I'm going to call the order of this September 23rd meeting of the Montpelier Planning Commission. First thing we do is approval of the agenda. I don't think we'll be, because we don't have quorum, we can't technically do any of the official voting items. That's absolutely right. So this is going to end up being a work meeting even if we got, so we have a fourth member, which actually means we have quorum. We do and we don't have a quorum, so in that case we will approve the agenda. Finally we can do some work. We're official now. I do have to leave early. Hopefully. 645. Front-load the approving. 645? Yeah. Okay. I think it's possible we'll all get out. There's going to be a lot of updates in things this meeting. Okay. Not a lot of action. Hopefully. So, okay, so everyone have a chance to take a look at the agenda? Do we have a motion to approve? So moved. Okay. Bye, Erin. Can I speak in? Mm-hmm. Second by Marcella. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? Okay. The agenda is approved. Next item is comments from the chair. The only thing I have to say is that this Wednesday at the city council meeting, there will be the CVRPC appointment. I've sent a letter to the mayor and city council about that. And they know that Marcella is our nominee, our chosen nominee. So should expect that to move along. And I think Mike also had a couple of updates. Yeah. So this Wednesday is also the zoning fixes that we approved a while back. Those are in their final hearing and hopefully adoption on Wednesday. So. Okay. Do you, okay, so I'll be out of town to... I don't expect anything. It's been the most remarkable set of zoning hearings. They probably had four meetings, just meetings before they warned it and they had no opposition and we had the first public hearing and nobody came out. So we're confident that it's been pretty quiet. So hopefully this just finishes going through. They're mostly zoning fixes. So they really should be mostly non-controversial anyways. Hopefully that goes through. The second announcement this afternoon, the downtown board approved our growth center renewal. So that is something that was approved in 2009. So in addition to a designated downtown, you get a growth center. You can have a growth center. We're one of six in the state. And so hours, every five years we have to go through a renewal process and today we went up and did hours and got approved, which is good. And they also approved some addition. There's a request to add Crestview into the growth center, which is up behind Redstone. Terrace Street, between Terrace Street and State Street, there's a piece of land that's mostly woods and it had been in the growth center and then was removed from the growth center and we asked them to put it back in and they did. So that was a request that had been outstanding for a year and a half. And so it was good. We've got that put behind us as well. So we didn't add in further down Barry Street, though, which is kind of also a place where things are better. Barry Street is already in, out to Sabin's pasture. Including Sabin's? Including Sabin's. Okay. That's different than the designated downtown, right, the growth center. Correct. The designated downtown is the core and everything builds off of that. So if you were to do neighborhood designation, do an NDA or do a growth center or do a new town center, there's other programs, but they would all attach to the outside of a designated downtown. What does the growth center renewal mean to us? It's just another, it's another program, another set of tools. The purpose of it is that the city commits to trying to have 50% of the future housing and 50% of the future job growth to happen within the growth center in exchange for making that growth center. So we want 50% of our activity to happen within what is 16% of our town. So we want to have everything in that focused area. In exchange, the state makes a number of things, cuts down on Act 250, you get a couple other bonuses and benefits, so there are a few other pieces that go in there. That's kind of the reward for going through and helping the state accomplish its goals. It used to be, initially, you had to have a growth center in order to qualify for tax increment financing. So that was initially why we did it in 2009 before I was here, but that was the impetus of it. To have a growth center, we can get TIF, and so nowadays you can get a TIF without growth center. It's just a little bit harder, but you can do it. But that was the reasoning behind it, one of the benefits being kind of an easier road to get the TIF, but it sets you up for some other pieces, but that's kind of the big picture of the growth center. So that got approved, which is good. It's been working well for us. We've been getting about 85% to 90% of our residential growth has been within the growth center, and almost 100% of the new businesses have, so it's been working out pretty well over the past five or ten years, so. What residential growth has there been in the last five years? Oh, I guess, down-street projects? You've got mostly down-street projects. There have been a couple of private smaller projects. Steve Rivlin had one over there, a couple of smaller infill projects that people have done. Not as much as we would like, but it's still better than seeing a lot of other communities that would have a much stronger set of subdivisions going on out in the rural districts, and we haven't had that. So those were the two, probably the bigger things that are going on right now. I know this isn't exactly in our purview, but I'm curious, what's the update on the court case with the garage? I just asked about that periodically. That's a good question, a good question. So there was the project was approved locally, and the Act 250 was approved. And both of those were appealed to environmental court, not sure if they've been combined yet, but they're being heard by the same judge, I think. There were a set of, a lot of legal maneuvering, and we submitted a motion to dismiss based on a set of things that's kind of been the big push to kind of go and see whether we could get a large portion of it dismissed, mostly on the grounds that the DRB really doesn't have a lot of authority, and therefore you can't be appealing things that the DRB doesn't have authority over. And that's just going to come down to the determination by the judge. I think it's a good case, but I'm biased. We wrote the decision, so we wrote the local decision. We are waiting, it was supposed to get a decision in August to September. They filed some counter motions to try to draw that out. So I'm still hoping to hear something in October. So if it's, you're trying to dismiss some things, but not everything, there's no chance that this will resolve it? It would to the most part. Without getting too much into the weeds, there's an acknowledgement that the DRB has the right to regulate landscaping. So therefore of all this list of things that they think that the DRB didn't do correctly, we think there's like one or two that, you know, and that those haven't been points of contention. And if there is a point of contention, then the judge could easily make a case on, you know, if we're holding up a large project, but for how many trees we need, then we can make a much quicker decision. So that's really, I think, where that's coming down to. But it's a much more complicated case than I can summarize. But that's a little bit where it is, is there's the appeal. We made a motion, they came back with a response to the motion and it's now in the hands of the judge waiting for a hearing that I don't know when the date is and a decision hopefully. Okay, so for item three, item four is general business, comments from the public. We have one member of the public here. Is there something that you would like to say to the Planning Commission? Hi. Hi. I'm Lisa Maxwell. I'm the new Executive Director. So here this week, I officially am listening. Excellent, excellent. Well, welcome to the meeting, Lisa. Thank you. Okay, well, we'll move along then. And we'll look at the minutes from September 9th. So everyone can take a look at those. Yeah. It is what happens. I mean, this isn't a correction, but just for the record in the future, she doesn't need to refer to me as acting chair. I think I was actually made of the chair. Yes, at that point you are now the chair. Yeah. And I, in this discussion of the boundary, since the current boundary plus the parts of the designated downtown that are not included, these are required. But the current boundary isn't required. It's just the designated downtown that's required. Right? Yeah, I think it's a little bit confusing. Yeah, just the wording. These are required. I think just applies to plus the parts of the designated downtown that are currently included, which includes not part of Berry Street and a little around the area. Yeah, we did. So yeah, we definitely made a decision on the college area. So we should remove that from the minutes. All right. Do you want to just add that to the paragraph above and say the college area was also discussed? Changes to the college boundary. Recorded upon the minutes, but by the way, it's it. I think we should, it should just try to be vague here because we're not trying to know. This isn't. Yeah. Sure. Changes to the college boundary. We're discussed. We're discussed. Maybe can we just change the first sentence there to say the parts of the designated downtown that are not currently included. These are required. Let's see. How about made changes to the boundary to include all portions of the downtown district. Designated downtown. Yeah. We don't need these. Just catch what Aaron said, Mike. Take out these are required and hit me one more time with that. I would just say the current boundaries were changed to include all of the downtown designated downtown designated downtown. Yeah. And then I would say there's a discussion to remove four parcels from the district. And there's a list East Main Street. Yeah. St. Paul. And a small section is through the street. All right. So we don't need this anything about the small part of Barry Street and Miles Court. Yeah. I don't think we. All right. Yep. I can make those changes. And it says cemented. I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. I guess so. Sounds like a motion. For approval. We have a second. Sure. Okay. Okay. Those in favor of amending the minutes as indicated. All right. Those opposed. Okay. That's great. Next item is related. We discussed next steps for design review proposal on the map. So first thing is. Did it all make sense to you, Mike? Yeah. You got the map. Yep. I've got the map. We need it. We need it. I've got it. I think that that's. It made the best. Slice that we've recorded what we discussed. Yep. You could put it into words, but it's. No. Much more technical than the map. No. The map makes sense. Because it did pretty much what we said we were going to do to make the parcels follow zoning districts or neighborhoods. I think stat we were a little surprised when we saw it that that national life was still in. I guess it was just an observation. But a lot of our discussions around the idea that it could be subdivided and that you could have commercial development go in. So it's kind of a looking forward kind of thing to keep it in. Yep. But no, that absolutely makes sense based on the neighborhoods we drew. That would make a lot of sense. I think we also focused on our discussion on it's a gateway. So there was sort of had some plus the. The regs. The regs that we're looking at includes a separate section on the western gateway. Of course, I think they just left it and we said it was. Because it was there. So it was there. So maybe a little back and forth. I mean, it's something we can visit going forward. But it certainly is one that provides a reasonable rational basis that we can take to the public. The issue we've had is that our design review doesn't have a rational