 More chance to let boarders, we have the full board. We've got Katrina and Sasha and Cheryl here as well, with a few guests. So go ahead with general public comment. We have. Go ahead. Public comment? Yes. I'm actually here about the subdivision rights, but in your public comment, Irina, I just wanted to say that I hope that the board isn't seriously considering throwing up gravel and road. And I don't think the town should give up anything it has. We don't know what beneficial use those things might have to the town in the future. I mean, certainly, as recreation byways, they have some values for people, hyping or biking or whatever. Just not in favor of throwing up anything with the town all the way to Patrick's. I think we're just going to take it on a burn, right? Right, yeah. Yeah, I know that there was a part about that last meeting, but as you know, I've always shared that. I know we should have thrown it out. OK, well, I felt like I had to say something just in case. But I'm not in a problem with the few trouble loads of gravel, but I also don't think that it's good policy to make improvements to the last four road to serve property. But I'm not having an objection to that. I just didn't want to see the road. I didn't think you would, since I followed the list of road down past my house, that was a subject of an ongoing lawsuit for a decade. I mean, I followed that. So it seemed like if you were going to willingly give something away, that would have been the time you would have done. But I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to take it. I'm sure you did. Every time I drove on, I'm like, I don't think it's just. You tried? No, I don't. That was a painful experience, I'm sure. Still killing it. Anything else, Sheila? I don't know if I'll come in. No, thank you for asking. Katrina? I just wanted to, I sent you guys all the forwarded email from Bridget Neese about, as of right now, there's no second kindergarten in Moretown. And as of today, there's 21 kindergarten, Moretown resident students that are enrolled. And one of the things that she didn't address in her email that myself and a couple other people have brought up to her is that district-wide, we're not asking for them to hire a new kindergarten teacher, because the district has enough kindergarten teachers. Currently, in Thatcher Brook, next year, there'll be five kindergartens with 73 kids enrolling to be about 14 point something kids per class. So we took one, from one teacher from Moretown and moved it over, sorry, from Waterbury and moved it over. There will still only be 18 kids per class, which is less than 21 that's here. Also, the state standard is 20. And it also is a QUSD, because it's on their website. So while we hit 21, we didn't automatically go to two classes. Is there a vote? Yes, five days full-time. So they have a meeting on Wednesday, is that? Yes, they did. Will you be there to push your concerns at that point? Yeah, that's too many kids. I mean, they're kindergarten. I helped sell for the kindergarten this year, and there's 15 of them. That's too many kids. What do you want from there? I don't think they can get a good education with that many kids. And I would suggest that you probably have emailed Christian and Gabe as well. Yeah, I talked to Kristen today. And I said that along with Peter. Does it help if the select board supports a certain position? Yeah. So it was in the budget for two kindergarten teachers. No, I understand. I've been following to it. I responded to her email answers today. She didn't answer the question about postponing the meeting for half an hour. No, I'll say it again. I think it's ridiculous. And also, although she basically said that Peter put out misinformation, she verified everything he said. And in fact, he did not explain why they allow people to choose who want to go to Waterford, but not Peter. I mean, she explained a whole bunch of statistical stuff. But kids have been approved who want to go to Waterford. Residents bring more town presidents. Just not the people who want to go to Moretown. So why? Right. She basically said, I think that's something that we've done in the past. And we can just do it. But there's no explanation. She felt her, too. I actually responded that I really need to get a shit about that. I mean, she should feel grateful that someone cares about what's going on with the board to say anything. I mean, I don't care how she feels. Well, that's the thing. It's not, I don't take it as something directly towards Moretown at all. A lot of people feel that way, that it's directed at Moretown. I just want my kid to get a good education. And if the district has the possibilities, then why don't they share all the resources? Well, I think there is some favoritism for the towns that carry the most votes. If you are a person who cares about advancement, as I know niece does, then you care about having the most votes from her. So I think there is some favoritism toward those with the most votes. She'll disagree with that, too. But we'll see in the future. Thanks. You know, John and I met with what's the gentleman's name from the Moretown? Right name? Or no. It was the group that's kind of meeting in town to kind of... Oh, right, right. I can't think of the name of it, but I know it's time. Jason. Jason. Advisory Council. At the advisory council. John and I about three weeks ago met with the advisory council here. And again, he, Jason, was going to take our support, and that's what we did as a board, and we're support what the advisory council was doing to these meetings. So that's where we felt our support from the board is coming in. Yeah, I totally agree. Oh, yeah, I think you guys supported it absolutely. I just want you to be aware that I mean, there's three people in my help that says, how would I not believe if we can't have the same equity at our school as the other schools in the town? She's putting one thing on us saying that, okay, well, if you have 20 kids, and we split into two classes, and then sometimes people are sick, that's like eight to 10 kids. Well, Basin has eight kids in hold. So if she's going to split that class up because she doesn't like the size of it, you can't. I know, there's a lot of double talk that comes out. Yeah, very certainly. Thank you. I'll wear that, but we should probably move on. David, now you've had some comments as well, right? Why don't you pull a chair up? David, Speck, you know. One better. Two things. Number one, I'd like to suggest to the board that you appoint a deputy zoning administrator for cases where I have a conflict of interest or illness or extended vacation. I've asked John Weir if he'd like to fill in his deputy zoning administrator, and he said he would be willing to do so. If you decide that something you want to do then the state requires that the town have a policy on the deputy zoning administrator as to when they perform and under what conditions I would be happy to look through various examples of such policies and present them to you. If he could do that, I think that would be a good idea. The second thing is, I've got some proposals for the changing the E-91 application and certificate. E-91 jobs. One that went with zoning. Thank you very much. Sounds sarcastic. It's turned out to be actually interesting. My very first call the resident said, I'm a little confused. I'm asked to submit a certificate of compliance saying I've posted the numbers, but I don't have the numbers yet because you haven't given them to me. He said, I'm a little confused too. Let me get to it. And lo and behold, the certificate was the current certificate. I asked for exactly that. I said, okay, we can change that. The second one is not marked because if you don't mark them up, I can use them. When I propose we change the instructions to an application form, which then has the instructions in it, and made an E-91. Is there a certificate? Somebody can have it. This is the current certificate. Normally, I wouldn't think this would rise to a need for the board to look at it, but it doesn't have fees. Fees. The current fee is $125 for the certificate of compliance. And as I wrote the draft, it would be $125 for the application. And I didn't assign a fee for the certificate. So the way any work is, the pony up the money, I do the work. I sign the number. The town's got the funds to cover my expenses. After I give them the number, they agree now to give me back this certificate of compliance. And our harm there is that no zoning permits are issued into line of that certificate back. That's my suggestion. You can do whatever you want to confuse, under it over. Is there any other regular fundamental changes application here? Anything? Everything from here down is exactly the same. Up in the top, the only change that might be of interest is that I've defined that they have to comply with the state regulations for the numbers being three inches high and two and a half inches, at least three inches high and two and a half inches wide and a reflective nature for all structures before it didn't include houses. I only skid this, I may be missing it, but I'm looking for the fix to the problem. If you have to attach the certificate of compliance, the certificate of compliance still requires the assigned street number. I'm probably missing something here. The attached certificate. Yes, it's here. It's the second page. Okay, so then would you still have to provide the E-911 on the street number? Right, but they're given them both at the same time. And if they don't have an E-911 on the street number yet? That's an application I will give them on an E-911 number. When I get the money, I get the number, I call them, I say, here's your number. I'm going to post your number properly and give it back to us. Okay, okay, these are two applications for the certificate. I got that for you, but this says that when you're collecting this, you have to include this as well when you can't finish filling that out when you're student. Where are you seeing that, Jason? Right up here. All applications for zoning permits must be accompanied. Oh, that's a zoning permit. That's it. It's a little warning. You're not getting a zoning permit. Like I said, the student is going to teach you. That's the state on the other page. So right now, currently, they're just paying me at 125 feet once they've got it, getting it up front. Is there any other? What's it costing us more? I don't want to charge someone for this. For all zoning permits, the fees are defined as being a zoning permit fee plus a $10 recording fee. That wasn't in the existing certificate of compliance. So has there ever, however the town would like to handle that? What would be your certificate of the recording fee at that point of $10? You can answer that one order with that. Is there anything better than with the other one? As you wish. Yeah, well, that's what we're, I just want to kind of keep the same structure we've had before. We just, now it's clear that it's being paid. That works, everyone. So these are going to get 125. Initiation would be for the 9-1-1. And then once he gets the certificate back, they'll pay $10 for recording. Okay. So the 125-1 fee, this would be the best subject for a different kind, but that seems like a little high number to me. Does it take that long to, is there that much work involved in that, getting that? I mean, that's four hours. In some cases, I've done them very quickly. In some cases, it's been quite a bit of time. And that's partly because I'm brand new with this job also. Yeah. Maybe that's a discussion for them. That does strike me as a little bit high. I think we can, you know what, we should, we have some history with this where, I think that we talked to JB, I think we established those fees with input from him. Because I think that was something that came up. But let's look into that to make sure. I think it's reasonable for some of the salary of the 9-1-1 administrator to be supported by fees, and some of the general taxes, that's probably what's happening in the app. So we will, I think, I think that's a good idea. I don't want to make it difficult for someone, but let's make sure we're covering our fees. Does that feed through the sign? The 9-1-1 sign? Martin usually. I don't know. Those are $60. I don't know. Those are $60 and those are close. Yeah, I don't think that