 Okay well it is 7 33 p.m on Tuesday October 24th 2023. Good evening my name is Christian Klein I am the chair of the Arlington Zoning Board of Appeals and I'm calling this meeting of the board to order. I'd like to confirm that all members and anticipated officials are present members of the zoning board of appeals Roger Dupont. Here. Patrick Hanlon. Here. Venkat Holi. Here. Danny Workadeli. Here. Elaine Hoffman. Here. And Adam LeBlanc. Here. Good to have you all with us. Here on behalf of the town we have Colleen Ralston our zoning assistant. Here. Good to have you with us and we also have Michael Cunningham who's the acting town council. Here. Good to have you with us as well and then going looking at the three hearings we have scheduled for this evening. Appearing for Docket 3764 to 12 Pleasant Street would be Nellie Aikenhead. Here. Good to have you with us. Docket 3770 4042 Dorothy Road which is a housing corporation of Arlington. So Erica Schwartz you with us. Here. Yes. Yes. Wonderful. And Docket 3771 281 Avista Road. Valerie Bruno and Matthew Stone. We are here. Wonderful. This open meeting of the Arlington zoning board of appeals is being conducted remotely consistent with an act making appropriations for the fiscal year 2023 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations and for certain other activities and projects signed into law on March 29th 2023. This act includes an extension until March 31st 2025 of the exact remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law which suspended the requirement to hold all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Public bodies may continue holding meetings remotely without a quorum of the public body physically present at a meeting location so long as they provide adequate alternative access to remote meetings. Public bodies may meet remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. An opportunity for public participation will be provided during the public comment period during each public hearing. For this meeting the Arlington zoning board of appeals has convened a video conference via the zoom application with online and telephone access as listed on the agenda posted to the town's website identifying how the public may join. This meeting is being recorded and it will be broadcast by ACMI. Please be aware that attendees are participating by a variety of means some attendees are participating by video conference others are participating by computer audio or by telephone. Accordingly please be aware that other folks may be able to see you your screen name or another identifier. Please take care to not share personal information. Anything you broadcast may be captured by the recording. We ask that you please maintain the quorum during the meeting including displaying an appropriate background. All supporting materials that have been provided members of this body are available on the town's website unless otherwise noted. The public is encouraged to follow along using the posted agenda as chair or reserve the right to take items out of order in the interest of promoting an orderly meeting. As the board will be taking up new business at this meeting as chair I make the following land acknowledgement. Whereas the zoning board of appeals of the town of Arlington, Massachusetts discusses and arbitrates the use of land in Arlington formally known as monotomy, malgonquin word meaning swift waters. The board hereby acknowledges that the town of Arlington is located on the ancestral lands of the Massachusetts tribe, the tribe of indigenous peoples from whom the colony province and Commonwealth have taken their names. We pay our respects to the ancestral bloodline of the Massachusetts tribe and their descendants who still inhabit historic Massachusetts territories today. This evening we will start with our administrative items. So item two on our agenda is the approval of the decision for five mystic lake drive which was docket 3761. This was a decision that was written by Mr. Hanlon distributed to the board for questions and comments and a final version posted back to the board this afternoon. Are there any further questions or comments in regards to the written decision for five mystic lake drive? Hearing none the chair will accept a motion to approve the written decision for five mystic lake drive. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. So moved. Thank you Mr. Hanlon a second. Second. Thank you Mr. DuPont. Does a vote of the members present at that hearing to approve the written decision for five mystic lake drive. Mr. DuPont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Holly. Aye. Ms. Hoffman. Aye. And the chair votes aye. That is approved. That takes us to item three in our agenda approval of the decision for 15 moccasin path. This is a decision. Excuse me that was I believe written by Mr. Holly and distributed to the board for questions and comments and final version released later this afternoon. Are there any further questions or comments in regards to the written decision for 15 moccasin path? Hearing none the chair will accept a motion to approve the written decision for 15 moccasin path. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. So moved. Thank you sir. Second. Second. Thank you DuPont. Roll call vote of the members who voted on that decision. Mr. DuPont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Holly. Aye. Mr. Rickardelli. Aye. The chair votes aye. That decision is approved brings us to item four on our agenda approval of the decision for 32 Appleton Street. This is the decision that I wrote distributed to the board for questions and comments. Final version posted this afternoon. Are there any further questions or comments in regards to the written decision for 32 Appleton Street? Seeing none the chair will accept a motion to approve the written decision for 32 Appleton Street. Mr. Chairman. So moved. Thank you Mr. Hanlon. Second. Second. Thank you Mr. DuPont. Roll call vote of those voting members on this hearing. Mr. DuPont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Holly. Aye. Ms. Hoffman. Aye. And the chair votes aye. That is approved that brings us to item five on our agenda the approval of the decision for 106 Mount Vernon Street. This is a case that was heard at our last hearing. I wrote the decision. I had passed a past town council for review as well. There was a one late comment from Mr. DuPont which I corrected and asked Ms. Ralston to include in the final version which I forwarded to her later this afternoon. Are there any further questions or comments in regards to the written decision for 106 Mount Vernon? Mr. Chairman. Yes sir. I was not present at the time that the hearing was to place and have avoided taking any part in the consideration or decision of this so I wanted the record to indicate that I will abstain on this vote. Thank you very much for reminding me of that. Okay then with that you know other comment on the decision I will accept a motion to approve the written decision for 106 Mount Vernon Street. Mr. Chairman. So moved. Thank you. Is that Mr. Riccadale? Thank you. Yes. So a vote of the members present at that hearing. Mr. DuPont. Aye. Mr. Holley. Aye. Mr. Riccadale. Aye. Ms. Hoffman. Aye. And Mr. LeBlanc. Aye. The chair votes aye. That decision is approved. That brings us to the written decision for 77 Tanager Street. This was a hearing heard at our last meeting. Decision was written by Mr. Riccadale distributed to the board for questions and comments. Final version posted to the board this afternoon. Are there any further written any further questions or comments in regards to the written decision for 77 Tanager Street. Seeing none the chair will accept a motion to approve the written decision for 77 Tanager Street. Mr. Chairman. So moved. Thank you. Mr. Hanlon. A second. Second. Thank you. Mr. DuPont. Roll call vote of those voting on the decision. Mr. DuPont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Holley. Aye. Mr. Riccadale. Aye. And the chair votes aye. That is approved. Okay. That brings us to the end of the administrative items section of our hearing. This brings us up to the start of the public hearings. Before opening tonight's public hearings here's some ground rules for effective and clear conduct of tonight's business. After I announce each agenda item I will ask the applicants to introduce themselves for themselves and make their presentation to the board. I will then request that the members of the board ask what questions they have on the proposal. After the board's questions have been answered I will open the meeting for public comment. And at the conclusion of public comment the board will deliberate and vote on the matter. Any vote taken at this hearing will be preliminary until the written decision is approved by the board as a subsequent meeting. All votes will be conducted by roll call vote. So with that the next item on our agenda is docket number 3764 to 12 Pleasant Street. It's a continuance of a prior hearing and I would ask the applicant Ms. Aikenhead to introduce herself and bring us up to speed on where we are. Okay. Hi I'm Mellie Aikenhead. I'm one of the applicants Mark Halliday is also here. There's a few things that have been going on. One is to establish the average friend is grade and another is to answer some of the abutters request for information. I can also restate our request but maybe you already know that we should maybe do the finish grade first I was thinking. Sure let's go ahead and rest that. I can bring up the plan. Oh yeah I can also share my screen if you want. That would be great. Colleen do you mind giving Ms. Aikenhead that permission? Yep you should be all set now. I should be okay. Yep should be able to share screen. Can you see it or no? Not yet. There we go yes. Okay good. So basically I thought that I know the most probably important critical question is the question about the average rate I thought I could address that first and then as the board sees fit I can reply to the questions and accusations from the abutters and their attorneys. They have implied that we haven't been transparent or provided any details but in fact about 90% of their concerns have already been publicly vetted and approved by town boards including the CONSCOM the historic district commission and as part of those processes the engineering department and the tree ward. Let's start in with the average finished grade. On August 28th as I'm sure you all know the ISD issued a memo stating that our average finished grade was 12.71 feet and therefore with the basement ceiling height of 19 feet our basement met the definition of a story. We have since then had several conversations with ISD and subsequently had our surveyor correct and add information to our survey including the following. One, the elevation measurements now reflect the town's standard methodology for a sloped lot which means that the measurements are taken at a point six feet away from the dwelling rather than on the corner of the buildings. Two, the rear elevations which are shown here are now based on the height of a future retaining law at the back of the house. The location type and size of the law was included in our notice of intent application to the conservation commission which was approved in June 2022. The formal order of conditions were recorded with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on July 21st. We proposed a wall on the eight foot contour line two to three feet approximately two to three feet high which brings the elevation up to about 11.2 I think. Three, we clarified that the bump out at the back of the house was a deck not finished space so the six foot of the house measurement is around here rather than six foot off the deck which is 14 feet off the house when ISD calculated a 12.71 foot average finish grade they were measuring six feet off the deck or 14 feet off the house because this is a real steep area it had a big impact on the calculation. And finally we have all measurements are now based on proposed rather than existing elevations. The average grade is calculated at 14.64 feet with the basement ceiling height of 19 feet the differential is 4.34 feet which is less than four and a half feet so therefore it's not a story. The butters have the butters have implied that these are my numbers but they are not these calculations were made by a licensed surveyor based on in the field instrument data collection which was used to create a signed certified recordable survey. We have nothing to do with the numbers other than the fine-tuning the methodology that the building department preferred to use. I can go on to other things that they questioned or maybe we want to have a discussion about this first. Why don't you go ahead and continue. Okay so they've they've questioned a bunch of stuff including parking drainage, GFA, steps to the pond, scale and mass, etc. The butters have stated that the existing parking is unsafe and insufficient and at the same time they are objecting to our proposed improvements. We can and have parked two cars in the existing paved area and we can and have been able to turn around at the end of our driveway and drive out facing forward. It does take a bit of maneuvering which is why we are proposing and have had approved an increase in the existing 20 by 24 impervious parking area to a slightly larger 22 by 29 parking area. This proposal is part of the notice of intent which was submitted to the conservation commission in May 2022 and we had two public meetings many of butters were there and it was approved by the conservation commission in June 2022. The butters have also claimed that we haven't provided any details on water flow and drainage. The opposite of true is true. Here are the details on our proposed parking area. We're proposing gravel with a 40% void that will be able to collect water. We have a true grid permeable paver system at the top with smaller stone. This is a profile of what the system will look like and the water capture of the area 22 by 29 by 6 inches deep which is 319 cubic feet will be approximately 958 gallons of water. Not only do we propose this to the conservation commission that their approval, they ran to find the town engineer Wayne Shenard who added a few more stipulations that had to do with soil types and depth of the stone base and he also signed off on this proposal. It's very detailed. It's not no information. Furthermore, the neighbors have questioned our calculations of the changes from pervious to impervious surfaces. Those calculations were reviewed and approved by the assistant town engineer Bill Copperthorne as part of our storm water management application that was filed with our special permit application in January 2023. So those have been addressed. Another question that the butters have raised is the so-called lack of details for the replacement of these cinder block steps going down to the pond. Again, this is part, this is taken from our notice of intent that was submitted to the conservation commission in May 2022 and approved in June 2022. We provided many details. These steps do not need code. They're unstable and they're diverting the water to the left side where it's eroding the soil and undermining our retaining wall. We have proposed to create 12 new steps for the seven inch risers located 20 foot distance with a seven foot drop from the parking area to the mostly flat low level of the path where the spacing will allow for equidistant one foot eight inch long treads to the back portion that's filled in with permeable bedding and gravel slightly compacted to form a foundation for the left part granted. This is not no details. It's particularly disingenuous of the butters to object to this because the owners of 216 Pleasant Street install these concrete steps on our property and the butters at 218 Pleasant Street subsequently clear cut this land which is our property. They didn't have our permission. They didn't inform us and they didn't tell the conservation commission that they were doing this work in a hundred foot setback. And now when we want to fix it by creating this we're getting a lot of grief. I think the last big question that the butters raised in their last letter was the gross floor area. The neighbors are questioning our figures in the application because they include the basement. They referred to this definition in section two of the zoning bylaw which is a very short definition of what GFA means. They neglected to consider the larger definition in section 5.3.22 which specifically states that the basement areas except as excluded to below which is the systems area are included in GFA. So we included it in our figures as is required by this definition. I guess one last thing is that they via butters this is specifically the Barber House chart of lot coverage saying that our lot coverage is higher by twice as much as the other three lots around us. They cherry pick the data showing only three supersized overlots oversized lots with 21,000 square feet 16,700 square feet and 19,000 square feet of land compared to ours at 6,800 square feet of land. So of course we have the most lot coverage. The Barber House where our closest butters do not include their own property. We need more fairly when looking at this data for the Historic District Commission look at every single property from route two to the 206 deposit which is the last house on spy pond and the results were very different. I don't have I thought that an architectural services might write a memo. They said they would on the average finished grade. I don't have that but I have this little sticking out from Dave saying okay as long as conservation said okay to the routine law. Yep. Great. Thank you for that. So the board did receive after the end of closing today a memo from Inspectional Services. Okay. So if I can go ahead I'm going to grab the sharing here. And I hope you see the memo dock at 3764 212 Pleasant Street. That's a single family dwelling on spy pond R1, applicant seeking special permit for two-story addition 942 square feet. The applicant applied to conservation commission due to the proximity based on the application to the conservation approval minutes from 616-22. The current renderings of the property by the architect include retaining wall. The basement will no longer be considered a story once the application conditions are met. Inspector Geldart reviewed the site plan with the proposed retaining wall and if the wall is built according to the plan approved by conservation the basement will not qualify as a story and the historic district commission has also extended the approval for the project excuse me until January 27th 2024. That's the information that was provided by Inspectional Services. Okay. So the application that was before the board and if the initial application it is a special permit for a large addition because the addition that is and a large addition only includes area gross filler area that is outside of the existing foundation for the structure. So in this case it is that front or referred to as the front right corner which is approximately 942 square feet. And there was some question about whether or not the basement would be included in that calculation. So I did want to go back to that section of the bylaw which I'll 22. There we are. This is the bylaw the following areas of buildings are to be included in the calculation across floor area. Obviously we have no elevator shafts. There's no stairwell in this part of the building the attic area. This is it. This does not have an attic in this area. Interior mezzanines are no interior mezzanines. There's no penthouses. So basement areas are included except as excluded if they're exclusively for mechanical uses accessory to the operation of the building. Sellers are included and the difference is a basement is just that more than 50% of it is exposed and then the seller is less than 50% is exposed above grade. Portions are included and garages except as included in the one below. So for this application although the so the lower the lowest floor is not considered a story. So the building this does not rise above two and a half floors. But according to the plans that portion of the the building on the lowest level is identified. Let me go ahead and change the sharing on this. So this is that lowest floor. It's identified an indoor outdoor room on a new concrete slab. So obviously it is not a utility room. And then above it is living room entry mudroom space and on top would be a bedroom. So the full portion