basis. So at least this has a basis. And I guess the next step then is what do we want to try to do with this from the standpoint of public input? Do we want to go to council? Do we want to warn some kind of public input? How would we want to try to get? I think we did anticipate a hearing just for this. We could do one of our own, one of these meetings for it. So it doesn't take extra time. What do you guys think? Yeah, that sounds probably the most efficient just because we can then kind of tailor our, we can make any changes to the map based on that. And when we do take it to city council, we've got a better basis for our recommendation. I think in the long run, if anything, if we didn't have a hearing and there ended up being pushed back later, that would extend the process. But if we have it now, the long run it'll shorten. City council can give whatever process they see fit to it. Yeah, eventually we're going to have to have the formal public hearings. I don't think this would be a formal public hearing at this point. We would just be putting out to get some general comments on it to start with. And then because we've got both the proposal and the map. So we're all going to have to really understand stuff and make sure the planning commission or the historic preservation commission is ready because we're going to have to do outreach to the community and really understand what it means and get letters to the bridge and to the Times Argus so people can get a sense of what it is we're changing and what it is we're changing to. Because that always makes or breaks these types of proposals. I don't think the map is making relatively modest changes. I don't think the map will be an issue. We aren't looking to make big inclusions like we did in 2015-16. We talked about really having a design review that went all the way up to College Street where you're including a lot more properties. So what was our decision last time? I think we were talking about October. But I don't know if we're... I think October would be good. Just get this out of the way so we can move on to the city plan. Think about like the last meeting in October. Sounds good. And before that what you were saying we need to coordinate with the Historic Preservation Commission because they help answer questions. Yeah. They'll be here for that. They're the second. Yeah, we might want to put them on the on our next agenda. So the first October meeting we have a coordination meeting with them. It would be nice to get the regs back from them so that the regs are sort of formally in our position. You're actually waiting on Meredith and I to go through them which both of us have been in and out on vacation. So we scheduled some time this week to work on it. Okay. It will be possible for by the end of our second October meeting for Historic Preservation to have their regs send back to us? Yeah. Well I don't think, I think it'll just be a matter of Meredith and I having something together. We should have something in advance though. So if we're going to do that on, if we're going to meet on the second meeting to talk about the proposal we should warn the meeting, the public meeting because we should have it out for the public to view and ask questions. And so we would move that to the 11. So the sense of what you're saying is Historic Preservation doesn't really have any feedback for us from what we did last. I think it was mostly Meredith and I were going to go through but I can, I can work with Meredith to get the changes done and Historic Preservation is meeting. I keep looking for the calendar that's not there anymore. The second, second Tuesday of October maybe. So, oh it reminds me the second Monday is a holiday. The 14th. The 14th is a holiday. So I'd love to decide what we're doing. Columbus Day. Columbus Day. I just know that, I don't remember that. So yeah, let me see what we've got because they'll probably be meeting on the Tuesday and I can see what their timing is on, on, you know, we'll make changes, we'll get it back to them, see if they have any thoughts on what Meredith and I put together. And then meet back with you with the planning commission for the second meeting in October. And then we'll, we'll warn the public input for the early November instead. Does that make sense? If, if you want input from HPC, they're not meeting any more times in September so it would have to be their October meeting and they usually meet the day after we do. I'm okay personally with getting the HPC feedback and having the public hearing at the same time. Yeah, I can synthesize that stuff. Okay. All right, then I will try to coordinate for the last meeting in October for our hearing on design review. And I'll try to see if I can get some input from them on making some outreach in support of their proposal because I'm going to need their help to digest all the details of it and how they expect it to work. And if that goes relatively well then we can decide whether or not we want to move forward on adopting it or if we're waiting for guidelines or if they're comfortable adopting them and moving forward with just the regulations and not the guidelines in place yet. That was what their next step was going to be. Oh yeah, writing the guidelines. They're going to write a guideline booklet. Yeah, it seems to me that the guidelines shouldn't be held up by the guidelines.   But if the DRC Design Review Committee is comfortable implementing these rules without guidebooks, they don't really use the current guidebooks very much anymore because they were written in 1976. So they pretty much make determinations based on the letter of the regulations anyways. Okay, I will work with Meredith on that. That's great. So yeah, what might end up happening is maybe the November follow-up meeting is when we maybe figure it out and vote on something. But we'll get all of the feedback and information at that October hearing. And we have time to post for the public. Yeah, it's, as I said, I don't expect this to be a formal adoption hearing. I'm not treating it like that. I figure this is just a public information. And if we get positive input, then we can move forward to adopting it and going through the formal process. Yeah, we've been thinking of this as like a preliminary. Yeah, just, you know, know what things we've got that look right, what things do people think need to get changed. Okay, that's great. So we'll move on to the next item, which is, Mike is going to give us the big update on what the staff's been working on for the implementation plans. And you have an example from the Historic Preservation Housing for implementation plans for the city plan. Well, I had some strike-out versions that I got. And this is, this was based off of the template that John created, right? Or a heavily modified version? This is actually based on, there was a model that I had created. This is Historic. So Historic has already reviewed and approved their housing has had theirs for a while. I can hand it out. But they wanted to have one more meeting. So they asked me to come back. I've got an extra Historic. These are kind of first drafts for these first sections of the city plan we're working on. We're very early in the process of redoing the city plan. So this is some of the first feedback we've gotten. Look, familiar compared to the economic development one? Yes. So, it's not based on what John put in. It's actually, if you remember, I had done some implementation outlines of how we could do it. And we had the example of the Butterfly Woods Rainbows and Unicorns and, you know, how things went. Just a way to get everyone thinking about it. And then, you know, we were looking, when you do the implementation, you've got to have your vision. What is it we're trying to do? And then break that vision into goals that are steps. And then the strategies, we really want to start forcing into different, into different boxes. Are we suggesting a policy change? What are our values? How do we spend our money? Is it a regulation? You know, do we need to regulate something? And if it does, then it has to meet certain rules. And then is it a project? One Taylor Street's a project? We do, it's something you do once. You don't build many One Taylor Streets. You only build one. So some goals you're going to accomplish by doing projects. Others are programs. Things you do over and over again. Tax stabilization. First time home buyer programs. How can we, what's our problem and how are we going to fix it? We need to get, actually in the case of the first time home buyer program, it was how do we get more kids in the schools? We get kids, we get funding from the state based on the number of kids in schools. So how do we get more kids in schools? Well it's an expensive town to move here. How can we get young families to move here being as expensive? So we have a first time home buyer program, which feels all warm and fuzzy. The nuts and bolts bidder actually goes back to the fact that we just wanted to get more kids in schools so we could get more funding to support our schools. And it works. And the fact that we give $10,000 to buy a house and we get $17,000 per child that goes to school. So it kind of pays for itself relatively quickly. So that was the kind of impetus behind it. But it is still a feel good thing. We do want to work on it for affordability reasons. But that's the program side. So you have just different boxes that we try to fit things in. And the hope is that when you read it backwards or when you read it forwards that you'd be able to go and say all right, here's our goal. If we do our strategies, we accomplish our goal. And let's make sure that when we did these we also looked back at all the things that we already do. Because in some cases, maybe we were doing things that are either counter productive or not really useful at all. So we have a housing preservation grant program that's existed for 10 or 20 years and it actually has a lot of money in it. But it wasn't doing any good because the program wasn't really set up to be successful. So how could we repurpose the money that's in that fund to better achieve the goals of what we wanted to do? So that was one of the things that Housing Committee was working on was how could we take that revolving loan fund? Basically it was a revolving loan fund that said we can only give money to people who couldn't afford to pay us back. Which is kind of the reason for being a revolving loan fund if I'm intentionally giving it to people who can't pay me back. You have to first not get qualified for a loan and then we'll give you the money. So it wasn't the best structured program so we found a better program that would help us to be able to support other organizations that fund similar programs. So it's a little bit easier for us to go through and say hey we'll match your grant that you offer for low income people to fix up their house. If Capstone has a program then we don't have to do the administration. We have to know that Capstone has qualified applicant X for a grant. We can match that grant to help that President Amant Piliar rather than try to go around figuring out how to run a program on our own. So a lot of these that's what they're doing. What are we doing that isn't working or is counterproductive and how can we do it better. And so that's what we did with the housing program was to really and they have a lot of goals. So housing is a more complex topic than say historic and cultural resources where they have I believe a single, yeah they have a single aspiration whereas housing had four aspirations. Historic and cultural resources has just one and I worked with them, gave them a number of options. You could do it this way you could do it that way and they chose their aspiration then the goals break that aspiration into a number of bite sized pieces and then strategies to accomplish the goal. So that was how we worked with this one and that worked the same for the housing and as I mentioned