 that we need. We're missing Darcy and Pat, but Pat won't be joining us. And Darcy, I thought was going to, but she might have been an if, if she was available. She does child care on Tuesdays. Yeah, so it might have been an if. Okay, so we are recording. Thank you, Athena. You're welcome. You're all set. So we are going to start. So it is 204 in the afternoon and seeing a quorum of the Community Resources Committee. I am calling the joint meeting. It is a special meeting of the town council and a regular meeting of the Community Resources Committee to order for September 15, 2020. Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the Open Meeting Law, MGL Chapter 30A, section 20 allows us to hold this virtual meeting of both the Community Resources Committee and the town council. The meeting is being recorded for future broadcast and any votes we take will be by roll call. At this time, I'm going to call on the CRC members by name to make sure the Community Resources Committee members and can hear me and we can hear you. Then I will hand the gavel, virtual gavel over to Lynn to call the town council meeting to order and do the same for the non-CRC council members before we move into the agenda. So for now, CRC members, Shalini Balmiln. Present. And then it's Mandy Johanicki is present and then it's Evan Ross. Present. Steve Schreiber. And Sarah Swartz. Present. And that is CRC called to order with all five members present. Lynn. Given that we have a quorum of the full council here on the the joint meeting with CRC, it's calling the meeting to order at 206. I'm going to call your name, please answer and say your present. So Lynn Griezmer is present. Andy Steinberg. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. And Lisa Brewer. Present. I believe that's it. Excellent. So now we will move on to presentation and discussion items to give a brief background before we start. This is a special meeting of the town council and a regular meeting of the community resources committee. There is public comment built into the special town council portion of the meeting at the end or in the middle of the presentation and discussion items. There is no general public comment built into the town council portion of the meeting. CRC, since it is a regular meeting of the community resources committee, once the town council adjourns, will entertain general public comment on other community resources committee matters if there is any additional public comment at that time. And then CRC will move on to regular other business it has to do. This first portion will take the bulk of the meeting through to about 345 p.m. to allow CRC to do its minor business and end by four is the goal in timing. I just want to say this is a start of a discussion. We're not here to try and make final plans today on priorities. This is the very first discussion of this. We're here to hear from the planning department, from the planning board and from councillors and the public to begin a discussion on what we might concentrate on for giving the planning department some guidance for where to concentrate staff time as it relates to zoning. The planning department will present their views on zoning and where they believe the most needed revisions and study and fixes and all and what they hope to do are. And then we will hear from the planning board chair to summarize the conversations and reasonings from the planning board that led to the memo that is in the packet and the three broad priorities they voted on. When we get to the council discussion we'll have time to discuss and ask questions. I would hope we can stick to broader topics rather than say specific, specific remedies. For example, if you think parking is a problem, maybe it's parking overlay district needs discussed but not potentially we need to either eliminate it or we need a park payment in lieu of clause or this or that. We're trying to figure out where we might have some large agreement for changes that we might want to see. Obviously there's some give and take in there and once we have a brief discussion we'll go to the public comment then we'll come back to discussion and we'll try and also figure out what the next steps need to be and where we go from here. I'll also be taking notes on the priorities. We have a started document of compiled priorities. We will continue to add to that document today with CRC member priorities as well as any other counselors that did not have a chance to submit and I will work on adding to that making it more comprehensive and publishing it at the next time we take up this topic. I've also received emails from the public and town committee members on their thoughts. Hopefully we will have a chance to discuss how to deal with that, track those items and solicit more. At this time then I welcome Christine Brestrup and Rob Mora for the planning department presentation and I also want to welcome Benjamin Prager who's also part of the planning department and you may do your screen share when needed and let's let's get on to what we're all here to discuss. Great. Okay, thank you. So I thought we'd catch up a little bit for where we left off after a long delay. Back in February and March we visited the CRC and the planning board and began our discussions about the idea of going through a comprehensive review of the bylaw and looking for improvements and adjustments throughout the document. We had what we felt was a really start to a really good plan. We presented breaking it down into essentially three types of adjustments or amendments. Those that would be performed mostly by staff in preparation to prepare for either the zoning subcommittee or CRC review which would take care of things like inconsistencies and just errors throughout the bylaw and maybe adjust some of those smaller items that we deal with day to day but don't necessarily require a larger discussion for each item and then you know then we would be working on bigger items, more substantial changes to the bylaw with the CRC and planning board, whether it be the signage regulations, the downtown mixed use building standards. There's so many and then we were also looking at possibly consultant work, engaging consultants to deal with some of the really bigger items that need a lot of public participation and guidance. So you know that's where we left off. We never really moved to the next step back then. In the past few weeks we've started working on things and I want to show you a little bit about that. Ben will share his screen here and I just want to talk a little bit. I don't spend a lot of time on this but these are pieces of our existing bylaw and Ben whenever you're ready if you can just scroll through. This is article three, our use regulations and you'll see that he'll come across some highlighted sections and what you'll notice throughout the document are confusion with just the simple formatting and numbering. So in this particular example we have our section number, subsection, subsections one through four and if we keep going we'll see other variations of that. There's another section and then as we keep going you might see an uppercase A, you might see a lowercase A, you might see Roman numerals and lettering. So there's just a real mix of style of kind of layout throughout the bylaw. Again I don't spend a lot of time on this unless there's questions as we go along but we want to go through and really clean all of that up. In this particular section coming up on the screen right now this is an example of the language referencing another section incorrectly. So we're talking about coverages and that section sends you to a height provision. So just an error, just a problem with the bylaw that makes it more challenging to use day to day. You can go ahead and keep moving along there Ben. Right here we're talking design standards. I just wanted to mention design standards. This is an article seven. This is our parking requirements. There's no doubt a big discussion that's going to occur about parking everything from you know municipal parking to the parking for private businesses and residential uses needs to be looked at for sure during this process. But little things that we deal with every single day and if you keep going Ben you know when we look at driveway standards the widths of the driveways, the access to them we're constantly receiving comment from the fire department that our bylaw doesn't provide the space that's needed for the equipment that we own and need to have available to access a building or a site in the event of an emergency. So we'll be looking at those sections to make adjustments there. A little further down Ben there's this section right there accessory uses. So this section refers us to another section that only really deals with large commercial type of vehicles but it implies maybe more parking for accessory uses. Accessory uses can be a residential apartment, an accessory dwelling unit, it could be a home occupation but this section is either unnecessary and should be dealt with some other way or just incomplete. So we want to work on a section like that. Common driveways again fire department access is a common matter that we deal with throughout the year. We want to want to work with the fire department make sure we have the regulations in line with their equipment needs. This last section in the parking standards has to do with creating a common drive. There are slow with length limitations to common drives and those in this section are reviewed by the planning board. Now it's very common and actually in most cases that a common drive is accompanied by an application to create flaglots and the flaglots are something that's reviewed and approved by the zoning board of appeals but in this one instance with the common drive it's something that is reviewed by the planning board. So that requires an applicant to go through both hearing both boards for both hearings and you know have two separate processes for review and approval for the same project which is just you know inefficient and unnecessary so that's something you know we'd like to look at. Again I'm just pointing out the types of things that we would like to start working on in our first review of the bylaw. The demolition delay here coming up article 13 this is a good example of a conflict that we've dealt with for years right on the same page a couple paragraphs apart. One section asks us to follow the advertising and notice requirements in accordance with 48 the zoning act like we would for special permits and a couple lines down it's not less than seven days so if you are familiar with the special permit requirements it's 14 days it's a mandatory 14 days so that's just a point that often causes confusion and adds to the extended time that it takes to see projects through the approval process. We can keep going then there's no doubt we need to work on our graphics many of these are hand drawn they've been around a really long time some of them cause still create questions that have never been answered and you know we're faced with interpretation every day. Fences is one of those examples shown on that bottom maybe so we want to work on those and make you know make those clear and more useful and probably more of them. The last image and then we'll wrap up about the existing bylaw is this is a a shot of our use table article three one very simple formatting matter is that you have to turn the bylaw sideways to read it so whether it's digital format or paper format it's something we'd like to change make it read and appear better. I pulled this section because it's subdividable dwellings is actually a bylaw prevent section that's never been used in my time here in fact I can only see that it was created to address one particular situation in town 25 30 years ago really doesn't serve any purpose probably something we would suggest eliminating but it's a good example of a lot of criteria being put into the use table making it hard to read hard to understand and you know it just creates another place where whether it's an attorney or developer or homeowner looking for the rules not knowing that some of it might be here and some of it might be in one of the other sections of the bylaw so that's just just gives you kind of a sense of the type of things that we would be looking at through that first level review not really making big changes yet but really getting the bylaw into a condition that's ready to start to for us to start making those changes and if we're ready to continue I'll ask Ben to move along into what he has started working on to reformat the bylaw now we decided that we we want people to still recognize the bylaw I know that it's the Amherst bylaw so we're not proposing a completely different look but enough of a look to make it feel fresh and new and and some basic changes to formatting and then talk more about what he's what he started to do here yep yeah certainly so the past a few weeks maybe maybe like one or two months I've been working on reformatting the entire zoning bylaw and so I this page that you see here is basically just the outline of what the new formatting looks like so there's you know adding a colored banner on the header in the footer that tracks the article title and the section title and then basically new just very standardized headings and indents for each different heading as you move