Technical and Soft Skills In this video, we will be highlighting the importance of a skill section when creating your online portfolio and discussing what makes a skill relevant to include. There are two types of skill sets you'll want to consider for your portfolio. Hard and Soft Skills. Hard skills are teachable skills or abilities that can be quantified and are applicable to your performance in the workplace or in your specific field or industry. Soft skills are subjective interpersonal skills that convey how effectively you relate to and interact with other people. Both types of skills are valuable to include in your portfolio. Hard skills or technical skills are typically the ones you learn in the classroom through books or other training materials or on the job. Depending on your field, relevant technical skills could include specific machinery you're able to operate, computer programs or software you're familiar with, programming languages you know, your typing speed, proficiency in a foreign language, sales or point of sale systems, banking operations, etc. It may also make sense to group your hard skills into subcategories to be more specific and organized. For example, if you're applying to a programming position, you'll want to list the specific programming languages you know, and organizing them all under one heading will prevent the reader from having to search for what they're really looking for. Soft skills, on the other hand, are subjective skills that are much harder to measure. While they are different to hard skills, they are equally as important in the workplace. They are attributes and personality traits that impact interpersonal interactions and productivity. Some examples of valuable soft skills include creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence, problem-solving abilities, etc. Unlike with hard skills, it can be difficult to point to specific evidence that you possess a soft skill, so it can be a good idea to share examples of times you use these skills. This can be done by incorporating these skills into job descriptions, cover letters and job interviews. Listing your skills is important as it concisely communicates the abilities you have that can be valuable as an employee and as a human being. That being said, not every skill you possess needs to be included. Potential employers want to know why you're a strong candidate for the position, not everything you've learned over your entire professional and academic career. Make sure that each skill you list is purposeful, relevant, and not too general. Things like Microsoft Word, email, or web searching don't need to be included unless they're specifically listed on a job posting, as most employers have an expectation that everyone holds these basic skills in today's job market. The same goes for soft skills that are described too generally. For example, instead of just listing your skills as communication, creativity, and leadership, you can elaborate to provide specific examples of those skills. Listening or negotiation, critical thinking or artistic aptitude, and conflict resolution or project management. Take a look at relevant job postings and pick out some key words the employer is looking for, then elaborate on it to demonstrate what it looks like or how it relates to the industry. For example, effective communication skills could be defined as listening, empathizing, and understanding client needs. Being more specific with describing your skills shows potential employers that you have the skills the company is looking for, and will help get you hired. In the next video, we will prepare an education and certification section of the digital portfolio. We will learn how best to showcase both formal and informal education.


So I won't go into it, but there was three takeaways that were kind of popular ideas from That all the group that the feedback I received so I'm gonna run through those and each of them have to be kind of dealt with in different ways So the first thing is I'd thrown out the idea of using a subcommittee approach because it seemed like a couple of meetings ago that We were struggling with how you know, how we how we had Approach each chapter one at a time, but it's just out of necessity from time constraints It's kind of a surface level approach a lot of the time. So I was thinking like how do we Not bog down the entire planning commission and meet like every week or something like that But how do we how do we use you know, reason time resources and the staff resources we have But do more and so the idea was to have like a subcommittee type Approach that's used often, you know commissions like this And so I threw that out there and people gave a lot of feedback about that and everyone seemed to be in favor of it So I think we're going to do that and we're going to have to develop it out and flesh it out exactly how we go about taking the subcommittee approach going forward, but I'll share with you some of my thoughts about it. And then, but then I'm going to keep going With the other with the other takeaways of the big takeaways. So The big picture thing with the subcommittees is that the idea would be, you know, two or three people meet take a deep deeper dive on a chapter Topic outside of our regular meetings and then come back to the meetings with a deeper dive and deeper understanding of the area. And it would be a way for us to Put more of our, you know, fingerprints on what's going on and take deeper dive without, you know, using it all the time. Well, what we'd have to do is we're going to have to figure out, you know, what chapters are a priority because not every chapter would this be appropriate for We'll have to kind of flesh out, you know, what the expectations are for the subcommittee review I'm not picturing that this is going to be something that takes up staff and I think it's going to be important that we don't do something that takes up a bunch of staff, especially considering the furloughs and what Mike's office is going through right now. So, you know, this is this is going to require more work from, you know, the planning commission. So that's the general kind of things to think about for us and for us to flesh out going forward. And when I'm done talking here, I'd like to hear what your guys thoughts are about that. One part of this one open question about the subcommittees is going to be how we incorporate that with Whether the subcommittees are going to do any outreach themselves or we're going to tackle like any kind of public outreach separately from that. And so that kind of segues me into the second thing. And that was the big takeaway. Or the second big takeaway from the feedback I received was that a lot of people are interested in doing public getting information from the public getting doing outreach, however you want to put it getting feedback from the public, though, in the short term. And not wait, there seem to be a lot of people interested and I think that that's a good instinct to is that let's go ahead at this stage and get more public involvement. Now, another thing I'd like to hear from everyone else is how exactly how exactly you'd like to go about that would we like the subcommittees to go and do some outreach if they do is probably going to be outreach to the The kind of vested characters within the city as it is. I mean, it's not going to probably be a widespread broad outreach if the subcommittees are doing it. Or do we want to do as a planning commission figure out a way to do some broad city wide outreach. One idea could be like a survey with both open into questions and closed questions to sort of get it, you know, to have some close questions about, you know, where we are and what we think, and to try to get feedback about that and having open into questions where people can just tell us anything related to city planning that's of concern. You know, if we do the survey. Again, we'd have to be conscientious of staff time and we probably would have to have that be like a planning commission document not not ask Mike to do that. I think. So that's that's one thing that's one approach we could take. I like that because it gets feedback from people who just are not people who's part of their lifestyles to come into events or hearings. It's makes it easy on them and and I think that's the easiest way and I'm thinking paper to or we do a combo of paper and digital. And have the same survey both ways. But I do think for some people, I mean papers on where we're going to hear from them. Another another thing we could do with outreach possibly is have an event. And I know that there's been events and mobiliar in the past. I haven't been. Part of an event. It's just about public outreach. I don't think but I've heard that we've had them before and other cities have them. We have an event. There could be a lot of good things about an event. My concern going back when I was talking about the survey would be, are you going to get that? The best the kind of vested people who tend to show up with these things or not because I think when it comes to outreach right now, there's there's different ways of looking at it. There's a ways of looking at it like, you know, we're not going to have an event. We're not going to have an event. We're not going to have an event. I don't think a lot of people would be interested in that. Or not, because I think when it comes to outreach right now, there's, I said, there's different ways of looking at it. There's a ways of looking at it like. Is the planning commission, like, you know, I don't know how to put this, but like, I think it is, there's like a political version where, oh, well, we asked everyone if they had input and then there's the version where, no, I mean, we really want to know so that we are making important. decisions. I mean, and I'm not trying to make the first one sound cynical or anything, but I think that from the from the feedback that people want to really know like what our community is thinking and we so anyways, so that's something to think about the approaches. The third thing I'll touch on real quick is there were a few people who wanted us to kind of sketch out a long term plan for this. And so once we've made some decisions about outreach, you made some decisions about the subcommittees and once and I can get in touch with Mike about what's coming down, and then I'll, I'll put together an outline like this long term so that's something that I can do myself. So with that, those are the three big items. The subcommittees and the outreach stuff. What do you guys think. I opened the floor to anybody. Yeah. Yeah, I think the idea of the subcommittees is is a good one. And I think that'll add a lot more Jeff's. I'm interested to know what the