Hello, my name is Dr. Julia Kazmaier, and my role is to teach computational social science as a new forms of data training on behalf of the UK data services. And today I will be talking about text mining, specifically on the basic processes of text mining, including cleaning and preparing some, your data, your corpus and all of that. And also some of the first natural language processing steps that you'll probably want to do. Just a quick flashback. Before we go too much further, I do want to point to some of our other resources that you may find useful, like previous webinars on being a computational social scientist, the introduction and theory webinar on text mining. There's a whole series on web scraping for social science research, some code demos. You can find these in our past events tab on our UK data service website, also on our YouTube channel. And upcoming events that you may be interested in, there's an advanced option to follow on from this webinar, happens in just under two weeks. There's a health studies user conference, so if you're interested in how data plays into health and care sector, that's quite useful potentially. And then there's a multi-day social data and third sector event in July. But if you have attended the introductory webinar that I just referenced, you might remember that text mining is about turning unstructured or semi-structured input into structured output. Today's webinar will demonstrate some of how that transformation actually works in practice. If you attended the introductory webinar, you will probably also remember that text mining has four basic steps, retrieval, processing, extraction and analysis. And although this suggests that they're a clear one-directional path to analysis, it's actually a little bit iterative, especially processing and extraction that we will be focusing on today. They're not always linear sometimes, especially if you're doing something new, either new as in text mining you've never done it before or a new text mining process.  Specifically today, we will cover processing steps like tokenization, standardizing, removing irrelevancies and consolidation, some basic natural language processes like tagging, named entity recognition in Chuck King, and some basic extraction, which I see that I have repeated myself a little bit, but also word frequency similarity and discovery. Don't worry too much if you don't know what these things are now because I will go through them all. Okay, so the first step, the first thing you do in processing is turning your raw data into something that you can work with. So that's what you got out of the retrieval step, which I'm not covering, and into something that you can do text processing on. So let's assume that you have a great big file with hundreds of newspaper articles in it. You might want to break it into smaller files with one article each, or insert a line break or some kind of clear delimiter after each article so that you could import the file into a spreadsheet program and each article would have it. Or you could turn each article into a dictionary entry possibly with key value pairs for the typical kind of article things, like author and title and date and things like that. All of these are potentially useful ways to process a raw data file into something that's suitable for text mining, and they lend themselves to different kind of analysis. The first with separate files is useful if you want to compare the documents, that is, if you want to compare the content of the file. So this, you know, this is if you want to dig into the text and compare it to other texts. The second in a spreadsheet is maybe more useful if you want to analyze them as entity. So, for example, an article on this date by this author as one entity rather than blocks of text. And the third, the key value pairs is useful if you want to discover relationships between these features. So it's not necessarily this article with this date by this author, but how all of the different articles by that author change over time in their content. So there's a lot of different sort of ways you can focus on text mining, and that influences how you break up your raw text into different text mining suitable files. However you do this, you will probably want to continue breaking it up into things, specifically tokens. Because text mining requires a basic unit of natural language processing analysis, which is called the token. So lots of things can be tokens, including whole documents, chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words, word stems, and lots more. Most common ones are words and sentences. So let's look at an example. Imagine one of my small files or one of my rows in my spreadsheet or one of my fields in the dictionary key value pair that I created first is this string of text. I would tokenize this string as words. It would look like this. Notice that apostrophe S counts as its own word. Also punctuation counts as its own word when you tokenize by words. It could also tokenize by sentences at which point the full stops at the end of the sentences are included as part of the token. Now when you have chosen your particular tokens, and that depends on again on what kind of analysis you want to do, there's no right or wrong answers here. You want standardization, and standardization is about replacing multiple forms of the same token with a single form. So this improves analysis. For example, if you want to count the things, you want to count all of the things that you really consider to be the same thing, you want to count them together. So for example, color written in American or British spelling systems, you want to standardize to one spelling system. Or for example, if miles per hour is written out in full words in some parts of the text but written MPH in other parts of the text or things like this, you just want to standardize on one particular way. So one tool that I find useful for standardization is reg x, which stands for regular expressions, and it works like a find and replace. It's useful for standardizing on terminology or acronyms and things like that. So for example, if I know that somewhere in my text are likely to be both the words cats and poody cats, and I want to standardize on just one, it's perhaps a strange choice to standardize on poody cats, but I'm going to do it. So in this example where you have cats, I want to run a reg x operation to replace it with poody cats. So that way I know that it matches and it will be counted similarly with where else in the text it definitely says poody cats. Now this is going to sound really tedious and boring and you have to go through all of your text loads of times and find out what's in there, what should be the same as a... And that is a big part of the exploration and the sort of processing. But once you find out these things, you can do multiple operations at once. So I can replace cats with poody cats, dogs with doggos, elephants with rhinos and problem with kerfuffle. So I can change this sentence in one operation into that sentence. And this is not a particularly useful example, but I did want an example that will fit on the screen. So this is why I'm using just a couple of sentences rather than proper text analysis kind of text. Now there are other kinds of standardization tools, things like switching from however the letters appear into all lower case or all upper case. There are spell checkers that will standardize to English or American spelling, for example. And there are other examples as well, but they all work a little bit like reg x in that they iterate over the text, compare what's in the text to an established dictionary and sort of switch them in and out depending on how the operation is defined. Things like the lower case and upper case or the spell checkers already have established dictionaries as part of the process. So each of these tools tends to target a particular kind of standardization. You might need lots of different standardization loops. Now, depending on your analysis, you may or may not want to remove some things that are present in the text if they are irrelevant to your purposes. So station is a good one. If you're looking at words as your unit of analysis, well, if you remember back to the word tokenization, the punctuation appeared as its own token. Now that punctuation is useful and it does have a lot of meaning within sentences or paragraphs, things like that. But it is not necessarily a whole lot of meaning as a token. So you probably want to remove these tokens to get something like this. Now in this case, I've highlighted that the apostrophe has been removed from S. This is a choice I made in this particular example. It is not required. You could remove punctuation but leave that apostrophe if you thought that would be useful to you. Another example of the kind of thing you might want to remove in this phase of processing is stop words. Stop words are usually determiners, conjunctions, adverbs and words like that. So like punctuation, they matter a lot for the sentence-wide or paragraph-wide meaning of the words, but they have little actual content as words in and of themselves. What's more, for any given language, they tend to have more or less the same distribution in text regardless of author or style. So they don't help you analyze the text necessarily. The fact that the occurs with a certain frequency is pretty much the same in newspaper articles as it is in grand literature. It's just one of those words that like punctuation, it happens as often as it happens. It doesn't tell us much. So you can remove these with stop words, sorry, stop word removal functions, which take a text like this and give you this. As humans, we can still understand this output. It still makes sense to us. Obviously, it's not grand literature. It sounds like someone who doesn't really speak English very well is saying this, but we would still understand the content. So that's something to consider when you're working through these text mining processes is do you need to run processes that will make the output hard to read? If so, you may want to run two different streams of processes so that you can sort of have something in parallel that's a little bit easier. Next is consolidation. This is getting a little bit into linguistics and the linguistic forms of the same words. So rather than miles per hour written out in MPH as an abbreviation, it's things like rain and raining and rains, you know, as different verb forms of the same word, things like that. And there's a couple of different ways you can do this. The first is stemming, which is a really aggressive way of stripping back word markers, things like verb endings and plurals and things like that. It would, for example, it worked according to rules and they would have a rule like remove ed from words that end in ed or remove s from words that end in s. And it can be a little bit too aggressive sometimes.  