 It's called the order of this April 25th meeting. I'm up here planning commission. First thing to do is approve the agenda. So someone's ready for. Motion to approve the agenda. So moved. Okay. We have a motion from Jeff. We have a second. Second. Second from Gabe. Okay. Those in favor of approving the agenda say I. Hi. Hi. Okay. Okay. Okay. We have a few things on our agenda that are update related. So I'll leave that for that. But one thing that's on the agenda is just thought to give an update that Marcella and I met this week and talking over some future planning stuff. And we just kind of a brainstorming session. And some of the stuff that we talked about will be coming up. But in general, you know, we were talking about. Doing some more, like, like working together as a planning commission to update the public on what we're up to a bit more. And we talked about some ways to do that. That we'll talk about later. And then gearing up towards our next hearings, doing some outreach. Where folks are no know what we're thinking like well ahead of time. So, so we'll talk about that later. But yeah, Marcella and I met. Brainstorms and things. I think it went really well. I don't know. I don't really have any other comments. Does anybody else have any updates or questions or remarks for things that aren't on the agenda? Okay. All good. Well, with that, I think the next thing is for Mike to update us on the city council votes on the river hazard. Regulations and the. Bylaws. Go ahead, Mike. All right. Yeah. So this should be really quick. Most of you probably know that we did pass the zoning. And the river hazard regulations. They were both approved. The. So the zoning, the two, two edits to the zoning one was the removal of. The number eight, which was the residential density, removing residential densities and 1500 riverfront. So that didn't survive. And they removed our recommended changes for the shading portion. But it sounds like in conversations that they're willing to entertain these things later on. They just. Weren't willing to make those changes at this time. So I think. Certainly we'll have to come back with some. Some discussion of changes. And we may have some conversations when we get down to number six and solar access. I don't know if we want to take these things up now. If we want to. Kind of capture what we were thinking and then kind of put it away or what our thoughts are going to be, but we can kind of take that up when we hit number six. But I think. We've got those two, two items. And then the other one would be if we get to it and if we want to go into executive session, we could talk about the other request that was related to the zoning, but they didn't take it up during the zoning, which was basically the. For lack of a better way of describing it, the boves proposal, which was to allow the DRB to take into consideration. A developer's reputation. And so we have a legal opinion on that, which we could talk about generally, but if we really want to get into seeing it and talking about it, then we'll have the opportunity. If we wanted to do it in executive session, we could. To just kind of get into detail and hear what the attorney had to say about that, that topic. So that'll be another one that at some point city council will probably want to hear back from planning commission on those three topics. And then we'll probably. It'll probably wouldn't. The zoning change wouldn't be made till this fall. And we already have a couple items on the list. For this fall that have come in. Some of them related to. CRS and floodplain rules. And we can't get enough points because our. Stormwater rules have a few little holes in them. So we've got to kind of fill in a few of those holes and clean up a few other pieces. So we've got a few little edits. We're going to do anyway. So we'll probably have a fall zoning update that we can put some proposals into. So that is it for the updates on that. Unless somebody has some questions. If they have questions about. Any of that. So maybe we're going to talk about this in the solar shading, but. And I apologize that I didn't listen to the city council meeting afterwards like gave did. That's great. But what was the. What was the opposition to the solar shading. What was the tenor of the com or the details of the comments. It was really a very. Small number of people. One of them was was at the planning commissions. Thomas Weiss talked about. He felt it was against the city plan. And there were a number of. Concerns about that. But then there was just a number of folks who were very much. Built my house. I've got. Passive solar and this is going to destroy everything. And I mean, they're really. I mean, in my opinion, a little over the top with their. Some of their. Concerns. But. In general, it didn't entirely surprise me. I know the council of very. Energy conscious. And so. I think they were. Kind of took a much more cautious approach to. Changing the zoning to the degree that we had proposed. So. Yeah, I'd say that's my, my interpretation is that. It's some city councilors themselves. Wanted to be more protective of. They, I think they wanted to probably feel like they're, they're being very careful and being protective of solar. I think that the things we pointed out to them, I think they did resonate. But I think they probably wanted more. And I think they kind of kicked it down the road. And. I think they understood how restricted the current one is, and that they're, that's. I didn't interpret things where, where the city council's. Determined to stick with the status quo. Like how, how strict regulation is now. They just, I think they want us to come back with something that's very detailed. They look a lot of support. You know, that's, that's my understanding. Yeah. So I think it was just like. Like Mike said, they're, they're very energy oriented. And they're thinking so. John's done a bunch of extra research. I mean, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, we came with some pretty strong points about how the trees and the terrain are the big shading problem by far. Like overwhelmingly. But. I don't know. I guess in hindsight, we may have been successful if we came with language for that. But I don't know. I don't know. Probably would have gone better. But so now we'll just, when we go back next time, we'll. Know what they want better. Yeah. Does anybody else have any more questions about this stuff? You know, just, just a comment. I saw, well, it may come up a little bit later, but I know you sort of drafted a memo about, you know, our desire to have lots of public input. I think that's really great. I wonder, you know, if. You know, if we're going to have a meeting, we're going to have a meeting with the proposals, but some of these things that are, you know, more controversial. If we ought to have an opinion that we've written that explains, so people could read that ahead of time. You know, because the reality on the solar issue is you really can't do infill. You know, it's a, it's fairly new in the zoning. But, you know, as we saw from John's data, like, we just explained. You know, we're going to have an opportunity prior to the meeting to understand our perspective as opposed to like you trying to defend it in the meeting, you know, on density, like maybe we could just put our opinion out somewhere publicly and explain the why. Yeah, we're going to talk about that a little bit later. We're going to. That was part of what Marcel and I were talking about, kind of changing our approach. To outreach and. So yeah, we'll talk about that. But yeah, keeping the public updated and stating our case, not just our case, but just letting them know how our discussions are going and inviting people to participate in that very early on, something we'll start trying to do. I do think though with some, with some distance between the hearings and now I've kind of just come to understand that like, you know, it's a political system. It's a political process. Like these things are going to happen. I don't feel like we've like lost anything here, but nevertheless, it's better. It's better to increase our process and prove our process as we go to. Okay. Do we have anything else for we. I. Well, do we have anything else before we move on? I think I want to skip the solar access discussion until John gets here because he's done that extra research and it'd be good for him to talk about that. So if we can. Just bump that down a spot or two. And then just jump right into the. To the, to the letter. So I, so I wrote this letter of the idea of the letter was transparency and goodwill. That was the tone I was hoping for. But yeah, like everybody's feedback and, and whether they think this is a good idea for us to put in the bridge or times Argus and. Or where you think we're, where should we, where should we put it? And what should we do with it? Anybody have any thoughts? I think I noticed that no one did any. Editing. In the file from what I could tell. What are your thoughts? I don't know what the timeline is on getting it out. I thought it was. Great. I might want to suggest some edits. I guess my only thought was like, and I don't have the sentences in my brain right now, but making the connection between housing and. And zoning a little more. Like explicit in some way, I guess, was my first impression after reading it. Like I'd like to find some. Sentences to make that connection more. Yeah. That was my only reaction, but I don't know what the deadline is for, you know, going in and making it. Yeah, it's, it's up to us. So if, if we want to. Plan to maybe vote on it and pass it out next time. Give people extra time to. Make edits. Sound good. Anyone else have any thoughts about things. That's where they are on that. That sounds great. Sounds great if you want to go in and do that. I guess I'm just, I guess I'm just trying to figure out, I'm trying to figure out what the, what's the core problem we're trying to address with this letter. We're trying to maybe, maybe another way to put it is, what's the four problem and who's, and who's the intended audience. That's, that's a great question. For me, the intended audience is people who were not going to, were not going to come to meetings. We're not going to come to city council. They have other things to do, but they, but they might see something in the paper and want to know more. So like, how do we, how do we reach those folks? And I think that that's an important group to me. Because I, I'm not entirely comfortable with like the only voices. Or the only people who know what's going on or the ones who are, you know, coming to meetings and paying close attention. So I think that's a great question. I'd like to, I'd like to have a broader reach to let people know what we're up to and also not have us like hide away and only show up every once in a while at a city council meeting. Does that answer your question? Kind of. I mean, I still don't understand. What's the, what's the problem? I mean, I understand that we have a sort of a broad. Want to have as much. As much as we can, but why this letter? Why now? I like, I like the, I like the letter approach because it's, it's, I don't like taking up a lot of time in our meetings, doing outreach stuff. I don't see that as our main duty, but it, it's better government to do those things. So like things like the letter and I hadn't gotten to it yet, but Marcel and I talked about doing like a monthly or so, like around every month do an update of just, you know, one of us right up like a summary of what we've been up to and putting that out there to, and you know, this letter would be the first of these sort of update newsletter type things. It doesn't take a lot of time away from our meetings this way and, but it's still. And it means that we're doing a little bit more outreach that we're doing a little bit more to reach out to the public. The problem is just, we don't, yeah, transparency. Do you have any more thoughts about Aaron? I mean, I just, I guess I'm just a little, I'm not quite sure what exactly