timing would be like for the subcommittees with how much time they might have between getting the document from from Mike before we review it as a as a planning commission. And also would this be a volunteer volunteer kind of thing or are you going to want to assign us or you know how would that work. Yeah, my thoughts right now are people with volunteer and if we did two or three people per topic depending on what topics we choose. It may be we could get away with at least most people only having to do one, you know, and the one that they think's important, but that depends on as a group what we what we're choosing to prioritize what we think is like subcommittee worthy. And then to go back to the first. What was the first part of your question about the timing of it. Yeah, this would I mean, we've already we've already gone over some of these chapters that we've already gone over housing but I think housing is one that we should have a subcommittee on. So in that case we've already we've already done it. And so maybe one maybe we could do this for the chapters that the planning commission's already done a one over on I don't know. Well, yeah, I mean we could do both we could have an introduction for chapters we haven't looked at yet which I think would be helpful for the whole planning commission to look at but some chapters like housing and have been affected by covid so it makes sense to go over that one again. Yeah, I also think that the document that Mike sent out this past week from the Congress and has some really great practical solutions for housing. And I know that our housing chapter probably already has a lot of that in there but I'd like to I'd like to compare the two documents. I think I'd like to do housing before volunteering. Yeah, I would too. And there's and there's economic development I think is one that comes to mind as a subcommittee worthy. I don't know what else actually reviewed the list of what chapters. How many chapters have we done already, Mike. We did housing housing historic preservation. Economic development. Well that one's not done right. Well, I mean we've, we've got the version that we're working on to make comments on. The historic housing implementation economic development and energy are the ones that you have the ones that are that were almost ready before covid hit or natural resources transportation and utilities and facilities I have drafts for that aren't complete. So those would be the next ones you'd be getting a community services I started. Really wraps up almost all of the required chapters. Then we have optional ones that we've talked about adding in on arts and culture. Governance and public safety are ones that are not required under statute but we had planned on doing chapters for so if we continue to have we've got three that would still have to get started. So I think I mean for a time for, you know, time management purposes. I wasn't thinking we were going to get this hammered out. I just wanted to put it on people's minds to think about the subcommittees and what we could do with that. I mean, I think, you know, I've got enough feedback this point where I think people want to do it so we're going to plan to do this we're going to do this. I think we're in one of, you know, there's a few things we got to work out. So possibly we'll put it on the agenda for next time to hammer out some things. Maybe I'll pitch a version of this and then we can modify it as the group sees fit. One thing about timing. Bart touched on the second ago about like the timing of how things will work out. I think we'll want to figure out what we want to do with outreach before we decided to pursue the subcommittee thing anyway. So maybe we can segue into talking about that for a minute. Everybody. I mean, okay, I'll start with this survey. Who likes the idea of a survey? Can you kind of see a hands if you think that that's could be worthwhile. Yeah. Okay. Done well. I don't like a survey for the sake of a survey. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head of my concern, which is I'm wary of a survey approach only because crafting a survey for it to be effective is really difficult to do it's it's it's really you got to be really careful about it and I worry about not doing a good enough survey to get the kind of information that you really want. Would you see this survey going out by chapter or for the entire document. I mean at this early stage I'm thinking that you know for some closed into questions we would recognize, you know what were the what we want feedback the most on and ask about those and this would be across all the chapters we have so far. And then the open ended stuff I really mean to leave it open ended to let people tell us what's on their minds, so that we're not directing them and maybe you know I'm trying to think about yeah qualitative data and how to do it well. Maybe you put the open ended up front so that you're not, you know, guiding people's thinking at first. People care about documents or chapters. I think we have to ask them, you know, what do they like about our community and if they could change some things. What would that be. Well, yeah, I just suspect that they're going to their thinking would be directed by various topics whether it be energy or transportation or any of those particular things but it certainly makes more sense to do it as a single. Outreach I think we're going to have to be careful to if we're going to be basically doing staffing this and because there's no capacity in Mike's office. So how are we going to distribute it because as you Kirby you and john both know young there's there's always the people who say that they didn't, they weren't asked. They didn't get the information so we have to just be really broad based and how we distribute it. Well, one concern I had about the survey was the distribution like I was saying before I mean trying to think it through. I mean we could do something like front porch forum which would be free and have links and do some free things but I think having a paper version is a way to reach a certain audience, which is going to have costs and I want to ask Mike if you what his thoughts were about the associated costs with sending out a paper survey. We're not going to have a lot of resources we've got most of our budget down on things so like our advertising budget in our mailing budget both are pretty trimmed down quite a bit. So I don't know if we'll have that. You know one options we can talk about maybe if we want to after we have the hearing we can kind of jump back into it if we've got a little bit more time is the municipal planning grant is coming out so we can kind of look at also look at this in two windows. One is what do we want to do in the window from now to December with us and look at a separate window which is, you know, we can have a consultant on board for January for 2021. And that can provide us a different set of skills and a different, you know, window of opportunities to go through and say, you know, we're going to do X amount of work now and then and then we can do surveys. You know, could we can build that into that person's work. You know what are we doing with that person's work. You know, do we want to have that person focus on handling the outreach for us and handling the surveys and handling all those pieces. Because we're going to probably need to be COVID still going to be going on we're probably going to be somebody with skills I don't have which is the public outreach skills. How are we going to reach out to the public when the public can't come to a public meeting and how do we reach out to the public when the public is meeting virtually. You know, these are going to be going to probably take some skills from people who are doing things different. You know, and again as I said we can talk a little bit more about what we want a consultant to do for us, because we also have some needs. If we're going to build this online. And if we're going to build this in the Arc GIS system for the for the hub, we're going to need somebody who's who's really kind of got some skills doing that. And do we want to have somebody a contract that does that so I think I think that's not necessarily two separate things because a lot of online outreach can be done through the hub. And I think we just have to have somebody who comes in who kind of understands all the pieces and parts that can really weave that into a online presence and, you know, a not online presence so we can get get both both sets but I think we can talk more about what we can do kind of short term and long term. I don't know if we want to kind of get the, some of the pieces done on the on the hearing and kind of get that behind us and see what time we have left to kind of talk a little bit more. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. I mean we can move on. I mean we can come back to this this topic a little bit more. But one thing I want to want to learn from everybody right now, if I can it's just, I mean there was a sense of wanting to do some outreach now might was just mentioning some options with the grant later, which we can do both of course and we probably will. We need to do something now. And because people are, you know, uncomfortable and we're working on the city plan because they feel like we're not getting sufficient feedback now. How, what are your opinions on how that should look like. In the short term. Can we can ask a question. When you say that there are members that are concerned that we're not getting sufficient feedback now. What are the feedback in terms of what, like just, what, what are we missing like feedback on sort of the nuts and bolts priorities that we've been reviewing in the various chapter outlines, or just sort of like thematic goals. You know, for the planets in generally. People vocalize in different ways or, or described in different ways. I mean, it's a general disconnect is what you know where, where the community is and where, where we are and they want to just want to touch base to make sure that we're kind of in step with the general community. Does that answer your question. I think so. I mean, just the general feeling, you know. Yeah. We are going to have to narrow down if we did a survey that she's with a question they're going to be in like where we've had to specifically figure out like where we're uncomfortable. And what we want to know about. Yeah, I'm just thinking, I mean, I think we can revisit this later on in the meeting. I'm just trying to chew it on this a little bit. I, it just seems to me that we've got a bunch of outlines for chapters sort of fleshed out right now we're going to have another couple of chapters we're going to get done fairly soon. We have