 Okay, let's call the order of this February 28th meeting of the Montpelier planning commission. First, we have to approve the agenda. When you're ready, we'll take a motion for that. Move that we approve the agenda. Second. Second from Jeff. Motion from Gabe. Those favor of approving the agenda. Say hi. Hi. Hi. Okay. The agenda approved with their, with our four person quorum. Okay, so comments from the chair. There's a few things here. And the first thing is the central Vermont regional planning commission representative. I explained it in the email earlier just to prep you guys because I didn't want to. I didn't want to drop it. Like put, put anyone on the spot. But the background here is that. Planning commissions typically send a representative to the central Vermont regional planning commission for the meetings, whenever there's something to be voted on at the regional planning commission level, we have a vote. So our representative would just vote for Montpelier. And that's what we're going to do. And I think that this isn't. Very really controlled at all by the city or the planning commission. You, you kind of. Use your own judgment. It's a monthly meeting. Most of those meetings involve. Presentations and, and just. Explanations of, of things going on from the central Vermont regional planning commission staff. So I don't know about like planning in Vermont. It's a big thing that Vermont does. It's all under statute. I'm sure you guys probably know. So Marcel has been a representative for several years now. I don't know if it's been three or four or what it has, whatever it's been. I was represented before that for a year and a half, two years. My understanding is that these things normally rotate. And so Marcel is probably been, well, she's been, she's been great in doing this duty for us, but, but it's been. A long time for her now. Is that, I mean, you're interested in, in rotating off, right? Marcella. Yeah. Do you mind if I add to your description of the. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, I wanted to turn it over to you because you're the most, you know, you're the most recent experience with it. Thank you. So go for it. Thanks. And I think I've only, we're probably close to two years. It's not been much longer than that, but. So it's, and you know, I don't know if this is just me getting kind of pulled into things, but it's not. I would, it's not a minor time commitment. And that's my, where I'm starting to run into issue here. And, you know, if it were just up to me, I would almost want us to think about splitting the work. Because it just seems like too much for one person. Unless you don't have other things going on. But essentially, you know, every, so we are a representative as Montpelier to the CVRPC. And those monthly board meetings are not that big of a lift. It's again, interesting presentations. And we'll have some more time. Um, things to vote on. I think they're going to be starting to take up the regional plan. Um, rewrite kind of like we are doing with the city plan here soon. Um, So that that part is fine, but what is becoming more challenging for me is that everyone is expected to serve on. At least one subcommittee as well. And there are a lot of different subcommittees. And currently I am on the executive, I or Montpelier is on the executive committee. And within the executive committee, there are also additional subcommittees and there has not been a lot of leeway to decline participating in those things for time constraints. So, you know, those start to become more challenging. That's another meeting every month plus additional meetings when special things come up. So, you know, the place where we're at, where Montpelier is at, because I consider myself a stand-in for Montpelier is we're in the CVRPC, we're on the executive committee and there's a nominating committee that happens every year that fills people into these many roles on the subcommittees. And those, you know, there's a committee that does that work as well. And, you know, it's one person from the executive committee fills that role. And they're really, you know, the meeting that we had was kind of like, well, these three people have already been on it. And oh, Marcella is the new person. So she's just gonna, it's like by default kind of. So, it's challenging. Marcella, I have a clarifying question for you though. Have you confirmed that a new person stepping in will be automatically assigned to the same subcommittees as you? No, I haven't confirmed. That's what we did when I stepped in for you. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think that, I don't think that's automatic. Like it did happen to me when I joined. Oh, it didn't. Well, yeah, I just assumed because I assumed of us as sort of just the Montpelier representative. And I think I was on some just like random subcommittee that's actually never met as long as I was there. So that's one reason why I maybe, you know, undersold the responsibility because I kind of, I managed to evade, well, I personally managed to evade all the stuff you're talking about. So I'm not managed to evade it at all. So this is why I'm saying, I think we should split the duties, but like, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't really, I don't really know. Someone served on a subcommittee, but not beyond the main executive committee. I mean, that would be the way to break it up, right? I imagine the executive committee is probably the most work-intensive one. It would be. There's other ones. There's some really minor ones as well. Yeah. Sounds really interesting. I mean, my only thought is, I mean, I'm brand new. It seems like you don't want to have a handle on where the city's going before you try to represent the city a little bit. So that was just really my thought. I was brand new. That's exactly when I started. The tradition actually is more like akin to hazing than for vets. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's usually newer people joining in and then you have the steep learning curve. But then you, it helps you, it does help you catch up. I mean, would you agree with that Marcelo all the stuff that you learn about there, it kind of rounds out your knowledge of. Marcelo, what's your sort of hour per week or month commitment? Per month. The board meetings are two hours. The executive committee are two hours. And then for the last few months, we've been having like an extra one here and there. So, yeah, plus the nominating stuff has been a little bit extra. So it's at least four a month. And then sometimes it's been getting up into a couple, I guess a couple of months in the last six it's been getting up into probably eight. Wow. Well, thank you for your service a lot of time. Yeah, it's not that I dislike it, I don't, I feel like I'm not moderating my tone super well tonight. I feel like I'm coming off as very complaining. It's not, I am just, I'm coming off of a week of it being very intense and I'm feeling quite honestly overwhelmed and like I'm not doing anybody a service by participating at the sort of half level that I've been able to participate over the last couple of weeks. So I mostly wanted to use this time as like, let's figure out an exit strategy or like a time like load share strategy for me so that I feel like I'm gonna be able to make it. Yeah, so we can talk about that. And I think there is some room because we have more than one representative at a time. I guess I'd have to ask Mike, like can we have three? Because Mike's my default alternative. Mike's the alternative, yeah. And can we have another alternative? Do you know that, Mike? I don't think that's the way they're structured, but I mean, there's also ways of not having me be as the backup if we had a second, if we had another alternate, if we had two people who wanted to be on it to share the duties. Cause I really, I've covered for Marcella when she can't make it, but I haven't really been sharing the load at all with her by taking other committees. So it really just comes down to the amount of hours in the week for me. Yeah, I would think it's volunteering for, for you guys is volunteering and for me it doesn't turn out that way, which is good for me, but also takes away from other stuff that I should be putting my time towards. Yeah, so what I'm hearing from you Mike is you'd be okay if we had two planning commissioners like we had a planning commissioners the alternate and then they could fill in. So that's an option. Before we go on with that though, I do want to mention that the staff there is really good. Bonnie, the executive director is a really good person to know. She's extremely knowledgeable about all things planning. Yeah, she's good. They've had a lot of turnover, a lot of new staff actually. I'd be interested in helping. I just, I can't take on six or eight hours a month. That's, I mean, I've got other part positions and things I'm doing. So, so Marcel, I can, I could help like on a committee or something or I could get back up or we could get a new slate of people in there, but I just, I couldn't do eight hours. That's a lot. Yeah. You guys could do something like if, if Marcel is like in her groove doing the executive committee, maybe she could stick with that and then you could handle the regular meetings and. Right. Yeah. I mean, if they're, if they're amenable to that, I don't know, I don't know if that, I mean. I'd have to ask. I haven't, I haven't. I think, I think they would be. It's just that you'd be there as the alternate and that is a distinction they make. So like, Oh, true. Like, would you be able to survive that way, Marcel? If, if you didn't have to go to the other ones? It would, yeah, it would probably help. Yeah. And then maybe, well, yeah, I feel like I've probably, you know, with not, I think the particular combination of stuff that I've wrote myself into here is probably particularly demanding. I think they're probably gonna, I mean, I think the general gist is that the executive committee serves one more year. So in July, when they flip everything to kind of the new committee rotations, theoretically I would stay on, but I may step off and get on and do a different committee. I mean, that could be a plan where once you're off the executive committee, transition out, maybe then Gabe could become the main person if he's still interested and then he could join the less demanding committee. And that's actually gives me time to walk myself out of like some other stuff. So. Yeah. And there may be others too. I don't know. It sounds like, it sounds like you have a primary and an alternate and then Mike would be like a secondary altered, right? That's kind of what I'm hearing. That's kind of the norm. And so if at some point, Marcella, if you step back then we would need to find somebody else who's also interested, Jeff. If this is the new guy thing, right? Like, you know, cause, and the other thing is, and I don't know Kirby, you probably know too, Marcella, are there, is there an ability? Do we have to be on every one of those subcommittees? Is it essential that Montpelier is on every one of those or is that just, Kirby kind of set this course and then you've slipped into it. And so now we have a lot of. No, I was not on the executive. I mean, that's. You don't have to be on the executive. But my understanding is you are expected to be on a subcommittee. And, you know, for various reasons, people pick the ones that are more interested. Like I did not volunteer for the executive committee. They, That's four hours a month, right? You do the two hour regular meeting and then some subcommittee one. I would speculate that maybe Marcella, you were pressured into it because Montpelier is a bigger town. Highly suggested, yeah, that I'd join that. Yeah. And they do that, like Waterbury and Montpelier, Berry are like more pushed into that. Yeah. Which is, and it is interesting. It's a good opportunity. It's just, I'm just finding that I'm having a hard time keeping up. Yeah. And you can look, Marcella also talking to them about getting off the other subcommittee. If it turns out it's like, look, the work demand is, time demand is too much for where I'm at in my career right now. I'll stay on the executive committee and go to the executive committee stuff. Gabe is gonna go once a month to the general board meeting. And that means you don't have to go to the general board meeting. And so he would ask the alternate at the general board meeting for those things and get to see all those presentations. And if you choose to go, you always can. But you just go to the executive committee and you can tell them, look, I just don't have the time to be on nominating committee or some of these other ones. And sometimes if you push, give a little bit of a pushback, they'll give you some space. Yeah. Because the last thing you wanna do is to go and get somebody who's been there for four years or six years or eight years and kind of learned everything and then just kind of get burned out and leave, they would rather keep people around for a while. Yeah, right. So I think sometimes you're just like, look, when I got on this, I was in this place, but you've finished your master's degree. You've got, you're chunking along through stuff that you're not everybody has time to do four hours of planning commission and then another four hours of CVRPC plus another two hours of subcommittees. And next thing you know, you're working part of a full-time job. I know. Just volunteering on stuff. You just out and up like 12, 15 hours. That's a pretty significant time commitment. Would you wanna, do you mind maybe to the whole group, Marcel, could you just send around like the schedule so I could see it and then maybe others who might be interested can see like, okay, this is the regular meeting schedule. Yeah, absolutely. And second Tuesdays is the board meeting. Second Tuesdays, what time is it on? 6.30 to 8.30. 