 Okay. Order this. January 24th meeting of the popular planning commission. First thing we have to do is approve the agenda. So everyone can take a look and. Move to approve. I will make a motion to approve the agenda. Okay. We have a motion from John. We have a second. Well, second that. Second from. Okay. It was me. I can give it to David. No, Gabe was really confused. I just saw his mouth. I guess he was talking to himself. I heard your voice out of his mouth. It was weird. Okay. Motion from John. A second from Aaron. Those in favor of approving the agenda. Say aye. All right. Any opposed. Okay. No posts. I don't believe I have anything. Thank you, Mike, for. The fabulous memo. I've been going through it. When we get to it. I'll just share screen and pull it up. Thank you very much. Does anyone else have any. News or anything to mention. Guess the only thing I'll point out is there was a. The legislature passed. The legislature passed. The legislature passed. The legislature passed. S 222, something like that. Went through and was signed by the governor that says that we don't have to host sites. Any more. If we choose not to. I didn't put it on the agenda. I've generally. Kind of staffed here, but we'll see. If it makes sense to kind of. Remove this or make this as an option. If you're not. If you're not. If you're not. If you're not. If you're not applying to commission meeting. It doesn't have zoom. They can always contact me. And I can always make sure that I'm here. Somebody's here to. Make this room available. But. As you guys know, unless there was a public hearing on the zoning, I've pretty much been here by myself. So. We can always kind of play that by year over the next couple of meetings. And if it doesn't make sense to have me come in. To host a meeting site where nobody's going to show up, then we can just go fully, fully virtual. So. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Let's. Jump into things. Mike said there's no one here for general business. So we'll move through that and on to review of the zoning. Amendment memo. I'm going to. Share screen now and pull up Mike's memo. Before anyone gets concerned, I don't plan to read it all out loud. I just want to point out the, the stuff I'm the changes. The little tweaks I've made so far, and then we can just go through and people can point out. Page to page if they have flagged anything for the page. All right, let's do that. Everyone see it. Yep. Okay. So assuming folks have gotten a chance to read through this. I mean, how about before I assume that do people feel like they want to take a few minutes and do a read through right now. Individually. Does anyone feel like that would be beneficial? You mean like you reading it out loud or. No, sir. Yes, sir. Just, just we, we can take a silent five and. People can read through it if they want. I don't even like reading bedtime stories. So. Yeah. Does anybody need. Time. Okay. Let's go. Just at the, the second. Sentence here I made a little change. Just for clarity. And made some changes farther down for. I mentioned the projects being proposed as potentials just to, just to. Emphasize that. I mentioned that we unanimously recommended the changes for approval. Cause I think that that will have, that should have some weight to it. That the staff and all members of the planning commission are all in agreement on all this. Mike did great. I mean, I just. Haven't changed much at all, really. So, you know, he gets through the explanation of the first change. Yeah. So I just tried to. Yeah, I just tried to go through and insert. So I mean, there was some comments in the planning commission public hearing that we weren't giving enough information. I, I do plan to work with the regional planning commission to come up with a, the draft zoning map. So I plan to replace the images. Hopefully that'll help clarify some of this with a slightly better image. But I did want to go through and have the specific amendment a little bit of the background. Summarize the public comments as, you know, not to put a lot into it, but just to summarize the public comments and then put your recommendation and my recommendation, which are generally the same with the exception of number eight. So, okay. I hadn't gotten a number. I did not. I didn't know that. Just to clarify, Mike, this is going to be made available to the public as well. For the meeting, right? So this would, we kind of have two audiences. Yes, it'll be available to the public as well. So, yeah, it hasn't been made public yet because I wanted to make sure you guys, because your name was on it, wanted to make sure you guys had the opportunity to review it and. Yeah, I think you did a great job, Mike. The only thing that I, that popped out at me was number eight. Mostly because I remember there being this conversation about. Was it like a council on aging or, or something like that, talking about, you know, this, the changes and maybe wanting to have some better review procedures, but I, I didn't get from that, that you were not, the staff was not in favor. That was the only thing that just took me by surprise a little bit to see that. Maybe I was alone, but I, I heard you mentioned that, but I, I didn't get the impression that you were, the staff wasn't in favor of the change. Dan, maybe I wasn't as clear as I could have been at the meeting. I mean, I support the idea. AARP, that was a guy AARP in Congress for new urbanism. So yeah, I did. You know, I think this is a good idea that we're thinking about. I just would not go through and make that change at this time because I think Congress of new urbanism. I want, I tend to agree with them on this point that I don't think our regulations are sufficient to, to ensure that we've got that, that bad projects won't happen. As a result of that change. I have one question. Who's our local architect? That was Sandy Fitzhume. Okay. And you think they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll. Okay. We're Sandy Fitzhume. Okay. And you think they'll, they'll know what that means when they see that. Enough of them probably well. Okay. So, okay. I mean, that's, that's your comments. I will. I won't change that. Yeah. It was discussed a little bit above. Yeah. I still didn't use her name, but I did mention. came out against everything, and I'm not sure how to point out that kind of feedback. That's why I changed on the first recommendation that overall the commenters were in support of the change, because I got the impression that Sandy did not like any of them. I even thought about mentioning that there were one or two people at the hearing that were generally against everything. I'm not sure if that's helpful to add though. I just don't want them to think that their comments were unrepresented if they happen to see this. Yeah, so I haven't I haven't made any change. I'm just bringing that up in case Plenty Commission has thoughts. So I'm gonna keep going through sequentially and we'll get back to eight in a second. Heaton Avenue looks good. Mike explained some of the miscommunication that went on. Another thing I didn't add anything, but I kind of feel like with Heaton Avenue some of the first of the initial outrage was people who just didn't understand like much at all about what was going on, like even the basics and they just and I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but it seems like after that initial outrage, which was like kind of pre hearing and people were corrected on some assumptions they had that that there wasn't a whole lot against it after that. But I think the right. It's probably fine as is. That was just one thing on my mind. I did change. I changed covenant to easement in