In this video I'm going to look at some past paper questions about hypothesis testing. The first question I'm going to look at is number 7 from January 2008. And here is the question. You might want to pause the video at this point and have a go yourself before you play on. Okay, well the first part asks us to explain what we mean by a hypothesis test and to define a critical region. This is what I'd say if I had to explain what a hypothesis test is. I'd say that a hypothesis test uses a test statistic to accept or reject a null hypothesis in relation to an alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis states that a population parameter has a particular value and it's rejected when the probability of obtaining a value similar to the test statistic is very small. We also have to define what we mean by a critical region and we can do that in fewer words. I'm going to say that the critical region is the range of values of the test statistic for which the null hypothesis will be rejected. Okay, so now let's move on to the main part of the question. We're told that in term time at a particular school, incoming calls arrive at the rate of 0.45 per minute. To test this, the number of calls during a random 20-minute interval is recorded. What we have to do is to find the critical region for a two-tailed test of the hypothesis that the number of incoming calls occurs at the rate of 0.45 per one-minute interval. We're told that the probability in each tail must be as close as possible to 2.5%. Okay, well we should probably start by writing down the hypotheses. The null hypothesis here is clearly that lambda is 0.45, the rate of calls is 0.45 per one-minute interval. We're told that it's a two-tailed test so the alternative hypothesis will be that lambda isn't 0.45. Now these hypotheses relate to a one-minute interval, but our test statistic is to do with a 20-minute interval. So we need to find the number of calls that we'd expect in a 20-minute interval. Clearly that's going to be 20 times 0.45, which is 9. Okay, so our test statistic will have the Poisson distribution with parameter 9. It's really going to have the Poisson distribution because here we're dealing with the number of events in an interval of time. Okay, now we have to find the critical region and because it's a two-tailed test, the critical region will be in two parts. We can either end up rejecting the null hypothesis if the test statistic is much smaller than 9 or if it's much greater than 9. In other words, if we get a very small number of calls or if we get a very large number of calls, we can end up rejecting the null hypothesis. To find out exactly what the critical region is, we should look at the tables. So first of all, we ought to scan down the column headed up by lambda equals 9 to find the probability which is as close as possible to 0.025. So if we do that, we reach the probability 0.0212, that's as close as we can get to 0.025. And that's telling us that the probability of getting 3 or less is 0.0212. So if our test statistic turned out to be 3, we would end up rejecting the null hypothesis. And clearly, if we got 0.1 or 2, we'd end up with an even smaller probability. So this part of the critical region consists of the numbers 0.1, 2 and 3. The other thing that we need to do is to scan away up the column until we get to the probability that's as close as possible to 0.975. So if we do that, we'll end up at 0.9780, because that's as close as we can get to 0.975. Now that's telling us that the probability of getting 15 or less is 0.9780. But obviously, we're really interested in the probability that we get by subtracting net from 1. And that would be the probability of getting 16 or more. So it's the probability of getting 16 or more, which is as close as we can get to 0.025. And that means that the other part of the critical region is the number 16, 17 and higher. Okay then, so we can say what the critical region is. The critical region is the numbers that are 3 or less, combined with the numbers that are 16 or more. The other part of the question tells us to write down the actual significance level of our test. And we can work this out by adding together the probabilities that we were just looking at. We need the probability that x is less than or equal to 3, plus the probability that x is greater than or equal to 16. And that would be 0.0212, plus whatever we get by subtracting 0.9780 from 1. And if you do that sum, you'll get 0.0432, which is 4.32%, so that's the actual significance level of our test. Okay, let's move on to the last part of the question. And this is comparing the school holidays with term time. We're told that in the school holidays, one call occurs in a randomly chosen 10 minute interval. The task is to test at the 5% level of significance, whether this is sufficient evidence that the rate of incoming calls is lower during the school holidays than in term time. Okay, well again we should start by writing down the hypotheses, and here the null hypothesis is going to be the same as before. It's that lambda is equal to 0.45. Our default assumption will be that the rate of calls is the same as it is during term time, so 0.45 per minute. But this time the alternative hypothesis will be that lambda is less than 0.45. This is a one-tailed test, because we're interested in knowing whether the rate of calls is lower during the school holidays than in term time. Not in whether it's different from the rate during term time. And as before, the hypotheses relate to a one minute interval, but our test statistic comes from looking at a 10 minute interval. So we need to find the expected number of calls in a 10 minute interval, and that's going to be 10 times 0.45, which is 4.5. So this time we have a random variable which has the Poisson distribution with mean 4.5. Okay, well we could answer this question by finding a critical region and working out whether one one call is in the critical region. But if this were me, I would rather just work out the probability of getting one call or less and find out whether that probability is sufficiently low to reject the null hypothesis. So we'll just find the probability that x is less than or equal to 1. 1 because that's the observed number of calls in the 10 minute interval as the actual value of our test statistic. We'll find the probability that x is less than or equal to 1. And of course if this is a very small probability, then we've got a significant result and we can project the null hypothesis. So we look at the tables and we find the column headed up by lambda equals 4.5. And we look across the row from where x is 1 and we see that the probability is 0.0611. So the probability that x is less than or equal to 1 is 0.0611. What's actually greater than our level of significance is greater than 5%. And that means we can't reject H0. We mustn't reject H0 because the probability isn't that low. And what we should say is that there's not enough evidence to conclude that the rate of incoming calls is lower in the school holidays than in term time. You ought to be careful how you express your conclusion here. We mustn't say anything too definite. And we certainly can't say, for example, that the rate of incoming calls is the same in the holiday as it is during term time. We don't have any evidence that that's the case. All we can say is that we don't have quite enough evidence. The probability isn't quite low enough, enough evidence to say that the rate of incoming calls is lower in the school holidays than it is in term time. Okay, so that's the end of that question. The next one I want to look at is number 7 from January 2006. And again, you might want to pause the video at this point and have a go at the question before you listen to anything else that I've got to say. Okay, I hope you've had a go at this question now. Let's go through it. The first part tells us that a teacher thinks that 20% of the pupils in a school read the Dino comic regularly. And he chooses 20 pupils at random and finds that nine of them read the Dino. We're asked to test at the 5% level of significance, whether or not there's evidence that the percentage of pupils that read the Dino is different from 20%. Okay, well, as always, we'll start by stating our hypotheses. And the null hypothesis will be that P, the probability that a pupil reads the Dino regularly, is equal to 0.2, because that's the teacher's default assumption. That's the starting point that it's 20% of the pupils that read the Dino regularly. The alternative hypothesis will be that P is not equal to 0.2, because this is a two-tailed test. The teacher wants to know whether the proportion is different from 20%, not whether it's less than 20%, or greater than 20%, just that it's different from 20%. Okay, well, our test statistic here then is going to have the binomial distribution with parameters 20 and 0.2. If the null hypothesis is true, which remember we always assume whilst we're doing our hypothesis test, the null hypothesis is true. Then we've got 20 pupils and the probability of success, i.e. finding that they read the Dino regularly, is 0.2. It's really a binomial distribution here, because what we're looking at is the number of successes in a sequence of trials. The trials being individual pupils and success being that they read the Dino regularly. Now, to test the null hypothesis, we've got to find the probability that X is greater than or equal to 9. The teacher finds that 9 of them read the Dino regularly, that's more than you would expect. If there are 20 of them and the probability of success is 0.2, you'd expect that 4 of them would read the Dino regularly, and the teacher has actually found 9. So we need to find the probability that we get an outcome like 9, an outcome like 9 students reading the Dino regularly, and like 9 in this context would be 9 or more. So you find the probability that X is greater than or equal to 9, and of course we can't look that up in the probability tables. We can only look up the probability that X is less than or equal to something. So what we'll say is the probability that X is greater than or equal to 9 will be 1 minus the probability that X is less than or equal to 8. So let's look that up. We need to find where n is 20 and where p is 0.2. And then we'll look along the row from 8 and we see that the probability is 0.9900. So we need to do 1 minus 0.9900 and that's 0.01. Okay, well that's the probability that X is greater than or equal to 9. But remember this is a two-tailed test and so there will be two ways we can end up rejecting the null hypothesis, either from getting values that are much bigger than the expected number, or from getting values that are much smaller than the expected number. And so we've only worked out the probability of getting one type of value that's like 9, the values that are bigger than the expected number. And there's also going to be some values that are like 9 but are much smaller than the expected value. So we've only worked out half the region that we're interested in. So we need to double 0.01 to find the total probability and that's 0.02. But anyway, 0.02 is significantly less than 5%. It's still less than 5% and that means we've got a probability that's lower than our significance level. So we have to reject the null hypothesis. And in context that means that we've got enough evidence to say that the proportion of pupils who read the Dino isn't 20%. Okay, the next part of the question asks us to state all the possible numbers of pupils that read the Dino from a sample of size 20 that would make the test that we just did significant at the 5% level. Well, I hope you can see that basically this is asking us to find the critical region for this test, but it's not using the phrase critical region. It's making sure that you understand what we mean by critical region and it's just putting it in a different form of words. But nevertheless, what we have to do is to find the critical region. So let's have a look. First of all, we'll need to scan our way down the column that's headed by 0.2 and stop before we get to a probability that's 2.5%. Here the significance level was 5%, but it's a two-tailed test, so we need to split that in two. So 2.5% at the lower end, 2.5% at the upper end. And we're interested in finding all the cases where the probability is less than 2.5% at either end. So we'll scan our way down the column headed by 0.2, stopping before we cross the 0.025 threshold. And actually we stop as soon as we start and 0.0115. And that means that this end of the critical region is just the number zero. And then the other thing that we do is we scan our way up the same column, stopping before we cross over 0.975. And if we scan our way up, that means we get up to 0.9900. And that's telling us the probability of getting less than or equal to 8. But 1 minus that is the probability of getting greater than or equal to 9. So that means that the other end of the critical region is the numbers 9 or more, 9, 10, 11, 12, and so on. So the numbers that would cause us to reject the null hypothesis, the numbers that would give us a significant outcome, are zero together with the numbers that are 9 or more, 9 all the way up to 20. Okay, let's move on to the next part of the