I'm a Night Mozilla Open News Fellow, and I work at Ushahidi and Internews Kenya. I'm going to be talking about teleportation as soon as my slide starts. Right, so my title is Mapping 101, Mapping 127.0.001. How to teleport and find home. And it's kind of about Mapping 101 because I work on open source crisis maps, but it's also a little bit about transporting yourself in other ways other than maps. So when we think of teleportation, we think about science fiction, right? We think of Star Trek. We think of Nightcrawler and X-Men, right? But teleportation has a close relationship to transportation, right? It's just breaking things into bits or cubits, transporting them across a landscape and recomposing them in a new space. And I was thinking about this a lot because I was toggling between New York and Nairobi and thinking about what home meant in those places and how the topography changes, but also the tele-networking capabilities change and how that affects my conception of what home is in those different places. So here's traffic, right? Network traffic is a way of transporting yourself. And maybe in Nairobi, there's a 20% probability of lions. And in Times Square, there's a 10% probability of lions. So the difference isn't that much.   But think about network traffic, right? The download speeds, the availability of apps at those speeds. Think about what your experience is on the internet and how different it is in places where the internet is slower, right? What is your home like in places where the internet downloads videos like that? And these are two needle points in my home. There's no place like local host. And I have a Kanye West tweet about Persian rugs and cherub imagery. And what this says to me is that I define home according to the internet, right? My loving memorials in my home are about the internet and memes. And teleportation itself kind of has similar root words to telecommunications and transportation. So it makes sense that that kind of network activity, that connectivity between point A and point B, the relationship is established in those similar root words. So there's three ways to teleport, right? You can do it the scientific way with the qubits and the decomposing like the Netherlander scientists. Or you can do it the geographic way by transporting yourself across space. Or you can do it the technological way, like globe genie, where you can kind of search for something and go via Google Maps to that new place. And if you take like a Feynman path integral theorem that's like been reduced significantly, you can see that it's usually about time. It's about space. It's about place, which is what we think about when we think about maps, right? We're breaking. We're flattening things to a 2D. And right, so collapsing time. The first type of map you're going to see here is shows internet speeds. And you don't really need to know what it means despite the red presentation you saw before. Red in this case is bad, right? So Africa not doing so well, not doing so hot in terms of internet speeds. What about in terms of disconnection? Your disconnection likelihood also bad, bad Africa. It's not doing very well. But we also want you to notice that we still break this down according to political boundaries that we established in regular map making, right? It's not any different despite the fact that you're talking about the data you're plotting is about connectivity in a different medium. So social media, we often connect ourselves to places based on our ability to contact our friends, based on our ability to network with them. And in some places, those connectivity channels are throttled by your government or by other things. So in Ushahidi, this is how we've dealt with this. We developed this product called The Brick that allows you to spin up internet anywhere. It's about the size of a cell phone and it connects to a bunch of sensors so you can deploy it in the field and collect sensor data about your environment, right? We also do this by private networks. So VPN, I would throw my IP address in different places to access faster internet, but we also develop crowdsourcing services like Crowdmap and our Ushahidi platform, which collects data from dumb phones so you don't have to depend on an internet connectivity to collect data about your space. We also do it by proxy. Ping is an app that was developed after the Westgate mall attacks in order to ping your network to see where your family members are. And then CrisisNet also aggregates a lot of social media data into one unified API so you can ping it to find out authoritative information about crises happening all over the world. And what I want you to notice about this is this is an example of a solar map that breaks down all the many worlds possibilities of what could have happened after 1777. You know, it's a frontier to future. It was originally a GIF, but now it's just a static image. So, but what I want you to notice about this is that we haven't really changed our mapping of how we fractalize space, how we break it down into frontiers, right? We're still ascribing to political boundaries to economic, you know, limitations. And we haven't changed it despite the fact that the structure and the architecture of the internet is different. So I started with the Kanye West tweet. I'm gonna close with the Kanye West quote, the world as a whole is fuggly, the internet is fuggly too, but I'm not in the construction business. And if you can ignore the non-sequitur of that statement and just look at the reds, right? He's talking about the world and the internet and also deferring the construction of it. But what's interesting about this conference is that we are constructors, right? And if you're gonna establish those kind of imperialistic boundaries, you need to think about the landscape you're imparting to posterity and what that might mean for the future. So, right, so my name is Aurelia. I work at Ushahiti. Thank you for listening. Thank you.


At 7.03, welcome everyone to the Williston DRB on January 26, 2021. First order of business is to open the meeting with a remote public meeting notice. I, Pete Kelly, as chair of the Williston Development Review Board, find that this public body is authorized to meet electronically without a physical location due to the state of emergency declared by Governor Scott and Act 92 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In accordance with the temporary amendments to the open meeting law, I confirm that, one, public access is available by video conference and telephone through Zoom. All members of the Board and the public can communicate in real time. During this meeting through Zoom, planning staff will provide Zoom instructions for public participation before any hearings are opened. To the publicly noticed agenda included Zoom, web address and phone number. Agenda materials and Zoom instructions are also provided on the town website, www.town.williston.vt.us. Click on public records and documents then agendas and minutes. Three, the public can alert us if a problem, if a problem arises during the meeting. If anyone has a problem with access during the meeting, please use the raised hand feature or chat box in Zoom or call, I don't see Emily on so probably don't call Emily tonight, right? No. Okay, we're going to call Bonnie at<PHONE_NUMBER> extension one extension one and leave a message for continuing the meeting if necessary if Zoom crashes or the public is unable to access this meeting, it will be continued to February 9th, 2021, the next Tuesday in our rotation where there's no current agenda. So that's the data picked. All votes taken in this meeting that are not unanimous will be done by roll call in accordance with the law. Let's start the meeting by taking a roll call attendance of DRB members participating in this meeting. Paul, present? Present. John Hemlegarn. Present. Steve Lambrick is not attending. Scott Riley. Here. David Saladino. Here. David Turner. Here. And I'm the chair, Pete Kelly. I am present. Okay. Is it necessary for you to go over Zoom instructions? It does not appear like anyone from the public is present. I don't think so. I think if anyone comes in and wants to comment, then I can jump in then, but I think it's probably okay. Tim Carney is present. Tim, would you like the Zoom instructions to be read or do you authorize waving those? I would like to see them. Can you put them in the chat? You don't have to read them to me. I can read them in the chat if that's convenience. Okay. Bonnie, you go through them, please. Sure. I don't have Emily's little presentation thing that she normally puts up, but I can let you know that if you have any issues, you can either push the raise hand button, which I believe is under participants or under where the chat is. And you can also put a question to the chat if you're having any issues. Other than that, if anyone has any issues, you can always just wave and I'll unmute you if you're having difficulty. Given the fact that you're the only one present, Tim, I think waving won't work for tonight. If you don't, use the raise hand. If they have a question, would you prefer sending it to everybody or just to the chair? I think that send it to everybody. Tonight's agenda. There's two items on the agenda. There are no applications, so we will not be voting, but the two items on the agenda is a form-based code discussion with staff, and that's anticipated to take about an hour. And then there's acknowledgment, and my screen just went blank. There you go. And then there's recognition of receipt of a legal opinion on DP21-08, the Barlin subdivision legal opinion. There will be no discussion at the DRB level tonight, but we will acknowledge that receipt of that legal opinion for the record. Before I turn things over to Matt, I'd like to open it up to any public input that may be out there. It looks like this would be from you, Tim, if you have any items or topics that are not on tonight's agenda. I don't have any input on topics that are not on the agenda. Just so you know, I represent her. I'm the secretary with the Forest Run Homers Association, and we're just interested in following the development that the schedule at me showed, and this was an introductory experience for me just to kind of see what's going on and how things work. Great. Welcome. We'd love to have your participation. Thank you for setting aside the time. With that, I will hand it over to Matt. Okay. Well, with apologies to Tim, because this is a kind of a atypical meeting of the DRB in that there are no development reviews or hearings on our agenda tonight. What the DRB chair and I discussed doing with tonight's