 Alright, I'm going to call to order the Monday, October 7th meeting of the Arlington Redevelopment Board being covered by ACMI. Probably have a full house tonight, so find seats where you can. First up before item number one is we have a couple of administrative changes to handle. There were two public hearings initially on the docket for this evening. We had 833 Mass Ave continue to November 4th. We're going to hear that. And then 93 Broadway was withdrawn without prejudice. And the hotel project at 12-7-12-11 Mass Ave let us know that they would not be back until sometime in December, December 16th. So we need to continue each of those. We need to continue the originally 833 Mass Ave special permit discussion, even though we have a meeting with the owner. So I'll move to do that. So motion. Second. All in favor. Aye. And we will move 12-7-12-11 Mass Ave to December 16th at 7.30. I'll make that motion. So moved. Second. All in favor. Aye. Great. All right, so we'll begin with item number one, which is a discussion with the property owner at 833 Mass Ave. And so Mr. Nessie, please introduce yourself and your clients. Mr. Nessie for Mr. Noyes, who is here. He flew in from Kansas City, arrived at the airport at 5.30. Got a rental car and got over here as quickly as he could. We know that this property has been in a tough condition for an extended period of time. I have been retained by Mr. Noyes to go ahead with some development ideas as far as the property is concerned. We basically have talked to the building inspector. I've gotten some history from the building inspector. And by the way, I have a personal history because I went to high school in the 1950s in this town. And Noyes Buick was an active operation at that point. And the Atwood House existed at that point. There's no question about that. What we would like to do, and I know that there have been complaints that have been filed with the police department because of youngsters getting into the building, because the building has been abandoned. Part of the problem has been that Mr. Noyes has not been in a position to do anything until he wrapped up his father's estate, which got wrapped up one month ago. So economically, he's now in a position to move along. I have retained, and I'm going to retain the services of an architect. I'm going to see me on Thursday with my client, Mr. Noyes. That architect is Montefrench. Montefrench, you may recall, is the architect who did Allington Animal Clinic. I wanted to get an architect who is familiar with the procedure in town so he can thoroughly investigate the possibilities as far as the property is concerned. I visited the property with you, Ken, some months ago as a matter of fact. We were all concerned about falling through the floor and other issues with respect to the condition of the building. There is a report which I've given to Jenny Rae from an architect that the building department got about a year ago from a structural engineer who went into the building, looked at the building, and basically said that it's in a very tough shape. He basically said, I can't open up the walls. I can't take down the ceilings, so I can't really get into that part of it. But he does opine that in his opinion, not having done that, by the way, not having taken out the walls, not having taken down the ceiling, he does opine that the structural aspects of the building would appear to be okay. Well, we're not going to accept that, okay? What we're going to do in conjunction with the architect, we're going to have our own structural inspector go in, and we're going to have him take a look at the structure to see whether, in fact, the structure is okay for basically rehabbing the building. Now, that said in the context of the ARB decision that talked about the building, the Atwood building, being rehab, rather than being demolished. There was one comment in the ARB decision toward the end that talked about the fact that if the client wanted to come back before the ARB to take down the building, he could not do so within 24 months of the time that the ARB decision was rendered, which was 2009. So now at a point where we're prepared to go, we're prepared to do whatever we have to. If we need to rehab the building for the purpose of going multi-use with the building, we're prepared to do that. That would contemplate some sort of office use on the first level, strike that retail use on the first level, and residential perhaps above for a couple of levels. We're prepared to do that. But before we do that, as I say, and I've talked to my client about this, he does want to have an additional structural inspection done. I think that's fair, okay? I think the architect is going to insist on that. You folks are probably going to look at the ARB decision that was rendered in 2009, where it seems to indicate that they would like to see the Atwood building remain intact and be rehabbed. But again, we're open to any ideas that may develop here in terms of what we can do. So Jeff is here. I know that you've been trying to have Jeff come in for some time, and I do know that I said to Jeff, you're going to hear some comments about the fact that the building has been abandoned, okay, and that no action has been taken with respect to taking steps to rehab or whatever. So he's prepared for that, okay? And we're open to a discussion at this point. We're open to suggestions if you have them, okay, in terms of what can be done as far as the site is concerned. You may recall that the ARB decision in contemplation of the Atwood house remaining up basically provided for 10 parking spaces. It also provided for the area behind the Atwood building so that an addition could be added to the building behind the Atwood building if it stayed up. So again, I'm not here to say to you that we want to take the building down. What I'm here to say to you is we need to have a structural inspection done before we know what we can or cannot done. I know there's been one by inspectional, but I was in there myself, and I must tell you that the building is in tough shape. So Jeff, do you want to add anything to what I've said? That was very well said. Please. We're open to suggestions. We're not interested in having this thing fester at this point. I've been retained. He's paying me money. He's going to be paying the architect money. This thing is not going to fester. We're here to move it along. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Noyes, for coming this evening. I know Ken had some questions. So I'll begin with him. Thank you for coming in and addressing this issue with us. It's been 10 years since we approved the project, the CVS project. And you are totally correct. There was a two-year moratorium at the decision to maintain the house as is. I'm not here to say you cannot do anything. We're here to encourage you to do something with it. It's rather massive. It's next to the high school. It's a downtown center area. It's been a nuisance. It's been attracting the wrong elements next to the school. I started this process, and then unfortunately lost my dad. I'm sorry to hear about that. I got sidetracked for a year, but now we're back. I just want to say to us as the board, at least personally, we're encouraging you to help you move this along. We want to do that. We're not here to hinder you from moving along. We're glad to hear that you want to do something with it. I'm just saying that there's many opportunities. I saw one that's right in Cambridge, right on MSF, next to the school where they kept the front of the building, more or less where it was, and built a whole building behind it. They lifted it up. I'm not saying that's what you have to do, but I'm saying that was quite amazing. I'm not sure there's the room and size and what you want to do, but I'm just saying there's many opportunities. We're willing to work with you in a way to keep the character of the house, if so. I'm not in the same position as you are. I've worked with Mike Burns, the building commissioner, and the skin of the building is in tough shape, but the structure of the bones in the building, in my opinion, was in pretty good shape. The foundation was solid, nothing was crumbling, there was no water in the basement. The walls weren't open, but they seemed pretty solid. I'm not going to argue the edges of what it is. I respect your coming of an architect that's going to say it is what it is, and we can go for over there. Town officials are going to tell us whether we're right or wrong on that. The fact that we come up with something that says the structure is not good, that doesn't mean that we're going to prevail. We know that. I'm just saying thank you for coming in, and we're willing to work with you and encourage you to move that along and we intend to do that. Much appreciated. I'm glad to hear that. If you can, in the meantime, there's still some windows and things that can do re-boarding. If you can do that, it'll be nice. It's getting cold, and it's sheltered space, and I know there's a lot of old mattresses, and you've been in there so you know what I'm talking about. I'm not going to go over that stuff that we found inside there, but if you should re-board it back up again, I'd appreciate it. Okay. Okay. All right. Any other comments? David. Rachel. Not for me. No, we do appreciate you coming in. Hopefully it doesn't take 10 years to see you again. You'll be here working with us many times, I'm sure, on this one. All right. Mr. Chairman, is this good? Yes, we're still ready. Is this a public hearing? It is not, no. I'm confused because your agenda says it's a public hearing, but it also says it's moved to November 4th. The public hearing request is for the CVS project. This was a separate agenda item related to the same address. This is not a public hearing. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, I would say, I hope you have the special permit because I think what Mr. Nessie represented wasn't quite correct. I was on the redevelopment board at the time, and there was a clear intent to maintain that house, and what the decision says is the ARB wouldn't even consider a request to tear it down. Within the two years of the date that decision was made. And furthermore, should you go in that direction, you must reopen the special permit. You must advertise it and allow public comment. I'm sure we'll do that in the time conference. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. So our next agenda item is the housing meeting, and I'm told that the town manager will be here precisely at eight. So I think what I'll do is move things around a little bit to see if we can't fill the next 15 minutes while we wait for the town manager. So first I'll move the meeting minutes up from September 9th. I realize that won't take too, too much time, but if there are any questions or comments on that, you can take a look at those now. See whether there are any amendments to be made. Rachel, I'll start with you. I did not have any. Anyone else? I had one comment. Oh, it just popped up. In the paragraph of my comments at the bottom of page one, there was a grammatical issue in the third sentence. Mr. Watson said the board may consider requiring the applicant to install by parking. I think that should be as a condition of the special permit is what we're talking about. I have no issues. I have nothing to approve those. Motion to approve meeting minutes for September 9th. Second. All in favor? Aye. Good. I don't think, I don't, the heights one, we told those individuals to be here at nine. Okay. So I don't know if there's anything you could do about that. So we may need to break before we can. All right. So we'll take a recess for about 10 minutes. And then start. And then we adjourn just before eight o'clock when the town manager arrives. I think that's the best. Okay. We might actually have both of the folks here. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that. Do we have Jason? No. No. Okay. Just around. Just around. Okay. Until then. Thank you. Walter. All right. So we're back on now. I want to thank the town manager for coming to join us this evening. I know his time is limited. So I'm going to hand it over to him in January to give us their presentation. And we'll go into, we have some speakers that have requested time and then I'll allow for brief comments, but understanding that the town manager's time is limited. And we're going to keep it to a pretty short timing leash tonight of three minutes per speaker after the first two that sent us materials at a time. So, yeah, please proceed. No, just to say, first of all, thank you. I know that it's been quite a process to get us to be able to have this presentation. I'm sorry that Gene Benson couldn't be here tonight to be with us and to hear this. And also the conversation that will follow, but I very much appreciate the board continuing to have the conversation and for all of the people in the room who also want to continue the conversation for different reasons. I'm very much looking forward to that. And I think we are not exactly picking up where we left off in the spring. We are looking for to inform this entire discussion and to also continue that dialogue throughout the community and other conversations, which we'll talk about eventually about the engagement process. So I just want to say I appreciate it. I appreciate Adam's time and attention to this issue and look forward to the dialogue. Great. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Can everybody hear me? Okay. I guess I'll talk in this direction. Thank you for asking. Do my best. So like Jenny said, obviously this board, Jenny and her team did a lot of work last year on issues of housing. There were proposals brought before town meeting aimed at housing production that didn't go very far, just being blunt. And as we took a look at the issues, we thought it would be good to start talking about why. Why are we talking about these issues? Why is it important for Arlington? And why should we be thinking about it? So like Jenny mentioned, we gave a very similar, if not the exact same presentation to the select board back over the summer. We now want to talk about this issue here tonight. And we really want this to be the launching pad for a broader community discussion about why issues of housing are important in Arlington and what potential solutions might be for the stresses or the housing stresses that people are feeling, either living in Arlington or desiring to live in Arlington. So to start, am I doing this? I can also do it if you want me to. So we're going to talk about some regional issues and projections. Arlington is obviously five and a half square miles. We're surrounded by our borders. Arlington community is very much a very identifiable, recognizable community, but we're part of a region. We're part of a regional economy, part of a regional housing market that impacts Arlington. So we need to think about ourselves and what's right for us, but we also need to understand that we're operating as part of a larger ecosystem. So we want to look at some of those projections, see what's happening in the region. Then we want to dial it in and look at what are some of the impacts on Arlington, what's actually happening from a statistical point of view on the ground in Arlington. We then want to look at what some potential solutions might be. We want to talk about current efforts or past and current efforts the town has undertaken. We want to talk about the work that the Metro Mayors Coalition has done. And we want to talk about some potential tools from a broad based point of view that we can use to start addressing these housing crunches, this housing crisis in Arlington. And then talk about next steps. So this first slide looks historically at growth in the Metro Mayors Coalition region. So that's 15 communities in the greater Boston area. I won't list them off, but Metro Mayors Coalition, 15 communities in the greater Boston area, what have we seen over the past, you know, better part of the past decade? We've seen tremendous job growth. We've seen corresponding population growth. But frankly, we've seen a limited number of housing units permitted during that time period. So the obvious impact of that is that home prices in Massachusetts are surging. We've probably all felt it or our families have felt it. Housing is becoming more and more expensive. And that's because demand is far outpacing supply in terms of availability of housing, especially in the greater Boston region. What does that mean from a more granular point of view? It means that a lot of households, especially households that are on the lower and the income bracket are cost burdened. So you can see to the left you see households by ownership who are experiencing cost burden and household unto the right, households that are experiencing burden who are renters. So you can see people that are closer to the top of the income brackets aren't necessarily feeling a higher degree of cost burden. But as you start to go down the levels of income and you see the yellows in the green, you start to see that there's large portions of the population that are experiencing cost burden. What cost burden means is in the yellow, just being burdened means you're spending more than 30% of your income on housing. If you're severely burdened, you're spending more than 50% of your income on housing. Again, on the renter column, you can see there's a lot of people, there's a significant amount of people in those lower income brackets that are severely cost burdened living in this region. So what do we see going forward? We see the growth in the economy continuing, meaning there's more jobs coming in, meaning more people will be moving in. We see seniors and non-working households staying in the region and not moving away sort of one-for-one with people moving into the region wanting to work. And we also look at what economists say is a healthy vacancy rate that can keep a healthy, affordable market. So you look at this, we're predicting, or the work of the Metro Mayors Coalition and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council is predicting that between 2015, some of this has already happened, and 2030, we have a significant number of new housing units needed to meet this demand, 185,000 units. So what about Arlington? What are we seeing in Arlington? So we're seeing that Arlington has a significant number of its households, our people with low incomes. 2,100 households, 11% of all households have extremely low incomes in Arlington. So Arlington's often talked about how much it's gentrifying, and it certainly is and how it's becoming a more affluent community, and it certainly is becoming a more affluent community. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people in Arlington that are still financially struggling. We also hear a lot of talk from all people about how we want to maintain Arlington's economic diversity. I myself feel like one of the best things about Arlington is its economic diversity. The people that you live in your neighborhood, the families that you meet with your children attending school, it's great that we have economic diversity. Maintaining economic diversity means maintaining affordability in housing, and that's I think an important thing for us to think about throughout this discussion. So what else are we seeing in Arlington? We're seeing 30% of households are cost burdened, so one in three spend more than 30% of their income on housing in Arlington. So the region is seeing struggles, we're seeing struggles here in Arlington in terms of how many people are cost burdened. Even more so, we're seeing low income seniors spend even a higher proportion of their income on housing. So we're seeing seniors, 172 low income senior households are spending more than 50% of their income on housing costs. So those are Arlington residents really struggling to make ends meet, primarily driven by higher and higher housing costs in Arlington. Again, over to the right you can see another depiction of some of the more broad charts we looked at before. Housing prices are rising faster than income. So none of this should be a surprise that we're facing these challenges. If prices are going up faster the people's incomes are rising pressure mounts and we have an affordability challenge. Down below, I kept going back and forth both before the select board as well as coming here tonight of what exactly point we're trying to make with talking about how many rental units were converted to condos. And ultimately the point is these are mostly apartments in two families that are being converted to condos. And from a tax base point of view that's good. The town likes that. When a two family turns into condos that is new growth to our tax base. The problem is it's likely that those apartments are going from what are somewhat affordable, maybe what we call naturally occurring affordable housing in the community to becoming luxury condos. So we see that's happening at a very fast rate between 2000 and 2014. Jenny, I don't know if you recall the number between 2014. So we see that happening pretty rapidly in Arlington tonight through 2017. I don't have a solution to that tonight but I think it's an important thing for us to remember in terms of what we're losing from affordability in the current housing stock. Before I get to this slide we lost the slide. I do want to highlight as we move into the solutions, what can we do? I think it's important to talk about all the things the town has done. The select board and the permit issuance the ARB has supported the housing corporations efforts at Downing Square and Broadway. So there's 57 units of a completely affordable housing in the development pipeline. I think it's important to recognize those efforts. The select board continues to support the allegation of CDBG and CPA and home funding for affordable unit production and preservation and that's really spurred forward by the efforts of Jenny and her team. The town continues to support the preservation program that allows people to try to tighten up their homes and become more energy efficient so that they can stay in their homes have their utilities be more affordable. We have ongoing preservation efforts with the housing corporation and the Erelington Housing Authority trying to maintain affordable housing in the community. We are constantly monitoring the existing subsidized housing inventory to make sure that anything that's on there can stay on there if there's things that are at risk of slipping off the subsidized housing inventory that we try to put ourselves in a position to do it. And finally, this board other boards have been continually working on the implementation of the master plan and the housing production plan. So there's been a lot of good efforts to date already and I think it's important to acknowledge that. Shifting a little bit and talking about solutions talked about the Metro Mayors Coalition at the start. So again, here's the actual listing of the communities that are members that represent 1.4 million residents in the region. And they've really, this group has worked on a number of things. It's worked on climate preparedness it's still working on that it's worked on the opioid epidemic and now it's also working on this regional housing partnership. So as I mentioned earlier they've set a goal of producing 185,000 units in the region by 2030. Boston has set a goal of being able to 69,000 69,000 units by 2030 and there's actually a piece I think in the Commonwealth magazine talking about Boston being well on track to meet that goal by 2030 and I think it's important to mention I know I've heard some concern in the community that if you just proportionately look at each community that meeting that 185,000 unit goal would mean Arlington would need to develop nearly 7,000 new units by 2030. I can tell you with absolutely no hesitation that is not at all how this regional housing partnership is working. Boston is the only one that I believe has set a clear goal. Cambridge hasn't set a goal yet. Somerville has set a goal. Every other community has been asked to have dialogues like we're having to talk about whether or not A, we want to set a numbers goal and if we do what that number is there's no mandate there's no prescription there's no one yelling at Arlington to build 7,000 households that is not at all how this is working. It's a collaborative effort acknowledging an issue in the region in every community trying to do each share, in defining its share to try to address that concern. So what are some of the things we can look at? Some of these are obviously very familiar to you. We can look at amendments to the inclusionary zoning by-law as was discussed at town meeting last year. We can continue to look at whether or not creating housing along the commercial corridors in the mixed use zones is appropriate. We can look at whether or not there is a different look at the accessory dwelling units as opposed to last year that could be more attractive to town meeting looking at whether or not we want to consider potential age and family restrictions. I think over archingly we heard loud and clear last year and I think this is important to me and the town as a whole with our net zero planning efforts and our vulnerability preparedness efforts we want to make sure that anything we talk about in terms of housing production that looks at climate resiliency so that we're looking at this very holistically with any of this work that we're trying to do. This was the other one that got left off. It's on the select board's presentation. There are other tools that we can start to look at that are outside of zoning. The zoning is obviously part of it but it's not all about zoning. There's displacement protection issues we can look at I don't know that we want to have a written control discussion but I know a lot of other communities in the region are starting to wonder whether or not that's something to talk about so there are other tools we can start to think about as a town as this dialogue moves forward. So what are the next steps? We spoke to the select board in the summer we're here tonight we're trying to set a date either later this month or sometime this fall for the select board in the ARV to hold a joint meeting to talk about these issues together we want to have public engagement starting really now and throughout this process and we're hoping that we can through this public engagement, through conversations with the ARV and the select board we can start to put together strategies that a larger amount of people want to pursue probably we said late fall or early winter when we sat with the select board I think we're thinking more of this conversation taking place over the winter through the spring and if there were recommendations we wanted to bring forward not thinking about bringing them forward until next fall because clearly this has to be a broad community dialogue get people on board with the need understanding the need and figuring out what the right solution is for our elected that people can coalesce around so those are my that's my presentation tonight happy to answer any questions the board might have thanks thank you no David okay I had promised a couple of people well Adam is still here so first I'm going to have Don Seltzer come up he has a presentation to make after him we'll do Steve Revillac who's also provided materials and then after that we'll do it by a short hand yeah I joined sorry I was pulling right at me too didn't say that okay also speaking about housing in Arlington from a slightly different perspective I'm going to try to focus on what this distinction between Arlington's needs where's Don Seltzer just before you start Don Don's presentation is available at the ERV's webpage with the materials from our last meeting so if you'd like to download those for yourself that's where they are available so I'm focusing on the distinction between Arlington's needs versus what state agencies are asking of us I'll start with the number that our town manager just gave us the 185,000 housing units and it's this week is actually the one year anniversary Metro Mayor's Coalition announced this number that same week Mayor Walsh announced that Boston's share will be 69,000 units and as Adam mentioned the other communities have been kind of slow to indicate what their share of this would be and it's not really difficult to figure out why they've been reluctant if you do the math take away