the driver of this letter just because I understand what you're saying sort of in a broad context. My thought is, you know, these are public meetings. They're recorded. I have no idea who watches them or when. And I, again, I just, I'm trying to, I'm trying to suss out with why, why do this now and what. Part of it, yeah, part of it is, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This just feels like there is some sort of an intended audience. And I'm just not aware of what it is. Like there's some trigger for this letter. Yeah. Well, part of it is that being aware of the fact that this, the city plan is coming up. We're going to have more zoning changes coming up or we'll be responding to the Congress for new urbanism coming up. We're a, I feel like we're, we're on the kind of precipice of do, like doing things that's going to impact the public more and that it's a good time for us to kind of up the outreach that we're doing. So I think it's just all the things coming up as is a big part of the trigger of like just knowing that the public is going to start or at least the city council is going to start hearing from us quite a bit in the next half a year. So to, to kind of get out ahead of that with the outreach and transparency. So, so to me that, that's a much more concise and sort of more well structured approach to the letter. I think what you just said makes a lot of sense. To just, if we, if what we want to do is to sort of give notice to the public that we are engaged in a variety of substantial, you know, projects. And let's just have the letter say that, I mean, just say, this is, you know, dear public, here's what we're up to. We're engaged in it. You know, we're in the front end of a couple of things. We're in the middle of a couple of things and we're nearing the finish line in a big things. Just want to let, you know, we want to apprise you of what's going on and we'd like to hear, you know, we'd like you to be engaged if you're curious. That's, I think that's the letter. The, I think the, the thing that sort of makes it confusing for me is, is that there is a lot of discussion and sort of broader problems. And there's a sort of recognizing, you know, sort of the housing issue and whatnot. And it, it's sort of just, I'm trying to figure out what it is, but what you just explained to me makes a ton of sense. And I think that is a very good idea. So there may be a way to, to maybe pair this down a little bit or to make, have it be a little more focused. And I think that that would do exactly what you're saying. I think that's what you just said to me makes sense. But we can work on, but that's really helpful. Yeah, I think we can, we can make, definitely make changes to make that. What I said before, make it clear that, you know, that's part of the, the catalyst for this. I like the theme, the theme of housing though, because it's such a big thing as touching everything right now. I think this stuff, like if we're going to keep doing this, that these letters will have different themes. I mean, there's been, I've heard that. And I'm saying this right now, guys, by the way, to get your, to get what you think to get feedback about it. Like having like down the road, having one of these that also has a theme of like explaining the density stuff, because a big part of why we've entered into, why we included density in the last proposals was to make people understand that better. And we kind of started that conversation, but we have, we haven't done thorough outreach about it. So I was thinking like, like one of these could be about density coming up, probably have one about solar shading. And then put this stuff out here a month or two before it, you know, hits the public as something we're proposing. What are your thoughts about, so what are your thoughts about having some themes with these things? I think if I, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead, Marcella. Well, I don't, I like, I'm a fan of themes. And I'm feeling like what Erin said makes a lot of sense as well. And like could pretty easily kind of be the lead part of the letter. And then, you know, so if people only read the first part of the letter, it was like, okay, we're, we're moving into a period of different types of community outreach around the plan and around zoning and, you know, take off a few things. And then another paragraph or two about the topic du jour. Go ahead, Mike. Yeah, I was just going to follow up on Erin's comments. Cause I thought it was, um, I thought they were good because I think in some ways I think it's what's, what's missing. I think a little bit in the letter is maybe the, um, the specificity or the timing of things. So, um, I think if we opened with a more, the general letter like you're putting together and then said, you know, so we're going to be having more public input this year. And these are the topics that we're going to be, um, coming up on. So, and, and these are the places we're going to advertise and we're going to do outreach. So if you're interested in keeping up on these, this is, this is when they're going to be up because we really aren't. I, I hate to have some of the open-ended, you know, it's kind of like the, want to hear a comment on what you do about the housing shortage. And I think my young people have different opinions in planning and beyond about what's the best way of doing it. And I always, I'm always of the opinion that you put together a proposal or a list of ideas and then you get, get responses as opposed to giving people a blank sheet of paper. Um, so I think if we were going to put something in there, say, hey, let's have ideas on the housing, housing shortage, then we would say our June 12th meeting is going to be a conversation about, um, strategies. Um, and here's, here's the current, you know, implementation strategies that we've drafted. If, if that's, you know, that way there's a very specific or to go through and say, hey, we're going to be doing more outreach. Um, we plan to advertise our outreach in, um, a monthly letter to the bridge. So keep an eye on your bridge. We're going to be on the weekly report coming out of the manager's office and we're going to be putting something on front porch for him. So, um, lots of places for you guys to, to hear about it. And we now also have can capital area and neighborhoods. So that contract has been signed with sustainable mob pillar. So that's, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, but it's supposed to be more of a direct connection to some of the, so if we have a specific case like North Field Street or Heaton, we go to can and they would reach out to the neighborhood. So that way a little bit of the question of, you know, we sent letters to every property owner and then we get hammered because we didn't go door to door handing notices to renters. And it's like, well, you know, that there's, there's a line at point at which we can, we can go to, but the advantage of can is the city's already paying sustainable mob pillar to do this. So as long as somebody signs up for can, signs up for the weekly reports, reads the bridge articles, you know, there are plenty of ways to stay in touch about what's going on. And then, and then we want to hear from you. And, you know, here's the date for you to participate. So that way I think if we were able to tighten up, so take what you've done and then either tighten it up or simply say these are the places to keep an eye out for the next things. You know, we'll let you know when the next public input session is and these are the topics. So Mike, tell us more about can and how we can provide content for that? Or is like, how is this a tool that we could possibly use for outreach? Well, certainly it's going to be a big tool as we get into the city plan. When we do the land use section of the plan, we're going to probably want to use can a lot. So capital area network or capital area neighborhoods came out of 2006, 2007, 2008. My predecessor did a lot of stuff that had maybe even four VISTAs or something. They had a ton of volunteer help and they organized and ran the capillary networks to build the last plan. So that is really, they have, they'll divide the city into 16, 17 neighborhoods or something like that. And then they'll have a coordinator for each one of those. So you guys have met Peter Kelman. Peter is the one for Mountain View Drive up by National Life and kind of up that direction. So he's the can coordinator up there. So he goes around and gets organized, gets people's names and email addresses. Then what would happen is if we've got something that could affect that neighborhood, then we would go through in the planning department, send a note to sustainable Montpelier who would then get things out to Peter or whoever the coordinator is. So we don't have to manage and maintain the capillary neighborhoods. They are managed by the sustainable Montpelier. So if you guys want to have something that goes out, you would just send it to me. I would then forward it on to the capillary network or neighborhood. Would something like this letter we're working on be appropriate for that? Or is it normally not something that long? Yeah, I mean it's because it's broad. They'll send it to all the, because this is a townwide thing, it would go to everybody. So I think if you've got something that's ready to go, then we would probably send it off. We could send it off to the capillary neighborhoods and then they can distribute it to everybody. Okay, that's good to know about. Yeah, so that's going to be another one that we're working on. The other new one that's not going to be necessarily directly to this, but the city also signed a contract with Polco, P-O-L-C-O, something like that, which is a polling software that the city now has access to. So it's not going to really help us with getting your letter out, but if you're in the back of your mind as you're thinking about what ways we can do public input and get thoughts, what the Polco could be used for. So as we move forward and we're like, what does the public think about this, this or this? We could have a poll that goes out and kind of get some input on it. Okay. That all sounds great. And I think that maybe we should use CAN for this outreach we're talking about for this time in the future. I was also, yeah, I was assuming we put this in the bridge. Does anybody have feelings about whether the bridge or the Times-Argus are what's the most appropriate place to reach out? I think Times-Argus would have to be a lot shorter for it to be in the editorial or the comments. It also may be just more appropriate in the bridge because it's more pillar-specific where Times-Argus is a regional newspaper. Okay. Yeah. I'm fine with the bridge. I was just wondering if other folks had thoughts. And is everybody okay with the idea I floated before about, we'll do some of these that are like topic-oriented and then other ones, Marcel and I were talking about we could do as just updates. Like if we don't have anything in particular we want to reach out about, like if we do these updates though, I'll want to delegate that and maybe delegate it a month ahead of time. So and so this month, use the minutes, use your own notes, put together a summary for what we've been up to the past month. What do people think about doing something like that? I like it. Sorry, jumping in. I wonder whether just the more transparent Google Doc and having everyone contribute ideas rather than centralizing everything with one person one month. Or is that what you're saying? I was just thinking about what the process I was thinking was we delegate to someone and let them know ahead of time so that they're not having to research after the fact. So that way we can share the workload. So like nobody is doing it more than like once a year. And then we would all approve it though before it goes out. That's good. Yeah, and I'm thinking these would be real short like paragraph or two. So theoretically you know except I suppose it could be different if we're talking about like putting out