have a one item agenda tonight which is a presentation of the proposal winning amendments for the single rest and seize zone in district that we will be presenting to ten b n at the beginning of may and the presentation tonight will the joint present this was this was a team cry get everyone on the planning board could do this presentation  recognize the representatives of the citizens for responsible sounding after the presentation i will ask if they'd like to say a few words and we look forward to your quest this year for us is something of a rest for her so we look forward to our primary purpose here is to answer your questions but constructive criticism of the clarity of our slides flow over presentation and related issues citizens petition looking for torry i'm in the gardens and your farm overlay district group of citizens came focused on what was happening in their neighborhood and were seeking a one year moratorium to restrict the building of new structures to a total height of thirty two feet as measured from an average grade to the highest point of the roof on what we refer to as the ridge that mor m passed through town meeting and it's set to expire on june thirtieth of this year so that was intended really to give us the opportunity to see how the moratori would play out how it would affect buildings or lack of buildings in this area and give us a year to figure out how we wanted to approach  more complete amendment for a portion of the town so the moratorium was prompted by some significant changes in neighborhoods that were brought to our attention by the citizens and these are a couple of examples the before and after you see small structures being replaced by three storey very large structures with not all that much landscaping very often in front of them which made them look even larger from the streetscape perspective so as you can see here the overlay district as the subject of the moratorium is single residence see but but the single residency zone in the town is much much larger than that small overl districts so as we thought about what would what should be done in terms of long term zoning we were thinking about the entire single residency district some of the issues and concerns that were raised by the citizens included on the scale of the house the houses that were in the new houses that were being built there massing overall height was a major concern  we were seeing exposed outdoor equipment including propane gas tanks on streets that don't yet have underground gas lines landscaping as are already mentioned was an issue that wasn't softening the facades of some of these very large structures and sort of big picture why is there a lot of concern expressed about how these very large structures were affecting the character of the neighborhood for they were great changes that were being made how the streetscape was changing and in particular how all of this was happening without any public review or input in these none of these large structures came before the planning board like you know in addition to existing homes which the playing board has seen for for a long time and it seems like a major loophole that had been identified by the citizens that one could tear down a house and build a new much larger structure and have no input from the neighbors no review by a town body and ultimately you end up with buildings that are aligned with the with the neighborhood so  so we put together a package of zoning amendments and this is an overview of that will take in more deeply on we we've focused on the definition of graded as one issue the existing violence says that grade can be altered by no more than a foot and we propose changing it so they grade can be raised by no more than a foot eliminating the option of lowering the grade in order to have room to build more math on a lot we also proposed amending the height restriction so the existing high restriction is thirty six feet to the midpoint we propose limiting it to thirty feet and to the ridge thirty four  that two foot differences is not something to be concerned about we also took on the issue of outdoor mechanical and fuel storage equipment for which there is currently no restriction whatsoever and we're proposing that that equipment not appear in the front yard that it not be within the side earlier setbacks so it needs to be you know set away from the side and rear neighbors that any such equipment if it's on the side or in the rear on the side of the house really that it be set back at least ten feet from the front of the house and that it requires screening on all sides so that no neighbor gets to stare at an air conditioning unit or a fuel tank that it would be screened by landscaping finally we took a look at the front step back issue under the existing by l can be twenty five feet or optional it can be an average of the buildings on either side the way that currently written that allows for a situation where a new building could be set back a lot further than existing the existing house on either side creating the gap tooth problem that we've seen in other contexts and that we've gotten a lot of feedback is not something that the neighbors like to see and so  so we propose changing that to require that the setback be the average of the buildings on either side so with that it's so i think i'll turn it over to you to give so more detail of the various you so if you if you look at the sly that's on the screen right now you'll notice is a substantial difference and the proposed midpoint right now is is six feet last then the current allowable midpoint which is thirty six feet you have the potential to go to at least forty four feet and the existing byelaw are where right now if you'd max out at thirty four feet if you look at some of the newer houses that are that are built around town especially i believe this one being built on that's road with