Town Council - workshop

What's the last movie you saw?

I saw Odyssey.

Oh, that's recent.

In an IMAX.

If you like a twist, I saw The Prestige has sort of a sixth-inch twist to it.

I'm not getting anything coming out of the PA speakers, but we are live still.

Are we on YouTube? Yes.

And do we normally not do... Do we normally have the screen blue, Chris? It's okay.

That is something for... And then they came out with The Hobbit. No. I actually don't know if it's 1963.

I just wanted to make sure that that wasn't something we were waiting for.

Yeah, I waited to see The Odyssey in an IMAX. It took me literally until two weeks ago to get it. recording in progress be at 613 on September 17th I call order the economic development community Procedurally, there are four other commissions of boards here tonight. We're going to take a pause, and we're going to let them each individually open their meetings as well. So let's start off with Planning Board.

Chris Stickney, Clerk of the Planning Board, calling our meeting to order, 9-17.

Next, Conservation.

Mark LePage, opening the Conservation Commission meeting for September 17th in Franklin. Okay.

ZBA?

Janelle Lang for the Zoning Board, calling our meeting to order on September 17th. Beautiful.

And then last but not least, design review.

Okay.

Yeah, it's Tahani Alkilani from the Design Review Committee. I just opened the meeting on September 17th.

Perfect. Awesome. Excellent. Well, the four of us on the EDC want to thank you all for coming tonight. As we were talking about here, this is probably maybe the first time in a long time, or the first time ever, getting all four kind of major boards all together. As you know, we've been talking about our job is economic development, and this session, thanks to the comment Bricolet made think a couple months ago in a CBA meeting called it permitting 101 so that's what this discussion is it's meant to be a workshop not not Jamie came to me and said does he have to do anything tonight in theory no this is meant for our time to to do all the talking I think to set kind of what we're looking for for tonight I think our approach, the EDC's approach to this comes in two parts. This may be a little bit more my bend than anyone else. The other EDC members, when I'm done, can chime in before we get going as well. What I want to do is I want to have a conversation, one, around, based on our current bylaws, where can the permitting process, the approval process for projects be changed so that they move through the process as quickly and efficiently as possible? That's one of my ultimate goals here. And to that end, today, I don't know why it just so happened i got in my email my town email a um an email from the pioneer institute which is the think tank and it literally was the subject of it was solving the permitting process 10 ways municipal municipals can make the approval process fairer and more predictable uh yeah maybe well it's probably not a i probably heard i was talking about it and somehow it got to my email it's helpful yeah i deleted it

I got it, but I'm not opening anything.

Okay, well, I opened it, and it was a 23-page document. I will make sure it gets sent to all of you, and there are points in it that I'll talk about tonight. But I thought that was kind of the first thing. And then the second piece of it is ultimately, and I think Jamie had conveyed this to you all, and some of you have done it and even presented it ahead of time, what changes can we make in the proposed bylaws so that they are, and I'm going to steal from the last one, to make the bylaws in plain language, remove redundancies, and clarify definitions. Because if we can do those, make those changes, to me, I think it also helps in the process. And in fact, that is one of the suggestions given the 10 suggestions. So those are the two goals that we're trying to get out of it. I'm going to defer to Caroline to see if she wants to add anything to that.

No, that's, I think it's great. I was told today that our meetings go too long and we have a, it's all been said, but not by me. So I'm going to be crying.

Okay. Okay. Max, you want to add it?

The only thing is, is I think this is a good opportunity to work better and closer together with each other. Make sure we're all on the same page. And maybe at the end of the meeting, maybe we could explore if there's some way we could continue this, maybe having a representative from each committee continuing to meet. At the council, we don't have a lot of professional experience with zoning and that kind of thing, and you all do. So being able to leverage that going forward might be something that we can discuss in terms of bylaws and that kind of thing. So if that's interesting to you on a board, pulling something together where we can sort of collaborate and communicate better, we can talk about that at the end of the meeting.

Mike, I think you said it well. I think the aim here is to try to speed the process up, and thank you all for coming, to speed the process up as much as we can, whether that's bylaw changes or even just your own input on a process or a procedure that you go through or struggle with or always seems to take too long, you know, maybe we talk through that with the ultimate goal in mind of trying to speed the process up. Perfect.

Well, before we get going, I just, I did want to highlight some of the stuff that was actually sent in that, in that, whatever, in that tonight. So, they actually had, they had recommendations that span three categories. And I, and when we're talking tonight, we can reference back to these. make the process easier to navigate. And some of their suggestions were around using standardized online portals for pyramid application submittals and having a single point of contact with the applicant throughout the process. Their second category was faster coordinated reviews. So coordinate peer reviews early in the process and standardize and synchronize internal technical reviews. And the last one was predictable decisions by codifying objective review criteria and efficiencies and local ordinance and bylaws. And we also require training for local boards. I thought those were really good, three good pillars with some definitions underneath it. So with that, I'm going to kind of open it up. Like I said, this is a workshop. I'm not going to pose questions or point to people. I'm hoping we can have a robust discussion. And again, I'd like to focus this part specifically based upon where we are today with our bylaws, how can we make the process more efficient and I will say this when I've had conversations with the town staff and Jamie we have the most efficient process in the world we probably do but I can always say we can make it more efficient and it is the dreaded red tape if we can cut out some red tape it makes it even more attractive and I'm not just talking about the last comment i'll say i'm not just talking about large projects i'm also even talking about what we can do for the resident who has one simple thing they want to do and we'll talk about that as well so with that i'm going to shut up and i'm going to see if anyone wants to jump in and and share. Mark, you look like you're ready to go.

Yeah, I'll throw something out there and, you know, kudos to you guys for having us in. Conservation Commission, we started thinking about this to begin with and I'd say your guys' invitation accelerated the process, you know, got us digging deeper. But we just went through a process where we analyzed our bylaws and regulations, right? And the good thing is we didn't go through and add anything, right? We weren't adding statues. We weren't making things more complex, more difficult. But boy, you know, I think it'd been a long time since these things were written, right? And just in terms of updating language, And what I mean by that is we updated some definitions that better match the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act, right? 310 CMR. So we're consistent, right? An applicant comes in and we've got our own verbiage. That just adds complexity. The way we define resources. small things like, you know, we were using an abbreviation that we had no idea we were using, but it was listed in the bylaws. It didn't match an abbreviation that's commonly used in the industry. So, you know, I don't know what the bylaws and regulations look like for other boards and commissions, but I can tell you for the Conservation Commission, we were glad we went through it. We redlined it. We're very close to being done with the process. and then results gonna be something that I think is a lot easier for applicants to understand and will more closely match things that happen at the state level. We also found some key components some key components that were in the regulation area that should have been in the bylaw. So just making sure that the statutes are listed correctly and in the right spot, that's part of being efficient. So that was a worthwhile process for us that I'll throw out there. It wasn't super complex, and I won't say we found a ton, but we found enough. to make it worthwhile.

I should probably know the answer, and I don't, that's why I'm going to ask the question. You mentioned regulations and bylaws. What's the difference with the conservation when you mention regulations versus bylaws? I can answer.

So the bylaw is voted in by town council. The commission has the authority to issue regulations on their own. That's one piece of it. The meat and potatoes is that regulation is process, where the by-law is the statute, what needs to be followed. That is the law versus the process on how to follow that law.

Regulation kind of governs how we go about it, right? Where the by-law are the guidelines that the applicants have to adhere to.

Meeting end times, regulation, for example. Ours is 10.

OK.

I will, just because you mentioned it, you did share kind of the red line version of it. And I'm going to give you my visceral reaction. You said you made it simpler. But when I read the red line, I saw more red to it than I saw a deletion. So how does adding more text to the bylaw create it more simpler in the grand scheme of things?

So great question. So one of the reasons you're seeing more red, right, is what I just mentioned before, is we had a good bit primarily around buffer zones, right, which are something that is specific to the municipal, should be bylaws. You know, the state doesn't deal with that. Federal Lands Protection Act doesn't deal with that. All that buffer zone regulation, or all those buffer zone statutes we're in our regulations in the wrong spot. So it's actually not a ton more verbiage overall. Matter of fact, we even consolidated it. We just moved it from one spot to another. If you look at that document, we put the buffer zone bylaws in, I think it's 181.5. That used to be where we started with notice of intent. So everything got moved down, I know this is kind of arcane, right? What used to be 181.5 is now 181.6. So holistically, there's less. I know it doesn't look that way, but we moved it from the regulations into the bylaws, which we sent you. We actually used to have a separate paragraph on 0 to 25, 0 to 50, I'm sorry, 25, 50, 50 to 100. We consolidated it down into one paragraph and then put the characteristics. So we did consolidate, but we just moved it around.

We also expanded on our definitions based on feedback from what we get from applicants. So the things that they used about or they needed clarification on, we made that

explicit we broke out some things right we i think it's i could look at it we just used to have rivers right so we broke out perennial streams correct right i didn't notice that where you define what a river is what a perennial stream would have yada yada and again that matches 310 cmr more closely and it's better for applicants because you know you're talking about perennial stream it's typically a different conversation than a river but you know or bank So it's helpful for them to have that additional context. So we did add some, you're right, but a lot of it was just moving parts.

And less time for me answering questions for streamlining and efficiency.

I appreciate that. Anyone else?

I'm not going to dive into specific bylaw changes right away. for anyone in the room who doesn't know me, Jen Williams. I'm currently on the ZBA. I was formerly on the planning board. I don't know that this is even... Oh, is the PA system working? Oh, it is now for anyone online. And I'm also a homeowner who went through the... process of attempting to get a variance. Recently, my husband and I are both architects. We'd like to think we generally have a sense of what we're doing, particularly around residential construction, these types of processes in various towns, but also obviously Franklin. Um, from a personal standpoint of going through that process, it was almost impossible to find what we needed to find online. Um, If a person was out of the office, we like, just for example, we submitted our application for a variance. Somebody was out of the office that day, so it didn't get filed. And then we had to wait an entire month to get on a meeting agenda. And then that meeting got canceled. So we had to wait another month. The rest many know what went on, but about the permitting process, if this was an online process, particularly for homeowners, but really for everyone, then we wouldn't have relied on a single person who's probably on vacation over the summer to be able to receive the documents and file them. It would automatically go into some database or system that's dated and be recorded. An online process would, in an intuitive way, take homeowners step by step through what they need to go through in order to... even get a meeting, get onto a meeting. Online also is the benefit of with each step having links to other things or definitions. There's a lot from a homeowner's perspective. People who this isn't their day to day, they're not in the field of construction or development or design or architecture or civil engineering, you name it, right? They have no idea what they're doing. I think us going through it just highlighted how bad it really is because we do know what we're doing and we still couldn't figure it out. You know, thankfully, it's easy to ultimately eventually get on the phone with someone and get a hold of someone days later. But an online process would save the town employees a lot of time. It would save us as homeowners a lot of time. So that's just a general process thing. And really anyone who's applying. Developer, like massive project and homeowner, like it should just be online. Like that's like the easiest low-hanging fruit. It's also one of many... things that were identified as the town master plan update as a goal is to get this process online. I searched streamline permitting process in the master plan update and those words all together are listed four times. The word streamline is listed a million times, permitting like a hundred times. It's clearly been identified as an opportunity for us to improve as a town to encourage development and then the trickle-down effect of economic impact in a positive way. So I'm grateful that we're all here together. I do think also related to the permitting process, there really should be two avenues to select how to go through the process, meaning if you are a homeowner with a tiny variance or situation, that should be just easy. If you are a developer or somebody who's going through likely a more extensive special permit or you name it, like all the massive projects that the town gets all worked up about, but a much, much bigger project, commercial development essentially, or multi-family residential, all those larger projects, that may warrant a different process that is also clearly identified. It could be like an opening page. Are you a homeowner in Franklin asking for X, Y, and Z? Or are you a developer, you name it, asking for X, Y, and Z? you know, I, I think the last thing I'll say, uh, specifically related to, I'll just say the easy stuff, which are generally variances, um, or, you know, certain, uh, applications that it feels like if homeowners are able to justify certain criteria that, uh, it could be reviewed by town employees. and just be approved. And I'll just give an example. We've had so many, a lot of variances come in front of us about stormwater, impervious area, you know, trying to put in a pool or trying to add something to the property that has, you know, they're overall have more impervious area that's allowed by the bylaws in that zoning district. If they can prove out with a civil engineering stamp all the calculations that with the mitigation that they're implementing on their site and the math, uh equates to them ultimately resulting in less or even better circumstances than what it was prior based on a professional engineer's stamped uh drawing that should just be able to be approved like they shouldn't even have to wait months to go in front of the zoning board um to be granted a variance to allow a homeowner to do that right so if like the homeowner it's clear to them that they can do their homework and what they need to show what they need to prove what professionals they need to engage to allow potentially town employees to just review and make the decision, then there may be less long meetings, right? There may be less meetings where we're all here at 7 o'clock, 10 o'clock at night. So I know that was a lot. Those are the top things I want my mom.

