Hmm, that's good because we wouldn't have been able to make quorum Okay, Charlie L is going good. You guys all good Mark is there We forgot that click the screen looking one We have no mouse. We have no mouse. So we're like, you know all thrown off now. It's just a shame We'll raise doing admirably All right Welcome to city of South Brunswick department of planning and zoning Development review board for June 5th, 2018 First thing we'd like to First thing on the agenda is directions on emergency evacuation procedures from the conference room If there's an emergency, we will exit either through the doors you came in from or these doors and we'll meet in this parking lot Scroll down the South parking lot To make sure that everyone who signs the sign-up sheet is safe and sound So if there's an emergency, please let's do that Number two additions deletions or changes in the order of agenda items. Are there any additions change the deletions? Hearing none comments questions from the public not related to the agenda and when you have any comments or questions on items Not related to the agenda During none hearing none number four announcements Well, it's good. Good to have you back Bill, but but we've had a record breaking Speed on the last meeting. So you've got a challenge ahead Doesn't take any time to watch that on Item number five miscellaneous application Ms-1802 of Merrill Kate To alter the existing grade for stormwater improvements the improvements consist of Regrading the lot and installing two stormwater manholes connected with a perforated pipe to an existing drain manhole at four Who is here for the African? Thank you very much Yes, that's great. That's great And if it's first raise your right hand you promise all the truth the whole truth and nothing much truth on the penalty of Pertry. Thank you so much. Oh And state your name Thank you Probably Small sway That goes on the left side from top to bottom and a deeper one that goes from left to right along the boundary lines there Which is the blue is the water that you can see so There is a manhole where it says current manhole that is about Probably 24 inches below the level of the street on my property And is I think was put there to manage this water flow as it was But the sways aren't quite deep enough can't really get them deep enough So my plan is to put I had a have a landscaper coming in his suggestion was Or two just you call manholes two greats one in the top left there one on the bottom left and Pull that water from those two primary areas and all with perforated pipe underground As a fringe drain and then cut into the current manhole that is there And I think that that you know he believes and I believe that that would manage this water problem Houses all around are affected by this my plan is definitely not to increase the The grade to push water back on to them But to actually pull the water from their property into into these manholes so that we can drain this and actually Improve the value of those five properties as well. This is the On the previous screen the bottom left It did get worse than this on the only complaint from these neighbors am I doing this is they they enjoy the ducks that come here sometimes Other than that they had no problems with it if you scroll down a little more there's I did this This is one of the sways that was cut in Pin there that is my property line. So you see the water does go on to the other two properties there As well Motion to close has he have you read the decision? Oh, yes. Have you seen the decision? Photos in your application I'll entertain a motion to close I move that we close 1902 of Meryl Kate for force local street Second the move in second would close this application all favor say aye. Aye. Aye opposed Thank you very much next steps Ray and Marla will Or you can please contact Ray and Marla and Give their plans and so on. Yeah Great Sounds great. Thank you so much. Take care Next item on the agenda continued continued Continued conditional use application see you see you 1807 and site plan application SP 1815 of Toronto fuels to amend a previously approved site plan for an auto repair facility the amendment consists of constructing a 1600 foot square foot addition to the existing building adding a paved parking lot and changing the use to Contractor or building trade facility a portion of the proposed work is located within a stream buffer requiring conditional Conditional use review at ten limerock limerock road. Who was here for the applicant? Is Jeff Galler from Trudeau consulting engineer and landscape architect on the project? Did not you are not here at the last so this is like continued from last week, right? For the last meeting, but he would need to be sworn in. Yes, right Please raise my hand. You promised all the truth whole truth and nothing with the truth under penalty of perjury Thank you so much. Please describe What's changed? The first plan we did not Allow for the replacement of the landscape that was Being removed. There was a 16 inch maple that's died that needed to be accounted for and So what I did is I planted seven willows on the back of the property down in the the grass of the wet area and Also just the number of Shrubs that we removed to move the sidewalk in the front of the building. I Didn't have enough Plants in there as As a trade-off so we added more There Yep, you see the plant list And you have you've seen the is there a draft decision. Yes, there is a draft decision, right? That's there. What is there draft? No, there isn't after the after All specs whose site plan with the but it's still red line. So it bread and so staff is happy that the Requirements are met for replacing the tree caliper That's great. So I have no questions That was not gonna be my question that this does replace all the calipers. Yes So if as explained in the cover memo The trees that are measured on a caliper basis are replaced on a caliper basis The shrubs and lilac the standard of industry standards is not to measure a thing on a caliper basis So he's provided comparable size and value replacement Okay, other comments question from the board mark you okay Okay, there's one red comment, but it starts at number two. Is there a number one or is that just all on the draft decision a Stream buffer which may be more suitable for snow storage Or is that just from last week? So those are that should not Yeah, sorry That should be removed because I added a condition to reflect what Abby had agreed to last week which is to relocate the snow storage I love that it's great not a tape but Other comments question from the board I'm all set Comments questions the public. Thank you other comments questions from public hearing none entertain emotional problems. I move that we close SP if I got this right SP 1816 and CU 1807 of 10 Lime Rock Road Is it 16 or 15? 1816 and CU 1807 according to the cover There's a typo in the agenda. Yeah, the agenda has 1815. Yeah, which is correct It's 16. Well, I'm closing the right one Second it's been moved in second with closest application all in favor say aye. Hi Opposed thank you very much. Take care Item number seven final application SD 1815 of Ernest and Eau Claire family trust to subdivide an existing parcel developed with a single family dwelling into two lots of 15 acres lot one 31 Hinesburg Road Who is here for the applicant? Hi, I am Andrea Dottolo of Trudeau consulting engineers and the owner Jennifer Eau Claire more way And this is a swearing Please raise your right hand promise tell the truth the whole truth and nothing about the truth under penalty of surgery All right, so this is Final application Subdivision subdividing off a 15 acre lot with a remaining 117 acre lot Nothing has been changed since the initial application although We do have draft findings That we'd like to review with you guys Great. Let's see. You are obvious. You are obviously looking at the draft decision Okay I don't see any comments. Do you send in comments when you pay attention to they're not highlighted in red? Oh, no, I didn't think they were a big deal, but the two items were That are conditions for amendment of the plan. So if you scroll down to condition number three everything else is boilerplate except condition number three which Requires that the plat plan be revised to show a 25 a 20 foot wide access easement on the 15 acre lot to serve the 117 acre lot and Show a utility easement on the 15 acre lot to serve the 117 acre lot The 20 foot wide access easement is required by our standard not explicitly, but access is required The board can't approve Subdivisions without access And then VTrans also sent us a note requesting that easement And then the utility easement is simply for the purpose of the existing electric line That serves the existing barn So I see the access easement. I don't see the I'm sorry. I'm not finding the utility easement Which item number nine Okay, just needed okay comments on those Yeah, so we were wondering About the 20 foot access easement from the 15 acre parcel it seems that the 117 acre parcel would have more than adequate room for access It's got over 4,000 feet of frontage along both route 116 and choose factory road And it does have two existing curb cuts along route 116 Unfortunately those plans don't highlight the 117 acre parcel There's a small cut out on C201 Which is a second plan We do have pictures of the curb cutouts if that's helpful though Yeah, Marla, what's the purpose? I mean they've got a ton of frontage, right? So it's to provide access to the existing structure If it were completely undeveloped a lot, oh, you're saying this little dairy barn at the bottom Is it were completely undeveloped a lot? Then we would say we'll figure out access later or the whoever develops it will figure out access later Because it does have so much frontage But we felt the whole concern is the dairy barn at the bottom. Yeah, we felt that the standard requiring access It's currently a road that goes from 116 through the back where the curb cut is to the barn Yeah, it's like a farm access road You could go to choose Yeah Right about there, okay, maybe a little far, but so you can start to see the so the barn is Here and you're saying this is the curb cut. Yes. Yeah, and there's the second one somewhere There's one just Right next to it where this one 16 Everybody following Is that adequate as far as the staff is concerned? Right, right, I think the question is just about the Okay, okay, and that satisfies v. Trans requirements as well Under item three. I'm just reviewing what it says They know that the standards of section 1111 require an access plan to be provided for the current use So if the access plan for the current use is the driveway to the south of the barn, I suppose that qualifies I do sort of wonder what the definition of access plan is for v. Trans purposes I don't want to approve something that they that wouldn't meet their standards So maybe that's something I can do quickly during our discussion is look up the definition of access plan Try that right now That particular section does not have its own definitions so we'd have to look elsewhere for them So we probably want to take a little more time Access plan means an actual plan Would you be able to provide a plan with a different view that shows where the