Planning Board - Regular Meeting

You ready for me to get things going?

Yes, indeed.

Okay, bear with me just a moment.

Recording in progress.

Okay, Mr. Marshall, let's see. You have a quorum of the board. We are recording this meeting. You are the co-host of this meeting, and the attendees are coming in. I think we're ready and good to go.

All right. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Welcome to the Amherst Planning Board meeting of August 19, 2026. My name is Doug Marshall, and as chair of the Amherst Planning Board, I'm calling this meeting to order at 6.30 This meeting is being recorded and is available live stream via Amherst Media. Minutes are being taken. Pursuant to Chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021, extended by Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2023, And further extended by Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted via remote means using the Zoom platform. The Zoom meeting link is available on the meeting agenda posted on the town website's calendar listing for this meeting. No in-person attendance of the public is permitted. However, every effort will be made to ensure the public can access this meeting in real time via technological means. In the event public access is disrupted for any reason, we will post an audio or video recording, transcript, or other comprehensive record of proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the Town's website. Board members, I will take a roll call. When I call your name, unmute yourself, answer affirmatively, and return to mute. Bruce Colvin.

I'm here.

Fred Hartwell.

Present here.

Jesse Major. Present. I, Doug Marshall, am present. Angus McLeod has told us he'll arrive around 7 o'clock this evening, so we'll look for him. Roy Johnson. Present. And Jera Smith.

Present.

Thank you all.

I'm also present. Oh, Angus, good to see you. I just joined.

All right. Thank you. If technical issues arise and the discussion needs to pause, it will be noted in the minutes. Please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment, and I will call on you to speak. If speaking, remember to re-mute yourself. To the general public, the public comment item on tonight's agenda is for comments on topics not appearing later on the agenda. Please hold comments on those later specific topics until we get to those topics. When public comment is solicited, please indicate you wish to make a public comment by clicking the raise hand button. If you've joined the Zoom meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your phone. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute when finished speaking. Residents can typically express their views for up to three minutes or at the discretion of the planning board chair. If a speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds their allotted time, they may be disconnected from the meeting. All right, time is 638. We are all assembled, so we'll go ahead to our first discussion. attend a topic which is approval of minutes. We have the minutes from May 6th available for approval. Does anybody have comments or want to make another, make a motion to approve? Jesse?

Yep, I read them. I thought they were quite fine capturing the discussion, so I would move to approve the minutes as they are.

All right. Does anyone else have any comments or would someone like to second the motion? Okay, then I guess I'll assume there are no other comments and I'll go ahead and second the motion. All right. Last call for comments on the May 6th minutes. All right. We'll go ahead and vote for approval. Starting with you, Bruce.

I am voting to abstain since there's a full board here and I was not present to the meeting.

All right. Thank you. Fred?

Aye.

And Roy?

I'll abstain. I wasn't at the meeting either.

All right. Jesse? Aye. Jera? Aye. And Angus? Aye. I'm an aye as well. That's five in favor and two abstentions. The motion passes. All right. Thank you all. We'll go ahead to the second item in the agenda, which is the general public comment topic. So members of the public, this is the time to make comments about items that don't appear later on our agenda. So I also typically read the names of the attendees I can see on the Zoom screen. So while I'm doing that, if you have a comment you want to make, please raise your hand. I see Kathy Axelson-Berry, Dodson and Flinker, Hilda Greenbaum, Jeff Davis, Nate Kelly, Peter Flinker, and the Amherst Notetaker. All right. Still don't see any hands raised. I know several of these attendees are here for items later on the agenda. So I guess we will conclude that there are no public comments today. All right. Time is 641. We'll go ahead to the third item on the agenda. which is a presentation on the Hampshire campus zoning study. We have Jeff Bag here, director of planning and economic development from the town to introduce the topic. Pam, I know he has a couple of consultants that need to be brought in. So if you can do that, and I will just say up front, it's my understanding that this is an informational session for the board to be updated and the public. So It's not a public hearing. We won't have to have public comment. But if it looks like we have relatively few members of the public attending, so if there are any that want to make a brief comment at the end of this presentation, I will ask for that at the time of the, at the right time. Okay, so Jeff, welcome and welcome to your consultants and take it away.

Yep, I'll start off really quick, but thank you for having us. The board members should have a memo in the packet. So it's available on the website. And then at the conclusion of tonight, we'll make the slide presentation available so that can also be included in the packet. We're really happy to be with the planning board tonight. You know, it's really a first time to be engaging with you as a board on the Hampshire College rezoning project. The request was for the members to watch the community meeting recording. So we had a first community engagement session on July 21st. So it's kind of a really ground setting the foundation and establishing the groundwork we're gonna just do a really brief recap of some of that and then kind of move forward with some of the continued discussion um towards a zoning amendment package And so we're really thankful to Mass Development, who is offering the town this technical assistance. And we are also going to be going to the town council for a work session on August 31st to engage with the town council as we continue on this process of a multi-step engagement. And then we'll talk about the schedule in a few minutes. I think with that, I will cover a couple slides along the way, but I am going to hand it over to Nate Kelly, who's the president of Horsley Witten Group, to kind of kick us off, share screen, and walk us through the project to date. So thank you again for having us.

Thank you, Jeff, and thank you, Planning Board. I echo those sentiments. Thanks for having us here tonight. I'm going to try to share our screen here.

All right, we can see your screen.

All right, thank you for that check-in. One never knows. You've done this 50 times and all of a sudden you don't do it correctly, but thank you for that. And so again, I'm Nate Kelly. I'm a principal planner and president of Horsley Witten Group, and I'm joined here tonight with my friend and colleague, Peter Flinker, who is probably no stranger to many of you, has done quite a bit of work with facilitation design and all sorts of great planning work in the Amherst area. And as Jeff said, we'll go through this pretty quickly tonight. You've seen some of this, but it is good to run through it a bit to give some context. But we have some added detail related to the public process, project schedule, and then some of the things that we're starting to think about relative to the key questions that need to be asked. Kind of getting into a sort of a bigger level of detail, thinking about the area, thinking about the site and also thinking about the zoning. This is a zoning project and how we want to approach this. So, with that again, we'll just do our introduction, which we've taken care of, go through some of the process. We'll recap for viewers and everybody, just the alignment with town plans. Again, you're no stranger to a lot of this material, but it's really great for us as consultants to come into a community and see the ties, see the policy context that's already been set. And it's really important to come back to that repeatedly. So we have our compass, our North Star, as it were, going through this. And as I mentioned, we'll talk a little bit about early zoning considerations. There's still a lot of work to do in that regard, thinking about our best approach, our best fit for a complex site like this. But this is something that we've looked at a lot over the course of the last 20 years or more, Peter and myself, thinking about different ways to approach this from the regulatory context, and then we can open it up for some early discussion. So our team again is, of course, Town of Amherst, and Jeff mentioned Mass Development provided the resources for this. Horsley Witten is what Mass Development calls a house doctor. We're on call with Mass Development and do quite a bit of technical assistance with them on projects of various scales. But a lot of it is this pre-planning and zoning work. We are Horsley Witten. uh not with us tonight is you three advisors who is as the process goes on they're a real estate economic development firm. And so once we start to look at different scenarios and think about different ways this site could be used, U3 will help provide some market context for us and look at some fiscal scenarios. So as we think about different mixes of whatever it may be that occurs on the site, they can, again, provide that context. Is it realistic? What are some of the barriers or opportunities from a market perspective? And then if we want to test ideas, they could say, well, here are the costs and benefits that the town can expect from different outcomes. And then lastly, Dotson and Flinker will help us really through some of the heavy lifting around how we visualize and think about how the site is going to be used. We'll have plenty of community engagement that's going to operate on different levels. Some of you have already attended our first event, but we're really going to get into that soon with a charrette process that Peter will talk us through. I mentioned we have fiscal analyses that are going to occur, and we're monitoring infrastructure all the way through. We're not doing in-depth sort of infrastructure feasibility, but we've had some preliminary conversations with folks who are in charge of your infrastructure, thinking about what the challenges may be in the future and how those will get managed. And then our goal ultimately is to have a full draft of the zoning in January, and we can head into the adoption process at that time. Peter, I will ask you at this point, this is a sort of a new slide where we've really started to map out of how this process, because it is pretty complicated, and we want to get to that January timeframe. So take it away, Peter.

Thanks, Nate. Good evening, everyone. So, yeah, we have, I guess the good news is this is a great time to do public participation. People are coming back from the summer. It's a great time to do public meetings. The bad news is we're trying to get everything done in the next, basically the next 20 weeks. So you see across the top of the page, it sort of starts in September and goes through December. And this, of course, is the sort of a phase two schedule. We've already started collecting a lot of information about the site. And then we had the public forum last month. So our goal is, Really, with this process, of course, is to produce draft zoning amendments, but have those based as much as possible on real ideas for the site. So to get to those ideas, we're going to start with a public charrette, hopefully the week of September 14th, maybe Friday and Saturday, September 18th and 19th. And at that charrette, we'll be sitting down in large groups and small groups and doing our usual... collection of exercises to try to help people understand the site, understand the history, and then think about what's possible in the future. And that's going to produce hopefully half a dozen different alternatives. And over the rest of September and the beginning of October, we will refine those concepts into some clear alternatives and then present those to a series of small groups, focus group meetings. Those could include residents of Applewood and the surrounding neighborhoods around Hampshire College. They could include members of the Hampshire College community itself, town staff, officials, and be interested to hear from you who you think it's important to meet with. And then the idea is to sort of have a chance to have a conversation with each of those groups about different ideas and through that sort of flesh out Are these the right alternatives? What additional things do we want to explore? And then over the course of the rest of October to sort of refine those into a series of clear concepts and alternatives for the site, and then to present those the first week in November at a second public workshop. And then in conjunction with that, we'll have sort of web-based feedback. So people who can't attend the workshop will have an opportunity to look at and comment on the different ideas. Then following that, we'll have a period of review with our team internally and the town staff and elected officials. to finalize the scenarios and then move forward to some final illustrative plans over the course of the second part of November and then trying to finish the sort of illustrative plans by the middle of December. Meanwhile, if you look toward the bottom of the screen, starting in October with the sort of the first set of well thought out concepts, U3 will do some fiscal analysis to understand sort of what the, how the market might react to those concepts, but also just as importantly, what the implications would be for town finances and services. And then they'll do that again with the final set of illustrative plans in December. And then there's at the bottom, a separate track for looking at zoning, which we'll be doing collectively as a team, but led by Horsley Witten. Sort of starting out with exploring different zoning approaches, different alternatives for zoning. And then as we get through into October and November, trying to refine those into a clear path for the best fit between the zoning and the site plan goals. and then finalizing draft zoning amendments by the end of the year for presentation in January.