we've built out for those, so I think that's... Yeah, I think we do. Can we check that to be sure? So we know exactly why. It would be nice to know exactly if someone's coming in to draw an application and tell us what is the cost of them to submit. I think we've looked at it. That was a speed, Martin. I think three or four years ago. Yeah. So, but this is, if it says that the road's already named. Well, something came to the road by name. Well, it says that the road is named, but no number sign would submit with $125 a day. So nothing could go toward the name of the road because of the name. Are you talking a road name or are you talking a... The signs? The green signs. Well, I think today, if it says the road is named, it would have a sign. Yes, you know. I mean, you just aren't going to name the road without a sign. I mean, that's how I view it. Yeah. Okay. I was under the impression that it was the responsibility of, on a private road, for the landowner to pay for the sign on the road. I think that's correct, right? That would be correct. Right. This is, I'm simply referring to the, you know, the 125 Main Street sign, the number sign. And I wasn't aware that the town provided those signs, those numbers. I've been telling people they had to post it in accordance with the state regulations. I think, Joe, you talked to me about the road name. Yeah. They are provided by the town. And the house number E911 signs are not correct. How's everything else going up there, David? Learning experiences. You've seen, how about applications coming in for a mount? A reasonable mount. Some of these have been a lot more work than applications. Really? And in some of the cases, agricultural exemptions is a lot of work without a permit. So, it's interesting. The house down the road, there's a flood area concern. There's been no permit submitted because it was all interior work. But then the flood area hasn't came up as an issue to be investigated. And it's continuing to be investigated. In fact, the gentleman that's had the engineer and I've received a certificate of elevation stating that that house and the ground right around the house is at the base flood elevation. And that owner is in the process of filing a LOMA application, a letter of map adjustment to have it officially taken out of the flood plan. So, if that permit is approved, if the LOMA permit, then it's... So, it's been very late. I didn't have to tell somebody. He used to have to spend $100,000 to look this house up. Oh, good. All right, thank you. Hey, Chuck, how are you? How are you? Well, thank you. Were you ready for it? Yeah, why not? Okay. So, this should be pretty quick. Basically, the company that is currently hosting the website is getting out of the business of doing that, and so they want us to move it off. And there's just a decision point as to what path to take. There's the cheap option and there's the better option. The cheap option would run the town about $4 a month or so. It's slightly more expensive, but better option runs $35 a month or if you buy a year, $350 for a year. I advise the latter option. What it gets you for that additional money is it's an environment that's specifically designed for hosting WordPress by a company that that's all they do. And so they take care of a lot of the security openings that can occur in WordPress and just make the whole thing much more robust. They even take care of some of the upgrades for you, so you don't have to do that. And in the testing I'm going to want to do to upgrade the website, it'll make that a whole lot easier because they have the ability for you to create basically a clone of your website in order to test anything you want to do. They do nightly backups, automatically, all sorts of nice stuff like that. So I definitely recommend that better option if the budget can swing it. That's it for you, Gerald. What's that? It's $25 a month, we've had, and we budgeted it around $500, I think, for internet. So it'll be my recommendation that we go ahead with Chuck's recommendation. Okay. And, you know, hop on out as soon as we can. Oh, second then. All right, all in favor? All right. Excellent. Should I connect with one of you two because we'll need our credit card to sign up? Sounds good. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. You know what, before we move on, Jason, do you want to give us a motion on the last? Move out of here. Accept the proposal to be changed to the E911 application and certificate of compliance. Second. Okay, Ali, thank you. Any further discussion on that? All in favor? Vote aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. So if you have a larger copy up, you can show that for David to use forward. All right. We have bylaw stuff coming up, but prior to that, why don't we go ahead and approve the minutes for May 6th? I'll make the motion to approve the minutes of May 6th. Second. Any further discussion on those? Anybody? All right. All in favor? Vote aye. Aye. All right. All right. All right. I wanted to wait because I had Carl and mentioned that he had mentioned, but I assumed he was going to be here. So let's make sure we're on the clock on that discussion. So let's go ahead and look at any of the new business. Is there any new business to the Ford house? What? Right. Anything new going on with you? You want to bring up? Nothing. You want to? Thank you. Kelly? Not me. Just on the right. So why don't we, Sasha, do you have any general public, I mean, pardon me, reports or communications? The only thing I have is Martin came in and talked to me this morning that he had a complaint from just the only way that, this woman's name is Ruth. And he was returning her call. I guess one of the siphons was in the truck and kicked up a stone or something. He just wanted to know if the town would cover any, which you'll be. It's not my roof. No. No. Thanks. And now we don't cover. Hello, no. Any other reports or communications? So Sheryl, anything for you? All right. We had just a couple of things. Again, just wanted to know where there was the note from Richard Belton, Eddie to the John and Darryl and Martin. No reservation. I have no relative to me. Thank you. As far as that property on the bus stop property rescinded the termination order there. Also, Richard's been busy. He's also done a well-visited inspection at property at 778 Route 100B. And he sent, that's a Frank Piazza property. And so there's a few things that need to be looked at there. And he also revisited Shane Brace's property. And that is now in compliance as well. Can you just or Sasha, let us know with a stand as far as the sidewalks just for public and I think we all know, but as far as where we're at. So Doug Henson is, we're all clear from the state of Vermont to get moving on the project on the bid process. So Doug Henson is preparing the final plans and the RFP to go out shortly. So we think certainly by the first week in June, we can probably get those RFPs out, look for construction by the end of this summer on that. And we actually came close to not getting the grant on the engineering study out here, but Cheryl and Pam DeAndre had appealed. And so actually since our last meeting, we were declined and then they appealed and it's been approved. So that's the last piece of the puzzle. Pam's expert wording and knowledge to... That was a nice turnaround on that because that was a $60,000 grant that was going to be able to provide a final parking lot design. So it could have been, that'll help that project by a couple of years otherwise it would have had a three cement curve. So that was very, very good, well done. Thanks. I contacted Ray Daywood today to let them know that they would be happy, that they would be needing to budget the town's share, the school's share of that, around $5,000. So the town will have to budget $5,000 for the share to put the final design. And Central Promotion Planning Commission will be doing the RFP. Alright, so it looks like Ray's other comment. Again, Carl, regarding the sidewalk project and that would be, are we going to, I think we talked about having two completion dates run this year and possibly as long as that one next year because I think it's going to be a real difficult time for somebody to do the project this year possibly for what I'm seeing. So I think it might, price-wise, it might work out to have an alternate or completion date of next year versus July or something like that. Do we, you think it makes sense to do that initially or go out and see what we get from these first bits? I think it makes sense initially. Alright. I think it's important because I think a lot of itters may look at the completion date of this year just not right now. And you set it up as an option A, option B, so you get prices on both. You're willing to do both. And then you can decide if it's worth it to us. That's the best scenario. Isn't it just one price? No, I don't, well, I wasn't thinking it'd be priced differently because I think it could be two prices. I think we should have both options priced differently. The other thing we need to remember we're trying to coordinate with the paving of $180 out here as well. Which is... You know what that's going to be? Next year? It is going to be. So that may be... Yeah, I talked to Doug about that a little bit. And that's why we didn't have an option for prices for next year. Thinking that price wasn't falling within the budget for the grant budget to do it this year, then we would put it up to bid again next year. But that would be after the paving project. It would have to be after the paving project. That's why we were moving forward during the project on this year. And after prices didn't come back within the budget. If all our bids were over the amount of the grant, would we go back for something entry grant on that basis? Could. Because they would have wanted to get it off-skinned as well. And that very long may happen because the project has run five years. And I already talked to them about that and they agreed that if the bids came up over price that they would have to amend the grant. And they amended the grant once to include the catch basin work. So the price for the catch basins and the price for the side we often get a confinement of one grant. We're saving us a little bit of money because we're only going to have to pay the 10% instead of the 20% of the catch basins. And that's certainly an option. Right, and they're waiting. Chris has been trying to coordinate with us on this project with the paving. I know he's mad with his people and with Doug and the other guy that pat on this. Because the last thing we want to do is to see fresh payments from here and then tear it up. I think, yeah. But I haven't seen the paving project out for bids yet, so I'm just wondering if that is going to happen. You know, 10 in a day. A lot of baby contractors. Well, I think, again, he's kind of waiting on this whole thing. I mean, if you look back, watch those emails, read all those emails back and see that he's trying to coordinate with us with his people as far as that whole competitive process as well. That's why we were in a dither trying to get these easements ready because if we did not have the easements in there and approved by the state by June 1st, it couldn't be done this year because of the paving project. So I'm pretty sure it's going to happen this year. Okay. Thank you, Ray. And everybody. So let's go ahead and move on to the interim by-laws for separate vision regulations. Karen, how are you today? I'm good. Good? Good. Is anyone else coming from your group? Well, I've got a couple more folks that are coming. Maybe John, I think, or if there's one about the asset. Hey, here he's outside right now. And I'm going to be in that area for a while. Yep, and we'll get a break too. Yeah, I might just point out the reason we did not go up last time is there were no representatives from the planning commission here. And David wasn't here. And we had a light board. So we decided to do that just to do it this week. Okay. Okay. So Karen, do you want to, why don't you pull up in any of you or any other people on the board as well? Where's Jonathan? Why don't you move up again? Sophia? Yes. You want us all up there? Yeah. That way we can all have a discussion. Without having a holler across the room? Say again? And weary of all of this. You're