of that would be included in the gross floor area. So the intended addition and gross floor area still exceeds 750 square feet. So the the the need for a special permit for a large addition remains. And so because of that the board in addition to the regular findings that the board would be required to make for a special permit the board would also need to find that the alteration or addition is in harmony with other structures and uses in the vicinity. We would need to consider the dimensions and setbacks in relation to abutting structures and uses. And we would need to consider conformity with the purposes of the bylaw. Those are the the additional findings that are required under the zoning bylaw for a large addition. With that are there any additional questions from the board? Mr. Chair. Mr. Rickidelli. Can I just ask one question in relation to the square footage? So I think the applicant mentioned 936 square feet was added to the building. But the addition on the on the data spreadsheet is 1600 square feet. So if the applicant could just clarify what the difference is between those numbers. Okay, so I don't I don't have these spreadsheet right with me but there's a second story and then there's an addition and there are two separate things so maybe the total is 1600. I'm not exactly sure I'm not looking at my papers. One thing I didn't did what I mentioned was that I did ask for 936 square feet addition. But in fact I realized that the floor one and floor two have a cantilever that are about 40 feet bigger than the footprint. So in fact the if you count the 312 plus 352 and 352 it's about just over 1000 square feet. Okay understood. So so there's about 1000 square feet of addition and then the rest is a new second floor that's on the existing footprint of the house. Correct and because some of it has a slanted ceiling it's not a full square second floor it's not the exact same size as the first floor. Okay thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you. Other members of the board with questions? Seeing none hearing none. We'll move on to public comment. So I will in a moment I'll open the meeting for public comment. Remind the public the public questions and comments are taken only as they relate to the matter at hand and should be directed to the board for the purpose of informing our decision. Members of the public will be granted time to ask questions and make comments. Members of the public who wish to speak should digitally raise their hand using the button on the reactions tab in the zoom application. Those calling it by phone can dial star nine to indicate you would like to speak. You'll be called upon by myself. You'll be asked to give your name and address. You'll be given time for your questions and comments. All questions are to be addressed through the chair. Please remember to speak clearly. Anyone wishing to address the board a second time during any particular hearing the chair will allow those wishing to speak for the first time to speak first and once all public questions and comments have been addressed then the public comment period will be closed. We will do our best to show documents as they are requested. So with that I will open the public comment period so if there are members of the public who wish to address the board please go ahead and use the raise hand feature. The first hand I see raised is John Garber if you could give your name and address for the record and provide us with your comment. Yes of course thanks so much to the to the chair and the ZBA so I'm John Garber. I'm here with my wife Sabrina. We live at 214 Pleasant Street and we have our kids Althea and Miles they're six years old. I think we're probably the closest of butters are the house at 212 is about nine feet from our property line. So you know we've submitted you know some some comments and questions in writing and I won't I'll try to keep this really brief just because it's a you know it's been it's been a long process here. I think just for our own mental health I just wanted to state that it's been just extremely frustrating just how hard it's been to get you know basic information during during this process you know I think we've had a number of questions and you know the applicant does point out that we've had some requests for information and this has been really going on since last February and even before that and you know it's been just a ton of effort to get clear answers. It took you know essentially eight months to get a plan that actually shows the location of that new retaining wall and the extent of the filling that's going to be required to regrade that the rear yard. You know this is really the first that we've seen of this major major aspect of this project on an actual plan. It's been almost a year and you know it's been really quite quite hidden and I think you know naturally it just makes us really nervous you know that we just don't yet still have a complete picture. You know I think we're we're nervous that we just don't know what we don't know and it's really tough for us to kind of really fully feel like we're able to assess the impact and it's just not clear exactly what's being done and it comes out in kind of drips and it's like pulling some times and you know I think that post-it note from the inspector was interesting that seems okay as long as it's built according to the conservation commission you know plans that were approved and I guess I'm just curious if anything among all of what was submitted and reviewed by the conservation commission actually shows a plot where that retaining wall is and I don't think there is because I think we've poured over those documents trying to understand exactly what's going to happen and I don't think that that's part of that that that package that's been approved so it's hard to see how that's going to happen. You know I think the the parking issue has come up and you know there is a plan to increase that parking area from a current area I think it's 480 square feet up to around 640 square feet so that's about by a third and you know it's a spot that you know we we think really does fit just just one car and I think our concern is that you know the plans still really lack detail about how this is how this change is going to be accomplished. You know I would say even on the the plot plans that say proposed plan it still just simply says parking existing and it may seem like a trivial issue but that parking area is bound on one side by our property line and on the other side by the property line of 218 Pleasant Street so I think it's just really important to us that we understand exactly how the space is going to be reconfigured and it's just missing on all of the plans that we've ever seen I think you know more importantly we do have concerns and I I don't want them to be dismissed about the safety of actually having two cars parked there I think you know with two cars parked there there really is just not enough room for either car to turn around and to make a safe you know forward facing exit and I think what actually happens is you know a driver needs to drive in reverse up up the shared driveway and then they need to use our driveway to turn around and I would say over the past six months or so you know we've seen a series of Airbnb guests who have been staying there and you know consistently this is what happens you know sometimes they'll ask my kids to like stop riding their bikes or to stop like chalk drawing on the driveway so they can use our driveway as a as a turnaround and so I just I couldn't disagree more like the applicant writes as part of the criteria for the special permit that the traffic patterns and you know won't be affected and impact to pedestrians won't be you know there will be no impact you know I I swear we I see this my kids see it we see this impact like like every day and I think having two cars there with the total inability to actually safely turn around and maneuver and make a forward exit is going to be a real something that's going to make us nervous so I think you know along we've kind of made this request that we see some detailed plans and I think it's reasonable to see plans that actually show how that parking area will be increased by 33 percent and sort of logistically how a car if there's two cars are what will safely turn around and you know I know that members of the ZBA have come down previously for like a site visit I I would definitely welcome you to come back and bring your car and just try to maneuver in and out safely and then try to imagine it with like a second car park there it's it's it's really tough you know I I think in terms of the you know the difficulty getting information and I think returning back to I think the more fundamental point here of is what's being proposed in harmony and end in scale with the neighborhood and with this proximity to the pond you know it's it was by like a lot of effort that mostly like Sabrina figured out you know ambushing the town inspector and try to really understand like how you measure these things like average finish grade and what defines the story and it was only by a like a lot of effort that we figured out you know that the existing house is actually like a two-story house and so it's two stories and and the project is proposing to build up and build another story on top and you know the the end result is a two-story house and I think like intuitively there's just something really unsettling about that there's just it's like on a gut level I just you know I it's hard for me to kind of understand that and I realize it's literally by like moving the earth behind the house like increasing the elevation of the earth like about three feet or more that this plan is going to basically enable a three-story house to be built you know 60 65 feet away from the water's edge and 20 feet from our our house and I think that's why like all of the butters you know it's very close to be you know the whole house is very close to each other and I think that's why it's elicited such a strong you know such a strong kind of unanimous reaction because I think just on a gut level we realize this house is just so massive and like out of scale with with with this neighborhood and with with the nature of being this close to the to the water um I just have like two other two more comments and I'll wrap this up I I think we've all seen these plans like since the original submission back in February and like there's been some additions to it there's been some clarifications like the plans haven't changed like one inch and I think for us it's just been this really apparent kind of lack of willingness to like listen and hear the neighbors concerns and to try to find some sort of even sort of you know minimal sort of compromise here you know I think when we saw that this was coming back um you know back to the ZBA for discussion we you know we we we thought for sure the plans must be changed in some way we could you know maybe re-initiate a dialogue and and see if there's some common ground we could find and you know we reached out to to Nellie and to the applicant and you know the response we got was you know happy to meet anytime but to be clear our plans are not changing and you know I think that this is just such a departure from the way additions were done at you know 206 to 10 to 14 I think in all of those cases there was like input from the surrounding neighbors that was sought out and and the additions really met with their approval and and had the support of the neighbors I think in this case it's really just a very different different situation um and the final comment I just want to make is that you know I just I wanted to stress that like we're definitely not opposed to construction we are not opposed to change we um we're opposed to this project like in its current form you know we've you know I mentioned we've had twins they're six years old we moved in literally um three weeks before they were born they've grown up in the house they've grown up you know next to the water wildlife they love like the garden outdoors sunlight air all of the natural beauty of like being right here next to the pond and being in this part of Arlington and I think when we like think about how our actions you know affect our neighbors and we think about like the benefits and the obligations of being part of a community you know I think the question of what can be done you know whether it's like by right or a special permit you know for us that would never outweigh the consideration of what should be done because it's the right thing to do as like a neighbor and as a citizen of the town so I I think you'll hear from other like neighbors tonight I you know we all love our homes we love our neighborhood but we're not we're not opposed to construction we're not opposed to doing like much needed renovations to like this cottage that needs some some love but we're opposed to the project in its current form just given the scale and that like disharmony and the impact to the neighborhood um and that's that's really I think our main our main issue I mean so you know I think and that's all I think we you know we wanted to thank you for listening and being very thoughtful throughout this has been a really long process but we really appreciate the chance to be heard we hope that the board could use some of what's in its power to you know really encourage an outcome that would be fair to the the applicant and fair to the neighbors and good for the the neighborhood and the town and and that that's early it so thanks great thank you very much um the next on the list um is uh show Isaac hi um apart from my voice I caught a very bad cold so uh the document we saw today is actually the first part I just need to ask you to repeat your name and address for the record oh okay um hi this is show Isaac um I'm a 218 Pleasant Street Allington um with my husband Ibrahim Isaac um and uh sorry for my voice I just caught a very bad cold also so the document we saw today is actually the first time I saw in this long discussion over a year I think um we've been asking to want you to provide more information and I even formed a meeting with all the neighbor together and I asked her can you provide more detail to us and she said everything was online and I said I didn't see any engineer plan or any other plans can you provide more or can you email me um sadly I didn't got anything until today I I mean everything I can see is always on ZBA meeting and so all the discussion or all the question or answer have to find out in this discussion on the ZBA meeting as well that's a little bit disappointing and frustrating um so a few things I would like to address first of all parking the picture that 212 showed on the right side of the red arrow she point it's actually belongs to 218 that's our property and then we find a surveyor that put a nail on it so the whole parking space not belongs to 212 there's a partial belongs to 218 so yes they can park two cars but they have really big trouble to turn around um like John just mentioned there and maybe a guest and even their tenant has allowed trouble to don't say turn around just park one car one SUV over there we have a lot of their guests like tenant has to use our shared driveway or even our own driveway there's one instant that their MB big guest has to park in my entrance of my driveway in a blockade for minutes and I cannot get out and I have to just wait there and that's not okay so um another thing is let's not answer it about 10 feet set back of right side staircase tour to 218 property they're gonna build a staircase tour tour I mean tour to our property but on the plant or application let's admit before the number was changed a lot sometimes it says 13 feet sometimes that's nine feet so today that this question is not get answered another thing is to want to express that 218 was claimed to lay a property without communicating with them on that picture there's an orange flag pole over there on the right side actually belongs to us all we do we didn't claim that thing all we do we just take out the fence that was marked wrong by previous owner and also I wish they did mention that they also come to our property to turn out true without communicating with us that actually I almost call a cop for that so I don't understand that why I try to form more multiple meetings and I get more details or plans from 212 but I never get it and I only can get in ZBM meeting it's forced trading and it's sadly and all my concern was not addressed as well so I don't know what else I can you know say or trying to push forward to be more nice neighbor to 212 that's all thank you thank you very much next on the list is rebecca gruber good evening thank you for letting me um speak on this matter rebecca gruber 215 pleasant street so I live directly across the street from where all of this will be happening um pleasant streets a busy street so a lot is always going on in pleasant street um and again has this been reiterated I don't think anyone's opposed to the changes although um the process of construction etc will be burdensome on everyone I'm now concerned though about this issue of the second car um there is almost no parking on pleasant street in fact the parking that's available starts right outside my driveway and there are often cars parked across the street um because there's tree work happening somebody's getting a driveway paved somebody has guests um if this second car um doesn't fit well down at um the 212 property and is going to end up being parked in the very few spaces available on pleasant street on an ongoing basis this will be a huge problem um technically I do not believe you're allowed to park there all day but the police don't have the time to come check that and certainly we don't want to be bothering them with that so it's very important that there be appropriate parking on people's um private areas and not have constant parking on the few spots available on pleasant street for all of the neighbors to use thank you thank you um then next on our list is miss Aikenhead but I do you want to speak now or do you want to I was going to have you come back once we're I've heard more comment I can wait I can wait okay great thank you um then the next on the list is Chiayun Sun thank you so my name is Chiayun Jessica Sun I live in 216 Pleasant Street uh with my husband Matt Dawson and unfortunately he can't join us on the call today um so I will I have three main things I want to address and some of this might be a repeat of what's been talked about and I'll try to be brief because we've heard some of them already and I think the first one is really the communication piece that other two of others had talked about although Nellie and Mark are open to have conversations but I often felt kind of dismissed and found that they are not really open to receive our feedback or address some of the concern that we posed back in March this year we've all had our letters and lists of concerns and again like this is really nothing personal against Nellie and Mark I I do want to kind of respond to a couple of points that was talked about I think Nellie mentioned the bar graph and I'm sorry I'm not very good at the technicality but the bar graph of the percentage of the footprint of the house to the land and I want to just point out that the the different houses that were shown was specifically lakefront like kind of immediate butters and in our neighborhood but we think like the lakefront property were kind of important to talk about and then the other minor point is I think one of the plan that was showed is similar to what was presented to the conservation committee in 2022 but one of the pictures that was in that was very recent I think that was shown with 218s kind of taking away some of the invasive species I think those pictures were pretty recent so I was just curious are there more submissions like are there updated submissions we should be aware of and I would really share like what John at 214 had mentioned like it's pretty unsettling for us because it's really like the minor technicality of what counts as a floor so it's a finished average grade whether that now does not count as a floor I think that that really does feel pretty unsettling and I think the second point I to talk about again it might be repeat with what some of the concern that's mentioned but this has specific impact to our house to 16 plaza industry because we do have deeded easement that goes to the lake and that easement would go by I think Nally's