Well, I don't know who all we've got, but it's 6.30. So I'm gonna call to order this meeting of the Manuski Development Review Board. Welcome to our first in-person development review board meeting since like 2019. We didn't have any in the first couple months of 2020. So welcome back everybody. We've got one substantive item on tonight's agenda, a couple of administrative things as well. So first thing I'm gonna do before I forget is ask everyone who plans to or is considering offering testimony to sign in. It's important to sign in because that's how we know you are here and if you are entitled to appellate rights, that's one of the things you may be well advised to do. So please sign in. Also anybody who wants to give testimony tonight or is considering giving testimony tonight or is generally gonna say anything out loud, you should all be sworn in. So normally we do this in a weird way over Zoom. So I'm gonna see if I can remember how to do it in person. So everybody who will speak or may speak or feels like they wanna be on the edge of speaking, please raise your right hand. And do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you will give in this proceeding shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the pains and penalties of perjury. Yes. Good, excellent. So first item on the agenda is changes to the agenda. Do we have any changes to the agenda? Hearing none, second item after the call to order is public comment. Public comment is required at every public meeting in Vermont. It is a time for folks to voice general things to the DRV, not about the particular application on today's hearing. Anybody have any general public comments? Wanna tell us how well or poorly we're doing? Let's move on to item four, approved prior meeting minutes. The prior meeting minutes have been circulated, they're in your packets. I would entertain a motion to approve the prior meeting minutes. So motion. All motion. All right, I got a motion and a second. All in favor, raise your hand or say aye. Aye. All opposed. All abstaining. Motion carries. I think I heard one abstention component who was not here. Great, so we are on to the first substantive item on our agenda, only substantive item on our agenda. This is an appeal of the zoning administrator's decision for an application for development at 401 Main Street because this is an appeal from the VA's decision. We will not be staffed this evening by the zoning administrator. Instead, Ben Gould will be staffing us. Ben is an attorney at Paul Frank, Paul Frank and Collins and we'll be serving that role for us this evening. The zoning administrator is in attendance but will not be advising us because it's his decision that is under review. I believe we have the appellate slash applicant here. Anybody on team appellate, raise your hand. I don't know who's who. Great, okay. Y'all at the table and some people in the audience. Great. Can you field a brief question, a procedural question or a bill from this board to Novo or on the record to environmental board? I'm gonna bounce that right there. Yes, and I will have to, I can verify that view I don't want to speak up if not I need to just confirm that. Okay. Yeah. Check out what I thought. I just wanted to be sure, thank you. We don't do on the record. My understanding for the benefit of the folks on the board is we are essentially stepping into the shoes of the lower decision makers and kind of reviewing everything afresh and deciding what we would do if presented with the same question. But as for the formal standard, we'll defer on the official answer there. So appellate, let us know what you want to say. Go for it. Floor is yours. Hi, I'm Abby Dairy. I'm here from Trudell Consulting Engineers. We're representing Joe Handy. We prepared the plans for him. With me I have Rick Bryant from StanTech. They are our traffic consultant. Jeremy Matoski from TCE is also here and right here the applicants attorney is here as well. And we presented an application to the zoning administrator for a multi-use building located at 401 Main Street. This is in the location of the former, I think it was a go-go gas on the corner of Norman Street and Main Street just in front of the high school. And what they are proposing in its place is this multi-story building and elevation is up here prepared by G4 architects with two tenants on the floor level, one of them being at Duncan Donuts with the drive-through and the other being a general commercial space. The upper two floors are eight total residential units. So here's the, this is the view from Main Street and this is what it would look like if you were standing on the corner of Normand and Main Street. So this is sort of that southwest corner of the building. General project description, 2,800 square feet with two tenants and then the upper residential units. Parking space is provided on both 401 Main Street. Can you sense my cursor show up on here? I'm gonna do this. What's this? Laser pointer, hold on. There we go, okay. So this is, now this is better. This is 401 Main Street right here. This is currently a vacant lot. It used to be the gas station. This building right here, this is Normand Street and this is a laundromat currently. So this is an aerial view of what it would look like with Normand Street having the circulation that it has now where there are two lanes. Here's Main Street and then the high, this is the high school parking lot to the east. So we have the building up along the Main Street frontage in compliance with the form-based code that is here. This is some exterior open space, patio and then angled parking spaces on both projects or both sites. On the north side of the building, here's the drive-through that I was talking about. And then here's an egress lane onto Main Street. And then here's how you would get into the site down here in the south. This is the first circulation pattern that we had shown the city. We had an alternative plan after discussions with public works that perhaps if we converted or if the city converted Normand Street from a two-way in toward the high school to a two-way where one lane would be in and one lane would be out and then sitting onto Main Street. What would that look like? So we had provided a site plan and done a traffic analysis or stand-tected a traffic analysis showing this scenario that Rick will go into further discussion when he talks about traffic. So what would happen on this site is all traffic would enter from the south here off of Normand Street. The right side of the lots would be the drive-through lane. Here's the window. This whole aisle would be stacking. And then exiting, you would either park and leave via Normand Street or exit onto Main Street through this drive-through lane. So those are the two different site plans at play here. And then just some general things about the site. Stormwater is collected via closed catch basin system. We're increasing site impervious by 0.02 acres. Landscaping is a mixture of shade and plantings to provide visual interest. Salt tolerant in the present hardiness zone. Lighting is full cut-off LED fixtures. And then here's a view of that landscape plan with street trees. We have some crab apples along Main Street, some bigger shade trees along Normand and then just some low complimentary shrubs surrounding the building. So that's just the general site overview and what we're proposing. And now Rick is going to move on to the traffic analysis. Thank you. And my name is Rick Bryant with Stantec. We're having office in South Burlington. We've done a lot of work in Winooski. We do a lot of work with Chittinac County Regional Planning. We help get safer for people to cross. We do a lot of work with VTrans. We help them with the visualization of the double cross diamond interchange that's happening up the road as well. And occasionally we get called upon to work with developers and help them understand the traffic impacts of their proposals and to share that with cities and towns. And that was our role here. We were asked through Abby to take a look at this proposal and help them understand and help you understand how it's gonna work traffic-wise. And so my agenda for tonight is listed here. We had a public speaking coach come in to talk to us a while back who told us to, when you do a presentation, tell people what you're gonna tell them. Tell them and then when you're done, tell them what you told them. So my first agenda item is gonna be findings.  I'll give it into the project description. It's gonna be a little bit repetitive what Abby had, but from the traffic perspective, what we're looking at, the analyses that we went through, the technical work that we're asked to do on these kinds of studies, and some of the assumptions that underlie that analysis. And gee, conclusions, we're gonna have the findings again. So let's look at the key findings.  It accesses side street and the high school. And that signal has to move traffic through and the question is, can it handle the additional volume that might come to this use? So that's part of the analysis and what we determined is that, yes, there's an impact there, but it's very modest, barely measurable. The site plan, it's good to put things in context when you try to understand what this might look like when it's built and operating. It might help to think back to what was there before. There was a service station. That service station had two driveways onto Main Street. We're gonna end up with one driveway and it's gonna be restricted to right turn only. So a big change there in trying to keep traffic moving smoothly on Main Street, which I know is a concern. The physical changes we're doing will help improve that. And then finally, the focus on the discussion late in the review process with staff and was the capacity to drive through. I should add that the discussion focused on that and the ultimate recommendations from staff pointed at the drive through as an area of concern. And so the concern that we looked at is how much space do we have on site for drive through stacking? Will all the cars fit on site or are they gonna spill into Norman Street and make it difficult for people to get to school in the morning? That's a valid question and it's something we analyzed extensively and concluded that that will not be a problem. So there are the findings, but now we'll get a little time explaining how we came to those conclusions. So we'll start talking about the project again. As Abby showed you, it's evolved over time. Here's the prior use of the site, the service station. And as I mentioned, two driveways, two way access. I don't know if there were any posted right turn restrictions at all. I think we can assume it was pretty much open access at two different curb cuts and that's changing. Current plan, as you see, we're down to one curb cut on Main Street up at the top there and it's a right turn only. We had conversations about that curb cut early on in the project. By the way, early on, you can see these are some of the reports. We've been at this a while since 2019. And from our perspective, looking at Main Street operations, and knowing one day we might have to come to this kind of meeting and defend this plan, we were pretty adamant about not letting people make a left turn out of that driveway. We saw that as congesting traffic on Main Street. It potentially would slow traffic, trying to get through the site and the drive through. And in our opinion, the safe and proper thing to do was to limit traffic to right turn only. And right turn and then continue north on Main Street. We don't want people trying to go diagonal across the intersection to get to Tykin Street. So that was a change that became part of this project early on. The two-way operation, as Ed explained on Norman Street, sort of came later. It was an evolution in trying to make the circulation work as best as possible. Just the, that's only one way right now. It's one way into the school, correct? With parking on the south side. So some of that parking would have to be removed up to our driveway to keep it open to two-way. And the egress from Norman and this plan wouldn't be restricted to right turns. We would do that. We understand the school would not like to have people from this site exit through the school property. So we were perfectly willing, correct me if I'm wrong, we would post a right turn coming out of the site to get you on Norman, head you back to Main Street. And we are also recommending a right turn only when you come out of Norman to get back on Main Street. For the same reasons, we don't want left turns at the northern driveway. We don't want left turns happening here. So you could basically only go north from this. They'd go north. The advantage though in using that driveway is that once they come out, they could then get into the left turn slot to go and now tie again into the neighborhood if they wanted to head south after visiting the site. I thought I read something suggesting that the city had looked at making Norman two-way and decided they weren't gonna do that. I don't know whether it's within our power to force them to do that. I wouldn't think so. But are you kind of operating in a kind of multi-dimensional universe? One where Norman's two-way, one where Norman's one-way and you're gonna tell us either way it'll work? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so we've been trying to work with staff and coming up with the best possible plan. And the last push was towards the two-way. There were some issues that I believe we addressed in terms of how to make that work and in terms of vehicles, being able to make the turns in and out and the school bus is coming in. So I'm not sure that those conversations were finalized, but we've been open all along to do what the city wants. And again, we were just heading in the direction of two-way as this is the best solution from all sides. Could we go back just one second? Sure. I have a little bit of questions. Sorry. And then is this fine? It should be a conversation. Is the line going across Main Street just north of the red arrow? Is that the line where the cars stop for the traffic light? No, I think we have like one or two car lanes to the light. No, that's something else. I think it's a contour. It could be a contour line. Right here, yeah. Sometimes you see utility lines are shown. Okay, thank you. No, the stop bar for the lights further up. As an engineer in working with data, we're big on charts. And this one picture probably works just as well, but again, from the layup perspective, what's happening on Main Street? We've gone from two-way access, two driveways down to one, and it's limited to a right turn only. So the analysis. We'll talk a little bit about the generic things we do and then the specifics for this project. On the generic, the three step to doing this is we establish existing conditions, get out there, count stuff, and understand what's going on. Then we do forecasts. How much activity is this development going to generate? How are those cars going to come and go?  You can think of it as plumbing. How full is the system? We talk about volume to capacity. If the road can handle 1,500 cars, how many are on the road? If it's 1,600, you've got a problem. If it's 1,000, your two-thirds of capacity and if the pipe's two-thirds full, it can work. So that's kind of the general process and I'll just again go through it very quickly. We start with, this is in our computers, obviously a mathematical representation of the roadway system that the top bar we can just go across, that's the dark lines. The dark lines of the streets, that's the driveway coming out of the school and then Taigan on the other side, Main Street going top to bottom, Norman Street's the line at the bottom there and the one in the middle is our new driveway coming out. And you see all those numbers with little arrows. What we're doing when we're counting is we're finding out how many cars go left at the light, how many go straight, how many go right. And we do that for the busy times of day. It's of no use for us to come in here and tell you, well, it works great at midnight because of course it does. People want to know what's happening at rush hour and they're on the road. So we look at commuter hours. We go seven and nine in the morning and try to find the busiest hour within that window and we go out four to six in the evening and find the busiest hour within that window and we populate this model with those volumes and we start layering the new traffic on top of that. So that's kind of step one. We go to step two. Again, I said we didn't anticipate how much traffic is gonna be associated with the Dunkin Donuts and the other uses, which at the end of the day, the other uses are fairly minor component. The conversation really came back to Dunkin Donuts. If you've been to one and you probably have, you know they're fairly high activity use. So how do I know how much traffic it's gonna generate? My crystal ball is this book we call the Bible, the trip generation handbook. People in my business across the country, across North America, when they do these sorts of studies they may actually go out and sit at the driveway of a Dunkin Donuts and count cars. We just permitted the Starbucks over in Essex on Susie Wilson Road. To do that, I went and sat at the Starbucks over on route two in Williston, or two eight in Williston because there weren't many Starbucks around and Starbucks is a little different from Dunkin in the way that people were asking, well, how are you gonna forecast that? And so we sat out there and counted it. And all those dots on that chart that you see is people like myself who've gone out and counted other Dunkin Donuts and other fast food Dunkin concept. The coffee shop is the lane use category with drive through.  You can compare the amount of traffic that's generating to the size of the building, which is usually a pretty good indicator. Bigger store might be located on a busier road and be able to accommodate more people and more traffic, et cetera. The other thing you could look at is the traffic on the road. This is the kind of business where it's a lot of pass by. There are many places you can buy coffee and you can have coffee at home. You can wait till you get to work and have your cup of coffee. People don't go a long ways or make special trips to go to a Dunkin Donuts, particularly at rush hour.  So you go to the one that's on your way. So when we look at this type of use, we are also seeing that it's what we call pass by traffic. People aren't getting on Main Street just to go to Dunkin Donuts. They're going to Dunkin Donuts because they are on Main Street and the Dunkin Donuts is on Main Street. So we look at the data from other sites, either the size of the store with a volume of traffic, a high volume road is likely to have more visits than a low volume road. And so we did that. And then the next thing we do is, as I mentioned, the operations analysis. How saturated is the roadway system? We produce these charts. You can see all kinds of numbers there, but across the top, you see the categories. We have a level of service. We rate on a scale of A to F. And you've been to school, you know, A's pretty good, F's not so good. We look at delay. We can calculate how long one might expect to get through the intersection. And the number that's generally most important is this one VC, the volume capacity ratio. How many cars are trying to get into the intersection in that hour versus the number that can handle? And then that number, of course, depends on the number of lanes, how the lanes are used, whether there is a signal or no signal. And you can see this chart, we break it down for a couple of different hours. We did all the different movements, but the focus really comes down to that volume capacity ratio. How you're overloading the intersection is kind of the first question you want to answer. So we'll come back to this. I just want to show the steps we went through. These are routine steps. If you work with VTrans, or you do any development on State Highway, VTrans will give you a guidebook that says these are the things we want you to do and it's going to be the same things I just talked about. The V to C, the closer to one, the worse? Yeah, the closer to one, the more congested. And one would be, it's maxed out. Your capacity, right? Yeah. I mean, generally it takes about two seconds to clear an intersection. If you were to sit at the light and there was a line of 10 cars waiting to get through the light because it was red and it goes green. By the third car going through, if you just time the successive crossings, cars would be two seconds apart. So it's about 1,800 vehicles an hour can get through an intersection if it's all one lane because it takes two seconds per vehicle. Now, and that's the number we start with, but then you whittle that down. So, well, there's buses, they take longer. Okay, that's a penalty. Someone making a left turn has to wait for opposing traffic. That's a penalty. So those results that you see factor in all those bits and pieces that again, in existing conditions, we go out there, we try to identify those things. In fact, staff helped us early on to say, you know, that light's got a push button that the pedestrians use. You didn't account for that. So we didn't. But there was a count done out there where it was actually in video and we were able to get the video thanks to your staff and watching the video, we were able to count how many times a pedestrian pushed the button and we put that back into the analysis and that indeed changed the numbers because it was called probably seven or eight times in that half hour before school filled. After that, nothing. It was really school related for about 30 minutes. But that's also a peak traffic time. It is, that all gets factored in. So I might be jumping ahead here, but does this analysis assume that 100% of the cars that are diverting to Duncan come from the population of cars that you're currently observing in that traffic pattern? Or are you anticipating a little bit more traffic coming up and down Main Street because everybody knows it's Duncan. We assume 50% were already on the road, 50% are new people. Okay. Which again, we go back to that trip generation handbook of all the studies. There are surveys that tell us that as well. In addition to counting cars, people will talk to people as they come in the store and say, we're going to be here on this road already or did you come here special? So you're counting for something of a magnet effect. There is going to be new people coming to this location. That was our assumption. Just while we're talking about that, I'm sorry to interrupt. What about the other Duncan domes that's right down the road? Isn't there one further up towards Costco? Does it factor in competition or? We haven't in this analysis, I mean competition could depress the numbers certainly. Does that Duncan domes go away? Is that the same owner? Is that that? I don't know. So my name is Ari Sleos. I am the franchisee locally on and operated for the record because they're most in Vermont. They haven't determined quite yet, but we made that location more just better than only. But they would be owned by the same people? Yeah, we own that location, yeah. Cool, perfect, thank you. Can I go back just one more step? Sure. So was it determined that the seven, or we're at seven, 15 to eight, 15 was the peak hour or was there a busy time in the afternoon as well? Is it school that's out at some point and then there's rush hour? Yeah, and we do have some numbers to share on that, but at the end of the day, we looked at the morning rush hour, the school dismissal hour, and then of course the evening commuter peak that I mentioned, and you'll see in the slides that the evening commuter peak is the busier time. Is the busier time? And it's, as you probably know, it's the busier time for Northbound Main Street. So when you're trying to understand will people be able to get out of the site at seven, three in the morning? Recognized that before the gas station went away, even more people were trying to get out at five o'clock with almost double the volume out on the road, so yeah. Does the study take that into account? Does it take into account that intersection and people stuck in traffic trying to get out? I remember being at that Irving Station years ago and having to wait through three cycles to turn right because nothing opened up, and if that's the case, you have a massive traffic jam in your parking lot. So, exactly, and as I pointed out, the condition that you're talking about and trying to get out, it's gonna be much easier in the morning than it would have been if you were trying to get out of that gas station. So it would be a better situation than what you live through. Okay, so kind of reading between the lines of the city's reaction, it seems to me like they were assuming Norman Street stays one way and they were concerned about backing up ingress to the school over like an hour and 15 minutes period in the morning. So that, I feel like is what I'll likely be focused on is the theory that between, say, seven and eight, there are too many cars in the Duncan parking lot. They spill over on the Norman, and then parents can't get their kids to school and then it backs up in the main street, and that's our understanding of their concern. So the, and the city's not asking you to change conditions for the afternoon because obviously no one's, fewer people, I guess, maybe more staggered are going in on Norman than the afternoon, so, right? Yeah, we're about to get to that, but this thing involved where we did a rigorous analysis of the afternoon, we did a rigorous analysis of the morning, and the numbers were clearly saying if there are issues, they're gonna be in the morning. So it's some of the later documents we did, we narrowed the focus, thankfully, just down to the morning, so we could get a more detailed investigation of that time slot, knowing that that was when you might have conflicts with the school. I wanna make it go on, but what I wanna bring up, my question is, if most of the traffic is southbound in the morning on Main Street, and people are coming in to Duncan, they're gonna wanna go left to get out. So my concern is how the plan will address that, because I'm not convinced they're all gonna be able to hop onto that left hand, internally, and go on to Tagon Street. They wouldn't be going to Tagon. Well, they can't turn to Tagon Street, right? Didn't you say the right hand turn would not contemplate them jagging over to the Tagon Street? Not if they're coming out of the drive-through, if they came out of Norman, they would have that ability to come up and then change. They're assuming Norman is two way. If Norman's two way, if Norman is two way. Sorry, I'll let you go. And we did look at those people wanting to go south, and to, again, you can get coffee most anywhere. What we find on these studies is that most of your traffic is gonna be a right in and a right out. If you're going north, this is where you get your coffee.  You go where it's convenient. There's- I've been there. And I recall there was a period in my career where we were doing a Dunkin' Donuts study about once a week. This is outside of Boston, where there's a Dunkin' Donuts everywhere. As there should be, because if there were a Dunkin' in every corner, you wouldn't have to get in your car to get there. And that would solve all the traffic problems. You don't just approve those in Boston? No, no, no. We have to go through the same process. And I did have one client call me after he got his store up and built.  