 28, 2022. So welcome everyone. We are getting going tonight into our ETC NEXT zoning regulations and review of previous draft amendments to those regulations and we'll be touching on minutes and so forth. So this is a planning night. Before we get going are there, is that anyone who would like to offer public comments and that's either in the room or online. And I don't have my online vision up yet so I'm not, I don't have anybody. Yeah, it's amazing. Like X-ray vision. And for folks who are online, if you would like to speak during public to be heard, you can use the raise hand feature which is under the reactions button at the bottom of your zoom screen or you can enter something in the chat or you can just speak up. Dusty, it looks like you do have Patty Davis raising her hand. All right, Patty, go ahead. Sorry guys, I have a really bad head cold. I just, I'm asking questions just for education because I'm fascinated with what you all do. But I have two questions. Number one is has our state of Vermont established a special independent study commission to consider whether our local government has adequate land use controls to manage growth and possibly change, like if we go green, that's question number one. Question number two, how does local government, our local government address non-conforming issues having to do with the planning commission? I don't know where I found this but it's eight dash 502. So it must mean something to you guys. So I'm just trying to educate myself because starting from the state, you can answer that in a short sentence or you can answer it during the meeting. There's no rush. Thanks. So your question number one, I don't, I mean, that's not something we're talking about and quite frankly, it's something if staff wants to pick up and run with at some point fine and I kind of feel that's outside of our scope, especially for this evening. I don't know that we have an answer for that. Well, yeah. Well, that's okay. I didn't want to ask anything that's related to the meeting because last time you said, Patty, we're talking about Saxon Hills. So I couldn't, I tried to ask something that did not, I mean, the technical answer your question, Patty, is all land use regulations start with state statute and waterfall down to the local level. So if you wanted to drill into what the states, either minimum land use requirements or the fence that they put around municipalities, you go to chapter 117 in the state statutes and you can find all sorts of things from... Yes. What powers are bestowed to municipalities to what things you can't regulate like accessory dwelling units and things like that. So that's the answer to your question. Okay, thank you. And then the other question was how do we deal as a planning commission with non-conforming issues? Is that why you're renewing all your regulations tonight to make sure things that are non-conforming to what your new regulations are gonna be? How does a planning commission deal with that in general? Yes, I'm not really sure what you're asking. So we amend our regulations basically when we have an opportunity, but when state statute changes, that changes our regs. Dave just said we follow the guidelines that they give us. And then the other thing that happens is by statute, we're required to review and revise our town plan. The town plan then drives the much of the regulations. And then staff and planning commission keeps an ongoing parking lot list. If any time we run into issues like we have with PUDs, we put them on a list for, hey, let's make sure we address that the next time we do a round of revisions. Oh, okay, thank you. That's very helpful. Yeah, and Patty, one more, a couple more points on that. If state law changes and our regs haven't been updated yet, state law still takes precedence. So we would still follow that. And then I also wasn't sure what you meant by non-conformity was say that we change our regulations and then a parcel or a property or a use is non-conforming. And we do have a section of our regs that deal with that and we're required to do that. I understand you. So if you have specific questions about that, we can walk you through it, but maybe outside the meeting. That would be section 3.8 in our zoning regs. Patty, you may find it interesting to go up and spend some time on the Chittenden, the Regional Planning Commission website. Okay. A ton of information and they're a huge resource for immunists. The VLCT, I've been to that website. That's different. This is the CCRP. Oh, okay. Which Essex also has a member or two on. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I just don't know a lot. So it's very helpful. Thank you so much. Okay. Don't see any other hands raised. Please, you're the audience tonight. You're the in-house audience. Big burden. All right. Let's move on then to our DTC zoning regs and review previous draft. And, Darren, did you have a flow that you wanted to follow to look at these or how did you want to approach this? Sure. I will get it started. So there is a memo in your packets that sort of gives an overview of where we're at and what is in front of you tonight. Basically, we are picking up where we left off in summer of 2019 when we were trying to work on the DTC next plan as well as the design guide as well as the regulations all at the same time. And that was too much coming out of the fire hose at once. So as planning commission directed and very wisely so, we put the other two things to the side focused on the plan, got that adopted. You guys looked at the design guide, the last planning meeting four weeks ago and said that looks good with some minor tweaks as we go into zoning regs. So here we are back at the zoning regulations. As you can see, it's still a rough draft. There is some highlights, there are sections that aren't complete. There's things that aren't quite fitting together, but the overall framework is here. So what we wanted to do tonight is we can run through it in detail or we can take a higher level view and just say, how do we feel about the whole concept of what's going on here? And I would put three sort of major questions to you as planning commission as to how we want to approach this. So the first question is, how this document would be organized? The way it was presented by staff and the consultants is, we figured it made sense to insert a new article into the regulations and the zoning regs specifically to deal with the town center zoning that we wanted to have. The reason for that is, it's a little different than the rest of town and we didn't wanna have to get into updating the entire document for the entire town all at once because we're starting a new paradigm for standards here, particularly when it comes to streetscapes and subdivision and lot sizes and all that. And that could create some discrepancies that we didn't wanna get into. So we basically wanted to firewall this new section of the regs. So then what we're doing is inserting a new article three and then all the subsequent articles would be re-numbered after that. We don't have to stick with that. That was just the initial proposal. Elements or question number two, as you know, the whole process of ETCnext wanted to get into a lot more detailed design and how we regulate design. We talk about that type of code that shall not be named, but there are other ways to get at that. So what's presented in this document is a hybrid version of form-based code and our current regulations and more traditional Euclidean zoning. So that the differences are basically that we are regulating and creating some standards by the depend on the form of building that we're reviewing as well as the geographic context at a very specific site level, not just as zoning district level. And we might also be looking at different uses based on what the context is. So that's a new, again, paradigm in this type of regulation and this what we're looking at here. And then the last thing is these standards are a lot more specific to very fine details of how buildings are built, how sites are designed than we have been in the past in our regulations. So I wanna make sure that the planning commission considers all three of those elements, the organization, the format of how we regulate and the level of detail to which we regulate as we look at these standards in this document. And again, we do not have to take what's been laid out as we must go with that, we have to adopt it. This is just a starting point. So we can dial back the detail, we can dial back the format, we can change how it's organized. One other thing we talked about is instead of doing this whole new section and would be to simply update the business design control overlay district with some of these new standards and some of the concepts in the EPC-NEX plan. So we can go with something like that. Or we can also look at some of these standards as maybe it is worth taking them to the rest of town and trying to implement that on a town-wide scale. So the door is open to any possibility. And then the last thing we wanna talk about tonight hopefully is once we've figured out some of those high-level detail, high-level concepts, how you wanna approach moving forward on this project as planning commission. Do you wanna create a working group? Do you want to do this at the full commission table every second or a fourth Thursday planning meeting? Darren, you're cleaning in and out. Sorry about that, is this a little better? Yeah. Okay, thank you. So there's other questions about, do we need a consultant to help us finish these bylaws up? These are the questions that we wanna know from a process perspective, how to move forward. So with that, I will turn it back over to the planning commission and Desi specifically to sort of react to what you think so far. Okay, thanks. One thing right off the bat, I wanna reach out to Josh because we've been floating the idea of the other commissions taking on some of these things in work groups. And Josh, can you give us sort of an update on where we are with that right now? I know you and I've met with a number of them and some of that, Darren may influence how we as commission approach some of the what's in front of us. Yes, thank you. Darren, I just shared with you the current as of the moment Excel spreadsheet for which persons from which other committees have recommended or volunteered for which particular things. So what I'll tell everyone is that at the moment we've got some buy-in, some pretty significant buy-in from both the energy committee and conservation trails. Specifically, and then Darren actually you could share this with everyone I suppose. Okay, I'll share it on the screen. Yeah, yeah. So we've got buy-in for the ETC next zoning design standards which again is what we're literally talking about right now which we sort of group with old historic place making and the potential rezoning of the lands on the other side of 209 because those are all geographically related. And