 So thank you all so much for coming tonight to our third public meeting related to MBTA communities. Our first meeting was on November 18th, 2022. Picture it. Bring your mind back to November 2022. We introduced MBTA communities in a digital meeting and asked for volunteers who may be interested in participating in a working group to help Arlington figure out where indeed they would put this, this zone to promote housing, to build more housing in Arlington, to build it at a more dense scale than is currently allowed. So after November 18th, we put together a working group of community members who have met way more than two times. We had held another public meeting on March 9th and in that public meeting we asked folks to please respond to a survey. I think everybody here hopefully has heard there was a survey that went out, a visioning survey to really sort of clarify the community's thoughts around putting in this zone and what needs could be met honestly by doing this and what opportunities we could have by putting in a zone like this. And so the survey was live for quite a while. Everybody who responded and on May 18th, the working group started to map the results of the survey on two different maps of Arlington to make sure that we could prioritize the community's values and the community's vision. The maps are iterative. If you have seen maps previously, you will not see those maps tonight. They are gone. We are moving forward with more comment, more input, and just I think more direction from the community. And that's why we're all here tonight. So our consultant is UTIL. We received a technical assistance grant via mass housing partnership. UTIL has worked with several communities to help them also work through these same questions that we're dealing with now with the MBTA community's policy. Can you get a little... Yes. And so I'd like to start by introducing working group members. And we'll start with Sanjay Newton who's the chair, the recently elected chair. Also from the Arlington Redevelopment Board, Steve Revillac, Kinlau, Mehta Admont, Vincent Bodan, Ramey Schneider, Shayna Corman Houston, Laura Wiener, Rebecca Gruber. And this meeting would not have come together without the committed help and focus of several staff members. I'd like to specifically mention Teresa Marzilli who's been doing community outreach for this project and just incredibly well I think is really getting information out there. Marisa Lau, our senior planner and DPCD, and Talia Fox is our sustainability coordinator but who has really doubled down on this project and on this presentation. And so this wouldn't have happened tonight without the three of them. This is an iterative process. When the working group got together, we sat down with a map of Arlington and said, where should this go? And the pens stayed above the map and stayed above the map and stayed above the map because this is hard. This is hard work to figure out. And it's going to take a number of tries, a number of chances at trying to draw something that works for Arlington. And so that's why you're here tonight. You will see how difficult this is a little later in a group exercise where you yourself will evaluate on a map how you think values of Arlington best play out. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to Sanjay Newton who's the chair of the working group. And again, thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Claire. I'm Sanjay Newton. As she just said, I'm the recently elected chair of the MBTA communities working group. I'm very pleased to have you all here tonight. I'm also pleased that ACME ACMI has been able to join us and our live streaming tonight. This will be available for viewing later. Claire has covered the overall process that has gotten us to tonight. So now I'm going to talk a little bit more about tonight. We didn't, we skipped that slide. Tonight's meeting. Okay. So in a moment, Zoe from our consultant UTL is going to remind us of all about some of the requirements and technical details for MBTA communities. Then Steve Revolac is going to talk about some of the results from our spring survey. He'll also talk about how that input informed the map, which we're going to use for our discussion tonight. Please note that the map we're sharing, as Claire just said, is neither a full plan nor the final map. The working group knows that the map will evolve and that there are many details to be worked out based on the conversations tonight and the conversations we're going to continue to have into the future. After Steve's preview of the map, Rebecca Gruber is going to introduce our small group activity for the evening. We have many choices available to us, and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts about some of those choices at the tables tonight. And I will just note, for those of you who are not at tables, I think all of you know that at this point, but there are some additional tables in the hall. And so after we do this little introductory presentation, folks who are not at a table, you can find your way to one in the hallway in case that wasn't clear already. And then finally, at the end, we'll reconvene for a short, given the number of tables, very short report out from the groups. Okay. Why Section A matters? Steve will talk more about the survey, but I want to note that the working group was very pleased to see that in the over 1,000 responses