Zoning Commission - Regular Meeting

I'm zoning commission regarding the zoning regulation rewrite for the meeting. First of all, are there any board or commission members here? I would ask you folks to come to the front row if you could please, because we want to make this kind of like an interactive discussion. Sam is from the Cod. So Sam will be, Sam and our co-chair, Denise. kind of be running and capturing data. So just for anyone, for purposes of introduction, we have with us this evening, Sam Gold from the River Cog. We have our permanent members. We have Michael Barnes, our alternate. We have, go start from the table. Let's see if I can do it backwards. Jane Marsh, secretary. And we have, let me see, Denise Savageau, Bonnie Reeves Schneider, Mary Jo Nozzle, Sam Gold I introduced, I'm Paul Orzel. I guess that was it. We're all here. Good. All right. Denise, I'll let you kind of take it off. I don't think we need to read anything here. It is a stakeholder meeting. It's a focused meeting.

So we want to make sure that what we've laid out in terms of the rewriting process is kind of a twofold structure. And one is to have community workshops and then follow those up with stakeholder focus group workshops. And those are primarily with the commissions that are going to be dealing with the subject matter. So right now we've held the one on the environment. So we held a community workshop. We heard from the public. And then we had a meeting with the, you know, boards and commissions and some of our other stakeholders, like the land trust that also, you know, so they could get the benefit of the community workshop input. And then they could say like, okay, this is what we've been discussing. This is how it fits into our discussion so that we're also hearing from the commissions. So we did that with the environment. We've adjusted the housing. We had the community workshop for the housing. There was, you know, 60 plus people in the room. So we had a good turnout for that in what we thought was a great turnout actually for the summer. And now this is the focus group where we're looking at the commission's that we work with, including obviously our commission. And what we've asked is Sam Gold with Riverclog to kind of lead that discussion. And I know he will do a great job kind of going through that. And the idea is to kind of have a dialogue. We're here to listen. The commission is here to listen to you. We may ask questions for clarification, but our job, we're trying to get information from you We're not expecting this to be a one and done. It may be that we find out that the Planning Commission has more they need to say to us and we may schedule a separate meeting just with them about a particular issue. We may do the same thing with any of the other boards, maybe the affordable housing boards, any of the other boards that are here. There's a lot of boards that deal with housing and land use and the zoning rewrite. It could be any board that deals with that. And it may be, like I said, that more things come up. I don't know, Sam, are you going to talk about, I don't know if Eric asked you to talk about this, but the two processes we're going through at the same time, are you going to talk about that?

No.

Okay, so let me... I just want to, I just, yeah, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because most people have heard it. And a lot of folks who are on another committee or working with COG. But when we're talking about housing, there's two things that are happening simultaneously for the town. One is the zoning rewrite. We started down this process last year. We kind of did a Clean up of the regs just because they needed to be reordered and there was stuff that needed to be done to clean them up. Now what we're looking at is the substantial changes. What are the changes to the zoning regs we need to do? And particularly tonight, we're going to be focusing on housing. But for those of you who don't know, there was some legislation that was passed in 2025 that also deals with housing. And so the commission has been dealing with that. So there's two tracks. So sometimes you're like, well, why are they running ahead and doing that when they're doing the zoning rewrite and they're trying to get comments for that? So we're... There's things that had to happen. We had a deadline of July 1st to take care of some of the legislation, and that had to do in the commercial zones where they now basically were allowing residential housing in commercial zones, and we had to deal with that. And River Cog was taking the lead getting good information out to us on that. But there's other things that also that legislation required, and that is to have River Cog work with municipalities to develop a housing plan, a housing growth plan. And that's not going to take place till after we're done. I mean, they're not going to have that information to us until we're basically done with the zoning rewrite. So we're going down parallel tracks, and no one knew when we started the zoning rewrite that we were going to have Public Act 25-1 get passed. There's been stuff happening in the legislature, and we don't know. Who knows what's going to happen in the legislature in 2026? But we're going parallel tracks. So I just want people to understand that because we have these, actually the first selectmen has put together a work group That includes planning, zoning, and affordable housing, because we're working very closely with River Cog on this Public Act 25-1, and that work group is focused on that piece. Obviously, then we bring it back to all of our commissions, but I just want to make sure everybody understood that. So sometimes if you're asking a question, we're like, okay, this is why we did this now and where we're going, because a lot of people say, well, why did you just change the regs July 1st? Why did you do that when you have a whole zoning rewrite? And I will say the one thing we did was we knew we were doing the zoning rewrite. So we updated the regulations. basically understanding that we could possibly change them once we got more input, but we needed to have something in place so that we would have, so that if we didn't have something in place, a developer could have come in and just said, as of right, I can do this, this, this, this, this. We needed to put something in place so that that says they have to come to the commission and do certain things. So we wanted to make sure we had some constraints around Public Act 25-1. That said, the constraints we put around it may need to be tweaked, and that's something we may take care of during this rewriting process. It may be something that we say, you know what, with all the stuff we heard, we're still going to wait for the housing growth plan to fix it. It's like we're not sure, but we want to make sure people, like I said, understand that there's two processes that we're going down, and we're trying to manage them as best we can, thankfully, with help from the COGS and thanks to the other commissions who understand this as well. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Sam to kind of lead us through some of the discussion on some of the things that we want to talk about and what we heard at the workshop, the community workshop, and then also what we discussed what you guys want to tell us that you've been working on in terms of your commissions and what we need to be focused on. So, and maybe before we start, we should just do, well, all of everybody who's on a commission. So we'll do introductions. I think that would be a good thing.

Before we begin that, I just want to mention for as a point of reference, the meeting is scheduled 630 to 830. So that's it. We can go, we can start over there.

Yeah.

I'm Stephanie Mengel from the EPA.

I have to say our restaurant and store district mission. I would argue this.

Planning and planning and co-chair. It's a it's hard to get out the housing strategic planning steering committee, which is a group that Denise was talking about. So it consists of planning, zoning, affordable housing, and the idea is to In the past, in a lot of these big projects, we're working independently and could have been better communication coordination. It's an attempt to bring people together early and kind of coordinate and communicate our efforts. Brian Grinchio, Blended Commission.

Ross Higgins, Affordable Housing.

Peter Lompezi, Chairman of the Appliance Leadership Center.

I'm going to start that because you're finished person is not here.

Okay, and then just public and Jim.

Just read the email. I'm here as a public.

I did not come to attend the zoning Commission meeting, per se.

I misread the email from Craig. So I can operate however you want me to.

You're a member of the commission, so you're an alternate member.

I am, yeah.

