live in riverside flats great and how many of you who are elected or appointed officials and everybody else is just interested how awesome you know there's ice cream over there know you're not holding me up apparently talk amongst yourselves ok for just some time to give me an anxiety attack are you ok perfect and you guys see all right so my name's bryan wright and i'm the principal of town planning an urban design collaborative and we are excited to be here and we've gotten a lot of experience here in the past few years in new england and i'm not from around here i am from here this is what i call my living laboratory this is franklin tennessee believe it or not all the way from tennessee several of my team members are also from tennessee we've got kara will be joining us in the morning she's from maine so that's kind of our our new england credibility carter there we don't have any vermonters but as much time as we spent here we feel like we've we are in an honorary citizenship so what i'm going to do tonight is try to pretty quickly go through a presentation to lay a foundation a common language so that as we all talked throughout this week we're all speaking the same language you got when i say a word you know what i mean you say something i know what you mean and it really helps the conversation go much more smoothly but you'll see some of my team members emily see that happen real time but so the format for tonight is we had the great historic tour which is super helpful for us certainly especially as outsiders to see you know what came before  d a lot of times we find that many in the community often haven't had the opportunity to dig into history like that so i always love to have those kind of presentations go on so i'm going to talk to you about what in the world it is we're doing here  and then we're going to stop and we're going to take some questions and comments for a short period of time because we want to break out into the tables and really do a table exercise where you guys are actually going to roll up your sleeves and draw with us and make marks on a map and really help to share your your ideas visually with us and then when we're done with that each table present back to the rest of you guys the top three ideas three to five ideas that you have for the area and then when we roll them of that we're going to stop again and open it up for questions and comments because as this process goes the one thing you'll see is i've got a lot of stamina a lot of energy and i will sit here until you guys are done until you're ready to go home  listening and answering questions and doing the best that i can to get that feedback because you know as a result of us being from away it's really important to have the experts work on the project and no one is more expert than all of you  who live this place every day and drive through it in and see it and know it and so rather than trying to pretend like i know everything about it you guys can assume that i know nothing about it because one of the things that's really interesting and different about our process is that we come here with a blank slate literally blank pieces of paper i've looked at the aerial photographs we've prepared base maps with the help of the regional planning commission you know i've talked to a few people around town they did a presentation a few weeks ago just kind of introducing the project but besides that everything's wide open now that said you guys have done a lot of work over the years i've heard about it everybody says well what's you know how is this going to be different than any of the other efforts that we've participated in so first and foremost i want to say i'm really impressed with how many people came out tonight this is great with a population as small as yours is percentage wise this is like in some cities you could be thousands of people right now so that's really cool but i think that one of the things you'll see is we focus not just on getting your ideas and talking about things we're actually going to be working and drawing in conceiving and writing and doing zoning ordinance to support the master plan and all of these things so it's a it's a different process than you guys have centers owning area here in this sort of purplish brownish color now that said these are imaginary lines on a map this is your existing zoning map but they don't mean much in reality you don't know when you've left one zone and entered another and so what we tend to do is look at planning from a perspective well what makes the most since ok so when we're drawing we're not going to likely say oh well there's a town boundary right there we certainly couldn't draw over there because that's not in the town some people may say well why in the world are you doing that we have no control over that you're absolutely right but it makes sense you have to look at things in context and so you'll see that we we do that we also see that there are some established neighborhoods and for for because it's a shorter word flats so what we're doing is we you know we've done sort of some analysis and kind of gotten ready some preparation we're doing with an initial public outreach here we are right now a master planning and palooza then we'll do a few different drafts of a zoning ordinance to go along with this and you guys will all have the official you know review process to go through and now be over a multi month period after we're gone and so that's kind of the way that the project all shakes out but if you haven't been able to figure out here's the little common up there in underhill and then here's the sawmill site there so yes yes what's on the screen is much more important in pointing the camera me so we're trying to videotape this and you guys can have it for ever more and you can share it with the community and all that so yes now i'm going to block you it's going to get down like this ok so here's what happens in most places in the country when people start talking about doing things developing changing things we see you know things in the newspaper a stop sign for development and and people coming out you know with signs and picketing and freaking out and here's why it didn't used to be like that but in most cases what you get today is not as good as what was there before even if it's just farmland that is you know just pastoral and beautiful even if it's woodlands if it's an old building it's just in most cases new development equals worse and therefore we've been conditioned as a society to be against it now that wasn't always the case as i mentioned and this is a statue of a man and he was a developer he was a landowner and he made a place of such character in quality in miami it's called coral gables now it's now it's like this cool historic neighborhood that people live in but people loved it so much they made a statue of him to honor what he did for them can you imagine a landowner a developer today having a statue made of them it doesn't happen much anymore so my how things have changed now we work all over the country and just because i said i'm from tennessee doesn't mean i know much about the any griffith show but when we ask people what they want what do you want in your community you wouldn't believe how many times people say i'd like something like mayberry you know and then when we're in new england they say yeah but we have to wear shoes here you know so  in actually looked on the internet and i found this images of the back lot in hollywood this is mayberry this is where they shot the show and if you look at it which you can see here is it looks like a historic little town there's a there's a place it's an obvious place it's not you know this is not suburbia obviously and so the things that yes people love the characters and the dialect and all of those things but people also responded to the place of mayberry and they wanted their place to be like that this is what most people get instead so they get these subdivisions that come in and you can just imagine that  this sort of legacy farm days are numbered because the next school desex going to come in here and wipe it out now i will say one thing that we've learned is in new england the increment of development here is much smaller than in other parts of the country you know in the south east it's no big deal at all for people to develop two three four hundred acres at a time here that's like you know an entire town entire city you know and so so you don't have as many of these sort of massive massive track home subdivisions and leases the ones that i see in my mind you guys have much smaller but you know what you get this and there's nothing you know this is a perfectly respectable way to live this is a great life for