we received, there were a number of goals and strategies with broad support. The working group did receive a handful of responses, which suggested we should not comply with the MBTA community's law. But our new governor has made it clear that implementing this law is important to the future of the Commonwealth, and our new attorney general has also made it clear that she will take action against communities who don't comply. I hope we can all agree to keep tonight's conversation focused on how best to allow multifamily housing in Arlington, and I'm excited to get to those conversations. This process gives us an opportunity to express Arlington's values through zoning. This work is essential to our climate goals, to our transportation goals, our economic development goals, and our goals for Arlington to be a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community. We look forward to the conversation we'll be having both tonight and in the coming months about how best to achieve our goals. And with that, I will turn it over to Zoe, who will walk us through some of the details of Section 3A. Oh, where did Zoe go? Here she comes. Hello, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Great. My name is Zoe Mueller. I work for UTL. We're an architecture and planning firm, as Claire introduced us, and I've been working with the team to sort of help shape this over time. So I'm going to just walk you through kind of the big picture, some of the basics about how this legislation works, and in particular what it means for Arlington. So there's going to be a bunch of numbers here. Kind of just relax into it. The main activity we're going to get to is really pulls back from a lot of those numbers. So the first thing to know is that this legislation relates to the type of MBTA community that you are. And so if you look on this map, you'll see that Arlington is categorized as an adjacent community. I'll get back to that later on, but this sort of gives you a sense of the root of this legislation, which is really about making sure that we have housing in the right places throughout our region. So for Arlington, we're looking at at least one district of a reasonable size for Arlington. That means 32 acres. We're looking at multifamily housing that's permitted as of right, which is defined as a building that has three or more units within it. It also, whatever the multifamily housing that's being brought online, it cannot be restricted by age, and it cannot be restricted by the bedroom count. So that's a way of making sure that it's flexible. It's going to work for a lot of different people. The next piece is a little bit more abstract. It's about density, and it's making sure that it's hitting a 15 units per acre minimum. And that translates for Arlington into a minimum unit capacity of 2046 units. I'll go into that a little bit more later, but that means that's the target we're trying to reach, a capacity for 2046 units at some point in the future. And the final piece is locational, which is something that applies for a lot of other communities that are subject to this legislation. But for Arlington, you have the agency to pick where in the community it goes. There isn't a locational constraint about where it has to go. However, there is a minimum sort of for each of the districts themselves. They cannot be below five continuous acres. And that's really intending to make sure that it's truly a district. It's not like a single parcel, a single person's property. You're trying to make it a zone. So I'm going to walk through this a little bit. You heard an overview of what I just walked through, but the community categories, capacity, reasonable size, district location, and finally, incentives are the key concepts here. So that's what you want to hold on to as we're going into this. So as I mentioned, Arlington is an adjacent community. That's what gives you the locational flexibility that categorize, category. The next piece is capacity. You heard me before say 2046 units. That sounds like a big number. It's coming directly from Arlington's housing base. That's about 10% of the housing that exists here currently. And the next kind of key concept here is what capacity means. So when we talk about zoning for a capacity, we're not talking about what exists there now. This is essentially imagining what could you build here if you were starting from scratch? What are you allowed to build here? So it's not about what exists now or what will be built. It's about what can be built. Reasonable size, you heard 32 acres to bring that home a little bit. That's only 1%, about 1% of Arlington. So it's not a big size. And when we look at that size, you kind of have some range, some optionality about how you approach that. You have to hit that minimum of 32 acres. But you can also allow it to be larger with a lower density. So you have that sort of range. You know, smaller area, higher density, larger area at a lower density. Some of you may have seen this diagram before it's used a lot to talk about the range of housing types that exist. Many people will be familiar with a single-family home, which is referred to kind of as often as a detached single-family home, meaning it's standing on its own. But there's a whole range of small multifamily building types that sit between that single-family home and what people often think of when they hear multifamily housing, which is at the