consensus of the majority of those like ward in this particular case there was one who did not consensus of the majority i think that defines it great you learn something new every day so if you would i joined a introduce yourself and until this what you'd like to do i'd just davis my own restaurants in the area and we're opening a restaurant at thirty hawthorne street liston in the maple tree place and it will be a fast casual counter service restaurant protocol price point and we wish to have first class and eventually third class licen with all the inside service resume indoor service there is also an a patio and on the southern portion just outside the right now it's only the first class you're going for the third class a second later or typically i believe a first class application goes to the town one approve that gets forwarded to the state  approved the third class is any outside consumption are typically smita directly to the state i believe yet our consumption would also go through the town that would ok so i have to get that to talk a little bit about how you will deal with the issues of under age drinking or serving people who shouldn't be serving over you know not for restaurants and catering business we have almost thirty years of seriously we envision this restaurant having a pretty low percentage of our total sales will be alcohol but we do want to offer it to people it will be a very short list of canned selections  why and eventually we'll have a third class license for a very very short list of house cocktails and it's the restaurant just to get the restaurant setting it will be both so recalled reading you have a great experience with other restaurants oh you're not this is not your first venture no no and here further questions regardless  civil authority don't work because here you explain why would you do this all three of four of you know that this was voted on at the board of civil authority last night this is was kind of one of those issues that was wasn't quite thirteen are on the democratic party two on the republican party which is fine except for anything to do with elections it doesn't give any kind of a balance for election purposes  state statute allows that there be a minimum of three per major political party the republican party people did authorize and send  word that they would like to have that third person represented on the board of civil authority and that being a ginger morton who was recommended by the party the party in the three members of also been a long time justice of the peace and election official and is just an amazing job in all you know aspects of that  days in march but what i meant is is people run for slug board people run for justice of the peace or affair and along with that comes this other aspect as a justice your responsibilities our elections your election officials as a board of civil authority your election officials board of abatement and tax appeals primarily and j p and so there's this whole concept of the political affiliation where you want to try to have a balance at least you have to have a balance is the minimum number and that's when you have to have one so if you're doing by delivering ballots to those that are h you have to have someone from each party if you're doing recounts you have to have different parties if you are opening absentees you should have one from each party whenever possible ok i get it ok that time of year again when the board has to certify number of highway miles in town for the hate to see transportation this is used to help calculate our local aid dollars that are sent to the town about fifty official the transplants so not a whole lot to one miles of class or road to this search certificate so that's an administrative just kind of a catch up for this form and in the board probably recalls we discontinued a couple small segments of class or roadway at chapman  again motion would be so i picked that up when i was doing preparing the flyer and suggested the board going to sign the revised warning which the board did and this is just a confirmation we actually we are starting up this morning citizen response program using some specialized software for this purpose software is provided to the brief description of the church it's a it's a resident portal and we can also input the requests as they come in so some examples they both work examples of someone want to report a pothole they saw maybe some branches down on a  trail we've also set up some have a permit in question a zone and complain and we can expand so departments to dog license question issues that come up around town so it's designed to give folks a web portal to submit the requests the ticket will route to  appropriate party in town once it's resolved the no get a notification with an email or text message and automated phone call saying the request has been fulfilled it also is pretty powerful we can create these knowledge base articles so if someone's typing in a question how is my say utility rate calculated we can have a article loaded in the site that will pop up someone can read the article they can let us know if it's helpful or not we kind of build that database over time so it's a pretty powerful tool and it's going to take us a the very reasons we didn't pursue it going one was cost and the other stuff time but the cost is come down significantly and the fact that it's offered by the same company or through the same company or that's partner with our web page made it much more  i've mentioned this before bed remind everyone to please put this on your calendar we're going to have a major major substance abuse forum on april tenth details of that still need to be worked out we have a committee that's working on that as we speak they've been meeting weekly for the last several weeks and includes school officials from around the area  were really pushing we want to have a big turnout so at this point we're just asking people to put it on your calendar and we get details about the actual programmable will make sure that gets distributed but we think this is going to be a very important program and the goal of course is to see if there is interest and and maybe some ideas on how to prevent abuse this isn't just about learning about it it's about working towards preventing it  week we actually got a sense of grants to help pay for some of the expenses thirty five from a dollar grant and we have a project manager that's helping us out who has an interest in this and  some of the money may go to the food some will do the publicity and other materials the final thing i want to mention and this is one that eric's going to need to provide more information on but there is a  that stands for we've talked about this before in a different context but it is part of the budget process and the sins of the software there in this valley is all across the state of using it and we're all concerned about the fact that this may have a limited life in the future because it's kind of a small operation and anyway there's these articles apparently have focused on this software and found that there may be security leaks or i guess there are security leaks in  the software and because the lead he's using you know that the company is using as a base is very very old it's i think be software from the eighty's or something like that proposed for change and there are major and broad reaching changes to chapter eleven which is about growth management and the change to chapter thirty six as a reminder in the industrial district is in plan related change adding in allowed use of financial services non retail banking to the industrial zoning district west so one one very simple and one with a whole lot of different facets and not really the two are related at all except they require the same public hearing process so they've been consolidated so that said growth management is a piece of willesden zoning that regulates the pace and geographic distribution of new residential development in town it does