6.30 to 8.30. Yeah, oh, and they are still, everything is still remote, which has been an enormous help for sure. But I don't think they're planning to go back in person anytime soon. Oh, I was gonna tell them about the pizza, but I guess that's not happening. There was, there used to be pizza. Yeah. Used to be free pizza. I don't need the pizza, but that's okay. Yeah. I don't, I guess I don't know. Things are starting to, you know, move that way, but nobody's really talked about it. And last time we were sort of in this lull where case counts were coming down and we were thinking maybe we'd start to go back. Nobody was like super jazzed about it. So I don't, I would be surprised if they rushed back to in person. So that helps from a time perspective. Okay, so will you guys, will you guys like do me a favor and just like email each other and work it out offline. And then just like loop mic in so that we can change the designation if that's where you guys land. Yeah, we can do that. So does it have to be like, from you guys have to nominate, like if I were to be the alternate, it has to be action by the planning commissioners here, or how does that work? It's actually by the city council. City council. In April, the city council, once they've said they've got the new elections tomorrow, we'll know who the new, not the new mayor, but we'll know who wins the mayor and a couple of the other council seats. Then they start going through appointments. So usually it's either the second meeting in March or the first meeting in April, the city council sits down and elects to slate. Most of those are appointments of city councilors to city council things, like who's gonna be on this board or that board and who's gonna, you know, I think we've got seats on certain boards in the community. And so they get into them. So we've got a couple of weeks. Yeah, one of the appointments that comes in at that time is who gets appointed to the regional planning commission. Okay. Some towns will send select board members. In Montpelier's case, for the eight years I've been here, it has always been a planning commissioner that has been appointed, planning commissioner and the alternate, or both either from, usually, since I've been here, I've always been the alternate. There's always been a planning commissioner that has sat in that seat. So we usually nominate the... I like the idea of having an alternate, you know, I mean, I think it's a good system, right? Like somebody's kind of your understudy, Marcel, right? They can kind of shadow and watch what you're doing and then be ready to step up when, you know, you want to step down. And I like the idea. It looks like a heavy load. I feel bad. Look at her. Like, can you see it? It's like, oh man. She's been great. If we get into a pinch, I can always step in. I just can't vote, but a lot of times I've been to enough of these meetings that, you know, if there was a conversation and we had to have what's the Montpelier's position on this project, you know, I will speak up and say, hey, this is our position, this, or this is my position as the city planner for the city of Montpelier. I don't have a vote tonight, but you know, here's where I would go on it if I did have a vote. And sometimes that carries some weight for some other commissioners just because I've been meeting with that board for a long time. I was on the board. So I've been here for eight years. Before that, I was five years in Berry City. When I was in Berry City, they never could find another person to seat. So I actually was the representative from Berry City for the five years I was there. So they're very familiar with me over there. I've been doing this long enough. And my first job in regional planning was working for West Regional Planning in 2000, where I worked in the same office as Bonnie. Bonnie and I worked, you know, when we're both worked for the Regional Planning Commission and she was the next desk over. So I've known Bonnie for more than two decades now. Well, okay. We haven't had too many situations where the vote and the big board is stuff that is like that about like a project opinion or we just haven't, we just really haven't had that many of it. There is a project review committee that would be problematic for me to be on anyways because of my work work. But yeah, just hasn't, it hasn't seemed to be quite that specific about like Montpelier needing to have a real strong opinion about something. Anyways, I can send an email with the schedule stuff in the link and you can check it out. You can go from there. Okay, yeah, great. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Gabe. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, I was gonna say earlier I liked the idea of Mike not being the alternate just because it lets him focus on planning work for the city more. So this could be like a good system. Okay, so you guys work on that and just loop us in if you land on something and then we'll get the, Mike will be able to get the information to the city council when it comes time to a point. Okay, so there was another thing I was gonna bring up at the comments. Both of these things like actually I should give credit to Marcella for bringing them up as good things to go over. She had mentioned in doing a city plan overview. So I went ahead and took a look at where we're at. Just to give everyone an update and what to expect sort of like short roadmap. We have finished more or less the historic resources, energy, housing, natural resources and transportation chapters. A lot of those are big ones. So that's great. We're finishing up economic development now which is another big one. So that'll be great. What we have a left is there's two groups. There's three chapters that are mostly going to come from city staff. There are community services which basically means parks from my understanding, public safety and utilities. So those are all three chapters that are gonna have a lot of input from city staff, the different divisions within the city staff. So I'm guessing they're not gonna be a huge lift for us unless we really for some reason want to tinker with a lot of that. It's gonna be a lot of review stuff for us there. And then there's gonna be two that's mostly on us. There's the land use chapter which is the city planning stuff. So like that's obviously on us to do all that work. And then there's the, we decided to do an optional chapter on arts and culture. So that's gonna be, since that's new and there's not a preexisting committee or something devoted to that, then we're just gonna have to take that on. At this point, I'm thinking it's gonna probably be pretty small. We just, it's gonna be the something to build on later maybe and we'll just get it going. And we have some ideas. And I think like over a year ago, I drafted some things that we could work, that we could develop and use for that. So those are the big ones as far as I can see from the work we have online right now. Mike, are there any other categories or chapters that I'm missing? No, those are the ones that are still left out there. I mean, we had some other optional ones but I just gonna try to focus on getting these final chapters punched out so we can start to get this rolling towards its conclusion because I would like to continue to use, continue to do the city plan in the same manner that we're doing the zoning, which is not to wait every eight years and do massive updates, but rather once we get done with the city plan that we can go back next year or two years from now and start addressing specific items. And then we can spend a year, for example, this year homelessness and housing is an issue. We might go through and say, hey, we've got our city plan, it's all done, it's all approved, it's all sitting on the web. Let's go back and see, work with the housing committee and the homelessness task force and see if we're doing enough and see if we need to make adjustments to that plan. And then make those adjustments, re-adopt the plan. And then the next year, maybe energy issues, maybe, you just never know what pops up. And maybe it's create a new chapter because something, maybe in 2020, we would have decided, hey, we need a public health plan. But I think that's the way I'd like to look at this going forward. And I think once the city plan is done and we've got all the 10, 12 chapters done, I think it'll make a lot more sense and be a lot easier to move this, advance this forward. I will say, Dan's here at the meeting tonight too. The community services is really, it's Parks, Recreation, Senior Center, Greenmount Cemetery, Solid Waste, Child Care, Social and Community and Economic Justice Committee, Homelessness, those are all in the community services. And so I'm working with Dan to develop the implementation strategies for, because we already got Parks, so we're gonna work on Recreation, Senior Center and the Cemetery over the next couple of months. And then Cameron, who is our Assistant City Manager, is gonna work on the other pieces that are in there, the Social and Economic Justice, the Homelessness. And then there's also a possibility of the Community Justice Center. They've actually kind of requested to be in our community services rather than under public safety. We're still gonna talk about that one. It has to be done. It's just, we've had this question before. Where do we put X, Y and Z, you know? Why are they asking? Do you know? While some of their work is based on, you know, off offender and victim relations and those types of things, they also have a lot of community, mediation and other services that they provide. And so they kind of wanted to make sure that they were understood as a service that's broader than just its offender programs that they have. Yeah, what gives me pause about that is that it's something we have going on that is an alternative to your traditional criminal justice law and order stuff. And if we separate it out, it's not looking like an alternative anymore and you're just making public safety just police, which seems like maybe not the best direction, but. We're gonna set up meetings. It was, you know, communication that we had just, as I introduced this to leadership team, and that was one of the responses I got was, you know, maybe we should look at it in this way. So we're gonna sit down with Carol, who's the director and the assistant city manager and me and we're gonna sit down and we're gonna have a conversation about, because a lot of things can fall under multiple places. You know, where do you put childcare? You know, we're here talking in economic development about how important childcare is, but you know, it's a community service and public transportation is a community service. Yeah. But do we put it under transportation or do we put it under community services? And we have a number of these that can fall into two places and sometimes it's a matter of finding out what's the most appropriate place in community justice. I don't know, we'll have that conversation and you know, the director will make her recommendation. Everything, of