 To be out of here at 645. I'm going to call to order the. October 10th meeting of the modular planning commission that is meeting on a Tuesday instead of the normal Monday. Because the city observes indigenous people's day and the. Employees like Mike or not. At work is that the first thing on the agenda. Is to the second thing on the agenda is to approve the agenda. So I can get an approval from planning commission. Motion to approve. I'll move to approve motion from our on and we have a second. I'll second second from Brian. Those in favor of approving the agenda say aye aye aye. Any opposed. Okay. Comments from the chair, the only thing that comes to my mind is that I've reached out to the housing committee. Like we discussed at the last meeting, but I just did that today. So. You know, hopefully we'll hear back before our next meeting, but as a reminder, I was just reaching out to see if there's any interests. Within the housing committee of having an informal meeting with us just to get to know each other and. Maybe start to have, you know, a more of a connection in the future that way. Next thing on the agenda. Is general business we do not appear to have any members of the. Community here to bring up anything that's not on the agenda. So it looks like we can skip that 1 and move to a reminder of. Reappointments that are coming up. I think Mike has more details than me. So I'm just going to pass it off to you. Mike to deliver everything at once. Yeah, I think the 3 people who are due for reappointment. Uh, technically terms ended the last day of September. So the appointments are in October. Um, so I think it's Ariane Aaron and John. And I know we have at least 1 person who has already. Applied a new person who's already applied and it's going to be going to council tomorrow. So if others are interested or if others are not interested, then. Just let us know or and we can, you know, if you're interested, I'd encourage you to try to go in and apply online or contact Mary Smith and Smith at Montpelier hyphen vt.org to apply. Um, so that's, that's where we stand right now. So, Mike, to make sure everything's totally straight to tomorrow's city council meeting is when all of the appointments will be done. Or there are 3 technically, they're going to be 3 vacant seats that are going to be filled tomorrow. And so if there's only one applicant, that personal will be appointed. If there are others on the list and they will deliberate between them. So 4 people applied, they would deliberate between the 4 to decide which 3 would get appointed because all the seats expired on September 30th. So, um, at this meeting, if they only have 1, then there'll be 2 vacant seats going forward. Okay, so yeah, everyone. Please do that if you don't plan to re up. Um, I would ask if you could email me and let me know just so I have some idea. Um, I'll go to the meeting tomorrow. To endorse anyone who's currently on planning commission, I think we have a great team. Um, but yeah, try to let me know if you don't plan to. I plan on reapplying, but where is the. Thing on the website, I'm just looking at the website and I can't find it. I know if you email Mary, she can get it for you. Let me see where. And commissions. So on the top bar, you've got city of Montpelier, you've got departments, and then you've got boards and commissions. If you just hover over boards and commissions on the left, you'll see agendas and minutes and then committee vacancies. And I'm guessing that's where we've got it. Join the planning commission. Is the 3rd one down. It's under the, the boards and commissions application and then on that application, you insert the planning commission is what you're applying for, right? I don't know. Let me click the button and see what pops up didn't pop up and do anything for me. Yeah, I guess you have to hit the view more and then. Yeah, I've got it now. It does have a box that says which, which one you're applying for. Okay, I'm going to send that link to all 3 of you. Okay. Not the best, not the easiest way of tracking on the web. Yeah, there it is. So, I just sent that. To our young and young Aaron. Yeah, you know, turn over can be a little scary because we want to keep our momentum going. Okay, it's also understandable. Of course, I'm not trying to guilt anybody. By the way, I'm just explaining why I. I'm trying to help you guys stay. Okay. Dokes. Let's move on. So we're here tonight. We're ending at 645 because of some. You know, meeting, shuffling and sharing a zoom link. We're to review the current proposed zoning amendment online. Mike, I was expecting a spreadsheet like we've often done the past. We didn't like you, you just sent us like a, like a. Modify version of the regs, right? So. Given that, I think that we probably should have you go through and point out the changes because I mean, I went through it, but I. Was not certain whether I saw everything. Do you think you'll be able to do that in. I don't know, 30 minutes or so. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'll get through the whole thing, but I gave you guys the kind of the cheat sheet last time, which laid out. Here's the section here was the recommendation and here's generally what was the change that was made and what I linked. This is the one that's linked on the. City website. Hopefully it is. And look at this real quick. You have to open it Microsoft Word to see the track changes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was trying to do. Get it to open up here. No, I got it down and it's a really, really big file. So that's why we're kind of linking it this way. If you, if you want my. And maybe it'll be quicker just to walk down the. Down the spreadsheet then. Are you guys able to see this with the red line now? I think you're not sharing the right way off the stock share and re re share. That's what I was kind of worried about. It was like a 25 megabyte file. Yeah, it's a big file. So this is. Generally what we're looking at. Now let's get through the obvious changes to the table of contents. So if you were to go through that other one, you'd find a number of little, there are some highlighted places, the effective date, once we adopt that we change the effective date. And so you'll see there are some small changes, some that are substantial changes. Right at the start. So for people not familiar with the way the zoning is set up right at the start in part one, we have rules that really kind of lay out what needs a permit and what doesn't need a permit kind of that big first bucket. So. Goes to what I call applicability. And as I described this to whether they're applicants or new zoning administrators, I always talk about as buckets, you know, you've got a land in the top bucket in order to fall to the buckets below it. And one of the first things is, you know, what needs a zoning permit for a development permit. Is basically, this is the big piece is in 104 where we talk about what development includes. So everything is development needs a permit. So then what's the definition of development. It includes these six different things. So, and we broadly define. What development is and then in chapter 110 we then go through and