 can everybody hear me? Okay, let's we can get started for tonight's special meeting of the city council. I will call the meeting to order and I'll start out with talking about some meeting logistics and I'll just mention to people we have always have the agenda posted on the city web page and if you're subscribing to the city manager's weekly updates you will also get that and we also have printed copies on the table by the side of the room. Anyone who's appearing remotely please indicate your change your name on your display to your first and last name. Anyone who speaks please indicate by stating your name and where you live. We pursue into our rules of conduct we ask that you keep your comments to two minutes and Councillor Bate will assist us with the with timekeeping. Anyone who speaks must be called on by the chair and please keep your comments pertinent to the the matter we're discussing. We'll start by first item on the agenda is to approve the agenda is does anyone know of any changes to tonight's agenda? Okay hearing none the agenda is approved next item on the agenda is general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on any matter that is not on tonight's agenda and I will start with the recognizing people in the room. Steve Whitaker you're standing up so I'm guessing you're seeking to be recognized. Yes Steve Whitaker there are not any agendas over here on the side of the room to correct the chair so therefore I couldn't speak up ahead of time to ask anything be removed from the consent agenda because I was not able and there's not one in the book packet that says it's a packet so precision is important especially when it affects people's rights to speak to and or remove things from the consent agenda. I want to flag the fact that we've spent probably over a hundred thousand dollars on Chad Bean not working and I just made the connection to the fact that the union contracts for our police and fire were swept through on a consent agenda with no opportunity for discussion so the fact that you're squandering the public's tax dollars paying somebody to not come to work while you know under fear of threat of litigation is really not of service to the community. The trash continues to overflow the snow plowing is leaving like the handicapped spot in front of the Kellogg Hubbard library is half full of snow many of the snow debris from the plow large chunks more than a foot of ice that could damage automobiles are left in the road this is not okay this is it's irresponsible it's not what we're paying for in tax dollars so I really wonder if we don't need a system of somebody to check and and report this stuff back because apparently none of y'all notice it and it shouldn't be left to me to come here and run around town and take photos of the the garbage overflowing and the you know the public works failures and you have y'all just yawn and you know say that it's par for the course. I also want to call to the question I understand you may be running for mayor and the fact that when I raised serious issues about the accountability of the money that the city money that goes to Good Samaritan and the theft and the sexual assaults that were going on there and you just said I find no merit to any of it and swept it under the rug. Similarly you are on the police review commission and the killing Chad Bean of Mark Johnson where there was clear records in the dispatch system that this person was suicidal, hallucinating, off his meds, unstable, wanted to jump off the bridge and he was well beyond the distance of any marksman with a pistol so Chad Bean was not under a threat and we shot him and killed him and you swept that under the rug without proper airing. Those are festering issues in this community with trust and leadership and it's not okay to have people who sweep things under the rug take a leadership it's time to start putting this city on a healing process and that means less corruption and cover-ups going on. I'm a little too angry to proceed with the rest of my two minutes. Thank you anybody else inside the room looking to be recognized I don't see anybody and anyone joining us online I do not see any hands raised but I'll just pause for a moment to see okay unless someone speaks out I will move to the next item on the agenda which is the consent agenda and we have nothing on the consent agenda. Moving to item six the country club road presentation and that's where we are. Great thank you Mr. Council President. I'm going to quickly turn this over to our project team which is planning our community development specialist Josh Jerome our community our communications specialist coordinator Evelyn Prim recreation director Arnie McMullen and from Whiteenburg Stephanie Clark so I don't know what and I would just well and I think tonight's presentation is basically to outline the findings on the site and then lay out the next future steps so it's not really it's meant to be more of a site specific update than it is to be full discussion on the future uses that we've got sessions coming so that I'll turn it over to Josh. You probably need to be on top of the mic more. Stephanie's going to handle the beginning of the presentation here and she is online. Hello everybody can you hear me okay in the room? Okay yes great and hopefully everyone remotely can too. Callie might be the only one I can see so hi Callie. Thanks for nodding okay great. With me tonight I also have Brad Ketterling from VHB if you want to wave Brad and from Black Rivers Design we have Mike Vidi and Jim Drummond both available to answer questions once we get into things a little bit more questions on the site findings so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and have some slides to go through so we can kind of all be on the same page. Very excited to be here tonight it is the culmination of a lot of work and the as you know a lot of history over the last several months where we've been deep in the weeds on the site planning and due diligence. Tonight we're going to go through an update on the process I want to tell you where we've been and where we are and where we're going just a reminder to some but education to others. Recap the fall community conversations we had. Josh is going to give you some data on housing and we'll explain that a little more and recap the the site due diligence findings which I know everyone's anxious to hear more about all the due diligence we've done and then lastly we're going to preview this the tight site test sketches the opportunities and constraints plans which as Bill had mentioned this is a preview leading into what's forthcoming as you saw in your packet. We're having a series of public meetings and creating a full court press of education community education around these sketches to encourage the conversation and gather input and so tonight is not the night for deep diving into the actual sketches but more of a process update and a site update and then kind of letting you know about these next steps and we hope that we're happy to answer questions about all of those and we hope that everyone who's at this meeting can join us for some of the community meetings. So just to review the process where we've been the community the city acquired the property in the spring and there were community conversations begun back then. We picked up the consulting team was hired in September and we continued those community conversations through the fall concurrently we worked on the due diligence studies and the analyses and that concluded in about December. We're now in the winter stage evaluating the opportunities and constraints with a series of public meetings and opportunity different opportunities for input. Then this work is going to continue into the spring with concept planning and more public meetings this is going to be a new set of plans for the community to respond to and following that we're going that's when the council is going to need to make a decision to put forward the the pull the chosen plan so that the team can put together what's called an actionable master plan and that will have a set of recommendations for more due diligence more opportunities for input and please note this is not a final land plan as many factors are subject to change based on the due diligence that is found in those future phases. What I want to note about process here because process is important is that we know time is of the essence funding is available now that may not be available forever. We know that there are needs right now very significant needs right now however we are also following a process to maintain transparency to be inclusive of as many perspectives as possible and to ensure the best practices of following due diligence so that means that development is still a few years away and I just say that so that it sets the understanding for the community that this isn't happening tomorrow so in this win in the fall process what we heard was that an inclusive and transparent process is paramount so to meet people where they are I just wanted to give you a quick summary of all the different ways that during this phase stage where we're getting into some of the testing and opportunities and constraints and the use of the site