most of those in place before we really drill down, put pen to paper and start drafting things in these subcommittees seems like that might be the once we get all those done that seems like a logical point to sort of put those outlines out there is sort of a framework for people to look at and provide feedback on whatever they want really I didn't even think we would necessarily need a survey to go along with it because there would be sort of guide posts and those outlines that we would put out there. You know, and we can. And the subcommittees can take those comments into consideration if they affect you know the certain chapters that you subcommittees dealing with but I feel like you want to give the public some structure around which to provide comments and I think throwing out those sort of chapter outlines is a good way to do that. Yeah, I mean I, I heard both points of view, you know, through the comments there was a point of view that you just that you just were talking about and then the flip side of that is wanting to get some general feedback from people where it's not based on what, you know, the way that we put it in to get more, you know, abstract I guess you could say, but anyways yeah there's there's no there's no reason to like debate that or anything though. Okay. Does anybody else have anything Marcel did you have anything to say about that point we move on for now. I think it's if we get a circle back I might have more about it. Okay. See everybody think about everyone think about that. And we'll put it on the agenda for later to hammer out some of these concepts. Well, with that we can move on on the agenda and we move to our general business where if there's any comments from the public about something on the agenda. Now would be the time not seeing that. There's anyone here from the public that who's not on the agenda. So there are no, there's no general business comments we can move on to the minutes. Everyone to take a look at the minutes that were sent around from July 13. I have a question about the first paragraph after public hearing on zoning changes. First sentence design review district boundary changes and changes to design review rules might review map regarding changes to the zoning boundaries as previously discussed to that. Did that happen to do we talk about zoning or do we talk about the design review. Design review boundaries what I should say yeah. About the zoning was later. So change zoning to design review. Yeah. Thanks. Okay. I have a couple of things under in the last paragraph on the first page. It talks about Brooke. I assume was broke dingle dine. We identify her as the attorney for Jim Barrett, because nowhere in here have we determined you know designated who she is. Can do that. Then the second thing I had was on the boat. The straw vote. I know that must have been really confusing on the recording in terms of what we actually voted on. My impression on what we voted on was that we voted between splitting the property and or changing. Changing river. The river district to continue to use a condition to have a conditional use for the storage units is that correct. That is what we voted on wasn't it. The next paragraph. That was two competing visions. One was conditional use the other was splitting the personal right. That's not what it says in our, in our minutes. In the paragraph above the actual vote. Right. So if then the next paragraph said that the straw vote was add conditional use to the river front. I see that. I see that. Okay. So in the next paragraph, it could say the conditional use or splitting the property came up for a straw vote. I think we had agreed on splitting the property. And the question was. Whether we expand Eastern Gateway or not. We agreed on was either the two proposals that were up for consideration were provide conditional use for. Storage units on the parcel. Or in the, in the zoning district or split the parcel and have one side be Eastern Gateway. The other one is the river front. Right. Yeah. So the paragraph above is correct. The choice. Discuss that paragraph is correct. Right. But the second paragraph. This characterizes bar proposal. It says an expansion of Eastern Gateway, which should be splitting the parcel. As opposed to expansive Eastern Gateway. Yeah, it's both split and expand in the same time. Right. You could say split and expand. So I'll put, I'll do that. If you guys are okay, I can use quotations, but conditional use in quotes and then put split and expand. Of Eastern Gateway and quotes. Yeah. The first paragraph there. I mean, yeah, as long as you make it clear that. Because saying conditional use to the river front isn't quite accurate because we were talking about changing just that neighborhood. Not the entire river front. Oh, it's true. No, we, we did, we did the proposal was to extend conditional use to the entire river front. Because the thought was. That was just the route to. It was a route to. Wasn't it? Yeah, the route to neighborhood is part of the river fund district, but it's not the only neighborhood. Sorry, how far does your friend go? Aaron, it's a big part. The route to is a big part of this. All right. My apologies. You know, one thing that would make that second paragraph easier. It would be if it was. If there was a colon after the choices discussed. Because there are a number of different choices. And they tend to sort of run it together. So. I don't know. I don't know. You may actually think they're one, two, three, four. There are four different choices. Discussed. You see what I mean, Mike. Oh, so you want to see, would rather see colons between all those. Leave it as it is colon change. Or just at least a colon to identify that we have a list here. And that list has four different options. Yeah. Four. Four different options. Okay. After the word colon to leave it as it is. Yeah. Eastern gateway. Add conditionally used to the root to neighborhood. Or split the property by the railroad tracks into riverfront. Right. Maybe it's a semi colon. Well, it'd be the colon after were. Oh, right. I would probably add semi-colons after each one of those. And I can do that. Yeah. Yeah. So. Just to, just to make it clear that we were looking at a number of different choices. Yeah. And then two of them came up to vote. One was the condition. Right. Option. And the split. Expand Eastern gateway. Option came up for straw votes. And each one went with three, three votes. So conditional use had a vote of three. And then split and expand had a vote of three. Yes. Okay. Thanks. I had sent out a, an email this week that where I thought I. Gave a summary of that. Yeah, I think so. That helps. Okay. Any more changes for minutes. We all set. Motion as amended. Okay. Okay. All in favor of changing them. Did we get a motion in a second? No, I'm asking for motion. On the amendments or on the entire. Minutes. Minutes as amended. I'll second. Okay. Okay. So Aaron. Made a motion on the, to approve the minutes as amended. And we have a second from Barb. Those in favor of approving the minutes as amended. Okay. Okay. Okay. Opposed. Okay. Then it's approved as amended. Moving along. Okay. The public hearing on zoning changes. This is. Related to the topics we were just discussing. From last week. Where we had hearing last week. And the city council. We had a variety of things. Which was the city council. The city council, the city council. We had some revoculations. And that was all that business was, was finished during the hearing. And we had a vote and we passed that on the city council. But we had a table. This other issue that came up, which was completely different. Which is related to zoning. You know, possible changes to the zoning around Pioneer street. The short version of the background here is that. Um, storage unit facilities, uh, on the, uh, on the parcel there next to Pioneer street, uh, this was a, there's already some, uh, units there, uh, but since the new zoning that took place a couple years ago, um, that use is no longer allowed. And, uh, so we were, we've kind of been confronted with, uh, you know, was this intentional to make this use that's already there or something that's not allowed anymore? Um, what can we do to, um, to, uh, reconsider whether storage units are appropriate here and, and, and what kind of solution is the best fit? We talked about trying to do something that's kind of surgical so that we're not opening up the door to all kinds of other uses at the same time. So we have two competing, uh, proposal that we talked about last time and each of them had three votes out of four members. We had four members present, uh, in voting and no, is that right? No, no, we have, we have five, five, five. So yeah, yeah, we had, we had five members, Stephanie and John weren't there, uh, last week, uh, or last, last meeting rather, uh, and so the, so the, you know, each, each proposal had the support of three votes. So not a core, I'm not, or not a, you know, non-majority out of the seven, uh, members. So, uh, so that's where we were. Um, of course there's aren't early two options. We could come up with something different tonight or we could follow, uh, what was discussed last time. And in a nutshell, just like you were talking about the minutes, the two, uh, proposals, um, are this. One of them is to possibly divide, uh, the, the, uh, zoning district there or the, um, the two, well divide the two parcels there and, and separate how they're zoned, having, uh, and using the railroad track that's present through the two parcels, um, as a dividing line and have the side that's nearest to route two, nearest to the road of the Eastern gateway. And then the other side of the tracks, this towards the river would, would stay as it is that accurate. Yes. So that's one idea. Um, and the second idea was to, uh, keep things as they are, but include, uh, a note in the zoning regulations that in this neighborhood only, uh, that storage units would be allowed, uh, in the riverfront districts, because that's the zoning district that the current zoning district that these parcels are in, um, the storage units would be allowed, but not, not across the entire district, just in this one neighborhood. More, more, more specifically, it would be allowed as a conditional use. That's right. That it would be allowed as a conditional use. Uh, what's up, Barb? I'm, I'm looking back at the chart and I realized I didn't have the use chart in front of me last time. And I'm still confused because warehouse or storage is currently conditional in riverfront. Um, it's the mini warehouse that is not. Yeah. Why couldn't they argue that it was a storage building? It's a different use. I mean, in the definitions, defined, um, in what way, what's the definition that excludes