 all of those. So we have a meeting on that. On order this April 12 meeting of the popular planning commission, first we have to approve the agenda. Take a look. It's a pretty busy one I think. In the minutes from last time. You had said something about wanting to talk about density. The density discussion this time. Decide not to, you decide to postpone that. Yeah. It's, you know, all of that's. Okay. So, uh, you know, kind of, you know, ten of them based on. Whether we, because, like, like, like, like how you pointed out last time that. You know, we want to make sure that the city planning goes first, you know. Okay. Sure. I just wanted to make sure that that we. Paid attention to that. I moved to approve the agenda. Okay. And the second. We don't see you, but now we can hear you. Sorry. So we have a much to prove agenda by barb in a second by Stephanie. Those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. I think that was everyone. Any opposed to the agenda. Okay. Okay. Okay. Agenda approved. Let's proceed. Come from the chairs next. I don't really have anything. It is. Disheartening that. You know, the, the legal system was used to destroy the garage project. Which is something that we learn about in law school that happens and. You know, you know, You know, You know, That's great. So I'm sure that's something that we're going to talk about later, because it's definitely changes the parking landscape and some of the other development stuff. But. Question on that. Sorry, what I was trying to say at the beginning. Was if we talked about a policy change a few months ago, and I don't remember what it was called, but I'm wondering if that would have had an impact. It was, I don't remember what it was called. I don't remember what it was called. I'm assuming unless it was specific to the actual process. I think, but I don't remember what it was called. On the, on the record. Yeah. Is that what was. With that they've mattered. Do you think. It's still a pending. Conversation that's, you know, this, this incident may put that on the forefront. We had followed up after that meeting staff had with. Some folks from. That have also adopted. On the record review and asked them some of the questions about, does this help, you know, the point of us of one of the points of us adopting this was to try to help avoid the legal process. And they said they still have a number of cases that still go to court. So generally what you end up with are more appeals based on procedural issues. I think the question, and this is what we will have to. You know, get when, when, when we have our combined. Plain commission, DRB city council meeting and inviting some folks. From other communities. We'll want to ask some of the questions. One of which is you may get appealed more. But are they kind of. Pretty routinely moved back. You know, kind of routinely looked at and said, no, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, rather than a two year appeal, someone can appeal to court and it gets, you know, settled up in five or six months when the court. Takes a look at the facts and makes a decision. So I don't know the answer to that. I think that's, those are some of the good questions we should ask. Cause that's really what we want is a way of. Kind of nipping some of those appeals in the bud. And. You know, if it's not. Long appeals, then it's not really accomplishing what we want it to do, but if, if it is, it looks like you'll still get appealed. But the question is, you know, is it for two years worth of appeals or is it something that. The courts generally can process and move back. And that's the question we'll have to find out. So the map of question is still out there. And the information is obtainable too. I mean. There's probably enough data out there to compare on the record review to other similar municipal appeals. And just compare it to see if it shortens things. That, that would be wonderful information and totally obtainable. Yeah. And, you know, still maybe a unique case. They're, they're a different. They're a different community. You know, a lot of people from away. A lot of people with the resources to hire attorneys, although. My career is no shortage of attorneys either. So. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Mike and Stephanie. Does anyone else have anything else to bring up the song, the agenda? Okay. We'll move on to general business. I don't believe we have any members of the public. I don't believe we have any members of the public. And with that, we can go on to the minutes. So if everyone can take a look at the March 22nd minutes, and you can get those out of the way and move on. These three. Other items. I'll move to approve the minutes. I'll second. Okay. Motion from Stephanie. And a second from Barb. Any discussion. Okay. Okay. Hi. Hi. Any opposed. Okay. It's approved. And on we go on the agenda. So we have the update from the working group on the transportation implementation strategy. Who would like to take over. That discussion. Well, I don't know. I don't know. Or I can jump in at any moment. Mike led us through this whole process. With a. Is this the third version, Mike? At least. Okay. All right. For me, third version for you. Yeah. And three is too many for me. So I can't imagine having 10. Okay. Okay. I'm trying. Oh, I shouldn't speak for you. But my sense was that he was looking to put it more into a. More expanded format. With. More strategies that. Do in fact. Connect transportation plan to other plans that we will be discussion. Discussing like the land use plan. Like the energy plan and all of those. So we did discuss some of these. I think, I mean, just speaking personally and let. Mike jump in too. Is that my biggest issue with it is that I feel as if the aspirations should be clear cut. One simple sentence that somebody could actually repeat. That's the aspiration. So for example, aspiration A being in Montpelier, it's easy to live and work without owning a car. Period. That's the aspiration without going on then to talk about. How that would be achieved. Because how it would be achieved should, should be a, should emerge in the goals from my standpoint. But. Do you want to touch on that, Mike? The reason why the second sentence is there and I am just being where Barb was going with this and it makes sense. The reason why I put the second sentence in when we did the original model. Early on. And we kind of framed it out. We really wanted the goals to connect back. There'd be certain targeted words that we would then have in the goals. And my thought was, and what I mentioned to Barb was we could certainly. You know, we have this version that we know. Isn't really going to exist. We've already had, you know, John and, and Marcella. And the subcommittee had already looking at the structure. So that's already going to get thrown into a completely different structure. We could just look at the second sentence. And we have a couple of these, I think also in land use where we have a second sentence. And it may be just. It's useful in this format to have that second sentence. So we understand here's the aspiration. We'll a little bit. Of a second sentence that then connects to the goals. But once we put this into John's format, we can drop that second sentence. It's again, it's really up to kind of. What you guys feel comfortable with. If you think it feels intuitive that. You know, you know, you know, you know, these six goals, you know, are touching on things that aren't actually appearing in. In the aspiration, but it's clear. That these goals are relating to the aspiration in that. You know, living and working in Montpelier without owning a car is not itself really something you can target. You kind of have to break that into a couple of pieces. What would that look like? It would have to be dense and it would have to have this, and it would have to have this, you'd have to have this, you'd have to have this. And those are those six little pieces that would have to happen in order for that to work. So that's really up to you guys as to how you want to. Work with that. As I said, I think it's helpful in this format, but we also know this format that won't survive to the final. To our final version either. Would somebody from the format committee like to talk about that? John. I was actually, I was going to suggest, and we can, John can start with us if he wants to, but we met to talk about parks and it might actually make sense to look at that first. What do you think, John? Yeah, I think that could be helpful at the very least and maybe sparking some discussion or getting a sense of what at least a few of us think where, where we should be going in terms of direction for that. Okay. You guys want to move on to the next item and then we'll circle back. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I don't think we need to do anything procedurally formally about doing that. So we'll just, we'll move on to the next item. With the plan to come back to this. Okay. We have the parks implementation strategy that was. Worked on by. John and Stephanie, I believe were the two, right? Yeah. So the, the attachment is the previous version. Okay. Okay. We don't have a new document. That's good. No, we don't. Okay. John, do you want to kick it off? Or do you want me to jump in first? I think if you'd like to, I'm just having trouble finding the map I was going to make. So I'm just going to recreate it because it only took. A minute or two. Yeah. So we talked about mapping at our last meeting. So John pulled together a map so you can speak to that piece. But we met two, two weeks ago, I think now. To go through this, the seven pages of the parks section. And, and whittle it down to, well, what are they actually trying to propose? So I think from the. From the perspective of the parks commission, I think that seven page document is a really good. Thing from, for them to have. So it's essentially their work plan. What they're working off of what they want to accomplish in a little more detail. But I think we, we whittled it down to five things. That they're trying to do. Which is a little bit different than what we're trying to do. Which is a little bit different than what we've been looking at in these really, really long documents. So. Part of the conversation here, I think is, is. That we needed to have is whether that's, whether you guys agree that that's the right decision. And actually I can. I can share my screen if you want to see what we did. That would probably be helpful. I think you can just take it. Let me. Okay. So in looking through all of the, we went through every single strategy. And anytime we hit on a new topic. We, we wrote, we wrote down a new, a new thing. And if it was already addressed within these high level policy actions, then we didn't add anything new. So we ended up with five things. The last two were sort of question marks that we wanted to get a better sense maybe for Mike about what they were. Looking at in some of the specific actions, but the vast majority of this seven pages can be summed up in these first three things. So one is to adopt the updated green print, green print plan and establish a related purchasing program. That one came up quite a few times in