 Just so that Peter and anyone else in the public, I guess they're not here for this, so this is for Peter. I put in the chat here a link to the Google Drive folder where you can look at the economic development plan that we're working on, so I told you I would get you that. And Mike, these working documents, isn't there a way for the public to look at them read-only on the city website? Yeah, I have to send the invite, I was trying to get my other computer to get there. So you know, Peter, that link will send you to all of the documents related to what we're working on now, but the one that's the spreadsheet that's revised PC template, I believe that is the most up-to-date version of what we're working on, so revised PC template, that file. Okay, well let's call this meeting to order. First thing we have to do is approve the agenda, so I'll take a motion and people are ready. I move approval of the agenda. Thank you. Do we have a second? Second. Second from John, so motion to approve by Ariane, second by John, those in favor of approving the agenda, say aye. Aye. Okay, agenda approved. Comments from the chair, I don't have anything specific, you know, we have a number of small things to go through tonight though, updates and so forth, so that's it for me. Does anyone else have anything that's not on the agenda, any planning commissioners that they want to make us aware of or anything? Okay, general business from the public. So usually, you know, this is, if there's anyone from the public who has anything to talk about that's not on the agenda, they could talk now. My understanding, Mr. Kelman, is that you want to talk about things that are on the agenda. Right? Yes, but I did want to talk just briefly about set the stage for that, which is not on the agenda. Yeah, sure. Sure. Like just let you know, like where my mind is on this is, you know, we'll be having a discussion of these topics as they come up and I'd love just to include you on those discussions as it comes up. So, you know, you won't not have a chance later to just let you know. But if there's something on the agenda, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So I just like to establish a context for any later remarks that I might make, of course I want to listen to, and just by describing in sort of abbreviated form, the housing crisis Montpelier is facing today, which I could skip if all of you had read it, but I don't think you have, right, it wasn't distributed, was it? Yes. It was distributed. I read it. Oh, I read it. I read it before to Peter, but I read your amended one gave I sent that to you, right? And then it was distributed by Mike over the weekend. Oh, everybody got it. Everybody got it. Oh, okay. Well, then I, then I will say no more. I do want to, I want to pull it up. It's basically I bulleted 14 types of or aspects of the housing crisis, right? They're bulleted. I think you described the problem very well. I liked it. I thought it was a good summary of issues that we're facing. Okay. All right. All right. Well, then I'll wait until the particular items come up. I'll just say one thing, which is that my proposal to create a permanent housing committee. I presented that proposal to the housing task force because it would involve them ceasing to exist. And they actually voted unanimously to make that proposal to the city council, which though I think they're going to do in the next, at the next meeting in the meeting after to phase out or to end the housing task force and replace it with a permanent standing committee appointed in the usual way by the city council. So I'll just, just let you know that because that's not on the agenda. Okay. Otherwise I'll chip in as you guys get to the items in the agenda. Thanks. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for, and thanks for letting us know about that. I wasn't aware of the city council doing that in the near future. Okay. Well, hasn't been presented to them yet. Okay. Housing task force will be presenting it to them. Okay. Great. Yeah. And it sounds like a good idea. I think it. Yeah. Okay. So we have a number of updates from Mike and there's four things and we're just going to go through that. So I'm going to, I'm going to hand it off to Mike to start with the updates. The first one being the community development specialists. All right. So I'll also throw out one, add one more in real quick just to let you guys know if you, if you aren't aware that there is going to be an Elks Club public forum tomorrow. So it's the Elks Club property. There was a bond passed. So there's going to be a public input session on that. That will be tomorrow. So if you don't have that, you can look at the city website and get a link to it. It will be on the zoom platform. Yeah. Do you know what time it is Mike? 6 30. If you, and I know Anne Watson posted on Facebook, a link to it. I had reached out to her and told her about how we were talking about how the space could be used for childcare. And that was something that. That we liked. So Anne's aware of that. All right. So the, the first item on the updates was the community and economic development specialist position. I can't go into a lot of the details, but I will go and say we, we did post that we had six excellent candidates apply. It's a remarkable set of candidates. Every single one of them had a master's degree or more. So it was a really good, really good selection. We just completed interviews. An hour ago. So we will be meeting tomorrow to go through and make that next step of inviting in for second interviews. The first one was by zoom. So the second one will bring in candidates. So hopefully we will have Kevin's position refilled in the next. Within the next couple of weeks. Mike, for those of us who weren't here when Kevin was here, can you just describe how that. Roll will interface with the. Our planning commission. So he doesn't. So Kevin is actually still here. Most of the committees that Kevin. Is staff for he staffed for the public art commission. He's staffed for the housing task force and the. Transportation infrastructure committee. So he, he fills those three. Those three roles. So a lot of what he does is working more directly with the housing folks. So he will, he works with me in developing some of our housing strategies that you have in the housing section. But he obviously has worked in a number of other, other places as well. So we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. For the new person when they, when they get hired and get on board, those will probably be the three committees to help be working on as well. Thank you. Is the position full time now or. Part. Yes. It is full time. Okay. Yeah. Kevin. Yeah. Kevin went to 0.8 for a time because of. Just. Family stuff. Yeah. I'm not going to talk about that a little bit, but he's back to full time now. Or the new person will be full time. So the next thing I just wanted to mention was the RFP for hiring consultant to help with the online plan. Hold on a second. I think Peter has something to say about the first item. Yeah. So since you guys have read. When I wrote, you know. That I. You know, I believe and I've recommended to my. That this person be dedicated to housing. That having this person have to deal with economic development. Is just not. Not the right thing to do at this time. Housing is such a huge. Overwhelming issue. And I just don't think that chasing down. And I don't think that's the right thing to do at this time. But I think that helping out the downtown. Is what we need at this time. And let me just add that now that a modest majority. 54% of Montpelier voters have approved the bond to purchase. The former Elks Club property. The city is going to have an unprecedented opportunity. And an enormous planning and public communication. Challenge that could have a greater impact. And that is to say, that there is no more regulation that has been considered, I would say in the last century. This critically important and huge from on P. Anyway, project is going to require the leadership. And on the ground, implementation efforts of city staff. It possess a very wide range of skills, including the ability to bring together and work with. that will be needed to plan, design and implement such a large and complex project. And moreover, this staff must have strong moral compass and the interpersonal skills to affirmatively engage and genuinely involve the widest possible range of residents, taxpayers and spokespersons for underrepresented groups in the planning and implementation of this project so that it serves all Montpelier residents. And surely a dedicated housing development specialist has to be part of such an effort and not be distracted by broader economic development issues. I feel very strongly about that, as you can tell. And I have to say that both of these requirements that I mentioned, both to be able to work with all of these different groups, bring them together. There's already so much bad feeling. This just, 54% approved, that means 46% didn't approve this, okay? We've got a public relations issue and it's not one that is just gonna be fixed by messaging. It's one that's really requires some genuine work with the community. And I can tell you from personal experience that Kevin did not do that. And it's gonna be very important to have someone who will do that, who will engage people in the community, not keep them away from the perspective developers. Thank you. So, Mike, a follow up question I would have on that is the candidates that you've interviewed, do we have people with strong backgrounds and like public outreach? Yeah, I mean, without getting into details of people's resumes, yeah. I mean, these were all very good, excellent candidates. You know, any one of the six could fill this position. So we think we've got a great person lined up. We'll have a conversation tomorrow about taking those next steps. But just so everybody understands how our form of government works. You guys are, you know, the planning commission and you guys work to provide recommendations to city council. City council then hires a city manager who then runs, we're a city manager form of government and city manager then goes and assigns and directs the staff. So, you know, I work with you guys and you know, the point of everything is for us to all be working collaboratively and