 All right, I'm going to call to order the Redevelopment Board meeting of January 13, 2020, being recorded by ACMI. Good evening. I'd also like to call to order the select board joint meeting with the Redevelopment Board here at the senior center. And if I could just have started with my colleague on the end, just to say your name. John Hurt. Joe Cura. Steve DeCorsi. Dan Dunn. Adam Japsling, town manager. Jennifer Rae, director of planning and community development. Eugene Benson, Redevelopment Board. Rachel Zanbury, Redevelopment Board. David Watson, Redevelopment Board. Ken Lau, Redevelopment Board. And Andrew Bonnell, Redevelopment Board. And just for formalities' sake, and the Redevelopment Board, we're going to switch back and forth in order. Could I take a motion from one of my colleagues to open the meeting of the select board? So moved. Moved by Mr. Hurt. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Mr. Cairo. Any further comments or questions on the motion made by Mr. Hurt? Seconded by Mr. Cairo. All in favor say aye. Aye. I'll oppose. Unanimous vote. Thank you. We are open. Mr. Chaptaling. Thank you, Madam Chair. So if the Redevelopment Board is so inclined, Chairman Mahan had asked if I would facilitate the dialogue between both boards as to not have dueling chairs as we tried to work through these agenda. items. So first, we went through introductions in just a brief bit of welcome. Obviously, we know what we're here for. This is a joint meeting of the select board and the Redevelopment Board. I can say in my institutional memory of working here, which is just about 10 years now, I don't believe these two boards have had a joint meeting. And I was speaking with some people in town hall with a longer institutional memory than mine, who do recall there being meetings in the past. But nonetheless, I do think this is first time in a long time. And I really want to commend all of you for making the time in your schedule. We all know we normally have Monday meetings every other Monday with a lot of stuff on the docket and many packed agendas. But taking the time to come here, talk about this important issue, have a dialogue, and figure out how we want to start the dialogue and move it forward, I think is very important. So I want to say thank you to all of you. And thank you to everybody for attending as well. How's the volume for those sitting in the back? Are you good? Okay. Whenever you're speaking, if you can pull a microphone towards you, that would be preferable. So moving on from that, the first agenda item is housing in Arlington, overview and highlights of town manager, director of planning and community development presentations to each board and overview of community plans in progress. So why don't we start with the second part and have Jenny talk a little bit about the overview of the community plans that we currently have in progress. So thank you and thanks again to all of you for being here tonight. I appreciate this opportunity to talk about plans that we have in progress and things that are coming up. Some of those things I've talked with the redevelopment board about at previous meetings. And that includes a memo that I wrote to the board in December with regard to the plans that are in progress and what those might mean to future zoning amendments or other amendments to town bylaws in order to implement those plans. And so we have things in progress such as the sustainable transportation plan which actually just had its kickoff meeting this morning. And that plan will be a really instrumental plan to thinking about mobility in Arlington and mobility options throughout town looking forward in the future. We do have a transportation element of the master plan but found that the transportation element can only go so far and also doesn't really incorporate alternative and sustainable transportation options that we know are coming in the future and that will also best position the town to implement those policies in the future. And that's really important for Arlington in terms of not just being responsive to a lot of the sort of day-to-day issues that we hear about with regard to traffic and congestion and those sorts of issues, the more sort of neighborhood-based issues but also connecting Arlington more broadly to the region which means thinking about sort of more broadly the issue of transportation and its intersection with other topics which includes, of course, housing and development. It also includes other types of neighborhood development and neighborhood issues that might be arising. So we'll be addressing sustainable transportation through that planning process. As I mentioned, it kicked off this morning. There will be community forums and a number of different ways in which people will be able to engage in that process. We're talking about mobile workshops and walk shops and tables at different community forums and meetings that are already in place. So a lot of things will be coming to you in the future on that so definitely keep abreast of those details as they happen. So that's one important thing that I think is just relevant to this board and also to this topic because it is cross-cutting. I mean, of course, everything that we do in planning has a cross-cutting element. It's not just about that particular topic. Transportation is as much about housing as it is about economic development. And so we're thinking about all these things and their intersections. The other thing that has a bit of intersectionality to it is the net zero planning process that we started last year. And the net zero plan is actually looking right now at the greenhouse gas emissions and their potential impact, what they are at this moment in time and what they're projected to be in the future if current trends continued with regard to transportation, the built environment and other emissions that occur in Arlington. It will help the town, I will say, to not just think about its own, public properties and the public places, but also about how we can look at different controls in terms of private development and private properties in town. And so I think that that will help us to create a pathway towards a more, what we're looking at is really a net zero to 2050 and how we can actually plan for that includes an impact on how we're thinking about housing and development as well as transportation and all of the other topics that we are familiar that cross-cut with net zero planning. So green and efficient community is what we want and sustainability is what we want in this community. And I think that net zero planning is just one of those other layers to this conversation. The other important thing that I wanted to bring to your attention is that we're doing an economic analysis of the industrial districts in town. So transportation planning, looking at net zero planning and then the economic analysis of the industrial districts. As you may recall at town meeting last year, we appropriated funding to be able to hire a consultant which we've also done for this project. And that consultant is RKG who is helping the town to look at and evaluate the economics of all of the industrial districts that we have in town which is a very small portion of land area total and also a very and even smaller portion of that land base is devoted to actual industrial uses. But we're trying to understand what potential there might be to change some of that in the future and how we can also innovate in terms of the thought process around those land uses in the future. And that means probably some greater creativity and flexibility in how we're looking at zoning and all of the properties in those industrial zones. And so that'll be also coming in the forefront in the future. The last thing that I wanna mention that I think is somewhat intersected with this conversation is all of these things are in my opinion and I wanted to bring them. Of course, the redevelopment board is familiar with it. The select board may be somewhat familiar but I wanted to make sure we're all on the same page about this conversation. The last item is the residential design guidelines. And I think most of us are aware of the fact that there was a study that was conducted that emerged from the residential study group over the course of a couple of years actually, which was looking at the type of development and the type of replacement homes that are being constructed, where they're being constructed in basically the R0 through the R2 districts. Those are our lower density residential districts in town. And trying to figure out what the impacts are and in response to a town meeting article that asked us to look at those impacts in direct relationship to essentially quality of life issues throughout town, as well as environment and there were other topics as well. So we issued a report which we delivered to the select board back in July of last year. And also back in town meeting earlier last year, we appropriated funds so that we would be able to hire a consultant to help us to devise residential design guidelines and also a design review process. Because I do think that some of the issues that we've heard over the years, at least in the time that I've been here and I believe prior to that as per various recommendations in the master plan, there is a feeling that we need to have a slightly different design review process when it comes to some new development. So I think that this process is just another thing for you to be aware of that also will have a future, some future set of articles which may be town bylaw amendments and they also may be zoning bylaw amendments. They are not happening this spring town meeting. That's the most important thing. These are all things that will be happening over the course of this year in terms of the planning phases. So we're looking at a future town meeting talking about 2021 at this point. But I believe that there will be many products and things and deliverables to be able to share with you over the course of the year of course. And there will also be a public process in order for you to participate in either forums or other opportunities to ask questions as we deliver those products to the public. So I think those are basically the four most important things that I wanted to share with you. And then also if you are interested in learning more of course again the redevelopment board has my memo from December. It's posted on the website as part of our Novus agenda but is also available of course to the select board if you're interested in learning more about the timelines for these different projects and where we think we might be at at a future town meeting. I say all these things because again I believe that there is an intersection in a lot of these conversations the thing that comes up the most is development, housing development and residential development. And so I think that that does have an intersection to this process. I don't think there's anything more. Thank you Jenny. Any questions or comments for Jenny? Diane. And Jenny I apologize if you said this and I didn't hear it. For the residential design guidelines you mentioned a consultant. Have we hired that firm yet? And if you could just. We hired Harriman. That is the consultant who will be working on the residential design guidelines as well as the recommending a design review process. Any other questions for Ms. Rae? So the only other thing I would add under this agenda item is both the select board and the redevelopment board. Or I should say I came to both the select board and the redevelopment board with a presentation in cooperation with Jenny. I believe the select board might have been back in July and the redevelopment board this fall to provide an overview of housing issues in Arlington as well as regionally. And not to put words in anyone's mouth but I think we have at least my feeling has been a consensus that there is an affordability crisis in Arlington and in the region. And it also seems from both comments made by these boards as well as comments at town meeting last year and from the public in general. That again at least a general consensus if not more that we have a need for more affordable housing in Arlington where there seems to be disagreement is how we go about achieving creating more affordable housing in Arlington. And I think that's at the crux of a lot of the discussion that we need to have. So without representing that information and not to put anybody in the spot is there any questions, comments, things folks would like to put on the table in regards to the matter of housing in general? Sorry, you touched on everything just about everything that I was hearing and I think where a lot of people had questions on all fronts were securing or implementing some system that we go through the next year review but that's something that's unlike what we've done in the past where it's affordable housing for only 20 years. Like up at Sims, we have certain units. They're not in perpetuity and maybe they shouldn't be in perpetuity but a lot of people had concerns that something would be redesigned for affordable housing and that wouldn't be the next best use. And maybe it shouldn't be. I wanna hear what everybody else has to say but I did hear a lot of that. So I just wanted to put that on the table. Thank you, Mr. Chaplin. Ms. Wright. Dan. You welcome a general comment? Yes, of course, yeah. So when I first ran for Select for nine years ago the thing that I told everybody that I thought mattered the most was that I was worried about the most was the budget and in particular, some of the budget busters I was worried about back then was the health insurance. And so if you were in town meeting nine years ago or 12 years ago, you would remember how the health insurance was driving us to the edge. And what I didn't see, I don't think many of us saw was how five years after that, health insurance would be much less of a problem for us. It's not gone and the cost is more manageable. But the growth of the school would be the thing