 Let's first recording in progress. Sorry. Sorry. That's all right. I was wondering who was talking to me. It was the recording device. Before we start, we do have a new member of the planning commission who was just appointed on Tuesday, I think. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Sage and. You want to give a little brief introduction of yourself. Sure. I'm very honored to join the planning commission. Just a little bit about me. I'm a pretty new resident to a new ski. My wife and I moved. Here early April. I'm a new resident. I'm a new resident. I'm a new resident in originally and after a few years away, we're now back in the area and really enjoying. Living in Wanooski. And, you know, interested in potentially trying to buy a home here, really make a life here. And it's been pretty amazing for me to see how the city has changed since I was at UVM almost 10 years ago. And there's a lot of good things going on, but I think it's a little bit different. I think it's a little bit different. As everyone recognizes, particularly related to housing. And so I want. My goal is to just learn and try and contribute a little bit of a different perspective as a relatively young person in the city, trying to potentially. Buy a house and make a life here. And I'll have a lot to learn. And I'll probably listen more at the start and try to contribute more as my term goes on. So, um, just so you know, do a little intro that the planning commission members besides myself and who friend in our Sarah, uh, Amy, happy Joe Tommy. And who did I miss? You. I don't count. And then we've got guests tonight and, uh, we've got a couple of guests here. Um, we've got Robert Miller from, uh, the housing commission. Jim Duncan, who's on the city council. And as the council liaison to the housing commission, I believe. Mayor Christine lot is here. Seth Leonard from, uh, B H F A. Did I get that right? Seth. Former mayor. And Tom gets a developer in town. Uh, at this point, I don't know. I guess with us tonight. Nice to see you all. We look forward to the conversation. Um, I think I would just say right off the bat, the, um, I, most of us in the housing and development world, I think when you ski is doing a whole lot, right. So, um, that's a good place to start maybe for today and look forward to answering questions and helping them with the conversation in a way we can. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And thank you for inviting me to be here and talk about developing affordable housing. You know, the CEO of summit properties and we, um, that development of affordable housing is our bread and butter. We, um, manage 1400 departments in Vermont, New Hampshire, upstate New York. Um, and, uh, new ground up development of affordable housing, um, is the bulk of what we do. We have about a thousand apartments in that territory that we've developed, um, including two recent ones in Winnowski, which I'm sure everyone has seen with Cassavan overlook being, you know, 39 apartments and, um, Park Terrace right on East down, which is 45 units and, uh, Fully leased up with folks moving in next week. So the demand is tremendous, obviously. And, um, yeah, I think we're going to, um, we're going to, um, we're going to move forward to chatting tonight and talking about maybe, I mean, one thing I will say is I completely agree with Seth that we have developed in a lot of different communities and regions. Um, and, um, Winnowski is not just a good place to develop. Not, you know, the regulations are, are really great in my opinion and have made the process of our last two developments in Winnowski. Um, go the way that in my opinion, um, I think we're going to be able to, um, we're going to be able to develop, uh, promoting the development of affordable housing in areas that you want it, um, the regulations and then the folks that are implementing those regulations, um, have been great to work with. So looking forward to diving in and chatting more. Great. Thanks, Tom. I think I neglected to introduce Heather Carrington. Staff. So. Economic development. What's your title specifically Heather? I should know. But I think, I think that's a good question. I think that is a good question. I think the best way to address this is by putting a little bit of a base onto the housing commission. Right. And Eric of Orwald, who is our. What's the right word? Planning manager. Planning and zoning manager. Planning and zoning manager. Yeah. There you go. Okay. All right. So the introductions are done. Uh, let me see any changes to the agenda. For tonight. Hearing none. I'll open it for public comment. Eric. Are there any members from the public out there with us? So, I don't know, I can, I will allow you to speak if you have anything you'd like to say feel free to unmute, unmute yourself otherwise. We can move on. Yeah, hi, I'm a new resident of Winnowski and I came to express my support of reduce parking minimums and here for the ride. Okay. Thank you. Great. Thanks. So next agenda item is approval of the previous meeting minutes, looking for a motion and a second on that. A motion to approve. Good. Second by Tommy. Are there any changes or edits suggested to the minutes hearing none all those in favor of the motion, please say I or raise your hand. Anyone opposed. Anyone wish to abstain. Amy. Okay. I think that passed. I hope you were counting Eric. Yep, I got it. Okay. Next, I'll throw it over to you Eric for discussion of the housing affordability and land use policy. Yes, so thank you very much. So tonight we have, as we've already gone through some introductions, we have some guests with us tonight to talk about housing affordability and land use policy specifically looking at parking. The housing commission was, was tasked with reviewing information related to housing and affordability and specifically looking at parking and how parking may be impacting the housing affordability. So they, the housing commission has spent some time looking at that information and has prepared a memo. You may recall. We did receive a memo from the housing commission back in 2019 that had some information related to to parking and housing affordability that has been updated and submitted back again in your agenda packet. So in order to kind of the reason why we're having this discussion tonight is because as the planning commission, one of your roles is to review the existing land use policy and recommend changes or amendments that may better align with either trends that are happening in the community or to help address issues that we're seeing either to support specific community initiatives or to, to work to, you know, kind of identify where, where we can can better serve the community in that regard. So, so tonight, as mentioned, we have Tom gets with summit properties and set Leonard with Vermont housing finance agency as well as Robert Malar and Heather Robert Malar representing the housing commission. Councillor Duncan as the council liaison to the housing commission by the Carrington as the staff liaison for the housing commission to talk about their perspectives and not only the memo and kind of what the housing commission has gone through but to talk specifically about housing policy and and the the issues that they're seeing and and facing as they try to develop housing and in particular affordable housing and how parking may be impacting that ability to develop not only the affordable housing but the housing mix that we've we as the planning commission have talked about in the past so trying to find trying to establish housing that is has more bedrooms or has a greater mix of unit styles and types that we're looking for instead of, you know, a lot of what we're seeing now are just either one bedrooms which as Tom mentioned are getting leased up very quickly, but not necessarily the only style of housing that we're trying to get here in the city so that's part of the reason why we wanted to have this this discussion tonight was again as we're looking at our land use regulations and looking at changes and amendments. We wanted to make sure that that we were we were cognizant of the potential issues that may be impacting the types of development that we're seeing and what we can do to change those, primarily looking at parking for tonight's discussion. So, any questions from anyone on kind of what it is that we're doing tonight or why we're here or how this is going to get wrapped into our work. So one question, Eric. So we still don't have the the parking survey that was being done this summer that's not available yet. That's correct. So the the the parking the parking inventory analysis and management plan that is being conducted. We are actually scheduled to have our next advisory committee meeting on believe the 22nd of this month. So we will we'll be looking at the model and we'll be looking at specific policy recommendations that that advisory committee will be reviewing and then the next step hopefully in October we will have a draft report from that that will provide those recommendations from the from the advisory committee. So in the next couple of months we should have that information or at least council will be that information should be presented to council. So this is sort of a all the information we're going to gather tonight is I mean we're not making any decisions tonight because we're going to need that study before we move forward with anything concrete I would imagine. That's correct. Yeah, we're not intending to make any decisions tonight this is really to be an informative discussion to kind of to look at things to basically look at the folks that are there are out in the world dealing with housing policy every day to see how the how things like parking are impacting housing and the type of housing that gets developed. Okay, so if there's no other questions I think what I would do is turn it over to to Tom or Seth whichever one of you maybe wants to go first and kind of introduce the this the, you know your perspective on policies and parking and how that impacts development or how you see development. So, Tom want me to talk a little bit about state policy, some of those high level things and then let you drill in. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Great. So just a little bit about what I do for for VHFA and what role we plan the state on this issue. I oversee the state's tax credit allocation award program and our development financing at the agency. We're the primary source of funding available for the development of affordable housing statewide last year, about 50% of the new starts on new construction and this is statewide. We're affordable units, and that's a trend that we're not terribly happy about. That's outside of Chittenden County. That's pretty much affordable housing or not much else new being built, which is what's really exciting about talking all of you here today is because you actually already have some other things being built and that's exciting. In addition to that work for on the financing tax credit allocation award side of things we support state and local policymakers in making informed decisions. Heather uses housing data.org all the time right Heather. Yes. So housing dotted at housing data orgs are great resource for planning commissions local housing commissions. And one of the things we do there is we try to assemble best practices and recommendations both from local municipalities and nationwide examples of what types of policies. We know work for affordable housing across the state and are backed as much as possible by data. And then in addition that I also oversee our asset management compliance mean we see how these projects operate over time and how they perform and what issues come down the river so it's easy to build something, maybe not easy. But it's easy to build something and not think about the consequences and measure it afterwards but our shop pays a lot of attention to how did things turn out operationally, and how did the decisions around parking and other infrastructure decisions during the development process shake out. I've got a couple quick slides Eric if that's okay just to frame a couple quick concepts. I'm not sure my screen for too long. I think it's disabled right now. Oh, let me. I will make you a co host and you should be able to. All right, try it now. Cool. I've all been doing this a long time but I'll ask that age old question can everybody see my screen can everybody see the slides. I'm putting this one up first because I just want to encapsulate. We are talking about scarce resources when it comes to the development, specifically affordable housing finance. Every year we have roughly about $59 million and available resources to develop housing. I'm using the word develop and that $59 million that's a combination of state and federal funding that comes into Vermont each year for affordable housing is split not just amongst new construction projects but also amongst all the rehabilitation projects that occur in the state. Okay, so an example, you know, we spent quite a bit of money on Spring Street doing a rehabilitation project that will be upcoming between a split project owned by shield plane housing trust. And when you see and also at the fort, but then you've got the new construction projects that Tom just referenced as well. I think a big number to take away from this conversation discussion is right now and the affordable realm. We're running about $330,000 per unit for a new unit of rental housing. So, does that seem high to folks. Is that surprise anybody. Yeah. I can imagine that math problem that exists right and I'm I'm okay to I love conversation and questions versus me talking at you all. But how's that $330,000 per unit set. So what's in that. Is it landing that is there. What exactly $330,000. Yeah, it's an all in. So it's the development costs associated includes some soft costs to Mike. It's not just hard construction. Do you know what the breakout is between the hard costs and soft costs. Yeah, hard costs, usually end up running about 60% and a typical project. They might lean as far as 65 on a rehabilitation project they're more in the 40s range. That's tipped a lot though, as a result of the pandemic. And costs increase at an astronomical level so a recent survey we did amongst development professionals and construction entities in the state. Found the average project increase to be 25% and prior to the pandemic and that's just over the last 18 months. We have projects right now outside of Chittenden County that are coming in at $386,000 per unit for residential construction. And that has to do with material and labor shortages and availability right now. I think that's a question in terms of this particular slide. Speaking to the rental market. Are you also involved and forgive me if I should have known this in the owner component of development. Yes, yeah. So, for example, butternut station, it's not being called station anymore I'm sorry about that. We'll just say the community center development butternut with CHT that's funded with the state tax credit home ownership program. There's a chronic underfunding of home ownership incentives though in the state so the pool of funds we have available for home ownership support every year is just a hair over $1 million in total equity. We do not put a lot in home ownership construction subsidy in the state. Whereas for a 9% tax credit project, a couple of which Tom will talk about in a few minutes. The average subsidy level that we're providing just with the tax credit program is usually between 62 and 70% of the total development costs. Because you can imagine how could how on earth could you charge affordable rents for something that costs $330,000 to build right the math just doesn't work. Divide that over that cost over 30 years and it doesn't take you very long to say boy if I'm getting rents that would be affordable to anybody in the even 60% area media income range that just the math doesn't work as a math problem it needs subsidy. Yeah, it's a great question Tommy this that graph on the right is is in normal times and that 59 millions is in is in normal times. You may have recalled that as part of the governor's package for the American Recovery Act funding or ARPA that you may have heard some about the governor proposed $249 million in one time funding to go towards the subsidy of housing. So that includes some home ownership and we're in the process of working with Department of Housing Community development on exactly what that's going to look like because we've got a few million dollars to work with on that front. So there will be some more news on home ownership development coming soon. That sounds great. Hey, sir. Yeah. Two questions for you. One. Are you seeing the cost of materials starting to decrease. The cost of materials is around. Slowly commodity prices are changing faster than what we're actually seeing on the ground. If you can just a second I'm going to zoom out and stop my share and I'll show you a different graph. I just don't want to give everybody whiplash finding it. While you're looking for that that $330,000. What's the size unit that references. So. I don't find it useful to do square footage. It's easier to do a per unit how a per unit basis and I'll say that right now primarily our projects are skewing towards studio and one bedroom that's a known fact. That's there are more. There's more. There's a lot of pressure to include additional two and three bedroom units at times, but from a market ability standpoint, those are a much more challenging units to be really blunt. For to be filled over and over again and they're more expensive to subsidize. So we do use a per unit match because it actually lines up pretty perfectly on the square footage. And we feel like it translates better for folks. So it's safe to say that that's probably like a one bedroom. There's a lot. Yes, there's there are a lot of one bedrooms in that mix. We are at 1.1.34 on our average building, you are average unit size over the last five years. We have four bedrooms and that includes a bunch of zeros right efficiencies count as a zero in our world, and then one bedrooms and a decent little mix of two bedrooms and a couple three bedrooms that includes rehabilitation project so that's not just new construction. And, Mike, there is in the memo I've referenced an inclusionary housing utilizing the grounded solutions inclusionary housing calculator. You can go through that if you click into that, you can actually look at different incentives and different configurations of bedroom numbers, and you can see the numbers it really goes through you know what the pricing would be and what the impacts of reducing parking or, you know, affordable units would be on the cost per unit. Thanks. From our survey the top responses in terms of what was causing increases in costs right now on a home ownership project in in White River, excuse me not White River Woodstock. We saw lumber prices go up 85% on the project and a duplex that we expected to fund at about $295,000 for total construction costs. We ended up paying $485,000 per unit for new construction on the duplex and and to be transparent butternut stations not far, not far off from that. And so Mike we're not seeing the prediction on the ground in terms of what people are thinking is that we won't see prices normalized if you want to break out the crystal ball. We won't see prices and and those, those, excuse me, those goods. And so until early 2022 is the current market projections. So in the market if you look up lumber pricing as a as a Wall Street item it's starting to come down but throw a hurricane or two in there and on the ground it's not the builders experience yet that has gotten lower. Okay, so we're going to move on here. I just like to start with that a little bit to put into perspective what we're looking at in terms of actual constraints and issues with resources, because it helps to understand when you're looking at a policy item like this how important it is that we erect this few barriers to making something that's already a very challenging math problem work. So just a picture of and Tom you've got a project that's not entered in here if people start look at the numbers and say that looks low, just activated tax credit units, funded by the low income housing tax credit program and pardon me I work in a lot of acronyms so always call me out when you see lie tech that's the low income housing tax credit program. So the key from a proportional standpoint is doing the best of any community in the state on a per capita basis in terms of getting those tax credits and that will improve when Tom's next project that he's talking about is fully leased up you'll actually have the highest utilization per capita in the state of the low income housing tax credit program. If you are designing housing policy in the city, that's something to be aware of is that we don't really have a whole lot more in terms of resources and subsidy to put into the city we're doing, we're doing is the best that we can possibly do a statewide funders right now, just to be transparent about that unless the pie grows. And that says that you're doing a lot right. And just to go back to this slide a second. You know that the gears over to the side are trying to tell you that a lot of our funding decisions are made in coordination with the planning process that when us keys hugged so tightly, and participated in with the state designations, and maintaining your state designated downtown and neighborhood designation areas. We get somewhere between $2 and $4 requested for every one that we have to give each year, and we don't like to say scoring projects but that's what we do we score projects and the top item for many