weary of all of this? We're now weary. Okay. So let's get it. So when we started working on the subdivision regulations in the fall of 2016, it's been kind of a long haul. We had a couple of public hearings with you then, not to go through all those years, but last fall, we had a public hearing with you in September of 2017. And then we made all the changes that were requested by the Select Work Development Review Board. And then, and quite a few by Carl as well. And then we, it was our assumption because we had voted to put the question on the ballot. And it wasn't, there wasn't a ballot for, I'm hoping that you are willing to adopt them on an interim basis at this point in time. And then put them on the ballot next, this coming March. So, again, starting in the fall of 2016, and it was a mistake. There was supposed to be a ballot in March at town meeting for this. So, in light of that, the interim zoning, that can actually go for two years. Yes. Well, one of the ideas or one of the things I kind of like about interim zoning is that if we have it for a couple of years, it actually gives us an opportunity to use it to see if it works or not. One year may not be long enough, but if we have it for two years, we can see, all right, is it really, is it detrimental, is it helping, or is it really not doing anything? I suppose it depends what comes up in proposed subdivisions. I mean, one year it could be a couple of long or maybe several years of help. Right. I mean, right. I mean, it's really not a big ask. Right now, it's going from what, three? So, anything less than four, if you've got two to four, that's going to be a minor subdivision. And if you've got four or more, that's going to be the major subdivision. But still, the... Three or less. Okay, as minor. Four or more. You said four or less. Four or less. Right. Okay. We're going to have subdivision burn out. I believe in the statute you can also, can you extend the interim for one year? I could be wrong about that, but I think the statute does a lot for that. So two, and then... The official one year. The statute, if you're pointing this out, it says that it's an interim zone regulation should be put in in case of emergency, but the definition of emergencies should be able to grow out. So it could do a planning commission make a case for the reasons why the emergency base is put in the interim. The statute speaks about more than just emergencies, other reasons that you could put them into effect. And I'll tell you that towns all around the state have put interim subdivision or interim zoning bylaws into effect for any number of reasons. Is there a particular statutory reason you would say you want to do this because of this reason? I would say because it didn't appear on the ballot. Right. One statutory reason that falls on it. For another example, the last time I think we did a review zoning was for that necessary structures on Class 4 roads. And that hung around for a while there. It was more than a year though. It was just an interim time. So how much was it? So how much as well was it for zoning? The one that I was talking about was that you didn't have to go to the DRP if you already had a permanent residence on a Class 4 road. If you were to go to the 3 minutes for a traditional permit for a porch or garage or extension. Before that, anything on Class 4 road had to go to the DRP which was an expensive time for the DRP and just... So we did it for that. I certainly wasn't going to purchase it. It was just something to get to. Two different reasons. I feel often when you're proposing regulations like this and the process has been going on for two years. You're really giving people an opportunity to do things to do things that create a subdivision before they somehow fell into effect. Which is not to force someone to do something in a hurry is not a good thing. And I think that's a reason where often towns enact subdivision regulations in particular as interim so that people don't run off and start trying to do subdivisions to get into the wire. That kind of is an emergency. I mean, you've given people two years and if you delay this to a town vote, that's now almost another year which is really the first definitive timeframe people have had because from the beginning of this process it could have happened as interim at any time. And, you know, I think so I think people were maybe facing that and wondering, should we pay a surveyor to go out and map out some lines? Maybe not, but if you give them a firm ten months, people are going to do it. The other part of this is it eventually gets voted and it gets voted down and it's not going to happen. But anybody who's been paying any attention has seen this coming for how long we've been at this? Three years? Since the fall of 2016. It's been a long time and we've had it several weeks. Right. So, I mean, if anybody who's shot they don't believe this kind of plot because they're not going to pay any attention. Right. Mike, in the back, did you have any comments from the your board on this? From the listeners board? Yes. You're a listeners board. You know, I think that any time you can provide listeners with additional information on subdivisions and new blocks and things like that, that's beneficial to us. And my understanding is that maybe subdivisions now will be required to have a survey map, right? Yeah. So, that's always beneficial to us as we start to be included in the version of the new block to have a survey map so that there's clear that you find more and more accurate in our assessments on the property. It's like, David, is there any administrator, do you have anything to share on this? Well, my wife asked me how I'm meeting like here at one time. I believed it was a good thing. I hate to generalize that. My feelings are that the interim is more for an emergency but it's not explicitly the final constitute to emergency in state statutes. It also suggests that interim will be something urgent and in our studies being done for a final resolution to the zoning question. So it's sort of like a trial period and so I thought, why don't you guys get to a vote instead of waiting until next March? This could have been decided by now. Have a special meeting and I'll talk to you later. The expenses. The expenses. All right, thank you. They don't also say why I would want a regulation. Because right now we're a four lot town as far as activity is concerned. So I think it's important to think about without involving them. If we had subdivision regulations we could develop on my own property. I could create nine of us without active involvement which to me is not necessarily avoidance of the big people which I want to do. Which I think anybody wants to do is come in here telling us how to lay out a subdivision and plan roads and how we deal with additional children in school. I think that should be done on a local basis as much as we can. So make us a nine lot town so we can keep the state out of our business as much as possible. Carl, I know you have just in the game here. Do you have some comments? Can you share us if that's the case that active 50 gets out of the picture? If we put this in the... It's an invite. Now unless you're above the 2,500 foot elevation or it's a commercial you have a commercial use plan. Do you plan enough in an inventory or power plan? Maybe ten years from now. Then it's triggered on the creation of the town in a five year period in the district. Because I don't think anybody has explained that in all the areas I've been to. You're right on. We've talked about it. How active 50 interacts with their local zoning who takes precedence at what point in the discussion? Well actually we did. We don't need to argue. Karen? Active 50 says in a town with zoning and subdivision active 50 jurisdiction applies to the construction of housing projects with more than ten or more units on land controlled by a person within a radius of five miles of any involved point in a continuous period of five years. It will apply to priority housing projects of 25 or more housing units which are basically mixed income. There's actually more than ten units if you have subdivision and zoning. And if you do not? And if you don't it's fine. I thought it was right. It's over four. That's four. If a town is not adopted by zoning and subdivision that's crazy. I think there's like fours in the gray areas just the DRD or less. Right. I can send you the statute again. I don't have a whole statute here. We've sent it around I shall see it. So rather was handed down on September 10th, 2018. Yeah. It has been on a meeting actually. And we will that's the whole packet. Yeah. I'm not advocating this. I'm not advocating the people that flip side of that is there's more for the DRD and we haven't heard in the opinion. We did well I don't know if you've heard from them more recently but in December we incorporated all their proposed changes to the proposed subdivision bylaw. Right. A lot of the changes came from either John and Paula you guys have a couple changes now Right. So we have buy-in from the DRD Paula is that buy-in from you guys Yeah. If all the members have an opportunity to review the comments right I probably have. You call for it. Yeah I know I did I just wanted to let you know like so I remember Yes it was. Yeah Okay. There was a point of subdivision activity before this I have not seen a lot of occasion to talk to you though. Right. To shield this point. It's not like these things come up a lot they could come up and you get several changes in the year I suppose but there's probably a lot of changes that people are subject to. Right. So Carl you feeling more comfortable now that you've got that information? I'd like to hear that but shield this point that we have to do this as an intro bylaw now should have been voted on it was scheduled to be voted on it wasn't. If you can just put them in what you're looking at is we could do just about anything within our bylaws it's not really to me it's not it doesn't need to be the threshold that I think you need to put it in place as an intro bylaw. Can I take something? Sure. So the self-toward intro bylaws the class 4 row the core was intro bylaws so every major change that has been to the zoning regulations in the last 10 years started out with intro bylaws. Oh well good that doesn't mean it was that's right you have the authority to do it the question is is is this a threat a big enough threat to our town and the economy and lifestyle and everything to warrant being put in as an intro bylaw versus being put in as a voted change to our zoning regulations. Tom, if we I think you guys are aware that we're in the south of the region I know you have had since you've been on board but I know that at least two or three in terms of the answers I can't on the exact number of my reflections there's been problems in the last year that came over. More than three I'm just saying I know there's some I don't know if you need me to do it and I'm here now 2016-7 2017-3 2018-3 how many over three plots being created doesn't give that exact because that timber mess one was three wouldn't have been effective that's one where you could have the zoning administrator before that's how many south of the region application the word improves some more approved that's what the notes strictly out of town for I'd be interested to know how many over three over that threshold under three there was sort of no reason to keep that data the type of regulations were being proposed I mean we also on the handout from September in 2016 we had 41 building permits and 36 in 2017 and 2018 14 building permits but Jimmy at the time said you know he couldn't tell us what they were all individually if we adopted the interim zoning could you put any exploration data on it well they do expire I mean they're good for two years under the statute what I'm getting at is I would rather get the state out to vote up town I don't want to go to this hanging out there I can support this if we can vote next town in 2014 yeah absolutely nothing stops you from doing that that's your call the only reason I was suggesting pushing up for two years it would be an opportunity to see you know does it work is it hurting anyone is it failing or not but if we want to go ahead and do it in 10 months you know next March whatever it was we can do that too I would