different, different forms throughout the document. The second one, developing a 10 year management plan and a volunteer program. And then we went through all of the, all of the, the second one developing a 10 year management plan and a volunteer program that was, we tied those together because the volunteer program seemed to be specifically about helping maintain things in the parks. I think that's a sub piece of that management plan. Developing marketing and outreach materials to track residents and visitors to the parks. And then the last two, there were a couple of actions around a park economic development coordination program that I was hoping Mike could tell us a little bit more about what they were thinking there. And then at the end, there was an action around studying, study, excuse me, to identify potential locations for another large hub of multi-use trails. So we weren't sure if that's something that would have fall, would fall within the green print plan or if they were thinking about something else with that action. So this is much shorter than the seven pages. John, anything I forgot to mention before other people jump in with their thoughts? No, I think that was a really good synopsis. I mean, the idea was really looking at the horizon of, you know, how long and how often we adopt these plans and, and thinking about all the different sections of the plan and articulating our goals and the, the specifics on how to get there don't necessarily need to be detailed, detailed in here. Now, if there is something specific, we should definitely include it, especially as it relates to sort of land use or specific properties or locations that we want to see implemented in the plan. But, but generally speaking, it seemed, it seemed like limiting it to this, this high level would allow us to wrap our heads around, you know, how we're going to accomplish the plan as a whole. And otherwise things get overwhelming very quickly. And then, and then, you know, even in one year, never mind like five years, you know, people disregard, disregard this like think of everything that every committee and city council is doing. How often are they going to the city plan to get guidance or figure out if that's what their work plan previously said they should be doing. And how, and you know, how, how appropriate is it. Given how, how quickly things can change, you know, be it ways of accomplishing these goals or different opportunities presenting themselves or, you know, as COVID presented or COVID showed us, our needs can change very rapidly as well. And coming up with these plans that have very specific actions seem, seem maybe more appropriate at the programmatic level rather than a city-wide plan. So at least for Stephanie and I and talking through this, you know, when we were going through those seven pages, it was hard for us to figure out like how are we going to do this. But then when we, when we went through it and, and kind of bucketed them into these five strategies were like, oh, like this is how we're going to do it. Like it's only these five things. It's not that crazy. And it may be exactly the same as those, what'll happen in those seven pages, but at least for, for us understanding how we hit our goals, it's like, we're going to update this plan. We're going to adopt this new one, you know, get this new fund going, look at some outreach material. And then, you know, we have these two questions. John, how does this fit within the formatting of, say aspirations, goals and strategies? Do these five fit within goals? Or are they really even higher level and, and become an aspiration level? How did you see these? No, this is how we like accomplish those goals. So those goals that those goals can actually be a little more specific, you know, than these actions. They can, those goals can add, add color and, you know, those should also be real things that we can say yes to whether or not we accomplish them. But the goal is, is like, what are we, what are we trying to accomplish? And this is really the how. And it's not like a complete roadmap, but it's, it's like the vehicle to how we'll get there. So these do sort of fit within the format of strategies. Yeah. Yeah. I think that in terms of, well, let's look at aspiration a goal a is make Montpeliers Park, some more vibrant part of the city's life. Then. That might get. Rewritten or included. As is. I think there's a decent chance it gets rewritten. Otherwise every topic will be make fill in the blank of vibrant part of like Montpeliers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we should bring some of them together, but. You know, I don't mean to, to minimize, like, I think. I think the, I think recreation and, and. Our amenities and facilities are a huge part of. The quality of life in the city. And. It's not a small to have it be like a core component of our economic development program. And the forefront is not like a. It's not a small thing. Like. This is. I just, I don't want to sound like dismissive of like, oh no, we, we don't want to. You know, make parks a vibrant part of my career. We're going to bundle it in with, you know, six different. Six different things. But I think when we have all of them together, then we can look at them. And. And craft them with all of them in front of us. And in a way that makes sense. And these five. What you're calling policy or actions. Would. Support each one of those goals. Okay, I see. Yeah, the hope would be that each one of those goals or something at least has one of these to tie to you. Otherwise they're just ungrounded, right? They're just. It's just some lofty. You know. It's just a little bit of a lofty statement that we'd like, but if there's, if there's nothing, there's no program or project that's going to get us there. Then, you know, it's just wishful thinking. So these, these don't get into the necessarily the specifics of those, but at least we know we have. A, a project or a program. And these. Intern are also tied to a responsible party, right? So you're not, you're saying that we would still include all of the goals that are in the. In the parks plan, perhaps rewritten or adjusted. Maybe some of them combined. The goals. Yeah, Stephanie and I had talked about reworking them some and. Okay. Didn't. I haven't been here as they were written right now because we didn't. Once we went through all the strategies, we were like, that was a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll come back to this. But this is the, the list of what the goals were. And I might have accidentally deleted one. So I'll check back. Yeah. I haven't updated the aspirations yet either, but I think. I think these could be much shorter and concise, like what we were talking about with transportation. So it's just that one high level sentence. Like you were saying. Does anyone else have any questions or reactions? What are your thoughts, Mike? I guess I, you know, I certainly see us going in a lot of these directions. We may have to end up with a, you know, maybe a couple more. May not be five, but certainly if it's down to six or seven. So a lot of what, you know, so a lot of this gets developed. Working with the committees and what they're trying to accomplish over the next eight years. And so in a number of places, I already started to kind of lump them in. And I've been doing a little better job of doing that with these. Latest ones. So you'll see, you know, they'll, they'll want to have like some outreach. So rather than having four different outreaches, I'll create an outreach program and start to have some bullets under them. And so there may be ones, you know, there are even multiple ones in the same under the same goal. So I think. You know, what you're talking about is certainly possible to start to kind of further condense them. But while I was working with them. It would be very difficult for me to kind of collapse their, their ideas down with them right there. I think what we can do is to do a little bit more. Of grouping things together and then kind of explain to them that. What we're trying to do is to. Kind of capture them and condense them down a little bit more. You know, so yes, there is an outreach program. The volunteer program, maybe a separate program. You know, certainly the 10 year management plans are really looking at. One set of things, but we can certainly, as I said, even if this longer list got collapsed to this, you know, to six or seven, I can certainly see that possible with some of those descriptions kind of coming in. You know, a lot of this just comes with. Talking with the committees as to what it is they're trying to do. What are your goals? How are you going to do it? And then they kind of just start spitballing things. And then I start putting them into boxes, but I usually left them a little bit separate. So. That's certainly understandable. Well, and I'll also say, Mike, I think with this one. So yeah, I can definitely see breaking out the volunteer program that makes sense. It could make sense here or maybe as its own thing. But I also, I think in some ways it was easier to do this with parks because. When we went through it all, it felt a lot more concrete. I don't know if that will necessarily be the case with all the other ones, but it felt like when we were talking about, these are really the things that if they do these things, that's, they will have accomplished what they're trying to do. And it's, I definitely think it's something that we would send back to the committee and say, does this, does this quantify all of the things that you're trying to do? Is there anything that we missed in terms of these really concrete actions that it might be a little harder. With some of the other groups in terms of what they've presented to us so far. But this one, when we went through a reaction, it really felt like it could condense down really nicely. Yeah. And as I said, I had been trying a little bit harder to start to group them. I didn't start to collapse them, which I think is what you guys did. But I did start to put them under, you know, you know, we should have a volunteer program do this. We should have a volunteer program to do this. You should have a volunteer program to do this. And you guys just looked at that and said, okay, let's just have a volunteer program and leave it at that. And I think that makes sense. But for the purposes of having them being able to. To get their thoughts down. You know, I just kind of kept them separate and then gave them a similar heading. And you're right. Some of the earlier ones, like the housing plan. I wasn't thinking in that way. And I think we can probably go back when we started looking at the housing plan to go through and say, you know, these three are really just an outreach program. And these three here are really zoning changes that have to be made and then start to group them together. Hopefully this makes things easier and not harder. Well, one of you share this as a sort of template with the group and maybe some of the other working groups can. Look to undertake a similar approach. So it's in the plan website folder and community services, utilities and facilities. So we should all have access to that or we can send out the, I can send a link out if anyone's missing it. Yeah, could you send the link? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So this sort of expanded the expanded version that we're seeing. Would be considered more of a work plan. Is that what you were talking about, Stephanie? The work plan to achieve these policy, these actions. Yeah. So their long list for that group is still, that's what this is what the committee is going to be doing. We've just tried to distill that down to you. So for the city plan, what does that look like in just a few key things that they'll be working on? That makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know that we specifically missed anything. If we did, I think that's the point where the mic can tell us or we can, when we go back to the committee, we can go back to the committee once we have these final to say, Hey, here are the things that we heard you say in your work plan. Is this, is this right to remiss anything? But yes, that's how I was thinking about it. Great. Yeah. And I was, I was thinking as I was starting to group these together. I'm trying to remember what group I was doing this for. Maybe it was natural resources, which we'll get to at some point soon. But I think it's important to remember that. By lumping them together, it might encourage the committee to look at having kind of subcommittees or work, working things. So if you broke this into a couple of groups, you might then, it might make sense to go through and have like an outreach subcommittee. If you're going to have. A bunch of things under an outreach. You know. Marketing and outreach might become a subcommittee. And we can come back to talk about the economic development piece. Which. Which might make sense later on if they're, if they're grouped well enough, then it might make it easier for them to go through and say, well, there's some of these that we can just. Do as a, as a committee, then there's some of these that just might make sense if we're going to. You know, kind of target. You know, I think some of this too came from, so with the. The mapping. Basically. You know, taking the few layers that the regional planning commission has. To make sure that every year we're working on. On the program, which includes many pieces. I think some of this too came from. So with the. The mapping. I think it's a good idea to take a look at the, you know, making the few layers that the regional planning commission had, including, you know, areas of land with public access, common open land, city, land, wreck areas, city parks. The whole, and if you draw like a half mile buffer around. All of those. The entire city is, is covered. Many times over. And so. Recreation areas are and open space and open land and. How, you know, there are elements of seasonality to them and. How they. Are appropriate for, you know. Either very limited or very expansive numbers of people. And that's what we're doing. And it's not something that we're going to be able to. Get into dive into. In too much depth in this, but it does deserve. Does deserve, you know, careful. And planning. So something like the green print plan or, you know. Or maintenance plan. Is something that should, should go into that, but it's not something that we're going to be able to do. And it's not something that we're going to be trying to, when I, when I thought I would throw up, you know, the buffers, we were thinking, maybe we can identify like. An obvious area that, that needs a park. And it's like, okay, well, then you started asking question, like, what's a park? And then, you know, how good does it need to be? And, and what, like. What do I, what does all this mean? So. Do you want to share your screen, John? I can stop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's like one of the features here. So there's still. More. Let's see. John, you're thinking this isn't. A lift that we could do ourselves then to try to. Pinpoint some areas of need. I think it's, that's what I'm hearing you say that's better. It would be better to put in a plan to plan to do it later. Yeah. Or if there is an area, you know, that's where we're going to be. We're going to be able to figure out all of our existing resources. And. And get, if, if we do get some input, it could be worth annotating. There are, you know, a couple of neighborhoods that. Do seem like there were, it's likely that they. Would benefit from. Certain types of parks, but again. You know, it could be very easy to do it with trails and connections. And the quality and size of some of these parks. It could be very easy just to. To not get this. To not do it justice in. Some kind of quick overlay. And the point of this again, which I haven't even done half of the features was just like. You just. You can make the case that all of my failures is in close practice. Proximity to a park, you know, and maybe that's a cemetery, but. It is all relative. I mean. And then, and then, you know, public versus private. A lot of our open space needs are. last met by private land holdings and how does that fit into the equation? So yeah, it's complicated. John, did you have a map that you could share with us, something you put together for this? I just grabbed the data from the Regional Planning Commission. Was I sharing my screen? Oh, I thought I was. Yeah, I thought you thought you were. Can you see it now? Yeah, there we go. So the Regional Planning Commission was making some assumptions about like the distance from the park that's impacted or something? No, this is just from the last plan and and it's some points and some polygons and it includes like common open land, city land, wreck areas, city parks, and then points that are just areas of land with public access. And then I just put a half mile buffer around those. Oh, okay. Those points. But if we did all the polygons and everything, you would just, you know, cover everything up pretty quickly. But you know, we've got a golf course, you know, the Elks Lodge, everything from Hubbard Park to like a cemetery and the ball parks or the wastewater treatment plan on here. It'd be helpful to make sure access is considered for, I mean, because we're not talking about just being in proximity when we're talking about accessing and using, right? Great. Yeah, I mean, I think your lines do highlight the two places that they're really looking. One is south of River Street, you know, that area, Berlin Street. That area is one area that is always highlighted as not having access to a good park. It does have a small park, but it doesn't have a, you know, a larger area. Where's the small park? It's over by Stonewall Meadows, right around where your cursor is there. Is that it? That looks too big. But yeah, I think that might be it. But I don't think it's as big as you have it mapped to me. Yeah, I actually think that it's like the condo's open land. Well, this was the area with the highest density without, without sort of like a park park that was evident. Yeah, which is I think why there was an effort to get another park over that. There's, you know, Stonewall Meadows does have a large area, a portion of it, which is developable and a portion of it that is not. And so there's always been a discussion of maybe trying to get that area that, you know, they could put in some trails and have a wooded area that would give people access to being able to go for some, you know, nature hike or just, you know, not necessarily, you know, there already is a small playground equipment area. But if they could get another one. Who owns it, Mike? Just so we're clear. The city owns the park. There is a park in there that the city owns. It's off Isabelle's Circle. Okay. And that there's, so there is a piece of parkland that we own. And then there is Stonewall Meadows is owned by a gentleman of Fecto, who's the one who owns Fecto Homes. He's done a number of subdivisions. They had permitted to build the project and it never got built. So. The condos owned the playground? The playground is publicly owned. Oh, okay. Okay. When you, when you said a city park, yeah, I couldn't like, it's more of a playground that's over there. Okay. So Beno, like Woodland type park over there? No Woodland park. So that's always been a discussion that, you know, then obviously the connection across Saban's pasture across the, the golf course over to Gallison Hill. There's always been kind of a discussion that there isn't much on that side, because that would benefit people who are up on Town Hill who could come down or people who may be farther down that could go up. You know, to a certain extent, the golf course is quasi public land, but we certainly can't. There's a limit to what you can do, you know, it's open to the public as a golf course, but not necessarily open to the public as recreation land. You know, and there's some obviously that's up there near Northfield Street. There's some private land, but no public land. Okay. So let's, I think we, you know, as John was saying, we can't do this justice now, but what do we want to do to make sure that it is done justice? Well, I think we'll be working on this as we start building out the plan, because the plan is going to eventually move into our online format. I think as we start building that out, we would, you know, start working on, on developing how and what information we want to put on those maps to kind of give out to the public. And then if we've got a, you know, as we are planning, we will probably have an interactive element to that. You know, you can tell us as we're doing the public input, but obviously once we have our adopted plan, it can't have that conversational piece built into it could be as I think we talked about. Um, it had, it can't be dynamic. The plan has to be static. But we can certainly have places that we can allow for interaction that's not technically part of the plan. Or not, depending on how we want to set it up. That's, but the plan itself during the planning process, we should probably have some interactive pieces. And then once it's adopted, we would shut those down and also be curious. I don't know if you were here from like the parks director or when we talk about having it as part of our economic development plan or is there, is there something specific that we're missing that we should be including or or looking at like, are we, is there a vision that Montpelier is like a mountain biking or cross country skiing like Mecca or any kind of outdoor recreations like snow biking or and maybe not, maybe it's just like, it's far more general than that. But I do like get, get bits and pieces of all these cool things that are happening around. And I don't know if I don't know if there's any kind of like Yeah, I mean, I can, what I can say is that Alec Ellsworth, who is the parks director, you know, the, the idea of having outdoor recreation as a part of our economic development strategy, that came from him, that is his push. And he is trying to get city council and others to, to build that into plans that we should be, you know, we have a great park system. We've got great cross country trails and mountain bike trails. And, you know, we're regionally starting to grow into a mountain mountain biking destination, but he wanted to kind of have, you know, whether it's mountain bike on road bike. He