that was driving so much of the conversations in town and how we had to, what I'm so like I'm saying that the, I think that the biggest thing that faces the town has evolved and continues to evolve. And the thing that I am most worried about for the town at this point is housing and housing cost. I've come to understand that if we, that we're just not in a tenable situation and if we do nothing, the result is going to be more expensive homes in Arlington. We're going to become more homogenous. We're going to become less mixed and it will have real impacts on what we think of as race and equality and how we find equality here in Arlington. And so I'm really glad to see everybody here to have us all work together on this because I think one of the things I saw last year in town meeting was that this change was even harder than I thought it was going to be. And I think that that's with us working together that we're going to be able to make some of these changes that we absolutely have to do. Like I don't, the form of them, there's infinite debate and infinite variation on them but we've got to do something or it's going to or we won't like where we end up. Thank you. Any other comments? Mr. Kirill. I'll just say that I agree with my colleague that we've seen this evolve. I mean, one aspect of it that I hear a lot in this building when I meet with the Council on Aging is the overall cost of housing for seniors. And obviously folks, we have an interest in making it possible for people to stay in their homes if they're able to be able to afford to stay in their homes. And the longer they do that, the longer I think we stave off kind of some of the situations we see where people have to rely on that now as their nest egg and properties become vulnerable to larger scale development. So I think that looking at some of those root causes on a social and economic perspective is incredibly important. I'm also just wondering for the planning director, I mean, you talked about the sustainable transportation plan which I think is very interesting in how it's cross cutting. Can you talk just a little bit more about how you see that potentially playing out that analysis? So I think one of the ways that it could actually be beneficial is in the existing conditions analysis, part one, which is understanding how people are moving around town right now. And also where the demand is for where people want to be moving around town or working on sort of the, what we consider the first mile, last mile connections and how that might drive and change residential growth in the future potentially, potentially. And then I think that that, depending upon how we look at those data, that might inform potential policy and potential ideas that come from the transportation planning process, not necessarily specific to transportation, but transportation policy has an impact on housing policy, has an impact on climate policy and other things that we do in town. So I do see that that has an intersection potentially but particularly around the existing conditions analysis, the future demand analysis and scenarios, and then of course in the policy setting. And to my previous point, allowing people to age in place. And people who want to age in place and may want to have specific options in place as a result of that, yes, that could also drive some policy. Thank you. You're welcome. I just wanted to raise a couple of things that we've discussed at redevelopment board meetings and just make sure that they were part of the consideration. And we draw distinction between affordable housing as that term is legally defined and affordability in general. And I think when we're talking about affordability, we're really talking about both of those things because we're sensitive to the need of the mid-market or workforce housing, which is not the legally defined affordable housing necessarily, but there are a lot of people in that mid-market who are having trouble affording the housing they want. And it's preventing people who might otherwise want to move to Arlington from moving here in some cases. The other thing is we've talked a little bit about the need to just keep in mind while we're having the discussion on housing, the need for commercial development. And Jenny mentioned the study on the economic analysis of the industrial zones and we want to just be careful that when we're thinking about how to address the housing issues that we're not missing opportunities to also encourage commercial growth in town or even worse, making changes in the name of housing affordability that might preclude further commercial growth in the future. So I just want to make sure that people are keeping those two things in the back of your mind while we have the discussion. Thank you, David. Anybody else? All right, so any other comments before we move on to the next agenda item, which is number four, proposed board review of future warrant articles? No, okay. So this agenda item was meant to respond to what I think were comments and requests last year, mainly about whether or not the select board was going to be weighing in on the numerous zoning articles that were before town meeting. And I don't want to speak for the board, but my sense of the board was that historically, the select board has not weighed in on articles not under their jurisdiction or that they wouldn't traditionally have the main motion before town meeting on and certainly wouldn't weigh in without the request of the board that makes the main motion as to not be stepping outside of their boundaries. I think through subsequent discussions that I've had with the board and Jenny's had with the board as well, there is a willingness to talk about some form of review and comment of zoning articles if the ARB so wishes. And going the other way, it's my understanding that the ARB has an interest in looking at potential town bylaw changes that would be before the select board that have an impact development such as the storm order bylaw or something of that nature. So we wanted to have a dialogue tonight about what type of process both boards would be comfortable with to bridge this gap and figure out how the boards can work together both with what they have before them that they need to make recommendations to town meeting on but also how they can weigh in across those jurisdictions. So Jenny drafted and we provided to both boards a memo as a starting point for discussion of how we could start to look at that. And the quick summary of that is pulling together a meeting after the warrant has closed at the end of January of the chair of the select board, the chair of the ARB, myself and Jenny, take a look at everything that's on the warrants and then collectively make decisions about what each body might wanna review that's not traditionally on its docket. Come back to each body, report on that. There'd be room for discussion in some back and forth and whether or not the body actually wanted to review or wanted to review something more that wasn't included on the list and take it from there. So the next part is exactly what that review would be. But before I jump into that, reactions to that first portion of the proposal about the discussion. See one thumbs up. I'd be in favor of it. I guess I would say, and we're certainly gonna take the time. One of the things that I hope to achieve was, especially certain years where zoning by law warrant articles were out there is sometimes I felt like the ARB was out there on their own and was kind of seen that way and by not participating, maybe not necessarily at town meeting that night, but in some other form so that, and similar with the board when we have any issues as Adam outlined. So I don't want to make it that, and nobody is saying that we wanna do this, that every ARB and select board warrant articles will automatically go to each other. I think what would help me amongst my colleagues with you all is what is that process that this is a really important town issue. The ARB, it would help the select board if we employed some sort of protocol, however that is, in basically to provide more of a educating on my side what I need to, you know, when people came up to me at town meeting, I said, well, I can tell you what I've read, but I haven't delved into it. But the other thing is on the really important issues, I'm not saying it has to be every single thing that the cross may meet, but we're in some way, the select board can join with you all so that I think it has a, I won't say better impact to town meeting, I'll leave that up to town meeting in terms of that, but I just know there were times like I just wanted to get up and kind of help carry on conversation, but I wasn't informed enough and I don't wanna step out of my lane, but I also do wanna be there and would like to have your support on whatever main issues that have the overlap. So I don't know what that looks like. I think the town manager and planning director have outlined a really good, they're gonna do most of the work here in the beginning and say these are perhaps partner articles that you could, but I'm also want both boards to thank you, we won't decide this tonight. What that process is of, I don't want it to just be okay, ARB and SB are gonna give joint reports on this from now on. I'd really like to, you all to have a conversation and ask them when we come together again to say, how do we outline that process and what's the best way to effectuate it? Thank you. I think I'd be in favor of this idea and like Diane said, not every article needs to be reviewed by both boards, but certainly with the case of something like massive zoning changes would probably be prudent and wise of the ARB to report to the select board and request input at a meeting and realizing that many of our meetings overlap, we could certainly arrange for a time when that isn't the case for one or more of us along with the chair, sorry, the director to present, answer questions from the select board and certainly take recommendations and comments. I draw a little bit of distinction between zoning warrant articles that are put in by others and zoning warrant articles that are put in by the redevelopment board. I think this process with timing makes a lot of sense when the warrant articles come to us, but when we're developing warrant articles, I think if there's a way to get some input from the select board earlier in the process than after the warrant article would have to be filed, I think would just allow us to get your input earlier and to use that input to refine what we're going to file. So I think for me, I think that distinction is important. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on that. I mean, the overarching goal for this, I would think would be to send a signal to town meeting or message town meeting that we have considered one of those articles that are of big importance here, but there really are three different routes that I see beyond that. And one is that each of our boards are making an independent judgment on the merits of the article that's filed or the goal is to provide advice to one another, which I think is one of the scenarios that you laid out there before things are fully baked. Or lastly, if they are fully baked, one of the other of us is looking for concurrence or support of a recommendation that we're making to town meeting. And it seems like there are different situations where each of those three scenarios might play out. Yeah, I guess I would say to Jean's comment we're this year, I think we're too far along. I know we're too far along to conquer that, but I think that's a very good suggestion for in future years, how to handle it, maybe even start the dialogue between the four parties as we described as early as the fall into December as the ARB is considering articles that it might be thinking about filing. I think to your point, Mr. Kira, we're starting to bleed into the exactly what is it that we want each board to do when it's looking at it? And I think it's good. I think the segue is appropriate of, yeah, are we looking for review and comments? Are we looking for recommendations or a motion? I mean, I would lean towards not recommending that either board set up a dueling motion or sort of a conflicting motion with the other board. I think council can converse with that, or concurse with that, excuse me. I do think review and comment make sense, but I think, again, Mr. Kira, you've laid out some things for us to further consider as we start to build this process out about how do we time it? Because if it's just a warrant article, there's not necessarily much meat to be considered while the other board is going through its hearing process. So I think those are things we need to work through and potentially we take this season as an opportunity to work through this and see how the timeline best works. What about my comments? About not reviewing everything? I'm sorry. I don't think every article needs to be reviewed by both boards. I think if there's technical changes or, I mean, maybe this isn't the best example. You know, if there was a technical change to a driveway slope article, I don't think that's necessarily the thing that both boards need to look at. If it's something like an accessory dwelling unit that was considered last year, changes to density within certain zones, things that feel like they impact aesthetic character, nature of the town more. I think that's what I see. I see the line, but I think that we'll have a dialogue. I think between the two chairs, myself and Jenny will have a dialogue and other board members might have a varying opinion when we come back and look at it. And I think those perspectives are important, right? We all have our own perspective on what the impact of any potential article might be, but another board member might have a varied perspective on what the impact is. I think to John and then Steve. So I'm clear. I wanna make sure I'm understanding what you guys have proposed is that would it be your preference that we wait for the