 Welcome everyone. We have a couple amendments to our agenda. One of them is that the sketch planned PUD has been withdrawn. That was a continued application from earlier this year. The other next change is that the ETC next master plan is now a discussion. We've really just changed the wording on that. And then we've also removed the discussion on zoning regulations. So with that, we'll open the floor for public comments for things that aren't on the agenda. Because we're going to get to the, if you're just here for the ETC, we're getting to that next. With that, we'll move on to the ETC next discussion. It's a discussion, so I don't think we're not hearing testimony on an application. So Darren and Sharon, that kind of rhymes. Darren and Sharon, you're caring about what we're seeing tonight. We have a Karen upstairs too. And we're in, we're here to talk about the ETC. That was a good one, wasn't it? I like that one. So I will just point out that we have somebody in the audience who wants to just have a statement regarding his lot specifically. Didn't know if you wanted to entertain comments first. I got the vibe he wasn't looking to stay and hear all the... We'll be here too long, so we'll get right to you in a minute. I'm assuming that's the gentleman you're referring to. The one you heard us talk to, yes. Good guess. We have a draft of the plan that's cleaned up and formatted and it contains, if not all, then at least most of the items that we had been looking for. Did you, is there any discussion or commentary that we need to know about from the consultants and or Dana who's not here tonight that might be relevant to our, for us to know about? So, and Dana extends her apologies for not being able to attend. She's not feeling well. But since we scheduled this meeting and sent out the final draft form, we have met with the town manager's office who has requested that staff meets with the other staff departments. So we're going to just... So let's hold that piece until later. I'd like to talk about the changes that we requested in the plan. I'd like to talk about the actual plan itself because that's one of the things that we're most interested in. Understanding that there's another component to be addressed tonight. That's not necessarily... That's fine. So I'll let Darren speak to that. I'm sorry for the technical difficulties. Apparently those projectors are acting up, so we won't be able to display things up like we normally will. But we can run through them since you all have access and we have our brand copies. Since you're getting ready, sir, if you'd like to give your comments to us, if you could state your name for the recordings. Ben Burrow. My family owns 54 Lost Nation Road. So what was... And I have some letters here from my father-in-law who's probably technically the owner of the land. What was concerning is when we were reviewing the ETC plan on page 4, there's a zoning map that's referenced in there. First of all, I don't know if our land's even technically considered to be in what you would consider the town center, but regardless of that, there's a zoning map in there that says something about current zoning and the front part of our property has an arc in it that says open recreation area, but our land has been agricultural residential since it was purchased by my father-in-law in the... There's some flood plain through there, but it's in the agricultural residential chunk on that land and that page 4 of the ETC plan has a little green arc through it that says open recreation. So we're kind of questioning that and knowing that I saw some other stuff saying that the future zoning will maybe be tailored to whatever's in this plan, even though we're not in the town center, I'm just afraid that there's a map there that isn't accurate. Yeah, I don't believe that anything on... I'm sorry, does tail with you? No, please. I don't believe that anything on Lost Nation Road besides the first couple hundred to a thousand feet was supposed to be a part of the plan and part of the new zoning. So I'm trying to check where 54 Lost Nation is relative to that. Yeah, you'll see... I don't know if you have a map there. You'll see that green arc that's right there. So this chunk had always been either part flood point or it was always agricultural residential, even that arc, so I don't know why it's zoned. Let's see if we can find the existing... Do we have the regulation? You get the zone. It just appears a stack from my father in a lot of letters. Did you get ready to share? So he's just wondering if you could have a letter sent to him about what the discrepancy is. So it's... Oh, you have it? It'd be right here. See that? See how that's there, but it's replaced on there with the green. So that's AR there. Right. I would say that's a loss, a change that should not be there. Correct. And that's the developable part of the land so we don't want it to be zoned as an open recreation. Well, in the way this plan... Yeah, that would make absolutely no sense if it were there. That should be an argument. Darren, that looks to be incorrect. Yeah, that's not the existing zoning, nor is it proposed. So that needs to be changed back to brown. Back to AR. Can somebody just send a letter to my father in law like he asks? If you have your e-mail address on that... Oh, I see. Is it Edward Barber? Yeah, he put his address in there. Does he have e-mail? But yours is on that thing. All right. Thank you. Good catch. Okay, that was a test. Somebody in the public actually read the plan and covered it beyond Paula. Thank you for bringing that in. Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you. Well... Yeah, well, you guys are regular. So, I mean... Okay, Darren, if we can sort of go through... I know we've got the... You've got the summary of the commentary... Staff summary and the addressed comments. We've got two documents in our... in our... So, the first is just restating what staff understood the changes requested to be, and we sent that along to the consultants for their changes. So, that was going in and then coming back out of the revision process, we've got a new document that's titled SE Group Changes, which starts by... It starts with comment author Dave Raphael, comment date 724-19-10, and it just runs through all the changes that were requested or made, proposed, and just summarizes those. So, that's all we wanted... We just wanted to show you those that, you know, it's basically a track changes without it being in the document. Okay. So, we've got the issues with what was sent to them and what came back out. Now would be the time to let us know and we'll pass those back on for further revision. So, what about all... I mean, I gave more than just grammatical and spelling error. So, where would the rest of those have gone? So, it might have been in... the consultants consolidated a lot of comments from different people if they were similar, and they might have just put that in... Somebody else's name. Someone else's... Under someone else's name or as a general concern. Um... But, let me just check... Did you notice, Dave, if there were some comments that you didn't see? Are you talking about written comments? Yeah. So, that stuff was addressed. Any changes in terms of, you know, updating information and inaccuracies were definitely corrected. So, they didn't list those, and we'll double-check based on your comments on how they used to make them. I'll go back through as well. I kept them. I'll go back through as well. We can ask them to beef it up. I haven't had a chance to go and check every one of them yet, so I will. Yeah, it might be good to have, since I'm concerned that it was... they were necessarily cherry-picked. They might have, you know, the items might have been decided that this is lookable, so let's work on it and if we're not... If something isn't going to have been worked on, let's actually put a note to that effect. And John went through and did... John wrote a book about it. John wrote a book about it. So, it would be good just to... I mean, we can go back through, but let's just... Does he have the book he can forward? Well, we have those. So, it would just be good to make sure that everything was at least looked at and acknowledged. That way, if somebody has an issue with something that was skipped, we can discuss those directly. They should be in the final draft. That's on the website. But you don't have the list of changes that was made. It's not public. We can potentially make it available. Well, we'll have the consultants develop one for us and add whatever their concerns are here that... I would like to see them because I've been witness to all of the discussions. We can give you a copy of these two memos that they're looking at. That's fine. So, commissioners, what in general thoughts or discussion points on the draft that's in front of us tonight? That's Johnny. Johnny? Well, I gave my comments and they essentially responded, but I don't know that they changed anything, so I'm not sure where to go with that. The responses were reasonable, but if that no real discussion or anything happens, I don't know where that leads us. So, I was sort of expecting us to be talking about it, not necessarily getting a that's nice, but we've got to take care of the consultants. So, as far as I'm concerned, they're still on the table. If nobody else cares about them, they're just my comments, so that's fine. But I thought we would all be talking about each other's comments before we decided what to tell the consultants to do. And I came up with some more... I have just one more question at some point tonight, but when I was looking through the neighborhood stuff for the Mixed Youth South and for the neighborhood commercial, it's if you look on just for example, if we're on page 61, page numbers, so Mixed Youth South on the new version is in the Mixed Youth South lots and density box, so it's chapter 6, page 61 as noted on the page number on the actual sheet. Just tell me if I'm missing something here. 138 acres total area. The existing residential units are 165 dwelling units. The projected residential units are 596. So we're proposing to grow residential units, but then you get to the existing non-residential 495,000 gross square feet. And the projected non-residential is less than that at 427,000 gross square feet. So are we actually saying we're trying to reduce non-residential use there? Sorry, I missed your comment. So he's just questioning this chart right here and is the purpose we're trying to reduce the non-residential square feet. I think that's how that reads, Joan, because if you look at like the projected that, well, maybe it is, maybe I'm misreading, is that total or is that added? Is that additional or total? Well, I guess would be the question. Yeah, I'm reading it that they're saying it goes down. That's the way I'm reading it so much. Right, but same with the residential. So are we going from 165 to 596, or is it an additional 596 on top of the 165? I think those are projected totals of mine. I believe that's correct and there's a you can confirm that on page it's in chapter 2 I believe there's a suggestion of the build out for actually, no, it's in one of the appendices I believe which may not have been updated yet but somewhere there's a full build out analysis but I'm fairly certain that those are projected final numbers not in addition to what's there today and in terms of the non-residential square footage, I think the idea is that there's already a lack of ability to fill non-residential space in the mixed use south area, particularly with the outlets so the idea was that it's going to focus slightly more on residential in order to help make sure that those non-residential spaces are viable and so there's an assumption that it will go down a little bit but that they'll be stronger So in the discussion on that just following that topic, is there like I'm sure real estate people have some kind of numbers that say in order to be viable these are the typical balances that you see in this type of area so we have municipal we have mixed use north they're projecting 20% of the areas used or I don't know how this is the land use mix is 20% non-residential in neighborhood commercial it's 10% and historic it's 10% so the largest non-residential usage area is projected to be in the mixed use south and they're saying we got to shrink it from what we have and I'm just, I'm going wow does that leave us enough like is that mix, what do we know about that mix, do you guys all know about what the right mix would be and are we really saying we want less commercial