I'm going to call to order the February 24th meeting of the Arlington Redevelopment Board. We have a lot to get through tonight, so let's keep that in mind as we go through things. First up is a continued public hearing for a docket 3348, which is 833 Mass Ave, the Atwood House. So I ask Bob Nessie, the counselor and your clients to come on up. Yes. Introduce yourselves and tell us where things are as of today. Thanks for coming back. Sure. Good to be back. My name is Robert Nessie, and I do represent the petitioner. Jeff Noise, the owner of the property, is seated to my left. Emily Driscoe, who works in the design office, is to his left. And Monty French, the architect, is to my right. We were here last time. We were asked to do some rethinking and thinking as far as the project is concerned. We were also asked to focus our attention if we could on trying to come up with a schedule with respect to what we might be doing in terms of trying to develop the site. What we have done is we have come up with a couple of different schemes that we would like to at least discuss this evening. This is not for definitive purposes because we haven't even gotten to that point ourselves. We met briefly with Kin, not briefly, we met for more than an hour, okay, with Kin, and with Amad Champa from the building department. And Amad Champa is gonna be rather pivotal because zoning is gonna be an important part of what we're trying to do in terms of developing this site. We're beyond whether the building is structurally sound or not. We say it is, okay? We agree with the structural report which I believe you have dated June 26th, 2018, that was addressed to the building department. I've gone through the ARB decision again from 2009 just to make sure that I knew what I'd be talking about here tonight as far as the history is concerned. We do know that the property is on the significant list, okay? We do also know that the ARB decision of 2009 indicated that the building itself did not have any historical significant issues, okay? Now, standing that, we know we have to go back before historical because we're on the list at this point, okay? I'm sorry, we talked about that last time. It was on the historical list at that time. Yes, it is. I just said that. No, no, at that time it was as well. It was in the document. No, it was then. Yeah, it was in the ARB decision. But I just want to make sure that that's right. It's right in the decision. Thank you. I thought I said that. You said the opposite, but I just want to clarify. Well, it's on the list, okay? It was on the list then, and we have to go back before historical. Yes. But they did say in 2009, it had no historical significance, okay? I think probably what they meant was that maybe the history of the building had some significance in terms of who might have occupied it, okay, but the building itself did not have any significant interest, okay? But again, we know we have to deal with that. We will deal with that, okay? What we are here about tonight is we hear about special condition number five, and special condition number five basically indicates that we should be focused on developing the Atwood House, doing our best to retain the attributes of the Atwood House, which I think we're trying to do, okay? We are dealing with a very challenging building in terms of trying to come up with a plan that would make sense in terms of development. We're in a mixed use district, okay? So we know we have to have at least some residential, we know we have to have at least some commercial to be able to satisfy that aspect of the bylaw. Montay has come up with a number of different schemes, okay, which he would like to put before you, simply for the purpose of discussion this evening, okay? And try to get some feedback from you folks as to what your reaction might be to what we might be proposing. One of the things that Montay has done, by the way, is he has moved the building up closer to Mass Ave, okay? And he's done that to try to be consistent with the location of the CVS building, which is out closer to Mass Ave. One of the challenges with respect to that issue is that when the CVS building was developed, there was a sewer basin that basically was constructed in a front portion of a lot. So if we're going to do that, that would be something that we would have to deal with as far as our plans are concerned and as far as construction is concerned. But with that having been said, I'd like Montay to talk about what the schemes are. Yeah, thank you, Bob. So from last meeting, I know that we talked about timeline schedule as something that you would like us to address. So I'd like to catch you up on what we've been doing since the last meeting to now. And that's outlined here in the letter of the narrative that we've provided. So we had to start by collecting proposals from various contractors to clean out the building and a lot of debris and some other things in there that wasn't really safe for us to be walking around and needles and such. So we had somebody come in, finally got a contractor that wasn't too busy to come in there and actually do the work, got it cleaned out, made safe. Emily and myself did a photography survey and then also measured out the full house, the existing conditions exterior and interior so that you can see in the package that you have in front of you the plans that we drafted from that. And also took note of all the conditions in the house. And then by that, you can see some of the photos. There's nothing in the house that we could see that had architectural relevance for keeping, but also noted that pretty much the whole house in itself, in terms of materials, exterior, cladding, the shingles, the sheeting, the trim, the windows, the roofing, the interior drywall, betters, trim boards, they're pretty much all shock gone. Anything worth keeping or being able to be renovated. So that's kind of a four-guide conclusion. And then you'll notice by the plan, which I think it's great to look at the plan, it has a central stair. And the central stair leads to an intermediate level that's between the first and second floor, which really is not, I mean, it's kind of really compromises the layout of the existing house and is not conducive towards kind of reprogramming the existing conditions. And then moving into the basement. The basement, I think is considered stable and sound, but it leaks a lot. It's a grand boulder and mortar foundation system, which is pretty typical for having leaking issues and things like that. So again, trying to remediate that in some fashion, you'd have to hunt the earth all the way around it to do some sort of repair to the foundation to prevent leaking. There are methods to do it from the interior, but those are never 100% they'll say. So in reviewing the whole project with Jeff and Bob and others, it just financially looking at the amount of work it would take just to keep the building after it's taken down, basically to framing after you remove all the material and having to reframe the floors to get the more efficient layout is just financially something that was not feasible in our mind. So that being said, we move forward in looking at things that would serve the community better in terms of providing a mixed use development that would provide small office uses for some of the local businesses and people in the area, as well as residential. And then also, the other part about it is bringing it forward, making it part of the streetscape, right now it's kind of pushed back, it's not really relevant, but bringing it out, making it part of the streetscape, being more contextual with the area and serving the community in our fashion. So we looked at a couple of schemes that are in here, they're really just conceptual massings to show what we mean by shifting it forward. Can you say what page you're trying to be on? I'm on page 17. Thank you. So page 17, again, the mass is a conceptual mass to show a couple of different things, pulling it forward, again, thinking about the streetscape of Broadway, or I'm sorry, Nassab, and how things are situated in a permanent design aspect, and then also making it a little bit closer, building it a little bit closer to CVS, trying to give us enough area to do the things that we need to do to get enough commercial space and residential space in there for mixed use. So that's one scenario. So within that kind of layout, we looked at a scenario where it was clear floor, first and second, that would be some sort of commercial or office use, and then the third floor would be a number of residential units. And then that's flat, essentially, or we could look at a scheme where the whole front end, all three floors, was commercial, and then the rear, all three floors, is residential, to kind of privatize the building. So those are the basic concepts, the shift, the increase in size, and the situation on the site. And then just to give you an idea of the whole positioning of the mass, the massing on the side, and what I mean by streetscape by pulling it out, there's a couple of bird's-eye perspective, conceptual images of the site with the mass on it, to give you an idea of what we're thinking. Again, we think that this is something that, rather than going through the pain of trying to get some small yield out of the house as it is right now, basically rebuilding it, which is just financially, I think it's not something that anyone would want to take on. This, I think, is something that could serve the community better, and I think it also is something that would be better keeping with the urban design and that's what I'm talking about. Andrew, Chris, Devin, John. I would say, I would agree with you, based on our last meeting, that there is a lot of work to be done here, it doesn't make financial sense to do essentially renovate the whole thing and the yield which you get out of, doesn't make sense, but can I suggest, would you be okay to put it up for sale? It's the building of someone to buy the building for a dollar to the building. It's been available for years. Well, let's make it public and let's put it out so that if someone really want to save that building, they can. Absolutely. And let's make that- What's in my right proper? Well, let's, can we somehow make that public or advertise it somehow or- Add us up to the private owner. Would you be willing to do that? If you say, you know, I said, we went around and around on this last time we met, but I think we'd like to give the opportunity for if somebody out there who wants to save the building can. And just put it- 30 years ago, it was going to be moved across the street and the contractor renamed on it steel and female. Okay, well, let's see what we find some braver souls now. Particularly so if someone thinks it has significance. Okay, historically, okay? If they want to move it, we'll let them have it, okay? They can take it. 100%. Okay, at least make that clear because I think that'd be a real good thing if given the ability for someone to do that, if you really wanted to do that and instead of just having it all, we can save that, you know. How do you do that? Where at the same time, do you want them not to go slow or to move forward? I mean, how do they do both things at the same time? Well, I think if I could. So we would have to go, I think that that's the other part of the timeline. We don't really have dates set to that timeline, but in this package we've kind of mentioned that we'll have to go through a phase of other means with you all in terms of design and all those sorts of things. So there's a process that we have to go through on this project, whereas the building can be moved in that time period before we get a permit there to do something done. When we are talking some period of time, that can happen during that period of time. All we have to know is that somebody has an interest in doing it. How we get that out to the public, I mean, is I don't mind, you know, even contacting the advocate if it comes down to that and saying to the advocate, could you put something in the paper about that and invite interested individuals to, in fact, contact us if they're interested in taking it up. And if there's any other local publications that are even greater that you would recommend, I'll