Planning Board - Regular Meeting

Give them the roll call. Right? Left?

Chelsea Eaton.

Bob Hayes.

Riley Bergeron. Ed Barra. Tim DeRoche.

Andrea Westby.

Thank you very much. We have a quorum. I don't think we'll necessarily be taking any votes tonight, but we do have a quorum. We may be. Okay, let's see. Minute. If I had a chance to review the May 12th minute.

I'd just like to say I'm going to abstain from this because I was not at either of the meetings.

OK. Anybody who's had a chance to review the minutes want to make a motion to either approve or amend?

So moved for approval.

Second. Second.

Second to approve the May 12 minutes. All in favor? Thank you. With one abstention. Planning board minutes of May 28th. I guess those in attendance are myself, Chelsea, and Andrea West. The people who are here today. So we'll set those aside until we have a forum and vote on those and maybe get our next meeting. All right. Next item. My understanding that first item 3A has been withdrawn.

Yes. So, hi, good evening. My name's Sacarla Brown, Planning Director. Item A, the continued public hearing site plan special exception review. This applicant has withdrawn the application completely from consideration for the Planning Board. So if the applicant would like to return, it would be a brand new application.

Is there activity at that property presently?

Not as I'm aware of. They may be, but I'm not aware of.

No, they have to get rid of all of their tow trucks and everything, so there's nothing happening right now.

Other business then, planning board to vote to approve the findings written, excuse me, findings written in the notice of decision letter for their self-storage and auto sales facility in the May 12th meeting. This is new for us, you've not seen this before, and I'm gonna let Carlo explain, but I guess this is gonna be common practice.

Absolutely. So the reason why you have this before you is because it's a site plan. And for any of your applications, you should be doing findings, which is the written decision. You voted on it. And so you actually have to explain, basically, your decision. And that's the findings. And the reason why that's important, it's important for a lot of reasons. But it is your written documentation of your decision. Absent of that, only thing that people have to go by is recording, but more of the minutes that have been approved. So you approve your findings, and it has your official reasonings behind basically how you find that application is in compliance with the ordinance requirements. So from here on, I am making that change is to make sure that you all are reviewing, making changes to, and then ultimately approving your documentation of your decisions.

People had a chance to review the June, the date of June 9th, the letter that encapsulates our decision to deny the application for air cell storage, et cetera.

I have, Ed, but I'd also like to add, unfortunately, I was not at the May 12th meeting where it appears this initially came before the board. Is that correct? It is. So then I won't be able to put any opinion or vote to this.

Chelsea, I'll appoint you to vote if you appear to.

I will vote.

Thank you. Any questions or comments on the letter as drafted? If not, I will take a vote to approve the letter and authorize that I and Sam sign this letter. All in favor? So moved. Riley moves.

Second.

Seconded. All in favor?

Very good, thank you.

Do you want to re-date this letter?

We can re-date the letter so you can sign. And the format of this will change. I didn't want to make big changes on it right here, but the format will change over time.

Thank you. Item 4B, continued discussion from May 28 of LD 1829, LD 2173, overview of regulations and proposed ordinance changes. We're going to have this discussion and see separately. Yes. And is this the order you want to proceed in?

So yes, this is the order I would like to proceed in. This is a big chunk of the meeting. The last portion is going to be optional for you all if you have time. I feel like you want to get into some of the supporting materials. But the thought was to allow this time for you to talk about these topics. And so I would like to proceed. Sure.

Michelle, if you haven't had an opportunity

So good evening once again

So this evening we're going to talk about support structures for the changes that are going to be mandated that we make here in the city and all over the state. So first I'm going to go briefly through some things that I went through last time, but it's going to be a very brief discussion. And then we're going to go to the main topics. You're not going to see the actual wording of those provisions tonight. It's more of concepts. And I'm actually going to be asking questions of you. and to get some feedback that will go into the drafting of those regulations. So as we begin, you all have a printout and I've done this intentionally so you don't have to very quickly write down everything I'm saying. Please feel free to interrupt me and ask questions. I do foresee that some conversations are going to take on a life of its own and that's okay. it gives me additional information that i can use when we're going through this process we are on a timeline to complete any of these changes as the comp plan also comes to a close so we do have some time to to talk about these things and i'm going to use all the time that we have because these discussions are important so

Yes?

Do you want, I don't, and the other gentleman, if you have something you want to address to the board, I'd be happy to take the motion to take things out of order so you don't have to stay through the educational process. Well, I guess I came at the perfect time.

Is that okay with the rest of the board if we take this?

I don't mind.

Good evening.

My name is Mike Lillette, I live at 242 West Auburn Road. Currently I'm looking at putting solar at my house. So I've gone to the planning department to find out ordinances and so forth, what I can do and what I can't do. What I'd like to do also, besides putting solar, is put a house windmill. There is no ordinance on windmills for the city.

If you don't mind. looking at the different

varieties, they start generating power at the wind at five miles an hour and they have a governor at 90 miles an hour. So basically what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to either get permission or the board look at allowing wind power. I'm trying to get ahead of the bus before I put in my solar. My solar will not be on the roof. It'll be in the yard area. I currently have three and a half acres. I live off West Auburn Road, and I have a continuous wind that comes through my property. With solar, I want to do a double punch where solar, when it's cloudy, you don't generate any power. But with wind, it works all the time. It would sit on top of the roof. As you can see, it's not very big. Depending on what size I'm allowed to do, it ranges from 400 kilowatts to 1500 kilowatts. The one that you're seeing right there is about 1500 kilowatts in power. So that's why I'm here. I'm trying to find out if we can bring something to the table. Energy bills are going up for everybody. And if I'm going to invest in solar and have the people there to hook it up, battery storage and so forth, there's a lot of things that come into play about how much power you actually They said there's nothing on the books. The only thing that's on the books is solar. So I'm trying to find out if I can, how I proceed with this and they basically.

I met with him, yes I did.

Yes.

I remember speaking with you. The direction was, since the ordinance is silent on it, there's nothing in there about wind as of right now, so we can't do it. I suggested that he bring up the idea, either come to planning board and suggest maybe an ordinance change to allow wind. So I met with him, but that's what we talked about.

... ... ... I'm more than happy to work on an ordinance amendment that addresses this. For the first time tonight, I question whether it needs to be addressed. We have a height limit for structures, planning a structure, and if you exceed that limit, you simply can't do it.

And I don't have any ideas.

It would be bounding on my roof. I have two chimneys right now. It would be secured with using that as the base. My house is two story. It's a ranch size. Even if you decide, well, you have to have more acreage than like a house lot or something like that. I'm not sure, but This is for my home. This isn't a commercial entity. It's just while I have all the wiring going, budgeting and so forth, I'd like to incorporate this win with it.

So as we're speaking about this, Ed, I'll just ask you to please rotate the mic because we're not being able to pick your voice up. So that's number one. Number two, I'll just let you all proceed.

Okay. Yes, Riley.

This is just public comment right now, so we're not making a determination right here anyway. And I actually tend to agree with you, but I think it would be nice if, I don't know, staff, if there's other cities that do have ordinances on wind and we could get an example of it. But I tend to agree with Ed, but just to wrap this up, I think it would be good if we could get an example, if there is one, just to look at.

Wouldn't wouldn't there be a pretty big difference between Somebody who's coming before the board just seeking. I mean this seems like it's just for his residential purposes We're not talking about a solar farm or a wind farm. So those would inherently be two different things I would think and Which I guess what we're saying is there's nothing regard at least for the wind. There's nothing in the in the book regarding a even a residential-sized structure. But it seems to me like this could be pretty simple as far as for a residence.

I don't think it's something anymore. So what I'll say about this is, sorry to interrupt just one more time. We have a member of the public here who's speaking on public comment and usually that's not a dialogue between the board and the person having public comment because afterwards you all are able to have these discussions about what would you like to do going forward because it's nothing that staff can do at this moment during this process when addressing your issue but I do invite you to email me and talk to me and we can There's already interest that you guys have expressed on to addressing this issue if it needs to be addressed, is that okay?

Well, it sounds like it needs to be addressed. He's been to see the code office, he's been to see the planning department, and they both punted, so he's here. Sure. So address it for him, okay? Sure, absolutely. All right, yeah. Anybody else want to make any comments on this particular topic before we go back to them? Okay, thank you very much. Awesome. We'll move the wheels as quickly as we can.

Were you done, sir?

Pardon me?

Did you have more to say?

No, no, I just wanted to get the wheels going to find out if it's allowable, if I can get an exemption or whatever. It's not something that I'm just going through the process and I'll work with you and we'll take it from there. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate your time. You have a great summer. Tell us about support for density changes. Absolutely. I thought we did have one more comment. Do you want to address the board? Okay.

I was going to say one thing, but I was going to comment also now that Mr. Ouellette has made his remarks. By the way, Steven Beal, 575 Johnson Road. we in our ordinances do have very extensive coverage for solar in the agricultural resource protection zone in fact the biggest single subject in the uh... under special exceptions in the AGRP zone is solar and the ordinances goes on in great detail uh... with that coverage but i don't believe that this gentleman's property is in the ag zone i think it's in low density country residential on the west side of the West Auburn Road. There is some reference to solar in other parts of the ordinance, but nowhere near as detailed as in the Ag Zone ordinance. End of comment on that topic. The other topic that I was going to mention briefly kind of elides from public comment into miscellaneous into future matters for next meetings at the end of the agenda, which is to suggest that if staff hasn't already thought of this, that at next meeting is the requirement under the watershed district ordinance that the director of planning and permitting uh... at the end of the the fiscal year that ends june thirtieth make a report to the planning board on the number of new residences constructed in the watershed in the area of the watershed in which residential construction is permitted which is essentially low density country residential This was brought into the ordinance a couple of years ago because there was an enormous amount of discussion about restructuring the ordinance and regarding what areas residential construction would be permitted in. within the watershed and where it wouldn't be permitted, whether there were going to be an absolute limit on the number of structures that could be built or whether it was going to be limited to a certain number per year. The decision was made that was incorporated into the ordinance to cap the number of new residences in that part of the watershed in which residential construction is permitted. at three annually. The first of those program years ended last June 30th, and Eric Cousins made the report at that time that there was one new residence constructed in the watershed in that first year. So the second year is ending in two weeks, and I'm looking forward to the report to see if there are any new residences that have been built. The reason for doing it that way was so that there could be an evaluation made if there was any notable degradation in water quality in the lake as a result of perhaps somebody attempting to do a subdivision within the watershed. That hasn't happened yet. There was only that one residence in the first year, but it's a part of an ongoing annual sort of status check. Thank you. Yes, I will stay because I like to be educated.

Absolutely.

Back to you, Carl. I'll make sure that you get that report. So to go back to where we were beforehand, before we change gears, we're going to pivot again, back to supporting for density changes. We're going to go through a quick review of LD 1829 and LD 2173, not as extensive as the last one. If you want an extensive explanation, we do have that recording available, or please set up some time with me and I will gratefully go through all the provisions in great detail. Next, we're gonna go to discuss support systems, the if nothing changes. Next, we're gonna discuss blocks. What is a block, how is it used, draft ideas. Next, we're gonna go discussing street standards and how that interacts with all these other changes. And then discussing open space and open space standards. And these all come together to support the additional density that we're gonna be required to do. It's not going to be appropriate to have exact provisions in every context. You're going to have urban context, suburban context, and rural context for these things. But I want you all to start engaging in these ideas so you're not seeing them for the first time when I'm bringing you a draft. So that's the idea behind that. So first, we're going to go straight into it through state requirements. The easiest way I have ever seen, have thought of explaining the density standards are through this chart. First thing it does, it separates lot sizes and density requirements. In the growth area, as delineated in your comprehensive plan, your current one, you have a growth area and you have inside and outside of the growth area. You have areas that have access to water and sewer, and you have areas that do not have access to both water and sewer. And that's how you separate the two. In a growth area with water and sewer, your lot size, we can't require larger than 5,000 square feet. For density, it changes. For the first four units, one unit is equal to 1,250 square feet. for the first four units, so 5,000 square feet, the first 5,000 square feet gets four units, and then each 5,000 after that gets one unit. So I explained that last time. So if you're doing a subdivision under these requirements, you're going to get 11 units on your one. However, subdivision resets after your five, so each of those one turns into four, and that's how you get to 32 units an acre. Next, we're gonna go for the growth area. If you're inside the growth area and you do not have access to water and sewer, we can't require a lot size greater than 20,000 square feet. Density, however, is gonna be controlled by subsurface water system requirements. And so there is not a limit for that. So if you can get a waiver for your sizing requirement, the density can go up. And that's how the legislation is written today. Next is non-growth area, and that has access to water and sewer. Lot sizes are going to be 10,000 square feet. Density is going to be 10,000 per unit for the first two. Again, five-year limit on subdivision. So then after year five, you're getting additional density. And then finally, the non-growth areas that do not have access to both water and sewer, it's going to be our rules. So we have complete control over those. Yes.