question. This tells us that the teacher takes another four random samples, so five random samples in total, and the extra four contain one, three, one, and four pupils that read the Dino. It's telling us to combine all five samples and use a suitable approximate test at the 5% level of significance to find out whether the percentage of pupils in the school that read the Dino is different from 20%. Okay, well, the null hypothesis is still going to be that P is equal to 0.2, and the alternative hypothesis is still going to be that P isn't equal to 0.2. But this time, if we combine all these results, our test statistic, the sum of all the different random samples, is going to be binomally distributed with parameters 100 and 0.2, because this time we've got 100 trials. There are five samples of size 20, so there are a total of 100 trials, but the probability of success is still the same, 0.2. And this gives us a problem because we don't have tables for when n equals 100, and then it tells us that we've got to use a suitable approximation test. So we're going to have to approximate this random variable that has the binomial distribution with parameters 100 and 0.2 with a different random variable. And we've got two choices. It could either be the Poisson distribution or the normal distribution. But I hope you remember that we use the Poisson distribution when n is large and P is small, whereas we use the normal distribution when both n times P and n times 1 minus P are greater than 5. Okay, so what we've got here, the P isn't particularly small, 0.2 is quite big, so we don't want to use the Poisson approximation, but n times P is 20 and n times 1 minus P is 80. So this is a situation where we can use the normal approximation to the binomial. Okay, so in order to do that, we have to find out the mean and the variance. So the mean of this binomial distribution will be 100 times 0.2, which is 20, and the variance will be 100 times 0.2 times 0.8, which is 16. So the mean is 20 and the variance is 16. So the random variable that we're going to use to approximate x, y will have the normal distribution with mean 20 and variance 4 squared, i.e. 16. Okay, now what's the actual value of our test statistic this time? Well, the first sample had nine students who read the Dino regularly, and then we've got one, three, one and four extras. So that makes for a total of 18 students who read the Dino regularly out of this total of 100. So the probability that we ought to work out if you want to test this hypothesis is the probability that x is less than or equal to 18. Remember, if n is 100 and p is 0.2, then you'd expect to find 20 of them reading the Dino regularly, and we've only got 18, so we need to find the probability of getting 18 or less. And to find the probability that x is 18 or less, we will look for the probability that y is less than or equal to 18.5. Remember here that we're approximating a discrete random variable with a continuous one, using the normal distribution to approximate the binomial distribution, and whenever you use a continuous random variable to approximate a discrete one, you have to make a continuity correction. So the chance of getting 18 or less, the chance that x is 18 or less, will be the chance that y is 18.5 or less. The reason for that is that the chance of y being exactly equal to 18 would be 0. A continuous random variable has zero probability of being exactly equal to any one particular value. So the chance that x is 18 would be about the chance that y is between 17.5 and 18.5. Okay, so we make the continuity correction, and we're going to find the probability that y is less than or equal to 18.5. So we do that by standardizing. It's the same as the probability that z, the standard normal variable, is less than or equal to 18.5, take away the mean, take away 20, divided by the standard deviation, so divided by 4, and that's the probability that z is less than or equal to minus 0.375, which is the same as one take away the probability that z is less than or equal to positive 0.375. We have to do that change because we're not going to be able to look up negative 0.375 in the tables. Here are the tables, and we can't actually see 0.375. Our choice is between 0.37 and 0.38. Let's round up to 0.38. That's allowed. Examiners are happy for you to do that. And the probability that z is less than or equal to 0.38 is 0.6480. So we have to do one take away 0.6480. And the answer turns out to be 0.3520. Okay, so the probability of getting 18 or fewer pupils who read the Dino regularly is 0.3520. But remember, this is a two-tailed test. So this is actually only half the probability that we're looking for. Remember, we want to know the chance of getting an outcome like 18. And one type of case where we've got an outcome like 18 is where we've got less than 18. But we can also have outcomes that are more than the expected number of pupils, so that are more than 20. And that would be the same probability as well. So we need to double this probability. It's a two-tailed test. You must double the probability. And that gives us 0.7040. Well, this is massively more than 5%. The probability isn't small at all. And so in this case, we're clearly not going to reject the null hypothesis. And we're going to say that the combined sample actually suggests that the proportion of pupils who read the Dino may well be 20%. I'm not going to say that we've got evidence that it is 20%, because we certainly don't have evidence that it's 20% rather than 19% or anything. But nevertheless, the evidence that we've got is totally consistent with the possibility that the proportion is 20%. It's very likely that we would find a total of something like 18 pupils reading the Dino regularly if the actual proportion is 20%. There's one more part of the question. It asks us to comment on our results. And I suppose there's a very obvious thing to say. First of all, we've got different outcomes. The first test turned out to be significant. And that led us to think that maybe the proportion is different from 20%. But then the second test had the opposite outcome. And there it seemed that the proportion may well be 20%. But then I presume we're expected to say, well, what should we conclude as a result? We've got one test that goes one way, one test that goes the other way. So what should we say? And I think the point is that the second test is going to be more reliable because you had a much larger sample size. And therefore it's the second test that we should go with. We ought to say that the proportion may well be 20%. Okay, now I'm going to look at one last question. And this is question four from June 2002. Again, it'll be good for you to stop the video at this point and to have a go at this question before you listen on. Okay, so the first part tells us that 20% of customers who buy crisps in a large supermarket buy them in single packets. But on a particular day, somebody has taken a random sample of 25 customers and looked at what sort of crisps they've bought and found that two of them have bought them in single packets. So we're told to use the data to test at the 5% level of significance whether the percentage of customers who bought crisps in single packets that day was lower than usual. I've got to state our hypotheses clearly. So this time the null hypothesis will be that P is equal to 0.2. The default assumption is that the proportion of customers buying crisps in single packets is 20%, so that's 0.2. And it's a one-tailed test. We're interested in whether the proportion is lower than usual, not whether it's different to usual, whether it's lower than usual. So the alternative hypothesis will say that P is less than 0.2. And then what we've got is a random variable which has the binomial distribution with parameters 25, 25 because the random sample had 25 customers in it, so we've got 25 trials, and 0.2 is the probability of success. 0.2 is the proportion of customers that we suspect tend to buy crisps in single packets. I hope it's obvious that we're going to be looking at a binomial distribution here because we've got the number of successes in a sequence of trials. Okay, so we need to find the probability that X is less than or equal to 2, the probability that we get two or fewer customers buying two crisps in single packets. And we can find that by looking at the probability tables. We need to find where n is equal to 25 and look down the column where P is equal to 0.2. And then if we look along the row from where X is 2, we get the probability 0.0982. So the probability that X is less than or equal to 2 is 0.0982, and that's bigger than 5%. That's greater than the critical value. So it's not very unlikely that we would get an outcome like this. It's not very unlikely that we would get as few as two customers getting Christian single packets. So we can't reject the null hypothesis. Okay, we can't say that the proportion of customers buying Christian single packets is lower than usual. We don't have enough evidence to conclude that the percentage of customers buying Christian single packets is lower than usual on this day. Okay, let's move on to the next part of the question. So now we're told that at the same supermarket, the manager thinks that the probability of a customer buying a bumper pack of crisps is 0.03. And to test whether or not this hypothesis is true, the manager decides to take a random sample of 300 customers. Okay, so we're told to state our hypotheses clearly and find the critical region to enable the manager to do this test, to find out whether the probability is different from 0.03. And this time we're told that the probability for each tail should be as close as possible to 2.5%. Okay, well, this time the null hypothesis is going to be that P is equal to 0.03, because that's the proportion of people that we think buy crisps in bumper packs. And this time we have got a two-tailed test because we're interested in whether the probability is different from 0.03. So it's a two-tailed test and the alternative hypothesis says that P is not equal to 0.03. Okay, well, our test statistic, the number of customers that we actually find buying crisps in bumper packs will have the binomial distribution with parameters 300, it's got 300 trials. There are 300 customers in our sample and 0.03 is the probability of success. Okay, well, we're not going to be able to find binomial probability tables which have n equals 300 in them. So we're going to have to use an approximation here. So we're going to have to approximate the binomial distribution. And this is a situation where we can use the Poisson distribution to approximate the binomial distribution because we've got a large value of n and a small value of P. We could also use the normal distribution if you wanted to because it's also true that n times P is greater than 5 and also that n times 1 minus P is greater than 5. But whenever you have the choice, it's easier to use the Poisson distribution than the normal distribution to approximate the binomial distribution because the process is just much simpler. You don't have to make a continuity correction, you don't have to do any standardizing, you just have to look up the number in the tables. Okay, so we need to find the expected number of customers who would get crisps in bumper packs so that we can use a Poisson approximation. And the expected number would be 300 times 0.03 which is 9 and we can use the approximating random variable y which has the Poisson distribution with parameter 9. And so what we need to do is to find the critical region for y i.e. the range of values of y which would end up giving us probabilities less than 5%. And actually, if you remember the first question I looked at, this is exactly the same. We've got to take the column headed up by 9 and scan our way down it stopping as close as we can get to 0.025 which is 0.0212 and then scan our way along that row and that shows us that that part of the critical region is the numbers 012 and 3. And then we've got to scan our way up that column stopping as close as we can get to 0.975 and then we look our way along the row below to find out that the other part of the critical region is the number 16, 17 and higher. Remember, it's the row below because 0.9780 is the probability of 15 or less but 1 minus that is the probability of 16 or more. So the critical region is when x is less than or equal to 3 together with when x is greater than or equal to 16. And the final part of the question where we have to say the significance level of the test will be the sum of the two probabilities that we were just looking at just as before is 0.212 plus whatever you get by subtracting 0.9780 from 1 which is 0.0432 which is 4.32%. Notice that this question was a little bit different to some that you see because we had to use an approximation and then find a critical region but there wasn't anything particularly different about it. We're just looking at the table of values for our approximating random variable and looking for 2.5% and 0.975 but otherwise there's nothing scarily different about it. Okay, so that's the end of this video where I've looked at three pass paper questions on hypothesis testing. I hope that you found it useful. Thank you very much for watching.


