 is 734 p.m. on Thursday, February 9th, 2023. Good evening, everybody. My name is Christian Klein. I am the chair of the Arlington zoning board of appeals and I'm calling this meeting of the board to order. I ask all attendees who are not recognized to speak to please mute their connection until such time as they are recognized by the chair. First, I'd like to confirm all members and anticipated officials are present. From the zoning board of appeals, Roger Dupont. Here. Patrick Hanlon. Here. Daniel Riccadelli. Here. Venkat Holley. Here. And Elaine Hoffman. Here. Welcome to all of you. Here on behalf of the town, we have, I'd like to introduce to everyone, Colleen Ralston, who is our new zoning assistant. She will be taking over the position that was formally held by Rick Valerelli. Good evening, Colleen. Thank you. Good evening. And I don't, is Marisa Lau with us? She was going to join us from the department of planning and community development. She's not with us yet, but she'll be joining us later on. Joining us on behalf of the board, is Paul Havity with us? Don't see Paul. I know he may be joining us late. I know he's had a conflict often earlier on Thursday. But we have with us Sean Reardon from Tetra Tech. Evening, everybody. Good evening. And also with us is Cliff Boomer from Davis Square Architects. Hi, everybody. I'm here. Good evening, Cliff. And then appearing on behalf of the applicant, we have Paul Feldman from Davis Mom to Augustine. Good evening, everybody. Good evening, Paul. And we have Matthew Majuri, who's the president of the Majuri companies. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. And then, Matt, if you could introduce the other members of your team for us. Surely. So we have Paul Majuri, our CEO. Jacqueline Majuri. Good evening. Jacqueline Majuri, director of real estate and marketing. We have Kyle Zick from KLZ. Good evening. Landscape Architects. Hello. Good evening. Christopher Mulhern from Harrison Mulhern Architects. Howdy. You? And Mike Novak from Patriot Engineering. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you all. So this open meeting of the Arlington Zoning Board of Appeals is being conducted remotely, consistent with an act relative to extending certain, excuse me, state of emergency accommodation signed into law on July 16th, 2022. This act includes an extension until March 31st, 2023 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law which suspended the requirement to hold all meetings in a physically, publicly accessible physical location. Public bodies may continue holding meetings remotely without a quorum of the public body physically present at a meeting location so long as they provide adequate alternative access to remote meetings. Public bodies may meet remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. An opportunity for public participation will be provided during the public comment period during each hearing. For this meeting, the Arlington Zoning Board of Appeals has convened a video conference via the Zoom application with online and telephone access as listed on the agenda posted to the town's website identifying how the public may join. This meeting is being recorded and it will be broadcast by ACMI. Please be aware that attendees are participating by a variety of means. Some attendees are participating by video conference. Others are participating by computer audio or by telephone. Accordingly, please be aware that other folks may be able to see you, your screen name or another identifier. Please take care to not share personal information. Anything you broadcast may be captured by the recording. We ask you to please maintain the quorum during the meeting including displaying an appropriate background. All supporting materials that have been provided members of this body are available on this meeting's agenda or on the town's website unless otherwise noted. The public is encouraged to follow along using the posted agenda. And as chair, I reserve the right to take items out of order in the interest of promoting and really meeting. So now turning to second item on our agenda which is docket 3719 1021 1025 Massachusetts Avenue. Turning now to the comprehensive permit hearing for the residences at Millbrook to be located at 1021 1025 Massachusetts Avenue. This evening, the board is continuing the comprehensive permit hearing for the residences at Millbrook. The redevelopment of an existing site in the neighborhood office B1 district. The submitted documents are available from the board's website or as an attachment to the posted agenda. At previous sessions, the board heard testimony regarding wetlands and stormwater plans for the property, traffic and transportation issues and architectural considerations. Tonight, we'll discuss revisions to the civil plans of the property and plans for the construction phase of the project. After members of the board have had an opportunity to ask their questions to the applicant, the hearing will be open for public comment and questions on the topics discussed this evening. The board has scheduled several hearings for this project. The scheduled dates are available on the project website under the ZBA page on the town website. At the conclusion of public comment, the board will discuss plans for the next session with the applicant before a vote to continue the hearing in adjourn for the evening. So at this point, I would like to reintroduce Attorney Paul Feldman from Davis Mumby Augustine to start off tonight's presentations. Thank you, Chairman Klein. Good evening, everyone. My name is Paul Feldman. I'm an attorney. I represent the applicant. As the chair said, this is a continued public hearing regarding a comprehensive permit that has been filed in connection with the development of a residential condominium development containing 50 units, 17 affordable units. As the chair mentioned, the subject matter tonight involves civil engineering responses, some constructability questions that have come up. We're going to actually add two items to keep the process moving. One item is a formal presentation to the ZBA from our landscape architect, Kyle Zick. That has not occurred yet last time when a more in-depth presentation of the architectural plans were presented. The board saw some renderings of landscaping, but really didn't hear from our landscape architect. We thought it was appropriate to present the landscape architecture like we presented the building architecture. And finally, we thought and were prepared to respond in certain specific ways to the comments that we heard about the design of the project at our last hearing. As the board knows, the applicant is committed to being open-minded about what we hear in the public hearing process. It's my experience doing entitlement permitting for clients and many 40B projects that projects improve as a result of the public hearing process and as a result of feedback from zoning boards of appeal. And so we're appreciative of that feedback. We're open-minded about it. To the extent we can make design changes to meet those comments, we strive to do that. And I think you guys know already to the extent there's something that we really don't think is doable. We try to be transparent and upfront about that. We've tried to be conscientious this time with regard to making sure that we've submitted to the board materials. We plan to present little PowerPoint slides and things like that. Mr. Hanwin alerted us at the last meeting that we should be conscientious to try to do that. We did submit all the materials that were presented previously at public hearings electronically and you'll see some slides tonight which have also been submitted. So the order that we suggest is the most official way to proceed is as follows. We'd like to call upon Kyle Zick to present landscape. We'd like to ask Mike Novak our civil engineer to talk about some civil engineering design changes in response to Mr. Reardon's comments. We want to have Mr. Mulher our architect present several responses to some of the comments that we heard from the public and the board at the last meeting. And then we wanna reach constructability. When we turn to each subject, I'll make a brief introduction so that you can appreciate how we're trying to advance the ball on each of the topics. And so with that, if the chair permits, I would ask that Kyle Zick have an opportunity to present the landscape program for this development. Great, thank you so much, Mr. Feldman. Mr. Zick, please proceed. Thank you, I'm gonna share my screen if you can allow me please. I think Colleen, I need to ask you to make Mr. Zick a co-host. There we go. Thank you. All right, you should see my screen, which is a overall site plan. Perfect, yes we do. All right, so this is mainly just for orientation because I'm gonna get into detail of different parts of the property, but at least wanted to introduce the landscape and explain how I will get through this. So overall, I'm gonna change my cursor to the end. The proposed building, 1021, 1025 Mass Ave is here. Massachusetts Avenue runs left and right on the bottom of the screen. Millbrook is in the upper right corner. So the site in my mind has different components. There's the frontage. What does the front of the building look like? The setback between the building and the public sidewalk. There's the sides of the building, Urban Park, which is the back of the building, and then the Millbrook enhancement. So I'm gonna take these one by one and get into more detail. The frontage, just Mass Ave is running left and right on the bottom of the screen. The building is what's a gray tone and the public sidewalk, which exists, let me go back to the hand here, runs right here. So a couple of things that would be important just for orientation. The building entrance is right here. Double doors and then the garage entrance is here. There's the curb cut on Mass Ave. So what are the components of the streetscape from the landscape perspective? And I think there wants to be a structure of street trees and we have four street trees here proposed. These are at the back of sidewalk. And that's purposely because we have that setback, it avoids conflicts with overhead utilities and it gives us the most soil volume to really grow healthy trees. Now these are not giant tree species. We're proposing a columnar form of a sergeant cherry, which is a good size ornamental flowering tree, but we didn't wanna overwhelm the space or feel like we had to prune the tree off of the building 10 years from now. Then there's also a plaza space at the building entrance but also extending left and right of that and there's seating to the right of the entry. There are bike racks near the electrical vault which is subterranean to the left. And then on the left side of the garage entry is a small seating area and that's surrounded by shrubs. On either side of the building, there is a walkway. One leads all the way back to that urban park in the backyard, other is egress or a second entrance to that front part of the building. Then as we extend to the back of the building, point out a couple of things. If we've taken that sidewalk from Mass Ave, you can come this far and then there is a screen fence with a gate and that restricts access for residents into the space. Now with the concept early on was that this highly disturbed existing space with a lot of invasive species, urban fill would be transformed into an urban park that would be all native species and really would be a benefit to the Millbrook Corridor from an environmental perspective. And the residents of this property would then have a walkway that would be universally accessible that would lead them down in through this space traversing the topography which we're heading downhill and then it'd be a small gathering area here in a grove of trees and other vegetation. Closer to the building is a large meadow which is native meadow planting established on top of the stormwater infiltration system. And because that has to be at a certain elevation and at a certain grade, there is a retaining wall that bounds that with a fence on top of it because there's a grade change there. But that provides, it's almost like different outdoor rooms. There's the meadow and then there's the woodland area. Woodland area is planted with all native species of a variety of sizes and that's very deliberate that we're planting larger nursery grown plants but also seedlings and quite a great variety. The other thing to point out is there is a fence around this property which is the faint red line and that's on the property line. There's also a gate in that fence and a wood chip emergency access path. That's something we heard that responders wanted to be able to get to the back of the building and that is an avenue to do that. Couple of other things to point out. I know there was a concern about fire department access to the building and equipment conflicting with some of the proposed vegetation. So we've deliberately selected plant material that's lower growing so that the ladders and those kinds of things can go over the top of that vegetation if they ever had to access the building. In addition to the nursery grown plant material we have seed mixes that have shrubs and a variety of herbaceous materials in them. And there's a few renderings of this space if you were on top of in that meadow on top of the stormwater infiltration system. The path leading from the building takes you down to the lower part of the urban park. This is the fence on top of that retaining wall. Now if I were in the park looking back at the building this is the seeding area, the oval shape. There's a few benches down there and we have shrubs on the interior and surrounding that space and a variety of trees. If you are outside of this urban park looking toward the development you'd be in that parking lot. There's a screen fence and all of our planting is on our property within the fence line. The Milbrook enhancement area. This is something that LEC Environmental has been working closely on for a while and they basically recommended to me the species and the quantity of plants that should be planted here. And it's a lawn area adjacent to Milbrook. This is not on our property but it's something that the developer has said they will do. And we're planting four different varieties of tree seedlings and then five different varieties of native shrubs in that area. So then this is our overall plant list. Like I said, everything within the jurisdiction of the Conservation Commission in their setbacks and the buffer zones in the riverfront area are all native species. We only deviate from native species at the frontage of the building where we have more extreme urban conditions between salt and pollution and those kinds of things and we just wanted a little bit more showiness at the front of the building. So we have some things that have more seasonal interest and more flowering. And then I have our set of drawings here I'll flip to them quickly and I'm happy to use them mainly for reference but we have a site preparation plan that identifies the trees that would be removed. We're planting more trees than we're removing. And this starts to get a little repetitive. I'll flip through these just to give you a sense that this is a layout materials plan. So it focuses on the hardscape but not the planting. Then we have the planting which I've already kind of run you through fairly quickly in an enlarged planting plan of that urban park. And then we have site details if you wanna get into what kind of paving materials or site furnishings or planting conditions we're proposing. So thank you very much. Happy to answer questions. Thank you. I had two sort of quick questions. One was the proposed plantings along Mill Brook. Has there been any discussion now that you have plans for that has there been any discussion with the conservation commission in that regard? I guess I would ask maybe Paul from our team if he knows if Rich from LEC has had those conversations. No, there has been no formal filing yet with the conservation commission. But we intend, we brought this up at the last meeting two weeks ago. We intend to make a formal filing with the conservation commission imminently like even perhaps next week or the week after. So we will, the conservation commission was open to commencing a public hearing under the Wetlands Protection Act while we were still engaged in the comprehensive permit process with the board. They will not close and we will continue to extend that public hearing until after this process is completed. So there's no concern that there won't be conforming plans between what may be approved by the zoning board under the comprehensive permit and what may be approved by the conservation commission under the Wetlands Protection Act. So we will be presenting these plantings and this planting schedule and Rich Kirby from LEC will be explaining the environmental reasoning behind this approach imminently to the conservation commission. And- Mr. Chairman, if I may add to Paul's statement, we have not filed with Concom yet because we've been working the last two weeks on adjusting the configuration of the building with potential side yard setbacks and shifting the building further away from Mass App. So we wanna have that nailed down before we pursue anything with conservation. Okay. And my second question was the renderings that sort of show the trees and the views in the rear, the size of the trees that are shown in that image, what is sort of the time scale after planting that that image represents? That's more like 10 to about 10 years out. Okay. Are there questions from the board for the, for Mr. Zick? Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. I wanted to follow up on the question that the chair just asked. I wondered if Mr. Zick had described for us what sort of care is necessary in order to nurture this proposed park so that it successfully reaches the climax condition that he describes as being about 10 years out. Yep. That's a great question. So most of it will be fairly typical landscape maintenance. You know, it's watering, making sure that anything that dies is replaced. But because it's all native, we have to make sure the folks that are maintaining it can identify these plants versus what may sprout up on its own because we're going to have to be mindful of invasive species wanting to re-establish. Particularly Norway, Maple, Black Locust, those kinds of things will want to come up because they're going to be in the area surrounding the site. That would be the primary concern in terms of some monitoring to make sure that the species that we want to grow here get established. And that's also the same with some of the seed mixes that we have. You know, the native seed mixes and a lot of people's mind are look weedy. And do you know what is a weed versus what is proposed? So, and they take generally three years to really establish themselves. So, you know, I think the first three years particularly are critical to make sure that what's proposed gets established after that, you know, we really should be able to back off and just monitor more. So, Mr. Chairman. Please. If I could, from listening to you, I have the sense that the expertise that's necessary to follow this along is something that is probably not going to, except by accident be something that the Condo Association is going to have and that they're going to, would I be right in assuming that in order to make this work, they're going to have to be able to engage professionals who have the knowledge that you just described in terms of steering this beyond the watering. There are definitely contractors that are skilled in this, you know, not every kind of suburban landscape contractor would, but there are certainly contractors we work with on a day to day basis that know how to do this work and could be contracted. Plus, Magiore's would have access to either myself or Rich Kirby to monitor things in the future. So, do you have any, Mr. Chairman, I wonder if Mr. Zick has any idea of, in terms of the cost that is likely to be borne by the Condo Association going forward, what sort of cost we're talking about in terms of making sure that this urban park develops in the way that you've envisioned it? I don't have any thoughts on the maintenance costs or even, you know, a premium over maybe a, you know, more typical lawn with trees in it. That's something we could look into and get back to you. And Mr. Hanliff, if I may, the intention would be to build the associated costs once we learn what they are into the Condo Association budget so that we are able to, you know, build that into the Condo fees for each unit. And obviously this maintenance will be in perpetuity. Well, I just, Mr. Chairman, just over the last 30 years, I've spent about 20 of them from time to time as the Chair of a Condo Association. So I have at least some feel for the way in which this all works in the real world and the relatively limited impact that what is written into bylaws has on the actual behavior of the association. So I appreciate Mr. Majori's comments. It seems to me that this is a tremendous, to me at least, this is a tremendous attractive, tremendously attractive concept. And I think that Mr. Zick and his associates have done an excellent job. But all of that depends upon it actually taking place in the way that it's planned and that the financing is there to make sure that it happens and the incentives are there to make sure that the people are using the financing in the proper way. And if we are going to be persuaded as I am that this is a, would be a benefit for the project, we also have to be persuaded that it's a benefit that's likely to accrue and we've thought of what is necessary in order to get from you to there. If I may, it's not uncommon in a situation like this that if the horizon is over 10 years that the kind of minimum association be obligated to submit an annual report to the ZBA by a qualified professional describing the status of the conditions of the program, the landscaping program and that annual report becomes the opportunity for an inspection to be made so that if invasive species are showing up they can be addressed, it creates an opportunity for if vegetation has died that it could be replaced. Yeah, it's what we fully expect from the conservation commission that would probably be a corresponding condition that there's a typically a two or three year a period of right at the outset to make sure that things are being, plantings are becoming established and they're not dying in a being replaced. But the, an effective way to address your concern is to hand wind about making sure that this amenity achieves its purpose. It is intended to be an important amenity both to the community from an environmental point of view and to the residents from an amenity point of view that an annual report submitted to the planning department will be an appropriate way of monitoring and making sure your conditions are being complied with. Thank you. Any further Mr. Hanlon? No, thank you. Mr. Chairman. Mr. DuPont. So if I understood Matthew correctly and I don't want to misquote, there's still consideration being given to stepping the building back from the sidewalk a bit further. And if, was that what I heard Mr. Chairman? So I guess- Mr. Chairman. Yes, Mr. Chairman and Mr. DuPont, we're gonna be jumping onto that very shortly but we've done a couple of studies over the last few weeks since the last meeting and there is an ability to shift the building back anywhere from the three to three and a half feet. And we're also have a concept to share with the board potentially reducing the side yard setbacks and not having to request any waiver. So we're gonna make that part of, that would be the third part of the presentation after we finish landscaping and we get through Mr. Novak's report as a follow-up to the drainage comments from Sean Reardon. But just one thing to add, but for purposes of landscaping, the amenity in the back, what Mr. McKeil-Zick has referred to as the Urban Park, that retaining wall is not moving. That is as you see it on these drawings. And so the result of creating a greater front yard setback between three and three and a half feet will not affect the design that you would just presented in terms of the Urban Park in the back. The only major change would be the reconfiguration of the infiltration system, but we would still net the same capacity that we have Caroline. Mr. Chairman, may I follow up then? Yes, please, Mr. Dupont. So then this would go to Mr. Zick. So if the building was stepped back to the extent that was just described, those trees that are shown on the plan for the front of the building that you referred to, I think as columnar, I'm just wondering if that provides an opportunity to have a tree, a different type of tree that would provide more shade. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because of the letter dated February 7th from the tree committee, which expresses concern, and I don't know if the applicants have seen that letter, but it expresses concern about the fact that that area of Mass Ave is really sort of a heat trap and that anything that can be done to provide shade is desirable. So I just didn't know if given that additional space, you could put in a tree that would offer more shade. Yeah, I think that's something we'll have to study. Once we, you know, if it's decided to go forward with that, then we'll study the dimensions and, you know, species that might fit in there that could be bigger or the same, but we'll study that for sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the Mr. Dupont. No, that's it. Are there questions from the board? Mr. Chair. Mr. Cadelli. I'd just like to ask Mr. Zick, those for street trees, are those in a planting strip or a landscaped area, are they in, you know, a tree great condition along Mass Ave? No, they are not. So the public sidewalk, which is concrete is where my cursor is now, and that's where the overhead utilities are. So at the back of sidewalk, I'll start over here on the left-hand side. There's a planting bed that shrubs and ground cover perennials and the first tree is there. So it's got quite a bit of soil. On the other side of the garage entry, there's a rectangular plant bed that's also in there. And then these other two are in a plaza, but we have planting on the surface. And then this other rectangle here is structural soil. So the two tree pits are connected with a growing media underneath the pavement so that we can expect these trees to grow larger than if they were just in small tree pits. Great, that answered my question. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Kedeli. Thank you, Mr. Zick. Are there any other questions from the board on this topic? Mr. Chairman? Mr. Hanlon? Forgive me, I forgot one. In the comments we've received early on, there were several people who had suggested in agencies that had suggested trying to preserve for their shade some of the Norway maples in the back. And that has generally, I think, not been well received by the applicant. And I was wondering if Mr. Zick could explain the reason why it is that in the applicant's view it's inappropriate to maintain those, even though they are invasive species, at least they exist. And they currently provide some canopy that otherwise would be lost for some period of time. Yeah, it's a good question. It's one of those things we always wrestle with because you're absolutely right. These trees do provide shade in their large, there's a large surface area, there's environmental benefits that those trees provide. But the problem with Norway Maple particularly is that they're very competitive. They cast very dense shade, they have shallow roots that outcompete anything to grow underneath them. And the roots actually have an allopathic quality, which means they harm other plants. So if we were to keep them, we wouldn't be able to grow anything else underneath them. So that's kind of number one. The second is they're really aggressive cedars. So they will put down lots of seeds in our park but also surrounding. So I think while we're trying to establish all native species, every year we're gonna get a new crop of brand new Norway Maples that we're gonna try to be controlling. So I think the longer view is we want to remove those Norway Maples to provide greater diversity and a native Grove here that will largely provide a better habitat and benefit to the Millbrook community. And ultimately provide more canopy than the Norway Maples provide now. So it's just that we have to be a little patient for it to catch up. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hanlon. Any further questions from the board? Are there any questions from Mr. Reardon or? I have one quick question, Mr. Chair. Mr. Reardon. So just wondering if there was any thought or what thought went into completely surrounding the wooded area with the fence. The reason I ask is your two-fold one, it's a bit counter to the riverfront area performance standards. So isolating that from the surrounding communities, probably gonna be viewed a little bit negatively by the commission. And also just the one site visit that I was out there, I saw about two or three turkeys. So I would assume part of this is to sort of keep it accessible to wildlife and it seems a bit counter-intuitive to surround it with the fence. I can start with the wildlife and then maybe either Paul or Matt can jump in. But from a wildlife perspective, Rich Kirby did recommend that with the fence that we keep it four inches off the ground so that the small wildlife can make the connection. And obviously birds are gonna be able to get over the fence regardless, depending what kind of bird they are. So I think we're trying to still allow the connectivity by not making that fence a barrier. But I don't know if Paul or Matt wanna talk about the fence in general. Well, I mean, this issue has come up. Yeah, this issue has come up previously when in one of our other public areas, we were specifically asked that the server park will be open to the public. And it's not, it's on private property. It's gonna be a privately accessible park. It's an amenity for the residents. And there are real issues associated with security and liability and basically the resonance of the condominium feeling like they're in control of their property that a private property owner needs to address. And so it's, if you didn't have fencing, you wouldn't have any way to control access. And that would be problematic. Mr. Chair, I wanted to add one comment as well. I'm looking forward to seeing any changes that may be available with an increased setback in the landscape plan. Because I hear the, and I've read comments about the additional shading would be beneficial. So I hope we can see that. And I've heard from Mr. Zeck that it is under consideration. The other thing I wanted to comment on is I would put another plugin for a potential use of the, or double use of the space devoted to infiltration. And I would advocate for a very small play space for very young children. I appreciate the response that I got from my memo from the architect. It was really thorough and thoughtful. But I will say that I believe that the Wellington Park, which is very close by, very close walk is not really designed for very small children and the Robbins Farm Park, which is, is more than a half a mile away. So I'd make just one small pitch for a very minor play space that I think could activate the rear space, you know, the rear yard to a greater degree than what we see in the plans now. Mr. Chairman, if I may. Mr. Mayor, if you're all right. We did look at that, Mr. Boehner. And unfortunately, with the pollinator meadow being only cut a couple of times a year, what looks like an advantageous spot for a child play area really doesn't really become that way because of the height of the grass that's gonna grow in that area only being cut a couple of times per season. I said per year, but it's actually per season. And further, you know, in our experience in projects like this, you know, the need for a park area based on, you know, the amount of children in this project has never really panned out or seem to make a lot of sense from a marketability standpoint. So while we appreciate it and we would do it if we could, we're not finding a viable location for it in that urban park area. Yeah, I just, Mr. Chairman, if I may just one specific. We previously submitted a fiscal impact report that fiscal impact report provides a study of the size of this project that given the unit sizes, the unit mix and the potential number of school-age children and that school-age children from, you know, kindergarten to 12th grade. And at most you're talking about maybe, you know, one or two. Mr. Feldman? Yes. Just, you know, as I'm sure you're aware, the board is not allowed to take consideration of sort of children and the impact of children into consideration on these projects where families are a protected class under federal law. So I just want to, I know that you're not necessarily heading in that direction, but I just want to make sure that that's clear to everyone that, you know, the board is not allowed to consider whether the presence of families would be more detrimental to the finances of the project or the financial implications on the town. That's not something we're allowed to look into. Absolutely correct, Mr. Chairman, and I'm not going there at all. My point was simply that the statistics for a project of this nature is you're talking about, you know, two to three young children at most that would likely be inhabitants of the building. And so a play area is not going to have much demand and given the purpose of the meadow and the environmental impact of the meadow, you would want to keep the meadow as a meadow rather than a play area. So that was part of the reason why Ms. Cliff's suggestion was a good one. And we studied it and we went back and talked to our environmental consultant about it. But that was the ultimate outcome on why you still don't see it in our plans. Thank you, Mr. Bellman. Mr. Bomer, did you have anything further? No, I mean, I think it's, you know, I think I'm bringing it up for the board to consider, you know, I don't have access to their statistics about the likely population of the building, but I do know there are 40-some additional bedrooms that could potentially be inhabited by children. So that's all. I guess I would say that and I may not be fully aware of all the benefits of the meadow, but I would think if the benefits are pervious surfaces or whatever it might be that if there were a play space there that you could accommodate those along with the play space. But again, I'm just telling you what I've seen that, you know, what I've seen provided in comparable projects and looked at the distance to suitable play spaces for people with very small children. And I just want to open that up, as I did in my initial analysis. Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much. Mr. Measuring? The environmental importance of the pollinator meadow far surpasses the need or the marketability of having a play space in this property where we're fighting for every square foot of a viable riverfront area to improve. So unfortunately, it's just not gonna work. We certainly would like to do it if we could, but again, the importance of this to the project and in turn to the concom will far away the importance of this for marketability. Okay. All right, then, I think we're at a good point to move on from the immediate topic of the landscaping. To point back to next, I think we would look for Mr. Novak. I'll just briefly introduce himself and. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman. Nope, Mr. Moore, I'm gonna ask you to hold. Are you speaking on behalf of the tree committee? Yes, and also a point of information. Are you not taking comments on the three parts until the very end? And I'm sorry, I arrived to the meeting late. You may have. That's okay. So the initial intent had been that we would hold off on public comment until the end, but Mr. Feldman had asked to include this presentation on landscaping, and I think Mr. Moore, you raised a good point that perhaps if we could have a small section of public comment at this time related specifically to the landscaping, it would make sense. But I would, Mr. Moore, if you're a representative of the tree committee and are looking to speak in regards to this question that you would certainly be recognized. Yes, I am representing the tree committee. Okay, so then the chair recognizes Steve Moore as a member of the tree committee. Thank you, Mr. Steve Moore, people on the street. I just, I wanted to applaud the thoughtful design that I'm seeing here from the applicant in terms of trying to balance the various needs that various folks in town have with this. I want to very loudly applaud Mr. Handelins, Mr. DuPontz, and Mr. Klein's comments relative to the trees and the tree concerns. It's an issue of growing importance in town and with climate change. And these concerns, we on the tree committee certainly feel our calm out. However, we are a little biased, really. I wanted to stress that irrigation would be important here. This particular past summer was a tough one and it's looking like the summers are gonna be more like that now. And I suggest you actually install irrigation equipment for the urban forest behind the building. I think if we make desires, well, part of the design now, it'll be much easier to deal with later with these social summers that we're having. So I would suggest that. I am very pleased to hear that the front setback perhaps will increase based on the design work that's being done by the applicant. That would be a huge benefit. I think I would like to echo it was either Mr. DuPontz or Mr. Handelins. I'm not sure that I think maybe Mr. DuPontz that the trees on the front setback, he shifted from ornamental columnar trees to perhaps more shaded trees to basically buttress the point of the letter that was submitted by the team maybe talking to the fact that that part of the speed scape on Mass Ave is relatively tree less. And this is removing some of the very large trees behind the current property. That might help balance that a little bit because they do need to grow to be large. Now, I know that they'll be close to the building and I know that they will require pruning. I think that needs to be perhaps part of the assumption here with the building plan that these trees will have to be maintained because close to a building is a tough for the tree, tough for the building, but we do need to think towards the shade streetscape on this particular side of the street in this particular part of town. I wanted, and I think maybe Mr. Feldman is bringing up that point to do with perhaps a annual report relative to the maintenance of the pre-plans and the urban park and the trees and vegetation of the property is an excellent idea. I think I might be concerned making that a condition if possible. I know that legally that's tricky for the condo association but a condition of the property may make sense to actually get this urban park to survive as I think Mr. Hanlon pointed out. Oftentimes, you can lose a third of your trees as they're trying to establish some sort of irrigation and also a care will keep that to the better side of that stack, so that would be helpful. Could you quickly go to the imaginings and images relative to the back park? I think I saw those flip by pretty quickly. Mr. Zick, if you could pull those back up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And the next one, I think it was of the fence. All right, that one right there. I know that Mr. Zick spoke to the fact that that might be 10 years down the road. I'm not sure that's quite accurate. I think this is a more mature picture. We have to remember that this spot is gonna be 15 to 20 years to get back from its Edyl and status that it will be for that time period. And the loss of the trees that we're having in that back area really are going to have a big impact. And I just am concerned that this is perhaps a little too optimistic about how it's gonna look in the near term. I don't think it will look like that at all. Unfortunately, that's our big concern is the loss of the canopy that we're having with the excavation and raising of that property. But we've made that point for, and I understand that there has to be some time for a forest to mature, but we need to be honest in terms, we're not honest, that's not fair. We need to be realistic in terms of how long we need to take. Oh, well, lastly, one of the benefits of the current existing conditions is that that offers a bit of a wildlife corridor around Mount Brook and close by. This is a pretty densely developed area. And we are now removing that, at least for the near term. And I'm hoping that the meadow that we're speaking to that's going to be a pollinator meadow. The purposes that pollinate to our meadow serves is certainly to help pollination, but it's also serves as habitat for small animals. And small animals move around. And I think the fence that you're talking about is going to perhaps significantly impede that. It's just something to consider. I think we need to understand the urban park is not only to the residences of the residents of this building and other residents in town, but also to the fauna of the area. And that's what we need to consider along with the benefits for climate change. That's all I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moore. Mr. Chairman, would you like us to comment on any of that at this point or? Mr. Mayor, if you would briefly, and then I would like to take some public comment on the landscape. Sure. I just touch on the fact that we fully intend to irrigate this entire area with drip irrigation around the plant material, spray zones around the pollinator meadow. So, you know, we're investing heavily in this and we want it to be something that thrives and has longevity and something we can be proud of that we can turn over to the Punn Association. So that's absolutely a must in our opinion as well. Obviously the street trees, we certainly would look at changing those species. If in fact, we end up moving the building back which may be the direction that we're going. The annual maintenance report is something we certainly would consider making a condition and part and parcel to the governing docks for the association. I'll let Kyle, if he has a quick second to comment on the maturity of the, of the, in the renderings and the wildlife quarter, I believe we've covered with the minimum four inches underneath the fencing. Thank you, Mr. Zick. Yeah. I think in terms of the rendering, you know, I do think, you know, 10 years is not unrealistic, particularly with irrigation. I mean, could it be 15 years? Yeah, but it all really depends on the maintenance and that, you know, with a water source, it makes a big difference to get these things established and to get them to grow each year. So I feel pretty good about that. Great, thank you. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. Just wanted to briefly refocus a little bit or reframe is what I really mean to say. What's on the, I don't really know what's coming as far as the presentation on the front is concerned. And I don't want to get into things before, before their time. But one thing that hasn't really been pointed out when we've looked at the front, if you'll remember when we had the last hearing, there was a difference of view and I seem to have found myself in the minority among my usual friends in terms of thinking about the way in which this whole area would eventually develop in the scale of residential development that we could expect along the corridor. And the applicant was sort of generally making the point that it was expecting a sort of more dense development along here than was necessarily approved by everybody who spoke. But one of the things that happens when you consider transforming an area like this, which is currently some condominium, some big buildings, some small buildings is the quality of the streetscape. That's part and parcel of the urban design concept of providing for something that's a walkable, comfortable area in front. And it's not really just this property or even primarily this property is that in general, we need to be moving in that direction in order to achieve the vision that most of us share almost, I think probably all of us in this hearing share about what Massachusetts area should look, avenues should look like and the way in which it should function in the emerging environment that is taking place there. And so consequently, whatever can be done with this property, which is kind of first out of the block in this particular area towards establishing a precedent that when one hopes over time will be established in other areas. It altogether creates the community that is ultimately what is at issue here. It's not just one property, but it's also a way in which we're going to be providing for housing and affordable housing in Arlington in the key areas there. So it really doesn't change anything, but I'm just trying to get across that this is a piece of a puzzle. And the broader puzzle is also involved in the urban designed objective that this project is part of. And I think it's helpful to think of it in that way and to think of it in terms of the quality of the streetscape here, however we move forward. So I just wanted to frame it in that way in the way that that may be a little bit helpful. At least that's the way I am inclined to think about it. Thank you, Mr. Hanlon. Okay. So I am going to take public comment for a little bit here on landscaping. So just a couple of comments first. So public questions and comments will be taken as they relate to the matter of hand should be directed to the board for the purpose of informing the decision. Due to previously demonstrated interest in this project and to provide for an orderly flow to the meeting, the chair directs individual public speakers to please limit their comments to three to four minutes and to use their time to provide comment related solely to the topics discussed previously, which is the topic of the landscaping for this project. Please note there will be multiple hearing schedule for this project and each will have an opportunity for public comment. Chair also encourages public to provide written comments to be reviewed by the board and included in the record. So those members of public who are logged in through Zoom who would like to address the board, please use the raise hand button in the participant tab of the Zoom application and you'll be called upon by the chair when you meet yourself and be asked to give your name and address for the record and we ask you to speak clearly with your name and address. We make sure we have that properly and you'll be given up to three to four minutes to for your questions and comments. All questions are to be addressed through the chair and please remember to speak clearly and concisely. Those calling it by phone, you may dial star nine to indicate you would like to speak and then you will be called upon as well. And once all public questions and comments have been addressed or we've reached the hour of nine o'clock, I would then like to move on so that we can continue with other topics this evening. So with that, we have one hand raised as Ms. Patricia Warden. Ms. Warden, if you go ahead and there you go. Thank you. Can you hear me, Mr. Chairman? I can. Thank you. Patricia Warden, Jason Street. I'm very interested and pleased to hear that the building may be moved back. I think we have to consider how some effects, shade or living shade and how it affects growth conditions on the land. I'm also very interested to hear that the setbacks may be increased. I would like to say that once upon a time, a long time ago, I lived in a bright sunny apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. Partway between Harvard Square and Central Square, our first two children were born while we lived there. One day, the sun no longer shone in our apartment. A high building was being built opposite us on Massachusetts Avenue. Our apartment became a gloomy place. At that point, we moved to a house in Arlington and found the sun again. I hope we do not start taking Arlington's resident sunshine away by allowing buildings that are too huge as is this 40D project. Have adequate elevations and shadow studies done? Do close-up butters have any idea what the effects of this grossly massive building will be? Actually, even the residents of a butty, residential buildings on Brattle Street will experience negative impacts. For example, the planned 40D building would loom over them since Brattle Street descends from Massachusetts Avenue and some of these homes sit 10 feet lower than the proposed building. It would loom over them by men's feet. Lastly, one very important aspect of the proposed building is its propensity for tragedy. There is not enough access space for emergency vehicles which put potential residents at risk. The building is just much too massive for the space. So I set that so ridiculously small and inadequate for emergency access. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Warden. Are there other members of the public who wish to address the question of landscaping? We have Adam LeBlanc. Good evening, Adam LeBlanc, Foster Street and Arlington, Massachusetts. I just wanted to ask the board if there's been any consideration with the front of the building and its pervious pavement of that front kind of seating area if there's been any consideration about that. It seems like stormwater management is a pretty big aspect of this project, seeing the infiltration in the rear of the building. So I was just curious if there's been any discussion previously about that. Thank you, Mr. LeBlanc. Mr. Mashuri. I'll defer to Mike Novak about our, any coverage issues we have, I believe we're relatively more than compliant with regard to that. If something had to come where we had to consider permeable pavers in the plaza area, we would certainly look at that. But Mike, if you could help me with that calculation, that'd be great. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mike Novak, Patriot. Yeah, because of the high point of the site runs a little further back from the sidewalk than the plaza is, we're taking so much of the building and that infiltration system that was mentioned, that actually captures the entire area of the building. Therefore, we're actually reducing what would be a runoff towards the Mass Ave and not required or needed additional mitigation in the form of, as an example, pervious pavers. And along with the fact that the entire front is not impervious as Kyle's plan showed, there are some planting areas in there as well. So, all in all, we're showing a reduction moving forward towards Mass Ave, so. Okay, but just to clarify, so the driveway that's proposed is not impervious, or is impervious, excuse me, and the area where the patio is, are you saying that's impervious as well? Correct, that's the hired scape, and Kyle, I just want to make sure that I'm not overstepping, and that is the materials you're calling out, but my understanding is that isn't pervious, it's the driveway and the patio area, and then obviously the places that Kyle mentioned that are holding plantings are not, or they are pervious in nature. Kyle, just, I mean. That's correct, that's correct. Mr. LeBlanc, do you have anything further? No, thank you for your responses, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. The next person with their hand raised is Mr. Don Seltzer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Don Seltzer, Irving Street. Some of these slides that I'm seeing tonight are for the first time, a rather detailed that I'm having trouble making out some of the relevant details on the limited resolution of the, I haven't been able to find them posted anywhere on the website, and perhaps I just didn't look at the right place, but if it's the case that they haven't been posted in advance for the public, I have to express my displeasure that we're holding a public hearing without making these materials generally available to the public in advance. If I may. Mr. Measuring. So those, Mr. Seltzer, those renderings were part of the record submitted a few weeks back. They're just a redaction or a copy of what we're presenting tonight in the PowerPoint, which we have provided to Mr. Chairman earlier today, but they are part of the public record. It should be on the town's website from a previous submission. Thank you for that. What happened to know the date that they were posted so I could find it? I believe, I want to say January 23rd, somewhere around, on or around January 23rd, there was a large number of documents posted to the website. Okay, thank you very much. I'll go. Thank you, Mr. Seltzer. And as Mr. Measuring said, the board did receive the copies of the presentations and those will be posted to the website tomorrow. At least didn't have an opportunity to get to that today. I got them to use a little bit late. So we were just not a problem. Any other members of the public who wish to address the question of landscaping on the site? Seeing none, I'm going to go ahead and close the public comment for this section of the hearing. We will have further public comment later in this hearing. But with that, I would turn back to Mr. Feldman for the, to introduce Mr. Novak to discuss the proposed changes on the site plans. Yeah, if I may, Mr. Chairman, I think it may make sense given the comments that have already been made in the preview that has already been given to some of the potential changes to the footprint of the building that maybe we won't be better served if we turn to the proportion of the agenda that is addressing feedback, the feedback that we received from the board and the public at our last meeting and how we're responding to it. So I'd suggest it's not a very long presentation and it'll really show some of the items that we're proposing to change and we'll help maybe inform the conversation with Mr. Novak that we proceed with that instead now. Okay, certainly. And as a quick introduction, there's only one thing I wanna say on the subject that Chris Mulvern is going to present. There were three things that we looked at when it came to the footprint of the building. The first thing we looked at is could we create a greater front yard area so we pushed the building back? Could we push the building back? The second thing we looked at is could we reposition the building so that we were compliant with side yard setbacks on either side of the building? And then the third thing we looked at is, is there a way to make the footprint smaller but still achieve the program and have an appropriately functioning building? We're gonna show the board all three of those considerations. Oh, also, in addition, I'm sorry, in addition, you will see some changes to the lobby. Yeah, Matt, let me just say that Chris is gonna present all of the changes. I just wanna alert the board when Chris makes his presentation about the footprint, the feedback that we're interested in. I was not trying to preview Chris's presentation in its entirety. Got it, thank you. I just wanna make sure we didn't leave any of the detail out. Yeah, not, Chris is gonna present the entire detail but here's why I'm making this introduction. When it comes to the width of the building, you're gonna be presented with the current width of the building compliant with setbacks we are able to comply with setbacks, not request any relief from zoning with regard to setbacks with the currently designed width of the building. You're also going to see the building presented two feet narrower. The applicant, the developer, Mr. Maggiore, would prefer from the project that it's delivering the town and the project that it is going to be delivering to the residents to keep the footprint at its current width reposition to comply with setbacks. However, the time and energy has been spent to make the footprint