access is? Yeah, absolutely This requirement is really a v. Trans is not an LDR requirement, right? So we're just trying to accommodate possibly the v. Trans So is that an administrative payment? I guess I'm wondering if we can close it here and figure out what access Plan means and then if it just means a plan of action then we just put a condition Yeah, we can put a condition in that requires something and then if it requires a physical plan That sounds good fine by me Okay, other comments questions from the board okay comments questions from the public yes, sir, please identify yourself We're not Regular payment just like characters Using that just understand that you're even saying that they haven't worked very well and I think we know familiarity with them and other sites and know what we have to do. But is the issue of whether they work on us and if we use them then shame on us if we come back and ask to take them out without having to make some other changes to get the coverage ratio right. The problem is you wouldn't have a curable site without the parking spaces that you don't need in Permian because you'd be below your required parking if you had to remove them. So if you needed to remove them in our place in Permian then you wouldn't have to have a site and we wouldn't be stuck with this construction project but it doesn't comply. There's a second issue in our minds as well which is lot coverage acts in most districts as a surrogate for open space and character of the neighborhood. It favors to not come towards lot coverage along with in theory place them across the entire site and then there would be no aesthetic quality to the site. So our inclination, go ahead. Oh no I was going to say what Marla just said. The district already has a pretty high lot coverage and it's going to be open space green space and if you heard these painters whether they work or don't work still have the appearance of paint. And so in theory we did allow this as a standard, we put paint in their site and just say we're going to take care of drainage. The 30% remaining is for green space and we always sort of get to that especially when we come into these non-conforming sites that are free existing conditions of way over lot coverage. So I try to get on the brutal green space like in the front yard lot coverage by adding green and not for this favor. So I personally want some for this favor which you get to go over the lot coverage. A strong low, sorry. The next issue is there are some non-conformities, some existing non-conformities at the site and I'd like to discuss these one by one if we can. I will mention that the hotel building that's there which I understand from Skip Hockner, he says the police are there twice a week handling issues that arise at that building. That building is also in, it has a setback issue, it has setback violations and we would fix those setback violations so they didn't exist anymore. Nevertheless there would be some other non-conformities that exist and that we would ask that they continue to exist but we wouldn't be making them worse. One of them is the canopy structure. There was actually a variance that was granted to allow the canopy structure to be built. We proposed to take down the building that is on the service station property and replace that with, and so there would be less, we would add two pumps and some more canopy. At the end result is that there would be less structure on the service station property. Where we would build we would not be adding to the setback non-conformity. The existing canopy would say a lot of money has been invested in doing the pump and tank upgrades and so we would keep those but we would propose to take the building down and add two more pumps. We think we can do that under the allowance that simply says we can, as long as we're not adding to the non-conformity for the structure we can spend up to $125,000 to add to it. That's just the easiest way to get there but that's what we're going to be proposing. Can I just clarify, the structure that you're proposing to tear down is not connected to the non-conforming structure, is that correct? It is not connected to the non-conforming structure, yes, that's correct. So you're removing the conformity structure and expanding the non-conformity structure? In a way that the non-conforming structure is, we're not expanding the non-conformity of the canopy. We'd be expanding it in an area within the setbacks. It's the back part of the canopy. It's the part away from the street. It's not the part out by the street for which it varies historically. So the next is... So just a quick question, are we all okay with that? Mark, John, Jennifer? I don't know. I just don't have a straight answer yet. Do we have to see a little more detail? I just don't have a straight answer. I don't have a problem with the old service station going away. I'm a little confused on the legal side of it and I don't want to think about it a little bit. We're happy, as I said, this may be an unusual sketch plan if it takes a couple of weeks to get through these issues to get to the bottom of them, but some of these are go-no-go for us. So there's a question about whether we're changing the non-conforming use. And we believe that what's out there now is a service station use. I have interviewed Mr. Skip Hawker. He's happy to come here and confirm at a meeting that, yeah, what I do fits within the definition of a service station use. There have been at least three decisions that have looked at that and said, yeah, this is a service station use. The only question seems to me, Skip Hawker has done what we think of what he says are minor car repairs there. And his, I hope I've got his language, the current owner describes this work as light-duty, quick, in-and-out auto repairs.  We think if you're a, the definition of a service station includes minor repairs, the allowance for minor repairs, we, staff has raised the issue that no, what may be going on there is that you're doing, it's a car repair service station use and a major car repair or motorcycle repair business. We think that it is not a major, we think there's one use that's a service station use and we base that on these facts. The use of the site has always been described as, in all, in at least three zoning applications as being a service station, there's never been permission granted to operate a car repair or motorcycle repair. The vast majority of the service station is devoted, properties devoted simply to the sale of gas, which is clearly a service station use. The, there's an accessory use of the site that has included the sale and installation of tires, batteries and lubricating oil. That falls under the definition of a service station use. The other automotive services that have been performed at the site include motor vehicle inspections and there are some other services, but there is, as Skip Hockner will tell you, they're all quick in and out, they're very minor things, he's not, he's not doing engine reconstruction or anything like that. The site has not been permitted or used to sell autos or motorcycles. The site hasn't been permitted or used to perform major repairs on autos and the site has not been permitted or used to sell auto or motorcycle parts and accessories. So for all those reasons, we think it's a service station work, we would propose to keep it a service station use. So I have a couple concerns about that. And I want to ask Araya a question. The adjoining property in the file, there's a letter that says you are operating as an extended big hotel, you only have a triple crew of hotels. What will be the use of that property today? I believe it's currently apparently being used as an extended stay for even residential units. Regardless of what the prior people said. Right, apparently, but it appears to have been approved already by the hotel. But the existing use is not, there's no need to be in compliance with the support. The existing service building that's detached from the fuel pumps has a sign on it. People would raise their voices because the microphones are not working. So you might want to raise your voices. The existing building, not the gas pump, but the enclosed building has a sign on it that says full service auto repair. If we apply that same logic, that's full service auto repair, auto service, auto and motorcycle service repair use, not service station. I don't, I have no stick on her because the sale of it to him ages, when I see him occasionally.  Is that not correct?  I don't, I think you've done more work.  I think his towing facility is actually out of an Act 250, which is like in Hinesburg. I don't know, but there are tow trucks that have a large scale of tow trucks sitting on this property that get out on the highway very quickly. I don't think he skips all that busy in this shop. So, I mean, I hear you, Marlon, but I don't think it's, I don't think he's doing all the lie in there. I think it's basically a gas business. I think the bottom line is that whatever use is around the property or not, pre-existing non-conformity. Gotcha, yeah. Proposal, I know more, but the proposal is to increase the use, is to expand the use by adding fuel in positions. Expand the non-conformance. And regulations do not allow the extension of non-conformity use. And the service station is a non-conformity use. Service station's non-conforming auto repair when it's minor or major is not allowed. I can talk to the expansion use if you want when you're ready. Go ahead. Okay, so the expansion, we believe that 100% of the service station property has been used for service station use. We're not proposing to change that. And if anything, we could actually reduce the amount, the portion of that, because some of the parking might be, you might say that it's being used for the new grocery store or retail use. So we might actually reduce the size of the non-conformity site that's used for the service station use. Whenever I have looked at changes, issues of expansion of non-conforming uses, you always look at the area that is being used. I've never seen a question where you look at what traffic is being generated, the non-traffic that's being generated by the uses that are occurring in the non-conforming use. The size, the area of the non-conforming use is all that long, and that's before and that will be true after. It is true that we propose to change the product mix of the non-conforming use so that more of it will be gas sales and less of it will be auto, the minor auto repairs. But the only way that you get to calling that an expansion is if you look at the, the only way that it suggests is if you look at the traffic generation. I would ask you to look at, as a lawyer advising people, it's never occurred to me to analyze this on anything, but what's the size of the area before and after? It's never occurred to me that you have to do a traffic study to figure out, gee, do you have more traffic before or after? It's the same area that's being used for the service station before. With four additional fuel stations. With four additional, but with no building. With no, you know, the auto repair businesses. That part of the service station business is going away. Before it's the same area, we're not, we're not expanding off the site.  