itself we are trying to find as many stakeholders as possible as I said there are meetings coming up those meetings are on the 28th the 2nd of February and the 9th of February there is a poll co-link on the website that people can go to to register or to state their interest in attending it is not required to register but we are encouraging the community to do that so we can engage attendance make sure we have enough space for everybody we've we've created an educational poster that's going to be posted around town and civic and public places there's a handout being distributed at there was one handout distributed at the first farmers market notifying people of the opportunities for input and also another going to be distributed distributed at this weekend's farmers market the educational poster and paper copy of the survey will be distributed with meals on wheels deliveries we've also created a video it's a five minute video very as short as could possibly be to be available on the website on the youtube city's youtube channel by the end of the week this will be posted describing the property and the opportunities and the questions to the public sending the public to the survey in particular because we understand that this meetings are not for everyone that is some of the feedback we heard the poll the survey is going to be using poll co which the city has used before there's a link on the website there will be a qr code on the print materials that will be open through the 17th of February and is intended to gather input from a range of people josh will be featured on vermont viewpoint on wdev with pat mcdonald on january 24th at 9am we are going to have the plans physically located up at city hall the library and the rec center and then updates will regularly go out via the recreation and montpelier live newsletters as well as the site specific this project specific newsletter which people can sign up for if they haven't already on the facebook pay on the montpelier website they can sign up for the newsletter we will continue to post on facebook front porch forum and the bridge there's a january bridge article coming out by bill focusing on this project and leading into the public engagement meetings i'm gonna take a quick breath here so it's a lot of ways to get involved we encourage everybody to spread the word as much as possible please share the video on social media please get others to take the survey or to attend a meeting or watch or watch the video with that said i'd like to talk a little bit about the fall process and explain some of what we found there were several meetings conducted public meetings stakeholder meetings of utter meetings we received many emails had many conversations and we also surveyed the montpelier business community as well as the montpelier high school students 83 high school students responded to a survey and giving their opinion about this as well and these were some of the findings but not surprisingly the top three priorities identified were housing recreation and environmental sensitivity the top planning concerns among most stakeholders were transportation and site access and the top procedural concern was ensuring an inclusive and transport process so because housing is such a top priority we wanted to give a little more data for the council to consider ultimately you will be the ones making the decision to direct the land plan the actual master plan that will indicate housing types so we wanted to make sure council had what it needed in order to make the kind of decision that needs to be made about housing product so josh can speak to this more and i will handle the slides great thanks Stephanie I think it's no surprise to anybody who's paying attention that Montpelier is an aging community just like a lot of communities around the state you can see the fastest growing age cohort is 65 to 74 years old according to acs estimates all of this data is acs it's not the decennial 2020 data which will be a little more accurate in the next data trunch to be released will be this coming May so we'll have some better some better data to go off from this spring but we're an aging community next slide and so what's important to also recognize is we're an aging community and the average household size continues to decrease over the last few decades 1974 the average size was almost four now Montpelier's average size is 1.9 so you have an aging population not as many people living in the housing stock that's available next slide and so this shows the mismatch of housing stock that we have studios one bedrooms two three four five more compared to the household size of our community where 35 percent of our household size is actually one person household although less than 10 percent of our housing stock is studio less i think it's 21 percent is studio in one bedroom so there's a real mismatch on that the younger professional in who's a single person needing a space there's not a lot of options out there for them and on the opposite end where you have the elders of our community you might have one or two people in a house with four or five bedrooms so there's a mismatch and again this is very common in communities throughout you know the northeast Vermont we're an overbuilt community because we're not having the large families that we once were next slide and we're not keeping up with producing enough housing stock in Montpelier this this next slide slows shows the rate of change in the housing supply um which has diminished greatly since 19 since the 1980s um according to AHS estimates is picked up a little bit um since 2010 but again we'll have some better numbers come this uh this spring from the census um but still it's not enough it's not enough of new units being created next slide and real estate transactions in our community continue to rise the average single family residence sold in 2022 was almost $400,000 as opposed to in 2018 it was about 277,000 so we've seen a dramatic increase in single family residence cost as well as multifamily residences two unit two unit multifamily residences average about 426,000 but once you get beyond four five six seven units those those costs escalate up to over a million dollars next cost and this this slide's really important because this shows what affordability is in this community for renters and for homeowners so you know anybody paying more than 30 percent of their gross income on their household expenses is not considered to be affordable and based on census data it shows that over 35 percent of Montpeliers renters are in unaffordable renting situations and likewise home owners also about 16 percent are in unaffordable situations this data is is old it's still only 2016 to 2020 ACS estimates I no doubt that these numbers are probably higher and right now in 2023 so something to really focus on is how do we become a more affordable community for renters and for homeowners and these are these this is all the housing slides in points that we wanted to make right now thank you thanks Josh thank you so moving from the housing data the following slides before I get to them are all on the website and I understand that these might be small images especially for people in the room so these are all on the website for further review when this meeting concludes um Stephanie can you tell that you're frozen okay I'm back so everyone can hear me okay all right 16 years in this business that has never happened I am so sorry I appreciate everyone's patience and understanding that I am human and in Burlington and I was just telling Josh before this that I was hoping that 35s weren't going to cause interference and here we are so thank you so much for your patience I'm going to load up my screen here and we'll pick up where we left off so as I was saying the due diligence phase we were in the process of talking about the findings so these these plans again these plans will be on the website tomorrow that you can see in bigger detail but VHB environmental scientists performed both an evaluation of existing online mapping maintained by A&R as well as field and warriors in September and October of 2022 for various natural resources including wetlands streams rare plant species and natural communities these studies determined that a variety of natural resources are present within the project parcel including wetlands and intermittent per and perennial streams and our subject that are subject to state and federal jurisdiction streams generally flow from north to south draining to the Winooski river and the largest wetland features are located in the steep and forested southern southern portion of the parcel some distance from the areas being evaluated for potential development that we'll get into next no rare threatened and endangered plate plant species were all observed with only one uncommon plant species mapped in one of the forested the forested wetland features streams and wetlands and their respective state regulated buffers are shown on the natural resources map which is in front of you now called existing conditions and are included as the underlays on the sketches where we're going to see additionally soil mapping indicates there are primary agricultural soils here they underlie