other end of the spectrum, larger apartment building. So we're talking about the full range of this. It's starting anywhere from three units up. And to give you a little bit of a feel for this, we're looking at things that are familiar to you that you'll see throughout the neighborhoods of Arlington already, throughout the region. These are very much within the 15 units per acre minimum, sort of getting right up to that number. So this is, even though it sounds big, it's actually quite manageable and relatable. This gives you a feel for some of the existing neighborhoods when you kind of zoom out from the parcel size. You know, we're already Arlington Heights, about 10.34 dwelling units, Arlington Center, 11, Capital Square is really almost at that 15 units per acre already. So again, this is an incremental change. It's not a dramatic change. And as I mentioned before, district location, that's up to us. That's what we're deciding here today. And then finally, incentives is a way that you can sort of extend from the base, but whatever we sort of allow here, that's allowed to move forward, even if you don't add the incentives to it. So that's a way of sort of adding an additional idea on top of it, but it's not something that's included in the sort of base law that's getting submitted to the state. So with that, I'll just close with two notes about kind of why this is worth doing. The first is that you stand to benefit from it a lot. There's a lot of incentives that are tied to compliance with this. So infrastructure, housing choice, local capital projects, these are things that every municipality throughout the Commonwealth benefits from and really needs and often cases to move forward with what they wanna do in their community. And finally, it also enables the community to participate in the Massachusetts Fossil Fuel Free Demonstration Program, which is part of why this is a partnership with the Sustainability Group. But in addition to all that good stuff, it's also, it's truly, it's not optional. So that's why another reason why we're here today. We have to do this. It's the law. It's something that's expected and it's something that we need to come to a good agreement about what we think it should look like for Arlington. And so this is something that when the law initially came out, people generally speaking saw it as, oh, well, if we don't want the incentives, it's okay. But truly, this is about fair housing and this is about making sure that we're all doing our part. So it's something that the state's gonna be serious about and so that we wanna take that seriously too and do it well for us. So with that, I will hand it off to the rest of the team to talk a little bit more about the locations and the survey. Thank you, Zoe. Good evening, everyone. I am Steve Revolak. I'm a member of the MBTA Communities Working Group. I'm also a town meeting member from Precinct One. And I'm here to talk a little bit about the survey, the results of the survey we took earlier this year. And to give you a look at our first iteration, first public iteration of a map. So as Claire mentioned, when we, where most communities have to sight through districts around transit stations, we, Arlington, doesn't have that constraint. There's so little developable land around Alewife that we have the option of locating the district pretty much wherever we want. And drawing on a blank map is hard. So we put together a survey to basically get resident input and help us come up with the first iteration of a map. So the questions dealt with where should the districts be located and some of the secondary goals we wanted to consider. Altogether, there were 13 items on the survey and it was live for about a month. Over 1,000 people responded. We received over 2,200 comments from 506 people. And interestingly, the largest one day response was April 13th with 243 people responding. This was shortly after a call for participation was sent out to the town meeting member announcement list. So it's great to see town meeting and town meetings associates being engaged and being involved. So this slide, I'm not gonna go through these, but these are basically the goals or strategies or objectives that were part of the survey. You could break them up into two groups, neighborhood amenities and proximity and location. These are the things we asked the community to weigh in on. So of all of the 13 different strategies or goals, integrating sustainable principles came out on top with 87% support. So 87% support, I mean that of 87 out of the people who answered the survey, 87% said this goal is important or this goal is important but maybe secondary to other goals. So that's what we're considering support. Along with this, are some more specific ideas. So sustainability, general principle, more specific ideas are encouraging multifamily housing near public transit, 76%. Encourage multifamily housing in walkable and bikeable locations at 73 and avoiding flood prone areas at 68. So one of the things you may notice is that the broad principle, well that got a lot of support and it's something that we can agree on. The specific ideas have a little less support but that's okay. This is something that we're talking about and we're gradually going to come to at least a rough consensus on. So just to show how these ideas get translated into a map. So this one is showing support for, this is the idea of multifamily