Let's go ahead and call this November 22nd, meeting of the Popular Planning Commission to order. First thing we can do is approve the agenda. Everyone can take a look. Need a motion to approve. I motion to approve the agenda. Okay. Motion from Gabe. Do we have a second? Second. Second from Ariane. All those in favor of approving the agenda say aye. Okay. Any opposed? Okay. Agenda approved. Four zero. And moving on. Next thing is comments from the chair. We'll be getting into this in a little bit, but we did have the subcommittee group, working group on economic development meet. This is Gabe and John and I met on Thursday. We'll be going over later in the meeting. What we did there, but it was a good, good meeting, good discussion. I had heard back from Alec Ellsworth in the meantime, and I went ahead and incorporated part of Alec stuff. Again, this is all stuff we'll get to, but just trying to go through anything that's new that's happened since our last meeting. I think that's about it as far as I can think. Just to remind everyone, we do have a meeting next Monday that will be a hearing. On the proposed zoning changes. We'll be hearing where we'll be hearing from the public. It's going to be very public focused and. It's not going to be too informational for the planning commission's purposes. It's just a listening to the public thing primarily. And I think that with that, I don't know if there's any other announcements. Mike, is there anything I'm not remembering? Nope. I think it's pretty much it. So we are. We did send out all the letters to, to. The zoning folks so that those did go out. So we're starting to get some feedback there. But other than that. It's just been busy, busy two weeks. Yeah, I bet. I bet. Thank you so much for that. I definitely know that going through the. Economic development chapter and starting to put that together as a always a reminder of how much work it is for the, for you and the planning staff and when you're doing that. So thanks a lot, Mike. Okay. So with that, we'll move on. And brings us to general business. We looks like we do have a member of the public in the zoo meeting. So I thought I'd ask Mr. Kalman if you have anything you'd like to bring our attention to song the agenda. Yes. My name is Peter Kalman. I live at six Mountain View Street in Montpelier. I served on the housing task force. For about a year and a half in 2017, 2018. And I was co-chair of the strategic. And I was a member of the social and economic justice advisory committee from its inception for about 10 months. And I apologize for not having come to listen to and. Share some thoughts on your deliberations before this, but the economic section, which you're beginning to work on is quite important to me. And. Yeah, I'd like to say that based on what I've read in the minutes, what I'm about to say, maybe unnecessary. So just please bear with me if I'm preaching to the choir. The subject is the 2016 economic development strategic plan. Which was prepared by a consultant for the city. And which I'm hoping you will not be using. Any sort of touchstone. Or the chapter on economic development that you are working on. To explain briefly why. I just want to read to you a bit of an email that I sent to mayor Watson and the city council in May of 2018. About this report. I had been hearing it cited quite often. And elsewhere by Dan Groberg. I'm really alive. Both of them referring to this as a foundational document. For our economic development. But when I read it, I had deep concerns about the document. So there were a lot of new people in the city council at that point. Very few of them. I think only two of them had been. I'm not sure. I don't know. They are in 2016 when this report was. Issued. So I was urging the new people to please at least read the executive summary. And I wrote them the following. I have some questions and concerns about the plan as written. Specifically about the economic development theory. It appears to be based upon. And the recommendation. The Montpelier position itself as a high end community. It makes me wonder how this plan jibes with the goals. Some of you and I have been espousing for affordable housing. And other programs that address the needs. The bottom half of the income spectrum. And if this plan is not what the current council is in favor of. What about the various departments. In the city manager's office. I'm not sure. My recent reading of the 2016 draft of the planning section of the city plan. Also reveals a lack of explicit concern. The lower half of the income spectrum. I hope I'm wrong about this, but it may be worth having an open conversation during your retreat. And subsequent meetings about planning for the near future. Well, that was the letter I wrote in 2018. And I just. I am concerned that we are becoming. A city of two very distinct. Hubs, although at this point I'd say the top half has become the top three quarters. Of wealthier, more privileged people like myself. And poor people. And I don't mean poor people. I mean people who just simply can barely afford to live in Montpelier. And I get quite concerned when I see. You know, a great deal of attention and enthusiasm and excitement about adding acreage. To a Hubbard park. Or having a recreation center up at the old. Elk's club. And yet when some of us were working very hard to come up with at least some temporary solutions to the seven years. And what sleeping bags as we speak right now. There just doesn't seem to be much of a will to address those kinds of issues. There's lip service given to it. But there are. It's not really happening. So I think when you think about economic development, think about economic development for all of Montpelier, not just for the top. So I thank you for your attention. Thanks. Questions if you have them free. I would just invite you to like to stay. I mean, we're, we're going over economic development goals. We're going over the strategies. It's, it's very much in the like brainstorming and formation phase right now. So. If you want to hang out for this meeting and just, and just feel free to, to give us ideas to, to mix things in. I can tell you, we, I think that most of us of the planning commission, if not all of us, probably all of us are right there with you. In the housing chapter, we wanted to address some of the things you just mentioned. We invite you to, it's, it's, it's publicly available to Google drive that we have for this. You can, you can access it through the city website and take a look at the housing chapter, transitional housing to address. And needs for housing for homelessness is, is going to be something that we want in our housing chapter this time that that's new. There's also going to be like recovery housing addressed, hopefully in that chapter, among some other things that are going to be new to open, to open up Montpelier and the ways you're talking about. It's very much on our minds. We're also going to be walking, we're going to be going through some of the things you just mentioned, I think at this meeting tonight on economic development. So yeah, please like help us develop this out because it's, it's the direction you're talking about, I think is the direction that we really are interested in. And it's really about ideas for the plan, but I think as you know, it's also going to be about in the future, this, even though we passed this plan and we, and we put great things in the plan, I'm have the same concerns you have about loop service. So we want to make sure that the things that are in the plan do get done in the future. And that's going to take, I think, like the residents of Montpelier to make sure that, that, that people stay interested and keep the momentum to make sure these things get done. So that's kind of my reaction to what, to what you're saying. Does anybody else have anything to mention right now, or if not, we can, we can move on on the agenda start working on economic development. Like I said, Mr. Michelle, I'd love to have you stay and, and let us know what you think about the things we're talking about. I'm going to grab some dinner and I'll be back. That's fine. That's fine. You can always, you can always keep up on, on the progress we're making up by, by looking at the Google drive this on the city website. And you'll see it's kind of just working documents in there. There's a, there's a Excel type, Excel type spreadsheet that we're, that we're putting the aspirations and goals and the strategies into. And we definitely want to focus on. A lot more on economic development other than just. The people who are already. In a pretty good place. Where on the, where's the Google drive? How do I find it on the city website? Mike, it probably direct to you the best. I mean, I would, I would just, I would just, I would Google to the, to the planning page and then, and then find it through there. But Mike can probably tell you specifically. I think he's looking. I do have one question about the Google drive. I noted in the last minutes, Mike pointed out. Open meeting rules are tricky around Google docs. And I noted, for example, you have a subcommittee of three members. Technically. I think that's. That kind of a meeting has to be warned. I know it's a pain in the butt. We ran into this with our strategic. Sorry. Our social economic justice committee very early on. How do you get stuff done. In between. Well, I thought is that's that working group doesn't get anything done that working group. It's not, it's not official meeting. It's less than a quorum. Everything that the working group does. Yeah. Everything the working group does comes back to. To the, to the, to the warrant planning commission meetings. And it's all discussed there. And recorded in public. Right. But the key is less than a quorum. Because. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And none of the other members like chime in on what the three do. So they don't, you know, they don't make it a quorum by chiming it in between. Okay, Kirby. Just one other thing I want to see. And then I get better.  The last thing you said. I think it's really important about getting. The citizenry engaged. Here is the. Difficulty. It's not just citizenry. You've got to get the people who are most impacted. You've got to get the people who are most impacted. You've got to get the people who are most impacted. You've got to get the people who are most impacted. You've got to get the people who are most impacted. By. Housing shortage. By job. Look, low paying jobs. And that is very difficult. Because they're a lot, they're a lot. They have to spend their time getting their lives. Lined up. So that's the, that is the big. Biggest challenge for us. How do you get people who are the most affected? To be part of the conversation. And I think it is going to require some kind of affirmative outreach effort by city government, by our committees to, to seek out. And maybe go to them. Maybe it's a question of. Canvassing. You know, I think it's a little bit of a lower income and asking questions of them. It's a tough one, but it's something I want. I hope you can kind of keep in mind. As you, as you're, as you're trying to address my concerns and your concerns. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question. And it's, it's tough from our position a lot of the times, because we're not in touch on the ground. We're like, we're, we're, we're removed from it. And I wish, yeah, I wish we could. I don't know. I don't have great ideas for it to do more, but I, but I acknowledge that yeah, it'd be great if we were more in touch. I'll make one suggestion. Can, which is the capital area. Neighborhood organization. That is all volunteers and it's people like me as coordinators. I coordinate for 30 homes in the area that I live in. And I talk to the people in our neighborhood. Frequently I send them news about what's going on city hall. I let them know about meetings like this. I think the closer you can get down into the neighborhoods, the better. And I think, you know, Laura Brooke is a coordinator for can at the sustainable. A coalition. And I think she would welcome. Contact from this group. To see how you might really be able to get the word out about what you're doing and get feedback. You know, in that way, that's one suggestion. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I want to point out to you is that we have these proposed zoning changes coming up. Many of them. So next week, we have a hearing on it on Monday and then, and then two weeks after that. And many of these things we're going to be considering our opening up the zoning to get more housing in it. And it's not going to be. Loved by everyone. So all of the people who are advocates to get housing done, I would invite. I think what's most important is that people show up for. When it, when it goes to the city council to like, make sure that they know. Because you know how it goes. Oftentimes people who, it could be a vocal minority that don't want something. So if we can get the. The majority who want to see more housing and things. That I think those allies would be really, yeah. And spread the word to can and everyone else that you know. Okay. Great. Thanks. I'm going to go each and I'll be back. Okay. Thanks. All right. I did post the link to the Google drive, by the way, in our chat here. Okay. Does anybody have anything on. On what just happened before we go on in the agenda. Okay. So the next thing on the agenda then is to review the minutes from last meeting. So if everybody can take a look at those. Okay. So I have one quick edit to that. Which is that under the who was present Stephanie Smith was not present on November 8th. She was not on commission anymore at that time. Okay. Good catch.  I move approval of the minutes with Mike's change. Okay. Do we have a second? Okay. We have a second from Jeff. Gabe, do you need a minute? No, I'm good. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. There's a favor of approving the minutes with the amendment. Say hi. Hi. Hi. You post. Okay. Minutes approved with the one correction. That brings us to a discussion of goals and strategies for economic development chapter that we're working on. So as I mentioned before, we three of us met. We went over things if everyone can just pull up from. The website pull up the template. What we did as a group is we works. On mostly on the goals. And then we. Flesh those out a bit. The language still isn't perfect for all of the, all of the goals as far as the working group was concerned, there's still revision needed to be done there. One thing that we did. It was important. Well, let me just cut in real quick. Peter, if you're, if you're looking for the, the. I sent you the link. And if you click on plan website. And then you have to go to plan website. Which has all the chapters. Click development. And then you click on the template is the one that Kirby is talking about. Yeah. Do people find it, will people find it useful if, if. We shared a screen. For the meeting. Yeah. Okay. I see at least a couple nods. So. Is that okay if you. Share Mike. Oh, you don't need to share. Okay. I mean, if there's, if you got something else going on, I can share. Nope. That's why I got multiple computers running here. Yeah. You definitely have the, the computers for it. So what I was saying before. I can share the screen up at the goals page. I'm just talking about the goals tab under the. Template for economic development right now. So we're keeping track of the aspirations goal strategies. So under the goals tab. You currently have seven from the working group that we talked about the other day. The tieback to the two aspirations that we had decided last meeting. Last planning commission meeting. There still needs to be some revisions to the, to the wording of these exactly. But one thing that we, that we did. Was start to tie each of the goals to something measurable related to what the goal is talking about. And it looks like Mike has it pulled up. So if you see, if we go to the right, scroll a little bit to the right. Under these goals. We have this potential ways to measure column. And you'll see that. You'll see that under under one, one actually needs a lot of work right now because it's, we're trying to have a goal that touches on. Opportunities for meaningful work for people. The percentage of positions that pay a living wage and up healer. To maintain educated train workforce with access to childcare and other core services. So there's a lot of going on for these goals we've in the past. We're working in our past several months working on this stuff. We try to. Make sure that. There's not too many goals because, you know, we've, we've been concerned about. Things being kind of lost in the shuffle, like what's with too much.  Philosophy so far. So we're trying to put a lot into this goal, but. There's a, there is a lot there. A lot of things hard to measure, but on the rise side column, we have. One thing that could be measured measured is the percentage of the jobs in my pillar that, that pay a living wage. That's something that could be measured. And. We can also measure the number of. Seats at preschools basically. Possibly we could do that. I'm actually not sure where we have, where we that's recorded, but it's possible, maybe. And then the percentage of jobs making. And this is like John Adams came this number of. 3,333 dollars per month. Which I think is. Yeah. I think it's a great help me remember that number. It represents. So there's a significant. Do you remember why John chose that number? I don't, other than. It's tied to this living wage. Maybe that's a certain percentile of income of. Yeah.  So when it goes back to staff, if there are questions about where to find the data, John seemed to have a doll at his fingertips when he was talking about it. Yeah. He's very good at knowing. What data exists out there. So he was pulling up. So, so these are some things that could be quantified. And they could be goals for us to, to increase. And so we're going to be doing it on our own. We're going to be doing it on our own. We're going to be doing it on our own at a time. It's unfortunate that the first goal is like the messiest. But. What are, what are people's thoughts about. These particular measurements and how we could incorporate these into the goal. And then whether the goal captures all things we'd like to capture. Under basically the, the theme or. The theme of meaningful work. I can't remember if I said this last time, I think these are. Like. Ambitious. Important goals. But I just want to acknowledge, like, I feel like, you know, it, housing, I feel like maybe we have as a city have more. Control over with zoning and other.  The economic reality that.  You know, if we don't meet these goals, it's not like. All on the city or anything. There's a lot of, there's a lot of macro factors going on. I don't know. That's just my first reaction to reading this.  Massaging and word smithing as things go on. You know, just to be consistent with where we've been. Kind of in the past. So the idea under aspirations. Is that we would end up with two. Like it looks like we've got to revise aspirations are kind of over here. To primary aspirations. So the way, I mean, for Peter's benefit to address the discussion of. The way we've structured all of our implementation plans is that we talk about the long-term goals, the aspirations, the visions, what we want to do. And the key is to have keywords in here that we're going to focus on when we get to the goals. So, you know, Montpelier will provide. Shuffle over a little bit more and see if I can get this to go. So that's a brilliant job market that pays livable wage. So that's one piece. So there's going to be one goal with that. When we asked the goal on the, on the job market that pays a livable wage. When we get to the goals tab, we want to talk about that maintain evolved transform. Are we trying to maintain our. Job market that pays a livable wage. In other words, are we already doing a good job? Or do we need to improve upon what we're doing? I would imagine we're going to probably. We're going to be looking at the statistics, probably be talking about improving that condition that encourage workforce development. Again, are we doing already a good job with workforce development? We kind of have to look and understand that to find out if we're maintaining, evolving or transforming that, and then offer sufficient housing for all members of the workforce. So that's a third piece. So I believe the first piece with trying to look at, and I'm just repeating this for a little bit for Peter's benefit, is to kind of look at economic development through the eyes of the worker. The second one was to look at economic development through the eyes of a business owner. And we had a long discussion at the last meeting of whether we needed to have, you know, separate categories to talk about commercial landlords, because that's, that's a different, you know, a lot of times business owners don't own the buildings and economic development ties very closely to the business owner. So, but it ended up getting kind of get lumped into two, two talks about through the lens of workers and one that's looked through the lens of the businesses. It's for private development and sure those projects have access to ample infrastructure. So that's really kind of looking at quality. So there'll be some things I think I can see quality is kind of the keyword in the first half and ensuring access to infrastructure is the second piece. So when we get to goals, we'll start to have these opportunities to provide in, but the reason why I kind of went back a half step to kind of come back to goals is eventually we're going to have to kind of have a little bit of a discussion, increase opportunities. I see that it's obviously we're looking to improve this condition. And there, I can see a bunch of these actually have this continue to improve. It's in there increased the number. So we're starting to see these words in here that maintain, evolve, transform. So we have a target. And so we're going to be trying to get this kind of understanding of how we're doing in some cases, maybe it's a maintain in some cases, maybe it's an increase, but these, these keywords should be coming back. And if we have new keywords, we'll have to go back and amend our aspiration to kind of make sure that things are consistent throughout. And then in the end, when we get the strategies, we're talking about exactly what will we do to increase opportunities to meaningful work and what will we do to improve business, economic, economic climate, those types of things. So I just wanted to kind of lay, lay that out that we may do a bit of word smithing afterwards to make sure this is consistent with the other chapters that have already been done. Right. So, so I'd like to like hammer some things down actually. We, we've talked about the living wage thing. It's been here from the beginning. So we're looking on this. There's been a couple of times that planning commissioners have voiced like some concern. I know John Adams has some concerns about even including that. Do other people have concerns about including it? Or, or at least like having it as a high profile thing in here. It's just, it's just, I think part of the concern would be by focusing on, by looking at the amount of money that the city is making out with the living wage and the, and those wages we are, maybe not in. We would not emphasize other things that the city has more control over. Or something. I don't know, what do people think about it? Having the living wage in there? I'd like to just, because I know that's kind of an open question out there, like whether, whether we're going to keep this. Are people generally in favor of it? Um, if I could pipe up. the scale and scope of it. For example, a livable wage for someone in Barrie who works in Montpelier would, in theory, be lower. And I know we do have the labor side and then the