much of the project area including most of the former golf course area there in the yellow the traffic assessment also conducted by vhb evaluated access traffic volumes and the and transit determined that there is adequate capacity at the us to intersection with country club road but that with any significant development a signal will be warranted this study also identified the well-known issue of limited access and poor accessibility and the traffic and access we identify as something we'll need to put forward in the recommendation for phase two to be studied more carefully once there's a desired development plan in place the archaeological assessment was conducted by crown consulting six sites were identified within under the undisturbed wooded sections and along the southern margins of the golf course and then the existing building itself the clubhouse that's shown here on the plan was assessed by black river design and they found that it was in good shape and could be reused with some limitations for example low ratio of exterior wall surface to floor area and some limited headroom that's as much as i'm going to go into tonight but all of those studies can be found in the city council packet on the website that will also be within the on this the country club road page for anyone to review and a summary of that is been in the memo that we provided to council the buildable areas map that's also within the packet on the website highlights the notable opportunities and constraints for development of any kind this is overlaid on top of the natural resources but it really highlights where there can be development where there can't be development and what kind of limitations there are in each of these nodes so that brings us to the question for winter 2023 this is the question for the public knowing the site feature limitations now and the community's identified needs how would you lay out the site so we have prepared some test sketches is what they're called this at this stage of the process we're starting with looking at housing and recreation those are the most land intensive uses there the feedback that we got at the fall was that varying types of housing was desired varying types of recreation was desired we are showing in these sketches two kind of extremes one being maximum housing one being maximum recreation and showing something on the spectrum in between and we're starting here because we want to gather feedback and direction about the scale what to include and what to accommodate and start envisioning the massing on the site we because of the way we're doing this process we can't presume to know what the desire of the community would be so we know that this is these these sketches are not exhaustive they do not address all of the features that are going to be needed to be included on the actual master plan they don't address wildlife corridors or full connection to a budding properties or solve the transportation issues but because this is an iterative process those will depend on the direction from this particular stage so test a is maximum housing this shows a mix of a lot of different types of housing product three and five story multifamily triplexes single family some on smaller lots some on larger lots this limits the recreation to really the two wooded eastern and western areas and some light recreation can occur in the stream and wetland buffers but maximum housing is going to produce approximately 513 units the next next test shows the other end of the spectrum what if it was entirely recreation absolutely no new housing approximately 300 000 square feet of fields a cluster of recreation buildings new and the conversion of the existing totaling around 66 000 square feet some hillside recreation and preservation and use of those natural areas to the east and west and then somewhere kind of on that spectrum is what we're calling the balanced housing and recreation plan test scene which shows that it could possibly accommodate between 170 to 230 units depending on if you went up three stories or five stories shows a mix of multifamily triplexes single family approximately 120 square feet of fields a cluster of recreation buildings new and conversion of existing again totaling about 66 000 square feet some smaller hillside recreation and the preservation of those two eastern and western nodes so again these are not final concepts this is an order of magnitude exercise to gain an understanding of the community's desired direction not a decision for these particular land uses while these address some of the community's concerns such as the existing many people said they wanted to see the existing developed areas be used for future development and we show some areas where you could connect to a budding properties the future concepts will need to take into account more design considerations like viewsheds wildlife corridors reuse of those walking paths the more granular and it's not known if we can meet all of these desires but the design team will attempt to show the various impacts and accommodations required to get to those desired outcomes so we have a variety of questions for the public that we're going to be putting out there in the video as well as capturing some of these in the survey we hope that folks will participate and get us their opinions and get us their feedback on these plans through all the various channels we've previously discussed so please my ask is that you encourage others to visit the website to look at the materials to take the survey come to one of our meetings and with that I'll stop so we can get to questions I can leave my screen up or I can take it down so we can see each other it's up to the will of the council thanks Stephanie um we can start with members of the council do we have questions I don't think we you you want it up or down there we go okay Donna were you raising your hand to go first oh okay anybody um oh oh sorry first go ahead yes yeah um so um thank you sorry thank you for all this um it's very comprehensive and so I'm looking at the different test plans and you've got the one that's maximizing counting the one that's all recreation the one that's a balance um I'm wondering just in general how the public input that you've received so far informs the development of these test plans so um for instance the we've got one here that's all recreation were there folks who were advocating for that was that a strong message that you got from the public that maybe it should be all recreation or all housing or vice versa and so just I wanted to know how what you heard from the public that made it into these test plans gotcha yeah great question um no there were a few people that said no development whatsoever no um housing development or you know any kind of big physical footprint um and there were people who said they really wanted as much housing as possible so there were a few opinions I would not say that those represented the the majority of opinions by any means but the purpose of showing kind of when people when there's people that have said we really want housing and we really want recreation some have been stronger on one stronger on another we wanted to show what those compromises will be if you really want more housing this is what you might be giving up in terms of recreation and if this is what you want for recreation this is how much housing you might be giving up so it was a way to kind of put um a contrast in front of people for them to understand kind of the different tradeoffs because it's not an infinite site so I would say to answer your question more directly we got opinions on the entire spectrum most people I would say we're more centered in the center a little bit of both or more housing than rec or more rec than housing but only a few on those on those end of the spectrum I know the counselor cone has joined remotely so why don't you and answer yourself and then go ahead with your questions yeah hi everyone I'm pink thank you for the presentation I just want to ask there are three different tests you called right ABC and then you show um in your present there are some issues with affordable housing so which one which test is the best solution for that problem have you done anything to understand that or they are two different things I think the question just to make sure I'm clear was um do any of these represent something that's more affordable or less affordable in terms of the housing yeah because we have yeah right we have um affordable housing issue in our town so doing test a or test c will be the maybe a solution for that if I did have you done anything about it if you haven't done it's okay yeah no I appreciate the question I think it's a great question um and we're writing these down because if you're asking it someone else might be asking it too so we want to have we want to be prepared so that's really helpful um I wouldn't say we've looked at that question specifically and these don't get at the affordability question per se like you kind of said at the end is it not really comparing apples to apples with that and that's true that being said what we know about the housing crisis is that we have a housing shortage at all price points and what's happening is