 It's working on it, just like that all lower case, that one, it didn't like that one, sorry it should have been lower case, it was all lower case, are you connected to it? Do you have another internet? Yeah, here you go. Here you go. This will work. This will come out from there. So I can put the power strip in too. How's it going? Congratulations. I don't have a little flipper. Yeah. How's it going? This is the second one. Yeah, Claire's the one to have these computers. I don't want to screw anything. I've gotten shorter and shorter. Good evening everyone. I think we should try to get started. I'm going to let people find their seats. I'm Leslie Ward and I am the president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. And I am delighted to see so many people here tonight. It is such an indication of how much we all care about this beautiful neighborhood and our Montpelier community. So thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to be here. I want to start by thanking Orca Media for being here. They're going to be filming and it allows people to be... YouTubeing in and listening for those who can't be here tonight. And I also want to thank... Who else was I supposed to thank? You had one other person. Oh well, of course. We are thrilled that Casey and her team are here and we'll talk more about that as we move on through the evening. Of course, we want to talk... The purpose of this evening is to talk about the plans for the beautiful buildings that surround this building. But before we do that, I want to take just a little bit of your time. Whoops. Great. I'd just like to take a little time to give some folks some accurate information about the college and our plans and why we're doing what we're doing. Some of you may be very well steeped in that. But I've had a lot of folks and many of my staff have had a lot of folks come up to us over the last several months and express their sorrow that we're closing, ask us about relocating our faculty. And a lot of questions that indicate to us that there are a lot of people for a whole host of good reasons and we don't really know who we are, what we're doing and what our plans are. So I just thought we'd kind of start on a level playing field of knowledge. So let me start by saying that we are a low residency school. And what does that mean? We're a low residency art school for graduates. Low residency means that our students get paired up with a faculty mentor, create an individualized learning plan, and do most of their learning from their home communities. It's a beautiful model for adults who have busy lives. You can keep your job. Your children do not have to change schools. Your spouse or partner don't have to get a new job or have a long distance relationship. And you can have all the support systems that stay in place that you need in terms of healthcare and other wonderful services. Our students are all over the country and in some cases all over the world. And that is true for our faculty as well. This beautiful model that works can have a faculty mentor in Washington, in the state of Washington, working with a student in Tennessee, or a faculty mentor who lives in Los Angeles working with a student who lives in Denmark. It is a beautiful model in that it really is geared towards the adult learner. So why did we have a campus at all if all of this happens all over the world? Well, each of our semesters, and you come for four semesters as a student, is punctuated by what we call a residency. A nine-day experience where you come together with the other folks in your program for a really dense and wonderful packed time full of learning from your faculty mentors, from lectures that are given by visiting artists, learning from your other colleagues and students. People attend film screenings, music performances, art exhibitions, literary readings. It all happens in this intense nine-day period. It's an amazing experience. It inspires our students. It creates community which artists need. And it sometimes transforms a student's experience here. It's beautiful. It has an inordinate impact on their learning. However, from a time perspective, students are only on this campus for six percent of their two-year period. Nine days every semester. We don't have students... So what does that mean? It means that we don't have students living here. We don't have students paying room fees. We don't have students paying room fees that help us maintain heat and upkeep these beautiful buildings. It is not a sustainable model. That became very apparent to the school prior to my even coming here. It is a fact that we have struggled with. We are also a school that centers our investment in our students. We take a lot of pride in that. We believe that we offer some of the best, if not the best, MFA education in the country because of the attention we give to our students and the community that we create for them. Because we're dedicated to equity and empowerment and our mission of supporting as many artists as possible, not only did we realize it was unsustainable to maintain a campus that our students only partake of six percent of their time here, but that we were using our resources to an inordinate amount of their resources, their tuition dollars, donor dollars in heating and maintaining buildings that were empty for part or all of the year. It is also was not lost on us that we were creating a carbon footprint from these buildings that had very little useful return for both the physical and environmental costs they were causing, but just by their being there unused. So we took a hard look at how we