 Up now, get ready for your thing, we'll take it. You want us to leave these things? Now is it working? OK. This is exciting. This is great. So I'm Greg Gossens, Aaron Temkin. We took an approach of sustainable Montpelier 2030, net zero 2030 as a very important aspect of this, and not only being net zero, but socially sustainable, environmentally sustainable, and resilient. Also 2030, scary, 13 years from now. So everything we did, we wanted to make sure it could be realized in a 13-year time frame. And that includes the economic conditions of today's society, the property aspects of our proposal. Every aspect, we ran through the rigor of, can this be accomplished in 13 years? And we present to you a design that we think is realizable in that respect. We've done the number crunching, and we feel pretty excited about it. This is a transformational project for our community, but also is done in a very methodical and doable set of steps. The team just go through. Greg Gossens, myself, Aaron Temkin, the dean of professional schools at Norwich University. Andy Shapiro is down in the front of the audience, who net zero consultants, our number cruncher. And we were very rigorous about numbers. And David Burke, a graduate student, helped us out with some of the presentation materials. OK, so we began this. There are a lot of things that the project was asking us to do, but we really decided that it was most important to talk, to really think through this from the perspective of what's going to most impact the quality of life for the community. And so there are four pieces to this. And we started with, how do we engage the rivers? If you've ever been to the farmer's market on a Saturday with a small child, they gravitate towards being as close to the water's edge as they can. And the fact is, like a lot of cities, we began, for a lot of our history, we haven't treated the river as a front, a frontage. And it really has gotten to a point where it can be and should be. So we were looking for as many ways as possible to engage and make the river as an asset of the community. We looked at various ways of making place, of making livable space in the, not just in the river, along the rivers, but inside as well. Making a playground connection between, for instance, Langdon Street and Court Street. You can see up in the upper right. Rethinking the way we use the plaza area around City Hall, as well as the small urban park on the east side of the confluence of the rivers and a much more substantial one on the west side. We thought a lot about the path, about how do we knit places together. The path, if we're going to really make the city both pedestrian and bicycle-friendly, then the way things connect is that critical. So in some ways it's a little subtle, but there are several places where, where there was never a direct connection before, and we've really made those places pedestrian, which you can typically see in yellow and all of these drawings. And then we thought about consolidating parking. You know, the fact is that, again, come back to this as a 13-year timeline, it still has to be a city with cars in it. We're not gonna totally remove them in that period of time. That's a longer shift. But we really thought, how do we take back a lot of the landscape, especially valuable landscape along the riverfronts, and make that the people's space as opposed to the car's space? And so if I talk about that in a little more detail, so on the left, this is all of the area where there's currently surface parking that we removed and took all of those spaces and fit them into these three consolidated parking areas. And in so doing, we've actually added 97 parking spaces, but we've saved more than six acres of surface area that belong to the car that now belongs to the people. So give that back to the community and do things that are both about resiliency and about some things that are better for the environment, but also give us the space to do all of these public park and activatable spaces. All right. Well, housing is a big issue Vermont-wide. In my office, we do a lot of housing in standing communities and Montpelier is no exception in that respect. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to do a nuanced approach to housing that reflected a number of different vehicles by which to go about doing it. We weren't gonna depend on like a private developer swooping in and building something. We wanted to take matters in our own hands and handle them a scale and an appropriateness that reflects Montpelier. So we ended up with 1,125 new homes within a 15 minute walk of downtown. And 15 minute walk is basically from the corner of state in Maine. And they come through a number of different ways. One is the mass housing downtown, increasing density and putting housing in the midst of the community. Right there is an illustration kind of highlighting of where we propose putting new housing. And you can see it's integrated not only into the downtown, but integrated into the green spaces, the play spaces and all of the linkages that we propose. So all this housing is linked in a substantial and meaningful way with the rest of the community. Another way to do it is you have to remember all of Montpelier downtown for the most part is in a FEMA flood hazard district. We need to recognize that fact. We can't be putting all of our eggs in one basket. Even if we do buildings that are flood resistant and flood proof, the whole idea of having everything in a flood hazard district is just not responsible. So we wanted to make sure that our nuance approach included housing integration into the community outside of the flood hazard area. And one, a couple of ways to do it. One is accessory dwelling units. They're fantastic. They are basically allow people to take their existing homes right now. The average in this region home per house population is 2.4 people are