good evening i'm liz allison chair of the planning board and i'd like to call the meeting of the planning board tuesday january nineteenth two thousand and sixteen to order i'd like to start as we generally do by introducing my colleagues if you notice we are slightly diminished in numbers this evening we sent one of our colleagues home with the camp which are of over one hundred one degrees he did show up briefly but we've sent him home planner i'm going to pass for just a moment as i see vice chair fiasco arriving you were first order of business is to finalize the proposed zoning amendments for the single residencies zoning districts just to very briefly recap this is a project that we have been working on for some time my predecessor mike if you still appointed a working group including joe the second now and me and we have been working with the residents represented here this evening  steve pinkerton to put together a draft version for the full board's consideration this evening as a full board we had a public discussion of these issues before christmas and in your folders you will have you've received a variety of materials what i'd like to do this what i thought i'd like to kick this off by  for it and i'd ask him to just hit a few of the high points and then to i will ask jeffrey to summarize the items that were i where we we where the working group and i believe and the resident group believes there's a consensus everything we heard at the public discussion supported it and ask jeffrey to quickly summarize those points and then i want to was the question of under what circumstances and single wrist and see do you need to come to the planning board for a permit or a special permit we've tried to balance the concerns that we heard at the public discussion of gee if i bump up my dining room by six feet i don't want to have to come to the planning board with the impact that a large and poorly thought out addition can happen upon neighborhoods so with that jeffrey if i could ask you to begin  by if there's anything in the research that you did not say it's a it's a six page document i'm not suggesting the reader going to a slow lake or even quickly but if you if there's a couple  couple towns and any point you want to highlight that would be fine if not you could just move on to the summary of the no further discussion needed ready for town meeting yes  so quickly i did it was twenty nine misspellings byelaws and i looked up and part of the exercise was to see what similarly situated communities are doing and to see if we can i can learn discovered very basically that there are really three types of zoning but non conforming zoning by laws one that is similar to belmont's that basically says if you have a non conforming structure what ever causes the nonconformity whether or not to be there are a lot of communities or twelve communities of the twenty nine that have that similar language then there another group that has a language that we have now that is similar to our general residence district that says regardless of the size of the addition if you're putting in whether it's conforming or not if you're putting on an addition or doing altering a non conforming structure it requires a special permit and that or or just that they've gone further with their by law than simply those two classifications which is where i focus most of my attention because that got to the notion of trying to establish a threshold with which the town could say anything less than this would be by right now anything greater than this would be by special permit so there were quite a few of  those fortunately which meant to me that at least that idea was indeed plausible enough and valid and potentially you know legally sustainable and there were roughly seven communities that have these other sort of consensus with respect to the working group the neighborhood group and those attending the public meeting in november the public discussion in november have a thirty thirty feet with a cap at the ridge at thirty four feet currently there is no cap so if you over the thirty six foot to the midpoint you could end up with forty to forty two foot tall building up that's it forty four to the ridge that is the cap was the cap to the ridge are seen as a really important piece to this in terms of trying to really you know one the next one was a regard to how do you define great currently the bylaws says that you can't change it more than twelve inches whether or not it goes up or down and there were some thought that it would be nice to be able come in certain to pop topographic situations it would be nice to have the developer lower the great maybe even be able to do it more than by a because as i read it that last clause and to allow for a cut in the grade to a it sort of not clear what that what the subject of that clause is yes so i in this is with respect to each v a c equipment mechanical outer mechanical and fields fuel storage equipment this is another area barbara where the language i think needs to be  worked on in terms of you know fuel storage equipment oh you have a very circle to ok this is another one where the language has to be better but the bottom line is that the front so the such mechanic such i'll talk with me and not be in the front yard and can't be in the rear set back and that the side set back of that would be determined by the food was a you know unit hanging off the side of the house how do we regulate that so this is to be more clear i'm not sure if this were a medium either again because of the language from concerns but that was a deliberate thought that it may need to be in terms of to be clear in what we're talking about and then we have the non conforming sections and the teacher read you have