through the bylaw because right now there's a lot of inconsistencies in the current bylaw with how numbering and lettering is done you end up with these very long chains of numbers like 3.24578 and now this kind of format that I am working with kind of has maximum of like you know three numbers in a row and then it moves into A's B's or not capital letters and then Roman numerals and then finally lower case letters there's only a few instances where it gets down to this heading five so this is kind of a you know an overview of the formatting and and now I'll show you basically what the bylaw looks like so you know this is section one or sorry article one article two is the zoning districts as you move down I guess article three is where it gets a little bit more complicated and the other thing I did too was you know throughout the bylaw there are references to other sections of the bylaw so you know as as I went through and changed the entire numbering system I had to go through and change the references throughout the bylaw and I also made them active links so you can click them it'll you know bring you to the place in the bylaw that you need to go and yeah I'm trying to think it was basically a means to make it easier to work with and standardized throughout because the previous bylaw is very hard to follow and you get lost in those long number chains so this obviously I didn't I didn't make any substantive changes to any of the wording or language merely just a reformatting and changing of the numbering system so anytime there's a reference to another section changing that link in the bylaw so thank you Benjamin we've got a couple of hands so I have a feeling they might be questions for you so okay yeah thank you um one thing I just comment when you're showing things that are print on my screen it's microscopic so maybe a little bit bigger but um I haven't looked really carefully at the way the numbering works in the zoning law in terms of if you add one more thing to it is it a couple desmoints to the right or the left um and how that works you know if you think a future changes as you're going through this but one of the things we noticed in the general bylaws when we were going to add something to a section and Mandy has worked with this that related to one particular one the the numbering is not completely logical in the way most people would think like you might think three four zero is a higher number than three three nine but it's not always um you know because whether you think about it's a decimal point so if you pick up any anomalies like that so just you know whether it's using decimal you know a decimal point to make we're still in section 32 but this is point oh whatever just be aware of it because it was difficult to figure out how to add something in the right place without renumbering everything rather than having the numbering system allow you to add a digit or two so as I said I'm not sure it would apply here and then the only other comment I had on this notion of reformatting is sometimes as I'm sure you and Rahab are both aware sometimes we formatting or changes where something is located in a way that people are used to using the old formatting can't find it anymore so just be really careful so I understand one set is Rob's where some inconsistency literally doing track changes kind of fixing but if people are used to finding in a particular section and it has moved or the cross-reference has changed and it had to change so just uh to be really careful for people who know this bylaw and use it all the time of which I am not one thank you Kathy Lynn yeah um my mind kind of goes along with Kathy's second point but the reality is many of these references here are found throughout many other documents of the town and so at some point there's you have to be an index that creates the crosswalk so that somebody looking at their deed can say you know it was blah blah blah and here's where it now is that to me that's the more complicated issue of renumbering it's the cross-reference to other documents I'm all for you know getting things in some kind of logical order I just want to make sure that we create that crosswalk that's all I had to say thank you thank you um back to Ben and Rob and Chris oh wait one more question Steve all right hi Ben hi Steve how are you good thanks so maybe another comment and I don't know if this is even possible without it going through a vote of the town council or whatever and you can see it here so that's at many of the points we're going through the decimal system so we keep adding numbers so when there's a subsection you go in 3.1 then to 3.1 2 or whatever but then in other places we're right here then all of a sudden we break into this whole other thing of where we have capital A capital so to me this should be 3.2.8.1 general then 3.2.8.2 so another we sort of go into a we break into a different way of organizing and then we go capital letters and then we go small roman numerals so we're sort of we're mixing media we're going from one kind of numbering system to to all of a sudden to roman numerals to capital letters and so yeah that's another one of I think difficult to explain why we've done that thank you Steve back to Benjamin Christine and Rob for continuing on and are you finished uh yep all right well I'm I would like to talk a little about the substantive issues and we know you know we've listed these again and again the planning board has a number of zoning articles that they proposed a town meeting that didn't go through for whatever reason among them were form-based code for north and south Amherst and mixed-use buildings and some changes to the parking requirements etc so what we're hoping to do is you know really dive into these substantive issues at first sort of chapter by chapter as Ben and Rob and I go through the bylaw but also in larger chunks we we know that the demo delay bylaw was looked at carefully over the last few years and Ben has been working very closely with the historical commission and they are almost finished with what they consider to be you know a new and better demolition delay bylaw so that's one whole chapter of the zoning bylaw that is almost ready to be considered we also have our new flood maps that are coming coming through we've been working with ACOM our consulting firm and FEMA on getting the flood maps ready but now we need to incorporate a new section of our zoning bylaw to deal with the new flood maps and we we actually just and this is something that I've been hoping for for a long time we actually just received what the state is considering a good model bylaw for municipalities I've been kind of thrashing around trying to find one and I've looked at various municipalities throughout the state but we we were finally given a model bylaw by the people at the state who work with FEMA so that's going to be very useful to us so that'll probably be a whole separate section of our bylaw having to do with flood mapping we know that there are a lot of problems with our parking bylaw we wrestle with this every time we have a site plan review application currently our bylaw requires that there be two parking spaces for every dwelling unit in town across the board and that makes sense in some places like you know potentially some of the outlying areas where you might have a family with with two parents and a couple of kids and they need two cars and you would assume that they'd probably have two cars but when you live in a more confined area and you're living in a studio apartment or a one-bedroom apartment do you really need two vehicles for every unit so that's something that really is kind of a vestigial requirement of our zoning bylaw we also need to look at realistically how much parking is actually needed for some of our commercial uses we don't really have updated information about that so we're going to need to examine that very carefully we have a municipal parking district downtown that doesn't require any parking for most uses except for strangely enough churches and other institutional uses but it doesn't require parking for residential uses or some of the or most of the commercial and retail uses and that really needs to be looked at especially since we've got so much more residential development downtown than we initially had that bylaw was put forth back in the late 60s I think and it's been modified over time but back in the late 60s there really wasn't much development of any sort downtown and it was an effort to encourage development and businesses without requiring parking but that needs another look in these days another thing is our inclusionary zoning bylaw which is chapter 15 or article 15 of our bylaw it's been a struggle ever since it was instituted I think it was instituted in 2005 and there have been continual disagreements about what does it apply to and also considerations about initially when we first really enforced it which was I think in 2010 the town was very eager to have more development particularly housing development and at that time the bylaw was interpreted as only applying to uses that required special permits for the use itself since then we've expanded the the scope of the inclusionary zoning bylaw to include not only special permits for uses but also special permits for certain dimensional requirements along the way we've realized that oh people really do like to live in Amherst they like to develop in Amherst and initially we had been worried about kind of dampening the ability to develop in Amherst by having a stricter inclusionary zoning bylaw and in the recent years we've realized that oh people do want to develop in Amherst so much that they are willing to include affordable units in their developments and we have I think three good examples of that now we have the university drive building that Barry Roberts built which includes four for affordable units we have the Aspen Heights building which is being finished on Northampton road that has I think 11 affordable units and the other one is escaping my mind right now but anyway oh yeah well we have presidential apartments which added 54 units and they also added six affordable units so we're getting the the feeling that developers want to develop in town so much that they're willing to provide these affordable units so we need to really expand the types of development that require this affordability component in addition to that we've struggled with the sign bylaw over the years the sign bylaw is very confusing it's it has different parts of it that conflict with other parts and it is very restrictive about what signs can be used in the downtown in particular and also in the village centers and what this results in is it's it's hard to enforce because if you actually enforce it strictly many retail places and commercial places will end up with very little signage at all and they wouldn't be able to promote their special sales or you know things that they consider are really important that they want to offer to the community so we really have to work on our sign bylaw and in addition to that there was a a supreme court case the past a few years ago that relates to the content of sign of signs and what you can and can't regulate and it's still kind of confusing murky murky situation so of all of the sections of the bylaw we feel like that's one where we could really use some consultants to help us whether the consultant is a lawyer or a planner or whatever someone who really understands what the current limitations are that the supreme court has put on regulating signs other things are that we know that there's a need for housing and increased density but where should it go and how should it be built and how tall should it be and what should its setbacks be I know there are some people in town who don't feel like there should be any more development but to be realistic there is going to be more development and so we need to think about where we're going to put it and what should it look like and how big should it be etc so those are all things that we need to grapple with and I'm sure that you're all familiar with the mixed use building conundrum we have a mixed use building use in our bylaw but very little describes what a mixed use building is except that it includes residential uses along with commercial institutional and retail but there's no description about how much non-residential use should be included in a mixed use building so we end up with things that have mixed use buildings that have very minimal mixed use space so those are those are certainly things that need to be dealt with and we've heard a lot of complaints about footnote a which is a component of our dimensional regulations and footnote a has to do with certain dimensional requirements are allowed to be modified under a special permit and many people think well you should just incorporate your dimensional requirements into your dimensional table and not have the ability to modify them via a special permit so we need to look at that as well so those are just some examples of substantive issues that we feel really need to be addressed in our zoning bylaw so as we're going through chapter by chapter we're going to be you know trying to fit in or draft sections that deal with these substantive issues and as I said before we already have some bylaws that have already been written that just