business side of this equation. I just want to clarify what the target might be. What applies to? Yeah, as far as what it means, I think that there is a defined wage that's considered Is that what you're asking about? We're talking about people in the residents of Montpelier increasing the number of residents that have a livable wage. I think it's what we were talking about. At least the way this is, the measures written out. Cool, thank you. That is an important distinction that is probably not clear right now. Did you catch that, Mike? Where I think the thinking is that we would be looking at a living wage as based on the people who are living here and whether their wages are livable as opposed to the livable, like the wages of the positions that exist in Montpelier. Yeah, we have two sets of data that we look at when we look at employment data, one of which is the rates of folks here in town. So we'll use unemployment rate. It can be looking at the residents of Montpelier and the jobs in Montpelier because I think I pointed out on a number of occasions, we have 9,000 jobs in Montpelier and 4,000 people that are in the workforce, 2,500 of which are working in Montpelier. There are people in Montpelier that work in Waterbury, work in Berlin at the hospital, work a number of other places. So it's not strictly people who live in Montpelier, work in Montpelier. So when you look at unemployment rate or wages, it can be tricky. You have to look at which one you're looking at. And the other thing that can be an issue, and I'm just saying this just from the perspective of when people get focused on benchmarks, it's a little bit why I've been a little bit leery and a little bit careful about pick them, pick them when they're good, pick them when they help you accomplish what you want to do, have a percentage of jobs that have a livable wage or those types of factors could mean if I shut down all the low wage jobs, if we only support high wage jobs and all the low wage jobs go out, then my percentage of high wage, livable wage goes up. So it ends up being counterintuitive. If your goal is to, the thought is the pie in the sky is that, well, we'll get these low wage positions and turn them into high wage positions. And so the people who are working them earn more money. But the other way of doing it from a benchmark standpoint, and a couple of these have come out through models of, some of the efforts that were done in New York City where everything was measured. And so that became kind of a thing where sometimes people would do things that were bad for the public because it was good for their benchmark and they were expected to meet a benchmark. So that's, I think what you're getting at is why I'm not entirely sold on us, including the livable wage stuff here is because it's a result. Yeah, it's a quantitative thing that's kind of like an end result thing that's not getting at, I would rather our plan focus on the underlying things that are definitely going to help people as opposed to a measurement that could be dubious. Like by focusing too much on a benchmark of what percentage of living wage. And unless Mike was just saying, I think things that aren't good for the public could end up, could result in that number looking good. And it doesn't really, I really liked that part of what we're talking about here though is we're talking about infrastructure things, we're talking about training things. Like any of that stuff's going to be a good thing to contribute into economic development. We can feel good about it. I feel like, because it's a foundational thing, but looking at this, yeah. So basically if 10 people have livable, if 10 people, if we have a pool of 10 people, five of them making a livable wage, five of them not making a livable wage. So we have 50% and our goal is to get to 100%. We could do things and just, lose four of those jobs and not livable wage. And now I've got five people making a livable wage, one person not making a livable wage. And I've increased it to 80%. I win, but is that really helping us? And that's what happens. Sometimes people get lost in, that's obvious case, but sometimes people get lost when the numbers get big and the numbers get one and two layers removed.  Kind of like when the best example recently has been, how badly was Montevillier hurt by COVID? And if you look at the numbers, the average wage and the average income in Montevillier went up by like $10,000 a year. And it's a little bit of a head scratcher, but that's because a whole lot of low income people lost their jobs. And when you average the people that are left, you find a whole bunch of people whose wages went up because you're not averaging the people who aren't making any money because they don't count towards the average, only people who are making money. So when you make a whole bunch of poor people unemployed, average wages actually went up in the pandemic from Montevillier. So it's counterintuitive, but sometimes getting lost in following statistics without understanding it can sometimes be detrimental. I really wanna focus, my goal has always been to focus on what are the goals? If we wanna, and if we've got a good benchmark, then awesome, let's follow the benchmark, but that's always been my concern is watching we are very careful about what we choose for a benchmark. Do we wanna, do we need to have that goal in there? I mean, it's been in everything that I've read, but do we really need to have it? You know, when you talk about workforce development, I mean, one of the things, you know, we can spend a lot of time and energy and waste resources when, you know, both the state and department of labor have really good programs, really robust programs that frankly are not utilized as much as they could be to get, you know, workforce development. So I mean, childcare, maybe there's something that we can do with zoning around childcare that enables that to better, but does it need to be there? I know it's kind of the buzzword that we see everywhere. Yeah, so I think there's a good example because that one kind of comes out when we look at the numbers through the pandemic, you know, we lost about 400 jobs in the pandemic. So our 9,000 jobs went down 400. And then a couple of them came back. Most of those jobs that were lost were, so there were two groups. One was people who retired early or retired. Some people were already kind of working in retirement and decided to just retire and stay retired. And the second group that was mostly women who returned home to take care of their kids. They have not returned because there isn't sufficient childcare, which is why the city has tried to expand its childcare program. So when we talk about economic development and getting more people back in the workforce, childcare is one of those key things in the same way that affordable housing, affordable housing, childcare are key components to economic development. But we can get to the strategies of how to fix that piece of it. Yeah, based on what you just said, it sounds like there's actually a decent amount of city can do. Can expand its own provision of childcare. Okay, so I just wanna make sure that we're making some progress. It sounds like childcare is something that we're going to keep in the goal and it's gonna be something we have strategies around. I'm not hearing a lot about, I mean, is there strong feelings about keeping the livable wage stuff in the goals also and having the emphasis there? Or like, I mean, it sounds like, I don't know. Do people wanna take it out? That's the question for the Plenty Christian right now. Do you wanna take the livable wage language out? Well, I don't know if, I mean, I like having something about living wage in there, but right, I see Mike's point about percentage of jobs with living wage and I don't have immediately something to put in there. But I think supporting something about, I don't know, sorry, I'm not more ready to spit out something, but. I think one thing is too bad, John's not here because if you look at the right side column over there about potential ways to measure this 3,333 per month number with something else that he had grabbed, which could be an alternative to us talking about the livable wage thing. I was gonna say my concern was with the benchmark, not necessarily with the goal itself. So let me just throw out two things. We haven't gotten to strategies, but let me just throw out two things that where the livable wage can play a part. Well, we can't require developers to pay a livable wage. That's not really within our charter and our ability to do that. Well, we do have our number of programs to assist economic development such as a tax stabilization and this has been done in multiple cases. So I'll pick Fred Connors. He's got the old armory building where Cabot used to be out just past the roundabout. So he's got that building out there and they put an addition on the back and he wanted a tax stabilization. In our tax stabilization policy, there are tiers and in order to qualify for the next tier, so you can get a three year or a five year or whatever the different tiers are, one year, two years, three years, five years. But to move to the next tier, if you want to get a tax break, then your jobs have to provide a livable wage for the period of time in which we're giving you that tax stabilization. So it's not a requirement, but it's an incentive if you're going to do that. Again, this goes a little bit probably feeding back to what Peter was talking about, requiring those livable wage jobs means most of those jobs that were there were not accessible to people without a specialized training because they were all jobs that were paying higher wages. So we basically supported getting more high wage jobs in town, which is good, except that most of the people that got them are people that have high degrees and high amounts of education. So we would have to debate whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. So that's one way of, you can have livable wage as a goal and support it. You know, kind of think of it as supporting it but not requiring it or requiring it in order for having certain benefits. The other thing the city council did few years ago from a policy standpoint, remember we talked about there are regulations, you got your permits, your policies, your programs, your projects, the five Ps. One of them is policies. In the city adopted a policy that any project that the city undertakes that will spend more than a certain amount of money. I don't know what it is, $2 million. That's making up that number, I don't know what it is but it's a high amount of money. So if we're getting money and we're spending more than $2 million then the people that get hired have to be paid a livable wage. I think it emulates a requirement in Burlington. So if we're gonna do an expansion of the sewer plant then everybody who works building that expansion of the sewer plant has to be paid a livable wage. So those are just a couple of ways that you can encourage and move things and support a living wage. So there are things that you can do but again, if we didn't have livable wage as a goal at all then it wouldn't make sense that we would have that as a condition in our tax stabilization. It wouldn't make sense that we would have policies to require it. So again, councils change. That was a council from a few years ago but I just wanna put a little bit of perspective in there of some of the things you can do without requiring it. I was just being a little bit more cautious about let's be really careful about the benchmarks. I would prefer focusing as much on the goals as possible and then later find out if there are some good benchmarks rather than try to make our goals benchmarkable if that's even a word. Furby, and you may have another method to your madness but I mean, just the last couple of discussions that we've had here over the last 10 minutes, Mike has a lot of ideas and I'm wondering if we could just get some consensus around what's in