 All right well let's get started. Welcome everybody and good evening and welcome to the 30th annual meeting of the Randolph area community development corporation. We're excited to be holding our meeting in this brand new common area here at the Randolph house. One of the many housing communities managed by RACDC and I'm glad to see so many familiar and friendly faces in the audience. I'd like to especially welcome residents of Randolph house who are here. Senator Mark McDonald joined us representative Larry Satkowitz a number of our funders and financial friends in the housing world so welcome everybody. We all know that housing is a critical issue across Vermont and the rest of the country and RACDC has been steadily working towards alleviating the housing pressures in our community. At the same time we strive to address many of the associated factors that can cause housing stress working with area partners such as Gifford Health Care capstone community action and Clara Martin Center to provide additional support to our residents and the wider community. During the past year we completed the renovation of this facility and while it did not add any units the 48 apartments here now have upgraded utilities improved common areas and a critical second elevator. Our work on Salisbury Square is getting even closer to the first shovel in the ground and we're evaluating other projects that could add significant new housing stock in Randolph. We continue to support our downtown businesses through our designated downtown program and had a successful if somewhat damp first Friday series this year. It's an honor for me to serve on our active board and I thank our dedicated staff and board for all their efforts. It's a big job. I also note with sadness the passing of longtime board member and past president Pam Stafford who we lost this summer and the retirement of our one of our founding members Pat French who will be honored a bit later in the program. Our meeting tonight will begin with a brief business session and several votes and I remind you that anyone who has made a financial contribution to our ACDC during the past three years is considered a voting member. We will then move to the presentation of some well-deserved awards and conclude with remarks from our keynote speaker Julie Campoli. So I call the official business meeting to order and our first task is to approve the minutes from 2022's meeting which are included in your little flyer here. So I would look for a motion for approval of last year's minutes. So moved. So moved. Ken Cawfield. Second? Second. Sam Hooper. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Minutes are approved. That was easy. So the second item of business is our Treasurer's Report which I will cover. I'll try not to get too much into the accounting weeds here but there are there are a few complexities this year to report. Our ACDC's financial year ended June 30th 2023 reflects continued financial strength and also a number of structural changes to our financials due to mainly to the Randolph House Rehab and related limited partnership, recent occasion and government grants. So if that's not a mouthful it's a lot of regulation that we have to follow. As general partner we are now we now fully consolidate Randolph House into the RACDC financial statements and with the approximate six million dollar investment in Randolph House our combined net assets have doubled from five million to just over ten million. Due to some federal requirements we will also be changing our fiscal year from June 30th to December 31st and as a result we are currently in a short six month transition period which will require an additional audit at the end of the July-December period. Financials for 2024 and beyond will then be on a calendar year basis which complies with a lot of the funding that we have. Our 2023 operating revenues shown in the left side here were we're down about 10% versus 2022 to mainly to some timing of project management fees but the day-to-day business continues to be pretty much on track. Expenses were also down slightly with the overall result being basically breakeven with revenues and expenses each about 1.5 million. We operate on a pretty tight budget and certainly value and thank you for the many financial contributions we receive including continued free office space from Bar Harbor Bank. So with that I'll pause for any questions anyone has on the financial report. Yes. Peter since you mentioned contributions what is your typical year income from contributions? We can't see that. Yes normally our range is somewhere between 40 and 60 thousand dollars so we don't we don't rely heavily on contributions but they really make a big impact. All right if there are no other questions I would look for a motion to approve the treasurer's report. Bob Wright. Second from Christine Maloney. Any other comments all in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay treasurer's report is approved. All right our nominating report the last piece of our business we have a volunteer board and again I thank them for all their service. I will also mention that we are always on the lookout for new board and committee members so if you have a passion for housing and community building please reach out. We will put you to work. This year we have three nominations for renewed three year terms for the following board members Christine Maloney, Dan Bennett and Sam Hooper. Additionally I would entertain any nominations from the floor if there are any. There usually aren't. All right if there are no further nominations I would look for a motion to approve the renomination of our three board members. So quick question is it Dan Bennett or Dan Devoe? It's Dan Devoe. Dan Devoe? Oh it is kind of. He's not going anywhere either. So motion to approve that. Salute. Tom Ayers. Second. Second from Tim Caulfield. All in favor of the nominated candidates please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay they're thrilled to continue. Okay so now we have a special tribute to our good friend Pat French who basically was the backbone of this organization and previous organizations for many many years and I think finally said it's time for me to retire from this. Pat was the involved in the merger of Randolph's housing organizations with our ACDC back in 1999 and I think he had served on the board ever since that time. He served as our nominating chair. He did just about everything you could think of for our ACDC and many other organizations in town. We honored him with a gift earlier this year but we wanted to have a shout out to Pat for all the work he did and wish him well in his retirement. And now I will turn it over to Julie. Thanks everybody. I'm Julie Ifland executive director of our ACDC. Welcome and thank you all for coming. Our 30th anniversary is certainly a milestone and we're really happy to share it with everyone. I want to thank Peter and the entire board of directors who unfailingly are supportive, thoughtful in their guidance and really generous with their time and their talents and as our ACDC grows that becomes a more and more important guidance to have. And so I'll reiterate Peter's thought that we'd love to have others join us as we continue to try to keep this organization vital and growing. This is a lot of important work to do. So I want to introduce you to our staff, the people who do the work of this organization because they are extraordinary in their dedication and their good humor which is a required quality. Laura DiPiazza, relatively new member of our team, the downtown program manager. She's really hit the ground running. She's promoting our downtown and our businesses in ways that are new and different. She's running events, cultivating collaboration among the organizations in town and she's going to be spearheading a downtown placemaking project this coming year. So stay tuned for that. We're really excited about that. This is a first Friday event that was not as wet. So that's good. Okay, here we go. Ann Howard is our SASH coordinator. Our SASH coordinator, SASH is for support and services at home. It's a wellness program for seniors eligible for Medicare and we host this locally. It's free of charge to the seniors and Ann and her team of colleagues help participants to set and achieve their own goals so that they are in the driver's seat but they have some really great co-pilots to make sure that they stay on on course. Now recently the residents of this building got together of their own volition on their own steam and created care packages for seniors in Barrie who were affected by the flood and then they damned all the stuff in Ann's card and took it to Barrie. So her job description is varied. Becky Wright, our Jocelyn House resident manager who I think is here also, in fact Laura is, stand up or wave or something when I say your name guys because I'm not sure people, no there's Laura, there we go and Ann, there's Becky right, okay and Ann's in back, Ann's in back. So Becky and Holly Pratt, our new kitchen manager I don't think is here and a host of Jocelyn House service staff really keep that big old house on Hospital Hill, a home for all who enter. Arlene is also here who obviously had done that job for a lot longer but Becky also doubles as a face painter at First Friday so again very versatile staff. Next one, Marty Lira who you saw at the registration table is our this year's AmeriCorps member for RACDC. She is here, this is a play and I stole Tim Calabro's photo of the play and it's a wonderful photo of them and Amy Yerana who's our departing office manager so we're losing these two fine Thespians and staff people this year but Marty hailed from Southern California. She arrived last October and quickly learned a lot about Randolph and a lot about Winter. So despite the challenges of moving to a new and cold place her ability to communicate and make friends easily really made her a wonderful ambassador for us and for the town. We call her the mayor of Randolph and we are all going to miss her when she goes back home for sure and Amy who's taking on a different challenge this year has been our office manager organizing supporting us always with a quick smile and frequently with a quick wit. She's