I just happen to be seated here. Trying to get out of the house, are you? Sorry, Brendan.

So you're going to be part of the commission there.

And it's fine. You can sit wherever you want. I'm seated, obviously. This is just a focus group workshop, so... and you just joined us what commission are you on sure okay hi we're just doing introductions are you here representing a commission or are you just a member of the public Why don't you come up front because anybody, you know, we did. So just to let you know, we said boards, commissions, as well as staff that may have things to say about, you know, housing. So why don't you join us up? We want the people, if it's public, that's not going to be part of our focus group discussion. We want them in the back, but the people who, you know, because we want to make sure everybody up here knows that these are people that can speak. Okay.

All right. So, thank you for going about the double track. I wasn't exactly sure what you were referring to, but I think that is a really important point. And although you are on separate tracks with what the requirements of Public Act 25-1 and your own zoning rewrite, I think you can think about the changes that 25-1 requires now to get a head start. And And what the housing growth plans, although that's the name of it is housing growth plan, what they are looking and asking municipalities to do is find locations that work for affordable housing. The River Cog has a deadline of June 1st of next year to give a number of de-restricted affordable units for each of the member towns of the Cog. The municipality then has 30 days by the end of June to decide if they want to plan for that number or they want to use a different methodology to come up with a different plan. And then you have a year to write your housing growth plan. The Office of Policy Management is asking for these plans to be more comprehensive, to look at all types of housing for all your housing needs. Although the statute, the only metric in the statute is... is units of deed-restricted affordable housing. Of course, we all know that that's only one small sliver of the pie, of the housing pie. It's probably some of the hardest housing to get built because it needs to be deed-restricted, but it also needs to meet all of our needs. But unlike the POCD, unlike any other plan that we do in Connecticut, this is actually the first plan that statute requires that you implement in zoning. In some states, there's requirements like, let's say, California. You pass a comprehensive plan. You've got to update your zoning regulations to be in conformity with the plan. If you want to change the zoning regulations, you have to change the plan. That sort of conformity requirement is very new to Connecticut, and this statute requires that. So the recommendations for areas of town which approaches for affordable housing are required to come with zoning updates as part of it once the plan is done. If there are areas that are conducive in part of your zoning update, you get a head start. And it's work that won't happen until later. But these are important things to think about, particularly when you're thinking about housing and residential zoning, because it's coming. And then furthermore, I think the way that you explained the July 1st deadline was really appropriate. It was not something that towns did because they were forced to, they did it to protect themselves. Because if you didn't update your zoning regulations for commercial districts, really there would be no grounds for denial, because there's no standards to apply. And that's unfortunately how a lot of these, how this Public Act works, is that it forces the towns to take quick action to protect themselves. But there's a lot more specificity that could go into future regulations because currently the wording of the statute is this middle housing, which is two to nine units of housing or mixed use. Well, you could identify in some parts of town, mixed use might be conducive. Other persona might be only two to nine units. And you could add a lot of more nuance and specificity which, of course, no town in the limited time that they had from understanding what the Public Act meant, which really wasn't until February or March to July 1st, really didn't get enough time to really do a full planning process to figure out if you wanted to revisit that. So I was glad to hear that that's something which might be considered as part of that, is that there's nothing in the Public Act that doesn't allow you to regulate the density, regulate height setbacks, all the different things that you normally regulate in a site plan. But it really does open up your commercial districts for two to nine unit housing by right, virtually by right. The only difference between by right and this summary review process is a restatement of health and safety, which is the basis of zoning anyway. So it's almost redundant, but it could be the grounds for which a commission did not. Well, actually, it's not supposed to be a discretionary vote. It's supposed to be a yes or no based on the application. It's not supposed to be discretionary. So you have grounds that there is a health or safety issue.

Can I just ask you something, Sam? I thought it was two to nine housing units on each commercial property. Am I wrong?

Right. It's a development between two and nine units. Yes.

So the only density we could say that you can only have two on every one?

Well, you could say that you need five acres per unit. And if you don't have, if you want to build nine units, you have to have 45 acres. So, you know, there's no limitation. Density is not, you're not limited in determining the density of.

Oh, I didn't understand that we could do that.

I understand.

I don't think anybody on the commission understood it.

And to be quite honest, I don't think the legislators understood it either. There's a lot that's in this. It was the public act was rushed. There's a lot of there's a lot of issues in it. And we're all sort of functioning under a bill that passed in three days. So.

Because we have a basic three-quarter acre size limit for all development that's not sewered. Most of the town isn't sewered. So we didn't say anything about that in our reg.

Well, I would say that that would come under health and safety.

That's what DEP said way back. You wouldn't know whether they believe in it now.

It also, by creating this new by-right category, it sort of punts it a little bit to the health department, the health district, to say, well, yeah, which more or less leaves it to the sanitarium to say, oh, no, you can't build this, which is not necessarily good planning, but that's, but, you know, this is a whole new area. This concept of summary review was introduced two years ago in a poorly thought out bill about nursing homes that would allow the conversion of nursing homes into apartments And they created this concept of summary review, but it was taking a residential institutional residential use and turning into another residential use. I think the public policy issue about nursing homes is a whole nother discussion, but whether we wanted to give offerings to close into nursing homes, but that it's not tested in any there's no there's no court cases there's no. we have no case law. So there's no guidance on this. So it's really a wild west as to what this means.

That makes me feel a lot better if we could adopt that because that was feeling pretty bad otherwise.

Depending on who your legal counsel is, some lawyers say, you know, because there's nothing out there, go test it. But I think this is an important discussion because it's in the background and as you're updating your zoning, you really should be keeping an eye towards what you're gonna be required to do in the next couple of years with those housing growth plans. And particularly for, I think that the idea for the affordable housing is that the township was zoned for areas where it's most conducive as sort of a preemptive A30G, although A30G is still in effect. So the developers don't have to follow zoning that you've set.

So yeah, if I can ask, so the River Cog, you guys are designating a designated amount of housing stock that has to be like each town is going to be required to have X amount of housing stock that's affordable. I'm trying to understand how your plan implements into the community.