many storage, um, self storage units from being warehouse or storage? I think it's just, it's a part of the definition in the definition section of the zoning, which I'd have to go and pull back. So it looks, it would come under, what am I looking for? May warehouse? I could jump in. And I don't have the ordinance in front of me, but I recall that there's a specific definition for warehouse that says it does not include many warehouses and then there's a mini warehouse definition. I'm not finding a mini warehouse definition, but maybe it's under warehouses. Um, but it defines two, but that particular conditional use is where warehouse or storage. So why is this not a storage and not a mini warehouse? So the mini warehouse definition, mini warehouse means a site structure, a part of a structure intended to provide individual storage spaces for lease to either commercial or wholesale customers for storage of business goods or to the general public for storage of households, goods commonly called self storage facilities. And that's what a mini warehouse is, but instead we're allowing and conditionally allowing site structure or part of a structure intended for storage and distribution uses. I guess I'm just wondering what. Revisiting the rationale behind that. Usually those larger warehousing is generally a part of another use. So for example, there's warehousing that is a part of Caledonia Spirits. Within the Caledonia Spirits complex is a portion is a use for warehousing. And they could, that could be warehouse or storage. Warehouse or storage, but it's generally for what's going on, on site as opposed to being available for the public. I see. So I've got some other, another piece to add. I got an email from Dan Armstrong and Dan is the owner or one of the owners of the late Vermont laser wash. And so he wanted to say that as for my thoughts, I really like the idea of changing the zoning to allow for future expansion or changes of use to our building. We have been considering extending a portion of our building, a small amount to allow for better customer experience and for our customers are always asking for vacuums. So maybe someday would be great to change the building to allow that or even to add some space for interior detailing. After COVID struck, we decided not to pursue those options while we all just try to stay in business through these crazy times. It would certainly be a bummer not to have the ability to make those changes. So thanks for the information. He was going to try to make the meeting, but apparently he hasn't. So I guess the factor that that would factor in is that simply amending the warehouse would not, of course, there's the warehousing is only one nonconformity. We'd also identified the fact that the car wash itself is a nonconformity. So fixing, fixing the use table for one wouldn't necessarily fix the car wash. I'll just put that out as information and he wanted to have his thoughts included here. Okay, that's good to know. If we, if we, if we did the, if we, if we did the split the particle approach, with that, with that effect with the, I guess my question is, would the car wash fall into an entire zone or would that parcel be split? That would be entirely in the zone. It would be entirely in Eastern Gateway. Yes. So, so that everyone understands that the, the split the parcel approach seems like it would make the car wash owner happy. The other proposal that we've, that we've considered would either not, you know, not address the issue that we just heard about, or we would need to alter it so that it would, so that it would address it. And I don't know specifically what we'd exactly have to do. I don't know if it's as simple as also noting that car washes are allowed or we'd have to do something more than that defer to Mike on that. Obviously. But something. Yeah, it would just be, it would be making two changes to the use table if you wanted to address both through the first option. Is that how you think we should do it through the youth table and not just a note? Well, be a note in the youth table. Okay. Go ahead, Barb. Yeah, was there another issue too that if we, if we made the many warehouse conditional use in, in its existing zone in the riverfront, that there would be other requirements that came into play for, for Mr. Barrett? Yes, it would be more challenging, it would be more challenging for Mr. Barrett under riverfront because there's other requirements, dimensional requirements such as that the height requirement, there's a minimum height requirement in riverfront that does not exist in Eastern Gateway. So it's, it would probably be preferential for them to be in the Eastern Gateway as opposed to the riverfront. And Eastern Gateway would potentially take care of the car wash. And Eastern Gateway would take care of the car wash. So about those height requirements, Mike, what's your opinion on, on the need for, for height requirements that are, that are that tall? So the, the, we did have conversations about that when we were developing the zoning and there were more minimum height requirements in other districts that were eventually removed, but they, they remained in riverfront. And a lot of it has to do with trying to build, it's trying to build kind of the, the form, we don't have form-based codes, but it's really looking at the form of what's going on. We want to build not just single story buildings. We don't want somebody to either take a vacant lot or to tear down a building and then replace it with a single story building. We want to see multi-story for a number of just density issues. You add more density. It adds more. I mean, if you get into the grand list and look at it from an economic standpoint, you just build a lot more value into structures when they're multi-story. You're going to generally see multi-use. You know, a lot of ours have commercial or office on the first floor. It's residential on the upper floors, or if they're multi, if they're multi-family, you're just going to make a better use of a limited amount of landscape. And when you're trying to be walkable to the downtown, you really want to get that third dimension. You don't want to just start building single story. You really want to build that multi-story structures, build that density in, build that walkable downtown. And it's just a key design feature that you find. If you look at good walkable communities, one of the first things you're going to find is they are multi-story structures. And because Riverfront was meant to be pedestrian-oriented, it follows that we wanted to continue that, because most of, if you look at a lot of Berry Street and even Stonecutters Way, they're all multi-story. And the idea was just to continue that. And that, of course, then when we get up here, this also, these two properties were also zoned for that, even though they actually are not currently in that design. They're all single-story structures. Thanks. Well, John, you're new to this discussion. I mean, do you, I'm not trying to put you in the spot or anything, but what are your thoughts right now? I mean, it seems like it just makes sense to put these properties into Eastern Gateway. Seems like they are a better fit for that district. I've been looking specifically at the existing uses on that side of the road. I don't ever see that side of the road becoming, you know, a building like an urban facade where it's a place where people are going to be walking, right? If you're walking, you're coming from the other side of the street and you're walking there or you're coming from pioneer and your, it's just for that specific area, you know, not that there's a huge difference between the two districts, but if the options are put one as a conditional use in this other district or, you know, move this one parcel that already is, seems to be mostly already made up of this use, why don't we just flip it over there? That's my initial take. Yeah. So, you know, each of these approaches had pros and cons that we discussed last time. I mean, the big con with changing anything to Eastern Gateway is that there's a lot of stuff that could be put in in the long term. Is that something that you, like, what degree of concern would you have with that that, you know, we could end up getting an industrial use or a car dealership or something? Well, I'm looking at all of those, I think they're mostly all conditional uses anyway. So, you know, I would trust in our review process and I am not overly concerned for that specific parcel. It's next to a car wash. You know, what's up, Barb? No, I was just wondering if, John, if you understood the other discussion about splitting this particular parcel because it's split already by the railroad right away. It's really hard to tell that from the map, but the car wash and the other uses that are adjacent to Route 2 are one side of that railroad right away. The self-storage units that are right along the river, which is prime location for past for future development is residential. Those are on the other side of the railroad track. So that was why we talked about splitting it potentially into Eastern Gateway and leaving the other portion as riverfront. So Mr. Barrett owns both sides of the railroad tracks. He owns the entire, other than the laser wash, he owns all of the property from Pioneer Street out to the old Grossman's lot and route to that whole area. So it includes a number of businesses. Some of them are self-store. There's the medical marijuana dispensary building. There's the insurance agent and there's the bear naked growler. So all of those are on that same parcel. And so the initial proposal was to shift all of those to Eastern Gateway, but the planning commission felt that just the areas south of the railroad right of way that go to basically from the railroad right away to Route 2 to Pioneer Street would be included. And the other part would remain in riverfront. Does that make sense to you? You're muted. So I was gonna say, I understand it was a little unclear to me looking at, I've got like three maps up on the screen here that I'm trying to make sense of, but that was helpful to understand it. So like that sliver north of the railway would be proposed to be to stay as riverside. Yes. If you want a response from Mr. Barrett. Yes, please. That'd be great. Sure. What's the question? Well, what they're asking is, so in terms of splitting the parcel with the railroad tracks in the middle and making Eastern Gateway just the area that's south of the railroad tracks. So your parcel would be split so that Eastern Gateway would be extended only for the area that's along the road between the road and the railroad tracks. Yes. Right, right. So your position is that would work and the total parcel, there are nine