 It seems like everyone's here so we could get started. So we'll call the meeting to order. So I'll be leading the meeting tonight as a little work session for us to get started on the city plan. This is to give Leslie a little bit of a break. The first thing that we'll do is approve the agenda. Does anyone have anything to add or change about the agenda? Okay, the demon approved. And then next we have comments from the chair. I don't have anything to add at all. There were some emails going around the last two weeks from the city. Is there anything notable? I think maybe, Mike, if you can just go over the RFP. Because there were some comments about that. They bring everyone up to speed on that because I don't think we've discussed that. Yeah, so the city, so we got a municipal planning grant last fall to do basically a master plan for State Street. And then throughout the winter there was some additional projects in the downtown. And so there was a desire to expand that to be the entire basically downtown core to do a downtown master plan, which I think a lot of us have talked about. But we did it as a group. It's just been a little bit of a while. We need our memories refreshed. So that RFP went out over, well, two weeks ago, so. Amaric, since you don't work in state government, you might not know what RFP stands for. It means requests for proposals. When we ask for people to submit applications, we call them bids, to hire them to do the work. So when we say we put out an RFP is that we're requesting that we receive bids from various consultants to basically do this work for us, which would be making a plan for State Street. Yeah, and now it'll be State Street, including Barry and Maine, Barry out to Hubbard, Maine out to I think school. And so they have a little bit of Langdon, a little bit of school, a little bit of Elm. But primarily just that downtown core. And the idea is to do streetscapes because it really isn't gonna change a lot. The streetscape that's identified for State Street is probably gonna be replicated for those same concepts because you wanna have a consistent theme. So there's probably not a big stretch to continue that. But it's also gonna do a land use analysis and do a little bit because it really came out of a discussion of the Confluence Park, which was discussed for Taylor Street. So the Taylor Street project, they're gonna put at the confluence of the North Branch and Winooski, they're gonna put in a park. And then they wanted to do one on the other side where the pedestrian bridge comes over. We purchased three parcels over here. So the city now owns these parcels. We're gonna put the bike path in, we're gonna put the bridge in. And we've got one lot that's available for economic development redevelopment. And we had another parcel that was gonna be a parking lot. And the question came up, what should we do? Should we keep with that plan of a parking lot in economic development? Or should we make the parking lot smaller? Should we remove the parking lot altogether and have a bigger park? Do we still wanna use the economic development lot for economic development? Or do we want that to be some kind of pocket park or something? So that was kind of the questions that came up. So what we wanted to be able to do was to have the consultant that's doing these downtown streetscapes to also take a look at our public assets that we have, the Jacob's parking lot, these three lots, the Heaney parking lot. We have some parking lots behind City Hall. And just to kind of take a look at what our needs are based on what our land uses are. So do a little bit of a land use analysis and look at, should we use this for parking? If we take out, for example, if we take out the parking on Berry Street, which has been a long time proposal because we need to connect our bike path, if we take that parking out, we might need to have that a parking lot to make up for those losses, those parking spaces. We just have to have a conversation where we start to balance things not looking just isolated at one parcel. We really have to look at the downtown and go and say, what are our downtown needs? We know we don't have a lot of green space and we should do more to have more green space, but we're also have to balance these other needs of if we want bike lanes, we might lose parking. How do we balance all of our needs to kind of satisfy everybody's goals with a very limited number of resources? So that's the third piece. So there'll be the State Street Streetscape, the Main Street, Berry Street Streetscape as part two. And then the third part is this land use analysis to help guide and inform the Planning Commission and City Council on what should we do about what we call 12 Main Street. Can you repeat that recap again? So we're gonna be looking at the State Street. Streetscape. Okay, State Street, Streetscape. Because that's the one that we already have a grant for, so we have to fulfill those great obligations. Then we will do the streetscapes for the rest of the downtown core. So that's Main Street and Berry and a few other smaller streets. And I remember us discussing that because it made sense to, while we're already doing that, to kind of look at it more as a unit. So Berry Street, others. And that's also a Streetscape. Streetscape, yeah. That is a hard word. Okay, and then the third piece. It's looking at the land use analysis and these other public parcels. And the State Street Streetscape is triggered by the work on the bridge? Yeah, and that was triggered by the fact that we have to replace that bridge in three or four years. So the hope is, if we've got a good conceptual plan then we might be able to talk about, do we wanna realign the curves to make wider sidewalks? The sidewalks are quite narrow on parts of State Street. It would be nice to have wider sidewalks. But if we're gonna make wider sidewalks, something else has to go. On street parking, maybe a turn lane. We really have to start to look at, you know, how could we make those wider? Other people may argue we wanna have bike lanes. We wanna have bike lanes, same question. Where would we, what do we give up to have bike lanes? And does it make sense to give those up? And if we gave up parking, where would we replace that parking? So when do you think that, what's the timeline going to be as far as us having a product to look at? Well, April 12th is when it's, is when the, I think it's April 12th when the RSVP proposals are due. They would then have about a year to complete the project. But I think they're gonna be touching base. Our discussions that we had before with the net zero winners, the team bridges and the other proposals, I think are gonna factor in a lot more. So I think if we're gonna invite team bridges, I would wait until after we have a consultant on board so we can have them hear that presentation as well. Because I think as they're working on this, we really should be integrating. If we're going to integrate it, that's where we would integrate those ideas is into that downtown master plan. There may be pieces that are outside. Team bridges talked about remote parking and using the railroad as a shuttle to get people in and out of downtown. That may happen outside, but what happens in the downtown core, we should really have reflected in that downtown master plan. So do you anticipate getting proposals from entities like the team bridges? I mean, I know they're kind of a group. Yeah, we've, I've heard, I've received interest from at least three separate consulting firms right now. At a certain point, sometimes they start coming together. Sometimes two of them will come in, one will be a landscape architect and another one will be, you know, more in the traffic side and they might come together to put in a single proposal. So I'm not sure where they'll, if they'll start mixing together at a certain point, but right now I know we have at least three interested consultants. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thanks for the update. Any more comments? I'll throw out one other quick one just to go and say that Wednesday we will be having the first, maybe the only potentially zoning for the interim zoning. And we put that together and we forwarded that, the interim zoning for consideration. And so council will be taking that up Wednesday. So they may hear it and vote that day. They may hear it, make some changes and want to have another hearing. Wait, can you back up a little bit? Because I know we're having a public hearing on some changes, but. All right, so. What are they gonna be hearing? They're hearing the interim changes which were just the steep slopes, not buildable area, just steep slopes, 30%. The landscape. And the landscape rules. Right, so it felt like those were priority we wanted to get them. Yeah, because they will impact projects that are being applied for for the spring construction season. And because it takes a long time for us, our hearing's not until April on the permanent changes, then it will be time before it goes to council and then council will have to have hearings. And so those probably won't be ready till the end of June before they're actually adopted. By then, kind of missed a chunk. So hopefully this gets the important fixes through so we can get some good projects moving. Do you think you'll need one of us on hand to explain anything? Wouldn't hurt. Yeah. But I will be there and they have been, the council has been briefed on it already, so. What time is it? It's gonna, this one will be starting at seven. So the public hearing is scheduled for 7.15. So it was initially warned for 6.45, then council had a meeting set up. An executive session that's gonna go six to seven so they had to push the zoning hearing to 7.15. It's bed time. Yeah. It's like the worst time. I could feasibly make it. Anyone else who wants to hear? Actually have a birthday party to get to after that, so. Oh, right. Yeah. Okay, so I'll plan unless we hear through email or someone else wants to attend and represent us, which is open. Any other business? Okay, so the business number four on the agenda, general business, comments from the public, and there's no one here, so we can move past that to our work on the city plan, which is where things become kind of structured, I guess we have tracing paper and we have loads of ideas. Anybody have an idea about where to start? Is that me, John? Sorry, I got a text message, I'm a little... I don't understand, I don't know. I understand, I don't know. Is it for the future hot failure? Future, very... No, it's future fall. Oh, and I'm gonna take notes and everything and I'll pipe those up and email them around and I guess potentially put them, I could put them on the website. Yeah, so we could potentially project this, although we have an HTML. That sounds like a fancy word for a doggo. You can actually just go on the website. Do that. Need some sort of conversion. I can go get one of those if you want. Are these maps the same except this one's a bit more zoomed in? Yeah, this one is supposed to be town-wide, as much as possible, captures most of it. This one is zoomed in to the downtown, just because it's where the action's at. Thank you for asking that, because I was trying to figure it out. This is never the same, look at that one. I feel like I should know this. Where is that? It's a trick question, that's actually very... So this is much pealier than it can be. This is my pealier with mercurys and red to gray. Yeah, it sounds good. And put two links to two maps up on our plan website. One is one that I made in August 2017, and probably could be updated, but I haven't had time to do that or I guess if people have ideas on what could be on it, I could do that instead of going through and aimlessly adding or removing things. And then the other one is just a map that everyone here has access to that you can add points to or lines or draw on and add to a maintain, evolve, transform, sort of finding commission workspace. Do you wanna just go over the transform, evolve, maintain language? Emory hasn't been here for that discussion, and we could all use the recap. Yeah. You're just our excuse to remember things we should know. So, so backing up some, we have to come up with a city plan. And that has various components to it that we need to include. One of those should be something that articulates the vision of what are we, why are we doing this? And a good way to do that is to try to document like what about our city do we wanna change or not change? So someone should be able to look at a map and it's not only things that can be mapped, but looking at a map can be a helpful way to do it and understand like in Montpelier in 20, 30, 50 years what's going to be different about it and making sure that we all understand or that we're working towards a common vision is important. So going through an exercise where we start just putting it down on paper, even if we don't all agree or that it's all crystal clear, can just be a good way for us to identify things that everyone agrees with or things that maybe need more work and then we can start to prioritize how to get there and how that will happen. So the idea of putting things into baskets around what do we wanna maintain? So what do we like about Montpelier? We may need to take actions to make sure that doesn't change or what do we want to completely transform? And then the third category is what do we wanna evolve? So maybe it's not something in between the two. So that's generally the concept around maintain, evolve, transform, mapping, exercise. And it's a good way to, and if we're gonna collect information from other people we can do away with those labels if we want and we can just ask what do you wanna change about Montpelier if you could change anything? And we have a tool now that Stern Environmental is working with Public Works that I think we should be able to use to gather input from Montpelier's citizens as soon as, I don't know, if I can get the keys to it. It probably has something up on. Stern should be able to take a lot of those map layers that we have and make them interactive. But in the meanwhile, I just created a simple Google map that we can all edit and have access to and anyone can go to it, but unless they are, they've been included, never given editor privileges, they won't be able to add or change things. So do we have Montpelier, you got one of these guys? I doubt it. Not even one of those. I don't even know what that is. You got one? No. Can you log into it? Do we have this thing? Will that fit in mine? Oh. Do we have? Oh, that'll work. Yeah. Well, actually, I can old-school technology. That's your name, Zara. Yeah. It's all in there. We'll go welts. There we go. Okay, I can hit the lights. Yeah, it's just the one that says council. Otherwise, we'll get the gardening club over here. Three different notes signify this. After repeatedly turning off other people's lights. So on our website, which at some point, we probably need to figure out what's going on here, how we're using it. But I think it would help to set aside some time to coordinate our efforts and how exactly we'll use it. Yeah. If you go down to the bottom of the home page, I just put these links up here. I have the original of the painting right there in my home. Oh. Here we go. You'll see two links. One is for a map with layers for the plan and another maintainable transform map. So this was one that created back a while ago. If you click the little sheets of paper that are stacked here, it'll open up some layers that you can toggle on and off. You can see they include building footprints that are colored by use, our river corridors, flood hazard areas, parcels, sidewalks, wetlands, et cetera, natural communities from the conservation committee, probably like an old zoning district's proposal that we should remove, because this was before I think we adapted the zoning, our sewer mains, water mains, various paths, et cetera. So. So we made some of our zoning district decisions based on where the sewer mains and water mains ended, just for people's history. And one of the things we'll eventually need to include in the plan is that it requires us to include a land use map, a future land use map, transportation plan, a utilities plan, and then another one that's more natural resource focused. So we'll have a