copies of the new the language because i think that's a place you would be good for everyone to have it in front of because it's the place there is some so this was the issue on which we heard the most pushback at the public discussion as i said a minute ago where people really people felt that there needed to be some of reason as to when they wanted to come forward and needed to come forward for a special permit and of course from the planning boards perspective from the neighborhoods perspective the answer is yes that's perfectly reasonable but there have to be some well understood limits as well if we want to accomplish the purposes of this this change in the  research was very helpful in allowing us to come up with that as was the very careful reading by the neighborhood group and really joe to stefano's ability to take a large number of possibilities and invision what they would all look like and what they would work out so let me just take the  what we look at this and i think it's useful to think about this we wanted to consider two key two cases broadly speaking one is where there is a voluntary gemmell wish someone takes  so partly because it's more straightforward you can take a page to  thought the concept here is that if you take down if you voluntarily demolish a house you may read build without a special permit provided it is on the same for of the same footprint and of the same size of the same mass volume whatever measure that basically you want to take down a house and essentially rebuild that house  not in architectural style necessarily but keeping footprint and size the same you may do so without a special permit does that mean if you knock down a colonial that doesn't have a little boy and you put up a modern  just read the current the two a language cause the structure to exceed the volume or area of the original non conforming structure if there's a better way in which we want to be could look i think we're all clear on the intent here and this is if you look if you tear down if you choose to tear down a house and rebuild a larger house you need to come to the planning board for a special permit and to the extent we can refine the language and that's and again that that's really this is the product of the working group the neighborhood  and you feel boxed up with water and you have two quarters of a much if you rebuild a house and you make a very tall here very short there and it still takes the same amount of water in the volumes to say but if you look the so that sort of like the volume kind of think that this so that's that's actually the gross billing area and in the town and what assessors do sometimes is they clued porches and other kinds of things in gross building area when they take away from that and in the include the attic and the gross biliary if you want the houses that have basically the same square footage as the house had before volume works if you don't want to exceed the living area that it had before then the language needs to be more specific in those terms of that what you're aiming for and i'm not sure what you're aiming for in to be we also require the structure to be located on the original footprint if i put that together with the restriction on volume and of course the height and set back requirements that are elsewhere is there still wiggle room there's wiggle room in terms of a barb put it out if you had an attic in the house that was not used as a living area ok that had not been built out and you rebuilt the house pretty much the same you put a bathroom up there you could put two bedrooms up there you've got the same mass of the house but now you have you've increased the living area of the house where you could argue that when you went in to do that now i don't know if you want to close that door or not it would just be the barbers the rich no take the case you posed nothing to make it and then you make it usable area so in the end one could be achieved by inserting the word living in front a area shall only be as great in volume or living area as the original non conforming structure  a just a thought which would be couldn't be greater in volume in terms of gross building area not exceed the current gross building area and not exceed the current meant at the public discussion that if you carried on a house you're going to build a new house that isn't that is larger however you know we will we've improved the definition you should come before the board the case of renovation extension alteration with the harder case because that is a place that people had concerns about an overreaching permitting  that conformed to that setback putting a second story deck informed and that would be potentially by right provided other things as well it so that's the the standard is that there hasn't been a series of projects over the course of five years that was something i said as i said at that point in the research that gross gross square footage by more than thirty percent and some of that building permits work and we can talk about that for the how that fleshes out so those are the three scenarios that w start all three of those have to be met in terms of whether or not a project in sort of by right when it is found that a project may not to meet one of those problems one of those standards than the planning board know the addition and or new building is appropriate in scale and mass to the neighborhood in that it will not increase the non conforming existing non conforming law coverage if it exists so if the structure is non conforming respect a lot coverage this is saying you cannot grant a special permit to increase that no no no i want to know which that's just not on the table right anymore and then finally number three is will not be substantially more