out of 12 buildings that have been made non-compliant. That's how many of the storage buildings there are on the lot. And the car wash, of course, has been made in non-compliance. So either of the entire parcel and the car wash, we were requesting that it be extended so that Eastern Gateway would cover the whole property and the car wash or just that strip along the road between the road and the railroad then would also work for both properties as well. Right, yeah, thank you. Okay, well, for time purposes, I mean, I think everyone but John has had a time, has had opportunity to discuss this prior to this. So just, can I get a straw poll? I mean, John spoke in favor of splitting the parcel. I'm not gonna go into all the language but splitting the parcel using the railway. So can I get some indication of who might be willing to vote for an amendment along those lines? I think we could put the whole, probably put the whole thing in, but. John, you said put the whole thing into Eastern Gateway? Yeah, I don't think, I've been going through the list of uses here. I wouldn't have, I think an objection to that. I think our concern that was voice, sorry, Kirby, can I? Can I? Yeah, please. Thanks, the concern from last week or a couple of weeks ago was that in zoning, in the zoning changes, I have to assume that they made that intentionally, the change intentionally. It's also my assumption that the existing uses aren't hindered by being out of compliance with the zoning now, like they can continue to do the things they're doing and make changes or upgrades or maintenance or whatever, that please correct me if I'm wrong on that, but I think they're fine to continue as is, but looking forward, this place is more connected to the downtown of Montpelier than the rest of Eastern Gateway. There is a natural break there where the forest comes down. It feels very separate. There's been infrastructure development to create more walkability out that direction. And so bringing Eastern Gateway in further, I think sort of goes against what I assume the intent of changing that zoning was at the time, which was to like if Montpelier wants housing and more affordable housing and stuff closer in a downtown, that's our zone to do that in. And if we just keep letting Eastern Gateway come in, it's potentially more likely that it will remain more industrial uses and not housing, but that's the zone. I mean like savings faster is directly across the street. So if that's ever going to be housing, we're not talking far away here. We're in, it would be kind of neighborhood-ish, or it could be. So I think that was the concern. That's still where I'm at. Like I'm having a hard time feeling like, having a hard time wanting to put it all in Eastern Gateway and not worrying about it, because it does to me feel like there was some intent or I assume, I have to assume there was some intent to give us a better chance of creating walkability, creating housing in that area. And if I could just dovetail with what Marcella just said, but my thinking's fairly in line with that. And in fact, I'd go even a little further. I just look at this as there was a deliberative process that went on to make these zoning changes. Those changes were contemplated and approved by the city council. I think that there are going to be some changes in terms of the outlay of the city. You're already starting to see it with the introduction of the distillery and sort of things moving out to the East. And I would give you guys so far as you just say, I don't think that splitting the parcel makes any sense. I don't know of another zoning area where we split specific parcels to make these sorts of determinations and more to the point is if, and I mean, this is a huge assumption, and I don't want to admit that, but if the railroad abandons that line that goes through there, which I think is not an unreasonable assumption at this point, I think that fundamentally changes what the potential uses of that land is going forward. And splitting the parcel, I think still opens the door for uses between the railroad right away and route two, that I think the city council contemplated and decided that they didn't want. So I think the way to thread the needle is to make it a conditional use. There are some guardrails that are put in place in terms of what can happen at the site. But if Mr. Mayor wants to put in storage units there, he's able to do that to the conditional use sort of process. So Erin, can I, I just need to be clear. Are you saying the conditional use and leave it in riverfront, the entire parcel, right? Yeah, that's my suggestion. Okay, all right. I just wanted to make sure I understood. Sure. May I just respond with a couple of points to the two folks that just spoke? Go ahead. I understand the future, the desire to alter development in the future. But this is a property that, I mean, we have to also talk about reality. Now, when you sit, when, yes, this went through a deliberative process, but you know what? It has worked to the disadvantage of my clients. It also was problematic over in the Bailey Avenue section. And you can always say, yeah, we're not going to tweak our zoning because we went through a deliberative process. But then when you're confronted with unintended consequences perhaps, and certainly we have 13 buildings on this piece of land, 10 of them because of what just happened in zoning made the 10 of them non-compliant. And the multi-millions of dollars that have been invested in developing this property since 1970, 50 years ago, and when 80,000 gallon tanks were removed from the property, all at the expense of the Barrett family. They're a business that's been in business for over 100 years in Montpelier. And so the point that we want to make is other than just making buildings non-compliant that will remain there for many, many decades into the future is kind of an absurdity to suggest just because you've changed the zoning. The only thing you're going to prevent is the Barrett's finishing and placing their last building on the property that was developed in phases. If it were Act 250, we probably could sail through on a plan implemented in stages. So all we're trying to do, I mean these have been beautifully kept, very great businesses, people around who are contractors, accounting offices, lawyers, they come daily to pick up files from these many warehouse units. And I would also mention that what Barbara pointed out about the fact that in Riverfront, you have a conditional use for warehouse or storage that doesn't have a requirement that it be attached to some other business is rather curious. On a deliberative process, why in the world would you put a more intense, big warehouse as a conditional use in Riverfront? If you're trying to create pedestrian friendly properties and all of that, you're not going to allow the mini storage units that have been there for many years. So we don't have any problems splitting the property if that's preferable. Whatever happens with the railroad happens with the railroad. And I have seen many situations over my 25 years doing zoning cases where a property fell in more than one district. In fact, zoning ordinances talk about and Title 24 talks about what to do in those instances. So we just, it would be too bad if on the notion that we want to change things and don't want to extend this, it's really just a name in many respects. The property is already developed. This isn't going to change anything in the next 50 years. And we would just like for these businesses to continue to be able to operate. There's one last expansion that the parents were trying to deal with and have they known that the zoning process was going on, they would have participated to say, hey, what do you mean you're making my property riverside riverfront and I will be in non-compliance. So we're just looking for some help in the most minimal way in terms of impacts on anyone else. But we think we should be treated like the Bailey Avenue area. We don't understand why this is being seen as a deliberate process. And yet unintended consequences or mistakes or changes can be made elsewhere because that's illogical and inconsistent. So we're just hoping that this can be resolved one way or the other. And we would like laser wash to also be treated fairly. I don't know what you do with many storage buildings to make them look like they have two stories unless you kind of build an old West facade or something to try to accommodate that requirement. And there is a building, at least one building on the property that is more than one story and that's the largest building, which is the trading posts. That is a two-story building. All right, point of clarification to make it ask. We're only talking about the part east of the bridge, right? Yeah, do you have the map that Mike sent out for this meeting? It was with the agenda. Yeah, I've got that map and several others and that's what my understanding of it is, but it also only has parcel lines on it. So there's this, the lattice design on there that shows exactly what we're talking, like what's under consideration. You want me to use the, to share my screen and? Yeah, no, I've got it. I understand it. I just wanted to make sure I understood it was clear. Yeah. Well, okay, so for purposes of moving things forward, so it sounds like I'm not hearing that we have some majority. Well, where was? With the parcel approach. Because it's- Where was Marcel, I thought Barb's, Barb was for Split in Eastern Gateway. You were for Split in Eastern Gateway. John, I thought was thinking all of them, but Split in Eastern Gateway would be okay. And if Marcel is okay. Yeah, I guess, I mean, I don't love it, but I could do Split in Eastern Gateway at least allows for some potential of housing in that area. I mean, yeah. Yeah, Marcel to be clear. What do you think of the other approach, which is to allow storage units in the neighborhood, but nothing, but to not, it's in Eastern Gateway. Yeah. I mean, I kind of find that six of one, half a dozen of another would be conditional use. So housing is like an option in Eastern Gateway, but like I feel like that's less likely and conditional use. So that means that it's an option to have storage units in the city, which is probably less likely, but not a great option because, I mean, mini storage is a vehicle, for the most part, a vehicle enterprise, based enterprise. So I feel like it's, I don't know, just kind of, six of one, I guess. You seem sort of the same to me. I mean, I prefer to try to solve this without expanding Eastern Gateway. I mean, my biggest concern is to extend industrial, allow, even though they're permitted uses and there's a review process. I mean, right now, I don't know. So I don't like extending