 All the meeting order. Thanks. Any changes to the agenda? None. We'll deem it approved. Third item is comments from the chair. Maybe I could just turn this over to Kirby since he ran the last meeting. I thank you for doing that and thanks everyone for moving forward without me. You couldn't figure out how to vote to adjourn. I know. I still didn't. It's my one chance to learn how to do some process. It's just a lot of debatable motion. Anything that you want to discuss from last meeting? Well, it looks like we are going to discuss the substantive part from last meeting tonight, which is kind of clear planning for tonight. We're going to talk about how we'd like to communicate with the committees and try to be leaders, I guess you could say, in organizing some of the work from the other committees in the city. So we'll be talking about that tonight. So we had some great comments about that last week. I gave a sort of stream of consciousness summary of the Rachel Energy Plan, which is going to vote tomorrow. I believe I know I've sent a link to everyone on the commission with that. And for the public who's interested in the Rachel Energy Plan, you can go to the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission website and find that plan and review it yourself as a member of the public. That's really it. Nothing new for me. Thanks. The only thing I'll say is we're going to keep plugging ahead with our new work on the new city plan. I don't keep calling it master plan. I didn't catch it either, Mike. Until just now and I realize. I don't know if this is the right moment, but I feel confused. So the city just update or approve the master plan and the city plan is something different. We've been using the term master plan for years in the city. And the term master plan is typically used, as you know, in the Act 250 context as you're mapping out a development proposal. And so given that it's often used in that context, we want to avoid confusion, refer to it as a municipal plan or a city plan and we settle on a city plan. But this requires a big paradigm shift for everyone, not only on the commission, but in the community. So that's why I keep trying to say city plan because we're trying to refer to it by its name, which is a little bit more clear what it's identifying. Do you have thoughts on that? Well, what, so what is, I guess I don't, yeah. The question is what are we doing here? Yeah, what is, yeah. The city plan is the master plan for all intents and purposes. Oh, oh. The question is, we extended the old master plan. Yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. And till when? December? No, it's good for eight years. Oh, well, we've got our money's around. But we can, we're tacked on some things at the end of the five or six years that have been in existence. So the idea is we start undoing it. Okay. And do we know how long that process will take? It's less than eight years, right? Yes. It'll take a number of years to probably get it. I promised we'd have the zoning done by the time I got out of Afghanistan. And we failed. So we don't make any promises. Okay. No, that's good. I just wanted to get it. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't understand. No, that's fine. Yeah. Sometimes if you were looking some other places, you'll see a discussion of a master plan, but usually that would usually relate to it like a downtown master plan or some type of site plan. It's a physical plan. It's a physical plan as opposed to the city plan or the municipal plan, which has the required time from education to community services to housing. So we're trying to use that terminology. Yeah. Landscape architects and architects would be referring to a master plan in a completely different sense. Most communities don't call their city plans or town plans, master plans. We just have because on my shelf I have master plans for the city in Montpelier coming back to 1965, 1968. For whatever reason, Weber did it in the 60s called it a master plan and everyone re-adopted it since then. We've been trying to use the term city plan for at least a year. We've been trying. It sounds hard. Yeah. But the public really knows it as the master plan. Yeah. But reality is not. I think there were elements of the master plan which were sort of interesting in this area going on. Yeah, there were more physical proposals that were in those plans. Connecting streets across. Making more printed street network through downtown. So yes, we're just trying to practice getting ourselves out of habit of calling this the master plan update. It's the city plan update. We will try. Yeah. And fail. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Okay. So that's it. I come from the chair. Um, general business. Comments in the public about some of the money on Jen. No, we don't have any numbers of the public present. So we'll move on to number five, which is called item five is called master plan update discussion. We're going to amend that to city plan update discussion. And you want to take it away. Yeah, I'll just kick this off. So we had talked about housing being the first chapter. The housing task force meets this Thursday. So I'll be going to their meeting this Thursday night and talking to them about this and inviting some or more of them to the 26th and have a joint meeting. Talk about the rest of these, which is a little bit of what our expectations are. We're going to provide a framework. Some of these we may not be able to answer. We wanted to start to talk about. So you want to walk through them one by one? Yeah. I mean, so the expected framework. So I just printed out. I grabbed three different housing chapters and I didn't make a bunch of copies of each so we can pass some of them around. We need to one was, you know, this one's very cities. This one's South Burlington's and this one's Middlebury's. So I just try to grab one from different parts of the state because they're presumably rich by different people. Maybe. Is there one that you prefer? I mean, a lot of this comes down to layout. There are certain requirements that we have to talk about in the housing element. But there's not a lot. I think a plan for affordable housing for low to moderate income. But really, you can talk about anything related to housing. You just have to talk about that one piece. So it really comes down to a lot of the plan is really to kind of tell a story or make a case or set the stage for what our plan is going to be going forward. And so there's a little bit that I thought that Middlebury did a nice job of laying out a little introduction piece. Then they talked about trends, you know, affordability, sustainability, character, social interaction. It looks like they set out their plan to be laid out with some principles in mind. And then they kind of tied them back in and then got into their goals and policies and recommendations. I didn't read carefully all the goals and policies to see if it really made sense. But I mean, a lot of this is what we'll eventually want to get to provide to our committees. This is kind of how we plan to go a little bit of it, though, is, I mean, that's why we're doing one chapter. One chapter, see where it goes, see how we... But the idea is, or at least the idea that we were recommending and discussing last time was that, why this is going to be in the plan is going to be relatively short with potentially links to a lot of other documents that were really kind of a bunch of information, but really to kind of digest all that information down and maybe put the rest of that into an appendix. So the implementation steps would be in an appendix? We could separate those out as well into an appendix as well, the specific implementation, and really just talk about, you know, four or five pages of housing. What's your thought about using what you've already done that you worked on last year with? That was what the housing case was. Yeah, that one is really not the final product. It's a good, that's the piece that would be kind of linked. We don't think that's necessarily telling the public. That's really kind of explaining to somebody who might be a little bit of a policy wonk who wants to know why we choose this policy really specifically, because it really kind of goes in, this is why we have this written this way, this word's important, this word's important, this word's important. Oh, I guess I was thinking more in