meeting and the absence of applications was taking a step back and providing this body with a little more opportunity to talk and learn about the Taft Corners Growth Center form-based code project, which is a town project, engaging some private consultant help to help the town rewrite the development standards for the zoning districts that are in the Taft Corners Growth Center area. And this is essentially an area bounded by Interstate 89 to the south, tributary to the Allenbrook to the east, and the industrial lands to the west, all the way up to the Allenbrook to the north, about a mile and a half square centered around the Taft Corners Intersection. I have a brief PowerPoint that I just want to kind of go through quickly to tee up the very high level introduction of this project. I think to some members, what I was perceiving in our conversation with the consultant team last time, there was a bit of a feeling like we'd sort of jumped into the middle of things. And I've done, I've done so much preliminary work with other bodies, the Planning Commission and the Select Board, but we never really did a staff level introduction with this group. So I'm going to take back the host ability for a moment, and I'm going to share my screen. And this, I promise, will be a quick presentation. And then my goal is to jump off of that and open it up for questions and answers with anybody who has them here in the meeting tonight. So I am going to share this PowerPoint and hopefully it will, sorry, I just lost my window. There we go. Can everybody see that? Yeah. Great. So you can see from the cover slide, this is a version of a presentation I gave to the Select Board back in October. I've only modified it just so. But this is a discussion of the form-based code project. What I want to do tonight is just talk a little bit about what form-based code is, why the town is pursuing this project, answer questions, and then we can go over where we are in the process and what will be coming up this spring. So I think it's worth just noting this is Taft Corners. This is 1937. Williston, largely farmland and the intersection basically being the home of a couple of farms, no Interstate 89. And of course, here we are maybe a few years ago now with the introduction of the Interstate exit and all of the growth and development that it has brought. Looks like we lost Scott and I got to let him back in. And Interstate 89 and its construction really was the catalyst for so much of what's happened in Williston ever since then. This is 1962. It's Oak Hill Road being turned into an overpass just outside of the village for the construction of the Interstate. And as is often the case, initially you build the highway, but the growth doesn't come right away. So here we are at Greenup Day 1970. The caption, this photo said these were some sorority sisters from UVM picking up later on the side of the highway. And in fact, the highway was so quiet, the governor was able to land his helicopter on it to go out and witness the proceedings. So just another point in time and you can see behind those young women, some of what would be Taft Corners today, I believe the barn in that picture is more or less the location of the fire station today. And almost immediately by the early 1970s and throughout the 1980s, plans for significant large development were submitted or dreamed about or thought about for Williston. This one shows the Maple Tree Place site as a traditional enclosed mall and ultimately evolved into the Pyramid Mall proposal that the town fought about so much in the 1970s and turned into the Maple Tree Place proposal that the town continued to battle about into the 1980s and mid-90s and some little bit of history there. The town was quite divided but really tried to come to grips with its fate as a target for commercial and higher density residential development. And again, I would say very much catalyzed by the fact that there was this highway exit bringing traffic in. And of course, over the years, lots and lots of planning, I overlaid a number of different plans, dreams, sketches, ideas that Williston experienced over the years. Many of them pulling for a more compact or downtown-like environment, many of them, most of them envisioning some kind of a grid of streets that would be interconnected and provide people with ways to travel between the quadrants of Taft Corners without having to go through the main four-way intersection, which was perceived as congested and predicted to get much more congested. We did a lot of planning. We got a lot of parking. One of the development standards that was heavily enforced through the years, there was a lot of concern, we're going to get all this development. What if there's not enough parking? So Williston, like many communities, had very traditional parking requirements, generating large numbers of required spaces. And so the couple of the images here, one's an older Maple Tree Place plan, one's an area of a lot of Taft Corners. One is those percentages at Walmart and Home Depot are estimated percentage occupancy of the parking lots there. And they do get fuller than that sometimes, but almost never all the way full. And the picture that says East of Best Buy was taken at about 10.30 in the morning on a Black Friday a couple of years ago. So theoretically, one of the busiest shopping days of the year at the kind of store that has big Black Friday sales, and yet still quite a bit of parking available. And the reason I bring up parking when I'm talking about form-based code is a lot about a form-based code tends to talk about where to put the buildings and how to de-emphasize the parking so it's not the first thing you see or experience from the street. And also may get away from hard numbers of required amounts of parking and focus more on the form of the buildings and the way the sites are laid out. So a couple of things that Williston did in response to this growth pressure. One thing it did was a little bit about going with the flow. Williston was the first state designated growth center once there was state law that allowed such a thing to exist. This means that a boundary was set, which you can see in the dashed line on this map, and the town committed to making sure that at least 50% of new development in Williston over the 20-year lifespan of the growth center would take place within this boundary. In other words, it was a commitment to focus growth here in exchange for some state development requirement relief, and that the town also committed to invest heavily in the infrastructure in this area, i.e. that grid of streets, some of which you see in the heavy Black and Black dashed lines on this map. So growth center is a planning tool. It's a planning tool that exists in Vermont, and it's one that Williston is now, we're most of the way through our third five-year cycle within that 20-year period. So we're coming up on 15 years of having this designation. And in the town plan, there's some language here that I've highlighted about the growth center. One thing that we say is that we want it to be design-conscious, pedestrian-friendly, mixed use. So what does that mean? The buildings look good. It's a pleasant place to walk around in. There's a mix of residential and commercial uses, and we say development and redevelopment, and I'll come back to that because certainly some amount of redevelopment will be part of Williston's story in the future. And we also talk about for the growth center in the town plan that we'll continue to look for. Are our zoning bylaws effective? Are they getting what we want? And primarily, are they getting us that design-conscious, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use development like we say we want here in the town plan? And in fact, the current town plan identifies the consideration of a form-based code for the growth center as a goal. So we say we want to think about using a tool that emphasizes the relationship between buildings and the street and the relationship and form of buildings and their relationship to one another. So this is straight out of the adopted town plan. So if somebody stops you in the grocery store and says, why is the town doing this form-based code thing? A really simple answer is because we said we would, but also because we said we would in a town plan that was the result of an extensive public process and conversation in and of itself. And so we're trying to meet the goals of the growth center as they already exist, concentrating new development in Williston in the growth center. In other words, not sprawling out up along our state highways, particularly into the more rural parts of town, that it will be designed conscious and pedestrian-friendly, that we will continue to build grid streets, that this is the part of town where the town hopes to achieve its affordable housing goals, because those are easier to achieve when you have some amount of density. Meet the challenge of evolving retail and commercial real estate market. And this is the pictures that I have down below, how it started, how it's going. Normally, when your big box retail store starts becoming the sort of annual home of a temporary Halloween costume store or something like that, that means it's not really commanding premium rents anymore. It's, you wouldn't build a building like a circuit city so that you could rent it to spirit Halloween for six weeks once a year. That's not how you would hope that things would go. And so when you start to see this in the community, the answer is in your future, you're either going to have buildings like this that sit empty, which has happened all over the country. And there's a lot of examples of that, or maybe a more hopeful view that some of these buildings and some of these sites might be able to evolve into something else that's more relevant for the future. And that's that idea of encouraging private investment and redevelopment. So one thing the town can do to help properties like this evolve as that demand for big box retail fades is to build up the environment around them, to invest in the roads and streets and infrastructure necessary for redevelopment, and to not let development leapfrog out away from that this contained boundary of the growth center, but rather say, no, if you want something new and intense in Williston, it's got to be in the growth center. That might mean you need to go redevelopment property. And now how can we have the land development standards that will also encourage that redevelopment to happen in the direction we want it to go. So towns considering a form based code. What is that it's a type of zoning. It's not that different