this case just for clarity so that people understand that it's the same thing as what's referenced above. Okay. I apologize if there's any typos. I got this done at like 4 30 on Friday and then had to go out. And so I just sent it out on Saturday. I never proof read it. So you may find some typos or something in there that I didn't catch because I did not proof read it. But I made a couple of changes. If anyone else noticed any point them out. And maybe after this meeting, I can go through for that and like finish up a review for that. Northfield. This, of course, is the most controversial one. I appreciated my explanation here and pointing out that the process for going from rural to res nine and how it's connected with the sewer. So I thought that was fine. Does anyone have anything on this section? I think one question I had was whether in the Planning Commission, there was a question about the new neighborhood development and I wanted to make sure that I got what your question was. Did I accurately capture what the question was? Kind of like commission recommends approval of this change that said they were interested in knowing if habitat or I guess I should say we considering this is your your the authors as well. Interested knowing whether habitat could still develop their project if they use or were required to use one of the planned unit development, specifically new neighborhood development section 3404. They felt council should consider the answer to that question in your deliberations. This could impact the decision in number seven below where the city will discuss whether to remove the requirement to use new neighborhoods and projects with more than 40 units. So I wanted to make sure I captured your question because I'll reach out to Zach to get what his response will be to that. Can I just clarify that we didn't doubt the question? I remember this discussion, but I just want to make sure that the if habitat could do their project with in a planned unit development, would we we wouldn't change our recommendation here to rezone, correct? Because it would still have to rezone for the density requirements. It would just be the open space that the PUD would allow for. Did I get that right? Correct. And maybe I should move this down to number seven. It would be more accurately placed down in number seven. I think we had because it would modify. Yeah, in my note, we had the discussion up here, but maybe it would fit more appropriately down in number seven. Yeah. That might make more sense to have it there because either way, we're recommending that the rural designation is changed. And Mark, I'll send you this markup version, Mike. Thanks, Marcella. And that that is a good point. I think I wasn't I wasn't thinking I was thinking that maybe that they could use planning is a unit development and keep it a rural. But probably not, right? I guess I'm not clear on that either. Is it because I was thinking the rural is a no access to water and a certain level of density. And I didn't feel like a project could because it would have access to sewer and water and it would have a higher density. And I think the number of units would not wouldn't work out if its data is rural, because I believe he's trying to his he's trying to cost out around 50 units. And being 58 acres, rural is two, two one acre per two units. So they would only have 20 something units available to them. And I think even with those density bonuses, I doubt they would be doubling. I don't have my regulations in front of me. But I don't know if you'd be doubling your density. Okay. So probably not. But I think at this time, when we discussed it, we thought it would be better. It could be a good thing because it would help provide that park that open space protection that was the main concern. I think the idea was that if this project fell through that it would be zoned in a way in which we would hopefully attract a similar project. If we if we did it that way, where PUD was needed. But I mean, I don't know. I feel like maybe this could be a distraction. And I don't know, maybe maybe it won't matter for city council, but it seems like they're going to probably have a lot of questions about to understand what we're trying to say here. I don't know. That's my way of opening the door to like, if people know that you're seeing it feel like it could be removed. Or if you want to advocate for why you don't think it's a distraction. So keep it in for now. Well, yeah, I mean, I put the words in there just because I wanted to make sure you guys this I'm trying to cite your words. So I just wanted to make sure on board with how it's phrased. So Yeah, I remember me. Yeah, we asked you included because we wanted to make city council aware of that different option that we had considered. We didn't end up voting to make that our recommendation, but it was something that at least some of us thought was a different viable path for this. It does it does seem like it has been this location has the potential to be a distraction or misleading. I mean, I think I feel like everyone is on board for rezoning the area. And the question of the new neighborhood. Um, but PUD is a separate one on, you know, perhaps that's an avenue to ensure or address some of the neighbors concerns. But I don't feel like the idea of keeping it in the same zoning district and then leaving, suggesting that they could use the PUD to get to where they need to go was what anyone had in mind. I don't know. Okay. Yeah, I'll probably put a if we move that to number seven, where which I think is where we're going, then I'll probably put a bullet here just noted noting that there will be additional comments on this project in number seven, just so that there's something that that clues the council in that, you know, keep this in mind when we get to number seven, and then we can have that further discussion there. Yeah, something like, yeah, C, C number seven for a related issue or something. Okay, sounds good. So we've gotten to the end of where I was done with the editing actually. So I'm gonna have to come back through this. But we have number four about the side setbacks. I've about the rail setbacks. I added in some language, the language from Alicia and to this and and I'm working on the strikeout copy as well. Is this is going to be a separate strikeout copy or just it's going to be all one document? There's a memo and then there's the official officially we have to have a strike through copy, a red line copy. But a lot of times that doesn't give a lot of context when, you know, for example, number eight, the recommendation to city is just on a table. There's a strike through that eliminates residential density. There's no explanation to it. So technically, what the city council will vote to approve or not approve is the red line strikeout that we then just accept changes on. This is just meant to kind of summarize. Alright, so what does it mean if we strike out that residential density requirement? Or what do we do if we add in this case, add a setback to rail lines? So we have number six, the new PUD rules. Seven is the removal apartment used in the neighborhood and conservation PUDs. And I put in a lot more explanation in here and you guys are welcome to review this between now and the next meeting if you want. Again, the planning the city council isn't going to take this up until March 23, I believe, we'll have to have a final draft by the time we get to March 1. So I can warn it with your memos and everything but we can go through and edit this at the next meeting as well. I did kind of go through, you know, as you go through it, you know, what are the issues with some of the mandatory PUDs. And so