Eastern Gateway. I'd like to do something more surgical, but I'll go either way though. I'll go anything short of extending Eastern Gateway to the entire parcel. I know it. This is kind of how I feel too. Like I understood John's point that, I mean, or at least I, after listening to John, my reflection is that, yes, maybe keeping a sliver on the river side of riverfront is, you know, symbolic. And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. But it doesn't make me feel a little bit better about not extending Eastern Gateway through it for the entire parcel. But no. Kirby? Yeah. May I make a motion? Yeah, if you think you have something that everyone would be supportive of. I move the planning commission to approve a change to the parcel that would split the parcel, have the land between the railroad track to route two, have Eastern Gateway be extended to that area and have the land north of the railroad right away remain in river side. Okay. Seconded, but I was on mute. Okay, so we have a second from John. Can we say it again real, just slowly? I move that we change the zoning in the parcel along these lines. The area from the railroad right away to route two, in other words, the southern part of the parcel, Eastern Gateway will extend to that area. That would include the car wash and that would include everything south of the railroad right away. Every north of the railroad right away to the river front would remain as currently zone. Okay, thank you. And yeah. Okay, so we have that made a second from John. So getting into the notes and bolts of the procedure of it and I'm sorry that my skill here is a little lacking but there is a discussion before we go to vote, right, Mike? You're muted, Mike. Yes, if you need another discussion, you can take it or you can move to vote. It's up to you. But before we move to vote, I just want to make sure we have vying resolutions here. So we only have one motion on the floor? We only have one motion on the floor. So, okay, this is the last chance for anyone to say that they strongly prefer some other approach before we vote. Is there anybody want to say that? Okay, is anybody want to discuss anything before we vote? Okay, so those in favor of the Aaron's motion say aye. Aye. Aye. So, any opposed? Okay. What? Aaron voted nay. I'm voting nay. Oh, okay, so you were, okay, that was misleading. You were putting that forward just for the sake of moving things along. Right. Fine, all right. So it's four to one. It did pass then. And that's our resolution of this. So thank you, Aaron, for that. So I think technically what we would just need now is the motion to send this to city council for consideration. I'll vote for that. Can we send to city council with like an explanation of the discussion or do we just send the one liner? How does that usually work? We can send it with whatever you'd like. Send it with Mike. It will go with me. If there's anything you want included in that, either you guys are welcome to have somebody go to the meeting, which as Kirby knows, he went to a number of city council public hearings to kind of represent the views or opinions. Or I will do my best to reflect what your thoughts were. Or you can write it down and send it to me and I'll be happy to read it into the record for them. Is it going to be the next city council meeting that this goes to? It will be on the, it has been scheduled for the 12th of August. That will be an introductory meeting. The public hearing because there's need to time period, you need to have 15 days warning in the newspaper for the time period to be official. I think there's a second meeting in August on the 26th. Yes, I think it's 12th and 26th. So the 26th would be the hearing. And so if it passes, I'll warn it for the 26th and it only needs one hearing. So it could be passed that night as presented or it could take multiple nights. As you know, we did 22 of them on the zoning in 2017. Okay, well, I can go and just be on standby on the August 12th meeting and I'm fine with doing that. Or Marcella, if you prefer, I mean we could write something up and agree on it together and send that as well. Yeah, okay. I'll take advice on that either way. Okay, well, the simplest thing is I could just go and be like, I imagine playing out, I'll just say that I'm there to describe the process if they'd like to hear it. And Mike would give his explanation first. Is that good enough? Yeah, yeah, if you're willing, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Okay, I'll do that. Thanks. Yeah, and you can also feel free to come. Okay. And represent. Okay, well, it looks like we have a resolution there. It looks like, so Brooke and Mr. Barrett, do you understand the vote and the next steps and everything? We do. Thank you very much for all the time that you folks have devoted to this. It's really appreciate all of your efforts and all of your thoughts. So thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Okay. I still need the motion to forward to city council for consideration. Move to Florida city council for consideration. I'll second. Okay. We have a... I forgot the standard motion. Okay. All those in favor of forwarding to city council for recommendation, say aye. Aye. Aye. Can you post? Okay. So we'll send that proposal to city council as a four to one vote. Okay. Next on the agenda, I can find what is a review of the draft energy plan implementation strategy. Let's get 40 minutes for that. Do we have those documents, Mike? Yeah, they were sent last time and they were sent this time as well. I can quickly resend them. No, I found it here. Okay. Okay. And so this is the implementation strategy for the energy plan. Would you describe to us like what this document's about? So this one is really much more complex than some of the other ones. So really groups into three groups of three. So you actually have nine aspirations and this really goes to how much the city's net zero 2030 and 2050, how much they kind of really had to break it into pieces. The first three aspirations are really looking at the functions of city government and how do we make us net zero for electricity? How do we make us net zero for transportation? And how do we make us net zero with respect to heating and the thermal goals that we have? So we've got kind of those three. And this kind of runs through it. So you've got electricity, transportation and heating as kind of three pods. And then we've got city government. And how did they break that up? Let me see. Yeah, actually they eventually originally had residential and commercial. And I guess they merged the residential and commercial. So they got it down to six. So you had the three for what the government would do because our strategies for how we change what we do as a government are different and the strategies we're going to need to get the public to be net zero with respect to electricity and home heating and transportation. So it's really broken into those six boxes. And they've had a lot of detailed work on what they had for goals. And a lot of this kind of came back to starting to basically put pen to paper and start to get them to answer the question of how. So they've had a lot of discussions over the years on what they wanted to see. And in some cases they had some strategies on how, but this was really starting to push down and really start to say, okay, if we're going to have net zero, if city halls can be net zero, is that going to take? We really had a lot more conversation about the specific strategies. And most of the ones for the municipal government were really looking at the capital improvement plan and those types of programs. And then we had a much longer discussion about, okay, how is it we're going to get to net zero for the public, for those other three? Let's say the private development for home heating. How are we going to get people to insulate their homes? How are we going to get people to switch from oil furnaces to wood pellets or to air source heat pumps? We can't just go and hope that they're going to do it. We really have to start talking about programs and tax incentives. And do we want to change our building codes? Do we want to adopt building codes that will require all new construction to be net zero or to meet a certain insulation standard? Because right now we can't require people to do that. As we pointed out, we know one person who, you know, just is very much against these ideas and in fact installed a coal furnace just to kind of thumb their nose at the systems. And, you know, you start asking the question, well, what do you do in those instances if we want to be net zero, you know, having people run around installing coal stoves is, and brand new ones is not going to be, you know, constructive. We have to find ways to go and say, no, that's actually not. So we may need to have regulations. So a lot of this kind of comes out of a lot of those really hard discussions. They spent a lot of time trying to come up with benchmarks. I didn't spend a lot of time working with the benchmarks and some of them you'll still notice are in yellow because they really never quite nailed them down. But we had enough to get the strategies and to start framing out these discussions of, how are we going to get electric cars? How are we going to get transportation? So that's a lot of what we were trying to focus on. Mike, did you point out that the two different timelines, the 2030 and the 2050? Yeah, so the municipal aspirations are all tied to 2030. So the goal is to have city government reach net zero by 2030 while the private sector would reach net zero by 2050. So they're two different timelines. And so a lot of the higher priority items are in the earlier ones for the city government. Because if we're going to reach 2030, we've got to start acting now. And when we're looking at the private stuff, there's some of them they think are important. We need to start now because we've got so far to go. We really need to start now. And these benchmarks would be moved to the appendix. Is that correct? I'm not sure how it's gonna, the benchmarks will end up playing out in the end. We still have gotta figure out how this gets formatted. I mean, these are just in here, as we had mentioned before. These, how this looks in this document is not how it's gonna look when it's in the plan. This is really just a way of being able to frame things out. So when people look at something and say, goal B, we wanna replace all residential and commercial heating fuels with renewable heating sources by 2050. Now let's really start to drill down to, all right, what would it take to be able to do that? How would we get 100% of all of our residential and commercial heating fuels to be renewable by 2050? To a certain extent, we've