from what we do already with what I would call our performance standards or design guidelines. It is focused on the physical character of the new development. So more worried about what the building looks like and where it is on the site less worried about the exact mix of uses or intensity of uses that happens inside it. This generally promotes mixed use. It can be designed to promote pedestrian friendly development. And I think most important to me and everything I've perceived working in Williston over the last dozen years, it coordinates that development and site design with the planned streets and other infrastructure. So we start thinking about, we know that development is going to come in maybe one lot or one building at a time, but we know that we'll do better if we have a coordinated goal for a streetscape because our streets are going to access more than one building. And that street is going to take on a sense of place of its own that will be better if there's coordination along it. Farm based codes are known for offering predictability. The standards tend to be standards that you either meet or you don't and that are clear, illustrated and easy to communicate so that citizens and developers all have a clear picture of the community's future. So these illustrations on the bottom, if you have an illustration in your form-based code like the one on the right that says in this place, this is where the buildings are going to be on the site. This is the bulk and mass of those buildings. That image may be also controlling the diversity of rooftops that's necessary and maybe even the part of the street that needs to have building windows and entrances on it. All of that's a picture that you can point to in your bylaw and say this is what we mean when we say this is what we want. And backing up a little bit, this diagram shows three things. It shows conventional zoning design guidelines and then form-based codes. And where are we right now? We're kind of in the middle with the design guidelines. We do still talk about use. If a big box store were to come to Williston as Target did many years ago and start trying to determine what the development standards were, they would find a standard that says one of the criteria you need to meet is to have a wrap of smaller stores around the big box, which is kind of what that middle drawing communicates. But that's literally the extent of the language you would find in the bylaw. So the picture there looks nice, but there might be other ways somebody would do that that might not meet your expectations. And the struggle of the staff and sometimes the DRV is we kind of know what we think we want, but we've got to go back to those words. Form-based code adds pictures in a way that makes it really clear what the town's goals are. So the components of a form-based code, there are two really big ones. The one on the top page, you're going to hear this term a bunch and I'm sorry, it sounds so wonky. It's the regulating plan. The regulating plan is where you start with your streets and you say, what kind of street do I want this street to be? What kind of street do I want that street to be? Is it important for buildings to be pulled right up to this street or is this a sort of a secondary street and it's kind of okay if it goes through a couple of parking lots? This is also a way of looking at what parts of town you might want or allow greater intensity or building height. We want taller buildings on this street. We don't want taller buildings on that street. So those colors in the street grid that you see there represent different development standards for buildings that are on those frontages. So in some ways, this takes you away from the standard zoning map where you might have a whole area of land where the rules are all the same, breaks it down to the street level and lets the town plan for what's going to be built along its streets in harmony with how it sees the future of those streets. And then the other part is the actual design standards for those streets and buildings. So if you were to imagine you're a developer trying to understand what you can do with a site, first you would look at the regulating plan and say, well what street am I on or what streets am I on? And then you would take that information into the design standards and you would look up a picture like this and it would say on those orange streets, a 6.2 live work building which is what's shown in the picture below is allowed. What's that mean? And you get this kind of a code diagram which has the dimensional standards, the front yard, the amount of glass, might have the front story height, might have the roof type or roofline diversity, some other things. And not only would it tell you those things in words and numbers, it would also tell you them in pictures. And it's a little hard to see in this slide, but the three little pictures on the side of the big picture of the building are showing things. It's labeled doorway, gallery, arcade. Those are things where it says, well here's the basic thing we want you to do, the big picture. Here's some ways you can modify it that are predetermined and that are okay. So going back to that top slide where the streets have different colors, the regulating plan, I call this the backbone of a form-based code. And it's a simple, it's a development standard that starts with a simple question, which is you look at a street and you say, what do we want this street to be? So some of you who were here two weeks ago might remember we started kind of talking about the state highways that divide, taft corners into four quadrants. Here's a look northbound at Route 2A. We need to go through a process a little bit as a community and say, well, what do we want this street to be? What do we think is possible here? And then we can answer the question of what should the development be like. So one answer is this, and I actually, I hold this out as I think a somewhat negative example, an attempt to turn a really wide, really busy street into a walkable pedestrian street. So this is kind of these nice street lights, right, nice sidewalk. But this street is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven lanes wide, counting the parking lanes. Probably really hard to ever have this feel like a unified street. It's very, very wide. This is an example of a community that spent a lot of money trying to beautify a really, really wide street. And it looks nice enough, but I would say you might look at Route 2A in Williston and you might come up with something different. Maybe this instead of that center turn lane, maybe this should be a treed boulevard down the middle. Maybe it's just so busy. Maybe we're not going to get street parking on Route 2A. Maybe we don't want people walking right next to it. Maybe it makes more sense to have a green belt that's planted and then a sidewalk. So those are the kinds of things you might think about. And then additionally, you might think about the buildings. And so in this case, there's mostly one-story buildings. There's a lot of really big signs that are clearly oriented towards getting the attention of people who are driving on the street. You don't need signs that big to get the attention of people who are walking on the sidewalk. And it's about 50, 50 buildings and parking lots. So there's quite a bit of parking lot frontage here. This might not be the kind of street I'd want to go take a walk down on a Sunday night because the traffic speeds might be pretty high.  And this backbone work, the idea of thinking about Williston streets this way, the good news is the town's already done and is continuing to do quite a lot of planning about this idea. This is a more refined map. It's not one of the adopted maps in the town plan right now. It's part of something that we're working on right now called the official map, where the town sort of takes a more rigorous look at what its planned future facilities are and what it wants them to be like. So the yellow dashed lines on this map are the planned or desired grid streets. But there's some other things going on on this map too, including showing where we have existing sidewalks and bike paths or bike lanes and where we have gaps in that system and where we have streets that don't have those things. So we're starting to think a little harder and at a little finer level of detail in this area about what these different streets are like. And then you start looking at this and thinking about, well, which ones are higher traffic, which ones are lower traffic or lower speed? One of the things we hope the public conversation for form-based code brings out is what of these streets could we really focus on to create those walkable pedestrian friendly places? It may not have to be all of them within this boundary. So back to the question, let's take another street. What do we want this street to be like? This is Merchants Way. This is down behind CVS. There's quite a few parking lots fronting on it right now. There's also quite a few fairly old buildings and sites that might be redeveloped in our lifetimes. What do we want this street to be like? I would say that the dimensions of this street lend themselves well to becoming a quiet walkable street, the kind of place you might want to go hang out on a Sunday night. Here's an example. This is a much more built out street in Mashpee Commons, a shopping center in Cape Cod that's sort of held out as an example of this kind of thing. Pretty narrow street. You've got some street parking. What have we done too? We've built some wider sidewalks up by the crosswalks to lower vehicle speeds and shorten the pedestrian path across the street. The development standard here says pretty clearly that the buildings are getting pulled up to the street. You can see some chairs out on the street, some awnings and things that extend over the sidewalk a little bit. Some very narrow alleys between buildings. This is a two to three story building form. This is all brand new stuff. Every building in this picture right here is less than seven years old right now. There's also clearly a lot of architectural control happening here. It is Cape Cod trying to replicate some of the historic buildings that you might find on a Cape Cod main street. I'll jump out of the way we want this street to be like a question for a second and just say we've had some interesting conversations talking to folks about, well, what's the Vermont style that new development could have in a place like Taft Quarters Williston that would say you're in Williston or you're in Vermont? How can we zone in on that so that there might be some characteristics that were required of buildings in this new part of town that would lead it to having more of its own identity? That segues into the development standards. What do we want the buildings to look like? How should they be arranged on that street? This is Wright Avenue. This is a street that will eventually continue past the horizon that you see here down to another new town street called Trader Lane. You can see the CVS there, which is a relatively new build for Williston. It meets the current development standards, which means it's set back from the street. That's about 20 feet. It does have a sidewalk, a wide sidewalk pulled up to it on the Route 2A side. It has this entrance on the corner that nobody ever uses because people generally go in from the parking lot side, but it does have a functional entrance on the street that was required by the current standards. There's a parking lot across the street from it.  