I tried to just go through some of some of the examples of things that that could be issues. So you guys can certainly go through and edit those down or edit those out if you want. It did feel like a lot or and could be summarized by, you know, has administrative challenges. Some of this feels like a bit of a, I don't want to say a straw man, but not not a strong argument, you know, one way or another for anything. Yeah, I think if we can, this is a long memo in as far as, you know, life in 2020 goes our people's capacity to read more than 12 pages. This might be a place where we can cut down on like, there are some administrative challenges. And if anyone's really interested, we can go and do it. But, you know, these hypotheticals on, you know, if they, I could answer some of these, but no one's proposing this. So that's why I say it feels like a little bit of a straw man. And there are very few parcels where this would kick in. So it seems like this could be cut down. I could give it a go. So I'm planning to continue editing and send it to everyone. And yeah, we could throw it on the agenda next time, just briefly, we don't need to like, go through it necessarily, but just give everyone a heads up and get an opportunity to get some further comments before we prove it next time. But yeah, I hear what's saying, John, I think I could probably narrow it down. And if Mike has an issue with what I ended up doing to like, summarize it, then you can you can bring up the next meeting, Mike. And yeah, as far as as far as getting some proof, it'd be great to get approved next time. So then we can get it on the get it on the website and get it out there for people like well in advance of March. That's one thing we talked about last time is we want to make sure that we're sending it out everywhere we can to give everyone the best chance of seeing it. Okay, so I'll note that as something to work on. And then number eight, appreciate that Mike did his best effort of writing a persuasive explanation, even though he wasn't helping. Well, I didn't get it. I understand that in the long run, you are in support of it. And then just a related thought on this, Kirby, if we do just continue as is, maybe we should consider in our plan, conversation updates to the designer view. That's actually what I want to do right now is is in the under the planning commission recommendation. I know this can be tricky, like in a group like this, but kind of kind of flesh out our thinking. I want to do with everyone involved. 537. Okay, that's kind of off the top of my head. But the idea is to get the message across that we're asking it to go ahead and do this. I mean, we're we're in there making zoning changes. Let's make the changes. I mean, I think the argument against what are the other many is waiting is who knows how long that could be. So we can do this. And then we can revisit the design reviews. My understanding is that the we want to make sure that design review covers everything. Every neighborhood that does not have a density cap. And we want to try to improve the design review process and get input from Congress and the urbanism doing that. I don't see it once. Yeah, go ahead. I'm not sure if it's worth mentioning, but you know, as a planning commission, our statutory like we can have these regulations and impose the zoning restrictions on people if we find that they are in the public interest and the health welfare of our community. And I'm not sure that we've seen any evidence that suggests that these density restrictions result in any public good in areas where we'd like to see where we have an abundance of public services and where we'd like to see development. I really liked that last part. Can you repeat it? No. Like we fail to see how these density requirements are helped the public good. Well, right, or are are are in the public interest? How will these whether it's lower high density, we've seen plenty of bad design. I'm not sure the density restrictions promote good design in any way. So what is the argument for these dead density restrictions? And that's that's at least my mindset as we look at at everything. I don't I don't start with the preconception that whatever rule regulation we have is good and is the reason for any good. In fact, if you look at development that's happened since zoning, in the most case, we most most of us would probably argue that some of the best development in all of my earlier happened before there was any zoning. So I don't I don't start with the idea that because the regulation exists, it exists for a purpose or it's good, you know, try to try to evaluate it on it's kind of like a zero based budgeting approach to our zoning. But I can't say that. It's for forever. I don't want to speak for everyone. I mean, I wouldn't mind throwing in a sentence that that's the same effect what you're saying that currently we don't think that this is doing anything anyway. So removing it now, removing it later, you know, what's it matter? How do other people feel about making that statement? It gives anyone pause we can, you know, we don't have to go there. Well, I like something like that. If John could remember how we said it before it sounded better. It was more elegant the way you said it the first time. Well, I think I tried to capture John's elegant, elegant statement when I said that accordingly, accordingly, we feel confident that when the further we fail to see our density requirements, this area promote good design or any public good. I know I missed a little bit of his elegance. It's on tape. It's all on tape. I was going to say that it's all on tape. We can go back and steal a lot of work. If I don't need to say quickly, I don't need to make a promise that I'm not certain we'll keep everyone okay with that. I want to add or subtract anything. Someone who's not me can feel free to rewatch this tape and paraphrase John better. Hey, it's lovely. You gave the John. Did I miss any, any of your great salient points? Looks great. Okay. Is anyone opposed to adding this to the memo? Okay. Staff recommendations. So we see that for Mike, not going to touch Mike's words. And then we have the minor technical fixes. Did anyone have anything they noticed in this section? This one got a lot longer because I did kind of have to go through each one of them and take what were really short and insert in the reasons why this one we should stop at so that the clarification on the hearings for state wetland permits. So somebody pointed out to me some confusion in the language the way it was worded. This came up last Thursday. And so I took a look at it and they were right the language. What was amended? So there's a statement that says only if it's on them on the map gets regulated, then there's an exception and then we put an exception to the exception. And then it says, Well, if you're in the exception, so it's like, well, wait, we got two exceptions going on. And now it's confusing. So I sat down and came up with a draft to fix the structure and makes it much, much clearer, much, it takes the ambiguity out of it. But it doesn't really change the intent too much. So you'll see the under the background at the bottom of that where the two bullet points are, you know, unfortunately, the amendment was poorly written. So it is should be an is so it is unclear what is what what exception is being referenced. So then there's a little change. So we just move the two references into it. And to into the next sections down, because really what we wanted to be able to do is say, we only regulate what's on our natural resources map. That's what we've agreed to all along. We're not, we enforce to a map, and it's the adopted map. And then