if we wanna use, if we decide to use ETC as sort of a zoning showpiece, if you will which is one of the options it would make sense to have geographically adjacent areas involved on that's some buy-in on allowable conditional use changes inclusion area zoning in the ETC throughout town Sacking Hill master plan 2024 town update and then energy efficiency mainly as pertains to carbon neutral zoning as it respects us of course but then the excuse the idea of charging stations and stuff and we're waiting on right now the ZBA met at the beginning of the month we've met with the leadership and they really like this idea but they have yet to give a specific names on who would be interested in what my understanding is their next meeting is May 5th and I haven't got any specific interest yet back from economic development either. And Josh, I'll just add I think the conservation trails committee was definitely interested in act when something won in trail stuff. Oh yeah, yeah. I didn't get any specific names, but you're right like that's obviously the whole team. Yeah. So to me what this says is that we've got interest from the some of the other some of the we're looking at we've got Tom Yando, did he offer himself ZBA zoning? I don't think it was through that. I want to say it was through energy. Let me check my email for a second here. I want to say, I want to say it was via me and we get the thing up from, up from. See them both. Well, yeah, it was via energy. Okay. And it's like public works basically. That sort of avenue, but not via ZBA. Yeah. So what this is starting to tell me is that we still got primarily the the ETC next that we're looking at is more or less the planning commissions. So we've got other folks that are interested. And I think from that we, I would like to suggest that we look at setting up our own work groups. And if folks want to join us on those, they can, but if we can use our monthly or our once a month meetings to make sure that we're on track to look for the other, you know, the high points to start framing some of the stuff. For example, you know, the question on article three, you know, I think that's ours to decide the uses, even the, you know, some of the tables that are along with that, maybe those get farmed out a little bit for review and discussion. What's on article three? That's what we're talking tonight. That's the proposed ETC next regulation changes that Darren was talking about at the beginning. Well, I can't remember who's Darren's memo or just a conversation, but there was somewhere, was it in your memo, Darren, where we talked about whether we wanted to scrap the permitted and conditional and go to a more higher level? Yes, that was in my memo. And it was not necessarily a strong recommendation. It was just something to consider as you look at both ETC and town-wide uses, you know, trying to simplify some of that might help from an economic development perspective and a permitting perspective, help things move smoother. You guys don't have to be so in the details all the time about, you know, this use, which is almost the same as this other use, but isn't allowed in this district and that creates weirdness. So I think the, you know, overall review of uses will give you some level of, you know, simplification and consolidation, but one thing you could go towards is simply, you know, is retail allowed in this district. Doesn't matter what kind of retail, doesn't matter how it's structured or how big it is retail and loud. Residential, is any residential allowed in this district, you know, or do we still want to keep the, you know, single family, two family, et cetera. I don't think we're going to get to that full extreme, but moving more in that direction might help with some of these questions. So, again, I'm going to say so a lot. If it kind of feels to me that tonight, maybe we should be deciding if we want to take this article three and run with it, we get chain, you know, update it, clean it up or whatever, or not. If somebody else please redirect me, but it feels like that's our, that's a starting point. If we embrace that, then, you know, we can fine tune it. You know, there's a couple of things like getting rid of that word I don't like anywhere we see it. And it's in there a few times, so. Which word is that? Form-based code. Yeah, I don't see, it's like, you're not supposed to say Voldemort either. Ah, I know! So what would the new word be? FBC, yeah, you know me. I mean, it could be anything. It could be design, it could be building design, you know. Dynamic design. We don't need to name it, we don't need to label it. It's just, I think that's in there a little bit and it's that term, that term brings with it a lot of baggage in my mind. And if we don't have that term, whether we call it building design or building code or whatever, we can find something out. But just that particular term brings a lot with it. Yeah, and let me say this about form-based code, and I've said this before. It is a style of zoning and of code writing. And basically what it's trying to do is give you the most objective and, you know, precise set of rules that you can get to decide what gets built in an area. So I don't really see it as its own thing. I see it as a place on a spectrum of how you do zoning. So the question, I think that the Planning Commission needs to answer is, again, how specific do you wanna get with your zoning requirements and your, you know, building dimensional requirements and setbacks and, you know, specificity of glazing and all of that. And then the other question is, how do you want those elements of zoning review? Do you want it to be at the Planning Commission table in a discretionary format? I'm gonna try and stay a little closer to the, yeah. All right, let me start over. Form-based code, it's not, it's a style. It's not a, you know, it's somewhere on a spectrum of how you regulate with zoning regulations. It's meant to be specific and objective as possible. So the question the Planning Commission should answer is one, how specific do you wanna get with your regulations? And two, how do you want those elements reviewed? Do you want it to be administrative done by staff with a zoning permit? Or do you want it to be deliberative at the Planning Commission table with public input and so forth? There is no right answer and there doesn't have to be a one or nothing for every element. So those are the things to keep in mind. Right, and I think there, from my perspective and it's just one perspective, that that is a more rigid or more defined and more administrative, you know, process. And it would be harder to step away from that if we felt we needed to. Whereas if we are approaching it the way we are, which is in more of a hybrid form, we have the underlying structure of that which shall not be mentioned, but it's not rigidly implied yet or implicitly, explicitly, explicitly implied yet. And it would give us a chance to move to that if we find that this is starting to work. It gives us room to maneuver going forward or we may find that we want that flexibility and interpretation, which applications of the table allows us now in the public input. Right, so what I'm hearing is you're not locking yourself in even though you're heading in that direction once you get your sleeves rolled up and starting, you might say, okay, we didn't think of certain things. I think we're, Paula, hang on a second. Constantly flowing. Yeah, we wanna have the tools that that provides which is these are the types of structures we're looking for, the types of, you know, that which it gives us, if we have it as a tool and not the rule, it gives us greater flexibility for now, because it's hard to change things back once you lock it in. That's my fear. And I think this is like half a step, but we're recognizing that it may be for start providing us the tools we need. Absolutely, and that's one of the biggest challenges with form-based code is that, you know, it sort of comes out of the box and communities implement it and then suddenly realize, oh wait, we didn't think of this. Now we gotta go back and fix it. So I definitely support the incremental approach to updating the regulations and the more clear that we as a community get about what we expect, the more specificity we can put in the regs and that can be over a long time period. So, yeah. And I would say in order to make, to take some of the teeth out of the phrase form-based code, we could simply call it form-based design. And I know it's a funny little thing, but it's not a code. Design is, design is, it is. Anyways, it's a minor point for now. Let's, let's, Dave, please salvage this. So one of the things Darren asked is, should we go to work groups, full commission or consultants to kind of talk next steps? I mean, where I'm struggling a little, Darren, is, you know, we've baked the ETCnext master plan. We have these draft regs and every time I jump into the draft regs, all it does is raise a ton of questions for me because as an example, we have some things where we're allowing 40% lock coverage and somewhere we're allowing 80 and like, I'm just trying to get my head around the minutia and the intended consequences. So I'm wondering what kind of consultant we could get in and what level of help they could get us to get into the weeds. Yeah, and I think the question of what do we do with consultants really is going to come later once you've figured out some of where you want to go with this. So if you were ready to right now say, hey, these regs look great. We just need to tidy them up. That might, you know, I'm honestly, we might not even need a consultant to do that. We could do that with staff, but we're definitely hearing this is not where, this is not the end point. We're going to workshop this a little bit. So I would suggest a framework of looking at a couple elements of the proposed, though the draft zoning and seeing how we feel about that. Dusty, I see Betsy Dunn has her hand up and had a couple questions in the chat. Do you want to entertain that now or do you want to keep moving? Yeah, I haven't opened up for comments yet. Let's keep going for a little bit and at 7.05, give us almost 10 minutes here. We'll take a break for public input. Sounds good. So I'm just navigating to the section that I want to look at real quick and then I will share that. And before I lose my thought, Dusty, I liked your idea of inviting the other work groups, energy, whoever is signed up. I mean, specific to the ETC next, honestly as early as you can so that you can all maybe eat off each other with suggestions. Absolutely. So I kind of jumped into the middle of this here because I want to highlight one of the newer formats that was put together in this document. So this would be an example of table that just like you'd see in article two of the regulations now, so each of these zoning district tables, it has the purpose statement, it has design elements. That's a slightly new