parking and maybe while that image is coming up i can have joe speak um ask his question well i i just want to add to that just why um given the conflicts that the parking creates and the fact that it's not necessary i would like the applicant to plead their case for the parking spots um okay so maybe we can jade maybe we can do both those things at once sure i mean i can go back to the original sighting of the building um jade you have i asked you to do a rendition um um we had it was a discussion we had uh and what that area would look like if i put the parking on governor davis drive in other words if i push the building you have that rendition somewhere jay oh uh it's not really coming up all of it yeah i'm not sure why we're not seeing the whole thing here let me see what i could do yeah there we go okay great um so early on and and i apologize i know it's late but we spent a lot of time with this so early on when we talked about uh that exact building i i always liked the building design i never wanted to change that but we talked about how to site the building and originally at one point we actually talked about flipping the parking and putting the parking on governor uh davis drive so you would pull in on governor davis drive he'd pull immediately into the parking space now you know the problem with the site like this is you got to try to make everybody happy it's a bit of a beauty contest so i was aware that my neighbor to the rear and many others in montpellier were sensitive to the sight line of the thrush cavern we're going to start calling it the zalinger cabin yeah the thrush cabin and i knew that people were were sensitive to that so so when we originally the better design the design i actually liked better was putting the parking on governor davis drive and that would have made the traffic flow uh you actually would have entered the drive through on governor davis drives and then you would have actually taken a right coming out of the drive through and you would have blended with the traffic on uh coming out of 99 state um but you could have accessed the atm machine from the passenger side oh no you put it you just put it on the driver's side i mean they're remote atms anyway you're not there's no person behind there it's just you know max headroom so uh so we would have so that was the way we we originally thought about it um not only would that have made it would have hidden you can see in the right hand drawing that's that's what you would have seen so as proposed that you see thrush you see the main doorway you see it from the sidewalk level you know where you're going john's building remains very visible if we do the parking on governor davis the gray square on the right hand side you can see that john's building disappears more importantly over the years i've had discussions with the state of vermont and with vermont mutual and with the city of montpellier about the development of what people affectionately call the montpellier the pit if we push the building if we flip the parking and push the building all the way to the right of way which if there is zero setback um then basically what we would do is we would preclude any development that occurred in the pit from exiting onto state street so by putting the building the way we did if you look at that space if someone came along and said we want to develop the pit and we want to be able to exit on state street it would be very easy to approach 105 state street about that we would give up our parking spaces we'd give up our sidewalk we'd obviously want our parking spaces uh you know replace the three spaces but what this configuration versus the configuration on the right does for you is you would actually if you could assign along you'd actually have two lanes of travel all feet in each lane obviously it would require the joint you know the property owners would have to cooperate with each other with any potential developer but we wouldn't but by placing the building the way we've done it we haven't precluded two lanes of travel and a six foot sidewalk going back to the pit so for us you know as we looked at the options you know urban planning requires a bit of vision and and and looking at not only what's good for me yeah I could push the building all the way over to the right and and blend the traffic blend my counterclockwise traffic with the 99 state street counterclockwise traffic and the world would be wonderful but I would totally foreclose any opportunity for anyone developing the pit to have two lanes of access and a six foot sidewalk going back so that's the you know that's the the thought process that went into this design and and honestly as I looked at it um you know there have been three cars I could have eliminated handicapped parking there's no requirement for me to have any parking having a friend who is sitting permanently I always paid attention to that with every building that we've ever designed so um you know that's the thought process that went into it I don't see us I truly don't see us adding to traffic congestion where they parked three cars at the gas station and sir your argument you know your your point is is well taken but there have been three cars parking on the side of the gas station for for 50 years so I don't see that this design as proposed adds to the congestion and that's you know that's just the history of how how what the thought process that went into citing the building the way we did thank you I I have a question that follows on to what you've just said Tom it's we're comparing this to the use of the the use of space structurally if you will that there have been cars parked next to the right away for decades so we know that cars can fit there and they can get in and out I'm thinking in terms of the actual function on a day-to-day basis as parking spaces cars will be coming and going much more frequently than I assume cars arriving at the beginning of the day for repair and leaving two days later would be so I'm picturing a more dynamic site than there has been in the past which creates more intensity of use asks more of that right of way um am I wrong about that well is that an accurate description I'm sorry who it's it's Brian question I'm sorry because I would I would beg to say no uh because again if you look at the historical photo you had gas pumps there now gas pumps you know in terms of vehicle generation gap so the vehicles they were either they had to get to those gas pumps somehow uh so they either entered or exited through the right of way cars can only move you know I don't they could have backed up I suppose but uh you know and they were gas pumps that service vehicles on both sides of the pump so our our proposed you know the proposed traffic that we're generating I think is significantly less than two-faced gas pumps okay thank you um I want to make sure we don't get too far um Joe was your question about the choice to include parking at all was that answered by the overview just now I I suppose um just to clarify you said that you'd be willing to eliminate your parking though if you could get it in the the pit area as part of some future development as yet not created yeah I put you know listen I spent well my public services are relevant but I believe in being visionary when you when you develop uh in a downtown and as I looked at that area and we looked at siding the building putting the parking on Governor Davis the fact that I would you know my option was I could keep that um those travel lanes 24 feet so if anyone ever did develop the pit they could approach me obviously they'd have to approach the owner of 99 State whether Mr. Malone in fact closes or not they'd have to approach all of the owners of those properties and obviously we'd all have to cooperate in terms of you know I I believe your question is would I put in writing and guarantee that I would give up those parking spaces if they were replaced to facilitate a development the pit the answer is absolutely yes okay thank you I just and did we get an answer um I'm sorry oh just if you don't if you wouldn't mind waiting for this to be said um I want to make sure um Rob was your question answered about why the diagonal versus perpendicular parking yes for now okay um I'll um put it over to you Alisha and I'll keep my eyes out for others who are able to raise their hands as well so Alisha please um I just wanted to mention that the gas station also had two curb cuts that could go in and out um one off of State Street and this common right-of-way and then one off of Governor Davis allowed an in and out on both of those so that's um also rather different as far as traffic circulation cars are moving one direction ma'am they they've either got to enter on state or leave on state I agree this is Jay can you hear me now yeah go ahead Jay and it's okay mind just raising their hand that'll give me my visual yeah I didn't realize I was muted um to answer the question of why the diagonal when we were looking at how to obtain the parking I had sat with Tom McCartle several times and we looked at in the diagonal was it with the perpendicular the car takes up more space so we would lead further out toward the right-of-way whereas with the the angular parking and this is a 30 degree angle it lessened the amount of space needed from the building so that was the reasoning for that great thank you appreciate the geometry that's a it's a very good reminder um other comments from uh so I'll go to Brian in a sec before I do um DRB members other things you want to jump in on this okay Brian please go ahead so just two more small points on on access and circulation and why parking um to address the why do we need parking question at the site I think everyone is aware of the challenges of parking in downtown Montpelier particularly when the legislature is in session and also aware of the significant efforts the city is going through right now against some headwinds to create um create parking in downtown so um you know in order to make an economically viable project in the long term uh for that will improve downtown Montpelier um we're looking to get some parking at this facility in order to um you know if nothing else ease some of the existing parking issues in downtown um and then uh regarding I just wanted to circle back really quickly to conflicts between um folks using the right-of-way and people driving on state street I just wanted to um really specifically point out um Tom McCartle from the Montpelier DPW you know we had some long conversations in the TRC hearing about the safety of and of that access with regards to the sidewalk and with regards to state street um and so following TRC Tom provided this comment about uh access on the state street he said I believe there will be occasional conflicts between ingress and egress movements within the common driveway to the extent these conflicts affect the sidewalk pedestrians and through traffic on state street is unknown but will likely have minimum safety and inconvenience impacts due to low speed and good visibility so just wanted to point out the city's own staff have have looked at the potential for conflicts with traffic on state state street and um find them to be minimal on state street not necessarily on the um not necessarily on the actual site circulation internal with the three different properties using the common right-of-way yeah my intention was to address the comments about conflicts with cars on in the public right-of-way understood right so that's that's a good reminder that when the DRB deliveries will be considering um circulation within the site as well as safe access onto and off of the site those are kind of two pieces of it um I think we've gotten some really good uh testimony on this and I'm inclined to move on um I'm sure we'll circle back to it in certain ways um so we have discussed um I'm back to the staff report here on page nine we've