space and if we need commercial space at some point where does it go like where, you know what I mean if we're saying well you can't put it here because we're already happy we took away the percentages in the town center so yes your thought process is correct so in part of the idea behind using the regulatory approach that's suggested is to allow spaces to be converted between residential and non-residential particularly on the ground floor so even if you have a fully residential building presumably that ground floor could be converted back to commercial as the market demands there's built-in flexibility and these build-out summaries are targets they're not, you know, it has to be exactly 427, 920 square feet of commercial space it's just saying here's our target here's what we're generally aiming for in a relative mix it may be more or less depending on what the market does over 10 to 20 years as our commercial square footage skewed a little bit at the moment because we have the outlets so if you weren't to sort of segregate, okay I've got my outlets here and everything else a normal mix would tend to fall into these ranges, is that kind of where this is headed? Yeah, the outlets were designed as a destination commercial area not serving just the community but the entire county and region we're recognizing that that's not necessarily the future of what it will hold and that it should be somewhat destination serving but also local serving in this neighborhood area and the town as a whole but not necessarily drawing people from Montpelier on a regular basis right, the SIRC sort of killed it so I guess I'm fine especially with this as a vision and if it's tied back to sort of known blends that are successful I think that is probably fine but it just struck me that we were saying hey, all that commercial space that we have is going to we're aiming for it to shrink seemed a little interesting You have additional questions thoughts? That was my big find So with something like that would we I mean you had a phrasing that that these are targets in the respect I mean that seems to me to be really a significant concept to include It doesn't actually say that in there or it says projected My question on that then So projected non-residential just use that as the example we're doing 427,928 is that 50% on the nose of what the projected total bill that is and that's how you got that number? This isn't us We should check with the consultants If that's where they got the number then it's saying this is what 50% of a bill that would be visiony as opposed to there's nothing visiony about 427,928 exactly but if you're saying that's what 50% would be this is the target that's good but listed as projected as this exact number is remarkably specific So maybe having the pie chart above that assuming this mix here's what that would look like given a certain distance We want to err on the side of this is a vision thing a visionary document Right Something like that to indicate this is what we want and remember we talked about changing things from exact number, exact footage to height the range of stories this is the same kind of thing that I think when we have projected numbers that are really, really exact that could be a little bit I think I'm correct in saying I guess I'll ask that to Darren is this chart which shows 30% non-residential the reality is it could be 100% residential Am I right? So the regulations that we're contemplating put a restriction on well they put some restrictions on what has to be commercial and what has to be residential but ultimately the point is that that pie chart is a target and it's a projection and a vision So with that in mind why do we need the chart why do we need the actual listed out chart why not just use the pie chart as more of a representation of a target and what we're presenting behind showing those numbers is just to give a sense of what 50% residential in this land area would look like how many units that is how much square footage but I think if we wanted to make that a little more vague a little more open-ended there could be some more detailed analysis of assuming X number of acres in this district at 50% with all the other restrictions you would need I guess you could do it with two pie charts and leave all the numbers out here's existing but I'm still stunned that something that significant in terms of a concept isn't written somewhere I went back to chapter 2 to see what this vision and it's not I haven't found it yet it might be in there but in their discussion of the mixed use south as a neighborhood it doesn't say you've got a lot right now and we're recommending that you lower that it doesn't say that it's still kind of a stunning concept it's a fine concept because I think that the outlets are an anomaly it mentions the outlets it mentions that it's still looking to have a regional and local draw so language supports what's currently there doesn't actually say your mix is off and we recommend that you change it one of the other things that makes that chart for someone who's not well-versed in this like myself it uses acres it uses drilling units it uses GSF it uses GSF per acre that's a lot of different values put into one bucket I'm looking, I actually went back to the mixed use north and what's the real message that we want to get across on that is this is the total area and this is the estimated building area and then we have a pie chart that breaks out what the uses are I think that's it follows along Josh was just saying it's almost too granular for vision statements and I think that's where we're aiming last time around was to make this more visionary the numbers are fine, keep them when we start looking at regulations then we can take the numbers and say we want to have a regulation to support this or something but you can use words like suggested or recommended that are a little more flexible but going on I think one of the comments that John had had is that they're really really long so we've got stuff in here that most I think most people are going to start and they're going to go over it and it's not going to stand out so I guess my question and Gladdy brought it up really is what's what's the real target, what's the real drive for these numbers and is it to show people what the idea is