Planning Board - Regular Meeting

All right, I think we're going. So now I just shut down the web. Robin, you're our vice chair, right?

Yes. All right. The meeting minutes.

from the 21st.

So this is what I sent out to Aaron.

How's it going?

Because we talked about these are the elements of a permit log that we'd like to see. And I never heard back. I sent him another note today like, hey, are you okay with this? Can I, I can put this in a Google sheet so you can just, we can all be entering. I mean, you could enter at the same time. We wouldn't have to even need you to print it out for us. We could all just go and see it at any given time. Nope. So I said another note today, like, Hey, just want to make sure that you saw this, what's going on. But just that, that document is what was on the table. Yep. That doesn't have permanent numbers. It doesn't tell us what year anything was.

Hmm. I move to accept the meeting minutes from May 6th. Second it.

Any thoughts of favor? No more E's on all E's?

Yes. I have Lynn with an E. I'll fix the 21st before I send it in. I took it out of almost everything.

No E's.

I have all these friends with Carol with an E and always been with Ann with an E. Sorry. It's okay. I know if you want to put two N's in my name, like, no, it's not a two N's.

We didn't have anybody log into the CMS.

Not as of yet.

Okay. So what's missing or different on that, Dawn? It doesn't have a permit number, right?

Oh, this year? No, it does not have a The key must be the key for the lot map, I would guess. Yeah, it doesn't have that.

Oh, we asked for a lot number, so there's some kind of letter.

There is a lot number on there. Is that what the key is? Does it say, like, U12? No. No, no. Yes, it does, down below. Like, it has key R01.

Yeah, those are the lot numbers. Okay, so we got a lot number. We have the name, the permit was issued to us.

We have the name, owner name. Not, I mean, I would assume that's who the program can be listed to. Yes, we do.

Short description.

Yes.

Relevant ordinances.

No.

Any other criteria, caveats, like a miscellaneous known column? No.

No. Yeah, because sometimes you're issued a permit with requirements on it. Yeah. Should we give you a date? Yes.

Yeah. We should ask for a date.

Okay, this doesn't have a date on it either.

We didn't ask for one.

Yeah, you asked for one. That's fine. I just moved. Yeah.

I mean, if your permit numbers are done in order, it would say like 26-001, 26-002, 26-003, so we'd know... the order for 2026. And then if we were shooting 2025, you would know what those were in order. But yeah, we should have a date.

So missing permit number, missing relevant ordinances.

Mm-hmm.

And we'd like to add a date. I'll volunteer to flip that and ask him to say that.

Okay, yeah, this is from when, on yours just says, spoke with Mrs. on site Looked, look in 2026 for new 12 by 24 shed.

Repeat that one more time.

Is that you? Yes, yes. Um?

No. That's what there will be. Just find a site. And they're not coming to our house.

All right.

Okay. So I'll go talk to him.

Email.

Cool.

Thank you. State Capitol pleasant street. What is that? State Capitol.

It might be a home-based business. I don't know.

New home, 28 by 48 on Pleasant Street. Which one is Pleasant Street? 108 is Pleasant Street. Is any of this confidential information? Nope.

Is there any reason why we can't ask for this to just be posted somewhere, either on our drive or on the can? Whatever it is, yes, we're in. No, there's no reason that can't be. Okay. I think that would be, I'll make that request to see if that's easier because then we're saving paper and it's all recorded in one place.

Well, this is an interesting one. On Pleasant Street, again, S26, whatever that means, unregistered campers, people living in.

I'm sure that's the lot at the end of, um, I want to wait right before you get the 35 mile an hour sign on the left-hand side. There's a guy that's got about four campers in his yard. He had a half of a double wide, like cut down the middle, like half a double wide parked in his driveway.

Is it right next door to Ernie Edmonds? Yes. Okay.

I'm guessing that's the property. And I don't know if there was, I don't know what that means. I think that was a permit violation. I don't know if that was a, Like I asked for some kind of a permit. It doesn't say, right? It doesn't really tell you what they're asking for there.

No, it just said for unregistered campers people live in.

It's almost like a violation. So those might be site visits, except you're saying nobody ever came to your property.

A tax assessor came the year after we asked for the permit to see if the shed was full or not. And I said, no. Could I take that with me? Certainly. So I can review that.

So when did you put the permit in? I'm just curious.

Because you're right. It does say field visit summary. It doesn't really say permit.

I want to say it was. And is that the assessor? Is that the assessor? No. Was Aaron the code enforcer? Yeah.

Was Aaron the code enforcement officer when you were doing that? No. That's what I was thinking, because he's only been in about a year, I think. But still, no one came to our house. That's why I'm wondering if that might be the assessor's site visit log or something. I don't know. I don't know. We'll find out what happens on it. Who was working in the town office before Aaron?

Now, who? Oh, Hutchins. Her maiden name is Hutchins. Well, no, it wasn't. Nikki. Nikki somebody. No, it was a man. It was working.

Oh, well, we had a Scott. We had a guy named Scott who was our enforcement officer. He really, he was part-time between us and Hartford. And I think June of, or late May or June of last year, he officially retired. And then Aaron picked it up.

Who was Bernard Bertrand? Bertrand Chase? Bertrand?

B-E-R-T-R-A-N-D? I don't know, but I think, well, when we get to the Build Maine Conference Insights, I thought I saw other things that are going to be relevant to that topic.

I'm just talking. My name's not in here. Wait a second.

My name's in there. My loan people really don't stop because it's... Oh, no.

They send a check to the... Scott Mills. Scott Mills was a enforcement officer up until last summer.

All right.

Okay, old business. I still have, the cluster housing update is on me. I'll get that up in the next two weeks. You guys all saw the note that the select board asked again for the four, they didn't know how many ordinances we had that were waiting for the select board to advance. So I resent the stuff that we sent back in April with all four.

And have the Excel document too, right? That kind of explained our reasoning why we didn't, weren't advocating necessarily legal review. Correct. Okay.

I think the other thing we should maybe bring up when they talk about department updates at the Silk Road meeting is how do we manage the legal costs going forward? Because we're going to have several more things coming up. But that's why we run into a bit of this, right? Right. But can we help them understand that they can give direction to the law firm? We can't afford... a $2,000 review bill for every single ordinance that comes through, how can we get the $500 review or whatever? You know, we can, as a town, we can direct that, but.

We'll see. How much is in there for legal?

It's probably lumped under professional services.

And I don't think, I doubt if it's broken out, but it might be.

So we can ask at time meeting for that breakout if it's not in there.

Okay. Budget committee. Okay.

Moving what we need is a professional services repo line item under.

So where you were, it says, sorry. Town clerk benefit and benefit deputy clerk? Are they increasing their pay?

How does it show? I don't know. You're really good at saying the legal stuff right now. I don't know what that means. Professional service. Legal.

Found it?

Yes. There's your page number. So it's article 24. Okay. Down at the bottom. So last year, we approved $5,000. So they put $10,000 in. They put $10,000 in. They doubled that.