here for goals and then we could send it to him and the staff to sort of think about and put some things in there that then we could bring back that have flushed out a little bit more because he's obviously thought quite a bit about this. Yeah, and that basically what you just said is kind of the plan as far as I'm concerned. I'm trying to walk us through some of our options for the goals right now so that we can get Mike that feedback and to come back. So that's pretty much as far as I'm concerned what we are doing. Yeah, and that's why I want to walk through these and get everyone's ideas on the different parts of the goals. I want to find out if livable wage is something we want to keep pursuing. If it sounds like childcare is something we do want to make sure we include. And just with that feedback, yeah, I expect Mike to come back. And the same thing with the strategies as you know, Gabe, like the strategies are not fleshed out right now. So there's going to be a lot of work for the planning staff on the strategies. There's just some like big ideas over there too. So yeah, I think that's what we're doing. We're just walking through these piece by piece. The column on the right, I don't want to give the impression that I'm personally obsessed with trying to make everything measurable. It's just so happens that a lot of these things are measurable as we discovered in our subcommittee work. So it's nice to think about that because a lot of the other chapters we've worked on so far, there was a focus on having goals that are measurable. It is kind of something that we've been trying to do more, but not all of them are measurable. Some of them are kind of subjective and that's fine. It just seems like some of these actually can be measured. They can't have benchmarks. But part of what Mike will be doing is coming back and telling us whether he thinks it's a good idea or not to benchmark some of these things. Okay, so it sounds like we'll be keeping livable wage in, we'll be keeping childcare in. Just maintaining an educated and trained workforce and increasing meaningful work. Those are two other parts. Those are not too measurable. Mike or anyone else, do you have thoughts about those other components of that first goal? Should they be their own goals? Should they be included? What are people's thoughts about that? The meaningful work part and the education and training part? So those two things combined with the livable wage, I mean, I think we could choose two of the three or maybe one of the three, but they all seem to lend themselves to each other. Which should be removed? I'm not quite sure. Well, yeah, we don't necessarily have to remove any part unless people want to. Yeah, I'm keen to slice these goals up with Hopkins Razor. So we come up with something nice and slim. Okay, I see what you're saying. See what you're saying, that they're redundant enough where we can actually take one out without losing anything. Any other thoughts about that? Mike, what do you think about that goal as it's written there? In what I would usually do when I was working with the committees is we would split those. And the reason we would split them is because the strategies used to improve, let's say access to childcare are gonna be different than the strategies you would create for paying a livable wage. What we're doing now though is a little bit of both at the same time. So usually what would happen in maybe Gabe and Jeff, if you haven't had this fully through enough of these yet, but usually like the housing task force, historic preservation, these other ones would come out with a really long, very detailed list of here's our aspiration, here's our five goals. If you break that aspiration out and here are the 27 strategies that accomplish these goals. And when that came to the planning commission, they would start to go through, all right, we're gonna lump the four goals into two or the four aspirations into two and these seven goals into four and we'd lump them together. So it would make it easier for the public to understand and digest. But from one perspective, we broke it apart because it was very important to be able to draw the line to connect the dots between childcare is important. Here's what we're gonna do about childcare. Liveable wage is important. Here's what we're gonna do for livable wage and having dot to dot. But again, when you get to the end, as Jeff was just pointing out, being able to consolidate them makes them a lot easier for the public to understand, which is why we're doing it in the plan. So if you keep them together, I'm okay with that because that's where we're going anyways. But in the back of your mind, just remember that when we get to the strategies, that's how I'm gonna be piecing it apart is, if we're gonna talk about access to childcare lumped into goal A, then I'm gonna expect to see strategies very specifically tied to it. So that I guess, I wish you watched the answer to the question. We could, Mike, we could, I mean, you see that there's these bold titles on each one. I mean, we could stick to something simpler for the goals and just know that that text that's after it is going to be, the strategies are gonna be those things. And what are people's thoughts about that of just having the simpler stated goal and just know that that's the stuff that will be covered in the strategies? What do you think about that, Mike, or is it too much unlike what we've done in the other chapters? I don't think it's that gonna be that different. I'm just hanging out here for a second to grab. I mean, this is what you guys eventually collapsed that down to one, three goals. This is historic. Identify historic resources increases appreciation. And then these are all the strategies for doing it. So this is where we're eventually going with what you're doing is, we're gonna end up with a set of goals that are very, you know, succinct as Jeff was pointing out. Identify and document the city's historic resources. It's not a big long statement. It's a pretty concise statement. I mean, that's at least for historic. I'll go back here to open another one. What do we do here for housing? Revised housing. Yeah, this is where this was really revised. You guys went through a lot of revisions with housing. This was four, then two. I think this was like 12. So again, you guys got it down to a very succinct increase in number of homes in Montpelier by a minimum of 30 units per year. Maintain a mix of housing types, occupancies and costs. And originally when the planning commission is looking at this, or when the housing committee was looking at this, they're talking about these, you know, as multiple goals. But we could combine mix of housing types, sizes, occupancies and costs because it all fell under a maintain. So these are all things we wanted to improve. These are all things we wanted to improve. So just to give you an idea, this is where we got to with these other ones. So now when we're looking at economic, you've kind of fleshed them out with discussion points, but eventually we'll compress it down to that single statement. Okay. Is everyone okay with that? That we just, we have the understanding that when we get this back from Mike that the goals will be worded a kind of simpler way, but the content that's there right now is going to be covered in the strategies. Is everybody okay with that? Yeah. All right. So let's just plan to do that. We don't need to beat that to death anymore. Let's go on down the list of goals. So the next one is to, it goes to resilient business environment, continue to improve our business and economic climate such that encourages and supports businesses. The subgroup had pointed out that, you can look at the gross receipts coming in to mobiliar businesses and as a way to measure whether the business and economic climate is increasing, such as it could be a benchmark that we could, that we could incorporate when it's like the web-based thing. I'm going to go through more of these goals. We don't have to just feel free to chime in if people have anything to say about any of these. So the next one is the, I think Gabe had pointed out these bold summarizations. Like he pointed out, this is kind of an entrepreneurship goal just to increase the number of small businesses through retention expansion programs as well as support for startups and entrepreneurship. We can measure the number of new businesses by the filings. The next one is one that the subgroup created. Is anybody want to talk about any of this stuff yet before I move on? Okay. So the next goal is something that we created. This is, John thought it was important to have a job creation goal. So we put one here that says, increase the number of full-time jobs by 100 per year. The current number is 9,252 jobs. And so by the end of the plan, we want to exceed 10,000. We had a discussion about whether that actually keeps pace with our housing unit goals. And it feels like this one's more ambitious because our increased housing would barely keep up with the number of new jobs in Montpelier, assuming that those people all live in Montpelier, which would mean that there's not going to be housing for people who are not currently in Montpelier, like, you know, for other people other than these new jobs. So it kind of opens the question of whether our 30 units per year is ambitious enough or how are you going to look at that? Anybody have any ideas or thoughts about this, having this as a goal and what it says? Would we anticipate those jobs to be filled by residents? I'm just thinking if Montpelier is like a node for the region, if Barry's growing or he's Montpelier or Northfield or whatever, that's still attainable. My bigger issue is that, I mean, how's the state going to change its job outlooking Montpelier versus other places or in total and how will that affect that number? And that's out of our hands, so. Yeah, we talked about that too. We were thinking that there's probably not going to be a, like, if we're looking at 100 jobs per year, we're not expecting those to come from the state government. But we didn't think it was important to, like, exclude government jobs either. That's just what it looks like now. There's going to be a new governor after next year, so it could change a lot in the next eight years, you know? There could be some government growth, but we don't know, we just don't know. As far as the, as far as the jobs being created here and then people living elsewhere, you know, that's as far as our entire housing chapter goes, and as far as, like, our overall goals from Montpelier, we want more people in the region to be here, so if we're creating jobs here, we want those people to be here. We'd like our plan to take that into account. Because it's just like, because elsewhere in our plan, that's what we want. Yeah, I think if we're creating more jobs than housing units, then we're going to be making, it's going to negatively impact affordability. That's been, you know, there's a lot to, a lot of evidence to show that it's going to create a demand. People want to live close to where they work, so that will create an issue. So, you know, just for ballpark numbers, statistical out there, we, our housing units are two per thereabouts. So for every dwelling unit, that's two people, but it's also on average, doesn't really work out in every single case, on average, only one, because we've got 4,000 people in the workforce in a city of 8,000. So again, you're splitting it right in half. So it's basically 50%. So for every dwelling unit, you're, that you are creating, you would need one job. So if we're doing 30, I think any number north of 30 on that would be creating more of a problem. And I'm just, I'm not advocating for, against whether or not we should be increasing the number of jobs. That's been debated a number of times by councils, by economic development directors as to whether or not that's a good thing or not a good thing for the city of Montpelier because we're such a job center. Job