course, you know, when it gets to you is your decision. You guys have lumped and split it and disagreed with committees in the past and that's fine. And eventually we'll have a public hearing and have a public process and then this will get voted to city council and then they can move and shuffle things as they see fit. So I think we just do the best we can. You know, we'll draft things up as staff and as departments and we'll see where they go and then you guys have the ability to push and pull them around. I guess the other pieces while we're talking a little bit about schedule and timing of things, I'll point out that I have an RFP ready to go. I'm just waiting until Wednesday for the higher consultant to help us develop the web. So I think Gabe and Jeff, I think I mentioned to you guys we're gonna do kind of a web-based city plan. It'll be the first one in the state. It's been done around the country. They're really much more popular, much more accepted. Nobody in Vermont has done one. So we're gonna be the first. And we applied for some grants and we didn't get them. So the city council has put in the city budget to simply fund hiring somebody to help us do this. So as soon as Tuesday's vote is over, assuming the budget has passed, I will get that RFP out and hopefully we can start hearing back on that piece. And that'll be another piece. It was looking at 18 month window. So we would get them on board in time for let's say May, June time period, and then try to have them on for till 2023 to help us basically build out the 10 web pages and the storyboards and the chapters we've been writing and the implementation strategy we've been putting together we can then build out what our plan is going to look like to the public. So that would be another piece just, so anything that isn't done right now, obviously, my office is gonna have to front load anything that's not done. So we can start getting this stuff forward to start populating these websites and whatever ones that the plan commission is gonna be working on like land use. In arts and culture, we can always keep that as a placeholder and if we get time to get to it, that's great. If we don't, it may be one that we simply say after the plan's adopted, we wanna do this as our next plan, as our next one and then we'll add it in. But we wanna focus on the statutorily required pieces to make sure we've got all those ready to go. And that's why economic development, community services, energy, historic, housing, land use, natural resources, transportation, utilities and facilities, public safety, those are all kind of required pieces. So, okay, assuming that we do squeeze in arts and culture, for one thing, I see that as one that if we're waiting for waiting to get the materials from those three that I mentioned that we're relying on city staff, if for some reason there's a delay there, that's something we can work on in the meantime. So that's kind of how I see it. Yep. So we have five left, two of them are things under our control for the timing. If we try to be conservative and give ourselves, I don't know if this is conservative, but like five or six months, does that work for you, Mike and work for everyone here? Yeah, I mean, it gets from my perspective, yes, we can, you know, my goal would be to have all of the chapters done and ready for our consultant. So the consultant's gonna first have to build out a template and start doing all these pieces in the template and those things might not be ready until say September, and then they'll start populating it and we'll keep shoveling information at them and they'll keep populating it and hopefully get ready for some amount of beta testing in outreach because the idea is we have to build the website and then we have to start doing some outreach and my hope, my plan in the back of my mind is that we can have all these chapters done by December so they're all in the website because we really can't do public input around Christmas. You know, pretty much Thanksgiving to New Year's is DOA if you're trying to do any outreach. So I'm thinking starting next January, we would have populated websites with kind of these beta versions of all the webpages that we can start going to the public with and start having outreach, start testing things, start hearing back from people, what do they think, what do they like? We have to keep the consultant on because in that time we're gonna get input, we're gonna wanna make adjustments and edits and changes, it's not unlike our zoning process here where we're gonna be jumping around on things but the hope is that by June, we've pretty much nailed it down. It may not be adopted by city council and we may not have all of our public hearings. I would love it, I think it'd be great if we could have public hearings for three months and then turn it over to city council and have this adopted by next June, that would be awesome but I'm a realist and I know a document of this size and of this scope is gonna draw attention and it's going to, and it's not bad. I sound like I'm grousing a little bit about getting public input, I'm not. It is hard when you do 14, 15, 16 months of public hearings but you do end up with a good product. I do wanna get a lot of public input but I do hope that we can keep it in a manageable place where we've, and I think if we find a good balance in what we're presenting, I don't think there'll be a lot of controversy. Usually where you have a lot of meetings and a lot of stuff is when we're proposing things that are gonna be particularly controversial and I think where committees have come to us with some ideas that might be a little bit more controversial, I think we've brought them back a little bit at the planning commission here so I think it's in a good place but you never know, you propose a moderate housing plan and you'll get beat up for not being progressive enough and if you make a progressive plan then you'll get beat up for not being moderate enough so we're not gonna make everybody happy so we'll do our best to kind of come up with a good plan that we think we can stand behind as a planning commission and then just let it see how it goes but my hope is to really have a good plan that is actionable and strategic and the website is a good outreach that we get more people involved than actually seeing the plan. I don't expect everybody in the city to read the plan but it would be nice to have a city plan that's accessible, that's online, that people are more likely to pick it up in a Google search if they're trying to figure out what's up with housing in Montpelier. They might actually Google Montpelier housing and get a link to our web page which has a description of what housing is, why it's important, what are the issues here in Montpelier and what are we proposing to do about it. Okay, so that all sounds like it adds up pretty well. If we're thinking the consultant's gonna get started in September then it seems like we're definitely on pace to deliver what they need by then. So, so it seems good. What's this under the gun? We certainly have to. Yeah. For president anymore, we've got deadlines. We have to get stuff to them. We've got a consultant on board who we're paying. So, it's time for us to put pending, get this out and get it done to them and then follow up. So yeah, it sounds like it's like the pace that we've had so far I think is good for meeting that deadline. So we'll just kind of keep at it. We have a huge delay with the zoning update stuff in the middle there, but we're not gonna have anything like that again. So it should be good. Does anyone have any questions or concerns about the timeline and okay. No concerns, but I just wanted to say I was glad Mike was talking about a good, robust public process. Because I know we can't, like it's impossible to please everyone with the plan, but I think one of the ways we can measure success is by like how thoughtful of a job we do with the public engagement process and making sure that it is really transparent and that we have lots of opportunities for people to comment and we consider those things and that is a good process. So I appreciate that and looking forward to that piece of it. Yeah, and speaking of public process, do we have the memo explaining those zoning amendments, have you posted anywhere yet? I haven't, that was what I emailed you about. I don't know, it was at the end of the email just to say, you had said you had a couple of comments and so I was just waiting to see if you had them. Otherwise I'll just go and take it as it was. Okay, yeah, sorry about that. Now that you mentioned it, yeah, I was actually on vacation when I received that and it slipped my mind. Yeah, I mean, I didn't have anything big. I mean, if you've like proofed it, then just go for it. Yeah, I'll prove it one more time. The rest of it, all of those documents, I emailed to Audra who does my web stuff in my office. I emailed them to her this afternoon. She's not in tomorrow because it's down meeting day but she'll be back Wednesday to get those posted online. The public hearing notices will be going out for that. So it is worn for March 23rd in April 13th. So if anyone's watching on Orca or online, the zoning amendments, that's when the hearings will be at city council. So they've already been approved that the planning commission is going to city council. That's when they're gonna have their hearings. They will all be posted by the end of this week online, which you can get to from the front page of the city website. Okay, yeah, great. Yeah, keep us posted, Mike, and I'm kind of of two minds about whether like me personally attending those city council meetings is a good idea or not. Like I don't feel a need to have like this image that we're trying to like push anything. So in some ways like not being there is fine because our memos kind of speaks for us. But at the same time, I don't want the city council to think that we're absent either. I think it would be helpful to have somebody there. Okay. It's gonna be two extra meetings. It would be helpful, especially if questions come up on that the one proposal you guys came up with to remove residential densities. I will always do my best to defend and kind of give the reasoning for it. But considering in the memo, I say I'm opposing it because I think it should wait. It might be helpful to have somebody there who's kind of willing to step up and champion that to go through and say, this is why and give it the oomph that it deserves from your perspective, whether that's you or... Sure. Okay, I'll plan to do that. You said March 23rd in April 6th. April 13th. Oh, 13th, okay. Okay, so I'll put that on my calendar plan to do that. Okay, that's it for the comments. Does anyone have anything else before we move on? Okay. So we have general business comments from the public. I don't think no one from the public is here and no one's live with Mike there. So we'll go on to the next item on the agenda after that, which is to continue review of the economic goals and strategies. So let's pull up the strategies. I don't have any big things myself. I see that some things it looks like have been flagged in yellow on here or like this mango color to maybe move to other places. I had something that even goes further back. I think we've kind of settled on some aspirations, but can we just revisit for one minute? Yeah, I just, yeah, let's do that right now. I was gonna ask Mike a question of those. Just, Mike, was it you who flagged those things to move them to other strategies to move them to other chapters? Or was that someone else? No, I highlighted the ones that are there that talk about the economic development plan, supports the implementation of housing. And my note over on the side is that to use in the chapter, not in the implementation plan. Okay, so that was you, okay. We're kind of trying to skip a few steps here because usually a committee puts these things together and then it comes to you guys and you guys go through and say, oh, this doesn't matter. We'll talk about this in the chapter and then it gets deleted because we don't have that iteration. I just put it in there and highlighted it. Okay, so yeah, let's go ahead and rewind on Gabe's request. And you wanted to look at the aspirations again, Gabe? Yeah, I've just got a comment. I think when I go through the list of ideas, I just keep getting hung up at the top. And I think it has to do with this aspiration too. So if you don't mind, if I could just