a lot of people i mean i grew up in a cul de sac subdivision neighborhood and all that it's just not what i choose today any longer now so that's the residential component of it now this is what the commercial component of it looks like in those places too and again this is a particularly heinous version of a strip highway you guys don't have this as bad as a lot of other parts of the country what what i found here is that you don't set your buildings back why it is far from the highway and your signage seems to be a little bit more subdued but what you see is that this could be anywhere in america who knows i don't know i can even literally today i was looking for this for this picture and i couldn't remember what town i took it in and that's not so great now here if you'll notice in the front yard if you can see it's of beautif ok so can you imagine the selection process you know they get a committee together they're like ok guys we're today it's hardy's up against mcdonald's in the express oil change in burger king have you seen the pansies in burger king's front lawn oh my god and the topiaries here these bush balls are amazing and so we give it to burger king and they proudly display it now if we're giving away awards for this kind of stuff have we not set the bar way too low you know like we have like the shame awards that you get you know so so anyway so that's what you see in most places in america now it's not the fault of mcdonald's and burger king inexpressible change and whoever else you can put on your hit list it is that does it and so are two predominant three three types as owning two predominant ones in the country right now so there's euclidean zoning which is separating each use from the next they'll tell you much more about that there's performance base owning and that has you know if you if you're able to meet these criteria if you don't emit this much carbon if you don't put out this much traffic then your development is approved that's great and all but the what he yields is completely uncertain so long as you meet that criteria you can do  that everyone hates but you've met the standards so that's a bit uncertain and inform based and that's we're going to be focusing our efforts on here and the ideas kind of comparing the two in euclidian zoning use is that that at the top of the list of priorities the biggest circle and then you go down to the lot in the site in the building in form base or character based learning as we call it you actually invert dad and so you start at the scale of the block the lot the site the building and they use is there but it's just like the fifth most important thing and so it really really begins to change how you think about things and you can focus on what you want things to be like in the future now this is what you get with euclidian zoning so when you separate one use from the next you get these pods so this  is a school pod you can tell because they have the fields around it but it could have been a prison to i don't know here you have the shopping pod right this man's we have an old video game from atari this is a housing pod this is a an office pod this is a multi family pod and there are moments when two pods come next to each other even though we work so hard to separate these uses the pods sometimes do bump up next to each other so what do we do so here's a shopping pod next to a housing pod we buffer ok so i don't want the people who live in this housing pod to be interfered with by the shopping pot so i'm going to put a fence here and just for good measure i'm going to put trees in maybe even a moat but what happens is that the people who live here want to shop here even if they hated they just it's convenient it's like ten second walk from their house but they can't without using wire cutters to make a hole through the fence and they always do they always cut through one way or another after they get sick of getting in their car driving out here getting on the highway coming around clogging up traffic getting in here and doing the same thing on the back because for everything they have to do for all of their daily needs they have to get in their car and leave they're forced to because the way the zoning is set up now historically we didn't do that we didn't even conceive of the ideas of buffers we had noxious things next to houses things that would kill you you know we know better than that now we have the e p a to make sure we don't do dumb stuff and and those sorts of things now in some parts of the country actually have to explain this image to them this is a village this is a town here this is what they do here you guys can you know you drive five seconds and you see it you know it's all over the place in new england but just in case you take it for granted so here you can imagine here's the common and people had shops along the ground floor and the civic building of course and people actually used to live above the shops right that's a revolutionary idea in a lot of parts of the country they forgotten it's amnesia and if you're not into all the hub bub you live down the street but you can still walk in and if you need a little bit more privacy you live here and it takes you a little bit longer walkable and then if you're a complete hermit and you don't want anybody to bother you live on the mountain and that's ok you know and that's just the way it was set up and people didn't need to buffer the form of things was compatible they all went together even if there's a detached single family house right here and a mixed use building right here in the corner the form of those things was compatible so they didn't feel the need to separate one from the next and here's what happens today this is legal in most places in america and in new england and this is illegal now and so we come in and we find zoning we say what's your favorite part of town and people say oh it's that place over there they have these cute little buildings and people live above the shop where they used to can't make more of the stuff we love so anything new has to be crummy so here's some of the things you find streets these are streets for people in for cars and for bikes see this these are kids in the middle of the street of course no self respecting kid would ride a skateboard on the sidewalk you know so they're going to be in the middle of the streets as i'm properly but this is also a street this is just connecting one apartment complex to another but look at this you could literally put eight to ten of these little jet as across here so they've not only wasted a ton of money on the paving and all of that they put on all this impervious surface so they have a negative environmental impact a traffic circle and you know all these things so that's the way that most municipalities the other streets open space wherever we are in the country people always know to say we want more open space more green space i don't care what it is as long as it's green and open again that's kind of because we know that if it's more open that means there's less of the crummy stuff that we don't have the will and so the developer says sure no problem because ordinance has a you know it's thirty forty percent fifty percent open space requirement in there and so they lay out their little subdivision here they say look i met my requirement here's the left over worst part the part i couldn't build on here's the and what happens is it's in the back and it's like there's no means land and you don't know me i'm going to be arrested if i venture in here that there are friends with my kid or people who think i'm a peeping tom or what's going on historically for those who have forgotten this is what they used to do but you guys still do what you haven't done away with if you take your civic space you're open space and make it a civic space and it's in the front of things primarily and building space on to it in the property values are higher and it's the place where you have parades and festivals and all of those kinds of things so it's really a different paradigm it's roughly the same acreage in both of these images but can you imagine how much more of this gets used in this little dribble of green in the back that if you notice is actually spray painted green as well i didn't do that in photoshop so a lot of times we talk about the idea of mixed use again a revolutionary idea for people it freaks me out because when we say what it would be like to have a corner store near your neighborhood they say absolutely not are you kidding me that's going to detract from my property values because this is what they're imagining they're magic they're going to get this set back from the street with a parking lot in front and you know if this comes