still working with us part-time but we miss her already and she's in the room too where's Amy there she is in back. Wayne Fontanella over here Wayne does not like to have his picture taken so we have really poor photos of him but anyway Wayne's our housing and property manager he manages three of our properties and handles occupancy applications he designed our first post COVID event which again we didn't get the picture right but that was the Cornhole Festival downtown our first foray after COVID and he also finds time to help with first Friday when a tent needs to be erected or whatever he's there to do it. The folks at Stewart property manager who aren't management who aren't here tonight but who manage this building some of our other apartment buildings also work really closely with our staff to make sure that the buildings and the people in them are well supported safe and happy and Nathan Johnston our IT manager who is here oh there he is right here so Nathan keeps us one step ahead of the hackers he finds a way for technology to help us do our jobs and to be accomplished goals from community service kind of things like downtown Wi-Fi to digital information boards like the ones you see out here and in these lounges and also amazing things that we never knew you could do with light he's really great at it this is from our our floodplain forest light festival that we did a while back and he's awesome with that Diane Nelligan who is also back there is our newest staff person she's starting like she started last week I think she's already working hard she's gonna be working with us on housing development and compliance work she's done some amazing project work in her career and so we're really thrilled to have her and then finally Darlene Kelly who also doesn't like to have her picture taken helps keep our increasingly complex financial projects loan funds financial reporting on track and she provides us with our office mascot and goodwill ambassador Oliver so so much of what we do requires a lot of perseverance a lot of patience a lot of heart and i'm really grateful to work with people who have these quantities qualities and great quantities and so i want to please join me in thanking them for all they do so i also welcome you to Randolph house we're proud of this project to breathe some new life into the important community asset we have here even before the renovation this is kind of a nice place to to live for seniors that's right on main street it's close to shops and services and dentists and physicians and pharmacies has sidewalks and public transit right to the door it has green spaces but it was dated out of compliance to both codes and norms community space was like a closet and there are like between 15 60 people living here on a regular basis so it's really important that we bring this up to speed for another couple generations of seniors so when we talk about housing projects a lot of time we focus on the construction part and that is huge right it's a big part of what goes into these projects our funders are back there they know they help us through the travails of getting funding and figuring all the pieces out so there was design and engineering studies there was grant writing there was contracting there was supply chain woes and there was of course covid to work around but like most of what we do whether it's constructing a building or holding an event what we really do is about people so i wanted to give you a little short story about a little known part of our Randolph house journey and this is called occupied rehab so occupied rehab refers to construction work on a building that people are still living in but may have to leave for a little while so when residents yes so some of our residents are here they're like i could hear the groans already so when residents have to leave their homes during construction on a building funded with federal dollars that's known as relocation covered by the uniform relocation act and it requires that we as the housing provider find other homes for the residents for that time as a result we need to figure out how to permanently or temporarily sorry pack up and relocate over 50 seniors service animals durable medical equipment and furnishings for between two and eight weeks during covid and a housing shortage in a way that met had regulations and on the construction timeline some of the seniors were able to move in with family and friends for a while but the rest of them we had to find places to go and actually even for the people who moved in and family and friends it was our job to make sure that where they were going was safe and affordable so the closest hotels were 30 miles away and in service deserts for the most part there was no grocery store nearby there wasn't walking to services there was no another doctors or religious services were nearby so we had only one bulk housing option available to us so we scheduled the meeting and explained to our 70 80 90 year old residents that they were going to be dorm mates at vtc's old dorm share a bathroom take meals in the cafeteria and learn how to stream with roku to watch tv goants no no good so the randolph house relocation made me love my co-workers not just like them but love them because these brave and kind souls took an impossible situation and one that was found in no one's job description and made it possible and even occasionally enjoyable we planned every detail we worked on weekends we reached out for volunteers rotary theater board members help pack unpack made or brought meals when the cafeteria who knew goes out goes on vacation sometimes um trouble shot technology transfer you name it it took almost six months to relocate every floor moving one floor out the same day that the others moved back in our residents were not always happy about the situation and for many of them it was really a difficult thing to do we made did our best to make it comfortable and they ultimately made the best of it living like college students helping each other out it was really kind of wonderful in the long run it was eye-opening but we now understand our residents in their lifestyle better than we ever did and now they know they're tougher and younger at heart than they ever thought they were are there nods from the residents are they not any please so we have two housing projects in our pipeline now that will rehab together 25 existing units and create close to 50 new units Salisbury Square um we're hoping the schedule to start construction next spring we've got a lot of work to do this fall but that's our target now and we've been in conceptual design of a new project uh involving occupied rehab of 25 existing apartments and the creation of 28 new units um and we're taking away two really important lessons from our Randolph house journey the first is that we're not building or renovating buildings we're building and renovating homes these homes are so important to people's lives and it's hard to be without them even for a little while the second really important lesson we learned is that we should definitely time our retirement to start before the next relocation project just kidding so um anyway we all know there's a lot to do and a lot to celebrate which is why we get together once a year to reflect to have some fun along the way and to thank people who keep this community ticking so thanks um once more for all your support and generosity you really keep us all going and um we're we're going to be enjoying handing out some some well-deserved thanks um to some folks in the community tonight so we should um shall we yeah should we adjourn the meeting first or keep under either way it doesn't matter thank you all right so now we get to hopefully adjourn our business meeting so i would look for a motion to adjourn the annual meeting from Tom Ayers second second from Christine all in favor please say aye and the opposed okay now we'll move on to the well it's not that wasn't fun but the the entertainment portion um so i'd like to call on bob right to come up and make an award presentation so i have a fun job tonight this is the annual award that we give out every year it's the Jim Hutchinson or it's a Hutchinson award and and it was inspired by Jim Hutchinson a little late Jim Hutchinson many of us know him some don't but he was a local guy spent a lot of time in volunteering and that's why this award was created to honor his time so it's not very hard to find a local person to award give this award when you have people like carol carol is a local business person as people know she's at the uh frankenburg agency which she owns and and it's it's thriving it's it's she's relocated it from a brick building beside the railroad tracks into a nice renovated building that uh so she's she's done a lot from the business community she's very involved in in the business she's she's a bi local kind of a person she really supports the local economy um and it's a real pleasure to to know her so she works hard i mean you know she told me the other day that she doesn't know when she has time to work because she volunteers so much and i'll give you just a little list of of you know some of the things that she gets involved with uh she's been on the gifford board she's no longer on that board but she was on that board for nine years she's currently on the gifford auxiliary board and she volunteers at the thrift stop so she also is part of the make-a-wish foundation she does some fundraising for the make-a-wish through a golf outing that happens that i think they raised 25 grand to support the make-a-wish foundation she's spent a lot of time she's on the committee of for the jocelyn house we did a jocelyn house renovation and a lot of you folks so we're kind enough to to donate to that fund but the jocelyn house as people know what kind of a place that is carol was was a instrumental person to help you know with through the planning process of that and as well as the fundraising so we raised i don't know close to four hundred and seventy thousand dollars i think for renovating that facility and it was another live you know work where you live occupied rehab but so she's she's a giver and you guys probably know that from anybody that that knows her let me see if