years has been designation location. We're concerned about ensuring that affordable housing developments are placing communities where there's adequate access to walkable streets there's adequate access to public transportation, access to health care and access to jobs, those are the things that we're concerned about as a, as affordable housing policymakers, we want those things to jive together. And then we want to see that you're doing a good job of participating in those state programs because we know if you're going to redo Main Street, where you're going to redo, you know, sidewalk project, you've got a much better chance if you're in those designation programs and playing well with the state of getting those fun, those funding resources. If you've, that's a good thing for our projects to we like to know that you're participating with the state planning process and that's why we state so close to the state consolidated plan. So we're going to turn the investors down into the way we make our decisions which we do through this thing called the qualified allocation plan, which is the document that really steers the largest pool of affordable housing resources. So we had those survey results about what people are experiencing in terms of costs. So, we held a forum with 76 development construction specialist, two weeks ago, and the first 30 minutes of it was a combination of development consultants and investors voicing frustrations in regards to how they're meeting different on the same issue they're having to meet so many different thresholds for different policymakers, and particularly where state local and regional policies overlap. And that's, that's just a general pitch tool not necessarily specific to parking, but that is highlighted as a huge huge use of time for developers and jumping through hoops, and it adds a lot of costs, meaning hey we've met this, this requirement that the state has for this issue but now we also have to meet at the municipal level and, and there's a difference between the two. Just getting into brass tax when you get into actual parking requirements a lot of folks ask us well what is your policy on parking and our answers and again we finance the majority of the affordable housing development that occurs is we actually don't have one. Please talk to us, show us what, what facilities are going to support parking in general. We for the first time in our history actually just financed a project in Morrisville that has not one single hardscape parking space associated with it they've got a parking agreement with the town to meet their needs and we were satisfied with that that was fine. But we don't require it. This is this comes from the American housing equity investor fund manual so to speak so this is the entity, for lack of better words that buys these tax credits, or the, the guide the agencies that buy these tax credits and create all that equity that goes into the projects. And it's kind of the gold standard in terms of what underwriting requirements are applied to tax credit projects, and it starts off by saying yeah this one to one thing is good it's a good place to start but it goes pretty, pretty quickly down to this idea of market study appraisable appraiser incomparable projects in the primary market area, meaning what kind of facilities exist on the street, can it be justified is the appraiser okay with it is the lack of parking spaces, impacting in some way shape or form. There's not an overarching policy when it comes to finance and and the lending decisions that get made about how many parking spaces there are it's upon incumbent upon the project developer to convince us that it's, it's a good idea. That makes sense. Cool. The process that we engaged on and informed is the zoning for great neighborhoods and apologies if you've already seen this and when you ski again is looked at as a community that's exceeding a lot of these, in a lot of ways, but the state put painstaking efforts into coming up with a baseline set of recommendations for towns to consider and brought in a number of consultants engaged with a number of planners statewide the Vermont Planning Association, and came up with these ideas about how to do how to address parking issues and parking reform and we participated in the group help fund this and just generally agreed that these are good philosophical approaches reducing the number of onsite parking spaces is a good thing. And that's how on street, where appropriate to count towards that inventory, and what when he's already doing to require new parking spaces to be behind buildings and eliminating parking minimums is a discussion point to and allowing on street parking in areas. I just wanted to realize that this is a set of recommendations that goes out to a state, you have a planner. There are so many. There are so many communities across the state that do not have an Eric and a heather. And in some cases don't really even have a functional planning commission right so this is also trying to provide a roadmap for those communities to make decisions. So just a little bit about the items on here. Again, we kind of jumped ahead on this a little bit but what what's causing delays and cost increases right now across the state, and it's material and supply and labor availability and the hard cost issues. I think it's really important to also notice the number of respondents that did identify, they just kind of left it in the medium range regulatory permitting at the state and local level and how it can be challenging and can add cost to projects and that's a, that's a tale of woe was oldest time from developers like that. I understand that for a lot of developers that would be no rules in a lot of cases. But I think our general reflection or my reflection back to your community would be is that from our perspective you're doing, you're doing a good job and the cost of the projects that we're seeing developed and in when you ski are actually a little lower, not a little lower actually Tom can point out some numbers where they're getting well below that 330 average that we're seeing statewide and that's a good sign. That means things are functioning here it's not getting weighed down in processing costs. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen there. I think that's because our process is just efficient. I mean, is there other reasons you think the process or lower quality of the housing just as good. And is the, I guess, my answer your first question be like, yes, it's predictability. There's so many unknowns and the development timeline, the further out you are, the greater your risk is and less money you want to invest. And your job really is policymakers in our opinion is the quicker you can narrow the range of possibilities and outcomes to that a development might have in decision making process. The more quickly a developer is going to spend money real money on a project to get it done, and it's actually going to get across the finish line. We've got, you know, I've got a project in in wilder Vermont right now that has a pitched roof that probably cost the project about $750,000 and delays, a year and a half, arguing over whether a project should have a flat roof or a pitched roof. And that was, there was no infrastructure to house those conversations at the community level and it just became everybody got their pen out and drew what they wanted at public meetings and that's, that's just an untenable environment to expect that, again, with these types of scarce resources that are projects going to get across the line. And quite frankly that experience scares us. And that doesn't make us confident that somebody's going to be able to push a project across the finish line so as I would just say when he's got predictable processes in my opinion. Mike Gabby has her hand raised here. Before it is my mic working. Yes. Thanks for the presentation. Nice to see you. A lot of what our planning commission, our conversations around housing have really been on spending time on family size housing. And I think now you have a new little one, or you have a child that the thing spaces get tight real quick. And what we used to have a lot of this tiny spaces and small units. And a lot of our energy and discussion has been around the bigger units, how do we get bigger units. And you sort of really quickly mentioned that your perspective or from your authorities perspective that it was more desirable to have the smaller units. I don't know yet why developer would want would be able to get more money out of it, but I'm wondering why, why your, why your group came to that conclusion and, and what we can do to sort of from your perspective to like move away from the studio and bedrooms and attract more families with and when you see and keep families and when you see by having larger units. And just to, and I can hear where I came across that way. We don't necessarily just promote the zero and one bedrooms right. It's when the market study comes out or we look at the housing needs assessment, or we measure market absorption rates as fast units lease up. We just can't lease one bedrooms fast enough, right. And so from a need perspective that keeps moving to the forefront and we see shrinking home or shrinking family sizes just demographically as a state. I do bring up a really good point that your community might want to foster that what I would say back is, I would try to find a tool that incentivizes it versus requiring it because from a market study standpoint, requiring something like that. It, it could create an uncomfortable dynamic in terms of funding resources and what makes good financial feasibility sense if that, if you understand what I'm saying so it's easier. It's easier to stop housing construction with policy than it is that to encourage it. And if there's a bonus or an incentive of some kind or a financial investment that supports or encourages additional bedrooms and the three bedroom size for example, that's probably what we would just say is a better idea. Yeah, there's also a disincentive in our zoning right now for three plus bedroom. So when you get to that in many of the residential districts, there's an additional requirement for another point five parking spaces. So that increases the cost as well so that I think that's functioning as an active disincentive. So I know that our planning commission is really interested in exploring incentives and getting rid of disincentives to get more family size housing in the city. Yeah, and we had ever discussed or even knew that you could require it. I think it was just like all of the new developments that are going up and when you see which are quite quite a lot are what our studio one bedroom and families are leaving in droves and even housing we said we have to send people with vouchers out of when you ski because we can't accommodate families here. So we're, that's