detrimental than the existing non conforming build it in a neighborhood that actually has a language from state law so that that has to be in there and that actually  them the ultimate thing that you're going to decide so that's that's where the dockyard and and just by way of that explanation of how these pieces fit together the notion is like coverage is twenty five percent in a single rest and see if we say you cannot if you're non conforming you can't increase if you are twenty seven percent decrease it and at the same time we're holding the height of the structure to the thirty or thirty two feet or the thirty feet  it's going to it would be hard it's very hard to see how a too large house gets built because certainly as we talk with the neighbors and steve you may want to comment on this after  others here have asked their questions the probably the the most detriment and what's perceived as most detrimental has been what in boston state circles they call land scrapers but they reach out and grab every single piece of land they possibly can and cover it with something and that's what this is intended to prevent  hundred eighty three and then i called out those which were only for expansion in structure structurally also defined as decks of those permits there were only thirty two that didn't meet either the nine thousand square foot lot size or the seventy five foot frontage of those thirty t was for so you'll see just as example there's eight permits for dex and obviously that doesn't increase lot little area and then you'll see that if you use go with the thirty percent threshold that there are there would be only eight cases that would be subject to a special permit from the planning board so in some of those you ma want to include you want you may have wanted to capture initially anyway regardless of this analysis because of the new home that this a tear down we placement or is the complete second story which changes you know it's basically a new home because it's made of reaction to a two and a half story structure so this is just just just as a breakdown of those building permits this also picks up with the increase in lockup which would be you'll notice in two instances actually coverage because those structures as either a branch hones or whatever were greater than the twenty five percent and in order to get by right permit they had to come in at under twenty five percent there so as jeffrey says the if we look if we do a back casting the restricting the live coverage wouldn't have been the trigger it would have been here so but it's good to have it because if someone pushes in that direction that is going to be a very disruptive see other comments from well going going back to the the the two page document and i just couple of small things i think at the at item number three and the second paragraph on page  two i think we there one gross floor aereo more square footage or something i think you can see solve that by striking the word square so those as and then and then the very last sentence on that page you know that i just a question i guess for a legal question that i'm not competent on it seems to me that it's risky to to save to tend to define negatively where we say reconstruction shall not mean this instead of saying what it does mean and it's if know i don't see how that we can at least talk more about what that means what reconstruction means and i wouldn't want to be creating an incentive for people to necessarily be building on a seam footprint with this scene with an existing foundation for example like i think that's something we should think about if somebody if wouldn't we want to but then the definition of reconstruction says you can't totally demolished and rebuilt unless you've unless you refer back to this section here the point of that is to say that if you're going to demolish the building you need to follow this provision here well i was i see i can't tell whether reconstruction is governed by one five five or the other thing which is the total demolition is covered by one five five when i read that right  any other comment if not i'd like steve pinkerton i on behalf of the neighbor to comment on behalf of the neighborhood group and then just to have jeffrey run through the schedule of what lies you know and so because i had heard with respect to that part a in the voluntary demolition i had to cause a structure to exceed that gross floor area ok i would just just y this really sincere effort to try to balance the needs of and the rights of people who want to improve their property by either building it a new or enhancing it in other ways to preserve those rights but at the same time respecting the equally important rights of the neighbors in a butters who want to enjoy their properties as they are without being overwhelmed by overwhelming construction and i think you've struck a nice balance in those two things i think it's important to point out to the audience that what you're wrestling with right now isn't so much  to be more restrictive in building things but to try to interpret things so that we're preserving the language in many ways of the existing zoning law i mean it's important to know that ender existing zoning rules if you have a non conforming structure and you're going to  do something to increase that nonconformance that is to say build a second story over something that doesn't have a conforming setback you already have to go for a special permit so this is not really adding a lot of new stuff to the books and i think the board has been very careful in preserving the protections that people have in developing property that the zoning current zoning laws afford but at the important we're as a you know responsible citizen group we're interested