So it is it is no one's required to build the house. It is about creating a plan that that can accommodate a certain number of deed restricted affordable housing units. And the definition of affordable is a little different than A30G. A30G was 60 and 80% of AMI. This includes a very low category of 30% of AMI. But still, these are probably people who are already in your community. If you work at Big Y, you're probably in that 30% of AMI category as a checkout clerk. There is need across the state for this housing. But as for how we come up with those numbers, we're still promulgating methodologies for that. And the town is still free to go its own way. That's the decision they'll have to make. And ultimately, there's an option to work with the River Cog and sort of hire the River Cog as your consultant. It's an affirmative ask made by the town. or you're on your own, at the end of the year, that Housing Growth Plan comes to River Kong for review and comment, but we don't approve it. It's approved by the Planning Commission and the first electmen. It then gets sent up to OPM for their approval. If they don't approve it within a certain timeframe, it goes to this new housing council. And then they have the power to approve it or not. And then, I think if you do not have an approved plan, I think the stick is there's some limits on state funding. Funding, it's funding. Yeah, it's funding that your town may not be eligible for.

So not to get sidetracked by 25A, but however we understand, we've got two parallel traps. That said, we're here tonight to talk about some of the things that have come up. And I know that you've got, you know, and some, so Eric had put together some of the ideas of categories. I don't know if he's- Yeah, that's what I was thinking of using for this.

Yep, yep. So please, there's copies up here if you haven't grabbed one. This is a summary of the stakeholder discussion from July 29th. And so on the left, you'll see the stack from IMEC, and they were the consultants who facilitated the discussion. And then this is Eric Knapp's summary of it.

And he did- Sheila, if we could have you sit up the front part of the discussion. Thanks. We're asking the commission members to sit up front.

Thanks. So Eric broke it down into five different categories. And I'm thinking it might be helpful to go category by category. And I was planning on just typing up some notes in the document. uh, with ideas of what kind of, you know, what kind of things are, uh, were you hearing and what's the approach of the... Take a look. We can have one of my ones.

We can have mine. Thank you.

and and if i think you ran out of copies but i'm sure we can get this email to everyone yes so so if if you could just share it with someone sitting next to you and it's up on the screen and it's up on the screen as well what we want to do is so the comments are into five categories and the comments we heard at the community session that said We're interested in hearing what you guys have to say. I just want to make sure you understand that these are just comments. This isn't a plan at this point.

I just want to quickly go over. The first category that Eric created out of the comments was about accessory polling units. His characterization was there was a strong desire to allow ADUs on a more relaxed basis than the current zoning regulations. particularly in the RU80 and 40 zones. Right now, accessory dwelling units are very difficult to build in town. As many of you know, it's limited to structures that are 30 years old and that have not changed in those 30 years. And it severely limits who can build accessory dwelling units and their usefulness as a factor. Yeah. For anyone who has never heard of it, there's something called granny flats, or it's usually a small additional apartment that's either carved out of the existing building structure or is built as an add-on to a structure, or it could be as part of an outside garage or as a standalone on the property. And typically they're constructed for family members, either younger or older families. and they're typically rather small. So it might be a 500 or 600 foot apartment. It is a way of accommodating additional units in a way that is usually somewhat invisible in the neighborhood. And if you think about it this way, if your zoning regulations would allow a homeowner to add another bedroom and bathroom to their house, it could be seen as no different than that. Because yes, you might be able to accommodate an additional person in that house, but ultimately the only difference is the relationship between those people.

Kind of a process question. Yeah. So I know we've had the public meeting, and this is kind of, I guess it's something, but that there were 80 people And I think you're still waiting for your survey or two, right?

Yeah. So what we're looking for you today is comments. Have your commission... Has your commission discussed ADUs? Do you, if they haven't, or do you have any reaction to like, well, our commission is talking about it, but we, you know, we have some different thoughts or we support the thoughts you see here. And the thoughts aren't all the same. They may be different thoughts up here as well. And you'll see that in some of the other categories, but that's what we're looking for. What, what do you want to talk to? So.

So the real estate broke for many years and I've seen the, advantages of having accessory apartments. I know people in O-Line who have moved into family homes that were converted to an accessory apartment and it worked very well. I've also loved my clients, invested clients on properties, bought the properties with an accessory apartment. There's still some of the relatives living in them as relatives move out. INVOLVED WITH THEIR PARENTS THAN THEY WERE DRIVEN TO NON-RELATIVE. SO I THINK THAT'S VERY IMPORTANT. IT'S EASIER TO ACCOMPLISH GETTING ADDITIONAL NUANCE IN OUR COMMUNITY TO ACCESS THEIR APARTMENTS.

SO IF I'M REALLY CORRECT, CAN YOU SAY YOUR NAME AND YOUR POSITION? I'M SANDY BALDWIN, THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF RIVERCOG. WE'RE THE REGIONAL PLANNING ORGANIZATION FOR RIVERCOG. The Lower Connecticut River Valley Council Governments.

Do they count as affordable units?

Only if they're deed restricted for 40 years. If they're deed restricted, affordable for 40 years, which very few people are going to do. So the deed restriction would have to be that it could not be rented to someone unless they meet the income levels set in statute. which are 30% of AMI, 60% of AMI, or 80% of area median. So very, very few, if any, accessory dwell units are gate-restricted. It would be, there is this concept of naturally occurring affordable housing, but VA 25-1 does not take that into account. Thank you.

So the historic district has multiple residential zone types. And I guess I heard the comment that ADUs are interior or exterior. I think the historic district is a residential rule originally thought of. And so the idea of an interior additional unit is one thing. New structures in the Very narrowly defined historic district would be of interest to understand. So that difference between exterior and interior, how the commission might specify. Right. And again, we're almost like, what's it, overlay? It's a historic overlay of the residential zone.

And I think the ADU regulation would fall fully under the purview of the historic district. There's nothing with ADUs that would exempt that property owner from going through the historic district process.

Well, on my question, though, does it imply new structures or does it really reinforce?

Well, that is, I think, up for discussion. Right. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it might be site-specific as to the attributes of the site, right?

So we're still in that information-gathering phase, so we're not saying whether, you know, it's all...

I'm raising that in particular case for the historic history. It's one item compared to other residential areas.

You're saying... Just to remind people, you know, we have Affordable Housing Commission 22222, did a full report of recommendations, and that was approved by the Board of Selectmen. So we're kind of not starting from scratch. We have this body of work, which is excellent, available to us. You know, if you look at that, one of the things is create opportunities for additional accessory, middle and starter housing to meet the needs of seniors, young people, and smaller households. And then they go on to talk about in-law apartments, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, we're not, we don't really have to start from scratch. We have this plan that we can place and we should just build on that. Might need to be updated, but, you know, it's there.

Okay. Well, we understand we have all the plans, but what we're saying, so are there comments about the plans? Does everybody in this room agree with what is in that plan right now? So that's, this is the comments we're trying to get. So we understand there's plans out there. So.

The comment is just, you know, we're not, we, As we all know, we don't have a lot of land to build on. So this has to be one of our strategies, our primary strategy, maybe, for increasing health. And it's probably one that I would think would have more of a consensus than some of the other ones.