Just to add, I mean, I did see in your last meeting where you guys did talk about that, you brought that up, Joe, where if we can, for that particular thing, why, if it's a stamp plan and da-da-da, and Gus can sign off on it, he doesn't, we don't need to come, because quite frankly, I think I said this to Janelle the other night, all you guys say when that comes, oh, thank you for showing me the calculations and blah, blah, blah. There's a few times where you... may quabble or whatever. But for that, and I don't know, and I want to figure this one out, and that technically, I don't know if that's a bylaw change or whatever, what we'd have to do to make that process so that they wouldn't have to come to a ZBA. And I'm not saying it's by right, but... It has to meet the requirement. It doesn't require a board approval. It can just get a simple stamp from the planning department. Marina is getting ready to chime in there, I think.

Yes, because I think 40A said that it has to be a variance. It can only be granted by MGL 40A, sorry. It can only be granted by the special program grants.

So the question will be, remember, zoning boards of appeals is all in state law. If we could do these administratively, I'm telling you right on the record, we would do them in a heartbeat. And everybody behind me, I can speak for them. I know we'll do that in a second. What I will research, and I believe Marina is completely correct on that, you require the variance. But what I will do is one of our action items we'll take back to Attorney Sorrell is ask whether or not we can do a special home rule petition to see if we can get a home rule exemption. My educated guest tells me no, but we'll double check because if we get a home rule exemption, then other towns and cities are going to want that, and then that starts to dig into state law. So sometimes you get to that point where you want to do something, but eventually it would open up a can of worms. But let's check and do our due diligence with Attorney Sorrell and see if that's something that we can do.

But even for – let's say we could not. I know we're kind of going a little off topic. But that doesn't preclude us from making that process simpler so that, in theory, it's more of a rubber stamp for this. Literally, Gus brings it, and all I've got to do is just vote it. There's minimal discussion about it. They just rubber stamp it.

It doesn't have to be hearing?

Right. You can put it on. The homeowner doesn't need to show up because that's the one beef that it does say in here, and I think you'll all agree. This process... is a two-way street it's dependent upon also the the applicant to provide a good documentation and i'm sure we all know when applicants come they present plans and it's missing holes even after they've gone through a technical review or pre-review they still don't provide everything so i understand that but if as you guys have said a couple of times because i've watched those If you just bring this, it literally looks like this, then it's a rubber stamp. You don't even need to show up, quite frankly, to that point.

They do have to vote.

No, they have to vote, but the applicant doesn't need to show up. The applicant did all their work ahead of time. Gus has signed off on it, and these guys just have to rubber stamp it. Gus, you're standing there, so I'm going to recognize you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Gus Brown, Building Commissioner. I'm sure these same discussions are happening in the State House right now with frustrated people that are going through boards and so forth and so on. And we don't take any of it lightly. We try to do the best we can. Sometimes staff is a little bit busy at times with the amount of staff that we have. I mean, I had three ladies at one time. The council was good enough to grant me an assistant that we will hire soon, so things will get better, but it's been tough in the building department. We did... three point eight million dollars last year. That's a lot of money for a department to bring in with a short staff. And I'm not looking for sympathy, I just keep plugging away. So, you know, when it comes to stormwater, when it comes to impervious coverage, There's a good possibility that I would be in agreement to try to rubber stamp it, and the reason I would is because it's infiltration when you come down to it. If an engineer certifies that we're in a water resource district that only allows 15% coverage, that they're at 20, yet they've mitigated it down to 10, I don't know the parameters of how we would do it. I don't know about home rule. That's all the higher ups jobs, Mark Sorrell. But why couldn't I stamp it if I see something that clearly meets the criteria? Why does someone have to wait two and a half months to put a pool in? And what happens sometimes, I'm not going to point blame at anybody. I'm going to fall on the sword and say we could do a better job. And one of the things that we just started to create was an online system so that people can do it that way. I'm going to tell you a story. Real quick, I pulled a... variance application out of Shrewsbury Mass two years ago for an addition that I was going to build. And their process was online. And because of the OpenGov system that we have, and there's a few people in the room that know about this, I just found out about this yesterday. You can actually clone another person's application, ZBA, and we did it yesterday. And I'm in the middle of trying to refine it so that people can get online. But the story really revolves around the fact that Shrewsbury couldn't decide whether I needed a special permit or a variance. It took a long time for them to decide. At one point it was a special permit. Then they went back to a variance. So I understand the frustration level. And then you got the contractor showing up. And he, you know, he's there for months doing work. So between the board and everything you got going on, people want their project done overnight. And I get it. And we all try to do the best we can. There's a frustration level, but we can do better.

To pick up on what you said, Jen, and this is to Marina and Amy and you guys back there, we do not have any online process today.

We have a small portion of it being online right now, but we will be fully online with our application at OpenGov very shortly.

Building permits are online. Ours are online for local permits. We can't supersede what the state requires. They have their own system. We're just waiting for me to review, to deploy.

All of our departments are online. They've been on Viewpoint for nine or 10 years. We started the system in 2016. We were one of the first, probably the first 10 communities. I think it's called OpenGov now, but I still call it Viewpoint because that's what it was when we got it. Board of Health. And we actually did take forms from Williamstown and Shrewsbury back then. And other towns have taken our forms, by the way, and copied them and used them in other communities. But I think what Gus spoke of, the special permit variants, Sometimes it's not always, not all of this is black and white. And one of the challenging things with OpenGov, we went through this. Gus remembers. Amy remembers because she was here. Marina was not. We wanted OpenGov to be all for planning board, conservation, and everything. But the software, at some point, you get down these rabbit holes where you can't perfectly line out a pathway to exactly point A to point C, and you can't map out an application that's perfect. And so, again, I think they're working on this in terms of working within the system. Some of the technology's gotten better. But some of the difficulty here is that some of this is very gray. Some of it's a little subjective. And I would ask Jen, you know, I agree with her values. I certainly agree that if we had an online system, it would be more customer service friendly. um you know and and you know if there are any suggestions of other towns or other software programs that you have let us know we'll happy to demo them you know if there's stuff that's more detail oriented because planning board applications are extremely complicated with this with the plan with the plans and what things have to you know what people have to submit the file sizes are oftentimes really large some members like things in hard copy some people can see things online You know, we've dealt with this at the council level too over the years. It's like sometimes people want everything on a computer, they can do it on a computer. Some people come in and they want everything printed out. So there's a little bit of that in it too. And so I'm not trying to make any excuses for the commentary, but if there are software programs out there as an architect, Jen, that you're aware of, or when you and Sam do business in other towns, like let us know. We all speak to our colleagues pretty frequently in our other communities. I feel like I've never heard of some one-stop-shop software program for planning boards that has taken over Massachusetts and everybody's using Acme Company Inc. Everyone uses OpenGov.

Everyone uses OpenGov.

We were literally one of the first 10 towns in the state to use it. We used to get a huge discount for that that we don't get anymore. Everyone uses OpenGov, so we are working on that. It is something that we're focused on, but I think you're right. There's no other software program that we're aware of that planning boards use, right?

And I will say, like design review, we got our applications up maybe about a month ago, and we started trying to implement it started in September for the new applications and we came up against a roadblock so now we're accepting paper applications again because we're trying to get it so that when you go to design review you get an approval from the Commission but then you also still need to get a building permit so we're trying to tie those two steps together because people don't always take that second step and they need that building permit so we haven't made the application live even though it's all fleshed out amy is working to start to get to the um the planning board applications up on opengov also as she's starting with sort of the simpler ones and we're going to hope to be able to copy from neighboring towns to try to make that a lighter lift to go back to the previous discussion about sort of rubber stamping some applications some various applications or things like that would have some concerns about that just because we do as department heads especially rely on our boards to have that subject knowledge and to be those experts in the field that and you guys might catch stuff that we miss so I don't want to ever sort of really run the risk of having something come across one of our desks. And we know how busy the building department is. And I don't want to sort of say that this is just a Gus problem. I think it's an all of us problem. I don't want to have that somebody goes into the wetlands, but we didn't notice it or something like that. So I use our board and commissions really that second set of eyes second third fourth however many sets of eyes and they are you know great at what they do so um i would have my own concerns about you know doing it administratively and and um removing the public eyes in that process too

I'm sure maybe a conspiracy theory or two dead serious, right? Like what's going on? What did Jamie do? He's behind the scenes. Gus is doing that. Hey, let's be real. Like we've heard this, right? So, I mean, that's a real thing. So there has to be a little bit of that publicly, but I think if you take your point, Mr. Chairman, you know, if there is a way to try to make it a little easier. So when the applicant shows up, um, I'm well aware that the expectation is Amazon same day prime. But, you know, I think we want to try to get there. But, you know, it is challenging sometimes.

Sorry, Max, sorry to interrupt. One more thing about the Statehouse. If you are in the know right now, there's a huge push to reduce all the dimensional requirements for building. So that's going to slow us down with the amount of hearings we have. Not for nothing. That's what I think. You know, we're not going to get as many people coming in because things are going to be by riots. My opinion is what I see. Definitely true.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So I just, building on sort of that, you know, I think I was looking at the list of forms here on one of the packets. Is there any way to reduce the duplicative information that people have to provide? Like if you have, you know, the first form I think is sort of Certificate of ownership. If your name and address and phone number is already on that phone and staples to the other form, do you need that information twice?

Through the chair, Max, that online system, if you've got that package you've got when you close on your house, you're going to have that. A lot of people don't retain a lot of that material when they buy a home, so that we can't help with. But this online system, I feel like once you can do it in the luxury of your own house. I don't think you have to go hunting for it. As much as, you know, you come into town hall, you don't, you hit, I don't want to say you're blindsided by what you have to bring in as far as requirements, but it's an eye opener what you've got to do. Some people are really good at it because they've done it before. Other people look like they're deer in the headlights. And, you know, you feel bad for them, but I can't go through all your personal items to find this form. On the other hand, we can talk to Mark Sorrell, with ownership means, things of that nature, why is a deed not good enough? Why do they have to fill out this ownership certificate? It's just the way the process that we've done, but we're open to anything we can do to help.

Yeah, and I think my point is just like, you know, if there's information that a person has to type or write more than once, is there some way you could package it in a certain way so that you know you just have one form or you just only have to put that information down once you don't have to put it down for each form or if you have something that you have give to the planning board and a lot of that same information is going to design a review that you don't have to just you know you don't have to submit the same information twice and it could just go from planning board to design review and then you submit anything additional I remember thinking about Barack Obama was running for president and he said that he wanted to have those He wanted to pre-fill the tax return with information that they already knew about you. And of course the tax industry was very upset about that and so they killed it. But stuff like that to make it easier for, you know, if you have stuff in the system already online that you pre-filled for a previous permit, you can just click a box and refill it again. Stuff like that.

Standardization.

So you actually touch upon one of the issues that we came up with, or we came upon in design review, which is why our online permitting is sort of on hold a little bit right now. Because when you've got your application in, then we're trying to get the building permit application. We're trying to get the system to not only prompt you that you need to take this next step, but also pre-populate a lot of the information from that original application into the building permit application. So that is something that we've identified, and we're hoping that we're going to be able to do that with OpenGov. It's not really something that their system is automatically set up to handle, so it needs sort of a lot of building on the back end to make that process work. Now, with regards to cross, like if design review and planning board both have, like the Main Street project,

Pollinating.