So is there any height requirements or limitations, particularly going back to the 5,000 square feet?

No, not in a state statute, no. So that's all local control. We actually will have a lot of control over design requirements. Open spaces, lot coverage requirements, those things are still within local control to an extent. You don't want to get too out there because then you start restricting and then you have other legal problems that occur when you do those things. All right, so I'm going to go to the next slide. So again, now I'm gonna show that really simple example of calculating the requirement and that subdivision resets every five years. That's the thing I'm gonna keep repeating because they've introduced a time stamp requirement intensity and that's why it's important to know about that reset every five years. It doesn't mean that they can't come back before you. And in a lot of instances, if you go through subdivision, one of your main provisions is that if you're altering this approval, that you have to come back before them. It doesn't mean that they don't get the density requirements. It just means that they have to come before you again to alter that plan.

Can I ask a quick question? Absolutely. With that five-year reset, does that mean five calendar years must transpire before they come to apply for a second one, for another subdivision after that? Or can the application be in process without the construction happening until after that five-year window?

The division, once you make the decision, the planning board makes that decision, and you're signing your findings of fact, that time limit starts. Five years after that, the vision has already been made. Five years after that, from my understanding, it's at five years after that, then they can come back and get the additional density. Thank you. This only becomes an issue In other instances, it only comes to issue when you're changing zoning regulations. However, because the state statute is written the way it is, you're having to deal with this every five years rather than at a time where we as a city are deciding to change density requirements in different areas. That's how the timing works with this one. So if you have an acre, basically you're gonna divide that acre up into 5,000 chunks. And that makes eight lots. And each of those lots in year one, you're gonna get eight lots and 11 dwellings. I'm gonna show the math here. And then year five, each of those one that has a single family dwelling on it now can do a fourplex. And that's how you get to 32. Are there any questions on this before I go on?

You say every five years, what happens in year 10?

So every five years, again, it resets, but you've already met your max density. So that's actually how subdivision is done today. And so if someone comes in these doors and they subdivide today, and they've maxed out their density on their subdivision, it doesn't matter that subdivision resets every five years, because they still have maxed out their density. However, because it says the first four units, they haven't maxed out their density on year five. But year 10, their density is already maxed out if they've done everything. So you don't have to worry about too much year 10 unless the legislative body decides to change it again. Okay, so I will move on. So this is a general review of those requirements. Number one, no planning review on a fourplex on a single lot. So we would be barred from that. subdivision on a fourplex so subdivision no longer includes that some of these provisions are active today so subdivision no longer includes the creation of less than five units inside of a building and so that's active today and that's a part of our subdivision law subdivision definition today so you will you will no longer see those as a subdivision application coming before Next is no additional restrictions for multifamily. Where that comes in is that some jurisdictions have buffers from multifamily buildings. And specifically to multifamily situations, state statute says that we no longer can do that. You no longer can, you have to treat them the same way you do as a single family dwelling. Next one is areas allowing commercial must now allow residential. There's one carve-out for industrial. So if you are in an area that allows industrial uses, then you have the option to not do that. But that's the only carve-out as of right now. Oh, there's other carve-outs, sorry. I'll get to those. And they have to do with environmental restrictions. The next is it eliminates a dwelling unit cap on single lots. And so this is how I'm phrasing this one because it's a better way to phrase it. So what happened is that they've basically outlawed what's referred to as single family zoning, which is no matter how big your lot is, some jurisdictions can restrict a lot to only have one single dwelling unit on it. The state says you can no longer do that. And so now they say, well, you have up to four units. The caveat is if you have the underlying density requirements for that. Next is it is now a requirement for utility capacity proof prior to the building permit. And so even if you're just doing a... Regular building permit for a single family dwelling, and if it's not gonna be on public water and public sewer, you have to give written proof to the code enforcement office before a permit can be given. Next is sewer and septic standards are controlled by the state standards. Some jurisdictions have chosen to add additional requirements to those, and the state says, no, you can't do that. Affordable density bonuses. Basically, yes.

We passed, I guess this doesn't include the watershed because we passed a lot, recently passed a lot of septic regulations on the watershed, okay.

Yes, and so that's one of the big caveats to that is that Lake Auburn watershed is exempt from a lot of these standards, specifically. Affordable housing gets a density balance of whatever the base is. If it's in a growth area with access to water and sewer, times that times 2.5. So if you have 10, now you can do 25. And then with that, there's a height bonus. So in the situation that we have height limitations, as we brought up before, height limitations are 40. You can not build a structure higher than 40 feet. If it's an affordable housing unit, they can do 54. They have a top limit of 55 feet, but basically they get an extra story above that. And then I'm gonna finish up the new requirements and then we'll get into it, but I just wanted to briefly go through these. ADUs are not exempt from sprinkler requirements. IBC code basically comes in when you get three units and above. There's a carve out for ADUs. Basically, ADU doesn't count as a dwelling unit, so do you have to sprinkle it? State says yes, it's in the same building, you have to sprinkle it. It's building code. First, ADU is not counted towards your density count, even if it's on a lot that has a multifamily building, three units and below. ADUs are allowed on a lot that has three units and below. There is no longer going to be occupancy requirements for ADUs. A lot of jurisdictions say, hey, to have ADU, you have to have your residency here on that lot. State has said, no, not anymore. next small child care facilities must be treated as single-family dwellings it was thrown in there as one of the like nursery schools and daycares daycares for i believe kids under the age of five um and there was a there's a it's up to i believe 12 kids there's a have 12 kids and must be treated as a single family dwelling. There is a different caveat from July 1st to July 14th of this year, but I'm not going to go into it. Training is required for planning board members now. We've done so already anyway as best practice, but now it's a requirement around the state. And then finally, exemptions exist for certain areas, including the Lake Auburn watershed. So that is, in a nutshell, all those. And so now we're reoriented. Now we need to talk about what are we going to do to support, basically, these changes that are being mandated from the state. And I separate these into three different sections. The first thing I will bring up is the concept of blocks. What a block is. So first, a block is really defined by streets, and it's by the ability, the size of a block is the ability to exit a door and be on a street and be able to go around the street and be able to come back to that same location. That's the size of a block. And depending on how big that block is, it really determines traffic conditions, traffic network, walkability, and speed, traffic flow through a neighborhood, all those things. And then whether you know it or not, the blocks are everywhere. They're literally, because they're defined by your street network, you'll see examples all over the city, all over the state, all over the country. This is an aerial view of your city today. And I bring this up so I can show you the differences. They don't have to be square. But you can tell immediately the differences when you're on different streets. This is a traditional block here. And it's small in size, but then they can grow. And then in a lot of residential areas, you'll see these elongated blocks. And what that does is that allows some calming on the street for residences, but also allows this more, this Lake Street, more of a collector to gather traffic away. So they're a part of a scale. And they're a part of a scale that exists from the site level up to the country level. We usually have a lot of regulations on the site. This is the lot. This is where the building is on the site. It's how far away that building is going to be from the edges of the site. But if you have a group of sites, that is what makes your block. Now, if you go one level up, you have a a group of blocks, make your neighborhood. And so a lot of the times, you're skipping over that block, even though you're making blocks all the time through the subdivision process. And then the combination of a couple neighborhoods makes a district. Districts is at the level of what we make zoning. We're making zoning on pretty much an area, a region, a smaller region, and that's how we make our regulations. Because to do so lower than that makes everything a lot more complicated. It means that you go from 12 zones to 124 zones. And that's not something that's going to be manageable from a regulatory side. And then you go to districts, and then you go to city and town, and then you go regions. So at each level you have a level of regulations that you do. Most of the times we are dealing with the site level really below and then at the district level. And so you can see that there's a lot in between that's not being regulated and not being directed. And that's actually the block, the neighborhood, is how your neighborhoods take shape. It defines basically how you live your lives and the things that you are able to reach and to travel to. So why blocks are important? They are the scale of walkability and connectivity. Once a block gets past a certain size, you no longer will walk. It's just not worth it. You get in your car, and if a park is 500 feet away, you'll walk to it. park is 1,500 feet away or 1,600 feet away, I'm going to jump in my car and go to it. It's just not practical to walk there. Add in if that has sidewalks and if it's comfortable to walk there, all those decisions come into play. They determine traffic flow. If you do not have blocks, what happens is what you're seeing in this picture here is an area of your own city. When you can see that it never circles back around, you have these cul-de-sacs and you're loading a lot onto this single road, this hotel road. And the more you load that traffic onto hotel road and it can't go anywhere else, the more traffic you will get, the faster the speeds must be on that central collector road. And so your blocks structure actually will determine a lot of what happens with traffic. So they determine traffic flow. And they determine your neighborhood structure. And it sets future possibilities. So the most permanent thing that you can construct are property lines. They're not structures, they're property lines. And the reason being is that the lifetime of a structure is usually between 30 and 50 years. Lifetime of a lot line, it's about 100 or more. They're more permanent than, rule of thumb, they're more permanent than structures are. So where do we find block regulations? Traditionally in land use pre zoning they'll have a lot of structures and that's why you'll see a lot of places pre zoning will have You know these very grid structure type of things and that's because they usually had like one line that determined this and it's a maximum width of your maximum length of your And then we had Euclidean zoning come in, which is normally what everyone uses. Euclidean zoning is the separation of uses. This is residential. This is commercial here. This is what have you. And then it kind of went away. And we started to say, hey, if you're in this zoning area, and we're not going to dictate how big your blocks are. We're just going to say we want a separation of uses. And how you deal with that is your creativity of what you want to do. The issue about that and the things that you already know to be true is that it causes issues that you now have to fix because you haven't dealt with the decisions. Every time you're doing something, you are making a decision. The next time we see block structure really come up is during form-based codes. The base of a form-based code is a block structure. have a form-based code without blocks in it, you do not have a form-based code. You have design requirements that go on to the site level. And that's really important to know, because your current structure does not have block requirements. You have a bunch of form-based code districts, and you do not have block standards in it. And what that does is that you can do infill development, but you have no control over how that neighborhood is actually going to function. and it currently doesn't exist in your ordinances. I've looked back, and very, very long time ago, you may have had some block structure, but you got rid of it as soon as you went to Euclidean zoning, and you never looked back. And you'll see some of the structure still there from a very, very long time ago. And that's just sometimes it's just practice that continues on. But you'll see here as an example of what happens when you no longer make it in blocks. And so you have this situation that you have on the screen where this is a block, Minot Avenue, goes down, comes all the way down on Poland, up Pride, and then Glendale and so if this land would be subdivided today 99% sure it's going to be into cul-de-sac because you don't have a requirement for any of these things to connect and no longer is one of the things that you require and so there's no reason why anybody would think to do that because I'm going to maximize my profit which means I'm maximizing the amount of dwelling units Right? And so here you can see that really you do not have control if you don't say anything about blocks.

What would the alternative be for that?

You have some different options. You can block structure. I'm not saying block structure is the only way you can go. And in fact, I am going to be providing several different options. there's something called connectivity index, which doesn't dictate how big your block is, but just how connected your roads are going to be. And so it says that if you're going to subdivide lots, then it has to be connected somewhere. And so what that does is that that always ensure that if you're going into a place that you can get out of it, and it doesn't have to be the same way. There's some sites that are not going to be you're practically, you're not going to be able to do it. And you're going to give people waivers for that. But you want to do one or the other, block structure or connectivity. And even in the situations where they can't do either of those, you want to have a separated network for pedestrians. And so they're not competing with cars. You don't have to worry about that type of issue.

So say there was a block structure requirement just for this example. Sure. Would that block requirement require those streets to be public streets at Auburn?