i've missed anything because i don't want to what's that i'm sure yeah she's she's been on the uh our acdc board she was on that board for for three years and food shelf she does uh she's on the board of the food shelf and she actually helps out there so she's oftentimes working so she's not only uh doing the planning stages she's boots on the ground kind of a person and people that know her can really appreciate carol buschett so carol i would like to present you with this year's hutchinson award i really prefer to be in the background but i was a friend of jim hutchinson we used to discuss politics that was fun i am a true believer in shopping local supporting local businesses local people and non-profits the people that have made me successful i think it's fair to give back um there's so many deserving people in our community that really deserve this award so i'm really honored that you chose me thank you so you have another award thank you carol yes thank you pa another award that's more recent that's um three or four years old that we call the energy rising award and um the energy rising is is to people who have done something not necessarily philanthropic not necessarily typical you know um typical work that with a non-profit but somebody who's done something that really jump starts something in our community um so 30 years ago rcc was actually created when 15 North Main Street burned to the ground and the community at that time said oh my gosh you know what are we gonna do it's hard to rebuild but without it what will we do and so we were built bell mains occupied that for many years um along with Clara modern on the second third floors and there was a similar feeling when the windslows stopped their business in the first floor that building and the community really this literally felt that were we going to survive this and um George Kelly and Nathan Gray stepped in bought the building and they partnered with three business people who were there sort of the new anchors to this new idea of a kind of indoor mall almost because it was a very very big space probably too big for any local business and it has made such an enormous difference not only are they quality businesses but it's a quality renovation and it just brings life back to that part of Main Street in a way that we couldn't ignore and so we wanted to honor um we wanted to honor both of the grays um who took the initiative and the risk to bring this place back to life and the business owners really make it sink um so if they would come up here I know um George and Kelly are actually I think celebrating their anniversary too so that might take precedence over this um but Nathan's here so um we just have something for the building Nathan this is um energy rising award one for each of you and we have little certificates to thank you for all the work you've done if you'd like to say thank you very much and then also Stephanie third branch pottery Stephanie Tyler it's pottery yes it's actually my favorite and Kelsey Wolfe I don't know if Kelsey's here she wasn't able to make it and Matthew right as well so anyway thank you all and hope you'll say a few words thank you very much for the intro Julie um it's been a long road um but like you said having that much darkness in Main Street just didn't feel right and I think Stephanie Kelsey and Matt they done an incredible job of bringing it back to life down there and kind of bringing the community back in town so thank you very much yeah absolutely um I didn't I'm awkward I don't know what to say I never but it's been it's been amazing beyond Main Street um and just the community response as well so just it's been really really great there you go Tim there's a new quote Tim Coney is saying uh empty bowls Tim uh interviewed me after he just did the empty bowls and the quote was it was really really cool and so um but yeah but thank you everyone for for this honor and for for supporting us so it means a lot so thank you yes thank you very much yeah you pushed the power button so you did your job we were in the meeting is your um Nathan Julie did you were you able to get your stuff up on the Nathan Julie oh so um while the technology happens I'll just say a few words about Julie Kim Holy who are very lucky to have tonight um actually ran into Julie's work um many moons ago when I started at um at RECDC um and she was um working with a lot of the housing organizations a lot of the state agencies around her China um and towns trying to help us understand what density looked like and how how downtowns work and um did some work I think on the early Salisbury Square um designs um she's a noted speaker author uh and and thinker about what makes infrastructure and solid things work with people and so we're really um hoping to get some inspiration some ideas from her thank you oh thanks um well it's great to be here thank you so much for inviting me thanks to Julie for thinking of me and um I just want to uh congratulate the award winners it's really easy to show up and talk for an hour but the real work here is done by people on the ground like Carol and Stephanie and the others that have put so many hours into making a place wonderful and caring um I just tell stories about the people that are doing the work that you're doing and I wouldn't be able to do what I do if it weren't for people like you so let's give them another round of applause can you hear me okay I will make sure that I will get very close to this but I need my images first well done wow okay it worked I'm gonna hope they don't run out of power I hope they don't run out of power easy to wear something like this sure so I should put it here so I'm gonna be looking this way okay okay let's start with the things that we love about Randolph and there are many many things to love about it I I actually um have done a couple of different projects in Randolph um the first one I'll I'll tell you about soon but um this was a 19 any image from the 1990s that Alex McLean took for our book visualizing density and it was a prominent this thing working I think I'm gonna just do this does this come out all right well I'll just stand right here I'm sorry I have a soft voice thank you okay um so let's just talk about the great things first the um what we call assets I also call them good bones like so many Vermont villages Randolph has got a very compact form a great urban pattern it's a really walkable size it's got a wonderful layout basically route 12 comes through which was the organizing corridor in the earliest years and then the railroad came through and all of the buildings lined up along those two corridors which are not at a right angle there at an interesting angle which makes a very interesting street pattern and right at the intersection of those two spots is what a real sweet spot which I think of as the sort of physical center of town and this kind of pattern makes it very walkable and very human scale and very comfortable there's a great sense of history in the buildings around the downtown that late 1800s architecture that from the railroad era is on prominent display in both the downtown buildings and the in the residential houses and it's been for the most part pretty well preserved and intact and then alongside that the industrial architecture that came along I think I'm getting a little feedback from both of these so I'm going to turn this off the industrial architecture that that came along with that railroad is also incredibly interesting and it's a little bit in contrast to the more formal commercial architecture of the day and then you've got these wonderful gateways that are pretty common in most Vermont villages where you come into town and there's like this constricting of views buildings that are set up very close to the street so that you're whoops so that you can't really see everything all at once you get a sense of entry and then more is revealed as you enter through town in a lot of the years that I've been watching Vermont villages many of the buildings that are set close to the road sometimes they will fall into disrepair and they get taken down sometimes they're they're taken out because they're seen as some kind of a hazard but I think that there's a lot lost when you do that because of that sense of of gateway and you get it on the other side of town on route 12 as you're as you're coming into town down the hill it's green and then these two buildings are very close to the road and then it opens up into downtown so it's a very strong sense of arrival you know you're in town when you're in town and you know you're out of town when you're out of town there are really wonderful view corridors and I noticed this the first time I came here to take pictures that so many buildings are placed right at the end of a street and they're often very attractive buildings like the library so that they present this kind of terminal view from within the village and then along the railroad tracks it's just wonderful to look down that sort of green corridor and just kind of see these tracks going off to the far distance which is one of the romantic feelings that everyone always associates with train travel you've done a great job of creating outdoor gathering spaces with the outdoor seating I came through town about a month ago and unfortunately it was too early in the morning for anyone to be sitting having having lunch at these places but you can see that that has a real potential to liven up the downtown and I'm sure that these are favorite places to sit there's a sense of enclosure that comes from those two multi-storey buildings along either side of of the street that give you a sense okay I am inside of this outdoor living room and this is also a scent gives you a sense of the identity of of downtown Randolph and this is why it was so important to replace that building in the early 1990s because without there's just a great big hole there and sometimes towns when they have a fire like this they they say oh great we can have a little park in there and it's never quite functions the same way as if you have a building while along that street which gives you that sense of enclosure and then there's some streets where there's not so much enclosure and you can sort of see the