Okay, we'll come back to that a bit when we get to the end here. You know, again, just to recap some of the local context, and especially if there's, you know, anybody will watch the recording of this. You know, the top priorities were stated by town council in a vote on June 1st, 2026. And these priorities focused around housing, small business development, and tax revenue generating uses. There's a clear acknowledgement that there's some sensitive lands here, sensitive habitat, farming, other resource areas. There needs to be a balance and adequate protection for those areas. With regard to the housing development, I think there's a recognition on the part of this resolution that this is an opportunity to provide a wide range of housing types, perhaps a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a community like Amherst. And of course, all of this needs to be considered within the context of services and facilities. What are the opportunities here? What are the things that the town could take on to help better serve the folks who live here? We have had preliminary discussions about utilities. I think the takeaway here is that there are no major red flags. There are some utilities on site. There are some extensions that would certainly be needed. There are some upgrades that would certainly be needed. But generally speaking, when you look at the capacity of the roadways, when you look at the capacity of the water and the sewer, again, there are really no major barriers anticipated here. beyond what, you know, again, the normal improvements that need to take place as part of a significant development project. The current zoning, as all of you certainly know, this is really part of the urgency of this project is right now the core of this is the district, which allows basically for one thing to occur. And that's what's been occurring there since the college was established. And so that changes need to occur in order to meet any of the potential options or different ideas that may be floated. Importantly, there are areas around the core that are zoned for lower density residential. So that provides some important context. And there's the farm overlay district in this area that provides special considerations and protections encouragement for the continued use of some of these areas as agricultural use. Then this was a map that we spent a little time using some desktop analyses. Maybe Peter, you can just give us a quick walk through on how we came to this and how this helps us.

Yeah. As you know, the entire Hampshire property is close to 800 acres. with about 630 of those acres in the town of Amherst. And so this was kind of our usual site assessment process to try to understand how much of that is actually developable. And of course, this is, as Nate said, a remote process using existing GIS data. Probably the most important thing to remember is none of the wetlands have been surveyed in the field and would have to be before determining what's actually developable. But what this shows is wetlands and water bodies and the associated buffers. It also includes hydric soils, which are likely to include additional wetland areas and What we learned is sort of what you understand through common sense if you drive around the site, which is there's a high and dry central plateau that sort of runs north and south through the campus, and that's where they built the majority of the campus buildings. And then the water drains off to the east and west into the various brook systems. And as you get further down into those brooks, it gets less and less developable, probably. And as a result, I think our preliminary conclusion that there's probably at least 200 acres that are developable, probably more subject to more intensive site review. But that a lot of it is also sensitive habitat and wetland areas that probably cannot be developed under current regulations.

Great. And, you know, in terms of context, I won't spend a lot of time on these slides, but, you know, your 2010 master plan, which was readopted in 2020, really just provides, again, some really sound policy frameworks relative to land use, housing, economic development, and sustainability that will carry forward through this process as an important backdrop, again, as an important policy foundation for supporting well-planned mixed use communities on the Hampshire campus. In 2021, the comprehensive housing policy talks about providing housing that balances the needs for students, families, and seniors, promoting home ownership, increasing housing supply, that variety that we talked about, promoting climate sustainability, and aligning and leverage multiple funding sources to support affordable housing. So these are important for us to carry forward in this process. continuing to build into the housing production plan, which provides some really good fresh data for us that helps us think about the different needs that could be fulfilled looking at this site in the future. So it really does. You know, again, we won't spend a lot of time going through this. I think most of you are familiar with this, but these are just really important sort of documentation that again, as consultants, we'd love to see this going, coming into a process like this, because it really gives us something sort of firm to stand on as we go forward. In terms of local precedents, we had talked about some of the, you know, Jeff, talked with us a lot about some of the most more recent zoning efforts that have occurred in the community and the developments that have come from that. Maybe Jeff, I could just ask you to talk about how these are useful to us.

Yeah, thanks. So since the town went to town council, former government, there's not that many things that we can go back to, but we really want to sort of highlight University Drive Overlay District and the effort and the thought that went in and how that actually has resulted in development to occur, which was the goal. And so kind of the overlay district is a success story that we want to kind of look at. Here it says it may be more about the intent rather than the specific uses, and that's something that we have to tailor as we move down south to the college campus, but Five University Drive is an example that has benefited from the zoning change, the predictability, and some of the things that the planning board spent a lot of time, and town council as well, spent a lot of time on crafting. And then the time that the planning board and the zoning subcommittee has spent looking at North Amherst and the idea of the overlay district over some of the existing apartment complexes also gives us a guidepost to kind of look at. And while we're acknowledging that it wasn't implemented, it was kind of held back for a little bit. The idea of looking at an area and encouraging certain types of development to occur in a predictable way is really a great idea and a great model that we want to look at for for this area. And then I think just kind of, we have a lot of project examples, but the two that we kind of called out are some of the housing types that we see is some of the larger buildings, rental units, and that kind of thing. And then, you know, the project on Montague Road, the 30 affordable homeownership units is something else that we can start to look at. and understand that there is demand for that and how could it potentially fit in the context of the college campus land that's available. So we're starting to backfill a lot of that information to the team so that they can see where we've had success. And I think we can go to the next slide. Some of the constraints as well. On the left, we're really looking at the site for the first time. It's just always existed as Hampshire College and the town hasn't really investigated it. And so that's really what the team has been doing since we started is really just kind of catch up on a lot of the baseline information that we often get. If we're looking at like East Amherst Village, we have information and we've looked at some of those areas and they've been zoned. Here, we're really starting from scratch. And so looking at the resource areas and, you know, acknowledging that there are farmland and conservation interests that are kind of surrounding the campus infrastructure, as was mentioned. And then really just this opportunity that's presenting itself for the town to meet some of its housing needs, also produce much needed tax revenue. And so there's really an opportunity here. And then the challenges, you know, there's a couple of projects the planning board has gone through a couple of these. It's a variety of different challenges that we want to walk through when we look at the zoning. Some of it has to do with the community character, the resource areas, or the location. um all of which we see some potential benefits um with this the way that the college has been laid out and its location close to roads and infrastructure and things like that so i think um i don't know what the next slide is if you can go to the next slide i think this is where i'll hand it back over to either nate or peter to talk about a couple case studies

And so thank you, Jeff. So what we've been doing, all of us on the consultant team have some experience in different communities where this sort of larger site, you know, single opportunity has come up. And so we brought our own experience with a few of these projects. And then we've reached out into the planning community and then done some of our own research to pull together probably about a dozen different case studies that we're still combing through to make sure that we understand. But, you know, it's just it's always good to know how this has been done elsewhere before you start to try to reinvent the wheel. And so we've looked at a few different examples that were brought to this presentation. But again, there's more sort of back in the lab, if you will, that we're looking through and thinking about, you know, where is it relevant? Where is it not relevant to Amherst? And one that you all are familiar with is the village. Bill, North Hampton, and this is a 126 acre master plan community combining commercial R&D light, residential uses. And it really is just, again, it's a good visual for everybody who's been there to see how these different uses can be woven together and sort of a cohesive concept, but one that gets built over time. And so we thought it was important to look at both the outcome and the approach. There are some unique aspects of this from an administrative aspect that make this really different. The presence of mass development as a key player providing a lot of administrative capacity and oversight, that's something that's going to be very different from Amherst. Amherst is going to be administering this at the town level through their normal development processes. So it's a little bit different in that regard. But it is nice for us to look at sort of a success story here that evolved over time and ask ourselves questions about the design. What makes this a good output? How does this or does this not apply to Amherst? They are, interestingly, they started out with a special permit process. their planned village district um and it appears as we're reading this that it evolved uh into a 40r when those provisions and those incentives became available so the foundation changed from a special permit process to a buy right process over time but still good to look at those different design aspects and how they baked that into their zoning With Sudbury, there was the Raytheon property. So this is a major manufacturing operation out in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where they really had a considerable amount of potential developability there, which turned into a really nice mix of housing and commercial property. development, big sort of plaza concept, very walkable in the way it's set up, sort of like lifestyle centers is one of the planning terms that you'll hear, but it's at the mix of grocery and everyday goods and restaurants. And that one was set up with a lot of oversight in the beginning. This is an interesting concept where they actually required a physical master plan to be approved at town meeting. with a two third vote. And so that was a high bar for the developer to get through. After that high bar, from that point, the approvals, the individual approvals have essentially been administrative. So they really front loaded the scrutiny on this. And then when they were happy with that, they sort of let the normal building permit process take over. With Rentham Village, so this is not the Rentham Outlets, this is Rentham Village. This is an interesting site where they have their traditional town center, but right adjacent to it, just to the north, is the old Tyco Industrial Site. So again, another sort of large-scale, 50-acre site. Mike Nygren. : site that has a unique development opportunity and it's right adjacent to you know, a well established town center so they had sort of a an interesting setup of. Mike Nygren. : You know, two different districts and a and a B and those were further subdivided so the scale of this project, not particularly large. allowed them to really get in there and think about sort of different zones, different sub zones, and how they wanted to move this forward. And the special permit does play a role in this particular process as well. Interesting. Another interesting note here is they have It's pretty much a mandatory pre application process. So this helps them to sort of set the stage early with developers of sort of larger scale chunks of this as they go through. In Great Barrington, there's the campus overlay district. So this is an area that encourages, this is where Bard College campus was, and this encourages a mix of uses and operates on different scales, very similar to sort of a conventional Zoning piece where they have a mix of special permits and mix of, you know, and it really depends on the density. So, certain densities are going to be allowed with a lower level of scrutiny. And as you get up the ladder, they, they sort of ratchet up their different permitting process. So modest densities again, site plan review in several of the districts, especially with some existing structures, the higher you go, the more that special permit sort of kicks in along the way. And then, of course, we are looking at your existing zoning. You have some tools in the toolbox here. And we look at something, for example, like planned unit residential development. Does this have a place or something like it have a place here? This is something that you're used to using. So we will look at this closely and see if there are elements of this that we can carry along. Jeff, I didn't know if you wanted to add anything to that, but that's really what we're thinking there.