No. So that's a different requirement. You can choose for that to be. It's going to be up to the city to decide if you want new streets to be public streets or not. They can be totally private, and I've seen them all over the place.

So I just was wondering, is we going to require a private street, even though it wouldn't be our responsibility, but we can require it as?

Correct. And actually, in the state of Maine, you can't gate your streets, which I thought that was very interesting. gate um so that's that's one of the things that that you have unique about maine because in other places you'll see a lot of neighborhoods and they have a whole block structure network and everything but they gate it at the front because they don't want people coming through in the state of maine you have to allow people to traverse that so for talking maybe a private street communities able to set standards for private streets So actually, for the creation of any streets, the city sets the standards for the creation of any street. It's one standard for any type of, for any class of street. So be it a local lane or a collector road or arterial, we have standards because Again, Maine says that you can't block your streets, so there's always an expectation that a member of the public can be traveling on that street, and so you want to set a certain level of expectation that that street's going to be safe.

So whatever the city chooses for a public street, the same standard has to apply to A private street. At this time.

Yes, at this time. You can make different standards and in different jurisdictions do make, you know, sometimes make different standards for different classes of streets. Once a street gets a certain amount of traffic, though, you want to make sure that it remains safe. And the city is in the Generally, a municipality is not making standards just because we want gold and glitter. It's because it's what's required for that street to be safe for a vehicle of a certain weight to be on that. That's why you have base standards. That's why you have separation between cars and sidewalk standards and things like that. These are safety requirements. Okay, so we're getting right into it. Choices to implement. There's two schools of thought. Some are gonna be more appropriate in urban settings and then some are gonna be more appropriate in suburban settings or in subdivisions that you have in more rural settings. So in more urban settings, most people, most jurisdictions go direct route for perimeter and sides requirements. And so that makes it fit into the current street network. So the point is you don't want something to go completely different from what people are expecting and to have some consistency when people are making new neighborhoods that is going to connect and things like that. So you see in urban areas, high density areas. And one of the reasons why that is important is because if you're in a high-density area and then you start having a lot of cul-de-sacs, they'll start loading more and more onto your arterials and your collectors, and then you'll have to expand those width-wise, a new lane. You get a new lane on, you have what's called Basically, it induces demand, induced demand, which means that people can drive from farther away to come into your city center, and it never fixes your traffic problem. It just means that you're putting more public money into these roads and maintenance of these roads and upgrading of these roads. And so that's a main reason why you want to really pay attention to your street network. These block standards have plain language. Very simple concept, but it's very important. An example of that is perimeter less than 1600 feet and side has to be less than 500 feet and then for because you're going so direct it's going to need exceptions because there's certain situations that you want to spell out except in this situation where I don't know it's all industrial uses on the land and they want all this parking in the front because it's industrial you're not expecting you know any pedestrian movement to be on there you want to give an exception for that And then the other way is indirect, connectivity index. So those are more for suburban and rural, where you are not expecting to have a lot of density ever, or you never want to have density in those areas. And it's medium to low density situations. It's a calculation. And it's basically links divided by nodes. And I'll explain that later. And best practice is to have a connection index greater than 1.4. And you'll see what that means pretty soon. It's no direct control over block size. That's really important to know because, again, we were talking about subdivisions. You're going to get block sizes sometimes very small, sometimes very big. You will not have control over how big that block size is at any given time because you're not concerned about that. You're more concerned about the connectivity of the lot to future development and current development. So let's look at connectivity index and why it's so important. I know I'm hammering this point down, but it is important to have. The houses that you see here and the school that you see here is the exact same distance as the crow flies away. The exact distance. However, if you have block size and you have some control of your network, you can have a more controlled route to the school. If you have cul-de-sacs, it loads onto the collectors and the arterials to get to the school. So it makes the actual distance that you have to go and to get there a lot longer, sometimes three and four times longer. And so even though you are extremely close to an amenity or to somewhere the community needs to go, you're actually a world away. And most times, if this traffic is very fast in here because the whole purpose is to allow cars to go through, it is not safe, and so you're going to get in your car to go through it. You're no longer going to walk. The calculation of connectivity index.

And so this, yes, absolutely. Can we go back to this connectivity index thing? So with the, I guess you'd say the preferred method rather than the cul-de-sac, you've got some interior. Are these streets that are running parallel? Yes.

So one of the things that I want to really hit home is that the reason why we make regulations is to go towards the outcomes that you want to happen because you feel that they're important. Keeping in mind that we want to give flexibility for things to actually get built, and there's a cost to everything for things to get built. However, there's a cost to not regulating as well. And you have to keep that in mind as well.

What do we gain with this picture that you provided? Sure. What do we gain with this little road that runs north and south to the school?

To this school?

To the school, north and south, as opposed to just having the next road, where you actually have houses on it, go to the school.

So you mean instead of this one? This person, this?

The plan on the screen doesn't seem to show it, but on my plan in front of me, there's a very narrow little road. Here?

No, go over to the school, go down. Go down?

Not on that road, but on the next one over.

This one? Or this one?

Well, my plan shows that a major road, probably an arterial road, and then a little road right next to it.

Yes. So the use of that, I'll bring that up right now. A situation from there is that you can walk that road. Pedestrians, that road is for pedestrians. And I'll give the example of Washington. here in your municipality. You're not expected to walk that. However, businesses are on that road, and more development is going on that road. And so you want to have access management to continue to allow that road for cars to go very quickly directly into the city. And the more curb cuts you have on that main road, the slower the traffic will be. And so you want to limit curb cuts on that main road and to provide a secondary access road so you can actually have those businesses operate and go a slower speed. And so if not, then you're going to have to regulate your uses. And you're going to say, actually, we don't want smaller uses on this Washington street. can't handle it because if we do it's going to disrupt and lower our level of service of this washington street and people are not going to be able to get into the city very quickly so some roads are for roads are are for cars streets are for people and so you'll see the difference here is that these big arterials those are roads these smaller these smaller sub streets those are streets And then most of the time, you see that little sliver of land, that won't be where places are. Usually that is unusable land, but really it's a buffer between the two. And you'll see that all the time in different places. That allows people to walk on that secondary street and they'll feel completely safe. And then you don't have to require sidewalks on an arterial road anymore. So even though right now, on every street that exists in your municipality, you have to provide sidewalks. Does it make sense to provide sidewalks on a road that's going 45 miles per hour? Does it make sense to provide sidewalks on a road that's going 35 miles per hour? No one's going to walk it. No one's going to be on those roads. So you have to provide a secondary access point for those things to occur. And then you have actually a bunch of those roads here that you're gonna have to start thinking about, how do we start addressing that type of issue? Now block standards don't require that. That's not what block standards do, but that is a situation that you are gonna have to address when we talk about streets and about secondary roads. This is just giving an example as even if you had a standard, you would see that same sliver on the right side here if you had a standard that you can't have any curb cuts or anything off our arterial access management standards. We see the same thing. And so the point here is just to look at the blocks and the ability for kids or older adults or anything to be able to walk interior from one place of interest to another place of interest without have to go on that arterialist road. And they can actually have the option to bike, to walk, or to do whatever. Or to Vespa. I want a Vespa.

I'm curious. I already have an answer in my head of my opinion, but I'm curious to your opinion of what Auburn's push for open and green space is going to do to complicate these kinds of changes. A lot of the developments we see are more of the cul-de-sac style. Mm-hmm. They have their benefits. Block styles definitely have their benefits. But from my position, just as even a passive observer of the most of the development plans that come before us, open space, open space, open space, open space is extraordinarily important to a lot of people. I'm just saying from my observation. How sticky is that going to be in the topic that you're discussing right now?

It actually is going to help the discussion because that's why we have a different section for open space and standards that you're going to have to think about for open space. Right now, open space in this jurisdiction is really thought of as conservation. Is that what you only think of open space for? What about active recreation? What about amenities for the subdivisions that are going in? Some of the discussions that you've already been having, That's going to involve the design discussion, but having blocks is not going to hamper the actual ability to have open space. And actually, one of your caveats and one of your exceptions for block sizes is for open space, except for open space can be larger in scope and things like that. And so you wanna have those. But then you wanna have regulations, and we'll get to those, of basically of the location and the quality of the open space and what it's used for in different contexts.

From what I've been seeing, there's a very fine line between the practicality and the need in Auburn for block style in conjunction with the appearance and neighborhood feel of a cul-de-sac style. I'm not interjecting my own opinion, but they both have value. Unfortunately, I think there's a direction that our current coding is pushing that isn't recognizing the value of both options, and I'm hoping that that gets clarified and applied.

Yeah. So those are going to be value judgments, and I'm going to give you some tools. And so you're going to have a lot to say about it. And so this is why I'm introducing these concepts, because then you're going to start to combine the different concepts of, OK, if we're going to go towards this, the block south, then what are we going to do on the streets? And what are we going to require for open spaces? So we'll get there.

Considering the size of our community, 64 square miles, some of that, of course, water bodies, Are there different approaches to different areas?

Yes.

That comes to the tools that we might use for one area versus another depending upon, again, neighborhood characteristics or uses that have become dominant or current zoning has tried to either protect or encourage.

Yes, absolutely. And these are going to be flexible. And that's why I refer to them as tools, because the numbers are going to be based off of what's currently in an area. How big are the block sizes in that current neighborhood? Do they have block standards? Are they mostly cul-de-sacs? So maybe we should go to the connectivity index in this area rather than block standards. Those are the discussions that you're going to have as we go along. And even in some draft provisions that are already put in, you're going to have the ability to be context specific and use these tools.

And I would think topography is going to enter into... Yeah. Okay.

Absolutely. So connectivity index. Blocks are intuitively easy to understand. You can think of them in squares or whatever have you. It's really easy to understand. Perimeter, everyone knows perimeter. It's the distance around the shape Connectivity index, and this is when we were talking about cul-de-sacs, right? Usually you use them that it doesn't say you can't do cul-de-sacs, and actually it shows that you can do so very well. However, what it says is that when you're making this type of subdivision, that you also must have to have some type of connectivity to the broader area. And so what happens is that it reduces the amount of loading on those main streets. And so you still have that connection, and you don't have control over the block sizes, but it still does the job when we're talking about not loading that direct impact on our main arterial roads and connector roads. And so you have that dispersion. And in these other areas, you have much lower traffic as well. And so in this instance that you see on the left side, so nodes are defined as basically intersections and dead ends. So you can see the red dots are nodes here. And then even though this is one road, you count a node as if the turn gets less than, I believe, 15 miles per hour. So some people want to get around that. But that's a node. And then the links are the spaces in between. They're literally linking the nodes together. You do not count the connection to the edge of the lot as a node. That's just as a link. And if you do so, if you count them all up, the nodes and the links, and you divide them, you're going to get a score. And you can see this type of development that's dead end. It goes nowhere. It just goes in a circle one way in, one way out. It has a connectivity score of 1.18. And so it doesn't meet your best case scenario of 1.4. And then on this other side, well, what if you make just a slight adjustment to the design? Instead of this, the cul-de-sac, it connects directly into this loop, and this loop connects directly into the edge of your lot line, and this connects to your lot line. And almost the same exact structure, you get a score of above 1.4. Just that small little change in that context, it changes how your neighborhoods function over time. And again, you're not really too concerned about the site level. You're supposed to worry about how does the neighborhood function? How does the district function together? And how does the city function all together with these requirements?

I'll ask you a quick question. I'm sorry to keep interrupting. No, no. No, you're good. I'm thinking of some projects that have recently come before us, even since the snow melted. Questions about the genesis or process of, say, an application that has cul-de-sacs. Is it going to be the board's responsibility or authority to recommend or to stipulate to a developer that they need more connectivity to existing roads, or is that staff going to handle that and then we review the entire packet?

So the regulations require that. And so it's not a situation where staff, we're going to recommend stuff, but we're not, we don't have jurisdictional authority over it. What has authority is the decisions that you're going to be making as you create these policy. These are policy questions and value questions about these standards. And once they are standards, then they have to meet it. And staff will say, you do meet this or you do not meet this. And then we don't make the final say. You're the jurisdictional body. We'll say, hey, this application does not meet the standard. We recommend denial because they just don't meet the standard. It doesn't matter where the standard is. They don't meet the standard, and so we recommend denial. And then you all have to actually make a decision on do you agree with the way that staff sees the application, or do you see it a different way?