smaller by two feet in width. While that would make some of the units smaller we think not deliver the outcome of the project that we think is in the best interests of Arlington, if in fact the board prefers the more narrow building it works and we're prepared to go ahead and do that. So we really need the boards, we would like the board's feedback on which it prefers and the applicant is open to making the building narrower. Only if the board determines that the benefits of making it narrower by two feet outweigh the product that will ultimately be delivered. If the board feels that it does, the applicant, the developer is absolutely prepared to proceed in that way. So that's sort of a decision question. As you see Mr. Mulherr's presentation, we asked the board to keep in mind we're gonna be looking for feedback from the board and the public. Mr. Mulherr, if you will. Great, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Christopher Mulherr and for Harrison Mulherr Architects, we're the project architect. I'd like to share my screen if you could make that happen. Yeah, if I could ask Colleen to take care of that for us. Oh, all set. Excellent. I have a short PowerPoint. Can you see my screen now? Yes, we can. Let me just get this started. So we were asked after the last hearing, which was two weeks ago by the developer to look at a series of changes to the project. And I just wanna walk you through where we came out. The first topic was about the feasibility of moving the building back on the site. And the reason for doing that is to reduce the presence on the street and to improve the front plaza area. What we were able to do is move the building back about 3.4 feet. So if you look at this slide here, at the bottom is where the avenue is massed as at the bottom, you can see the red line, the red dashed line is the position of the building prior to the move. So the building has moved back and it's moved a little bit to the left, which improves the setback on the right side to 10 feet at the front and 11.1 feet at the rear. The gating factor here is this 10-foot minimum setback of the back, call it the northeast corner of the building to this jog in the property line right here. That is what's driving the train and this is showing the building at the current width of 137 feet. So we're a little bit shifted to the left and we're shifted back in this case, 3.4 feet. The net effect of that is to increase the size of the front plaza. And that's a good thing because it gives us more room for these trees. It gives us more room for the planted area around this bench area. It gives us more room for the bike rack so it can be loaded from both sides and it gives us more room in the seating area of the hardscape plaza. It also parenthetically increases the queuing space for vehicles coming out of the garage. So we've got an excess of 20 feet from the property line to the building line here plus the 12 feet of space at the recess where the garage door is pulled back. So that's the first change. The second change was one of the board members suggested that we look at flipping the stair tower and the elevator bank at the lobby of the building in order to reduce the visual impact of the elevator penthouse. So here you can see side by side the before and after. The previous massing is on the left-hand side. The element in the center right here is the elevator over travel penthouse. The image on the right is with this ending out of stair as a stair instead of as an elevator. So we have a reduction in the visual appearance of the building. This right-hand image also shows the enlarge garage door and the recess at the garage door into the building. So this is a change that we're happy to make. It's pretty easy to make and we can show you what that looks like through all of the levels of the building. The third area we looked at was the parking layout. Chairman Klein raised the question of the intersection of the parking grid and the column grid of the building. So what we were able to do was to adjust the spacing and the parking spacing and the column spacing to get the columns out of the parking spaces and also out of the drive aisles. So this is the previous layout. You can see that we were splitting the difference on these spaces with the column locations. And here is the proposed layout where what we've done is we've got a little striped space in line with the column grid that's not part of a required parking space and gets us the clearances that we need and removes the ambiguity about what's a space and what's not a space. So that's the parking layout. Another suggestion that was made last time was to look at the access to the courtyard and to see whether there was a way to get the access point closer to the elevator or stairs or both in order to make it easier for residents on the upper floors to get to the courtyard. We were able to achieve that. This is what we had before. We had the access in the middle of the U of the plan right here. And this is the proposed outcome where the access point is at the bottom of the sheet here directly off of the elevator lobby. In order to make that happen, we made minor adjustments in the layout of the courtyard itself. These trees moved over to make this walkway a little bit more, a little better defined. The area that had been the walkway here got to be part of the planting area. This planter was reduced a little bit in order to get the walkway to go through. The big question that we've been wrestling with is the one that Mr. Feldman discussed. And that is whether it makes sense to reduce the width of the building by two feet. Here are two diagrams. The one on the left is the existing width at 137 feet. It has compliant setbacks on both sides. So we're meeting the 10 foot minimum at the front. And also we're more than that at the back. And we have a little bit wider than that on the left-hand side. Reducing the building width by two feet, we get to 135 foot of width. And then we have two feet to give. We can put it on either side. It's really up to what the board thinks is the most appropriate. We can improve the condition on the right side. We can improve the condition on the left side. We can split the difference and increase the setbacks on both sides. Just to make sure we understand this, we wanna make clear that the parking layout still works with the reduced width. We are using compact spaces at the edges of the garage. And we have a little bit of a margin between the compact spaces and the building line here, this little hatched area at the edges. That's a little smaller than it would be at the 137 foot width. This 135 foot width, there's still about two feet of clearance between these compact spaces and the building line. So it works on the garage level. It works on the upper levels. The penalty is across basically all of the units in the property, but it's not a large penalty per unit. It's 35 or 40 square feet per unit. So we think we can make it work on the upper floors as well. So it's up to you guys as to whether the changes in the building are, sorry, whether the changes in the increase in the setbacks warrants the reduction in space in the units and the reduction in clearance in the garage. That's all I have. Thank you. Well, thank you, Mr. Moharn. Just a very quick question. Mr, excuse me, Mr. Mejure had mentioned something about a change to the entry lobby. I just wanted to make sure that that, we understood what that was. Sure, Mr. Mejure. Sorry, Chris. Let me go back to this. Mr. Chairman, I was alluding to the fact that we shifted the elevators back and pulled the stair tower forward. So we had less of a projection on the penthouse for the stair tower versus what we needed for the elevator tower. Got it. You can see here that the stair and the elevators are reversed from the prior scheme. So the stair moves towards the front. The elevators and the mailboxes move farther into the plan, other than that, not much to say about it. It works out. On this level, it works out upstairs too. Here's the second floor plan showing that change right here. Thank you. One follow-up question on the second floor for the patio area. I note that there's still only one access off of that courtyard. Yes. Just one. Is a second egress from that courtyard not required? I don't believe a second egress is required for that courtyard. The intention of the courtyard is that it's for the use of the residence. We classify it as residential use. And at that, at the size of this courtyard and residential use, it only requires one exit. So the maximum occupancy is 49? Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. Are there members of the board who have questions or actually if I could ask Mr. Boomer if he has some comments. I know he's just seen this fresh. So it's, you haven't really had a chance to look at it but just curious about your initial thoughts. I gave Mr. Boomer a little preview over the phone earlier today. He did. He did. I've had a few hours to think about it. So I most definitely support increasing the front setback. To me, it was crowded. It seemed kind of random, the setback. I think they need the space and it will help. On a lot of practical measures that they may even facilitate easier construction perhaps although that I know that's a deeper discussion but certainly providing more space that could, even if the main benefit is a larger tree canopy, that's important. And I think having that three feet back, additional three feet matters. For me, as far as side setbacks, I think you know from my written report and last hearing we had, my feeling was that certainly I'm more used to seeing a little more radical mitigation strategies that have to do with carving away at the masking of the building. I think the applicant hasn't chosen to really look at that. So in the absence of that, certainly any increased side setback to me is beneficial. There is a benefit, there is a scale mitigation benefit just from increasing that side setback. So I support movement in that direction, absolutely. I think that, I'm sorry, I don't remember which board member may have actually been a public observation about relocating the overrun for the elevator. Definitely a good move, you see it in the rendering and that's very convincing and positive. I think the rendering and maybe the architect can confirm this one way or the other, but I'm sure you've been working pretty quickly on this, but I think the rendering didn't show the increased setback, it did show the elevator. You're right. We don't have this setback increase shown in the rendering at this point. Yeah, and I think that will be even more compelling that that's a move in the right direction once we see that rendering. I think that to me is the most significant change. As far as the diminution in unit sizes, I think, I agree, I'm not sure the architect really said that changes were de minimis, but from my recollection about unit sizes in the proposal that's technically really on the table, I think cutting back on some of those unit sizes is well worth it from the public's perception of the building. I think Arlington could support and have a lot of confidence these units will still be very attractive, even if they're 35 or 45 square feet smaller. I will say I appreciate seeing all of this and especially I'm also hearing about the egress, potential egress issue that's important. But anyway, from what I've seen and from the time I've had to think about it, I'm certainly supportive of the direction and the applicants here, I think really understanding some of the issues and moving in a positive direction. Thank you. Thank you so much. Maishori? I was just thanking Mr. Bono for those comments. Thank you. Sorry, Mr. Chan, sorry to interrupt. Could we have the slides back one more time, because we haven't seen the slides before. So if you don't mind having the slides back on display. Yes. Thank you. What would you like to see then? Just the ones where the building was reduced, the two side-by-side comparison of the building, which please, thank you. The questions or comments from the board on what we've seen here. My apologies, this is a little hard to read in terms of the dimensions. But basically that the width of the building is reduced and the setbacks are increased. I believe they're increased equally in the right-hand image. But the overall length of the building remains the same, is that correct? Yes, it does. That's driven by the parking spaces inside. Mr. Chan, I just want to point one thing out. It'll come up in the civil discussion, but these pictures that depicting the infiltration area are in exactly sort of the same shape and volume, but it's, because the building is getting pushed back, the shape of the infiltration system is going to change slightly. What we made sure of in order to be able to present this alternative so we knew that we could do it was we asked Mr. Novak to make sure that we could slightly modify the shape of the infiltration system to accommodate all that needs to be done from a stormwater management point of view, retaining, keeping the retaining wall in the same location. And when the civil engineer pointed out, yes, that was doable and achievable and he could model it and it worked. That's when we had confidence that we could present to the board the alternative and really ask the board if it wants us to move in that direction we can. The other piece of feedback is if the board would weigh in on if we pick up those two feet, how do you want us to distribute them? We can meet the setback as you know, we meet now the setback with the wider building that you see on the left. So there's no longer requests for waivers and setback and comply with zoning, but with an extra two feet, how would you like that distributed? Would you want it all on one side, split evenly as you're happy to see in this diagram or any other variation? We'd appreciate the feedback so we could actually finally position the footprint. Yeah, thank you. So speaking personally, I am pleased with the direction of these changes. Absolutely, thank you. Even if it's only three and a half feet, not even three and a half feet extra at the front, I think it really does help with the scale of the building because it is so tall, especially compared to some of the buildings immediately close by and then there are apartment buildings that are taller still that are farther east from this site but they are setback considerable distance. So I think that this sort of works into that scale of distance from the street in height of the building. So I feel that that's better. And as has been said by many people, I think having a better opportunity to put larger trees in front to again sort of break down that scale but also to provide some shelter on that street that that will be very well received. I like the narrowness of the building. Certainly wouldn't say no to being narrower still but I understand that some of the constraints that you have from the perspectives that you bring to this project, I've been sort of going back and forth with this question. I do think the 135 is better than the 137. And I've been sort of going back and forth on it, does it make sense to skew it one direction or the other? I think for me sort of the more important question is maintaining the ability for emergency access along the side of the building if that's necessary. And so I think overall it's probably better to just sort of split the difference between the two and try to make both of them as wide as possible so that we can maintain that kind of emergency access. I agree that the swap of the elevator slightly further back is a very good move and really sort of it really improves the streetscape from making that sort of less prominent than it was before. I do like the access to the second floor courtyard being closer to the elevator. I think that really sort of facilitates people's ability to get to that area. I'm still a little concerned about only having a single means of egress from there, but certainly as long as it's compliant with building code that that's what the requirement is and that's something that being a state law is something that cannot be waived by this board. So as long as you're compliant with state law that then that is fine. And then I wasn't sure were there, have you looked at anything in regards to the layout of the top floor? I know there was some discussion possibly of trying to shift other parts of the massing farther back and I wasn't sure if that was something that you had had a chance to look at at this point or was something that you thought might be worth considering. Yeah, so we did look at that. The trouble is that the elevator core and the front stair are where they are in the front wing of the building, right? So we need some massing to connect the dots between that stair and the other stair. We have right now just a couple of units on the front wing and they're behind the elevators now. So they're on the courtyard side. So we couldn't see a way to reduce the visual impact of the fifth floor from the street. The good news is that the last version of the fifth floor that we drew was showing an emergency generator on the roof. And as we understand the world now, that's not gonna be necessary because the water pressure in the main across the street is sufficient to drive the sprinkler system up to the top level of the building. So we're gonna be able to get rid of that and that'll be one less element of massing at the top of the building. And it's probably premature to ask but as far as the shadow studies that we saw at the previous hearing, do you anticipate there will be much of a change in the shadow impact due to the adjustments that have been made for this hearing? I don't. I think that the width of the building is not gonna make a huge difference. The moving of it back, that's positive from a shadow point of view. But as someone pointed out, Mrs. Wooten, Ms. Wooten, I believe it was mentioned that the impact on the Brattle Street address is where the most significant problem is from a winter shadowing point of view. And that won't be modified by the move in any kind of meaningful way. Okay. Questions? Questions from the board? Mr. Chairman? Mr. Hanlon. I just wanted to focus for a second on where you put the extra two feet if you reduce these. I guess I'd like to sort of, certainly if doing splitting it was actually, was beneficial from point of view of emergency access, I think that would clearly be right. I don't really remember the pictures that we had last time well enough to know whether or not given, I assume that the extra two feet will not actually give the fire department an ability to sort of slip up the sides of the building and you'll still be looking at access from