we go through in the next thing to go through and say, if you get a state permit, then you don't need to meet the requirements below. And unfortunately, we kind of put that into the applicability, and we really should have put that into the next statement below on the on the requirements. And then what came up was, and what we were trying to fix this time around was to go through and say, Yeah, but what about the hearing? So they're exempt from the regulations, but they still have to go through the hearing process. And that doesn't make any sense. So he said, Alright, well, they should be exempt from the hearing as well. And so we tacked that on to the bottom. And we ended up with this big long mess in three zero zero six B. And so what I did was going to pluck those two out of B, put one of them in C, which says who needs to have a hearing and put one of them in D, which says what rules do you need to meet to kind of go through and say, you don't need a hearing if you need if you get your state wetlands permit, and you don't need to meet these requirements if you get a state wetlands permit. So unfortunately, you guys have already forwarded or somewhat voted unless you guys want to vote to reconsider, we can take that up at the next meeting when I've got the strike out, you guys can take a look at the strike out and see if you like the change. And if you guys want to re reconsider, you guys can go and reconsider your decision because council hasn't taken it up. But otherwise, I'll just have city council take it up at their level to go through and make that correction. Hopefully it'll make more sense when you see the strike out. Seems maybe simpler if we go ahead and approve it. So you don't have to go throughout the full explanation with city council. Okay, well, I can put that on I can put a reconsideration on everybody voted in favor of it. So the way Roberts rules works if people care is that it would take a person who was in the affirmative to make a motion to reconsider and then we would just vote but we would put that on the agenda for next time to have a motion to reconsider. Then we vote on the change. And then that officially becomes the new sure we can we can do that before we just not I mean, not that we look, you know, legally after anything, but we'll probably we'll vote to approve the memo next week as well. So maybe we can make do that vote and then do a memo vote following. Yeah, I'm always careful about the zoning. You know, the process I'm usually whatever about but when it comes to a zoning amendment, somebody else has an axe to grind will go and hammer us. But for the fact that it was sent and then it was changed and it shouldn't have been changed and would had to have been reconsidered. So that's why I was being a little specific about following the Roberts rules at the next meeting to make sure that we do it right. So it's all in the minutes correctly. Yeah, yeah, no. Otherwise, really, yeah, yeah, no, that's I mean, we're making a substantive change. So we should revoke and and there should be notice. Yeah. Okay, I if everyone's all right with that, I think that that's better than then Mike's not a city council having explained the whole saga behind why there's this oddball thing in there. Okay. Okay. Is there anything more on this item Mike? No. Okay, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna touch this. I'll let you just redo this accordingly. So like as as if we did approve it. Okay. And then if something different goes down, we'll go from there. So next we have we have the signs change. Is this the the Domino's amendment, by the way? No, the Domino's amendment went through. In the past, this one was capturing to two other oddities that we're sitting out there. That says other technical changes. Solar access and shading. So I put a little more in here because we got a little bit more public comment here. Yeah, I thought the solar access and shading could be a little clearer or I didn't feel like necessarily some of the argument was as strong as it could be because I feel like, you know, in theory, we all of course, we're like, we want to promote solar access. But it seems like the reality of this is, well, we know that this regulation either prevents additional housing units, or it certainly adds to the cost of housing units for whatever analysis you need to do. But it also doesn't, we haven't seen any evidence that it supports additional or preserve solar access and reduces shaving, shading and talk about shaving here as I try to approach Aaron's beard, beard length, but you know, the reality is this could, we know most shading occurs from trees, not buildings and most solar panels are now being put on roofs and new roofs, not people's yards. So I don't know, it seemed like this made it more of a gray area or a little more complicated. I guess there is like the, the nod to trees, but I'm not sure if we wanted to make it clear like this regulation can prevent new housing units adds to the cost of any new housing units. And we haven't seen any evidence that it supports solar access or reduces shading on areas where we would have solar devices. Okay, I think if I had my way, I wouldn't have these rules, the solar access rules at all, but trying to thread the needle between there is public support for that in some corners, some very public support for it. So when this was originally proposed, you know, in all honesty, when this was originally proposed and how it was proposed, we did our professional directing of the rules to place it in a location where it would only apply in limited situations. It did not accidentally end up where it ended up, but it still will affect, you know, some projects. So, you know, my, my, I wouldn't have put it in here in the first place, but it made it in here and it has some public support. So I feel at least getting it to a point where it's less of a burden would is is an improvement over where we were at or where we are at today. Yeah, I'll try to be the existing I think everyone supports the existing PV and it would probably be pretty hard to develop something to shade someone's existing roof-mounted PV, right, panels like I don't think that's going to get in the way of a whole lot or I don't feel like that's the issue. Yeah, I think it would have to be a very specific case of somebody who puts up, you know, just a solar rack near their property line in a district where somebody, you know, then puts a two-story house, you know, then, you know, during, during December, you might get some shading on it. I think if I was investing $30,000 into solar panels, I probably would try to make sure I was putting it in a place where that would never, you know, where the risk of getting shaded by a future project is limited. But yeah, I think if it's on the roof of a house, it would be very difficult to be shading. I don't think very often people shade other people's roofs, but we have a lot of topography around here. So it wouldn't take much for somebody who's got a house on a hill in back of them that happens to be south to make a difference. Okay, I'll try to, I'll try to shorten this and try to leave Mike's points while adding those that John just made. Does anyone have anything else on number nine? And then we have the River Hazard Area regulations. Does anyone have anything on this? So I'll do some further tinkering right after this meeting. Send this around everyone. Plan to vote next week. Before that, we'll vote on amending our original vote to encompass the wetlands fix at number six. It's no, it's part of number nine. It's like lumped in technical. Yeah. But yeah, this wetlands fix. I'm not going to change the language though, Mike, I'm just gonna leave