in next to your house your property values are going through the floor even though you have all these great conveniences now whereas in the past and in places where they still continue to do it this is a corner store as well and it fits right into the neighborhood here's a row house right next to it and just down the way a little bit could be a detached single family house and the houses that are near to this are actually worth more than the houses that are farther away from it because they have the same bread in here as bread in here and cheese and orange juice and whatever all of those things are but the form of this corner store is in keeping with the character of the community of the places that are most loved people want to carry on so i would never believe it until i came here last time if you guys said we have a traffic problem here and so i'm driving from burlington apparently with everyone else from burlington at the same time and i'm stuck in the middle of farms in traffic it's  phenomenon that i haven't seen very often you know we go to small towns and we had this terrible traffic problem you wouldn't believe it i had to wait for half a cycle of that light you know nothing you know well you haven't been to a real city now so you know it's not quite as bad as this but this is what most people experience now in other parts of the world and even in our country we actually try to balance the different modes of transportation and the begin the lot of these things are commonplace in this region but here you see so many cycling and  pedestrian and an automobile but there are a lot of choices now these kind of thing get harder and harder the more rural you get because the distances between things are farther you know it's more difficult to make the infrastructure etc but a lot of people in america apparently he didn't have a good enough buffer here but a lot of people in america sort of subscribe to this you know they're not in it for the community the feeling of the there to see you know in it for my head and and so you see this kind of stuff too you know while i walk but that's not what everybody thinks anymore you know for a long time  was you know that was the predominant sensibility today things have changed and so these are the things that we're seeing as being important to people that you know taking your kid to pick berries at the berry farm that's all organic and it's you know all my food all the food on this plate was local came from the farm that i was eating at night you know you guys had this great fresh network and you know it's a big deal here but it's not everywhere so you guys are lucky that that's then you also have this whole idea of creativity and the creative class and people really just doing things that are outside of the box and innovative things in and new businesses and all sorts of things and so this is what that looks like so this guy you know he he may look young but he's the c e o you know and he's running his company here with his laptop and shorts on the same thing this guy he's he was going to retire but why don't you retire you can go live wherever i want to now because technology makes it where i can do this and so i can keep doing something that i love and still be where i want to be and then finally at some point you say ok enough is enough i can't take it anymore i'm going to going to take it easy and enjoy myself and so there's all these different types of people you know different things that are important to them different stages of life that are looking for places that are authentic that meet their needs and have character and to me it's this type of mindset that is can be the saving grace of many many small towns that previously before the technology and all of these other things that have happened way are too far off the beaten path for people to consider and now we have opportunities for people to and i've met a person after person so far here even that are already doing these things and so again and i'm to teach you guys about it i'm just highlighting the fact that that's going on now these people who have these kind of sensibilities as well as many other kinds of people those are just a few are looking for already set off in the places but places that are walkable that are mixed use that are compact and diverse and so these sort of fundamental principles are tried and true and so when we start talking about places it's not just enough to have a sidewalk it's that you need to have meaningful destinations you need to have a place to go and so we know that the average american is willing to walk about five minutes or quarter of a mile to any meaningful destination now again out here it's a little bit different when you're in the countryside and so you have to think that well it's most likely that somebody that's going to come to a place that is out here will have to drive from somewhere and then park and then get out and experience it and deal with  the sorts of things that makes us thing i already talked about that need the explanation compact is looking at the idea of being able to take some areas and have them be more dense and preserving the more scenic areas for  open spaces and natural areas and then diverse is something that means a lot of different things so it's the versity of age and income and ethnicity and all of the things that make places that people like to go really unique and authentic and so that comes into play as being important so we do all of this and they were able to create all these things using zoning even though zoning is cause a lot of problems but the character based zoning that we're talking about and us and we'll be transitioning away from that that term form base because it's while it makes a lot of sense to me as a planner i just found that when we talk to communities when you when you say character owners people understand like there's this part of town as this character in this part of town is that character and it's not about use it's about the way the like people understand here the rules and you follow these rules and it's very simple it provides for a range of development options from rural to more or less urbane we focus on a fishing use of the land we're reducing sprawl and traffic congestion comparably uses the term and physical outcome describing for many good development in the public in private realm and so how do you decide what's good well that's what we're doing here tonight we're all decide not to and i'm through this process all deciding what do we want it to be you know what do we think is good and we're coordinating the planning and design and engineering all up front at the same time so the key elements of successful walkable built environments kind of the the one two three four  e diversity density distance destination and design and so we'll focus on those through this process trying to make these immersive places and so the question becomes what is a form based or character based code do how do you what do you do so it protects the most loved parts of the town it allows you to simplify the development process if you want to you can create more predictable outcomes creating walkable places of character balancing the modes of transportation and enhanc economic vitality in the area and that's often a really challenging thing to do again the more remote you are the harder it is to kind of have this vital economic character so too many words all right so character let's talk about character so the way that we think about a character based approach we have to have a framework and since we're not using uses we need to start to define what the different aspects of character are in a community now the thing that's great about it is that a form based or character based approach unlike only code is intended to be calibrated for this place for the place whatever place we're working so what we did in burlington is not relevant to what we did here even though we're so close and we know that and so if you put what we did in burlington here you're going to get more of what they love about burlington and not what you love about this place and so so we start to break it down and we'll go through we're going to study and figure out what each of the character different distinct character areas are and need to be needing to be in the study area will measure them and document then we have very like a scientific process we call it an optics survey so we'll go through and what you'll see is out there with a measuring wheel making sure we understand the d n a of this place so but in a nutshell sort of generically here's how we think about character so we have sort of from the most rural natural zone untouched nature all the way into the most urban place so this six