretty solid organization as well not quite as local but you know pretty robust and in Vermont securities work with them we found them to be just awesome like their staff is all kind and laid back and I don't know pretty pretty awesome organization and they got a ton of money from Bezos ex wife afraid her name yeah yeah I totally agree and I would say the same thing about everyone at down street housing you know the scope of the projects that they're they tend to be in are like in the dozens of units rather than hundreds of units but yeah thanks yeah and we've also worked with them too a great organization yeah but yeah not not at all to the scale that CHT is thanks yeah my understanding is there's some geographic division of the state with some of these certain ones they have broken up the state in certain ways and then how php money gets or the housing conservation housing yeah housing conservation board how they split up their money so there there are certain regions that go in but ever north I think covers the whole state and tends to be an umbrella organization that comes in I was going to say what was your name before they were ever north oh you're going to do that anyway so they were they were actually the partner on this project at the transit center with down street they kind of took care of that four down so I mean it turned out to be down streets at the end but they were the people that did it yeah and that comes into a little bit of the challenges a little bit inside baseball some of the issues we've had because we have been talking to our housing partners about trying to do projects up here the issue is it takes them they have a long they kind of stack these projects of which ones they're working on and they're applying for federal funds and so if they start going in on a separate project they're actually competing with themselves on their own projects that they've been working for years on so that's kind of a little bit why it's like boy it's hard to go in because I might actually then disqualify myself from my waterberry project that I've been working years on and you know we've got a commitment to that project and a commitment to that community and so sometimes it's difficult because they end up competing with themselves they're not competing statewide they're competing locally on a limited share of money so okay so anybody else here in the room would like to be as any observations or questions okay and is there anyone online out there in the zoom world who wants to click your your raise hand function or you can raise your hand physical hand too but I'm more likely to see it if you click the raise hand okay so it seems like we're at a decision point of a couple of things one are we going to tell the city to go forward with this next parcel of work which is a lot and two within that what do you want to hear from us about which which option to take option one or option two clarity is kind yes yeah getting getting clear up front is what we want Donna make a motion that we proceed with option two that we do the TIF first is there okay any discussion because we can authorize it but we not there's no money in the budget for it so are we just authorizing a concept tonight or are we supposed to talk about money cc the country club road project has some funds that it just got through that lease that we could then assign to cover some of this upfront until we get reimbursed so that's part of your motion okay I like it together yeah John do I need to make some big inferences there it's better if you phrased it for me maybe a phrase it's in actually on the other agenda item I can read it approve advancement of the country club road project through the preparation phase and provide guidance and a lot preparation cost upfront from the money in the country club road project fund that's good thank you that makes sense yes yeah yeah all right um ready to vote on this no okay well let's talk about it then well it seems like then the money came out for the country club we got a number of letters and contacts from citizens and it feels like at least we should have a conversation about that versus just wham bam this is what we did but I don't know how you feel but so let me address that because I don't I don't think we need to hold things up I mean we can hold the money up um because in order to get to the tiff we still have to do the zoning and the growth center which we do not need to hire people for we'll be doing those in-house so as Mike said we weren't asking specifically for money we would come back in the future with those proposals that is you know as we mentioned at budget time that is the source that we thought about it you know if you feel that should be on an agenda I get that we did have a lot of concerns and we are advocating really strongly at the state level that they provide the funding that those individuals need and so you know we certainly would like to see that happen um yeah so you don't need to commit the funds tonight we would what we would do with a direction to proceed would be to work on well first of all then you'll take up the zoning and we'll make those decisions then we would work on the growth center and then we would come back and you know we would get proposals for the next costs and we would make a recommendation on where that money came from if it wasn't the FEMA money then I guess we either don't do it because we don't have the money or we have to take it from somewhere else so so you don't necessarily need to do that although that if that's in your motion you could also vote on it so it's in the motion now and I'm sorry I kind of pushed you to put it in the motion now but I'm very comfortable with that again it was country club road property that was going to be leased and rented and this is to further use of that country club property so I consider it's in its fund and it's only 100 estimated up to 150,000 k so this seems very reasonable yeah I'm a little torn here but um because I do think we kind of pledge to have a bigger conversation a more in-depth conversation about how to spend that half a million dollars and but also if I'm understanding this right kind of the idea is that any money that we put up front we're expecting we're going to get back through the TIF process down the road at some point and so if we could I mean I know that's way down the road but if we could earmark that and remember that that this this money came out of that 500 or so thousand dollars and that when we have that bigger conversation about what to do with that money that we're going to remember that that is still potentially on the table we may decide that we're not going to try to reimburse it that it make I mean I think it makes sense to spend some of that money on this purpose but we haven't really had that full conversation anybody else have any thoughts I agree with all of that really I mean I thought we were going to have a larger discussion there are other ways we can spend at least portions of that money I would rather keep it separate so you're suggesting you should we should not have the funding as part of Donna's motion I am suggesting that yes and are you also making that motion or I can do that yeah to amend I will amend to remove the specification on the on the funding okay is there a second for that do we have any discussion on that I think I would rather wait and have a broader discussion about that money given that we don't need to make this decision tonight I think we very well might end up saying this does make sense but I do want to get kind of the update of what's happening at the state house on various possible funding sources what money might be coming in I know we're not going to know till a couple months still but but anyway I yeah I'd rather have that as a since we don't have to it's not going to hold anything up to not make that decision tonight I'd rather just look at the whole pot holistically so I would support this motion and then support Donna's motion to move forward with option two okay Donna so if we separate the money going back to Tim's original question then that means somehow the staff is going to take out some of that potential advancement if they're moving on option two what direction are we allowing them to move on with this motion without any funds attached to it like I just said the zoning which we're doing now we would get to work on the master on the growth center application that all takes a period of time and we would probably seek proposals for the actual costs for the work and then we would have to come back and say which we would do anyway you'd have to approve those anyway you would be spending that money tonight and we'd come back and say okay well now we're ready to do tiff it's going to cost $50,000 for the tiff application will you approve that and from which source and likewise if we do engineering work and all that stuff we would have to come back to you and say we're retaining an engineer for this due diligence work and it's going to cost money and you know I mean Tim's right there's no money in the budget and and as we've said when we presented the budget there was no money in the budget our anticipation was to use the female lease money so obviously that money can be used for any number of things and you know call it $150,000 if we use that you know we will have to then take it from someplace else or not do it that's those are the choices so those earlier steps of completing the zoning completing the growth center designated nation waiting for that to be approved that probably gets us into what may june yeah I mean we should have if everything goes well we'll have the zoning done at the end of the month we would then be in a position where we could start developing the growth center expansion application and so I would be hoping we would be by the end of the fiscal year you know we'd be looking at June July that we'd be able to have that approval done I don't know their schedule but once we do it then it's a couple months at the state too so oh so we're not really risking anything we're not holding you up by taking the money out tonight yeah no and that was why we didn't put the money in as to request our first step was really to go through and say give us direction make sure we're all moving forward let's get a direction and then we can start going obviously if the decision was we want to get an RFI out early then we would probably be coming back fairly quickly to go through and say we're going to need a consultant because we don't do that we're going to have to come in get an RFP to get a consultant to do our RFI and that would take some time but now this is fine but at some point we're going to recognize and we just wanted to make sure we put that number out there that was the number from white and Burke that they felt about 150,000 for us to get through this next year and a half and so we should just have that in the back of our minds we're going to probably coming back for some requests at some point that are going to total in that area 55,000 is about the estimate for the TIFF application okay Donna okay but if you won't come back until let's say May or June the TIFF has to be ready for the legislative session no no doesn't it no no the TIFF TIFF is all through the agency that okay great no we've been seeking different legislation on TIFF but the TIFF program exists and there are there are still there's a limited number of TIFFs but I think there are at least two or three available and nobody no active applicants so we would be seeking to slot into one of those and it's an application process to the Vermont Economic Progress Council of EPC and again that takes two or three months because they look at it they review what they do a site visit that's my concern yeah yeah we don't we we right but that it's going to be the case no matter what and we're not dependent on the legislature but we do need to get to the TIFF sooner than later okay but we can't but we can't until the growth center's done okay the motion before us now is to amend Donna's motion I think we're I feel like we're ready for that vote um all those in favor signify by saying aye aye any opposed okay great now we're on to Donna's motion do we have any more discussion of that all those in favor of Donna's motion to approve going forward uh as proposed with option two signify by saying aye aye any opposed okay great this is really exciting I've been really looking forward to this meeting to see the next concrete step so so thank you and you know it is eight o'clock usually we would take a break at 8 30 but experience teaches us that uh the first public hearing on a zoning set of zoning amendments tends to take a long time so I'm going to take our break now so back in 10 minutes so I will call us back to order and we are ready to go um with the more zoning more more more time for Mike Miller in the spotlight yes still Mike Miller still planning directors so um and this is the second of three he'll get me one more time here so uh I'm going to go through a quick presentation on the amendments to the zoning and river hazard regulations this is is a public hearing and I will uh call the public hearing uh or I'll commence the public hearing okay so uh quickly what I'm going to go through I'm going to go through the process of what we're talking about tonight uh where to find the proposals if you're still looking for them uh describe the changes in the unified development regulations and which is also known as the zoning bylaws most people call them zoning bylaws and then describe the river hazard area amendments as well and then what are the next steps and then we'll jump into some questions and comments so the process this is two hearings over two nights so uh tonight we're having the first hearing each hearing is going to cover amendments to two sets of regulations just so we're making sure we're covering all of our legal bases these are actually we're calling it one hearing it's really two hearings at the same time to look at the zoning in the river hazard area regulations and we are required under state law to have two hearings so we will have a meeting tonight hearing tonight on the 14th and on second one on February 28th the council can have additional hearings if they choose so if at the end of the 28th uh you guys are not ready to approve or make changes you're welcome to warn another hearing or add just continue to another date certain and we will just continue having hearings so where to find the proposals if you're looking for it you can go to the city's website on the main page and you'll scroll down to what are called popular links and on the right hand side you'll see zoning and floodplain regulations we were kind of hoping it would say draft but we didn't have enough letters so that's where the drafts are if you click on it you will get to hear and right on the top of the draft zoning and river hazard regulations and we've got both of those plus the draft zoning map and if you're just looking for a list of what the changes are there's an excel table on the list of zoning changes that has a list of about 99 changes most of them we made you'll see notes in them if there's something that's grayed out it's because the planning commission opted not to make those changes so i'm going to quickly go through the the zoning map changes uh we have uh so periodically we get requests from property owners and developers who will come in and say uh for various reasons uh this needs to get adjusted in this case this is uh 155 northfield street it is a property some of you might know it's a it's a daycare facility and it used to be part of national life national life subdivided it and sold it off and so it is currently included in western gateway where that use is a conditional use and they really are they front on northfield street it makes sense for them to be in northfield street so they ask to be moved to northfield street and they are now in a different zoning district uh we're also going to talk about some country club road changes to accommodate the redevelopment that we were just talking about we'll have a very tiny change on 29 sibley street it was a parcel that was purchased and merged and uh we just need to clean up the map there and then there's a set of home act changes last year act 47 the legislature made a number of changes that required any uh areas that have sewer and water to be zoned at a density that has at least five units an acre and for the most part we met all the requirements of the home act uh with the exception of the town hill neighborhood and we will talk about that so uh this is the proposal um on the left for country club road it's a little hard because this is just zooming in onto a zoning map if you see the number two the route two sign that is the roundabout and then the gray line coming out moving to moving down as route two and then uh so agway would be at the bottom of the the road you'd make the left and go up into country club so one dash four is really the area where the country club is the two parking areas and a lot of the lower flat areas where you have some recreation fields and we've proposed making that urban center one it is the most flexible zoning district and we felt would be most appropriate if we're going to be going out to bid to get developer interest that we give the most flexibility to any proposal that might be coming in we will probably eventually in the future be adjusting the zoning to more better reflect what ends up being decided but we wanted to open it up and make it the most flexible possible and not restrict what options we might see from a developer so that's just the proposal um above that those are the also all areas nine dash nine that is a uh residential three thousand so that is reflecting the uh actionable plan uh and what was proposed for the townhouses in the open area so everything that you see that's the dark green on the left and the right of it those are areas that are too steep and are forested if you were so if you're walking around in the country club site and you're not in the woods you're in either one dash four or nine dash nine on the right hand side that's the sibley parcel it's a little teeny tiny piece of a parcel that the adjustment was made uh the last two changes are uh this is the town hill so we have shifted that it used to be called residential 24 000 which meant it was one unit per 24 000 it is now going to be one unit per 9 000 consistent with state law and then there was also a little piece of residential 24 that was in sabin's pasture uh that's a little piece of land that was owned by kasey ellison her parcel is split into three different zones and has riverfront res 24 and then makes use residential above it that middle piece will now be res nine so other home act changes within the text um so within the text we made the maps changes we now have to make those other changes to the text itself to reflect those um so we rezone those move those neighborhoods into residential 9 000 we also needed to change the density of residential 9 000 so our densities and units are all based on residential 9 000 if you're in that neighborhood that means you have a minimum lot size of 9 000 square feet you also have a density of one unit per 9 000 to be consistent with the new state law home act a fifth of an acre is 8 712 square feet so residential 9 000 we're not changing the name it's still going to be residential 9 000 but the density will be one unit per 8 712 uh housing and density uh so the planning commission and this has come up a couple of times has made wanted to come up and make proposals to make housing um to remove barriers to more housing being developed so um this is a list of changes that planning commission is proposing to help to free up some and make make housing easier to get permitted so figure 214 that's the use table uh adds large and small multifamily currently we just have everything labeled multifamily and so in this case we've split off small multifamily which would be from five to 14 as one use and 15 and more is another use uh and that would allow us to have multifamily as a permitted use in a few more zoning districts uh the small multifamily um we added more types of congregate housing so we have two types of housing you have dwelling units where you have all the requirements of housing all five requirements of a housing you know kitchen living room bathroom um congregate housing you share one of those required elements so you might be in um co-housing where uh everybody has their own rooms in their own bathrooms but you share a kitchen um and so there are different housing options that exist and sometimes I mean the classic one would be living in a dorm and eating at the cafeteria that's congregate housing so adding more types of congregate housing instead of just one just allows it to better match with some of the dwelling units types so they added some clarification there section 3002 this is a policy recommendation again these are all policy things we can discuss we in 2018 we had a proposal that said regardless of density if you have a single family home on a conforming lot with sewer and water which most properties do you can have a duplex regardless of density you can already have an accessory apartment you can have a duplex what they want to do is to expand that right to go up to four units so if you have a conforming lot in the city and you're on sewer and water you can have up to four units regardless of the density so if you're in residential 9 000 and you have a 9 000 square foot lot you could put a four unit building on it um and that's just uh you still have to meet other requirements still have to meet your parking requirements and all the other design requirements but there are a number of projects that would be opened up if there was a little bit more ability to allow some of these larger or small multifamily these quad plexus triplexes so that was a proposal they put in there and the other big policy recommendation we had this conversation the last time we had a proposal which was to try to remove the density from some additional areas of town uh one of the things that came out of a report by aarp was that you know you you really have to make sure you have good design reviews if you're going to not have the density regulations so their proposal is any parcel in the design review district and we believe we have pretty good design review rules uh if you're in the design review you will not have a maximum residential density um currently urban center one urban center two urban center three the urban centers don't have any residential densities you can fit as many units as you can in the buildings that are there you don't there is no maximum residential unit number this would simply expand that to include other areas of the design review district Mike can you remind us what that area is that area uh it it looks big on the map because it expands up to national life uh comes down and covers the areas around the high school in western gateway comes across the um capital complex kind of goes out i think as far as maybe the is it the middle school elementary school the one of main street main street middle school so it kind of goes out that far i believe it's on i know it's on st paul i don't know if it extends to lumus so it's kind of in that in that area um and it goes part way down berry street thanks and it is around vermont college yes there is an island around vermont college the maps are online so you can find it yes uh so the second major change we made some major changes to the demolition provisions uh we had a recent court case and so we learned um a bunch from how the judge interpreted our rules and it wasn't bad we it came out the same way we did he just used different came through a different theory um so we thought we would clean up the demolition rules um that has also been an area