This is another kind of smaller, quieter little street. What should this street look like? If we build that other street, Merchant's Way, which is just down here, out to look like something a little more compact, how should this lead you into it? What would we want this to look like? Then in Taft Corners, there are also these greenfield sites, literally in this picture, a greenfield. This is the site that would have been the Essex Alliance Church, which is shown in the site plan down below. We know that it's not going to be the Essex Alliance Church. They've put it on the market. What should a place like this be? We back out a little bit into even more of a town planning mode. This is pretty far from the center of town. Should this be commercial? Today, the zoning here allows the most intense kinds of commercial uses allowed anywhere in the town because it's part of the Taft Corners District. It's not quite as central. It's next door to Chelsea Commons. In the photograph at the top, I have most of Finney Crossing at my back with some row homes and other different mixed density dwellings and then eventually commercial. So when you think about a site like this, you can look at that site plan down below and imagine that's really just a blank slate with two curb cuts on Route 2A and one entrance into Chelsea Commons. What should it be? What should the development standards in town ask for it to be? How should it be connected to the rest of the neighborhood? And what should, again, those streetscapes and buildings be like? Maybe something like this. Maybe this is too intensive, but this is another example of new development brought in under a form-based code. Now, just throwing some questions out there, we can get really into the weeds and start talking about some of the things that are in the design review chapter of the current bylaw. Are there materials that are desirable? Should the roofs be pitched roofs or flat or how tall? What about windows? How many? How much? Does there have to be a front door facing the street? Should the bottom floor of these buildings be required to be tall enough to hold retail even if the initial tenant is going to be residential? You can see in these buildings that the bottom floor is a little bit taller than the second floor such that a commercial use fits in better. But if your plan suggests that this is an area where you really kind of expect it to stay residential, maybe you don't require a form that might ultimately allow for retail use. So the process, where are we in all of this? This is all told going to take the town over a year, and we're in the very beginning part. So we are working with a consultant team, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute.  We've connected them with the director of public works to talk about our street standards, and we've connected them with you folks with the Development Review Board for individual interviews as well as other members of other boards like the Select Board Planning Commission, Conservation Commission, and Historic and Architectural Design Committee. And what comes out of this and what we heard about a little bit two weeks ago was the public design workshop and vision planning, and that's the big intense two week long get everybody inside the virtual room and talk in plain English about what the towns hopes and dreams are for Taft Corners in very, very simple terms. What do you want it to look like? What do you want it to feel like? What do you want it to be like? And the professionals that we've employed to work on this take that input and start drawing pictures of it, and they start drawing pictures of it that they can actually show us what our own streets and neighborhoods in this area might look like as those standards play out as those lots are developed and redeveloped. And that's a that's a iterative process. So you see it, you see what you want, you see what it looks like. Oh, that's not really what I wanted. The drawing changes and the town interacts through that citizen input process to really refine that its vision. And then the hard part, we send that consultant team back to actually turn those nice drawings into a development code that will work for the town that's enforceable, that's that can be communicated, that can be administered by the staff here and the DRV. And then we go into the the formality of adopting it, which is, you know, like any other bylaw amendment, it has to go through the planning commission and select board, and go through a legal process to become part of the town zoning. So I'm just emphasizing this with the you are here. We're still in a very preliminary place with this. We know, we know that we're going to try out this idea of a form based code. We know, generally, what the town's long stated goals are for the TAF Corners area. We know we have some really great experts in town in our citizen boards and on our staff that we want to talk to about some of the sort of the real world constraints and boundaries of this. And then we're going to go and we're going to ask the whole community to join us in participating and developing that vision. And so we haven't done that part yet. And we haven't done any of the technical stuff yet. That's all to come. And so a little bit about the team that's working on this, I'm going to go through these pretty quickly. DRB members, you met Jeff Farrell last time. He's our, he's our lead from Farrell Madden or Jeffrey Farrell and associates, I guess he's going by now. And I just call out, you know, one of Jeff's projects was, was Winooski not that long ago. And so, you know, I'll just say that, you know, one of the things I've already participated in was a sit down with Jeff and the Winooski planner and the Chittlin County Regional Planning Commission staff to talk about the code Jeff wrote and how it's going in the real world, which is great, you know, that we have that local experience where we can, we can actually take, you know, something that was a paper document produced by our consultant locally and talk to the person who's been staffing administering it for the last few years and talk about how it's going. And I think, I think that's going to help inform us well in Williston. Keith Covington was in on the call last time, Common Ground Urban Design and Planning. I'll just say, you know, a lot of what Keith does is facilitate that public process by drawing the pretty pictures and the renderings that help you see how what you say you want might actually work in Williston. Paul Dreher is a local architect. Lots of experience in Newport was in on the Winooski project as well and some other communities. Paul will be the person that our team will be asking questions about, you know, local Vermont design constraints, you know, what's the R value got to be in the wall in the roof? Where's the frost line? And is this going to work in Vermont or not? Justin Falango, you might have seen him. He's also going to work on the urban design and development standards. And you can see some of his work in those 3D pictures in his sheet there. And again, that you're going to see a lot of images that look like this as we start talking about Williston, except they're going to be pictures of Taft Corners, but with new buildings as we test out those ideas. Rick Chelman is our engineering person. This is the guy we send into the into the fire to talk to Bruce Hoare, our public works director. Our ideas for street design is going to work in terms of what the town of Williston is capable of taking on handling. Where do the utilities go when we do things in Williston? How does this interact with the town's public street system? He's our engineer on that. He's out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Anita Morrison, Partners for Economic Solutions will be doing a market study. So, you know, one of the things about whatever sort of idea of a built environment of new buildings and sites and redevelopments that we come up with as the hopes and dreams of Williston, we want to understand that against, well, what's the market really looking for out there? I can make some very broad brush statements about the future of Taft Corners. I think that there's been an awful lot of demand for residential, especially multifamily and apartment living. Not a lot of demand to build big box stores anymore. Not a lot of demand to do much more with retail almost at all. We've been hearing for years that there's not a lot of demand for office space in Chittenden County anymore. And that was all before COVID when everybody's employer figured out that they had an office at home that they didn't have to pay to rent. So, you know, broad brush, I think we know some things about Williston's at least, you know, next 50 years in that in-person retail is in somewhat of a decline. There's still a lot of demand for residential in the area, and we're not so sure about office. But Anita will actually look at that in terms of, well, this plan you've come up with for Taft Corners creates, you know, this many square feet of these different things. Is that realistic within the kind of demand there might be in Williston? Have you planned for enough demand in Williston? So we're going to try to test our ideas out, not just against, you know, what they look like, but how they might function in the town and local economy. Steve Price is going to do some of those on-the-ground visualizations. And so the types of things you might see from him are like those three photos in the lower part of the slide. Existing conditions in the upper part. And then in the middle photo, you see the addition of some bike lanes and, you know, street lights, landscaping, nicer sidewalk. And then filling that out further with the landscaping at