housing near transit. So this is mainly near our bus routes. This is showing multifamily housing near walkable and bikeable locations. So we have areas that have bike lanes. We have the Minuteman Bikeway. We have areas of town with sidewalks. And the sort of the last one, avoiding flood prone areas. These are areas to avoid. These are our flood districts. So yeah, so generically you could kind of refer to these as smart growth concepts but basically the concept of just doing transit oriented, putting things near transit and looking at things like climate change coming up in the future. The second theme that sort of arose out of the survey was commercial vitality. So the promoting the development and vitality of commercial centers was the second most popular strategy with 82%. And on this slide are some of the sort of like the related ones, like encouraging multifamily housing that includes mixed uses, 71%. Multifamily housing near commercial corridors, that's 63. And with 60% each, encouraging multifamily housing along commercial corridors and in commercial centers. So mixed use is a little hard to show on a map but basically the term refers to a building where there are two or more uses. The general configuration is to have some sort of commercial like a restaurant or a shop on the ground floor and then you have apartments above it. Now the others we can show on a map. So this map is showing the idea of having multifamily housing near commercial corridors. So these are basically around Mass Ave and Broadway. They're not right on Mass Ave and Broadway but they're set back a little bit but still close. This map represents the idea of putting multifamily housing along the commercial corridors which is just sort of the area in the middle that you saw on the previous slide. And of course our business centers, Arlington Heights, Arlington Center, Capital Square. Sort of rounding out the survey, the remaining four strategies were providing access to shared community spaces with 80% support. Encouraging multifamily housing that includes affordable units, that's at 77%. Encourage multifamily housing in all neighborhoods at 55. And encourage multifamily housing on existing large parcels with 46. One of the little takeaways from this, 12 out of the 13 had more than 50% support. So there's actually some things that we can general, there is some general agreement here. And now on to our map, the draft map. And this is the product of a couple of sort of internal revisions, it's something that we'll show you tonight and it's something that will change. We will probably be back at another, we may very well be back at another one of these meetings based on showing something that's evolved based on continuing this dialogue, continued public input. So in putting the map together, we really tried to take some of the ideas that we got from the survey. So sustainability, commercial vitality, access to commercial areas, walkable and bikeable locations, proximity to transit, avoiding floodplains and avoiding anything currently zoned as an open space district. So here is the map, it's small. If you want a bigger version, every table has a set of slides. This one is, you'll find it in there. But essentially it follows the corridors. So these are our areas where near business, these are our areas that tend to have better walkability, better bikeability. They're close to public transit. We're avoiding floodplains in East Arlington around the Alewife station. This map also, if you look closely, it does not include any of the parcels in town or any of the business districts or the industrial districts. So it's being placed in areas that are solely residential now. And there are three areas to it, sort of following, they're colored blue, kind of magenta and orange, but Arlington Heights, Arlington Center and East Arlington, this is, I think, sort of a natural representation of how we think about Arlington. So with that, I would like to welcome Rebecca Gruber who will provide us with an introduction to our table activities. I'm one of your neighbors. I'm a member of the MBTA working group and I'm a town meeting member from Precinct 10. So we're about to move on to the main part of the agenda, which is asking you with your neighbors to think about a few of the significant choices we have in front of us in the design of the map. This is an opportunity to share your ideas and to hear the ideas of your neighbors. We're gonna ask you to consider, sorry, I turned to look at the slide. Oh, thank you. Okay, thank you for your patience. So two questions, as I was saying, one, considering the size and scale of multifamily housing and the other, how zoning should relate to our commercial and industrial zones. At your tables, we have a more detailed description of those two questions. You'll each have a facilitator to capture the ideas, comments, questions you all might have. You'll have a large map, which is the map that you were just shown. You'll get to pour over it. It'll be on the table. John can hold up, because he just did, the one for the table that I'll be working at. We also have individual maps. They're sort of like table gifts that you can take with us when you leave tonight. Okay, and we have some other materials that we'll be giving you to look at. After our discussion, we'll ask you all to pick a spokesperson and report out from your table something that you all seem to come to an agreement