Pollinating, yes. Thank you. Those applications, that might be a little bit more difficult because they are sort of standalone-ish. We could see a...

They could use the same... On the certificate of ownership, it's a single form by itself. They could reuse that same form to submit with design review or conservation or planning. So they wouldn't have to regenerate that form for each application. I know with planning, our forms are all individual, so they're typically only filing one form with us. If they are filing multiple forms, we accept one certificate of ownership. So they, you know, they could reuse that form because it is an individual form and not attached to the other applications that go with it. Okay. If that makes sense.

Yeah, and I just didn't know, I was looking at the physical forms and the need to be notarized. When you do the online version, is that still necessary somehow?

There would be an electronic signature like I certify under penalty of perjury sort of stuff that you would have to sign off on. And you're creating an account when you create the OpenGov account. So you would be submitting your own sort of personal information.

Through the chair, I never walked into the town of Shrewsbury until the night of the hearing. I did everything all along. Now don't go, I can't promise that's what happened here, but we're shooting for it.

And Munis is a completely different system. That's more for administrative purposes.

100% finance HR has nothing to do with it. And there's no modules or anything within that system that's available for this type of thing.

And is this platform, OpenGov, is it open source or is it closed? Could IT feasibly go into the source code and do a patch?

No. Actually, Viewpoint, and Gus will remember this, Amy will remember this, we were one of the earlier adopters, and actually... They're the only company I've ever experienced in my career where we went and did forums with them with other communities and gave them feedback eight, nine years ago. And surprisingly, they took our feedback and they reconfigured the system to what local cities and towns were hearing and saying. And I think as Marina might have pointed out, and I've been out of it for a few years now, but since it's been up and running, but it seems like it's pretty much the mewness of now planning for cities and towns. It's like the de facto software program. They're very responsive. They're continuing to evolve. And any feedback that we have, these folks work with them to try to give them suggestions, and they're a very responsive company for a tech company. They're national now. They have hundreds of communities throughout the country.

One other thing I'll add is I know sometimes when you have an application, because I've had to do applications. They have the forms, but they also have a profile about you where it has your name, your address, your phone number. Is separating that out into a profile better than having a form for each time you do I think you create an account, right?

You create a profile.

So it has your phone number?

That's why we actually have them. So your dog license, you work through the town clerk, you do your dog registration through it, and that was the reason why we went with Viewpoint because it was a one-stop shop platform. that every resident could do for all of their business within everything in Town Hall, except for paying taxes, which is a whole different system, which we just can't merge them. But for just about everything else, abutter notifications, DPW permits, my office is 100% all the licensees for liquor licensing go through Viewpoint. I mean, it's across the board. Every department in town uses it. If you go on the platform, each department has their own profile. You can go in. look in it, you can create your own account, your own profile, and you can do all your business in, pretty much all your business in one spot.

So if the information is in your profile, do you need to put it, does the form need to ask for it a second time?

I don't think name and address and stuff like that, I think that's all you need for the person, right?

Yeah, that would be unique to the person. Sometimes you've got folks that are applying on behalf of someone else. So we do need to ask name and address because you could be the applicant, but it's on behalf of an owner. So there are places where we can't cut that out. But if we can figure out a way to sort of duplicate it in your next step in the process, that would obviously save a little bit of time.

Thank you.

Thank you. Just on the top of this conversation, I'm sure the software will be figured out and we'll get to a point where it's super obvious. I do think our website could also help us to eliminate a lot of the phone calls and the questions and the emails. Again, I think this is less so developers know what type of forms they need to submit, but for the residents, for the homeowners, just a couple of suggestions. I think that it would be great to have like an FAQ frequently asked questions of like, what am I even applying? What do I need to apply for? What's a special permit? What's a variance? What might, you know, and have an obvious link of where that is on the website. I think right now homeowners might not even know if they have to go to the zoning board or the planning board. And that might sound silly to all of us or people sitting in the room, but like So much could, I think, just help answer questions without you all having to answer questions, right? And helping them to even get to how do I even start the online process, or how do I even start a project? And then similarly, I do think it'd be helpful just for the, again, for the residents to be informed of what's going on in town. if instead of having to go to all these separate pages to find projects, what hearings have happened or are upcoming, and some things for that project are filed within the planning board page, but then stuff that is specific to just a design review meeting, they have to go to that page. It'd be great if there was just a projects, current projects, past projects, upcoming projects, part of the website, which then tied to This is in front of planning, zoning, design review commission, conservation commission, et cetera. And so it was all in sort of one place. BPDA website is a really great example of just the BPDA, the Boston Planning Development Authority, of all the information being very easy to find. I know it's Boston and it's crazy, but it is easy to find.

They have a staff the size of our entire town hall.

Yes, yes, yes. Chris Stickney whispered that in my ear, so I am blaming Chris Stickney on that one.

It could be a model of just how communication can be doled out.

The reference was, one, get in trouble, but two, to her point, there is a singular page where you just go click projects, you search your project, and then there is a literal timeline of what meetings, when it was approved, denied, continued, whatever, in a single stream. And it has links to all of the documents that were uploaded.

We'll circle back as a staff during tech review and try to look at the BPA model, and we'll try to figure out a way to do this. I do think that it can be improved. I'm absolutely not saying it can. I will say nobody reads frequently asked questions. No one reads anything. Look, they don't. And we've actually found in our experience that the phone call is the most efficient way. I remember vividly a moment during one of the hearings, Janelle, you literally walked somebody at the microphone who couldn't find anything. You said, man, if you go to Zoning Board of Appeals, projects, Stobarts, it's there, right? Like I think some of it is just, it is very confusing, it is this endless labyrinth of questions, but I think we have to try to be better to try to bring that chaos and confusion a little closer to where people are at, but also realizing we can't spend hundreds of hours trying to create something that's gonna, like a frequently asked questions that no one's gonna read, because a frequently asked questions we did it for the override and we had like 50 questions and like the website analytics were like eight people went there. So I think like some of it's like a return on investment that just isn't going to go there. And we've encouraged people and I know this sounds funny and I know it's antiquated. If you pick up the phone and you get a live person, you're probably going to get an answer to the question a heck of a lot faster than if you try to read the bylaws, read all the questions, search around. But I think to Chris's point and Jen's point, I think we can create kind of a clearinghouse spot that if there are different projects on ZBA or design review or planning, we could do something creatively from a PR standpoint to say, are you concerned about development? Are you looking for something right now? here on the home page and then at least there's some one pager to try to orient like a table of contents where people can go. And as we evolve, we'll take this, you know, certainly advice under advisement and try to figure out, you know, easy ways to do this. I would note, just for the cheap plug, we have a legal advertisements free email sign up list where if you sign up for our legal notices, you get all of the legal notices that are there. I tell people to sign up for that all the time. If you're concerned about development, sign up for the legal notices because it goes right to your inbox and you'll be included to know what's going on.

Thank you. Joe Halligan with the ZBA. I've been lucky enough to serve 14 years in the planning board, a couple years in the ZBA now, almost two years with my partners here on the master plan. So I'm very educated on that side of the field, but I'm more educated as the developer. I've been through the rank. I've done it all. I've seen it all. The way to speed this up is pretty simple. If I want to just renovate a home for a building permit, there is a checklist that I have to go through before that permit is issued. Taxes, water bills paid, submit a plan, engineer, you have to do all that or I don't get a building permit. To speed up ZBA planning board conservation, right now there's kind of a feeling in town, well, anybody can apply if they want, but they're applying with half applications. There should be a form or a way that an applicant can't even get in front of a board until everything is done. If someone's coming in with a big warehouse down on Grove Street, we know Beta Group's going to review that. That fee should be paid to them prior to coming to us with the application, reviewed, so at least when it comes to the first meeting, we're talking about something, not, okay, well, we're going to have to let Beta Group, the peer reviewer, review this. Let's postpone this. Oh, it's a holiday, 4th of July. We'll see you in eight weeks. That should be done at the planning department level, reviewed, and looked and says, okay, this is 99.9. There will be some comments from the boards, but we're there. Most of the conversations are about, can you get this? We'd like to see this. That could all be done boilerplate prior to getting to a planning board or a ZBA meeting. And that's my opinion. The next thing to speed things up, Piggybacking what Jen said, I'm not throwing anybody under the bus. Four weeks ago, I was approached to buy the Aiken Farms. They accepted a verbal offer. I said, I just want to do a little homework for us. I know it's a farm. I always dreamt of owning something like that. Cleaning it up, pony rides, pumpkin patch, and selling the stuff out there. Right on the corner like that. I made two calls to the Conservation Commission, no answer, and an email.

I emailed you back.

I never got that response.

Okay, that's fine. I'll resend it. But I did email you back, and I said I can't call you today.

I don't know where it went, but I didn't get it. That's all right. But I'm not throwing anybody on the bus. But this is what we developers go through. Now, three weeks later, can I pick up on that? And I've lost interest since. Another project came up. Time is of the essence on some projects, and quick responses or answers or a phone call back. It keeps people happy. You want to keep the project going. Again, no disrespect. It's just the way some things happen. It happens to me and myself. But those small things can speed things up. I'm glad we have a council. Because I was really under the impression when the council got elected that you guys were here to slow development and slow the town of Franklin down. We don't want another framing in. I'm a little confused because now I'm hearing how do we speed it up and get development.

I think the answer to that question is certainly I can only speak for me personally as one of nine. I'm on because I believe in smart economic development. I'm not going to go build a seven-story building on East Central Street. It's about smart development. I think there's a balance there. So, yes, I am pro-development, but it is pro-smart development. And I'm not speaking for the other members here or the other members of the council. And so that's part of the reason why I wanted to get on the Economic Development Committee is because I also believe to work our way out of a fiscal cliff, you have two ways to do it, or three ways. You cut, you raise taxes, or you find another way to drive revenue. We cut, and we know typically we haven't been able to raise taxes, so let's find a way to do smart economic development. If there's a way that these boards can come together to make it more enticing to do smart stuff, then that's why we're having this conversation.

And to touch on that, I watch all the meetings and I see where we're going to be in a downfall four or five years from now. We need development. But I'm glad that we have a council that, again, I'm not looking for seven-story buildings. That would be done in Franklin. But someone who's looking positive to get things done so that we can keep up with the times.

Correct.

And if people didn't want to develop, we don't need anybody in this room. Correct. So I look at it as when someone comes in front of the board, the glass is half full. Let's try to get the best development out of it. We have someone with a positive attitude trying to develop. Let's help them get the best product we can.

Mm-hmm.

there's better there's been a feeling in town over the years that slow it down slow it down and it starts to discourage developers i think in the last two or three months there's been two planning board members uh meetings canceled there's nothing on them and now i know you won't like this subject but there is also the word spreading through developers and people who want to invest in town that a split tax rate might come that's one more nail in the coffin what it takes to get a project permitted the expenses the cost Whatever you think you're going to spend on a project, it's one-third more, guaranteed. If you're going to spend a million, it's going to be a million and three when you're done. The developer doesn't find that out until the end, but that's on him. That's part of business. But there's a lot of unknowns. All those little nails in the coffin start to make it like, you know what, I think I'll hold back for a while. I don't want to feel that way. I want to feel that the town wants to see a nice product being built or renovated and create more tax, more revenue, beautify the town.

That's my opinion as a developer and a member on a board.

Appreciate that.

Thank you. Just to build on the comments you made, Jen, about the permitting process kind of online. In fact, that's the first two steps of their 10 things, which is make online permitting information clear, easily accessible, and consistent with zoning. And the second one was use a standardized online portal for permit application submittals. So to that end, actually, they did reference that the Franklin Regional Council of Governments in the center. Franklin County?

Yeah.

That they, Franklin region, it's right in the smack dab middle up north part of the state. Northwest of the state. Yeah, northwest part of the state. That they actually have a, that they've all partnered together And they have their online permitting, yada, yada process. So I will take it as a takeaway for me. I will reach out to the individual who wrote this article and find out more about that. But it appears that they have created a process. And, Jamie, you've got to look on your face that maybe you know what the heck I'm talking about.