terms of the housing piece that you actually did that had the implementation steps involved. The implementation steps would definitely be in it. We would probably digest that into a table or a table or something. I'm not sure how that would get formulated, but the written text part, I think what's in that table, we can always work on how to make that presented. But I think what we need out of the committees is to kind of work on the text part that would be relevant. How do you see it? The goals and policies will agree that it's a goal we like, and at some point we just have to decide how to present it. So I think something that could be useful right now as we walk through what parts of the analysis we think are important to be included in the housing chapter and with a view to how those would be important in other chapters. Stephanie sent me and Kirby some helpful comments. She's saying things that we might want the housing task force to consider could be a current conditions analysis. For example, we want them to take a look at what the housing availability is right now out there. Just to kind of see what's available on the ground today. Then the goal setting, which is what you're just talking about. Well, you're talking about the implementation of those goals, but first you have to identify the goals. So what do you want to see accomplished in the next 10 years is the framework that, I mean, the timeline that Stephanie offered. We could assess that if folks think it should be eight years or however long. The third piece that she recommended is capability assessment. Meaning what resources or tools does Montpelier have that could be used to reach the goals. And finally, this is the implementation piece. What actions should the city take with existing resources or in order to gain additional resources in order to meet these goals? I thought that was a great framework for what the meeting should be in a given chapter. Well, let's talk about it. It sounds like they probably have a lot of this information. It's just might be floating or maybe they just need help to framework. Maybe they don't. Maybe they have it all planned out already. But if we have a thought on it, we should offer it. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure they have a they have an idea. I think of what they want. I think the issue is just presented in such a way that it can be discussed and debated publicly because they as much as they have a lot of support, you know, they also get pushed back on certain things that they want. So at the same time, they make a case for something, you know, they'll have the support behind it. And then if the planning commission or city council decides to make some changes, we can obviously address those. But I think they just have to start to put those things down and put them into context and decide, you know, we've talked about an inspection program, rental inspection program, you know, the housing task force has. Are they interested in saying that's going to be a goal that they want to follow up on? Or is that one that they kind of they kind of like the idea that they don't want to push it? That was my question for you. Is it the goals that you're seeing as the piece where more I mean, I mean, the assessing current conditions should be straightforward. I don't think anyone's going to really debate on that. There might be some members of the public who could help correct or provide history where he did. But that should be pretty straightforward. The capability assessment, what tools we have, that should be fairly straightforward, right? So then the two things where it could be trickier is goal setting and implementation of those goals. But we can at least get some of the pieces put together. So current conditions should at least partially be set in the existing city plan, right? You reworked those statistics anyway? Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of statistics. So usually the bigger question come in. Yeah, the bigger question is for some of these is how much of this do we really want to talk about? Like we were coming up with just five or six pages that we want to talk about for housing. How much do we really want to talk about current conditions? Because we could have current conditions. I could put five pages of census data on housing. I think a summary on that with the appendices that you discussed would make sense. Yeah, I think we just have to pick out what are the important ones based on our goals. So I usually work a little bit backwards on the goals back to conditions. Because you really, again, come back to this telling the story. We're going to tell the pieces of information that are important to explaining the story. I think that works as long as we don't have to write up the current conditions before we figure out the goals. But I think there needs to be a form of understanding. Compile them somewhere in an appendix. We have to understand them. Yeah, because otherwise the goals don't have any context. Yeah, it's close to the data from the 2000 census. 2010. So what do you folks think about? Because I feel like it'd be helpful if we give them more narrow or more specific sort of a box to work with them. And if we can set something up so that anything that's being written is sort of classified, tagged under sort of an accepted framework like maybe there's a goal. And if we can have one goal, this is an example of the components of the goal. And then there may be some measurable objectives like how do we know if we've met that goal. And then you have strategies, policies, or actions that link to those. And then behind those you should have the information or data of supporting. And if we have them essentially write this in a way that all of these are classified in a way, in a certain way, with the same tags and the same schema, then what we can do is afterwards is create a plan that's sort of digital or interactive very easily so that you can then sort by either committee program or project that this is assigned to or topic area, if that's what you're interested in or what's on this year's objectives or targets. So you have the information in one place, but then you can provide different views. It seems to me if we follow the rule we're going to use existing water and sewer, the number of places for new housing is pretty small. It's only five years of work to identify those places and change zones so that more housing can be. Just coming through the narrowing, they're concerned with terrarium, meaning better enforcement of housing codes. I think we do need to maintain the quality of the opportunity of building many new houses. This is in a golden view. So one of the goals is to... Yeah, and that's a money issue, of course. That's an enforcement issue. I bet there's very little data. I'd be surprised if there's much data on maintenance and rental quality. I mean, it's really a market factor. Since our rents are comparatively high, I imagine the places are well preserved. Well, that's what I would know. Are people getting fear dollars? So I'm interested in pursuing this discussion, but I want to make sure that we have our sort of process framework suggestions for them first before we get into the substantive. This is where we're treading right now. No, and it's a great point. But it sounds like they've already done a lot of that. Did you say, Mike? It's from 2010. Yeah, it depends on that. I mean, there's some data that we have that's fairly even more up to date than that. We can get some realtor data. Because some things really kind of fluctuate with time pretty quickly. A number of days on the market or actually months supply is the one that the realtors use more. You know, how much supply is on the market because less than six months the prices have to rise. It's more than six months the prices have to drop. Well, it sounds like we'll have to re... If this is going to be our initial chapter to send out to the other companies as an example and it is the most likely to change, we'll have to revisit it at the end of the process again. They're all going to change. We'll probably have to revisit them in the end. I mean, economic development is another one. Unless we started with natural resources, it would be probably the most static factor. I think a lot of them would change. But a lot of the policies that go in, and I like where John was going with his thought of trying to set