The only thing I'll add is it's probably not as well used as it should be. And I think that's one of the things that we can hopefully kind of assess is, is there something in here that's holding things back? And do we have an opportunity to clarify or adjust it? And I think you'll talk about a couple of the other zoning districts on the next slide too, which are very similar circumstances of kind of just testing what we have. And is it producing the things that we hope for? I think that would be what I would add.

Yeah, so here with the, you know, the resident village center, the business village center, these are things that have been tested that are at play in the community. So what elements of these are potentially scalable? What elements of these could fit nicely into a larger concept? So between those two village center districts, the University Drive, we've already talked about, you know, what's working, what fits, what doesn't fit. So an interesting observation is these are areas where more than one potential principal building is allowed on a single lot. That's really an important consideration going forward. So our job is to kind of go through sort of surgically and look at these different things that we want to carry over, that we want to borrow, that we want to tweak as we go into our sort of new zoning that will be developed for this. You know, other considerations. We're looking at housing types. Remember in the beginning of the presentation, this is really an amazing opportunity to provide a diversity of housing types. So what definitions, what controls do you have in place now relative to mixed-use apartments, different scales, different densities? And we'll be looking critically, like, do those meet the needs? And are there things missing? Are there just... definitions of different housing types that we need to fold in here to make sure we get that rich diversity that could be a great opportunity here. And so here, you know, as we get close to the end here, as you saw in Peter's schedule, we're thinking very high level right now, but we are thinking about, you know, the different zoning elements here, whether we'll be looking at an overlay or a new base district. Predictable permitting is going to be essential here in a complex site. You don't want to fall into the trap of making your zoning too complex. There's already enough to think about. And there are good tools and good approaches in here that can help make this predictable, easy for you to administer, and attractive to the developer, and good for everybody because you know what you're going to get. And this idea of master plan approval, phase development, as I mentioned, we're looking at the plan unit residential. We have to think about building reuse. There may be an opportunity to reuse some of these buildings, and we don't want to unintentionally draft zoning provisions that all of a sudden makes that really difficult to do going forward. That's a good idea. That's a desirable use. I talked about the definition of housing types, design standards will be key to this as we go forward, how they fit in remains to be seen. And then a large site's gonna have different ownership opportunities. And again, we just don't wanna set up barriers to that going forward and make sure folks can seamlessly integrate the experience of multiple parcels, even if they have different owners across the site. And then maybe, Peter, you could speak a little bit to, you know, what's the link here between these questions and these considerations and the Charette process, the public process that we're going to be doing?

Well, I think it's easy to say but hard to do. But I think where we've seen successful examples, it's where there's the right fit between the zoning and the site planning goals. And so, as I said, what we're going to be doing is we're thinking about different alternatives for the physical layout of the site and the types of uses and the type of structures that we want there. We'll be thinking about what's the best fit with the zoning strategies and how do we make it really easy for developers to do a good thing and sort of get out of their way while protecting the town's needs to ensure that there are no negative impacts or at least reduce those impacts. So it's gonna be an interesting challenge. But one of the things we wanna hear from you tonight is what aspects of zoning do you think are really important to explore in this way

Right. And so we had sent along some primer questions, but you folks, certainly, I mean, this is your meeting. You can bring forward what you think is important. But, you know, broadly, we want to know what your top goals are for rezoning the campus why are those the highest priorities what are your biggest concerns um as a local official and what are your biggest concerns for your constituents in the public um you know what specific conditions what kind of safeguards or performance standards Do you think you're going to have to be included in this to make it successful? What type of housing, you know, what are the housing types, the building heights, the setbacks? What's sort of the key zoning elements that you think either have to be flexible or have to be really well defined? So, yeah, we're thinking about, you know, what kind of opportunities you think this presents very broadly and looking ahead, you know, 20 years from now. What's a really positive outcome going to look like? So with that, I'll pass it back to you, Mr. Chairman, and you can sort of have folks weigh in as you see fit.

Okay. Thank you, Nate. And thank you, Peter. Board members. Any thoughts? I know this study was not initiated at our request, but this is our chance to influence where the consultant team is going. Bruce.

First of all, I was really raising my hand to ask if we can take the visuals down and see ourselves all together. There we go. Basically, it's accomplished, but I'm not seeing any other hands. I'll say, in the presentation and what I've seen and read about the intentions of the town, I haven't come across anything that I have found seriously problematic or something that has galvanized my concern, shall we say. I mean, it's not that I don't have any and that I don't have interests. I have many of those. But I think it might be useful to say that the general intent here seems to be, in my judgment, to be applauded. I think it was the speed with which the town moved to secure the mass development interest and the support and then to engage the a trio of consultants and what's come so far is um generally very encouraging from my point of view and i'll i have other things to say but i'll stop at that for the moment all right angus

Yeah, I'd agree with a lot of what Bruce just said. It's great to see the work that y'all are doing. And thank you for coming here and sharing some of it with us. I guess I have two questions about kind of process. I agree with Bruce that the priorities the town has put forward seem in keeping with the master plan, the housing production plan, with the opportunities this presents. So I guess my two questions for you all are, One, there are reported attempts by Hampshire alums and other groups to try and raise money to purchase the land and keep it focused on education, on some kind of educational mission. um which would would seem to run counter to the plans that we're exploring here uh for the most part uh so i guess one and i don't know how serious those are but but it's something that i've heard a lot of people talking about so i'm curious how that's being thought of um and then uh perhaps connected to that um i'm also curious how hampshire college itself is is figuring into this um and that that likelihood that they'll be I know we're on this expedited timeline, but Hampshire also seems like it needs to sell the land quickly. So I guess I'm curious how you all are thinking about this planning process, when Hampshire is simultaneously having a process and conversations with, you know, possible buyers, whom whose vision may not be as aligned with this, although through zoning, we can control to an extent what they can do. So I guess I'm just curious about those kind of two things.

Yeah. I'll try to take a stab at that. I mean, I think we have been trying through that community meeting, be very clear that we are not making the decisions about what happens. That is something that's solely the responsibility and the control of the college and the trustees. However, you know, zoning is what the town does. This is pretty common for the town to zone private property to assess and understand and envision the, you know, what does the, what is the best for the town. So that's, that's really our opportunity and our goal here. And I think in terms of like the timelines and over, you know, The questions about timeline are great. They're great questions, but the rationale that we have is that we, our best foot forward and our best opportunity and our most legitimate process is to just jump in and start. We don't want to wait and just sit around and find out what happens. That's not going to serve the residents of Amherst the best. And it's also going to likely put us under the most pressure possible as if we just sit back and wait for a sale of some sort to happen and then try to respond to that, we would be behind the curve. So we just try to position this that we are communicating with the college, they're aware of our process, but we are moving forward. And the thing that we're trying to do is do it as quickly as possible so that we don't interrupt what they need, we complement it somehow. So this is options. I said in another meeting, this is like a menu that we're helping create a menu of options. Right now the menu is very minimal opportunity for institutes of higher education to function here. So we just wanna open it up and we wanna use it, use our plans and all of our thought process to kind of set us up well for the town. and then the one more specific comment is in terms of educational institutions or people who want to re-establish educational use and we want to be really clear that that's always an opportunity so chapter 48 section 3 has has certain protections to educational institutions where you know it doesn't matter what the zoning is they can always establish an educational use and so we're not restricting them in any way, we're actually just creating that menu of other options. Understanding that the town has so many needs and they're really well established, as Nate said, I mean, the master plan and all of our planning documents point us to talk about a walkable village center here. And so we just jumped in to act as quickly as we can. We're not rushing it, but we just need to be approaching this with earnest because this has a real potential to be necessary and also critical for the town. So this is This is not like a blue sky exercise that we just want to put on a shelf. This will be utilized. So, you know, just to reiterate, like the college has its own process and will be making its own decisions. But we are really considering what the town's needs are and establishing what we can through through zoning, which is under the town's control. So hopefully that starts to answer that question.

Thank you, Jeff. Brad and then Jesse.

Yeah. I generally support Jeff's approach, but I have to ask, as I have not heard whether UMass has been approached to step in here because, I mean, from the perspective of the Housing Subcommittee, we are very aware of the effects on the town of the, The pressure is occasioned by off-campus student housing of UMass students. And it wouldn't be awful if UMass stepped in here and said, OK, now we have a whole bunch of basically dormitories. And that would take a lot of the pressure off of the housing, the adverse pressure off the housing market if UMass got involved in here. So I'm just curious whether they have been approached or whether that's out of the question.

Also, try to answer that. I mean, we are not in the position to be approaching UMass or other organizations. That would be something that would be the college's land. We are working to establish the zoning that would allow multiple different things to potentially happen there. I think the key thing, though, Fred, that you did mention, which is important is housing and the demand and things like that. I mean, what the town council initially voted on back in June was that this is an opportunity to potentially generate new tax revenue from land that had never really been considered as a potential option for tax revenue. So over the coming months and year, we're going to start hearing other conversations at town council level about deficits, budgets, structural deficits, and things like that, and just a growing need for the town to increase its taxable base. And this does create this unique opportunity that hadn't really been ever considered until recently. Inviting UMass could have some potential benefits of relieving some of the demand, but if it immediately or just transfers and continues to stay off the tax rolls, That's not going to benefit us in the other way that town council has identified as a goal. So it's a, it's a little bit of a balancing act there, but I guess the bottom line is that to the best of our knowledge, it's not something that the college is pursuing. That's what we think we know. The college has a lot of its own initiatives. UMass has a lot of its own initiatives. They have a big program that they're launching to investigate the condition of all their facilities and buildings and things like that. So I just don't think that's going to be the highest or most direct path forward, more so that this is going to be sold and we want to just at least set the stage for the town to kind of reap some kind of benefit if possible. So Fred, hopefully that answers some of the question.

All right. Thanks, Jeff. Jesse.

Great. Thanks. And thanks for the presentation. Overall, very supportive of the approach. Just one quick comment, I guess. You sort of ended with looking at the mechanisms we already have in zoning and how that could fit in here, and in my mind it's almost like why go there, like what this is a real opportunity to do just different things we can't do the rest of our town. And like, you know, in subcommittee and planning board also, we've talked about 40R, 40Y, different types of things like that, where we couldn't figure out where it made sense in our current zoning. And to me, this is a really big opportunity to do that kind of thing and do it differently there because it is such a large physical and otherwise opportunity. And priority wise in my mind is sort of the workforce starter housing would be top of the list if you were asking us to prioritize. So yeah, thanks.