cooperatively. And I think we've been doing that very well. But officially I work for Bill. You know, I'm not working for you guys and I think you guys know that. And so when it comes to staffing, it comes to making decisions of personnel and how we title things, that's under my direction. And you know, housing specialist is a different job. If you were to see that advertised in a position, that's a different, completely different job than what I'm offering here. And a community development specialist is actually what this position is, a community and economic development specialist. The reason that that got rolled back in, economic development got rolled back into the title was because we had done an economic development strategic plan and created a Montpelier Development Corp. And when that dissolved, those functions have returned back to the city and they've returned back to my department. And therefore, Bill thought it was prudent to put that in the title. Now, how much does that change the actual job that Kevin was doing is, it doesn't actually change it a great deal. We need to make sure that our positions are broad and flexible enough to adjust with what is going on. And I'm very comfortable with the job description, very comfortable with the name, it's not changing. It is going to be the community and economic development specialist. And things change over time. I mean, the role that Kevin played over eight years, well, he's been here 10, worked for me for eight, was he worked with getting downtown grants to build sidewalks, he worked with the public works and really it depended a lot on what was going on. And we need the flexibility to have our staff be responsive. When Brownfields became a significant issue for the transit center, Kevin went out and pursued and got a million dollars in grants to help clean up that Brownfield. And when we had other projects that were coming along, those were the things that this position really works on. So I've talked, you guys have heard this spiel before, we talk about having our five ways that we implement plans. And we have people that work on the regulations and the permits. Kevin's position works on these projects and works on these programs. And we have opportunities to do more. Kevin took this position a long way from when I originally got here and he has worked through a number of projects over his years to get stuff going. We're at a new opportunity and I'm sorry to see Kevin go, but I think we're gonna have, hopefully a great person that's gonna come back in and bring new skills and new ideas that we can move forward on. But at the same time, we can't pigeonhole this person to only housing just because that's not how our government works. It's not how our office works. We're gonna have people that come in and is there gonna be a lot of time spent? We don't recruit businesses, but if somebody comes in our office and says, I'm interested in bringing a business to Montpelier, what opportunities, what programs do you have to help us? And we're talking about our economic plan. We've been talking about it the past few meetings. We'll be talking again later. These are the programs that the community and economic development specialists would be addressing. If somebody comes in and wants a tax stabilization, this person explains what we can offer, what the TIF can offer and those types of things. And it doesn't take away from the fact that there's gonna be a majority of the effort that's gonna be tied to housing because that has always been the primary focus of the community, when it was the community development specialist, that was their primary focus, was revolving loan funds, housing projects, working with Down Street, working with Ever North, which was housing Vermont, that has always been a focus. And that'll continue to be a focus, but there's time and room for people to be working on other projects throughout this. So I guess that would be my comments on that matter. Okay, yeah, thanks, Mike. And just as a clarification, I hope you didn't have the impression that we were trying to have any kind of oversight over the hiring process. I don't think you think that, but we wanna clarify that. That's not what we're interested in doing. Gabe, do you have something? Yeah, I'm just curious. So who's, would it be this person's role or whose role would it be to whenever final plans are made for, it is Peter Ray's, and it's a pretty tremendous opportunity and challenge whatever's gonna happen at the old golf course, right? Who is the project managers that this role, is that who would do that or who would do that? Right now, the country club is in Cameron, the assistant city manager. She's the one who's running the project right now. And they're bringing me in, I believe on the 13th, maybe? I wanna say it's the April 13th council meeting. I'll be making a presentation to council on how municipalities do large scale projects. So I'm gonna be start to be brought in on how we go through a process, because although I haven't done very many projects here in Montpelier, I did a lot of projects in Berry City. And we try to work them in the same way where I have this plan, prepare, implement, breaking into three big steps. Transportation planners breaking them into like five or seven steps, but we really wanna focus the first year on planning. And so that's what we're gonna be doing, getting a conceptual plan. I'll go through a lot of these steps and explain why it's important, how it's helpful. So I'm gonna be slowly brought in to help with the planning side. I'm not gonna be really carrying a lot of the weight on that, we'll bring in a consultant to help to do that, that's our plan right now, is to bring in a consultant who can manage the process for two reasons. One is we wanna make sure the public can interact with a kind of a third party. If we do the presentation, that's why tomorrow night's presentation is being hosted by Paul Costello. So he's just gonna facilitate it. And so we wanna start to make sure while we are a staff running the project, we can kind of start bringing consultants to help to facilitate the process because we need both the facilitation as well as somebody who can then direct the site investigations because we obviously have to know where the wetlands are, where the prime ag soils, all the pieces that are gonna go into any future Act 250 permit that we expect that we're gonna need to get. So we start doing some homework so we can do that process. So I'm gonna be start to be brought in. When we get to next year, so as we start getting into those next preparing and implementing steps, the community and economic development specialist is gonna be much more involved in that process. And especially when we get to implementing because our idea at this point is we expect at some point there's gonna be some housing, some recreation, some open space. The question is the balance and what it looks like, but eventually we're not gonna be building anything from the housing standpoint. So at a certain point as it gets to, let's say we've got a proposal that's gonna subdivide 14 lots for multifamily housing. And then we're gonna have other lots that are gonna be subdivided for single family or other units. So somebody has to get in the business of connecting if the decision is make this affordable housing. Well, somebody's gotta reach out to our partners and see what our partners are willing to do, what their timing is in order to start moving these forward. And so over time, so really it's gonna start with Cameron, it's gonna move a little bit to me, then it's gonna move eventually to the economic specialist to start rolling this out. Thanks, Mike. Sounds like a couple meetings should attend, huh? Thank you. Yeah, I've got a lot of meetings I'll be presenting it coming up. Okay, does anybody have anything else on community development specialists before we move on to the RFP for the consultant for the online plan? Okay, thanks for the update, Mike. That seems great. Yeah, it's good news. So really quick, the RFP that was released, sent out to VPA and then actually got onto the GIS list served as well, which actually has turned out to be a remarkable resource for this because I'm getting bombarded with people who want the RFP. So I think this is gonna end up, we're gonna end up with a lot of folks who are interested. So for anyone who doesn't know, our plan is to build out our city plan in GIS, ArcGIS, into storyboard format. So instead of having a printed document, we're actually, we'll probably have to have a printed document somewhere, but the idea is that this would be mostly an online document with storyboards and very graphically rich. And so we need to have a consultant who is familiar with that and familiar with how to, not only how to lay that out, but what's the best way to convey messages in that format. And so we've got money set aside that was in, we didn't get any grants, we had applied for a bunch to get any grants, but the city council just put $20,000 in the budget so we can hire somebody and just do it with our own money. So hopefully that, hopefully we get some good, that RFPs do April 4th, so we'll see how many people respond to it and what we get. And I will probably bring you guys in on the, you know, on the process and I don't know if there's somebody, one or two of you who want to review the proposals with me, I'd certainly invite anyone who wants to kind of participate in that. But I'd like to bring it to you guys to recommend, to make the final decision on who we hire or make the final decision on who we recommend to council to hire. So, John. I can volunteer to review some of those since it's a world I think I know really well. I would definitely appreciate that. Remarkably little about it. Thank you, John. I guess people can think about this, but yeah, other planning commissioners if you are interested, let us know. I can help Mike, but if there's other people. Yeah, it's just a matter of probably scoring them. It'll be scoring them so we can get a small sample to interview with you guys to plan and commission in April. So that would be the plan. And we'll see how much work it is depending on how many applications we get. Okay. Yeah, Peter, do you have something to say about this? Mike, I have a question. Is this going to be something that will, how is this going to be accessed by the public? Will