 All right, Mike, is everything working okay? Everything's fine. Okay, great. So any changes to the agenda? Hearing none, we'll leave it approved by consensus. Item three is comments from the chair. Tonight, we're gonna have sustainable Montpelier coalition presenting the various proposals that submitted entries for the, what was the name of the contest, Mark? Sustainable. Sustainable Montpelier 2030 design competition. There we go, sustainable Montpelier 2030 design. He has competition. And we're gonna be starting that at six o'clock. So we have a few minutes before then to address some of the other pieces that we've loosened that we have and make a list of other loose ends to wrap up. So that's how I see us using this time tonight. So moving on, item four is general business, comments from the public about something about the agenda. I assume that you're here for the sustainable Montpelier explosion. But if you have comments on anything else, it's not on the agenda tonight. I invite you to come up and speak. So we don't have any. So that moves that item five, which is the final punch list items for zoning fixes. So Mike, we have about 10 minutes to talk through the list of items to take care of. I don't know if we get through decisions for all of them, but we should be able to prioritize. We might be able to. So the pieces that are missing for anyone who had from the email on Friday, the updated matrix has a couple of yellow ones that are left, two of which are actually the same thing. So there was number 15, which said a map needed to be developed to show the channelized areas of urban centers one, two, and three. I have not made that map yet. So that is one outstanding piece, although I'm gonna have a hard time finding unchannelized sections based on how the DRV has been issuing decisions. So we'll see. Oh, I thought you were gonna talk about the snow. No. No, it's just a lot of the place everyone was thinking, I mean, it's already been determined to be channelized for all of the North Branch. So that kind of takes out, you know, then that just leaves us the Winooski. So I kind of just have to look to see where we might have places that are still not, don't have river walls. Winooski, but we'll see. I'll develop a map. The next one that isn't done yet is 18, which was developed a definition for a painting studio. It shouldn't take me too long. I just finished, which I should mention. I emailed you guys late today, the strikeout version, which has everything except for these yellow ones. So that's what I've been working on. So it's got. Strikeout version of all of this. So we have a matrix that said these are the changes to be made, but what we will actually be approving is the strikeout document, not the matrix. So that goes through and shows where all the changes were made. So it was 15, 18, 61. So 61, there actually is something that we could do, which this 61 we did part of, that was a recommendation to allow new neighborhoods, PUDs. And the proposal was to allow them in Western Gateway, Eastern Gateway and Residential 24, we made a vote to put them into Western Gateway and Residential 24 and we never made a vote on Eastern Gateway, either way. Yeah, I recall that we just wanted to make sure we're very thoughtful about that process. So I wanna have a quick discussion about that now. I was the person who was hesitant about Eastern Gateway and I've been over there since then, I can't say that I have, I don't know, a strong opinion now, but I mean, Mike, what are your thoughts about? I hope you didn't get in there. We have somebody who is interested in the Eastern Gateway because part of the country club roads in Eastern Gateway and they've considered doing some type, I think, I don't think they're looking at new neighborhoods, but it's certainly giving people options, I think is fine if they're gonna do a good project and they wanna take advantage of the benefits that doing a PUD would offer. I don't see why it would be a bad thing, but. Yeah, I mean, I think that I recall your hesitancy being in part because we really wanna encourage density in certain areas. So we don't wanna just mistake encouraging density for certain areas, for encouraging density everywhere. We're gonna be thoughtful about it. So is this really an area where we wanna do that? It's not exactly walkable. So it would be like a walkie-loose version of the sub-debit or suburban type of development. Is it along the rail line? It's a pretty big area. I mean, it's a big. Yeah, it's a pretty area, yeah, okay, so. I mean, there's a lot of areas out there. I mean, Route 302 is Eastern Gateway. The end part of Route 2, Country Club, kind of those areas. What's the, I mean. I think new neighborhood might be a little bit more of a challenge to fit in there, but if somebody had an idea to do that. And they could feasibly, by long periods, they could feasibly get a density increase. I mean, what's the density set out there? The density is pretty high. So I mean, there's one unit per 5,000, so I bet they would have a lot of potential development. Is there any residential there now? Not a lot. There is some, right when you make the corner at the roundabout, there's an old hotel, and as you go around the corner, there's actually one that had apartments. I don't know if it's all converted to commercial or not. If you go a little bit farther, there's a single family, there's a home out there. This is town hall. But we also have some vacant lots, and the question comes up, how would those get redeveloped, and what would we be? But I think it would, I think it would be a challenge for somebody to take advantage of it. The question is if somebody came up with an idea. It's not, so the people who are interested are not necessarily interested. I don't think they're interested in a new neighborhood. They're interested in, I think they're more interested in cottage cluster type. Yeah. Yeah, Galleson Hill is pretty industrial. I don't have a, you know, I'm not, this isn't one I'm gonna fall on my sword over with people. Don't think it's gonna make a lot of sense then. No, it doesn't, it doesn't care about that. Do you know where it starts, as far as a lot when you're leaving town, does it start at the roundabout, or? That district? Can you pull up the zoning map? It's the purple. I think it goes slightly around the corner. So it's just this piece down from here? Yeah, it goes, the car dealership, the car dealership would still be in. Yeah. That's a pretty steep slope. That's the, yeah. On this side. And a lot of that would be in the 11-9, not the gateway. Most of it is, yeah. So five dash two is steep. So it's really just, like across from the Agway? Yeah, Agway, across from Agway. It's the biggest open space. Yeah, there's the place with the SKI tower. On the side of the country club, farthest from town, it looks like the most open. Yeah, I think new neighborhood PODs was contemplating larger parcels. I don't know if we're gonna have parcels that could make that work, but like I said, there are a couple of ones that... Well, I'm not hearing a lot of interest in allowing this POD in this district right now. But this could be another item to table and to consider as we move through the city plan process and see if this makes sense. But for now, it doesn't sound like we have a strong feeling one way or the other. So I think we should leave things as status quo until we have a more broader discussion about where we wanna make changes. Does that sound good? I guess it's a concern just that we don't want, maybe we don't want residential development in this Eastern Gateway, because I don't, I mean, I would be supportive of including the Eastern Gateway. I guess I don't quite understand the concern because I'd rather have development here versus like East Montpelier. You know, it's still closer in to me, but if it's not totally walkable. And I think the cross-format trail, I don't know what's ever going on with that, but it is gonna be connecting, hopefully connecting that. I don't, you know, if we wanna table it, I'm not passionate about it. There's already some residential that's allowed there, right? Yeah, residential is allowed there. It's whether this POD would be allowed there. The POD should be, you know, mini-unit development. Density is one long unit for five days. Yeah, it seems that if we already allow it, I think part of our discussions for the plan is that there's no real strong vision for this part of East Montpelier, which is on our to-do list to like figure out what this is gonna be. Our question's like, we do have, if this is our industrial zone of district, and we do have some of that infrastructure supporting it, like we should create an environment that's gonna be conducive to that, but without a clear vision of what it should be, it's hard to make decisions about what we should or shouldn't allow them. So, I don't know, it's not helpful, but. No, that's helpful. No, I agree. So we'll table it. Okay. Come back to it. The other two were already approved, right? Western. Yes, the Western Gateway, which includes part of, you know, national life and residential 24. So the last, last two, maybe last two. 83, 84, so we're back to, I need a definition of the painting studio, which I already have, so actually have two of them telling me the same thing. Add definition of change of use. I actually was going through things and found out I actually already had a definition of change of use, but I did add in a quick statement on the two include additions to, including an addition of a dwelling unit into that definition. I handed that out. It's also in what I emailed today. I just printed out that one page. I don't know if you guys wanted to have a broader discussion of change of use, but it actually was in the definition section. But you're just modifying it with the. Yeah, because we had a question. We had a concern about the fact that our use table says one and two unit and three and four unit. And if we define the use as say three and four units, if somebody goes from three to four units, is that a change of use? Technically no, it's the use is three and four units, but we actually do want to have them get permits for it. So we