Thank you for that. And I couldn't agree more. This is a once in a generation opportunity. So we'll, you know, we'd like to do our homework and see what's on the books right now, but we will be thinking outside the books most certainly.

um angus uh go ahead and yeah i was just gonna also um echo what jesse is suggesting um that the idea of a 40-yard district is is great there um i think the other thing that i was uh also thinking as y'all were talking about possibilities um i remember talking with nate malloy about um the prospect of trying to bring another grocery store into town or something like that. And his concern, or what he voiced, was that there's not really places in town that would allow for a whole lot of parking for another grocery store, apart from the Big Y. This also seems like it could be another opportunity, and that would be a... major source of tax revenue, which could also be helpful. So I think also just trying to think about what kinds of commercial spaces would work there. It's not a great location for a lot of commercial spaces, but if y'all were able to build, if we're able to build up some kind of a walkable area, it's near Atkins, like there could be things that we could, that could be viable there, which I would, I hope would be included. And it sounds like y'all are thinking of those kinds of things.

Yeah, that Sudbury example, I think, really speaks to the kind of thing you're talking about, Angus, in terms of how they took advantage of those sort of like larger, larger development opportunities.

All right, Roy, you're next.

I want to commend the town for hiring a group like Horsley-Whitten, and I really like the examples that you gave, you know, like I've been around the Village Hill at Northampton, and that gave me a a picture of what could be there. So I just wanted to thank you for doing that. And any more that you find like that I think would be really helpful for anybody looking at what the possibilities are there. Thank you very much.

All right. Before Bruce, before you go, I'm going to jump in with just a couple of responses. One thing that I'll be interested in is how you think about this parcel in relationship to what we thought was going to be a town center just south of it kind of around Atkins, which we found out, you know, with the project that was proposed down there a year and a half ago, there's a fair amount of wetlands and it's fairly difficult to develop. So, you know, should the village center that we envisioned not be centered on Atkins or those roundabouts, which are frankly not very pedestrian friendly? And should it be centered on the Hampshire campus? So maybe we want to have some village center zoning and some other more commercial zoning in a part of the property. I guess the other thing, from my perspective, we have a lot of single family housing in town. We're going to have a bunch of ADUs in town, whether we like it or not. We have a fair amount of what I'll call multifamily, but a lot of it is student housing in downtown and certainly there's the potential for more around the university. But we don't have places like Amity Place, I guess, which which are condos. Reasonably, I don't know, maybe there's what maybe 12 units per acre. But those kinds of things are fairly efficient in terms of land and are taxable, and they can function as starter homes for families. They're not single family homes. But they are single family dwellings, which can be bought and sold in the market. So I would encourage a fair amount of consideration of that kind of development. I'm more of a fan of that than I am of the sort of tiny little houses on individual plots, which I, although they're charming, I'm not sure they're very efficient in terms of land use. And they certainly demand more yard upkeep than some families may want to do. So that's my two cents. And with that, I'll turn it over to Bruce, who's got his hands up.

I kind of agree. I look at this opportunity and as far as housing is concerned, my general sense is that it should be more dense rather than less dense. I think the Ball Lane example is probably kind of minimal in terms of density. density and that we should move up from a base slightly higher than that. I also think that I recall that the board, the planning board was, I think, universally supportive of the project that Archipelago brought to Atkins Corner. We never got to formally vote on it. The only way I think I know what I'm talking about is when When it came time to withdraw the application and the application was withdrawn, we all took it upon ourselves pretty much spontaneously to express some degree of regret. I think I said when that project first came, I said, this is what good development looks like. That was a phrase first thing out of my mouth at the beginning of that hearing, the first hearing of probably five. And I never really changed my mind on that. It seems to me, and I don't know this, but that what the possible waterloo of that project was the incursion into the wetlands, which may or may not have been slightly due to parking and the amount of parking generated may or may not have been to the amount of first floor commercial space that the applicant, the developer, perhaps thought that was necessary in order to gain approval. And we've been looking at that. This board has been looking at the percentage of first floor use of non-residential commercial for quite a while now. And we've thought about it and we've shaped it and we've recognized that there's a resistance to providing even the minimal levels that we've proposed. And it seems to me that on this part of town, rather than University Drive, we might be more forgiving. So I think I would ask that the study, A, thought in terms of some development or encouraging some development opportunities or in South Amherst that would have been a beautiful building if it had have gone forward it was really elegantly designed it really would have been nice to have lived in it would have been nice to visit it would have been nice to look at in my view although if people in in Applewood may not have agreed but I think they would have in time actually so that development seems to be one of the guidelines, the formal guidelines that I would like to think that we could have there. But nonetheless, South Amherst, more than North Amherst, is more spread out. This opportunity should seek to go backwards from the general configuration of South Amherst. I don't know that people in South Amherst would agree or disagree with that. My sense is it should be not controversial. we have a unique opportunity. So using this opportunity to consolidate density and so forth in various ways would be, I think, an important thing to do. Number two, I also agree with, I agree with Jesse and others that workforce housing should be a primary objective here. It seems to me that it's too far away from campus to be as effective at student housing as the overlay in North Amherst was deemed to be by those of us that were trying to advance it. So workforce housing has also been something that we spent time wondering how to make happen and this seems to be a good opportunity, a good place and so forth. What else did I want to say? I wondered about, I think something you said, Jeff, or maybe Nate, the existing buildings and how to encourage, manage, regulate the reuse of those buildings and for what purpose. It seems that that portion of the site that's already got buildings on it represents different challenges and so forth than the open parts of the site. Maybe wrong, but it seems to me that it probably is different. It's not obviously going to be ideal for housing. We don't know what might be ideal. It might be ideal for a some other educational institution, although that would seem to be a challenging thing to wrap one's imaginative mind around. But nonetheless, I'm wondering whether the process would phase or subdivide the way in which the zoning is brought forward to the extent that if the existing block is more challenging, more demanding, more difficult, that maybe that gets handled on a different schedule. Because you have got, as you said, a pretty advanced schedule. And I'm wondering whether letting, focusing on the easier and perhaps the larger of the 200 acres that are there and not letting something that may be difficult and slow down the process, if it can be intelligently and manageably cut out and and put onto a different um zoning um schedule uh i don't think i'm expressing myself very well but you kind of bright intelligent people i think you can figure out something from what i'm getting at here it's the um I think I'll stop for the moment. I've got a couple more things, but I'm not sure that they're worth saying yet. Oops, wrong thing.

I'm just muting myself. Thanks, Bruce.

Sure. I just wanted to offer just a quick comment on the existing buildings and reuse. I mean, I think our conversational example that we've been using is the red barn. Right now, the thing that we're facing is without an institute of higher education owning the property, the Red Barn cannot operate. So it is what Bruce said, very important that we are addressing this. I think we want to go with as much flexibility as possible for use of existing buildings. You know, so much so that maybe they're not even required to have their own lot. You know, maybe there's ways that just allow them to be reused. But the Red Barn is our conversational example because it's pretty well received. It's pretty well understood. You know, it's a venue for a bunch of different events. And it would be a shame if we can't figure out a way to allow that to continue easily and quickly. The only thing I just wanted to add to this was the idea of thinking outside the box. You know, my approach, my push is let's not talk about this never getting passed. Let's talk about making this happen. Let's talk about how important this is and let's get the zoning passed so that it doesn't have to get broken up and that we can actually accomplish this sometime early next year. I think to me, that's thinking outside the box for everyone. Jeffri Boisvert- For what we can do and what we need to do to really maximize like the timing of all this, but that's just my opinion. Jeffri Boisvert- That insight plan review kind of discussions, I think, would really be outside the box and kind of help us push. Jeffri Boisvert- Push just push this forward so that if the opportunity doesn't get missed, and I think that's one of the biggest concerns we have is just making sure that we don't miss the boat so i'll stop there.

Okay, thanks Jeff chair.

Thank you. I just want to say thank you guys for all the work that you have put in and will be putting in over the next couple of months. It's a lot. I just want to echo really actually all these sentiments about thinking outside of the box. I love Jeff's point about making sure that we have something practical that can be passed. But I do also, you know, I would enjoy being challenged and being presented with new ideas that we haven't seen in Amherst before. And I would encourage you guys to be bold and creative within the world of reality, of course. But thank you for all you're doing. And I look forward to seeing what you guys produce.

Brett KenCairn, All right, Tara. Brett KenCairn, I had one other thought that i'll express. Brett KenCairn, At the risk of making probably an enemy or two. Brett KenCairn, The farm that's at the sort of the northern end of the property along route 116. you know, to me it feels like a relic in that it seems like it's mostly been livestock and I don't see very much other livestock farming in town. So although it lends the sort of rural character to that end of town, I'm not sure that it's a really economically viable piece of land for some new owner to come in and farm. I guess I'm just saying I don't think I'd be all that disappointed if that parcel was zoned for new housing just like much of the rest of the open land on the property. And that may prompt some folks to disagree with me, and that's fine. That's why we're here.

Bruce.

Do I correctly understand that that parcel is in APR?

I don't know. Not that we know of.

So it said FC, farmland conservation, and I wasn't sure whether that extended to being APR. I can say that I'm the chair of the board of the North Amherst Community Farm, and that is a 30-acre parcel of which 20 is arable and so forth. And we're in the process of trying to figure out how that land can be maintained in a useful uh agricultural uh and very broadly interpreted so but also with a strong community involvement and so forth and it's a problem we haven't solved with our as our current lessees have uh entering some form something something effectively a bankruptcy so we're we're we're navigating that water so there may be some uh particularly if it was APR land that we're talking about here, the experience that we're going through in North Amherst might be useful for that parcel of land. But that's not actually why I put my hand up. That was just apropos of what you said, Doug. And for the group's record, I could be useful if that is, in fact, APR then. But I thought it would be my question to myself and perhaps to others then was, On this land, is the opportunity sufficiently attractive to development or could it be made sufficiently attractive development where the inclusionary zoning fraction could be lifted from 10% to say 12% or something like that? I would simply ask whether the study would ask that question because it was something that we were thinking about in the North Amherst overlay and whether or not it would be an unacceptably disincentive or whether the whole proposition is sufficiently attractive that it could stand a slightly greater percentage of inclusionary zoning. attached to it. So that's really just a suggestion or a question.