that as an interim step and subdivision review process and it because it establishes a limited number of dwellings that are available to be created through the subdivision process it is competitive and projects compete with one another based on a set of incentives that are laid out in the growth management chapter and are awarded points as part of that process growth management is handled by the development review board and they use their scoring system to inform allocation decisions and to plan for future growth as they're reviewing subdivisions so that's the broader context as far as we know williston is the only town in vermont that that handles growth management quite in this way through this competitive process it adds significant amount of time and effort to the subdivision review process but it does afford the town another opportunity to ask for and sometimes get attributes in developments that it sees as desirable or achieving the goals of the comprehensive plan so that's the broad view of growth management it has existed in willesden in some form or another since the mid one nine hundred ninety s and tonight what is proposed for review and potential approval is a hold set of changes to accomplish a couple of broad goals one is to lessen the administrative burden of growth management this means the amount of effort that it takes the planning staff to administer the program and address some of the complexities that arise when you start saying things like you can build a house on that lot but not until this year or that year there's a couple simple ones like we currently have a by law that says when you get growth management allocation you get a certificate that's kind of like a stock certificate or a coupon and you turn it in when you go and get your permit that hasn't worked well people lose them we end up spending a lot of time despite knowing exactly what the allocation schedule was for a project resurrecting these things finding them marking old ones void things like that it's honestly easier from where i sit to simply review the decision the d r be made and make sure that the permits be assured are are in line with it redrafting the scoring criteria within the by law so that you're not talking about its ten points weighted by a half or ten points way to double but rather straight numbers five ten fifteen points so we started as a baseline with the idea that each category would add up to one hundred points and following the weighting as a starting point as full point numbers to those rather than saying this is worth ten points but it counts double just say this is worth twenty points and trying to make that a little more consistent and then redrafting those scoring criteria to make them more readable and understandable for applicants so there's things that you know you're saying you want good neighborhood design but not necessarily guiding out with you know what should an applicant tell the g r b about their project that means good best you can fire away next are a set of changes designed to strengthen the incentives so it's competitive and it's an incentive based program sort of made that made the development that brings the the most incentivized out tributes to the town when  the towns have a good track record of getting some of those incentivized attributes but there are goals that have been added to the comprehensive plan over time that the planning commission wanted to see added into the scoring criteria  site energy generation or energy storage the so called smart grid or you know small scale energy production green energy out in the opportunity for projects to complete compete for allocation by constructing sustainable transportation facilities very small scale parking ride secure bike locker transit stop type facilities that allow people to be more flexible in how they get around strengthening the energy efficiency requirements for allocation we were citing to energy star currently which has become somewhat outmoded and difficult to administer we're talking now about for wind energy codes in the stretch code things that are more easily identifiable within the way energy efficiency is looked at today we're also suggesting proposing to limit the exemption for minor subdivisions that don't meet the minimum score which in willesden is thirty points in this system there's always a few units that can be given out to projects that are not able to meet that minimum score we were proposing limiting that exemption to projects on parcels smaller than ten acres in size that the embedded intent in the bylaws has always been well what about the small time land owner who just needs to split there are a lot often to convey a development right to a family member or to sell it off and make some money so this to it's sort of corrals that we've had a few instances in recent years of larger projects on the four and five unit scale saying well there's four units of exemption available i'm going to go for those because it's easy and you know if i get a project in certain parts of town is pretty is a pretty large project so there was a desire to limit that the next broad category is  meet that demand for residential development in the r c d and allow flexibility in the construction schedules to meet the market in the constraints of construction while still maintaining that cap of eighty dwelling units over a ten year period that the town has become really accustomed to experiencing and so the way you do that is growth management has traditionally been a ten year window and when you get to the end of that ten year window we come back to the select burton we say ok next year is the last of the ten year cycle we need to adopt amendments to this chapter to create a new ten year cycle the proposal here creates a ten year rolling window essentially you're in year one whatever wasn't allocated last year  in form or year one is now on it's no longer available to be allocated but you're always looking forward ten years and there are rules about how much of what's available in that ten year horizon is allowed it's only about a little more than half of it once you get  year out is ever available this makes the system a little more complicated but it means you're always looking at the same amount of unit availability across the same amount same number of years one of the challenges of the ten year window is when you're in you're one of ten it's not all that competitive you've got you've just stretches out till you're ten and when you're in year ten even the best project in the world might not be able to get allocation because it's all been given away or almost all of it's been given away another change is to adjust the geographic target a little bit this removes a few units from the growth center into units from the ag world this increase this is the other sewer service area where recurrently offer twelve units a year to twenty  year so this is the residential zoning district area between mountain view road and williston road in the village that's an area with significantly higher density than the twelve unity year ag world district and  the greatest amount of demand we've experienced over time so a slight shifting of the unit counts between the three geographical areas the next one is to allow flexibility in construction scheduling by allowing projects that have commenced construction within their allocation schedule to proceed with building all of their allocated wehling units at any time within their overall schedule what this means i guess i'll back up and describe how this has worked in the past a project gets  allocation to build out they get a certain number of units and they get them over seven or eight years usually before it makes sense to start that project the developer needs maybe the first three or even four years of that allocation to be available so they wait so we go through this whole approval process hearing process final plans everything else and then nothing happens for a couple of years and then suddenly there's construction