But if they want to send all of them to legal, that still is not going to be enough. If they spend what they've spent, or, you know, like... Or appears professional services... We attend computer support session.

I do have to say, somebody asked, as I was walking out of a meeting, who the Newtown attorney was, and they said that name, and the person went, I can't afford that attorney's house. They're one of the most expensive attorneys in the state. But I guess, I don't know who else. I don't know.

I doubt it. Okay, so they've done all that, but since we don't know. I guess all we can do is ask the question, and will that be enough to cover what you want to be able to do with reviewing all the planning board documents?

This isn't. Now, for fuel and gas, they put nothing in to help assist people. Under which? Under point R425. I don't think that.

There is, I believe there are state funds. Oh, that do that? For general assistance that you can apply for.

Okay.

Yeah, there is, absolutely. And there's an application for that.

Okay.

Yeah, I'll have to go through this and read my questions. Who is that?

I think she was, no, she was on it. Okay. Diane was explaining that that comes a lot from the people. Right? For the funerals. For the funerals. I didn't say that. I don't know. Oh, somebody did. Said that because they provide that because of... Okay. I don't know.

But that's all we wanted to know, right, was what was the legal budget. I don't know that the line item answers the question, did they put enough in for what they want to do for reviewing. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Because if they know of other legal things that are coming up, That we're not aware of.

I mean, the comp plan. I don't know. We know that the state has to review that. I'm assuming legal have to review it as well. As well as.

No, I mean, outside our work. Right. Would fall into that bucket. Right. So how big of that, how much of that pot is for what you're expecting to do with training board documents versus. Correct. And is it enough? Yep. That's our questions, right? Yeah. Wow. So this time we lost. So we know what that dot point is. Is this enough for what we need? Which includes ordinances and comp plan. Anything else that comes to mind?

I mean, certainly any other legal questions that can't go through MMA, like having a lawyer review the specific application for the solar project, review the and or question on the solar project. I believe if there's any FOIA requests that involve legal, there's a cost for them to deliver that result as well.

Yeah, but that's not planning board related, right? Correct. So I don't want to bring that up as a... These are the things that the planning board thinks that we may have to expend funds on.

Right. I'm guessing we'll have at least six ordinances. The four that are there now, at least two more plus the comp plan.

I just put ordinances, comp plan, and any legal questions that can go through MMA. Let me ask the question. I guess it's going to be at the town meeting since we don't... Well, the pages are up to the

15, 17, 19 is missing. 21, 23, 25, seven. And it's page numbers. Okay. Well, I for one appreciate the big type. Sometimes it would come out in super tiny, like micro type, and they're very hard to see. Very hard to take notes on.

Beautiful. Cool. Okay. LD21.

So I learned a lot at this building conference about these auxiliary dwelling units and different things about that. So I'd like to take between now and the next session and kind of pull together a summary of what I've learned, what the legal thing says, what APCOG sent us, but also what I heard about in this session and look at our ordinances and say, this could affect our housing and minimum lot size ordinance, maybe our cluster housing ordinance, which we're still reviewing for other stuff. Do we want to have a separate, you know, auxiliary or dwelling unit or accessory dwelling unit ordinance just for that, which might not be clear?

I don't know.

So I'll have a recommendation and some ideas at the next meeting. Because there's a lot of discussion about, there's different rules in different parts of the state. I want to really look at that legislation in depth about because they want to encourage a couple of things, right? If you're, let's say you're a young person who can't really afford to buy their first home, but if you have this little rental unit in the back, you could maybe get enough income to actually afford to buy your first home.

You want in-laws, a place for the in-laws to move into, you know, or you're talking like new thing now, the tiny homes. apartments?

Well, it could be a tiny home, it could be one of the things they talked about at this building thing was a model they decided that doesn't have it's like a studio, and it doesn't have a kitchen. So either you give somebody a microwave and a hot plate, or you let them into the big house for the kitchen or whatever, but they it doesn't because it doesn't have a kitchen, it has very different rules. You know, and so they were, there's just a lot that I heard about that I didn't hadn't thought about before. So I like to think it through. And So you could come back. I would say we, we don't have an apartment. I didn't look for cluster housing. We, we have one that we've been making changes to that. I've got all the drafts. I just need to pull together all of our notes into one draft. Right. So that's what you're talking about. Cluster housing. That's cluster housing. These auxiliary dwelling units are things that are ADUs. ADUs. Okay. That's what I think 2173 is all about, which is.

I think we should have a separate, I mean, the ADU is what, what, is coming up very popular these days. A lot of people are doing that, I think.

Well, people are saying, you know, can we alleviate the housing crisis by just adding a single, simple one-bedroom unit onto the back of somebody's house or on the side of the house?

Yeah.

There's different building rules, too, whether it's detached or whether it's attached. Right. I can see that. And then what about, is it tied into sewer facilities? Or your septic? Does it have to have its own septic? I mean, there's some of that spelled out in that regulation, but I want to read and understand.

I don't know much about septic, but don't they put in the septic when they put in the septic according to how many bathrooms the house has and what the capacity of living is in a home? Or do they not do that?

Well, I'm sure if you have septic instead of municipal sewer, I'm sure the size of your septic tank is going to be based on the number of bathrooms and the number of people in the house.

Right. So my question then would be if you're going to add to the back of the house and add more space for living people.

Will your septic be sized appropriately? I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure that's all in that.

Okay. So what does that stand for? ADU?

It's either accessory dwelling units or auxiliary dwelling units. And I think they made it a statewide piece of legislation because some municipalities that have kind of high-end homes don't necessarily want these, right? Because it can kind of look like.

Well, a perfect example is my brother lives in Sotheby and their house overlooks a really nice property with a barn and stuff. And I understand why the lady's doing it. She wants to do exactly that in her yard because the daughter has cancer. But it's turning out not to just be a small thing. It's like a double wide. Because it's right in their visibility and everything. So I don't know what the rules would be or anything on the size. I can understand the small ones. But that property isn't conducive. to a bigger home, but I don't know.

Well, and so that's, I mean, I think we will have to look at this and say things like we have the setbacks from the property lines have to be right now, whatever it is, 20 feet, 30 feet. I forget exactly. You still have to keep those same feedbacks? I don't know. I want to look at LD 2173 and see what it says. Is that going to let people put stuff closer together? LD 2173. Yes. And Eric and Buff can send us a link to that.

Yeah, I saw that.

Yeah. And I tried to open it once and I couldn't get it. But I want to go through and read it in detail and then look to see which of our ordinances does it affect. Because a cluster housing ordinance is already giving you half of our lot size. And right now our minimum lot size is just, it's 40,000 square feet. It's just under one acre. Do we change that? I mean, we do in the cluster housing development, but that's really for a whole new development that's going in. do we amend that elsewhere? Or do we say for ADUs, it's still considered one lot. The lot size hasn't changed. You're just adding another dwelling unit. Right now, I think according to our ordinances, you'd have to get a subdivision permit if you put that on because you're adding additional dwelling units to your home. So it would affect potentially our cluster housing ordinance, our housing and minimum lot size, and our subdivision ordinance. So do we think about rewriting that? some of those to be able to clarify that for people who might do that.