that there's a crunch on a lot of housing products because even if you're building a multimillion dollar house which we're not proposing here but you had something like that someone's going to buy that instead of buying up the four bedroom three bedroom middle income house that more people need so you create supply the supply is going to help your affordability problem so on that general principle max housing might be your best solution that being said it's very much going to depend on the developer because again this is not there's there's not a scenario in my mind at this stage in winter that I would say the city should be the developer of the housing more than likely you're going to subdivide and a piece of this is going to go to a developer put it out for an rfp with specifications of what the city is looking for and that developer is going to build the product that you're looking for or or may propose something within a range and so it could be the test C is just as affordable in terms of producing affordable housing stock because the developer might come forward with a plan that shows the majority of all of that housing to be affordable housing stock so a little bit will be to be determined that's a really good question we've jotted that down so thank you thanks Stephanie I had a couple of thoughts one had to do with the the method of getting word out to people and I know that the city and the school district are two different entities but if you could get the all the teachers to send things home with the kids from the school that would not only expand the reach but also get the hopefully get younger people out since people my age aren't don't have kids in the schools but younger people do with with regard to I noticed in in reading through the comments that people made at the meetings or or submitted later there were a number of comments relating to where the recreation center should go and whether it whether we should be putting it on this property at all or whether we should be doing some kind of adaptation of the of the gym up at Vermont College of Fine Arts and I understand that your mandate has sort of been expanded to also look at the VCFA property and so maybe not that's not exactly okay but continue and I'll start back to that so so the question is one of the questions about recreation is have you have you looked at whether the gymnasium building or fitness building at VCFA is a reasonable prospect for a new recreation center for the city? Yes okay that's your question yeah yeah so we yeah we haven't been necessarily brought in to look at that per se but we have had some preliminary conversations to see what what might be possible there in terms of if they if it's still available if it's you know if it's available on the market those conversations are ongoing I don't have any I don't have any conclusions on that right now but I would say that one of the questions we have you know about that property is would it be suitable for what's needed is it possible to convert is there this you know is the infrastructure of the building such that it would support what's needed and I don't have an answer to that either even if it was available and the question is you know is it available for purchase or have those conversations proceeded so I don't I don't have an answer for that but it's a concurrent conversation the city is having I would say. Thanks and with regard to the truth another another recreation related question in the in the hybrid model which I think was Model C does that provide enough room for the kind of modernized recreation facility that we're looking for? So that that's a great question the the footprint and the kind of I wouldn't go so far as even calling it a blueprint the kind of overall concept that was used for the test C and and for test B building wise came from the recreation center and the recreation center or the rec department I mean came up with kind of a this would be what's ideal from from that from their perspective and so max recreation in particular has all the elements test C the balance does not it has you know less rec fields for example then would be ideal but that was kind of our our starting point but more research is needed too about what exactly is needed for recreation for the community and so this was really a starting point for the community to respond to. Okay thanks and Carrie. Yeah I guess I kind of have a follow-up on that about the you said that the the recreation department gave you information that you used to for the test plan that had recreation in it and I'm wondering if if that's in this 109 page document that we got somewhere I didn't see it. You didn't read every word of every page Carrie. No it's not no you you're okay you're astute to point out it's not in there this was a this came out of conversation we had several conversations with the rec department and with some of the did the public input inform any of that at all as well or or was that specifically what's on the plans shown yet again we're starting kind of with the the highest and and factoring in some of the elements that a lot of the elements that were in that recommendation from the rec department do capture what was mentioned in the community because it included everything. Yeah it included almost everything that that folks have been saying. Hey Donna. Stephanie I'm a visual person and the three scenarios of your test sketches went by too too fast because they weren't in the attached so I will have a lot more once I see that but it comes back to the questions of you're gathering information and you said you use the Montpelier rec department and they gave us some scenarios before we obtained the purchase of the country club and we did a lot of surveying of what was needed when we looked at the berry street rec renovations so I'm assuming you have all of that. I don't think I do I think what we have what was given to me was from the rec department of the most recent I would say culmination of that and maybe is I don't know Bill if Arnie is there in the room. Yes so he may have some iteration. It would be nice if we had things for all the sketches they provided us before we got into this. Where those not in the packet I thought we provided the sketch. I'm a visual person too Donna. And before you get into that my other question which you can think about why Arnie's talking is I was curious as to who you've been talking to outside of the city like are there land developers or housing developers that you just had in casual conversations of what they felt as far as a balance of trying to mix dense housing with single housing and you know in any other groups that were interested in the uses of the property is that happening now or is that going to be at one of the other stages. Okay I'll think about that and Arnie can speak to the rec. Yeah. Hi Arnie McMullen from the recreation department. Testing. Arnie from the recreation department. Yeah they asked me for an idea of what we were looking at for a footprint for a and let's let's change the name from recreation center to community center because one of the things we don't want to do is outgrow a possible facility before we even get started. I mean when you look at community type buildings you want to look 50 to 100 years into the future because this is stuff that's going to be used far beyond my time here. But one of the things we wanted to make sure we included was an indoor walking track because as people spoke we have an aging community. A lot of seniors can't walk outside in the wintertime and people with access issues can't either. So this would provide that but we're trying to look for multiple space use gyms you know having you know two or three basketball courts so we could think about in the future AAU tournaments which bring a lot of people to community. Talk about economic opportunities for businesses you know in different things like that and many other core functions that we do like our youth basketball program. We're struggling right now just to have space for our youth basketball program because it is more challenging to use some of the other facilities in the city. So you know part of what we want to make sure we do is we don't outgrow it in the first year. I did give them a ballpark square footage but you know it depends how big you want to make the footprint whether you go out or up. But it does include community rooms and other types of things that you would use in a community center for possibly even having community dinners if you wanted to do something like that. And we also talked about that this could also be an emergency space so if you know there was an issue you have an emergency shelter that's certainly out of the flood plain which not all of our facilities are. So you know so those are some things we're trying to think about of all the possible uses that a community center could use and also for senior programming you know so they have a very tight space where they are right now. So I think part of the question from council member Bate was when we were looking at this two or three years ago and we ultimately at that point we're going to renovate the rec center. We did a community survey of what people wanted to see in a rec center. Do you