say, but not this, not this, not this, not this. There are two ways you can do it. You can either when you're doing a applicability statement, you can very specifically line item things or you could go through and broadly put a big umbrella out and catch a lot and then exempt some things. And so within the exemptions, we had a question that had come up in the past about electric vehicle charging stations. So if you need to put a little electric charger on your house or into a parking lot, does that need a zoning permit or not? And what we've recommended here, which came from some other recommendations is that electric vehicle supply equipment, for example, car chargers associated with an approved parking space would be exempt from needing to get a development permit. So you simply don't even need to get a zoning permit for that. You'll probably need a building permit. You'll probably need other things, but you won't need a zoning permit to put in a charging station. So that's, and that's what all of these numbers are for, one through probably 15. And then there's also a set that applies just to the design review district. So that's what these are about. We've gone through and done some clarifications. Just typo things. So when we talk about things, we got some policy recommendations in here. Some of them are just typos or better wording and punctuation. And that's a lot of what as you, if you were to go and start scrolling through, that's what you're going to find throughout this document are just some clarifications that came up. This is talking about non conforming structures. So we had a question because of a project that came up. Somebody wanted to move a non conforming structure. But they weren't going to fully move it to be compliant. They were just going to partially move it. And the question comes up. Well, if you're going to move the building, do you have to bring it fully into compliance or just make it less non conforming? So. And so we've had some clarifications and a little bit of wording clarifications within this one. In this case, it says non conforming structures shall not be moved unless it's brought into compliance. So if you're going to bother picking it up and moving it, you can't, you know, if the setback is 10 feet in your garage is at five feet and you want to move your garage and you're going to move it from five feet to seven feet. No, that's not going to be approved. You're going to move. If you're going to move it, you can move from five feet to 10 feet. So that's, and that's just a policy decision. We can write it however we want. We can write it to say you can keep it non conforming button. The zoning administrator needs an answer when she gets a permit. So that's what this is all about. There's probably some reason in there admin administrative was misspelled. So that's the issue with those. So again, if you were to go through that other list, you'd be able to start to identify a whole bunch of changes. Res 24 we talked about at the last meeting is going to be a district that goes away. So that's disappeared there. But really, if you want to see the very specific pieces, then you would have to kind of look at the strikeout copy because the strikeout, the, the Excel table I sent last time doesn't go into the specificity that this does like we've talked about making the lower part of country club road urban center one. That's just a recommendation because they want five story buildings. And this is the only district that allows five story buildings. And because the city owns it and controls it, the easiest thing to do is just to simply make a new neighborhood. We'll have urban center one out in that area. And this is what the description would be. The new development area includes approximately 17 acres of the lower former country club where the city actionable plan for the country club road site proposes high density housing and a future community center. The desire is for this area to allow residential buildings up to five or six stories and to have rules that are flexible into how it's designed and laid out. Proposed development should promote a pedestrian area and design balances future recreation and community uses, along with residential and some limited commercial. So that's just that is the strikeout recommended written description of what that character of that neighborhood would be like. So again, if, if you're just wanting to understand that 30,000 foot view, you probably just could use the Excel tables. If you're somebody who's like, I really want to go and see not only what are you doing, but I want to see exactly how you're doing it because I want, because I want to see those details. And it just depends on how you want to the details you want to look at what is actually getting adopted and what is actually getting voted on is this strikeout copy. So this is if it's not in the strikeout copy, it doesn't exist. So if there's something, for example, written into that Excel table that says we should make this change, but I forgot to make the change in the strikeout copy, then it doesn't happen. Because this is what would actually be voted on in by council is we, we vote to adopt the strikeout copy. So, and like I said, I don't think I, you would want me to go through this whole thing. Just looking for red supersede was misspelled administrative was misspelled. So, like I said, you'll see a lot of those that just little, little things, little things, big things. I think one of, okay, go. I did want, I don't know what other people saw in there that they wanted to talk about, but I did want to talk about demolition. And also I didn't quite understand the sidewalk provision if there's other things that people want to jump into those keeping a list. Those are a couple of things. I was going to actually get to the demolition was going to be one that was one of the big ones was removing residential 24. We talked a lot about this table demolition will be coming up after in a little bit after the table. We talked about, we made this one to four dwelling units. These were the changes to congregate living and multifamily. So there's a lot of changes to this table. There's that change of emergency shelter made a few adjustments to retail sales. We used to have two categories. We used to have retail sales and service. And we had malls and shopping centers. And so, you know, we sat down and said, what is that? You know, what's the difference between, you know, a mall and a retail center is, you know, the building that Obashans is in also has another commercial use. Does that make it a mall? You know, so we just went through and decided we would have two categories. One would be retail sales indoor up to 20,000 square feet. And then there's retail sales indoor of more than 20,000 square feet. So we got rid of the distinction between malls. We just say, if it's big, then it's in this category. And if it's smaller, it's in this category. And then we turned this one into outdoor, which already existed. And then we created a new line for service. So my quick question about that. Does that mean that like a place like Obashans is going to go from permitted to conforming? Like, is there going to be a