Bruce, you're reminding me, I think I saw an article just this week that some, I don't know if it was San Francisco or Berkeley or one of the towns around there, they were thinking of actually eliminating their inclusionary zoning requirement to spur more housing construction projects. I realize that's probably not an option we'd want to consider given the state benefits for maintaining our level of affordable housing. But on the other coast, it seemed like the pendulum might be swinging a little bit in the opposite direction.

Yeah. To be clear, I'm not advocating this at all. I'm simply saying that is this a moment when the question is asked and we learn a little bit.

All right. Thanks. Jeff. Again, just the. Oops, I can't hear.

My microphone. Yeah, just to offer just a thought on inclusionary zoning. I think we have identified it as a potential policy discussion that we, want to chew on as this unfolds and i do want to just offer i guess using the out of the box theory just you know there could be other opportunities to not require the inclusionary that not apply the inclusionary zoning but think about other mechanisms to bring the mix of housing so you know one thing that we see is that um affordable housing developments are you know especially of a certain type if they're located correctly They just need bigger buildings in some cases. And so if there's a way to create an area that's suitable and allow the center development to occur and encourage that to be affordable or potentially even create a pocket that's going to be for affordable housing, there could be another way to do this that would actually um allow more creativity to come um from the development community into a parcel like this so we're going to look at inclusionary zoning and I think this is kind of the weighing the pros and cons of different options so it is on the list and I think um a policy discussion about whether applying the inclusionary over this acreage is the best way or if there's another alternative way but I think it's a good conversation piece so I just wanted to kind of lift that up and echo it right

Bruce, again.

The never-ending Bruce. A question. You went through a number of things that you were doing, Peter, you, Nate, and you, Jeff, with charrettes and so forth and so forth. But what I didn't hear was whether there is any intent to try and convene a little focus group of the five or six existing active groups property developers in town. I would simply say beyond that, that when we were 30 years ago trying to do the beginnings of what was then the comprehensive planning, we would call it, There was a different, they weren't the same. It was hard for us to get that group to even pay attention or to be involved. But it seems that we've got developers in town who are active now who would be prepared to sit down and talk. Is there intent? Is there value? Or is there perceived no value in talking to these folks? Or is it just something you intended to do that you didn't broadcast? And maybe you don't want to broadcast it. I don't know. Maybe you would just say no comment. But it seems to me that this is a group of individuals that should be brought into this discussion as engagingly as possible.

Yeah.

Yeah, we, we, we welcome that idea. And it's definitely been in our thought process. I think the unique, the uniqueness is the way that the college has their request for, request for proposals process out. So we have, you know, talked that if there's organizations that have expressed interest through the college and would like to talk to the town, we're, we're very open to that. I think it's the size and scale of it that we want to make sure that we're understanding the size and scale and the need. If one of the options that we think is one entity who has a series of partners within it to do different types of things, we think that it could be one center that might play out. And if understanding that size and scale and those needs would be important for us and that would help us calibrate zoning so that we want to make sure that our zoning is sufficient to support the things that people say what the market will need or what people are proposing. So we are looking for ways to calibrate what we propose. We don't want to propose something that's too small or so low density that it will never materialize because that's not worth anyone's time and it's not going to help the town. So we are thinking about that, Bruce. I think the focus group's It's not fleshed out exactly who they will be after we have these next couple of meetings, but it is something that we see part of the process.

All right. Jarrah, and then I think I'll ask if there's any members of the public that want to make a comment.

Thank you, Doug. uh actually jeff you kind of alluded to this just at the end there about if we if we were to zone this like too low density it may never materialize i really appreciate the fact that several of you have mentioned that this is like a generational opportunity for amherst um because i think a lot of people don't quite understand that and so what do we need to do to either make sure that we really take advantage of that? Or what could we do to get in our own way of being able to take advantage of that? I know that's not a super easy question, but I would love your thoughts.

Jeff, you want to take it up?

And that one is a great question jerry i think that's what we need to focus on i think that's the input we're gathering tonight and just understand that i don't i don't actually have an answer to that but i think that's the kind of thinking that we need to bring through the process and whatever zoning amendment package gets produced in for january and gets referred to to the the crc and the planning board you know at that time that's what we need to be making sure of that we've been clear what if we're producing barriers or if we're creating the opportunity that we we hope to

Nate, I think you put your hand up.

Yeah, just quickly for you, Gerald, I think a lot of this is sweating the details in the zoning. And that's one thing that Peter and I, we've given conference presentations for decades on the common pitfalls, like where communities get cold feet, where communities put something on the books that seems to make perfectly logical sense, but they don't understand the unintended consequences. And so, you know, some of this is big picture and thinking outside the box and being bold. And then the other side of that coin is sweating the details and just making sure we don't, you know, put in overly complicated provisions or capricious density caps and, you know, just things that

know make people feel comfortable when they read it on paper but you know sacrifices some of this incredible opportunity very well put thank you all right so members of the public uh do does anybody want to make a comment about this topic uh then now would be a good time to raise your hand um you typically allow three minutes All right, I am not seeing any hands. I guess everyone is here for the next topic on our agenda. So with that, Nate and Jeff, have you gotten what you hoped to get tonight from us?

This is great. I hope to see many of you, all of you, as we keep, you know, convening folks and at the charrette will be a lot of fun.

All right. Well, thank you for coming.

Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. Great timing. Appreciate it.

All right. Good night. All right. We usually take a break around 8 o'clock, and I think this would be a good time to do it. It's now 7.54 on my clock. Board members, if you can mute and turn off your camera while you go away and come back by 8 o'clock, that would be great. Thank you. All right, as you come back, panelists, please turn on your camera and let me know you're back. Looks like we've got one member left to return. All right, Jera. And Pamfield Sadler, I'm seeing two Amherst Notetaker. Is that an AI recording device you're using, or is that not related to you?

That is not related to me.

Okay.

As far as I know.

Okay, that's fine. And I guess whoever's managing that will manage it. All right, time is 8.02 and we'll resume with our agenda. The next item is East Amherst Local Historic District. review proposed provisions for the East Amherst Historic District. So from my perspective, we've received the proposal from the local Historic District Commission. We've received at least, I think, two memos from their chair, Steve Bloom. We've received a couple of pieces of correspondence from the public, one from Cinda Jones, and one from Janet McGowan and one from another gentleman. I don't remember his name, but we have all that material available to us. And we've been asked whether we would like to recommend this revised historic district to town council for adoption. Brett KenCairn, And with that, I guess, I think we should just go ahead and have a conversation, I will ask our offer members of the public, an opportunity to make. Brett KenCairn, To comment on the proposal or whatever. Brett KenCairn, At some point during the discussion. So, um, I guess the only other thing I'll say is, um. We reviewed the initial proposal. I think back in April. Bruce, you were out of the country at the time. I think the rest of us were here except for Roy. Roy obviously was not part of the board at the time. I think the vote that evening was something like five to one, maybe. There were six votes, I think, that night against a recommendation which had prompted the commission to come back with their revised proposal. So anybody want to talk about this? Angus, then Jesse.

Yeah, I wasn't here at the last planning board meeting. We were in the hospital.

Congratulations, by the way.

Thanks. Yeah. Baby is good. Mom is good. We're in good shape now. So there's just a couple of things that I wanted to add that I would have shared then. One, I wanted to say that I am really impressed with the Historical Commission for the work they did with this consultant to record information about these properties to write them up in a report. And I'm really excited to, I've already driven around a little bit and looked at some of the houses. I'm excited to actually walk around with the packet and spend some time looking at the properties. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to think about ways of foregrounding this area and helping people understand this area better. And I think the Historical Commission has done a really nice job of jump-starting that. And I'm excited to see what else we can do with it. That being said, I expressed a great deal of hesitation around the initial proposal of the East Amherst Historic District. I think this is a much better proposal than the one that was brought to us before that is more consistent with balancing a number of different priorities that the town has, including historic preservation, but also including lots of other things. That being said, I don't think this is the right time for me, at least, for us to move forward with this historic district, especially considering the changes we're considering to the commercial area just directly abutting this area. I've already expressed a number of thoughts about this particular area that's under consideration for this historic district. I'll just add a couple of other final thoughts. One, I'm not sure what our vision as a planning board is for this particular intersection of streets. Currently, it falls under four different zones, RVC, BVC, RN, and RG. I don't know what that means. What I do know is that it's on a PBTA bus route. It's right near one of the only commercial strips in town, and it's near a brand new large elementary school. So I think there's actually a lot of prospect for us to make some changes to this area and to think more intentionally about what we want the area to look like in the long term. I don't feel at this juncture that a local historic designation will help us with that process, and I fear it could hinder it. The final thought I'll just leave with is that any additional regulation, zoning or otherwise, naturally reduces new construction. That's fine if that's a trade-off that the town council wants to accept. but it's something that I am hesitant to just run forward with without deep consideration. I think this is an area that's ripe for infill, and I'd like us to be thinking about how we can change the zoning to make that more possible and to have a coherent vision for this portion of town. Okay, that's it. Sorry, but I wasn't here at the last meeting. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you, Angus. Jesse.

Thanks, Doug. I also missed the last meeting. I did watch most of it after the fact. I was here at the original meeting. In April, I was also not in favor of the broad district. I actually do like this proposal to identify specific properties. Living in one of our other local historic districts, I have not seen it as a big barrier to development or infill. I know some of the parcels might limit larger scale thinking. But I agree with what Angus just said is we want to be intentional about that. And I don't think this would really be prohibitive of some of these larger scale thought processes that could still include some of these identified properties. So yeah, I would go in favor of it. That's all. Thanks. Okay.

Anybody else want to make a comment? Okay, Bruce, I can always count on you.