if that's the case then generally pie charts work better than lines of numbers unless you're an accountant or somebody who works with them really if you're just reading through it and you want to get what the target is I like your idea of having this as a pie chart that shows the current mix and this is what our anticipated future mix could be and you could put the pie charts are a little bigger you could actually put the number of units that are in there in the pie chart just in case they're trying to tie this back to chapter 2 of the information starts on page 26 and there seems to be a couple pages of discussion about the build out and the vision and I'm still not seeing anything that suggests that we're trying to shrink the commercial non-residential how they arrived at those numbers but even if we take the numbers away it's somewhat irrelevant because we're not saying that it's going to be a reduction necessarily I think they arrived at them based on their build out analysis based on the assumptions they made in a model so I'd like to know for ourselves what that what the changes, if the recommended changes are going to produce that outcome that should be known and deliberate rather than oh whoops we accidentally reduced the commercial unintentionally so another pass at making this less specific and more visionary and that would carry through all of chapter 6 the language in chapter 2 talks about it continuously refers to 600,000 square feet of retail slash commercial and that number doesn't match either of any of these what page are you on starts at 26 let's see and that's for the entire all four neighborhoods not just one district present ATC has just over 600,000 square feet so that's adding it all all the different neighborhoods in chapter 6 I mean I'm just digging deeper on this but if you know you've got 600,000 square feet of non-residential and you know you've got four different neighborhoods to put it in some discussion of what's desirable in each neighborhood and why as part of the vision you know that's easy to follow would be I mean this is fundamentally back to my comment to read because there's stuff buried in here that's actually buried it's not in there like it makes sense because you're reading it like a book it's embedded and you have to really be able to track back and forth between all the sidebars and the pie charts and the colors in order to pick it out and tie it together and maybe a little I'm just saying you know craft a story that's easier to follow than bouncing around a little bit and who's deciding how many people we can handle in a given area or what the target population is for I don't know when's this go out to 2050 something like that so it's based on sewer capacity it's based on buildable space it's based on what the market might provide and that's where all the projections come from and I think that should be stated somewhere in this document so people have an idea of where these numbers were arrived at and how and I mean I guess you know I may be conflating some of what I heard in one recent listening session with this but there was an overlap between and what's happening to the town we don't use the word merger they do now we don't hear okay consolidation and planning and a vision of what the town wants to be so I think John's right I think that you know to some extent this is very confusing and it's not clear-cut and it's not really designed for the average citizen to look at and understand and I'm not I'm not casting aspersions on the average citizen because the average citizen in Essex is pretty smart should be readable and to your point John real quick about the neighborhood mix it is in the vision statements for those neighborhoods but they are broken up over several different pages and there isn't one place where it necessarily talks about all that in the bigger picture so to make it more readable to the average reader that would probably help so to follow up on that right in chapter 2 it says details of this analysis provided in appendix B we don't have an appendix B it is in the appendices document which we didn't put in your packet today because it hasn't changed since the original but it is in the reference section but same sort of thing as bouncing around so we asked, I'll be picky but we did ask for a complete document we didn't get a complete document so it's just a point of from my perspective we got we got the meat but we didn't get the whole thing so just I think keep in mind as we're going forward it's so now we have 100 page vision statement with another 100 or 200 pages of appendices and that's the complete document and we're trying to say oh here this is a vision you know what I mean it's like you don't want to put everything you ever thought of into the report but I think to boil it down just a little bit you have the clear vision and even if it references an appendix if you want to know more about where these numbers came from here's the studies or here's the planning documents or something that this is based on but just the touch on how did this really come to be I think would be helpful and maybe it helps streamline the part that we all hope people read which is the first 100 pages which maybe it gets down to 75 or something 50 50 we're definitely in a draft mode independent of anything else no it's this this is the reason for that it's here Johnny you got more? I stick with that like I said in my comments I made them in writing because I was trying to start the discussion so if we move through people's comments we'll hit everything but that's really the big thing is like I mean how long have we been reading this for a long time and we still are finding things that you know wow and I'm just we want it to be friendly for people to be able to pick it and get the idea about what's happening what do we really want by the way we're trying to modify the mix of uses in certain neighborhoods for these reasons that idea might be something that was missed the last time around when we talked about making this more visionary that actually could change the style of writing instead of just taking hard references out of the document maybe it's more appropriate to actually redo the document in a slightly different way or drastically different way to emphasize vision statements and less about