I have a draft for economic development that we've just Lisa and I have just started to work on and we'll work on more when she gets here so that way we've got an economic development plan. I've started utilities and facilities. I have started a bunch on energy. The energy plan we're putting in a municipal planning grant to really take the energy plan to another level. By the way, does the energy I'm assuming so but does the energy committee know about the event that the Regional Planning Commission is putting on the energy summit? Yes, I believe we've forwarded those to Jamie who is going to forward them on but I can try to make sure we get those out. I think there's also a transportation forum that I sent to Kevin our community development specialist who works with the transportation committee to make sure they've got that sent out to them as well. Okay. And yeah, and we worked with I was working with the Regional Planning Commission on their interests and doing parts of the energy plan which they are interested in helping out with because they have the expertise in doing what is the enhanced energy analysis which is a requirement in order to provide comment to the public utility commission. So I always remember these by their acumen PUC so in order to do that you have to have an energy plan that meets a certain level and has a certain number of analysis so they're going to help us with that through the municipal planning grant hopefully. But this was as I said this is one my goal was to work with the different committees start to get these implementation strategies together and then start boxing them up and getting to you guys as they approve them so as I said historic is here it's yours you guys can start reviewing it it may be easier to review in context with other ones housing hopefully will be approved next month and so on and I'm just going to keep trying to crank these things out. So when you say you're working on utilities and facilities are you working on that or is there a committee? I'm working on what I do is I put together an analysis and I start to frame things out so I don't necessarily write it out for them but I put together a note to go through and say you know this this is what we're trying to do I explain to them I do the butterflies and rainbows thing with them and explain to them how we're trying to do this and then I start to put some things out to say this is some things you do already are there things other things you could be doing that you're interested in doing other things we should be studying. No I guess my question was more are there sections of the city plan that don't correlate to a committee? Yeah utilities does not have a committee. So you're just working on something? I would be working on that with the public works department. Okay. And actually which surprises me a little bit public safety does not have a committee. Public committees we don't have a public safety committee so that one will be another one that I'll probably work with the chiefs on and then take the city council or get some input on what our policies and our goals are with respect to public safety. But we do have a community services committee transportation and land use is you guys. So that would be the other one as we look to future agenda items we started talking about it and I think that was what John had some information on using a little bit of that maintain evolve transform looking at those maps. What do we want to what do we want to see stay what do we want to see things change and I think what we would want to try to do is to start thinking about that in context of the land use because you guys are going to be the ones to pull that together and we can see and you know we're going to have our chance also to modify the sections as they come in. Yeah and everybody's made aware of that. You know I've told them it's not just so it's not just this is not the housing committees plan it is the city's housing plan. So in some cases there are things in here that they may not specifically do but they're aware of what their role is and then it's explained to them that once it comes here your job is going to be to look at them and see how they relate to each other. Are there things that are missing are the things that are conflicting you know do we have things in the historic plan that conflict with the energy plan those types of conflicts or pieces so I see that as a key role for you guys and once we have the implementation plans then we can go back what I look at is going back to writing the chapters where and I've explained to the committees that you know once we kind of know what our goals and strategies are we can write a plan that's going to help tell the story rather than just have a plan that's full of 500 pages of data and charts and graphs we can actually spend a chunk a thousand words to 1500 words that explains you know why housing is important and what are we looking at and then link to these other plans and if people really want to go you know if somebody's a real housing wonk they can go at the barriers analysis from 2012 and other studies that we can link to but really what's important in the housing plan that the public would read is why housing is important and why we are why our aspiration is what it is you know why is it important why do we you know why is one of our goals to have a healthy housing market well because 90 plus percent of the housing that you're going to live in is going to be from the housing market so while it's important to have subsidized housing and that's going to play an important and key role we also have to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that the market is operating well enough that housing doesn't continue to get unaffordable and that means making sure we have land available for housing development and that's what they get into in their aspiration A so and we try to throw everything we can in here and some of these things may end up falling out in the end because everybody wants to be a part of the tax stabilization program and the city just goes and says no everybody can't get tax stabilizations we're going to save this only for these things in which case even though it's in here it's a proposal this is kind of what they would like knowing that somebody down the line us city council may come in and go and say no that's we're not going to amend our tax stabilization program to support X, Y or Z. This does seem like the best one to me for housing. Oh tax for the tax stabilization. Yeah it's a good one. Yeah it's tough. You can't under state law we can't which I didn't know when I initially wrote this we can only do it for commercial properties so you can do it for commercial housing but you can't do it for so it's to help with the rental market not homeowners. Yeah and technically it's only supposed to be for commercial and industrial I would be interested in kind of drilling into the enabling rules rentals wouldn't be considered commercial as if the rental has to be at least five units I think at five units it becomes a commercial apartment under the tax assessing rules. I haven't personally drilled into the enabling rules so everybody knows we're not a home rule state so we can only do what the state says we can do so if the state says you're allowed to give tax stabilizations for commercial and industrial that's all we can do we can't stabilize a residential property. But if we define commercial apartments as five or more than its commercial property and we can therefore give them a tax stabilization but I haven't read the specific enabling rules to see how flexible the rules are in there but it would be important to see especially with the housing because it's one of these things that lowers the cost if what we're looking at the reason why we don't get more housing built is the cost. It costs more to build than you can sell them for unless you're building really expensive housing so we've got to figure how to bring the cost down so that way developers can see a profit and then they can turn and say well if I can get a return on my investment I'm going to spend a million dollars to build a quad plaques knowing I'm going to get the money back because I can tax stabilize the property for the first four or five years and get revenues. In this case it would be only municipal taxes right? In this case it would only be municipal taxes. Which in my opinion is high so it matters. Yes I think it's like 40% of your tax bill so. Which is higher than just about everywhere else in Vermont. It is the overall tax bill probably is on the higher end. How high the municipal portion is? I guess the municipal portion is because we have more services we have more a higher municipal tax bill. Yeah and our schools are actually I think pretty good staying close to average spending of the municipal part. I'm just pointing that out to say that Montpelier is a good candidate to use tax stabilization as a leverage. No we used them very successfully when I was in Barry it's a you know there's a lot of good programs and so the other thing we've been trying to do with each one of these committees is to try to draw them out of their silos and try to make them think broadly about how you would you know what are all the tools you know that we could bring to bear on accomplishing our goals. If we wanted 150 more housing units you know we always we always point out you know part of my job I'm responsible for trying to get 150 housing units in five years but I'm not going to pick up one hammer I'm not going to pound one nail but I still have to figure out how I'm going to encourage 150 housing units in that same way for economic development. I mean how do you do it when you're not actually hiring how do I get 500 more employees if I'm not going to hire anybody. So I'm thinking one conversation we'll be having is whether 150 in five years is ambitious enough which not to bring my explode pressure up. It seems that we talk about housing a lot as a land use and just you know. That was the number in the EDSP that was put in there and we honestly you know we we had actually thought about having the number higher and then they were they pushed to go with the 150 in five years which would translate to 240 in eight years because our plan is good for a year so. What's the EDSP? Economic Development Strategic Plan. So it was a plan it was developed in 2016. That was intended it created the MDC as the kind of the agent that would move the plan forward. That's MDC? Montpelier Development Court. That's one of the ones they had a number of pillars and a number of objectives including trying to get another hotel in the downtown. And getting a number of housing units built. Those things don't have to match though right I mean that plan is from you know three or four years ago so. It's going to provide input into our yes. Yeah that was the foundation that was built at that time but if we have more aggressive goals. Then you know we we already know we're going to be closing in on 100 units pretty quick just with projects already happening projects yeah 18. Yeah there was 18 there's the 30 for the transit center that's 50 almost 50. We had six from Maple Tree Place there we've got got a couple other projects that have happened smaller ones here and there. So we yeah we definitely want to be to make our aspirational goals something that goes well beyond what we know is definitely going to already happen or most likely going to already happen. Well those keeping in mind those happened after we we adopt the plan in 2016 and in the three years we've we're closing in on 100. These are 100 that are going to meet that original. Yeah to meet the original goal of 150 so yeah we've had people who come in. I know the city manager thrown out numbers like why can't we talk about a thousand new housing units. I think it all comes down to what's the vision what's the goal what are our aspirations and then we start talking about what would it take to get