gonna have to have regulations that say all new units that get installed meet a certain requirement. How do we do that? How do we have that rule in effect? And then how do we incentivize people to do fuel switching, you know, and down the line? So, but how this actually gets presented when we're done with the plan, it's gonna probably look a little bit functionally different because this is clunky because like we had mentioned before, you're gonna have, you know, develop a net zero 2050 implementation plan and that gets repeated over and over and over again. And we really don't wanna be doing it that way. So we'll come up with a better way. So you got an assistant, John. Cute. So Barbara, are you on the energy committee? Yes, I was when this was being developed. This is really good. This is a really good outline. Well, it's got a lot in it. And so that's the only, my only concern is it kind of, it's kind of overwhelming. But I'm glad to hear, as Mike said, that the formatting may end up being a little bit different. So. Oh, go ahead, Aaron. Can I ask a kind of big picture question, Barb, since you were talking about this, was the energy committee concerned about sort of outlining sort of goals and surrounding the siting of renewables in the city? I'm thinking specifically about like the Act 174 issues. Yeah, we were involved in the central Vermont regional planning effort around energy. The thing with that is that they had not identified any renewable energy generation within the city limits of non-pilliar. It was really in surrounding areas. So essentially it didn't impact us in terms of where we might cite something. Is that what you were asking, Aaron? Yeah, no, it is. I was just curious, because I thought maybe that was the answer, which is there's not really a lot of good areas to cite renewables. Right, they didn't give us a wind generator, anything like that. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, that's helpful. Anyone else have any comments about the plan? I think it's really well-structured, and I think it provides a really good roadmap for how to really memorialize a lot of this stuff. I think it's pretty good. I don't have any specific questions, just reading the second time I read it, but the first time I didn't have anything. So they did have, there were a couple of places where they didn't have the answers to the question. So, you know, as I mentioned, we were talking about how to reach those goals of net zero. And so a number of places you see, they'll just develop a 2030 or 2050 implementation plan. And that's really just to go through and say we don't have all the answers yet. We have some ideas that are gonna get us there, or if we do the strategies we've outlined, we're gonna get 50, 60, 70% of the way there, but for the most part, we're not getting 100% to where we wanna get to. And that's why there is a catch-all for a lot of these to develop an implementation plan. And the MEAC really wants to hire somebody to come in in the same way that Burlington spent, you know, $100,000 plus to do their energy plan, their energy implementation strategy, was a much deeper dive than I was able to give this strategy. But we were able to start to talk about, you know, the framework of pieces, knowing that all the pieces aren't here, but hopefully we'll get more pieces as these implementation plans are developed. And I think it introduces a few of the aspects that we need to be looking at just to give the public a general idea of how complicated the issue becomes. So, but I think you're adding in the 2030 or 2050 implementation plan is a critical element to it because we can't identify all of the strategies here. Yeah, it seems like a lot of good work went into this. I think obviously some things could be simplified or removed and that's not to say that, you know, they're bad ideas or they won't happen or just because they're not in here, you know, they can't be looked at more by the energy committee just because it is a little bit, it can be a little bit overwhelming, but I think maybe reframing it or presenting it a different way might, it may not look as overwhelming. I do feel like there was, there seems to be a discounting of the costs associated with adding either regulation or ordinances. We've got like three different ones potentially proposed here all marked as costing low. I think having the city adopt its own standards for some of these things might have an approach with caution, you know, having our own labeling standards, stretch code requiring net zero are all marked as having low costs and other things like having a, what was it like the level three vehicle charging is marked as having like a higher, higher cost. You know, one of those things is relatively easy and you put it in and it's done and the other one requires a lot of human capital that I don't think we're recognizing here, but aside from that, I think the general strategy obviously, you know, encouraging, promoting housing, walkable, community in and around our downtown seems obvious and good that we're recognizing it here. There may be, I try to think of a better way to capture like the, not to quantify it, but having more people and businesses in Montpelier mean fewer vehicle miles traveled and, you know, there are huge energy gains there as well. Yeah, we actually did discuss that, but that ended up becoming a land use or economic development piece that was not necessarily related to energy. So it sort of become those kinds of aspects that are very important to shorten those vehicle miles traveled, but ultimately it wasn't anything the energy committee could require. Actually, aspiration F is the one that talks about vehicle fuel fossil fuel use and you'll see that there are still some holes in that part. For example, goal B under aspiration F is the transit ridership. Still, we don't necessarily have a goal on that. Was any number ever talked about on that, Mike? Page seven? No, it was, those kind of came out different and we never really did nail those down. Because yeah, we were also not sure how it might tie into the transportation chapter. So, you know, if they were going to touch on it or not. So those two, this section of the energy plan and the transportation plan needs to be coordinated. Yeah, and I think the transportation plan has done a good job of, certainly in their aspiration to address a number of the things that John and you are looking at, because one of their aspirations is to that you can live, I'm trying to remember exactly how it was worded, you can live in Montpelier without the need of a vehicle, without the need of a car. And that was, it's not to say that we're trying to take everybody's cars away, but that we want to have a transportation system such that it's not a requirement. You shouldn't be required.  And that's true in a lot of communities in the United States is that you have to own a car. It would be really difficult for you to live in the town of Berlin if you didn't have a car. There are no sidewalks. It'd be a long bike rides to things and certainly would be not a very convenient way in January to get around. But we really wanted to go and make sure that you could live in Montpelier. It's not a necessity, not a requirement. And that's what the transportation plan was looking at. And it doesn't mean everywhere in Montpelier, you're gonna be walkable or bikeable or able to get on public transit, but that there is ample amounts of places where the housing and the transportation overlap that you could have a lot of housing choice where a car is not a necessity. And hopefully that will then translate into options down the road where, whether it's car share, whether it's the microtransit whether it's transit that, whether you're 21 years old and trying to figure out what you're doing, you can live in town and get a job and find a place to go grocery shopping and do what you need to do and rent a car if you need it. And that's really what we were kind of looking for. That's what the transportation committee and that's how they framed it. And hopefully I'll get a meeting with them at some point because they are at like 99% done with theirs. I just have to have one more meeting with them to finish theirs. And so did they incorporate microtransit mic in the plan? I believe it's in their plan. It's mentioned in it. It's been a little while since I've picked it up and read it, but I'm pretty sure it is. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, Mike, are you looking for us to approve? I mean, they're all approved to a point. I mean, we're just going through, approving it, you're not disapproving it, you're not throwing it back to me and saying this is not going in a direction that this planning commission is going to support, in which case I would go back. But if everyone's still good, then it goes in the pile of things that we start moving towards getting public input on when we're ready for that. And, you know, we want to talk a little bit more about how we want to move this planning process forward. We can certainly go back to that initial conversation we were having about, you know, what do we want to do in these two windows of time? We've got the window of time, assuming people said, yes, let's use our municipal planning grant to hire somebody to help us with the city plan to help carry this to the finish line. And if that's one thumbs up, then the question is, okay, what would we like them to do? They wouldn't come on till January. And then what would we do before then and what would we do as a planning commission after that? So, okay, yeah, I'd like to dovetail on that because I'm just to make sure everyone's on the same page. My understanding is based on our previous discussions is that we would use that to do a lot of the digital work, the website type work to put the plan in a form that's really like next level. I think we did a lot of talk early on about that. My thoughts are between now and then before we have a consultant get involved that we figure out a lot of the substantive aspects of it and spend our time doing that. Is that where everyone is? They're thinking about the planning grant and the how we'll spend our short-term? Yeah, I mean, I would certainly agree with that Kirby that it'd be tempting to get the consultant to do all of this public outreach. But I think ultimately we need to do some of it before the consultant gets involved. And so it's gonna unfortunately fall to us. Yeah, do we have any other thoughts about how to involve the consultant and what we should focus on before a consultant before January? I'm sorry, my connection got really bad for a while. What's going on? So yeah, we're talking about this municipal planning grant that we have and an opportunity to have a consultant