the specifics and it really feels like they just pulled some of the specific numbers but left the same format in let me ask you another question because this might help the follow up document the one that actually has the meat in it about the details and how you half of this document that document did we no regulations right? so the zoning regs if I'm not mistaken are going to look an awful lot like the later chapters in this with here's the design of a block and here's how big it should be and here are the building types and all that that's what we're hoping to so can the vision push some of that out into the regulations and let this so here's a thought on that though what if we we can't get concurrence or agreement on the regulations required to say you're going to have this type of building only here and this type of building only here we've got a vision that we want to try to get there but if we can't do it in regulations in one shot I mean that my thought was that the regulations might take multiple cycles before we get to this vision you know we're going to have to make steps because we may have to make multiple iterations of those regulations until we get to this design point but if we have it here we won't have lost it and if we don't have it here we have to lose it if we don't have that consistent presentation I think there should be a statement in there though that says those types of visions that we have for each area is subject to change because you don't want to pass history of boards with the past 20 years even though a master plan in the EDC next is a vision and a guideline some boards stick to it and they're not as flexible to say yeah no we're not going to have that flexibility to change something so so if it says they're subject to modification based on the time and the situation and something along those lines anything to emphasize that this is a vision not the regulation this is a scope or a target how we actually get there we're going to work out that's part of the next discussion too but that's also going to be the regulation can it be more of a couple of examples rather than the way the regs would be laid out these are the forms yeah I've made no comments whatsoever on the form piece because you need to show some examples and you want to give people an idea of what the types of construction elements you're talking about what's appropriate and what part that was all fine I didn't have any issue with that stuff I'm still back on the you're telling me you recommend this for this neighborhood and I just want to make sure we get it I want to make sure it matches what we're all thinking and that part of the vision is for everybody else because it's taken me quite a while and I believe I know what I'm looking at to put it together to really say I see what we are saying our vision is for that neighborhood because I want that to be really clear we had trouble figuring that out even with the study before because we are having trouble achieving that within the regulations so the most important thing is for our vision to be clear if we as a group know what we are trying to achieve that's going to make everything else easier and I just keep reminding us that when we say this is our vision we should be reasonably sure it's achievable within our boundaries and not kind of ignoring certain realities that earlier visions have ignored hold that thought Mr. Mangan I'd second everything he's saying he brings up good points and also goes back to our previous discussions on my biggest review of this latest doc was our concerns that we mentioned about pulling regulations out and John's points just further drive that home and it's causing me to rethink some of even my previous feedback and as I look at the doc it seems like there's one little section of a vision statement for each area it seems like that should be expanded considerably to really focus more on what we want to do not the how we are going to do it and I think there's too much of the how we are going to do it in this doc and that should be just all taken right out I don't like to say it but you might provide an example if here's how we might do it or how we're going to approach it but getting to those specifics I think it's a very confusing doc unless someone's going to sit there and figure out all the percentages and numbers this stuff is going to be messed I would just say to that before we move over that any of the work that's been done has not lost or wasted so there's nothing to say that we shouldn't have done this level of detail or taken this approach so I think it's just this is the natural iteration of how this stuff goes I actually like everything that's in there I'm just struggling with how to present it I will also know I just want to know one other thing that's extremely minor but Sharon just take note starting on page 80 chapter 7 the bullets say recommendations but only on that first slide the following slides just say key I assume they're all supposed to say key recommendations that's a dangerous question I need a new page I think John has a good point I think one of the things that probably bothers me the most about this is that some of us have been talking about this in different formats or in different forums for what three years now and we just we have a nice document but I'm not sure it's exactly where we need to be with taking it beyond us out to the world and it sort of bothers me a little bit because maybe we didn't express ourselves well enough when the consultants and the staff when we're putting this together we have different ideas that we couldn't get them to fully grasp so I think again I don't think we should consider any of the time wasted or like that because early on we were looking for guidance and then we got to a point where we wanted to see a full document so we're really I feel we're in a natural progression through this review process as we've seen the full document we wanted it different and we're making changes to it Josh this ties into everything we've been saying so page as it says in the document and the paragraph is overall vision and if we're thinking about readability and getting it out there something called overall vision you shouldn't have to wait until page 22 we have a lot of like if you look at that chapter it's in chapter 