 I'm calling the meeting to order at 633. I see we have present myself, Commissioner Knox, Commissioner Mangan. Recording in progress. Commissioner Brusso, Commissioner Raphael, and it appears Commissioner Spurland just joined us. Good evening. Good evening. So tonight's agenda has only two items, a consent agenda item and a work session. So to anyone in the public, I want to make clear that in the work session, we will not be discussing the merits of any proposals to amend zoning and regulations. There are no such proposals before us right now in official form. Our aim tonight is to determine as a commission where our work priorities should lie for the rest of 2022. There will certainly be points in the work session at which public comments are welcome, but I want to let everyone know that this meeting is a lot more about the how than the what. With that said, is there anyone in the public who would like to offer commentary on something not on the agenda or on the consent agenda proper? Now is your time and please state your name clearly for the record. My name is Al Seneca for the record. A little bit late to the game because I'm not sure how this works, but in an effort, we had talked with Sharon Kelly regarding a couple of items that we hoped to get on the, I guess we'd call it the work workshop committee. We have written a letter to Sharon and Darren to bring to you guys and I can certainly give you a heads up on it or I can just let it rest at that. But I don't know if that's what you'd want you to do right now, Darren, or not. Josh, would you like Al to hold his comment until after the end of the work during the work session or if it's related to that? I think it would make sense in the work session if we're going to be going over the priorities to add it to that point. Well, I don't know how these would be added. Will they get added to the work session or is it? So the letter just came today, so I don't know if they're going to be on the work session. Yeah, so it might be a good idea that I, if I just. So what we're saying is we can take some public comments during the work session. Oh, you are. Then you can say that then that's how it will be entered into the record. We'll forward your letter to the planning commission. But for right now, we're going to do general public comments and consent to get them. Does that make sense? Okay. We only have one agenda item that's going to think about three minutes. Okay. Yeah, we'll be close. And then we'll be into the work. I know how these things go. Sometimes they last on midnight. You never know. And then you give me three minutes of pain. I know that the consent agenda item is very quick. Presumably. Are there any other pieces of public commentary? Hearing none, then if there's nothing from the commissioners as well, I will take a motion to approve the consent agenda. I'll move. We approve the consent agendas. John Mangan. Rafael second. I heard moved by John Mangan, seconded by David Raphael. All those in favor of the consent agenda as moved, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed nay. The consent agenda passes seven to zero or six to zero. We're missing shoe, aren't we? Zero in which case. We now are on to the work session portion. Is there anything staff would like us to know beforehand before we dig into this? I'm actually going to, I'm still dealing with technical issues here. I'm going to shut the camera off for a minute so we can get the whole room in view. And I would just let. I would also say to Mr. LaRosa that the letter will be the consent approval letter will be mailed around tomorrow and will be sent on its way. Great. Thank you. Have a great night, everybody. Enjoy your work session. Thank you. Hi, this is Walter McCarthy, an attorney for Sheehy, Furlong and Beam. And I represent Lake Champlain, which was part of that consent agenda. Can you please also make sure that I receive a copy of that approval letter as well? I can do that, Walter. Alrighty, thank you so much. Everybody. Thanks. Bye. All right. So, Josh, answer your question as far as stuff staff would like to know. The one one thing I do want to mention is that I sent a late email with details of the bylaw modernization plan. You've seen that before, but just wanted to make sure that was in your possession, so you know what the obligations are under that. Most of those are later actually in that document. I can go through them when we get to the work session. But I just wanted to make sure you saw that was added to your packet. I have other comments I can make when we actually get into the work session. Alrighty, thank you. So what I think the charge before us tonight is sort of a two part thing to determine the urgency of particular items, which is to say, are they high priority? Should they happen this year? Or should they happen later? And then also if they need to be sort of deferred to someone else, some other group, which group would be the best group? If we think something isn't urgent, but we still think it's important to whom should we direct it? So what I was thinking is, is everyone have the Essex PC work plan priority Excel document? Or Darren, if you could put that up, I think it would just make the most sense to start with that and then look down and yeah, look down at each one sort of sequentially. Before you get into that, did you want to let out? So yes, yes. I'll actually, you want to come around a little bit so we can see as far as having a day with the technology. Okay, I'll try to be as brief as I can. But so we've sent the letter off. You'll have that. You can distribute it to everybody on the board. But I'll just, I'll kind of hit it quickly. Number one, the Saxon Hill Industrial Park. We are in the RPDI zoning district. And we also own land in the I1 zoning district. One of the requests that we have, and I want to stress that I'd like to be involved with all three of these requests because there's a lot more details that I'm going to get to tonight, but certainly would want to work with the town on all these three projects and make sure that we're working together. But anyway, the RPDI zoning has a lot more restrictions than the I1 zoning. And we're finding out, as you know, we're putting up several buildings up there right now and we're having some success, but we're also having to turn people away because we can't, they don't work in that zoning district. And I think as our request was made, that we'd like to have some more of the allowable uses that are in the I1 district in the RPDI district as well. I could go through some of the details here, but that's number one in a nutshell. Let's see, number two, a property that I own in Essex, again, 38, 40, 48 and 60 Upper Main Street. It's probably better known as the mini golf and the driving range. We have for several years, probably hadn't done it correctly. We haven't gotten many letters in, but we've talked about getting the potential of getting that rezoned as well. We certainly would like to talk and then come up with a master plan to show the town what we could do there with a zone change. It's currently in the AER zoning district. I'd like to talk with the town to see what we could do there. There's been a waterline installation that was one of the main, you know, stopping points that we don't have sewer and water there, but now the waterline has been extended and it butts our property. And, you know, we've talked with public works and they're amenable to letting us tap that line. I've got four buildings up there with wells, some of which are failing, others that fail every year by the end of the season, you know, so we'd like to get town water up there at the very least and then maybe talk about doing some rezoning there as well. The third piece that we'd like to talk about is high crest drive. We just got approval. Well, as you know, we have the two senior housings there. And we've got approval to do the next one. We own another piece of land in the back that we want to do. We want to keep it in, you know, in the senior housing realm, but the zoning has changed back. I guess there was a congregate housing density bonus that was given to the three buildings that are there right now. The next piece of land doesn't have that. So we'd like to talk to, to the board and the staff to see what we can do to either get it changed back to the, you know, the density bonus or maybe just changed because that, that whole corner that I believe where right aid is. And then the senior housings is in a zoning district that could be changed. But just something that we could talk about so that I could put one more senior housing building on that right now. If I, if I did it, I think I could get 11 or 12 units. But with the, with the density bonus, I could go to the, you know, 50 units, which the other two buildings are right now. So I guess that's it. I'll let you guys read the rest of the stuff. And we'll leave it at that. If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Talk about a full circle. My very first PC meeting was with Al. When the mini pot was first going in back in. 20, no 2000, 2001. Yeah, that's about right. Yeah. I first very first me and we did go until 1230. That was, I think we broke a record that night too. Never again. No. Well, I think that that's been over the years. I've proven that I'm a little, I'm a, you know, I live in town here. I enjoy working with the town of Essex. You guys are been more than a pleasure to work with over the years. And I certainly enjoy working with you guys here. And I certainly, you know, want to continue that, you know, that working relationship. I think like we showed up in Essex, we, we helped settle a long time lawsuit. We've given back some land. We've given, I think it was 245 to 150 acres of land back to the town. I think that are, you know, examples that we, we said, we want to work with the town. We don't, we're not looking to just come in here and slam things around. So we want to continue that relationship, you know, there's 200 acres up on route 15 with a mini golf is that again, we, you know, we're not opposed to a little bit for the town, a little bit for us and make it a really nice place for everybody to enjoy the biking and the hiking up at Saxon right now is at an all time high. I think it's just a wonderful place to work a wonderful place to live, you know, so that's, that's our goal. We want to continue that relationship with you guys and the town, quite frankly. Yeah. All right. Thank you for that. I really appreciate that. And we'll, and we'll give that a thorough read. Thank you. Okay. We'll see you. Yeah. Yeah. So we can start filling in the blank and say, you know, good here, maybe that's a good in this. Yeah, no, but. We need to go through the whole. Keep in mind that letter is a brief synopsis. I mean, there's a lot more we can talk about in all of these properties. Maybe not so good in this spot. Yeah, no, and we need to go through the whole thing. Yeah, keep in mind that letter is a brief synopsis. I mean, there's a lot more we can talk about in all of these properties this week. There will be a lot. Several hundred acres to discuss and work with, so. Yeah, I agree. Good. That would be a fun moment for us to get to the end of this one, because I don't have a chance to talk about it. I know, I'm sorry, I just figured I'd get this letter in today. We've got to rush it, so anyway, thanks again for all your time. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just saw it landed my email. Thank you there. Very good. All set? Good. Good. Thanks, guys. You're welcome. All right, so one thing I want to share that sort of guided my thinking before we go down the Excel is, Darren, am I able to share from mine here? You should be able to. Let me know if you can. Should be able to share a screen. I want to share the contents of my screen. I want to share a tab I have open here. Careful. Well, I'm trying to, trying to bring up that Eisenhower decision matrix thing that I was talking about over the email. So let me see if I share my desktop. What does everyone see? Probably just me. So far, just you. Yeah, so you have to click the window and then go to the bottom. There you go. All right, is everyone seeing it? So briefly. OK, what about now? Yep, now I can see it. OK, so this is my thinking is just sort of a shorthand. As I was looking at each item, just sort of which are the things that are urgent and we need to be the ones that do them. That is to say the PC and staff need to say this is the thing that we're taking on as our priority in 2022 versus those other things that we would need them to start from someone else, say. Like we would need information from energy committee, say, or trails committee or what have you. And then the other things that probably we should be doing, but we should be doing them later, which would be under the not urgent, but still kind of important. And I don't think anyone thinks anything on the list. It should be deleted as you see that. But that's sort of what's been guiding my thinking as I looked at it. All right, so now I'm going to see that. I'm going to stop the share now. I have a question, Josh, John Megan here. So how can we capture the amount of effort required for items or the potential impact for items? Because what I'm thinking is like if something is low effort, but yet it can have a high impact, then it should be low hanging fruit for us to easily pick off. But I'm not sure if urgency tackles that necessarily. To be fair, I wasn't when I was thinking of it in applying it to our situation, I wasn't necessarily saying urgent so much as like high priority. And I think you're right that something that is low hanging fruit and would be a good bang for the buck counts as high priority. OK. So it's just something urgent in this sense if you agree with that way is something that we can do in 2022 and the important is it's something we should do, if that makes sense. Yep, yep. All right. Stop the share now. So I should just be seeing my face again. And Darren, if you could bring back up the Excel document, please. So while we were talking about that, I added a column here for impact for John Mangan's points. So you've got urgency and difficulty, which are your eyes and how our matrix adjust is shared. You've got impact, which I should probably have put somewhere else. And then we've also got resources, what's our ability to get it done. Does that seem workable for everyone? Yes, I think so. Yeah, what it does for me, the only question I have is are our topics specific enough for us to really understand what the desired outcome for them is so that we can assign these levels of rating to each one? No, my fear is that if they're too high level or too generic, they really could be anything under the sun. Yeah, that is fair. One of the things, when I was thinking about that, the things that are broader, we would want to narrow something down, and that's where resources, I think, would be important. If it's something generic, like housing, say, then, sorry, there's a baby in the background, then you would want to know which resources to people, persons, commissions, what have you, who specialize in housing, what would their top priority be that they would want us to tackle in terms of housing? Again, using housing as a generic example. There would be persons and groups that we'd want to narrow it down if we ourselves hadn't narrowed it down. And part of this evening could also be and should be to narrow down something that we think is too generic. If we're thinking, for example, old historic center zoning, well, what do we want to rezone and why do we want to rezone it? That's exactly the question I think we want to answer. And then go from there on what the urgency, priority, impact, and so on is. Would we also look at this, this is Dustin, also look at this starting with the high, less granular subject. And as we get into it, we would actually, I would see us splitting off and calling out subtopics as required, as topics of their own that might be graded differently than the overall. For example, 40th and Allen zoning. If we get into that, we may find that it's not just zoning, there's, maybe that's not the best one to look at. I can't put that in better words right now. I'm just saying, I don't know that we can't get that granular yet because we don't know what we don't know. Right. So I would see this as being a living document that each item that's on here, we start with it, we resource it, we grade it with what we know today. And that grade may change as we learn more about the needs for a particular project. Right, and that's where I think resources or partners would be more important if we have the generic idea and then we realize like we put it out to somebody and we realize there is a granular thing, but that's working in tandem with again, energy committee or say trails committee or whatever committee you like. I think that's where we get more granular and the document evolves for that reason. I agree. One other thought to keep in mind is that as you work on any of these topics, there's going to be crossover with those other topics. So it is a little bit difficult to try and narrow in on one thing, but I think there's picking something and going with it because it has those overlaps and those cross-cutting benefits, we'll start to sort of move the line down a bit. This is Sharon. I was just thinking that in past years, we've picked a few kind of big items and all the other items just kind of were on hold as you can't have too many balls in the air on different things. So I guess I would just throw that out as an idea is like maybe pick a few to start and the others are just parked temporarily. Well, and if it turns out that one that we picked isn't working so well for whatever reasons, go back to the list and go to another. So I don't know if I'm making this more complicated in my head, but it seems like if we're going to try to tackle all of these on the list, that's a lot. Well, I think I should probably clarify what I meant. Well, a lot of what we're gonna doing right now, I hope is saying something on the list isn't something that we wanna do right now, that it's again, not an urgent thing for us to do. And then under say partners, we'd note, oh, you know, I know so-and-so on this group, I'll talk to them and report back in two months what they think of this issue and then it can bubble back up. What I, as you said, sometimes things just sort of stay on the low boil. And I think grading things by urgency and impact difficulty resources and so on, we can say, okay, here are the big things that we are gonna focus on. That'll be the core of the effort, but these other things, they're not just gonna sit there. We do have a process for saying, okay, we'll check in every once in a while. If that makes sense. I think- That does make sense. The group saying we should absolutely like, I'm looking at on my screen, the word or the Google doc, we've already graded three particular things as sort of the top priority on that brainstorm document, which we've graded ETC, PUD, and then incentivizing affordable housing. So I think those are already the, those are the three things that are gonna be the main event. And the question is, what are we gonna do with the other things because we do have this list of things and how are we gonna prioritize them while we're working on the big stuff? What happens to the other stuff? And another question I had was at the last workshop, I think it was discussed that the desire was to get a quick amendment through for what we already have, the statutory changes that have come upon. I think we were waiting to see what was happening with cannabis, but once that decision was made to go forward with a quick amendment. So I don't know if it was decided or not, but I just wanted to throw that out there to see if we were still on that trajectory. And I think that would have been dusty who had mentioned that. I don't, that's not what I was actually saying. What I was trying to do was say that if we went to an electronic format for documentation, we formalized that, then we could send updates through more frequently. So the target wasn't necessarily to get a batch through right off. It was when we have some ready to go, we could potentially send it up. Still gonna take coordination, but we needed to have the electronic stuff, the electronic master copy in place before we could do that. So we can use it for that first batch, absolutely, but. Right. So do we want to, on the Excel, do we want to go down, just go down in list form here and talk about what we see the urgency of each thing? I think that'd be a good first step, because then we at least know which things are sort of gonna remain on the back burner and which things are more important. And then we can talk about, as we've said, how to divide up them in accordance with their importance and whether they're granular or large. When you're looking at this, and maybe this is a question for not just you, Josh, but maybe John Mangan, if you're looking at these, in my mind, I would go down through and only look at a column at a time, what's the most urgent and do them independently and then see what the score is at the end. But what, I mean, is that how you sort of envision this, using this, Josh, Darren, whomever? Yeah, you're saying going down the urgency column and saying like, say, next, what's that? Support, e-finality, rezoning, yeah. And then do the same thing for the impact and same thing for the difficulty. Exactly, as opposed to saying ETC, what's the urgency, impact, difficulty, and resources is right in a row, because then I feel like that way we'd get bogged down. And we may wanna consider the difficulty at the same time as the urgency because we may get through three items, and if they're all highly difficult, we might as well immediately just backlog everything else and not waste time discussing it. Because if we already know our year is maxed out because of the difficulty of three items, then why even go into the details of the other ones until it's time to actually do something with them? Well, here's one thing to think about, John, with that is if you have something that's really difficult, and we don't have the resources or time to jump into it, this would be potentially where some of the other ones, the low hanging fruit might come in. So if we have a good understanding of what's out there in front of us, known to be in front of us now, that'll allow us to maybe be more flexible when we have a month that we don't have anything that we can work on on the big one, or something like that. I'm not sure, but it just seems to be- Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, so what I was thinking, like I said, we already have our big three, and as we go down, we'll talk about that, but if we already have three that we know are gonna be the focus, if we again go back to that January meeting and agree with what we said then, then it still behooves us to look at the other ones and say, okay, we know this is backburner, but what can we do so that when we're ready to do something, we can just do it? If it, whether it's low hanging fruit or something can be sort of on a low boil in the background because we know who our partners are or what resources are. So when, as Dusty says, we have a lighter meeting, we can say, okay, where do we stand on parking or performance standards, say, as opposed to saying, well, we don't have anything with the big three right now, we're not doing anything. I think the point of this is we can sort of figure out how to keep things moving on all of them, even if it means some of them aren't moving at a given meeting, say, or moving at the same pace, I guess is what I mean. Ash, I have one question. How do you wanna assign values to this? Do you wanna have discussion and consensus? Do you wanna vote? I was thinking discussion and consensus, like I said, go down the column. Can we fill out the three that you said already had ratings because I wasn't at that last meeting, so. Yeah, so