need to be brought forth again and and see if the town council is willing to go along with them and we're going to be working very closely with the planning board on this of course so I think um I think I don't really need to say anything more about substantive issues but I'd be happy to answer questions thank you Christine um I just want to for the record note that I believe Darcy Dumont just joined us so for the help of our minute taker she could note that um and welcome Darcy um and so I think I see we have two hands but I think before we go to questions from the counselors I do want to recognize our planning board chair Jack so that he can quickly discuss the memorandum and the planning board discussions and all and so that then the questions can go relate to everything so Jack. Hello um thank you for having us and I was thinking Chris that you mentioned Beacon the North Amherst has a good slug of affordable housing as well right I think maybe that was one you were thinking of may I answer that so Beacon was part of a 40b application a comprehensive permit so as part of their application they needed to provide affordable units but they did not they were not under the jurisdiction of the inclusionary zoning by-law so I was trying to give examples of um developers that voluntarily you know chose to develop and to include the affordable units as part of their permitting process I couldn't I shouldn't say voluntarily they were required to include the affordable units but they chose to develop even so so that's what I was trying to get across thank you um so uh our understanding is the planning board was tasked to provide you know very limited focused um priorities back to the CRC and we've discussed this within the last couple of planning board meetings but in the meanwhile we've also you know gone through a lot of change uh their staff um so we have really kept things simple on and our three bullets uh are included uh within the memo that you have received and um you know they essentially improve downtown zoning uh and unlock housing development and increase diversity of the housing stock and then recodification of the zoning by-law I mean those are all real obvious and I feel like is that really helping you at all because those things are you know just you know given Chris Prestridge's rundown of substantive issues um you know they're they're right right there so we did not spend a lot of time to get into the weeds with regard to more than those three general things because I think again uh Christine Gray-Mullen was with us as chair um and we just knocked that out those three bullets so uh we did add additional detail uh within the memo that you were provided uh but those are just general things taken from our discussions uh which were cited in the third paragraph there um but prior to what we were trying to do is change from a chart uh that had you know some history uh Chris what's that I had that up here that that chart zoning priorities chart it's yeah the zoning product everybody yeah so it had five columns three rows lots of bullets in that too but we we kind of want to recast that but we have a lot a long way to go but again I think we're at a point we're kind of trying to take cues from uh the CRC with regard to what you want the planning board to do and that also extends to like the zoning subcommittee uh which we you know decide would be on hiatus uh until we get further you know uh directives from the town council and the CRC um but that's basically all I have I thought Chris really did a good job talking about the substantive issues and um that's all I have. Thank you Jack um we're going to go now into questions and discussions from the councilors so I'm the list I have we're going to use the raise hand function because that's the only way I'm going to be able to keep track of things and I will just go down the list Kathy. Thank you both um I think my question is mainly to Chris but then um indirectly to Jack um Chris as you know I early on it was actually before the election for council I started coming to that zoning subcommittee um so the the items you just listed out were there then um you know and some of them had you know a paragraph or two underneath it so my my question is um how far did you as staff um on or as staff with planning board members the subcommittee get to things like um defining mixed use um because I actually just before this meeting um or two weeks before this meeting you know sort of went through a bunch of other town zoning laws and usually mixed use was to a whole development area not necessarily to a building but you know so I was looking for examples of of what had other municipalities and or cities not necessarily just in massachusetts what did they done you know do they say you know second floor should be offices um square footage you know what was done um so it's it's a question kind of going down each of them because it seemed to me when I was listening to it some things were further along to be able to say for example this is what one might do and some were less and then so that's on that list and it's jackets on that same colorful chart you know where I went to a planning board meeting where people were saying should this be blue or should it be yellow you know I mean it's does it move up in rank and are these subsets so there started to be that discussion because I I had hoped we would be seeing some discussion memo coming up from you you know in the council so it would get our juices thinking so that's a question on that and then I had one it's more picky or more specific about the flood maps we had these flood prone conservancy zoning they're like zoning overlays um and at least one that I know of up in North Amherst was because of a court case and it went on the books it was challenged and it was in so if we have things like that that were there for a particular reason not just a FEMA map but because of history um I think it would be useful for us to get a little history about it rather than wholesale just writing them out I think we all want to update the flood maps but um there there that went through a whole process um Dave Zomek I think was around for that but anyway it was North Amherst farmers were concerned about a property near them and if it flooded they flooded um issue it was a affecting neighbor so um it would be a request if we look at some things um at least give us a history of how did this ever get on the books was there a good reason for it so the first question was more on how far we got on some of these issues um and then Jack I watched the planning board meeting with the three ABCs the three biggies and underneath them were a bunch of bullets um things like mixed defined mixed use building was underneath it inclusionary zoning was underneath it and I think you made a decision not to have anything more refined than the three big areas and I just was not sure why because I thought some of the sub bullets made sense they fit with Chris Brestrup's list I mean because they've been things people have been talking about for a long time so that those are my both viewers yeah so I think what happened uh but Mandy is okay I was gonna call you jack okay sorry um so I think what happened is that we you know for for the sake of time we were we just wanted to come together and make some decisions and and uh we really you know again we had so much turnover uh in the board in the last month we just kind of laser focused on that but you know there's no doubt that we can provide you know a lot of detail and organize further and we're willing to you know spend uh devote say half hour 45 minutes you know as long as we don't go into the wee hours of night uh too discussing and and and coming up with something that's um going to be helpful to to everyone uh because I think we're all touching we'd all be touching the same points um but we do have perspective because you know we we see the projects come through um you know the mixed use thing that you mentioned that's you know it's it does need to be defined um you know the parking and all that and and so you know we speak to each of these and perhaps after at the conclusion of this meeting the CRC can come together and you know give us a little bit more of a directive because I may have missed something as as being as the you know the the vice chair about exactly what you wanted but all I know is like we just got we wanted to get the three priorities and so I think we we do have more detail but it's not uh in a in a in a sense that it's coming from the entire planning board and it should but we have three really great members new members with that we're very you know excited about what they may bring uh ideas and um but I I hear you uh Kathy thank you jack christine did you have anything to add um I wanted to just um uh answer some of Kathy's questions and one of them has to do with the mixed use building and we do have a good um mixed use building zoning amendment that is sort of waiting to come back it was presented to town meeting um I'm going to say you know five years ago or more um and we thought it was pretty solid but it went down to defeat because one of the uses that would have been allowed on the ground floor is um was parking as as one of the potential uses so um we'd like to bring that back and um work with the planning board and the CRC to to refine that and see if we can get that through um Kathy's other question about um the FPC zone so the FPC zone is a separate issue from um the flood maps it's it's sort of confusing but the FPC zone is an actual um zone zoning district and it's not an overlay district um it is part of the zoning bylaw um the flood maps are something that is created by FEMA based on um their analysis of the land and those are the flood insurance rate maps so that's something that's recognized by the federal government and by the state and the conservation commission also uses it um to show them where they can expect a hundred-year flooding um so it's really a different um it's a different animal than the FPC zone even though FPC is um somewhat related to the flood maps so what we're going to be bringing to you is the flood maps as they're developed by the consultant who's been working with FEMA and with us and um a text of a zoning bylaw to accompany it which we now have a model of and then um we're going to have to figure out what do we do with the FPC zoning district um do we eliminate it do we change it to match the new flood maps um how do we deal with this my um my recommendation would be to incorporate the new flood maps as an overlay district within our zoning bylaw so we could end up with two competing things we could end up with an overlay district that reflects the hundred-year flood plain as defined by FEMA and we already have our current FPC zoning district so we have to figure out how to how to make those work together but the FEMA maps are kind of sacrosanct because there's something that's approved by the federal government and it relates to whether people can get flood insurance on their properties um so that's that and then I think that was worth the two questions that I felt I could answer for Kathy those those were the only two things I zeroed in on thank you okay Alyssa so I'm well aware that we're 50 minutes into this and we haven't actually started talking about priorities yet but I want to reflect back to something that was said way back at the beginning by Rob and then Ben associated with structure of the zoning bylaw and Kathy also commented on you know the ability of people who've used it in the past to be able to use it moving forward etc um I wanted to just point out that you know based on my experience which starts with tau meeting in 1999 struggling to manage to work with the zoning bylaw through my work on the master plan through my work on select board town council um I'm aware as as we all are that there are different products out there on the market that can help with things like this in terms of structure and we struggled to find one that would help us with meeting agendas in minutes and we've not found one that we can modify to our purposes for that but the ecode 360 that's out there in the world associated with zoning bylaw does seem like a structure worth considering and I bring this up because when I was on bylaw review committee the second iteration of that the reason that we were able to make a beautifully linked beautifully crosswalked all the things that people talked about earlier in today's conversation document is because Jeff Kravitz spent an immense amount of time working on that in addition to his other responsibilities prior to the pandemic we generally had a fully staffed planning department and nobody had time to do this and I do not believe that Ben suddenly has time to do this because you know he's not additional personnel he's just new person new or personnel so I would really strongly encourage the town to look at doing this in an electronic fashion rather than trying to come up with some beautifully formatted long word document with links in it that's that's not the future that's not how we need to manage doing this we need to do this in a more structured way and that should also simplify all these are we using capital letters are we using small letters buy a structure put it in there and let's and let's move along with that thank you Alyssa Dorothy