 busy agenda for tonight. First thing we have to do is approve the agenda so if everybody can take a look. Mike, considering we have the elections tonight, am I right in presuming that I should continue to do the chair stuff until we get to that? Yes. Okay. Okay, acting without any authority here. Okay, so yeah, everyone can take a look at the agenda and we'll need a motion to approve it. Move to approve the agenda. Okay, we have a motion from John. Do we have a second? Ah. I think Arianna or Marcella rather. I don't know why I get to mix up sometimes. Marcella has a second. Those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, agenda approved. Comments from the chair. I don't have anything too significant. Just that we have a couple of new members obviously. It's Gabe and Jeff. So welcome Gabe and Jeff. Are you there, Jeff? I spoke with Gabe a little bit at the beginning of this one. Maybe you guys will, we can take turns and let you introduce yourselves to the entire group. We'll do that for the comments. How about you go first, Gabe? So Gabe Lajanas, I've been a resident of Montpelier for the last five years. And my brother's a builder and I've been working on some projects with him over in New Hampshire and I've just started doing some work here on some infill and see how we can get some more housing. And so when I saw the vacancy, I thought it was a great opportunity to be involved in the policy discussions. I do have a legal background. I'm a financial advisor is my main line thing, but I love to pour some investments and pull some investments into the community and again talk policy. So great to be with you. Thank you. How about you, Jeff? Hi, Patista. I work for the Green Mountain Care Board. I've lived in Montpelier for two years. So I spent much of COVID in Montreal waiting for my wife's screen card. Looking forward to get more involved in the community, particularly in this planning side. My background prior to state government was a doctorate in geography where I studied pedestrian behavior and what motivates people to move around. So we're just looking to bring that into the public sphere. That's great. And yeah, that's definitely going to be really helpful for us. Okay, I guess while we're at it, maybe the planning commissioners, we can just speak real briefly to introduce ourselves and tell a little bit about our background and maybe our time served on the planning commission. Community Development Department and for the past five years or so, I've been with the Center for Geographic Information and which is the state's GIS office and I'm on the planning commission for a while now. Eight years, maybe? The longest standing, although my attendance as of late has been a little spuddy. He's definitely a senior member. Ariane, how about you? I'm Ariane Cassand. I've been on the planning board, I think about three and a half years. And at my day job, I work at the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, which is the statewide funder of affordable housing and land conservation. And I have Marcella next. Hey, I'm Marcella Dent. I work for, well, I'm the newest, except now I'm not the newest. So I was the newest on the board or on the commission and I have been a Montpelier for about five years and I work for the Agency of Natural Resources here in Montpelier with Ariane and also sit on the CVRPC, the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission on behalf of this group. And Aaron? You know, at the U.S. Supreme Court, traditionally the junior most justice, you know, when they go in conference, the junior justice sits near the door and has to answer the door when it opens and so Marcella doesn't have to do that anymore. Perks have moved it up. I'm Aaron Kisicki. I'm an attorney with the Agency of Natural Resources. I work with Marcella actually and I've been on the Planning Commission for a little more than three years now and I've been vice chair for a couple of years. So welcome aboard everybody, really looking forward to working with you all. So thanks. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about this new chapter for us. No pun intended because we're working on the chapters of the city planner now. Okay, so with that, we can move on to the general business unless somebody else has something up, one of the planning commissioners has something they wanna bring up right now before we move on to general business. Okay, general business is opportunity for the public to speak about something that's not on the agenda. If there's anyone from the public here who would like to bring anything up. No, we don't have any public here in City Hall and I don't see any public on Zoom. So I think we're settled. Okay, okay, that's great. And with that, we have the election of the chair and vice chair and Mike, why don't you walk us through this? All right, well, usually this election used to happen earlier in the year but when we reshuffled appointments, so it used to overwhelm city council because everybody would be appointed in April. So what happened about two years ago, three years ago was the city council shuffled and moved everybody throughout so different boards get appointed at different times and the planning commission got moved to October. Of course they forgot last fall, last October to appoint anybody because it was 2020. So this year we got to reappoint everybody. Some of you do a two year term and some of you do a one year term. I'll have to get the list to see who's who. Hopefully you guys know who's who. If not, I can find that out and let you know. But as a part of that, once the board is reappointed or the new members are added, we go through and elect our chair and vice chair. So those are the only two, I guess, officers that we have because the city pays somebody to do our minutes so we don't have a secretary. So nobody has to worry about doing that as a part of their job. So that's it. It should just be pretty straightforward. This is usual, it's one year appointment. And I guess we can just open the floor to a slate or open the floor to individual seats. I'll let you guys figure out how you wanna kind of handle that process. Okay, does anybody have any thoughts? I nominate Kirby for chair and Aaron for vice chair. Can I, is that appropriate? How I did that? I'll second. Okay. Do we have any other thoughts before we proceed with that? Yeah, I nominate Marcella as vice chair. Is that, is that like it? So we can't appoint a slate then. We'll just go with individuals. If there's only one person for the chair, then we can point that. Well, and I decline the nomination for vice chair. So we have a slate again. Okay, Marcella, how do you feel about that? Or do you have any other thoughts? No, I'm okay with that. I mean, I can expand upon it if you want, but I, yeah, I'm okay with that. As long as folks are okay with me continuing to, I mean, I think anyways, as long as folks are okay with me continuing to do CBRPC stuff, I just moved into the, like they just did rearrangement of the subcommittees and I just moved on to the executive subcommittee. And I feel like it's a good learning spot for me. So I kind of like to continue to do that. Oh, that's great to hear. But I think that's manageable with a vice chair role. Yeah. I would say having been on the RPC and been on subcommittees in the past that if you were to try to be chair and CBRPC, that may get a little, a little better. I think that would be way too much, yeah. I think I was vice chair when I was on CBRPC. There's recent precedent. Cause you, were you vice chair last before? I was, yeah, I was vice chair when Leslie was chair. With Leslie. Yeah. Okay. Then yeah, you were. Okay. Do we have any other thoughts before we move on? I know this is a tough spot for our new members because they're jumping into a dynamic and this is their first introduction. Anybody else any of the thoughts before we move on with that? I'm fine with the nomination for chair, by the way. Yeah. I just, I just, I think Kirby's done a great job and I assume you're a willing to continue as chair. I don't, I don't mean to block anyone, you know, who would wish to be chair. And then Marcell, I think that's great that you're willing to be vice chair. Okay. Do I call this vote Mike or do you? Let's be above board. I can, it doesn't really matter. I mean, we've got a motion from Ariane. Did we end up with a second? Yeah, I'll second. You're on second. I think we added an attorney that understood Robert's rules here. I'm sure we could run this, but I could go through and ask. So we're going to approve the slate of Kirby and Marcella for chair. That is my big weakness as chair. The procedure is not my top priority. So a motion to approve Kirby as chair and Marcella as vice chair. All those say aye. Opposed nay. All right. Motion carries Kirby. Thank you, Marcella. Welcome. Thank you both. Thank you. Yeah, thanks everyone. That was, that was quick. Let's get out of the way and that brings us to considering the minutes from September 27th and September 30th. September 30th was our special meeting regarding the zoning exclusively zoning proposed changes. For our new members, by the way, the way that this kind of stuff goes is, maybe you would have already noticed and you already pulled up, but I just thought I'd say it just in case you're wondering what we're looking at. Mike sends out these documents about a week ahead. So we're just looking at the minutes and the agenda that he had sent out previously. So right now we're just reviewing the minutes and people have a chance to review those and make sure that they're accurate for what actually took place at the meeting. Because sometimes the staff you have to transcribe the minutes are sometimes trying to summarize some things we were saying and sometimes we felt like we said something different than what was summarized and so people want to make little amendments to what the minutes say. I do have a one, just maybe add for the September 30th minutes. It says, let's see, the property, that little paragraph that says the property on the right hand side of the street from Washington County Mental Health is the next proposal. And then the last sentence as Barb mentioned, it depends on what the easement states, but we didn't say that there was a