a thirty two foot height restriction in place in the moratorium district you'll notice that it actually fits in quite nicely at thirty two thirty four we think gives them the builder a little bit more leeway to have a little bit more creativity and with that you could probably get a little bit more space up on that extra half a story where if you have to do dormers on a thirty four it's not going to look as in cumbering and also at that height believe it or not you'll notice that the roof line looks it's not as steep so it's a little bit wider  so you actually get like some better space up there believe it or not by actually lowering the pitch so that was the thinking behind that the other thing we did is with a flat roof structure a contemporary structure we're going to we were proposing that that structure be no higher than the midpoint of the pows allowable height in a conventionally framed building i e gabled building something within a line of roof so i think it keeps everything pretty clean it keeps everything very very simple to understand so that being said i think that someone can still build their you know contemporary home if they want to and i think that would actually fit into the neighborhood or we think it would fit into the neighborhood a lot nicer and at the same time they might find after drawing it out maybe they want to go with a thirty four foot conventionally framed house that would be more complementary to what's in the neighborhoods today next sli well people who r t have it in their front yards obviously if you are going to replace a condenser that's existing in the front yard you would be subject to this but people that are going to be bringing in new age equipment whether it's an existing structure or whether it's in a new structure are going to be required to meet this requirement of being in the side yard or the  slide the final amendment limit non conforming construction so what this really does is that if people have a nine thousand square foot lot which is the required zoning size with seventy five feet of front you'll have to follow the mechanical equipment you'll have to be at the heights that we're talking about you'll have to follow sidelined you'll have to follow a set back as prescribed but for structures that don't comply with the current demential regulations you again we're not taking away anybody's right to knock down and come back with demolished and rebuilt but you would be coming before the before the planning board  for review and the issue is we don't want to over build on smaller lots a lot of the lots quite frankly years ago zoning in the sea used to be seven thousand square feet and if you notice most of the lots somewhere i've seen them is small it's like a low sixes but pretty much you get into like the high eights and so recognizing that fact when again we're not trying to stop anybody or prohibit development or redevelopment in any way what we're trying to do is just more or less work with people work with developers so that you know well not taking away the rights of a developer we don't want to take away the rights of the potential neighborhood to have a type of say about what's going to go back so that's why we want to have a public review and in point of building projects going to be treated  know treated the same and then closing a loophole really is what we're listening to with the the neighborhood group it really should follow the same requirement that you would be you would have to follow if you were going to do a new edition that was greater than thirty percent i don't think that i haven't seen it on a site that jeffrey am i missing that is that that allowed but what will happen is if you have a gross floor area of two thousand square feet you would be allowed under our formula to build up to thirty percent of that number so it would allow you to build a six hundred square foot addition once you go over that amount you would be in front of the planning board again for a review so we're we're going to allow and if you think about thirty percent on any house and i think that's a pretty generous  addition given the lot sizes here and what we're trying to do is capture people that have the exterior or the structure of the past five years so they will be like a look back here is what we're trying to say so if you added fifteen percent you're looking to put back you know twenty eight percent guess what you'll be coming to see us because we'll consider that as a forty three percent increase in structure new homes you can see i think we talked about that  we talked about that earlier this the planning board would be the permit granting authority and we're just looking to find out and to do an exercise where you know what gets redeveloped would be in scale and complementary twenty but quite frankly we're looking to if someone is going to demolish and rebuild we're looking to add value to the entire neighborhood just not just a lot so each jeff you can go to the next slide and i guess what these amendments will do is if you look to the first slide on the left you'll you'll notice that that house is quite a big larger to the house on the left which which actually they went through a major renovation of the people to the left and i think they did all the right things and then the folks that bought the house to the right i think a developer bought that and he had someone that wanted to buy that home before he even constructed that and they had them develop that large a structure which is actually on sargent already believe and i think that that was one of the catalysts that that helps the neighborhood group really come to town meeting and put us where we are today and then you know again you could see i believe that jeffrey is that the that that is the for an elevation right to one of the bottom of it so that's what it looks like to the bottom if you look to the right you can