in and promoting both sides of this equation so that's that's what i've got to say again thank you for your work on this public hearing notice to the newspaper this friday that to publish the in order to publish the notice it would be good to have we will publish a notice this coming week is that sufficient to allow you to do it publication right because the publication is going to really it's going to comment on the sections it's not to be the exact language in the end this will be clearly a draft  yes and we would if he would probably add by everyone on the board jeffrey now clean it up as best we can but then it would profit greatly by everyone on the board everyone in the neighborhood really reading it carefully yet what is the motion i need him we need i need i am looking for a motion to approve these changes in the zoning vitalized governing governing single residence subject discussion of this is the beginning of a series of discussions on true its purpose is to provide a outline a framework or an outline within which we made might discuss these matters obviously not to provide anything definitive and this is a discussion that will run  over the next months but just to just to take us through it briefly up to this point we have heard a total of eighteen cases under the general residence zoning by laws as change we six percent were to nine twenty two percent withdrawn which in most cases obviously the applicants are withdrawals are generally because the applicants saw that this would not move forward in a favorable way and so they prudently decided to withdraw and reconsider and as we've been through there are for the first is what's our formal process the second which is related is what are the tools that we're using what are our formal tools the third is well how good have the outcomes which in the end is what we're really supposed to be about process is an a is a means to an outcome not an outcome in itself and finally when we when this these these changes were passed by town meeting we said we understand there is a great deal of latitude for the planning board before this sunsets we will come back to you and we will try to make it more driven and less bo driven and i add that not because i think that on the basis of a thousand cases of which we have actually four construct units to look at it we're going to make a huge amount of progress but we need to do it and therefore it's good to keep it on the list let me start with the area where i think we need a before we go to where i would we may want to look at and it's something that we can change before we hear additional case i've thrown out a couple ideas to get the discussion going but we'll return to this next when we meet next nominations would be really right now do not ask for told will be the area and that means that we end up going through the plans as submitted and coming up with the total air living area or we're taking it off the architect estimates on a floor by floor basis so one thing that we could easily do let's just say you give us the total living area as part of your submission if we are going to do that we need to resolve the question of  the first column is always original where what we have now if the african gives us a total living area thats different from the total living asked about total living area in a systematic way we have we have what we need if we do this i can say said from experience the experience of the eighteen cases we need a rule about how that  and how that gets settled you know we're asking about a total living area is right now are the only again it's the only thing we ask for in the way of opposed to a big project like the pushing village yes they days that they will sometimes draw a sketch before they if they think there's going to be an issue in terms of you know they have things have to go through the approval process they might not do a full thing but would what it's always nice to ask for is you want to get as soon as you can you want to get the square footage used on the building you want to get the growth building or you want to know the number of floors which is absolute you want to know the total living area and then you want to know you know the coverage and all of that and if you can get at this point  basic sketch floor plans that could be attached and a simple elevation that could be attached at the beginning that's a very useful thing to have to yeah i mean we're we're getting those now and you should get those in the very you get those as you go through the process because i mean if they get approved if they need to go the special permit a different thing but they can also be simplified in the sense of you don't need that in the initial stages you don't need detail construction for you need drawings that basically show you what the building is and what the dimensions are on the fourth and you need an elevation of the size and then the details can come that is certainly high but i would think that would be the minimum type things that you would want to have to be able to look at w gross square footage of that would be but you know to laze a very good step in the right direction and people just on the on the question of whether when the applicant and the assessors total living area numbers differ yeah yeah that's that i think that when they differ there we couple of places where somebody did an addition that was two stories and the assessor only picked up the first story part of the edition i think at that point that it's a matter of if it's in the ballpark it probably doesn't matter whether it's varies by i think it's very difficult for someone who's coming in the earliest stage of trying to get a permit to ask them to spend the cost of having a professional do an interior set of