FERCOG is a different structure than what we have in eastern Massachusetts. The reason why they're all regionalized like that is because every town out there has about 800 people in each community. Greenfield is the main community there, which is about half the size of Franklin. And then the other 30 towns or so, I mean that's probably one of the most rural parts of Massachusetts. So they act, they have a regional county form of government out there. Individual towns have town meeting. But they have so few resources and so few staff, they have to regionalize in that way and they have to have one system. They have a regional animal control for 35 towns. They have regional public safety. They have regional virtually everything. So they're probably not the best example as an apples to apples comparison. They're a unique, obviously unique area.

Yeah, I just bring it up because it did reference it in the document and it said that they have under one software license the ability to do online permitting, what else did it mention? A number of different, inspectional services, yada, yada, yada. So I'll take it as a takeaway. I'll personally find a little bit more about it because I do think whether it's frequently asked questions, checklists, or whatever, to Joe's point, everyone's point, which is, The more that can be lined up ahead of time, I hate to use the word tech review, whatever can be done before they come to the board that can legally be done before they come to the board, then it, in my opinion, speeds up the process. So that way it's, again, I'm not trying to make each board a rubber stamp, but I do see, I mentioned it earlier, that a lot of developers come without all their I's dotted and D's crossed, and I'm sure that irritates the crap out of you guys.

And we have nothing to study when we go home for that.

Correct.

Correct. So we're wasting two, three weeks with nothing we can go home and learn about.

Correct. So I do agree that as part of our checklist, at the bottom of the checklist, make sure you dot all your I's and cross all your T's even before you ask to be submitted.

Correct. Correct. That's the key, because right now, anybody can just submit, let me see what they throw at me. Correct. Then they complain and drag it on. Correct.

Mr. Chairman, really quickly, and I know Joe knows this, I mean, we have the tech review pre-meeting, so that is designed to make sure that they've considered all of the bylaws, and that usually roots out a lot, and we also request every development go through conservation and planning and design review at the same exact time. That is very unique in Massachusetts. There are other towns that kind of do it, and they try to do it, but I think as Joe would know, that saves the most amount of time at all. You don't start a planning board and then planning board gets to say, like a lot of times around here, they like it when they don't file at the same time because the planning board says, oh, well, you know, we have to wait for conservation. And then conservation delays for three or four months and then go back to planning board. That's why it takes two years, three years in other communities to do that. But I will say as a tech review staff, we make all those recommendations. We tell everybody to do them. But I think oftentimes those proponents don't always file the stuff the way we suggest. So we do try to do that up front. It doesn't always work and it doesn't always help. I do think the checklist ideas may be helpful to homeowners in town who don't know a lot about the process, don't know a lot about where they currently, I think for the average homeowner who's looking for the pool or the ADU or the variance or buy right, I think that's where those checklist ideas can come in. I think most folks that are in development

you know probably have a pretty good idea of what the rules are thank you i just had one follow-up comment at least for conservation as well um so we we review under two sometimes federally as well but two separate agencies we are the agency for mass dep right and we also protect or we uphold our local bylaws so if someone a developer were to feasibly come and meet all the requirements under dep and the wetlands protection act but not our local bylaw we are required to open a public hearing so there there is that nuance to it i just wanted to clarify for us

Yeah, I just had a question about the process with regards to get professional review and that goes to the planning board. If the applicant wants to do plan revisions and have it re-reviewed for professional review, you know, because maybe there's something severe that, you know, maybe it's not ready for a public hearing yet, is that something they have the option to do?

Once an application is filed with the planning department and it's stamped in with the town clerk that becomes and we publish the public hearing that becomes a public hearing. So any of the discussions about changes and the plans need to be held at the public hearing. At this point you wouldn't have The board members make the decision. If there's missing documents, I will bring it to their attention prior to the meetings or even prior to stamping it in. But I do tell them that, but I can't start the decisions that the planning board makes based on the stormwater and the traffic and the layout and the plans.

So in terms of professional review, what is that? You get the application and it goes to the planning board? Because I just want to understand. So when does professional review?

So it's basically, there's a staff review. So when it comes in, the staff reviews it to make sure the correct fees are paid, all the documents are there, and then everything gets stamped in. Then it goes to the professional review. We've got our consultant engineer. We'll have DPW. I'll send it to conservation, board of health if they're septic, our town engineer. and they'll start their review process. I can say our consultant engineer puts together a scope of services fee. The fee comes from the applicant pays us through the town and we pay the services depending so that the scope of services takes a couple days from when the application comes in. They give us the estimate. I send it to the applicant. So it's up to the applicant to get us that fee. the beta will not start their review until that fee has been received by the town. So sometimes I get it in a few days, sometimes I get it in a few weeks. If we've already posted the public hearing that is typically within three weeks of the application to get the process started and we don't get a check till a week before the hearing, I'm not going to have a review from beta in time. And one of the reasons why we don't want to hold off on that hearing is because it does give, they may not have, and I know, Joe, you've been through a lot with this, and they may not have the review from our engineer, but at least the board gets a review of where they're going with this and what their thoughts are with this. they have that first meeting has an opportunity to give them feedback maybe it may be the landscaping or the size or the units the parking and mainly betas review is more based on the stormwater that's their expertise and you know our boards great but they're not stormwater management people so that a lot of that's the stormwater and where the board looks more of you know what's best for the town

So in your view, it's better to get that feedback from the planning board and from Beta together rather than addressing the stuff from Beta first and then having the planning board feedback separate.

Yeah, it can make a big difference because, you know, Beta is still in the process of reviewing it and they always attend that first meeting and it's an opportunity for the applicant to really give the board an overview. this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, this is why we came up with this plan. And then when Beta can hear the board's feedback also, they can put together a letter kind of together. I also do review letters for every single meeting to kind of give the board an overview of what's in front of them, what waivers they requested, any issues with parking, stuff that might come up, kind of in a general sense. And then Beta gets into more of the stormwater.

Thank you. That's very helpful. I apologize. I'm not as versed in planning as you all, so thank you for your patience with me.

Max, may I add a comment as well? It's also more economic for an applicant to make changes in one fell swoop than to continuously pay to make site plan changes. So just to wait to get board feedback, beta feedback, resident feedback, and then go in and make the changes.

Thank you.

Talking about kind of the, Jamie, you mentioned that we have a process for kind of all the boards kind of do it all at the same time. I'm going to bring up a little bit of a sore subject. I don't know, is that always the best way? And again, my perception, when 444 East Central, when it got to the end, it felt like there was a There was a slight misalignment between what the Conservation Commission was trying to do and what the ZBA was trying to do. And I never got a clear sense that that you guys had to finish before they did, or they turned over the... So to me, it felt like there was a misalignment there, and I don't know, while they can all go at the same time, do they really have to kind of go, well, this kind of goes a week before, and then yada, yada, yada.

So applicants, when they need to go between ZBA and conservation, we recommend they go to ZBA first, because if ZBA is going to deny the project, or if they're going to grant waivers from local bylaw, that significantly changes our review. Um, unfortunately that project did not, that did not happen. So that is why there was a mismatch. And then by the time that the applicant had broached this conversation of waivers, we had review. We were nearing the end of our review under the state wetlands protection act, but then we were waiting to know if we need to go back and review under local bylaw.

Right. I think typically having them all work concurrently works better, right? I mean, we might. We've got a couple projects we're waiting on now to go through other boards, but we've gotten it as far as we could already, so by the time they get done with, say, ZVA or planning, we're not starting from ground zero.

30 40 percent of the way there so we can we can move through more quickly it gets a little confusing but if you wait if you do it linearly right we wouldn't even start till yeah right yeah i agree that linear can we'll stretch it out it just i'm probably bringing up that one because i remember seemingly in that last week it just seemed like a i mean you hit it it was like a I still don't know who the hell has conservation oversight of that thing, to be honest with you.

Well, they're in appeals. Is it them or is it you?

We're not talking about that tonight. The ZBA has the opportunity to waive our local bylaws, and they voted on it. So that's a 40B wrinkle that only comes into play there.

They're not overseeing the Wellands Protection Act. I'm sorry, Cheryl.

Right, our local bylaws. That's all I bring up. I think that's where it got a little messy maybe. The ZBA had to vote whether to waive the Conservation Commission's jurisdiction over our local bylaws for that particular project. I think as the attorney said, 40B... puts the CBA in the shoes of all the other boards and commissions in the town. So in that particular instance, I think that's what happened.

That actually brings up, you know, to talk about third rails and stuff, but I noticed with some previous projects there's been some conflict where one board thinks there might be an agreement with the council that if looking for a friendly 40B that this is what the project's going to be and these are the concessions we'd make as part of that, and then another board might say, well, we need more parking. And so then the thing goes up to three stories or four stories, and then another board's not happy with that because it's too high, and then there's conflict between the boards where they're not all on the same page in the town council. Is there something we could do in the future to make sure that that doesn't happen? I mean, we all have sort of authority over different things, but at the same time, we seem to be, especially with regards to parking how many stories something should be, and those big hot button issues, we don't seem to be all on the same page.

I guess I would just note that obviously that's a relatively unique scenario, as Mr. LaPage stated. When you get into 40B, it's a whole different statutory mechanism, right? In some ways, I think the confusion that Council LeBlanc is referencing is actually because the planning board conservation process actually traditionally works so well together and concurrently in both boards. Because all the staff, too, are in one office, everybody in, well, they were here. Well, Gus is still there. But anyways, because we meet weekly and because they're already all working together, everyone kind of knows what's going on. And the planning board and conservation process works, in my view, extraordinarily well. And the boards both are very, very good at it. They've been doing it for 20-something years now. So then you enter into what the public and other people see as a pretty fluid process. But when you get into 40B, that's a whole statutory mechanism that changes that a little bit. And because the Council had adopted a friendly 40B policy because we were nearing going under 10% and accepting those applications, we outlined a whole process before that where we had a non-binding review from the Planning Board and Conservation Commission before that, and that was designed to try to help inform the Council whether they wanted to support those projects or not. But then ultimately still beyond all of that, non-binding and binding, you get back to the ZBA really is the entity that's gonna approve or deny any 40B, and then you're into a special, you're into a unique special territory. And I think they're probably, even for all of us on staff, it was kind of a unique scenario, I think, that kind of led to some of what you're discussing. And also in that case, and I think he stated it at the time, the chair at the time, Mr. Hunchard, also believed that he could just, the ZBA just had authority to just change whatever the project was. And so I think in the past, The ZBA had seen how these projects go and had had a parking ratio that I think it was 1.76 spaces per unit. If I recall correctly, that was what Mr. Hunchard believed is what the ZBA does. That's what they do in this circumstance that may not have been the case. And that's why the council went to one of their meetings in August and reiterated what the conditions were that they had had. And I know the parking was one feature. but people have to not forget on that project, there was a bunch of other mitigation that was agreed to in terms of things like evasive species. I mean, the conservation non-binding review had a significant impact on that project and on the quality of that project that many counselors thought was very advantageous, right? And so I think you just saw that get into a point where they needed legal clarity that the parking ratio really needed to be down where the original proposal was in the friendly 40B. So, I mean, that was a very, very, obviously a very unique situation.

And so to be clear, like, if we, you know, do have friendly 40Bs in the future, is that likely not to happen again, that we have all these conflicts between the boards, or is it something that could, and we should, you know?

Well, I will say there'll be an SHI presentation at the, I think, the October 29th EDC meeting, where we're going to get an update on the percentage, and I think we're going to follow back up on the friendly 40B policy. And so I think that's the opportunity to define that out. And I think still lingering out there someday is going to be the safe harbor question you know, depending on whether or not, you know, Stobarts goes forward or not, and whether or not 121 Grove Street is completed and stays on the rolls, right? We know Franklin Ridge will, we know that a couple of other projects will be on the rolls, and I think that'll be a policy decision at some point for the council to determine their friendly 40B policy. And then eventually for the ZBA, if another friendly 40B comes in, which I really highly doubt will happen anytime soon, but if it's a for sale project like 202 Washington, That may be something that the council wants to consider, something with starter homes or smaller homes or affordable homes for sale. Still, even if you guys approve it as a friendly 40B, the ZBA could still end up denying a project like that, or they could invoke safe harbor on a project like that, even if it's for sale, and politically we want more for sale units. You know, the ZBA will still have the authority to invoke safe harbor whether the council likes it or not. That gets back to Mark LePage's comment with really 40B is its own beast. And the ZBA really is in unilateral control of 40B. So that's a policy decision I think you guys will talk about at the end of October and probably through November.