of concern people in the past have said our concern about removing residential densities is that people are going to come in and demolish buildings and replace them with these big box ugly boxes um so tightening up and making better more defendable demolition provisions will help relieve some of those concerns i can get into some of those details now i might need a little bit of light but we could get into the demolition rules is there a specific question you had on that or did you want me just to highlight the changes please all right so for anyone following along at home it's this is three zero zero four gotta go through and refresh all my memory on all the details we made so we made substantial changes to this one um so one change that we had early the the other addition that was written it wasn't clear if demolition applied only in the design review historic district or if it applied in everything um in this case we've clarified that it does apply everywhere but that there are different rules um when it comes to demolishing a historic building or part of a historic building so the rules for demolishing a non-historic building are relatively straightforward and simple um you just need to let me see all structural debris must be removed it must be restored to natural grade and ground cover shall be re-established unless otherwise specified as a condition of the development review board so we're pretty clear that's not historic um you're pretty flexible to be able to go and remove a structure and work on replacing it um the room the demolition of historic structures was a much more complex set of rules and so what it wasn't entirely clear i'm trying to look through the how how they had formulated it there was an undue financial hardship piece uh unless it the project could be found to have a substantial benefit to the community so those were really in the past those were like kind of like the two things you either had to prove one or the other and so we kind of went through and broke it into a couple more pieces that really looked more at um putting a requirement of the requirements the application shall demonstrate one or more of the following the application meets the standards of two showing no historic uh loss of historic integrity or it doesn't have a historic integrity the application meets three showing that it retains the historic that retaining the historic structure is not economically viable or the application meets the standards and four that shows the project provide public benefit exceeding the historic loss so we've kind of gone through and broken into three different pieces and rather than having there were some rules for the income piece and we've kept those income pieces we've just been clearer about what are the rules of um showing there's no historic integrity and this was actually part of our court case um just because something old doesn't mean it's his has historic integrity and that that was that was what went to the case in court was that there was a historic historic barn in a backyard with a shed dormer off the back and they wanted to remove the shed dormer and then move the historic barn and renovate it and the question was and it was appealed as to whether or not they had the right to demolish that that shed dormer off the back and it was just like you know and we had historic reviews that came in and said there's no historic significance to that but we really didn't have a good set of rules that said yes that's okay to remove that and here's the process so we just needed to have much a much clearer set of guidelines as to when this has no historic integrity and therefore can be removed and the case of comparing the value of the property to the public benefit of the of the project so we just needed to kind of add a little bit more bite to it to make sure that as we review it we have a little bit more that we can we can rely on in the review and without I think going through line by line that's that's a big picture of what we were looking for there's more of the economic and it was more of talking about economic viability as opposed to the hardship of the owner kind of changing the dynamic a little bit because we really need to be equitable about these are land use regulations and I can't hold you to a higher standard in zoning just because you might have more money than your neighbor does it you should all be treated equally under the law so the standard really should be about the economic viability of the property and not the ability of the property owner their ability to to do something so that was a little it's a subtle but that was a little bit of what the distinction was we were trying to work for is show us how the project itself isn't economically viable and therefore it needs to be demolished as opposed to well you're a wealthy business owner from Burlington you can afford to fix it up but you know if it was a homeowner we would we wouldn't make him fix it up so those are a couple of the pieces that kind of get to some of it and I'd be happy to answer questions I would need a little bit more time to dig back into the the details of that one that was a change we made before the flood these were ready to go before the flood and we just had to kind of table them for a bit so a couple of them are not as fresh in my mind as I'd like to flip them off the answers but that's what the that's the big picture of where that one was going the next section of the major changes to sign rules this really has been an issue going all the way back to 2018 when we made the big zoning changes we kind of took what our consultant gave us and we recognized there are a bunch of issues with this and we're just going to live with them and we've lived with them as long as we can live with them this really came to a head with a proposal from national life they want to have a sign at the bottom of the hill and we just can't approve the sign it's the only allowance they have is for like six square feet and we're like that just doesn't make any sense the the rules don't make any sense the sizes that are in our rules so most of the changes that are in here really are looking at the sizes the heights we we do put in there a prohibition on which we I think we currently already have but it just clarifies the no internally illuminated signs but a lot of this came I went through and literally drove around and took measurements of the downtown signs the the river street signs how tall the how tall are they how big are they and got a sense of what they were so that way we could put in here some more reasonable signs that would go through and say this is what we see I haven't heard a lot of complaints you know we might go through and say this this sign is too big we have a couple of them they're too big we're not going to let that one but these all seem reasonable this is the existing size of signs that we see here these are going to be fine and then really started to address how we which signs how we measure them so we classified them differently what we will be doing going forward is whether you're a wall sign so you're parallel to the roadway are you perpendicular to the roadway like a pole sign or a projecting sign because as you're traveling signs that are perpendicular to you need to be bigger or parallel to you need to be bigger than perpendicular to you it's just and the higher the speed limits you are the bigger a sign has to be they don't have to be a lot bigger but they do have to be a little bit bigger so if you're driving at 25 miles an hour signs can be smaller because you have an easier time of reading them at those speeds and it just goes back to how the signs sign companies have these rules wasn't there a bit of a argument about the method of measuring the signs for the duck and donuts or the dominoes dominoes pizza years ago there is there was no issue with that was just a mistake that we made in in the office it was a it was a quick thing it was our mistake when we did it the way the rules were written it was each side of the sign counts as a sign so when they came in and said you know let's say it was an 8 by 10 sign we said oh that's 80 square feet that meets the rules but actually that's 80 square feet on the side and 80 square feet on that side so that would have been 160 square feet it's too big I think those numbers aren't aren't right it's the dominoes was much bigger so dominoes got a sign that was basically double the size they were supposed to because you just look at the sign you multiply it out you look at the chart you're like yep that meets the rules but then there's a provision that says well if it's a two-sided sign you have to count both sides we tried to set the rule so we don't have that doesn't lend itself to that mistake so um excellent so a lot of this um like I said these are just the rules that we had in place were had had been problematic and we just needed to to get them cleaned up so that's what you see with the the sign rules um removing solar access and shading requirements this was a proposal that was pitched last time and didn't quite make it through and they thought they would put it back in for consideration again uh this was put in again 2018 um and at the time we didn't really realize there isn't really a thing called um uh there's a legal premise that they're basically saying you know there there nobody has a right to solar to solar access it's it's a right that doesn't really exist and so here we were actually giving a right that technically doesn't exist and it becomes a problem because it's really easy to shade the way the rules are written you can't shade roofs walls or yards and the definition of yard is your setback area so you can't even shade your neighbor's lawn next to so it was kind of like wow that's really quite the rule so we came up with some proposals last time that said well maybe it's just existing solar projects maybe it's um existing and proposed um but in the end the planning commission voted to just say let's remove these requirements altogether we have a funky town with the hills and the steep and more solar projects are blocked by trees than buildings and there's nothing we can do about the trees so we their recommendation was just to remove these requirements they're really most most people already shade their neighbors and to have rules that say no new buildings can shade their neighbors just means we're not going to get very many new buildings so that's their proposal uh and I support that proposal um section 3510 remove boundary adjustments and move them out of 350 to 3125 that just makes it administrative under state law if something's a subdivision it has to go through a subdivision process but if somebody just wants to clear up a boundary line with their neighbor and make a boundary line adjustment they shouldn't have to have this big long months long project we can do it as administrative permit uh 3126 makes permanent the interim in emergency housing provisions you guys adopted emergency housing provisions as an interim measure this makes them permanent we made a bunch of other typos and technical corrections which we do every time as we're working on the documents we'll find our typos mis references you know it'll reference 4302 and it should be 4303 we just highlight them and we put them in a list and we fix them and we have three additional changes 2107B I think I mentioned this and I can put these in the document if you guys just go through and say yes do it for some reason we said former uh the former um ccv building on elm street and it's not a former building it's an actual building so we need to just strike the former uh the second change was uh remember I've referenced that um within the um design review area it would be exempt from zoning it would be exempt from density requirements if we did that we also have to add the words capital complex because technically the capital complex is not in our design review district and there are eight private properties in the capital complex that should also receive that benefit because they do get design review and the last before we go past this too far your presentation says make permanent the interim interim emergency housing provisions of 3126 and it looks like it's actually 3125 that's because when you delete the one section before it that one gets moved or something like that there's it's it's a it has to do with the reference number of there's a provision oh because the boundary line adjustment gets added to 3125 pushing the existing 3125 to 3126 gotcha um and the last recommendation we have is to 4204 which really is looking at some delayed projects uh we had a number of projects that had been proposed during covid or at the start of covid the permits are still valid but under the current zoning you have to complete your project within two years what we've proposed in these regulations is to change that to say once we you get an approved project you have two years to commence your project and then two years to finish it most towns have it that way it's just because we might approve a project and then you have to go through act 250 might take you 18 months to get through act 250 you're not going to be done with your project in six months so putting that in there to go through and say here's your window time to work that's in there for this 4204 proposal what we want to be able to do is to allow a reset of any valid permit because we had a lot of project during covid that kind of came to a stop because they're just like we we we can't do anything until this gets resolved as soon as we get that resolved we get hit with a flood and now they're like you know now I got to go back through the process so we're hoping we would just put in here a one time thing that said anyone who's got a project that was approved after a certain date if it's still a valid permit we're going to give you another year to commence your development because we've already reviewed your project it's already been approved we just want to go and give you a little bit more window and then you'll work within this existing window of you'll have two years to commence your project and two years to complete it so that's just a suggestion I had because it was more than one project that we had people coming in and saying we'd really like to be able to go and take advantage of the permit we had approval for and we're limited we can only give one extension and some of these guys have already run out of their extensions the river hazard changes are really short really quick um what there's a federal recommendation that it's not a requirement it's a recommendation that critical facilities be required to be elevated to the 500 year floodplain so your critical facilities are things you'd expect your your fire stations police stations and these other things obviously we have a number that are in here but if you built a new one you would have to build two uh above two feet above the 500 year instead of two feet above the 100 year floodplain and there are other private I'll call them private um not public facilities that qualifies critical facilities your hospitals your nursing homes certain facilities like that and usually what we're talking about these are facilities where we would not want to be in a position where we have to evacuate them um we really want to put them in a place where it is the least likely that we're going to be in a position think of an ice jam coming in and starting to flood your elementary school you obviously would not want that situation to happen because you don't want to be trying to get moving children or disabled people for example the 500 so 500 year flood plane in Montpelier so it varies because as a as a river narrows the the the 500 year is going to be higher and as it's wider it's going to be lower but in general our in for Montpelier you're talking about a foot higher than the 100 year so for the most part if you're two feet above the 100 year floodplain you're already above the the 500 but um the 500 year flood plane is also bigger horizontally so obviously the 100 year floodplain is here city hall is in the 100 year floodplain the police station is in the 500 year floodplain and there's a line in between so obviously there's a slight areas where things get get added in it's just a recommendation that they have to elevate above the 500 year for critical facility mostly because we're talking we're talking critical facilities we're talking about the those folks that we do not want to have to move a whole bunch of them really really fast so you know nursing homes or level one nursing homes you know schools those types of facilities and there's a list and the way they recommend it is to have what they call class class class three and four critical facilities something like that in our building code so it's a building code we can go right to the state building code and say if you're one of these categories you're in and you should be elevated higher and then we made a few like two minor technical changes so next steps how how we review is up to council we can walk through line by line we can start with this summary and take questions the entire zoning in river hazard areas is open to change so if there are other things that are in the regulations that you know about just for purposes of conversation we can have conversations but if you make any substantial changes it must go back to the planning commission for comments not their approval they will provide comments and give them to you as to what their thoughts are and I will take any questions okay thanks since this is a public hearing I want to start by opening up two questions and comments from the public I think I sit down thank you down Jones northfield street I'll be very brief I want to compliment you Mike and the planning commission on the increase in density proposals I think that's been long needed in town and I think it is one of the things that I would hope the council would move on the only thing I was sorry not to see because of recent problems is we still have parking minimums in town and I really would like to see us consider getting rid of the parking minimums downtown because it will allow for development in areas of the state may be vacating but do not have parking attached to them so I would like to encourage that it's being considered as part of this thank you very much thanks Dan uh linda burger and you'll need to be allowed to be unmuted and then I guess you know the drill by now not yet here thank you hi thank you very much I'm from district one I live on um lower state street directly on the river and I'm wondering about pardon I know your name is on the screen but could you start by telling saying your name okay sorry I'm linda burger I thought I said I'm linda burger I live in district one on the river lower state street um the difference between the river bed and the banks have changed dramatically after the July flooding so I'm wondering how that is being factored into the designation of the different floodplains so um at this point we don't have any new zoning or any new floodplain maps that are coming out the state it is something that the state works on and they have folks that are working on mapping I don't know if it will take into account this flood event because I actually started working on it before this flood um but there's a meeting either tomorrow or Friday that one of my staff members will be going uh that they'll be attending to to go and see the status of those flood maps um and we will continue to look over the next year um and get input from the um resiliency commission to to see what recommendations they have for making other changes these changes were all proposed before the flood and we're just held up waiting for us to get some time to actually bring them to council so we don't have any new changes um based on what happened in the flood so we will be certainly going back and reviewing as we as we move forward um with the exception of one change I think we propose to take out a requirement for a prohibition against sheet rock in the below the flood stage um and that's just because it's the easiest way to remove and put them back in um so that's why we've we've changed that provision but other than that we haven't made any provision based on what happened in the flood can I can I make an additional comment would that be all right I mean recently there was flooding on lower state street again with very minimal rain so I feel like there's some urgency here is so it's just it is there a feeling of urgency or it's just okay to let the process go the way it is and that's probably all you can do in terms of the structure of the state and the city um I guess the way I would answer that is there there are going to be a couple of different processes the the river regulations are what governs how people build their houses or businesses um in the floodplain uh so we're really looking at the properties those I think what you're referring to are kind of those improvements that need to be made um to the floodplain itself maybe culverts need to be made bigger or things need to be cleaned out or river banks need to be reinforced and those aren't going to be a part of the river hazard regulations but that's certainly part of floodplain management and the city and state are looking at a number of things I know the resiliency commission very much is going to be looking at what are the best ways to move forward to improve how the floodplain functions and makes it work better and that's going to be a process that'll be separate from the river hazard regulations this is really looking at um you know I want to put an addition on my house and I'll tell you how high you have to put your your addition or those types of questions but there's certainly work that needs to be done to make sure that you know maybe a culvert under state street maybe it's undersized and it needs to be resized well we'll have to go and those are going to be all on a list of things that we have to work on over the next couple of years and I don't have a schedule of that thank you thanks uh Rebecca oh Rebecca co-pans hi thank you for having um this conversation I just want to really um thank the the planning commission for their work on the zoning changes I feel like this is one of the most profound um immediate efforts that we can do to improve housing in Montpelier and I just want to um quickly just weigh in and say thank you for this work and I fully support um these efforts especially the density the changes in density so thank you to everyone and I I hope you move them forward I was going to be required to have one parking space for each apartment I was hoping to put seven apartments in that building density requirements were applied to that building uh which interestingly uh when I looked at the map I thought it was in the capital complex so it would have been uh would not be have any density requirements but then was pointed out to me that in fact it was well they didn't use the word gerrymandered but that building has been gerrymandered so it was in the redstone neighborhood which is kind of across this across the other side of Bailey so here I was ready to buy a government building was for sale turn it to seven apartments I just could not do it um so here's my point it's not just a matter of making zoning changes I applaud the zoning changes one of the things that I think we really have to be thinking about is giving the department more administrative flexibility to say oh this doesn't make any sense yes you can do that we can help you figure out how you don't have to have parking places where where it's impossible we can think we oh you're right that really that building should have been in the capital complex now we're going to do we're going to waive it instead is a long process and going before the drb etc etc okay similarly um one of the problems that I run into several