contrast between these side streets the front of right aid and then the the side street down to the police station things kind of sort of bleed out and you don't really get that strong sense of an edge and then you've gone I can tell that you've gone to an effort to make pedestrians feel comfortable downtown I mean you have this great sense of that sidewalk is up a little bit higher than the street which gives you there's almost a little sense of theater that's your up on a stage looking down on the other side of the street and it also raises you up above the level of the cars and I guess I can't point with this but you've also done a good job of marking the crosswalks I'm sure that that presents a challenge for wheelchairs and I didn't happen to notice how you've addressed that but but that raising up a couple steps is really kind of a nice design feature that you have inherited from another another era and then pulling out the sidewalk with those bump outs is really helpful in terms of narrowing the distance that people have to cross the street so I felt entirely comfortable walking around Randolph as a pedestrian so you should congratulate yourselves on doing a nice job with pedestrian infrastructure and then there are institutions that that will bring people into town oftentimes in a village you guys are lucky to have the the Chandler Center I don't know what the relationship is like but it seems like a wonderful institution with a great history and a wonderful physical presence downtown this is a reason for people to come I attended a concert here a couple years ago and everyone spilled out and the big question was who's going to get to the restaurant first to get the available tables and then everyone else like us had to drive somewhere else but it's just an influx of people that you can definitely take advantage of and then the hospital up on the hill it's only a nine-minute walk from that from that campus down to the town if you walk it directly it might be a nicer walk through the neighborhoods but that's a real opportunity for the people that work there for the people that visit there they should be doing that walk if the hospital is a healthcare place they would think that they would encourage walking encourage going out on a break at lunchtime and going into town to get your lunch so there's a real opportunity to maybe make one of those corridors improve it so that that connection between those two between that institution and downtown is much more visible and much more in people's minds and then you should never underestimate the power of an electric car charging station I was really happy to see that in addition to the one up by the interstate there's going to be one downtown I have had an electric car for the last six years and I can tell you this Manchester Vermont station which is on between my house and in my family in Berkshire County in Massachusetts I have spent more money in the village of Manchester you know at the taco place at the bookstore at the Thai restaurant and all the shops there it's an incredible economic development tool because unlike filling up your car with gas you are stuck somewhere for almost an hour you know and and you want to take a walk and you don't want to just walk around the convenience store eating your bag of chips for for about an hour and unfortunately that's where most of these places are getting put so I don't know who's responsible for this one downtown Randolph but I think you're going to find that it's it's it's a great thing to have and so will the travelers that are going across the state of Vermont and then of course the train which is a really wonderful romantic presence and people love the train it's got some limitations and that it only comes through in one direction one day and the other direction the other day so you're not exactly going to get a lot of day trippers on the train although we did take our two-year-old granddaughter on the train from Burlington to Virgin's on a wonderful outing one summer day so there is a potential to do that but but but the great thing about the train is it just drops people from far away right into your downtown and and and I was happy to see that you've got this great bus system that I don't know if there's a connection there between the train drop-off and the bus pickup but there's potential to really make those two things work together and I was really also impressed to see that your your regional transit system I don't know how regular it is it might not be that regular but it's pretty extensive you can really go far on a bus and and that just really helps to have that kind of infrastructure existing in place and it's deserving of a lot of support so what I usually talk about is walkability how do you make places more walkable and one of the first things I say is it's it's not about the sidewalk if you take these people that are standing on the sidewalk out of downtown Middlebury and you put them somewhere else you would realize there's really no reason for them to be there they need to have a reason to be there there's a sidewalk and it's perfectly smooth and it's perfectly safe but that's not why they're there it's it's what's around the sidewalk that really matters it's that it's that beautiful architecture that they're standing next to that will catch the sun on a warm spring day it that invites them to stay and chat with someone they run into it's the bank it's the library it's the it's the bookstore all those things along main street in Middlebury that will bring people there and then the sidewalk makes it possible for them to walk down the street but it's all the other things to make it the reason for them to be there so there's been a lot of research on what makes a place walkable in the truest sense not just safe for pedestrians but a place where people can live without a car comfortably can have a high quality of life and can can live in a place where walking is the primary mode of transportation and these are the characteristics they've got different names proximity is really about being close to where you need to go every day connections you want to be able to walk without crossing a six lane road or making great big detour around a river you want to have lots of different things a balance of uses residents next to businesses next to civic institutions it needs to design be designed well for people to feel comfortable in it and I usually call this scarcity parking scarcity but that usually really freaks people out so it's really about just enough parking you don't want to have any more than you absolutely need for people to to use a car when they have to use a car and then density is a really important thing and I think that in Randolph you've got you've got three of them but there are three that you really could develop a little bit more if you want to make your place your your your community more walkable because what you want is you want more destinations to walk to you want more things to do and things to buy and you want more people that are living downtown so that they can support all these activities they can support the businesses and they can participate in the life of the community and I found this wish list of activities on on your website just things that people would love to see downtown and it's a great it's a great list and I think you might have already acquired some of those since 2018 but but I think this sort of speaks to this idea of you know we just want to have more things that we can do in our beloved downtown so we've been hearing on the news that Rite Aid is going bankrupt I don't know how everyone feels about this building here but I see this as a great opportunity to have a whole lot more for your downtown and it would be a shame to lose a pharmacy but there could be a building there with a pharmacy in it and many other things in the building so I'm going to talk about infill in Vermont and first I'm going to pause and talk about the first time I came to Randolph was in 1993 30 years ago and and that's me with my brown hair and youthful looking face and and youthful idealism because what I was trying to do was to show at the time it was really only sprawl development everything was built outside of town in a very automobile centric pattern and I wanted to just show hey we can build in our village centers and we can do it in a way that fits the character of those places so I studied village patterns and I chose four communities and I came I put out a query on the planners website whatever it was at the time was served and the planner in Randolph contact me and said we'd like to be one of your case studies community so I use this neighborhood just south of the railroad tracks as a demonstration of how you could put some accessory dwelling units you could put some subdivide some of those larger lots and add more houses so that you have more people living in a downtown and I thought great people are going to see this and then this is all going to start happening because it's such a great idea and I had absolutely no idea how huge the obstacles to this kind of infill development was there was no market for it there was regulations against it all of the powers that be it's just not the way they do business so I've noticed that things have started to change and I did a little research to find out well how much infill has there been going on in downtown's in the last 30 years and I couldn't find any data so I just kind of made my own highly intuitive highly unscientific chart that showed that in 1993 there was hardly any and now there's a lot in some point some point in the last 30 years things just just spiked upwards and it's just been a convergence of factors which is that people are tired of driving everywhere there's just been a real hard work done on doing downtown development and revitalizations there are tons of nonprofit organizations in the state and there are all sorts of state policies now that support development downtown and we've had you know politicians who who embrace this governors and and say legislators who embrace it embrace this idea and I'm happy to report that it's really happening out there now and I'm just going to give you a sampling of recent infill development and some of them are in