So again, we can probably more or less still understand this, but it's not clear why elephant was stemmed to elephant. I think it's possible that there might be a adjectival form of the verb. I'm not sure. But cats has been reduced to cat dogs to dog becoming to become, you know, so it's, you know, all right, this is good. But, you know, if we're happy with this, if this is enough standardization and consolidation and we're ready to move on, then great, we can do that. But sometimes we want to count the verb forms and the noun forms separately or the adjective forms. So the rules for stemming are perhaps too in elegant for us. We don't account for irregular pearls or irregular tenses and they reduce rain, raining and rains to rain. And, you know, at that point, you can't tell verb and nouns apart. So another option for consolidation is lemmatizing. Lemmatizing is similar but a bit more sophisticated. It reduces nouns to singular noun forms and reduces verbs to root verb forms, but it keeps nouns and verbs separate. So if we put our process text through a lemmatizer, we get a new list of tokens. It's a little bit different than when we got out of the stemmer. We still have cat and dog instead of cats and dogs, but we have elephant instead of elephants or eleph. You'll also notice we have raining and becoming rather than rain or become because unless a part of speech is given to the lemmatizing process, lemmatizing assumes everything is a noun and effectively becomes just a depluralizer. So that's not entirely great. I mean, maybe this is fine as well because we have elephant and raining and becoming. Maybe we're okay with this. But there are other things we can do, which brings us on to our basic natural language processing, part of speech tagging. What lemmatizing couldn't do in the last step that we saw was properly separate rain and raining and becoming into their root words because we didn't tell the lemmatizer that those are verbs. So part of speech tagging is a basic natural language processing function that sometimes this will count as part of your processing and sometimes it'll count as part of your abstraction. It uses linguistic structure and linguistic information. So it is text mining and sort of language analysis rather than just cleanup and preparation of data. But it is not usually a goal of natural language processing in and of itself. It's more of an intermediary step that allows you to do some much more sophisticated natural language processing. But if we start out with something like this, which has already gone through some of our processes and put it through a part of speech tagger, we get something like this. And so it has the word and then it has a part of speech tag, which we see here includes pronouns, verb and gerund form, nouns in plural form, nouns in singular form, add verbs as well. That's the R-B for also. And if we take our part of speech tagged text and put it back through the lemmatizer, this time telling it to check the part of speech tags, we get a properly lemmatized output with the verbs reduced to a root verb form and the plural properly singularized. So we can also choose to output this. The output from the lemmatizer could be string and part of speech tag pairs like we see here, or it could just become strings. If we're done with the function that part of speech tags has played, we don't have to keep it in the output. So another basic natural language process sort of function that you're probably going to want to use at some point is chunking, which requires word tokenization and part of speech tagged text as input. And it builds it back up into larger structures that have logical relationships. So here I've just taken the first sentence, it's raining cats and dogs. And we put it through a chunker and it gives us a chunk like this where it recognizes that all of these words belong to the same sentence. Now that's, you know, that's all right. That's pretty good. So we've taken it apart into words and then build it back up into a sentence that is recognized linguistically as a sentence. Now I've represented this visually so that it's easy for you to read as people, but what actually is returned from a step like this chunking step is a little bit harder to read. It looks like this and computers can read it, but it's a little bit tricky for us, which is why I represented it differently. Now a particular kind of chunking operation that you will probably find useful at some point or at least interesting to play with is named entity recognition, which aims to group the word tokenized and part of speech tagged word tokens into sentences, but also into noun phrases that are associated with people, organizations, places, other kinds of proper nouns. To demonstrate this, I need a new sample text because there was no named entities in my reigning cats and dogs example. So I have this example. Bruce Wayne is the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, but is also Batman. And if I put this through a named entity recognition chunker we get. Oh, that didn't work. Somehow my formatting is going a bit squiffy. Never mind. Here we see, let's see if I can get person, Bruce. So that's pretty usefully categorized Bruce. It's recognized that that's the name of a person. And organization, Wayne. Okay, well, that's not quite right, but it's probably influenced by the fact that Wayne Enterprises here is definitely an organization. And Scott, you know, is and those are unsurprising Batman, also recognized as a person, very useful. So we can see this is, and that is all still within the sentence category here. So that's pretty useful. I mean, it hasn't worked 100%, but because this is an automated process, you should never expect it to work 100%. If it's really important for you that it be close to 100%, you will probably have to do a lot of manual revision or a lot of training your own named entity recognition chunker. And you can start with one that's, you know, freely available and then train it to get better at the kind of tasks you want to give it. But anyway, so named entity recognition is pretty useful. Now this brings us to sort of the end of the processing section. And it should be clear at this point that there are a lot of different processes, but I can't tell you which ones you will need to do and what order you will need to do them in. So because it really depends on your, your research, your specialty, you know, how you're planning on approaching the analysis, what kind of text you're using, all of these things. So there are some rules of thumb in that things like chunking and or part of speech tagged limitizing requires the text is already tokenized and part of speech tagged. So there are clear, some processes have clear requirements for input. Regular expressions are probably best to run some of these steps before removing upper cases or standardizing to uppercase, because as it is acronyms and abbreviations often rely on uppercases to be recognizable and distinct. So this is probably a step you want to run before standardizing to either lower or uppercase. And if you make changes to the way in which you do things, so if you started out by removing the uppercase and then did redjacks found that that didn't quite work and did switch them. You probably want to document exactly how you do it and start the whole thing from the beginning because replicability is important. So for example, if you had this process, if you started out saying, right, I want to tokenize it, remove punctuation, remove stop words and stem it. And then later on decided, no, actually, I want to tokenize it part of speech tag, it limitize it and then remove punctuation or stop words. You should always start the whole process with raw data every time. And that might seem like a huge hassle, but you can write code in Python or R that chain these processes together so that it's not a huge, you know, faff to start at the beginning every time. Ideally, it might still be a bit of a faff, but it will be an important and replicable faff. And also, this is an iterative process so that, you know, you might start out thinking this is the pipeline that you want, and at the end, it might be this.  This is just part of it, especially if you're doing a brand new thing, either new because you've never done natural language processing before, or new because you're trying to achieve the new kind of analysis. You're probably going to go through this a few more times. So now we're on to the basic extraction. And you might be surprised, but simply counting words to find out word frequency is actually a really useful thing in text binding. It, in a very broad brush way, identifies the most frequent terms and concepts in a set of data. So it's useful for analyzing sort of in a broad way, things like mood or opinion or category or, you know, what this text is about. So, for example, if you're analyzing a set of customer reviews for an online service and the words that come up the most frequently are expensive, overpriced or overrated. Well, you probably need to adjust your prices or aim at a different target market. You don't necessarily have to go through and read all of the reviews to get that kind of insight. You don't necessarily have to do really complex, you know, clever analysis to get that kind of insight. You can just do things like we're counting. So let's look at a couple of examples. First a trivial one using our sample set, you know, our raining cats and dogs and elephants example. So here's a little visualization of the pipeline I did to get this output, which tells me it occurs twice, raining occurs twice, cats, dogs, also elephants becoming and problem all occur once. Now that might be quite obvious to us. The text that we're working from is pretty small. We could have counted that up manually just, you know, jotted down hash marks on a piece of paper. But that would not be a reasonable approach to analyzing the entire text of Emma by Jane Austen. I would not want to go through that counting, identifying all the words and counting how many times each one happened. Emma and many other classic sort of works, by the way, are available as corpus, as a corpus that you can use through NLTK corpus Gutenberg functions. And I will cover this in the code demos that I will share the link with you at the end. And you can see my code and you can run these code and you can play around with Emma. So again, here's the pipeline I used. I got this as an output. Well, this is the 10 most common words when I ran this analysis of Emma. Mr. occurs most more common than anything else. Emma, pretty common still, could, would, miss, must, hurry it, much, said and think. All right, pretty good. But we don't necessarily just want all the words or even the most common words. Sometimes we want to know how many times a particular word occurred. But that's an option you can do as well. You can search for, you can get the return of the count of a particular target word. In this case, the word common occurs 142 times. So it's outside of our 10 most common words, but it's still pretty common. Now word similarity, if we're not interested just in how many times a word occurs, but we want to know how many times similar words occurred, maybe we can count them together or we can contrast them and say this word, you know, this field of research uses this word, whereas a very similar word occurs in this other field of research and these two research communities are not talking to each other. For example, that might be the kind of analysis you want to do. You will want word similarity and this uses the concept of word vectors, which are built into packages like Spacey. And what these do is for words included in the word vectors package, you get each word that has a vector has a score on 300 dimensions. These scores are derived from how the word is used in a large corpora of natural language, what part of speech it is or is most frequently used as, what words are typically found before and after it, that's called collocation and other kinds of linguistic analyses. So you use these to derive word vectors and then you compare the word vectors, between words. So when you compare word vectors, you get a score between zero, which is no similarity and one, which is identical. As an example, let's say we have three words, troll, elf and rabbit. Now, all three are nouns, so we're going to be somewhat similar, but two of them are fictional creatures, so should be more similar than either is to rabbit. And if we look at the pairwise comparison of word similarity, we find that to be true. Troll and elf are 0.4, they score 0.4 in that similarity ranking, whereas troll and rabbit is only 0.29. Interestingly, elf and rabbit is more similar than troll and rabbit. And I assume that's because, I don't know, maybe they occur in similar kinds of texts, or they both live in the woods, they're both seen as positive. I don't know exactly what it is, but according to the word vectors, rabbit and elf are more similar than