 Okay, not that I necessarily need the mic right now, but there's people that are watching this at home, so I'm really excited that you all are here. This is great. So thank you all for coming out to the final reveal, I suppose, of the Huntsman Park design. So I'm excited to see what you all have and to have a conversation about it. The way that this time will more or less be structured is we're gonna hear from Vermont River Conservancy and MacBroom and... Milona McBroom. Milona McBroom, about the plans. And then if there are, you know, sort of just clarifying questions as we go, I assume clarifying questions are probably fine, but we'll have more time for more in-depth questions at the end, and I think that's pretty much it. Does that sound, any other comments? I'll do a little intro. Okay, great, so that's it for me. Awesome, thanks all for being here. Thank you, Aya. And when you all speak... Oh, is it that mic there? I don't know, it probably is both. This one here. Well, welcome everyone, thank you for being here on what feels like the first night of fall. Isn't chilly out there? And thank you also to Orca Media for recording this, it is live streamed now, and then the recording will be available tomorrow on their website and YouTube. And I'm just very appreciative of all that Orca Media does to keep our community informed and engaged, so many thanks. And I was thinking to, we'll do a presentation. I'll do a brief introduction here and then hand it off to Milona McBroom. And it would be great to hold your questions and comments to the end. And then when you do, if you do wish to come up and have a comment or question, if you could do so in the microphone so that those listening at home can hear you. So I wanna introduce myself. I'm Ricardo Erickson with the Vermont River Conservancy. And also from the Vermont River Conservancy is our executive director, Steve Libby, here tonight. And VRC is a nonprofit land trust protecting land along rivers throughout Vermont for public access, for conservation, and for encouraging flood adaptive communities. And a year and a half ago, VRC started an initiative called Face the River. We wanted to facilitate community discussions to think about how we relate to our rivers in a new way. And all too often in our cities and town centers, we have built structures around our rivers. And essentially, we don't see them, we don't interact with them or relate with them, and we have turned our backs to them. And so through a series of public outreach events and presentations in Montpelier, we heard from many of you in and around Montpelier about your relationship to Montpelier's rivers and how you would like to improve the way we see and relate to our rivers, how we as Montpelier can turn and face our rivers. What we heard from you was excitement and potential of what could be. And more specifically, we heard from so many people that you want a riverside park in Montpelier at the confluence of the North Branch and main stem of the Winooski River. And we personally loved that idea. And so did Mayor Anne Watson. She was listening in and she loved the idea too. And VRC loved this idea of a confluence river park, so much that we decided to apply for some grant funding to see if we could get a conceptual design for such a park. We received that grant funding. We went to the city council, we got their approval to go ahead with this work. And the first thing we did was we created an advisory group comprised of 17 people from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Many of them are here tonight, so thank you to our advisory group for helping us along the way. The second thing we did was put out an RFP to initiate this step of creating a conceptual design for the park. And out of several very qualified proposals from throughout the country, we hired Mylon and McBroom to do this work. And the team is led by Roy Schiff, the water resources engineer from Montpelier and Regina Leonard, a landscape architect. And it has been our pleasure to work with Roy and Regina and that they're capable and creative team and they have far exceeded our expectations in creating this vision, this conceptual design of what a confluence river park could be. So I'll now hand it over to Regina to describe to you the process that they went through to provide some background and ultimately to reveal to you tonight the final conceptual design for the confluence river park. Hi, I'm gonna back up a little bit and I just wanna talk about the context and as you all know, there's a lot of exciting things happening right now, which goes kind of hand in glove with the whole vision to reorient your community toward the river. With the Clean Water Act in the 70s and the rivers getting healthier and wildlife coming back, communities all through the country are reorienting themselves to the river. And I think by way of the development and some of the other investments that are happening in your downtown, it just makes this project really, really integral to that whole opportunity and making that happen. So what we wanted to show is just the context of things that are happening. And so if you look at this visually, you can see the green star is where the confluence river park is proposed. And so when we're talking about that, you can see that's where it is. Just to the east or on the other side of the river is Shaw's just to orient everybody. We have Main Street sort of diagonal across the right hand side of the slide. The new transit center is just to the west. And if you look at the dashed line, that's approximate location of the new shared use path. The red stars indicate places that are in transition where there's been some community discussion about what's next and opportunities for revitalization. And so there's a lot of exciting things that are happening and confluence river park sits right in the middle of all those exciting things. So when we were brought on board, we were told there were certain design considerations that should guide this effort. One obviously is river access. It sits right on the river, but one of the things that we wanted to do was look at river access and what level was feasible to provide river access. We also wanted to look at accessibility so that we could get as many users into the park space enjoying the park space and possibly enjoying the river as possible. We wanted to look at expanding recreational opportunities from this site. Flood storage and resiliency were also important topics as you all know, this is an area that floods every season. And so we were thinking as we were moving through that ways to increase flood storage and resiliency. The context and history, this is in the capital city, it's right downtown. There's a certain flavor that Montpelier has. And so as we were developing the designs, we were constantly thinking about how to fit it into place. And we relied on the community and input from the community to help us. And finally, creating this exciting public space. We weren't sure when we started out what the community was looking for for public space. And