measurement i think what we've said we're going to look at the total living area and we've said their claim to have to do that and i mean they can't even come in for a building permit without something like that isn't that correct j you could see if there was a significant variation between the it's you know grossly deficient like they missed the second story you know there was a building permit or something that was a permit and if there's an issue that the the applicant general view is when there's a discrepancy the apple can see the the number the applicant is giving us is always larger than the number in the assessor's office and my view was that arises because people did work they didn't permit it they didn't pay for a permit they haven't been paying paying taxes on it and if i understand the virtues of a case by case basis but i have to tell you i don't believe those things happen by accident very often and if they happen by accident maybe it's sixty feet or eighty you know it's a small room sized accident and there seems to me something inappropriate about rewarding people for ignoring the permit and building a home and then being able if i put them into that category of reckoning up your parents and then claiming it's not killing your parents and claim you're an orphan but it's along those lines and but but as i say i can see this is this is not necessarily the dominant view  is this is the issue barbara that you and rafi raised in your memo are there some things like trying to build a duplex townhouses on a very small lot that are just so problematic that we what we don't want is for them to for the applicant to spend two or three months talking to community development so that by the time it gets to us they've already invested time and money in plans that the border is just just aren't consistent with the spirit of the general residence rezoning wri which barbour you have done a list of design standards that we're going to impose you know we don't like spindly columns we don't like we like natural materials and again this is i want to raise them and if people could think about this are there circuit breakers that we want to talk with jeffrey about that if you see this after you've had two meetings if you can't jeffrey always says explain what you do jeffery that no this isn't consistent with the spirit of the zoning and do we want to give jeffrey more guidance in which he would say in effect you need to listen to me tell you what the jet what town meeting voted and what the general residence just trick needs to look like now or you need to come before the board before you invest a lot of your time money and energy but if we're going to say that we need to have a right i mean i've talked about this with the limited number of cases we've had as well the circuit breaker is there's potentially several breaks here in the circuit where jeffrey's repeatedly telling you know something and they're maybe not hearing it but we've also had situations where n can come to the board a number of times and there might be some really keeping issue like the bathroom in the basement or on the floor at that they're not listening to but because we have a full discussion that includes you know architectural detail you know i don't know if it's hard to know what message they're hearing and whether and then they're spending more money to address the architectural detail issues hoping that i think we're going to forget about the third floor bathroom whatever it is and feels like there ought to be a way and this is kind of difficult but you know the collar early vote it does feel like we should if we have a fundamental problem with with a design it would be great if we could that that up front then the other thing can make the choice about whether they want to go and spend money on the second or third or fourth that drawings or not and some certainly well so the difficulty is how do you manage the process i'm so our messaging is clear you know but it is clear we're early saying you know anything's possible maybe we'll come up with such inspired architectural ideas that when we look at the way the house blows we'll say this is fine but that would not maybe one of the waverly streets of mission just so you can see what it comes looks like you know when it comes into the board a very bright and with that we move on to item for discussion on demolition delay and the historic forward and they are faced with the fact that the demo delay expires in june thirtieth two thousand and sixteen a good warning to us by the way where we kind of  time that we have met so thank you for having me tonight just to give you an update of where we are yes the demolition delayed by a lot of the existing by a lot as a sunset provision for june and it snuck up on us and we have been working with a consultant doing a town wide survey of historic resources in town and that was meant to be used to revise a new by law and our work on that has taken much longer than we anticipated or consulted and still working she looked at about six hundred fifty properties and the historic district commission has been working with her over several months to come up with a total list  properties to be surveyed our contract is for about two hundred survey forms about one hundred fifty of those forms will be new forms about fifty of those will be revised forms where existing forms had problems and  corrections or updates the demolition delayed by law has been working well if you remember there was an appeal process if your property was on the list you had the possibility of appealing no one went through that process  left we've had two properties on the list submitted demolition permits in one case it was on prospect street two hundred fifty seven pro where we