 I had to get that turned back on there. I'll move to a proofy agenda. Motion from Stephanie to be the second. Second from Ariah. Those in favor of approving the agenda, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Agenda approved. Moving on. I can pull it up. Comments from the chair. So I have a couple of things of note. The first is that we have re-appointments coming up. I actually didn't write it down, but I think it's this Wednesday or next Wednesday. I don't remember the date. I don't think it's this week. It's not this week. I think they pushed it to October something. It may even be October 11th. It's 13th. Wednesday, the 13th. And the city council meetings normally started. Is it six? Six 30, I believe. Okay. So it's usually very early in the agenda. You need to reapply online, using the forms, you know, that the city provides. Building that info. I just cut and paste for my resume pretty much when I do it. The profanity filter does not like Latin honors. You can figure that out for yourself. Just an FYI. So everybody reapply online. If you plan to, please let me know if you don't. I know that Barb's told us that she doesn't plan to reapply. Mike has told us before that there are other people applying outside the current planning commission. So be aware of that too. If you, if you don't end up applying, there's other people. And it's probably a good idea to go to that. October 13th meeting at six 30. The city council might ask us to comment or something. So make sure everybody's aware of that. Another thing that's coming up is this Thursday at five 30, we're holding a special planning commission meeting just to go over some short-term zoning changes. I got to arrange to meet with Mike in the next few days. So Mike, you email me and tell me your availability. And I have a few meetings this week, but we'll figure out a time during the day. We can, we can chat about it. Mike and I are going to chat about possible larger density changes for us to discuss at the meeting on Thursday. But we'll hope to polish something. So we're not trying to figure it out on the spot on Thursday. So everybody be ready for that. We've got to make sure we have a quorum because we do have to vote to pass things out. So if you, if you don't plan to be there Thursday, I guess you should email Mike and I to let us know so that we can be aware of whether there's going to be a problem with quorum. Um, those are the big things I have. Hey, for anybody who's done the reappointment, do you, can you tell me where the appropriate forms are on the website? I find that to be kind of, is indeed. I already did it. I Googled, I think, but there might be something in an email. I think Mike sends an email with a link. Should read Mike's emails more closely. Thank you. If you still can, let me know. I'll try to send it out again. September 16th, he sent an email with the link. PC reappointments is the name of the email. So I think you were going to have a third topic, Kirby, to talk about what we wanted to do about the Indigenous person's day because our next planning commission meeting will land on the 11th, which is in City Hall is going to be closed. So I don't know if we wanted to skip that meeting, push it to Tuesday, whatever the decision is, that way I can go and take care of getting the rescheduling. So the big issue there for everybody to know is that, you know, that's a day off for Mike. So rescheduling is probably the right thing to do so that we have him. Is everybody okay with the Tuesday after? So instead of meeting Monday next time, we meet on the second Tuesday. I see the RPC, but I don't think that should stop you if it works for everyone else. Yeah, I probably can't make that meeting either, but it may not matter. So you may have, well, you won't have a new reappointing until the 13th. So anyway, Tuesday doesn't... Yeah, I'm actually going to be traveling that week so I'm going to be, that's going to be tough for me too. Okay. Do we want to... I can join you Kirby. We want to be able to work on the city plan and vote out chapters possibly. So, Ariane and Erin, would you make it? That would be four at least. I'd check my wife, but I think so. Yeah, I can make it. Yeah, I think so. I should check if there's a dueling meeting, right? But I'm pretty sure I make it. Okay. I think another possibility would be to meet on either the first or the third Monday. Those become very tricky because we've got DRB and DRC, our first and third. So, Horka can't hit everybody. Okay. That's good to know. Well, let's plan on, I guess we'll plan on Tuesday the 12th and if any of us four can't make it, then we'll figure out something different. Sound good? So just, if you find out you're not available, Ariane, Dawn or Erin, just let us know. Okay. Thanks, Mike, for reminding me of that one. And Kirby, I could give input on whatever was being worked on on that Tuesday and I could come to the first 50 minutes of the meeting. I would just have to pop over to CBRPC. Okay. Yeah, yeah, please do anyone's course, free to send us some comments or leave comments on the Google Drive for the chapter. What chapter will we be on then, Mike? Assuming we have housing done tonight. I'll have to go and see. I'm currently working on economic development. So I'm hoping that I'll have something wrapped up for that. Otherwise, I've got a couple of chapters that are in process that I could probably move forward. Okay. Okay, that sounds good. For economic development, the working group hasn't met. Yeah, because I thought that would come later. I'm not sure what to do about that. I mean, maybe we could do it without the working group or... It's one, if anybody, I'm working on it in the drive itself. So I'm throwing down a lot of notes and thoughts and stuff. So the original draft that was put together was put together by the MDC director. So it's kind of a new... So I've just kind of said where they were going, I don't think really makes a lot of sense. So I've kind of come back to try to reshape and start to think about things. And I haven't started to compress it. So there's like still three aspirations. And I know we'll probably want to try to figure out how to squish that down, but I've tried to box economic development into a couple of pieces to see where we could go with it. And then I'm working on the goals right now. And then we'll try to see where the strategies go. But we can certainly, to a certain extent, maybe work on aspirations and goals as a planning commission as well, just to kind of think through, have some ideas down there, we'll have a bunch of stuff in there and we can kind of hammer out the last of it together. Okay, if we feel like we need more time, I mean, maybe we could take a smaller chapter on. Like public service or utilities or whatever's ready. Yeah, utilities and facilities, it's fairly close. It's unfortunate, public works is so understaffed right now. I've just been trying to get some time to go in and sit down and meet with them. So nothing kind of gets out ahead of where they want to go. I don't think there's anything in there that is, but I just wanted that opportunity to sit down with them and have that conversation. But if it doesn't happen, I don't think it would hurt for us to start moving ahead with utilities and facilities because I don't think there's anything in there that should concern members of DPW. I just don't wanna get any relationships off on a bad foot. Okay. Okay, yeah, that sounds fine. But yeah, I've definitely opened to tackling something smaller and giving economic development time because that's probably our next big one after housing. Okay, well, the next thing on the agenda, unless does anyone have anything they'd like to comment to the group on before we go on? Okay, next thing on the agenda is public business. No members of the public are here. So we'll move on, which brings us to the minutes. People can take a look at the minutes on September 13th real quick. We have a motion to approve the minutes. So moved. Motion from Stephanie, do we have a second? Second. Second from Ariane. Anybody need more time? Okay, those in favor of approving the minutes, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Minutes approved. And that brings us to the housing chapter. So to catch everyone up, I sent an email to everyone about some work I had done on it. Let me pull it up. So in hopes of getting some work done tonight, I went ahead and filled in the strategies as well as aspirations and goals in the template online. To do that, I drew from the housing chapter from 2019 and also from the work of the housing subcommittee. There's a document that we were, there's like a working document that we had been working on entitled collapsing the housing chapter that's also on the Google Drive. And I tried to pull everything from that and also everything, mostly everything from the plan from before or just to give us something to get started on tonight. I used the aspirations from our last discussions on this and then I used the goals from the previous housing chapter and modified it to fit the aspirations and I cut some of them out. There's also stuff that's cut out that we had decided that was more appropriate for transportation. So with that, we can jump in and read through these things and folks go ahead and give their comments. After we talk about the aspirations, goals and strategies right now, we can vote on it, we can have some ideas or some ideas out there, we can kick it back to Mike. He may have some strategies he wants to fill in later. And then when we go over the chapter language tonight, I'm not gonna do the walkthrough to save time. I'm trying to respond to feedback from folks who said, it wasn't their preferred style. So we're just gonna talk about any aspect of the chapter language that anybody wants to point out or bring up. And otherwise we'll just assume it's read and vote for it, vote on it without reading it out loud here. So with that, we'll start with the aspirations. Should I share my screen, is that what that helped? Yeah, you might as well. That