up a framework. I do think a digital plan is the thing of the future plans. You know, that's still kind of the requirement we have under state laws to produce them. I think a plan that's interactive on the web is going to really be something... If we can start making some steps in that direction, I think that's kind of searchable where you've got everything there. You can search by box and bring up what's all in the energy plan, what's all in 2015 or 2018, what's in... How does that touch on other areas? Yeah, how does that affect other areas? That interactivity would be really useful for us. So how do we do that? I think that's starting at the end and working to the forward. You know, instead of starting, you know, most of these plans, when we write to the plan, we start at the front and work our way. The last thing we work on is the implementation plan. And I think the same place I was going last year, which is really kind of let's start with the goals, policies, and recommendations. Find out where we want to go and then write the narrative part, supports that blaze different things. But if you have a pretty good idea what the goals are, then that's really a good way to do it. I think the housing committee already has the goals. I think that document I provided last time with the goals, policies, and recommendations, I think the goals are there. That was our first shoe through the process. I think we have more refinement. We need to do with that and more discussions and go to the public and get more input and work on some of those details a little bit more because it really didn't work a lot on the details. But I think some of the big goals and the vision pieces are where they're probably going to be heading. The only question I had for them that I found was that we really didn't have a good goal on affordability, which is one of the ones that's probably the most important element to it. Kirby, what are the outlying towns saying about populations and growing stagnant? If we build a lot of houses, theoretically, what are the people going to come? I don't know a lot as far as data. On that, I do know that there's some growth around us and I know anecdotally because I know a lot of people who live in towns around us who want to live in a peculiar area and they try and build an either renting or buying area. I know enough people that's just a very common area in this region. People are going to communities nearby because there is housing available there. This market is really an extreme position and then we have close to zero percent. That's the measure for vacancy, rates for rental, that kind of thing. It's a complete seller's market. Have you also seen an increase in commuters to the essentially growing denier or the pricing where housing has gone? Could you speak a little bit? An increase in commuters to the Burlington area as housing prices over there have increased very dramatically from 2000 to 2010. The population growth has sort of pushed out to that 35-minute drive area and needed a little bit beyond when you look at any businesses around, St. Alden, Fairfield or Fairfax. They've ever seen population growth as housing prices in Burlington. There's a little bit of that mobiliar as well. So what do we do with that? We increase the supply of housing. That's right. And especially housing that's walkable to downtown. Not just bring more. A lot of the statistics pieces are just to understand the situation. A good example I can give is when I was working in the Wild County, everybody that lived in Morrisville worked in Waterbury. Everybody who worked in Morrisville, which was a job center, Morrisville was both a federal community and a job center. It takes talent to do that. So they actually had, you know, like 80% of the people who lived in Morrisville left to go somewhere else to go to work. And there was more jobs and there were people in Morrisville. So everyone from Johnson and Wolkhead everywhere came into Morrisville. So it's kind of this weird 8 o'clock everybody flushes out and everybody flows in at 4.30. Everybody goes out and everybody comes back and it was this weird dynamic because the people who lived there couldn't, people lived there because they couldn't afford to live in Waterbury. But that drove up the housing prices in Morrisville such that people who worked in Morrisville couldn't actually afford to live there. So they lived in Wolkhead and Neaton and the community. So you end up with this weird, but it's helpful from the planning commission and the planning standpoint to understand that about your community. And I think that's a little bit of understanding. Our housing situation helps us realize that it's not just our housing situation. We're being affected by Chittenden County. So certain things we're not going to be able to affect. We can't change. We can't make them build more housing to help lower the pressure here. But at the same time, we're increasing our housing stock. We have added a lot of housing over the past 50 years. But at the exact same time, we've also, you know, our housing household size went from three to two. So just to keep the same population, we had to have a 50% increase in housing. At housing units, we just get smaller households. But that also gives us a housing stock of large houses predominantly filled by much smaller families. So that's why the Housing Task Force has tried to come up with new policies and programs to say how can we take these larger houses and be able to do these infill. That's why, you know, doing these duplexes, can we take this, you know, we're not really adding a second house, you know, trying to explain to the people when you're doing the master plan and doing the zoning. We're not actually looking to add another house when we say we're going to add another quality. We're simply going to take that existing house and subdivide it internally into two units because it was a house that was built for a family of six that now has a family of two. Yeah, it won't have any more people living there than the previous one. Yeah, it's got the same number of people. It's just going to be two units in an increase in the density. But I think we've allowed it, the new zoning will do a lot to enable more housing. And now it's up to the Housing Task Force to come up with ways of how do we facilitate, how do we help the property owners who have a big house to subdivide, you know, to make that happen. How can they learn how to be landlords because I think that's the trick for the housing committee and the strategy to... And that comes back to your comment before, which is we have limited areas where we can have development. So how do we... Well, that sounds like a lot of technical knowledge that would be required. Both contractors have to do it legally. How do you get the buggers out of their own pay and other things? That sort of thing had to be available for people to do it. So does Housing Task Force have a list of goals of that nature now? Yeah, I think I handed it out last time. I just put my copy somewhere. I'll just pass it around. That was... We had some last time, so I remember we had this housing development until, well, that was the goal. The aspiration was, Montpelier will have a healthy housing market that provides an adequate supply of housing in a mix of housing types, sizes, and occupancies. The goal, how are we going to get housing development to have a 5% vacancies in the rental market? And so looking at developing an infrastructure and sending it to the program, that's to help people be able to extend the utilities to these units, because a lot of times it's just... We're trying to get the costs down for the developer. So the costs of the developer, $280,000 to develop the unit, but they can't make enough rent to pay the mortgage if we can get that down to $250,000. Then we might be able to get them into their range where the economic market works for them. So that was just a list of tools. Now the question for the housing committee is how many of those do we want to pursue? What's our priority? We just started putting ones out there. Are there others that we miss that we... Yeah. Are there other programs that we miss that we should be considering putting on that list? And there's some elements that could be taken off now, potentially. Yeah, some of those we've already done with the zoning. The sprinkler stuff, there was a comment in there that said we