I was like, I didn't do the market study. I did the traffic study. But the reason why he wasn't seeing the numbers, he thought he was gonna see, is he was on the wrong side of the road. He was south of Boston. People, computers in the morning were headed north. And they would have to make a left turn into off of a busy road and a left turn back on a busy road and he wasn't doing the numbers. He just should have waited till he could find a property on the other side of the road. So that's one of the few times we got the forecast wrong and we overstated it and it was upsetting to the client that he was on the wrong side of the road. So can I ask one more question about traffic problems? If Norman stays one way inbound to the school, can you go through the drive-through and then go back to the left, to the right to get to the school?  You're forced onto Main Street.  And you can't turn into both those drive-ways side by side coming out of the school or both exiting the school. Okay, so you can't grab your coffee before and then. So if Norman is one way and then the drive-through is also, the parking lots will both be one way. The drive-through you can circulate through, but yeah, if Norman's one way, we had a one-way parking lot too, yeah, that's correct. Yeah, we had conversations early on about taking one of those school drive-ways and using that as a way for people to make a U-turn. If they came out making a right turn, then they wanna go south, they could come in, turn on the, yeah, and then make the left at the light. But we learned early on that we shouldn't try to mix school traffic and dump-a-dones traffic, so that plan went away. So as I say, this has been an evolution. We've kind of gone over this array. We've looked at different circulation options, which we just explained. The other thing, if we go to the next slide, was the traffic volumes. When we first did the study, we were using numbers shown to the left there. VTrans is out counting cars all the time. They had done a count of this intersection in 2018. Their data was available online. We pulled that in as we normally would do and use that to do our analysis, and this is the morning peak hour number. And at the left side, it says total entering volume, so there's four lakes to the intersection, and if you counted all the cars in all four lakes, that total number in one hour that VTrans counted in 2018 was 1584. After we had started, the city had hired RSG to do a study for the school project that's underway right now, and they went out and counted cars as well. In fact, when we, as mentioned in the video earlier, was their video that they took. And there are numbers for whatever reason, and we counted, VTrans counted in September, beginning of the month now, but this again during the school year. They were at 1751, so there was a higher number that they counted, and they also broke their counts down by five minute increments, so you could see that busiest half hour for the school, so there was even a peak within the peak, and so those first three columns kind of shows an evolution where we started with what was available back in 2019. Staff asked us to use the newer counts that came in from RSG, which were higher, and obviously, when we talked about volume capacity, that pushed our volume up a bit, so we were a little more congested, so we're looking at a worse scenario, and at that early chart I showed you with the level service, we did two peaks. We said, well, what's just the hours a whole, but what's that 20 minute window that's the busiest? So we ended up using those 1781 number, but on top of that, our computer models, when they try to analyze operations, they actually apply what we call a peak hour factor, so built into the analysis model is this assumption you're gonna look at the worst 15 minutes.  So in effect, by the time we were done going through the stack of studies, we were 22% higher volume by the end of the day than what we started with, and again, we did all this being responsive to the questions that were coming from staff using the most available data, the most conservative data. So that's kind of the existing conditions piece of the study, getting the volumes down. The second piece I mentioned was that we had that chart with all the data points, our trip generation. Given that the Duncan is the dominant use from a traffic perspective, you can see the light blue colors are the current land use proposal. We're expecting 151 vehicle trips, and the A and peak hour, that drops down to 90 in the afternoon. That 90 is 45 customers coming in by car, 45 customers leaving. I'm sure there'll be other customers who walk in or take their bike, but the vehicle traffic is in these estimates. And again, for comparison, you can see the numbers associated with the gas station to go to that same source, the same Bible. We knew there were eight fueling positions. We used that to tell us what the gas station might have generated, and in comparison, you had the Duncan's more intensive in the morning peak, which is why we're focused on that. But the Duncan's less intensive in the afternoon peak, which is, again, a positive impact. Fewer curb cuts on Main Street, less traffic during the busier afternoon hour. So that 150 in the AM, that's 75 customers. There are trips in and there are trips out. Correct. Does that sound good? I do pretty sad that it's going by a president. All right.  I'm not the market, right? I'm not doing the marketing side of it, but this is just driving.  You're gonna have people that park at the school a lot walk over, which, again, is good. The business doesn't need to have all those customers come through the drive-thru. It can sustain itself with people who walk in. And that's always a positive. The drive-thru is obviously important. Like the last 15 months we lived through with COVID, you wouldn't have been able to get your coffee if not for the drive-thru, but. Yeah, I would know on that from a health and safety standpoint, you know, the drive-thru has been pretty critical for us interacting with customers in a way that we can do that, or keeping everybody safe. I know that doesn't speak to traffic. And I would just, from a traffic standpoint, just make a comment from even the stores and certain guests that it's in my experience with our restaurants that we have in the drive-thru, it's a release valve for flow. And the situations that are not permitted for drive-thru tend to be more involved in that because we don't have that release. And we're finding that guests are not able to just point it out. It's a convenience. You're likely not going to be. And the drive-thru is busy. You're no longer going to visit that site. Right. Thank you. So this charge is putting those generation numbers into context again. What's been added is the measured traffic flow northbound on Main Street. So whether it's the, you know, 90 Duncan people trying to get out in the afternoon or the 112 gas station people, you can see the people trying to leave in the afternoon are going to have more of a challenge with 725 northbound vehicles versus, you know, the Duncan Peak in the morning with only 404. It's a much easier situation for exiting traffic. But does that take into account the people coming out of the high school? You can tell I don't have kids in school. Do they use the same way to get back on the Main Street or is that separated in some way? So someone coming out of the high school, are they going to be competing for the same access to Main Street? No, because they're coming out with the light. They have the benefit of the light. There's the school driveway up here. There's the site. So they, okay, does that... This part of the light goes on and off for them. I guess the light's going to be there no matter who's using this. Okay. So is this the egress for this? Is this just assuming that the only way out is through the drive-through, meaning tenants of that property are going to have to wait through the drive-through lane or get in that slip lane to move their property? There's space so that, have me and be, you can show. It's basically, if you're trying to go north, you can bypass the drive-through. You might only do that if you're initially parked on the right part of the site. Most people wanting to park close to the building will come around and then make a left and be parked on some of those stalls. Which case you're now facing Norman Street so you'd come out by way of Norman Street? That's a two-way. That's a two-way. Can those, the parking space is on the right. Can they back up when there's cute cars in the queue for the drive-through? They can. There's room. There's room for them to back up. This is the proposed site plan with a two-way Norman Street circulation. So we're working through those three steps. What's the existing conditions? Do your forecast and now with the analysis. And again, I always zoom in on the numbers that have been circled on the chart there. You have the set of numbers to the left side with a .74 circle. That's the existing condition. And then the build condition to the right is once you add in the traffic from this project, how's it going to work.  So that's turns that aren't happening today. And then the other half of it, because we had that 50-50 split, are people that are going to come to this store that wouldn't otherwise be out there. So these are special purpose strips to come to this site. So the combination of those vehicles, and again, it's that the morning number was 150. And again, some are passed by, some are new. Some want to go north, some want to go south. Some are in, some are out. When you put them all in the intersection, we change from being at 74% of capacity to 75%. And that's the morning peak. You see some higher numbers down below the 78 and 79. That's that 20-minute window that we're asked to look at when the school is at its peak. So the big number there is the change. We go, we add .1. We use 1% of the capacity in the intersection roughly. So it's not a big change. And it's less of a change than if we were to reopen the gas station in the afternoon and see those bigger numbers trying to dump out onto that road at a busier time. But a D is not good. A D in an urban setting is wonderful. And, you know, we all just went through a weird 15 months, but one of the first things I did in the pandemic as I'm a traffic engineer is I went down the corner and counted cars. And compared that to what someone else counted a year earlier and saw that traffic was off like 65%. And, yeah, less traffic means less congestion. And if every roadway operator level service A, none of us would be going to work. We wouldn't have jobs. We'd be in a pandemic situation where we're all stuck at home doing nothing. So to be at a level service D in an urban setting on a busy commuter route is pretty darn good. If you enter the circulator and you have, that's more of a E or an F. So, yeah. And that calculated delay there at 40 seconds. It's even getting pretty close to the C range. So, no, that's it. And, again, this is after we went and pulled in the RSG numbers that were taken at the, they were 22% higher than what we had started with. Other days you might see much lower numbers. So, this is also assuming that folks leaving the drive-through are not making a left turn onto Tegan after leaving. Correct. Right turn only on the drive-through. Did you say left turn onto Tegan though? So, I think you do take into account some traffic going northbound on Main Street and then turning left onto Tegan. That's good. But not from the drive-through. If they came back out to Norman and then down Norman made a right back onto Main, again, they could go to Tegan. So, let me reframe that same question. Assume Norman is one way. Getting vibes from the city that they're not going to change it. I'm just reading, I just read this today and it seemed like they didn't want to change it. I assume that's their call. Maybe that's something differently. But I think you're trying to prevent cars that are turning right going northbound on Main Street from doing an immediate left onto Tegan because that's the easiest way to get back southbound if that's where you were going.  Like, nobody is trying to do it anyway. Like, disobeying sign. Yeah, in terms of how we assign trips, everyone that we assume would be wanting to go south and that's looking at the pattern traffic, they're out there, you saw the 400, the 700. After looking at that, we came up with a distribution and we put all those cars out to Norman and then up and then left onto Tegan. So, we assume they're doing what we expect them to do. Well, if Norman's one way, if Norman's to go north... Then they're coming out and they're going to head north and we'll find another way. Easier they'll find another way. Again, we're talking coffee here. They're either going to find another way to get turned around and come south or they're going to go another route.  