more education about density or solar shading we might need a little more space on those but for these kind of regular updates I think they could be pretty short. With a little general with a point to where you can find more information and engage further. Other attorneys are struggling to figure out how to write a letter in one paragraph here. So that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think we're going to go back to the plain language thing. Yeah, okay. So it sounds like we have a plan. Do we have anyone who would like to take on the first update which we would put out maybe beginning in June at this point between now and then. I feel like it should be me and I just wanted to let you know that I really like to do this. But I do like to do it and one of the things I do stuff is just with nominating committee. I just have too much going on. So I'm happy to do it at a different time. But if we're going to do it now I just can't. That's fine. Again, I'm saying like we assigned it now. So someone knows that. So I don't want to be the but they want to be more transparent. We already have minutes and you can expand on the minutes a little bit, but to make it really relevant for people to really understand, they really, they're gonna need to watch the meeting or participate in the meeting, but also it would be a multi-page document. So I'm feeling like we'd be better off to put things out ahead of time, like Mike was saying, like maybe you put out a general note at the beginning saying, hey, you know, like Aaron said, here's all the things we have coming up. And then when there's a weighty matter, like we have two issues, we know people are very concerned about it. We have solar, we have density. So as we get to having those meetings, and I agree with Mike, you know, like you don't want to blank sheet of paper, let's make sure we have some proposals and then we have a public hearing, right? And we can put something out publicly ahead of time on that issue, right? That's a little bit deeper and prepares people to come and get in comment. As opposed to like writing something that's a little bit longer than the minutes, but still isn't much more useful. Yeah, I hear you, I hear you. Just the balance we're going for with this is like something that's not going to take a lot of time from us. It's not going to distract a lot, but something that's going to actually, you know, be more than just the bare minimum about reach. You know, the bare minimum I think is we have minutes, you know, like, so do a little better than that, but you know. What if we said like quarterly or something instead of monthly? That way, and then, you know, then it would coincide with like by annual zoning updates and a couple of other things. And the stuff on the ground could be on front porch form, either proactively or responding to people with whatever arguments or bad shaped stuff they may have on tap. I mean, I think just this all comes sort of back to me. What is the core concern that we're trying to address and how do we do it most efficiently? And I tend to agree with Gabe. I mean, we have minutes, we record the meetings. I don't think there's an issue with our transparency. You know, this is more of an exercise in trying to be, to create outreach, but I'm still a little bit of a loss of what's lacking right now that we need outreach for. To be clear, Aaron and Gabe, you guys, not fans of the update thing, but you're fine with the topical outreach stuff. Is that correct? Yeah, I think we need to do that, but I think we need to have had our, you know, like Mike was saying, like we need to make sure we really know what it is and provide some, you know, provide our view of why this is important and, you know, and then people come prepared and we have a more meaningful conversation, but absolutely. I mean, maybe we start with that and see how it goes and if it feels like it's creating some more generative engagement or if it's not enough. I mean, I hear what you're saying about the minutes and the videos, but like pretty self-selecting is, you know, who's gonna feel like that's accessible and, you know, that coming to a meeting feels good. I don't know, it just, it isn't, I feel like more is good, but I mean, with capacity and stuff, I, what if, as I'm hearing, I was of, you know, originally of the opinion, we should do it more often, but hearing the discussion, like maybe we'd just start with the topical stuff and that makes Kirby's focus on housing a little bit more relevant for that first letter and then we do another one in the fall for the zoning stuff. We're leading up, we do two, one on each topic leading up to that. I think it would need, I think it needs two, they're both pretty dense topics, no pun intended. And I think we're gonna have a lot of public input over the next year. And I think it's, the letter is similar to what you're talking about, it's gonna be important. You know, this city plan, I don't expect us to just develop this city plan and then roll it out into public hearing. This is gonna be one that as we're, you know, we'll get to it later on with the consultant. You know, this is gonna be a process of developing these where we're gonna be putting these chapters together, getting them online and immediately trying to get people to start giving us public input and comment on them. So I think this is gonna be a process throughout this year where this is, they aren't gonna be true public hearings, but I think we're gonna be dedicating time and meetings, you know, maybe special meetings, you know, and maybe in other times we've done, you know, a booth at the farmer's market and stuff like that to try to make sure we open up as many opportunities to get people to start knowing this is going on. We're doing the city plan update. Here's the draft, here's where you can find it online. Please review it, please get us comments, you know, here are all the places and ways you can give us comments. And I think there's gonna be a, I think input is going to be a big part of the next 12 months because of the city plan. It's just by its nature. But we do have zoning updates as well that we have to fit in there as well. And I think some of the theme conversations that you're having, you know, we do know we're gonna have this conversation on shading. Let's have a public input meeting before we make a draft for public hearing. You know, instead, generally we've been putting everything together, going to public hearing and getting our public comment. And maybe this time we'll take a step back. We'll say, we wanna have more, we wanna redress this density issue let's have some public input before that. How much can we get, can we get some, you know, dedicate a public meeting before we actually put pen to paper to draft up the thing. So I think we've kind of got two different buckets, but the goal of trying to maximize and increase our input, I think, hopefully is should be a big part of this year anyways. And we can start to direct people when we're ready. I don't wanna start directing people to start giving us public input. If it's just gonna take time away from us actually getting the stuff ready for them to review. I'd rather be in a position where, you know, our housing chapter, our transportation chapter are ready to go, they're on the website, let's start getting some input. Now we can go and work on the energy and historic resources while we're getting input on those. Then the next month or two months later we've got two more chapters up on the website. And then we've got two more that are coming up. And hopefully by the end of the year we have 11 chapters up on the website and we're just getting public input on what people think of the city plan, what's good, what's bad, what they like, what they don't like. So that sounds good, Mike. I mean, the only caveat I would add to that though is that I think we do need to reach people other than just that subset who wants to come and talk out of here. Like most people are not in that subset. So I do feel, I'll feel better if we're informing and reaching out to people who aren't just in that subset. But it sounds like we're gonna do that with the topical outreach. But yeah, I like having a diverse approach not just doing here and stuff. Yeah, and we can look at other things. Like I said, when we're doing the city plan we can have a much broader conversation about, okay, do we wanna just, I can set up meetings at the senior center so we meet with seniors during the day. We can set up meetings. We can do presentations to, if there's a business group, we can have a meeting with a business group and kind of show them what the economic development plan looks like. Maybe they don't care about the other chapters. We can have a conversation, have a meeting at a housing task force. And or just, as I said, the farmer's market is always a great place to have these. The Historic Preservation Commission did a lot of these at the farmer's market. Setting up tables at Shaw's or at the co-op. Yeah, if somebody's gotta sit out there and kind of talk to people or have a couple of people there to talk to people. But that's what we're trying to do to kind of get a handful of people to start to talk to you about it. It's not a bad idea. If people are willing to go spend time doing that. I had a thought, I lost it. But it was an important question to the group. Maybe I'll come up later. Too bad. It was about, it was about the letter. Oh, do we want to involve other committees? You know, that was the thought originally. That idea, just full disclosure came from Lauren Hero, one of the city councilors when I talked to her about doing this. And it seemed good at the time, but I don't know if we're trying to make it our committee reaching out on these specific things that has a lot to do with us. Maybe it doesn't make as much sense to try to bring in another committee. Like this one, since it was about housing, I was thinking housing task force makes a lot of sense. But I don't know, if this is gonna be a newsletter type thing from us, then maybe it's not worth bringing other committees. What are people's thoughts about that? I think we can certainly, you know, network with them and let them know something's coming if it's relevant to their subject area. And then they can reflect on it, share it. If there's a notice accompanying, are we still talking about the letter itself or the overall outreach, okay, the letter? If we post something simultaneously on front porch forum, that there's something in the bridge that we just go ahead and read it and committee members from the other committee could respond there. And just from my point of view, I'm also on the complete streets committee and I'm sure some of those people would, you know, at least back us up or respond on a front porch notice about a certain thing about transport or land use if they had a heads up. Okay, yeah, that raises some other questions. Do we wanna put this stuff on front porch forum? I'm not good at keeping up with front porch forum, but I know people are, there's just so much. Does the city have an account that we would post it from or is it like individuals? I don't have access, but I know our zoning administrator signed up. You have to be a resident. So sometimes it can be tricky to get in if you're not a resident and I'm not. Right, yeah. I know that I just thought that they were, so we've talked about this for work. I just thought it was kind of like if you were doing quote, business-y type stuff, you needed to have like a, you kind of needed to have a business account rather than, but I suppose given that this is volunteer, we're volunteers, it might be able to just post by ourselves, which I think I've seen before. I mean, we could create a special account, which I think actually might make sense because if someone uses their personal account and they'll feel like their personal account is now attached to this, and I don't know, I don't want anyone to, any individuals to feel like they're free speeches, you know, mixing with this stuff. Yeah, I'm good for that. I don't