it be through the city website or will there be, will it be its own application? It'll link, there'll be a link on the city website to the, basically it would be the hub with the storyboards. So there would be a direct link from the main page. Will there be any way for people to get to it directly without going through the city website? Yeah, yeah, that always works that way. If somebody were to Google Montpelier city plan, it would pop up with a direct link to it. Okay, because that's pretty important. The city website at this point is a jungle. Yeah, there's a grant to replace that too. No, I know. Well, apparently it's to repair it. But the problem is it's for one thing, it's got a search engine that is just awful. You can't find any, it's very hard to find things. Okay, well, I have a concern about this from a, that means this is only going to be accessible by people who are somewhat computer literate. So I think that you need to figure out ways to get this out to the public. So the public really knows how, how they can get to it in a friendly way. Not just to get it up there. I mean, the city council had this incredible equity report that was done in August. It's sitting buried somewhere on the website. Nobody from the public is aware of it. That's a good point. I mean, it will be important to make sure that it comes up in a Google search. But I'm assuming a consultant could help with that. And promote it, and promote it. It's got, it should be a press release. It should be, you know, on public forum. I mean, really get people. Yeah, we want to do that. I mean, we want to, when this thing's done, we want to show it off. So we'll be doing that. And we're also just so you're aware, Peter, we're in the process of reaching out to the public again about the proposed zoning changes that we've passed out to the city council too. That's, we've been trying to get the word out about that as well. Actually, I'm glad you mentioned that. Would you guys impressed by how many people showed up in that Zoom meeting for the proposed changes? Right? Yeah, I was a lot. Yeah, no, that's one of the silver linings of the pandemic. Zoom has enabled many more people to actually engage. I think it's something we should remember as we get back to non-pandemic life. Let's keep up the Zoom. I mean, because people will come to things if they don't have to drive downtown and put money in a meter and so forth. All right, thanks. Yeah, yeah, we're not in a hurry to change really. Okay, so what's the next item? Just to remind everybody, the city council hearing. Yeah, so that's city council hearing is next Wednesday, eight days, 10 days from now. So just letting people know that that'll be going in. Letters have gone out to the Sabans of Butters. So that's all been taken care of. So hopefully, I'll be getting a presentation ready for that. Hopefully that rolls out pretty smoothly. There'll be two, at least two. There's one now and one on, or one next week on the 23rd and then April 13th. And there can be any number after that, depending on what city council wants to do. Yeah, I'll be there, Mike, in case they wanna hear directly from planning commission on any of the items. Anybody else who wants to come, let's go for it. All right, and then the last thing, and I don't know if we want to have more of a discussion on this one here, but I did throw in there at the last second, AARP, Congress of New Urbanism Memo that we did receive last week. So we did get that in, finally. There are some items, I think, that are good suggestions that they have in here. Some of them, I think, a little bit, are as a misunderstanding on their part, and I think a little bit misses the point on a couple others, but I think there are different ideas that we can talk about over time with that one. And so I'll let you guys decide whether or not you guys wanna get into that, or just so you guys know, you guys got a copy of it. Yeah, I think what we'll do is we'll circle back to it whenever there's a lull in the city plan stop. I think it's probably good that we continue to prioritize the city plan, but the issues that they draw attention to, I think, are things we should revisit and go through one at a time. And depending on what happens with the zoning changes, there might need to be some follow-up either related to the density cap stuff, if it does happen or it doesn't happen, and then if it does happen, the design review follow-up that we all know is needed. So I think all that stuff's connected and we can all revisit it when we don't have city plan work to do. Does that sound good to everybody? Yeah, bad Peter? All right, this is the last thing I'm gonna say and I'll let you get to your work. I did read the memo and I just, I share, I agree with Mike, what he said. And I'd really caution the commission that while some of these fixes may be necessary, they're unlikely to be sufficient. I would say significantly, quote, reduced barriers to infill development and conversion of existing buildings to multi-unit occupancy by Montpelier home and property owners. I've added that. There are a number of considerably more challenging structural barriers than the memo identified, including costs of construction that are too high to be financially justifiable for individual homeowners. The apparently limited capacity of city staff to provide the kind of guidance individual homeowners may need for such projects, the power of NIMBY neighbors to gum up almost any construction that has any exterior element as some of us here are painfully aware and the potential for any set of regulations. Our current ones, the AARP suggested changes to have unintended outcomes that favor large-scale developers over individual homeowners. And in my opinion, and Mike and I have argued about this in the past, I'm gonna say it though, in order for Montpelier to address these and other structural barriers to infill development, et cetera, by homeowners, Montpelier needs to have an appropriately staffed city housing program that provides a zoning guidance, the technical support and financial incentives needed to help individual homeowners to cost effectively renovate their older, less energy efficient homes in ways that will increase available and affordable living units. This is a much more efficient way than built than new construction. But Mike, you heard what Mike says. We're not in this business. That's not what we do. Well, I think that is what we should do. And if it's not gonna be done by Mike's department, we need a department that will do that. We need someone who is going to handhold homeowners to be able to do this. We've passed 80 years, we passed, I think, I remember what the program was 60 years ago and very few people do it because it's just too hard. There's too much to do. They need handholding. Well, okay, so I don't think that Mike's comments before were saying that his office is off the hook for that. He was just saying that one position is housing. Mike and I have argued about this in the past. Yeah, to kind of reconcile some things though, we are working the city plan now, we're working on a new housing chapter with new goals and strategies. So my question is actually to, like Mike, do you feel like the state of the housing chapter where we have it now? Like this will be the future housing chapter, Peter. Do you feel like it addresses the things that he was just raising? Cause I mean, I feel like we tried to do that, but if there's missing pieces, if there's something we can do to bolster what we've already done with that housing chapter, it's not too late. Well, I think we've got a lot in there. So we've focused on a few places, one of which was to do some training within the developer community to try to do some of those boot camps and some of those ideas, which I think one of the issues we have is just not enough people who are developers as well to do the work. But I disagree with Peter's assessment that we're not there and a few of you may have applied for permits before. Meredith and Audra, you pretty much, you don't have to know anything about the zoning, you just have to walk in and tell them what you want to do and they will walk you right through the process of getting a permit. There is a ton of hand-holding. Now we don't go out and pound the nails for you but we're gonna be there and when it gets to Chris, Chris Lumber who's the building inspector, if you're a homeowner and want to put a deck on and you're getting a permit, if you contact him, he'll give you what you need to know about how to properly mount that deck onto your house, what type of hangers to use. He's not just gonna sit there and say, well get me your blueprints and I'm gonna approve or deny your application. He'll tell you what you need to do to properly construct a deck or put up a railing. So we do a lot of hand-holding and that's a lot of the advantage of what we have because we have our own code enforcement officer. Most communities, probably 245 of the 251 communities just rely on the state to do all their permitting. We have a code enforcement officer. So that's our plus and I think and I'm very proud of Audra and Meredith in the job. They do it helping staff. So I think that's one I would go with. I agree. I think that they are great and I have worked with them as a resident and they are, as you described, from my experience. They make it easy. Gabe. So I just wanted to comment. I think it is relevant to the conversation next week. I don't know Kirby if you actually would get called on, but one of the issues, the only thing that Mike did not concur with us on was the issue about whether or not we have the right the right code to be able to do design reviews as we lift some of the density. And I will tell you that that piece of the AARP report I disagree with. I think Marcella had asked this in one of our other meetings, like what does character of the neighborhood mean? And I think AARP did a good job in highlighting that that's not a good standard. We're putting the DRV in a really bad situation when they have to interpret what character of a neighborhood is and just giving a lot of power to neighbors that don't want to see construction going on. So I think that's a fair point, but the things that they describe are very elitist. Like there are modern designs that won't fit the character of the neighborhood as some might interpret