So I'll be prepared. There's so many. Cool. You want to go to Building Maine Conference and Science? Absolutely.

So it was a very interesting workshop. It was a workshop. These are all the different things that are going on there.

Where are you at?

It was in Skowhegan. Building Maine. It's under new business.

Is that the one you just went to?

Yeah. Yes. Yep. This is something else. Hold on. Hold on.

Hang on. Let's start.

I got lots of stuff in my.

Lots of sponsors. Look at all these sponsors. Wow. I know. So many sponsors. Half the book of sponsors.

What was it, investment? Skowhegan. Oh, okay. Here's some information.

So the first thing I went to was a discussion on TIFs, this tax increment financing. There's a lot of questions about whether we need to shift the legislation. Is there some kind of change that might happen in the legislation of TIFs? There are two, which I thought was interesting, two organizations that... basically have to approve a TIF, one or the other. You kind of fall under one. One is the Department of Economic and Community Development. That's if you're doing market rate and affordable housing. If you're doing some kind of services outside of a district, capital improvement within what they call a TIF district, DECD does a lot of that with a municipality. Maine Housing does TIFs if you're specifically looking at some kind of childcare, recreational facilities, operating assets, finance, there's some overlap. It wasn't clear 100% which organization you're going through to get your TIF approved. There's some development challenges and TIFs are super important for the town. I don't know that our town understands how best to use them. And because you're setting aside, you're basically, as the property value increases, you're setting aside that value so that you don't have to pay more in school taxes, you don't have to take a reduction in your state revenue sharing, but you can use that tax revenue for like water sewer improvements or infrastructure or putting in sidewalks or whatever. You can also use a portion of that tax revenue that you're setting aside in what they call a credit enhancement agreement. So that's the, basically a rebate to the developer.

What does that stand for?

Tax increment financing.

Okay, so maybe...

It's essentially like a direct tax rebate. So you could say of that value. So the person, the company or organization, whatever it is, pays the tax and the town through a credit enhancement agreement, basically gives them a portion of it back. They can get all of it back. In some cases, they might rebate all the taxes. If you want some new business to come in, that's going to offer 50 new jobs or something. But that's a negotiation between the developer and the town. on what kind of a credit enhancement agreement, how long is that going to be in place for? Does it go in different percentages? But it shelters the increase in value. It makes it invisible to school funding, state funding, and county taxes. And it's really helping to get a municipality to be a partner in development so that you're working on these things together. You can also use it to tip to support municipal bonds. So if the town has to take out financing, like let's say, They agree to pave roads in a new development. And they want to take out a bond for that road improvement. Or even you want to extend water and sewer into a new development. And the town takes out the money to do the water sewer extensions on a bond. You can use some of that tax increment that you've sheltered to pay down those bonds. So it can be a really nice net net. Because a lot of small scale projects are very difficult these days to make even break even. And no developer wants to only break even. You have to make a little bit of money off this project. The challenge is always how do you talk to the community? How do you get community support? Because they don't understand it. And people feel like that developer is getting a deal. You know, we're giving them a tax break. Pictures help me. Yeah.

Yeah. Like you start talking about complex financial tools to me, then I'll kind of track along with you, but my eyes glaze over at a certain point. If you show me pictures, I'll follow along a lot easier. I'm a visual person when it comes to that kind of thing, right?

Well, and it's pretty easy to show. you know, if we do nothing, right? Here's what's happening with like the tax value of that piece of property or whatever it's going to be, right? If you build on that, here's now the value, like the windmill. Here's our house and here's the value. Right.

And now we make the house bigger and here's the value. You know, just simple, right? And here's the difference between those two things. Well, you can even show.

And we're going to shelter that difference. You know what I mean? That's right.

Like, I wonder if Claude can help us do that. Claude, can you help me build a simple deck that explains tips?

Yes. And I've seen some good presentations. Yeah. If we could get our hands on something. Absolutely. And make it walkable, workable. Yeah. You know, and for example, commercial properties right now, commercial development is very difficult to be profitable without having housing in the same kind of development because that can be more profitable. So you have to kind of have this mixed use approach development areas if you're going to try to actually break even so let's explain the concepts and then explain how it may apply to our town yeah the community the common some of the ideas that we might have the common myth for communities is this is a tax break for the developer that's what everybody thinks and that's why they go like but that's what you're sure right myth

the myth buster, you know? Right.

So I just had a conversation about what would you want to keep from the current TIF regulations? What would you want to modify or add? What would you want to abandon? So that was what the conversation was all about. I don't know that that's going to lead to anything, but the two people that led that conversation are really knowledgeable about TIFs in multiple states in New England. So they were a great resource. Great. Well, and the other thing, the question I thought was really interesting, which is, as a community, we have to determine what you're willing to say yes to for the betterment of the community. And I thought, ooh, that's a great way to position some of our charrettes. What are you willing to say yes to for the betterment of our community? And that kind of gets people- That's in your notebook, right?

It is. Okay, good. It's underlined. Then I won't write it on my notes. No. When we're gearing up for that.

There's a lot of discussion, too. You have to define what they call a TIF district. And it basically says, increase in value of this project. Now, you can modify your TIF to bring in additional projects. You can also say, we're going to use that money for the water sewer extensions. But you could also phrase it as improvement of municipal services. such as blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So if you want to then bring in some additional improvements of municipal services, because it's in the original TIF documents, you can do that, right? So there's a lot of ways to how you write the TIF. They give you a lot of flexibility, that kind of thing. I thought that were very helpful. Everything requires a public hearing, a DECD, if you're going through them as the financing stores, they require a special public hearing, special applications and that kind of stuff. Right now, there are certain statutes like these. It has to be for 20 years or 15 years or 30 years or whatever. Some of the terms are vague around that currently. So this is the stuff that we're talking about. We need to improve the TIF legislation to make it a little tighter, a little snugger, so there's less ambiguity. I'm okay with a certain amount of ambiguity because I think it gives you some flexibility. you have to talk to the assessors to establish the current rate, the current valuation of that piece of land, right? And then you have to assume what's it going to be at a completed valuation. Then the current valuation gives you your base rate and then all of your TIF calculations are off that base rate. So that's important to how they start.

That's what it says.

Yeah. Yeah. The original assessed value. Yeah.

They're the button. So basically anything above the base value, once the development begins, goes into a TIF fund.