times is that planning and community development means working with developers not with individual homeowners and property owners who might be able to do some development themselves uh the whole idea of passing uh adu laws and duplexing and so forth was to give individuals particularly seniors like myself an opportunity to move out of our giant homes divide them up in some way um and really increase housing internally not not to bring in developers to develop brand new uh parcels i'm not against that but i think that the that the planning office needs to work much more with individuals thank you thank you speter um jesse so there was something being said there about um i think flexibility in planning and that's something i also agree with uh sometimes things just don't make sense and uh it seems like there's a sensible way through that but you know for whatever reason that's not possible um i'd like to take example here i have uh this is about the sign topic um is it okay if i pass these around sure okay so in in the first picture we see uh the existing golf sign that's still there the the golf part is gone uh but the existing structure of that sign is there um you know i'm like a collector of like vw's and very many things old right if it strikes my fancy i'm like oh that's cool i'm into it um this is like sort of a piece of transportation history uh it's pretty old um you know and i just think it's really cool and i'd like to see it repurposed um and i'd like to move that sign from where it is and i have permission of the owner tom was on to move it um and i'd like i think it fits really nicely with the gram central logo the actual shape of the sign is a perfect fit uh gram central also has several nods to transportation like the tube in london and obviously uh gram central station in new york and so when i went to planning it you know it was like well you know it has to be a 12 foot sign max now because you're moving it um and uh it's not historical anymore because you're moving it and i just think the thing's beautiful it's a nice piece of our history and i'm trying to save it and kind of give it new life and so i think that's like a good example of uh what the gentleman on uh the web was saying that you know we need planning and administrative to have a little bit of flexibility uh we obviously don't want things being abused and stuff like that but uh that's my request and just bringing it out into the open that um there's a pretty good example here i feel like of something that's sort of stringent but not you know making that not possible and so i guess i'm here requesting a variance a waiver a discussion about this so that as we uh i just came in the other day just to ask about this sign and then heard that there was going to be some discussion here and i was like oh okay i'll show up um so yeah so those are the renders of what we could do you'll also notice that there's a yellow mast sign that was part of the spooner specialty tools and probably before that the um the oil company that was there quite a bit of history in this building as well um and that sign is well above you know the 12 feet existing um i don't need two signs i'm game to take down the big tall yellow one and put up the cool white one once i spend significant amounts of money refurbishing it and making it have new life but that that's my request and and when i kind of drove in i i did very little preparation for this to be clear um when i drove back after printing these at the office at from security i i was looking at signs as i drove in and the sign of this size does not feel out of place in that district or that road okay thanks jessey thank you obviously the city council doesn't have the ability to take up a variance request but but i'll ask uh mike is this something that could be a variance could be requested for something like this uh it's not i was trying to go through and see where so in general what we have is um so zoning administrators are required to literally enforce the zoning regulations that is in statute that we have to do that so what we set up uh is our rules that pretty quickly go through and say these are the things and we try to go and make sure these are the things we want to see happen and if you do what we all want to have happen we can administer and administratively issue your permits so that's generally how the rules are set up so uh if you need to meet the parking if if you meet one parking space per dwelling unit we can issue the permit now it doesn't say you can't it just says you need to go to the drb uh if you want flexibility because zoning administrators can't have the flexibility we could i mean i'd have to see first of all the height of this sign i don't have any information on how tall the the existing sign is so we'd have to go through and do some work and i'd have to work with meredith to go through and do some additional look at where things are to see what the rules are and how difficult it would be for him to meet the requirement um is it something that this the sign base could be uh lowered or cut down or buried underground slightly to bring that height down we we usually work with people to go through and try to see how we can make this project meet the requirements there's generally a a rule for why once you're above 12 feet and you're traveling on a road that sign is significantly above the the height of the the traveling public to be able to view it uh it's already intentionally trying to get people who are farther away uh you know it's why you know you'll see big giant sign so you can see him from the highway it's not meant for the people who are on the road they're trying to get it out to the highway so usually that's what the 12 foot height is is really to make sure the height of the sign is matching with the roadway so people in their vehicles can actually see the sign at the reasonable speed in the reasonable way but we can we can look at these before the next meeting and come back and give you some four examples as you said you're not going to be approving this this is going to go to the planning commission or this is going to go to the drb or this is going to go administratively uh and we can say this this project currently would not meet these rules and you guys would have the right to say we think these types of projects should let's change the rules then it's not being changed just for jesse everybody would benefit from that rule change and everybody would have the same rights that jesse would so let's say you say we'll make it 15 feet then he can have his sign but then everybody has that same right that jesse does um and that's that's what i would probably recommend we is we would take a we could take a look at it get more information on this and bring you some information for next time okay thanks sounds like good conversation to have uh you're you're beyond your three minutes so but thank you for bringing this in uh yes sir tom sterns my pillow resident on state street um i just wanted to speak in favor of the congregate living changes not only is it important um accessibility for for housing but um it's only really been the last 100 years that we've been living as single families in our own private little rectangles and about half the planet doesn't do this and so here we are in this country struggling with affordability and struggling with mental health and lack of community and connection in many ways and congregate living has typically been thought of mostly as a special population type of housing and i just really applaud the um expansion of it and the recognition that there are many people who are desiring to live in a um a shared living arrangement and the affordability of not everybody needing to have their own kitchen for example is an important peace peace and i think um is healthy for our community um my question is in regards to parking requirements for congregate living and if there's any changes because once you start sharing a kitchen it's very contagious to start sharing other things such as vehicles there's a quite a big affordability factor that comes into that especially if you're talking about this happening downtown where it's really walkable or or nearby at least so please don't make congregate living places have to have as many parking places as normal spots thank you thanks mike do you know what the proposal is on that off the top of my head what i can say is i know that congregate living because you aren't counting dwelling units you're counting um square footage of the property instead so it's based kind of more like a commercial you'd have a parking space per so many square feet and it would kind of work the same way but again similar to dwelling unit we have rules that are set out and with parking i mean unlike the signs where it didn't look like we had as many waiver requests or at least i didn't see waiver requests we can also talk about adding waiver requests to the signs um parking has a whole range of options to uh so if you've got a project that doesn't have enough parking or doesn't have any parking at all you could get a waiver for parking uh based on having um bicycle parking or your proximate to the downtown and therefore people can walk there you can have uh proximate to the to bus routes so there's a lot of options to go in and get waivers from the drb but the zoning administrator doesn't have that opportunity to give those waivers it has to go to a board and it has to get heard by neighbors because obviously if you um if your proposal is going to be putting more cars on a street as a neighbor you might want to go and have some input on that some streets are perfectly fine they don't have a parking issue other streets might have a parking issue that the drb wants to take into consideration and make sure that you've exhausted all of your options on site you might be able to go through and say you know you might not want to extend your driveway another 15 feet but we're going to require you to extend it another 15 feet because you could add another parking space that type of thing um and that that's what the drb has the flexibility to do thanks um tim you had a question actually i thought jesse um his point addressed the kind of a fundamental zoning issue that i've kind of struggled with for quite a while and watching how this code is changed over my career which is a while but still not that long and it's just fascinating how i don't know if you've got it up in your screens if you've gone through this zoning code but maybe some of you haven't been through the whole thing before but it's become just really cumbersome and it's all about controlling what other people do you could not build Montpelier the way it looks today under this code you just couldn't and um but we love it this is our town and we love the way it looks we love the way it works and i don't feel this zoning code serves us very well i think it's one of the primary reasons we haven't seen new housing created here it's really um out of control and i think the discussion about a sign um there was a very intelligent discussion but it went nowhere and that's what happens with so many things that people want to do in Montpelier because of this the housing committee has just started the subcommittee to start looking at it but really we need to be talking about it and if we're making these big changes in our zoning code i think things worked a lot better when i remember when it was about a six of the length that it is now it is that much bigger than when i started out um and it just goes on and on an intelligent educated person i don't think can come in with the project and read this and understand it without having to hire a lawyer and an engineer and go into the staff and ask for their interpretation because there's so many things buried in it that you just can't it doesn't make sense so i'd like to see a bigger review of zoning um and actually reduce it thanks tim well you're way behind the lectern but come on up i've been i've been trying to make sure as a member you're there and you want to be heard so thank you i've got some comments that i'll take one passing around please and while that's happening um your point did you start out by introducing yourself i'm sorry thomas weiss resident of montpelier district two montpelier's first zoning was in july of 1943 so anything older than that was done without zoning in place and mr alfano some flood information i'm a hydrologist and streamflow person i'll relate your question to the flood of july the flood of two percent two tenths of a percent annual probability which is the base that the proposal is for was about a foot higher than the flood of july downtown it as he pointed out it will vary around the city but but just for rough purposes adding two feet on that would be two feet would be about three feet higher than the flood we had and i don't know if all of you are aware of the flood marker to the right of the stairs just as you come through the doors that flood elevation of the 1927 flood which was the largest flood that has been recorded in montpelier would put three inches of water on this floor so and now i'll start my testimony uh these comments are based on my experience as a hydraulic hydrologist and a streamflow hydrologist meaning i made some of the first flood maps in vermont back both sides in 1980 and i also analyzed the flood of july 2023 uh the regulations are intended to further purposes and policies of a section of statute that include resilient community development in a manner that will promote safety against floods and that will encourage flood resilient communities as we're aware the 2023 flood showed us that our flood resilience can be improved resilience in this case relates to the speed at which facilities recover from a flood and the cost of that recovery and these proposed amendments i don't think go far enough because they only relate to critical facilities i believe that the flood of 1927 should be the basis of our design flood elevations that flood is going to come again the flood that we had in july the precipitation was about three quarters of the precipitation of the flood of 1927 and there's no reason to expect that we're not going to get a storm that big again so i i anyway i'll leave it there we just don't know when it's going to happen and i disagree with the fundamental concept of this proposed amendment which is that an individual's home is less worthy of protection than city hall or the high school or any of the other items that are called out as critical facilities and if you're going to increase protection for some class of facilities i request that you provide the same level of protection for all the facilities which would be done by deleting the sections relating to critical facilities and amending 644 which is the design flood elevation and put that information into that section i'm surprised that hasn't been done already in this one no matter what design flood elevation you use i think c 121 needs to be amended to properly include everything within the area below the design flood elevation and not just the flood hazard areas or the boundary of the point two percent annual probability because if the what the proposal is is to regulate everything in that area up to this elevation but if it's an area where the ground is down here well you don't have to regulate it to this elevation because it's outside the boundary um now i know you're beyond the uh the time limit but i know that i i'm interested in hearing you hit the high points of what your comments are about the country club road property we have two hearings so i get two comment periods oh yeah you definitely i assume i assume you'll be back two weeks from now too uh probably but um i suggest that the design flood be based on a free board that'll be above the elevations of the 1927 flood and i ask that you strike the term 500 year flood from the uh regulations that was a political decision that was made years ago because it gives people a false sense of security and i suggest that you refer to it everywhere in the uh the regulations as the flood of 0.2 percent annual probability uh there's a i've got some more comments that are written i won't go over them now on this part so i can now move to the country club club road if that's okay yes um and we're yes start giving another two minutes based on zoning or three minutes based on zoning rather than flood i've got a 231 page zoning amendments 10 page four pages with a hundred different comments and i'm only allowed two minutes i don't think that's appropriate i understand we have we have uh procedure procedural rules and uh i'd like to work with you on getting in what the important things anyway say the country club road property the major point is that the property does not belong in the urban center one district if you retain the goals for the property then it belongs in some kind of a new district which might be called an urban residential district if you look at the purpose of the urban center one uh this property is not in the historic downtown it's not in the capital complex it's not in an adjacent mixed use neighborhood it doesn't have any of the infrastructure that's required to be in place in an urban center one district so i give you some suggestions as to the purpose of a new district which i haven't be calling urban residential you might call it something else but it just doesn't belong in the urban center one and when i look through the table of uses of what's allowed in urban center one many of those are inappropriate for what i believe is being planned for the uh at the country club property either in the denser area or in the residential 3000 is it segment so um there is that i think there are some points that don't comply with act 47 as i read act 47 of the tables of dimensions a simplex one unit would be one dwelling unit per 6 000 square feet maximum i believe that act 47 allows duplexes at 6 000 square feet so that would be two units per 6 000 square feet and then triplexes or larger would be one dwelling unit for 6 000 square feet each there are a number of other comments and the last item is the restricting access to sunlight or the the restrictions to solar access as mike mentioned that was discussed two years ago um i testified against striking that that proposal does not comply with the master plan and i list in my written document there are six points within the master plan that that's that striking that would if you strike it it would not comply with the master plan and those six points i've got uh some text there definition at the top of bank i suggest being amended and there are a few more proofreading problems and i understand how hard it is to find proofreading problems so i'm not making the point just pointing them out so maybe they can get corrected thank you very much for allowing me more than my share of time to speak thank you very much thank you um mike do you have any thoughts or response to any of these comments now i guess a couple of them that that just jumped out i wanted to mention so the flood of 27 making that the flood of record as opposed to what is the hydro hydraulic models what happened after 1927 was a whole series of flood control dams were built upstream so right spill um the marsh field dam and the uh one about of north berry berries dam yep the orange east berry dam so those three flood control structures hold back a tremendous amount of water and make a big difference so we had uh i believe 6.8 inches of rain this summer uh we had that in about 24 hours the 1927 flood was about eight inches of water over a longer period of time over 48 hours so they're very very similar but uh at the same time you could see the benefit of those flood control dams and that's why we did not see if we did not have those flood control dams we would have seen the flood of 27 all over again um it's the flood control dams that have made a tremendous amount of difference and i'm not a hydrologist i'm a certified floodplain manager i do know the maps that we have that are developed are developed by engineers using h and h hydraulic and hydrologic models based on the rainfall based on the topography based on the computers so um they have pretty accurately if we considered june to be a 100 year flood um one percent chance annual flood event then we pretty much mapped our 100 year flood event it was pretty close it was a little higher in the wanouski so people in lower state street state street had slightly above um that level but for most of the people on the north branch it was about the 100 year flood event so the maps that was a pretty extreme weather event it only hasn't happened that bad in a long long time and so that was a pretty good measure so we require people to be two feet above that all projects that have been developed at that elevation transit center um sometimes a small thing sometimes people are just putting in a heat pump and we made them elevate the heat pump two feet above base flood elevation they didn't get their their equipment damaged because it was elevated so meeting two feet above base flood elevation has worked that's not to say it isn't a good idea for us to have a debate about whether or not it should be three feet um but i would continue to use what we have as the the federal model and the federal floodplain maps and simply add more free board above that because that keeps us more consistently when we talk to the state and when we talk to other folks using that benchmark makes makes more sense um we can certainly add more free board to that if we think that's makes uh is a benefit uh i don't disagree um getting to the urban one comment for country club road uh i don't disagree we we we put that together as a more of a quicker thing we didn't want to go through and create a whole new zoning district and then find out everybody wants to go in a different direction so certainly if the council says we we like the direction it's going but we really do need to go and create its own urban center one doesn't work we should create perhaps as as tom suggests a uh urban residential and we we could create a new district uh as opposed to adding a new neighborhood to an existing district um as we said when we were developing it we know we own it so we're not really giving everybody the right to do whatever they want we're going to be working on a development agreement so we set things out to be as flexible as possible but he is correct the purpose statement doesn't perfectly line up the act 46 there was a comment about duplexes we already allowed duplexes so that's already something we've done uh the state home act says if you've got a single family home you can have a duplex we already do that that's already been the law of the land for montpelier since 2018 so uh that's why you don't see that as a recommendation in these regulations is because we already did that um and the definition top of bank i thought we did that but i will have to double check to make sure i thought that was on our list of repairs at the last meeting but i'll have to get a copy of thomas's comments if we've got an extra one okay thank you i because one council is not here today okay i appreciate that because then i can have the list and and look through them thank you okay jesse uh you've already spoken i hope you have very brief yet well plans i there was um i was recently introduced to something that's uh the river corridor uh that's been adopted by the city which is apparently a state area um and there's a property that i'm that i'm purchasing that's affected by that essentially eliminating a lot of what you can do there as i understand so i don't know just comment on maybe the river corridor has some downside to our residents as well thank you thanks um is there any other member of the public who would like to be heard uh either in the room or online not seeing anyone asking to be recognized i will