redevelopment board to tell us which articles you're proposing that you want our input on? Or is it gonna be, it sounds like two chairs would get together. The chair of the Slack board can essentially request what articles the Slack board wants to take a look at. I don't know if that distinction is kinda... I guess I'm hearing two separate things. Right. One, for where we are now in the process, we'll have those four people sit together based on what's filed, have a dialogue about what should be reviewed, starting at a new cycle based on what Gene said, we would meet earlier so that as this board, as the ARB, and again, I guess potentially the Slack board's process isn't quite the same as the ARB, you know, as the ARB is aware of articles that it might start to look at, bring them to the fore so that the Slack board chair can be aware of them and give some consideration to whether or not it's something the Slack board should weigh in on. Yeah. Am I expressing what you were suggesting clearly, Gene, is that? Let me get to a moment on that. I think one of the things, I don't clarify what Gene says, maybe different for what Gene meant, but one of the things when we make changes or make recommendations for changes, it's for a reason. And that reason is to address issues that we feel that it's out there. That's like lack of affordable housing, that's an issue. So we're making changes to address those issues. So that's where we welcome your help in earlier on stages, addressing that because I don't think we really need help on making the actual, if you move this over four feet or just, that's not what we're asking for. I think we're asking for some help and different opinion on when we address how do we encourage more this or more that or less of this and that, and then we can go into how we go about doing that. So I think one of the things that I was encouraged by Gene, what Gene said was that we talk earlier on that kind of stuff is helpful because that's the main crux of, I think we both share the strengths in. I think the idea would be to get policies, goals, priorities, somewhat in harmony with one another where the reason that the ARB might be thinking about things in those three buckets and how we see a select board for helping us to further those or whether they say your way out of line, take a step back on that for now. You know, I think an example I'll give for that because it came up last year and it's gonna come up again is what to do about housing, what to do about affordability and what to do about housing for seniors, housing for low income people. I think that's an area where having the two boards have some sort of discussion about how do we get from where we are now to where we wanna get to go and what could change with zoning and other town policies to do that is probably I think going to be a helpful discussion before the board goes ahead and tries to figure out what to do about zoning, for example. I just wanna follow up on what Gene said earlier. And I think you're right when you're talking about proposals that the Redevelopment Board is developing, I think it makes sense to whether it's the Redevelopment Board coming to the select board and telling us what you're thinking of doing, what's on your mind and receiving some feedback and you receive that feedback early enough because the one thing I'm concerned about too is we're going through, we're talking about going through a process perhaps with both boards, but there's a public process too and to the extent that we are going back and forth, the public needs to weigh in and that probably pushes up the schedule in terms of when you may need to make, do you work for potential town meeting because that's one of the difficulties is the closer you get to town meeting, the more difficult it is for people to see what's being proposed and to try to understand it. So I think for things that are being developed that make sense for us to meet in the fall in the short term what you're proposing makes a lot of sense because it's more reactive to what has been submitted and the two chairs can sit down and see what's there but I think we do have to be mindful for town meeting that the zoning, the recommendation on zoning articles gonna come from the redevelopment board and that's gonna be the primary motion regardless of how the individuals feel over here and same thing with town bylaws. So that's something as we go forward and the issues come before us we really have to be careful about in terms of not overdoing it. I think on the larger issues that we deal with and I think housing is a very good example. What we have realized is that it often takes an holistic approach that goes beyond zoning and beyond things that are within the purview of the ARB. And I think it's okay if at different points in time we're moving forward with zoning articles related to housing or other policy changes that may be within the purview of the select board on housing but it's important for us to have that holistic understanding of where how all these pieces fit together and that we're working towards an overarching solution and making sure that we're not trying to solve a problem kind of without all of the pieces to the puzzle. And so I think that's where the collaboration between the two boards is particularly valuable on these bigger issues that require that holistic approach. I think I'm struck thinking about this by thinking about some of the different pieces in the town's finance process that maybe we can talk about and learn from because I think we do this a lot more on the finance side with a lot more regularity. And I think about all of these different independent authorities who have a lot of power over the budget and how we through a combination of dialogues and iterations and also independent board actions finally get to a place where we can get to a, if not to a consensus to a place where town meeting and voters can decide. And so things that I'll mention include things like, I mean obviously the finance committee's recommendation to town meeting carry a lot of weight but also things like the retirement board can independently do things like choose what the discount rate is that will blow up the budget. And if they change the number in an unexpected way it'll just totally blow up the budget and they absolutely have the authority to do so. And similarly the school committee, they are independent budget authorities. And then we kind of, a lot of times there are meetings that are one-on-one and then there's also times that we corral them all and put them in a room for budget revenue task force or related to the long-term planning committee. And it really is a multi-month dance where you kind of get to, hopefully you get to a place to a consensus but at the same time all the independent authorities have to take their own votes and periodically just take their own vote because they think it's the right thing regardless of they've actually gotten consensus. And that may be, like there may be a bit of a model there. The downside is that it's not, there's no direct flowchart. If yes, go to here and if no, go there. It's much more of a back and forth in an iteration where it's a little bit messy, but at the same time I think it's instructive. Yeah, I was about to say in response to David's comments that it almost sounds like more meetings between these boards, potentially one or more of them being in more of a goal-setting fashion or a policy. And I think Andrew touched on this a little bit earlier, would be, that would be the way to achieve a more holistic vision that both bodies are working collectively on. When do you, when does your board have your goal-setting meeting? Because we just started doing our goal-setting meetings and I would say that they're happening generally speaking in the summer month at some point. Okay, so July. So maybe that makes sense doing a July meeting. I would also just add to this conversation that I think perhaps if we, this would of course mean a change in my attendance at A or B meetings, but some level of my attendance at select board meetings to provide an update to you more regularly about things that we're talking about. I think that that would provide that sort of, I'm calling it, or you called it a holistic understanding and how things kind of fit together. I'm glad to provide that, of course, the board as well. I was just saying that, I'm happy to come in and have talk with redeveloper board about the goals and such things as affordable housing and how we can tackle those. I still wanna make sure we're leaving it within the redevelopment board's purview to develop what those articles look like. So I would envision the process would be that we could get together, come up with the general goals that we wanna tackle with any zoning changes that get proposed, then kick it back to the redevelopment board to come up with how that gets addressed, then it comes back to us for comment, whatever that process looks like. But not that I wanna kick the can, but I think the expertise sits on this side of the room on how to develop these actual changes. And then we're happy to review them and give comments on that as opposed to, it seems like we're moving towards a more collaborative process in the development of the zoning articles. No, that's okay. I like the suggestion by Ms. Rait, but I think as we get further down the road where that gets defined, because I know whenever I have to have any of our professionals, you know, town manager, town council, not be at a meeting, it's usually something like I don't want it to happen on a recurrent or frequent basis. I think when we sit down in the future, whether it's at a goals meeting, and I think that's a very good idea, when we start outlining the process that I was talking about, I would envision that's where we'll have more discussion of I'd love to see the planning director at every select board meeting, but that's not a good use of her time and she's your expert, not mine. What I would envision in terms of Ms. Rait, the planning director coming in after we have that goals meeting, and we set in the timetable of what's gonna happen when and when we get to that point after the planning director, town manager, and two chairs have gone over, the warrants are going over the issues, brought it back to our respective boards to say, here's some suggestions, kind of fine tune that, because I don't anticipate this happening a lot. There may be a year that goes by that we still have a goals meeting, but we may not have any commonality in terms of the two board issues, but that I see Ms. Rait, the planning director, coming in after all that process, the mini-identification of commonality of warrant articles, each chair brings it back through the town manager and through the planning director to their respective boards, gets a sense on that, and then when perhaps there's this goal meeting or whatever, that's where we all come in and say, I think it's this one or two things, or maybe this year everything's running, we already have an overall picture, so I didn't want, like I said, I'd love to have the planning director at all our select board meetings, but that's just not an efficient time. It's best that she's with the ARB, but I do like having the ARB come up with, define a plan of where and when the planning director, sort of being an ambassador for the ARB, and that would be for you all to speak about and devise, and when she should appear at a select board meeting or vice versa, maybe it's select board, combination there of coming to an ARB meeting, so I just wanted to put that on the table. So I think I'm hearing a lot of consensus yet with some details to work out, and I think the strongest consensus was right at the start about having the two chairs myself and Ms. Rait meet to start a dialogue after this warrant closes this year, but if both boards are comfortable with it, I think myself working with again Ms. Rait and her team could draft up a memo that either addresses what the board members have all suggested or leaves where there's still open questions and then come back to a future meeting, if not even perhaps not a joint meeting immediately, but at individual board meetings and see if we can work out the framework of a process we'd like to take a look at for the next year. Does that sound reasonable? Okay. So you guys have to do it. It's on us, it's on us. Right with that plan. So any other comments under this agenda item number four? Okay, thank you everybody. So the next agenda item, we wanted to take this opportunity to brief both boards on two articles related to zoning and housing that we are anticipating having filed for this upcoming annual town meeting. So, Jenny, are you gonna talk about it? Thank you. So one quick housekeeping issue, we had a sign-in sheet, not everybody here probably signed it, if you want to, we were just trying to make it a little bit easier when we get to the part where people may want to comment or ask questions or talk with us a little bit more. We have some names signed up on these sheets but I'm guessing new people have walked in, so please, if you have not signed that and you'd like to say something, if we could get you to sign that sheet, that would be excellent, please. Thank you. Oh, there's another one back there? There's a little note card. Oh, okay, all right. Well, if you haven't signed any one of these sheets, please do so. Thank you. So in the packet, there was a draft of an article that has been drafted by staff and also in conjunction with the Housing Plan Implementation Committee, which is a committee of the Redevelopment Board to implement the Housing Production Plan, which both boards happened to adopt a few years ago and we are still working to implement. One of the actions in that plan called for the adoption of a municipal affordable housing trust fund, which is essentially a fiduciary entity, a municipal entity that would be able to hold and then administer funds that are just directed and related to affordable housing. It can do a lot