should have removed the sprinkler requirements. So you are using that format at least as a talking point? That would be the start. My assumption was I think that's where... Yeah, okay. If we started to work on something like that, then we've got something that's kind of... We could put it into an Excel-type database, not a computer person, but some kind of database that would then let you be able to manipulate within the matrix of different fields. I want to know things that are already being done, because some of these that are described in there are talking about continuing to do something. Well, that's not something to do. If the goal, if the program in there says we should just keep doing what we're doing with this program, well, that's not something new. We just have to recognize that we're doing it. What are all the new things that we play to do this year? We can search that. It would be helpful then to... I'm trying to put John's suggestion into practice then to think of this in terms of starting with the goals, maybe, and breaking out based on future action, maintaining those categories we talked about before and having committees kind of divide things up that way for us. I think... Or something else. Well, I think figuring out, or we have goals, objectives, strategies, or actions, what are the different attributes that we want to know about those actions? Are they part of a... What project or program is going to implement those? When will it happen? How will we know when we get there? Is it measurable? Is it something that we're maintaining, evolving, or transforming so that your community in and of itself could be one so that we could then see what are we, across the tent, we're proposing to keep doing, what are we changing? How much will this cost? Is there any data supporting it or do we have any estimates on the cost so that we could then sort by terms of dollar amounts? A priority one? Would you have implementation over time or would you have goals that are part of the way through the process? In other words, intermediate goals in order to sort of set targets or are you just saying that in the course of these eight years we're going to get from point A to point B? It depends on the goal. But some of them would have more immediate goals. Right, and some of them may also be limited by data availability. So we're going to have the 2020 census coming out of this. We're going to have a bunch of data coming out of this so it wouldn't make sense to say we're going to get used to 2019 or 2021 estimates here. So I would say there should be some flexibility on benchmarks. But just having so that when people write things out they're thinking, well what is this? Is this a policy? Is this a strategy? And then once it's in a box then you can ask some of those other questions. Once we have them all it becomes much easier to bring things together and present a plan that people can read and understand. So the first question is is this a policy project? You had a few different things. What was your program before? What was the other one? Permits, programs, projects. And I just threw it at random. Yeah, that's what we talked about before. That's what we talked about before. So that would be like an action type or something like that? Yeah. As one of the kind of data for... Did I go over the... We put together a hypothetical discussion one that I went over. Maybe a year and a half ago. Kind of laid out because it would lay out in a structure how you would go through and say, well, maintain, enhance, transform what are we trying to do with butterflies to try to maintain the butterfly population we're trying to enhance the number we're trying to be transformative and introduce your unicorns it was meant to be just a way of having the conversation but it does lay out the pieces of how you talk about each one of the steps how do you talk about a goal how do you talk about the policies in those P and U? I'm trying to bring together our different ideas about what we're trying to do right now and that's the framework we talked about that exists that we can use as a template to bring technology into it more it just sounds like it's not a change in the information we're providing but it's a change in how we end up displaying the information down the road is that an accurate description of the way to use technology more or or should we be gathering like a different data set of the group of information right now to plan for that I think it could be a little bit of both I mean if something it's helpful to know what you're working towards if you want to have a format and to make our lives easier and if we're going to do it let's do it once so right now we're trying to fit that to something else so I'm up there has G Suite for government you have Google Drive set up committee I don't know if it's set up I'm just wondering maybe there's a plan folder for all the committees to be working on documents in one place and they could even do settings if they're visible from anyone in the public but everyone's sort of working on copying the template that's the same everywhere yeah I mean I think what I'm hearing is in order for what we do now to translate into things that are easy to use in particular just technology tools we have available we need to make sure that we're doing it in a way that it's consistent from day one so when we're setting goals we have to identify what are the various drop down menus so to speak so one could be is this goal to maintain enhance or transform what it means to evolve so whatever terms we're going to use let's use the same ones every time and whatever you're most familiar with and in particular just use those then the second question is is this policy like program or would it be a regulatory mechanism I mean that's sort of another one so figuring out what are these various differentiating pieces figure out the terms we're going to use and then using them across the board we'll enable the tags that we place on them to be cross-referenced so if you want to see every every goal that it amplifies a regulatory change you can click something and see the goal scale and that's what you're envisioning right and I think these whatever we're asking there needs to be a purpose for it right we shouldn't just ask for something because it sounds nice so it should have a function which then leads to writing something that's useful right if you're writing, you know you have to write something in order to be classified for whatever needs to be answered that question and there's a reason for that and write something that's pretty useful it starts to force you doesn't let you be lazy it forces you into a direction which is a little bit why we did that whole structure that we did start to force when we got into this once you say you're going to do a regulation now you have to answer one of these questions it's got to be either encouraging something or you're requiring something but you can't you know so it starts to force you into this thing why or what are we going to do with this regulation use this regulation to require solar panels or we're going to do something that provides a density bonus so we can encourage so we've got to have that kind of discussion and by having it within the box it starts to force you into not just saying you know the zoning should discuss or have regulations about solar panels by direction call it a table and we can then if we were working on zoning we could get to the zoning policy so how's something like that work John is it if you had it in a say a little document is a matrix or something then and you went to search for some particular item would you be since the Google is searchable would it be able to top up all of the things that say have regulations attached to them yeah I mean ideally afterwards we basically just create an interface that's a lot more user friendly so you aren't in there we don't want to send people to a spreadsheet or to people not to read something you should be able to search by word or drop down or different views or paths there's lots of different ways to do this and we can also just link it to different maps what would the committees have to do it first then excel document or something like that there would probably be the easiest meeting myself but if we're trying to access databases the databases are still around but I think a lot of people are either comfortable with Google