Well, once it's assessed. Sheltered. Once it's assessed, that valuation is sheltered, right? Right. When we get a statewide valuation every year, now the monies that come to us from the state and our school taxes lag a couple of years, right? Because that assessment value gets reported to the state. It doesn't actually get into those school and tax calculations for about two years. So like we had the windmills giving us, I don't know how those were taxed. I think that's another thing we perhaps have to work on as a community, like how do we tax those things? Or solar projects. Right now, people say we don't tax them at all. When I talked to the assessor, he told me other communities were taxing them, not just on the capital equipment they put in, but on some measure of what they're producing. What they're producing. Yes. And I'm like, how come we're not doing that? So I don't know. I don't know if we maybe need to get a little more adept at how we tax things. Yeah. They also, the thing like, what are you willing to say yes to? There's also the but for case. Like if you didn't do this, here's what happens, right? It's a little bit of the Christmas ghost thing, right? If you didn't do this, here's what happened. You know, without a TIFF, this project would not happen at all or whatever. So those are to me are a little bit of a heavy handed kind of answers, but you have to be a little careful about those. Scarborough, I want to get a TIF policy. Scarborough has written one, which I did not get right away, that specifically here's what we need from a developer for information to execute a TIF. So they specifically have a form that developers have to complete or have to provide this long list of information so the town can then determine if they want to do the TIF or not. I don't think we have any of that here, but I think we could do that. Um, there are, they are some examples. They were talking about favorite right size tips, but sometimes a TIFF can be written so big and broad that it becomes like useful. So it becomes a burden to the town or whatever. So how do you write size that TIFF and you're gonna have more than one. And I think once you do one process for doing others could be easier. So I don't think you have to write one for the whole town, but we're not that big a town. So maybe there's like one that does everything. Um, they say make a TIFF as long, many years out as it needs to be and no longer. Sacco says, everything's a 10-year TIF, one site, one project. And if the dollar needs of the developer are met sooner, then the TIF can go away sooner. So if you figure out you need that tax break for the first 10 years to be able to get your project to break even or make money, once it's doing that, TIF can go away. So I think there's some clauses in there that could make it a little bit easier for the town to swallow. Augusta has... optimize their process for vetting TIFs, they have two meetings and it's done. So they've got all the information and they review it. I think they do. I don't know if that's the select board. And then if they do a public hearing, then they decide, I mean, I'm not sure how they do that, but we'll find out. Um, you can do bite-sized tips like specific reimbursement for specific tasks.

Like the developer had to do a, B and C to get their, their credit enhancement agreement back.

Um, you want, so having these things right-sized, um, both defining the district and the benefit to the developer, uh, developed less risk and less ambiguity on every person. Uh, so they're, uh, they're discussing right now about there's current discussion going on about changes to the state funding formulas for education, completely separate from tips. But if that, those formulas change, this might, the impact might change this as well. Um,

So,

there's ways to get access to technical expertise on tips. So that was all good. There's a lot about the mill rate at times evaluation, which is basically the formula for determining how much you're sheltering. So if our mill rate goes up, so you could look at a project and say, Hey, this qualifies for this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here's how much you should choose to value that stuff.

Anyway, that was one session. It gives an example, like if you're making a manufacturing project and the base value is $500,000, the new value is $2 million. So $1.5 million would be the increase in strategies for improved economic. So basically everything above the base, right? Right. It's so complicated.

You can do a very simple spreadsheet and show the benefit year after year. Even if you assume like a 2% increase in base value, And I don't know if that changes every year with like inflation numbers or if that's just stays the same and never changes. I know the town submitted TIF for the windmill some time ago, but it wasn't right. So it did not. So another very interesting session was on land use policy, which I thought was very interesting for us.

That's a timely topic.

Yes, I sat on two of those. Bristol, Vermont was a great example of facilitating small-scale development. They talked about policy alignment, which I think is part of what the comp plan could do. All right, so designating a growth area and what kind of things you want to have in that growth area, which is all part of what we're doing for the comp plan. Finding community partnerships for things, housing finders round table. There's a lot of ideas on what they talked about. How do you make this actually work? This land use policy, I think what we're doing with the comp plan, I think is right. They talked about there's right now in a lot of areas, especially in our area, right? We have these large single family homes going in. Like if you look at all the new houses on Staples Hill, since I've been here, that's what they all are. Right. And then in some places you get these kind of apartment buildings for low moderate income. All right, affordable housing, rental units for apartment buildings. What's missing a lot is this middle, where they talk about duplexes, townhomes, cottage courts, or stacked flats. You know, just this whole kind of middle scheme of housing. And I'm thinking that could be a lot of what, as we're developing, some other spots around town. That's the kind of thing we should be thinking about. I don't think we even have enough of the low moderate income, high density apartments. We don't have that, but we have a lot of this thing. And there's a great calculation in here that really, there's a toolkit that I sent away for it's called homes for all, which is really talking about how do you get that whole spectrum in a community and why it's important to have that in the community, because that way you get all kinds of workers. Yep. Then they also have prototypes, um, and models for like homes to build that are, you can just, I just give them to you for this homes for all that's their project. One guy partnered with AARP to get senior housing in like, yay. There's a builder's workbook, you know, there's all kinds of tools out there that are available. They talked about to get these things going in this policy alignment, they identified the roadblocks. Like in Vermont, every building permit is issued by the state fire chief. every building unit. So that was a roadblock because the fire troops office can only do so many. So they did some of that. What about like panelization or pods or modular types of home? Can you do some offsite construction so things can come in and happen really quicker on site? And they gave some examples of different kinds of buildings. You know, certainly with today's economy, cost is the number one issue for building materials. So how do you help with those things? How do you align infrastructure and capital? So they decided they created some kind of a predictable permitting so they could streamline those kinds of things to go through. One guy talked about a carrot and a stick, two strategies to building the community building. The carrot is really all about community preservation, you know, and I want to go back to some of the stuff that historical society has to look at. At one point, we had multiple hotels and opera house, all these craftspeople, business, you know, all these things going on. And without that, it makes it very tough to to keep your community afloat over time. They talk about municipal revenue, affordable housing, and economic development are kind of all three sides of a little Venn diagram there. But one, I had to laugh, he had his Venn diagram up. He's like, you'd think if you had this, this, this, and this, and this, you'd get this successful middle. He goes, there is no successful middle. Sometimes the change from an architectural-based code to a form-based code. So there's all kinds of things that potentially we could do. Some of these things don't matter to us or don't apply to us because we don't have zoning. We go by, we've not as a town adopted what they call MUVEC, M-U-V-E-C, which is main universal building and something code.

I forget what the E stands for. Maybe engineering, building engineering code.