reviewed the demolition permit and the property owners did a lot of research to show this particular house had serious radon problems and they had looked at several ways to solve that problem with no success so in that particular case we did determine that the house was preferably preserved but we couldn't see it and acting the demolition delay because the property owner really looked at all alternatives demolition the second property was one hundred twenty two waverly street i'm sure the court is familiar with that in that case we did determine that property preferably preserved and we reached out to the property owner and to the developer to meet with us which is really what the bylaws meant to do to give us the possibility of meeting with the owner to look at alternatives and maybe help them identify an alternative to demolition that they hadn't thought of  unfortunately they declined meeting with us and they opted just to wait out the six month period so we did have an opportunity to you know work with them to look at how there are just you know we could have determined while you've looked at other alternatives as that the first case so we have about i would say half of the survey forms done we still have a small number of properties that are still question marks whether or not we want to have survey forms done for those over still working on that but the list is pretty much complete for what we're going to have the survey complete and we really do need that survey completed before we can come to town meeting with you five so our hope is to go to town meeting this spring and just ask for an extension of one year to the existing bylaws so just as it's written now we just want that extended one more year so we can really work hard to review those survey forms and work with the planning board and other interested parties that want to have a voice and with the new miles joe and just to be clear i'm sure this is a question you'll have the opportunity to answer many cams but we can answer it here first the survey yes no the what we're asking for it in extension it will be the existing last federal thing that was approved at town meetings so it's not you know we're not adding anything to it there are those two properties that have my demolish will either come off the list but  you know right now we're not adding anything to that so again it is just an extension of the buy elias that as it was approved down anyone have any questions for so does anyone see any reason that we would not support it if the extension of the demo delay as proposed by the historic district commission  the idea is that there are there are a number of issues there that we know will come from the board but the board will want to take up where before the board does that there really needs to be spade work done of the sort that geoffrey did for single rest and see where go out in that case this case go up look at what's there understand what other counts have done that's one kind of research there's a variety of other kinds of work that is essentially prep work designed to provide the board with a solid foundation on which to make a decision as to should it do something should it propose new zoning whatever there are also cases the one of the best one of the good examples is the we passed a by law on religion to preserve religious and cultural buildings we pass that no one has made use of it but the issues that led us to worry about that namely that we have a lot of religious and cultural buildings in visible locations in town and a number of their future is uncertain we don't want to wait till someone calls us and says they pull the delay of the board can't look at every issue but the notion is this should be we should have a kind of on ramp that where the we we really we start a committee a working group starts looking at these issues ahead the second sense in which this should be the on ramp is the there are any and there are all to the good people who would prefer would like to be more involved in things going on in the town who would like to be more involved with town government with civic life in burma we think that is absolutely terrific  there is also something to be said for giving both the town it's communities and the citizens a sort of try before you buy civic volunteer isn't isn't to everyone's taste and you find that out pretty quickly in your first town committee it's somewhat better if that isn't the warrant committee or  of course often when the selectmen and are looking at they have resumes all important all impressive and no one's actually worked with anyone on this list so this is both an on for issues that are out there that we need to bring into the mainstream of what we're doing but we're not ready to do it and it is an on ramp for people who want to get involved see how they like the update there are a couple obvious issues the first is air b n b which we initially said we could it's just it's it's an issue that we need to take up at some point and we don't want to be doing a  start when we take it up so with that his background i have asked rafi given that given his work and the general residence issue and concern with east enders if he would be willing to the still would like to take that up but i think that that is i think they're being beers coming home as an issue you've heard some citizen discussions about that and it's been raised by the brought to us i think that would be fun to kind of stretch and take a look at that and see how belmont could try to understand that in its place here and also working with some new folks that might be interested in engaging in just on the subject of air b n b the metropolitan area planning council calendar for this year has a topic for each month and one of the months