close the public hearing and open up for comments or questions from council tim just the urban one thing is something i'm still struggling with too for country club road and also just looking at the concept of we'll change the zoning for us for our purposes because we're the city but we're not really establishing zoning for that area that's the highest and best use that we would intend for it to really be um for if anyone else showed up to do anything on that property it seems like ethically somehow we we should just determine what's the right zoning for that property to create the use that should be there and that's the zoning we should be putting in place not some inappropriate moniker that lets us just do whatever we want that we won't let somebody else go do there and certainly it's that's valid and and what's what's the difference are we thinking like urban one allows for like stores and dry cleaners and a whole bunch of commercial development that we probably aren't looking to put in the new neighborhood on country club road yeah i mean and if if i were going to draft something up and i and i certainly couldn't certainly would for the next meeting i would just need to have some parameters of guidance of what you guys were thinking you folks were thinking would be the appropriate um sense of what we're thinking of um should we put a density requirement i mean i could i grabbed and used because the actionable plan talked about allowing up the five stories we only have one district that allows five stories so if we don't do that i we just have to create a district from make it and make it kind of fit in for that area so then we have to start talking about okay if we talk about setbacks what type of setbacks did we want thinking about what type of bulk and massing what type of building sizes and that's where somebody a developer may come in who wanted you know a longer single building which would have a large footprint it's like well now we just knocked that out because we have a footprint requirement of you know 30 000 square feet and they were going to do one big one now they've got to break into smaller pieces so the the flexibility the sense of why i did it was just to let's see where people are going and then we can kind of put them together but we can certainly come in and go through and say you know what we do kind of have a sense of where we want to go with this we're going to want multiple buildings uh they're going to be of a certain size and we can put it in there we can always change it later that's always an option to go through and change it later to go through and say well we were thinking this is where it was going to go it didn't go this way let's do a quick we can do an emergency amendment and change it in a couple of weeks um tim is you have a follow-up on this i guess my other follow-up was just looking at the proposed zoning map and so we also have it abutting rural sun areas like some of the Zorzi golden property is still the green for rural and some of the town hill properties trying to understand why it's property under specific and if you've mentioned savings pastor or ages Zorzi or gold then it would be part of the tiff and part of the district we're trying to create wouldn't they have similar zoning goldman is they are already rezoned on their side we did that the lower 15 acres of theirs is zoned for riverfront which is the same zoning district as berry street so it allows up to 27 units an acre so it's very it's very flexible they can put a lot of uses in there but it doesn't have unlimited uses and you know certainly we can take that same approach and use a riverfront type designation down there um where the lines are on our map to the to the west there's some green that's actually we own that um it's also steep slopes um some of that is a parcel going a little bit south of that is owned by steve rubalini again very rugged not easily developable mostly forested mostly wet um so a lot of the ones around it the two areas we've carved out of the two areas that are open and most of the areas that aren't open are really rugged and not very developable so that's why we've kept those in rural we don't expect those even if we wanted to I don't think those would be easily developable pieces of land so that little blue area is all the things developable of the I think the urban center area that's carved out there is about 20 acres and then the piece across the top is another 15 something to something something in that ballpark so it looks small on map but you know it's it's 20 acres in size it's a decent piece of piece of property thanks thanks Mike is I have an over the question it relates to Tim's overall big picture question which is the zoning ordinance is too big too complicated and we we need a massive overhaul not something like this to paraphrase now if I'm right it from working on previous zoning amendment efforts it seems like a lot of the reason that it's so long and detailed is to allow for administrative approval of things that that we want to encourage is that right uh yes that's um there are a couple of things some is as courts uh jm golf is a big decision uh as decisions have gone along through supreme courts and environmental decisions they require more detail and regulations there's an expectation developers have to have an expectation of knowing whether or not they would meet a permit when they come in to apply so we have to then we can't just have rules that say you know you have to be compatible with your neighborhood you actually have to describe what that means and what that looks like or you can't have a negative impact on the scenic qualities of an area you have to actually express what that means and if we're going to have administrative permits which we have drastically changed um you know uh when I got here we we're basically issuing the same number of permits we did in 2014 when I got here as we are now um when I got here in 2014 permits if you count every day a permit sits in our office there was 9 000 permit days we're now down to 900 permit days an average permit only stays in my office for about two days we do a couple hundred permits a year so permits go through really quickly uh we used to have 50 percent of all applications went to the drb we now are down to like 10 percent so most applications don't go to the drb and so a lot of that requires us to then go through and have have rules and the more you get into it the more questions that come up and so you need to have more answers for more questions of well what what happens in this scenario and what happens in that scenario uh we do have staff that understand the rules and you're more than welcome you know your taxes support them they you doesn't cost you anything to call and talk to the zoning administrator or the assistant zoning administrator and ask them questions and have them guide you through the process that is free of charge you're not charged until you put your application in so please take advantage of that if you've got questions you don't have to read the regulations they will they'll move all the things that you don't need to worry about off the table and the other changes that have happened were some other concerns and that people had that we we really wanted to add in people were concerned about steep slopes people were concerned we you know 10 years ago before 2018 we had no regulation of wetlands we had no regulations of steep slopes we had no regulations of riparian buffers on our streams to add those in ads pages but most projects aren't going to need to meet those requirements so they are there and they do take up space but only projects that happen just because the city didn't mean they weren't regulated for wetlands correct but the state does not regulate steep slopes and they don't regulate the riparian buffers so that was some concerns the public had for policies or the council had for policies that were included but and following up on the other thing is it feasible to say that once we're finished with approving the city plan which I know is is is coming towards us on the highway that that might be an opportune moment to start looking at like it does the zoning ordinance in general look like what we want it to look like or should there be changes you're always welcome to look at that that is going to be another opportunity you know I guess the other point I would make was our zoning actually was very was was specifically studied in 2016 up to 2018 to make sure that every one of our neighborhoods could be built under this zoning and that was the whole argument that was in in 2017 was people didn't like the fact that we were increasing our densities of all of our neighborhoods you're doubling and tripling the density of our neighborhood and we were just like that's what's already there we are simply changing our zoning to match what our neighborhoods are because if something happened to your neighborhood you could rebuild it under our current zoning it was something like 90 threshold yeah we have a 90 threshold 90 of our properties within every neighborhood should be conforming we could certainly go for a higher number that was what we left because we knew every neighborhood has a building or two that might be really small or really big and so we made a 90 percent rule to try to get everybody conforming because we we wanted to make that actually a reality we didn't want to have zoning rules that you know and before we had more than 50 percent of our properties before 2018 50 percent more than 50 percent were non-conforming either a non-conforming parcel or non-conforming structure and by the zoning that meant you had to go to the DRB to get approval which is why everybody had to go to the DRB whether you want to put a porch on or a deck on you're always having to go to the DRB and we eliminated almost all of those so we really approve a lot of permits very quickly and then we added more pages to the document when we did the design review rules because our design review rules were were five statements each with like six words and that just doesn't will not pass the jam golf test at all so we had to add more language to explain what what these meant and that way we could be more precise and be able to more efficiently especially over time a lot of the complaints of the old design reveal was well i'd get disapproved in 2006 and designed and disapproved in 2012 and then approved again in 2018 they should always be administered the same way which means you need to have a little bit more guidance to ensure that even as board members change you can get a consistent ruling on the same set of rules and so that was a big change again it adds more text it does but it's it actually is to the benefit of the applicant to have that text thanks lauren you had your hand up by what seems like kind of a long time ago but uh yeah just a couple kind of comments and one question one just overall really appreciate seeing the move to more density that's just i think great for what we need for additional housing for the community the solar shading issue i remember the conversation a couple years ago and it did feel like the current language is way too strict at the time we it was like we didn't have time to come up with some middle grounds like throwing it out altogether also seems like a blunt response like we're in the process of the state house of passing a much more ambitious renewable energy standard that's going to require a lot more solar development so i'm just curious about like as the energy advisory committee looked at this maybe we could get some feedback on like a much narrower but still having some provision so that we're not totally removing possible solar access as a consideration so i would like to ask them i think they're meeting before the next meeting i believe the next hearing so i'll see if i can get some feedback from them i don't know if you already have but uh what do you have now okay and then just just for the flood level issue i mean just with all the climate change modeling and stuff i just think if we're especially if we're making new investments and in things we should like the higher the better like like you know within reason but like certainly i think this is a good step in the right direction but um i mean it's pretty uh scary when you look at the climate science and so i think we should be anticipating that things will be ratcheting up and getting worse and that you know we should expect that 1927 flood we should be preparing for it and we should be you know doing everything to prevent um you know putting people at risk unnecessarily if we're making new regulation so just airing in that direction would be um my preference in general um and i guess my just last question about the when we were talking about changing the zoning around the country club is there any difference depending on how we do it in terms of um growth center designation or anything that intersects with the state or is that all not related and any does any zoning change we would make wouldn't impact that or is does that's something we have to think about the growth center requirement is it has to be at least four units an acre so so even if we were talking about you know going to a riverfront standard that would be 27 units an acre so we're we're not going to be anywhere close to i mean we're going to be way way under the density requirements needed for growth center whatever we choose any other counseling donna i'm glad you brought up solar because if i put solar panels on my roof i don't want someone to come and then build something next to it that takes away my son so it thinks we need something there um i don't have the answer i just have the worry and i was really glad when we did the 90 percent that was to me real progress that we made sure that what was in a neighborhood designation matched up with 90 percent it it really was practical and i don't like parking being removed we already removed a lot of parking and i see person after person who has either rented or working somewhere who don't have parking and particularly with the winter time and so i feel we we may have to really look at that because it's fine for the developer but when you don't have a lot of choices for housing you take what you can get and then you struggle with the car and i didn't feel so bad taking parking away when we were thinking of a parking garage and people had some options but uh i don't think that i'm totally comfortable with all the removal of parking and when it comes to the country club road i really see maximum flexibility for now and as things move we can narrow that down but i remember a discussion with savings pasture at one point three years ago four years ago we were sitting around the table and we modified that area because that owner came with us with a proposal and to me is that's being flexible to the time it was getting us where our vision was as a city and yet the zoning at the time didn't match it because we wanted some of that with the with this partner who was coming to us to have housing but some part to stay open for public access and so i see the same thing with the country club there's a lot of different uses and the more flexibility we have as we sit around and develop those uses then the better off we are and so i i don't see we should be treated any different than anybody else who comes and says gee we have this idea it really matches the gold of housing and recreation let's let's try to make this zoning work so that's where i'm coming from if if that makes any sense tim to you thank you kary did you have your hand up okay um i feel like we've identified about a half dozen things maybe not quite that many that that are questions that people might want a deeper look at you know including what should we call country club road what and this is talking about taking some of dr weiss's comments into consideration a couple of flood things the solar am i missing anything signs yep and you know i don't know if we'll be able to to get through all of that with with one more public hearing one more meeting assuming that tim's idea of re looking at the entire ordinance i would hate to see that hold up the changes that we have before us right now but pal and i can't tell are you raising your hand or just okay okay thanks um could uh could we have a motion from someone uh ask is scheduling a second public hearing with the idea in mind that the uh zoning doesn't need uh the unlike an ordinance zoning doesn't need that because it's uh following a different statute it's already warned for the 28th okay so we don't have to we don't have to vote on anything tonight we just no unless you had a particular change um as i said if people are okay i'm going to make those three changes to the document so that way the document is refreshed with those three changes um that i described if those are fine and i will come back with um a new zoning district that's going to require me to add another column onto my use table that's what i was trying to avoid having to do um my sense if you guys are okay with this because the the actionable plan talked about six stories i went with that because there's six stories we've also talked about riverfront which has a lot of density i could make a district that's very similar to riverfront which is barry street and barry street includes stonecutters way so it's got a lot of uses that are allowed in those areas um but it would allow for six stories which was either five or six stories i think it's five stories that might be in the plan i'll i'll double check whether it's five or six but we can make that match so that would be um up to 27 units an acre and if that's about 10 acres i would allow up to 270 units in the lower area that seems like a possibly a way to go i'm not sure i remember um might have even been before i was on the council one of the previous iterations of this zoning and savings pastor debate where people were saying that we should be designing the new neighborhood in sabon's pasture or wherever we're gonna gonna build it to be able to have like a a little neighborhood store so if someone wouldn't living there wouldn't have to drive downtown to get uh get a gallon of milk or wouldn't necessarily have to drive down to down to do that those kinds of errands whether there's enough business to make that feasible especially in light of the fact that there's a little store kind of like that right on uh route two i don't know but that's that's the flexibility that we we may lose if we change it into just urban residential so just throw that throw that into the mix so uh so i'll make a new district we can vote on whether you want to keep it or change it i will get information on the sign that jesse was talking about just so we've gotten information so we can make a decision whether we want to make additional changes to the sign rules and i'll make those three changes that i proposed at the start so we've got a complete document to to propose and then maybe we'll think about solar and yep we have no no decisions yet on solar we can certainly talk about the different uh details of that it's it's the way it's currently written is very problematic so if we keep it we should certainly talk about making changes to it donna i just had a question about michael's coming back with a new zone and that time we can still decide if we want it to be flexible or are we losing flexible totally depends on what we put in it right i know but you're asking to come back with something so i'm it's not a done deal it's that compared to the flexibility that he came with tonight i'm not sure what the answer is that i think my sense is i'm i'm i can leave what's in the proposal right now which is the very flexible and come in with the proposal and then you guys can decide okay yeah somebody will make a motion that says let's take out the urban center one designation and replace it with the new proposal that mic brought in or keep it yeah and you can vote it either way thank you sounds good everybody happy with this for next time good news for next time i just checked is that um other than getting the audit report all this is really all you have on the agenda so this is the building code stuff so um so you'll have all evening great well other stuff we have we've come to learn that what we think is on the agenda two weeks from now tends to especially if we put anything off tonight yep exactly okay thank you um back to you're still up mic i'm still up sorry correct um building code first public hearing i owe him and i owe him big now then i will open the public hearing on the uh amendments to the building code this one hopefully will be much much faster and i've regretted saying that before in the past too so tonight we've got the first reading on amendments to the building regulations so what this hearing is about this is first of two readings this is going to work just like your standard ordinances if you haven't done an ordinance amendment if you're new there there are two two readings you have a first reading and a second reading the changes are being proposed to remove the fee exemption for energy efficiency projects and changes to clean up the building regulations for accuracy and to make them more defensible if challenged in court um you are given both the clean version and the red line version in your packet because the red line version was all over the place so it might be easier just to read a clean version and council could take the opportunity to talk about the flood exemption for the flood fee exemption that still exists uh there is no end date on it but it's not part of the regulations but i just wanted to put that out there if people wanted to talk about that we could put that on as well so why remove the fee exemption um staff is removed is recommending removing the exemption for energy efficiency projects because there are many types of projects the city supports like affordable housing projects they all pay fees only energy efficiency and accessibility projects and i'll talk about that in a little bit get a fee exemption these projects still have administrative costs still have inspections we don't believe the fee is a barrier to anyone doing any of these projects and probably most significantly is the exemption makes a significant difference in the amount of money we collect in 2023 energy efficiency projects made up 25 percent of all non flood related building permits so we had 162 permits that were not associated with the flood 40 of them paid no fees because they were energy efficiency projects that could be insulating that could be putting in heat pumps that could be putting solar panels anything that qualifies as um energy efficiency doesn't pay fees um because we don't ask for project costs we don't know how much this is going to generate or how much of a difference this is going to make but we know it's going to probably generate more than ten thousand dollars in additional income so generally fee exemptions would have been built into a fee schedule so why are we amending the regulations why are we coming to amend the regulations they're usually built into fee schedules but in this case it is literally written into the ordinance uh the other exemption in the ordinance is handicapped accessibility improvements um these could be as small as handicapped ramps to as big as elevators we aren't recommending removing the fees on accessibility apps we don't generally get them and we had none of them last year um if council would like to consider removing that exemption you're certainly welcome to as well um the flood permit exemption is not in the ordinance as i mentioned earlier and was made as an emergency measure that can be ended or sunset at any time and staff so why did we review the rest of the regulations well we were basically we've had this list of amendments that needed to happen for a long time um and this just