ok thank you welcome to the january th two thousand nine hundred meeting of the playing board i'm charles clarke on the chair of the playing board let me introduce you to the members of the jeffrey wheeler thank you offer for being here this evening we have two important developments that are both town developments that are coming forward to us this evening   st one that we will be discussing the new high school which is significant project in the town will be among multi year projects will have a major impact on the town both during the construction and after the construction is would like to say at this point our thanks to all the members of the high school building committee who have worked very hard and i think have produced a very nice product in the end that being said of course with the playing board and we will have some comments and we will have some to suggestions on things and we will push things around that you've worked so hard on a bit but thank you all i would also   nd one is the police station which is the renovation of that that that is a wonderful job that has been done by that group as well and we look forward to their presentation  also yes the curb cop and perhaps also just bringing you up to date on the motions that we have made i guess there just to be again it so the high school traffic working group came about as a reason really because of concerns that were raised in the various neighborhoods that would be very much affected by the new high school and perhaps increased traffic and other safety issues but as we put as the committee was put together it also has consisted of line clancy is a member of the school committee has a member and mark a little off from the board of selectmen is the chair of the committee and as we have worked since august it is clear that you know every  that this high school has sort of overlapping areas for which the planning board may not be responsible for some of the areas that really affect the high school the school committee has its role and responsibilities the building committee has its role and responsibilities and so high school traffic working group actually is the group that can take a big picture look we represent people in the neighborhoods and also the town is represented so it's important i think that we look at this project from a big picture at times because it is going to have an effect on the community the number of children that are going there will increase we hope that the amount of traffic that is generated will not increase and i think that many of us feel that is extremely important for the town and the committees that are dealing with this to think about ways in which children can safely access the school by walking and biking but that is a real important feature of this and so as you look at the the site and the circulation of the site and so forth i think you also have to be also have to think about how children are going to access the site and how will children who walk from various portions of the town get there and how will children who would like to ride their bikes to get there safely that i think for us is a very important feature so as we worked in the beginning to put together a memorandum memorandum of agreement or memorandum that deals with sort of the way we felt with the responsibilities of the of each of the members who serve on the committee and then also how the high school traffic working group can sort of and so this was sort of the framework actually one of the goals has already been achieved and that is that the town did vote to decide to build a high school and so the goal one has already been achieved for what you are grateful and now we're and so i'm sure that you can read this but i hope that it will help you as you think about ways in which you're going to affect time the site plan for the high scope and the other thing that we have done is that as the meetings went on we adopted a series of motions which we have sent on already to the board of selectmen and these motions have all been adopted by the board of selectmen and i think also again as you look at the  as you examine the issues around the high school and the site plan that these motions will also help to instruct you a little bit i think the one that we're really interested in the committee did vote to say that there seems to be no better solution to the entrance and exit to than a high school then off of concord avenue and hitting just street so there were other  curb cuts were examined across from oak street across from orchard story but none of them seem to fit what has been planned for the high school and for the circulation on the on the site and so we do feel that that is what will have to happen at the same time because hit and just street trowbridge and baker have had very little attention over the years in terms of their sidewalks and street pavement that we have also asked the community development common street area and so forth but all of the children who come from when barack before we get the tunnel will have to come down brighton street and all of the kids from baker trowbridge underwood and so forth will be using the hinge a street trunks and so that is also a very important one and that and turns also will be the entrance for people who are dropping off when the school is built who are dropping off their th and th grade children so i believe that you have a lot of work to do to put together this but we help that you know if you will take into consideration the fact that even beyon concerns about having children get to that school safely and i guess i would just remind you that in the at the golden streets and trance the children coming down there about eighty percent of the children in belmont go to school and that the burbank the wellington the china re the high school and so there are always a lot of children on the street and we hope they'll be more on the street and fewer children in their parents cars and personally i believe that bama could really become a very good example of a community where small geographically and we have lots of sidewalks already and i think we could be a very good example of a community that really has regulated speed and really gotten the children to go to school on their feet so will really notice here by given that the planning planning board will hold a series of public hearings on the design and site plan review d s p r application for the belmont high school building committee for the construction of a new seven through twelve high school at two hundred and twenty one dollars concord ave the project includes a new four hundred and fifty one thousand dollars square foot four storey building with academic and science wings media and dining commons and administrative and health streets as well as new access roads drop off loop sidewalks utilities playing fields and landscaping the existing gym and gymnasium and swimming pool will be renovated the d p the d s p our public hearing process will be held in three separate phases as outlined below all your time yes i know that right but i don't remember opening the public hearing in general yes ok playing board my name is bill of our high chair the belmont high school building committee and of again i thank you for inviting us here open a series of meetings that will be very informative to the belmont community as well as consult to my left is david warner would want to larson our landscape consultant and then to my far left is book trivia she's with the firm perkins a well she's signed leader for the project so if everything's good i'll take it if everything's bad she tonight is to talk about three things vehicular circulation curb cuts and parking but i want to just step back very briefly and give you folks an overview of the project and those in