2 we have like here's this meeting we had here's these nice people who came to the meeting oh and here's the vision like at the very least in chapter 2 it should be here's the overall vision here's the meetings we had to get there but this should be like page 1 in bright red ink if this is the direction where it's like here's our overall vision and then if you look at the little I'm going to tell you, red sometimes is hard to see so eyes get all over you that's a really good point because for people that care enough to go to the history let them let them find the history but then what's funny is underneath that highlighted vision it says what I think is the actual vision after that this vision speaks to the important community needs making the ETC better connected and more cohesive that's the vision where are you reading that? overall vision catch me the title of the doc the whole thing you've got the Essex town center ETC as a diverse community etc etc and then ran this little like one paragraph in black the sentence making the ETC better connected and more cohesive like that's the whole thing and it's this one sentence hiding in paragraph in page 22 after this lengthy like here all the meetings we went to it's like we want it better connected we want people walking we can delete 21 pages and just pick up right there but you know what I mean like what do we actually want we want a more cohesive better connected ETC and then once everyone gets that like that's why we're here here's how it's going to happen here's why we want it I just want to point out one other thing and this is just total graphics alright so if you guys are sitting over there I know you can't read this but you can see it so if I show you this page what is the most punch? picture the picture the block right it's not the vision statement the vision statement is the weakest thing on the page and I was another one of my comments that I just they they need to look at that because you know graphics are important to this and if you keep playing with colors and boxes and pictures and you get all the stuff on the page you've got competing weights competing you know strengths and you want to make the thing that's the most important the punchiest and if that vision statement is you know getting that it's on page 26 but if it's 22 if it's not the thing that jumps off the page at you then maybe that should almost be repeated on the heading of every single chapter with the blue up here better connected and more cohesive every chapter and then when you see the box all highlighted then you know that's the better connected more cohesive here's how this neighborhood is going to make that better connected more cohesive here's how this neighborhood is going to make it happen and then when people in that mindset we keep repeating it then it's like oh I see you're going to put these buildings like this and the setbacks are going to be this that'll make it better connected and more cohesive I get it people will be out walking better connected and more cohesive like just drill that that's the whole thing what's kind of like when we look at our staff reports you say this is the finding this is why it meets this criteria so we're talking about a redesign of this document and we talked about it last time making a visionary this is even more visionary let's roll it out to the you guys are okay let's roll it out to the folks that are here Paula you were jumping one of the things I was going to say is with the discussion that's gone on tonight I see this as sort of the difference between our previous town plans and the document representing the current town plan yes we're not disagree we're from a hundred plus pages down to a lot less and readable and enjoyable in reading okay folks you're on the spot you're here we need to hear from you we're not this is really good discussion and conversation because we want people to be interested and to know why and I think back to I think at the last meeting or a couple of meetings go the woman that said what's our purpose so that kind of brings it to the front I think we've had a couple of different times it's been touched on either previous meetings tonight what's the vote for the town and I think we've got to avoid I mean we're really focused in this area though the woman that was here at the last meeting was talking about what's Essex's vision we're working with a subset of that I don't want to make sure we don't travel too far outside of this this area but that statement is the leading statement it should be the title page of our document it should be everything heading from the top of each page it's there Mr. Lyons you've been joining us once in a while do you have any thoughts that you'd like to share with us I think it is a little confusing as I look at some of the vision statements it's not entirely clear to me what we're trying to accomplish though you know I have you know seen the process now it's been very slow because we've been looking at a lot of the same content for a very very long time my experience has been probably 18 months and a lot of the content really hasn't changed so the slowness I think is one of the observations I've made and the clarity of intent with each of these centers and districts isn't entirely clear to me so what I end up trying to do is look at okay what's the current use that's allowed in terms of the very specific regulations and what are you guys moving to and try to draw my own conclusions from it but the document itself doesn't make it clear to me it's exactly what we're trying to accomplish and so I've struggled with that since day one and so I went to the comparison of the very detailed items to try to draw my own conclusions to be hopeful to be led a little bit more on what we're trying to accomplish particularly in each of the districts but I would like to thank the staff because I did make some very important pieces of input it took a while but it got implemented so I do appreciate that thank you for thanking us and to be clear about those vision statements they were crafted partially to be regulatory and partially to be plugged right into the district vision statements which have regulatory weight and have some sort of statutory role but if as we're hearing this plan needs to be more visionary and convey that vision