 We did have an agenda which basically reiterates that we put them up. That's too small again, right? Yeah, we'll do that. And then, yeah. Ah, so I hear you've been here. Oh, yeah. Yes, I have not. Oh, that was right here. Yeah. Well, so, I'm originally from New York. You're very detailed. Yeah, yeah. And I'm having a meeting. I'm having a happy time with humanity tomorrow. Just like this and the organization tomorrow. All right. Just talking to you. Yeah. Yeah, man. So good. Well, that's planning. You like this bit of the teaching? It's really good. Yeah. It's a really good, smart area. Yeah. Because I'm working on my, I'm working on my master's in communication myself. No, I've been to these meetings before. But I'm getting my master's in communication. Yeah. I mean, I do see some sort of, you know, I'm working on my thesis. Yeah. And technology has changed me for this, especially for me. Ah, I see. Which, you know, media was, for now, their first coming up, you know, Hollywood, the mechanism of, you know, Hollywood so long. You know, a lot of people, especially in the, you know, yeah, very, very, very, very, very strong, I'm not a big fan of that, like, getting a new zoning, but no, it doesn't exist, and you just have a period of time to get a new zoning. Yeah. You know, development regulations, you know, and then when you just do that, it's just, it's a code base for that. You're also glad to do very specific things, but you can do them sort of anywhere you want. Mm-hmm. If it's, well, it's prohibitive or for other reasons, you know, it won't get done. Yeah. Otherwise, it can get done, but it won't get done. It won't get done. Right. I totally agree. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. And I said, well, you know, it was, I've been doing it quite, it's a privilege. Is it on? Of course. I don't like it. Of course. That's kind of something. Kevin, how would you feel about zoning in on your computer and then sharing your screen? Or I could also just, like, what do you, what do you, what's your preference? Do you, what would need to get a Wi-Fi? Yeah. Okay. So tell me what the Wi-Fi is. And the Wi-Fi is, I'm going to squeeze that in here. The Wi-Fi is City Hall 9919. Is City Hall open? Or City Hall secure? Yeah. City Hall open. And all lower cases and spaces in the capital are to City Hall 9919. Okay. Hey, Larry. All right. That didn't work. City Hall. No capital. Stay right in the hall. 991. Uh. Like that was a 9919 exclamation point. Yeah. What were you saying? And then you're going to e-mail to the link? Yeah. We're just testing. No access to it. Use the mark. Yeah. That's for these guys. Yeah. No entry. All right. Let's just go ahead. Maybe it's, maybe I have internet now. Yeah. It's not, it's not connecting. No. Is it because of your password or just not connected? No. Connected. There's no internet. Sometimes you got to go like, Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe our firewall or something. Maybe try to city hall secure. Hi everybody on zoom. We're having some internet issues with the city halls internet. So we might just have to go through my cell phone, which is not ideal. But if we can figure out the internet then we will project and share. But if folks wouldn't mind muting themselves while they're waiting, otherwise I can meet you for, meet you for you. And we're going to get started shortly. All right. How's the visibility on that? Thank you. Thank you so much. Great. Are we good? Yeah. I get with zoom text. Isn't that great? Yeah. You know, it's a great thing. Yeah. Let me know when you want me to start rolling. Yeah. Once more. Yeah. There's another couple of minutes to arrive here. I think it's already live on YouTube. Oh it is? Yeah. Absolutely. Great. It goes a while. Yeah. Absolutely. But thank you again. How do you feel? I'm a little bit nervous. Larry, I'm not an expert on Nimbia's themselves. No, I'm not. I'm saying, how do you feel? Oh, how's the flight going? I'm doing much better. As long as you're eating and staying healthy. Yeah. It's going. It's going. It's going. All right. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. So what was that? What was the first thing about? I think that's what humanity is, the whole. Let's, let's try about it. Okay. Hello and welcome everybody. Can everybody hear me okay? Cool. Hi. Thanks so much for coming out today. My name is Zachari Watson. I'm the executive director for Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity. And I'm sure some folks will be coming in here throughout the meeting. But we are asking everybody to wear a mask today. And thank you all very much for for that. I appreciate being mindful of keeping everybody healthy. There's a sign-in sheet circulating right now and so if you haven't signed that yet, yeah keep passing it around so we can make sure that everybody gets signed in and we can continue to communicate. So we are here today to, this is the first stakeholder meeting for a housing development project which we are exploring the feasibility of for a project located on Northfield Street and you'll see lots of maps. I'm not going to try to describe it for you but so the the goal of this meeting you know we're really bringing a blank slate today. We have an idea of some of the constraints and the restrictions of the site and we'll go over those but before we get any further into this process we really want to hear from you. We want this to be a discussion about how do we capture the interests the needs of the people in our community and as stakeholder, as community members you are stakeholders but I know there are there are