there and are we willing to get there because you know nothing's going to be free. So the bigger the goal the more money we've got to put towards it and how much money is city council and other folks willing to put you know housing is one of many goals having complete streets and building bike lanes and having net zero by 2030 and the net zero community by 2050 each one of those is going to cost money so at a certain point it'll come down to balancing but that's not my job that's I make recommendations and everyone else has the hard job of making the decisions but as where it is right now this is where it is and I think we can certainly once it's in your hands you guys are welcome to make adjustments to that and I don't think the city council would be opposed to having more housing. I think I'm not thinking of using incentives or spending money thinking that demand is very much there and finding out what we can do to allow that demand manifest into housing what do we need to remove from what's stopping people. Yeah I mean certainly if somebody came up and had a proposal had a 10 year proposal for the VCFA and savings pasture parcel and said we're going to build 250 units I'm not going to say what you really should stop at 150 because that's our goal. I think that we just think we need at least this much to start to tip the scale of the market because right now there's nothing less than 1% vacancy rates and houses stay on the market for days and weeks not months so we just need to have more supply out there so that way the price stops going up and up and up and up making things more unaffordable. Maybe 150 won't tip the scale but 150 was our start. So planning to plan what do you think we should do as far as our work on this? Should we start going through the implementation plans one by one or? I would certainly take the time to go through like historic and cultural housing as I said I got one more meeting on them but go through and start reading historic and cultural you know understand what their goals are understand what their their aspiration is and start reading the strategies and this question came up and I should remind everybody the purpose of a lot of the highlighted pieces in these the italics was that when this is done and this is as I said this is trying to not let good get great get in the way of good eventually we would like to have these be hyperlinks so this is going to be a digital plan and that was what John and I had talked a lot about was we didn't want to make another paper plan we'd rather have something that's online that people can really interact with and so if you were you know at the bottom of this one conduct a survey for archaeological sensitive areas and map the resources that's an informational piece but if somebody wanted to know what is that why would we be doing that you could click on that and get more information but if we were to put all the information on that in each one of these suddenly our implementation plan is really big so the idea was just lay out what it is and then if somebody wants it they can click on it and there would be a much bigger description or maybe you hover the mouse over it and it pops up into a pop-up box or something like that that's the tech stuff that John knows that's what you could do. Who's going to write that content? I think that's something that would happen over time because it's a chicken and egg until the plan is adopted it's tough to write because some of these go into multiple let's say zoning the zoning may end up having a large amount of pieces just because the unified development regulations touches on so many chapters but if you were to click on it it would be able to go in and tell you what these things are or designated downtown may relate to a number of things and you can click on it and understand more about the designated downtown program but until this is adopted I can't really reference back to can't do the how it all connects until it gets adopted and then you can go through and do the next level so you're thinking these links aren't going to be part of the plan they're just more of like they won't be extra outside resources yeah they probably won't be active at the time we adopt the plan okay the final piece that would go along with this in my big world dreams of dreams is once the plan is once the we adopt the plan we've got the framework plan it gets adopted I can then start going through and putting together the hyperlinks and the pieces that we can just keep adding in over time to support that and the last piece that I would like to see is something that a lot of other communities around the country are going to which is to do videos and I would love to actually the Montpellier alive hired somebody to do some videos for their stuff and they were really good I guess they were somebody who actually did this type of work in New York City they either retired they came up here and so they did some work for them and they were fantastic and so if we could get somebody who could do the videos their places in Texas and a couple other communities that have done this and they found that visits to their city plan websites 83% of the traffic went through the videos so people weren't reading the transportation plan people were clicking on the transportation plan clicking on the video and then the video has a 10 minute video and what is the transportation plan and what are the plans what are the goals and how are we going to do it and it's a great educational piece but again that's another large step but you can't do videos until you have the adopted plan but I would eventually like to go through and say hey we could adopt this plan in 2020 or 2021 and then look at 2021 and 2022 as opportunities to kind of backfill that with the supporting documentation that would really you know if somebody wants to know historic or economic development or whatever it is you could click on that and have that and that should tightly reflect our 1000 words description you know the written word is obviously different than the spoken video word so they're not going to match exactly but you really want to have a written text that would be in the plan but if you click on the video you'll get a very similar presentation of the of the information. I'm glad to hear you lay out like when we're going to do things because I think previously we've talked about this I feel like we've had like an eating and elephant type problem like well we're doing videos and we're doing this entire plan and we're doing website and we're like it just seemed like it is way too much but it's think about let's concentrate on the plan section by section in the chapters and the written part and then the website links and the videos that's all awesome things that we can work on later they don't have to be and if they don't happen then people just have questions you know what what do you mean archaeological insensitive and they'd have to ask me or ask the historic preservation commission when you wanted to do that why why are you interested in that we can explain well it makes it easier for people to design projects for Act 250 if they understand where the archaeological sensitive areas are and it's just it's it's to help help applicants in their process but also helps the historic preservation understand if we have a lot of archaeological sensitive areas in the same place then maybe we protect those by using a different tool not regulatory but high gate for example is has a lot of Indian burial grounds so for them understanding their archaeological sensitive areas could be critical not only for Act 250 but it may make sense to go through and say you know from from an ethical moral standpoint maybe our best approach is to go through and purchase the development right to purchase the property that these burial mounds and other things are located but I don't think we'll have anything to that degree I think for us it's mostly going to be understanding where where archaeological resources exist and is there something we should be doing about it something we should be or is it just information and no I get no no no the town the town of high oh okay sorry I missed that oh I'm sorry I should be I wasn't thinking of that like space out for a second and then I was like I did no definitely no the town of high gate up at the Canadian border and random yes so yes so that's that's the sense if you you know as I said to read through it and read through it, and some of these you might go through and say I don't understand what this is, it may come down to the fact that they understand what a certified local government is, you may have never heard of it. But the Historic Preservation Commission knows what it means and they put it in there. And we just may have to explain some pieces to other people. Basically public comment will come from posting the website, or given how interrelated some of the sections are going to be, it sort of feels like it'd be hard. If we want to not post things until it's all done, I'm just curious about the comment. Yeah, that's a really great idea. Would it be possible, so we'll get these implementation plans, we'll go through them, add and subtract, maybe then the next step should be to make work something out with the bridge or something, get them in the bridge, and then we move on to the next one while we wait for comments. I mean, I'm all for public input, but I've worked on some stuff not related to this, but if you have like a multi, if you have like a multi-pronged plan like this, in my experience it's better to have final finished package to comment on. You start putting out pieces, especially if you stagger them to release to them, you're just going to get bogged down and sort of the give and take. You give them a final package, people, like my experience is the public tends to prioritize what's important to comment on, as opposed to giving them bits and pieces at a time where they're just sort of commenting as things come in and bogged down. I'm all for input, but it just seems more efficient to do it as a final piece. I was thinking we would get a little bit of the comments out of the way early that way, but I think you're probably right. It would bog it down. Yeah, I worked on something like that, and we found that as we were putting stuff out, you would just get a slew of comments, and if you were grappling with that when it was coming back, you'd be putting something else out. Yeah, you're trying to amend the historic while you're trying to present the housing, and then by the time you're... You're trying to figure out how you're going to fit this stuff together to begin with, like with what you have in place, you layer that on with public comments, why you're trying to do that, and it becomes impossible, so I just... That's a good point. It's better to sort of redline a complete package and work on that, I think, than sort of redline why you're putting it together. And we may be able to put together more coherent outreach for public input. We may be able to bring in facilitators to go through and say, we're going to do some... Let's present the plan. This is what we've been working on. This is how we got here, but now we need public input. We can break people into breakout groups and be able to talk about... If you're interested in historic and housing, and then we can switch people, you may be interested in a couple of different things. We can rotate through and do that a couple of times, have two or three meetings to try to help people to get some time to understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, why it's important. Because certainly this all ties back into being able to... Each one of the committees is trying to look at this as, what's my eight-year work plan going to be? And we're trying to go and say, look, you're not going to do your eight-year work plan here, but you do got to start thinking about what would you do? What types of things do you think you want to look at? How many of these implementation strategies are you... They'll end up being 12. 