make some comments from some research that I've done and just some of my thoughts about it. Go ahead. So we've got this idea of Montpelier providing a resilient job market that pays a livable wage. And so first of all, I mean, just, grammatically, I know we'll probably have some other heading goes on, but Montpelier is not going to provide jobs, right? We want to have a similar to what we have below. We want to have a robust economy that provides those opportunities. But just here's some data. As I went into Department of Labor and just did some research. So we have an incredible job market here. We have 1.6% unemployment rate right now, which is really strong. And the state of Vermont put out a study. It's a little dated, it was 2020, but they did a study on living wage. And depending on your family size, there's some different criteria. But when you go again, and you sort of look at the jobs that are available inside of Montpelier and where they're all kind of stratified, you maybe have 15 to 20% where there could be some question about whether people are earning a livable wage. It really has to do with service jobs. And we're always going to have service jobs. There's always going to be people that are in those industries. So it just makes me wonder if this is really where we should be kind of setting up our focus for this goal is this discussion of a livable wage. Or if we ought to be, I kind of just dropped some language in over in D, which somebody else had put some stuff in childcare, transportation, just saying something very similar and 2D, like we're going to have this robust local economy. We're going to want workforce development. We want people to be able to improve. We want people to start businesses here. We have all those things that should be really be dialed into this living wage when it doesn't look like it's our major issue. I agree with Gabe on the livable wage portion. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but with the resilient job market, where I was going with that months ago was not relying on the ebb and flow of the state job market, making sure that there's other employers and other opportunities there. But yeah, the livable wage stuff strikes me as a bit aspirational and fluffy. And I'm someone who's, I've read some of that lit and a livable wage for someone in Barrie is different than someone in Montpelier, given the rents. People from both those communities may have jobs in Montpelier. It's kind of a toss up. Okay, I think I think I'm cool with resilient too. It's just as soon as we start talking a livable wage, when you start looking at the goal, you know, like, what are our strategies? All of a sudden we're going down a rabbit hole. It's like, is this really the direction that we want to go? I would be okay with changing provide to have because I take your point that we don't create markets as a city government. And then removing the livable wage would be found me too. I rewrote it down below if you guys can see changing provide to have and taking the livable wage. Is there any more tinkering we want to do with that aspiration of looking at it? So I was one who added C. And so that really looks at that part that talks about and offers sufficient housing and services to members of the workforce. And my suggestion, because it's a little bit iterative. So we kind of look forward to our goals and then our strategies. And then we kind of walk our way back to the start to go through and say, well, and provides equal access to employment through sufficient housing and services, specifically childcare and transportation for all members of the workforce. So aspiration A was supposed to kind of talk to our labor side as opposed to our business side. And so what we need from a labor side in this would be a resilient job market, encourage workforce development and provide equal access to employment through sufficient housing and services, specifically childcare and transportation members. I think it'd be nice to clip that part of Mike's language and throw it in there. I mean, housing, this is the issue, Jeff, that you sort of get to, right? It's like, okay, that's awesome, but you can't even find the rent, right? Like maybe they're making the income, but there's not even, they can't even live here, right? Cause there is no place to live. And so, you know, and I don't know how we, I guess I didn't really dive into the childcare. I don't know how as a city, we encourage more childcare, clearly it's a need, either. We actually provide it, the city's recreation department actually is a licensed childcare provider. And we, since 2020, have been expanding that to- Oh, that's awesome. Throw it because it was such a demand. But if you- Mike, before we move on from the childcare thing, I just want to clarify that it's the pre-K that's available through union elementary. Is that the one you're referring to? No, I think union has their own. Okay. The city has a childcare service that's run by Arnie, the recreation director. And they're talking about with, if we get the Elks club property, is they wanted to build an expanded facility along with the recreation facility out on the Elks property, because what they don't have is sufficient room to provide infant care. We don't have the sufficient size or staffing. So we can only do kids over a certain age. And during the summer, we run the summer programs. And the summer programs are actually designed to be childcare programs to allow parents who work to be able to have a place to have their kids who normally would be going to school, that we have an expanded summer program for that reason. I'm just curious. I mean, it's maybe not like relevant to this goal, but is there, is it like what they pay, is it somehow income basis or some subsidy or is it just market rate? I don't know. I just know that the market for childcare hasn't, if the free market were providing and childcare providers, we wouldn't be doing this. Yeah, right. The issue is that there aren't enough childcare providers and maybe it's because of some of the regulatory burdens or whatever, I don't know enough to know why we aren't getting enough childcare providers other than it would cost a lot of money and there's not enough people who can afford it. So not enough people get into it, but there's not enough childcare providers. So it does get subsidized because we're paying, tax dollars are paying for Arnie's salary and the salary, some of the people that work there. And then we get some revenues, but I couldn't tell you whether or not it pays for itself. Is it just the after-school program you're talking about? I'm getting out a little bit over my skis now to go through and say where exactly how much I know we're doing a childcare program and maybe during the school year, it's only after school. Yeah, I think the rec center thing is after, like I have a toddler for the record here, that's why I'm informed on this. Well, I don't know if she's four, I don't know if toddlers are at work, but she's needs pre-K stuff. This is the landscape as I understand it. Yeah, I think the rec center is an after-school program. So that would be to help with school age and help fill the void of working parents and need after-school care. The city through union and through, like I think the education fund though, not the general city budget provides pre-K at union elementary. As a parent, I gotta be pretty critical of that. They offer it for, you can have it, you can get it for free subsidized, but the hours are a few hours a day either in the morning or the afternoon. And that doesn't work for anyone's work schedule. So like currently what they're offering there is like it doesn't help. Like it doesn't actually address like full-time care need at all. I mean, I think just this conversation suggests that we ought to lift out some of that language that might put in there and specifically identify both housing and childcare as a labor issue that we wanna work on in this plan. And it may be that they end up being talked about more in other plans. As we said, the childcare will be in the community services chapter and it'll be talked about more in depth in that chapter. But what's important here is that if you were to talk to maybe the social and economic justice committee and start talking about, what are the barriers to employment for folks? You would generally see people in the lower income. The three biggest barriers are housing. Sure, you can get housing. I've got a job in Montpelier and I can live in Barrie. But that necessitates transportation. So either I have to have housing, so I'm here. So as a single person or as a young person who doesn't have all the resources that we have, all of us old folks, you gotta have transportation, housing and childcare are the three big ones that you'll see as the barriers for people who could be in the workforce but aren't because of these barriers. And if you were in a place like Atlanta or down in the South, that's where you start having these conversations, especially when you talk about transportation. Why is it that people have jobs but they have to spend an hour and a half on the bus every day? It's all about transportation. We've got jobs in one place, people living in another and we don't have a transportation network that connects them. And so it may not be as big an issue here in Montpelier but for certain people it's going to be a barrier. Maybe not as bad as it is in some of our metro areas but it certainly can be significant if you live in Barrie City, which is the second largest community in Vermont for population of people without cars. So there's a large population of people living in Barrie City who don't own cars and rely entirely on public transportation and they're second only to Burlington. So it becomes a significant barrier if you happen to be in that community and some of that comes back to, you know, Barrie City has a lot of folks who had been incarcerated and have been released. It's the home of our courthouse. So a lot of people may have had driving violations that got them into trouble. So now they're without a car because, you know, they don't have a license. So these are a number of the barriers that people look at, you know, in other communities incarceration can be a large barrier. I just found these three were probably the biggest ones from Montpelier that I thought from a workforce standpoint, as you said, 1.6% unemployment, we got to find more workers. You know, what's keeping us from getting more workers? I would think the three big ones are gonna be housing, childcare and transportation. And opened up anyone who's an expert and can correct me and say, you're missing a fourth big one or something. These were the three I could find. No, I think you're on the right track there. I think that, I mean, housing and childcare really stand out as just Vermont wide kind of crises. I don't know what we can do here, but if we, I mean, I would definitely be up for exploring strategies to bolster the what the city can do about childcare. Like currently, I think there's a lot of room there, but... Well, when we get to the strategies, we can talk strategies. But I think at this step, when we're looking at aspirations, you know, I think what you worked on... Well, if we're gonna put in the aspiration, we're gonna back it up with strategies is kind of my point there. Yeah. So, yeah, okay. So do we want to put a chop here in this? Mike, can I ask you a quick question? Is the community services chapter, which shape is that in as it been drafted? I just... No, we're working on it right now. Okay. And what's the scope of that chapter? I just had it pulled up here. Yeah, we went over that earlier. Yeah, so our community services, and we're still, it's a little fungible at this point. We've kind of, we already did parks, because we did parks when we did natural resources. I still have to finish writing it out, but it's, we've got most of the workings of that. Then recreation, senior center, Greenmount Cemetery. Solid waste, I can't remember solid waste ended up under, solid waste may have actually ended up under utilities facilities, but childcare, homelessness. We have social and economic justice. So Dan, who's on the line here with us, he's gonna be working with me on the first three recreation, senior center and cemetery. And then Cameron, who's the assistant city manager is gonna be working with me on the other three. So we hope to have by May, that I'll have these, at least the implementation