wanted to be clear. One option was to break the use table into four lines, one unit, two unit, three unit, four unit, and then five and up. The other one was to just go and add that to the change of use definition to go through and say, well, adding it's a change of use. And therefore it's not a change of use on the use table, but it is a change of use because of, it's a change in the intensity of the use. A four unit building has more intensity than the three unit building. And that's our justification for having you get a permit to change that use. I think this is a bigger discussion, maybe not a long discussion, but I think more than I want to get started on them. Sustainable Montpelier Coalition, and then we have a couple items to touch on at the next meeting on the punch list anyway. So I propose that we push this conversation about eight, four off till our next meeting. And the last one was 131. And that's one I don't have, yeah, which was to do a strikeout version for the enforcement. And so that's gonna be more substantial. So those were all the yellow ones. So we have made decisions on actually one other one. So we'll, I'll get you the painting studio definition. I will get you a map and I will get you the strikeout version of the enforcement. So those are the last things I owe for you guys. Well, we have notes that 125 was brought up to last time, including three and four residential units. We decided that that's another kind of broader policy item to discuss as part of the city plan discussion. Okay, so no. So we have a few items here. Yeah, we made a vote to make no change. Okay. So leaving it for now and talking more about it. Yeah, thank you. Yep. So there's one more item for this package that we need to wrap up, which is our memo that Ruby and Barb have been working on. How's that effort? So, I mean, feel free to jump in Barb. But the quick version is we met and I'm going to make some changes and send Barb a draft and she can tell me whether it's something she wants to sign on to or not. And we discussed if that's, if it doesn't work out that way, we might end up having to listen to and move forward that way. We also had an idea to discuss about the other slope change we made, about giving the DRB, just talking as a commission about giving the DRB maybe a standard to apply for situations where they're having to decide whether they're going to allow construction on a 30% of greater slope, but maybe there's some land available that's flat. And so that that change of ours is not pushing development unnecessarily on the slopes because when you combine that with the density change we're doing here, I don't think any of us want to allow greater density and then have that density put on slopes. So some checks on that side of it, which I think would assuage some of Barb's concerns. But that's a greater discussion and the memo discussion is also a greater discussion. So we don't have any, I don't have anything for us to look at right now. I drafted another version of the memo based on what we came to before and gave it to Kirby and asked him to make some revisions on it. So I don't think we're that far away, but Kirby might think otherwise. Do you think you'll have a draft of one or two memos? However many memos we need to consider before the next meeting. So if you could distribute it before the meeting we can all review it and discuss it in the meeting. Right, I mean I have a draft that I could agree with now, so it's really up to you, Kirby. Yeah, yeah. I'll send Barb something this week and then she can get back to me. We'll have something at the next meeting. So we'll, I mean the map for channelized rivers is something that, will we have that, do you think? Or is that longer? Map for the channelized. I should be able to get to that. I just spent a lot of time on that strikeout version so I didn't get time to count it. It's okay, I'm just wanting to get a fence. I will, yeah, I should have something, at least something that we can start to discuss and debate as to, you know, really we just need to get something on the ground and have people start to discuss whether they agree or don't agree with it. So we have item 15, item 18 slash 83. Painting studio definitions, 84 and 131 and our memo about steep slopes slash, I'm sorry, buildable area, buildable area as far as the density population. So that's what I have on my list for the next meeting. Good, okay. Anything else on the punch list mic or something like that? Nope, I think that's it. Okay, so the next item on the agenda is to discuss the upcoming adoption process for zoning. We need to vote to set a date for the public hearing. I'm kind of getting a sense of the timeline track that we're on right now. Yeah. Why don't you walk us through? So that's just gonna need the standard, we have to have at least 30 days. So whatever day we finally approve this and have that strikeout version complete because that's what we will use as our vote. Then it'll be 30 days to have that public hearing and then we can decide at that point based on public input, whether we wanna forward it to city council or have another public hearing, reconsider. For those who went through the process before, this was the part, you have the public hearing, you think, ah, we're ready to go, have the public hearing, then you get a bunch of input and you're like, all right, well, make this tweak or that tweak and we're back to warning another public hearing. But maybe it's something, because these are mostly zoning fixes that this is one that we can go through the public hearing and move it to city council. But it'll be 30 days from whenever we have a draft ready to go. So I had that on the agenda in case this was ready to go and we punched it out today and had it done, we could have it on. It'll probably be on every agenda going forward until we have it. Because we can't touch it if we don't have it on the agenda, so we'll just put it on there. Okay, great, thank you. Yep. All right, so I'd like to invite Dan Jones up to give us a presentation on behalf of Sustainable Monpilier Coalition and I understand Dan has some overhead. We have a, yes, we'll have to see whether this decides or... Oh, okay, now it's in. It's pretty bright now, so that's good. So just for anyone who's commenting, the only speakers that are on are the speakers that are up here. So if you have something to say, you'll have to come up so we can catch you on the mic or you won't be heard. Bye. You look on TV like you're yelling at us, standing over the table. Okay. Hi. I feel like I'm sort of coming to give you an introduction to some ideas. We began broaching with you back in September, but there seems to be a large number of new faces here. So hi, I'm Dan Jones. I'm the executive director of the Sustainable Monpilier Coalition. We arose out of a process that started with a design competition for what could be a sustainable future for Monpiliers. That completed two years ago last month. Okay, so in that competition, we have a bunch of interesting ideas we thought we'd offer you as part of your planning for the new master plan, city plan. Is there a way of getting the lights off over the... There are two options, the lights are on or the lights are off. Yeah, sorry. Oh. I think it's gonna be fine. Okay, now. The new projector works much better than the old one. The old one, okay. So nobody's figured out how to get the back lights on in the front, never mind. It's not switched that way, but some time it will be. Some time it will work that way. Okay, so where we started was in, back in 2014 when the energy committee, which I was chair of at the time, led to the point where it said, we're going to be net zero city by 2050, 2030 maybe. And started a bunch of innovations or grow out of innovations that actually led that way, which includes the district heat plant, the new city solar farms, where we now have a megawatt of generating capacity specifically to the city. We've been educating citizens on energy efficiency. And we even were so good that we were on the 10 finalist cities for the Georgetown University Energy Prize, which was an honorific that was actually quite fun to be part of. We're not quite sure why we were one of the 10 finalists, but we were. And they took into account the fact that we were actually making strides. So the big new solar plant, et cetera, made a difference. All of our work did not look at was the issue of what is the biggest carbon sink in our lifestyle, which is the automobile. So a little city of 8,000 has a traffic jam at 4.30 in the afternoon. And what we really discovered looking around was there were acres and acres of parking lot. And so I would manage to actually get a copy of a drone image of downtown and ended up making this map. So all the red on there is off street parking for Montpelier. I'm sure some of you have seen this before, but it's really a very interesting use of our landscape where this should be theoretically the most valuable and interesting real estate in town that is dedicated to the parking of the automobile. And it also meant that we had actually land use and energy use as a very curious combination. If you don't talk about land use, you can't really talk about energy use. What we've been doing for 60 years is spreading out upon the hillsides and becoming a commuter city rather than a dense downtown. If you look at 110 years ago, this is kind of what downtown Montpelier looked like with a lot of housing, commercial space, et cetera, a nice railroad station down there in the middle. Somewhere about where the new transportation center is supposed to be. And this actually is the most energy-efficient form of use of the real estate. So we started asking the question, how do we do a transition to a sustainable city, local future for a small city? And we knew that while we'd like to have young people coming here, this is downtown Burlington, they tend to be less car-oriented than we are. They like bicycles, they like getting around in other ways. They don't want to be as dependent on the car, but there's no place for them to live unless you are car-dependent in town. So we started looking at this in terms of sustainability, which starts