was air b n b and they had a map b sites from the past year and it certainly i could i couldn't it was a fairly small map and i couldn't really define the boundaries of belmont but it certainly looked like more than one or two there's anywhere between thirty and two hundred fifty and last i looked i saw it was three three hundred are there are we is the town policing sites other than air b n b you know i think list someone just mentioned to me today and maybe the window is too broad to be an issue but sabbatical dot com it seems i mean i know people who've been on sabbatical for probably a while you know a year six months or a year who have rented out their homes and i think as ravi takes up this issue we need to think about would be if this is feasible for our next meeting that you put together a brief statement of how you what you see the groups charge no one agrees and i think that well i think you the point you've made will be well will be incorporated that certainly something you want to take into account because the you know the ground rules i would say are one  this is not a policy making recommendation making body that were were not having an appoint a committee create an appointed committee to make recommendations this is a staff it appears this is a staff it out committee and the second is there has to be something for you to think about is what's a reasonable amount of time you know what would be a delivery date and if the issues if you brown the issue to all shared in rented housing you know you were here but you will be coming to my retirement party for the planning board before and there but i just got to be broad enough to be talents that you need being careful not to underestimate the importance of some daytime availability the second just my understanding that there were twelve people who and he might be asking him to give you the names or perhaps to send a letter suggesting that they might want to be get in touch with you so that might be a way to kick it off but i think you probably want to do both and then there is that wonderful power posted on the town website tomorrow but just because this is a topic of some interest let me just hit the high points i as you know construction financing his hinged in the past on our retail pre leasing activities last week we announced the signing of two leases one a major national tenant and the other a rink not five thousand square foot restaurant we are pleased to announce that a search for small format food store and pretend it is progressing we are in discussions with the financially strong experienced market leader that prides itself on providing fresh high quality prepared food and other necessities in a small format store the food store plus two other leases will total twenty two thousand four hundred square feet for about sixty percent of the total retail space available at coaching village given the quality and financial strength of the signed in perspective tenets the project is forming a financially sound base of future income that helps with construction loan underwriting recent traction resteal leasing should or celebrate our progress on a number of fronts in regards to demolition the buildings provide our current bank collateral for our current mortgage so we are finding that small scale demolition of that lot full scale demolition prior to construction along closing will be problematic while our current bank might allow us to perform selective small scale demolition we don't think doing a persian at the demolition will help move along the project the demolition process is most cost effective and expeditiously handled upon construction on closing in which case the collateral be fully released and the entire site can be demolished our continued focus our continued focus is centered on retail leap releasing and closing the construction loan which ultimately provides the maximum benefits the project in the town we are getting the traction we need to achieve these goals and appreciate   i was surprised to know that they are only revealing now that the existing mostly vacant buildings are the collateral for their existing mortgage because that part of the agreement that they made was to do demolition on the early time maybe  i'm surprised that we still haven't heard target date for the closing in and that we've heard many times that the date has moved and you know all but one document w needed the last time they were here in december and i would have expected this letter to set out to address the closing date issue in more detail but i guess we will take that that will clearly be something that we will take up i just add my voice to the the detail of the one of the issues that's perhaps the most important one of which is the closing that although the last meeting that it was encouraged to see that there is some kind of communication a little bit more substance on the or details on the closing would have been probably a laying a lot of our concerns and that of the community who is anxiously awaiting forward moving progress on that piece to look forward to the next meeting and i think that's that's well stated in understated just just looking at my calendar i realize that our next meeting is on the ground hog day whatever whatever movie that might remind you of scott i think we've discussed the planning topic for twenty sixteen by the when we by the time we meet on the second i should have a schedule for the larger topics  ready to distribute to the board that involve some coordination with the assessors real it and other developers but i hope to have that ready to they are maintaining three bedrooms are not creating a fourth bedroom and the addition is the is being built for for an additional bathroom and walk in closet on for  the it's