strategies all fleshed out. So we've got something that we can work on in the end of May into June. Great, thanks. Yeah. So, I mean, so with that said, if we're putting childcare in community services chapter, then that would be a reason not to put it here as part of the aspiration. We would reference that other chapter in the chapter language, the narrative part of economic development, but save the strategies for that other chapter. Does that look like the direction that we're gonna go? So we would leave it here in the aspirations, but when we get to the strategies, we talk about it being implemented in the other place. No, no, I'm saying, I don't think it should be in the aspiration here if we don't have strategies for it here. I think that we, but in the narrative chapter language for economic development, we refer to, I mean, at the end of the day, I'd like to see some strategies where we're more ambitious for childcare, but structurally, it sounds like that's the way it should go. Well, I think it's okay to have it in the aspiration here if it's, I don't, just my two cents on that. I would be okay with having it in here and having it referenced later on that it's gonna be implemented through, because otherwise it really doesn't get caught, doesn't get, as people are thinking about it and thinking about economic development, I don't think they're reflecting on it if we're not really. Yeah, I think, Mike, I think you've identified sort of the holy trinity of the plan, frankly, and to the extent that we can put that in another place, in any place we can in the plan, sort of a thread that binds everything together, I think it's fine keeping it in the aspiration, just reference it. Okay, we can do that. I thought that in other chapters that we were trying to keep the aspirations, like streamlined and not do that kind of thing, but it's fine with me. I would generally think that's a good way to go, but like I said, I really think that the three issues that Mike just outlined are really the three things that we keep going back to in every discussion we have. So I think that might be the one place where we can kind of have some repetition across the board, but you know. I think flagging things too, you know, I'll tell you, I mean, just as a voter, Mike, you just flipped my, like this, I had a particular opinion about this whole golf course thing, and you just flipped that all over for me. I hadn't seen that piece of it, that there was part of it was that we could have a childcare center. And you know, and I'm just one person, right? How much can we highlight to people they can understand that, you know, part of the reason we don't, we can't maybe expand or grow or do things is because we don't have the right services. So yeah, we're not gonna have strategies for it, but I think helping it is a clear aspiration for economic development. I think it's great to have here, Kirby. Okay, so what we have now, it looks like it looks like Mike added some things. So there's an alternative online five here for aspiration. This is like rewriting aspiration A, and it now says molecular will have, will have not provide a resilient job market, encourage workforce development and provide equal access to employment through sufficient housing and services. And then in parentheses, specifically childcare and transportation for all members of the workforce. Yeah, I like that. Thanks for letting me go back to this. I just was getting really hung up on the strategy because I just couldn't. No, I think this is great. I think this is, I mean, kind of the point of tonight is to like decide what strategy should go in and what shouldn't, like where should we be focusing? And that's what this is all about. So, okay, so we'll, after the end of our discussion, we'll plan to vote on that aspiration, okay? To change it. Does anybody else have anything on inspirations where we jump in the strategies? I guess this, I don't know if this is the place to point it, but this is more of a question to Gabe because it sounds like he'd given more thought to this than I had certainly. But to the extent that there are trickle down effects from changing the aspiration to exclude the livable wage piece, I'm just looking at the livable wage strategies. And I guess the kind of the threshold question I have is, like, do you see value in any of those strategies that are the three strategies that are outlined under the livable wage piece? And the strategies is like, if those have value to you, or can they be placed somewhere else? Or I'm just trying to guess. I think that's the thing is I was having such a hard time wrapping my head around it and a 1.6%. I mean, again, I don't know if you heard that part, Aaron, but 1.6% unemployment and based on state of Vermont numbers, like 15 to 20% of our people are in service jobs where their wages aren't below, but we would consider livable wage. All the rest of the jobs would be livable wage. So is that really where we wanna focus our energy? And I may be wrong. I mean, if you wanna include it, but it just was, that was the question in my mind is do we really want to spend money and energy with limited resources on that when it doesn't appear to be our problem? I think it's housing, transportation, childcare. I mean, the stuff might just align. I think that's the real issue. So I don't know. It just seems like we're distracting when we have limited pool of resources. And that was the reason I asked to go back to it because I did, I looked at these and I'm like, I just don't know that that's really what we should be doing. Yes, so I think what I'd like to do is just go through the strategies and for each one, it's kind of like stay or go. Stay, go, mentioned in the chapter, move it to another chapter. Those are kind of the four options. So you guys wanna just do that? Go ahead, Mike. Yeah, I was just gonna mention I think, you know, getting along a little bit with Aaron's comments. If we decide we've left that we're going to leave out the living wage, then goal number one on the goals page would also go away. So that would be one of those, you know, that goal is meaningful work and living wages. So if it's not in the aspiration and we don't have strategies, then that goal would go away and the other ones would just get promoted up one. So just so we're, as we get to the end, and before I forget, just to point out that if we make that decision, then that one goes away too. Okay, yeah, so let's do it. Let's make that decision. The first three and the first grouping of strategies are livable wages study, livable business marketing program and livable wage incentive policy. Who's in favor of just removing those and not focusing on that in the plan? Is that where we are? Well, you've heard my opinion about it. I think you just re-read it. So Aaron, Marcel, and Jeff, what do you think about removing that? Well, I think on the incentive policy, like we talk about TIF and tax civilization and stuff elsewhere, don't we? I'm blanking on where, but that's come up before. Yeah, it's used in a number of places, including, you know, if you were just encouraging more job growth, there are a number of places where we have those. The question is, and we actually do already have this in our tax stabilization program. There actually already is, you know, a thing in there for livable wage. And again, and let me remind you and anyone in the public, these three you see here, I was given, we're gonna have livable wage. So I tried to come up with using our five P's, what are the things that we could do? And I'm not encouraging us to do any of these or discouraging us, just these are things we could do just to help shape people's thoughts of if we wanted to do a livable wage, these are some of the things that we could do that would help to advance that and not saying, you know, whether we should or shouldn't. But, and I think I actually missed one. The city actually has a livable wage policy they already have right now to make sure that all city employees earn a livable wage. So I think that stuff sounds fine and it's like just if we omitted, it doesn't mean that we're like, you know, wanting to go the opposite direction on the preexisting things. You know, it's fine that those things exist. It's just a matter of where we want to focus. I see us like funneling city money towards things that provide a livable wage. It's just a backdoor way of saying that we're not going to support service industry stuff and we're going to support every other type of industry. Like manufacturing or something would qualify for these special treatment, but the service won't. And that's effectively what that means. So is that what we want? Is that what that means? And no, I don't think we want that. I mean, the end result is that service, like, you know, like retail businesses like don't have enough margins to pay these kinds of wages. So they're not going to get the TIF and the special tax treatment. And not only service, but I'm imagining that at least at current rates, like home care and stuff like that, maybe disincentivized or not prioritized. And that's something that is definitely a priority for the state right now, sort of senior services and child services and all that. That's true. Childcare businesses. Yeah, probably wouldn't pay enough to. Yeah, I guess that's just sort of my question about this. I mean, I feel like the first two strategies in the pretty amorphous, I don't know what they really mean, but the incentive policy one, I'm just, it seems like there might be some value in it. I just don't have feasible it is. So I mean, I don't have a strong opinion on it. I just don't have the knowledge to really weigh in on it. But for the extent that it would be feasible if we have an impact, I would support leaving it in, but it sounds like there are other people here that understand it better than I do. Yeah, I guess the example that I think I've given in the past for the for like the tax stabilization is that it the question is, is it really helping to make sure that folks who wouldn't otherwise provide a livable wage? Does it give them an encouragement to provide a livable wage? Or are we just giving a tax break to somebody who is leasing to somebody who is, you know, we the point of the livable livable wage is to help people who are in the lower incomes move up into, you know, into a livable category. And if what we create and give tax breaks for our jobs that require bachelor's and master's degrees and, you know, the folks who are not earning a livable wage don't have a chance of getting these jobs. And so they end up in a position where we're just giving, you know, we're giving breaks and incentives. And that's not necessarily a bad thing from the business side of things. Maybe, you know, any tax stabilization that brings more businesses to town is good. But, you know, we won't give a tax incentive. As you said, we won't give a tax incentive to help a daycare because you're not gonna pay a livable wage, but we will give it to a company to come in and bring additional insurance jobs. Now, there's nothing wrong with additional insurance jobs. We love the additional insurance jobs, but they're gonna get a tax break in the daycare and the childcare won't. I think we should, let's, can we note that to maybe make an exception in the tax stabilization for new childcare businesses? I think maybe we should get very ambitious like everything that we can offer. I think we maybe should for childcare businesses. That would be cool. I mean, does that go, we got a separate section on childcare, is that our spot? Or does that kick over to the people working on that? Yeah, I think Kirby's suggestion would be good down under childcare to kind of go through and highlight that as an opportunity to provide tax stabilizations to providers of these services. I mean, I would add TIFs to whatever extent that that's ever relevant. Maybe they already do. Yeah, TIF probably wouldn't apply too much, but tax stabilizations and other economic development revolving loan funds. The RLF is revolving loan funds, which we do have and we can establish programs to help those. And as we get down to those other ones, I can explain what are some of the things cities can do to help businesses. I think it's a good idea. I think we should move it down under childcare, whether it ends up on our plan or another plan. That was a great thought, Kirby. I think I think there's a lot, there's a lot of other thoughts we could have too when it comes to that. But