conservation easement. So just adding in something about, there is a conservation easement on a large part of the Keaton Woods parcel or something. Have we been able to confirm that? Does anyone independently check that since that meeting? No, I still hadn't had a chance. Kevin, who's gonna be the one who's gonna go and check that for me, he's been actually in training for the past three weeks. He's gonna potentially take over as the assessor when our assessor retire. So he's been training. That's nothing like 120 hours of video zooms for three weeks. Is that, is it with PBR that he's doing it? Cool. So he's the person I rely on to kind of go up and check these things out. And I haven't had a chance to have him in the office yet. So I'll let you know when we find that out. Okay. The question. I was also taking these things up. Go ahead, John. What is the, what are we trying to figure out if there's an easement on? Whether there's a conservation easement on the Heaton Woods behind the sister living home up there. You know, the woods that are basically like on the properties that are on the, I think it's the west side of Liberty street. There's, you know, the hill and the woods behind there. And Ariana pointed out that she believes that there's a conservation easement on that property. If there is one, then that would just assuage all the concerns for people who think that it might be developed in the future if we change the zoning. So it looks like there is, but it's for like the western third of the property. Which is more towards Harrison Avenue. What's the western third? Yeah. So well, it includes the Harrison Avenue like park and field. And then the sort of like ridge line and that area behind it up to, packing up to the properties on Liberty. We can show you. Okay. It includes all of that? Yeah. So that was a big question. And if that's the case, then we don't have to worry about unforeseen development happening up there. So it's this area here. Yeah. And I think the area that's not conserved, I mean, there is probably some, maybe development potential behind Heaton Woods, but I think this is pretty steep slopes. If I'm right. Yeah, it's super steep. Yeah. I had no idea there was a map layer for like privately conserved land like this. That's crazy. Yeah, it's not, it's not definitely not perfect. You know, it's possible that more of it is. I'm sure. Yeah, you can see that it's pretty steep back there. We can add sense of direction to my flaws because I said west, but it's like clearly north. Northwest. Northwest, we'll give you that. I use strictly my side, your side in driving now because I can't left and right. It just doesn't come out right. Yeah. I was, I was for the, my first sense that the left side, but it like totally depends on which way you're, what direction you're driving. Okay. So, so just no need to like dwell on this anymore, but, but that'll be nice to know for the future. Cause that's definitely going to come up the hearing. We have a hearing coming up for, for Gabe and Jeff. So, you know, there's a hearing on proposed zoning changes coming up. Is it scheduled for the end of November at this point, Mike? Or no, not scheduled. Hasn't been scheduled yet. Okay. So could be in November, it could be December, maybe at this point, but that'll be with the public participating and giving us feedback on a number of proposed zoning changes. The meeting from September 30th was, we held a special meeting that was just informational so that the planning commission could get caught up on it. My cast and documents that he'll need to share with you that will tell you a lot of details about what those proposed zoning changes are. A lot of them are along the lines of making or changing certain areas so that there's more development potential for housing, changing sections of some neighborhoods to allowing for more units to go in, along with like some slightly easier setback and other sort of design-related regulation. And this is, it's really us hearing from the public and then adjusting the zoning to fit more of or what we're thinking overall is like what we wanna see as far as the zoning policy for the city. So that's what a lot of the changes are, but there's various different proposals in there. So you wanna check it out to see the details on all of those. Okay. So do we have that change from our own point of view? Okay. Do we have any other changes for the minutes? Do we have a motion to approve the minutes? Motion to approve the minutes? Motion from Erin. Do we have a second? I'll second it. Second from Ariane. Those in favor of approving the minutes say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Minutes approved. Which brings us to, there's a municipal planning grant resolution that so Mike needs us to approve this and then I will sign it if we approve it to apply for funding. So why don't you fill us in on the details about it, Mike? So it's the same application we submitted last year. We didn't get funded last year. So I've worked with somebody different or I'm working with somebody different to get a different cost estimate. I've made a bunch of amendment tweaks and adjustments to it to kind of make a better application to hopefully get funded this time around. We're gonna cut down the amount of money we're requesting to hope that that helps to get approved this time. So these, for those who don't know, municipal planning grants, the state sets aside about $400,000. It used to be a million dollars when I was working for the RPCs. It's been cut down since then and never restored. So it's down for 50, somewhere around there, 480, that the state municipalities can apply for to do state, to do local planning. So if you wanna update your town plan, you wanna do zoning regulations or apply for downtown designation, there's a lot of things you can use these planning grants for. These are really kind of set up for you the planning commission and the planning staff to kind of get projects going. You can't build things with the money but you can do the planning. So it's a good piece. So we are currently gonna be trying to get the money. This money we are targeting towards hiring a consultant to help us get this. We wanna do an online project. We want the city plan to be more web-based and digital. So we kind of need somebody who's got skills in that area. We don't have that in-house. So we need somebody who can help us put together those storyboards and make that happen. So as I said, I've been speaking with a couple of consultants who do this and I've got one that's getting me an estimate. So hopefully we'll get that ready to go. The money, the match money. So we can get up to $22,000, which is, we applied for about $20,000 last year and we didn't get funded. This time I'm trying to get it down to maybe around a $10,000 grant request and we'll still put in $10,000 of city money into the project. So that's kind of my hope. I'm trying to just shrink down their scope a little bit to try to get it down to about a $10,000 request. So we have a little better shot of getting funded. So, but yeah, if you've got any questions, I can certainly answer them. Otherwise, it's a pretty straightforward process. And I sent out the resolution a little bit late. So you should have gotten it later this afternoon, late just before this meeting. If you wanted to see a copy of the resolution, it's just a rote, pretty standard form. But I wanted you guys to be able to see it if you had questions. Anybody have questions for Mike about the grant? Is there anything else you need from us before, like, for it or would it be more like after if it was awarded? Yeah, if it's awarded, then you guys become kind of the lead, I'm the grant administrator project manager, but you guys are kind of the decision makers on it. As much as this has been kind of driven by me and the planning department kind of driving the bus when we get a municipal planning grant, you guys are kind of running it at that point and I'm providing the technical support to them. So you guys would have more of a decision-making role if we get a consultant to work on it. Okay. Do we have any more questions? Do we have a motion to approve the grant? I move to approve the resolution. A second. Motion from Ariane, a second from Marcella. Those in favor of approving the resolution for a municipal planning grant, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Were there any abstentions? Just a double check that. So it looks like unanimous approval and like, that's great. And now we can get back into our main business, which is to finish reviewing the strategies for the draft of the housing chapter. And one thing I want to try to do here is forward the, so for Jeff and Gabe, we have a Google Drive that we've set up just for this process for the city plan that we're working on. And it's organized with folders for each potential chapter for the plan. Some of the, just to give you a little bit of background, some of the chapters are statorily required under Vermont law. And then there are others that are more optional. We are planning to do a few optional chapters, but they're all there under this link. And I'm going to try to email it. I already forwarded them. Were you guys able to get in? So I'm in it, but there's a lot of folders. So I mean, I can get afterwards with Mike, but I just don't know exactly where to be looking. So right now we're talking about the housing chapter. So open the housing folder. And then the two things we're talking about tonight are going to be the strategies and the goals and strategies and then the chapter itself, which is just the narrative text. And it looks like John put in the chat another link to it in case anyone needs that. So I went through and rather than go in, because we had the template housing, which was the one you guys were working on last time. So I went through and created a revised PC and started going through that one to kind of clean it up. So I could, I didn't want you guys to lose all of the notes that were in the template before. So, so for Jeff, if you're looking at what we are, if you get to the, what would be planning, plan website housing, if you're on that tab, you'd have one that's called revised PC, which is an Excel table. Is that what we're reviewing? That's