never rose to the high enough on the list to work on it but because we were coming in for this we figured we would come in with the um with the rest of our changes so building regulations don't mention our cooperative agreement all of our building inspections that we do right now we do with a cooperative agreement with the division of fire safety there's no reference to that or any of the rules embedded in that in our ordinance so they really aren't talking to each other and they really should we have outdated code requirements we actually write into ordinance we enforce the 2003 building codes which have since been updated many times but we are required to enforce our ordinance and our ordinance is referring to old ordinance old codes so we need to update those codes and what would be the best practice would be to go in and say as most recently amended so you'd have the 2018 IRC or as most recently amended so that way as the IRC gets updated in 2023 or 2026 it automatically updates we don't have to come back to you to change your regulations that's the way it should have been written in the first place it also had poor construction poor organization it's just a pet peeve of mine I write organization I write regulations and they're right ways and wrong ways and this was kind of a jumbled mess so I tried to clean it up and then we were missing requirements necessary to allow enforcement we don't do enforcement not very often at all but it does worry me when we don't properly have things set up because if we had a situation where we did want to go and issue tickets we would not be able to it says in here we're allowed to issue fines but if you don't follow state law you actually can't issue those tickets so this is simply going to go through and make those ticketing authority meet state requirements and therefore if we ever had to which we hope we never do we would be able to issue a ticket so really quick the changes we added an authority to this it's always good to have it it's good practice we moved the purpose statement that wasn't to replace the one that wasn't one because there were purpose statements in two different places we cleaned up permit requirements and then we defined application requirements as sufficient information to determine compliance I'm a person who puts that into most of my regulations I don't want to list all the things you've got to put in your application because you might have a whole bunch of things that you don't need to give to me because it's not really relevant to demonstrating compliance but then you end up with weird waiver rules to the application forms so this just cleans it up fees we've discussed earlier there is an option we just wanted to put it out there we currently allow full refunds for projects that are not developed there is always a lot of work associated with reviewing applications and issuing permits you always could consider this being a partial refund you know or in full except for $100 if a project is not developed that's just an option we wanted to put out there does that come up very much uh it happens more it doesn't happen a lot but it it happens 10 times a year so I mean but these are a lot of times we spend a lot of time working with somebody we'll meet with them eight or ten times come up with a building project we get everything permitted ready approved and then they'll come back a year later and say yeah we're not actually going to do the project and everybody's size and it's like that was a lot of work to get that all the permit reviews but that's part of the job and it's not an issue but it's just with something we wanted to consider some places say you get your building permit you bought your building permit and if you don't build it you bought your building permit um we haven't we've always given full refunds so the codes we've had used to be if you look at the old code it was a long list we've shortened it right up shortened it to the Vermont building and fire code the state energy code and then the NFP 101 IRC and RBs are one and two family and then as I said as most recently amended and then we have a couple of unique codes just in case you don't know automatic sprinkler requirement and an abandoned vacant building code um we've removed a couple others that we either don't enforce like the property maintenance code or covered by other codes like swimming pools for some reason we had special rules on swimming pools but swimming pools are actually regulated so we don't need them and then we moved penalties to ticketing requirements and the last thing we removed licensing section as it's covered by other state statutes so that's it um I'll take any questions all right since this is a public hearing once again I'll start by seeing if there's anyone in the room who would like to be heard on on this or if anyone on zoom who would like to be heard on this topic while we're waiting for that I recall if there was something called the bokeh code is that that was the property maintenance code that nobody as far as Chris Lumber and and Michelle knows nobody has enforced that in their time okay yeah last time I remember hearing about it was in the 80s sometime okay I am not seeing any members of the public wishing to be heard so I will close the public hearing and open it to the council for comments or questions or thoughts Lauren just on the energy efficiency fees um I mean I assume this is just driven by we're we need more money for the city budget so it's a way to bring money in I mean this is one I also want to ask Miak about potential implications um to get the energy committee input I mean to me it's like we're doing like the state's putting incentives the federal government and the inflation reduction act is giving incentives like we're desperate to get people to do energy efficiency projects with like the climate crisis so to be like let's make it more expensive as we also are pouring like state and federal incentives just seems countered to a big urgent need that we have as a society to reduce fossil fuel use and climate pollution so going after this of all things just seems like against other goals and like literally the state will give an incentive to someone and then they'll have to put that money towards a Montpelier fee to do it it just seems like not the right place to go after additional money but that's just my opinion Donna can you tell us approximately how much those fees average a project I mean in the big picture we issue 100 and this year we issued 242 building permits but 80 of them are flood related so usually we're in about 160 building permits that raises about 75 to 100,000 dollars a year depends on how big the projects are if you have any big projects so having 25 percent of the permits not paying and as we said you know Down Street comes in has a project they've got to pay their fee it's affordable housing there's there's a lot of public good out there a lot of projects we support but we also have staff that have to go and administer and enforce and do the work of those projects and I think if this were a handful of projects every year we wouldn't be worrying about it but we just went through a very long process of trying to come up with where we could be getting additional revenues and to have 25 percent to find that 25 percent of our projects didn't pay and just I'll also put out there in total 50 percent of our projects didn't pay fees because the flood had the flood exemption was another 80 permits that we didn't get fees on that we understand that's a one-year one-time thing but we did have exactly 50 percent of the permits it was like 260 and 130 permits didn't pay any fees this year so it's and we only raised we're supposed to raise $75,000 we're at $25,000 in building permits right now so we are significantly under we're underperforming in our permit fees so I think I just I think it's if council decides you want to keep it that's perfectly fine that is that's your policy decision I'm putting it in front of you because I think it's my job as the director to go through and bring it to your attention that I think this exemption is having a difference a significant difference in the amount of fees that we're collecting for next meeting could you come back or the next hearing come back and and share the average the solar projects would pay we don't know that because they're as soon as they're exempt we don't ask them how much the project is building fees for everyone to understand building fees are paid based on the amount of investment so it's eight dollars plus a certain amount per thousand dollars of the project and as soon as they're exempt we're like yeah it doesn't matter we don't care I'm sorry you said that earlier as soon as you repeated it I remembered I'm sorry thank you okay it's also with this is the time limits issue for permits and it's come up a little bit this time too or at least looking through this red line version so if you issue permits is this also like a maximum one extension oh for how long they're valid for yeah yeah I didn't look at that provision but that is I don't know and what it is in this one it could be extended as well I think it's one year it's good they're good for one year that's that'd be my memory but it feels like it should save a lot of just backtracking it might make sense to make these longer to be more practical I mean having thinking about this last year for me for example I was going to replace the atrium on the plancher block at the permit staffed at all the work and then the flood hit and I didn't have the extra money to do a project like that so I'll definitely miss the days yeah totally selfish way of looking at it but it's an example of something that yeah we certainly show other people are going through yeah we certainly could either as a one time thing or just as a general rule of thumb usually people come in to get building permits at the time because you're gonna have a you're gonna have a financial outlay so usually people are coming in I'm gonna start building in the next two weeks and here's my my permit and my fee so usually development starts right away but this is a unique case but we certainly could there's nothing in statute that says it can't be longer yeah I mean it's also just getting contractors now for everybody is an issue so maybe longer would be something to think about is there a downside to letting people keep their permit open longer not that I can really think of you know it's not like these are rules that change significantly such that it's like oh we're gonna issue something and then six months later oh that would have been illegal had they applied now I mean there's very few incidents where something like that's gonna happen so I think issuing a permit and having it open longer I don't think it's gonna I don't think it's actually gonna come up often but you know as this case points out that's that's a real that's a real thing and my other two are just that the flood permit exemptions so if that comes up in a year same topic really just working through virtually and possibly get commercial electricians I don't know when we'll be able to do projects but we're gonna be way beyond a year same with our elevators I mean there's and those are really big ticket items so obviously if you get permit fees on that you get a lot more money yeah some communities have have stopped their permit fees with the waiver so they're getting people to pay again if you were asking me I would not be stopping the exemption before the end of this year just be calendar year because we've talked about when the flood happened people said how long do I have to elevate my utilities in the basement and we said it's going to take a while for all these plumbers and electricians to get through you got till the end of 2024 so it doesn't make sense for us to then go and pull the pull the permit fee out from under them put the fee exemption so I would say if you were going to we would at least be keeping the fee exemptions through but again it's a policy and a decision of the council if you guys want to keep it indefinitely it can stay indefinite too but eventually as time goes on flood damage is just going to go away right so there'll be yeah and then the third one I had was just the sprinkler system clarification because that ordinance like so we did away with or somebody did away with it way before my time but on for single family homes right it's only for multi yeah I believe it was initially and I might need to do a little bit I think it was initially to everything single family two family we then exempted single family and I'm trying to think if we also got the exemption onto two families he did for twos if they have an outside entry or something yeah there's a rule is it now up to four I think it is okay because I know we had a conversation it was a yeah Barb Conray had a big push on trying to push that up a little bit we were in I just don't remember exactly whether it went to four went to three but it okay thanks but yeah that's a sprinkler requirement that does not apply across the state is something we had adopted before my time because the thought being if we had more more buildings with sprinklers we would have less need for a fire department and over time we might be able to work our way towards a volunteer fire department I think that was the theory plus plus and then it didn't work out because they were it was the idea that as as we grew if we had sprinklers in every home as we grew we wouldn't need to expand the fire you know oh wouldn't you expand the fire department okay the size would be the same as opposed to you know we might need more police more public works like everybody if we get more housing we wouldn't have that need and also it's they are clearly proven to be safer for life safety but they're a cost housing and so at some point we said okay well we'll change the continuum so yeah wasn't that we were going to go to volunteer oh I knew there was some story behind it but yeah and people would save money on their homeowner's insurance right if they have a sprinkler and there's a tax credit the tax credit it was all put as a package you get the tax credit you put in the sprinkler but I think it probably you would take a long time to have the insurance savings catch up with what you spent with the sprinklers in anybody else okay are we ready to have a motion to set this we are ready to set a motion to set a public another public hearing so someone ready to do that and keeping in mind that there are some things that we're going to look at changing before the next time so is this motion just about the building code hearing that we're having so I'll make a motion that we proceed with the second hearing for the building code on February 28th is there a second any further discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye anyone opposed okay great thank you we have now we have next buyouts is that you mike no it's not me uh i'll need to just be able to get that guy back out how can i close that guy yeah oh i think oh did i lose josh no there he is oh josh there he is okay beautiful just give me one second to get my bob back do you have a presentation or no okay it's gonna be really quick and everybody wants to get the week all of our people enjoyed your evening in my pillar that's right yes members of the council have given up their valentines night all right pass this around to get my keys back ready josh yep okay uh josh to roam community and economic development specialist for the city of Montpelier um i'll keep it pretty brief because i know there's some other individuals behind me that would love to be up here but this is sort of just a preview as we've gone further into the recovery process we know that there's going to be a number of buyouts that the council is going to have to consider and we're at that point now in my action item i mentioned two there's going to be a third one that we intend to bring to you in a couple weeks so just wanted to preview that these individuals are all substantially damaged properties even some of them might be repetitive loss structures or severe repetitive loss structures um the city has um entered into a memorandum of agreement with vermont emergency management for them to handle the administration of all of our acquisition projects that will relieve us the burden of managing the grants through FEMA the state themselves they'll handle all of that um what we would do as the city is just sort of be the liaison between the property owner and vm um and to help make that a smooth closing because ultimately you know during an acquisition the city is um taking ownership of the parcel in agreeing to maintain that parcel after it's converted into green space to be maintained as green space in perpetuity so there's a number of funding sources that vm has access to and my understanding is that as acquisition projects come into the queue they will put them in the right bucket at that time for instance like some could go into the flood resilient communities fund that that's a state-run fund or a FEMA program called swift current or their regular hazard mitigation grant program which is available to us so all three of them have different cost share structures ranging from 75 25 all the way to 100 percent covered obviously let that's what our goal is um is to get these individuals into a program that has 100 cost share so the community doesn't have to come up with that that cost share so i just wanted to preview that we intend to bring three of them to you in a couple weeks um and you'll have to vote to accept those those parcels thanks josh one of the things i was thinking about as you mentioned a property being reverted to green space is there any is there a definition or any regulation on what green space can be can it be constructed catchment or flood mitigation beyond just being unbuilt on um i mean it could be restored to floodplain um i don't think any of these parcels um are large enough to have any sort of significant impact on it um but certainly they could all be parks the pocket parks um which would be a nice amenity for the community um and so yeah they're just not very big parcels thanks donna now are there any of the significant damaged properties that have not decided to buy out yet yes so how long do they have um timeline on that well i mean um the funding window is is is finite and so if somebody wants to um go into a buyout um they really should be in letting us know um probably in the next no later than in like the next six weeks probably just so that we can ensure that they get into the queue um early enough and you're in touch individually with all of these property owners and i assume you're communicating to them that you need to you have a fixed time to make a decision and here's what it is yeah donna what percentage of their property value so the process um uses a forensic review so they'll look at the fair market value of the property the day before um the the flood event so they'll they'll they'll figure out what that fair market value is um on for july 9th 2023 and because these are all substantially damaged properties um and they're in the flood plain um they're all considered to be cost beneficial according to FEMA um and so you know sometimes you have an issue where if they're out of the flood plain um and it goes over a certain the assessed value is over a certain amount 360 thousand then you have to do a full benefit cost analysis these are not the case um and so you know i think these properties range in assessed value from 255 um to probably 295 300 000 so part of the process is going to be allocating funds for the acquisition um demolition of the property capping all the utilities and and restoring the site so that's part of the whole project cost and do they have the ability to you know it's might be kind of a good thing for them that uh we just went through the town-wide reassessment but but do uh does the homeowner have the opportunity if they want to do go out and get an independent appraisal to argue for a higher value than the assessed value i don't i don't know if they have the ability to sort of um use a third party i mean i think vermont emergency management is going to come up with um a method that they have to apply to every single parcel um and so you know i i don't i've not i've not seen that in the policy guidelines that's if somebody doesn't like their uh praise value that they came up with that they can challenge it okay anyone else have any other questions and pelin i'm just looking on the screen to see if you're okay um i think we're set thanks a lot josh all right item 16 leachate come on down who's kurt this is your show or starting out anyway right yep i'm kurt modica public works director um here tonight we've got representatives from vermont d ec they're going to open up the discussion with sort of an overview of the status of um the regulations of pfos with the vermont and then kasella is going to go through a presentation of um where they're at with the treatment process of the leachate uh up in coventry and then following their presentation i'll provide a recommendation to council so with that i'll turn it over to uh vermont d ec thanks for hanging in and staying with us thank you for having us you got to listen while sorts of fascinating conversation good evening i'm pete leflum i'm director of the watershed management division at vermont d ec and with me here tonight um emi pelacic uh who's the manager of our wastewater discharge permitting program from within the division and heather collins who's the supervisor of our pretreatment program also within amy's program and i'll just talk a little bit about why this all matters and the sort of the dual level set of where we are with the permitting and and the the relationship of the different permits so as i mentioned amy's program issues discharge permits direct discharge permits to wastewater treatment facilities like montpelier for example um we issue that permit it's a federal permit we are a delegated state so we issue that federal permit in place of epa as part of that permitting process certain discharges to the wastewater treatment facility also receive pretreatment permits so those pretreatment permits are intended to provide treatment for substances that may not be treated at the wastewater treatment facility and also to provide treatment for subs substances that may interfere or pass through the wastewater treatment facility or upset the wastewater treatment facility so that's sort of the relationship of the way that we permit discharges to surface waters direct discharges from facilities themselves and certain discharges into those facilities the jurisdiction for pretreatment permits um is triggered by the existence of a direct discharge permit so in other words if there's not a discharge to a bremont wastewater treatment facility there is no pretreatment permit that we can issue because it's then outside of our jurisdiction currently why this matters currently there is one facility in the state of bremont that is accepting leachate from the coventry landfill and that's the city of montpelier should the city of montpelier decide not to accept leachate from coventry then the pretreatment permit goes away and we don't have jurisdiction over the landfill why does that matter well our pretreatment permit which we can talk more about requires cascela to treat for to remove the five bremont regulated PFAS and we've been working with cascela there's a draft discharge permit or pretreatment permit out on draft right now to have cascela operate their facility and monitor it closely over the next six months six months from the date of issuance of the pretreatment permit to analyze and provide the data necessary to create a effluent standard for treatment of leachate treatment of leachate is different than treatment of other water matrices it's a difficult matrix