way, if there's anybody who's watching the recording of this or watching it later on, they'll see what we're talking about on their screen. Okay, everybody see it? Yeah. Okay, so this is based on our discussions from before. I made wordsmiths a little bit, I don't remember. Sorry, I'm not gonna remember everything. But right now we have aspiration one, which is having to do with supply of safe and resilient housing that meets all in current or current future residents. The rental goals and the housing goals fall under that as far as the housing supply and the rental stock. And then aspiration B is, we didn't finish this discussion before, but it looked like there was interest in having a distinct aspiration that's related to fair housing and everything that goes with that. So right now it's, as you can see, it says mob killer will affirmatively further fair housing in order to protect all people from discrimination, promote economic opportunities and create a more diverse inclusive community. So, I also left a note there for the first aspiration that I took. We had the word efficient in there for energy efficiency, but since that's going into the energy chapter, I actually took that out because we're not gonna have a goal about that because it's covered elsewhere. What do people think about these aspirations? I'm gonna comment Kirby that comes up later in the chapter as well. And then in light of Mike's suggestion down there in line 12. So for aspiration A, it looked like Mike was saying that A dealt with zoning and implementation. So having, I wasn't sure if it might be worth being a little bit more specific about a diversity of housing supply, like the mix of type sizes, occupancies and levels of affordability. Cause I understand that aspiration as written sort of implies that, which works. But then in the chapter, we kind of get into it a little bit more specifically. And so maybe that's like enough, maybe just just kind of expanding upon it in a pointed way in the chapter is enough, but I wouldn't be opposed to adding those words about the mix of type sizes, occupancies and levels of affordability back into aspiration A and maybe saying, in order to meet the needs of all current and future residents. So that might be a little wordy. I don't know. I defer to what people think it may be enough to just sort of define it and blow it out in the chapter itself and keep it brief in the aspiration. Does anybody have a response to our song? The way I was thinking looking at this was that the type size and having housing stock that meets all needs goes into B a little bit. I mean, I'm not too worried about it. I'm fine if A and B kind of cover a little bit of the same ground, it was just a thought. Kirby, what's the definition of resilient housing? My other comments. Okay. As far as this goes, my understanding is it's like it's flood resiliency. In the chapter later. The goal to A here says maintains safety, health and resiliency of our homes and neighborhoods. That's where the resiliency comes up again for the goals. And then for strategies. Not a good sign. Am I spelling this wrong? I swear it's there. It is spelled wrong on number two. Oh yeah, look at that. Okay. The problem with the Excel version, it doesn't have any spell check on it, so. Did I spell that wrong? No, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. Did I spell that correctly? So yeah, it looks like in the strategies, the only strategy is the enforcement of river hazard areas in order to protect development of the most hazard, in the most areas and developers to elevate buildings to be safe in the flood hazard areas. And I'm pretty sure that's the only place it comes up with strategies. So I mean, it's probably another one of those ones like efficiency where we can kind of have a debate of whether or not it needs to get reiterated here because we just did the natural resources chapter where we talked about that's why we're doing the mapping. That's why we do the, it's kind of a little bit of the turning things over. The first one was protecting the waterways and protecting and identifying where natural hazards exist. And this one here is kind of looking at it from the housing standpoint of saying, keeping the housing out of the hazardous areas to keep people safe. As long as it's in one place or the other, it can be in both and that's not an issue, but as long as it's at least in one place, we're covered. As someone who talks about flooding all day, every day and most days, I struggle with that a little bit because I think it's hard to consider what we would do to the houses themselves in Montpelier to really make them resilient to flooding given the fact that a lot of Montpeliers in the downtown is in a special flood hazard area. I don't think we're going to elevate all of those properties. So I think there are some things we could do, but it's, I don't know how much we would actually be doing to the houses themselves. We would elevate the new construction anyway. Right, so we could have better standards so that new construction has to be elevated. Two feet above the flood plain. Yeah. Do we have any, I want to circle back to Marcel's thing. I feel like we left that unresolved, but do we have any suggestions to modify this to make it more clear and accurate? I mean, we could change the aspiration language to mention, to say flood resiliency. So is that something that people like to throw the word flood in there? Natural hazard resiliency or something. It makes it more clear. You don't have to dig in the chapter to know what we mean by that. Are we specifically only talking about flood resiliency though? I mean, is it possible that we could be talking about other kinds of climate resiliency as well? We aren't yet, but we could in the future. Yes, I'm fine with anything. Anybody has a suggestion? I'm struggling with these goals. I can't say, for three of them, I definitely will have no idea if ever we'll be able to say that they'll be met or not. And then for the top one, I'm also not sure that that's even measurable anymore. Nor is it necessarily, it's a messy or complicated measure. Like I feel like something cleaner is just like we want more housing and all types of it. And we want more people, like number of people and home seems like it's really what we're after. More is not a measurable goal. So are you, is there some other way to rephrase that? Is that you could still make it a measurable goal? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we could certainly select a number. I'm not going to throw something out, you know, off the top of my head here. I guess I could, but I'd be just making it up. It feels like a more of an aspirational statement. That thing, I disagree with you, but it might fit a little bit under aspiration A. There's an adequate supply of housing to help further, you know, about pillar's growth or something like that. Yeah, but I'm just trying to get to like, okay, at the end of this, are we going to be able to say that we've done that or not done that? And what's something we can tangibly work towards? And, you know, figuring out exactly what an adequate supply is, is maybe not completely possible or necessarily that valuable either, you know, odds are, no matter how much housing we build, we probably won't meet adequate supply, right? So what's like a realistic number or even just slightly beyond realistic that we'd want to shoot for? Is there anything in terms of that we know of that would be problematic in terms of our capacity for water or sewer that could serve as a good, like, well, we can't, you know, we can't build 5,000 homes because that would probably exceed that. Certainly probably won't do that regardless. But I'm just wondering if there's any other kind of physical limitation for us to be aware of. And aside from that, you could pick a number, you know, 1,000 a hundred a year. I know we've done things like that in the past that just becomes like a very simple to understand, clear towards what we want. You could certainly break it down into, you know, rental versus non-rental or looking at our housing type, you know, or demographics, you know, we've got, what are we, we're at like 92% only white households, like maybe we want that to be a different number in eight years. That could be a clear measure of like, what does it mean to successfully create a community that's inclusive of diverse people? It means that they've actually moved here, you know, not that we've created a lot of pamphlets that says that we support those things. We have, if we wanted to base it off community services, we, there is some language in the chapter here that's a little helpful. So, Montpelier currently has the capacity to increase our population without creating problems of insufficient services. So, I mean, that was one thing you mentioned, like, are you thinking like we could, if we wanted to redraft it in that terms, would that be, would that be better? Like increase the housing stock to the point to which community services are able to, I don't know, meet the needs of that housing, like make that the goal? I don't understand the capacity of them enough to know whether or not that'll be a limiting factor or not. And something tells me that we probably won't build enough homes to hit up against any of those ceilings. I could be wrong, but, so if that's the case and if people are on board with picking a number of homes, you know, what is that number going to be? I don't know. Yeah, the reason we chose those two numbers is those are real estate market standards. So, if you have rental vacancies above 5%, that's when you start to have prices, it's where the prices start to be in balance when it comes to rental. You wanna be in that area of about 5% rental vacancies because then there's enough for turnover and it's not driving up prices. When you're less than 5%, then you end up with prices being driven up, which is why the prices are going up. And the similar figure that the real estate folks look at, and these are taken nationally, is prices will rise when you have less than