thereabouts and getting smaller. Most of our housing infrastructure was designed for larger families and larger uses. So it's a sustainable way to go about doing it is to do accessory dwelling units in those residences. Did a walking survey we have, we basically counted on only 20% of people doing that type stuff. But it's a great it allows people to age in place. It basically is we're heating those spaces already. So we're basically getting a two for a number of residents. So here's just did a little sketch of a typical Montpelier neighborhood, kind of the scale. So we have a four family section of a block that can go into a nine family section block without kind of ruining the scale and the feel of the neighborhood. And that goes from finished attic spaces, carriage house conversions, infill, sensitive infill. And in notes, the infill is like a duplex size house. This isn't like integrating in 14 unit buildings in the midst of our neighborhood. Neighborhood is keeping the scale and the proportion of everything. In the second floor unit, in fact, my wife and I were kind of giving our house right to our second floor unit because we want to age in place. So again, from four till nine, a great way to do it. If you couple that with an aggressive weatherization program, we can make these all net zero ready. And that's part of the policy aspect of it all too. So we have to generate new energy. And here's where Andy really helped us a lot. So we wanted to make this real. So we calculated everything we presented and tried to figure out what our load is. And that is including doing net zero ready, all new buildings. So we needed 4.2 million kilowatt hours a year to do new buildings. We proposed a trolley and we'll get into it a little later with people mover to help kind of lead via traffic downtown. We calculated the lower part. Roof top capacity is 1.161 million kilowatt hours a year. So we can do that on roof tops. Code Gen, and that's in the middle one, the district energy plant is the plant is designed for a Code Gen system. Code Gen means that plant can not just produce heat but electricity. The Code Gen capacity that can plant is 1.35 million kilowatt. Sorry, I'm drying up. And then that left that we needed to do ground mount PV of 1.8 million or about nine acres of PV. It just so happens, we want to improve that in the city limits. There's a great site up by the stump dump that has fantastic solar access and is just under nine acres or all of all and so it's still a lot of system dump function. So here's a little diagram. And just to show, so on the left, the rooftop PV that we can add just with the buildings that we're creating, we know we need the nine acres so each of these blocks is an acre and we need six and a half more except we figure out with the Code Gen that we can avoid. And the plant is designed with Code Gen in mind as an accommodated. So transportation, moving people in and out of the community. We want to be less car dependent, obviously, but we know we need to accommodate cars. We know that we have this huge influx of people on a daily basis to work for the state. So we proposed a people mover running from Berry on the existing rail bed to the Amplac station, to the railroad station. We saw in the PV slide how much energy that's going to use to be factored in the energy on that one. We also want to obviously continue to cross Vermont trail, the trail to downtown and then extend it up to the rec fields. So basically we have a people mover trail on the entire River Valley network of the city. So a couple of things that we wanted to check out and we applied this rigor to everything we proposed is for years we've been talking about like a gondola running up the national life, which I think is a pretty cool idea in many respects. But we want to run the energy on it. So a gondola running eight hours a day takes 22,000 kilowatt hours a year. So that's 1.4 acres of PV. An electric bus running 12 hours a day, the same route takes 33,000 kilowatt hours a year, only 0.2 acres of PV. We chose the bus. If we could find the acreage, go for a gondola, but we chose the bus because we took the net zero aspect seriously. All right, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about how we're trying to make vibrant public spaces. So as you can see from this sketch, we thought a lot about ways of expanding the places to play, the places to recreate, the places to bike. We added an amphitheater at the confluence, the rivers, we added steps down to the rivers, we added a whitewater park because there's enough level change when we remove the dam to actually allow for that. Yeah, and actually there is a group in town trying to get that through and they've studied enough that it seems real. Well, I've traveled many times in Berlin and one of my favorite parts is the small little children's play areas that kind of exist between the buildings, the interstitial spaces and there's a perfect opportunity for that in also creating a connection path that we've always really needed between Langdon Street and up to Court Street. We created a little recreation area with a play fountain during the warm weather. And in a second, we're gonna show you, we'll talk about the rest of the year. We created a market area that we're all gonna show in a little greater detail. We thought a lot about what to do with the riparian barriers, what to do by the most rich ecosystems are at the boundary conditions. And right now we have really fairly narrow margins between where all of the kind of the beautiful parts of the river ecology can exist and we've made those much deeper which isn't just good for us and good for the livability of the place but it also means it adds a lot more resilience, a lot more absorbative ground by the river's edge which is gonna help in all of those high, severe flood conditions. And also really helps to storm water mitigation. So