Boston's share and you have 116,000 units left for the other 14 communities on a base of 338,000 housing units this is a 34% increase in the housing for all these 14 communities for Arlington a 34% increase in housing is just a mind boggling number it would mean increasing our housing stock by approximately 6,800 units and the first question that comes up where would we put them the obvious thing would be to put them in our high density residential areas the R4 through R8 districts right now we have 5,000 housing units in those districts and this is 25% of Arlington's housing stock and it's in just 5% of its land area we could also consider using our business districts converting them over to housing that's a bad idea for a number of reasons I'll touch on that a little later we can think out of the box for other solutions we could fill in spy pond and put apartment buildings there actually that's not so much of a stretch from what's proposed for the wetlands flood zone the MUGAR property another thing is Winchester Country Club we've got 45 acres there beautiful countryside overlooking Mr. Pike take that over but even if we figure out where we're going to put this housing the question from day one in these discussions should be what is going to be the impact of such a population increase in our town's infrastructure and particularly the transportation services for that right now but this should be part of our discussion all along before we simply say we're going to have all this housing we have to be fighting for what is the impact of that housing however much it tends to be I'm going to give you a different perspective here is the Metro Layers Coalition 13 cities and 2 towns and I've ranked them by their housing density and if you look here that Arlington falls into sort of the middle third here of density but we also have 5 cities which lie behind us and posing a question here what if we asked these 5 cities to simply build out to Arlington's present density what would that gain us and the answer is about 111,000 more housing units in the region a major dent into our proposed goal for the region I'm going to carry it a little further Arlington is also lumped into what's called the inter-core communities by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and there are 20 other communities there besides Arlington and we happen to fall exactly in the middle as far as density what if we asked half of the inter-core cities and towns to match our density we would end up with 218,000 more housing units far more than enough to satisfy Mayor Walsh and his goals so I'm going to stop for a moment and just throw out some editorial comments Arlington doesn't have to be ashamed about anything when it comes to housing we have been doing our share for a long time what I propose that we focus more on what Arlington's real needs rather than what Mayor Walsh or Governor Baker thinks we should provide I don't think there's anybody in this room that would argue with that what we need is more affordable housing that's what we're lacking and I'll just briefly mention that coming up and the other thing that I don't think has received very much attention is that we have to do something about our shrink and commercial ways it's really in a drastic state right now just a quick comment on affordable housing I've taken the 1100 units that are on the state subsidized housing inventory list and I've broken them down according to who actually created them and if you go through the numbers you find out that 5 out of 6 affordable units have been produced either by the town itself or the housing authority by non-profits and only about 1 out of 6 has come from private developers over the years and of that 1 out of 6 the lion's share of them have come from a single development unit that's Millbrook Square 146 units and this was developed 30 years ago we've done a very little since in the last 15 years we've added 53 units under the 15% inclusionary bylaw those are mostly Sims and Brigham Square the board is of course familiar with all 4 of these properties the 2 on the left here Broadway and Downing Square the final stages of reviewing them and they were produced by the non-profit housing corporation of Arlington and we've got 48 apartments and every one of them is affordable in contrast looking at recent private development here are the first 2 instances of our mixed use bylaw where we've ended up with 13 apartments and only a single affordable one in among them now just going to shift over to Arlington's commercial base these are all the communities in Massachusetts that have property tax revenue greater than 100 million dollars and I've ranked them according to how much of this property tax levy is from non-residential in other words commercial business and we have a number of fortunate communities in the state where they have 50 even 60% of the property tax revenues come from their commercial base I know you can't read the legend on the bottom but where do you think Arlington ranks in all of these communities any guesses? about the middle of the door right there at the end we are dead last and it isn't even close if we look just among the Metro Mayors 15 collectively the Metro Mayors 15 has nearly half of their property taxes coming from commercial and this average is actually being dragged down by Arlington because our commercial base is only 5.6% what this says is that we're not like the other communities of the Metro Mayors 15 we have a significantly different financial situation because of the lack of our commercial base and that's why I'm just throwing out this warning that we've got to be careful about converting any more of this commercial tax base to residential it's going to affect our long-term fiscal liability let's do a quick case study Brigham Square many of you in this room remember when this whole section along Mill Street 7.5 acres was zoned industrial back 25 years ago half of it was re-zoned to B2 and then they came up with a new B2A district two years later and for years the town tried to attract commercial activity to the site there was talk of a star market I believe for a while and for whatever reason the town failed and what we end up with instead was the Brigham Square housing development that gave us 116 units 17 of which are affordable and it also gave us 40 students in Arlington's public schools so what's the balance sheet of that the cost to educate those 40 students is $580,000 we only collect $470,000 in property taxes from this property so we're ready to deficit without even counting the other types of town services that they get we can't follow this path in the future it's disastrous so I'm going to echo the town manager's points about how we might address the issue in Arlington he brought up amendments to inclusionary zoning bylaw I suggest that the first step should be to eliminate the loopholes that are in the current law and consider ways to increase the percentage of affordable units this is something we took a try out try out last spring and didn't work out but there were some ideas there and I think we could let me visit that and figure out how to increase the percentage as far as housing creation along the commercial corridor number one we have to protect our existing residents who live there and also the businesses that are there from displacement due to redevelopment and we also have to look at redevelopment that isn't going to sacrifice our existing commercial base accessory dwelling that's going to come up again in the future and I ask you bring back the residential study group to look at last spring you asked them to study it as sort of a last minute thing you know that's their purview they were given one hour to discuss it they stirred up a lot of the problems with enforcement unintended consequences let them go at it again for extended time so they can come up with real recommendations of how we implement this if we do and I'm glad that storm water and climate resiliency was on the town managers list you're going to get a lot of resistance from residents if you start attacking landscape open space the value of from a climate point of view we value our tree canopy we value why we can't do redevelopment and still preserve some of our trees and here's the last point here this is one I'm bringing up that I've noticed by seeing some problems with storm water management in town and that is right now our policy for redevelopment is just don't do any worse than you were before if you buy a property that's a lot line to lot line is completely impervious you're allowed to go ahead and redevelop the same way there's no minimum standard that's a thing we should change and that's all I have to say today thank you thank you can I answer any questions on this can you go back to the density when you raided all the cities and everything else this one this is the metro mayor's covish the density for them okay so this is based off of square mileage of land right that's how the density is land area it subtracts out water area this is directly from the US Census Bureau data but it doesn't subtract out parks and all the other accoutrements that go with that so if you look at just thinking of Quincy for example yeah there's the fells there's a whole bunch of land there there are ways to calculate I just went for the most direct I didn't calculate these numbers I took them directly from the US Census Bureau how they calculate density and certainly we can go into more I think if you if you take just that out it would skew