with more people living in town, downtown housing equals less commuting and shared energy resources like heat and electric. But to do that in Montpelier, we've got to create some ways of getting people in and out of town in other ways than their personal car, which will free up the land and reduce our oil demand. And that will allow us to recapture our riverfront and green space, which means more recreation, flood mitigation, quality of life, et cetera. So to do the first one, we actually have to do the second one first. And we want to build a people-centered local future, but the question is how? So I was talking with a friend showing her that red map, a couple of years ago, down in Boston, who is an expert in design and has worldwide connections. And she said, you know, this is the kind of problem that young designers really enjoy. So what we'd like is, what you really ought to do is have a design competition. And I said, okay, how do you have a design competition? But with some guidance from some people, including Barbara, I have to say, so I was helping this as an architect, we managed to raise some money to have a $1,000 prize, our $10,000 prize for the best design and put it out there. And by God, we got 20 actual entries from around the world. Not only did we have them from Vermont, we had them from all over the country, we had them from Japan, we had them from Iran even, we had them from Sweden, you know, so she was right. This is something that actually young designers were interested in and it created this fact. Now, we had the designs or the proposed designs and we set up across the street at one more time a little pop-up gallery for a week. And hung all of these designs and had people come in. And we were amazed, actually, folks were coming in, they were sending serious time looking at the designs, talking about them, thinking about them. You know, it was actually fascinating to watch the kind of level of conversation and the consideration, you know, which is we always have this issue of designs and getting public input. And this was a really strong bit of public input. So people put their comments in and they had what is that telling me, okay. And we had a voting, okay, so you vote for the best five. Okay, and I don't know why this is doing it, but it's. So we got it down to five finalist choices and that's where we had two years ago the final presentation of those five designs. You're seeing them here, I'm gonna give you a chance to take a look at them a little bit in a minute. And this doesn't. The thing's got a hiccup, it's not your stuff, it's. Oh, it's the machine. Yeah, I've done it for other people. So we had the final presentation over at the pavilion. Here we have the Swedish team making a presentation via Skype, you know, which was kind of neat that they had made it to the finalists. And the audience, we filled the pavilion. I mean, there was over 200 people sitting there in rapt attention. It was kind of amazing, actually. They took notes, they vote, you know, they were actually really interested in what was going on, the whole ideas. And again, a second round of voting. We also had voting online, voting, you know, at city halls. So we tried to engage as many people as possible and had over 750 votes cast. And we thought that was pretty neat because we were watching how people were responding to this. The winning design was Team Bridges. So they won in terms of, you know, of the five way vote, but you know, there were a lot of votes for the other ones. So it was not a slam dunk. And then we, you know, a few days later had an award ceremony up at the state house where we got the governor and the mayor to come and receive the design, give the big check to Team Bridges. Now, the guy on the far right is Jay Ansel. He was the lead designer. He also was the head of Black River Design over here. And I will suggest to you that you invite him and his team in or to give you a presentation on exactly what there are. I'm gonna try and give you an overview of what was going on, but they would probably love to make a presentation to you as well. Oh, so we still had a challenge, okay? And did anybody go to the Ed McMahon presentation last March? You know? You know, huh? That Ed McMahon. And who was one of the smart growth advocates in the country was a guy who actually cares about this stuff and line we love from him is planning is important, but implementation is priceless. Okay, so we still have these design, this design idea and these concepts, but how do we get them actually made into facts on the ground, which is the big question. So, year and a half ago, we formed, Net Zero Vermont had done the competition. Net Zero Vermont wanted to keep out of statewide focus. And I and a couple of people behind me said, well, okay, we've gotta do something that's specific to Montpelier. So we created the sustainable Montpelier coalition. This is our opening ceremony and at the reception, a little rainstorm came through and left us with this rainbow. So we took it as a positive sign that something good was going to come out of this. And I'm going to stop here for, oh, I'm gonna leave you with it though. Okay, all of these designs, okay, the workbooks, all of them are available at netzerovt.org slash finalists. And I encourage you to take a look. What I'm gonna try and do is give you an overview of some of them tonight, but it's a wonderful site so you can have all of the materials online immediately. And it's kind of fascinating. So what I'd like to invite you to do is take a few minutes and take a look at the boards of the designs surrounding us. So that for a minute, before we come back and go into the next step, if you don't want to, you don't have to, but I thought that this would be interesting for you. So what was up with the hiccup on that thing? Let's talk about that. So what is that about this that? I don't know. I can't remember. Somebody was talking about trying to figure out what was the hiccup. There was a, just periodically gets a thing going in it. It just gets this little glitch, huh? It just stops. Yeah, it pops out and pops back in. It always comes back so we haven't worried about it too much, but I've only been at two meetings. This is the second time I've seen this used. So, and I thought last time maybe it was just something with the connection, but now that it's doing it here too, it must be something with that. It's something with that and the signaling because. Yeah, before somebody's got a wire that's not fully plugged in. I'll let Seth know and let him take a work on it. It doesn't fix the traveling issue, but really, it's unreasonable to expect because I want to be a small amount of traffic at 4 p.m. Yeah. In Chicago, this isn't a traffic. It's going to fit. No, I didn't. So it's really not that bad. Oh my goodness. Thank you. Yeah. Clark took us in. So this week, Seth, I'm going to take over the show. I'll say. I think we can figure it out. Let's hear it. It's funny. Right? And then the rest of them are here. Sure. Yeah. I mean, this would be amazing. It's interesting that all of them they're putting it under there. I wonder if one third of them are pretty much over there. It's under this article. Yeah. Well, it's not going to be under this article. But they basically decided that there was this railroad line. That makes sense. That makes sense. If we had something that was a streetcar and all of these designs would be something else, then we'd get the rail. But they were the most, you could show the rather than concentrating everything here, we upgrade it for the spaces. This is down to the high air, where the iron over the stoke arcs and the stoke arcs. That's the bed, I think. Oh, that's the bottom part. I have to get the road lead out here. Oh, OK. This is the postage. I guess I never realized that it's under here. So I'm trying to drive it. I'm trying to drive it. I'm trying to drive it. OK. Oh, on the block? Well, I don't want to change the range or something. Yeah, exactly. Right. So yeah, that's the roadway. Oh, the stove works. Oh, that's like when you cross over. When you cross over this pioneer street to the road to where we have it. Yes. With the idea that this is the only place where the auto wash and all of that sort of stuff that could this be a better place, maybe cheaper to build a higher density cell in there. I don't think it would be underground. This is a change of scenery. This is a change of scenery. What? This is a change of scenery. Yeah, but that was not the word. Right? No. This is not set in the right way. Yeah. Yeah. And I am. I'm trying to remember these. But this would be in the flood plain, right? This is actually a little above the flood plain. The flood plain is actually in here is a little more. OK, I'll go into that. OK. But everybody's already talked about it one way or another this year. It's amazing what the grade does in your camera. The time it should test service. Yeah. This one gets into your 30% grade problem. Yeah. What's in a town in this kidney path? I'll get into that. OK. Self driving. No. Well, that's where they were going. You know, we're actually in the past year and a half something, stuff that's happened. I'll talk about it when we get into this. It's neat. How do we do it? We could just get a ski lift from you now. Well, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it. I don't know. But that's not how you do it. You can experience it when you're pretty. Are you still talking about it or not? Maybe they can talk to you. It's not. They can't talk about it. I'm trying to think of what you need. Except national life. Oh, right. I'm Elizabeth Parker. Yes. It's more of a squished dome than the other. I mean, that's not the one that was hanging in your office. It's still pretty. No, that's it. Yeah, this is it. Exactly. Interesting. So that's true too. That's true too. All these women out here, all over the country. They live here. It's interesting. They change how people live together. And then have a PV amount to it. Covers, like the one at the co-op. Yes. So generating power. They're also protecting the cars. They're also helping in car services like gas and service. Bob Sonoco is getting... Yeah, so