talked about the fact that the oh Bill before I go on do you have something you're muted you're muted Bill try now nope still muted I didn't say anything now I'm unmuted okay so I just I just want to put some context for the DRB um we're if the applicant were renovating Harold's Gulf and changing the existing use to a 21st century use historical operations there might be relevant but Harold's Gulf was demolished two years ago the site is line fallow lay fallow for several years and so the historical use isn't really germane to what the DRB has to assess now the DRB is is charged with assessing whether the project is going to be is designed to prevent traffic conflicts within the site so Harold's Gulf gone and forgotten thank you thanks Bill all right let's move on um so we've discussed the the right of way and how that right of way will function given the proposed use and it's our duty to make sure as DRB that that is um that means our standard here for vehicular access sorry I'm sort of skimming as I go here um don't worry I also read it before we've talked about curb cuts we've talked about shared shared access is already in place spacing of access points is suitable um I'm sorry let me back up a little bit when we talked about the right of way width we we need to determine as a board whether it's appropriate for two-way traffic in a commercial lot to be 11 and a half or so 11.71 feet rather than the standard of 24 we've heard testimony on that um we've also heard testimony on backing out of the accessible spot we need to determine that that is is going to be safe continuing through the staff report page 10 I'm looking mostly at the red so at the bottom of page 10 is where we talked about um or where the staff report highlights highlights potential issues with queuing in the two waiting spots behind the drive-through and um we have talked not specifically about the queuing but we have talked about how what the expectations are for how that space would be used either as an exit from the site when there aren't any cars in the drive-through or a turnaround spot for cars coming out of the parking area um we we need to make a determination that there's sufficient drive-way lines to prevent queuing in the street and we need to make sure there's not internal conflict in the site I think we have received adequate testimony to allow us to contemplate that. Do DRB members feel that they have enough information? Looking at my notes here please bear with me. We've discussed exiting parking spaces emergency vehicle access is is not raised as a concern here in the staff report bottom of page 11. Moving on to page 12 street improvements are not necessitated given the expected volume of traffic it's fairly low. So then in our deliberations as the staff report indicates on page page 12 we're going to be talking through the things that we've just received testimony on I think that's where I need to leave it for now because we're going to need to probably deliberate as a board so I'm going to move on. Meredith jumped in here if there's anything procedurally that you want me to pause and tend to. Nothing yet. All right cool thank you. The proposed parking spaces that are there meet the dimensional requirements though the issue is with the shared right-of-way and whether whether we want that 20 foot corridor if you will between that is typically required for parking return testimony from Brian for angled parking that is not as necessary because of the turning radii. Okay so we have thoroughly discussed I think access and circulation and what I want to do now is move on to the special use standards which apply to the special use on this property which is the drive-through. Okay is everybody with me? You're very good sports. So the special use standards are laid out on page 14 of the staff report and list a number of requirements that the stacking lanes be located to the side or rear of the building they are the stacking lanes shall be clearly signed marked etc and separated from travel lanes and shall not block access to parking loading and service areas. It seems not to be the case however based on testimony we've heard you know this special use standard says the stacking lanes shall be separated from travel lanes at the same time we have heard that the the drive-through area may at times be used as a travel lane to exit the site. Is that correct what I just said that at times it may be used to exit the site? It's not people may go out that way if there's no one in the drive-through it's you know because it's still only a one-way access there won't be any conflict with folks using the right the drive-through pillars. Meredith does the standard that stacking lanes be separated from travel lanes preclude the use of a drive-through as a travel lane or am I reading into that? I have no further clarification other than what it says. I'll take it at face value then. This is this is not something that has been interpreted previously. I think this mostly has to do with making sure that the end of a car in a stack lane doesn't stick out into a travel lane. The pedestrian crossing is not relevant because of the location of the stacking lanes. It is not within the required setback because there isn't one. The size is appropriate. There is a roof overhang as described and pointed out in the design and I'm at the bottom of page 14 now. Standard G on our list is that drive-through facilities and drive-in establishments shall be located a sufficient distance from property lines and screens to prevent adverse impacts including but not limited to noise and light trespass on adjacent properties. So we've heard testimony about noise and light which both sound quite minimal and how services will be provided. We need to discuss whether the drive-through is located a sufficient distance from property lines and screens to prevent adverse impacts. So I'll start with the one that I think is a little easier. DRB members, do you feel that you've received testimony that there is sufficient screening or avoidance of the noise and light trespass from the functions of the drive-through? Do folks have thoughts on that in the DRB? For noise and light? Correct. Yes. I feel it's okay. Thank you. So then the next question is whether our standard call asks us to determine whether there is quote-unquote sufficient access or distance from the property line and we've heard testimony and screen diagrams that the drive-through goes right up to the rear property line. Is that sufficient? Invite DRB members to think about what that means and what they think. Okay. At this late hour, I think what the best thing we can do is gather the information that we can garner from the open meeting and when we close that meeting, we can do so with prejudice which allows us to reopen it if there are sections that do not from a technical perspective meet our needs for information. Okay. Thank you, Kevin. I think that is after 10 o'clock. We should be aware of the fact that at this point we're just gathering whatever's left out there. Okay. I'll proceed with that in mind. Thank you and I do appreciate you all. In addition to this being our first new meeting, this is where I get to play mine. This is my second meeting chair card, right? So thank you all again. All right. Moving on through, we heard bottom of page 16. We've gathered the information that I think we need to determine whether landscaping requirements are met. Thank you, Bob, for that. Do DRB members have any further questions about landscaping? Okay. I'm going to move on. DRB will also need to contemplate whether screening is necessary in front of the parking area and I think that's something that we can do using the information that we have. Regarding outdoor lighting, the board needs to determine whether we need additional, there is a requirement that a lighting plan be submitted and we need to determine whether to ask for that or whether we feel that the information we have is sufficient given the type of lining on the site and the scale of the site, the location of the site. I wonder what DRB members thoughts are about the need for schematic on the lighting. I don't know that I need an engineered schematic, but I'm interested in a sketch that highlights the lighting a little bit and sort of shows what lumens will be where. Would others find that valuable? Yes. Would the applicant be willing to provide that? Yes, we can do that. My understanding, however, was that if you were below 2,000 lumens, you didn't need to provide that. All of ours are below that amount. For all major site plans, there's supposed to be a lighting plan. Okay. I thought there was an exception. Nope. So if you look in section 3204C, it's just one sentence. All applications for major site plan approval shall include a lighting plan prepared by a qualified professional lighting designer or engineer. Period. So we had discussed this in the fact that you didn't have a lighting plan. And I was like, well, you're not proposing any new standalone site lighting. And I wasn't quite sure without that if the DRB was going to require the full site plan, full lighting plan. But they are. Although I think I heard it may not need to be an engineered plan. We can show the photometrics of each fixture at each location. That's what I would find valuable. Is that appropriate, Meredith? Yeah, I think that's appropriate. Yes, we can provide that. Thank you very much. All right. So last, I'm going to confirm that we have the information we need to deliberate on the conditional youth standards, which are what we use to evaluate the suitability of the drive through. So we haven't talked about the capacity of community facilities and utilities, but the drive through is not going to lead to more park usage or more children in schools or more flushed toilets. So I think we're okay there. We've talked in detail about traffic. Regarding the drive through, do DRB members feel they need additional information to evaluate that? I think that as we deliberate, we may decide that we need more information. Okay. I think that is a possibility. I'm continuing through. I'm on page 22 of our staff report, and I do not see any further issues on which we need to collect additional testimony. Are there any, what I'm going to do is invite final remarks, final comments from the, final questions from the DRB members and then any final remarks, brief final remarks from the applicant. So DRB members, final questions. Yeah, I've got a couple murders. It's Michael. I'm sorry. Sure. Michael, go ahead. With the right of way, what's the plan for handling snow and ice removal in the right of way? As someone who works at 107, I know that, I just know that that's a problem. Historically, that's an issue. Ice builds up and snow builds up. It seems like there's a lack of ownership to who's going to handle that right of way as it comes to snow and ice removal. Has that ever, has that been discussed? I'm sorry, sir. Was your question, your question was about snow removal in the right of way or on 105? So when ice maintenance on that right of way is historically, in my opinion, my humble opinion, right, has been poorly done. Well, we have been curious with the new building coming in, that creates a new opportunity to create a new discussion, right? And so I'm just curious if that has been discussed among the three, or the other two landowners? Well, we have, we have not, we have not discussed it with the other two landowners. We own several properties in Vermont that share rights of way or share, you know, common ingress and egress. And usually what happens is one party takes responsibility for it and the other two have a responsibility to reimburse them for it. You know, it's a shared right of way that uses in common. So to answer your specific questions, sir, no, we haven't, Mr. Malone doesn't own the property yet. So I can't have that discussion with him. And I haven't, when there was an issue with the water line servicing 107 State Street a couple of years ago, I paid for it. I didn't ask my neighbor to. So I hope that answer will be shared. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Michael, did you have another question as well? Yeah, I'm curious, what's the thoughts on the increased traffic at the location? Has anyone done a vehicle study? How many vehicles you anticipate going through that property? Because as everyone knows with that new restaurant at 107, traffic has steadily increased over the past three years to 107. So curious, has anyone looked at the increase at the proposed 105? And then the secondary question is, has there been any thoughts to that intersection, which can get quite congested at the morning, afternoon, and the, you know, 430 let out time for state employees? Have those been looked at in any detail? Michael, you're asking about the traffic impacts to public right supply and streets. How about be all the above? No, as there've been an estimate on the number of vehicles that you anticipate now that you're putting in potentially right, putting in a bank with a drive through that I assume that's going to increase vehicles. I don't know that would be like Northfield, but there'll be certainly an increase. And then that intersection, the of Davis and state that intersection is, and it's pretty hairy at three discrete time periods during the day as a traffic study been thought about or done. So we have not done a formal traffic study, typically how these things are estimated is the Institute of Traffic Engineers publishes a document they've gone around to all kinds of different sites all over the country and set their account in cars and then they published some statistics about what you might expect from a proposed development. So we did using the IT information and so they do them based on various independent variables, but for this one we selected a drive in bank with a single drive through lane, typically where you evaluate that it's during the one hour in the afternoon where traffic is the worst on adjacent streets as the PM peak hour. So based on the IT information we expect the project to generate 28 trips in the PM peak hour, but you have to keep in mind that the way traffic engineers think about a trip is if someone comes into the site that's a trip and when someone leaves the site that's a trip. So though there are 28 trips coming and going from the site, then we would expect that to actually only be 14 cars that access the site during the PM peak hour coming and going because the distribution coming and going is just about equal for these uses that have been studied. So you're saying that intersection is going to be here with an additional 14 cars at the peak time period? That's what we would expect based on its statistics. There's some mitigating factors that go along with that. One is that the 14 cars doesn't consider what are called pass by trips. So pass by trips are cars that were already on the street network passing by the site and then end up stopping there. So someone who works for the state goes to the bank on their way home from work pass by trips. So typically in an urban situation like this you would reduce the number of expected peak hour trips due to the the fact of pass by trips. We haven't done that here in this estimate. But you know so we don't feel that 14 cars in peak hours is a significant impact at all. It's pretty minor in relation to the volume of traffic that's going by on state street in that hour. And it was reviewed by DPW and they had no issues whatsoever with traffic. They didn't ask us to do a traffic study. There's a lot of vehicle accessories that go by at that time. I mean I would encourage you to maybe think about that a little bit. Thank you. I think our threshold for a traffic study is something like 100 or 200 additional trips a day. So I. No. Meredith. No. So the threshold for requiring a professional traffic impact study for proposed development is when that proposed development is expected to generate 75 or more new trips during the AM or PM peak hours on class one roads and 50 or more new trips during an AM during the AM or PM peak hours on class two and three roads. So we haven't I mean we haven't met those numbers anywhere near. So there's no requirement for a fresh study. And when when Department of Public Works evaluates this data they look at the condition of the nearby the most recently reported condition grade of the nearby intersections. And so Department of Public Works felt that these numbers were accurate and weren't going to require a more detailed traffic study. That doesn't mean that they didn't have issues with potential conflicts but the actual number of vehicles was not an issue for them. Right. Okay. Great. All right. Thank you Michael. Any brief closing comments from the applicant? I'd like to comment from Jay a comment on your question about is there's adequate I believe it was what separation from the drive up on the neighborhood property. The pattern of use from the tavern has been that they part up against the Gulf station and my guess is they will simply do the same and there will be a curve all the way along that so I don't wouldn't perceive there being a conflict or being any different than the past pattern. There will be a curve separating the drive through from the other property. Correct. Okay. Other closing comments Tom did you want to to have some remarks? No just wanted to say thank you. I mean as all of you know urban planning can be a challenge and it's never a question of what's perfect. It's a question of what's reasonable and presenting an application that checks all of the boxes. It's not a beauty contest. You're not competing with any developer next door up the street. We're proud of the project that we've submitted. We think it checks all of the boxes. We think it's forward-looking and we think it complements an area that we know is very special. So thanks very much for all your time. Thank you. Phil has his hand up. I a final comment and then I will also okay if you can unmute if just make sure. Yes you are. Go ahead Phil. It's not a comment about the substance or the proceeding. It's more about process. Okay. Earlier Kevin said that he would close the hearing with prejudice and then suggested that if you conduct your deliberations and you need more information you may ask for it. I think I think you meant without prejudice not with prejudice number one but but number two if when you we depart tonight you either have to adjourn the hearing until a date's certain in which case you leave the record open or you have to close the hearing and the record is closed. So I know Kevin we've been through this before and if you need more information while deliberations are ongoing then you won't be able to obtain it if you close the matter. Phil you kind of jumped in line. I was going to actually talk about that. This is Meredith. So it looked to me like you like the DRB definitely wants more information on the lighting plan. Is that something that you were asking for before you could make a decision about the lighting compliance because if so I don't think we can I mean we can't close the hearing. It would be as Phil said adjourning to a date certain or continuing to a date certain to get that additional information. You know Mike's on so he could always talk about if I think there is a possibility of saying oh we're going to reopen but that would be a whole new notice process. Nailing notice to all of the adjoining property orders the whole thing all over again. Yeah let me just clarify what my early comments were. Essentially I'm in agreement with what with what Phil just said and basically want to make sure that we didn't limit our ability to get the information we need to further develop our review and ultimate decision on this. So my my intent is the same but I would defer to the the proper process. Okay and I don't need the lighting plan to make a decision it's more for the record for as far as I'm concerned. Okay so is there then here's the thing does anybody feel like they have to have more information to make a decision on any of the items discussed? If they do then we probably should clarify for the applicant what that information is so that they can get it to you at a later date at which to after which there would be a deliberation. Does anybody need more information? And by the way there was a question that I somehow missed. Oh nope never mind. Okay so I'll put that out to the DRB members do we need additional information in order to complete our deliberation? I don't. I don't. Okay I think I put this on firm ground to close the hearing and enter or more likely schedule a deliberative session. Good I asked another procedural question would it be appropriate for interested parties to submit proposed findings? Uh for you for the deliberation? Mike. I'd object straight up. Straight up I would object. It's not standard practice. Just hold on guys I think the question is to the the procedural people. That's not something I have seen that's not something that is anywhere in the regulations I think that's more of a court proceeding. And I appreciate the intent. As the person who often raps things if somebody did that yeah that would be great but I don't think we can do that Phil. Well it's done at all kinds of administrative bodies and this DRB is an administrative body. Mike you have way more history in this than I do but it's also I mean I'm not sure you could even provide that before the deliberative session that seems like a whole extra me adding of evidence after the hearing has been closed. Yeah as the non the non-lawyer talking about this that that would be my only concern is that we would be taking we'd be taking that evidence after the the hearing it's I don't know how much you would be considered evidence if it's proposed fine. Yeah fine is not good evidence but I don't think it's necessary. Yeah I mean if we had it before or if it was still open I would think yeah we would take it under under advisement but I think once it's closed and they go into deliberative I don't know if they can accept any other additional even if the applicant had additional information I don't think it would be appropriate for the DRB to get an extra email or an extra piece of information after this after it's closed I don't think we take any more information would be my non legal thought. I've not seen it in 40 years. I would have taken it before I would have taken it before it was closed I would have said yeah the DRB could take it under advisement. Yeah so Phil next time present it before the hearing and then we can share it for the public record and then we're all good. I'll remember that. All right we're learning all the time and the creativity is flowing at this point I would I would like to bring this to a close so Kevin do you have a last thought here? I do go ahead. That has to do with the circulation issue and if we close the meeting right now we're not going to be able to go back to the applicant and say well you know there may be a tweak here or a tweak there that'll make this work better. We're going to be limited to what we have at the moment that we close the meeting. So I asked the board to give that some thought do we want to continue this or do we want to close it? My vote would be to continue it. And ask for a redesign of the parking. Again it's just a few minutes before 11 o'clock in the evening here. I don't think that good decision making is made at that time of the evening for most of us. I think there is an option to continue the hearing. There would be an option to continue the hearing and to schedule a time to go into deliberation. In other words we know you're going to be going into to deliberate this. The only thing that happens once you come back is that you'd have to come back and reopen the hearing to make your if you wanted something