this by quite a bit it might for some communities certainly I know in the case of Quincy 40% of it is actually water area which is taken out in doing these calculations the water yes but not the parks and that's a big deal and I think if we want to present this as true density we should look at that in that way there if we want to do a lot more legwork in figuring out these things certainly we could do that one thing I want to point out while I'm here if we take Arlington's density and increase it by 34% we'd be awfully close to what Boston's density is today yeah but you're okay I'm not going to argue you're assuming that we're taking the taking whatever is left over and dividing it up amongst the communities I don't think we have decided that yet and the reason why it's been so difficult for communities is that they look at these numbers and they say there's no way we can do 34% increase and if everyone says we can't do anywhere near 34% we're not going to get anywhere near the 185,000 unit goal and another thing about that is what the Metro Mayors Coalition said is that 185,000 units isn't going to bring down housing prices it's that's the minimum they think will be required to stabilize the situation the sobering numbers yes he's going to look at in a more inclusive way of not just saying this is purely that Arlington certainly cannot do that 34% increase there's no way we can do it and no one's talking about that I think we I don't want to lose track of that because then everybody gets all we can't do this they throw the chalet with the bath water I think there is a responsibility of doing some of it we don't know what yet and how yet but we're going to talk about it that's all I wanted to say sorry I didn't mean to lose this very nice Don thank you other questions Don I'll let you go I'll have Steve Revlak come up if anybody has questions for Don you can ask them when it's your turn to speak keep things moving here could you provide that entire slideshow to the board? certainly Aaron has it as a PDF I didn't know what you provided to us so if you could do that we'll add it to I did a lot over the weekend because I was expecting to go before Adam and so I needed to provide some of the contacts once I got started I just kept going and there were some good points there I was also responding to some feedback I got from the board members who sort of hinted that maybe these 10 spreadsheets that I'd started with are not the way to present it so I took them all out Thank you Steve Hello Steve Revlak, 111 Sunnyside Avenue I'm here to talk about Town Day a group of us had approached in Vision Arlington about collaborating on a Town Day activity a housing survey our idea was to have a public engagement kind of activity that got people thinking about housing and also gave us the opportunity to gather some input from the community so I volunteered at InVision's Town Day booth and I'm presenting these results as a volunteer who worked in the booth so this is as an individual rather than on behalf of any organization or whatever so the survey consisted of six poster boards each containing a housing related issue so the people who participated were given three little adhesive dots and we asked them to put them on the board that corresponded to the issue that was most important to them we also had a supply of pens and post-it notes so the people had the opportunity to write comments and put them on the board as well so roughly 339 people participated and what you're seeing there is a total of about 1117 dots on different boards and stickies so my written report goes through these in order they kind of just as they appear I'm going to jump around a little bit so based on based on the dots housing affordability came out as a prevailing issue with 308 now having read the written comments I get the sense that affordability means very different things to different people and there are very different ideas about how to address this so for example one of the comments was we don't need more housing we just need to make what we have less affordable or make it affordable less expensive on the other end of the spectrum was a request for more multi-family housing transit oriented development and a red line extension so there's a lot of ground between those two views although they're both trying to get to the same place social justice came out in the second at second with 197 so that's our top tier affordability and social justice the middle tier consisted of lifestyle options which was 149 and doing more with existing resources which was 143 to fill out the bottom we're setting a 10 year goal for housing production that got 119 and maximizing flexibility of home space with 81 alright some observations based on compiling this and again these are coming for me as an individual people see most concerned about affordability which is to say the cost of housing housing costs in Arlington have and in the Metro Boston area have kind of been going up on an unescalated ride for close to 20 years so seeing this concerned I think is understandable there was some appetite for bringing back rent control now state law doesn't allow us to do much in this area unless we wanted to look at a voluntary program or at least that's my plain language reading of the Massachusetts rent control prohibition act so there's some recognition of the importance of older naturally affordable apartment buildings now Arlington you know back in the 50s and 60s was a pretty pro growth place we built tons of apartments and that's fortunate because it allowed those buildings to be built in the first place the downside is we have not kept putting more of them into the pipeline so as the you know our stock gets older at some point it's going to have to be refurbished renovated upgraded and that may lead it to be more expensive so could you go skip forward to a couple of slides number one with a pie chart like the next to last page yep that's it so I also did try to do a little bit of devil's advocate reasoning about affordability and part of it was this question which comes from envision Arlington's last survey and the question asks you know what was your household income in 2018 so the largest group of responses was more than $100,000 per household and 71 of the respondents indicated having a household of $100,000 or more per year so I knew we were in a flowing community I didn't quite realize that we were that affluent but you know this goes back to the escalator we've had steadily increasing home prices year after year so new residents who come to town have to make a little more than a new resident who came to town last year combine that with the residential turnover with the last 15 to 20 years and I think it is fair to say that we've done a lot of we've gentrified quite a bit you know it's been you know there's been no fanfare it's just the people who move in or the people who can afford to move in I mean this hasn't been completely bad because in a sense we're able to do things like rebuild schools build town buildings improve staffing etc etc we have I think solid financial management on the town side and that helps but you know you need capital to do that sort of thing so I mean despite the housing costs there's part of our status kind of works at least for part of the population that's a pro side to it the con side is that there is the issue of pricing people out I think there's been some I'd be completely surprised if there hasn't been some sort of level of displacement you know and just you know our kind of our metro growth patterns we're also running into traffic congestion and of course we have the regional housing demands so in summary I thought this was a nice activity a good opportunity to talk to people and I see this is a beginning of what's like probably going to be a very long conversation but I'm glad to see us getting that conversation started and I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak they don't have questions for Steve go ahead well I just want to didn't have a question for you specifically Steve just wanted to say to Adam and Don and Steve thank you very much for coming and presenting all this valuable information Adam especially I'm reassured to hear what you had to say tonight and feel like the town's taking a measured approach to this and recognizing that we need solutions that work for Arlington regardless of what the Metro Mayor's Coalition may be thinking and you know as Don pointed out Arlington and the other communities that he talked about are each unique and we need to find solutions that work well for Arlington optimize the space and the opportunities that we have and are supported by the citizens of the town and I'm glad that we're starting a process that's going to generate ideas largely from the citizens to figure out exactly what those issues are what problems are we actually trying to solve and what are the options on the table to address those problems and then which ones are we going to be able to move forward with that people are going to be on board with and that will actually work in Arlington and if we you know if we disappoint the Metro Mayor's Coalition that's okay as long as we do what's right for Arlington. Thank you David Barbara I submitted a written report to you on October 1st and I'm not going to read it but I'm just going to give you a brief summary. Could you I know who you are but could you state your name and address for the record please? My name is Barbara Thornton and my address is 223 Park Ave in Arlington