know what the cost is for things like that, unless we could do it, so volunteer thing would have to look into it. Well, if anybody feels compelled to do front-force forms, if Jeff brought it up, like you guys, if you guys want to look into it and see how we can do that, then we can maybe have that discussion later, but for now, plan on the bridge and can, if that sounds okay. So about other committees, do you have any other thoughts about, I mean, whether we should, for this particular one, reach out to Housing Task Force to have them be a co-author or just us be the sole author and share it with them and do it that way? Yeah, I just think us being the sole author of these, this outreach effort is probably the best we could go. And we can certainly pass them that we have an input or suggested edits or whatever, but that would keep it to a minimum. Yeah, it seems fine by me. Does anybody have any other thoughts? Okay, so we'll just do that. Okay, sounds like we have a plan for this stuff. So we'll put it on the agenda next week too, to pass a letter. If people can put their comments in, I put in a couple of quick bullet points in the document, just as we were talking about things people flagged to try to include. It sounds like the intro language is what people want to work on to make the intro clear about why we're doing it. I think I'll just plan to leave that to others and we'll revisit it at the next meeting, okay? So let's circle back. John Adams, we were waiting for you to talk about the solar shading on the agenda because we know that you did some additional research. So with solar access, the solar question, we're gonna have to come up with a detailed policy that's different than what we did last time and develop that out. And it would probably go into the next round of zoning changes as part of that. To catch you up, John, in case you missed it, we talked about doing, we're gonna plan to do a little bit of public outreach on topics over the next months and we'll probably do publish something just explaining and talking about our views on solar access is one of those things. We'll also need to be developing that policy. It doesn't have to be done until it's ready to, you know, until later, but we could work on it now. So that's a question that's open. I don't know, what thoughts do you have, John, after your additional research? Yeah, so I guess, just stepping back, I guess I'll say I was surprised at how restrictive the regulation was. I did not think it would, it was that it would have such a significant impact. And by that, I mean, doing the analysis of, you know, what we currently have that would at least require the, that wouldn't pass that calculation. You know, I know you could, there's an opportunity to do some kind of analysis that would, you could maybe demonstrate somehow that it didn't do that. I obviously did not do that for every property immobiliar, but just the fact that, you know, such a huge significant percentage of our properties would have to go through that and potentially not meet that requirement was, it was surprising to me and forget exactly what those numbers came out to be, but it was in terms of housing units, probably close to half or less than half, definitely half of our, of the city's grand list, almost all of our, you know, historic buildings that are not on the outskirts of town. It's almost like everything that was built before zoning, where we've, which makes sense, which, you know, where we would have had these, these large setback requirements in these, in these like 60s and 70s style zoning. So, yeah, I just wanted to start by saying that and I sent those slides, I think, which show you the building footprints of those properties. So, that was surprising. And then I did a more elaborate, I took some areas and did a more elaborate solar insulation analysis, more, if anything, maybe more for my curiosity, which found, they basically, I used a digital elevation model and removed all the structures from one model and kept them in another. And then just looked at, I did an analysis on for that December 21st date, which I think is, I don't think is a good date to use because it's, when there's the least amount of solar access, but so anyhow, and what was interesting is, you know, city-wide, rather somewhat insignificant because generally speaking, the amount of building footprints across the city compared to the rest of the line areas and that isn't that large. But I think what was more interesting is when you do compare areas or when you run the analysis with and without buildings, with buildings, you end up, or without the buildings, you know, you have more of this partial shade, which makes sense, you know, your trees, lose their leaves, you get a mix of some partially shaded areas. And then with some buildings, you have more areas that are maybe fully shaded, but you have more areas that receive a much higher level of full sun. And that's where, that's where all 90% of the solar panels are immobiliar. So all of that to say, you know, if this is really about solar access and generating power using solar energy, we need roofs to put those on because that's where they go and that's what generates the highest amount of of solar access. So all that to say, I don't think that, I think the regulation we have currently is deceptively written and calling it solar access is doing everyone maybe a disservice. You know, there's certainly a case to be made for, people have, you know, not having your entire property being shaded by an enormous building that's built next to you, you know, a lot of, that's why zoning came to be, you know, with in New York City over 100 years ago. But I think we have other regulations in place that would prevent massive skyscrapers from shadowing our properties along with, you know, building footprint, massing other setback requirements. We have a lot of these other things and that has more to do with, you know, site plan design and the mobility rather than just explicitly solar shading. So sorry if that was a, a ramble there, but that was more or less my takeaway from looking at all of that. You know, I think we could replace it with, you know, of course, buildings should not shade existing, new buildings should not shade existing solar panels. You know, that makes a lot of sense, but I think as currently written, it seems like this regulation could do a surprising amount of harm in preventing, especially any kind of multifamily or rentalizing, which in the analysis of buildings was almost all of those buildings, you know, would not meet that equation. So I think, I think when we revisit this and we do outreach, I think we'll need to explain all of that. I think also we, and people tell me what they think about the persuasive value of this, but I think putting it in the context of how this was passed in the first place. When I talked to the city council, I mentioned that I was on the planning commission. I'm pretty sure when we did this, because I was on there at the end of the zoning bylaws, like for the second half or so of the zoning bylaws being passed. And like I had no idea that this would be effective in this way. It sounds like John, you didn't have any idea that it would, you know, effectively work this way. My convention before that this came from the consultants, I think, and it was just some stock language taken from somewhere, which apparently that place was a, like, so we dropped in maybe the strictest version of this kind of thing possible, maybe. So I don't know if that context helps people. I think it helps because it helps people realize like this is partially so bad because we didn't realize, and maybe there's a better way to put it or a better way to phrase it, but starting from the point of like, no, like we didn't know that it was going to work like this in the first place. And that's part of the reason why it needs to be fixed. I don't know, what are you guys? I mean, I usually start from the perspective of, you know, in terms of what we're legally enabled to do, and that's enabled, you know, if we're taking away people's property rights, we need to have a very good reason, right? We need to have some kind of evidence to suggest why someone can't do that build there. And there's, you know, plenty of various good reasons why we don't allow just anyone to do anything, the environmental degradation or building the floodplain, et cetera. In this case, I don't feel like we've received, we've received evidence to suggest that this is in the public interests and warrants the planning commission taking away someone's right to build on this basis. So flipping it on its head, I don't think we've just, I don't think we've received anything that justifies us doing this. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's a better place to start the conversation rather than the context thing I was thinking of. Yeah. It doesn't always work or resonate with people, you know, like we have no real good reason for why we have density requirements, but it's not a very compelling argument, I guess. So if I could just comment and, Mike, if this is kind of appropriate, please let me know. And you just, the only project that's come up where I just was coming to question the project that I'm doing right now, I refuse myself in the original discussion, but I think it's interesting just to say when I put that project forward to the DRB, the engineers' interpretation of the guidance was that it really had to do with buildings that had stuck at the southern view, right? So, and my building didn't have anything to do with it. The DRB interpreted that a different way that it had to do with any shading anytime December 8th. And so that we were, you know, we had to come back in and demonstrate that the trees actually above the hill actually provided more shading than the building did. And so then it went through, but it seems like maybe there's sort of, Mike, is there a way that we could get some interpretive guidance that would make it very clear that it's really, we don't, you know, that it's at the intent that it's to protect those, you know, those southern reviews of, you know, so people have the opportunity to put up solar panels or they have really good passive solar as you, as you, you know, the analysis you just put forward, like a lot of us don't have that anywhere, right? We're just not in a good place because it drained the trees anyway, but it really was meant to, you know, to keep people from putting that in a long place, right? It's a good spot. Yeah, it kind of, it's not completely clear in rules. There are kind of two formulas that are in there. And so it depends if you're the applicant or if you're the person who is the abutter. And I, what happened a little bit was we kind of looked at it from the standpoint of staff, kind of looking at the picture, that little picture they show there. And it's like, well, here's the shortcut. If you're looking to the north, if your building is going to go and cross this 20-foot fence image on December 21st or following this image, then you're over and you've got, you're going to impact the solar. Now in Gabe's project, north of his property, because you know, obviously the sun's coming in from the south, so you're looking on the north property line, is the street. So he actually kind of got out of it a bit because he's not going to be impacting his neighbor because there's a street before the neighbor's house, so he was kind of able to get out. Now the neighbor was able to look at the formula and that's looking at what's happening between nine o'clock and three o'clock on December 21st. So now the sun is rising over here, making an arc and then coming down over here. So what that person was able to start to argue to the DRB and to staff is that, well, regardless of that fact, I'm to his east, so we're up to the west of him. So when the sun comes up in the east and comes across at this really low angle, now it's going to make a shade on my house. And so the DRB was kind of left in this, okay, now we've kind of got this conflicting set of rules. One