lot of these components be separate maps included in the plan, but the maintain of all transform one is really take all of those into consideration and come up with more of a vision statement if you want. So this map is just essentially should serve as a reference point, and I can add or remove things as people want. We can even feed our maintain of all transform points into this map if we want to have that as a layer to toggle on enough. So when you say add, you don't mean just toggle that little check mark. You mean adding a whole other layer to that list. Right, exactly, yeah. So in the evolve maintain of all transform, and I did this several months before coming here, so I came up with examples that are possibly not appropriate or the best, but and I created again these three categories, transform, well maintain, and one for placeholder for questions or comments. So if you were to log in, and I'm guessing we're logged in as Leslie because this opened in edit mode. If it were someone not logged in or who doesn't have edit access, it just you don't have the ability to edit it. But with this, you can essentially just add a point or a line if you wanted. So let's say we wanted to transform the historical society museum, which I don't know why we would. We probably don't want to do that at all, but it's listed as point three. So do away with history. Yeah, this is a good thing you're editing fast. Yeah. Museum of the future is what we want. Do away with the museum. Oh my goodness. I got married, by the way, so let's not do that. Maybe the last to get married there now. And you can add a description if you save it. Go there. Maybe we decide to change that from a different category, move it there, and you can order them. They'll change the sequence of the numbers, zoom out. It'd be easier to see if the different are there. And we can just take that and have it feed into the other map as a layer. If we'd like, we can also export it or view it as a table. We can add different categories if we want, aside from just description, if we wanted to have it priority ranking or whatever we wanted to do. Do we want to put in some right now? Just try it out. Does anyone have any? So here I put in Main Street Shows, Stone Cutter Intersection, Make Safer and Pedestrian Oriented as a Transformer. Here evolve the pedestrian connection between National Life and Downtown. Transformational could be the revive rail line for commuter rail service. I mean, that's one that has been proposed by Team Bridges and a number of other people are looking into that. That would be a transformative project. It's not something that's here. We're not evolving and making it better. We're completely adding something new. So we could do it as a line, but I'm not gonna trace the entire railway. How close do you have? Light rail? Yeah, it was just whether two proposals, one that's going to Team Bridges and we've actually been doing, trying to do a study, getting some funding for a study, which would look at just the Washington County line. So it goes from Montpelier Junction to Barrie City. And the idea is that could be just a light rail, commuter, trolley type system. We'd look at what cost effectiveness, whether it would work. That would allow for much better access. If you wanted to have commuter lots, if you wanted to move parking lots to the outside, that would work much better because you could, if you lived in Barrie City and worked in Montpelier, you could just go down to the Granite Museum in Park, jump on the rail line. You'd probably be faster using a rail shuttle to Montpelier than you would actually driving your car in the traffic. The other discussion that's been going on, which is more statewide, and we haven't been involved as much in, are folks who want to connect Montpelier to Burlington in Essex using the high speed line, on I-89, so that would be a much bigger, different project. I think it's involved in that discussion with State. It's, I mean, Blittersdorf is a private individual who has interest in trying to see that happen. So he's kind of putting his own money and his own capital behind it to try to see if he could get that to work. He's bought Budcars, which are vehicles that would actually be able to make that journey, but there's a lot of cost involved in actually doing it. If he's trying to do it cost and houses, something like, we'd have to subsidize it to the tune of around 300 and some odd thousand dollars per rider, so. Per rider? We could just buy everyone a house instead. Yeah. Yeah, so that idea is still being pushed and considered, so I'm sure it's one that would at least make it on our list of things for conversation, whether we decide to include it in our final plan, would probably come with a lot of input from the Transportation Committee and the public on whether that's something we wanna pursue or if that's just an idea that, you know, we're gonna get a lot of ideas that people are just gonna give us. Either way, I think the rail line right now, we can all agree, totally useless space. Something should happen, whether or not it's a rail, we probably don't know, but that may just be an outcome of the plan that we have a study or dedicated resources to figuring out how to effectively use that space. I think the same thing could apply to the waterfront there too, right? I mean, maybe we don't know exactly how we'd like to transform it, but it seems like everyone in the city has an interest in wanting to see it be used better. Downtown Daly or? The waterfront strip along the rail line there, just those all those parking lots. Started to cut you off, Leslie. No, I think that we had a totally separate idea, so it's better to continue with this conversation. You accidentally add points, you can delete them by hitting the garbage can. So, what do you, do people want as useful? Yeah. Is it like, that's nice, we're not going to eat it? Give it a try, we can decide whether or not it's a good fit for us. Let's plug in some more ideas, I mean, because then we can take this and just put it on our website as a layer. Just like initial thoughts, brainstorming session. Yeah. So one, I have, I don't think it's been, I don't know if it's been part of any of the proposals, but the base of National Life Drive, if you run down it, then you're kind of stuck running on a highway without a shoulder to get to the bike path. There needs to be some sort of connection, pedestrian access, whether it's via Green Mountain Drive, whether it's a crossing to get to Green Mountain Drive to get to the bike path or another way, but. It has been talked about. Yeah, I would imagine. And the reason why it's difficult is because it's technically a limited access highway and you're not supposed to have sidewalks on a limited access highway. So that's where, so. What's the. I would say add pedestrian access to connect National Life Drive and. Green Mountain Drive. Green Mountain Drive. I think that's in our, it's in our gap analysis that we did for the complete streets plan. That was identified. And there were a couple of options that have come up for how to fix that. One is to move Green Mountain Drive down to make National Life Drive and Green Mountain Drive a four way. And therefore you could put a light there. Green Mountain Drive doesn't have the problems anymore and that would exit into that parking lot for Green Mountain Power. Just add pedestrian. What about U32? Is there a need for some non-motorized connection through? Is that something, is that something we'd want? If you could bike or ski to U32 to the art college of finance. I think a lot of these will be able to populate through those various plans that we have. The complete streets plan identifies a number of gaps that need to get fixed. I think there's a, the green print that I think came up the parks and those guys, they have a plan that would talk about, yeah, just like that, a line that would connect those on its way across. I think the gap analysis talks about a sidewalk from U32 down to, and we have a high school, but we don't have sidewalk on Callison Hill, I don't believe. So you don't have walking, you can't walk there if you happen to be a student. We really