of different things under state law. There's actually a lot of functionality to trust funds. Town council has provided some background research as part of this process as well and also came to speak with the Housing Plan Implementation Committee. My own background and experience is pretty deep in terms of developing affordable housing trust funds in municipalities throughout eastern Massachusetts actually and advising them about this. So, Aaron actually, Aaron Zwerko, the assistant director was able to draft a number of different versions of an article just to kind of get the conversation rolling and to potentially file this as part of a warrant article for the annual town meeting coming up. So we wanted to just bring this to your attention that it may be happening because we're talking about housing and we're talking about it and when we get to the part about what we wanna do in the future, it goes to a special town meeting potentially for 2021, but you should know that there are a couple of things that are still, you know, that are moving as part of any process. We have a number of committees that talk about articles and changes in policies and so things will still continue to advance. So that was the primary one that I wanted to bring to your attention and I'm happy to entertain any questions. The Housing Plan Implementation Committee is actually meeting this Friday morning to talk about this further. And of course, the article deadline is not until the 31st, so we still have some time. And there are a number of questions to be ironed out as part of that process. Yeah, I just have one question on FAA. There's a provision in here about the trust shall ensure that all expenditures of funds received from said Chapter 44B are reported to the Arlington Community Preservation Act Committee for Inclusion, the Community Preservation Initiatives report from CP3 Department of Revenue. What is the interplay between the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and CPA? Let Doug talk about the legal mechanics, perhaps. Hi folks, Doug. Hi, I'm Town Council. I'm just gonna shout so everybody can hear me since I don't have a microphone. Hope it's a more pleasant version of attorney shouting at you. So there's a lot of different ways in which an Affordable Housing Trust can be funded. One of the ways is Community Preservation Dollars, but there's some very specific state regulatory requirements for what those expenditures may be. I think some of us have been a little bit pleasantly surprised by the flexibility of the Community Preservation Act with respect to housing. But when you're putting it into an Affordable Housing Trust, you have to ensure that it's consistent with both the Community Preservation Act and then the acceptable uses of money under the Affordable Housing Trust Authorizing statute. Do you want me to say anything else about it now? I mean, not at the moment. I don't think it is. So just to reiterate, if I'm understanding correctly, then the CPA expenditures towards Affordable Housing could choose to invest into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund to meet that requirement. It could be something that the Community Preservation Act, the Municipal Affordable Housing Trust Fund would essentially make a request to the Community Preservation Act Committee as part of the regular application process. It would have to be for, ideally, although in some communities it doesn't have to be this way, but ideally I think in this community it would be for a specific purpose and then that would be an appropriation that's made and, of course, in our case, it's recommended to town meeting as part of the overall appropriations and voted on and then it goes into the next fiscal year but it's deposited into that trust fund account instead of where it currently resides, which is in the Community Preservation Fund. Right, got it. And there may be another component to it. I'd like you to just add something just to make sure that everybody's clear on this. One of the advantages of doing that is that the Community Preservation Grant process essentially coincides with town meeting. Because you have to reserve a certain percentage of your funds under the Community Preservation Act for Housing, if there's comfort of the Community Preservation Committee with doing this, they can essentially put money into the Affordable Housing Trust, which can act on opportunities as they arise. It's one example of why there might be adaptations. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I have a question regarding, I guess it would come under section seven and it's already defined in previous sections, who the Board of Trustees are and how they're named and qualified. And there may not be an answer to this question right now but in terms of overseeing these funds and an independent audit that then gets certified by someone and submit it to the Board of Trustees, I believe if I understand the process correctly, would that be, do I have that correct? That is correct, that is how it would work. It would have to be by the town treasurer slash collector who would also be participating in the process. But yes, the fund itself would have to go through basically like a single file audit, I think would be what it would be called. Do you envision that happening along with the independent outside audit that powers and Sullivan does or is it recommendable for municipal affording housing trusts, you sort of get an independent auditor that has an expertise in that. I think it would happen as part of the regular town audit with powers and Sullivan. I don't see why it couldn't happen with that or simultaneous with that. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, I did a question first and then a comment and you may be getting to the potential article for the real estate transfer fee but is the, is an affordable housing trust fund the only recipient if the town were to adopt first part is adopting the resolution and then filing a home rule petition for the real estate transfer fee. And if we had that fee, then yes, it has to be deposited. The way that the current rules are written is such that it has to be deposited into an account that has, that is just for solely for affordable housing and be able to stay in an account that is devoted just to affordable housing. The only mechanism to do that is to be able to be able to stay in an account and the only mechanism to do that is through this type of fund. There is no other way in which we can establish a special fund unless you had home rule petition which you don't need anymore because after 2005 and the acts of 2005 we're allowed to adopt this type of legislation to create that kind of fund. Okay, thank you. And just to comment, so this one here that the municipal affordable housing trust fund was action item 14 in the housing production plan. And so to the extent that we're going forward and we're having meetings in the fall, it's really, I think it'd be really helpful whether it's the housing production plan or the master plan to say, okay, this is what's on our mind. This is what we've adopted previously and it just really gives us a good baseline in terms of where we're going forward. And this one was adopted by both the redevelopment board and this Board of Selectment back in 2016. So it's just following through on that because I think it just gives us a baseline, gives us a better understanding. This is where we're coming from and to the extent that it's a change then maybe there's a discussion about changes to the master plan or to the production plan. Just to follow up on that, I just wanna make sure what we're doing with the municipal affordable housing trust is we're moving forward and setting that up. A fund source of revenues that could legally be deposited in here could be a possible 2% real estate transfer fee, but there could be other ways that this fund could be set up. So I just wanna make sure I have it clear that we've had longstanding plans to begin this, go through town meeting. I don't want people to think air go because we haven't done that public process yet that this is being set up because any decisions been made on that recently proposed by the, I think the governor, 2% real estate transfer fee tax. This is just to set up this trust, one of which that could be, but it could be three, four, five other avenues. That's absolutely correct, yeah. And there's actually just to, there's a number of bills right now and legislation that's going about around the real estate transfer fee. There's one that's proposed statewide and then there's a number of municipalities who recently put forth home rule petitions and those are in varying types of petitions for real estate transfer fees in terms of the percentage that would be activated, the threshold that then triggers that fee coming into play. So there's a lot of different ways in which that could be proposed and that's actually something that hasn't been developed yet in for Arlington. So that's something that's being talked about with the housing plan implementation committee. There are some town meeting members who are interested in this and who are embracing it and thinking about filing this potential for a home rule petition and really it would be a resolution for town meeting but I don't actually have a lot of other information about it other than to tell you that it is a mechanism that could be in place and actually we did a quick study, if I can jump to that if that's okay, okay. We did a quick study of just sort of looking back at how much we might have netted as part of if we had a real estate transfer fee and so we had actually about in 2019 this past year, we had 152 sales transactions and so what you do with this particular proposal would be that you set a percentage of whatever transaction or sale occurs and it could be over a certain amount. The bill that is actually currently floating around at the state level is proposing that it's over anything over the housing median income statewide which is actually quite low, it's like about $470,000. There are other communities that have issued home rule petitions that are much higher than that, a million, $2 million so any sale over one or $2 million, a percentage of that would be translatable into a fee that then goes into an affordable housing trust fund and then can be used towards that particular purpose for the development or the preservation of affordable housing, any number of different things. So in Arlington we had, for example, in 2019, 152 transactions, if we had had this instituted at 0.5% of every transaction over $1 million rather, not $100,000, that would be amazing. It would have been $104,320 that we would have netted in that past year. So it's variable, we can look at changing the upper limit of the number, we can look at changing the percentage point. We wanted to look at that also in comparison to what do we currently get for CPA? So for example, in FY20 and FY19, it was about $500,000 just towards community housing, not overall, but how much money did we have towards community housing? So it's actually kind of a fraction of what we are getting through the Community Preservation Act Fund. Just did this for illustrative purposes to give you a sense of what we could potentially get from this and yes, if we had it, it would be one of many different options that could go as a revenue source towards a trust fund. But there are actually many different options in terms of revenue sources for the trust, including people donating property or land, gifts that can be given to the town, grants, there can be federal funds, there could be Community Preservation Act funds. There's actually, it's pretty limitless in terms of what you could put CDBG in there, I wouldn't advise CDBG. I also wouldn't advise home money either. We do receive some federal home funds through the town. There are other revenue sources that can be used in order to get funds into the trust, including the other one would be through zoning, which our zoning bylaw through the inclusionary housing section actually has a payout component. So if you make a payment in lieu of developing affordable units, which has rarely occurred here, but we have had a couple of transactions occur where we have funds that are technically set aside for affordable housing under the, as part of the SIMS redevelopment process actually. So that would be an example of a funding source that could then be taken and transferred into a trust fund and be used and utilized extensively for that purpose and roll over year to year, so it wouldn't have to be re-appropriated. I'm very glad you raised the point that there's flexibility with respect to the real estate transfer tax concept of where you set threshold for where it kicks in, because we wanna be very conscious if we move forward with this as a concept that we don't increase the unaffordability of that mid-market housing. And so setting that threshold very thoughtfully to avoid that problem should definitely be part of the discussion. Totally agree. So that was all that I wanted to share about just things that are in progress that I'm aware of. There are other things that we are, that have been floating about, but nothing else it is, of course still the warrant article filing period. So when we have that, I think as we just discussed at the previous agenda item, when we have a better sense of the articles that are forthcoming, it sounds like we are setting up a process to talk about those in the future. Those are the two that I'm aware of. Thank you, Jenny. And I will add, unless I'm mistaken, I think these serve as a good example of two articles that if filed will come before the select board for the main motion, but the ARB will obviously have an interest in. So just in case you think we were just making it up that there would be a select board items that you'd be interested in. I think it just so happens that these two would very much fall into that category. So the next thing we wanted to talk about was a draft community outreach strategy