12 of these? Okay. Yep. And that includes the two that are sort of outside the committees that you were talking about, public safety and utilities? Yeah. Yeah, and it'll be close to 12. There's going to be one on governance that's not required, but I think there's enough that goes on in Montpelier, that governance will be one that I'll have to work with city council and the manager's office to put together. Historic, housing, energy, land use, transportation, utilities and facilities, governance, economic development. No, I'm starting to lose track of what... It's okay, it's not a quiz. But I get you an idea. Just think about the committees that we have. In a lot of times, we're going to be required to have an education plan, but I think that's rolled into the community services. Public safety, maybe that's separate, maybe that's rolled into community services. I don't know how they want to see that, but there are a couple of them that. So maybe 12, maybe 11. And how are you thinking of doing the chapter writing? Is this something staff will do here, or should we personally work on writing any of that, or something else? There's always, if there's people who want to work on it, otherwise it's probably something I was going to try to continue to work on. It also may be something that we eventually try to draw in some additional help in the form of a grant, if we decide to go through and hire a consultant to go and help put that together. It really depends on the amount of work staff and commissions want to put into it. If commissions go and say, hey, I'd like to write my own historic chapter, then we can say, okay, you've got 1,000 words, 1,000 to 1,500 words, and explain the values, but I would probably want to do at least one that we would all review and then go and say, here's the land use, just so you guys get a flavor of how we're talking about things. Just so we don't get stylistically 12 completely different. This land use will be ours, so we'll write the chapter on that and then that can be used. And we can say, here's a guidance that you can work from, unless people, really it's the city plan. So you're thinking of the committees possibly writing the chapters then? I was thinking I was going to do most of the drafting and they were going to go through and do most of the editing to make sure it met there, because we wanted to get a single voice. It could always work the other way that they write what they think, and then we sit down and rewrite it to go through and say, you told us this, but we've got to have this plan sound consistent, so we're going to rewrite what you wrote. I'm open to suggestions. My focus has been on, personally, has been on trying to do the implementation strategies, because I think there's a challenge and a little bit of an art to doing, to writing these and forcing things into their right boxes and how to phrase things. New, are we continuing something? Are we amending something? Are we doing something new? And then having specific things. So I've been trying to do this. Once it gets out of this, then I'm open to getting help writing chapters. It still seems much more manageable than it one time did to me. Yes, especially when you hear that I'll be writing. So historically, it's always been handled by the planning commission chair. The thousand words succinct chapter thing, actually, that seems appealing to me. Yeah, until you have 12 chapters, you've got 12,000 words. Yeah, writing a short story doesn't seem... Yeah, it's not as bad. Once you get going and once you get rolling, the issue that comes up is everything has to meet state statute. So eventually we have to talk about certain things, which means if you don't talk about it in those thousand words, we have to have it as a separate document that we link to it. In a lot of cases, we have this stuff. When we need to have a complete streets playing, where we already have a complete streets playing, all we have to do is link to it. And now we can expend our thousand words talking about why is complete streets important and why is it important to you, the homeowner in Montpelier? What are complete streets? Why is it important? Why do we talk about it so much with our transportation plan? And I think that's more important than actually getting into the nuts and bolts of... Are we going to have two sidewalks on Berry Street? Or are we only going to have one? And what are we going to do about East State Street? Well, we don't need to talk about that. That's in the plan. Can you tell me the 12 sections? All right. Hot quiz. Hot quiz. So how is it? Housing, historic preservation. Historic preservation energy. Economic utilities. Economic. Economic development. It's technically, I think, it's called community services. Okay. About land use. Yeah. Thank you. Let's do this before it's coming back to me. Governance. Transportation. Is that on there? Three more. Yeah. No energy is... All right. No education is in community facilities. Statutory? Yeah, it's statutory. I've seen it. Well, a lot of them are statutory, but there are a couple of them that are outside. I'll probably kick myself because I probably have some that I've already written. Is this thing up recreation or...? Oh, natural resources. Conservation commission. That's conservation commission parks. But recreation helped. I don't think recreation... Recreation usually falls under community services. Just like our community services department we have includes our senior center recreation parks trees. I'm just asking because I was... What I'll do to follow up on this meeting is send everyone a sort of city plan timeline outline and go through to give everyone a heads up of how we'll be approaching it. And if anyone's unhappy with that then they'll give them a chance. But one of them will be to bring out the 12 sections because we have... I know we've discussed this on point or another like possibility of adding additional sections. Yeah. Listing them out. I think public safety ahead is a separate one emergency services. It's like an A-minus in the past. Probably look it up online. 4382? Is that regional plan? Sure. So anyways that gets you a good chunk of them and at some point I'm going to pop in my head for the last one. I think it'll be good to lay out the plan so we can stop having meetings about planning and actually stick to substance for all of our meetings from now on and go through the information plans. Yeah if you start to being able to like I said if at the next meeting ignoring I don't know like I said we've got to figure out what the next meeting is. If the next meeting is actually four weeks from now then that's the historic... Of course maybe it's appropriate to review the historic implementation plan on the same day that we do a hearing on the proposal. We even 645 so we can briefly talk about the Columbus Day and what they were... I'm not here so I don't know if we're scheduling an alternate night to try to meet or if we're just discussing that meeting. Those are the two choices it seems like yeah. I don't I don't feel pressure for us to have to meet that week. We're planning to do the hearing as long as we have Robert Duxford over that. So maybe like if you'll be in touch with me Mike if anything comes up if we need to do anything prior to that meeting. But... Okay yeah because I'll try to push... I'll try to lean on historic preservation to see if they'll do any outreach and I can put out some stuff on your behalf to the press to go through and see if we can encourage input. I was going to ask you about that. Is that something that outreach to the press is that something that your office usually does or do we participate in that? Usually it comes out of the... I guess the legal stuff always generally comes out of ours and getting warnings out but if people want to advocate for things that's certainly always your position on the board you've got that right. I mean when we were doing the zoning we had a number of times I think Kim would occasionally write stuff on his own or Barb would write stuff to the papers letters to the editor to go through and say no no no the public is you know you know I'm hearing seeing a lot of stuff in the papers about misrepresenting what we're working on on the planning commission and this is what we're working on. Okay so the notifications you're talking about for the times I get sent on the bridge are kind of legal? Yeah we would probably put one... Well it wouldn't be necessarily a legal warning in some sense it's just a matter of... Jamie is kind of like our public information officer so anytime we're going to have a formal meeting we'll go through and run it through her so that way we've gotten enough meeting space should it be here should we warn it somewhere else we'd probably try to have it here I would just try to reserve the memorial room so we've got both sides in case we get a large crowd and then get the formal things out to the Times-Argus so they've got a press release but beyond the press release it would probably be encouraging input from... So no meeting on Columbus Day. Okay. Just before me. We may there may be some emails just about comparing for the next meeting. Do we need to informally adjourn? Do you just like leave it hanging? No we just can't vote on anything. Oh I think... She's only made a four to eight to a adjourn. Oh she can't vote to a adjourn. That's a good call. Geez. Sure to adjourn. We'll go home. We'll still be holding a working session so I don't think we can do any more. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for sticking here forever next to each other. We're never going to get this meeting we'll never end. It will exist always. Had enough votes to open the hearing and not enough to air. This is Kafka situation. We're stuck in meeting purgatory. Okay. Well the only thing else on the agenda is to discuss the vision statement. Which I didn't... I should have looked at the agenda a little bit earlier to print... reprint that out because I think I forwarded it to you guys. But I didn't get that out. Yeah we have it in our email for sure. Well just... It was the thing about like service. Yes it was all about service. Yeah Montpelier serves. Oh yeah. So that's something we need to like work on right now right? No. Like what whole place does that have in the scheme of this? I think we had that in the context of when we were starting the plan. I think maybe John was kind of talking about maybe we need to have an overall vision that we're starting with. I mentioned that they had done this branding exercise. I couldn't remember what it said. This was the Montpelier, a good place for humans or something. That's what it was. Branding thing. It was a branding thing that had been work done. And it was you know I think it was good for what it was trying to do. I don't think it necessarily translates to our city plan effort though. Or at least I might. Can we can we just talk about doing the vision state or planning to the vision statement around the same time we write the chapters? Doesn't seem looking appropriate. Yeah I mean it's it's going to be I think a compilation of all of it anyways. I would think I would have done it last. He wanted to do it first to kind of build. I don't think there's a right or a wrong to that. It's just you know just as we said we're doing these backwards. We're you know most communities will write the text of their plans and describe all the analyses. Do all their graphs and tables and then afterwards write their implementation plan. We've decided you know what's most important to us? Having a strategic plan so we figure out what we're going to do to actually accomplish our goals. Because Montpelier has a lot of goals and we never really talk about what it's going to take to do them. So let's start with that and work backwards. I think division statement can work either way. You could start with one or you can end with one. I