should have bike lanes and side, and at least a sidewalk on one side. Yeah, I think cars drive pretty fast up there. It's a shortcut. It's tempting too, because it's so wide. You can also add photos to all the videos. I've seen deer though. I saw like a dozen deer on college last night. They had crossing streets maybe. Oh, there's one after the other. Yeah, just like a huge clump. Do we get rid of the deer? Yeah. Eradication plan for College Street area. So the idea with this map is that we would all take individual time and think about it, because I'm like, this is just my beginning of thinking about it, and I'd like time to do it, but I wasn't quite sure what the vision is, or maybe that's what we're discussing. Yeah, I mean, I think it would be great if you over the next while we think about it, even take photos with your phone, and you can add those that'll really bring it to life, I think, when you see something, you're like, I would like that to change in my career, or I really like that, and we should identify that as something we value. Are we concerned about becoming unwieldy when we start to have several dozen points up here, or is that kind of the idea? I think that's the idea. And then when we have some of these meetings, maybe we can go through and consolidate, clear some out, or categorize, or we can see how it goes. Not done this, so. Yeah, no? And I think eventually we would be kind of breaking it into the different, we'll eventually be thinking about it on a chapter by chapter level. I mean, at this scale, we're just getting ideas down to talk about, but at a certain point. When we start talking about the historic resources chapter, we're gonna have that discussion of the historic museum. And we're gonna have that discussion about, do we match our design review to our historic district? I imagine before we even get there, that we start bringing in the committee's feedback, right? And I guess we could incorporate them in this along the same way. Yeah, or we'll have the town-wide, I think, survey tool that we can see if there are any patterns that emerge there. We could, if we have our stuff done, a good amount of it done first, we can have it as a base layer that people could also potentially either vote up or down or something along those lines so that they're not just adding to things that are obvious. And then the other part that maybe I think I can open that from here, I'm not gonna go into Leslie's email. So, but is the spreadsheet or the tables that I worked with Barb on to give the committee's guidance on how they could submit what their goals are and their strategies that would relate to those. So, to have them list goals that you can measure that someone can say, yes, we met that or no, we didn't, and then how do we measure that? And then list out whatever related strategies are. That's a little bit of the piece that I've been trying to work on in between meetings is to try to go and start to pull some language together so that way the committee's, when they start to meet to talk about this, they're not starting with nothing. What do we already have in our plans that talks about what are our aspirations, what are our goals, and then say that these are just places to start the conversation and maybe they're pretty close to what everybody thinks. Maybe they're not, but at least it's a place for people to start thinking and it helps to, when you see it written out, to go and see how you would do something similar to that. So, do you wanna, we wanna practice doing some more? I mean, I think it helps me to do it a few times so we can determine what falls into which basket. We've got the, we did a few transform, evolve. I mean, I think we wanna increase affordable housing. I don't know how we would signify that on the map. Maybe there's certain spots where we wanna encourage it. Yeah, and it doesn't need to be perfect. So, yep, maybe one that would just go into the questions and comments, maybe the affordable housing, maybe something that just doesn't fit on a point. Well, I thought it would be nice if we could spot, I mean, it's been a discussion, right? Yeah, if we knew there was one, if we knew... Well, so... Sabin's pasture is a great place for this and... I mean, can't you make your broad area, you know? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You just do points, I guess you just do points. You can draw and make broad area, you can draw lines. You have to click the pencil, there we go. But in general, I think we wanna increase housing opportunities in and around our, within walking distance of our downtown. We may need to revisit what we think the radius is for that, because I know we've had discussions in here before and I remember debating, like, mile and a half, two miles, what's actually walkable? Defector in Hills. And because there's schools too, because the whole Bailey Avenue place, people have to walk a whole mile to get to the middle school and that can make people late to school. Also builds character. Especially in winter. Queen's Hell, Erin grew up in Nebraska. It's nice that that's considered walkable though, that they are actually walking from that. Yeah. A lot of people, like, their parents work in the town, so they're just the neighbor of least that. Sometimes they have to walk. We tend to focus in and around the downtown, but, we should also. I mean, just as an example of a maintain, you could, we might get comments from a place like College Street or by VCFA to maintain the historic character of this, you know, residential neighborhood. You know, maybe it's College Street past. Well, we might get comments about maintaining the character of a neighborhood, whether it's historic or not historic. Town Hill may say we want to maintain. We gotta define character. Yeah, I think we avoid ever putting the word character in any of that, because it's meaningless. I mean, I- There's gotta be something about it. I think you're right, we're gonna get that comment. But I don't know that we need to put it in right now, because I- Or we should encourage them to articulate. What about- We go over measuring. Is it that they like and value? I think what people do, though, is then they fall back on density and things, and that's what I'm scared of. I'm scared of people focusing on things that aren't really preserving the character, but they're measurable things that people can get behind. I'm just gonna talk about historic facades, in order to- Yeah, there's- Yeah, density. There's just a sense of- A measure of- You can't, like, see that. But we see it over and over, like, so, yeah, how do we talk about character and leave room for building out housing and all the other goals we have? Well, let's identify what about that character makes it that we value. Is it, like, architectural detailing? Is it, you know, scale and massing? And if so, like, what about it? Those are all, like, tangible things that you can- That's my property value. I mean, that's also something we could look at and I should add probably a layer, right? Got a 3D rendering of property value per acre. Like, we probably wanna increase the value of our properties in Montpelier if we want these levels of services. So what kinds of development? What does that look like? There are clear patterns, you know? The stuff we built, ironically, the stuff we built after zoning is worth a lot less than per acre basis than what we built before zoning. So we need, you know- Just zoning in general, not our recent zoning changes. No, no, no. Right, right, right. Zoning in Montpelier. Zoning in Montpelier. This planning commission ruined. I thought I was a great guy. I'd like to submit my letter of application. I think that's a great point, though, about defining character. Yeah, it's really hard. It's gonna be one of the biggest challenges. But we don't have to define it. We can focus on actual things. Yeah, exactly. A little bit each person. So what does that mean? Right. So retain the historic nature of close street neighborhood. No. I'm not gonna put that one in there. What do we do over here? No, there's been some talk about Nikki leaving, right? Is that something we wanna, you know, signal that we