see a much much larger that than the house to the right so on both sides i think it i don't think it really enhances the neighborhood which is what we're trying to accomplish here so jeffrey go to the that it's it's so that would be the thirty two so that structure acts to be two feet shorter would not be as tall as it is twenty two beds road i think if i'm not mistaking that's also to the thirty two feet jeffrey  and the front which are thirty two feet which which we were discussing earlier would would actually be a much different looking building have that command has i plan review because i think that maybe would have been looked at a little bit differently in a little bit more closely and then finally sixteen try road and i think that that's a newer home also jeffrey and if i'm not mistaken that's also higher than they are just looking at that that would probably be helpful moving on you can move on to the next with that yeah  i think only a height but no again there's no landscape requirement so we think that's critical it's worked really well in the g r s that we the town meeting actually passed a few years back  petition before a town meeting and it was overwhelmingly approved by our fellow citizens by ninety one percent majority i think it speaks to the concerns that the whole town had and still do have over over a building  the only real complaints that we got after that meeting were well why didn't you have it cover the whole town that was the biggest concern and i think the planning board has wisely chosen as our see as the using our neighborhood as a test bed over the last year as why it's taken s r c is the next reasonable step and it's because of the how many how much an idea of the homes in those neighborhoods and also the fact zoning district with a lot of non conforming lots so initially we were concerned that the thirty four foot height limit might be too large but for a nine thousand square foot lot that's a perfectly reasonable restriction it seems to me in other words people are saying why did you raise it from thirty two to thirty four when we had had that going on and i don't think that represents a capitulation a compromise at all in fact thirty four feet sounds perfectly reasonable a nine thousand square foot lot but the second thing that the planning board has done is bring into the fold into the public review process houses that are new houses or to be constructed on non conforming or smaller lots and that's an important consideration one of the concerns that brought us to the table to begin with was people who were saying look i just want to put an addition up of mine garage which happens to be outside the  setback rules and i had to go before the zoning board how come if i had just torn my house down it could have built anything i want and that was that was an issue and it's a big issue there was a big loophole in the rules that didn't bring  brand new houses into conformance with the rest of the neighborhood and i think the planning board has done a really good job in defining what the limit should be and bringing them into the and to the review process one last comment  other towns in this area arlington concord needham and many other towns before town meeting this year are going to be bringing similar kinds of restrictions this is not just a belmont concern it's a regional concern  really across america but about certainly within eastern massachusetts the process that we've gone through in belmont i think is unique and very interesting it was founded it was started with the citizens ground up issue concern but then there's been a partnership with the town and specifically the planning board and others in the town including that the inspectors and everything else everybody has collaborated in this town to come up with these proposed amendments in other towns it's been entirely citizen review without a whole lot of input from the the you know the powers that be the regulatory authority or it's been from top down and i think that belmont has been rather unique and rather special in having this be a collaborative effort between the citizens and the town and developers and coming up with this thank you very much and the last line of that first paragraph that does not increase the non conforming nature of the structure are we all but they're ok if you look at master was forty eight section six they use a modifier of substantially and as you've written that any change to the least amount a millimeter would increase the  but the faint statue uses the bottom part of stance fully and i invite you to think about do you want every case to come up or by full permit or would you allow the back of the buildings back or to look at things in one where it says and alteration to a structure which i think you want to use the word that that is restrictive and which is and yet the same thing and number two where you have another what would happen under those rules if somebody bought two adjoining lots each of which had houses saddam and the took both of them down which is the original footprint do you want to build in free built or could they somehow in this area of town residents see them built on five thousand square foot houses with ten or fifteen  you're going to be stuck having to put your compressor out in the backyard in the middle of the backyard and the people who install these things don't want running all those pipes underground to get out there so you may want to think about how would compressor unit for either air conditioning or a heat pump if it is tied up against the side of the house and shielded as best you can you know would that be allowed board do you still have to go full full blown back for a permit and although i would invite you to have substantially modifying even when you go put a special permit to the board on these non conforming is s the next thing when i was on the planning board we had