What would your feeling be for ADUs in the beach communities?

I don't know enough myself about the beach communities that don't live there. So I don't know.

So it's not part of your... What would yours be? Well, I'm not supposed to be talking. But to me, that's the only areas that have structural solutions. So I'm just curious what you would feel about it because... That's a good point. We've always been a little nervous about that.

we want to address the beach communities, especially that we now have a sewer project moving forward, right? So we know the sewer project is going to take in Old Lime Shores, Old Colony, and Miami Beach Association. That's going to address at least 500 homes. So in that association, there's a number of homes there that are zoned for seasonal use.

They can't be zoned for seasonal use anymore because we had to abandon that whole thing.

Years ago.

We had to. We were sued.

The problem is that the dwellings have to meet the building code standard to be here around.

Correct. So there'll probably be a number of those homes that will try to move from seasonal to full occupancy. So that, if they do, that will somewhat, those are smaller homes, that will somewhat address some of the senior housing smaller units becoming available. My own expectation is that the people living south of Route 156 are looking at were told that they would probably have an increase in property value of about 30%. I think once the sewers go in, there's a good chance that they'll find that paying for the sewers is probably becoming unaffordable, and that it's the best approach now is to take and sell the house and realize that gain. So that might make a lot of availability, may make more availability for movement in that area.

That's not creating a single new housing unit.

That's not a negative news I'm talking about. I'm talking about the house itself becoming available. The lots are still small. The ability to build an extension to the house is somewhat limited. But more up to you, though, they probably could do some building with some of those lots. Some of those lots, you know, were to where... to where the zoning got changed so that the adjacent lot became not buildable. And then it became such that you could, you know, some of those people own an adjacent lot now. Those could be an aid to you. That could happen. I think the zoning commission should support that. but there's not a big fire.

Unless I'm missing something based on what Sam was saying and everything that we know to this point, and I'm not knocking down the ADVC. Personally, I would love to be able to do that for my in-law, but it doesn't address the affordable housing side of things. So having that be part of the plan, That was well before certain restrictions, I think, have come into place. And seeing people enter into deeded agreements, I don't know how that would... I still see that happening a lot.

One thing I want to point out, there's one comment that stood out for me, it's the last one, Common E. Try and limit ADU usage to prevent transient use. I think what they're referring to is Airbnb and VRBO. and that it is a risk if you are if you are going to emphasize these small rental units and they're in beach communities how do you reserve them as housing for residents as opposed to uh an income source potentially for um that is competing with the hotels or whatever yeah of course the beach areas have been that but that's how but that's historically how they've been so in a time it may not be a winning argument but it is it is a concern

What is that by age-friendly?

We don't, I don't know exactly. That was a question that I was reviewing with my staff. One thing is there's many ways that you can interpret age-friendly. There's a concept called universal design where you design, let's say you design that unit to have level entry. So you're not doing steps. It's not on a second floor. It has enough room in the bathroom, so you can have a car and maybe even a wheelchair to get in. So there are certain building standards for making a unit more friendly for aging in place. And you could also imagine an ADU where at some point the homeowner flips and moves into the ADU and rents out the house. Particularly if it's a single person, now it's a single person household, they don't need the whole house, and they decide that they want to stay there, and they rent out the main house during.

I think the last legislature, didn't they have legislation about loosening the rules on ADUs when it was defeated?

Yes, I was actually debating whether I should bring that up. There is discussion about, so back in, I think it was 2020 or 2021 sessions, There was a mandate on ADUs that allowed towns to opt out and have their own regulations. O-Line opted out and kept its own regulations. There has been a lot of interesting ideas that come up in a session, and that was one of them that sort of forced the issue. And that bill did not pass. But it could very well come back.

I have a question. If an ADU is added to a property, does that increase the available housing stock, so therefore it's going to require additional affordable units?

Not necessarily. The methodology for looking at how many units are needed is not based on necessarily your existing housing units. It's looking at other needs of your residents based on income levels and a number of other factors. But just adding housing units does not necessarily do that. Although under 830G, to not fall under that 10%, every unit you add gets you further away from the 10%. But really, none of our towns in Riverhog, except for the city of Milltown, are anywhere near that 10%. And it's not really a reasonable goal for really any of our towns. There is such a thing as a moratorium that a town can get if you make some progress towards getting towards 10%. But it just sort of delays the inevitable because that moratorium eventually expires. And during that time that you have the moratorium, you're probably building market rate housing anyway. So it gets you farther away from the goal of the 10%. And the 10% was never a mandate on the towns. It is a developer's option. So the developer has the option to choose to do an 830G, but it's not a mandate on the town that they shall provide this number of units. And the same thing comes with these affordable housing plans or the housing growth plans. It's to show that you could accommodate the units, but reality is that... housing unit for someone making 30% AMI is not going to be able to be built with us.

I was just going to say that. If you're expecting a 30% AMI, the cost of construction is going to outweigh the rent income.

It ends up becoming, these plans may actually throw it back at the state and say, growth may be able to accommodate these places, but it will never happen without X percent subsidies to make these things penciled out. I think that's ultimately What will be interesting in this upcoming session is whether the General Assembly will have the money or not. If there's no money, it's not happening.

Yeah, because no developer is going to make money on 30%.

So if we could just continue our discussion. I'm just trying to make sure we get everything covered.

And there's one other interesting comment here. The consensus seemed that two doors on a dwelling where the next dwelling was closed was not favored. We were a little confused at Rivercock just because a lot of houses will have like a main door and a main bedroom. And so I think it's really just it's a design issue here that there was a concern. It's my question.

It's like how do you do ADUs? What are the different ways of creating that from a physical access and structure? Or is that even defined? Can the commission define it?

Well, in the historic district, you have a lot more power to define those things. And furthermore, if you were to establish a village district, you would have similar, but for new build. I think locations, those are things that can be part of the discussion.

Are you saying you were confused by that comment? Yeah, yeah. In the group that we were in, it appeared that when they showed a picture of a duplex with a door side by side, so you could clearly see this is one unit and this is another, it was over 90% were against it. So I think that that's where that comment came from. And maybe the consideration there is to not have that mirror image, have the design so that it it's more pleasing.

And not sure how those images, how they fit into ADUs.

Because ADUs are not... Because ADUs is going to be fairly smaller.

But if you have a house with a door here and you add on over here and you put the front door right next to it and it's clear that that's a side-by-side unit, that may be what people react to. So Maybe zoning changes to accommodate that. Do everything you can to make the entrance on another side.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Right.