operate. We took a hard look at what our students need and we decided that we would be better off leasing space on another campus that was used most of the year and we could inhabit that campus at a time when they didn't. Summertime and that we could then put the money that we were saving towards the things that really mattered for our students. Scholarships, increased scholarships, investing in our faculty and our programs and in our equity and empowerment initiatives. So I want to say loud and clear that we are not going out of business. We are changing how we do business. I understand that impacts this community which is why we're here tonight but we are very, very dedicated to our mission. We also know that there is a vocal minority of individuals in our VCFA community who do not, can't imagine us continuing without owning this campus and they can't imagine the school could serve its students without gathering here in Vermont. And while I really respect the intensity and the high quality of the experience that people have had here, our school is our community. The experience comes from our faculty, it comes from our values, it comes from our pedagogy and it comes from what we do when we gather together with both challenging our students and caring for them. And we are committed to putting our resources to deploy them in the best way possible. So I hope that answers just some, maybe some confusion that may have been out there about the school. I also want to say this beautiful building that you're in today, College Hall, is a building that we will continue to own. We have, and the green, we have no plans to sell College Hall or the green. Our administrative offices are here. While our faculty are flung all over the country and the world and our students are, most of our administrative personnel are here. We have some who do work remotely. But this will be the heartbeat of the administrative offices. So I wanted to make that really clear too. Tonight, however, we want to talk less about the school and more about the campus. So we've invited Casey Ellison and her wonderful group here and Casey is the principal of 150 Main Street, the purchaser of three of our buildings to talk about her plans for Gary Library, the Crowley Center and Martin House. Before Casey takes the floor, though, we also wanted to share with our community that we have two other serious buyers for the remainder of the 10 buildings that are for sale. One of those buyers is one of our current tenants, the new school. Some of you may be familiar with them. I want to put on my glasses and read their description of what they do, so I get it right. The new school of Montpelier is approved as a general and special educational independent school by the Vermont Board of Education to serve students with the disability category of other health impairment, speech or language impairment, specific learning disability, intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, emotional disturbance, developmental delay, multiple disabilities and traumatic brain injury. Many of you who live or who are in this community often have seen those students with their teachers around the campus. They're wonderful tenants and we're just thrilled that they're interested in purchasing two of our buildings. And we're getting very close to a signed agreement with them. And while I can't disclose the second buyer, or the third buyer, really, I can say that we are very close to an agreement with an entity that would allow the campus to continue to operate in the higher education space and that it would give the community the continued benefit of the kind of neighbor it has valued for years. And that buyer is interested in the remaining five buildings. So we're just really happy to share that. And certainly as things become, you know, more firmed up, we will be happy to share more details as time goes on. So without any further ado, I want to turn it over to Casey and her crew. We're going to have time for questions at the end. When we do get to that point, we'll ask people to come up to this microphone and ask your question. That allows the folks who are streaming in on YouTube to see you and hear you and understand where the questions are coming from. So thank you very much for your time. And Casey. Hi, everybody. Hi. I'm Casey Ellison. I'm a naturopathic doctor. And I work with a lot of these folks around here in this room. And yeah, we're here today just to introduce some of the ideas that we have for these three buildings. Gary, Martin and Crowley. Just a little bit of the technical details. We're under contract with VCFA at this point. It's we're under a due diligence period. So the sale is not final. We have about four months to kind of go through, come through all the details, make sure everything would work. And also have, you know, discussions like this, kind of check in with the community, see how everyone's feeling. And so we've been working together for quite a long time, a lot of us here. And everybody's going to have a chance to introduce themselves and what they do. But I just wanted to start it off by giving you an idea of kind of what we had in mind. So at this point in time, nothing we're talking about is final. We've started the process of a zoning application, but nothing there is, nothing's even been warned yet. So it's not approved at this point. The point of us doing that is just to see kind of where we stand, especially with Gary, because we have some ideas about Gary to share with you and we want to know whether that will work, whether that fits in with the community and what everybody wants and