what we're going to be reviewing. Yeah, but the first, that's the first thing. That's the first one. So thanks, Mike, for reorganizing that. Yeah. And so if you look at the bottom, we've got aspirations, goals, there's different tabs along the bottom. Okay, Anna, thank you. So, yeah, to catch you guys up, the two aspirations are things that we've already talked about. This is what we've landed on is the two aspirations, which are the overarching main goals that we want to accomplish through the housing chapter. And then the goals are kind of subsets underneath the aspirations. So if you click on that tab, you'll see there's six goals. And then there's a column on the right that shows which of the two aspirations each goal is related to. So it looks like we have four goals related to aspiration A, and we have two goals related to aspiration B. And then the next tab over brings you to the strategy, which are the specific programs and policies and action items that we're going to use to accomplish those goals and aspirations. And we have made it quite a way down this list, actually, of strategies. Mike, do you recall specifically which number we were on? I don't have a note on it, but I thought it was down to the last two. I mean, we were really close to the end. I also had some homework assigned to me with regard to me complaining about our goal of the related to vacancy rates, which meant that I needed to come up with an alternative. Okay, let's do that, because that was one of the goals things, right? So let's talk about that. Do we want to do that now? I don't want to derail us if we were getting close to finishing our strategies. Since the goals come before the strategies, let's do that. If we're going to revisit a goal, let's do that before finishing the strategies. Yeah, I think in terms of our strategies, you may not change much, but so for our new members, the context here is most of the time when we read through our goals, I try to look at them and say, can we actually check a box and say, like, yes, we've done this, or is it just something where it's sort of ambiguous and you look at it and we don't know if we really met it or you could argue whether we did or not. And we have this increased rental housing development until 5% of vacancies is continuously maintained, et cetera, and I was not a fan of this given how vacancy rates are hard to measure, they're complex. Our goal isn't actually around vacancy rates. We want more housing and we want more people here. Like that's our real goal. So I thought I was a fan of saying, like, let's at least build this many more homes in Montpelier within the next 10 days, sort of fairly concrete and something we can measure. But what's that number going to be? So one thought I had, and we've also talked a little bit about growth in surrounding communities and growth in sort of like the Montpelier suburbs has been faster than it has been in Montpeliers, at least in the past couple of decades and we know that growth within Montpelier and around our walkable neighborhoods results and a lot fewer vehicle miles traveled, there's all these other benefits to it. So if we say that we want to grow at least as fast or faster than some of these surrounding, if we look at like more town, Duxbury, Calis, they were growing at in the last decade 5.7, 5.7, 3.4%, Watesfield, 7.44. And Montpelier was at 2.8% and that meant and we added 143 homes from 2000 to 2010. So if we were going to say bump our goals up to 7%, that would mean 300 new homes over the next decade or between 2020 and 2030 or 30 homes a year. So that's sort of a number I thought doesn't sound like not overly, it's not crazy. And I do like the idea of us framing it in, our goal will be to grow at least by this much so that we don't have, let's say we are successful and we do grow by that much, we'll avoid a situation where people are saying, we've met our goal, like we don't want to allow any more housing. It's like, I think we do, but in terms of measuring our success, seems like if we can get to that place where we're growing at least as fast, maybe a touch faster than our surrounding communities, that there's like something, I feel like we could present that and there's some rationale behind it. And it's not, we know we have the public infrastructure and services to support that many more housing units where our people per household size didn't change much, I think it went from 1.95 people per home down to 1.9. So that should equate roughly to the same amount of percent increase in population. So that's my thought, what do people think of a will increase by at least, you know, 30 homes a year if we want to put it in terms of annual numbers? Are you thinking of breaking it up by rentals and then owner housing? I wasn't, we could do 15 and 15, but as a separate goal, we have to maintain a mix of housing types and I think we want all an increase across the board. I mean, it's not exact, but we're pretty close to in the 50, 50 range right now between apartments and single family dwellings. Yeah, we're at 56% owner occupied, 44% rental. Yeah, so I mean, even if we just, and it's not actually all that different from a number standpoint than what the housing task force was looking at, which is 30 units. They were talking about 240 units over an eight year span, which is the same number that John came up with. They were just looking at it differently. And I guess just really quick for Gabe and Jeff's benefit, what you have before you for most of these chapters, we'll have an exception when we get the economic development and a couple others, is that we have no shortage in my pillar of committees. So our first round of deciding how we were gonna come up with implementation strategies. For example, what's gonna be our housing goals and what are our strategies for implementing it? Our first step was for me as the planning staff to go and meet with the housing task force to talk with them about what their goals are and to develop the implementation strategy. So we take that, it's one of the documents that's on that Google drive. And then we take that and we plug it into here. And because it's kind of, if you look through what the housing task force came up with, it's not very user friendly from a presentation and a plan. So what we're trying to do at the planning commission level is to try to go and maybe refine it and condense it a little bit and package it up a little bit better. So they did talk about this benchmark of trying to get 240 housing units. They have some people in the field who thought that what we want is to a target of a 5% rental vacancy and six months supply of housing of four sale housing units because those are kind of real estate figures. But again, as John pointed out that that could be kind of a clunky metric to use. We can count the number of housing units really easily. But we do know we have near 0%. So one of the reasons they picked 240 was because if you were to take our number of rental units and do the math and come out with, well, how many more housing units would we have to build to go from zero to 5% you end up in this 240 range. So that was kind of how they kind of came up with their number of housing units. So all the chapters that you get, we've already done transportation, we've already done energy, we've already done historic. Those have already been done and reviewed. And those were all prepared by the Historic Commission, Transportation Commission, MEAC, the energy folks. And when we get to some of these other chapters, the same thing holds true. There are certain chapters that won't have committees in which case I worked them out with the department heads that are responsible and then we come up with something. So that way the planning commission can review it and we, again, come back to condensing these back down. So that's how they got here. That's why we're having this discussion. We first decide on what our aspiration is, what's our big vision. We break that into pieces, that's our goals, and then we break out to steps. All right, we got our goal, how are we going to accomplish that goal? And that's what you'll see between aspirations, goals and strategies. So. Can you go back over what that recommended language change was? Is it 30 a year for a decade or what's the time? Yeah, I guess the lifespan of the plan, I guess, is eight years. I was thinking in terms of a decade, mostly because we have our decennial census goes from 2020 to 2030. Although I guess by 20, our plan will be up by 2030. Either way, 30 a year for eight years or 30 a year for 10 years is still 30 a year. You know, however we might be framing some of these other ones in the plan, I guess we can just be consistent with whatever that timeframe is. Anyone else have thoughts on John's proposal? Which I think works out to the exact same number that the housing passports came up with, right? So that's, yeah. It's just rephrasing it in a plain number. Basically, that's kind of how I'm interpreting what you're saying. I think you said this, John, but I'm was, I didn't, where would we put, I'm fine with what you came up with. I think it's good to have a measurable, but also not something that people could use as like a cap to, you know, later on, but where were we going to stick that? Was it a strategy or was it? A goal one. A goal one. Yeah, replacing the language for goal one. They can see, they can tell you. Okay, so we're expanding, oh no, no, okay. I see the way, because yeah, the way goal one is talks about rental first and then ownership second is kind of confusing. So we're just, you're just thinking we'd put it together and we'd split the difference. Say 15. I'm just a fan of saying, you know, more housing to keep it simple. I think, you know, the reality is the financing and the market will determine like, oh, we'll only see, you know, more rental or multi-family in these next couple of years and maybe things might swing another way and the bottom line is, you know, more housing is all, it all helps each other. You know, the more single family can get people opportunities to move from rental and more rental can also, it's just, I don't want to, I think if we say, you know, 15 and 15, are we not meeting our goal if we, you know, build 35 multi-family but