full maturity. So you start to think about how the things that you're requiring from development might grow and change over time. Steve will help us with that. And of course, all of you and, you know, the Williston DRB in particular, you know, you will find yourselves probably administering at least part of this code. There's probably, like the current bylaw, lots of things that you won't have much say over, because the bylaw will just say, or the form-based code will just say, this is the way it's got to be. But we know there's always going to be judgment calls. There's always going to be sites that bring up questions we didn't think of when we wrote everything. There may be some things that there may be times when a waiver from a requirement is appropriate. We hope to write that into the code and put the responsibility for granting or not granting those on the DRB. And at this stage of the process, I think the most important thing is, you know, as members of the DRB and folks who really do get into the nuts and bolts of how new development happens in Williston, you have a unique and really highly valuable perspective, both on what you've seen so far and what the future of the town might be and your citizens of the town. So you have your own desires, hopes and dreams for Williston. You might have them for your families or your children or your friends in town, and you certainly have connections to other folks in town you can bring into this process. And, you know, I often say for DRB, you know, if you run into someone in the grocery store and they want to talk about some particular item that's up for DRB here and you're supposed to say, you know, no, no, I can't talk about that unless we're in the hearing. It's ex parte, it's not allowed. Here is something you can talk to people about at the grocery store. In fact, we want you to. So someone comes up to you and says, I heard you guys have a part in this form-based code project. Yeah, let me tell you about it. Let me answer your questions about it. Can you come to the charrette? All of that is more than appropriate in this case. So I think that is it. Oh yeah, one more with pretty pictures and a couple of questions. What do you want this place to become? Again, this is something you can ask your friends and neighbors too and ask yourselves, and how can that evolution happen so it's economically viable and helps the town achieve its stated goals. Now I'm done and I can stop screen sharing. Thank you, Matt. I think it's time for DRB members to ask questions. In other areas that have already been form-based for a while, do we have any names of areas that we could kind of just look and see how things have worked there? I mean, it's been around for a while obviously, so it'd be nice to check out and see how things went in those areas and what people think have happened there and if they like it. Yeah, well, so certainly, you know, Winooski is a good example. I would say a lot of what's in Winooski might be a little more urban than you might end up with here. You know, some of the buildings are maybe a little taller, but a lot of the new development you've seen in Winooski in the last five years has happened under the standard of a form-based code. That includes re-workings of like the facades of some of the buildings on the Rotary and on Main Street, which might actually be a more interesting thing to look at and we can look at sort of the way those development standards play out because they're, I was looking at a standard for street frontage Main Street stuff that would look a lot like the fronts of like Maple Tree Place buildings. You know, it was like a page. It was really short. It was really clear. It was really to the point. So that's one. Come over to my backyard Market Street in South Burlington, South Burlington City Center. All of the development that's happening there is happening under form-based code. So the only thing there is there's only one street right now and I think there are maybe two categories in the regulating plan on that street. So does everybody kind of know where Market Street is in between Dorset and 116? So if you come in on the 116 side, there's these row homes that have pitched roofs and I think they're rentals, but they look like condominium row homes. I believe that's one sub-district of the form-based code and then as you go down the street, there's a taller four or five-story building on the other side of the street and I believe that's in the most intense piece of the form-based code area. So it's bigger, it's blockier, a little more modern looking and then City Hall. What's that David? We're just going to, it's the R5, the R5 district is that. Right, right and then you have the City Hall building under construction, but you know you can pretty well tell what that's going to be like at this point. It's really coming along and Allard Square senior housing next to that is also a building that came in under form-based code. What are the, what are some of the most common criticisms of form-based code? Well, I think the most common one is form-based code usually imposes more architectural standards on the actual design of the buildings. So that can feel to a developer like it's really dictating a lot of design to them. I mentioned about six months ago to a local developer that Williston was thinking about a form-based code and that developer immediately whipped out a legal pad and started drawing a wall section for me and said it's killing me and I think it was South Burlington that South Burlington makes me set the window in by a certain amount. So it's like the you know the window glass couldn't be flushed with the brick it had to be in a certain amount and he said that's just like it messes up my whole design it doesn't let me be creative with how I want to build the building. I wish I had the freedom to decide that and show it to somebody and have them make a judgment call as opposed to like either the window is six inches in and you get a permit or the window is not and you don't. So I think that's the biggest criticism that I hear is that it can narrow the options an architect has in terms of how they design that building. One example came up the redevelopment of the Holiday Inn right at exit 14 the architect had proposed there's a Hampton Inn or another hotel being proposed there and the form-based code did not allow I said all doors must be it can have no locked exterior doors something along those lines and you know as a hotel they wanted to have several doors that would be you know key key access only and it took you know an act of Congress to get the change to be able to allow something that you know it's fairly basic on a hotel but but it was you know there was a process set up that could that could update the code it just took a couple extra steps David did that have to go to city council to change it did yeah yeah so on the one side you get that you get the benefit of maybe not having to go in front of the DRB just an administrative checklist but if it's a little bit more complex then it may be a little bit longer process. Yeah I guess I'd follow up to and say you know five years ago when we were talking about form-based codes there were a lot more folks in the consultant world who were really adamant that form-based codes had to mean that all approvals were administrative with with no you know planning commission or DRB involvement and and to the point where some of the Vermont crowd was was saying you know if you go to do a form-based code make make sure that if you want the DRB to have a role when it's all done you make sure you're working with a consultant who supports that because they they don't all support that that has really from what I've heard from the regional planning commission that's really changed in the last five years lots of communities want to have a shorter and more efficient process that still involves some kind of visit to a board like yourselves so you know I can't I'm sorry I thought you had Scott I was just going to say I I had I had my my interview yesterday with the you know with the with the guys and gals and that was that was certainly a question that I brought up to them and and and they assured me that there was still a role for the DRB and that there was it wasn't so restrictive same thing you just really just said that the codes can be written one way or the other or somewhere along this continuum are very restrictive not as restrictive or a little bit more the greater ability to be adjusted as you go along you know and and that's certainly from you know my perspective as when I'm wearing my other hat as a developer you know it's obviously a major concern from the really restrictive side and I know I know my partner developer in you know in South Burlington has had quite a bit of difficulty with some of the issues that you brought up and I don't know whether you were referencing him or not but certainly it certainly sounded familiar yeah I think probably and you know you know what I would say is my personal experience of what has been built so far in city center south Burlington is I go you know I walk down that street I can walk around the corner from my house walk down that street they are they are certainly modern buildings they don't they don't look historic they don't look old what I notice about them is lots of doors and windows lots of high quality material on the exterior lots of brick they are you know right up on the sidewalk and even with just those like three or four new buildings there you start to get a feel for like hey this is this is going to be a street and and down on the residential end where there's I think I want to say 12 or 18 of the same row home kind of in a row it's you know it's it's it's the same form over and over again but you know some differences in color and things but there's a there's like a real life on that street on a summer evening now if you walk over there there's there's people out on their porches there's kids playing on the sidewalk and although it's the same design kind of repeated over and over again it has more of the feeling of like an old street in a in a New England mill town then then necessarily feeling raw and new but to some degree to me it feels like it wouldn't even matter what the buildings look like so much as the fact that they all have porches and front doors and that there's that there's people there and you know that's a site that you know 20 20 25 years ago you might have said oh let's get those buildings away from that big street and let's let's get a green belt in the parking lot you know barrier there and instead all the parking is is behind so you know I