needs. But yeah, basically at this point, we are proposing and working toward having Martin and Crowley be healthcare space, basically. So we're looking at clinical space, a lot of different, really cool integrative medicine practices that we all work with. And some of you may be familiar with the bath house plan. I don't know if anyone remembers that. See Joe nodding over there. So we had put together a pretty cool bath house idea for the area around Sabin's pasture, but the scale and the timing and all of that just really wasn't working at the moment. So we've kind of, we've revisited that a little bit and we're looking into potentially putting a little baby version of that bath house in one of the buildings over there. So healthcare space, a little baby bath house, and then as it says here, we're looking into creating like a creative art space in Gary. So we're going to get into all that a little bit more in the sides that we have. But basically performing arts, music, to conference space, all kinds of mixed creative use and the idea is for the three buildings to kind of blend and work together and have a lot of really cool things going on and people in them. So I'll just say that I'm probably forgetting a million things right now, but we will get back to those things. We'll start with this, which is clinical space in those two buildings, Martin and Crowley. Like I said, I'm a naturopathic doctor. I've worked mostly in the past with women's health and then kind of moved into oncology. So that's kind of the work that I will be doing and should we not some of us? I want to give everybody in this I don't know which one, maybe we'll just keep it on this slide and do you want to go first and introduce? Hi everybody. So I'd be one of the people working in Petro Rowan Rhymes. So I'm a deep tissue, sports and injuries, massage therapists. I incorporate Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and I would be working within the clinic space to be in Crowley and one of the hopes with Crowley is maybe that the baby bath house would be in that space so there would be potential for people to be doing sauna, steam, cold plunging, things like that to do a little bit of a circuit maybe to do that before and after sessions or for it to be a part of sessions. So yeah, that would be my priority. Hi, my name is Dr. Christina Annerly. I'm a local chiropractor and acupuncturist down on State Street and I'm one of the practitioners bringing in a pretty stable and robust practice and I'm vital life and that being said my main focus is really being able to meet people where they're at with their healthcare needs and I have a pretty diverse set of offerings being both chiropractic and an acupuncturist and I'm really focused on Petro and I work wonderfully together because we love sports injuries and biomechanical reorganization and so we have great referral practice together. We want to And as well as I love treating children with sensory integration issues I work a lot with concussion in the same vein sensory integration memory loss getting people back functioning where and I think all the practitioners here we really our practices come together really really well and we already have a really wonderful referral network between us and which is why having everyone together in the same space is a really powerful concept that we want to share with everybody and bring that together so that's me and I'll give the floor to Wendy. Hi everybody my name is Wendy Halley about 9 years ago I opened Lucid Path Wellness on State Street I am a long time clinical psychotherapist about 30 years I just figured today I started when I was 4 almost 30 years and so my psychotherapeutic practice focuses mainly on short term solution focused employee assistance program work which is basically working with in the workplace with employees and their dependents and also helping workplaces deal with issues they might be having between employees and such and workplace wellness so that's a lot of my psychotherapeutic practice and then I have this other foot in a different world where I have also a long term usually until today under the radar practice doing shamanic work so basically entering a dream state and working with the dreaming of other people and helping them kind of I guess change the dreaming the narratives that are playing out in their unconscious but it's very hard to describe clearly how'd I do yeah you can ask questions later if you're that interested but the thing the reason why I opened the wellness center on state street it's like the biggest secret in Montpelier is that I purchased this enormous healing chamber that uses light and sound I got very excited about it when I tried it out in Colorado it's the only one east of the Mississippi it's huge it's about 3,000 pounds and it's an incredible device that uses harmonics to bring your body into a place of harmony on all levels it's a really cool experience it's incredibly difficult to describe it's a marketing issue which is why maybe it's such a big secret could be but anyway I don't need a storefront and so I also have been Christina and I in particular have been talking about combining our practices for a while because they complement each other really well I said that right anyway I am very excited about moving my giant machine into Martin because it fits that was the big thing it fits so I'm excited about that and then moving the rest of my practice there as well and let's see I also I'm a podcaster I don't do it live which is you could probably tell from me talking to you right now I have an idea that I don't do it live and I do