zone would be like downtown burlington there's only and only a small part of downtown really to be the sixth so in each community and not only do we figure out well which of these loans is appropriate to be in the in the community we're working in but what does that zone mean in this community so it's like this sort of micro calibration so it's a lot of kind of upfront thinking and figuring out for us but in the end it's a very simple document that we go through so here's what these things look like and who nature so this character dysart one second zone we're getting into more agricultural uses and building types of characters so you see farmhouses you know pasture and things growing around them this is actually what farm looks like in vermont and then this is the third zone this is a more typical you know you'd have detached single family houses primarily set back farther from the street on larger lots so that's what the third  here's another example getting of the force you start to see that corner store kind of the mix use in some row houses coming in this is kind of a cool version again if you see this picture and say that doesn't look at all like what i would imagine having here you're right you may be right i don't know it's not here this is in oregon this is in portland oregon it was really cool and some of the things about it represent that fourth zone but it's not being calibrate yet to your forces so don't be concerned when you see things that are architecturally strange to your character strange i'm guessing that we probably aren't going to get into the fifty's zone even here just because we you know what i've seen so far and what i've heard about people's preferences but here are some of certainly not that yeah maybe i don't know if you guys are going to tell us so so that's kind of how you break down that character based framework and so in the zoning ordinance we're going to be looking at different type of the way that buildings meet that meet the street or address the street so here you see what we call a common yard and what that looks like is sort of the yards out house in those places row houses this is over in burlington as another need example but a little bit more rural certainly not like a row house you find in boston you know on a brownstone  a live work again a kind of a rural version of a live work and even a more rural version this is super cool this is plumbing on here i think so it's you know kind of these out buildings you guys have really cool out buildings all around  small commercial buildings and apartment buildings and i showed you guys an apartment pod earlier and you know i heard some snickering in the crowd because most of times when you talk about apartments that's what people think about they think about apartment complexes and they're kind of  like where you just scattered buildings kind of around the parking lots all around them and that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about character based it's about buildings that fit in with other buildings and so here that might not be appropriate here but it fits in with a detached single family houses on the same street as it in across the street as it in burlington and so you know apartments as i mean now again we don't totally discard use and so i went through all of these other things and here we go this is a used table from  the list of uses is has gone buckwild we said in the cell block well it's just gone crazy they've you know it's so long it's like to think it's part of the ordinance it's you know the bakery that sells muffins is separated from the bakery that sells cupcakes and they're totally different as this one as i say in this one doesn't that's all the difference in a muffin in a cup you know and so some of those things can be consolidated and cleaned up but in some communities we work and they say we love our use table and just translate that into its own it needs to go in and will be ok so we have to figure out how some can say we hate are you stable and it's ridiculous and we just want to say makes use of commercial and residential some of those  very very high level restaurant kind of topics there so now i mentioned drive through in the opening for take our presentation a few weeks ago and everybody snickered and i soon learned that i just you know i said something that you guys have been talking about for a long time and so we found that in new england in particular oh no now i've big box even medium boxing a lot of cases and gosh i hope this doesn't shut off i'm really nervous now and drive through these in many communities are prohibited and and so the reason in most cases i ask people why do you not want to drive through a big box i say they look awful have you seen that they're terrible now in new england you guys are have a more sophisticated aversion to them in a lot of cases they say have you seen the environmental impacts cars that sit there and idle around and it's  where they had prohibited drive through in their form based only ordinance and then realized later on down the road that it was causing a problem for them for marketability and they weren't getting the growth that they had hoped for in their town center area and so they had us come in to fix the form is good we didn't write the original one but they had to come in and help them figure out the drive through situation so here's how you get clever with a drive through so here's this you know let's say let's call this main street let's call this street and what happens is that this is a drug store so the drug stores here on the corner and you can imagine that here's the drug store here here's the street sidewalk these buildings you know all pulled up to the street and in the rear behind it all within the block you know only a block and with that in the rear here's a parking area where they can actually have ample parking if they need it that's pretty big parking there for them and then you drive in here and you circulate in the rear and here's the drive through window on the back of the drugstore and you go through here and the circulation all is figured out and all works and so this is this image is literally in their zoning ordinance and it describes how it can function now here's a bank same deal we want to show in a different location so here in the corners one situation here is kind of a mid block situation multiple drive through with the suction tubes and pneumatic tubes and same deal you drive through and you pull through and that's that so that's how some banks work we even want to take it to the extreme and say you know the most auto oriented thing you can imagine is a car lot right a car dealership so here's a here's a form based approach to a car dealership and so this is pretty urban looking the architecture and this is for a different project but what we're showing is a small plaza here where they had like four cars you know kind of cool on display and then the bulk of the of their of their area was in the back and then these are the service bays that have the storefronts on the front here and certain drive in the back and you know so we kind of took it to an absurd extreme to show that as an illustration now so on top of the nice sidewalk hero store front so this is the convenience store portion of the gas station so you know looks just like a nice little storefront or whatever and here's the pumps in the back so you drive in circulate you get your gas you walk in no problem but you don't see all that business in the back you know it's like put this one in the front business in the back you know it's like a urban mullet and so what we've got here is the the walkable streetscape and all of the things that character that people want so you unless it's literally just a philosophical concern about fuel sales or about idling or about any of those kind of things if it's just we don't want to screw up our town concern you can deal with that easily  it's just a matter of the community deciding you know what makes sense here's another example this was one we're doing right out of atlanta where there's you know sprawl everywhere and so this is the you know the conventional gas station on the corner and we showed how they could actually retrofit that pull it up here and there we kind of have a side entrance there's a said the side street here and there's a detached single family house right there next to it and this is a built example this is new  know obviously not in the region in the palm trees and south carolina where they have plenty of sprawl and and so this is a market which is called the street is kind of here and then you see back here is the gas pumps and the thing there so they didn't put a huge canopy so visually doesn't have a big impact but in