where is this? The Grossman's lot here. The traffic circle. This would be Bob Sonoco there. Now they take out the whole Grossman's lot. And the bike path is extending this way. Yeah, they're already working on this section Is it actually going to be going there? No, no, no, it's going back here. There's some question about whether they want to work the real world. Right. Everything is a movie talk. Yes. Yeah. I wish there was something like that. So we found this map in the job trailer. Yeah. They had a copy of this, so thank you. Really? Yeah. The guy awarding the job. Construction site. From his daughter to work. It was great. We just do a... ...a college, a career exploration. And they went to Black River. And they said, I love this. I'm working right here. Yeah. Yeah. If that's how far this extends. Who's side of that? Well, this is all... It's still Montpelier. Yeah. Montpelier goes from up here to down here. Well, this is what we were talking about with the Eastern Bay. We wouldn't have a vision for it yet. Well, this is why we're trying to... Right. I appreciate it. Right. This was the area I was thinking about, but I wasn't sure if that still fell in the Eastern Bay way or not. No, it doesn't. It's beyond that. Do you have any idea what it's going to cost to try to ask for a car? Oh, well... It could be a bug car. The state owns the right-of-way from Montpelier's junction to there. They are, in essence, giving it to remote rail systems. They're paying for remote rail systems, something like $50,000 a year to use the life of the Granite trains and supposedly do some maintenance, which doesn't get done. The state, for about $6 million, could rebuild the tracks and put them up to 40 mile an hour. And then David Bloorstorf has these bug cars that could work on those tracks and be able to get something at a much lower, cheaper level than trying to... Once we've got it working, we could look for light rail, et cetera. Well, compared to what it takes to keep them two going, it's about the same. And if you do it, it lasts a lot longer. That's what people miss about rail, is that you put the money in once and then you have it for a long time, rather than... These rail, this rail bed goes back... 1850, something like that. Is that when he did it? I was just wondering about that. Or it should be enough. Well, let's kiss it. How? Oh, it was amazing when all these things are in. Well, that's why we want to talk to you about it. Yes. It's a chance to think about it. I mean, yeah, you can stare at this stuff for hours. Yes. They said they still want to look at them, so... They said it'll bring people to a better point of view. The idea of putting residential by national light, it's an amazing sight up there. I'd love to have a place up there with all the views. Yeah, the views are... Well, that's what I thought. It would be worth it to pay for the ride on the gondola just to get the views going up to the capital and all that. I think so. What does a gondola cost? Just buy some of your own. David just bought one. No, I don't know if he has found one. They want to move out of that. You can't buy it. You can see like four cars. Two cars. We're good. Looked from a skier, right? Yeah. Did you have a chance to get a $1,000? Yeah, I think nobody gets one of the shots. No, actually this one. No, actually this one. This one does not open in the multimodal. It's a little bit hard to tell. I know. I know. It's kind of hard. That's where they play. Right now, of course, it is the most possible. Right. Unless it was some other way that was equally convenient. They're once in, they talked about holding it. A few of them got rid of it, got rid of it, had hotels. Yeah just didn't know if they relocated it same place else, but its probably not. of this. And you notice that there's really no privilege to see this. Yeah. Put a picture over it. This is weird. Yeah. It's a blank slate. Yeah. Very much the way. They have a key to it. I think there was that side. What do you want to do? What do you want to do? What do you want to do? What do you want to do? Well, but these guys. Well, but these guys. Well, and the work that's online is as best as this. Yeah. Yeah. It's a curious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people know what the controversy there was. This one's pretty clear. My path here. Oh, they didn't go that far? Yeah. This is one of the worst. Right. In terms of. I was listening to somebody who's that way but has an understanding of the full. Yeah. Snap there. That's right. Yeah. I mean, Bill Ray there is a chance. Interesting. Right. Right. So that's what I wanted to do for the I'd like to say. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Yeah, so it's good that they used 10 new parts. New things that I haven't noticed yet. I want to know what they've said though. Oh. That's what I was saying. Without that political comment, what that is about. We can probably re-imagine the streets taking advantage of what they're doing. No, we should reconvene, because we can look at those key elements once we're done. OK, this is part of it. All right, planning commissioners, we should have a seat. Do you have more for this? Are you going to use the screen right now? Yes. OK. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I don't have a script. I just look at the screen and talk about what's going on so that. No, no, we're good, yeah. Oh, I woke it up. We provided you a little handout here where we started with five areas, vision, compact walkable city transportation, and then we basically tried to gang these with your city plan report from the that you guys have published and the current one and tried to use that as a basis to start looking at stuff. And then finally, we have ideas that are within the various plans that here so that you can reference it now. But I'll try and go on and give you an idea of. So the vision is maintain the historic path. All right, fine. Follow the smart growth principles, increase housing and jobs, hope that the slide. Oh, economic development. Hand out. Yeah. So if you look, so these are some of the slides from the finalist presentation. Hopefully they'll keep playing. OK. So one of the teams and the Swedish team in the loop had this idea of the unintegrated approach. I don't know what to do. I don't know. It's blinking. It's a blinking one now. Talk to Seth. All right. So this is one of the steps toward the plan that you see there. The bridges plan, you've had a chance to look at and sort of talk about. This is the whole idea of the larger city working with the idea of a link throughout the city by rail that connects things. So it changes the land use concept based on transportation, part of the vision. I like this one with the neighborhood concepts where it was taking downtown rather than the larger neighborhoods that you were talking about earlier. It takes smaller ones. So for instance, here around the north branch, we have actually a new neighborhood emerging because you've got the French block housing. You've got the new transit center, et cetera. And you've got the church talking about housing in there. So that actually now creates a residential neighborhood to think about it. And so what they've done is thought about ideas where there could be one back at the pit, in other words, which could be a combination of housing and parking. Development, I'm trying here. And you thought you had mercury retrograde. I don't know what I did, but it's obviously, it doesn't like me. Should we try turning it off and on again, do you think, or do you think? It's always a different thing to try. Right. We can try it and see if it's too hard to kick. So anyway, going through some of the vision things that come from a number of the things, which I'm just gonna sort of throw out at you. If you have questions, comments, et cetera, please don't feel free to just stop me. But part of what were common to a number of these was a reduced vehicle and increased pedestrian asset for the city to embrace its riverfront rather than ignore it. Public spaces, recreation quality of life are part of the downtown. Open space, public arts. What do you think? Is it done or did it? Oh, it's okay, fine. Population growth by saying, okay, we'd like to have an idea of maybe increasing the population by 2,000 people, which could be done with 1,000 new units if we're taking two people per unit. River access, be nice to be able to get access to the river. There's nowhere actually downtown to get river access. Buildings, and a number of them go into this, so it's not just because they're architects in other ways is they're durable. They're compatible with the net zero goals, okay? You've gotta take into account the floods. River buildings have to be raised on plinths. Not all of them had this, but that's one of the things. Several of them had a ways of having the year-round farmers market. Four seasons, our public spaces. Creating a city identification with sustainability and net zero. This is something a couple of them brought up. It's a, in essence, becomes a marketing tool for Montpelier just like we got the Georgetown Energy Prize. This is something young people and others are looking for right now. It is an area that we could make an area of strength if we had the zoning and the plan and stuff to move forward on. Couple had new services, hotels, conference centers, food hub, so did this die altogether? It doesn't like me. I have to take it, not as a... Oh, there it goes. It's coming back. Yeah, just two. So those are some of the visionary pieces that are possible within this. Several of them had net zero ideas where you change the architecture largely completely, but also create public spaces. I don't know, it just doesn't like me. It's okay, I'm gonna... It's just gonna flash, that's all. Okay, so others of your goals are like a compact, walkable city. We need housing close to the city center. Reinforce and expand traditional patterns of development. We're working on the multimodal transit center, but is it multimodal or is it a bus station? And that's a question. So this is some of the ideas that came up in the... You can scooch around the table and look at his laptop because I