They don't go to, gee, what's the traffic generation? Is that? No, it's not. We disagree. The canopy, which covers the, which is part of the service station, is being expanded. So you are expanding an area, you're expanding a canopy, which is being used to house, if you will, the fueling position. Service station includes a definition of dispensing of gasoline, dispensing of using gas pumps. But if they remove, I'm just guessing there. If the building is 600 square feet and they're removing 600 square feet and they put back up 600 feet of canopy, have they not left in the same? It depends on whether it's a expansion of, or a swapping of one use for the same use or a swapping of one use for a different use. So the first, the first question of nonconformity affects the second question of nonconformity. Remove the two uses, the auto repair and the repair building, and then you have the canopy, which has the service station component. But if you were to tear down, say, 300 feet of canopy on the other side of it, improve site circulation or something, that would not be an expansion. I'm sorry, the service station includes minor repair, sale of odds and ends and so forth, right? The minor service repair may be when, as Marla put it out, there is a sign indicating that it's a full service, not a minor repair. And because that's going away in my brain, there's a little bit of a net benefit. So when you wave two, you're getting rid of the two bays that are there now. And yes, you're adding two pumps, but it seems like it's a little bit. The size of the building that's going away is larger than the area of the canopy that we would propose that. So the net benefit is actually towards conformity. Yes, so the existing building is just for size comparison, it's 1,680 square feet, so that'll be raised and demolished. And the canopy expansion that's currently proposed is 800 square feet. So just size-wise, just so you know that. All right, it's sitting on the floor. That's the thing up. Yeah, there's going to be anybody not going to use the service station. So if I talk to my lawyer and I'm often been accused of that, but there are two issues here. One is, are there two uses or one use? You don't have to listen to me. We'll have Skip Hotner come in, he'll tell you. If you come to the conclusion that there's one use, then there's one use. If you come to the conclusion there's two uses, there's two uses. With that issue aside, then the question is, are we expanding the one use, the one we think is one use, are we expanding that one use? And that, I think you are onto the issue of, are we going to have smaller, less buildings then? Yeah, I think this is the question of the two uses. The question of what? Of the two uses. If it's a single use, I don't have a problem with it. Good. So. Yeah, and you know from my, you know, 15 years ago working on the gas station, you know, yeah, we said full service auto repair, but. It's poverty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't break jobs and, you know, we didn't do engine overhaul. So. And I have to say to staff that unless something miraculous happens, my feeling is that this project in general is a huge improvement. So my bias is going to be to try to shoe home this project in with, you know, all the respect to the LDRs and all the respect to you guys.  Well, I've seen that two times a week. I'll go with two times a week going to the hotel. Yeah.  That's what I sold to Skip Hockner. And if it was only two times a week, it was pretty good. Yeah. We were, that hotel was really bad. Yeah. It was really bad. Yeah.  We're missing one of our members who is a start-up improvement of affordable housing and I can foresee that discussion. Yep. That's where we're going. Yep. And that's coming up. That's, I'd like to add another story, like the sort of housing that we just made. I think that's realistic, although I will say when we sold that building to Skip, it was barely habitable. I hope he's done things to it to make it better, but it was really bad. Very bad. It was a bank property, foreclosure property. The thing a good wrecking ball didn't fix? A wrecking ball was exactly what it needed. He didn't tell me he had done anything. So he said, he described it as being stuff that was there from the 1950s. Yep. Okay. So the relationship to the comprehensive plan, the, in general, the zoning law, and I'm sorry to go to the law, but the law is that you can do anything you want with your property unless it's clearly prohibitive. And the language... What's going on? Don't you want to... Excuse me. I'm on the relationship to the comprehensive plan issue. Okay. So I'm following... Skip is over. Yeah. Oh, did I? Oh, okay. Well, okay. I just put it in the wrong place on my notes, but let me say my... What I've recommended to the Valleys is six issues have been raised. If we can get to... If we can see daylight on five of those issues, the six being traffic, then that's a good place. I'm happy to walk through the traffic analysis that we have done. I believe the way it's going to get resolved, and I think we've got good solutions, but I think the way that you're going to have certainty that it's resolved is for your traffic engineer to talk to our traffic engineer and for them to bless the... You know, make recommendations and to decide stuff. And I'll... I think the Valleys are reluctant to invest in the traffic issues until, while these other issues are out there. And... But then my recommendation, and who am I? They sometimes get mad at me, but my recommendation would be if we can get through those issues to try to hire some people to see what would resolve the traffic issue. Nevertheless, I'm happy to go through it. And that is, we think this is in the traffic overlay district. We understand that the traffic overlay district is being considered for some changes. And this may well illustrate the need for those changes. We've decided that we couldn't wait until those changes were made. We have to proceed with this project or not. But basically, I understand that the traffic overlay district, really what it does is it allows traffic... The purpose is to allow traffic to move faster between Burlington and Shelburne without really considering whether that's beneficial, how it's impacting people in South Burlington. And I think this could be an example of that. We believe... So you start with the budget and then you figure out what you're going to generate. And you've got to come up with ways to treat the difference. We think that the budget that we're starting with should be the 125.2 trip ends that are generated by the service station property today, which we're not changing and which is a separate law. And then... And that's calculated by eight fueling positions times 15.65 trips. And then the hotel property we think is entitled to an additional 7.5 trip ends. So you add that up and it's 132.7 trip ends. So this is different from the staff gets? Yes, yes, no, I understand that. There's a disagreement here or not a disagreement. There's maybe... Well, anyway. We, using the 10th edition, are using the same edition. I mean, is the base the same? Is the what? So... The staff, I think, is analyzing this as, gee, this is going to be one law and we think we can continue to treat it as two different laws. We think if we treat it as two different laws then you get to keep the traffic that you... the traffic budget that exists. And that's why I get into the issue of, gee, why would you take away somebody's traffic budget? What they already have so people can drive faster out under 7.7? We, I think the ordinance says that we get to keep what we have. We don't get to add... We don't get any credits for what we have but we get to keep what we have. So that's where the difference is. But I'm not a traffic engineer and I think it's an issue that is worthy of people thinking about more. I've thought about it a lot with our traffic engineer but I don't think it's worthwhile. I would encourage people to not make this snap judgment. Let's figure out. So anyway, we're at... If that prevails, we've got a budget of 132. We think the way to analyze this is that we need 229 trip ends. And we think we can connect to three different properties and get 15 trip ends per property. So then the increment we're down to... What are we down to? A difference of about 40 or 50 trip ends. When I, working with our traffic engineer when we got that far, he said, look, the way to solve this is to go to Hanifers and to negotiate an arrangement across easement with them. Because once we have the cross easement with them, then we can start looking at how traffic will be able to access the gas station without going out on route south. It will be able to come in the back way. And oh, by the way, Hanifers said, you want an easement to use our property, we're going to want an easement for our people to use your property. In addition, you open up... There are so many interconnections back there as far as being able to figure out, well, okay, we can't do it on our property, but where could we make traffic improvements that would allow us to make... to come up with the end result that we have that the traffic situation is better off for our project having enough. So we don't have all the answers. But I'd like to sort of do it in a two-step process because my client doesn't want to invest a lot of money in traffic engineers if these other issues are happening. That's a problem. Staff has analyzed the traffic from the land development evaluation perspective since that's our requirement. Under land development regulations, the budget that is for these two properties combined is 15.56 triplets. That is the regulatory budget under the land development regulations. That's simply a mathematical calculation based on 15 peak-hour trip ends for 40,000 square feet of land area.  So that's the budget. Then you have to sort of quantify the trips that the property currently generates, which we estimate using the IT through generation management for both the motel and the gas-slice service station to be 117.24. We also estimate that the opposable with the additional fueling positions and the replacement of the motel with a 9,045, I'm not sure how to reuse, a convenience store to be about 203 triplets. The credits that Mr. Anderson mentioned under the regulations are added to the budget, the budget being 15.56. So the outfit has to come up with 102 credits just to get them up to what they currently are generating. And then it doesn't take into account the additional traffic that they're going to generate by adding four fueling positions and replacing the motel, which is a low-traffic generator, which is a much higher-traffic generator at the retail store that's at 25,000 square feet. So we think that there was a difficult, with a big hurdle that the applicant needs to overcome to comply with LDRs as far as traffic generation. Okay, so obviously we'd better table this part. See whether we can get through that. I think you're right, John. I think we've got to get through everything except for traffic. And see if you're still happy enough moving forward because obviously staff has an opinion. And frankly, every time we come into one of these very complicated traffic situations, we have to look to experts because it's beyond us. Speaking for me, it's beyond me. And so I think realistically, it's a question for the pros. And staff obviously has a significant issue. If we can put that aside for a second, can I go backwards for a minute? We skipped over non-conforming parking, which was 2D on the list. I think parking's kind of different. Oh, so we're moving that up. Okay, never mind. Okay, yeah. Never mind. Go ahead. Okay, so I think the next issue is the issue of the relationship to the comprehensive plan. And what we're required to do is do a tension by the applicant should be given to the goals and objectives and the stated land use policies for the city of South Burlington is set forth in the comprehensive plan.  