not that many single? So the mix in Montpelier is not going to, it'll still, it'll still be, you know, within at least 60, 40 or 50, 50. And thank you guys. The market will push it and I think there's gonna be a number of them that'll be very difficult. If you were to go through a lot of the projects we see will end up being condos and condos can go either way. You just don't know if somebody may buy it and rent it out or somebody may buy it and live in it. Yeah. So it'd be very difficult to start counting. So I think it'd be easier just to go through. We want, whether it's 30 housing units, you know, our goal is 30 housing units a year or 240 housing units over the eight years. However you want to phrase it, I would just go with generic housing units and kind of let the market decide. We know our nonprofit developers will also be developing some affordable, you know, rental unit, rental units in Montpelier. So that will be, you know, a part of the mix. At least I think Ariane can correct me if I'm off there. Okay, thanks. So I wrote some potential language there based on what we were saying, like how close am I to, so I wrote it in column I across from goal one on the spreadsheet. Is that what you're thinking, John, or should we change that? Is it different? I would say the number of homes in Montpelier. People don't like housing development, but they like homes, right? Increase, tell me again what you said. Increase the number of homes in Montpelier. And we wanted to include a minimum of 30 units to send the message that going over that is not a bad thing, right? Do we have any more thoughts about either the language or just the idea overall? We'll be voting on the whole thing when we finish the strategy. So how about for now, just get like a quick voice vote to see who's in favor of making the change based to replace the language from goal one to the language that's in column I there. If you're in favor of making that change, just say I now. Okay, anyone against this change? So that's something we have a majority there and interested in doing that. So let's just go ahead and switch out that language and then we'll move on to the strategies. So our recollection was Mike, clean this up a lot for us, which is lovely. Yeah, I haven't gotten down to the bottom. I started at the top and was working my way through the list. So I will be. Okay, yeah, I can see. Yeah, I'd been out straight for the past couple of weeks. So I was happy to finally get to jump back into this last week. Good, yeah, good to have you back. So just, yeah, we're trying to remember where we were. Did we get through the develop a fair housing policy? I think we, I think we did talk about these possible, all these possible strategies relating to, like one that was specific to senior housing and then another specific to recovery housing and other specific trend to transitional housing. And then we had a strategy related to the, studying the, or identifying the fair housing needs. Then we had to develop a fair housing policy. It's been a while since we talked about this. It's been a month. So I know that it's not all charging back to me at the moment either, but then what we had left, we had left to talk about were these last two, which are the only two strategies related to goal four, B four, which I think the way that Micrie did it was going to be these six, which is support partners in the development of housing that are not provided by the private market. So these two, these last two strategies are the only ones related to that goal. And it's what we have for helping partners who are providing, who are supplementing the private market is number one, continue the work of the community development specialists. And the second one is to review the zoning bylaws for barriers to development. And I think I came up with that one based maybe on some other suggestions that were made, which it's kind of what actually, I think what I had in mind was for one thing, we only had one strategy for that goal. So to try to come up with something else. And it's along the lines of some of the discussions we've had about the Planning Commission looking at zoning changes that could be needed because of things in the zoning that were unforeseen barriers or things that we think maybe aren't working out the way that they were intended. So I think that's what I was thinking about with that strategy. Does anyone have any thoughts on these last two strategies related to the, it says before here, but I think it's going to be B six goal. Sorry, this is the main T in the city's B six, meaning the cell B six maintain the city's commitment to affirmatively furthering that one. No, I'm sorry. Let me share my screen because I was using words to show where I was with this, but that's. I'm just going to grab the paperwork. Just goal number six or yeah, okay. So it's yes, we've gotten really far through these goal strategies last time. So from what Mike and I were calling, we just had these last two to review. And the thing I was referring to is over here, it says goal B four is what this relates to, but Mike could rearrange them. Now it's it's goal six, so it's going to be B six. Okay. That's the, that's the discrepancy I was trying to go out there. So anyway, these last two strategies are for goal B six, which again is what's relating to the goal of trying to support the partners in development of housing that are not provided by the private market. And if that's what the community development specialist currently is doing, a lot of the work that's done there, my understanding. I feel like Ariane would know a lot more about this than me. Do you have any thoughts Ariane? Well, I don't know a lot about what the community development specialist does them on Pealier, but I like, I mean, I like that we have, I mean to me, the one below it to talk about barriers to development with actual developers, I think is a great goal because like I was, yeah, I don't know. I think that's a good goal. I think it's a lot, it can be a lot more complex like we were talking about transitional housing and the models were changing a lot of times. So, okay. Okay, but it seems like the community development specialist strategy, I'm pretty sure came from, I think it's either in the current plan or it came from the housing task force. Yes, it did. And it's a continued strategy, which I know that we don't always love, but it seems like it's, I don't feel a need to tinker with it, it's something that's going on, that's doing some good things. Anybody have any thoughts about those strategies? Everybody okay with those? I guess, oh, oh, sorry, the only thing I'm thinking about on the last one there, review the zoning wireless for barriers to development. I don't hate the idea. I just wonder if, do we need to like consider what we would produce out of that? Like how, thinking about how we would show whether or not we've done and, you know, accomplished one of the strategies, would we wanna think about how we show that or will it just show up in meeting minutes and agendas? I guess, yeah. We could do in like a, we could have like an audit, like we could use municipal planning grant funds to hire someone to do an audit and do this discreetly to produce a report with recommendations or it's just something we chip away at, but we do risk kind of slipping, slipping through in us. I think that what you're saying basically gets at the answer, which is it puts the planning commission in the planning department in charge of that one. So we would decide, I guess, what the review would look like. Yeah, and I suppose we could put this in and we couldn't decide later what the review would look like. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So I think, so there is, I'm trying to find it and trying to grab the, here's the old, what came out of there out of the housing task force looking at what we have here. So there were two separate housing planning initiatives that were recommended. And I see we've got one on line 31, fair housing. So that one or study, so there was supposed to be a, to redo the barriers to housing study. I'm trying to see where that is. I know it was discussed and I thought it was in here and I am unfortunately not seeing it. So one of the things, it sounds like what you were trying to get at with line 36 was to kind of do a barriers to housing study, which I thought was in here and I can't find it. So it could be, that's how we could rejigger 36, which really isn't just for affordable housing, but is kind of, it could be here, it could be up, you know, it'll probably get tagged here and tagged for increasing housing because whether you're looking at increasing housing by the market, which is what goal one is, or whether you're trying to increase it by supporting our partners that are providing housing, not supported by the private market, which is goal six, the barriers to housing study helps both achieve both those goals. So I believe that's really what 36 is looking at. And then we probably, or I can adjust it when we get there is the supporting at least one housing planning effort. So what the Housing Task Force does right now is they are getting money every year, $150,000, and they put about 50,000 of it away into a reserve and they hold on to that money so that way they can get to about $100 to $200,000, which they use to help these affordable housing projects. So French Block, the Berry Street Projects, the Transit Center, those are all projects which we donated money out of the Housing Trust Fund to help facilitate that project to happen. So those are individual projects that housing efforts. So we have a couple of possible ones that are in the queue. We just need to kind of see if they're still viable now that with the housing market, housing market's up but so are the costs of everything. So a lot of people have kind of shelved their ideas. The second project was to look at identifying particular groups that are disadvantaged such as refugees, asylum seekers, group homes, persons reintegrating from incarceration in the homeless. So they looked at that as a separate group. So their goal with the life of the plan, the Housing Task Forces goal through the life of the plan is to do one major general project and then to have one targeted