show you one more from here on the computer tonight. Well, I would give the Historic Commission a call and ask them because they probably have resources that we don't have here or connections that we don't have here and they might know people that do this kind of stuff. I don't know. I'm not in that circle, so I don't know. But to answer your question, I think it can be done in the permitting process. Having someone one interested, they could. It's a rather large house to move as one piece. It's probably going to have to be divided into quarters or halves or whatever. They've done that over at Unmass Ave on, what's that school that's right there? Leslie, the one right on Unmass Ave. But these move next door. But that was a big house too. Who can move? I mean, there's been several houses of that scale moved in Cambridge as well. You can do it. Okay. Good. It's reasonable, hold on. It's just, financially, someone wants to seek that kind of money in it, you know? Well, I think we've seen a record tonight, heard on the record tonight, Mr. Noy's house was saying that it was in the office for the property, for the house. House and that's property, house and that's right. So, that option is certainly out there. And, you know, I'll let the other members of the board have an opportunity to speak, and I'll let the public have an opportunity to speak to what's required to do with it. But I think I've encouraged that there's some progress here. You know, the fact that we were just handed this packet tonight doesn't comply with our usual rules for accepting materials. It was just on the press, that's fine. So, we'll take these in, we'll take them under consideration. You can also tell the wooden down member before this evening who will presumably be back with us next time. But we'll have these provided to the department electronically as they post it online. I'll do that first thing tomorrow morning. I appreciate that. We can have you back at a future date if you've had some further discussions. I don't have a whole lot to say other than that. I just need to have some time to dig into this. Again, I'm encouraged that there's something happening here. I'd like to see a little bit more as far as design and plans. You know, looking at this, I get that it's just a massing study, but my fear is that any massing study, somebody who doesn't deal with this all the time is gonna say, oh my God, they're gonna build a big, big rectangle of a box, so. We have to be careful with zoning as well. Yeah, I understand. I'm anticipating a further meeting with Ken and with my champ from the building department as well so we can brainstorm this even more and get some ideas, okay? I'd like to share a few things with you right now.  And I think you can pick up on CVS, has a colonnade there. You can maybe have a colonnade on the lower floor and invite it in and out, kind of pick up on that and then. And I think that there's a way to do it that sort of respects the existing flow of the street but really adds to it as well. We have the CVS property, you have the high school, you have the new high school that's coming, you have the church on the other side. I think you can do that in a respectful way if there's a way that stands out. I like the idea of the mixed use building move along the property. The idea of mixed use throughout the time period, I think that's clear. But I'd like to see more about what you intend to do there. My understanding too, and I'll direct this to you, is that there are some restrictions on what can go into a commercial space there based on the lease with CVS. Yes, there are, as a matter of fact. We have to be careful about that. It's probably going to be office, okay? Rather than a retail, rather than selling food products, selling pharmaceutical products, selling things of that nature. Anything that CVS sells cannot be sold. Simply stated. And that's pretty much everything. That's pretty much everything. Sure. Okay, so, Ken, did you have anything else? Just one line about, when you look at the massing, you see the CVS massing. And if you just take that E of the roof line, you sort of, I just make that massing model so much more fitting. Yeah, I think we would get into a whole streetscape study and look at it because that, I mean, that's the first way is to bring it forward and know you're studying the streetscape and how the whole mass out of the situation. And I think it's a great opportunity to have this as what could be on the rest of myself. And I think us as a board is very interested in that aspect of it. So, and we did give you a schedule in terms of what we're trying to aim toward here. It's in your package. Second page yet, okay? I believe, okay? It's sort of use of it. Okay. So yeah. G.B.U.U.I. Well, let Rachel go first. I mean, it's, again, having just received the package is very difficult to provide any meaningful feedback. So I'd like some time to go through, I think, whether I think that aligning with the CVS location as you've shown it here is the correct move or not. I really would like to spend some time of looking at the streetscape. We're looking for your input. Yes. Great. I don't have anything to add other than we need to figure out how to make sure you're on a schedule that gets Yes, yes. Just on a reasonable amount of time. Yeah, and again, I'm going to open it up to public comment. I have them ask questions and go through the process. But let's think about it, Dave, when these folks come back and we're looking for what we have reasonable time. We're also into town meeting time, which means that we're going to be very busy for the next six weeks. And the request is that they provide the material in advance. You'll have it in advance. So that we have an opportunity and the public will have an opportunity to review it. Let's come back to a date and I'll open it up before public comment. Please raise your hand. I will call on you as I see you. Stand up, state your name and address, your record, whether you were in Arlington or not. Or just this Arlington or not. And we'll get through the process. Yes. I'm John Atwood grandson of Lake Dr. Charles Atwood. And my local address is 60 Pleasant Street, Arlington. And I grew up in this town and when my grandparent sold the house at 821 Mass I have in 1953, I happened to be living there because my grandfather suffered a stroke himself and he was in the nursing home. So my mother and I moved in with my grandmother. And when they sold the place where they had lived for 50 years and my father and his two brothers grew up and how he's now living, they had a plan which was to keep the medical aspect and that they sold it to a friend of the family, Dr. McCarty. And he was going to have doctors' medical offices there. And this was done initially and then unfortunately Dr. McCarty died young and then that was the end of the plan. So things have been unsettled ever since up to this date. And I realized it's a very difficult problem how to repurpose it. But what I heard tonight was I think so much encouraging if we could have a mixed use possibly residential and offices, anything to do with medical pharmacy would be good in the outward spirit, I think. But of course a lot of work does need to be done to bring it up to law and its standards, I'm sure. And so we'll continue as I say, I want to stress the historical aspect and I offer again some materials, in fact from Dr. Atwood himself at the time of his 25th Harvard College anniversary of his graduation. He also went to Harvard Medical School and I'll give it to the board next to the proposals and a photo of Dr. Atwood sitting off in his rounds with his one horse shea carriage. He served the town for about 50 years. He was elected to the Board of Health a few times. He was the town physician and I think of it now as we face a coronavirus practice of course through the great flu epidemic in 1918. Anyway, it made a lot of contribution to the town and he and my grandmother was also active in one of the first women's town meeting members where I think representative of the best of Arlington and products and contributors of their time. So I view the site at 821 as not just a matter of saving the actual structure, but it's the appearance, how it appears in the town and we have with families, good friends of the noise for many years. I still have an odd one of the noise my mother bought from the noise dealership many, many years ago. It's now a classic car. I see this. I keep it right here in Arlington. So it is a difficult problem and it's a long do for solving and I think some progress is made tonight but I would stress the historical significance of the town, the house and the people that live there what they contributed as a civic management community and rather than if possible, picking up the house and moving it to me that's saving the house for the house's sake. Granted, it's not of the significance of the Jason Russell house. So it's not just the house for housing but I think the house in the location and of course it's so nicely situated there and I have a little reference to the interior of the house. I lived there for a year and of course visited often but to me it was a very elegant place. I've submitted some other photographs and I remember very well the landing which Mr. French mentioned and also I used to do my homework in the doctor's office. It was a nursing home so it was a magical place for me and almost encouraged me to go over med school with Dr. White. At any rate, I think some progress has been made and I just say I would like to see the house saved. I'm not sure what the intent was back when the zoning requirements provided for preserving the house. I mean that's the issue I think we've all wrestled with. What do we mean preserving the house? So that's where we are. But I think that it's coming back and what I'd like to hear when we talk possibly of some medical officers there and that remakes you is keeping the house. So this sounds somewhat positive. So I encourage a solution and thank everybody for all the effort they've made and I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and John Worden's agency. Well I think the applicants that they ought to sit down with the Historical Commission at some early point because they have the jurisdiction under the demo of the delay. Any changes? Sounds like there's a lot of changes to the exterior of the house that are being contemplated so that leads to be better with them. I think a couple of points there on which I disagree with the presentation. I think moving it out towards the street is not a very good idea even if the sewer weren't there. I don't think you want the sewer running through the basement anyway. The houses, a house like that has a front lawn. It's not very big front lawn but it has a front lawn and it's appropriate for a house like that. And the house on the opposite side of the street, the reason they don't have big front lawns is you know what, the street was widened and they ran the sidewalk right up so it actually almost touches the porch and on the central house. That's why those houses look to be so close to the road. I'm glad the house seems to do it but I think we shouldn't badmouth the buildings and say well the important people live there significant to the town live there but the house itself not so much. Well, the house was built in the 1890s just because it's 130 years old. It's not the Jason Russell house, it's not the Jefferson Cutter house or the Jarvis house but it's a pretty old house and it's a good example of the sorts of nice homes that used to populate Massachusetts Avenue before they decided to tear them down and put in the little 19, 20 strip mall things. So, and it's exciting and where it is, it's a good idea, I don't think. Lining up the CVS, I mean the big problem that a lot of people have in the CVS and I was involved in that process is it's too close to the street and I think people have been happier but then like a little breeding space there. In fact, as Ray pointed out that there was a requirement in the permit that there be some landscaping in front but the landscaping seems to be a slab of cement on the bench which is probably not really using the local space and anybody's definition. So I would have some respect for the building