kind of wanted to have a focus in our economic development strategy. He hasn't gotten there fully, but he hasn't given up on making that push. So certainly from your perspective, all of your perspectives on the planning commission, we may decide, you know, how does this fold into our economic development strategy? Do we agree with him? Do we think this is a good direction to go? You know, certainly that is, that is his, his push, which is why it is in this plan the way it is, because he thinks that we have the pieces. And if it were in our plan, it would open up opportunities to maybe get economic development funds to build out this trail system to connect us to other, you know, the East Montpelier trails and the Middlesex trails and kind of build us out as a central hub of a regional system. It feels like that's like the type of level that we're discussing that we should be having or thinking about or hearing about from people, you know, like, what are the big ideas or things like, if you, what are the first three things that you talk about when you talk about what Montpelier is and or like what we're going to be, like, is it going to be any kind of a recreation thing like that? And I don't know if it is or isn't, but it feels like if it is, that should be a key part of our plan. I'd be interested in knowing more like of a concrete idea that that serves as a nexus between these things. I mean, obviously, if we develop out more recreational opportunities, they'll be, it'll be more likely to attract in my mind, probably more on a regional local level than on anything further out than that as far as like tourism. But sure, there could be more users of this, but how, how does, you know, what's the concrete economic development involved? Does that make sense? I mean, there's, there's passive economic value to have it to attracting users, sure. But is there something more to it than that? And I think that's, you know, it's a good question. I don't have the answers to it. I think some of this comes from, so for people who don't know, Alec, this is probably his second year. Maybe, maybe he's just finishing, finishing up his first year. He's worked for the city for a number of years, but he's only been the director. And, you know, he's a young person coming in with a lot of energy and a lot of excitement and a lot of things of trying to set his legacy of what the Ellsworth years are going to be as Parks Director. And I think this is a little bit of him kind of setting things out. This is the direction he wants to go. This is the direction he wants to see things to go. And he doesn't have all the plans. He doesn't have all the, all the things yet, which is why you see in here a number of times where we talk about needing to have some management plans or needing to have some other plans is because, you know, he's got an idea of what he wants, but we got to start, you know, being able to have the answers to those questions. What does this mean? You know, how much, how much of a regional network? What does this regional network look like? And I don't think he has all the answers yet, but I think what he wants is, you know, you can head up to the Hubbard Park and be able to cross country ski out to Morse Farm. You know, you know, why shouldn't that be possible? We should be able to do that. That should be a doable thing. What about connecting up our Mamba trails that are here in the city to Mamba trails that might be out in East Montpelier? Can we, can we make some more connections out there and then try to, from his economic development strategy, you know, have it where people, you know, we were going to be until recently building a new hotel and, and, you know, could we use this as a draw to bring people in to go through and say, hey, you know, you can stay in Montpelier, enjoy, enjoy an evening dining and having a great time with everything that's in the downtown and you can spend your days heading out on a number of outdoor, whether it's here in the city or whether it's to Waitesfield or Stowe or, but you could use this as your base to have local opportunities on our bike paths or regional opportunities riding out of Montpelier and into some of the surrounding towns. I think that's a little bit of where he wants to see that go. And if we want to do that, then that means obviously that's why we start talking about having tools like, well, if we, if we want that, then we have to do marketing and we have to do other, other things. If we just want to have the best local bike paths and networks and connections, and we probably don't have to be doing as much, you know, networking, you know, a little bit to make sure everybody in town knows these are available, but we don't have to be marketing it on a regional level. So that's where the, you know, he wants it to, he wants us to be a destination. And again, that's really up to, you guys on the planning commission, up to the city council and everybody else to agree, that's the direction we're going to go. We're willing to invest a little bit more in marketing, in making these connections, because we'll have to spend money to get those easements to connect us up. And if that's a goal, then we've got to be willing to spend the money in the time to do it. Do we have an idea about the money for a trial network to purchase easements for? I didn't articulate that very well. What's the price tag? Oh, do we know it? We don't know it. That's why, you know, they're looking at starting to build that out. You know, I think, as I said, I don't think he's got all the answers yet. I think he knows what he wants, which is a regional network and these pieces, but he's, you know, still working on what that would look like. And the parks commission is the one that's really looking for. We should have, you know, access to those small parks and those neighborhood parks, really easy 10 minute walk and to a large natural area within a 15 minute walk. And that's their kind of the park's goal to build out that green print idea. And I think that's, I think that's starting to break that into, although the green print includes both trails and parks and parkland, I guess we broke them into three pieces, then really, he's looking a lot at the trails, but there is also this component of parks and parkland that are kind of separate but related pieces. Let's move on. Before we do, let's talk about next steps for the park chapter. Stephanie and John, like, I think it's grant, it's going to be given that we like the way that you've put this up together and that we're going to, you know, proceed and build on that. So what are we thinking as a planning commission for or how to flush it out in a lot of the ways that we've talked about tonight, like including in the chapter ways to address needs and, you know, underserved park areas and incorporating the economic development thing. So that's my first question is, what do we want to do for next steps before we move on? I mean, I could be willing to work with, you know, whether it's the subcommittee to kind of help to collapse those down a little bit more. You know, I could take a stab at collapsing them, collapsing them down and see if we've got a refined, you know, kind of a more refined one that we can piece out into John's Excel tables, well, sort of Excel tables, whatever they were. You mean this the city subcommittee, to be clear, not a planning commission subgroup? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, the planning, yeah, the planning commission, you guys to work with you guys to. Oh, okay. I would, yeah, I would rather be working with you guys to get things done. I think, I think I would rather get things to a point where we are comfortable with what we like before we start going back to other committees so that we don't have a sense to say, you know, we hear what you guys are doing and you guys are really in the weeds and that's great that you guys are in the weeds and you guys can keep that chapter that you guys developed. For the purposes of planning, we've kind of broken this into these pieces and let us know if we didn't capture the spirit of what you guys want to do. Yeah, I think, I mean, it'll be, I'm looking forward to going back to them in light of these changes and things to see, to see how they react. But okay, so I was just trying to clarify what group you were talking about. We don't have a parks, we only have a natural resources subgroup, unless I'm totally... We've got the structures committee that we can... It just rolls off the tongue, continuity and structure problem. Okay. Well, I can just do it and bring it back to you guys next time, one or the other. I mean... What does CNT have to say? Would you rather Mike do it or would you rather work with him for the next part? I can specifically about parks or for some of the other... For the parks. Yeah, I mean, it might make sense for Mike to take the next look based on the five items that John and I listed out and see if you think we're missing anything or to help us clarify the last two and then we can communicate about whether that's said or not and send it back to you guys, back to the full group. Okay, that sounds good. Do we have any... Do you have something to add, John? Yeah, I was just going to add in terms of the mapping, I just grabbed what was from the last plan, but I don't know if Mike or Alec or somebody wants to look at that and make sense of it in terms of is it up to date? Are we missing anything? And then do we want to classify or bucket them differently? Do we want to try to label them as neighborhood park or natural area or look at them functionally as opposed to a mix of ownership and other classifications? I might say we can take a little bit of that, not that we've been... Well, we've been doing a pretty good job of jumping around. So part of the next thing is also... So I've been starting to work on writing the chapters that would be going into doing those, which also talks about what we want for maps. So I think to some extent we'll be working the maps into the chapters as we start working through the chapters too. So I don't know if we want to kind of tackle the maps in that piece, rather than trying to tackle them in the natural resource, you know, the implementation strategies, we could work with them in the chapters. I don't have a preference. I think either way is fine. An action that was articulated, did I miss that? Or is that something that Mike's going to work on? Is it incorporated in one of these already? I think, if I'm understanding you, I think it's something that we still need to develop out some more. And so Mike was going to take a crack at it and come back. For within the chapters or in its own chapter? When she said equity, I take it to mean access to parks. That's what you're talking about? Yeah, and it was based on what Marcella had raised. I assume that's what you are talking about. The determination of which neighborhoods are within X number of minutes? Either that or just a way to write up something to put in the plan to ascertain that. I think the green print plan, I think the idea of the green print plan, which they proposed updating is to look at that, is to specifically do that assessment of one of the different areas of where we have parks, what are gaps, and