issues or excel and then from that as long as they don't get destroyed the integrity of them can sometimes get screenable you can then migrate it to more secure database but it could be interactive in terms of working on one document the whole time within Google Docs or something but that doesn't mean that other committees are going to be able to input to that particular document unless you want probably not probably going to just have a chair or some other docs so that we don't have too many kits in the kitchen you could see but yeah I think some committees it may not work for everyone either but it's good to have an open process the more open the process we can make it I think it's the open the more people who have an interest in commenting well I like the idea of having the working documents available online it would be viewable to the public not everyone should be able to edit that we don't have a Wikipedia situation but just the least the committee working on it would have editing ability and then everyone also got viewing capability potential for comments then if the public was going to view it could be public offer comments that would build it I mean that's a problem to have anything at any time but having them write them down is really helpful yeah well and that brings us to the next be here the process should we expect the committee to use and I have some notes from Stephanie here her thoughts are that each committee should be responsible for at least some form of outreach on their chapter like a pick-off or a reasoning meeting and then at the planning commission level we would review the visioning from the last plan I guess she's talking about the last master plan and have some public discussion to make sure it's still accurate so I think she's talking about a separate outreach process there but as far as the committee's outreach I think they should come to an initial recommendation with goals and then have some sort of outreach to the public to see if those goals are for the community I think it's important to address the expectation as well so we would actually say that each committee would have their own outreach meeting potentially yeah I think they could choose the way they want to do it but it seems like it's important to get feedback on the goals at that level so that they would have control over adjusting the goals based on the feedback before it came to us rather than it the public coming out against whatever the housing task force says without them having a chance to kind of think about it you can never predict what the public will do I mean they may not care at the first step and the exact same thing as proposed a year later by the planning commission at least if there is at least if we've gone out in the goals this is how we plan to accomplish it this is what we're going to present to the planning and provide the opportunity to adjust it at that point and present it again so that might be something that would coordinate it through your office then yeah I would probably with whoever the staff is we would have to be working with them when we're working on the plan we'd have to be working with them with an idea the energy committee the plan we're focusing on goals, policies, recommendations we're going to start there work our way back to the written text part when we've got some draft goals either go out with no goals and try to go to the public I usually think that's a bad idea usually I like to give it to the public if they don't like it then we can go back if they think we're going in the right direction refine this this is too far one concern I have is often the only members of the public that come out unless they were opposed we don't always get an accurate representation of what the broader community wants I don't know if anyone has ideas about how we can reach more members of the public but that's something I've been following over a lot is there any budget for food or anything like that at this meeting we can do I mean if we can find things at work and it was something like if we could buy three or four pizzas we could make these things work I think we would find in our budget the money for stuff like that if it's bringing people out then we'll do I think it's just a matter of finding what is the piece and I think in different times in different topics it's going to change I think the approach community services to get to those chapters just going directly to the senior center and these rec facilities going to where people are who would never come we've gotten the farmer in our bed but we go to shops or other places in town we've tried a various mix of that with the energy committee and it gets very response but I think you know in terms of elements that are concerning to others then I think going to the senior center makes a lot of sense in the when the last master plan the actual master plan was done there was a meeting up at my college that there were probably 600 people there at various times and it was sort of a general kind of they set out the goals and on all of the areas and you know the sticky buttons and all of that in terms of what they thought was going to work How did they get attracted to the meeting was it? I think that there was build up in terms of talking about it and so people were in the newspaper whatever there was a lot of energy beforehand and what I remember is we just found out about it and showed up and you know I think it should not just be one event that it should be something I think they also had like 6 or 7 business that were working on that project and there was a lot of do we have just one life? we have none oh right so yeah we've got so I mean the process was going to try to use a lot of the policies and recommendations out of that plan because I don't think they're necessarily that far off necessarily a strategic plan what's the most important goal is important to protect housing price it's all about stickies we should do about housing it might not be the most effective tool it seems like we need to get a greener about goals first and I think that was a little Joan's thing we started with that endpoint let those committees come up with a recommendation those policies recommendations go out to the public get that even if they don't necessarily write that start we can say that to the end we'd really be down to writing well read them what our goals are it's going to kind of lay out what we're telling people to turn in your introduction to housing this is what's important about housing these are our goals, policies and recommendations tell itself we're going to write based on what our goals are because we're going to exactly summary that by really talking about the overall approach approach and justification and why it's important we're going to talk about why it's important because it's going to end up being your goal if we start with the goals I try to kind of make that the outreach that occurs with the outreach ideas maybe we could think about as we develop the goals and we have a draft maybe publish that in some way to get feedback on so if you're not as people in a vacuum having to sell housing, we actually put them out there and that way we're also not being too reactive like we kind of already know what we think the priorities are so we start working on that but then incorporate outreach so that's kind of like still be early on the process and goals is the person that's going to do it get feedback at that early stage as to whether or not those are committed goals yeah we're going to build everything off the goals and you should probably move on except filling goals is the most appropriate thing to get feedback from because maybe not everyone is experts in everything but at least we'll have some opinions on the goal side but not the weeds so that would be the most appropriate just have a place because people naturally will come up with solutions have a place to evolve those these are the ideas we'll talk about that's a great idea we'll talk about that as a way of evolving the public we still have to present at some point what our recommended approach is but we at least with your goal we looked at 10 different options for implementing that goal are appropriate and would be the most effective and then go to the public and say these are the four we think we're going to recommend or we could do any one of these or are there ones that you guys like better yeah I