remember that? Yeah. And so the question is is that feedback include was that provided? That's correct. Yeah we included what was part of that. We just so that was all given to that was provided to the consultant. Yep. Well and likewise in that discussion we talked about in our exercise rooms but space for child care. And so I don't you know I don't I don't know if that's going to be a link behind her drawing so we know where your mindset is now with a bigger picture but I'd love to have it comprehensive. Got nothing wrong but I think that the the specific uses of the space is something that's you know we're further down behind that right now it's sort of the massing you just if we'd have this much area for rec and then what went in it and who ran it and how that all worked would be something we we'd move toward. So I child care I know has been a huge need identified. Yeah I'm only concerned in thinking of those in as much as they're included in the footprint that's all. That's all. Thank you. And they did also mention the existing building which has child care in it now would be a potential not being not big enough. You could be right. Arnie I'll ask you the same question that I asked Stephanie about the Vermont College gym and whether you have looked at that and have any thoughts. Honestly I spent about three years on that campus. I did my time at Norwich. I graduated from there. And I was a gym supervisor at Vermont College at the time when they had that and that really you're not trading much you're actually going a lateral move. So if you want to see in my opinion if you want to see recreation grow and to create a real community center I don't think that's the space that's going to do it for you. So it's about the same size as the current gym right now. I think that's it. I'd heard that from someone. Carrie? Yeah question about the scope of this this work that the consultants are doing because you had mentioned that they're you were under the person that their scope had expanded to include looking at the is that correct? No no we hired them to do this project. I don't know is part of the feedback with VCFA was excuse me this site they were people in the community that said should we look at VCFA and we convened a conversation. Their firm is also doing VCFA. So that may be where the confusion is that so they're right. So and so they've kind of done the Chinese you know the firewall between doing that so we convened a conversation just to see what was available but I know Stephanie's not working on that project at all. Yeah not it, not me. And David's not working on our project so they're split up. So I think that might be where the confusion is. We did have a conversation about where it was at and at that point that our thinking about what was needed wasn't far enough along to really make it. So I think to Stephanie's statement that there were that there are ongoing conversations were open to it but we're not really that's not what we're focusing. So I wanted to get back to Councillor Bates question. You asked about other land developers if other housing developers have opined or anything we have not gone that far yet that feels a little premature at this stage again because if the community comes back saying we really want like more rec and really keep that housing super confined to just the very entrance to the site for example that will very much dictate what can be done and a lot of what a developer is going to look at is available acreage and what is available you know and where is that going to be located and I think your point is that they could provide a perspective about how the use is kind of interface and you know how do you how do you bring the two together and that's why we have VHB on because VHB does the land planning for developers. I mean that's what they do and so a developer would actually use VHB to do the land planning and so we're using them to help us envision what that would look like. So these are three scenarios obviously two extremes and one in the middle that show how those things could interface and then we'll kind of where I think we're probably going to end up is somewhere on that spectrum and it's going to be about the dial and how do you bring those things together and then this next phase is really stage is really going to be pulling in well there's all these elements we also want solar array or you know skate park or dog park you know how do we incorporate all of that and and accommodate it within this space. Well yes and I understand the timing but I do think there's an advantage for you you having in your repertoire the information that a realtor like has as well as land developers on what people look for and what what happens when you start mixing dense housing whether it's condos or duplexes with singles housing that's all I was just thinking so that when we then reach for the stars we have somebody standing there saying well there is this market pattern for people yes that's what we found because luckily we've had a lot of local developers develop and housing recent and so I think they would have a lot of experience we could gain from. Donna I'm sorry Lauren I'm sorry I'm looking right at you yeah I mean a lot of the questions I had have been asked I mean I think it's notable that it looks like it really simplifies things that you're really centering the rack at the existing building that that looks like a usable building like there's not multiple places where maybe putting a rec center would be appropriate so like in a lot of ways the designs look very scalable and like you could do like a little more housing and it looks like there's a lot of sites that are appropriate for housing which is really exciting that there's a number of configurations so I mean I think in a lot of ways this really narrows the questions for the community in a really nice way so I'm excited to see that that like we can really get to the crux of like what's that balance between housing and rec and you know making this just a great site that's meeting a lot of community needs ideally so I mean overall I'm just kind of eager to get the community feedback I know we've talked about it before but the social and economic justice committee I know that there were some you know questions raised about how to make sure we're like reading as many people as possible I think that group would continue to be interested and you know if you want to join one of our meetings maybe at 8 a.m. and happy to invite you and do some brainstorming of reaching some of those harder to reach communities to get some of that feedback and really put that into this process but really really great to see all this and appreciative of all the work that's clearly. Thank you and you highlighted a point I didn't get a chance to say which is you're right that the natural resources themselves and the opportunities and constraints of the site itself does dial in where development can happen and it was the recommendation of the land planners that you do put your recreation down centered where kind of the existing infrastructure is because again if you're having you know more people visit the site than live there because they're visiting the recreation you don't want them driving through your neighborhoods and your your small streets to get to the rec center so that made a lot of sense and I think to answer your other point we did yeah we were consulting as you know with C. Jack in the fall and that was very informative to some of their recommendations for just city procedure in general inform some of that list very long list of the different ways we're trying to do outreach but we're still open to other suggestions this is a you know a multiple week month long stage and there's an opportunity in the spring to do this again so it's always process improvement thanks Balin yeah thank you I was uh wondering what will happen uh old recreation center buildings if they decided to move this new uh place is there any plan about it we will keep it like again recreation buildings or there will be a plan to turn them into a housing so I would say that is an open question there's no you know we have had a lot of discussion about possible uses for that building including keeping it as recreation including using it for some facility for the homeless community to you know housing and I think we would probably undergo a similar perhaps not it wouldn't have to be as long because we wouldn't have all the natural resources infants or anything but I think we would probably do another community process um but certainly there's some urgent needs uh so my thought would be as soon as we make a decision about what we're going to do and say the say for the sake of discussion that that decision involved proposing and building a rec center at country club road you know that process in itself you know then designing building getting funding is going to take a year or two constructing it so while while we're preparing for that move we would then be preparing so we would be we wouldn't be wasting time so we could know immediately what was going to happen to that building you know that building has a huge amount of challenges it has asbestos it's not accessible it's it's it's a funky old building so