We are not required to adopt MUBEC because of a town of our size, and we haven't legally adopted it as a town-wide standard. So we fall under the, I think, IRC, which is the residential code. So even for things like apartment buildings, you can follow the IRC instead of MUBEC, depending on your funding source. If you use any kind of state or federal funding in building any of those structures, you have to automatically... So you can have a little bit of variation, like... One code has seven foot ceilings, one has seven foot six inch ceilings, right? So can you, if you're adapting an old building for reuse somewhere, right? You may not want to have the bigger standard, right? Because an older building may not meet that and it'd be too expensive to try to force it to meet it. So lots of good examples. The other thing they talked about was the continuous life cycle. The measurements I have are some of these things that is revenue per acre. And so I want to take that online assessor's book, which has, I think it also has a lot of sizes on it to those. So we can go through there and determine overall for the whole town, here's our revenue per acre. For Main Street, where the houses are closer together, here's our revenue per acre, you know, for Staples Hill. So here's what you want to have in a in a new development area. You don't necessarily want to have people keep building one house on, you know, these five, six, seven, eight, 10 acre sites out in the middle of the woods, right? It doesn't mean you want to stop that, but that's never going to get you enough revenue to support the increase in municipal services. You have to have a certain amount of density.

Okay.

And how to do that. And we did all kinds of calculations like this business impact.

Because of the, you know, the public,

works and all that kind of stuff the density well it is it is um but you're but you're talking about an apartment building that might be two million dollars versus a home that might be 200 oh i get you okay i got it it's the tax revenue value per acre yeah okay and you have to somehow increase that And there's South Berwick has changed some of their land policies to show where it's easy to protect the rural because you don't want to get, we don't want to give up our rural character and our woods and trails and everything else. But it's also easy to support the city development if you can help people understand why that's so important to do both.

which we can do.

But there's the ability to walk to create social infrastructure. Can you walk to a senior center? Can you walk to get an ice cream? Can you walk to church? Can you walk to these places? So you don't have to get in a car and drive, right? Can that, what if we made that a goal? That'd be a good one. For like main street and down 108, you know, that could be a really interesting thing.

And it used to be really. Yeah. We could walk to everything.

There is a survey that this guy did too, which I got a link to it, called the Maine Place Code Survey. He thought it was going to take him months to do it. It took him two weeks. So I'm going to find a copy of that survey and see if that's something that we might want to think about.

You mean he surveyed the whole town?

I don't know exactly what they included in that place code survey, but that was for South Berwick. And they had... south of where it sits in the corner of another town. And so they had a little downtown, little kind of density area. And then this one big street that went down that didn't have a lot, it had a manufacturing factory, I think, on it. But then that town merges into the next town's main street. So they're like, okay, there's a lot of unused good stuff on that corridor. And they had this whole housing development kind of off to the side, but it was, oh, it looks like those pictures that you see on that, you know,

you know, house, house, house, house, house, house, house, you know, whatever.

It was a very, it was a neighborhood basically. But nothing from there was walkable to downtown. Um, you know, and they found another spot where they could like turn this corridor that was like doing nothing into a really beautiful park, you know? So they, I mean, they make by looking at those maps, those big maps and understanding some of these principles about, Hey, we want to condense certain amounts of development here. Um, and we want walkable, we want accessible without a car, blah, blah, blah, you know, all these things you really does. It helps create a shared vision for where you want to go.

That was all pretty cool.

Uh, parking. is a big deal. You're going to have residential and commercial. Where can you have on-street parking? Because that is a huge benefit if you're going to attract people to come to any of these things. Rural, any, or I'm sorry, any retail type of stuff. Density standards. They were encouraging everybody to get the GIS software. I don't know if we can get that, but that's the master mapping stuff.

Well, I said he was going to use GIS software and help me make maps for... God, my new boyfriend.

Is it C-L-A-U-D-E? Yep. Yep. The other thing I thought was very helpful that we should put on the front of our thing is nobody is coming to save us.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah. Which is right there with hope is not a strategy. Yeah. Right. You keep doing the same thing you've been doing and expecting a different result. That was insanity. Right. Nobody's coming to save us. We are responsible for saving ourselves. That's right. And addressing one problem at a time, which I think if the comp plan can identify some of the issues, I think we can get there. So risk mitigation is certainly a set of tools that you want to work at or tasks, right? How do we reduce risk, which are things like TIFs, which helps attract investment, right? And then you want to invest in change, which are all lovely, but they're going to happen by statements, but you have to have 20 units per acre in one of these cities to break even. In another city, you had to have 32 units per acre to break even, depending on the size of the units, right? Either single family homes or apartments. Just the cost to construct them, put in the infrastructure, everything else, you had to have 32 units in an acre. In an acre?

In an acre, yeah.

What are they, closet size apartments?

So I have examples for Newcastle and Madison. Density is not a catch-all solution either, right? You need to have these important conversations. you can't cut your costs as a way to get to save money, which some of these towns have done it. We're just going to cut our services. We're going to get rid of our police station or police services. We're going to partner with the next town and share the blah, blah, blah. Investment always brings risk with it. We have to be willing to take on a certain amount of risk. Community bonds, like actually taking out a bond to get cash to do water service is important. They do that here. Yeah, we haven't done it for a while. I heard them talk at the last Select Board meeting about getting a bond, I think for roads.

Well, at the Select Board, what did they just get approved for for the River Road?

Was that a bond?

The River Road.

Yeah, I think they said they had to take out a bond to do some of the paving. But I think they want to do some fixes along. They were looking for a grant. It was a grant. It was a grant. Now it's a planning grant just to decide what they want to do to fix the erosion on the side of the road there. Oh, so they didn't get anything to fix the road yet? I don't know.

I'd have to go back and think about it.

I'm learning, but I didn't. So they have, also some of these towns have, if you have people that have seasonal homes, like they're not a resident, but they've got a home in that town, they have a higher tax rate. And they don't, yeah. I don't think so. I think we're all the same tax rate. So I think there's things like that that are policy driven that should certainly be on the conversation.

Yeah.

The grays are selling their house.

No.

They went on the market last week, Monday. Who's selling? The grays. Her neighbors. Is that the one that overlooks the lake? Yeah, with the big lawn. Where are they at? 1.7 million.

Or 1.4. They have a whole lot of acreage. They have a lot of acreage. Oh, yeah. You know what? That's the one I did see online. I couldn't picture where it was.

They went online before they were prepared for it to go online. But anyway.

Well, they live in Massachusetts, don't they?

Well, they're here. Bill's here most of the time. They have a condo in Mass because their kids are there. But we're not recurring. Sad day, but it's a lovely time. Land banks were another interesting conversation I went to in a community land trust. So they were talking about What do you do with properties, for example, that are either abandoned or if there's like one spare lot in between houses that's just sitting there vacant, but if you could put something on that that could generate tax revenue, you'd be better off overall. So there's a lot of examples of what people are doing with these land banks. So right now the town says all the time, we don't want to be in the business of owning land. They own the town forests and they've got the buyout land. You can't put a new house on the bio land, but you can do other things there. But there are some houses in town that have collapsed that are just sitting there. So if you could somehow figure out how to do a land bank or a community land trust.

You're saying land bank? Yep. Yep.