the three little wages here go. It sounds like that's the direction everyone's heading. Is anyone want to advocate for keeping any of the three in? Okay. So we'll just put those aside now or remove that for now. I'll highlight them in red so that way we can know which ones were discussed and removed and which ones were discussed and kept. Okay. And then so the next thing is workforce development. This is like stay or go. It's a new idea. It's like written by Mike. If I could jump in. Yeah, go ahead, Tim. How does this intersect with the thing on the ballot tomorrow about careers? What is it? Washington County career, something. I'm just wondering how this sort of a strategy intersects with other regional, even state programs. Well, I know the Department of Labor has some pretty outstanding programs and they've got a lot of funding that comes in from the federal government to do some of that. And so with what maybe, I don't know. I mean, does the state have robust enough functions that we don't need to need to do that? I think I wrote some of this that Mike maybe tweaked it. Yeah, I think this was originally about four or five different pieces. We had originally had this out, as you can see up top, this is the revised PC template economic. And I think the original one, this was a number of different options. And I kind of went through and said, well, let's think of workforce development as a program because most of this, we're not doing the education and training. We're just gonna try to connect people to that education and training. And I'm not sure if this is the right way or the best way to do it. Or, as you said, if there's a lot of these good programs out there, and I think the programs are pretty good that are out there, I think the issue, there's conversation taking this a little bit of a step back. There is a conversation in the community development, in the housing task force, a homelessness task force, and the social and economic justice that they want. Unfortunately, we keep getting the term hub used a lot. And there's a hub that's looking to do the development at Elks Club. But there also was a discussion of having a economic development hub. And what it meant was hope to do is that it was gonna be a facility where maybe there's a, let's say a homeless shelter, but you could also come in and get connections to services and the city would have a community development person who would help connect you to the services. We wouldn't necessarily provide services, but we have people that would help to connect you if you're homeless and you need housing assistance. We can get you in touch with housing assistance folks. And if you need job training, we can get you connected to the job training. I know this is a discussion that those groups, those committees are having, but I haven't been a part of it and I'm hoping to get more when I meet with Cameron about some of the details of that. So this, we're kind of looking at the workforce development, but I could see how it could also simply fall into that same umbrella that they're talking about of, can we do more to help connect people? We have a lot of people with needs and there's a lot of services out there. And can we find ways of connecting? And I'm not sure how much it shows up further down below. I mean, in the version that I wrote, I had some of this, right? Like connecting with what you're talking about. But then also further down as we're talking about, business building, like that economic development officer can also be somebody who knows where the resources are for entrepreneurs. And we've done some of that. I don't know all the details of it. I know there were some grants that were given, particularly targeting like BIPOC communities to try to help them get launched. I know the city was involved in that. But the idea of having a single person that was sort of the resource for economic development, I mean the equivalent of Mike, but economic development that can support, all of our efforts and the people in the community was kind of the thinking. So what are people thinking? Do we wanna change this? I guess I like the idea. I'm not sure whether it would be sort of a city strategic plan goal or strategy. I'm being redundant here, but it's something that could come up in council or whatever, but doesn't need to be written down in a long-term plan. Mike, what do you think about addressing workforce development in a way in which we're being careful with resources, I guess, not reinventing the wheel. It's already being done by the state or elsewhere. I think if workforce development is important, then we should, I don't know what else we could do for workforce development, to be honest with you. As it comes to educating folks and getting them prepared for that next job, I think this is one of the few things we could do. I think what I would do is leave it here and maybe remember we're gonna eventually prioritize these and we might just put it as a low priority compared to the other things that we're gonna do. And maybe that gets elevated as a C-JAC and Homelessness Task Force get talking about things that if it becomes more of a reality that they're going to have this homelessness, community justice, opportunity hub, then okay, it would kind of make sense that we would layer this in, at least the workforce development side might layer in. So if somebody were to contact City Hall and say, hey, I'm new to town, I'm unemployed, I'm trying to find out where to go, we can say, hey, you can contact the hub and they can help coordinate to get you in touch with all the services because we have a lot. I mean, we have CCV here, we've got voc rehab, we've got adult education, we've got all the state Department of Labor things. We're very fortunate being Montpelier, you don't have to go very far to get, to find the help, you just have to figure out which door to knock on. Okay, I'm gonna leave it, okay. And maybe it gets reworked later on. Again, none of these are final, maybe this is a good idea that makes it for a certain amount of time. Anybody have anything else for me to move on? Okay, housing is the next one. So obviously we're done with our entire chapter on it, but so for the economic development aspect, we have a strategy of housing marketing and outreach program. What are people's thoughts on this? So I'll point out this was actually, this actually is cut and paste from the housing chapter. So this was when we talked about housing, what we can do for to increase housing, this was proposed to have the housing marketing and outreach program with all this information. So this is... As somebody who's trying to do development in the city, I'd love to participate if we can, and get plugged in additional resources. So if it's a strategy that's already in housing though, like what we've been doing so far, like assuming we're gonna stick with the same format is we would reference that in the narrative chapter but not have the strategy here. No, we would have this strategy here. But what you see over in column N is that G2. So when John built out that Excel program, when this all gets dropped into that Excel program, it gets linked. So you're only gonna see this once, but it'll show up multiple times as you go through and say... Okay. As you ask questions, it keeps showing up, but the key is that it's gonna show up once because it's only in G2. Okay. I think I understand what you mean, is that it's not going to look redundant based on how it's put together at the end. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the ones that we pulled out and removed were the support ones that are above it. Those were the ones that we talked about them before. We said, let's just pull these right out. Won't it officially be a strategy that's linked to one chapter or the other though? Nope, it'll be in both. Okay. And so the way for Gabe and Jeff's benefit is remarkable. John's a genius at this stuff. So you really gotta go and see him working at his finest. He works for the state GIS stuff. So he's got all of the technology stuff. And what he did is he dropped these into this Excel program that basically pulls data around and it turns everything into cards. So you could then go through and query and say, show me all of the ones on economic development. Show me all the strategies for economic development. Show me all the economic development strategies for workforce development. Show me all of the strategies that are implemented by the community development specialist, which another one of these columns over here says who is doing it? So we could actually query in this plan how many things is the planning director doing? How many things is the city manager doing? How many things is this committee doing? You could actually query. And it just pulls up all the cards depending on what questions you ask. And the tasks, because you'll see the downtown program appears in all three of the goals for historic preservation. It also appears here in economic development. It also appears in housing. So the downtown program, TIF program, tax stabilization programs, they appear all over the place. But they're gonna show up in this plan, but when it actually gets to the city plan, there'll be one card that'll say tax stabilization program. It'll describe the tax stabilization program, and then there's gonna be a tab, which would tell you all the places where this program is used to implement a different goal. Okay, that sounds fine, that sounds fine. I was just trying to make sure that we are following the same spirit that we have been, but yeah, that sounds like that'll be great. So does anyone have anything more on housing? Bill, baby, Bill. Yeah, I mean, we do have the entire chat front that has mini-may strategies. Okay, so then childcare is the next one. There's this language that says use in chapter, not implementation plan. So we didn't have any strategies for the implementation plan, but based on what Mike just said, we can have whatever strategies exist in community services could also be linked here then under the same approach. So- The reason I pulled the housing one forward is because that one was very specifically about getting to housing developers and trying to, so there was a much more economic link. But yeah, in theory, we could pull all the childcare ones forward and link them here. And maybe once we've start to build this out, it becomes, or makes more sense to kind of go through and say, hey, let's just click all these guys into this. There's only gonna be one card anyway, so we might as well link all the childcare ones also to economic development. But we'll understand that more as we've start building out the website. Okay, so let's plan to do that. Let's also plan to make sure that what we said earlier about the RLF and tax civilization applies to the childcare businesses. And I imagine once we get to community services, there'll be a lot more strategies for that. Who's working on that again? Is that Cameron? For childcare, yeah, I believe Cameron's can be working on that one. Okay. And, okay, so I trust that Cameron kind of knows the gist of what we're putting together. Way more than I do. But like the format wise, like the format we're doing and... I'm working with her on that. So I'm working with Dan and Cameron at the same time. Okay. All right, does anyone have anything else about childcare for strategies? You wanna flag or we'll be tackling it again under community services, apparently. Okay. Transportation and land use. So these are two other things that are just flagged for us to talk about in the chapter about the implementation plan. Again, we already have the transportation chapter done. We don't have the land use, but I guess there's potential there to also have some shared strategies. Mike, did you happen to look at the transportation plan to see if any of them could be clocked out that would apply to workforce stuff? No, most of the ones that would would be probably tied to the public transportation. So maybe some of the my ride things. We can be more careful about going through and more carefully applying other goals, I think later on as we get in the process. Okay. It's always tough to do this because I might put in three hours of work to come up with a whole bunch of them and then have you guys decide you don't wanna have that strategy in there. And then it didn't make sense to do all that work. So some of it is a little bit iterative to kind of come through and say, let's see where we're at. When we get