we, the last meeting, we put top of the list as ETC and then strengthening PUDs, getting clear guidelines and then affordable housing, specifically having to do with density. I think those last two, Josh, are kind of captured in this program, so is that still good? Yeah, I agree. Yeah, so those are the real big ones in terms of urgency. So then let's pop back up to Fort Ethan Allen rezoning. Let's just assign, after a little discussion, what we think. One thing we could do is just put our, our grading in the chat window. As we discuss, if you get a number, just throw it in for the chat. If we're all in person, we put little dots on things, I think. Yeah, this is our equivalent of a dot. Yeah. I know, that's why it's not here. Actually, that means he's gonna be one of the primary resource or partners to most all of these. Exactly. So Fort Ethan Allen rezoning. So everyone just wanna, I think Dusty's ideas are good and we can just pop in the chat what we think each one is. We've had a lot of stuff come in with that, but I mean, how much has been coming in recently, Sharon or Darren? Actually, something right now is happening. Particularly with William Parkinson property, Simon's starting to show interest in working on that. So I would say that is on the move, not necessarily that zoning needs to change immediately for everything to work, but that would certainly help. So is that rezoning more or is that allowable uses? I would suggest allowable uses for now. And I say that because part of his property or maybe all of it is in the industrial zone. And I don't know if the town is ready to change anything in industrial, but specifically I think I personally think the uses, if we could massage some uses, for example, they have in the industrial zone, they allow a neighborhood shopping center. And if you go read the neighborhood shopping center, it's a bunch of different type of uses that I know that Mr. Parkinson, actually, William is turning the reins over to his son, Peter. And so in neighborhood shopping center, a restaurant is a permitted use as well as a whole bunch of other things under that. So if the PC was agreeable to allow these uses to go in individually and maybe with a master plan knowing that they're working towards getting a neighborhood shopping center or scratch that idea and maybe use some of the uses that are allowed in a neighborhood shopping center as massaged uses into the industrial zone. So the timing of that is interesting because we have Mr. Sennichal asking for expanded uses in uses in the industrial zone going into the RPDI. I mean, I'd actually suggest we, I mean, Fort Ethan Allen is a historic center. Can we come up with a new zone? Historical industrial center. Right, something reflecting the different character of the fort. Yeah, it's, it's... There's a couple of ways that this works. Go ahead. Yeah, you're right. I think it could be done in tandem with industrial uses. Sorry, did I cut you off, Dosti? No, go ahead. Okay, I was done. I think we want to be careful of creating new zones just because I don't know, we'd want to get legal opinion. We don't want to get into spot zoning or more overlays. So I think that just complicates things. I mean, we're probably due for really looking at our use tables for allowable uses as well as ZBA-approved uses in all zones, I would think. So that actually almost... Go ahead. Go ahead. That actually almost makes a new line item because if the fort is I, and we've already got Alcomen in the door wanting changes in the RPDI to match the existing I, you know, are we opening up? I'm concerned that we start, I'm concerned that we're going to have overlap unintended consequences. And that's why I like the 40th Island rezoning. It's a historical center. Is rezoning it? Would it give us different options for historical grants to work on the water tower or any of the buildings that are in there? Any answer? Go ahead. My understanding is Williams properties are located in the industrial zone, not in the historic zone. Darren, are you... What I'm talking about is instead of adding industrial uses, uses the industrial zone, talking about creating, if part of the fort's already in the zone, why don't we move more of his stuff into the historical? I don't know. I'm concerned about expanding industrial uses to meet that particular parcel because we're going to have people wanting, you know, whatever we put in, do we want a shopping center in the RPDI? Right. And I think Al was careful to say that he'd like you to just pick up the uses from the industrial and plop them into the RPDI, but the RPI is different than the industrial. So maybe you can pick up some of the uses, but I certainly would caution you guys exactly as you're saying, Desti, to be careful of what uses because it is the RPDI. And I think we saw, I don't remember if it was last meeting or the meeting before, I think we got another memo from Al or his representative and for some proposed changes to uses. And personally, some of those I didn't agree with, most of them I was fine with, but there was a few that I was like, eh, I'm not sure we want that in the RPDI. I agree. That was covered sort of in the memo he presented tonight as well. I haven't thought on 40s and Allen, but John's had his hand up. Yeah, I was gonna say John's had his hand up. John Mangan? So I just have a question. And this is just maybe me, my inexperience of some of this, but don't items eight, nine, and 10 have to follow seven. I mean, aren't we going to be talking about some of those things in item seven anyway? And if so, it's sequential and we can't really get to those until we focus on getting the design standard set for ETC Next. But ETC Next is a designated area already. 10 definitely follows from seven because the old historic center is one of the neighborhoods imagined in ETC, but before Allen definitely isn't and allowable conditional uses is broader than that. I agree with you, John, that 10 definitely follows seven. I think that is the other two don't necessarily, I don't believe. Josh, and anyone else, do you wanna subsume 10 into seven or do you wanna still keep old historic center as its own topic sequentially following after ETC Next? I think as it's, and my personal view is as its own, but sequentially following ETC makes sense. Okay, so I had another thought, quickly on 40th and Allen. I think, I agree with the view that it should probably have its own zoning designation. I'm not sure if the industrial zoning designation fits the area very well because there are existing historic buildings that don't really, current industrial uses don't really fit in there. That's part of the problem that it's had retaining tenants. So I do think that should have its own zone whether it's subsumed into a whole 40th and Allen zone that may also enter a phase with Colchester or if there are still separate zones and a separate historic industrial zone, that could be part of the discussion that you get into when you look at that topic. But I do agree it's separate from allowable conditional uses and industrial zone because I think it's a little bit of its own beast. And a reminder that 40th and Allen, a lot of those buildings of Williams are just cold storage. They have no utilities, so. John, you still have your hand up? I was just about to put it down. Sorry about that. I just wanted to be quicker in recognizing it this time. I let you sit for a while last and I'm sorry about that. Oh good, thanks. So in terms of urgency then where do we wanna score 40th and Allen? I see Dusty in the chat has said two. I think I would put it as a two as well. I don't think it's a must thing this year but within the next two years I think it's reasonable. Is there any disagreement with two as a designation? Any case to be made? And it's also worth remembering that this isn't the only column we're gonna use to rank our stuff. And this may end up, you know, this could be, it could be looked at as urgent but the end result of this year's discussion might be that we need more information. So. Right, exactly. And that's the thing about 40th and Allen rezoning is definitely a little more granular. And so there could be specific, as we said, resources and partners out there. And for right now it sits, but it comes back more informed later on. Sounds good. So allowable slash conditional uses. What are we thinking in terms of urgency there? Any thoughts? Well, I think this goes to the discussion we just had which was if we're talking about doing it across zoning districts, I think that's a pretty high priority because it hits some of Al's concerns. It hits the 40th and Allen. So I mean, I think personally anytime we do zoning and subdivision regs, looking at the allowable and conditional uses for their appropriatenesses should be part of the high priority items. Mm-hmm. So a three. Sounds good. Three. All right, sounds like a three. The old historic center rezoning, I feel like, as we said, that sort of is nestled under ETC. Hey, guys, I want to talk real quick and just make sure, Tom, you're on, but we haven't heard from you all night. I want to make sure that we can actually hear you. Oh, sorry, I'm still awake. Thank you, sir. How do you word out? Okay, so old historic center rezoning, as we said, it's a fit, it's a natural fit under seven. That's sort of a more granular thing that we can't really do until we have some sort of concept of what we're doing with seven because there's some unanswered questions on the, the Google doc talked about, for example, form-based code. That's something we'd want to resolve before we really tackle 10. But in terms of urgency, I have a kid coming in. He's trying to get, he's trying to help us plan. Old historic center by itself, I would say a two or a one. Like I really love the idea of the old historic center, but I think it's probably a two at best and most likely a one. So like 1.5, which I'm kind of cheating the system, Josh, another thing that can come into play with that is if we go for state planning designations like village center, that could be a huge help for that project. And the timeline for that would probably have to follow the plan update for 2020, assuming that's in 2024. So that's like a two plus year sort of thing that you can start after you've had the plan conversation. I'd be my suggestion. So yeah, I'd agree with one, not because it's not urgent or important, but just timing-wise, that's where it fits. Right, right, and urgency is talking about do we want to attack it this year? And I certainly don't think we can do it this year. And if it's, it's got to be tied to the ETC and as well as town plan, that means the earliest is two years. So I think a one is warranted. All right, inclusionary zoning, both in ETC and throughout the town. Any thoughts here? I think that inclusionary zoning, we're going to have to take some action or some stand on it within the next year anyway. So I think it has to be a three at this point. It's going to come our way, whether we like it or not, and whether, you know, I think we need to take some of the lead, not definitely not wait for the housing commission to try to tell us what it should be. We need to get that into our site, as to how we think it'll work and where it might go. I gave it a three. I think that makes a lot of sense, especially again, since it's tied to other things that we have declared freeze thus far. What can we do on that topic though? What was that? What can we do to make zoning more inclusionary? Time to answer that. I think a lot of the next item, the bylaw grant and sort of the ADUs, missing middle housing, the review process, the density will address a lot of the issues that inclusionary zoning is trying to solve about. And the whole point of that is, increasing availability of different types of housing, different affordability levels of housing. So that can be a regulatory mandate, which is what inclusionary zoning is. X number of units must be X% affordable, or it can be done with these other techniques of encouraging certain types of developments and sort of incentivizing. Yeah, that's what I think are. My other thought on it is that if we are going to increase density, that is the very best time to institute an inclusionary zoning policy, because that's the carrot you're giving a developer, saying, hey, we're going to increase density, but we want you to give us affordability. So to me, those go hand in hand. Right, and that's what I was getting at when I said this seems so tied to ETC, I mean, it literally says both ETC and through the town, and also density. So it seems very naturally tied. And so three makes a lot of sense to me, and we'll talk in a little bit about the difficulty of doing it, but if it's naturally tied as part of something else that we have already said is likely to be a top priority, it doesn't make sense to include it. Yeah, I think if you look at the bylaw modernization grants and the Vermont State Smart Growth Principles, you know, affordable balance opportunity in housing is a prime thing, and you know, it will have to be addressed if we're going to take part in this, which has already been decided, so. Right, right, yeah. Like it seems baked into the cake almost. I'm sorry, there's no disagreement there. Energy efficiency, specifically carbon neutral zoning. Frankly, I would tie this with the town plan update and make this a one again, it would be a broader thing, because it's a major shift in thinking and we can do a major shift in thinking now, but that will basically put a lot of other things on part. We put it as a one, then the impact, we can rank it higher with impact and push off others to help design this and have it then be part of the town plan update in 2024. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And this is actually one of the, I kept saying energy committee, because I thought of this thing as something that could be bubbling up and then it's ready to be added to something more, more meaty, like the, for example, the town plan update. But I think one is good for urgency. Yeah, I'm not agreeing, you have to figure that out. What was that? You had not agreeing with one. Oh, you're good, good. Will you lose your guys? That works. I'm still here. Yep. Go ahead. I said sewer capacity reallocation, equipment upgrades, what are people's thoughts on that? Maybe you didn't catch that. I missed that, yeah, but that was okay. So where is that ours? How does that relate to? That was my question. So I think that fits a lot with the density and ETC next and it's sort of an element that has to come into play with those, but that is primarily gonna be driven by public works. It should just be part of your conversation as you work through those other elements. And it will come into play when you think about, okay, where do we wanna allocate growth within the community? And also, for instance, if Al Seneca wants to rezone that section of his property behind the mini golf course, that's going to affect sewer recalculation availability because it has not right now. But we're not, go ahead. I think that really, the sewer capacity reallocation ties in very closely with anything we do with density. And I think I would leave it there but not make the sewer capacity and equipment upgrades a prime thing for us to do. We just need to be aware of it when we start trying to reallocate density in certain areas. But that's- So how do we get that? I mean, even though it's integral, I mean, we need it for ETC next. We need all this stuff. I mean, that's all there. But that's, how do we wrap that into our planning map because it's not in our regulations to do sewer reallocations? I mean, what would our goal with this item be? Would we be sending something to the select board recommending it? Or would we be saying in order for us to do, again, to the select board because that's where this lives? I mean, so on our planning map, how do we capture this? This almost seems to be a sub-item of number seven, number eight, number nine, number 10, number 11. So it's, I'm wondering how it stands on its own. You've got sewer capacity under bylaw grant and all the stuff associated with that. I think that might allow this to sort of be eliminated as an item. Yeah. Feel about that. There's a message in the chat. Yeah, absolutely. It's consideration not to be ignored. But it seems like this isn't something that we have. Right. It's not a standalone item that we would take, say we hypothetically give this a three of urgency. I don't know exactly what we would then do. Yeah, I think I agree with what Josh just said. I'm not sure this needs to be a light item subject in our list of priorities. Yeah. And we do have a comment in the chat that says water from Joe Sullivan saying water and sewer are crucial factors for economic development. You hear Douglas in the background agrees. But yeah, I don't think we necessarily have to take a stance on that comment so much as say it belongs under the subheads of seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. We can acknowledge it's important for that thing it's a standalone item. That would be Jean O'Sullivan. She's our economic development. Oh, great. Jean O'Sullivan, sorry, yes, of course, sorry. Jean O'Sullivan. All right, so I'm going to delete that. Wow, that was easy. Yeah, let's delete some more stuff. So 14, we have parking, including bike slash electric vehicle. Urgency. Yeah, so urgency, again, this is one of those things that ties naturally to other things, especially things like density. I mean, especially under bylaw modernization, again, we have and parking, including bikes and EVs. EV tying in its own way to carbon neutral things. So in terms of standalone, what exactly would our deliverable thing be here that would be separate from bylaw modernization? Because I agree, it's an item under there that's important. But what would the separate deliverable be separately distinct from bylaw modernization, you think? So my thoughts on this are, I think it could be part of your bylaw modernization package. I think it's important to consider, it's not necessarily essential to make those fundamental changes to zoning that the bylaw grant is getting at. And I think it could sort of be its own sort of work on that as you have time, focus on the other things first. Basically, what I would want to look at is are the parking ratios that we have and the requirements that we have too excessive? And what are the ways to allow some flexibility in that if you want to have some standards, but not have it be creating a sea of parking at every project? Right, great. And then, of course, adding in some requirements that in addition to car parking, you have bike and EV chargers when you do do parking. I think those are fairly simple lifts, and it's just an honor of getting some basic standards and some design standards. That could probably even be farmed out if you wanted to involve the Compensation Trails Committee or the Energy Committees. Right, Dustin, you have your hand up. I was just going to suggest this might also be from a zoning perspective requiring, and we require bike stands, we require, we can start requiring EV, but this could be potentially wrapped into performance standards. What do you need to have in a parking lot? You need to have an amount of parking, you need to have a bike, and you need to have EV stations. So I see this as an opportunity to do enhance the performance standards that have been talked about, not just a standalone item. Right, we have another comment in the chat. There may be money for electric bikes coming in from the legislature, we should keep an eye out for opportunity. Thank you for that. But to Dustin's point, like I do think the balance is, this is kind of an interesting thing to, meaning parking, an interesting thing to address, but it also does fit nicely under either 12 or 15. Physically, I see the point about 15. And then that sort of makes me think about things like 12 and 15, if they have a lot of things, a lot of items, then the sub-item could be something that we judge for particular difficulty to give in time, maybe, a thought. So are there any other thoughts on what to do with parking as a standalone? Dusty, your hand is still up. I'm just limping back from letting the dog out. Haven't had a chance to put it down yet. Got it. I'm having a hard time seeing how parking and bike parking and maybe parking can fall under the category of performance standards. I see where you're going with that. It's, here are the things that we expect, any development to have and not create negative impact, but I'm not sure that quite fits under that specifically because that's about undue adverse effect on neighboring properties in the general community. I'm not sure how parking fits to that, but I do agree. It doesn't necessarily be a standalone thing. It can fit under one or another of these. Yeah, I mean, it's already under 12. It's already under 12. Yeah, I mean, it's already under there. Okay, great. All right, so now, performance standards, general well-being, screening of mechanical equipment, appropriate burn buffers, hardscape between incompatible uses and lighting standards slash ordinance. When we were talking before about some of the low hanging fruit, it seemed to me looking at some of this stuff and performance standards and all might fall into that category with a few well-directed words or paragraphs to put it to rest and say, here you go, select board, we've made these changes. This kind of stuff, I don't think it's the stuff we need to agonize over the way we will on some of the things we're thinking is more important. And I would also put into this category the last item was solar and electric charging ready as one of those types of changes. Just by emerging 14 with 17, you're saying or putting 17 and 14? With that comment in mind, I look at that and knowing that there's some low hanging fruit in there at this point and the larger bucket, I would actually say that should be a three. Maybe we don't get to it right off, but it's one of those that, as Ned said, shouldn't take a lot of, at least elements of it, shouldn't take a lot of work. Yeah, it's an interesting discussion because if difficulty is a one, say difficulty is a three, not too difficult. I'm looking at the scale upside down. If we determine hypothetically, the difficulty for something is a three, but it's something that we would like to happen in three to five years, should it actually, as Dusty said, be a three. If something is, well, it doesn't need to happen right away, but it's really easy to do. That's an interesting, I don't know. I don't know what to make of that. It's interesting concepts that this, we would say something isn't really important, but we would do it before something that we've said is important. Yeah, I think this gets the question of, okay, is it actually urgent or is it simply impactful or easy? Right. And you might still choose to move it forward, as Dusty said, even if it doesn't rate highly on the urgency, but yeah, if you wanna try and split hairs on that. Yeah, I don't know where I land. It's just an interesting idea that something may not be urgent, but it may be easy. And if it has a high impact and it's not difficult, then I don't wanna get bogged down, but then what is the urgency really telling us? It feels more like if this doesn't happen, will you have failed? Right, right. And that, yeah, it's a kind of a separate designation that, yeah, like obviously if we don't get ETC next zoning really quickly, that would be bad. Yeah, just an interesting idea. I don't wanna get dragged down too much in the semantics, but it's the thought occurred to me. So we heard two parties, I mean, discussion. I mean, I don't object to this being a three because I like the idea of like these things being done really quickly and again, being tied to bylaw modernization in some way. Like those things are connected to each other. So it does make sense for it to be a three. I was just, I don't know, following my own philosophical rabbit hole there. Think about