some writing as well and then maybe I'll do some sleeping when in between all those other things did I cover everything? thank you for your time hi everybody I'm Claire Wheeler and I'm not one of the businesses represented here but in my day job I'm the director of inclusive entrepreneurship at Mercy Connections and I teach business classes and self-employment to folks that have traditionally been locked out of access to entrepreneurship so women, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming people people with disabilities and different abilities new Americans, immigrants and refugees newly settling here in Vermont and in the nighttime I am lending my services to these people who I love dearly all businesses also that I am a client of working through the business plan so as Kisi mentioned we are very much putting our ideas together this is kind of the first step of getting feedback from the community and really wanting to know what's going to work in those spaces if those spaces will work for what we have envisioned and if they're all viable businesses as well so that's kind of where I come in with some spreadsheets so maybe I'll advance the rest of these slides does that sound okay? so just to kind of review these are some people that you could just look at right here but I got excited about the different colored circles so that's why they're there so I'm actually going to I'm just going to skip ahead to the simpler buildings this is Crowley and you'll recognize it as the newer building and this is where we're talking about having practitioner space, clinic space mostly in the upstairs rooms that you can see there on the top and it's got a really beautiful entrance that you've probably seen folks gathering in which would be reception, it would be where we'd have naturopathic remedies and different things for clients using the space and then the small hydrotherapy center aka the baby bath house in the basement where there are already rooms available that would work really well for that so as you can imagine there's stuff to figure out there and there's a lot of engineering and cost related to that but that's the plan for Crowley as far as we know in terms of permitting the personal or professional services use is all that we would need in order to be able to do all of that in the building and so we won't be applying for any zoning changes for this building and then Martin is the building kind of right behind Crowley you can't quite see it in these pictures but right behind it is this machine that Wendy talked about will be and again this will just be healthcare practitioner space similar to Crowley personal or professional services is what it's currently zoned as that's what we'll use it for and then Gary is the library which this is where it gets a little more complicated so Gary for that space we're kind of testing out and seeing what's possible as Casey mentioned we'd really love to create a multi-use community space that's centered around the creative and expressive arts so thinking about it sort of as a venue, as a gallery as a place for the community to gather for workshops and conferences and potentially also being able to enjoy food and drink Tula might talk a little bit about the juice bar idea that we have going on but healthy and restorative food and drink available currently Gary is zoned for academic institute library personal professional services as Casey mentioned we've begun looking at the zoning application and in order to kind of create the most possibility for what we'd like to try to accomplish there the new conditional uses that we're looking at for that space include restaurant they're listed here theater and performance exhibition convention or conference structure and museum gallery and exhibition hall so even those uses might give you a sense of what you're going to do there let me see if there's anything else maybe you can I'll leave that for you hop on in Tweedler town hello everyone my name is Tweedler pleasure I am yeah I am very excited about the idea of potentially starting a juice bar and Gary and I'm figuring out some models for that whether it's going to be some sort of fresh breast thing or if it's going to be juices that are prepared earlier in the day and then you can just purchase and take to go oh I forgot to mention I am a graphic designer and web designer and I have been a raw food chef for 15 years so raw foods and health foods and all of that is kind of where that part of my that's the part that comes in with the juices well we'll make the designs beautiful too but yes so the idea would be to have a juice bar possibly smaller scale cafe possibly to go foods or still working on the business models as you can clearly see but yeah that's the plan and yeah that's what I got I guess I'll finish up the slides just to say Casey we've been kind of envisioning and thinking about Bath House for years in Montpelier and we're also kind of seeing this idea be popularized in other places in Vermont I just came back from a lovely weekend in Montreal where there are many spas as part of the cold culture so I just kind of wanted to highlight the idea that finally in New England the idea of hydrotherapy as a health practice is becoming a little bit more well known and it's really exciting to see something being proposed in Burlington south end and then the most of pretty recent issue of seven days kind of talking about the practices of hydrotherapy and the benefits of it across the region so happy to talk more about sort of where these ideas come from and where they're being practiced and why we think Vermont Montpelier