the draft the language for the plus persona lots of discussion it went everywhere and you can find that but it can't be inconsistent with the care of the local neighborhood big litigation on that the judge says it's a fine standard two years so you'd have judicial approval for that standard you may want to put that in somewhere as a standard to use when you're trying to evaluate people's petitions for special permit or when they're trying to get something done if what they're doing is consistent with the character of the local neighborhood that's kind of what you're hoping for because all of the discussion i've heard as people are getting the the yes when they see the giant houses go and when they see these warehouses go in instead of the nice cape cod or other high passes but people that are trying to build consensus to with the local neighborhood that is a good thing for them to do it you may want to mention that somewhere in your definitions of how you go to judge these petitions  two have you talked to developers in the neighborhood have you gone in put have anybody reached out and also you know you chose the the thing about the the houses were show the thirty six thirty four thirty i was wondering if you're concern yet i'm twenty three just i have two questions one is with the brown mounted mechanical equipment applied to solar panels of somebody who wanted to do ground mounted solar installation and the other would be in terms of the landscaping how specific are the requirements for that my concern is that a lot of people are starting to reject the idea of large green lawns because of the environmental implications so if people wanted to do alternatives but still have a natural setting does that sort of thing work questions because it means that we'll try to answer what we can unite and what we're flyers further thought will certainly help time think through between now and town meeting  had one member of the planning board and i my dad longest serving member of the plan thank  you landscaping i guess that was your cue to come which i guess the question was we've talked about landscaping surrounding the mechanical equipment and storage equipment does extent do we prescribe landscaping and does that impact people's ability to have a tradition oman or do some other kind of landscaping and then the second was more specific with and the general mans and the general landscaping the planning board has when when a special permit is required we have focused on on two areas one is the replacement  or our addition of st trees of a of a large enough sized head to give a reasonable chance that the trees will survive so we've been specifying trees at three and a half to four inches as street trees as far as planting around mechanical equipment we have left the choice of planting to the owner and simply said that the the mechanical equipment needs to be not visible from the front door of the adjoining neighboring yards and left it so that if someone has a particular approach that they would like to follow in screening mechanical equipment that is consistent with the rest of their existing landscaping that that would be acceptable on these fide laws and these amendments with a public discussion in it with the public conversation in november which was held in the our gallery and which was advertised we've had at least four possibly more public hearings with public input before that so the answer is we reach out to you we try to reach out to everyone so we do not make a special attempt to reach out we reach out to everyone and give everyone an opportunity to have their voice heard we've been we kicked off that process in november and we've certainly had developers less than thirty four feet and i as a matter of fact we just approved three i think one was twenty four was twenty eight one was thirty in the house and come up quite nice in the developers in bracing the idea of having a thirty those drawings typically go to a lumber yard along the edge of the as an engineering team that engineering team does quite a bit of work on snow loads live loads debt loads every kind of load you can imagine and given what happened a few years back again with that the winter that we had when people have that type of problem with collapsing roofs if anything the new standards to building are overkill was invited and a lot of the people that we heard from were actually homeowners looking at potential expansion projects so they were other stakeholders that we heard from and listened to and made adjustments to our proposed amendments based on the feedback that we got from them to balance their interests with you know their neighbors in the surrounding neighborhood the did you did you want us to come in i'm sorry did you want us to comment on your remark yes i'm sorry i just have to ask you to come to the fire or explosion and also for how i mean it's one thing on a farm have a propane tank but here you have very small lots so what kind of size restrictions are there on propane tanks i don't know if you have anything what i mean did you know when you have any you know might be something you want to look into because you yet like in the area you know to a school or grow street where there's no natural gas lines presently ok i would also point out that given the landscaping requirements if you have a very big land propane tank you're going to be putting in some pretty big pushes well that is it does not deal with safety issue i appreciate that fully but the the requirements of shielding and landscaping and placement do something to limit it but it is usually the western eye or is absolutely that's why we will be talking to china for example some people do and what they do is because they bring their appliances and and they want their heater it's they think more cost efficient and there's like a just a little switch that you turn over and you're new here and it