the back here there's the canopy and all of that and i mean wow that's a that's a heck of a mobile you know in most places so so anyway the seven percent that's apparently people beat us to the punch and they're just doing it because here they did it because it made since it was like well where else we're going to put it we're out of room you know and and probably people in the community said heck no or not putting it on the front and so anyway so here is again let's take an extreme example of all of this you see here is all new this is all new now if you if you just look here he said this is the highway this is actual highway so this isn't some this isn't a place we're trying to make you know rural country character you know a village down town center they're like you know this is serious they want to make a walkable place and they said you know what let's just be real we're a high one highway and all that so they did was again they pulled the buildings up to the street sidewalk street trees even on street parking but look at this this building the corner here see that in the back so you drive in to your business here again here's another one so one of these probably drugstore ones maybe a gas station this is actually a big medical facility so here's the drop off in the back for the patients because you know you know enough to walk too far and you know and then they try to you know they do their best to make a comment here but it's kind of lame  anyway so so this is on a grand scale unlike anything that i would propose here just from at least from my if you asked my opinion but i just wanted you guys to see this some of these kind of wacky far fetched ideas are being done all over the  preservation component to it we've also you know we're going to ensure that any redevelopment of underutilized properties or properties that are not currently use are going to be more of what you love and strengthen what's already there and so that's an infiel greenfield kind of a situation and then we've got we want to maintain and expand the uniqueness of this area all the things that we saw in this photographs those are the things that you know make this place different from the next the history the architecture the the hills the mountains you know all of these things that are going on so that all focus is on authenticity and so you want to hear very often people talk about authenticity when you're talking about his own ng ordinance it's you know there's two things you don't work well together but we focus on a lot so we know that to do a rural form base owning ordinance is a whole different animal and so we study rural places and this is my favorite book called anatomy of the village by thomas sharp and he went around the english countryside and he documented he measured mapped these amazing villages and hamlets in towns and photographed them and it's really cool because now i just because i'm a planning nerd i i go and look on google earth and compare you know from one thousand nine hundred whatever when he wrote this book to what changed now and  street right here and so that was kind of cool sounds like a main road in the road in its current trajectory was kind of a side note so that's kind of an interesting thing for me to think about and you see you know that all the gravity was right here on the common now as i talk to people here you know as an outsider out of town planner i come in a sorrow look there's a there's a common there that must be the center of the flats everybody knows that right and i've learned that no in fact that's not the case for most of people that i talk to that's that's under and even know that jericho even had any of that and we don't think of it that way and so you know it's kind of a clean slate in the in the in the riverside flats area for where the center could be and so it's kind of neat to see how that can happen in and the lessons learned from this these maps so what you guys have to decide is what you want to be so do you want to be you know a crossroads where you guys are already a little beyond that you've moved past that you saw pictures of when you were just that was just a few buildings kind of some key intersections here with agricultural around it and then it transitions of this and you know in a lot of ways this is kind of where you are right now really you've got some buildings here kind of lined up along the road still agriculture around and scenic nature and then you know kind of the next step is you know deciding where a center would be and then starting to make something there and to do that you put buildings and buildings the finest space and it starts to have its own weight and gravity and then once you know once you make a place things start coming in and you get some of the cool things we've heard a lot you know we've heard that there's not a great love of chains but there's a desire for commercial songs it's charming and character and mom and pop and all that and you know the zoning ordinance doesn't require something the mom and pop but you can do things like you know set the lot sizes so that it's not going to be a two hundred foot wide lot necessarily which could lend itself to you know a really large box and so those kind of thing can be embedded in it and have the effect of determining what happens down the road but there is you know you can't just say no to wal mart for instance you know you have to do other things to do it so you can't against them now ok so this is interesting you know because when i talk about this idea of densify in a rural area a lot of times people say you know i don't like that you know the thing that i love about this image this is a real place and they you know decided that this spot there was a middle place but elsewhere it's going to stay you know natural and agricultural but in here they weren't afraid buildings are attached to each other now they're not really tall they're not really urban buildings they still you know look like a country town or village but it's really interesting if you think about what the density is in this area and what a lot sizes are and all that you'd probably be surprised if we calculated what it is so i just like to show that image this is obviously in europe but we can do it elsewhere so we're thinking about you know what's the point of this you know smart growth of smart economics that's proven and you know businesses and all of that gravitate towards it what i've heard is that the economic side of things is important to a lot of people but it's not the we're not struggling here we're not going to dry up without it we're not going to you know and so what we want is what we want first and we're going to be successful economically that so what's more important is this is community is people coming together it's you know i've heard that you know this is a has been over time and  it still isn't it ebbs and flows a tight knit community and and you know we want to see people having these moments where they're totally breaking the law here and taking over the sidewalk and inconveniencing all their neighbors being terrible citizens but look at that they're having so much fun right so  these kind of things are important and you know it may not be that it's intent you know ever this intense of all this on three parking in very kind of an inner city neighborhood inner city in the best way you know things like this you know where do you have your sacr some and i have to explain to people around the country what in the world these kids are doing and they're not escaping from some sort of a child farm but they are having fun and you know in most communities in america this kid back  is is toast his knees are bloody and bleeding because they have sacrifices in parking lots because they don't have a calm and they don't have a space they don't have a place and i know do you guys have three centers right but it's interesting because the thing that i've heard from a lot of people is that we don't have a center even though you have three like they're labeled centers right and that's great and they're you know the one below us one with a little church in the little common with the trees in the middle with the call center thank you so that's confusing for an outsider right so this is the center is well defined obviously and has a great little store there and all of those things and it's picturesque in that way  but i don't see a lot of people down there for all looking in the green and this sorts of things and the other center corners right is you see it on the map and you feel something happen there's a moment there and it's cool you know has this thing going  on but again there's not a it's not like i'm going to stop necessarily as i'm going down fifteen like