substantive change for anyone who's already in there? No. So in this case, the way, just so everyone understands, along this side are your uses on the left. Along the top are your various zoning districts. So Obashans happens to be an urban center one. And so it is, these are all permitted uses, which would mean you just need to get a zoning permit to do a change of use. And because they're not changing anything, they can be permitted. So you can do indoor sales with an administrative permit. You also could do outdoor sales with a permit. And Obashans actually has outdoor sales. They put stuff on the sidewalk. And that's okay. They probably have a permit that reflects that they can do indoor and outdoor sales because you're not limited to just one line. You can add multiple lines in. So yeah. And then if you want to do small equipment and service and repair, that's the new line that's down here. That's also permitted use. So yeah, I said conformal and I should have said conditional. Like, so what kind of business exists that's going to fall in the more than 20,000 square foot category? We may not have any. We may not have many. I don't know. 20,000 is a pretty big footprint. I'm trying to think out just how big maybe city center might be that might be in the 20,000 square foot. It's footprint footprint might not be, but it's a multi-story building. So, but most of it has since been converted to office. So, but that's what it's really looking at. It's the number of square feet of retail space. And it just gives us the opportunity, the flexibility if somebody were to come in and purchase a bunch of buildings or purchase a space. Maybe they buy Fecto's lot where he parks mobile homes and somebody decides to build, you know, a large mall type building in there. Well, that's just going to be treated as retail more than 20,000 square feet. But that would be under Eastern Gateway. So, but that's really what it was looking at because we really wanted to. So we just tried. We tried to run a lot of straw man arguments through things so we can understand. So I'll give you an example. Just kind of know these numbers off the top of my head. When I was over in LaMoyle County, Morrisville, there's a price chopper. That's about 40,000 square feet and there's a Haniferns that's about 60,000 square feet. So it gives you an idea, you know, that's technically not a mall. That's a single building. So somebody could come in, let's say, you know, Walmart decides they're going to come in and they're going to drop a building of 80,000 square feet somewhere in the city of Montpelier. That would not be a mall. That would just be a retail space. So by splitting it the way we're doing it, by simply looking at retail less than this, retail more than this, rather than counting the number of things, which is what we have now. Well, your retail or if you've got more than one person, you know, if you split a 5,000 square foot space into 2,500 square foot things, well, now you're a mall and you're going to have to go through higher standards. Well, that doesn't make any sense. What makes a difference is the size of the building and the size of the use. So that's why we, our recommendation is just to put it now whether 20,000 square feet is the right number and not 10,000 square feet. We'll, we'll argue the policy on that. But 20,000 square feet is a decent sized store. But you know, I'm going to think price chopper in Berlin pushing 100,000 square feet. You know, that's, those are, those are big footprint buildings. I don't know if we've got any land that could support that, but if someone were able to find a spot or clear a spot that's, you know, we would want to have special take a special look at that. That should be a conditionally used. What will, what impact will I have on the character of the neighborhood, but a smaller retail space probably, you know, 15,000 square feet probably won't have that impact on the neighborhood. So that's why we, that's how we think of it as we try to process these types of straw man arguments. That kind of makes sense enough. So that's what we do for a lot of these use tables we try to go through and just try to make sure we cover all of the things that should be addressed as uses on the left hand column, and then we say where they should be allowed, maybe they're permitted. Maybe they're conditional. And maybe if there's a dash they're not allowed at all. And that's how we review all of these various ones. These are the design review rules these were just passed about two years ago. And we've added a new exemption I believe here that's public art so if you do public art that is not attached to a building then it it does not have to go through design review we're not going to have design review judge art. That would be a bad idea. That's the design review. Now there's been passed. That was just a correct. That's the correct term talks about existing historic contributing resource well that is a character defining features so that's clarifies a few things. And there it is to change the definition. A lot of definitions we struck, and that is because the definition should be in the final so some of these were moved to the bottom. Some of them were redundant with what's in the definition section. So that's why they were removed. Changing some of the language and I believe coming up here. This provision was in the wrong place so we moved it. This is what we talked about the last meeting so this was a change that was added in residential density remember we talked at the last meeting at a minimum any conforming parcel served by sewer and water may be approved for up to four dwelling units your effective of the district's density. So that was the second piece that you guys recommended you wanted to see. Four units on a conforming lot so regardless of where you are inside or outside design review. You can have four units if you have a conforming lot. And if you're in design review you have no density requirement at all. So those are the two big requirement. Those are the two big recommendations that we were talking about. So, you know, a small amount of words can make a huge difference. So these two provisions really make that's that's the bulk of our discussion we will probably be having with the public and with council is those two. These changes that appear right here on 3002. And Mike, yeah, we go back to, there's a section on historic buildings, and then projects that do not involve an historic building. All right. I had. I looked through this all today and something stuck out at me. I think you've already changed part of it. Yes here. The contributing and non contributing has been changed to historic structures. Ditions and alterations to non historic and non contributing structures shall respect. I don't set back in the buildings. Objects that do not involve historic buildings so additions and alterations to non historic. Buildings. So I think the distinction we were looking at here was that non contributing structures are non historic so it was kind of being redundant a non historic and non contributing structure. Mm hmm. But the historic structures only the ones that are within the. Like the nationally recognized historic