can go from propane gas to e so might my feeling is that anyone that you see using propane right now probably has been in touch with the gas company and probably knows that it's going to be a temporary thing and that  natural gas is coming so you know thing is i mean being in the real estate business i don't know it's certainly a homeowner's right to do whatever they please in terms of how they heat their house but i don't know that me personally as a developer would ever choose to put propane as a permanent type of source of fuel energy and something that i  poly yes and i'm full time meeting member precinct one i want to thank you all for a very well written by law on where very happy that we have this added to the town by laws in regards to the environmental conscious lawn there is an option and i i think it's good to go on record here it's called proles premium mary richardson  had a piece on the chronicle many years ago and i installed this lawn it does need no watering very drive resistant i cut it once a month it's organic towns that had programs with the company and you know support homeowners doing courage them to do something that's good for the environment and not put all the chemicals and all the stuff on  but certainly if we if we now turn to the to the totality of your questions there are certainly some points of legal drafting this has been reviewed by town council but there are certainly some issues barbara that you may want to comment on the other but otherwise we would turn to george hall to take a look at some of the issues that you have raised  i would just comment on two of them one is the question of having an absolute standard with respect to if it's not on if it does not com would be should the language on that point be softer and i i personally am of the view that it it shouldn't be because what that language is doing is saying if you are going if you are not compliant then you will come for a special permit either from the zoning board of appeals or from the planning board and i think that we have some statistics jeffrey in the jeffrey has pulled together some very good statistics and the that i'd ask him to review for you now that says actually we can sit set these pretty tough  clear right now these are very clear bright lines and they do not we have to look at the question of whether that would give us an overwhelming case load and jeffrey is about to reveal the numbers that suggest that it won't i guess i would just respond a little to liz's point i agree with maintaining the absolute sort of increase of non conforming requires consideration i think that the clear line just eliminates ambiguity takes pressure off of negotiations that perhaps various town staff have to have as to whether something substantially non conforming or not  and the general noise level systems these days well the general noise levels have gone down but the general noise levels of h p a sea systems that has actually gone down they're actually more quiet now they have raised the sear limit which is how they they view efficiency of the units they've raised it used to be ten it's now thirteen i believe it's going up to the side step back is fifteen feet right and the house is fifteen feet from the boundary there's no place to put the condenser other than in the setback in your area on the screen it assumes that there is green grass between the house and the setback of the side that back but typically you're going to find that the setback is fully years between the boundary and the side of the house a lot of these houses in the thirty's were built that way if you're looking at the sides that back it's in that green area right it's that green area as that back right that's where you can put the air conditioning equipment i could go over there and point but i'm supposed to stand here yeah so he so typically what you what you would do when you put air conditioning equipment in is you want to as close to the house as you can get it well i would think if you only have fifteen feet of setback and then you hit the wall of the house most of the contractors are going to want to snug that condenser right up against the wall of the house so the pipes come down and directly into the condenser so it's going to be in your sat back and there's no other place to put it yeah i am not sure i mean i think that you're thinking that we i think i'm misunderstanding the question i think what we're saying is we're allowing you to put it against the house or allowing you to put the equipment close to the house but it says you can't put it in the he wanted so how i understood it i think he may have a point i'm not sure that's something for us to think about but so the pad that you can put the condensor on is going to be taking away so if you have a fifteen foot setback in the pad is three feet leader now twelve feet so you're attacking my head around here if i mean a typical parking space if you're thinking about a car going in there for instance and you need to get a vehicle for your driveway typical  avenue just south of can't get over there the pattern is driveway house set back driveway i was set back driveway has set back so if you're going to put it in a i mean the fed back is fully utilized for dimensional purposes between the boundary and the wall of the house on the side there's no green grass left over between the set back and the house but typically people run foundation plantings against the house anyway they don't really run green grass so i'm thinking the side is going to be green grass on one side to it's not the driveway outside yeah i would give us a let me give you a slightly did a different answer to your question let me give you a different answer to your question which is yes generally it's more detrimental to your neighbor if the side thoughts are very small the case that you've described it's more detrimental to your neighbor for