centers by definition have more jobs than people who can fill those jobs. There's only 4,000 people in the workforce who live in Montpelier and we have 9,000 jobs. So even if every single person lived here, we would still have 5,000 people commuting to town every day. You know, I know this maybe puts a little bit of a wrench in the progress that you've made. I think the very first board meeting that Jeff and I attended, you know, that was the goal of the 30 housing units per year. You just look at the data that's coming in. I mean, there was some reporting in the Wall Street Journal this weekend just talking about a lot of the moves. It's not just COVID, it's like climate refugees, people that are trying to get out of places that aren't livable. And you see Chittenden County doing a lot to expand housing. And this may be sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity to capture some movement if we're more pro-growth. So, you know, just getting to Mike's point of how do you have something that's more affordable? You know, you have to, we all can't be competing for the same housing stock. So just maybe a thought at some point of coming back to that number of 30 per year and asking if that's really the right number. I'm with you. I think that doing this whole exercise, looking at job growth, made me realize that we weren't, maybe weren't ambitious enough about what the housing goals, that 30 per year is not adequate. Jeff and Ariane, what do you think about that? I'm down with it all. I guess I'm just a bit worried about sort of this interior focus at the moment of jobs in the city after match housing in the city. We're dealing with regional issues. I mean, people, they mentioned people moving from to Vermont to maybe settling on Montpelier instead of, or going to Montpelier instead of Chippin County. I mean, we have people leaking out of Chippin County due to the affordability issues here, there coming here. It's this very dynamic system. And I'll take all the jobs and housing we can get. I mean, you'll note that you can do right here, but maybe, I'll stick up here, maybe something productive would be to have like a ratio rather than absolute numbers. Do we want more jobs in housing, more housing in jobs, whatever? But I'm starting to ramble now. So that's the general justice. Yeah, I think generally we do want the housing and the region to be here and other urban places that where it makes the most sense for smarkers and everything. That's definitely on my mind. Peter, do you have something? Yeah, sorry, I missed a bunch. And maybe you guys have talked about this. It sounds like you've talked about a little bit, but Jeff has raised the issue of regionality. And look, realistically, we can have goals from Montpelier, but that's not the real world. There are people, and it's not just Barry. We also have the entire East Montpelier, East Calus, so forth, where people are living out in the country and they come in. So how do you phrase these things so that it's not just, oh, this is Montpelier jobs from Montpelier residents? Because that's not reality. How can you, what can you do to make it closer to the real? In your word. Yeah, so I think part of it is that we're trying to set these, so these are the goals part of the plan where we're trying to decide like how ambitious we're gonna be. And then the strategies that put these into place, which is kind of what you're going at, like the action things. No. We'll, no. No, you've got specific metrics that you're associating with the goals. And I think that is a bit of a problem. To me, I realize you're using the structure that you've given, aspirations, goals, metrics, strategies. But goals in a way are aspirational.  Do you mean downtown commercial businesses or are you including car dealers and the big national companies that we have like national life?  And I think Jeff's put his finger on it.  But how are you gonna measure their revenues? The hospital, because it's a huge employer. But it's part of UVM. How are you gonna measure? They're one of the largest employers in the area, but it's in Berlin. Do you know what I mean? It's associating metrics with these goals that I think is distorting the conversation. Well, yeah. So you know, yeah, you might have been away for that part, but these metrics are not necessarily gonna be things we use. We're just putting them down there and we're actually going through the process of thinking like does this, does it make sense to try to use these metrics or not? But you're making a good case against using gross tax receipts. So we're probably not gonna, that's probably not gonna end up in the point. But we only wanna use the ones that make sense to get at what we're trying to do. Well, housing, I agree with what you said earlier. Housing is one of the clearest measures. Our very low inventory, the cost of rental, all of these things in housing show that we have an acute housing problem. And I would think that that could be, maybe think about housing as the driver of this, look at your other goals in relationship to housing. That idea of Jeff said of a ratio, for example. Yeah, I mean, what are the thoughts about using a ratio for job creation? And I guess what would be important is that the ratio would make sure that what are, the jobs aren't created, the job creation is not creating a problem for housing. Is that what we should try to design it around? You know, just to point out that number that John put in that, that's the number of jobs in Montpelier. So that is not the number of the Montpelier workforce. So that measure, whatever it turns out to be, I mean, when he was suggesting that, he was suggesting a more regional approach, right? That we're creating jobs in the city, but the people, you know, they're living wherever they live. I guess I'm just keen to harness should there be growth elsewhere? Like the apartments being built at the Berlin Walmart, for example, I know that's senior housing, but that could advantage Montpelier as much as it advantages Berlin. And I guess speaking more broadly, I spent a lot of the past decade in Montreal and their lower housing prices are in part due to the lower wages and all of that and all these systemic choices they made over the decades, but also they're growing outward with a lot of transit oriented development and the pressure on the whole region's housing supply, at least some interesting synergies as well as sprawl. I mean, not great, but it's just something to think about. Hey, you know, I guess if we're thinking about metrics, what, and this is to answer the question about the job creation and housing, just as one example, the real question is, how many people live in Montpelier, work in Montpelier? How many people who work in Montpelier would like to work in Montpelier? How many people who work in Montpelier but live elsewhere would like to live in Montpelier? I mean, in some ways, it would be good to figure out some way to figure out what is the problem? Is it just a demographic problem or is it also a psycho-emotional problem with people being unhappy about where they live and they live somewhere where they'd rather send their kids to school here, that kind of thing. And I think if you begin to look again at some of the surrounding excerpts, you would get an interesting picture, I think, of relatively privileged groups living out in the country, having country life, coming into Montpelier to do their shopping at the co-op or whatever, but they're happy with it. Whereas there are people who live on Barrie Street on low income, they can walk everywhere and got all that in close to the city opportunity, but they're not very happy with their lives because of how little money they make. Is it that kind of more important than the numbers? Yeah, these are good points. How do we have ideas for a different kind of job related goal or whether that should even be a goal? I mean, I think we can certainly get into having a conversation about maybe factoring in the regional context for some of these. Into whether, remember, we also have this, which are the direct goals, and we also have the chapter. And some things end up not fitting well in the goals, but fit very strongly into the chapter where we can talk very directly about, we don't see ourselves in Berlin and Barrie City as competitors, which some communities do. There's definitely some places that see their neighbors as competitors. In fact, Berlin and Montpelier have in the past considered themselves competitors. And when we tried to create an economic development commission, one thing we wanted to do is try to see if we could pair up with Berlin and people didn't want that. But I think we can always go and see about the thinking of ourselves a little bit more regionally when we talk about our economic goals because it does, we do operate regionally. And Jeff's point about the housing up at Berlin Mall, we put in a letter of support. The planning department put a letter of support into what they, I guess it's a growth, was it a growth center or a new downtown to program from the state that they wanted to do, a new town center. And we put a letter of support in, supporting the fact that they were gonna close to build as many hundreds, 400, 500 housing units up there. But we didn't see that as competition. We supported it. We put a letter of support in to go and say, we think that's a good thing because any housing in our region is good. And we wanna have housing here, but we're not gonna oppose housing there. And I think we can kind of see ourselves less as competitors. We do have goals, obviously, environmental goals and other efforts that we wanna see most of our development happen within our urban core. And Berlin has an urban core. Montpelier has an urban core. Berry City has an urban core. If you look at the development trend since the 1960s, 80, 90% of the new housing development occurred outside of those downtowns. They occurred in East Montpelier and Middlesex and Callis and Worcester. And people commuting in less development happened. And over the last 10 years, most housing growth happened in downtown Montpelier and in Waterbury. So that was a positive change that we now have development. So I would hate to go and create a situation where we've got, we develop a working pressure, not enough housing. And so we end up reversing that trend and people start building more houses out in the country, creating more urban sprawl, creating more traffic issues, creating more energy issues because we're creating more jobs than we are housing. I think we've gotta make sure we work those two in balance in whether it's Jeff's idea of having some kind of ratio. But I think we have to look regionally because all of our communities need to be thinking about this in the same way. We've gotta kind of be working from the same playbook that we want to increase our housing in the downtown, but of course increase the jobs because that's the lifeblood of Washington County is our downtown core. We have three job centers and everybody else is a bedroom community. I think that's very well put, Mike. I think if we talk about the, that's what we wanna do is downtown with public transportation disclosure, I'm on the MyRide community and I'm very excited about the potential for MyRide, but when I have more housing, the idea of infill housing, the idea of ADUs, the idea of duplexing, all these things that the development office has been working on to have a zoning will allow greater density in the city that will organically grow downtown businesses and especially if there's transportation up to the hospital and over to national life and even to Waterbury and to Barrie. So ultimately, hopefully we'll have a really good transportation system along that route to corridor. That's the kind of thing that would be great to see in a plan like this. That's more important than metrics. Yeah, I think we should make sure that our transportation, I mean, we're gonna be doing this, we're gonna make sure our housing and transportation and