itself and not sound like you want to tear down the studs and rebuild it. I don't think that's really being historic. That's crazy. I think these houses, these are well built but they're not like the stuff they put up today and it does not protect, you know that. So I'm glad it's being preserved. I think that that's the most important step but I think it's citing as important and I don't know why you have to move it over to the west unless you're gonna put a driveway to the right or something and of course I can't see the plans, they weren't shared with you earlier. But anyway, it says this, I see some good things, some bad things. I'm interested to hear the next chapter. Thank you. I think it's important to point out to Mr. Ward and Mr. Abbott the proposal's not to save the structure. It's not to what? Save the structure. It's not to save the structure of the house. That's what they're proposing. What they're proposing is to take down the house. So if nobody buys it, the house will be gone. What? That's what's in the proposal. That's what's in the proposal. And I know you can't see that because the documents weren't here in the sense that I appreciate you clarifying that for you. Thank you, children. That's why we'll move this up tomorrow. The whole point is the structure is good, okay? But it's difficult for us financially to work with the rest of it. This is why I wanted to make sure that people didn't leave with the understanding that you were gonna save the house. We're not. So they're not. That's not what I understood Mr. Nessie. I started off by saying we're not gonna tear the house down. And now he's saying, well, maybe we will. No, maybe. That was why he didn't say that. I think that was the previous meeting. Yeah. He said that. Not this meeting. The previous meeting he said that. And then they were gonna investigate that. And that's why they spent, I don't know, two months, three months? Yeah, two months. The only last visit and they investigated it. And that was the outcome. And that's why I said, we went over, what you need to change and what need to be taken care of. I mean, it's a three-story building. It's, if you want to put in any commercial space in there, you got to put in an elevator in there. This central staircase took up the middle of the house. We went through all this whole thing here. And this geomachete helps us to make sense to put anything that's like, besides a couple of small office rooms and that doesn't leave a vibe or doesn't, it doesn't work, makes sense. So they're presenting this, saying, if we do this, it gives us the opportunity to do something here, that's substantial, that's mixed use, and so forth like that. And I think that was one of the options you were saying today. That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. That's just to be clear. And thank you for making that, you know what I mean? But that's what I understood today. Today is different than last time. Yes. I think Mr. Wharton also made a good point that contacting the historic commission and getting started with that process is very important. You don't have to do that for sure. Parallel. Yeah. I'm sure we'll get feedback from them as well. Parallel. Yes. Okay. Other comments from the audience? Well, I think another consideration. David Adams. Oh, my sorry. I'm Dorothy Nash-Weber, and I live at 60 Bartlett Avenue. Thank you. And 10 years ago, when the special permitting was being built for CVS setting for the conversation was about Fiat Woodhouse. And actually at that time, a very important element was, to my recollection, that it be affordable housing. And so, I just wanted to put out a few ideas for you all to consider. The maintenance, another element was, as we all know, was that the noise family who's been here for a long time and one of our wonderful neighbors, they were going to maintain the property for those 10 years, which hasn't really happened, to be perfectly honest. So when we look at, and so I guess at the last meeting, it was brought forward. Well, we can't do affordable housing. The numbers just don't work. So we have to do market rates and now mixed use and now even tear down the building. So just as part of the analysis, I wanted to throw out the thought that one should look at those numbers and see which numbers have to do with, relate directly to, not having maintained the property for 10 years. So, and in my opinion, those numbers should be minused out from the project because we should not be now having market rate property because it was not maintained for 10 years. So I think one suggestion is to back those numbers out, number one. Number two, I'd like you to look at it in the proposal in some detail also because if, as I'm talking to the choir, how you, your design choices, your appliance choices, your molding choices, all your choices in renovating a building would be different for low income housing than for market rates. So in low income housing, you don't need a marble countertop, et cetera. You don't need a $450 toilet that's part of the design family of what you're putting in the bathroom. So I would just really ask you all to drill down a bit and extract the numbers that I mentioned and look at the concept and decide for yourselves whether this could be an economically viable project for low income housing and would that return still be good, reasonable? So the majority of the property from CVS, the 25 year lease with the extensions is a sweet deal. It's really nice. And I would encourage you to just look at that, please. Thank you. Sorry, Chairman. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you for just answering. Could you clarify, are we in the public hearing right now? Yes, we are. Oh, I didn't realize it had been reopened. Yes, sir. Has the board itself done an independent assessment of the property by hiring its own structural engineer to see what they thought of it? No. I would recommend that you do that because I think you need to have an independent evaluation. I mentioned months ago when this first came up, this is a conclusion I knew was going to be reached. And certainly, you're empowered to do that. I suggest that before just assuming that it's uneconomic to save the building that you get your own opinions for doing that. Thank you. Thanks. Anyone else? Man of eight. Probably March 16th. That's my guess of the best of the hearing evenings because that's the technically the latest of them. So I would suggest that we get to March 16th. March 16th, 16th. So that means that we would need 161616. So that means we would need materials by... 10? All right, we'll have the kind, but just the 12th. Yes, please, the 12th. Okay. We will have materials to you in advance of that hearing, while in advance we'll have them. Please, again, please provide these to the departments that they can be posted on. First thing tomorrow morning. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thanks very much. Well, we need to continue that on March 16th. Motion. Second, motion. Second. All in favor. All right. Ken again. All right. All in favor. All right. Thank you. 1616. Thank you. Okay, John. We'll see you guys later. I just want to give you the opportunity to take a film on that. I went in the morning, though, right after. I think you had a lot to do with it, too. Yeah. That way. Yeah, well, that's right. Do you want us to... Well, let me know when. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We have some, we have additional business to discuss. So if you'd like to assist us, yeah, we'll have an owner who can take it outside. If you'd like to have it outside, come on, too. There you go. There you go. That's the plan. That's the plan. Okay. Thank you. What do you want? Chris. Okay. So moving on to our second agenda item is special permit docket 3616. I pay Tokyo at 4.34, 4.34. That's out. And I don't know if the opponent is here this evening. Yes? Okay. All right. Come on forward and tell us what we're looking at here this evening. So this is now open. Welcome to the materials as I combine them. Andy, what's the matter? That's all right. Yeah. All right. So please introduce yourself and tell us what's up. Charlie from Vital Signs. You're going to mess up, right? Yeah. Skaka, C-A-C-C-A. Thank you. Arigachigen, I'm in the building at 432, 432-8, 434, 436 Mass Ave. That's the original address of work. For the last 90 years, our family's been there. Okay. Arigachigen. It's probably a chee-chee. Well, we've got our land. We have our materials. Oh, my gosh. I don't know who filed it, shall they write, but we'll take your word for it. So, okay. Walk us through what you're asking us for this evening. Well, he knows it. So he had, it previously was Shanghai restaurant. And yet they had a fire and it's been closed for what, a year and a half? Almost two years. So what we're doing is basically pulling down the Shanghai, how you change the name, and we pull down the Shanghai name and we put up TAPA Tokyo. Same family. Same thing, same signs. Same owner. Same owner. Same size signage. Same size signage. Same owner, yeah. So we just proposed to get an approval on the signs that are up there that are installed. Okay. The signs are in the front. I agree with you, they're exactly the same. Yeah. The sign was around the side. That's basically the parking lot. Is that the same sign? Yeah. That is, yeah. I don't recall, that's all I'm just saying. Yeah. It's just recovered. It's recovered. Okay. Yeah, but it's TAPA Tokyo. It's just recovered. They changed the name to try it out. Right. It looks nice inside. Yeah. A lot of headache went in. Looks nice. It does. Yeah. Yeah, so we're just getting, trying to get approval from the board here to say yes. Fair enough. Anyone else have questions on this? Concerns? Well, I have concerns. So my concern is that it doesn't complies with the current sign code. And I know that you've already taken over of going and installing it, but it is over in both quantity as well as size. And I just don't see how we can approve them when it's, but it's not compliant with the current sign code. Yeah, I agree. Once the old signs came down, I think it was incumbent that they beat the requirements with a new sign code. Now there is, and I've thought about this a lot and I went and I walked and I looked at it and I walked around and I looked at it again because there is a provision that allows us to basically grant waiver. It doesn't say waiver, but for the larger signs, more signs, et cetera, with some exceptions that don't apply to you when it's in the public interest and I hadn't really figured out why it would be in the public interest to approve signs that are not consistent with the sign by-law where if it were consistent with the sign by-law, people could still see the name, they could still see what was being offered, et cetera, et cetera. So I hate to do this, but I don't think I can approve something that's so far removed from the sign by-law requires. How much bigger is it? It's a lot, actually in my memo. It's a lot bigger. So it explains how much larger it is for both. It's on, well, page 22 in the entire package. If I might vote, please. Older signs had about 47 and a half square feet per sign. These newer signs, well, two of the newer signs measure just over 38 square feet and the third wall sign measures 60 square feet. So it's a little bit of a mixed bag. And as I read the by-laws, and I'd be happy to get correct with business sign district, wall sign one per business, 40 square feet. So I hope I, what if we, what if we... No, you're reading it absolutely correct. The key phrase in there about when you can grant that way. Yes, you have the ability to grant that in, basically we're talking about just so everybody's on the same page, 6.2.2 C1C, right? We're all reading the same thing. And that does allow the board to do what we're talking about, but for the issue of the public interest. And if the board does not, that's up to the board. But that would be the reason for it. The nice clean looking signs and they contributed. I saw some of them on the SAF the last few days I've been looking. And that is, but I didn't know if it won per business because that is one, two, three businesses actually and then we changed, there were three separate stores there. So here's the