and so understanding how the particular treatment system that cascela has installed is operating it's really important for us to develop the so-called t-bell or technically-based effluent limitation for these types of treatment facilities so again the pretreatment permit is it would require that it's been out on draft we've received many public comments on it and we're poised to move forward with issuing that permit if we still have jurisdiction to issue a pretreatment permit um I'll pause there if there are questions about any of that and I have the two experts here with me tonight to be able to answer any questions you might have which is so far okay great um the the leachate from cascela represents one of the more significant sources of PFAS in the state all of the material that all of us dispose winds up in the landfill that material perks down through the landfill is collected in a liner at the landfill and comes out it's all collected it comes out as leachate we our management strategy for PFAS is in the state are to identify sources of PFAS prioritize those sources and then provide treatment at those particular sources work on source reduction source identification source reduction and then if necessary source treatment as I mentioned cascela the landfill as a result of everything that we put into the landfill that contains PFAS is which are many many things these days um that combined contribution of PFAS is there's an enormous opportunity to provide that treatment at the landfill and eliminate those PFAS is from you know recycling into the environment so we um we have the draft permit out as I mentioned we have a number of comments we've received and we're poised to move forward with response to those comments adjustment to the permit and then potentially issuing it so that's the status of where we are at Vermont DEC right now Donna oh what's the time limit here you said you have the draft out how long will it be out the draft would um I should have said it in the past tense the draft was out for a 30-day public comment period we had a public meeting we received all of those comments we have those comments and we're working how many pages of comments 267 pages of comments so it is closed right it is yes the comment period is closed correct and we're working through processing all of those developing response to comments you know evaluating making additional tweaks to the discharge permit and then you know pending where we're going with the issuance of a pretreatment permit and the jurisdiction for a pretreatment permit we would um we would then move forward with the issuance process so when you say I may have understood what you said a little differently from the way you meant it when you say you are poised to issue the permit that makes me think I hear that you was saying you support the permit you're just about ready to go and sign off on it is it when we issued the draft permit we we supported the the concept of the draft but we put it out for public comment we received those comments we're working through the comments responding to them and making you know if necessary making changes to the permit we would then be poised to issue it but every anticipation is that it will be issued when when you've completed the review when we complete the review and make the necessary adjustments to it we'll be prepared to issue it great thanks gary so if I understood what you said that uh you only have the jurisdiction to issue this permit because Montpelier is accepting the discharge so if we decided we're not going to take it anymore then what would happen to all of that leachate and would it be regulated at all or what happens then we only can issue a pretreatment permit if there is a wastewater treatment facility in vermont that would accept it that that gives us the jurisdiction to provide the pretreatment requirements for it if it then goes if if there are no vermont facilities that would accept it currently Montpelier is the only facility that does accept the leachate if if there were no vermont facilities accepting it it would go out of state and it would then be regulated by whatever entity you know whether it goes to new hampshire or new york or wherever it goes to um that particular state would then be responsible for issuing a pretreatment permit if they chose to okay loren thank you and appreciate you hanging in for a long night um my question is you know so it was a big part of our discussion when we were kind of going back and forth the number of years ago about whether to keep accepting the leachate because of course it does have these contaminants you know it's very concerning to be bringing any PFAS into our community I mean and then there's everything else that's in leachate and knowing that it's persistent it's creating contamination you know so we're like knowingly contaminating our community but we wanted to be able to have this hook to be able to move forward with pretreatment um I guess I'm curious how you would characterize your consideration for I know that you know we're going to hear more about a proposal tonight on a like kind of newer technology I believe there's other technologies that would perform better at removing PFAS at some point it becomes really to me just really hard to say that our community should continue accepting PFAS contamination you know despite this regulatory morass we're in so I guess it's like how are you going to be weighing the fact that you know I know there's a proposal to do a technology that removes less PFAS than other technologies could because presumably it's cheaper um so how are you weighing that and I don't know how long we can stay at the table taking it if there's better technologies and just curious how you how you're considering the different options no it's a good question and certainly Heather and Amy you should you should chime in but I guess I would say that part of the one of the requirements of the permit that where we would propose to issue is a six month pilot study so to evaluate exactly how well this particular technology performs at removing PFAS is from leachate and again leachate is a very very difficult matrix it's different than than regular water treatment because it's so dense it's so viscous it it clogs a lot of other treatment technologies so looking at the operation being able to evaluate the operation across the unit at its efficiency in removing many different PFASs we're interested here in Vermont the five regulated PFASs but of course as you know there are many many other PFASs and how does it perform against not only the five Vermont regulated but the other PFASs that do exist that's the purpose of the study that's the purpose of the pilot study so this amendment that we're proposing to issue this this permit amendment it's an amendment to the existing pretreatment permit would require Kasella to operate this unit for 180 day period and to scrutinize across the unit through pretty intensive monitoring how the unit's performing at removing these PFASs so that will allow us to really assess Kasella you know we'll talk about some of their existing information but you know allow us to assess it how well this unit's working just and I don't mean to get ahead of the Kasella presentation but they shared it so just like looking through some of the slides it's showing like 60 percent removal of one of the PFAS for example if I read it right and correct me if that you know like do we anticipate that it's going to get better and that they're going to be refining the technology and again it is five of 14 000 PFAS like are we testing organic floor like are there ways to get at the fluorine content or something so that we're capturing more I know there's other you know protocols that can test for a lot more than just the five so it just sounds like you're planning to do which is great but I mean I guess like what are we going to learn like we already know the EPA is saying there's essentially no safe limit of PFAS best case scenario if this plays out the data that we're going to be presented it still is not removing all PFAS so we're still planning to move forward with the technology that's going to still result in PFAS contamination being brought to Montpelier so I'm just trying to wrap my head around how this is a good outcome if if there's better technologies and if like your perspective is there's no better technology out there and this is just I mean I know it's a really hard situation and Cosella as you said like has brought in all of the waste collectively that has all the PFAS and it's this huge global issue so you know I don't I'm not trying to like demonize anyone but I'm just trying to get like the best outcome the cleanest water and not result in contamination so as we are too yeah yeah so I guess just like what are you expecting to see that's going to be tell a story that would be like yeah this is a great outcome if we're already seeing it doesn't remove all PFAS and then what are you doing about that like I'm sorry I think that it's important to kind of like back up a little bit just for people to understand you do realize that there is PFAS coming into the influence already just from the consumer products that your residents are using so talking about removing all PFAS from the leachate you're not going to even be able to remove all PFAS from your influence coming into your plant from just regular residential use I'm not saying like one's better than the other but you're you're taking a highly concentrated form from all of our waste from our trash but you're still getting your residential product stream coming into your plant so you're not going to be able to remove that either yes but we are choosing as a city to import a PFAS contamination and so that's a very like I agree I'm also like there's legislation to ban more PFAS from our products like there's a lot of work going on like I totally hear you and like this is a piece we can control and that's not a very satisfying answer to me I think you know we should wait we know we're gonna we'll stay here and and be able to answer better or discuss better after Kasella presents the results of what they've been able to do so far there are the process steps that they can continue to take to looking at things like certain additives that might enable them to better remove some of the PFAS so it's a it's a real emerging technology this is cutting edge across the country right now what we're trying to do with this leachate treatment here in Vermont and so the 180 day pilot study will give us a lot more data as to you know how the unit is performing once it's really fine tuned if they look at different additives you know what does that do to the overall performance of the unit so you know again that's the purpose of the pilot test is to really because this is new technology to be able to evaluate how will this technology perform in a tough matrix like leachate so it will I think the pilot study will give us a lot of answers to you know to some of your great questions and just to kind of add on about the the analytical techniques that you were speaking to the method for detection of multiple PFAS in this matrix have now been accepted by the EPA and so it's something that allows us to use that method we're not just asking them to measure the five PFAS we're asking them to measure all the quantifiable PFAS that exist in an approved method at this point and if there are different types of analyses that can be added to the permit for a requirement for determining you know like speaking to the organic fluorine tests those kinds of things that it's an emerging contaminant with emerging testing techniques and so we've tried in the permit to maintain at to stay at the cutting edge not only of the technologies that are being used but the testing that's being used in order to quantify the best of the abilities that are out there now again just sort of speaking to our overall management strategy for PFAS in the state it's to identify the largest sources and try to apply the best technologies to you know to remove those PFAS to try to limit as you mentioned where a wash in it right I mean it's it's in rain water it's everywhere so it's a really tough problem very can you just clarify a little bit more about the 180 day pilot study and what happens at the end of that and what you're looking for and what you know what conditions will trigger what response sure so uh amendment that we put out asks gives them some time to prepare for that pilot study and then within four months of the permit being issued they need to start the pilot study it needs to run for at least 180 days to collect data for us to be able to analyze according to EPA's techniques to set the limits based on that technology and so once that pilot project data collection period is over we'll start that data analysis and we will depending on where we're at in the permit cycle when that comes through we'll either reissue a new permit with limits in it based on that analysis and the the type of tech the technology that's being used uh or will amend the permit again depending on it because it's a five-year permit and you can amend it until it needs to be renewed the the system will be allowed to continue to run and treat the PFAS and continue to be removing PFAS from the waste stream even until we get those permit limits and then at which time those permit limits are promulgated they'll have to be able to consistently meet those to stay in compliance with the permit so you so they have six months and we see how it goes we see what they're able to do and then what they're able to do it determines the limits that's how the technology based affluent limit procedure works it actually balances the cost that's going into running the unit and the technology that you're you're using and the maintenance of the system and the uh the results that you get out and we have received a lot of comments on the permit about setting goals which is very challenging because we don't have water quality standards surface water quality standards for PFAS at this time so setting numeric limits based on source receiving water protection is not quite available to us which is why we're taking this technique of trying to reduce as much as possible the PFAS that's coming in from this very concentrated source so I would say that in to summarize my answer is that essentially we we have as part of our comment response period some things to consider as to how we set successful metrics for the pilot project as we're finalizing the permit issuance here okay thank you so so what's the incentive for cassela to improve the product the results once the limits are set based on what they can achieve at that point in time after 180 days what's what's the what's their incentive to improve the process well this point the incentive is being driven by the peculiar requirements for receipt of the leaching and so the evolution of the way that the regulations are happening it will depend on what you know what requirements are in place at any given time so first it will be the technology based affluent limits eventually EPA is going to have surface water quality limits that we that Vermont will adopt those likely won't be protective enough so we're trying to take this approach to stay ahead of the federal regulations and be as protective as possible without having very solid numbers for surface water protection EPA has been working for several years now on developing water quality standards aquatic for aquatic there are two different types of water quality standards ambient water quality standards human health protection and protection of aquatic organisms they've been working for several years on the aquatic organism part of that they currently have out in draft form for public comment nationally water quality standards for two of the PFAS is PFOA and PFAS those standards are orders of magnitude higher than what we're seeing in ambient waters here in Vermont so they won't be the limiting factor which is why we're doing the technology based affluent limitation optimizing the performance of the unit is I mean it's uh running the unit in an optimized way as again we're jump we're we're giving a spoiler alert for I think what you'll hear from Kasella so why don't we be happy to come back to your question after you see some of the latest performance data from from Kasella but but sort of the question I as I understand it is is shouldn't we be looking for some kind of mechanism to drive them to constantly improving improve their performance and if if the standard is based on their technology that they're available to do now what's the driver for constant improvement we don't have the baseline you know because this is cutting edge we don't there's not a proven method that we can point to and say you need to do as well as this method because treating leachate for PFAS is right now there's really not nationally there's not much if any information as to how that can be done the use of this unit on this foam fractionation technology that they're using on leachate is is a new concept relatively new concept I'll say so um and another question that may seem kind of nebulous but throw it out there we've got measurements here for five out of 14,000 compounds is is it safe to say that the efficacy of of this technology on those other 13,995 tracks the efficacy of the five no they're all the PFAS is an incredibly difficult subject and there are there are different estimates of how many different PFAS's are out there it though they're out there there are far fewer that are actually used commonly to the point that they're going to create concentration issues right now there are a couple two of which I mentioned a moment ago the PFOA PFOA and the PFOS you know not PFAS which is the assemblage but PFOS those are the two that raise the most concern they're older compounds that because they're older they're found in a lot of the trash they're also more problematic in terms of the research the epidemiological and aquatic life research they're more problematic so we're really focused on those there are it seemingly infinite variations of how you can create a molecule with fluorines hanging off of it um and many many different properties that resulting from that but though there are that many there are a more limited set that you actually see um in troubling concentrations in um in consumer products and in you know in in trash but they're they're really really hard to to generalize okay thanks any more Mr. Lauren sure just kind of like building on Kerry so this technology is piloted meanwhile and we set our standard base on that but meanwhile there are better because this is an emerging field there are better technologies that are developed and found yeah can we require a transition to a new technology or are we locked in it's a five-year permit so for five years but then you could force a new standard that we could only map the new technology or updates to this technology like a hypothetically yes I mean the five the permit though it's a five-year permit there is a general re-opener clause that we put in our permit so we can reopen a permit at any given time will there be new technology that comes along that quickly that we would reopen a five-year permit I don't know I'd say probably not but but it is a five-year permit so every five years it's renewed and you know if there are different standards that come along again Vermont is is way ahead in this our neighboring states New York and New Hampshire do not have this requirement but anytime say there's a new technology that someone people decide is generally considered to be be better and it's developed I can imagine Kasella or any company who's started with the one that we have now say well geez we already invested 800,000 1.7 million whatever it is in this old thing we need to get our money out of that before we can justify making a change right we we hear that a lot from the regulated industry in general we hear from municipalities when it comes to nutrient reduction or reduction of we're constantly adjusting we typically we receive standards from the federal government they work on developing new and different water quality standards every three years we reevaluate our water quality standards as a rule here in the state also subject to federal approval and we ratchet down on this most recent round we came up with new standards for copper and for aluminum you know we typically are reducing you know the the limits for discharges into the environment you know from wastewater treatment facilities as you well know we did that several years ago with the Lake Champlain TMDL and ratcheted down significantly on phosphorus discharges on the western side of the state on the eastern side of the state we're looking at nitrogen contributions to Long Island Sound so we're constantly revising permits and ratcheting down on those requirements we never can go up through a concept called anti-backsliding but we can go down and we do and we you know that costs are an issue we we hear about cost issues from most regulated entities but at the same time we have standards whether they're effluent treatment standards or water quality standards or TMDL based standards that we we push out and you know hopefully you are able to provide funding to ameliorate some of the impact on communities but we that's our job thanks tim i'm just thinking if we finish this item we've got other people waiting for other items should we let them go home and get some track on how we're gonna end this meeting well i i think i've i've been thinking that same question it's just curved right because what we have after this is the water sewer and budgets and water line replacement plan now that's that's a big deal and and we've been eager to discuss this for a while i don't know if people are willing to stay past 11 to have a full discussion of that but but since it's just curt i think we we we cross that we we deal with that when we get to it i don't i and i'll take the temperature of the room once once we see how long this takes yeah yeah i think and i well i know when you're getting older and so okay time to hear from kasella thank you thank you this is great thank you very much uh we're we're glad to be here uh sam nicolai uh vice president of engineering with kasella with me i have jeremy labby who is our general manager at our country landfill and joe gay who is our regional engineer for the state of her mom you guys have had the slides so certainly we can try to keep this fairly brief although we certainly want to give you any information that would help you in terms of of this discussion so you recall we were here in july um at that point we had done uh testing both in the field and bench scale uh and we're optimistic about getting our treatment system in so treatment system uh the full scale system started in august of this year and so the results that we're going to talk about tonight are a compilation of data starting in august uh going into the the present day so a reminder you know this is the foam fractionation technology um miss hurl had you know good points and questions about well why did we select this particular technology you know the primary reasons were that um we found it to be effective in the exact characteristics that p fos um creates problems with p fos was used by manufacturers as a coating it likes the water air interface and so when you aggressively foam you drive the p fos into the foam that combined with the amount of low foam that we were able to generate which is a critical function led us to this technology we did not do a bid process for this technology we did not select the lowest bid we evaluated several vendors we selected we thought the best vendor that we thought would be the most effective um admittedly it's a a field that continues to evolve and grow there are a lot of very smart people and universities