this check this out you know it's like oh wow look at that cool town hall look at the house look at this fork in the road you know and so people go by you know  yeah people stop their good good ok that's good that's why i count on you guys to let me know these things we don't want to underestimate so what i've heard over and over is that that the flats is a real opportunity  to do something that's identifiable and very much more substantial than you can do elsewhere in the community and the tricky part of it is that it's kind of at the edge and  we how do we take this opportunity and change that perception and really be able to focus on making something that's important so so as we go through this process there's a facebook page here that's facebook dot com slash jericho planning so we'll  keep putting stuff on there and updating stuff you guys need to get some more chatter going on there because it hasn't been much thus far and we had it for a few weeks go on even if you don't have a facebook account you can go on and still log in there and see what people are saying so  at a glance here i think there are lots of these schedules in the back if you haven't gotten one already and so here we are october seventeenth thursday so we just had the ice cream social and photo tour opening presentation we're about to school tomorrow morning will have two meetings town services meeting in a business and land owners meeting and we'll start to get in some of the details now all of this the whole process even these meetings even if you have nothing to do a town services it's open to the public anybody can come in if you just happen to be into you know fire stuff if you happen to be into road stuff come on in listen talks share your two cents whatever so these two meetings are going to happen in the morning and  there have a name comp of the conference room and so we've taken over and we've set up a our office in there and so you'll just come in there anytime where it's blue and says open studio you just you're welcome to drop in because we know that the presentations and those sorts of things may not be at a convenient time for us we're going to make sure we get your input whenever you can then the next day what day is this saturday cetera so you got to meet your neighbors an art exhibit reception they're going to have an interim pin up in the interim and we're going to listen a lot to something that i have to remind people because most of the time people there they're doing this instead of this so we try to remind everybody how to be citizens we want to listen a lot through the process because we're going to be listening and we need you guys to listen to each other and they're going to have interim pinup that evening and what that means is we've had a couple days to work at that point so we're going to we're going to do a brief presentation  going to show you what we've done so far and say here's what i've heard from you guys so far did i hear right and here's what we did with what we heard here some drawings and some ideas are we on the right path and gives you guys an opportunity give us a good feedback loop really fast before we get too far down the road and so will do that and then the final night we'll have the closing presentation and it'll be like completed work so there'll be a master plan like an actual plan showing roads and buildings and all of these kinds of things for the area there will be rendering some artisanal say you know from this spot in the plan here's what the view looks like here's what theoretical scene might look like and so we'll have all of that now the thing that you need to remember is the plane that we're showing is a possibility it's one possibility it is something that can be yielded by the form based approach and so what happens then is that pla in some communities we work and they say well if you do what's on that on the plane we came up with during the plane a palooza that's pre approved if you wanna do something different and you have to go through the normal process and whatever or you can say you know  you can just come in and do something submit something follow the code and it's going to yield something excellent in keeping with the character that our master plan is has shown but it will the already  two with the foremost code to be what you guys are looking for so you'll see this sometimes and that's ok allowed we work you notice that our studio is open from nine in the morning till ten at night most days and that ten at night is because normally some guys will be there till two in the morning you just never know sometimes this is necessary and so don't be surprise so they have lights up and can we talk for like five five minutes burning initial questions that will something like if i don't hear an answer to this question i'm not going be able to pay need to have happen is for those people who live in the area for sure to come and tell me here's something i'm really scared about or here's something i really always wish we could do and equally important is everyone else you know in the community because as you said you know because of the things you guys already have over here the schools and the library and the park and all of that people are already coming which is really cool it actually solves one of the big problems that when you're trying to create a place you might have a how do we get people over there are there any coming for other things so now that they're here how do we capture them and give them something it then additional thing to do and then also you guys have the people driving by from here to there from burlington into burlington and all that stuff so how do we if they're using your roads and even the traffic how do we how do we peel out some of their the money of their pockets how do you know let's bring in some dollars here you know and get them to come in you know that's what most communities would say so you may say absolutely not we want we don't communities but i think that it's going to be important to realize it everybody's got a stake in this even though they're outsiders out of towners and we can see them as a an asset or a liability and if we're going to make them until i believe the how do we do it in a makes the most sense and it doesn't make any sense to say oh well there's this line this invisible line there rents sort of the on park street but then starts veering over and it looks like it runs through some houses and you know on the maps i have and you know so i'm only going to plant half of that house so we're going to we're going to do something that you know if you one of the things you guys can do for me on your maps is draw what you think the study area should be really helpful because we're gone out of you know well i would say this in most of the communities that we work in we get to town and they say oh we're so afraid of this development pressures and all of the things that might happen and the town was from the seventeen hundreds century every single lot has been built out and it's clear that not much is going to happen unless they redevelop a surface parking lot where they tore down something beautiful at one point and whatever and so when we come here when you look at the map it's clear that there's a twenty odd acre piece of property right in the middle of all this that has potential to become something i don't know when if i do you know if you know the odds these days of nothing happening unless it just goes to land trust or something like that and so when we see that when the community has seen that i suppose so that's the thing and for whatever reason for the past eight years or however many years you know plans have been being drawn for the area so there's you know i don't know if there's a specific study that was the turning point that said we need to do something but i feel confident that  if you don't do anything something will happen and it's likely to not be exactly what you had in mind it's kind of my general blanket statement for that that sort of questions yes yeah well it doesn't work like that so that's a good question you know as i as i fly through i mean we give entire multi day seminars off gave you guys the the super nutshell version and so one of the teach you guys a little bit about the parts and pieces the thing about a form basic character based approach is really different did it's not an on off switch there's not a yes or no in most cases so nearly everything is intended to have a range of possibilities which seems like a certain amount of uncertainty because we say one of the things we do is give you guys some certainty by taking away some of the subjectivity of a rigged typical review process in other communities and so you say in this is own