you to put your h b a seanie c unit on the side then it would be for you to put it in your own backyard and as written this encourages even though it is that your contractor may not like it as well it may involve some additional cost but the idea is if you decide to do this your neighbor you should whatever inconvenience noise etc associated with it to a greater degree than your neighbor bears it so yes you will perhaps as it's written you may have to move this to the side the pipes don't going to be around the pipes run through the house down a wall if you're coming from the second story you have like an air handler upstairs down the wall you know so into the care condition nothing really goes i've never seen refrigeration lines run out of long run underground in my life anywhere i'm not aware of it so i look at that whole plane over there and i see condenses going if you look at the right side where it's green in this particular instance right i see them going along that whole line i see them going along that you know we turn the other way i see him going over there see if i see a bunch of different places where you can put condense equipment that fits within the did you want to comment steve pinkerton precinct seven i've been in and out of the energy efficiency business and dealing with residential air conditioning for thirty years and the solution in this case is that you would put the equipment the backyard and in our neighborhood which is got very most of the houses have eight foot setbacks going back to the old roads they're all non conforming nobody has air conditioning equipment a mechanic working on the sides because it's too close to the neighbor houses and it makes too much noise what everyone in our neighborhood has done for the most part is put them in the back yard they're going to back mine happens to be on my screen porch roof on pads it's very quiet and it's it's you know there's it's easy to get away from that as as a contractor it's not that difficult to bring the frustration lines out to the back side of the house they're going to have to come somewhere and putting in the back of the house is really not that big an issue know i think you're right every case is going to be different bob we're just giving you as many possibilities as we as you can possibly have so if you if it works better on the side and in one case it works better in the back another case it's really going to be if if it comes before our board and we have to show we're doing a cycling review and we're giving a special permit them we're going to kind of tell you where we think they should go anyway we're going to put them in the best possible place i think i think we're going to suggest  that we will indeed but with the with the current wording we will certainly look very hard find a place in the back yard if you have very very which we can't i do think that the other point that you raised about the situation where someone could buy two lots and combined them and they'll be very large structure that is conforming a potential loophole that we all need to consider a little bit more carefully because everything's defined right now is nonconforming so it can look to you jeffrey is how that will play out actually funny that question was actually asked and answered at the november a public discussion and i remember it because it i'm an economist by training and it's neat question where i should have gotten to the right answer first and i didn't my colleague mr de stefano got to the right answer first so i'm going to ask him to give it again argue i need to review your particularly brilliant your awesome on them would be up was just given the average price of a house right now down which is some around nine hundred thousand dollars and you're looking at one point eight million dollar land acquisition before you even get a home on it which i think would probably pushy close to three million dollars by the time you're done putting a house that big on a lot that size in an s r c neighborhood which i think would probably price you out of the neighborhood  so i'm not saying it could happen but i'm saying the likelihood of it happening is very unlikely  understand that i was just reading the words ok ok just reading the words i don't the polaski feels different but the the words read such that if you did buy too large and tore down both houses and they were no lot and so there's no review but that's fine because it's still controlling against city and the economics will control the masses right you've going from one house to two and then the economics of gemma's to be what you're saying is if two locks were combined and point is really when you read these amendments in the context of the entire zoning laws that you would agree  my name's pick callahan from precinct seven also in a member of the committee for responsible zoning and i want to thank the planning board for their presentation this evening and to all those who came out because i think we've been informed  quite nicely this evening with regard to the presentation some suggestions that have been made i think is going to be very very helpful there are two things that i just want to add it was a very cold snowy day i believe it was january a year ago when we walked the neighborhood to get a signature is for a petition and we were just overwhelmed those who were in the neighborhood are going from door to door at the  really tremendous outpouring of support for what we were beginning the process that we would be getting at that time to get signatures far a petition and it's wonderful to be here at this point in time and i just want to remind people that this is an article that's going to require a two thirds vote at town meeting and if you are in support of the article we encourage you to talk to other town meeting members to urge them to support it as well so i want to thank all of you this evening