Are there any other ideas on ADUs, accessory dwelling units?

You mentioned O-Line chose not to last time when the ADU was brought up. I was curious as to...

to answer your notes why i can tell you uh okay so the adus that were being talked about in that bill were these separate things that people could buy granny pots yeah they were not part of a house they were just things that got parked on the land and only for so long as you had a granny and then they were supposed to disappear and we took one look at that and said in the beach areas that would be off so we just couldn't see that that was a good addition to the town it's also rushed you had to just make a decision right away so it was it was it was a marketing kind of a thing where they were marketing these things to people um you had to have a separate driveway which some of this is based on trying to have work within existing infrastructure

And as I recall, one of the proposals for that was that you would have to develop another road into that ADU and it was sort of self-defeating.

Thank you. Any other comments on ADUs? I probably should have a comment about ADUs with affordable housing because that's This is an issue, is that the intervention that is relied upon in 25-1 is these deed restrictions, when there's lots of ways to intervene for affordability, but your homeowners are not going to put a 40-year deed restriction on.

No, especially not against their relatives.

Well, it would be for the relative who may not be paying rent anyway.

And just to remind it to the other fellow, if you bring this back and discuss it with your commission's you know, like I said, this isn't the end of the dialogue. You can either give us stuff, you know, additional information in writing on any of these topics, but I'll keep reminding folks that as we're talking about this, think about like, oh, we need to have, if you need to have this discussion at your commission, and if you would want to give us something in writing or talk to us more about any of the topics. So I just, I'll keep reiterating that.

Yeah, I just want to mention a couple of things earlier. That's on the post and battle last America We're having a discussion at the Senate board meeting about aging in place. And the population, an old line a year ago, 65 with 80, there was 1,633 people, which is a substantial number. And 85 plus, there were 192 people. I don't suspect that they changed that much, but there are a lot of residents that we can accommodate and still took a part of what you for people on house numbers.

Yeah, I'll give you an example that a number of the time senior housing is deed restricted affordable and and so that counts towards that would count towards this. If that was an approach, I know Essex is senior housing is is done that way. So there is potential there. And I think that addresses the comment here, make ADU regulations. That's separate than ADU and age-friendly, but I think having the thoughts of ADUs and trying to promote them as a solution for your aging population, while at the same time being an opportunity for younger residents as well.

And then the footprint, having been senior moving to the accessory requirements, rent out the main house is very viable. It's going to help some people. There are two residents that I know that would, well, if they were to do that, they would be able to access the apartment.

yeah i i i last year my mother moved to a senior apartment if that was an option in her house her house was way too big for her uh to just flip that she that would have been a viable option for her but it really wasn't you know uh to do a construction project was not not really a viable solution again the cinders if we can keep them in place which

It's also on our board's radar, trying to help them. We have a community service, community service that volunteers can go to people's homes. Of course, if everyone's vetted out, you can help them. You can choose for them and help them. And these are the seniors that have lived here most of their life or all their life. Of course, they're treated tax-based. They paid a tax so they were involved. keeping them in town, I think it's very important.

I'll let you pivot off the subject, but the ADUs with the sewers going in, is that even a viable option? Because aren't the sewers sized specifically for the exact house count now? So that's really not even an option if they're increasing the bedroom load in that area.

Yeah, in that situation, you might have to do something internal where you're really cutting into these.

Yeah, you're eliminating a bedroom in your home to add it to somewhere else.

Well, the next category was role character. It was an area that was discussed. There was a discussion of attendees like the town's open force and open spaces, mixed message on cluster-style subdivisions to protect this. drinking water and around water capacity was a concern. Balanced housing need with the preservation of qualities that make O-Line distinctive. And Dan Hughes gave a strong sense of what we did not want, which is, you know, I want an O-Line. They don't want to become like Niantic or Brantford. So, you know, reviewing this, I had a few questions. Some of it was a discussion of, you know, mapping of, like, understanding where are the towns important to open spaces and forests that these participants were really talking about. And also, where do you have those drinking water, groundwater capacity concerns? Some of this seemed like mapping exercises. And then trying to think about what are the qualities that make O'Line distinctive? Because if you're looking to protect them, you need to know what those qualities are.

Well, it was very clear when we did the clicker survey where they did the clicker survey that they didn't want any townhouses, period. Every time anything like that was shown up, they huge negative. So still letters didn't fly either.

I have a question, and I'm not sure if this can be addressed here, but every time I hear the that push back against not wanting or wanting to become Granford, Niantic, Clinton, Westbrook, whatever. Old State Road is cited a lot. And I don't know if maybe this is what you were saying just now, but do we think the intent behind that is the amount of open space that has been turned into Mixed housing or mixed use, rather, or businesses. Because when I think of all these other communities, we don't have what they have in terms of a main drag. I mean, our biggest main drag is Paul's Road. And that's not a main drag. So I struggle with, I get it. None of us want to be that. And yet I don't understand where that sentiment comes from. I'm probably asking you respectfully.

I don't think it is the main drag thing. I'm old enough to remember when the townhouses on Boggy Hole and Peppermint Ridge were built. And right after those were done, there was a massive uprising in the town against that kind of housing. And so if you think about in Eastline what you can see from the turnpike, the housing up on the hill, You know, it's a lot of housing. It looks a particular way. That's what the residents of Old Lyme do not want. At least that's my opinion.

I have a couple of my opinions on that as well.

I don't think I think that I want to like not have feedback so much. So if we could say more, give us your thoughts.

I'd be interested in what interpretations are of that, because I think it's important to understand what that means.

And I think C and D should be sort of thought together because C is you know, preservation quality is the old line that makes it old line distinctive. And then we don't want it to be Niantico-Granford. So I think they really need, but those concepts are concepts that need to be further defined and fleshed out.

People don't want the big housing units.

Overdevelopment. It's busy in those communities. You drive through and you're in traffic.

When I think of Brantford, I think you have a lot more commercial involved. I think of Niantic, I think more tourism focus.

A lot of commercial.

A lot of commercial, yeah.

In my group, it came across as density and scale. The whole island is more rural, scale buildings relative to the landscape, and just gentle density.

I guess I just don't see how we could become that.

Well, redoing Halls Road to be a downtown scenario with mixed use would be a perfect example of that scenario. If you're going to create buildings, you're going to move them close to the road. Right now, our buildings are set back from the road, so the scale seems smaller. But if you eliminate the need for the setbacks, you move it up to the road, now the scale seems bigger because it's right in front of you.

But it's true.