specific project, the two they were looking at. So it's kind of tagged in 31 as identify fair housing needs. It really is a hope of doing two separate projects. One being a housing project for disadvantaged groups and another one being a housing project for, it to sponsor a housing project, which we usually don't, we usually wait for people to come to us for those requests. So Christ Church would be a good example. They've had a project they've been trying to work on for a while behind, it's on State Street. They have that building that's behind the church. It really needs to kind of get torn down and reconstructed and they would like to do a housing project back there. It was supposed to be done in conjunction with the parking garage, which as we all know is now toast. So they have to kind of re-go back and consider how to move forward. Now that they don't have the advantages of having the parking garage back there. Do you think we need to reword the strategy or do you go with? I can tweak it as long as you guys are okay with it to kind of break it into those two. 31 would kind of get broken into two. And I think 36, if it's not already above somewhere, it's to do the barriers to housing, which I actually think is in the budget for next year. Down Street does this periodically every eight to 10 years. They will do a barrier to housing study. They do it for a number of communities. And we just, we're gonna put in, you know, $30,000 into the other funding that they get to kind of help them do the barriers to housing study. And they kind of carefully pick through our zoning regulation to look for any of those things that, you know, maybe me and my staff have overlooked or you guys have missed or the DRB has missed, they can kind of go through and say, you know, these are the things that are still holding up housing development from happening. A lot of the 2011 barriers to housing was what ended up getting implemented in the zoning that some of you adopted when 2017 and was adopted January of 2018. A lot of those changes that were made came from recommendations from the barriers of housing study in 2011. Okay. Because we had a lot of barriers. You think working with Down Street then is how we would go about accomplishing strategy 36? Or are you thinking that it would be kind of similar? Yeah, 36 would be, yeah, I would probably label that one, conduct the, you know, yeah, conduct the barriers that, redo the barriers to housing study that has been previously done or something to that effect. Okay. One clarification for Gabe and Jeff, by the way, is you'll see some of these asterisks in this table that say added by me. The me is Kirby. I, in an earlier draft and throwing this together, I compiled just like existing strategies and threw them in, but then I put notes on things when like something new-ish was coming from somewhere else. So that's the background there. If you're confused about who me is there. That was just when I was like sliding some of this together and some of it was based off of, we've actually been having working groups for some of these chapters, like three-person subgroups and housing had one of those that consisted of me and Ariane and then Barb who was one of the two people who left the planning commission recently to make vacancies that you guys came in for. So there was the three of us in this housing working group. So some of this stuff came from that too. That's what those notes are about. Does anyone have anything else to bring up related to any of the strategies before we vote to approve this draft? And also so that the new members are aware, we plan to vote out these goals and strategies right now. It means that they're in a shape that we like at this point, but it's not the last bite at the apple as far as making any changes to these at the end of this process when we have mostly done versions of all of the chapters and all of the goals and strategies for all the chapters. There'll still be opportunities for the planning commission to make some more tweaks. Just so you know, it's not gonna be the last shot at this, which is probably gonna be important for you because the learning curve, we're aware by the way that the learning curve is steep. We've all been through it. If anything sounds Greek right now, we know that. So anyways, not the last chance to make any tweaks to this, but we are gonna vote it out. So does anybody else have anything to say about the strategies as they are now? Just sorry if I got confused there, I was also distracted. So number 36, you're saying would be as part of a fair housing assessment? Cause I was thinking more of like a, this was something about 36 was more about surveying developers about improvements be made, but you're saying it's part of the fair housing assessment? Yeah, I think it's 31 that we were talking about. Okay, so that was, okay. I thought somebody said 36 in fair housing. Okay. And I got confused for a second there. I think it was my fault that I was, I think I made the reference to 36. Yeah, Mike was talking mostly about 31 that stuff. 36, I was looking at the header of 36, review the bylaws for barriers to development and that header itself kind of, but the text down below seems like it's looking at other things, but I don't think it's that far off of what the barriers to housing would review. It looks at efficiencies, it looks at costs, unnecessary, you know, if you say, for example, required traffic studies for small projects, that's gonna get picked up in a barriers study because every time you try to do a small project, you have to pay a traffic engineer to do a housing or to do a traffic analysis. It just adds costs to the projects. And so it is inclusive of those types of issues when you look at a barriers to development. So, yeah, Down Street, when they do it, they are also housing developers, so usually they've got an eye to this, but usually they also hire a contractor to go do the assessments because usually they'll do them for a number of communities. They'll hire a consultant to look at, say, Barrie, Northfield and Montpelier and do a barriers to housing study on those three communities or something like that, so. Yeah, well, I guess to me, in my mind, they're different things, because well, it's been a while since I've read a fair housing assessment, but it's kind of, it's more focused on barriers to housing for protected classes and not, I'm interested also in just, I mean, which is important and definitely should be done, but I guess I thought 36 was different, but it sounds like it is different. Yeah, thanks for clarifying that. I was a little fuzzy on that too. So yeah, like, I think, yeah. So our understanding is that 36 will be different. The Planning Commission will independently look at these barriers. Downstreet is a developer that we could. Right. We could consult and we could look at their report and but we could also ask other developers to when we do this. Okay, great. That's all right. Any more questions about the strategies? Any of them? See the top ones, Mike has fleshed out for us nicely. Mike, I think if I recall, it's like you've been doing this, but the priorities and the costs, I think they were all set to medium on this version originally or more or less set to medium. So some of those might need adjusting when you go to work on it. Do we wanna vote on these and then move on to the chapter language? We have a motion to approve the aspirations, goals and strategies for the housing chapter. I'll move. Can we do that? Okay, motion by John. Do we have a second? Second. Second from Marcella. Those in favor of approving the aspirations, goals and strategies of the housing chapter, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, approved. And so now Mike will take it over and kind of work on pausing it up for us and that'll be there waiting for us later on when we go to finish this entire project. And with that, we have the chapter. I have to find the correct one. Should be just saying housing plan chapter. Yeah. So it looks like some folks have made some, have come in and made some little changes to it. That's great. The way we've been doing this or the way that we're gonna start doing this is people can just review this in advance and do like what we've been doing here, which is if you see some suggestions to make for either wordsmithing or just some substance stuff, do this and then we can approve these quickly. We're not gonna walk through it. We're not gonna read it in this meeting. I think at least though for Gavin, Jeff's sake that I would like to just maybe pause our meeting for a couple of minutes and give those guys a chance to read through this as background. This will be the text chapter that, the text for the chapter that explains the aspirations and goals and strategies that we were just working on. The aspirations and goals and strategies are really like the work items that are going to be done. They're the kind of the implementation stuff that the housing plan chapter language here is just a background information, a narrative that's going to, I think we're eventually going to have a website where like this language would be the kind of text for the website with like dropdown menus and things like that for the aspirations and goals and strategies. So they kind of work together, but this is not kind of the implementation part of it. This is, I'll just say it, it's kind of the fluff that there's fluff involved. I think Mike would agree. That's kind of fair. So if you guys can read through this, but it has an important part to it, which I think it sets the tone in some ways, for instance, of what matters to us and what the priorities are and things. So okay, with that, I'm going to give her a couple more. Yeah, I guess I can also just jump in really quick and just go through and say, our hope is that we were just mentioning with the municipal planning grant application. We want to do an online document, not looking to have a 400 page city plan that's just full of tables that nobody's going to read. So our goal is to kind of make each chapter very succinct, maybe 1,000, 1,500 words and have a consultant do what's called the storyboard and do it in GIS. So that way we can be very visually rich and kind of get across the important