you're gonna need to unmute Dorothy okay I am still confused about the the BL district um it starts um near me on Halleck and it goes you as we read it earlier in this meeting uh north and south prospect now in south prospect there is a business but um there really aren't businesses to speak of except at the corners right near Pleasant street on Halleck but there are some multiple there's some apartment building some like garden apartments on Halleck um in other words kind of transitional to the more residential nature of the budding blocks um and I saw here I'm hearing contradictory things um one build up the BL and two whatever you do it should taper and be a buffer and kind of go slowly into the residential area so um and I mean I also know that there's many suggestions many of them good for creating some more density in the residential area the blocks so I if somebody could tell me what the ideas or plans are for those areas um I mean if you go on north prospect there's a couple of multiple dwellings but it's mostly private homes is the plan to knock down the private homes and build apartment buildings um I mean there is one at the end at amity and the parries at the corner of amity and um north prospect I'm just kind of like it's been talked about a lot and I have no idea what somebody wants to do or think is wrong with it or has plans for so this is to Christine I guess Christine Rob so there are two separate things going on one is we're looking at um chapter 40 r um and chapter 40 r is a program that's offered to cities and towns to um create an overlay zoning district that allows greater density in certain areas um in uh exchange for um the developer agreeing to design guidelines and providing affordable housing um so that is a discussion that's been happening kind of outside of the realm of the zoning bylaw and perhaps you're thinking of that miss pam when you're um talking about the bl zoning district because that's really the only quote proposal that we currently have for bl or bg and it's not really even a proposal it's an examination of what might happen if and it's a process that we're going through and we're hoping to actually try to wrap it up in the next month or so um we're going to hope to get the consultants to provide us with their best um suggestions for how a 40 r could be um established in the downtown and bl zoning districts but then we're going to take that product and say does this make sense for this location and if not could we use this program and have it be built elsewhere like east amherst village center or palmery village center so that's that's this one track the other track is that we're looking at um the dimensional regulations um in the bl as part of our zoning um bylaw rewrite and we have done studies in the past um i'm going to say again you know four or five years ago about what we could do in the bl to make it possible to build new housing there and that is the kind of thing that we're going to be bringing back to the crc as part of this um zoning bylaw rewrite so that's separate from the 40 r the town may well decide that it wants to go in the root of the 40 r but that will be a separate process and eventually it would have to be brought together with zoning but for right now it's separate well i i guess i i could see um i hear that we have a lot of we don't have enough family housing we certainly don't have enough affordable family housing and our new buildings that have been going up are not family housing um it is family housing on the majority of certainly north prospect um so i i just want to remind everybody that we need family housing and that is not the most expensive housing in town by the way that is i think moderate housing that uh in that area um which i think increasing moderate housing is a is a is a great thing that we want to do so if something else is built there then i guess that you'd better better be for families which is what we haven't been doing and there must be it must be more expensive to build for families is all i can guess thank you dorthy shalini so um yeah thank you everyone for um thank you manager for preparing all of this and combining all the lists and um and everyone else here so okay i have two broad questions and then specific ones so the two broader questions are i think directed towards the planning staff and maybe even the planning board members is what kind of zoning is preventing new businesses from opening and succeeding and at town and uh for promoting more mixed family housing and for smart growth so that's the first question and then the second is what kind of studies have already been done with respect to zoning you know which promotes smart growth or have already because i'm all it feels like zoning is such a complex issue and we need consultants to tell us how to to do the zoning conforming with our market our master plan and our values and goals and so i was looking up and there's one for example the cecile group had for north armist uh billet center form-based zoning and so like it seems like there are some studies that were already done with respect to zoning and what are the suggestions that have been made and can we start over there so those are the two broad ones should i stop here and then add more later yes let's give her a chance to answer may uh yeah um so i think they're as far as i'm aware there aren't um zoning regulations that are particularly preventing new businesses from starting except that it's hard to find land so in the downtown new businesses are are welcome in the bg there's not really anything preventing them unless they're you know a research company that's doing something that we wouldn't prefer to have in the downtown in which case they can locate out on university drive but one of the difficulties that um businesses have had at least in the past and trying to locate in amherst is the size of the sites that are available and whether those sites are um connected to sewer and water so for instance there is land up in north amherst um in the vicinity of the intersection of root 116 and cenderlin road fairly large tracks of land um but those tracks don't have sewer and water connections so it's been hard to develop them in the past but other than that other than being able to find um you know the proper land area or to find the proper building i'm not aware of zoning issues that are preventing um businesses from coming in i mean there are things like marijuana businesses that want to come in that may not be appropriately located because they you know within the proper buffers and that type of thing um with regard to family housing there's not um again there's there's not anything that's preventing family housing from being built family housing is being built in amherst hills and it's being built in amherst woods and um but those are fairly large houses that are being built in fact there are even some houses that um one house that was just completed in echo hill that is near me but those properties are expensive and so when a developer buys an expensive property he wants to build a house that has a commensurate value so that he can get the value back from having bought the expensive piece of property so so that it's really the market that is preventing family housing from being built in that way and family housing in terms of apartments is another question and the the reason that um that family housing for apartments isn't being constructed is that um well developers go where the market is and right now the market is smaller units for smaller numbers of people either one or two people who want you know a one bedroom unit or they want a studio apartment that's where the market is the market isn't really in family housing to provide it for um for moderate income families and so we have to you know take responsibility for that and if we want that type of housing to be built we have to kind of step in and um you know kind of support it um the way we supported or the way we are supporting 132 Northampton Road um there's a move afoot to use the property that the east street school is on to provide affordable family housing so that's that's one opportunity there there may be uh ways that we can rezone some of our land to have smaller lots with smaller houses allowed on them and that's certainly something that we should look into can i do a follow-up question so i do have an email from someone as an example of how the current zoning is limiting or has been has made it harder for this local professional and this person is zoned in it's a local professional zoned in a PRP the professional in research park and so they wrote that zoning is so restrictive that unless you plan to have a small research lab you have to go through site plan review which cost me tens of thousands last time as multiple meetings with engineers lawyers architects etc it's also designed with the image of a rich corporation who can afford such bureaucracy meanwhile the person who bought the land which contains a resident isn't allowed to build residential units because it's PRP so this plot of land can't really be used by us so that i mean i'm hearing these kind of stories of not big developers but just small local doctors or dentists or lawyers who are finding it really hard and so then they go and build my own neighbor who's a dentist has built in Hadley the couple have opened there so what is the perception and then exactly this kind of examples of where we are sending that signal to our local and i'm not talking about big development at all i'm talking about just the small spinoffs i just heard from another person who wants to do an outdoor recreational business and after talking to some counselors locally and just get talking to them people locally is now turned off and saying i'm gonna i want to i'm probably going to open in Hadley because and this would be an ideal business for us because it's about creating opportunities for families and people to use the outdoors and so it's like completely consistent with our goals but you know so there is these perceptions and messages that we're sending out and i feel like as a council at planning board and planning staff and all the staff you all need to be on the same page what do we want and this actually reminds me of an MMA conference um workshop that we entered in uh went for this year and it was by April Anderson and she had an amazing presentation on economic development where she works with towns using smart growth tools and can get funding and whatnot and one of her slides had this question for the town to be clear what do you want to be do you have the buy-in from residents and does the market support your goals and i really feel like we may not be able to answer those questions because i think we know what we want to be but we're still acting in ways that are contradictory to who we say we want to be thank you shall any um we're going to move to Steve Schreiber and then we're going to try and pivot the discussion to priorities Steve so one of my mantras is that all the parts of Amherst that appear on our website that appear on post cards that appear on all the tourism brochures were all built designed and built pre-zoning and all the parts of Amherst that people love to complain about were built after zoning so clearly there's some kind of a disconnect between what we imagine Amherst to imagine or want the character of Amherst to be versus what the zoning bylaw is providing for us so i think that that disconnect you know is is really essential so you know i read through the list of all the priorities and some of them are you know dealing with that like let's get rid of i happen to live we happen to live on a property that i think is one of the thinnest sites in Amherst but at least one of the thinnest sites in rg and it's non-conforming by frontage by a factor of 50 percent it's 55 feet in a zone that requires a hundred feet so basically my neighborhood cannot be built under current zoning so i think there's some big existential questions so that may be beyond our scope of even you know even dealing with that um you know what's the big question is what do we want Amherst to become and then there's so many you know the the current zoning has become so complicated that we can throw you know ideas at different parts to it but it still may not achieve the result that we're looking for but i did want to make that was all leading to my question about family housing because i i think that's a point that counselor Pam made is a really good one we have to be careful about how we define family but i do think of my own you know i do think of my own circumstance that i'm here in a single family house in downtown Amherst and that's fine but there may be a time that i want to move in even closer to downtown which is actually you know so i'm probably not going to move into a place where i can rent so i'd love to see more ownership opportunities but that's a little microcosm of that so not every family wants to live in a single family house but the other thing is that not every family is like my family you know with there are all kinds of different families that exist here we should be also you know very welcoming of all kinds of people who you know even if they don't even even if we don't consider them to be a family but we should be welcoming of all kinds of people that desire to live in Amherst so yeah we have a lot of