I guess I'll bring it up because we're all here. And I just, you know, want... Our board's input, if we do revise that policy, should we? Is there some feedback we should incorporate from you all into that as to how we approach things?

Sorry, Chris. Do you need an answer to that, Jamie? I just had two thoughts. One, getting back to the online application, I'm professionally licensed in 11 different states for my work. which is super exciting. And each state has their own way of doing it. And one of the states that I operate in recently changed their process and went to a common application. And that's everyone from real estate agents to hairdressers to plumbers to appraisers. It's a nightmare. Because I have a reciprocal license. I have a license in a state that allows me to get a license in another state. But I had to go back and re-enter all of my original I'm getting my license for the first time. So I just want to make sure we don't swing the pendulum too far back the other way, and that we're making it more difficult for the applicant because there's extra stuff we're asking for that maybe isn't necessary for their purpose. The other point, and this might be less liked, I think the other thing as the board is what we can do, and I've not watched all of the board meetings, I'm not speaking from any experience other than my own, we could be more direct with the applicant. If we don't like something about the project, too many units, too high, too tall, too broad, first meeting, hey, this isn't going to fly because of these things. So when you come back, don't come back with, we say, oh, just a few less units, and they come back with a few less units as opposed to half, which is kind of what maybe we wanted. We've got to tell them that up front. Because that's what's going to drag that process out far longer than it needs to be. So just being direct with those applicants.

Are those opinions or are those objections based on zoning and other requirements?

It's a little bit of a mix because some of it is zoning when they're trying to achieve a greater density or height than is allowed. So we have the authority to say no. The other part of it is... there's districts in the in our town based on where they sit and what the use is that permit substantially greater density than anyone would ever want anywhere and that creates a big problem because the developers coming in saying this is the size of my parcel this is what the rules say this is what I can be able to build but it's not I'm allowed to build you can build it if we say it's okay but you might not want to do that because it's gonna ruin your profit margin and you're no longer financially feasible

I was just trying to get to the discussion earlier about pre-defining what's going to be successful early on in the process, which cut to your point, but I just wondered if there was a way to even preempt that sooner by having those kind of expectations.

I think that's the challenge with the open meeting requirement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The town council can have an opinion, the planning department development can have an opinion, but then when it comes to the board, our opinion may be very different.

And I don't want to beat us to this, more than we have on the interior process, but are there third-party service providers, maybe for bigger developers? Do you use expediters to kind of help, maybe not so much in a town like this, but other locations? In a prior career, we used to hire expediters all the time to get building permits and engineering documents signed off, and I used to think that this was like the most corrupt business in the world, because You know, you do everything you're supposed to do with engineers and architects, whatever, you submit your documents, but it sits in city hall for six months. So you pay somebody an exorbitant amount of money, and they walk it through, and you have your permit next week. I don't know if there is a middle ground or other third-party providers that could be coaches or, you know, I don't even know if that business exists at this level for this kind of thing, but As I hear all of this, and I hear the homeowners are naturally going to be confused, and we don't have the staff to kind of walk them through or do it, I mean, I just don't know if there are other resources or other knowledgeable people that maybe folks have to pay for or the town can, you know, hire and in turn charge folks.

Joe, I know you might have to find this, right? Well, you can hire anybody to do an application. It's simple. You see the owner's signature, I could hire one of you guys to do that for me immediately. That's fine. The difficult part comes is you're only allowed to use beta group as a peer reviewer. And they're a one-stop shop. We don't have anybody else that can do it. So if beta group is busy, there isn't a second firm you can hire through the town. There's only one group, which I've always thought was not fair. I think the town should offer two or three people. The application goes to them. They can bid on the job, who's available, who isn't. Sometimes I know I've been in a position where beta group was so busy it took a month before they could review my application. And that, I think, even fair to an applicant, I think there should be two or three very good, as good as beta, they're one of the best, have a couple more people that are available that the person can reach out to and say, are you available? Or the planning department can reach out. The developer pays the fee, so... Maybe your beta group's still busy. Amy could call up the next guy in line and go, listen, are you available to review this? It's kind of a sensitive project. Sure, we can do it right away. They're only one person. And whatever that price is, you pay. You can't compare it to anybody else. You can't get a second opinion. To me, that's not fair as a developer.

To clarify from conservation's point, so the town does have a contract. We go out for requests every three years, five years? Four years. Four years, thank you. Um, to get, to, to interview different third parties and we go through that procurement process. Conservation again, we're like the cousin to everybody. Um, we're a little bit different where the commission ultimately holds the authority under the wetlands protection act to say yes or no to peer review and who that is. Um, so the commission actually can choose who they want. I would assume you've been happy with beta. They're consistent. They know our bylaws. That's another nice reason to have consistency across, um, peer reviews. You know, you mentioned predictable decisions. having beta, rinse and repeat, that gives it that predictability.

I mean, you're typically seeing the same engineering consulting firms presenting too, right? So they know beta, beta knows that. It definitely helps predict the outcome.

I will say, as a staff member, there's been times I've had to call my representative at Bain and be like, okay, some... If a developer doesn't ask where something is, I'm, I'm very busy. So it needs, we need to have open communication, but as soon as somebody asks a developer or an applicant asks, like, do you have my peer review? I have this deadline or my client's asking where this is. I call beta. I ask them where it is. And I say, could you please reprioritize this? So I will, I will mention that. And then we have different peer reviewers. So the people that are peer reviewing on beta side for planning board are not peer reviewing for conservation. So there isn't a backlog in that way.

I would just quickly say I'm fairly certain, I will triple check. I don't believe we can have a menu of engineering firms, but I will triple check. But I think to Joe's point, he is right. Both our peer review, I mean engineering is complicated, right? And this does work both ways in both scenarios. We've also waited for the proponents engineering changes for months and months and months and months on end, right? Thank you. I know we sit there and say we want to hurry up and sometimes the proponent is dragging this out for months. And I will also say, you know, sometimes beta does get backed up. I mean they're a very busy firm. It's like lawyers. I mean, some of this work is very complicated. Um, when you're talking about litigation too, in certain circumstances, you know, you could get even backed up even further. So I think it does work both ways. It is something that we can probably improve on, but I will triple check and get back to the EDC on whether or not we can have one, two or three so that if, if beta's, you know, got a full plate, you know, can we have a plan B? I don't think so, but I'll double check on that. I thought Bellingham did cause the project behind me.

That developer had a, they were. The Lou Petruzzi project? Yeah, they were looking at multiple firms.

Yeah, I mean, it might be the fact that you either have non-contract, but then if you've got to put it off the bid, then you've got to wait for time for the bid to come back, you've got to wait for the payment to come in. It could even be a longer process. And the thing with beta, and I know, as Joe said, there were times that I've actually dealt with them being, where's my review, where's the review, we've been waiting. and I've been working with them like in the past year or two to make that faster. I have timelines with them now, a two-week time frame to get the reviews in quicker and more closer to our meeting dates.

Are there penalties for that maybe, for not meeting a timeline?

That's a procurement contractual issue. Yeah. Generally, penalties are going to push companies away from signing a contract. you could actually make it more difficult to actually do these things. And to Amy's point, we do a retainer for four-year contracts so they're there and they know to plan for X amount of work for the town of Franklin. If you go out to bid each project, not only are you now going out to bid and now you're into that cycle where that takes months, but you may not get, if they're already busy and they already don't know they can do the work, you may not get a beta or a Hancock contract. or another engineering firm to even do it. And they may not even do it.

I think the tough part is a lot of these engineering firms work for applicants that may come in front of us. So our beta is 95% town. I've been through three bids every four years of putting out the bid, and most likely the other engineering firms that come up are like, well, how much town work do you do? To represent a town, they're like 5% of our business. So we're trying to also avoid a conflict of them having their clients.

Thank you. Actually, before we go, we haven't talked to Design Review yet. And I ask that from the perspective of the process and I bring it up because for the first time a month or so ago I actually went to a design review committee meeting and And I was there on behalf of a project, but I also was advocating for the design review to have more input around standards around town, i.e. form code kind of things. Is there, how do we incorporate design review into that process, or better yet, develop standards so that when a project comes forward, it's meeting what the design review has said. This is what Franklin should look like. If you're on Main Street, this is what Franklin looks like.

Yeah, if you allow me, I can just speak in general, not for the design review committee, because I can't. I cannot do the opposite because I'm like understand what all trying to say because like I am urban planner and I can see it like the big picture first and take it away to the details on which detailed. Yeah, vice versa. If you allow me, I want to comment I tried to be a to stay at the last because I'm like the newcomer but I can see like the whole allow me to like summary like a quick summary it's like the process we as a I tell you guys and we as a town we see like the and it is the planning process it is a complex a wicked and the design it's a wicked process and we couldn't like make it like simple more like a simple process because once we make the change to our like built environment we can't just undo the thing We have to live with the sequences like we are for many, many generations. But the thing I think if we like focus in like homeowners and developers and the individuals, they would like to go like step by step, like in a linear process. But the planning, it's different story. It is complex. But in planning, it's easy to... and like scientific way we can go from this complex to a linear. I'm not worried about this because I heard every one of you guys and I think we have all what we need to do this. I can't now, if you don't mind. allow me, I have to do my homework to go for details about like specific thing to do. Uh, but the thing you mentioned, we have to do something and desire review, but still we have to tackle the whole thing. But I have, uh, like a suggestion if you allow me and it will take, uh, a burden from like our shoulders. And at what point, at one point we have to do this thing in way or another about the , do you know? The main street project. And my suggestion is, it's simple and it came with a like, I have like a bad headache. It's like we as a planner, we have to, Sometimes we will take things in the easy way by doing what we call it gaming. It's a casual meeting, but still we speak out of our experience. And we do know our limits. We have to do this, not that. I suggest like a workshop, if you call it. It's like a gaming, and we, in specific, we'll discuss the devote project in the main street. It's not the project itself, but the way we, when they went to the, We didn't go in the process of reviewing the project, but I already sent an email. But I've seen like that the permit, the zoning, the economic things, issues on the developers. Let's be honest. At the end of the thing, it's about money. It's about money. Everyone is concerned about money. where it would come from and where it would go. And to be honest, at the end of the things, we have all the same goal at one point. And if we do this workshop about the project, I think the zoning permitting and the aesthetic thing and I'm also an architect, licensed architect, but in my country. But I know about the details, about the building, and all the details. And as a new resident in Franklin's town, I have the fresh eye, the first impression goes and walk in the street, I felt kind of fragmented thing. I don't want everything looking the same. No, no, it's the variety of the things and the richness of the things. And I'm like, my eyes, it goes like smoothly, then that's something. About that location, exactly that, and specific that location, it's like kind of the heart. where we go from the east to the west, and the land is going up. And the train station, and the trees, and everything, and this traffic sign in the middle. And it's kind of the perfect location to discuss all the things we are thinking about. And we can take it from there. It's casual. You can say your mind still. We have the privilege to speak our minds and to tackle the things in a more casual way. But when you start speaking about the definitions, this is the way we start the planning thing by going by the definitions. But I think in planning, and myself, I can start from there by trying to digest the whole thing in Franklin Town. I think the two magic words we have to focus on is, in my opinion, the GIS, because it's the location, it's the thing, it will give you the what and the why. You don't have to think. And like, you know, other people, our, like, scale, we can't If we know the whole story, we can't just grab the whole thing. And in other words, the resources. Because this is the way we can evaluate where we are standing and what we are having to invest in to keep and to church or this kind of thing. things, following, understanding our resources. And it's a lot. It's a lot. Even the smallest thing, because I came from Jordan. It's a development country. Even so, you guys have a lot to keep and to to like I don't want to like miss saying anything but we have a lot and it's easy to get to grab all our resources and I'll be more than happy to see the GIS with all the layers and we can start to there like getting facts about our top. I'm sorry.

Marina, you jumped up as soon as I refused. No, don't apologize. What other additional color would you like to add to that?