to the end, then we can kind of go through and pull a few more pieces back in. Okay. Yeah, I just quickly pulled up the transportation chapter and looked at the strategies and it seems like there's some room, like the, I don't know, the complete streets initiative is related if we wanted to. Yeah, the complete streets would tie into the land use. That goes into the fact that if we have compact mixed use development that if you don't have a car, you don't, if you have a mixed use neighborhood and you don't have a car, you don't need a car. I mean, our goal, our primary goal in the transportation chapter is that you can live and work in Montpelier without a car, that you can live and work in Montpelier without a car. The compromise in that is there were some people that wanted no cars and some people that wanted, and the compromise was let's just make a city where you can have cars if you want cars, go for it. But it shouldn't be a necessity. It shouldn't be, if you wanna live in Montpelier, you have to own a car. And 90% of our country and our communities in the United States, if you don't have a car, you're really in trouble because you can't get to doctor's appointments, things aren't walkable. So by making a walkable mixed use neighborhood, if you can't afford a car or you have physical reasons why you can't drive a car, you can still live and work in Montpelier and be successful. So we also have a couple of strategies that go to public transportation as well. Shared mobility is the phrase we use there, which could possibly be linked here. There's one that the initiative to subsidize public transit and shared mobility for low-income residents could seem relevant. So we can just keep that in mind as some shared strategies. Okay, so with that, we can move on to the resilient business environment. We have several strategies here. What are our thoughts about these? Well, there are a lot of them here so we should probably just start. You wanna take them one by one? You can either take them one by one, yeah. So economic development strategic plan, that's happening. So that's in it seems. That's in the budget to get done, yeah. Public education outreach regarding economic development, this seems tied into with the new staff, the economic development officer work, right? What do people think about this strategy? I think as long as we have a clear person to do it, or section to do it, there's nothing wrong with outreach and education. Okay, you like that one, Mike? Yeah, I mean, it's one of these ones I was not. I mean, it's not a really big thing, but I mean, if it stays in, I'd be like, that's a low priority. I wouldn't be putting it ahead of some other things. Okay, seems fine by me, unless anyone wants to speak up to remove it. The next one is unified development regulations. Yeah, makes you zoning, expand your zoning. That seems fine. I mean, it kind of goes without saying, but I'm gonna just move on. People can speak up if they have thoughts on any of these designated downtown program. That's something that's happening that's continuing. The growth center program is a continuing thing. I feel like maybe John Adams has been the one that's spoken out against like, I don't know, against continuing stuff, but I don't wanna put words in his mouth about that. Neighbor development area program is a new thing. Yeah, I mean, I still think, John would say that. My point is I think if we get stuff into his format with his cards, we'll have a whole set of stuff that might be, these are things that we already do that we're gonna continue doing. And I think there's value to the public, and if all the public sees as things we're doing that are new, then the public doesn't see all the things we're already doing. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to put in these things that we're doing and why we continue to do them. Because if the public's like, we're not doing anything about affordable housing, and it's like, well, actually we've got 12 things that we're already doing that we're continuing to do, and we're gonna be adding one or two more down here. Okay. But if all they see is we're doing one or two things, they think you're not doing enough, this is all you're doing are these two things. So. Okay. I wanna make sure we get through this. So I'm gonna speed it up a bit because I just realized that we have a little bit more than 20 minutes left. So neighborhood development area program. So I'm fine with the continuations for the record. Neighborhood development area program. Everyone's seeing more of that. And then the next ones continue the efficient and predictable regulations seems tied with the zoning bylaws mentioned above. Next one's eliminate our elimination of business equipment tax. This is new, my pillar's one of few communities that has a separate business equipment tax top of the property tax. So yeah, this is business personal property tax. Yes. Yeah. My, I love how my day job intersects with all the stuff in the most boring ways possible. So this puts the city at a disadvantage. So that seems fine to me. Do we have any idea of what kind of revenue comes from that? Actually, it generates enough revenue. That's the hard part. It's hard to give up that revenue once you've got it because you have to balance it by increasing revenue on everybody else. So it's basically a shift from commercial to residential. And that's been the sticking point with it. But it's a real issue. Do we know of employers that have chosen to not have their businesses here because of that tax? Yeah, we do. Yeah. Yeah, there folks. I mean, when I was working in Berry City it was one of our big selling points was we would always Oh, you did? You sold against Montpelier. Oh yeah, we would. When I was over there, it was like, Hey, you know, why are you guys gonna pay business? You know, taxes, it's actually why, if you're curious, the Times Argus was all printed in Berry City. And it had the, it was over there because the printing presses were so expensive that having the printing presses in Montpelier would have put them out. So they were over, they stayed over there for as long as they could until they ended up, I guess now printing down in Rotland. Sounds like a good thing to leave in and have some nice public debate about. It's, I mean, I think if we're, we can't really talk about economic development without having that as a thing. And it's not gonna affect everybody. But as we talk about it, it was something for Caledonia spirits to consider as they were choosing Montpelier. My concern is if the revenue is significant, it's gonna be made up somewhere. It's not like we're gonna cut the budget somewhere. And so you're looking at maybe the municipal property tax increasing, which makes living, which makes living here harder or at least owning a home here harder. But if we suggest cutting, do we, if we suggested this, would we also have to suggest where to make up their revenue? I mean, that may be nice of us, but is that part of what we have to do in the plan? We wouldn't, but for that strategy to actually be achieved, that would have to be done. Great. And that might have to be some of the discussion that goes into either the chapter text or maybe as this gets developed as its card that we reflect that other piece of, the other thing to consider is that this would increase the tax rates by this much. We've talked about it from time to time, among the department heads of like, if this were to happen, this piece, this would happen if we did, let's say a local options tax, we do a local options tax to add to 1% on, it's gonna raise, I don't know, $600, $700,000. And then we go through and say, yeah, but as a thing back to the business community, we can get rid of this other tax, which hurts our ability to be competitive. And therefore, it doesn't raise any residential property taxes because it's all being taken up by the local options tax. But again, it's, I think if it happens, it happens because it's a piece of a bigger puzzle of things that come up. Mike, I have a question. I haven't looked at that in forever. Do you happen to know off the top of your head whether the city gets to decide their rate for the personal property tax, in which case we could have a strategy of lowering it, but not completely eliminating it? I'd have to get more details. I believe it's our taxes because they're at zero. So I think it's something that we could raise or lower or exempt more items or different items. I think it'll probably, I imagine if it went to the city council, we'd probably be looking at a little bit more of a study of who's impacted, has it really hurt Montpelier having this tax here? Have we really lost business? And I honestly can't tell you who didn't choose to be here. Can we change the strategy to look to study it, to study alternatives to it? Or study alternatives to it and consider eliminating it? That would probably make some more sense. Everybody okay with that? So, yeah, so we're still running out of time. Study alternatives to the current property tax system. There's been an idea this question. That's a John, that's John's idea. This was, we had a conversation in our subgroup. Remember talking about this, that we have a bunch of vacant land. This is a real, we have a real issue, right? I mean, I was looking at it partially other day that's just completely underutilized, ridiculous. And so, should there be some kind of levy, when buildings are underutilized? I know it's not a popular concept, but boy, we got some people just sitting on a lot of stuff that could really help the community. I know the roadblock is state law. I mean, the city does not have control over state that state laws and how property taxes work. So, yeah, Act 60 and Act 68 kind of make it very difficult to decide you're gonna have a different tax system. You could have a different, you could have some other kind of tax, right? I mean, the city could have a tax penalty or something. I don't know, I knew all the details on how they do these things other places, but I think that was kind of the idea, Mike, maybe you could go back and look and see, maybe we could just wait till John's back around. John and I have had this discussion a number of times and it's like a theoretically, like very interesting idea, but when you actually start looking at the way that Vermont laws work, I have a hard time seeing how you get there without like drastically changing state law. But yeah, when we can continue talking about it, and if there is like a workaround thing where we can kind of get at what he wants to do, which is to incentivize development of desirable property that's underutilized. Yeah, I think that's what we need to explore though. It's like, how to do the gist of what he's saying, but the specific way that he pitches it, I see is like legally really hard, if not like improbable. Yeah, I have my issues with it too, but I'll let it roll onto the next stuff so we can try to get done. Yeah. Okay, so let's, I don't know, what are we gonna flag that one of us? When I get yellow, I'll do some research to see what some other cities have done. I know other people are doing it, and everybody- I think I would like just, we'll move on, but I would like if that strategy were to emphasize the actual policy goal that John's getting at, which is to encourage development of vacant lots. Right, right. And do that through taxes or incentives or something. Right. Okay, so the next one's entrepreneurship, job attraction and expansion. We have a continue with the regional partners. We have a new one, this business development program. That's related to what we talked about above with the economic development officer. Yeah, this one's targeting talking to the business owners and the property owners though, as opposed to talking to the folks who are in the later side. Yeah, so that all seems to make sense if we're doing one of those, this would be a compliment to the other one. So a lot of these functions just so you know, a lot of these functions are of these functions here, not the functions above, are done by our community and economic development specialists down in my office. So if you need support for grant writing, grant administration, other technical, applying for VEDA, Brownfield revitalization, veggie, all that blah, blah, blah stuff, that's all stuff that we will currently do. So there's some of this that's new and some of it that's a continuation, so. Are you now that you're working for Montpelier? Are you selling that