use it. What do you think, is that better? It's not working. We can also just see them all around. Yeah, we can see them all around. All right, you know... Unfortunately, you'll have to excuse me a second while I get it into another mode here because it has to go out of... The air is human, but to really screw up, you need a computer. It seems like there are connection issues. Clock to set the buzz. Oh, come on. Now it's doing what? Swap displays. Oh, all right. Do you want to put it maybe on top of the other one? Yeah. I don't know if you'll be able to see it, but if you... Well, I will stand off to the side and use my little clicker. You're gonna have to move around a little bit, but I'm... So you want to put it on top of this one? Well, if you move it forward, then less of us can see it. Yeah, all right. You're gonna want to leave it there. Yeah, all right. Hopefully this will now decide to work. We never know until it... So this is one of the designs that shows the idea of the open space opening up the downtown. All of them basically try to open up along the river, okay? Creating different kinds of walkways so that, you know, if we're talking a walkable city, this one had covered walkways to, you know, imagine getting around downtown. Okay, this one, you know, basically mixed-use neighborhoods, okay? With, you know, looking at the walkability of various areas. That, you know, that's out of this one where they're creating and proposing different neighborhoods around. One of the pioneer districts is about as far as it goes, right? This one is interesting. They call strainer streets, okay? Which is a mixture of the streets and actually getting the water channel rather than using the traditional sewer system as trying to keep the water channelized and working in rain, you know, the rain parks, the ways of processing the water. So it's part of the walkability of the, and the experience of the whole city rather than just doing everything downtown. Okay, so a few of the others in there were, you know, housing and green ribbons along the river. That, you know, you can see that in a number of them. Streetcar line to new neighborhoods and bury, you know, gold increase population without more vehicles. That was the whole idea of having a more walkable. You know, I thought it was interesting that the accessible indoor covered pedestrian path linking buildings, you know, you think it's weird, but if you've ever been to, like Minneapolis or St. Paul, where they actually have, that you can walk the entire downtown without ever going outside with these link things. And in midwinter there, you know, I'm not saying we're gonna do that, but it's just, it's interesting. What we had, and several of them are, you know, were paths to connect, you know, and this is where the workbooks help you to see this, if you want to. Connecting on and off street spaces, closed streets, several of them suggested, you know, either Langdon Street closed or a loop of Langdon and State as a kind of church street marketplace for Montpelier. What- And was the suggestion to close altogether just a pedestrian traffic or- Just pedestrian traffic, except for, except what light they do in church street, which is you're gonna have trucks on it till 10 in the morning doing deliveries and stuff. You know, you can't close it to get it. They have to get the supplies and stuff into the stores. Okay. And that also said, you know, we need more activities. This is not part of your job for younger demographic. Oops. Okay, transportation, obviously, is one of- Wait, just back up for a moment. You say the suggestions encourage more activities that would attract a younger demographic will help achieve some of the broader goals of bringing in more population. That's what I was saying. What you see in several of them was a suggestion that by having a sense that this was a place that young people could be. It's like there is a great deal of interest in the new bike trails up above North Branch. Okay, that's that kind of activity for one group. It's not gonna be my demographic that's gonna care for it, but there are, you know, if we had the ability to access the river, you know, and have canoeing, kayaking, et cetera on the river, it creates a different sense of the downtown. It's recapturing the river. So a lot of them basically are working on the idea of refacing recapturing the river so that it becomes part of our lifestyle downtown as opposed to what we've sort of turned our back on. We've got parking lots that go right up to the edge. It's not a... Well, I do think that we can try to keep that in mind as we work on the plan, if that makes sense. Well, that's why we're trying to talk to you. We think you have a lot of latitude in that if you wanted to look at it. Okay, so we want convenient smart trans systems. Now, this is one of our sustainable not peolier's big goals and I'm gonna talk about what's going on for a second because we have done two things in the past six months that have proved to be kind of interesting. We realize in building coalition, you bring people together. It's not like we're doing this by ourselves. We're too small, et cetera, but we can convene people to talk about. So we did a discussion roundtable on transportation up at National Light back in September. Had the major employers in town, city counselors. We had the downtown, the Monterior Live. We had the planning, the economic development people, other representatives. And out of that, one of the presentations we'd organized was from a company that does something called Microtransit, On Demand Microtransit, and you're gonna hear more about this soon. On Demand Microtransit is basically a marriage of small buses and an Uber type of software where you can dispatch them in a way that has them responding to demand. So it's nine o'clock in the morning, or eight thirty in the morning, and you have people, a bunch of people who like to get downtown to work, but you have others who wanna get to national life, others might wanna get up to the hospital. And the computer knows that some people wanna go here, other people wanna go there, because you put it in in the request and you can call it in, you can put it on the smartphone. And different buses will pick you up even if you're next door with each other. It's not like one bus going around doing it, because one will be directed to go up to the hospital and another one will go to national life, et cetera. So it's the most efficient way of collecting people and keeping them moving. And this is something that has been developing over the past couple of years. So we had a presentation on this and actually the people at V-Trans who were there at the thing said, well, this is very interesting. So they actually organized a working group to explore it and named us the San Diego-Mapiria Coalition as their community partner in this. And so we have a couple of city counselors, Barbara, we have people from the Center for Independent Living, we have seniors, et cetera, all meeting at V-Trans to look at whether this is possible, okay, as a way. Because if you can imagine, if we could get 500 people, there are 500 people, state employees, who live in Mapiria and drive down to work. There are actually 1300 people who live in Mapiria and commute to downtown to work. So a good part of your parking is actually taken up with people who live here. Yeah, of course there are the people from Barrie, there's a people from other places, but just talking about what happened, we're only interested in what happens here. So that's why we're interested in this as an approach because what it would allow is us to rethink the land use because we could work with the state and say, well, if we can get 150 people using this, could we get this piece of property to develop along the river? Because part of our goal is also to reclaim the riverfront and you can't do that as long as you've got the parking lots going right up to the riverfront, it's a whole new way of trying to do it. So the fact is the state is, we're working with the state, the state is committed to having a white paper out within the transit administration, transportation administration by the end of March, with the hope of maybe if some federal transit administration money is available having a pilot project start by the end of summer, if not in 2020, where this would replace, in essence, the circulator, the capital shuttle, the hospital shuttle, and would actually provide services on an on-demand basis rather than a fixed schedule. So that's why it's called microtransit because it's like seven or eight passenger vans, although it would have a couple that will be larger and wheelchair accessible that can be used for people with special needs and start reinventing what might be local transit. Couple that with the idea of a train, number of, almost all of them had some version of light rail because they saw the rail going through town. This one was the most fully developed but it was not the only one which was to connect different parts of the city with a light rail system. So that was a common one and making room for that kind of thinking in your future planning would be very useful. So here are some of the, you know, so here's where most of the parking is now. The state employees take up a good portion of it. One of the ideas was to look at this, these are walking paths to be developed, walking and bike paths, you know, as a whole plan. This is part of an idea of basically being able to recapture the whole South of State Street area as a pedestrian centric development as opposed to, you know, auto centric. This one's very interesting in terms of bike paths and other paths to connect different parts of the, you know, could there be a path that goes from, in essence, the nature center into town, could there be a path, you know, you've got the one bike path sort of started, but, you know, could there be others and could that become a major feature? Had a young man talk to recently who was so interested by these plans coming up that he was going back to Holland where he had been working because he's a bike fanatic and wanted to be a part of the place. And he said, well, you know, actually, maybe