So Tahani is one of our newest commissioners, and she is doing her... She has brought a fresh pair of eyes to the whole process. So far, she's only had to, the Design Review Commission sort of has two pieces that they handle. They handle sign permits, which is a little bit more, historically has been more, okay, do you fit the dimensional guidelines that are in the bylaws? Yes, you're not over 26 square feet approved. And then we have site plan and we're reviewing. So that's where Depot will come to us and we'll come to the commission and they'll review it. She has really, I've watched the last couple of meetings, because Tyler is staffing it now, I've watched the last couple of meetings. She is pushing back on folks and trying to, even on the signs, where historically it has been sort of this rubber stamp, this fits, so you can do it. Hey, how can you make it prettier? Can you improve the font that you're using? Can we change a little bit? Can we get more detail on the color that you've submitted? Because this color might be a little bit too bright for the area that you're proposing this for. So she really has stepped up and been very active in just the two meetings that she's been in. But to go back to your previous comments about sort of how design review fits into this whole process. So an application like Depot, Depot Street, will be submitted to the planning board and then it comes to design review. Design review in those instances is a recommending body, right? So just because design review decides that they want it to look a certain way doesn't mean that the planning board has to accept what they've recommended. um design review is where folks will have the community will have their opportunity to get their voice heard about what the for this for this project to use it as an example what the what depot street will look like and in essence how main street is going to develop in the future right so you know shout out to anybody who's listening please give us your comments because we want to make it an inclusive process design review when you're talking about these sort of issues is a little bit um flexible you know because we're talking about the New England character of the town and in just the limited commentary that we received for their original submission to design to to the commission um the we solicited feedback from the residents and I can tell you there wasn't a single AI generation, because everybody went on to chat TPT and put in the picture, the Zoom picture, or the Google picture of the building. There wasn't a single one that looked like the other. They're all all over the place. So people's idea of what the New England character, which is what our design review guidelines say, is a little bit all over the place. So you need to try to find a way to merge those opinions together, where maybe not everyone's going to be happy, but you're going to have something nice that's going to sort of domino effect how everything else is going to look. And then they make the recommendation to planning board, and planning board has kind of a say.

Yeah. Can I comment just one? I think when you ask me about the science, how they like more standard. out to be like a standard for design. I think there's something in design, it's like contagious, where like one house makes like its entrance in a specific way, the other house will like do the same. We can depend on this and we have all the regulation and as Marina said, she said like the size you know, the safety issues and everything. But still, I can see the developers' point of view. Their business have to be sold. They have to make money from their businesses. In my opinion, we should give them more freedom to get more light colors, light maybe, at least in the commercial or in some area in the downtown, because we have to bring back the carnaval and the public life in the downtown. But the thing we have, it's all about one street with the cars, and we have to go back. Because of that, my suggestion with making a workshop, like gaming, in that exact location, it might give us the chance to start over by going again and saying, this regulation will apply. Because myself, I won't be happy to cut the parking lots, or happy to the building not to do the setback in the fourth level?

Sorry, can I just add one more thing? I'm sorry. You had mentioned very briefly like a form-based code. So I think I've mentioned in the past that we actually did apply, the planning department did apply for a grant through the state, a one-stop grant to see if we could do something to that effect, a light version of it. We don't really want to over-prescribe, but we do want to give... through the zoning, an idea of like, this is the shape of the building that we want. This is how we want them to be positioned. And so we want to sort of give those guidelines in a light way, because you don't want to get to the point where you have a thousand pages of zoning, which is very easy to do. So we did apply for that and hopefully if we hear back from them that we received, we got the grant, then design review will be tackling that on because it will be an update to their bylaws along with updating bylaws regarding public art and things that sort of all tied together about the form and the look of the town.

Just as you said, the design review is a recommendation committee, and the planning board can accept or reject that. This is where I fear where the process gets a little muddied is so folks will come to the design review and express their opinion about the design, and then you'll spend time with the planning board, and they'll be talking about what the facade of the building is. It's almost like why don't – if have the conversation about the design with the design review they make the recommendation if anyone comes to the planning board wants to complain about the color of the building their response is go to the design review because that's wasting time and money so that's where i think it gets very cloudy in my opinion in the process can i just chime in um i don't disagree

But I also think one of the special permit criteria that the planning board reviews and special permits the zoning board reviews is if the project is aligned with I forget the exact wording. Character and whatever. So it is within our jurisdiction to have an opinion on that. And so maybe an unpopular opinion, I don't see why we need a design review commission because it is an unnecessary part of the process or another layer that somebody has to go through in the process that maybe is unnecessary. Signs, if the materials are clearly defined and the size is met, and this requires maybe the bylaws to be edited so that it's very very clear that if you are in the downtown district you're in commercial one or you're in whatever zoning district you're in that your signage can't be you know a certain color or can't be a you know certain font type serif sans serif whatever the bylaws need to be clear what they could be but if they're meeting the criteria again the the professionals in our um departments could just approve it Yes.

You know, a historic district commission can cover a lot of that.

Yes. So and related to design, it is so subjective. And we don't have definitions in our bylaws of what is New England character? What is the appearance of Franklin? Because that's what the design view commission is charged with. You're brand new. You have an opinion. The board before you had opinions. I have opinions. Design is subjective. And unless our bylaws say, here are the materials that are allowed in these districts because they, based on all of these precedents and professional opinions of X, Y, and Z, this is what it means to be of New England character and give the developers a menu list of options of what to choose from from that list. Same thing with appearance of Franklin. You go downtown, I'm sorry, there's vinyl siding, there's brick, there's white brick, there's yellow. So tell me what appearance of Franklin is, right? That's what needs, in my opinion, to change is the bylaws need to be extremely clear of what what these things are so that way it's clear to developers what could be considered. And I don't, I think signs could be approved as long as they meet all the criteria and the criteria is clearly defined in the bylaws. To me it's, I don't think it's a necessary board and I think there are different ways to engage with the public with things like the Depot project that are through online but not necessarily through, you know, particular, maybe there's, I don't know, that's my personal opinion.

so i do want to just add sorry to respond to that we do have design review guidelines which do go into further detail it's not in the bylaws the design review guidelines are like 70 or 90 pages long but it does give examples it's got pictures that show and i will say this is part of the process that we're going to be updating with hopefully this grant um because it is almost 20 years old so they do need to be updated but it does go a little bit more into sort of like here's an image of the type of windows that we're looking for And I think design review is where all of this should be fleshed out. You have folks that are architects. You have folks that are landscape designers. You have folks that have a little bit of that aesthetic view. Sam was on it, and Sam's got that aesthetic. And he doesn't think the design view could exist.

But all I'm saying is it's another step for developers because I'm an architect, you're an architect. We as a planning board and zoning board also need to review the character and the context. So it's great that design guidelines exist as a guideline for developers. Hopefully we can get those up to date. It's great working on that. But if they exist and they're looking at that anyway and we're reviewing it anyway as a part of the special permit criteria, then why have a third review of it? is all I'm asking.

I'll follow up on some of that. And I have a bunch of comments, but this touched on some of it. In the master plan, Jen mentioned permitting Streamline was like all through it. So there's a couple of key objectives that are in there that I pulled out, which is updating the design guidelines, Um, we actually debated in the land use committee quite a bit about, is this helping the permitting process, having more design oversight and more design criteria, or is it hurting it? And, um, at the end of the day, I firmly believe that that good design is part of smart development. Because when you have good design, when you have clear guidelines, when you have clear expectations, when you define what the character of our town is and wants to be, and it's not too stringent so you can still have that vibrant mix, then you get people on board. You don't get people hating development and then throwing that in front of every single subsequent development again and again and again that is and it's and it's a skill good design and so we talked about developing the form-based codes having better definitions thinking about the historic uh there's there's talk in the master plan about really getting out in front of parking and rethinking the bylaws and allowing more shared parking which can then help attract smart development that rather than try to shoehorn parking onto a parcel right the master plan talks about the peer reviews and looking into can we have a couple on call because we think other towns do have that. Just simplifying the zoning map, the colors of it we heard were confusing to people and there's too many zones and there's like business zone has what, two, three parcels on it, right? Can that one go away? Neighborhood, business neighborhood? No, there's a business zone. Yeah. Yeah, neighborhood which we have and people seem to like, you know, they like the little, DB Mart and tabletop kind of thing. So how do we get a little bit more of that stuff sprinkled throughout the town? So those were some of the master plan things that we pulled out that were available to try to help the permitting process, help growth. I have a couple other things. Well, I have the floor.

I can go through. Okay.

In my nine to five job, I'm dealing with permitting delays in a different town that basically stem from the boards and the town not getting along. And so first and foremost, I want to say how awesome it is to work with good staff. and with other boards that want to have these types of joint discussions. So thank you for that, thank you for that. And we should try to keep that communication going back and forth. Because it's terrible to go to a zoning board of appeals meeting that the building department sent you to and the building commissioner's not even there and they're fighting each other. Anyway. Next, I want to say education, education, education is the key. That's like for the general public. We tried to make some really simple diagrams during the master plan process of what these different boards do. And this is awesome. You know, can we get these for every board, every commission? Sure. I don't know who put this one together.

She just walked out.

Awesome. I mean, it's just great. These types of, you know, really, really clear, simple, what do we do? What is the process? And education for the volunteers ourselves. And going to that, I know Isabella and I went to, and Moreno was there, to the state conference. It's an annual conference that basically explains a lot of this. You get people like us in a room talking about this kind of stuff, which is great. In terms of the ZBA meetings, I think one of the things we can try to do a better job of is meeting every other week as scheduled, but maybe we can alternate the big projects and the small projects so that the private homeowners aren't in the same meeting with a big, giant project. We do try to bump them up to the front of the meeting, but it just gets confusing. It's late nights for us.

You haven't been watching council meetings. I know. I'm sorry, guys. You know what?

That's... We didn't apply to be... Touche. You think that's us? Everybody picks their role. And... And... Oh, also on, on our us that on, on our side, um, if we can try to hold, um, the engineers, both the peer and the applicants, engineers to more strict document deadlines, like there's been a couple of times when things land on the desk in the meeting. And I want to say, forget it. We'll review this in two weeks. But we try to flip through it quickly and see if we can get the meeting closed out that night. And most of the time, we do. But it's hard on us with full-time jobs. So I don't know if we can be more clear about posting that or getting that out to people. OK, to the big projects, some ideas. if there could be a more robust technical review before it even comes to the zoning board, like with early mitigation ideas, with comments in writing to the zoning board or just on the record for saying, fire department has no concerns about this proposed development as it is on such and such a date, right? Then there's something there when the general public says, but what about the fire department? It's been reviewed, it's been vetted, we don't have to talk about it. Unless there's a change, right? So then, you know, just even clarifying that communication flow and that communication process of how to get, well, okay, this has changed. get that comment, do they still stand by it or not?

Just a clarifying question, because that's something that at least we could do, but for example, 110 Populatic, the commission, it is in front of you, I'm not talking about it, but the commission has said, okay, we're close to closing, but we're waiting for ZBA decision. Do you want a letter from us about that? Because that's something that we could do in that case.

I think the more transparent we are with each other, you can put a big giant draft on it. Right, right. Non-binding. Non-binding. Just not to interrupt because you still have the floor.

Being on planning and not being on zoning, it's actually surprising to me that it's not the same in the fact that planning, we always had letters from every single town department of topics that were relative to that project, of like town engineer, fire department, you name it. Zoning, I haven't seen that, and I don't know if it's just like a completely different process intentionally, or I'm just wondering, like can we just, and this goes back to Joe's point of like, can Beta do the review before, like for that first meeting. I'd like to have the comments from the town before that first meeting too, because then we're more likely to make a decision quicker if we have all the information in front of us. Because I'm not gonna, you know, make a decision on a retention pond that the town's going to have to accept forever if I haven't heard from Mike Maglio about, you know, the access to it and, like, if it's, you know, he thinks it's okay for the long-term, you know, maintenance from the town, right? So, like, I'd love to see similar processes for these approving boards to help streamline the process. Sorry, I give you the floor back.