that says, look at what happens on December 21st and one says, look at the kind of the shortcut. And the DRB kind of fell in the shortcut and said, well, the shortcut can trump. And in that case, that's pointing to the north, in which case it's not affecting the person who's complaining right now, who is to the west. So it wasn't clear. Certainly their things could be better, but I think if we're going to rewrite it, the point is what should the rules be? Had your property been in a slightly different location, it may have been much more difficult for the DRB to kind of do one of these two because they're able to say, oh, north is up here, that's the street. We're going with that because we think that's, we're going to use that as our excuse. So it's not something that could be fixed by a city engineer opinion about how to interpret that. I'd have to look at it with this, probably the city attorney to go through and see which one we think. Off the top of my head, I don't remember. It comes up so infrequently. I do remember getting to Kirby's question about the history of this coming in. I did have a sense that this was going to be problematic when it was being drafted. But remember, we had a completely different group and they were looking at different things. So we had Barb and Kim Chini and a number of folks who had different viewpoints and opinions on things. And so for me, I thought this was going to be a problematic one, which is why the two pieces I thought were going to be problematic. One was the architectural standards and the other one was the shading standards. And so both of them, I very carefully maneuvered and manipulated to get them in to only apply in major site plans. So that way it was basically getting us out of having it happen very often because we don't do very many major site plans. But they do happen and this is a case where one did show up. Other cases that we've had major site plans hasn't been an issue. Caledonia Spirits, big building, not big enough to make a difference. It's got enough of a setback. It's not close to anything. It may make a shade, but it's not going to impact anything. I just didn't know if there was a shortcut because it's interesting the comments and maybe Kirby have a different impression because you were trying to defend it, but it seems like most of the people who are coming forward were talking about their opposition had to do with passive solar. And again, that could be anything. Right, and that's somebody wants to grow vegetables off. All of a sudden you can't do the infill. Yeah, there were two major ones. One was passive solar. I'm not able to heat my house. I wanted to heat my house with the sun during the winter and shading it. If somebody can shade it, then I'm losing my ability to do it and I spent all this money building a passive solar house. That was one argument. The other one was we should all be vegetable and food secure. We should be encouraging and supporting people's ability to grow vegetables and having their own gardens. And that was argument number two. Now I think some, depending on what the public policy is, growing gardens, we don't need to use December 21st if we're talking about yards. If assuming we were talking about let's regulate solar. We shouldn't be using December 21st because you're not growing gardens. So show me what the shading diagram looks like on June 21st. And I'll tell you what, it's gonna be completely different. And then we have to say, okay, what time? If you're talking about seven o'clock at night on June 21st, it's gonna cast a long shadow, but is that gonna impact somebody's ability to grow a garden? No, probably not. So we'd probably just need to go and look at some rules if we were gonna do that. But if we're looking at passive solar of a house, then shading somebody's yard doesn't make a difference. Shading somebody's house might make a difference. How much solar shading is unreasonable? And I think we've gotta go from, right now they're talking about no solar shading. And I think we could argue that that's really an unreasonable standard that for 20 minutes on December 21st, I shade the last three inches of your house. That's too much, that's unacceptable, that's unreasonable. And I think we can say that rule sounds unreasonable. We have to find a balance that says, okay, what would be a reasonable rule? If we're gonna protect passive solar, what is reasonable? And maybe it's a March 21st standard, or maybe it's a, I don't know. And as a candidate, looking at John's maps, looking at John's maps, it may be something that's completely based on where you are to go through and say, it's just not reasonable to think that you're gonna be in a residential 6000 or residential 3000 or residential 1500 and not have any solar impacts from your neighbor because chances are good, you're impacting your neighbor right now. So to have a rule that says others can't shade you but you can shade others isn't really equitable or fair. So it may just be that in these zoning districts, we're not gonna regulate it because guess what? For every one of you that's complaining, your house is probably shading your neighbors. So not to mention like 97% of shading in the city is from trees, and we're not saying like, all right, we're not advocating to cut down trees here. And there's no like height restrictions or setbacks requirements on trees. So it just feels disingenuous to say that this is really about solar shading. And the other thing I think that we should keep in mind is because of this is a major subclan requirement, this really has like a disparate impact on low income households. And we're only subjecting or preventing the development of rental and multi-family housing. This isn't applied to single-family homes. I don't know if you looked carefully at the building for Pernice, should have added more context, but the homes on College Street do not meet this requirement. Like this isn't like, we're not talking about these 10 story monolithic buildings shading here, we're talking about some, basically what homes in my peer look like cannot meet this requirement. I think we know our policy of reasoning. Hopefully, John, you're keeping track. I know I'm not in one place keeping track of all these arguments that we're going over, but I think we need to do that. I think it sounds like we should strike while the iron's hot. This is all in our minds, we all know what we're doing. So maybe we should go ahead and put together a new proposal and then we'll have to shelf it for the next time we go to city council. Unless people feel strongly that we insist on sending it back right away. At any rate, I think it might be a good idea for us to go ahead and have a new proposal, have all the policy reasoning there, maybe go ahead and even draft the outreach we plan to do based on all this reasoning. But it means that we need to get into the pieces of a new proposal. And I know John, you said earlier, basically the same thing that we proposed before, but I think city council wants something different. But I think we, as a person who lacks efficiency, I kind of hate this, but I feel like what we sent before was incredibly simple and it was a turnoff I think. So if we adjust, which I don't like that reaction, so I think simple is better with the law for lots of reasons, but maybe we send back something that's an adjustment that has more pieces to it. And I can go through the things that Mike had pointed out earlier and that's been said in this conversation and maybe next time we can plan to vote on a version of this that's new. So let me go through the different pieces. Remove shading on, so one thing would be to remove shading on yards and walls from the requirement. So make your roofs only. Another thing would be to allow actions to mitigate or minimize the impact of shading instead of precluding development altogether. Another thing would be to exempt the most highly developed neighborhoods from requirements. This is all stuff from Mike's list, by the way. The next thing would be to change the date from December 21st. And then the last thing would be to allow DRV to provide a waiver. So since we're talking about this now, since the policy reasons are fresh on our minds, do we want to ask Mike, because I think that's the appropriate way and Mike, correct me if you think there's a better way for it to ask Mike for our next meeting to give us language to incorporate some or all of those things that we said. Well, I don't think the idea was that we would incorporate all of those. Those were six options. And I was kind of hoping they would be choosing one out of that list of six or seven or coming up with some other ones. You know, if you guys have other ideas or other ways to skin the cat on this one, that. Well, I think some of those things can be mixed and mashed. I mean, we can make your roof only and also allow a waiver and also change the date. But is that what do you think? I guess if I had, if you gave me guidance, I, you know, you'd have to pick which ones you want me to try to use as, to craft it, I guess. Do we feel like we have a sense of what's the best approach? Maybe that was part of the issue of city council felt like there were too many options and we didn't give specifics. I mean, I think we've got to start with the, well, what the, and this, this will go back to Sima Aaron's piece, kind of going back to what's our policy objective. You know, why are we doing this in the first place? Or John mentioned that, you know, what is our policy objective? Why are we doing this? And you know, if your policy objective is what was proposed by some of the people who are making the arguments. And I really think that group that spoke is a big minority, or is a very small minority of folks. And they were just looking for something and a number of them had an axe to grind in a reason for doing it. I won't get into entirely, you know, one of them who didn't want to have any of the shading on their property was currently appealing to try to go and keep somebody from being able to move a property. So they're in the middle of an appeal. So it was kind of self fulfilling argument there. But I do think, you know, we would have to go through and say, you know, I would start with, if the public policy objective is this, then I think this is the appropriate set of regulations. Or here's, you know, a couple of ways to accomplish that. But, you know, and we've got to decide, are, is sustainable individual food source growing? You know, is that the, is that public policy we're trying to advance with this shading? Then we kind of get an understanding of what would be the impact. By building homes as far apart from each other as possible, it's probably not the best strategy to preserve our farms here. No. I agree. I think it's, and I don't think shading from houses is preventing people from building gardens. No, and also, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why that's not an appropriate argument. Talking about an urban center here, like. Yeah, but I think if the city council were saying, this is a public priority, this is our public policy draft solar, I think we would either have to come back with evidence that says that you're wrong. But I think, I think we need to come up with what our public policy is. What is the goal? What are we trying to achieve by having these solar and shading rules in effect? And I think, I think, you know, John's right. And I think our opinion ended up being right in the first place, which was, it's really to protect these solar devices. The one half of solar shading and solar access is talking about, you have to build houses that have a south facing roof. So that way you can put solar panels on it. You don't, you're not required to put solar panels on it, but you have to have a south facing roof that you could put solar panels on. And then the other half is solar access, which says you can't shade south facing. We have ambitious energy. If that's the two pieces, then there you go. Yeah, we have ambitious energy goals and we're going to need to build some