this could happen here. So he's going to stay around to try and help make things happen. I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. The, okay, this one, again, is connecting. This is the larger, the one where we use the railroad to connect the various nodes developed in town. Okay, see, again, this is their version of the transit center. You can see it in here. They didn't look at the design that was, you know, but as you can see, the tracks are part of that. So this is an area where you see that was a common theme. It was developed differently by each one, but it's something to start thinking about. So others have said, well, you know, we can have a streetcar, you know, add rail service to the multimodal center. Okay, that will bring it multimodal. Right now it's only a bus station. You know, others want electric tram on removed parking lanes, okay, on state and main as a possibility, or people mover light rail. The idea of shared car share, vehicles, bike share, et cetera, was brought up with some of, whether that's in your province or not is not an issue, but it is something that could be developed if it was safer, okay. A lot of bikes are blessed, I've talked to, do not feel exactly safe on the streets right now. The bike share is the bike taxi thing, were you? No, it's like you go to Boston or you go to Montreal and you can rent a bike to, you know, Conor Casey thinks you can do it all with a scooter. I'm not sure that that's the appropriate, but that's the idea, that's a bike share. Car share would be the same. If you had this microtransit system we're talking about, you could imagine a system where we had brought back car share, only more of them. One of the problems with the car share was you had to have a car to get downtown to get to the car share. If we get here elsewhere and people were giving it up and say, oh, I have to go visit my grandchildren at Randolph, you can go get the car share for the day and go to Randolph or you could go to Lebanon or Burlington or whatever and bring it back and return time. So rather, and there's a huge economics for this because I don't know if you know that AAA says in Vermont it costs $9,000 a year on average to keep a car on the road. So if we could price the microtransit in general for somewhere a third of that where you could have the same convenience without owning a car, that might be a real attraction. Attraction, if you will. So we've actually put out the first RFI on the microtransit and there has been, got four responses, two of which were real. So the state is actually excited about this possibility. Okay, now rivers and green space. We've got a problem in so far as, again, we've turned our back on the river. Okay, we've sort of lost that as a feature. Every city in the country that really wants to do smart development embraces its rivers. So it's time to start thinking about that and I think this is in your ballpark to some degree. This gives us natural features, vistas, air and water protection, wildlife, plus a lot of public access to recreational opportunities whether it's walking along the water, boating, resting, one friend, Elizabeth back here, had found a picture, a sad picture before the construction started over here. Somebody went in a business suit coming downtown with their lunch and kind of sitting on this rock that kind of overlooked the river on a sort of sad because there was no nice way to actually be close to the river. So that is something that could be, so this is what the river, the confluence of the North Branch and the Winooski look like now. It's not inviting, but one had basically created a whole park by the river where the river could actually flood in and become a skating rink and a waiting pool using Winooski water. Others, as you can see, always the green space along here is recaptured and almost all of these, that one there. Again, creating a whole circulation of the river where you can experience the river in multiple means. One thing I'm noticing is none of them acknowledge the gas stations on the other side of the river. So I just wanted to keep everyone's, keep that in our mind. They're basically saying you could do better. Right, well, agreed, agreed, but I just want to point that out. Potentially moving those services to the satellite lots would be more appropriate anyway so that those would actually potentially be located as well. And further away from the water. I mean, the job is, and planning is, do you want to, does things just stay the way they are or do you want to imagine other ways of doing it and should they be there, but that's... And I think one of the discussions we had about zoning when I first started and we were rewriting, well, we've been rewriting the zone for years, but when we first started to remember there was a discussion about what we wanted to do for allowing uses in the area that we called quote unquote, gaseous valley. And I had just joined and I wasn't really sure how to express my dissatisfaction that the gas stations were just right on the river. I think that's something we can re-examine. Not to say we should close down those gas stations, but we could make it so... A migration plan. Yeah, exactly. Mention that. Because this, I mean, these are idealistic plans obviously. They're idealistic plans, we're trying to give, that's why I said this is sort of an upper level view to give you some ideas that you might think about in a going forward plan that would be a little more imaginative, exciting, et cetera. And so that's all we're doing. We're talking about reclaiming the river. Reclaiming the river. We're talking about reclaiming the river. You know, here's another one decided to take out Shaw's and put a conference center in. Well, maybe. But notice again, here's that space where the old blind and the Moai property, that's reclaimed as a park in there now. So it becomes, in essence, a gateway park there as you're coming in, Main Street, et cetera. So there's another possibility to think about. That one, this is Confluence Park in there. So this one has, you know, a merry-go-round, a farmer's market under a permanent roof, okay. And you can see people pulling their kayaks into the river down here. Do you see that on a postcard? Huh? It's what? It could be on a postcard. It does look very enjoyable. I think it was an ad against the parking garage. Oh, you're being sarcastic. Oh, okay. Oh, I have promised my board that I'm not taking a position, so. But on that note, since I brought that up, a lot of these seem to actually be compatible with what's being put in there because a lot of the green ribbons, like you mentioned the word ribbons, which is a good term for this, are on the other side of the tracks. So that's still a possibility. Oh, it's your board. Come on, wake up. Yeah, that's true, Kirby. I think, you know, that it's still that area on the other side of the tracks is pretty well-developed in most of them. Not necessarily for a parking garage, but it's shown as developed. Right, but in the other ones, there was a garage somewhere. Oh yeah, no, no, I will get into that in a second, okay, that's another part of this. Sorry, we're getting ahead of you. Huh? What? We're so excited, we're getting ahead of you. No, no, I'm happy to give you whatever you want. I'm, you know, so this, I'm just showing this, this is the one that has the entire sort of south side of State Street as a separate driverless neighborhood. Okay, public green spaces. So all of them, in essence, address the public green space that this is, you know, you can walk around Montpelier and say that's, where is it? You know, is the State House alone the only green space in town? So taking the parking lots. Yeah. So, the other thing about riverfront access, and this one I wish I could blow up for you, because it's very interesting, I will make this, by the way, available to you if you want to. Yeah, that would be great. Have it for the record, this is. Well, we'll have, I mean, we're creating a website where we're going to put in, use it as a repository for all the ideas that we're kicking around, so this would be great. It's all on there. It's all been on there for like six months. Okay, it's already there. One day we'll start planning, right? One day you'll start putting stuff on it, but it's there. No, the site's there, this stuff has been up there for a long time now. Oh, the entry. I'm just giving everyone a hard time, because I've been asking to, I've been trying to start the city plan for six months, but we just talk about zoning, so. Go ahead. Well, do you want to, I got it. John, I'll let you take over the thing. We're just trying to get you. John wasn't persuasive enough. We needed to bring in someone from the outside. Is that Shami? No, just to be clear. Dan, you just pushed us over the edge. Now we can start here. That's right, exactly. So. We're here now. What this is an interesting representation of is the floodway, okay? So you have to then consider, and whatever you're doing, and several of them did actually address this, which was, anything that you do within the floodway needs to take a consideration of, are they on plinths? Do they have to be raised up so that you're not sitting there with the assumption of being flooded? It's like, you know, any new development has to, you know, in my period. Well, that's the 100 year flood. Okay, so we actually have to then pay attention. You know, this is the red line is what downtown with the 100 year flood. Okay, so that's gotta be part of the consideration. There are ways of doing it, but it requires raising things up, having common space, kind of commercial space, common space, storage space in the floodway, but you cannot have living space. Okay, so we were one to get to the point where housing was of course going to be a part of this equation, because if you want new people, if you want to get the people on the hillsides, et cetera, they have to be somewhere to live with a half a percent vacancy rate in town. That's a challenge. You know, I'm not telling you guys anything you don't know, but the question is, you know, how do we have safe, affordable, diverse housing? You know, you've got ideas of duplexing old homes