those are the things that I see as as as positives I do know that you know Chris Snyder has certainly wrestled with some of the development standards and the and the design standards as he's tried to you know come up with those solutions yeah yeah that's my understanding too yeah I mean I mean I think you've kind of hit on the the the potential snag there which is at what point have you dictated too much you know are you dictating more than you need to to get that feel or that vibrancy that you're looking for and I I like that word vibrancy because I think that's what we're looking for is that that sense of life in a in a space or an area of town but you know I would tend to agree that whether the window is two inches back or six inches back or 12 inches back that might be something that you actually want to vary a little bit to give it a little bit more life instead of them all being the same I mean there's certainly lots of examples of neighborhoods that are all the same and go to both the east side of Baltimore and it's nothing but those as fault-sided buildings you know block after block after block parts of Boston are like that too exactly if you ever if you've never seen it look watch the movie Tin Man sometime you'll know what I'm talking about in Baltimore but uh so you know I guess that's that would be my my point there is that as an architect put that hat on you know I would be a little hesitant to have people telling me exactly where in the building envelope I want the window for one thing uh industry standards are going to change they have in the last 10 15 years about where we put the insulation on a building and that tells you where you want to put the window you want to change the code every time science decides there's a better more efficient way to to build something I don't know about that um my other question had to do with um you know form-based code always kind of starts off with well the use doesn't matter well is it does it still allow for some control over that do we want a gun shop on every corner do we want pot dispensaries next to the school building yeah um you know I think that's another thing where the field has really become much less rigid and most form-based codes in Vermont that I'm aware of still do have some underlying um allowed and prohibited uses um there there are some uses that you might not otherwise want where you go well you know as long as it didn't result in a big ugly building I think I'd be okay with that use um you know in this district um you know you think about some of the challenges around um how to how to get the loading dock placement and treatment right at healthy living right you know I got a building that's got to have a loading dock but I'm in the downtown how can we make that work um and there's there's ways that you can try some ideas out around that with form-based code and and you know maybe you'd have a little more to go on I mean I think I think the board and the applicant together did a really great good job um trying to solve that problem at healthy living but those are the kinds of things that can come up um I think there are always still some undesirable uses that you may regulate through land use whether it's the very specific you know locally undesirable land use like a gun shop or you know Williston Williston technically prohibits bars townwide every everything then Williston that's a bar is really a restaurant that has a bar um and you know there's there's ways to to sort of do that um so yes there can there can still be land use rules under that I would still recommend it for certain things you know there's a whole suite of industrial uses that just tend to produce incompatible amounts of dust noise light vibration etc that that probably you know don't work but one thing you might think differently about is things like intensity of use um if you get the building right does it really matter if there's 10 or 12 or 15 units per acre anymore you know if you if you get the building right um and you and you get the site amenities in the right place and in the right amount so you might think about even something as basic as density you might think about differently Matt does the um does does uh my internet connection is not working very well um you can hear you Scott you can hear me okay Matt's frozen on my screen oh maybe it's me I don't know um now he's on yeah I frozen okay either way um um great lost my turn of thought um um the uh so does does uh does how does how does growth management factor in with this uh you're gonna love this answer um it goes away we have to we have to as a community you have to decide um I personally and from all of my years administering all of the bylaw including growth management um I I don't think it's the right tool for the growth center um I I think a lot of what you're trying to get out of growth management being an incentive based system goes away when you start just requiring what you want in the growth center yeah um I think the other part is that the towns in terms of like impacts to town services and impacts to the school district um we've seen a rapid development uh in a fairly intense development in the growth center um without the same kinds of impacts on those other town services and capacities that we might have seen if we got that number of units in in rural or suburban williston um it's it's not that it there aren't things that we have to provide services to in the growth center that weren't there before but it doesn't seem to be as as um real as relational to the exact number of dwelling units as it was when that development pattern was more suburban yeah so so in that regard I think it it will necessitate a relook at at growth management for that part of town at least um the one that we can't get away from is sewer capacity right um you know I mean the town just only has so many gallons per day capacity at the Essex Junction plant and we we will have to my view the town will have to increasingly make harder decisions about how to allocate that capacity and where and how in town um to spend it but it's been it's been my understanding that that has been relatively stable over the past decade anyways correct it's it's been stable um the the two metrics that I communicate every year to the select board are um can we keep selling as much every year for the next 20 years as we've sold every year for the last 10 years and last year was the first year that I said no um we can't keep going for the next 20 years like we've gone for the last 10 just barely uh we we either need to um sell less or or buy more capacity from Essex Junction if they'll let us um and then the other question that I try to always do is I look at the five-year rolling average of sewer use and then I look at the the year's amount of sewer use and so 2020 calendar 2020 will be the third year in the row that the year's use is exceeding the five-year rolling average so we've been flat for a long time on sewer use even even with all of this new development being added the total amount of gallons per day sewer um that we've produced as a town hasn't really gone up very much from 2006 until about two years ago and it's starting to creep up a tiny bit uh just in the last couple years so you know we're we're I mean we're seeing full buildout of things like finny crossing we're seeing buildout of of now some of cottonwood and yeah eventually more people are going to produce more wastewater but there are other things like all of the conservation measures and low flow everything um and shrinking household size that have been into that where it just doesn't go shooting off into the into the sky uh with new development it's been flat for a long time yeah um hey Pete um you had you had uh communicated something earlier that maybe you can bring up regarding um regarding uh multiple doorways and access points and parking and well there's uh there's a property that that uh the company though that I worked for was looking at developing in south brilington and the use on the property is very restrictive because of form-based code where um all uh entrances to to any residential units that are built have to be street facing and uh and parking in the back roads connected and uh all of a sudden it it takes a parcel that is pretty substantial in size uh for the setting and in a pretty desirable location and makes it far less valuable and um and and much more difficult to develop and that was that that's an experience that I've just had in the last week yeah I mean I would I would like to take that perspective into this process especially when we talk about things like market study um you know I don't know that we're going to come up with the number but we should be testing our draft rules out on real sites in williston and if you start to see something where you go well I could have had I'm making these numbers up but you know I could have had 75 units but with all of these rules I'm down to 50 and that means they're all you know 2,500 bucks a month now to make the project pencil um if if our market study says that what the market really wants is apartments that are $1,700 a month we should understand that if we're adopting a development standard uh so stringent um that it may be really saying no to the development of that parcel right and and so I think it's really important for the town um to look at the way its draft rules would impact different properties and try to try to test out that scenario that you're experiencing and say well jeez with all of this you know we just took we just took a developable parcel that maybe made a lot of sense maybe for achieving the town's housing goals um and and really took it out of play and and go back and say do our do our do we want rules that do that or should we you know should we adjust so I think another rule that needs to be or another consideration when the rules are developed is uh there's there there there are streets that have limited development especially set back a little bit from two way that one example that you that you provided that that I think could be a really interesting uh area for redevelopment that could have a really a lot of interest in a really good vibe but there's a lot of um there's there's a lot of examples where there's a few infill opportunities or maybe even knock downs and we just need to consider when we're developing the rules that we we can't have certain rules and design standards uh setbacks etc on the infill that are incompatible and look out of place with the existing buildings so that that just needs to be considered how do you do that well I haven't got the foggy as but um you know I'm sure I'm sure the consultants