really small towns like lindenville and bellows falls and and and and there's there's just stuff going on at different scales in different size communities apartments commercial affordable housing market rate housing renovation of historic structures and and then up to the scale of urban city mixed use commercial like like the one in berry in montpelier in morrisville which is i guess about the same size as randolph uh five thousand something people there's done 120 new homes built within the village in the since since i think about 2012 and that's that's really impressive because we got a housing crisis going on and which helps because people understand the need for it but but this is a town that just said we need this we want housing to go in downtown not out in the farm fields so they've got a very supportive town government they have rewritten their regulations to encourage this they've got a very active net housing nonprofit that has become a partner to private developers and then they have this ambitious local developer who was a professional hockey player born in vermont and came back to the state and decided he was going to be a developer i think this might be his hometown and he has built a lot of this housing and partnered with with the lamoille housing trust to make it much of it affordable and it's truly it's truly a great impressive story about what is possible to solve the housing housing um crisis so so let's move down to brattle borough in the southwest corner of the state in this is just a one great project that happened uh this is a big parking lot as it looked in 2008 and the same location in 2017 and this is uh the land was owned by the brattle borough food co-op and instead of just building re making their building on that site larger they decided we're going to make a real urban mixed-use building so they they ended up with ground floor grocery store offices on the next floor and then two floors of apartments and it's really quite a wonderful beautiful building and center of activity that really enlivens this part of downtown brattle borough and along with this here's the uh the new building as part of this project across the wet stone brick they built a little pedestrian footbridge so that you could get to this you could link the co-op parking lot with the municipal parking lot on the other side of the river and then link to that part of downtown so this is bending 10 on the other side of the state in the southern part this is uh the platinum block which was built in the 1880s and in 2014 it was mostly empty upstairs a lot of the storefronts were also empty there were a few businesses kind of struggling the building was a bit dilapidated and this consortium of local individuals and institutions got together and said we're going to just buy the whole block and redo the whole thing they were incredibly ambitious and you know the bank the local bank the medical center bennington college uh one of the larger industries in town and several civic minded people got together and formed the bennington redevelopment group and and they ended up building this with 17 funding sources and tapped lots of grants they they they borrowed they got equity and they and they just turned over every rug for every grant they could possibly get and in 2002 and this has got it through the the pandemic which is also a feat in itself in 2022 ended up with 31 new apartments right in town conveniently located bookstore coffee shop restaurant and a pet supply store so now they're going to the other side of the block they got the ones on the right done and they're working on the part within the red boundary and adding 60 more apartments and ground floor retail medical office urgent care center and a fitness or fitness center this is you know it might not be that but it'll be some kind of combination of those uses and the in the the affordable the housing in the first phase was all affordable housing in the second phase is going to be more market rate with some affordable mixed in and so the really important things just to get this mix of income so it's not all people of one one income level so and i'm going to talk about three railroad towns if you go along the the railroad corridor there are you guys have some sister or brother towns that have been doing great things the first is white river junction which was struggling for so long and they had these storefronts downtown that were empty and they've decided to make them as incubator spaces so they for low rents they got cooperatives of artists to come in and i think maybe people here know about it because i saw them i saw this listed in your wish list of something like this downtown but they've been doing a good job of just luring in businesses like the tucker box and making it more of a happening place to invite investment and of course they have the train as well it's a little closer to new york city and they're starting to get people that live in vermont but want to be able to go down to new york very very easily especially retired people this is the downtown very very compact and what that means is that the the opportunities for redevelopment are pretty small the lots are really tiny here's that i don't know if we've been there but the polka dot restaurant long time establishment has got this parcel right behind it and now it's got this modern um three store four storey apartment building um and now it's a Thai vietnamese restaurant really sticking with the times there um and then other apartment building just on the other side of the tracks and it's drawing a much more um kind of urban crowd that kind of likes that connection to Dartmouth likes that collection connection to new york city so that there's a synergy between this northern stage company which is a cultural institution and the and the folks that are mostly empty nesters or maybe that's an assisted living place i think it is actually is yeah that are that are locating next to that so you get you get these you know infill opportunities this new population also the center for cartoon studies is there so it's kind of like this really interesting balance of cultures there in a place that is extremely intimate and walkable and here's the each dot represents a place that's been either redeveloped or or constructed and then as six junction another railroad town up in Chittenden county i worked on a project there about 10 years ago to help them develop a vision for the five corners area which was had its heyday in the during the railroad era and probably started declining in the in the 30s even though IBM is on the outside of town the downtown was really pretty much emptying out so we did this whole design process with the public and came up with just this series of conceptual images of how they could put more buildings in their in their downtown area so there's existing and then just showed where you can put infill buildings now this was in 2015 and the the difference has been remarkable they have just really made a lot of this happen usually when i do a plan like that i just sort of think well you know that was that there was a nice job and uh it usually just doesn't ever happen and and i just am shocked every time i go to sx junction to see you know what new thing has gone in on the ground and they are really capitalizing on the high cost of housing in burlington people see sx junction is a very walkable affordable alternative to burlington neighborhoods so they're getting tons of people that are interested in moving there here's another before and after of one of the routes right into the village and another i mean we did these visual preference survey and people you know would say they don't want to see the image on the top they won't they don't want to see lots of parking lots what they would like to see is is buildings and and restaurants and shops and one of their biggest challenge is traffic you know how do you how do you build something nice when you've got tens of thousands of vehicles going through your your your town center on a regular basis and what they have done is is built or they're building right now this little connector the image on the right shows how they can divert some of that traffic that's coming from the south away from the five corners and build something much more pedestrian friendly up here and one of the great benefits to that is then it opens this up as a new street with development potential there another st albans which doesn't have the benefit of being in the chitenden county economic engine they have really had to make their own opportunities make their own magic up there and they've done a fantastic job this is uh this is the downtown another town that was built in the railroad era bigger than than Randolph but has the same kind of large lots and kind of gracious feel that that era that that era embodied but one of the really important things that they did was to develop a downtown master plan and you know they had more resources bigger town they had professional people on staff and they and they hired a consultant to do this but it's become a really invaluable tool because it just looks at every single property downtown and says okay what's existing where can we put a new building where can we renovate the facades where should we make the investments when we get a grant what's the most important thing to do with that money they became very strategic about it where the parking areas how can we share those so that we don't have to keep building more parking whereas there's a place where building a structure would actually make sense and they actually counted all of the the the square footage the new development opportunities how much could they they get so they were very kind of data driven about it and it's really happening there they have a lot of of buildings have have kind of sprung up in this town in the last in the last 10 years and here are four underdeveloped sites in St. Albans probably five years ago and this is what's there today and you know you might think oh there's so more urban and that's not what we're about and sure people do have that response that it's changing and it looks more like a city but for the people that get to live there the people that the empty nesters that want an apartment the