You can, but I've got some menu bar on the bottom of my screen that's interfering with the hand raise function, so I use the old-fashioned way. Whilst I appreciate Angus's deliberation on this, and I should say that he's done more deliberation than he gave rise to in the His comments, including a certain amount of research of studies and so forth, because he was engaged by my comment last time, a couple of weeks ago. where I said that I was unaware that there was any studies that substantially indicated that local historic districts inhibited development opportunity in a way that limited the housing opportunities and so forth. He sent a few studies which I reviewed and I was interested in them. I think I will well refer them and commend them to the Local Historic District Commission and to its archive and so forth. I think they're very helpful. But I also think that they were not entirely relevant to our situation because they're mostly centered in large metropolitan, very large metropolitan areas and so forth. But nonetheless, it's very instructive reading. So, as I said, Angus, I'm impressed with the way you've approached this, but I disagree with you. I essentially agree with Jesse's position that I think that this is not something that will interfere with our deliberations. The Local Historic District Commission's purview, while, as you noted, Doug, is absolute in the sense of whether it grants or not a certificate of a applicability. It is narrow in the sense of how it can exercise that absolute discretion and so forth. It's quite narrow and we've defined it a little better recently with we being now the Local Historic District Commission, which I am also a member of and have been for eight years. We've taken steps to improve our understanding of what is in our bailiwick, what areas of our authority and so forth, which is, as I said, quite limited. So I don't think that this is going to be an inhibiting factor. I also know that the Local Historic District Commission and certain members have put a lot of time and effort into this, and if we don't do it now, it's not going to happen. I don't think. I mean, this amount of effort doesn't get redone. It doesn't have a long shelf life. Members of the commission turn over, except me, it seems, which is distressing. But nonetheless, there's not another architect type people in town who are prepared to kick me off. And so I've agreed to keep staying. But there's a... There's a sell-by date on that one, I'm sure, I hope. But so while I'm still there, I agree that this is a good opportunity. I think it's appropriate. But I think that the commission will benefit, Angus, from the deliberative work that you've done. Thank you.

All right, Bruce, I will, I'm going to just interject. I was on the CPAC Commission when the request for funding for the study came to CPAC. And I voted in favor of conducting the study. At the time, I said I'm in favor of doing the research. But I'm not sure I'm in favor of a local historic district. Um, and that position really hasn't changed. Um, I know. I mean, I'm I my personal observation from a couple of projects that are That have had to interact with the commission is that it does. It may end up with a better aesthetic product. Um, but it does take more time and, uh, if you have consultants involved, time is money. So, um, you know, I do think it's a barrier. And I said at the last meeting that, you know, I just question how much of town we want to have under a local historic district. And that is not clear to me. I'm not really prepared to increase that amount at the moment. And, you know, so be it. I'm probably making it, Bruce, so that I can never succeed you on the Local Historic District Commission. But I guess I'll take that risk. Jarrah.

Thanks, Doug. I'll just say I agree with everything that you just shared. I agree with Angus's sentiments and everything that he stated beautifully as well. I will restate, like I did last time, I would be willing to consider this proposal down the road, but I don't think that right now is the right time.

okay um i will say uh bruce um i'm surprised that you think that this has a relatively short shelf life because i do i could imagine i mean i've i've looked at some of the material on the historic commission's website that has you know, pages about historic properties that were done back in the, you know, back in the 70s. And that kind of information is still useful, I would think. So I'm surprised to hear that there really is an urgency to this and that we couldn't come back and consider this in three years or something once we've thought more about East Amherst at a larger scale.

Well, we could. We would need a champion at that point in time. And the current board will have turned over. And unless it's driven by Walker or somebody who's, and we don't know where Walker will be in three years. So, I mean, that's not, okay, that didn't come out the way I intended.

We don't know whether you'll still be on the commission at that point.

Well, we hope we know. that I won't be. But it's just the way the world works, Doug. The things come up and they capture attention for a period of time. This has captured the local historic district's imagination or attention for what it might consider to be too long. and which is to say over two years and so other things come up and with other people on the board and and i that's why i think it has a limited shelf life because this is the board this is the commission cons as constituted that have put the effort into this that have developed the arguments that understand it and have driven it forward And it would have to be resurrected by a group that would want to put the time into going back and further understanding and so forth. And of course, things will have changed. And so it will require another load of work. That's why I think it has a short shelf life. I don't think that's the primary reason for why we should move forward. I think we should move forward because I think it's the right thing to do. But I understand that not everybody on the board here would support that proposition.

Okay. Thanks, Bruce. Fred?

Well, I completely agree. I've said many times that I'm reminded of the Joni Mitchell, you don't know what you've got until it's gone. And I live in this part of the town and I live in an An 1868 Greek revival. And I've done a detailed analysis of the history of this part of the town. And I think that this is certainly worth protecting to the mild extent, the very mild extent that is involved in the historic district. So I will support this.

All right. Thanks, Fred. Any other comments from the board at the moment? Roy?

Well, I was really impressed with Cinda Jones and what she wrote up. It's hard when someone pays that much money not knowing that it's going to be in a historic district. I can appreciate that. At the same time, I thought the presentation by Elizabeth Sharp really made some sense to have those 22 homes on those streets to go into some type of a historical district. I'm kind of on the fence on that, but both points are made. Remember, I'm new to the board and I think right now I would vote in favor of it.

All right. Thanks, Roy. Angus?

Yeah, I don't want to believe at the point because we need to have a vote. But I would just say that to Roy's point, they are currently already in a national historic district. So this would be voting to place them into a local historic district. And the national designation doesn't come with any kinds of limitations on what property owners do.

Okay. Roy, I'm going to drop your hand. Bruce, I'm going to recognize your hand.

Thank you. I move that the board recommend the adoption of the East Amherst Local Historic District to town council. I think that's simple enough.

Before we have a second, I'm going to go to public comment because we have a hand raised. All right. Pam, could you bring over Nancy Ratner? And anybody that wants to make a public comment, please raise your hand. Hello, Nancy, you have three minutes and give us your name and your street address.

Thank you. My name is Nancy Ratner. I'm the chair of the local historic district. And I want to remind the board that the Amherst master plan enthusiastically adopted by the planning board, the plan to have local historic districts. And it's your responsibility, therefore, to be supporting, preserving these kinds of neighborhoods. We've gone to great lengths to come up with a plan for this neighborhood. We've reduced the number of properties in response to your concerns. I just want to also mention that several of the things that were in Cinda's letter were incorrect. She mentioned a property that was not included. That property, in fact, was included, and if you prefer to have all of the houses in the district included, we would support that. It was in response to your concerns that we reduce the number of properties. I believe that it's important to remember that the National historic district does not protect the historical properties. It only identifies them. So being in the National Historic District is of no help in retaining a historical section of our town. And very few towns have the kind of history that we have. These are houses that are all pre-Civil War. They involve important figures in history. And if you value history at all, which I would hope in a college town, and this is really a college town in many ways, that you should be thinking about ways to preserve what is part of our important history. I'm very concerned that you are ignoring the tremendous amount of work that went into putting together this proposal. What Bruce said about having a shelf life I think is correct. Many of the documents that we turned to were documents that had been put together about 10 years ago. They all had to be redone because there's been change and there will continue to be change if you don't allow us to go forward with this. And some of that change will end the historical nature of the most important and most historical part of our town. I sent you a letter talking with a reference to a Connecticut study, which said, excuse me, said some very important things about the strengths of local historic districts.

You have 30 seconds.

I just want to encourage you to support this.

Okay. Thank you, Nancy. All right. Pam, can we bring over Hedy Startup? All right. Welcome, Hedy. If you can remind us of your street address.

Hello Doug and everybody on the planning board. Thank you for your service. My name is Hetty Startup and I live on North Pleasant Street and I just want to support what Bruce Colden says and have you urge you to pass this and forward it to town council. It was something dear to the heart of Paul Barkelman to look into this nomination and Those 22 buildings contain some of the most interesting architectural styles and history and materials that we have in our town. They are finite. You will not see those kinds of buildings ever again, in terms of square footage, in terms of how much that kind of craftsmanship would cost today. If you ignore this, what you're ignoring or saying can be done down the road is an appreciation of something that is character defining. It's part of the texture of town, but it's also tied with memory. I just recently went to Historic Deerfield and they're working on their federal brick mansion. And it's just really fascinating. And I want Amherst to be part of that wider story of the beginnings of our town. So I really hope that you will have, those of you who are unsure of this or don't want this to go ahead right now, will have a change of heart. Thanks, Doug.

Thank you, Hattie. All right, Pam. I think it's Kitty Axelson-Berry is next. Hello, and if you can, hello, Kitty, can you repeat your name and give us your street address?

Yes, Kitty Axelson-Berry. Oops, okay. Yep, we can hear you. And I live at 89 Stony Hill Road, which is in Echo Hill South, which is part of the East Village. It's a really vibrant area. I do almost all of my grocery shopping here. I use the nail salon, the dry cleaner. The dentist, the tax preparer, the library that's just over the border in Pelham, as well as the car repair place. I take the bus here to go into Amherst for a film or concert. So I'm very familiar with East Village and the historic properties here. And they really add up to something. As Hedy mentioned, the word texture, and I think that's a really good word. because we all have a very human need for beauty and for diversity and for texture. And I'm talking about diversity of architecture. I would hate to be surrounded by the canyons and the monotony that are created by certain types of development in particular when it's development for one age group only as is the case elsewhere in Amherst in places that were not preserved in what I think and what the master plan calls for as reasonable and historic. I would like to refer you to the town's master plan, which is really reasonable based on in-depth consideration by so many residents with diverse viewpoints. Unfortunately, the implementation committee that it calls for has never been created, so we've been cherry picking from it ever since. But the master plan repeatedly calls on us to honor the historical cultural character and beauty of our neighborhoods and to protect historic cultural environment areas from, quote, domination by development and to, quote, emphasized preservation we have some work to do on preservation of historic properties here i hope you will vote on behalf of residents in the need to protect those that kind of diversity and in the three years or so that doug marshall mentioned that we have plenty of time for this sort of thing there could be a serious diminution of the diminu whatever lessening of commercial act the commercial activity here and the diversity in housing too if like if it if it happens to um if we over develop like we did in town to the destruction of commerce in town in downtown amherst and the destruction of uh you have 30 seconds Okay, and don't worry if you if you are familiar with this area, you will realize that there's plenty of opportunity for development and densification all along Route 9, Belchertown Road, College Street, and also Main Street and Pelham Road. Okay, thank you.

Thank you, thank you. All right, Pam, next is Steve Bloom.

Steve, don't say anything.

All right. Welcome back, Steve. Oh, I'm sorry. Can you hear me? Yes, welcome back.

Okay, thank you. I'm Steve Bloom. I live at 259 Lincoln, and I just wanted to make first two small corrections. First off, as Nancy just said, I'm the vice chair, not the chair of the local historic commission. Secondly, the vote that was initially taken by the planning board was not back in April. was in june so i just wanted to you know correct the record there all right the main thing i wanted to ask is i wanted to ask mr mcleod and you know that and also um uh jared i'm sorry i'm blanking here what's going to change and you say it's not the right time what's going to change in three years and what is your vision for this area i'm kind of at a loss i mean is it a vision that there would be smaller buildings of infill behind these historic structures? Or are you hoping to have massive apartment buildings made possible by the demolition of 200-year-old buildings? I'm kind of at a loss of what you guys are driving at and what you think is going to change and why this isn't the right time.