the community that are maybe hearing about this f i don't know the last year maybe they've missed a few meetings so it's going to be very brief and then we'll get right into right into the meat of our discussion and if it's if it works we'll go through this presentation which is rather quick and then open it up for dialogue but we could go either way so the five points that i wanted to have discussed briefly tonight would be our basis of design that our building solutions are sites lucian's that we get into traffic and safety in parking obviously the last two are really where we want to dive into as jeff research from our st phase of the project so our basis of design really starts with the a miss bringing us into the program and the school committee voting to make this a seven through twelve school and that happened quite a while ago i guess body or go now just a little over a year but it's really two schools in one they're separated but joint under one roof and they're share some common spaces these were this was the basis of our desire for the town  the after several public meetings it was very important to the community and to the building committee as we heard to save pieces of the project that couldn't be replicated that being the field house the little gym and the pool on a day must be a program you don't get all that it so or  you get none of that for instance for the pool so that was important to save most important was a student occupant safety in the building the building was what we were focused on that being the school program serving seven through twelve students and so we spent a lot of time developing the building and how we can have students walking and biking safely on the site the building needs to feel like part of the belmont fabric of the we need to have zone building control for different occupied uses we needed to have phase construction we have nowhere else to put the students but where they are today so the design had to work around a solution that allowed the students to safely stay in the building uninterrupted with their teaching and learning while we built a new school and that turned out to need two phases of construction our school program comes st like i said and then the next year program was our secondary component that's how we always measure things sustainability if you haven't heard was one of our high goals for this building but i think just to give an overview a brief discussion of how that plays in and then our month of our month of february will be when we think we dive deeper into the building like jeffrey said we talk about how that responded to our basis of design so good evening everyone nice to be back here today thank you for having us and our goals for this project was to create an inclusive process with a project that's educationally sound and cost effective for the town of belmont  the massing work to embrace the pond as well as to find a separate entry for the middle school that was really clear and distinct as well as another entry for the high school and you know i don't know why this is fuzzy maybe it's my eyes but it's ok for that so the massing really works to do that the other thing that happens as you may remember is the middle school has a smaller scale so that's three stories and so it steps down from the fo storey component of the high school built talked about safety which was paramount in our design both in terms of an interior design perspective and exteriors relative to pedestrians and bicyclists the building was  for after our uses so the st floor was primarily the public spaces which included the kitchen the cafeteria the music spaces the athletic spaces accept or and those are on the st floor we do have a separate  athletic entry that could be accessed by card control and that would allow this area of the building to be zoned often again that deals with safety so people don't travel through the building the auditorium the music component is in the west side of the building this is on the east side of the building as you probably remember maybe sixty some one thousand square feet is run of a good area in the building which is predominantly the gymnasium piece of the building in the locker rooms on the upper floors are mostly classrooms there's a centralized spine that kind of goes down the building with maker spaces and technology spaces and other shared spaces natural lighting zero net energy was a focus so the design and  exterior is primary early brick with another material at the base and then some more detail in finer scale what you'll see during the later meetings at the entries so that's a pretty high level overview and i'll turn it over to david that's the extent of the existing building so the phase that bill was referring to is phase one build this portion and then phase two would be to build this portion up to the that part of the existing building is torn down but focusing in on the entrances we have a new entrance proposed over here by that substation building we understand is slated for removal and then a nother driveway intersection that you've heard about and you're familiar with over here across from golden street it's this is connected through the site with a two way driveway all the way through so it's two way and in both directions there's a loop at the front of the building here and this is the primary entrance for the high school this is a loop over here primary entrance of the middle school both of those loops can accommodate full size buses and emergency vehicles and we have service unloading coming in to the back of the building over here and we've checked all the turning movements of getting in and out of there now if we zoom in a little bit  start to focus on a couple of more details we want to point out that we have a fire lane that continues all the way across the south side of the building here it connects out to concord avenue at this point and then from this point over to hidden ger and underwood we are showing this as a multimodal path that will accommodate bicycles and pedestrians every day but also allow for emergency vehicles to enter and exit from that side of the site over here so there's a through access all the way through here for authorized emergency vehicles only and then it's always open to pedestrians and bicycles we have a plaza space over here that is a really creates a civic presence and entrance to the building where faces up to concord ave and we have sheltered bicycle parking for the high school over here and sheltered by school parking underneath the overhang of the building here for the middle school i'm going to get into a few more details relative to bestir and bicycles and vehicular circulation and some subsequent slides but while we're still on this one i just want to mention that we have all of the athletic program represented here with the exception of the tennis courts with the new baseball field with overlapping soccer the varsity softball field a soccer and lacrosse field here and then the rugby and football practice and we do have baseball and softball on the west side of harris that area is we know in the planning process still for potential ice rink let's move to the next slide so this is the st live showing dedicated diagrams for circulation and this is focusing on all of pedestrian routes that we have throughout the site and where they connect to the perimeter town infrastructure sidewalks in los walks and that sort of thing i want to point out the future underpass is factored in over here at the a lexander avenue and that you can see we have designated crossings across these driveways and across at the intersection with concord avenue walkways that bring pedestrians right into the main entrances and also come alongside the building they connect along that multi modal path which i mentioned earlier which is paved we also are showing the connection of the intergenerational path continuing the loop all the way around the pond we have connections between the field so that the  people who come in park and come and access the site can get to their destination easily let's go to the next slide so for bicycles we are showing this multi modal path coming all the way through connecting  avenue to the hidden underwood intersection we're also showing that that has a branch at this point in the next across over towards this intersection here at the golden street crossing going street this is a  bike path that is planned for a separate above the curb bike path not a lane that's in with the traffic flow right now and that would continue across the face of the site and then the bicycle connection to the alexander a few jobs under underpass and as you can see the sheltered parking here and here providing good places to leave the bicycles that the engineer the entrances to the school can you describe to the bike path unconquered to get to the nd bike path so right now you have a lame that's in the traveled way and the plan is to have the bypass separate from the paved travel way above the curb so up so the traffic you have so the truck which was the traffic working group has expressed some some benefits of exploring the removal of the conflict over a bike lane between a parking lane and the traveling so that would be the raised bike path moving the curb are you actually are not to that extent but but it will have more like that yes similar you know we just as you heard those recommendations the nelson nygaard and larsen team as are getting going on that but that's the idea that was expressed and so this is the vehicular circulation diagram as i mentioned on the st slide you have the two way traffic flow that comes all the way through the site behind the field house and connects all the way out in both directions we also have the loading service area at the back of the building here near the kitchen receiving mechanical electrical rams and both loops like i mentioned earlier here this is the fire lane along the building and then transitions to a multi modal path at this point we're making that stin because through here we want to make sure that it feels contractual to the landscape and it's more parklike so we're using a narrower with the pavement with stabilized law on either side but in this vicinity will meet all of the requirements for building code fire lane minimum of twenty foot paved with and then of course you can see the circulation for a matter of streets which outside of the scope of the site plan for this project we understand the town is considering all of the traffic implications on the right here is the intergenerational path that's already been approved by the c p a right we understand the construction documents have been prepared for and it's on to be built from these two points between here and here the school project is honoring that plan and showing he's not we have a solution that doesn't require them right now we're using it but if if comes to be that the community path ends up on the south side then our solution would push that drive in and create a different pathway for raised from the level of the vehicle lane if we put the can go back to slide ok this bike with bicycle paths here it would be if it was pushed in on the curb it would be on the high side of the curb cambridge well that's much bigger but it has the same philosophy yes it has lights a signal zation it's you know i'm not sure we would have that's not where we were going with this but it would be a bike lane that was raised and protected away from the driving and parking consider we could consider this because this you know we don't have any houses or anything here the other side of the street is the town as always and paulson said there was a bunch of motions and and some of them are picked up by the design team of the belmont high school building project because they're on the north side of concord out and the others that are not are being worked on through the town's consultant and so there is a desire to have a part drop off here in front of some homes want to bring one thing and one more thing out don't move from there is that we are looking at a paved sidewalk right here a lot that doesn't exist today again to provide a safe path that there's just nothing there are we still and can we can question motor vehicle if you're already in question mode or not they're going to go but we do we do have we're going to get into traffic next and then we're going to get into a parking dialogue but i have one question about walking ok so if you could go back to the diagram on the walking past there we go i notice that there's not a walking sidewalk on the north side of the when you're parking lot there so the question is do people then get out of their cars and walk across two lanes of traffic another group of cars to get to the sidewalk if they're parked on the north side you're talking about a future community path no no no just going about our car right now you have no sidewalk on the north side there  i just want to raise one really important design point that wasn't mentioned which is and i wanted everyone to take note of this that one of the really important design features for the entire team was to reduce the visibility of parking and cars on the site and right now it's the mala fact there's tons of parking so if you go to this site now you have a very expensive green space on the east side you have all kinds of green vegetation trees  vegetation on the west side and the parking is generally pushed to the back and that's a secondary reading to the site so that was a very important design feature that i think that as a planning board you can see but we want to point that out for so you know looking at the slide you know before i get started i just want to say that we absolutely hear that concern high school traffic working group from the same page you know we absolutely agree that it has train and cyclists there are extremely high priority they need to  kly so looking at the slide you know these are all of the bicycle and pedestrian counts that we took both within the site and outside the site you know we really did our homework we want to do identify ok where is the greatest demand for those things how do we make sure that we provide the adequate facilities you know so every existing entryway and exit way today we want to those sites you know observe the pedestrian cycling out there to make sure we have a good understanding of where those demand lines actually  operational challenges especially you know we keep the queues that exist to be on golden streets also you know further downstream conquered that comma and now you know that's another intersection that's not functioning well today and then of course  as it stands in this current configuration we are looking at shorten queues and reduce the ways at gordon street for individuals trying to pull out on to come are also expecting that expecting overall an improvement so i do want to mention that our traffic working group has made recommendations as impulse and said that this neighborhood be reviewed and that's being undertaken by the town's consultant across there and you want to go you want to go across the train tracks to get on the middle that's a terrible spot so to let the left turn that's enough yeah yeah yeah i mean unfortunately because of the proximity of that intersection over a track ye so here's a little bit of a you know preview of what we're expecting terms of some of the traffic flows to and from the site it is two way circulation throughout the site you know as already stated so most likely the majority of entries are going t  we'll get those numbers to do you expect the trips to increase or are you going to try to i mean you've got twice as many kids right so do you expect them to increase and by what the mag negative i guess i what i would say is that obviously you know your parser correct there's many more students that means there's more total trips how many of those are vehicle trips you know when we did the preliminary traffic analysis we kept those  just discourage some single trip students that park their cars to school with either higher fees or or restrictions on parking they're looking at better ways to encourage bussing ramp up and improve the opportunities for students to walk and bike to school we as a group want to be somewhat realistic that there's still going to be the need to to drive to school but bringing the drop off opportunities on concord have would very likely reduce trips on campus where those conflicts could occur the alexander av underpass opening up would potentially change what happens on the other side of the tracks but would potentially have that but it would probably reduce the trips to the side of the track so yes there's a lot lot of dynamics there and it's hard to predict especially that side because the school the the students coming down from the hill may elect to be dropped off there rather than coming out of the bridge and moving back so there's the walkers that would come from that neighborhood but now there may be some dropoff trips there it's so we can talk with these numbers based on the current breakout that was measured our optimism is that it will definitely improve over time what was your feeling when you looked at the traffic on this in the looked at the  four square miles or something two miles by two miles in the high schools in the center of town so you're not driving more than a mile and a half or so to get to the skin and any part of town i'd say maybe two miles tops especially within a basically rate yes i mean also design this to discourage you to well and that's that's what i'm sure you're trying to do encourage other modes and discourage us but we know that the current drop off is much easier than this new one this is not as easy we didn't make it any easier than the as a matter of fact it's probably twice as long you know when you consider what's done today so it's not nothing is is easier for driving i want to mean you take your classes on and off well you know i said to myself i don't need my paper because i'm going to have it on the screen but that's so the philosophy here is that we need to start somewhere with park accounts and i think i want to over this with you before but i'll do it very briefly thank you so the the bylaws would require us to have a lot more parking than he's even rational so we would even go there we know we should talk about what's there today and what we think the needs are what is there today is some issue here is what was counted a strike parking for the school operation and then also estimated for the civic when the loop road is produced you know loop road is used area school time but for civic events it is used for parking so there's another amount of parking there and then we'll count the spots over by the ice rink softball field which is still part of the campus so all in we're at four hundred and twenty eight spots and i'm sorry for i'm sorry four hundred and forty seven dollars spots all and if we look at just what staff and students are today and then increase that for the additional staff that's coming with the seventy eight dollars grades and the growth of the nine through twelve that puts us at another number that then so the remaining spaces for student parking that we have today is one hundred and eighty one dollars that we know if we kept that the same and just added for the increased growth we need a total of four hundred and twenty nine dollars that includes some visitor spots so we're counting all staff visitors and the same amount of student parking that question of how much student parking wants to be on campus is probably really what the discussion is because it doesn't seem too rational to  take away parking for the staff but also keep in mind that as you do that the civic parking capacity is also impacted because again we have today a total of four hundred and twenty eight dollars of our four hundred and  forty seven dollars on the entire campus and right now we're proposing four hundred and thirty dollars so it's already reduction and that might keep going down we were not proposing that even any more than four hundred and thirty dollars there is a discussion with the school department what student parking might be meaning is it could it be also tagged where there's student parking on concord out through designated spots do you want to take all student parking out while there's still be students that drive in they're just going to park all day in the neighborhood and that's also a concern of the school department trying to keep the students on the campus or at least contiguous to the campus so we want to engage in discussion with you to see how we c come to a number because that affects how the final site plan works out what these folks showed you today was at capacity of four hundred and thirty some of which are west of paris field but that's not a bad thing because that program over there requires some parking you know that will help out on that will help out in hockey that will help on library i mean that has other civic benefits when you think about the pool in the summer where people have a space more space to park in that area and it gets them out of the neighborhood it helps for the football games and soccer games they don't park in the neighborhood because it's partially right there on campus and believe it or not it's pretty close to the school because our school is moving west from where it is today so it's not like it's in a different area code but  certainly it warrants some discussion because our group your needs to get a handle on where we want to go with parking you have before we get into the discussion can we so the ice rink the nineteen at the ice rink is that in the pull off last time they came and talked to the selectmen their parking cut was much higher than the seventy or eighty that we have over there today so they are they were they were a lot so the question is what does this entire we should be yes because one of the things we can do is allocate untold number of parking the parking that you want to see west of that site and then talk as that would become integrated into there are a fee the the school committee is right in the rights there also that would be part talking she a half it's a real it's not real because that what that means ultimately is taking space away from the school campus it's not simply replicating what's currently there it's talking about a much larger facility more parking again taking space from the site the school committee has yet to even suggest which way they favor the r p is being done to see what kind of responses they're they're looking at a private party partnership the town does not have money to fund the ice skating ring so looking at ways of having funded you know some private organization come in and then have some kind of lease back to the town to use it but nobody necessarily has stepped up t no you said bring them the r a p is going to solicit responses that will eventually dictate who the them are right because they are feed us not give them a novel up and say this is what you can get well that's that's what that's what we're trying to define right now as a group of what it what is think we have to just plan for what we need yet and whatever comes out of this is what they get and they would come back to argue for you if they need more for some rational reason and you know that certainly i think geoffrey there was a need for a number that was work already today we have more information we can get in this process and the sooner we get it the better and if you get it so there is a plan that was proposed by one interested group that had a way out of my can parking maybe jeffrey could find out what that parking count was any place else and then the hits and then it injures the same thing i mean because you need access from that point that neighborhood may have a different traffic flow when the traffic folks study the solution  mostly enjoying things and very loyal and there's a lot of goodwill around and so i want to my disclaimer immediately is that i'm not a grumpy old man and i'm not talking about but we do live at the bottom of golden street and i only started last fall going to all these meetings have pointed out there is a ny have to be about this whole thing because no one seems to realize that from belmont center wife is bumper to bumper going out in the evening for two hours and bumper to bumper going in for two hours and just to put that all that pressure on that one point with a two way traffic and bikes and cars and forgive me but before this is over we're going to have end up with a one way circuit because they're just not going to be room for all the cars and all the traffic and all the people when when we make decisions regarding the whole campus and where you know where when we were discussing the possibilities of the one way through campus and that that remains a possibility if if you know things are an issue after the campus is fully operational but like for now this seemed to be you know according to consultants the the most logical way of looking at the traffic the big a lot of the discussions that we've been having have been about keeping the cars off the campus in the st place and i think that's really important to us and being in the neighborhood we're probably going to see a lot of people dropping their kids off on the side streets and whatnot and i'm comfortable with that and we were exploring the option for the concord ave drop offs and how they'll work and we have a consultant on board for that so i think that you know one of the really agonizing things about it and i have to say living on trowbridge i'm not super excited about having having people be coming down our street just to get to the driveway on our side but it does it makes the most sense from  the way the constraints of the campus so i'm hopeful that you know with some of the things that we're looking at going forward i really want to make sure the school committee is prioritizing bussing i know that i think that we also need to as a town be talking about slowing down traffic and incentivizing walking and making walking a normal thing for students to do from a very early age which that's been some of the work i've done in the safer  t school group but part of that is making people feel safe when they're walking so i think that we have to always be having that i too how does it feel walking down the street our cars whipping by you and do you have  a patch of grass between you and the cars or do you not even have a sidewalk which is what we have on baker street right now so i think that you know a big part of the discussion is how do we make people feel comfortable with walking and how do we how do we slow down that traffic in the whole neighborhood so thanks and i'm just going to add one thing and by about paul's son i live on school street one point about the curb caught on golden street which is the curb cut is directly across from golden streets so i think the concern of many people and terms of making sure that people drive at safe speeds is what will happen when somebody decides to try to beat the yellow light and rush through that intersection when people may be crossing to get to the you know the m b t a bus stop or just crossing to go to the school so some way or other we have to be sure that that intersection is safe not only with the red light but at all times studying license plates cut through traffic and particularly in the neighborhood in which i live noted that in the morning somewhere between eight and eight thirty am seventy three percent of the traffic coming down lower goeden to concord is cut through that roughly we have about four thousand cars each day week to week day going up and down adam together going this of course is directly affecting school street where you know as we call ourselves the for school neighborhood and entry schools be on the installation of the underpass when it happens we assume it happens that it may take a few years but once it does as a coincides with the completion of the high school that that could cut the traffic down by so much as fifty percent you know really town now being divided in two sections for people who live on the other side of the tracks this gives them an opportunity not just related to the high school in accessing other things you know the library the center you know using that that underpass that that could affect the design and reduce the traffic significantly that will affect the high school and the area around and the last is that the area that you know it's a concern and golden street is not far from the center adding a law is presumed to make things safer but also to attract traffic where there's a light  but you know the consideration of making those left turns easier making things easier perhaps for cut through traffic signal as signage timing of it and trying to reduce that cut through but seem to be a very everything that i heard seems to be accurate especially when the traffic times the day that that are so difficult when you look at the high school operation today the high school i have every once in a while a poorly planned meeting that starts at seven hundred and thirty at the high school and it's horrible i need to just play in that meeting at eight o'clock and it's far with high school but as you heard deborah say that the traffic is horrible and so forth so that the high school traffic does have an impact intersection but predominantly those cut through for purposes other than the high school in the afternoon the high schools a lot of that by two hundred and thirty and that traffic really starts queuing up at three and then it gets just absolutely miserable like after school activities really slow things down and they start coming out just as right if you have after school now that the after school graphic writing and it's yeah but the school itself you know packed schools so if you have athletics if you have those and they start to wind in on already even if you have no you have a day with no after school and it's it's difficult so the high school is a bull's eye there because it's right there but there's a predominantly difficult traffic situation and belmont that has a lot of good people working on it and we're we're we're plugged into that and our team is trying to do something that'll try to improve it we are not able to work down at the bridge that's well beyond our company so so that's it i think we'll have to wait for the bridge to fail before we get well that'll be a while there's a good comment that what will that underpass how that underpass is the impact it's what we can we can deal with that this plane i mean what's interesting about this is how big is the high school now it's like twenty three million two hundred and sixty thousand square feet sixty thousand so you're increasing it by thinks that's that's for the additional staff certainly the student parking remains pretty much the same although that can change i think you get that factored in as well and you need a one hundred and eighty right now and the middle school kids alone there's going to be more people getting of driving age before we had june and you know some things were up parking with the yellow buses and so that that is i don't think it's getting any less i'm not saying that's a good thing i'm just saying that that st of all who've just just focusing on that upper linear parking lot which by the way i did a little quick study and it measures exactly this it's a standard parking lot measurements of the eighteen foot and twenty four feet and what if you took the parking lot in front of whole foods at fresh pond and you ran it linearly you have the right number of parking spaces so so just to visualize that activity in that parking and that's a dynamic parking lot so this is arguably not as dynamic people are going to come in they're going to park and they're not going to do anything for a while but all soul food scares me well this is what's scaring me about this is that very dynamic is it is it's very dynamic this is going to be pretty dynamic for a really critical time so tell me when who's going to st of all who's parking in that parking lot along just the upper right there just parking in that lot is that student or staff so just the superintendent failon has made the students certainly would be arriving about the same time as the people are coming to drop their kids off at the middle school entrance so they're going to be coming on and hit injure and tell me how they're going to travel are they going to go through the entire property and come out  in wherever they're going to park but that's going to overlap to some extent with people actually coming to drop their kids off in the students are going to come and park and they're going to be parking while the traffic is trying to go through to drop their kids off ok  they're going to be stacked i'm jessica bennett i'm not i live in target st tammany member high school traffic working group and the newly formed transportation advisory committee there is and if all the student parking is going to mostly be over right yeah so some could be there but if they're if that is happening if they're high school since parking over there they're arriving at a different time in the middle schoolers are going to be arriving anyway before or after before before or after i think that's a big thing in our neighborhood is that there is so much cut through traffic particularly in baker street which is which we haven't really talked about much but there's a lot of cut their traffic coming off of brighton to avoid that late at concord avenue at the temple and so that's that's a big concern and i think that's part of the study that were engaging the engineer on for that neighborhood but i hadn't thought of any concerns regarding conflicts from the east side for the students parking just because one of the discussions that's gone on regarding keeping the school day experience separate for the middle schoolers and the high schoolers was that they would be arriving at separate time so it could be potentially a problem somebody is arriving later or earlier or whatever but but that that didn't seem to me to be a big choke point because of that staggered time  go all the way up and then come back down around rather than directly enter the drop off it has to do with queuing so and i think i want to i want to just bring that up because so this loop also pretty takes the queuing that you just talked about all the way back to arlington out of they would to some extent the queuing that was measured through here and down across here is purposely considered when this was put together you know you're right you could i think and paulson peace of mind to be if you make it easier they're just going to do it so this is not this is purposely not straightforward and it also provides better queuing away from the light so that you're not turning specially here right at the signal which makes it adding raised elements through here to slow the traffic down this is not a drag strip you if you've seen people come through here before one is open right that and they added those speed bumps and so that is thought through and let's just talk about one way for a minute and we went through this one way whether it's one way this or that way if you're parking here and you do what i do which is i think i get a culture space will just keep going and all of a sudden you know there's a night and then you had it's one way now i'm back out in the neighborhood and taking the whole loop alleviate the problem of coming and then looking and searching and hunting and pecking some schools do that it is an administration issue we talked about it and i think just see also said that the school times are being considered in two thousand and twenty five is many years from buy school could be the latest starting at that point i think we just want to make sure we build it so that people can have those options and have that flexibility because because it's going to change too when the tunnel comes in that'll change the dynamic so if you separate the middle school and high school start you only had one point which is what you have now when you add a separate chronological point on the cylinder i don't know if you're doubling it but you're actually increasing the impact to spread it over time you have you actually have to time to time so none of those are so finalized superintendent has a lot of conversations that he's having and it will continue to have for many years and two conquered conquered half parked on street parking how many what's the capacity we haven't we haven't done a parking yet that has been a motion by the traffic working group to consider parkings off the campus which you know we've been waiting billy can i decide to hold out right now decide concord out seems like it's not really a neighborhood impact right on the side and guess what if i'm a high school kid i was once and i'm assigned way over here yeah and i see that spot it's all offices there that have some parking that flows the park on the street i don't see anything yesterday so some of that starts to right filter back past the exxon station is that we should factor we shouldn't we should include some portion of  of our review that we would like you to do that is to come to the remit on that because we've done that for other things you know we can make that a conditional part you will be voting on a number of parking student parking spaces they're going to need to find those twenty in the concord ave is a viable yes but i mean i was recalling what we did on the permian museum where they came to a parking grievance with the post office it was superintendent and tile work tour supplement if if they feel that they need to supplement that number as well and they'll just meet the requirements because if you're not if you're going to say well you need to demonstrate one hundred and eighty dollars student parking that's one thing if you're just going to say the total shall be for ten for that's that's done and the superintendent works with the town to deal with any other issues that may occur off campus so they will probably go that this is also part of the solution for the parking at the senior center parking the senior center they came in for they to be reviewed by the planning and they had to get a waiver as well and part of solution was to create two to bump that parking exactly and that was part of the solution they came out of planning for the process working with the senior center build one so this could be the similar to a show that's question we would need to know how many spaces might be available in concord yes so that's  know i have no questions i'm good so we've we've given you we have some of your homework at this point so so i want to first bring up one other thing that we're coming back and we're going to come back next week hopefully garden i was thinking where in terms as i design on you see it all over and medical facilities and businesses numbering parking spaces so that each teacher or staff has an assigned parking space and if the students are given permits or they pay for permits for a semester or that they are given a level of safety on the campus so this paulson and paulson ninety schools st i think my concern about not providing far enough packing  your deliberations is that you then leave it to people just packing on all the neighborhood streets and one of the whole points about getting the traffic working group together was the concern that if there wasn't enough packing on site everybody the neighborhoods would be filled especially with the students packing america has a neighborhood streets so i'm not i guess my sense is that when you start talking about conquered avenue  you i assume are talking about packing on conquered avenue in front of the people who live on conquered avenue on the other side of the street is much more limited and i believe so i don't know how many spaces you would get on the other side of the street which was a question of you how much student parking is there in the neighborhoods now i would say there's very little kids to pack along conquered avenue i believe and then also they're back in the parking lot so if this is so it is going to be relatively the same so the middle school students we've established aren't going to drive right they won't yet so i asked how many parking permits are signed not so last year with principal richards and in september there's about fifty and come june there's three hundred right so not so  could be a rite of passage to get a parking pass but not every they're not three there's no way three hundred park student cars sitting on the back there every day so it's a different that's another dynamic yeah  routinely and certainly on any any occasion like prom or anything like that the neighborhoods really fill up with all the family cars that might be a corner case but i also wanted to point out that should it turn out that underwood comes reverses and direction the parking lot you could find more parking to sign to students on the opposite side of underwood from because there's already shadow that there is they're building above that shadow and i guess the question we could say from for next time is how would how the angle of that south wing was   concern with this group yes i'd rather go to yeah i think we can talk at this point because we have another public hearing coming i think we could we can go into more detail on circulation next monday  committee meeting which will give us an opportunity to discuss and get the comments back from the building committee on the exterior package that up and send it to you that week so you'll still have two weeks before your committee there's a lot of complications the committee from the townspeople to the to the architects it's very well done it's difficult to say and i think you did a good job we're still going to have questions but i want to compliment you on that and thank you for doing we're happy that you like all the material that we gave you because we worked very hard on that and i would like to think jeffrey and spencer for working with us a number of sessions to help us pull this together i'm here this evening with the members of our building committee you can see them behind me and our architects ted galante from the golan the architectural studio in cambridge as well as two of his architects that have been working all along on this project so we are very excited about this project we think we have created a design that preserves the historic nature of the police station while putting together some additions and some modifications and some renovations that will end up with a building that will last for at least the next fifty years this gives the police an opportunity to stay in belmont center to stay on the site to be a part of the center of the community it allows us to preserve that historic building as you may know we have applied to the c p a for preservation funds for the exterior of the building they have received our application very positively and well we'll hope the town meeting does as well as what we have for you tonight is ted i'm going to turn it over to him to actually do the presentation and then we're all available to you to answer any of your questions welcome to let to go to so thank you very much the holding cells and provide this a booking and processing area for visitors as well as of date the accessible portion of the building putting in a new elevator and expanding the building on the  entrance to the curb sorry the entrance to the parking is through a curb cut here we're proposing to move that burka down a little bit and keep parking in this portion of the site on parking in this case on top of a garage portion that's added below so those two stories are parking one down low one at grade of the street grade at the same time all of this green space is being maintained in the back and carrying a long ear and we're proposing a green space that really becomes a buffer between pleasant street and the park me area running along here and and enhancing the green space that's in front of spaces i was talking about here there's an existing green space we're taking over part of that with the new expansion of the building into this area but increasing the green space along the front line and providing a little maintained at street from presidents and you start to see some of the green spaces along the street just from a bird's eye view you start to see how things are coming together so that green space that's sort of the overall approach of the project and  ok and actually joined us for our meeting while you were doing the high school we were doing our business next door so he did have an opportunity to look at a lot of the drawings and hear all of our debates on the  finishes of the edition so his he's certainly here and we did mail ouch to the big circle three hundred feet or whatever it was with the information and an invitation if you have questions contact us so we have reach out to the neighbors did you want to go to the microphone introduce yourself and tell us what your comment on the land on the landscape or the whole project or that's more just i mean my question the if you can make them grow there i planted some there and quickly died so hopefully somebody has a greener thumb than this guy but the big fence yeah yes your point really about the fences yes the  is would be great you know one of the concerns really is these parking spots here pulling in florida and headlights just come in right into to our living room so any mitigation for that would be greatly appreciated main reason we're here one hundred percent supportive of this project but want to make sure that we have a little bit of a fingerprint of the of what will be more affecting us as being the sole butter's to this project and so i do appreciate you bringing that up but yes these this type of thing  the the piece of equipment and yet there are different noise levels going on so it hear it so i recalculated doing the same rudimentary kind of thing that you guys did and came up with something pretty close so i'm happy with them but the the one question i have is i was assuming you're measuring  it so you are not one hundred feet ok good we're on the same page here so i'm happy with that and the same with the lighting i think the got good fixtures that are pretty much downcasting and not going up one question what is the exterior finish and looks like it's sort of middle and we have agreed that we would like to see a terror caught up finish it will be grey as you know it there will be no visible fasteners so it will just be the finish the terra cotta it will last significantly longer than the cement fiberboard we think it's a better product it's a more expensive product but it's a better product and if our goal is to create a building that's going to last for another fifty or eighty or one hundred years then we want the exterior finishes to last that long also we hope that we have learned from some of the errors that have happened in the past on other buildings without casting any aspersions on other building committees because we are all volunteer building committees and we all respect the work that goes into these projects but there have been some failures in other buildings and so we want to try to avoid that here so it will be a lovely shade of gray terror it looks like the neutral sort of background i mean you're you don't want to be competing  diagrams is that the end of the actual intention you know what i'm talking about because there is specifically about the topography in the background there i mean there's some beautiful trees that are being illustrated there all the ones that are back there now are completely dead so you know i also have concerns about trees on my property which will be of over the new property i mean the new construction which is a concern for me from a liability standpoint so i just want to make sure that we're involved with specifically landscaping to your point about s and everything else but also about a lot of the tree removal that will be going on because we would like to make sure that even if it is on our property i don't i don't want to be liable for a brand new beautiful building that's going up especially with these guys with guns over here so you know you're good neighbors are great neighbors until a trip my tree falls on your police cruiser and then you know everything goes to hell so yet we just want to make sure that that you know as as we move forward with this it will be a year project obviously is the main a butter it's going to be impact impacting on our household our kids and and everything out so whatever else we can we can do specifically about the topography in the back there you know we  would we could actually help with some of the you know excavation there is i wouldn't mind a lot of dirt being pushed on to my property so you know then you would have to pay as much to have it removed things like that you know but it would just require a little bit of a dialogue and just want to make sure that we can continue those things on because i think that the goal really should be to make it as as nice in the back there and there is concerned about flooding in some sense especially with that street cut but we talked about  that separately but you know i think i think there are there are some issues but as long as we can we can make sure that we work together on it it's my only concern otherwise i think it's a beautiful design as as the closest neighbors we think it will be a great addition maples i am more concerned that we should remove them actually during the construction process and i wouldn't of your liability right a little bit ok because it because you're on that line like on that borderline you're going to have to take out a significant amount of trees that are right there i have a few that are just a few feet over if we work together to just get them all out at the same time work that's right that's right and so and then you know as far as the rest of the stuff back there yeah a lot of it's you did a great job  yeah i mean i'm just our other business good evening crisis on the border single resident the zoning district there has been an application or concerns that we extend the protections of the s r s just see to the single residence  e storing district we have discussion of that the the town planners have begun to take a look at that and to look at what the implications of  would be if we move forward in that direction jeffrey saying that i'm looking at a time yes when i do this expeditiously yes so you don't have the maps and questions yeah yeah it's seventy averages about seventy to seventy five percent of the town is nonconforming with respect a lot size i have tried to find out i discover where the different lot size requirements come from and there is no answer to that other than just kind of there with jeffrey or you know i know yes and one of the things that the planning board did around lot size which was significant is you reduced the lot size requirement for the single family homes in the the average lot size isn't even for the s r b district isn't even within six thousand square feet six thousand something you know what it says and i can't mean that i don't have the printer and it's not six thousand square feet is the average lot size but as you can see certainly green does and the red doesn't conform so again it's that sort of the two district kind of subdistrict kind of thing that's going on with this area in our concerns are coming from the residents that yes yes neighborhood right and so then what we then resubmitted was the maps that show so you know this is if you add this is the median this this talks about lot size and t l a and then as you add you know ten percent twenty percent and then ultimately thirty percent you can see that you're whately increasing the amount of buildable area the density build up will density in that area  from before three years is a different server so it was a much more complicated to try to go i want you to five years but three years is what we're going to get so and what we did is we extracted additions home new homes and  us and then you'd be able to see by looking at all the different from asian if you apply the ten percent twenty percent increase or thirty percent what that would what that would include it may not include ultimately went three hundred feet because they felt that anything greater than three hundred feet was yes yeah yeah right that's why they went from square foot to percent of three square foot of that is whether you allow  square footage or cubic footage or but keep the height and and the front for so the say so you could add on in the back a lot if you have room but you wouldn't have the same effect as if you were putting at one and a half story on top of him it was a long evolution to get to thirty percent given all the other alternatives and that was go to mark or as we can get given you know all things considered but the thirty percent first of all it was it seemed it felt like the right number of anything bigger than that was going to be overwhelming and you really you'd go you'd get some hopefully some of that answer to that question will gel once you may once we're able to look at the three years of building permits and you can see what what and what would cap what you would capture if you went with twenty two baker street bacon street came out of the ground and i'm pretty happy with what we did i mean i think it's it's big it's definitely big but it really i think it's given all  is that if you if you just put it on to the whole zone so the bigger houses can you can do bigger additions with the bigger limb but you're protecting the smaller  one so that so that so that the larger lots are going to do it as you know but right anyway yeah so and they're quite large and they're quite large and you're quite low so that's just really only captures the ones that are in this in this the ones that are non conforming in your cherry picking because you're saying a non conforming lot in a sense you've already done that by but you know the definition is i mean if you had if you had you know a vacant if that was vacant the whole thing and  building at another level is a totally different concern and and the and the question i think the complication here is trying to figure out how you handle that big house on the cliff that's not thirty percent pill lester