that to you to reorganize it accordingly. Yeah, it was a little bit tough to kind of decide how much to do. I knew this was going to make it a lot longer, but I also it, you know, damned if you do damned if you don't if you if you make it too short, then, you know, we got complaints that we weren't doing a good job of explaining these. And too long, then everyone's gonna say, well, you know, there's an awful lot here, can't you make it shorter? So considering this is being directed to the city council, and the counselors historically have been very good about doing their homework. So I think even if even if the counselors don't fully read through it, even if they pick certain ones that they want to read through, I will summarize it in in the hearing process and they'll have all the information they need. If they want to if they want to know more, they will have the information they need to kind of to drill down. That was where I was going with it, even though I know it's going to make it longer. I think it's it's the information's there. If people want to look for it. I recognize that probably five people will read it. But at least it'll be at least people can't say we didn't give them the information. And I will still try to work to get those images updated. I recognize those were not very good images. They're kind of stolen out of the existing zoning map. But now that we've kind of gotten as far, I'll go through and have a draft map pulled together with by the Regional Planning Commission. So those will have probably, you know, where it's a green changing to a yellow, it'll probably have yellow stripes or something like that. So that way, it'll have a hash line so people can see what's changing. I guess while we're we're doing a little bit of reconsidering. Marcella made a good point about the first one. And I kind of wanted to go back and think about that. So in that first one there, the image, if you go down a little bit in the image, we were talking about right where the first O is in wood. There was that property that is on Whittier Street that we kept out. And the more I thought about that, the more I thought that was that was a mistake. And I think Marcella was right. If I were in that house sitting on that sitting on a porch on that house, if it has a porch, and somewhere to ask me, Well, what is what neighborhood am I in? I think it's really hard to go through and say I'm on the College Street neighborhood. And the properties to my left and the properties to my right are all in this other neighborhood. It fronts on that street. And I think even though it would change the zoning, you know, a large reparsal, they would have more ability to develop blah, blah, blah. I think I would go with what Marcella said. I think that property should be included and make that slightly bigger add that 20th parcel in. But that that would be up to you guys to reconsider as well if you guys wanted to reconsider it. I guess I was just when I was driving home and thinking a little bit more about it, I was like, you know, the based on the parcel size, I didn't include it. But I think the reality is if you were to tell me that one house on that street in the middle of that street is not a part of the neighborhood, even though it's on the street with all the other houses, I think is a is a mistake. So I'll move that we do what Marcella said. I think is there a problem with notice at this point that I'm like, like informing the property owners and yeah, the same same question. I if we're looking at this from the legal standpoint, no, there's no issue. We can we can we can change we could have done all this without notifying any of the property owners. We go we went above and beyond and try to go above and beyond to make sure we don't do something that that you know, the public is going to be upset about that we changed the zoning and didn't let them know. But legally we can make the change. And what I would probably do is decide if we're going to I would probably just send them a notice, you know, it's probably very similar to this that would just go through and send them back and probably send them an individual letter that just goes through and say, Hey, I wanted to let you know, we had a zoning change that was going to impact Whittier and and Harrison Ave. And we didn't include you in the original proposal. And we decided to include you in the other proposal. This is the impact on your property because it's really the only parcel that we're changing. Would it would it would it be too much to just to call them so that I I don't know who they are. So I don't have phone numbers for them. I mean, we would probably make sure we got a letter to them. You know, and I can check sometimes the assessor sometimes folks, you know, have have a more direct contact if they've gotten the zoning or a building permit, we might have something on file on our computers. I mean, we can do a little bit of homework to see if we can, you know, make that a more personal connection. Yeah, I feel like if they if they have questions that calling them would let you just resolve any issue right then and there with a letter, they may have outstanding issues and don't want to see like our good intentions be, you know, rewarded with someone angry. But yeah, if you if you can send them a letter and call them and let them know that this is being considered. That'd be fine when we open it up next time to we were planning we were planning to vote to open it up to to amend our original vote at the next meeting. That's that's when it would happen. So the only other one that may come up that won't come up for you guys, but you guys may hear about in a big circle. Maybe I'll hold off on on that one because it's going to be a little bit more confusing. It'll be easier once it's here. So there may be a there's been somebody else who just needs a boundary line adjustment, but it's also on a zoning district in order to fit a project in. So it will probably be clear and probably better if I wait till we've got the proposal. But they're not quite ready. So they're going to try to submit it to the city council. If the city council takes it up, they have to send it back to you by law. So you guys may get something on the rebound, but it just happens to be a zoning boundary that has to move with the parcel boundary. So that would be a connection there. Okay, thanks Mike. Okay, so we have a plan for next time. Finish this, get it out to the public right away afterwards. I'm going to stop sharing screen if I can. And next on the agenda is a review of economic development goals and strategies. We also have a pile of minutes to do. And before that pile gets any larger, I want to just go ahead and say let's make sure whatever we're going to do. And maybe we can just do look at a cursory review of the strategies. And because I don't think we have time to fully digest everything. But we'll see how it goes. But just to give you a heads up that maybe around seven want to move on to the minutes. Yeah, I wasn't sure if we were even going to get to these, but I had them done. So I wanted to make sure we got them. I got them out to you guys in advance. You'd have a chance to take a look at them. Yeah, thanks again. I see you've obviously done a lot of work lately. So if everyone goes into the Google Drive, you'll see that the revised template for the economic development goals strategies now has a lot of strategies. This is the Excel document, right, Mike? Yes. And I think I made a new one. So it should be revised PC template economic development. Because I didn't want to delete what you guys originally had. So I felt it was better. We'll we'll kind of archive what we did originally. Because