in particular could use one yeah so I think from here we might, are we ready for questions anybody else want to hop in that's a great question that's the last slide thank you thank you everybody so like I said I'm sure we're forgetting a lot of things which hopefully everybody can jog our memories by asking questions yeah we're really excited about all these things I can talk all day about the bathhouse idea if anybody has questions about that it's something that I've been studying and working with for most like half of my life at this point Petra too and of course everybody else here has gotten roped in in a bunch of different ways as well so please ask any questions that you have and we'll do our best to answer them hi thank you for your presentations I'm Paul Carnahan I live over on Sabin Street and sort of a technical issue I was wondering if you are owning the buildings owning the land the college had talked about doing a condominium type arrangement so I was wondering if you're entering into a condominium arrangement where you co-own the parking spaces and the heating plant and all that how do you envision that working out thank you yeah so we're still working out some of those details but we will not be purchasing the land the buildings are all we would be purchasing and yes we are discussing a condominium agreement mostly to deal with parking but there is a possibility the parking will be dealt with through a different kind of agreement but we do have some shared heating with the buildings being kind of linked we're going to be working on making that a little more autonomous and also kind of in agreement with with VCFA at this point in time in terms of sharing that so I think that was all the question that you asked does that answer your question hello Joe Castellano Sabin Street it's a Sabin Street Mafia over here I also know Claire and Petra as well I just want to say that I am very encouraged by the fact that you guys are coming up to buy three of the buildings and I think that you are going to put them to some wonderful uses have a couple of questions now I know it's still very preliminary do you have some sort of timeframe as far as if everything went like perfectly what your timeframe to actually get permitting up and running and then obviously I don't think financing is going to necessarily be an issue but that's certainly another question too yeah so like I mentioned before we have a four month due diligence period which is a little spongy at this point because there are things that you know like parking there are a lot of questions around that we want to make sure we address everything in traffic studies and everything so four month due diligence it puts us into July particularly I think is that right Katie July and we anticipate opening the clinical space earlier than everything else we still have a ton of research to do on everything but in terms of the baby bath house we anticipate that taking some time to build probably I'm guessing at least six months but hopefully we would be operating everything in Martin and Crowley other than that starting in maybe August or September Gary is a much bigger question mark in every way because of course we have lots of ideas and because we don't know whether we can even get zoning approved at this point we're not counting on anything in terms of it being any kind of done deal so we need to figure that out first and then kind of go from there it's not it wouldn't necessarily be a major remodel or anything like that we would probably be using the building mostly how it is so I really don't know when we would get into Gary it's hard for me to even guess but I would say maybe not till next year at this point yeah hi I'm Donna Ackerman my house of butts VCFA land on camp street my question is I have a million questions do you anticipate at this point that the parking that exists will take care of your needs yeah that might be a question for Katie I do think that what we have right now will accommodate the needs of what we're planning for and as people saw in the campus master plan that we submitted there are areas where we would add parking if needed down the road so I think the two most likely places might be a little more parking right along ridge street and then the old tennis courts so we wouldn't need that right away just based on what these folks have planned but given some of the other that Leslie referred to if those items come to fruition eventually and by eventually I mean probably from now there might be some additional need but right out of the gate we're in really good shape okay great could I ask one more question please and it's for UKC how does this affect your plans for the use of the lower pasture please at this point we're just holding on to that land we're really not sure what's going to happen there at this point we're not actively seeking any other we're not considering selling it or developing it or anything at this point basically the original bath house plan that was intended to go in that land we're trying to create something that ended up being extremely expensive as you can imagine and our whole model is one of accessibility so that is something we're really still working on building something like that and then make it really accessible for people so I'm hoping that at some point when we are able to expand the bath house that we might end up still building something there I won't say I'm hoping that I am open to that possibility and as you may also remember there was some discussion of what we were calling phase 2 originally that we were interested in creating beautiful