hack. In violation of the signed rules, without a permit, you put up new signs. If we were to go ahead and approve this now, we would in a sense be saying, you violated the signed rules, but that's okay and we wanna give you a break. We didn't know that. I understand that, but they've been in place for quite a while now. And I feel like if we approve it, we'd have to approve everyone who came before us with signs that are bigger, more signs. So that's why I think if we were to do this, we might as well go to town meeting with a completely new signed by law because this is way outside the signed by law. And I don't- What can we do to, can we take down a side sign or something on the side? Well, the side, you're allowed to keep the side sign. We're just talking about the front. The front, the specific, we're allowed to keep the sign on the side that faces the law, but most of these restaurants in the center are side to side signs. I saw that and if any of them were to take down their signs and then they would have to comply with the new law. We're not requiring people to take down existing signs in a sense grandfathered in. So when somebody's putting up new signs, I think that they need to meet the rules unless we can find that there's some big public interest to allow a variation. I can't find a public interest in this instance to allow it. But it looks so much better the way it is than if you have phone boom and then nothing. And yeah, they're trying to stay in business which is not very easy. You don't know how low the rent from this to this to help them, which isn't an issue for you. And then this virus came up which really was sort of like the last nail in the coffin. Well, I'll say this. I don't feel as strong as Gene does. I do understand your point. And I'm opening up to only say it's an honest mistake. You didn't think you had to come before us. I don't think I want to penalize you for that. People make mistakes and that happens to you here. You're not fighting it. You came up once you were notified that there was a mistake. You came up and addressed it. So I'm not gonna hold a high price for that. I'm not penalizing them for that either. If they came with the signs as they were without putting them up, we wouldn't have to say they don't need to regret it. So what I'm suggesting is maybe you would come up with some sort of compromise but what Gene is saying is correct. We just can't just say these signs are fine because it's setting presence. We're gonna see continuation of this right here. We won't tell anyone. Well, I'll be fine. I'll see you to report it. Okay. But is there a way we can work around this a little bit? Great. What kind of signs are these? Well, they're hand signs, right? Yeah, hand signs. They start back black color, so they're really receding. And then you have the gold lettering, which is half-inch gold lettering. So they're... And it's facing from the existing light above, right? Yeah, the lights. I don't know if he even has light above. Yeah, there is some light above. I like those lights because it just lights up the sidewalk too and it makes it... Yeah, it's not internally lit or anything. Yeah. It just encompasses the restaurant. It makes the restaurant look nice. So can we look into things? They can't really afford to make new ones. I know that. Can we look at maybe removing one of the three signs in the front? Yeah, we could do that. What's behind this? Cement. Just, no, a black. It's just... Yeah, right, right, black. Like board, like the perimeter. Just horrible board, yes. Is it plywood or is it cement? No, it's a sort of a medley... Yeah, it's like a metal finish. A metal tin. Exactly that size. Yeah, that's why we covered him because it was not too pretty. Not pretty at all. So he's going to have to put something up there if we take these down. Yeah, I tend to agree with Gene in a lot of ways. And it's difficult for me to do that, not because it's Gene, but because I know that we have a business owner here who's struggling. I know I'm not mistaken that he's made, but I do fear the President controls everything. We made this decision now, going down the road here. We're sort of signaling that anything goes. So I'm going to open this up to public comment. I'm sure you can see if there are people in the crowd that wish to speak. We're also down a member this evening. We may want to have something to say. So I would suggest that there be a continuance here after the public comment period. Tonight, it takes place. Show us what you might be able to do. Work with Mr... Could be the owner, I'm sorry. The end escapes me at the moment. Andy. Oh, Andy. Andy. And see what might be economically reasonable and feasible for you. I understand, but we're... Yeah, I know. So I'm going to turn this over to the public. Please raise your hand if you'd like to speak. And I will call on you. State your name and address for the record. And we'll work through it early fashion. So everyone wishes to speak to this. So again, we have a very busy six weeks. I don't think it'll take too much time up in a meeting to put this on. I think we could probably squeeze it on the 16th as well. Just projecting ahead. Couple of some options. Can you... I think you need to work with us before you get to finalizing everything and hosting it for March towards... The meeting itself is on March 16th. Yeah, let's see what we can do here. To keep everybody... All right, all right. Everybody happy in line? Yeah, yeah. So I would entertain a motion to continue this docket. 3610 to March 16th, 2020. So motion. Second. All in favor? Aye. Okay, we'll see you then. Thank you very much. Thank you. Have a conversation with the department before that happens. I hope us is to make it up. We're into conversations. No, no. Conversations. We're sitting in there before the meeting. Have a conversation with... I was going to say, you've talked with Ali Carter. Yes, yes. So if you get into the valley, you can follow up from there. Okay, good enough. Yep. All right. Thank you. Can we take a look at the back? This is just our side of the building. This is about why I don't text you. I'll leave that to you. I'm just going to show you. You're defined by the reach as... Defined in the violence as the intent. Yeah. It's going to be assigned with the middle head. Yeah. Right. So I think that's a motion. And you want that. I'm just going to have to go over and say this. That's what I'm trying to think of. All right. So let's... We have about five minutes, seven minutes, before the next public hearing is scheduled. Yeah. We have to switch right there. So amongst the four of us, I think I'd like to do some housekeeping just real quick. So we have to wait till 8.30 to actually give the next public hearing. So what I will do is just sponsor an agenda for a minute. With that David here tonight, I think what I'd like to do is table item number four, which is the election chair and vice chair. We have everyone here that will find a vote on that. We'll get to the debrief of Jordan Beatty and Scott Moore after this public hearing. We can get through the lease extension for the retirement support in seven minutes. Why don't we tackle that right now? Okay. We need to... Okay. The construction next door is actually going to be starting in the next month. And as part of that, I need to move the retirement board to the second floor for building, which means I need to amend the lease. And I also am changing the amount that's rented for as part of that process due to the constraint to have it out of the loop. Also not reasonable. No. No. And it's also a very short-term lease. Their lease is actually up by the end of June 30th. So it's really just a temporary condition and the best thing to do is to move them off to the second floor and figure out what to do with that space in the meantime. And they have to pay the costs of the moving and everything else. So it's a burden. So there's no... So we're not paying any fill-up? No, we are not. In fact, they're installing a door because it's separating out a larger office suite that's on the second floor. So what I need is the authorization to be able to enter into this... It's basically an agreement to amend the lease. As I stated, it's moving to the second floor suite. Half of that suite changing the rental amount for the remainder of the term, which will end on June 30th. So you're actually just authorized to do that? Authorized to do that or under my guess to sign that. Yeah, you would appreciate that. And these are documents that are our lease standard lease agreements and lease amendment agreements that are authorized by a county council. I have some questions. So on the first page, at some point, it says, whereas landlord and tenant-desire is extending the lease term until 11.59pm on December 30th, 2019, I don't know why that's there. What should that be? That's probably because I've been trying to update this lease. That is my guess. Should there be a date instead of December 31, 2019? It's actually, it would be July. Yeah, it's extending the term of the lease through July 1st. And it's 20. This feels like this document got some 2019s in there that should be 2020s. The second plan is... So there are two leases involved here, right? No, it's an amendment to their existing... So it says there's... So their existing lease is just the standard model lease that we use with all of our tenants. All of the town's tenants. So... First, it talks about a lease on one lease for the ground floor right office and the second this for the second floor suite. The second floor suite. But it says that there are two leases. One for the ground floor right office. Yeah, because they are still going to be there for a number of days until they move upstairs. One of the things that confused me about this is it describes the first lease, then it describes the second lease but in both cases it says lease. So I couldn't follow it through and say which lease was which lease. I think you would typically call it the lease and then the amended lease. Well, no, there's a lease for the ground floor right office and a lease for the suite on the second floor. So I think the first time you use lease it should say where you have in the parenthetical. You mean instead of agreement? No, so it says where as a member at least attended the ground floor right office so they're building its essential school. Demise, premises, blah, blah, blah. Lease dated July 1, 2016 and then there's an open parenthetical. I don't think it should say lease. I think it should say lease ground floor right office. Okay. Because right in the next paragraph or the paragraph two down it talks about the second lease and doesn't, and this is the lease for suite 202A. The third whereas paragraph actually needs to be, that needs to be, we need to strike that one. Because that needs to be stricken. Because it's actually this. Okay. And then the next one where the whereas it uses the term lease but I didn't know which lease it referred to because the two leases referred to above. So if you get rid of one of the two leases that's fine. If you keep them both in then you need to say which of the two leases we're amending the original lease. So it would be helpful to say that. I think that's the lease that we're talking about. The term of the existing lease. Okay. So I think a little clarity. Then on the next page. The next page. I wanted to, any capital cosmetic improvements paid by the tenant shall be reviewed and approved prior to carrying out work in suite 202A. Which is fine. Are they leaving the ground floor? They're leaving. As of the moment. I believe it's going to be next by March 1st. Okay. That is their deadline to move. Okay. All right. So those are just my comments to clarify which leases which is. Yes. I think existing leads. And which premises. The amended leases for the ground floor or the second floor suite. Okay. I got to say that now. Yeah. So we can clarify that. Approved that administratively. We want to grant the authority to enter into this. I would move the authority to enter into the lease with the amendments we discussed. The only thing. Okay. I'll second it. All in favor. All right. Good. Okay. That's done. Okay. I'll do back. Okay. I'll do it now. Yeah. Yeah. I can help you. I can help you fix it. Yeah. Okay. We'll take 30. And we'll move on to our third open caring of the evening. Thank you for coming back. Apologize for the evening you'll consider. We ran out of members. All right. So we're reopening Docket 3504. 