better we can save those vision statements clarify them in the plan but put them back into the regulations and I think that's the theme we're hearing is a lot of this sounds great but it needs to be in the regulations not in a planning document that needs to more clearly convey where we're going so unless we want to go into stuff I'd almost like to shift into the other portion of the discussion which I think that this is a great, this is immediately relatable to that which is getting a increased buy-in from other staff other staff from other departments prior to moving this forward and I think some of the contention, you guys can speak to the specifics but my belief is that some of the contention is on the specifics that we put in that are not, as John E. mentioned, are not truly obtainable so if we make this more visionary it should help with some of that discussion because we're not tying it to a specific quantity or growth square foot versus acres versus for acre putting a median down the road or something like that it really shouldn't even say that why do you want to do that is what I should say what is the intent of doing that that was something that was I thought was interesting in the comments from Dennis Lutz when he was saying if you want more pedestrian safety here is what you should be doing if you're calling out pedestrianness in the vision document instead of saying let's put a median try this instead so if to your point if the document just said we'd like better pedestrian stuff because better connected more cohesive then he would say oh here's how I recommend doing that perhaps and that could change as technology changes as they build out mix changes as personnel change as the population changes but we have the vision of better connectivity greater walkability so forth one thing that we'll want to be careful of as we sort of try to distill it down a little more is not getting it too mushy and making it clear exactly what the intent is and trying to be as specific as possible again without walking into too many of those details so you know when we say we want you know better connected more cohesive ETC we have to say what that means what that what specific changes might be made but we can talk about making better pedestrian crossings on route 15 making improving safety and improving traffic flow and you've already done that most of the neighborhood descriptions providing provide or enable access to trans to stop within walkable that stuff is there they're clear objectives and goals and if we go back to the you know the we start off you start off with you start off with use lots and density mix yourself page 61 the first thing you're talking about is density and so forth the second thing is then we start getting into the vision so if we if we provide emphasis on the vision which is walkable and so forth then reorganize some of this stuff section B should be section A I mean that's that's the vision and then section A is potential ways of getting there like given given the overall vision this is how this neighborhood is going to achieve that and that also calls out the distinction between the neighborhoods and why we have different neighborhoods and zoning areas like this is a smaller scale version of better connected more cohesive here's what that means this is a larger scale here's what that means and then you put the data in after that and it's like oh now I see what they're saying because this is what that could look like these numbers are much larger and mixed you south than the historic center I get it and it draws the reader along a little better that way if you keep tagging back to the vision and saying this is how this neighborhood doesn't and then the regulatory stuff follows pretty naturally it's like oh of course they're requesting again this set back and facing a primary street such and such because that does provide the connectivity and I think having Mr. Lyons and I forget your first name Jeff thank you having Jeff speak to us of the fact that he was having to go through and keep going back and forth and look for it I feel to really reiterate what Josh just said putting that intent first how does it meet the vision and then give it some potential enabling mechanisms got to be potential because the regulations are going to be the actual enablers and we had a number of go ahead Paula that might be something to have as a note in this that supporting regulations will follow something you got something to say you got something to say I've been following conversations between staff and their comments on getting into the what happens when you actually implement some of these specific things I was hoping that that really does kind of get pushed out of the vision and maybe it helps us if we don't have as many specific recommendations for do this on route 15 kind of specifics in the vision again it should be as you said we want to achieve this on route 15 and then the document can have examples of how that has happened in other places and sometime down the road you're choosing it or you're working with Dennis and with the rest of the community you have to figure out how to achieve it and then that project comes forward under its own merits with its own pros and cons but it's not stuck as a here's a problem if you have that vision because we don't know that yet we don't know the final execution and I guess if we think we have final executions in our vision then maybe we didn't mean to do that here's another way to think about it in our town plan in chapter 1 there's general policies, goals and actions there's general policy is the overall statement of what we want to do with land use or housing or the economy the goals are these specific points about what the desired condition is and then there are actions that go along with that that help achieve those goals so I'm hearing that's maybe what we want to do with this plan is say we want the general policy of better connected more cohesive DTC and then some goals about medallions and then some goals about what that looks like and what that means but the actions come in that regulatory part of things better connected more cohesive goal walkability on route 15 regulations sample regulation in appendix A real like regulations forthcoming something from there here's example