affordable housing potentially like maybe some food space food incubator space we talked about a lot of different ideas similar to this throwing a lot of things around to see what would stick so at this point we're keeping it as open space we definitely want it to remain park for the community and whatever we do that's always in the plan so it would be a low a low low density situation no matter what it is so does that answer your question? I'm Elisa Tversky I joined the property on First Avenue next to Dewey and I want to say I'm so delighted to meet you and that this meeting is happening because this from my personal point of view this gathering of neighbors and getting to know who the owners are is really what I was hoping for and I also sensed in your talking about Gary because conditional use might come into play some hesitation and perhaps some fear about a response from the neighbors and I can only speak for myself but to say you know I'm a designer I like seeing constructive reuse of buildings please don't be afraid of the neighbors just engage us in transparent conversation I think we want I would like to see constructive reuse of buildings and I really appreciate the fact that you're taking this step to engage us today and I guess if I had a question it was do you have any ideas about how ongoing engagement with the neighbors might take place in a way that we can support you whenever possible and encourage you to live as possible within what works for everyone including the community so if you have thoughts about I would say you know as often as you would be comfortable would be great for me and but you know I don't know what you have in mind so if you have thoughts about that I'd love to know thank you yeah we we have some ideas I should also say Petra and I live at Seven College Street so we are slightly further down neighbors to the college as well so it's nice to meet many of you and for that reason and for the reason of wanting this to work for everybody we're really excited to keep talking so ideas would be you know hosting some kind of ongoing conversation whether it's in person or on zoom we I think we have contact information for many of you because we've been trying to start that conversation so the first idea was just to make sure that we can be in touch as a result of tonight and I think we brought an old fashioned clipboard to make sure we have everybody's email addresses so the thought was we could at least make sure that we're in touch and begin the conversation of hearing what you all might need as neighbors or we all might need as neighbors and what kind of conversation is going to be helpful sharing updates as they come along that sort of thing so that's kind of as fully cooked as that idea is but it's certainly a start and I think we can co-create something that works for everybody thanks so besides the clipboard very old school we'll also be launching a website soon where people can see updates and read about what's happening and that's still cooking up but it will be up and available and it'll be all about websites so ways for us to see what we're doing, ways for you to get in touch with us, all of those things available. As part of the business planning for Gary there's lots of folks in the community who I think have good ideas for use of that space and desires for use of that space and so we'll also be beginning a process to engage folks who know a lot about running venues seeing Meg in the back there, hi Meg in Montpelier and what works and doesn't and who have desires for what that space could become just so we're kind of getting a lot of ideas and again coming up with something a little more specific and a little catered to meet the needs of the community so those might be the same processes, they might be slightly different like keeping you all, you stakeholders neighbor stakeholders as involved as possible around the procedures that are and the development as well as sort of building the business plan for Gary is sort of its own it also needs focused attention so we hope to begin both of those processes as a jumping off point from tonight. My name is Linda River-Valente and I've been a Montpelier resident for about 25 years I'm a small business owner and I was also your librarian some of you for about 13 years when I worked at the Kellogg Hubbard also your little people came in after school and books were checked right so as a community member for 25 years and knowing the arc of the soul and the spirit of this town it is a great relief to me to hear that there is in fact not as much calcification or kickback at this particular meeting that I anticipated it's a great pleasure to hear the way that people are receiving this information and to know that especially with the changing project around Gary and the way that it's still in you can clearly hear a still in transformation friends who used to go to the Langdon Street Cafe and so mourn the changes on Langdon Street except for the lovely J. Langdon you know this is it's a really exciting thing to hear about the potential shift in this venue for Gary so I'm hopeful I'm also listening I'm also excited to hear the way that these friends are going to bring something back to town that we lost for a little while but it's not gone forever my name is Peter Kellman I used to be a neighbor on College Street right across from Petra and Claire and even though I live on the other side of town I think it's really important to engage people from the other side of town some of you know that I've been doing a newsletter recently called the umpiliar public engagement newsletter and anybody who