definitely high on our radar and hopefully part of this discussion today. I think that's where, you know, we would be interested in discussing density bonnet bonuses, you know, parking minimum reductions, you know those sort of levers that we have to get a developer to think about a bigger unit. Well, so. I can share with the planning commission I've recently done an analysis of the net change in number of units across different bedroom counts and home ownership versus rentals. There's been a net increase in three plus bedrooms, since 2018. So we're not the narrative that we're losing as buildings come down, we're losing three bedrooms that that's not accurate. We're gaining them but we're gaining them at a much slower rate than we are gaining the studios and one bedroom. So what that will do if that continues is that will continue to create that gap and widen that gap, but we aren't losing them currently we're gaining them. Okay, that's helpful. So, thank you for that, that that part. I'd like to get Tom in here before we run out of time tonight. Yeah, thank you. And I will circle back to the bedroom size because I think that is a really important one we've got some real recent experience on a mix of unit sizes in our two most recent buildings that I think is really relevant but just sort of stepping back to the big picture. It was really interesting. I hadn't seen that statistic that Seth put up before that when new skis utilization of tax credits per capita is leading the way in the state or at the top and I think that is great and I don't and that's in my opinion not an accident. And I think that that is a direct result of the steps taken to moat development in the places that the city wants it through a process that's predictable. I mean that's, you know, getting that neighborhood development area and downtown designation, which makes it so that when we go to housing it's exempt from Act 250 getting the form based code in the gateway districts to show you know so that we know when we come in that we're going to have a predictable process those are the things that you know some of the other than you know it's a great place to build but there's a lot of places that we would look at and seeing those having that process to be you know clear was were some of the things that drew us to a new ski and the cast event project in particular that one. It's a I've used this example talking to folks throughout the state and then New Hampshire and upstate New York of a development experience that was really rare and unique in the affordable housing world because typically if you talk to affordable housing developers. When they take a project and envision it you know from conception till from that point on till it's actually so that's a three to four year process to you know get to completion that it takes it just takes a long time to get your permitting to get your design then to go through the actual process of applying for all the various affordable housing resources that are necessary to make this project a reality. And so any area that you can make more predictable and streamlined it makes it that much more likely that you're going to be able to actually develop that affordable housing cost effectively and cast event. That one. So it was October 2017 that we first conceived of that project with it was on a parcel owned by Nate and Jackie Digest who you know I'm sure most of you're very familiar with. And from October 2017 we went in with the city met with Jesse met with. I'm not sure I'm forgetting who the planning and zoning administrator was at the time now for getting but from the from the very first meeting it was this is the development type of development in the area we want we are going to help you get through this process as quickly as possible. We were fully permitted by February 1 which was the deadline for our tax credit application got our award in May started construction in September and we're done and fully leased by the next September. So that that type of timeline is not possible almost anywhere else in the state and it took a lot of years of planning to allow that to happen. It wasn't. And so I just I've used that example a lot of times and so big picture for me is these when he's doing things the right way. So all you know the suggestions that I have feedback on parking and other things it's more tweaks as I see it. And you know I hope that from VHS point of view they see this as you know an area that want to keep giving tax credits to show the other communities that look if you do things right. You know this community is like this is going to attract development and it's going to be cost effective so this is where credits need to be allocated. That was subtle Tom. It's a good place to build set. So, you know that you know jumping over to the specific you know the parking question for tonight we have obviously a lot of you know 1400 apartments a ton of data on our parking needs across different types of housing across different areas that we that we have properties. And, you know, I think that my overall points would be one yes structured parking when you have to build structure parking it's incredibly expensive. Our data matches up with what was in the housing commissions, you know about $35,000 per parking space that's required so it's it's a big, big factor cost wise. When you have to get that in the small lots, you know the Winooski Gateway District lots a lot of the places that we want affordable housing to be built. They're on small lots that because that's what we're trying to get access to transportation and have the development in areas that are appropriate for affordable housing. So that means that there's probably not going to be, you know, you will rely on underground parking and that's going to be really expensive. So to unness to have unnecessary parking requirement is definitely a big cost impediment. And from our point of view, you know there there are ways I can see that there's we have so much data on with the parking that we need that to have some flexibility that is data based, you know that I know there was sort of overall recommendations to have some sort of process in the code to present data and arguments but this is our typical parking requirement but you've shown in whether it's market studies or other buildings why in this case you can use some on street parking to lower that I think that that's a fantastic approach. I would say with the form based code is great. That leaves very little wiggle room for things like this so it's the one drawback is you kind of you check the boxes and you go but every once in a while there does, I think it is appropriate to have an issue like this where we say no, there can be a waiver process not all, you know, they're not all are created equally. You know some of the major categories in our portfolio we have about 900 apartments of independent senior living and the demands there it's, you know, 0.6 or 0.7 vehicles per unit are typical affordable mixed income properties about the one to one one vehicle to unit is about what folks have that's a portfolio average. It's a deep subsidy homeless supportive services properties that we manage that might be 0.3 or 0.4 vehicles per, you know, per unit so it just doesn't, in my opinion, makes sense to have the same requirement that with no flexibility we so to allow something the process that would allow that data to be presented to factor in the availability of on street parking, I think would be great. You know, in specifics to a new ski you know cast event overlooked 39 apartments, we've got 22 two bedrooms 17 one bedrooms, and we've had right about 40 vehicles, the whole time we've been there. We were required to do 44 spaces so there's a little bit of excess there's some street parking. So in my opinion in that location it's a slightly more than we probably you know a few spaces more than we would have we probably would have said let's want one to one is what we requested or 0.9 to one something like that so I don't think that overall for our developments I would say oh it's it's way off base we're way over building parking for the types of the last two types of buildings that we built and we need to see the park terrace in the cast event buildings I think they're pretty close to what we would have wanted anyways. Tom, if I can interrupt you for a second. Yeah, just talked about cast event one to one and the unit mix there what about a park terrace you're calling it. Yeah, Park Terrace is 45 apartments and there are, I believe it's 54 spaces. We have that small there's a 1600 square foot commercial space that in addition to the 45 apartments. So it's a little more than that one to one. What are you talking about. So, right across from cast event overlook the one that's under construct just finishing construction. Not the big one, but not the small one with the bigger one. The big. Yeah, the woodhouse. Yeah, the woodhouse. So, what's the mix of units in that. That is, it's I think 11 studios 24 one bedroom and 10 to bedrooms. And that does, you know, just quickly going to the unit mix discussion we did at pass event we did the 22 two bedrooms we did majority two bedrooms and then 17 one bedrooms and no studios. And that was at a time where VHFA was actually really encouraging and incentivizing development of two bedroom units. And our experience there with the lease up was that the one bedrooms were just flying off the shelves, fully leased months and months before we opened up the two bedrooms much more challenging. Do you have families living in those two bedrooms. I had a lot of demand from families know we thought we would we almost I mean we were the expectation was that we would end up with it would interest a lot more families and we've not seen as much family interest as as we've expected. And so we did a more balanced unit mix at at Park terrace and we did that, you know, only 10 to bedrooms instead of sort of the majority to. So it's been an interesting process but yes the, the demand of Park terrace it's fully leased now so the demand for the two bedrooms is certainly there, but the ones in the studios again we're the first things to go. If I could ask a question Tom when, to the extent that you've built three bedrooms or manage three bedrooms have you found that those go more slowly than the two bedrooms or is it a situation where maybe like two bedrooms is too much for a couple but it's not enough for like a family. Yeah, and we don't have a ton of three bedrooms in our whole portfolio. We maybe have 33 bedrooms something like that, and they are more challenging there's it's it's. There's a line we know there's long waitlist but when when unit turns over there's just not always a family ready to move and so they just don't turn over. So quickly the are wait lists for the one and two bedrooms and studios everywhere so long. There's just no question that when