butters, there are folks that have interest in actually the development themselves, what type of housing is going on there's one, Zach I guess we don't have audio, sorry, we're on mute. Thank you Peter. You didn't miss anything important I just said a lot of stuff. And I let somebody in. So the internet here is not letting us on the computer for some reason. Yeah okay so yeah this is the first stakeholder meeting and all right we want to get all your thoughts and we have a really nice format for the meeting tonight which will review the agenda and the the intent of the style of this meeting is to make sure everybody has the opportunity to speak and be heard equally on every aspect of this and so there's plenty of opportunity to be engaged. We then are going to take your comments and we're going to build them into some concept designs and where we'll have a second stakeholder meeting and where we'll be able to have a chance to review multiple designs and you'll have another opportunity to be to engage in that process at that point. So the first question everybody asks us is why is Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity doing this? Don't you guys just build single-family households? It is a legitimate question. We typically do only build single-family households for low-income homeowners between 30 and 80 percent area median income. All of our homeowner our projects are for home ownership and we offer mortgages which are designed to be affordable so they're always less than 30 percent of the income of the people we work with. Folks that have worked on Habitat for Humanity homes know that we basically keep the cost of construction low by engaging in volunteers using donated labor and then and the homeowner themselves actually commits time on that house through what we call sweat equity and then we offer them a zero percent interest mortgage. Those payments then get cycled into a revolving fund which then helps us build our next home. So that's our traditional process but you know I don't know folks got a chance to read an article I recently wrote about the the state of housing and how ARPA funds are going to impact it and what it has to do with is the amount of incentives and programs that are out there are primarily to support rental housing and so as a result of that oftentimes Habitat for Humanities and home ownership in general is left out of the mix of our major housing developments and so as a result if we want to be in a part of that housing development where we can build houses on a long-term scale and really plan and be effective in making a dent in the housing crisis that we have right now we had to think long-term and bigger and it's honestly we we did a lot of praying about trying to find that parcel that we could build house after house and it just so happened that one of our volunteers that was serving as a liaison for one of our homeowners for a house we built in and Barry so he's a liaison helps our homeowners who oftentimes had never owned a home generation generationally at all navigate the home ownership process and he came to us and he said Zach I just got 50 acres in Montpelier you know I never thought about it it's in current use I don't really know what to do with it but I wanted to do something good I want to leave some sort of legacy here what do you guys think about this so myself our architect our builder a local engineer walked the parcel and just to see if it made sense and there was a lot of question marks but it did feel like it's at least worth exploring so we applied for and we received a community development block grant through the Vermont Community Development Program of $50,000 to conduct an engineering and architectural feasibility study to determine how many houses we can build up there what's the access look like what are the site constraints we also received a $10,000 feasibility grant from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board so that's sort of the where we're at we've had three public meetings with the abutters we walked the property and we did two zoom meetings or sorry a zoom meeting and we had a public meeting before we submitted the application and we've also had lots of comments about this when we looked at rezoning the parcel both through the development review board two meetings and city council two meetings so we're about seven meetings into this but we still have not put anything on paper because it's really important to us to hear from you about what you want to see in this project so we're focused on housing building in many houses as we possibly can also recognizing that this is a beautiful piece of land with some serious constraints in regards to the forested land on it and so we are committed to housing and conservation so we went through a feasibility we went through an RFP process and we selected engineering ventures who partnered with Park architecture Gossens Bachman as well as VIS and they are an amazing team we could not have asked for a better team these guys are involved with every project that's going around in the state if anybody knows anything that's going on they do and they have a lot of good answers good good connections so we can work with them feel very confident working with them to come up with a project that meets our needs so we're doing that feasibility study right now our plan is to complete it by August so I'm gonna step down because I'm the bureaucrat here and I'm gonna leave it up to Kevin Warden who's who's in charge of engineering ventures who's gonna walk through our agenda and everything else so great thanks a lot Zach just to give you an