outside. And I wondered if somebody could just explain to me the way in which the decision on where to put the extra space would affect the emergency aspect. If it didn't affect it at all, just looking at it and again, would like advice on this. If it didn't affect the access, it would seem to me that providing a little extra space on the side where you have a sidewalk and where you have the people who are sort of enjoying the walk down that side of the building might be able to use the space more but I'm not dogmatic about any of this. I'd just like a little bit more explanation for what the issues are. So, Mr. Hanlon. The access on both sides is not sufficient to move fire apparatus, obviously. So, it would be walking access on both sides of the building. Take your point about the left hand or west side sidewalk, perhaps being more important of the two side yards, but I guess my view is that splitting the differences is still the way to go as far as the additional space. I think the access, the emergency access is gonna be as was presented last time from various adjacent lots and from the avenue in front. Mr. Chairman, if I could make one comment. One of the things that I would, I'm gonna recommend to the applicant now that we're getting feedback from the board of that it prefers to reduce with is that we will reach back out to the deputy fire chief and ask the deputy fire chief straight up. From an emergency access point of view, do you want both feet added to one side or do you wanna split the difference? So to answer, to help answer the question for all of us, I think talking to the deputy fire chief and getting some feedback could maybe illuminate and give us the answer of what the firefighter really wants. And if the deputy fire chief said, oh, give me the two feet on the left side that's gonna give me, I think that's gonna then grow that setback. Chris, maybe you could tell us what it's gonna grow with you, but it's gonna be like 12 or 13 feet at that point, right? That maybe what he prefers and we'll report that back to the board and that'll help inform the board. So I was gonna suggest that we didn't do that in advance because we didn't have the direction from the board about width, but now that we're getting the direction and I know other board members haven't weighed in yet and we'll wait, but it sounds like between the review architect and the comments that we've heard that it's really preferred, we'll move in that direction and we could get the information. Mr. Chair, if I could just make a quick point. Clearly my preference would be meeting setback requirements as the minimum standard. So to the extent that you can make it compliant on both sides, that'd be great. The only other thing I'd say to consider is the massing on the left side as you're facing from the street is a little bit bigger because it doesn't have the cutout of the courtyard. So if there's any sort of, there's basically a larger building face on that side that may sort of suggest that maybe some of the additional space gets given to that side. Excellent point. Excellent point. Members of the board with questions? Mr. Chair. Mr. Regan Belly. I just let that echo what the other board members said as well as Mr. Bomer that I think the progress on the front, the increased setback is really helpful. The switch of the elevator stair makes a visual difference which I think makes the building feel less imposing from the street, which I think is really helpful. So I'm very happy to see those changes. And I just want to, I guess, reinforce what others have said that I think the more narrow building is helpful. It's great, I think, to just see that the building is within the setbacks now. It just gives us that comfort level that even though this is a larger building than many in the neighborhood that are at least being those minimum guides. And I would advocate for keeping the building as far to the right, maintaining that 10 foot setback and giving all the extra space to that left side. Because as Mr. Regan just said, it really feels like a much taller building where the five stories go straight up next to those adjacent apartment buildings. And in addition, that's sort of the side where the shadow impact is most significant because the building is sort of oriented so that the bottom right hand corner is the south of the plan. So as much as we can advocate for this building to be pushed away from that line, I think it will positively impact those neighbors. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Mollie. Yeah. I would have to agree completely on what Dan said about this. I think the building on the left side seems closer, at least from the image I could see right on the screen here and is a taller building. So that narrowness is further obviously makes much more less impactful when you shift the building. So that 375 is a welcome number for sure from my side personally and shifting to the right would be my reference if I can voice out the preference. I had a few additional questions with kind of tying with the landscape portion that I was thinking that what would be the impact on the landscape when the building got shifted? So I will bring up back question to Mr. Zeke here to see first is I would like to understand why that seating arrangement was made on the left side of the building? Was that a programming part of it that probably I'm not aware of? What was the reason for that? And then the bike, sorry, go ahead. I could hit that one, Mr. Mollie. The reason for the seating there is that it's near the bus stop. And while we don't think that there's gonna be a lot of use because the buses are going west on Massav, the bus stop is immediately adjacent to that seating location. So that's why we put it there. Okay, changes. If to me, as far as landscape is concerned, at least more the better is what my opinion on that one is. So that pocket seemed like place where you could have a lot of landscape. Of course, minus the point where the garage, the in and out of the car is not impeded because of the landscape, but just a thought that that portion has a lot of potential to increase the amount of landscape and other aspects. And again, but that having it close to a bus stop does make sense, but again, I'm not sure of the usability of it for that portion. But to me, that sounds like a place where you could have a lot of softscape and landscape portion. That's one opinion. And then the bike rack, obviously there is a bike storage in the building itself. So this is for the, what would put this one? Is it for the retail? It's for visitors, yes. So it's for the retail, visitors to the building who don't have access to the garage would have a place to lock up a bike. And it's over and above the one and a half bike storage spaces that are required in the bylaw. Okay. And Mr. Holly, we would, if the consensus was that the bench area wasn't a practical solution, we were trying to meet somewhere in between having a bus shelter, which we really didn't think was appropriate in having nothing, but if the thought was to have just landscaping there, perhaps another street tree, we're certainly open to leaving that up to the board to decide as well. Just that now that the building has pushed back, I think that depth is a good spot where, could have a nice green space there. I would prefer it myself. But again, I'd leave to the rest of the board members to weigh in on this one for sure. And then also if it's not too far, the hardscape on the right side could be where you could add some benches, not that there's a loose furniture and FF&E portion being addressed there, but this could shift there as well if still meeting the programming requirements of the project. And all other changes are really, thanks for that. And it's a welcome for the project. Yeah, thank you for saying that. And having the courtyard on the right side does help and makes us dictate to push the building to the right. It's just my opinion. And thanks for it. Thanks everyone. Understood. I would advocate for losing the benches rather than moving them to the other side because I think we need to have as much flexibility as possible for the potential retailer to own that front space and to enliven it in whatever way they feel is appropriate. So I wouldn't want to hamstring them by having fixed benches in that zone. Okay, that's fine. I mean, could almost take that third, sort of middle back bench out, take the two benches and sort of slide them to the right and add a second tree to the left there before you get to the path. Right. Fair enough. Yeah. Mr. Conner was gonna say, maybe the board can give us some feedback. We do expect, since this is the westbound traffic, it's, there aren't going to be a lot of people waiting at any one time to go west at that bus stop that maybe all we need is one bench. You know, again, everybody, if the board thought, you know, what's going to get so little use that the benefits of programming that area without benches exceeded the convenience of having a bench, we would do that, but maybe all you need is one bench. Yeah, I sort of like the notion of the two benches across each other, you know, sort of thinking back to the, you know, the past few years, it's nice to have an outdoor space where you can have a conversation with somebody with a little bit of separation, if necessary. But, you know, to the question about a shelter, if we, if the benches end up being slightly closer to the trees, then it does, the trees can sort of provide that shelter so the benches can be in the shade. So if somebody is waiting for the bus, you know, they can at least be in the shade. And, you know, if it is wet, then possibly it's not quite as wet under the tree. For the point. So, if I'm hearing the feedback, so we get some direction, shrink that bench area, have the two benches facing one another and try to position it so that you're adding another tree along the streetscape. Is that the sort of the goals? Yeah. Okay. I think, you know, as much tree canopy as we can provide along the street, I think the better often. And, you know, I do appreciate that we do have the issue that this is the side of the street with the electric on it. So, you know, it does sort of hem you at the street edge. But, you know, as much as we can accommodate behind that, I think is great. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Are there other comments from the board? Seeing none. Try to decide if we should ask for some public feedback at this stage or if we should hear more about some of the other site issues that have been investigated and then cover that all at once. We need some senses to hear the comments on the site plan because then it's the same subject matter. Okay. So let's proceed then with Mr. Novak's presentation and then we'll come back and cover all of that together. That makes sense. Chris, I think you got to give up this drawing and Mike Novak, our civil engineer who spoke earlier for a moment is going to advise as to changes to the civil site plan that he's been working on in response to comments from TouchTech. Thank you, Paul. Mr. Chair, I will need permission for sharing if you could be so kind. And just what we do that just to make sure we're clear Mike Novak from Patriot and I will do my best to go through some of the higher level changes as efficiently as I can in the interest of time and touch the major points and then of course answer any questions. Thank you. Colleen, if you could go ahead and make that change and make Mr. Novak a co-host. There we go. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you. One moment please. And I will do the can everyone see me quickly? Yeah. All right, great. Again, I think everyone is pretty familiar with the site at this point but just again, Mass Ave, the site here, no brook behind. So what I'll touch on is mainly focus on how we addressed the comments received by Dr. Tech and Mr. Reardon. Mr. Reardon's letter initially had three kind of major points, constructability, emergency access and stormwater design, there's a lot of intricate details in those three overall subject matters. So I'll do my best to touch on the higher points as soon as I can get, there we go. Just to reiterate and re-associate everyone the existing conditions plan with the two existing dwellings, no brook to the rear Mass Ave on the front. One of the comments that affects this plan and affected the overall approach was the request to show one for contours as opposed to previously shown two which we've done here. And that led into the request to model and if everyone can see my cursor, there's two depression type areas here and here within the site that in certain storms will probably retain water and Mr. Reardon's comments was to examine that and see if that is the case and if so model it correctly and efficiently. So we went ahead and did that. Again, the black line identifies what I identified as the depression areas for these of Mr. Reardon's review. And then I updated the existing conditions in regards to the stormwater management plan that's a separate document to establish new existing runoff rates and volumes of stormwater. Again, for comparison purposes. Sorry, moving forward, that's just an demolition plan. We have a site layout plan similar to Kyle's. No major changes on that. Sorry, there's a little lag on my screen. So in examining that existing conditions and identifying those depressions, we instead of jumping straight ahead to the final design of the stormwater, we took a look at kind of the interim of what would be going on during construction and stormwater and erosion control. So on the left hand side, you can see we've set up kind of the initial phase one, we're calling it a erosion control plan. And again, this kind of jumps the borderline between constructability and stormwater management. So I'm bleeding them together a little bit, but bear with me. And we wanted to establish erosion control measures and we also wanted to establish after demolition and tree removal, mimic these existing basins or depressions, but do it in a way that made it beneficial to allow us to do our construction. So we sized a little more formal depression with a forebay and we're gonna show some diversion, swelling towards them. And again, the site predominantly flows from front to back, from massive back towards the brook. So the idea was to capture as much of that as we could as the construction was going on. And it's a little difficult to phase the intricate pieces in between, but this on the right hand side is a phase two through four type of thing, a type of timing, excuse me, which in the building would then be constructed. And if you recall, we're providing temporary maintenance access through the rear of the building as it's constructed to allow front to back use. And the idea would be to maintain this basin as long as we can while building the infiltration system and the building itself. And of course, if we recall, the building is connected to the infiltration system via roof drain. So it'll be a little while before we're actually collecting stormwater through the infiltration system from the building. So the idea would be to maintain this basin on the rear, which has a rep-wrapped outlet to really control any kind of runoff and again sediment for beta to help with erosion control until this infiltration system can come online. And then once that does obviously a lot of the area of discharge from stormwater will be captured through the building area. We've really tried to give a detailed sequencing of how we're going to approach this. And I think Matt wanted to touch on this a little later in terms of constructability, but we really tried to answer a lot of Sean's comments through that sequencing along with this layout. And sorry, there we go. So the overall grading plan, the final grading plan. And again, this does not reflect any of the building movements we've been discussing. But as Mr. Felden mentioned, this wall will stay in the same spot. This infiltration system will get reconfigured slightly probably a little shallower front to back and a little longer left to right. The path is maintained. And as Kyle noted a while back in his presentation, we added that wood-chipped emergency access that required a little bit of re-grading to make it an applicable pathway. So the high points were kept the same. And we then took this final grading and did the final drainage analysis compared to, as I had mentioned in previous, the revised existing numbers. And again, we're meeting all the requirements and all the storms. And as we mentioned earlier, the front with all the planting areas that we're creating and again, the high point through here and taking out the building, there's not really a need for any storm water mitigation in front other than what the landscape provides. One or two quick other pieces. In the interim since my last presentation, I was able to get down to the town engineering department and dig into some of the existing utility records. And I was able to uncover that there's a water line that was alluded to earlier on the south side of Mass Ave, Massachusetts Ave. And that is actually, and they have pressure information related to that as well. And that's 150 PSI 12 inch high pressure line, which is what Chris was referring to in regards to our improvements. Initially, we were showing tying into this water line on the north side. Come to find out that was a lower pressure line only about 55, 60 PSI. So we revised the connection details. We're gonna bring one line across and then tap off our domestic and fire services from there once we're across Mass Ave. We were also able to get some inverts for the sewer shows on slopes for the connections. One of Mr. Ravens comments was concerns of velocity. I think we've addressed that. And from there, we also wanted to add in, and I think we've seen this before, but this was officially added into the package. Some of the access we've looked at for fire safety based on information provided from the town for their particular truck, their ladder truck and some of the radii that it could handle. And I know this has been a point of discussion, but this was a visual that we wanted to add. And as you can see, I think Paul's point of asking assistant chief where he'd want the extra room is the way to go, but I don't think we could fit in any apparatus, so I'll just reiterate that point, but maybe he'll tell me differently that he wants something to go up there. And if he does, we'll do our best to make it happen. That's a very broad overview of some of the changes that we did in response to Sean's comments. There's a lot of other little details, but well, I didn't mean to actually flip to the detail page, but maybe that was done for a reason, but I'll try to get back to the site plan. I'm having a little lag on the computer here, but Mr. Chair, I'll turn it back to you for questions. Great, thank you very much. Mr. Messurek, did you have something you had wanted to add? I won't jump in now unless Paul, do you think we should just... No, I think we should... Constructability is a very important subject. Ward's asked us about it. We're prepared to address it, but I don't want it to consume the subject matter that we've been at, which is site design and building design, so we can sort of have that discussion in an organized way, and then we can move to constructability. Okay, so I'm good. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I would ask Sean Reardon if he has comments. Sorry, a little slow on my mute button. I think all the changes are in a positive direction, and sort of the foundational concerns I had in the beginning about the basis for the stormwater analysis has been addressed. So I did have a chance to look at how Patriot has modeled the existing conditions, and I think it looks on point. It's got all the elements that I was looking for, and I just get it sort of dig down a little bit deeper and sort of readdress any outstanding questions. Great, thank you. Are there questions from the board? Only question I have sort of goes back a little bit to what we've, to the discussion on landscaping and irrigation and such, is along the sides of the building, what's the intention for the ground level? Is that just grass or is there something going on there? Well, Kyle, did you have a seed mix associated with the sides of the building or not? We do have a seed mix for both sides of the building. Okay. It would, yeah. So would it be more of a grass type surface or more of a? More grass-like. Yeah, okay. And Mike, it appears from your grading that you have a ditch or something contemplated there? On the right-hand side? Yeah. Yeah, we went out and took another look at this and one of your points was kind of the transition area there. And I think we need to, it's a little hard to see, but there's actually a small timber wall that sits probably right outside of the property line that holds the side of this house up a little higher and there's a high point in there. So I think we have enough room to just give a little bit of a direction so that the water wants to bring back and not go across. There's definitely an area in there where it kind of flows back and forth because of course the property line is not staked out, but there's some undulation there. So I think the intent of that is to just reiterate that our water needs to go to the back and not to the side. And all I'd ask is just make sure you're not damming up along the property line because right now it looks like both projects sort of grade through your site to get to the brook. So it just, we don't wanna do is create a dam along that property boundary. Understood, and I'll make sure that we had enough spot detail to make sure that that doesn't happen. Okay, thanks. And then how is water, what happens with the water that falls at the front of the building and the hardscape area where that is not permeable? There will be runoff towards the sidewalk as there is now and again, but overall the area from front to back across the frontage of this property is less in the pre to post. Right, so, and again, we've added the landscape areas so there won't be much runoff in those areas. Mike, how are you handling the ramp down to the garage? Say again, Chuck, I'm sorry. I assume there's a ramp down into the garage, is that true or is it that grade? It's pretty much at grade. We're at about 95 in the front. We just go up slightly to about 95 too. It's a very slight, yeah. Okay, thanks. Sure. Any questions from the board? None. I'm gonna go ahead, I think at this stage and ask for a public comment on the last two topics that have been discussed. So one was the changes to the footprint of the building and how those are and the changes to the building itself that were presented, which includes the making the building narrow, we're setting it back further, moving the elevator back, reorienting the entrance onto the courtyard and adjusting the columns in the parking area to make sure that we have the proper clearances. And then the presentation that Mr. Novak just gave in terms of warm water and the way that the site itself is laid out. So just as a brief refresher, so the public question, the comments are taken as they relate to the matters at hand and should be directed to the board for the purpose of informing our decision, ask people to please limit their comments to three to four minutes and use their time to provide comment related solely to the topics discussed in this phase of the meeting as I've just outlined them. So the members of public who would like to address the board please raise your hand using the raise hand button which is on the participants tab in the Zoom application. Those of you who are calling in by phone, you may dial star nine. Once you are recognized by the chair, we ask you to please give your name and address clearly for the record and then you'll be given time for your questions and comments. And I would like to make sure that we are getting a little late. So I try to keep it as tight as we can. So we make sure we save time for the discussion about construction, the constructability and still have time for the public to read in on that. So with that, the first hand up is Mr. John Warden. Mr. Chairman, can you hear me? We can, sir. Thank you. Members of the board. Sorry, John, I just need to ask address for the record. Oh, 27 Jason Street. Thank you so much. 40, 45 years and a couple of days ago, we were in the midst of the Great Blizzard in 78. I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember that, but it was quite a storm shut down the whole state for about a week. But the redevelopment board was not deterred. They were in town hall having a hearing on a massively oversized building on Mill Street. And I was the only member in the audience and they talked about a lot of details and adjustments and plant digital sapling here and there and so on. But they ignored the elephant in the room which was the fact that the building was just too big for the site. And that was a site that's many times the size of this site. And so that elephant is still here. You may have trimmed his toenails a bit or pushed his trunk in a little, but it's still too big. And so I think they're going in the right direction, but they're not going fast enough or far enough. An example that I think is worth thinking about is in North Cambridge next to the former North Avenue Congregational Church, which is next to former Sears Robux store, which is now all part of Leslie University. There was an antique house, quite a nice house. But instead of tearing it down, they refurbished it and repainted it and so on and put the big ugly high-rise building behind it. It looks a little ridiculous, but from the window of an automobile or the window in the bus, the street face is this nice old house set in a fairly urban environment rather than the great bulk of the building. And I suggest that if this great bulk of a building must be constructed, that it be done in a way that preserves the streetscape along here, which includes the very important architecturally Highland Fire Station and low-rise apartment buildings and other structures that are consistent with this part of the neighborhood, of which just anything of this size and bulk and height is totally inconsistent. But it has support to think about these larger, I say, smaller issues and then try to make this thing sit into the environment that exists in our Arlington, not what some developer wants to do to fill his pockets. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Warden. The other hand that is up is Mr. Moore. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman, Steve Moore, even on the street. I want to, as I said briefly before, applaud the idea of pushing the building back, that was one of our major concerns previously, echoing all the comments made by board members in the end of life. And the move towards trying to vegetate it more as part of the streetscape, I think is important. I do want to ask one question. Now at one point, one of the presenters spoke to structural soil or structural activity under the sidewalk. Is that true, Mr. Chairman, first? Matt, I'm not sure who, I think Mr. Zick maybe can address that question. Yes, structural soil is proposed between the two street trees that are flanking the building entrance, and that is a way to have rooting space underneath the pavement. Okay, Mr. Chairman, that is excellent because street trees, particularly long mass average, are high use and high stress areas at a hard time. The addition of irrigation is important, but one thing I wanted to add, and I see Ms. Stamp's hand is up, she may bring this up. Well, I'm going to mention it quickly and she can expand on it. Is it possible to structure any of the hardscape towards the street to collect water and water the trees? Mr. Zick, is that a strategy? Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mayor, you're right. We're intended to irrigate the front of the property as well, I forgot to add that. No, but I think that the question more specifically is could the hardscape at the front be designed in such a way that the water that's collected is used to assist in that irrigation? I see. That's a kind of question. Yeah, I think that's something we could look at. It's something that we'd have to coordinate between architecture, civil engineering and landscape architecture. Okay. Okay, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Moore. Next up is Susan Stamps. Oh, Ms. Stamps. Got it, sorry, it was on my phone. Can you hear me okay? We can. Yeah, thank you. Just a couple of quick- Just name an address for the record first. Susan Stamps, 39, Grafton Street on the tree committee, but not speaking for the tree committee. Thank you so much. What Steve brought up about the watering, the street trees, two things. One was, yes, we're starting to look at that in urban forestry, they're starting to put grates, not only use structured soils, but have grates and slope the sidewalks just ever so slightly so that when it rains, instead of the runoff going, I think I heard someone say it goes towards Melbroke, but anything that can be captured and to go into the planting pits would be fantastic. That's number one, number two. Please check with the tree warden and use his gas leaks detector. If you don't already have one because there's a lot of gas leaks along Mass Ave and we don't want you, we use it to plant every street tree now in town and we do find a lot of gas. So, and they're gonna die if there's gas leaks in the pits. Finally, somebody was saying something about planting grass beside the building. I wasn't looking at the picture at the time, was doing something else, but somebody mentioned that there was going to be grass beside the building and I don't know how big that area is, but I would ask the board to consider asking that anything planted in areas where they could put grass which really environmentally isn't very helpful to put plants that pollinators like grasses, tall flowers, things like that rather than just grass. So those are my comments. Thank you Mr. Stamps. Thank you. Are there any further questions from the public? Do not see any. So I'll go ahead and close public, excuse me, public comment for this section of tonight's hearing. We will squeeze in one more public comment period at the end once we've talked about constructability. I did just want to follow up briefly on that, the point that Mr. Stamps made, the question about the plantings on the side of the building and just if the mixes that are considered for those areas, if they could be something that is as a longer lifespan and it's less labor intensive to maintain than traditional turf grasses. Yep, the seed mixes proposed aren't traditional turf grasses, they are a native mix, yep. Okay, perfect, thank you. And with that, I would turn back to Mr. Feldman to introduce the third section of tonight's meeting. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My first question is Matt, when you give you a presentation, are you gonna need Mike's materials or do you have your own? If Mike could just go to sheet 505, that would be the reference point for my presentation. Fair enough, so here's the introduction that I think is important for me to make. Constructability, we've been analyzing constructability since it was brought up early on by Tetra Tech. And we're at the stage now where we're working on constructability in two different parts. One part is how are we physically going to construct the building, the stages for construction to demonstrate to the board how you would actually build the building and move materials around the building site all within the limits of the private property line of the developer. The second component of constructability is the activity along Massachusetts Avenue and the public right of way. And what we would like to cover tonight is phase one of constructability, which is how the building gets built, but everything that's happening within the property line of the private developer, the sequencing, the phasing, Matt's gonna go through that so people can understand how the building will be sequenced and built. We'd like to defer, first of all, the hour is late anyway, but we'd like to defer until next meeting, Mr. Chair, the detailed discussion about the components of the construction plan that engage the public right of way. Given that thought, you see it on this plan that there's already been thought given on deliveries and access for deliveries and the like, but we continue to explore issues and we want to talk to our consultants and try to get some additional feedback from the town engineer if we can because we have other concepts and ideas that we want to bring to fruition before we formally present that design for feedback. So tonight we want to focus on and present constructability of this building, how it gets done within the limits of the private property line. And in two weeks, we will present a more complete understanding and detail of to the extent that construction issues would, how construction issues would work with regard to any incursions into the right of way. So with that, Matt, you got a lot to explain how do you get the thing built? All right, so again, for the record, Matthew Maggiore, I'm the president of the Maggiore companies, we are the owners, we are the applicant for this project. And just as a quick recap of the evening and the last several weeks, I'd like to thank Chairman Klein and the zoning board and all the third party consultants for their time and extensive efforts spent on this project to date. I'd also like to thank the public for their continued valuable input and also to our team for their valiant efforts turning around the critical deliverables that we need to keep the project momentum going. We've covered a lot of ground in the last several weeks and I'm confident that we've demonstrated our commitment to listening to the various concerns raised by the boards and the public and the third party consultants. And we've really strived to do our best to implement as many of the suggested modifications to the project as possible, while still maintaining our unicount and density, which is part and parcel of the viability of the project and the ability to pay the cost of acquiring these parcels. In terms of constructability, I have to be honest, I've never been asked to publicly present how we're going to build a project because it's really what we live and breathe every day. But I understand why Sean has asked us and made this a critical component to the permitting process because of the sensitivity along Mass Ave. The strategy for this project is obviously to construct it with minimal impact to Mass Ave and the public realm while striving to maintain public safety as a top priority. And as Paul mentioned, we're going to get into that at a future meeting once we consider a number of other options after some valuable input from Tetra Tech. With this in mind, we've created a phased construction plan and this will focus on primarily using the building footprint as well as the temporary staging area that we're going to construct at the rear over top of the infiltration system. And that area is once constructed on a temporary basis will be approximately 6,400 square feet. Again, that's at the rear of the building in blue where you see that infiltration area. The first phase is geared toward constructing the rear woodland as Mike explained, getting that area to a rough state to complete the work that would otherwise be hindered once the building is constructed. So basically, day one, we're going to install in our stabilization for the site and we're going to temporarily fence the site, make it secure and obviously we're going to take down the buildings. Once the buildings are raised and that debris is disposed of, we're going to take the trees down and we're going to stump and we're going to start cutting the site to be able to install the infiltration system and the retaining walls. And again, this is fairly heavy construction and with the setbacks that we have and the encumbrance is a long mass out, the only way to build that stuff is to do it first before the building gets built itself. So the goal is to go and construct that infiltration system and the retaining wall, construct the temporary drainage ponds and the forebay to collect runoff during construction. That infiltration system will be geared up to be able to be used as soon as the building goes vertical as soon as we have a roof on and we have our roof drainage tied in. So we're prepared on a temporary basis and we're prepared once we have a roof on to capture that roof water into the infiltration system. Again, I mentioned we have about 6,400 square feet of staging area that will be created at the rear and this is really the primary staging material storage, lifting, hoisting area for the project. The second phase of the project is basically the excavation and construction of the basement and that structure slab, excuse me, and that's the structural steel over the basement and the elevator shaft that goes from the basement to the fifth floor. So upon completion of the basement construct, we'll able to backfill that and be able to start working on the conventional perimeter foundation walls and footings and interior footings. Upon backfill of those elements, we will then construct all the underground infrastructure for the project, i.e. Oil water separator, floor drains, underground