He's living in a rented apartment. I feel for young people, I remember how hard it was. I think it's only gotten harder for young people to start out. I think the housing situation is something that we all have to worry about. But what we're, I'm not sure that it's we're legally required to keep that hotel there particularly where I think what the ordinance says is that we have to have, allow, you'll have commercial development out on Route 7 and then have allowed a good entryway into the neighborhoods. And we're certainly providing that. Or we could provide that, especially where people would be able to come right to us without having to go out on Route 7. I don't think we're required to do, even if we're required to do that, I don't think the ordinance requires us to do a whole lot more. Okay, let's open this guy up. Or Jennifer, I know Jennifer's. Right there. I was just going to say, I don't think it's a requirement for saying quotes, but I think that the, the effort to preserve the affordable housing is where the, where the hiccups is. Now I'll go back to my, add another floor and somebody managed some affordable housing and got it built in. Above a service group, above a convenience group? Yeah. It's a built-in clientele. I think my take is that you're talking about a major intersection off the highway immediately after that. This is not where most people want it. Well, no. There's a reason that that, that that motel doesn't do well. It's not a great spot for housing. I'm not, I've always been of the opinion of the way Burlington does it, where you may have to buy credits for destroyed units. It makes no sense. There may be a give to get. We don't have that. And I, I don't think this is a place to be trying to do that. I don't think this is a place to be trying to place affordable housing. I know it's not a good one. I'm with you, but I don't, I don't agree with it in this case. And I do think the interconnection is pretty vital. I mean, you know, getting people out of that street and into the back, you know, Haniford unfortunately is building right on the, on the same footprint that was there. If they hadn't been, we would have had a whole lot more interconnection back there based on what the city plan was. So, this is a good, this is a good start. I agree. Mark. I've been trying to follow this, but I'm getting scattered blockages in and out. So we're talking about the relationship of the comp plan right now and the affordable housing issue. Yes. I think one thing, you know, I don't think that I'm not in agreement with that consistent with the needs and objectives of the comp plan. You know, Bill, I heard what you were saying about the, this proposal is a vast improvement of what currently is there. And, you know, we're trying to figure out a way to make work. I'm not sure I'm in agreement of that, that concept and principle because, you know, it kind of goes to what have kind of stuff gone along over the years. The big projects that come before us that we may love, but it doesn't work. It doesn't fit. And we may not be able to approve it. And then there's very big projects that we really hate and we have no other request to approve it because it meets the needs. I think we're kind of as, you know, probably in a gray area here because it does seem to be a lot of issues with this project in general. Just based on the staff notes. You know, we haven't even gone to parking yet. But I am a little concerned about the fact that we're getting rid of what is arguably and notably, you know, sort of like a known issue, you know, residential parcel. But we are just replacing it with a service station. So I I'm not that's sitting on the fence kind of answer right now, so I'm not really sure how I stand. I just don't think it does meet the needs and the objectives of the COMP plan in what's currently there. Okay. You're getting a split decision there too. Yeah, I do that. Okay. Could I, before we leave that, could I just point out, I think Ray identified an issue that and that is I guess the bill, the project is being used as a long-term stay hotel, but I couldn't find a permit for doing that. I think there's, I agree with Ray that what it's permitted for is a motel. I'm not sure a motel is you know, is if that's the baseline. I'm not sure it's really contributing to housing in the city. It's contributing to, but anyway. Unless, if I could just add, unless we invoke the 15-year statute of limitations on zoning violations, in which case the property is in compliance, if it's been used this way for more than 15 years. Okay. I can tell you before we sold it, it was being used as a motel. We had to get people, we had to get them, get them to pay on a very regular basis. They stayed longer than you might have for a motel, but they were on daily arranges and we didn't, we didn't put them under I think the issue is really front yard parking. We recognize that there's a parking, we will meet the parking requirement. Exactly how we will do it if we fully develop the bottom floor. I don't know. We don't have enough spaces right now to meet the requirement if we develop the bottom floor. But the issue that I think is out there is the front yard is whether the parking can be in the front yard. And what we would propose to do is to solve it and there are really two ways, well, there are two ways to solve it. One is to keep the building where it is as shown or the other is that we're prepared if we have to to put to put the front, the parking that's shown under a porch so that it is behind the front of the building. If that's what we're required to do. We think we can do it. My concern but my concern is that if we put it under a porch, the intention is to have a one of a kind building here that will be designed. I recognize your zoning ordinance doesn't allow you to look at that but it will be a one of a kind building because we want it to be canceled. Because you want what? We want it to be canceled. We want a good looking site and I think that it is maybe more challenging for an architect to do that if we have parking in front under a porch. But we thought about it from a convenience store point of view and what a concept. In the wintertime people could drive in and be essentially indoors. The so we think we can solve it keeping the building where it is. Now staff memo has suggested that we have to move the building up to the street and the ordinance that you have is almost written for this site I think. You have the slope first of all but then you have the Champlain Water District easement and if you I don't know if we can show where the how far the Water District easement comes down but the only the Water District easement that we can't build on top of is in the middle it is in the middle of the two properties. So the alternative is if we come out to the street building where we've got the entrance coming where we've got the second the southern most entrance exit. If we put a building there and we still have the interconnection to Hanifers which everybody wants us to have it's in your ordinance then the way we would have that interconnection would be to go through the middle of the two properties. That would have our people our people it would have the building being further from the gas pumps and it would have a lane of traffic running through between the building and the gas pumps. We think that is a bad design because for safety reasons there is nothing else. So your ordinance allows you to allow us to have front yard parking if the law has unique site conditions such as a utility easement or unstable soils that allow for parking but not a building to be located adjacent to the public street. So we've got this huge easement that's in the middle of the property and although we don't know that we have soil issues we do have a huge slope issue that we're trying to address. So our pitch would be to allow us to keep the building where we've got it but if you say no you can't park in front of the building then we'll put a porch on. Right? Can I ask a question? Yes, please. Bill can I bring in Marla? I guess I'm saying I don't see how putting a porch eliminates the new apartments you can't park in front of the building because you're not parking under it. Is that would you feel that solves that you can't park in front of the building? The other problem that double loaded the parking in the back is that the first apartment is in the parking space. Yeah, I don't know that the parking space is the same but if it were a parked branch in the back that could solve the grade issue and the parking in the back issue. Like Ray said the building was a different shape maybe where the apartment was really came out to there and sort of cut off where the easement is that full size of the easement is because the apartment was really seem like that are you know work around the easement. Yeah, I think John, I think Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead Marla. No, no, I was just saying I would be okay with that. I mean, I obviously want to hear what Ray and Marla have to say about the easement putting a porch on it I would say that we still are seeing parking in the front of the building pail lines, cars that's built into the deep earth is not parking in front of the building. It would have to be super high too because you know somebody with a bike on top but the parking area is different. Right. So I think the sense of the four members that are here would like very much to see like a new configuration No, it's three members I'm happy with that. Oh, you're having a report. Yeah, actually I'm in favor of parking in front of the building. Okay, three out of four. Okay, so I guess now I guess what I hear you saying is that you might want us to consider other designs I don't know could we not determine where we are what we'd like our next step to be right now and we talk about it and figure it out and I guess I don't know in terms of warning requirements for an adjourned sketch plan if you need to notice us for the next meeting and okay, so we'd really like to come back I think and see if we can get just, you know, you've been very helpful to us but if there's a little bit more certainly we can get maybe we can work that out now you've got a lot of hurdles here The other Mr. Valley says if this were easy, everyone would do it Yeah so and the last step coming out of the plan is development standards staff doesn't consider the layout presented with the criteria for classification of the BUD it's not particularly innovative inefficiently uses available space by increasing impervious and doesn't represent infill as both processes were already developed so