and I'm a precinct 16 Shelma President First Don Nice job. That was a great presentation Do you want me to leave this with you or do you have Jenny has it already I'm going to revise it with some more information Basically I'm here to say I hope you will be bold. I hope you will consider yourselves as part of a bigger region and look for beyond just Massachusetts examples of how we can solve as members of a region the problems that we have in front of us here in Arlington I the report that I just submitted to you has three examples pulled from a book written by David Rusk who writes about cities and suburbs and he is co-founder of the zoning an organization that looks at zoning nationally every ten years he gets the census data together he looks at hundreds of municipalities crunches the numbers and figures out what works What works is when a broader governance works together like the regional coalition that is what works for individual municipalities within a given region and I wanted to just jump ahead building on something that Don said about the importance of us not having a strong commercial tax base one of the things that one of the examples that you'll see in the report that I submitted from Mr Rusk is the example of Minnesota the fiscal the fiscal disparities plan in Minnesota where they actually take money from the richer commercial tax base municipalities and redistributed to those communities that don't have such a rich commercial tax base it is just random that Cambridge is a filthy rich but it is what it is I think our responsibility here in Arlington is just what is our part in the region what is our role, what is our responsibility are we doing our part and what does it mean to do our part as a part of the region and how can that benefit us I think the evidence shows that if we act as part of a region it does benefit Arlington more directly than if we try to do it alone Barbara that example where they were redistributing commercial tax revenue was that in the context of an area that had functioning counties that provided county services the county issue is a big issue this was actually it is easy to talk about in the county context you have to look at the number three of the example that I gave you and they probably have counties but I don't think as I read it and I actually talked to David Rusk about it and it doesn't have to be limited to counties it can be some kind of an amalgamation of municipalities that come together and even have a special purpose organization that focuses on land use and zoning issues for example or that for example we did 40B it's not a county issue but there are things that we can learn from that particular example and then bring back here so I'm curious Adam is that something that the metro mayors coalition has discussed in that kind of a concept to help the communities that don't have a commercial tax base so it's something that I brought up at metro mayors coalition meetings and PC meetings and MA Mass Municipal Association meetings the challenge we have I don't know the demographics of that area in Minnesota that Barbara mentioned the challenges you saw in Don's map I think Everett had the highest percentage of commercial there was Cambridge after that and I didn't pick up the rest of them because there was a lot of a lot of gateways cities in there and you break it down into an argument where you're saying city that has a significant proportion of low income children give money to all of them to in Melrose and it's a political loser so I think from an equity point of view I'm on board right because we we have wealth in this community that has Steve demonstrated the people who have been moving into town access to the overrides whereas communities like Cambridge Everett Brockton they have commercial tax bases but their population doesn't have the ability to pay and it's also you can't just look at what the commercial tax base as a whole is because industry in Everett is very different from industry in Cambridge I do think there could be should be some model I'm not sure if it's a direct community model or if it's a more overall progressive tax structure where the states collecting tax revenues in a different manner and distributing them differently than it does now but I do think the inequities of Brockton have in terms of communities with commercial bases and those that don't is something that in all of this has to be more seriously moving I was just going to say that I appreciate that you brought up the correlation to what Steve and John just presented as well in the opportunity that we have to perhaps extract some of that the wealth in the opportunity that we do have here within a growing commercial base which you suggested as well I think that there's just correlation that's right there in front of us that is important for us to really dive into Patricia Thank you Mr. Seltzer for your very careful presentation The only housing Arlington needs is affordable housing in addition to some elderly housing that is according to available information including Arlington's master plan Arlington affordable housing is increased best by leveraging funds that we can easily access to purchase existing the links and residences for renovation for affordable housing and such funds include CDA CDBG federal home funds and others that strategy will work even better if we establish an affordable housing trust fund increased linkage fees for developers and really state transfer fees the inclusionary zoning by law helps but we need to counteract developers gaming that system Arlington redevelopment board might be able hopefully to better protect houses like the Atwood House for use as affordable housing Arlington needs more commerce and business we should not change zoning to enable more market and luxury residential units costing more in services including schools than tax revenues that they bring in our residential real estate taxes are 94.4% of tax revenue that is by far the highest of all mental communities our non-residential share is only 5.6% whereas Boston area communities have non-residential tax share of 47% which is 9 times higher than ours we cannot afford to burden Arlington residential taxpayers further with confiscatory real estate taxes to provide housing for wealthier municipalities 100% of Arlington residents have renters let it spend more than 30% of income for rent even though Arlington rentals cost less than Summerville, Cambridge, Vermont Winchester and sometimes less than government subsidized rates for instance for a one bedroom unit in Arlington the rent is just about just above $1400 for a similar unit in Brookline the rent is over $1700 a new unit in either case is much more at between $2000 and $2500 if we permit massive new construction of mixed new buildings then many renters who cannot afford newly constructed units would be displaced or evicted in Boston evictions and as last year reached 43 evictions per day we could have a tsunami of cries for help which Arlington Arlington cannot deal with the resources of Arlington housing authority as nonprofits for example the housing corporation of Arlington would be overwhelmed with a tragic increase likely hundreds of displaced families threatened with homelessness thank you thank you Jennifer I have a few points I'm going to try to make them very quick so one point is about the school so I think just to be intellectually honest we talk about the cost for each additional student to a school we can't talk about the average cost for students we have to have the enrollment growth factor which is next year is going up to 50% so it's about 7000 so if you look at the cost to Arlington of adding an additional student it's about 7000 of course there's extra cost for healthcare and so forth but we also get chapter 70 money and that is potentially going up so probably about 7000 is probably a pretty accurate number in terms of the additional cost I actually am supporting additional housing not in spite of the effect on schools but because of the effects on schools what I'm worried about is current trance in Arlington I don't want Arlington to become a town which I think people say in Lexington is where people move in with toddlers and move out when their kids go to college and I think we're heading in that direction I'm concerned about the loss of housing diversity in town all those apartments that became condos means that younger people don't have kids in the school system can't afford to live in Arlington anymore 1990, 20% of Arlington's population is between the ages of 20 and 34 in Arlington we have older parents people generally don't have kids in the school system before 34 now it is 17% near 2010 70% it's probably even lower now during the same time period population number 65 1% to 60% so what I am concerned about is loss of housing diversity what I want is smaller units I want units where a senior can downsize and stay in Arlington one of the most prominent opponents of new housing in Arlington is actually looking to downsize an older person in the community but he hasn't found anything in Arlington he's trying to go into Cambridge I've encountered many people like that going to Cambridge, going to Burlington kind of has that they're looking for in Arlington similarly people who have younger kids may not need a bigger housing there's just very little available in Arlington so we know that to support the schools economically what we want are a bunch of people in town who don't have kids in the school system we don't