district. Yes. Okay, so just those buildings. Just those. Yep, we only big. You may have an old building. It may be 110 years old, but if it's not on the national register, then it is not. As our regulations. Take care of it. It is not. It would be in this category, not historic. Okay. That's defined Mike. Sorry, Maria. I just want to make sure that we that we're covering it adequately. Yes. That's under applicability that the applicability is that it's only. Contributing structures on the national register in in the Montpelier historic district national register. Okay, great. Just didn't want ambiguity. And then the second sentence to me seems. Very broad. You know, any non historic structures that overshadow or diminish the historic character of adjacent historic structures. It just seems that that can be read. Very broadly or very narrowly depending on who the decision maker is, you know. Has that ever been used to, you know, reject any permits or. I'm not very few projects ever get denied. In design review and. I'm not sure. But yeah, I admit this is a somewhat. These, these were developed by the historic preservation commission. And we went through and we reviewed them and we made a bunch of tweaks and adjustments to it. But pretty much we left it as they presented it and. Let it go. Under the old rules, we had officially six. Six sentences and each one was like this short thing. You shall not impact have negative impact on the historic character of the building. And that was it. And so we've turned into about 50 or 60 little lines now. But yeah, there's always going to be a certain amount of gray. But this one. Yeah, if I were. If I were really trying to polish things up, I would probably want to have a little more guidance. Embedded in there. Yeah. But it hasn't been an issue. And I think some of these, we kind of let roll until we get an application that really highlights. How problematic it is. So that way we can kind of go through and say, ah, now we have a case study of this. How would we write the rules to better address this project like this. When. So. So my understanding of that would be the way that this plays out and tell me if it's, if it's different than this. That when you're looking at the historic quality, like if design review. Committee is looking at this historic quality type question. That it's going to take into account that my appeal here is a. Well, is it like a post war as to consider the type of historic city that it is, right? And that means just a real mix of different architectural styles and. And things like that, right, Mike? So. While it's broad, my assumption would be that. That a lot would be passable because of the character is. Am I totally off base and thinking that it would, that those things would be considered. I think, I think a good example of this one would be, let's think about the transit center. It's a, it's a non historic building. It was built new. Projects that do not involve historic buildings out to vacant lot. We're putting in the transit center. So the transit center as it's being designed and proposed and we're looking at. The plans that are being proposed. We, you know, we'll look at. In this case, it's talking about additions and alterations. Well, there are new additions on non historic buildings that overshadow or diminish the historic character. So we would probably look at what's going on next door in that case. It doesn't have buildings next door. So it doesn't, it doesn't overshadow it. But if it happened to be a proposal to. You know, maybe it's over near school street on main street. And this was a proposal I was talking about. I think there's like a TD bank. People have talked about, well, maybe somebody take out TD bank because you can because it's a non historic building. We could put up a five story building legally put up a six story building and somebody might go through and say. That new building or that addition or that to that building. It's it's going to overshadow and diminish the historic character of the of the adjacent building. So how will this building impact. We're really comparing the proposal to whatever historic buildings happen to be the left and right of it or across the street from it. Is it so out of character in its size and scale that it overshadows and diminishes the historic character of the building next door. As long as the style of that new building is something that looks similar than it should be fine. Yeah, it's not always the size. It's not always that it has to be the same of the right character, but you'll usually carry something through. If you were to look at the transit center. Yeah, you'll see it has, you know, granite. It has granite fenestrations in places on, you know, different pieces. So that way it's like, well, these building next doors have granite. It doesn't. It's not faux historic. That's what the the design review doesn't want faux historic. They don't want fake, but they do want something that's not going to overshadow it. And it's not going to be so out of place that it actually detracts from the historic character of the building. You know, I think if the post office were proposed today as a new building, it would be denied. It's just so out of character with the historic buildings around it. You know, it was a, you know, a postmodern. I'm trying to think of the name of it. It's actually a very appropriate name for the architectural style. Brutalist. It is a brutalist building and I always love the name because that is exactly what that is. It's just hammered into that historic space regardless of its impact on the historic courthouse right next door to it. It's celebrated in its offending nature. I don't think that would be allowed because of this type of condition nowadays. We don't want to pretend to be historic, but we don't want to be a glass box of postmodern whatever that's going to really be out of character. So that's that's what they're trying to look for. I think in that sentence, the, I mean, diminish, I can see, but overshadow, there are plenty of, you know, centuries old cities in Europe that have a beautiful mix of modern and old, you know, I don't know that it's that bad if there's a stunning, beautiful new building that overshadows, you know, some of the older structures downtown, you know, like, it will add to the beauty of the city, even though it's overshadowing a historic structure. I mean, I understand diminishing is it has a different connotation but I mean this is not this is for some other time but it was good questions and I think the overshadowing my question back to historic preservation is what did you do? Did you mean it in a bulk and massing, like overshadow like you're physically bigger or you talking about overshadowing and diminishing in the same sense, you know, you're doing something that diminishes the historic character next door, because of something that you're doing and I, you know, you can overshadow your big brother but it doesn't necessarily mean you're bigger than them, you know, you can do things that phrase overshadow doesn't necessarily mean physically bigger in that, or does it mean physically bigger that's a question. It's an unclear word. We're committing