on and then something that you all were still discussing. And we'll probably get back together around 8.40. So before I finish up by presenting our group norms, I absolutely want to acknowledge that we may not, we will not be able to answer all of your questions tonight. However, please share any questions you have with your table facilitator so that the working group can follow up on those questions. Okay, so now for the group norms. And we provide these to you to just help you have as productive a discussion as possible. Be present, presume welcome and extend welcome to one another. Listen with the intent to understand, not necessarily to respond. Speak for yourself and speak your truth in ways that respect others' truths. Use I statements, suspend judgment, take space and make space for others. Agree to engage in polite, constructive and productive dialogue and feedback. Expect and accept a lack of closure and when things get difficult, turn to wonder. And before we turn on the lights and your facilitators start up their work. On behalf of the working group, we want to thank you, our neighbors for spending this time with us. We're very excited to hear your ideas, both those in the report out that'll take place in about 30 minutes or so and all the others that will be shared by your facilitator. So we'll come back together in about 30 minutes. Thank you very much. Have fun. If you're not at a table, you can, yeah, you know what to do. I'm so happy to hear all this wonderful conversation happening. We want to do very, very, very quick report out, okay? So one thing, you should be one sentence, right? What's your table agreed on? And maybe something you were still discussing. I know my table is ready to go over here, so we'll maybe start with them. Winel, if you wouldn't mind sharing very quickly and then maybe Steve will come around to your table and we'll work our way around. So very quick, folks. So agreement on corridor, still discussing what size of buildings. Let's come to Steve's group over here. Still talking about in all neighborhoods and there were lots of things that were agreement on I'm not gonna repeat because we gotta keep going with time. Rebecca, does we have somebody here who's gonna share? Incentivizing agreement on, I'll repeat for you. Incentivizing excuse and order, okay? We agreed on that. And discussing the relationship between density and affordability. Great, and the need for parking. Claire, do we have somebody from your table or you? Something will be caught for ACMI, so it's okay. Let's, yep. Agreement on corridors and including Broadway. Still discussing, still discussing parking, thank you. From this next table. Great, that was actually pretty loud, so I'm gonna not summarize. Irwin, could you? Great, thank you. Next table. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Great. I'm looking forward to reading all those sticky notes. Okay, next table. Agreement on maintaining affordability. Yep. Was there something you were just still discussing? So still to where and still discussing the corridor concept. Who, we still have a couple that still we need to. Yep, okay, great. Great, thank you very much. The next, yep. Yeah, yeah, go right ahead. Great, thank you very much. Who, yep, Steve, yes. We're talking about all kinds of things. Okay, tables from out in the hall, yes. Thank you, and we don't want that all those incentives don't lead to a rich corporation and they just come. Okay, great, thank you. Yes, we've done this table. Was there another table from the hall that I didn't get? That was you, okay, great. I think we've done everybody. So thank you. It's been great to get a little taste of, right? I understand that did not capture everything from the conversations that we had tonight. So please, as a reminder, please help your facilitator make sure that all of your stuff got captured on the thing. Yes, Grant? Yeah, just, so, so, wait, wait, wait, wait, so, so. The working group will be reading and discussing all of your input from tonight and using it to further iterate the plan and the map. We will also be updating our FAQ document based on suggestions you've shared this evening. We expect to have another public forum probably in July to both share our progress and continue asking you for further input about this, this, you know, as the work progresses. In the meantime, we encourage you to continue this conversation with your friends and neighbors. We will have additional materials in the coming days for you to be able to have those conversations and provide further input for the working group. An evening like tonight takes an enormous amount of work from many, many, many people. So the working group would really like to thank the many, many town staff across multiple departments and divisions who made tonight possible. In particular, a big thank you to Teresa Marzelli, Marisa Law, and Talia Fox. Plus all of our facilitators at the tables this evening. On behalf of the working group and the Department of Planning and Community Development, we want to thank all of you for joining us tonight. We really are so pleased that this room is full. And as I said, at the beginning of the evening, this process gives us an opportunity to express our town's values through zoning. We look forward to the next opportunity we'll have to come together and to continue this conversation. Thank you so much for your thing. Yep. Thank you.