solar panels. Build some solar, solar panels. I think energy goals is probably what is going to resonate with city council with most people. And I think that's how we're thinking about it. So, I mean, if everybody's all right, tentatively just, I mean, Mike's asking us to like, what's a policy outcome we're looking for? We're looking for a balance between housing development and energy goals. In this case, they go hand in hand. Like there's no, and this policy goes against both. Right, so as far as the things we want to ask Mike to include in a rewrite, I put the list in chat of the like five different broad options, I mean, what do people think that we should ask Mike for for next time? It seems like allowing for a waiver and limiting it to just, you know, roofs or even roofs that could potentially that are suitable for solar panels. There's like a rational mixes there. Okay, what about the, if we're gonna check, if we're gonna check for a roof, are we gonna still look at December 21st, or are we gonna? I mean, I don't think, I'm not even sure how that date would have gotten in there, but it doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, so the date, the history on the date is that that is a formula that is used by solar providers to determine in some cases where a solar panel is appropriate. So I know when we were doing our solar project for Long Road up here, they would do their solar analysis on December 21st, and you didn't wanna have any shading or any topography or anything that would affect the solar farm on that day, because then obviously, you're basically guaranteeing you're gonna lose some power because it's gonna be in the shade at that time. Now of course, if it's only there for a brief period of time on that one day, then, but they kind of use that as their benchmark. It should never be in the shade if you're gonna build a solar farm any time of the year due to topography or trees. So they'll cut down the trees, but you can't cut down the mountains, so you'll have to move your solar farm somewhere else. So that's where the date comes from, but it doesn't really make any sense when we're talking about a house or a building unless you're trying to maximize the protection. If you're trying to maximize solar protection, then yes, you would pick December 21st. But I actually think it's more complicated, but I actually think the coming up with a reasonable and unreasonable shading, sometimes, I mean, that's why you have something go to the DRB, is you can have the reasonable persons make a determination. If it's a calculation, it could be an administrative approval. It doesn't have to go to the board. So if we've got something that's, you can't unduly shade a neighbor's house or whatever, and then you could give the DRB some guidance in some guidelines that go through and say, you shall not shade existing and proposed solar devices. And then kind of working your way down to some other guidelines. It's another approach that gives some flexibility. It's not a black and white yes or no. You can kind of take a look at it and say, you should minimize the amount of shading by adjusting the location or size of the house or the structure that's being built. So it's not saying you can't build a two and a half story house. It's saying, all right, if you're gonna build a two and a half story house, it will it impact the neighbor? If yes, it will shade the neighbor's house. What can you do to minimize that or mitigate that? And there may not be much you can do, but you can't deny it for it. But you could say, you've got the house located 12 feet from your property line. If you move it to 10 feet, that extra two feet moving it in that direction is gonna help prevent shading over there. You can move it. Okay, so what if we change it where it's just roofs? And I think we have a lot of policy reasons for why it should be just roofs. So one thing roofs are where most solar projects go. So if it's about solar projects, there's a lot of policy reasons to have it to limit it to that. And then allow waiver and also allow the DRV to just direct the applicant to take some mitigating steps. Do we want something more or different than that? That makes sense to me. I think most, I don't think there will be too many projects in these neighborhoods that will be shading other roofs, unless we're talking about the shed roof that's 10 foot high or something. But we're going from making almost making a significant percentage of Montpelier's development and non-conforming to probably a very small percentage. Yeah, and I think that's so what goes along with asking Mike to come up with this language for us is also, John, could I ask you to, before the next meeting, just you don't have to write a letter or anything, just pull a point like all of those policy reasons that you've got over for us. So we'll have those when we go to talk about this later and we go to do outreach about this later. Doesn't have to be anything polished, but just I don't want to preserve all of the reasons behind like, you know, why we think this is the way to go. You do that, okay. And then we'll, you know, we can have this done for now. And then it'll be ready to go later when we propose. Does anybody have any other thoughts about that or does that plan sound good for our next week? And then we can move along on this issue. Okay. Okay. The thumbs up is helpful, Marcel. Yeah, I think, and I think some, we've got some other rules that, you know, that if we're making a good argument to the council and to the public about why these rules don't make sense, especially the shading rules, we can, you know, one other one we can point out is the fact that we have street tree requirements and other landscaping requirements. So you're required to plant trees on this, on, you know, in the street trees for projects. So if you happen to have a house that's, you know, on the north side of the road, you're required to plant trees in front of your house that, you know, is gonna then shade your ability to go and use that roof for solar panels. It may take a while before those trees grow big enough, but you are required to have those street trees. So there are a number of places where these rules are gonna start to, you know, automatically build in landscaping that's gonna affect your ability to meet the requirement. So I think we've got a lot of points we could make that'll maybe convince some other people that this isn't necessarily a good idea. Okay, does anybody have anything else on solar access before we move on to the agenda? Okay, so the next thing is the idea of having a commissioner's 101 workshop. This is an idea from Marcella, so I'll just turn it over to her to talk about it. Sure, thanks. Well, so I was thinking before I talked to Kirby that it would, a commissioner 101 type thing might be nice. Just like kind of like a, just not a long conversation, but a short conversation about like what it is that we do and what rules exist that we need to operate within and that sort of thing. Because I definitely didn't get any kind of that on the boarding when I started, but after talking to Kirby, it sounded like I was thinking with Gabe and Jeff like it would be a good time, but after talking to Kirby, it sounded like he spoke with Gabe and Jeff and then everyone else has been on the commission for a while, so now I'm thinking perhaps this would not be super relevant to anyone else, but it's on the agenda, so we can talk about it. If anyone else has thoughts, let me know. I don't feel quite as strongly about it anymore given that it sounds like most folks have had some semblance of onboarding. I would love to have this. I never had it, and I wish that I had, so I just wanted to say that really quickly. Okay, cool, thanks, Sarah. Yeah, I think it could be useful. I feel like it could be good for just like a revisit even if you've heard it a little bit before, but I also don't want to totally turn off half our group for an hour if that's what it's going to feel like. What are people's thoughts about this? I mean, this could also be something that, I don't know how you envision it exactly, Marcella, but if you want to just go over some like, some of the basics of the different things that we deal with, one possibility might be to do it like an hour before or after a meeting, so it's optional. True. True. What kind of content were you thinking that we'd go through and who do you think would be the best person to do that? Yeah, I guess I was sort of thinking Mike could probably speak to most of it off the cuff. I don't want to add, Mike, I don't want to add like something unnecessary to your to-do list that is already too long, but we could also have like, I don't know if there's some other expert that come in or the city manager or something, just talking about, I think like some high level talk about like what the planning commission's like theoretical space in government is, and then if we have any like guiding documents, that regulates us other than like the plan, and then just like maybe we could talk as a group about like best practices and kind of make that more of a conversation. Is this something that the RPC does or they could do? Yeah, that crossed my mind. I don't know. Maybe. What do you think, Mike? Yeah, I mean, it's something that, it's certainly I could take a little time to put together, you know, if it's not right away, but be a good idea to have it certainly before, as I said, we want to go and start rolling out this city plan. And I think it'd be important that we all kind of understand where we fit in the picture. I think we've been kind of going along and talking about it in pieces, but we can, you know, if we spent an hour and just went over, you know, from a statutory standpoint, what is the planning commission? What are you guys really intended to do? How do things differ between what you do and what I do? I work for the city manager, you guys work for city council. So although it kind of looks like we're kind of, we're kind of do things with different directors in mind, but, you know, you've got to charge from city council to what you're supposed to be trying to do. And from that, you know, how do you handle yourself for public input and public comment? I think we've talked about that a bit, but I think there's, there are a lot of little pieces we could go through. I don't know if we, I don't know if we have rules of procedure. We might somewhere. They don't come up very often because we don't, you know, we don't have that many meetings. Not like a development review board has very detailed rules of procedure. But I think there's enough there that we could really kind of go through and kind of make sure everybody kind of gets set as to what their role is. We've taken a lot of public comment from the public. What's your role to respond to them? We've taken a lot of input from other commissions and commissioners. You know, at the end of the day, the city plan is yours and you guys don't have to listen to them, but there's obviously a role in there. But I think we can have a pretty short, doesn't have to be detailed. It really kind of depends what questions you guys have. What's our roles and responsibilities of the commission? Yeah, even that what you just said, Mike, about our different reporting structures like that, I probably should have realized but it didn't click until you just said it. So I feel like stuff like that could be really helpful. And I also don't hate the idea of doing it during a meeting, especially if it's, as long as it, no, but I don't, you know, it's not because the rest of the group isn't like completely horrified by that idea. I think it could serve a little bit of a public outreach function too. You know, if somebody doesn't really understand I say as somebody who recently did not, you know, before I started didn't necessarily understand it could be a good resource to point people to. So, who's my thoughts? So what are the people's thoughts and what are your thoughts about whether we should do it, like maybe the second half of the meeting or outside of the