I'll talk about a lot of the community input that we went through in order to find out what the community wanted in that public space. And finally, the integration of the shared use path. There were a lot of ways in which the space could react with, interact with the shared use path. And so we investigated that through design and I'll talk about that a little bit. So just to orient people that, you may know where the project site is, but it's wholly different when you go down into the project site. And so Roy's gonna take a few minutes sort of walk you through the project area. Thanks. So here's a drone photo of the site. You're all probably familiar with it. The North Branch is running right to left on the screen. Joins the larger Winooski River. You can see at the bottom of the screen the shaws in the back parking lot. This photo was taken a couple months, couple months before the new bridge went in for the bike path. And a couple things to discuss. One of the prominent features in the river on the North Branch is the trestle dam, also known as the rock dam you can see on the right. It's a very low head dam. What you don't see is under the trestle bridge, the railroad bridge is a bedrock grade control structure that crosses the river. And there's actually several bedrock grade controls that are all around the Main Stem Winooski. And it's a really magical spot. There's a lot of wildlife still there. Excuse me, could you say what is a bedrock that every year? Pieces of bedrock that are sticking out of the river. Is that because they're bedrock sticking up or because people have put them in there? No, it's natural. Sticking out of the ground, yep. And what that does is that kind of controls the bottom of the river elevation so it doesn't dive down. So you can go on to the next slide. So that's the river setting. One thing that's really obvious when you get down here and when you look at the site is there's a very small area of vegetation around the rivers. And that's a long-term vision is to re-vegetate these rivers. This is the actual bank, the corner where the Main Stem and North Branch meet. And it's a lot of, it's ages of construction rubble, industrial rubble, concrete, metal, glass, automobile parts from some of the land uses that were taking place right in this area, some train parts it looks like. And a lot of invasive or maybe non-native vegetation is located on these banks right now. There's actually not a lot of vegetation as you can see in this picture. Now here's the shot right upstream of the Trestle Bridge. This is the new abutment for the pedestrian bridge. And I took this photo as I was going down to look at river water levels. And what you see is that the old stone walls in the back are all flooded. This is April 15th. We had quite a wet April and May in the area. And the water levels pond up through this area. So you'll see the water level rise five or six feet. In this area. And if you've been down there, this is the same location but under lower flow. That's the stone wall on the right. That's part of the Trestle Bridge. And these are two stream gauges we've been looking at to monitor the water levels and help us place the park elevators at the proper elevation. That's an ongoing water level study. We can talk more about if folks are interested. And this is looking back upstream. You can see the Trestle Bridge and the Trestle Dam, excuse me, in the background, the long parallel line in the river. This is looking up the North Branch. And the stone there is the protection on the abutments of the new bike path bridge that's now been installed. Here's the bridge looking downstream from the parking lot, the farmer's market parcel, and again, looking at the confluence. So an interesting thing about this area is that the two water levels go together on the main stem and on the North Branch. And those are dictated by very different things and different watersheds in the state from up in Worcester and from up in Cabot. Those all converge at this spot. It's a really amazing natural spot that people don't get to enjoy right now. So just wanted to take a minute to talk about the public or the whole process that we went through. And I know a lot of you participated in the outreach. A lot of you were on the committee or on council. But initially what we did is we gathered all of the prior community input. You had started this conversation about the riverfront a very long time ago. And so we gathered all that information and we started to try to understand it. And then we went out into the community and we started meeting and getting input. We developed three concepts. I'll take a little bit of time to talk about those and the important features of them that assisted us in decision making. Once we got those three concepts, we went to council and we had a few more meetings and we thought we understood the feedback. So we prepared a fourth design, concept D. And I'll talk about that too. From there, we continued with the outreach and then to where we are today. We've had a community survey. I'll share the results with you. All of that input led us here today to what we're calling the concept E or the final concept. So along the way, we met with lots of people. When we met back in May, I think we presented the three initial concepts to city council and at that time, they asked us to continue work but to really meet with more groups, more user groups. And so you can see that we really picked up and we started meeting with all of the interested parties. So we met with the people that take care of the park. We met with the fire and safety people. We met with the train people, the river folks. So we tried to reach out to as many people as possible to get feedback and input on the design process. We had a community event at the farmers market which was a blast. We talked to a lot of people. And then we also had a couple of public workshops as well. The latest one was back in July. So when we started the project, we started with three kind of main approaches to the park design. We thought we knew what people kind of wanted. We had a big laundry list but obviously we needed to prioritize what would fit on the site. And there were different ways that we could integrate the bike path. There were different levels of accessibility. There was the balancing act between is this more of a river park or is it more of a park at the top of the river? And so these three initial concepts were really asking those questions by way of design. So in concept A, the strategy here was to really create more of a larger public space at the top of the park. And so the bike path winds through it. There's a big performance area. But what that does is that compresses the slope. And so the access down to the river was limited because there was less space to get people down there. The second concept, concept B, was really focused on integrating the park experience fully with the bike path. And so in this design, we had a slightly smaller park space at the top of the park with a big central focal point and some cultural elements