ourselves to living in the shadow of our past. Literally in the shadow. We have a lot of historic go very well together I think, you know. And I think they've done a good job the design review I think has done a committee has done a very good job of using these, because we have a lot of new buildings. We proposed a new hotel, which got permitted we proposed parking garage that got permitted we proposed a transit center that got permitted. These are all things and really they were just looking at making sure that how it fits into the context that it worked and it didn't. You know, we've got a great historic district let's not let's not ruin it with something. And I think they've done a good job of balancing and walking the walking that line so far and and I think it's just going to matter of waiting and seeing how this goes. I think it's used going forward to see when when and where we need to make adjustments. But in this case we didn't want people to start to get confused with non historic and non contributing it made it look like we're looking for two different features you have to have this and you have to have this. And really there isn't two things that's one if you're non historic you are a non contributing. So, thanks for that mic. So we had, you know, this is a very typical question you're going to get. So we're down here back down in 33002 which is most of your dimensional stuff. How do you measure a setback what's a setback so we have two different setbacks we've got setbacks for principal structures and we have setbacks for accessory structures. What we didn't have to answer a question was, what happens if your accessory structure is attached to your principal structure like you have an attached to garage. I mean the garage can what setback does that meet if it's actually connected to the house. And if you happen to have your garage under your house does that mean your house can go into the, to that setback line that accessory setback line so this these are the types of issues that we run into and we go yep we need a rule that explains that. I'm not sure it could go either way. But in this case, accessory structures such as decks and garages. When it's attached to access to a principal structure the accessory structure may encroach into the principal setback. But the uses in the portion of the structure that are encroaching shall be limited to the accessory use. So, if you wanted to have your garage in the basement under your house. Then you can put your whole house closer to the property line, because you can't have a principal use, which is the residential that close so. People can come up with different ways that was how we proposed to make that change. One of the big changes which Gabe was getting at this is a significant change you see an awful lot of red through here. The demolition provisions. We had a project go to court on demolition. There was a proposal to demolish a structure and so it actually had a lot of court review of the old one, and it didn't the court really didn't follow the rules the way we thought the rules were written. And so that's one piece we knew we knew we wanted to make some changes because the court wasn't reading the rules the way we were so we want to clarify them. And the second piece comes in. When we've talked about density, one of the biggest arguments against it was people are going to come in and they're going to buy up our houses. Excuse me, and they're going to demolish our historic buildings, and they're going to put in a big giant flat roof building. So one of the answers was well if we've got good demolition rules that make it harder to demolish buildings then that gives us more ability to push back on that argument to say all right we don't have to worry about people doing that because we have good demolition rules so that's what you see here are new rules and there's also going to be an understanding that Historic Preservation Commission. We've sent them to them and they're not entirely happy with them. I had given them an opportunity to give me a draft. It really wasn't administratively working, but I tried to take some pieces out of it, incorporate it into a draft that I came up with with our zoning administrator and this is what we have. We're going to strike out some pieces stay some pieces were moved, but in the big picture, a lot of this has been substantially rewritten to try to clarify and make it a little bit. In some cases more difficult to demolish historic buildings, but you still can demolish historic buildings and in some cases that's where we're going to probably have some pushback folks, but I'll let game ask the question that he has on this. You're up above it just implied and maybe this is new after you know what you talked with Maria about but it's sort of implied that you know any building that was like 50 years old could be historic. I don't know where I saw that but you know it was a little different than your description that you had earlier where historic building is one that we find on the map. I don't know what the art service has that identifies those contributing buildings to the designation right that's a that's kind of a different thing and so I don't yeah that's it right there. That's part of the purpose statement up there but yeah go ahead. Why I'm just concerned that anybody can say that this is an old this is an old house therefore it's historic like I'm I'm concerned that this reads that way to me just having read it. You know there's plenty of old buildings that should be absolutely or safety hazards all over the state that should be worn down like just because of buildings really old does not mean that we should have to go before the DRB to get permission to tear it down. That's that's my view. I mean, you know if if we can put something beautiful on a place where there's something that's underutilized we're not taking care of well and it does not contribute historically to the designation. The National Park Service agreed on then then to me that it shouldn't fall under these provisions but I just when I read it it's it sounded different than when you told Maria a minute ago. Yeah and in the purpose statement. It does read that way. And I think this was some of the pieces I pulled from their stuff and trying to go and keep with them. The reality is and maybe we should reword some of this stuff up in here in the purpose statement purpose is not regulatory. So applicability is where the magic. It's a very odd funky word applicability it what what needs to meet the requirements that happen under here so all applications for demolition, which there's definition of shall meet the requirements of section D. In addition to this section D is the demolition of a historic structure, which is defined as on the National Red and third, shall meet the requirements of E which adds an extra layer of stuff in there. So maybe it just up above if you could just I hate to be a wordsmith here but therefore no could could be eligible for inclusion like just because you're 50 years old does not mean National Park Service is going to say that you're eligible like you could be eligible you get to apply. That doesn't mean you're eligible. That's actually