we you know there I think there would be a serious question it should be evaluated whether reuse attempted to readaptive reuse of that building makes sense or you know whether it be taken down and just rebuilt uh into something new and you know more suitable to what the future needs would be thank you Donna now in the packet that I did find was the uh discussion about the existing building the old else club building are we discussing that tonight um can I mean clarifying questions about that assessment I think we totally can yeah I mean sure you have questions questions or observations well I there I mean I guess I was looking for observations from the Stephanie's group and from Black River as to you know just sort of going over this so that the council and the public both have it in their mind uh huh yeah I mean Jim or Mike um could probably give you the the two-minute spio of overview so that you have the context and then you could bore into some specific questions if that's helpful I would prefer that that'd be great yes um Jim or Mike I don't know really where to start except that our general conclusion is that the building that's there is in actually quite good shape um it lends it's I mean was we wrote in our existing conditions report there are some uses it doesn't lend itself to so well um for example housing because the amount of interior volume to the amount of exterior wall where you could have windows is not a very good ratio um and it wouldn't be very good for you couldn't do like a like a gym where there's ball games or something like that because there's not any spaces with enough ceiling height but that said there's a lot of other things you could do that could be potential uses in a community center including sort of um health workout type spaces or community meeting rooms or catering facilities or commercial office space daycare there's any number of things that could go in there and it's as they say there's there's a quite a lot of retained value in the building from from what we've observed and we could do we could do a lot of that with while essentially retaining the shell and just configuring what the inside of the building looks like it's pretty flexible that way because it is actually a steel frame um with you know sort of non-bearing partitions in it so it's it's not like an old wood house or something where you know all the walls are holding up the floors above and so there's a fair amount of flexibility with you know not unlimited but that's quite quite good I don't know Mike did did I miss anything or no well not for me you didn't but thank you but my other my other question then again it's part of the process when the hub expressed interest in perhaps creating a public private partnership we talked about that we might need to reach out into the community to see if other groups are interested do you perceive something in the future that we would be doing that as part of this act of looking at not only this building but seeing if indeed there were other organizations in the community that wanted to join us right yeah it's really important for their aspects my comment would be as if it helps maybe raise money or get some some funding it might be an avenue to look at I don't know how you would go about it exactly but sorry Stephanie I don't know if I can that's okay yeah we yeah we wear that falls in the process Donna I'm not 100 percent right now um because again it's so hard to predict the process when the public we want the public to guide the process so we can't predict what the public will say um again what if what if the response was yeah we need 500 units like I don't care about you know this let's put recreation elsewhere that little existing building can be converted into something but otherwise you know I don't think I don't know that that's out of realm of possibility I really just don't and so that would then dictate those kinds of conversations so I would say it's in the process though and it could even be a phase two recommendation again if you've got this area designated for rec how is that going to be programmed it's going to be a pretty detailed analysis that's outside of the scope of this phase because it's also incorporating revenue streams and looking at um programming and different kinds of cross pollination that's going to be really important you mentioned daycare for example now you've got you know another private user but is it also somehow related to a co-housing use of some sort if you had a developer come forward with from the RFP process you know that wanted to make use of that you know so there's a lot of different iterations we want to be open to you and it's your own fault you know all of you I mean you've done such a great job of presenting so many ideas we want to think the next step and the next step so you have to contain it but we don't want to lose these ideas either so thank you that's been my life for the last four months absolutely I hear you I have to say that one of I was very encouraged at seeing the the analysis of the of the real estate and seeing that there's not major impediments to do a significant amount of housing and other development that we want to see while still retaining a good amount of open space and environmental protection so I think that that given that given that we got into the purchase fairly quickly to have it be have have you come back and say well this looks like a space that really can be put to use for the the range of possibilities that the people of Montpelier want is very encouraging to me I think you bring up a great point and I wanted to highlight that you know in the natural resources assessment what we've done is inventory what's there and while what we've highlighted as buildable areas are based on a lot of you know topography and staying out of buffers there are still some elements we should you know make sure we're flagging for the next phase which is basically when we get a land idea in mind then we have to look further deeper at the impacts and so for example primary ag soils is going to be one of things that gets impacted if you know we're doing building on on primary ag soils one of the complications of a project like this is it's not a straightforward where a lot of times you have a parcel of land and there's a desired use of the hospital comes in says we need a medical clinic here it needs to be this many square foot square feet tell us what the impacts are and we'll mitigate them or look through the permit implications in this case we're doing it a bit iteratively here and almost in reverse so it's telling us okay we think we can do this let's see what we want to build and then we have to go back though and test it against permit regulations we have to get approvals for that so when I said like the actionable master plan is not necessarily the final land plan that's because there's additional steps that will need to be taken to make sure that these things are doable and completely feasible but you can't go all the way down that path until you know what you want to build so we're running into a bit of chicken and egg as it goes with master planning okay thanks if people in the council are satisfied I'll open it up to questions from the public starting with people in the room Steve and then Steve Walker I only heard mentioned from the I guess he was black over design is that David Jim Drummond Jim that was the only mention I heard of having potential I forget what were he used but the idea of commercial space workshop space so that people could actually live and earn a living on the same property I think we're we're treading far afield to imagine that we're gonna petrol or electric everybody from Montpelier up to this site to to recreate it's it's a transportation nightmare even for the people who want to you know buy a lot there so the idea making that space somewhat self-reliant for food or men or work without so much travel would give us the benefits of the economic development possibly we could allow I mean if it's if it's designed to accommodate some of the older folks and have housing affordable housing for caregivers maybe that'll free up some of the big houses that only have you know one person in a four-bedroom home in Montpelier but we need to think about making it attractive to for both of those functions elderly care caregivers and people who want to live and work nearby and I didn't hear much of any of that in these early concepts but I'm sure you're doing a good job keep it up thanks um okay Ethan my same question whether there's any thought of any commercial space okay same same okay thanks looking at people online um I have to see Emma Zava is up first hi there can you hear me yes hi Emma Zava's um resident of Montpelier um so as I was looking at the the sketches I was curious and I think a lot of city counselors have asked questions about sort of the recreation and what went into that um but I was curious if the consultant could speak a little bit more to sort of the the fields or designs like what was put sort of onto those maps because I feel like I don't have a really good sense of like what what is is needed or wanted and sort of why we selected these fields or the science building or that type of thing and I