work to do and i'm looking forward to the journey thank you steve jack a quick comment i'm pretty sure you wanted to answer a question from a while ago yeah i was just going to say i um steve uh tribe may remember uh with regard to ham's inquiry about the bl area that john tune presented um i don't know what project went into several years ago but he essentially gave a presentation how you you wouldn't really be able to build in kind any of the structures within the bl district and that's sort of what steve is saying about his house and you know that to me just you know doesn't make you know very much sense so that's that's a big uh lift that that is in front of all of us i guess so um and then i have some other comments but that's that's i just wanted to point out about the bl thank you jack um we've heard a lot about what the planning department thinks might need to be worked on and that they want to work on some priorities from the planning board we've got a list of compiled priorities from many counselors that listed not include any from the crc i had told crc members they could just bring them to this meeting and we'll add them in later um given what we've heard what we've read uh it would be good to discuss as a council and a body what priorities at this point we might be leaning towards dorothy okay so connecting where we've been and where we're going um i'm using a very simple definition of family which which i know family can be anything but i'm using one that means has children in it a town a small town i feel has to have children and um we're losing children we're using losing young families and towns are made up of a lot of people and i know a lot of people who do not have young children at home don't even have teenagers at home but you don't want a town that's all that way we're in a very transitional moment now in the united states a lot of people who have moved into cities have decided they want to get out of them and i think a lot of them are going to want to come to amherst and we have um working more increased working at home we have the internet and hopefully one of my dreams is that we have townwide internet which the town i came from norfolk connecticut is working very hard on for the same reason the town is dying the number of children the elementary school is decreasing and there are people who want to be here i think i mean particularly with what's happening in california right now i just feel that amherst is a great place to come and i'd like to have places for families of all incomes including people who live here in amherst's renters to be able to become buyers or whatever so i think that we really have to look ahead and say what makes a long town healthy in the long run and it includes a lot of things but it does have to have some families and that's an area that we're having a problem so that's what i'm hoping for thank you dorthy elissa elissa you're muted thank you um i understand that this is a new process and i really appreciate how you solicited from all of us and and also you mentioning that that seven pages doesn't even include the crc's priorities i also want to point out we don't seem to have a document chris kept referring to what the planning board already has ready for us that's not really covered by the planning board's memo there's not a list that says this is ready this is ready this is ready this is ready so we need that list instead of just having it spoken to us verbally as well as you as crc is undertaking the masterful task of figuring out how to take that list that has only been provided verbally the planning board's list of their priorities the seven page list the crc's list so thanks good luck thanks elissa um i don't see any other hands right now so before we continue this conversation we are going to move to the public comment on this um evan just raised his hand after evan we will move to public comment and then we're going to come back to the council so evan so i guess at crc was told not to submit our priorities because we would have the opportunity to talk about them yes um and so crc members so i was i'm actually hoping that before we go to public comment the crc could talk about what we may have brought to the table sure um much of which i think is also reflected in that dot that lengthy document that was compiled from other counselors um i want to say that sort of my priorities are driven by um how we can try to make housing more affordable in our community um and i think that means two things i think that means increasing housing production and i think that means diversifying our housing stock so that we have lots of different types of housing being produced um and i think for me the other part because i often look at these things with the climate lens is how can we uh concentrate development um in already developed areas and how can we concentrate development around transit and send a message that we're looking um to have a sort of post-carbon town within the next several decades so with that i know that several people have already seen sort of what my priorities are i know that chris has a list of them um but i wanted to say for me number one would be tackling the problem with the bl it's absolutely absurd to me that we say that bl is a place where you should be able to build multi-family housing and yet the zoning dimensional regulations literally don't allow that to happen um i've also seen john cune's presentation that shows that pretty much everything that's already built in the bl could not be built there under a current zoning and you i think when i did the math it was like 70 percent of parcels could not support um even a single unit of housing never mind more than one unit based on what it is um i think there's a lot of proposals out there to fix it um i i think my dream would be just to rezone it all as bg but i think probably a good interim step would be just fixing some of those dimensional regulations i also would like to see us try to promote more um multi-family housing of different types i think part of that's apartments i think that means we have to think about how can we make it easier to build apartments i know we don't want to get to specifics so i'll leave those out but there is no way that foot no m should continue to exist in our zoning bylaw um and there is no reason that we should continue to have a 24 unit cap on apartments uh i'd like to see us move away from single family zoning and allow duplexes and triplexes by right and i'd also like to see us allow accessory dwelling units by right i know those are both things that have been discussed by the zoning subcommittee of the planning board um and have been discussed by planning department um the last two things i'll say is i want to support looking at um parking minimums um i i i want to just echo what chris said there is absolutely no reason that a studio or one bedroom unit should be allowed should be forced to have two parking spaces that's illogical it's also completely contradictory to our new climate goals to continue to promote um parking as a primary use of our land and for uh for private automobiles i think we need to look at seriously reducing parking minimums um for residential development and perhaps even reducing them further for residential development that's in close proximity to public transit if someone has access to a bus we don't need to provide as much parking and the last thing i'll say um which was mentioned before was about increasing density in our village centers and the area around us i think steve made a great point about how his his house couldn't be built under current zoning um that if you look at um the dimensional regulations for some of the neighborhoods surrounding downtown north hampton um and then you look at the dimensional regulations for our rg and rvc district they're dramatically different and it doesn't make any sense that we require such large lots for what should be the densest residential districts i think all of these can help to improve housing affordability while keeping a lens on climate um and i'm happy that i saw many of those in the councilor comments that were submitted and that i heard many of them um in chris's presentation and so those are the my priorities that i would like um to lend my support to all of which i think have already been said so i don't think these are just things i'm looking at thank you evan um we're gonna go to shalini and then see if sarah and steve have any comments to add to shalini uh i went into echo everything that evan said and also talk about form-based zoning if that's something that we want to look at and um yeah that's all that's all for now thank you shalini um steve or sarah would you like to if you have a list provide it i did not make a list for the reasons stated earlier that the crc will have many chance for our own priorities to emerge but in part one of our jobs or the way what we're trying to do here is to look at what our colleagues um and what the community are you know what their priorities are but i think that's something i'm particularly interested in is you know basically the the trend where we have existing village centers and in the downtown area and um trying to unlock smart growth in those particular areas and i agree with a lot of what's been said that i think trying to create a monocultures of certain housing types in the central business district which is you know the first few examples that we've seen seem to be some kind of a monoculture but encouraging a more different kind of mixed use buildings in those areas that may be attractive to um people who aren't interested in renting i guess is what i'm saying so i think a particular interest of mine is what do we do encourage the development of multifamily owner occupied housing in the the downtown area so the other thing that i find particularly heartbreaking being a umass employee and often meeting new faculty that are moving to this area is the inability of those new faculty to find housing that works for them so a lot of them really try to find housing that's within walking distance of the umass campus and or and either it's not available or there's a monoculture being set up in particular housing units so they end up going across the bridge to the our favorite north hampton or east so so i would love to have the traffic come the other way so people move from east hampton to to amherst because amherst is the cool place to live plus you can walk to work if you're a umass employee or to move from north hampton to amherst and walk to work take the bus to work so that's my those are my priorities thank you steve um sarah do you have anything to add before we move to public comment um yeah and i want to say this delicately because i i am very sensitive to the fact that alissa brewer said one time that if you would not appoint someone to planning board if they're against housing and um so i want to say that i didn't write a list this time not that i'm not interested in zoning but i am concerned about how we're now starting to go about initiating zoning changes and i don't feel that initiating zoning changes should be the job of town counselors and i realize that is my just my own um view but i guess it feels like a slippery slope that we had an appointments committee that was taken apart and we gave it we gave all of the appointments to different committees which in and of itself sort of made sense and it did make sense for crc to take over planning board and zba because we work with them a great deal but then crc um put forth the bylaw to change just and i realize it's just i plan review from a two-thirds vote to three and then we um we one of our questions we then we said we think that crc said we think that maybe that the zoning changes should then be initiated by town counselors and for me it feels like it's sort of taking away from the job of the planning board and the zba um and one of the questions even that we that crc thought about asking planning board um interview people was how do you envision yourself working with the crc with zoning changes so i just i feel a little bit uncomfortable with how our process now has it's all these little things that are sort of accumulated and i can see where there's a possibility that the things that crc and town council have done could make zoning changes a lot easier and we could be much more nimble and we could work way more quickly and i also can see where it could go awry so i guess at this meeting i just wanted to say that i have some reservations but i say that with respect to the counselors on crc who i really feel like have excellent intentions and i really don't i don't want to say much more about it um because i don't want to take away from the good work of our committee thank you sarah we're going to move to public comment and then i know we have a list of counselors who still want to talk we will come back to that list when we finish public comment so i just wanted to mention that um i if you want to speak at public comment please raise your hand i will recognize you in turn we have approximately um we're going to try for try to keep it to two to two and a half minutes um so that we can get back to council discussion too um and i will start with john page please let me work on this please unmute yourself hello can you hear me yes we can john all right this is john page from the emmerced