All right. Thank you, Steve. Anything else?

No, thank you.

All right. Let's bring over Hilda Greenbaum. Not Kitty Axelson Berry. There we go.

Hilda Greenbaum, 298 Montague Road. I live in one of the oldest, best preserved houses in Amherst, built in 1737. And it's built and will last longer than any of the new buildings that are being built. And my house happened to have been the family home of the trolley conductor, Baxter Eastman. A little bit of history. We've got two people on this board that have no idea about this town. They're newly here within the last couple of years, and I really resent the fact that they're deciding very important issues about which they know zero. A little history about Main Street. In the 1950s, that street was a slum. 797 Main Street, which was an important factory house, it's called the Smith House East, was covered with tar paper. And luckily, the interior and most of the exterior was survived underneath the tar paper. My husband and I have saved at least six houses on Main Street, and Joel has saved a couple more after that. We have turned the neighborhood around so that now those properties are selling for big prices. People like living in old houses that have character. And it's not true that saving old houses ruins neighborhoods. There's absolutely no data to support that. And I would like to say that the first historic district, the National Historic District, which was founded in started working on at least mid-70s and passed, I think, around 1980. On that board, along with my husband, was Cinda Jones's mother. Cinda Jones's mother has written several books on the history of old houses in Amherst, and particularly one about old barns in Amherst. And what Cinda wrote in her letter is totally contradictory to what her mother probably taught her as a young kid. So At this point, I'm very upset about the kinds of positions that young people new to town are taking because they just don't know. And I'm very angry. And I wish that there could be better support from the planning board. But I don't support a lot of things that you're doing because you just don't know what's in this town, what the geography of the town is. And I'm just very unhappy. And I just, I don't know what to say. But I have made my living and I'm giving my money back to the town that helped me make this living because every time I got a $2,000 job, we bought another old house, fixed it up and put it back on the market. And now they've become quite valuable looking at the recent sales. So I think I'm living proof that a lot of the things that are being said by this board just aren't true. So I can't make you change your mind because you're dug in and that's your problem, not mine. Thank you.

All right. Thanks for taking the time to come and talk to us, Hilda. All right. Pam, you can move Hilda back when you get a chance. All right, board members, any further comments you wanna make having heard the comments or had other things come to mind? Roy.

I was in Boston yesterday and as I drove through and went by the old state house where the Boston massacre happened, it really hit home that preserving some of these buildings is so important. And can you imagine if they had torn that one down and there's these skyscrapers all around it. And so, Elizabeth Sharp made some great points in the meeting last week, and that's one of the reasons that I think we should support this. It's only 22 buildings. I don't hear any of the owners coming and talking against it. And I would probably feel different if the owners of those buildings came forward and said something to the effect that it was going to affect their property value or something like that. So I'm very much in support of this. I heard Hilda. I knew Ruth Owens-Jones and the work she did. And I think we need to move forward. And I think Bruce is right. You know, let's put it to the town council and see what they want to do.

You're excluding Cinda, right? She's obviously an owner that did reach out to us.

Yep, and I think she'll be okay. Okay. Angus?

Yeah, just two quick final comments. One, the survey that the Historical Commission did indicated that there were other owners of properties that were not enthused about the local historic designation. The only other thing I'd add is there were others who were in favor of it. So I think, you know, it's there's mixed reception. But the only other thing I'd add is I think it's regrettable when people in town respond to arguments with ad hominem attacks. And I don't appreciate that. I think the Historical Commission has done really wonderful work. I think they're putting forward a really great idea in a lot of ways. It's one that I think as the planning board, we have to balance different parts of the master plan. And local historic designation, local historic district designation is one of those options for historic preservation. There are others. Jarrah mentioned some of them in his memo, but they're also listed in the master plan itself. Regularly updating inventories, preserving historic properties through direct acquisition, encouraging preservation, restoration, and rehabilitation and adaptive reuse through a variety of financial and other initiatives, tax incentives and abatements, federal funding and assistance, shortened project review time. Anyway, these are all in the master plan. But my point is just that I think it's unfortunate that several times, both in my nomination to the planning board, as town council was considering this, and now in this situation, there are people engaging with attacks on character as opposed to arguments. And I've also heard attack criticisms of the arguments, which I think is very fair. There are different priorities that we're trying to balance here. But the planning board is trying to balance those different priorities. And the Historic Commission is focused on historic preservation, which is their goal. And it should be their goal. And I appreciate them for doing that work. Thank you.

All right, Angus. Thank you. All right. Brett KenCairn, I guess I, I will say I enjoy seeing and going by then the Noah Dickinson house and the Daniel Kellogg house. Brett KenCairn, I appreciate the architecture and the settings of those buildings. Dave Kuntz, Many of the other buildings don't strike me as architecturally special they probably are much more special in terms of their history. Dave Kuntz, But. Dave Kuntz, just wanted to go on the record that I don't hate old houses. All right. We have a motion on the floor from Bruce. Does anyone want to second his motion to recommend to town council that they adopt this local historic district? All right. I see three hands. Jesse, you got there first.

Sure. I'll second that.

Thank you, Jesse. All right. Are there any more comments? All right. Then we'll go through. And I think I'll go ahead and start with you, Bruce.

I'm an aye.

Thank you. And Fred?

Aye.

Roy? Aye. Jesse? Aye. Angus? Nay. Jarrah? Nay. And I was a nay as well. So the motion carries four to three. And Walker will you be drafting a recommendation memo for me to sign or how will we convey that to town council.

Yeah, I'll get a memo drafted and let you know when it's done and then you can sign it and move on to the next steps.

All right, thank you. All right, the motion passes and we'll move on to our next item on the agenda. Dave Kuntz, Time is 840. Dave Kuntz, We can go to the fifth item, which is the general housing discussion. Dave Kuntz, And first item is to talk about the zoning amendments Angus that you, I believe drafted for us to allow housing in the PRP zoning district. And I don't know, Angus, are you going to lead this discussion or Walker, will you? How do we want to do this?

I believe we left off the previous discussion of this matter that Roy and I were going to do some additional research and follow up. So I'm going to go ahead and say that Roy and I should probably speak first and I can start. I was charged with talking to Rob Mora about the prospect. I did discuss it with him. He said that he is in favor of it. It's been supported by the planning department in the past and he would like to see a memo and a draft of the language that would include the parcels to be impacted and see what that would look like. But he didn't have any negative comments about it.

All right.

So Roy, did you come up with anything?

Well, I've spoken to five out of the six owners of the properties and all of them are really excited about changing the zoning to anywhere from 55 and over type housing, mixed use, affordable housing, I heard. And one person was really excited about doing even more with the town with their other parcels. So I was pretty excited about going forward with this. I sat and talked with Jeff Bagg for a while. And I think it's time to continue moving forward. But I think The planning board, the zoning board, and the staff was pretty overwhelmed at this time. And I think as Jeff gets really comfortable with doing and pulling all the staff together, I think this can take place.

All right. And one suggestion Jeff had, they mentioned to me was that potentially Roy or anyone, Angus, anyone who's interested, maybe draft the memo first time around and that I can then revise it to save me the time on that. At least I can also take a look at what the zoning language would look like. If anyone's willing to take a stab at that.

Um, Angus, I'm going to call on you next. I really hate for us to be giving you anything new to do.

Yeah, I don't want to force it on you at all. Well, I'm just trying to clarify, is this different from the memo I've already written about the proposed changes?

Yeah, so the memos that go to the town council typically include a background of previous discussions on the topic, why it's being considered, similar zoning, like kind of an overview of the entire thing, because they may not be familiar with the discussion at all. So it will, it'll kind of end with what you have, but it shouldn't also include kind of a history of the project, which I am aware is probably not the easiest to do without Ben there.

I mean, they usually, I mean, when Christine Breastrip used to do it, she really, it sort of was based on the minutes for the meetings. and took the text of the minutes and sort of listed that in chronological order and then ended up with some of the pros and cons.

Yeah, that's kind of the best thing to do is to go back and look at previous discussions.

I wonder, you're saying you really don't have time to support this at the moment, is that right?

I don't want to say that for sure. I would like to work on it. I think that if we'd like to get it moving a little faster, some help from the board would be appreciated. But I'm not so far behind that I can't start taking a look at it.

Okay. Roy, I guess I'll call on you, and then we can have a discussion about how we might move forward.

Two things, because Angus started this project. If you could forward any of the paperwork or anything that you have, To me, that would be really helpful. And then I know you're really busy, but if you have time for 20 minutes in the morning for a cup of coffee, I'd love to sit down and talk with you for a few minutes to see what more I can do to move this forward.

Roy, that was a question to Angus or to Walker?

To Angus. I met with Walker.

Oh, we can get coffee. That sounds good. Yeah.

I'll email you.

Okay. And Pam, I'm wondering whether, since you are our center of action on minutes, would you be able to tell Roy which meetings we've discussed this topic in case he's able to generate that chronology?

Mm-hmm. I will, I will definitely be able to tell them which agendas it was on. We just have to keep in mind that there were many nights that it was on the agenda that we tabled it. Right. But yes, I can put together that list.

All right. So Roy, we will check in with you at a certain point about that. Jesse, I do see your, do you want to weigh in on this?

To help we find information, I believe it was discussed at the subcommittee, but I think it's correct if I'm wrong, not in any detail. It was really just about if that should be on a priority list somewhere. That's my memory. So rather than have you hunt through all those minutes also, that's all I'm saying.

Yeah. I mean, the conversations were not, were not that substantive. It was, it was really basically, I asked the subcommittee, is this something that we want to look into? Subcommittee said yes. And then I think I asked the sub, we, we discussed in one of our meetings, whether it was better to do an overlay or to just rezone PRP, but that was pretty much as detailed as the subcommittee got because we stopped meeting, uh,

around March, April, somewhere around there.

And that was really when I started actually trying to change the language in the bylaw, because that was kind of the next step. It was like we, the subcommittee needed to actually see the change in language before we could do anything with it. So I mean, I could, we could find, you know, that meeting potentially and reference it, but there's not much of substance. And then as far as, I don't know the full history of PRP and like proposed changes over the last 30 years. My understanding is, you know, it was created with one intent. Not much has transpired. There's been some failures. So I'm not sure that I could narrate that. And I don't know if town staff, hopefully y'all could. I mean, I know there's that project up in the North Amherst PRP that didn't come to anything a few years ago, Accelerator or something.