So there are people around the country that specifically go around and acquire those properties at a heavy discount. Like one town tried to bid out a piece of property they'd acquired for tax, non-payment of taxes, but they had a minimum, right? And apparently nobody met the minimum. So people wanted it for dirt cheap. In the end of the day, they sold it to a land bank for a very low price because the land bank was committed to putting new, whatever it was, I don't know if it's commercial or residential, but put something new on that property, fix it up, clean it up, put it back on the tax forms, right? That's their whole goal. That's their mission. So I think we could think about in one of our conversations around this stuff, because I think that you could probably identify six or eight properties or more around town. I don't, that's in some towns they do. I don't think they, I'm not talking like eminent domain. You're not taking away anybody's land, but if it's vacant and I certainly think we could look at people who've aggregated a lot of non-payment of taxes here.

That's what I was asking about that one person. We've got a lot of properties here.

Well, the question is, I mean, there's not been a mechanism to do that in the town. There is now, can't develop a code, which we introduced to this last week.

Also, we're reading, they said that even if they're paid off, their name is still going to go on the list.

Well, you have to send this to print at some point. Right. Right. And then if people come in the next day and pay their taxes, it'll still be on the list. Right. I mean, they put tax liens every so often. I don't know where that is in here.

23. Well, it starts on page 21. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, and you can also, if you map, if you look at these with the tax maps and figure out where these are, right, then you can start to say that would be a property for a land bank. Right. Or for somebody to come in and actually have developed that, um, or not. So anyway, uh, and some of these are all, yeah, that's all 26 didn't even show. There is more, I think 25 and 24, right? Yeah. Which is not in here. So I just thought that interesting things there to do with the whole land bank thing. Yeah. It was very fascinating. There's a group called Home Headquarters in New York. They finance some of this stuff. Community Development Financial Institution, CDFI, funds some of these land banks. What's the name of it? CDFI, Community Development Financial Institution. I don't know if they're a national group or if they're only available in certain regions, but we have coastal enterprises, a bunch of financing sources around the state. I don't know if they would do this. So there is some discussion about a new law for tax foreclosure. And I don't know what the tax foreclosure rules are in Maine around municipal use of a community land trust. Could you put it into a community land trust until community decides what they want to do with it? I don't know. We don't have a vacancy ordinance. If a property is left vacant for some length of time and it's falling into disrepair, we don't have any ordinance to handle that.

Well, that's one we should have. Okay, the property right there on School Street, I guess, the old Campbell place, I mean, it burned, but they never cleaned it up. Isn't there a way to take care of some of this? I mean, it's a vacant lot, basically. She's never coming back.

she's in well we'd have to look at the map figure out which property it is who owns it currently you could always approach that owner and offer something for that lot um the one that's falling down on the left-hand side when you go up up up school street oh yeah on the left-hand side he ripped it down i think i think the person across the street which was um a harding

I think he owns it. And he ripped it down. And I don't know why he didn't finish taking it out. There's asbestos, I think, in that house. Maybe he took it down because it was going to be a hazard. But he just took it down for that reason.

That's what I thought. Years ago, I offered to buy that when it was still in decent shape. It would work, but it was not falling down. And the person said, absolutely no way in his entire life is he ever going to sell that property. Butler. He's died. Butler. I just thought it was a cute cottage, and it could be a really cute place. It was a really cute place in that way.

I think who lived there? It wasn't a York.

So there's a lot of underlying principles that were talked about here that were like, determine the places of value, but also how do you make people value the place? Like, how do you make a community that people value the community? Not that was sense wise, but, you know, I mean, things like I want to stay here because I value this location. Yeah. there's a lot of talking about different material construction and things that are getting like super efficient on how do you can build a house with like, you know, fiber cement siding to really up your, our values and all that kind of stuff. Cause there was somebody from Atlanta that was talking about housing design and people are like, how much R value you got in those walls and that roof? Because those houses you're building are not built. Oh yeah. 20 units per acre was actually cashflow neutral. 32 was cashflow positive. Yeah.

20s.

units per acre. Now, again, I don't know if that's individual, I had to go back to look, was that individual houses? Was that just apartments? I don't know.

Break even and 32 make money.

Yeah. So an interesting guy, I've got his deck, he's on, he put everything on his LinkedIn website, urbanists and architecture. He's got quite a set of plans, something they call like the four pack, right? And certain Building standards, you can use this IRC, which is the International Residential Code. But if you change it to a different structure, like two stories instead of three stories or three stories, if you go to anything else, you have to now go to Southern Code, right? But you want to keep it in this because it's cheaper to build. I mean, a lot of tips on how to do stuff. He's got a housing catalog that you can just go in and pull from. And he talked a lot about why you don't necessarily want to have retailed with apartments over it. Cause he's like, he's, he says that is 100% never profitable, but you can build retail with interesting residential, like on the ends, you get attached to it or around the bag. And he had lots and lots of beautiful, he said, he said, all of us architects always will give you big pictures.

So we have a lot of interesting pictures. Cause they were doing that a lot in Vegas, on the outskirts of Vegas. And then we started the, you know, the housing communities. building them but then with that with the units above and the apartments below and they're not profitable i forget why he was saying exactly they weren't profitable but uh you have the units on the end they're profitable well yeah where's my phone because i took a lot of screenshots of his thing maybe because you could get that backspace if it's just one business and nothing on top maybe i'm gonna go back and ask him all those questions

He used up every second of his talk time and there was very little Q&A.

He had a lot to say. Who was this person?

Eric Kronberg, K-R-O-N-B-E-R-G, from Urbanist and Architects.

N-R-O-N-B-E-R-G. He had a lot of very interesting creative methods. Now, actually, here's one that he said actually was profitable.

This is interesting because it's got a flip. So he's got some retail in this corner here, but right next to it's a doorway. The doorway goes up to the residential stuff. This is the one he was talking about that said, that's retail. This is all residential. And you kind of build it all together. But he said, if you try to put apartments over top of that, it would never work. Yeah, it should don't. So that one, the middle section of that is retail.

Oh, I thought that makes more sense. You know why that makes more sense is more units.

Probably. A lot more units. So here's one that he said that was part of a specific project. And this one did have retail lights at the end. But he said right next to that, if you look through the doorway, the doorway goes inside to the hallway upstairs. So there are people over top of that, but it's more of a. But you'd have to develop higher. To get more units. Yeah, correct. Basically, right down the street, they're not. I think his example here was how they had taken a real interesting architectural survey of the community, and they found a lot of these like VNEC. Where is he, Otto? This was Atlanta, but these are projects were all over the country. You know, that kind of New England style homes with dormers and all that kind of stuff, right? So they could design this whole new community to be consistent with the style of the area. Yeah, because when I first started looking at this, I looked at a bunch. You can get free designs from affordable housing stuff all over the state of Maine. But everybody wanted to do the nine box apartments like you see in Lewiston or you see in Rumford. I'm like, I don't want a box. It has to look like a village.

He's known as the Zony Whisperer. He is. He's a very nice guy.

Very nice guy.

Because it is the expertise in navigating zoning regulations and the redevelopment challenges.