else. Yeah as I understand it once we close the meeting and if we want to reopen it it has to be worn. So you'd have to worn it to a date certain. That's a time issue whereas if we continue it to a date certain we can analyze the data that we now have maybe at the end of that review we say oh guess what we have everything. But I personally am not prepared to say that. Okay so let me ask the question. We haven't done this before that I know of. But does the DRB staff the staff question does the DRB ever plan ahead to a date certain such as June 1st and then schedule a deliberative session in between those and then collect additional evidence on the date certain a close deliberative session to determine what additional information is needed. And I'm not proposing anything sneaky I'm just trying to think of how the DRB processes this into a next step. I have not done this long enough to have the background so I'm really glad Mike is on here and Phil is on here. My inclination would be to say we continue the hearing and then have the deliberative session. I don't feel like having a deliberative session in between makes sense but Mike, Phil have either of you heard of something like that where there's a deliberative session in between two open parts of the hearing. It's happened in Act 250. Okay and I think in my experience I've seen it in but it's been more happened more often in situations where the boards have deliberated at the time. So I've been in committees where they would go in or they would close they would they would go into deliberative session and you know everybody goes out in the hallway and waits and then everybody comes back in and they ask for a couple more questions so they could get a clarification on point and then then they go into yeah all right we'll make our decision now we deliberated we asked these questions we now have an answer now we're going to vote to make the decision but I haven't seen it in between but it functionally I would think it would work the same way again not being the lawyer that would be things I've seen in the past. Okay that's what I need to I want to make sure we don't overanalyze this at this point because this is not something I definitely want or need to do but I'm sure Sarah jump in and then Rob. Okay I would just like to say on behalf of the applicant this is a very comprehensive and detailed proposal and the analysis and the questions this has gone on for some time I'm not sure that continuing these deliberations is going to amount to anything more than a rehash and a second crack at the apple to come back in and make different arguments you have all the evidence that we could possibly present I don't know what else could be presented in terms of you know is there some specific thing that you think has not been addressed due to the time constraints that needs to be further addressed this is the opportunity to present the evidence this is the public hearing this has been prepared for our experts are here with you know what I point out it's that it's the vice chair of the DRB who's asking for the continuance I guess with all due respect it doesn't matter who's asked the question is why what's the purpose what's the legal justification for it I think we've we want to make sure that I'd like stop please thank you we want to make sure we have the information to do this right we also want to do it in a public and forthcoming way sometimes we will have a private deliberative session where we go through everything we usually do that after we close the hearing I was trying to explore whether there was some other way to make sure that we did that contemplative exercise and then also made sure we filled in got additional information if we needed I'm hearing that that is cumbersome and atypical so I don't mean to suggest something strange because I don't want to be unfair I'm just trying to understand what the boundaries are what we can do appropriately so feeling that out understand the vice chair's request I'm going to hear from Rob and then from Kevin and then I want to make a decision about where we're headed so Rob well I was going to motion to continue the hearing to the next regularly scheduled development reboard meeting as my motion and we'd happy to discuss but I feel like as process goes we do start start there sounds fine that we have a motion on the floor is there a second second from Jean they're for the discussion by DRB member so technically it has to be to a date certain so we would have to state June 1st I believe okay would you accept that amendment Rob yes and Jean would you accept that amendment okay and I think Kevin's trying to talk but he's muted go ahead Kevin oh still muted sorry give us a test test one two three please Kevin can you hear me yes yes okay under the previous zoning regulations we would be going through a process where you have the preliminary approval and then final approval I'm just think that considering that we're transitioning into a completely new ordinance it's it's important for us not to lose perspective on how this process works and since we're all since we're now presented with the situation where everything can potentially be discussed and decided at one meeting I think we need to exercise that power judiciously okay Kevin do I hear you agreeing that it's appropriate to leave the hearing open and continue to a date certain as has been proposed by the motion you do okay so further discussion by DRB members all right hearing none we'll call the question with a vote the motion on the floor is to continue this hearing to a date certain which is June 1st 7 p.m I will call the roll are dead yeah Rob yes okay thank you um Michael yes Kevin yes Jean yes and this is Kate and I am voting yes as well so the motion carries um fix in favor one again uh and we will continue the discussion of this on June 1st at 7 o'clock thank you all for your work because this is work um on our agenda the next item is approval of the minutes I'm going to defer I'd like to propose that we defer that to our next meeting not urgent business and we will return June 1st um any other business members of board there was a suggestion to have a possible because some of us are new to the board of having a private preliminary session a DRB private session maybe as a preliminary possibility oh a training session no no not necessarily just a private DRB meeting regarding of the discussion that occurred here today I think you need to deliberate yeah private deliberate session correct thanks Mary that was discussed as a possibility between here and that and there what we what we will probably do is what we may do is can be in the hearing on June 1st um see what additional see if we need to collect additional information and if we don't adjourn into deliberative session at that point is that right Mary that's a likely outcome yeah so so everybody can can between now and June 1st everybody can look at their notes from tonight they can look at the staff report they can re look over the application materials and my understanding is we're not having an in between deliberative session because that just gets cumbersome and messy we'll reopen the hearing on June 1st um and have back and forth if the applicants feel like they have some additional information that they want to bring to that June 1st hearing that they think will clarify some of the questions they can bring that um and not just applicants also you know other interested parties and then after that part will eventually you know DRB and the DRB is happy they can close the hearing on this application um and then what would probably happen because there will be other applications for the June 1st hearing is that you would close the hearing plan to go to deliberative session and wait and do that deliberative session after you've gone through the other applications that are on the agenda for that night that's usually how we do it we don't meet everybody else who's caught gotten on the call for a June 1st hearing wait until after you've done a deliberative session okay thanks Meredith that's a good explanation so I would say that between now and then there's just two things I would remind folks um one um especially for newer members getting into habit of um assuring that you do not discuss these applications or how that um beyond what's already been presented in the public record if someone says what does the application say about the right of way you can say the application says this but don't opine on it that would be ex parte communication and don't put people's opinions on it um and the other thing is in advance of our next meeting and we all did our best tonight um I think people did their homework I appreciate that um now that we have information and notes from this hearing um please please be prepared so that we can be expedient uh next time um and just a quick now if at any point db members do get questions from the public they can always send them my way as well um because I can I can discuss applications with the public about you know questions about where things are who supplied what I can have this with the public you aren't supposed to um so at any point you start getting questioned give them my contact information and just send them my way if you feel like you need to that's not a problem that's one of the things I'm here for great great resource thank you Meredith um I'll thank you again and I will take a motion to adjourn motion yeah second moved by our moved by RJ and second enthusiastically seconded by by doe I'm going to assume that um it's unanimous so all those in favor raise your right hand we are adjourned thank you all very very much thanks for a good work Kate you did a great job yeah it was good thank you thank you good night


Next up, we have, let me sure I'm reading the right one, yep. 30 years behind the ballot box, a first-hand look at the multiple factors preventing fair, effective, and secure elections in America, featuring Ion Sancho, who served 28 years as supervisor of elections of Leon County, Florida, elected in November 1988. Sancho was sensitized to problems in elections where 5,000 voters were disenfranchised in a 1986 state and local primary election due to the misprogramming of the voting machines. Sancho was candidate in that election and since then has dedicated his professional career to properly administering elections in Leon County, working for fair, accessible, and verifiable elections nationwide. Concerned by voting machine security, supervisor Sancho sanctioned a number of red team attacks on his voting system in the spring and summer of 2005, captured in HBO's 2007 Emmy-nominated documentary, Hacking Democracy, showing how the system could be hacked to alter the outcome of any election without being detected unless the paper ballots themselves were audited. Ion Sancho retired after the 2016 presidential election. He has remained active in elections field, appearing as an expert witness in election cases and working with public and private entities, heightening awareness to the threat of foreign intrusion to the American voting process, particularly the critical need for audits. So please welcome Ion Sancho. I'm a wanderer too, so I'm going to use this. Someone killed the public screen and I was glad to listen to the presentation by Amer McReynolds because when I talk to jurisdictions and activists around the country, Colorado is one of the states that I point to that are doing it right. And that's a rarity because they, I come out of a completely different environment, completely different environment. Richard Hason, I think is the best writer right now in terms of election issues on the internet, wrote a book called The Voting Wars. I'm a warrior in that war, and I've got the scars to prove it. As was mentioned, I was a third-year law student, Florida State College of Law, and I wanted to implement environmental regulations in 1986 that the Florida legislature had passed. I decided to do that to run for my local county commission. And something happened that election that completely changed my entire professional career and my life. And that was the local election official, misprogrammed the voting machines, lever voting machines, which were invented in the 1880s by the way, and many jurisdictions in the country were using lever voting machines in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, it wasn't until the 2000s Florida election, which I'll get into in a little bit, that in fact the lever voting machines were barred. And what I found out after having this veil of the assumption that every time I had voted, that vote would count the way I had cast them, was the fact that I couldn't trust what was going on in elections anymore, and that I sued the supervisor of elections office in Leon County, trying to have that election set aside. When 5,000 people are forced away from the polls and unable to vote, I thought, was it no brainer? You got to have a new election? Well, the judge told me after a three-day trial, you got to show me a precedent for this. Well, an election with 5,000 people turned away from the polls had never happened before in the state of Florida. I couldn't show the judge precedent. So Judge Hall looked at me on the final day of the trial and he said, Mr. Sancho, you don't have a legal remedy. Your own remedy is political. So as soon as I graduated from law school, I ran for and captured the position of the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office.  