rabbit and troll. That kind of makes sense. You can do something very, very similar for document similarity, and this is a really interesting option that works similar to word similarity, but instead of having preloaded word vectors, it builds a vector based on your documents. Now, this is really sensitive to how your documents are processed. So if you remove the punctuation, if you stem or lemmatize, you know, all of that, that will influence the document vector in a big way. But what this does is the analysis builds a vector for a document and then compares the vectors between two or more documents. And again, it returns a value of 0 and 1. So as an example, Emma and Persuasion are both novels by Jane Austen. They scored a 0.99 similarity. They are very similar, not least because they're both books by the same author. Emma by Austen and Julius Caesar by Shakespeare are 0.97, which isn't, you know, that's less similar, but it's still very similar. They're both English language, for example. They're both classic literature. They're both fictional, you know, things like this. Emma by Austen and Firefox, which is a selection from a WebText corpus called WebText, scored only 0.86. So while Emma and Firefox are both in English, the grammatical structure of WebText is very different than the grammatical structure of fiction from another, you know, from quite a long time ago. So they score much lower in similarity. And of course, you could do this as a way of testing the likelihood that two texts are written by the same author or that two texts are written in the same timeframe or something like that. This is fundamentally the basis for how plagiarism checkers and things like that go. So those, instead of scoring a similarity, they score a sort of originality thing. So that rather than just a simple document vector, they also look at sub-document sections to see whether things are quoted too closely, whether particular phrases appear identical in each or whether they're just very similar. So there's a lot more complex stuff that can be done. But again, this is just a basic natural language processing webinar. Okay. And finally, discovery. So we got a sense of word frequency from word frequency counts, which words are important to a document. And we can actually set those to be collocation counts. So we can say how many times does word A occur within one word or within two words of word B?  That's collocation. And it is one kind of discovery. Might, for example, want to know whether a particular noun is more often paired with positive adjectives or negative adjectives. And that's a useful kind of discovery collocation. But I want to show you a slightly more sophisticated thing that is based on patterns. So first, you define a pattern to discover context and use. For example, in this case, the word like, followed by the word A, followed by a noun.  Okay. So we know that all of these things on the end of like A, they're going to share something in common. In fact, quite often they're referring to people, gentlemen, woman, bride, brother and daughter, all people. And that's a useful thing. So we know that for this author anyway, this kind of structure tends to produce comparisons to people. But I argued that it could be much more sophisticated than this if we use a more complex pattern. So for example, if we define the pattern as a verb, followed by the word like, followed by the word A, followed by up to three modifiers, followed by noun, we get things like looked like a sensible young man, or argued like a young man, appear like a bride, seems like a perfect cure, enters like a brother, writes like a sensible man. And these tell us not only more about how the author uses the phrase like A. Again, these are mostly about people. But we find that there's definitely some verbs and some adjectives that match with the kinds of people. So for example, if we were looking at just this short list, we get the idea that men are associated with arguing and writing, as well as being young and sensible in various combinations. And if we were to continue this analysis, we might see if women are also associated with arguing and writing, or if women are associated with other things like, I don't know, playing piano or walking in the park. Likewise, we could also see if women are associated with being young and sensible, or with being old and insensible, or with being, I don't know, middle-aged and mathematical or any other combination of adjectives that might be interesting to look at. You can see how this is a little bit like collocation. And that we could find instances of young men or sensible men.  We can tell that if we do different kinds of linguistic analysis, but they are not pure collocations. But anyway, you can use a structure like this, this kind of like a phrases, which you could interpret to mean that these are stereotypes that exist either for this author or at the time of writing or that there may be ideals like that young men should be sensible or that young men are likely to argue, you know, these kinds of stereotypes. But then they're a little bit more complex, a little bit more interesting than just whether these words occur together. The fact that they occur in this structure tells us a little bit more about how the author thinks, how these words mean, how society interprets these concepts. Now really, we've just dipped our toe into natural language processing and a big chunk of today's natural language processing was taken up with the processing part. So we're about to wrap up. I do want to provide you with some links. The first one will take you to our GitHub page. If you go to the code branch, you can see our, there's a Jupyter notebook for processing and a second Jupyter notebook for extraction that works through interactive code examples for all the different things that I've showed you today and actually a few things, more things like actually how to remove punctuation, you know, different kinds of ways to analyze the text in the basic concepts that I've shown you today. There's also some resources like the natural language toolkit and if you want to look at the corpus, natural language toolkit corpus, things so if you can get the web text or the classic literature books, spacey, it's similar to natural language toolkit, but it is more recent and arguably a lot more powerful. So depending on whether you feel up to taking on something a little bit more powerful, that might be interesting. So also if you're interested in how word vectors and document vectors work, there's a semantic vectors package on GitHub and an excellent book called Geometry and Meaning by Dominic Widows in which he explains why you get meaning from words by creating these 300 dimension or more word vectors and how you can use a geometric interpretation of words to analyze similarity and function and even translation and things like that. It's a very interesting book, but it is absolutely chock full of math and theory. If you're into that, it'll be right up your street. If you're not, it will be a coaster.


The appointed hour is six o'clock having been reached. I call this meeting of the Amherst Zoning Board of Appeals to order. My name is Steve Judge. As chair, I want to welcome everyone to this meeting. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order, suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 30A, Section 18. And the Governor's March 15, 2020 order, imposing strict limitations on the number of people that may gather in one place. This meeting, this public hearing of the town of Amherst Zoning Board of Appeals is being conducted via remote participation. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but the public can listen to the proceedings by clicking on a link on the town's webpage. In accordance with the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 40A, and Article 10, Special Permit Granting Authority, of the Amherst Zoning Bylaw, this public meeting has been duly advertised and notice thereof has been posted and mailed to parties at interest. We will begin with the roll call of the regular members of the ZBA. Steve Judge, chair is here. Mr. Langsdale, Ms. Parks. Here. Mr. Maxfield. Here. And associate members, Ms. Waldman, Mr. Barrick, Mr. Greeny, Mr. Meadows. Here. Also in attendance is Marine Pollock Planner and Rob Mora, the building commissioner. The Zoning Board of Appeals is a quasi-judicial body that operates under the authority of Chapter 40A of the General Laws of the Commonwealth for the purpose of promoting the health, safety, convenience and general welfare of the inhabitants of the town of Amherst. One of the most important elements of the Amherst Zoning Bylaw is Section 10.38. Specific findings from that section must be made for all of our decisions. All hearings and meetings are open to the public and are recorded by town staff. The procedure is as follows. The petitioner presents the application to the board during the hearing after which the board will ask questions for clarification or additional information. After the board has completed its question, the board will seek input. The public speaks with the permission of the chair. If a member of the public wishes to speak, they should so indicate by using the raise hand function on the screen. The chair with the assistance of the staff will call upon people wishing to speak. When you are recognized, present your name and address to the board for the record. All questions and comments must be addressed to the board. The board will normally hold public hearings for the information about the project input from the public is gathered, followed by the public meetings for each. The public meeting portion is generally when the board deliberates and is not generally not an opportunity for public comment. If the board feels it has enough information and time, it will decide upon the application tonight. Each petition is heard by the board is distinct and is evaluated on its own merit and the board is not ruled by precedent. Statutorily for the special permit, the board has 90 days from the close of the hearing to file a decision for a variance. The board has a hundred days from the date of filing the file its decision. No decision is final until the written decision is signed by the sitting board members and is filed with the town clerk's office. Once the decision is filed with the town clerk, there is a 20 day appeal process for a agreed party to contest the decision with the relevant judicial body of the Superior Court. After the appeal period, the permit must be recorded with the registry of deeds to take effect. Tonight's agenda, ZBA 2021-03, Pioneer Property Services, LLC, request a special permit to convert the existing detached garage to a residential unit, which will increase the number of residential units converted dwelling from one to two under section 3.3241, 9.22 and 10.38 of the zoning bylaw. Located at 275 Eastern Pleasant Street, map 11B, Parcel 63, neighborhood residents, RN zoning district. This hearing is continued from February 11th, 2021. We also have the general comment period to the public to comment on matters, not before the board tonight and other business not anticipated within 48 hours. The first order of business tonight is ZBA FY 2021-03, Pioneer Property Services. Before we begin, I wanna acknowledge that Mr. Langsdale is here. Yes, here. Yep, there he's here. I have one disclosure and one report. After our last meeting on this application, I received an email addressed to me and the town staff regarding this application. Email raised questions regarding the ZBA process on and the merits of the specific application. The email does not affect my ability to partially act on this matter and as part of the public record. Are there any other disclosures? I also have a report at the last meeting, the board authorized me to determine whether a peer review of the groundwater drainage plan was needed. I met with town staff to review the submitted