service to the businesses? Yes, yes, we provide this. Drag down Berry City, yes, every time we can. Can that one person assume the information, you know, the roll up above that's kind of directing people to services too, or is that, does he have, he or she have enough work to do just with what they're already doing? The community development specialists is the one who basically focuses on mostly housing programs. So a lot of that stuff, so he's pretty busy right now. And that's the job that's actually, he's leaving and that's been posted. So it's a job opening right now at the city to replace that, to replace Kevin. But yeah, he did all these other lower ones down here, so maybe I should change that to say new, continue. Okay, that seems great. Tax stabilization continue, that's pretty straightforward. Montpelier economic development revolving loan funds. Why is this new? Get my cursor back to where I was here. Keep rolling. So we do have some funds. So we have a Montpelier economic development revolving loan funds. So what we had for a number of years was it was all housed at the, kind of in the state, state of Vermont RLFs, which used to be formerly federal dollars that had come to the states, had gone to the municipality. We had recycled it, so we had loaned the money out and gotten payments back. So we had money. And then they reached a point where the state was saying, if you guys aren't gonna use it, we're gonna take it back. So we simply repurposed them. And that was allowed, we didn't do anything wrong. By taking them out of the RLF, it meant the state couldn't claw that money back anymore. But we still have the money, and now we're creating our own revolving loan funds. So Kevin did all the work to kind of close out. One of our biggest ones was the Capital Plaza RLF. So in 1992, after the big flood, Capital Plaza, the Besheres came in, got the Capital Plaza, they got a loan. And as they paid those loans back, they became the Capital Plaza RLF. So we now just have that money. We loaned, I think, almost all of it out to Caledonia Spirits, because they needed to have new water lines put in. So we loaned that out, and I think it's only like a five-year loan, so we'll get that money back. So we still have revolving loan funds, but we don't have any programs. So we kind of have this thing. We've got money, but we don't have anything to market because we don't have any programs. And this is what the new person, when they come in, he or she comes in, we're gonna kind of say, hey, we've got this pot of funds. What's the best way to multiply this money? How do we make this money make the biggest bang for its buck? But what we need first are our goals, what we're working on right now. What is the most important thing for us to work on? Well, then we can write an RLF that targets that money to our highest priorities. So that's where it's in here to kind of say, we've got this revolving loan fund. Let's talk about how we can do it. So the revolving loan fund is new, the money is very old. Money's 30, 40 years old, but that's a little bit of background on that. Is it no interest loan? It could be whatever we want. It's our money. For Caledonia spirits, was it a no interest loan? I don't know. They're... Okay, it's just curious. Yeah, their loan may have been a little bit different. Their loan may have been because it was for the water line and it may actually come out of their water fee. So we may have actually kind of loaned it to our water department. Our water department fixed the lines so they could get a really big customer and then they're gonna take the money from the increased thing. So we're actually gonna get it paid back from the water fund, not from Caledonia spirits. In this case, but like I said, in the future we could have a number of different programs. So that sounds like it was effectively no interest loan. I don't know why that worked. Okay. And that one, it was probably zero or no interest loans. Okay, so let's try to get... I don't think we're gonna finish, but we'll see. So that's good. That seems good. There's not anybody has any problem with that. The next one is the development, the building stock utilities facilities section, outdoor recreation promotion program. And this is from the parks director. This is like in line with what he wants to do. This is good. I don't know when we get to the community services stuff about parks, if we're gonna try to share some strategies like I said, there's some potential for that. Is anybody, is everybody okay with those? Yeah, I had to find a place to put his recommendations and a number of his recommendations I thought kind of fell under facilities. So I kind of put it into the building stock utilities and facilities, because a lot of his kind of fell into that category. Yeah, I don't think he's gonna have a problem with where it goes. And then, so the partner with the neighbors, I remember, yeah, he had a lot of stuff in his presentation about that. You tag this one as using chapter on implementation plan. Yeah, a lot of these, when we've had these in other chapters, when we talk about, let's, we'll have a natural resources, we should partner with the Winooski Basin, whatever. We kind of, we didn't put those as strategies because there's nothing to do. That's just something we talk about. That's just part of doing your job is partnering with your folks. So I think it's good, it should be discussed. Let's just put it in the chapter. It's not really a strategy. Yeah, that sounds good. So then below that is the Greenprint implementation program. I cut and pasted this from the natural resources plan. But I think this seems fine and seems relevant. Yeah. A lot of it comes down to, we're talking about facilities and this was their plan to expand the park facility. If you think of the parks in the trail system as a facility, then their Greenprint plan was, their plan, how do we connect Hubbard Park to U32, to up to Morse Farm out to, into downtown, across the river and out towards Northfield. How do we connect all these trails together? Well, the parks department has a Greenprint plan which helps to connect. They have nodes of things and then they have trails that would connect everything. So I mean, it's a very broad, very progressive way of looking at, in the context of facilities that businesses need as being a bunch of trails, but I like it. Everybody good with that? Okay. So TIF, continue TIF, that seems straightforward and then economic and then there's this one about how utilities and facilities has crossover, which is fine. And then we have vibrant downtowns. This is where economic development and complete streets, so transportation more or less overlap there. Streetscape improvement to continue, a city tourism marketing program continue, Montpelier alive. At one point we had a increased Montpelier alive's budget strategy. Is that gone? Yeah, we generally haven't had those in as strategies. I think we usually will talk about things directly if there's something very specific that's targeted to them. Can we just add the word expand at the beginning there just to emphasize that we're doing a good job. We'd like to do more. With the tourism marketing? Yeah, just expand city and tourism marketing program. Yeah, I don't think we talk about like increasing budgets anywhere else. So that would kind of get around it. There you go, expand and then continue expand, very good. And then the last thing is the hotel and parking garage project. And if there's momentum for this, I'm fine with having this as something we want to still do. Do you have other thoughts? I don't know if we would put this in the plan per se, but is there, I mean, I just wouldn't want it to be a repeat of what happened before. I am in favor of that type of a project, but I would want to do it in a way that wouldn't end us up right back here. I don't know if we can control that really in the plan, but. Yeah, I think it's, I put it in there based on trying to capture a little bit of, you know, when we talk about vibrant downtowns, you know, our big push was, you know, part of our vibrant downtowns we have right now is during the day we had a lot of workers. Unfortunately from COVID, that's been an issue. So we kind of had this nine to five vibrant downtown because of everybody working here. 6,000 people work in Montpelier. Well, 9,000 people work in Montpelier. So we get a lot of vibrancy during the day and then it drops off quite a bit, but some of that we were trying to capture was from our tourists and getting more people in here to spend time. And that was the big push for hotels. So if one of our goals, if one of our sectors is we really want to have a good, vibrant tourist economy, then we're going to have to have more hotels. And if that's not important, then don't worry about the hotel and parking garage. It really kind of comes down to if we want more tourists unless people are going to drive in and leave, we're never going to capture people and capture their, if we're talking economics, we're not going to capture their money. I think it's important. I don't think we're going to, I mean, we can leave it here for now. I don't think it's actually a strategy what's listed there. I mean, it's what we hope, but hope is not a strategy. Sure. Do we talk about tourism in any other chapter? Not so much. I mean, it would be the economic one that. Yeah, okay. I guess to be honest, I hadn't thought about it before. So. Oh yeah, maybe we, I'm sorry. Going off of what Gabe said, maybe we can reword the strategy to be more proactive and to seek a project like this and then leave it. Okay, so we're out of time. This is what I'm thinking that we can do. I went ahead and updated that aspiration. There's a few other little updates and tinkering that we talked about to do. How about we try to get that stuff polished up and done before the next meeting? We won't go through it again. We'll just vote at the next meeting to approve the goals, aspirations and strategies. And then we'll move on to whatever other chapter from there that we'll, so we'll have plenty of time after doing that, but it will be the like a last minute chance if anybody has any goals, aspirations, strategies stuff to do that we haven't discussed yet for economic development. So we'll plan to vote next time, try to polish it up before that meeting. So we have like a clean version of what we're voting on and then go on to the next chapter, which will be one. And I'll try to work on writing the written economic development chapter. So that's what we think that hopefully we have. So usually we do the implementation strategies, then we go and do the chapters. Sometimes I'll have them both done at the same time, but in this case, we hit them one at a time. And I'll plan to, Mike, if you draft it, I'll plan to also go through and work on it. So hopefully we'll be able to just knock out both with quick votes next time. I'm happy to do that as well on the chapter. Give it a read. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Maybe we can both do it. Okay, so do we have a motion to adjourn? We have a plan for next week. Just real quick, Mike, what do you, what just, we don't expect one other chapter. Do you think we'll might be ready next time? Well, we get started on arts. The economic development chapter, written, the written chapter part we'll have. Trying to think about what is the date of our next meeting we would be. It's going to be the 14th of March. I don't know if I'll have much else. I'll be working with the community services, but we won't have that done. The economic development housing is basically done. I can, I will also then try to, I've got utilities and facilities mostly done. And maybe I'll have to make that, put that on the higher up on my list to get that, that wrapped up as well. Well, I mean, we can be, we can be kind of modest about it. And we, if you want to start in utilities, we can just do the aspirations and goals. And you don't, so keep it, keep it a little contained that way. Yeah, so that might work. Let's plan to do that then. Okay, sounds good. Sounds like we have, we know what we're going to be doing next time. Do we have a motion to adjourn? A motion to adjourn. Motion from Gabe. We have a second. Second. All right. You look like you were going to do that. Second from Marcella. Those in favor of adjourning, say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. We're adjourned. See you March 14th. Daniels. Thanks. Thank you everyone. Yeah. Thanks, thanks.