overview of the format the next thing we have an agenda up here that was one intro next we're gonna talk about existing conditions everyone on the same page is to the site we're looking at and what's on the site now then we're gonna have three important categories that we want to talk about the first is conservation development design which is the way we're proposing to look at this site then we're gonna talk about housing and sustainability and then we're gonna talk about park and public access and you certainly have a question a brief question please feel free to ask it but our goal then is to do breakout groups divide everyone into three groups and meet with each of those professionals that deal in those three areas and then you know if we have a time rotate around because we really want to give a chance for everyone to contribute their ideas and questions and thoughts about each of those ideas about each of those three areas of consideration so first and this is going to be tricky we're going to go over to existing conditions and we just had to blow it up to make a visible but as Julia goes to the next page we might have an issue you can try to go over I can I'm happy to do it just finished out but then we're gonna go to you all right so if you can see this this is up here we're up here on Main Street and across the river and up Northfield Street is the project site it's 54 acres it's at 102 to 110 or so Northfield Street if you're at this this kind of south end it's about a 15 minute walk into town there is a right-of-way if you want to go to the next image I'm sorry in front so yeah it's fine front on Northfield a little bit it fronts it has a point where it connects to Pleasant it fronts on Hill and it has an easement across 1 1 16 and 120 Northfield onto the parcel of here. What type of transportation is there and if there's not transportation especially for people with special needs can we have GMTA or possibly another transportation company help with bringing people back and forth. Great question don't know the answer yet but we're gonna take that down and be able to get back to you on that but certainly accessibility and connection to the city is an important part and I think we'll be talking about when the housing and sustainability section mobility and access is certainly the key point. So on the site there's a network of existing trails which show up here is green woods roads leading off from that easement I mentioned up through the site there's a drive up to here which then goes to a single family and then a beautiful woods road up the side of the slope that that west side that heads down to Northfield and there's also a fairly significant and beautiful ravine right up the middle here picture there there's some dry stacked stone walls one that runs through near that ravine and then some up at the high point site is around 700 feet at the low point and elevation 900 a little above at the high point so a couple hundred feet of elevation change to go to the next slide this is a slope map so wherever you see red is steep and wherever you see green is flat basically and so if anyone's familiar with the site it's definitely bounded on the west and on the east with steep wooded slopes but when you traverse those woods trails and get up to the higher parts there's areas there that are you know certainly less than 10 or 15 percent and flatter go to the next slide this is a soils map it's really all one kind of soil and it is you know moderately shallow to ledge although I did walk up throughout the field and used a hand probe and got at least four feet to soil but as we look at areas through the development very shallow ledge areas maybe one to stay away from or you know find areas where we can instead of cutting in and you know cutting down through the existing topography fill above this is just a quick solar access it is sloping to the to the north down to the north so it's not one of those perfect south-facing meadows but it's got quite good solar access especially up in the upper area we walked it before the leaves were out and you can kind of get a sense if there was some clearing in the middle what it would look like we're pretty close to the to the solstice here which represents is representing by this upper arc so you're going to have sun rising kind of up in that corner there and sun setting up in this corner then in the winter solstice down in this lower arc you can see sun is rising down in this area and sun is setting down over here obviously a much narrower band and then we have another one yeah and this is just representing I think you know one of the first tasks we had exact said no preconceptions but before we could even come and meet with folks they'd understand could we have vehicular access to the second and legally there's an easement to the site through 116 and 120 by the Mount Peter housing authority there and one thing I didn't mention at the intro is there's a three acre parcel here right on Northfield which is really all under the same ownership but it is a separate three acre parcel and would remain that way and right along the east boundary of that there's a woods road represented by green and just a little below that there's a really nice traverse in that brings you up to the higher plateau so we're right now looking at that is a likely point of access vehiculately to this parcel and I think that really brings us to Julia who's going to talk about conservation development design yeah I can do that but I'll zoom in while I'm Julia I'm also with engineering ventures I just wanted to talk a little bit about conservation style