what's been coming at us lately. Yeah, I know you're right. We've been, a lot of talks about buffers, a lot of talks about impact to neighborhood, general wellbeing, screening, so right now that's a lot of it is asking for and we're not empowered to require. So I still think it's a urgent and it may not be all of them. Maybe one item on this list is something we can do this year and the rest of them have to be tied to something else. But that's why I would look at this as an item at this point. I think we should try to do it this year. So that's what made me think three. Makes sense. Is there any further discussion on the idea of performance standards as a three? If not, oh, go ahead. That sounds good, I was gonna say. Oh, okay. So 2024 town plan update, including wildlife habitat and forest blocks. I mean, by definition, this can't be a three because it will not happen this year. It also can't be a one because it has to happen within two. Right, I mean, two. People think it pretty much has to be a two, doesn't it? By default. They should all be that easy. Saxon Hill's smaller change. And is this what Mr. Seneca was referring to or is that what we're calling this? I think so, that was a, I think that's where that came from, so. Right, I remember that. Let me check again. Yes, he attended that meeting. So I believe that is right. Yeah, from the last meeting where he said that. So did that something that would then to sort of go with the theme of the night be tied to allowable slash conditional uses? It would, but I think he's also with tonight's request looking for some additional asks in the Saxon Hill area because of the other lands that he received. I think it's in that letter, but. Right. Yeah, I don't know if you got into that, but there's a way on the spot he wants to do this, more of a, almost a rezoning, but not quite. I would like to have our new economic coordinator, whatever we in on this item before we finalize how we're doing it. I don't think Jean has seen it yet. It just, just hot off the press. Darren, did we include her? We're not figuring out how tonight, remember? Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we're just saying generic priority. And this is again an email that I just got. We all just got 45 minutes ago. May, hi, it's Jean loves to weigh in. I could weigh in tomorrow after seeing it. And now my dogs are barking. I'm going to mute again. Sorry. All right. Thank you. I'm going to put in a couple of columns or rows. So we've got Saxon Hill rezoning around. Uses. Well, so usans are actually added back up to allowable conditional uses. This, I will call it Saxon Hill masterful. That's where I'll call it. All right. And again, I haven't, since we have been in the meeting, I haven't read the email yet. Yep. He also was asking about density for congregate housing in the B1 and then rezoning, Senegal. Right, the off the putt putt. Yes. And he's been asking for that one for many years. Dusty, I think you've been on the board when he's asked it. And it's always been not entertained because the watering sewer wasn't there. And now that it is, he's back to the table with it. Right. I'm putting it in parentheses because I think housing in the B1 is another issue that staff would like to look at because it's actually allowed in pretty high density, but is it appropriate in a business district? Is the business district still a business district? Those are the questions. So I think that's specifically for congregate housing. Since these are discussion points, and Al's doing what we've asked every member of the community to do is to come to us with requests. I would, at least for addressing, and he's come to us and he's hand delivered to us. So I would give this an urgency. The urgency, we haven't gone to the other columns yet, but I would give the Saxon Hill a three, the rezoning off of 15 of three myself right now, just because it's a request that was asked of us in person. And it's somebody who's actually looking to have something done. It may not make it across, as we go across the board, the impact may be less. But I think this, at least at this early stage, I think we need to look at it. My two cents. And you said that, Dusty, for just the Saxon Hill master plan and the rezoning his lands, not the density for congregate housing. Correct. Correct. And that honestly can also get subsumed under your density. Yeah, I think it, because it can be density for all types of things and all types of housing. So yeah, I think we can pop 17 into 12. I don't want to do that. Cut and paste. Yeah. Copy. Paste. You're typing the whole thing. Wow. No, I'm just gonna have to sort of hand back. Okay. I mean. Yeah, we do. So now we can get rid of 17. All right, so 18 solar electric charging, ready, smaller change. What remind me what? This one was, I think I brought it up and it's just making sure that there's a conduit for EV chargers when, and so that when people do buy an EV, they don't have a huge retrofit cost. Right. Doesn't that fit in with the parking lot discussion we just had? Right. That seems like that fits with 12 really nice thing. Could be. I'd like to extend it right to residential to make sure in new houses, at least have the circuit and the breaker panel and a conduit outside. And I also, for solar as well, you were thinking about having either the electrical box capacity or even just the solar orientation of the house and the roof that we were talking about. The solar wasn't mine. So I'm not sure what's included there. I think kind of what I just said is what I think of when I think it's solar ready. Ready to accommodate solar panels, whatever that means. And so for this number 18, what exactly would be the thing that the planning commission would deliver here? We have some standards. I think I found a table that we could just modify pretty easily to do the electric charging bit. Yeah. This is a state model zoning ordinance as well for this. I think it would be pretty easy as a standalone like this. Separate from it wouldn't be under, again, it wouldn't be under 12 somehow. Well, I think it'd be under 14, right? I don't know. Anyway, it probably could, but I think it's easy enough to do and I'd be happy to keep it separate. Maybe we need a more generic line item that talks about energy efficiency and renewables that would allow us to delve both into, the commercial and multifamily as well as single family residential. So I think those would be different. I think you've got a category here potentially. Does that feel comfortable for folks? I think, yeah, I took David's point to be sort of a generic heading. So maybe energy efficiency and then carbon neutral zoning will be one subhead and solar and electric charging capacity ready would be a different subhead. Yeah, I mean, it could even be, I mean, we could even get to the point where we're talking about, you know, wind. I mean, there's just lots of things that could fit under that category. Yeah, just like et cetera or something. Comment in the chat from Jean O'Sullivan. There may be money for retrofitting and new charging stations in the transportation bill. Is everyone so comfortable with that? And then eliminating 18? Well, except for the priority. Yeah, we're priority for that's now a one because we've added that. So the question is, would energy, energy planning, energy efficiency, are you comfortable with that being on a three to five year time horizon? I think that's too far out. Right, and Tom's point, and I think your point there was there's a model ordinance ready that could be put in much more quickly than a three to five year timeline. I think no worse than a two. Yeah, at least a two. And then the thing is, are we at a two for carbon neutral zoning as a thing as well? So I'm hearing maybe we undo this part, go back to this and call that a three. Works for me. Yeah, probably, yeah, probably. I like the idea of there being a generic energy efficiency thing, but if there's something in it that, for example, carbon neutral zoning is not gonna happen, whereas solar and electric could be immediate. It doesn't make sense to group them together if they're at such different levels of readiness. And therefore. Are we at the point in the discussion with the solar and electric charging ready? Are we looking at that as residential or are we looking at that as the commercial? Because one we could do, we would probably have more of an impact if we were focusing on commercial, industrial commercial versus residential. But, because there's, as somebody was just saying, what are we actually asking for? What does that mean? We don't know yet. Commercial, it could be, as you said, it could be the full conduit, the full build out residential. Are we asking and requiring people to put in extra panels, extra conduit just in case? And that's where I guess it's still at the high level. And I'm okay with calling it a three to get information, but I'd wanna know a lot more about when we get into it is, what the difficulty and the resources required would be to know what we're actually asking for. Totally definitely, Carl. Yeah, I think the, an avenue there would be to see the model ordinance that we're talking about and seeing what that applies to and how well that would fit in. And what the impact would be, of course, like just so we would know before assigning something. Those are all the things for urgency, though, aren't they? Yes. We have, I just wanna point out, this hasn't come to you directly. We've had a couple of conversations with folks who are interested in specifically zoning ideas such as A-Lers, R-to-B, Off-Broad 15, which is, again, part of EPC Max. So I don't know that we need to go in category. We've also had some requests in the historic center, specifically for Palo's place and the furniture store. Again, more about uses and housing and whatnot. So just noting for the record that those are in there, that those have been brought to staff and to some extent to the commission, but I think they fit under existing categories. So no need to discuss further or add more rows. Yeah. Right, those will come up when we do the main head. So for impact, I think this one can be maybe a little quicker, because we know sort of where we're going, but starting at the top then, ETC Next Zoning Design Standards. I mean, I think the impact is the three because this would change a pretty massive area of the town and that was the whole point, especially, sorry, go ahead. I would just say it makes sense. Yeah. And especially we haven't resolved the form-based code issue, but if we were to go in that direction, that would be an amazingly high impact because it would sort of change the way we do things. But I think this is a no-brainer three. Agreed. So for Ethan Allen rezoning then. I mean, this is something that, I mean, I lived in Melanie and I lived in the fort when we first moved here. And so it's very near indeed to me personally, but I don't know that I can stay with a straight face. This would be a three for the town as a whole. Yeah. One thing we, one item that we could, before we made a final say on this from my view, I know we've had enough stuff come through. I would consider it a two, but I would also get economic development input on this. This is one that I'd wanna ultimately partner out with and see what the opportunities might be. If we do X, then we can get Y. And I think that's some of the information that we don't have routinely is, we can have our vision on this, but I think some of the things that Ned has talked about as far as changing building codes and so forth, some of these things, if we can make small changes or big changes, then the town may get a lot more out of it. And that's, so over the years, we've had a lot of requests come in for different businesses that Mr. Parker's wanted to go into his area on the fort and he hasn't because zoning and so forth. But so I guess I would go ahead. Yes, I'm sorry. I can't figure out how to raise my hand. No, I agree with you a hundred percent. The fort has so much potential, historic