that Jenny and her team have put together about how we wanna talk and hear from the community, talk to and hear from the community over the course of the next year about housing as recommendations are considered and potentially moved forward. So there is a document in your packet. And again, I'm gonna give the microphone back to Jenny to walk through this plan. I think we made about 20 copies in the larger scale. And if you received one of those, you're very lucky because I'm looking at a very teeny tiny version of the document that I created. So, but luckily we did create this. It is just a proposed document. It's a draft for the redevelopment board. I would say you've seen similar processes that we've talked about in terms of doing engagement and outreach in the past. And I think what's important about this document for everybody at the table this evening is that we wanna be able to set forth a process that everybody understands that's transparent and that allows people to engage at different points in time during that process to provide feedback, input. There's a loop that we wanna be a part of that includes all of you at this table but also a lot of other people who are in this room as well as of course many, many people who are not in this room. And so we've tried to design a proposed process that hits at as much and as many people as possible. And it starts really with sort of more of an opening, not something definitive in any way at all. There's not a, we're not, we don't have a proposal that we're moving forward. We're trying to open the conversation. And so the first phase is really about bringing awareness and that started with this meeting tonight and an agreement to work together and move forward on this particular topic. And to then move into and really start to kind of publicize and summarize what we've been hearing to design some of the materials so that we can talk about what we wanna do next. And then to provide a number of possible options for how people can participate for the next few months into the future. Really it's February through April which we're proposing to be kind of the next part of the process after we're done with this particular phase of setting up where we wanna be, what we wanna do, how the two boards are going to engage with one another. And that includes things like we have a town survey. This particular year we did put in some questions. If you've taken it, you know this. If you haven't, I hope you take it. Not just this board, but everybody in the room it's very important. And it does include some questions about housing and residential development. But there may be other mechanisms to do additional survey work where we wanna engage more people or we didn't hear enough voices as part of that process. We'll learn that rather soon. And also to have community workshops, perhaps open houses, we learned a lot, I think from whenever we do host open houses I think that's a good opportunity for people to be able to just drop by. They don't need to necessarily stay for a two hour, three hour meeting and be talked at necessarily, but to have something that's a little more interactive. And to be able to then, as part of that process, develop sort of the broader engagement strategy. And to get a sense of what people are talking about, what are the most important topics, I think that could feed back into those conversations that we talked about having jointly again in the future, perhaps in the fall. I heard that was one of the points in time that we might talk again, but maybe we wanna have other points in time that we talked before then. To give you a sense of also what are people talking about in the community about housing, how is that being communicated? How does that potentially translate into policy issues? And spend essentially the latter portion of this engagement process, which would essentially be for about six months from June through November to talk about policy development. So giving us a pretty decent amount of time to really vet and think about policy proposals and think about options as we move forward with this into potentially what we're considering here. And I know at one point we had talked about fall, a special fall town meeting in 2020. I think at this juncture, it makes much more sense to think about 2021 and a special town meeting at that point in time. I chose February, could be a different month. But I was playing it off of the recodification process, which was a special town meeting in February. I believe there are some limitations about when we can set a special town meeting. So I don't wanna speak out of turn too far in terms of when we actually, what is the best date to have a special town meeting without getting in the way of annual town meeting, of course. So that would mean then the last portion of this engagement strategy would be engaging the public as we get through into the town meeting process, which includes, that becomes a much more formal process at that point, which is public hearings, obviously the things that we talked about, both boards doing together, leading up to ultimately the town meeting. So, and that could be in other situations, we've had neighborhood meetings, which means that we go out to different places within Arlington at different schools or there could be other places where we can a little bit more closely get to different precincts rather than bringing everybody to Town Hall or this beautiful room. So, I think that that's pretty much everything that I wanted, you know, it's pretty much in sections, but with, to make it clear, it's really about the opening and then sort of narrowing down into policy development. Once we get to actually having proposals, then also having a process around sharing those proposals towards the end of the process. Glad to answer any questions. Sorry if I'm missing this, but somewhere in this, we got a great presentation about the affordable housing crisis in both of our meetings. And I think the first step should be to educate the public about the affordable housing crisis and not jump into the solutions. Because, I mean, to garner public support, the first thing you wanna do is let people know that we have a problem. So, I don't know if it's in one of these items, but I think that would be something that would be very early on in the process, is to have a public forum where that presentation or some variation of that presentation is given to the public and open for comment. And then we transition into the period where we figure out what we do with it. That would be basically in the first two sections. So, it says zero and then one, but those first two sections is where we would be proposing to do educational and outreach kind of activities. And I would just state that by we, I don't necessarily think that this is just a town activity. I believe that there are many other parties who are interested in engaging in this conversation. Some of them are in the room, who are also interested in having housing forums, panels, expert panels, and sort of broader discussions about this topic. I think we would wanna work with as many of those groups as possible to continue that education and outreach. I envision it as a kickoff to this meeting that we're having right here and us determining that there's a problem that we're gonna work towards the solutions is one big forum at Town Hall, where you have a presentation, not to reiterate what I just said, but one forum that everyone knows who that we promote and then they can come in, comment, and then you roll off from there. And yes, I just wanna, if it's okay. Just to, so the proposal would be community workshops, open houses, we could make that into one of those could be a Town Hall type forum, of course. I'm not sure where these two suggestions, whether it's a workshop, whether it's my colleagues on the ARB determine that's something that they should avail themselves of the opportunity, but having conversations with the Town Manager and Planning Director about affordable housing for seniors, but also for veterans, whether it's short-term or long-term, as well as special needs adults, 22 plus housing for them. I know, what I'm asking right now is, I know there's an awful lot of, and I've worked with Jeff Chungo, the Veterans Director, at least two to four times a month in terms of hooking veterans up with services and by and large, it's usually long or short-term housing, and I know there's a lot of funds out there that I've been reading those journals that come out of Veterans Affairs, as well as philanthropical. I was approached by somebody who just did a big, indirectly just did a big project in movement for veteran housing. So I think at some point when either the Town Manager or my colleagues on ARB, I think a conversation, and if it's at a workshop, but I wanna use everyone's time effectively with the Veterans Director, because I'm amazed at how many things he's tapped into when I've, and I've always spoken to the Town Manager about working with Jeff, but there's so much funding out there that really is looking for a place to go around veterans housing, as well as, you know, severely autistic adults once they hit 22, some of them at that point do stay home, but a lot of them sometimes they age out of the zero to 21 residential housing, and there's such a need for that type of housing, not only in Allington, but all across the state, and I also think in terms of that, the Disability Commission or something like that, that's aware of that. I mean, I'm aware of, you know, the different nonprofits, they're basically looking for real estate in places to build this, and those three uses really on a tax on the school system, by and large, the studies have shown on a tax on vehicular transportation, it's more pedestrian, bicycle, or more dial-a-ride, share-a-ride, things like that, and there's a lot of companies out there, E-mark, Communispond, there's like five or six big ones that have formed non-profit corporations because I've received the literature, and they're talking six and seven figure development, so I guess what I would say to the ARB when we define that, I don't know how much myself or the select board really gets involved in that, or that we should be the funnel to gather that information, I think it more ends up with you, because you identify, you know, I watched that presentation you had where you went through the whole town and it had different colors, and we basically can't build on route two, but you all will be making the decisions for that, so I guess through the planning director and town manager in terms of identifying those sources of funds that are available, see if they do fit in the Arlington plan that the ARB has spent countless nights on on what could be developed. I think you did it, Jenny, did you do it when you first got here? You said, I'm thinking outside the box now, and you basically went all through Arlington and you talked about different uses. It was as part of the housing production plan process. I watched that, I watched that, so what I'm thinking of is like, what would you say? Well, you know, it may be Jeff Chunglow tells you there's a certain fund that you could get, you know, maybe one, two million, or 500, 750,000, it would need this many units. This is the place it would have to look like. You all did that all over Arlington, think out of the box plan, you may say, you know what, we can definitely use those funds, solve some veterans, solve some differently-abled adults, that's what we're supposed to say now, differently-abled adults, 22 plus. So I'm gonna leave it to you two and my colleagues on ARB on how to define that process and where and when it kicks in. Thank you. I just wanna say, acknowledge what you're saying, of course, on that any different type of housing, housing for people with special needs, housing for veterans, housing for seniors, housing for families, all these types of housing would be part of the conversation, affordable workforce. We've talked about a lot of different types of things, the redevelopment board, three bedrooms, we've talked about that as being a priority at least of the board. So I think that we are talking broadly right now at this point in time. Thank you. I just wanna follow up on what Ms. Mahan said. I think there are at least two pieces to this. One is how do we make the town a more welcoming place for that sort of housing development, whether it's for more senior housing or developmentally disabled adults or workforce housing, et cetera. And I think that's partially zoning and partially some other pieces. But the other piece of it is, where are these developers? How do we invite them in? How do we have conversations with them? So that when we come up with what's our plan gonna be, you know there's gonna be people out there who are able to enact the plan. So I think both of those pieces in some ways have to happen. I don't know if this is in here or not, but I think if it's not, I think we have to have some way to have conversations with potential developers along the way. We can include that. I'll just add to that as well. The other piece I think that goes along with that too is what is the commercial infrastructure that needs to be addressed in order to support these communities as well as other housing needs that we're trying to bolster within the community. Any other comments, questions, suggestions, feedback? Excuse me. I'm very happy to see that we've got approximately six months scheduled out in which we're really just focusing on education and receiving community input and that we're not really even beginning to formulate policy proposals until potentially next summer. I just want to make sure everybody understands that this is a plan, but this isn't set in stone. And I think as the outreach and input phase progresses, I think we just need to be very conscious of whether we need to give even more time to that phase and not feel like come July, no matter what else is going on, we have to start formulating proposals. I think we need to see where the community engagement takes us. Last call? Okay. All right, now we're going to move into public comments from those in attendance. Do we have the list? Whichever. Did I make them? No. But Adam was going to say. But Adam, I'm sorry, did you have a solution? Yeah, I'm amazing for talking about this. I don't want that responsibility at this evening. Right. Thank you for your patience, everybody. I think we have these in the order in which people signed in. I'm going to ask, I think I know as the select board does and I believe as the pre-development board does, if people could limit their comments to three minutes. It's a long list. If there's a point you're trying to finish, we'll let you finish. But if we can try to respect everyone's time, that would be appreciated. Oh, and it is Ms. Mohan suggesting if you have anything written that you'd like to submit for both boards, that's very welcome as well. So the first person on the list is John Wharton. I think that's, yeah. Mr. Wharton. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Well, I don't think I was the first to sign in, but I was the first on that piece of paper. And ladies and gentlemen of both boards, I want to say two things. One, I agree that the affordability, whether affordable or just affordability, is a most important housing issue in town. And I think, and creating that kind of housing, whether by construction or conversion of excellent buildings should be the only kind of housing that we're promoting in this town at this time until we've solved that problem. The outreach program I think is very important. I think the outreach, I've heard it said that the reason we didn't get through our density program last spring was that we didn't explain it well enough. Well, I think you did plenty of explaining. It's just that the product you were pushing was like selling ice boxes to Eskimos. If nobody wants it and nobody needs it, you're probably not gonna sell very many. And it was exactly that without going into the details of why that stuff was all bad for Arlington. As far as subsequent outreach is concerned, I'm glad to see it's gonna be a somewhat prolonged process. That's good, we take time. But I think it's very important that the, and we had this public process last year, that last winter and around Christmas Day and over spring and so on, that the public, that it's not be strictly controlled, facilitated meetings, pushing somebody's agenda, whether it's MAPC or Metro mayors or whoever, with limited public opportunity to respond except by sticking things on a map or something. It's important that the public be given a real opportunity to present their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their facts. And the reach out should be to the neighborhoods. What are the people of Arlington really concerned about? One thing is the tear down mansionization business, which is a removing small, maybe almost affordable or affordability houses and replacing them with these huge things, vinyl clad boxes that go for over a million, a million point two, a million point five million dollars. The rock busting that is devastating neighborhoods, anywhere west of Pleasant Street Mystic Street is subject to this. We tried to regulate that town meeting voted down by a narrow majority. The escalating taxes that are driving people who have lived here for their whole lives or have lived here at least for many decades, driving them out. They're all going to Wooburner somewhere because they can't afford the taxes anymore. What are we doing about that? The importance of preserving the commercial core, industrial business stuff, not adding more housing as a finance committee chairman has told you. We can't afford to bring in more people. We're at three minutes, Mr. Ward. We're at three minutes. Okay, I'll just conclude by saying that that industrial and business thing is extremely important. We have 5% of our tax base is industrial. Most of the communities around here have 40%. That's something we've really got to work on. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Alex Bagnell. Thank you. I think our zoning bylaws are working exactly as designed. They are encouraging single and two family construction with buy right permitting and discouraging multifamily construction through lot size, density restrictions, parking requirements and a special permit process that enables a handful of incumbent residents to change delay and ultimately make it so that only high end projects are economically feasible with the excellent work of HCA accepted. This structurally unequal treatment has proven itself quite capable at perpetuating both race and class based segregation. Maintaining our existing bylaws does not merely maintain the status quo of Arlington housing but slowly works to increase this inequality. When asked about repealing 40B on a ballot question in 2010, Arlington voted resoundingly by an almost two to one margin to preserve 40B suggesting that the town as a whole is not satisfied with the results of our multifamily permitting process. As a structural problem, I think this calls for a structural solution and I would encourage you to think about a broader conversation that is more than just the contents of our bylaw. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Steve Revillac. Steve Revillac went 11 Sunnyside Avenue. Earlier this evening, members of the board talked about the housing crisis we have in Arlington. I'd just like to echo that and actually put some numbers behind it. So the former owner of my house purchased it for $151,000 in 1999. I purchased it from him in 2007 for $359,000. Today it's currently assessed at $501,000, which is, I mean, it's spot on for similar houses in my neighborhood. That's what they're going for. The point is for the last 20 years, our housing costs have been an escalator that's been going up and the key only effect of that has been that every year someone new comes to town, they either need to make more money or spend more on housing than the family that's lived previously. Or came in the year before. Now, with that in mind, I want to just pick a couple of items out of the 2019 town survey. So there was question 37, which asked, indicate the number of years that you have lived in Arlington. Now, roughly 30% indicated living here five years or less and 59 respondents indicated living here 15 years or less. So despite the housing costs, people still come here and they, you know, we're still, we are a hot market. People are still coming here and they're paying the cost of housing. Question 40 was, what was your annual household income in 2018? The most common response was more than $200,000 a year. That 28 people responded that way and something like 71% indicated earning at least $100,000 a year or more. So I think it's safe to say that Arlington's real median income is probably higher than the median income that HUD assigns and is typically worked with an affordable housing calculations. So finally, question number 41, what's the highest level of education completed by a member of your household? 73% indicated completing a, with a master's degree or higher. So the point is, after like 20 years of this, we have a population that's very affluent, very highly educated and essentially matches, you know, our population has come to match the cost of the housing that they live in. You know, for better or worse. Now, 20 years of gentrification, I think it, I will call it gentrification. I mean, it hasn't killed us. There are some ways the town has benefited. We are expanding town staff services, we're renovating buildings, we're building a new high school and all that's, you know, that's all well and great. But it does come at a cost of, you know, effectively erecting an economic barrier towards living here. And, you know, the easiest thing we could do would be do nothing and just let the ship keep sailing where it's heading. But I think that we, I think that it is a crisis and I would like to see us do something. And I mean, there are two, I see two issues. One is affordability and the other is the imbalance between supply and demand. I think there are a lot of things we can do, but, you know, and I hope we take an all of the above kind of approach, but I really don't see us, Steve, we're at three minutes. Okay, that's it. Next speaker is Don Seltzer. Thank you. Don Seltzer Irving Street. I'm a resident for 47 years. I'd like to speak about the outreach strategy both past and present. Last year, the town limited the scope of its outreach. The public forums ignored discussions of infrastructure, transportation, and most importantly, schools. At nearly every forum I attended, someone asked what will be the impact on our schools? The answer was always the same. We don't know, we don't study that sort of thing. The same question is going to come up again, and I am troubled by how town officials are preparing for it this time. They're using a hired consultant to push an incorrect narrative about the cost impact of higher housing density on our schools. I wish I had time to go into detail, but it comes down to this. They claim that new students are cheap, just half the per capita cost of students already in the system. This claim is based upon the mistaken idea that a finance committee appropriation tool called the enrollment growth factor accurately represents the true marginal cost of increased enrollment. They are badly mistaken. They have overlooked the fact that a significant portion of school costs are completely outside of the school budget. They're tucked away in other town budgets. The school budget does not pay for $3.6 million a year in pension contributions, for example. It doesn't pay for 9.2 million in healthcare costs for teachers. And most significantly, the school budget does not even pay for our school buildings. In fact, more than $25 million of the school costs are paid for by other town budgets which carry the brunt of increasing enrollment. In the last three years, 600 students have been added to our public schools overloading our classroom capacity. And what does this enrollment expansion cost us? We've spent millions on temporary modular classrooms. In 2017, we had to expand the Thompson School by six classrooms. That's $4 million a debt. 2018, it was hardy. Another six classroom addition, 4.8 million. And just this past year, we reopened Gibbs at a cost of $27 million in new debt. We also lost the $340,000 a year we got for rental income from that building. These expansion costs are the result of a changing demographics. What is going to happen if we have a large increase in our housing? The town averages 30 students in our school for every 100 housing units. For every 1,500 new housing units, figure on building a new elementary school. And if we're to achieve the Metro Mayors Coalition goal for increased housing, we could expect 2,000 more students in our system. How are we gonna handle that? The $7,300 per year marginal cost being used for planning purpose is a bogus number to put it politely. You're at three minutes, Mr. Seltzer. Can I have 20 seconds to finish up? It ignores the very real imminent threat of a new elementary school required by a rising student enrollment. And my main point is, it's time to bring the finance committee and the capital planning committee into these discussions for a realistic analysis of the problem. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Mark Rosenthal. Good evening. I'd like to start by thanking whoever it was. I don't remember which of you it was who talked about making it possible for people to stay in their homes. I'd like to point out that that's an important aspect of diversity. And I'd like to draw the linkage between that and commercial development, which the town has done very little of and needs to do more of. First of all, the fact that the elderly are not taking advantage of town programs to help them with property taxes is often claimed to be because they're unaware of them. That's not the reason people aren't taking advantage of the programs. It means they're not taking advantage of the programs because the programs are unacceptable to them. Finance committee chair, Al Tosti, has pointed out that residential development costs more in services than it brings in tax revenue. And as other people who have spoken to this issue before me have explained a big part of that is the cost of our education system and the cost of new buildings as we bring in more people and therefore more students. But it's important to note that only 6%, maybe it's 5%, somebody said 5% earlier, but a very low percentage of Arlington's tax revenue comes from commercial that's much, much lower than Cambridge, Somerville or even Lexington. So when we wanna build a new, contribute our part of a new Minuteman High School, that means 94% of that is falling on homeowners. And then a couple of years later, now it's another $300 million for a new Arlington High School. What's next? I mean, when 94% of that falls on homeowners, Cambridge can afford to build more than we can because they have a much larger commercial base. We have next to nothing. And in the era of internet commerce and Amazon we shouldn't be thinking of commercial as meeting store fronts. Store fronts are going to be in trouble for a long time because of that. We need to be talking about other kinds of commercial development. And I'd just like to point out, I had been in a sort of pie in the sky discussion with some people on the Arlington list and I talked about an idea that I had and a friend of mine said, hey, we tried to do that a couple of years ago and town officials wouldn't support us. My idea was essentially a startup incubator. There are more details that I won't go into right now. But the friend of mine told me that they had, he had actually gotten a number of potential businesses. We're at three minutes, Mr. Rosenthal. Okay, about 20 more seconds. You're at three 27. All right, thank you very much. Next speaker is Patricia Wharton. Thank you. And I'm really grateful for some of the comments made by the Arlington Redevelopment Board, especially Mr. Watson. I have a question that I would be glad if you could please answer in not more than four or five sentences. And the question is, do you have plans to help residents being evicted or displaced and to provide more schools and new school facilities for the many students who will be brought in if your density articles are enacted? Thank you. This is a time for public comment where, from open meeting law point of view, responding would be problematic. I will respond in saying that the issues you're raising, I think need to be vetted during the outreach process when we're hearing from residents. And they're important issues for us to talk about and see how they fit into any proposals that might come out of the outreach process. Thank you. It would have been good if you had addressed those last year. It's caused some of the great deal of anxiety. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker is Roderick Holland. Hi. Briefly, if a special town meeting is the mechanism for floating the next substantive zoning changes I'd like to suggest that it would be a great idea to schedule it many months in advance so that town meeting members can actually be there. People travel and it's hard to predict when a special town meeting is going to be held. There's no rule of thumb that one can consult. So that's thing number one. The outreach for the density zoning proposal last year was actually pretty impressive. And I remember the meeting for precinct seven. There were a lot of people there. There was a lot of engagement. One thing that became fairly obvious was that people had what if questions they had use case questions and they weren't getting answered not because of a lack of willingness but literally the lack of capability. And this is actually for the select board as much as for you guys. The town would really benefit from some internal capability to do modeling and simulations so that when questions like this pop up they could be rapidly addressed. This technology is 50 years old. It's been improving over time. And it really honestly it might be worth investing in it. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker is Ann Thompson. Hi there, Ann Thompson. I'm a 28 year resident of Arlington. Also a visiting lecturer and research scientist at MIT and I teach real estate economics, real estate finance. I'm a housing expert so to speak. I would love to be on some kind of a committee. I volunteered to be on committees. I love data and I love housing. In any case, I was looking at, I have a database I'm working on for something else which is the 1.6 million parcels in the five counties in the Boston metropolitan area and I decided to play around with some of the data. One, in terms of where Arlington is relative to these other nearby communities. One, as people have mentioned, we do not have a commercial tax base. We need more commercial tax base. Most towns around us that are in this mayor's coalition actually nearly everyone has not only a huge commercial tax base. I didn't bring my spreadsheet with all the percentages but I have it. But also they can have differential tax rates. Therefore they have less of a problem funding the schools. There's also a thing where in terms of the construction that's happened, I was looking at the average unit size in Cambridge of all the new construction over the last five years because they're affordable housing in Cambridge. It's all or the average square foot footage per unit is 800 square feet, which is not family housing. That's, you know, we need to decide and I mentioned this at town meeting, we need to decide who the affordable housing is for. It can be for the student bringing students in. Maybe, you know, it's politically incorrect to say that that may not be the greatest idea giving our budget issues. But there's a lot of data that I think I have. I know how to model, I know how to go through it. I've got GIS, I've got all kinds of experience in all of this and I love doing it and I won't cost a lot of money. I also would be happy to go over some of these, I would say, maybe not really thought through presentations by MAPC and some of the other exterior firms that have been hired that I think haven't looked at things through an economics and econometric perspective as to what really works. Nor lived in the town for 28 years to have seen the changes that have gone on. In any case, I just wanted to let you know I'm here. I lived down East Arlington, a block and a half away from Adam, suggested a couple times to Adam that, you know, I help out in some way. But please keep me informed and I'd be more than happy to help in any way. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is John Gersh. Thank you, John Gersh, town meeting member, precinct 18. First, let me thank you guys for this forum. This seems like the model for public forum and cooperation. So thank you. But, and I'm thrilled to hear the talk about affordable housing and growing our commercial tax base. Thank you Mr. Watson for bringing that up earlier, early on, but I feel like we're still under the specter of the mass mayor's coalition goal that that 185,000 number is still sort of hanging out there. And I didn't really hear that come up tonight. But if you just did plain math, that would put 6,800 new units in Arlington. That could increase our population by a third. We're already the 12th densest community in Massachusetts, 10 of which are cities. And if our surrounding communities built to our density, we would have hundreds of thousands of new units. I'm not suggesting that. But I cannot address the impact of 6,800 new units on our infrastructure, but you guys have to. This can't be an afterthought. And I guess I'm, again, most people have said most of this, but I have to ask you to put Arlington's needs ahead of the regional needs and really think in terms of affordable housing only and growing the commercial tax base. That's all. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Beth Malofchik. Hi, Beth Malofchik, town meeting member. I actually ran for town meeting because I was so horrified at your information forum last January, the housing forum. I was horrified both by the message as well as the methods that were employed by the people I assume we paid MAPC and CHAPA. So I hope that moving forward, we won't utilize them. I'd like to reiterate statements of my colleagues that we need to address Arlington's problems, particularly since it's been stated moving already. Our commercial tax base, I believe, is 5%. That might include commercial and industrial. 5%, the remaining 14, I think it is, members of the Metro Mayors Coalition for which we pay $10,000 a year, second year running for membership. And I'm not sure why. I don't know what we have in common with them when the other remaining members have a tax base of 48%. They have money to build schools. We don't as we know if you're reading the Arlington list. I am very pleased by David Watson's comments. Thank you so much for remembering. We have limited industrial zone and commercial zone in town. I think that needs to be protected. I'd like to see a warrant article to do that, to preserve it. We don't need to turn it into residences. We need to turn it into lab and research space, which is going for a pretty hot rental in Cambridge, Kendall Square, et cetera. Commercial, holistic, I like that too. I like your holistic viewpoint. We need to think about Arlington as a town, as a community, all of it, retired people, people on limited income, seniors. I live in a neighborhood that does have single room occupancy, which I think Ms. Mahan mentioned. So it can be done. You've got the funds in your warrant article that's gonna address affordable housing. Buy the house before one of our developers gets it, tears it down and puts up two badly built plastic luxury duplexes, which is what is happening on Beacon Street and Park Street in East Arlington. Holistic and green, I was glad to hear that Ms. Rates said we wanna be a green community. We sure as hell do, and there are a bunch of us who are working on a natural gas ban. Brookline has provided us with the primer, how to do it, why to do it. They have done the groundwork for us, so I hope that we will see a warrant article this spring. A lot of people really wanna try to lower our greenhouse gases, which the high school building committee has made more difficult by pulling out all the green features or a significant number of the green features from the high school. I hope the select board will get personally interested in that and fix it. We need the solar panels. We need the food digester, because as Mr. Chaplain mentioned at the goal setting meeting, I think it was the first week in August that John Gershne attended. Ref use is becoming more expensive to get rid of in town, both recycling, and I've assumed that's the reason why we had the food digester in the high school in the first place. I guess there's a lot of garbage in the cafeteria. You're at three minutes, Ms. Wojcik. Thank you so much. So I'll finish by saying, let's save the tree canopy on Mass Ave and not take it down at Broadway Plaza and let's not move the veterans park to behind the police station. Thank you very much. You'll be hearing more from me. Next speaker is Carol Greeley. All right then. And then the next speaker is Pam Hallett. Excuse me, Pam, I'm sorry. I skipped the name. Carl Wagner, excuse me. Thank you, I'm Carl Wagner, Edge Hill Road. I wanted to say thank you specifically to the ARB and this legboard for having this meeting. It's great, and I hope the people of Arlington are watching on ACMI. I don't know if people are even aware that I view those boards as essentially volunteers doing their best for Arlington. So I think that's really fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, last year from 2018 December until a town meeting eventually spoke its mind, something came up that really concerns me. And so I hope that going forward, there can be a change to address that. And that is that the density articles that the unelected officials put forward really did not represent something that had its genesis in the voters or the taxpayers, the renters, the owners or the businesses in Arlington. As you heard from other people, they came from out of town or they came from the minds of the unelected officials. So who are we that pay their salaries, not yours, but theirs? Who are we to say this isn't right, you have to change? How are we to do that? The only way to do that is to express it through voting for different select members of the board. And I hope that going forward, you will realize that the people who live here and work here, these are stakeholders that have to come before any outside interests, whether they're developers outside or Metro or areas that are talking about changes that are good for Boston. What's most important to us, and therefore in the people we vote for, is that you work to make sure that our cost of life, our quality of life, the way that our children go to school, the density that we live in, the reason we chose to live between Lexington and Cambridge, that's preserved. You are in a sacred bond with us if you're elected by us. So I hope you will continue to do that. And that means I specifically have an ask. My ask is that you would work with the ARB and the manager and the planning department this year to direct them to recognize we are the most important stakeholders here. And that means that a serious analysis of research, as well as what they have told you about plans for more density is undertaken before anything that would wreck the town that we moved into is undertaken. Thank you very much. Sorry, now Pam Hallett. I think you can hear me. Town meeting member from precinct 21 and Executive Director of the Housing Corporation of Arlington. First of all, I wanna say a couple of things. This is a wonderful, wonderful gathering. I can't wait to see what these brilliant minds can generate by working together as two boards. This is very exciting. I really commend you for pulling this together. I also wanna say that affordable housing is clearly a crisis here and you've all recognized that pretty clearly. And it is a crisis for many, many people in Arlington. Most of the people that come to our office looking for help are from Arlington already. They've lived here for anywhere from 10 to 100 years, basically some of them. And we have been very pleased with the fact we put together a network of social service agencies in town that has been able to work to take each of these cases and get them housing, get them other kinds of social services to meet all of the needs that they present to us. But it is definitely this Arlington community's problem and the people that are living here that really need our attention the most. I also, though, want to say that the real estate transfer tax is such a wonderful concept because housing, as everyone has said, has increased in value dramatically with very little work on the part of the people that have owned the property. Not that that's an issue. That is the way real estate works. But to have then that create a tax which then helps the people that need help is just such a wonderful idea. We'll be testifying tomorrow down at Statehouse to hope that the legislature decides to put it in effect across the state. And so wish me luck in talking to them. But thank you. Good luck. Good luck, ma'am. Thank you. Next speaker is Susan Stamps. I'm Susan Stamps, town media member and member of the tree committee. I just had a couple of thoughts. Really appreciate the meeting. It's been really good and informative and shows that you really do want community input. We all do. The first thought I had was about the composition of the initial committee group, working group, which was going to be two members of the select board, two members of the redevelopment board and the town manager and perhaps Ms. Rae. I think maybe that was it. I'm not sure. Or just one member of the select board, one