would like to keep them here? I don't know if we can do it through this, but we could really say, you know. Yeah. Maintain presence of schools, you know, beyond the public school system, having higher education available is important. Yeah, I mean, I think those would both fall into our education plan, which we're required to have in our economic development plan, which we're required to have both of what you're gonna touch on those, maintaining those opportunities. Because I don't think we had any input on that during our all committee kickoff meeting. I don't think anybody's goals were to maintain. Invocational. One question we had during the zoning is for a number of these areas, what is the, right? What is the vision? You already had a maintain for Hobart Park Trail. What about a park in District Three? I don't know, my district's, that's the south of Berlin. Basically behind my house. Behind my... Park behind Leslie's house. Yes, that's what I want. She's gonna donate her backyard, in fact. Actually, we haven't ever been to a trail back there that were privately owned. But, yeah, somewhere in that realm there or on Berlin Street or, you know. It's certainly in the council's goals has been to study that, so. That could be a question or comment here. Do we want to have access to, because the closest playground to me is elementary school, I think, which, you know. It's pretty much the only one. Not that park. Park slash playground in District Three. That's what I would write. Yeah. That'd be a transformer and evolve. Not much there to evolve, right? The area. Sugaring farm. Yeah. We own 50 acres behind the little, little field street and that's like, right, that's that. So we have a donor for the park. That's excellent. Yeah, I'll call us then. Again, I'm not gonna start adding candidates, but if we understand these points are not intended to be exact, someone sees like a part of that property. I think it evolved that's along the same lines as what we just did, that's more of an evolved-out transformer is to evolve the winter recreational environment and moppular. I feel like, we don't, the things don't have to be so dead in winter and I think this goes into economic developments. Some other things. Climbing gym, greenhouse, there's like attractions that could be like winter, give you something to do in the winter. Like, are there any, what's the status of this dump dump? What do you mean by status? Still a dump. Still open. What is it open? No. What? Who controls it? Can we do anything with it? It is public works. Considering, I mean. It is public works and it's primarily used, it is used as a stump dump still. It is the old city landfill, so it has a classification in there for that, but it's used for the stump and it's also used for snow dump as well. It is one of our last ones we have left. Fires. I thought that's what we used my street for. Oh, dumping snow. Let's just plow it there and leave it. Because that's what's been happening. Oh yeah, well there's not enough space to deal with all this snow. Yeah, we keep, the unfortunate part is we've lost a number of our snow dumps with changing rules, so we used to use a lot of our floodplains for snow storage and we can't use our floodplains for snow storage anymore, so. Dump snow into a new ski. Dump snow into a new ski. Happens a lot, so. It happens a lot still. Kirby's deck, not even, just a window of all of the various privates. It used to be floodplains, though. They used to go under the, there used to be a large snow dump under the I-89, so they used to just go down there, park it on, dump it on the land, and let it melt there, but we can't use that one anymore. Yeah, my first floor, my house is very thankful that that doesn't happen anymore because it's not as at much risk of being underwater. Going up this way. All the way up to right spill. How about we maintain protection of the floodplain, floodplain, breaking wood, and. River corridor. Aaron, was there one about the snow dump that you wanted to add? No, it's just curious, but we know what. If there was an opportunity there, that was not being. Sounds like there's no opportunity. There are some trails that you can. Definitely. Yep, there is, the trails do come in and go around it on the hillside. South side of it. It's good to see Google Maps finally updated the stump dump road to Finch Road. Was it called Stump Dump Road? It was. Because there were no other houses on it, so it used to be just called Dump Road, and then we changed it to Stump Dump Road, and then once a residential development appeared on the north side of the road, they requested that their mailing address not be Stump Dump Road, so. With lots of finches. Yeah. I think so, I don't know. Seems like at the least, we could come up with multiple uses out there, like have there not been. Rather than just one. We studied it for the solar, we studied it for solar and it didn't work for solar. Why not? Just the way that the, like. The way the landscaping, the hill kind of goes up, and so that's why we ended up with the city's solar farm is at Log Road instead, which is just a little bit farther north. What's going on with Redstone? Redstone. There was an auction, so that is a state-owned, was a state-owned, still is a state-owned, yes. Allen Goldman won the bid, but they, I think it's been a little bit of time, but he hasn't yet closed on purchasing it from the state. He's won the bid, but hasn't closed on it, so we don't know what's going to happen with it until that step happens. Is there a crazy plan to connect to the long trail from there, or am I thinking of something else? Yeah, that was in the newspaper. Okay. What you think? He said that. He owns a number of, owns a lot of land, hundreds and hundreds of acres. And so his land goes from there, he owns the land that's all the trees to the west, and a lot of that extends out towards the Worcester Range, where he thought if there was an organization that could help connect to some other parcels that you might be able to connect to Worcester where we could connect up with the long trail and. Oops. I botched it. You got, yeah. We're really not used to reusing your computers. As far as big housing transformations though, yeah, that right there. That would be great perhaps. That's walking to downtown, closer than Bailey, right? Yeah. Be good for high school students? No, this is part of the city plan, but human services, like I feel like we didn't hear much about that from maybe the groups that were at that meeting, but has there been, I don't know, any talk of the human service community and what resources are important or what they might need, I don't know where we would find them. What are some examples of human services? Well, like I don't know if I'm thinking of something. I'm thinking, my husband is on the board of a drop-in center for psychiatric. Survivors, like, so I'm just thinking, I'm going for a vote. Yeah, I mean just for the, because I don't know, sometimes talking about all the smart girls and stuff is great and the energy stuff, but I feel like we're talking to a certain group of people in Montpelier and I just am wondering about other people in Montpelier and what their needs are. Yeah, so community services, we will have a chapter and I think we have to have a chapter on services. And so community services will be one of those chapters. So we have a senior center. We have our recreation, not just recreation facilities, which might be on a facilities plan, but we also have services that go along with that daycare, after-school programs. So as planners, we kind of have these three bubbles that overlap in a lot of ways. So the stuff we always focus in on are those built natural resource pieces. A lot of what we've talked about here, streets and sewers and all these other things. And then you've got this second bubble, which is economic development. And then there's the third bubble, which is people. And that actually ironically ends up being the one that we forget about the most are those social capital. And it's more difficult to plan for them, but at the same time, those are just as valid planning, planning topics and talk about equity and those