property before shows property so it's kind of two different properties but we have a six feet wide easement and we're pretty concerned about how these new proposed plan will impact that because I might just want to point out in the updated plot survey that was uploaded last week still does not show the sides back sidesteps that was in I believe in the the plotted plan but it was not shown when like in the survey where because in the survey there is our easement but we don't know how far the addition might go into our easement so that's something we've been requesting we really like to see so that's about steps and another one is really the parking plan that you've heard many times I don't because it's not shown on the survey so we don't quite know how the 480 square feet current plan is indicated and also like what would the more importantly what would is the proposed plan that's still something unclear to us and we just really want to avoid getting into any kind of issues in the future so I would really like to see that and that's again tied to the deeded easement and I think finally it's really about the history and the characters of the neighborhood so we live into 16 Pleasant Street and I think next year it will be our house will be 170 years old and if you think of our cul-de-sac I believe our house is the first one that was built I feel proud and also a lot of responsibility some of you know like an old house comes with a lot of work and we're incredibly cognizant of the responsibility I do feel like I want to maintain the character of our house and also the neighborhood and I think the proposed plan I don't want to repeat everything we stated in our letter it's on the docket we really believe the proposed plan is completely out of proportion even though it's stated as a three bedroom home if you look at the details I think there's enough of an alcove it's really a four bedroom house and like as some of the a butter has said yeah we can't disagree more and really think this will negatively impact the health our mental health the morale character history and integrity of this neighborhood and that preserving that is extremely important to us so thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak absolutely thank you so much next on our list is Steve Moore well yes thank you Mr. Chair Steve Moore Piedmont Street I must say I am impressed by the strength of feeling that the speakers are all talking and it's fairly important to folks I am not in the butter I'd like to ask through you Mr. Chair of the applicant she had chosen pictures of the concrete center block steps that are going to be replaced by a moral landscape set of steps that had erosion on one side of the picture and also a picture was shown of some cleared area which she claimed had been cleared without approval since it was for land I'd like to know a little more about that did that occur I mean we just heard from the last speaker that they have an easement now an easement doesn't allow folks to modify the land that they have an easement over but it does allow them to to pass on it and I'm wondering just the owner feel that they performed something illegal when they did what they did and for them well why did I guess I don't understand why even though it's an easement why they would feel that the the butters were allowed to put in stairs I don't I don't understand that is that was that it's my understanding clear of what I thought was presented thank you Mr. Moore I would ask because they can head so the concrete steps that were put in were those put in before or after you purchased the property okay so the concrete steps I believe were there before we bought the property I'm not 100% sure the clearing of the land next to that was after we bought the property just recently in sorry if you're facing the pond looking down the stairs was the area that was cleared to the right of that or to the left of that so the stair to the right of the stairs okay thank you so so honestly we didn't want to make a fuss about either thing but it's kind of we're in a tough spot because we're getting so much fuss about what we want to do to fix it which is really just to be nice to the neighbors because we don't need that ourselves for access we just thought we want to get rid of those concrete blocks and put in something better so that 216 which is the big house that has the easement can get to the pond so it's not something we have to do it's something that we thought would be nice to do the easement different easements have different terms 216 has an easement to pass and repass on foot to go to the pond they don't have an easement to build steps they don't have an easement to store boats they don't have an easement to make any improvements but they have the right to pass and repass we wanted to make it a little nicer for them there are other easements on this property including one that we have which is an easement to use the driveway and the right of ways for all purposes that roads are include including laying conduit paving and repaving putting in gas lines putting an electricity our easement that we have to get from our house to pleasantries is very different than the easement that 216 has to get to the pond okay thank you for that your question that is my question and so the steps that are going to be installed by the applicant as shown in the share screen right now is for the use of both the applicant and the neighbors you availing themselves of the easement correct i don't think we really will need them because we have direct pond access but we could use them okay thank you and lastly i also heard airbnb get mentioned a number of times and i don't know if that was in relation to the applicant's property or one of the other neighbors this is going to be an owner occupied property correct okay so here's there's two different airbnb's going on on our property we had an air we had it was empty for six months while we were going through this process it cost us that cost us 15 000 so we put it on airbnb we had it rented for a couple months we now have longer term tenants in there our intent was to move down there this has been a very contentious and unpleasant process for us so i don't know if we will actually move down there we might end up doing something else shallown abraham and the blue house next door to us have two airbnb's in their own house that have nothing to do with us okay all right that that clears it up for me this is certainly a complicated case mr chair thank you thank you mr more mr chairman uh yes mr handlin um so when the chair opened the public comment period he included a direction to try to address the issues that make the this that give the board the information that it needs to have in order to decide the case and at least from my point of view disputes back and forth about the easement and what the easement covers and whether anyone has intruded on the easement those are legal things we always kind of assume that for our purposes that that the private legal issues have been addressed and i am not sure that there is anything that was said although it was very heartfelt and obviously people are have had experiences which are not particularly pleasant for them um they're not helping me uh and that we've gone pretty long already um and what we need to understand better is what we is what uh how all of this fits into the statute that we're trying to enforce um and i'd just like to encourage the people who continue to talk to us to to focus on that uh i have been impressed by the willingness of some of the neighbors who have each said that they would be prepared to do some sort of compromise uh they at least talk about something that would be a modification that would be a useful thing uh to at least further discuss but beyond that we need to understand what it is that that is going on here that will affect um and how it will affect the uh the the criteria that we have to apply and i'd just like to encourage people to focus on that issue because that's the issue that that's the discussion that would be most helpful to the board thank you mr hamlin um so next on the speaker's list um is uh tomorrow joseph thank you um thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak here i think i'm the last of the abutters um i'm in 210 pleasant street so on the lake right next to 212 um that the current home is uh 10 feet from the property line and there are 22 feet that separate the two homes um my husband and i and our son moved here in june 2008 so 15 plus years uh enjoying the pond my son was five at the time he's grown up and gone to college now um we have watched additions be built at 206 and 208 over the past 15 years um the experience there was different it was a much more um collegial and interactive process um we are very concerned about the proposed bill like like others here we are not against this property being developed being improved but what is being proposed we believe will um negatively impact the enjoyment of our home and the neighborhood in general but this is a unique neighborhood with historic importance where the homes are extremely close together the plans for 212 if approved by the zba would negatively impact our views privacy and noise levels both inside and outside the home we are also worried that it might impact the foundation of the home given the close proximity of the homes either through change drainage replacement of this retaining wall the details of which we are just learning or the greater weight of this new structure i've submitted a letter which notes how the proposed plans are inconsistent with arlington designed guidelines and bylaws problems posed by these plans appear to be precisely what animated the creation of those design guidelines so that arlington's older homes would not be replaced by new homes that were outsized and inharmonious with the surrounding neighborhood i have submitted photos taken from the lake showing the shoreline and of course the zba has also taken the time to see this area for itself and appreciate the impact that this proposed home would have on the harmony of this neighborhood finally i will mention the applicants have never sought to meet with my husband and i although we are the residents who have lived here the longest we are we are renters and not homeowners but i believe that we still have an interest here we are not going anywhere in long time here nevertheless we have continued to engage in this dialogue requesting additional information regarding drainage elevation window placement parking spaces landscaping and hardscape thing that information is still not complete despite the very long time that the application has been pending and the numerous submissions that have occurred we therefore urge the zba to reject this application for all of the reasons that have been cited and we thank everyone for your time and attention to this important matter thank you uh looking at the speaker's list um the only other hand is mr moore seeking a second time uh mr moore yes thank you mr chair second time around uh i i want to thank mr handle for his comment uh he he's right about redirection and refocus and i apologize for taking the conversation away from the decision thank you well thank you um are there any further members of the public who wish to address this hearing this evening and it's there was one or two other hands that were up before but were taken down so i just wanted to make sure that everyone's aware i do not see any additional hands um i do see a wave um this son did you wish to to speak no okay through the screen do not see anyone else okay with that then i will go ahead and close the public comment here portion of the hearing um so that brings us back to the board so again uh just to reiterate what we had at the start so this is a excuse me a request for a special permit for a large addition under section five four two be six um in addition to the regular um findings which the board needs to make which are in section three three three the board has three additional findings it needs to make it would need to find that the alteration or addition is in harmony with other structures and uses in the vicinity it would need to consider whether the dimensions and setbacks in relation to a budding structures and uses are appropriate and consider the conformity with the purposes of the bylaw so i think there's a there's a lot of uh the the butters and the neighbors and the other residents have have said this is a fairly unique situation in town because pretty obvious at one point there would have been one house with a lot of shore access and that has been subdivided into a number of smaller parcels all of which are very close together um and really very intertwined in terms of access to them um and sort of moving in and about the the district and then also in terms of access to the shoreline that there are easements that are in place to preserve um to preserve access and then these this situation is really fairly unique to this set of like four or five houses and then once you start moving um towards the center again they become the much longer larger lots um with one or two one or two buildings upon them so um there were several themes um mr chairman yes mr handlinch um i was kind of hoping that there'd be an opportunity for board discussion before we got into the summary of the case and uh i wondered if we could do that you've mr miss Aikenhead had previously deferred answering some things uh until the the commentary was all over and i at least have a few questions that i'd like to ask oh absolutely no i just want to reiterate what the board needs to do and then i was going to go right now to sort of pull out some of the things that were mentioned several times well that would be fine i'm i just wanted to make sure that we didn't rush pie oh absolutely absolutely um so there are a lot of concerns uh specifically about the the parking and how the parking would work um both in terms of how it would be accommodated on the site and how it could be navigated by by one or two vehicles um there were concerns about the preservation of the easement um and how that would be achieved uh there were a lot of concerns that sort of about the process how we got to this point various things about communication uh those sort of uh keeping everyone informed and things like that um that were brought forward um and then there were also um towards the end a couple of concerns regarding um sort of the appearance of the building in regards to its historic character the historic character of the neighborhood um and the the proximity of the houses and sort of how that proximity can cause issues in regards to um uh privacy and views and the like uh so i believe those were the the main things that were brought up and with that i would uh mr handlin i would ask you if you're so i wonder if if we we could put up the plan that shows where the parking is or will be or both uh cycle through my plans here um here's one so on this this is from the application that was submitted to the conservation commission um and currently this is the the portion here that's identified as existing parking is it possible to to increase the scale here so that we can see that focus in on that particular area sure um 100 exactly what is in your view but let me that better okay that helps so what i would like it's it it doesn't help nearly as much as one of the exhibits that one of the applicants put in which which made it bigger but you can sort of see where this is and i wonder if ms achinhead could show um how this fits in with the neighbors the the what where specifically any shared aspect of this parking is located and exactly where the extra as i understand it from the material submitted to the conservation commission the idea is to increase the width of this by two feet and i would like her to show us where uh where that would be essentially outline for us what the what the actual driveway will be look like after it has been enlarged um using this as a template so basically we don't have like a lot of leeway or play down here the the parking right now is fairly close to john and sabrina's next door what we wanted to do because it is very tight as they pointed out time and time again was in so far is its relatively level is just straighten this out a bit against our house and on the far side of everybody else's property just to make it a tad bit wider and a little bit easier to get in and out of we can right now part this the easement that the 216 has to get to the pond is here we can pull two cars in here already and be off excuse me ms achinhead when you say here at least i'm not seeing any oh yeah so this is a little arrow but i don't okay i think i have to share my screen to do it um that would be fine with that that'll be fine with me so let me go ahead and stop my sharing here okay all right go ahead now i have to zoom in did you see that is it big enough no okay so in the upper left there there's a zoom percentage two on the oh yeah okay do you like 200 yeah is that good a little more okay so this is can you see my arrow now yes okay so this is the existing parking area pretty much goes along the property line right here it's very tight it is difficult to maneuver though it's possible so what our idea was to just make it we can't go too far because the land drops off but to widen it out on this side which is away from the neighbors and to straighten it out a bit over here which is by our house to add some extra maneuverability this land this right here is the easement footpath that 216 has to pass a repass on foot we are already able to pull two cars in here and be out of their way but if we have a little bit more space it would be a little bit easier we do understand that the the easement is legally binding and we are not going to interfere with that in any way because of course we cannot okay thank you um mr chairman i we have the sort of disadvantage that the record in this case is just for this case and it doesn't include some of the other things we know from from the other case and i think that that i i just like to observe that that what we learned when we went to the walkthrough also included issues that i think are continue to be important in which i think everybody is assuming that uh we'll keep in mind one one of those has to do with uh constructability uh the it's a tight fit in there and it's a little difficult to get larger trucks through and i think that uh maybe mr reherdele or others remarked on that and certainly it is true that that one of the issues that is not being talked about a great deal but which matters i think a lot in the overall scheme of things is the effect that the building will have on the view particularly of mr garber's property but maybe the views of the lake uh with respect to some others and those are those are issues that are actually issues in the case um we haven't heard as much about them in in this hearing but we heard quite a lot about them in hearings on the previous application um and uh i if mr cunningham uh proves of this but i'd like to sort of incorporate by reference the material that were submitted in the other case and the testimony so that um we're not forced to try to figure out when we want to rely on something which which is the occasion on which we heard it mr cunningham is that an appropriate thing to do as long as uh thank mr chair please uh michael kind of acting town council i think mr hamlin's suggestion would certainly be helpful as long as those materials were at least at a later point made part of the record yes i think i'm only referring to the things that were actually part of the record in that earlier case and i think that's uh that would be helpful for the board i believe mr hamlin's suggestion is a good one and is permissible mr chair thank you so if i guess we may have to sort of make sure we have consent that we do that but i i do think that it's important to keep uh much of that in mind because you know we've talked a lot about the process and obviously people have proceeded in this case in a way in which has not certainly calmed everyone's nerves but when it comes down to it there are some specific things that uh are that pose difficulties here and uh and i i just mentioned uh some of them one of the things i'd like to also ask mosaic and head about um we've had a lot of back and forth about stories and and the magically disappearing story and of course that's not magically disappearing because of any magic that anyone of of any age manages to make real life stuff go away it