we wouldn't have to figure something out so I don't, you know, I don't know if you want to keep going or not but our thinking is that the language that's being referred to is from the purpose section of why you have appeal it is not a legal requirement that we do those things now we think we're pretty innovative here you know we think we're very innovative we disagree with that we're not sure it's a legal requirement that we be innovative we think we need each of the legal requirements really approval and I'll just say that and maybe it's something when we come back and look at moving stuff around we can convince you about it but thank you John, I would say one of the things I mean, while I I'm not against front yard party that's just one of my things this is not, this is a service station and it's arguably one of the entrances for the city of South Brunswick it's really, you know, it's a little bit like CVS is up on the corner they came to us with a lot of different things we looked at a lot of different options and it was a very difficult project because of where it is this is fairly similar you get off the highway and what's front and center an old golf station whatever it is and you could be a lot more innovative in terms of style I mean, I recognize it will cost more money to do it but you're up against a lot of things and if you take Trader Joe's position and move from a wrinkled tin building to a nice brick frontage, you can sway this board to get something and give something I think that's fair there may be things that are impossible to get over I don't know because there are some staff issues here that are big when I talked about one of a kind design, I mean I've worked with Valley all over the state they've done some really good designs you're going to call it the maple leaf or the maple field and they'll hire an architect but we got to get through these other issues I only bring it up because you need to be prepared because you're up against a lot here and some of these things may not be fixable so we'd like to come back and have a second visit great and you will work with the staff on coming up with time for that so the meeting to continue so if we wanted to be on for the next hearing which is June 19th I would be advised materials by this Friday which is a pretty high bar and the meeting after that is July 17th the first July meeting is a recess July 4th skip out there we haven't had the public so July 7th so before we close we do want to see if anyone public has coming yes thank you my name is Sandra and I represent the abutting land owner of promotion properties at 833 Clean City Park Road, LLC our property if you want to scroll down a little and put the cursor on it it's in the upper left hand corner right there that's the property that I'm referencing to the right yes so our property lies down gradient and west of the gas station property it's currently being utilized as a 30-unit apartment building and parking lot for the residences we'd like to go on record to state that there's a pending claim of its property owner skip hopper it has been determined that the property owner's past operations have resulted in petroleum contamination of our soils the state of Vermont has performed extensive testing of our property continues to test to determine the extent of the plume that is migrated on to our property this information may not bring that we bring up this information that we are bringing up may or may not come to this hearing but we want to go on record letting the board know that this is an ongoing case we also want to express that future development and excavation of this property could lead to future releases and our contamination of our adjoining property we have a duty to look out for the health and welfare of our tenants our property has already been degraded by the past operations of the abutting land owner and we are protecting our interest to make sure that more impasses do not occur thank you thanks very much 2 July 17 do you want me to motion that because this is a discussion so I move that we continue sketch plan application SD 1816 out of 793 and 907 Shelburne Road 2 July 17 we will be seconded to continue this to July 17 all families say aye aye thank you so much thank you next time on the agenda minutes of May 15 we will all have a chance to oh yes thank you did he stick around for the minutes that's nice we should have gone out of order and done the minutes first yeah we should have we should have gone out of order and done the minutes next oh that's right oh that's right look at the minutes so comments suggestions for changes I've told you we're actually coming do not need that you don't need to have a present I'm here for our attorney a while ago he said we do not need to have the same people present Bill and I watched the videos that's right looks as though the minutes reflect what I saw so I move that we approve the minutes May 15 2010 we approve this application all families say aye opposed okay it's not like you lost Mark and that's the end at 844 p.m. thank you very much take care


All right, good morning, everyone. So today's talk is going to be very low key. We're just going to share some stories and think a little bit about what it means to tell stories.  So let me start by telling you a little bit about my own connection with fiction. As Matt said, fiction is one of the best ways for us to understand ourselves. But the question is, why? Why is that even true? Humans are, in my mind, rather interesting. We don't have any other form of intelligence to compare ourselves to. So we just have human intelligence to go by. So I don't know if this is a universal of all intelligences or something very unique to Homo sapiens. But I posited that humans are incapable of understanding the universe unless they can take it inside themselves and turn it into part of their story. We have a tendency to treat the randomness of the universe as plot elements in a story we construct for ourselves. This is neither good nor bad. It just is a feature of human cognition. This is why, when we're trying to understand a lot of scientific concepts and so forth, we have a hard time doing so. It is actually almost impossible to find someone to give you an explanation of something, say, the theory of evolution without them attributing some kind of plot element to it, some kind of ultimate cause. It's because we humans are not capable of processing the universe as essentially a series of random events. We must impose a plot on it in some manner. We must find a purpose. This is neither good nor bad, all right? So I want to start by thinking a little bit about what story actually means. And it turns out there's a really interesting story behind it. So the word story for our language is very much related to history and both derive from the same French root. After the Norman conquest, the English language fundamentally transformed itself by importing a huge number of Latin-based French words. And history and story were not distinguished as distinct things for the longest time. So when you said you were telling a story, it could be a history or it could be a tale for entertainment. And when you said that you were recounting a history, it could be a chronicle of true events or it could be a narrative constructive entertainment. The two were basically interchangeable until fairly recently. And this is why even today journalists write stories, even though they are the first drafts of history. So you might wonder, OK, well, surely the Anglo-Saxons had a word for a story before the French came and imposed this on them. And you will be right. The actual Anglo-Saxon word for story is spell. Spell still survives in that narrative sense in words like the Gospels, which are literally good spells, good stories. And in words like spellbound. When you're spellbound, you are actually being enraptured and held in place by a story, not necessarily incantation. Spell did not acquire in the meaning of magical incantation until, again, fairly recently. It was displaced by history and story. But I think there's something really powerful there. A spell, OK, a spell, that's what a story is. A spell is a thing emanating from the human mind that transforms the world. I think that's what a story literally is. And it's also a way for you to take the world into yourself and incorporate it into part of your being.  So think about some abstract concept that's very important to you, say patriotism or freedom or faith or hope or whatever.  If you were forced to define for yourself what it is, what are the memories and what are the things you rely on? Just take a few seconds to think about that. So for me, the word I'm thinking about is love. And I can tell you about C.S. Lewis's Four Loves. And I can tell you about all the definitions of love and all the meditations on love by philosophers throughout the ages. And none of them are really all that. Don't get at the heart of what love means to me. What I think about whenever I sort of think about this word is I think about my grandmother. I think about my grandmother when I was a very small child. I remember I was working at the family dining table at my homework. And my grandmother was sitting next to me to keep me company. And she was knitting a sweater for me. And I looked over and I could see that because she had arthritis and her fingers and joints were very swollen and it was hard for her to move the needles. It was very difficult. And so I asked her, grandma, does it hurt? And she says, yeah, it does. It actually hurts a lot. So I say, well, why don't you stop? Why are you doing that? And then she said, well, I don't want you to be cold. That is the core memory, if you will, the foundational story of what love means to me. And no matter what happens for the rest of my life, I will always go back to that memory to define what it means. Same thing with many other words. Courage, for me, will always mean on the playground my friend who decided to stick up for me when no one else would. That is the definition of courage. And I was trained as a lawyer, but I went through years of classes and seminars on legal ethics and so on and so forth. But I will never, never understand what it means to be a lawyer without remembering the judge I clerked for and how she worked with me and taught me what it means to treat every litigant's claims as seriously as I could. This is true for all of you, I suspect, that when you are thinking about abstract concepts and abstract ideas, you always go back to some foundational story that defines for you what that thing actually means. We humans are incapable of understanding abstractions without concrete stories that embody them for us. Stories are the means by which we embody values and enact them. This is true not only at the level of individuals, but at the level of entire societies. We have foundational narratives that define for us, that encode for us what these values are. I am a fantasy novelist and I write epic fantasy. So forgive me if I keep on thinking about our lives in that way. I really do think that all of this are in some manner like the great epic heroes of old. Right? Like Adam or Gilgamesh, we are born naked and helpless into the world full of confusion and chaos. Into that nothingness come our first guardians, our parents or caretakers, and they become for us our angels and our gods. They give us our first mythologies. The way they love us become the way we think about love and the way they hurt us become the way we understand pain. We acquire this mythology with which we then understand the world. And over time our friends, our foes, our lovers give us more and more of these stories. Every time they come to us, they do something that embodies their values. Those stories become part of our mythology. And later on, when we find out what our quest is, our armor and our repertoire of spells of these stories, they stay with us as we go on our quest throughout our lives. And later on, you know, we're old age when we die, we have nothing but the story of our journey behind us. We are, our shroud is our spell. That is it. We are like Merlin in the end, wrapped in that story of ours.  