area chamber of commerce i know this is just an initial conversation so all i want to say is we're viewing this as an opportunity to clean up zoning um resolve conflicting or public manic information and most importantly to perform some measures to spur economic activity through commercial residential and mixed use development in the time of emmers um personally i'm really excited to see counselors leading on long-term visioning and look forward to working with staff planning board and counselors on the chamber zoning and planning priorities in the months and maybe years to come so thank you thank you john next is ira brick me okay so i want to make a few related points the one is that people have used the word smart growth several times without really defining it i just want to say there's also the concept of limits to growth i think that emmerced is filling up quickly and from what i am seeing that there are a lot of people that are trying to move up to the valley from new york and i don't think that there's going to be an end to demand so we need to figure out when we've run out of supply when are we becoming a town that's overcrowded the second point is i have met very few people that think anything positive about the five-story dorms downtown i'm glad to see in your brain dump that many people are suggesting three stories i think the five story is the wrong use and people are saying you can't regulate use but if you build something that acts like a dorm it's going to be filled with students i am in favor of building of the town building a three-story model create something that then you say this is what we want downtown a couple of you have said what do we want figure out what we want what i would like to see is buildings that are one story and an aging replaced by three stories with service and retail and restaurants on the first floor and apartments and condos there's two stories above those that are attractive and profitable for the developer but attractive to families and professionals and i also just want to question the use of the term lost him yeah he comes hear me not not hear you again ira okay can you hear me now yes okay form-based zoning from my reading of it and i've done a few readings is build what is like there already and what i see downtown now is inappropriate five story dorms and also one-story aging buildings that are nearing being decrepit and i think five store form-based zoning is just inviting more of what we don't want and i think we need to figure out what form we do want and build it so that the use is not inappropriate for who we want thank you you thank you ira next up is hilda greenabum or greenbom sorry greenbom two ways greenbom sorry there's no e in the in the middle sorry about that hilda that's okay but i've been confused for years when when they first moved here i got a telephone call from the oriental grunt i wanted to know if he could deliver my rugs and i said i'll be glad to have them but they're not mine anyway um i want to get back to a couple of things that were mentioned first the whole issue of the bl zone i know is contentious and if i had my way we would have put the bl zone along north pleasant street as part of the historic district but people wanted to get the historic district through town meeting and thought the best way to do it was not to put those buildings in but that's the part of amherst that i was glad to hear steve schreiber say is the postcard part of amherst that is a historic district there and they're very charming buildings and i thought that there was only one house along there that was conforming as to lot size but i guess there are a couple more as if they said 70 but um i know that there are developers who want to see the east side of north pleasant street travel over to the west side of north pleasant street all the way to umass and i thought we had nipped that in the bud with the gateway when we said this is not what we want but we want to try to preserve the historic district as it is because some of us feel that it's worth preserving and i know that's controversial but the other thing i want to correct because evan has said it several times and put it in writing that apartments are limited to 24 units that's not the complete bylaw that's only part of it the buildings may be limited to 24 units but the building each building 24 units but you can have any number of them as long as they fit in the density requirements um if they're 20 feet apart and we haven't built any of those at least since the 60s or 70s but that's that that's what the apartment is you can have more than 24 units but that's the limit per building um the other thing i'm gonna well i agree that we do need family housing here jay there were twice as many kids in school and my kids were in school and i don't want to tell you how many years ago that was but this was a town of small families all these neighborhoods had young kids on them and now you don't see children in the middle of any neighborhood you go to there seem to be all big kids unless you go to a UMass um you know graduate student housing something like that but so i think that we do need to find a way to bring the young families back here if we're going to have vitality of the town and not just be college students and all people which is what we're getting to be um i had been talking about density for years and years and years go go go i'm totally sorry hilda i did that by accident i went to hit the i hit the wrong button so hilda please unmute yourself again okay i'm muted i'm sorry about that that was that was completely my fault by accident so as long as you're not shutting me up no i didn't mean to at all all right all right so this is getting back to with the whole issue of density in the rg unit rg area and what happened when um the crow hill apartments on high street were built somewhere around there the the the number of square feet per unit was doubled because the neighborhood didn't want it so i forget whether it's 250 feet or 200 feet per square unit anyway 2500 feet per square unit and i think it went to 4 000 i can't remember the numbers anymore because it's been a long time but in any event that was put in there to cut the density back and that may be one of one place where you want to look but my argument over the past 20 years has been that units should be density should be determined not by the number of units in the building but by the number of bedrooms or how many people per square foot or whatever could fit in the building because the bylaw would let you build eight bedrooms and a duplex but it wouldn't let you build eight single family or or whatever so the that that's an issue that with me goes back a long long time about how you figure out what's a unit and and and and what is density and what's the best way to look at it so that that's another another thing that's on my my list is if we have a zoning bylaw i'm really concerned about the number of waivers that have been handed out lately the only place that i can think of offhand and there are probably others that i haven't used where in in the parking requirements if you're near downtown and near a bus stop and you're walkable and all that then you can have a parking waiver but otherwise i don't know in the bylaw how these five-story buildings got to be 60 feet when we have an absolute limit of 50 feet they got a waiver and if we're going to have a bylaw seems to be it ought to be a bylaw that's enforceable and if a developer comes along and says i can't afford to put in an elevator unless it's six stories or five stories and we've heard this one several times um then they get the extra in order to build a building they get the extra story to pay for the elevator um i don't think this should be we should decide how high we want the building to be and stick with that and not give somebody that's coming along a waiver and then this brings up another whole issue since i have bought opportunity zone and prp we were made certain promises when this land was zoned prp back in 1989 um then there would be no housing and it would be a very low intensity kind of development and then the pip on route nine got built with everything that the prp does at least three or four different things so the prp zone doesn't allow and so i'm concerned with that as we have some development that's being proposed for the prp up here and just to make sure that whatever the bylaw is it's it's stringent with regard to what the limits are and of course the zba can always make things less than the limits it will accommodate the butters but that hasn't been happening lately it used to happen all the time in the 80s but we haven't had that mentality at least over the last 20 years that people are not only building to the max but they're building beyond what the max will the bylaw will allow so that's that's another thing that's on my uh on my list of things that if we fix up the bylaw we we look into then first footnote a if we had a hotel draper that burned down like north henton had north henton is stuck with that little building that was a new berries and a faces stuck between you know the tall late victorian buildings because their bylaw had changed and the new bylaw wouldn't let them fill in the whole and and so that's the kind of situation that footnote a is supposed to deal with it's not supposed to allow a 60 foot building because it's in the vicinity of a building unless he's street three blocks away and that's another sort of waiver or abuse of what the bylaw really says that that people have gotten away with over the last few years that that if that's what you want put it in a bylaw otherwise you know make waivers really only for the 40 b that are giving the the affordable housing or some other incentive and i think i've probably been through a good hunk of my list i'll yield to somebody else thank you hilda and sorry about cutting me off with my wrong mouse click i'll cut myself off now uh meg gauge but am i you you are good now i think meg you got me you unmuted me i i'm yeah okay i think meg i got too many things going on meg i think you're good to speak now you can hear me yes great thank you mandy um i uh appreciate all the work that's going into this important conversation about zoning and development but it seems to me by uh maybe it's where we are but that it's piecemeal and we're doing it um we're doing it piecemeal rather than in the context of a strategy i think amherst needs a strategy for economic development um it's like teaching somebody how to play chess by just showing them where the pieces go on the board uh talking about building standards before we've talked about a building program um sort of dealing with development site by site um i think i'll just put my cards on the table i think a strategy for amherst economic development needs to focus on the arts um there's a whole concept that i learned a lot about while i was working on the amherst cinema project called the creative economy uh where economic economic development is sparked by cultural activities north adams in 1998 the year before mass mocha opened had an eight over 18 percent unemployment rate and now actually i'm not sure what it is right now with pandemic but um it's not good for the arts to have a pandemic um but it was down to about four percent last year um i feel really uh the the amherst cinema development is a really good example of the kind of partnership you can have with a nonprofit and a for-profit it's uh and it's uh sparks all sorts of other kinds of development people wonder why did north hampton suddenly becomes the cool place to be rather than amherst well i think it's because they uh in the 90s and the early 2000s or whatever we call it they there was this huge development of the arts particularly uh music and theater and now that's happening in east hampton and the magnet has moved toward east hampton and i think we could be that same kind of magnet the arts are very consistent with an academic community uh and they're very consistent with zero energy goals so i just encourage at some point for us to step back and think about what kind of a town do we want and what can we develop that will draw people here uh the way we want them to and the the way people spend money in the 21st century and the way they buy things thank you oh i just want to quickly say i totally agree with hilda that the zoning bylaw should be what we want it to be and not just our opening bid with developers yes yes yes thank you thank you mag people i have a lot of more thoughts about the arts if anybody ever wanted to have that conversation and how how we can work to fund it without um the town having to spend a lot of money on it we raised three and a half million dollars for the for amherst cinema and um anyway that's i'm really interested in exploring that further as a way of enhancing our downtown okay thank you mag next up is gabriel guld let's see you should be able to unmute now gabriel and can you hear me yes okay so i just want to thank you all and reiterate exactly what john page said earlier this is going to be hopefully many months of conversation i'm hoping not years because time is of the essence and i wanted to jump on really to say mag gauge uh my name is gabriel guld i work with the bid and i would love to speak with you more about the arts because um i couldn't agree more and part of our downtown