I don't. I've been a fighter my entire life. I was a Puerto Rican growing up in a white suburban neighborhood. That is a whole other subject. So I started in the office of Supervisor of Elections in Columbus, Ohio. And the very first thing that I found was, well, okay, I've got about 150,000 voters and we had about six employees in the office. Wow, how does this work? Well, one of the things that I immediately discovered is that the local election agency in every jurisdiction is the least important governmental agency in that jurisdiction. You've got fire departments, emergency services, water, power, utilities, all of those rate higher than elections which most local officials and citizens believe only happens every couple or every four years. You can do it okay. You don't need any money. And we didn't get any money. And that's the case in terms of most jurisdictions in the United States of America. They don't have the resources, so they're resource restricted right off the bat. Secondly, I found out is they're overly dependent upon the vendor. When I started, and again I mentioned we use lever voting machines, and off the bat, I wanted to get rid of those because interestingly enough, a lever voting machine has a similarity to a touchscreen or a DRE, Direct Recording Electronic. They are verb accumulators. It is impossible to do a recount on a lever voting machine or a touchscreen voting machine. It's impossible. They aggregate the numbers. If you ask a touchscreen to do the recount, it'll give you the exact same number that it gave at the outset. And you cannot break down the individual votes that make up that number. It's impossible. So I started going around to the trade shows where the vendors always had operations. And they made every kind of promise. They promised the moon. But I tried voting on these systems. I couldn't figure them out. It reminded me the first time that I tried to use a microwave oven. I couldn't figure it out because no one had taught me how to use it. And an old twist knob, it was 1975. It was the size of a small oven. But again, it was not user friendly. As Amber McReynel said, it was clearly not voter centric. It was basically what the manufacturer could cobble together. I went to every trade show in the country. I went to every organizations to go to other trade shows. The election center, IACREOT. These are organizations that bring election officials together. And I found out something else. Election officials are very risk-aversive. They believe that no press is good press. In fact, they don't like the press at all because the press finds out their problems. They find stories about great turnout, no errors. The press writes stories about when there are problems in elections. When something melts down. So election officials like to hide from the media. They don't like to be open to the media. And this is the second time I've been to the state of Nevada. The first time is when I went to an election center meeting in Reno. It was a new supervisor of elections. I went to this election center meeting in Reno, Nevada. And there was only one other Florida person there. It was the individual in charge of the legislation committee for our state. And she took me out to lunch.  If you play along with our organization, we'll advance you in our organization. And I looked at her and said, well, it depends. What are your priorities? What do you want to do? My job and the reason that I ran was because I was experienced in an election that was a complete meltdown by an incompetent supervisor of elections who didn't properly administer his staff. And my goal running for this office was to fix that. That's my number one priority. And whatever that leads me, that's where I have to go. And I'm not going to support the association just because it's the association. Well, that was the end of my leadership opportunities in the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. When we had the issue of the very first major political issue that I was involved with was called the National Voter Registration Act. More commonly known as Motor Voter, a concept that was started in the west of the United States, Colorado, Washington, those states that actually are concerned about voters voting. And I will tell you that I found that Florida officials and many election officials really didn't have much concern about voters.  They make mistakes. They make our jobs complicated. That's what I was hearing from election conferences. And this infuriated me. This really did. And it kind of pushed me in directions that I... If I think back on it, it wasn't because I planned to do it. It was because I knew these people didn't have the interest of the citizens at heart. They didn't. They had their careers at heart. They wanted to be safe. And they were clearly over dependent on vendors who really didn't even know the products they were marketing. Let me give you an example of that. Following the meltdown in 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act with appropriations up to $3 billion, they said. That enticed the largest ATM company in the world, Deebold, to get in elections. There's free money here. Let's get into that business even though they had not a clue. Not a clue about elections. They purchased an elections company, Global Election Company. They bought it, lock, stock and barrel. And then they started marketing their machines. Well, there was all kinds of disquieting pieces of information coming out from around different parts of the country and from Europe. In 2004, I was approached by two journalists from Great Britain who said that the Deebold machines that had been used in elections in Great Britain had weird results. They didn't trust them. And so they came to me knowing that I was kind of a black sheep to some degree and interested in technology. And they said, Mr. Sancho, we would like to test your voting machines to see if in fact we could steal elections on them. And I will tell you that my staff was outraged. My technical staff said, it's crazy, you can't do that. But I will tell you that having had the experience that I did in 1986 and 2000 when I watched how the state cooked the books in the elections of that year, I adopted the slogan of X-Files, which is trust no one. I even went to an elections conference in North Carolina and I found an X-Files t-shirt and I bought it and I would wear it to elections conferences, trust no one. And so when I was challenged by these journalists saying, we think the system can be hacked and steal elections. The system that has been used in many jurisdictions, Florida, Ohio, all across the country, the system was used. My decision was, I want to find out. I want to know if my system can be hacked and steal elections. So again, we engendered the first series of red team attacks in the history of the United States on a voting system without the permission of the vendor. And by the way, after my tests were done and the controversies, all of the voting machine manufacturers changed their contracts to prohibit election officials from doing this. It is illegal to do this what I did in 2005. But this is before the vendors got wind of what people could do. And so the tests were showing that what the default company had told me that every action that you did on this optical scanner would be notated in a log. It would be there. No one can manipulate this machine, touch this machine without being recorded in a log so you could find out if your machines were manipulated. Well, I soon found out that it was complete falsehood. One researcher was able to penetrate, go completely around every safeguard in the device because the device was loaded with software that allowed you to go through the software and come in through Microsoft and bypass every safeguard that the default company thought existed in their equipment. And on our first tests, the voting machine, when it was turned on, normally produces a zero total tape showing to the election administrators, the poll workers, that in fact, there are no votes on the machine. Zeroes come across everywhere. Except after this researcher penetrated the machine, the paper tape said this, is this real or is this Memorex? That is what my vote tabulation tape produced with no evidence that it had been tampered with. Hari Hirsti was one of the attackers. He wanted to go directly and do a full-blown test on the server, essentially creating an election, a real election and manipulate it and see if he could steal it. He was confused because in fact the server is in fact secure. Irrespective of what they've shown me on the memory cards and on the scanners, I in good conscious could not let them have access to the server because again, I didn't trust them either. But once I produced these partial results of the red team attack, the default corporation told me, we are not selling you the necessary upgrades for you to be able to use your voting machines anymore. They're cooked. Well, I wasn't too worried about that because the other two voting machine vendors in the state of Florida had been pursuing me for years because Leon County under my leadership had this reputation of being on the cutting edge of technology. After all, we had brought OpticalScan precinct-based voting, a system which really I thought was the most secure at the time. And I also baited the first Windows voter registration system in the state of Florida, a company called VR Systems, which the Russians penetrated in 2000 and I believe 2016 as the reports from the intercept and the mall report indicate. So they... I had a $2 million contract with ESNS. They were willing to take me on as a client. We had signed the contract. I had it in black and white. And over the Christmas holiday of 2005, I got a call from the president of ESNS. Mr. Sancho, I'm concerned about this test that you did on the D-bow voting machine. A competitor, a direct competitor. And at the end of that conversation, you told me we're going to refuse to sell any voting equipment to you. You will not buy any ESNS equipment from us. Okay, there's one other. It's the Sequoia system. Talk to Mr. Kramer, representative from Sequoia and Florida. Yeah, we'll sell you the machines. Then I get a call with him within a week. We can't sell you any voting machines, Mr. Sancho. We can't sell you any voting machines at all. So there's a federal