but the idea was that we integrated traffic calming and moved bicycles right into the park space. And then this one also integrated an accessible ramp to provide accessibility all the way down to a fishing platform about four feet above the water level. And then finally on the third idea, the concept C, the focus there is okay, what if we had the bike path that segregated the two spaces? So West of the bike path, we had more of a seating area at a place for people to come eat their lunch maybe, but it's more of a passive rec space that had more to do with the bike path. And then the other side, the river side became more of a riverine park and we had smaller gathering spaces. We had ADA access all the way down to a fishing platform. And so we had these three concepts that handled the design program in different ways and we were interested to see what the community would tell us about what they wanted, what was their priority. So essentially what we heard from people was wrapped into concept D at the time. And so what we heard from people is, I really like having open space at the top but maybe not so much open space but I really want the small niche spaces. Those small little seating areas at different levels all along the path. People really liked those. They liked the idea that they could find a private space to go sit and have their lunch. We heard from people that we want a boat launch and we want fairly easy access and so we really want you to really think harder about how to get boats down to the riverfront. So with this concept, we established an offloading area and accessible parking space and we oriented that toward a boat launch area. We also tried really hard to get accessibility all the way down to the riverfront so that you had an accessible path and along the way the niches. So this concept really balanced all those things. And so the next thing we did is we sort of grouped all of these concepts and then we went out into the community and we met with people. This is at the farmer's market and we timed that with a community survey and so this was sort of our launch where we went and talked with people. We had the community survey. We pointed more people to that and this was really helpful to us and the community survey was open most of the summer. We closed it at the end of the summer. We had 112 responses but what we did is we really looked hard at, we had a lot of what's called open answers and so we would say, what would you be most likely to do at the park? And people would answer and then what we did is we went through all the answers and we created this typology of groups of answers, the themes of answers and then we crunched those numbers and so what we found is that most people that were responding to the survey, the common denominator that most people said was a top activity was really just sitting and relaxing at the park. Picnicking and eating was really popular. A lot of people said that they would go and sit and have their lunch but also the idea of using it for recreation so using the bike path, walking, running through the area, that was also really important so we were able to really better understand what was important to people in terms of how they would use their park. When we asked them what's the most important activity or what's the most likely activity, you can see this is the trends of the answers so people sitting and picnicking and walking and just enjoying the river, just sitting and relaxing and enjoying the river was very popular and people said that they would do a lot of that but interestingly that's very passive, those activities. We also wanted to know, well would you be likely to do active recreation so would you use this park to swim or kayak and a resounding percentage of people said yes, they would. 69% of the survey respondents said that they would recreate actively from the park so they would swim or kayak, fish and we thought that was very interesting so it really told us that we need to create a balance of spaces for people. And then finally, remember the question of we were trying to balance this park spaces when we looked at initial concepts? We floated that as a question and we said, what do you think's the most important kind of balance of uses in the park space and it was rather almost tied when people wanted a larger space down near the river's edge and they also wanted those small niche spaces all along the way so smaller private seating areas and then also more space at the river and this just shows the trends and the answers for the question what elements of the concept designs were most important. As you can see, the river was high and spaces near the river, park spaces, the designs, people had favorite design approaches but essentially it was river and river access and park space. And then finally we asked what design people liked best and fairly overwhelmingly people chose D which told us that we had listened when we were talking with people and trying to integrate comments into a refined design which we were calling concept D. So those were the results of the survey and the outreach and what we did after that is we refined the design program. Again, we knew that the refined design had to kind of have that balance of spaces. River access was really important but it needed to be balanced with the other uses that people wanted there. People really liked the idea of the bike path being somewhat integrated but they didn't want activity or movement on the bike path to be impeded in any way by a park element or feature. And accessibility, we heard from a lot of people make it accessible. We wanna get people all the way down to the river. We also heard that in river recreation was really important and passive recreation, seating, picnicking, eating, reading, watching. The balancing of those activities was part of our refined design program. And finally the environment. We heard from a lot of people that they wanted a softer park environment, something with native vegetation, more grass but at the same time, people did care a lot about the flood resilience of the design solution and the water quality. We also heard from fire and police safety that the integration of visibility into spaces and not creating hidden spaces was really important to them. They needed to have their eyes on spaces. And so we took all of these into consideration as we refined the design. So the final concept is really, this picture really shows it's prominence right at the confluence. So it's got the main stem of the Winooski and the North Branch. And the point of land is at the confluence and that's where most of the park features are. That's where the wide point of the park space at the river is. And as the river gets improved and restored and the health comes back, activity in the river will relate to the features and the access that is provided through this space. So just kind of a large overview of this concept and certainly we can answer questions but the crux of what this design does is it balances that upper open space. So it provides an open green space at