And in the instance that you're giving us here, the standard is, I don't necessarily understand these notes you've been describing, but the standard, if we do understand them, is 1.40. So an application would come to us, with your recommendation that it doesn't meet the standard. And we've adopted that standard in our ordinance that we're not in a position to say, well, it's close enough. Yeah. It meets it or it doesn't. Yes. Your example here, is it dependent on there being three public streets?

No.

No. Where do these roads go then?

And so a lot of times you're talking about... This is just an example of how this can work if you have this type of connectivity. There's nothing saying that another link can't be on the same road, so the top road, and most subdivisions do have one entrance here and one entrance there. Those are all gonna be links. It really depends on how deep you're going into and how many offshoot roads you're making inside that subdivision. That's gonna impact your score. And so if you're doing something that looks like a flower that goes in and you have an offshoot here, offshoot here, offshoot here, offshoot here, offshoot here, and there's low connectivity based on the score, this gives you a number to actually provide contacts. Right now, you can see a project and say, this doesn't connect to anything, but you have no standard to back that up. This actually gives you a measurement to back that up. And where you set the measurement is going to be your own opinions during the policy walk, during our policy discussions. But once that policy is set, then you wanna hold people to that design standard. Same as any other standard that you have as far as distances between entrances to a subdivision or speeds, design speeds of a road or the inclusion of sidewalks or whatever have you. These are all standards and they all have different uses. This ensures that you don't have 150 houses loading onto one main street.

That's basically what it does. I don't think we've approved a project since I've been on this board that isn't exactly that. One way in, one way out. 93 units is the last one.

It has consequences.

That's what I was referring to.

I mean, and these are values that have consequences. If it's loading onto a highway, that might be different than if it's loading onto a local street. What happens if that's loading onto a local street? So then we get into street standards. I'm going to just talk very directly. You're in a situation where your density in your downtown six units an acre, eight units an acre. We're talking about going to 32. And so you're gonna have to have, you're gonna have to up your standards of what you are requiring for people when they're making roads, if they're putting that amount of density on new roads. Street standards apply to new roads. They don't apply to roads that are existing. Road is existing, it's already done. Just as you can't apply today's standard into something that you approved two years ago.

already there you already have it's already built it can become a legal non-conformance but as far as that's concerned it has a right to exist same thing with the street um we do have the right don't we to require improvements to existing public streets that might be the access to an exit from a development 100 unit subdivision yes we've got to build

Yes, to an extent. And that's when we bring up, I don't want to say the rule, because not everyone is adverse in land use. Fair share rule, right? There's an extent of where you can demand offsite improvements. If there's not a direct nexus, A, that's getting a little bit down the street, even though we're loading onto this other street that maybe can't handle all of that traffic, we can demand traffic improvements. Maybe we make them put a light in. And that's the extent of that. We can't demand that they put sidewalks all the way down this arterial street throughout the city. That's not something that you can do. So there are limits. And because there are limits, you want to make sure that when people are actually making new streets, that there are adequate standards to support that level of activity. Streets are really important because they define the travel experience for pedestrians, bikes, and cars. I put that that way on purpose. Pedestrians, bikes, then cars. A lot of time, we're thinking the opposite of going cars first, and then we tack on the pedestrian experience. But what that has resulted in is that sprawl and disconnected places within your city right now, and it's become really, really expensive. If you see your budgets on a yearly basis, you're gonna see that number keep creeping up about maintaining your road networks. And that's everywhere in every state and every municipality. Materials are going up. Things to know about streets. There is a difference between a road and a street. A road is designed to carry traffic very quickly, car traffic very quickly, from point A to point B. You need both. You want people to get into your city very quickly and then to have a good experience while you're here. So you're going to need a road to get you into places of interest. Then once you are there, you're going to need streets that define your experience while you're here. A road's main goal is for the efficient travel of vehicles and utilities. A street's main goal is for the relationship between the private and the public spaces. And you can see some clashes. Look out right side of this door. You have a main arterial going over to Lewiston. And if you're walking on this sidewalk, Cars are going very fast, and because there's a short width between where you are on the sidewalk and the actual traffic, it becomes uneasy. You have that uneasy feel. Because you are not designed to be there. You're designed to be in a car on this road, traveling somewhere else. So you're defining these different places and what the uses of different places are. Streets will now have to accommodate parking. Because parking requirements have been lowered on the site, it no longer becomes the private responsibility. It is now the public responsibility to deal with parking in the growth area where you have access to water. That's one of the consequences. These decisions are not free. Someone always pays for these decisions. And one of the decisions to reduce parking standards, residential, means that now we have to deal with the issue as a city, as a community. Next, sidewalks and esplanades, or tree yards. It's the area between a sidewalk and the road, that area right there. They have to accommodate people, power, snow, and trash. Last one's important, going to a new trash system, right? That needs an actual physical place to be. Now when you're designing new streets, you have to account for that. You have to account for the snow, you have to account for trash pickup, because sometimes one side of the street can't have parking on it that day. trucks have to come through and get the trash. Same thing with snow. If you don't have a place for the snow between the sidewalk and the street, the snow will go on the sidewalk and you no longer can walk.

So are we talking only new streets that are developed, or are we talking about making changes to the city's existing streets?

Our purview is the standards of new streets. However, We are currently making improvements to our current streets, but those are gonna be decisions to improve our current streets, but these are standards for new streets. So we're trying to make sure that the problem does not get worse for our new construction. We should not be constructing new development that has the same problems we already know that are gonna occur. So that's the idea behind this. We can't make it better, don't make it worse. So what to do about streets? We plan for the most intense, because we have to. But we allow variation for good design. And I bring this up because in 2014, you actually had some studies done, some design studies done, about streets in Auburn and Lewiston. And you had designed things already done. And I'm going to bring this up now. So the idea behind this is you're going to have some strict standards, but then you're going to allow some waivers to those standards for better design. Look at this. Complete streets guide for Lewiston and Auburn. So this is a document that already exists. Right now, you can get a waiver from street designs with the approval of the city engineer. And so why not actually put it in the standard In order to do the waiver is that one of the things that you have to take in consideration is complete street design. Fair. And so I bring this up, and you'll get this in digital format so you can look through it. I'm not going to look through it all today, but I'm actually going to bring this up. This is called Street Mix, and this is showing you, it's an actual visual representation of how wide right-of-way is and what can go in that right-of-way. And that's important because that's what your street standards actually dictate, how wide your right-of-way is and what actually gets constructed in that area. And this shows you basically the width of a sidewalk, these lanes for parking lanes, driving lanes, turn lanes, and everything else. I provide this in here so you can start playing around with it and you can actually look at our street standards in chapter 46 and see what you can construct in our current right-of-way standards. And spoiler alert, you're not gonna get all the things that you want to get in there. Bike lanes and things like that and sidewalks of a certain size and separation between the road and a pedestrian sidewalk. You have to alter your street standards if you're going to actually accommodate all these different uses. So this is why I bring this up. This is interactive. And so you can go with this and say, bye. That gets out of the way. And at the top, you can see the 60 foot width. So you can go down to 50 foot width, and you can change that. And you can show the different room that it has available between the edges of the buildings and the actual cars on the street. No parking on those streets? No parking. Look. Is that parking? That's parking. And you actually have some width left. And so I actually deleted one portion of the sidewalk. You can do those things. And we'll use this as a tool as we're going through these standards to see, OK, what is appropriate for a basic street design, where we're talking about this type of street, a lane, an arterial, or whatever have you, if we're expecting pedestrians to be there. I'm all about giving you tools. So the proposed changes. So currently, you can only get a waiver from these standards if you have a demonstration of a hardship. Yep. And hardship is actually a term. that has a very distinct meaning, and that's a little bit too strict for waivers from these. Our lanes currently include cul-de-sacs, and that's not really what a lane is, and a driveway can access a road of 35 miles per hour. So it's dangerous for you to have a driveway off a road going 35 miles per hour, because you have to get up to speed after you get onto that street. and the cars behind you don't have time. They have to hit the brake, and that's when you have a lot of accidents. So the proposal is to give waivers for hardship or safer for pedestrians, better design. Lane is one-way street. Only streets access roads of 35 miles per hour. So if you have a road of 35 miles per hour, you have to connect it with a local road so you actually have some way to get onto that street. It's not a driveway. You're not backing into it or something like that. Having a continuous pedestrian network between on and between sites, you don't. That's actually not a standard right now. And so someone can do car-oriented development, like a drive-through, and if someone's parking in the parking lot, you don't really have to worry about how they're going to get into the building from a design point of view. It creates conflicts between those two. And then curb extensions on streets for parking in the growth area. So a curb extension slows cars down, just as a visual thing, and allows a shorter distance between people crossing over. So again, it's the distance between roads going very quickly, getting from point A to B, and streets that we're expecting people to be on. You have to provide some standards to that. You actually have seen some of the design, your public works and your engineering department has done that around the city already, but it's not in your standards. And so you're not actually requiring people making new things to do these things. And so you're going to have to go back and retrofit those things, and retrofit and retrofit. And we know those best standards because we're doing it around the city, but you're not requiring new things to be built to that standard.

So where we're seeing the word proposed over here, is this something that you're working on? Yes. And these would be in Chapter 46 or 47 of the street standards, right?

Yes, this would be in Chapter 46.

You're not really thinking that you're going to tell someone who owns land on a street that goes with a 35 or 40 mile an hour speed limit that they can't build a house on that.

Oh, no, they can build a house on it, but if it's going 35 miles per hour, then you do need to have the connection to a street. I just want to build a house on my property. I don't want to build a street. If a house is built on a road that's going 35 miles per hour, it has to be set back from that road quite a ways to feel safe. A road going 35 miles per hour at speed is extremely dangerous for people even in your front yard. It is a danger concern.

As you heard Bob say, with 64 square miles, I guess the majority of that land area is covered by streets where the speed limit exceeds 35.

Not the majority. You would be surprised. And then it's context specific. So in the city, in the downtown proper, you're going to have to, you know, there are streets designed for the movement of cars. When you're getting to more rural and scape, We're practical with this, right? You're going to have those areas that are on those fast roads. They're going to have very long driveways. And they're going to have very long ways to see visually down the street. And they'll have the ability, it's lower traffic, to be able to get on that street. So again, this is kind of rules of thumb, and then you're going to have your exceptions. But you must make standards and then have the exceptions, rather than trying to go the opposite way. Because if you try to go the opposite way, it's a much harder ask of the application coming before you, because you have to have that direct connection to one of your standards of approval. So if you have the standards, you can come down for it from certain situations, but it's a lot harder to go the opposite way. And that's the idea behind these.

Have you seen that maybe we've gone in the opposite direction? It seems, if I'm remembering correctly, that we've actually reduced the setback requirements I think pretty much throughout the community. So as you say, if you're on a rural road and we have, you know, some of those 35, 45 even, and, you know, yes, it would be nice to have a good setback, have a longer driveway. Seems in recent times we've gone the other way. We've kind of reduced the setback requirement. So before we might have required 25, now maybe down to 15. Yeah. So we have some work to do.

Yes. And so this is just saying, keep the context in mind, right? And so do you want a setback of a single family house on a road that's going 45 miles per hour and the setback is five feet? That's, it's it's it's using some some good judgment between that too um and it's a brand new house so existing homes you're always going to have those existing situations and you want to make sure that you're you're at least flexible in your in your provisions to provide for those those offshoots but the exception is not the rule right so you should have a rule and then have exceptions you shouldn't plan your rules over for the exceptions

We have a state that's put down these mandates, and they're pushing and allowing for significant growth throughout the state. Is it going to gravitate to one area? How strongly is this surge of construction coming?