very inaccurate and accurate correction that should be in there. I was thinking the, the next sentence the demolition of these buildings. I think you mean these buildings to mean buildings that have been, you know that are eligible and have gone to state or national registry certification, as opposed to just any building that's older than 50 years. These buildings is just a little. Yep. Yeah, so demolition of historic building historic structures. Yeah, maybe we just changed this to. We're buildings on the National Registry. Right. That's like the most specific right. The state or national. But we do recognize but not every building can or should be saved these rules have been developed to balance the historic integrity of buildings with the cost of retaining such buildings, or parts of such. Thank you. I see John. I'm going to turn his hand up for a little while. Go for it, John. muted. muted. So, going back to your, I think it was maybe the first change you had talked about maybe glossed over a bit Mike. Around not performing structures and the move. And requiring them to conform like if you can't move it unless it'll be conforming. I think we have a lot of historic non conforming structures. And I'm wondering if that if, if that policy were to change to be, if we allowed for reductions in the non conform me so you can move it. If you were reducing the non conformity, even though you wouldn't be required to completely meet. Whatever the non conformity is because in most situations you probably can't anyway. And I understand the logic and well if you can, then you, and you're moving it you probably should move it so that it does conform. But I just don't think that there aren't that many places in Mount failure where most of these buildings are in pretty tight situations and if we can facilitate their adapting to new development without being demolished. And maybe that would be preferable and this is a, you know, I don't know if this is a solution in search of a problem or not, but it seemed like I can think of a number of instances where I would like to move something or, you know, make some kind of change to an un conforming building that would reduce the non conformity but the way we've written it now is they can't. So it's it's sort of incentivizing just leaving things the way they are. Yeah, I agree and we can probably make changes to to effectively make whatever policy change we want to make that was how we recommended making it, you know, we we looked at a couple different options like it as long as it improves it. But in the end we just made the recommendation for the most part we've tried and and a lot of what you said is is was certainly absolutely true. Before the 2018 changes, we've tried to make when we say we've tried to be like 90% conforming, we've tried to make everything 90% conforming not just density and lot size but also setbacks and these other pieces so like for most, most neighborhoods you can have a garage up to five feet from a property line garages and sheds and a lot of times, most communities have like one setback, and it's got to be 10 feet, and you have garages and outbuildings that are five feet. So we just went through and made two designations we got a setback for accessory structures and we have a setback for principal structures and principal structures have principal uses that those are the things in the use tables and accessory structures have accessory uses, like sheds and garages so I don't think we have a lot of means we have hundreds of noninformities that. Yeah, there was. Yeah, yeah. I'd be in favor of what John's saying it's just adding a little extra language on one of those sentences saying on like it cannot be moved unless it's like in, you know, unless it increases the compliance with regulation or. Yeah, the way those are worded it would you know you need to reduce the degree of noncompliance that's what that's their magic word and those are degree of noncompliance and so we would rather than say you have to come into compliance. Like we said we've had these applications where somebody's picking up and moving a building and we're like if you're picking up and moving the building. You can move it the extra couple of feet or somebody's moving it a far distance. And you're like that's that's a lot of effort to move this thing to keep it nonconforming and if you're going to move it that far. You can make it conforming when it stops, except if the rules say we can let you move it that far and you can just make it nonconforming in a new location. It should be on the same lot. You can't just like move it across town and keep it nonconforming. No, it is on the same lot but we've had people who've wanted to move buildings say they needed a little bit more room for their garage. They want to move the garage back 20 feet and you're like, well, you know you're two feet from the property line and it has to set back a five feet. But you're going to move it back 20 feet and not move it the three feet to make it conforming. And that's where the rule comes in either. You know, the rule is either you have to do it or you don't. And the answer is, well, no, you can keep it on the property line or two feet from the property line because you don't have to come into conformance. That you would have to move it at least three feet away. Yeah, and now you'd have to move it at least a little bit to make it better. If it's if it's two feet away, you got to make it at least three. So are people generally in favor of Mike massaging that language a little bit to go along the lines of what John's saying, got a thumbs up from Gabe. See some nods and thumbs ups. Alright, so if that's fine with you, Mike, that would be that would be good. And not and I also didn't want to just skip over Maria's points above about the historic preservation. I might actually need to look at that provision again, but to remove, but the possibility of removing overshadow from that sentence. I was just going to check to see if people were interested in that, but I want to look at the provision again because right now I think it's and overshadow and diminish and if it's written in a way in which you have to have both of the things. And I think for it to make for it to stop a project that maybe removing overshadow actually is going to have a policy outcome opposite of what we're thinking. Yeah, yeah, I should have pointed out, you know, there there's certain lessons that they always, you know, if you get go to classes on how to properly write regulations they was going to tell you, you know, never use pronouns always use the same word. And this isn't creative writing this is boring, plain old writing just keep using the same word. But the other things that they always tell you is, you know, be very careful with your hands and oars. Because, and according to the environmental court, be very aware of your Oxford Thomas, because they have gone after rules based on whether or not a comma existed before the last element so they try to go through and either be careful about all of your punctuation because it matters. So, yeah, the fact that it has and means a lawyer will go in and say no it has to be both it has to overshadow and