we also, we've had this idea, one of the things that make a pedestrian city livable and navigable is landmarks. So we came up with this idea of these three hub towers that are places where you can meet, you can say, okay, meet me by the hub tower on Court Street. When I've been in Spain, any time I was, I brought a group of students there and if there was a place needed to meet everybody at two o'clock it was always under the clock in the Plaza de Mayor, right? So we're trying to make some places where you can say, meet me here, right? That you can see them in the distance and it also provides public restrooms which we all know you can kind of use when you're out with the family in the middle of the day and bike parking that's sheltered, a lookout space and there's enough of a TV and at least the symbol of a wind tower not gonna gain a lot of power with that. You know, you can plug in an electric bike for instance while you're playing in its park. So, I mean, they're fun and symbolic. That's right. And then this is really a four season city, right? We don't just play during the summer, we play during the winter. And so that same play fountain can become an ice rink, the market area which is during the year looks like this and can expand, we're building out onto it and turning this into a 12 month market area. You wanna talk about that? Yeah, it's a 12 market indoor market area which also includes a food production hub, local food production hub. Right, and then in the winter becomes a winter recreation closet. There's enough elevation change where we can have a slide run and we can have an ice sculpture gallery and we can have as much fun out here during the winter as we do during the summer. So with that, just some key facts. We create 570 units of housing downtown, more than 1,000 within 15 minute walk which is a critical factor of pedestrian accessibility. 120,000 square feet that could be state or private offices, new retail hotel and conference space. 6.6 acres less surface parking, 97 new parking spaces, four acres of new public space and 2,600 lineal feet of riparian barrier protect our river. So to summarize, we really wanted to make this montaillir, stay montaillir, do it in a scale that is of us but do it in a way that's visionary but visionary and varied measured steps that are doable in our confinement and doable in 13 years. We have a question coming from one of our expert panelists, Ken Jones. Come on over here. My question is about transportation. Gretchen, 13 years isn't that far. How do you envision the transportation network changing in Montaillir and how does your design move towards that? Well, we need to accept reality for what it is right now and then look towards the future. And that's one of the reasons why we have that light rail system going in with remote parking areas. We do realize this is a city that both is gonna grow within but also we do have this large population that comes from to within both tourists and workers. So that handles all of the transportation for those types and including tourism. Internally, I would love to be a city that doesn't need cars at all. I hate cars. But on the other hand, anybody who's ever worked on a project know that vendors, granting organizations and right now the market demands parking. So that's why we consolidated parking but also had that 6.6 acres of less parking surface area. So it's that whole idea of that nuanced approach. This isn't one big fell swoop. This is a very nuanced approach that's based in real market conditions of today and real financial aspects of today. We have a question from the floor. Please provide some insights on accessory dwelling unit ideas. When and how do you or will we begin to convince owners of this? Seems like we have some landlord and developer things here but and the huge cost, not to mention inconvenience factors of extensive renovations. Can you comment on that please? Sure, building a new housing unit from scratch. For instance, $250,000. I think that's pretty, actually pretty low considering how it is. You can do some accessory dwelling units for a fraction of that, $20, $25,000 thereabouts. If we have a program that incentivizes that kind of growth and I think that it ought to be a program that incentivizes that. It not only allows that to happen but also it makes it so that it's affordable for people living in those like my wife and I who in our, we have a 1600 square foot house we're empty nesters now. I would love to have an apartment to help me afford our house. Now our house is set up probably for less than 20 grand. We can set it up for that. But I know, so that kind of thing, I think it ought to, it has to be a partnership of the community and what we liked about the accessory dwelling units and the infill, we're not gonna rely on a big, large scale developer to swoop in and solve our problem. We can do it on our own. And we can do it on our own in a scale that runs from individuals to some of our local realtors and developers. And then up to the larger scale stuff. So that scalability was really important to us. Here we have a quick question here. Will there still be a grocery store downtown? Yes, we took Shaw's. We moved the store up to the front and moved the parking to the back and put affordable housing on it. I did a project with Andy Shapiro down in Brattleboro that did that very thing and it worked out great. And in fact, we were able to do majority of the heating of the housing above the store with reclaimed waste heat from the refrigeration system. Refrigeration system takes out boatload of energy and it's sustainable. This from the floor said great work and will we have enough restaurants? I didn't know we were starving for restaurants but I love to eat so. I'm just a bit concerned. Yeah, and what if we had 150 some pounds in square feet, it could be all a restaurant if we wanted to be like that. This one