economic development chapters all match each other well. And I think part of the regional question comes down to the transportation that's gonna be available and what we're planning to do for it. I think transportation is also gonna, just to put this in people's minds for our hearings coming up on the zoning changes is to keep the available, make sure that we keep in mind the transportation resources that are available for some of these neighborhoods that are kind of on the edges of like what's walkable to downtown we should also be thinking about. And this goes to actually a conversation I had with Jeff before about thinking about how transportation is going to link up with those zoning changes that are being proposed. Anyway, okay, so sounds like we're going to still work on this job idea and see if we can flush that out. In the future, Mike, do you feel like you have enough feedback here to look at it more and to come back and suggest something? So do we think we're doing a little bit more of linking it or at least, I mean, we don't have to link them necessarily, necessarily connect them at the hip is one thing of, I mean, we just have to be sure we track them and monitor job creation and housing. We don't have to go and tell somebody, I'm sorry, you can't get a permit to build your new building on stone cutters way because you have to first create 17 more housing units. I don't think we want to be doing that but at the same time, I do think it's a good thing for us to be monitoring both. And I think there's a little bit that also goes to these numbers, I guess, that I'll point out when we get to the strategies. This is really meant to be a strategic plan. So we can wish for the moon, but as we start getting strategic, we've got a limited amount of resources to apply. And when we only have so many dollars, are we putting our dollars towards creating more jobs or are we putting our, you know, and when we get to these down the line, we can start having a little bit more of a thought that we might come back and maybe adjust a few of these as we get a little bit more of a conversation. But I do want to kind of, it's easy to go through and say, economic development is our goal to create more jobs. Is it to grow the grand list? Is it to be an entrepreneur? Is it to, you know, revitalize and have a vibrant downtown? And, you know, if your answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, each one of those has a dollar sign to it. And so you're then having a much bigger economic development plan. And we don't even have a person who does economic development right now. So just to give you a perspective, that would be all kind of new programs and new money and raising taxes to spend on these new resources. Or are we going to be very targeted to go through and say, you know, at the end of the day, it would be great to have all six of these goals to grow our, a number of jobs, to grow our GDP, to grow our grand list. But really, if I only have this many dollars, that's my target. That's really what I want to look at is to make sure that we're helping our existing businesses grow and thrive. And if we don't create another new job, that's okay. See our existing businesses grow and survive. But that's the policy question where we eventually get down to, it'd be great to do everything. Eventually we'll have to probably pick a number of these that are going to be our priority. So job attraction and creation may be something that we later try to weigh with some of our other ones. What is more important, this or that? I think that's a good point, Mike. And I think that could be valuable tonight where let's get down this list. It's going to be, we're going to be leaving a lot with the planning office to flesh out. And maybe one thing we can cover tonight is just to give you some feedback about what we think, what we anticipate are going to be the higher priorities we're going to want to be ambitious for, for strategies. If people can start thinking about that, while we go through this, like what feedback we can give to Mike about what we think is going to be a priority. Cause I definitely have some, I don't have a grand vision for a lot of this stuff, but I do have some things that I think are should be a higher priority. Okay, so the next, the next goal we have is to improve our building stock to make it more flexible, efficient, and well maintained. Maintain and improve the quality of our supply of necessary utilities and facilities. So this goes to, in my mind, it actually goes to infrastructure type things. It goes to, I did throw some strategies in based off of what Alec Ellsworth's plan was for making outdoor recreation a big part of economic development. A lot of his ideas I thought fell under this goal, which is basically he wants to see us like expand our trail and park infrastructure so that it becomes more of a draw for people because we have by having a lot of that. So I'm thinking, like I think if this is an infrastructure thing, not just for auto rec, but for in general. Does anybody have anything to say about this before we go on to the next goal? So I guess I'll just really quick the, so these next three tie to the businesses. Remember how I said your aspirations and two aspirations, the first one tied to looking through the lens of labor and the second one through the lens of business owners and property owners. So these three development, vibrant downtowns and housing are about what we can do to support the businesses directly. So in the two pieces of this one, the first one talks about improving building stock. That's kind of talking about what can we do to help the commercial landlords and the second piece is maintaining the quality and supply of necessary utilities and facilities, which is mostly what the city can provide because we provide the sewer and water, we provide the parks, we provide the bike lanes, we provide, you know, we're the engine that helps drive the private market. So this would open up into a whole set of strategies that would kind of focus in that direction. So yes, we went over the development one. The next one is, you know, like gave it from the like label of like vibrant downtowns on there. Cause like a lot of the strategies do go to downtown stuff here. It's maintain and improve our sense of place and quality of our public built environment. This is the aesthetic stuff. And then, and then finally we have this goal for housing, increase the quantity and affordability of our housing as it contributes to mobilities as a place to live, work, learn, shop and play. One obvious thing here is that the housing actually goes to both of the aspirations really. It goes to the providing housing for the workforce and providing housing to help support businesses. Just a comment maybe for discussion as Mike goes off to think about it. I mean, to his point earlier, resources, right? Finite versus investment, you know, my view and I don't know what others' views are, but when we look at category A, you know, how do we make the best use of the resources that we have existing? We get to category B, my feeling is that we need to make some significant investments which may require, you know, bonding and other things to happen to do, you know, like I love those outdoor things, people could flip over when they have time and look at some of those strategies. The idea of having, you know, trail systems that are connected and, you know, we just, you know and having the right, if we want to have all this housing we need to have the right water and utility set up to build us, support the housing, the roads, right? We need to improve our roads so people want to live here.  They didn't really get to any resolution for what I could see. But the idea of it is, you know, do we want to have something that, you know, the city could come out and just take a wagout, you know, on town meeting day to say, here's worth exploring some of these things. But it seems like that's the area where we need to make some investment if we really want to achieve these goals. You're saying development and housing or areas of focus, is that what I'm hearing? I'm just seeing if there's a consensus on that, that that's a place where it's probably new resources. I'm with you personally. I think that I like the idea of economic development being driven by infrastructure type stuff. For one reason is that it seems equitable that you're spending money for everyone and you're not trying to, it just seems like it's a low risk way to spend is that you're not risking wasting money that way. If it's on foundational stuff. What do other people think about which of the goals we wanna be ambitious about? Is everyone in agreement to like development housing or big ones? Housing for sure. Development, I think, it's a high priority but I think it would follow at the pace of housing or jobs. I'm wary of, and forgive me if I misinterpreted the gist of the cut of your jib game, whatever the expression is. But if we were to like ask for a bond to fund a new rec center or a new wastewater treatment plan, I don't know what needs fixing in Mark Pillar in particular right now, but I'm wary that there's willingness to pay for that sort of big investment. But yeah, housing number one, I guess that's the main thing. I think, do people think that we should revisit the 30 units per year and try to increase that? Do you think that's something that we need to do? What do the planning commissioners think about that? Yeah, I would support visiting that. I think it was a good goal, but I think if we're trying to stretch, I think we could stretch. Yep. Okay, and if you have any recommendations, Mike, for if we were to increase that, what do you think a good number would be and what makes sense that's, as you said, something that's not high in the sky, but something that's achievable, but also, you know, effective? Yeah, I think it's one of those ones it is. I mean, 30 units a year, it doesn't sound like much, but when you get down to doing it, it's actually a surprisingly difficult number to hit. You'll hit it periodically, which we have when we did the transit center, you know, one shot, we got 36 units. That's awesome, but we just don't get too many transit centers and French blocks. So as we go up, it becomes a matter of resources and it becomes a matter of how much the city is willing to kind of get involved. And I would, you know, if the goal is to have more, you know, I certainly wouldn't be thinking we could get 100 units a year. We just don't have the land to do that, but it certainly would be possible for us if we were, you know, I hate to speculate on options, but unfortunately we're not Arizona. We don't have miles of flat desert that we can just plow into the next set of cactuses and build out some more. We've got a lot of terrain and a lot of limited space to build, but there is still room for us to do infill without destroying the character of our neighborhoods. So. Okay, yeah. If you can let us know what an increase in a realistic increase looks like. Yeah, like great hundreds, probably pretty, pretty difficult. So Peter, do you have something else? You're on mute. Mike, wouldn't inventory be a better measure than number? In other words, how much housing is available, you know, whatever the, at any given time. We have, what's our inventory now? It's 1%? We had a debate on this. So the, the, what came out of the housing task force and came to the planning commission was to have a target of 5% rental vacancies in a six month supply of housing, which is what is considered the balance for, you know, if it's less than six months, prices tend to rise. It's more than six months and prices tend to, to level out and drop eventually. So we were looking to targeted those. The planning commission discussed it and felt those were too kind of, kind of out there a little bit. So the thought was in a minimum 30 units per year, because if you were to calculate, we're at basically a 0% rental vacancy. If we wanted to hit 5%, we would need a minimum of at least 240 housing units, which would be 30 units a year over the eight year lifespan of this plan. So at a minimum, and as I think if you look in the housing plan, it does say at a minimum 30 units per year. So the goal was we didn't wanna just have 30 units. Our goal was to have a minimum of 30 units. And the reason that number was chosen was because now, of course we could add 240 units in eight years and still have only a 2% vacancy. I mean, we know it's a minimum that we would need is 240 units based on the current statistics. So that's how we went from, you know, we have had that discussion. Do we wanna have that metric as 5% vacancy? The difficulty is John's concern was that's a number we don't have. It's very difficult to get. And there's a lot of estimates out there, but there's not actually a database where we actually have a way of knowing exactly what it is. We could off the top of our head, we all know the vacancy is zero because just go and, you know, pick up a one ad and try to find a available rental unit in Montpelion. You won't find one. So it's either zero or effectively zero. Yeah, but the reason why I just mentioned it as a better metric is because that is a reflection of demand and availability, not just availability. You say 30 more units, we have no idea if that's good enough because we don't, there's no measure of demand in there. But I understand there's some difficulty in estimating inventory, but some real estate people, they're pretty confident about, you know, the inventory numbers that they throw around. It's just something to consider rather than just a wrong number of units. We ended up, we liked the direct approach. We liked that it was less squishy, but we didn't necessarily think that 30 was the right one. I mean, we can increase that. So that's how we went with that. As Mike was saying, it's pretty squishy to base it off of these rental market estimates. We just, we liked having the direct thing because it was, it's more obvious that like, do we meet it or not? Like I think we thought that it would encourage more development in a way. Okay, so looks like we have that stuff handled for now. Looks like we had plenty for Mike to look at and to consider. I don't think we need to go into what's on the strategies page right now. Just know that there's some things over there that are based off of Alex's work for outdoor recreation and economic development. So there's some strategies there. There's a lot of content that Gabe put over there that's just kind of the seeds for ideas for strategies based on what our goals are. But I think we're good with leaving it to the planning staff to flesh out from here. Is that okay with you, Mike? Yeah, I think I've got enough to be able to put things together. So if we got a couple minutes, I just wanted to go back to the aspiration is one thing we pulled out and didn't include in the aspirations, which we had a little bit of discussion of which we kind of have to figure out, I think, from a policy standpoint, within the EDSP and within other things we've talked about, you know, what sectors. So somewhat what are we supporting when we're talking about supporting businesses? We've talked a little bit about outdoor recreation tourism. These were the pieces that came out before from a failure to have successful employment in a variety of sectors, including state government. So state government is our biggest driver. Sometimes when I talk to economic development folks they actually cringe at the fact that, you know, why would we want to support state government? But when they are our strongest employer, you want to make friends with your folks that feed you. Businesses that support functions of state government. So the reason we have more nonprofits than anyone else per capita in the country is because we support the state government. So we have the nonprofits and lobbyists, finance, national life, outdoor recreation we've kind of talked about. People want that to be a focus.  And then retail and tourism generally come in because that's our downtown, that's our Montpelier alive. That's our vibrancy when we talk about these things really comes down to our retail and tourism. But I guess they're, you know, a really a kind of a decision that kind of falls in of, it seems like an awful lot of sectors that we're supporting because when we get, and I bring this up because when we get to our goals over here, you know, we do start talking about vibrant downtown, you know, that's kind of supporting those two tourism and retail in the downtown and those types of pieces. Kind of having a sense of, are we missing? I'm kind of of the same mind that we don't need to really worry about the government. The lobbyists and the people associated with government are gonna come here anyway, but the things that need the most work, I mean, Montpelier alive has done a great job. There are so many opportunities to increase and build upon the foundation that's already been set to really market that destination of our downtown. There's such great resources there and it can be improved. So, Mike, I'm understanding that you're asking whether you think our aspirations cover the ability to concentrate on some of these niche areas. And I think that it does without having it in the aspiration. The aspiration for the business side is Montpelier will maintain a, make sure, yeah, Montpelier will maintain a robust local economy by supporting quality, private development, by ensuring those projects have access to ample infrastructure. I think that that covers the ability for us to have some strategies oriented toward specific industries. So I think that it is covered in the aspirations. Am I understanding that that's your concern? Yeah, I was just making sure we kind of understood, we were kind of on the same page of what we're hoping to try to do. And I get Gabe's point, and actually it's a very good point is the fact that when we're kind of thinking a little bit out loud of that sustain, maintain, evolve, transform, I don't think we have to do much. These may be our sectors. Montpelier's sectors include state government businesses that support the functions of state government finance. Those guys are fine. We want them, we love them, we want them to stay, but we really don't need to support them. They are fine taking care of themselves. But where we do need to focus, if we want to expand our sector and if we want to be successful having multiples, is outdoor recreation we need to improve on. If outdoor recreation is going to be a focus, we need to do things to support that, including parks, trails, bike paths, those types of things. I'm not sure about supporting the professional services. I'm not sure about specialty manufacturing, but retail and tourism, certainly those both come up again and have come up, is that our, I don't want to say our downtown is economic downtown, it is fragile, but certainly COVID has shown how quickly we could lose our key players in the downtown. And they were remarkably resilient, but I think we do need to continually make sure that we are doing things that support our downtown and have that strength. So are you good with it though? Or? Yeah, I think it's there. I just wanted to bring that back. When I saw these down here, when I saw the vibrant downtowns, it started to trigger me back to those sectors that we had talked about. And if we're gonna, as our sectors, are they reflected in here? Because I can talk about those sectors in our chapter. And as long as they start to come out here and we can start to point to things later on to go through and say, hey, we talked about wanting to do outdoor recreation, and if that's gonna be a focus for business development, remember this is about people, it's about the business development, are we doing enough? And I think this facilities here maintain our quality and supply of utilities facilities, part of those facilities is gonna be that park lane. Part of that is gonna be those bike paths. Yeah, so if you look under the strategies where I like drew it up based off of what Alex said, it was development and vibrant downtown are the two categories that I thought his things would fit under. So there it is, he's going over. Meaningful work, entrepreneurs, development, vibrant downtowns, yeah. Yeah, so I think what you're looking at is like, yeah, what gate you threw in there. You're on mute game. I think gave through that stuff in there. I think that, so further up is the stuff from Alec. I think further up maybe C or D. Yeah, over there, you see. To the right side there is the outdoor rec stuff, and that goes to, I had put that it goes to development and to vibrant downtown for the goals. All right, well, I will work on the aspirations and goals primarily and try to start to flesh out some of the strategies and because we're a little bit, I have to kind of teach you guys a little bit of what I taught every committee as I went through. So when I put together strategies for them and when I put them together for you guys, I'm just putting things out there and don't look at it from necessarily the sense that I'm advocating or pushing or trying to think of an idea. By all means, I'm putting things out there to help to spur people to think about things outside the box because a lot of, in this troop planners and missionaries, I just gave a presentation for the regional APA to try to get people to try to think at different strategies. So I'll put things in here like tax stabilizations and these other things to start to get you thinking about how we as government impact development. It's, you know, I kind of have this, I always like to say, I get this odd job that I'm supposed to create housing without swinging a hammer. I'm supposed to create jobs without hiring anybody. What do I do to make these things happen? And that's a little bit of these programs that we start talking about. What are we gonna do to help get there? And so I'll put things in here that we may absolutely say we're absolutely not doing that. And that's perfectly fine. I am okay with people throwing things out because I'm trying to put things out there to say, here's one way of doing it, here's another way of doing it, here's another way of doing it and you may throw them out. So when you- We appreciate the feedback. Yeah, when you review them, don't think that I'm off the deep end. I'm just putting things out there to help you to think and maybe you come up with other things. Once you hear my ideas, maybe you think, oh, there's actually a better way of doing that from another place I worked or another whatever that I've been involved in. Yeah, thanks, Mike. I think we understand that. Peter, did you have something you wanted to add real quickly? We're gonna, we have to adjourn pretty soon. Yeah, real quickly. I just noticed in that list of things to support, there's a pretty big one that we do support now and that I think is pretty important to Montpelier and that's arts and culture. I- Actually, we actually wanted, we want to do an arts and culture chapter, which is something we hope to get to later, which is not, this is gonna be new for the city plan. So we wanna focus on it to that degree where we wanna give it some chapter actually. Okay, I just wanna point out that the city currently is quite good at supporting financially, supporting the library, the TW Wood and other things. And Montpelier Alive is with the art walks and the front and it's a very important part of Montpelier. So maybe it belongs a little bit in the economic development area too. These arts places cannot survive without city support and we already are probably losing the film, no, what do you call it, film festival. We might, the college is cutting back, the college with fine arts is cutting back. This is something that we should be thinking about. In fact, you're gonna do a section on it is great. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Okay, does anybody have anything else? It sounds like, you know, we've given Michael a lot to work with. Our next few planning commission meetings are going to be away from city plan stuff a bit because we're gonna have the hearings on zoning changes coming up next week and then the second Monday of December, which sounds like it's good timing because it's gonna give Mike time to flush out economic development more. You look kind of stressed, Mike, hang in there. You've got maybe another month before we'll be hounding you about this stuff. Okay, does anybody have anything else for me, Jern? Okay, we have a motion. Just a brief question. So for the upcoming hearing, is there anything in particular we should read or familiarize ourselves with? It's a different format of meeting. It's gonna be different. You should definitely read the memo that Mike had prepared before. Unfortunately, you and Gabe joined after the planning commission had the benefit of going through everything. Well, we didn't go through everything because there's been some things added since then. But at the next hearing, Mike, you do plan to summarize. Yeah. So he will summarize and then we'll hear from people. But it's not gonna be as much opportunity for the planning commission to get into asking questions because we wanna make sure it's for the public. Yeah, so I think we broke it into like four steps. One is that we open the hearing. So it's a planning commission. Kirby will open the hearing.  I'm gonna try to keep it relatively short to kind of focus on the different points. The way it technically goes is you guys are free to ask questions. Usually they're clarifying questions. And then we try to turn it over to the public. Now, just for understanding how this works, kind of in practice is, we try to have the public address everything to the board. We generally don't engage in debate with folks. We really wanna hear their comments. By all means, ask clarifying questions. If you don't understand what it is they're asking about or if there's something in particular, you wanna understand it. But the point is really to make sure we hear from as many people as possible and kind of get ideas of which ones. And after this first meeting, we probably won't have any, I mean, you guys are free to go and say, we wanna have some time to deliberate what we've heard. But we're gonna have two hearings. So one's gonna be on the 29th next week. Next one's gonna be on the 13th. Probably gonna depend how the 13th goes. If we go for a full two hours next week and we go for a full two hours or two hours or more, I should warn you that if we still have people, we may decide to stay a little bit longer on the 13th just to make sure anyone who wants to be heard gets heard. I have no idea how this is gonna go. We could end up with a lot of comment. We could end up with very little comment. I'm gonna suspect, I'm gonna assume we're gonna end up with more comments than less. So, and then, so if we had time on the 13th, we might sit down and go through and say, all right, we're closing the public hearing. We've heard everybody, everybody who had something to say we've said it. Now we're gonna sit down and we're gonna talk about what we heard and of the, I'll call them the 10 proposals. And we might, it's up to you guys how we do it. We might systematically go through and say, I really didn't hear anything about number six, seven and 10. Do we wanna just assume that those are okay? And now let's go back to one. We heard some comments on number one. What do you guys think? Do we still wanna support this or not? And then kind of walk our way through each one of the proposals and then decide if we reach a point where it's like, I'm willing to send all 10 of these to city council for consideration. I'm willing to send all of them, except number nine to city council for consideration is whatever you guys can make a motion on. So usually though, we try to reserve that debate until after we've taken all the public comment. And then we move forward. And if for whatever reason, guys are like, I think we need more time for more public. We can say, planning, Mike go out and warn another public hearing for January because we want to take more public comment. This is as much yours as it is mine. I'm just here to staff this. You guys are kind of driving this. So that's a little bit of how it goes. A lot of it is gonna be listening to the public, listening to what they have to say about the zoning proposals. And as I said, I'll be there to answer questions. A lot of the stuff is gonna probably be questions from the public that I will answer. So we may deliberate on the 13th, like Mike was saying, or it may run over. We don't know at this point. We may end up having to use our December 27th meeting to deliberate and actually vote out that proposal. If that happens, there's a preliminary question of will people be available December 27th or are they going to be, is that going to be Christmas vacation and people don't want to? Are you going to be around on the 27th, Mike? That's a threshold. Okay. I'm not going, I'm... Do people think that they'll be around on the 27th, that that is gonna be a meeting that actually happens? I'm in town. Yeah, I'm in town. I mean, I would rather not, but if there's a, if we should just move it forward on the 27th, then I'm around.  Is that gonna like throw a wrench into things as far as getting to the council? Nope, it's just the time. It's gonna take as long as it takes to get it to get it done and get it done right. That's always my concern is to make sure that we make sure we don't rush anything, that we take enough time to think about, excuse me, consider all of them. Okay. Well, we don't have Aaron or John or Marcella tonight to really get good feedback on who's gonna be available on the 27th. So it looks like we're gonna need to table that till the end of the meeting on the 13th. Trying to help me remember everyone to revisit whether we're gonna have the 27th as a meeting. It sounds like that's gonna be up in the air. So we'll either deliberate on the 13th if we don't have time, maybe the 27th, maybe the second week of January. Sorry that everything's so tentative. It sounds like we're just gonna have to play it by ear because we don't know how much public engagement there's gonna be. Is that okay with everybody? Okay. All right, so do we have a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn. Motion from Gabe. We have a second. Second from Ariane. Okay. Those in favor of adjourning, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, everybody have a great night and see you next week. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Thank you.


Hello friends. Today is just an ordinary day. I just got home from work. But it's a little different because I picked up Gracie's best friend Roxy to come over and play with Gracie. Okay, so we know all toys have been collected and picked up. Let's see how messy it gets in here. Okay, we got our first toy out. We'll have Gracie. Are you getting jealous? And look, there's Rita. Rita's a little confused. She's not sure what to think. I'm just gonna spy through the jungle of my Gracie girl. What are you guys doing? What's that? What is that? Huh? I think I hear toy three getting ready to come out. Oh yeah, we're really digging in there for this. What is it? What did you get this time? Oh, this is an old squishy. That's garbage. Oh, what's going on with the cat? Is this your first time? Is this your first time meeting a cat? Gracie, don't worry. It's just a cat. What are you just a cat? It's just a cat. I'm assuming this is Roxy's first time meeting a cat. Rita, what's that? What is that doggie bugging at me for? I think she's ever seen a kitty. Oh, what's going on? Rita's not afraid, though, at all. Oh, here we go. I think toy four is about to come out. Did it? No, it's still the same ones. Okay, Gracie. Gracie, what are you thinking about all this, huh? Are you excited?  Oh, here we are. We're back in the box. Back in the diggy box. Two can both play with it. Yeah. You want to use one end? Here, here. Gracie gets that end. And Roxy, you get, no, that's not how that plays. Look, look, look, grab it. Come on, Roxy. Roxy, get it. Yes, you're allowed on this couch. This is the why I covered this one. This is the doggie couch. You get it, little girl. A ten is, oh, I hear toy number five coming out. Come on, Roxy. What did you get to find? Look at these two go. Okay, now the toy has been grabbed. It's a pink, what is it? It's a pink smiley cat dog.  Roxy, your ears up. Roxy, your ears up. Okay. I don't know if you guys think this is extremely boring or not, but I just thought I'm not doing anything exciting. So maybe you guys would like to watch the doggies play. Well, that is exciting. What is that? What are you guys doing? Oh, Roxy literally just took that from you crazy. Oh, we're literally going to dig through it. Okay. Anything good, Roxy? Hey, well, you were just sniffing. You were just smooching with my friends. You were smooching with your friends butt.   Donkey has fallen out. Oh, squirrel's coming. Here's squirrel. Oh, they're actually tug of warring. Are they? Are they? Are they? I don't know if they're tug of warring, but they're doing something together. Rita spent her whole life around dogs. She's not afraid of anything. It's kind of cute for you know, a blind cat that has no eyes, isn't afraid of dogs. She doesn't swat at them or hit them either. She just kind of little look at them. Rita. Hi, baby. What, crazy? Roxy, what? What do you think about all this? Not much, huh? No, not much. What's going on? What is it, Roxy? What is it? Gracie and Rita are BFFs. Well, well, I guess so. Me and Gracie and Rita are best friends. Can you believe I let that cat climb all over my furniture, Roxy? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Just do whatever it wants? She only gets one short life and I should make it as best I can for her, so I will not stop her from doing what she wants.  I'm sure you guys have, but her head's even tilted. Like, what is that? What is it? Roxy, what is it? Gracie, did you tell her? It's just my sister. It's just my sister. Three hours later, the same, same scenario. I think it's time to say goodbye to Squirrely and Tiki Bird. They aren't doing so hot these days or not. Apparently, they don't understand what not on the doggie couch means. Off the non-doggy couch. I've got to have one couch for the humans. Or, you know, I guess you guys can play on it today. Uh-oh. In case you didn't know, this is my ball bowl. This is where we sit down and edit the vlogs. We edit them on our TV. We hooked up to a monitor, I guess. We don't have very much high techie stuff and when I minimize this, I don't know what that means, but I just X everything out. We just use Windows Movie Maker. Oh, see? What project am I restoring? I don't know, but it's all corrupt now. It's probably my ears when I made yesterday. Do I want to save changes? I guess not. Look at that stretched out ham hawk. Look at that ham hawk. That is a juicy, juicy, juicy leg. Where me was not good enough. We are going to take Mr. Pumpkin Man. Hold on. Mr. Pumpkin Man actually has his tag. Rocks. Here, Roxy. Drop it. There you go. Okay. Dog toys. Dog toys seem to all be out.  Nate's up. After you. Roxy, you don't know how to open the door? How hard is this, Nate? How hard is it to walk two dogs? Not really hard.  Look at that sky. I thought that was Roxy. Her purse. Oh, working. The dog park dog party has come to a quick little end. There's the quick little nightly stroll with the two love bugs. They're not dating, but I mean like the two lovies. Well, how was that? Did you guys have fun together? Was that so much fun? What's that? Crazy. Are you like, I want to have a sleepover again. Oh, you will be soon, okay? You'll have one soon, okay? Okay. Look.  Oh, is she sad, Nate? I'm sorry. But does that mean you want to get another dog? All right. Okay. Gracie has a play date. And maybe I think that's what I'll call this. Gracie has a play date. Well, love the life you live. Love the life you love.