then the purchasing policy is the second piece of that. How do we then purchase some of that land so we can, so it's not specifically called out and what we have for the actions right now, so it could be more explicit. But I think that's where I was seeing it addressed. It could also be a matter of just programming. We might actually have the land or the park. It just might not be meeting anyone's needs, right? It's possible that there's accessible land that we own. It's just not programmed in a way that people want to use it. So I feel like the getting the input and hearing from folks on what we're doing right and how we can improve is yeah. I just didn't want to shortchange it by drawing a polygon around a thing and stamping it and saying, we got a park here. We did it. And the reason why I brought up the written chapter is that I think some of these nuanced pieces fit well into the written text, which as I put a couple of these chapters together, I think we've got historic written. I just gave you energy. Some of these are what you want to say is easier to say it in the written text and go through and say, we've got a equity. We might be talking in the introduction of the park section to kind of get into this idea that we have great parks and we've got great things here and there, but it's not equally available to everybody. And I think that's easier to say in a written text that goes through and say, here's what we've got. This is what's going great. And here's where we're falling short. We're falling short by our own measures. And our own measures are on equity and on fairness. And these areas that don't have access to it also happen to be have more of our affordable housing. So while certain areas are wealthier areas have easy and great access to these parks and resources, our folks have less access. And that's a problem. And we recognize that's a problem. And we recognize this is something we have to work on. And we don't have a solution for it, but we've got this green print plan that has been our model. And we need to make revisions to that in the next few years to identify exactly how we're going to solve this problem. And I think that's easier to say than it is to build into an implementation strategy. That sounds good, Mike. Thanks. Do we have interest? I wouldn't mind reaching out to Alec and to ask him to come talk about his ideas about linking, directly linking economic development with parks. Do you think that would be worthwhile? Do we have interest in hearing from him? I can certainly invite him. I think it's up to you guys. With the question, I think it'd be whether we wanted to finish tweaking these two pieces before we invite him or just have him come in and just talk to him generally. So we have his input before we do our tweaking. I think the latter sounds decent. I mean, I'm assuming he's not going to just have some kind of pitch that's directly related. I think it would be more likely that he would just come in and give some of his ideas, and then we can kind of take those and see if they can fit into the plan or not. Does it sound like there's any interest? The planning commission, is that seem worthwhile though? That's what I'm looking for from you guys. I'm seeing some very minor nods. I think it would be good. I mean, someone has ideas and a grand vision for the future of our city and the director of our department, and they see this as the key to economic development and quality of life. We're probably worth hearing from. Okay. So yeah, I know you could invite him, Mike, but I'm actually interested in if you don't mind, I'll reach out to him. I mean, you can of course bring that to him too, but I'll plan it in touch with him because I'd like to have a conversation anyway just to get a better idea. Do you have his contact? Do you have his contact information? I was going to just go to the website and use the publicly available if there is. If you can't find it, just shoot me something and I'll get you back the contact. Okay. I think I've met a number of times before. I think I know who he is, but okay, that sounds good. Okay, so let's take what we've discussed here and let's go back to the transportation implementation. Well, given that, it seems as if what we would, we need to do with the transportation is look at some condensed policies in the same way. Sorry. Yeah, Mike. Go ahead, Arianne. Oh, I was just going to say, I agree with that. Yeah, I feel like that's what we were sort of trying to do with the reorganization, but we didn't use the spreadsheet and now that we've seen an example. Yeah, right. Yeah, we can do that better. I think this one's going to still be longer. It won't be down to five, six, or seven. Transportation is just a much more broad, diverse topic. So we'll probably still have more, but again, if we're digesting, you know, 11 pages down to 15 things, that would be probably a pretty good shot. So maybe before the next. I think that's reasonable. I think that's sort of why I brought up the fact that this is such a, it's part of why I think parks is a really good one for us to start with, because it's a much more concrete thing in some ways than a lot of these other chapters. But yeah, I think a lot of them will probably be longer than that. And that's okay. But it's just really finding what is the, okay, so here's 15 pages of thoughts and ideas that are really great. What are we actually trying to do here to really send that down to those key things? And maybe that is 15. But if they're really 15 key unique things, then maybe that's okay. Right. So that's a good place for us to, it gives us a better place to start, you know, sort of jumping in in the middle of the whole plan rather than trying to work from the sidelines. So perhaps the working group needs to get together again and look at boiling these down. Arianne and Erin, does that make sense? Sure, I can do it next week. I can't do it this week. Do you think that the the work you've done so far though has helped you move towards being able to do it? Is there any value in going through it as a group? I'm worried. I don't know. Rather than a subcommittees or have we gotten far enough away from it now that we need like a reminder? I don't, I think I'd rather take a stab at it as a subgroup first now that we have this model for the parks, parks one to be able to look at. Well, I'm confused as to how the parks one was different than what we were talking about before though. Oh, well, one is what we've been talking about all along. Well, the parks one is significantly shorter. I mean, it's basically drawing together. It drew together five policies out of I don't know how many strategies in this 11 page document. So it's significantly more concise. And the strategies in the in the 11 page or whatever it is, it becomes more of a work plan. So the longer version is the work plan. But what we're trying to use as a planning tool, at least the way I'm reading it from what was done for parks, was that that we're kind of taking a higher level view of it and saying, okay, what are the policies that we need? Or maybe the goals to to accomplish this. And I think we could boil down some of the ones in the transportation. Sorry, in the transportation in a similar way. And I just think it's really difficult. I mean, for us to have developed this for parks as a group, I think would have been difficult. I like the idea of you giving a shot at it, because it may take more time than what we have now. And so if you guys can put some of the work in before we talk about it as a group, I think it will save time in the long run. But I'm also interested in hearing from Marcella more if she has like any concerns or questions about what's going on. Well, I mean, I get I get what you're saying that they did group a little bit more, you know, outreach under outreach, volunteer under volunteer, that makes sense to me. I also thought we were going to kind of do that later down the road, because isn't there's going to be outreach in every one of these chapters, there's going to be volunteers in half of these chapters. You know, there's like a certain amount of overlap that's going to happen. And so we would be doing the culling then anyway. So I guess I thought we were doing it then. But as long as we're not losing anything critical, we can do the grouping now. It might have just been my misunderstanding. Yeah, I think there is one, you know, one piece to keep in the back of your mind, and I think maybe this is where Marcella was going, is to make sure that we look at the implementation strategy. Because the whole point of this was to make sure that we've got strategies that accomplish goals, and goals that accomplish our aspirations, and to make sure we've got those pieces. Now, once we collapse them down afterwards, that that may make things a lot easier for us to digest. But we may start to lose that, you know, did we end up after we collapse it, did we end up with a goal that didn't have any strategies? Or did we have strategies that didn't have a goal? And I think, or just making sure that we've got enough, you know, is there enough in there that goes and says, yeah, if we did these strategies, we'd accomplish our goal, or is it, you know, we'd make some progress, but we wouldn't do it. So I think there's that's, you know, when I wrote these, not that I expected them to be the end of everything, that was where I was going was just to make sure that internally, I've thought about it to make sure it would work. Not that I expect the public or everybody to read it. But if we once we start condensing it, that's fine. I'm happy, because I want to make it the best readable document we've got. But we I think before we condense it, we just have to make sure that we've accomplished that initial goal of having a strategic implementation strategy. Yeah, and I think having the, I understand that the continuous references to complete streets and capital improvement plan and all that stuff is redundant. But that's somewhere we got to know which chapters are falling, which connect that to those things, because it's a bunch of them. And I don't want to lose it. Yeah, we might be talking in circles, I'm not sure. Well, I think part of this is how, how mind brain works. And I think John and I have similar, similar planning brains that as a more visual person, it's easier for me like that seven page document is really hard for me to look at and figure out what on earth they're trying to do. So our process was to, we went through each, each one, we went through every single one and said, Is this a new thing? Or is this something that we've already talked about one of these things? Does it fall into one of these buckets? Or is it something else? And if it was something else, we added a new one. And then so we read every single one and decided, is it a new thing? Or is it already included? So I, the intent wasn't to lose anything specifically. I think the intent will specifically, the intent was to not lose anything. But to make sure that we were capturing all the things that they were talking about, but making it something that you could actually digest. Yeah, that makes sense. And I like the idea of determining what's new and what's existing or continued, which I think we've talked about