feature here where we're talking about the specifics of, okay, the general goals are there but here's what we really need with that. Similar to, we've got the plan, the purpose, the overall vision. Now here's the design elements of the design guide. Once you hit the next page, now we're into the details, the midi group. What's different about this table of allowed uses is you've got the uses, they're grouped by, for instance, residential, commercial, civic, et cetera. I'm just trying to zoom in here to get that a little more visible. So you've got permanent and conditional but what you've also got are these dots that go into the building types. So for instance, let's see, this is the mixed use north, so we're talking the area to the north or west of Route 15 Center Road between 209 and old stage road. So let's look at multifamily three to four units. That building type is, or that residential use is permitted but only in the form of a townhouse, a live work or a multifamily small building type and we'll look at building types in a bit. It's in the design guide, it's also in some of these tables. But for instance, we wouldn't want the multifamily large building type to include a three to four unit dwelling. We also, we're not talking mixed use here, it's a purely residential use. So that's sort of the different structure of this document that can get a little more specificity between the use and the building type. So that's something new. How does the planning commission feel about that approach? And I can provide more examples if you need to work through that a little bit, but. Let's reach on. I think it's a good approach, but it's, I have questions like the multifamily five plus units is permitted, but the multifamily large is not. So this is a little confusing because of the way it's laid out. We're allowing both types of, both sizes of multifamily dwelling or just saying that, okay, if you've got three to four units, go look at these building types, townhouse, live, work and multifamily small, to figure out what you want to build. Or let's say, oh, I want to make, I like that townhouse concept that I saw on the design guide. What kind of building can I actually do with that? What kind of, all right, that makes sense. Sorry. So you can approach it from either way. Okay. John, where are we picking up with those recommendations? Yep. What was that, John? Where are we coming up with those recommendations for building types? Is this just a copy of what we have today? So yeah, this is a copy of what the consultant has had. This was just, you know, first blush. We don't have to stick with any of these specifics, but the building types are a little more set at this point. You guys have looked at the design guide and that's where those building types came from. And we've agreed those were overall okay. It doesn't mean we can't revisit that. And I personally had some question about why we distinguish between multifamily small and multifamily large, mixed use small, mixed use large. Again, that sort of gets into the specificity of uses that we may not care about in the end. So we can tweak some of this. But what we're trying to get at, and I'll look at the building types later so you can see a little more of what that means from a regulatory perspective. Basically, we're just trying to say uses and dimensional requirements depend on the building type that you're proposing and vice versa. Josh, I see your hands up. Are you muted, Josh? What makes you think that? So, thank you. I was brilliant. I just so you know, we can tweak specifics and everything but I really like the idea of pairing the residential uses or commercial uses or any uses where the building types. I remember liking that in the, was it the design guide? We saw that and it had like, here is what we think by a townhouse. Here is what we think by this because I wanna say it was Paula actually, if she's there, she can affirm or deny this. Some years ago said that there was sort of a Wild West feel to some of the architecture and it didn't talk it in the town center and it didn't talk to itself or each other or the other buildings. And I like the idea of the building types because that could sort of bring that sort of visual coherence to the whole area. And I like, we talked about that both in the ETC and just generally. I remember John Alden talking really persuasively about that idea. And so I like this in general specifics. Yeah, we can talk about the individual things but I like this idea. Cool. I'm actually gonna. One of the core concepts that has been with us since we started the ETC Next discussions is going to having more specified, not just uses but design, part of the design guide, streetscapes, everything all seems to be tied to this sort of approach. Awesome. So hearing some pretty good consensus that we wanna stick with the building type approach and it makes sense to talk about uses in the context of those building types and we'll get into the specifics. True. I like it, but I think I'm trying to figure out like who judges the building type? Sorry, there's gonna be a gray area as you switch from one type to the other. Is that something that's done in the office administratively or how does that? I'm sorry, I'm getting in the weeds right off the bat. No, no, it's a great question. And that's something that I think the planning commission should answer. However, process-wise, you wanna do that either at this table or working groups or staff gives you a recommendation. But those are some of the questions that we went back and forth with consultants about is how do we wanna approach this? And I can look through my notes and maybe check in with Mark and Sharon as to sort of why we ended up with these specifics of categorizing by size versus going with a more traditional, well, I'll say it form-based code where it doesn't matter what the use is, doesn't matter how many units it is, we just want to look like this. So my memory is the answer to that is yes, and they would have choices, but you guys would be deciding what those choices would be that they can pick from. So administratively, they could come in and pick whatever the selection. Darren, is that your understanding as well? Yeah, and actually I'm gonna jump over to something else that might help you us get a sense of why this is important. So looking at those building types, this is another section of the proposed regulations where this would be the building type standards. So let's say we wanna do a mixed use building and we know it's in the correct zone and it's allowed. So what does that actually look like on the ground? So each of these tables is two pages long, it's got four sections, kind of similar to the design guide. First section talks about lock configuration, how big can a lot be, how much frontage, how deep, stuff like that. The next part is the building siting. That's basically your setbacks and how it faces. I'm just, I guess. And he fades in. Can you hear him, Ned? Ned, well. Right. Sharon, can you check the volume on the TV and maybe turn it up a bit? On the TV. I think we just need to have Josh do all this talking. Josh, yes. Well, no, he just needs to keep his, because when he made a point of keeping his face close to the mic, it was fine. All right, I will try again. So. It's better, Darren. Okay. So, follow you. Follow? All right. Yeah, that's fine if he stays in that place. All right. I need to get myself a headset or something. So each of these tables has four sections. We've got the lock configuration. That's basically how the dimensions of a lot, how big can it be, how wide and how deep. The building sighting, which is setbacks and how it faces the street. We had a discussion about primary streets and secondary streets that gets into some of those streetscape design concepts. Parking is in there as well. The next section is height, mass and use. So getting into a little more about what that building looks like visually. Well, actually more of what it looks like structurally. How many floors? How big are those floors? What does the facade look like? And then the last section is the facade and frontage, some of the more aesthetic elements, glazing, pedestrian access, the frontage type, sometimes the roof types might be in here, I think, materials, et cetera. So to jump back to where we were before, this is why we would wanna talk about a building type and the uses. If you're gonna pick the mixed use small type, it's gonna have subtle differences from the mixed use large in terms of a lot of size potentially setbacks and probably more likely the height and the floors and so on. And particularly for some of the larger buildings, you're probably going to see more of a federal style you know, architecture as opposed to maybe a, let me get back to the smaller ones. Well, I guess they both might be federal style depending, but the bigger your building gets, the more structurally it depends on sort of a squared off architecture. So I hope that tangent was helpful. Okay. Um, let's take a break and entertain some public comment. It's a little beyond 705. Paula, you're here. Would you like to, I'm looking while I'm trying to get to Zoom, take your hands. One of the things I wanted to say back about 15 minutes ago was that there's no reason why you or we can't come up with, we here in SS can't come up with our own name for what kind of form and design and style we use. Yep, that's true. It might be more descriptive and more helpful to people. Okay. And then in terms of the style and what you want to look toward is let's not forget the responses and the result of the responses to the survey that was done in terms of what people wanted to see here in Essex. And it was pretty consistent that, you know, they wanted Essex to look like a New England town. And that can mean a lot of different things, but so it gives you an opportunity to have some variety, but it also gives you a pattern to follow in terms of wanting to maintain that feel. And then in terms of the Northwest sort of district area, I know that one of the things that Debbie was hoping for for that area, which is the original owner, was that it would be a mix of housing and smaller businesses, sort of like a neighborhood general store or not a big thing, but just the neighborhood store where the kids could go and buy an ice cream or you could pick up a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk or whatever it is you want, but the smaller kinds of things that you might see in a typical New England village. A sweet clover, like a sweet clover market. Yes, a little less, like a seven to 11. Not, yeah, more individually owned, not a chain. Well, that would be sweet clover, but sweet clover is sort of very specific and I wasn't trying to get that specific. Thanks, Paula. Betsy. Thank you. Thank you, yes. What I was wondering about is, I like the idea of the forms that you have for the small residential and this is how big it is and this is what the setbacks are