No, I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. In terms of clarifying the workflow, this is already touched on. Awesome that the reviews happen concurrently, but I do think we need to clarify like if there is something that goes before the ZBA and the ComCon afterwards, right? Like I think that's the key is we just want to clarify our workflow. calling things non-binding, having that open communication feels good. Oh, this was something, all right, maybe third rail, safe harbor. So 444, Felt like a catch-22 in the first meeting where every document that came before the zoning board of appeals was approve, approve, positive, positive, positive. And people are saying, are you gonna call for safe harbor? Well, everything is saying this is a good thing for the town, we should play out the process. so if the town is going through the tech review these early discussions town council is considering a letter of support for a big development that should be talked about very clearly and not just landed on the zoning board of appeals there's a pitch for going forward of just how that i know it's ultimately the zoning board of appeals jurisdiction to call for Safe Harbor, but If that's the case there needs to be like the long-term projection of the SHI Percentages right like There needs to be a lot of guidance a lot of data that comes along with this application when the question of safe harbor comes up So there's something about the safe harbor process of how we want to handle it as a town and I think that's oh and just a pipeline of all the big projects just really understanding I don't think I have a clear understanding of all the things that might be coming to us in the future that are under review right now and then we can really sort of map out our year better

Well, if anybody, any residents have comments, I can certainly go.

Before we go to you, Joe, you had something. I'd like to close my comments out tonight by just saying I've lived in this town my whole life. I plan on dying here. I absolutely believe that this town has the best process in place. I watch all the meetings. I think this is the best conservation commission we've ever had. I watch them. They explain in detail to any abutters. It's almost like an educational class. You spend a lot of time to educate those people so it becomes a smooth process. That's never been done in the past. So I really appreciate what they do. Our planning board's been great. ZBA, of course, I'm going to say is great. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the process. I came here tonight to give ideas on how to just speed the process up. I don't think we need to change anything from design review to conservation. I love all the opinions. A lot of smart people here. Obviously, we all love Franklin. We're all volunteers in this room, except for one. Don't worry, Joe. The idea is to speed the process up. And I do believe, I don't want to over exaggerate the percentage, but I'd say 80% of it is from the applicants that do not fulfill the applications. They don't understand anything. And we become classrooms, which we weren't. volunteering for, we're volunteering to make the best decisions for the community. But we find ourselves educating people and it goes a long time. And then does anybody else have something to say? This person repeats the same thing now and it just keeps going. And I sit there, we go on TV or in a meeting and I go, oh my God, I mean, that's the same explanation three times in a row. So with that said, there has to be some control of the boards. new questions and new information. And when there's only five or six people in the room that are torturing the project, but there's 36,000 people at home who love the project, we cannot fall victim to just six people. We're in a tough position. We have to make a decision for the community in a whole. There are a lot of these meetings where you get the same five or six people that don't even live in that area that come there and create an issue. One small issue is an example. I remember one time I was getting a project permitted, and the person says, you know, I live about a quarter mile down the street, and my kids play street hockey and sit in the street all the time, and they might get hit by a car. Well, maybe we should, can we do a traffic study on that street? It's a quarter mile away. Common sense has to be used as adults and say, enough is enough. This is a great project. It works. We understand your concerns. Let's move on to the next question. That's a lot of delay also. And I'll end it with that. I think it's great. One last comment about the science and design review. I think that should all be, I didn't come here for that. This wasn't part of the subject. But what if we got a legal seafood and wanted to come in the center of town and they want that big chrome fish lit up in red neon? Are we going to tell them no?

Yes.

Why would you? That's what everybody wants. Fine restaurants. We don't have anything. That's all here in the street.

I thought you were talking about the sign specifically.

I'm talking about the sign, but McDonald's won't come. Legal may not come. They have their model that they use. So we have to take... I'm not saying just to prove it. We should take them one-on-one and decide if that fits in and that not just no, not allowed. We could eliminate some great Develops developments in town.

Yeah. Do you know legal seafoods coming? Is that what you're saying?

If the sign is not approved, it's illegal seafood.

I mean, I'm just trying to, I'm just using that as an over exaggerated example, but some companies have to have their franchise logo and we certainly wouldn't want to lose a good tenant that would be vibrant for the downtown because we don't approve of this signage. So it should be taken on one-on-one by the design review. And the more the merrier to get an opinion on it.

Yeah, a quick comment. I agree 100% because the thing I try to do, I'm trying to do, is for the tenant to be themselves. Why you do not use your original logo that I've seen in your, I mentioned that like twice, but just, Let me comment over that. Do we need the design review? It was a question. We need the design review level. We need that. Is it a committee or not, advisory or regularity? But we need the design level review. But the thing, when you are urban planner and architect, you can see the whole thing. You can see the aesthetics, the details, the structure, the zoning thing, the planning, the regulation, everything. But if you are only a planner, you can't see those things. It's different to be an architect. We process the thing differently. Because of that, maybe when you're like, architect and planner, it's easy for you to do both. Do the zoning or the plan and regulation and do the design review. This is the thing, but I would like to comment over your like magic word education. It is I think it's the magic word for tonight, education, because we have the oldest library in the USA. And that's why the reason my son just, he bought a house here for that reason. It is a big, yeah, it is a big thing to have. And all over the world, we ask where was the first and USA and what's called and what design and where it's located and everything. That's kind of all.

Yes, you stood up, so I just want to recognize you. Really quick.

Thank you for your patience.

You're all roughly brand new doing this. There's a few in the room that have been here. I don't know, Chris, Joel, you know, I look around the room. You're all brand new. You do a great job.

Well, I'm sorry.

You're brand new on the ZBA. And I don't think you realize how good you are, especially my board. I'm not my board, but the ZBA board. And I go to a lot of different towns. I do work in other towns. It's not run this way. There's arguments. There's people that don't get along. We've always got them wrong. Why do you think we're still here? Because it's a great place to work. I don't think you realize how good you are. I don't want to say overthinking things, but you do a great job. I see it. I've been around 28 years now. And I want to give you two more plugs real quick. We secured a $15,000 grant. I can't mention who it's for, what project it's for, because there's a quorum here. It's huge. It came from Mass Housing Partnership. I just found out about it recently. We secured it. We got it. The other thing is we looked at 60 hearings over the past three years as EBA. All but three were passed. I shouldn't say passed. All but three were voted on the same night of the hearing. I realized leading up to it, and maybe with some mud and water and so forth, but they do a great job. They've done a great job. Past chairman and the other member on the ZBA did a great job. You don't get this far and things don't stay as calm when you don't do what you've all done. So I appreciate it. Thanks.

Max, and then because of the time, I don't want to keep everyone long, so I'll take Max. I just want to address Janelle's comment. Say that again? I just want to finish off with Janelle, just to respond to that. Okay, and then you can comment, and then if anyone has any general comments, then I know Bricolat, you've put together something I think you want to show.

Yeah, I'll just scrunch it down again.

Right, but realizing that I don't want to be here until 11 o'clock at night, and quite frankly, I didn't expect us to solve it all tonight, and if we have to do this again, I'll buy some more pizza and we'll do it again. Tomorrow night.

Don't push it, John.

It's Friday night, right? Friday night. I have dinner plans. But I do think this has been beneficial, and there's a lot of things that have popped in my head that I think we can build upon. So with that, Max.

Thank you, thank you. I think building off your points, this has been a great collaboration, building those lines of communication. I didn't know if we want to meet like this again in the future or if we wanted to get a smaller group of us together to kind of working group to try to sort of have those lines of communication more regularly, quarterly, or something like that. I just wanted to get your feedback as to whether something like that would be helpful. The other thing too is you all have a lot of good experience around architecture and bylaws and planning us and the council, we don't have a lot of that experience and so being able to have a handful of you to provide sort of that communication between your boards but also maybe provide us with some advice might be something that would be helpful. So I just want to get your thoughts as to something that you consent to or maybe you don't want a part of.

If you're asking for an answer, I think the consension is probably yes. The issue you run into is when does it, at what point in time do you accidentally have a quorum and trigger an open meeting and have a problem? So I think that's the only thing to keep in mind is how many people are there from each board in the room. But yeah. Okay.

Go ahead, Jamie.

Yeah, uh, really quickly, um, just, uh, holistically, I think to that point from max, I think, you know, this is one of those things maybe once or twice a year you do. Um, and maybe some of the items that I've picked up that the staff are going to work on that I've kind of committed to working through this with the team. You know, we can kind of check back in, um, you know, some of these points are really great things. Some are in the master plan. Some are ideas that have come out tonight. It's going to take us a little while to get through them, but I think there are some doable things here in a short term. And I think there are some clarifying questions around 40A and whether the ZBA can do some administrative things or whether we can have multiple carements. I mean, I think we can get answers on these things rather quickly. In terms of Janelle's comments, you know, a few things. Just first of all, thank you for the compliments of the staff. You know, I think everybody hopefully knows and feels how much we all get along really well. We love each other very much. We do fight like a family every once in a while. That's why we have our tech review space. It's like Thanksgiving family time for us. I love it. It's wonderful, but we have a great, you know, staff, and I appreciate, you know, it really isn't like this in a lot of other communities, and I think that, you know, what we do here is as efficient as possible. The shared parking issue is something that I think was in the master plan. We will look at the zoning map. I think if people think, you know, A different color scheme might just differentiate some of those oranges and magentas and reds, you know, might make it a little clearer and more distinguished of what zone is what zone. And, you know, we'll take back the comments about the business zone and are there zones that just can be eliminated to try to simplify it. So we'll talk to the GIS staff about that and see what they think. Going near the third rail comments, which aren't really that third rail, but I think the safe harbor comment that Janelle made is really a friendly 40B policy feature. I think that's a very easy thing to do. I'm not going to go back and look at hindsight, but when you do go back and look at hindsight, we had three friendly 40B applications, right? When you go back and look at where we started with this, there was a real threat to going under 10%. If you were under 10%, all three of those projects would have happened, you would have been crammed down your throats, you would have gotten nothing for them. And so you don't also know whether or not those projects are going to come to fruition or not. And so I think now that we're going to be at the percentage probably that we're going to be at or possibly be at, and I articulated this I think at some of the 444 hearings. I think that's an easy thing to be able to put into the friendly 40B policy to make sure that if there is a friendly 40B application that safe harbor is considered or at least looking at the SHI at that current time. And as we've all hopefully learned through the 444 process, every five years in the middle of the decade we get recertified with a percentage. And Marina is going to be presenting in late October with a number of where we're at now and also looking at the market rate units versus the other projects and trying to estimate where we are with SHI. I think my estimate during the Stobart's hearings is probably going to come true. We're going to be somewhere around 14, 15, 16, 17%. I just want to note on SHI, which really hurts, and maybe this is a legislative matter, When they calculate your SHI now, they do it based on the current unit. So 121 Grove and Franklin Ridge in Habitat, the house at Washington Street, get added. But then they use the common denominator for 2020. So the number's really not accurate. And this is a problem maybe as a council. We missed a little bit of an opportunity last night, but I know with the election coming up, this is something we really need to talk to Jeff and Becca about, about why the SHI is calculated in 2027 with the higher amount of number of units on the numerator of what's affordable, but the denominator is the 2020 number from the census. That's BS, like that's ridiculous. We should be able in 2027, go to EOHLC and have the market rate units and the affordable units and be able to get an accurate percentage. Because that really does change the conversation with Safe Harbor, right? Because you could show up in 2030 with a huge number on the bottom, and that changes the percentage. And I think a lot of towns and our colleagues struggle with this. But just to address that, and also, Safe Harbor has never been discussed before in this town. I've been here 11 years. And I will just say, as a little bit of an inside joke, it was ironic that one of the Biggest developers in Franklin history was the one who brought up Safe Harbor. So the irony of that is not withstood on me, that somehow all of a sudden one project that one individual didn't like, who's developed this town beyond belief, all of a sudden whipped Safe Harbor out on one project. A little suspicious, a little strange, but in my 11 years here, and you've been doing this, Joe, a long time, and some of you, I've never heard Safe Harbor been brought up in this town. Also because we went under 10% when Glen Meadow came off in 2018. So we've never been in a comfortable position to talk about safe harbor. But I think going down forward, that's something we can easily put into the friendly 40B policy and have that as a standard thing. And maybe that will give the ZBA at least a little bit of help and a little bit of input from the elected officials as to maybe to help you so you don't feel like the entire burden is on your shoulders the next time something like this comes up. And then on mitigation.