So those are market questions. And from a market point of view, Really what development does, and it has done, is it goes, where is the land cheapest, and where is it cheapest for me to build what I want to build, and give me a good return to do so, lower capital requirements. It's gonna depend. You have a really interesting situation with the city of Auburn, because you're a service center. And we see communities gravitating towards service centers as our other communities are losing services. And so it's to be determined as of right now. But you just want to put some stuff in place where you have some security at the beginning. Because if you do not put some security at the beginning, then you're going to try to play catch up, and you'll never catch up. You just won't catch up Most likely you'll you'll you'll get most of the development where your amenities already are because that's where people want to be this the where money already goes and amenities doesn't have to be a Library or anything like that I'm gonna need is waterfront right the waterfront is a minute, so people want to develop over there That's why you put very strong regulations around your water, because you were protecting water source, but you also have strong protections along Taylor Pond as well. It's the same thing, because that's where money wants to go. Money follows money. So it's to be determined. Your land values are actually quite affordable right now in the city of Auburn compared to cities of similar sizes in your state. Auburn has seen... growth um higher growth numbers than some other um some places already i would i would expect those trends to continue especially when this goes into effect because you have some um some blocks in your current regulations that's stopping some of that stuff from occurring one of the things that that we were reviewing today is that your general business district You have a general business district, let's take the mall area right now. All of that commercial development that goes on, you're okay with it. Yes, good, good, we're okay with all this commercial development. You have a cap on density of 17 units an acre, which sounds high, sounds high, but when you're talking about a multifamily building or structure coming in, it's not high. It's not high enough for that type of deal to work out to pencil. And so now you come in, and now you're talking about 32 units an acre. Okay, that changes. The calculation changes now. And now it can be close to shops and everything like that, and I can get 32 units an acre. Now can that development come into this area? You're going to have to look at your height requirements again. Again, in these areas that you are expecting to be urban course you have height restrictions of forty feet so forty feet that's a four story building but the building codes change at four stories so really you're gonna get a three story building so if you ever change that you're gonna get much higher buildings and then the numbers start working again so these are Current provisions have an impact on market forces. And because this is a regulatory change, the calculations are going to start to change very quickly. And that's one of the things that's why I'm putting all this stuff before you right now is because people are already running these numbers. And I'm trying to make sure that you all are prepared to make these decisions because they're preparing themselves. Open space standards. So open space standards is the last concept I've been speaking a lot. Open space standards are important because we have to talk about amenities and social infrastructure. People need more than just a house to live in. We already know that. the more houses and more dwellings are around, the more services are gonna need to be available. And you have a choice. You can either put that onto the city. Again, you're making the decision. You can either put it on the city to provide, that means everyone provides for it and pays for it, or you can require the developer to support those dwellings and those people that live in that subdivision. Those are the amenities that we're talking about. And there's a cost each so amenities to serve the public people who use development as this any increases Increase amenities will be required to keep the same level of service So if you want your library to serve the same this have the same programs More people are there you're gonna have to provide more money for it. That's how it goes. I It's more than just a place to sleep. It's access to nature, like for us. It's access to recreation. And it's access to light and air. A lot of your provisions that have to deal with open space, it's more than just your open space requirements in your subdivision. It's also your setbacks. It's your lot coverage requirements. Those are all open space standards. They might be called something else, but those are open space standards.

But you would agree that our open space standard is ?

Yes. Yes. It needs some work. Abysmal, it needs some work. We can say it needs some work. So lot coverage, setbacks, and open space requirements for subdivisions, recreation, and conservation. Different areas are going to need different things. And you're in the rural areas, I'm not saying you need to provide a basketball court because you're out there in the country. We're in Maine, and it's not exactly right to roam like other countries, but unless it's posted, can be on other people's property and you can enjoy the vistas and everything like that. When you get to the suburbs, it turns a little bit different. There's not a lot of things or places to go and things to do if you're so isolated. And I'll bring you back to one of those first pictures when we saw a bunch of multi-families that just directly load onto the street. There's nothing for those people to do inside their development. So they're going to have to go somewhere else. Again, it's more traffic on your networks and things like that. So the roles of open space by context, urban, coverage, setbacks, consolidated communal amenities, both active and passive. So we're not expecting everyone to have a pool in their backyard. If you're living in the urban core, you're thinking of, you know, there's the YMCA for that, right? There's other places that you can go. And connection, those are places that, you know, you have to interact with other people. It makes a stronger community. Suburban, setbacks, coverage. Independent amenities. And active. No additional impact on the urban. So if people are making the choice to make suburban neighborhoods, that's their choice. We're saying, hey, yeah, that's okay. But you're going to have to take care of yourself a little bit. If you're deciding to make housing in a certain way, that's going to be the cul-de-sacs and a bunch of cul-de-sacs all together. And maybe you need to drive it. of field for kids to play on. I mean, it's not asking for much. And then some conservation. You know, some areas are going to have, you're talking about greenfield development, you're talking about protection of wetlands, vernal pools, and things like that. So that's what you have to deal with suburbs. You're dealing with both sides. And then rural, you really did most setbacks in independent amenities. There's going to be passive, and those are, you know, hikes and things like that, and all those type of things. Conservation. That's why you have some strong rules in the Ag. You want to conserve that area.

You want it to function in a certain way.

And coverage requirements. That's why coverage requirements are actually really strict in rural areas all over the country. Like you look at, you can only cover 15% of the lot and things like that, or 20% of the lot. And that's pretty normal for rule areas because you want to keep the rule because you want to keep them open so we go on to the requirements proposed to be include included and these are again these are just concepts right now you'll see wording later on we want to correct the small subdivision oversize it right now I've never seen this before in my career if you're doing a subdivision from one to ten units you have to provide the same exact amount of space for open space maker Only when you get over that, you provide 5,000 square feet more, which is actually more than 10% of an acre. So actually, you're requiring more open space after the first 10 units than the first 10 units. What it's doing is it's incentivizing really big development very quickly because the numbers don't work with small development. I can't do a four lot subdivision here because I'm gonna have to give an acre of open space. Is that fair? I would say from a planner's point of view, I don't know if that's fair. And the same amount of open space for a four lot subdivision as a nine lot subdivision. It's almost double the amount of people. So I'm thinking of correcting that to just be a percentage That way you're scaling up 10%. And actually, that gives a reduction after the 10, because right now you're at 5,000. You go down to 4,356. Active recreation requirement. So you said it, not me. You said abysmal. I didn't say that. And so making sure that these larger subdivisions are having some active recreation in their open spaces and some amenities. then add location and accessibility open space requirement. Right now, they can put it right in the middle where everyone's backyard is and no one can really access it. They can call it open space and it's nothing you can do about it. And we've seen that a couple times, right? But if you add a requirement that they have to have frontage on the open space, oh, automatically, now it's accessible to everybody. If you have to provide some, Some accessibility requirements that you have to have, like a sidewalk that gets you to the open space, you can get there. You can walk there. And you add in sensors for good interactive design for these type of things. So trails can count. different amenities, you can say these count more. For this type of amenity, you get a bonus. And one example for that is that there are places, and actually, I'm liking this idea, is that if you provide porches of a certain size on the front of your dwelling, that can count as a percentage of your open space. Because what it does is that it provides the opportunity of interaction between the people who live in that subdivision. So it's doing the same purpose of some act of recreation. It's providing an incentive for people and communities to be closer together and actually have some interaction. Right now, you don't govern that at all. And so you can play around with this, and you don't have to play around with your density count anymore, because you don't really have a lot of control over density anymore. You have more control over your design. And so you can actually do those things. And then some location requirements. Some thoughts, we're working through this, but open space located within 800 feet of the center of the subdivision or within 800 feet of the dwelling entrances. So you're never more than a walk away from your open space where you're making a subdivision. And say, okay, well, what if you have a really big subdivision? Make multiple open spaces. So everyone, every family who's living there has access to it. Do those things. Accessible by pedestrian traffic and has frontage on a road, accessible. Removed ability of fee and lieu used on own project or directed activities by developer. That's another thing I haven't seen. Right now, in your provisions, you have a lot of leeway to the developer to decide what you use your fee and lieu for. And I have not seen that. And I have questions, legal questions about it. about providing what's supposed to be public money on private improvements. And then last one, direction of how to account for trails. Some people are going to want to make trails, and you want to make sure that that's calculated correctly. I've been a part of a lot of big subdivisions. They say, hey, we're making a trail through this basically otherwise unusable space of wetlands, and we want to count that entire space as active open space. And you go, no, no. The length of the trail, the width of the trail, you can use for your count. But you can't count for all that unusable acreage. that's not what that active recreation requirement is for. And so those are some ideas that we have to support the amount of density that's going to occur. If we did not have this amount of density that we're expecting, then would see some different provisions come up and some different ideas and a lot more flexibility. But I want to lay how important it is to plan for the higher density and not. With that, those are the ideas. Those are the main ideas to support the amount of density that's coming. So the idea is to go through these and talk about these. And then after we work through the support systems, then we'll actually see the actual provisions themselves as far as what the state requirements require you to do to up density. So support systems, the actual density provisions, you'll see charts and numbers and things like that. And then after that, protections for your sensitive areas. to make sure that the areas that you want to protect are going to be adequately protected from all of this occurring so that's in total what i have to say thank you and i think it will take a are we going to then move next to our planning board training or do you want to talk about these questions

so i think for the the second presentation um we'd like to focus the meeting more on to carlos the proposed ordinance changes for ld 1829 so i'm happy to postpone that to july if the board would like that so far just giving a heads up we have a pretty light agenda for next month as well The purpose of that presentation was I had heard from some new members about being overwhelmed by the amount of information received in a packet and kind of how to go through it. So it basically distills the MMA training and grounds it in our current rules and ordinances and staff memos. So that's what that is. But I'm happy to postpone it if the board would like. I just want to put that out there.

Are you asking if we want to postpone the planning board training?

Yes, yes, I am, yeah.

Are you suggesting that we do one other thing tonight, either LD 1829 or this?

So I'm gonna be more direct. My recommendation is that we go through our questions and then we postpone the other presentation for our next time. However, we're providing that ahead of time so you can look through it, you can ask questions and have those things ready for next time.

I like your recommendation.

Can I say something in relation to this presentation? So just kind of to summarize the open space blocks and streets, this is really so that housing cannot exist in isolation of itself. If we have previously single-family, single-lot zoning, you're really, you know, if people are So with this, what we're trying to do is create neighborhoods. When we add this density, we're not looking at housing just dropped in isolation of itself. We're looking at connectivity, street standards, blocks, open space for people to come to Auburn and really be engaged and be in the community rather than just coming here to sleep if they don't work here. So that's kind of why we're suggesting these changes.

Thank you.

Yep. And we're going to get into these questions. And the last thing I'll say about the other portion is that a lot of your existing neighborhoods already have these things. A lot of what? A lot of your existing neighborhoods already have all of these things that we're suggesting these be standards. And we're just asking, hey, can we, for the new things that are built, can we at least come to the level of some of these neighborhoods that are already being created? So I'm not talking about the recently created ones, but I'm talking about things that have been created 50 years ago, 70 years ago, right downtown, you have that walkability, you have that access to amenities and et cetera, et cetera. So for us to construct and to draft these standards, I have questions and I need feedback and I need discussion, but I'm gonna get right into it because we're already past 7.45. So I'm off schedule, apologize for that. First question, do you want to adopt just the state standards verbatim or alter for the Auburn market? The state standards have a time component to them, as we discussed before, and that's the state minimum, and we can do that, or we can make it cleaner and easier to do, but that does mean that we're making it a little bit more flexible than the minimum of what the state says.

So we can alter the state standards, but those are the, seems that the only way we can change them is if you require more.

Allowable. Allowable, yes. So for instance, you have form-based code districts. They don't have density caps. You have like seven form-based, and they don't have density caps. And you don't see the explosion of different units because you have to build in a certain way. I'm not saying that you go no density caps all around the city. What I am saying is that you can go a little bit more looser than what the state requires you to do if you want an easier, more workable system going forward. But I wanted to get your ideas for that. Sorry, Bob.

So you're suggesting that actually form-based coding allows us to go with less as opposed to allow more.

So form-based code actually allows more density, but it has more restrictions on how the structures are built and everything else. The standards, the ideas I've brought together today are not form-based codes. They are just scaffolding that allows you to not worry so much about the actual individual homes in a subdivision because you don't have that control for the density count as strict as you did before. And so it's gonna be an option for the city either to go, hey, we're just doing verbatim what the state says, but the consequence of that would be that you would see applications come back for an amendment in five years. See, there's consequences for doing that, right? You would see a different type of development going on. Incentives would change, because now we're talking about 11 units an acre. And so some of your zones would be not a big initial impact, and then the next five years you'll see a big impact. So do you want a little bit more guidance right out the gate from that, or how would you, how do you guys want to, what are your thoughts on dealing with it a lot more simpler than going the complicated route of timing?