plans, the town engineer reviewed the plans a second time and agreed to ask Mr. Sparkle for additional information regarding Mr. Sparkle's calculations. We determined that the information from Mr. Sparkle would probably obviate the need for a peer review. Subsequently, the applicant informed the town that they wished to withdraw the application. No peer review was contracted for this matter. The following submissions, is there any other disclosures or notices? If not, the following submissions have been received by town staff. The February 12th email from Mr. Steve Schreiber. The February 27th email from Neil and Jen Mendelsen asking to withdraw their application without precedent and a email from the butters asking for withdrawal with prejudice. Is there a representative of the applicant or the applicant who wishes to request this withdrawal? Yes. Neil Mendelsen, Pioneer Property Services. All right. Are there any comments or questions from the board members? If there are any, Mr. Maxfield. Yeah, Mr. Mendelsen, I wanted to ask can I ask why it is that you are requesting to withdraw without prejudice? Is this just become the process to become to cumbersome to much of a financial burden? Yeah, I think I went through this process feeling that I could adapt to the comments that were received and the board's concerns. I really tried and I still think that this project could be a compliment to the neighborhood but it's become obvious that the opposition is very great to it and the burden on my business it's I'm a small operation and I just can't afford to keep going. So I regret having to do it but I want to do it. I want to withdraw and I'm asking that it be withdrawn without prejudice. Mr. Maxfield. I have one follow up question. If it were the case that the board were to say that we felt we had enough evidence as is without requesting any more from you or imposing any more costs on you, would you prefer that the board move forward and make a ruling one way or the other with the evidence that we have currently if we're not coming back asking for necessarily more information outside of what we've gathered over the past several months, would you want a decision if the board felt we had enough to make a decision one way or the other? Yeah, I would and as a matter of fact, I would be not opposed to any conditions that you would propose and including owner occupied. I really do have a vision for this building and I think it could be really nice and I, you know, it's kind of a, you know, a passion of mine and since I bought the building and since I bought the property it has been something that has, I wanted to do and you know, it's so yeah, I am, I am, I would totally work with the town, the board, neighbors, I, you know, to make this come to fruition that is my dream, yeah. Thank you, Mr. Alston. Any other comments, questions from board? If there are no other questions from board members I would entertain a motion to adjourn the public hearing on this matter and open a public meeting on the request to withdraw the application of the special permit. Is there a motion? So moved. Mr. Maxfield, is there a second? Second. Mr. Meadows seconds. A vote occurs on the motion. This vote requires the majority of the ZBA three members to pass. This will be a roll call vote. The chair votes aye. Mr. Langsdale. No. Mr. Ms. Parks. I need to ask what we're voting on now. Okay, we're voting to close the hearing and open a public meeting on this item and then we can have discussion amongst the board members on this item. Not to close, we're voting to adjourn. Adjourn. Adjourn, the person who always catches me with adjourn to adjourn the meeting and open a public meeting adjourn the hearing, open a public meeting on the application. Then the board members can discuss at that time the application request to withdraw. Yes, Ms. Pollock. I believe attorney Joel Bard has raised his hand. Okay. Hold on, we're in the middle of a vote. Let's vacate the vote and then we'll start again. We should not be having discussions except one clarification on the vote in the middle of a vote. So let's vacate the vote and we'll start it up again. Mr. Bard, you said has a... Yeah, Joel, can you speak? I did ask to unmute. So maybe his mute is not working, his unmute. All right, well, we'll never mind. Okay. I think in your motion, you may want to need to say that you will reopen the public hearing, that you're just adjourning for this next bit, but you will be reopening the public hearing. Well, we'll reopen the public hearing if the motion to accept the withdrawal is not approved. And we'll be back with them, we'll continue the public hearing. Yep. All right. End the discussion. We're voting to end the hearing where there's discussion and input from the applicant. We're voting and then we're voting to open the meeting where the board would discuss amongst themselves. And so if you may... So if the board has any sort of clarifying questions, I think now would be a good time to be had or is that correct before you close the public hearing? Or adjourn the public hearing? We can ask those clarifying questions during the meeting, but it's better to ask them during a public hearing if you have questions. Okay. So let's proceed to the vote on the previously stated motion, which was a motion to adjourn the public hearing on the request to withdraw without prejudice and open a public meeting on the same matter. It's a roll call vote. We've had a... Mr. Maxfield, do you make that motion again? So moved. Who seconds? Sir. Mr. Meadows? It's a roll call vote. Chair votes aye. Mr. Langsdale? Aye. Ms. Parks? Aye. Mr. Maxfield? Aye. Mr. Meadows? Aye. Motion passes. We're now in a public meeting to consider the request of the applicant to withdraw the application for a special permit without prejudice. Are there people have questions, discussions and comments? Mr. Maxfield? I think we should deny the request, I think over the past several months, we've gathered a lot of evidence. We have a solid proposal before us that I think we can vote with conditions one way or another. If we wanted to, we can deny it. If we don't want to pass it, but either way, I think we have materials needed to make a decision one way or the other. And I think that the board should move forward and we should come to a vote on this matter. So I think we should deny this request. Any other comments? Mr. Langsdale? I agree. Ms. Parks? Mr. Meadows? I don't know that I feel ready to vote on the project because I have some concerns about the project that I don't know if they were fully answered or they weren't fully answered for me. And so I'm not feeling as comfortable about voting on the project right now. Mr. Meadows, you were... My comment would be primarily about the last letter from Mr. Schreiber that in which he indicated that an architect would be necessary for this. I'm not suggesting that that's the best route but if it is left open as an open issue and we vote, we vote on this, it could end up causing problems after this vote if we don't ask for everything that is needed for the project. Mr. Langsdale? I would like to ask Ms. Parks, what are those concerns that haven't been answered for you? So one of them is about the management plan and about how that would work if it weren't owner occupied. So if it were for unrelated people and one of them were the property manager, how would that work? So I have concerns about that. I also have concerns about eight people on the property. I know that there was like a range of six to eight people but that feels like a lot of people on that property. I'm concerned about a non-permeable surface for the parking. I'm wondering if it's possible to do a permeable parking surface. I'm concerned because the original house isn't finished and I would feel more comfortable with the project if the main house were completely finished. I guess I just had a lot of experience with people not finishing things. And so it concerns me that the main house isn't finished yet. I did have a concern about having the architectural, I guess it's a licensed architect designing the project. I don't know, I just haven't looked into it. So those are some of the concerns I have. I just, I wasn't 100% comfortable with those things. Mr. Langsdale, before I recognize you, I just wanna express my concerns about the application. Generally too, I am concerned about the number of people residents on that small piece of property. And I'm concerned about the effects upon the neighborhood whether we were detrimental or not. I'm also not sure that the, as Ms. Parks was, I'm not sure about the drawings and if we would need additional information, additional drawings and a more complete set of drawings, I think before we go or a waiver from request for a waiver, if we want to approve that with the drawings. The permeability, I originally had a real problem with the groundwater. The water. Oh, is it? Can you talk a little bit about the water? I had a real concern about the groundwater runoff. But I think that the study done in the discussion with Mr. Steele's, I am less concerned about that than I was. Generally, I think that the applicant has to be, if we do not allow him to withdraw this, and it continues to be an open issue, the applicant has to be prepared to, could be asked to provide more information. It might require more expense on his part or their part. And I'm not sure that it's up to the applicant to decide that if they want it or not. But I don't think that in my opinion, I'm not sure that I don't think that this would proceed without additional time, effort, and perhaps cost to the applicant. And lastly, allowing the applicant to withdraw without denial means that he can go back, work on this and present it again at another time. If we keep it open, if he wants to, he can go back, reassesses his designs and come back before the board at a later point in time. And I don't think that would be deemed to be frivolous or it wouldn't be inappropriate to come back with a more complete and better application if he so chooses. And so for that reason, I'd like to give the applicant the opportunity to withdraw it as a request and do it without denial or without prejudice. I know the neighbors are expressing a concern about that, they would like to have this denied with prejudice which would preclude a similar proposal from the applicant for the next two years. And I do not feel that that's appropriate or needed. I think you tend to have that only when you have frivolous or sort of malicious applications that tend to take up the time with the board. And I don't think this is the case at all. I think this is an honest attempt to do something with this property. It's done with all the good intentions. The board just may have a different feeling about whether it's appropriate or not. But for those reasons, I would support the motion to allow the withdrawal without prejudice. Mr.  Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, the main house, as Ms. Park said, isn't finished. I don't know what that means. The outside needs to be repaired, but the applicant has already said that that's part of the process and certainly would be a condition. The photographs that we've had of the inside, they have made a lot of additions and everything. The other thing is, we keep talking about the runoff from this parking lot. And the town engineer has looked at it and okayed it with the plan. One of the things that we've heard constantly at the beginning of this was that the property to the south of this property, 275, has had a lot of problems with water in their basement, which is a runoff from 275. So if nothing is done, that will continue. So if there's a parking lot with permeable concrete, which as we have dealt with before, plus the plans for the runoff that the applicant has presented, it's only gonna be a lot better. And if the town engineer has already said it's adequate, why are we still talking about this runoff? It doesn't make sense to me. The runoff is being taken care of. Mr. Maxwell. One of my concerns here to really about withdrawing this, without prejudice here is, I think we've spent a lot of time here in the public hearing, and we haven't really had a lot of time to discuss amongst the board here about some issues that may be insurmountable, such as this being an undersized lot for even one building out, it's two buildings on their show, there's two structures, but we here on the board have been really gotten into that issue if let's say all other concerns are addressed, how does the board feel about that? There's nothing Mr. Mendelssohn can do to change the size of the lot. Would that be something that ultimately the board would deny this project for? And Mr. Mendelssohn withdraws, spends more time and money, comes back to the board, ultimately just to have it get denied because of the lot size, why didn't we just do that now in this meeting? Why did we send it back? There's one concern that I have of that going backwards or withdrawal. And two, I think we've been working on this for since October, five, six months now that we're at. And I know prior to coming on to the ZBA, I would hear stories of people who come before the Amherst ZBA. And then it's just roadblock after roadblock after roadblock never gets anywhere. And then they withdraw their application without ever getting a decision. And I frankly don't want us to operate in that way. I think we've heard more than enough evidence to make a ruling one way or the other. I certainly think if we want to move forward in this, we will need to spend a lot of time working on conditions to address the concerns that we have here on the board. But I think we have the information we need to start working on that. And then if it turns out that we don't or we run into issues that can't be rectified, then we can deny the project. But I think we really should move forward on this way. And we should rule either up or down on this project. And we should not have this project withdrawn. Mr. Maxwell, I'm not sure that I agree. I don't agree with your characterization here. The ability of the applicant to withdraw this is in the applicant's interest, if you want. It's very possible that if we continue on with this, we would deny that the application. The application would then, the Mr. Mendelssohn then could not reapply for the next two years. It was essentially the same application. He couldn't even go back and try to modify it a bit, but the sense, it'd be up to us to judge whether this would be a new, substantially changed application or not. Secondly, I think that you're right that the board has not had time, there's not an opportunity to address, to talk among themselves, to address the concerns. And that's the process, that's the effect of the hearing process. We've been in a public hearing, we haven't been in the public meeting yet where we typically do the conversations. And from that public hearing, arguably the applicant has heard that there's concerns that he may or may not be able to overcome. And it's the applicant's desire to withdraw that. Our desire, I think as a public body, our desire to come to a decision should not be paramount to the applicant's desire to continue the fight or not, or to continue the application and continue on with additional information. I think that if we do go ahead and deny the motion to withdraw and continue with the application, continue it, I think there'll be additional information needed from the board. It seems obvious from the discussion so far tonight. And I'm just not sure that Mr. Mendelson wants, and it's up to him. I'm not sure that Mr. Mendelson wants to continue to engage in that and spend the money on it. So this is at his request, at the applicant's request. And I feel that allowing them to go back and reapply if they wish at a later point in time is probably the best for Kim, as well as for the board not having an open item on our agenda for a period of time. Mr. Langsdale. Yeah, you just stated that we as the board over this period of time, these months have not had a chance to discuss this because everything has been about presentation in a public hearing. So now we're sitting in a public meeting, finally. So now we're beginning to talk about what we think this project is about, what it can do, how it can be done. So we have to finally ask the applicant what he wants to do. However, he deserves to hear the board discuss this entire matter before we ask him, do you wanna go ahead with this? He has already said he wishes that he did not have to withdraw. So I think it's incumbent upon us to have a real discussion among the five board members about what this project is, what, if we're looking for anything else and I think it's, and then it's up to us to present all of that to him and say, do you wanna go ahead with this or not? Rather than us deciding whether he should go ahead with this or not. Mr. Langsdale, it is up to him. We're not deciding whether he should go ahead or not. But we're not deciding whether. But he deserves our input, which he hasn't had up to this point. But that's what we're doing right now. I talked about her, I talked about my concerns, Mr. Meadows talked about his, you had an opportunity and so did Mr. Matchfield. And so we're continuing that process right now, but in the end, it's up to Mr. Mendelsen whether he wants to continue to push for, continue to have this before us or if he wants to withdraw without prejudice. I will say that I think that I would be in, I would be more, I would be of the opinion that we need to have more exact drawings, something either from a licensed designer, things that are to scale. I think that's gonna require some effort and expense on his part at the very least. I know Mrs. Parks has questions about the drainage. I've had those somewhat ameliorated for me and the town engineer has spoken about that. I think the hardest thing is the number of people on the, I think the hardest thing is the number of residents on the property. When you'd have eight residents on the property and in that neighborhood, I'm worried about the effect on the neighborhood. And we have to find that that it does not have a more detrimental effect than the existing structure to be able to make the 9.22 determination and then to go through 3.3241 and then go to 10.38. I think there's a, in my opinion, there's a huge hurdle and there's more information needed and there's more questions to be asked that I think then I'm prepared to vote for this application at this point. Then excuse me, we have been through five months of this. Why haven't these things been addressed? Why haven't these been addressed? I'm really frustrated by this. I mean, this whole thing about the drainage, what are you looking for? The drainage would be far better than it is now. Mr. Langsdale, we did address it. The parking far better than it is now. Mr. Langsdale, at the last meeting, we even thought about having a peer review. We talked with Jason Steele. He said the peer review would not give us any additional information. He reviewed the matter again and he said that he thought it was adequate. I think the difference between a permeable driveway and a flat driveway, a pure asphalt driveway is little. There's very little difference in the permeability of the water with these permeable pavers and just asphalt. And so I think even if we require that, it might be marginally different and marginally beneficial to the abutter, but I'm just not sure that it would make much difference. And why are there questions still about the drainage? Ms. Parks raised the question about the drainage and I had the questions beforehand, but she... But what are those questions is what I'm asking. Now that we've been given all this information, what are the questions? Why are the questions still there about the drainage? Just a second, Ms. Paula. I just wanted to clarify something about the stormwater management discussion item. So the way the things that were left off with the town engineer was putting a pause on having a peer review for the stormwater, but to have the professional engineer, Bucky Sparkle, to submit his hydrological calculations for determining the proposed stormwater. And so it is my understanding that that information has not been provided to the town engineer as of yet. So that would still need to be provided if this project were to be... This application process were to be carried on. So I just wanted to clarify that. And then I also just wanted to say since attorney Bard, I believe had something that he wanted to contribute. He is calling from the airport. So I wanted... Was letting you get in. Yeah, so Joel, I believe... Let me press that. Let's see here if that'll work. You might need to press star six or star nine. I seem to forget. Okay, here we go. There we go. Hi, Joel. Hello, Mr. Chairman. Yes, hi, everyone. I apologize for the background noise. Actually, the comment I would have made, I think has been addressed, particularly by the chair, but I'll make it again. And that is simply to point out that if the board votes to allow this to be withdrawn without prejudice, the applicant can choose to proceed and try to address the issues as he thinks best and come back. So it doesn't cut it off entirely. The whole point of allowing it to be withdrawn without prejudice is to give the applicant more freedom, if you will, and obviously not have to wait for two years and come back if he so chooses. So the extent of the comment suggesting that a vote to allow this withdrawal essentially shuts off the project isn't accurate because it puts it fully in the applicant's hands to decide whether to pursue or not. He simply not face the penalty if he withdraws now. And that's my comment. Thank you. Thank you, Attorney Bard. Mr. Maxfield. I mean, the question really here for me is going to be, I feel that we have enough information that we could begin working on conditions and seeing if we can read the conclusion or not. But if enough of the board doesn't feel it's the case, if enough of the board feels that we would need to impose additional costs on the applicant, it sounds like this is something that the applicant does not want to do. In that case, I would support the withdrawal without prejudice, but I think we have enough information now if the applicant withdraws comes back to us and addresses all of the concerns that have been raised throughout the public hearing over these past five months and comes back to us at a later date, there will be a new set of concerns that are raised and a new set of why these can't be here. I know originally when this first came in, one of the public comments I believe we received from, I believe it was Mr. Rosnoy had said specifically that he could support this project if it was smaller in scale and it was done by a professional engineer. And I see his signature here now on the letter to us saying that we should withdraw this only with prejudice. So I'm not seeing, if they come back to us, it's gonna be a new set of concerns that are raised. It's not gonna be new information that we need that's going to help us. I think it's just going to be, we should use the information that we have now. And vote on the project one way or another. We might feel that we can't address these concerns. We might feel there's no conditions that we can put on this to make this a workable project. But I think that's something the CBA has enough information to do and I think we should do that. But if enough board members disagree, we think we can't go forward without imposing additional costs then. I would like to hear that. And if that's the case, then I will support this motion to withdraw. Ms. Pollock. Yeah, yeah. So in addition to what I had said about the applicant. Was asked by planning staff. And by the town engineer to submit hydrological calculations for the stormwater in order for the town engineer to provide a more comprehensive review of, of the stormwater for