and then depending on the time of the market sometimes the experience of the town has been some construction happens in the market dies back or tastes change or things need to change the project doesn't complete the way we thought it would there are projects and will list and that we're finishing up back in february less than a year ago or maybe just a touch more than a year ago that were in progress when i got here in two thousand and eight small projects projects with fewer than twenty units that's a long time for a single si to be under construction so what this would do is it would say to the application you have your allocation schedule once you start you can keep going until you're done and that means is a system that has always been a little bit lumpy in other words we don't get exactly eight units every year would still be a little bit lumpy but the lumps would be able to be aligned with market desires infrastructure constraints and other things that are faced by someone who's trying to get a project off the ground the other benefit is if the if things are going well the project finishes sooner and builds out in a shorter timeline the last part of that is on the ten year horizon there's no difference at all it's still eighty units a year over ten years but just when they happen within that ten year window may shift a little bit along a couple others replacing the outright expiration of allocation with a slow build provision the first couple years i was in willesden two thousand and to two thousand and twelve we spent a lot of time with folks who had maybe one or two units left in their project but their allocation window which was originally for later extended to five years had expired they literally were the owner of a plot of  that had no right to develop any more that can be hard for the person who's trying to sell that lot because you know no you can't build a house on it until you come in do some process for the town it's also hard for everybody else who lives in that project because if it's not yet a completed homeowners association and there's this lot where there was supposed to be a house where there's now not a house for maybe some years while we wait for the you know reopening of allocation so what that what this replaces that with is a slow build provision if you have a small project what happens is maybe there's a water too that you don't build when you thought you were going to you can still build one or two units a year even as you come out of what we thought was going to be the outer limits of your allocation schedule pretty much meets reality slow build though if you have a very large project something more than thirty to three hundred units the slow build progression does allow you to continue building if you if you go past exploration but it's so slow you would never want to so few of the large projects would be heavily incentivized to come back and reapply and regain allocation with a project that would need to meet the bylaws as they sat at that point so that's the slow build the last part is just to subject all the units approved under prior prior versions of allocation that are on don't now to the same set of rules there's been times in management history where we've had up to three if not four versions of growth management to administer going back in the old files how are they doing it back then what are the rules about timing expiration this would would change that to say all units that are and built as of the adoption of this are going to be administered under this system so nobody would expire anymore for example everybody would go to this slow build provision then we have a category the last one to encourage highly desirable types of residential development by exempting those types of development from the growth management process and the eighty unity year cap entirely so this is what in a conversation with the planning commission we kind of called the high flyer standard if a project brought things to the town that the town had said it really really wanted a very high level of energy efficiency production of affordable housing including units that are affordable eighty percent of median income which is the kind of housing we'd really not gotten very much of in williston at all energy efficiency energy production enough things in this system in this new scoring system to score seventy points or more there is no project in willesden today that would have scored seventy points or better under this project under this proposed revision so we're talking about a sort of next level project that we haven't seen yet in willesden that combination of affordable energy efficient major open space asset protected forever that sort of thing so there is within that the possibility that eighty units are building under the regular system and then there's this high flyer project out there we think we've drafted it in a way that it's hard enough to do that that not everybody's going to be a high flyer if they were a you'd get a preponderance of really innovative progressive new developments in town you know producing most of their energy on site providing lots of affordable housing etc etc but we think we think that the points have been set up in a way it'll be a real challenge for somebody to meet that that sets that high bar and says if you're really willing to do all these things you could you could end up not having to do growth management the other part is exempting units that are eighty percent area median income affordable from allocation requirements so if i have a project i'm going to build one hundred units and twenty five of them are going to be afforded eighty percent median affordable stuff the byelaws pulling for if you're building that you just would not have to go get allocation for it you'd have to get allocation for all the market rate stuff in your project but not the really really affordable stuff so that's the that's the totality of the changes that are recommended under this and don't forget about industrial zoning district in this added use good thank you so this is the time where new to the public has their opportunity to make a that will bring more clarity to the process and i think will in the end get that time will stand to a point where they will get more of what these growth management policies have sock because anybody else had that it's an awful lot it's it's a little bit hard to absorb at one time so i'll try to be as brief as possible and the other thing is please do not take my questions do not infer whether my questions show that i support or do not support what is it's more just to make sure i have an understanding the undergrowth management that the first item you brought up is less than the administrative burden and without a problem the administrative burden i mean you explained how there's a fair amount of work is i'm asking from that question was was it holding up your ability to and projects were bought and sold between developers who ended up not conveying those magic pieces of paper we had printed the buy a lot contains a a reestablishment of valid growth management certificate process where i was supposed to charge somebody thirty dollars and go make a photocopy and write an opinion that it was now the valid certificate and if they ever found the other one they couldn't use it and it sounded great but it just didn't work and  the processing of those permits for new dwelling units it more challenging than they needed to be when all i was doing was going through the motions of something the bylaws said i needed to do when i already knew the answer because i could go look up the decision and i and i knew how many permits in a communicating draft scores based on the weighting of the projects the other party has it made it really opaque to applicants so they would read in the bylaw that something was worth ten points but not see that really with the way it became twenty points because those two things were not expressed next door to one another in the chapter it was really only