sanitary, secondary feeds, anything that goes beneath the slab, then we'll prep and we'll pour the slab. So right then and there, with the lay down area at the rear and the slab cord for the footprint of the garage, that becomes the runway, the platform, the focal point of focusing on building from our property barring what we're gonna talk about for public safety at a future meeting. But those are our primary means for material handling, deliveries, vehicle parking during the day, during construction, just about anything and everything we can do will occur from the footprint of the building and at the rear of the building, excuse me, phase three of the project will be the beginning of the vertical construction. We intend to erect the second level of the steel podium. So this building is a combination of what we call a composite, steel and concrete, second floor deck and then the balance would be a stick or wood frame construction for floors three, four and five. We're gonna erect the second level steel podium in two phases. The first phase will consist of the erection of the columns and beams at the rear, 50% of the first floor footprint. We'll handle this with a small crane that will sit within the front 50% of the first floor footprint. The second phase will consist of the erection of the columns and the beams at the front 50% of the first floor footprint and at this point, we would change the method of erection to a smaller crane truck or forklift, obviously due to limitations and the inability to park a crane on that side because of the overhead wire conflicts. Upon completion of that steel, we'll put our decking down, we'll pour our concrete slab and we then have our second floor platform which will become the runway to our vertical construction. At this point, the vertical construction continues in the same conventional manner that any major project like this would be. It's a wood frame construction. Again, we'll be taking deliveries through our driveway entry into the building. We'll be offloading inside, we'll be shuffling and shuttling that product through to the back. We have a 20 foot wide opening at the front of the building. We'll have the equal size temporary opening at the rear of the building to access our temporary staging area. And we have, as I continue to say, this full runway of opportunity to build this project. Excuse me. The final phase will be at the tail end of vertical construction, which would be to go back and dress up the rear, get everything to final grade to construct the urban woodland area. We would be eliminating and grading everything out to get rid of the temporary drainage ponds. We'd be putting in our stone dust walkways and working with LEC and Kyle Zick on the robust implementation of the planting program, irrigation, walkways, and fine tuning to turn this project over to some happy homeowners. So we have thought a lot about this. With 45 years in the business, we wouldn't be here right now if we didn't know that we could build this if we weren't completely confident that the majorities are very capable of building this building. So we have some work to do regarding how we're handling Mass Ave and between conversations with Tetra Tech on the city engineer and our traffic consultants. We're very confident that we can develop a plan that is mutually agreeable for access through to maintain the safety of the pedestrians and to maintain the safety of the workers and deliver a successful project to the town of Arlington. With that said, I'll open things up to questions or if Paul has any- Yeah, just to think, again, I don't want the board to think that we're deferring the conversation on Mass Ave because we see that there's issues. We wanna find to, Mass Ave is the primary activity that's gonna happen with Mass Ave is deliveries, delivery of materials that will then get onto the site and move to the staging area or within the building temporarily stored within the building. And so what we're fine-tuning is how that delivery process will happen. Other than deliveries to the site, we don't expect there to be a lot of activity on Mass Ave, but it is a construction site and we have to address pedestrian access. We have to address vehicular access. We know Mass Ave has dedicated uses already as a car traveling, it has a bike lane. And so what we're trying to do and what we wanna complete in the next two weeks and then present is a more complete picture of, how does the delivery process work and how does the delivery process cohabitate with the other dedicated use system, Mass Ave. And we've gone a long way in developing this but we had some specific questions for our own track consultant that we wanted to get an impact from. We wanna try to engage the building, the town engineer on a couple of specific points and then we think we'll be in a better position to present the complete picture. That's why we're deferring that. Great, well, thank you, thank you both. We appreciate that. So just make sure we have it straight in my mind. So the first floor level is gonna be steel-framed and then infill at the perimeter wall and then from the above, second floor and above, is that wood framing or is that like-age steel framing? So you're correct, we would have a steel frame that would support the second level with like-age metal infill on the exterior first floor walls. We would have a composite deck and concrete slab that would be the platform for the second floor of living with three floors of wood on top of that to complete the fifth, you know, the five stories. Okay, and then when you're, what are sort of the constraints that you're sort of trying to work with in terms of, you know, trying to lift materials up higher into the building? Is that why you're saying you would have a sort of a lift system at the rear of the building that you would be able to put materials onto and then bring it up to the higher floors and then bring it back towards the front? Is that the general idea? Sure, so let me give you a quick overview a little more in-depth on the lifting. So that whole 6,400 square foot area at the rear, we would have a boom style low at the rear of that building that would be, you know, picking product that was, that's being shuttled to the rear and that would be loading each platform, you know, typically, you know, those booms could be anywhere from, you know, 60 to 80 feet in reach as needed. And so we would be constantly utilizing that as the picking point, you know, for the various floors and then, you know, shuttling that product with pallet jacks and whatnot, you know, through those floors to get them to where they need to be on the footprint to be able to construct. As it relates to siding and window installation on the sides of the building and the rear, we would intend to be using an all-terrain scissor lifts that, you know, can easily fit within our setbacks. They tend to be about six feet wide and those would be, you know, scissor lifts, you know, moving up and down, that would be installing siding and windows and trim and things of that nature. As we get to the second floor courtyard, we are gonna be designing the podium to be able to support a scissor lift to be able to be placed on that second level courtyard. And that scissor lift will be used to install all the windows and siding within the confines of the courtyard. That material will be delivered to that second level still from the rear and then carted by hand to, you know, to the courtyard where they would be then put on the lift and installed. So there'll be a lift on that podium for quite a while, you know, while we're building that interior of the U, so to speak. As far as, I know it's awfully early to be thinking about this. In terms of construction hours, so the town of Arlington has specific construction hours that are in the general bylaws. I apologize, I can't remember them off the top of my head. Are you planning basically to work during those sort of standard hours, Monday through Friday, Monday through Saturday, what is your work we'd like? We'll work any possible hours that we can. We like to work Saturdays and I know that towns have ordinances on start times, sometimes it's nine o'clock. So, you know, we would obviously be a, you know, Monday through Friday, I'm assuming that it's, you know, seven o'clock start before, you know, before motors turn on and, you know, you hear backup alarms and things like that. So whatever the limits of the hours, you know, per zoning, we would be utilizing. There's been no waiver requests to the general bylaws construction limitations. Okay, perfect, no, I just wanted to clarify. Are there questions from either the board's consultants in regards to the constructability questions? Mr. Rudin? Well, quick one, just set a curiosity, Matt, total duration for construction, how long? 16 to 18 months. Okay, and then, so thank you for the description. It's very helpful. Now, that's the way you describe it. So the inside will be available for contractor parking too, right? So you have all those parking spaces for people to, so when you're building the upper floors and you have the heavy, you know, amount of trades in there doing, you know, the plumbing, the electrical and all that stuff, all those people can be parking inside. Right. Okay, great. And then the elevator, is this, so I know you were mentioning that third, fourth and fifth floor is stick built. Is the elevator core like concrete or how does the elevator core go up? Is it similarly framed? It's all masonry. Masonry and that would be staged. Okay. And then just one last quick question. Any thought to where you're gonna do your concrete washout? So I did see that in some of your comments and when we have limited site like this, we tend to buy kiddie pools. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but we walk out and kiddie pools and then we bust everything up and take it away, but that's usually the cleanest way to do it in a setting like that. Great idea. All right, appreciate it. That's it for me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Bomer, do you have any questions? Maybe a little bit. And certainly I'll look at this with a little more detail, but so the purpose of that storage area in the back in the blue is to minimize impact on the offloading time on mass evidence of what it's for. So you store materials back there and then deliver. I'm just a little confused about the amount of time it takes to offload the materials is probably less than the time it would take to offload and have a vertical lift at the front of the building, especially if the building is set back further now. So I'm sure I can jump on that. We're trying to avoid, there will be times where we have major deliveries on Mass Ave and obviously we'd have the appropriate police details to facilitate those deliveries. The goal is to be able to really minimize that and take as many of those deliveries into the building and out to the rear where we have much more telescopic ability with the angle that you need to safely lift the product up. So if you look at what you have for depth out back versus what you have up front, you have the confines of the, of a future transformer vault up front, you have the confines of the overhead power lines on Mass Ave. So it would be impossible to be able to face a boom lift against the building and be able to lift safely up onto the front of the building at Mass Ave. And I forgot to mention that the infiltration system that Mike Novak's designed is HD loaded, we've given them all the weights of both a boom lift, of the lull of multiple lifts of plywood. So everything has been thought out carefully so that we can be on top of that as long as we have the proper cover. So you mean with that? Sorry, can I just add one? We also brought the manufacturing on that and gave them all the loading specs so they gave us the required cover they've been looking for as well. So we double-checked it. So even the, I think you were saying at the very end of the project is when you build the woodlands in the back. So even at that point, you're delivering like trees back through the parking garage level. Absolutely, and actually if you look at, if you look at the architectures in the finish stages, once we get the building exterior finished, there's still a double door, in large door and a dedicated hatched out area in the garage so that we have the ability to be running that, small equipment, skid steers and small mini excavators and sending all that product back on carts or whatever we need to do with that, running lane from the front to the back. Okay, while I'm looking forward to seeing the street, the next piece of the, yeah. Yeah, at one point, just so we don't gloss over it, that access to the back, which is initially, the large access during construction, which will get to be a little bit smaller, but still be double doors as size purposefully because going forward in the future for maintenance of the urban park, if there's a change in a planting that needs to be made, we're giving the kind of minimum association the means, the permanent means to be able to do that. It's been designed so that, if you have to get a skid through there or a little bobcat or what landscaper is typically used to, to do some work back there, there's the, it's all designed in the capacity to enable that access with that equipment. Yep, understood. Yep, thanks. Thank you. Great, thank you. Are there questions or comments from the board? Mr. Chair. Mr. Rikadelli. I just have one question for Mr. Majore. For the foundation system, you guys don't anticipate deep foundations and no pile driving or anything like that, just traditional foundations for this building, right? The foundation to be traditional, obviously we have the high walls of the basement and we have to look at the soil condition between us and our neighbor at the southeast corner of the property. And there's a possibility that we would have to sheet pile that corner to support our excavation. But other than that, it would be completely conventional construction. Okay, got it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions from the board? Seeing none, I will go ahead and move on to public questions or comments as it relates to the constructability. Again, public questions or comments should be taken as they relate to the matter of hand and direct to the board for the purpose of informing our decision. If you are on Zoom, which we all are, you can use the raise hand feature on the participants tab or star nine if you are calling in. So go ahead and open the public comment period. Are there any members of the public who wish to ask questions in regards to the construction or how the construction will be taking place on the site? And once going twice, seeing none, I will go ahead and close public comment then on this. Okay. So we've spent a good amount of time, I think making some really good progress in terms of discussing the overall aspects of this project today, especially discussing that the aspects of the landscaping, that was the constructability project, how the stormwater moves to the site, the footprint of the building and some of the other architectural moves that have been proposed by the applicant. I really appreciate all the work that the applicant has done in the previous two weeks to prepare for this meeting. I think it has made it much more informative and much easier for all of us to sort of understand what your intentions are and sort of where your priorities lie and what you're proposing. As we've discussed already, one of the things to cover in our next hearing would be sort of discussions about the use of MassApp during construction and what the implications are gonna be for public convenience, public safety and those aspects. Are there other topics that you would like to revisit at that time? Yeah, so just like we did two weeks ago, our team will debrief tomorrow morning and talk through the comments that we've heard and so the list that I've been making is that we're gonna proceed with the 135 foot wide building. We're gonna abandon the 137 foot building at this point. We will try to get feedback immediately from the deputy chief as to if, from a safety point of view, he has an opinion. If he's indifferent and unless I'm reading the board wrong, there did seem to be a consensus that even though the chair originally said split the extra two feet because of the massing on the west side, because there's no you in that portion of the building and Mr. Reardon, I have this comment as well. Let's hold the setback on the east side to comply with zoning and unless there's a reason from an emergency point of view, not to put all of the benefit of the two feet on the west side, that's what we're gonna do. If that's the answer, what we're then gonna do is say to Mike Novak, okay, Mike, you got to design your site plan with that footprint in that location. So start to get to the next iteration of site plans. We can get it to the board, get it to Tetra Tech. We are going to have Kyle Zick look at the comments about the trees in the front addressing the seating area, trying to get another tree in there what type of trees he would propose after listening to the comments of Mr. Moore and other members of the tree committee and they're written documentation. So we're going to address that. And everybody keeps their own list, so we'll consolidate them. We will present to the board in two weeks, everything that we've done in response, as well as a presentation of deliveries of materials and how the Mass Avenue access point will, we propose how the Mass Avenue access point will be used. And with that, just to sort of forecast, we'll be at the end of February, we would think we're getting to the point where we may be able to start to list what's left for us to finalize and get into the board so that the board then has the project in front of it that we are asking it to consider so that you know, okay, this is it. One of the things that I frequently do if asked by the board is, I work with the board on articulating particular conditions that the board would wanna see to ensure certain outcomes. I know there was a mention about, you gotta be careful legally about how to bind the future condominium association. For example, if there was an annual, an obligation for the first 10 years to submit an annual report with regard to the development of the urban park, I'm confident that we can legally do that in a proper way so that it is legally binding on the condominium association and it's a legal requirement to become an association that can be enforced by the board or by the zoning enforcement officer if they fail to do it. So I frequently work with boards and I know I could seek counsel from Mr. Havarty on how to articulate and prepare conditions. Our goal as the applicant need was to say, we would like to, we hope the board is gonna be favorably inclined to improve this project but our goal is not only to get it approved but to be able to have it conditioned in a manner where we're not in a position where we need to object to a condition. That there's two pieces to this, we hope it's approved so that we don't have to appeal a denial but we hope it's approved with conditions that we've worked through so that we don't have to appeal a condition. And we're prepared to work with the board and with counsel to the board to achieve both outcomes. All right, thank you very much. Are there any further questions from either the board's consultants or members of the board in terms of things they would like to make sure that are covered at the next hearing? Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. This may or may not be at the next hearing but off and on we've been talking about the area, the landscaping of the area and treatment of the Millbrook area that's offsite. And we haven't really borne down very much on that because at least as far as we know, conversations at last time had reached a sort of a breakthrough and things were about to happen. We didn't really talk much about it tonight although we did look at it in a picture. And that sort of is a shoe that ultimately needs to drop and I'm guessing that the applicant needs time to make that all work out but it should be on our task list before we're finished to understand exactly what's proposed there or at least as best we can. So that would be, I mean, obviously I think we should give the applicant all the time to nail that down that the applicant needs but eventually we need to circle back to it. Second thing is I wanted to just sort of say that we don't always send out notices to the tree committee and I think that Mr. Moore and Ms. Dampfs have both done a great job of helping us work our way through some of the issues tonight. I would like it eventually if the applicant would reply to the questions that were asked by the Clean Energy Futures Committee in the initial set of responses by the town just so that we understand where it is they're coming from on that. As far as I know, I mean, there's been conversations that have seemed to me to go in multiple directions and I'd just like to have as clearly understood as we can what the answers are to those questions and we'll take it from there. I mean, in general, there's a lot of I just spent some time rereading all of those comments. There's lots of interesting things there much of which we've discussed some of which we haven't discussed but it would be worthwhile just to make sure that we haven't overlooked anything and obviously not everything that we've been asked to do will be able to happen but it has been a useful compliment to the outstanding assistance we've had from our experts. That would it be helpful to invite a representative from that committee to attend the next hearing? I don't know whether, I mean, we could do that. I don't know whether it's really going to be completely necessary but maybe we should see what transpires what it is that once the applicant has thought about what they wanna say, we may or may not need to have somebody from the CEFC to further discuss it. I just don't want to let the issue get lost. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Anything else from members of the board? Okay. There is one other thing I had wanted to talk about and this is I had mentioned this in an email probably three, four weeks ago between myself and the applicant and some people from the town. So the board is able to request funds of the applicant to assist in the review of the project and assist in sort of the process itself and so the board has requested funds and that is covering the cost of having Tetra Tech and Davis Square associates provide their expertise to the board that the board wouldn't have otherwise. And one other thing that the board would like to request funding for is the creation of a transcript of the hearings so that we have full documentation of everything and that the board has done this on its two recent prior hearings and we feel it's important to have this record not only for the board so that the board can have a written record when the board goes to write its decision that the board can know accurately what everything that has been put forward and so that the hearings, so that all the findings that the board makes it can link back to exactly what happened in the testimony that the board isn't trying to put anything forward that was not in the record prior and obviously the documentation is also valuable to the applicants, the applicant knows exactly what happened and what was said and what was agreed to as they review the decision that the board makes and so I had spoken with in special services about what it would cost to prepare that and the response from them is that it would probably be under, I think there was a, they had thought the number would be under, would be up to but not exceed 4,000 depending on what exactly, how many hearings we have, how long the hearings are, et cetera and so I had discussed this initially with the applicant and there was some pushback as to the necessity of it but I did wanna have that question again because I do feel that it's a valuable tool for not only for the applicant and the board itself but it's valuable for the public as well and so I really would like to include this in the 53G funding but I did wanna give the applicant a chance to respond to that. Well, Paul, we'll just make, I mean, it sounds like it's something that's important to Mr. Chairman and something that was done on previous projects so I'd be willing to say if we could try to cap it, do our best to do it for less and we'll just do it and move forward. Yeah, I'll just point out two things. I get having some understanding on how much transcripts cost and how many pages are created per hour of testimony and how many hours of testimony we've had. I'd be shocked if this is gonna come in at $4,000 or below but I think that needs to get nailed down. The other thing I would say is I think it's a real open question of whether or not the statute allows funds to be used for transcribing the public hearing. I think that's beyond what the statute was designed to do. Obviously, if my client agrees to it, then that issue is not an issue. You know, the Zoom hearings are recorded so I mean, if there's ever a doubt asked to, gee, what was said on that subject, we could always go back to the recordings and flush it out. It does seem wasteful to me to create an entire transcript that is gonna turn out to be 15 or 20 hours worth of meetings to write the decision. I think we've all been taking pretty good notes and we're gonna put it in conditions and we're all gonna look at the conditions and we're all gonna be able to agree and the plans are being changed to address what we're saying. Again, if the client is open to it or if the board says we'll cap it at $4,000, okay, it just doesn't seem like a good expenditure of money and I know I'm pushing back when Matt Maggiore already said it's important to the board. So... Chris, can we firm up that number? I can certainly work on getting that to be a firmer number. I did wanna invite Paul Heverty to speak on this question, especially the question as to whether or not this is something that's allowable under 53G. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I mean, I think there's two separate questions here. Whether it's allowable under chapter 53G, of course, it's allowable in the sense that this is something that 53G funds can be used to pay for. The second question is whether or not you can require it of a comprehensive permit applicants as part of the process and the regulations aren't clear. I think I will have to agree with the attorney Feldman that if you were getting feedback from an applicant saying that they're refusing to do it, then unless you have a specific local regulation that requires it, you probably wouldn't be able to impose it as a cost. But that being said, I have on multiple occasions had boards request from my clients funds to have transcripts of hearings. My clients have provided those funds that have gotten the transcripts. They have actually used the transcripts that have used transcripts from local board hearings in litigation when necessary. There is value to having it. And it's a lot quicker to read through a transcript than it is to sit through and rewatch a three-plus hour board hearing to try to get for that, that one piece of information that you're looking for. So there is value. Mr. Chairman. Yes, sir. I just want to, just from our experience of the previous hearings, we do go into this 40 days of silence at a certain point where we can't, the cardinals are never more closely cloistered when they're electing in the pope than we are when we do a comprehensive permit. And we're constantly, especially those of us of a certain age, you're trying to remember what happened. When you can do a word search through a transcript, you can get to that. And I can remember several occasions on the ones that we did two years ago where we were desperately trying to figure out what it is that somebody had said. And when they had said it, it was, by that time it was months earlier and it is not that easy to work through a lot of Zoom recordings. So, and it was basically, as Mr. Feldman pointed out earlier, one of the things the applicant would like to do is to avoid appealing conditions that we may get wrong. And as much as we try to get it fixed before we go into the conclave, there'll always be something that comes up and having a bit more certainty during that period of time and understanding exactly what people said and looking from the transcript back to the actual statement, if we have to do that, it tends to make this work just better. It avoids a conflict that doesn't have to happen. And I think that that would be in everybody's interest. We're on board just, we could cap it at the 4,000, I'll be appreciated. Mr. Chairman, I promise that when we get to 4,000, I won't say anymore. So we don't actually add them. You realize that we'll be a part of the transcript then. I get that. Okay, well, I do appreciate the applicant agreeing to this. I think it will be valuable as if everyone had a completely agree on the cap. So with that, then I would make a motion. So I would move the Designing Board of Appeals, request the applicant transfer an additional amount of $4,000 to the designated town account to retain a consultant to prepare a written transcript of the proceedings further. I move the town council and the department of planning the community development staff be authorized to manage the contract for the approved consultant and communicate needs for additional funds for the retention of such consultants consistent with section, with chapter 44, section 53G, the board reserves the right to request additional funds in the future. And I would just say as an aside to that, that does not imply that the board will be requesting additional funds, but should an additional consultant be required that the board would still have the right to request that in the future. Second. Thank you, Mr. Hanlon. So this is a vote of the board to request an additional $4,000 under 53G for the retention of a consultant to make a written transcript of the proceedings. So with that, a vote of the board, Mr. Dupont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Riccadelli. Aye. Ms. Hoffman. Aye. Mr. Holley. Aye. And the chair votes aye. That is approved. And again, thank you to everyone. Yes, Mr. Majore. Just we'll get that check out right away. Just would ask that in the spirit of time, if they could begin the process now so that they could catch up to where we are, so that if we need these transcripts to write the decision that we're not waiting weeks after our decision has been rendered to be able to get the transcripts, that would be absolutely. So then the proposed next meeting of the board would be two weeks from tonight, which is Thursday, February 23rd at 7.30. Just to make sure that that's still amenable for the applicant. Yes. Perfect. It is. Mr. Chair, can I just ask one clarifying question? Yes, Mr. Bellman. Because I think Mr. Havardy may, I'd be interested in his view. It's been my experience that there are many times when a draft decision is prepared, it's the applicant has a chance to review it to see if we have any suggested language changes that we would ask the board to consider. Is that the process that you guys do? Do you object to giving us a draft decision so that if there is some cleanup to language that we're suggesting that the board agrees with, we can accomplish that before the decision is rendered? Speaking on behalf of the board, I would say the board is, I don't think we have an objection to preparing a draft for review. My understanding is that if we were to do that, it would have to be done before the hearing closes. And as such, it's a time constraint for us to have to make sure that if that's the case, if the board needs additional, if there's additional time required to make that review and to make sure that everyone gets a chance to do it, that we're not, that if additional time is requested to hold the hearing open long enough to do that review, that that's not an issue for the applicant. Fair enough. I think we have six months. I don't remember where we are in the six month. Right at the moment. But I do get the sense where we're probably, maybe three and a half months into it or something like that. I don't know if Mr. Havardy has a recollection, but I think it was... I don't, but I think we should look into that because I think we're probably closer than we realize. We are. I know it's the dates in April. I'm pretty confident that Steve, the closing date, I'm just... Yeah, I think it was October 19th. Was it that the public hearing was opened or something like that? So November, December, January, February, March, April. Yeah, I think it's sometime in the third week of April. That sounds about right. So we still got, I mean, we could confirm it for sure. We still have a couple of months. If we're, hopefully we're hearing it too away, to be able to sort of complete this stage of the public hearing process, and that would give us a month to get a decision done. And that's why Matt's comment about transcripts to the extent they're needed, we should get on them because I don't know if it takes a stenographer to, I mean, to, you know, the strive version to create this transcript. The date is April 16th. April 16th, I thought it was the 19th, close enough. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hanlon. Just wanted to point out that in the larger of the two cases that we had a year and a half ago, we did do a version of a draft of a decision. It wasn't the final draft by any means. We did a lot of work in the 40 days, but we did do something that both the applicant and the public got to see. And if you remember, we got a fair amount of comment. On that from, from everyone. So it was a pretty public process. And we had, there were lots of drafts that were going around and material from experts and so forth, right up until the time that the hearing closed. There wasn't the final draft though, we were still have lots of work to do. Okay. Well, maybe with that in mind, and I was having to you in the past has sort of provided us a basic outline to start from. So if that's something you could put together for us again, that would be great. Are there any further questions? If not, I move to continue the public hearing for the residences at Millbrook to Thursday, February 23rd, 2023 at 7.30 p.m. Second. Thank you, Mr. Hanlon. Are there any questions from the board as to what we're voting on? Voting to continued. This hearing to Thursday, February 23rd, 2023 at 7.30 p.m. Vote of the board, Mr. Dupont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Rickardelli. Aye. Ms. Hoffman. Aye. Mr. Holley. Aye. And the chair votes aye. So we are continued on residences at Millbrook until Thursday, February 23rd, 2023. Thank you all very much. I really appreciate everyone's... Likewise. Thank you so much. Good night, everybody. Good night. Thank you very much. Good night. Good night. Absolutely. So for the board itself, the next meeting of the board is Monday, February 13th at 4 p.m. This is our practice hybrid session. Pat and I had a little bit of a preview of that. We've already lost that. And so it looks like it'll work well. I just had a quick question as to who thinks they would want to be in person at Town Hall Annex for this and who would like to do it remotely? I know Pat Hanlon is going to do it remote. I will be in person. I will be remote. They will be remote. I'd prefer remote as well, Christian. Okay. I'm happy to go in person. That'd be great. And then get gone as well. Okay. All right, I will let Jim Fini know that. Excuse me. Make that work. And then we do not have a hearing on the 14th. There was a case that was actually scheduled for the 14th, but the application was vastly complete. So that's been rescheduled now to the 28th. So that will be the next one for that. But before the 28th, on Thursday, February 23rd as we just voted is the continuation of this hearing. So that will take place the 23rd to 730. So with all this, I would thank everyone for their participation in tonight's meeting of the Arlington Zoning Board of Appeals. They appreciate everyone's patience throughout the meeting and especially would like to thank Rick Valerelli, Vincent Lee, especially Colleen Ralston for joining us and welcome to the board again. We appreciate all their assistance in preparing for and hosting our online meeting tonight. Please note the purpose of the board's recording of the meeting is to ensure the creation of an accurate record of the proceedings. It is our understanding that the reporting made by ACMI will be available on demand at acmi.tv within the coming days. And if anyone has comments or recommendations, please send them via email to zbaatown.arlington.ma.us. That email address is also listed on the Zoning Board of Appeals website. So to conclude tonight's meeting, I would ask for a motion to adjourn. So moved. Thank you, Mr. Dupont. Second? Second. Thank you, Mr. Rickadelli. So vote of the board to adjourn, Mr. Dupont. Aye. Mr. Handlin, I will take it as an abstention. Ms. Hoffman? Aye. Mr. Holley, I'll take it as an abstention. Mr. Rickadelli? Aye. And the chair votes aye. The board is adjourned. Thank you also very, very much. Appreciate it once time and look forward to seeing folks on Monday. Good night, everyone. Good night.