This blocks me. Right. I think that's where, and that's where our discussion, I think. I don't see how it could happen if

Well, you put a couple of big developments along Boston Post Road where people can see them, make them townhouses. Is there property available? There's quite a bit of property in the whole time.

That sounds different. Again, I think, I guess my point would be, at least from the affordable housing standpoint, I want to understand what that means.

It would be a good survey to prompt.

Yes. I mean, when you said when people, because I bet it means something different for everyone you're saying.

Sure.

You know, and so I think it's important to pull the overall sentiment out of that so that we know what not to do. That's it.

And whereas I think, you know, that idea of an option for a survey to flesh out, you know, that more. And I look through, I make summary of like, yeah, anything that looked like, you know, apartments or townhouses, you know, there's 70, 65% against. Yeah, it was very high percentage. But at the same time, like the first two ones, A and B, are really about preserving the natural areas, but also about the carrying capacity of the land. Because when you're dealing with septic and well, you know, I think that's B, drinking water and groundwater capacity was a concern. That's really about the carrying capacity of the land to support development and making sure that you don't, you know, cause problems. But also on the first one is really understanding what are the defining open spaces and forests that are important.

You can see how the developer gave them the leeway, where the Y is, and across the street, where the right-of-way is. They can develop that to the max. That's one of the proposals that were put forward on the overwrite. It could happen. If the zoning ended, they could build both parcels to the maximum, and you'd have a fourth in particular in the Brantford or the Newark State Park. That's for our downtown, and we're changing the calendar there for that one. Okay.

One other comment that we discussed in the Historic Commission, and I know the zoning committee is talking about it, but it's just lighting. of Old Lyme is a fairly dark, if you look on a dark skyline, it's a very dark area. And not only when we talk about density, it's density, not traffic, but lighting and the historic district, not just what's in the historic district, the lighting that might exist there that we have comment on, but it should be any lighting that's directly adjacent to the historic district and then changing the character of the district. So I don't want to, and that's been a problem.

Along with lighting, one thing we brought up was in my interview is dark sky, not just for commercial, but new construction, dark sky everywhere, lighting.

So we looked at that in the conservation zone, the Gateway Conservation Zone, But are you saying we should look at that across?

As an astronomy.

As an ah? Bias. Burgers have that same bias, just so I should know. I just wanted to, because we do have it in certain areas, but I was just looking at it.

One thing I would be concerned or I would err on the side of caution is, in essence, is creating a town-wide HOA. That's my fear for some, and that's just an unfounded fear. But as you start to implement dark sky compliant, you start to do different things. And not so much the dark sky. I have no problem with that, actually. But as we start to redefine our zoning regs, I'm just scared of people's property rights in that same thought. And I don't want to create the ability of almost like a town-wide HOA. I don't know. That's just my own thought process.

I don't know if you understand what I'm saying when I say that.

So like an HOA, they restrict the way your house looks. They restrict the way, how many cars you have in your driveway. There's so many restrictions in an HOA, homeowners association. Whereas I don't want our zoning reg, I mean, that is in essence an HOA book, right? That's a zoning regs, but I just want to make sure that we don't create too much restrictions on everybody's personal private property, I think.

I think the conversation about lighting in particular is more about density and scale, which is different than the number of, like, you know, the type of lights you have, but saying when you build a much taller building and it's a higher density and you have more lights, that does impact, you know. No, I agree. So that's different than HOA, the truth. Yeah.

Also, I think one of the things that you see now that you didn't see historically was larger windows. So there's that potential from a lighting perspective when everybody has, you know, the houses didn't have the windows they have now. They had candles. They had candles. But they also, you know, didn't have windows because they wanted to keep the heat in. They came taxed your glass. Yeah, exactly. And they taxed your glass. There you go.

And, you know, this whole section is called Broke Character. It's sort of, it could be seen as being like the town HOA saying, we're going to be this way. And so it's really just trying to understand what's really important here and what is like, you know, full cutoff lighting so you're not casting glare on your neighbors. That's an obvious one. But again, the I appreciate not wanting to be told what to do with your own private property.

It's more not so much that. It's more like the blight ordinance. There's ways within a blight ordinance that it can be considered an HOA, whereas there's tools and effects that you can help blighted properties get out of being blighted without having requirements of the strictness of a blight ordinance.

Any other comments on rule of character, what that means to you?

Could you talk a little bit about, there's been a lot of discussion at the state about that piece in planning conservation and development, and can we use that? I mean, we can obviously do the zoning, because then we'll just very specifically say, this is what you can and can't do to maintain that. But they're also saying, you know, that character is not one of the things you can, you know, so could you talk about that or how we have to be cautious about that?

Yes, there's been a lot, there's been discussion about this is that character is a poorly defined, you know, discretionary word that commissions use to not deny applications they don't like. And so I'm not necessarily an expert on the legislation of the zoning, the implications of that, but I think as much as you can things in more factual things like these are the oval spaces, of course, and the defining natural features that you want to protect, then it's not really just a discretionary, I don't like this. It's like, no, this has a negative impact on X, Y, or Z. And so I think as much as you can in your in your in your zoning sort of identify what's important, what you've heard from the community, what's important and and there's like a logical progression of like this regulation protects these things or or regulates it for this public reason. I think you're in a better place. Thank you. I think I think what they're what they were attacking was, you know, an ill defined or undefined community character. I know it wouldn't see it, but I won't tell you what that is.

I just want to make sure everybody understood that will be our challenge as we're doing this.

But if you're talking about natural elements, you're talking about certain rural or natural elements that the tenant wants to protect or wants to be mindful of, I think that's perfectly legitimate. Especially when you're coming down to development that's based on well and septic, that of course is going to be based on soils and it's going to be based on on the natural features of that particular parcel, as to what you could put there and how much you could put there. But if there's no more discussion on the rural character one, I'd say the next category was a better mixture of housing, which we've already sort of touched upon with the ADUs, but I think it's a bigger discussion of, And so there seemed to be a broad sense that the current mixture of powers and options was not meeting the needs of existing and possible future residents. The need to keep and attract young people was mentioned in various ways, but there was no agreement on how the best to do this. And there was a sense that seniors needed better options. Several options were mentioned, age and place, and we touched upon this from ADU. Downsizing without leaving town and plan for the future considered the town's long-term demographic trends and who will live in Old Lyme over the next 20 years. So I think if you take a look at this all together, it's really, the things that are left unsaid is that what are the housing options that are not meeting, what are the needs that are not met? And who are the people, and what is needed to keep or attract young people? And what are seniors looking for? So those are some of the questions that I had meetings.