potential. There's a water tower, there's so much there. And a lot of, and so here, so the designations and all of that, we can look into that and find out really where the benefits are and how to work that. I would just add also, we need to reach out to the public works, there's some infrastructure issues that are high priority in the fort, it's specifically in Mr. Parkinson's section. So we'll look into that and get something back to you. Right now, trying to get uses to go in there, of course, they'll have to come back to the planning commission, but. Things like the public work stuff would be where we'd start getting into when we start talking about the difficulty because that's where we want to, what's the impact? The impact could be very high, but the difficulty could be one because there's a lot of infrastructure changes. So yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So are we comfortable scoring that a two with sort of those provisos? Well, everybody's just jumping in at once here. I know, I think it's something I said. I have no objection, sounds good to me. Allowable conditional uses then, that seems like a two to me. I'd actually go back to something David said earlier and I'd put that as a three. Anytime we're doing anything, we should be looking at those tables across the board. I would consider that a three, only because whatever we do with that is can have a major impact. Yeah, I'd like to second that. I think the conversation that we have day to day in the office with folks who come and say, hey, I'd like to do this, can I do it? Often turn into a well know and then you have to go to the Zoning Board for something like that or we're constantly interpreting things and trying to make them work. I think having the uses aligned with what people are looking to do will make a huge impact that you may not see at the planning commission because it doesn't come to you, but yeah, absolutely would be climbed up. And I wanna ditto that as well for sure because in my mind memory, the last zoning amendment was 2014 or even before that when you guys really rolled up your sleeves and looked at uses except for the 2017 where we did a quick fix for the RPDI zone because of a lawsuit. So I definitely Dave Raphael is right on the money. You should be looking at those every time we do a zoning update. So ditto. All right, perfectly fair, three it is. Old historic center impact. I gotta stick with the one on that. Yeah, I mean, again, it follows ETC, that's sort of a subhead, but yeah, I think that's a one. I can imagine a nice rezoning in my head and it looks nice. There's signage, but yeah, I think a one. I think a one is fair. Josh, when you say rezoning, are you talking about, I think when you talk about things like the fall under ETC next, creating more opportunities for businesses or housing and stuff to go in there, that feels impactful, but I'm not sure is that what you're talking about? Are you talking about more wayfinding and gateway sort of place-making? I guess I am more talking about place-making that's a good point. Okay, should we call it a place-making then? Well, remember though, is this where we, when we talked about potential, I'm trying to think what it was, I think it was with the impact or the potential impact of the cannabis discussions. We were talking about the historical center where it is, it's adjacent to one, two schools and the cemetery it's got. So I'm thinking that there was the zoning we were actually talking about for that area. And I may be missing that, but I thought because it was at the adjacent to the ETC next effort, we wanted to go back to that as well. So. Yeah, and I'm just asking for clarification on what rezoning means in that context. Okay. Yeah, I'm looking back at what we said in January and it looks as though at the time we had, I just had it, we'd combined the fort in the old historic center and said similarly under walkable mixed use. And so it was about making it mixed use here, but you're right, the thing that I'm referring to is definitely more place-making. So I think in terms of rezoning that may, I think Dusty, I think it was Dusty who said this feels like a one as well. Dusty, to your point about the cannabis and zoning issues specifically, I think that'll fall under either ETC or allowable uses. So we captured that concern. Is that still okay that this is a sort of different thing? Yep. Yep. That's good. All right, so inclusionary zoning, both in ETC throughout the time, I mean, that seems like a three since that would address lots of other, just housing in a very big way, if done thoroughly throughout the town. And it impacted also be negative too. So that's part of our discussions. It's gonna have a high impact no matter which way it goes. Right, right. The big change potentially. Bylaw modernization impact. I mean, that's tied to so many of the other things. Again, yeah, a natural energy efficiency. I gotta stick with my one on that one. That would say no more than two. Yeah, I could be talked up to a two, but I think one is for me. What was that, Tom? Two for me. And two. Yeah, like I said, I could be talked up to a two. My thought on that is that it's important and the overall impact can be high, but what you as a planning commission can actually affect might be limited into the staff. That's not my thoughts. It does. Performance standards. And this is a lot of stuff under here. Seems like that could be a three, right? I think so. Yeah, 2024 town plan update. Two. Two. That's actually a big update. I mean, that's a big impact. Yeah. Even though it's out there, I would go with the three because we have to keep, we can't not do that. We have to do it, but we're not making huge changes, right? Do we know that yet? We don't know of any that we're far. It looks like, yeah, as Darren's writing right now, if it includes state designations, that's a pretty big impact. What are state designations? State, I mean, Darren, you can answer it. You'll probably do a better job. So I was gonna let you jump in, Josh, but I'll take it. The state designations are those planning area designations such as village center, town center, downtown, and neighborhood development area. Those are four, I think, that are out there at the moment. They provide some amount of either tax credits or grant eligibility. They can, in the case of the neighborhood development area, it's meant for basically a housing area near a downtown or a village center. So that can give some expedited review through active 50 and waivers on fees. So that can have a high impact if done well. And in order to apply for those designations, you have to say you want to do it in your top lane. Okay. I'll go for three. Karen, yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, Darren. Right now we have those designations in town, but they're in the junction, which is why we can't have them outside of the junction, but that could likely be changing by 2024. Am I getting that right? Generally, yes. You can have multiple village center designations. You can only have one town center or one downtown in a single municipality. So right now the village has a village center. If they are becoming a city, they might consider changing that to a downtown, but if that's separate now, the town can go its own way and have any combination of village center, neighborhood development area, down, or new town center without worrying about what the village is doing. Right. And presumably those designations could be tied to the ETC village, or not like subgroup neighborhood thing. So that strikes me as a pretty, I mean, I think we all agree it's a three. I think we're there now. Saxon Hill master plan. The only thing I'll say about that is that was as a result of a court settlement. So I don't know if that has to go back before the select board who signed off on that settlement or if we're just way past that and now it's back in zoning. That goes into the difficulty. How to do it goes into the difficulty. We're trying to figure out what it means to us. Yes, sorry, my bad. I'm just rushing you guys along. I know. I'm gonna stick with the two on that one because I mean, there is a plan in place. It hasn't been in place that long. I don't think it's broken yet. I think there's some urgency in looking at it, but I don't know that it's a huge impact unless we get feedback, not just from the applicant or the formal, but economic development, economic committees and so forth that changes would be a huge boom to that area. I mean, that's the piece that we can make a statement, but we've gotta be willing to change these numbers when we get evidence to support a change. Right, that's where resources and partners come in. Yeah, I think two is warranted for those reasons. I don't hear any disagreements with the two. Rezoning the land, the Seneca lands off 15 and 289. I mean, that strikes me, that could be pretty big, especially if I understood correctly, the prior issue was sewer capacity. That could be, depending what it's rezoned at, obviously we don't have any idea right now, but that could be a three, I think. Well, if housing is an issue and that's the zone he's looking for, I would agree. Yeah, that's like, we don't know what the rezoned could. It could look like, but if sewer capacity is no longer the same restraint, then it could be a lot of things with a great deal of impact. Sounds like it's a three. Yeah, and then solar and electric charging ready. I would say two, it's not, you know, the impact will build over years. I was thinking two as well. Two is fair. Yeah, that's not far enough along yet. So in that case, moving on to difficulty, ETC next zoning design standards. So a question that I think I need to resolve for myself about difficulty. Are we saying difficulty is in, it takes a lot of work, or are we saying it takes different kinds of work? Like, for example, this mean, this will take a lot of investigation, if you will, to come up with the exact kind of zoning we want, or is it just a matter of writing the thing we want? Not ETC per se, but I'm thinking of, for example, the thing where we have a model ordinance is just a matter of writing it, but there could be other model ordinances that are for a zone like an ETC. And so that would be a lot of work to do it, but not a heavy lift. I don't know if I'm making myself clear. I hear you, Josh. Some of the, how hard is it for us to accomplish it? We come under resources. So difficulty might be more of like, you know. So if we, if we have the ETC next, so when we went through that process, we had a lot of that written out. And I think, you know, Darren, you guys had been working a lot. So in my mind, the design standards, we already have a lot of that written. I would think that that would not be overly difficult. The bigger question would be, I think as you were alluding to, Darren, do we have the resources for it? Yeah. So the next column. Right, that's kind of what I was trying to tease out. Yeah, difficulty might be more of a, what do we know? What do we not know? So in that case, I think this is a three because as Dusty said, like, we know what we're doing. We had all this written out in the original, that original much larger ETC plan which had a lot of this stuff in it already. And that was sort of the philosophical choice we made to separate it out. So presumably that stuff is still there. There is the issue of form-based that we will need to sort of discuss. But I think a three makes sense here because we, at one point, this was all ready to go after a fashion. Mostly ready to go. Josh, your mouth was moving for a sec, but I didn't hear a sound coming out. I think I personally think a two makes sense here because there may be things we don't know. If we're judging difficulty by like what are the known knowns and the unknown knowns of the unknown knowns or whatever they were, I think. I think there's enough options that we have to consider to put together the final document that it's probably a two. It's not an impossible task, obviously, but it's not