I don't think I made changes to aspirations. But I did make a couple of tweaks to the goals. Now I got to try to remember completely what they are. And maybe that's the advantage of having the other one still in existence. Yeah, so we had narrowed going through a bunch. So I think when we did them, we had meaningful work, resilient business environment, entrepreneurship, owner opportunities, job attraction and creation development, vibrant downtowns and housing. And I went through meaningful work and living wages. I think what I did was I split the first one. Yeah, so the first one was meaningful work and human needs. And I split that into two goals. Rather than having one goal. And again, we can put them back together. But I was really kind of looking at increasing opportunities, meaningful work, and per percentage of positions that pay livable wage. And then those services that support the increasing quantity and quality of affordable housing, child care is there essential to through thriving and successful workforce, additionally maintaining a mix of land uses and improving access to affordable public transportation are key to fair and equitable access to employment for all residents. So I was trying to capture a couple of those human needs. So because our first one, remember our our aspiration a was about the workforce. And so the meaningful work, the necessary workforce services. And that was mostly what went to those. And then I looked at entrepreneurship, job attraction and creation were very similar. So I combined those two. So we had resilient business environment, I combined entrepreneurship, job creation and expansion, those kind of all go together. And development was looking at the building stock and utilities and facilities and vibrant downtown. So I don't think development vibrant downtown. So the housing was in number seven, which was kind of grouped in with the economic development side. And I had rolled that up to be part of that workforce. So you're welcome to disagree with me. So the necessary workforce services was where I put the housing, transportation, and childcare. And a little bit of that comes down to as I work through the strategies, kind of where the strategies fit. So that was, so I did want to go through and say I tried to keep everything that was there, I just shuffled them a little bit. I like, I like that you combine some things. I mean, that's what we've been doing with a lot of these makes sense to me. And maybe some of this will make a little bit of sense as we go through the strategies, because, as I said, one from seven to six, maybe we can crush it down even farther. Again, as I said, when, when, when I do this with the committees, the committees usually kept things nice and long and then you guys would come through and start lumping things together and we would crush them down. So we're kind of trying to do this accordion, push and pull to fit everything in and then crush it down at the same time. So under strategies, and hopefully this will help explain why I grouped them the way I did. The first question I have was, in the goals, you guys talked about meaningful work. And I don't know exactly what that is. So I really couldn't come up with strategies for what you envision meaningful work is unless you were kind of thinking meaningful work is the livable wage. I think it also, it could also went to whatever workforce training we were going to do. Or is that, yeah, we were thinking like, if we're going to include anything about childcare for services, any kind of education and training that it would all go in there? It looks like did you put a lot of that stuff in the second goal, the work for services? Yeah, I kind of expounded a little bit on that to kind of go through the necessary work services because I think the there are really three factors that come in for for workforce and economic, you know, three big ones, or at least three big ones that I kind of key in on one is affordable housing, housing and affordable housing. From a workforce standpoint, you can have all the jobs that you want. But if nobody can afford to live there, then then that's going to impact the workforce. The next one is childcare. This pandemic showed the impact of childcare. Our workforce is dropped by 400 people, nobody else's, we haven't increased people on unemployment, our unemployment rates as low as it was before. But we have 400 people less. And that goes to two factors, one being number of people that retired and a number of generally women who are now staying home to take care of their children. And a lot of that's due to a lack of childcare. So childcare does affect your workforce. And then a third one, which usually you'll hear a lot about from housing advocates is transportation. So, you know, having people, you know, especially talk about a stow, a lot of low income jobs, but a lot of high price houses. So people have to figure out how to travel from Morrisville or from surrounding towns to stow to go to work to get home. So transportation is a key barrier to economic development. So that was why I picked those three people have other ones. Yeah, I almost feel like meaningful work was a carryover from something else, you know, that we just kept bringing along with us. And, you know, if you look at, I mean, all the data is people are trying to understand this great resignation and you know, the, you know, whatever we're are 2% off of the labor force or 5%, depending on what numbers you look at. The issue is that people are defining meaningful work very differently. I don't think that's our job to define. I think we could just strike it and we'd be okay. Yeah, I agree. It seems like, you know, meaningful work for educated people seems fairly fraught with it seems like it is leftover from, you know, words that sound good. But when you think about it, good words for the chapter, maybe not good words for an implementation strategy. Yeah, it seems to implement meaningful work. I don't think we can. I don't think we do. It seems like it also risks sounding fairly elitist as well unnecessarily. Yeah. So I think of, yeah, I'm fine with removing that. I think of aspiration A as the people aspiration and aspiration B as the economy aspiration. I noticed that Mike moved like job creation stuff from an A goal into a B goal. So I want to pull that out and say, do we think of job creation as a people thing? Or do we think of it as an economy thing? Then that goes into like how we, you know, how we craft the goals. Yeah, and I mean, we can get into a little bit when we get there. Job creation, I see as something we work with businesses to create jobs. I don't think we necessarily work with the, with the individual people, you know, if somebody wants to be an entrepreneur, we're usually helping them. We help them from a business standpoint, which is why I kind of moved it to more the business side. But I think we can I mean, I think when you, you know, and I don't know if we've ever been engaged in something like this or successfully, but certainly you look at places that have competed for, you know, companies that are trying to expand to make their communities more attractive. And if we wanted to take that approach that that would be, I mean, that would be job creation, right? We're trying to create whatever it is, tax incentives, or some reason that, you know, Montpelier is the best place, but I don't know if we've ever done that. I know when I lived in Northfield, there was this whole idea that we were going to do that because we had some industrial space that was under utilized and their economic development committee was working on it. I don't think they had any major success after, you know, three