six months supply. And it's a, it's kind of a funky number, but it's a, how long, how does this stay on the market? How many houses are selling and how many of them are on the market? And if you have less than six months supply, then your prices are gonna go up. And as anybody knows right now, the prices are, they're selling in weeks and months. Before market, they're in the negative numbers in terms of they're selling before they go on the market. Yeah, so yeah, it's pretty, so that's why the housing committee kinda chose those numbers was that basically just keep building rental housings till we hit 5% vacancies. And that could be hundreds, that could be many hundreds, could be a thousand units before we finally reach 5% vacancy where we can understandably expect that according to market forces, the prices should stop going up once we can get vacancies up to 5%. And then there are a couple of other factors that could go into trying to make sure we are at 5%. That's why there's some conversations about trying to figure out how to regulate Airbnb's because what happens is you create a unit, goes on to Airbnb and it's not available. So you end up with a certain dynamic of other things, but mostly what they're talking about is our biggest issue we have is supply issue. And currently we're nowhere near 5%. And the six month supply of housing fluctuates really fast, unlike the rental housing which pretty much stays measured. The six month supply can fluctuate in a matter of six months, it could wash itself out and we're back to six month supply. It really depends on, it's a much more fluid number and much more difficult to manage. And that's one change I made by the way of the wording of this when I plugged it in here was I included the words continuously maintained for each of these goals because it's not like the goals met if we hit a six month supply once. The idea would be to continuously maintain it. Okay, so for the sake of time I'm gonna ask anyone who, if you're in favor of looking for an alternative way to define this, like John's interested in, raise your hand so that we have an idea whether we wanna try to come up with a different way to define it or if we wanna just stick with what's here. So raise your hand if you're interested in something different. Yeah, I don't think that, I don't think rental vacancy is a good way to go. So I am raising my hand. Okay, I'm seeing three and three and a half. Can I ask you a question, John? Why is the rental vacancy and the housing supply timeline, what's problematic about that? I honestly don't know why. I'm just trying to understand it better. Yeah, I think theoretically it can be helpful and like Mike said, there are these natural standards but we live in a very small community and that number is not readily available nor reliable. It's also messy and like I said, complicated. So really it's not like as a community, we don't really care exactly what a vacancy rate is, right? We care about whether people have housing and we are growing as a community and that people's needs are met. So this is sort of like supposed to be an indicator of whether or not that's happening and it could serve some purpose around that. But again, it's like, okay, well, how many, how will we know when we get to that 5%? That's a little unclear and it's sort of abstract. So really what we want is more people and more housing, right? So let's say that and let's count that and I don't think we'll ever get to a point where we'll be at 5% vacancy anyway. The only places where you'll see that across the state are those communities that have seen significant decline and even there, I don't think they're way off from 5% vacancy. So that could be not the best Vermont specific indicator. The other thing is like the type of housing since we have such a limited housing supply, you could conceivably get to those higher vacancy rates if the type of housing that you built is not affordable to X percentage of the population. So imagine if you have some kind of larger scale luxury housing development that can't meet those vacancy rates, we have a small enough housing supply that those numbers can be, those vacancy numbers can be pushed one way or another. So in my mind, it's just like, let's just build more housing and those could be of different types of housing and let's have more people in our community. Okay, Barb go ahead, but let's try to speed this up guys. We need to have some measure and it's actually, because we're a small community, it should be very easy to determine if we have 5% vacancies because we know the number of rental units and we can determine the number of vacancies. We can certainly determine it for residences as well. So it gives us a goal and the thing I like about it is that it's flexible as our population increases. So does the number of units that we need to be supplying. So it allows for that and it's a very, it really should be a pretty simple thing for us to do. If we were in a big city, that would be tougher, but it's really not that hard here. So let's, what do you guys think of this? Just the, it's a matter of how we're gonna measure it. I think, you know, we're all on board for increasing the supply. It's just how will it be measured? So I don't think it's gonna affect the strategies too much to change the goal language, but John, why don't you come up with something and for the next meeting as a replacement as a better way to do this and then we can take a look at that specific thing. And then, and then feel free to reach out to any of us during the course of that for input to improve it. Sure, I can do that. If someone wants to send me Montpelier's vacancy rate numbers, historic vacancy rate data, that'd be great. I think you might wanna check with either the realtors who are keeping track of it or potentially other people who are writing regular reports. Mike, is that something that Kevin Casey would keep track of? I don't know if we, I'll have to check with him on the rental vacancies. The month supply is a standard number that is generated every month by the folks at the realtors association. But the vacancy rate, I don't know, I'll have to check with Kevin. Kevin works my office, community development specialist. He's also a licensed real estate agent. If the number of vacancies is available, he would have it. But I think like John is suggesting, I don't think there's a standard number that we can, as I said, month supply is something we can just capture from the Vermont Realtors Association and it's a calculated number. I don't know if such a number exists for rental vacancies. I think Kevin has been putting together some numbers for the housing task force, Mike. Yeah, we periodically have a number. I don't know if it's a standardized number that comes out in time or if it's a number that gets basically assembled by looking at a variety of other facts. Cause I know he's talked about an estimate of 40 rental vacancies at any time. But when you're talking about 2,000 units, most of those 40 are tied up in other ways. But I'll have Kevin get in touch and let you guys know that John know. Okay, that's great. So let's just plan to do that so that we can move on and then we can tackle it later. But it seemed like people were interested in some alternative ideas. So go for it, John, and get back to us. I wanna circle back. Yeah, I was gonna say Jeff, if you jump back to the aspirations, I think if we start at the top and work our way down, I think the aspirations, when I reviewed what you put together, I thought I could see where all four of those pieces fit in. So I, and I think I was thinking the same way Marcella was about a few of these pieces about the diversity in the mix of housing types. And I was like, well, I guess if we're talking about housing that meets the needs of all, then it's assumed that we are providing a mix of types, houses, an occupancy level. So I kind of figure that that all fits in. So I thought these two aspirations were good and would capture everything that needed to get captured. So that was my opinion on that part of it. Yeah, the more we talk about it, maybe it just makes sense. Maybe we just flesh it out a little bit more in the chapter and basically just by that, I mean put a very fine point on like, in order to meet aspiration A, the needs of current and future residents, we will try to have a supply of housing in a mix of type sizes, blah, blah, blah. And I think we've had that in a couple other chapters where we went through, where in the, I guess I'll call it the working draft, we kind of have transportation. We want to have being able to live in Montpelier without owning a car. But in the working draft, we kind of defined in six or seven pieces what that meant. But when it came to the compressed version, we kind of struck all those out basically because we were trying to condense it down and our goal is that you can live in Montpelier without having to own a car. And here are all the strategies and we compress the strategies and compress the goals, but it's all still there, but it was written out long form in the working draft. So that way, if somebody really wanted to understand, well, what does that mean? Then we could have this longer piece. And I think that's what we'll have here is in the working draft, the draft that the ABCD kind of breaks that into its pieces to go through and say, if you really want to understand what it means to have housing for all, this is what we're talking about. Or to meet the needs of all folks, this is what it's going to mean. We're going to need a mix of housing types, a mix of housing sizes, mix of occupancies in a mix of levels of affordability. So I think that's, I think it's all there. I think we've done this before in previous chapters to kind of cut the extraneous out. Our current ACS vacancy rate is 8% with a margin of error of 10%. ACS is probably the worst source of data. It is pretty bad. It's a great source if you've, for larger populations. Yeah, larger populations and stuff that's a little bit less dynamic. Okay. So what I'm hearing is people