the, for this project. In addition, you know, based from the last ZBA meeting, which was on February 11th, the board members asked for the applicant to submit a photo image of the proposed parking barrier and provide more information regarding this along strong street and to include a valuation of its safety. Someone of the board also asked to, about provide a spec sheet for a bike rack and show its location on the updated site plan. The board also asked for provide a list of all proposed site and building, building improvements that the property owner is expected to conduct in 2021. The board, two meetings ago asked that the applicant review the management plan. And in the applicant did not provide that at the last meeting. The board asked at two meetings ago, two more items. And so I'm about to say which is have pioneer property services, LLC representative give testimony to the board about rules and responsibilities and have a, a pioneer property services LLC representative review business portfolio and explain staff levels for property management company. And that information still hasn't been presented to, to the, to the board. And then in, in, in this list that I provided the applicant in an email correspondence. After the February 11th meeting, which is listing all this was please confirm that the submitted building plans compile with the requirements of section 3.116 of the Amazon rules and regulations. If the submissions do not meet these standards, the applicant may request in the board may consider a waiver provided the board finds that there is sufficient detail provided on the building plans to render a decision. The board may also make additional conditions of the approval related to the building plans. So I just wanted to point this out that there is some, at least in the previous meeting, meetings, the board did have more sort of questions and information needed by the applicant. I think what the delineation of points that Miss Pollack just made indicate that the applicant does have some specific things that they're supposed that things that the board requested. And it is in my judgment and we, if the applicant disagrees, he would allow him to state that in my judgment, he looked at those, the applicant looked at those additional requirements and decided that he would allow him to do that. And I think that's more than he wants to go through to get this thing approved. If that's the case, then that is, and I think we should honor his request for withdrawal without prejudice. I know that everybody wants their project to be approved. That's totally, that's very understandable. You think you have a good project. I think that is a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's something that we should recognize before we could approve that project. And it's up to the applicant, whether he wants to continue to engage with those. With those engaged to provide those requirements, whether it's additional costs, whether it's time and effort on his part or whatever, but that's up to him. And if he wants to withdraw it and come back and reset with additional. Then I think we should allow him to do that, to come back and to meet with those, to meet those requirements for the next time, or go ahead now and take the risk of the cost and the risk of whether the project will be approved or not. Mr. Mendelsohn, I did see your hand up. This is clarification. Just if you want to clarify something. We do not, we do not take public comment. In the public meeting, but since I attempted to characterize your position, I want to clarify what it actually is. Yeah, no, I just wanted to clarify some of the, the list that Maureen spoke about with the, the business overview, the management plan. Staffing levels. That was covered in Mr. Sparkle's presentation. If you go back and look at it because. I had a discussion with Bucky before that. That meeting and I said that I would prefer him to present information about our company and the management plan. So he did attempt to do that. And I feel like the management plan. You know, is somewhat detailed and. For me to, you know, explain it in detail would entail basically reading it. And I feel like that document. Should be more of like a collaborative type of thing, because I don't have, I mean, this type of management plan hasn't been done. That I know, you know, that I know of before. And so I was kind of just invent, you know, inventing it as I went along. But that's all I want to say. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Other comments from board members. Mr. Meadows. Simply say, Mr. Just that I agree with everything that you said. I understand. I think I understand where Mr. Maxwell is coming from. I think that there is one unfortunate insurmountable. Situation here and that is the size of the lot. I think that there's a number of people that would be living on there. And the. The fact that it, that the proposal does not really. Going coincide with the rest of the neighborhood. In my judgment. I. I'm not very good as a suit sayer. But my sense of what has been proposed and Mary Maureen could help us here for the town for the rezoning would allow this to be done by right. So it's a little bit of a quandary there. But to your point, Mr. Maxwell, I was just expressing myself so you'd understand. Other comments from board members. Ms. Parks.   Keith, you're not muted. But I didn't, I had not heard that it was permeable. So I don't know if I missed that, that it was, that that was a discussion that was going to be permeable. So. Ms. Parks. I'll just clarify that while you still remain the issue. It isn't permeable at present. Your suggestion was that if we made it permeable, it'd be better. And my response to that was in talking to both Mr. Sparkle and Mr. Parkley, I think that if you have a semi permeable. Flow across. Gravel asphalt and grass. Regular grass isn't that different. And then it doesn't slow it down. So if you have a semi permeable. Materials such as pavers with holes in them. It will be somewhat better, but not very much better than I would be just with asphalt. So that I don't think I was very clear on that. And that may have led to the confusion. I guess for me, it's just a matter of how it looks as well. But I, it's again, it's the number of people for me. And so I don't feel comfortable with the project right now. And so, you know, I'm trying to think right now I'm thinking, what conditions in what way would this project make me feel comfortable is the way that I'm thinking about right now. And I don't know if I have the answer to that. I don't, I don't know what conditions would make me. Feel completely comfortable. And so I don't feel ready.  When, you know, other things may change. So I just don't feel ready to do that. Got it. Okay. The last statement I made is I think we have a list of things that. The applicant would know would be need to be presented to the board, whether it's under a resubmission or whether we continue this process. So I don't think it's some amorphous ambiguous. Thing that he has to, that the applicant has to respond to Mr. Mendelson has a very specific request. I think some of those since February have been put on pause because we had the act, the request to withdraw. And so therefore a lot of that wasn't done since that period of time, such as Mr. Sparkle's. Resubmission of his hydrological calculations and other things. I think we, on that point, we did, in deference to the applicant, we did not push for Mr. Sparkle to engage in some, to build some time that he would have then, then send back and build back to the applicant. So, or did we go for peer review at that point? When it seemed like Mr. Mendelson was going to withdraw the application. I'd also say just one more time that I, in my, my peer, my time here on the board, when an applicant gets to the point where they wish to withdraw, and it's not, and we've had a few of those recently, for a host of good reasons, when the applicant wants to withdraw, we typically permit that to happen. And we only, we only deny that opportunity, or condition it with prejudice. If we think that it is a frivolous, malicious, some kind of, where it's going to take up, ridiculously take up time with the board or the public, in ways that are not beneficial. And so that is not what we, I don't think we have that here. And I think that to the extent that Mr. Mendelson has, has taken a look at what he's been requested by the board. As a list from the town staff, he's decided that he does not, if he's decided, he does not want to continue with this application. It is, in my opinion, we should allow him to withdraw it, to get back together again with his, his consultants, if he wishes, and come up with another application that he'd be resubmitted. And I think that's the best. It's clean slate. And we can, and that seems to me to be the best thing to do. I guess I'll just try to kind of wrap up everything I've been talking about this whole time. And then we can hopefully move forward here with this. But like I said, I think the same for what the, the evidence that we have for us, I certainly couldn't vote on this today. I definitely need to work amongst the board with what conditions we'd actually want to put on this project. And I think that would be definitely a process that we have to get through. But I believe that we would be able to get through that with the evidence that we have with the project that we have in front of us. And I personally believe we could get to a project that I would support voting for and approving. I don't know if the rest of the board feels that way. If, if, if people have concerns about, like I said, specifically the lot size, nothing Mr. Mendelson can do about that. I mean, the best time to raise that concern was four months ago, four months ago. And I think the second best time to raise that concern is now. Because if, if nothing can be done about that, no amount of, of engineering can, can overcome that. And we should accept the, the motion to withdraw. But I don't know. I feel like, I feel like we've got just, you know, small mom and pop property management, you know, we're trying to live the American dream of getting financially independent, you know, secure retirement and said they're, they're living the American reality, which has just been cumbersome bureaucracy and roadblock after roadblock. I think we have the information to move forward. And I think we should work on conditions. But like I said, I guess I just like here from the, from the rest of the board kind of one last time, do you think, do we not think that we have the information to begin working on conditions and seeing if we can come to a vote on this. If not, then yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm ready to, to support the motion. Mr. Meadows. I move the question. Previous question is moved. Is there a second? The vote is not, the motion is not debatable. I second the motion. Previous question is, is up for vote. Chair votes aye. Mr. Langsdale. What I'm sorry, what is the. The motion is on the previous question, the previous question motion. The motion is on the previous question motion. The motion is on the previous question motion. Would. Require would. Past would require that we go into a vote on the motion. Before us, which is to. Approve to end the discussion. And move to the motion to approve the request to withdraw without prejudice. So the previous question and the discussion. If passed. Okay. No. No. Ms. Parks. Hi. Mr. Meadows. Hi. The vote is three to two. The previous question is ordered. Discussion on. Application of the motion to withdraw is ended. There's a motion before us to. Permit the to approve the request to withdraw without prejudice. And. That's up for a vote now. So everybody understands the motion. This is on the question to withdraw. Please. Please. Restate it. Sure. You bet. The motion is to permit the, to approve the request from the applicant. To withdraw the application