development because that's sort of one of the main methods that we're going with it's an alternative to more conventional cookie cutter style developments it's an alternative to conventional cookie cutter style developments that have been really common the goal is to balance the protection of the important natural features with the sustainable long-term development the first step in this is identifying natural and cultural resources that we agree need to be protected the primary constrained areas like Kevin was talking about like steep slopes things that don't really apply on this site but other things like wetlands or flood plains that you know need to be avoided at all costs then the next step is identifying other cultural features or historic sites scenic views woodlands things that we'd like to discuss today when we break out into groups then after that we determine the areas that are going to be put aside to be permanently conserved and this is all done before we choose the building sites before we draw the lot lines so that we're assured a balanced development in the future sometimes this development style results in more dense cluster developments though not always but it is a tool to get more housing in there as opposed to more land consumptive styles of development this is just one part of the framework there's lots of other challenges and opportunities with the site that we plan to look into and take into consideration and I think we'll hear more about that now from Steve and Greg about housing and sustainability yeah I'll just add on to what Julia said DNRC which is headquartered down here on their website has a great little intro to conservation development design my name is Greg Gossens and we're going to be looking at the building aspect of this when we get into the whole affair we are looking to do net-zero carbon neutral development so sustainability is really going to be important to us also linkages make this a walkable integral part of the community I live up on College Hill naturally this site is closer to downtown than my house is up in College Hill with above the same amount of vertical challenge to it so I'm accustomed to schlepping up and down the hill to get to downtown so I know it's doable and I know we can create some meaningful languages in downtown and Lincoln with mass transit we designed the transit center here so I'm all over mass transit so when we get into the housing we're going to look at every style of housing we can think of I mean the sky is the limit it's going to be rental for sale townhouses two plexus triplex is a single family large buildings we're going to do whatever is appropriate for the site right now it's a blue sky conversation we have no preconceptions there's no agenda to what kind of housing we're going to put up there what kind of income group except for we want to make it affordable as everybody knows we have a shortage of affordable housing in this entire state and this community is general so we're going to be looking at affordability both as something buildings people can buy and get equity and something people can write so we're going to look at everything in that respect you know we're looks like we get about 260 or zone for 260 units here but we're thinking more to be what again it's a wide open but thinking target more about half that and that's going to be aggressive in that respect so so obviously we're not going to build it up because this is a beautiful piece of property and there's a definitely a larger amount of the property you want to conserve and make it public use however you know the job is the what housing you build the housing must have some kind of ramp or some for accessibility regardless oh absolutely universal design universal design it's extremely important so you know the jury's out more here to listen today to see kind of what your housing preferences are as we as we move forward but right now like I said it's totally a blue sky process great I think so Paul as you could fall from architecture is going to speak a little bit one component of this project is very likely to be a public part of public access so Paul you speak a little bit about that process my name is Paul Simon I'm a landscape architect with park architecture LLC and yes we focus on park design housing development work and you know with 50 acres here I think it's safe to say that there's going to be more green space than hardscape so the focus will be much instead of trying to integrate a park it's more integrating the housing to a park that's already there so I think that's the thinking here and of course universal design is going to be important with that to make sure we have accessibility not only to the housing units but to the park features as well so what I'd like to think about when we get into the breakout groups too are some of your thoughts with existing trail networks both passive and active recreational opportunities to the site maybe some areas where you believe could have a great overlook scenic areas conservation areas as well that probably don't even need to be touched important buffer areas between adjacent residential neighborhoods and whatever you everything's open basically so we haven't drawn anything up yet we just we've walked the site as well and we've taken a look at this and we think there's tremendous opportunity and it's great that it's a large site because with the conservation style development like was like Julia mentioned like we what we could do is really focus in on consolidating the housing in such a way that we're really emphasizing more of the the park as the feature here instead