wants to give me their email I'll send it to them this is the way we should be doing it this is exactly the way the DRB comes later the DRB should not come first the DRB is a very formalistic bureaucratic process that creates animosity so I say to you guys thank you for doing this and I would urge people in town talk to your neighbors get other people to become engaged now I do have one caution it's very hard to putting up a website is not enough it's very hard when everybody's got busy lives to engage them and to keep them involved so I think you guys need to be thinking about building up a mailing list email is very powerful okay so I encourage you to do that don't depend on a website alright thank you hello my name is Danny Sagan I live with Elisa Dorske at 31 1st Avenue I have a question about the hydrotherapy space because I'm following the models of sort of appointment based therapy and treatment that you're all describing and I understand the model of a juice bar and maybe some social gathering around art I get that the hydrotherapy space which I won't use the word bath house because I prefer the word schvitz but anyway is this a public facility that's open so many hours of the week and we join as members or we pay once we go I mean what is the concept there has that been discussed as part of the business plan okay okay alright thanks we've looked at some different models for it and it's changed because the scale of the actual bath house or what's the word used yes so the scale has changed so when we were looking at a bigger bath house hydrotherapy place of course we were looking at memberships and all the different things and having a clinic space there and then with the smaller scale we're just going to have to see what works because it'll be a smaller space so maybe we'll have membership and appointments where you get a certain time and you kind of work through a circuit of things so maybe you'd start with a hot pool maybe go into sauna, go into steam room, go into co-plunge, maybe do that five times and so the idea would be that you would kind of do that until you felt as though you were good and then there would be more people going through so that is one model so accessibility is really important to us we really like the space to be accessible to as many people as possible like Petra said it is a much smaller model and hopefully it's just the beginning but there are many models of different bath houses all the things so we kind of outlined every one of them and gone back and forth and kind of created a combination of things so we do need to see also zoning why is what's going to work because for example with personal and professional services there's a requirement that there is a schedule followed in some way because of parking and making sure we don't have too much traffic flowing through so there are creative ways to deal with that even if it's just like oh I'm coming in and do you have space for me to schedule right now like so we're looking at all the things and we would welcome your feedback on that because we do want to know what people are looking for so let us know what you're thinking Hi my name is Patty Mariam and I'm a current student at VCFA thank you all for coming and for the community this is a lovely meeting and I really appreciate hearing about what you're doing it's exciting it's good work but the very civility of this community that you have here with the neighbors is something that was denied to students of VCFA we were this was hit with the ADAS in July at the residency with no warning we had no idea that the school was going to be sold and we had no input in this and regardless of what President Ward says place is very important for all students and for the arts in general when we come here in that intensity of 18 days for each of us a year a total of 180 days out of the year we're on the campus place is very important and the places that we're looking at moving to are now Colorado Springs and Susquehanna, Pennsylvania we feel safe here this is a place where artists we don't feel threatened and given what's just happened in Colorado Springs at Club Q and in general the crime rate both there and in Susquehanna we're really unhappy we're really really unhappy and afraid about the move and why that's not on you guys and I would love to see something like what you're talking about in Montpelier but we would have appreciated this kind of a moment one of the students no staff, no alumni alumnus were involved in this decision to move and so I don't want to hold it against you but I would love you to work with us so we have a group called VCF A Stay we have a website where we put up our concerns and the research that we've done because we still haven't been given a plan from the administration nobody sat down with us and said here are the buildings we've done this analysis this is how much it costs to restore them maintain them there was no plan so you guys have had more time with our administration than our administration has given us students and the alumni so I have a question for you Gary Library is really dear to the alumnus and the students it's an amazing place we go there in the panic of a residency that's the place we go why are you purchasing it if you don't have a really clear model because it's so valuable to the history of the place and the connection so if you could answer that and also talk about if there were other buildings other than these three that you considered because the Crowley Center was built with donation money over a million eight I think so people who thought they were donating in the legacy of Louise