and everything, but I'm wondering about how we, in making all those choices for all the different various types of buildings you've got, do we have inspectors that go in when all of the face, the outlines, sound outlines, but when they put up the structure of the house but not all of the walls and everything, do we go in and do inspections and make sure they're adhering to, this is how high it's gonna be, this is how wide it can be, and if they moved it out by 10 feet, are we coming in and saying, you gotta pull it down, use the 10 feet too wide here and let's stay with it. Do we have any teeth to it and do we have regular inspectors that go out and do this because there are gonna be so many different types of buildings that you've got and different frontages and the setbacks, then I think, I'm wondering, do we have inspectors number one that go out and do this just as they get done with the framing, that's the word I wanted, the framing and then when they get to the plumbing, go in and check the plumbing, go in and check the electrical as they get to do with those things, do we do that? I think that's a little outside of our purview. A quick general answer. Yeah, let's give a general answer. If we're talking about a commercial building, the state inspectors come, electricians, building codes and all that. If we were gonna go this way for a residential building that wasn't part of multifamily, just a single residential lot, I would say that we would probably require the engineer of the project to give certification that it meets the height of everything they said it was going to be. So, and even with single family homes, public works is involved with inspecting the water lines and the sewer lines as that progresses, but with the actual construction of the building, I think we would rely on for a residential building development would be, we would rely on a certification from the engineer that says it was built according to the plan. And that's, then it's up to. Question, you don't generally have an engineer involved in a single family dwelling here. What you, the only authority you basically are working on is the developers doing the installation that has a state license for plumbing or electrical and he's putting his license online. I mean, you get an engineer, yeah, you could do it, but you're gonna end up getting two, three grand more for the cost of the house. Yeah, not required in single family dwellings. There's no, you don't even have to use a licensed plumber or electricians, only when you get to multifamily and not that code kicks. That's a little frightening, but it happens. It is. You know, because there's another personality. Because you've seen this stuff. But it does have an impact, because when you look at the one, the corner of old stage and 15, that multi-use home there that they put in, it wasn't supposed to be as tall as it is, and they just built it. And they knew it was bigger than it was supposed to be. So Betsy, they had to cease construction and that would be, I think, 11 old stage road, the Colvard building. So I put a stop work order on them and they had to come back to the planning commission to get approval to fix what they have done. So the general answer to your question, Betsy, is that when we have these regulations, we review plans through site plan review, whether that's staff or the planning commission table that say, okay, we give us your plans. Yep, it looks like they meet the standards. Great, go build it. And if they are building it, not to the plans that they gave us, that's a zoning violation. And then the zoning administrator, we can involve stop work, figure out how to resolve that, whether it's they go and do it as the plans they presented or they get an amendment if that's within the realm of possibility allowed by the regs. So that's not gonna change with these new standards. Okay, okay, thank you. Yeah, so one thing to remember too is that the new standards will actually, even though there may be a lot of them, it should actually make things easier because there will be some specificity and it won't be quite so much of a builder or a engineer coming in and saying, I think this is better than what you might think, whereas now we might actually have some firm guidelines for them to say. It doesn't matter what you think. Exactly. Patty Davis has had her hand up. Yeah, I know. Patty, go ahead. Yeah, I like what you just said just now, because my question has to do with lock configuration and setbacks and our goal when we got the consultant was, well, not really just him, it's my opinion is if we have the same setback for anything that's built when it comes to commercial or infill or green space, have the public realm, the public realm right of way be the same distance, have that be a standard? I find reading all this stuff, I read it all before the meeting, under lock configuration, my questions are like the building setback, like the front of the building in relation to the streetscape, the primary street is 10 feet minimum, 25 feet maximum, having all these different distances, how can we make a walkable community when the setbacks are all different depending on the type of building? I guess the conception of public realm to me is a form of hybrid code. And maybe if we just have to write new codes for our new requirements, standards for the hybrid code or standard code that you've been doing, I'm asking, would that be something you guys would be interested in? The form-based code of saying, okay, every building, if we start with infill development first and green space, and we code those areas first, has to be a certain distance in front of the streetscape, that right of way area, so that it's the same, no matter how high the building is or how deep it is, and parking, of course, is in the back or on the secondary street. I just wonder why reading all your stuff, all the buildings have such different setbacks, minimums and maximums, is there a way to standardize that so that you have that public realm all throughout town? Patty, one of the things that we've been trying for is to allow some diversity with some consistency and having everything be exactly the same I think it would be horrible, frankly, because we'd have buildings that would potentially be three stories high in the exact same placement as a one-story building, and I think that we would be handicapping ourselves tremendously. It has to do with public realm, public realm. We were talking setbacks and so forth, so that's what we're talking about. And I think we've been through a lot, and Paula referenced the discussions that the community engaged with us on, and although we want an old New England feel, supposedly, and I'm still grasping that, we didn't get the impression that everybody wanted everything to be exactly the same across the community. And it wouldn't, if you look at old, if you look at New England villages as they grew and as they developed, different, I mean, you would have the same required setback in terms of proximity to the road, but then the actual building would vary and some buildings might have, if we're talking commercial and in the public realm, then some buildings might have seating out front, others might not, and it would also be affected visually by, as Dusty said, the height of the building and feeling overwhelming if it's too close and the height would dictate that it needed to be back a little bit. So, but it also has to do with the interest of the space and making everything all lined up does not create interest or good design. So, I know you're coming up. I just got a question for Paula. I just want, before you jump in, I just want to say I'm gonna bring this back to the PC in five minutes. So, Tom and John and Josh sharpen your pencils and chew you too, Dave. I know you've been writing, so I'm not worried about that. Go ahead and put me on the spot. My question for Paula, you're talking of, you know, community vision and all, are you familiar? I'm sure you probably are with Alexandria, Virginia. Do you spend any time there? No. They have done it well. And I mean, they got miles and miles of townhouses and stuff. So, and I think they're not all, they're not all even, but you go into the neighborhoods. I think, you know, the biggest fear I see if we raise that design standard too high, we're cutting out a large group of moderate income people who can afford to build. Is it the more stuff you add, the more expensive? Oh, I don't think it has to be that. I mean, a lot of, And so I want to be careful. Yeah, a lot of New England houses are actually quite simple. But Alexandria is a good example. Not New England. What? It's not New England. You should put together a little something and present it. All right. So, let's move back to, let's move back to. But I do know what you mean, Ned. Anyone else have any comments or questions? That's sitting and listening in. If not, I'm going to jump back a couple of minutes early to the PC. So, let's go around the table. I know, Darren, you've asked us a number of times about how we want to approach this, what we want to do with this. I'm not getting really a sense from anyone how we want to dive in other than, you know, we've got this article three sitting in front of us. Do we want to run with it? Yeah. We've got a number of the tables, PDFs of the tables that we can use, the definitions, the roof types, the, you know, the design types and so forth that we've got in there. Are these things that we want to accept? I mean, do we have issues with the sizes? I think, hang on a sec. Dave, you mentioned earlier about lot coverage and so forth. Do we want to start getting into the numbers or do we want to maybe accept these in concept and then go back to, you know, the consultant discussion and drill in deeper on each of these, on the numbers? I mean, the reason I'm keeping going, trying to keep this going is we've put a lot of years into getting to this point. And I don't want us to stop and throw this away and say, let's revisit because I think this is, in my opinion, more than a good starting point. This is probably 90 percent there. And I don't want to lose sight of that. I mean, here's, in my opinion, where I think I'm at is, you know, this is where the rubber hits the road and the devil's in the details. So I would be hesitant to do a lock stock. Let's just approve it all. I think what I'm worried about, especially with the differences in numbers, is what the unattended consequences would be. Would love to see us take one area of town and one or two building types and flush out all the details in a couple of those and then reverse engineer that against the building that's there and see what it would do. Like with that, can we, what would it do to that area of town if we adopted and then, you know, let's pick two building types where we know there's a building and then go back at a building that is that type there today and say, all right, what would happen if we applied these standards