You may just not attract those people. It's a convenience business. So, if it's not convenient, if I know that if I pull out of the shop, I can't get back to where I want to go, I will find another place to get my coffee. Kind of rejecting my premise that anyone was going to turn left from coming south down to go to this Dunkin Donuts if they know they're being forced right when they come out. Well, no. If they're familiar with the site, if they've been here before... I'm sorry, we talked about one-way Norman. We're assuming... Okay, one-way Norman. Yeah, so we're going to lose some of those customers. Yeah, you're assuming that it sounds like the vast majority of folks are going to be coming north in the first place. So it's on their route instead of like super off their route, especially since they can't keep going south. Correct. Again, I may get a phone call if this gets built saying, you told me I was going to do 150 trips. I'm only doing 100. What happened? I said, you're on the wrong side of the road. People will do what makes sense. As much as, you know, but as me as a planner and you as a board and staff don't want congestion, people don't like being caught in congestion. So if they know this is a difficult site to get to, they may not come here. And they will find someplace else to buy coffee. And I, you know, that's kind of a good lead into the next part of our analysis is the drive-thru queue. If you know it's a long wait in the drive-thru, you may decide not to buy your coffee here, not to buy at that particular time, or not to go to the drive-up window by the stake in a new parking stall. People have choices. So if I come to the site in the drive-thru queue, it looks like it's full or almost full. I don't have to pull in to the queue. I can go around, I can park, I can go to the next place. So understand that there's the math and the science, but we're dealing with people here at the end of the day.  So for the queue, again, it's volume capacity kind of thing. Do we have enough space to stack people without causing a problem? And what we did, Abbey's site plan I think had some little cars drawn on there. She had them packed really tight together and I think told me, we have stacking for 12 cars. And I scratched my head and said, that's not how I would figure it. You may be able to draw them, but people sitting in a queue have some space between vehicles. If it's on a street or a traffic light, typically it's 25 feet per vehicle on average. And that fact is that there might be some trucks in the mix. We won't have an interactive trailer going through the drive-thru. So we could probably assume maybe 22.5 feet or something, but we went with the conservative approach and measured the distance that we had for stacking at about 200 feet, which, again, conservatively that's eight car lanes. So we then tried to apply models to see is eight car lanes enough because when we get to nine, we are having an impact on the school or a very undesirable impact. A very short impact potentially because if a car were to get onto the road, we estimate about 45 seconds to process a car at the window. So in 45 seconds the queue would move up a car. But again, it's a situation we don't want to see, we don't want to have happen. And I'll talk you through how we got there. But the starting point was, okay, what's our capacity? That's just a measurement of the length of store and we have space for eight vehicles. So I know that you've said that you think the tenants are a negligible portion of this and we're focusing on the Duncan traffic, but isn't it conceivable that people who are living in this apartment facility are going to be leaving at the same time at this peak hour and are going to end up congesting that line further if they're trying to back out? The resident component? Yeah. Do we have resident parking on site? Yeah, there's on-street spaces proposed and residents would be mixed in here also. So there's eight apartments? There's eight apartments. Okay. So you think even with eight apartments that those people leaving for work at the same time at this peak study, that's not going to congest that line further? There are very small numbers of apartments and that's all fact in our study. I mean I keep saying Duncan, but the apartment trips are in there as well and the other retail space, but apartments are like half a trip per unit, dwelling unit, so in the course of an hour we'd have four cars either come or go associated with that and some of those will be parked on the street. So they are in our numbers, but they said when we're talking maybe 150 trips in the morning, it's a very small component. Is there anything that takes into account how difficult it would be for the tenants to enter into the line of traffic to exit the parcel? I mean, I'm just thinking if there's a line, if there's a queue of cars, that's dependent on someone being courteous and letting people in. I mean it is dependent on people respecting the pavement markings. There's the do not block markings on the pavement that we have at this throat here, where you would egress, and this is the two-way version, but in your packet there's a C201A, so you can see what it would look like with all the north circulation. So just north of that crosswalk of the do not block. Are any of the spaces reserved for the apartment? I mean that would be up to the applicant. You know what they want to set aside for apartment versus the commercial spaces. But if it was one way, the drive-thru entrance would go through where the tenants are parking? No, the drive-thru in both scenarios is still the order board is going to be right here in both scenarios. So the queuing is on the side that has the laundromat, which the peak hour doesn't coincide with a dump yard. Chris, question for you. Is do not block? I assume that it's 200 feet without the do not block. Correct. We can see the gap there. The 50 and the 25 and the space in between. So we basically looked at this queuing issue three different ways. Two of which was shared with staff, two and a half I'd say. There was a question that came up late in the game and we I think partially answered a staff question on the queuing. And then at the suggestion of Abby's team, we ran a new analysis that staff hasn't seen but also trying to answer the same question, are the eight spaces enough? And at the very base level and what the models look at is you got a service rate on the left there. Basically how quickly can the employees get your stuff out the window and get paid and get you moving on? If that's a slow process, you're going to have a longer queue than if it's a fast process. The other half is the arrival rate. How many people driving by that wanting to decide they want to buy coffee? Or they change their habits day to day. So how many people are coming in? And again, we look at an hour. We look at the morning peak hours we're studying and we wanted to compare those two rates with the understanding that if the rate that we can get them through the window is slower than the rate they're arriving, we have a problem. The queue will just keep building infinitely until demand dies off. Is that an ideal service rate at just like a generic window? I'm wondering how it takes into account the fact that that car at the service window is the one that needs to leave and turn to know where for them to go. We'll get to that. This is just very basic to say. What's my service rate? And these numbers affect into the next analysis. What's my service rate? Is it higher than the demand? Do I got more cars arriving? I can go stand that one for a second. You go back the other way. So understanding arrival rate, again, you saw the traffic forecast. We did the assignments. We talked to Duncan to say, you know, what percentage of your customer base uses your drive-thru typically. And again, I've done these for years and I've seen similar numbers. And you know, we come up with 60%. It's a pretty good split of parking versus going in. So the large amounts of drive-thru is 60%. So that 45 number is the 60% of the... half of the 150, 75 is the number of customers an hour that we determine. 60% of that's 45 coming through the drive-thru. So the bulk of them, we're assuming, will hit the drive-thru lane. And then it's how fast can people service them? That number is evolving. Through the pandemic, a lot of these people are driven to drive-thru businesses and they now did a lot of online ordering and such so that your order's ready when you get there and move people through quicker. But so that's changing. And again, my other... earlier days we studied these and we've seen those drive-thru windows operate 30 seconds a car, 120 cars now. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Given there had been a while, we now made some other observations at some of the other drive-thru where there was a line. It's a lot. It took them to get... Picked a number of about 85 vehicles per hour is a service thing that we're assuming you can get past the window. And again, our demand is 45. Test number one is the 85 greater than the 45. Yes, it is. We know this can work. But in fact, to think about it, if they're coming through a regular interval and it's 85 an hour and the demand is 45 an hour, why would there ever be a queue? By the time the second guy arrived, the first guy would be gone, right? But things aren't uniform. They're erratic. You can have five minutes where you're getting slammed and you're seeing more than 85... a rate that's higher than 85 vehicles per hour and now you start to build a queue. That won't be sustained for the entire hour and the queue will dissipate. But because things don't move in a straight line and you're going to get some up and down, up and down, there are queues. So we go to the next step, which is we applied the stochastic model. Again, it's in the study, but it looks at those arrival rates and the service rates and assumes that they're random. There's an average, but there's some randomness assumed so that you can calculate, well, what's the probability and I'm going to have zero cars waiting, one car waiting. We put this chart together and we keep adding up the probabilities till we get to the 95th percentile condition. Standard target in highway design. If you're designing a left turn lane out on the street at the traffic light, you design for the 95th percentile queue. You want to make sure that 19 out of 20 signal cycles, everybody can fit in the space. So we're applying that same standard to the drive-through to say we want to be sure that 95% of the time everyone fits and when we look at that threshold, it puts us at a four-car queue. So we're expected to 95% of the time only need half of the space that we have available at the site. This is 95% of the time during the peak hour. This is that morning peak hour condition. So in our busiest hour of the day, we expect to be only using half of the queue space 95% of the time. That was the finding we shared with staff. Some questions came up about that. We did some sensitivity analysis and saying, well, what if it's not 45 vehicles per hour that arrive? Well, what if it's not 85 vehicles per hour that arrive? And we can rerun that, and I think the... What's my next slide, Lekli? Okay, we'll come back to... Yeah. So we did a test saying how much demand would we need to need all eight cars? Or how much slower would the window people have to work to hit the eight-car number and discover that we would have to be off by 33% in one case and 24% in the other case. I think that was an memo we pushed out just before this meeting. So we rerun this model to kind of test to see what if we're wrong? How wrong do we have to be to end up having a problem here? We had a good margin of error. The third test, and again, this came later because the question did come up. As you were talking about the site plan, if you've got your food, you can pull forward and still be on site, not in the street yet. But if you have to wait now to get out onto Main Street, won't that contribute to the backup? And when that question came up from staff, we looked at the operations analysis and we said, well, the drive-through capacity is 85 cars an hour because people are buying and selling stuff. The gaps on Main Street to get in is 550 per hour. So basically there's plenty of room to get out once they get past the drive-through. It probably isn't a problem, but that's as far as we went with it. But since then, Abby's team said, you traffic guys have these simulation models. Why don't you simulate that? So the next thing we're going to show you is the third test that we didn't have time to share with staff.  And basically, since we told them and ignored that truck, we encoded for percentage of trucks in the traffic stream. It doesn't know that we wouldn't want a truck going into this high school. But you code the model to say that I have 400 cars northbound on Main Street at that time of day. And it has a random number generator that spaces them randomly, but populates this flow with the 400 cars an hour. And you do that for every approach on the intersection, on the street system. And you can animate and simulate. So it moves the cars through. And as it's doing it, unlike the first model results I showed, it's actually measuring what's going on. And it measures delay. It measures travel time. So every one of those digital cars that moves through the system, it times them going from when they came in to the exit. And if they're waiting in a light, it measures the queue. It looks every 10 seconds to say, how long is the queue? How long is the queue? How long is the queue? It basically takes snapshots of the video. So to understand the situation, the question that came up is, while your drive-through lane is so close to the street, won't those things interact? So what we did is you see that street where it says Duncan, that's her exit driveway. And it comes out and you make the right turn to go north. But we introduced a fake street. You see the little street segment going north-south through there. Right about where the drive-through window would be. And what we did is we loaded traffic on that street and made it so busy that the model was telling us, you can only get 85 vehicles per hour past that side street. We modeled as if there's a stop sign and you're on the Duncan driveway, you hit a stop sign, which is the same as the drive-through window. And you need to wait there to the same weight that you'd expect if you're at the drive-through window. So we basically created a drive-through window in the model. We ran the model, it measured what was going on. We ran it 10 times. And the model told us that the expected 95th percentile queue on the Duncan Donuts driveway was four cars, which is exactly what we got from the other model, which reinforces our initial thinking