actions of what that could look like but not necessarily public works back not even in regulations yeah yeah put it where it needs to be and not necessarily in this I mean does it I'm not hearing that we're really Dave you haven't said a whole lot but I haven't seen you get too antsy about anything either so I don't feel like we're all that we're really out of sync with what we want to see in this which is vision oriented with the goal or the true vision is buried currently put it forefront and you know I like the idea of having it in the header on every single page because it is what we're trying to achieve and then each section how does that section meet or enhance that goal like I said you've already done that by in the neighborhood you've already got elements that do that so put what we want up front you know put the goal up front not buried no no reference to regulatory type quantities or something like that if we want if we want to put graphs in there and my what I'm heard is use little less specificity use what we've got now what we could have in the future or use it as a way of saying this is instructive this is example or this is a study or analysis of what that would look like but it's not necessarily a prescription so one of the things that we've frequently done that I do at my work is when I'm working with the customers is these are the points that I'm delivering now if you want to see it here's the 200 pages of support documentation that got me to these 10 bullet points they're there if you're available but most of the time it's not necessary or it doesn't really impact the use it's all the history so that's the appendices that we park all these extra details in and that way people we don't lose anything is still there for future almost like you can just put a title on this to be put it on the shelf for the future because it's all there it's all there and then you put out a re-blended version of it that just has the more readability but you can just keep that I mean you don't have to maybe this is appendix 2 or something well the other thing is all those appendices there's three or four of them but they're all in one big so we can probably split them up but I think we have the idea I was going to say I think we've been talking about it for an hour I think we're clear on where it's going moving this forward I mean my expectation based on the emails that have been sent is that you folks will be working with the other departments to try to get better buy-in I mean I feel like this redesign should be done first it might if we do this redesign and then I'd really like to invite them to meet with us as well because I don't I'm worried that some of our intent may get lost in the technical representation you know because it is when you guys start talking into staff it's probably a little more technical and some of our vision to Ned's point might not be we might not be able to communicate it clearly to you so now you're deluding it by bringing it to them so can we be involved can we help if we can't invite Aaron or Dennis to meet with us at our time then potentially we have members that might be able to meet during the daytime with them I know John Hsu had said that he'd be willing to do that he could be one representative that sounds like a good idea and maybe we can get Ned we see enough of Ned maybe Johnny if he's in town I'm not sure Josh or whomever I'm not sure yet because I haven't made peace with what he's written yet but anyways I think for me the offer is that I would really like to have public works fired, police whoever has commentary that's unresolved you know once we recraft this then I'd like them to take a different look at it and maybe sit with us or us sit with them I also want to say that you know the town in general whether it's through the administrative side or discussions or new buildings or any of the things that I need a new highway I need to fix my salt shed whatever it is it all does cost money but you've got to think about these things first we've got years and years to implement the things that we are visioning here and it's not fair to throw a big dollar number out there and scare everyone away right now because that shouldn't really be how this works we should be trying to find the vision that's meaningful to our community first and you know we'll work our way towards achieving it over time okay you're a hundred percent right you have to make the decision and we're going to move forward on a long term basis or stay where we are and go back we got you yep any last words on this from any of you folks okay we're moving on I think we've got the only thing we've got left now is the minutes from August 8th someone want to offer a motion I'll second that okay opening the minutes does anyone have any amendments they want to offer to the minutes hearing none all those in favor of the minutes as written I opposed minutes carry 6-0 we are done we have other business empty so I just wanted to let you know that I've reached out to the town attorney to bring an action against Rick Bove for the dumpsters the situation is horrendous still it's not picking up outside the dumpsters people are still complaining so we have one year to ask on my end are you on here we're going to be doing that so the next thing is as a result of the better breakfast people are I should say as a result of the Essex report or article people are calling up so I'm going to be seeing more of these uses coming before the zoning board I'll bring them to your attention as they come forward at the last zoning board hearing they basically the only condition they put on there was to adhere to all the state requirements of a bed and breakfast of an Airbnb sorry so again the unspecified use requires me to inform you of these applications and I will do so as they come forward I'm interested to see where that must follow all the state that's a little ambiguous very good to get signature pages updated with Johns yes thank you you can just make your own little line sign right out you can cross his name out or you can make a new line we've done that in the past but yes I'm not on this one you're not on it ok so let's get a new back page do you guys want to hang out or do you want to if you can do it quick we can adjourn so I move to adjourn all those in favor bye