think if we can split apart the goals and the implementation piece or they have more of a productive conversation and that's the goal is to eventually reach that and a strategic plan that's our goal this process how are we going to measure it how do you measure being strategic yes well I mean for for me wearing my planning hat at least having tasks that we can start to be able to check off that goes and says these are accessory apartments and how many of them at least we've got policies that we can look back on ultimately the hope is that we've got goals that are aspirations that are clear that we can have understanding of and I think we're going to try as best we can to attach benchmarks some things we can put benchmarks on I think some just it's tough to put a benchmark on safe houses houses what's a safe house I mean it's a difficult thing to have you know this number of houses will be you're so measurable yeah we could say got that one answered no it's smoke detectors actually yeah we can have somebody inspect smoke detectors so like when the housing task force comes in next week are we going to give them I mean we have those four points that Stephanie came up with that sound good do we just give them that or do we want to give them something more like a template to put this into and then say I guess I'm just not yeah quite sure I would be interested in trying to get a template okay likes for a little bit some of that that format kind of fits itself into the template anyway can I take a look at that there's a little bit of that that kind of fits into that that template format we think we just have to find a way to categorize yeah I thought you had a bottle we do this was actually written we had the one that was the hypothetical which was the butterfly drain both in uniforms but this was actually written using that format so if you were to look at that you know maintain the city's commitment to affirmatively further fair housing and bring attention to the city council linear with the city's not fully not fully meeting its obligations so as a goal it was required to say either they're going to maintain transform and so that one's going to maintain because we do already have a policy on that so I think you know there's certain ones that it was designed to mean that that one doesn't have as many goals it doesn't have the it was already kind of written in that format just I think we need to figure out how to assemble that in an online way the committees can start populating their fields so for example so goal A so the aspiration first is aspiration A Montpelier will have a healthy housing market that provides an adequate supply of housing in a mix of type sizes and occupancy and then there's a variety of goals associated with that aspiration so goal A is increase housing development until 5% vacancies is achieved in the rental market so that's good we can measure that benchmark that's what it's saying target 5% rental vacancies by 2025 benchmark net increase of 150 housing units in five years and it's necessary to achieve benchmark 240 units by 2025 and then there's strategies and here's where I think there's an opportunity to further identify these strategies by what whether it's a program or regulatory change and that's what this all of the green is so the strategies are to develop a program or amend a tax stabilization program or conduct a study so I think that it's already it's already laying itself out for the green ones I think were new I think the greens were all the news and the other ones were to continue there was continue amend if you were either going to continue to do it you were going to amend it because sometimes we would have a program that just needed to be adjusted in some cases we needed something so maybe we could give it tags like that now at this point and just say continue program or continue whatever a new program so there's two categories there whether it's a program project or whatever and then whether it's new and before it was a little bit wonky and it feels a little funny but when you start to get into it you realize it had started to force you into boxes that helped to help you to organize the tag how that works it would be easy to tag those because that was already laid out in that framework in a set of rules this is how you write goals whatever you think would make sense we can make a program recognize does that sound reasonable so whatever tag you can choose the tag but I think being picking a consistent tag and putting it on the drafts now it's going to make it much easier later that's the sense I was getting from proposing please jump in and moving in that direction realizing it's okay it's not perfect big things that are necessarily to be in a word doc as long as people are answering this question in a structured way then we can move it to something else afterwards could we even then I mean we could certainly highlight each one of these as a tag but then we have other tags so that we could read between the different reports focusing on the energy talks about housing and so the energy in housing could that then link to something in the housing section so because we talked before about how much interconnection there's going to be between them that draft talks about that in a number of places whether it's neighborhoods and it references having neighborhoods that are connected so the housing plan supports the Complete Streets Network or having neighborhoods that are close to recreation areas in policy of having certain distance that they have from every neighborhood so I mean it's already in there and I think that can certainly be built on the energy plan having affordable having energy efficient houses are making housing more affordable because utility costs are a part of the factor that's used for calculating houses it's affordable so we have targets in terms of how many houses would have been weatherized by us and the housing committee supports your efforts on the energy committee to do that because that is helping us on the housing committee accomplish our goal of having more affordable housing because a thousand dollars a year on heating costs that's a thousand dollars more affordable that this housing so then Part C says we should have a message of support and expand the commission's role and it needs to provide a proposed plan for the element but the commission reserves right to an end to balance the other chapters of the plan so how do we express that in a way that's supportive and I guess I'll just kick off by conveying Stephanie's comments since she sent them in she notes that different committees will probably want different levels of involvement from the planning commission while they're working on their chapters so her suggestion is to give them options of how we might be involved with the caveat that since we do a review and support their work and maybe move them to help us involve it at least some way before they have a final chapter so some of these options are one to invite someone from the commission to participate in the meetings who could be the liaison two request to be on the agenda of the planning commission meeting involved in the full planning commission of the planning process or three so that working sections of the chapters of your chapters for the planning commission to review and provide comment on throughout the so I guess it's going to depend on what stage they're in what they move on but also to talk about maybe some of our goals and we just want to make a shorter plan that's usable and strategic and that our we appreciate all the work they're doing and part of what we want or need to do is to be critical to a certain extent or push back or if they do get this criticism or if they shouldn't think of any kind of attack is that we should be working on this together and it's coming from a place of love it's going to be interesting I'm thinking of it in terms of when you are responsible for a bigger plan and somebody else is responsible for a tiny chapter it's easy for each committee to put forward a lot of goals and we're going to have to we're going to have to help push people to identify the really key goals and having in mind that we have all these chapters to do I think one role we're going to have is in defining the current things we talked about how we want that to be sustained in the city plan in the end I think it sounds like maybe at the outset we're going