to that building and just kind of talk through it and say, would it get closer to the road? Would it be back further from the road? Would it, would that style be allowed? What would happen to the driveways and the lock coverage? And because I'm just nervous, you know, I don't know what the hell that, I mean, I know conceptually with the difference between 40 percent lock coverage and 80 is, but we go from 40 percent lock coverage on one building type to up to 80 on another. That's a huge difference. And now the intention may be that we want more green space with one type of building than another, but all the buildings end up coming in at the 80 percent lock coverage. Okay. That's exactly what I'm saying. So I don't know, that's my opinion. I don't want to get too far down the road on the details and find out we're going to throw the whole thing out. I'd rather just flush out one or two building types and say, well, let's go at it really hard with the detail. So do you feel this is something we should do? I'm going to pick on you, since you've got a good, a better I think understanding what we're looking for. Do you think this is something that we could have a work group set up and do some preliminary work and bring it back to the commission for discussion? Or do you think this is a full commission discussion each time? It might be neat to see a work group try to brainstorm this a little because I don't think we're going to do it in a meeting like this to that detail. So that means our work groups need to be three PC members or less and other other. And that was going to be my point. It's like before you guys even get so far ahead with what you're talking about tonight and you're now inviting other groups to come in, they're already behind me, Apal. Would have been great to have them, those groups here hearing what you're- No, I don't think they're, I don't think that's true. I don't think that, I mean, that's different because we've been talking with them now for over a month about everything that we're doing. So this is just another facet. Yeah, but they haven't had their nose in the ETC next. They didn't live it the way you guys have lived it. So they're going to be seeing this and honestly, probably for the first time where they really are digesting it. But it doesn't matter as long as you invite, if they're included, I think that'd be great. And I think David, I totally agree with that's a great idea because it would be sad to go through weeks and months whether we hire a consultant or not to then determine that you have to chuck it. Yeah, you've been jumping out of your chair. Yeah, just to, no, not really. Oh, I think, I think David's idea of maybe grabbing two, because there's some inconsistencies in here that I think we need to work out. And the only other big thing is if we're talking the town center, I think we ought to lose this section on single family detached homes because unless we really want to build that up there, and I'm not sure if, given what that, the value of the property we're talking about, who's going to want to build single family homes? I don't think that's the purpose of trying to get a town center of more single family homes. I would probably lose that first section, interesting, completely. But what about on, as you go north-west? Yeah, what is he going out of the center? We're talking on the other side of Route 15. Yeah, hang on. Yeah, the other side there, you know. So this sounds, I mean, Darren, from your perspective, this feels like it's starting to gel. Tom, you got to put your hands up. Tom and Josh, both. Well, let me go first, because I think I have sort of a fundamental question. Darren, in the text, the highlighted yellow said the goals are certain percent residential, certain percent commercial, certain percent public. How is that going to be enforced? If an application comes in on a single plot, we're going to, we can't divvy up the percentages. So we can't approve like five buildings. The six developer comes in, we say, oh no, you have to be apart because we need a certain percentage. So what's the plan there? I had the same question, Tom. And again, this was in a draft, you know, halfway built sort of situation when we, I love to, by the way, say no as we're bringing it back to you. So we didn't get a chance to flesh that out with the consultants, but it's definitely a question in my mind. And that's again, where the design parameters might be a little less, you know, firm in terms of like every project must do this, but it might be more of like, hey, in this district, you know, these are the targets we're aiming for. Are you consistent with that? That's something that we can maybe work with. And again, that's, you know, we need a lot more specific language to say, you know, what that means. One other element you could explore with some of that, particularly for the mixed use south and the mixed use north is an official map. So those areas are what would likely become a new town center designation and staff's opinion. And one of the prerequisites for that is an official map where you lay out, okay, here's where the, you know, development's gonna be, here's where the infrastructure is gonna be, here's where the civic space is gonna be. So that could be another way to get those targets. And, you know, we already have some of that going in the both property where we've got an active master plan and it's not set in stone, but it gives a sense of like roughly what things look like. So a couple of approaches. Yeah, that assumes that one large landowner. Well, not necessarily. So that's the official map is, you know, telling all the landowners, here's how the town is gonna, you know, require that you do things. And of course it's a conversation with them as you develop that official map. It's almost like going through a project review, the site plan for a subdivision review with a lot more screwed. Yeah, but how do you pick the landowner to post the whole part? So relative to that question, some of the building types require a minimum frontage like 75% of the frontage has to be a building. So would like a pocket park count is that for that frontage, for example? Yes. So I'm gonna jump to table 3.10, which is somewhere in the probably towards the end. So one of the, you know, standards, you know, elements, the elements of standards is defining these civic space types and getting more specific about what we mean when we talk about civic space. So if we're talking, you know, we've got, these are sort of rough, but, you know, green, a larger, well, yeah, fairly large, centrally located, you know, green landscaped area, up to being a quarter acre and two acres sort of pulls together a whole, you know, set of buildings all the way down to pocket parks, which are, you know, tiny 500 to 2,000 square feet. Basically just, you know, a nice green space to pass through on your way between destinations, you know, we've got a whole range of things here. So one of the ideas was to probably pair these civic space types with some of the building types, or maybe with district types, you know, we can sort of figure out what makes the most sense. We haven't gotten to this level of detail yet, but there are ways to approach this for sure. Does that help, Tom? A little bit. Specifically, my question was, if you have a single lot and you wanna build a commercial or something and you're required to have, I forget the number, I think it's 90% of the frontage has to be building facade, well, you know, they came in and said, okay, well, we're gonna do 80%, but 10% is gonna be a pocket park. Would that meet the criteria? Yeah, so the building frontage criteria is really getting at how that building hits the streetscape. And basically saying, you don't wanna take up the entire frontage with your building, leave some space either for access, whether it's vehicular or pedestrian, maybe a pocket park, maybe party your frontage types, which I'm actually gonna jump over to here. This is another element that we're looking at is how does that building interact with the streetscape? And, you know, is it a covered porch? Is it a gallery or something in here? I wanna say, for a court where you actually the building steps back and you've got an interior space framed by the buildings that way, you know, you've got your building frontage is not the entire property land. So, yeah, there's multiple ways to get at that. And it's trying to figure out how all those pieces fit together that's gonna be the double in the detail work that David mentioned. But I think some of them had a minimum facade. So, I don't know, I'm just thinking if we're trying to get a certain amount of civic space and yet we're trying to maximize the usage of each lot, it just seems in conflict. So, if we say civic space counts as usage of the water then it would be okay. Right, and I think keeping in mind that civic space does not have to be public. It doesn't have to be on the road. So, that could be interior to the property. It could be, you know, a building that on a corner that frames, I wish I could visualize this for you, but I'm trying to think of an example. Right, I agree, I understand. I'm just wondering the degrees of freedom a developer would have. Yeah, and that's up to you as the planning commission to decide, you know, and it might not even be something you can specify in the code and in the regulations. It might be something you have to, you know, negotiate at the table when they come in with a design. I'd say those things are definitely something you would be harder to bake into the rags. So, at what point do we get a master plan for the North District then? At what point do we require a master plan for the developers? Is that your question? Well, you were saying that we could have a master plan that would give us sort of the amount of civic or public space that we wanted, but that wouldn't happen as part of the zoning rags that would have to happen at some later point, right? So, you could go either way if the planning commission wants to adopt an official map on its own to, you know, put forth here's how the layout's gonna work. That's almost, you know, it's the process of adopting a zoning ordinance. You go through and say, okay, here's our map. Here's the public hearings. We've notified everybody and we've worked with the landowners, et cetera. The alternative is to have the developer bring you a plan first with some parameters in place. You review it at the table. You could make your master plan more binding than they are currently. Right now it's pretty just, you know, it's a sketch on paper. Darren, let me jump for a second. I wanna, Tom, I wanna loop back to your second because I'm almost feeling like we're drifting away from your original question is how do we manage if we're supposed to be, you know, 40% of green or whatever, how do we manage that? If we don't have a single owner, it isn't gonna be manageable through a master plan because that's not, the master