has to do with the peculiarities of the way in which our law is written um and in some ways the impact the physical impact that this will have on visibility and on the neighborhood in general here um is likely to have to do with the actual height in feet rather than the height in stories and i wonder if mrs a ms a can head could uh uh could comment on that way how how tall is this compared to what the what it was required and and in view of its location with respect to the uh neighboring properties okay so our roof line is 26 uh feet i think one inch which is nine feet below the maximum 35 foot that's allowed by right significantly lower than it's allowed by right i it's probably roughly equal to jonah sabrina's property i don't know exactly because i haven't measured that the thing about the stories like the basement was considered a story that that number did magically appear and it didn't magically disappear you we can still we could have two and a half stories by right so we can still have a half story on the second floor and a half story isn't defined as half height it's defined as half of the square footage above the floor below being seven feet tall or low so in reality if the board concludes that it is a story in the basement which i don't think it is but that's okay we can still have two and a half stories i think the view to the neighbors isn't going to change because you just have to reconfigure the second floor a little bit to reduce the size of it's only 50 percent of the floor below at seven feet or higher so mr chairman the reason i raised this is is i'm not too concerned i mean it seems to me that that i've seen heard no reason to doubt the way in which uh inspectional services has treated the um has has treated the uh heightened stories i just think that heightened stories is a is not the right thing to be looking at when you're looking at neighbor at the actual impact on the neighborhood it's something that we would that would have been very important to us if that story hadn't disappeared we would have had a proposal to for a new non-conformity that would have made this a much different case but it isn't that um but it does involve a question of of of neighborhoods now one of the things i think that the board ought to remember is that the reason why it is that we have at least in my view the reason why it is the way we have a special provision for large additions is the possibility that by proceeding to do things that a homeowner has the right to do um it could be in a situation where everything is build out have an unfair and unreasonable impact on neighbors and so you're looking particularly at the uh at butters and what and what those impacts um on what did those impacts uh uh would be and they have an importance that even is more important i think than the than it has in a normal case because it is that it is figuring out the reasonableness of what people whether proposal is in unfair on fairly narrow scope that uh is that we're we're asked to look at we'll be asked to look at the general neighborhood in the community when we do 3.3.3 but the special things about the large addition have to do with the way in which uh buildings in close proximity may affect uh one another um and so it's it's i think important to both understand that the uh story that this is not that high but it is high enough to actually interfere with uh with you and i don't think that there's any dispute that some interference is likely to take place uh at least with respect to the garber property and perhaps with respect uh with respect to others um so i'm going to let it i'm going to stop monopolizing people's attention right now but i do think that it's important to focus in on the way in which this will fit into the neighborhood and the degree to which others in the neighborhood will be adversely affected by some of the things that miss Aikenhead would otherwise have had a right to do but she doesn't have a right to do it if she needs a special permit right thank you mr hamlin are there other members of the board who have comments or questions uh mr care miss hotman yeah i just want to pick up um the sort of last bit of what mr hamlin was saying specifically with regards to views um because it does seem clear that there's some impact to the views on the certain adjacent properties but uh i think there's kind of an active question in my mind about what degree of impact is reasonable and uh it's not as if there are clearly protected view rights here so i just i'm curious to hear from other members of the board at exactly um how to assess that impact great thank you um i'm just gonna stop the share here so i can see one of the screen are there other members of the board who wish to um mr chair mr gidelly i i do have a question um regarding the retaining walls um so i just want to make sure that i'm sort of understanding uh the the extent of the retaining walls i think uh if i could ask the applicant mr chair that there was a retaining wall shown on the original plan that kind of comes off the house and in the four plans of the basement it says to rebuild that retaining wall i think on the plot plan that we just looked at with the purple lines there's an additional retaining wall that's sort of in in the on the lake side of the house as well so are there two tiers of retaining walls and uh if you could just explain the sake and head uh what the construction i i think you showed a um section of what one of those was but if you could just explain uh what those two walls are i think it would be helpful for me in understanding the grading on the site sure i can do that if you want i can reshare my screen but basically right now the back of the house has a foundation that then turns into a retaining wall where the house ends so that will be new foundation and then that wall turns so if you're in the back of the house and you're going left towards the easement oh okay let me just yeah there we go oh so right now there this is the back of that except for christian maybe you can show them yes yes this is the existing retaining wall that correct and they're all linked together so but the back of the house where the addition is will turn into foundation yeah i don't know if we'll need that the extension to go out to where the wall turns but that wall that turns is the one that's being undermined by those cinder block steps mm-hmm there's a huge drop off we have to rebuild that because we have to have something there it's not a new wall it's going to be rebuilt the level might have to change a little bit but it will need to have to be to be redone so so mr chair if i if i may um so um that top foundation wall so a portion of that will now be the foundation of the house so i'm assuming a concrete or you know a structured wall there so and then the rest will be potentially a concrete wall as well or would also now be a block wall so okay so the wall but that's behind the house right now is concrete it's about five feet tall it goes from the proposed the place that says proposed to two-story addition over to the easement that's concrete already some of the replaced by foundation some of the will still be retaining wall then where it turns it will be probably concrete but it could be anything really the additional retaining wall that's two or three feet high is out at the edge where the purple lines are so that is new to bring up the grade so that there can be a patio back there which the conservation commission approved and so that we can have footings for the deck that's then that is a new wall but it's low and it's porous and we propose a gabion wall but it could be something similar to that okay okay that's that's very helpful i think that just understanding how those those two things are interacting was sort of confusing to me uh and and i think you know on one of the uh the four plans for the i think the basement of the proposed the extent of that wall looks different than the overall site plan um and i was wondering if that was being you know cut back or or uh reduced in order to get the parking in or if that is maybe just oh no that's way behind the house so show me yeah so uh the one that the chair just pulled up on the screen the extent of that wall just looks a little um a little different but maybe that's just because the addition comes out much further oh you're talking about to the right of the house or the back this leg here on the so i don't know for sure like there is a wall there it's not exactly that shape i think that's kind of a rough rendering as opposed to an accurate display because the wall in the survey has a little bit of a kink in it it's not straight there will be something pretty much like that pretty much out there it depends on how we're going to deal with the steps and the erosion and the the change in grade that's that's there the back wall that the back of the house that's going to stay the same we're not we can't go any further into the resource area than we already are so that wall will be in the exact same place okay thank thank you mr chair you're welcome um so is there sort of a final set of landscape plans that show the entire proposal including the revised parking area the location of all the retaining walls the location of the house the front steps and all that is there a prepared plan that includes all that information miss Aikenhead no there isn't i have a land management plan that shows the vegetation and the plantings in the back the patios and all but it's more of a rendering than the exact plan there's not a whole lot of play to move where the parking is as i said we're going to straighten it out it's going to be there we can't go any further because it drops off and we're not going down to the drop off but we haven't drawn it all out in a plan because like in this plan here you know the parking we know is somewhere in this area but it's not well defined um and we know that there's a landing and steps somewhere in this area that's similarly not well defined um right i mean you might if you go down to the architects plan you can see where that stuff is but right yeah i mean it's unfortunately there are several aspects of this and some of them that are seem to be fairly critical to to the the the plan itself and the functionality that are missing from the plan at this point right um and i just wanted to confirm that i wasn't looking in the wrong place no okay we can have things added i guess like in my mind everything's going to be on our property within like a foot of where it is now we're not going on the butters we're not going in the event we're not going against the conservation commission we're not going against the historic district commission but like moving earth around in this type of space it's really we could draw up a plan and have it be exact to the inch but it might in reality it's probably not going to turn out that way because it's very complicated to get to do it ahead of time as opposed to working with what's there as we build yeah now it's just it's hard to assess you know exactly where the built where the parking is is there sufficient space clear of the easement and trying to get an understanding of sort of how the vehicles would move i mean there's sufficient space clear of the easement now so when we make it bigger it's only going to be better we have we have had two cars down there many times in and out um and then this retaining wall the one that's the one that has the jogging it over by the easement that can't go any further than the easement because the easement is the easement and we can't interfere with that so we have like what a foot there to play around with maybe that's it we know we can't interfere with that easement we we know we can't do anything on anybody as his property we can i mean we could draw it all out but yes yeah i would like to just from from the point of view of of what happens suppose suppose this is approved it will be approved uh subject to um a condition that requires uh the plan that's executed to be consistent with uh or be the plan that is before the board and we're in a situation where um we have no one plan that shows that we have testimony that indicates where something may be but that's not the same thing that you can present to ISD and say okay this is what was on the proposed plan and at the very least i think we need to have something put together that is unambiguously what the proposed plan is that doesn't have to be all one piece of paper you could say there's a landscape plan and that counts too and you could conceivably incorporate by reference some part of plans that were before the conservation commission or pull them out but either way at the end of the day you have to have something that's unambiguous so that the inspector can decide whether or not what's being proposed is consistent with what was approved and that's difficult to do if you have to look at lots of different places and if you have to sort of imagine as we do with the parking exactly uh where that would go and i would say that that um it's true for miss akinhead's point of view that what they already have works for two cars but it isn't equally true from mr garber's point of view that it works for two cars and there's testimony that that the current situation has caused some inconvenience in the neighborhood as well and and we have to take all that into account so it is certainly would be helpful to understand the way in which the expansion of the parking space uh might alleviate the difficulty that mr garber and others have observed it would also be helpful i can't tell is the is the is this dashed line the easement what this is is akinhead is this the edge of the easement this dashed line around the plan you know you're on mute sorry okay so that dashed line is the easement that's the easement for the 216 to pass the repass on foot you can see if you go towards the pond our property jogs in by six feet yep that and then after that there's an easement for 216 to pass and repass but it's on uh 218 property okay and our we have an easement ourselves onto 218 property beyond our own property by six feet so see how there's that dotted line if you go to the corner of our property just to the right of 60.5 yes there we have six additional feet going into 218 land to drive pass and repass and park our cars so it's bigger than it seems that whole width is accessible for us to us for all purposes that all roads are used for right but you would not be able to you wouldn't be able to obviously wouldn't be able to park there or park in the easement but you have that you're saying you have that for maneuverable space in order to exactly and it's right now that the right now that so there's 12 but there's a 12 foot wide easement so some of that is on our land when you cross over it's on John Garber's land and so there's two that thing it says 12 foot wide waterway half of that is on 218 land half of that is on 214 land it's our right to pass and repass right now about eight feet of that is paved so there's an additional four feet that we have access to that is not currently paved okay so like we can maneuver with an eight foot thing we're fine with it but if the neighbors start making the fuss about how dangerous it is we can widen it out to our full 12 feet so that we cut the danger okay is is this portion of the plan here is this is an actual roadway correct this no that is also labeled right away which to me looks like it benefited our property at some point in time but we have not pursued that it's underneath their deck right now ah okay i see mr. turn mr. DuPont so i i have a couple of questions as well do we have a front view from the front going down to the lake or the pond i have a front elevator oh if you do then i will stop sharing i can share my screen i can put that up a lot of views but you might have to live this far enough away or did you want further back i was really looking to see what it looked like from the garber's property if there's a view so that uh yeah i can back up i have to get a different photo out this is like started right here is the edge of the garber's property this i think is the property line the blue line and this is the street going down because if i may mr. turnman when we visited um you i remember standing on the garber's deck and asking the question about what was proposed at the time where it was going to extend upward and you know how far to the side to the right as we were standing on the deck and i remember miss achon had uh saying you know what it was going to be the dimensions i don't recall what they were but i was trying to visualize it in terms of you know what the visual impact would be and as miss hoffman had alluded to there's no specific view easement in our bylaw so it sort of gets carried over into the questions i suppose about whether or not the structure is in harmony with the you know rest of the neighborhood etc but i guess my question is if miss achon had can recall what the dimensions were at the time that we visited what is the addition going upward on that right hand side going to look like in terms of how much higher it's going to go within the existing roof line um you know how much farther out it's going to go to the right as you're viewing it from the front um so that i'm really asking for comparison between what's being proposed now and what was being proposed then because i had an idea a very vague idea quite frankly of what it would look like if i was standing on the garber's deck right so in terms of going from this corner right here out to the right the addition is about five feet so most of the addition is an l behind the house right here the vast majority of the addition is behind that l so first level wouldn't be seen it goes out to about here there because their porch is kind of over here it's a tangential view i don't think they would see the first floor too much the second floor will be new and higher so that would be visible and and so there was a comment made mr chairman um about you know in the event and and by the way i think that the work that's been done uh with regard to what's a story and what's not a story has been is fairly definitive you know according to the calculations that have been made that have been revised that have been reviewed by the town so for purposes of discussion i think that it is not a story down there um however i know miss achon had made the reference to the fact that even if it were a story that she'd been be entitled to build a half story where uh she was proposing to build upward and that she'd have to keep it to you know under 50 of the floor below and it couldn't if only 50 could be seven feet or above so i'm just wondering if that was built rather than what you're proposing what would the difference be in terms of the square footage on that level do you know if if you understand my question yeah so so i think you had said that even if the basement was considered a story that you could still go up a house and and so you know because of the requirements for 50 and seven feet all of that i'm wondering because you you've got 930 square feet that you're talking about right for this as is proposed how much different would it be if that top level was just built as a half story based upon that calculation okay so if you know they're rough numbers but like right now the proposed first floor i believe is 1175 so let's just say it's 1200 right yeah 50 percent of that would be 600 that means 50 percent of this second floor could 600 square feet could be seven feet tall or height so the rest of it has to have enough of a slope so that it's under seven feet so so the other 600 has to be under seven feet right now because we have a cathedral ceiling dining room we have 999 feet so somehow we'd have to get rid of 399 feet which we could do by stepping it all back and doing for example a roof deck on the on the pond side right i was just trying to get my point is like like first of all well i want to get into this we haven't tried to compromise because we have but if we had to do that it wouldn't make one bit of difference to the neighbors in terms of height of the building views or anything else okay thank you and i did i think i pulled up i pulled up my historic district commission there's an interesting i have to just find it but i have a little indicator that shows how high how much higher our roof is going which is about 10 feet relative to the garbors if i can find it actually i know where he is he's the historic district commission it's pretty picky bunch they did analyze the scale and massing of this