to get maybe lengthy descriptions of these things and that part of our contribution will be the paradigm and I think some of these like that document right there can be one that could end up just as a white paper just information that would be used to build a rationale for why these are our aspirations and why this is our aspiration to be in the plan but it certainly had the time of that white paper if we're building this on a web we can just web link so many things and somebody really wants to know how we dive down in this deep as they want to go into some of these topics finding that information yeah I mean could those aspirations be part of the appendix that kind of thing that's directly because that helps to explain that kind of thing I just don't want the uses to get separated from each other yeah I mean certainly they can all be brought together into a single yeah single linkable document or you want to make that into a large 50 page white paper on the energy plan that gets stuck in that because it's all put together and assembled nicely I just don't have the time to do all the pieces put together all the white papers but does each committee have their web page? they don't but we just created a website and I think we just need to while we did two years ago we've got a new website that we can now on the previous web we couldn't edit so there's a new one we can so I think it's just a matter of us coming up and saying here's how we like it structured and then with those new Google Docs I don't know if that would be something that would be different related we'll figure out the pieces but certainly on the web we should have all the pieces for people the final product it does already have a website and Google Docs and constantly growing things so I'm not sure how I believe it's probably viewable everything we have on our show it seems like many would have to bring us a draft and we discuss it here and then invite committee people to come in and talk about it I think ultimately yes but maybe they didn't want some involvement before then well if we did we just got on the same page and showed interest in what they're doing and why let them do their work for a while and I think that works for each committee they probably don't understand the essence of developing a plan very much as a whole public human take and running it through the city council and why brevity is important I think it needs to be a given take if we're going to be responsible for writing I don't want to have to sit there and read a lot of documents on the web page by myself with no feedback by other people frankly I'm not going to do it you talked about discussing it I would read it and if I was going to come to a meeting or something what do you think about this I just like to say it right in well I think if we had the goals, policies, recommendations either a consultant or a staff that were going to get you on my page so what's our housing element well now that we've all had the discussion on the both policies and recommendations the committees had their discussion they've had the public inputs pull something together and start to say okay this for our housing chapters tell the story we're trying to tell you know it's just inspirational for just getting a majority of the public on board with why affordable housing isn't working for Mike since we've been in the energy committee been working on this for a while would it make sense to bring the sin as it does you know just our goals you know at some other level to bring them in to the commission to talk about I don't know I guess that's up to the do you want to we were going to start with the housing I mean you can close a second for the amount of work that's been done on goals and policies I just want to make sure that that's the right direction or that the commission is in agreement with the direction so it would not necessarily mean that it would in-depth dive it would just be very let's first figure out do you have what you need to meet with the housing task force we will come back to energy committee but we talked about a lot of things a lot of concepts and I want to make sure that we have a clear list yeah I think yeah what I think we'd be working because they're going to be coming to talk to you guys and I'm really meeting with them to kind of invite them in but I think what we're going to be the direction of I'm going to be telling them if I understand you guys is we're really going to be focusing not on that six or seven pages we're really going to be starting on the structured discussion of these goal policies and recommendations and to start to build on that and then to make this something that we can get into Google Docs or some kind of way of being able to track them to get a process so we can all go and say I like this process I think this is going to work and then once we've got a process that works we can then start to bring the housing committee get to be our team of things are you thinking I guess I'm not clear whether we would want to send this chapter to other committees before we send it to the public for engagement what do folks think about that should we reach out to should we ask the housing developers to reach out for public feedback on the goals before we circulate this or should we circulate it have everybody be working on the goals and then they can all be reaching out to the public like every committee well it sounds like we would send one we'd send one chapter to all of the committees as it was saying yeah and I just think I was just going to say I don't think this is very readable like as a as a public comment they document to get to the public so I didn't know if we want to ask them to do something it's like if we identify just the goals which is sort of the higher level right they've done a lot of the content yeah I don't know that we want to start there but if all of the committees could come up with goals would that be a useful not concerning is trying to not get into trying to get into housing services and utilities you have all these different ones if we start to throw this out we don't nearly have the staff to start to work with that many committees which is even if we once we got done with housing my next recommendation would be to say if you wondered about one let's pick three chapters that we're going to work with three committees for the next year to do energy, historic preservation and transportation we've got a complete street plan we've done a lot of work with energy we've got three more chapters and after that we can go back yeah well we'd have to finish what we're we'd have to finish housing this is going to take time just to do this housing chapter can we send chapters to the city council for yeah as a process instead of giving them this huge document about for housing just putting it on the city council for discussion because that would get a lot of public discussion in the way yeah so it's one to look at we'll see where the council goes we had this that you know don't send us to zoning all at once at the end send it to us in pieces so we send it to them in pieces we can't possibly don't repair this we don't have the entire thing until we're just like okay so because so many pieces interact I think we can give them the housing you must have talked to the prior council about how the plan would be to help I think we've got a lot of new people we we better start with that process again it would be good to get their input of what their priorities are bigger picture where they'd like to go maybe set some expectations on the process once they do get them not interested in another situation where like with the zoning they go ahead and have their entire separate hearings and then write their own zoning their intention is to act like a second planning commission as well as the council actually I'm going to not ask them for their opinions until they've seen the homework because their opinions are not going to be very important they won't be very deeply involved I think there are some thinking and say look this is we like your comments I think we talked a little bit about this at the previous meetings one thing we had been waiting for as staff was for the new council to be seated just so we could see what their goals I mean they still have to get introduced and settled and do they want do they have as a goal of the council to we need a new city plan and we need to get