amherst foundation is going to be to start creating more arts more performances and more experiences in order to create economic development for downtown and that is all thank you very much thank you gabriel okay at this time um we are going to back to the council it is almost 345 now um we're going to try and wrap this up in about the next 10 minutes or so so that we don't go too far over with crc um we need to talk a little bit more about priorities obviously we're not going to finish that talk but next steps is is is also important i'm going to start with the list that i have right now which is actually we're going to start with andy because he has not spoken yet hey well thank you i mean this has been an excellent meeting and so thank you for organizing it um i'll be really quick i first follow an apology to you in the committee because i was late on getting my comments in and i mean they may not have been included but on the other hand i was very pleased to see when i read the summary of comments that all of the themes that i had hit upon is being the important strategies were covered by by my fellow councillors so i was supporting them uh not in any way adding or duplicating uh or i was duplicating but i wasn't adding but there was a couple of nuances but the three areas that i talked about was um one is economic development which has been brought up and i came at it as a slightly different angle because of my finance committee role and talked about it is new growth and if the town is going to support the schools the libraries and the services that we feel are so important we need to make sure that we have an economically stable base and so it's not just economic development but you need new growth in order to have increases in property taxes which is our one stable control form of revenue and therefore we have to have new growth but it's also important for this community to really be thinking about the kind of new growth that is appropriate and i think a lot of the discussion that i've heard today has to go along those lines um the others was uh climate and um energy policies to see where they can be built into um our zoning um bylaw because i think that zoning can encourage certain kinds of development um that will then decrease our carbon footprint i'm going to that and the other was the housing question um which is where i'm going to end up so i can be really quick about my comments uh knowing the time crunch that uh you're under um i had started with affordable housing but i think that the conversation today was talking about a variety of housing that included also family housing um which includes some affordable housing issues but includes other issues too um i think one of the things uh because a comment talked about um criticizing buildings were built that have ended up encouraging um some student rentals or a large number of student rentals i don't know what the real answer to that is but the reality is is that we have a lot of student demand on housing it is gobbling up our neighborhoods i think that we all know that there are um houses that have were family houses that have been converted to student housing and that takes away housing opportunities and if we don't create some kind of housing that's appropriate for students um that phenomenon will continue and it runs counter to the goal of family of creating family housing opportunities and then there was um and i'm going to conclude by saying there's there's two kinds of zoning that we put into our zoning by-law with the idea of encouraging things to happen and i think that both of them have not fulfilled the vision one is the prp which was previously mentioned i don't think that the prps have so far created the kind of development that was envisioned at the time and the other one is cluster housing and this goes back to something that um when i was a member of crc we talked about a little bit because there is a cluster housing provision but it hasn't resulted in the development of much of the housing that we were um wanting to encourage when that provision was created and uh so those kinds of existing um by-laws need to be examined as to why because if you don't create housing that encourages developers to develop what you want there's something wrong with what you designed so i'll leave it at that and thank you thank you andy um kathy i'm gonna try to just build on some other comments um you know and mandy you very artfully combined everything we put in um some of us and i don't know how well i did it did a memo that tried to be in context you know so when i'm reading through i said well this goes with this this doesn't so just a couple comments um andy picked up on something that steve had said you know young professors are new to town can't find housing that's because you know if i knock on the doors a long van meter there's a whole neighborhood where i knew all the new professors in town they all live there when i was uh campaigning those were student houses with one exception you know in neighborhoods that had been all what we would have called started homes one-tooth bedroom homes so it's we have an overflow coming from umass that we can't probably can't build fast enough to get out of without some control on that end and i believe dartmouth at one point committed to putting dorms on campus you know i'm trying to think of user space so we do have a demand driving some of what we're seeing built so i worry with our vision of what we want to become if we open up new space allow more density what stops that from turning into what steve called the monoculture you know what you know unless we say what we would like there um and somehow say these are the kinds of things we're encouraging you to build so that's this vision of where we want to go this second thing um just on listening to this the word smart growth um on chelene if i have started trying to exchange articles i was looking at our walkability um meeting public space it's not built into our zoning law very much on if you're building something big next to a narrow street you have to worry about its height how far from the curb should it be and when you look at examples of smart growth so i put in my piece aurora colorado they said look at the street with step back from the curb regardless of what the public way currently is but say you want a sidewalk that's six feet wide so two wheelchairs can pass and some green space or maybe more cement but that's so people can sit there and meet with each other so we need that kind of vision if we move out to village centers too so if we're building up and they say think about the building across the street only built high enough if the building if the street is wide so we've got these little narrow streets in some parts of town and we create tunnels when we build too close to them so the smart growth people are saying as we expand think of the second story steps back a little bit so it doesn't cast shadows we move it back from the curb a bit so we can have um enough passing and i found one town that said our public way is very narrow the pre-existing little sidewalk is narrow if you want to go up another story give us some of your land you know just move it back so it was and then andy picked up on um solar and conservation there were some smart growth towns that were doing that in their new development and we don't have much land is what chris also said there's not a lot of land that can be developed that's not developed yet um so we're redeveloping land but they were saying same thing in some of their places where it was saying only two stories high if you build to an energy code that's very strict we'll give you another story if you get a lot of points we'll give you another story and doing it as an incentive system um and so we could say we want to get to zero net on if new larger buildings are coming in and i thought it was a creative way of getting mixed buildings and the architects like c would have to say how do we avoid a monoculture you know how do we have a vision of the master plan of some mixes and then but not stop all development and meg's idea about the arts is that the first floor does every new village center have a performing art space you know because we don't have old factories like east hampton does that we can just renovate you know we're stuck with beautiful amherst but it doesn't have warehouses it doesn't have the old industrial so i do think we have to start a little bit with the master plan what could we be where with the vision of what we want and then what's stopping us from getting there and worry about market forces you know if you open up something the market will give you they'll build on every inch um you know because if you can so we need to think about where we want to go before we um uh exceed to growth and then my final comment on new growth is i've said this before and i need to prove it new growth does not always yield net income for the town in terms of finance we sometimes spend on roads on sewer on water on schools as much as that new unit that came into town so we do need to think about the problems of the larger urban areas that they no matter how fast they grow it's not fast enough so we need to be really able to say do we want green space do we want um evan someone sent me your dissertation you know talking about place for the rainwater to fall off into some green space around our buildings um we need to be thinking about that when we're building we just can't cover every little piece and say oh but five miles away there's a park i mean we need to be worried about our housing developments as well so i'll just stop there because it's a vision it's a visioning and then what's stopping us from getting there and what could we do if we go slowly thank you kathy dorthy well i think she mentioned a lot of the themes that are going through my head which is that we need an integrated plan for downtown we can't just have things happening next to each other because what we want downtown is we want lots of little pieces of green space it's not enough to say well we've got a common here we've got kendrick park here okay those are nice those are great and i love them but there have to has to be um both private and commonly shared green space even around an apartment place so that people can actually go outside and stand somewhere or do something we need to think about balconies on apartments um i may have mentioned this but you know here we are stuck in our homes if you happen to live in a house with a yard you're a lucky person uh my son is living in an apartment in washington dc he has a balcony the balcony has saved his life his sanity um we need to think about that so we need green space downtown around in many places some of which is connected to the residents of the building some of which is shared which means setbacks on the buildings and it means the green strip with benches and which people who are walking by because we're talking about walkable streets and some of those streets aren't very walkable right now so the arts what we do have shallony talked about going to an uh mma convention i remember the workshop on fire stations and i discovered to my great joy that town after town in massachusetts has turned their fire station into an art center and i just saw it what a great place it's right downtown once we move them get that new and built and you have the theater and you have workshops and rehearsals and you have other business spaces and you have restaurants in that building right downtown so we there's lots of things that we can do but we we have to have a good coordinated plan because if you talk about density and developing downtown really we have to work so that it's not just filled with dorms because they're not bringing the town the vitality that we've been talking about um and i'm glad that andy mentioned cluster housing again i'm very interested in plans of housing which have a lot of shared green and a little bit of private green but has the housing smaller units closer together perhaps attached in ways to not just have the single house stuck in the land the you know the green lot even though that is nice but that's not where we're going to go if we want to build affordable family housing because as has been pointed out the new homes that are being built are ones that are very expensive i read my little amherst who sold what to whom every day and you know the values are going up not down so thank you for the work that's going on and i'm hoping that we can get a kind of unified vision that we share that we share and then figure out how to get the zoning code to reflect that so that we are making a code that makes it clear what is our vision of the town and this is how it is and so it's not all waivers and exceptions and kind of randomness um it'll be much easier to build a beautiful amherst that way thank you dorthy evin yeah so i just i talked very specific before and i want to broaden just a moment um i think it was i'm losing track now but i think it might have been hilda who said we want this to be a community that isn't just uh college students and old people and i can uh support that statement um i'm a bit of a unicorn in that i am a person who is in his 30s who has chosen to live in amherst there are very few of us here and any of you who want to talk about why i have a lot of opinions about why there are so