that we have adequate stacking with the eight cars on site. I think the concern David was asking about earlier was the stop sign in this model, if I'm reading this plan right, the very first car in the queue is at the window. And they're also the closest to getting back on Main Street. So if the light is red going up on Main Street, there are like how many car lengths is that back to the drive-through entrance? From the picture we see here, it's maybe a car and a half. So two cars are stopped at the red light in the right lane. This car probably can't clear the window. First car on the drive-through can't clear the window to let second car in the drive-through through to get there for a break. I think that's the concern. And it looked from that model like the stop sign was kind of further back in the drive-through lane. There's two stop signs. The one to the right represents the drive-through window in the time you might wait there. And the second one is at the right turn only to go on to Main Street. The flaw that I see here with this, which is maybe what I've been springing up, I'm not sure, is that the intersection of Taigen and the high school drive above the Duncan gives enough room for 5, 6, 7 cars to stack in that simulation. But in reality, it's only a car and a half to two cars. Is the Duncan drive-through lane in the right lane to the intersection? Or is it looks farther than a couple of cars? Yeah. I would need to double check that because we had it all coated with the... I mean, we basically build this off of an aerial so the distances are real. Yeah. And I'm looking at your... Yeah, but you're an aerial. What I'm not sure is if we didn't maybe tweak that distance a little bit to try to squeeze in this fake driveway, but it had been originally modeled with all the proper spacing. But we were trying to get at that because when we ran the model, the reason we used the model is if there was a queue on Main Street, it wasn't letting the right turn out. And if the right turn out wasn't able to move, it wasn't letting cars move up from the drive-through.  And if we're off by our car length, my apologies, but I think we're... The intent was to make that precise and it may have simply shifted a little bit having to try to... Again, your computer models aren't as flexible all the time as you'd like them to be. So, again, we did the test of do we have enough capacity to get all the customers through, we did. We ran two different models to figure out how much we're going to need. We concluded half of what's there and, again, we're talking 90% percentile. I'm not saying you'll never see it longer than four cars. You may see it at eight cars. It's a bad moment. Whoever's ever at the window is having a hard time and things do back up. But day in, day out, these are our expectations. Again, the staff didn't have the opportunity to see that last simulation effort. We do know that staff, as I learned today, had been communicating with RPC traffic engineers and looking at some of this and they raised the same question, but did not cite any issues with us being able to make this thing work. Can I go back to the four cars 90... Is this four cars 95% of the time? Correct. Okay. So, I sort of understand how you're arriving. I don't really understand it, but you're telling me that you have inputs based on the traffic flow that currently exists accounting for some magnet effect and you're comparing the rates and the model is telling you that 95% of the time it is four cars or fewer in this line. Have you done any cross-checking? Because I'm just thinking back to every time I went to that Starbucks you were talking about on Suzy Wilson Road, swear to God they were more than four every time. I just wonder, like a gut check against other drivers in Chittenden County, are they all 95% four? Or is this site weird? No, no. Again, I've done, I'd say a hundred of these over my career. The four is smaller than what typically you might see. When I was doing field observations to, again, observe that rate, the sites that I looked at, a couple of sites were running at about six cars, I'd say. I mean, again, I wasn't there for the entire hour measuring the queue every second, but when you're making these observations five, six cars would happen on occasion. But I was also at sites that were on four-lane highways, a two-lane road here. So yeah, this is probably at the lower end of what you'd expect. But again, it's, we're hate to say it, we're on the wrong side of the road. It's a two-lane road. We have potential for a walk-in. And I think with the turn restrictions coming out, we're probably not going to be as busy as some other drive-throughs. The first problem with that question is that you're understanding the name test. Well, I don't know how comparable they are because the model just said drive coffee drive-through, right? And I assume that includes more than just Dunkin' Donuts in the trip generation model. Yeah, yeah. And the Starbuckses, they're a little different than the Dunkin' model. I think when you go to Dunkin' you order coffee. When you go to Starbucks, it's a triple latte. I'm not a big coffee drinker, so I don't know. But, and yeah, when we did the work for Starbucks, actually, like we did here, did forecast, it was conditioned that we come back and count after it's built to see what it's doing. We went to go back and count. We didn't measure the queue per se. They didn't come up with a question, the permitting, but they were interested in the total volume of traffic. And so when we went back, they did say, yeah, our drive-through has been real busy, but a lot of that was COVID related that people couldn't get into the store, not everyone could get into the store. There was limited service in the store. So how are the numbers compared to your prediction? Well, they first sent me the numbers and they were double what I expected. And I said, oh my gosh. I'll go be so far off. And I called the guy who did the count and it was one of these video things. They take a video and he looked at it. He said, and we did a whole week and I guess Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, they were double. Thursday and Friday seemed reasonable. And he went and looked at it and said, oh yeah, there was a math there. It was double counting the first three days. So we fixed that and looked at the numbers again and we had predicted 194 vehicle trips and the morning peak hour again, busier location, busier road. The average five-day count was 194. I was like, wow. So the condition said, you know, where we were, there were impact fees associated with building on the site. It tied down with traffic degenerates. So they said, you know, we're going to charge you this fee on the premise that your forecast is correct. But you're going to go back and count it after bill and we're going to adjust the fee and ask you for more money if the number is higher than you expected. So the client was very happy to learn the name. It's a good model. So what I promised you, we could skip that. Yeah, normally we went, we talked about all that. I promise you we'd come back and repeat the findings. We went through the process that, you know, staff wanted us to do it. The VTRANS would have us to do really, you know, we got lefts and rights and new trips and pass-by trips, but we really aren't going to change the operations of the signalized intersectional hole. That got a lot, you know, compared to today with nothing on the site. Yeah, putting those uses there. But if you look back to when it was a gas station, if you were to do a gas station with the two curb cuts, we've really cleaned up and simplified the operations along that section of roadway. Well, you may have had people trying to cut across and make a left turn and all those things. And, you know, we recognize the importance of understanding the drive-through. We have no interest in having the drive-through queue to spill back onto the street. If the queue is longer than eight cars, we're potentially losing customers. Because if it's a 45-second wait time, as we estimated, times eight, you know, you're six minutes waiting in line, you're going to go someplace else probably. So it becomes a self-limiting factor, but from what we think is going to happen here, it looks like we have a pretty good cushion there. Do you have any chance to have a study of when it was a gas station? Traffic impacts at that point? Do you make an actual count from the gas station? We're going back probably five years now. Yeah, I do not. Again, the way we did that, we go to the same source that we used Estate for the Duncan we look at as an eight-fueling position service station. That's where the numbers come from. And again, it's the same sort of thing. People like me are out counting gas stations. They send the data into Washington, D.C. It gets published in the trip generation handbook and updated every couple of years. And you can go back and see what everyone else counted and say, okay, I'm getting five trips per station per hour. And then you multiply that out. Okay. I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier about online ordering, maybe speeding up a drive-through. Like if you place your order at home, you go to the drive-through and pick it up. In theory, you're moving through a little bit faster because they don't have to make your food from the time you order to the time you pick it up. Is that just kind of observational colloquial like you heard it through the grapevine? Or do you have data suggesting that the trend is they're getting faster? That's grapevine kind of software. In addition to talking to the owner. I have a comment to that. Yes. The mobile app would allow you to pre-order either your drive-through or pick-up. So you're skipping the whole process of stopping at the menu board assuming that there's no cars in front of you. We're finding that people are less likely to wait in the drive-through because they have that alternative. So if they say, okay, you're at that peak that there is those four cars there, I don't want to wait the extra time, I pre-order, I'm going to go and grab my coffee and exit the site rather than wait the extra five minutes that they take. So we are seeing that consistently now. You've seen that in the last year really ramp up because of the COVID situation and people not wanting to sit inside the restaurant for a long period of time. So my theory was it would make the drive-through faster or you're telling me that it actually makes it shorter because people are diverting from the drive-through when it's busier and just walking in. Yeah. There are two major projects about to happen in this area. One's going on the school renovation and my understanding is that they're going to be combining their two exit lanes into one and then the main street reconstruction which is about to kick off next year I don't know when, next year or something. Did you take either of those into account and how would you anticipate those affecting the traffic that was intersectioned? Traffic-wise we understand that the reconstruction will probably mean a new signal and optimized timing to make it work even more efficiently so that's a positive impact. We did have access to the data from the school study that study itself said even though there's a lot of building construction going on they're not going to see an increase in traffic. That it's accommodating an existing overcrowded condition they're not expecting added enrollment, added traffic. So no traffic impact from that and likely positive impacts from the reconstruction project. We're looking and have recommended do not block the box, striping out on main street so people get into Norman and that would assume that those sorts of things would be part of the state project as well. I think we sub right at the state. Do we see in here somewhere is the configuration of main street in this area going to stay the same essentially or is the left turn lanes? Yeah, the turn lanes stay the same. The number lanes stay the same. I think the shoulder treatments and bike lanes are being added, new sidewalks. But the number of lanes we assumed in the traffic model to analyze the operations are not changing. I can see that the school actually may be even in helping the situation because I know they're adding parking at the back that's accessed from other city streets. I have a clarifying question just to make sure I understand the site plan. So if Norman remained one way, can those folks, so say that the queue for the driving is backed up. For those folks that do decide to park and go into the store to either pick up their order or just purchase in there, there's no way for them to avoid having to exit through the queue line because they still have to get into that same right turn lane. That's the only, there's only one way out. Okay. But we have, they can go. They don't need to enter the queue line. They just need to be, they'll be next to the queue line. They do need to go through it. They'll need to emerge. And eventually merge to make a right turn. You cross the line, you don't have to get in the line. Yes. I found that Detroit was thinking, I think it was in the city's explanation why they didn't think converting Norman to a two-way was a good idea and it was because of, partly because of what the street's going to look like after the new reconstruction. It's a, it's from Johns, the bus speaker, Letter, Danes, May 5th. Right? Is that right? Yeah. That was raised. So it's like there's the red circle, there's consideration to adding a pedestrian traffic or island there at the crossing. I don't think that changes your configuration. And there were some concerns, the text talks about some concerns about buses turning on to Norman. But it's going to be normal. So this isn't moving to the right. Yeah, so that's that. So this is just a bit of a fool. It doesn't, shouldn't be changing up here. I think they were saying that's why they didn't want to turn it to a two-way street. I have a question because I'm not an engineer. So for some of the predicted values, there are margin of errors included. And so one of them is 33%, one of them is 24. Is that normal? That seems high to me, but I'm not an engineer, so I don't... We didn't say, let's make sure we have a 33% error margin. We simply figured out that was kind of working backwards. How much higher or lower could the number go before we had any car queue? Okay, so I guess... And it just happened to be 24%, 33%. Okay, somebody's asking that and related to the city's concerns about the assumptions made and that if the assumptions ever... Any real life ever exceeded the assumptions. I mean, these margins of error might indicate that it could happen on a more normal basis, maybe, I don't know. I think so. I'm going to try and answer this question just to make sure that I have this right in my head. You're not actually reporting margins of error for your statistics. What you're saying is if there were a margin of error, if you assume that it's erroneous, it would have to be erroneous in the correct direction by more than 24% or 33% in order to get to this scenario where you're coming back here and saying, well, I was wrong. So do you report margins of error in terms of... I mean, you've got certain data going into these calculations, right? And is there... I guess you did give us the 95% confidence interval, but is there like a margin of error, standard deviation, like it would be familiar within a poll that you report? I don't know if you have one. Again, it's... I showed you the departure with the volumes. We started what we thought was a typical day. We found it even higher day. We analyzed that.  