allowing infill and cluster. That's what, you know, what this was looking at was how do we do it within, in essence, these concentrated areas? So, notice here, the idea was, okay, we could have housing here on the other half of where the tax department is, you know, or back here on Court Street. Okay, they were looking at a variety of places in town you know, where housing could be considered. While you brought those two ideas up, I have a question that's maybe for Mike. So partnering, both of the things that were just mentioned there seemed like really great ideas. Doing something next to 133 State and also doing something with the pit and Court Street, but they would require partnering with the city. Is it appropriate for the Planning Commission to reach out and start talking to the, I mean, work with the state, start talking to the state about partnership things or is that more of like the city manager's role? Usually the partnership stuff comes through the city manager, I think what we would be looking for is to propose some development themes to start working towards. You know, we're gonna have to come up with a land use plan or come up with plan policies and goals of what we're looking for. So we could plan to work with the state that we probably shouldn't in the meantime talk to the state? Yeah, we probably wouldn't be doing the outreach, but we do wanna have the discussion of all of the components. So when, you know, council makes a recommendation they've thought about the, you know, is this, would this be a good idea for us to do that? Means we as the Planning Commission may study whether from a transportation standpoint, you know, there's a lot of discussion about putting a big parking garage and putting a bunch of development in the pit. All the transportation studies will tell you you can't put a parking garage in the pit. It just messes up every intersection that's down there. All the studies have said, if you're gonna do a parking garage you have to do it in the Jacobs lot or you have to do it in the Capital Plaza lot because it has easy access back to the highway for efficient moving. So before we have a manager or a council look at building a parking garage say, we would probably go through and just go and determine whether that's a good idea and then they would go out and actually do it. There are other places on state or at the labor lot, et cetera where it would not be the same. Yeah, where an idea may not have been considered yet but I think we wouldn't necessarily reach out to the state. I think we would go and look and determine whether it's a good idea. How does it fit into the land use plan? How does it fit into all of the other pieces? And then we would bring that to council and council says that's a great idea, might go and study it. It's kind of the same way with the railroad idea. Do we or do we not work on the railroad? I think as a planning commission we come up with a policy that goes and says we think this is a good idea, needs more study. We recommend to city council that we study it and then I can as staff get to work studying it and if we find it's a viable idea then we start working with, okay, what are the barriers? Who do we have to? We seem like the foundation pieces for our entire city plan because so much hinges on parking and transportation solutions and if we choose to put the wrong things in the city plan things that are looked at later and are thought of as not worthwhile or not plausible then we've built up our city plan on that idea. So I don't know, that's what's kind of in my mind is this stuff. That's why you're a TV. So this one is just an idea from the Swedes of housing where it's built up so that again the bottom floor is up on concrete plinths but the top part is actually rather than concrete, et cetera and brick is a wood construction. It turns out there's been a lot of increases in especially scant and avian someplace in America where wood is now actually for large scale structures such as this unacceptable medium because there's been new ways of bonding wood of constructing with it that actually provides the strength necessary to make this kind of stuff happen. So, and that of course would be very good for Vermont because then you could be using local. It's not like you're having to import mahogany to make it happen, it can be done with. You know, this is where, oh yeah, so this was the idea that they had in here that Pioneer Street could also be a new area for housing development that hadn't been looked at before that encouraging it in there becomes a way of getting it, getting some new housing capacity relatively proximate to downtown. Another version of in essence in Court Street, this is with minimal parking underneath and more appropriate housing appropriate for the architecture of the area on where the pit is. You know, there is parking in the pit, so it's not like there, it's not a parking area. The question is, what level of parking do you want there? And I think that's where curvy was, you know, your point as well taken, which is we might not be able to do anything with it. If the state or the federal, because I believe some of it's federally not. Well, it's a state, it's mainly the state. You're not going to get the post office, but you know, that's the thing, but the most of it is actually owned by Vermont Mutual. So what actually they would be, now if they could be convinced something in the work that they were also always looking for investment opportunities, so. Is there anything downtown that's not specifically on Madison City is going to have that problem? Yeah, that's true. Anything inside? Right. For downtown. Yeah, even the two garage projects that we talked about, one was Capital Plaza, one was Jacobs, one is owned by the Basharra family, one is owned by the Jacobs family. Yeah, that's a good point. Either case, we're always looking at it. The state happens to be the biggest. The state's the elephant in the room, but. And a lot of things we can look at though, in terms of policy reverse, like right now, we think of like land value taxation. So right now, like Liberty Mutual, they took down buildings on Court Street and their taxes were lowered, right? So the less we invest in private citizens invest in our downtown, the lower their property tax, but even though our infrastructure is exactly the same. So let's start creating some economic incentives for actually building things, and then things might get built. Right, so we decide what we want to do with that, the lipstick, too. What? No, we haven't imposed the land value taxation on our like, big municipal plan. Again, this is the one where the neighborhood idea we're showing where you could have, again, it's basically trying to figure out a deal with the state to get access. There's really only about 700 parking spots from Bailey Avenue down to number two Taylor. So it's, you know, there are ways of thinking about trying to trade those off if we can get other people into town in other ways. They're all state employee parking lots, of course. Again, this is another version of the Court Street plan. I'm not pushing any one of these, I'm just saying this is the kind of thinking that was going into all of this, so it was, you know, giving them a defined area of pretty much the downtown created a way for a lot of ideas to come forth out of this, which was great. This one was sort of fun because, again, it took that idea of a park on the East Gateway Park here, but also creating an art space in here rather than parking a lot, now that's Jacob's property, so there'd have to be some way of doing it, but, you know, again, riverfront, okay, activating the riverfront, you know. If anybody's actually gone behind the propane tanks and stuff, it's actually kind of a pretty part of the North Branch down in there, if it was accessible. You know, so that's just another way of looking at this. So now we get to parking. All right, we know it's everybody's favorite thing, so, you know, how do we do it? Does it include satellite parking, garages, surface parking, okay. What's the whole, we know there could be satellite parking, that the city knows it, but is it doing anything about it? For instance, there's a whole lot up where the old Brown Derby was that was supposed to be considered, but nothing's happening with it. There are other places that, you know, so this is where we've had ideas, including the vaunted garage down there plus some Court Street plus over here behind 133 State. You know, what they're proposing is you could take 403 spots in these area and turn it into 590 spots in those areas. So it's a, you know, so it is a centralization recapturing land, so that's one approach that was considered. This is an interesting one. This is an idea of a plinth where you literally, rather than digging down into the riverbank, you build up from it and then you create green space on top of it and you have parking. If it floods, it floods in there and you're still above the floodway, okay, that's one approach. Whether you like particularly the buildings on top of it, it is another way of considering how we could have combination of parking and development within that area, because the river is always a consideration, the flooding is always a consideration and global warning tells us it will be, it will come back to haunt us at some point. So would that actually perhaps help us in terms of soil mitigation of that area in? Sure. It is contaminated, we could just leave it there. You could just leave it and basically seal it and come above it. It's adding additional fill on the floodplain. It's adding fill on the floodplain still, which is not typically ideal. You probably have to. If you give an Arkansas river, I mean you're really imagining putting the whole thing as a... Yes, there's the Karmie Corps of Engineers and all the rest that have to go through, but I believe the engineering is possible. Stephanie works in hazard mitigation planning, so she has to say it. Doesn't mean I know everything, but yeah, I feel like I need to chime in with her. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, it's in size and it's all a flood, it's all a flood right now anyway. Yeah, we're going up. This one is 133 State Street, where instead of a new building that Gosson has proposed, this one has parking above and then housing above in there, which they say this can be designed in such a way that not only that, that the parking below, if it were done flat-floored, could become housing if we had more aggressive strategy for keeping cars out of downtown, depending on what happens with it. I'm going to take a position that nobody else likes, which is global warming stuff is telling us we're going to have to do something about the car sooner rather than later. Nobody wants to admit it because the assumption is we're going to keep going on the way it is. Both the economy and the environment say we're going to have to attend to it sooner rather than later, so the more that we can do the thinking that we'll do this, from my point of view, but I'm not one of the designers that is just, I stick it out there because I think it is something that we're going to have to worry about. Again, parking down at the, I know you keep saying there's somebody looking at the grossments a lot, but that's been years and nothing's happened there. Is there, is something happening there? There's people that, the property has sold, I can say that because it's got a new sign out. Oh, okay, I didn't, Yes. So what are they doing? Well, it's a build to suit. Talk about a, shall we say toxic site? That remediation, what would I hate to face that one? They've done the testing, they know what's there. They've got all the plans. What was there before? It was the location of the coal gasification plant, so it does have coal tar. I'm not going to put a children's school there. Yeah, you're probably not going to see any daycare facilities. The construction company after that, right? Yeah, grossments, that's why they call it the grossments lot. Right, it was the grossments lumber company back, that may be before some of yours time, but it was sort of a New England franchise of lumber yards. This concept's interesting because they're actually looking at taking the parking and putting it under solar canopies, as well as moving tools. Which makes a solar park out of it as well as the, gas station, service station. You see four places like that in front of the co-op, but this would be a whole parking lot. And then they had the idea of moving Bob Sonoco down here with a convenience store that would, so if you parked there, that would be where you'd wait for the train and where you would get a coffee. From there, it looks like the bike path would just take you in too. The bike path would take you in as well. But see, they've got the train coming here. The bike path, I think they're assuming you come over here with, but that's... This is imagined as a city development, not a private one. It's imagined as a city development, but it could be a private one. It could be a private parking lot, basically. This is recognizing, suggesting there could be a garage over at the labor lot, which could triple or quadruple the available parking there and, you know, so. Touch the screen, yeah. Some kind of a link into, you know, they talk about it as a third of a mile to here, but there could be shuttling or whatever to this. But again, that could take, you know, 800 cars. Final area, which we started with, which was the energy component of this. You know, the whole idea of this was to get net zero energy development plans forward. Okay, so, you know, how do we get renewable, reusable energy, reduce the greenhouse gases, reduce the energy demand, and meet or exceed the state energy plan, you know, 2050. It's like our grandchildren are supposed to deal with it, but the reality is it's something that has to be talked about now. So different of them had different ways of, you know, and these were more summaries of what could be done, you know, putting in wind and solar, putting in a reduction, you know, so it was a combination of, you know, if you do the right new building, you know, and you had to, you know, where is the next one? Here, connected to the district, new buildings connected to the district heat plant. You know, surprised that the city wasn't more aggressive on that one. That, you know, you could have net zero building in essence with the, you know, the new level of what can be done as far as insulation, building design, making the best use of the solar gain, making, putting the solar panels on top, you can make net zero buildings without, you know, a real lift anymore. I mean, we know how to do it. The question is the choice. You know, having the district heat plant is of course an added one because you need less electricity if you've got the biomass service provided. Okay, so this is an interesting one. These are existing buildings that say all have to be retrofitted. Okay, it's one thing to build new. The other one is all of that is there, okay? All of it is very wasteful in terms of design and energy. So there's a whole job that the city has to do. That's where, it's interesting that, you know, the mayor and council are considering this charter change thing, which will allow sort of an energy rating from the landlords because, you know, the landlords have been sticking the tenants oftentimes with the energy charges for the heating, et cetera, rather than saying, should we be taking more of a proactive role, which will help the landlords to actually do the energy work, the efficiency work necessary. I can tell you, having done the efficiency work in my house, boy, it doesn't make a difference in terms of the livability of the place and the cost of heating it. So I'm a big advocate on that one. So this is, you add those in with the new buildings, all of whom are now have, on this plan, have solar fields on the top of them and the district heat. So again, the district heat was a feature of a number of these for the downtown. It does a way of actually creating, you know, lots of new units, you know, that could be supported and heated. But the city has to take that seriously. They sort of, like, they made the cost of hooking up, like you have to pay for it now, which is why the French block chose not to do it because it was just too costly. So summary, I'm going to have to turn this and read it myself because I didn't point it. I thought it was going to be up there. This was going to be. So more housing and transit equals less traffic. So we've got to work on alternative transportation systems. Walker used transit from home. That's one of the reasons why we're looking at the microtransit because it makes it easier. You know, when you talk to the seniors, et cetera, everybody says, well, we'd like to take the bus, but it never comes. I don't know when it's coming, Wednesday, you know, it's like, so the idea is you have to make something that is convenient and easy as your own car, okay? And that's what we're looking to do. Riverfront parks and green spaces and housing development are necessary for, you know, our future development. You already know about diverse housing throughout the city, but what the red map and these things show is there's a huge opportunity downtown if we can figure out how to capture it. We need alternative parking options, okay? And we renew renewable energy to reduce our greenhouse gases. So, oh, come on. I apologize, I have the rats, I haven't heard it, but thank you very much, Dan. All right, I'm done. I have a couple of pieces and then I'm on. Oh, it's empty. So what these are is proposing design concepts that can be integrated in your new city plan, okay? That's why we're here tonight. We're including the city's committees and we've made presentations or a part of all of them and various ways for building the coalitions. We've already done, like I said, both the transportation roundtable and a roundtable on the lower north branch which led to some different thinking about what could be done along the riverfront there. So we look to work with you on anything we can provide in the future. We hope to be a resource to the city committees as they work with you to contribute to the city plans. So we're not trying to be coming in from outside but to be a way of influencing all of the different people. As you can see, the design competition offered multiple concepts for each of the city committees on what could be done. We just wanted to give you the overview of what came out of it so that you could be prepared for the future. And well, thank you very much for your time. That was, and we almost got it. Yeah, we did. Any questions or anything else? Anybody want to finish one? A lot of questions, a lot of questions, but I think we're going to have to kind of work through some of these ideas. It sounds like, I mean, I felt myself thinking about the challenges of a variety of the ideas and we'll have to find that balance of being able to look broadly, are wishless in not getting bogged down by what the hurdles might be, but also thinking about what the hurdles might be is because we don't want it to be a non-starter and then we have problems. So we're just finding that balance, it's going to be a challenge. This is why I was telling you about the microtransit and the train is that we tried to say it's not a parking problem, it's a transportation problem. You know, so sometimes it is just switching how you think about things rather than saying, oh, we got this parking problem, what do we do? Oh, we need more garage, we need this or that, rather than saying, well, maybe we have to change how people move around. Maybe we can help do that and make it fun and convenient, et cetera. And that changes the discussion and moves things around. So that's what I was hoping you might consider for some of these other pieces. Sorry, I have to leave too. Anyone else have questions or thoughts? Okay, thank you. We're gonna look at all of this and we'll probably ask you to come back again. We're at your disposal. Thanks so much, thank you. My pleasure. So, Mike, is it okay if we kick the meeting minutes and considerations for the next meeting? Sure. So, that was just the last item again. It was just do I have a motion to adjourn? I move. Stephanie seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. We are adjourned.