the top but it's oriented and shifted the seating. It's got tiered bench seating like steps. Like you'd sit on the steps of city hall. That's the kind of seating. So people can come and sit and have their lunch and look out into the river. They've got a berm with plantings at their back. We retained the easy boat launch access and accessible parking. We've integrated as with concept D an opportunity for people that are biking through the area to park their bikes or fill up their water bottles and really enjoy the park space. We provided a little performance area. One thing that we heard from people is that we know that the upper area is not that big but we'd really like to have some kind of performance shelter so that maybe it's temporary but we might wanna have it covered so that if we wanna have a band or there's an event that we have a covering and so the orange on the plan just shows where that performance space may be. It's an informal area but you can put up a canopy and the idea is that you could have small events at the top of the park there. This integrates small niche spaces and overlooks throughout with big boulders set in for seating or set into the sides of the wall so that throughout there's opportunities to just sit and enjoy the environment. There's an accessible path which the entrance is at the top of the site on the right just to the top of the temporary canopy and that's where you would access the path and then you wind down and you come into a series of small niche spaces and if you keep winding down around you've got these small planting areas with native plants and trees and you can walk all the way down to the river so we've tried to hit an elevation that's slightly above the normal river line and we've also provided an area for the kayak and boat launches to get into their boats from the offload area and again the larger space is at the water's edge and we've integrated some of those natural features so to get a better sense of what this looks like we cut a couple of section elevations so that dashed line at the lower image kind of we cut the site and it's you're looking to the east in this picture so if you start at the top of the cut line that's to the left and you can see what you're looking at is a small planted berm that provides some separation from the railroad corridor and then the long area is that bench seating that I was talking about the tiered seating and then boulders in a planted space provides a little bit of separation from the shared use path and we're showing here the there's a small little waterfill station and the shared use path which is bordered by a retaining wall and this is an area where if you figure that you're entering at the top of the site by the time you get down to where this cut line is on the path you're going down quite a bit in grade and so the height of the wall is actually the highest at this point so you can see that we've used boulders to soften the wall and you can see the if you look at the dashed line that's the existing grade so you can see that in order to make more space at the river's edge we're actually cutting into the slope so the idea is that we've got this tiered pathway that winds down through and that's stabilized by big boulders and plantings until you get down to the river and then there's a wider open space with seating opportunities and water access areas to fish and areas to kind of pull up on your kayak and then just one more cut through this is looking through the actual thickest part of the site and so the upper left of the section line if you look at this is where your temporary parking and your unloading zone is for the kayaks and again you can see the cut line you're seeing part of the berm that provides some privacy and separation for the park seating and then the open lawn area and the path that winds through that area and then you start your terracing down to the water's edge so just a little bit about materials and stabilization we would envision and the next phase of design really starts to look at the technical details and it would start specifying materials but a couple of considerations for materials is we were told that natural materials is what people want and so to the extent possible we've integrated lawn at the top of the site but we've inset large flagstones to provide accessibility accessible access to some of the upper areas and to the path and then I'll show you some examples of different sites that have been stabilized that are very similar in use just so you can get a feel of what those materials might feel like but we did hear loud and clear from people that they wanted a natural feeling to the park so we're at about a 10% level of design right now conceptual design is really about establishing the vision of what's possible, what the community would like to see the next phase of design is gonna get a lot more detailed the other thing to know is that the site is in flux and in transition and so in the middle of us doing this project there were a lot of things that were happening contextually so the new transportation center was being built and the new bike path or the shared use path was being built and so there were a lot of conditions that once they're built would have to be verified for elevations and exactly where they ended up sometimes when sites are constructed they end up a little different than the design drawings so it's just to say that this conceptual design is at about a 10% level of design but we thought it was important to show you the breakdown of what the costs are likely to be you can see that the bigger costs really have to do with the amount of earthwork and the terracing and the stabilization of materials and the amenities would also be fairly expensive if you want to have nice amenities that feel reflective of your community things like your overhead shelters or some of your lighting or some of the seating if we went with some normal bench seating so the breakdown really is the most expensive cost is the earthwork and the terracing and the stabilizing materials I wanted to end on just the design piece with showing you what's possible in the long range and these are river parks that were established the Confluence Park in Denver the Truckee River Park in Reno and also show you the Brooklyn Bridge Park all of these parks are fairly recent parks they were all installed fairly recently and as you can see the treatment of these parks down in the flood zone uses a different varieties of materials so there's concrete is utilized, big boulders are stabilized with mortar or concrete and so when you get a park feature like this that's going to be flooded those are the types of materials and as you can see here those materials they feel at home in the park and you can see that they provide the access down to the river so these are long term visions as your river gets restored and as your recreational opportunities get improved by that restoration this could be the future vision for Confluence River Park and here's just another view and I wanted to show you if you look at the lower