are basically fine with the aspirations that's are written right now and we can move on to the goals. Because John did point out some other things about the other goals we can get to. But before we do that, I just want to make sure everybody's okay with the aspirations right now. Yeah, that takes care of it. Start clean back. Okay. Okay. So John, you mentioned how you thought goals two, three and four were lacking measurability or what was it? Yeah, I mean, when I read all of these, the first thing I ask myself is, can I say with certainty that we will have met this goal or not met this goal? And when I read those, I struggle to do that. And I think some of the sense we've talked a little bit about this was that not everything is going to be able to be measurable, take for instance, the reason why we have building codes and we enforce the building codes, the residential building codes, that were one of a few communities that enforces residential building codes. But the reason we do is to maintain safety. And if we just go through and say, well, because it's not measurable, we really shouldn't be having it as a goal. I think that's, I think there are many things that we do that we don't necessarily measure the outcomes or the outputs necessarily but it's being done with a specific goal in mind. And like enforcing building codes is one of them. So I mean, so I don't know if this helps or not, but the goal is to maintain safety, et cetera. And then here's the four strategies that we have right now to do that. Three of them are continues. So it's continuing enforce building and health codes, or no, two of them are continues. And then there's conduct a housing survey to find out how the rental units are meeting housing standards. And then continue to enforce the river hazard area regulations. And then there's a strategy to, this would be the only thing that's not maintaining, I guess, amend the sprinkler incentives program to add opportunities to reduce the cost of retrofitting structures. That's, those are the measurable things, I suppose, for that goal. I'm struggling with the sprinkler incentives program add opportunities to reduce the cost. What does that mean? In other words, incentivize the city gives it pays incentives to reduce the cost. That came from the existing plan. That's not my language. So I don't know that we can improve it. Ends of specificity. I think it's a little higher up there were a couple of improve the action verb was improve and they felt a little non-specific to me. And I was thinking, yeah, improve provisions of the tax stabilization program, improve the excess accessory dwelling unit program. I just don't know that just mean fund more or change specifically. I would think we would want to be a little bit more specific there. That way it would become measurable, at least as soon we did it or we didn't. In those two cases, the specific point is to provide incentives. And that's how we could improve the accessibility of those, the use of them would be to give incentives. But we didn't specifically say that further down. What is the incentive in those programs? Is it more money? Well, it's certainly for the ADU program it is. It's basically property tax breaks. Yeah, the way it's written in here is to continue to provide incentives through the sprinkler incentives program to reduce the cost of retrofitting structures for sprinklers. And yes, that is a tax savings. You get a tax discount. It's not exactly breaking. It's not exactly breaking records now in terms of what's happening. So it seems like- No, but the idea is not to get rid of it. I try to capture all of the things that we are doing already as a municipality. And that is a program that does exist. Yeah, if we're adding opportunities, though, what are the additional opportunities? Whereas before we specified summer incentives, what are the opportunities that we might add to this? Yeah, and I was just saying what is in the plan itself. So this is what is in Kirby's on the screen, not what is in what the task force sent to you guys, what the housing task force sent to you guys says, continue to provide incentives through the sprinkler incentive program. It doesn't say to add opportunities. And the add opportunities might have come from the collapsing document bar from you. I mean, I think you might be criticizing your own language right now. Well, it probably is because it needs more specificity. Certainly, yes. I mean, actually, this is the one I have the most trouble with anyway. Are we talking about residential sprinkler systems? Are we talking about commercial? I mean, it's a whole world of difference. So, but I didn't remember seeing any distinction in the original document. Okay, so a threshold question here for our purposes and developing strategies. Are people more in favor of continuing the sprinkler incentives program as it's currently running? Or do you want to try to bolster it? So, and then we can talk about how we bolster it if that's actually something that we're gonna have as a strategy. But it's currently a continue. So, if you're in favor of just continuing it, will you just raise your hand, indicate that? Does anyone know enough about it? No, have we gotten any sort of feedback that says it really needs like a boost? Or, and I guess I would say that with the other two that are the improved that I mentioned up top. So this, I mean, the continuing which came from the housing task force, right, Mike? So I guess we can infer that they didn't think it needed a boost. Yeah, we can probably make those- I'm not sure that's something they even discuss, is it? The sprinkler incentives program, is that within their purview? I mean, it is from the standpoint of they make recommendations as to how things affect housing. You know, in the past they came out, you know, in support of your proposal to remove the sprinkler requirement because it was argued that it was a barrier to the construction of new housing. So they, you know, they review anything that has an impact on housing and make a comment. And the fire chief and the building inspector had their, you know, gave their two cents on what they felt should be the requirement. So does this even exist? I thought it was for the, because we required it, we required sprinklers of single family homes and duplexes whereas no one else did. So then we created this to help upset that, but then we got rid of the sprinkler requirement. So does this still- This still exists as an incentive. If you, it's not mandatory, but if you chose to put a sprinkler in your house, you could contact the assessing off the assessor. And I believe he will reduce your property taxes by 10% if you install that. And I don't know if it's just, I believe it's just the municipal rate. So you take the municipal portion of your taxes and that's how much it would reduce. The larger point here is for multifamily. If we're talking strictly about housing, it's about multifamily housing where they might not otherwise, it might be an existing building that doesn't have sprinklers because this is specifically about retrofitting. So I don't know, it would be good to know how many units have actually taken, multifamily units have taken advantage of this program by virtue of, it seems like in calculating it, it seems like the incentive needs to be higher, but it doesn't matter really. Is this, I mean, I made the assumption that this was available for, if you were gonna put in 20 units and put in sprinklers that this is available for that, is that true? I, so I'll talk a little bit generally at first. So usually what happens when we do these is I'll go through and if you look at all of the ones that we've already approved, they'll have that topic line like you do and they'll have a large chunk. So usually I'll go through and explain what is fully involved in this. So what would happen is once you guys approve this, I'll go through and like the transportation plan, like the energy plan, they're gonna be much bigger descriptions underneath that continue the sprinkler incentive program where it'll explain the full details. In this case, I don't know the nuanced details of, I'm pretty sure everybody who's got a sprinkler. So in the case of commercial and industrial, you are required under state rules unless you get a waiver to put in a sprinkler. So there's been a question and I know it was a debate that we've had. I don't remember what the answer was, but there was a debate of should we really be giving an incentive to people who are required to do it? So that was one question like those, but I believe everybody gets that benefit. It was a big push by the previous fire chief. It was kind of an idea of, we're gonna try to work ourselves out of a future job. And the idea was if we could get everybody to have sprinklers in their homes and we wouldn't need to be manning a 19-person fire department. And that was the theory back, this is before Bob Gowens. That was the theory, was that sprinklers save lives and we're gonna get everybody to have sprinklers. Now, whether that's, it's still the policy on the books, whether it should change, that's up for debate, but I could go through, I'll go through when I put this together to kind of explain what we know. It does this and this is the benefits and this is why we wanna continue to do it. Well, just, I mean, this is the cost of retrofitting structures for sprinklers. So these are buildings that currently don't have them. We have a number of buildings in the city that don't have them. If they were built new, they would be required to have it, but they don't right now. And so it is actually, it's good to have an incentive. It's just a question of, is it enough to make a difference? And how does it, like the state has their tax credits and they'll cover 100% of the cost of those in our downtown and growth center, right? I prefer it for qualifying structures. I think they provide 100% up to a certain dollar amount. Yeah. I do know there is that grant program and we do assist writing those grant applications. What do people think about rewriting