meeting? More than three people, it's got to be a worn meeting anyway. So if there's more than three commissioners, I think if we want it accessible from the public to the public, we would either attach it to the beginning or attach it to, well, it would probably be easier to attach it to the end of a meeting, not that I want anyone to stay longer, not that I want to stay longer, but 730 to 830 means Orca already has their cameras running, their cameras are running automatically. So their cameras would just keep on running until we finish the meeting. Well, Mike, that's what I was thinking for if we did it outside the meeting would be attach it to an already, you know, notice meeting, but we'd also do it during the meeting, we do a 637-30. So that's kind of the question I have is, and then, you know, do people have thoughts about that? You know, it could be, I mean, I don't know what I don't know as a newer commissioner, but it could be something that you just say every year we're going to do 20 minutes of refresh on our legal responsibilities, you know, like you or in any other professional setting, you know, it's important to do some continuing that. So we could just go over them at a certain, you know, time of the year that we're doing this meeting, or we could just, you know, I could do something with Jeff's approach with Mike, but I think that's fine. Any other thoughts? I think I'd rather see it during the new meeting time and shorter, where we're worried about a full hour. Okay. Yeah, well, we could put it on, we could put it on some agenda in the near future then for like 645 to 730. And Mike, I'm happy to help prepare this with the copy that I'm no one asking for it. I might not know exactly what to do, but I, like I said, I just, I want to be mindful of your respect that you have a lot going on. Yeah, I think we can do it. I don't think it's something we can do right away, but maybe it's something we can look at for, you know, June or July or something like that, something that gets us out of this immediate window with a lot of stuff going on. And as I said, I don't think it would take that long. And I might be able to find somebody who already has one somewhere on the VPA list serve that they've already kind of put one together with the basics of this that I can just steal from. Yeah, thanks. We used to have the, we used to have a great group when I was at the RPCs and they used education and training collaborative and we all would put these canned presentations together and we would just stick them out there so anyone could grab them and use them. I'm wondering whether we already had one that was put together on the basics of the planning commission. Yeah. I bet the RPC has a can something that they do. Because they probably do for some municipalities, they probably do come in and tell them like, this is your job in the planning commission for people that don't have staff. Yeah. Yeah, definitely don't want you to put a ton of work into it, Mike. And it sounds like, it sounds like, I mean, Marcelo and all the rest of us are in agreement that if you wanna mostly wing it, I mean, that's fine. It's just hearing additional content on this subject is good enough. Yeah, and like I said, I could involve, if like Gabe's idea, we kind of do this a little bit regularly going forward, you could involve some like best, just sharing amongst us as like best practices or questions that have come up about us, about process. It's like keeping an eye, a little bit of an eye on how we're doing throughout, which I tend to think is good for any ton of work. That one does. Thank you for considering. So it sounds good. So yeah, we can plan to do that whenever you're ready, Mike, and we'll throw it on the back end of an agenda. We'll make sure we leave like 45 minutes that week. And if people feel like they already know everything they need to know, they can piece out at 6.45. So sounds like something for everyone to like. Okay. So the next thing we have is to discuss next steps on RFP for the city plan consultant, go for it, Mike. All right, so quick update on that one. We had posted the RFP to hire a consultant, somebody who specializes in being able to do the web based kind of the storyboards that we were talking about for doing ArcGIS. And so while I had like 14 firms that were interested in getting copies of the RFP, only one applied. So John and I took a look at the RFP. It's good, they're good, it's there. So one question was, three days before it was due, we were notified that we got the municipal planning grant. So rather than being a $20,000 project, it became a $30,000 project. Now we can look at that in two ways. One is we've got Stone Environmental who's our, the one applicant, they're willing to do what they could for $20,000. We could then use the other $10,000 to help supplement and add to that project and process. We could use some of that $10,000 if we wanted to do other things, hire a facilitator for a public. I mean, we're talking about the city plan update. So we might be able to use some of that extra money in another way. Basically, you know, hire Stone at the $20,000 and know that we've got another $10,000 in extra money. We also could repost it if we want to go and kind of get a broader range of groups. So those are kind of the two options. My one concern is I don't know, you know, I'm not, I don't have any experience or background or real good input on how to write, you know, how do you write a storyboard? How do you write a good product? You know, because we're basically entering it something that's different. You know, writing a webpage, writing a storyboard is different than writing a PDF to plan. So, you know, what are the right ways and wrong ways of doing it? I wasn't sure, I didn't really see in Stone's proposal that they're gonna be, you know, they're kind of really kind of taking a technocratic look at it and saying, we can do the nuts and bolts. And I'm not sure, that's where my, that's my only concern is, you know, I was kind of hoping we'd get somebody who would be a little bit more of working and doing a little bit more hand-holding for us to kind of go through and say, here's what you want to do. Here's how long you want to make it. You want to make your paragraphs this long. You want to be this. You want to use links in this way. You want to use maps in this way. And that was a little bit of where my concern was is are we gonna have enough of that understanding or is there enough between John and you guys with your abilities, you guys, you know, as I said, my writing skills are not the strongest. I'm a very nuts and bolts writer. I write great zoning bylaws because don't worry about, say the same words, say it, you know, but prose is not in my wheelhouse. So that's my number one concern, is making sure that we can put out a good product. I think it'll look right. I think it'll operate right using stone. I just don't know if we've got everything we need to make sure that it's going to communicate what we want it to do. So that was the one concern. And John had a suggestion, which was to pull together, I think it was like continuity and format subcommittee, I think it was Kirby and John. And I think it was Stephanie before, but I don't know, maybe Marcella or somebody else wants to jump on to that. And basically that subcommittee was trying to look at how, what was the, if we're gonna have a consistent format, let's have a committee that's gonna look at it and make sure we're doing things consistently. And there are pretty much two pieces. One is the written chapter piece, which are the storyboard. And then we kind of have the second piece, which are the implementation strategies that John had shown, you know, this really slick Excel, you know, that's why we put everything into Excel format. So that way it'll drop into this other program that lets you be able to manipulate and search the implementation strategies and how they're layered. And I think that was really slick. So I think we kind of had these two pieces, but the thought was maybe we pull that continuity and format subcommittee back together again to try to put together a quick chapter. So we could show it to Stone to go through and say, all right, here's what one of our chapters is starting to look like. Here's one of our implementation strategy. Now let's start to have a conversation with them or meet with them on the side and invite them to come and meet with us at our next planning commission meeting. I'm just spitballing here as to how do we wanna try to take this to the next step? We have a RFP, we have a proposal. Now we kinda gotta decide if we wanna work with them. What are people's thoughts about the next step? So options, just to be clear, options are think about going with Stone, in which case we've gotta think about how we're gonna handle the storyboard on our side or do we put the RFP back out there to see if there's any takers that has more experience with that? So I've had a little bit of experience with Stone. I think they're good. It was mostly GIS stuff though, so not necessarily writing and storyboarding, which is where my concern is, I would personally send the RFP back out with a larger amount of my, that's just my fault. Did we put in the RFP like a, sorry, did we put in the RFP like an emphasis on this sort of like guiding us through the more creative part of it as well? We talked about it, and just for context, Stone has already been working with the city. They helped set up some of the projects that the city has. So we have some pieces that public works has done. So we can actually go into our website and in the middle of winter, you can go through and open up their storyboard on snow plowing and a map will come up and show you live action where the snow plows are and who's got which snow plows. So snow plow one is currently on Cliff Street and snow plow two is currently on Main Street and where's the sidewalk plow? Because they all have GPS in them and so they automatically loop into this. So they've got a thing to explain to the public, why do we plow the way we do, what's important? But that's really more of a nuts and bolts presentation of why does the first snow plow just come down and plow the center of the road? Why doesn't it, there's a reason why we plow the way we do. There's a reason the big snow plow goes over here, the small snow plows go over here. So they kind of, it was meant a way of educating the public on, we always get questions on our snow plowing. So here's a way of educating the public on how snow plowing works, what's the process, why do we do things the way we do? And hey, if you wanna see where the snow plow is, here's the snow plow and here's the snow plow, where it is on that route right now. So. I love that so much. Oh good. So that's what stone has already set up. So from a technical standpoint, from a GIS standpoint, you know, they've already been working with the city. They already know our software because they helped us set up the same thing. It's an Esri GIS hub. They already set it up for them and wanted to do more things, but we never, we kind of ran out of money with public works. So it's not surprising they were the most interested. So they do have that, but we do have the extra money too. As I said, we could hire them to do the technical work and know we've got $10,000 and maybe we find a consultant that helps us separately that says, here's how you do storyboards. Unless that's not a good idea. What other people saw some of the choices? John? I think we should dial in the RFP. I think if I think consultants looking at that would have been, they would fear just being a black hole because unless we're just giving them what we want to put up there, then they're looking at our, you know, what 300 page plan we came up with last time and, you know, my pillar is known for having an engaged populace and they're just thinking what am I getting myself into if I'm gonna be the person responsible for trying to mediate and come up with the language that's going to please this city. So I think maybe by my de-mistifying