house really extensively okay you can i don't want to hold you up so you can do something else while i'm looking this is just an indicator from the street that's the garbors this is shawn abraham this is the 216 pleasant street our house is below this and we had to put a we put a pole up on the roof to show where the roof line was going to be and it's somewhere like just barely visible from these trees so it's lower than their house still but it's higher than it is now whatever you just described we do not see right now you can't see because i gotta find the right picture oh sorry mr. dupont did you have further questions uh no that was a thank you um mr chairman uh yes we i apologize for interjecting i was hoping to be acknowledged just very briefly my name's sarah radigan i'm the the attorney for john garber and sabrina how you are aware that we had a public comment period earlier this evening i do and i just wanted to interject briefly to ask if the board would like to see um either photo or video that um my clients do have that um that will show you at least things obviously the existing uh view from their property line um the you know uh the various board members um questions about the impact from their property have seemed to be important and i was going to ask that one if they were able to share the photographs or video that would be helpful um and two to request that if this board is going to request additional information from the petitioners that it would be very helpful to our clients to see um a view rendering not fancy doesn't have to be you know super fancy but something that would show um what the impact would be from the perspective of the neighboring lot um and this is really due to the fact that the the massing of that second floor structure is right you know nine feet from the front property line um so um contrary to what miss achonhead was suggesting which is a smaller second floor addition that could be stepped back would make no difference to to my clients um one that i i would entirely disagree um and that might be just the type of compromise that might be possible okay let me um thank you thank you so members of the board would you like to see those additional images mr chairman mr handlin i i think it would be it would be helpful one of the big issues in this case is going to be the impact this has on the neighboring properties which in part in large part is going to have to do with visibility and the one thing that we don't really have we plot plans won't tell you that and understanding a better than our memory of the walkthrough that we did last spring um it would be a little helpful in having that in our minds can i just say one thing i found the pictures i wanted to share with you okay if you could go ahead here on the screen the red line so currently we're seeing the image you had before which is the driveway with the red arrow and the blue line oh i don't want to chart a visibility that's not changed over okay well i'm seeing it but you can stop it stop this share stop it and then start a new one yeah so unshare this click on share screen okay oh yeah okay and then you should be able to pick something different um but uh i'd like to recognize mr cunningham you had your hand raised thank you mr chair i just wanted to note that although public comment period has closed uh the chair has broad discretion and to the extent that there is something that the board would like to see and the chair would have like would allow the board to see that that would be permitted but just a reminder that the public comment period has closed thank you mr cunningham okay can you see my screen now can you can yep okay good so see this little red line yep this is the future height of the roof the highest the absolute highest point the historic district commission asked us to do this for them so we went up we measured up the roof height we put a thing when we marked it so here we are this is our future roof line this is sabrian john's house and here's our future roof line and here is their house this is the highest point of the roof not the lowest point this is if you're looking from way up at the corner you can see that you're gonna slightly almost be able to see our top roof line and same here this is from the pond side it's gonna go up yeah that is helpful thank you um i could go ahead and have you stop sharing um and then miss radigan did you have the images that you were referenced i'm sorry i don't but john and subpoena i have just two very short clips i think maybe if they'd be helpful i could share my screen yeah so miss ralsson if you could give a junk garber the ability to share screen okay you should have permission now to share okay great um let's see here um this i think can can everyone see a like a video of a deck there yep okay this is a view from our um actually from inside our house uh in in from our from our living room essentially um and you can sort of see the doors back doors are open and um this is another video these are all very short there's three this is another uh video of just um from the the property line just showing the proximity and that's the the flag there is still i think we still see the same sorry um one second sorry about that uh i think this is a view from the sorry i'll restart there was a view from the property line you can see a stake there so there's nine feet then um i believe at the start of that video you could see more around the corner where the parking is correct okay yeah sorry but it doesn't turn any more to the right doesn't no no it doesn't okay and then i i think just to share just one final one equally short um this is just from you know inside our is this the right one's right okay yeah this is from inside our living room again just showing kind of what what the current existing is and what we would be looking at to add 10 feet on top of that yeah mr chairman mr hamlin if when you look at that last picture there's a chimney that's that sort of coming up and i imagine the 10 feet is a bit higher than that chimney i believe that chimney is the one that the pole with the red tag on it that musik and head showed earlier i think it's that chimney yeah so you get you you get a sense if you look if you sort of imagine that that something a little higher you get a sense of of what what you can't see what you can't see now and you wouldn't be able to see if the if the addition went up even even that that level that 10 feet level no okay i mean it's not 10 feet above the top of the roof because the ceiling upstairs is nine feet so it's 10 feet above the bottom of the roof yeah okay and my thanks to uh to mr garber for sharing those images um so going back to the board so it sounds like there's still some questions that the board has um at this stage that we need to try to resolve and i'm the per mr hamlin's uh comments earlier i'm not sure we have all the information in a format that we would need not only to to render a determination but also to then be able to verify that the terms of whatever decision is made are being followed um as the as if the project were approved and to move forward so um from what i've heard from the board at this time um that the the site plan really needs to be inclusive it needs to show where the proposed parking is really going to be um it should include the uh front entrance which is now going to be relocated to the left side but that with the the entry stairs for that um and confirmation on the just on the location of the the retaining walls just to make sure we have that understood um and were there other was there other information that the board was was seeking um i mean it would be helpful i think to understand the turning radiuses for the vehicles but i'm not entirely sure that that's the some sort of so that we have not requested in the past for a residential project at this scale um we've certainly done so for you know comprehensive permits but not for something of this small scale but i don't know if that's something that the board would find helpful for its deliberations mr german mr dupont so i i think something that at least gives us the information i'm not sure how formal it would have to be i think that you know if we have a clear delineation of where the parking is then i think that you can get a feel yourself i mean if other members feel they want something that's more scientific that's fine but i i'd like to go back to it's a part of this that's critical for me is you know if i'm looking at the view from the garbors deck which i believe is what the clips were that we were just viewing although from inside the house um even though there's no such thing as a view easement in in our bylaw so i think though it would be important from my understanding to see essentially what that view would look like if you were on the garbors deck or at least from the front so that we could get a sense as to where the roof is going to be extended if you're viewing it from the house because as mr handlin said you can see what you can see and can't see from the garbors deck where it currently as it's currently constructed but miss Aikenhead said and i want to make sure i understand this that the 10 feet is not from the top of the roof it's from the bottom or is that from the bottom of the shingles the bottom of the roof as you're looking at it from the front it would go up 10 feet from that point is that what we're saying yes approximately because the first floor height is established already and then there's a hip roof that goes up but the second hole is going to sit on top of the first floor and it has a flat roof so i believe the ceilings are 90 and you need some framing so it's probably 10 feet all right yeah oh okay so this is the current top of the first floor this door is in the same place yeah i see and this is essentially this yeah so this is essentially the hip roof probably goes to here right now roughly but i don't know who has control there but could somebody show me this other the pitched roof probably comes to about this yes i agree but where's the top of the existing roof right now so that would be the top of the existing roof would be about here yeah okay and so the new part the new part that's built in the front is going to be a couple of feet higher correct and then in the back is it is it true that then the total height if you're looking at the front as it exists now is going to be that 10 feet higher is that with that sort of the back the back part see yeah there you go the back part which is now on the right hand side yeah the highest part that's the 26 feet height versus the allowable 35 the front is a little bit stepped down i will say that we have met with the garbers once with their attorney and twice otherwise to say what can we do to make this better can we take a foot off the roof can we make some adjustments and their answer across the board has been do nothing we will support nothing you can build out your basement so if they want to propose something we are so happy to listen uh chairman Klein could you just on that picture that you have would you go back and show me where in the front you would just showed me where the roof line was existing um on the front of the yeah so if we're going to the side view then that would be approximately in this position got it okay so so the distance above that is not 10 feet no it's more 10 feet above this line here for the second floor right but i'm trying to figure visually from say the garbers property it's going to be not a full 10 feet above what exists now no not above what exists now all right that's right sorry sorry to interrupt but there's an elevation there's an elevation later on in this set that shows the existing oh ridge height of the roof from the first floor level so you can get a sense of that and i believe it's about eight feet difference okay to the point of the roof to the existing do you remember which sheet number that was uh should be page 20 on the pdf okay ah thank you yeah so i have that 12 foot three and a half from the first floor to the top of the ridge so if you you do the math for the at the high point of the roof is uh of the proposed is 20 foot 11 three quarters from the first floor height so difference of home you know eight feet and change but you have to double check and make sure this is from average grade because that 26 is from average grade and that looks like yeah it's it's uh 20 20 foot and 11 three quarters from first floor which is the same dimension that that 12 foot 11 and three quarters whatever is measured time well that said first floor but the 26 is from average grade which is lower yeah i'm just i'm talking about the 20 foot 11 three quarters is measured from first floor right but but the 26 is from average grade so it's not necessarily eight foot differential there is another diagram in here somewhere that yeah but it's it's visually it's a eight foot differential of what the existing roof height is to the proposed so it's just trying to answer mr. duPont's kind of thing of how much higher is this new roof than the existing thank you thank you other other questions or comments from the board all right so seeing none um chairman could i just one of the things that i'm sure this achonhead is noticing is that i mean we have been focusing on the impact uh on this this little neighborhood which does raise some special considerations and i at least i think we're all trying to be sensitive to what the impact uh is um this house is probably i think now the smallest of the houses of the group uh it is not going to turn into a McMansion uh it's not what the design guidelines were concerned about those are the five and six thousand square feet houses that are cropping up in in other parts of another parts of town but still this is a this is the environment it is which is all tight together and where a little bit of activity on one house affects the others i just want to emphasize that what we have not talked about is all the things that was talked about before the conservation commission uh there are a lot a lot of things that are in the public interest that are being done in connection with this this development in terms of the effect on spy pond in terms of the effect on erosion and and wildlife and and all of the kinds of things that the conservation commission is concerned with um this is like to make to make a big improvement and that improvement won't be just enjoyed by this property but everybody else who's enjoying this little bit this bit of the lake and i think we shouldn't forget that and which and in some ways that's what is making this case seem so difficult for me because there is a lot of good in it and it isn't just a nuisance to everybody and it isn't just it isn't like building a McMansion someplace where you'd rather not have it this is a situation in which uh there's a lot on the good side and in which nevertheless there is an impact i think on the surrounding neighborhood that we have to decide something about how reasonable that is and i must say i'm very disappointed that and i don't i do not want to listen to any other discussion about who it is who is willing to talk to whom when uh the fact is that nobody seems to have been willing to talk at the same time so there was never a conversation um i think that just in order to be able to put this in order so we have something that is structured that we can properly vote on it is going to take a little bit of time but i can certainly say that if both sides should decide that now is the time to talk and to talk seriously about making accommodations that could soften this degree of the that could soften the impact that the house is certainly going to have on on the neighborhood that it would certainly make our job a lot easier when we try to figure out what to do with it the way this is going there's going to be winners and losers and i don't really want anyone to be a winner and loser if necessarily if if it's possible to come up with something that if it's not perfect is still something that that is an appropriate compromise on both sides so there's a little bit of an opening left for serious conversation i don't want to actually if it doesn't happen we're going to do our job and we're going to do the balance that we can and i don't think anybody can can predict and predict what we'll do but i certainly can't and i can't predict what i will do so um there's so there's some room for trying to do a little private ordering rather than take your chances with well meaning but not perfect members of the public body like this one well thank you mr handlin um so if we could focus on what additional information the board would like to have before it renders this decision um we can pass that along to the applicants the applicant is aware um and then you know for your your you're very well taken um statement there is still you know a small opening to see if there's a way to come to some kind of an agreement that's a little bit more in keeping with everybody i understand we've certainly heard that um you know there have been there has been an effort to try to get some compromise um but it has not proceeded very well um and hopefully there's there is an opportunity in a way to make that work um because otherwise the as mr handlin said the board is just gonna have to to render a decision um i think we've talked about the site plan and what we would like to see better delineated on the site plan we want it to be more you know everything that's going to be on that site we want to see it so we know exactly where it's going um if there any changes to uh the plans so right now the like these elevations are out of sync with the my understanding is that these are out of sync now with where the um where the retaining wall is in terms of where the patio height is and things like that so we just want to make sure that that's all taken care of and cleaned up um so that the the drawings we're looking at are you know accurate that they're coordinated and accurate um i think it would also be helpful if we did have a plan if we'd had like on the the the proposed north elevation if it was dashed in sort of where the the outline of the existing house if we could do have a set of plans of that um should be very simple for the architect to do but it would give us a good you know a good visual of how to compare what we're seeing um before and after so we're so that's a little bit clearer delineate clear more clearly delineated for us um are there other things that the board would want to request mr chair mr rickadelli just to build off what you said you know i'm most concerned about just seeing a coordinated site plan with all the elements on it just so we know uh you know both the locations of the retaining walls that we talked about but also the extents of those walls um and uh i know miss akin that you mentioned that things with grading get difficult but um this is a projection for you because this is the plan that we can approve um but it's also um a check for the neighbors so that they know exactly what they're getting if uh if this were to be approved so i think that's critical and especially um the parking area and the dimensions of that parking area so we can evaluate you know the best we can whether that can accommodate the cars that it's supposed to mr chairman mr handlin um a few minutes ago there was a discussion that was talking about turning radiuses and so forth and i i'm not sure that that came to a conclusion again i'm not uh as is true of others i'm not particularly wedded to any particular way of doing that but having some visual way for us to make an independent judgment of of the very different views the applicant and some of the neighbors have on how functional the proposed parking will will be and uh whether or not you can actually use what you have there without backing up and then going into a neighbor's driveway um it would be useful just to be able to to see that so that we can make up our our minds because the applicant and the neighbors have a totally different view of the reality on that and uh we're going to have to choose what what we think is right and i don't at this point want to make that on based on credibility uh i'd like to to have at least some evidence that enables us to to form an independent judgment mr sir yes mr leblanc uh just to go off mr handlin's point i think um when we're talking about the parking if we could at least get you know a couple of outlines of what a car looks like in the proposed parking area i think that'll go a long way in helping us understand the maneuverability of a