people that can't afford to drive very far the people that want to work in a place that's close to where they live it's wonderful and and the city is really celebrating its successes and they're not stopping there like they have built a lot of affordable housing that what they really want to do now is is do middle missing middle housing which is housing that is in their region at 62,000 and 93,000 a year and that's probably 80 to 120 percent of the area median income so it's not what we think of usually as affordable housing it's the people that don't have enough to really buy in the market but are too wealthy to qualify for the affordable stuff it's a huge problem i don't know if it is here in Randolph but it's most of the most of the country it's a big problem it's a gap and that's what they are looking at right now they have a tiff district and before it expires in the spring they want to try to make something happen happen with this tiff money so that's kind of the real big investment stuff there are also these temporary short-term strategies that you can use to generate interest in your downtown just to kind of get people down there celebrate the place imagine the possibilities and and one is just to activate a space with just a weekend of events and this was a this was in pittsville massachusetts um this group called better block will come in and they'll just kind of paint the sidewalks and put up cones and and they were trying to kind of get people interested in this beautiful historic fire station which had was kind of falling apart and no one seemed no one seemed to aware of how they could do something with it and they just wanted to bring people in there see how nice it was so they set up a weekend of you know activities in there it just generated a lot of interest in that building in that place you might be familiar with the better block pop-up that happened in Bethel about 10 years ago and the same folks came in and they just kind of showed okay here's your downtown as it looked existing and you know you could just do some simple things there to kind of make it look a whole lot better just to kind of get the ball rolling and they did the same demonstration project there and and the wonderful thing about this effort is that so many people come together to work on it and make it happen that they meet each other they share ideas and then they that's the germ for them to kind of carry these ideas forward and a lot of the things that happened in Bethel during this better block event are really come to life um food trucks can turn into brick and mortar businesses is what happened in Essex Junction when I did that work um I said you know food trucks are great you should think about filling in those empty lots so they got this food truck for that empty lot and and one of those infill buildings that business moved into the coffee shop so you don't have to sit outside in the cold with your cup of coffee all year long and people that take the train always go to the coffee shop before they get on the train in the morning and then open-air markets you probably have a farmer's market here do you I mean it's kind of obvious to see that that's great way to get people to come out to um support farmers um but it's also a way to support artists um you start with a with a stall and then people know your work they get familiar with you and then you develop a following and then before you know it you've you're on your way as a business and then there's just great ways to build community the village of Craftsbury tiny little town in northeast kingdom every year the 4th of july they close they close the street even though you got to go far around to it's kind of inconvenient they don't care because this is the town's day and they pull out picnic tables and ping pong tables and barbecues and everyone just kind of sits and has a great time together the local store and the local farm support um donate free food for everybody and it's just a wonderful way to just connect with each other and build that sense of community without spending hardly any money so I think um in conclusion the things that really matter is that to do village housing it takes a village when you when I was doing research to find images of a lot of this infill housing you see so many pictures like this of the ribbon cutting and there's just tons of people at these ribbon cuttings and these are the people that showed up for that day and it just shows you how many people it takes to make this happen it's not like a developer getting an option on a place and then just kind of by him or herself making it happen it's just lots of players um there's almost always a public private partnership and that means committed town leadership and usually a local nonprofit um local institutions are almost always behind these projects and they either add their financial support or they they could become a tenant in whatever gets built to help support that especially commercial space which is always hard to fill um and then um you're always going to need additional funding sources there's the market is not really there yet to do this kind of development without any help at all but thankfully in Vermont there's all sorts of help from the state and there are many many programs that you you can tap into and um Vermont nonprofits have become absolutely expert at tapping into new market tax credits and low-income low-income housing tax credits there's no shortage of expertise around in how to do that um so back to downtown saint albin's I think the lesson there is they had a long-term plan and they had this idea of this is where we want to end up everyone could see it everyone's on board not everyone always there's always some resistance but there's some consensus around what we want to do what we want to do first what are the most important things and then they have committed partners there's in order to do those buildings that I showed you they they had a tiff district and and it was very successful because they had the city behind them a local development the Champlain Housing Trust which is a great institution in that part of the state that the local hospital and then the community college those are really wonderful partners and they were all working together and they tapped these sources of funding that made it happen um and the really wonderful economic story out of that is that since that tiff district was started in 2012 they've they've added 70 million dollars to the grand list which as anyone any government official will tell you that's that's a pretty wonderful thing to celebrate um and the other thing is it takes a lot of time these are the headlines from Vermont Dinger on that Bennington project that just kind of went on and on because it was complicated and it needed support and there was just kind of this it was kind of a saga but the people that were doing it they just never they just never took their eye off the ball and they just kept kept at it these are the headlines just between 2016 and 2019 but it tells a story of how long it takes but it's worth it um so what's the vision where what do we want it to look like what do we care about what are our values what would make downtown Randolph a whole lot better you've done some of that work people have been talking about what they want I think it would be helpful to start making some a drawn plan counting up where the opportunities are where are the properties that you could infill talking at starting of conversations with some of those landowners are they interested in doing something like this um and then you know what what's the plan um where can we add stuff making a map um counting up the square foot is just like St. Albans did um and then what's the strategy who we want to partner with what what are the funding tools that we can take advantage with so it's not it's not it's not easy and I hope I didn't bomb you out with this long story of of all of the the difficulties but it is absolutely worth it and I hope I wish you the best of luck and I hope that you can take on this challenge and do it with a with a with a committed community in full heart thank you and I have no idea when I started or how long I took but I'd happy to take questions or have a have a conversation anybody yes you don't mention the need for good landscaping along with the buildings and I think that's very important it is very important and I'm and I'm sorry I didn't mention it and I feel ashamed I didn't because I'm a landscape architect that's what I have my master's degree in yeah it's interesting we we used to do um workshops on visualized and density I think I think Julie referred to one that I did in the area and basically we gave people images of of neighborhoods and we asked them to just describe their gut reaction to these places and we had pictures of neighborhoods all over the country different density levels and it was amazing how the the ones that everybody liked were always the same whether we did this in phoenix or st johnsbury or new york city or chicago everyone loved the pictures with the big trees and I mean I think that's so innate in us as human beings and if you ask people what's important they'll tell you they don't even need a visual preference survey to tell you that but but it's the thing that almost always gets cut from the budget at the end because it's the thing that can get cut and without someone complaining too much but I think that having requirements that people plant street trees is really important because if you can get some good street trees in there that goes a long way it might take a while but once you establish a canopy overhead then you get that sense of enclosure you get the shade you get the birds you get all those wonderful attributes that we know and love about trees but you gotta you gotta plant them and you have to plant them right you have to require that they get planted lower levels shrubs flowers that's all wonderful but I do find that communities will often plant flowers when they should be playing trees because oftentimes you need something really big and I can't tell you how many roundabouts that have been built with you know swirling tech traffic and there's like six little tulips are in the in the center and nobody's