in previous chapters. So I think that makes sense. I gotta say that I'm a little bit eager to see us start to put things in a consistent format. Like we've talked all along about changing the format in this direction. So the more work we can do now to get it in that format, and then have our substantive discussions based off of that, you know, gets us to where we're, where we're trying to go. So that makes, that makes sense. I mean, I like, like the housing group, you know, we should probably meet sometime and do a similar thing. Of course, after transportation and the two of you run transportation. But that's, that's on my mind too. So for us to, I think it seems to be the time we've gotten the feedback from continuity and structure. We can start converting it and having those, having our policy discussions around this new format. One more thought, sorry, and then I'll stop talking. I think the other, the other piece of that is now we can look at those five or six things and say, are these the right things, which is not what we were doing. We were just saying, what are the things? And then we can bring that back to the committee and say, well, here are the six things that parks want to do. Is that, do we agree with those things? Are those the right things? Are those meeting our goals? How do those connect with the other chapters? Then it's a lot easier to do that sort of assessment instead of just looking at that full seven page document. So that's on my sense in my head. That makes sense to me. And I think that conversation is one that I think would be great to have soon or start to have soon. Like the, what do we want to do? Is this covering all our bases? Sorry, go ahead. That clarifying question and maybe you said this already and I missed it. So when you guys did this with parks, you just, you put their aspirations and goals in those sheets without changing them. And then you kind of do group the strategies. Is that accurate? Yeah. And I don't think the idea was that we wouldn't change them. I think we just, we started with the actual action piece. Like what are they trying to do? And so I don't, I don't think it was that we did not intend to update those. We just haven't done that yet. It seemed like they kind of worked backwards, Ariane, from what was going to actually happen as an action. So is that, is that what you're sharing? Is the work you did for parks? Okay. So you'll send us a link on that. Yeah. I just, I replied to the email from this meeting. Okay, great. Thanks. And with that, maybe, maybe not to look at the aspiration and goals piece as like the model, but just as the example of where we ended up with these strategies. And again, without judging whether or not they were, they were the way to go or that, that they would accomplish all of those goals, we just wanted to work through something so that we could then wrap our heads around it and then maybe have, have these types of discussion. And maybe, you know, we can do something similar or start talking about the goals and vision more. But I think those, looking at those more globally when we have them all together could be, could also be a more fruitful exercise because those will have a lot more overlap. So I'm going to have to do this with natural resources soon. So are we saying that we want to do a little less like value judgment talking in the subcommittees and a little more organizing, noting where deficiencies may be, and then bring the value conversation to the whole group? I don't think so. I think the committees, like a lot of the subcommittees are doing that for us, right? And by subcommittees, I mean, like 10 committees providing us with that raw material or like their, their plans or their goals, like that's what they're doing inherently. Yeah. And we just did it for the sake of formatting with literally no judgment on any of it. Right. I think it makes sense for committees to start. We're going to have to have those discussions make those decisions. So to the extent that subcommittees feel comfortable doing it, at least for me personally, I think it makes sense, but others. I think, I think that my idea has been to, you know, we want to get it into the format. So the form aspect of it is definitely something that we need the working groups to do. But kind of saying the same thing as, as what John others have said is don't feel like you're handcuffed though. If there's policy things that come up and you feel like you'd like to push for change in that direction, don't feel like you need to wait till it comes back to the Planning Commission. Do you think add those policies in? Yeah. When you bring it back to the Planning Commission, then you can tell us what those changes were. I think that was helpful. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead and include them. Like, right. Like it. Parks was kind of like everyone likes parks. We want parks. Like it wasn't too, too complicated. Just one more, if I can ask one more question about the parks. And again, apologies if I missed this, but did they have things in their plan that were like maintain this policy? Because I'm kind of curious for you. I think there's a lot of that in the transportation plan. And I, yeah, to me, that doesn't really fit like into a goal or strategy. So I'm just curious if that was in the parks plan a lot. There was one that had to do with safety. I wouldn't say it was in it a lot. It seemed like a lot of it was around like we have a volunteer program that maintains park. Like let's keep those maintained. So we were able to kind of generalize those all into this. Let's keep maintaining our parks with volunteers or however we're doing it. Probably not something we need to dive too deeply into in the plan. I think that would really help in terms of clarifying things of not having quite so much emphasis on what we're maintaining. Because, you know, we can just clearly state that we would that this is a valuable thing that's going on now. We would either expand it or continue it in some way. But I think we can break that down or we can condense that in maybe in a more coherent fashion. I noticed we did we lose Aaron? Is he gone? No, just on video. No, I'm here. I'm just eating dinner. You mean we don't get just to watch? All right. Yeah, I mean, when I look at the I guess the strategies I don't really see like any of the maintained stuff. So that I mean, that makes sense to me. I just want to make sure that I'm not just curious about your process. And I think transportation, you'll have a lot, you'll have harder decisions to make than we did in that section. We'll bring them back to you. It's harder to identify things not to maintain. Just reading an article in Nature on like our way to solve problems is always to add things. It's never to it's never to take anything away. Just human nature. Yeah, and I think we were trying when we were developing these, you'll see in some of the other chapters that comes up, yeah, that maintain or continue to do something. You know, we'll have to have a conversation about how we how we fit those in. Because we did want to reflect all the stuff that we do because there's a lot of things that we do. Just so people understand, especially if especially if one of our goals is to maintain a certain condition, we're not looking to improve it or transform it. We're just, you know, things are good. And we want to keep it going that way. And the way we're going to keep it going that way is to continue to do these three programs that we're already doing. And that's nothing, you know, sexier dynamic about that. But it does kind of reflect what we're doing. It is nothing new. So it's not like, well, what are we going to do new new over the next eight years? We're not going to anything new. We're just going to keep doing what we're already doing because we're satisfied with what we're doing. And that helps us achieve our goals that we're working on. You know, and some of those may come down to the amount of changes we made to our regulations. You know, a lot of our zoning maybe, you know, just continue to enforce our zoning the way it is because it's already doing a good job of protecting water quality and protecting open space. You know, so we'll just have to see as we work through it how we think those pieces, you know, accomplish our goal of collapsing things down while at the same time keeping keeping some of those pieces. But yeah, there are a couple of them that we'll have to figure out, you know, there's a lot of policy statements, we should have a policy on this. And some of those are very unique. We also have some of these that we support the transportation plan or we support the natural resources plan. You know, how do we how do we capture keep those? And it may be. Yeah, I mean, that was my question would be, you know, I think there is a lot within this transportation plan that says we support the land use plan. Well, you know, fine. I mean, the land use plan ought to stand on its own, I guess, without the necessity of having each one of these other pieces having to have strategies that that support it. And there were a couple of those in parks and we took them out. I think part of it is because this is one plan, all these actions are going to come into one big list at the end. And if something relates to economic development and parks, we can note that we can say, Hey, this is a park action and also an economic development action. So I think once we have the full list, it'll be easy to see those connections a little bit better. And so we took out those statements that were we support this other section. I think that may go back to what what we see in here and what is good in here is not necessarily what might be good on the final product that we move this to. So you know, I think it's valuable at a working document stage. In my mind, as I read them, I think it's helpful. But as it works its way to its final version, they may not be useful and can be removed. And I think we'll just work through some. That was one reason I did we know we have I think natural historic resources. We have both a chapter and we have the implementation strategy and that's that's one very simple very straightforward chapter that we can always start to work through and you know, parks is another one that's fairly straightforward that we can kind of work through. And those will help us to build before we jump into the housing and the transportation, which are going to be much more complex. So, Mike, you've sent us both those parts of historic resources. I think so, if you don't send them. Yeah, no, I just haven't looked for them yet. So, okay, thanks. I think now you also have all of energy and an energy chapter too. Yeah. Yeah, we can definitely look at that too. Wait, is the energy in like an updated format? Yeah, what I sent you this time with the written text of the energy. So it's the energy chapter as opposed to the energy implementation strategy. So like the overview, right, Mike? I mean, is it intended? Well, when we build out the website, we're going to have a web, you know, we're going to have a web page that has energy and it's going to have the energy chapter and it's going to go through an introduction and it's going to have, we've talked about having maps and