coming out during the hearing we wanted to take out a way so that somebody's going through this process even if you know of a landowner who's not a developer could sit down and understand what this was asking for and how they how they could meet what it was asking for so those were some of the challenges we faced so i mean to in your mind clearly and i saw in the planning commission of mine clearly it was if this is a benefit that reduced mr burnet and i on the third bullet i like the idea of making it more readable and understandable for applicants that's good but that probably also means the same is true for the public and that's good too  don't really have anything to mention about i don't number two except i was surprised to hear and you'll hear whine a little bit that thirty points is the minimum so thirty points means you don't get any whatever ranking any prior you get no right to proceed on your project so today there are thirty there's a three point minimum and up to four dwelling units can receive allocation in projects that don't meet the thirty point this this would reduce that one of the items i'm having a little bit of trouble visualizing is the ten year window for the eighty units versus the current and you made a comment that first of all it keeps us within this this amount this eighty units per year that we're happy that we're used to but how will we see how with the change that going to the ten year future window verse it is a you know a block of ten years and you get you started to get close to the end how i guess i'm asking the question is how is that a benefit and what are the benefits of that but also what are the liabilities what are the earth until i build this is what i think i would like you to focus on the potential liability of the moving ten year window is that it takes away something that you had to do with a fixed ten year window which is every ten years you had to assess should the next ten years look like the last ten years can we still support eighty dwelling year or do we still have the sewer allocation the services and everything else so in the time i've been here when the ten year window was expiring we would as the planning staff say ok so for growth management to work at all we've got to get back in front of the select board with  vial on them and to set up the next ten years this would say until you change it eight units a year ten years at these numbers is is what's going to be available so the way i would first see that being different is you might start thinking about changing what that tenth year out looks like based on some other feedback there you're seeing a select board members  we really are having trouble covering emergency services we're not sure we can buy enough sewer allocation to continue to support this as beyond the ten year horizon it's already got and there's numerous places in this draft where there's caviar saying all of this is only true if there is sure allocation to sell for these projects and if there's not this doesn't mean you can hear some right to to do it without that because because just like everything else you need to make a project happen you need to be able to go to go and get that so to some degree i think modifying the numbers modifying the pace of growth becomes something that the staff and the select board have to pay a little more attention to but i think it gives you that longer lead time and you know you don't ever feel sort of locked into that one ten year period you can say well geez we just did attachment and i'm kind of worried about what sewer looks like ten years from now staff when i watch it you know dial this back and move ahead with a development is towards the end of a ten year block you're kind of you know up the creek you know you you have very limited options which ultimately may not work for you if we have the rolling ten years probably not all of that goes away but at least some of it goes away or a fair amount of it goes away so it's a more fair equitable way to do allocations is that a fair comment yes well i'm the whole planning commission is welcome to join and i would say that your characterizing it as equity is very similar to how i say the town experience is a more consistent amount of competitiveness in the system and the ten year block if you're in year nine or ten you could have the best project in the world but there just might not be units to give and the rolling allocation would be would do away with that kind of artificial impact on competitiveness things that we were significant that i gave the most thought to were the ten year rolling period and really right now we have a bunching with a whole lot of pressure in the difficulty at the end of the ten years and then suddenly everything's open again and this just even that out it was hard to wrap my brain around to look for it means that it is a consistent process and the other one is about being able to build your units once they're allocated not having to wait for  ready the market isn't in the right place and so we have sort of an artificial push pull and if someone for a project is approved i've seen things like northridge where people are upset with the length of time to develop and  see this solving that problem which is you're still getting the same number of units over a long period but they develop the building schedule has more flexibility so i had to give careful thought to those to all the rest to me were tweaking incentives and making things run smoother and so how do you feel about those two is most important thing into the next room which is the geographic distribution it sounds like we're taking your two away from the gross center which somebody might argue wait a second that's where you want growth to occur that's probably where our town plan wants growth you know wants our growth to be focused but yeah we're taking units away from that for sure so couple things the town's commitment  across the twenty year lifespan of the growth center is to do at least half or more than half of it's growing in the growth center so at fifty six twelve and twelve the distribution we have today we're doing way more than half in the growth center at fifty fifty twenty and ten which is the proposed distribution here that's still true the other thing and planning commission members test my memory on this is we spent some time looking at what's been approved and permit it and allocated in the growth center  it's mapped and what's left for land and what's left for potential development within the kinds of densities that the town is comfortable with today looking at finney crossing looking at cottonwood crossing and then looking at what's left in the rest of actively taff corners there simply is not another piece of land where you're going to be able to build under the current density rules another finney or or cottonwood what they're what there is is a lot of opportunity for residential in fill in between some of the retail buildings there is some room for some redevelopment a lot of it is on the scale of projects that might have thirty to sixty unit in a building or into building something like that so it's a question of scale and there's a question of the capacity of the development community to build into what's left in willesden and i think informed by those things taking six units a year out of the growth center and moving it into the other sewer service area didn't seem like it would undermine the town's goals as it relates to the growth center i think this will be it for me the high flyer standard so what i've heard tonight is the captain the highest you could possibly get if you added up all the points is one hundred thirty is the minimum if you don't get thirty your project doesn't go and seventy is in it to seventy that i really have a question about is the at least the number that's there that kitchener that high flyer standard and i just don't know how to evaluate that sure one way i could use to evaluate that is when i was in grade school and i would come home with