points. People can digest that five, 10 minute read and that's about it. And so 1,000 words, let people kind of get it, have some stuff that's integrated into the text and visuals, whether they're pictures, graphs, tables to kind of show and help explain what we do. Why is housing important? Why do we care? What are we trying to do? So that's what we want to get across to the public rather than having 27 pages of tables of how much housing has been built since 1950 and all these other things, we really want to get to the point and then eventually summarize for people in the bottom of this to kind of explain in a little bit, what's our goals, what are our strategies? How does this plan relate to other plans in the chat, in this? So we kind of have these related pieces. So that's what a lot of this is. It's really meant to be very succinct way of kind of grabbing the public and letting them know what we're trying to do. And then I guess it's up to you guys if you want to take a few minutes to read it. Yeah, I'll just ask, like Gabe, Jeff, what do you think? Do you feel like you need a couple of minutes to read it? I skimmed it enough, I'm upset. Jeff, are you good? I'm good, I've looked at most of it and yeah, it sings up well. Okay, great, thanks. Okay, and I've also looked at the more recent changes. I actually really like what people have changed. It looks like there's some questions in here. So if anyone's like adding questions or if you have any further questions, let's just go ahead and tackle that now that we won't stop and let people read it. It doesn't sound like we need to. So, yeah, questions or changes other than the obvious ones in here? Well, this, I haven't been kind of a lazy comment. I think Task Force had presented something to the city council in June, but I couldn't find it on the website. Mike, do you know what I'm talking about and do you think any of that information would be helpful to add? Okay, no, I didn't realize I had clicked my mute button. So they usually try to stick to what is in the housing, what they had developed in their housing report, but they did have some new things in there. I wasn't gonna go through it the late date and start to go through making adjustments to it. So I think my thought was I was gonna let things fly with what they had approved. And again, when we get to our public comment, we're gonna be sending this back out to the committees to go through and say, hey, this is what the planning commission adjusted. This is what we came up with. What do you guys think? What does the public think? What's the council think? And then we'll be responding and reacting to that. And if they have some new strategies, they're like, oh, we've got this new idea. We wanna do X or Y. And that one that we talked about there, we either have already finished that one or we decided we're not gonna do that one. Oh, but I thought, didn't you write the chapter or does the task force write the chapter? I wrote the chapter. Yeah, I was just, my comment was just that I thought it might be helpful to have some updated just a few data points from that report in this narrative, but I couldn't find it. So I couldn't put them in myself. And I mean, I didn't, I guess I could have emailed you and asked you for, or somebody and asked for a copy, but it's not, if it's too late to do that, that's not a big deal. And it can be added later. Do you see Mike, where, well, yeah, I'm screen sharing here. So I kind of highlighted the spot where she's talking about. Montpellier is not the only community facing a housing shortage, but we think it's a key place in our region for impactful solutions to take place. And so inserting some data related to that. There's a section in these chapters for like linked or relevant sort of other materials, right? We could include it in that way as well. Yeah, there's a lot of expectation that we're looking to a lot of other things. If people want to drill down and understand more, they can. Okay, so are you okay with? Things as they are, Ariana? Yeah, fine. We had some other comments. I think Marcelo is asking whether there's a Parks and Recreation chapter. Yeah, cause I was trying to mirror, I was trying to mirror the language that was up in the first paragraph. And we had like a whole conversation about parks and proximity to neighborhoods. And there was a map and stuff, but I don't remember the context of that. Was that in transportation? No, it was in parks. There's a separate, it's under, would be in the website under community services. So parks is part of the community services department. Okay, so we could say, so maybe we just tweak that to say the community services chapter addresses at the parks and recreation. That way it just, I think the first paragraph talks about why housing is important and parks is one of the things that it mentions. Yeah, cause I changed that there. Actually, I think it needs to be capitalized, be consistent. Are there any other places you threw in? No, that it was just there and I couldn't find where that was. And I- You had an E-Full too, like- Yeah, community services will eventually, it'll eventually have the recreation, senior, center, cemeteries. There's a bunch of community services that are all under. Yeah, there you go. And if you look further down into the summary of past efforts, you've got the housing needs assessment. The link isn't there. There's a housing needs assessment and there's a barriers to housing report in a Montpelier housing and needs assessment from 2003. So that's what they were looking to kind of redo again. But maybe I'm confusing Ari on the barriers to housing and the housing needs assessment. Maybe those are, I was conflating or combining the two of those. Oh, sorry, I didn't. I was just assuming there was one report. So maybe one of them looks at barriers to say a specific class of people. You know, landlords with discriminatory practices or something like that could be a barrier to housing. You know, if there could be theoretically plenty of housing but if there's discrimination going on, then certain groups would have barriers to getting in. The homeless trying to get into housing have a barrier, have a financial barrier to getting in. That's got nothing to do with building more housing. It's just the fact that there's, there are going to be barriers to certain groups, certain individuals, people with substance abuse are going to have barriers, people who are formerly incarcerated are going to have barriers to housing regardless of whether there's housing available. And I think the housing needs assessment and these other housing assessments look at your local regulations to go and look at a more general housing conditions of, like previously, we had our zoning rules, our zoning densities were set so high that most of our neighborhoods were non-conforming. So you couldn't build a new housing unit because it literally would be illegal. You can't get a permit to build a housing unit because all the housing that's there is non-conforming. So we revised all of our zoning to be 90% conforming and therefore it would automatically build in a certain amount of new units that are possible. So that's a different, I think maybe that's what Ariane was getting at. There's kind of two different barriers to housing. Okay, so go ahead. No, I was just going to be, I mean, to me, right, the fair housing assessment is about for certain protected classes, I think, really specifically. And then a housing needs assessment is sort of like how many units do you need? And then I think another sort of question is, just talking to developers about what's a barrier for them and then talking to homeless advocates and advocates for those in recovery about what's a, so maybe, yeah, anyway, just to try to clarify that, I think all those are important, but different to me in my mind. So I want to have in response to a comment, Erin left chain reword of the next sentence after, with this says, city businesses have a hard time recruiting top talent due to a lack of executive housing as well as affordable housing. And then in response to his comment, I had just changed the next sentence to, many others need to travel to the city to build various needed positions because they lack affordable local options. Kind of made that more general rather than before, there was like a focus on entry level positions and things like that. Just kind of broaden that. What do people think about that sentence? That's better. And do we have any other comments to address? I had some stuff in there about resiliency. We talked about this last time though. I think it's a confusing word that we should identify earlier. Yeah, I didn't put it in, but I could just stick a sentence in. Yeah, I think what we landed on last time was just, I think we just used the word flood resiliency to be to specify what we're talking about when that comes up. We didn't in our aspiration though, when we just okayed. Yeah, aspiration A is Montpelier will have an adequate supply of safe and resilient housing that meets the needs of all current and future residents. It was supposed to say flood resilient. There was a problem in moving things over because if you see our... Yeah, and that one it's like flood resilient, yeah. Yeah, so maybe Mike missed that I made that change to the aspiration when he was revising. Do you see that, Mike? Where it says flood resilient there? So yeah, my understanding when voting to approve this was that it was the same. That looks... It looks like the second aspiration is the same. It looks like they're the same now. So everyone knows I did throw flood resilient back in there. Does anybody have a problem with that? Okay, so sorry about that Marcel. Okay, now let's return to what we were just talking about. What should we do about flood resiliency over here? So, I mean, if it's... If we're just... I guess I had forgotten what we had decided that. So if it is just flood resiliency, then we just stick the flood in front of it and that should be fine. Where is it? Resilient, yeah, resilience in the face of natural disasters. It's fine actually, it is... First, second, the second, third paragraph of how the housing plan relates to other chapters. Yeah, I think it's fine now because it does say resilient in the face