So everything we do has a margin of error built into it. And again, it was just kind of when we got... We did jump over the last few sides quickly, and it caused some of the confusion. I was leading you there, and now you're asking me the questions, what I call the sensitivity analysis. So again, on the left, we had eight stacking spots. The analysis we did was based on 45 vehicles per hour, wanting to go through the drive-through, and that told us we had four cars in the queue. We had to increase that number to 60 vehicles to make the calculations say that the 95th percentile of the eight cars. So it's comparing that 45, which is what we analyzed. How high could we go until we hit an eight-car queue was at 60. So that's when I say 30% of the 33%, it's adding another 15 to that 45. I'd have to increase my... My forecast of cars going through the drive-through would have to be off by a third to the wrong direction, as you say, to even hit the eight-car queue. Or 95th percentile queue, where it's still going to fit on site. So I could be off... I could be that wrong and still be right. There are two variables where you could be wrong, right? The other one was the 85 per hour, how fast I can get them through, and I may have done another chart, but that was in the letter we sent out last week. The 85, if I dropped the 60 or 65, and that would be like 24% of 85. So we're doing Punnett squares now. If you're wrong, my bulls... Just trying to cover all the bases, because I was anticipating a question and saying, well, Mr. Bryan, you sound like you know what you're talking about, but what if you're wrong? We're wrong sometimes. But like I say, this isn't a razor thin margin here. We're saying this only works if we hit that 45 exactly. So I do want to be mindful of time and it's eight o'clock. Other questions for the appellant from the DRV? We do have an et al lead to hear from. I do just want to clarify that in the perfect storm where you have nine cars, one car is either waiting on Norman Street to get in or they must exit through the high school parking lot. If they decide that's too long, I don't have time for this, they will be taking the high school to leave. If someone comes in, then there's eight cars could they continue on and just exit through the high school? Yes. That's the only way they could exit if they decided that they could still come on site, drive alongside the queue and come into a parking stall and then walk in. The fact that the queue is eight cars doesn't mean you have to stop on Norman Street. You can keep going. You can go on site and park, the other option. If you choose to not go to Dunkin Donuts and you go past, you have to exit through the school. There's this parallel lane, right? You could just go one kind of notch beyond the drive-through and there's a way to get through without going all the way back to the high school. You could come on site and circulate through all the parking and come back. You could do that. If you're going to do that, you're going to pull in a parking stall and go get your car. Yeah, but they wouldn't get all the way back here. And that's this whole situation at the high school. If they don't want to be a customer, they're going to essentially just get into the next one. I'll admit, I've bailed the drive-through lanes before. Set for five minutes like that. To go all the way back to the volume assumption, the measuring days were typical or atypical of the school volumes? We typically will first off, most days are pretty much the same. If you do a week-long count. Not last year. Well, day-to-day was pretty much the same. This day last year versus the year before, probably not. Day-to-day, you'll see Friday afternoons can be a little weird. Monday mornings can be a little weird. Middle of the week things are pretty constant day-to-day. So when we ask for a count, we do not count Fridays. We typically do not count Mondays. So that's our first precaution. And secondly, we talked to people that did the count and they would, anything unusual that day. Was there a crash? Was there construction? So we don't know for certain, but I'm just telling you from doing it just for years, you can, unless you see something strange going on here at the ends of the week, you're going to be within 2-3% of atypical. And again, we started with what we thought was atypical and we bumped up 22%. Other questions for the pellets? I think at this point we would... Okay, so just for the parking, one thing I had noticed, I can't, maybe it's in here and I'm just missing it. So for the calculations for the parking spaces, does this change whether or not Norman is one way or two ways? Is this the number? So there's 29 spaces that are available for this calculation. This is for it as a two-way street or a one-way street? It's for it as a either. There's room for four parking spaces on Harmon Street whether it's one way or two-way. Okay, I had seen numbers on a different page with these calculations. That was five spaces on Harmon Street? Yes. I originally, when Norman was going to be one way, there was no change. It looked like we could fit five spaces on Norman, but when we had to sort of neck it down to make room for the two-way and to block egress traffic, we lost a space. So if it's one way, I think we can go back to five spaces on Norman, but according to the parking calculations, we don't need it. We can only need four on street. Wasn't there fewer in that calculation? Weren't there fewer spaces available at 32? Weren't there like nine available or something like that? There are. We added two extra spaces because we moved the dumpsters up where currently there's a cut-through on the north of the laundromat. So now the dumpster is there, and you can have two employee spaces from a while ago. What is being asked of us since there's two site plans shown here? What's the appellant asking? Is one asking to be approved? To approve one of the site plans. It's a weird, I mean this goes back to whether I don't believe the appellant has any control over whether Norman is one way or two way, so we kind of have to get the city's position on that. But I think they have to operate on dual tracks. So say here's why you should approve it if the city tells you it's staying one way. Here's why you should approve it if the city says it's going to be two way. Is that fair to say? So they have to make parallel arguments. Okay, so at this point we would typically ask the appellant to vacate the table unless the city folks want to do it from the audience. But it is more helpful for the folks videotaping to have this area with the mics and stuff devoted to who's telling us what things we should consider. Thanks for putting up with our interruptions. This is larger than the Vermont Supreme Court right here. We've got more folks to deal with. I can't think of the last time we had a full house on Zoom. This is ironically higher demand post-COVID. I feel like we're seeing all across the board. Trying to plan a conference for January and we're predicting higher than normal attendance. That's what I thought you should come. The hotel is very confident that we will be able to do a relatively normal thought. They're a little bit conservative in their projection but we can make it work. I'm John Roger. I'm the public work instructor slash co-interim city manager right now. Do you want me to jump in? Go for it. One, this is incredibly challenging site. If you look at it in plan view it's smack down in front of the school. It's sharing an entrance with the school. Right now there's a pretty high base peak morning entrance into that Norman street. That's what really flew the red flag for us right at the beginning because that 715 to 815 peak window we're having the concerns. Once we looked at the rest of the data, the afternoon traffic generation wasn't really concerned for us. It's really specifically that 715 to 815 window that we're looking at. I should say typically for these types of projects that are happening on the corridor we do get some challenging projects. We haven't been here before where we've never come to a consensus on solutions so it is disappointing that we haven't gotten there but really appreciate the development team and we've been peppering them with questions as you probably heard. They've been great to work with. Just to go back to the traffic impacts I think I heard most like I heard a lot of the comments that you all provided were very similar to our concerns. So really to kind of step back we started when we started looking at the project the first iteration of the traffic pattern showed traffic entering the school property and then getting to that traffic signal type which we thought was workable because now you're distributing that traffic a little bit. You're not pushing everyone out to that egress right at the light and forcing everyone right.  So we originally thought okay this is workable but we in the city we can't say yes go on the school property and use that traffic signal. So you know unfortunately the school was interested in allowing that access into the school property and then we were forced to really just look on site like okay how are we going to make this traffic pattern work, connect to our street network and not cause issues. So one option you heard tonight was looking at the two way conversion of Norman street. We are just to be on record we are not looking at that as a solution. We met with the school later on in the project. Their concern is that they're looking to they're looking to implement a busing program or increase their busing program. So looking at that and turning races with the main street project and you saw that pedestrian island we're proposing plus losing a potential on-street parking space you know I don't know if you've ever dealt with on-street parking before but it gets emotional with residents sometimes. So before we do any big conversions like that we want to go out have a public hearing with the folks impacted and seeing that we were going to potentially lose on-street parking for this conversion specifically for development wasn't appealing to us. So we have nixed that as a potential option and we've taken that away from the table. That helps with decision making. So I mean that you saw some different iterations here but hopefully that clears up sort of one pathway forward. So going back the two-way conversion was the last iteration that we saw with the traffic impact study and then the May 5th letter that you all have was kind of like our final like okay we as a city we unfortunately can't get comfortable with this traffic pattern because ultimately we own it. Like once development comes in they you know start you know they're in operations and traffic is flowing. If there are issues with traffic you know design teams gone developer you know yes they have a footprint there but there are the approvers of this traffic pattern. So if there are issues that's on us now and potentially the school to try to solve. So that's where we really have a real comfort level issue with this modeling. And I'll just go through the quick kind of like high points of where issues are which I think you've all sort of seen already. So one is just site egress. So as you've seen in the plan there's only one egress point with the one way conversion. So everyone's coming into Normand they're going into the Dunkin Donuts and they're having to come out at that egress point that curb cut that's two car links back from the Tiger Street and they have to go right. You know to us there are modeling shows that might be okay. We have some real concerns there because there's really not any there's no relief though from that.  