when that unit turns over there's going to be somebody ready to take it and it's just that we have some four bedrooms in our portfolio to only a few of them. We know the demands there but it doesn't seem that it's just not as predictable. Is it a lack of marketing to these families, say in the Winooski community that we're not getting through to say this is available. Is it just that maybe there's people who are not savvy to be on top of what's being becomes available quickly enough. I mean I'm not just throwing it out I'm not saying you have to answer that but. I wish I wish I knew the answer that I mean that our two bedrooms are more challenging than the ones but still full. So we try to, you know, a market as full with two friends as opposed to couples, some couples with one child, but not we don't even have. I mean last I looked at or checked in a cast again I think there was only a handful of children. If I could make a suggestion a lot of times the way we try to validate units is to do a survey of the local housing authority wait lists. And that might be a good thing for you to do to just take a temperature I would Burlington Housing Authority the last I saw. It was around 15% of their vouchers served households that were three bedrooms or larger, but a substantial portion of those households were what we would consider over housed, meaning that they did that. If they applied for new unit they wouldn't actually qualify for a three bedroom home again. And that's a that's another kind of chronic issue because it uses that voucher subsidy up in a way that that limited resource gets strange to. Yeah, that might just be a suggestion for you to measure that ask the Winooski Housing Authority and Burlington Housing Authority what their wait list for three bedroom homes look like and that gives you a sense of the demand. And I'm sad while you're speaking can you share what's going on with. And it doesn't sound like Tom develops condos, but what's going on with the condominium market and is that something you guys finance as well. Yeah, and we're we're partial funders of the a butternut station as an example condominium development at large has kind of grinded to a halt due to financing mechanics just long story short the units by and large need to be sold, almost the thing gets built it's pretty frustrating the the large financing entities. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and FHA are primary funders for this type of development and their requirements on condos are very conservative. There's a meeting next week with the Department of Housing and the governor's office to talk about this exact issue about how we could potentially pump some money into condo development and affordable condo development specifically but it is a tough nut to crack. Fannie, if the reason that butternut growth that's what it is now even though there are no trees there so it's better not grow. The reason that that is going forward is actually Michael Monty did some very creative financing with that and use new market tax credits that aren't generally used to that way. I think it kind of came up with a new model for funding that so you know there are creative ways to get around it. And I hope that there will be more people utilizing that. Joe, Joe, I saw you had a question. It's more of an observation than anything that I think we have talked about this at the planning commission before and I don't know that Winooski really has any way of shaping this but it really does seem like the only way to promote owner occupied family housing in a growing city with limited land masses through condominiums which we are not building. John, anything else you want to add. We cut you off. No, I think that was the only other I still had note I had down just was in terms of other ways to promote, you know, affordable housing there was I saw some recommendations that, you know, potentially do some, you know, on the impact fees that and other fee waivers. We're not overly burdensome in that area, whereas other communities, you know, in relation to other areas we develop. But I could see, you know, some, what I see maybe as low hanging fruit in that area, if they're you know want to encourage the development of affordable housing you've got things like the sewer and impact fees where it's pretty easy to demonstrate how much usage we have from with clear data and if you had an incentive that that's real money you know $90,000 on the project that is just finishing up right now of impact fees, which is based on a usage that's just, you know, state published. So there's areas like that that I do think are opportunities to help incentivize affordable housing, in addition to the parking area. That's about all I have. Okay. Thanks Tom. I'll throw it over. Ask if Robert or Jim or Heather folks who are joining us from the housing commission or that side want to add anything. I'm going to, I just want to give a little bit of the background, you know, there's, we made recommendations in 2019 and I think that effectively what we're doing is bringing forward those same recommendations and you know, a couple of the process that we made as recommendations one of them was to do the parking inventory study that is currently ongoing will influence your ability to take action on these in the future. So we are definitely continuing to support the recommendations that were initially made and I think that in doing our research on the impact from a strict lens of housing affordability. So we're working minimum requirements make housing less affordable. So, you know, if there's one takeaway, it's those are increasing the cost of housing in our community. So anything that can be considered to reduce those required minimums and we've given you a series of different options to consider would impact housing affordability, but in addition to that. Recently, we've been having kind of the same conversation on the parallel track that you all have been having about multi bedroom units and you know we've been talking about how we want to welcome new families but where will those families live. And some of the issues with that which is what led to the analysis that I did in terms of, you know, the net changes to our housing over the last few years it was 2018 to 2021. And just to give you those numbers which I will send to you as well. The net change that includes the demo being subtracted and then the new unit units being added total residential units, it was positive 295 units studio units plus 55 one bedroom units plus 153 two bedroom units plus 55 and three bedroom units plus 17. So 71% of the unit new units being constructed in when you ski our studio or one bedroom so you know as I had stated earlier, it's not a problem there's a demand for those. But if we continue to skew that way where 71% are for studio or studios in one bedroom and only 6% are three bedroom plus, we're going to widen a gap that already existed in our community. We had fewer multi bedroom rental units than the surrounding municipalities to begin with. So that will continue to skew that so we need to come up with ways that we can incentivize and when I say incentivize I mean save money. We need it's a money solution this is a money problem. So going through the grounded solutions inclusionary housing calculator. We looked at a series of things and actually Tom I love that you brought up the impact these because that was one of the things that we looked at. And you know, the reduction of parking spaces would have the single largest financial impact on affordability for new affordable housing construction and multi bedroom units. So if we bring this memo to you today, it's primarily the previous memo that we had brought you with one addition, which is a very targeted incentive for multi bedroom housing, and that could be number one, the reduction of that disincentive that we talked about previously. So requiring more parking spaces of those does not help us to build those and already they are very financially difficult to make pencil out. In many cases those developments when we use the inclusionary housing calculator, they actually would lead to the developer coming in at a loss so they would owe money after developing a building that is three bedroom properties, three bedroom units. And that's not ideal for anyone who is trying to put together a retirement fund or their kids college fund. So that and you know you have that's how you have to think of development I think in many cases that that's what it is, it is an investment, and so it has to provide some kind of return it definitely can't leave you at a deficit. The one piece that we are adding to this is really to look at reducing those parking minimums requirements for multi bedroom units and those all the way up to 100% area median income so people who are making the median income. We have a gap across the board so it's not just for the affordable deeply affordable but for up to 100% area median income is what we're recommending. And I'll give you an example of what I did a little bit of work with CHT because I was the project manager on butternut Grove on the city end so I've worked closely with CHT on that. And I requested from them what their parking construction actually cost. So it was $45,000 per parking space for them to build that structured parking. Initially, the their initial projections were even higher than that but they've brought that down since. So if we were only to remove that additional those are all three bedroom units, 20 units, if we were to remove just the point five additional parking spaces for every one of those units because they're three bedrooms. That would be 10 parking spaces which would save that project $450,000. So it's it's a significant impact. And I'm going to stop talking I just wanted to kind of give you the high level like this is what we're coming forward with. And I want to turn it over to Robert so that you can dive into some more details if you would like. Before you do that Heather, you kind of conked out on my computer when you're doing those numbers what the number of two bedrooms. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me get those back in front of me. I will send this to you so you all have the two bedrooms was 55. So it was 19% studio units 52% one bedroom units, 19% two bedroom units and 6% three plus bedrooms. Thank you. Sorry, Robert. No, that's fine. patient here tonight Robert. What's that. I say you've been so patient waiting. I'm totally okay listening I think people much smarter than me with a much stronger background have had the floor first and, you know, I'm more here to back up, you know, Heather, I think hit on the brunt of what we've been discussing and the memo, you know, covers a lot of those details. You know, so I really don't know what to add other than to just to back up that this is where the housing commission has come to on these things after reviewing some pretty significant data. You know, speak to the program Heather mentioned the online, which really allowed us to experiment with different things and see how how different possible incentives could theoretically really play out and Heather was even able to get some real numbers from some local developers so so we weren't just making things up we're pulling some real world members to try to get there and there is just a very limited number of things that we can control at the local level that are that work as incentives for what we want whether it's it's more three bedroom door or more affordable housing or what have you. And really the parking seems to be one of the biggest pieces. And I know we're still waiting on the, the most recent parking study, but you know we did have the downtown parking study not too long ago and wouldn't be shocked to see some similar numbers come out of there. I think moving ahead with something makes a lot of sense. Even as we wait for that that to come to finish. Well, I guess technically I'm involved in that. Thanks for the reminder Eric that that's just a couple weeks from now. Okay, so I'd much rather answer question. Go ahead Tommy. Well one of the questions that I have as we look at this is we earlier heard the percentage of affordable housing and I know that affordable housing going up to the median is very different than the low income housing. How did the housing, did you folks look at what the market is versus our surrounding communities and what's when new skis relative share. Yeah, we've looked at that a lot. That was one of the, you know, first things that we looked at the percentage of affordable whether it's big a or small a, you know, second likes to point out there's a there's a big difference between affordable state, big a affordable versus just small affordable. Our share is much higher as a percentage of over overall than than our surrounding communities. So we've looked a lot from the beginning at ways to encourage, not just not affordable housing alone, not big a affordable housing alone but you know, middle income. Yeah, it's Tommy. So one of the gaps that we found in our community is affordable housing for people who are between 80% of the area median income and 120% of the area median income. So we have more housing that is under the 80% that would be low income housing that moderate income housing is a gap in our community so that's one of the targets that was initially set by the housing commission. So as far as, are there any recommendations that you would have related to that for the planning commission to help move that dial in the direction that we want to go. I'm not sure that parking. I mean I hear what you're saying with parking. That makes perfect sense. I think there are other recommendations that you might have for the planning commission to make it incentivize developers to target the markets that we're looking for. You know, I think it's in the memo and I think it's already on your radar to look at the existing density bonuses, the bonuses around that and reexamine whether they're doing what we want which, you know, speaking as someone who was on the council and we voted on form based code that was the understanding we had at the time was that we were going to come back to that much, much sooner has been has been able to happen. So those bonuses are actually set in the form based code to be for the 80 to 120% area median income so the gap that I was just talking about is what those incentives are specifically slated to in the language of the form based code. Additionally, because I believe and this is one reason we're coming forward with the parking recommendation first because of the limited lot sizes that are available along the form based code parcels. When you give people a bonus story for providing housing that is within that range, they can't necessarily build the parking to be able to support it without going further on underground and having increased costs that would then nullify the benefit of doing that additional I want to kind of add on one piece that I really struck me when I serve the commission going through this quantitative exercise is just to emphasize the order of magnitude is squarely on density bonuses in parking like there's, there aren't really other incentive structures we can use beyond those that would have the same bang for the buck. So yes, you can like as Tom was saying my guess a little bit of additional fee relief and add some to a project but it's not, it's not even the same playing field as parking environment reductions or density bonuses so I think we're thinking about incentive based approaches instead of not looking at waivers and not looking at regulatory approaches there's just, we can discuss the other ones but if you want to get the most benefit for the city, what our goals are around through bedroom units around middle income affordable housing. Those, those two really just are going to continue to rise to the top. And there's other things we can consider but they'd be icing on the cake rather than one of the layers in the sheet. Yeah, I know this is a completely different direction in a way but does the city have a target number for its population. I mean how much, how many, how much dense how many people can we actually fit in this one square mile. How, how much, how much is that true. No, I'm saying what I mean, should we go from the top down I mean what are we trying to, how many people are we trying to get to live here. And it's sort of, it's gotten very I'm sorry guys I know you talk this talk every day, but it's gotten a little abstract for me I'm not sure. How many families do we want how many, how many single people do we want how many houses do they need how many beds do they need to sleep in. I see the mayor wants to respond to that Christine. We've been growing at 1% per year for the last 10 years. So I think at a minimum we need to think about that continue. There's no, I don't think there's a goal on population size. Could we become overpopulated. We have data on the capacity of our wastewater infrastructure on our streets on our housing and it's not. We're not like coming to some precipice of not having capacity for that group. And it is something that gets looked at from time to time. So we're able, if we do start growing beyond 1% a year, we will, we will know if we start to come up against those thresholds. And how many children do we want to get into the school and how much how many children can the school accommodate. They also have those numbers I don't recall them offhand but they have they are building this brand new facility to accommodate a significant increase in students. Yeah, I think those are all great questions. I know a lot of times, I'll do work at a university and they'll say we want to increase our population by, you know, two or 3% you know by 30, you know 2030 or something and so you need to look at all the aspects of what that does. And I'm just curious if the town has looked at that from, you know from your sewer from your public facilities from your open space from like all those elements to really know that you're providing services that that amount of people would need and what I mean because we are such a small space. I'm not sure we could figure out what the capacity could be for a healthy environment. I thought that Eric actually had presented us with a figure at one point it's something like 200 expected units in the next 10 years added, as far as housing was kind of the range of what was anticipated, and I might be misquoting. It's 260 households it was part of the transportation impact. Okay, okay, very good. I wasn't entirely off thank you. Wait, 260 households that we want to get in here. What kind of a timeframe, I went. I think it was like 10 years wasn't it. Is that I misquoted. Yeah, I don't know. The Regional Planning Commission does projections for all their municipalities and that's the information that we used in the. In the transportation impact fee or the impact fee assessment as well. It's, it's basically a projection of growth rates of capacity of availability. It's not necessarily a target that we're trying to hit to say that we want that many. It's, it's just kind of what we're, what we're, the, what we're projected to, to potentially to take on given all the other factors that are at play and historical rates as well. And I think the other factor to add there is the more housing you do add the harder it becomes to add additional housing because you know the build the built area is. We need to be wise about. I think Abby has been patiently wait raising her hand for the quite a while here. Sorry. Yeah. I think that's it. I think that's an important point like universities project out like UVM projects out. No, they don't want to grow. No growth. You know, and that's like providing some foresight for planning and and everything for the property up there. And so we, we can't grow at 1% endlessly for like so tiny and so deeply packed in as it is. That's, that's simply worth exploring in more detail but I kind of wanted to point out one thing to bring the housing commission and Tom to speed on and then the second element in the room. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it because we have spent a lot of time talking about it on the commission. So the first thing is, we have talked about, you know, developers coming and saying, you know, we don't need parking people are walking and biking and taking bus. And I'm like, we have so much work to be done. I mean, very obviously in our bike infrastructure was, which is almost non existent. So where are they biking. Our sidewalks are decent, but a lot of areas are lacking repairs or sidewalks. And then our busing isn't our busing is like good for the area but it's not like a great reliable all the time seven day service 24 seven 15 minute parkings that make people feel like I don't need a car. So it's hard for us to swallow the parking reduction without the infrastructure. So it's like baby, let's make a community where people don't need to have a car. Who's paying and put installing the sidewalks he's paying installing bike lanes. And what often happens is they say we'll use on street parking, and then it makes it really hard to install bike lanes after you designated roads to on street parking. And so Burlington deals with this all the time when they're trying to get bike infrastructure in place such an uphill battle, which is one of the reasons we recommended against having that on street parking at the class event overlook, because we don't have sufficient bike infrastructure and sidewalk infrastructure on one of our busy streets. It got installed anyway we told its temporary but it sounds like Tom you're like counting that as a part of your resident parking, but we're told that that's going to be removed like that's not part of the