The Eruptor.

The Eruptor. But I don't know if there's other examples of that.

Yeah. Didn't this particular change show up on one of Nate's lists of potential things to do?

yeah i think maybe looking through some of nate's files would be helpful and just even if we just gave a brief overview of the fact that this zoning was created with a certain intent in mind and that it appears to not have been particularly successful um at achieving goals that might be enough yeah we may not have to do specific project examples right uh bruce

I've got a question. I'll do my comment first. Roy, it might be helpful, it might be possible to give Christine Brestrup a call. She's retired, but she's only recently retired. And I've, with her consent and support, called her on a couple of things and asked for her recollection and her input. And she's been... very forthcoming. So it might be that the question about the history of the PRP or that the sentence or the paragraph that she could help with that because she's probably got a longer institutional memory than anybody else around at this point. And she hasn't lost it. I mean, it's still very much there. So I think she would be willing. You could suggest that I suggested it and see what happens. And then there was a question that we ordinarily there would be some kind of a vote to move this forward. But it sounds like maybe we would wait to move it forward until the board creates this document.

I think that would be that would make some sense.

Okay.

Especially with the language still needing to be drafted for this, the bylaw, the article.

Oops, lower hand, Bruce.

All right. Thanks, Bruce. Roy.

Thanks, Bruce. I'll reach out to Christine. I know her pretty well. And yeah, when I met with Jeff Bagg, Jeff Bagg really kind of felt like we should get together again to go over because he had a lot of information. And so I had one meeting with them. And I think once I meet with Jeff again, I think we can start moving things forward. But anything that anybody has, if they can send me, that would be help. And I could write up a bylaw and send it as a first draft. That would be helpful. You're writing a memo, right? Not a bylaw? Just a memo with bylaws, whatever. Whatever's needed.

Okay.

Angus?

Well, just to clarify, so the...

I've edited the bylaws. That's in the document or the documents that have been sent around. We could go in a different direction with those edits, but the memo and the memo that I sent around explains each of the line item changes to the zoning bylaw. um i think i i would find it helpful if before our next meeting um walker and pam y'all could send an example of one of these um memos that the town council would want to receive um i was modeling my memo off of memos that that made it sent but i think they weren't like formal town council memos um so it would be that might help us as we're thinking about what we're aiming for

Yeah, definitely. And also there's certain like legal language around a zoning change. You have to list all of the parcels that will be impacted and some of that hasn't been finalized yet. I don't think we have to change any of the actual edits of the bylaw that you did. I think that's all good.

Well, we could. I mean, like I'm not, you know.

Yeah, I'm just not saying that we don't have to just to make it like legal or anything.

All right. Sounds like a plan. So Roy and Angus are going to have coffee. Many of us are going to send some stuff to Roy. Angus will be as involved as he wants to be.

All right.

So why don't we just include this on next meeting's agenda just to kind of see if the pieces are coming together or not. Dave Kuntz, All right, it was not listed, but under general housing discussion I thought we could have a brief conversation about the at you. Dave Kuntz, situation with the bylaw that we passed last year, I saw in the Gazette that the zoning board did make a decision and Walker I wondered if you could. Dave Kuntz, Just recap what happened and tell us what the next steps are i'm not sure where it, you know.

Yeah, I actually just talked to Rob about this today. Everyone's a little bit unclear. It's kind of a unique situation, but we're waiting for the official written decision from the ZBA. So that's the first step. And then they have to have a specific finding which involves figuring out exactly what they voted on, which I guess in the end of the meeting was a little unclear. So once they resolve that, we're going to figure out what sort of enforcement can be done and how that's going to impact other projects in town and projects moving forward. And in the meantime, there's almost certainly going to be a proposal to change the bylaw so that we don't run into the situation again, which I think is going to come through planning staff to you.

Okay. Good. Jesse and then Angus.

Thank you. Thanks, Walker, for that. I was going to raise this exact issue and I spent a little time with ADU bylaw and was going to share and propose some language change, even though it seems kind of ludicrous to me, but maybe that's a little ahead of us. If you're going to work on it, I'll just wait.

Yeah. Although if you want to send me suggestions.

Sure. I mean, it's pretty simple, but yeah, I don't think it needs to be a big change, but I'll send you what I did. And of course you're the expert. So thanks. Okay.

Angus.

Yeah, it's a bizarre hearing and a bizarre like podcast thing to be navigating. I guess the only question that I have, I think it's great for us to think about rewording by law. Is the town expecting a lawsuit over this decision?

um i can't speak to that i um i think that probably the person who appealed to the zba wouldn't sue the town because they got their their they were their appeal was approved by the zba but i can't speak beyond that all right uh fred yeah um as i understand it the the zba hearing was

And the issue was an appeal from the decision of the building commissioner. And the way that he's applying the bylaw, I was gratified by the ZBA decision. And as I indicated at the last meeting, this is a highly consequential situation and issue. And just in my own neighborhood, the neighbor that has been a friend of my family for 30 years is now moved to New York because of the consequences of the degree of change that has been involved in this kind of construction. And yeah, so I take this to some extent personally. I can remember 30 years ago, my five-year-old daughter discovering that the people who moved in and the Jason Blatt also had a five-year-old daughter and they became best friends forever and subsequently were maids of honor at each other's wedding and so forth. And because of the way things have gone, their parents discovered that every morning they had to go out and remove beer cups from their front lawn that were coming from across the street. And then when this situation happened, and something very comparable happened even closer, and they realized it was just going to get worse, and they voted with their feet. And as I said a couple weeks ago, they are now residents of New York State. This is an extremely consequential a very important issue. And I applaud the decision of the Zoning Board of Appeals and we should support it if necessary with clarifying language in the bylaw. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Fred. All right. Anybody have anything else on general housing discussion? All right. We'll move on to old business. Time is 8.59. Any old business not anticipated? Nope. Any new business not anticipated? Nope. Angus?

I'm sorry. This might have been under old business. I guess I'm curious. especially hearing the Hampshire plan tonight, there's so much on the planning department's, you know, list of things y'all are working on. The downtown design review standards, Hampshire, you know, commercial strip on College Street, So I guess I'm curious. I don't think it needs to happen in this meeting, especially because it's late and I'm sure we're all tired. But I'd love to get a sense from y'all maybe in the next meeting about how y'all are thinking about all the different things that you have cooking and balancing, prioritizing, you know, if we're still on track with it. Yeah. design review standards or if that's just kind of been paused as we shift to Hampshire you know which is more time sensitive anyway I'm just curious about that but but it doesn't have to be tonight I don't need any answers tonight just wanting to know more yeah I can come back with some thoughts at least and deeply appreciative of y'all for everything you're doing it's it's a lot on y'all right now thank you

Dave Kuntz, Alright, so maybe Walker let's put that on the agenda for next time. Dave Kuntz, Whether it's its own item or just a report of staff. Dave Kuntz, All right, any for me and our subdivision applications. Dave Kuntz, You okay about upcoming zba applications anything we might be interested in.

I was supposed to talk to Jeff about that and I hadn't gotten to it. So I'm still not aware of any.

Okay. SPP SPR SUB applications. Yeah. Okay. All right. Committee and liaison reports. Bruce, anything for PVPC?

No, there was a meeting, but my Zoom meeting crashed and I couldn't get back in. And it happened at the very beginning. Sadly, something must have happened, but I don't know what it was.

Okay.

All right. Roy, have you started meeting with CPAC?

No, no meetings yet. But who is the liaison? Who's the staff person in that committee?

Leah Carver, the accountant.

All right. I'll reach out to her to find out when.

Yeah, I know they're going to start accepting applications in October. So I'm guessing you'll be meeting around then or a little later.

All right. And then I haven't received official notification or a point of that I was appointed to the design review board, but I did talk to Angela today about it, though it is in process. Okay, well, I did get invited to their meeting last week. And the the agenda was one set of signs on a bank. building along Triangle Street, which was pretty straightforward. So that's all I have to report for that. All right. Next item is Report of Chair. I really don't have anything to report. Walker and Pam, anything for Report of Staff?

I don't think so.

No? All right. Anybody else have anything They want to say before we adjourn. All right. Well, time is 903 and oh, sorry.

I just wanted to say I really appreciate you know, Bruce, I think you said it earlier that, um, you were expressing appreciation with some of the things that I was saying, but also said that you disagreed with them. And I think that's just a really, I appreciate this board and the members of this board for being willing to countenance disagreements of opinion and not let them kind of devolve into something unproductive or unhealthy or or whatever, we can and should disagree. And people all over this town disagree in different ways. And so I just wanted to thank you all for modeling that civic discourse.

Thank you, Angus. Bruce?

Yes, that was well deserved. Angus's contribution to this discussion did not, sorry, did not deserve the kind of sceptical reception that various members and colleagues of mine on the local historic commission delivered. And I'm trying to help them think and behave better. But what I put my hand up for was to say that The work that Angus did in digging around and then forwarding stuff for me for my opinion, I think I copied Walker with the reply that I made to Angus. And then within a very short time, I got an equally thoughtful and thorough evaluation of what Angus had written and what I had written, which was nowhere near as thoughtful. And so between the three of us in the course of a short period of time, a fair amount of light and a very little amount of heat was put onto the subject. And frankly, I will try and bring my commission colleagues to understand that whereas the planning boards may not have its primary purview in the work that the Local Historic History Commission does, When we turn our attention to things, we do it diligently, and I really want my commission colleagues to understand and appreciate that, and that will be something that I raise, probably not on the agenda, Walker, but in some way will try and communicate that to the commission. I mean, essentially, the vote was turned around, but it was... It was 3 1⁄2 to 3 1⁄2. Maybe, Roy, your on-the-fence comment moved slightly in the latter part of the meeting. But essentially, this board is constructively sceptical of the situation, and the vote reflected that. And that is probably not going to have much effect on the town council, I think. I think the council is going to make its own decision, and I think if the local historic district commission doesn't behave a little better, there will be shooting itself in the foot. And I think we have to help them more understand that. That's it for me.

All right, Bruce. Any other last words? All right. Time is 906. And I guess we are adjourned. Next meeting is in October or is in September, right? Does anybody remember the date? It's the second, Pam? Second of September, okay.

It is the second.

All right. All right, well, enjoy the rest of the summer, and we'll see you in September.

Thanks, everyone. Good night.