of the housing as a feature perhaps because we have that opportunity as well so thanks great thanks fall so that brings us to a group sessions if anyone has any brief comments or questions I can take them but otherwise yeah people talk about affordable housing what is the range of what's affordable these days that do you want to jump in on that yeah no that's a great question so we affordability is mostly determined by the housing and urban development based on the individuals median income based on the area and based on their family size so so habitat for humanity we work with very low income families they range between 30% to 80% of area median income and that doesn't probably mean much too but for Orange County or sorry Washington County a family of four which is pretty kind of the average is somewhere around 30% that's $25,000 annually for the whole household up to about $62,000 annually for the whole household so that's that's who we work with but you know the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board Dastry Housing and Community Development oftentimes they will go up they can I don't know how often they do but they can go up to 120% of area median income which I thought my head I think is around 80 or $90,000 a year for a family of four so that that gives you an idea of just kind of the spectrum of incomes does that answer my question I want to buy an affordable house oh okay what what is the range of price that well it's so the reason we look at your immediate your your the median income is because affordable affordable is based on what you what is affordable to you so typically a house is considered affordable if your payments are less than 30% of your income and so that's what's determined to be affordable so and when you look at if you're if it's a mortgage you're looking at your your escrow as well as your mortgage payments so it's all those things combined but typically that's what we're looking at a lot of remoders is something like 35% of remoders are cost burden which means they're paying more than 30% of their the money on their in on their house but again it depends on what your income is to determine what is actually affordable the house that we just did in Barry we gave a mortgage for $124,000 so I would say for the folks that we work with it's usually somewhere between a hundred and $150,000 is a mortgage but that's different for different organizations one thing we haven't mentioned either and I think is the intent we've worked with of these other team members on developments that have a whole range of affordability right up to market too and all intermixed and that could be a possibility here yeah I think it's we know from our own experience so a big part of component of habitats program is community volunteers that we work with it's not only about you know making our houses more affordable by using volunteer labor it's also about building a community a network of support because we know that oftentimes poverty comes to folks that don't have a network of support folks that they can ask for money from ask for a little bit of assistance here and there and so we build that community and we also know that means that we're we're intermixing low-income housing with moderate and high-income housing so it is generally bad practice to do like a an exclusive affordable housing development it doesn't lead to much financial success and that's why we we are really committed to having a mixed income community I think Greg we worked on one down in handover 11 an area right near the Dartmouth Hospital that has I know janitors from the hospital and surgeon we're you know living all in the same communities wide range it makes for a more vibrant community when you don't kind of organize income groups so that's how there's two hands back there. I have one last question. In your affordability question do you include the host of utilities? The operate like utilities and stuff like that so we include those in our for us specifically we include those in our we look at what is their monthly operational expenses total and so we kind of estimate that there is a certain amount that people are spending on those things but we do we do we can factor in those things a lot of times mostly when we look at affordability we're looking at debt to income ratio so we're looking at what is your recurring debt you know car loans private loans credit cards things like that and for us and a lot of organizations we usually don't want more than 10% of your income going directly towards recurring debt because then that bumps into that utilities and operating costs but you know one thing that we're really excited about is how it has been really pushing for high-performance homes and we just rehabilitated a home in very hundred-year-old Victorian to high-performance standards and why that's important for our homeowners is we're giving them an affordable mortgage we're also saving the money on the utilities and I see somebody serve from the passive houses too and we you know we actually did a passive houses in East Montpelier for that same reason we can help see those utility costs we want to save our homeowners when we build them right you kind of answered my question I know the quiet liar in factoring in operational costs for heating and cooling and flood loads into a mortgage and everything but if you can energy model those down to an extremely low level doesn't that make the rental units and the units for the open market more affordable so we can I can speak to rental units we don't we don't deal with rental units that's unlikely that we will be building the