my report card my parents saw a seventy they didn't slap me on the back and say good job they probably said we need to figure out how you're going to work on on this so i guess what my question is is why seventy why does that make sense is that really truly high enough to create that high flyer standard but let me let me give you some context phinney crossing under the incentives as exist today which are significantly strengthened and tightened in toughened under this draft phinney crossing received a score of seventy point finney crossing to under this revised  scoring system would not probably score fifty five points we don't have enough of the onsite energy generation or storage we don't have the transit facilities designed  don't have the eighty percent area median income affordable housing component where we do have some affordable housing so you really would have to imagine a project like finney with a whole lot more green energy a whole lot more integration with transit a lot more affordable housing in fact used to score full points and some of those really some of those incentives becomes things you have to do to make it up over that the other thing that i would say maybe not is directly about phinny but we've clarified and tried to put some structure around some of the more nebulous criterion here so we had things like neighborhood design  compatibility provision of neighborhood space that were kind of a well they provided neighborhood pocket park but is it a five point park or a twenty point park this proposed revision puts a lot more structure around that gives the town a lot of tools to evaluate those things so like i sort of started that section with saying nobody in existence in williston today would score seventy points under what this is asking for and it seem that you wouldn't want to say that to be a high flyer you had to have a hundred points because then you're really just turning everything in into almost a requirement and also there are certain things that certain projects because of the piece of land they're on may not have an opportunity to do if you're not on a transit line you're you know we're not on a transit line the way we're incentivizing development being on transit lines is that fifty of the eighty units are need to be situated in the growth center so there are other structural things at play th anyone else only audience who actually comment tonight before i ask for a motion to close a public hearing rolling ten year there are there are rules about how much of the available haitian anyone here can be given to any one project so today and in this proposal if you're looking out at a at a at the available units in a year in the future you can only give a maximum of three quarters of those units to any single project so twenty five percent of whatever's available has to be left open even if nobody else is asking for it has to be left open for some other project to come in and take so there's always some room for new projects to come then the other part of it is yeah you know once you once a project gets its allocation it has it  it and it gets it's essentially vast it if it's gone through the rest of its approval process and it gets to build whatever standard you know it obtained that allocation under but one thing that has come up a cup the times i would expect to continue to come up especially with large projects is they change over time people want to do different things it's very important that in the system we have today and in any system going forward that when the development review board sees a change they're able to say even with this change this project is still meeting the things that it scored points for in that system and if it's not if the change is big enough that the evaluation should change then the decision by the d or b and the what i would them to make is to say this project is to go back to sketch plan pre application and compete for allocation under the new rules so you know it's the truth of the the business where it and that projects and applicants do get in the standards under which they got their approval that's that's when the property right is essentially conveyed it's also true that if things change enough they may have to surrender that and come back and compete again and so you know step one set of rules right now if this is adopted to a a significantly more stringent set today with a bunch of these other things if if if another adjustment was considered by the board at some point in the future you would want to look at that high flyer score and you'd want to look at what the capability is other you have solar panel suddenly became much much less expensive if suddenly there was lots of money available to build affordable housing you might say well gosh those things aren't as hard to do is they used to be maybe they're not worth as many points we still want them but or maybe there are some other attributes that you want so i wouldn't i would encourage everybody to think about this system is being all of a piece and you have to think about how all those parts work together when you're making changes to it and that's that commission did with this this round  i sit there and question to what's the actual feasibility of somebody get taking into account the limited amount of land we actually have left to put something of that kind of project on what's the feasibility of somebody hitting i fire status  well what i would say is it doesn't necessarily have to be a very large project although it's probably something more than a two or three lot project so you know we talked a lot at the planning commission about what kind of attributes that might  involve on the smaller side it might be a project in the ag world zoning district that provides a really big open space asset and serves it up as perpetually protected by a third party that kind of thing but maybe also is providing  some affordability or some of those other things i talked about there is there are examples nationwide of projects that have successfully integrated all of those attributes that this calls for there are very few examples there are no examples in willesden and i can't think of any really good ones even in the county that hold this offer mean that the  or very similar types of housing over and over again a big project like finney has a lot of ability to to offer some diversity of housing types this criterion goes into that much more in a much more detailed way and if somebody was really pulling for that high flyer they really aren't going to be able to build that same house over and over again and get there but it's going to be a mix and i really could not predict the ability of somebody to to achieve all that in in one project of any size i think it's possible i think it's physically possible i am not an expert in what it takes to to create a profitable development and whether whether somebody looks at that and says well i can i can make money on that and it's worth it to me because then i won't have to do growth management maybe but i think we can i think the planning commission has made it challenging enough that it doesn't just open the  parties procedurally the derby would have to see this at sketch plan they would have to agree at that sketch plan pre application stage with a developer i think you might have a high flyer here and then the developer would have to do all of that engineering and design to go into that discretionary permit level and the d r v would have to make that finding as part of their approval that they felt it was a high flyer and that they felt it could be permitted without going through growth management like all decisions the d r v makes that decision would be appealable and you know and any interested party could appeal that decision and go to state environmental court and say i i don't think the d r v really gave this the right score and you know gross mentioned allocations have been appealed in town in the do you need it i would view growth management as it has evolved through