parking but you know over time your residents are going to feel like it's part of their parking and that and that you guys want it and it just becomes really hard to take that away so it's hard for us to say get rid of parking minimums or you don't need as much parking and say until we deal with on on street infrastructure for alternative modes. That's a huge important point that you're making apps. And I think we do we have some plans in place for some of those things and certainly that is very much part of the conversation. But to feed into that conversation a little bit I also have numbers on renters that have vehicles in the city so when I delivered this memo in 2019. I was looking at 2017 data, and at that time, the number of dwelling units so not bedrooms not number of renters, and to read your house no matter how many bedrooms that had no vehicle was 18% of 2019 I've just updated it that was 23%. So to some extent, I think that we're encouraging. As we are bringing in people into these one bedroom units, they're not bringing cars with them and part of that is because we are the walkable dense smart growth urban center that we are, we do need to improve all of the things that you're talking about. But by removing the parking spaces, you're actually removing the likelihood of bringing more cars. It's, it becomes less convenient to park your car. If you don't have an automatic to parking spaces with your unit. So I guess my question is, how is the survey conducted and how do you get every rental renter person to complete it. Oh, it's not a survey. No, that's I'm sorry that's from us census data. So it's American Community Survey data, and it's something that I reference repeatedly. It's not it is not ideal data or perfect data but it does show a trend over time. What I'm seeing is a continuous reduction in and based on the number of cars that are in the city with the addition of 105 units in those two years, there was actually a net reduction in renter vehicles in the city of 53 cars. So I believe that what is happening is you're finding that some of the younger millennials Gen Z are less likely there's a lot of evidence that they're less likely to purchase a car they're less likely to purchase a home. So it's trending in that direction. And then when you make it more difficult to park a car it's not as easy to just you know park as many cars as you want. And then they're more likely to be using alternative forms of transportation and become voices in support of actually building out that bike infrastructure and the sidewalk infrastructure. So I think there's a possibility that this could actually help to move in the direction that you're looking to move I'm a walker so I am very strongly I don't have a vehicle and very strongly in your camp as far as getting that done, but I think we'll help that. And so the second point is the newest development. Obviously caused a huge stir with parking between the cast event overlook the three developments there there was like a lot of upset neighbors and quite a lot of feedback that any commission received about insufficient parking over parking in the neighborhoods, undercounting the necessary parking, you know, lots of backlash from the development and how much parking was available. And lots of raw feelings about parking in the city because of it. And so, just cautioning that this will be a very like we have to approach this very sensitively and very smartly because nobody wants what happened in that neighborhood which is a lot of people are pushed out of parking in the neighborhood in a way that the neighbors felt like they weren't involved in the. We heard that the renters felt like they were do like they were told they had parking and then they didn't and now they're, or they didn't want to pay for parking so they're just parking on the streets or they're parking out over at the deli. Probably not counting the numbers when you say with who's parking site because they're not paying you but they are bringing cars and they are parking the neighborhoods and there are like some issues going on with this with gateway developments that's not the only one but with gateway developments leading into neighborhoods and how neighbors are impacted and what that conversation is and with gate with the form based code just really streamlining things we've obviously talked about the pros of that. But the cons of that are like how the neighbors feel like they can't participate in the process but they deal with the consequences of those developments so just throwing that out there because we spent lots of time and the planning commission. Talking about that and also receiving a lot of participation from constituents that were really feeling bad about the way that the parking was developed. If I could I just follow up on that because I do think that there's a something really there because in, as I see it's definitely like the communication part of it rather than the actual amount of parking that is available because I mean what you're seeing now. I was at the I was at the large meeting of course with all the neighbors that were there and we all we talked about okay we have cast event over here and it was pretty unanimous everybody acknowledging that and did you know the amount of parking there was was not impacting the neighborhood. And just you know the four spaces out front those are in addition we have enough parking there for all of our cars. And now what we've seen now that we're finishing development. If you've seen the neighbors there they've come in and asked to have on street parking eliminated just they all signed a petition saying that they don't need all that on street parking. What I did was really in my what I saw was better communication up front to show folks you know in my I was probably not as aware of what a hot button issue was going to be. So when I came and presented them as all I had was our data to say when this is done we are building enough parking I have so much data to show that we are building enough for everybody here and I stand behind that fact that this building is about to go up and our folks are not going to be using all of our cars there now whether you would want them to that's a different question that's a policy question whether it would actually be okay to have not a space for every single person at the community which I think there's a good argument for but just on the ground. I think what you're going to see is we're we're parking everyone at these communities. That's a jing up front to all of a sudden they say oh this is developed and I didn't know about it I understand how that's a room for improvement room for improvement on my side as a developer to take those issues before they start to blow up. And other residents on Manso asking to remove on shoe parking because they don't want overflow. I think that's why they don't want overflow parking from the apartments asking to eliminate on street opportunities. I guess I saw the petition. I wasn't 100% sure it was seemed like a lot of folks they want to have on street parking eliminated so that residents on Manso wouldn't be able to park there. My understanding of their desire to eliminate the on street parking was so that that area could be used as a as a basically a path they could walk there while this while the discussion is ongoing about getting funding for a sidewalk on street. So they felt that it was, it was a better option for them to be able to walk in the street than to have the vehicles parked on the street. So that's why they submitted the petition to eliminate the park. It sounds fairly logical that they're thinking we would rather park in our own driveways and not have the use of the street in front of us and have it completely congested by the overflow and and eventually possibly get a sidewalk out of it so they're they're foregoing a benefit to their neighborhood in lieu of something else. But just to say, so you're hearing all of us talk a little bit. These are the kinds of discussions that we're having. And so this is how you know this information that you give to us this is sort of how we'll be hashing it out. You know, I, there's another thing I don't, Eric, maybe you remember better than I did but you know there might be some legal implications to about one of the things the problem we ran into when we presented a reduction in parking and then asked for it for the council not to approve it, was that we kept coming across you couldn't just say okay we'll reduce parking for multifamily homes. You know there was a sort of across the board that we had to work with and I don't know legally if we're just going to need more assistance or knowledge to you know what you, I think Tom you brought up a couple of things like you're going to be in your housing. Well obviously yeah it would be great we should eliminate that, or multi, you know more, more, more units that are going to be for families well you know kids are now going to have a car. How do we do that. Can we do that all legally to pinpoint things that specifically so that's another part of the discussion I think we'll be having. So, we can set it up so that there are different rates for different uses I think the issue that we were running into previously was the with the discussion of the parking waiver was that there was a desire to only allow certain uses to take advantage of the Yeah, we were limiting who could actually use it which is where I was concerned that that would cause some some potential legal issues to say that. Yes, a public institution like the school could use the parking waiver but just a regular developer of housing could not. We can establish different rates for different uses if we want to get into that level of detail in in our in our existing regulations for parking. We might need to which is a lot of work but we can do that. Jim that one to say something. I just wanted to share the housing commission and very careful to talk about this is multi bedroom unit construction and not family housing because that is a fair housing issue we can't. We can restrict who gets these houses to people with kids. So just to make that clear that that's going to have to be part of the discussion there is no way to ensure that a family will go rent. It's constructed we can't require that we can maintain income for poor ability and for for a period of time or infertility but you can see the income piece and not the actual types of people were living in that building that unit. So, if you notice the housing commission language has been very clear and careful on that and we continue consistent on that. I'm curious. I just want to do a time check it is eight o'clock. So, we can continue going that's fine. Or we can wrap it up but Abby were you trying to say something before I cut in. What I hope is a quick question maybe Tom can lend some insight to us but we had heard sort of off the cuff from a