93 Broadway. us through. What's your presentation? I'm Zeke Brown on the architect working on the project. Kevin Flynn on the owner of 93 Broadway in 87-89 Broadway. So I'd say I go to the board again. We've met back in 2016 and I want to thank, first of all, I'd like to thank Jenny and Erin for the, I know, helping me navigate through this process. I've not been through this process before. And for anyone who's not familiar with the situation, we, back in 2015-16, we were in the Gibbs School and the town needed the Gibbs School back and so we had to move. And we were fortunate enough to get this property over at 93 Broadway and construct a building that's up here now. And I just wanted, for those of you who've never, don't remember or are never sorry, this is the, this is, this was the property and this is what Zeke designed, that's what we have there now. And I brought it to a couple other pictures in case you guys might be interested. You may have seen as you drive by, the rooftop has a tarp up there. That is a, the rooftop playground, which is kind of an innovative thing that we've done for the kids. And that's what, I think you might want to see what that looks like. And I'm actually very proud to report to you, because we talked about this at length, back in 2016, that we had, there was a question about what the transportation situation was up there. We talked about parking spot things like that. But I'm incredibly happy to tell all of you that we've had tremendous success with our bicycle transportation program. In fact, this doesn't even, we have, we have another rack in the back. And in what we're going to propose tonight, we're going to propose even more racks and some covered racks and also some indoor parking of bicycles. So that program has really worked out well. So the, the law itself sat there for the last year or two as I tried to figure out what to do with it. And, you know, we looked at, I looked at different options because we were trying to phrase some of the cost of everything we've done. But the reason we're here for you tonight is simply because we have a lot of families, I mean, a lot of families who have asked us to extend the school. So I've made a change in our direction. And what we'd like to propose to you tonight is an addition up to the school with essentially a four classrooms. I know it says five, but it's really four. The fifth is actually a gross, into a gross motor space that we want to use. So with that, I'll turn it over to Zeke. That extra growth space, right, is for a different age group or just another class of the same age group. Do you talk about the gross motor space again? No. The addition that you're planning is. Oh, it's going to be four classrooms of the same age groups. And approximately of the 72 children that would be there about just about four, somewhere we're estimating 14 to 17 of those children, are existing parents who have, you know, their additional children in that space. Oh, and I did want to, you may remember, I don't know if you remember, but we talked about the dumpster area. Do you remember that? And I wanted to bring you a picture because we remodeled the entire thing. This is off North Union Street. Oh, and also, by the way, I don't know if we've mentioned this, but the way we, when we did our transportation study, we actually built it. We put a camera up to overlook the parking lot. So we monitored this over the last couple of years. And this is where we get our data, just so you're aware of how we did that. And, but the off North Union Street where we have the service area, which is, you know, gated within that screen game, but we remodeled it. So we put a walkway and everything in the back in order to have good access, you know, for all the service areas that we built. Yeah, it works well now. So the building, the proposed addition architecturally is pretty straightforward. It's really just an extension of what's already there. So there was a request to get some site context for this meeting. So I put together a site elevation. I measured, I measured these there to scale. This is existing and the sort of blank spot here. And this is the proposed piece that would extend the daycare. And, and it's, it's in plan. There's a 3d image of it here. This is the proposed portion in plan. It's this. And really what it is is a big open space in the basement, sort of this flex classroom, two classrooms on the first floor and two classrooms on the second floor with office space in this kind of knuckle zone right here. The materials for the siding are going to be the same as what is already there. We're going to continue the cedar treatment along the top fence up here. Behind that is a closed space on the third floor, on the second floor, sorry. And that's going to be more built out as more offices as well. That will largely be not visible from the street because of the screening for the kids, the fencing for the kids. That's what I've got. Do you have questions? Happy to answer questions. Well, can you go back to the elevations? Thank you for taking time to do that elevation. I was a little nervous at first because I thought the building was a lot closer to the brownstone next to it. Yes, and I was worried that the windows would just light up with bedrooms and everything else. It looks like you've got enough space there, so I'm much more comfortable now. Yeah. At first I was a little worried about that. Then I don't remember last time we were here. We gave you a hard time about parking personally, and I drive through there every day. That's how I go to work in the morning. And I don't have not seen an issue there as far as queuing up a parking. And I figured there'd be a lot of cars all queued up every which way, trying to drop off and pick up. I don't see that, so you guys have done a great job of doing that, and I don't see an issue here now. I want to be totally frank with the board, so the only problem we've had with parking has been over on North Union Street. There's been a parent or two who, when they park over on North Union Street, there's an apartment building next to us. A couple times they parked in that parking lot. And we've already talked to the parents, but it's one of those things where they just absolutely mind what they do, where they go and do it. And so we're monitoring that, so to say, and it's preventing that from happening. It has not got to a board level, so I think it's a big issue. But I do have one small request. Okay, again. Yes. And it goes back to the original project. Yeah. You show planters on the ground there, and then you went ahead and put those concrete planters in the corner there. I know you did.  The light was behind the telephone pole or something like that. Not just that, Kent. I'll be honest with you, okay? We live in a world today where I have to take into account the possibility of something much worse than an accident of someone trying to drive into the building. And I know Zeke and I talked about it. I know Ginny, we talked to her about it, but it was really, when we designed that front, it was all about what type of glass we put in, the structure of the building, and having massive planters in that section, because there's a classroom there to prevent any possibility of someone taking some type of vehicle or something and trying to get to the building. That was my thinking. I have no problem with the planters being there. You make them look a little nicer. That's all I ask. Well, we did. Ginny asked us to sink them down. We did. Yeah, but it's still this concrete box that you put a planter in. Okay. You line it with something or put something pretty good? Okay. I mean, it's uniform. It's all together. It wraps the corner. Is there any space? How big is it?  They are, well, those concrete things are the planters. Yeah, it's a big two foot by four foot concrete. The energy dissipator. Yeah. Yeah. What are you suggesting? Is there any room? No, I leave them alone. Is there any room where you push it back against the building a little more? Oh, it's tight. So, if you leave four or five inches of possible planter piece to soften up the edge in the front, that's all. See, I'll leave that to you. I think they're tight. I think this is about a two inch gap now. Yeah, because now you have to have planter pieces in two inches. But you know what I'm telling you, I'm just trying to think creatively. Me, Rachel, you might have a better idea than I do.  Okay. And I like it. Fines. I'm just looking at it right now. We just hang down over the front. Like a trellis sort of thing. Now, Jenny, if I recall though, there was certain kind of plants that you guys were looking to have in there. In the planter, yes, in the planters. But now I think we're onto something different. Potential. I think mine might take away from the next facade of the building. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want them going up here, but if they... It's just that box. Not the walls. The whole building looks nice. Once you give it that plywood up on the deck up there, it would look a lot better. I'm open to any suggestions, but I will say that the number one priority concern for us is safety. And I'm not going to push a ill look into that. Changing that. We can move on to the... That's all I had to say. That's what's actually proposed. It sounds like we're just checking out the plantings themselves at this point. I'm not asking you to... We do the whole building, we're doing anything else. It's a way of you can soften up that corner a little bit. I should have been a little bit more pointed in presenting, but really we are asking for a parking reduction. Exactly the same as what we asked for originally. Yeah, and I thought I said, I was the only one that had issues with parking. And I think you guys done a good job on what you guys done before. So I think you're asking the same thing with the same space as everybody else, the same number of spaces. I'm okay with that. It's actually even more... It's better because this had six classrooms and we get three spots. This has got four, five classrooms, the CaliGros motor, three spots. So the ratio is a little bit better even. We calculate it based upon all of the rooms that are provided, all of the classrooms. So it's in the ML again. And I'm fine with it. What I'm saying for me is I'm fine with what you guys done there because you guys shown the fact that there was no traffic issues there. There was no... In fact, I drive by there every single day. I see it. So for me, I'm okay with it. I think it's all been very successful. I agree. Unless somebody says something that changes my mind, I have no problem with parking reduction. I have two more curious questions. Anything else? Why is the new building slightly tilted as compared to the other one? Because it's lining up with the buildings to the right. It's sort of working with the context of the street a little bit and it's opening this, being a little bit more inviting courtyard. That was still reasonable. And it looked to me and maybe I got this incorrect that there were some trees on the property line that would be taken down. Can you talk about that and whether there's any... It was in the photo, thank you. It showed some trees that would look like would have to come down. I don't think there's any trees. No trees? No. There's trees on the fence lying in the back. They're on the other side. Gene, is that what you saw here? Yeah. There's one photo here that makes it look like they're on the property, but what do you show? It's just how many were. So they're not on the property? This one here. This one here. The little ones in front. The big one right there. That's on the property line itself. It's actually the fence and the property comes up right up into it. So that's going to stay? Yeah. No, we have no intent to take that tree. That's that tree right there actually. So you won't take it down any trees? I don't see any trees. In fact, we'll be adding trees. I was going to ask that because that was the other part of it. It didn't show unless I missed it. I just wondered whether you'd be adding trees.  