like to move forward with the interim zoning these guys have put a lot of work into it I don't see any detriment at this point it's going to stop so if you want to go ahead and vote next March I mean John I mean I think it's up to two years so I mean we can decide anytime if we want to have it on March 4 or not but I think it makes sense to adopt it tonight but I think let's make a decision on when we when we vote on it too I don't want to just hang out there we have up to two years we want to vote on it next March or the following I'm not sure how comfortable I am doing things on an interim basis that should be done by a vote I'm just mulling if it's coming if the vote comes up soon I'm still mulling mulling mulling what do you think I think it's going to be an interim and it should be voted on no I understand so that's next yeah 10 months because that still gives you enough time to see if it's going to work and it's not I'd move to accept the interim zoning bylaws presented by the planning commission with a vote for 2020 on them I'll second any further discussion all in favor go right aye aye aye to explain the may vote it's just a matter of if something should be voted on I don't think we should make a habit of doing things on an interim basis and if mine were a deciding vote I'd make this one otherwise but I'd like to have that on record alright so we will we'll adopt those we will put it on the agenda or the warning to be voted on next time thank you thank you everyone thank you thank you good thoughts we can talk about that thank you thank you thank you alright I think you should so you approve the interim zoning? yes so I would like to check if you'd like to check in the meeting list? yeah yep how are you doing John? we'll see you there we asked Paula the DRP was thinking earlier so we took your opinion on the zoning bylaw alright so now we've got flood plain management net Swenberg and I'm Mr. Archer I did bring a slide show I'm wondering if I could show is that a wall even with rain? is that a wall even with rain? yeah you shouldn't say that wall would probably be better does this come down? no are you going to work with the sunshine on that wall? it's going to be hard I think it's going to be light space unless you have a screen is that a wall? yeah yeah so I don't know let's try it yeah let's see take up Sasha take this and turn it around and put it over that side to the point the other side is point and it will be light can't hurt right turn it around okay we're going to open this wall and I think it's better and there's a log in right there okay there we go it's a strategy that's good you just stand there that's good you just stand there yeah yeah when we're in the white shirt we'll just stand there okay there's my two of them okay the best work does this too they're like holding you away from it all the time oh my god cheers cheers it's nice to walk everywhere it's definitely a bonus there's a lot more going on there though oh yeah a little bit I'm glad it's working out yeah tell us what's up what's up I'm a super man I'm a super man ok I don't understand I don't understand how to read the manual I'm sorry ugh okay okay Thank you No, but remember time is a bunch of changes to the minutes last meeting, so those may be approved also, the second in April, you can take care of it. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, this will be interesting. Let's see how this goes. No, I can actually learn math. It makes it more complex. We can take the... Have you emailed us to the town office? No, but I can follow up with a PDF or something like that. Thank you. All right, let's go with that. Thank you so much for the opportunity to meet with you tonight. And we will be here. I hope you can see. So this is a, as I understand it, you wanted to understand more about basically CRS and river coral protection. So I just wanted to do a little introduction of what that's all about. And, you know, just kind of put some framework to it and then of course take questions that might come up. So this is, so we'll talk about should more town participate in the FEMA community rating system, CRS and or should more town consider protecting river corridors. And this is quite an interesting challenge. Move the line. Yeah, move that way. Each slide is different. So this is a quick map of town showing special flood hazard areas. And right now there's about 55 structures plus or minus that are in the special flood hazard area. Most of those are single family homes. So when we think about these things, I just encourage a community to be considering a number of factors. One is, you know, where are the flood plains and river corridors in the community and what's already at risk. This is public data that's online. Protect what works and avoid making the problem worse as a general strategy. Working toward, you know, reliable roads and reducing risk for the town and for people that live here and work here. Prepare for emergency because there will be emergencies anyway. And making sure that it's possible to ensure the residual risk because there will still be otherwise, you know, there will be penalties and costs for things as we go along. So what I want to speak to tonight is the importance of both the special flood hazard area and river corridor area together. These things are important aspects of assets here in more town. So protecting the room needed by the river and protecting flood plain functions. And that's really kind of carried under this idea of no adverse impact to those systems and hence also to the interest of the town and the residents. So making room for rivers. That's a big thing you can see in the bottom right. I had to pass around about some of the different resources that are available online. One called flood ready Vermont. And another one called flood training. And these are opportunities to look at past those events. Thank you. These are a number of sites that just have a lot of information. This is a report that I pulled down about more talent from the flood ready community data set. And one thing you can notice that it has some information. About 55 buildings in the flood hazard area. About 26 flood insurance policies. So just shy of half of the buildings in the flood plain carrying flood insurance right now. It's about 7% of all the buildings in the community. In the upper right, it's kind of hard to read, but there's a little breakdown by ERAF. I don't think people are familiar with ERAF, emergency relief and assistance. So not so many of us, but over a couple of us. So I will talk about that. This is basically a program to support towns that are taking steps to reduce risk of damage from flooding. And right now the community of downtown has a rating of 7.5%, which is kind of the default for the state. And in part that's going to change as soon as you're able to catch up and update your local hazard mitigation plan. I assume the planning commission is involved. So as soon as a draft for that ends up going into the modern emergency management, the community will get scored as having a working plan for the time being. What does the percentage change to? It changes from 7.5 to 12.5. So these dots are really locations where there's been damage by two municipal assets, primarily roads and culverts and bridges that have required help from the federal taxpayers, that's your left pocket, and that basically helps to cover the cost during major disasters. So this is a widespread issue in Vermont. And ERAF is basically set up to help out in these situations as well. So here we can see after a disaster, a federally declared disaster, federal taxpayers come to the rescue of counties and states and municipalities and provide basically 75% of the eligible losses to the community. The difference is still pretty hefty. So in Vermont, they invented this ERAF, Emergency Relief Assistance Fund, and that by default picks up another 7.5% from the state budget and the community has to be major. So in this case, it's still a pretty substantial amount of money oftentimes. If the community finishes four basic things, it's in the National Flood Assurance Program, which it is. The Emergency Operations Plan or Management Plan, which it does, has a local hazard mitigation plan and road and bridge standards that it bumps up to 12.5%. And then if the community is taking the additional step of protecting river corridors or similar thing, which is to join CRS and protect the floodplain area from development, it would maximize the state contribution of 17.5%. During the Event of Tropical Storm, I mean, basically it was such a big event for the state that federal taxpayers stepped in and picked up 90% of the difference. So ERAF wasn't such a big factor in that nature of that. Except for the 3% cap on the river west of the counties. If the town had expenses of over the 3% of the river west, would you pick it up? Wow. So there we go. If the town was up, it would still increase its name. So the 17.5% for that fifth thing, and again there's two basic aspects. One is that the community adopts protection for river corridors. We'll talk about that with DEC recommended standards of no adverse impact on the river more straight, including small stream setbacks of 50 feet on streams that have more than a half mile, half square mile of watershed flowing into that point. Or joining the community rating system, CRS, and having a standard of no new fill and no new structures in the flood hazard area at that east. The PPR put together, as you probably remember back in 2013, this mapping of money, from FEMA, every little report for more town, which was basically the community received about just shy of $5 million from FEMA as well as other sources that were provided to the community. The largest part of that was in this case actually a national flood insurance program and some of that was because of substantial damage to structures and then also public assistance. Typically after an event of flooding damage and so forth, the flood insurance program picks up a fairly small chunk. Most of the damage that happens happens to municipalities. It happens when the road goes out because of culvert failures or stream crossings and that's the biggest impact. So flood claims and river corridors are important to us in a number of different ways. One is if they're actually important for water quality, they allow the soap to settle out and not flow down the river into the larger water bodies and the lake and so forth. Flood water storage is a really important part of what a flood plain does. It's where the water goes and we don't want to have it deprived of the place to go. It's often associated with excellent wildlife habitats and no matter where you are on the planet, often places of beauty, often places that people recreate and identify with as key features of something, need something where we live. And finally, it's really important to us tonight thinking about public safety. So when there's damage after a storm, it's a devastating thing for the individual at the time, also for the community to think about where to go. Typically after a flood event or an overbank or erosion event, people are on the phone, they're desperate and there's been damage and they want help, they want permits, they want money and they want to go in there and they want to fix the river or fix the stream so it doesn't ever hurt them again and protect their assets and their investments so that they can continue to exist. That's a legitimate need and interest. I'll be a tragic because if you get in there and you start filling up around the edge near the river of the stream and you burn it and try to keep the water in the channel or drench the channel deeper and armor the bank, all these things that may become important to protect that structure also deflect the water and the energy downstream and across the stream, often at the adjacent property owner or into the town culvert or the road. So it's a tricky thing to manage. So we ended up in this situation, we were losing the ability for the channel to adjust and absorb its energy and slow down the flow of the water. We're losing the function of the flood plain and then other buildings are put at heightened risk. And this building as well, I think now it's safe having put in $10,000 or $20,000 of riprap and invest in making it more expensive and at risk. So