right corner the reason I want to show you this is that's a material that's like a stabilized granite shavings and it has a look and a feel of a stone dust surface but it's a hardness of concrete and so there's a lot of new exciting materials and treatments out there that would give you that natural feel without having to go to concrete for stability and so these are the things that as the project goes forward technical design and more information those are the decisions that the community will weigh in but there's a lot of choice of materials and developing the detailing and you can see that upper left hand side is the kayak launch at the Brooklyn River Park so lots of exciting stuff and with that I just want to hand it to Steve so he can sort of wrap up the big picture for you. So I think one of the things that we learned going through this whole community process was we were really focused on the Confluence Park area and that relatively small area with a lot of kind of intensive design thinking but as we talked to the community and learned I think about ourselves about what's the context that this park is going to be located in and so there's it's an urban area so there's all the kind of like aspects of urban life that get focused on this particular park but it's also in a river setting where you have the North Branch and the main stem coming together and it really got us thinking about the rivers themselves and how this project could kind of like energize some thinking about restoring the rivers and restoring water quality and really thinking a lot about the flood aspects of this the flood resilience aspects so part of this end of this presentation is kind of like looking forward to the larger context of the rivers in Montpelier and we've heard from a lot of people about you know having a canoe access or kayak access site here really implies you can get to that place from other access points along the river so we know that there's other opportunities upriver downriver for kind of using this central collection spot as a place to like connect for other river access areas the whole idea of bringing people down to the river really includes the responsibility of that river being clean enough for people to be there so really focusing and working with other groups like Defensive Manuski on you know what is the existing water quality what do we need to do to get it to the level where you can feel comfortable in being down by the river and in the river itself so I think from our organizational point of view it's really exciting to have this conference park kind of energize this larger conversation about river restoration on a larger scale in Montpelier so that's kind of like the next challenge is get the park built and then let's have this be a great river for that park to be part of so so that's essentially it and you know if you have questions or comments you can welcome them and I think it would be best if if you could go to the microphone up there with your question or comment something that's perfect thank you and wake up okay one if we're going to have a canoe kayak what have you access I think along with that we need some sort of a portage to get over the dam just next to Shaw's a safe portage area and that will give you access to the river further up another thing that I'm kind of I'm ambivalent about is your fishing area it doesn't look handy capped accessible because it's a bunch of steps I would rather see maybe a ramp with landing for people to fish off of the landing which would be a lot safer because you wouldn't have people flinging lures over the heads of other people and things like that and the third thing I want to comment is the concept of native plants native plants being different things to different people and I would like to see the planting list come from plants native to Washington County if you need a way to figure that out you can go to Go Botany from the Wildflower Conservancy formed with the New England Wildflower Society and they have maps that show you what's you look up the plan type it into the search and that'll show you what is native Thank you, great. Thank you, thank you and I just want to those are all great points and to your point about the portage this site is actually just below that dam so the portage wouldn't be an issue for putting in at this site you could actually put in at the Confluence River Park and paddle to the next dam is in Middlesex I believe on the Winooski however, good point and in the broader thinking about rivers in Montpelier that dam is certainly a consideration if we wanted to have people be able to access the full stretch of the Winooski If you went upstream you've got trouble also if you went upstream in the North Branch there's a little dam there just above the railroad bridge and something might be done with that too for a portage although it's not nearly so dangerous from the Parks Department first of all, thank you so much for that I have too many questions maybe you can and I apologize I know I've had many questions throughout the process and I'm always thinking more what would be the what's the scope of our discussion tonight as far as what would be the most hopeful questions I mean are there any changes to be made to this or is it things to inform City Council about tomorrow night or questions or ads? Yeah Well I would say from a design standpoint it's never too late to give comments because the design is only a 10% and so your comments get recorded and then when the design gets picked back up those can get integrated and refined as the design moves ahead so I would say share them and we'll make sure that we they get integrated in the next phase of design All right I guess my first question is what has the data on the river shown as far as for our lowest point here is it five to eight with your river gauges how does it correspond to that and I'll just keep it to that with a little niche which is I'm curious about what you found or what you know about what we might be facing year to year at that lowest level as far as is there gonna be a layer of sludge oh look at that is there gonna be a layer of sludge to clean up or what's the process? So work in progress river was at 513, 512 this spring pretty high probably semi-annual type flooding occurred however in June we were at 508, 46 so the actual elevation of that platform is proposed right now I have to say these are all approximate so we do believe that the bottom layer will get inundated annually both by ice and by a flood and the balance is do we connect people to the river do we leave them five feet above the river and talking with Parks Conservation Commission the sentiment is that we'd rather have some mucking out to do periodically and have robust materials down there that the thing's not gonna shift but we're getting connected to the river because the base of the river if you see 75506 we're probably at 505 now like the river's way down well prior to this rain so we're three and a half feet above the river but if we start to design for 510 11 we're gonna be like six six, seven