and giving precise succinct example or two of what the end product is, we can maybe make better use of their time, otherwise they'll probably be, either a lot of back and forth or someone who will only say just give me what you want and I will put it on a website, you know, which is fine. It's just, it is what it is. There's nothing wrong with it. But if we were looking for, you know, initially I think when we talked about this is we wanted something more digestible and functional as opposed to just, you know, a brick that sits on a shelf. Mike, what's the timeframe? If we put another RFB out there that's a little more precise, so we'll be able to pick somebody else or a stone if they decide they wanna incorporate that more detailed part. So the timing is, you know, I'm really hoping to get somebody on board because I just wanna be able to start because I think the first step, we kind of broke it into three steps for them and the first step was to build the template which was to go through and say, this is what, we got 11 chapters, this is what a chapter would look like, you know, in just a template format and then we could go through and build one. I think once we build the first one, then we can just keep throwing stuff at them and they can just build out what we need for the rest and they can keep shooting to us to go through and say, I need a picture, I need another table, you know, what do you guys need? And so there'd be a little bit of an iterative process to finish building it out. But I think, you know, we've built, we've written chapters and started to assemble a lot of the information and we've got the, I think the implementation strategies are basically done. We just have to go and format them and into John's program to get to them and show how do we link this chapter to this? Or is it embedded inside of it or is it a link to something separate? And I think that's, you know, that's the first step. So my hope was to get somebody on so because that first step, I think is gonna take the longest, getting that first one where we've got that connection. But if we think we need to or want to go back out, we can certainly do that. 5,000 of the dollars is in this year's budget. So that's the only thing I'd have to figure out how to squirrel away. If we kept stone, the advantage of that is, you know, we interview them, we get to a point, we say everything's good. I tell them, invoice me for 5,000 bucks because I've got that in this year's budget, which I have to spend before June 30th. If we go out, then I kind of have to make sure we hire somebody before June 30th so I can tell them on June 28th. PDF me an invoice so I can stamp it and pay you 5,000 bucks. Just basically just, you know, the contract is gonna be, we're gonna pay you 5,000 to start. 20,000 when you get us to template and another 10,000, another 5,000 or whatever it is. We just, rather than set it up by a pro rata or by the hour, we would just peg their payments to benchmarks that they reach. And that way I can pay them 5,000 up front and make sure we spend this year's money because I got 5,000 in this year's budget, 5,000 in next year's budget, separate line item for $10,000, then I got the $10,000 grant. So I've got 30,000 in these little pockets. So basically if we did it, we'd have to be really quick because what do we were basically heading up to May 1st. I'd have to be able to roll that out. We get something back in two weeks. The other option is, you know, I'm just kind of rolling things out of my head. If I work with John or Jeff, if you've got some ideas of consultants, I can target three consultants and go through and say, well, SE Group was one of the ones that was helping us to start. We know we've got stone. You know, maybe you guys are like, hey, you know, VHB was interested, CAI was interested, you know, you might be able to go through and say, hey, give me a couple of them. And rather than do an RFP process, I just contact some and go and say, this is what we're looking at doing. But I agree with John. If we have something that we can, if we sit down as a subcommittee and put a mock up something together really quick, then at least we've got something to go to them and say, this is what we're looking at doing. This is what we're gonna provide you. We're gonna provide you this. And what we need from you is for you to turn it into a storyboard and to do the technical pieces and to help us make sure that we are communicating clearly. You know, somebody with a lot of experience writing websites will tell you, put this banner up top. Don't put that banner up top. Put this picture down here. Don't make that picture so big. You really wanna have something over here because you wanna capture people over here. You really wanna do dropdowns, but no, that's too much dropdowns. You want somebody who can help you go through and say, if you wanna communicate with people via this media, here are the do's and don'ts. And I'm fully willing to, and I think a lot of us as a planning commissioner are fully willing to go and find out what the do's and don'ts are and get them, all right, here's your historic resources chapter. Now that we know what we're supposed to do and not supposed to do, here it is, plug this in. Here's the picture. What else do you need? Oh, you need a graphic or you need the data layer showing the historic district boundary. I'll get you the historic district boundary data layer. You want the design review district boundary layer? Oh, I can get you that too. That's this one here. All these should be in the same story board to explain what we're doing, why we're doing it, what's important, and then have a little bit of a conversation like that. And I think that's where this is gonna, this is where I hope this goes, that our person is working with us to kind of teach us and then we're just, at that point, we kind of start learning as we're getting through, by the time we get to the 11th story board, we should be pretty well dialed in on, all right, here's the land use chapter and here's all data layers, here are the pictures, here's the stuff, because we've already done 10 of these, we kind of know how this is gonna roll. You know. So, Mike, you don't need to vote from us obviously, right? Like you just, you're just looking for input. Yeah, pretty much, if you know, if people can give me an idea of what you want me to try to do, and if people wanna think about it and email it, that's okay too, but I kinda, if we're gonna repost it, then I kinda have to know, if I'm gonna reach out to other consultants just directly to go through and say, you know, we think there's only a handful of folks that are really willing or interested in doing this and here they are. Okay, so we've only a few minutes left, we're gonna have to put off the executive session to next time, maybe we can do that at the beginning and next time, Mike, just FYI. It'll be there at the end, just. Yeah, okay, but we'll just have to reserve time. We'll have to make sure that we reserve time then. But anyway, we've heard John and Jeff say that putting the RFP back out could be a good idea. Is that what everyone else is thinking? I didn't, just to clarify, I didn't necessarily, I don't necessarily think we'd need to put the RFP out to, what I was suggesting maybe is it mutually exclusive from putting the RFP out again. So I don't know that I have an opinion about that. Okay, I was reading between the lines. It's like not helpful at all, I know, but all of Mike's talk of all these thousands of dollars in different pockets makes me think of the story with my late grandfather when I was a child driving from Montreal where I grew up crossing the border and they asked if we had $10,000 or more of cash on us. Said if I do, I've got someone else's pants on and they didn't like that. Again, more information that's not helpful, but I thought I would share that. I would just say it sounds like we both want to get a little bit more than we originally asked for and that there's also a timeliness too. So why don't we just give, you know, suggest that Mike go ahead and reach out to those people. They already named three or four that were interested. We do have an additional grant, right? And he can just kind of run with that to see who else might be interested between now and the time we made. Everybody good with that? And so John, I don't want to cast aside your side point then, you were talking about doing the subcommittee thing and like in looking, like tell us again the takeaway from what you were trying to point out there. Just dialing in and spelling out, you know, creating an example and being clear on what our expectations would be and what the deliverables would be. Because I think that as they are right now, they are a little bit vague and could be intimidating for a, for a little bit of hitting on the project. So in the next, I agree with John, I think he's right. I think he did. So in the next week or so do we have other people who want to join John and Mike in doing that then? The committee that was referenced, the subcommittee that was referenced, I think it was actually John, Stephanie and Marcella, by the way, I wasn't on that one. Do people have an interest in meeting up and doing that then? If there's interest, we can take that route. If there's not, we can kind of, I think what Gabe said makes sense and just have Mike reach out individually without us doing that. I guess I'll defer. I don't feel, I mean, I don't feel, I don't have a lot of experience with these. So if it was just putting the other chapter, that'd be fine. But again, still feeling, I guess we're gonna end the nominations committee stuff in the next couple of weeks. So after that, maybe CBR could see. Yeah, I mean, I can also just work with John if he's willing to just meet for a little bit. Just as I said, I don't think we need to develop anything fancy, just that we both, I think, kind of have things in our head that we can get down. The idea is that we can go to the consultants and say, this is really what we're looking for. We're looking to give you this and we're expecting you to put it together in this format. And but this, this is what we will be giving you because a lot of times I kept getting emails, especially late in the process and they were like, well, I downloaded your master plan from 2017. And I was wondering what you were, and I was like, no, it's, there's nothing, there's nothing with that master plan. I think that's what happens. A lot of them downloaded the master plan and said, this is not a $20,000 project to take this master plan and turn it into a storyboard. And I think we just have to go through and say, no, we've written something separately. This is what we're gonna give you. This is what we're hoping you're gonna put together. That's, you know. Okay. So does anyone else have interest in meeting with John and Mike? It could be no more than two more people just for open meeting reasons. Anybody else interested in participating in that? Okay. Well, you guys feel free to do that. I can, I can get in on that. I just, I'm kind of slammed right now at work. And I just, I don't want to commit to anything in the short term. Like, what's the timeline on this thing? It's gonna probably be something that would have to be pretty quick. Cause if I'm gonna reach out to other consultants, I was kind of hoping I'd have something I can kind of go out to. Yeah. Yeah, whatever. I'll do it. Okay. Okay. So yeah, you guys can loop Aaron in whatever you plan to do with that. Anybody else real quick? So, okay. I'll leave it to you, Mike. And then, yeah, if you want to reach out, you want to put the RP back out. Your call, obviously. So that sounds like we're good with that. Anybody else have anything else on this before we adjourn? Okay. Do we have a motion to adjourn? I moved. Motion from John. Do we have a second? Second. Second from Marcella. Those in favor of adjourning say aye. Aye. Aye. Be opposed? All right. All right, guys. See you guys in a couple of weeks. Thanks, Kirby. Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot.