thirty pm we will start on time and on time two we had agreed that what we would do that one of the things we would do this evening is take a look at a draft  presentation of how we might get this meeting he thought certainly the intent is that it is going to be a discussion and a conversational style discussion but i think what we found in the past is that it's useful to provide some kind of framework and so this is our first cut at both the framework and the handout we kind of played a one page four sides handout for those in attendance  but the but the current draft which is called i believe version one which would suggest that we fully expect something jeffrey and i put together we fully expect there to be subsequent and the war has reached a consensus that these two are the potential targets of opportunity does everybody feel that captures what we've talked about here is there anything we'd like to add to it in the way of setting up thought is it'll be that we should it's always helpful to remind people of what we are talking about and exactly where these through our next life you're free so we'll have waverly square and south pleasant street i do think right now we're not plan where we'll put up the maps we'll have large maps that we can put up in the room but we're not planning to do a math handout simply because when you try to get this onto an eight the the first will be descriptive we haven't put that together yet but just a kind of a thumbnail of what's in waverly square and what's there right now we may do a little on what it what's the  slide what we did was to go back to the bible where the role of the responsibilities of the planning board described and tried to translate those into relatively  f statements so when we say we want better good commercial development given that definition of the planning boards responsibilities in the town laws what is it we what are the criteria that we should use as various alternatives are proposed they are not in any worse order importance and they are as you noted f but i think this is a place that we should agree amongst ourselves when these are whether we want to put weights on them i think i think i thought was that we would leave that that would be a topic of discussion for the group the goal to make its christopherson street strictly commercial you want any residential type of element to that because that does not count that it all seems to me that cushing square although quite large and the residential aspect with one hundred fifteen units does have that infrastructure built into it for like the new it seems like the new way of of central living you know urban development per se in fact most weeks we come here and try to discourage excessive real estate development residential real estate development so that the fact that a plan included some element of retail would be a fact about it but it's not a criteria it's not better if it does that and the purpose of the criteria is if we had to if it's imagine we had two plants one hundred percent commercial and ones fifty fifty residential and commercial you don't have to do the in out much analysis to say that in terms of the fourth and fifth criteria the all commercial plan is going to perform better but it might not on the first release of the purpose of the purpose of this is to give us criteria so that any suggestion that is made for these two areas can be systematically evaluated against the same metrics so one could imagine a development that had some residential that had spectacular design was included shuttle i'm just making out you know included shuttle service had improved accessibility to public transportation so that when at the end we went through and scored it the scores would be something like that one to five point scale that we all grew up with you know you could imagine being having a four by four or five five two point five three which one could then compare with any other but the idea is to have some consistent way of looking at ideas as they come forward given the f a r s of everything in that area here going to be probably some residential component will push the commercial rather than the commercial push the residential and one of the things that i think there were some ideas about was that remember when we did this before we ended up doing just commercial we ended up with structured parking in advance of being expensive to build  some of the larger commercial things which would produce a greater impact on the tax base if you do a commercial that's relatively small on these you probably don't get very much more density than you have there now the underlying land value remains the same the difference in the valuation in the contribution for the tax base to the town is the difference in what you build on top of the win if you don't build very high you don't  very much it's not a significant contribution so one of the things that we should be cognizant of is what will be financially feasible for denser development that will produce more tax revenue so we should keep our minds open on that there's also they have been some proposals as part of the planning planning activities joe knows about these the competition the architectural competition and things and at some point i think you have copies of those fears and you know at some point it might be for us just to take a look at those and to see how somebody else takes a look at this thing but as a first line on this i think this is a reasonable way to go forward on this the other thing i would add on this is on our table here we have this so we should just again and that will have to do with drive through and things and that's that's going to be a major critical issue in terms of the commercial development of these things because take a look at the commercial view i think we would like to think about that about if we want if we should think about the issues of drive through and their impact on the streets two thoughts first on the the big point that the two of you have raised that what if that suggests to me that we should actually on the very first bullet remove the word  just me and the others as well we should we should have a base case which is where every square pretty much as it is south pleasant street pretty much as idiots and i think there are some analyses of these that we can use was spring works of those that we confront because i was going to say just in terms of the the architectural planning thing that was done for waverly square for the past year mark polo and i were out walking in the neighborhood and we ran into two of the students who were working on that and were interviewing residents and i believe businesspeople as well as would be could take a look at that but i just want to be clear what the reason for doing a base case on it now is that it may be that if you add any if you add significant amounts of residential that compared to that it is not that that alternative is dominated by what's there now and it's gradual improvement without any changes oh closely with the neighbors and in fact that these things were initiated by the neighbors in the property owners in the area i can't imagine trying to take anything forward to a town meeting where the property owners in the area were other important tasks so we referring to the property owners of the commercial space where the other property owners are the well there are also other bunkie have a stake both but i can't but unless the commercial inlets the owners of the commercial property have some enthusiasm for this i don't see it moving forward and so that they'll be a touch you know if there is and if there is some general level of enthusiasm we'll get to the point that we'll talk about ground through but i just want to keep us in a position where we're not looking to where we're not trying to where we're not in a pretty position of advocacy for something that residents either residential or commercial property owners just don't want to see i think yeah i think you're right i think you're absolutely right les but i will tell you i think that what we're going to end up doing if in  for thirty two feet and accept her etc because i think to really have a really good development though all those things are going to really play into how creative someone can be my point with the first criteria that i saw out there was that i don't want to take anything off the table for a developer to come up with a scheme that would encourage some good growth some smart growth something because as chuck said one of the drivers of the retail is going to be some component of i believe anyway in my position i think you need some some aspect of residential you need that smart growth you need you need people sometimes living in an area which which is what pushes great hoping to do you know let's face it they're hoping to have those one hundred fifteen units drive the businesses or at least contribute to to the business is there going to be below them to get a good retailer in here that everybody in belmont dreams about everybody wants their creating barrels i've heard all the stories that  all the dream retailers that everyone would love to say you need huge amounts of parking which we don't have without it parking decks ok it takes a lot of thought i guess is what i'm trying to say so this just there's a bunch of criteria i just don't want to discourage development i want to encourage development and i think that when you take certain things off the table and leave them out you don't encourage development to its fullest but there were talking about that in essence what you're talking about is we should take off the table a mix of residential and commercial and we're not taking anything off the table but what we're doing is trying to be really transparent i and believe me i understand the impacts of residential residential development but i just think i think to leave that out is is and is in my opinion center of like one of the towns i don't i don't know what will happen on such a pleasant street i just i can tell you that belmont isn't burlington it's not well family it's not you know it's not winter hill up a lot it's just it's much different it's a it's a small form a square mile town that has traffic problems right now ok you know i think a place to look for a model on this it's a little bit different if you go to north reading and you look at the development to trade on the commuter rail there they've done relatively smaller mixed use kind of things there and that's similar and they have some parking issues  not all of that so probably that small mixed use kind of thing but i think waverly square in particular i think it could be the node of and urban village and it is kind of now but it's kind of tired and and and  i think my sense is that where things will go i think that's an important point to raise at the public hearing i mean the second point is and what i think we want input from the community is what is it that will make belmont a better place to live you know do people want a pretty narrow you know really square or do they want community gathering places you know sort of restaurants in places where people go the way they go to belmont center do we want another one of those or do we want like convenience of you know so we don't to drive to burlington there where scenario i remember when we bought cushing square i had people coming up to me because i used to be an old department store say oh bring create marilyn i was like i wish i was that easy we don't have the parking here in the parking certainly isn't and in wave if the park if there was an opportunity to do it anywhere it would probably be on top pleasant street to be very you know i don't know if you have to drive through i mean i don't know if you have the traffic which you know i agree with you but they're just saying i mean the likelihood of that i agree that with the office  it'll be an interesting conversation i think it'll be interesting yes you're right maybe we should move on to the next line which is the discussion that we've been talking about the alternative commercial futures which may include a mix of residential and commercial which is where we hope that people will come to the meeting with me again if not the people don't come to the meeting with ideas then it's going to be a somewhat sterile discussion but this has some grounds in reality of what is and what counts this is tool even in at some theoretical level what are the tools the town hands for shape in development in that area because there are included some things on the list that i think a pretty unlikely and there may be other tools that i that are not on the list that we should add but i think that in as what we bring to the discussion we really do need to say here are the kinds of things that between the plan obviously almost everything needs to go to town meeting as it should and some of these things are certainly not in the hands of the planning board but these are some of shadow on this which i'm sure your world where is what the tito's in the long run and i don't know if that's a seven year process if that's a ten year process or not three stops in weston a much smaller place one can find other ways of improving the time never mind you but i think that beef i mean but in my mind the order of battle so to speak is first we see if there's any property planning for it probably would be a discussion with our representatives on the absolute sense gravity of this to any kind of development story but you know are there other are there other things perhaps in your previous life there are other big tools that should be on the list that we just make people aware of that's what i mean the city of boston has they have their general sort of when you go to the area there's two things you can go for the large project or you can go for the smaller project the small project which generally would be most of the things that  have one we have a meeting on the seventeenth before we move forward on this so it will have a chance to look at this again in a more polished form and make any other changes  with that we can produce a discussion of item two when we move to item three discussion on potential signed by law so many amendments for which i turn to mr started out with a checklist of things that we thought we wanted to cover and i think we've drilled down a little bit and we've had a lot of support from jeffrey and spencer looking at other communities bylaws to think about what where we may be missing things or where we could be for some of our regulations consistent with some of our neighbors and so we focused on a handful of things now this give you the update  to narrow it down maybe or or focus it after the checklist of the agave you from last last report so we spent some time talking about window signs and in limiting the area there is currently a limit on the number the percentage of area that window science can take up it's pretty large when you count temporary window signs and i think we came to realize through our discussions that it's temporary signs in windows that a lot of people have expressed concern about that it kind of clutters things up and looks bad right now i think you can feel your windows up to fifty percent of area coverage if you include temporary signs which is a lot and so we spent some time talking about the total area limitation that should we should be moving toward and also defining what a temporary site is we don't have a definition in our bylaws of temporary sign and many other communities do we also don't have a by law that identifies prohibited signs so we have talked about adding that and we're looking at neighboring communities on that issue as well we're taking close look at awning s and the amount of area that letter lettering and logos should take up on on things and we are also looking at adding a requirement which most communities have so the the rusty or paint chipped sign is in many communities there's an obligation to maintain it in good repair or it can be ordered removed and so we're really looking at the mechanism for maintaining or for creating an obligation to maintain tines as well as addressing what we would do in the event that we changed by allies and we then have existing non conforming signs and how you know that so those areas that we focused on we have spencer has gathered a lot of language from other towns for us to take a look at so we started discussing  that language we have another working group meeting next friday the thirteenth our next meeting as a group is tuesday january seventeenth what we need to do is figure out whether we can  get language to the meeting on the seventeenth we've moved pretty far along in town council there are actually there's at least one community where town council has written the signed by laws as the of concord so we know some of the language that town council has approved indirectly and but i would like us to be in a place if possible where before we share actual language with the group town councils gone over it just identify you know even if the language looks good in the conquered by law we need to make sure that it fits in well to all of  so we started to talk about this earlier liz that i'm going to think we need some guidance on the process we should follow to to pull town council into the into the review process so that we don't you know get focused on language too early that we shouldn't be so do any thoughts on yeah you want to say so what was the way i was room we could potentially do for that the meeting on the seventeenth i could imagine us having almost like a little powerpoint presentation like one slide per issue if there was some language that you know we were i think that i think that is fine i would have been prepared to go directly to a public hearing but i think it's i think it's better process if we look at it first my i think the my major suggestion would be that this is a process suggestion and is consistent with our philosophy of we try not to make exactly the same mistake twice and the leg to make what we should learn from single resident c which as you may remember we were about to go to town meeting and then it turned out there were some flaws in the language and so we ended up going to town meeting a two weeks later we should think very carefully about how we never to do that again and then maybe what we should do is once we've had a discussion as a group at a somewhat conceptual level you have language and if you want to take it to count co communities those of those comparable communities that have already been identified by previous by other committees so we can just what we can just pull that language that we've either know has been has been reviewed by some council of some sort and we know specifically that town council just did concords by law so in one in this couple is or are we are looking at the language conquered so that was more the idea is that we could do with the conceptual framework as this is the now the the amendments that we're looking at are much smaller you know there's you know adding a definition of temporary sign where one doesn't exist adding a provision about prohibited signs they're a little bit more discrete smaller chunks of regulation they're not an entire review process and that we like the one we created for last year so i think that it's that it's conceptually more manageable and the language that we present could be very close to what milli gets proposed if the board is comfortable with  it and perhaps you know working group setting maybe it work week we can we can read then once we have the language we can try re translate that into english and just make sure that the way what it says in english is what it says and i love language proper position of not at seven o'clock at night you know attorney who is going to a meeting and then depending on how that conversation goes because it could be a or b loves everything in know for the conversation necessary or could be that the board like public hearing right doesn't have to be the public hearing doesn't have to be done the beginning of march i was hoping to do the public hearing in the middle of february oh our second meeting in february yeah that's what i'm hoping for all right that as a defense attorney first yeah that's what i'm hoping for but see i'm hoping that by having the public hearing in the middle of february in the board sort of result resolving any sort of stuff that has it can then be distributed count meeting members right individual residence but they do not review this by law and right but i'm again i'm just trying to get people's edits in good if you're going to sit send something send something along now don't wait to the last minute and we would welcome but we would welcome comments from all residents and all t on meeting members as early as possible and that's why i want to strike at the let's be optimistic about it i think w exactly what our new buy a lot will say and then put it into the buy a lot and i think it can be that simple yet so sure we are we do ok with that we move the as you can imagine there's been quite a few meetings happening around partment of meetings happening around the whole demolition permit in foundation permanent  d in several mini conversations with beloved as representative toll brothers where things currently stand is they've told by this has been provided a list of things that materials and part of the problem is we have no real control over that it's a d e p t regulated issue that license site professional is the one who sort of pfizer everything who regulates everything however what we do have control over is issuing the permits to allow the property to be disturbed and to be built so we are making sure that indeed what is being proposed with respect to the demolition permit and the foundation permit is indeed can go forward with respect to the e p a and the whole h follow up on environmental issues hopefully we'll have some some of the paperwork necessary so we can feel comfortable in signing off on him issuing some of the permits or starting that process of some of the permits at that point you also go in sort of mitigation and and that public meeting will hopefully be held somewhere in that same time friend of january twenty third he's still trying to confirm dates and locations but that will the public meeting notice will be sent to native neighbors in the butter and he hopes to begin so we'll mitigation and removal by the beginning of march at the same time that's occurring he is hoping to begin by the end of january p and so on that all has to be determined and laid out and so he hopes to begin that as i said by the end of january as well so so  at this point there are those four documents that make up the emotional toll plan that ultimately you have to sign off on and at this point only one of those four parts has been  approved just management plan has been approved by the board of health the motion control plan the phasing plan and temporary stormwater management plans have not been approved and they won't be until we get this environmental information  to feel comfortable enough that what's being proposed is being done is certainly within limits of the environmental medication and i expect that  january seventeenth at least given the way bill was talking to me this afternoon that the board will be able to sign off on the erosion control plan at its next meeting ungenerous seventeenth that would be good so what sort of i had expected they it felt like they were dragging their feet the beginning you know december and i said you know what the holidays around the corner i'm sure he's just waiting for the holidays to be over and then and so he it feels like he's jumped into it now but both feet in his meeting with the e p a in town staff and and getting everything done he possibly can that's a request because they didn't read it just got a letter this afternoon from the board of health regarding the dust management and i don't know she has been angela or has been in direct contact with the l s sort right so there may be something within them i have not reviewed the letter i just got this afternoon to the maybe something within that but that's definitely something i need to check on that you know i mean because i don't want to second guess but i'm just as  trades people will be coming there the site will be disturbed and one of the criteria is that they cannot be parked in the residential area and they can't be parking in the business there so my question is where will they be parking going to be lots for which there is  so this this was a discussion in the form that we had now heard a sufficient number of cases and the general residence district especially a sufficient number of special permit cases that we should begin taking a look at what we had done and trying to understand the effectiveness and trying to understand the process better so what we have here this evening is a first that means this is the current plan it can be changed will treat the any case that was withdrawn as no decision because the great majority of case cases are withdrawn when jeffrey explains that there are two choices either the board will vote against granting a special permit which will mean you cannot come back for some period of time or you can withdraw and i believe without exception people have seen the wisdom of taken we think we understand what meeting why town meeting these five lives they wanted they did not want very large houses that were out of scale with the neighborhood and they did not want very like houses that look terrible with their lives going to ask whether there was just thinking back to last year's process you know there was a planning board power point presentation that kind of laid out at least the planning wards intent yes which presumably is some overlap with our meeting maybe only one in zero four it's pretty clear but i would be interesting if there were one there was presented that when connection with those amendments could i just might like to set the stage a good idea i think we i think we can probably there was also a neighborhood power point which again at the end was more or less merged with the planning board power point but i agree that's a very good idea the second is me and impact impact as desired by town meeting is what is the single most important thing but i think it's also worth while to understand our own process and two and three i put in lowercase so i put the first in upper case and i put two and three  and one of the process is each decision is either yes or no and if we look back what are the drivers of that decision in a statistical lately have enough cases that we can do that and thirdly and again this is lower case but for the cases where we say yes we grant a special permit the time to do that very significantly from one hearing one week to a period of several months and so the point your third issue can be explored is to better understand what drives the kind i think that would also be helpful the the approach here is to put together a database and you have the the graphic you have represents a sample of that database not the entire database that's why  including it as a formal slide at this point but just to give you an idea of what it would look like essentially that we do what twelve month look back in the general residence just three either new construction or additions that would have been subject to permit the special permit under the bylaws and then we look at all cases going forward  look at the i mean again barbara and i think your idea of going back to the power point is a good but certainly total living area was a major concern that's why it's that one of the drivers that we look at the distribution of total living area of homes permanently created by life change and the distribution vice total living area of homes after the bottom line change as i say what you have in front of you represents only a sample but i'm pretty sure that this is going to be a fairly dramatic i mean if the question if you wanted you wanted to shift the distribution in size i think as i said this is about  thirty three sent sample but it will be clear that it should be pretty distribution so it is this data february twenty third team to twenty fourteen yes this is the twenty thirteen to twenty four this is the twenty thirty this is the second that would have required ok ok i have a question yeah so we're including in the the projects that came before the void and were voted on b board i missed part of this when i wasn't on the board how many cases did the board vote against in denying a special permit that goes back to the first the is part of this is that there are a number of people that sort of post think they're going to jeffrey and they sort of don't go to a place but we also had a number of cases of people that came to the board and had a number of hearings public hearings and then they withdrew them and somehow that data shouldn't be lost in my opinion i don't  that have had public hearings and gone to several public hearings and had many groups is that we basically told them if you come to a vote your chances of it being passed are low your options are better not to and then you can come back i don't think that information should be lost because that's informative of what the board is saying that we don't want  we can certainly collect that information i think there is a speculative area you know the question is what what what bad thing did not happen because that was in place is really hard because what about the people who never brought the thing forward or came to know but if the people they came to a public hearing and were basically told this isn't going to isn't going to fly i mean isn't that informative if we've had a public hearing we've got a couple of them and they're basically told this is falling it doesn't look like this is going to be within our criteria i mean maybe that doesn't go into the numbers but that's part of the color of of what's happening on this w what i think it would be is more informative because they agree with was his point that we don't know that we can measure the full extent of the deterrent value here and yet this change but what we can measure is initial proposal and maybe th will come up as part of the key drivers in the process and that analysis of the original proposed g l a and the approved t l a account we can certainly collect that information and see what we want absolutely it would be an interesting one would be burt street because originally they came here as a two family average student and they ended up getting permitted on a one shot deal by the way it was a one meeting oval for single family so and i'm trying to remember two different applicants and i'm trying to remember where they actually did they withdraw or did we vote no because i can't remember the oh assuming they