the years as a tool that has taken on a lot of a lot of utility and a lot of meaning for the town it started off we just need to regulate the pace of pro so we can keep up and it's just about the number of units we get and it's turned into well what if it's competitive and then well if it's competitive what will people compete on and one of the things we look at really hard in the planning commission is should the town continue to have growth management or should we just have really high exacting development standards as much as anything i think highflyer is a chance to test that out a little bit and say what if we just said not everything but anything that doesn't engage in this competitive time limited process if you really want to work that you really wanted to get through subdivision review and something less than eighteen months what if somebody could meet this bar and that was a lot of the thinking that went into establishing that so do you need it i don't think so but i do see it as another step in the evolution of the process of going from we just want to keep up with the pace of growth to we really want to articulate in all these different ways just what it is we want out of new development that comes to the town i mean he crashing at it i'm i am hung up floor because it to me when i first was looking and it was kind of like that fast pass thing at disney they got completely out of control and it's been a nightmare and it's now like you don't want to go to disney if everybody can get in it disaster d c and i had i didn't mean to in any way undermine or whatever that do you see the ability for this to get abused in that sort of a manner i don't think you i would call it being an abused i think a lot of it if we were in a world where it made sense for a lot of applicants to utilize this process you might start to look at it differently you might start to look at making it more difficult to achieve you might start looking at  e maybe this is the baseline and maybe we actually want to this is now growth management and you know now the minimum score is not thirty nine the minimum score is fifty or sixty or seventy and something beyond that becomes becomes that  but i guess what i'm really saying is i think the board through its legislative process has time to react to those sorts of things i think today a seventy point project goes far beyond anything the town has seen before  and then you can oversee that project and have to make sure that the here to the guidelines and the plan that they set out yeah the the only condition that really what requires a lot of ongoing oversight is the affordable housing the  and i don't say that it's challenging it's as challenging today as it's going to be going into the future there will just be more units to keep an eye on i'm finding myself in my role and with some of what's going on with perpetually for housing in town how to keep a closer eye on it out of the planning office there may be a point where the town wants to source that to another department or contract that monitoring out but it's that one thing where you do have to keep going back and checking to make sure the price controls are in place made being maintained especially with the scale of projects that get built in the list and so we don't tend to have really really gigantic projects with you know hundreds of affordable units that a big housing trust is willing to take on and maintain we're we're going to be kind of in the do it yourself mode in terms of monitoring that for the time being and i would say that given it's one of the highest rated goals that the town is set for itself in the complex to have affordable housing it's a worthy one of spending some town energy on they're sure i heard correctly or maybe i'll use different words to see if i heard it correctly you meant it right now the way you've been following development in medicine for quite a while you do not anticipate that the high flyer whatever you want to call provision will cause the eighty units per year to be on a ten year rolling average i'd say to be exceeded by much if any at all well no i mean the first part is that the performance of the system has been much closer to sixty units a year so that the town sets eighty as a target as a maximum what it experiences over the last twenty years is something navy sixty one sixty two so that's that's the first part is  what you're feeling out there is not eighty even though that's been sent as as a limit you know the second part is and i think this is you know it's worth leaving eighty is the limit for now but when the town set the eighty year a limit this was a really different place  with much much smaller administrative capacities emergency service capacity school capacity sewer capacity all of those things were much more than that said eighty units a year as a limit as a maximum has proven to be a manageable rate of growth to be able to match with its scale and its provision of services and there were sort of a run on on the high flyers let's say do you feel that the town would have adequate time to respond to that and go in and revise the bylaws i think you would i mean given given the pace of new development that comes in the demand of the market the  are infrastructure construction of cars there's lots of other things that go into what shapes the development this is almost the extra stuff that we don't outright require but really want is what gets embedded in growth management so i think given all of those things that all tend to manage the pace this is just another tool in the toolbox they have the ability to reduce impact fees when somebody is building affordable housing projects that build a piece of transportation infrastructure can sometimes count the cost of building that against their transportation impact  liability so there are some things like that can they be adjusted can they be changed i think you know i think they can and it's always worth thinking about all of the different things that the town can do in this regulatory  dial very much we still do not out of it but we have over ten thousand jobs in lost and fewer that number of residents and many many of those jobs are low wage work in of control you know we've tried other incentives to have a dialogue let's give this a try it's it's not opening the floodgates there are still lots of forms of review as map points out there are many many other and over again is of course i have this huge problem ok here's a chance to see if we can do something about that and let's get it right and it's very carefully thought we're the only question i have or maybe it's a comment is it's pretty major decision is there a rule in each make a decision quickly well one thing that would make it ministr easier is if this is adopted prior to the growth management hearing happening on march twenty second and the only reason for that is we we had to think a lot about when w the new scoring criteria become a factor had this been adopted prior to the end of the calendar year it would have been a little easier we could've just said it starts with the next calendar year that said we rarely ever see any residential pre application until the second half of the year but the way the draft is written right now says this takes effect immediately any changes to this chapter take effect immediately following the prior growth management here or the applications that come in and get reviewed under the new criteria everything we're going to be reviewing with the d r p in another month or so will get reviewed on the criteria as they exist prior any changes so we were to wait to our next meeting if possible which is in two weeks i tonight was very helpful and i very much appreciate all the input but i don't know if possible i would like a little bit of time to think about what i heard possibly receive some comments and if so if it's at all possible to wait till our next meeting that would be my preference what's the most the statute say after we pass a change or takes effect twenty one