working on this problem um but it does appear not only from our work but nationally throughout the country that foam fractionation is sort of leading the pack as what people are finding as the most effective uh for managing these technologies or managing these compounds so these are the results that you're seeing you can see that we get very effective removal of four of the five compounds but we do struggle a little bit with the fifth compound p f h pa so we're in between that 96 and 99 percent removal which we think is excellent the p f h pa has not um been consistently 66 it goes up it goes down we'll show a little bit of that um it is a seven carbon compound it's not necessarily a short chain compound and i'm not sure we know exactly why it's been so difficult for us we have some good working theories and we're expecting to continue to improve that in the pilot test uh six six month program but there's no doubt that that is a compound that we've struggled to get consistent removal on this is a chart that we showed you in july in july it was based on what we hoped we would be able to do this is based on the actuals so we're showing you the mass that's coming in to the wastewater facility both from leachate and from the residential influence on the left and we're showing you what we're actually able to achieve through treatment on the right so this is not new you've you've seen a version of this before but we're very happy to report that the actual field conditions match to what we said we were going to do uh you know in july and to be clear that the uh the units are grams per day so in all that we get from you before we were getting two tenths of a gram per day in in how many truckloads one truckload a day no this was 30 roughly 30 000 gallons a day and now it's down to 0.02 okay so a gram is a the weight of a paperclip so a fifth of a paperclip is is what we're seeing and we're getting that down to uh a fiftieth of a paperclip so we're dealing with really small concentrations and really small amounts of mass here which is challenging of course both from a removal and a quantification standpoint but even that quantity is hazardous to health even these very low concentrations so the the levels of that we evaluate and regulate for PFOS are a full magnitude below traditional compounds so we're measuring lower and we're being held and identifying health impacts of those lower concentrations okay thanks again this is a a graph you've seen before it's really the same data showing you into the pie chart so we're really shrinking the the amount of PFOS that you're coming down from leachate to a very small amount I certainly appreciate herles comments that it is new it's coming into the facility as opposed to the residential um but the whole goal here is for us to remove this and get as low as possible so that's not providing an impact to the wastewater facility this is probably the meat right here so now instead of percentages you're actually seeing the concentration data so on the left you're seeing the the data before treatment so all those colored bars represent the various of the five PFOS compounds and you're seeing the variation over time so it kind of goes up and down um you know over the the weeks and months on the right you're seeing the the treated and you can see by color we're very successful when everything except for the blue the blue is that recalcitrant compound that we have trouble removing you do see that we were successful in two samples in early November where we actually got the results down and met the drinking water standard and those were the only two times we've been able to do that where we've gotten all five low enough that we were below the 20 so we know it can be done but we've not been able to do it consistently with especially that fifth compound the other four compounds essentially are at the drinking water standard or right at it or above or below it that fifth compound is the problem child and that one is up and down a little bit more still we're very very pleased with this level of progress on the amount of removal we're getting acknowledging that we've got to continue to try to find solutions to get that fifth compound a little bit lower I'll point out interestingly that fifth compound is the only one of the five that is not part of the federal drinking water standards so only Vermont is regulating that fifth compound EPA is not going to regulate today that fifth compound so it's interesting that everybody has their different perspectives on which of the compound is supposed to be regulated that fifth one is only in Vermont today nevertheless we're doing our best to get as much removal as we can again I think you know we want to share this data just showing you know the magnitude of the reduction and again you can see our our PFHPA that fifth compound at the bottom is the only one that we continue to show higher concentrations to the earlier point that DC made you know the two compounds that are of the largest concern are those top of those top two compounds PFOA and PFOS those are the ones that have the most study those are the ones that have the most standards that everyone is focused on and we do a very effective job of removing those two it is only the fifth compound that we have a little more trouble with we wanted to try to graphically represent how this closed loop is working because it really is a closed loop in Montpellier you guys are generating waste and biosolids coming from the wastewater plant that's coming to the landfill that is being managed at the landfill we're sequestering PFOS within the landfill that's where the vast majority of the PFOS lies then we're sending the leachate back to you it's being treated at the wastewater plant so you've got this loop back and forth and we want to kind of show you a little bit graphically what that loop is so on the left is the estimate of PFOS that you're sending to us in in mass so you're sending us waste that contain PFOS you're sending us biosolids that contain PFOS like every other community in Vermont so nothing unique there but this is the portion that Montpellier is sending us and I assume our profile is pretty much indistinguishable from other communities yep yep so that data does not include household trash only because we really don't understand how much PFOS is in household trash but that does include bulky furniture carpets things of that nature and so we certainly could produce that graph for any other community in the state of Vermont and it would look very similar on the right of course is then what we're sending back to you and we share this to say we're doing everything we can to try to get this mass as low as possible the ultimate solution is that we're sequestering that PFOS in the landfill as much as possible and we don't want to lose that acknowledging that we want to get it out of the leachate as well and the further reductions are intended to do that so really to give you a cap of where we are today the system has been operating since august in an exterior containment what we consider a temporary location we are very close to finishing the building it's in its final stages electrical plumbing we're expecting in a matter of weeks to be completed with the building we'll have a two to three week period where we're move the system from its exterior location inside the building to its permanent home and then we expect the permit to be issued from the from dc and to go into that formal pilot testing period and i think the agency has already talked about sort of the schedule going forward from 24 into 25 i think the only thing that i would add perhaps to the earlier discussion is that part of our obligation on the pilot testing is not only to report the data but also to report what we were doing what's happening temperature-wise what's happening climate-wise what's happening at the landfill so that the agency can track and see what the differences are so there isn't any way for us to gain the system we're saying we're only going to do certain things that they're going to see our behavior as we try to get as low as possible presumably as we identify what are those factors what's the way we operate the system that gets the most bang for our buck then the limits will reflect that and that long 180 day period is intended to shake those kinds of questions out over that time frame most of us have toured Montpelier's wastewater recovery facility so just out of curiosity what does the machine that does this look like how big is it so we'll jump back to the other slide it actually comes in a shipping container so it's a fairly compact footprint oh that's it i think my friend Jeremy would tell you that he would love it and it wasn't so compact because it's difficult to work on and maintain but that that shipping container essentially will go inside of our building so it's a fairly modest footprint there are tanks and filters and other infrastructure that are going to be outside of of that box but all inside the building itself yeah i mean the associated infrastructure it's a 60 by 60 building so it's not a small building because you have tankage for the concentrate that comes off the back end which one of the benefits of home fractionation that most of the separation technologies don't provide is that it gives it in a manageable fraction you know people like well reverse osmosis works better well it doesn't really because it takes a thousand gallons of leachy and it gives you 800 gallons that looks really good and 200 gallons that you don't know what to do with right and so this one will take 50 000 gallons and turn it into 50 or 100 gallons that we can solidify or we can destroy because destruction technologies are not there where they can process large volumes yet and they're still years away from being having that ability to do so you know we're keeping our eyes on it but there's all that stuff that needs to be inside that building to the tanks to supply leachy back and forth to concentrate the stabilization that we're going to use or destruction that we may use someday down the road needs to have room so it's quite involved it's a multi-million dollar project it's not that we you know i i've heard the concept of us cheaping out we did not we looked at what the best technology was in fact when we initially did our study this wasn't even considered uh when we did our study that the state of mandator we do and they asked us to look at it because it had come out in that time frame and we did look at it added it to our list of potential candidates with brown and called well and said this looks really promising we want to go down this path so it is a small container for a lot of stuff yes and it comes from australia so it's really hard to work on at times unless you're small and you have really small hands but it is a really really cool technology and when we happen in the facility we'd love to bring you up for a visit if you were interested i think we are probably going to be the first commercial operation of one of these in the entire country um and one of the first landfill is treating all of our leachate the entire country so you know we're we're setting the tone for the rest of the country with this and uh i'll stop talking yeah i'm interested so happy to address any questions the council may have okay anybody have any questions so uh just two things i guess what else is in the leachate that we get and what and what what does the leachate itself with everything that it contains how does it affect our our facility when it gets here so that's a big part of what dc has done with this current permit and did with previous permits so forget about PFAS for a second part of being permitted to come to the facility was to ensure that the wastewater plant could properly manage what's in the leachate leachate is primarily a mix of organic compounds so it tends to be a little bit higher in BOD than your traditional wastewater but very similar it does have a fair amount of ammonia which has to be monitored it has to be evaluated and it does have a fair number of metals which have to be um also tested for um but that evaluation is is part and parcel of the pretreatment permit and and the agency would not allow us to take it to wastewater plants if it were not able to be treated so you're um you're measuring the content of those those sorts of organic chemicals at your end but uh so we know what's uh what the percentage is in what what is sent to us essentially we know what the mix is Joe you can speak to our our current monitoring programs yeah so we we sample quarterly for um volatile organic compounds semi-volatile organic compounds metals chloride ammonia um and report that to the agency the city gets a copy um in this newer permit we're also testing for PFAS monthly that report goes in with our monthly report um so yeah so we're looking at the analytical quarterly for and how is it actually transported in a tanker truck or something and what happens if that truck spills and we have leachate you know on the highway it would certainly be considered a release we're the um has to be reported has to be cleaned up as it would for any other kind of release um you know and similar to um if there were gasoline truck or um other kind of vehicle i haven't heard of it happening but it's not like it's not a toxic material it has this material it's it's a wastewater um well metals ammonia we would spring into action and and clean up the release we'd assist the state emergency response any any material would end up back in the landfill so no no east palestine scenario no no i mean leachate needs to be treated because of the organic mls that it contains um but but you know this is not a hazardous material it's not a flammable material it doesn't rise to the level of kind of the rail disasters we've seen unfortunately on the news recently but if it spilled out on the ground you'd presumably have to excavate you know dig up a lot of the whatever soaked it up and that would be going back up to your place it would yeah um just one other thing going back to my earlier question uh with the dc folks um it's i mean seems to me that you you're you're pursuing this um vigorously i mean you you started at much lower levels of treatment and have continuously brought them up but the only incentive for you to continue that once the limits are set based on the 100-day pilot is non-manual of the permit is that in fact the case or do you have are there other limits in the permit are there any incentives in the permit other than non-manual there won't be a written incentive in the permit the incentive is going to be that while all of us i think are frustrated that we don't know what the right limits are they're coming epa doesn't move nearly as quickly as any of us would like but there will be limits one day and we want to be able to utilize the technology to get below those limits or know that that the technology cannot get below those limits and when that happens we're going to have to implement technology that does now we one of the reasons that we like this technology is that we believe it will be very adaptable to add on to there are other technologies that could go in front or behind to help improve it so we feel confident and one of the reasons why we pulled the trigger as early as we did that it's getting us better removal than that we think we'll achieve otherwise and we will see what the regulations bring us but rather than wait another five years for epa to figure out what the right number is this is what i would think of an interim step and our goal then and our incentive is to ensure that we're leading the way finding ways to further remove it because eventually there's going to be a number that comes out from epa that and i'm sure you're curious as to why it worked in november so well and yeah but they are very curious yeah i mean um yeah i mean this is this is i mean it obviously it can it can do a better job with that we have some working theories we're we're looking forward to testing those out i think the agency is looking forward to hearing from us and and testing those out and you know we're excited that we're not dealing with oh five percent removal to 95 percent removal no we're getting good consistent results we got to find a way to improve that one compound so it's tweaking around the edges and and continue remind me what what you do with the foam once once you've processed it so today the the foam is allowed to return to a liquid state um combination of spraying it and and just time so that gets back to a liquid um and we essentially mix it with a mortar mix a cementation mix and bind up that liquid so that it then could go back into the landfill the reality is the landfill is a full cycle so in theory it could go right into the landfill and go around and around and it would always be captured but by putting it in the mortar mix we bind that up so that it can't escape and it's going to stay as a solid material we know that solid materials do a really good job of staying in the landfill because we've seen the graphs that say hey for all these waste materials the vast majority of PFAS stays in the landfill is a small amount going to leach out we don't know that's one of the things we'll we'll work to evaluate but regardless it'll be in that closed loop so that it can never escape that landfill environment thanks for all this i mean really from where we started a year ago it is great to see the progress and i do think the ability to continue working together as challenging and frustrating as it is to have this huge contaminant um and i'd really encourage to hear the idea of maybe you know adding a reverse osmosis system or something down the line if we still can't figure out how to get i mean it looks just from googling it like that's cause like nobody's figuring out very well how to capture that particular because it's a shorter chain PFAS and it's a breakdown product of other PFAS and all that so i'm sure you won't be alone in trying to figure out how how to get it out but yeah i think just obviously like from my perspective just continuing to try to get as little PFAS back out into the environment as possible is the goal so that's the lens like that for me i'm bringing to this and you know talking to a lot of community members here who are kind of baffled why we even continue to take it um but yeah i guess i'll just i'll leave it there but it's getting late anybody else all right where do we go from here speaking about full circle yeah right thanks this is great all right um again court modica public director says chris cox chief operator of the water resource recovery facility so um i just wanted to wrap up the presentation or the discussion tonight um with just some of the implications with the decision that council does make you've heard a lot of it already but there are a couple things that we have not covered um the first is we have a really large upgrade planned for the wastewater plant and we're just starting work on that now recently signed the final design contract with our consulting engineer and there are some components of of the plant that are that we need to consider whether we take leachate or not as we work to upgrade those so the first the biggest one is the uv system that wasn't initially in the project scope but we recently found out that our uv system is no longer going to be supported for parts so the ballast cards are called they did one last run of manufacturing them we bought a bunch to get us through the next three years but that system will have to be replaced they're all our alternatives to uv parasitic acid is something that we could potentially utilize that works well with leachate acceptance so we just need in order to advance our project and we're in the process of doing that we really just need a decision from council so that we can proceed accordingly with the upgrade another component is the arpa grant so the city was awarded one million dollar pretreatment grant and we're allowed up to a hundred thousand dollars for administrating that grant if we do not accept leachate um then you know we're not we're not really it's hard to justify the grant to the city because we're no longer accepting pretreated leachate so that is on hold now until council makes a decision about the future of leachate acceptance again dz um discussed the regulatory oversight piece so there'll be no more regulatory oversight should the city not take leachate um and environmental impacts so um i think what where we started with council really setting limits and clear goals for casala has really moved this process along and i think that's a great success story for one player in the council um but if we don't take leachate um there's a lot more uh trucking that goes along with moving the material out of state so there's you know carbon emissions associated with that environmental impacts um and the majority of the leachate is still going to end up um being discharged into lake shamblain plasberg is the primary alternate discharge point uh for leachate for casala so it's just it's hard to see that there's any environmental gain i think there's a lot of environmental uh negatives if we um if the city decides not to accept leachate and then finally is the financial impacts um so we are the budget if we get to that tonight um it does not include uh leachate revenue so there's an opportunity to amend proposed rates which will be another discussion later on um so uh each load we take right now we're taking one load a day and that quates about a hundred thousand dollars a year um the most we have taken in the past is four loads a day um so there's an opportunity for financial benefit to sewer rate payers and then on are they producing enough to for us to take again but four loads a day if they yes hitting bad odds from yes they are yeah flooding rate gotcha and then the last um financial component is our our sludge disposal so uh like cal said our um dewatered solids go to the landfill and um we have very low rates from casala because we take the leachate um so there's it would you know casala would likely um need to put our rates to market rate which is essentially double what we pay now so that would be roughly like a quarter million dollar annual additional cost to the city um so with all of those things for council to consider um i did draft up a draft motion and open to modifications to this should any council members want but this is um what we tried to find is a balance of um maintaining accountability and treatment until the state permits are actually issued and we have clear levels established of um of treating treatment amounts or levels on the on the vermont drinking water standards and the reason we're focusing so much on the vermont drinking water standards is because that's was the direction from council initially is um to meet vermont drinking water standards which casala is not able to do now but they have made great progress and i and i um as you heard they said they're going to continue to try to improve on that process so the way this is written is um is to try to find the balance of allowing us um to uh continue with acceptance of leachate for all the reasons i mentioned in the previous slide um until their permits well and then at limits of 80 percent reduction so that's kind of the average of all five being reduced all five components in vermont that are regulated being reduced by 80 percent until their discharge permit is issued by the state at which time we would revert to requiring them to meet that permit um so i can read the whole motion but i think that's uh for council member if they want to but i'll turn it over to you for discussion okay any comments or carry yeah just just a quick question the 80 percent that is uh looking at all five of them together not each one that's correct um i i think this uh discussion really puts mont pilier into an