of natural disaster. So I think since we use the word flood in the above staff, I think we're okay. Okay, do we have any other things to change here before? Any things that people left a comment on but without an actual change in the text? I do have one minor point. Forgive me for the new guy. Yeah, yeah, no, jump on in, welcome. Cool, so the first line where it notes education, health care, employment, recreation, food and opportunity. It would be great to see transportation as one of those nouns in the list. It may seem a bit meta to have housing determine access to access, but we're talking about bridging the gap to nearby communities and jobs. I think that would be a good point for density right there. I think that's great. I mean, as I'm sure you know, we have a transportation chapter which crosses over and actually, a lot of the stuff that used to be in the housing chapter, we moved to transportation because of the huge link between the two. So I've made that change, is everybody okay with that? And do we talk about how other, I think we talk about transportation below, right? And there's gotta be a paragraph on that, on how the two chapters connect. Yeah, the first paragraph, which one? The first paragraph of that, it's the start of the second page. You know, some are obvious, such as location of utilities, energy efficiency. Yeah, I've highlighted it in the screen sharing now. Seems like we could even do more than just the one sentence. Yeah, it's gonna be tough. We've got, there's so much overlap when we start getting into housing, transportation and land use chapters that at a certain point when we're done, I think we just have to kind of, you know, hold them at arms length and give them a read and make sure we haven't missed something or, you know, we talk about something that maybe would be better in the other chapter because they are so integrated. And, you know, when we get into economic development, you know, economics in general, there's a link, you know, your ability to find work is directly connected to where you live and your transportation options. That's just, you know, one of the basics. So yeah, thanks, Jeff. Totally right that that should be included up top too. Do we have anything else? Do we wanna vote the chapter out? I mean, this particular chapter, I should note, still has a lot of work to do in the parts where my will flesh it out. Like all the chapters we voted out have needed some things added, but this is one where summary past efforts has a lot of room to be fleshed out still. We're just leaving that for Mike and staff to finish. Maps and tables, best position goals we've just done. That's why it's blank now because it hadn't been done before. So, so there's- You get right what it is. So you guys approved it. Yeah, exactly. So there's quite a lot to be fleshed out. I just wanna note that. Yeah, and the maps and tables are, they're not intended to be separate. They're intended to be integrated into the text, especially up top in the introduction. So our hope is that these aren't separate data points that these are integrated into the conversation. So when we do our storyboard, we're gonna probably go through and make a number of edits. This is kind of meant to be our first run of the chapter that will become the storyboard. And working with a professional on how to tell the story in a storyboard, they're gonna probably recommend a bunch of changes of how we structure it. So that's what I'm hoping to get with the consultant is that extra level of expertise in these areas. Cause we don't wanna just have a written text, a bunch of tables, and then a bunch of links to other plans. We kind of wanna integrate this as much as we can. Yeah, that sounds great. Definitely looking forward to seeing whatever end products there is, but a lot of more work to do before we get there. So do we have a, are we ready to vote for the chapter? We have a motion. Move, dude, vote the chapter out. Okay, motion to approve this chapter by Erin. Give us a second. Sure, second. Second by Marcella. Those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Chapter approved. I'll stop sharing. And we do have one final thing, so it's a good thing we have some time left. We have one final thing on the agenda before we adjourn, which is an update on the proposed zoning changes. So Mike wanted to update us on some things cause other things have come up since we have that special meeting on it. So I think that's what Mike wanted to fill us in on. So go ahead, Mike. All right. So I am working on what is basically the strikeout copy of that. We had two topics that came up. One Gabe is going to be intimately familiar with and a second one, which is dog park. So let me just grab this really quick. Put this up. So this is... All right, I'm not commenting on this one. So this is actually one of Gabe's project. This is North Street and Ewing Street. So just so Jeff knows and other folks know in the public who may have questions. The planning department, particularly the development review folks keep track of projects as they come through to try to identify things that may or may not from a policy standpoint be what we are hoping for. And so this is a good example. So in our zoning, I wanna say it's in the subdivision requirements or it's in the major site plan requirements that if you're building a new structure you cannot cast a shadow onto your neighboring property. And so this actually came up as an actual case. And as I said, this is Gabe's proposal. And you can see that on December 21st between, you have to evaluate between nine and three during the day, does it cast a shadow on the walls or roof of the neighboring building? And so in this case Ewing Street, North Street there is on the corner here a very small corner will come out in for a short window of time on the lower part of the wall. There will be a shadow that will be cast on the neighboring building. Now, if you read the rules strictly this project could have been or some might argue should have been denied because it cast a shadow but it's shadow was of such small consequence that the development review board voted to approve the project anyway. So but we did wanna point out that we do have rules in the major site plan. So if you're building a new project that's not a one or two family, one or two families exempt, this is a three family. So it did have to meet that requirement. It is a new construction and it requires looking within 15 degrees of due north to go and see if it was there. And I think that's why in the end they decided it didn't apply because really this isn't technically 15 degrees of true north or something. Oh, and he had some other, there were some other information showing the existing tree line. So they had some other, but regardless of what you see here, the question still comes up from a policy standpoint. Would we live in a fairly compact community? We would really start to have a significant impact of denying projects if we cast shadows at December 21st and it becomes really complicated. The amount of work you have to do to go and prove this. Think about somebody who lives on Prospect Street. On December 21st, there probably isn't any sun that hits your house on then because of the hill behind you. So, and yet you can't build another house there because you might cast a shadow. If it wasn't for the hill behind you, you would be casting a shadow across the street on somebody who's due north of you. So it really it's a question of policy. So we're gonna, we are gonna put together in for the public hearing a recommendation to either adjust and we haven't sat down to exactly work in how we're gonna do it, but we'll make a proposal to at least give the DRB. All these have to go to the DRB, but at least if we give the DRB to be able to examine under a reasonable, there are a couple of areas we could go. If you wanna give me thoughts, you can. One could be, you can't shade an existing or permitted solar panel. So if that were actually shading a solar panel, we could see a reasonable argument that would say you should deny that or adjust the project such that it doesn't cast a shadow onto an existing solar panel, but there's no solar panel sitting on the ground there. So that's what we're thinking of either it could be, you can't shade an existing or permitted solar panel or give some flexibility to the development review board such that they, you know, the project shall minimize the impact of shading on a budding properties or have some other standards, some other subjective standard to that type of discussion if you kind of see where I'm going, as opposed to a strict you shall not cast a shadow on a budding house wall or roof. And that's the way it's written right now. So we're kind of just looking to think that that is gonna deny a lot of good projects because it's gonna create a small amount of shade in December onto the house. It doesn't account for trees. It doesn't account for other factors. So, you know, there could be a row of giant trees, but that wouldn't impact the way the analysis works. So that's a little of what we're thinking is this may not have the impact that we thought it may deter good housing projects from moving forward. So, Mike, it sounds like you don't know, like you don't have exact language for how, like a suggestion for what we will do with this point. Like it sounds like you have just a few options of things. Yeah, this just came up. So we'll, because it's gonna be going to public hearing, you know, if you guys have a sense of, you know, the shading rules that exist, you know, we can, you know, we probably shouldn't be reviewing that if people have a sense of, you know, I think protecting solar panels is the best. We'll write up the draft in that way, knowing that you guys will have every right to go in and make changes. The other thing you guys could say is, save this for the next time we're doing a review, which might be another six months down the line. We've been averaging about two a year for zoning amendments. We can certainly push it out. If we delay it, it could get in the way of projects between now and then. This is the first time it's come up since 2018 when the rules were adopted. So it's the first one in three years, but that's not to say that