days after math so and then you need to buy the twenty six did you save march obtain the views of citizens on community development to furnish information concerning the amount of funds available in the range of canary development activities that may be undertaken under this program effectively historic an archaeological resources harvest lane with the intent to purchase it in january of two thousand and one when our option becomes available resources a nonprofit for those who don't know we have four sites  burlington barry hyde park and now wilson and we operate workforce development and training programs for low income disadvantaged individuals people who are blind or visually impaired folks of other disabilities in help them get into jobs we also work with some in school youth to get them help them improve their skills so that they're better equipped when they graduate from school to be successful in the workforce and we we do those training programs through our social enterprises that keep things out of the landfill we also run programs that support high school dropouts and do construction training and get enterprises and those social enterprises really are fundamental to is providing this workforce development training and really the only way that we could afford this this building is acquiring it  ownership will save us over three hundred thousand a year and that funds a lot of training programs and a v c d p funding is one of the few significant amounts of funding for this type of acquisition so we hope the town wilson will support this and really be there's no cost of the the town resources preparing napal cation in hopes that this will be be supported by the by the town and then it federal money that gets passed through the through the state  we have an overall capital campaign that actually looks like some of you i may have copies of as i can make these available we are about thirty percent of the way towards raising the three point five million that we need to fund this overall project this overall project in the biggest piece of it is acquisition of the building but it also included some of our moving costs the cost to rehab the space we're using in burlington  so the capital campaign were about thirty percent of the way towards our goal but the v c d p piece is a pretty key part of that and so we can re five hundred thousand as a public facility that would support the continued job training workforce development programs and so i'd love to answer any questions so part of that i believe this is being used by another company is not that's right there's two tenants that we would inherit as is our tenants that would help us pay the mortgage because three point five million is is the fund raising and we have four point four million of debt that's the overall capital campaign so that the project we're submitting to for money could be a development program is just for acquisition which simplifies a lot of things there's a lot of  we did a similar project in barry when we expanded to central vermont in two thousand and nine received a v c d p grant through the city of barry and it was because it included construction members of the public here that wish to make of the public comment on this that this is the time to do it there are nonetheless the board if they have any questions or  comments going to the project no our mommy would be similar with how we've done this in the past with i think the cots project in burlington and i think there was one other the school conversion project sorry i'm not drawing the names addresses and so the only question i have is tommy made the comment has no impact on the town just to verify that with rick and eric particularly if we have to do one of those doing a single audit would be covered by the organization of the grand i don't know which but well you know i view would be it would be resource i think i think because we would we want to keep it as simple as possible in terms of application so we would just if there's a hope is that we'll have someone accept a job offer on that position before the end of this week so that may be taken care of in a matter of a month or so so anyway other than th conditions with the other thing i decided i'd do i did know to think in some of the written material just some of the ways that this project supports the town plan and is consistent with that we even know we are structuring the v c d b application so that it's just for acquisition one of the improvements we plan to make to the building is to put solar on the rooftop that would cover one hundred percent of resources electricity needs we would also install replace do a lighting upgrade and replace a bunch of fluorescent lights with only the lights that are more efficient and also with motion sensors so that we would just consume much less electricity and i guess is part of the solar insolation we also would have an opportunity to replace and add insulation on the roof which is i think under on the motions before us she emailed me and asked the that since could be not on the agenda i told her no that has to be on the agenda because it was worn  had and she would like to be present for the vote i asked her to if she had other objections to the to the proposals to some of those to me before tonight's meeting and she responded that she thought that she did have some problems with a couple of parts of the other proposals and would like to have a just a discussion on that with a chance to dissent and to have more debate on the issue i also told her that the board would make the decision as to whether or not to continue w that in the meantime i think there's there's a question as to whether or not we need to take action tonight on this so get melinda i think maybe if we could give us at least by four of the large funding sources so if you were to make changes to weeks from now that would i'm period we did get i mixed engines to two of the grants that we ran out in the end of two thousand and eighteen and those have been extending to the end of march but we are worried about for the joys especially if the federal government were to close down again on february and can you come in two weeks so i apologize for that and i remember missing the boat that we had this summer because i was traveling and being very disappointed but i didn't think to get to submit an application and so this just says that in the event funding from the united states american land water conservation fund exceeds two hundred sixty thousand dollars which it does then is this that this must be done if we want to do it before closing in order for town to be eligible and in fact we had submitted an application to bella and where we were accepted as you know so we we are indeed an enrolled in the program so that that's well how does that work and is there any liability reason we should know about that it could come back so how that works is that there's some language in the conservation easement that basically excludes this point zero eight acre parcel or less the town will still own that piece but it won't be under the conservation easement until such time that the town gets a letter of complete basically a letter certificate of completion from the state that we've done all we need to do as far as  say remediation and my understanding was that monitoring would be ongoing even beyond that time but at that time the state w made an evaluation of the monitoring that's taken place thus far and if it's contamination has subsided to levels that are underneath the state threshold for any issue with that you know there's just a small hole in the easement if you will yeah it's not like you can build something there on that would actually be against the federal communi force program rolls so there's nothing you could really do there even if these we didn't cover it and i'm asking this of everyone it's this is that i didn't think that was acceptable proposal clutha board agreed with that piece but then there was the other piece well if we can they get a grant