this is a vicious cycle of, where you're basically damaging flood plain functions and increasing the risks on other structures in the community and creating a positive feedback loop with bad outcomes. So the trick is trying to find our way out of this trap which is very common in Delano and across the lingon. So more town together with the agency of commerce and community development and EPA was involved in a process of coming up with this idea, how do we plan to manage storm water and flood water for a more robust, safe outcome of the process that happened after tropical storm. And basically it's in part by directing new growth towards safer places, identifying those and kind of making that the growth that's possible, trying to avoid putting stuff into a known hazard area. And then in places where there are already vulnerable settlements in exposed places, being prepared for the slow, extensive slag of making those structures safer. And that's not an easy thing to do. So the community has a municipal plan working on the local hazard elimination plan and these are also affected on the regional level and they're basically identifying what are the hazard areas and how do we plan for flood resilience going forward. That's a task not only for each community but for the communities across the state together to try to reduce the damage level. So AmeriCorps corridor is basically built on the channel. So we're trying to understand how much water is coming down the hill from the watershed. It has a channel size. And then liquid moving through landscapes tends to make these kinds of sinuous patterns to one extent or another, kind of going around obstacles, maximizing its roseness and then slowing down and then speeding up again as it goes down the hill if anybody canoes or contacts on a river and notice those patterns. So basically as the river gets squished by new development, new houses and septic systems and parking lots and sheds and riprap to protect all those things, the river ends up being bounced off the riprap and straightened more and more and it becomes straighter and faster and more rosen. And it delivers more water quicker into the village and down the hill and it does more damage on the way. So the idea is to set things back and off as we go forward that we're not constraining the path of the river. And so this is the idea of the river corridor. It includes the meander belt, this area that the river needs for the size of the watershed and it's kind of the least erosive path through the valley. And it also includes a 50-foot setback on the sides where you can have a stable bank with rocks and trees and things that could be there without having to riprap. At the point that the river has accomplished or the stream has accomplished its least erosive path because we've given it the room, it doesn't have a lot of erosive comp anymore and so it's easier to establish and maintain these kinds of habitat conditions and bank conditions. So why protect the river corridor? It's because the river corridor protects you. That's you because you are a federal taxpayer, a state taxpayer, and a municipal taxpayer as well as you might be living with the river corridor by the river. So the idea of no adverse impact is we're trying to keep what works already for the community, what works for the community. Right now these flood plains work. If we lose them, we're going to be much worse shaped. The river corridors are part of that process. So we're trying to protect the room that remains for rivers and streams and their flood plain functions. I don't cause damage to others, address the known hazards that are published online, protecting the people and the investments that are already at risk, our friends, our family, reducing public and private losses and aligning again with this larger idea that in the watershed, in the state, we're all working at this. So in the special flood hazard area that has a special form, and this comes out in the language of the Vermont DBC recommended model language, which is like a starting point for the community. The planning commission could take up and look at and consider and make changes to, but it's a good starting point for that process. But the standards that I was going to point out were the no adverse impact standards are no net fill, not adding more stuff into the flood plain such that we're losing the place for the water to be to go. And if there is a need to fill for some reason that we would create space to compensate for that, where the water is allowed to go and deposit silt and spend time without crashing into the village. And then the other idea is elevating the lowest floor of any new or substantially improved structure high enough so it's safe from damage. And in this case, recommending at least two feet above the base flood elevation. So that's particularly important like a place like the Mad River where this valley has not had a new study since the 80s. So the flood maps we have really don't deal with some of the more recent flood history and what's likely to be coming and what are recent trends. What is the base flood? So the base flood is the basis of the insurance program which is just picked out of a hat as being a flood with a 1% chance in any year. So if we had a base flood winning the flood this year next year the same ticket goes back into the hat of 100 tickets. And at that time we need to draw it out to see if we can have another flood of that size again. We have in fact, you know, as many winners as we have luck it doesn't disappear from another century and there's some communities that would keep that to the same years. Alright, so this is basically the idea of compensatory storage if there is an appropriate need for a fill to elevate a structure or approach a bridge or that sort of thing then anything that gets added we would find some place nearby that the equal amount of material below the base flood elevation would be removed to provide compensatory storage space. And that tip wouldn't be across the river but it's just shown that way for ease of viewing. So I have a question. Go back to your last. So where your channel is right now why not keep those channels clean out rather than let them keep on filling up year after year. I think we want to keep the water in the channel. We used to clean out these streams yearly. So why would we stay in the channels? Why are we so opposed to that now? We'll talk about this in a little while and then we'll circle back to that. We'll touch on that. So in Moortown you also have that might be of interest to you. In the red on this map you have a red brown color. This is the edge of the official flood insurance map. Moortown digitized recently online. And then now there's an acquisition of high-quality topographic information all across the state and Central Park Regional Planning Commission and the process of getting the equivalent of one foot contours for the Mad River Valley a little bit more in advance of that process and hire through another grant Du Bois and King to do a study of the flood risk in the Mad River Valley. So you may have seen a presentation of work with some of that data a little bit. So this other layer in here, this reddish layer, is the result of that study that Du Bois and King did. So you can see in some places in the official map and in other places it's a little bit more extensive. And they also they map also the same discharge for a tropical storm Irene on the same landscape so that's actually outside edge of all the map which again is an existing data there. It's not the actual boundary but again it's the size discharge of liquid moving through this landscape with a much higher quality topographic information. But when Du Bois and King did their revision they took the same level of water that FEMA had predicted back in the 80s so it doesn't really have any update. So no adverse impact in river corridors is again the basic idea of you're trying to protect the room that remains for rivers and the floating functions. Particularly this room to move from side to side and to handle the energy that's coming down the river from this watershed on the high flows. And the basic way that's promised is you don't want to build anything closer to the river than what's already in place. What's already there. As you do that you really care about it you're going to insist on protecting it from the river and inevitably forcing the river to be straighter and faster and deeper and more harmful down the watershed. So a protected river corridor that's that beige area near the channels is allowing the corridor the channel itself to a room and to deposit and to move back and forth dynamically slowly over time to handle its energy and its task in the watershed in the valley. And so that allows people to plan for investments and so forth outside of that area so that there's no alarmed hazards and loss of function. So Moortown has like all towns across the state has mapped river corridors they're online and you can see them by going to the right-hand side Bitly the it.ly slash flood atlas you can see both special flood hazard areas but also the river corridors as identified in the community so that's a very helpful source to go review things and this is the way the no adverse impact theory works out in the river corridor so again if you can just stay out of it that's best, it's safest it's the right thing to do if for some reason you're trying to put something into the river corridor there are certain times where the community could adopt language that would allow for that with some flexibility it doesn't necessarily mean things are safe but it would make it no worse for the community and the function than it already is so this is the way where it plays out so in this situation we have a river channel a great river channel coming through and then we have a corridor either side of it and so here we have a house that's really remarkably close to the river top of bank and so the idea here is that in terms of using the no adverse impact theory this house is not actually safe but we assume that as the river channel erodes back and forth and sometimes close enough to the house they're going to freak out and they're going to apply for a permit and invest tens of thousands of dollars and if they wanted to put in a garage or a barn or another building that was behind that structure or just downstream of that structure the riprap wouldn't have to be any more than it already is that we've already lost the ability for the river to manage its energy in that spot and something is behind that it's no worse for the river corridor it doesn't mean that that new thing is safe or that the old building is safe but it is a way of accommodating certain kinds of new structures in a way that's more flexible in that situation and also when it comes to, in this case the yellow object which is a septic system a lot of times those are downhill even closer to the brook or the score of the river and so again in this case then you could perhaps put something of similar character underground or septic system that's kind or just downstream 50 feet downstream and it would be no worse than the situation already is for the function of the river corridor it doesn't mean it's any more protected it's just a way of cutting the risk and then on this particular piece there's more of how the river corridor gets attributed when the corridor is moving through a village or a hamlet situation or an urban area and in this case we have two red buildings and they're pretty close together they're a couple hundred feet apart and it's such that there's no way you could really expect the river channel to come and they're in between these buildings and back out again they just simply can't happen there isn't enough way that the river channel can really use that space and so in this case again if these buildings are so close then if something is built between them but no closer than what's there then again there's no loss to the river corridor there's no way the river can really use that space however it doesn't make that new building actually safe that's a whole other issue that might require some teamwork between homeowners to pay for riprap and all that sort of stuff but that's the way the logic of this infill situation works and so they haven't worked through again a village hamlet or an urban