few people in their 30s in amherst and it also takes me a lot to on a public meeting in my 30s so uh anyways um one of the ways if we actually want to have generational diversity in this community um is we have thousands of young people who come to our community every year and then they leave and so if we actually want generational diversity the best way to achieve that is actually to try to keep some of those graduates here so they set down roots and this is going to be to something that i want to send a message to my fellow counselor is that if we want to do that we have to show students when they are here that they are welcome here and that we want them to stay and i say that because in the suggestions that were put forth that nandy compiled and in some of the discussion today there is a lot of anti-student sentiment and it really does concern me for example please stop calling the downtown development dorms they are not dorms that is infantilizing to the adult residents who live in those apartments and honestly insulting to the non-students who live in them but it also sends a message that we don't want students downtown i saw other comments that said things like um have developers um commit developers to developing um housing that is for non-undergraduates that kind of language tells students we don't want you in our communities we want you here to support our local businesses but we want you to stay on campus and that is not the type of atmosphere or language that's going to convince young people to stay in our community when they graduate and so i want us to be very careful about the message we're sending i understand the challenges that are posed by having a large student population when it comes to housing but when we turn our solutions towards things that are literally discriminatory against students things like trying to reduce the number of unrelated people who can be in a house things like saying we have to have housing that we say from the outset is not for undergraduates things like calling anything that has students in them dorms that sends the wrong message and i don't think that's going to achieve what we want if we want generational diversity here it's not just about having housing for the new professors it's about getting the people who come here to stay here and when we have these conversations and we talk about how can we prevent students from being in our communities that's going to do the opposite and so i hope we can really think about how we're using language and how we're having these conversations as we talk about zoning thank you evan um we're gonna hear from elissa and then steve and then we're going to wrap up this portion of the meeting thank you i'm just trying to understand what we're doing process wise you know that's the question i'm always going to ask we heard from a couple of counselors who aren't on the crc at great length about their campaign speeches about the things they're interested in doing and i would have been happy to give one of those too but we don't want to be here for another hour and so i would just like crc to have some time which you now don't have because it's after four o'clock to discuss how can you incorporate not only the but that we gave you which several of us touched on relatively briefly others at great length also give the public another opportunity to talk about that just what's the process moving forward that's what i would like you to have the time to be able to discuss thank you elissa steve and i'll be really brief because actually evan hit on most of the things that i was going to say but we if i look at the grid of who's here both us the council plus the public we also are a kind of a monoculture here right so there probably aren't any residents of those buildings that everyone likes to call or know that many people like to call dorms they're not here but have been any of us met them the answer is yes i have i have friends that live in those buildings and they most definitely are not residents of dorms so i think it's really easy to other you know to other groups if you don't feel that they're part of the conversation but why don't we welcome them into the conversation that people that live in the five-story buildings and let's hear why they move there and what they wow are they contributing to the town how are they contributing to the life of the town and i think you'll all be surprised thank you steve to address elissa's comment we will probably get to that at our very next crc meeting since we run out of time today to really get to that i will summarize a little bit more as we talk about next agenda preview at the crc portion of this meeting and at this time i'm going to move to item number four which is items not anticipated i don't have any uh lin do you have any no um so that means we are moving on to item i think it's it's ability for the town town council to adjourn that would be lin that would be you doing that um unless others want to stay i'm going to adjourn the full town council meeting and so several of us need to be here unless you're going to talk about when you are going to be doing what that we might want to join next yeah so we'll get to that at the next agenda preview i'm not going to kick anyone off this meeting um but but it will be a discussion of when our next meetings are because we have to set a schedule first and then what will be on those meetings so that will happen at item number 10 um on the agenda then i will fully update the whole council on once crc decides what those items are okay so uh those that are on the council but not on crc basically uh we're welcome to stay but we're now audience thank you but i'm not moving you over to audience just for now because it'll take too long so town council is adjourned at 404 thank you thank you thank you um we're going to move on to the rest of the crc agenda the next is general public comment is there any public here that would have any general public comment at this time before we move on to action items i see one hand i'm going to recognize hilda green bomb there was just one item that i i forgot to mention and that's the issue of if you want apartments the apartments require that no more than half the units be of one size therefore that means that to build an apartment building with 24 units in the building there has to be a mix of sizes they can be ones and twos but you can't have more than half of one kind so it it almost requires you to put a couple of threes in there somewhere now another one of the big loopholes with the mixed use which is why people going that route is that they they don't have that requirement of mixing the sizes of the units and then another issue that that came up in town meeting which i pointed out you can have a mixed use building by just opening up an atm machine or putting a washing machine open to the public in the building and then it's a mixed use building so it's just a giant loophole for any developer to walk through to get the maximum of the units as small as they might be into the you know the size of the space that they have without many constraints on it so that's something that needs to be looked at if you want family housing then you've got to make the mixed use buildings comply a little in some way with the apartment bylaw where you have to have a different size units you can't have more than half of one kind so i just want to put that out there thank you hilda there is no more public comment at this time so we will move on to action items fall 2020 meeting times everyone has seen the schedule in the um packet is there any discussion or requested changes to that schedule i am not seeing any hands um so the schedule moves us hopefully off of the finance committee Tuesday meetings was the goal um and so hopefully we'll be able to do that um i will acknowledge that there is a december 29th meeting i will hope to be able to cancel that um but i put it in there so it's on our schedules um it goes through the end of january um if there are no other requested changes um i will take a motion to adopt this amended schedule evan shallony steve so moved thank you evan do i hear a second a second leave seconds is there any additional discussion seeing none i will go through the roll call by the way sarah had to leave uh by 405 um she had an issue with some family obligations so um that she couldn't stay any longer but she was also okay with the schedule um so we are not she'll be fine with it so roll call we start with evan yes steve yes shallony yes and mandy is a yes that is a four zero vote adopted with one absent at this time um moving on we have minutes are there any we have three sets of minutes the august 26th 20 25 p.m meeting the august 26 20 26 p.m meeting and the september 1 2020 meeting um i have been through them and the revision suggested revisions from that for clarification purposes are in the packet um i will go through them quickly i did not have any for the september 1st meeting um for the august 26th meeting at five p.m i just wanted to list the candidates that were interviewed in the others participating remotely i added the announcements as none and i fixed a verb tense uh is there any other requested changes to the five p.m meeting minutes for the august 26th meeting i am seeing none we'll go to the six p.m minutes and those i spelled mr burt whistles i corrected the spelling of his name one time it happened to be wrong and then i cleared up a sentence on the second the third page that read maria chow and jack gemstick are the most senior members have served less than three years and their terms are up in two years i corrected that to they are the most senior members have served around three to four years each and their terms are up in two years um because i remembered myself saying that i wasn't sure exactly how long they had been on but it was around that time and then there was one other um change of just a scrivener change any other requested changes to the uh six p.m meeting minutes for august 26th i see none are there any requested changes to the september 1st meeting minutes i will then take a well i will make the motion to make it easier to adopt the august 26 2020 minutes as a five p.m meeting as amended the august 26 2020 minutes six p.m meeting as amended and the september 1st 2020 minutes as presented is there a second second leave seconds that is there any further discussion seeing none we will start with steve hi uh shalini yes mandy is yes evan yes they are all adopted um announcements uh i just want to say thank you to i know they've all left by now um but thank you to everyone that came today to present and all um next yeah we will obviously be continuing this um any other announcements from anyone else we will go to next agenda preview um our next meeting let me make sure i get the date right now that we just changed meeting dates is september 29th um at that meeting we will be discussing housing comprehensive housing policy and we will also be discussing zoning um as for zoning um i think we'll take the conversation we had today we'll take the compiled document um we'll add any priorities that any crc members wish to add and any that i received by email from other counselors that didn't quite make the deadline last time into that document i also hope to sort of do an executive summary that pulls out large broad topics to help um help us have that conversation about where counselors might be focusing energy or might want energy focused and so that will be the zoning side um housing uh i am in the middle of drafting a document as we agreed to last meeting um that brings in the goals that we had talked about at the last meeting um i hope to have that to everyone early next week in a packet so that people have time to review it um but it won't come until next week are there any other agenda items oh and there's one other thing we will it's going to be a busy meeting um we want to discuss before we completely forget it the appointment process that we just went through um and how we might be able to make it better if we think we can make it better or not um any changes we might want to make to it i guess is the better way to say it um go through with how we thought it worked and and if there's anything we want to change or not um so that will also be on the agenda so it's going to be a busy meeting anything else from anyone uh shalini just a quick question about the process the appointment process are we just so we're going to share from our perspective what we observe and think but do we want to talk to people who went through the process or what's the goal of that i mean yeah i don't know you know what i'm saying i i can reach out to the candidates that went through the process and see if they have anything they would like to add um suggest what their thoughts are um i i can certainly do that um i have received some brief comments that were not specific um just shortly after but but i will reach out to all the candidates that went through the whole process to see if they have any suggestions or comments regarding it since it was our first time going through this process um is there anyone else people would like me to reach out to so i will do that um any other comments on next agenda or agenda previous see none thank you for the extra 15 minutes i appreciate it um with that we will adjourn at 4 15 p.m thank you all thank you