links and an introduction to the to the implementation strategy itself. It'll have maybe a paragraph or two that says this is what our implementation strategy looks like. And if you want more detail, here's the link that would take you to the what John had kind of developed, which was this, you know, whether it's the cards or whether it's some format that we have what we're working on right now is an implementation strategy that would have all those strategies because we don't want to talk about every one of those strategies. We want to condense our topics down to a bite-sized piece. So a member of the public who's interested in what is the city's plan for housing, you know, they don't want to read the implementation strategy. They want to read a written description that really talks about what is housing? Why is it important? What's our goals? You know, same with energy. And we wanted to kind of digest it down to about a thousand fifteen hundred words. Energy's a little bit longer. You know, again, it's the first draft. We can cut it down. You do kind of go over what the implementation approaches are Yeah, within that chapter. We understand what our goals are, but we're not really getting into the weeds of everything. We what we want to do is to convey the importance and the ideas. And again, this I when I put together the first draft, I always put these things together as a draft. And it's I think it's easier for people to beat up a draft than it is to just give people and say, what do you guys want to do? So I'll write up a draft. And if you guys think I'm completely off the mark, you know, I'll admit I'm not the best writer in the world. I will be the first one to say that I'm a very left brain, nuts and bolts kind of writer. And if somebody's got a little bit better flair to it, go right ahead and take what I've gotten and work with it or or kind of take another stab at it. Or tell me I'm not right and we need to reformat to do something different. I'm good with that too. Well, it's good to have this first one to really dive into. Yeah, this is first chapter. This is what my brain was thinking of. And again, you should have an energy an energy chapter and you should also have a historic resources chapter and both of them kind of try to describe what our goals are as well as implementation plans for each one. And we have implementation plans which are separate for each one. Yeah. We so we have on our agenda to receive the energy chapter and the natural resources. We didn't we didn't have a document for natural resources. Was there supposed to be a chapter or an implementation plan there? The implementation strategy should have been there. Yeah, there's a document in the email. Is it under the draft city plan? Is that what it's labeled as? Yeah, okay. It just it didn't say natural resources. Oh, yeah, because the city plan MCC that's Matt Montpelier Conservation Commission. Okay. That's why I should have re renamed it. It was power. Okay. No, if we've got a if I don't move like your guy turns off my power on me. Okay. Yeah, that's the that's the tax department bathroom is that way. You take too long, you're in the dark. Okay, so do we want to do we want to jump into either one of those we have about 22 minutes? I mean, I wasn't planning on necessarily presenting them. I just wanted to make sure you guys receive them so that way you guys have them a couple of weeks in advance. But certainly welcome to either introduce them or answer any questions or talk about them. Since since natural resources is a big one and we have the implementation plan, do you guys want to spend a minute on that might be something good to be familiar with. That's why I'm saying since it's a big one, since it's going to be a one that we're going to be working on. So I guess I get the quick introduction on natural resources actually breaks down fairly nicely into three three chunks. The three aspirations. So one is really about kind of understanding the natural resources and what they want to do is to make sure that they've got their map natural resource inventory. So that's one bite. We need to understand our natural resources and their focus to do that is through that natural resource inventory. We want to do the inventory and do the analysis and make it publicly available. The second piece is about having, let's see, Montpelier citizens are informed and are engaged with the natural world. So again, you know, same as you've seen this theme in a lot of places, you know, we kind of have an understanding. We got to understand what's going on. We want to get the public. We got to reach out to the public and we want the public to be engaged. You know, and I think that's you'll see that in historic. You'll see that in a number of chapters where, you know, there's an understanding piece and outreach piece. And then the third piece is our strategies that we do to protect the environment. And a lot of those natural resources tends to fall into well into regulatory. So you'll see a lot of stuff about the unified development regulations and those types of things. So there's a couple of conservation programs. So I think if, if you were to go through, you would probably, if you were doing some grouping, you'd probably find a whole set of groups that are going to be kind of in that unified development regulations, conservation program. Let's see. They do have the touch back to that volunteer conservation program. Hey, Mike. Yep. Does drinking water get folded into the plan at all? And is it in natural resources or in facilities? It's under utilities, but there's certainly an overlap. Um, you know, protection of water quality is, is, you know, clearly in the natural resources. And that drinking water that, or that, that water quality that goes into our drinking water is also a related piece. Is that, is that the same for wastewater too? It would be, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. I haven't finished reading this, Mike. What's the spoiler on the plan for addressing stormwater in the long term? So, I mean, again, this is where we get a lot of these ones that kind of connect this, you know, this plan and utilities plan kind of connect up a lot. Within the utilities plan, there is a proposal to create a stormwater utility. Now you guys don't have the utility plan yet, but it's been framed out that we will create a stormwater utility. And that is a lot of the ones that you'll then see in here about talking about how are we going to make ourselves improve the water quality. So is there, is there any contemplation of either updating or replacing the system? The stormwater system? Yeah. The combined ones? Yeah. Yes. So that is a, you know, eliminating the eight remaining combined sewer overflows is obviously, you know, foremost in that stormwater plan. Okay. It's just, you know, they've got a couple of things that they're doing to minimize the chance like they're going through and doing a bunch of programs right now to eliminate roof drains. I think there's a number of state buildings on State Street that have some still connected. And those contribute to some of the problems that we have. So we've kind of got a program where we're working with a number of landowners where like the roof drains can be easily separated or sometimes not easily separated. And that's part of the problem. I think we used to have, I want to say 50 combined sewer places and we're down to eight. So while we do get beat up a lot in the press, it is something that the city has over the past 20 years worked aggressively on. And some of the ones that remain are just very, very difficult. You know, I know one of them comes down East State. And so, you know, the easiest solution is to combine, you know, to keep them, to separate them on East State, have it come down the hill. And then we've got to dump them somewhere. But unfortunately, the best place to do it would be to run up and dump it under the Alto Bridge. But we're not there yet. So we can't complete that separation process until we can complete a place where we can actually dump that stormwater that's been separated rather than combining it and mainstream. But it's in the plan. Yep. There are plans to do it. It's just a matter of money and time. And then we got all the other private ones, you know. So when we talk about the stormwater in here, well, the stormwater utility would still, again, start to be able to regulate private parking lots as well. But we obviously can also regulate stormwater through our zone. So when we talk about stormwater, we're usually talking about where we got these programs, stormwater utility being a program, and we've got regulations where we've gotten our zoning. So then an issue like the roof drains is the plan, if we eliminate those as contributing to the sewer, the storm sewer, then where are they supposed to discharge on site? Is this a case? They'll discharge into a storm sewer rather than discharging into the sewer. Right now what happens is they end up discharging into the sewer or they're discharging into a combined sewer. Okay. I understand now. Okay. Yeah. I thought we were eliminating telling them they couldn't have them anymore. No. Sometimes what we have, sometimes what we have is a problem is we can't disconnect the roof because we don't have a storm sewer system that could put them into. In other cases, we do have the separate system, but we don't have a discharge point yet. So we end up connecting. We have a sewer line and a storm sewer line, but at a certain point they have to be combined because we don't have an outflow yet. And those are the things they're working on. But yeah, it's important to have that in as a goal. And again, the more we can talk about under natural resources in these different places that we can talk about, natural infiltration of storm water, as opposed to having less impervious cover. There's number one. Number two, if you do have impervious cover that it gets directed to an area on site, which can allow for infiltration, that's number two. And then the third one is then we start getting into these other strategies. But the first ones are to just plain have less impervious cover and secondly to do as much infiltration as we can. So from my quick look at it, I was very happy to see the action of the strategy about assessing whether we need dams or we could remove them. That's exciting. I'm also wondering if, is there somewhere else where we'll assess flooding a little bit more or are we saving that for the hazard mitigation plan? And any strategies to prevent flooding? It should be probably, depending on what aspect of flooding you're talking about, it could be an emergency services. And it could be, it could be here. I mean, obviously certain natural benefits discussions we would probably want to include as much as we can here. Our discussion of the fluvial and the river channel movement, that should be in here because that's really talking about a lot of the water quality. Right. I think it's also worth, I think within Montpelier, our rivers are pretty tight and there's not really a lot of space in most of the town to actually do anything about that in terms of like a restoration project. But I think if we start looking a little further away, like a little further upstream on the Winooski, there are opportunities, I think, where we could help with projects that would reduce flooding in Montpelier potentially. So I think it's worth having a conversation around that. And that was my day job hat and I'll take it back off. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we do have a river corridor. Really it runs only from coming street bridge up to the Wrightsville Dam because that's really the only place where we have a stream channel that can move, which is why that's the only place that we've regulated it. As much as the state may like us to have more of the Winooski, the reality is most of the Winooski and most of the lower north branch are channelized and there's no real opportunities to to restore them. And a lot of it, once you get onto the Winooski, if you start talking about wanting to have, even if you had room where maybe we could have a little bit of maneuvering, due to the location of the railroad, a lot of those soils in there are going to be, you know, they're not going to be soils we really want to encourage erosion on because they're urban soils, they're located close to these rail lines that have had a lot of crud in them for a long time. We also have a lot of brownfields that are located, you know, whether it's Pioneer Street or up farther where Malone Property is, while they are redeveloping that site and they're capping that site and doing a lot of work, there's still brownfields, we still wouldn't want to see the river meander. And by the time we reach up to Route 302, we're pretty much out of the city, you know, that Stevens Branch becomes the city boundary. There's not a lot there, but certainly we have talked about the two rivers property. There's an easement on that property and that's great, but it's not publicly owned. So we've talked in the past about it would be nice to have a certain amount of public ownership to that to make sure that it remains conserved. Which property is that? The two rivers site, so that's behind, if you're, there's an old building that's kind of falling down between Agway. Okay, that's what I was picturing, that site behind Agway where it's a little bit lower in the back. Yeah, and if you look out past that building, there's actually close to 10 acres of flood plain that has been conserved that is being used for the parks director is using for the feast program. They grow food out there, but it's not city owned, but it does have conservation easement on it. So we've kind of been encouraged about it would be great if we had a little bit more control over that site because we might be able to restore stream banks or we might be able to do some other flood projects that could help to, you know, have an area above this above the city that could absorb a large flood to help to mitigate the downstream effects. Yeah, okay, well reach out to me if you want to talk about projects because I think that's yeah that's one of the few areas where there actually could be some potential I think. Okay, well I think I think that gives us a decent overview of some of the highlights in here. So thanks Mike. Yeah, and the summary of the energy plan again these so all the chapters and feel free if we have suggestions to change things up by all means we should have a conversation on it because I've just been starting to write chapters so we can start to have them and you know even just to read them generally you know just go through and see you know I write an introduction how does the energy chapter relate to other chapters summarize information about Montpelier what would we have from maps what types of things would we want to see in the map and then try to summarize our aspirations and goals and our outline of the implementation approaches I think is a little longer than I would like here in the energy plan but I got my ideas down we can always wordsmith it and start to shorten it up but I wanted to kind of get the thoughts of so if somebody you know and read it from the viewpoint of somebody who's in the public and they may end up being rearranged we may move you know this piece up or this piece down but that's that was kind of the thought was that you know somebody who's a member of the public who is just interested in what our energy plan is you know to try to read this you know can can they read it in about five minutes and kind of get a sense of what's going on without getting into the weeds but giving them enough of a sense that they that they really understand what our goals are and how we're going to do it should we have the continuity structure working group take a look at the chapters and see if we want to have a like consistent format for that also well Mike are you planning to use a consistent format in writing these that was my plan so like all this all the subheadings you've had in here Mike are things you were thinking of doing for every chapter yeah okay and you've taken the aspirations and goals and put them together without defining which are which is that correct yeah in the format of that might change I kind of put them put them there I just put the aspirations I didn't even put the goals I just okay yeah it says aspirations and goals I just put the ask what the aspirations are there on top that may not stay there that you know it may stay there again that that I think comes to the continuity and structure to kind of understand how we want to have that discussion but again read it for how it is trying to tell the story to a general member of the public and you know if you don't think I'm even close then that's fine too again I'm trying to put in a first draft so we can start having something to beat up and we're going to find things that you know I think you did a good job talking about that but I don't think we talked about enough or I think we completely missed on something else so again I think I think an efficient use of our time might be to have continuity structure look at a chapter they could use energy as an example to go through and give like general feedback for others and then later on as we start as Mike starts to draft chapters all of us can sort of have the same education so to speak from the continuity structure and what they had to say and then we can we could go through a wordsmith individually maybe later on because if we start I feel like if we spend time to wordsmith something now it I don't know if things could change or as a group or or if you want it could change does that make sense so just getting the format consistent and then going back later at the end to make sure the to do the yeah have continuity structure look at it we all go over that feedback together and then we can start sort of assigning you know everyone or people can volunteer to wordsmith certain chapters later on but at least we're coming from a similar place that way so they should be looking at the chapter as well as the implementation the two pieces together is that what you're saying uh yeah I mean they have the focus is on the on the on the the chapter not the implementation right so this yeah the the verbal written piece that we have here is the chapter right and so that's what you're thinking but then structure and continuity will need to be able to relate that back to the implementation strategies in terms of aspirations goals and strategies right yeah they would look at they would look at how the two connect and interact and and see if they you know Mike has obviously made that connection already but we can look at that again to see if we have a different if you want to look at the point of view on it my my point though is let's get thinking similarly on it before we start wordsmithing it just seems like we'll save time in the long run we're all gonna have different styles you know so and I just need to have a format so I know as I build these things out for you and again I'm building them out knowing that this is going to be an iterative process and you guys are going to change it we're going to eventually build the chapter in our website we're going to get public comment and it's going to change again but I just need to have a format so I can start building out first drafts that we can start chewing on you knowing we still have a couple of I still have three implementation strategies to finish but the the emergency services that the police commission won't be wrapped up until July so I haven't been in a rush they've been busy so I've been kind of I figured let's start working on these chapters and implementation strategies let's start nailing down a few of these and we will eventually come back to finishing utilities and facilities it's mostly mapped out but our engineering team is down two people right now so I'm trying to not stress them out by trying to work with them too much but and the other thing is what the chapters that are remaining are the facilities the community services so we did parks but I still have to do recreation senior center education you know a couple of these other ones but none of them have committees except maybe recreation has a committee but most of them don't really have committees so we're so we are so a lot of those I can do in house and just work with the directors of those departments and so those those should go a little bit easier like community justice for for some of the the justice pieces the fire department police department emergency services those will all be in one chapter and then the rest of the community services will be in another chapter utilities and facilities will be in another chapter but there really aren't committees that I need to work with so that begins a little bit more flexible to get those wrapped up later but of the eight chapters that we are pretty close to implementation strategies that we're pretty close to finishing we can start writing chapters and starting to flesh some things out because that would give us an opportunity to start getting some input from the public oh and land use which I need from you guys but we will I think land use will kind of fall into a certain place once we've you know again worked our worked our way through all the other chapters I think land use kind of will become pretty obvious okay well that sounds like it sounds like a good plan so when I mean no big pressure on economy structure but let's wait to hear back from them and before we're smithing that the chapters then after that we can kind of divvy it up okay well thanks everyone does anyone have anything to bring up before we adjourn how do things go Marcella oh they're thesis I'm it's the final thing is do this week so I'm like I feel I don't know but the defense went well thank you for asking congrats okay all right we have a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn okay second okay motion from Marcella and a second from Barb those in favor of adjournment say aye hi hi all right everybody have a super two weeks see you later thanks thank thank you Mike we appreciate I appreciate you I think we all do I hope it doesn't feel like we're trying to throw what you're doing away or change it too much no no and don't worry if you want to invite me to the continuity and structures feel free to have me I'll be happy to go and meet with you guys while you guys talk it over okay sound good thanks everybody