area so on a flood ready analyst we talked about the link for that earlier already nearly 90 communities have by-laws for no adverse impact on the flood link or the river corridor functions so this is a very big thing that we've been working at as a state for a while and this is a big step so CRS this is a program created by the National Clean Insurance Program and it's really focused on the insurance element of things and really taking finding a way to create incentive for communities to take a better more conscientious step of flood clean management in their communities to avoid damage and hence with less damage less losses to the flood insurance program and so by participating in CRS the communities are able to acquire a discount on flood insurance for anybody who has a policy in the high risk special flood hazard so in this case you can see in this map up here the darker towns have a higher percentage of their community in the flood zone and with us are buildings in the special flood hazard area so we have about 10,000 buildings across the state that are already in the special flood hazard area and so far we have about 6 communities that are in the program Redler of Bennington Burr-Vinge Waterbury Town and Village Montpelier and Colchester Colchester and Ralph Burrow have achieved a class 8 and that gives them a 10% discount on flood insurance policies for anybody who has a policy in the high risk area so again I think that if more time is trying to make sure that people that are living in the flood hazard area have flood insurance before the next flood and they don't come out wiped out, impoverished wiped off the grand list and we really like to get them to subscribe to flood insurance and this is a tool to help slowly reduce the cost so that's the intent of the CRS program I'll also point out that most national flood insurance policies in the United States are written in the CRS communities there are most communities that are in the program are counties along the coastline where the county government does a lot of the work to organize the CRS participation and it gets them a discount on flood insurance and we have most people that are at risk and so communities in Vermont and New England we're paying full fare and we're actually helping cover the costs that are discounted elsewhere in the CRS program on some level we're kind of carrying some of the other damage that's happening around the country in floods on the left you can see the manual which is about two and a half, three inches thick but it basically allows the community to look at its steps that it's taking and see what kind of crediting it can get to that and a lot of it has to do with particularly areas that are protected into houses and little things that will require insurance this is a quick synopsis of the communities across the state and you can see Brownborough down the bottom as a community it's benefiting at about $20,000 a year, well a failure $24,000 a year in Brownborough again best off per policy it's about $239 off the policy so that's substantial as a class 8 community I've been working with Montpelier and they're going to get to a class 8 this year we'll see it takes a fair amount of time in administration and it takes a lot of dedication it's a little bit bigger but the easiest place to start is by doing this thing called the CRS picture and I can send a link to that and you can just fill that out and this is actually a little tricky because it's an older version of the manual so it's not the new one but you can get a quick sense of giving one more time is doing how much credit is and I can tell you off the top of my head given the standards in the community and the amount of area that's going into the protection of the flood hazard area it's going to be extremely low so what to do next so I would suggest and you're already going to update the hazard mitigation plan roll in your way with that do a quick check the CRS participation update your regulations to adopt no adverse impact standards for the board or the special flood hazard areas in work with community partners like Watership Groups and Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission to plug away at mitigation priorities that you're identifying a plan there's lots there are residences not only as we said in the special flood hazard area but in the floodway areas with high velocity high risk and there is funding available through FEMA hazard mitigation grant program that can help communities help owners get out of it if that's something that they're ready to do and maybe along the same lines I just want to say that flood insurance program is convenient it's not getting out of it any time fast and congress particularly congresspeople from dry states don't want to put any more money into it and so the cost is going to be going up and it's right now on a schedule to rise every year until older buildings are paying for their flood insurance on an elevation rated basis that is how high is the water coming and how high is your lowest floor and you want to make sure your lowest floor is high higher the better, higher the cheaper in the wayman most of our lowest floors are basements that's where the heater and the water system and all sorts of damage is going to happen and the flood insurance rate is, for the premium, extremely high so helping people get out of the basements and or elevate that next floor sometimes are the big things to be thinking about in terms of mitigation wherever possible so let me stop there and just kind of model any questions that are coming up for folks and see if I can answer any of them any of the public big questions? Mike I was trying to pay attention but I don't think I really quite understand how you can find the borders of the river and the special flood hazard areas particularly in Wartown is that something that you have on map and it showed us there was that in that how you can find the boundaries of the river corridor I think that had actually worked in the slides other 40 slides let's see what you find and when you did that I was curious are we in the river corridor right now here in this building by definition or not? Mike so alright so the basically the way it would work this is an odd place of course in Wartown village but basically if you think a little further upstream where the river is moving through not rock bound environment what you have is basically again liquid eroding and depositing in a dynamic way which is the natural way that rivers and streams operate and so what it's basically doing is it's trying to identify this area that's needed for the meander belt and then protect the banks that are needed for that to be stable that's the basic idea however in Vermont actually let me just say that when rivers are steeper they don't do a lot of meandering they go crashing down the hill and leave boulders and mega boulders behind and there's really not a lot of meander and any little bend you get in there is going to help slow the water down but it's not doing quite the same thing in flatter landscapes you're going to end up with more of these sinuous meander developments that you might find just upstream so you're trying to capture that meander belt as it exists and then again the banks next to it in a place like Moortown in the village where we're in a rock gorge it also has this aspect of trying to identify even if this is the ideal meander belt sometimes there is an edge of the mountain an edge of the valley wall where you can just the river can bang up against it it's just not going to move anything for huge amounts of place for time so we consider that the valley wall and also if it bangs up against a state road like 100B we would call that the valley wall that's not going to go anywhere people are going to put that road right back in there again so inside of those valley walls the river corridor would basically be confined in terms of the meander belt that's all that's got for the meandering the buffer would still lay over that as well but in this case if you were going to put a building between us and the church then we would already look at the buildings along the top of the bank and we would say there's no way even if it wasn't a rock gorge they would all be defining an area that would be defended to protect existing buildings and anything and further away it's not going to make this information any worse but as you get down into the bigger meander belts on both sides of the village you can see more of the actual dynamics of the meander belt so here we've got a meander belt established again trying to capture this area so what's happening here is we have an existing stream channel in some places in Vermont historically they've been routed and dredged and straightened and turned into sluice ways that's a historical practice in the mountains when the loggers came in when they go up there to identify a new plot to log as they would hire the young men to go up there and basically grab all the trees on the channel pull all the bogies out of the channel and make it a sluice way to get the logs out in the spring because they're going to pile them all up and wait for the high flow so a lot of our streams have been turned into high velocity straightened streams and then we put our roads right next to them it's a setup but basically here we go we've got a stream in the real and existing condition that has barely a wiggle in it it's highly energized and dangerous what we're trying to do is understand given that watershed given the gradient of this area given the way it's supposed to work based on the science and the assessments that have happened across from around the world it needs a certain amount of city velocity to manage that level of energy and this is what it would choose so this is the meander belt and basically every time they would be across over a point you would kind of identify that as the center of the meander belt and plot that out again you're talking about the area of the river over time are you looking at the geological data from years and years ago see where it was flowing to define that quarter let's see if I have an image for you so we want to kind of finish this presentation up so that's alright Mike, I like the question but I was letting that go so it has been studied extensively and in Vermont as well it's not about this particular spot or that particular spot because we have aerial photographs on certain places where we can trace that pattern and how it changes over time since aerial photographs started in the 40s and topographic maps from Beers Alice and so forth before that but for the most part it's based on understanding the amount of water coming the watershed, the gradient through that valley and again where the valley walls are at the end of the function so you might have a quarter that goes to the bottom yeah, if you go online to bit.ly slash flood out slash flood out as you can see the identified areas yeah no, so it's a different thing entirely but they're connected, they're related they're important together so the 1% annual chance flood sometimes called the 100 year flood but it doesn't come every century you can get it once, it comes again anytime it's a different thing so the 100 year flood 1% annual chance flood the face flood is how high the water comes as liquid and for FEMA when they do the maps they assume that the landscape always stays basically the same and the water just kind of comes and goes the house doesn't push away but it's basically pretty stable as it exists and so that's again this is all about the dimension of how high the water comes and this is really the river forward where it's more about protecting the area from the energy to be able to come to its least its slowest path down the hill for the area available so it doesn't come in all at once it has great power ripping out the side of the road ripping out the culverts and the bridges and the houses as it goes so they're slightly different things but they work together and by way of channels we're trying to avoid how the channels get deeper because when the channels get deeper and the water stays in the channel it's very convenient for not getting wet but what it means is as that water builds up and gets deeper and deeper it's heavier and heavier and as that slides down the hill that weight becomes a shear it becomes a cutting of the ice