or four years of trying to draw people into some of those underused commercial spaces. So I guess I'm just saying I don't know if that's a priority for the city or not trying to attract employers. Yeah, but I think I think the key is within the strategies we're working with businesses in job creation, we're not looking at, say, we're going to do job creation by bringing in a whole bunch of workers, and then we'll figure out what to do with them once we've got them here. We're not looking at the worker side in job creation. We've been doing job creation with the businesses to create to create the jobs. And then we bring in people to fill those jobs. Little semantical, but you know, these first the first to, you know, the livable wage and the workforce development, I think very, you know, directly are trying to target the workforce. And so I guess with that I tried to take mostly what you guys had as as things and try to massage them into what would be one of our, you know, one of our five P's, the programs and the policies and the permits and those. So, you know, the livable wages, livable wage study, livable business marketing program, and livable wage and incentive policy. Again, not necessarily really strongly in support of a couple of these, but trying to capture what it was we were trying to do and turn it into an action. I think the livable wage study would be a good place to start to understand, you know, what is our livable? What does the landscape look like? You know, if we want livable wages, how are we doing? We know we've got some of the highest wages in Washington County. Where are we falling short? Is it specific sectors? Is it just retail? Is it restaurant? What are you know, where are the places we're succeeding? Where are the places where we're falling short on livable wages? What is this going to tell us? Well, I think the goal was grab the right mouse here, increase opportunities for meaningful work, which we can take out and the percentage of positions that pay a living wage. So the goal was to increase the number, the percentage of positions that pay a livable wage and maintain an educated and trained workforce. So if that's our goal, if our goal is to increase those opportunities and increase the percentage of positions that pay a livable wage, I think one thing we need to do is to understand, you know, where the barriers are to doing that. And then somebody else, not me had recommended, you know, Montpelier should develop a program that allows business to verify that they pay a living wage so it can be used as a marketing for that business. You know, I'm not sure. I mean, a similar example wouldn't be municipal is, you know, the sustainably harvested timber. You know, there's now a third party seal of approval that you could get that you're the wood you buy to build your house has been sustainably harvested and and managed. They're great for marketing. I don't think that's effectively something the city of Montpelier would be able to do. But again, if just trying to follow through with an idea somebody had, how would you implement it? This kind of how you'd implement it. And then the livable wage incentive policy just goes through. And I didn't know I wasn't going to go through and list them all separately. But Montpelier should adopt the policy to apply economic development incentives, such as TIF, tax stabilization in any economic development, RLFs, Revolving Loan Funds to favor or apply only to businesses that provide a living wage. Right now, we have what you'll see later on some programs that we have like our tax stabilization policy where you can get certain certain amounts. But if you want to go from a three year tax stabilization to a five year tax stabilization, then you need to be paying a living wage to the people who are going to be working there. It becomes a requirement. So we can't require people to pay living wages, but we can encourage people to do it. So again, this kind of comes back a little bit to that initial thing. I think livable wages is a laudable goal and objective. I just think it's one of those ones that's just really hard for local governments to be really kind of getting in there. How much time do we spend trying to increase the percentage of livable wage jobs? We're a city of like 8,000 people. I don't feel like we shouldn't be the state legislatures having a hard enough time justifying that Vermont can do these things as a state of like 645,000 people. And who knows what I mean? I think this whole idea of the entire economy is changing underneath us. And the idea of the discussion of livable wage is I don't know if we're going to be having it. Maybe we'll be having it. But supply and demand are going to, we've got people in Burlington they're paying $30 an hour for pizza delivery guys and they can't get people to sign up. So I don't know. I wonder, I don't know even where that came from. If we go back to the aspiration, do we just want to have a resilient job market, encourage workforce development? Because that's probably something we can do. Sufficient housing and services for all members of the workforce. Do we need to even work that livable living wage in there? I think it wasn't the old plan and we just probably carried it over and everybody wants everyone to make enough money that they can live, obviously. But I think in terms of what we can actually do, I think the reason you're having a hard time coming up with good strategies, Mike, is that all of us were is because you can't really affect it with the city of like you were saying, 8,000 people. It's certainly a city, you know, not necessarily of a previous council. I mean, councils haven't changed very much, but a previous counselor had this as a living wage as a big pillar of what she was pushing for. So I even wonder, like with the tax subsidies and stuff, you get some tax break for paying a livable wage. I mean, we're just redistributing money to pay somebody a wage, right? Because we're just taking it out of tax bonds. I mean, what is it that we're really accomplishing by doing that? Yeah, I think the example I used last time was one of the issues is that the jobs that pay a living wage generally are the jobs that require specialized training or specialized degrees. So the beneficiaries of the recent tax stabilizations where people have said, I'm going to pay a living wage, I should get a tax stabilization is all jobs that, you know, required some specialized amount of training. And so, yeah, we increased the number of those jobs. But they aren't jobs that just anybody, it's not like we've helped our retail or our store employees get any more money. We still have the same number of people, same number of people earning an unlivable wage. We've just increased the number of people making a living wage. So we have increased our percentage. But I think our key, if we were going to look at this, my personal opinion is the key would be to identify the people who aren't making living wage and identify what are the things we as a municipality can do. I don't know if there is much, but are there things that we can do that would help them increase their income so they're not in that unlivable wage income area. And I don't know if that's more workforce development. Again, but there's got to be, as you said, there has to be somebody who delivers the pizzas. We've got an economy where we need people to deliver pizzas. I don't know, that's a policy issue. But as I said, I put a bunch in here. Just to remind everybody and remind the public, if they're watching, there's a number of things in here that doesn't necessarily mean I support them. They're just, I try to put things out there to get people thinking and