starting in January. And I was talking about in our past discussions from many months ago, we had talked about using that consultant to develop a website and make our plan part of a website that's more advanced than what we've done in the past. And so I was just saying, my expectation was we're gonna go ahead and do that and use the planning grant in that way, which leaves between now and January for us as the planning commission to sort out a lot of the substantive parts of the plan and to spend our time doing that. And Barb mentioned that, you know, that means that we need to be doing the outreach ourselves to in the meantime, which I agree with. So we're asking if you have any thoughts about what's about the short term and do your thoughts differ on how to use that municipal planning grant? No, that seems like a good use of the grant money. I guess the only thing I would say is that we've got a lot of work to do before January and that's about a ton of time. Yeah, well, now that we're back on track, we can start focusing on this. So that's at least that's something. That kind of makes sense with what we were talking about earlier, having working groups and maybe being able to move forward more quickly in that way. Yeah, when it comes to the chapters, we were talking about economic development and housing, maybe two chapters that we use for subcommittees to take a deeper dive. What's everyone's thoughts about some other areas that deserve it? I personally think that energy's in good shape. That's a big area, but I think that it seems to be in great shape. Some of these others seem to be either in great shape or they're smaller areas that maybe don't meet the same treatment. But what are some areas that we do think need treatment, deeper treatment? Can I ask kind of a silly question? Because I guess this has never been really clear in my mind. What do you envision the scope of the subcommittees work to be? Well, yeah, I mean, it's something that's been, you know, to be worked out, but loosely, they'll sit down, go through what we have so far and do extra homework and looking into how can we do this better? What needs improvement? If they need to, they can reach out to other sources and kind of do the deeper dive that we sometimes wish we could do but we just aren't able to do in our regular meetings. And it would be, you know, we could do it open into kind of like that and leave it at that or we can decide that, no, we want each of the subcommittees to be very much on the same page and we could actually hammer out some, a scope. We could do that, we could hammer that out more. I think a little bit more structure would be a good thing in terms of here is what, you know, we would like a subcommittee to produce and so that we end up with compatible products, you know, setting things up so that things are triaged and organized in a certain way. It's like, here's what we identified that, you know, the slam dunk priority, good stuff, you know, here's some other stuff and here's what we think we can drop and generally, you know, put it in the right buckets, you know, not, doesn't need to be perfect, but if we somehow create some kind of framework to start doing that so that things look similar across chapters and then we could start bringing things together, otherwise I'd be worried that we end up with some very different looking documents that are, you know, just here and here. I mean, one basic question along those lines is, I mean, do we want the subcommittees to do work like you're talking about it, that like producing something or is it more, do we want them just to point out general observations about what we already have and bring that back to the group? But even doing that, I think needs to be done in a specific way, right? Like how, like what kind of observations are, yeah. Oh, what's the basis of the observations that we're making? Yeah, would it, would it help Kirby if we, between now and the next meeting, try to formulate some idea of what we each think that the subcommittee ought to be looking at in a particular section? I mean, is each section going to be different? I mean, you said subsequently, obviously each one's going to be different. No, right, but in terms of what we, yeah, how we look at it. Yeah, I mean, I think developing some parameters that are general enough so that they apply to each one, I think is a good idea, like what John's saying. I mean, yeah, one way I think of it is, yeah, I mean, what's the scope? I mean, what are we looking to improve? Based on what I've heard so far from the group, I'm thinking what we want is one component of it, or one parameter, one factor, ever you want to put it, would be to make sure, to look into whether the, what we have so far in the plan matches community priorities and goals. I think that might be one aspect, because that's what we've been concerned with. Maybe another one could be, does it provide too little or too much information? Because I've heard that from the group here, I've heard both of those things at different times. So how can this chapter, or what level of information is appropriate to be provided in this chapter? I mean, that's another parameter. Yeah, but we could keep going with this. And I think that, yeah, we can put it on the agenda for next week, and that could be one item, and hopefully we can hammer that out at the meeting next week. How do people feel about that? And I'm gonna say week and the next time we meet. Sure, that sounds like a good way. Yeah. Can I ask another baseline question really quickly, which is, is there an expectation that the subcommittees will actually draft some of the final chapters, or is this just sort of a working group to kind of hammer out what's gonna be drafted? I was thinking more of the second thing, but if we think getting into drafting is more appropriate or more worthwhile, you know, I'm open to. A lot of the iterative process I had with the other subcommittees really was, you know, I draft something just to start them thinking, and then there's a lot of chewing on it, you know, the energy plan you see is not something I just wrote and they looked at it's, you know, I started throwing things out, they take things, they change them, they move them. So it's a very pretty iterative process. They usually, there's not a lot of, given a blank sheet of paper and just trying to go and put things together. I sort of thought what these subcommittees would be doing is reacting to what was already drafted. Is that not the case? Yeah, I think that would be the jumping off point. Yeah, okay. So they're drafting it. Yeah. Or we're working from something. Yeah, I'll just say the one exception that you can consider as well with your subcommittee idea is the planning commission is gonna be the committee who's responsible for drafting the land use plan. So it may be that you have one subcommittee that is gonna at least tackle the land use plan and you'll be the one who's doing more of the drafting of those to bring back to the whole planning commission to go through and say, you know, I worked with Mike and this is what we've come up with our aspiration for the land use plan. This is what we think are gonna be our strategies for accomplishing that. These are goals and that's gonna be a process that takes some time. I mean, Barb, you went through with the energy chapter when we did this as a subcommittee. I think we met as a subcommittee four or five times. And then we went to the full board at MIAC and met with them twice and then came back once to the subcommittee again to make some final changes. So the land use can be complicated and that can be one that there can also be opportunities to get public input as you're going through it. You saw that happening at the end of all of the other chapters though. Is that what you said before, Mike, or could we be jumping on that now? You could be jumping on land use now. I mean, I think you guys are familiar enough with all of these pieces to kind of start to see how they come together. And that's gonna be, you don't have the transportation chapter yet, but you will be getting it. You don't have the natural resources chapter, but you'll be getting it. And I can fill you in on where they're going, where they're leaning on things. And that's gonna be the challenges. We have, what is it, 10 square miles and how do we do the land use for our 10 square miles? We're gonna have some places that are more protection of the natural resources. We're gonna have flood plains and we're gonna have to kind of start to layer these pieces together. And that's where, you know, whether it's using GIS or whether it's just thinking in concepts, we've got to start coming up with, what's our generalized land use plan look like? We have a zoning map. That's great, but that's not really what we're building here. We're not building a zoning map. We're looking at a generalized land use plan so we can look to the future and say, you know, where do we want development? You know, where do we want things to maintain, evolve, transform? You know, we're gonna probably be talking about our historic district and talking about how do we maintain these areas? What are the areas that need to change? We're gonna have certain areas that are gonna be more transformative. We've got the whole route 302, our Eastern Gateway District is auto-oriented. I mean, I don't see that our future goals for this part of town is to remain and continue as auto-oriented. I think that's gonna be a transformative area and what's it gonna take to do that? How do we change, you know, that part of River Street to a walkable, bikeable area? I mean, we've got to build sidewalks. And I think that's gonna go into what are the strategies? What are the priorities? Is that our priority for the next eight years to work on that? Or do we have other areas that are gonna be the priorities? Those are the conversations we'd have to have. Okay, so, you know, we could pick this up next week. So it's great to run it on everyone's mind. Hammer's moving things out. It's definitely tricky. I think we're getting close though to having kind of a group understanding of what we want to do going forward, which is great. So I'll send out sort of beginnings of an outline for the discussion for next week. We'll put it on the agenda and then we'll go from there. You know, there's two issues. There's the subcommittees and the outreach issue. So we'll tackle each one. So yeah, everybody brainstorm. This is definitely a lot to work out here. So with that, do we have a motion to adjourn? We do. I'll second. Second by Park. All those in favor of adjourning? Say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, you closed. Okay, we adjourn until second Monday of August. What do you use? Goodbye.