that's digging further deep and ripping out banks and taking out culverts and houses and dropping roads so we're trying to make sure that it doesn't get too deep and actually the water can like it does in nature spill over its banks but it has too much and spread out and slow down and dump out the muddy silt and not come crashing so probably a way over I have one quick question has mitigation or has this expanded if we had a disaster tomorrow do we step at 7.5% or do we have time to get to that? VEM, the Mud Nursing Management is very interested to work with you it had it tomorrow it had a disaster tomorrow almost we got hit by a chain thunderstorm today and ripped out a few culverts what would happen is it would take a while before the tally comes in and then there would be a federal declaration it's a month out already it sounds like it made the bills and then at that point once it's declared then basically they would come around and they would declare this is the date we're going to hold the ERAF score okay so it's not the date of the disaster of the disaster? that's right and you would be scurrying to get a draft down the hill so that they would take it off and say at least the draft is in thank you so one more question what's this the entertainment is established okay so now this 50 foot here becomes this 50 foot here here here so this 50 foot is a changing I don't know changing the description at some point you're going to keep on unless you keep this wherever it goes you have to clean it out somewhere or else it will just keep on moving and this 50 foot will keep on redefining it actually no, it's a good thought though you got the right idea it's through time before we wait that and so here's another one where you can see it's showing again in red the neanderbelt which allows for inside of it for the channel to take its energy and move through that segment of that gradient and come to an equilibrium at least the rows of slowest path to the valley and then the buffer is beyond that but this is a fixed area so having done that it doesn't require the entire valley it just basically is trying to come up with a space that's available to do the work and then knowing that you can build into these other areas we can defend all these other areas against the river and balance it off of those but we still know that we've protected space in the valley for this least row of slowest path to develop in the neander and retain itself so if you do it the other way which is the traditional way which is only by setbacks so only by setbacks at the top of the bank right now by 25 feet in town and more than 50 feet well then this is going to a row at it and of course eventually it's going to take that spot anyway and it's a dynamic system and setbacks really don't work in this dimension or in that dimension unless you're allowing to come out to its full energetic equilibrium in the neanderthal but basically in that community say even if you come out to the edge of the river corridor we also want to make sure that or if it's sticking out already it's already because rivers don't watch maps if the river decides it's going to come out over here because there's something who knows hit a rock or hit a house it's already a river corridor and it pops out over here well it doesn't actually this house safe actually but we would know that it's going to be accommodated in the river function but shy of that the community might say if it's already roving at the edge of the river or we still want to have a 25 foot puffer a 25 foot setback just because that's so crazy close but that's a kind of a different thing any other questions for now so if the river was straight which I guess in places it was on and now that it's straight along we carry you to encourage it to create the meander thing because it's not going to do it on its own if it's already developed this channel or it might in the case of like Irene where it took out part of the road we put the road back so I mean it's a road but that's the lip wrap speech that you would give them and in terms of like more town village we're really half a ravine because we've got the rock ledge on that side when it floods and overflows it comes this way and like most villages in New England there's like old houses here so it's not like we can allow it to just oh come on through the village we're in no problem so we're basically stuck with what we got except in places where there's a wide flood plain like just upstream here like in Waitesfield where it's just this big wide thing and there's not a lot of houses there and just there it can do whatever it wants so Waitesfield as you know has protected the river core and the flood plain from new development to basically not accelerate the amount of water coming out of the town village which is obviously a wonderful benefit from the village because they did have to do that of course if they allowed it all to go into subdivisions and McMansions and fill lots and put in strip malls all of that is naturally acceptable for the National Fund Insurance Program we would end up with this channelized straightened thing with no place with water and tarry and would all come into the town at a higher, faster level with more damage so the idea is that more town as well could do that into the benefit of water barrier to the benefit of other communities you could ask me do you want a river? river and a road so the point in that case is simply it is a lost cause it's already crazy narrow valleys and with straightened rivers I know so many places I drive in the road jammed right up against the edge of it it's really, really vulnerable crazy and that's a historical settlement pattern there may be times where towns say basically that road has blown out six times in the last decade let's find another way to do this I know towns that have explored that and done that it's very hard shy of that what you're really trying to do with river corridor breaks is not allow somebody in the one spot where there is a little bit of a gap between the river or the stream channel and the road somebody is not going to come in there and put a little cap another little, because it's a little place that nobody it's a cheap little lot to sell the bike and sell off you're basically saying look we're trying to give the river whatever room it's possibly able to get that's really the way it only works it doesn't solve the problem you're kind of panicking because most of the development is already happening along the river there are towns like Montpelier where there's lots more development that could happen I'm just saying that there's still lots that could happen and also even on these cheap little sections that happen there's still often really places up the hill where there is space and we're trying to maintain this comes up this situation is a different dynamic with the flood plain this is a natural constraint with the basically with the gorge that's why the bridges and the mills went in here because of this remarkable feature it doesn't make it an easy place to figure out so just to understand the concept what you're saying is this river or area for both the bad river and the loose river is defined on a map we know you can find out exactly where it is and the suggestions that the town consider land use regulations which would significantly restrict development within that corridor you get as much of the land as not being a play hazard area or even a 500 year flood hazard area and much of that it still needs to be agricultural purposes but no structures recreation baseball fields it gets tricky with baseball fields and softball fields because the trick is that within the river corridor you want to do stuff that you don't care so much about so when the river channel comes into it if it's going to throw off your leave people are going to say we're going to erase the money we're going to rip-wrap the bank that might not be the right use if you're going to have to protect it against the river that's the trick if the ball field could just kind of keep escaping the river channel that would be fine private property and people that own this land we essentially the town would be imposing development restrictions is there a money available to purchase conservation defense? so a couple of thoughts one is that these are hazard issues these affect all of us and these are systems the river corridor is in essence working for us today in more town not only because Watesfield has protected protections but because it still was there to function for the community so it is a function that is serving us and what we're trying to do is protect its ability to continue to function so it's something that actually is part of the dynamic functional landscape and basically the point is that we don't want to as private individuals stumble into a way of showing that capacity it's something that it serves us all shy of that there are certain instances where particularly in Vermont we've given a lot of privileges to farmers so farmers can riprap their banks to protect improved fields and they don't need a municipal permit for that they can do that because of the nature of state law and so in those circumstances at the situation where the community through its hazard mitigation plan might try to work with community partners and acquire what's called river corridor easement on some of that land which would give a financial benefit to the farmer in view of hard armoring the banks so the channel would move a little bit every year like it's always done for hundreds and thousands of years but the farmer would have some income to say okay well I'm going to have to I feel it's a little bit different this year so that is another opportunity to pursue it it's interesting to say that because ag uses our executive farmers to do that it's a plan that if most of the active and ag river is in more town in order to work with ag that's a problem but the big thing is trying to get obviously things we have control over in our lives to work together to use information about hazards use information about systems to avoid creating new problems for our neighbors and that's what the river corridor and flood plain have no adverse impact we work together to avoid more disasters for our 50-odd residents in town that are already living in the flood that's for more how does it know adverse impacts how is that determined does the applicant have to bring in to ensure provided opinion that basically the way they're going to do their development there will be no adverse impact the modern bylaw has language and they're basically what I sketched out basically says if it's infill in this area or it's behind or very close to our stream these would be acceptable places that could be where new development could be directed and then if it's a more subtle thing it's often possible for my colleague Sandra who's actually a river scientist in this basin she's often able to come out and look at it and see if there's actually bedrock features that are in there creating a valley wall that wasn't detected otherwise through ground assessment so that's a way in which there could be a refinement to understand what's actually available to the river and help to direct the proposal for development beyond that it's possible to get consultants to do fancier, fancier things typically works pretty easily about that David? People in Moortown have got two options to qualify for the additional 5% E-Fast money one of which is adopting river corridor programs and their associated bylaws Moortown has already adopted a 50 foot Parian boundary so in the small streams there would be almost no difference once the watershed area gets larger than that corridor is defined on that map right there you can look at it after it gets bigger sometimes up to 140 feet each side of the stream the other option is to do the CRS which this is one they discussed and that has the benefits of the 5% E-Fast money plus the discount to the homeowners and that requires if I remember correctly bylaws which say no new development no new structures in that flood hazard area in Moortown in most cases there's very good overlap between the river corridor and the flood hazard area along the Mad River valley and the Winooski with some exceptions in most cases the exception is that the river corridor area is bigger than the flood hazard area so