of the, and then so just four people. And four people is good. One of the problems that the tree committee and I know many other groups in town had with the process last year was we were kind of brought in after a lot of, there had been a lot of investment by the redevelopment board in their ideas. And understandably, it was a tough thing when they finally rolled out the ideas to hear a lot of pushback. And I appreciate that I think the idea behind this process that you're talking about today and the dialogue between the select board who sort of speaks for the whole town and the redevelopment board who are more the wonky experts in zoning is to open up that process and have more of that feedback. But I feel that there ought to be a working group to think about what are the committees in town which represent the particular interests which will be impacted and have their voices in the conversation from the beginning not way down on the chart when you get to inter-departmental slash community engagement. I think the community engagement, the relevant committees really ought to be brought into the tent right in the beginning. And I'm, and who are we talking about? Greenery, trees, and that sort of thing was a big topic for many people, not just the tree committee. I think there should be a member of the tree committee and a task force that is maybe parallel to what you're talking about in the beginning. Somebody perhaps from the disability commission, there were a lot of disability issues that came up that were only talked about once the public medians had gotten going and the articles were basically written. Also someone from the housing community. There ought to be environmental concerns addressed right from the beginning. Whether it is somebody from sustainable Arlington or somebody from the new clean energy future committee. And finally, I do agree with what somebody said that it would be a good idea to have a representative of the builders in town. So one, two, three, four, five, six. That's three minutes Susan. Oh, is that it? Okay, so I'd like you to think about that so we don't all come in when it's harder to get our voice and I think it'd be better to be part of that initial presentation. And then my second idea was from the last time was visuals, visuals, visuals. That's what literally everybody was complaining about. We wanted to see what you were talking about. So thank you. Thank you. Next is Joanne Preston. There's three people after you. Good evening. Joanne Preston, 42 Mystic Lake Drive, town meeting member precinct nine. And I'd like to say last spring I attended all of the ARB meetings on the zoning articles. At none of these meetings, however, did I see the Arlington residents that would be most negatively impacted by their passage. These are the residents who live in the older very basic apartment buildings along what I guess we now call transportation corridors. And I think it's very important that they be included because research in other areas show once these areas with these older buildings are rezoned, taxes go up, rents go up, but more significantly they get torn down to build these bigger buildings, most of which are luxury apartments they cannot afford to live in. Now, who are these people? I actually know someone who lives in one of them and I asked her to describe her whole apartment complex. She said 50% of the people who live there, over 50%, were not born in this country. Most of them are recent immigrants from the Czech Republic, Russia, China, Bangladesh. Anyway, you get the idea, the Caribbean. She said in her little complex of four units is one African-American family, one Chinese family who just came from China, a Indian family, and her family was a second generation Irish. How are we, these people have not, they're not, they're going to be difficult to reach but we must do it because they're going to have such a negative effect if these areas are again put up to be rezoned. They can't come to evening meetings, many of them because they work at night. They work in restaurants. They work the night shift as attendants. Many of them have problems with English. They can't, and many of them come for countries where you don't just walk up to town hall and tell them what you think, right? It's much too dangerous. So I would recommend that immediately the methods last year did not reach them. So this I think should be one of the first priorities in your outreach plan. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Alan Holman. Arum, Arum Holman. Hello, Arum Holman, 12 Whittemore Street, 22 year resident of Arlington, former town meeting member and possibly future town meeting member. I wanna thank you both for both groups for listening tonight, appreciate that. I appreciate the fact that you're listening. Couple of comments, definitely yes on the transfer tax. I proposed it a year ago when you proposed up zoning the town and so I appreciate the fact that you listened to me even though it did take a year, better late than never. Concern about this proposed schedule, yes, you say you wanted to listen and when you withdrew your support for the townwide up zoning article last year, you said that you did wanna listen. I'm glad you're finally getting around to it. However, I'm concerned that this protracted schedule is really an attempt, a second attempt at that kind of up zoning and you should be listening but that's not what we want, that's not what we need. My main point is that Arlington should not be converting its commercial and industrial spaces to housing as we have done for the last 20 years, just to cite a few. The legacy project in Arlington Center, 135 units, no affordable housing because at that time there was no inclusion of rezoning and even though I asked the Arlington redevelopment board to ask the developer to put in some, the redevelopment board refused to even ask. Later on, we've had the Brigham, 140 units and I don't remember the exact number of units at Sims, I believe it's something well over 300 but overall of the roughly 1,000 units of additional housing built over the last 20 years to roughly increase Arlington's number of housing units from roughly 20,000 to roughly 21,000 of those roughly 1,000 units that have been created over 20 years, not exactly a great pace, very, very few of them have been affordable. And what you have, what has happened is that in order to do that, we had commercial and industrial spaces converted to housing, which wasn't very affordable, it's the wrong way to go. We need the commercial and industrial spaces. When you build housing, you don't really help the town's bottom line because most of the money goes to providing services. When you have more commercial and industrial space, we don't provide as many services to those businesses. That really helps the town's bottom line and that increase to the town's bottom line can help with the town's fiscal problems, which right now I'll define as annual budget increases on the order of 4% in a town whose population is not making 4% more money every year. We're at three minutes, Mr. Holman. Okay, so I will urge you, the industrial spaces, they create jobs, they create identities, you need to keep them, you shouldn't be doing studies saying, oh, let's mix in some more residential into the commercial industrial. Help them out, make Arlington a job center. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker is Karen Kelleher. Good evening, I'm Karen Kelleher, precinct five, I'm a town meeting member and a member of the Housing Plan Implementation Committee. Thank you for holding this forum. I wanna ask you to think about this forum and ask all of the participants in this forum and the citizens to think about this as a reset. I think we had a relatively unproductive conversation last year that did not get at the real conversation which we're trying to have, which is about our values and our lifestyle and who lives here and what our lifestyle is like. There's things that are scary about change that can cause really strong reactions. But what we're trying to solve here is a very, very difficult problem. We're fighting the economy, we have a booming economy in the greater Boston area, it is causing both the strengths and benefits that we have here in Arlington. Those of us who own our homes here have realized tremendous appreciation because of that, but we also have the affordability crisis we're facing in Arlington and in the region because of that. So we need difficult solutions, none of them are going to be easy and I'm really pleased to see us turn to some solutions. What I heard last year and what I hear tonight is unanimity that we are concerned about the increasing affluence of our town and the squeezing out of a more diverse population. I hear that universally. And I would love for us to lean into that, that place where I hear unanimity and try to start working on solutions and I think the proposals that are coming out of the Housing Plan Implementation Committee and other places to create an affordable housing trust and to start thinking about how to fund that are productive. I also happen to work in affordable housing. I've spent about 20 years creating and financing it and it's very, very expensive and the more expensive your market is, the more expensive it is to subsidize housing so it's affordable for low income people. And so the estimate that Jenny gave you for what we would have raised in a 2% tax last year would not even buy one affordable housing unit. $103,000 is not enough to subsidize one unit. So we need to start aggregating resources and understanding that to solve that problem we have to make hard choices and we have to think about things we may not otherwise want to think about and balance all of our objectives which include good education for our students and solving our traffic woes and being sustainable and having green spaces and also creating the housing we need or the affordability we need in our existing housing for the people we say we're concerned about. So I would like to ask us to really consider this meeting a reset. Let's not try to repeat the conversation we had last week, last year. We may need to talk about density to solve this problem. We may need to talk about revenue that is painful for us to come up with. We're gonna need to talk about a lot of other things. I hope we can think about creative solutions, ways that we can envision a future that will lead to some of those things but also may cost us some things we don't want to give up. We're gonna have to do trade off some of the things we value in this conversation. There are two ways to create affordable housing. One is to subsidize it. The other is to get the market to subsidize it. And so I just want to comment on some of the things that have been said tonight saying let's just focus on affordable housing. And there's a lot of criticism of I'm not sure whom for not creating affordable housing. The market is part of the value we can use to create affordable housing. So I think we need to include that in the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm worried. Last speaker signed up is Len Diggins. Hi, Lenard Diggins precinct. Tom, any member precinct three? I didn't come with an agenda. I just want to comment on a couple of things that I heard early on in the meeting and during the comment period. Respect to sustainable transportation and its impact on housing. It isn't so much its impact on housing as much as it is impact on affordability of just living. If we can get transportation costs down. So for instance, people don't need to own a car. That will bring down the cost of living for them. So if we can work on things along those lines that just bring down the cost of living then it can maybe allow people to buy more house. Same thing goes with sustainable housing. If maybe we can develop policies for sustainable housing that will make the cost of owning a house lower then that will make it possible for people to own more house maybe more solar so that they're not paying it more for electricity or maybe some other ideas we haven't thought about but just kind of think about sustainability in terms of what it can do to the cost of living itself and not so much the cost of an affordable housing the affordability of housing. And finally, with respect to the notion of making Arlington first, I hope that we appreciate me from what's going on in the world especially with respect to climate me that yes we can work on making America first but we can't isolate ourselves from the world me. So in the process of making Arlington first let's try and work with people in the region because if we elevate the region we're gonna elevate ourselves too but we really will need to work with everyone in the region and have that notion of cooperating with them because there are a lot of good people in this region who really care about things and are trying to make life better for everyone so yes, make Arlington first but let's work with everyone in the area. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who came both to listen and to speak tonight. Okay, so our final agenda item is to discuss future joint meeting dates. I don't know that we need to select a date tonight but I did hear under a prior agenda item to talk about possibly setting a joint goal, setting dialogue sometime in the June, July, August timeframe. Is that? Can we say July or August? July or August. Versus June, is that okay? And I probably not suggest we pick that date right now given how far it is out but commit to a couple months before July and August circulating a poll and finding out when members are available to have such a meeting. Does that sound amenable? I would say it's a very least wait until after the local elections. Yeah. Don't want to commit somebody or may not be here. Okay. All right, there's that with nothing else on the agenda. I think you can look for a motion to adjourn so we'll take a motion to adjourn from this side. Motion to adjourn. Second. All in favor. Aye. Thank you everyone. Thank you so much.