As we were leaving that meeting, Someone brought up the point that young people don't really want to live here. There's not a lot to do. I mean, my kids moved out. It's not a big entertainment area. I don't know that we should spend a lot of time trying to get young people to stay, unless, you know, a school teacher with affordable housing. Otherwise, I don't think they really want to be here.

Well, so this is something I was going to plug, and I'm going to just change this. So as part of the preparations for the PAFIT 25-1 work, River Cog has completed needs assessment, existing condition data packets for each of our towns. And so in looking at that comment, I was thinking about how the town looks when it comes to families with school-age children. And actually Old Lyme is doing a better job attracting or keeping, you know, families with kids than a lot of your peer towns and neighboring towns. And, you know, you could do better to sort of balance out your age, but maybe that's what it is being referred to as, like, not necessarily, you know, we're talking about young families as opposed to young people. But that's, I'm just, that's just a guess. Schools. Yeah, I don't know.

Or attracting wealth.

Yeah, I don't think you're going to have a happening club scene.

All right, over here.

Some of the question to Zoe is that recently, we've passed fixed use within commercial sellers, like some tendency there. When we discussed this in the planning commission, the particular commercial area along Route 156, which helps up a good part of the C-10, C-30 zones, would not work, we thought, would not work with Mixtures. We thought that perhaps you should have included multi-band. We found it very difficult to see a developer being required to put retail on the first floor at that location, and then we felt it would probably not be viable for them to do that. So, you know, the particular areas I'm talking about is like where Cherry Stones used to be. It's now a golf range and so forth. We want that whole strip only to the police department. So we've talked about that. We've briefly discussed whether or not the cannon you should have one of those traffic but we should look at traffic um oriented communities whether that would make sense for this town to define certain areas and then specify what could go into those areas such you know We know the sewers are going to allow greater density, perhaps, of all that shrimp.

But not on the north side.

But they won't because they can't increase the volume of septic outside of what's already there.

Yeah, can't go on the north side.

So that won't help with that.

It actually limits it even more, I would think. Than it would have before. Because before you might have the ability. Of expanding your septic. With the soils that were there. Whereas now you're tied into. Whatever current volume you have. I think. That's the way I'm interpreting it.

That's an evaluated. You saw studies of that.

It's a condition. No it was a condition. Having it. See this is a problem that's getting solved. So with all the money that's being used. And all the sources that are providing it. They're saying, we're not giving it so you can make another problem. We're going to solve the problem, but then that's it.

Because their systems are already at capacity for the most part anyway. The sewer infrastructure that goes from Eastline, Waterford, and New London is already almost at capacity. Is the limitation reloaded? Yeah, well, I would imagine it's everything along the whole network.

I think it was a condition of the whole consent order project, everything else, that that was it. They're going to fix this problem, but they're not going to let the system be expanded into other areas.

Like the sewer line that goes to Point of Woods, because they did that 20 years ago, it's sized exclusively for Point of Woods. So no more effluent could be tied into that system. So we're going to parallel that system all the way to East Line. So I imagine they're building a size system that's size specific for the beach community right now.

So people in the beach community, will now be served by the sewer system. If they decide to upgrade, sort of, for all year and season, that could probably just cause the system to be sized that.

Well, the system is sized for everyday use.

So whether you use it- 365. It would be sized for the max use, so, which would be during the summer. So it would be sized for occupancy, full occupancy in the summer. And in the winter, the seasonal units would be used, but it would have to be able to handle that volume if it was used. It would have been designed to handle the volume of full occupancy.

So then, as a follow-up question then, when you considered mixed use in those commercial summers, did you consider bulk and panel?

It's considered, but not included.

but you didn't consider it and you decided not to go forward or to allow multifamily in that area because... Yeah, so we didn't at this point.

We're taking comments. As we said, we had a very short time, so we did something. If planning has some other thoughts on that and very specific comments, say them now and also give it to us. We want to make sure people understand that we did something very quickly with recommendations from RiverCon to have something on the books, but we're certainly amenable to change that if we think that the proposed changes will work. So if you have very specific... Have you considered... We will consider if you tell us what you want us to consider.

That would be a That would be a discussion at length. We have it under our agenda to talk about. But looking at that same commercial area, looking at whether the density, the sound view, that commercial area a little bit along 156 would actually meet the criteria. Along with Hull's Road, would they meet the criteria for a transit-oriented district? Maybe you could define the type of housing. Maybe you could do, like, cluster housing in there, define it. So if people have problems with duplexes in that area, you know, is there a way, Sam, when you define a transit-oriented district,

Then you can define the type of housing that can be placed. So it would help if you explain what that's what I'm going to do. So people don't know and what the benefits are to it.

So so Public Act 25 dash one created a thing called transit oriented communities, which isn't really anything new in that. It's always been within the power of the town to be able to increase density in certain areas of town, increase densities that might be more pedestrian-friendly and could potentially be more transit-friendly. The reality is that the town has very minimal transit service from Estuary Transit District or River Valley Transit. So you're never going to have a level of transit to actually be transit-oriented. But In this, in this specific session, 25-1, it gave an option for towns, if they adopted these certain densities in their zoning regulations, it would potentially allow the town to access more state funds. And, and Those state funds have yet to be appropriated, so stay tuned. None of the towns in the Rivercock region, 17 towns, have gone in that direction yet because there's really no point. Go there until this month, actually. But in the right place, this could be the right option. But the whole use of transit is a little bit of a misnomer because many of the towns that are identified have minimal transportation, and it's very difficult to live in this town without a vehicle. Very, very difficult. The service that we have is very minimal. I think it's two-hour headways going either to, say, Brook or to London. And it's, you know, there is Paracansas service as well for people with disabilities, but it is very limited. But the concept of creating an environment that is, in a small area, denser and walkable where people can walk, that's traditional New England development pre-World War II. That was, you know, every town had a walkable district because that was how people got arrested.

But Sam, do you know what the transit requirement is? So we have a bus route segment.

Oh, there is no... Yeah, I mean, we are considered a transit community. We could apply for this.

Yeah, you could apply for it. But the organization who pushed this, I tried to meet with their... With our bus company. And it's like, you do know that this, you know, without... massively increasing transit service, it'd be very difficult to live here without a car. This is not transit oriented. So it's a little bit of the use of the term is not really appropriate because O-Line is never going to have the level of transit we need to be able to be competitive.

It's like if you built 25 apartments in one location, All the people living there have different time schedules to get to work and everything. And in a transit-oriented district, they have a lot of options for buses. Catch any bus and get to where they're going in 20 minutes. We don't have that option here. You have to rely on when the bus goes by, and then the bus has to go on the rest of the route wherever before you get to where it might be close to where you're working. So it could take an hour to get to work. And that's part of being in a rural town that makes it challenging.