interesting position because we we regulate the housing within the city with zoning or whatever we pave our roads we we do all this stuff that really affects the city of mont pilier um this decision puts us in a position of really influencing the environmental regulation system and the environment outside of mont pilier because we're the linchpin to state regulation and and i think that's uh for for us to want to be a player in improving the environment not only within mont pilier but outside of mont pilier it's an opportunity we don't often have donna it's an opportunity to take responsibility i mean we put the same stuff in our landfill so that we're responsible for it and i don't see shipping it off to platzberg to go back into the lake i'd rather see us be assertive we've had partners that have been very responsive and i would propose that we i make a motion to recommend the motion that curt laid out here word for word is there a second okay thank you go ahead so if the if you're talking about an aggregate is you're talking about an average is there a difference between an average and an aggregate how is it calculated 80 seems low to me given the results that i'm looking i'm looking at 98 99 except for the one sort of recalcitrant version yeah um right so the sum of all um the pre and post treatment with an 80 reduction from the initial number to the final number and and the wording is a minimum so um you know encouraging cacela to do to do better if they can 8100 gallons a day this doesn't seem to have any limits on that is is that still the same amount or they it's are you considering more so i do have the first part of the motion um notes that the limits will be approved by public work staff and within our existing discharge permit so we have a limit uh on gallons per day of what we can take in our permit now um i think we believe that's around 60 000 gallons a day we don't anticipate getting to that level anytime in the near future but um so really what it would be dictated by is um you know chris's primarily chris's comfort level um and um and what the plant can accept and and treat effectively gallons a day we're taking almost 2.1 million gallons a year this stuff um running it right through and sending it up the river past a lot of other communities too to get to the lake i i'm not there any other comments from members of the council lauren kind of struggling with the math still of the 80 percent of the five maybe it's because it's 11 24 at night it's not helping um like one piece of this that i definitely don't like is that we will revert to the the dc permit standard like i would want to see what that was i feel like us setting out the 20 parts per trillion the drinking water standard even though it wasn't an existing surface water standard as a goal has kind of pushed the conversation and the process forward and set an ambitious target for this whole process i want us to continue doing that i mean 80 percent i was trying to do the math it seemed like you got set a higher number based on like just the averages they're showing us right now so um i think we could go higher like i want to be pushing for the best possible if we're going to go in this direction and i i don't think i would put that whole last section about i think we should keep ours and push for it we could always look if dc goes lower than what we have or a more protective standard we could move in that direction but they might go higher that we wouldn't want to and we don't i don't want to revert to a less protective standard um if they're hitting it and able to achieve it because of what we're putting out there so would you think it should be more like uh where it says at which time at which time the council would reconsider the limit or something like that laid out that lowered problem but but yeah i see what you mean like a more protective standard more protective standard um or cut that whole salmon i understand where you're getting at you're right would be a good idea i feel like maybe we could we could just revisit it if i mean i assume we'll get a presentation once the dc you know we like inviting kasell in every six months so i think i think yeah i might like i'd be more comfortable just getting rid of that we could always revisit it and see and if it's more protective than moving that direction you put a period after standards and then to be reviewed in six months by the city council yeah i think something like that i mean i wondered too i mean if right now we're taking one truck load i would love to not be increasing the amount we're taking it's i thought that was kind of getting us the amount where we could kind of send a truck it was helping with our uh other waste costs i thought yeah well one of the one of the impacts is as if the city were not to take leachate that we would pay market rate for solid disposal that was but if we were but if we were still taking one truck load and not increasing it to 60 000 gallons a day yeah well we yeah right i don't anticipate us getting to 60 000 um i guess the ask at this point would be to the ability to go up to two loads a day that's likely all that we would that we would be comfortable with at this point as up to two loads put that in the in the motion would that would that help people's comfort level loads as opposed to three loads or four loads i mean what are you what what's the process you're using to evaluate that answer that um yep we are working through um we had before this year accepted up to four loads a day um we had had some ecoli violations um attributed to leachate and so we are working with brown and cauldwell and with kasella as well to try to understand what type of disinfection system we need to make sure we don't have any violations and we've we've done studies kasella's helped pay for those studies with with brown and cauldwell and we're our comfort level is with two loads at the dilution which is the you know mixed in with the influence that we're taking that we can comfortably meet our ecoli limits and and through this next phase we'll be looking at uv systems or different types of disinfection systems that will allow us to take three four loads per day if necessary so it's really an ecoli um consideration so if um if we didn't do this uh and you have you need to replace this uv system right and you can do you can choose a system that will treat leachate or one that won't is that did i understand that correctly there's a couple options and not all of them leachate or are not as well so there's you know the end product or the end process of the plant is is disinfection and there's a variety of ways to do that um and there's different costs associated with each operating end construction so um you've uh the leachate does um there's an acid within it that um from the studies from um kasella's engineer an acid that can impact the light in the uv system that reduces its effectiveness at higher at high concentrations compared to the influence so um so yeah there are alternatives to uv and we would look into more of those should the city decide to take leachate uh i i don't know what the cost differences are but would it make sense to look into that anyway given that maybe the technology would change down the road even if we didn't go this way tonight that someday we may i take it you don't want to replace the system every five years or i don't know how long it lasts yeah it just impacts the financial picture of us being able to select the best long-term cost effective alternative not knowing what the future is yeah okay yeah kasella has said that they'll work with us if we need to put in a uv system that is more robust or disinfection system that is more robust to accept leachate so they have offered to contribute financial assistance to that so just a continued partnership loren back to the wording of 80 percent removal like if their total amount goes up 80 percent removal could be more p fast total like why are we moving away from a part per trillion standard which is what every other regulation uses i mean looking at their chart like i can see it's way above 20 so that's it's is it because it's a horrifying number that we would have to propose what's the thinking there um i mean i i'm seeing them touching 500 occasionally 300 if you're trying to set something that they could hit consistently or yeah i mean that hundred parts per trillion like i know rhodiolins set a surface wire standard of 70 parts per trillion like yeah i'm it's there is um there's a lot of fluctuation in and what kasella is treating so the like they said if there's a big rain event at the volume of leachate goes way up it's just an easier matrix for us to track so we don't we as public works we don't want to be in the business of regulating permits this is why i added deferring to the state that's really what the state does um you know we do public works permits and but that's not a long term monitoring so that's pretty heavy burden on public works to put that on us long term um and we're trying to find and they the percentage is just an easier way for us to manage and check um the removal rates and so what we would propose is that kasella would send us in the interim period until the state issues a permit they would send us the results we would you know they would have a summary of the data and we'd be able to you know check that relatively quickly rather than going by the exact parts per trillion moved under each parameter um so it's a management ability for us partially it's just an easier metrics to understand and in some ways um i mean it's not just there's no i mean we can change it if you want but um that was kind of the thinking behind it it looks in their graph like they're i mean they're reported a month by month parts per trillion like i would think that would be just whatever we ask for them it's either a percentage or a parts per trillion measurement i don't really understand why that's different it just a percentage feels like of what and that could be changing over time and so do we even know what we're getting then it's like they just stamp off like yep it was 78 or 82 percent today but of what whereas parts per trillion is like an absolute number that we can compare to other time periods i just i would feel more comfortable with a standard that everyone else uses as opposed to this percentage that i've never seen and i assume like dc would be moving towards a part per trillion i don't know as opposed to like a percent removal standard um remains to be seen but it's more likely to be a generic standard so it just i don't know why we'd be setting a different type of standard than every other way that this is always regulated that seems harder to gauge what's going on so is that a number that's ascertainable so that either uh could sell it would report or we could ascertain in what comes in chris you were shaking your head no you should step up so because there are people there believe it or not there are still people at home uh watching this we clearly have the lab data so we clearly can report the actual ppt um our struggle was um it's not as if we're getting that consistent 66 of that fifth compound it's been bouncing up and down so we were trying to give feedback to kurt to say what can we achieve really thinking that this was an interim step we expect the state's number to be lower and you certainly could clarify that and say you have to meet the lower of of these two items that would be another way to to capture it um but that was the reason behind the choosing that percentage you're certainly correct we have the ppt numbers it's just a matter of selecting well what ppt number do we want to to select and that we're operating the system in an interim condition we want to get it in the building get it in the controlled environment so we can understand advantages the system better too this just allows us to get to that point before the permit decision well folks are we going to get to the point where we're ready to make a decision tonight or we should should we stop and take it up next time as far as the permitting do you need us to make decision tonight do we have another two weeks month but we're also accepting it now and if we don't take action to change that then you still have jurisdiction i guess my only other encouragement would be you're really only setting path for six months you're asking us to come back and talk about it you're asking us to do the pilot study you have the opportunity to then modify ideally we'll be able to share new data and better data this was our best guest of of a number that drove us to continue to find ways to reduce it but was at least achievable in the short term i'd encourage if the council could consider that and know that it has the authority to come back in six months and and put something new on there but that this is holding our permitting up in a way that's not as productive as probably we'd all like it to be i guess i support motion i think it's it's a tough choice it's the um it's a choice between two um undesirable outcomes but um we've come a long way where i think we're in in the in the end we we may be contributing to a solution to a problem maybe not a complete solution but i think we're improving the situation net net um so i i would support this motion lauren my sense throughout this process is us for example choosing the 20 parts per trillion helped drive better outcomes so kind of going to an outcome that they think is already achievable as opposed to pushing for a better outcome seems like you've already that will push a weaker dc regulation because they're like oh the people if you guys are willing to take it for a higher standard great then let's not push on progress so to me that doesn't accomplish it i'd rather say 70 parts per trillion which is the surface water standard in rhod Island looks like if you average out maybe that's like a monthly average or something so you know so you can have some fluctuation day-to-day or you know give some like time for the technology to keep being tested i don't know if that's a number i'm trying to look at your graph and figure out a number that might be achievable over a month but would still be pushing for progress and maybe we could figure out the details change that part it's just that we have to then measure it right they're measuring it they report it's in their reports already well they're measuring it but we're verifying right we're not so yeah do you want to move to amend the motion your graph and it's like 500 to zero and i can't really tell if could you like is that an achievable number at all or is that like impossible and off the charts as an average or a minimum i mean we've clearly been over it right i'm thinking an average like i do when i understand it's a pilot and i think giving time to work out the kinks figure out how to get a better handle on this short chain one and um but like to me that still goes in the spirit of setting a target but also i don't know not possible which is is there a number that you could meet as an average we pull the fifth out and make its own average would that work for you i guess depending on what it is and is it trying to push towards finding a solution because i mean there are technologies out there like you could add in a reverse osmosis and get there so it's like it's a comes to be a financial decision a technology like figuring that all out so if it's like this pilot can't actually meet a reasonable protective standard then like we need to know that and i don't want to just give up already yeah i think that's right i think that they've done every time we've told them you have to do the do something to improve what you're doing to uh keep us going they they've done or tried to do it but but i think you're right we need to keep that pressure on right that's what you're saying and if we find out that what they're doing now doesn't work then the the the machine you have allows for add-ons in front of the system to or outside of the system to make you do better that's what i heard you say anyway we would certainly be amenable to a target of 70 ppt to drive innovation we're not meeting it today so i don't think you can set a minimum because i'm worried that we'll fail instantly but i have no problem with council saying we want to drive innovation we want you to continue to strive to get as low as you can you have a target of 70 ppt come back and report on it to us yeah could we say 70 parts per trillion by the end of six months i guess i would ask it would be most productive if we got all the way through the pilot program so that would be six months plus four so perhaps the end of the year carry it's it's not clear to me that this technology is capable of getting it down that far i think we agree we we don't know for sure whether we can do you think it's possible that it could could get that low with this particular technology well we did it we did it those two samples in early November the question is whether we can isolate the behavior and the variation of lead shade over time so that we can consistently get those results and i i'm being honest here i don't know the answer to that we we believe this is the right pathway to go down and will be effective but i don't know the answer lauren or donna sorry if we set that as a gold and then as close to you come to it or maybe you make it then we can judge that when you come back but you could still set it as a gold lauren i would support that could we amend i believe it was donna's motion yeah it's donna's motion um to say i mean maybe we keep curts proposed language of ensure a minimum of 80 percent aggregate removal of the five regulated compounds under Vermont drinking water standards with a goal of 70 parts per trillion combined and maybe and maybe keep the until final issuance of the dc discharge permit at which time all treated leachate received shall meet the lowest of the two standards okay so that's a motion to amend donna's motion are we ready to vote on that motion is there a further discussion don't people talk about high standards and low standards so the lowest of the two standards is not what you mean you mean the highest standard but the lowest number right so what do we want to say the most protective standard all right so that's the motion okay all right are we ready to vote on that the second one is donna yep yep tim do you have anything to say before we vote limited the quantity we're accepting or are we just leaving that out there we haven't limited the quantity is the motion what we've heard from the department is that they would not at present be willing to accept more than two truck loads per day and whether we put anything in the motion or not i think you're hearing from council that if you started to get a higher than that we would want you to talk to us about it does that seem accurate all those in favor of the motion uh lauren's motion to amend donna's motion signify by saying aye all those opposed okay we have a roll call um donna yes carry sal yes tim lauren yes and pelin yeah okay the motion carries we have amended donna's motion do we have any more discussion on donna's motion or are we ready to vote on that so i'm gonna take a start start out with a roll call call uh donna yes carry sal yes tim lauren pelin okay we've uh passed the motion and uh thank you for sticking with us this is complicated and very important stuff um and i appreciate all the work that everyone has done on this um we're clearly not doing water and sewer budgets and water line replacement tonight you know it's already almost midnight we're not doing that um but thanks for saying sorry exactly that's right okay city council reports lauren actually we should decide when you want to do because you're not here on the 28th is that right yeah right that's school break so i will be out that week i will be remote that day so one idea i could do it remotely potentially yeah well i like to say the other idea is if we're gonna meet next week in my review we could do that one we could do that first just nothing else just that yeah that way then you'll still have time to do the zoning on the 28th yep yeah let's i think that's a good idea great thanks okay council reports starting with lauren just very quickly reminder public forum tomorrow night 6 30 to 8 30 p.m at montpellier high school for the um montpellier commission on recovery and resilience would love to see lots of people there um do you want to unmute palin palin are you shaking your head do you not have a report yeah no report okay want to make sure you're heard if you want to be heard tim yeah i really appreciate it tim no report case sal carry and donna do you have a council report oh i did have something oh yes i received a complaint from constituent who felt there was some bias in her timing with the cards and she went back and set through the tape of our meeting and she found herself at three minutes and 30 seconds and i had her at three minutes and 25 however she was correct that the person after her i missed timing so he didn't get any cards he talked only for four minutes but she's totally right he got more time and so just to bring up to the council again it's very legitimate as much as i try to pay attention sometimes i get listening and i forget to push the button um so if indeed the council may want to consider to help it be more stable some sort of more automatic timing or i can set a timer that in three minutes goes off i can still do the cards but if i miss it at least that three minute goes off so think about that i mean before people didn't want a little buzzer because it you know it's a little annoying the cell phone buzzer isn't that bad um but anyway just think about that because it's a legitimate complaint so i just want to pass it on thank you oh you should hear some of the cell phone buzzers that i set up at home and they some of them are quite unpopular i can tell you that that mayors report i second the invitation for everyone to come to the resiliency commission tomorrow night we had a board of abatement meeting scheduled for tomorrow night and we canceled it because we thought it was very important to give all the members of council the opportunity to come and participate and i'll be there and i hope to see a lot of other people there um annual report is out and available to be picked up is that right john no the balance right no but i mean the don't we have the boxes with the amic printed annual report already i don't think so okay i know okay i thought i saw him in the hall okay he must have been oh okay yeah those are available yeah um yeah as many as you want to review last year i am and then one other thing that i just want to mention because i just you know it's more of a personal thing than a city thing but once again today in st louis there were kansas city there was another mass shooting and we're up to something like 23 at the celebration for the super bowl and we're up to something like 23 mass shootings in the united states already in 2024 and the the reason that we continue to allow this to go on is just uh beyond me and so it's something else that goes beyond the borders of the city of montpelier but uh but we are not we are not immune and that's all i have and clerk's report yeah just um to note that then tomorrow night's board of abatement meeting is not canceled it is postponed until the following thursday um the 22nd and this should be the last one that's on the schedule until march 28th so but don't forget the postpone meeting city manager uh anything i had i forgotten so we'll pass and put it in the weekly memo or send out by email okay and we'll get out notice because the uh the notice is not uh is not official yet but we will be meeting uh next wednesday 6 30 it was going to be a special meeting but now we've got at least a couple of items and hopefully that'll be it and with that we can adjourn at 11 55 p.m as councillor hurl said