it may not come up for some other projects. We know we've got projects on Northfield Street that are being proposed, so it could come up. It hasn't, it could. For any new construction that's not single family, they have to meet this requirement. Sometimes usually it's not an issue because they're not multi-story. Where it starts to become an issue is when you get a two-story or a three-story building, then you start casting a longer shadow and you have the potential impact that that shadow may touch another property. Okay, do any of the planning commissioners have thoughts about what they'd like to see or when this comes up at hearing or whether you think we should make sure that it's included when we discuss it at the hearing? So that's what I'm thinking about, like some things we could hammer out, either we can include or not include it. Also if we do include it, like what kind of way of addressing it would you like to see? Would you like to see flexibility for the DRB? Would you like to see just not having a shadow, not trying to regulate these things or just sticking to solar panels? Like what are your thoughts? The existing panels makes a lot of sense. I think the simpler and cleaner we can make it, to avoid adding costs of analysis and then having room for potential debate or putting the DRB in a weird spot. I think they appreciate anything as clean cut as possible. And then we have other massing setback standards. So it's not like, I think we could avoid some undesirable development that be overly obtrusive on neighboring properties by other design means other than this. So I would be supportive of switching it to existing. Existing solar panels, that's it. Yeah, go ahead Mike. I was just gonna point out that, I know Gabe has kind of recused himself. Gabe didn't ask for these rules to be changed. There we go. So here's the rules for solar access and shading there, proposed shading. And this is kind of the catch here. Proposed development shall not shade existing yards, walls, roofs within an orientation of five degrees on this date and time. So it's pretty black and white, cut and dry, but Gabe didn't ask for this to change. He met the rule, went through, made his application. So this is just something staff looked at this rule and said, I don't know if policy wise, this is what the planning commission and city council was hoping for when this was passed. So, and I think these rules were, I guess, big picture, our consultant works around the state and they work on a lot of things from urban to rural. And sometimes we kind of get plunked in with some draft rules that get adopted that really fit okay if you lived in a more suburban style where you've got a little bit more room and the houses aren't as big. But once you start packing people in and getting 10 feet from the property line with a three story building suddenly, this isn't even that, this is farther than that, but there's a little bit of the solar sighting. Yeah, I liked what John had to say. I also like that even if we were tempted to try to just keep part of it, but try to soften it up and give discretion of ERB, then what we're really doing is putting them in a tight spot where they're having to possibly interpret ambiguous language. And I don't love that circumstance. Do we have any other thoughts? Yeah, I agree with John. I think that's the best way to move forward. Yeah, I agree too. Okay, this is just getting what our thoughts are for when the hearing comes up. But in case people wanted to investigate or look into something else about this, that's why I'm gonna bring it up just so that Mike has a chance to be prepared for what we're thinking. Yeah, and it helps me craft what I'm gonna basically say, which would be this point C would probably be emphasizing identifying and building out. So really you'd look to the North to go and see if you've got anyone with a solar panel. And that would be either hot water or PV. So if you have some kind of solar device, then we would be looking at minimizing or not impacting any solar collecting devices. Okay, so yeah, so you got an idea of what people... And there may be some people in the public who think otherwise and think, I like getting sun in my window and now it's gonna get some shade. And I think there's just a certain, I don't know, reality of, if we hear an outcry that shading windows is an issue, then we'll have to go back and kind of revisit how we would wanna regulate that if we wanna regulate that. Because right now this is saying, if the sun comes up and warms the side of your house, you're benefiting from a solar gain on your house. And if somebody builds next to you and you now have a shadow that creeps across throughout the day, you're gonna lose some solar gain. But we'll certainly have me act no and let them decide how much they wanna kind of give input on that. Okay, were there any other changes you wanted to make? The second one really quick, which shouldn't be a big deal is we have somebody who's looking at trying to build a dog park. And what we found is the way our definitions are written, we've got a strange way that our recreation, the discussion of recreation fields is really written such that it talks about it kind of as natural areas. So it really doesn't allow you to have things like fences and open, it talks about recreation trails and walking and those types of things. So we just wanted to go through and put in a revision that would kind of split things into two different classes. One is gonna be rec fields, which is really anything that could be those hiking trails, but it also could be have some amount of development like a fence, because they wanna have a dog park with a fence, but the minute you start adding other features, outdoor lights, benches, bleachers, those types of things, then you start being a rec facility, because we have two classes right now, but we don't have anything that kind of fits in between. So if you wanted to even have a soccer field, the soccer field would have to get approved as a facility, as a recreation facility. And it just seems like that's a little much because if it's just flat open field with some lines painted on the ground in a goal or two goals that's not really a recreation facility, that's more of a recreation field. And same thing if you wanna have a dog park, if you're just gonna put a fence around it and let dogs run around, that's really kind of a recreation field. If you wanna have a stadium, you wanna have a baseball, wanna have outdoor lights, you wanna have speakers, that's a recreation facility that needs much higher reviews. So that's what we're kind of looking at is to kind of split that. So what you were presented, the 10 you were presented, these two we would just be adding on as well. And again, I am now getting a lot done over the past week, now that I'm kind of done with a lot of extraneous things, conferences and presentations and the like, so. Okay, we're almost out of time. Does anyone have any questions about the change between recreation field and facility? Everyone feel good about adding these other two things to our other list for the hearing? Anyone against it? Not against. Okay, so I think that all sounds good. Does anybody else have anything on this before we move on? So can I just understand, just as the new guy here, so is there always a hearing? Is it like once a month we have a hearing or what is the schedule? It's about every six months, but it's not, there's no set schedule. It's just when Mike's accumulated enough feedback from the public to warrant us having a hearing on making zoning changes. Okay. This is a pretty long list too. I think maybe in the past from what I recall, there's usually five or six things we're looking at, but this time it's looking like what there's gonna be about 12 items. Part of that's my fault, I think I added one. So. Yes. A lot of the changes are small. There are a number of changes that are relatively small. There's a bunch of technical changes, but then there are a number of them that are zoning map changes and I'll get those. I made a note to send out that memo to you and Jeff, so that way you guys have it. Knowing that it's gonna get tweaked a little bit as I do the strikeout copy. So what I need to do on my end is get a strikeout copy, as I mentioned, a clean copy of that. And then I have to go and write a cover letter and then I have to mail it to everybody who's an impacted party. So I kind of have to make sure I've got enough time to get it posted in the paper, have a 15 day window to be able to get everything mailed out with a big mailing because there are a number of changes and some of the changes are big parcels. So there's a lot of a butters. So that's what's taking a bit of the time. It's just to try to make sure we get everything right. We got all of our I started and T's crossed. So when we do the strikeout copy and get it out, it's obvious to everybody as to what's going on. Yeah, and we'll probably go over this later, but so at hearings like this, when we're talking about zone making changes to the zoning based on public feedback, I mean, we have to be aware of there's some like legal issues to be aware of like spot zoning is not something that we're legally allowed to do. So we can't be changing the zoning just to accommodate one parcel or one person. So the idea always when we go to review these is, is this the policy we want for the city and in that context, like do we wanna make the changes because we want to adjust as a matter of city policy. It's not about accommodating a person or anything like that. Just that comes up, but I think it helps people frame like how we need to go into looking at it from what we're legally supposed to be doing. Okay, well, that's, looks like that's everything for tonight. Do we have a motion to adjourn? Is that, is it time for that mic or am I skipping something? No. Okay, yeah, if you've got a smile, maybe you just got excited. I got my pen. I'm ready. I know it's a who's making the motion. I'm ready to make the motion. Wait, did I talk over it? I think we'll give that one to Marcella again. You got it. I'll second the draw. Second by Aaron. Woo! Okay, those in favor of adjournment? Say aye. Aye. Aye. See you everyone in a couple of weeks. Welcome aboard, Gaben.