I'd like to put this out there. I'm a big proponent on relying on the strengths of others and knowing that you have a lot more experience in planning and permitting and more municipalities than just Auburn. Which direction do you lean and why?

Riley, do you want to say what you want to say first before I answer?

I hope it doesn't change. My preference would be to do something that was more altered towards Auburn because when the state statute goes into effect, we're down where you have to abide by that minimum anyway, so we might as well have it as suited to our community as we can get it. That would be my preference.

So my answer is to go simpler because you have a lot more There's a lot less variables that you have to deal with. And then you're making regulations that are directly controlling what you want to control and not by proxy. Density is a proxy regulation. It doesn't tell you how your neighborhoods are gonna look. It doesn't tell you how your neighborhoods are gonna function. It doesn't tell you any of that. All your other provisions tell you that. And so I'm saying, hey, we go the route of really dictating the scaffolding of, like, hey, this is what our neighborhoods want to look like, and that way you can lay off on the density count. So you can say, hey, in this area we'd like duplexes, right? We'd like four-family homes, or we'd like single-family homes. You can do that type of design. And this is the type of area we'd like, and this is the distances between primary structures that we'd like in this area. None of that has to do with density count, and you can do those with it. uh... and i i would like us to go more that route that's my opinion uh... because it's actually it's actually guiding development the way to the things that you actually care about rather than looking at a number of that that doesn't mean anything in out of context proactive versus reactive for agree with that

takes out of play the five-year increment?

Correct.

So that is allowed by the state?

Yes. The requirements by the state have to do with density count.

So as long as we, but what density? I mean, at the beginning, we could have one density. Under the state five years out, they're saying it multiplies.

Yeah.

But if you set the density, at what level to begin with then to comply, say, out five years?

So you can do anything. The point is not to concentrate on the number because if you look downtown, you don't have a density number. And in some areas, you don't have a density number. So I will say this right now. In your industrial area, you allow farm housing. In your industrial area, you do not have a density count. You don't have a density requirement. you have this all around your city. You already are using some of the other terms, is that if you just make the scaffolding and then come back, and you can say we have a max of, 32 units an acre and you make it in your growth area with water and sewer, 32 units an acre. And then you're always going to be compliant with state law. You can do things like that because when it comes to density count, it's always a theoretical maximum. It's always. You have developable land, right? And you do a calculation and then you have to deal with setbacks. You have to deal with distances. You have to deal with open space. So you never get that top number and you're never going to get the top number anyway because you have all these other requirements. And so why are we basing ourselves on a number which doesn't actually lead us to the outcomes that we want to have? Now, there is going to be the interim, right? The interim is a COMP plan is passing and we have until July 1st to get compliant. And so this is going to be a set of provisions for that. And then you're also at the same time where you can start thinking about, OK, COMP plan is going to be telling us to do a lot of different things now. because that's what happens every time a comp plan passes. So you're going to have to rethink zoning and everything after a comp plan passes anyway. You're going to have to do this exercise. But I have to get you compliant first before we can get to those long-term discussions that are going to take a lot longer.

I want... Your question was, do we want to adopt just the state standard, which we've been over? Yep. Or alter for the Auburn market? I don't care to follow the state standard. I don't mind if we have

a collection of ordinances that allow for a greater density than the state says we must have, this minimum density.

That's fine. I think the important word in your question is market. I don't know what the Auburn market is, and I think if you established a scaffolding or a zoning scheme that allowed 100 units per acre, that's not going to happen in Auburn. It's not. You can put it out there, but I don't think that's going to happen. I'm not afraid to make that possibility, make it a possible outcome, but I don't think it's going to happen. I think I would like as much as possible to let the market dictate so that if a developer wants to propose that and he's right and I'm wrong, well, good for him and people have got places to live and I guess everybody's happy. I just don't think that's going to happen.

I think we're not gonna see developments that are much different than what we have now. But if we can afford

that opportunity for people to try it if they want. I'm all for that. I wasn't sure what your assumptions here are. Is this with the state standard? If we adopt the state standard, we would expect to see more housing in these zones, less housing in these zones, little to no change?

So these are actually your current zones that you push your density towards. And so I'm making the assumption that the zoning that you have today are the areas that you want more density in or less housing zone or no housing. So in looking at your zones today, I'm assuming that in your urban residential district, your multifamily suburban district, your general business one and general business two, the minors, uh... inform is cold areas that's where you want more density and if that's what your zoning tells you to today that's my assumption but i don't know so that's why i was making that assumption less housing in the low density uh... residential area the rest of the jury in suburban residential area lesser and then the little to no housing in the act sound that's real doesn't allow It's not encouraging all this housing in those zones. But again, that's my assumption just by reading the regulations. I'm not you, and you guys are the residents here, so I'm looking for more insight from you all who have made this your home.

So those, that's the way our current zoning ordinance appears.

Correct.

Yes. And I don't think you're right. But with the changes that are coming, state law changes, all of the zoning is going to be a greater density is going to be allowed in all of these zones. Yes. Exceptional.

Yes, but you can put provisions in that restrict how dwellings are made in certain areas. So you can have stricter open space standards in the ag or the industrial areas have different requirements. You can put different requirements in suburban residential that they have to do more Active recreation space. It's no longer just on changing the zoning number. It's now on what actual design changes you want to make for these areas to encourage or discourage this type of use here.

So while the densities that we're familiar with will increase, we can apply other standards to the various zones, zoning districts, that might serve to shape those developments in such a way that the density is not going to, even though allowed, probably not occur?

Well, I mean, so, to a point, right? And so, because the first answer was verbatim or not, right, simpler makes above what the state minimums are, right? And then you can say, well, how much more do you want? Do you want it double what the state is allowing? Do you want triple allowances? How does that want to scale up based on your context and what areas you're going to be, suburban areas or moreover, you know, close to a highway, those type of things, yeah.

I guess it seems to me that we might then be accused of put provisions and more requirements on a developer to the point that we're trying to discourage that type of development to get to the density that we feel that we need to go to by the state regulations But at the same time, we're loading the cost to that developer because we're going to be requiring more amenities or more improvements and probably more off-site type improvements.

And so it's basically saying what I've said before is that, listen, we're not going to burden the cost on development that we don't want to encourage, right? So we're not going to subsidize the cost of you making suburban sprawl. It's not something that the city wants to do. We shouldn't be saying, hey, you out there with no amenities and everything like that, you're gonna build all this and then put the cost on all the other of your taxpayers. So that's more what we're saying. And as far as other restrictions, I would shoot back. It's no different than environmental restrictions, right? And so for vernal pools, they're much stronger restrictions came online the exact same time as everything else. So now you can't even, before you could develop a percentage of the area around a vernal pool, you can't do that anymore. And so the state itself is doing the same thing. It's saying like, hey, we're giving more density, we want more density to occur, but we're also providing protections for the things that we wanna protect. And for us, it's quality of life.

I can appreciate Ed's point. As you mentioned, we've lived here and have a little more familiarity with the city and the town. For me, it's kind of hard to envision where this growth will occur given the patchwork of our zones in conjunction with vernal pools, ag zones, industrial zones, and what could already be considered a crowded downtown proper. it's kind of hard to envision where these things may occur and that difficulty in envisioning that makes it even more difficult to answer this question from my perspective anyway.

Fair. It's fair. I can, at the next time, I can bring up the map again. where it shows you that where you have access to water and sewer and you can put on an aerial, you can see how much green field you have in the city that's in your growth area that will be affected by state standards.

Oh, but then the open space people get upset.

My thought is that your assumption lines up, and you've been at all the meetings as well, with what the long-term plan is going to, these zones do line up into these categories. So if I jump into question two, then I think it would be smart to anticipate that and match them to the criteria that you align your assumptions. Okay.

Am I the only person that does not have a list of questions in front of me? Where is that? I don't have it.

That was a yes.

It was passed around right before this meeting. Sorry, Chelsea. We failed elementary school. Yeah.

Okay. This makes a lot more sense. Okay.

Okay, so are we okay with going on to question two?

Are you okay with that?

I'm okay with that, yeah. Do you want to rezone areas within and outside of the growth area to match with the criteria above?

Should be reviewed, I would think, for sure. Yeah. As a side question, Riley may be involved because he's sitting on the complaint committee. Recognizing what the state's put before us, it almost seems like we should now have more industrial land and begin to shrink our growth area. If we're going to truly, you know, I guess maybe that's not a question that needs to come up if we're going to alter, you know, what we're doing to avoid the implementation of all that the state is putting down.

So we're not avoiding it. I want to make that distinction. We are definitely not avoiding it. We are implementing it. what the state is putting before us, but we're just providing support for that amount of density in those areas.

Okay, so I guess again, I would wonder if the comp plan committee might be considering to, when we first saw the growth area in bright red, it really showed up as an immense area. And I know it's broken down to, you know, with or without water sewer. But at the same time, it almost seemed to me that we should phase in what we're considering as growth areas.

So that is not something that our board has with these provisions. And so I definitely hear you, but I have to concentrate on just the compliant portion. And then Riley, you're actually with the comp plan.

committee? I highly recommend to everybody the last three meetings we've been defining these growth boundaries to the parcel level and it's hard to explain nine hours of meetings but it's it was you could find the information looking there but to the phasing part it wouldn't be something that we could be phased in because once the plan goes in effect it would just be the the growth zone and And I don't think we didn't increase, I don't think there's any large increase in any of the industrial zone that I can think of.

There are some changes that you all have made. You will have a chance to look at that again, because you have been going parcel by parcel and look at it again. Some large changes have been made. The growth area has reduced in areas. One of the main things is that the areas that do currently have water and sewer are within the growth area. And so they're making sure that that remains consistent in part by One, it's good planning practice. And second part is because even if you're outside of the growth area, if you have access to a sewer, you're gonna get a density bump anyway. And so it's better to have a little bit more direction on how you would like that to go rather than not. And the second portion on phasing is that anytime you want to make an amendment to your comprehensive plan, you have to convene another comprehensive committee and go through the process, again, of amendment process. And I do not believe the city is considering that at this moment. And so I can only concentrate on my task, which is to make sure that you're compliant with the state law in the time that it's given.

I do have a question. Sure. When you talk about rezoning areas, like within the growth area, like would that be combining zones? Like we have a bunch of form-based code zones.

Yes, that could be under consideration. One other consideration is that you have a suburban residential zone that your minimum lot area is one acre. Do you want to alter those provisions in the suburban residential or do you just want to rezone it a different, Do you wanna make a new zone and just rezone that to be compliant with that portion? Does it make sense to go zone by zone by zone or do you want to just rezone it into compliance? That type of thing. You're gonna have to do a little bit of both because as the state provisions get closer together, you're gonna see some zones just like this is, This is exactly the same now. So do we need these two zones? The uses are the same. Only thing that was different was the density count and now the density is the same. Do we need both of these zones?

My short answer to question two is yes. Thank you. Simply because the Grandma Moses patchwork quilt of our zones makes it confusing. And I think having, excuse me, it will maintain a neighborhood feel, having a larger, more consistent zone.

And that's consistent with the scale that I showed at the beginning of this presentation, that basically the site makes up blocks, the blocks makes up the neighborhood, et cetera, et cetera. Are you all prepared to go to the next question?

I'll just echo what Tim said if you're looking for opinion. Yes. Yep, I'm ready to go to the next question.

Okay. Big one. Do you want lots on private roads? Frontage definition and subdivision standards currently say no. And that's a big one because because you only allow subdivisions to happen on public roads currently, as the provisions say today, you do not have a ton of landlocked parcels, which is something that happens all the other time in a lot of other jurisdictions. Policy decision. It makes allowing development on private roads allows development to happen a lot more easy. Again, there's a cost to every decision. It also allows landlocked parcels to actually progress and happen a lot more frequently. So I need some feedback on this.

Do you mean existing private roads? Because a road, you want a 40 acre field and you want to subdivide it into 20 lots, you're going to build a road.

And that road needs to be a public road, as our provisions state today.

What do you mean by a public road?

In order to have a new lot, that new lot needs to have frontage on a public road.

What do you mean by public road? Is that going to be a road maintained by the city?

Correct. It needs to be accepted and maintained by the city. I can bring up the zoning ordinance.

So like what we just approved on by Sleepytime Hotel is that frontage refers to the private road that they built that connects to the public road.