you can have porches or not stoops or not you know shop fronts or not you know and so you have a range of possibilities you're not required to do a porch per se there are areas that you know it's not appropriate so in the most urban zone it's not appropriate in downtown burlington where they're ten story buildings that have a detached single family house with a front porch on it you know what that you know so so those are the you know kind of extreme examples where you might find that but in general it's not and you know we'd say between this many in this many stories it's not just many feet it's how high you can build absolutely no higher than that because what place that's real and authentic is like that can you imagine what new england villages and towns would have looked like if historically they all had a set number of feet that you could build no higher than you wouldn't have any of kind of  fluctuations and variations in the ins and the outs and so even setbacks except for the most urban areas where you have as you know maybe a zero build to line you have between zero and fifteen feet which is a wide spread when you start think about front set backs and so all of that stuff is calibrated and so when we go out and do the synoptic surveys we will we'll know you know what are the typical setback ranges within the most love parts of the town and that goes into the zoning ordi there are standards just like you have standards now and a lot of them you know we also own is presumptuous to a certain degree and so but we know that when we're in a place like this and that's kind of why i try to give our give give me a little bit of  credibility for understanding rural places more than most people because i know that if you go in and start messing around with a place like this developed organically over time and try to codified you can mess it all up you can total botch it which the typical use based on has no problem doing it's actually really good at that and so we we at least will work really hard to make sure that we don't mess it up and you guys will help us figure that out appropriate cross sections in a place of walkable character that have been calibrated for appropriate rural this and jericho nisson the flats and this and all of that stuff and so so we'll have that in there and a lot of detail  talk about bicycle provisions you know what's appropriate in different areas and you know where you need you know bike lanes bike paths you know you don't normally see it in rural places of the us in burlington we did cycle tracks and all that kind of stuff so so that'll come into play and then there's this idea of a context sensitive thoroughfare design to understand that a real thoroughfare or a road as it traverses the countryside should change its character it's not that route fifteen should be like this all the time because sometimes you go through places sometimes in the middle of the countryside and you can put the pedal the metal and it's no problem as long as you watch out for the cows right but when you come into a village or a town center you need to slow down there's people walking you know and so transportation and so we're making streets that are safe and complete for everyone and so it's a key component of all of this so you'll get to ask more questions in a little bit but for the next thirty minutes let's break into our tables and i'm going to forget some instructions but we've got each of you has on your table a a list of things to think about and some instructions is pretty easy so you've got dots of different colors red green and blue and you're all going to forget what they teach me and i'm going to tell you and it's on the sheet color coded even the first thing you're going to do is go to the table that court the number that corresponds to the number on your name tag and then what you'll do is you put the red dots on the parts the areas that are the that need the most improvement the green dots are the areas that you love the most and the blue dots are the areas that are the biggest opportunities so it's pretty easy but we're going to ha facilitators for my team kind of floating around the table so we're going to get you go and when you get stuck we'll be back yet so the number on the table for sponsor number in your name everywhere ok so so that was great now if you notice that for most tables i just interrupted you which is great that means you weren't sitting here with nothing to do being bored like you were the beginning and technical problems so we always say you know leave him wanting more so that's ok if you didn't get everything written down you going to keep coming back and telling us more and more and more so now what we're going to do is go through each table starting with number one and you're going to have your spokes person in your spokes model your map holder stand up and are going to present your five big ideas or three however many you have and everybody is going to listen and we're going to take notes on it and then also even if you didn't cover they were actually going to go through poor megan is going to have to go through all that she's taking notes or she can have to go through your maps and pull all that stuff off there are going to make a composite map so all the ideas will will be captured so table number one can we get can we start with you guys shows there's continuity  all of the ideas a lot of them focused primarily on how people move through the space what we enjoy about the space not so much about economic opportunity and that sort of thing the other big idea the idea of  what would seem to be this area here which would be an obvious town center and the idea or one conceptualization would be to move on in this full activity in that area and have  any kind of residential or economic development sort of work from that area outward third idea was pedestrian and bicycle access so not only for the flats area specifically but also looking at opportunities to connect all of the town centers of jericho center to underhill underhill to jericho corners big idea number four that was  good idea number five redirecting traffic through the school zone so the idea that was some intentional thought around traffic flow could make it safer easier to navigate and  that would make it much quieter because any you don't have to worry about you know cars coming off from hitting people on the side ok so i just see the nicest heckler's in all of america here all right so that was great and believe it or not i just like this time and it's that's really helpful for us to go through that process so what i often find is when we sit down and everybody starts marking on the map new questions come up that you hadn't thought of before things that are more specific and all that so  can we just open it up for some more questions anybody have any you want to talk about any yeah he's in traffic flow is that piece of what you're doing it's not a time i think that i may not be  everybody's so excited about complete streets and all that and you hear it all over the place and every city is doing complete street standards and all that and i always say that's fine because that's all they can control what's in the right of way but we want to complete community we want it all we want to complete street complete stuff around it that we want to go past and walk next to a nearby and and so it's you have to start to create some of that critical mass and you design these places and create them the place you know the trouble is that to make those places there has to be the market right and so you have to like your traffic studies or three you know the market analysis and all that and you can anecdotally you know even you know without an actual market study i can anecdotally look go out there and tell you and you guys can tell me even better you know what's likely to work here first of all what do you miss ali you have to go elsewhere it's been your money for that you just assume come here and spend your money for and all of those kind of things and so as we're contemplating this all the things that you guys just said that's that's what we do and that's what we've heard so far we've been hearing that even though it's been subtle until you just explicitly stated it and the idea you know sure there's different stages of life and different people need one and it's kind of an interesting where the time now where several different life stages and in preference it preferences have converged so that people who are getting older what the same thing is people are just starting a family and in some all these things kind of coming i was like in my neighborhood in tennessee it's an it's a new traditional neighborhood sort of trying you know wishing it was a