feet above the river pretty disconnected now you see in the concept there are stairs down and that accommodates and there are some bolder features on the edge that may have platforms so they're tiered so you could walk down according to the water level and go down and be connected with the river so this is really a work in progress we got the gauges in after the spring high flows you can see the dates there we're gonna try to get a good handle on the ice level these have been referenced to the elevations on the dams but we're gonna get a surveyor out there and really make sure the gauge elevations are all properly surveyed so we can make sure those numbers in the right column there are exact so good point love to hear your feedback on where to put the bottom because it's either a little more maintenance or a little more connection to the river it's a balance can you tell me for context what the river might be at right now? I would say 505-ish, 506 it's really low well it was right before the spring I mean today, like after though I didn't get out today but I can probably go out tomorrow and tell you like where it is it's coming down because it was a short intense rain on last night so if we're at looks like June 20th, we're at 512 and let's say there's a pretty thick layer of mud that gets deposited on that lower part would we just wait for another flow to flush that out or would that be like people down there with shovels? so we've had some through this public process some ideas have come up have volunteers around the city I mean it's not gonna we don't expect 10 feet of silt in there but it might be a layer so we'd go down and wheelbarrows shovel it out throw it on some gardens probably have some nutrients in it get it out of the floodplain annual maintenance, YCC type crew or let it run and flush I mean there's some options there for maintenance doesn't the thinking was that it's a volunteer level half of an A job that it doesn't require the city to make a big maintenance investment annually if we want to keep it on the lower side that was sort of the thinking I hope you're right and my last question would be just to keep it all within this time frame what I saw in the previous slide about the CSO overflow there is on the three to five year time scale what would the experience of the park be like with the CSO still there right across the river in the North Bridge? well I guess the first thing you're bringing up some great points ice, really high flows, CSO overflow there's gotta be a way to close off the river access while it's not safe to go into the river that said we've been looking at the water quality the overflows are not very frequent but if they did you would maybe smell and see some things you don't wanna see in a river and you wouldn't be able to swim in it not shown here there's some E. coli issues on the North Branch that would that are not safe for contact friends of the Manuski is doing some some recon work to try to identify the sources of that so I think as Steve mentioned and Riccarda and Regina like the park sets the stage there's still work to do to really enable that contact and creation down in there I'm Sulebar and I live up the hill the first thing I noticed when I walked in the room is I was disappointed in how few people were here I just think this is such an exciting project next I'm so glad to hear your consideration of the rest of the riverfront because it's hideous you know the the decrepitating remains of industrial development that some of which are probably over a hundred years old or maybe more I just love to see it just expand all the way up you've addressed some of the things that I had concerns about one is the water quality I mean I'm not sure I want to go swimming in there or boating if it's level to tip over you know you know I think that's an important an important thing you said a little bit about flooding but my concern is a lot of what I see looks like riprap and I'm concerned about the riparian science behind that and whether we are doing damage either at the confluence or downstream in terms of a rigid unmovable bank so I am concerned about that and I'd like to see something I'd like to see that address I've watched one of the tributaries up in Worcester back and forth deposit tons of river rocks on my son's yard so I would like to see you address those issues appreciating what it does when you constrict the channel what it does downstream did I have something else oh yeah the pictures you know that the concept drawings of the park and so forth and down to the riverfront oh no it looks pretty formal and artificial to me I'd like to see a riverfront that looks more natural I appreciate you probably using some I don't know kind of icons sort of things to plug in there and so forth but I'd like to see it look a little more natural and I think that goes along with my concern about the rigidity of the bank thank you thank you yeah I just wanted to maybe comment about the water quality transition and one thing that I think was really encouraging to us was to look at these other cities that have gone through this transition I mean you know in downtown Denver you know you can get in the water down there and so I think that's you know a hopeful sign that you can make these turnarounds for these rivers that you know historically have been used as dumping grounds it's going to take work it's going to take you know a while to achieve that but if there's any place to me in the state of Vermont we should be able to do this it's in the city capital in the capital city so I think that rallying the interest and the funding to really you know address the water quality challenges is something that is very feasible here I mean other places have done it and I think we can do it here too so I'm not sure I'd want to get in the water under the Brooklyn Bridge yeah well but it is pretty amazing there's many many other urban areas that have it's amazing what they've done to recreate that kind of high quality experience in the river so we're hopeful I guess I might add something on the rigidity of the banks because in Montpelier we're unfortunately stuck a bit you know with the development you know the the history has really led to more and more stuff closer and closer to the river so creating a soft spot at this corner would really actually create a hazard to a lot of the stuff including the new one-teller development and I mean there's a giant flood of wall and a gas station across the river but all that said so that that just implies we can't do a full naturalistic design like at your son's property where the river can spill and move no they got rip-wrap all the way so not naturalistically that but we can we can imitate nature so it may be rigid to a flood or an ice scouring event on the corner but there can be plants that belong on a riverside planted all around those rocks we call them joint plantings it's not that will actually serve riparian function for invertebrates and birds and things seeking cover and shade the water a little bit there's very little shading all