plans are for the owners of their lot, for lots, whatever. You know, even today we have a, you know, it's almost a first in, first out sort of deal. If an area can only have so many residential buildings and there's multiple owners or the lot coverage or whatever you wanna do, there's still an element of first in, first out. So unless we come up with a overall master plan for the area out the door, I don't know that that's something that we could enforce or make any one applicant say you have to, you have to shoulder your 40% or something like that. It's by lot, you know, we've got a lot coverage. That's where the buffers and everything else that we talk about come into play to maintain a certain amount of coverage per lot, but the overall parcel to the point that might not be really an enforceable concept. Yeah, and I think Dusty is hitting it on the head, you know, if you're doing a parcel by parcel, you're probably not gonna get those larger open spaces that you're looking for. So for things like a main green, you do wanna put that planning, you know, idea out there and say, hey, here's where we want it. Developers gotta make it happen if you abut this space. But when you're talking about finer grain of a neighborhood, maybe individual pocket parks are okay on each property or maybe you give the option of both depends on how you wanna deal with it. And I think for the green table 3.7.3 under the cottage stuff when it's talks about, you know, the height, mass and use and building facade and frontage, it shows, you know, different layouts that include, you know, the different green space and so forth that could be included. Yeah, I mean, that's just layouts and so forth. Like that would include some of the green, some of the open, not only it's not the only thing, but that's just that that starts, I think, to accommodate the amount of lot coverage that we're looking for per building type. So I think we've got a pretty deep rabbit hole. Yeah. We wanna pull that gun and have Josh. I think it's worth a memory that we've been there before. Right. Yeah. Tommy, you okay for now or you have another? I have smaller things, but I'll defer those. Let's circle on over to Josh for now. So what I was gonna say, and this actually fits in well, I think the last was that 10 or 15 minutes shows the virtues actually of Dave's approach to which I'm gonna give a pretty big ditto because all those questions right now that Tom had, they were great questions, but we can't answer them effectively at the table at a meeting. I think the idea of sort of SimCitying things and game playing and figuring out how would this look different in a work group format and then coming to the table, then every one of Tom's questions would have been answered pretty easily. Oh yeah, we role played that and here's what that looks like and here's how that's different. And so before Tom raised his hand, I was gonna say ditto to what David had said and now I'm gonna say super ditto to what David had said. And just for folks that are listening in and so forth, I'm gonna stick with the PC for another 10 minutes and then at 1950, roll it open to the public again. So everybody I'm sure is gonna have some questions. So I haven't heard much from John. You still with us? Yep, yep. The only thing I have is, I definitely agree with working through some real life scenarios. I think we talked about that before too. I think that's a great idea. The only thing I have a question on is when the article three, like when are we gonna get into the weeds of the uses, the allowed uses? I know right now it's a draft and there's all those black dots in there, but I don't know who made the decisions on the black dots. And that's what I was kind of getting at earlier too. Like are we gonna walk through each one of those and decide as a group what's allowed in each of those areas for each of those building types? And to answer one of your questions, John, those dots were put in there, starting with the current uses that we had. Can you guys hear me? Yeah, we can. Okay, it was starting with what we currently had, trying to match it up with what was in the ETC plan, but ultimately the consultants basically put those dots on and said, here's a starting point, let's negotiate and talk about what makes sense and present this in the planning commission, particularly the highlighted ones that were like, yeah, they weren't sure about that. Okay, I just think it would be useful to go through as a group at some point. I don't know when, but I know for example, like drive-throughs, right? We talked about that briefly. We didn't reach any consensus on it. I think we need to revisit that, especially after COVID and seeing how useful things like drive-throughs could have been and it was something like that, but we never really circled back on it, but yeah, it looks like we've already made decisions on it. So I just wanna make sure, you know, I'm assuming it's not a final decision, it's a draft, just as you said, it's a first stab at it and we should look back at all of those uses again. Yes, it's definitely just a draft. Okay, cool, that's it for me. And if I can jump in at the end, I think that's all the commissioners, hopefully, right, Dusty? I'm circling back to you. Oh, I'm good, just doubled it out to Dave. Also, we definitely talked about that. The consultants were here too, is modeling some of the existing buildings and putting it into this, see what happens when it comes out. So Darren, I got something, but go ahead. Fine, Dave. Okay, no, actually you first, Dusty. So I'm actually gonna, I'd like to request that Dave, you start something up and try to grab, as you said, a couple examples. Take one of the area. I don't care, you know, you figure out the way you wanna look at this. Small enough approach right now, just basically to do a proof of concept. I mean, we may take, run forward with it, but if you could, do you think that you could bring together a group and again, we can only get three commissioners on there because it has to be a work group process. But do you think you could have something for the next planning meeting, which is the second meeting in May? Even if it's not complete, is it something that you feel you could show process-wise this is progress? It's okay to say no, I'm just trying to, I wanna get too far down the road without knowing that this is gonna be a really functional tool for us. So we're thinking of taking two building types in a specific area of the ETC and doing a deep dive on those, on the tables on those two types and then having a conceptual discussion on perhaps a couple of buildings in that area of the ETC that are existing. Yeah, I mean, if you need to narrow the scope down so it's one, one existing and one, you know, in a comparable structure with the new form, just to something so it's manageable. Did you get your volunteers first? Nope, I get to get commitment from the person who's gonna drive it first. And if I actually could jump in briefly, one thing I wanted to mention and I had a conversation with Matt about this and we can talk about it more deeply in other business, but I think you should focus on the neighborhood commercial and historic center districts first and those building types that would be in those districts. The reason is that I am not sure we're gonna be able to get to adoption of the zoning for the mixed use, north and mixed use, south in the next few years for infrastructure reasons, but I think you could start, you know, you could probably get some adoption of those other districts sooner and I'll explain why later, but. That would be my suggestion. Neighborhood commercial and the historical. Yeah, because those are gonna have the least amount of change from what we currently see there and have some good examples, particularly as a historic district of some of the building types we're looking for. So if this modeling, I mean, that seems like a reasonable for this modeling approach to see if the modeling style is gonna work for us, but if this does, then I would think that we would zoom this up and maybe even at that point, you know, that might be something that we test to a consultant to do model this, model this, model this, if we have more concrete. Is that, do you feel comfortable with that Dave? I mean, with respect to what we might be able to do, to do this as a proof of concept, do the one that makes the most sense that shows us the most, the best comparison for this process. If it's in, you know, the area that we're not gonna be, doesn't matter where. Okay, yeah, I think so, that'll work. So those areas are in the smaller lot. But right now we gotta do the proof of concept. So this isn't necessarily gonna be something that it's gonna be the end result. I mean, it might be, but we gotta see whether or not this tool will work. And I'm not talking about Dave, I'm talking about the modeling process. No, I'm curious. I did not escape it, Mr. Chair. There, couldn't help. I also think those districts and the building types associated with them will be a lot easier to do that proof of concept with. There's a lot fewer factors to deal with. The only thing that might not be as demonstrable, you might not demonstrate the proposed changes as well as something where it's a bigger, could be a bigger impact. So I don't wanna lose that. Right. And that's why I would look to Dave and just make a choice on what you think would be the better tool to demonstrate this. Now, with that said, which commissioners would like to sit in on this with Dave? I'll work with Dave. You handle that? If you'll have me. Get room for one more. Tom? What about the public? Workshop is gonna be a little bit different on this. So this is, it's not gonna be a defined public input necessarily until it comes back to the table here. And that's the way these things grow so we can get the work back to the table partially gelled. And then we can have this public discourse on it. We've done that before and if... What I'm thinking is in public discourse. And to clarify, there's no legal restriction that you couldn't have a member of the public with you when you do that work, whether it's in the field or in an office or whatever. When maybe for the third one who's gonna jump in at any moment to join the group, maybe what time were you thinking to do it? Maybe that's why people are... 4.30 in the morning? 4.30, 4.30. Right before I hit the gym. Yeah. Eat the traffic. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm still baking the request in my head. I'm willing to do it. I'm just trying to bake it so. You could also get some sort of a proposal and I'd be able to flush it out, send that out, see who wants to invite. But I was sort of thinking. So maybe let Shue and I sit down and flush. And this is what has flushed out while flushing. Well, unless it's totally garbage. This has worked before. So you guys go forth, come up with the concept. We have a basic concept. Come up with a... See if you can develop this into a working idea, working plan and then decide how to go. If it's convenient to make it accessible for other public input, so be it. Otherwise, I mean, this is part of the process. I'll just tell you what I'm thinking when it gets to public. You do. You do. I don't worry about that. I know you find ways to make sure your input is entered. I was just going to offer that. I can draw what they're talking about for them. You can do what? I can draw what you're talking about, whether you're talking about making... She's an architect. She can save your crans, Dave. I'd like to just interject. I think that the first... What you're suggesting with Dave and myself working on it first is a good idea because probably within the first hour, we're going to realize what the right route is to try to prove the concept, right? And I think that otherwise, we're going to waste other people's time. I think between the two of us, we can probably realize like, okay, here's the best thing to do to try to flush this out. The reason I'm pushing to have this done for the next meeting is I don't want this idea to take months to develop. Fair enough. If this works, small scale, find the one that demonstrates the idea the best, whether it's in the areas that Darren mentioned, or wherever you think this process will demonstrate most effectively the unintended consequences. Right. We're not testing the infrastructure, but we're testing the... For off the record, I'm going to take my real estate of 21 plus year hat off. I'm going to go back to my software development hat. We're going to do use case analysis and rapid development. And this is going to like... I'm going to be dusting off some skills. Yes. They're working good ones. You can do it. I'm going to do agile. Exactly. Oh, the Dustin speaks my language. Yeah. So, again, if this works, it's just like reaching out for the other commissions. If this works, we're going to scale it up. And this isn't written in stone yet, but we need to get this idea going so we can then determine whether or not we can move forward with the article three that we've got conceptually. I like article three. And the tables that go with it, but as everybody has recognized, now we're at the point where the fine details matter. So, let's see what it takes to do it right. Now, I've got 750. I'm going back to folks on the online and Paula here, if there's any comments. SDA, Tom and Tom did have a couple other questions, I think. Yeah, we'll circle back to Tom. I want to make sure anybody, because I haven't been engaging public comment except at these certain times that I don't want to shut folks out. So, I'm not seeing, okay. Hey, and Patty, go ahead. Dusty, I just wanted to say that, not to go backwards, but at 726, what John was mentioning about how some, so the frontage, no, he was referencing, for example, lot frontage or facade, is 80% of the lot, the coverage versus 40% lot coverage, and that there's no, there's, there possibly is inconsistency in the setbacks of the building placement on the lot. What he was saying back at 726, when you look at this video, is what I was getting at when I was talking about public realm. And maybe I was using the wrong term public realm, but I was specifically talking about, especially in the historical district, when you guys write code for the infield development that's soon gonna be in between the buildings that are there, having lot coverage standard. I mean, I know if they have tables in front and all that, I'm not talking about building height and size. I'm talking about its relationship to the street. That was it all. And I, when I heard John speak, I'm like, yes, John, that's what I meant. That's what I was getting at. So I just wanted to clarify, thanks. Good, thank you. Anyone else off the line? Hey, would no one else asking anything? Tom, I'll turn it back over to you. Okay, just two small points. Darren, what about a double shed roof type? Is that something that would just be fall under shed or is that an oversight or what? Here on mute. Thank you. Pull out the roof types. So when you say double shed and let's see, this is, so this is the shed type that we have. You're thinking like that, but mirrored on the roof. Yeah, like two shed roofs with the row windows. And I think that's a, yeah, that would, that's a gable. That's a gable, but yeah. Shed roofs are single, single pitch, one directional. And a gable is basically a triangular. With a pink. Yeah, it's a ridge. It has right, but it, well, a double shed that doesn't meet at the top, right? So they're separated and you can either have windows or a wall in between. I see what you're saying. There's a house on Orchard Terrace in my neighborhood that I think is exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, so I guess here's another, a general question, a general response to your question is, do you want to stick with these, you know, six or seven roof types? Or do you want to allow more flexibility? Would be something you should look at as you work through these regulations. And if there's a type of roof in here that, or that's not in here, but that you see in the ETC that we want to keep, we should add that in. Yeah, I don't know. I've seen like commercial buildings use double shed and it can look nice. And I'm not, you know, promoting it, but I'm not sure that we want to exclude it either. What does he mean? What does he mean when he says double shed? Because when I drive, instead of being like this, one is here and the other one starts up higher. Oh, so there might be clear story windows in the other part. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Okay, all right. Got it. What about a building like that? Okay. And then my other question, Darren, is all the, the drawings show a rectangular lots. What about trapezoidal lots on angle one? Good question. I think we've talked about this so much in the concept, we haven't gotten that detail yet. And I think similar to how we deal with irregular lots now, we're going to, I would say we'd probably try for the, as close as we can get to these standards, but there's probably going to have to be some level of flexibility that you put in there and say, okay, yeah, there's no way you can possibly make this exactly as you want. So there's going to be some amount of either waiver or flexibility in those ranks. There is a waiver section in, built into this article three, that actually gets fairly specific. So we can look at that. The other thing that we're talking about when we look at the ETC is, particularly for greenfield development, but so like mixed use north probably, we want to try and have some level of, a lot of street grid and a block and a lot of layout that is sort of baked in so that we don't have to deal with those inconsistencies going forward. So probably going to be more of an issue in the neighborhood commercial and the historic center, but hopefully less so in the mixed use south and mixed use north, where we have some fairly regular lots already. Yeah, well, I'll throw out that your regular lots are sometimes more attractive as the point. As long as we have like a waiver where we can address it and says, if your lot doesn't, I don't know how the wording would go, but some process to deal with it. Yeah, like I said, there's a section in that it deals with both block and lot dimensions and standards as well as waivers. Okay, thank you. Which we don't have to keep exactly but it should be addressed for sure. And if there's no other questions, I just wanna wrap up with a couple of confirmations that I'll ask if there's more questions. Go ahead. Okay, so what I'm hearing is we're good with the overall format of a new article three that's firewalled from other parts of the regulations for now. Maybe as we go forward and explore these, we can pull in other sections of the rags or long-term as you update this in the future so that things get more into one clear article rather than two separate sections. So good on that. Yep, I think that's the approach that we're aiming for at this stage. Excellent. Let's take- Thing number two. Go ahead. Yeah, thing number two, we're okay with the use tables being defined by building type and then shoot, what was the other element that I was thinking of? How specific, if the level of specific. Thank you. So the specifics are where we're still in limbo. We're gonna figure that out, but we're okay with the format of those district tables and we're not necessarily gonna go back to the business design control for this area. We're gonna use these new district tables. Awesome. Just wanna make sure we're all clear on that. I think that's, again, we've spent a long time getting to that point. Yeah. And now we need to just fine tune this. Now that said, if we get to a certain stage and finally need to make a drastic change, we'll make a drastic change. But- Absolutely, yep. Just making sure we're all on the same page going forward. And then the last comment we'll make is that a lot of the standards that we're talking about, again, we're focusing on building types right now, but tonight, but we can also talk about these as district level standards. So when we talk about lock coverage, that could be higher in the mixed use north and south, lower in the historic center to get back green space that we're looking for that's historically done there. So you can approach this from either angle, a district approach or a building approach. Just keep that in mind. Okay. So we have on this, Dave, you and Shu will take a pass at this and have something either ahead of the time to float it by everybody for commentary or have something for the next planning meeting. If you have something for the next meeting, great. And we could jumpstart this, but if we can try to target having something for that planning meeting in May. Which is, that's May- Second Thursday. I don't know. Okay. 26th. Thank you. May 26th. With that, let's close on this discussion for the evening and go real quickly, the work group process with the other commissions. Josh, you're, we're still looking for PC members to be liaisons for the other groups, correct? That is correct. If you saw the, that Excel spreadsheet that Darren shared, we've got Shu very committed to trails and as a process. And Ned, I will say that Ned, he told me he wants to continue his work with housing committee, but I haven't heard from anyone specifically as to the charges and work groups we've laid out here. Well, Shu did, right? Yes, that's true. So we know we've got, Will Dodge is starting up a process, possibly multi-commissioned group, but we'd like some commissioner or two to be available for liaisoning with that. So please keep in mind that, you know, reach out to Josh with thoughts. I don't see this as being a huge, huge commitment, but it will be a conduit for those working groups to be able to, you know, to send questions to the PC even in, have some awareness of what the PC processes are happening. So I think it's important