working on this and if that's direction then that helps us to know that social media says look we're about burned out on this planning stuff we want you focusing on a very specific we want the planning department working on complete streets and making more bike lanes and sidewalks well that kind of takes my staff away from working on this and we kind of have to adjust we've kind of been meeting here the past couple of weeks because we don't have the council direction I think they're gonna punch me in the shoulder everything I say so I'm pretty sure especially with the housing plan everything I know about this council says they're interested in housing so ultimately we're gonna need to have a housing plan that's been an important thing that as their platform in terms of process getting back to that what we want to ask the committees for you think it would involve necessarily involve your staff if we just ask each of the committees to come up with their top six goals without any of the support information to that because I know from writing the energy plan it's really helpful for me to know what transportation is saying because then that influences one of our goals I think we do need to be with that staff to be involved because we're not just kind of throwing things out for people to give us as we were just talking about we want to force them into these boxes we want them to start talking about things in a certain way because that lays the foundation for us to then develop an implementation strategy and I haven't met with them to kind of talk about this is what we're trying to this is how we're trying to frame our goals to sort of frame our well I mean if you're only operating on the goal level you know sort of the high level and they send out some basic parameters to those committees that they haven't spoken about this is how we see goals and they, you know, will all get it wrong anyway for a while but it's just been really helpful I think just to have an idea what are the six major goals that transportation has they've got them they're not the ones I think at least getting the ones through all the committees before coming back and maybe two years before we come back right, right, we'll come back to you later but at least we know or then the two committees that are involved in an elder lab could have something to talk about right, right, you know at least we know what we're thinking about now maybe encourage them to be less than six because that would have us be around like 85 goals for each chapter as well which one? if each chapter has six goals we'll have great new goals oh we'll get it down to six is tough six, no, six is free we should have three for the entire plan sorry John yeah, well I mean I think John's point is that if we want to achieve the goals we have to be really critical with the ones that we include someone asked you on the street what are you guys doing, what are your goals you have 80 goals we're going down today where we think we'll be at 500 it's definitely improvement we're not responsible for all any of those goals it's just that they are forming this framework that other committees are working from so each committee is not responsible I thought this template and sort of intro discussion that we're hoping to put together I was in the assumption that we were going to send it to every committee now even though there might be some that we don't speak of for a year is there enough background for them to understand what we're sending we might speak that with some of it the template and the message about outreach and the message about support that you can see that we have under the agenda right now do we have a template to send out until I mean part of the reason we were doing the housing chapter was we could develop the template for the housing to basically find that template that's not that much of a delay a month you're talking about getting the entire chapter done I think it'll be probably knowing that they meet once a month it'll take more than three months to get done with this every three months but it'll take six months what if we just gave them a look at no one piece that's done develop one aspiration one goal one set of implementation strategies for that knowing that you may have three or four I'm only interested in the six goals I don't want every step of one of those six goals the template needs to have eventually yeah that's the point I think we're trying to nail that how we're going to do this and it sounds like a template that has the goal of the implementation of the steps just one goal and that down and then say as you develop your goals we will we will we'll come back we'll come to you already talking about our outreach expectations is a big part of what we're doing but also if we're going to tell them that they have to there's an outreach component they're going to have to get staff support well and that's why we would so probably we would give a lot of we're saying down the road this is what we're expecting but right now what would be helpful maybe to all of the committees at once would be a sense of what your committee thinks are your most important goals even if they're not the right format we'll probably get goals all over the place although if you came up with one example with the aspiration goals and strategies that might help get it in the right words another option could be to ask for some pile of info like that and to send the templates forthcoming yeah definitely let them know but there's a format that we're going to offer maybe I could put together some a form letter for the committee's case the B and C for my agenda messaging a message with an ask Mike's busy writing so he'll come up with the ask this is what we'd like you to send us under A would be what our expectation from the committees could provide to all of the committees if they could provide overall goals that would really help because otherwise we've been operating so some of our goals will no longer be appropriate so I think Kirby and I will put together a to send to the various committees and an outline for walking through our expectations of A, B, C with a housing task force for the next meeting please let us discuss that and then we'll try to have the outline together before Mike sends out the agenda so folks can in the beginning I don't think I'll be able to I don't think as well as we'll send it out before her comments with the committee agenda but I'll send it on the agenda all right item six couple of the minutes from February 26 she was enlisted as president and she wasn't president or no I was I was in bed Mike requested that I not come and share I appreciate that you missed you that much no I just thought I was trying the wallpaper yeah any other updates in the minutes okay all those in favor with those all those in favor with those unanimously um there's something else I was going to just mention that I can't remember what it is I'm sure I will take myself after do you have to do with the chapter no something separate from the city plan discussion do you approve of a grant request no no approval for being requested that's an announcement first announcement we'll have personnel changes in the next year no zoning administrator yep she's going to be going to stuff where she lives in Waterbury that's a great job what's she going to be doing there she will be the zoning director we were motion we were we used to sadly watch where all this the regional planning commission it was always funny to go and watch the fact when is she leaving when is she leaving I'm going to record my thanks for the terrific work she's done and hope that this is a promotion well deserved she will be she will be in this she's extremely talented something knowledgeable about it she's running historic preservation that's making me nervous energy is going to be somebody will have to one of us will have to be taking that meeting is tomorrow that meeting is tomorrow but there is also a meeting that I shared with you there's a party for departing politicians that's tomorrow right for the outgoing mayor and the city councillor so I'm pretty close to going with her that is tomorrow I sent an e-mail yeah I don't remember now it's going to be right at the phone five o'clock was that it or no there's another thing that you're thinking of no moving out make a motion to adjourn second second it's not a good opportunity all those in favor say aye aye