So by definition of your zoning ordinance frontage refers to The area that's connected to a publicly maintained road Does not refer to a private road what I meant was the

Frontage definition and I guess I'm also thinking about the width of the because we we just we just approved a development that has a interior private road in the lot, but the frontage calculation was based off of It was facing a private road, but it wasn't based on density, or it wasn't a density-based calculation, like the number of units per, it was about the amount of area required for the road, like the width of the road for a fire truck and the bus to get in and out of.

This is a little different. Give me a second, I'll go down to the standards.

That's what I'm saying is my understanding is that we did you're saying our zoning ordinances don't allow for it but my understanding is that we did as long as they were able to meet the access to the public road

So I'm going to go directly to your provision and General requirements lots No person shall make a subdivision within the city unless all lots of the post subdivision have frontage and as regulated by the zoning ordinance upon a way granted legal access. The following ways shall constitute legal access to a lot. Number one, a way accepted by or established as belonging to the city provided access is not specifically prohibited. Number two, a public way shown on a plan approved in accordance with the provision of this chapter and in this code. Number three, a private way existing prior to October 6, 1968, which way is shown on a plan recorded in the registry of deeds. prior to such date and is deemed adequate by the planning board as evidenced by the board's endorsement on a final plan for the subdivision of land in its approval. In its approval of existing private way, the board may make whatever requirements it feels necessary to approve the way consumer it with the projected use of the same. And number four, a person issued a permit pursuant to subtractor in a Great Pond watershed shall have copy of the permit on the site while work is authorized by the permit is being conducted. Four makes no sense in this section. One through three makes sense.

So to Riley's point, I think that the project that you're thinking of on Danville Junction Road, it was a condominium. And so we didn't have lots on the road.

It was a big lot. So the lot in a condominium, so that's the issue with condominiums. And actually, that's why your subdivision state law is written the way it is, the condominiums. in planning, it's called the condo problem, is that if it's one single lot, your frontage is, if that one single lot has frontage on a public road, then you have, a lot has access to a public road.

So to your reading of the general standards there, I don't, I'm not, to know if the definitions are in the front or the back. But I think a public way, which was number two in your description, is a road in a subdivision that's built to standards and the public is, there's an recipient right of dedication. Every member of the public has a right to use that. I think that that's what that means and that is also what I would call a private road in as much as it's not a city-owned maintained road except the definition section says something different what does it say it says publicly accepted and as the city for public way yeah public well in that I guess that that is troublesome how do I I think I understand the city's current position is that it doesn't accept newly built roads. If I build a subdivision road, the city's not going to accept it. So we should alter.

Yeah, so to answer the question, you would say, number three, that you would want to have houses on private roads, and so that the code should be altered, right? Because that's what I would agree with. I guess obviously we do need some rewriting in general.

Ed, think of it this way. Your road to camp and my road to camp are private, and this would allow development on those roads.

Are those roads paved?

No, but they're private roads.

Anyway. Different conversation. The answer is yes, absolutely. That seems like a... So then... We had a... I'm sorry. That Wahan Oaks application was tabled, I think, in part because of this issue. It was a company that wants to build 14 lots of affordable housing, and they were going to build a road, and then all of a sudden they told them they can't do that. It didn't make any sense.

But if we say yes to this, that private road at the beginning has to be built to an acceptable standard by the city.

You have to require that.

I'm sorry, say again?

So you will have to require that. Would require it. Yeah, so that's one of the things is that your whole system, your whole regulatory system right now when you're talking about roads, it's under the assumption that they're going to be public roads. your whole system is set up that way. And so if you're going to allow it on private roads, also you need to have provisions that say such. And one of the things that I'm thinking of is that there's a reason why you don't get a lot of development that's in a different format right now. And one of those things are more like a neighborhood cluster, and you can use it where the road comes in, it's a parking lot, and then you don't have direct frontage on a road. You can have a lot of simple, and it's all fronting on like a public open space. And they say it's a pocket neighborhood. You don't get those right now because you're required to have frontage. And frontage, it's defined of some distance on a public road. And so you would be allowing these other types of development. If you are now saying that you are only going to allow them on public or private roads, that's a decision. You can not require them to have access directly to a road itself. You can just allow it to have public access. That's a decision. So these are all different types of development that you can allow to exist, and it does open up different possibilities. However, again, nothing is free. That also opens up the possibility that you may get some landlocked parcels. Is that okay? A lot of the times that you'll see what's called cluster subdivision, that you'll have lots that are in the back and they're reserved and they're cut off on purpose because they want that to be in conservation. And if they don't have frontage, then it's easier to preserve that piece of property. I mean, this is all types of ways that you can do with it, but I need to know the preference of you all and which way that you want to go with this, of more flexibility or less flexibility, because they're costs associated with each.

Who maintains a private road?

If you have- Road association, HOA? But you don't require that right now. You don't require an HOA to be done. You don't require a road association to be created. And that's one of the big things that I'm asking about is because if you're going to allow private roads, then you also are going to have to require some maintenance of that way to be maintained.

With that, I would say yes.

Yeah. Do we know what the city's current position is on accepting roads that are built to city standards?

I'm not privy to that information right now, but I've asked, so I'm waiting on that answer, and once that's provided to me, I can share that with you all.

Would we have to set the standards for the road maintenance agreements?

Somewhat, yeah. I mean, you're not gonna do this all alone. You can set some requirements, just as you set requirements for anything else, or a general requirement of it shall be maintained So a standard that allows vehicles to traverse that way. It's something general like that. You don't have to get exactly, maintenance shall be done every 10 years on the first October 1st, every four years, something like that. Okay, so I've gotten my answer. Would you all like to move on to the next one? Yes, we would. Do you want to require newly approved properties with no public frontage to manage the own trash pickup? So the city is now dealing with this right now. Trash pickup is a big thing. For multifamily, they're already kind of required to provide servicing for their own trash. But now we're starting to talk about, well, what about single-family homes if you're not going to require that frontage on that? that public road because services usually come with the public road. We're not required to do trash pickup on private roads. It's not a requirement. And then if you're making more private roads, you're gonna have to do some design requirements that says, okay, this is how you're now gonna have to deal with your trash.

Don't we require that roads be built to a design standard regardless of their status?

We do, but the city is not required to have the trash pickup on the private road.

Right, but it's not because the road is any less adequate than the public road. Correct, yes.

But then that goes in, how long are you gonna allow that private road? If we're talking about a mile down the road, okay, that's not too bad, but what if that road gets very, very long in these very large subdivisions? And how are you going to deal with trash in those situations? So that's not going to affect all of this stuff.

Something to think about? So manage their own trash pickup. I mean, people on private roads are now doing on Taylor Pond, 600 camp owners who throw their junk at the end of the road every Wednesday. Now I guess they're going to trundle their garbage cans up there and line them up. I don't know what the plan is for that. So they're managing their own trash.

I mean, that's adequate. I'm just saying that you're going to have to make these decisions of, OK, you can make that 600 single family home lot subdivision if you want to, but you're gonna have to figure out your own trust situation. And before we approve it, you're gonna have to demonstrate that you have a plan to deal with this.

My view is that if a developer's coming to town and he's gonna spend his money and he's gonna build a subdivision that we all want and he's gonna build a road that meets our standards, I don't know why the city doesn't accept that road and accept responsibility for picking up trash, driving school buses, and plowing the snow.

Because the costs of types of development it's not equal to the funds that are coming in for that type of development. So for instance, usually you do what's called an impact fee study, and you also do a financial impact analysis. A financial impact analysis says over time if the tax revenues from those new parcels will equal the amount of services that you're giving to those parcels, right? Impact fee study says, hey, for each new unit that comes on, there's a cost that's not included in the tax revenues that the city is going to have to eat, right? And we're doing this trade-off every time. I'm not saying that you make people pay impact fees. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there is a cost for development. And so based on the type of development you're doing, single-family homes versus multi-family. That's different tax revenues. And if single-family homes, in general, rule of thumb, in general, do not equal those revenues that the services that are costing. And one big thing that comes out are the maintenance of roads. So for, I believe, one quarter, one half of a mile or three quarters of a mile, you're paying a million dollars every 15 years to maintain that road. So the return on accepting that new road, it's going to be, I mean, the cost to maintain that road is going to be subsidized from other places of the city. That is one cost of development. So it really does matter what type of development you're doing. So it's an easy calculation to do, too, based on how much square foot of road that it takes to maintain. That's one of the reasons, that's another reason of maintaining That's one of the core reasons why planners say you want more compact development more than more sparse, because it is more expensive to take care of that road network than more sparse it gets.

Well, I think there's a minimum density. I think that's what cities and towns are there for, to provide these types of services. People are paying a lot in taxes, I realize.

Yep. So there's a policy. That's what I'm saying is a policy decision that I can't make, but I do have to give you the information. Bob, did you?

I guess I recognize Ed's point of view, but having looked at our city budget and that Yeah, if we can keep our lane miles down, right now we have lane miles that stretch to Baltimore and beyond. So we need not add any more lane miles because they are costly to maintain. So I think that's the reason the city for some time now does not accept subdivision as public roads.

So policy decision, nothing to do right now, but it is something for you all to start thinking about. If you would allow me, can I go to the next question?

What do you think you got for responsibility?

This needs further discussion.

Yes, you may go on.

Well, I think for any development, It's almost, again, there has to be recognition that they're going to take care of their own trash, but built into that development is going to have to be a common area where trash from that area is going to be consolidated for pickup on the public road.

Could be. The next one is, do you want to allow backlots? Backlots do not have frontage on a road. You see them all over different municipalities. You can get an easement. It doesn't have to be a road. You can get an access easement or something like that. You wanna allow them. Sometimes it allows cheaper development or splitting off for your family if it doesn't require a certain amount of frontage on the road. So that's something to think about. Right now, frontage is required for every lot.

Wouldn't that be covered under an ADU?

No. So ADUs actually exist on the same lot. So it's accessory to the primary dwelling. Now if you make a new lot, it's not accessory anymore. It is the primary dwelling.

I've seen this in play in other communities that I think it's a good idea.

So if you have a back lot, you could have a multifamily property back there?

Possibly.

And they would be going on a private way, like a private driveway, basically. Possibly, yeah.

But this would also entail the primary property owner deciding to make a back lot and it getting approved for all that to happen anyway.

So with one making of one lot, it's not subdivision. And so you go to the lot split. situation, which means that you get no checks from your local municipality.

But this question is simply back lots, not a lot split, correct?

So to make a back lot, only make one back lot, it is classified as a lot split. That's what, it's not subdivision. I have to use those terms because, but it's not considered a subdivision. considered a lot split.

I've seen in other communities the back lot provision does have some requirements such as you can't have a 90 degree turn in the road. Yeah. Fire apparatus has to be able to. Yeah.

That was going to be my thought. I think this also would want more discussion. There's places where there's areas where there's, that would be, this would be a great solution to add more housing. There's also places where there's long, skinny lots where these easements can get long and create problems for fires. So, like, I think there's plenty of those lots as well in Auburn. So, I think this would be one where it would be kind of zone by zone maybe. Yep.

You have current provisions right now with the length of dead end streets, 600 feet, but the language is loose. It says we want to discourage rather than shall not be longer than that. So that's some language that you should look at if you're allowing back lots and things like that as well.

I think the general answer is yes with restrictions.

Yeah. Do you want to allow pocket neighborhoods Again, frontage is an issue for fee simple lots. Now pocket neighborhoods are situations where it's a whole neighborhood on an acre. And so the parking gets consolidated in like a surface parking lot on the side. And then you have an open space and homes, they all center around the open space. And they're fee simple lots, but they don't all have frontage on a street. And pocket neighborhoods are becoming more and more popular all over. They actually have pretty good size. I've seen sizes from 600 feet to under 1,000 feet. And they're decent-sized homes, and they're affordable. What was the 600 feet to 1,000 feet? The size of the home. Usually you can fit comfortably on that type of lot. That type of configuration.

You said an acre?

Yeah, an acre.

think I think it would be a good idea but also with consideration to the connectivity that we talked about earlier and then also to the with the inclusion of the open space improvements where it sounds like we're looking to make this would be I would think this would be a good idea so you can see how these things are starting to connect together like the things that you're requiring and it allows you to do more more different types of things

Next one is...