diminish it could diminish it and it could overshadow it but it overshadow and diminish. It's an or. Oh, is it. So in that case, yeah, we'd be free to to remove it. Thanks, Maria. So straw poll thing on that are people my concluded just want to see how you feel about it. How do people feel about removing overshadow and that provision. Thumbs up from John high five from Maria thumbs up from Gabe. Everybody on the screen. Brian you guys cool with. Yeah, okay. Would you be all right with us. That was like, you know, once it was pointed out sometimes. You just need to have things pointed out and it makes a lot of sense to go through and say that's that's a bad word from an administrative standpoint we like to have nice clear rules and that's mostly as we keep using them we keep identifying. That would work better with a bit with a different word or if that word were defined. So by removing it, it would just be diminish and we just, you know, if asked, you know, it sounds like our policy reasoning in a nutshell is concerns over how overshadow could be used. In a context in which we think that it. We would be stopping things that could be aesthetically pleasing or complimentary. To the nature of the city. Um, okay, that gave, did you have more stuff on, I know you demolition you to another thing. We have 15 minutes left. I just had a question about the sidewalk provision. I didn't, I didn't quite understand it. I, there may be other things that people want to get to before that I think it's almost towards the end. All right, well, I can I'll just quickly scroll through and we'll see if there's anything, anything else big that jumps out but again. So these were the quick so D the this is what it would take to remove a structure that's not historic. You know, materials have be removed site restored to grade ground cover reestablished so there's not a large requirement if you're removing your falling down shed or even a perfectly good shed. And it also includes because we had this question about demolition how much is how much this demolition cover. So if you're removing a porch up the front of a building is that demolishing the porch. In the way this is written the answers yes. So, if it's not historic it's not a historic building then all we care about is that the debris is removed that the sites returned to grade and ground cover reestablished. So you can do that administratively you don't need to go to the DRB. If you're removing a historic structure or part of a historic structure and this is on the register, then you've got these additional standards. The historic integrity. So in other words you have to demonstrate there's no historic integrity to the structure. And that says very specific that's it. That's it. That's a term of art in the historic preservation world historic integrity and so what we're going to do. And I've worked on projects where we demolished historic buildings, city place in very city when we built that one that involved demolishing the old Wayland's drug building. And they said that a historic preservation has come through and they said no this building lacks historic integrity. It's been changed too much over time had a fire inside there's not a lot of historic integrity left in this building so it therefore can be removed. And so there are standards that go through looking at the historic integrity. And then economic viability. This basically comes down to in some of these are existing things we had in our existing zoning so we've kept some of the things that are in green. For income producing properties. There are some requirements and then if it's a not an income producing property. In other words a house, then you've got some other rules. That's most of what all of this is and some of these were reviewed by the judge and so we know is okay. They didn't have comments on those and that was what the judge used was some of these historic valuations and considerations and then there's a public benefit standard so if there's a clear public benefit you can override some of these other requirements. So, again, some quick changes to riparian area I think we've always had issues with this there's kind of a mixing of words always use the same word. There's another rule. So we talked about riparian area and then water setback. And so they tend to be interchanged and so we've been trying to clean that up. I don't think there's much for a little while. That was a repeated issue. Parking maximum this up the maximum amount of parking only applies other than one or two unit buildings. Okay. I think that's fair to all the parking requirements. If you did that then yeah, I think we had a conversation about adding some more of that in. I don't see much in here on that though. We do have a bunch of proposals we're working. We are in the process of working through these sign regulations. So that will change before the next sets of meetings. We're trying to improve that special uses and structures. We've reached in here. A couple of cleanup things. Some stuff on congregate living. A little bit of stuff on many warehouses. Basically we had questions about many warehouses and you know if you've got a shed and a multifamily housing that at some point, people have access to various places than those could be any storage fall into that definition and we didn't want it that way. So I think we can we can probably just jump to sidewalks. I don't think we're going to vote this out tonight. I think it's probably not a great idea to vote anything out given there could be controversy around the fact that some commissioners haven't been reappointed at the right time. So probably that's the wisest not to vote anything. So I think we could just like cover sidewalks and then when we pick this up to vote on it next time. Just, you know, we won't go through it. We'll just do the vote next time. Unless people bring stuff. There was the strike all the solar shading that we talked about. Let me see. We're getting close. We should be getting close to that's conditional use and unit development. And I bet what gave is talking about is under subdivision, which is next to correction to the uses. We had a discussion about that. Suitability of land requirement. Clarifications. Access sidewalks. Right. I just didn't know what I mean I guess I could go look to the reference of city street typology plan. I just didn't know what this meant because you know I'm sure you have this, you know when you're looking up at what we're talking about. We can have sidewalks to know where because the way this was written before. Does this free that up at all like what does the city street typology plan say with regards to sidewalks. But the issue where this came up was that it was based on the density. If you. Development review board, except within the real distance shall install sidewalks on both sides of new streets. After we passed this in 2018 we did what was called a street typology study. And so that is kind of it created seven or eight different types of streets. The other complete streets of a goal of complete streets is that we accommodate all the users pedestrians, bikers, people who drive cars, parking cars on street and we're looking at all the different