had real plans to oh yeah they  total living area look at it for floor area ratio because those again going back to the point those were the things that got me to look at what there's a missing slide here one of the things the town scale for the moment that i'm leaving that but i think it would be very it would be it if there were a way if there were any kind of way of classifying the initial know but but i don't think i don't think going component by component is going to do it one needs you need to look good overall indicator i have no share with town meeting are the guidelines that we've developed right that that are i mean they're not law but they are a guidance that we have developed that is supposed to inform applicants i mean that in sort of it's a little aspirational in some circumstances but at least it's there as a set of as something to point to to say well this is how my score and i'm putting vinyl siding on because i maxed out the rest of my gore design suggestions and i don't think that anyone would ever thought that you know you know we've really terrorists would have brought in the numbers the next thing we see is a kind of a first using the full database a first cut at this and  analysis in some circles known as a graph an analysis and looking at for each application if we know the total living area the floor area ratio and the number of bedrooms and number of units whether it's one or two we can put that into this into a statistical machine and we will end up with an estimate of the probability that the board was me it shows our decision making and the other thing we will be able to do once we have this is there will be there will be at least one case where when we put those things into the blender and trade when we put those in the hopper and turn the crank the probability of this being approved was point seven six but it was actually rejected though we said it was had a very high probability of being approved it wasn't and if we dare we can go back and see what are the cases where design or something else really drove the board's decision or the other way around it looked as if it was going to he this is the path so with what we do is just do that and not do the simple analysis and then we'll go back and say all right if we want to hear the cases that we met where the simple analysis doesn't decision process that we didn't know they were actually very much affected by windows much more windows are much more important than the first believed or me but looking at the difference between what you would expect and where what happened was now almost always you know make us more self conscious was and so this potentially i don't know for the viewing audience sort of those who really following this  hugely impacted by design for the adjacent the immediate neighborhood but again this will give us or it may turn out that once we look at those three or four factors that we're basically explaining everything we do and the you did so i planned design review on those last two years and then you don't have vinyl and even if you run the market check and run the stats on it say of the market was growing at you know x percentage and then you run that percentage vs what those sold out compared to the other comparison take all the years of the time into account it will be a really interesting analysis to see where that ends up do you think that you know what's up you think that if you don't you think they jumped over the market i think they did i would i floor area ratio versus the neighborhood medium  still trying to think about there's a whether there's some way to systematically incorporate design in landscaping but in any case we will see whether if it turns out that most of the difference in that length of time it takes to get approved get a special permit is essentially the barkeep say no it's a single family needs to be under twenty six hundred square feet in this neighborhood and the length of the length of the process is very much driven by how high the outlook and started and how long it took to come down there's also another for which which i don't think we can measure here but we've seen the same architect for different projects that they seem to do a little bit better on the second project so the first i think we just had experience with it and i get that well i will bet you the pots you know will go through the same kind of analysis where  met where where's the time difference very different and i think that pops out yeah i think that's right because we will probably have people that get on their professional resumes actually i think we should also make the care of the number of meetings and i don't know which way this goes but the conversations and the involvement of jeffrey you know that it's best to scream because we've talked a lot about having the guidelines and see if that improves the predictive power and i agree there are more things we can do but the thought is to get these three things done and the starting point and then we can think about doing some of the how does this relate to the mark to the prices actually received how did we change the square foot price and so on but i think the goal is to have something to have this for everyone to take a all right and with that we move along to updates on potential and fine art projects jeffrey may have something for us potential cases i think this evening know you the only thing is just you may be aware of the belmont a school will be coming before the board with a proposal to build a gymnasium with a couple glasses classrooms and some office space if you're familiar at all familiar with have an access that runs parallel to the cemetery plant so they will be providing building a driveway loop so you come in off the concord down the driveway parallel to the cemetery and then there are soccer fields and try to get some feedback from them and then they will be meeting playing board   any any committee reports that anyone wants to give this is not a preview gender for the next meeting obviously the agenda for the in the arguments will be kicking lovely in the sign and sign that with the it's with the notion that after that we move to a public hearing