No, the one you did, the photos. Yeah, the photos. I can't see them there. So you see this here? Yeah, this is an older photo. But if you drive by, I actually had new trees planted. There were some very small trees that were there originally that we planted, and I moved those over more toward the property line.  If you drive by, you'll see them. There's two large trees in the beginning.  Are you going to plant any more trees or have you treeed out? No, no, definitely one of the kids. See, we planted for shade. But this section here, we wanted more green area. So we're definitely going to be planting some trees in there, for sure. And we'd want some additional screening anyway with the building. Yeah, I think it would just be helpful to show that it's going to happen. But that was it. Okay. Rachel? I don't have any comments, I think. It's a very thorough proposal. Yeah. Vance, may I make another comment from my heart? Quote customer and our families. They several had asked me, and actually I read the report on Broadway. They asked me to actually comment tonight about bicycle lanes and on Broadway. The lack of them. And it's in our community, it's a big thing. It's a lot of our family do bicycle, they use bicycles. If you look at the picture, you see that those bicycles are tandem. They have their children in the back. So again, it's a sort of a safety concern. And so I hope the board and whoever's involved in the town, you know, if I can add those comments to whoever handles that whole Broadway renovation. But I certainly commend you for the obvious commitment to alternative transportation that you tackled with your employees and your parents. It's great. So let's turn it over to public comment. If anyone wants to speak to this. Same rules apply, please raise your hand. I'll call on you to state your name and address the record. Mr. Loretta. Thank you, Mr. Trim and Chris Loretta, 56 Adams Street. You know what I'm saying? First of all, that I certainly support this change. I think this is a much better proposal than the next year's development that had previously been approved for that law, which really dominated the equipment that came next to it. I had a couple of questions and comments about the parking bill. And I'm wondering, would you recapitulate what the nominal parking requirement was without needing to leave? Do we call what the number was? 28. 21. And I thought I saw that even in the applicant's materials that they expected, even with their reduction, 11 people would be driving, and 11 employees would be driving to work. Yeah, I think that's part of it. Yeah. And what's the total number of spaces provided? And I think you talked about the shifts that they worked in, how they, you know, how we handle that. Yeah, we, those who drive, we schedule their shifts, their interest, you know, they, we have someone come in at 7, 7.15, then another shift that comes in at like 8.30, type of thing. We do the same thing on the, on the back end. But all 11 are there at one time? Not really. It probably works out overall to probably like nine on a consistent basis. Okay.  The other concern I have though is about the location of the spaces. I'm wondering how the proposals consistent with section 6.1.10, the parking and commercial districts for properties located in business districts. No parking shall be permitted in the front yard nor shall any driveway directly in front of the structure be permitted. Now it does allow you to make a finding that that's necessary and convenient whether that means, but I'm wondering if it would make more sense for the parking on the side and preserve fun of the building as the open space that would probably allow you to put a little more parking into. Do I get to answer that? It really I think just comes down to the amount of space we have on the site and meeting a certain amount of square footage for each child in a classroom. And if you take that down to the state minimum, the classrooms are tiny and they're mean and they're not very nice. And I think people like this business and what they do here because this space is uplifting and airy and open. We did look at putting parking or or massing it a little bit differently, but for classrooms, this is about what we can do. Yeah. Can you go up? We're at 34 and a half feet right now and we max out at 35. I actually appreciate the fact that you preserve a single curb cut as well. I think that that's given that the parking is where it is currently. I appreciate you just wanted secondary curb cut that you're having. Usually the whole corner was a curb cut. There was no sidewalk at all and that really helped the engineer. They utilized the existing garage but it's been there previously, which was in the back of the building as part of the rebuild of the entire site. Anyone else wish to comment on this application? We're back to the board. We do have one member missing this evening, but I think we've got some material for this hearing. We just had one condition to finalize the landscape plans, which include the plan Dursall. Yes. And that can be done administratively through the department if you want to come back to us. I personally think that this is a the kind of project I wish we signed more of. I think the design is unique and innovative. A original plan took what you'd really think had an eyesore in the neighborhood and really greatly, vastly improved my work. So I'm glad I get to say that to you in person. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm glad you've come back with something that's workable for you. I think you do a good job of keeping it in line with the neighborhood. I appreciate the answer that you gave to Jean-Marie. Why is this a really tilted event? You can see clearly here on your drawings that it's exactly a fit with the curve of the street and the way those houses are. It's very thoughtful. And I appreciate that. You've got great design. You're offering a service that every city and town in the region needs more of. So I'm sure you'll have no problem filling those classrooms and hopefully your parking won't. And hopefully you won't have to worry about your parking, but that's more or less what I have to say. I'm glad this is something workable. So I think I would add to the motion to approve their application. The additional condition. Two comments. Motion to approve the two comments. One was the. It's just one amended finalized landscaping plan. Okay, that includes the. Yes. The planters. Yeah. All in favor. All right. All right. Great. Thank you. I'm sure. All right. So we still have additional business to discuss. So as I said, just sort of moving through the agenda. I hope some new people have come in. We're tabling item number four this evening. We'll do that when we have a full cover of four members next Monday. I think so. Yes. We'll do that. We'll do that next Monday. There's a meeting in the merge cycle. And it's not at the police station. No, it is at the senior center. Our last meeting in the senior center. We'll cover that. We'll cover our actual schedule at the end of the evening before we do open forum. So next up is debrief and follow up from a joint meeting with the select board, which feels like forever ago. So turn it over to Jenny to walk us through that. So I think from the agenda, you have the memo, which is sort of an outline of the process that we agreed to for the review of warrant articles. And then you have a schedule of engagement that we are proposing. And this was actually written by the select board, by the way. So like a few weeks ago. More than that, actually, at this point. And I will just note that we were able to start that process this morning by having our first meeting with myself, time counsel Andrew, Adam, and Diane to talk about the warrant. And we also have things that we will then bring back to the board for the future meeting to discuss. And it'll be sort of vice versa. So we've already started to enact that process. And we also talked about having the group meeting in July and trying to pick a day in July that would allow each board to have a separate meeting to kind of, you know, have their own individual meetings and then have their joint meeting at some point during one day. Because I'm sure you're not, I think it's hard to say. So unless you have any questions about sort of the structure and the process that we talked about at the joint meeting, I don't have anything more to say about it. Other than to say, I think it's a really pleased that we have the process in place. I think it will be helpful for everybody to understand what's going on and to be selective about when we choose to provide feedback to either board. And the meeting this morning was very collaborative. In the end, the idea of how the two boards can continue to work together, carry on with a lot of what we discussed, then meeting back in January, I think it was very positive as far as the discussion went and how we can support each other and where we think it's appropriate to back off and lead each board together and so on. I'm encouraged by how that went. I think over time, the results will go in a positive way. So if there are any questions on that, then basically this engagement schedule is what you also looked at when we met back in January. And the only thing I wanted to add is that I did make some amendments to it since we talked about it in January, which was also those amendments were made in preparation for this left board meeting when you were also supposed to talk about it at the February 3rd meeting. And those things include sort of adding a couple of different items. One of them is to make it clear that basically we're trying to allow for participation throughout the process and that wasn't necessarily well illustrated by the spreadsheet. So we've added that just to make it clear that the engagement is throughout the process. We would be having, you know, the next step is really to broaden the engagement and just have broad open engagement, which means really opening it as an opening starter discussion about housing. So we have decided to do basically a question campaign to basically ask people about their, what they, to open ended question about housing and to have the ability for people to come to places that will be located throughout the community. We've sort of started to look at, I'm looking at Erin now because she actually has worked with Kelly Linema on this engagement schedule and might actually want to talk about sort of how we decided to populate some of those engagements that will be happening, which includes the sort of front end portion of it. So in number two, broad and open engagement means basically starting now, if possible, after we have this conversation moving through May, where in May we would actually have a public forum. But there were the other opportunities because as we talked about at the joint meeting, public forum is not the best and nor is the only way to get people to engage in this process and so we want to create multiple opportunities for that. So that we would then sort of winnow things down into feedback comment period and ultimately by summer and into the fall, talk about policy development. So there are a lot of people who have, including us, have a lot of ideas about policies and solutions. We obviously have a housing production plan, which has very clear recommendations, but there are new ideas that are coming up. We want to be able to structure that as part of the opening of a conversation and then getting into the narrowing of it by talking about policies towards the end, which would then ultimately lead to the construct of whatever might be submitted for town bylaw or zoning bylaw, or both, presumably, and then into a town meeting, which is, you know, I know we've been saying, first we said fall, then we said winter and now it might just be an annual fall. Well, I think the conversation, I think the conversation and the participation by all of the stakeholders in the community and the buy-in, us showing that we are sincere and then the select board showing that we are sincere and listening to all things, I personally said in meetings and one on a lot of people that I am open to all suggestions that we put everything on the table and the time it takes is the time it takes to really get to a good outcome. And so, where we had this town meeting remains to be seen in the next few weeks, but I think what we're saying is we're going to go through this process and see it through entirely and have the conversation that we've been asked to have with everyone that's willing and interested and ready to participate. And I'm kind of excited about it. I'm terrified, but I think it'll also be a good exercise for the time we go through. Can I ask one question? I saw this right here and I thought we were also, when we last talked, we were going to broaden subjects to not just housing. And that's some of the new ideas that Jenny talked about in some of the conversations that's going to happen. Okay, so we did talk about bonding. This all began as a housing discussion. But I think the housing discussion, we all agreed on this and have discussed this, has to happen as part of the broader type of discussion on the whole. You can't continue to grow housing without growing commercial. Yes. And that has to happen and solutions need to come from this process. And both of those ideas have to work hand to hand to get a good outcome. So it's mixed in somewhere in the schedule here right there. I see no saying that. I always hear it's housing. So yeah, if I hear it correctly, when we say housing, we also mean commercial and business. I think we mean development on the whole. Okay. I think we need to have that discussion on the whole idea of this. Sorry.  