seeing the tulips but yet they're almost always put in that situation so it's an issue of scale you know just go for the biggest bang for the buck you can get which is usually trees and also ecological function the trees provide the best bang for the buck I could go on and on about trees but I won't yes so you've seen like a lot of redevelopment around the state and revitalization of communities and you acknowledge how long it takes and the process that goes into it a few years ago we went through a revitalization program called R3 here in Randolph with council on rural development Paul and John Copans came in and worked with our community and kind of lost some steam due to the pandemic yeah and I guess what I'm asking is in your experience going from these different communities what do you see as the biggest barrier to getting continuity and getting a town plan moving in the right direction and what do you see as the as the easiest the lowest hanging fruit to solving that is it is the issue permitting is it the is the issue ideological politics is it it depends on the community it just varies every community has their challenge and sometimes you just don't have good political leadership and you got people volunteering and wanting things to happen and the mayor or whatever just doesn't care about it and I have found that that is the most difficult thing until a change of leadership comes in it's really hard to to get things past a certain point because you really need the local government support sometimes it's a nimby problem and you got a population and often it's wealthier communities that have a lot to lose that that will say no no no no this is we like things just the way they are and we don't want anything to change they won't won't say they don't want anything to change but they will just put on the brakes in many different ways or come up with lots of reasons why it shouldn't happen that don't have anything to do with the actual reason I think nimbyism is probably one of the biggest issues and then there's also just like a resource issue like with the really small towns they just they don't have any professional staff at the town government then it's just harder to to get things going and that's where the regional planning commission expertise really helps the folks at the state you know tap into those resources as much as possible and and nonprofits especially housing nonprofits they're just so good at what they do and I can't think of a bad one in the state of Vermont you know some are accomplishing more than others but they're all you know pretty skilled and so yeah I think I think it's kind of resources to pay for expertise like it's hard to do a plan like I showed you from St. Alvin's just with a bunch of volunteers so if you can scrape together some money through grants to hire a consultant to do that it's really helpful because once you've got that plan which is what they had in Essex Junction what they had in St. Alvin's then it's just so much easier to just rally interest and excitement because you're all looking at the same thing saying this is this thing came up on the market and that's on our map we've talked about this let's make that happen so you can kind of focus your energy but yeah I mean every community I found that towns are like are like people they all have their own personalities and they all have their own dysfunctional aspects and sometimes I go into a town I think I don't think you guys need an urban planner you need a therapist because nobody's really talking to each other and you've got one group on one side and it's just like I wasn't really trained for this but but that's that's a rare exception you can use that observation in the house of representatives no I'm sure I was talking to my son who was talking about projects he's done at work and and he said it's you know it's problem because we go down the into a rabbit hole with this group and then we get to a dead end I said well that's like when you are a scientist and you're doing experiments he said no no people are way more complicated they make it much more difficult I'd like to just make a comment as a counterpoint to Sam I mean he talked about the R3 effort losing energy and I wasn't as involved in this as Sam was I'm sure but you know I think one of the things you mentioned is time frame or the amount of time these things take you know if we look at the things that came up in R3 we've got a hotel being constructed outside of town right now we've got a child care center these are both things that came out of R3 we've got the first Fridays that came out of R3 we've got Belmains which has been developed a lot of those ideas and emptiness came out of R3 and I think that that it has been it has been an is being a success it's just taking time time and energy and persistence by a lot of people Sam included I mean his own yeah well no I appreciate the counterpoint that's it's a great it's a great point and I think we are one of these interesting communities that has a ton of assets and is finding a way forward and it's and it's another example of one that takes time yeah so I appreciate that yeah I mean as long as you know you know that you're still moving forward you know that you're you're not just stalled out or saying you know well it's going to take a long time and stop trying you know you just have to keep keep turning over stones yes this is more of a comment or an observation than anything else from somebody who in my retirement years after 30 years in the nonprofit sector has returned to my roots in journalism there's an institution that needs to be a vital partner in this kind of work moving forward this country is losing a hundred weekly newspapers a week to the internet to social media to and you know thankfully we have a vital weekliness paper that's right for the Vermont standard at Woodstock which is on very shaky financial grounds right now as our and I noticed in your presentation coverage from the Sinaldans messenger the Addison independent Bennington banner Valver reformer yeah I I think those articles in the digger were from the Bennington banner yeah and and those are vital institutions that we need to preserve as a community because they're gathering places they're conveners for the kind of discussions we need to have and I just want to put that out there absolutely I completely agree with you and and you know there there's also the put it's really telling people not only just giving information on projects but telling stories like I think one of the biggest ways to fight nimbyism is to just tell the stories of people that need housing that don't have housing that recently acquired housing how their life changed and when that story is told I think people's empathy goes way up and and sense of fear comes down because a lot of fighting of development is really just fear of change so I think in in situations where the press has really grabbed that topic of of the housing crisis and told the story from many different dimensions it's been extremely helpful I mean there is this perception in many communities that building affordable housing is going to bring undesirable elements into town yeah you know I hear that a lot we hear that a lot right and usually the people that are saying that are would themselves qualify for the affordable housing that they're talking about because everybody needs affordable housing right now yeah but you know there's lots of lots of embedded biases that we have all kind of grown up with and we're exposed to through the media racist and classist that we are suspect to so continually being exposed to people stories really helps us overcome that yes we compete a little bit with the interstate okay modes of transportation with trains was lovely because people had to stop and stay but when you got people going by 70 miles an hour how do you you know benefit community-wise to get some of that traffic into downtowns I mean is there thoughts on other communities that are in that kind of situation yeah it's interesting I did a project for the state of Vermont 15 maybe 20 years ago about how to get how to deal with development interstate interchanges how do you to not do the stuff that build the stuff that should go downtown balance the needs of the travelers with economic downtown economic development and at the time there was a lot of talk about signage and we didn't realize that the internet was about to show up and obsolete so I think that probably social media is a really good tool in your arsenal you know travelers really rely on Yelp and Google ratings to kind of steer people to destinations because if something is rated really high that's gonna it's gonna make people do detours I think that the the um you're it's a challenge because you're far enough away from the interstate that it's not you got to kind of make a commitment in an electric car you're gonna you're going downhill and you got to say I was coming down saying today saying well if you don't have much charge left I really hope that charger's open because I'm not going to get back up that hill but I think that I think that it just getting the word out to people in non-conventional ways about what you got going on there and using the press and buzz so that people will you and maybe you won't get the casual people that are driving from Boston to Montreal because they're going too far they don't want to make that big a detour but you could get a lot of Vermonters that will say I'm gonna go down route 12 because Randolph's got a lot going on and we're gonna have lunch there um but get on the radar of like seven days and you know anyone that's kind of shaping tastes about what's happening where I you know good a good um I spent a lot of time in the northeast kingdom and I gotta say hill farmstead brewery I don't know whether you know about it but you go into their parking lot in the middle of nowhere and there is no Vermont license plate these are people from all over the country that have decided that they have got to taste this beer so whatever kind of marketing magic they are using it really works I guess they rely on scarcity so people it's hard to get yeah you can't go wrong with beer yes you didn't say much about programming but I think it's important