He talked about 1,100 square foot two-bedroom home will never pencil, never be profitable, whatever their building codes are down there. You need a 900 square foot two-bedroom home. But in some municipalities, wherever he's designing, they have requirements for how big a bedroom has to be. And like Really, I have an old farmhouse. I have very tiny bathrooms everywhere. Two-story is more land efficient, right? Because you're getting more stuff up. I'm like, so they have finance. Oh, he talked about junior ADUs, these little plugins that can go on the back of the house. That's the ones that, you know, it could increase affordability because now you're buying a house, a kid may be buying his first house and he can become a landlord. I know my brother, my older brother, when he bought his first house, he had an apartment up top in the first floor. He lived on the first floor and he rented the upstairs and that's how he could afford the house.

Yeah.

And you also can keep if you keep housing under certain conditions, certain standards, then it becomes fee simple like mortgages for the people who are buying those, which makes it easier for them to finance.

Right.

I think they're talking new construction. Right. For some of these things. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae are currently offering conventional mortgages, I think, on the ADUs. So if you want to put an accessory drawing in it, you can get financing for that.

Whereas five years ago, you couldn't necessarily get that. Anyway, it was just very interesting.

Those were some of the biggies. But I did like, nobody's coming to save us.

I am starring that, writing that down, because that could be on the front of our comp plan. I really like it.

Yes. What's the other part of the saying on the front? We are responsible for saving ourselves.

Is that on the confine now? No.

Oh, no.

Responsible for saving ourselves.

I mean, we could put a couple of interesting things there. I think that helps set the stage. Put on your big girl pants and save yourself. Which I went to a one of those Yankee exchanges at Christmas this year, and somebody actually had this giant pair of big girl pants.

I mean, this big sideways, you know, huge. You could fit four people in there, basically.

But it said right in the front of them, big letters, big girl pants. I think we should borrow those for one of our sessions. I know.

So you can take a look.

I mean, go ahead and take a look at these and just scroll through those. I took a bunch of this. I will get his slides and share them, but those were just really interesting to see.

So I would assume that he does things outside of Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and there's other architects. I know the Canton Development Corp, which is a nonprofit, has an architect now on the board there who's very good at the same kind of thing. Dan Miller? Yeah. It's the same.

Yeah.

Dan's the one who's going to help us with our charrette, right?

Yes. Yeah. He helped us facilitate those public work sessions. And I'm thinking there may be a lot of these. if we think about how we break these down into like two hour bites of conversation, which I think maybe by the end of June at our next meeting, we should be thinking about that. But I want to see what you're doing with the plan.

I agree.

Because summer's filling up and I'd like to start doing those. Maybe if we do like one every other week for a period of time until we get- That's interesting. Well- So this was interesting because they were talking about how do you build connections in a community, right? And you want places that people can come together, whether it's a park. He said in one of these developments, there was like a little park across the street from it, I guess, whatever. And somebody just put one bench there, one bench. And some older person sat on that at one point and then somebody else came and sat. And eventually it evolved to a... friday night everybody bringing out you know cheese and crackers and your press of a beer and some folding tables and all around that one bench so how do you build connection places yeah in the community for people to connect you know and we have talked a lot about we have old people we have young people and we have people in between right but how do you um Like, do we want to build a senior center that has a daycare attached to it over time so that you could get all these generations together? I mean, there's so many things we could do in so little time. This was, he talked about that thing in the middle is like a planter, I guess, but there was, there was something, there was something adjacent to this, but because there were sidewalks, people could walk by and just say hello on your porch. And he's got a lot of these modular porch designs. Show them. Yeah. There's a lot of modular porch designs he's got where he said, you know, this particular house could sit this way, but we've got porches that can go all the way around here and here. I mean, quick, quick add on stuff.

Are they still attached? I don't know. What about a little sidewalk going up? Yeah, it does. But I was wondering if those homes were actually attached to each other. I don't think so.

I think they're a little consistent.

That's a different expectation. Oh, you know what it is? It's everybody do classes. Yeah.

Asking me before Jeremy's and it's reaching him now.

This is so true.

There is something to be said about having neighbors close. I have friends in town now. If I text her and say I'm out of cinnamon or whatever, I know exactly where her spice cup is. She knows where mine is. I don't even have to ask.

Just come over and let me know you're coming to get it. We're good now.

Very cool. So it was a very interesting group of people. I learned a lot. I talked to a woman who's starting at the really interesting landscape consulting business. So I will get as many of these documents I can get for free. Yeah, this was important to me too. This community design principles define the public versus private spaces. which is true, include features that foster community, create communal moments, promote connections, consider the impact of parking, utilize missing middle types, like the duplexes and the stuff that people, isn't a high rise apartment, isn't a single family home, balance repetition and variation, create a sense of ownership and use dignified designs that are built to last. So if it's 20 years from now, it's still gonna look cool, not outdated. You know? Anyway, I just thought they were... He had examples of... He had those eight points and he had examples under each of those, which I didn't necessarily get all of them, but it was cool. One day? Two days? Two days. I mean, the first day didn't start until like 11, but... And I signed up for a tour to... um they took you to eight different like little restaurant things in the area of scouting to see what what was going on so and then i discovered that the one i want to go on the tiffs overlapped with the i'm like i made it to a few of the places but they have a little bakery and it's a little bar and it's like they're very tiny units yeah like the bar may have maybe seats 10 people you know maybe squeeze it maybe that upstairs in the back i didn't get that far but um She's very nice and she had all kinds of micro-brews and she said, oh, I was a patron here for a couple years when the owner wanted to sell. She only had it for a few months. Those breweries are popping up. They're really popping up everywhere. My brother kept asking me, where do we get micro-brews or locally brewed stuff in this area?

I'm a wrong person. Roll to every town around here. They all seem to have one. Manchester has a really good, it's called the White Dock.

The food there is delicious, by the way. But up above is the brewery, too. And they say it's really good.

There's a place in Lewiston. There's two places that Rick found. One's called The Vault. I forget the name of the other place we went to there. It's more like a beer and wine store. But my brother came out with micro-brewers to take with him on his journey, so he was very happy. So it was very cool. Well worth the money I spent to go, I think.

Okay.

It's tough.

I'll show you what Clyde came up with today. Here you go, Lynn. I can see from here.

I can see. Oh, that is one big cup. Yes.

So the top is much unchanged because what we had talked about was putting the detail behind all of our chapters.

So is that from the Google Docs? Not yet. Oh, okay.

Because as you'll see as we go through some of these, like the formatting is way off. I want to make sure that everything made it from the Word document over the PowerPoint, things like that. Because I just finished pulling it all together. Okay.

15 minutes before I came here.

Because I timed out Claude again. For the second time. I was working on it this morning, and he was like, yes, you've run out of computing power. You need to come back at 4.50. Or you can buy more computing power. I'm like, yeah, no, I'll come back at 4.50. And we'll keep going, right? So yeah, that's the second time I've shut Claude down. So these little green things are meant to be pictures. Pictures, yeah. because we wanted pictures. So this is like population, chapter, big space for pictures. Go slower. Just going to run through it, because I haven't done a lot of editing yet. It kind of looks good. I think it looks good. It's starting to feel more cohesive. This is the economy chapter. Housing. So help me understand.