law that goes into effect on January 1st of 2006 under the Help America Vote Act. You had to have machines able to do X, Y, and Z. Well, all of a sudden, my machines couldn't meet the state standard or the federal standard. Why? Because I was essentially being blacklisted by the only three certified vendors allowed to sell voting equipment in the state of Florida. That was pretty, that was worrying to me now. I hired a lawyer who was the head of the Miami-Dade Election Coalition. The state didn't know she was a lawyer, which much to their chagrin because the state began hearings to have me removed from office for failing to provide the legal equipment necessary to run elections. Even though the reason I didn't have the equipment was because I'd been blacklisted by the voting machine vendors in the state of Florida. So the story gets even weirder. ABC News picked up the story. They were the first national entity to pick up the story. And they put me on national radio, an ABC national radio on one of their Sunday programs. And that went really great until I got a call from the reporter who put me on the radio from ABC. And said, you need to talk to our counsel. He has to talk to you. And the counsel gets on the telephone and says, Mr. Sancho, we can't cover this story anymore. We can't report on it. I'm sorry, but we can't talk about your story anymore on ABC. Okay. What's going on here? What is really going on here? And my attorney found out that the White House was pressuring entities to have me fired. And they tracked it to Harriet Myers, the general counsel for George Bush in the White House. He was trying to have me removed from office. Well, this is really a strange story. Why am the White House interested in this? Except that you have to realize that Ohio used those voting machines as well as Florida. So I thought, frankly, that I'd almost run out of my range of options. And I actually had convinced myself, had conversations with my family that I might be forced out of the job. But that it was okay. I had a law degree. I was intelligent. I could provide for the family. And then on Valentine's Day, I get a call from some individuals that wanted me to fly to San Francisco. They said they had something that I had to see. And I was actually at an elections conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So I jumped on a plane in Albuquerque and I flew to San Francisco, where I met a group of people who were very interested in elections. They had an organization called the Electronic Verification Network, EVN. And members of that group that were on a technical advisory panel advising the Secretary of State in California about election issues had independently taken my tests from my description on the Internet that indicated this flaw. They found the flaw that we found, the so-called heresy hack. Not only was that existent, there were 16 other vulnerabilities that the technical counsel found with this equipment being used all across the United States. They called the Florida Secretary of State's office. Officials flew to California. They came back. The state stomped their attack on me. No apologies, nothing. They did put out in a technical advisory saying in every county in the state of Florida one person cannot program these voting machines. You need multiple individuals, at least two have to program these voting machines. Why? Because one person doing it alone could steal the election. At that point, Deebold, who had been really trying to remove me from office, to the degree they sent their general counsel to the Leon County City Commission, or County Commission, and said independently of me I didn't know they were in town, they met with the staff of the Leon County Commission and said if you remove Mr. Sancho from office we will sell you the needed software to do your voting machines. And the county attorney laughed at them. Mr. Sancho is a duly elected official, a constitutional officer. We cannot remove Mr. Sancho from office. Which was probably not the answer that Deebold wanted to hear. So the upshot was that once the verification of the flaw was identified they basically had to sell me the equipment. Because one other thing happened. The Attorney General of Florida issued an antitrust subpoena to the three companies demanding all emails, telephonic communication that had my name in it in discussions among themselves with the three voting companies. And with that subpoena the voting company sold me the patches to be able to continue to do elections in 2006. We did that 2006 election and then what we ended up finding was jurisdictions all over the country were dropping the Deebold voting system like a hot potato. In fact, business got so bad they had to change their name. They changed their name to the premier voting company. And that didn't help because we opened the door to a whole series of tests that were done in the Midwest, East, and essentially the Deebold optical scan equipment simply would not meet basic tests on the security issue. And so that company was forced out of business. And what they did try to do is they tried to do a sweetheart deal and sell all of their equipment to ESNS which would have created one company controlling 80% of the voting market in the United States. They were forced to join a group of individuals to bring an antitrust case against ESNS. And with the help of Senator Schumer the Justice Department antitrust division we were able to force ESNS to divest itself of that equipment. It had to go to the second largest company so there would be competition and that was Dominion. That was at an elections conference listening to Kathy Rogers who was vice president of ESNS and by the way before Kathy Rogers was the vice president of ESNS she was the director of elections for the state of Georgia. And this illustrates another problem this revolving door. You do a good job selling their products for them and they'll pay you. They'll put you in positions of power. And I've seen that over and over and over again. For example ESNS is a very intelligent company when after the 2000 election Florida independently decided to get rid of all of its touch screen lever voting machines and central count optical scan systems they hired the former secretary of state and chief of elections in the state of Florida Sandra Mortham to be their lobbyist. Sandra Mortham had also at one time been the running mate of Governor Jim Bush. Sandra Mortham was also the chairman of the Republican campaign committee in charge of raising funds for all the Republican legislative candidates in the state of Florida. So they picked somebody with political clout they picked somebody with knowledge and when the state of Florida decided to adopt systems they adopted two kinds of systems you could have a touch screen paperless system or you could have a precinct-based optical scan system both were available and they even asked me did I have any objections to the touch screen and at that point I had no evidence so I said I don't have any I don't have any information to be able to challenge your decision today I can challenge that decision now but then I couldn't but one thing I want to talk about in terms of complimenting Colorado Colorado and Utah come from states where the voting wars is not very hot Florida Georgia, Tennessee, Texas the voting wars are very very very hot in those states election officials were ducking for cover wherever they could because the laws that were being passed were not asked by election officials and in fact if you look at a lot of the laws that were passed during that decade one of the things that you'll find unique to all of them is the recommendations for these new laws did not come from those state associations of election officials they came from the party just as when we found out in 2010 when I was meeting with Kurt Browning the secretary of state and Governor Rick Scott introduced a bill banning Sunday voting in early voting the most popular day of early voting in the state of Florida and let me have to give you some statistics why they did this it seems that in the 2008 general election the one that President Obama won 56% of all of African-American votes were cast not on election day not by mail ballots they voted in early voting African-Americans took to early voting like ducks to water in the state of Florida because one they were concentrated in the urban areas and urban areas had the most difficult time processing the large number of voters coming through and one of the things that you'll see in many states is they have laws that are actually biased in favor of rural jurisdictions versus urban jurisdictions for example with mail ballots there was a law in the state of Florida that said if a voter has made an error on a mail ballot the supervisor of elections shall notify that voter to have that fixed well in the rural jurisdictions and I've talked to my peers there they would actually go door to door they would deliver the ballot to the voter and have them fix it no urban election official could do that impossible impossible so again what I saw over and over and over again is that partisan politics was a critical element to what is going on and I know you've heard people say well I don't get into the politics of it well in Florida you had to you had to and what you find is that what I call regulatory capture has occurred in the United States by election officials they actually have to depend upon the vendors this puts them in the position of defending and changing the laws to benefit the voting machine companies because that's who they're using they've got to trust them that's their mentality so for example in this past legislative session when ESNS only has a ballot marking device as it's disability voting that violated the state of Florida's optical scan laws that were passed in 2002 and ESNS had the election officials their clients contact the legislative members on the committee and they changed the definition of what an optical scan ballot now is in the state of Florida not only did they change it to allow for ballots marked by BMDs they put in the statute that BMD ballots were voter verifiable it's in the statute well BMD ballots are not voter verifiable unless you can read QR code or barcode which you can too so again these are some of the things from the underside of being an election official involved with serious voter wars and realizing that at the state level and in many local jurisdictions elections are not voter centric they're not voter centric so with that I'm going to stop my presentation


is that of the young learners and we'll take that as being anywhere between the age of 2. There are English classes for children age 2 onwards, up to perhaps the age of 16. One thing about young learners is that they tend usually at least to be self-motivated and enthusiastic and they can keep up their self-esteem through a number of different things. So, try to bear in mind when you're teaching young learners that you want to constantly praise them. When their self-esteem is high, they're much more likely to learn in an effective way. Do a lot of repetition, again in the form of verbal drills, singing songs and all those sorts of activities. Make sure that your speech is slow and simple. There is little point with our younger learners in using language that they don't even know in their own native language. So try to keep your language as simple as possible. Always try whenever possible to reference the individual person. So rather than talking to them as a whole group when something has not gone right, try to reference the individual. You need to be aware that as young learners they're going to have a very short attention span and therefore you need to prepare for that. So you need a lot of activities prepared because they will have a very short attention span. Perhaps most important of all, particularly for young learners, is to keep it fun.