do yeah one one thing we really tried to emphasize uh when we were talking to the the consultants um on on this project was this is not a greenfield place you know this is a place that depending on how you look at it is is at least half if not 75 developed we know that redevelopment will be slow new development like you said will have to coexist with with old development for for probably a good long time um and I'll add one more curveball to it we may have sites that people want to partially redevelop and so if you want to you know take my circuit city example you know now the empty ac more and and let's say somebody wants to redevelop that part of that site um how do you how do you impose a standard that pulls the building to the street if they only want to redevelop that part of it um you know that is that is a problem you know do you give up do you say well it's only you know it's only a third of the building so we'll let you build in footprint um but but we'll let you build some kind of a cool you know adaptive reuse of a big box um you know again I think I think the town needs to think about that and and that that actually might be a role for the drb there might be times where you're classifying something as either a new development or a redevelopment or an endofill development and then a pope imposing a more or less flexible standard based on um trying to fit it into its environment um so you know even the street I showed when I showed you know merchants uh we've got two brand new developments with parking lots that front that street because you know we said pull things up to to route 2a there's one property right in between those two properties that's older um that's currently pulled up to 2a with a parking lot you know fronting down there uh the the sanamond property property so so when that comes in to redevelop what do we do with it right it's actually one of the properties I was thinking of yeah um and I can't guarantee that this process is going to come up with the perfect answer but we do have some horsepower to ask um one of those folks on the consultant team to draw it both ways for us so we can think about it and think about maybe what ought to be um what ought to be the decision okay what other questions do board members have Tim do you have anything no based on what I've heard so far your job is anything but simple so Tim you know what happens when there's an opening on the DRB who has participated in the last case which is solely you um I think I saw him raise his hand you get you get appointed I guess I just you know want you to know that I I don't know if you knew the consequence of this well I just want you to know I have a really good sense of humor I think you do too right in yeah it's fascinating listen to it and uh you know it's never as simple as you think um and there's so many parameters that uh could be considered and there's such a dynamic here no matter what you do there's bound to be you know some flaws and I won't say errors I'll just say flaws and the best thing you can do is be responsive to it you know I think what has occurred to me is the last whatever you call these set of regulation zoning rules were set up for a 20 year life that's way too long you know it's got to be short you got to adapt as things come along all the time um so you know beyond that um it's it's almost a nightmare to kind of listen to this stuff but but uh I you know I I think it's great it sounds like you got you have a you know really good resource in that and um you gotta do the best you can. Yeah and Wilson has changed a lot you know it's changed a lot quickly it's I mean when we when we moved in in 1990 we had to we had to go to South Burlington to go to the grocery store and you couldn't take Marshall Ave either you couldn't could not take Marshall Ave it was it's changed a lot it's uh it's quite different yeah I mean that's interesting Pete because I lived in Heinsberg at that time or just after that in 95 to till I moved to Williston in 2003 and we would drive from Heinsberg to Williston to go to the grocery store because Hanifords was there now yeah so yeah you know um I think one thing about Williston that I've certainly you know been witnessed to over the years and and occurred long before I got here is the town has I think really consistently pushed for um a higher quality of development and and design um then is often presented to it in the first round um and and the town has has consistently been in a pretty good position to ask for more um of of the development community so you know CVS is a good example um you know all all CVS really wants is that 13,700 square foot floor plan inside that's laid out like every other CVS in the country you know I think what the guy said in the hearing was you know when when the Coca-Cola man comes to CVS he needs to know exactly where to push the dolly to the cooler that has the Coca-Cola products in it it's it's very rigid um but they have market studies that say what communities are the ones that are desirable for them to be in and so when they come to a place like Williston they say well what's it going to take to build a CVS here and Williston says partial two stories pull it up on the corner give us a little urban park with a piece of sculpture in the front of it we want a rain garden in the parking lot um you know and and full height windows even if you're going to put louvers in them afterwards to back the coolers up to them because we want more glass on the street so you know under Williston's existing rules it it did all of those things and CVS kind of you know looked at it and we negotiated and argued a little bit and then they said okay if that's what it takes to to have you know our footprint in this town um that's what we'll do uh Williston had the ability to um say no to the pyramid mall and ultimately get something that looks like maple tree place which i would i would argue is is a better outcome than than a traditional um you know enclosed mall and i think Williston can kind of continue that pattern of being able to you know set its destiny a little bit through the way it adopts its its development standards and this is just another another iteration of that okay all right Pete i had one more question or comment sorry i was unmuting myself so matt i you know the the concept of the grid streets that i i hear referred to frequently um you know it all predates my my involvement or like tim my first attendance at a meeting um but you know it seems to me that the parking is a huge component of whatever we're going to decide is good for Williston um it takes up so much space as you pointed out at the beginning of your presentation today um but you know identifying grid streets and whatnot that's taking essentially developable land and dedicating it to public street at what point does it make sense to do the same thing for parking and say look this is where the town of Williston is going to say we want parking here and we're going to look for the grants or the the funding or whatever to put a larger structure there because we know structured parking can get you more parking in a smaller area but it's expensive um but you know then you get like the parking garage on cherry street or whatever where people park there and then they walk downtown burlington i don't know if we want downtown burlington here or not but it's the same idea that you know right now every site has its own parking lot because people have to drive there then go to that store and then they get in their car and they drive to the next parking lot you know i've done it i've driven from hanna first to cvs on my way home and i stopped there um and then i stopped at shaw's because there was one thing at hanna first that they didn't have well we do live in a suburb you know we live in suburbia we know this is not you know a burbia right it's not a it's not it's not an urban setting and no it's not something like something like that does work in burlington although they are certainly having their issues down there right now but um you know but but if you're going to increase the density of shops and shop fronts along a street like market street why not i mean when you go to a town or it doesn't have to be a big town when it's all over the country i've been what do you like to do when you're there you like to kind of just browse along the street to see and look in the shop windows or whatever you know i'd say there's no place in willis then to do that so i so i would agree and you know pete and i have touched on this in the past and and i know that anybody who knows me knows that you know out of everything that goes on density is my hot button um the uh you know finny crossing you know is borderline successful from a density standpoint from a massing standpoint from having enough people living in the development so that there's there's you know they can get out walk around you know ride their bikes we're not you know we're not there yet to support a corner store there's not enough people um it would be really cool if we could figure out how to do that now i'm not i don't you know again we're suburbia and i don't think anybody anywhere in suburbia is they've they've figured that out but but it starts with density and i and i know you know five years ago when chris and i started looking at you know what i guess you know what we call finny crossing commercial or phase two and the you know the after we built the first four apartment buildings the next three you know we kind of went to matt and said hey well it gets it even predates that but matt and um and uh ken um you know said hey you got some extra density put it in you know and i think that was probably the first time in the history of united states that happened but um but you know it it gets more people there and and i and i do know that that there are people in in town who don't like what they see at finny crossing um but the only way we're ever going to get there is to get you know to get more people in our growth center and so you know let's that that to me is that to me is one of the uh you know one of the things we all should be thinking about and ultimately you know what it's it doesn't read why i bring this up my long-winded you know kind of responses it's controlled by parking yeah right i guess i'm just building on that you reminded me scott one one thought i had is whether um and i know the form-based code is more focused on the form than the the the land use but it does strike me that you know of the four quadrants i guess three of them have residential in them now you know the the maple tree place marginally with with the maple tree place apartments but