it. So we go in and put really strict rules in about what a facade's gonna be or how wide something's gonna be. We can really limit housing. And I feel like that should just be chucked out. What does it mean character of a neighborhood? Like if we want housing in those particular areas where we want to remove density caps, I'm still totally behind removing density caps without any additional, maybe we need to remove the word character of a neighborhood out of those sections. Maybe we need to do that. But anyway, that's just wanting to get that out there. Yeah, I appreciate that. And that is something we need to work on. It doesn't mean that when we go back and look at designer view and make it match up with what we're changing the density that we have to be draconian about it. It does need to be clear and easily and it's something that's easy to apply. I think that's what you're saying. We have some power to do that, I think. So I think if we do a good job with it, maybe we can, I like where your head's at though, because I think it's what's gonna have to be on our mind. John, you muted. All right. I just wanted to add maybe some clarification or add to what Mike was commenting on in terms of the developer bootcamp and just to clarify that it is not for developers, but it is very much Peter in the spirit of what you were talking about and something the planning commission talked about was that there are no developers coming to save us to build all of the housing stock that we need and we're going to have to do this ourselves and that we have a lot of smart, talented people in the city, people who have one of those skills that you need to be a successful developer. It might be an attorney, it could be an architect, but they don't think of themselves as developers and we need to do what we can to maybe switch that thinking or turn on that light and then empower them, give them the skills and encouragement and a network that could help them do their pro forma and figure things out and connect them with those people that they may not have as part of their network. And that was the idea behind the developers bootcamp and there are people that specialize in doing exactly this. They space them out over time and have these intensive multi-day workshops that people sign up for and then are available to help them. So I thought it was just worth mentioning, maybe clarifying a little bit of what Mike was talking about in terms of developer bootcamp or workshops that is not targeting existing developers but for our community members who don't necessarily think of themselves as developers but seeing what we can do so that we can get that incremental development or those infill projects. I just wanna add something. Can you hear me? Yeah, by the way, I agree that Meredith and Audra and Chris do a great job and I've had great experiences with all of them. But the missing element is it still costs way too much to do almost any of these projects, particularly like an exterior ADU where you have to put a foundation in and you have to bring in utilities and so forth. Somebody, there needs to be something more like what you're talking about as a developer bootcamp. There needs to be a homeowner bootcamp where people are helped to understand and I really think, I mean, you guys all know about the ADU pilot project that we had, which got all of what Mike's six or seven ADUs built? Yeah, it was the program got interrupted a lot because of the COVID and also unfortunately it was, it's part of why you have pilot programs. So this was a pilot program that was hopefully trying to go and work with a bunch of funds that actually came as federal funds through to the municipality. And that is what turned out to be the biggest disaster of the program. And it wasn't until we got into it and at the time when we applied, we were told we wouldn't have to meet these requirements and that we would be able to do all of these things and then once we got the money and once we got started, they gave us the grant agreement and they said, well, actually you can't do exterior ADUs and you can't do this and you have to get section 109 reports for everything and you have to mitigate all asbestos and lead and you have to go through and test for archeology and you have to go through. And so you end up spending $15,000 to in order to be eligible to spend and get $20,000. So that's why you do pilot programs and the intention was to have a bigger program. So the intent is once the pilot program is complete and I believe he has five of the six done, once the pilot program is complete and we get a report from Tyler, our intention is to use our housing trust fund and to look at other funding, go back to city council and go and explain, this is what we learned. This is how much money it would take. There was a lot of interest. We had more than 50 people contact the city interested in building ADUs. So there's a lot of interest in doing it and the question is, how do we do it? And this is part of the learning process of going through but we're not gonna jump into developing a new process until we get that report, until we get that final product from Tyler that lets us know how much money do we think the owner needs in order to do this and what's the delivery mechanism for getting that money to the homeowner and it's actually two pieces that homeowners need and that's what Tyler was trying to provide. One piece is education and information and the other one is money and so that's what Tyler, that's what the program was supposed to provide was homeowners want an ADU but they don't know how to hire a contractor and so that's what the program was supposed to identify is how can we do this? And so they try to number of ways and what we'll need to do going forward is to identify the mechanism for how to do these two pieces and at this point, Tyler was getting paid entirely out of the federal money so he was providing the technical advice. Now, if we do it locally, we'd have to figure out how to do that technical advice piece. Okay, but that is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a program like that Audra and Chris and Meredith would participate in but you need somebody like Tyler to carry the ball and that again is one of the reasons why I think we need a housing specialist but never mind, never mind but Mike, what you just described is exactly what I think is needed and if we had that, I tell you we would have 50 or so ADUs built and the quicker we can get that out, the better. And that's why we did it and that's why we're doing it. And that's why I supported it. And this was mostly Kevin's idea of how that worked. Kevin and Tyler were the ones who worked that out to make that work. But yes, we're gonna try to get through this last piece so we can get that report so we can try to figure out how we can roll this out and what the costs are gonna be to make it something that works going forward. Okay, thanks Mike. I believe, well, Peter before you go I do have something for you here. I put a second link in the chat box if you could just click that and save it, save that link that's to the housing chapter that we're working on. I want you- I gave him permission to the drive so he's got viewers to the whole drive so he can see all of them. Okay, I just wanted to give him one directly to it because he has this interest in housing. You know, this is what we've worked on so far it's not too late to change it but we have done a lot of work here. Since you have an interest in this area, please go through. So this is, you know, this is the perspective new city plan. This is like new stuff. If there's something missing there based on, you know your assessment, let us know and we can revisit and try to because housing is really serious we don't wanna miss any good ideas but there's a lot of good ideas in there that you might not know is like, you know being considered so you can be aware of what we're planning and the developer bootcamp I don't wanna reiterate don't get caught up on the title. It is a homeowner bootcamp. It's for people like that. So this is the revised PC housing template that's the one that you just sent? Yeah, I think that's in that is the right one, right? Mike, I tried to get through to make sure it looked like that is the where we're at with it. It has 21 strategies. You click on the strategies tab. Yeah, so yeah, go to the strategies tab to see the good stuff. They like what the specific things we're planning to do. Okay, all right, I'll do that. But by the way, let me just ask one quick question because I've read the former master plan and I've read the famous economic development strategic plan which I've already told you about I have concerns about. But there's quite a bit of stuff that is in the old plan that is just wrong. You guys aren't picking language up from it at all, right? There's some continuing stuff from the old plan but we went through it piece by piece and there's stuff we threw out and then there's lots of new stuff we've added. So it's a mix of things. Cause not everything in the old plan was unworthy or, you know. No, no, no, no. I mean, there's just some things that are factually wrong. Things that have changed like transportation, the description of the public transportation is completely different. I hope you all update it. Yeah, that's my right in it and so forth. My right? Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, it was like and Mike has mostly been the writer for the narrative part, which you'll have to go into the folder and find the narrative part. Like what I said, she wasn't the narrative part but the narrative part's all going to be updated. It's not all the way done yet for all these chapters but yeah, the descriptive part will be updated and it will reflect current state. And will the growth area be more clearly identified? It's referred to 50 different times but there's only one not very clear map of it. There's on the online plan, there's going to be maps. Like when Mike was talking about the online plans, going to have a lot of graphics and things. We'll have those maps, I mean, right, Mike? I mean, that's my question. Yeah, we still need to develop the land use chapter. That's what the Planning Commission will be developing and the land use chapter is where we're going to discuss where our growth center is and where our various, where we have designations and where we would like to have designations. Mike, it would be really great if maps could be consistent across uses. If the master plan, the voting districts, all of it could be overlays for these. But right now, different departments all use different maps from different types of maps. And it's very difficult. For example, try to look at the voting district boundaries that is in the city clerk's office puts out. You can't figure, once you get to downtown, you get lost. Anyway, it'd be great if you could create something where overlays could be used by all the different departments, public works, city council, et cetera. All right, I'm really going to leave. Sorry guys, I've taken up too much of your time. Yeah, well, thanks for the input. Okay, that's all the updates. Did we, oh, we had a possible discussion of the AARP senior. I think we went over that. That's just, it's not going to be something that we forget about, so we'll circle back to. And so that'll bring us to the appointments for the CDRPC. For the people who weren't here last time, we had a discussion at the beginning of the meeting last time about making some changes about the CDRPC representation because Marcella's been doing it for a while. It's time to transition that she's on a couple of subcommittees on the CDRPC, one of them's executive committee, which is time consuming. We discussed the possibility of having, right now we have a Marcella's representative and then Mike is the alternate, but Mike serving as the alternate just to fill in if she gets sick or whatever. So we're thinking about maybe using those seats differently and having two planning commissioners have those roles and having one planning commissioner who's an alternative, who's actually more active and isn't just filling in, but actually has some things that they consistently do. And then Marcella might have some things that she does. That's where the discussion was when we left off. Marcella, do you wanna update if that, is that evolved at all, like are we, or is that's kind of still what we're thinking of doing? I don't think it's evolved at all. At least I haven't given it a whole lot of further thought. I'm on the, so I'm on the executive committee and I'm also on the nominating committee, which is part of like as the executive committee rep, like somebody from the executive committee has got to be on that committee. And that work is just getting going, but would end theoretically around the middle in like, I don't know, may maybe. But I guess I'm not sure like how much wiggle room do we have to start having someone else go to the CVRPC meetings before we go to the city council for the official reappointment. Yeah, they wouldn't be there officially. So they would be on that. Yeah. Yeah, so I actually have an update on that. So it was a little bit of my surprise that they actually appoint them right away, right after town meeting day. So they actually had their appointments last week, last week the council meet. So I mentioned to them that usually these two positions CVRPC rep and the alternate are usually planning commissioners or myself. And so they left it up to you guys to appoint who we wanna have as the rep. You guys can vote and then I'll send a memo to council that says that these are gonna be the two, the two representatives to CVRPC. So as soon as we make the decision, we can start moving forward with basically a little bit of division of labor for people who missed the last meeting. So the thought was maybe one person would attend the general meeting which meets on the second Tuesdays and that will let Marcella just do the executive committee. So they would basically have two and if they're both there, Marcella and the other person were there, then Marcella, because she's the lead person, her only one vote counts. So if you've got more than a representative at a meeting then only Marcella's vote would count. So my attorney warning bells are kind of going off. Do they actually have the power to delegate that to us? Yeah, it's just appointments. So a lot of places just have appointments. So they may put it on a consent agenda to kind of bless it but they've already appointed all the other representatives to all the other boards. Okay, yeah, I would feel better if it's on a consent agenda or something where it's something where they're doing it because I just, I don't know if someone challenged some action of the CBRPC and discovered that there was some fault with the way that Montpelier did his appointments and I don't know, it sounds like a big mess. But okay, yeah, if it's gonna go on a city council consent agenda then that seems fine. Okay, who was interested in sharing, who was interested in the alternate seat? For the CBRPC. I thought it was mostly been Gabe. I think Jeff may have followed up in an email but am I right about that, Gabe? Yeah, I mean, Jeff said that he was available on Tuesdays. My thought was, well, if I eventually was gonna go into the other role, I can be in the executive committee would be a good prep like if Marcel is gonna stick on for six months or a year and a half or whatever she's gonna do. But Jeff jumped right in and said he's got those Tuesdays free. So I don't wanna, if he's got the opportunity to help out, I think that would be awesome. Yeah, I would like to, so I'm on the nominating committee. I would like to nominate myself right off of it, right off of all the committees. So I think it's the July like fiscal year flip over. If I could just back out entirely at that point that would be great. But I don't know if that's possible. Jeff, what are you thinking? I will, I am tentatively available but less so than when I send that email. So I will defer for now. Okay, I don't have it, I can do it. I don't have any conflicts on that Tuesday. Okay, so the idea is Marcel is gonna stay on. But Marcel, just so we know your preference, you want to stay on until about July, right? Like it's not like. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. I would feel kind of awkward ditching off of the things I'm in the middle of now. I mostly just needed like, I mostly just needed like an exit strategy. Okay, so I think that could work as an exit strategy and then we could just read through the appointments later. Mike, do you see that being a procedural problem for Marcel to resign from that representation later? Even though it wouldn't be the middle of a term, I guess. Yeah, I thought that's what we had done last time but maybe I'm misremembering that. Yeah, it is kind of funny the timing because we appoint right away while the CVRPC usually goes through July and then the new board starts in August. That was why I thought the RPC appointment was later. That's why I told you guys, I thought it was gonna be later in April. But apparently they appoint it right away, which doesn't really overlap well. So I think if we wanted to, I think the reality is just Gabe would have to recognize that as Marcella drops off in July that come August, Gabe's now the primary CVRPC rep. And then we could have a discussion whether Jeff steps in as, or whoever is gonna step in to be the alternate at that time. Yeah, I mean, that timing actually really works good for me because I just think other commitments that I have, like by July I can wind some of that stuff down, right? So I think it would, I like the idea of having two people though, right? I mean, Marcella, you've been through this, Kirby, you did it and there's maybe others on here. I mean, just think about the burden sharing that goes online. I mean, eight hours a month plus these meetings, I mean, that's quite a bit of volunteer service. Yeah, I think at least the situation that I've gotten myself into now, which perhaps was my fault, but I mean, it was my fault, but like this situation is more than I think, more than I am really able to effectively handle by myself. So, yes, you could probably figure it out where it'd be fine for one person, you know, on the main board and on a committee that meets less regularly, but... Yeah, not everybody who's a CVRPC rep is also on a planning commission that meets twice a month. So some of them are appointed completely independently and they hold no other seat. So that's their only responsibility and some of them are retired. Yeah. It's a big difference between taking somebody who's got a job and a family and is already doing two planning commission meetings a month to then, okay, I can do a general board meeting, but then you start getting pressured to do the subcommittees as well. So, yeah, it does start to add up your time commitment to it, but hopefully, as you said, hopefully, maybe we can do a little bit differently than we have in the past, get two people appointed. And then, you know, if something comes up, you know, then maybe Gabe's going to August and Jeff's going to September. And then, you know, from a workload standpoint, we're starting to divide it out a little bit. I think that sounds good. And yes, a lot of them are retired. So this is a good activity to get into if you want to feel young. Because the meetings are skew, skew older. So, Gabe, you'll feel like you're a college kid again. So, okay, that sounds like we have a plan. So do we have a motion to nominate Marcella and Gabe as the primary and Gabe is the alternate for the CVRPC representative from O'Piolier? Do we have a motion for that? So moved. Okay, motion from John. Do we have a second? I'll second. Second from Ariane. Okay, so those in favor of the motion, does there need discussion? Any further discussion? Okay, those in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstain? Okay, so that's our motion is passed. And we can get that to city council. And effective immediately, we can start operating that way. So, Gabe, are you aware of when the next CVRPC meeting is? April 12th. Marcella, will you get me a link or something? Or where do I find it? I'll, hold on, I'm pulling it up on my calendar, too. I will send a note to Bonnie to let her know what's what. Are those virtual, by the way? I guess I should have asked that. They're virtual, yeah. Okay, good. Yeah, it is the 12th, 630. Very good. Okay, yeah, and if Bonnie needs something from Mike or I, just let us know. Okay, great, thank you. And I appreciate everybody's willingness to help out. Thanks. Thank you so much for doing that. I know it's draining and thankless, so