vehicle in the space um nothing fancy you know just a dashed outline of a typical vehicle size um i think would be helpful and go a long way thank you anything further from the board okay um but i am going to recommend that we continue this hearing um so we have a couple of dates coming up uh so november 14th it is effectively three weeks from now um and then we would also have that november 28th is two weeks after that that is just after thanksgiving so it's not thanksgiving week um and then we have december 12th so those are the next three upcoming dates for the board um as i would ask as she feels she could be ready for the 14th or would she prefer the 28th i might possibly be able to be ready with the 14th but there's a lot to pull together so the 28th's probably safer okay okay we're good that so um with that then i would entertain a motion to continue the special permit hearing for 212 pleasant street uh to a date certain of tuesday november 28th at 7 30 p.m mr chairman mr hanlon so moved second thank mr dupont so this is a motion to continue the special permit hearing for 212 pleasant street on to a date certain of october 28th 2023 at 7 30 p.m as moved by mr hanlon seconded by mr dupont vote of the board mr dupont hi mr hanlon hi mr holly hi mr riccadelli hi this hoffman hi mr leblanc hi the chair votes aye we are continued on 212 pleasant street um thank you all very much mr chairman mr hanlon i i just like the record to reflect that this board member at least would be particularly happy uh and thank and give a lot of thanks uh in the days after thanksgiving if what we have next time is a kumbaya moment rather than a three hour hearing thank you we'll try thank you so much good night good night okay so this brings us back to our agenda the next item is docket 3770 4042 adorothy road um so i would ask the applicant to introduce himself and uh tell us why they are before the board yes hello everyone i am ericka schwarz i'm the executive director of the housing corporation of arlington and i am joined by vickers and tea um from reframe systems a summerville based company um so we are um proposing to put an adu an accessory dwelling unit behind hca's existing two-family home which is located at 40 to 42 dorthy road um and i will just quickly run through some just a few views just to like orient you um and then vickers can kind of get into the details of the benefits of this um of the benefits that we see for what we're proposing so if you could go ahead and give the schwarz the co-host privilege all right you should be all set now okay um so just a very few couple slides so um no my first one was actually a pretty sort of start with our all right so you're seeing a map right now right yeah just just to orient people this is 40 to 42 dorthy road it's at the corner with parker street which at least the corner of is a private way um and you can see it it sort of backs up to to thorn dyke field um an area that i believe regardless of i haven't actually tracked what's happening with the the proposal proposed for parts of that but i think where we back up uh is an area that will remain woodsy regardless um so this is just a view on dorthy road of our two family when you're standing on dorthy road facing it straight on and then it's at the corner with parker and so this is this is the view from that private way and you can see this um garage in the back which we would plan to demolish um our tenants our current tenants uh do not use it um and approximately in its in its place but a different shape sort of narrow or longer a little taller we'd be proposing to put the adu and this is just another view of the garage straight on and you can see that we really you know the property line goes right up to that wooded area um so i'll just say just a few words about why we're excited before turning it over so um normally hca wouldn't be pursuing a single unit of affordable housing um but we're excited to do this because we are partnering with reframe systems and they have sort of a new product that they're they're putting into this pilot phase we're actually getting to do this at a lower cost than might be in the future because um they're piloting it with us as well as some other communities they also have a similar agreement um with the summerville community corporation where they're going to pilot a triple decker but what they're proposing is a product that's a modular unit but it's it's sort of like the newest greatest modular units of today um where it is a net zero all electric solar powered massachusetts built in their own factory a modular unit meant to be a cheaper alternative to traditional construction so we're really excited to place this single unit and create one more unit of affordable housing but also we're just interested in seeing if this might be something we might want to use in the future for multifamily development um so i and i will just say one other thing which is um we've we've spoken about this with our own tenants in both of the units in our development and also with and i think he's here um are a butter sort of across that private way who's the only other a property owner that sort of you would regularly use that this this part of the private way um opposite our garage is another garage um to make sure that he's aware of what our plans are and and you know we'd be coordinating on you know the brief days when there would be a crane for example maybe bringing this these pieces of this modular unit to make sure there was we weren't disrupting any access to the driveway that's opposite ours um so i'll stop uh sharing um and turn it over to vicas hi sarika hello everyone my name is vicas i'm the co-founder ceo of reframe systems so we're partnering with erika and hca to build this uh two-story adu i would like to request screen sharing permissions i could walk you through there we go um what we're actually requesting so um as erica pointed out um wrong window sorry um as erica pointed out we're replacing an existing garage uh with the two-story adu this is still a high-level schematic we're still refining a lot of the details at but in the interest of time we wanted to get um a couple of uh variances in play um so we've submitted a special permit request the first thing is to get sites at back variants due to places unit will be within six feet of the property line in the back uh to to make sure that we can meet the appropriate size of the unit and also uh create um off-street parking for the the primary the principal dwelling uh we end up in a situation where we'll end up placing the adu on the property line at the back and will be within four feet uh to the left side um so that's the first variance we're requesting from uh from the zoning board the second thing we're requesting is a height variance um the by right require allows us to get up to 20 feet tall um we'll actually end up being in our current version of the design almost uh 23 feet this is largely driven by by two things one where in an effort to make sure we're not disrupting topsoil and not increasing the use of concrete we're choosing to go with helical piles as our foundation system this ends up adding almost a foot and height and because we're using uh prefabricated volumetric modules we end up with some inefficiency with height which are not an issue for other zoning considerations we're kind of hitting up against a constraint here uh the a huge advantage of taking the volumetric approach where we ship where we prefabricate this entire structure and the factory and bring it over is that the actual construction site is not really a construction site it's a pretty quick installed process a very low disruption to neighbors it's a really clean quiet site and also allows us to really be very quick uh but to to make this happen we will need to request a height variance um and then the the inspector flagged that we had to request for two additional variants as a part of it uh one was uh to create the driveway because this is a corner lot even though we're going to have the driveway um created on the the location of existing garage it was suggested that we request a variance uh to do that so we're adding it here for documentation purposes and lastly we're still refining our our floor plan but we'd like to understand it as an appetite to allow us to build an additional 108 square feet that's where our current gross floor area is landing a big chunk of this is due to the installation requirements we're trying to build to a passive house zero rating this requires us to have about four inches of exterior continuous installation um that adds about 67 square feet and since there's no allowance to not treat exterior installation uh separately from look from gross floor area we're kind of impacted there the second piece is because we're building this as an affordable rental unit we're trying to comply with the DHCD requirements for minimum sizes for bedrooms that's adding some additional 27 square feet for our bedroom on the second floor and lastly again to meet passive house ratings our mechanical room has to be increased in size to have an energy recovery ventilator that's adding another 14 square feet so if this stack up is what's driving the delta from the 900 square feet cap to the 1008 square feet we believe these are all small changes given the unique location of the site the fact that it's really not going to intrude that much on neighbors and this is kind of tucked away in the back we believe all of these variances are are minor and don't really affect the character of the neighborhood we would like to request your your support in allowing us to realize that building an affordable passive house zero adu and having the service of blueprint for how we can partner with other community corporations to get more affordable housing out there thank you very much for the presentation um so what we have for us in this application so it's it's a special permit for the accessory dwelling unit in an accessory structure and then there are three additional variances because there's two that were published um but we are looking so one would be for front yard parking so we had the height variance and the site set back as part of special permit uh 23-1 and then the inspection department flag that we create uh v 23-1 to to flag the the floor area variance and the parking variance okay thank you um yeah so I I had noted the the height in the area um before but as you say they are in a way sort of baked into the way that you you do your construction and the way you um you design these units um is there any and you had you know specifically indicated how much of that area is really taken up by issues like insulation and minimum room sizes and and the like um so when the accessory dwelling unit was bylaw was passed by a town meeting a few years ago um it was a pretty contentious item in a lot of ways um and the you know the 900 square feet was was established to sort of keep the keep ad use from becoming uh too large and too prominent as they went forward into really sort of keep them as a as a minor use on the site rather than a primary use um so I think that this is something that the board is going to have to to talk about but by by greater sort of underlying concern is where this is a request for variance the first variance criteria is looking for something that is unique about the site that basically would make it impossible to adhere to the requirements of the zoning bylaw and what we have here is a flat rectangular site um which doesn't really have anything about it that would preclude following the bylaws um with the exception of the chosen method of construction um and so I think this is sort of the first thing that the board is going to have to really consider is you know can the is is this something that the board can consider for a variance or does this not meet the requirements for a variance um under state law I would open that question to the board um so what their opinion is on that on that question Mr Chairman Mr DuPont so first I want to say I think it's a great looking concept and I'm very supportive of the idea in general um of this type of construction and I will admit though that what Mr Klein has just outlined was also on my mind so one question I have is is this going to be set uh right on the lot line in the rear that's what the drawing currently shows I think we have some opportunity for moving it by right up to a foot uh but yeah because I I have I had a question about that and it's partly because I'm not entirely clear I mean I do think that as Mr Klein put it it's really due to the nature of the materials and the construction that the you know that the dimensional requirements as far as the square footage and the height are being proposed to exceed what's currently allowed um and in generally speaking when we look at a variance we say well it has to be some part of the land that is unique to this property but having to do with topography soil condition or lot shape and I I'm not sure and I'm not saying I can't be persuaded but I'm not sure I see that and that also it raised a question for me about you know we've had a lot of garages in the town that are sitting on the property line in the rear so that's not anything that's unusual but what is a little bit different here is that there's a proposal essentially to demolish the garage and to reconstruct a larger building and I was trying to go through the zoning bylaw to see if there's anything in there that says that you can build something essentially from scratch uh you know that would be on the lot line and there certainly are provisions to build a garage on the rear lot line that's you know that's in there and I just don't see you know unless the building department inspectional services is saying well you know we consider it to be a demolition you know a lot of times when there's demolition of an existing building they require and I don't know under which specific provision of the state building code that you leave up like 50 percent of what's existing in order to have it not be an entire demolition but to be an addition and you know the architects on the board can speak to that much better than I can but I'm not entirely clear how we get around the fact that we're taking down a building and we're putting up a new building which is clearly not a garage and we're calling it an ADU which to some extent shouldn't make a difference because we've looked at garages on the rear lot line knowing that those are going to be converted completely to living space and we haven't had a problem with that concept but I still don't necessarily see how we get from demolishing an entire garage and not using it as part of the ADU and then putting in a brand new building which is not a garage and then having it be an ADU and maybe other members of the board can help me out here because I'm stuck on that point before I even get to the square footage and the height and then of course the parking so there's a lot sort of wrapped up here even though generally I like the concept. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. Two things. I am like the chair I think and like Mr. DuPont hung up on the notion of figuring out how this relates to soil typography or the shape of the lot and that's not something that we can just wave and say well if it's a good idea we have actually had within the last six months several cases which where what the applicant proposed to do was a really good idea but because it violated you because it couldn't be justified on that basis we had to say no because that's what variance law requires us to do. I do have a difference of view with respect to whether you can tear down the garage. Obviously you can convert a garage and you could probably add things to the garage so that you have an addition to and that's all something that wouldn't pose any particular conceptual difficulty but if the problem is demolishing the garage then you have to sort of think well where how does that stand and I'd like to point out and look at the provision of the bylaw because where with the six foot limit comes from is the accessory dwelling units and what the bylaw says is an accessory dwelling unit may be located in an accessory building which accessory building shall not constitute a principal or main building by the incorporation of the accessory dwelling unit provided that if such accessory building is located within six feet of a lot line then such accessory dwelling unit shall be allowed only if the Board of Appeals grants a special permit on finding that the creation of such accessory dwelling unit is not substantially more detrimental to the neighborhood than the use of the accessory building as a private garage or other allowed use and it seemed to me that the authority to do some to to build something new is implicit in the language that is chosen by the accessory dwelling unit ordinance itself. It doesn't talk about garages particularly although it clearly is thinking of garages as one possible use that would be a benchmark for considering what the accessory dwelling unit would be but all the way through this it talks about accessory buildings and it talks about them in a general way that doesn't limit it to a garage or any other particular kind of accessory building. I'm absolutely positive as somebody who was who worked with the folks who at time meeting who brought this about that they would be astonished at the notion that you had that this only applied to garage conversions and didn't apply to other kinds of accessory buildings that were that were built new and clearly you can build you can have accessory dwelling units in new buildings if it weren't is a matter of fact if it weren't within six feet of the lot line then you wouldn't actually have to come to us at all it would be buildable by right. If it is within six feet then you can still do all the same things you could do if it wasn't there isn't suddenly a requirement that this be a pre-existing garage that suddenly jumps up when you make it five and a half feet you are basically still doing the same things you were before but this time you have an additional criterion that comes into play. I've made this point on a couple of other occasions that where it wasn't as pushed to the extent that it is here but actually I think that while the the framers were certainly looking at all those garages that were on the property line they chose to write and some meeting chose to accept a much more generally written bylaw that did not imagine that if you were within six feet of the lot line you had to have a prior garage so I'm not too concerned about that I am I am concerned however about in general meeting there's the requirements of the state law and I will also say that I'm very concerned about violating the 900 square foot limit again as somebody who is part of the process that brought us this this bylaw that was very important in allaying the concerns of people who thought that the adu bylaw would be an indirect way of allowing you to essentially turn a single family into a two-family house you wanted to have some way of limiting that down and I understand here that that when you figure out why it is you need the extra space to accommodate in this particular kind of construction situation to accommodate passive house zero it still is a really important part of the compromise that brought us the legislation that the limit was 900 square feet and I'm finding it very difficult to to reconcile that underlying idea with the notion that that that that is variable by variance it that gives me a lot of pause thank you sorry uh Mr. Enti sorry I was going to say that was really helpful to hear I think to us the place where we have the greatest flexibility is working hard to reduce the the floor area the site setback is something obviously don't have much of a choice given the site constraints and that's probably the one we'd like to focus the board's attention to and then the second thing would be if there's any appetite for considering the height increase and then we would try to manage the floor area to be within under square feet Mr. Chair Mr. LeBlanc I think at first when I saw this I was a little unsure about you know the demoring of the garage and then putting up a new structure kind of how Mr. DuPont laid out but I think the more I've kind of looked at this maybe I could be persuaded that it is something that's possible but I think where I get hung up is the the extra height and the extra square footage because when I when I look at this um you know it's a two-bedroom unit you