want an ever increasing number of the town to be just people with kids in the school system at that moment we want them to stay in Arlington after the kids move on before their kids get in that's why I'm supporting housing the other point I just want to briefly make is that I'm passionate about that process and I've sent some messages to some of you I'm glad it feels like you're taking this process seriously it takes a year in Arlington to have an open, honest dialogue about things to make the community comfortable with things to get ideas from the community and I just urge you to trust that process you're going to get a lot of different voices and one of the things I think is really valuable about this open dialogue is that people who have a particular opinion realize when they're in the room with a bunch of different people that there's actually a wide variety of opinion in town you tend to live within your small groups, me included you don't realize how many ideas how many diversity opinions and being in a big open room and talking about these things over and over again you find out how much diversity opinion there's in Arlington and seriously I urge you to not go to the community first with a solution but to go with the issue and the problems and raise those questions so don't present a plan first that would lose you a lot of goodwill seems like you're not doing that at this time which is great and yeah, so I'm just excited about that thank you I actually printed out a draft order I'm going to say so there's plenty of comments and I've given an electronic version to Jenny so that you can all have it my name is Patrick Hanlon I'm a meeting member from Creece and 5 I live at 20 Park Street also I'm an associate member of the Board of Appeals excuse me, the Board of Appeals and a member of the residential study group I actually came expecting that this would be a more fiery meeting than it is and I think that's one terrific thing that has happened it was pretty fiery at times last spring but I thought that and do think that the conversation on all sides tonight has been open it has been thoughtful it certainly is this kind of conversation that you can carry on and that you can maybe get something there with and I think that is a tremendous step forward ultimately the objective here is to have a well conceived, well supported and well explained response to however we define the problem whether it's partly the regional housing crisis partly it's a question of affordable housing which isn't strictly a matter of the regional housing crisis and partly it's a matter of lack of diversity in housing space those of you who know me if they had seen me last year instead of standing up here and nervously walking around I would be nervously hopping around a serious problem with a hip which I have since discarded for a new one at that point I suddenly realized that living in a house with four different levels on it was not possibly going to take me into my 80s it did okay into the mid 70s but you know eventually it's going to catch up with me and eventually I'm going to be looking for some place that's a reasonable place on one floor and if you look around at the opportunities to do that in Arlington it's small so you're looking at basically thinking possibly of having to leave for the community so diversity not just for senior people but for other people matters a lot and that's not just an affordable issue that's a matter of just having a supply of a diversity of options at every price point which is language that's taken directly from the housing production plan and it's already our policy to try to achieve that I think that one of the things that's emerged from this discussion is an openness to not just start from where we left off or almost but to go back to the drawing board and think about what is that as our goal and what are the best ways of going about and getting that goal I started thinking it was really important to have an integrated view and a comprehensive view of various ways of addressing the housing issues that we have it's not all about housing production it certainly is not all about zoning what Mrs. Warden has come up with I think are all things that need to be considered the same thing is true of Don and that's one of the reasons why it's a great thing that Adam is going to marry you together with the select board to look at this in a comprehensive way and not treat this as a zoning issue primarily but as a housing issue which has a zoning component but it has other components as well and the community needs to look at that in general I think that that when we get into further into the discussion and as this discussion has indicated there are a number of questions which I think need to be addressed and addressed as clearly and as transparently as possible one is how would solution actually affect housing production what would get produced the zoning change applies to nonprofit developers as well as for-profit developers and if there are restrictions there that are not reasonable they affect everyone so what would we do about that what would we do do we imagine do we imagine inclusionary zoning can get for us what proportion of our effort should be in the area of expanding funding or facilitating in some way all affordable housing or mostly affordable housing and beneath all of that there's a question of what does it mean to be affordable housing there's the capital A affordable housing that enables something to go on to the SHI but there's also a more general concept of affordability as well we need to look at the financial implications on the town as everybody has already done what is the implication for schools what is the implication for tax based and so forth lots of discussion that's something that we're going to need to reason through to a sensible a sensible consensus or almost consensus to what extent do we imagine that if we have more affordable housing or more housing in general multi-family housing to what extent is that going to involve redevelopment of housing that already exists and that may be already affordable to at least small affordable to a lot of people if you redevelop that and you get inclusionary zoning ordinances what you may find is hollowing out the middle where you have housing that's available for more affluent people housing that is available for less affluent people and in the middle what you've lost is housing that is affordable to people in the middle and maybe those are also people that we want to have in our town or to preserve diversity and finally it's important to look at what is finally because there is no finally in this discussion but we ought to look at it broadly at environmental considerations part of what goes on when you have a reasonable housing shortage is people move far away and then they commute in how do they go in they go on in along route two which is on the border of Arlington they come in on 993 which is going down just barely when you look at the states look at the six most congested areas in Massachusetts most of them are really close to Arlington so we don't really benefit when they built a lot of new housing out further out even though it's denser if those people have to come through our community we certainly don't benefit when they spew carbon dioxide into the year and contribute to greenhouse gas problems so we need to look broadly at environmental and we also need to look very specifically we need to understand where are we not going to be willing to make those trade-offs in wetlands or in storm water where is it that we're not going to be making those trade-offs and even more important is where is it that with imaginative planning and imaginative engineering we can figure out solutions that enable the conflict or the potential conflict between environmental and housing objectives to be resolved and maybe even to have a solution that is better for everyone so there's lots of questions to be asked and they need to be asked in a way that doesn't presuppose we already know the answers because we don't know the answers but we do need to figure out just what it is that is reasonable for us to be contributing to our regional problem and then we have to find the will to do that and that's going to require good faith and it's going to require discussions and cooperation on all sides and this has been a pretty good meeting in persuading me at least that all of that is possible and I hope that it actually happens Thank you Mr. Loretta Thank you Mr. Chairman and Chris I was wondering if I could ask the town manager a couple of questions one on the Metro Mayors Coalition we have a town manager on my slide that showed how housing demand follows job growth and I'm wondering as the mayor's coalition looked into reducing job growth why don't we do job growth in the area and I think that's actually part of the problem is most of the mayors are elected politicians we're pointing them out there and we're basically at full employment right now within the commonwealth itself there are certainly other gateway cities that could benefit far more from both the job growth and the housing growth who have the capability to do it and to increase housing at a much lower cost the political consideration is that an elected politician will never say we don't need more jobs they really need to start thinking about that and distributing I think the mayor's coalition is too small and someone said we need to look at this regionally but we need to look at it a much more broader