for a town like Randolph and most others to have a kind of a theme or goals that's much bigger than any individual building or housing plan and Randolph for example as the Chandler Center for the arts as a which is a regional art center really and a regional hospital and as evolving restaurants which become a theme too but internally if people making plans can agree on what to build what to support I think comes out much better especially when it comes to promoting the town outside of town so that consensus of the people that this is what we're not give our focus to right and there and I thought you're going to say programming around like having festivals having having events that draw people from a broader region region or state I mean that has been the formula in Burlington there I when I first moved there 30 something years ago there were no there was much there was a they just started the marathon that year and now like between the middle of May till the end of October there is something every weekend of beer festival food tasting jazz festival just like they just keep coming up with more of them and as a matter of fact they had a they had a slogan contest in Burlington and one of the one of the entries was yeah we got a festival for that but I mean it's just it's just so invaluable to get people into town I mean it's frustrating if you live there you can never get a table in a restaurant because there's always something going on but as a taxpayer I'm like yeah this is great but I forgot what I was going to say yeah I mean there there are different scales that you can do that at but so it's not that you can start you know smaller and if it works you know just kind of build it up and invite more and more people music festivals are you know outdoors you can have more people whatever it is that I guess you guys have a lot of goats here or something is that what I read in that yeah all right so a goat theme something you know whatever it is that makes you unique that we have the New World Festival of Strongest People from all over the East so you're already doing a festival yeah yeah great that's wonderful and so how many people do you get to come to that 1,200 for a one day yeah and so great spillover to town businesses for that one day you've also started becoming a and I understand it's a kind of a resurgence of this but we've started becoming a mountain biking mecca as well and have a very active trail development system regionally that the hub for which is here in Randall I think that you should think about train visitors and marketing these activities to the people that could you know in up and down the upper valley I mean the sorry the Pioneer Valley and into New York City to just offer this as an option you know you come do a weekend and your bike is ready for you at the at the station here are the places you can stay and we've got this other thing going on and I think that's a great untapped potential because what you want I mean I've I ride the train my husband I travel more on trains across the country than we do in airplanes and the biggest challenge is what's available when you step off the train and you're in this place that some places have good car rental or bike rental or hotels nearby and other places it's terrible and you know you often decide where am I going to where am I going to get off the train and it often has to do with what sort of visitor amenities they're offering there that you can find out about and look attractive to you so I would really dig into that possibility and find ways to get the word out yeah um I think to mention the hotel is is coming back that's at the interchange but how how important do you think we really we have lost all of our not at the interchange um short term rental except Airbnb and even that after COVID is pretty limited so when we're like in a downtown like we're starting to look at what we could do for short you know for visitor uh yeah oh so there isn't a place to stay no no is there are there any here there's nothing pretty much oh wow well that's a that's a missed opportunity well I would think you know any property that like that right aid I don't know what the status of it is but if that were to get redeveloped then some kind of hotel is part of that some kind of lodging if there's nothing here that's a great there's no competition that's a great uh opportunity yeah one of the difficulties there is they're just putting up the 67 unit hotel on exit four and it's just going to be a chain hotel yeah well it's going to be a chain hotel there will be a hotel please right right the point is once you have one just justifying another one is going to be hard you actually had it well you know because it's well I mean I'm not a marketing genius but I know that it's a completely different experience what it would be down here and this is going to be a residence a motel so longer term stays it's actually a new chain that's just evolved in the last yeah that's a very different experience than what someone would have in downtown Randolph with all the wonderful stuff here so we will we will look at that because we preservation trust didn't study for a while back I mean before COVID we're just like the end of the world right so so we're gonna do another one again to just yeah I mean when people are traveling it's like the airline industry is is out of control busy and so people are moving around so it doesn't seem like there's a there would be a fear of investing in in lodging so if you got off that train yeah and I have oftentimes right and the closest place to stay may be 30 miles away do you not know you're gonna need a couple of aims well you know then you need a card rental place within walking distance but I mean if you you oftentimes you think is this a nice little downtown experience that I would enjoy overnight and do I want to stop and spend the night there and then get on the train the next day or is it a gateway for me to get to the ski area or get to the hiking trails that are farther away in which case I'd want to have a hotel nearby because the train's usually late and you get there later than you want to I'd want to be able to get my rental car without having to get an uber or whatever so just put yourself in the position of someone that steps up a train doesn't have a car what do they want and and then build the infrastructure around that it'd be interesting to see as the EV market broadens and the number of charging stations broadens so that people don't get range anxiety like you referenced earlier if EV car around could be something that could be integrated with the with the Amtrak station have EV rental have 15 e-bikes there yeah in collaboration with the bike shop here in town and you jump off the train you jump on an e-bike you run a Chevy bolt or whatever and yep off you go that's that's really good they had ski towers I don't know if you're 33 uh and I noticed from rumor there was a ski area here I mean tiny albeit just like maybe like suicides to drink smaller but I don't a lot of great skiers have come from Vermont or have trained or informative years of getting to me Olympic skiers which we have we've had a few of them came out there was a hill actually 11 it's ridiculously small and uh this was probably bigger and uh what's her name one of uh the one who won the ones at killington trying to remember her name right now Mikhail it's different train on train on that when she's a teen or in her preteen years so and I always wonder why we end up with I know killington's killington but why we're gonna couldn't have could they have some towers up there up in the other past hospital hill I don't know why they could never redevelop that uh into a small local uh you don't have the school children or whatever else to be able to go there outdoor sport and also I think that could might turn out into the champions uh scare on this town I wouldn't be surprised or snowboard excuse me I'm a skater snowboarding now yeah but those towers are still there as far as I'm sure that there's a way to do it again I would also think about your sister towns along route 12 because it's kind of a much more interesting way to come up along instead of taking the interstate you know there's some really nice little towns along route 12 and just trying to kind of develop some synergy between what you can do here and what you can do there to just kind of get people to think about that as a as a much more interesting travel corridor yeah I know there's a cheese trail I'm sure there's a beer trail maybe there's a goat trail well I don't want to bust this up at an time I think we need to wrap up a formal part of the meeting but I'd like to thank Julie for her great presentation Julie let's say we need a town plan at least 500 times thank you very much and thanks everyone for coming feel free to stay and chat a little bit I think there's still a few little snacks in the back but thanks for being here and appreciate your support and we'll see you next year or thanks a lot first of all I want to thank Julie for that lovely photographic journey she took us on because I think that it makes all of us want to go see all the places you showed us I know myself I'm very intrigued by what you showed us and I love seeing the before and afters of those and I just want to take one minute of your time and I feel very privileged to be able to just tell you a little bit about the heart of Randolph area community development corporation and that person is Julie Ifland she has given herself countless hours if you've driven past the third floor of Bar Harbor Building in the evenings and you see those lights on it's not the cleaning crew that is Julie working tirelessly to advocate for this community and I considered a privilege to work for her for the time that I've spent there I've learned a great deal from her and I've often told her Julie there are things I don't know and I feel very unqualified to do some of the things I'm doing but one of the things I feel very confident is that you know what you're doing and I just want to thank her and I think that everybody tonight who has been recognized for awards and people who have been called out for the jobs they've done our board our staff I believe she needs to be recognized too