That's it. Our entire lives is about telling that story, constructing that story. And again, this is not true just for ourselves, but for families, for professions, for entire nations.  That's what it is right now. Great stories for cultures are stories that are fought over every generation. Every new generation must recommit to those values and retell those stories. That's how it is. A people was not defined by blood or religion or land or any of those things. It's defined simply by a story. All nations are fundamentally just stories. And it is the only thing worth dying for and living for. All right. So as you can feel, stories are very important to me. That's why I make my living telling stories and constructing stories. But let me tell you what happened to me during the pandemic. During the pandemic, I saw something else about storytelling that I hadn't realized before, which is that stories are magical and magic can be both good and terrible. What are conspiracy theories other than mass storytelling exercises? I was surrounded by horrifying stories and stories of hate, stories of division, stories of fear, stories of terror, stories of oppression. For the first time in my adult life, I felt unwelcome in my own country. It was a horrible time. There were people saying incredibly nasty things and threatening me. It became a place where I lost faith in the very idea of storytelling. I always thought stories could give us hope, connect us with our deepest values and make us feel what it means to be human. And then I realized that stories have a darker side. They could potentially lead people to kill, to hate, and to go to war for the most rung of reasons. I simply could not write anymore. I actually lost all ability to write. And I had a crisis of faith. I was wondering what's the point of storytelling at all? All my life, I've been telling stories about how humans are imperfect, but we are capable of perfecting ourselves. And now I was faced with a reality that I could not accept. Science fiction writers have always imagined that if there were an existential threat to the human race, we would put aside our differences and come together. And the pandemic proved the exact opposite. There was an existential threat. And our reaction was to prepare, to accuse each other and to go to war. It was incredible. Honestly, that's the only word I can think of. So I stopped writing altogether. I couldn't tell any stories at all. And of course, being a working writer, I had deadlines to meet. And I was faced with the fact that for the first time, I had a case of writer's block, if you will, that meant that I couldn't fulfill the deadlines that I was signing up to do. So being a computer programmer, I decided to solve this problem the most natural way, of course, which is to program some artificial intelligence to do the work for me. I thought if Ken could no longer write, surely Robo Ken could write. So this was long before the days of Chatchi B.T., okay? I mean, it was being developed, but it wasn't actually published or anything like that. So I was struggling on my own. Now, in my other life as a computer programmer, I had been interested in machine assisted or machine augmented creativity for many, many, many years. In fact, even back in college, one of my first programming projects was this little robot, if you will, that wrote Aetna's and Vincent Millet style sonnets. So this is something that I returned to over and over again. So I decided to essentially, I didn't have a gaming PC, I didn't have a very powerful graphics card, and so I had to leverage Google's platform to do this. But TensorFlow was very cool. So I ended up writing essentially a little language model trained on my own work. I was very conscious about this. I didn't want to train it on anyone else's work. I wanted to train it on my own work to see if I could get Robo Ken to write something that I could turn in. And of course, the results were terrible. Now, those of you who do machine learning know that you need a lot of input for this to work. And because I consider myself a pretty productive writer, but even so I did not have enough data for this to work. So this was the result. Now, it's actually kind of fun because I could see that there were things in there that evoked my concerns. There were almost thoughts that I could almost imagine came out of myself. But this was clearly a dead end, okay? So by the way, this is one of the reasons why I'm not particularly excited about generative AI as it exists now. Because essentially what generative AI now is, is an attempt to recreate and imitate and replicate what has already existed. This is fundamentally a different process than what creativity is. This is fundamentally a different thing than what we are trying to do as creative writers or creative individuals. So the fact that this failed shouldn't really have surprised me that much. But anyway, it failed. So this was a dead end, okay? So I said, okay, so turning to my own words and turning them around isn't doing anything. What else can I do to reconnect with storytelling? So I turned to my children, right? So I realized that one of the best things about being a parent is you get to reconnect and rediscover the stories that you enjoyed as a child again, right? So as I mentioned earlier, I say that stories are how we encode values and stories are how we connect with our values. So then that means the stories we tell our children, presumably encode our deepest, most fundamental values as a society, you ought to be able to discern from the stories we tell our children what values are most important to us. What do we consider to be so important that we must give them to our children as their first mythologies, right? So what I'm gonna do is just read to you from a few of these stories that I loved and I love reading to my kids. And then we're gonna go through them and see if we can discern some values out of them, all right? This is the exercise I went through during the pandemic.  It was a hobbit hole and that means comfort. Halfway between Poole's house and Piglet's house was a thoughtful spot where they met sometimes when they had decided to go and see each other. And as it was warm and out of the wind, they would sit down there for a little and wonder what they would do now that they had seen each other. One day, when they had decided not to do anything, Poole made up a verse about it so that everybody should know what the place was for. This warm and sunny spot belongs to Poole. And here he wonders what he's going to do. Oh, bother, I forgot. It's Piglet's too. And here is one from Frog and Toad. One morning, Toad sat in bed. I have many things to do, he said. I will write them all down on the list so that I can remember them.  Now that is a to-do list that I would like to have. Okay, and then one of my favorite stories, Good Night Moon. Good Night Room, Good Night Moon. Good Night Cow jumping over the moon. Good Night Light and the Red Balloon. Good Night Bears, Good Night Chairs, Good Night Kittens and Good Night Minns. Okay, so what are we supposed to discern from these stories, right? So I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realized that these are actually really wonderful values that the story try to teach us, right? So there are a set of values that recur out of these stories and in fact, I find them to be fairly universal. You can get them out of stories we tell children from across the world in different societies. One of them is humans are creatures of society. It's this society that is very important to us, right? We crave to be close to our friends. We crave seeing them. Like, Pul doesn't even care about what they do. He just wants to be with Piglet. It's the being with each other. I remember, you know, when I think about my grandmother, the fact that we were just sitting together, that was wonderful and I wish that could happen again. You know, she had passed away a long time ago but that's what I miss. It's this idea of being each other's presence, which the pandemic denied us and which I missed so much. And I realized that a lot of us, a lot of us say that we miss our college days and it's not necessarily because college was wonderful in some particular way. It was because that was one of the last times when we were still very close to our friends and we could walk over to see them any time we wanted to. And as adults, we no longer have that luxury or most of us don't. If we do, that is very, very lucky and beautiful. And the second thing that we teach our children that I think is actually incredibly important is being playful is important. Humans are meant to play, right? That there's a reason why play games is on there as a to-do item because that is what we're meant to do. We are meant to be playful creatures. We're meant to be curious and playful and engaged with the universe in that way. We were never meant as creatures to, who spend our time being quote unquote productive in the capitalistic sense. We know plenty of research showing that hunter-gatherer spend a few hours a week making a living and the rest of the time was spending telling stories and casting spells at each other, right? Being playful, being engaged, just being curious about the universe that is what we were meant to do and that is one of the values we care about and we tell our children how important it is. The next value that I discern from them is the value of being rooted, okay? We love this feeling of being connected with our environment, with our neighborhood, with our society. Much of the dissatisfaction of modernity comes from this alienation, the sense that we are not rooted where we are. Again, in the modern world, we're told that we should be rootless. We should think of ourselves as packages of talents to be deployed by global capitalism wherever we think we are most efficient and can generate the most value but that is not our purpose. Our purpose is to be rooted where we are at home, where we can be with our friends, where we can actually play, where we can feel the sense of being rooted and the sense of belonging, all right? That's something that we sorely lack and which we tell our children is important. The next value I got out of it is empowerment, the sense that we want to have a sense of control of our environment. Why is a hobbit hoe so wonderful? Because it's a home that you control. It's not some cookie cutter, high rise thing that you're not