types of issues. Social equity, racial equity, has a place. Put in a point somewhere downtown, just anywhere downtown. Yeah, I'm not. I think maybe coming up with some organizations to reach out to and get ideas from, I think Downstreet's one. In each chapter again, we talk about education, we have adult basic education services. So even within our education chapter, we might talk about the school facilities and how much they could support and how much capacity they have. We can really talk about it in a bricks and mortar, nuts and bolts kind of way. But we can also talk about it's link to economics and how are we doing a good job of preparing kids for future economic opportunities. And we can also talk about the social human interaction and those services that are available to people that aren't physical. They're about job training and retraining. So identify human service related needs and priorities? So I'd always encourage when those types of things come up because that's always gonna be the thing that, certainly I'll call that my fault. My weakness is the human services and the social services and remembering to include that component. So if you think we're missing something, it probably means we are and we should be thinking about this. One thing I'm aware of that the entire state needs is recovery beds. So for drug addiction, the state's done a lot in the last few years to help with treatment. And you can get at least some treatment in Vermont, relatively easy compared to how it used to be now. But then recovery after treatment, there's almost nothing. And almost everything that does exist is in Burlington. So that was one thing I was going to bring up was if it's in the housing, it also fits into the services, this chapter that we're talking about fits into both. But yeah, having more of that. Yeah, there was a lot of work that was done in the housing committees about homelessness in the past couple of years. And that's one that, we talk a lot about housing but we don't talk about what are the services that are needed to support that transition from homelessness back to housing. Is anyone's past here recently? Or what's the sense? It's been silent the past year, at least on my front, downstairs. So certainly when the zoning was going through, there was a lot of discussions about the potential and possibilities. But ultimately at the end, we haven't heard much. But that's not to say that there isn't something somewhere percolating, but nothing that has made its way to my office downstairs. Does the same family still own it? Yes. Okay. Yep. So where is he? Yeah, so where is he, Aja, family? Although the parcel, if you look to the left of the screen west, that part of that is owned by the college. So there's, you see that one field, that's owned by the college. So there has been discussion of a potential project of a cottage cluster, senior housing facility to go in there. But... I didn't put slopes on here, but that's also... Yeah. Mm-hmm. Slopes plays a big part of all these discussions for those. But it's a good, it's got some good day layers in there. It's one of those I don't have. Yeah, this was last year. So these are our ortho's struggles to get. See a bit of snow still. Oh yeah. These were ready to pop. Did we remove the museum? Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did that. Before that goes public. Get rid of it. I'll get a call from Eric Gilbertson in the morning. Let's talk about moving the historic building where Fock Capital is located. Moving it? Forward towards the street. Yeah, there's been a proposal because there is an application. Is there an application? Well, certainly it's not a secret that there has been a, the old gas station that was at the corner was purchased and demolished. And it's a proposal, there will be a proposal to redevelop at that site. There was a discussion about potentially trying to move Fock Capital back up to the street. But that, as far as I know, has not materialized. So I think they're still moving forward with their plan to build a new structure there. It's safe to say that for this ocean of parking here, that we want to work towards a, maybe, better use of it over time. Yeah? No. How about that greenhouse? Endure a water park. People would come if you build it. They would come. Five-story skateboard park. That would be great. It's just a small lap pool with a toilet on it. Yeah. It's just like a greenhouse where you could go and walk around somewhere where it's actually like warm. It's warm. Kugul is a lot of space back there. Mm-hmm. Is that part of the capital complex? It's not in the capital complex, but the state owns the parking lot to the left, right there. That's owned by, and then the other gray parking is owned by the insurance company. And then it goes to the federal and courthouse parking. We heard some proposals to put a garage in behind 133 State, behind the Department of Taxes there. And that seemed like something that was appealing to put a garage in there. Yeah. Because that is opposed to the pit, which is much more complicated with multiple landowners. This one's just the state. You have the state one in their own parking. They probably would be opting for one over here. Because I think that the parking lot near where the Gerdon Park is in the river, we should try to move away from that one to the right. Yeah. They're transformed into green space or, I don't know, river oriented. Or anytime you're ready to build a meme who's residential or... Yeah. We have this engage the river there. You don't have to live that close to a highway. Yeah. But we're going to have a... We're not going to surprise though. Sure. We're going to have to be like a mid-rise sort of thing, like the Taylor lot. Yeah. Maybe a base. I think this goes to the... Most of the projects that we saw for Net Zero Montpelier competition, there were a lot of ideas in there. We could certainly kind of throw into that site. What about this gateway? You've tried to raise this earlier. Yeah. Well, I've got the question over here about what our vision is for really this entire area to the east and the south. And then the neighborhoods up here, what if anything, are there needs and what have they articulated? What's happening in that space with the restaurant? There's... Yeah. Nothing yet. It's clean. Well, I think we need some sort of connector, pedestrian connector up there. I mean, people can walk up and down Northfield Street, but it's pretty busy. Right. Yeah, the sidewalk is great. Yeah. Oh, it doesn't? Even after the... It does. Even after the project was... Northfield Street project was done. Yeah, it doesn't go north. Oh. Or south, rather. It's going to put... I'll have to see the gap analysis, see if that's another one that we flagged. Yeah. But I know one of the goals that we had before when we did the zoning was that we wanted... We may not get mixed-use neighborhoods. People like their residential neighborhoods, but we did want them to be walkable to an area where they might have some. Yeah. And this is an area that really, other than the hotel... The Grange. Doesn't have that many opportunities for... Do you live in this district, too? No, I live on Lower East Street. Oh, okay. But my parents own apartment buildings up there. Oh, okay. Couple more. I'm the only one on this commission who lives in that part of town. Everyone else lives in districts one and two. From the sole voice for District 3 here. No, I think that I do the whole commission. I think this is comprehensively about the city. I don't know. But yeah. I just want to comment back here. John, since you were in that neighborhood, there's that residential neighborhood kind of... Oh, you're classifying everything behind national life. And over there is part of one, I see. Yeah. And I put improved neighborhood connectivity. Yeah. Do you want to put something near the Econolage? Development of a restaurant or bar? That would be pretty sweet. Right there. He's a big fan of... Nice British pub or something. That would be great. With some trivia on a different side. Is this for you? No, we don't. It's still owned by the Econolage folks. Fish and chips. A pub would do well. Note to