Crowley who was a chair here I believe it doesn't hold well they thought they were giving money towards the VCFA and now it's being sold to a for profit business so these are concerns we have and I would love further conversation with you folks to talk about that and if you could just answer some of those questions I'd appreciate it well I think some of that might be not ours to answer but for our part I would say that I think that it's important for us to be able to hold the grief of this moment kind of right next to the excitement that we're having for the potential for this space it's a really complex thing so I think I can't speak for all of you but for me hearing that VCFA was leaving was also a very sad thing to hear and that was what I had personally processed first before this came up as a potential for us so I really hear what you have to say and I wouldn't ride over that grief and the fact that you know this is all very conflated and complex and I'm sure for a lot of people it's very sad and we're entering into this potentially without we're not trying to skip that over we're definitely here for that to hold that and to have that dialogue and to feel it ourselves so I appreciate you sharing the harder side of it I think that I can't quite answer I don't know how to answer your question about Crowley that is a complicated thing that I don't have the awareness of personally but I will say that Gary we're not sure yet if we're purchasing it we're interested in occupying that space probably for the same reason that the students love that space it's a beautiful incredible just full of so much it's an incredible space and we would really love to be part of you know taking that forward as an artistic and inclusive and incredible place versus you know other things that I had heard like people maybe thinking about putting housing in it it didn't seem it didn't seem like that would be something I would really personally want to see myself as a community member I thought you know maybe if we could create some kind of performing arts and other kinds of arts space that everybody could still occupy it you know the VCFA students who love it could still occupy it right alongside the new students who we know are coming in so it's not a perfect answer but I mean I imagine it might be preferable to it becoming condominiums so I hope so I would yeah without just skating over that I would hope that that does offer some degree of comfort knowing that you could still be in the space that you love alongside of all the new people that might love it Hi folks I'm Glenn Hutchison I'm a neighbor in Montpelier across the river on Prospect Street and a friend of some of these people and this is another question I think that is probably unanswerable yet but I'm also curious about Gary as a library that's touchy subject at the moment and I'm I'd like to just bring it up what's going to happen to the books does anyone know what does the college think might happen to the books at this point do you folks have any ideas definitely have a plan to move the collection back to this building we have a space committee that's been working on that question for around six months the library collection actually used to be in this building so it is in a sense coming home and so we are planning on bringing the collection back into this building we are doing some deaccessioning there are some books that in the 12 years that we've owned the collection haven't been taken out so there is a process underway where the librarians are looking at the collection and pulling things out just to make sure that it makes sense to deaccession some of those works and then the rest of it will move over here eventually so I hope that does answer your question Katie that reminds me I had a question with your staying with the administration in this building from what I loosely understand it tends to be the upper levels and that the lower levels had some classroom space will there be tenants or other people using this building using those extra spaces or will it just be VCFA administration in this building so all staff have offices in this building with the exception of the library staff but those folks will have aren't there classrooms on the lower levels still or am I mistaken there are classrooms on this level on the lower level so how will those be used we will continue to use them as meeting spaces and they may be rented out on occasion to people who need meeting space in Montpelier okay thank you I'm not sure of the time but I imagine it must be getting close to 8 o'clock but I want to make sure anybody that did have thank you Joe it is just after 8 o'clock I want to make sure if anybody else had a question it doesn't look like anybody is headed towards the mic so again I want to thank as Leslie said in the beginning all of you for coming out tonight we really appreciate the time we appreciate all of you folks to come to start to talk about what your vision is and to Orca Media again to help us be able to provide access to folks who couldn't make it out tonight and certainly we will be having follow up conversations as folks want to hear we want to engage this neighborhood and as we have more information we are really eager to share that with all of you so thank you so much for coming tonight hear more than a website thanks to Peter's comment which feels really good that a clip we'd love to have your email address and stay in touch so if you want to be sure to be kept in the loop please share your email address with us and just by putting it here on this paper and Peter's we can do double duty or we can share