we can go through and remove them, adjust them, and take them. Mike, thank you for doing some work on that. Kirby, I know I personally didn't have a chance to really dig into that. I was reading the memo for the changes and so maybe it's just something we could take on as homework and be more informed to comment on next time we're together. Yeah, I think that was the plan all along because this was kind of our backup item for tonight anyway. I think we could take this on and try to get actually through it at our next meeting because it's going to be the main thing we do then. I think that all of us are trying to figure out what vision makes sense. It sounds like we're, from what I've, from the people I've heard from tonight, it sounds like there might be interest in trying to strip down economic development to the most achievable things and concentrating in the areas we think are the most achievable. And if we can think about for next time like what that might look like, I think I could be on board with that. I do want to, I do want to make sure that we include the connections we have to Montpelier alive and to what the parks director had told us that he wanted to do for economic development because I think that's just us synchronizing with other efforts that are going on, you know. Mike, could you carry some of those over to some of those recreational things that really Yeah, we'll get to some of them as we as we get down through to the lower ones and some of them I had to point out you'll see a couple of them are highlighted to go and say using chapter, not an implementation plan. I think a couple of them were, were good text pieces. So a couple of them that I lumped together. So you'll notice under workforce development program. We talked about, you know, getting a staff person to connect people needing to upskill. And then also I figured that same position could also connect employers who need workers in the program could also be used with the state to provide satellite offices in Montpelier for services like adult education, CCB invoke rehab. So I tried to kind of take what were three separate ideas and figured they're not going to operate without a workforce development. So if we just called it, we want to have workforce development program. It's just an idea. And if we're going to do it, it's not a one thing. It's a we hire somebody and they work on a number of different items. And so that was why I kind of grouped those three into one. We could certainly add more pieces to that if we have other ideas. But that was where I lumped a few of them together. You know, I don't know if it's worth doing. I mean, it's a little bit of a step back, just as we really start working on this, just a thought. I was at Association of General Contractors of Vermont had their annual meeting in December, and there was a I have to find his name, but there was a state economist that came in and did a presentation on sort of the outlook moving forward. That was very housing focused, but it was really good. And kind of levels that everybody, you know, the conversations throughout the day. And I wonder if I could find out who that was to bring somebody in for 50 minutes and just give us sort of their math, what the state's macro outlook is, and maybe what it might mean to a community like this. That would be worthwhile or we feel like hey, we've already kind of done that in past meetings. Was it Tom Kovett? Is it Tom Kovett? Is that Ringabout? Jeff Carr? Oh, Jeff Farrin. Yeah, I don't know his name. I'd have to go back and take a look. But it sounds like somebody you guys probably work with, right? He was really good. It was very, very useful information. I would just say that he shows up in our world sometimes, I think or we all get you the name. I mean, if you think it might be useful. Yeah. Yeah, or you could just pass along like if there were materials, you could pass along to us about the housing outlook. I would be I have no idea what the other state economists is saying about that. I would be interested. OK, that sounds like a plan for next time. I want to give everyone one one related heads up. Did I ever report back after speaking with Dan Groberg? So I spoke with I spoke like we got distracted with the hearings about the zoning bylaws and stuff. So I don't think I've ever reported back. I had Dan review just where we were at a couple of months ago or a month ago on economic development. The gist of what he his feedback was, you know, he was happy that we had things in there that went along with what he was trying to do. And I don't know him very well, but this seems like maybe a personality thing is his response was, I don't object to anything in there. So so he doesn't object. That was the feedback from from Dan. So so it seems like everything's fine there. But you know, as we get further along here, whatever newer version of things we have with it. OK, let's review the minutes. He might end up finishing early, which will be helpful for me because I want to do additional work on our memo. So if everyone can take a minute to review all of the minutes attached to the email from Mike, there's one two three four of them. And so we'll spend a couple minutes doing that. And then anyone sees anything in any of those minutes? Let us know. I need to be added as present to the 12 13 minutes. December 13th. I wasn't on the previous two for travel, but I was on the 13th hearing that noted. Otherwise, well, do you want to do it all together? I don't know if I should make a motion to approve all four of them since I wasn't at the first two. I think you should do them all together if everyone's comfortable with it. I make a motion to approve all the minutes with that change of adding me on the 13th. Yes, of course, without it. Thank you. I'll second that. OK, we have a second motion from David and second from Marcella. Any discussion? Any further amendments before we vote? Is everyone ready to vote? Anyone need a minute? I'm not hearing that there's any further discussion. So those in favor of approving Gabe's motion to approve the minutes with the one change to add Marcella to the 13th minutes. Say aye. Aye. Any opposed? OK. So the minutes for us. Thomas Sorry. Was that the name you were talking about? Yeah, it was my guess. So I win the prize. So let me just double check. Do our next meeting is scheduled for Valentine's Day. Are we going to have big issues? Disappointed spouses and significant others? I always do my partying after the planning commission meeting. So I'm good. That's not actually false. Just make sure to get to the 14th and have everybody go. Well, kind of. Yeah, that's a good point. Is any. Is anyone know that they won't be able to make it because of that? Because the only other option is next Monday, fifth Monday. So I feel like these questions are too personal. I think I'll be OK, Mike. All right, how sad are we all? We're going to do a Valentine's Day. I mean, some of us have kids. So like you could use that as an excuse. I'm sticking with mine. My plans are going to take place after the meeting. OK. All right. So it sounds like we're good for that. It's going out to dinner anyways. Well, Mike, were you kind of asking for yourself? Did you want the No, I just in past years. Yes, it could have been a big issue. This year. No, not with not with COVID. We no big dates. OK. So it sounds like we're still good for that. On that note, do we have a motion to adjourn? You do. Motion from Aaron. Do we have a second? Do we have a second? Nobody wants to leave. I second. I second. Gabe, come back in. Motion hearing in a second from Gabe. Those in favor of the journey, say aye. Aye. All right. See you in on Valentine's Day, folks.