people watching. But I'm sure when we talk to Laura and the folks who are doing economic development, we would certainly be looking for sites that are available for redevelopment. And that might be one of them. At the same time, transportation may come in and say, that's a great place for our park and ride lot to the downtown. So we'll probably get a couple of different ideas from folks that we would have to weigh in the end. They're getting over there. I don't know. What National Life is up to, it does feel like it's an underused area with more potential. You have these incredible views and land here that gets used once a year. We had the proposal for the gondola up to National Life to get people up there and then the proposal to have residential development up there. That way it becomes more of a village. It would have the residential and these other opportunities. It's all owned by National Life, so it's something they would have to either partner on or support. I seem to be very engaged in the community they support. I mean, musically, their name is on every event I've seen. Every single playbill and poster. We're running out of ideas, John. We're done. Yeah. That's it. We have the future. Would it help to delegate some things for each of us to kind of interest that we have to come back with some ideas for it? Is that something people aren't interested in? Like looking at human services, organizations to reach out to. I'm not going to do that. Maybe I'm too tied into that world. But I'm happy to do that. May as well leverage that. Anything else we need to feel like we need to come back in? We can probably get a, well, maybe this goes within the same template of the other sort of goals, but a non-matte-based list of what our vision and maybe strategies are. So you can add that to the page. In our Google Drive, we have the notes from the top priorities from various committees. Maybe we could all just review that and plug in some of the ideas that we thought are a good idea. And maybe a specific homework item for you, what you remember is to think about any kind of complaints or ideas that you've heard from people your age who have done Drive. I hear like a lot, like everybody who lives like past Northfield Street, like about how dark and shady it is kind of like on the walk. Like there's no sidewalks, really. And it's a little dangerous. Maybe more lights. Is there still people making that walk even with that? Yeah. Like some of my friends and their parents can't make enough. They have to walk to the middle school all the way up to that little, like, near number eight. Yeah. Is that where the, is there a bus or is it? No, there's no buses from the middle school. Oh. But what's at the number eight? Is that just where they live or are they? Yeah, it's just kind of the colonial drive. Oh, okay. So they live in that area. Yeah. Yeah. So they have to walk home and it's kind of sketchy at night. I usually walk down here, but now that they've had some. Logging. Yeah. Occasionally gone down this way and it's just not fun. Yeah. I mean, it's better than it used to be with the project, the recent project. I run up and down and sometimes runs from them to work. And it has improved, but it's just a very near real area. I don't know that there's a lot we can do for expanding into. I mean, it's safer, but maybe more lighting. Yeah. Are there other map layers to be any ideas of things that people would like to see? Put the slopes up. I mean property values, you can do that or? Yeah. The values we based on the city's appraisal, I take it. Yes. We can adjust it with the CLA. Just leave it as it is. It doesn't change much between when you're comparing across. Right. You raise everybody's CLA. I would just put this on a similar fucking market value. Right. With CLA? That common level of appraisal. So it's just a factor that the tax department calculates and will multiply for the purposes of the equalization payments for schools. It's just to make up if you're trying to compare it to other towns, but we're not really doing that. But it's always a good interesting model to take a look at when you're looking at various projects because you think, you know, one tractor supply that must be worth this much realizing how much, like, if that were five houses, five houses would have generated more taxes than one tractor supply. It's because of the way of... Right. If you look at, like, China Star and the tattoo place, you know, not what most people would think of as high-ranked places, but this one parcel generates a lot of tax revenue per acre because it's used so efficiently. I think, like, I don't know, 20 apartments and 3 businesses in it. So if you take that and you multiply that over a block, that's a tremendous amount of value compared to other maybe less efficiently used places around town, around new work towns. I have a question. Has there been... I haven't been in any discussion about Stonecutter's way. It seems just kind of random that we've got a straight, kind of nestled in there, but... I'm sure that Tom McCartle could give a nice, broad history of that because it was state rail yard, and I don't know if it's still owned by the state, and we lease it, or if it has actually been transferred to the city. I think that would be a nice pedestrian path. I've also heard of, you know, a one-way street and my favorite one-way street. Oh. Especially in the winter, that sounds like a great idea because berry is the absolute worth buying. Yeah. They both are right now. They probably are. I mean, it's just been a really terrible year for that. I ride it in the bridge. No, you get town. If you drive around town, you get town. The pavos in my neighborhood. Yeah. Oh, everywhere. I don't know if this is a point for the map, but I think it's something that we have to think about as we have these downtown discussions and that's the existence of the brown fields and there's contaminated sites, so we should all be aware of that. Maybe there's a layer or more? Yeah, I don't know, but it's something that's going to definitely affect what actually gets built or what happens because it puts limitations on, especially the cost of putting something in each of these sites. My understanding is pretty much all along the river there because there used to be industrial stuff pretty heavy and popular at one point before there was a lot of regulation. There's economic development opportunities in this area, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Down in the Montpelier Grand at Works and those other buildings in there, I think I've been proposed for redevelopment. He is trying to... What'd you say? A QZ? Yeah. What was the butcher shop? How do we bring the butcher shop back? Can we just put that on here? I would take that. That was my neighborhood bar for a while, too. Yeah. But I think there's a lot of... there's opportunity in that area that enough people live there. There could be more. Yeah. And with the new bike? Yeah. And now Caledonia Spirit's further down. There's like this... There's opportunity. We do need a bunch, right? A street stumble. There you go. So the gateway near there, we had brought that up. It's kind of related to this area of the city and it seems like you can commute by foot between the two of those. Are we thinking like industrial for the gateway? Because that seems like the only place that you're here in this area. Yeah. What is the cross Vermont trail? Aren't you doing something with the bridge over there? It's being built right where you see the words Vermont Patient Alliance. It's going along that old country club road and then it goes down and it's coming back out over by Agway. Yeah. One of the tough questions that a lot of communities struggle to address and deal with is when it comes to characterizing the purpose of various roads and streets, is we have streets that are places for people. We have businesses and homes that people should take kind of priority in terms of the design of the function. So it's okay that cars are slow there. And we have other road infrastructure that are designed or should be designed to move large volumes of vehicles. So, you know, obvious one is say 89. So