I think there's a broad broad discussion on development on all of it. Okay, because I think we have to do both. I can't see us doing only one sided thing. It won't be balanced. And we said in the meeting it has to be done as a holistic approach where we discuss the role of how growth is done wisely and how it comes as both presidential and commercial development. And to your point, can I think that that needs to then inform the questions and the prompts that we might put in an open-ended way? Yes, totally agree. So that's why it's just it's broad, open questions, not leading questions and not questions that are about a policy solution. So that's that's the starting part. Good, good. Anything else on that agenda? All right, very quickly. We're just going to say that probably very soon after we're going to begin scheduling things and we'll keep you informed about that. Do you want to share anything further? Yeah, so just quickly, we are going to have in-person tabling events that are generally informal through like mid-March to mid-April where you could talk to me in person. We're also setting up a phone number that people can call in and leave a message about their question. We're setting an email address to be able to do that. I'm also looking into other online tools, whether it's through a text response or through a more simpler use of SurveyMonkey. So trying to hit at all ways that people might be keen on talking or responding. You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. You can talk to a voicemail which might be in my it's not something that I think Arlene does before the way to engage with people. So I think that trying these new ways to enable people to be comfortable with how they're talking to the town. I like the idea of that because so many of these things by necessity happen at night and it gives people another forum to have their voice heard.  They have other ways to have their voices heard. And then lastly I'll just point out to the folks that are here and people that are going to be listening on ACMI. The town survey is open and there were questions related to housing included in that. So I just encourage everyone if you haven't done the town survey to complete it because that data that we get out of there with the questions on housing will be informative to this process as well. Of course the other topic areas that are covered by the town survey are just as important. So you know if you haven't done it take the town survey. So that's it but that's coming up quick so there'll be information put out there very soon. So next up is final Broadway Carter report. Do we need to do anything beyond acceptance? No it was just to... I think it... I'm sorry it's just too accepted. No it was just to you know announce to you to everybody that this is the final report. I think that what it's still online is a you know the PowerPoint presentation. Obviously you saw the draft of the report. This is the final one. It has gotten very favorable reviews from many people. I think a lot of people like sort of the boldness and creativity that was demonstrated by the students here and you know there's a lot of really interesting ideas that would be wonderful to really capitalize on but involve many different property owners and you know a lot of different things. Moving parts. But then there are things in here that are perhaps quite actionable and including things about bike lanes and things about mobility and things about streakscape and street corners and quality of life in general and so I think that those are things that we will be looking into and picking up on. A lot of people have asked if we're planning to do anything next on this and we'll just say that we're probably post-town meeting is when we can really pick this up in earnest again. There are a couple of warrant articles that were one warrant article I think in particular that relates to this. That's basically a resolution to have a design competition. I don't know all the mechanics of it but I think we will be talking about it a little bit more into what that petitioner envisions but I think just in general people have a lot of interest. I will just also add that we ended up deciding to work with one of the students through a professional affiliation that is offered by MIT through the Humphrey Fellow program and he's going to be helping us for the next for basically 30 days and doing research and sort of grabbing us through a number of things related to town meeting. He might, he will try to attend some of our hearings upcoming so you all have a chance to meet him. Good. Good. So that was all of just to share this. And I think I said this one when he came and gave us the final presentation. It's a really unique look at a part of town that doesn't get a lot of attention for better or worse and I think there really are some compelling ideas in that we can pick up and run with and dive a little bit deeper into it. So speaking of diving deep into things, it's time to look at the minutes from several meetings. So David being here? Yes. So long. I don't think we've missed any one of these meetings. So we begin with December 2nd, 2019. I'll just take comments from those of you that have had it to those and we'll just incorporate them. We were all at that hearing so we're all able to vote on that. Maybe you can comment on which one was that? That's up for a while. That one, right nothing on this one. On this one, I think this happens in a lot of them and I just wonder if we can start doing this a different way. When we accept the minutes we usually have discussed what the amendments are we want for the minutes. We accept them with the amendments but then when we look at the next minutes it just says accept with amendments suggested by the board. I think it'll be better practice to actually put in. I don't think we get to go that deep since so many of them are just wordsmithing. Well some of them are just wordsmithing, some of them are a little bit more. And the record is there on ACMI and see exactly what happened. That was my only comment on this one. Motion to approve this minute. All in favor? All right. January 6th. On page three, the third line from the bottom it should be design competition not design competition. Motion to approve January 6th as amended. All in favor? Aye. January 13th. This is the joint meeting with select board. Yeah I did not receive any comments back from them by the way. I did provide them the same draft minutes. I don't know if they were looking at them tonight actually if that's possible. That's the 27th right? No, the 13th. Do you want to table these just to make sure that we're not pulling into that for real then? You know it's been posted for a while actually and I provided this to them as soon as we finished them which is also allowed. Okay I just did if they're discussants tonight and they have changed. I don't actually know if they are so and I don't know that we're ever going to find a similar date that we're all talking about. No I just meant if you wanted to reach out to they're worried just to get an idea. These are very detailed compared to the minutes that they typically write so I think they were quite comfortable with them. Okay. I will I will let you know. I don't have any comments. I want to thank Erin on these. Erin is the one who wrote these meeting minutes. Good job. Thank you. So they pull for a lot of who does them usually. Yes. Excuse me. All right so Rachel has made a motion to second. Can you second it? All in favor? Aye. Aye. And January 27th. On the fourth paragraph it says on the first page. First page Ms. Werko explained. I think I really think it would be helpful to have a little more detail there because she gave a really good explanation which helped inform a lot of the rest of the discussion but it doesn't it doesn't say what it was and I think that's actually more important. I'll work on getting a summary. No summary would be good. Yeah that's right. This is this is not the part of the meeting that I attended. Yeah actually. That's right. On also down on that page a little more. It says Mr. Benson asked about the shadow study comma the hotel shadows with its neighboring building. I think you could say Mr. Benson asked about the shadow study and if the shadows would be cast on solar rays in the adjacent residential neighborhood the response was shadows would not be cast on the existing solar arrays. This seems as if I said they were hope they weren't. I asked the response was no that they weren't. On page three where it says Mr. thank you for reminding me. Mr. Lau moved to approve the 50% fee waiver. Mr. Benson seconded it was the other way around. I moved to approve and can seconded it. On the next page it says Mr. Benson asked about the traffic volume study and how the Brookline numbers were used in the study and then it doesn't have what they said. I don't remember what they said but I think that's something about how they were used in the study so I think something needs to be headed there. I think that actually that sentence sort of belongs with another paragraph where I think he did explain it. Yeah I mean I'm sure it's in the water where it actually happened but I think it was described tired about but maybe I'm something like in the presentation perhaps. I don't really wasn't really sure where we go but when I saw the sentence and then didn't see. I think Gina asked the question and they answered it. All right there was an answer. They did answer it. So the answer should be there. Then the little father on that page where it says Mr. Benson moved to approve the warrant articles as drafted. For town meeting it was with one amendment because we made one amendment as amended. So it needs to say as amended. Yes I recall that one. It was helpful. Those are the ones that I had. Anything else? Any other comments on that night? I moved to accept the minutes of January 27, 2020 as amended. All in favor. All right. Good work. Good work. So we'll get to open forum in a minute. I just very quickly want to go through the next little month of March because we're going to be very busy. Either Jenny or I will follow up with David to be sure that he'll be at every meeting. I don't think you've gotten any comments back on these hearing dates. No and I mean everybody was affirmative in terms of being able to participate. My purpose behind this is really just to sort of read this out in public because we're going to be all of the time. So the next four meetings Monday, March 2nd, 2020, 7.30 beginning in Central School, Vaynerom, which is next door, Monday, March 16th beginning at 8.30. 