traditional village like you guys have a place and and it's like you know five o'clock it's like a parade of people walking their dogs you know people who come and retire and then people roll in their strollers and we've got  generations living in the same neighborhood and all of that kind of stuff and so if we can you know set up the place to accept that it can happen but if you just simply another and we think about manhattan manhattan and you see the movie gangs of new york it's like you say there's like you know pigs and stuff in the middle of the group of the common there and now there's massive skyscrapers right in the same spot and so they went all the way you know they went all the way and other places and there's reasons if you think about the city of bruges in belgium you know used to be the seaport and then the people in the silt it up and they could no longer kind of get the ships out there they got frozen in time and like twelve hundred or something so there's all these buildings and they couldn't do anything but keep the buildings up because they couldn't afford to do the other stuff and that sort of difficulty is this amazing place and time and they couldn't agree on even if they wanted to and so you know i'm really really interested even though i said earlier that it's this for everybody and all that i haven't heard anybody say hey i live right there in this spot and and here's what i'm concerned about or here's what i'm hoping happens will somebody is somebody willing there's there's more than two hundred fifty cities around the country that have four missoni subsidies for the entire city not just for a small area like this the city of miami for instance is like an extreme example imagine trying to capture the area they got a form base code it's now transformed in this cool funky hip area where there's still industrial looking buildings but it fits because that was a character that's what everybody wanted massive investments happen there and lots of tax dollars have been generated yeah i mean these kind of things happen i mean this is it's i mean literally you know we're working on a private development project right now it's eighty thousand acres a private development project and it's got a county line running through it it's like county line road and so you had to go the developer had to get through the process with the county to the north and then to get their process of the county to the south and you know what each of them required was a little bit different but i you know the good part about it is that the stuff that's there that's noticeable around the little common there on park service stuff it's it's charming character you know it's what's there if they just leave it like that it'll mess it up good you know that'll fit right in with you know what you guys are going to do and what you guys decide to go to some totally different but but i wouldn't you know there's nothing we can do about it we draw on it and we show when we say here's what what they're doing on the other side for what as we said it's all for what it's worth if you can consider  yeah well what i would love to see happen is i love my phone during the feels like this is underhill calling we saw what you did next door would you come help us please absolutely we're there we know what to do so let's see what else w that's and one of the things is always frustrating for me and the planner you see you know we're just going to bust through the boundaries over here you know and underhill just because we have to it's so close but it's like you know when i see these three things that are identified you know and i did a five ball you know you want them to somehow be symbiotic and work together you know and so i it's hard when our study areas can find you know and  it's you know something to put on your wish list to do in the future and make sure that anything you do to this center is set up and ready to accept the other ones when they come in and i think that's a great point to mention one other thing was we might not have the population down to support some of the things that we want for services and that we can take advantage of people going through up to cambridge you know back and forth portsmouth new hampshire and people complaining everybody comes in and all these tours and all this stuff and i said just to be clear without those tourists you can't have your downtown they are subsidizing your downtown for you and so we'll pick do you wanted to just be locals or do you want to have a downtown and you also have something you notice that will shrink and be smaller will be you could sustain something but the tourists are made you a downtown or kept to a downtown and so so do we know do we want to go ahead and siphon some of them off and let's go ahead and pick their pockets over here and keep that money in your center you know we want to pull all the people one for get one from essex come here  spend their money right maybe they come to the dog park yeah so we know how to draw th not yet but it's on my list i've been asking people where places we need to see that are cool now what's on my list there into that said into that in we have to think about you know if we are going to capture some of that those people that are driving and even people from within that within jericho who are just not in that immediate vicinity we're going to need to provide some certain extent but when you're if you're really getting a draw there you know what to think about some parking understand you know there are some parking fields already out there parking areas associate with the with the park and with other things so there's there can be some you know shared parking kind of stuff going on  but when you're looking at doing development in that area we're going to have to make sure we comedy for that and it's going to be one of the things the character based approaches in to do is going to be tough the way it's going to be in the back it's not going to be out front so it's couple times but if you ask you know nearly every single person in the room or in the town or in every town around here do you like this mom and pop or do you like this chain they're always going to say i like the mom and pop because mom and pop know how to make stuff look cooler and they tend to be in a cooler building and they care more and it's not corporate in their sign isn't glowing and bright and it's you know hand carved in whatever and all the things that make mom and pop charming now the thing that becomes tricky is when we wind that you know mom and pop is all will accept that independent of the market that that conception of our preference it would if we all prefer that and so we have kind of as we go through this process or through you know when we're trying to make a center are we realistically going to be able to have a center if we only allow for that and knowing also we can't exclude  businesses and we can set up the standards like you have now and what comes in comes in and so you know hate to even bring it up but so the dollar general right and elizabeth controversy i've heard all about it right so let's just go there all right so the dollar general going all over the place so so what i say is in the most loved places in the world you go in and you see a dollar general if there were there and you wouldn't think twice about it it's like ok it's you know it's like their corporate philosophy is i don't like this or that but the thing about the dollar general that most people have a visceral reaction to is the form that it tends to go because it tends to be in suburban strip and all i when i when i make a statement like that i'm not intending to generalize and say that everyone feels that way i'm saying in most cases there's a we here and so i do know that there's objection going and i was just about to go there philosophical objections to these kind of places with chains in but in general that's what we see the primary concern is that said i always ask people ok so let's just say there's something that we have  philosophical problem with we're going to put it in a form that i'm ok with but i still hate the thing that's inside of it all that it stands for all that it is but if it means and let's just say something besides dollar general because let's just say we've got something that we have a problem with if it means that we can have a center are we willing to accept something that is problematic to us if it means that the rest of  yeah yeah that's ok we like it that's this is all we do  surface which is great and we can handle it so you guys have to keep coming back and sharing with us and participating so we'll see you tomorrow morning whatever time the first meeting is of your schedule and throughout the