going to be an easy one because you have a lot of things to balance out here. Yeah. It would be complicated by having to work with Colchester to some extent. I'm in accordance with another municipality while I think a lot to me. Yeah, I think that's fair. Allowable conditional uses. I would call that a two. I don't think it's very difficult because we're working from an existing list, but having to do the analysis and making sure that we don't have unintended consequences does make this a thoughtful process. So I think it would take a fair amount of effort to do this, even if it's not, I'm not sure how to phrase this. We're not having to come up with something from scratch, but we have to make sure that what we're doing, what we do doesn't have unintended consequences. Right. The zone, the uses are already there as in there's a table of what uses are available, but yeah, we have to make determinations. I think that's where it goes from a three to a two is we can't just copy and paste something and say, all right, we're doing this now. In this spot, we've got to determine whether that is a good fit. Old historics and our placemaking, I think that's probably either a two or a three. I don't think that's very difficult. Hey, two, three. Yep, two is fine. So inclusionary zoning, ETC and throughout the town. I got to call that a one. Yeah. My mind. This is because there's in terms of unintended consequences. Since we've given an impact of a three and if I recall, Dusty, you said that this three could be a plus three or a minus three. Yeah. I think it's a one because we want the plus three and we've got to figure out how we get the plus three and I think that is something that will take a lot, a lot of discussion and consideration, weighing pros and cons and whatever. Bylaw modernization. I would put this as a two. I think you have a lot of guidance out there as to what can be done. And it's simply a matter of deciding how you want to deal with it. I think that's fair. I was going to say a lot of this, as you said, a lot of this already is sort of there as the template. But again, it's the determinations. I think a two. Yeah. I think it's covered a lot of that stuff in the past. Two, three. I'm going to say it too, just because I think there is a fair amount to step through. We'll take some time to work through this for sure. Yeah. Even if they move quickly once you make decisions. Yeah. Energy efficiency, carbon neutral zoning. I don't think it's that hard. There's a couple other people dealing with this that should be able to pick up on other people's steps pretty quickly. Right. As we've been saying, are there sort of template ordinances that already exist for this sort of thing? All over. Yeah, exactly. If it's essentially a copy and paste, I think that makes it a three. Yeah. Performance standards, general wellbeing, et cetera. I think there's, again, copy and paste available out there and it's a question of fitting it into assets. Right. So I think we've landed on twos for other things where there's a copy and paste, but there's determinations that have to be made. I think with carbon neutral is not a matter of determinations. It's determining, yes, we want to do this and then copy and paste. There's more there. 15, so 2024 town plan update. I think, I mean, if we're doing it right, that kind of has to be a one, right? I don't think it can be anything other than a one at this point. Right. And then, I mean, ETC, ETC plan took quite a while and I would score that in retrospect as a one. It was obviously worth doing. I think we did a great job, but it was a one in that we had to do a lot of things. I mean, I'd reach out and shake David awake and say how many of these have we gone through? And even if it's minor, I mean, it is difficult. We've got a potential change in our joining community. We've got some potentially very major things coming at us that would have to be accommodated in 24. Well, and David is awake and I think part of the challenge we have with some of these other things is we have to go back and make sure that the town plan is solid for supporting something like ETC next. To make sure that now that we've got it, that the town plans crystal clear that we support it. One other thing I want to point out as we're skipping a row is that I believe rezoning the Seneca land off of 15 and 289 would also have to be in the town plan before I could really be implemented in zoning. So that's another element. Not a difficult one, but it will be difficult to pull all that together. Right, and that's exactly it. I think 2024 town plan in a way includes literally every other thing on the list because it needs to provide the support and vision for it and then the backing. So I think that's got to be a one. And the public outreach. Right, right, and that's comprehensive. And since Darren mentioned the Seneca land, let's not forget that the Ealer parcel is a big piece of this discussion as well. And we got to add it into 17. I agree, Justin. I'm not sure if the Ealer lands need rezoning because they're already zoned unless you want to extend the sewer core. Is that what you're talking about? Well, there was some discussion of that. Yeah. Yeah, they're captured within the B1 subzone of the MXB-PUD to be part of the mixed use north within ECC next. But there are some, from a planning perspective, some significant questions about are we adding new streets? Are we adding new neighborhoods? So, yeah, it's a line item for sure. Already captured in the current town plan, that's my clarification. Right. Erin, did the total Ealer lot fall within the ETC next or is that a split? No, it's a split zone law. Okay. Yeah, it's almost like the town plan has to step back and we got to ask the tough question about whether it still reflects the vision for Essex for the next whatever number of years, especially on some of these larger parcels that are getting a lot of development pressure. Yeah. I don't know if you want to add that as a separate thing. I think we were going to add it into 17. Yeah, as we part of 17. To sort of, yeah, rezoned altogether. There you go. Good way. Let me read my work. Okay. Okay. Do you want to assign that a difficulty as well over there? I think it's a one. Yeah, I think it's a one. That was going to say that Saxon Hill master plan, anything that has the word master plan in it, I feel like it has to be a one or a best of two just because there's, again, the actual doing of it isn't the challenge. It's the considerations and the public process and so on. In terms of difficulty, I also associate with sort of just time, excuse me, time consumingness. Yeah. So I feel like that's a, then solar electric charging ready. If there's, if there are already templates that exist, this is not that difficult. That might be one of our low hanging fruit when we get to the end. Yeah. So three is what we're saying. Yep. You were on board with that, right, Tom? Yes, I am. Yeah. I thought that was, yeah. All right. So resources. So before we dive into this, I want to make a quick comment about start capacity and involvement with the planning commission. So any of these topics, we could dive into the plan. Oh, sorry, Josh. I think we have some technical issue. Were you talking? Yes. I said a lot of resources. This strikes me as perhaps a three because we had a lot of the zoning design standards prepped in an earlier iteration of the plan. Okay. Like the resources exist. I'm good. What I was trying to say is before we dive into this too much, I think that in terms of staff capacity, obviously there's me and Sharon, we have Dina as well and even Dean until we have a new director who might have a little bit limited capacity. But that said, we can work on any of these particular topics sort of behind the scenes. We can't promise necessarily a specific meeting, but we can get some work on it. But there's also a question of how much the planning commission wants to sort of take on some of the heavy lifting with certain things. So there's, I wonder if there's a way to explain this in terms of having the planning commission decide on policy and then directing staff to do the detail work versus having staff sort of go through the whole thing and bring you a finished package as we sort of have done in the past. I just wanted to insert that into the consideration of resources before we dive into assigning those numbers. So I got a question on that whole column. I'm wondering if that column, we should hold on that for tonight and that be a discussion unto itself because what resources are we gonna need for this? What resource, I mean that this is, this might be where we have to be more grand. Do we need, maybe this is not giving this a number. Maybe this is, who do we think we're gonna need? Before we can say whether we not. For example, with ETC NEXT, do we need a consultant? Do we need, is it internal staff? You know, rezoning. We already know that we want the Economic Development Committee, but we also heard that we need public works. So the suggestion, do we wanna take the time tonight and change this column from a numerical to just a listing of what we think and who we think we would need for this? That might drive some of the complexity or understand what we need to get out of it. A five. I think on the polling, what we know now, what we wanna do in this column of resources, we really, at this point in time, it's either a three or a one because we don't know where we're going and the rest of the direction is gonna be with the support for this. Unless we can specifically name resources now and none of them are guaranteed. So at sort of synthesizing those two things, pass on resources tonight and go to partners or others who can take the lead and then maybe readdress resources at a subsequent meeting. Is that what I'm hearing? Well, I think, yeah, the staff is gonna come back and evaluate priorities and how they're gonna be taking the lead on it. And I don't know what you're really gonna have to tell us. Yes, no, in this kind of timeframe, we really don't control the rest of their workload. Yeah, I'm not, I'm glad, I'm glad, Dusty. I was gonna say what I was thinking I was hearing from Darren is almost the opposite. I think staff wants us to say these are our priorities. Can you fit it? What is it gonna take to fit them in? So maybe we've got those first three columns and we use those and how do we rank them? And then we have to look at the resources that it's gonna take. And I think, John, you might've made the comment, if we don't have the resources to do something, then that's gonna put it down on the list. So we've got something, let's say, for example, the solar charging and ready commercial. Let's say we have no resources for that right now. So I get to one and we know that because it's not something we're gonna work on today. But we get down the road, we find that that should happen. It's got a high impact and it's not too difficult. Even though we don't have resources, all of a sudden we got an open time slot or we turn around to the energy commission and say, can you work on this and come up with something for us to put in? It's not something we have to direct staff to do. Don't waste your time on it. Right, so David, you have your hand up. I'm on another, I was just wondering what happened to the, I thought we were talking about looking at the phasing at some point. Did that not make the list? That's a good question there. It's not on the list. How are it under something before and now it's under what? No, you're right. I'm looking at the dock and under bylaw modernization. Strength and PUD really need a clear set of standards with phasing slash maxes. So I think we put it under the bylaw modernization. Yeah, maybe process improvements if that's in there. So I'm going to do process all of the power phasing. Yeah, the only place where I see it. Thank you. Thank you, David. You want to start looking at partners or do you want to just pause for Jermaine and work all of the same day? So what I do think, and this is my