the rip-wrap along and the walls along the rivers that you're seeing on the screen here heat the water and impair it for for all the aquatic life so you know you're right the more we can vegetate even if it's rigid and we vegetate it and cover things it's a step in the right direction and we're going to try to make a first step in the right direction on this corner but it's not going to be I just want to be clear it can't be naturally functioning because this will migrate and move into the railroad and everything else good evening I'm Richard Amore I'm served on the advisory committee so I'm very familiar with the project but I just want to say thanks for VRC the river conservancy to leading this project the design team for actually making it so it's a challenging site lots of things already in play with a full to use path topography it's a really small site to be able to provide ADA access down to the river so commend you on the design commend you on the outreach you did with the community and the only question I have when can we build this thing thank you I have a couple questions I was really grateful that you had in there the existing slope like with those cut-throughs so I could see sort of where the natural bank exists currently I was sort of shocked just in looking at this design I thought well surely this would include like adding material out into the river when the river is low because there's no way you know it goes out that far but I suppose if you're if you're removing some mass from the bank that it's the that space is really there which is pretty exciting and it's it's just shocking to me like how much we can do with the space that is there even though it is small it's like there's a lot going on there and I think that's pretty exciting one of the things that I I was really grateful for the question about the sludge or potential maintenance and sort of in that same vein I mean we we pave a lot of things in Montpiler and we repave a lot of things and so just thinking about the materials that we're going to be using and I know that's not the level of the design that we're at right now but you know I think about this as a space that's gonna probably experience some significant freeze thaw temperatures and so are there examples of places with freeze thaw cycles like ours that have infrastructure like this in or near the river that has lasted or if not like what is that maintenance like to maintain it and maybe that's the you know the VYCC sort of thing where they would you know come and if we need to move boulders around fine but does it mean like repouring cement for stairs or or what I don't know and and so is it safe to assume that like that just as an example well actually all of it like so the pathways in that lowest level there the like what people would be walking on is more or less concrete or something like it like a poured sort of substance I think that those are all the questions that we've been grappling with too and what I would say is that what we've been thinking about is thinking where the flood waters are likely to be those areas would be we'd have to stabilize those in some way so it would have you know a harder material so whether it's flagstone set in and mortared in place or whether it's a pervious concrete or something like that that's that's kind of the next phase of design that we start grappling with that we start calling communities that have their riverfront parks like this and saying what are you using and how's that lasted there are a lot of the park examples that we showed are all relatively new but they've been in place for a few years and so I feel that we've been thinking about it especially down in the flood zone we know that that needs to be resilient to floods freeze and thaw as you move up in the park that's going to get a lot of activity so we know that you know using like something like what I was talking about the stabilized granite shavings or something similar to that that has a more natural feel but it's going to be stable enough they're using that material at the Brooklyn River Park they're using it at botanical gardens and so it's a still a relatively new product but it has a lot of hope now how far down we can take that material is a question but those are all things that we really really in the next phase of design that's going to be what we're really trying to figure out what are those details you know the other thing I think you commented on it looks like a lot of riprap and that's not what we want to do we we want it to feel more intentional so we want we want to use like big rounded boulders and in river stones and so part of the next phase of design is figuring out how to fit those pieces together and how to detail that so that it has the outcome and the look and the feel and the longevity of all the things that that we're trying to achieve in in park and now obviously that's going to be more expensive than just dumping riprap over a bank but we all know what that looks like and nobody wants that in this park so to your point I think that's going to be one of the major major things in the next phase of designs is really really doing a deep dive and looking at that John Snow with the tree board among other things and it looks to me like you're really talking about a major construction of the entire site not just adjusting things or putting things in but you're really building it from the ground up literally right is that right yeah there's a lot of excavation happen there yeah and in that process let's make sure we consider the trees because it's really easy to draw these trees on here they look great but you know to get a tree to grow successfully and stay growing is a whole other thing and it can be done but it's it is significant investment Paige Gertner I'm at the conservation commission and I'm wondering it's not a huge area but I'm wondering about stormwater management and what happens with all that concrete if there's totally impervious surfaces with water coming off the Taylor Street parking lot and the bike path and that whole area I don't know how that's designated but I'm assuming that's going to be considered as well yes okay yes is there because Taylor Street supposed to have a lot of mitigation right stormwater management along the site okay so yeah is it possible to have pervious surfaces down by the river or would that just wash away in a flood situation I think these are all the questions that will get addressed in the technical design but certainly your point yeah certainly your point about you know integrating stormwater absolutely especially where we're creating the ramp system the accessible path that could be a nightmare so yeah we definitely we need to consider that and that will be considered in the next phase of design during technical development I actually with that one exception I really like the way you did the accessible path I think that was because it's pretty creative getting it to go all the way around because otherwise it would have been like this it's nice so something else to think about thank you