thank you. Well, I've learned now not to get myself roped into too many of the sick things. But man, it's tough. The peer pressure is real. It's like, talk about feeling like you're in high school again. It's like, well, we've all done it before, and there's three people in the room, and it's like, Marcella, it's going to be you, right? And I'm like, well. They definitely tried to pressure me, but I got to say, I was more heartless. I was just like, nah. That's good. This is a good skill to learn, a good skill to learn. I was like, OK, I'll be on your Brownfield committee that meets once every 10 years. I'll do that for you. OK, that's great. Good to know we're moving along there. And then so the next thing we have to do is approve the goals and strategies for economic development. Have we not done that? I guess we haven't approved the strategies. You know, we didn't quite get to the end of it, and we ended, and it's good that John's on here, because we had this one bit of discussion about the vacant lands and taxing. And I think it was 730, so we just shut it down. But I don't know if anybody else did some reading. It seems like Oakland, there's some other cities that have done this and they'll pour any money into like a fund, you know, like low income housing fund or something for underutilized properties. Kirby, you seem to think like the city couldn't have its own tax because that's what it looks like most of these municipalities have done is they've created their own tax. No, I'm not the way that Vermont works. Cities don't have the authority to create laws. They have to follow whatever the state allows. You know, we have to do charter changes for a lot of things, and that means legislative approval. As far as the tax side of this goes, I just, I'll put on my like tax attorney hat for a second, like supposedly like so. So the idea of land that's vacant, like a parking lot in downtown, while people are sitting vacant, the way that the Vermont system as it stands would try to capture that value is that our, while people are as an assessor who is on staff for most towns, it's a lister, will value it based on its highest and best use. So that parking lot would be valued, not necessarily as a parking lot, it's supposed to be valued as its highest and best use. It's still vacant land though, but it would be vacant land and like how, like it wouldn't be like, it would be based on the value of how could this be used. And I would think the assessor would value it based on basically it should be used as an office property or commercial space or something like that that would have a higher value. Are we doing that? That would seem like a huge incentive. It's, but I, they're gonna, what they're gonna do, I think is like, they're gonna take the land, there's gonna be a land schedule for the downtown and whatever, and so there wouldn't be a building to value and they're just gonna take that land schedule, which is gonna be probably pretty high as far as vacant land goes. But it's, yeah, but it's not going to represent a building. And that's what John's pointing out is, it'd be nice to tax them as if there was a building, so then there would be less incentive to not have a building. Is that right, John? Yeah, I mean, basically right now, like we had a case where we had some homes torn down and their tax bill goes down. So we're incentivizing, we are not incentivizing investment in our community. And that's all for the same, it's not like our services went down when they tore that down, right? So the cost of our services should be exactly the same and the marginal increase of adding homes or businesses is not necessarily that high, but our tax structure is completely unrelated. Therefore, if we had a way to focus just on the land value, the land value, land value taxes, essentially the concept that people have been exploring, then you have some predictability in terms of when you're investing of what your taxes will be and you don't have that distance, you're incentivized to invest as much as possible in your property. There are obviously a lot of challenges and it needs to be rolled out very thoughtfully and making sure people are enabled and have the resources to invest in their properties. But the idea that we could set stuff up not to disincentivize investing in areas that we would like to see development, obviously you would not want to do this in places where you do not want to go. But you know, I just look at like the growth, like, you know, whatever that growth map is, right? If you look at that, it's not just the downtown, right? It's a more expansive than that. And you have people, and if we're not assessing them properly, right? People are just, there's a lot of parcels out there that are underutilized and it sounds like buildings too. I've seen some buildings that are really underutilized. Well, they should be taxed appropriately, right? With the best uses. And maybe it's just, maybe we just need to do it. It sounds like if that's already on the books and it's just not being done, maybe we just need our assessor to make sure that as they go through this next round of property taxes. The assessor is doing it correctly. And the way that the property assessment's done is because we have the statewide education property tax because, you know, we have the state property tax to pay for schools, there's, it's state law strictly controls how assessment is supposed to be done because so the towns can't play games and, you know, contribute less to the education funds than other towns. So it's, there's not really any wiggle room for doing anything differently. There have been some, go ahead, John. I was just gonna say, you know, there's been legislation introduced and I don't know where it is at this point, but to have pilot communities do this. So I think, I don't know if as a strategy, we don't need to like figure out all the details, but simply say that, you know, we'll, we would like to move forward and exploring any opportunities to shift our taxing structure and practices so that they incentivize more investment in these areas and our growth areas. And then if there is a pilot an opportunity or a pilot community that gets passed, you know, we're in a place where we've already identified this as something we'd like to do as a community. Yeah, I think that sounds like a fine strategy. Yeah, and in the plan, it's pretty much says that, you know, it says there's been an idea discussed for a few years about implementing a land value taxation formula in order to assess higher property tax scheme for vacant land and buildings in the Montpelier Growth Center. This has not been fully examined and should be considered. So that's the description of the strategy to study alternatives to the current property tax system. So we're not gonna be getting into in this plan exactly what that's gonna look like, but you know, there are pluses and minuses that we should be looking at in that system. I mean, housing is front and center. So who knows, you know, there could be, you know, there could be a pilot that comes out and just making, it's not committal, right? We're just saying we'd like to explore. I think it should stay in. I like it. I know Kurt, you felt like there was no wiggle room, but who knows what could come in the future? No, I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea. I just, I have biases because I work in property tax policy a lot and get used to a certain way of thinking about it. And this is different than that, but if the state law changed them as a matter of policy, I'm not against anything about it. Yeah, I just think there are pluses and minuses. I think there are challenges to doing it, but I think as John points out, you know, there are advantages to that system. You know, the current system has its checks and balances. We'd have to just see how the checks and balances would work in the other system. You know, the checks and balances of our current property valuation system is that you can check it against the sales record, and that's how you get the CLA and the COD for the current level of assessment and the coefficient of dispersion, which kind of gives you an idea of how good you're doing, because the idea is this is the value of your property. And if people are selling properties, then you should be able to go through and compare what was it assessed for and what did it sell for. And that's how you get these CODs and CLAs. That judges how good your assessor is doing. You know, this other valuation system, we would have to see what are the checks and balances in that system because it's now separated from what its sale value is. So how do we make sure that, you know, a land value tax system in Berry City is valuing things appropriately compared to Montpelier. I think those are the questions we'd have to hear from an expert on how those work to make sure that we are, as Kirby points out, sending our appropriate amount of money to the state over time. So yeah, so state law changed. I mean, it would be a municipal version of this. So I don't think the state legislature would do anything that's gonna drastically change how Ed funding works. I just feel like it would be such a big change and like scary for them. But if it's allowing municipalities to like do a municipal tax, it's not affecting education tax. Yeah, do a municipal tax that way as opposed to the education. You'd have two valuations to your property, yeah. Yeah. So I think that's how it would be done if it were done. Yeah. Yeah, state law changes. Maybe we have a strategy in there to jump on it. And if there's a pilot, have Montpelier try it. Yeah, I know the mayor is in support of this idea. This is an idea that has been out there and has been talked about. And I know the mayor has been interested in hearing more about this. There might be other things, other possibilities. It's not exactly this, but just some getting a, maybe it would be a charter change thing, but just like a, if we had a fee for undeveloped land within the growth center, you know, if we could... Like I feel like there are other things too that maybe wouldn't require like a state law thing. It would just require a charter change. I don't know what do you think about like, basically like taxing or making it, you know, dis-incentivizing undeveloped land in the growth center, John, but in a different