this so that we say that someone will be responsible for reviewing the sprinkler incentive program and recommending improvements that would lead to more housing development? Is anybody opposed to that? As long as we can think of somebody to who would look at that and if we do think it would promote more housing. Could be us or it could be somebody else that Mike could point out. I'm sure Mike can almost with that. What do people think of that? I'm seeing a couple of nods. Seeing a thought bubble above John's head that says I hate it. You didn't know it was telepathic. I think it's fine. I'm a bit indifferent. I don't think this is like a... Yeah. Okay. I mean, we can leave it at that and like Mike we're definitely open to further improvements and ideas there. In general... To put? Go ahead. Is it a struggle to get people to put sprinklers in buildings? New buildings? Well, no, new buildings are required to but in existing buildings? Yeah. Oh, to retrofit, okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of the thing I was thinking into just because the language if we're... I don't wanna like find about semantics here. But if we're trying to lead to more housing that's not really what this is doing if it's about retrofitting. Yeah. It's retrofitting existing housing. It goes to the safety. Yeah, and there's kind of a mix of two things that are going on here that I may have to split into two separate strategy bubbles because one is the sprinkler incentive program which is more than just retrofits. It applies to everybody. Building a new home, if you build a new home and you put a sprinkler in it and now it's not required to put a sprinkler into a new home previously had been. And it's now been removed from single two family homes. But if you chose to, you could qualify for the sprinkler incentive. You could get 10% tax reduction. So again, that's one program. And then the second program is how do we handle the cost of retrofitting structures? So if you had a three unit that was going to a four unit it's now required to have a sprinkler. Is there gonna be an incentive that's gonna help to get sprinklers to how do we handle that? And maybe that's where the study is, what can we do to provide more of an incentive to the retrofits? But there is still the existing program for everybody else to put in a sprinkler. The idea was trying to offset some of the costs. If it cost you $10,000 put in that sprinkler then maybe over a reasonable period of time that 10% tax savings will add up to help defer enough of that cost to make it worthwhile to do. I think the answer is the reason why not many people do it is because it's not enough of an incentive. It does actually pay for itself because it's a permanent tax credit. So it will eventually pay for it. It just may take 50 years to do it but it will eventually pay off the sprinkler. If you own the building for 50 years then. Yeah, and that's the one thing we were trying to do is to increase the tax credit put an end date on it. And that's getting people who are already in the program to get a bunch of people who are vested in the program who don't want that change because they have long ago paid off their sprinkler and are just getting the 10% credits now. And it's just a theory of how you see it. They see themselves as less of a risk and less needing of the fire department and therefore they should get a tax continue to get their tax credit. That's policy discussion is not my, where I'm at, so. Okay, so like, so noted that my command of turning us into two different strategies but is everybody okay with the state of it right now? I amended a little bit to to focus on affordability of rentals and homeownership as opposed to new development. Okay, so I'm going to take it that our sprinkler discussions over. Do we want to pop back up to this tax stabilization? Was there anything further to talk about there? I just feel like those two, number two and number three are unclear. If it's like the same as the sprinkler one, it's just continue to improve or continue to provide incentives or if we have a specific way we're hoping to improve those things. I think my understanding is like the idea again here would be someone should need, would need to review the program and offer recommendations for improvement. Yeah, that would be fair. Number three, the ADU program, the city does not actually provide incentives. Those incentives are coming from elsewhere. So once, if the city were to provide it, potentially more would happen. But I think your point Kirby about having, studying those two might make sense. Would people feel better if we, if we changed the language to say like review and recommend improvements? So that the way it was originally written was to continue the provisions of the tax stabilization program that provide assistance in the development of commercial rental housing units. So the original continue to do what we're doing. The improved suggestion came from the working group. Improve as in increase. In other words, take a step forward by increasing them in a reasonable manner. So yeah, that would in theory, tax stabilization works in one of two ways. You're gonna either increase the percentage of tax stabilization or you increase the number of years. And I think I believe currently commercial housing is eligible for up to 50% tax stabilization for a period of 10 years. I believe at the highest level, if you were to receive the highest level, that's what you'd get. So recommending an increase would mean either increasing the percent or increasing the length of term, which I don't believe we can do. I believe under state law, we're limited to tax stabilizations up to 10 years. I don't believe we can stabilize beyond that. I could be wrong, but pretty sure there's a limit to what we- Is that for any size project? It has to be commercial. Under state law, we can only stabilize commercial projects. So we generously defined commercial to include what are called commercial residential, which is five or more units. So those are the only ones that we've, I mean, if you can find the lawyers that are willing to generously go beyond that, but we're limited under state law. Being a Dylan's rule of state, we kind of got to follow what they say. And I believe the tax stabilization language under the state puts it at certain percent and a certain only commercial. It looks good like that, Kirby. Yeah, I mean, it's like a review might come up with it. Like if state law doesn't allow us to do any legal improvements or improvements to the program itself, then we could at least promote it better or something. How do people feel about these now? Marcello, does the language I added help? Or do you still- It's a much more specific if we don't have particular ways to improve, at least this will allow us to get to a suite of ideas to improve or maintain. Yeah, and for any of these things, Mike, if you want to put planning commissions responsible, I mean, that's fine. But if there's a group that's more appropriate, that's fine too. Okay, so we've looked at these. Are there any others that stand out to people? I'm gonna take suggestion from Barb note off of that third one, because we covered that. There's another suggestion from Barb that might be for discussion here. It's this is from the working group and something that she had put in the document. Amend the zoning ordinance to encourage multi-family housing and then the exploitation is expand the zoning districts that allow multi-families permitted or conditional uses. I may have altered the language there to try to make it specific. Yeah, cause I can't necessarily remember the discussion on this one, Kirby, as to whether or not we felt that there were more appropriate zoning districts that should have it. I think every zoning allows it, except for the rural district, which doesn't have sewer and water. They don't allow multi-family, but it is permitted or conditional in every other zoning district. Now, we could have a debate as to whether or not they should all allow it as a permitted use. Currently, there are a number of districts where multi-family is a conditional use. And really, the conditional use is generally, at this point, looking at one thing and that's character of the neighborhood. So you have to have the density, so you'd have to have a big enough piece of land, but if you were up on Town Hill, and I'll just grab that, or maybe even Terrace Street, if you get out in one of these res nine, res 2100, 2400 districts, if you have a big enough parcel, you could currently, you'd have to go through conditional use to put in a multi-family structure. And it would have to be judged as to whether or not it's in the character of the neighborhood. And then they'll argue that we don't need it because our housing occupancy rate for rental housing is at 8%, give or take 10%. Or they will go through and say that there aren't any multi-family units out here. Therefore, a multi-family will be out of character because there aren't any out here. And basically, because it's not out here, we won't allow it out here. But if in theory, if you had a five-acre parcel in these areas, which res 21, it's basically half-acre zoning, you could have a five-acre, you'd have 10 units, that would be multi-family. But. But they still have to meet everything out. Even if it was permitted, they'd still have to meet all of the setbacks and massing, right? Yep, setbacks, massing, the parking requirements, they'd have to still meet all of those other requirements. So I think there's definitely a good argument we certainly could review where we think it would be appropriate to have conditional use. But I think as this is written, I don't think it really, I think we've already achieved that standard of allowing multi-family as permitted or conditional because I think we already do that. But we should review whether or not more districts should have multi-family as a simple permitted use. That meets the bulk and massing, meets the parking requirements, meets the density requirements. Obviously, if you wanna have. Sounds like it's found the way it's written. Yeah. I actually like it. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do and it's something that could result in more housing, more units available in the city, which is what it's all about. Anybody else have anything on this? If we don't have any other comments, I can move down to the next, there's another BARB suggestion to expand the scope and authority of the Housing Task Force Committee. I think originally it was that the Housing Task Force Committee wanted to just continue to exist basically. And so the difference here is that it says to expand the scope and authority. Do you remember what else you were thinking there, BARB? Well, I'm just looking on my other computer so I can see what the collapsed version was before it went into this document. Haven't found that section yet. Housing Task Force, oh, there it is. I just, I took it verbatim. The scope and authority of the Housing Task Force to coordinate housing initiatives. Yeah. Right. So basically looking at expanding beyond what they're doing now, because having attended some of their meetings, it does seem as if they're pretty constrained in terms of how they can use funding. And essentially the funding has to end up being funneled through housing authorities. So I think that there is more potential in the Housing Task Force to be able to take a proactive role because the city can't. So Housing Task Force could become the active, the actor here and make a difference. What do other people think about this? Do we need to share up the language a little bit? I have to say, I don't think they're gonna be interested in that change personally, I just. Not yet, Mike, but they could be in the future. Wait, they don't want an expanded scope and authority? I think where it wants to go is to, you know, we, you know, we like to, we describe that we don't build anything. So we aren't, you know, we're trying to come up with programs and incentives and doing community development and working with grants to help our partners be the housing developers. We aren't the housing developers. And the Housing Task Force trying to make them housing developers, I don't think is where they want to go. They want to continue their role as identifying the barriers to housing and incentivizing and helping our partners to develop housing rather than having us become housing developers ourselves. They're really in terms of restricted, in terms of what kind of housing. It's not the development of multiple housing types. It's not the development of, you know, even potentially market rate. It's only low income housing that they can pass on through the housing authorities. So the idea would be to give them a more latitude, in other words, because the city can't. No, they can spend money on things that aren't low income housing. In fact, you know, this housing plan talks about wanting to make sure we expand housing for everybody. I mean, this housing plan itself that we're looking at came from them and they've advocated we need housing for all incomes, low income right up to higher income and they identify the barriers to those housing as well. The first time home buyer program is not necessarily income qualified. It's being a first time home buyer. There are a number of programs that they could create that wouldn't maybe not necessarily specifically target low income. I mean, a lot of them generally do because higher income folks have more resources available to them. But I don't think there's anything that technically prevents them from advocating for other housing programs that might be more broadly applicable. All right, so it sounds like this doesn't do anything. Yeah, do we want to put it aside for now? And Mike, would you be able to ask the housing task force if they had any interest in this that resonates at all? I mean, I could certainly ask them. Just yet you could just ask the planning commissions wondering if you feel like there's a need for expanded scope and authority. If they say no, then that would inform your decision. There's another thing I added here that I put it in almost as a question. Get to that in a second. Oh, shoot. Well, I'll put it over there for now anyway. It's not the right box for it. So a little further down here, I don't remember my thought process exactly here, but when I was going through this, there was some content that I was looking at here that made me question whether there's any kind of guidance for the Housing Trust Fund to decide or to incorporate like thinking about helping make sure that the money's being spent to help affordable housing as opposed to just anybody who's just asking. But maybe this isn't a need. Maybe this is already taken care of in the current process. So I'm just wondering what are like folks who know more about the Housing Trust Fund think about is there a need for a policy or guidance that helps guide it towards need as opposed to just anybody? Mike, can you like tell us more about it? Cause I'm... Yeah, so I think Housing Trust Fund, it gets an annual allocations. We also have some extra money that revolves back. So a lot of the funds that we loan out are 0% loans that are paid back on sale of the house. So we get a number of these revolved back over time. So we do have a set of funds that come in. I know we developed a policy recently. I don't know what it was, but off the top of my head, all the details of it. But a lot of the Housing Trust Fund policies are really geared towards how you can establish programs to spend the money. So it's kind of, you kind of got to think of it as a two-step thing. You don't actually spend the money out of the trust fund directly, usually. We will sometimes go in for specific projects to make a donation of $100,000 to the Berlin homeless shelter, for example. I believe that's a proposal that either, if it hasn't come in, it will be coming in. But most of the other ones are programs. So the first time home buyer program will request $60,000 out of the Housing Trust Fund. And these are the rules that we're gonna use to administer those funds. And then the Housing Trust Fund Committee, which unfortunately is a separate committee than the Housing Task Force. So the Trust Fund Committee will first make a recommendation that the Trust Fund will then forward on to the City Council and the City Council will then approve the program for being used. So City Council can then go through and change the program. So usually these programs are developed by our partners. So we always say it's our first time home by our program. Well, it's not. It's Downstreet's first time home by our program. They already have a program that qualifies people and spends the money. And if you qualify for a Downstreet $10,000 first time home by our program and you're buying a house in Montpelier, we will match that $10,000 with another $10,000. So that's how the program worked. We have very low overhead on administration because they're doing all the work. We're just throwing an extra $10,000 onto the sum. So that's kind of the way it works is anybody can come in with a proposal and we are now getting a similar proposal for the ADU program. So the ADU program we're currently doing is a pilot program run by Tyler Moss and his group. Eventually when those funds are gone we wanna continue that program. So we're gonna have to come up with a program who's gonna administer it and then they will request money from the Housing Trust Fund on an annual basis to say we want $60,000 going to this program too. And we'll just have to make sure we have enough money to support the program for that year. So that's really how it works is programs come in or projects come in to ask for funding. Most of the projects are only vary these high profile projects. Taylor Street, French Block, Berry Street, some of the Berry Street projects. Basically if it's a down street project that's a housing Vermont project they probably come in and ask for funding. So I guess that's the best I can summarize for how it's currently used. The policies we have are policies for how to create a program to spend the money. It's not so much the policies. It is not itself the program. So it sounds like maybe we don't need this idea. What do you think, Mike? I think it's important that we have policies. I just, I might have the Housing Trust Fund or task force figure out what these policies should be. I think we have a policy document because we recently went through and collapsed out a bunch of other old revolving loan funds. We always get questions from the state and federal government about what are you doing with your old revolving loan funds that have money in it. And so we finally took the money out of those revolving loan funds and tacked them on to our Housing Trust Fund. So in doing that, we had to kind of create a policy document. I'm pretty sure we already have one. I also, I don't think we need the two, both of the ones above and below that one. I think we can change the first one to say identify alternative funding to expand the Housing Trust Fund. And I don't think we need both. Should we combine them though or just, just, is it worth mentioning this policy in the plan? What do people think? Like I threw this in here, but I'm not at all attached to it. Like if we, okay. They're separate items and they're related. I mean, I think we currently fund the Housing Trust Fund at about $140,000, $150,000 a year. We're trying to get it up to $200,000 a year. So that's one objective. Certainly we could meet that objective by getting alternative funding sources but the Housing Trust Fund, the Housing Task Force has very specifically been trying to identify other sources of funding. So they've had discussions about, can we, if we did a local options tax, should we be doing that? Can we get a charter change to tax accessory or Airbnb's, those types of things. So they are very specifically looking at, where can we get funding that's not from the general fund? Can we tax the sale of mansions? I think there was a discussion about that. If you sell a house that's worth more than $500,000, that a percentage of that will go into the Housing Trust Fund. Aren't they studying revenue sources in order to expand the trust fund to get to 200,000 reserves by 2025? I can let it go. It feels like one thing to me. If you say it's two, that's fine. It can be one thing. Word of the word, we could combine them. Do we, anyone else wanna combine it or just, or leave it as two strategies? We're talking about, you're talking about these two, right, Stephanie? Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I skipped over the other conversation. It's okay, you were bored with it. Suddenly let us know. I certainly wasn't trying to cut you off, I mean, we can go back. No, no, I just, I went ahead and moved it over to like a thing maybe Mike could check in with the Housing Trust Fund when he checks in the, or the Housing Task Force when he checks in about the other thing. See what they say. So I'm putting it aside for now. But combine them, yes or no. Those in favor of combining, raise your hand. See two hands. See a half a hand. If no one else cares, it's fine. Just a different, yeah. Yeah. Okay, we'll just keep them, what's that Marcelle? I was just thinking I feel a little under informed. So. We can keep them separate. It sounds like Mike was slightly leaning toward separate so whatever. Okay, gonna go on down to the next ones. We already covered these are the A2s that go to the second or second goal, which is about safety. Maintain safety, health and flood resiliency around the neighborhoods. We have these four. Before I go on to those, just had a comment. I'm not sure where it fit in. The one thing that strikes me that it's missing but related to the, is it like the marketing and outreach program, market existing incentives to housing builders, developers. I feel like we need more, like we have very few builders and developers and the developers we have develop larger scale housing. And I think there's, I think there's room for more, I think guess what there would be all like small developers. So people doing duplexes and fourplexes that don't think of themselves as developers. Like just members in our community. Like I don't think anyone's coming to Montpelier and going to build a bunch of housing. It's going to be like small development built by us. And a lot of, we don't have, a lot of people either don't have the expertise or don't think they do. So one thing I would propose maybe is looking at, now the, I think I've mentioned this before, the incremental developers alliance does small developer boot camps. And I think that sometimes just gets translated and then as we play telephone or this evolves, it's like, we'll just have like a marketing and outreach program. And I'm not sure if that's where this originated or not, but I would really like us to do, I guess small developers bootcamp to get people to become those. Otherwise I feel like we're just marketing to the people who know this, the same like three people who know these things. So John, are you thinking, I mean, could we replace the word developers with something that's more descriptive of the small scale projects that you're referring to? Yeah, I think we could just say like host small developer bootcamp from the, like be just very specific with what I'm talking about. It'd be interesting to see in Montpelier if anybody took us up on that because the whole word developer has a bad connotation. Yeah, I think that's the point. And like challenging people like, what is, you know, I mean, historically, this is how Montpelier was developed like the Montpelier that everyone loves, right? It was just incremental, small, smaller buildings built by people who lived here. And there's no reason that couldn't still happen. There are tons of, I think of architects, landscape architects, attorneys, people in real estate, like they have one of like the five skills that you need to develop housing. If they got together trained by some of those other people, they could also start doing these smaller scale developments. So maybe it's wishful thinking, but there are people doing this and I just put a link in the, at least I thought I did. I saw that pop up momentarily. I don't know how to do it. So I threw an additional sentence in there just to kind of add this into what's already there because I feel like we could just expand on it. There you go. You have the link. I think provide training or bootcamp for potential small scale developers such as homeowners. Does that capture everything? Well, I think what you were referring to, John, was something like duplex, you know, developing a duplex might not necessarily be done by a homeowner, for example. We need to develop developers. People who don't think of themselves as, Barb, you need to become a developer. Like how do we... Don't worry about that. I'm working on that. But what we, I mean, we need to figure out another word for developer, John. It's true. Where's the source when you need it? Yeah, what's another word for a housing maker? Yeah, that's right. A creator. Yeah, a creator of homes, of buildings that have people. Yeah, well, that's why I think there's such as in there to try to get at what we mean by it. I mean, I wrote such as homeowners and related professionals. Be something better. Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, if we have the bootcamp, it's great it'll end that all. Who shows up, whoever shows up, whoever shows up. And I don't think it matters what we put in the plan, but do people agree? I mean, should we be putting energy or effort towards trying to cultivate that in the computer? I think it's certainly make a difference. It could make a difference. Yeah. I don't know that we really need to even need the qualifier for saying potential small scale developers. I think we could end the sentence there. Okay, I can remove that. You could say like from local professionals or something if you wanted to. I think the homeowners is gonna throw people off. Professionals and non-professionals. Yeah, local people. Yeah, I mean, the point of it might be to get non-professionals up to a point of knowing when they need to get help, but to be able to do it themselves. Provide training or bootcamp for potentials, local small scale developers. Yeah, I mean, I think you could leave bootcamp out because training sort of says that. Unless you're planning something more. John seemed to like that word, so. Are you planning something more intense, Chad? I'm on you. It's a three-day bootcamp. You lock them in the room? You can't leave until you learn this? Not in COVID times. That's right. Okay, I think that's... Yeah, we've had a couple of different... That is one of the things that was envisioned with that program was the smaller these bootcamps to get folks. The other angle is to try to get some larger housing developers. A lot of the stuff that we've been talking about requires the construction of... We kind of have two things. We can't really just break into one to go through and say, oh, well, we just need to do infill. Infill is gonna be important. It's gonna get us where most of the easiest to develop land has already been developed. So we're kind of going to be doing a lot of infill, but in a few places we do have the need for larger developers. And it's been pointed out, we really don't have a developer class here in central Vermont, which is somewhat surprising. If you go to Burlington, you go to Chittenden County, you have multiple professional housing developers who build housing. So when we talk about developing Saban's pasture or developing Stonewall Meadows or even just that project that's up on the Econol Lodge in the old Brown Derby lot, the ability to build 45 housing units on a two acre lot is that takes a professional developer class. Mom and Pop are not gonna be building that scale, but we just don't have that scale here. So that is a proposal of folks that are coming in from Chittenden County and what we're trying to do as a little bit of that marketing is to try to get some of those folks to start thinking about Montpelier and these areas around here to start considering doing some projects, where it's appropriate, where it fits the zoning, where it fits the character, but we can't build those. We don't have that class of developer here in town or in Washington County. We really need to make sure that we can get some folks in who know how to do that scale of project in order to do them right. So that's a little bit of what that other side of that marketing is. We need to get, we just don't have enough builders and we need more small scale builders and we need to encourage a couple of these large scale ones to at least recognize. They're not gonna move to Washington County. There's not enough to do here, but to get them to start thinking about moving some of their capital and some of their work out this way would help us out a lot. It's so good. It would certainly help if they, if they had a certain approach to projects might guarantee them more success than other approaches. And I think, we've gotten such a bad reputation for developers now that anything we can do would be a step forward. I like the optimism. We have no place to go but up. It sounds like the strategy covers both things, local developers and bringing in big ones from outside. So this sounds good. Sounds like we've got it all covered there. Okay. I'm gonna move on. Does anyone have anything else on the A1 strategies? Before we go on to A2. Okay. So A2 is a smaller list. It's these four things. We touched on it earlier. Does anyone have anything about the A2 strategies? We already beefed up some of the language under the sprinkler. Okay. So I'll move on from A2. At this point, at this point I'm not trying to get this done tonight, by the way, because we still have the chapter, but that's like the next meeting we'll lay him to take care of the rest of the stuff, by the way. Okay. So we're on to... Sorry to... Can we go back to the building codes thing? I just, I just wonder if there's, I mean, sort of what we're talking about the sprinkler. So just saying