thanks Paige one thing we had talked about above the higher flood levels of possibly doing some pervious along the path to sort of as the crown on the bike path sheds onto the site then maybe that will infiltrate on the first layer but that would be well above the flood levels and then we transition it possibly to a more rigid surface on the bottom where we know the ice level is going to be more frequent flooding so that's kind of the thinking we have right now is actually having different surfaces for the similar elements but guy based on the results of the water level study so storm water treatment on the top flood resiliency on the bottom and there will be yeah and you know along both your couple comments there is quite a bit of fill removal here so we're going to create some flood storage in this area if two major rivers coming together so it's not going to appreciably change the flood levels per se but you're going to not further and croach out into this system which is exactly what we we really can't do that here there's too much stuff going on in the river so it's a step in the right direction for sure. Hi Gary Holloway I'm also on the the steering committee I just want to say you know thanks to the river conservancy for taking the lead on this project you know and getting support from the city but really being the lead and driving this kind of project forward you know it has a real impact on you know the community and potential economic you know opportunities you know this is this is not an easy site to work with it makes it look so big when you look at it in these pictures and maps and then when you actually go there and realize how small the space is the fact that you were able to incorporate so many elements into such a small space is really impressive so I just want to say you know thank you for having a really thoughtful approach and you know the level of public engagement throughout the entire process has been tremendous so I feel like there's been a lot of input from a lot of different people I agree with John it's you know before you plant a tree talk to this guy you know and it's you know living in Vermont you know no matter what material we choose you know we continue to pave streets with asphalt and it just doesn't work in this environment but yet we continue to do the same thing over and over again so looking at a park I appreciate the comments in terms of you know maintenance and looking out how we've been kind of trying to create something that's durable you know for the long term one question I did have was in regards to the access drop-off area kayak area because I've been I remember this came up in the past that you know that's really one Taylor's parking space you know will will there be access into that area as it's shown on here which is a question that has not been answered yet okay yeah remains yeah and as far as whether it would be allowable for boaters to drive in you know with their boat on their car drop it off and then drive out that ingress egress of the transit center it not still do to be determined and permission has not been granted yeah I think there's other ways but this is curious so anyway thank you all just so you know we're aware of that question but also ourselves don't have an answer in some of the great so it's all great right off yes thank you you need more care yeah I'm Michelle Braun from Friends of the Winooski River this is a super exciting project I'm really glad that you guys are doing it and I'm really glad that you brought up water quality I just want to say is that organization responsible for monitoring the water quality in the north branch it has never yet met the standards for swimming we are we've been working for years to eliminate source by source by source as we discover them then we continue to work on that to be clear we started working on this before I had children and my daughter's going to college it might be a little while before but I hope that with this as inspiration the community will get behind that effort so yeah thank you Michelle, could I ask you what about water quality in the Winooski River is that swimming? no if if you want to well you know it does not meet the EPA standard for E. coli a good place to swim that almost always meets the standard is at the north branch nature center but not within a day or two of heavy rain but in clear weather the nature center is the place to it it changes over the has changed over the years essentially from coming street down the the way the standard works is it's essentially a risk level so your risk your likelihood of becoming sick from ingesting the water increases as you move downstream it spikes really high right under state street where we think there might be a source there but you can check there are water quality reports on the friends of the Winooski River website with really detailed data for yours and these guys have been checking that out for the question and I also think this is a great project I don't get wrong but if you there's a plume of stuff under the Taylor street area right or has that all been remunerated the the the the the the the the the contamination of the soil yeah are you going to run into any of that in the excavation process we believe we will that's why that the project is that's reflected in the range of the project okay okay okay so and just to let you know we have met with the people who have dealt with the soil remediation aspects of the one Taylor project of which little piece is connected to it so we sort of have a rough outline of what needs to happen to this the Crack of Action action plan the plan for the site in terms of the remediation that's sort of on the radar okay because it's a question that I've asked the city on a couple of occasions and haven't ever gotten an answer but if you plant trees and maybe it won't impact maybe you'll do full remediation or whatever but if you plant trees and they go down the roots go down into this contamination does that contaminate the leaves that so slightly fall into river or anything else so how does that work depends on on the contaminants in the area some will stay on the soil some might move into the trees this is sort of down the road but you know if it's a revegetation we may over excavate remove the contaminated soil put in clean soil and then plant in that there's a bunch of different ways depending on what an environmental you know quality professional will say is is there and and how and what the level of contact is with people what the vegetation is and all that so that's a part of the remediation that will take place on this site you know as part of the park design I don't know if anyone else has questions but if you do I'm just going to open that up one more time anyone else have questions great thank you again this site in my mind is somehow the center of the city and I know it's small but it's really important and I'm really excited that that we're having this conversation that thank you for all of your work thank you for being here and I look forward to the next step so thanks thank you