way. Yeah, anything, you know, and I'd prefer maybe framing it in incentivizing people to do the right thing as opposed to telling people that you're gonna tax them more, but whatever shape that takes, you know, if it's some kind of vacant building fee, or there's a number of different ways you can do this. Yeah, that could be something to investigate. We could have a strategy, become a development strategy to have someone at the city, I don't do a study might be too big of a word, but to have some staff like look into what would need to be done to have a fee or something similar at the city level, just to do, there's just to be some economic... I think there's enough cities that have done it that we could, you know, benchmark off and see, but it sounds like either way, either there's, you know, there's some kind of legal change that has to happen at the state level, right? Either a charter change or... Yeah, there's just legal work involving Vermont law specifically here, you know. How you're targeting it, if you're targeting it as a property tax or some kind of tax change, then yeah, that's gonna require that. But other things like vacant buildings, we can assess vacant building fees separately. We already have the authority to do that. Okay, that's good to know. Berry City did it. When I was there, I drafted their vacant building. What about vacant land? Wasn't about vacant land. There's was about public safety. This was, you know, I got there in 2008 in Berry City. 2009 was the market crash and suddenly, you know, 30, 40, 50 vacant houses were all over the place. And so lawns weren't getting mowed, things weren't being kept up. So there was a vacant building fee, which actually I think was zero for a while, but had penalties that if you failed to meet these standards then we would send these fines to them. And it had mixed results. Sometimes they were very successful. Sometimes they weren't. And actually surprisingly, it was the foreclosed properties owned by banks far away that were actually the easiest ones to deal with because we could just send them a note and they would either send somebody out from property maintenance and fix it or they'd send us a check for 500 bucks. We'd be like, score. And we'll send you another letter in two weeks when you haven't mowed the lawn again. So it was, yeah, we already have the authority to do some pieces. And so if you talk about fees and things, we have those opportunities. I think the question is gonna be, is that where our priorities, when we look at staff time and priorities and when we get to that level of, we've got our ideas here now. We've got to kind of have those discussions of what are our higher priorities and what are our lower priorities. In certain towns, this is a big, big issue. In Montpelier, most of our vacant buildings are owned by one or two people. And I don't know how to change that. But we have a number of vacant properties that are owned by banks and or are in legal limbo. We've helped get a couple out and get them moved on, but others are still stuck. It's amazing how many of them are stuck because somebody has passed away, nobody inherited it and it's sitting in limbo. And we just got to get around to waiting till the banks give it up and sometimes the banks don't. So we've got a couple of those. If you're driving down River Street, you're like, why hasn't anyone ever done anything with that building that's just falling into the ground? It's legally bound up. There was one on Charles Street that was stuck for years. There's another one out on Helm Street. It's amazing how things get stuck. So I need to guess somebody owns a building in Montpelier to adopt me. Apparently. Apparently there's free buildings that we don't know what to do with. It's just got inherited, it was amazing. So the one that modern looking building on River Street just passed Dunkin Donuts, if you're kind of heading out towards, or actually it's not River Street over on that, it's still part, it's still Berlin Street. Dunkin Donuts is still Berlin Street. But that modern looking building that Wade Ward Joyce built, that was on a property that was bound up in legal issues that we were able to work with the courts and stuff to get it out so we could get it sold so they could basically tear down the building and redevelop that site. But we haven't really had the resources to go and attack that as much as, we kind of hope that with the housing prices, what they are that housing developers will kind of do some on their own to try to unjam these properties. So I think like what you're indirectly saying is that even if there's some sort of like carrot or stick and ball, it's not going to affect these situations because it's just tied up and... It depends where it is. It's in the growth center. If it's in the growth center, I mean, I think I've been surprised in some cases, I was giving the negative of the vacant building ordinance. I didn't think it was gonna be effective the way they put it together, but it was primarily targeted towards getting the, next to the Econolodge, that building torn down that vacant restaurant building. And much to my surprise, they contacted the property owner and they tore it down. So I've learned to... I have my thoughts of where I think things will go, but it doesn't always work out that way. So maybe a new fee on that building, on some of those vacant buildings, and contacting the banks that own them, we'll give them an incentive to, more of an incentive to move those forward and get them back. You know, in some of the reading on this, I wasn't quite expert in what John was talking about, but just trying to understand what other communities have done. Just the idea of identifying them, there's this sort of like shaming type thing that happens where people don't want to be the derelict building. You know, like you say, there's probably like two or three landlords that own most of the stuff that we're talking about. They don't want to be identified as people that are holding up housing. And it's amazing what happens in these communities who do these things that all of a sudden they start getting traction, right? Just interesting. Yeah, you know, Vermont has a delinquent taxpayer list, by the way, you can look up, talking about public shaming. Like the whole reason that exists is to shame people into paying their taxes. We could do an underutilized property map, and there's a number of different ways to do that. I think Burlington did create that in their last city plan, but you could do it as a combination of property value and then a number of other factors based on your floor area ratio. And you don't want to... Yeah, anyway, that's just something we could probably do fairly easily, you know, without changing state tax law. Yeah, and that doesn't necessarily have to... That's just information. I mean, you can do that just to get information and then figure out what we do, what do we do in response to it? So, yeah, that would be good information to have. So what do we want to put down as strategies out of all these various possibilities? What number are you looking at right now, Gabe? Because I'm not sure what number we were on. 18. One line. 18, okay. So the alternatives to tax system. So do we want to keep this as is, or do we want to add another strategy along the lines of what we're talking about now or add to this? Do we want to add the map idea or... I think we should add that. I think the rest of it, what we talked about is sort of captured in the exploring the ideas, right? But that's kind of a new idea. Put a map of underutilized properties in the growth district. Okay, I'm gonna leave that to you, Mike, to if you want to create a new strategy for that or add it to this one. I'd probably just add a new one in there. Two computers going here. Let's put a note of it for now and we'll fill it in later. Okay, yeah, let's go through the rest of these strategies. There's, yeah, I thought we made it farther than this, but... We got mostly through the list. We just had a couple that hadn't been approved. Yeah, I wish I would have left a note of what number we left off on. I think we actually got through all of them. That was the only one that was hanging us up. Is that what everybody else remembers? We just didn't have time to vote it out or anything. Okay, okay, yeah. So we made it through Tiff, Streetscape. Now, Hotel and Parking Garage we talked about. That's the last one. So, yeah. Yeah, I think we're just missing a few folks so we wanted to make sure we, especially John had been involved in so much of this. Okay, so before we vote on these as our strategies, does everybody want to take a minute to go through them to make sure that they're good with it? Do you need a minute, John? I don't think so. I think the only place I had questions around the golden strategy was around workforce development and whether or not that was appropriate at the city level. And if that was just taking away from maybe our other priorities around housing. But I think we also maybe talked about this and I don't want to rehash. Yeah, we talked about it. We talked about this last week and there are existing, there's some existing, there's a lot of existing workforce training resources out there with like the community college and many other places. And the city's role would be just to have our staff connect people with those things. So that the idea of the city just being a part, like an entity that connects people to those things is what that goal is about. That's my recollection in your way of our conversation. It just seems kind of odd. Like, I don't know. I'm not going to go to who goes to like the city to figure out any of these things. I kind of, I agree, but Mike said that there's people who have done that, like it's happened. Honestly, I feel like it's just by having it in there it's just showing that we're, as a city we're not neglecting this as a need or trying to abdicate the city's responsibility to help the citizens in this area. So it's kind of symbolic in my mind. We did talk about things like housing and childcare that the city can do stuff about that makes a big impact on economic development. And we want to have strategies on the online version of the plan. We want to have strategies for housing for the like childcare is going to be in community services I think chapter, we want to have like links from