opinion, forgetting for a moment the resources and the partners column, I do think it might be a good idea to make some determinations about overall priority based on everything that we have. Because then priority can sort of determine like, okay, this is a priority. We don't have the resources now, but here are some partners. This is sort of what Dusty was saying about, they say solar and electric. Like say we say based on these numbers, yeah, that's a priority. And here's, you can take the lead because staff's not going to have the time to do it or whatever. Like get energy on it. And one of us reaches out or chair to chair the energy committee says, you know, who do you have? You talk to Will Dodge and say, do you have something here for us? Because I think partners can be really important here. That this need not be, again, this need not be even us or staff in some instances. If someone says, oh yeah, we've been working on this thing and it fits in nicely with what you're doing. I mean, that's great. If something gets done, it doesn't necessarily matter who does it. Oh, Darren, I see you've ranked everything. Yeah, so I've sorted this first by urgency, then by impact, then by difficulty. We can play around with the sorting if you want, but that gives you a pretty good sense of what rises to the top and what stays in the bottom in terms of, you know, I guess you could say a priority. I think that defines it. Is there really any discussion beyond that? No, and I think this is pretty much like those, specifically those top like five things. Those were pretty much what we had sort of flagged as the possible priorities going in for this year. Again, these are all priorities. We want something with a three in the urgency about what are we gonna be doing in 2022? Yeah, I don't even think we can do all the threes really. So, I mean, until we get into the details of what the project of each one of these is gonna be, I mean, that's a lot of items right there. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight threes. Yeah. Unless these are relatively small, but it seems like a lot. So I think one thing with, for instance, inclusionary zoning, there's already a working group dealing with that. So as much as you wanna have training commission eyes on it, you've already got that ball rolling. So that can be something that, you know, also housing connections. I'm gonna take a little bit of the edge off of it, right? Right. Yeah, I think that's exactly. Yeah, that's good then that works to be able to do that. So you're right off the bat, the ones that are pretty much at our tables to begin with are, you know, the ATC next and the allowable conditional uses and the bylaw grant, right? Those first top three. Yeah. Performance standards, yes, but do we need, I mean, that also can be ours. I mean, but a lot of, some of these may end up getting split out into subsections as we get going. As we start understanding more what's required, we may pull out, you know, buffers, hardscape between incompatibility. We may pull that out and let it be its own item. Yeah. Performance standards could even be a solution to some of the problems you encounter in these other categories. Right, it'd be so many of these, touch on so many of these things. So if we start looking at who the partners are, who can we, who do we think we wanna have involved in this? You know, for example, ATC next zoning and design standards, let's have the zoning board included. You know, let's bring some of these folks in if they want. And what can we use them for? I see that's a bad term. How can we leverage their input? How can we collaborate? Yes. Everyone likes that. More cohesive, better connected, more cohesive. I think so allowable conditional uses, both ETC, both seven and eight strike me as like, what does the ZBA think of these things? Because they're the ones, especially with number eight, that's kind of their thing. You could probably also have them help you with performance standards, because they probably consider those a lot, impact that they've ever. And I think just sort of free floating, like 13 and we already said 13, 17, the energy committee make a lot of sense. I mean, number 15 is pretty much like everyone in town for the partners who can take the lead or 2024 town plan. I think that in terms of leadership, that is definitely a squarely in the planning commission and community development for both of those. Absolutely. Yeah, we're like, they're the originators. Yeah, but in terms of resources, like it's a partners, like it's a big lift. DCRPC helped us with the previous one. And my memory is Regina said that she had looked at that prior to her recent workshop with us and she didn't feel like it needed too much work, but just my memory. Yeah, I actually think the content changes to the town plan is more going to be simple stuff, but making sure you captured all the little details. But I don't think there'll be a lot of controversy in it, hopefully. For example, 71 wildlife habitat and forest blocks, that can probably break itself into its own category that we haven't discussed tonight. But it's also... Like trails? Yeah. Trails would be, yeah, we can put trails in their partners, that's fine. I mean, it's such a, like I said, it feels like such an omnibus thing, but yeah, trails definitely gets to wildlife habitat, forest blocks. I mean, state designations is an economic development thing potentially. Yep, all right. So let me see. So we, seven, my eyes are getting loopy at this point, seven, nine, 12, 18. Yeah, and you don't have to fill in partners for all of these to name necessarily, but it's good to know for the ones that you have partners that you can start conversations with those folks and help move those things along. Yeah. Yeah, and I think some of the things we've said, like... What about public works? Oh, I mean, they're... Yeah. That's why I think a lot of these are et cetera. What do you mean for 12 specifically? 12 is one, but so is, you know, so is ETC next, so is nine. Yeah, cause... I'm just wondering if this is something, if we can engage with some of these folks and we can figure out how to best engage with them, we can just say, hey, we're doing something, you want to play, we kind of have to give them a defined request. Right, right. So that brings up a great question. How do you want to approach these groups? Do you want members of the planning commission or the chair to reach out? Do you want staff to make those connections? Do you want to invite them to your meeting, go to their meeting? You don't have to decide that tonight, but just keep those not in mind. Yeah, I mean, I like the idea of commission members, the board members or board to board or whatever you want to call it. Should, I mean, should we come up with, before we go, should we come up with sort of what we want to ask them? I mean, is it a generic energy commission? We want you to join us on something or do we take this list and share with them? This is, you know, this is what we're working on. This is where we think you can fit in and help us. And how do we, and is that a one-time master? Is that like a regular, maybe that's another meeting. I think that is another, I think that's a separate meeting because right now it's just sort of, we know what our priorities are and we, I think we have a good idea of what things, what could be the low hanging fruit. But I don't think tonight we're ready to say, let's go to the energy committee and say X. But I think we should come to them with something reasonably specific because I'm thinking back to when we wanted the junction planning commission to come play with us. And it was always sort of an open and hate come play with us. And that didn't really get the results we wanted. So if we just say energy committee, come play with us that maybe they will, maybe they won't. But if we say conservation and trails, we wanna know what you think about forest blocks relative to parcels and what is your vision and what do you see as the trails connecting it, then that would be a specific thing that they ideally have a lot to say about. Cause we're picking partners as people who would naturally be interested and useful. Darren, yeah. Yeah, I just had a thought. So you could do two things, possibly more. You could have a meeting with just through planning commission to talk about what you wanna flesh out these tasks and then assign someone to go talk to those groups. You could also invite those groups to your meetings for a short stand, you know, half an hour to talk about that. So it's more of a back and forth before you go and talk to them. Those are sort of two ways to go about that. Yeah, I don't know that I can determine that right now, but yeah, I think those are the two ways to do it. Shall we put this on the second planning commission meeting in March to bring back up for a few years? Why the second? Well, I thought we were dedicating the second meeting just for planning. Sorry, my bad. Do we have time? What do we got? I don't know what we have coming up. I believe you do have time. There is an item on application on your first meeting in March agenda. I believe it's a conceptual application that actually has something to do with forest blocks, interestingly enough. Yeah, you've got time after that. We can amend that agenda to have a discussion on. We just continue the same agenda item from tonight. Yeah. With the focus on collaborating with other committees. Yeah, I think that's the question we need to ask. Like, I think it's very clear. I mean, just as when we came into the meeting, that seven, eight, nine, and to a lesser degree, 10 are the priorities. They're urgent, they have a big impact, and they're not that difficult. And you can dedicate your second meeting in March to the planning commission diving into those a little more. And then use that first meeting to sort of get the partner projects. Right. Because the partner projects to me, like the most collaborative one, this 2024 town plan, which we're not going to finish the second meeting in March probably, but the energy committee one, that looks like some pretty low-hanging fruit potentially. Because we have two topics that are specific to them that we've graded as not too difficult with a moderate impact. But again, that's something we could talk about at the second meeting. I think that's a fine way to do it. Perfect. So do we declare victory? I think we can go home. I think we can declare some victory here. Go on to the minutes. Go on to the minutes. Unless there's any further talk. Tom, John, Dave, any last thoughts? I'm good. No, I'm good. All right. Just a reminder that in years past, way back, sometimes we found that work groups work really well for small, like many projects like the phasing. We did that in a work group with a couple commission members, couple engineers, community members. So maybe we do that again for some low-hanging fruit. I don't know. Just a thought. Yeah. I think that can be what we talk about the second meeting in March. Maybe we go to the energy committee and they say, hey, we've got two people who really like what you're talking about. And we do something like that. I think that's a good point. Yeah. That's a good point. But if we're putting that to bed for now, I will take a motion to accept the minutes of February 10, 2022. So moved. Second. All right. That's Tom. Yeah. Moved by Dusty, seconded by Tom. Do we have anything to call out in the minutes? If not, all those in favor of the minutes as moved, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, nay. The minutes of February 10, 2022, pass 6 to 0. And so the next agenda item is other business staff. What do you have for us? I don't have anything. No way. All right, I'll move for you adjourn. I was going to say I'll take a motion to adjourn. Moved by David, and seconded by second. I'm going to give that one to John Mangan, I think. Moved by David, seconded by John Mangan. All those in favor of adjourning, please say aye. Aye. Adjourned at 842. Recording stopped.