I'm sorry, before we leave six, can you explain what frontage is an issue for fee-simple lots? I'm going to own my lot, right?

More meant in this jurisdiction. Frontage means the length of a lot extending between the side lot lines of a lot which borders an accepted portion of the street. Main turnpike frontage does not apply to this definition. So we're going back to accepted street, the public accepted street thing. Right now, you're not supposed to make a lot without frontage, period. And so you can't do pocket neighborhoods if you require frontage for every lot. You can't do it. Some of those lots are not going to have frontage.

So I'm going to walk from my little house to where my car is parked. Yeah. There's no road.

No road. You'll just walk on the sidewalk that goes directly to your parking lot. And it's really helpful in smaller infill lots that you can't get any connectivity anyway. You know, you're going to have... What do you do with an acre and a half in a high density zone and you don't wanna make a multifamily structure? You wanna make something that looks, that operates similar to how you want a neighborhood to do, but you gotta make your return. So giving a different option for what's referred to as the missing middle, those type of deals of more infill development. You want to put caveats on that because you don't want the situation where you have these huge developments and it's huge parking lot on the side and it's multifamily buildings and they're saying that it's a pocket neighborhood to get out of other provisions. So you want to put some limitations on that.

I think it's a great idea that pretty much almost exactly defines the condo complex I live in here in Auburn. Yeah. And we don't have our own specific driveways or garages. We have a I think it's a great idea. Um, we already talked about seven. Um, so I'm gonna go on to eight. So dwellings are unlimited for farm labor. New current practice. Um, I'll bring up the.

Industrial zone. Industrial zone doesn't have density requirements, but it allows dwelling for farms, farm labor. That means that you have unlimited density. Do they have farms in the industrial zone?

They can be. Well, Steve, do we have farms in the industrial zone?

Yes, I would like to. enormously farmhouses are permitted in the industrial zone. That's all.

No other accessory farm buildings at any time are permitted. And it doesn't specifically state farm labor. It just says farmhouses.

Whereas in the Ag Zone, there's a very careful delineation of farmhouses, principal residences. Okay, fair enough. But the farm dwellings are?

is when they expanded the industrial zone way out to the Lewis Conjunction Road in the airport area, there were a lot of crimes in that area.

And I think they sought to capture an existing structure of a set of circumstances.

And when you read the ordinance, it's very anomalous. Heavy trucks, bulldozers, ironworks, and .

OK. Thank you. I asked. Thank you, Steve. So what do you want to do about it?

Is our current practice having a negative effect on our current farms within our municipality? It's not broken, don't fix it. That's just my opinion.

But it does give, it gives me, this is another example of, it's not only in your form-based code areas where you have potentially unlimited density. Industrial, it's another zone that you have unlimited density and you don't see the explosion because there's a caveat.

Okay.

When placing multiple structures on lots, do you want the new lots to obey the setbacks of the zone from each other? This goes on condos. Setbacks are from lot lines. you have multiple principal structures on a single lot, it's only a couple zones that you have any type of separation, mandated separation. And in some of those zones, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So I'll bring up general business zone. General business zone, your buildings have to be separated by a distance of what the height of the building is. So it makes those structures spaced out by design. Do you want that? Is that what you want? Do you want more of a standard? If we're talking about density and we're talking about multiple structures on a lot, Do you want them to be closer? If you want them to follow a setback, then an easy way to deal with it is said, hey, multiple principal structures on the lot shall be set back from each other, principal structures shall be set back by double the amount of setback. And then you have the same pattern that goes interior to the lot and between lots. Because your setback is half of the distance between. was supposed to be half the distance between where you have the structure on this lot and the structure on this lot, double the distance.

So the scenario you're stating is code compliant, frontage to the road, but within the complex, do we want to maintain enforcing?

Like distances between primary structures.

My answer would be no. There's a buyer for every property.

But it's a decision that you need to make because not making a decision means that there's no distance between them. So in an area that you are mandating that you want the structures to be, in a simpler sense, because your requirements right now, it says there's only a few certain situations that you can allow multiple principal structures on the lot. 6034, right? So, In this sense, you're allowing more principal structures on a single lot, and you need to make a decision. Or the decision is zero. Or practically, it's going to be fire code, which is fire separation. And generally, that's 10 feet for fire separation.

I think if you go to general business, it has the distance for principal.

First, I'm going to go to 6034. No more than one principal building shall be erected on any lot in residential zoning districts except for these caveats. Multifamily buildings or developments under Division 9, the addition of accessory dwellings, and then it goes on to the four dwellings per lot because of the carve-outs of LD 2003. But this is, you can see how it's been added on, but initially your system was one building per lot. You were in that system. You weren't supposed to have condos.

Even if the lot was twice as large as the minimum lot size requirement, you wouldn't have constructions on it.

No. So it was pushing people to subdivide. rather than having multiple principal structures on the lot. And so state law came in 2003 and said, no, no, no, no, no. If you have double the space, you've got to allow them to have that. But prior to that, your whole land use structure was built on the premise of one structure per lot, one principal structure. So I'm sorry, I'm going to get back to the distance way. Tim has said no distance. And he's all right with that. Except fire code. Fire code. Of course, safety. Are there any other thoughts? I agree.

OK. Thank you. I don't quite agree, but.

I'm just going to draft stuff, and then we can see how it goes. But this is first reactions.

I just want to say, Bob, I don't think that a development is going to occur in such a manner even if we don't dictate minimum setbacks. I just don't think people are going to be successful in putting buildings three feet from one another, or whatever the minimum setback is.

But places have tried. So in my draft that I'm making, I have made the front lot line wider than the depth in some more rural zones to create space. And I'll give the example of when we're going down to 5,000 square feet, Current practice is to have long lots, right? We're in the northeast, that's been our current practice since we've been a country. So that would mean 50 feet width and depth of 100 feet. That's 5,000. Now you have some other zones that you want more space out, suburban, residential, whatever have you, so minimum lot sizes. So in those zones where I'm sensing, again, that goes back to the question one, that you want those places a little bit more spaced out, then the frontage, the front lot line, the width, can be 100 feet and depth can be 50. So it spaces out those structures.

You're going to be okay with that if the speed limit is 35? No.

If the speed limit is 35, I, you know, it's just, so my role is not to make decisions for you, right? I've said that, and I'll say that again and again and again. If you want to take your life into your own hands and to get from driveways onto a street, that road that is going 45 miles per hour, and you want to allow that to go on, hey, we all have risk tolerance. Hey, I'm just, I'm not going to be anywhere near that road. So you'll see in some drafts I have is that in suburban residential zones, you'll see wider, 100 feet wide and 50 feet depth, because the idea is that you want it to be more spaced out. But if you just want the standard going like, hey, forget it. Let's go the 50, 100, 50 feet wide, 100 feet back. I'll do it. We'll be done with it.

You have to reduce it to 50.

we're gonna have to state, to make the, to make sure that the regulations aren't so strict to prevent a lot from being made, that we have to reduce those requirements of width. And that's gonna have to be down to something that's reasonable. You can do 50, you can do 60, you can do 100 width. But once you get further than that, the depth of the lot, you have no actual usable area on the lot once you go past 100 feet. So you have some leeway, but you don't have total leeway. So I'm saying in suburban areas and areas that you don't want too much density and closer by, as we've said in number one. the rural residential zone, you can change the width requirements. Still 5,000 is just the width and the spacing between the buildings are gonna be a little bit more.

I'd be interested in seeing your drafts and the zones that they're in and also to question 11, I think those similar zones, the more rural zones would be where my preference and probably the public preference that the multifamily buildings look like single family.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. We hear that a lot.

You can do that. I mean, it's easy to do. You'd say single entrance. You already have some standards like this, by the way. They're already here in the conversion of one-family dwellings. So it's just altering these a little bit to say these apply to multifamily buildings in the zone. They have to look like single-family dwellings, and this is the standards for them. basically the stairs on the back has a single entrance you can't have multiple entrances on the front and go that way so there's some clever things that you already do in your regulations this is what i'm actually pointing out is that you already have some tools that you are using i'm introducing some new tools but it's not like i'm going overboard and going to like hey this is something we have never wanted to do ever before i'm saying no you already have some Some some stuff in here like the conversion of one family dwellings and the one one principal structure for a lot and things like that Because even with this it says want no more than one principal building So if that's the case you can you can say well the density count yeah Have unlimited density, but you can only have one building what it's going to encourage people to do is to make a bigger building And that's one building, but you can do that So do you want one bigger building with all the density in it, or do you want smaller buildings? And I know it's gonna be zone dependent, right?

Well, yeah, because my thought on that is that the density requirements are for where there's high growth zones. So the places I would say that aren't high growth zones are like the rural areas that don't have sewer and water. There isn't that density requirement from the state, correct? So people wouldn't be building big buildings out there because...

Yeah, outside of the growth zone with no access of water and sewer.

I guess that would be my answer to question 11, then.

OK. Again, a lot of information, a lot of questions. But this goes on my other statement. Sorry. Sorry, Tammy. This goes on my other statement, is that all 19 requirements from the state require us to make all these other decisions and then each of one of our decisions impacts our land use structure and so it has to shift our structure has a shift so any any individual preference you have it's going to have an impact down the line There are no free decisions. But it's getting used to that and being used to doing trade-offs and saying that we are doing the best that we can with the information that we have today. And then later on, allowing yourselves the grace to say, hey, all right, we thought this was a good idea and we want to redo this requirement to make this more strict or less strict or whatever have you. It's going to be a work in progress because these are brand new regulations statewide and there's not a good rubric to follow to do this. We're all in uncharted territory for such a large area. If this was downtown, it'd be a completely different conversation because your form-based codes are already compliant with the density requirements.

Are we going to be meeting again before our next official meeting It appears that our agenda would otherwise be light for the July meeting I see no reason for a special meeting between now and then

It's pretty light right now, and it would also allow us time to get information back from our drafts that we've put out there for comments for legal sufficiency.

So we'll just, does anybody know the date of our next meeting other than the second Tuesday of July? Does anybody know when that is?

It doesn't matter, it is when it is.

I see you, Steve, just a minute, we'll get there.

Okay, we're there, public comment once again.

Very quickly. One additional concept that needs to be kept in mind when considering these very substantial restructuring of how ordinances are created and enforced and enacted is that we have in the city a number of very important controls that are in the nature of standards, but they're not ordinances. The two principle ones are uh... maximum uh... grade of roads which is currently set at eight degrees but you can't find that in writing anywhere except perhaps in some notes in the engineering department and twenty five degrees maximum grade for construction of houses and that's not in any ordinance in any zone that's been i won't go into any painful details but that's been variously enforced and ignored in some very PATENTLY OBVIOUS WAYS IN THE PAST. SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE ABOUT THAT.

I'd just recommend, again, if you get a chance to watch the last three or so comp plan meetings about the growth size boundaries. And the one before it, we had the definitions of what the growth zones were. So they're interesting, but they're voluminous. So I just recommend them. Very good.

Yes, just following up on that, just put a plug in. The comp plan, the planning board's review of the comprehensive plan is coming. They're working through the goals and policies and future land use map. If you want to get a jump start, we recommend looking through the inventory and analysis section. That's online right now. These are very data-heavy chapters. So you don't have to go through all of them line by line. We suggest looking at the story map that Barry Dunn did. It really distills them down. So if you want to get a head start on that, go for it. But just want to put a plug in on that. And Riley and Bilal, they're on the committee, so they're aware of that.

And in addition to that, we'll be sending you the draft of the policies and actions that the plan committee is working on currently. It's for, if you want to go into that detail, it's for you, so you can understand how that part of structure is put together.

Are the definitions of the growth zones up? Because we did finalize that, right? We voted to finalize that.

No, not yet. And so we're just going to be sending things to the planning board, and so they can understand. So the first time you get into the document, you're not seeing it for the first time and haven't. and expect it to make a decision on it within a short amount of time period. If we give you this information as they're being constructed, then you can actually get a gist of what the Complaint Committee is going towards.

Anybody get kicked off this city anymore? I can't get in anymore. I can't get my password fixed. Who'd you make mad at? I have trouble from Europe. I have trouble from West Auburn. So if you try to reach me today.

Okay, that solves a lot of questions that I had. So I'll make sure. Yep.

All right. Well, motion to adjourn?

So moved. Second.

All right. All in favor? We're adjourned. Thank you.