think um sort of to follow up on that like I really appreciated the data that Josh shared on sort of the housing affordability crisis in Montpelier um and I would love to like become more informed about sort of recreation needs in Montpelier like if there's been an analysis of like what are our recreation needs and where are the gaps you know like what is the difference between like what we need versus want um you know where like you know are people not able to to schedule basketball games and kids like are literally not playing or want to play um or you know are all of those kids able to play but we wish we we want it to be on a different kind of court or something like that so I just wish I had sort of more of a um insights into to to the landscape that we have now and and what our needs what our gaps versus wants kind of so if anyone can speak to that thank you okay Councillor McCullough do you want me to respond I I can wait till you yes please do okay um thank you Emma and I actually remember you from our meeting and your comment in particular because I that stood out for me um in a big way because um I kind of felt feel the same way in my own community um and so your your question is well taken it is a piece of this stage it's it's actually happening as we speak I would say this is this is the stage this is happening um we got the rec template as we talked about I'll call it the template that we used to to mock up and to mass out the site from the rec department based on their data um I do not have that backup data but it sounds like it's something I could get so that's going to be it's on my list now to get that um to understand where those recommendations come came from but being that Arnie's part of our team that's just that's where the data came from in terms of trying to come up with a template of a possible footprint for it the programming though as you're talking about kind of dialing into that is still TBD and the reason for that is because again we don't know from the community what it is that we need and I think what you're what you're really bringing home is something we keep kind of circling around which is cool I'm going to name the question it's like who decides this is what we need and the truth could be said the same could be said about the housing and there's probably there's not one answer right there's not one solution at all on either side of this and so what this is going to come down to is trying to get from this process as much feedback as possible to see if there are kind of there are there is consensus and one of the exercises we're going to be doing in the public meetings is to look for consensus we've kind of got this exercise plan where people get up and actually interact with the maps to be able to um and and I say get up because there's one or two onsite options there's also a virtual option people are going to do this virtually as well but um provide their input about where certain types of uses should go and what kind of uses you know do we want more multifamily you know what is the community want and so that is what this this kind of process is is what is the community asking for um as we get more granular on that I think that starts to exceed the capacity of a of a land development team and it gets into programming and specific to recreation which is not you know why I was hired it's not my specialty at all but um there may be the need once we've identified that this is the proper area for it this feels like the right balance what are those exact needs and how do you justify them I think is your question like how do you how do you quantify those needs and identify what those gaps are and it's not um an exercise in anecdotal evidence necessarily but but what are the real what is the real data I hope I hope that answered your question in terms of process thanks thanks Stephanie Joe Castellano hi Joe thanks for coming oh well thank you can you hear me yes just fine okay and oh I'm in the center screen now okay well I want to thank you so much for all the detailed information I was just able to quickly glance at everything one of the things I want to uh suggest to Stephanie and to the city council those bills as we're moving forward I mean certainly there's some members of the public are going to be more engaged than others in the process and I know that you're trying to do as much community outreach and get public feedback and input so you can best design something that fits the needs of the community um a couple of things I would also stress that maybe we also look at demographic data to help drive some of the decisions because as Josh pointed out in one of the slides we are an aging population and at one point there was a downsize this group of about 100 people and all of us have not gotten any younger and we're all in these big houses pretty much one or two people kids have either moved out or we never had kids and now we're looking for something on a single level and then some of us are on fixed incomes low incomes so I'm looking at maybe we look at some sort of over 55 housing segment as a portion of the housing or even maybe a co-housing so you're bringing younger families who are having challenges affording something in town with and have elder around so you'll have a nice mix in a more vibrant community that was all I had to say thanks Joe you're welcome um stan brinkerhoff thank you jack uh stan brinkerhoff from my player I've got two two quick questions um um the first one is in a maximal recreation space diagram there's there's no housing but in the opposite diagram um there's there's lots for houses right not not um condos or or duplex style buildings um if you look at the average revenue of a multiplayer household at around $70,000 last census um and kind of the price the square footage price to build houses for families um have we thought all about the maximal design being more completely um shared houses or condos or duplexes um the second question is if we look at that maximal housing at 500 units and we use Josh's data of 2.2 people per household and we add 1500 people to the country club property that seems to move kind of the center of gravity of where people live in town you know 15 percent of the population now lives outside of of the downtown um is there any concern about and maybe it's coming up in the later phase is there any concern about utility um fire ambulance police um is there a cascading effect where we need an extra fire engine and we don't space for it any longer uh those just two questions thank you thanks Stephanie is that a master plan yeah go ahead Stephanie are you considering I do have one comment yeah sorry um I just wanted to say you should you should be a master plan understand because you're thinking of all the things that you do have to think about so to your second question first um absolutely if you know this is shifting toward whatever this is shifting toward is going to have multiple impacts and one of those could be you know services they could be they're going to be utilities they're going to be other infrastructure the transit question comes up a bunch so as this you know if it were only 10 units versus 500 units that very much shifts how much you have to focus on um those elements but those are elements that will need to be baked in they might be baked in in phase two or maybe part of recommendations for phase one but what your point is in the first question is um actually no I guess it's still part of the second question is really that's something that the public needs to consider as we look at maybe concept plans in the next stage where we're comparing concept plans one two and three we expect to come back with kind of some um I'm not going to call impose and cons because we're not going to pine on the on the quality of these but you know the the tradeoffs and the different um constraints and things that are going to impact if you get if you do this it's going to cost you this and it may be a cost you know an actual financial cost it may be an opportunity cost um it may be you know just other types of costs that we're not thinking of but is that worth it for what you're looking for so those are absolutely big considerations to be to be taken into account um the first question being can we consider moving single family into multi-family possibly you know the max family housing model was shown to show that there could be a variety of different product types because that's what was really came forward a lot in the meetings with the public is lots of different type of product because there's lots of they wanted um a lot of people wanted a price point for a lot of people so that you're not just having a site that's only you know low income or only high income you know that you have a mix of people on on a on a property but you know absolutely during the public engagement phase right now one of those exercises we're talking about in the public interaction is to specify for those billable areas what would you put there if you want multi-family stick a pin in it because that's what we want to hear so thank you for that question I can respond quickly to the second part too um and this would need to be updated but a number of few years back we did a we had an