allowed to modify. You have control over your own environment. You have the power to change the environment, to turn it into, this is the last value and the most important, to turn it into a part of your self definition. The little bunny in Good Night Moon says good night to all these objects. Why? Not because they're objects, because each object has a story connected to it. Each object has become part of the bunny's personal mythology. We love to be surrounded by objects that have stories in them, that tell us who we are. We use these stories, these tools around us, these objects around us as storytelling tools. They tell us who we are. They tell us why we are. They tell us what we want and what we yearn for. All right, so society, play, rudeness, empowerment and self definition. These are the values that we encode in stories we tell our children that we claim to be the most important values. And yet ironically, as adults, we do not live like this at all, right? These are the values we claim to be incredibly important to our children, and yet we do not live like this. Repeatedly, we are told that we need to be productive and not playful. Repeatedly, we are told that society is not that important as much as being, maximizing our potential as packets of talent for global capitalism. We are not empowered in our own lives and we are not pursuing self definition as the most important goal of them all. And most importantly, okay, I'll tell you this, none of these values are about turning, turning within yourself and swirling your own words around in the time to generate Robo-Ken. They're all about connecting with others, connecting with the outside world. All of the values that we care about, are about extending ourselves out, connecting with the universe, making the universe part of our story and making ourselves part of the universe's story. We cannot get out of our own depression, our own solipsistic sadness by turning into ourselves. We have to turn out. That's the only way to get out. And so I did end up writing a story, and it is about AI, but it's actually written by me, not so much by the AI. I did end up using some of the words that the AI generated, that they were just sort of seeds. I ended up writing a story about what it means to be human. Even though it's called 50 Things, every AI working with humans shouldn't know, but as you can imagine, this is really a story about what it means to be human. And it is a story about those values that I care about so much. That's how I got out of it. I got out of it by reconnecting with our deepest values about what stories are actually meant to do and to remember my grandmother. Because my earliest stories were told with her. We told each other's stories. We made each other part of our stories. All right, so I wanna give you a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, which I think is very, very valuable. And it's Le Guin talking about writing. And she basically says that you need to understand that artists are not people who just reflect reality, whatever that means, who reflect facts. They are actually trying to get the truth. And the truth is not about facts. She says the truth you get from inside. I wanna be very careful about this. The inside Le Guin is talking about is not a solipsistic prison inside your own skull. That's not what she means. She means about going inside the collective unconscious. That vast interior terra incognita that connects us all and from which all true stories emerge. Le Guin says this about artists, but I would argue that this is true for all of us. So let's go back to the metaphor I had at the beginning where all of us are epic heroes on our own journey. I haven't actually completed the story.   And at some point, right, you find yourselves like Dante in midway through life's darkwood and what do you realize? You realize that you are no longer merely the hero of your own story.  The way you love them is the way they will understand love.   You are also a powerful, magical, spellbound figure in the stories of all those who depend on you, who are in your lives. We are not merely the heroes of our own story. We're also important players, supporting players, or perhaps even inspiring guides in other stories. That is the only legacy you will leave behind.  No, you will live on in thousands of copies in the stories of all those that you touch. We live in webs of stories and that is how we're defined. We are the heroes of our collective stories. So what does this mean? It means you have to think very deeply about what is your story and what is the story that you're trying to tell with your own life. Because remember, you cannot pass on your values merely by defining them and proclaiming them and lecturing about them. That's not gonna do anything. You actually have to turn them into stories in the lives of those you touch. You actually have to be, to put it mildly, be your value. You have to embody those values through your own actions.  That's all culture is. Just millions of people re-enacting and embodying those values over and over again. That is the point of the American experiment. America is not an idea and it is not a set of orders and any of that. It's all of us who consider ourselves Americans trying to embody the American value over and over again, generation after generation. And it's true for all of you, whatever it is you do, how do you become the best X that you wanna be? You have to embody those values and carry them out over and over again. And so think about this. You're not there just to tell a selfish story about yourself. You're there to help others tell the stories they wanna tell. If you don't believe that you're living according to your deepest values, then change that. This is the great thing about life being a spell for a story. It is not finished. It's not published. It's not fixed on the page. You get to write the next chapter. If you do not like where your story is, you are welcome to change it.   And so that's the thing I will leave with you. Think about what values are important to you and what are the values you wish to embody? How do you wish to become like Virgil de Dante, the guide in other people's epic stories? Because only by doing that will you get to live your best story and to tell the story that only you can tell. Thank you. So I love the little time for Q&A. So I think if any of you have questions, I have about 10 minutes to take questions. Come up to the mic. You can walk up to one of the mics. Ken, I love your speech and particularly in the beginning, you mentioned about the source, what do you believe, it's love. And then you have done some experiment with generative AI. So do you find that AI can understand and love and then can be sharing the love? That's my question. Okay, thank you. So gosh, let me put it this way. Here's what I think about AI. I'm incredibly interested in the potential of AI. I just don't think we are quite there yet. I find it very interesting that our current obsession with AI is how well it can imitate what humans do and the imitation being the key here. There is a fundamental assumption that if the imitation is good enough and we can tell the difference, somehow that's the same thing as the real deal and we actually know that's not true. I mean, deep in our hearts we know that's not true. I do think that if we can develop AI to the point where it's actually a separate fundamental consciousness of the universe, then it will be incredibly compelling to listen to the AI about how it experiences the world. We've only had human intelligence as an example. We've never had to deal with another intelligence at our own level or higher. So if we can get to the point where AI can actually be a separate intelligence and really experience the world and truly engage with the universe in the same way that we do, then I think it will be incredibly compelling to sort of understand how we are fundamentally different and how AI, even though it's based on this, may in fact do things differently. I'm incredibly, you know, I'm really, really inspired and thoughtful about the idea that someday AI can allow us to tell stories that we cannot tell by ourselves, that it will allow us to discover values that we don't really discern dimly. We're not at that point and today's AI is nothing like that. So if you were to ask me the question, you know, does AI understand love and does it experience love? Today the answer is a definitive no, but I don't know about tomorrow and I don't know what's gonna happen the day after tomorrow. I'm much more hopeful about what AI can allow us to do that we cannot do not merely what AI can imitate. That's not interesting to me at all. Great, thank you. Can I? Thank you. Hi, thank you so much for this presentation. It spoke to my soul and I just am so glad that you're here to speak with us. For folks who are not able to make their own robo-ken but have not yet decided what their story is or are not sure that their story is worth telling to others, what recommendations do you have to help them pass that hurdle? Oh, wow, thank you. That is a great question. So I'm not very wise even though I'm old but I do think I've learned a few things in my life. I will say this, the one bit of advice that I love to give people which I don't hear a lot of is please, please follow what you're enthusiastic about. Your enthusiasm is a better guide to what your quest is than almost anything else. I think we do our children a great disservice in this country by emphasizing over and over again this idea of being productive. The idea that they need to, that for example college education should be measured by after 10 years from graduation what the return on your investment is.   It's just dumb, I don't have any other words for it. I'm sort of flabbergasted really when people bring that up. No, that's not the point. The point is you need to figure out what you're enthusiastic about and what you wish to play at, okay? Find the thing you wish to play at and just do that and pursue that. Let me tell you what, it is much, much easier to find the thing you're enthusiastic about and to be good at it and to just play at it and make something beautiful and then figure out how to make people pay for it. That's much easier than the other way around which is find what people are paying for and then try to make yourself love that thing, okay? You cannot make yourself fall in love, so don't do that. Which is why I find the advice of forcing people to pursue careers in STEM or finance or engineering so stupid to help find out what people are enthusiastic about and have them do that. That's the only thing that matters and we are all too afraid to be enthusiastic about something and to pursue that so just to your original question. The answer is you have to find out what you're passionate about, what you're enthusiastic about and to just do more of that and to find a way to make people pay you for it. You can invent ways for people to pay you. Trust me, that is a much more fun problem to solve than the other way around. Good morning. In classic writing, there's the hero's journey where our hero Ken faces an existential challenge. Pandemic loneliness, isolation, threats from the outside. Who's your helper? Who is the Sherpa that helped you and how did the story end? I would say in this case, there were many, many different guides that came along and helped me and this will be sort of fun, I guess. So for the longest time, I couldn't write at all, right? I turned to Robo Ken and Robo Ken was a bust and so one thing that helped a lot was to connect deeper with my children, to really be a parent. I think a lot of us actually don't spend enough time to be a parent. It's something that I strongly recommend to actually do it, to just sort of say, radically say that I'm not gonna be productive, I can't be productive, but I'm gonna try very hard to be a human being and to be a father and to actually try. That helped me a lot. I thought a lot about what I was showing my children, what I was demonstrating to them. I was telling them the stories about how important it is to connect to play and so on yet all the time I was telling them, did you finish your math? Did you do your homework and all this stuff? It's very strange how conflicted and contradictory we are with our own actions. So that helped a lot for me to think deeply about my own hypocrisy. Another thing that helped a lot was to pursue my own passions. It turns out that for the longest time, I wasn't able to really engage in gaming in any capacity because I was so focused on trying to be productive and to do things that are useful. And I said, I can't right now, so I'm just not gonna bother. I'm gonna go back to the things I used to love as a kid, which is to play with these video game consoles. And I realized that there's a whole community of folks who love repairing and modding old consoles.  