to keep the, for the communication on these working groups. What's our timeframe for these groups? Are they all going in parallel or? Everything should be more or less in parallel. I mean, by nature, things aren't going to be targeting. And we haven't set a timetable yet. I think we're still trying to find out what we think and be done. Some of these groups are not going to be able to meet quickly, just by nature of their, their style. But everything is still in a formative phase. We're trying to define the scope, really, is what we're, what we're still exploring. The zoning board had mentioned that they want to try to reach out to the other groups and work with them as well. So hopefully that will. And, and, and for you guys, if, if the commissions, you know, or the other groups speak to you, Josh and I spoke with Will Dodge the other day. And there's some key elements that we want to maintain in this process. And I don't, I don't think it's an issue with multiple groups working on concepts together. But it is, I think it's key that the input that comes back to the planning commission be through, the various commissions and not just, you know, a couple of people sending us a comment or coming to our meetings and giving us a comment. It should be part of their public process to say, we support sending this discussion item and these findings to the commission. So if energy and economics and zoning is working on something, we should get three reports. One from each of the commissions. Right. That gives. That gives consistency in the process. It gives more opportunities for public input and public viewing. And it gives us the ability to, to when these, these changes are vetted and they're either approved by us and sent to the select board, we can, you know, quite frankly say that we've had more involvement than we've had before. So those sign-offs are really, I think going to be, you know, important. To have from each commission. I miss anything, Josh. I think that's got it. Yeah. Okay. Darren. Since we're talking to, yes, thank you. Since we're talking about these work groups and the projects specifically, I want to. Quickly revisit the bylaw modernization grant. Only because I've been sitting on that. Not putting on an RFP for a long time. I think that's going to be important. I think that's going to be, you know, important to have from each commission. I think that's going to be important to have from each commission. I think that's going to be important to have from each commission. Not putting on an RFP for anything specific. Cause I wanted to make sure. We didn't. Lose an opportunity to use that money for. If you see your other projects, if we needed to. So I'll ask again and again, don't have to have an answer tonight, but soon would be good. Should we go ahead with the original plan, which was to do a build out model for the areas of town, outside of the town center. I think that's going to be important. I think that's going to be important to have. Similar standards or similar goals, you know, densities, plot sizes, et cetera. Or do we want to continue to hold on to that in case we need it for. If you see code work or potentially. For maybe doing some of these mockups and. Scenarios with. The. Zoning parameters. What's the deadline again, Darren, to that. Yeah. I think we're going to have to spend all of our money by the end of 2023. So the clock is starting to tick on getting an RFP out. We are still okay. So. I think any consultant, including the regional planning commission can accommodate the build out model. Basically, like from this summer onward is when they need to get started. So that's why I keep bringing this up is. To make sure we don't miss that window of opportunity. I think we're going to be able to do that. I think we're going to be able to secure somebody. But we still have to revisit that after, after Dave and shoe, have a chance to, to take a swing at this. That may be, that may be one of the, the easy, easy things to, to farm off. To a consultant to, you know. Do this for all the areas that we've got. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Um. We, we see where are we going? I think we're going to be able to see where we can get started. Okay. I think we're going to be able to see where we can get started. That's next. Minutes, I believe. Okay. So I minutes from 324. And March. I'm 324. First. Okay. We approve minutes for 324, 22. Second. Second. Second by John or Tom. Good. It was. It was me on, on line, john. Okay. Anyone want to offer any changes to the minutes from 324. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed. And it's carry seven zero. Now take a motion for the minutes of four. Fourteen. And this is the updated one that Sharon sent out. Whenever it gets sent out. Take a motion. So moved. Seconded. Moved by David seconded by shoe. Anyone have. Offer. Updates. Moved by David seconded by shoe. Anyone have. Offer. Updates. To the minutes. And the newer, the additions are highlighted in yellow. So anybody have any. Everybody a chance to see those. Okay. There are no comments. All those in favor of the minutes. Signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed. And it's carry seven zero. Now we also have. Question other business. At least one item. Is the community event. Email. And. May 15th. May 15th, which is Sunday. And come together. It's a Sunday. One to three. So as if anybody has any interest, they're trying to put together a table. The planning commission to. Me in and answer questions and meet the public. They're trying to get all the groups together. Slack board. Yep. Was about to say. And so. If you are interested, you know, you would be expected to man the board and just speak to the public. But the deadline is May 2nd to reserve a table. So if, if. I can probably be there for some of it. Think, but I'm not sure. At this stage, if I'm going to be available on that Sunday or not. Is anybody. Josh, you had mentioned that you might be available. Is it this nap time? It is absolutely nap time. I need my rest. Yeah. In all seriousness, W's nap time is pretty much exactly one to three. So that's going to be a rough one for me. Okay. So. We need to know by. Was it Monday. Tuesday. Yeah. Go ahead. It's, it's, it's tough. It is tough. And, you know, I would say that even if you can't do industry, I appreciate saying, like, maybe you can take an hour. And maybe that might work amongst yourselves, but even if you can't do it, you know, if you can't do it, you know, maybe you can take an hour. And maybe that might work amongst yourselves, but even if it's just an hour, we can have something. There. I'll speak for the zoning board. I have four, four people who can't make it. They already have commitments. I'm expecting my last one, but probably not because he too is a father of your child. And that's just a tough time. I mean, it is. I don't know if we're going to be there. If we can include a copy of the ATC next plan. Yeah. And just have it available. And if one of us can be there, we'll show up. Yep. Yep. I don't know that we can, I mean, it's. So I think what I'll do is get a table, one table for the planning commission and the zoning board. And just put some stuff on it. And between, I know that Darren is attending on, I'll be attending. I probably won't be there for the whole one. Yes. That's what I'll do. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. What else we have. I had a few updates for you. Go for it. So one is that Dennis. Let's made a presentation to select board. Last Monday. Regarding the water and sewer enterprise funds and some of the capital projects that they're moving forward on, some of which are directly related to the ATC. One is the water line on route 15, upgrading it to that 10 inch or 12 inch transmission line, which is going to construction hopefully next year with a bond about this November. So just FYI, things are moving on that. The other project was the Lang farm pump station, a sewer pump station. That one will start getting some engineering and design together towards the end of next year, I believe. And the reason that's also relevant to your discussion tonight is because we have a lot of work to do. So one of the things that we're going to be doing is, you know, we're going to have a lot of work to do. And one of the things that we're going to be doing is that. Ned brought this out and I'm sorry to steal your thunder, Ned, feel free to jump in. If we are working on these regs, but we don't have sewer, you know, infrastructure capacity is not going to create some permitting issues. And the answer is probably yes. We can't allow a development to go in if we don't have the actual capacity to support that sewer. Flow. We can't do that. We can't physically be upgraded until 2024, maybe later. Keep that in mind as you're working on zoning updates. Doesn't mean you can't work on the updates, have them ready, but final adoption for certainly the mixed use north and mixed use south might be limited in terms of what you can do until that infrastructure is in place. Similarly with sewer allocation, public works is going to try and make some moves on that in the coming year. But that all is going to have to kind of come together with zoning kind of at the same time. I think we've known that those, those limitations have been there from the beginning. So it's, but we've got to put something out there in order for changes to be right. Yeah. Absolutely. Not saying it should stop the work just sequencing. Sorry. Sorry. Almost. My notes here. June 26th for your second meeting of the month. We have a study in progress right now with CCRPC. You're looking at speed on route 15 through the town center and also potential interventions, you know, curving bullbouts, that sort of thing that can do some traffic calming. And they would like to make a presentation to you folks around that time. So just wanted to put that on your radar and pencil that in if we could. Already in the book. Excellent. You did. Yeah. Last thing I promise that bipartisan infrastructure law is starting to roll out and there will be some funding for some of that. Traffic calming and pedestrian bicycle safety. And it's part of their safe streets for all, safe streets and roads for all program. Some of that involves what they call vision zero, zero fatalities on the roads is the goal. And there might be money to create a plan for vision zero or to do some implementation projects. So just put in a bug in your ear. Start thinking about that. I'm done. Dave was going to use the volume. You're going to be done anyway. I think. That's a bad thing about giving us leaving remotes here. Anybody have anything else they want to throw into the table? Okay. So reminder, get. Please reach out to Josh with, you know, availability or anything. What you might be willing to do as far as the other groups so we can keep this moving. All right. Move. Second. But Dave second by shoe. All those in favor. We are adjourned.