know a two-bedroom two-bath unit which I think is a pretty good unit but I think it could be done as a one bedroom or a studio and be within that hundred within that nine hundred square feet and still be a successful thing and that would get rid of both of those items as well because you would get rid of the um the height increase so it'd be you know something comparable to the height of the existing garage that's there and then also still be you know I'm assuming haven't done the math I'm assuming would be well under the the nine hundred square feet if we just do a single single story thing and I um also just going back to the other ADUs that we've seen so far come across the board have either been one bedrooms or studios that we've looked at that are going into existing garages so we I think because it's the square footage thing that gets you um it kind of restricts you to those levels um and obviously as we can see once you start to try and push the boundaries on that and get two bedrooms you're really above that um so I think it'd be something that'd be willing to consider if we saw it as a you know something that is conforming more to the height and floor area thank you for that Mr. Chairman Mr. DuPont uh to be brief so I'm persuaded by what Mr. Hanlon read from the accessory dwelling unit section I do however wish that they had made some sort of a reference back to the fact that you know notwithstanding the provisions of the dimensional and density uh requirements you know where it says you've got a six foot rear yard you know setback or side yard I suppose as well I kind of wish they'd tied that up so that if you read it you knew exactly that this that's in the chart doesn't apply to the accessory dwelling unit so that's just an aside but yeah I think that it was well stated and I'm I'm persuaded that it is it is doable um to put it on the property line and I think Mr. LeBlanc's points are also very well taken and I'm sort of in alignment with those okay thank you um in regards to the the question about the parking so is Parker street private or public you believe the section is private sorry Erica I think you're on mute yeah yeah it's my understanding it's a private way okay um right because if it's a private way then you can accommodate parking on the street and it's outside of our jurisdiction right um but the parking that is on the property would have to follow the the bylaw um and so the spaces have to be seven and a half by eight or eight and a half by 18 and not in the front yard uh which is a front yard that faces Parker so would it be possible to just extend the driveway farther back so that that what what here is right it is the blue car could effectively be parked farther from the street we believe so um we just have to verify that but we believe we can create a a setback from the street uh to where the the parking officially starts so we feel confident we can address that okay the the zoning board is amenable to us having the driveway and then can I just ask a question so that please what is the amount of space that's required to be called front yard that we wouldn't be parking on is there a dimension there that it would have to not encroach upon so it is so unfortunately I can't read the numbers on the the drawing that's on the screen um but basically whatever so the setback where the building comes closest to that side street there's a setback is it say 12 feet maybe yeah existing building yeah the existing building okay so as long as that 12 feet um is maintained and actually that raises raises another interesting question which is that the accessory dwelling unit is also located partly in the front yard you know it's all in this is it on the front yard or the side yard this was confusing to me just because the the address of Dorothy street right yeah yeah this is Dorothy that's the front of the two family but we're creating an accessory dwelling unit that will essentially face Parker street so I I got a little caught up in what's considered a front yard or not but yeah so it's a corner lot so it has two front yards that face the two rights of way so one faces Parker one faces Dorothy and then it has one side yard and one rear yard but you get to choose so the choice I believe that was made here is that the side yard is the one that goes along Dorothy and the rear yard is the one that faces the the um the end of Parker street there um so that's a little confusing in the zoning bylaw is to whether that portion of the lot that corner Parker if that is still within the rear yard or if that is front yard the front yard yard extending the full width of the lot between the front line of the nearest building wall and the front line and the rear yard is the yard unoccupied by accessory structure or accessory use is here and permitted extending the full width of the well that's not helpful um they both say they stretch the full width of the lot but in this corner condition where does one end the other begin because my my concern is again is that table that gives the setback dimensions for accessory structures in the residential districts it's six feet from the rear and six feet from the side lot line but it's 20 feet from the front which in this case would be 12 because it's established elsewhere on the lot but that would severely curtail the ability to locate the building in this position which we're trying desperately not to curtail um mr chair mr. Leblanc there is a illustration in section two that i don't know if that's when you're looking at that um designates you know front lot lines and rear and side lot lines for corner locks there's a notation that says one of each and determine that owner's discretion right right but then what i'm getting hung up on is the definition for front lot lines as it's the full width a lot and the rear lot line also says it's the full width but obviously they can't both be the full width because they overlap yeah so which prevails um but i think certainly what we would like to try to do is get this so that there are no variance requests mr chairman mr. Hanlon um so i assume that the definitions are struck in this way because unless you have a corner lot the front the front yard never intersects with the with the rear yard and so the problem of overlap never never comes up and the draftsman just didn't or the drafters i should say didn't have this situation in mind when when they drew the definitions um and i guess i don't know there's no way that we we can just make something up but we because somehow this has to get resolved one way or the other um but maybe somebody's already made something up and i wonder if we could have a conversation with or get the idea of inspectional services as to what to do in the situation or more less usefully possibly is what this board may have done in the past but i'm guessing that that would be extremely hard to find we might be able to find our way our way through through this assuming that assuming that that it turns out that that way of approaching it is useful for the applicant because it's still it still does a fair amount of eliminating their flexibility on how to on how to proceed here but other than that we just have to in the absence of guidance from inspectional services it seems to me we just have to decide what how to reconcile these are irreconcilable things in this kind in the situation absolutely um there are other questions from the board at this moment mr chair mr rickadelli uh if i can just ask a question of the applicant um just because this has come up in past projects but especially if we have law line conditions you know if if this were a garage we'd be requiring type one or type two construction for that wall uh but also eliminating the amount of openings in the wall that's on the zero lot line condition and uh you know there's our our zoning arlington zoning but also the the building code under under three feet will actually you know not not allow openings in that zero lot line condition wall so i'm just wondering um for the applicants you know would that be a possibility with your plans to first construct it in a non-combustible way uh at the zero lot line condition and also to reconfigure to um not have openings along that side the getting to a type one or type two construction with our current construction method is going to be pretty hard for us to do the the second thing is we were given our understanding that the the wooded area in the back may not be developed in the foreseeable future we were actually hoping to lean into that fact and actually move all of our windows to that side and actually have that be more of the pup so we're already counter to uh what you're suggesting unfortunately yeah i understand i you know i i think that this has such great merit and like the other board members i think we would really love to see a lot of these in arlington so hopeful that there's a way we can get there i just i so i think that that uh like i said you know may not be a building or a zoning code issue that may be a building code issue so uh i'm not sure uh well this board would not have the authority to get around that um those requirements in terms of openings uh so just something to consider as as you you all move forward yeah we yeah if i could just add we will have to consider that obviously if it's a building code issue but part of it was also that for the the privacy this is relatively close to the the main structure and so for our existing tenants they indicated understandably like well how close is it going to be can we still have some privacy so we thought well if we have more windows on the wooded side it's nicer for the people in the new adu and it's nicer for the existing tenants but so well we'll see if we can work that out mr chair mr holly the exception five four two eight for exemption for energy efficient homes does have an existing principal building by definition here the minimum frontage and the lot area exemptions are made for a her score of 54 or better would but we're not doing in the existing foundation footprint so or by a special permit it's an and requirement they're right it's both or it's it's sorry it's an all requirement you know it's not you know yeah would that apply in this situation i'm sorry with that mr hamlin mr hamlin what that gets you is uh what that gets you is the inadequate frontage and inadequate lot size would be forgiven under those circumstances which would make some lots buildable that otherwise are not buildable but i don't see how that would hear that's not a problem to begin with you're doing an accessory building on an existing lot and regardless of the lot size and and frontage you're able to do that under the adu bylaw um this stage i do want to uh if i could ask the the applicant to stop the screen sharing and then i would like to open for public comment i don't know if they remember the public court here to to talk to this but i would like to give them an opportunity if they are um so in a moment i will open the hearing for public comment public comment is taken as a release of the matter at hand it should be directed to the board for the purpose of informing our decision um if you wish to speak you can digitally raise your hand using the button on the reactions tab and the zoom application if you're on phone you can now start nine uh you'll be called upon by the chair uh as to give your name and address the record and given time for your questions and comments uh so with that um we have one speaker uh rebecca gruber uh rebecca gruber 215 pleasant street thank you for letting me speak um i'm very excited about the hca's proposal for this adu unit and um the type of construction being proposed i remember that wentown meeting voted on the adu bylaws this was one of the hopes they had for the use of adus and i'm very supportive of the zba finding a way to make this work and um having this opportunity for adding an affordable unit in our town thank you very much thank you um mr moore uh yes thank you mr steve moore piedmont street i um i find myself in the unenviable position of i believe disagreeing somewhat with mr hanlon um in terms of his interpretation of the adu bylaw i think it it hinges on the definition of the word creation um my memory of the discussions that occurred around this in town meeting was that the idea was to have adus occur as part of existing structures or renovation of enrichment structures be them within the primary residence or conversion of a garage like we discussed like the folks that we were discussing earlier not the demolition of a garage and a rebuild of a new structure um and because i think that's a stretch of the adu bylaw because you're taking an accessory drilling unit in that case and not putting it to a different use you're removing it and building another accessory structure which i think is a different concept and i i i think it's i think it's important because uh i thought the point of the adu bylaw was to take what is somewhat accessory structures that are used for one use and adapting either to that use plus another or adopting it entirely to the other use in the terms of a garage for instance but not tearing it down and building a structure um so i'm a little little confused about why this is okay here um and maybe mr hanlon can enlighten me as to why i am wrong mr hanlon mr chairman the let's take a simpler situation let's suppose that you have a relatively small house and you have enough room to and you don't have a garage and you have enough room to build a new structure a new accessory structure um that is not within six feet of the line uh in that situation there is not a single word in the bylaw that prevents you from doing that and not only that is it doesn't come to us it goes directly to mr champa who would approve it as a matter of right there's not a word that says you have to be repurposing an existing building the language is always just an accessory building and this and this would be an accessory building all right so suppose you take the next step suppose you say well that's all true but suppose you already have a garage there but it's an old ugly garage and you don't want to use it well you say okay i'll take away that garage i'll demolish it it's empty now it's empty like it was in the first example i'm going to build a building there and it's a new accessory building and it's not within six feet of the lot line again mr champa hasn't it would decide this all by himself and he wouldn't have a single word in the bylaw to rely on to say you couldn't do that so what is the difference between that and this and what happens if you build it within six feet the only difference is that it comes to us the only difference is the jurisdiction and what we have to do what we have to do there is apply a very limited standard of review in order to in order to approve it so it seems to me that the the notion you have to be that there's not baked into this bylaw the notion that you have to be using a pre-existing building you can build a new one you could demolish and and and do another one the only thing that was left over was what happens when you get close to a lot line and there it seems to me that the language i read earlier is fully consistent with the notion that it doesn't have to be a primary garage and that for that matter the rules that do apply to garages don't apply to the accessory but buildings that are envisioned by the bylaw okay mr i appreciate that that that enlightenment because that's i understand what you're saying i just my memory of the conversations were evolved a little differently than that and during the creation of the bylaw but as you say the words are what the words are in the bylaw and where it is silent i guess you can do that even though my my memory the discussions were different that all right well thank you uh one additional question um was the plan for the uh the arlington housing corporation and the applicants and i'm not sure who the applicant is we are for i guess it's the corporation i'm not sure uh was is the plan to make this uh uh what do you want to set an affordable rental unit would the plan be for that to uh transfer with the property uh or uh is it just an aspiration i'm not sure what you mean by transfer for with the property but it will be a rental unit so it will basically as if 40 to 42 dorothy road was a you know a triple decker or a three family it will i'm not sure i'm understanding your question so at this point the the housing corporation of arlington does own the building at 40 42 it would be operating it as they will will continue operating it as an accessible property um and that's the ad you will add a third affordable unit on the property okay all right i didn't know uh with the whole discussion we've had about affordability lately if it was going to be something which uh would follow with the property uh in terms of defining what affordable is market rate or less than yeah in fact we plan to set the same affordability restriction that we have on the other house on the existing house um just to make things a little easier to manage and so it'll it'll align with the rest of our portfolio as far as level of affordability great great thank you mr cheer thank you um so it does sound like we have a couple of questions for inspectional services um and we would love to give the the develop the the building designer an opportunity to see if there's a way to come closer to being within the requirements of the zoning by law um so actually first well first we have no other people in the speaking queue so i'm going to go ahead and close public comment um so with that done then um we have as i said we have questions for respectful services there are some uh questions for the uh for the designer about what they may be able to accomplish um so my recommendation if if uh if the applicant is amenable would be to uh seek to continue this hearing um to give us an opportunity to for both sides to to do a little bit of research we can come back together with a little more a little better information in front of us um so we do have we did just continue something to november 28th um we do have a hearing on november 14th if um there's a sense that we can that we could get information together by that date um and there's also december 12th uh so i would just ask the applicant if any of those three dates being november 14th november 28th or december 12th would work for them a rica november 14th works for us if that works for you yeah we could we could make that work okay others yeah so with that then mr chair this little blank i just have one more quick thing yes i just was noticing with the elevations with it being on the helical piles there's a there's a gap between the bottom of the the building and the ground that i was just curious if there's been any thoughts about how that may get infill to prevent um you know debris or you know wildlife living in there and i think maybe if that's something that can come back either uh when you know when we do continue it to the next one it's um just come back with a thought on that thank you for raising that this is still an early schematic design the plan is to have skirting around it so it doesn't uh none of the stuff is exposed but we'll make sure to update our our drawings for the the hearing on the protein happy much mr chairman mr handlin before making a motion on this i just wanted to say again what i think has already been clear but just just to make it very clear given the state statute if we have to grant a variance we'll have a hard time doing it so the task that's before us is to figure out some combination of of figuring out what what the real of dealing with the rules and dealing with the building that it get the variances out of the picture if this is a special permit only then it will not be a particularly hard problem for us i think but if it's a variance it's an extremely difficult problem so that's kind of what the task the mission is for the next couple of weeks and and i wish the applicant great success in being able to do that absolutely with that then the chair would entertain a motion to continue the hearing for 40 42 dorothy road to a date certain of november 14th 2023 at 7 30 p.m. mr chairman so moved second and then second mr dupont so this is a motion to continue to the date certain of november 14th mr dupont hi your handlin mr holly hi mr rickadelli hi mr hoffman hi mr leblanc i chair votes i we are continued on 40 42 dorothy road thank you all very much look um so with that then we would move on to docket 377 128 when a vista road um we'd