without prejudice. Any further questions on. Procedure. All right. The chair votes I. Mr. Langsdale. No. Ms. Parks. Hi. Mr. Maxfield. Hi. Mr. Meadows. Hi. The motion carries. It requires three votes. It's a majority vote from this. This motion. The motion carries. We will. So the application has been withdrawn. We have approved the application to be withdrawn without prejudice. We have two other items of business. And at the end of the meeting, we will. Adjourn the public meeting and close the public hearing on this matter. Our final motion. But I'd like to move on to. The two other items on the agenda. The first of which is public comments on matters that are not before the board tonight. So again, it's for items not. Not. Not beyond not on the agenda tonight. Okay. I think Mr. Ron. You're gonna hear from Paul. Ron, Ron, Ron, Ron Zoe. Mr. Rogers. Can you state your name and address? Richard. Richard Rosnoy. Can you hear me? Yes. So we were going back into public hearing before our vote was set was going to happen. Now we. Now the chair says you've already voted. And then you're going back into public hearing. or you decide, we decide the whether we vote on the motion or not during a public meeting. The public hearing is what we started with, presentation. The board then moves to a public meeting. That's where they make the decision on a motion and we have discussion. The only reason that we're going to go back to the public hearing is to close it out. And we'll do that all in one motion at the end of the meeting. So we close out the public hearing on this matter and we close out the public meeting on for the two matters that we have on the agenda currently. So for all intents and purposes, the motion, the matter is withdrawn. Wow. Well, I had the microphone. I need to clarify the record and correct a misrepresentation about me by one of your members. Mr. Rosner. It has never been my position that I would approve this project with a properly certified engineer or architect certifying this, Mr. Maxfield. Mr. Rosner. We're at the point where we're discussing items not on the agenda tonight. Yeah. It doesn't matter. It's time for you. It doesn't matter. I have been misrepresented by your board, Mr. Judge. Then my reputation is on the line and I need to. Mr. Rosnoy, I think I didn't mean to do that. Excuse me. Mr. Rosnoy, I think we only wanna hear on matters not before the board tonight. I have been misrepresented by a member of your board, Mr. Judge, and we need to clarify the record. So you can do that at some other. We'll not have my professional judgment slandered. Mr. Rosnoy, we're done with this conversation right now. We can talk on other items. Well, this is another item. No, it's a matter of whether one of your, it's a matter of whether the board recognizes. The chair has the ability to try to restrict comments that are not germane to the topic before us, which is items not before the, not on the agenda tonight. We'll go ahead for the next, if there's anybody else that wants to comment, public comments on items not before, not about the items that we had on the agenda tonight. All right. I don't think there's any other. You're correct. I don't see any other. All right. I know the other item is that I noted that there's an interest in having an administrative meeting to consider ZDA comments on zoning bylaw changes. I think Ms. Parks, you had mentioned that you would be interested in having an administrative meeting to talk through some of that, perhaps having Tom staff go through some of the, be there to help us if we want to have a ZDA comment, either as a board or individually. And is that something that you would like to have done? Well, we could do that. I know that they were looking for comments or if there were things in the zoning bylaws that needed clarification. And I think that we've run into a couple of things that it would be nice to get more clarification on so that when we're making decisions, we're not trying to interpret what the zoning law is. So I don't know if other people are interested. I can also try to pursue this on my own. But- Ms. Parks, I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea for two reasons. Number one, although some of the things that are maybe unclear may not be what is currently being considered by the town in terms of zoning changes, it doesn't hurt for us to make a list of things that are confusing or in that or not clear and ambiguous to the board. But I think that would be helpful. And even if it's not considered by a town council for a period of time, it's still good to have our experience communicated to them. I also think that there are issues that we see as the zoning board of appeals that other individuals do not see, other boards and councils do not see. And to the extent that we find that there are zoning bylaws that create a housing problem or create work for us that make it difficult for us to do our work, I think it would be helpful to point those out as well. So I'd be happy to have a meeting, an administrative meeting on that. Maureen, what is the next, when is our next meeting? And do we have items on the agenda? So let's see here, the next meeting would be Thursday, April 8th. And as of yet, we don't have any items on the agenda. So if that works for folks, we could hold an administrative meeting. Does that provide enough time for you Tammy and Ms. Parks to go through some of this? Mr. Moore on this Pollock, can you be at the meeting for that? I also guess I'd like to ask you if staff, if there's still efforts to change the housing policy of the town and whether we should comment on that. I know that the CRC, the Community Resources Committee had transmitted an early draft. We've not gotten an updated draft. I don't know if that's something that with everything else going on just put on the wayside or if that's something that we ought to review again. Rob, do you know where that is at? Yeah, I think at the moment, the zoning bylaw amendments have taken priority. That's still something that you'll see back with the CRC, I think in the coming months for further discussion. So I would encourage you to look at the latest drafts and formulate any comments or questions that would be forwarded either through staff or to the CRC. But I think the next couple of meetings, you might see it focused on zoning bylaw amendments. Rather than housing policy. Right. All right. Are there any other comments or questions from board members? Okay, so Maureen, we can schedule the administrative meeting for April 8th. Correct. At the usual time at six o'clock. Six o'clock. So that's for everybody's information. That's a public meeting that we'll have. It's an administrative meeting to deal with this matter. And to the extent that you have questions, I'd encourage you to contact Maureen and raise those so that we can be prepared, so that the staff can be prepared to answer your questions. And so we can make this as productive as possible. That would be great. All right. If there are no other matters, I would entertain a motion to close the public hearing and adjourn the public meeting on tonight. Do I have a, is there a motion? Mr. Maxiel? Is there a second? Second. And for clarification, we're closing the public hearing on ZVA 2021-03 Pioneer Services, LLC. It requires a roll call vote and no discussion on the motion to adjourn. Chair Boat's aye. Mr. Langsdale? Aye. Ms. Parks? Aye. Mr. Maxiel? Aye. Mr. Meadows? Aye. Motion carries. We are adjourned and we'll see you all on April 8th. Thank you all. Thank you.


Hey folks, Ned here again talking about a Server 2008 end of support and I want to talk to you about a new option which is available right now. It started being available in October with the latest 1910 version of Windows Admin Center and that is the ability for you to take the storage migration service which you know by now is how you would migrate from 2008 file servers to 2019 file servers and that could be anywhere on-prem and a VM running on VMware and Hyper-V. It doesn't really care or matter. But with the new option added to Windows Admin Center and I'll demonstrate it right now you can actually instead of going and setting up new servers by hand and rolling everything let us deploy you Azure ISVMs on the fly while you're doing your migration. So when you get to the spot of turning on data transfer instead of pointing to the server that you spent the weekend building away from your family you can now say give me an Azure server and take care of all the provisioning and then we'll just carry on with the migration. So let's do this demo. I'm going to create a new Azure VM. You can see that I'm not going into the Azure portal at all. I'm still in Windows Admin Center and it's going to do all of this work in the middle of the storage migration service workflow. So I'm going to pick a resource group and I picked a subscription. I'll enter in some name for my virtual machine. I'll pick a region to put it in. In this case I'm going to put it in US West 2. Pick some operating system that storage migration service supports. I'm going to put in some admin credentials. You can see that we are checking the validity of the password here against the those matching or and also against the rules of Azure ISVMs themselves. I get to the size piece. I can select all sizes. But if you notice it started with a set already picked out for me. That's because it looked at the source machine and said these approximately match what you're migrating from. When it comes to storage, we automatically provision all of the storage for you. You can see that we're going to format it with NTFS there. I'm going to give some credentials to join the domain because this system is going to when it's all done provisioning join this new Azure ISVM into your own on-prem domain because you already have some VPN connection, Azure Express route, something that allows you to do so and you want to use this VM. Of course, all your end users who are going to it locally will need to get to it now remotely. So you can see I've got all this options taken care of. All the steps that I would do by hand in the Azure portal are now taking care of within the storage migration service process itself. And I never leave whack. So you can see here I'm actually creating the VMs. It's creating the interfaces. This is actually using real Azure REST calls to go to the back end and talk to Azure on your behalf and it's going to take a while. So we're going to time compress this, create the VM, join the domain. And when it's all set here, I can walk away from this. I can come back to it. I can view status. I can actually close this whole browser, come back into it. It would resume right where I am because all this work is actually happening obviously in Azure. I can give up on this and decide I don't want to do this. And when it's all done, in the middle of my transfer setup piece of storage migration service, I will have this brand new machine. And you can see right here it's been customized and created and selected. All my storage is already provisioned and it's ready to go. And if I go look inside of Azure right now, I'll see under my virtual machines and my subscription that all of my existing VMs are there. And this VM that I just created right here is there. As if I'd done everything through the Azure portal itself. So that was the demo. When you're all done doing this migration, your users won't be able to tell, your applications won't be able to tell. As long as you've got an express route or a VPN connection, just like any other hybrid IaaS workload you'd run inside of Azure, you've taken your migration and moved it to not just be an on-prem targeting option or even a hand rolled yourself IaaS option. But now the convenience of deploying IaaS as part of the workflow. And your users won't be able to tell the difference. For more information, take a look at this URL. It's a guide on how to do these steps. And thanks very much for your time.