this chapter to those things as well and acknowledge the connection, economic development connection. Do we have any other comments about the current state of the chapter that's the goals and strategies? And I'm not trying to be dismissive of like what John said about the goals either if people feel like they want to remove that is their interest in removing that goal? Or okay, so not, not hearing, not hearing interested in removing that goal. I'm interested in it, but. Yeah, I know you're interested in it. I could go either way. I could go either way. I think the only way that really comes out in works is the community services department is already interested because we don't use the word hub enough we've got the hub for the Elks Club who's interested in the recreation. We've got the ArcGIS hub and we also, there was also an interest separately in having a community services hub and that was going to be something the community services department was going to run in the downtown and it meant to really kind of start to work with some social and economic justice, some homelessness, how do we connect people to services? And if that, we're not sure if that's going to go anywhere but if it does that might be the opportunity where something like a workforce development person, you know, if you were going to have somebody that was going to connect people to resources that's probably where it would be implemented and not through say my office as the community and economic development specialist wouldn't be working on this but it would be in conjunction with that but I don't see us probably doing an economic development officer in that way unless it's part of that hub, community services hub. So we have one goal and one strategy related to this. I think one thing we could do if we could keep it in there as a possibility like what Mike's saying, we can move it down though. We can make it instead of to the extent that people see things like ranked and importance. We can move it down to the last goal instead of being what right now it looks like the number one goal people. Or is that even gonna? I think that makes sense to move it down if we're gonna keep it in there. Okay. And then yeah, I mean, and on the online version, there still will be a list so it will be relevant, right? Like the order in which these things are listed. Yeah, the order doesn't matter. There's just the order is usually tied to what's listed in the aspiration. The aspiration lays out a number of things and then they're broken into goals and then broken into those. So it just depends on where in the list of the aspiration. So we'll have to move this down to goal number two because there's only two goals under the first aspiration. So instead of goal number one, it would be goal number two. So yeah, is that okay, Mike, to do that? Yeah, I'll shuffle it. Yeah, so people are interested in that. So let's do that at least to de-emphasize it a little bit. Is there anything else people have comments or feedback about? So I mean, we're ready to vote it out. And again, nothing is permanent. How it's gonna start getting moved into the online version and then when the public sees it, we will make more adjustments. Okay, well, do we have a motion to approve the goals and strategies for the economic development chapter as discussed? I'd so move. Oh, I second. Either one, I'll first or second. We have a motion from Marcel and a second from Gabe. Any further discussion? Those in favor of approving the goals and strategies? Say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. So we've made it through that and we don't have the chapter language yet. Is that correct, Mike? Nope, not really. Okay. So he's been buried, totally understandable, which means that all we have left is to approve the minutes from the two February meetings. So people can take a look at those real quick. And when you're ready, move to approve them or change them. When people are ready, I move to accept the minutes as provided. Did we, the second set of minutes is reminding me, we discussed doing tax stabilization for childcare businesses. That's not in the economic development chapter though, is it, or that'll be a strategy that we talked about for a different chapter, the services chapter. Is that right, Mike? Yeah, but I believe it's, which is number seven in that list. It goes through the tax stabilization program as an economic development program, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we added a sentence on the end, childcare and commercial housing projects should be given special consideration under these rules. Cool. Okay. Thanks for the reminder. But yes, it will also, when we talk about childcare under community services, we'll also have that same strategy. We'll, when it's online, it'll all be just one thing with links to the other ones, but. So do we have a second for approving the minutes? Gabe, move to approve. I'll second. The second from Jeff. Does anybody need more time? Those in favor of approving the minutes, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Thanks. The only thing left on the agenda is to adjourn, but does anybody have like any more announcements or anything, or do you want to? So for next time at the meeting, we will cover the economic development chapter language. You think, do you think you'll have that, Mike? I'm still, I'll be trying as much as I can to get, to get, to get going on that. Okay. I started it, but wasn't really able to get through it, but I will, if you. Get that on the top of the list again. Okay. If you, if you want to do like, I don't, I don't mind helping out. If you want to like throw in like your thoughts, like in an outline or some bullets or something, and I can, I can flush it out, that'll help you. I'll see what I can do. I've got, sometimes just a matter of getting a couple hours without being in job interviews and. What, do we, do we have any goals or strategies lined up or did you have thoughts about which one, like. So I've got, the community services is being worked on. Dan are my intern. He's working with Cameron on the community services. So we'll have most of those chapters in May. So we're still a little bit of out on that one. So really, yeah, economic development would be the top one. The other possibility is I can get through the utilities and facilities, which is mostly done. I just got to finalize a couple of pieces. And I think we could get that rotation strategy out. Not very glamorous, not very exciting, but you know, it's one of the other required pieces that we've got to get through. So, but I want to try to focus on getting the economic development chapter done. Okay, so let's, so we're tentatively going to plan to get the economic development chapter done. We can have utilities, possibly something to start on. And, and if yeah, if you need, if you're not able to, we could do arts and culture, because we have some stuff for that. We'll be doing that from scratch anyway. And if all fails there, then we can have our, I kind of don't want to do the CNU, AARP discussion until we get the city council vote on the related things, but that could be a backup too. We can start fleshing out. We also can just start fleshing out what we want to start to do with the land use because we've got most of the pieces we need for land use. You know, community services won't affect land use that much, public safety isn't going to affect land use. Utilities and facilities to a smaller degree, but we can start having just some, you know, start framing out our discussions of land use and where we want to go. What, you know, what do we do? What, what do we already have in our plan? What are we talking about? How are we doing this? You know, really start to have some thoughts on, you know, getting back to our little bit of our maintain, evolve, transform. What are the, what are the places that we're trying to keep the same? What are the places that we need to change a little bit? What are the places we're going to need to transform? Because we're going to really, the land use plan isn't meant to be really detailed. It's not meant to be detailed like a zoning map is that that's really down. We're trying to work on some general direction for the various neighborhoods in the city. And, you know, maybe just, you know, if I can pull together a neighborhood map, we can start pulling together what we might want to try to do in these various areas. It's one that really does need a lot of public input, but at a certain point we've got to put together the first map to let them start, you know, give them something to respond to. Okay. Yeah. So I was thinking, I was thinking that was going to be like work intensive for you to get that going. So that's why I didn't think of really going there, but. It would be more work intensive, but. It would be a little more work intensive, but I was trying to think we were just having a conversation and just starting to have a discussion between us. It'll make it easier for me to develop it later on. If I've got some notes as to where you guys think we should be going rather than have the first draft and have you guys then kind of beat it up for a bit. It'll give us a little bit of an opportunity to kind of develop it at the roots and build it up from there, which as you guys have seen doing economic development takes a little bit longer to do when you're the one, you know, you're not responding to somebody else's economic development plan. You guys are trying to build it. And that means we're throwing stuff in and taking stuff out along the way. Okay. So if everybody could just think about like the land use chapter and what you think will be important to focus on for us. If you need help, like if that seems too abstract, you could take a look at the current city plan and look at the land use chapter there to know kind of like to get the gist of what it's about. So we'll plan to possibly have that discussion in the future though. So if people can start thinking about it, that'll be helpful. Okay. Do we have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Okay. John. John. Move to adjourn. Do we have just John have a second? Second. Second from Gabe. All right. Those in favor of journeying. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. All right. You guys have a good night. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Okay.