think we're going to be learning as we go. I just think that's inevitable. Which means that we're doing it at the end is what makes sense. Because I don't think we have a clear one going in. Well either way it can be a check right? Like you were saying you can read it backward or you can read it forward. So we start backward and we just have to make sure that the vision statement ends up being what we want it to be. And if it doesn't then you've got to go back a little bit. Yeah but so to use time well though I mean. Yeah yeah no I think it's fine. I think it works both ways we would just have to make sure that. Yeah it is the same way that's been the hard part that like when it came to the historic for me working with the HPC. I don't know a lot of the stuff so I've just got to throw stuff out there. And then eventually go and tell them we're going to have to knit this together. Whatever you have for your aspiration we've got to work together with your strategies. And vice versa you know you can't have a strategy that doesn't help support a goal that you have. And so we would work back and forth and I think you're right. For the vision it's going to work the same way just on a much bigger scale. At the end we have to have a vision and we look at the vision and everything underneath that doesn't add up. And we have all that we will have 12. You'll have 12 of those. Or slash well implementations and you can look at those for themes and build that into a vision. We'll have a lot more than 12 aspirations. Right yeah these guys are several. So but you'll theoretically those will kind of all team and rally. We won't have nothing to go out. Yeah I think no we're going to have a lot. I think we're going to learn a lot of this process as like the planning mission itself. If we were all like Mike and John and have this all this background and planning maybe we do know right now. You know I think considering our variety of backgrounds we're going to learn stuff. And Stephanie would did this in the past too so she's kind of got something in there. Guess who's not here. Right yeah so I'm going to put this. I'm going to put this outline out for us sort of all be on the same page about where we're going like as a plan and I don't know if John will be entirely happy because we've had it seems like different visions of how we're going to proceed with this have been batted around at least that's might have been my perception of why I'm kind of confused about it. So I'm going to lay this one out there which goes it seems to align with what Mike's planning to do. We could still take what we have here and still plug it into I think John has a lot of process pieces. He wants to do do the web which I want to too. I want to write this so we can get this and do an online plan. I think there's been some different visions about the process will follow. I'm going to lay this one out here which seems to which is what I'm all trying to do is basically align with what you're doing and you're the one with the full-time job doing this all the time so it'd be wise of us to follow your lead anyway. So that's I'm just letting you know that just out out loud that like that's yeah if we lay it out then at least we can whether people agree or disagree we can decide that that's how we're going to proceed and hopefully we'll talk minimally about about planning and we can start talking about the actual implementation with our meetings. After that October hearing yeah we can start to maybe put on the agenda both like you'll have housing done by then right so we can we can look at both of these maybe that first member meeting and as I said the most of the energy plan may end up being one that that we can kind of set off to the side because we're if we get the municipal planning grant to write that chapter that's going to be one that there'll be an entire process to develop that and we can task them with the whole I want your thousand words I want your from paying you lots of money this is what we want because they can do all the public input and have the really detailed discussion of how we're going to be net zero by 2030 and be have a community net zero by 2050 and that's going to take an entire public process and they'll take care of that okay bucks me I can't remember that last one I'm going to put a small amount of effort into digging through my email to find the list I've got it downstairs yeah okay so that's what that's what we're planning to go forward make sure I'm clear about so we're not meeting on this routine but then the meeting after that we're gonna have it all goes to plan historic preservation maybe 28th here would be something the 14th is Columbus Day and then 28th would be the next meeting and we would have a design public hearing on the map and the presentation we'll do some outreach we'll try to get historic preservation to do some outreach and then we'll have a meeting see if we can get some that much public input I will try to reserve the extra room so we've got both rooms okay and we'll talk about the regs and the boundary map yep the regs and the boundary map and give you back from the public and from historic preservation and then that will just be taking it all in and then the and then the meeting following that we'll decide what we do next which most likely it will be to make changes or not make changes based on the feedback we received and then Senate City Council to start the actual formal process well we would we would then warn a public a formal public hearing we could either go to City Council I mean I'll probably invite the counselors to the meeting just so that way they can get a if we get enough of them here we can ask them I can pull them afterwards to go through and say what did you guys think are you guys in support of making these types of changes you know are we just wasting time at the Plain Commission to adopt these things and give them to you if you guys aren't going to be interested in taking it up so you can kind of get a poll from them if there aren't enough of them here then we may go through have a public hearing ask to be on the council agenda go and meet at the council in December that wouldn't take away from one of our work meetings because that would be meeting and on their night just probably you and you know whoever wants to come we can go and sit down present to the planning present council here's what we presented here's what we heard what do you guys think are you guys interested some of those squeakiest wheels will probably come back and and give their version which is fine it's good and then they can make a decision as to whether this is a good idea to move forward or not the process for our informal public we do we have a process for like getting feedback and giving the presentation will that be historic preservation or will we be talking about I'm gonna think we should yeah I'm gonna invite I mean we've got historic preservation presentation that they gave us yeah and I missed that meeting as well so um we'll probably take take a look at that and see if it's something that we can put back up see if we can get historic preservation to be here for the meeting on the 28th and then we would do the presentation go and say this is what's been presented to us and if there's a spokesman from historic preservation that's willing to take some questions I think that's helpful I think it's helpful to have them yeah maybe there for questions merit it's also a really great resource yeah but I think since we're the ones having to make the decision this is going to be tough have it like having a month between meetings but um I'll just I'll send you some ideas for the agenda for that night and and we'll plan to start it off by doing an updated presentation for I guess I'll do that on where we are with the ranks and where we are with the boundary map and explain our thinking yep we would not be able on the 7th is DRC and DRB have this room so it just means we wouldn't be on television we'd have to take in record our own minutes no I'm just saying we I mean if it's it's not impossible I mean we don't if it's I was only saying it was going to be tough because it was just because I know that all of this information that's it that's in my brain right now is going to fly away and that's not I agree no I just think if you I think there's some value to kind of keep focus as best we can but it's not that big of a deal I'll read it that day well I mean we can we I can get other rooms I mean there's a community room over in the police station um the worst case scenario is you're down in the zoning office where we've got a table that can sit eight or ten we just have to make sure it gets some signs but there is a 30th so this is a five September has five Mondays so actually if we were to meet on the 7th it would be two weeks from today yeah and the 28th is actually five weeks from today yeah so it's not it's not as crazy an idea as you might have to pull a set of sink that much so some material to review later what's going on so if you want to try to if we do want to try to meet on the 7th um you have to just give me I'll be out of town notice okay let's go and be chair for a day I don't mind that at all I'm just wondering if there is some want to kind of keep us focused on we haven't seen might appreciate getting back to us do we want to just pull I mean considering there's only three of you left do we want to do you want to pull the rest of the commission just go and say hey would who's interested in meeting on the 7th yeah we can be there without any there's no problem yeah that's just yeah pull that's just pulling as long yeah discussing policy I think that's setting the meeting if you guys want to pull do you have a sense of what we would have on the agenda for that I mean I'm just trying to what's going to happen between now and two weeks from now that we could kind of chew on have some information to prepare for the 28th and we could we could review I mean you guys have the final historic we could start reviewing that piece we could review what Kirby sends out on the the calendar in the FYI this is how we're going to do the plan adoption process and here is our here's our plan adoption process and here's our design review potential process okay I'll include that okay yeah I'll include an email and then you could like follow up if you wanted to just to say hey you know to draw attention to it because it's going to be a lot of stuff in my email so you could I basically what I'm saying is we both do it all right I'll follow your lead and I can I can certainly meet yeah and then all for not all for not I definitely won't be able to on the seventh sorry that's more hey hey it is it is my it's my anniversary oh you did a really great job remembering before the meeting was over yeah just going by the numbers no don't worry about it we've got Columbus Day weekend I'll still include it but yeah it would just be without Mike yeah well yeah I'll just yeah I'll frame it up for you all right just think with that we can adjourn but for our agenda for the night you just leave yeah we're just going to end this meeting that Irish goodbye


The oxidative modification hypothesis of atherosclerosis is still debated. This review examines the role played by oxidized LDLs in atherogenesis taking into account data derived by studies based on molecular and clinical approaches. Experimental data carried out in cellular lines and animal models support the pro-atherogenic role of LDLs. This article was authored by Giuseppe Miollino, Giacomo Rossitto, Paola Caeli, and others.