do we really want a mixed you or residential in all four quadrants or should we be directing them to try to get some density in the you know the finny quadrant and the Blair park cross quadrant um and and i could see the benefits either way right mixing some residential in all four of those quadrants or should should each of those quadrants and it was kind of thinking about this should each of the quadrants kind of have their own flavor or character is there kind of the senior housing institutional northeast quadrant the residential quadrant hey hey hey hey no you are the residential quadrant the Blair park i heard institutional you're i was thinking of btc for that oh good thank you yeah yeah but you know i don't know you know right now they all kind of have their own kind of distinct characteristics and whether that's a good thing or not i think it's it'll be interesting to see what the community says when they come out well i think david you know you bringing up the quadrants and and before uh john and scott talking a little bit about parking i put out i put all that under the theme of there's kind of some big questions underneath this process for the town to start considering if not trying to answer um on the parking side i go back to john's thing about you know what if there was municipal parking and then you're not requiring everybody to build their own right and you know that it's not consuming as much land um you know where's the town gone so far on parking we've we've got a bylaw amendment that reduces parking requirements and and and ups the mandate for shared parking arrangements but we know that shared parking is tough you're demanding that a private developer make an agreement with maybe another neighbor to share parking and you know it's only going to work out so often or you know when there's a really big um mixed use site all under development at once well the the way to really do share shared parking is is to own it and just say where this where the town we've got parking you don't have to build it yourself or in fact you can't build it yourself you you know you you you buy into our shared parking somehow so that's one is you know that's kind of a a little a little rural suburban place maybe getting a little more urban and start saying well geez do we do we have the capacity to develop municipal parking in that way and you know the one thing I would say about that is that evolution's ongoing in williston when I came in 2008 I think I presided over the development of the first three street parking spaces in a new street in williston um Brett Grubowski wanted three parallel parking spaces on zephyr road across from the the townhomes and and I had to go talk to neil boyden the public works director at the time I said oh I don't want to do that I don't want to plow that you know I it's complicated and we're gonna have to tow you know I mean so that was a rural town right saying I don't know if we're set up to have people parked on our streets in designated parking spaces and then you go the next step and talk about municipal parking um in that official map project that map I showed with all the sidewalks and and grid streets on it one of the things the town can do with official map is also start planning for public facilities and I do think you know we've talked about it more as in that process about public parks should there be public parks in taft corners if we're going to have our most intense development there should there be uh open spaces that are owned by the town and that aren't aren't fully privatized um but it's the same thing for parking or other other community facilities should there be other uh lands that are anticipated for community facilities like parking so the other big big picture question is um you know david uh saladino said quadrants right and are there four quadrants with with their own identities or is it all one place and this came up briefly in our last drb conversation about um the the state highways that create those quadrants right and as long as their state highways controlled by v-trans they will be a certain way and if and if the town wanted them to be less like state highways it would really end up having to having to take them over and so there's a there's a big question that I think will be asked as part of this process but probably not answered which is does the town have any interest in in taking on um those those roads um or is that something you're going to sort of maybe leave you know leave for another 20 years and then and then ask it again um you know we've talked a little bit in here about sort of the the ditch section along route 2a or sort of the way that those you know still kind of feel like rural highways and then what does that mean for how you plan for the land use in the in the four quadrants I can also see the perfect logo for this project using the the the t from the taps corners or the crossroads as t yeah I like it um yeah I mean I really think that might be too big of a question for right now but but I think it's it's in the town's future um I think a lot about you know he said the institutional quadrant you know we do have a the Blair Park quadrant that has three big senior housing buildings and a technical college um and you know if if you live over there and you want to get to the Taft Corner Shopping Center or uh Texas Roadhouse even um it's it's not the best walk in the world right now to do that um and you know do you do you at least want to try to you know connect the quadrants better than they are hopefully yeah that's not an easy cross no I walked look at it yeah we walked from the post office to northfield savings the other weekend who we went cross country there through a couple of those lots it's uh yeah well you know it's and it's funny because for years I've been writing letters of support whenever uh DPW goes after a grant to try to make another little sidewalk connection somewhere in Blair Park because we get a lot of citizen demand because because people in the senior housing like to at least be able to you know walk the circle um and when when Blair Park was laid out there was not a lot of anticipation that anybody would ever want to walk along that road so it you know wasn't initially built with a lot of sidewalk so we've been piecemealing it in ever since now having having worked you know I work in Blair Park and there's way more activity and a little smoking hot than there is in the sun you're hanging out there with him I I'm not but it's sometimes quite funny the you know well below zero and they're out there that's pretty funny yeah it's it's a gathering place you know you add smoking hot to the form-based code I think you just call it a bus shelter David there you go there you go well this is this is great you know um what I what I really hope is um I hope you do all get a chance to talk to the consultant team John I don't know if they're going to find a time for you no I wait I've got a time all right good I saw some back and forth there so I was hoping they'd they'd push through and work that out yeah oh good um you know I hope that those are good informed conversations I think you individually all have a lot to contribute to this project and I hope that I don't have to be shy about coming back through the through the various stages of this and trying some ideas out on you because I think it's really important to come back to this board and when we say so here's how we think this board might end up being involved in the process I hope you I hope you do that that we do that yeah um you know I want to test I want to test those things out with this group um because I I you know ever since I even initiated this project I I've been uncomfortable with the idea that it would be 100 percent administrative because I don't think that's what the community wants um I don't really want all of that weight on my shoulders every single time and the other thing we always have to hammer with the out-of-state consultant teams is in Vermont anything that's administrative is appealable to the DRB anyway so you you can't escape um the the DRB at the end of the day um it's just that things sometimes happen very fast when they happen administratively and people don't you know they don't realize they have time to appeal any other questions I'm all set okay here's loud but I just want to also say it's nice to hear everybody's brains kind of working together in a way that you you don't normally get to talk about things so that's been really interesting to just be able to listen on to your conversations that's not that's not a reference that I get very often you say in working that's uh that's refreshing even after eight at night it's amazing right any other discussion for tonight okay cool well is there a motion to adjourn sure I'll make the motion thank you Scott is there a second I'll second Dave Turner seconds it uh any further discussion all those in favor hi hi any opposed uh six in favor non-opposed motion carries we are adjourned great thanks everybody thank you everybody see everybody later


But the structure and focus needed to execute on your idea, what is the 1-2-3? Am I fully passionate and committed to this? Because if so, usually you can find a way, at least here. But when that passion or the commitment decreases, it's harder to work through the barriers. It's harder to say, I'm going to go for it, I'm going to implement this. But I do see a lot of entrepreneurs who have fantastic ideas, but the implementation is sometimes lost. And that's when people are talking about business planning.  It's the process of coming up with the linear thoughts, the dates, the goals, and the measures with actual metrics. I will reach ex-sales by this date. And there's research that shows those businesses are not only more successful, they're more successful raising funds. Now, why is that? Is it because they're more focused or is it because they're speaking investor? Further research would be needed to know what the answer is to that. But I can tell you from having pitched to the investor community over and over again that they want to see something that works and something that has not only potential to make money, but these days is already making money. And then number two, that you know your numbers and that you have a fantastic team. So the commitment really needs to be there from the entrepreneur side. Money is not just going to fall from the tree. And that's in the U.S. they're really looking in a microscopic way at this. Abroad there's a whole set of access issues which are completely different than what we face here. And much more challenging politically and socioeconomically.