if you adopt the river corridor option this doesn't mean Winooski river and the Mad River but also the streams versus the CRS and the prohibition of new structures you will be affecting more people so you have to decide how you want to approach this and what the costs to individuals and benefits are the question is it is substantial improvement of existing structures also prohibited with the CRS approach or is it just new structures period and also accessory structures just new structures I just wanted to clarify the CRS has those provisions for shadowing and infill to allow a lot of building to be possible is that correct but but maybe there's a way to I think it's a community adopted a standard of you know no natural that might be a long way that might be a long way for me that's next to me Karen may have a question or comment well not along this conversation it's always been curious to me that this River Corridor CRS initiative sort of runs directly counter to our other state initiative to have compact settlements where you are directing on your development and those are as Ned said mostly right adjacent to rivers so a discussion for a different way so it wouldn't allow any infill any infill author in the student to report because there's no adverse impact approach so you could put in skyscrapers up and down all of that is completely acceptable by no adverse impact and that's how it operated in Malkilio as well during this state review it's supportive and complimentary so the other big way of compliments is by protecting the real function of River Corridor's upstream and allow the compact developments to survive I think Jeff will want to have any details any of the projects that adopted CRS also adopted the prohibition of new structures to get 5% cultures they did so one Malkilio is running I think Raul Barrow also has developed a standard there was not even a 30% rate no so CRS has skatey 8 different standards all the way down to a 45% discount but separate from that is the ERAF standard so the ERAF standard basically says you're not making the foot very worse as well as you're in the CRS probably thank you Nick for the presentation I think going forward we need to obviously evaluate this show we have the other program that we already have we'll take a look at that and see what we want to go with the comments you've heard excuse me guys can you just keep it down a little bit um Karen are you guys working on the HMP is that correct the local has their mitigation you've got the regional commission coming on space and you draft a little while ago we put some comments on it and tomorrow night we're going to be going over it we've been working on it for several months we couldn't start until the grant money came there's a lot of things wrong but anyway alright thanks on that we should work together to talk about this process and this presentation here as well now we want to move forward on that there's a plaintiff commission alright is the plaintiff commission going to weigh in or study the difference between the CRS and the river corridor plan yeah tell me they can't wait so fascinating one of the things about this mitigation plan they can deal with five identified five hazards I think flood is significant because they have snow people pray for snow I mean nobody prays for a flood but people not quite sure how this all works if this was just about flood this thing would be good but some of the stuff that it's just I think to share a point if you guys can weigh in that way look at the full talk opportunities here and come in as I would be good to them in today how many do you have five kinds of properties here at rest I remember when I was developing the land and the river and the houses put back the school so it's like it's easy to say no new development in the village because there's no there's nothing to say there's nothing to add did you see the building more times straight into the building no there's lots of people the spectators all around the property you think you have a lot of say where it's the last as it was all the way down the channel is that the sub-union red stress thing I will put it there again for your last try I think if the community proposed basically no net fill I think that might fill a long way the fill is a different but I'm not sure I don't know if that's been fully explored I'll look into it what's the straw or what's the funds whether we have a half or for the other well now in order to get the other five percent so right now we get seven and a half percent and if we have one of these times we get one hundred five percent if we just have the mitigation plan how's the mitigation plan it's a no brainer that's going to be ready in a couple weeks it's to get to the seventeen it's the other five percent but there's not an actual no alright so that's something we should basically let's drop those off for FEMA they'll consider it all of that is our plan which means we need the first and third to be ready to run school life how do you see the time to get that off thank you John alright so we're going to move on if there are no other discussion on this thank you alright so we have some cool business what so you guys went up to Carlson's yeah you know you know we should just you know we should just how can how mark this what for session try and figure out a way of channeling so what right now I was just running right down the question so if we can channel that off onto Carl's property well yeah I guess we're thinking at this point we'll see you get anywhere in a way but come up with a plan for Carl to approve the the classroom that's there you know above the above the turn around a little turn around where it was going to fix up the room anyway to approve the turn around to where Carl wants I think at least I would say that we're getting from the town that they can be the market out there and I would certainly help out if I could coming up with a plan that would be acceptable for the town that we could improve the right way something like that right what they think will be forms of ditching which I would think would be all in Carl some ditch work and things like that so you want to basically just help on the plans to get done and stuff like that or I mean as far as you can remember we're going to fix that because we we're going to approve the turn around and the room getting up to the turn around even though what she was going to do without Martin being there I just didn't know exactly what Martin was going to do he said that last time he was going to do it after the turn around so just working with Carl and Martin to help too as far as getting the plan for that if you can touch base with Martin yeah yeah yeah I'll try to give him a call tomorrow so meet up with him I'm going to meet up with him meet again anything else I didn't have any problems with any of the alternatives proposed for this work excuse me any other old business just a Cheryl actually has done email me the land management plan for our property back here and it definitely used to be amended because because it was done 10 years ago when we were still in the assumption of the shared land so it makes reference to the town and school and so on so I will get in touch with Michelle because she's the chair of the reckoning and see how much involvement they want with that but I think that all the parties that use that property should be involved and we do amend the plan that and you should have some say or somebody from the school should we get some feedback of what they're using it for exactly and that brings all of that into the plan and Ray learned that he's still on the right committee side alright I'll give you the other thing that the business is and we may have this I'm not sure but this was the painting job for the town but there wasn't anything on the notes Ray it was the $9,000 bid is there any I made a motion to get it alright any second for the discussion all in favor and I spoke to them this weekend and they're just a weather thing as soon as it clears up that's just me there I have a remote business too while I was out I was assigned I wasn't there when it happened so I do not know what the expectations of this are what's the board want we're very good at this so very low expectations show up and I don't know any of the discussions we had around this table basically represent our interests you know whatever just stay on top of them whatever I don't support them but you're really asking me if questions are looking at the why's behind things I think that's a good idea to keep up there my view is they're welcome to spend whatever they want but what they choose to spend on it won't necessarily increase what we're going to pay that's that's my thing alright alright anything just you know 10 days and bring the board that's fun thank you for your interesting assignment not a problem that's why we put you there see there was two of us not here at the end of the meeting me and you and they flipped the coin pretty much and then they we approved the plan for a review committee renewing the CD and also for using the money to pay for the truck and I just mentioned last meeting that when we have a full board we just got a part of the decision can I mention which one of these paid for the truck I'll check and you would pay back pay back for a year period that's right that's right the other one was on the the pond that dam drunk trap is building and that we waived the footage square footage fee that would have added up to $1250 and fire department said they could definitely use it as a fire pond so we're going to waive that and we are going to help with putting a road actually up to a rocket I saw that in the editor somewhere or you would say it's nice to have a pond up on that pond it's nice to have a pond do you need a pond? I didn't realize it was so expensive in this town to have a pond for them well it's it's a structure and it's funny it's weird that's just how it is in my audience it's a square footage on a structure so it's the same as what happened it's weird probably something that should be looked at it's really, really it's a structure it's as easy as you want no no it's not what I'm talking about but really the only goal for it is the footage so is that the Sony or that's something you should have looked at whether it was a suit or a S9 you can sort of pond the structure like that and then engineer the feed the feed and then submit them John alright so I guess we have some sign to do let me just first of all let's look at it I guess I just saw that that was Cheryl she wants to be able to have it done before she's done and is anybody else going to be coming on Wednesday is that for the insurance thing yeah yeah I cannot you will be there yes I also have Cheryl if that gentleman could come to our next because I'd like to kind of hear everything as well really depends on how it goes on Wednesday but I would assume that we're going to need to have that in front of us understanding that on that that we can as it counts it's like we can choose to do it or not we could possibly go or not, we're right which so I want to hear arguments but just reasoning why don't you need a signature? I'm sorry so I just went through there's some open paper criminals here so we get the new truck on Friday no one came home so we got it, I think it was on Friday I was at least I knew I'd follow the old one back to St. Johnsbury we did see the old one at St. Johnsbury because we did go to a new table for structure so we did see the old one but he didn't tell me when the new one was coming in that would be Friday, I think they probably squawked at the same time but so following the thing definitely there was a lot of good problems old lights on the right-hand side and things are worn off on the right hand and it started to rain and the guy I put his window down and the window, I remember stepping on it and telling me the window doesn't squawk somebody's out and he's trying to get everyone one of those things and I'm signing this for one as you guys can see in the back this is for a curb cut Martin did sign it but it's a smaller copy so that's what they're wearing where is it? I don't know, I'm sorry this is for me is it for a curb cut? 800 802 U.S. room 2 that's a bad idea I'm going to say ash, mud, woods, dry coffee coffee we're going to be able to get one on course