I woke up this morning to scenes of mounted horseback police using batons to beat people over the head and shoulders in that war-torn chaotic city known as Melbourne, Australia.  And I also struck me that, you know, let's not kid ourselves. There are tens of millions of Americans who would absolutely support the same kind of draconian lockdowns and police crackdowns we're seeing on Australia and New Zealand right here in the United States. I don't think there's any doubt about that. So the question for all of us today is, of course, what to do? A few months ago in New Hampshire we held an event discussing medical freedom.  I don't know if any of you are familiar with the MP teaches at Texas Tech University. And he gave this great talk about following the science and he said, you know what we did wrong with COVID was instead we followed the wrong science. He said instead of talking to medical scientists and virologists and immunologists about disease and how transmissible COVID might be or how lethal COVID might be. He said we should have been talking to social scientists. We should have been talking about trade-offs. And of course that's the one thing we haven't talked about over the last 18 months since this COVID nightmare started is the trade-offs. We should have been talking about things like depression and alcoholism and suicide. And we should have been talking about the economic damage from shutting businesses and schools and churches. But we should have been talking about boosting natural immunity and supplements and things like this and alcoholism and weight gain. But instead we've been talking mostly just about COVID itself. Now Ben is a brave guy. But imagine if you went on C-SPAN and said, no, no, no, we shouldn't. We don't need to listen to these doctors or these scientists. We need to listen to economists, right? You can imagine the reaction you get from that. But that's actually the truth because what we haven't thought about much or talked about much over the past 18 months is the unseen in Bosnia's conception of the scene and the unseen. And we're all about to experience the unseen for many, many years to come as a result of these COVID lockdowns. And the reality is that there's no scenario under which a poor society is a healthier society. So job number one is to be a wealthier society. And we're shooting ourselves in the foot with respect to that. So no, what we've been through over the last 16 months, it wasn't worth it in any sense of that expression. And if we had literally done nothing, if our politicians had literally done nothing, it might have actually resulted in fewer deaths in hospitalizations. We'll never know. But we definitely know that just this sort of targeted distancing of elderly and vulnerable populations, immunocompromised populations, while allowing younger and healthier people to go out there and run the country and work would have gotten us to a degree of natural immunity faster than we're getting to that. Now, with a lot less collateral damage to our economy and to our physical and frankly our mental health, I think we're all struggling a little bit on that side of the aisle as well. So this is what it's all about, the seen and the unseen. It's the job of social scientists like economists to show us that unseen. And I think they're falling down on the job. But there's a silver lining to all this that I'd like to talk to you about today. And I think that silver lining is that the story of the last 16 months, the political story in this country hasn't been about presidents. It hasn't been about Trump or Biden, particularly. It's been about governors and mayors and county officials and school boards. And I think there's a very important lesson there that we all ought to be heeding. And we really need, I think, at this juncture to start being a little more clear eyed about where we are in terms of the political and social and cultural and economic reality of things in the United States. So first, let's just dial back a little bit to that strange and unsettling time of March last year, 2020. There's this expression, the fog of war, which is when you don't sort of know what's happening because you're hearing a lot of conflicting reports. And I remember feeling that very sense of the fog of war when 9-11 happened. I was working for Congressman Ron Paul in Washington, DC. And of course, the Keystone cops and the Capitol Police bungled everything. And we spent the next couple of days hearing all these what turned out to be debunked reports.  So whenever there's a crisis, we get all this conflicting news and information and sometimes it turns out to be false. Well, we're experiencing the same thing with COVID. And I recall very distinctly being in a restaurant in March of 2020 with my wife and daughter and having that sort of that feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you're about to go over the first hill on a roller coaster. You know, what's coming? And that feeling wasn't based, it wasn't a fear of COVID or a virus. It was a fear of what government's going to do about the virus. And of course, that's the exact same feeling I had on 9-11 was not as some terrorist going to come blow up my family, but rather what is government going to do in terms of drastic overreach as a result of all this. So here we are 16 months later and we're still in the fog of war. We still have all these questions which nobody can seem to answer for. So we hear a lot of conflicting information. Do these vaccines work? Do they stop anybody from getting infected? Do masks work? Is there asymptomatic spread? Are we creating variants? I don't know. I offer no opinion on the medical part of this or vaccines. I think by all means get one if you care to. But the point is that we've gotten more information at our fingertips than we've ever had in the course of human history. You basically have all of human history on something the size of a deck of cars in your pocket, and yet we still struggle mightily with any kind of wisdom. There was a series a year and a half ago or so before the Trump election on PBS. It was called America Coming Apart or something like that. And one of the people they interviewed was Steve Bannon, who was one of the architects of the Trump victory in 2016. And he came up with this expression, which has stuck with me, which is, he said, we're living in post-persuasion America. He said, it's never been easier or cheaper to have facts at your disposal, to obtain information. There's never been a time in human history where that's easier. But yet people are digging in more than ever to their own worldview, rather than being open to facts and changing it. People are doubling down.  And we have the ability to just hear from sources that comport with our own view of things. And so it's very easy for us to live in a media or information bubble, and just we suffer from confirmation bias. And I think that's been operative throughout COVID. And in a sense, just like with Trump in 2016, just we in America are watching at least two different movies. So we've all seen what's been happening in Afghanistan the last few days. And we worry that 9-11, which caused things like the invasion of Afghanistan, has forever remade American foreign policy into, I guess, what we might call permanent state of war making and invasion and nation building, permanent war. So the question we have to grapple with is, will COVID remake American domestic policy into a permanent new normal of masks and vaccine passports and business and school shutdowns, and perhaps what is the biggest untold and unremarked upon story I think of the entire COVID year is this absolutely insane CDC rent moratorium, where for the first time in American history, not even the housing authorities in the federal government, but the Center for Disease Control has unilaterally come along and said we have the ability to vitiate thousands upon thousands of here to for locally enforced contracts across the country seems to me to be a very, very crazy turn of events. So what we know is that you don't defeat a virus, you live with it, you work around it. This is becoming increasingly obvious. But I said there's a silver lining and I think there is. And that silver lining is that the dominant political trend of the 20th century, which was centralization of political and monetary and economic power, I think is being threatened and challenged in the 21st. And I certainly hope it is. And I actually hold a lot of optimism when it comes to this because I think not only is this the way forward for the United States, I think it may be the only peaceable way forward in America. And we've seen some tremendous examples of this in just the last year, where the various states and the various countries around the world have really acted as sort of laboratories in a big federalist experiment. But of course, decentralization comes with a price and we'll get to that here in a bit, but that price is tolerance. It's a heavy price. We have to allow ourselves the painful rejection of universalism, at least in the political sphere. We have to allow people who see the world very differently than we do, the freedom to apply their own worldview as they see fit and where they see fit. And I think this inability to allow for different worldviews is really at the heart of our problems. And I think it's also the opportunity which COVID presents. So what I'd like to suggest to you today that we've learned in the past 60 months is that all crises are really local. At the end of the day, when things shut down and most people went home because of these edicts in March and April of last year. All of a sudden, your immediate circumstances became very important to you.  All of these things became much more important because we tend to live in this sort of digital world and most of us travel a lot and we have this sense of the world well beyond our town. But for the first time, people started to have very different experiences, depending on maybe if they lived in Florida and South Dakota, if they lived in New York and California. And certainly if they lived in Australia, they've had a very different 16 months. And so for the first time in a long time, people started to think of themselves as Californians and Floridians. And I think that's a very healthy development for America and I want to encourage that. I think we ought to recognize it, celebrate it rather than bemoaning it. So when we think about being tied to a place and we think about all of us going home last year, that was a change. That was a change for most people. And I remember reading this article about Kristi Noem. She had come out early on and said, well, we're not going to have any lockdowns in our state of South Dakota. And so she got a lot of grief for this. And there was some change.org petition to force Kristi Noem to have the same kind of lockdown and mandates as some other states were. And she said, well, you know, we have one of the lowest populations per square mile in the country. Why do we have to have the same rules in South Dakota for COVID as we do in the rest of the country? Well, that seemed like a fair question. Why shouldn't local circumstances inform the local responses to a communicable disease? So she held firm to her tremendous credit. I'm not a fan of Oliver policy, but she held firm. And she never had statewide lockdowns in her state. And as a result of that, maybe some other governors were emboldened a bit. And we ended up with about five states which never had any kind of statewide lockdown. And there were also some sheriffs at the county level who stood bravely against all these impositions. But I would call soft martial law, I suppose. So here's what Kristi Noem said.  One size fits all approach to this problem is herd mentality, OK? The people are primarily responsible for their safety. I oppose, meaning Kristi Noem, draconian measures, much like the Chinese government has done in actions we've seen European governments take that limits citizens' rights. So at the time, you know, back in that fog of war of, let's say, April 2020, that was actually pretty brave stuff to say. It was refreshing. And it was also a very needed reminder that all crises are local.  Your physical body has to be somewhere. You have to exist in a space, in time. An analog space, not a digital one.  Who knows what Jeff Bezos requires on a day-to-day basis. It's probably a lot like what we require. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, this is really a great equalizer because people are starting to see that even elites are subject to the same kind of rules the rest of us have to live under when things get ugly. And I remember there was a report in the news early on how because Amazon was doing so well in the early months of COVID, that Amazon stock had gone way up. And overnight, at least on paper, Jeff Bezos's net worth had increased some crazy number of billions of dollars. And so this was, you know, everyone was sort of bemoaning this and saying, oh my gosh, look at the rich are getting richer. And so there was a demonstration outside of Jeff Bezos's house in Washington, D.C., where he has one of several houses because a few years ago he bought the Washington Post. So these protesters are out there and being the kind of subtle people that they are, they've enacted a mock guillotine, which is presumably designed for his neck. And I was thinking to myself, you know, I don't know if he's there, I don't know if he's home, maybe he's at one of his other houses. But if he is home, you know, just a couple, just let's say 50 or 100 dedicated knuckleheads with nothing better to do and nothing to lose could absolutely disrupt the life of, well, I guess the richest or second richest man on earth. I mean, if he can have ingress and egress to his home, I mean, let's say you have a helicopter, let's say you have some house somewhere with a safe room that helicopter has to have fuel, that house has to have, you know, food and utilities and all kinds of things.  So if these faraway production facilities, farms and warehouses and trucks and trains and power plants break down, eventually we all feel it. And we're still feeling it now and we're going to be feeling it for a long time to come. So who's to say that a more localized approach to dealing with this is wrong? Who's to say that the Japanese or the Singaporeans or the South Koreans or the Swedes did it wrong? Who's to say that Kristi Noem and Ron DeSantis did it wrong? I'm not sure that it's anyone's place to say. And what's so interesting about this is international authorities like the UN, like the WHO, like our own CDC, they were unable, utterly, to project any kind of global authority on COVID. All the countries just went their own way. And all of a sudden everybody was saying, well, you know, we're going to do what we're going to do. And even the Schengen area agreement in Europe where 26 European countries are allowed to travel amongst each other without passports, that broke down. You know, in Canada we saw provincial travel prohibited. You couldn't even drive from Newfoundland over to Montreal or something like that unless you had some express purpose. And there were even some suggestions for and briefly having checkpoints between US states. So again, who's to say, who's to judge how different localities around the world, around the country act under duress? And I would suggest that this calculation becomes more and more difficult at scale, moving from the local to the regional to the national to the international level. Crises remind us that local matters. And this is exactly what we should want and expect in a pandemic, right? This is what we want, competing visions as to the severity and the scope of the problem, differing localized approaches, experimental treatments, nimble entrepreneurs providing resources and supplies to us. And you know, we're going to have scoreboard. And to an extent, we do have scoreboard. Now, we have some data 16 months later. We know that ventilators didn't work. We know for the most part that lockdowns didn't work. We're starting to think that maybe masks don't work either. And so hopefully, there's going to be remorse. There's going to be recriminations. There's going to be hopefully calls for some criminal action against some of these governors who failed us so badly. So what we have to avoid is allowing the political class to gain from all this. Because if there's a silver lining for all this, it's that we have to understand how, you know, at the end of the day, South Dakota really isn't New York City after all. They're two different places. And why do we have to have the same rules for 330 million people with respect to COVID? Well, I think a lot of Americans woke up to that over the last 16 months. But then what follows is if we could have different rules relating to COVID across 330 million people, why can't we have different rules about taxes and guns and abortion and climate change and everything else? So that's the opportunity. That's the silver lining behind COVID. Now, one thing I just I have to show you, I can't resist. I'm starting to really dislike this guy.  I don't want his new normal. But this is a beautiful thing. This isn't some think tank survey. This is from United Van Lines. So they spent 2020 figuring out who's moving where. So guess what? California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois lost people. And Florida and Texas and Tennessee and some other states gained people. Shocker there. So what's happening, ladies and gentlemen, is a form of soft secession. This is people moving with their feet. And I'm not even going to say that this is necessarily ideological. People are fleeing dysfunction.  You know, so far there's not a lot of data or evidence that that's happening at all. Maybe it's the red state voters leaving California and Illinois and New York and New Jersey. We don't know. But what we've had is this remarkable experiment and federalism that's having real results.  And I think it's an absolutely beautiful thing. And, you know, we actually have a real-world example of where federalism works beautifully. And that's Switzerland. All you have to do is look at the Swiss government's website and they lay out the principle of subsidiarity and federalism. Now, the big difference in Switzerland is that most people pay about 80% of their overall tax burden, either to their local Canton or their commune, which is this, excuse me, their local commune or their local Canton, and only about 20% to the feds. Whereas here in the United States, that's flipped. We spend about 80% of it to Uncle Sam. So that's a problem. But apart from that, there's no reason why we couldn't be engaging in a great awakening, I think, for a federalist system in the United States. And not because of constitutionalism or anything like that, just because of people's desires to live in places that work and to live around people who share their thoughts and attitudes and opinions and values. And when I bring up that 80-20 thing on taxes, let me just say real quick, this is 2020s. If you want to call it a budget, this is a farce. But this is what Congress and the federal government did last year. So let's just say they brought in about 3.5 trillion and they spent about 6.5. So in a sense, the MMTers are getting their way, right? If half of everything the federal government spends to operate is debt financed, they don't need your taxes for 50% of what they do. Why not 60? Why not 80? Why not 90? Why can't we be Switzerland? It's all funny money at this point now anyway. So what we have to think about is whether we can really turn our backs on DC, whether we have an opportunity of a lifetime, perhaps several lifetimes to go a new direction. And I think we have to be thinking of Washington DC more like the Afghans do. In other words, we're all aware of how Uncle Sam projects military and economic power across the world and bullies people in this crazed foreign interventionist foreign policy which we've been suffering under, especially since Reagan. But oftentimes we fail to recognize that DC is an imperial power with respect to the 50 states as well, right? They're bossing us around just as much as they're bossing Afghanistan around, maybe more. And so when we see the US federal government fail, when we see it fail in Afghanistan, when we see it fail with respect to its COVID response, maybe that starts people's minds questioning whether things have to be this way. So when far away imperial cities begin to fail, when they can no longer project authority, the natural response is for more regionalized or localized approaches to governance. So again, COVID is an opportunity and we ought to see it as such. It gives us actually remarkable visibility into at least two psyches operating in the United States today, the predominant psyches. And the first is those who are AOK with the new normal, who welcome it, who like it, who view those scenes that I was talking about earlier in Melbourne, Australia with approval or maybe even satisfaction. These anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxers are getting their comeuppance. Riot cops on horses are beating them with batons and that's a good thing. There are millions of Americans who think that. There are millions of Americans, probably tens of millions, who would be AOK with these kinds of dystopian lockdowns with no end in sight. That's what they want here. That's not what I want. So I'm gonna leave you with a couple of tough questions. You know, do principles scale? Are principles situational? Does it matter when we're talking about simple human freedom, what we would all consider freedom in this room? If 10 people die from COVID or 1 million people die from COVID, should our approach in those two scenarios change? Well, that's a very tough question from an ethical perspective. But from a trade-offs perspective, I think we can say emphatically that trade-offs don't scale. What's good for one place is not necessarily good for another. And politically we all know how the political class is going to respond. We all know how they answer that question. More, more, more, more. That's all they know how to do. A crisis comes along and what do they do? They throw money at the problem and they boss us around. These are their two approaches to any human problem. Okay, so we know what they're going to do. We can't listen to them anymore. We have to contain them and we have to control them. And that's increasingly difficult, I would argue, at the federal level. You're gonna get 80 or 85 or 90 million people to vote for, let's say, a presidential candidate whom we would consider a reasonable person, like a Rand Paul, let's say. That's a pretty big enchilada. Okay, that's a lot of heavy lifting. But if we turn our backs on these people and walk away from them, literally and figuratively, I think we have the answer in front of us. Mises wrote two books that are radically decentralized in tone and approach. He wrote them in the interwar years. Between 1919, when he had just come home as an artillery officer for the Austro-Hungarian Army, in 1928, the first was called Nation, State and Economy, the second was called Liberalism. If you haven't read these books, they're both short, you can read them easily in a day or an afternoon. If you need one, ping me, find me on Twitter, I'll be happy to send you one. In my opinion, these two books are amongst the most important he ever wrote, and they're also, I think, misinterpreted in many ways. Mises cared very, very deeply about political minorities, about people who find themselves in a political jurisdiction as minorities, whether that was racial and ethnic, whether that was linguistic, or whether that was simply because of the political views that they hold. And I'm gonna suggest to all of you in this room that that's us, we're a political minority, and we ought to start thinking that way and acting that way. Because these people who approve of the lockdowns are not likely to change, and the cost benefit of trying to get them to change their minds, I think, is not nearly as attractive as the cost benefit of trying to get away from them and unyoke ourselves from them. So the silver lining of COVID is that our task has been made clear, and that is, in my view, separation rather than persuasion. Thank you very much. Thank you.