of above the two hundred thousand which is what we've committed all then money and i trust the public land incur additional cost or costs that are not being that you anticipated would be compensated but but not for this grant would not be compensated right so we're putting sixty thousand of our own money into closing in the capital to buy the land and then when the libs have grant comes through the money should come june or july depending on if the government shuts down and how delayed they are then that will kind of reimburse us for that the extra money we've put in in and i think like originally we were i think only intending to apply for two hundred thousand but then as the you know project was drawing to a close and we still out of funding gap we said later discuss all of it one time and then go and vote on them so that afterwards is like a logical way to go and i should more mention that the first three documents we're talking about the board already approved and so we're talking about in some reasonably minor changes i think the biggest issue that we've had to discuss when we discussed that at the board's meeting on we so that's why we brought to the board attention on january eighth and so you've had some time to think about that issue since then but that was the big issue and we are talking about these all these other targets are very very pretty much minor issues which we've shared all the details with deals on those as well also sounds like from the trust for public lands perspective and possibly also from bill and i don't want to put words in your mouth but there is concern about moving this forward yeah yeah definitely there's the time is getting short bottom line is i would appreciate hearing ter comments or concerns it's not about that i just it's just scheduled a very concerns about hoping that we can move this forward because there are concerns down the road government shutdown what not a board because there's there's no policy issues really i'm all i'm not arguing that i should review it i just wanted to know that is a condition of the town has to review before the closing and that would include a legal review and all that s with that recommendation what are the liabilities ok first of all sorry i don't have the ear and i'm out in front of me if six hundred comes out of it what is it left with after reimbursement of the land with after reimbursement from the land water conservation from six hundred minus the two hundred so we will be left with two hundred thousand after reimbursement from land water co looking your crystal ball looking down the road the near future is having quote unquote only that still a healthy amount but only two hundred thousand dollars is that going to be it's out of  concern i don't see anything on the radar but it doesn't mean that you know something couldn't somehow magic not magic grandpop but i think that the conservation commission has recognized that to be a risk but has thought that this acquisition is worth it one other point is that i believe we have another i forget that this is i don't know somewhere between forty and sixty thousand budgeted for next fiscal year to go and do it so that would be added to the two hundred thousand and i don't know if you also included the amount that's being but it was budgeted for this current fiscal year you know so you know we're looking maybe at three hundred thousand being in that fund in the very near future so if i could complete that my think about this is the tax implication if you will of trying to restore the environmental reserve fund down the road after this amount is taken out this amount  six hundred miles of two hundred doesn't appear to be it's not small or insignificant but it's not on unduly large either it's a along the normal lines of what we have been doing in the past ok some organization i don't know which document it is because i pull both the reason i analyze this agreement needs review by vermont and are to make sure that it conforms with the conservation fund stateside program rule it's been reviewed by the program staff that is in charge of that program but she has been trying over the last three weeks to get it in front of they and our attorney  d has not been able to get her time because of the legislature because of the attorney's involvement in things in from the legislature so it is there is a possible small possibility that the and our attorney may have comments on either that the easement or the license agreement to make sure they conform with the state state's i have rules but we don't know that yet the lateness agreement can change at any time post closing these men cannot so if there are changes to the easement that are really minor we'd love for the to authorize the expenditure of up to six hundred thousand from the town's environmental reserve fund for the purchase of the can up property it authorized town manager to close on the purchase of the property on the town and execute any deeds and legal documents required for the transaction seventeen acres of their land to the town of forest in in doing so they're remaking their remaining land is no longer eligible for current use and it must be withdrawn from current dudes and so landowners who withdraw their land from current use incurred when used change tax a one time one time fee which in this case would amount to around sixteen thousand dollars and the fees collected by the state a small percentage goes back to the town i think up to two thousand dollars so in trying to figure out  how steve can could donate land to the town and not have it cost so much money to him we thought of a concert having if he has a town holding of this conservation easement both in order to reduce these costs and also to ensure that a little more protection of land and the town has done this in the past so the advantages are obviously the reduction in costs and also that some additional land is protected around the town forest there there's what i see as a minor disadvantage from the town's perspective just a very slight reduction in tax revenue from the personal but i think we had at one point estimated what that reduction would be for the entire community force and it was pretty minor as i recall this is only in so an acceptance of a conservation easement this is an easement that the town would hold over steve pages land would require select court approval and we recognize that the conservation easement has not yet had a chance to look at this and you probably want to recommendation from them and if it's on their gender for tomorrow morning so we're not expecting you to make a decision tonight requesting a decision but presenting this information and asking you consider it  if there are questions which were more than the proposal i would recommend that we have a consensus to proceed with this pending a recommendation from league conservation my question would be is what are the next steps and sounds like next the first next step is the conservation commission needs to weigh in on this and then would a conservation easement document be drawn up or would wouldn't with the next step be we authorize you to enter into an agreement we bring that prepared darker at first ok ok i  catamount community forest the same time because if the boundary line adjustment between the pages and the chest public land is done without it without the easement th just you know did it to steve and you know debbie for their donation of that land that's yes pretty amazing for sure thank you all right we have completed the agenda so because we've had once before actually it was under union contract but it was a display matter and that was rather involved as you know it so you may recall this is not a dispute about or it's a matter of holiday schedule  y it's it's a fairly simple issue so the question is does the board want to hold this in open session or closed because you have i believe the option and the obviously it was on this individual's mind why i said it was up to the slack ward to make that decision