continue, is there any improvement in code enforcement or anything that would be beneficial or could be looked into? If we were willing to pay for more positions on the city staff, I mean, we currently have a, someone who does that, does building inspectors, but he's also our health officer and he reviews plans. And, you know, basically we would need more staff. Yeah, I just, I just find all these ones that are, we have to sort of continue or maintain. I agree with that. I look at it, I look at it like, the plans recognizing that this is an area where we're pretty good on and we're not trying to be ambitious about. The A1 goals tend to be what we're ambitious about and these A2 goals are more about maintaining because we think we're in a good spot. That's what I think the plan sets now, like whether we agree with that and want to go that way. It's a different question. Okay. Do we, do we, do we have anything else on A2? Did anybody else wanna respond to our own comment? Okay, so B1, again, the aspiration goes to fair housing, discrimination, diversity, all those issues. The first goal is to maintain the city's commitment to affirmatively furthering fair and accessible housing by focusing on the areas where needs are not currently met. So this language, I changed around a bit. There were some aspects of it that I thought were kind of problematic. There was like an emphasis on the city's failings kind of and I just kind of reworded it so it didn't sound that way. But so the focus right now in the language is to, is on fair and accessible housing and then where needs are not currently met. So there's not really a blame there. And then the strategies are ones that go to, a lot of these go to vulnerable populations and some of them are improving things, trying to introduce new access to new things. So we have this, we have something that I think this first one is from the current plan. It's the ADA Revolving Loan Fund Program. So this is something that's in our current plan to allow matching fund grants for making housing accessible. And then the next three, the first one was something that's in the plan that was a recommendation from Housing Task Force, I believe, and it's about senior housing projects. I went ahead and created two other ones based on the same idea, but for other areas. So there's senior housing to incentivize that and then to incentivize the creation of recovery housing. That's a concern I've had when it comes to housing and nuclear because the only drug addiction recovery housing that exists in Vermont from what I've heard and I've heard this from the people from Down Street that it only exists in Burlington and nowhere else in Vermont. So this would be something where we at least have zoning districts that allow that to be. So I'm thinking maybe as a permitted use, and then the same thing here is for transitional housing. This came up in my conversation with Shayna, who's the staff for the Procedure Act, Social and Economic Justice Advisory Committee. They're very interested in housing. I told them some of the things we were planning to do with the plan and she was really excited for it, by the way, but transitional housing, which is to transition in times of homelessness, that goes to, she thought that we needed something in here for that. So that's where this strategy comes from. It's phrased in the same way as the senior housing and recovery housing. And then I think these other two came from, I think the housing task force. I guess I'm just wondering on the recovery housing and the transitional housing, and Mike, you can answer this. Is that more specifically a need to have just group homes be allowed? Or what's the exact zoning category they would fall under? Yeah, I mean, so for the three of them there that say amend the unified development regulations, I don't know if any of those were in the original from the housing task force. So we don't separate out, yeah, because that's the subcommittees version. But the senior housing, we don't have senior housing as a separate category. We just have housing. So we don't, it's not a separate use. And we also already don't regulate the occupancy type, so we don't really get into the families. So whether it's transitioning homeless, and this was true also for folks who are coming out of prison as well. Our community justice department downstairs, they have a program for helping folks who get out of prison to get housing and you've got housing opportunities for them as well. That goes to the housing for all concept. But those are all, we don't separate them out as a separate use. So if it's a single family home, it can be used in that other way. I mean, if it qualifies as a group home, then it's protected under state law as congregate living. But if it's a single family home and you wanna rent it out only to folks who have previously been homeless, you don't need a zoning permit. There's not a special zoning district, special zoning classification. It's a use of a single family home. And so from that standpoint, we're already kind of already allowing that by not, by not identifying it as a separate use, we're basically allowing it. Mike, don't we have senior housing and group homes identified as different uses? Group homes are because they're separate. So we've split housing into two groups, two Uber groups. So one group are your dwelling units. So if you're, if every unit in whatever the structure is, has its own kitchen, bathroom, living and sleeping facilities, all independent, all separate, then those are the dwelling units and those are your single unit, two unit, three unit, four unit, multifamily. Your second classification are your congregate living. So those are ones where one of those, one of those four or five uses is shared. So it becomes congregate. If let's say you're in a dormitory, you have your own private room with your own private lock, but you share your bathrooms and you go to the cafeteria to eat. That's a congregate living. That's a separate use and it's classified under congregate living. So group homes tend to be in this ladder. They can be in either group, but if they're in a single family home, they're a protected use and are treated any single family home can be a group home as long as it's eight or less folks in it. It becomes congregate living. Senior housing is identified. Yeah, the reason I pulled this up is if this isn't in red from Barb's document, that means that she pulled it from the current plan. Like there is something on senior housing already in. But we already have an existing use designation for senior housing and a definition. So not sure how that fits in. Just I have to sign off in a few minutes here, but just my two cents. I mean, I don't think that we need that about the senior housing. I mean, my experience in working in Vermont and housing for 13 years is most communities are pretty welcoming to senior housing. So I don't see that as a problem. I don't know if it has been a problem in Montpelier, but that's not it. As Mike said, it falls under general multi-family zoning. But I definitely would be interested in maybe just one item talking about allowing different kinds of congregate uses. Cause I think that's really useful cause I think not all potential recovery housing or homeless housing is gonna happen in a single family home. And it often does, there's other opportunities for other properties. The project that was not pursued because of the fear of neighborhood resistance. So I think something about congregate housing would be useful. I think that's a good idea. That's awesome. And it looks like, I mean, we're gonna have to we're gonna have to like wrap things up. So we can kind of leave it there with like knowing that these are some things we wanna, some strategies we wanna maybe improve and make better. And sounds like Ariane, you have some great ideas. So before the next meeting, if you can think about what would make for a good effective strategy in this area or maybe all three of those things, that would be awesome. And then that's where we can just pick it up next time. Does that sound good? I think that's the end of the list, isn't it? Or is there more beyond that? There's a four as well. There's not much or a B four. I mean, so we're getting there. It looks like we'll be able to definitely wrap it up in the next meeting. And it sounds like we'll have a quorum to do it. And Ariane said this, she'll be able to make it. So she can help us with that. We can all think about how to improve these and whether there's like inclusive, you know, some strategies we can have that touch on inclusivity and diversity and stuff that maybe aren't here too. I'd be interested in hearing if people have ideas. But let's plan to take it up next time. Then Mark, make sure you download or have the most recent zoning that was adopted in February 21. Change those uses. Use listing that significantly. We collapsed it. Oh yeah. Okay, yeah, thanks. I will. Okay, so yeah. We obviously need to work on these in policy. So we'll do that next time. Yeah, I was hoping if we hadn't done, I could go through and do the, do the kind of match them up to the way the process we'd been doing and kind of fill them in. We're pretty close. Yeah, and if you wanna do it for the ones we've covered so far, that seem to find my main, do you feel like we need to vote on? No. I'd rather have you vote on the final one than vote on the... Cool. The concept. Yeah. I'll save these. I'm not gonna delete these. I'll create another page to put them on. So we won't lose the history. Well, yeah, this was great for making progress. Sorry if I jumped the gun on you, Mike, and by throwing the strategies in there. I think we had a good discussion tonight. Does anyone wanna celebrate this good discussion by mentioning to adjourn? Anybody? Where's Aaron? Sure, I'll do it, so moved. I'll move it, that's fine. All right, I'll second Aaron. You can let him have it. Motion by Aaron, second by Stephanie. Those in favor of adjourning say aye. Aye. Aye. All right, adios. Thanks everyone, see you Thursday. Thanks everybody.