You can't go into the school property. You're there's only one way out and you know what models don't capture sometimes is those you know those people that are going to make the left turns. What what kind of safety issues that going to create and that's you know that's things that you can't capture in the model unfortunately. Two I kind of touched on the baseline school traffic so in that morning in the 715 815 period that's the highest AM peak period because Normand Street is sharing an entrance for the school. So it's school entrance public street but it's really the school entrance. So you're layering on what's already like a really high peak traffic generation another really high peak traffic generation with a coffee shop and Dunkin Donuts. So that obviously is pretty concerning to us because especially with the one way Normand those you know parents that are dropping off people that are coming into school to work they're not those you know the 50% pull-offs that are coming into Dunkin Donuts and hitting the drive-thru they're getting into the school because they can't come back out to Normand Street under the one way conversion if they're going through the drive-thru so they're hitting that egress in the intersection. So you're layering on new users they're either northbound on Main Street they're pulling in or they're coming southbound on Main Street. So you know just you already have that high peak traffic there it's almost like what is the worst thing you can put at development site that's going to conflict with that already high peak and it's you know a coffee shop would be probably the one of the worst uses you can put there with the existing baseline traffic. Now I have four highlights but three it's just you know the modeling assumptions which we talked about I have a lot of respect for Rick and just his experience but with all models they are estimates right so you know with the queuing distances you know yes four queuing distances but that's based on IT trip generation and then you distribute that into the intersection you're saying okay 60% of the people going northbound are coming into the Dunkin Donuts and 20% are coming from southbound and so there's a lot of assumptions that are baked into you know potentially how many users are going to enter that drive through in Dunkin Donuts. And again is the city who's going to eventually own that traffic and be responsible for any issues there we're not really comfortable with you know resting what I consider is a pretty high-risk intersection because it's you have the school traffic you have kids coming in the morning we're not comfortable with you know kind of resting our hat on all those assumptions that are baked into this model especially given that it's a pretty complex intersection that's going on there with school traffic and really short left turn lanes, two car lanes left turn lanes so that's our number three item and then our sort of final item is just say it does work that's great but if it doesn't work what do you do to solve those problems? I don't know what the retroactive sort of solutions are if there are problems if there are people that are trying to make left turns constantly you can put up signage you can enforce you know ideally you put a media in it we can't do that because we have left turn lane so I don't that's really concerning to me that there's not you know if there are problems there are easy solutions to fix those problems but that's sort of where we landed on you know our recommendation to the zoning administrator unfortunately so again we don't like being in this position we want to try to find the solution but you know unfortunately in this one we just couldn't get there with the traffic and so we did offer you know two options that we could they got as comfortable with this one is take out the drive through like make it a pull in you know like the starbucks that's further up the corridor I think we could kind of get comfortable with that knowing that the assumption would be cars would be hitting that egress a little bit slower and it potentially couldn't create that bottleneck because they're parked or two you know limit the drive through hours during that peak school period so that those weren't overlaying at the same exact time and then we could kind of evaluate and say okay all right let's see what is the model accurate what we think is happening there and then potentially open it up that morning if you know things were going okay so those are the two options we offered I would just say one other recommendation if you know for the one way you know since we're going with this we're looking at the one way normans model I don't think we've seen sort of a final traffic impact study that includes the final numbers for that so meaning we've gotten we've gotten a traffic model that shows traffic going through the school and hitting the light I think the second iteration showed a version of all egress out but it didn't include some of the items that Rick mentioned like okay well what happens when kids push that walk button how's that impact traffic what's the queue distance if it's if those cars aren't coming back out so I don't think we've seen that sort of final final impacts study if you guys do choose to sort of overturn it because the last iteration that we have is the two way conversion in cars coming back out to normal and being able to like make less and rights so but yeah that's that's kind of where we stand any questions I'm not sure if this is a relevant question but I'm going to ask it anyway in the appellance presentation I heard a recitation of a condition on another project that was basically approved conditionally tried out for a month but stay on site and count the cars and you let us know whether your prediction of 495% of the time is accurate and you know we kind of reserve the right to revisit this if XYZ happens or doesn't happen was there any consideration given to you know we're hearing the appellant say 95% sure this is what's going to happen I have to be really wrong to be wrong you're saying this just feels sketchy because the really complicated and the assumptions just can't get you comfortable have you considered you know trying it out and observing what happens in the real world during like next school year yeah and I think that's where kind of option 2 came in option 2 for approving it is like okay don't open up during that peak morning let us see what it looks like when it's not peak school and then we could potentially evaluate it you know during those that peak hour doesn't that kind of screw you if it turns out that like 3pm is actually the worst because you've said they can like wouldn't it be better to be like alright operate all the time but give us the data and then if we need to roll you back at some time of the day yeah we will yeah I guess my concern was I don't know what the mechanism be to roll back operations I don't know what power we would have there to our city attorney if that's even a thing that I think that's where it was in this other application maybe that was just for fees I don't know that was for impact fees which we don't we don't have that that's more of like you pay a fee based on your trip generation how many cars you're adding to the road network type thing so you're kind of viewing this as a way to unloading I believe so I don't know any mechanisms where you basically can't unbring I'm similarly wondering if you if we were you know this would be approved without the drive through component just as a brick and mortar location or if we you know approved it under hours that you know it had to open after 8.30 is there any is there any enforcement to prevent them from changing the business model and adding a drive through or opening earlier yeah I don't know I don't think there would be if that was that's what they were proposing to do yeah if you're saying like without an approval yes I'm saying if they came back to us and said okay we want to we want to open this up then yeah yes yeah if they just tacked one on then okay this also might not be relevant but were they required to have commercial space on the ground floor of this do you know for this phone base code I think so no not not required all of the gateway things had to have something cool on the ground level just for the I'm forgetting the name of that storefront zone the rest of it could be residential so right now I again I feel like I don't want to rely on anecdote but I wish I had a little does Norman street back up during the peak school times just because of too many people trying to get into the school at once or is it pretty decent flow and the backup may be further in on the school property further in on the school property I don't have I drop off kids every morning but I haven't seen it back up on Norman street it'll back up on the school property so if we can narrow the concern it's really we're really talking about the eight cars in the queue and whether you're going to get that night waiting on Norman to get into the queue for Norman street but I also say our concern is you know the unmodeled behavior of people trying to turn lefts and make odd maneuvers that you can't you can't model unfortunately so I kind of reviewed that as maybe impacting the speed with which they would be able because if you've got somebody who's trying to make a road left that's going to back up the drive through if you've got somebody to try to do the wiggle to tie in that might back up the drive through but am I hearing you say you also have just kind of broader street safety concerns with people not being able to control their behavior enough with like a median so that it's going to decrease road safety in that area yes and that's you know and that's also coming from discussions with the school because I mean we're a walking district in Manuski too so you do have a lot of kids crossing it usually further up at Tygan and entering there but you do have kids coming up main street so you know you've got you've got walkers and then you've got you know uncafny and folks trying to wiggle into the Dunkin Donuts so you've got I mean it's like I said before it's kind of a it's a little it's kind of a complex intersection as is and then adding that element of the Dunkin Donuts doesn't help things I mean there's also a bus stop right there that's one thing that I'm like oh I should mention that to Rick like have we modeled the bus stop that's right there because I've sat behind traffic so it's the minutiae of things that that you can't model that that are concerning to us we're talking about GMT bus what route is that that goes up main street I'm not sure which number it is 709 turns left on Tygan yeah it's the what it's the Riverside app when it turns left on oh the green line oh I guess they abandoned this they abandoned the colors they abandoned the colors I guess that does go a little bit I was thinking maybe it was like a commuter that went up to the same level where is that stop right in front of the building it's just south of the Norman street I mean the other project that that's coming along next summer too is exit 16 VTrans project so that's going to completely change the exit 16 intersection to the north I don't know what that means traffic wise for our corridor but that is another just another piece that we're like here's another unknown we don't know how that's going to impact the traffic patterns here did you just make this yep okay I'm just curious consideration sorry has any consideration been given for the property just north of this project this is all form based code and theoretically the owner of that building could tear down and put up a building right up along the sidewalk as is going to be the case all up and down main streets would that affect your decision as far as if this were to be approved and there were a drive through that was exiting cars every three minutes do you have concerns about visibility issues should that intersection close in as a result of development further north yeah that's a good point the building you're talking about it's a really tough building to develop because it's like right at the intersection we've looked at and we're like I don't know how this curb cut is going to work because it's right in the intersection so yeah we do have concerns on how that would all sort of get developed all those parcels are sort of in an island surrounded by the school campus which is a little the way I see it the stop line heading north if that curb cut the reason that the stop line is there is because of the curb cut for that building and if that were to change this might change our conversation a little bit more but so that's yeah that's a future like what are we going to do on that one other questions for the appellate we got a lot of those topics out during the appellate presentation so I do want to I'm breaking the rules of procedure a little bit by going back to the appellate but I do want to address the question of whether we're on the record Norman streets one way so do we have like a quote final traffic impact study with Norman street being one way like are your numbers like final final taking that into account because as you heard there were iterations and iterations and it may be that the very highest numbers were done don't know I'm not sure that it matters again in terms of the offsite what we're looking at is the delta and we're saying that the 150 trips in the morning take hours and affect that intersection of 1% of its capacity that's going to not going to change in the the issue we had with the staff report or denial was really just surprising if there's a desire to go one way we show you a plan of one way and we're going to do that but the condition that we either don't get the drive-thru or we limit it during the time when people can use it is just untenable from a business perspective you know we've done the analysis for your sake and for the owner's sake to understand that it can work and on that basis they would like to move forward with permission to do the drive-thru and start with that and as opposed to say well you're asking us to trust the forecast we're going to assume the forecast is wrong so you don't get the drive-thru to start with just my experience it's kind