region but my other question though is locally and I thought I've heard a few people tonight talk about the increased tax revenue that new development brings someone told me and I don't want to mention his name but I think he's a good authority that one select one has created a spreadsheet that has shown that the town can build its way out of its spending problems and that is if we build enough new development we won't have to be doing our continued overrides every few years and I'm just wondering if you know anything about that and you can comment on that but I'm not the first in that spreadsheet we've modeled a lot of spreadsheets and we've never I think there's no amount of commercial for our housing world or expense cutting thank you others well thank you that was a really positive discussion thank you Adam for coming and thanks for arranging this it's the first of many to have this be a more conversational open process than the S versus them that occurred last year when the folks in this room can get on board with that and come up with constructive solutions to the things that were outlined we'll continue this dialogue as things go on so thank you all, appreciate it I'm sure some people will leave I know Adam has to head back to the select board we have additional videos we're still in the process we do like all of that are we calculating that if you can give me some guidance I would apologize, yes let's talk after I can't make it, sure we have additional business and none of us want to stay all night so if you're going to leave we'll do so quietly so we can keep things moving here we're still holding that so next up we have appointment of the Arlington Heights neighborhood action plan implementation committee I know we have the two nominees appointees here so if I could ask both of you to come up thank you for your interest in these seats and this committee I always appreciate seeing new faces so I'm just going to go from left to right and have you introduce yourself my left to right tell us why you're interested in being part of this committee and what brings you here this evening my name is Jason 40 and I live at 545 Summer Street I've lived in Arlington Heights since 2008 I love my neighborhood but I'd like to see it it seems like there are some opportunities to make it much better through planning I am a design and planning professional specifically an architect have about 20 years of experience working on a range of project types higher education mixed use currently working on a 100% affordable 40 unit project in Cambridge Porter Square and so I am interested in lending a hand and using my professional skills to contribute to the implementation process of the plan that's in place thank you Hi, Rob Davison I live on Tanager Street in the Heights I was born in Arlington and was raised here and went through the public schools I've lived in Arlington for most of my life I'm a corporate creative director so we have something coming I also I'm a visiting faculty member at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design so I enjoy working with multidisciplinary teams on brainstorming and kind of taking conceptual strategy through to implementation so I kind of enjoy that process I frequent the Heights business district a lot and I see lots of opportunities for enhancement and improvement I've lived in Brighton previously and I enjoyed kind of seeing the transformation of the Brighton business districts through the Brighton Main Street program and enjoy visiting different municipalities and seeing how they've evolved their business districts from Pittsfield to other places outside the country even so I would like to use my professional experience as well to try to drive the plan forward and improve the Heights Jane, do you have anything to add? I put the memo in the packet which outlines that we had a very a very big response more than I think we've ever had to any committee we've ever assembled so it's a very popular there's a lot of interest in the planning process there's a lot of interest in the plan itself for those people who would not because there's only technically two spots that we said we would fill that you would fill through this committee there's many other people who I hope will stay engaged we would intend to have a community process which I've outlined in the memo that there will be some sort of engagement event that's up to the committee to figure out those next steps also some people in the community have commented on the fact that the plan while the plan was being developed we were also in the midst of preparing for Springtown meeting which talked about specific zoning issues that we're obviously not pursuing at this time however there are many other things in that plan that are worth a lot of attention and time and the devotion of this committee to explore which includes items that don't have to do with zoning and have to do more with placemaking and programmatic issues and business development and creation so I hope that the committee continues to explore that while also thinking about the other zoning recommendations that are not tied to Springtown meeting that are also recommended after a very thorough analysis of the very specific area in Arlington Heights so I just want this board to be aware of the fact that there's more to that plan than the one thing that's been discussed I know you are mostly aware of that but we haven't spent a lot of time talking through that plan and when we agreed to create this committee we talked about sort of what they would be doing and how it relates back to that plan but also that there would be some continued engagement that would be occurring so for the people who do not get appointed this evening I hope that there's continued involvement and interest and passion and pursuit for the Heights to make it the best place possible that's why we wanted to do this work we were actually being responsive to many neighbors in Arlington Heights who came together a few years ago actually and really encouraged the town to do something about Arlington Heights forming support Arlington Heights which led to a hundred person meeting that we held actually in the summer a couple of years ago and I hope that inspiration stays and so I appreciate your interest of course in the committee and there's a whole slate of people of course that would be appointed as part of this not just these two individuals and is there someone from the board that's going to sit on this as well? that was something we talked about but you would need to make that appointment as part of this process for designation so do any of you have questions for these two gentlemen? I think you're both very qualified to be on that commission yeah I agree I too live in the Heights and Rachel lives in the Heights Ken lives close to the Heights we all are invested in this project process seeing how it goes through and seeing how the conversations take place in a more contained arena than town-wide zone by-law changes so thank you we appreciate you being willing to step up and donate your time which I'm sure you'll be doing a lot of so with that I think I would hear a motion to appoint this slate of people including Jason and Robert second all in favor hi congratulations see more of you both thank you you'll be in touch with me thank you so do we want to designate someone from this board to sit on that committee? I'll give it up to you I'll nominate Rachel I would be happy to sit on that so nominate Rachel to sit on the Arlington Heights board action plan recommendation committee second all in favor hi great that's your one right? thank you we have open forum left if you've already spoken on housing tonight please talk about something else we've heard you we're happy to hear it if anyone has any other concerns anything they'd like to talk about related to the ARB please go ahead I have a request with the board I would ask the board to clarify what its policy is about listing correspondence received on its agendas I think at a meeting back in July I handed you at the meeting some suggested changes suggested zoning changes recommendations to my law now obviously since I handed them to you that night I couldn't have an agenda for that night but I would have expected like any correspondence you had received through the mail or by email at any time that they get listed on the agenda in the correspondence received category if indeed the correspondence received there's only correspondence related to agenda items and I think that needs to be clear if you did correspondence received and that's what the select men do then I think that should be noted as well but generally if the board is having a correspondence received I expect that any correspondence they receive gets listed there doesn't mean you have to act on it but this is that you're balanced that you've received it and the same thing happened last week when I sent an email objecting to the lack of open space total lack of open space development on Broadway that the housing corporation we brought before you again I realized it wasn't sent in time to be listed in the agenda when the agenda was printed but it didn't show up this week in the correspondence received either so I would just ask that somehow on your website or elsewhere you make it clear whether you are including all correspondence received in that listing of agendas in business or this evening unless anyone has anything else they'd like to discuss motion to adjourn second all in favor bye good thank you