economist do a study for the city about services and the conclusion was up to about 2,000 more residents I mean it didn't get depending where they were and all that was really not going to have a major impact on on the various things particularly you know if this is multi-family housing it's all going to be required to be sprinkled so you know while certainly have fire response we wouldn't necessarily need to add more fire trucks and those kinds of things because it would be sort of built-in fire protection in the buildings um you know the crime rate uh is probably not you know a new neighborhood isn't necessarily going to result in a whole new crime rate it's going to be the same folks that live here already so it would be whatever evolution of needs and those services uh you know the schools at least presently um the formula for school funding is you know the more students you have the more money you make so uh and I at schools at one point had the capacity for it for a little while there they were growing but I think now the school populations leveled off a bit so that last I knew and I assume it would be part of this is to determine you know their take on what's a sort of an excess acceptable level of influx of students before they need to talk about new facilities and those kinds of things thanks bill um phyllis okay well um I'm trying to get my trying to get set up here very good thank you very much um I uh was attending another meeting by zoom so I only came in midstream I missed Josh's presentation and I was not able to find the packet online so I have not viewed it yet in my the very quick viewing of the three options I certainly need to study them more I'd like to just for a moment step back and remember when we had when the city first had the vision of purchasing the country club property and there were discussions at the time about how this was a unique opportunity for the city to acquire such a large tract of of land um both open fields and and forested land and there was a lot of excitement about the city acquiring this unique parcel I I participated in a number of meetings and I know that there's been the the tension between recreation conservation and housing and I certainly support a plan that would have some low and affordable housing available um I'm quite dismayed that the consultant's plans are so drastic on either on the two far ends that to propose 513 units um and and the number of streets and and and I heard the consultants say that there had not yet been a wildlife corridor assessment there had not yet been a traffic study and I think that these are very important perhaps the fire department can deal with another 2000 people but that number of cars on the road would create a very different commute on the very Montpelier Road um I have heard a lot of talk this evening about a recreation in terms of a recreation facility and I haven't heard anything about outdoor recreation and I'm sure that the city counselors are well aware that last year there were volunteers from Onion River Nordic ski club who groomed the ski trails ski trails at the country club property people are out there walking their dogs or out there jogging walking and so recreation is not only indoors and in the 35 plus years that I've lived in Montpelier anyone who's moved here I've always told that person you need to find your winter sport and certainly some people might play basketball year-round but you don't love winter if you're indoors playing basketball you love winter when you're outdoors cross-country skiing or ice skating or or animal tracking whatever it might be that's the love of winter outdoor recreation brings in tourism money it brings people who live in and and you know outlying areas into the city so that they can recreate outdoors and I I don't know how much consideration there has been of the positive impact of outdoor recreation and just the last thing I'll I'd say is that that I would hope that there would be a consideration of not breaking up that property with all of those roads even in the low housing model the balanced model there are so many roads and and I look forward to the ongoing public discussion thank you thank you so much Stephanie I know from reading the report that there was discussion of outdoor recreation do you want to talk a little bit about that as in response to the comment absolutely yep no outdoor recreation is absolutely as much a consideration here as indoor rec in the plans there's you know there shows the different types of outdoor rec spaces again haven't gotten into any programming on those exactly what that outdoor rec looks like is going to be very much dependent on community input but that was absolutely considered especially in what arnie provided us in terms of that footprint in that template and the importance of that we also met extensively with both parks and recreation departments but parks department especially talking about the importance of continuing the u32 trail um showing continuity of that and and possibly accommodating all of it on this site you can see that mapped on those sheets themselves thanks stepping um is there anyone else who has any questions or comments they'd like to make before you wrap this up sure if you can keep it brief yeah it's brief um the relationship of this this property plan process to the downtown master plan and i know that our the outdatedness of our downtown plan has been an issue in revising zoning uh it's been subject to several meetings and might our recreation needs be handled in a distributed fashion some of it at vermont college college i i'm a firm believer that the liquor the state's liquor building could be stored anywhere and that's a great building to use as a rec center uh so it is in the flood plain but my point is that we we need to kind of think of this in a more holistic fashion and not let one need of a pent up demand for recreation uh to define the site for elk rather than look at what our other options are even in the distributed manner i bet there's pieces of vermont college that would serve that well and there's potentially the high school liquor building down there too so i just i want to understand how how these different planning processes sequence or fit together is this thing going to move slow enough to where the city's downtown plan catches up i think it's been back burner um so okay thanks steve yeah anyone else who wants to be heard on this evening's discussion before we wrap up nothing from you bill i'm sure stefan is going to get to it but just then a reminder that the next steps from this are three more sessions but i will turn that to the team to tell you all about that let's say okay come see us um come see us on the 28th we're meeting on the site itself all of this is right on the website it's blasted in every forum we can find um but again 28th is on the site itself uh on the second February 2nd um at night six to eight o'clock right there in city chambers um we'll be having another meeting that will also be hybrid like this one and then on the ninth from noon to two is a virtual all virtual session so if you want to attend a meeting if that's something that someone you know especially someone you know a neighbor a friend who's looking to get involved please send them there otherwise you can send them to the website and these city's youtube channel um we'll have a five minute video it's not a tiktok i will say i was very tempted to learn what tiktok really is in order to do one to get more engagement but i'm not that clever um and so we have this video that'll kind of be a lot of what you heard tonight but packed into five minutes and to giving just the little teasers so people can go to the materials themselves dive in a little more and then take the survey and we're hoping we'll get a good turnout from the survey and our plan is to come back and meet with you in march and recap what we've heard and start to and ask some questions it'll kind of depend on what we hear what we're going to be asking you but in march um end of march i think the 22nd is our target date to meet with you again to go through what we're planning for the concept planning phase stage within this nap this last bit here over the spring great thanks a lot Stephanie this is great thank you so much it looks forward to seeing everybody sometime it'll be in person i'm sure yes okay that wraps up item six country country pub rose presentation i don't believe we have anything uh to take up under other business um city council reports i have nothing very very pleased with the presentation thank you no report from me tonight all right okay the one thing i will take up in my portion of the city council reports is that tomorrow is uh 2023 homeless awareness day and there will be a big event at at the state house with the variety of things happening throughout the day and so if you have the opportunity to be there i encourage you to do that don't forget i'm sorry oh palin sorry i didn't see your hand up but do you have it palin it's okay i don't have anything to share thank you for the presentation thanks uh john do you have anything no clerks report no senior managers approach report so we can without objection we'll conclude the meeting at 8 11 p.m thank you all