16th is at 8. Yeah. We have a hearing. The project. So the meeting will still begin at 7.30 the warrant or what warrant article discussion will begin. But we'll start at 7. Okay. Yes. It's just the warrant article. We'll be in the lion's hearing room. Oh, on the 16th? Yes. 16. You shut that out. I'm reading this into the record so that anybody watching on ECMI. This is all in an email to all of you, by the way. All of these dates and the locations and all the information. Also, this document is posted on the town's website, which is the entire package that's posted as part of and it's also downstairs at our counter and I think in other locations as well. We're busy and we're in different spots, which is just why I'm going to do this now. Thursday, March 19th, beginning at 7.30 in the Arlington Police Department community room at 112 Mystic Street. If you don't know how to get into the police department, I don't know where park. Just right down to Mystic Street. So, I'm in the same boat as most people. The 19th. The 19th. The water is in there. Really? Into the meeting room. Yeah. Into the meeting room. Okay. And Monday, March 23rd, beginning at 7.30 again in the lion's hearing room. So, you've sent this out in the email? Yes. Yeah, because I have it on my schedule now. Yeah. We all have it again. I just want to read it out of the meeting so that folks who watch it on ECMI and don't go to the website or know that those meetings are taking place in foreign countries. The document should look familiar because this is the same kind of template document we've been using now for all of our prior time meetings. Yeah. And you've also got a walkthrough of everything that you're going to be looking at. We also have a walkthrough of what we're going to be discussing. So, if you have any questions before we get to those meetings, talk to Jenny or Erin or me and we can point you in the right direction because these are going to be busy nights and we're going to have to vote toward the end as we did last year. I don't think there's going to be the same kind of brush with amendments and changes that we had last year, but I do want to make sure that we're giving people that there are a lot of citizen articles and I want to make sure that they all have the time to be heard. I want to make sure that we have plenty of time before we get put in what's really a condensed period. So, this is on the website. So, if there are people out there who want to comment electronically or otherwise, I would encourage them to do so as well if they're unable to make one of those nights. The one that goes on the citizens group will be online where we get hold of them or... Everything is in that package that I just mentioned. Everything is in here, all the warrant articles. Yeah, I saw that, but it's not that detailed. It's just... Yeah, it's not the zoning amendments, no, because some of them still need to provide the actual amendment to us, some of them haven't. Because it's very general right now. And so, we'll be fast. We have asked every applicant, every petitioner, to provide us with documentation so that we can post it prior to your meeting. I don't know if we'll get it sooner. Of course, we'll provide it, but they have a timeline. We've been in touch with everybody at this point. Because we're nice to get, like, maybe a week beforehand. So, we actually get a chance to read and understand it. Since Monday is your first hearing, I think you're going to get it on Thursday. Yeah, even Thursday over the weekend, that's fine. That's what we have. At least better than that day, yeah. We requested it as soon as it was actually the day that we posted everything. We requested all that information from every single petitioner. Yeah, if I do get it that day, I reserve the right to continue hearing. Okay, so that's all I wanted to talk about there. So, I'll move to our last agenda item, which is Open Forum. I know there's some folks in here who wish to address us. I won't necessarily take any action or anything. This is public's time to make comments. So, this is a word and I'll call on you first. Thank you. Patricia Wardham. Thank you. At the December presentation of the Dawg M.R.T. Broadway Report, the increased tree recommendation and pictures were good, but there were a number of serious errors and misconceptions. Fortunately, Mr. Lowe and Mr. Watson made very helpful improvements in students' traffic and parking suggestions. The report is financially and environmentally irresponsible. It makes no estimate of the devastating financial consequences on increased school population in the overcrowded 1500-student Thompson School. One of the student leaders said that the reason why they were recommending increased dense housing was because in all of Arlington, there are only 93 units of affordable housing, and so Arlington must build more housing. But this is wrong. The planning department surely could have informed them that Arlington has over a thousand subsidized affordable housing units and about 2,000 more naturally affordable units. There are 170-part affordable family units provided by the Arlington Housing Authority just down the street from Broadway. In response to my concern that the report could lead to massive evictions and the displacement in Arlington, the student leader said that no zoning changes would be recommended, but we can see that this was not correct. This final Broadway report does recommend massive dimensional density rezoning. So what happened? The report's recommendations are very similar to the Planning Department and Metropolitan Area Planning Council recommendations of last year which were rejected by town meeting. So the report is just same old, same old. The Broadway report proposes recommendations of the town's hazard mitigation report. It even chooses its focus target for dense multi-story housing, the stunning sign Marla in Ahe area, an area across the street from a female defecated flood prone region and endangered by global warming. It also ignores the hazard report's recommendation to acquire available open space for recreation and flood water storage. I'm sure there are some who lack the report. Landowners, architects, construction and real estate interests, including the lawyers, but none of the Broadway residents I have spoken to likes it and some are horrified. The report is simply a manifesto for misery. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else wish to speak here? Do I need to come up there? You can just stand up and tell us who you are. My name is Wendy Richter and I am the open space liaison with ARB and I just am trying to be present more and watch more and so I just wanted you to identify so you know who I am and know that I'm going to be trying to bring things that come up here back to the open space and vice versa going forward. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Wendy. It's important to note Wendy is actually also on our design review group and on the master plan of the mutation committee. Yeah, he does a lot for us. Thank you, Wendy. Anyone else? Seeing none, I'll take a motion to adjourn. Go ahead. Motion on the adjourns. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Great. Thank you everyone.


Hey what's up folks, in this project we're making a Jeopardy-style game controller with the Circuit Playground. We set up our key buttons as buzzers so whoever presses there first will light up the host controller. The Circuit Playground is fitted inside a 3D printed case and the NeoPixels light up in the player's color of choice. Dylan Harada wrote the code in Circuit Python and set it up so it can also work as an HAD USB controller. You can even enable wireless Bluetooth control with the onboard slide switch. The code is commented really well and it's fully customizable to add support for additional buzzers. The Circuit Playground has tons of built-in goodies that make getting started with Circuit Python really fun and easy. You can get the parts to build this project by heading over to the Learn Guide, links are in the description. The parts to build the case are 3D printed, snap-fit together, and printed with minimal supports. The enclosure is printed in translucent PLA filament. Normally labeled as natural clear, this diffuses the NeoPixels so it can evenly illuminate the case. Hardware screws and nuts can be used to connect the wires to the pads on the Circuit Playground. You can bend the pins from jumper cables to make them right angled so it's easier to bolt and fasten. Check out the Learn Guide for a full step-by-step tutorial on building this project. The Circuit Playground is fitted into the enclosure with the USB port lined up with the cutout. It's secured to the available mounting holes using M3 screws. To boost up the sound, a Stema speaker is mounted under the case. Additional screws secure the speaker to the bottom of the enclosure. This bottom cover has a speaker grill and snap-fits under the case. The wires are routed through this hole so they can plug into the arcade buttons. For the host controller, an LED arcade button is used and gets mounted to the top cover. You can use cables with quick connects to easily plug them into the arcade buttons. Once installed, the top cover snap-fits over the enclosure. The buzzers feature a similar assembly but with a threaded screw on top. The jumper cables can then be connected by plugging them into the JST connectors. It's a fairly modular assembly so you can easily disconnect things and put them back together. We like using it as a stand-alone controller and use it alongside an iPad while playing Jeopardy. We're having lots of fun with it and hope this inspires you to check out the circuit playground in CircuitPython.


As Nigerians usher in the new year 2024, the presiding bishop of the Redeemed Evangelical Mission, Trem, Mike Okonkwa, has charged them to focus on God as he is the only hope to survive the challenges plaguing the nation. Bishop Okonkwa, who gave this charge during a crossover service in Lagos, says the hope of the country was not in the hands of the leaders as the issues are not peculiar to just Nigeria. The auditorium lights up with dancing and thanksgiving. The faithful are grateful for the year 2023 despite the huge turmoil they went through. Just before the dawn of the new year, they pray fervently hoping for a fresh start. The presiding bishop, Mike Okonkwa, then takes to the podium as he makes prophetic declaration for members and indeed the nation. So as the countdown begins, 2024 saunters in ambigibulation by the congregants. Bishop Mike Okonkwa declassates the year of great and mighty things. He explains further the reason behind the prophetic word. It is to us specifically that they come in here wishing to expect great and mighty things in different areas of our lives, in our career, in our profession, in ministry, in family, in our health, in different aspects. Indeed the outgun year could not have come with lots of hardship and difficulties for countries of the world. The man of God shares some insight on what to expect in the new year. The fall is not going to offer any person any good. I can tell you that without fear of contradiction. If you are expecting any good, you are wasting your time. Your only hope now is to focus on Jesus.  You will see challenges the way you have never seen before. With great expectations in hope for themselves and the country, the congregants are speaking with high spirits. There is no gain without pain. And the new hope of the present administration to me is a process and not a magic. So the Nigeria has to be hopeful that this new year, 2024, Nigeria will prosper us. It's a work in progress and I'm sure and I'm certain that things will be good. The year 24 for me has a year of great difference. And what I wish and expect, I want God's word to really work in my life. And for Nigeria as a whole, I want a well-structured country and God's plan to really come to stay. The service so far has been great. That's our papa, our daddy, our big daddy. He has imparted a lot of knowledge into us in order to go about this 2021. And we hope that the Lord will lead us and direct us and keep on blessing us to survive and to keep on going years upon years. So in the wake of the new year, haven't prayed and given thanks, the faithful are hopeful of a silver lining after a challenge in 2023. Justin Akadonya, Plastipine News Lagos.