There was something very beautiful about taking an old console and opening them up and then trying to figure out what was wrong with them and to get them to work again. And it was very incredibly calming to learn this skill and to become good at it and to sort of appreciate the artistry of these creations. When I'm opening up one of these old Game Boys or Game Gears or PSPs, I'm looking at the circuit board and I'm appreciating the beauty of it and I'm realizing that I am connecting with the manifestation a spell, if you will, cast from someone's mind. A designer came up with this layout. A designer came up with a way to fit these components in to make it do these beautiful things. A designer crafted this machine to be a storytelling machine to tell the stories that enthralled the entire generation. Zelda and Mario and so on and so forth. An entire generation, multiple generations now have grown up on these global mythologies and they were enabled by this machine which was the creation of someone's mind and the creation of a group of workers who hand-soldered all these components. When I think about it, it's incredibly moving how humans really are. We can imagine an entire industry of people who crafted stories for each other, who's devoted their lives to the creation of mythologies for people, to cast spells, we're magicians, right? Technology really is our epic poetry. It's our epic that we tell these grand stories to each other. So that helped a lot to learn and appreciate and connect with the minds of other designers and other creators and also something else that helped was for me to read the Dao De Jing which is an old Daoist classic from thousands of years ago and I, like most classics, it's one of those things where you think you know what it's about until you read it. I mean, I think all of you have had this experience. I remember vividly where before I read Moby Dick I had this impression of it being horribly boring and just completely not my kind of book. Then I read it and it was the funniest thing ever. There's something incredibly funny and you're reverent and just all around random about the book and that's never explained. People are always so, when you hear a commentary on Moby Dick it's always so obsessed with the symbolism and how tightly constructed it was and so on and so forth and no one ever seems to talk about how funny and loose and crazy and just it's Melville following his enthusiasm wherever it took him. That was lovely. So engaging with the classic Dao De Jing had the same sort of experience. I thought I knew what it was about but it wasn't at all what I expected and all of these things share the idea of, again, that as human beings and artists we connect with the collective unconscious, the shared interior all of us have. So that's what got me out. Yeah, I think I'm running out of time unless I could keep on going or... Okay, I'll do one more question. Wow, you just walked us all through an amazing story today and you've left your mark as an inspiring guide in my story. And I wanted to ask you when and how did you realize you were a storyteller and not professionally but in your life and in the lives of others? I, this is so funny. I do have a story about this and it's not the most... It doesn't reflect the best on me, I suppose. So here's how I knew. When I was in elementary school and this was back in China so all the kids were walking to school and my school was actually pretty far away and the walk back was fairly long. I remember there being a few scary parts where there were some dogs that really scared me and I didn't wanna walk alone. So I wanted others to walk with me but I could not entice them to go out of their way to walk with me. So what I would do is I would tell them stories and I learned how to tell stories in such a way that they would have the right length so if they wanted to actually hear the ending they had to walk with me all the way back to my home. So years later I realized that this is like my own version of what Dickens went through in David Copperfield. If you read David Copperfield, there's this scene where he tells stories to his schoolmates to entertain them and in exchange for his own popularity and I was like, ah, I suppose all writers are connected in that interior way. So that's my story. Thank you. Thank you.


Language is such a fundamental part of early childhood and the development of language and hearing language. It's really a building block for social and cognitive development. If you measure children's vocabulary when they get to kindergarten, so how many words they know, it's super predictive of like their reading skills later on in fourth grade, for example. And we have these huge achievement gaps by socioeconomic status in reading. That's a problem because it means that as a society we're not giving all children an equal footing to start with as they're coming into public schooling. I was really excited to see the LSX announcement when it came out. The brief was we want to cross-collaborate with people and combine art forms and with science. I was like, that's brilliant! Brilliant! This is what I want to do. This is what I'm interested in and how exciting when it be to work with people from different worlds, different fields to make the work that I'm doing even even more interesting and have more of a background to it and be more accessible. I was really drawn to areas of research surrounding poverty in how it impacts children. That tied directly to this big project I've been working on in the criminal justice system and one of the scientists in the group Meredith, her work was all about the word gap. So the word gap is the fact that children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are exposed to many more words during early childhood than children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds basically at home. But the important piece of it that we know now is that it's not so much the gap in quantity that matters but it's the gap in quality so having those sort of really high quality conversations with the children is what we're finding is more important. To the point that early childhood can really make a difference for a person throughout their whole life, one of the things that we try to emphasize around policies is also that yes that's the case but it needs to be something that's a sustained investment and not equivalent to an inoculation that you know we need to have strong transitions into primary school as well then and continued opportunities for all children. This may sound cheesy but it really was a true collaborative idea. I don't know at which point it came up but as soon as it did we all kind of jumped on it we're like someone might have said let's make a PSA let's oh we could do that animation oh I could write the script or like we all kind of jumped to it and saw that this is an idea we can action well with our contacts and we really believed in it and I think that was the key thing we believed in the message we knew we could communicate it across and we knew we could make something beautiful. It's very early on in the brainstorming of the animation we thought what better way to get this across by having a child read it. We wanted it to feel very much child-centered so that the voice was coming from the child of you know talk with me that's all you need to do let's have a chat together let's hang out and rather than being told I think there's a lot of sometimes parents feel that they're being lectured to or they're being told to do this in order to get a healthy child you should be doing this and we really wanted to avoid that we wanted to say look it's quite you know it should be enjoyable it's an it's a natural thing. When we envisaged how it would look we did have some initial ideas we wanted something quite simplistic but the benefit of working in this field already is I have a few animators that I've worked with before who I trust I don't really trust them to produce really visually stunning pieces I trust them to take the concept of the science I'm working with and translate it into the best idea as possible and then we all love the visuals that came back and we ran with it. And then my daughter Sia was the voice in the piece which is actually really lovely and it was done as a bit of a let's just see how this sounds and everyone seemed to like her voice which was really nice for her and it's been brilliant for her to see it all come together as well. One thing I've learned just through doing small research studies parents who do know more about child development and about you know what kids are capable and about interacting with children do then ultimately sort of interact with them in ways that promote learning so there is something very much to be said for just getting information out there in an accessible way so that if parents want to access it they can. I'm really grateful for the fellowship and the opportunity to engage with this incredible group of people. It's just been a really great experience for me personally to work with such a diverse group of people and learn a lot about different industries I mean I still have a lot to learn but it's been a it's been a great experience for sure. Even talk, I hear what you're seeing and it's helping my brain. It's actually lighting up in so many different places all at once. What's really amazing is that there's a way to make my brain go even more and we can all do it. It's very simple and lots of fun. Like sharing. It's all about taking turns and talking about lots of little things or even big things. But wait, or how do flowers go? You can also talk to the source? Or can you see women when you sing and we try it? How was your day today? Talk with me.