first like to express our gratitude for their patience this evening it's been a lot longer getting to you than we had anticipated um but with that i would ask the applicants if they could introduce themselves and tell us what they would like to do yes thank you for um for having us um i'm valerie bruno stone my husband mathew stone is sitting next to me hello and we're also joined by our architect leslie mahoney um hello hello we are uh excited to to bring this plan forward we purchased our home at 28 point of vista road with plans to stay long term and invest in arlington um our oldest child began kindergarten this fall um and our young guests will be in school in another three years um so we have many more years to reside and invest in our neighborhood and in our community um our home truly has not been updated since it was built in the 1940s um we've lived without a dishwasher with two young children uh for several years which is no small feat um all the work that we have done to improve our home so far uh for example the windows and the roof we've done in keeping with the original character of the house and we have every intention of doing the same with this proposed addition um we uh believe that there's actually very little impact on the view from the street um and that that's a a plus in our design we've lived here you know now for almost eight years we have a good sense of how our family lives in the space and our needs for the space and we've designed the space with that in mind and tried to be very efficient and mindful of how to make efficient use of the space to preserve as much open area as possible um so we'd like to request your support in expanding our home to meet our family's needs um and continuing to to grow and invest um in our neighborhood and in our community um and so with that we'll we'll turn it over to our architect Leslie Leslie would you like permission to show your screen yeah that'd be great thank you only if you could take care of that perfect thank you so much you should be all set okay okay that's the one okay so I'll explain to you how um we have a pre-existing non-conforming house on a non-conforming lot um these are just existing elevations and I will point out right here on the right side elevation there is a small screen porch that is currently uh has no foundation it's just on piers and I'll be talking about that um all the addition is going primarily on that right side and on the rear these are the existing plans and this is looking from the front that is the screen porch it's more of a sunroom really um the foundation plan you'll see where we are adding we're adding foundation where that sunroom was and um it is a similar um footprint but it is pulled a whip back toward the house by six inches we are currently non conforming um on this side um the right side has um 8.6 feet to the property line and um we are planning to make it nine and then on this side over here we are currently where do I have that information we're currently sitting at nine feet and we're extending that line straight out of the house the other non-conformity at the property is just the property itself um which only has a 50 foot front um only has a 50 foot front um street and we're required to have 60 so here you can see what we're adding we're just adding some living space a family room and expand in a kitchen and then a deck in the rear the second floor that space has a new primary bedroom over it so it now becomes a fourth bedroom and then in terms of the site plan itself this is I'm sorry about this but it's looked at from the opposite side from the rear of the house so this is the existing property and this is the new property so in terms of gross square footage um we are adding more than 750 square feet we are adding um 1272 square feet and um this is a sloped piece of the property here and so but our usable space still fits on the more or less flat-ish area in the rear of the property so I just wanted to bring that to your attention so those are the large issues with this this is two-story and this new piece on the side is one story right here are the new elevations so this is the new elevation to the rear this is the elevation from the front and you can see the rebuild of the sunroom in a smaller configuration and part of the primary bedroom that pops up behind which is here um it's a good question so in the the upper right corner um unfortunately that just they both say left side on the right side there um for when you you would see so you're on the you're adding a sort of a new shed essentially off the the main ridge going towards the rear um so that would pop up on the you'd just see a little sliver of it um in that upper plan I'm a little I'm just not quite sure what I would be looking at from that side and it's partially because I'm a little confused by the the gable on the the new gable on the rear where the peak of it is just slightly offset from the main building it's not quite sure how all those facets come together right I have a roof plan here let me show that to you maybe that will help so this is the new rear piece that's being added and it's a shed roof that's being overlaid on the main house itself okay um the existing ridge is parallel to the street and then the new gabled roof is tying into that shed roof and I've attempted to line these up and due to just dimensional reasons it hasn't happened um partly because we're trying to keep this line exactly where it is um is the the dashed line is that an inflection in the roof or is that just the line of the existing house that's the line of the existing house okay yeah this is overlaying all the way up as shown here this this is the new kitchen and primary bathroom addition here and there's a roof line that's going all the way up there okay um so as you had said that there's nonconformities in the side existing nonconformities in the side yards right on the one side the nonconformity is being reduced from 8.6 feet to 9.1 feet so it's moving farther away on the other side even though it's in line with the side of the building because it's at an angle to the side lot line that one is slightly increasing from 9.1 to 8.9 that's right as it goes and even less with the deck but we can certainly hold the deck back yeah it increases by about two inches because the side line is at an angle okay um and then as you said the frontage is not existing nonconforming the lot area is existing nonconforming neither of those are right touched um and then the other question I had was in regards to the usable open space um so you had indicated that you were did the proposed usable open space is 930 square feet and the proposed gross floor area is 3264 and that comes up to a usable open space percentage of 28 percent which is less than 30 um so I'm wondering if there's a couple more inches in that flat ish space in the back that there is a little open space back there that would keep you under over 30 percent um because you can actually go so the usable open space can extend over the deck okay so you can bring it up to the back of that house and I think that will get you where you need to be yeah that would be fine yeah absolutely okay yeah inspectional services considers going on to decks as it's an acceptable practice for usable open space okay yeah we can show a new calculation for that and then um this and as you said this is a request this is a large addition um right and so the board would in addition to the regular findings the board would need to find that the alteration addition is in harmony with the structures and other uses in the vicinity that consider the dimensions and setbacks in relation to the body structures and uses and consider conformity with purposes of bylaw so with that I would ask members of the board if they have questions in comments in regards to this application Mr Chairman Mr Hanlon I have a question the because this is a large addition it's especially important the relationship between the addition and the surrounding properties and I wondered if you could or if the owner could provide some description of how the of what's on the other properties that are around here that I hate to put it in terms of what would the neighbors think but that's kind of where where you are and and it makes a difference how crowded it is and so forth as you no doubt have noticed since in some of our earlier cases so if somebody could just describe what's what's around this and how the this addition is going to relate to the dimensions and and where the other properties are the other buildings are in the here in the immediate vicinity so our neighbor to the I can't could could you try to get a little closer to the microphone is your hard to hear sorry our neighbor to the left of our property has a very similar addition it's a slightly larger house than ours they did their addition just this this year the neighbor to the right of ours has a very similar footprint and their deck extends out to you about where the end of our addition would be so I would say I wouldn't describe it as a crowded situation right here we go yeah you can see the addition that the neighbor put on here it's very similar it's a two-story addition and then this is the neighbor over here who has the deck that extends out similar to where we're going to come out to and then to the rear of us the house is is quite a ways away and it's sort of a lower elevation as well so it doesn't there's a fair amount of space between there great thank you around very helpful thank you google um other questions and comments from the board none um I will go ahead and open the meeting for public comment remind of the public comment is taken if it relates to the matter hand um should be directed to the board for the purpose of informing our decision members of public who wish to speak and use the digitally raise their hand using the raise hand button on the reactions tab in the zoom application or if you're calling it by phone you can dial star nine are any members of public who wish to address the board mr. Moore did you want to raise your hand nope okay and with that I see no members of public who wish to address the meeting so I will go ahead and close public comment um as it relates to this uh hearing um um so just uh so for the board what we have before us um this is an application uh which comes to us for a special permit for the large addition um but additionally there is an existing nonconformity so there would be a very slight increase in the nonconforming nature of the structure we just need to find that it would not be substantially more detrimental to the neighborhood than the existing condition um so are there are there questions or comments from the board mr chair mr mr rick cadelli um I sort of hate to ask this question since we've I talked about this a lot this evening but uh I remember reviewing a similar case um with a two-story addition on the back and I'm just looking at the pictures of this house and there's a significant grade change I I'm just wondering if that average grade calculation has has been done for this just to make sure that um that lowest level is is not counted as a level um I'm not sure if uh Miss Mahoney if that's something you've already looked at yes I did look at it and I am um it's not an official level I'm just counting it in the gross square footage right um I have the information here the um shoot is the question asked on the application the application would ask for the existing height and proposed height right I know I show on the rear elevation drawing the um average height of the structure and I do have basement story if ceiling is four foot six above grade it's not the uh elevations show the average grade yeah I would have to find those calculations and get them to you I did calculate it and it does not count as a story okay because I had the same I was curious as well great yeah we we had a recent case where it looked just like this us and uh it was just it just tipped over that um that border into being a story and it got much more complicated from there so thank you sure Mr Chairman Mr Hanlon um one thing I just point out is in the memorandum we got from the inspectional services today there was no indication that there was a potential violation of the rule of heightened stories so I at least take comfort in the fact that ISD has not signaled that as an issue the point thank you okay so with that are there anything further from the Mr Chairman just to to have it clear on the record I think that when we look at the three particular criteria the compliance with the purpose of the zoning bylaw uh dimensions with respect to other uses and buildings in the vicinity that the answer that we were provided uh when I asked that question was uh was appropriate it seemed to me that that it did allay the notion that there was somehow an unusual crowding here or something that would make this unreasonably impinge upon buildings or uses in the immediate vicinity so that the I think that the board can find that each of the three requirements of the of this particular of the special regulation are met on the without going through all of the other seven it seems to me that this is consistent with the with the neighborhood it's clearly allowed by a special permit and that the board can find that each of the uh requirements of section 3.3.3 uh are are fairly clearly met in this case right thank you and to that I would just add the in regards to the the increase in the nonconforming nature the structure that it is incredibly minor going from 9.1 to 8.9 feet on the one side and there's uh more than well offset by the by the reduction in the nonconforming nature on the opposite side of the house so mr chairman here when when the emotion is event is is eventually made as as it I assume there'll be a motion to approve this uh we ought to be clear that we're talking interested in abundance of caution is that we would not only be addressing the grant of the large addition but also uh any possible question about the extension of an existing nonconformity absolutely so should the board uh vote to approve there are three standard conditions that the board would impose um on a grant such as this the first is that the plans and specifications approved by the board for the special permit shall be the final plans and specifications submitted to the building inspector of the town of arlington in connection with the application for zoning relief there'll be no deviation during construction from approved plans and specifications without the express written approval of the arlington zoning board of appeals number two is the building inspector is hereby notified that he's to monitor the site and should proceed with appropriate enforcement procedures at any time determines that violations are present building inspector shall proceed under section 3.1 of the zoning bylaw none of the provisions of chapter 40 section 21 d of the massachusetts general laws and then institute noncriminal complaints if necessary the building inspector may also approve and institute appropriate criminal action also in accordance with section 3.1 and then standard number three the board shall maintain continuing jurisdiction with respect to this special permit grant um with those are there any additional uh conditions that the board would want to impose upon this grant mr chairman yes mr hanon earlier there was a question about adjusting about usable open space and i think that uh miss mahoney undertook to um update the plans to show more clearly where the usable open space would would be and so i think a condition that that the applicant update its plans in order to correct the calculation of usable open space would be a useful additional criteria so we have uh so the applicant is to provide a revised site plan indicating and dimensioning the areas of the existing and proposed site that comply with the requirements for usable open space is indicated in section 2 of the zoning bylaw town of erlington to the inspectoral services department for review and approval that was terrific mr chairman it's not like i had that pre-written or anything um is there anything any other conditions that uh members of the board would want to consider seeing none with no further questions uh the chair would entertain a motion mr chairman mr hanlon i move that the board approved this application subject to the three standard conditions plus the additional condition uh updating usable open space that the chair just read into the record thank you mr duplant so this is a vote of the board to approve special permit for 28 point of vista road with the four conditions as previously read into the record um the vote of the board mr duplant hi mr hanlon hi mr holly hi uh mr rickard ellie hi the chair votes i the special permit for 20 of its are one of its road is approved great thank you so much thank you thanks and again thank you for your patience this evening thank you good good night night we'll say the success rate of people uh in cases that start after 10 o'clock is really very high at this point don't let that get around we almost finished earlier than town meeting would but just over it feels good to be non controversial um yes it does i hope you are happy ending on a high note thank you thank you thank you so just for the board so we did continue two hearings we have one that's continued to the 14th one that's continued to the 28th uh according to colleen we don't have any other items on the agendas for those two nights um but i had asked her for the 14th um to put some time in for the board so we've been kind of going at a breakneck pace on a lot of stuff for a while and i think it would be a good time for us to to just sort of uh take a breather and review uh some of our procedures some of our documentation um i think a lot of you noticed that this was the first time we got the the applications were electronically submitted for the zoning board um so i think we want to take a look at that at that procedure make sure that it's we're getting the documentation that we're able to get works well for us that that procedure works well for the applicants i think we're going to have to make some adjustments to our rules and regulations in order to better uh coincide with that um there's definitely a couple of things that i i know i need to adjust um as well and the the other thing i'd like to try to do on the 14th is talk a little bit if there are any zoning um amendments that we would like to propose um i know we've talked several times about the gap between an attached and the detached dwelling um there's a couple others so that sort of picked up along the way and today we're sort of that question about accessory dwelling units uh being within six feet of the thing would be good to sort of clarify so if there are any sort of things like that that have sort of come up that you've come upon um it'd be great to discuss them on the 14th and then i will schedule time with the arb in december uh to discuss those with them as they put together their docket going into the spring they have notified me that they are planning to put forward a major zoning package for the earlington heights overlay district so they do have some other big things they're trying to do in the spring um but i have been nagging them about these ones so hopefully we'll be able to get this included in the spring as well so that's what we'll do on the 14th um as well as uh that other case that we just put onto the 14th so with that um i would like to thank you all for your participation in tonight's meeting of the earlington zoning board of appeals appreciate everyone's patience throughout the meeting i'd especially like to thank Colleen Ralston and Mike Cunningham for their assistance in preparing for and hosting and participating in this online meeting please note the purpose of the board's recording this meeting is to ensure the creation of an accurate record of its proceedings it is our understanding recording made by acmi will be available on demand at acmi.tv within the coming days if anyone has comments or recommendations please send them via email to dbaatown.arlington.ma.us that email address is also listed on the zoning board of appeals website and to conclude tonight's meeting i would ask for a motion to adjourn mr chairman so moved thanks for the board to adjourn mr dupont hi mr handlin hi mr holly hi mr rickard ellie hi topman hi and mr leblanc hi the chair votes aye we are adjourned thank you all so much i'm sorry it was a late night and uh we'll see you all on the 14th have a good one good night