Alright little buddies, the meat has been preserved, lunch for another day. Coming off a pretty tremendous catfish and white bass, a multi-species adventure. It is cool this morning, it feels wonderful, and I just got done cleaning catfish and putting them up in the fridge. I still got catfish goo on me. So it was about this time last year when I got diagnosed with brain tumor, old Willis. That was a rough time. It was also a blessing though in the way that I was able to grow as a person. Still to this day I think about life differently. When you have something so crazy like that that happens where you know that life could be shut off any day, any minute, when you have something so close to your vital organs and veins that if something just goes wrong, you're done. You start to think in a different light. You don't sweat the small stuff, little arguments and things that you might have beforehand. You just don't do those anymore. You're just happy to be alive. Be going every day.  So a year later, even though that was probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me, it could also been one of the best things that's happened to me. So when I wake up now and I look in the mirror, I don't see the dramatic results like all of you guys saw after my brain surgery where I look like Dagom Frankenstein and I have all that blood and fluid in my face and my eye. I mean, all I have now is just the numbness feeling on the side of my head right here. I'll often catch myself just rubbing right here going, man, that's just, I don't know. Like when I'm sitting there thinking, I always just do this because it's weird. It's like a numb patch. But the scar, the scar you can barely tell. I mean, Dr. Kim did a phenomenal job. My hair has grown in through it. There's a little bit of a part there that's kind of funky, but other than that, I'm good. Now about three or four months after the surgery, I hadn't had any headaches or problems up until about a month ago when it started getting super hot. I was just out in the sun quite a bit and that might have triggered some of my headaches, but it's always in that same area behind my eye. And that was the first time I remembered, oh yeah, yeah, I still got a tumor in there. And I wanted to clear that up because I've met so many of y'all since that. I was super pleased with the surgery and how things went, obviously. I mean, look at me, as handsome as ever. But seriously, I haven't had like any major reminders, you know, like any type of seizures or anything like that post the surgery. But what I haven't talked about a whole lot is what is the status of Willis now a year later? And we'll find out more for sure very soon. But today I have to go get an MRI. And that MRI is then going to be taken to Dr. Kim or who I'm going to see. So I'm going to take you guys along for that. And that's when we'll really know what is going on. If the second treatment is going to be happening, how they're going to do it, it would not be another brain surgery, at least I hope not. It would be some sort of radiation treatment, a precise radiation treatment. I kind of think of Willis as an old beat up bully right now, you know. He was giving me a lot of problems.  He's like Voldemort, you know, in the shrunken form that he is. And often I forget he's in there until I have to go for these scans, you know, every few months or so. And the last time we were at the doctor, I was kind of shocked to see how much Willis was left in there. There's some scar tissue and some tumors, some areas they just couldn't touch because it's on the bundle of nerves, the bundle of Willis and carotid artery and optic nerves, just things you don't touch. So I think the goal here is we're going to see which direction Willis is still growing. And if he's growing in a consistent direction, we're going to hit him with radiation. We're going to zap him and end his life, just not in mine. Sometimes I debate even talking about it anymore because I just I like to put it behind me. But I know me having the tumor has actually helped a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And I've gotten to meet a lot of you. I love when someone says, hey, I caught a fish because you showed me this technique. That feels really good. But when someone says I have this problem, it may not even be a tumor. It may not even be it's it's some sort of problem. Hey, I'm getting through it because I'm watching your attitude and it's helping me get through this. That makes me feel like I'm doing a good job as a human being. So that's the reason I want to share all this. You just got to set up with an MRI. We'll talk about it more, but I got to clean up the rest of my cat fishing guts and stuff before the sun gets out. It gets really hot. That's gross. Very strong stash today. On that gum, smell, lack, cat fish, so bad. It's going to be embarrassing. Yeah, it's not even the problem. It's nothing like bass, like bass is a sweet smell. Catfish is like a slimy goo. Right now we're on the way to the MRI place. This is our new every few months routine. Roll over here. I sit in this tube thing and I scan my face. It takes a long time. It takes like 20 minutes inside of this tube. And it's like the loudest thing ever. They put these little earphones in that aren't really earphones or like earphones because they can't have any metal in there. They don't really work that good last time. They just didn't work at all. So all I heard was, any of y'all have ever been in one of those, you understand what I'm talking about. So if you're wondering if we're going to find out anything today or not, we're going to just get scanned and then the professionals are going to look at it. And I got to get another needle in my arm. I'm sure I've been stuck so many times in the last year. I'm just like used to getting stuck. I think I'm right there with you. You've been getting stuck a lot too. The amount of times I've been stuck for the last four months. It's the pregnancy game. Medical hazards over here. Yeah, throw some soy and some peanuts. We got a real mess on our hands. They stuck me. Stuck me in my arm. That lady that stuck my arm, she did such a good job. You know, I've been stuck so many times. And I didn't even feel that one. She was just like, we'll put her right in there. Is that good? She did a great job. It's so weird, the taste. I actually got a weird smell this time.  Which I don't know, what is contrast? It's like what's to make the, I guess, your veins up here. But what is in there? Sometime a metallic, like metal. Metal? That just doesn't sound good for you. I think it's a blue dye type thing or some type of dye. Just doesn't sound good at all. Let me put some Sharpie juice in my veins so you guys can see what's going on in my brain. It was a rhyme. Now we just have to leap it to the professionals to look at it and see what's going on. They give us all the images on a disc. If you and I were to sit down and look at these things together, we probably wouldn't. I know a little bit because I've looked at them, but you'd go, what in the world going on in there? It looks like a daggum, swirly poop. I hope they say he's dead. He's shriveled up. He's just going down. Looks like OSG's plants in the summertime. That's probably true. Yeah, I'm thankful. I'm thankful for everything that's going on. It's all good. I'm feeling fine. This time last year, I felt like a crusty old pine cone. It was like a bus hit you outside of the head. It was a stopping point in life. It was like, just stop for a minute. Here's what's going on. And it was so hot. It was exactly a year because I remember my birthday. I was going to the doctor and they said, you're going to have some brain surgery. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. What does shepherds eat? They eat pie. I'm not saying I'm a shepherd. I don't even know why they call it shepherd's pie. Someone let us know in the comments. We're going to try some of this. Now, the reason I'm showing you this, there's all sorts of wild game happening around here. My goal is to make this place an organic tree house. There's nothing but just organic meats going on. There's deer meat. There's hog meat. There's chickens. There's babies. There's, well, we don't eat babies. We're not going to eat babies. And this deliciousness right here, this is one of Stephanie's, her latest creations. But anyway, she made it from the hog sausage, from the hog I killed this past spring. We're running a little low on deer. That's okay. We're going to take care of that this fall. Of course, little Amy's going to be here right during deer season, right when bow season comes around. And the Amazon trips. Oh, right there at the boat. I'm going to miss some great outdoorness because of our daughter that's on the way. I'll make sure to remind her that when she's over. But it's going to be an extreme blessing.  There was a questionable doubt there at first. Oh, yeah. We all, no one wanted to say it, but we all thought it. Anyway, OSG does an amazing job. He loves her kitchen. This is one of the main reasons we got this house. And she cooks. She wets it up all the time.  Keep this tummy fed so you can keep creating fishing videos. Gosh, it's my dream girl right there. Look at her. She's going to water her plants after I said that. That's funny. She's watering her plants. I always have to remedy. I'm like, babe, you water your plants today. She's not exactly a green thumb. But don't tell her I said that. Why do they call it shepherd's pie? Well, shepherd's pie is traditionally made with lamb. But we don't have lamb. So it really can just be used with any type of meat that you want. We got you. Okay, water those plants. I got you. Claimed it. Do you want to get an LFG approval? Oh, absolutely. Oh, no. Delicious. Well, that one's actually a subscriber special recipe, so it's not on my blog.  Shameless plug. She went for it. I'll allow it because I love you. The day is reaching a close. We've gotten our MRI. I've gotten some things off my chest with you guys. We've reminisced. And there's one more thing I got to do. You know how I do it here at the Treehouse, guys? Wood all the time. Wood projects. Look at the house. Mostly wood. Got to work on that wood. I got to work on Emory's room a little bit. I don't know if you guys have really seen that on this channel. I've showed it on the Lake Life family channel, but not really on this channel. Let me show you what's going on in there. This is little Emory's room. And she's gotten tons of clothes. Look, she got a diaper cake. She's got her little antler set up with her flowers. Clothes and blankets. Galore. We got OSG's little nursing area. Look at that. Someone set that in. Thank you guys. And of course we have her crib. And then this is my contribution. So since I built myself a wood wall, I figured I'd go ahead and build Emory one too. And she can put her little mounts up there. Her little fish. Looks like it needs a walleye. This thing looks like it belongs in a cabin or something. But OSG's going to paint it up. You guys can follow along on this on the Lake Life channel, if you'd like. There's one more step to do on this before we proceed to the other stuff. And I've gotten that honeydew dialed in. Got in the order called in. And that is to add the last baseboard right here. It's got to be a special cut, though. And then I need a molding on top. Molding I can do right now. That's easy. So we're going to do that. Question. What kind of molding did you want? There's literally no molding here. There's no molding. But something to match the molding that we already have. Cabin like, not too fancy. Just a piece of wood basically. Basically. Got it. I never get tired of walking by old Mondo. Hey, big Sally. How you doing today? You good? You still haven't caught up to that bluegill yet, huh? That's all right. You will one day.  Oh my God! No! No! Weep! Yeah. Let's see. What should we go with? That looks better. Well, I'm here in here. You have my blinds. Hang your blinds. Thought I was done. Yeah, maybe later. That is going to do it for today, fish and freaks. It's been one year since we got diagnosed with old Willis. We've had some trials and tribulations, but I think we've come out on top. The renewal of life has happened. So thank you guys for all of the support and being here. Of course, I will keep you updated on Willis. When we see what's going on inside of there, I will let you know. Believe me, I'm ready to know myself. So go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more. And if you want to check out even more stuff with baby, the house, and Willis, you can subscribe to the late life family channel. Until next time, fish and freaks. We love you. Thanks for being here and we'll see you. Quite honestly, usually, correct me if I'm wrong. It's better for you. It's higher protein. It's less fat. It's, she's just stuffing her face.