developer that they're going to build bigger units they're going to build them in Burlington not in when you ski. That's why that's the case and what we can do to change that. So they said if they were going to build three or four bedroom units they would they would skew toward Burlington. Yeah. That demand. I have an answer to that actually I spoke with a developer who told me the same thing. In Burlington they developed they recently eliminated parking minimums in several areas of the city and that was the reason that I was given by that developer specifically for three plus bedroom. It was, I know they I think they eliminated them across the board in certain areas. They did. Yeah. Yeah, so I was told by a developer that's why their developments over there that are more bedrooms. Okay. So the demand side there wouldn't be any difference in my opinion. Given it's 801. First I'll thank everyone for coming today that set and Tom and Jim and Robert and Heather and who else am I missing. It's not a regular member I guess that's it. If anyone has any final comments they want to share with us thoughts, please do so. My only thought would be thank you to set and Tom because I do think they presented some very interesting data. So this I think this is a very meaningful collaboration from all these folks. Yeah, and I need to do it more. I was just going to say I think that, you know, unfortunately that time was limited I think we can have a lot longer discussion about all these topics so we may be reaching out to Seth and Tom and the rest of you folks in the future. Yes. Happy to help and support the conversations anyway we can absolutely. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Any final comments on this topic, or we move to the next agenda item. I think people are ready to ready to bolt it looks like a big smile on her face like it's over. I start vacation tomorrow so I'm ready to bolt. Thanks again. Let's move on to city business. Eric or Christine or even Jim if you want to hang around. Oh, I guess Jim just laugh. I'll start. I just have a couple of quick, quick updates under city updates. The primary one I think that I just wanted to mention is that the pool, the pool has finally closed for the season. This past weekend was it's was the last day apparently was very successful. The creamy stand however will stay open for a little while longer so anybody wants to go get a creamy feel free to do that they'll still be available for for that. But that's the, that's the primary item I wanted to, to mention under city updates. Because I can never seem to find that creamy hour. I don't know offhand there. They're pretty active on social media so they may have something there. Instagram it's like, well it was when the pool was open it was like 12 to 6 Thursday through Sunday, but now that was close. I'm not sure about Instagram is where I check. Yeah, that's my problem. Well, congratulations to the city to Christine and to everyone else. What a, what a tremendous asset that is the city. Yeah. We're actually going to get like a overview summary sort of about the season went at an upcoming council meeting so that can be interesting. You're probably aware that on Tuesday at city council we have for my international guard leadership in and significant amount of public comment. I took notes on all the questions that were raised by residents and share those with the Tang leadership they're going to get us back a written response. And we're going to do like a push out like we do with our agenda is all of our dates. So that'll be coming forward. I also sent the recording of that, the timing TV recording to our senators and the governor walks with the recommendation to to check out what our residents are saying. Thank you for doing that. I've been writing and calling them all just the responses or just can there's nothing. They thank me for sending. Yeah, okay. No response. No, I can't. That's what's hurting is you're not really, I feel like, you know, we keep speaking up and we're just not getting a straight answer. And maybe there is no straight answer is just, it's the federal government and we have. Vermont has no control over it either I don't know. But if you're nothing else take consolation the fact that they can't say nobody didn't say anything. Yeah. And so it does have value whether whether or not it advances. I just wanted to ask you did they mention anything about when the f 35s came, the projection was a reduction in the number of flights annually. Yeah, so the f 16s operated about 8,000 flights a year and they have so far been doing to, and they're projected to do five. So it is less than it is. Okay, well that's those are the numbers that they gave at the start just that now we're getting I think six or eight taking off daily as opposed to four. That's what that is one thing I had those numbers from you and I share those with them in advance and there I did request in the written response for them to include like hard data on what's actually happening. And I thought you did a really good job moderating it like asking pointed questions, keeping it moving forward but giving everybody a chance to speak like I thought it was really well facilitated and appreciate just the straightforward questions that you had and your ability to like re ask them from what what our residents were saying you know I felt like, you know somebody called out the council for not asking questions, you know, and I, and I, I, I agree like it's our represents, you guys are represented. And we the people are kind of like suffering from this so I really just wanted to say I appreciate I appreciate you coming with questions, asking questions and then reframing the questions to make sure that we get answers because you know a lot of their participation was like we're not high enough up to be able to answer this, you know. So anyway, I just wanted to say that that I thought that the very clear questions from you and the follow up that you're asking for is really wonderful. So I appreciate that. And then my last update is that we at the next meeting on 920 will have our city manager finalist presentations. We're doing some push out in our reach around that to try to get public engagement, happy to have anyone's feedback. We will take public feedback on that into consideration we have our final discussion about putting an offer. So stay tuned for, you know, it'll be on zoom but the actual. The computer is pulling around today I missed what was that topic. The 920 meeting we'll have our city manager finalist presentations and are hoping to get resident input and feedback on that. That is the finalist. What's that. Are there two finalists. Yeah, we were. We interviewed three and advanced to. How does the, how does the public get feedback to that. I mean, yes, you. Yeah, so that'll be whenever when we do like the saying the push out saying this is coming up. There'll be options for email. Social media. Yeah, as our director, she's going to put together some, like a proposal of like different, different input ways that we can. And it's also it'll be recorded to so like if you can attend and absolutely watch the reporting and we'll have a seven day open comment period. Is it not until 920 that we find the names, find out the names of the two finalists for 920. It'll be before that, whenever we do, whenever we get out the information saying this is how you can engage and this is the upcoming meeting details. I don't know if I'm supposed to say them yet though, so I won't. That's it for my council updates. Thank you. Oh no, one more, one more. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. September 22, 21, Tuesday, the 21st. John and Phoebe will be joining me for an orientation for new commissioners. So Brendan, you'll be getting an invitation to that. I look forward to that. Thank you. The Brennan, you're still on after this evening's meeting. Yeah, it was, it was great. I mean, I, I'll say that, you know, I really enjoyed this and it's really impressive to me how engaged everybody is and committed and it's really so far so good. So I'm excited to be part of it. You know, I always say it. A couple things. Yeah, I got, you know, trying to be selective, but it's a good start. We're fully stopped like our commission alternative alternatives are all. Yeah, we have a whole slate of membership right now. That is the way I was thinking. I think we were all here tonight. Yep. That's pretty impressive too just just just just because you are here Brendan everyone's decided to show up. Yeah, so everyone's so excited to meet the new guy just got everybody in. So does anyone have any other business they want to discuss tonight. I have a question. Sure. Just because I'm going to keep asking this but has the city continued conversation about the former state Stevens site. Is there any movement on that or is that still kind of dormant. So, conversations. Yeah, I thought that we had discussed about the city possibly being conversation with the diocese about the property and what Mike correct me if I'm wrong but I think the diocese is still trying to figure out what they want to do. It's actually say Francis Paris Council is trying to figure out what to do with it. It. Yeah, the city, the city has been in conversation only so much as a conversation with the Lucy housing authority to see if there's any kind of joint thing there. But at this point it's there's really nothing that I can report. Okay. I'm curious. I mean, there is, you know, an important piece of the municipal real estate that's that's on there that's municipal infrastructure rather that's housed on that real estate. That's probably why I'm concerned about it. Well, yeah. And so nothing, nothing can happen with that one acre. That's least. Yeah, until 2044. Sure. I understand that but the whatever the future may be for the rest of the parcel could affect upon that one. Sure. Okay. If there's no other business, I would look for a quick one of the just remind folks our next meeting is scheduled for September 23rd. So that'll be the fourth Thursday here and we will pick back up with our discussions on form based code amendments. And I will be out of town that night. Oh no. What will we do without you might have a great discussion without me. So, 24th. Okay. 23rd, 23rd, two weeks from tonight. Yeah. Who did we end up making the, the, what's, what's. Yeah, I was no longer. It was Abby. Abby is the vice chair. That's going to be yours to run Abby. She can do it. I should have been paying better attention Mike. That's what I do. So hearing none of the business, looking for a motion to adjourn and before you do that, thank you over for coming and for listening tonight in your comments. Motion to adjourn. I'll second that. All in favor. Aye. No one's opposed. I assume. Thanks again everyone. Thanks Christine. Thanks Eric. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Take care.