Go back to like 36 and 37, if you would.

Okay.

So that's what I mean. I need to go pull the word document up, make sure that what's being represented there came over correctly to the doc. Because I don't know all those word documents by heart. What?

What? So... I want to be careful about some of these strategic goals and actions.

These are all going to be, I think that's, that is what I want to propose our next working session to be. So I want to clean this up, post it. And I think we all need to go through each chapter and make notes and make out, move things around. You know, if these are not our goals, then let's blank this out. We'll leave it as placeholder and wait for our shred. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, so, but at least everything is pulling into... Because some of those, yeah, some of those I think are like motherhood and apple pie. And I'm just worried that they get so general and so vague. We want them, coming out of Charette, the town to be more specific.

So like here's some things where the formatting needs to get fixed. And this one, this white one, I think Because there was a problem when I opened this in PowerPoint, it said it needed to repair some stuff and it deleted some things. So I think it took, and that's what I think these white pages are. Okay. That like actually just deleted information. So I definitely need to go back. That's my next thing is I need to do a quality check.

So one of the things I found is when I take it down out of like Google Sheets or Google,

slides or whatever we've got in it whatever if you put it in a google doc google format right and then you try to pull it down yeah i did i didn't i downloaded each doc to my hard drive and then i had claude do one chapter at a time because before when i had to have him do all the chapters at once i think steam came out of my laptop at one point like smoke or something and I'm like, okay, we're just going to do this a little bit at a time, take each document and pull the detail in to each chapter. So that was today.

So I would love a copy that I could print a work in, but then you lose it. Then you have a version.

Right. It's version control. So I'd really like to just clean this up. We'll post it. And then you do whatever editing you want on Google. Okay.

But my concern is you do all that and then you download it again off Google and it messes up all the...

The formatting? No, I'm doing it in PowerPoint, and then I'll upload it.

Right, but I'm saying if we all edit in Google, whatever that is, whatever it is, slides, then when you download it off of there again, it messes up the formatting. Now, that's been my experience in the past, but I haven't used it this time.

Oh, yeah. Okay. We'll try. All right. Let me try. Oh, this looks better. There was something about this that looked really wonky the first time I looked at it. Like, wow, I need to clean this formatting up.

So a lot of this is like shades of green, right? Like that green that's light green. And then there was a bunch of stuff in the front that was blue.

Maybe that was just my eyes.

I don't think it's all shades of green.

Oh, here, right here. Yeah. But this is in our goal sessions and we can change these for sure. We can make them, we can make them great.

I think, yeah, yeah. I think it's somewhere up here. There needs to be a, a master visual, right? That kind of shows whether it's a Venn diagram with a bunch of circles that all come together and these are all the components, but then you're taking each of those components into those specific goals, you know, whatever. It just, for me, it has to be like,

Well, these are loosey-goosey because I told them we didn't have that ready yet. This and the stuff at the bottom. I think that's why Claude made them blue. See, these look really wrong. Look at this. Some of this, I just got to go in here and find these pages and clean all this stuff up. That's just not right.

Did you say there's 80 pages? Yep, 979.

Yeah. See, plan implementation is blue because I told him to placeholder it.

Right.

Anything I told him to placeholder, he made it blue. I didn't put it in the format that we were using.

Okay. I'm good. I'm cool. Yeah. I'm going to leave it blue.

That way they'll know to come back and update. So next step, like I said, go and check, make sure everything came over and you've got it all in these, all the information and clean up some of this stuff. Wherever we had charts and stuff, it came over wonky.

Yeah. So I say you have to go in and play with it. Somewhere on my computer, I've got all the raw data that I put into those charts so that you could make those charts again. Or I made them in an Excel based on the data I had and then I just did the artwork. So we could do that again if we need to pretty quickly. Yeah.

So that's where I got today. And he said he could help me make maps. So that's the other thing I want to work on. All right. But first I'll clean this up so I can get it posted. Okay.

You say posted on Google Docs?

On our Google Docs. And then I'll send everybody the link when it's out there.

Okay. So what's in there for agriculture so far? Nothing? Or is that still a big, pretty big blank?

Not a lot. Okay, let me get to it. Here we go. Existing land use. See how the history came over so weird? That's just so bad.

I gotta fix all that. Look at that. It's so bad.

Looking at history, Brock,

Well, that was kind of a weird section I thought anyway, but it's all right.

Where are you, agriculture?

Let's see my chapter.

That's the other thing I want to do is eventually, these are like, I want to make these hyperlinks. Yes, yeah. So you just click on it and it'll jump. So agriculture is chapter seven.

I'm wondering whether... We want to put the two things that are at the very back end, which are all the actual development plans and action plans, if we want to put those up front at some point.

Those are easy to move around. Slides are easy. Yeah.

I know. I live in Portland. I love them. Yeah, right? I guess Kathy was talking about doing this in Microsoft Publisher. There's a lot of problems with it. Errors in spelling and all kinds of other stuff. And different fonts and type sizes. Yes.

at page 57. This is supposed to be a place for a picture. Yeah.

That's not a very big picture.

Yeah. So maybe some of it, yeah. Under here, the only two farms listed again are Cone and Acres and Rocky Ridge. Yeah.

I think I have three.

Well, Ferris, and then you've got all the stuff that's Crane Brothers. yeah yeah those are the three i think i listed then the crane brothers crane brothers rocky ridge and comet are the three that i listed and i actually carol ferris's is actually i don't and i said you know there's farm credits farm tax credits didn't get and i don't i heard that she's recorded so i just think there may be financial and tax benefits to certain people if they're farms. And I don't know that everybody's taking advantage of those. If you want to put this on a drive and give it to me, I'll start at the bottom and work up some formatting. You can start at the top and work it down. I mean, you're just like getting stuff on the page and all that kind of stuff.

Let me see how far I get tomorrow because I'm going to keep going tomorrow. And then I'll give you a call once you know where I'm at. All right. And we'll figure out how to do it. It says dairy, farming, livestock, hay, pasture, land, especially. But this shouldn't take long, I feel like. You know, compared to getting it all under one deck formatting and fixing my stuff isn't going to take long. And I think we should think about, you know, as a team, that's the next step as we need to go through this and say, is this how we want this to look?

Is it giving people enough information?

Right. Too much? Do we need to edit? Whatever. So it's kind of a... Well, we have a lot of micro farms.

We're out of time, right? That's right. We have a lot of micro farms. Yes. That I think...

I don't know that we have to necessarily list them, but I think there's... And the different types of, you know, section for the different types of forests that we have.

Cool. And these are all the sections... Tree Protax Program. These are all the sections that fit with the sections that we're supposed to have as requirements.

Yes.

Yeah. I think, wow.

And do we, at the end of the day, do we publish it?