it's best to pick one and go forward with that. And oftentimes people try to split the difference and they think they can make both. So then you have all these trip generating uses with curb cuts on roads that are intended or originally were intended to move lots of cars that then become congested and are terrible places for people to walk on. And they now no longer serve any function in terms of they're not great at moving cars. They're not great places for people. They end up being very expensive in terms of infrastructure and very low in terms of yielding tax values. So they become a net loss. They increase our taxes because they are paying for the infrastructure that they're using. So identifying what are areas that we are going to consider streets and invest in for things like sidewalks and other areas where really they should be limited in terms of uses that generate trips and we're not going to be places where we want to encourage high levels of activity. And oftentimes things like industrial uses could be good potential. This is where they require maybe more space. They don't generate as much traffic or the traffic that they generate is maybe more truck oriented and you don't want on your streets. So that's a discussion we can have around some of these spaces over here. I don't know. It's not something we've talked about much. It seems like our options are actually quite limited. It seems like Route 2 is... It's in Route 2. It's about it as far as having those options, right? For us, the traffic moving type options. Yeah, and where does it start and end? And we had a lot of discussion with that in our complete streets plan, the street typology. So as we get into talking about transportation plan that's what we would probably be talking about those exact things that they had to address when they were looking at that, which is what would be our perfect river street and Berlin street. If we were to lay it out, we would have vehicle traffic and we need pedestrians. If we're doing complete streets, we have to address how the pedestrians move through here, how the bikes move through here, and how the cars move through here. And we have to make sure we've accommodated all of them. And in some cases, with Northfield Street, we have failed to provide for all of our users. We are addressing how pedestrians move through this space. So that would be flagged in our transportation plan as a deficiency that they may take... You know, some of these may take, you know, decades. You know, we're missing sidewalks on East State, but that's because it would cost three-quarters of a million dollars to build the retaining wall to keep that sidewalk going on East State, just because there's just a cliff there. So some things just take time and lots of money to fix, but it's still there as a need. It just may be more difficult to fix. Yeah, right over cliff. Just keep filling it. Yeah, there's the sidewalk gap a little bit farther up, I think. Yeah, that's where it crosses over. That's where it crosses, and there should be. You know, it's a pretty busy area. That road has enough pedestrian traffic that it should have sidewalks on both sides. But it has a gap. Should we shut this down? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like we should take this back up after a public hearing. Well, I think we'd be able to do a little adding things in between, so we'll take a look. So how did... Yeah, can you go through how you got here again? So if you go to... If you go to Montpey.City, or planned up Montpey.City, it'll take you to the same place. And you go all the way to the bottom of this page. There's links to the two maps here. And these are open just to planning commissioners at this point, or is it open to the public? Anyone can see them. Can see them, but they won't be able to add them. Right, and if you log in with your Gmail addresses, which all of you have, then you can edit the map. And if you can't edit, send John and Sam in a note. You can also edit, he can make sure... Anyone? So should we just have a place on the agenda then to revisit, like, every time, just to see if anyone's added anything so they can go over it with the group? And in that way, track? Yeah, let's do that for now. What we do in between meetings? If you didn't add anything at all, come prepare to something to add on that meeting. Yeah, read a plan. Come up with something. Is there like a broad timeline for this city goal? I don't know what to expect. Yeah. My hope has been that it's 12 chapters at a minimum, so that's going to take time to work its way through. So I've kind of said if we were done by the end of... I mean, like, done with the whole plan and ready to go to public hearing by the end of 2020, I'd be happy, or even if it was adopted, I would be shocked. Just because it takes... Once we've come up with stuff and once we've gone to the committees, you know, if we're going to be inclusive, it takes time. If we want to write our own plan and just roll it out, then we'll get crushed, but we can get it done faster. So we really want to come up with proposals, work with the committees, work with the public, and then I think we'll end up with a very really strong plan within that timeframe. We could also. If you go... the energy part here, it takes you to this folder in Google Drive, which has the tables and, you know, spread... Not everyone loves spreadsheets, so there are other ways to kind of make this more accessible, but this has the idea of the vision, the goals with target date, data source, priority ranking, strategies, and have it so that committees, if they wanted, if we wanted to set these up for committees, can basically select when they think it's ready to go to the PC and they can have it all come together in one place. A lot of this is some of the stuff I'm going to be trying to kind of get prepared to help set the table for them because it's a little bit complicated and we had some models on how to have the conversation so it was consistent in how they all connected together between your aspirations or your visions and your goals and your strategies. I need a couple of notes on these minutes. I'll take those. Your computer back. I didn't shut it out. You probably want this stuff. Thanks a lot for your work, John. Yeah. Dude, it's a long time. Except for that other map which I did moments before. It was still great. Does anyone have anything else about the city plan? Let's just move on to the minutes. I moved it for the minutes. We get it. John has made the motion. Do we have a second? Just so we can start discussion. Second. I accept Leslie's sentence. On the first page under the final punch list item rezoning fixes for the last in the second sentence just a small typo but it says the administrative officer should have a way of settlements or coming into compliance or upcoming advice or coming into compliance I believe. Just to be clear. But the section was too restricted to the other. Okay. The second page under the motion to warn a hearing on bracket date blah blah blah The second sentence says the best way to process with the city plan which I think that should be proceed instead of process. Proceed. I had planning commission. She was not authentic. Oh. Where are you? Where are you? And then the final edit is right above the the last sentence before adjournment is the motion passed on a three to zero vote with those who have been in attendance in that meeting. I am fairly certain that I also joined that vote so it was a three to zero because I knew we needed for our motion to carry. So that would be my final correction. You got him? Is everyone okay with the changes? Yeah. So should we vote on approving the minutes with Leslie's changes? Assuming John adopts of an his motion. His motion. Yeah, I pretty accepted the I pretty pre and post accepted. Leslie changes friendly amendment, blah, blah, blah rules and stuff. We have a vote. All in favor. Hi. All against. Kind of looking the lawyers get to blah, blah, blah rules. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The minutes are approved and that leaves us with number seven. We adjourn. Wait a second. Okay. Not debatable. Yeah. And we adjourn.