very common when you have a first story element to build a second floor above it which he has a master bedroom walk in closet and that's what they're doing except that that being the case there's a question then what makes up a neighborhood and that's the thirty foot map is what you have in front of you you have two maps actually one that shows all the zillions only break down and one is without zoning and when does the applicant wish to come  i would make two suggestions the first is that the that the applicant be asked to add the total living area numbers that we well we have not made at know we haven't made any large decisions about the process i think asking the applicant can need to add the total living i think we're all in agreement that would be useful we we get it anyhow it's just it's much better to ask the applicant to state it  i think it would be very useful to have joe's perspective on the neighborhood  as a working group and  the question is there there any reason not to move out to harding avenue and  it looks like by what was presented here we're just missing the two houses two fourteen and six sixty seven yeah oh i'm on either end of the top right that's that's it exactly yeah  the question is how far down whoring do we want to go do we want to go down to use the williston is the outbound there and then cut over to twenty four and fifty five seventy seven or where do you see how i think we could go to the  so i think that's that's what we should do other than you know we respect our arterial roads are important it's also the case that if you're within i think three hundred notification that there's got to be a good case for taking you rather than ok make it not stupid you know in the same way their mutual funds that take the s and p index and then essentially build another index by taking out companies they clearly are going to get kicked out of the s and p index soon so they take w pretty defined crowd rating and then just make it not stupid and i think that's a way to think about what we're doing when when we have the neighborhood the full blown neighborhood discussion that we will be talking with the assessors who look at it in a much more market oriented way and i think for the purposes of this the market and the i have been the representative the plate the planning board has christ by statute has a representative of the community preservation committee we met last week and there are chose five properties to five projects to advance to town meeting let me just read them it did not appear to me that any of them are going to re that the planning board would probably not weigh in on any of them that was my first guess but i had i said to the committee that i wanted to get a run through the list tonight and see if people anyone saw a reason to dollars and this is actually half of the intergenerational plan because the project is planned with the expectation that the new high school high school renovation might go forward and it's clearly not a good idea to complete the intergenerational have around quite put on what during construction or prior to construction obviously we'll know on the twenty seventh of whether that's going to happen or not in which case i  ok that that fits several different materials the only reason i ask is because in our agency we have recently come on a material that is much more  friendly you know semi non urban condition but it's also easy to repair and starting user using it on rails to trails conversion and  other places so i'd be i'd be interested in knowing what the material is there consider it in your hands tomorrow that would be great i mean i am certain you know the thing the thousand both of which were supported by the most needy all of us who have set through corporate presentations for very good supported very large transactions and this was perhaps the most complete presentation that i have ever seen you could have added a number of zeros and it would have covered the issue but there is a seventy five thousand dollar project to for the town hall near your revealing us which are a pair of if from facilities department which are in very bad repair and will be repaired consistent with the fact that it is a historic building there is a twenty five thousand dollar grant and this is a citizen's duty group julie crockett is the sponsor to do a design feature a design study for p q playground that the idea of the twenty five thousand is that it will when it is over they will have a set of essentially be ready to have a set of documents so that the town could go to bid and they intend to come back to the c p a next year for the two hundred twenty five thousand dollars it will cost to the playground proof  and finally there is a project proposed by the d p w for the reconstruction of wind for tennis courts for three hundred twenty five thousand dollars that was the only project on which there was not a unanimous vote and there would be some additional discussion in february but but it was nevertheless passed by a substantial majority does anyone see any need to bring any of these projects before the planning board that at the point at which this was installed and the noise was going to be the police department was going to be there to conduct the measurement that would probably drop quite a large crowd that cation that i certainly intended to be there i thought were as neighbors would be there and that they should just think about that in deciding as you remember joe the stefano and michael have told us many times you can get a life if you like if you're prepared to pay all i have in the way of updates all right for february second i think we've kind of defined the agenda already so i'll move on to item ten review and approval of minutes and he changes