of the way things are done every time we're having these hearings it's before the project's built we'll have a tree lie on the best available forecast and evidence analysis decisions I feel like I did hear the city say that the goal of operating the drive-thru except for that time was to maybe like ease into it and revisit it and get some real-world data and then revisit so on that same note is it a thing in your experience to condition a project say go for it let's get some real-world data but come back and tell us how many cars are in this queue and if it's more than eight you're not going to be permitted for that time anymore is that something you've ever dealt with that yes we need permit before it's built it's not there we're all mandatory line experts that tell us what it's going to be and that makes people nervous I'm ringing the bell sorry I'm long-winded here but that was subject to Act 250 and under Act 250 if you read the permit and get the permit says it's subject to review and revision so statewide major projects are subject to Act 250 the state can come back upwards built and say what's happening is not what you told us was going to happen we need to revisit that one question's for Ben other questions for the I'd like to point out the difference let's see what looks like in the world we can't tell you how well the drive-thru is working if we're permitted without a drive-thru we're not going to put out a building if we don't expect that we're going to get a drive-thru I think the applicant would be agreeable to a condition with that effect I'm going to call it Schrodinger's drive-thru face the point that you recall I used to say I've done a lot of dunk and donuts some of these we walk away from we look at the site we can't help you here this isn't going to work you should probably look elsewhere sometimes we get asked retroactively to get involved in something that did go wrong and I recall one site that had it had no stacking cars were spilling out on the street and they had to come up with solutions they ended up reconfiguring the park the circulation a little bit they moved the menu board they limited the menu for certain times it was just coffee or donuts since it gets trapped in front of the bag no sandwiches in prep time so they put an attendant out there so if you go to the parking they got it so there's ways we've seen situations where people have dealt with it after the bag I guess we're in a position of we can't prove that it works much less you know it's unlikely that my questions are going to actually resolve this tonight but any thoughts on that discussion? if you allow them to open up fully with the condition that it would be checked and the only based on what John said the only solution would be to shut the drive-in down and that would then close the business you would go back so it's a choice between condition the drive-in for don't operate 7.15 to 8.30 or operate all the time but if the traffic impact study was wrong for 7.15 to 8.30 then we revert to the condition that you didn't like but the reason you didn't like it is because you told us there wasn't going to be that many cars so it's kind of like put your money where your mouth is I don't want to put you on the spot yeah I mean that's why we've been working on this since 2019 and we haven't unfortunately come to a conclusion there's not a clean answer ultimately it's I don't think it's a great site for this I think it could cause a lot of problems but it's one of the things like you can model it and you can make it work but does it actually work and yeah there's no way in my mind there's no way to tell unless you build it but the problem is if you build it and it doesn't meet the traffic model then I don't know how you fix that and then it's a city wrong and then it's taxpayers that are having to fix that issue not developers I guess in my maybe naive mind if the applicant were to say I'll build it on the confidence of the traffic study and if the data you find some real world metrics that everybody can agree it's not that hard to count cars I don't think that's one of the easier parts of your job everybody agrees that if it exceeds that threshold during whatever time it's already built but that drive-thru can't operate so maybe I'm just not accounting for how things actually work in the real world but that was the motivation for my questions I like where the compromise is going I think that's a reasonable ask the nuts and bolts of it though is a little tricky do you just say okay well it's trip generation cars in the queue okay well how many people are actually doing left turns that they shouldn't be and they're causing accidents what's the threshold to say we got to shut this down because it's causing too many crashes what's too many crashes so that's where I get kind of hung up it's like I don't know where you set that limit that bar at to say nope this doesn't work well I will say we have 45 days to issue a decision 45 days and nuts and bolts time so sorry don't need to dominate the discussion other questions for the FLE alright I think we are done with this agenda item we do have other agenda items for this evening yes great question I don't think we have other interested parties in the room we got a letter from the district school district basically but doing a placeholder for the appeal but do we have other interested parties that we haven't heard from any of these orange chairs want to talk seems like a no I was curious for this can any neighbor if they had concerns come and have given testimony or does someone have to already have commented on the initial application of the ending to talk because it didn't come before us I don't know so it was warned correct me if I'm wrong but it was warned just like any other application public notice specific neighbor notice I'll come to the table and I'll just go through the next couple agenda items with you as well since we are moving on because this was a specifically warned development review board hearing all the adjacent property owners were notified by certified mail of the hearing and all had the opportunity to attend tonight to provide testimony in person or written testimony in advance of the meeting it's all done via statutory requirements so they all get 15 days notice prior to the meeting so what the final comments to the folks attending which was 401 Main Street we do typically meet in a deliberative session that is non-public we have the option to do that tonight we also have the option to not do that tonight or kind of start it and continue it whenever we want basically that's what they do in Burlington I think they schedule a specific separate deliberative session so they're not here till midnight or there till midnight so we do issue our decisions in writing we come out within 45 days stay tuned feel free to stick around and watch the rest of our meeting or have a good trip home count the cars on your way the next item on our agenda is election of officers we currently have three officers of this board we need to elect more or elect the same positions right so yeah so I unfortunately did not include the memo in the agenda packet that was in front of you but basically per our rules of procedure every year we elect new officers that coincides with the fiscal year where all the boards and commissions are either the members are either reappointed or newly appointed so that just happened starting July 1st so this is the first meeting we've had of the new fiscal year so this is the time when we would do our election of officers so if the memo was in front of you you would see that Kevin is our current chair Matt is our current vice chair and Harland is our current secretary those are the three positions to be re-elected tonight so normally I don't know what the I clearly make a poor secretary I can get your one this is my opportunity to see the responsibilities to another member of the board if they would like to but Kevin take it away so normally we would I don't know take nominations from the floor you can nominate yourself you can just kind of talk about your thoughts your intentions so the officers have to come from the five non-alternates? that's correct yes that is that is written into our rules of procedure fine are the member levels still the same as they were a month ago are alternates still alternates or has that shifted? yes no that is still the same Elsie and Caitlin are the alternates currently none of us has made way so I'm happy to continue as chair if folks would like to continue that I will say we're probably moving next year hoping to stay in Winooski don't know if that's going to work is only what it is so I especially if I'm leaving if I'm forced to leave the board next year I'd love to write out a final term as chair that'd be cool I would support that if you do we would have to have like a special election no that's your ascension to power that being said that being said I'm more than okay now that I've heard that news of remaining as vice chair you're waiting I'm waiting to find that letter are you opposed to serving as secretary? no I would try and bring a pen if I was just for the look it's a good look great well it sounds like we have three people who want to stay in power unless there's any objections anybody want to anybody want to move the slate as articulated by Harlow the slate being chair of vice chair of secretary as currently constituted sure I'll make that motion but do I need to repeat the whole thing? that's why we love having Eric even as secretary it's right I would second that one alright all in favor all opposed all abstaining motion carries alright the incumbency bias prevails once again alright so let's speed through the rest of this because we still once we go off the record let's talk about deliberative session but city updates of the business? I have nothing specific to report on whether those items tonight unless you all have anything for me are we having an August meeting? oh yes thank you for saying that we do we will have a sketch plan for our August meeting I received a proposal for a two lot subdivision that will come in first as a sketch plan so that would be the only item so far on the August agenda we could potentially look at doing that remote again if you want to do that or meet in person well I guess we're doing them partially in person I would be here either way so if anybody did want to show up they could they could attend here as well it is the 19th of August yes that is the next date of our meeting as well the deadline for getting on to that agenda is next Friday but I have not had any conversations with anybody that have any information that they're looking to get on to that agenda other than the sketch plan I will be fresh off of a 12 day hiking trip in the Alps I may skip that meeting Matt this is your moment oh dear so far my only responsibility as vice-chair is I had to sign one document nine months ago but otherwise that would be right now that's the only item we have on the agenda as a sketch plan it would not require formal hearing at that time it would just be comments from the board on the proposal that would then be forwarded to the applicant to make changes or updates or corrections and then bring that back as a formal submission as a preliminary subdivision play alright so I would ask my perennial question about the court cases I know you have a comment on George Street George Street I don't know about I haven't heard anything recently I guess is what I would say actually at 133 Elm Street I just had a conversation earlier this week with our other council that was representing that case it sounds like they are working towards a settlement where they would not do any drying the rest of this year and be looking to move out of the facility by the end of the year as well so that I think is where is the direction we're heading in so that would while we would lose a tenant in the city we would resolve a nuisance issue that was of concern to the residents has there been any traction on the hotel potential development here there's like three sites yeah so they're still ongoing basically is what I would say they're still in some level of discussion or negotiation I'm not involved in those because I'm ultimately the person who will be permitting them so I don't know what level of discussion or where they are specifically but I know they are still in some level of discussion okay motion to adjourn when are we delivering so once we adjourn the public meeting this camera turns off and we're then in deliberative session and we can talk about whether we want to keep that going tonight or not do that thank you motion to adjourn motion second all in favor all opposed all saying motion carries we are adjourned now in deliberative session which looks the same do you want to take sorry I need to shut this down it takes me a few minutes okay yeah I was going to say do you want to take a quick break because I think they still have obviously the computer is still in here and so I'm guessing the appellant is still here so I don't know if there's enough room in the back if you did want to deliberate tonight or not for everybody probably be more comfortable in here so I'm pretty comfortable asking whether we do want to do that even if we're not technically like cloistered do we want to stay do we want to schedule a time by zoom or come back here with like pizza and still deliberate a different way may I have a feel of my position I'm not I don't know if you voting but I would like to participate and I am the same person like tomorrow so I would also go to Minnesota and then Seattle so I think it's so it's almost nine o'clock now I'd be okay with going for an hour hour and a half if other people are okay with it I'm less okay with that it's my bedtime yeah I would vote another night if that's okay do we get the calendars out now