uses and what we can do is say in certain situations and with certain speed limits and with certain traffic, you can mix things in certain ways. So, it's not safe to have somebody riding their bike on route to in the travel play, you know if you were just driving out three smart failure, it wouldn't be safe because cars are going at 50 miles an hour. And your bike is going at 15 miles an hour 20 miles an hour at best. So it's really not safe you should have a bike lane. So that way the bikers can be on that way as well, and be safe. And be able to move safely without conflict and that's that's really what it's looking at. And pedestrians would walk in that same shoulder area, because there's not a lot of pedestrians we don't need sidewalks. That's the philosophy. But as you get to different street types, you know a small residential neighborhood you might have a dead end street that's only 300 feet long. It turns around. And you might be able to go through and say, look, bicycles, the speed limits 2025 miles an hour. So cars, pedestrians and bikes can all use the roadway to to move. And it's a policy decision as to who needs to but you certainly don't need to have sidewalks on both sides of that street. And so the street typology is a map and we adopted a map that said, here's the street typologies for every street. I'll just go take a look at that. I just wasn't familiar with it, but that that makes a lot of sense to me. So I'll just pull it up so I can see where what's what. Yeah. And for, and for certain streets, and we've had this come up, not just for, you know, for some projects where it has come up where, you know, there's a requirement to put sidewalks on both sides. The street typology has said, there's no, it's not warranted to have sidewalks on both sides. There's not enough traffic. There's not enough speed. This street requires a sidewalk on one side. And that's the requirement. So what we want to be able to do is to get away from the fact that our zoning conflicted with our street typology. Thank you. Mike question about that. Back in sidewalks. My, I thought my understanding was that sidewalks shall be installed along new. Not, well, I guess it's, it's what does new streets mean my, I thought Montpelier had decided that whenever a street was repaved or refinished that sidewalks would be installed on both sides, according to the, the typology plan. But is this only for new streets like, you know, this. Yeah, so this is looking at the developer would be responsible for now in some communities they're going to do things differently. And what we've recommended is that stuff on the existing streets that are not built up to its appropriate capacity, that's really up to everybody, everybody being all the, all the residents to, to pay for our substandard streets to come up the code. What you'll see in a lot of places and you'll, you'll see it all around the state all around the country is, you know, you'll come up and somebody will build a bank and it's like, Oh, this road is supposed to have a sidewalk and so they build a sidewalk in front and it doesn't start nowhere and goes nowhere because there are no other sidewalks on the street. And the way these are also these rules are also nested into the subdivision regulations so keep in mind if we wanted to do something different we'd have to do in a different place but if they're here, because this is about subdivisions and building new roads, and the new roads would have to include sidewalks if that typology requires sidewalks. This doesn't require somebody on a substandard street who happens to be building a house on a vacant lot on the street that's supposed to have a sidewalk and say well you're supposed to build a sidewalk because there's supposed to be a sidewalk there. It's a different policy you can have that policy, but it would be a different policy we'd have to write it differently and it would be in a different place. Yeah, so it's just because East State Street is being, I guess there's water lines being put in or something and as part of that, we're getting a sidewalk on the other side of the street. Yeah, required by the city that this, this other sidewalk be put in as a plan. Yeah, the street typology that street typology East, East State Street, Berry Street, Elm Street. Those are all roads that have the same street typology and they're all required to have the same street. And East State Street, the requirement is to have sidewalks on both sides because of the amount of pedestrian traffic, which is a lot. You need to have it on both sides. And according to the typology and we'll see how this comes out in the end, there should be an uphill bike lane. There should be on street parking on the downhill side and biking is shared on the downhill. So there'd be a share or for the downhill, because you can bike fast enough to move with traffic safely so they're going to allow that. But uphill, you can't pedal uphill fast enough to move with traffic so you have to have a bike lane so that it will probably be losing some parking on the uphill side. So we need to accommodate that. Okay, so that sidewalk requirement is somewhere else. Well, yeah, that's going through our capital plan. It's a policy. So there's a policy that says as we reconstruct roads, we will reconstruct them in accordance with our street typology plan because we have a plan of having complete streets throughout the city. We never set a date and that was one of the things we wanted to go and try to force them into a date so that way we could actually build it into the plan. I mean it costs more every time we fix a road if we're going to make it be a complete street, but we're never going to also have complete streets if we don't eventually get there and this, this has been an issue for a long time, especially if you were looking at Berlin Street, that's another one that routinely comes up. There's sidewalks that disappear and stop and Berlin Street is very similar to East State Street and these disappearing sidewalks and you're required to then cross the street to keep going up and it's not very dangerous. It should be on both sides. All right. Very good. We have to adjourn in a minute we had one more item left. And it was setting a time for the hearing. I don't think we need to have a lot of discussion. We're not ready in two weeks from now because we haven't voted this out. So, logically, the first meeting in November would be the earliest. Mike, if that works for you. I think it needs it needs a 15 day notice in the newspaper. That's why it takes, and that takes usually a week to get into the newspaper. So, if we wanted to get it in the newspaper to start having some hearings we would want to start thinking about when you put that in. If you think you're read if you think you'll be ready by the second meeting or the first meeting in November. Then let's go for that. If you think you need a little more time, we can plan on the second meeting in November. And yeah, so since we have to get out of here for another group, I'll take a motion to adjourn. I'll move to adjourn. Mission from our young second from. From John. All right, those in favor of journeying say aye. All right. See you next time.