is what would you do to bring people out into the town streets on weeknights? It would be great if the commerce and town with a commerce and town experience. Well, the ground level of all of these new buildings is commercial. So there's a lot of opportunity for new restaurants for nightclubs, for new performance space, things like the amphitheater in the park. I mean, that's a prime opportunity for performance space at night that we don't really have now. Not to mention the way we're rethinking the market, the market area as a 12 month facility also creates a lot of opportunity for nightlife and night activity that we don't really have ideal places to accommodate. So we've been really thinking in almost all of these places there's versatility created. We're not creating one off usages. We're creating nodes where activity can happen but we're trying to create flexibility so the nature of that activity can really be quite arranged. This is a really wonderfully organized three-point card from one of our youngest here in the audience. I really liked how you proposed reducing parking spaces in Montpelier, point number one. Point two, do you know how you are going to get the money to do all of this? And point number three, your idea is really smart. So maybe the answer, some answers on that. That money thing is so important and that's why we wanted to do a scheme that was scalable and that could be handled from a lot of different financial aspects ranging from individual land owners on up to larger scale developers. And that's really crucial. Also, we've got a pretty good handle on the tax credit programs, all the energy efficiency programs, the requirements to get grants. I think everything we proposed up here would pass the test. What would score high if you went and tried to get grants for it? What works for new market tax credits? What works for low-income housing tax credits? And all of those other things that actually, I work with on a daily basis all the time to try to do it. I think this would be a high score instead of design objective. It's also by very deliberately making the strategy not rely on a one scale of development. We've tried to make it acceptable to a lots of different scales of financial development and investment, which, I mean, that diversification itself should make it much more realizable. And we also think helps make sure that what we get in the end is still a town that we recognize as being the scale of Montpellier. From our other location, which has a really good turnout, by the way, over at the UU, how much of the new housing will be affordable? That's a balance that we as a community need to figure out. I mean, there are plenty of opportunities for housing, how that balance works is great. I love mixed income housing, so we don't vulcanize the different income groups. And I think that if we put that as a community goal, then we would, sort of like, inclusion Arizona, and it's up to us to figure that out. This question, what is your plan to make the Winooski River more sustainable and fishable? Well, I can't remember. How much riparian buffer do we use? We use 600 lineal feet, 26 feet. That's a significant part of our riverfront. And it was a balance between where do we do as more of a naturalized riverfront versus a more aggressive riverfront that people can get right down into. And as you can see, we really put the emphasis a lot on the riparian buffer because also, I've lived in Montpere for 34 years now. The last 15 or 16 years, we flooded twice significantly and flooded in minor degrees a number of other times. We need to do something to make our community more resilient from flood. So we really did put more of an emphasis on the green, the resilient aspect of the riverfront. This is a schedule question, more of when does what happen and which projects in your opinion with your plan should be addressed first? Well, you'll notice those who are kind of following things in the city, a few of these are already in the works. And we didn't wanna throw that out. We didn't wanna confuse the issue of proposing something I was gonna get in the way of something that's already happening. So right now, the Multimodal Transit Center, the Moat Trust Building, which is to the right, or just, yeah, right there, sorry, you had to point out. That has been permitted already. The next thing I think would really be great is we can start talking about the parking situation. But we've been talking about a parking system for 37 years now. But we do need to kind of get that going next. And I think we do need to get off the snide on parking. I think we've proved that you can deal with parking and include increased parking, but also increased green space and little building space. Yeah. Yeah. Search around town for parking spot. It's indeed a great job of kind of the rideability aspect and the energy usage in balancing that. And we do determine two trolleys, one new and 15 men that interval. We have about 20 seconds left for this. And we have more questions here. Many of them financial. Some is state government. What are they expected and needed to contribute financially and property access and youth? How much is this going to cost? What sources do you envision? We don't have to answer all these because we only have 10 seconds. But I think what we'll do is we'll capture these questions and keep them in front of you and other teams for the benefit of everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Greg mentioned a couple of times that this is very data driven. If you're interested, among the things that are being posted online are the full reports as a workbook about each project. And we very deliberately added three pages of Appendacy Stars that shows you all of the data we used to make from what we designed to make sure that we were really following through in being able to do what we say we're trying to do. Thank you.