One tiny thing in that. I saw my notes, but speaking of that developer reminded me. Could, and I asked you this, Jamie, but I think going forward, if part of the friendly 40B process, if the town assessor's office could do an early draft revenue calculation. Because we could do our own calculation, thinking about is this worth it for the town or not. The town council members could do their own calculations. The outspoken developers in town could do their own calculations. But it would be great if we had some number, and even if it's, again, non-binding, draft from such and such date proposal, then that gives a sense of, is this valuable for the town or not?

So when you go to the council first before it comes to the ZBA, similar to another project that was approved in town, it passes 9-0 for the lift. The council who represents the community wants it. It comes to the ZBA, how do we pull safe harbor on that? Yeah. I don't, how do you differentiate with that?

Well, I would hope to believe, and I just hope because I have a lot of it, I hope that when the ZBA sees a nine to nothing proposal for like a 202 Washington, right, and you see that they're advocating in their policy for forced sale units, whether it's condos or whether it's duplexes or whether it's single-family homes or starter homes or 40Ys, I would love to believe that our members of the ZBA will take that input into consideration and they'll see that as an advantageous project, right? I think, I would like to believe that. And I think that, you know, overall, I think our planning boards and conservation commission and ZBA, both past and present, I think our boards have taken that input into consideration. So I'd like to believe that that happens. But there's only so much, Joe, as you know, in 40B that we can do on all of this at some point 40b is a very very strong law and puts that really in the hands of the zba and the state and so some of that is hard and we all know if we didn't have chapter 40b we would have no affordable housing in massachusetts so i mean or very little right so i mean it's a very strong statute for a reason and i do think as one as many people have pointed out it was i think approved in 1969 and the law has not been amended since The voters went to the ballot 10, 12 years ago for a statewide ballot initiative to eliminate all of 40B, the whole chapter, and it was 42 to 58%. It was a landslide against getting rid of it. So the voters have spoken on this issue too. So it's tough, right? But I'd like to believe if there was a nine to nothing vote, like 202 Washington, I'd like to believe the ZBA would take that into consideration. But the question of the revenue is actually a great segue into the other point about mitigation. And I always got to preface these things because everybody, you know, hears things and they take them out of context. My commentary is not anything on the previous EBA members or the chair or the current or not. But I think the planning board over the years, and one kudo to Joe as a planning board member, I agree, the planning board has always had, Mike Maglio goes to the meetings, right? There is a professional element to it that I think the planning board has systemically gotten into well before I even got here. That was a priority for the planning board. Always make sure, there's like a mini checklist you guys had. Fire chief, taxes, town engineer, DPW, you go through each department and you kind of get a semi-report. Same thing, I think, with the assessors. I want you to know as ZBA members, the chair in the ZBA really has the discretion to tap into the town staff. Now, when Stobarts came up, I think you were a member. You obviously weren't the chair, Janelle. And so you ask these questions, and I think traditionally in the past, for whatever reasons, other members of the ZBA didn't necessarily always ask these questions to be confirmed. Generally, an applicant before the ZBA is going to put a revenue estimate on there, what you're going to get for tax revenue. My recommendation to you as ZBA members would say, if that comes in, you could basically say to Gus, I want to make sure that the assessors, you know, we have a request from the ZBA, formal request to the staff, we'd like the assessors to really consider are these revenue projections in this proposal you know within some margin of error you know is it way off is it accurate because assessors are always going to make it really really painful to answer that question accurately they're never going to say it's a dollar for dollar match because when you say it's We're going to get $930,000. The public is always going to say, where's that $930,000? So they're always going to be a little hands off. But I do think you have the support and you have certainly the staff support to be able to say, look, we just want to get from the assessors, is this in the range of what they're talking about? And so that's at the discretion of the board. The previous CBA members didn't always ask for this stuff. Same thing with mitigation. There's been a history with mitigation at the ZVA. And this is a little dicey because you can't just do what residents ask us to do. Residents ask for way too much mitigation oftentimes, right? And what they'll do is they'll just go appeal it to superior court, and they'll win, and then you get less. So with mitigation, you have to be reasonable. You have to identify a weakness in the project, either based on public comment or peer review. and try to apply mitigation to that standard, right? And so I do agree with you though, that through the 444 process, one thing we can definitely do better is making sure that that checklist like the planning board has used for many years. Y'all should have a checklist. What are the 10 things that you want to know from town staff? And maybe even the ZBA could generate a checklist. What are the standard 10 things? We want a letter from the fire chief. We want a letter from the school superintendent about school children, right? I'm serious. Because that's an important factor. Because when you talk about mitigation, and we're not going to go in a deep dive right now about school children and economics, but we all know there's a lot of misinformation out there, and we all know a lot of residents show up with responsiveness to say, we've got to block the project because we don't want any more children in our school system, which I still don't fundamentally ever understand. But usually it's a reason to say children cost too much,

So kill the project.

And you can't use that. But I do think if you come up with a standard set of town engineer DPW, roads, whatever it might be, I think if you have that discussion and maybe kind of generate what the ZBA might want, I think you'll set into motion a new precedent moving forward Where just like the planning board did for many years, you're going to set into motion like a core list. Ten years from now, no one will even be asking for this stuff because it will just be matter of fact. And what you're going to find out is applicants are going to come in with that kind of material in anticipation of that meeting. So I would encourage you to do that. And you guys always should know you have the full support of me and all the staff to show up. But when it gets to the end of the project and the engineer is trying to say, well, what are we trying to mitigate? It's very hard for our staff to respond to that at the last minute. So I would encourage you to do something like that. And I think it would be very, very effective if you had your own little list of letters that you want from the fire chief and the school superintendent. And things like that. And the last quick thing I'm going to say is Joe stole a little bit of my thunder, but Chris nailed it. In terms of efficiency, tastes great, less filling. Tastes great, less filling. I watch a lot of meetings. I know that's very sad and pathetic. But I can't tell you how much time I sit there and watch this. And my wife and I watch them together. She used to be on the school committee for years. She's a local government guru too. And she'll sit there and she'll watch the video and she'll be like, oh my god, how many times do we have to hear about where the school bus stops or traffic? The chairs of the committees have got to say enough. Because when you add up all those comments, I can tell you many meetings, you're doing two or three or four more nights just because you're hearing the same comments over and over. We understand traffic. We get it. We're going to deal with that. We understand all the other issues. But I think at some point, Chris nailed it. At some point, you've got to kind of cut to the chase, get to the point. Is there any new comments? So I appreciate that, Janelle. I appreciate all the great feedback. We will work on some of these issues. We'll work with Gus on the scheduling of small projects, large projects. I think those are all fantastic ideas. And I think a lot of these ideas are really going to kind of fine-tune things and really try to encourage or really try to provide a better process and a better experience. So I think this was a really, really productive forum and I hope at some point we can do them again. So I appreciate that, Mr. Chairman. Thanks, Mike. Thanks.

I just had a quick question. If boards want to put something on the agenda that is not a project, like to discuss something or have an upper initiative, are they within their freedom to do so? Absolutely. So I just want to make sure you know you're empowered

Yeah.

Take action as long as it's within your purview or your charge or whatever. You can have a discussion item on things that affect you because I don't think I've seen that done that often, so I just want to say that.

Thanks, yeah. Thank you. Any other comments right now?

I just want to announce to everybody that at some point in the next month or so, we're going to be proposing a local historic district study committee. I don't know what that's going to look like, but that's the cool part about it is that it can look any way we want it to. know whether a district comes out of that is entirely up to the study committee and town council but it's still something on the on the table it's coming up soon so keep an eye out for it i'm sure we'll be hearing from a lot of you will this committee have similar to if the ec does this occasionally will this committee intentionally have a at least single representative or ask for a single representative for from these it's in the statute so yeah it's technically they're supposed to have two nominees from the American Association of Realtors or something like that, and then whatever the historical society. Do we have a historical society? No. I would know that, wouldn't I? We don't. You wouldn't, but we don't. We don't. So I imagine the commission would propose two nominees. But it can be as small as three and as large as seven. So I'm sure there will be overlap between some of the boards, considering the interests around here. So, yeah, it's coming up.

Thank you. A request to the council this year. Yes. In order to get the bylaw changes we've recommended implemented, we need town council approval. Will we be able to get on the town council agenda for that? Of course. Thank you. All right.

I would just ask. We've got two choices. We can either, the EDC, do you want to review that bylaw at your next meeting and then recommend it formally to the council? That's probably the easiest way. You can at least make a formal recommendation. Because at your next meeting, you're going to be considering like seven or eight different smaller bylaw changes.

I did my homework, too. Not that anybody else didn't. Sorry, I just really took this to heart as a forever student. You did. Thank you. Yes, yes. There are two other things that have not been discussed as a way for streamlining permitting, and one of those would be electronic signatures. So the commission did vote in electronic signatures. So if any other boards, yes, thank you to Jordan. So if any other boards or commissions would like to do that, that would definitely help fast track. And then this is one that I don't personally agree with, but it is an opportunity that I identified, is our public hearing and legal ad circulation. It's technically 10 days, which means that an applicant has to file 14 days in advance, two weeks in advance, to give us enough time to post a legal ad. The Violence Protection Act is five days. Now, I'm not suggesting that residents only get five days' notice before a public hearing, but it is a consideration that I wanted to bring to you.

So what is the recommendation? You threw out a bunch of days.

Maybe seven. You could thread the middle. And those are for new submissions for legal ads. So when we get projects into us, they have to circulate for a certain amount of time. So that means an applicant, before they can even get to a public hearing, they have to make sure they meet those deadlines.

Five business days, if there's any holidays.

Usually, I think there's a statutory issue around the holidays. Yeah, it excludes the holidays.

Those usually don't qualify. And again, I'm not suggesting it.

I just looked through. The thing is, the families do reset after the weekends. Yeah, they can't go and check their schedule or the events or anything. They need more than a week.

Yeah, so it's technically calendar days, excluding holidays.

Yeah, for the public hearing.

But business days would help, yeah.

The thing that for the individual to just process the thing and read the notice or go to the website or review anything they need. to go at least for one weekend. Because of that, they will need like more, like 10 days. Yeah.

So you mean business days? Yeah, business days.

Yeah, at least seven days.

Well, before we wrap up, since this is an EDC meeting, I'm going to defer to Counselor Malloy. Do you have any closing comments?

Other than thank you, no, I think this is a great conversation. I learned a lot, so I think this is excellent.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming tonight. I know it takes a lot out of your schedules to do things like this, but I really appreciate it, so thank you.

Yeah, ditto what they said. I think it is a really big benefit to be able to bring all these groups together and that everyone is willing to carve out three hours tonight to do it out of the regular schedule. I think it just says a lot about the willingness to work together to improve these processes. Thank you. Perfect.

And the last comment I'm going to make is that the second thing I wanted to cover tonight was the bylaws, but in our general discussion we talked about that. And the most overriding one to me was clarifying definitions. How do we clarify so therefore everyone knows that a potato is a potato a potato it's not a tomato so so I appreciate yeah that's fine let's call the whole thing off right so I again I do appreciate your time and quite frankly I would do this once a month if everyone else wanted to do it because I as I said to Joe I have a passion to do this right now for the town I mean if I If I could leave my job and do economic development for the town, I would do it because I think it is what will bring this town into the future. I truly believe that. And I appreciate your time tonight. And with that, I will let all the other committees and boards close their meetings. So we'll start with planning so that they can officially.

Planning board will close our group. Do we have to vote?

Just move to adjourn. Just move to adjourn.

Was there anybody on TV? Was it public? There was no hands up. We really lost our quorum anyway.

You don't need to actually motion to adjourn. If there's no business, you can just say, meeting adjourned. It's fine.

Meeting adjourned.

Okay.

Conservation. Conservation meeting adjourned. Okay. ZBA?

Meeting adjourned.

Design?

Meeting adjourned. Excellent.

And with that, I close the meeting. Particularly, you do need to ask if there's no new business person.

More business.