rentals now we only build home ownership not only are you acting in a climate action way you're you're creating more renewables you know more renewable production on your net zero project will be available for other other things yeah I think that's charging electric cars or so yeah we can look into those things we can look at how much is this house going to save you and does that mean that you might have a little bit more flexibility on a mortgage banks don't really have that flexibility I think there's some more momentum towards that direction where they want to start to consider that I don't know how much has been done with that but that's a I appreciate your comments energy modeling and also in sizing all your HVAC equipment and there's cost savings there I'm excited to hear more about it my question comes to like environmental my question comes to environmental can can I don't have a tough humanity when in terms of this parcel or going forward with other parcels and they maybe include solar eating in other things like that you know solar panels and I think that's a great segue yeah so the question no no it's great the question is well will there be solar and we don't know yet but we're ready to kind of hear those questions take some notes one of the breakout groups with Greg and Steve's you talk about housing and sustainability and I thought if the folks in the two rows behind them and Larry if you want to jump over there we'll get a plan there and some notes and start taking those questions Paul do you mind doing park in the back so if the last row and folks standing could hang out with Paul my idea is here after about 10 15 minutes will rotate so after about 45 minutes you'll have a chance to share some thoughts and questions about each each category Google that all right I guess everybody I just have a couple more comments I want to let folks know about next steps so you're continuing to be engaged in the process cool so I first just want to thank our engineering ventures and Gosses Bachman and partner architecture thank you for leading this you guys were really smart so thank you and yeah I mean so I think this was an interesting structure we were trying to develop a way that everybody got a chance to participate you know I think a lot of times when you just get this this type thing where I'm up here talking it ends up being me or one other person like this way we got a little chance to talk and I know maybe 15 minutes wasn't enough to really dive into the details it kind of felt like at about 15 minutes we got into the details but the conversation doesn't have to stop here I'm available you all should have my contact information either got it on front porch forum or sent you a letter or a special invitation I encourage you to be in touch with me to talk about this if you had additional thought something comes to you later you're like oh Zach for that this thing get in touch with me and I'm working directly with Kevin weekly and we have a committee that's reviewing all this so this is not the end of the conversation we're gonna take everything you guys have gave us today which was a lot I think and we're gonna consolidate it into a couple design plans so we'll have a little bit more our plan is to meet on June 21st right now that's what I emailed about but we have to kind of follow up after all this discussion so between June 21st here 537 30 again that was in the letter I sent to a butters and I also spend it on sending out front porch forum we may need a little bit more time to work with our team and to pull these times these meetings together and if that's the case we will let you know but that's going to be our that's going to be our last public meeting before we complete the feasibility study and then the next meeting after that will either happen or it won't because after we go through designs we look at the cost that we're going to make a determination by August about whether we want to move forward with this project or not if we decide not to move forward with the project the city gets all the work that we've done and so they have the plans and they could move forward with it if they wanted to but we're committed to this we want to make this happen and your guys is buying to this project our local in community members our businesses our butters your buying makes this possible and even even though it's a challenging project so our hope is that after we finish the feasibility study get green light that this is a kick butt project and we want to move forward and the next meeting we will have will be a presentation of the site plan of this project and then then it's fundraising so yeah it's fundraising and for those that don't know how development works it's the beginning of a formal review process with the planning the DRB and a lot more common opportunities thank you yes no we don't get we don't go from there to building a street it's probably a year and a half long of permitting for a street and then a lot more permitting after that so it's you know and we're we're thinking we're doing a hundred units this is multiple phases and it could be anywhere between five and twelve years before this whole thing is completed so long long-term project but we don't know until we complete it but thank you all for being here today I really appreciate it and ask you continue to be in touch so have a nice rest of the evening oh yeah and if you haven't we're it's a sign-out sheet right here oh okay if you haven't signed her sign-up sheet we would love to be in touch with you so please come up and sign your name before you leave but thank you again for joining us