Part of that legislation required the state to put together a committee that was going to come up with what you needed to do. And I'm not sure that has happened yet. So we don't know what the requirements for being a transit-oriented development are yet. So, you know, what the scale would be, what they would be looking at in terms of parking requirements, because the assumption is that you won't need a car.

Well, I can talk about parking if you want. This is something that went into effect on July 1st that everyone should know. And we already took care of that. So let's say a developer comes in, puts a 16 apartment unit development in, and there's no parking provided for the residents, that cannot be grounds for denial for that. If it's 17 units or larger, The statute now provides a maximum number of parking spaces that the town can fire based on, I think, bedrooms of the units. Of course, there's nothing stopping the developer from putting in parking, and probably any bank that's financing the project will want to see parking. But the town on its own, for smaller projects, can't set a parking requirement.

But very specifically in the transit-oriented development, there's going to be standards on that, and they're really looking at not requiring any parking. So that's a real challenge. So like Bonnie was saying, if you really don't have the transit, it's really, really hard to Because, you know, they say that we're transit because we do have some buses that come in. But it's not like, you know, we're not transit compared to other cities. So it's not like you could just go to the bus stop and take a bus here to your doctor's appointment or this or that or whatever. Because it's not just about getting to work. It's about getting around town. It's about doing your shopping. It's about doing a whole lot of other things. And so... Until we know what those requirements are, so I think I would say with transit-oriented development, we want to think about it. And we can do some of that ourselves. We can think about transit-oriented development without being part of the state program. We can think about how to better do you know, development that kind of works that way. That said, I would be cautious until we know what the requirements are from the committee that the state's supposed to put together so that the towns can buy into that. And that hasn't happened yet.

And I think... We don't have so much control of the frequency of the bus coming down that route unless it's coming down.

Not that much control.

But I also think...

So that is correct. River Valley Transit has on-demand transit, which is in Saybrook, Essex, and parts of Westbrook. We also have a zone in East Hampton and one in Middletown, and also a successful one in Guilford, Madison. And the idea is the bus runs like an Uber. It's still not unfortunate. But I think the important thing when you think about transit Transit lines all begin on foot because it's walking to a bus stop, walking to a train station, getting on a train, then walking to your destination. So creating a place where you can walk to a destination and walk back and accomplish something on foot is something that any, even the smallest rural town can accomplish something like that, where there's enough density of something that people can actually walk and do something.

There's a road that we go to, it's Walton County, Florida. called 30A, and it's multiple communities along the road. They put in sewers. When they did that, they put bike paths on top of sewer lines. Also, it's not directly adjacent to the road, so it's very safe to progress on bicycle. And it is enormously popular. It's a very natural-type environment, and so people commute between the different town, the building developments, to retail, not on foot, not on car, and it's safe. I don't know if that's at all possible.

Yeah, and that's where planning ourselves, are there areas where we could do some type, so that would be something to consider. But that's a little bit different than what they're talking about in transit.

If a community has some ban, somehow, you know, anything, Somebody driving for that count, they have their own.

So there's no real counting for the purposes of necessarily for the program that's transit-oriented communities. It's just to actually fund a competitive public transportation system, it just requires a subsidy, which we just don't have the money.

Yeah, I'm saying it's not public, but private to the community.

Well, it would be publicly funded by that community.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the taxpayers have a finite pocket, unfortunately, and it's expensive. The transit district that you're currently part of is funded in part by a contribution from the member towns. So Old Lyme is paying in to a transit district for the bus service you're getting. Most of the operating costs are being subsidized by the state. but there is, I think, about 8% of the subsided by the tenants. So there is that, but it's just trying to do the most with what service we have, which is unfortunately scalable.

And, you know, if you kind of go through some of our minutes from those meetings we had, one of the reasons we focused or were advised to actually focus on having the mixed use versus just housing was to protect our commercial, limited commercial area we have on Halls Road. And that was compelling for where we are at this stage with 25-1. One of the reasons we looked at that ore. And that is why.

From the planning commission, when we did come back and said that we definitely agree with that there's mixed use for Halls Road To protect the commercial.

Until we had the conversation tonight, I guess I didn't even realize that the commercial district down by the Soundview area, the C10, that that really can't be expanded into the two to nine units if the sewer is already going to be capped at that size. I just had that thought process while we were sitting here. Wait a second. So like, even though we have this mix, it's of no value down in the C10 zone because you can't increase the density down there.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

So like Dave Hamstrung,

that because the sewer, that's where that application fails.

Correct. So yeah, so to, I guess, that might answer some of your questions about the mixed use in that district, because it's limited by the sewer.

Correct. No, not there.

I don't know.

You can do some, but you just can't do it at any high density.

I'd like to recenter back to this topic. It was a better mixture of housing. And just to touch upon, you know, what you think is the housing that's missing or is needed in the community that, you know, I think we talked about ADUs, but ADUs is only, it's like, you know, a single apartment here or there. I think this is probably touching upon other types of analysis besides detached single family, but what would that be and what would be desirable?

So a couple of questions that come up there that maybe if you go back to your commissions is obviously talked about age demographics, whether we need for aging in place and the older population or younger. whether it be young people trying to stay in town or new young families coming in. But you can also, besides age demographics, you can also look at, do we need more rental units versus home ownership? And maybe is that impacting, whether it be the senior population or the folks who come into town who might not be able to purchase a house, do we have enough rental units? So just think about some of the other things that impact housing and what we might need when we're talking about housing units, because it's not just about how many bedrooms or whatever. It's rental versus home ownership. It may be some other things. Maybe you know, even styles of housing? Do we need to make sure that we have, you know, like that one floor type thing just so that we have more units that are not up and down that we have? So just thinking about housing in different ways, if you have any thoughts and if you have any right now, but otherwise bring those back to your commission because those are some of the things that we can impact is when we're talking about housing design, if all of our housings are you know, tape style. I'm just throwing that out there. But basically when your bedrooms are upstairs, is that, is that good for that when we're trying to meet an aging demographic, for example, or whatever. So just think about all of those types of things that impact housing and what we could do from a zoning perspective.

The observation was, it's always interesting. We have these discussions on alternative housing options and people at this meeting, um, We're all in favor of different options. But then when you show them specific pictures, everyone's against it. And I think part of the problem is if you just show a few townhouses, the perception of people's mind is there's rows of townhouses. And without showing the pictures and the context of where it would be, I think, you know, that kind of slants it. So everyone was very much in favor of all these alternative options, and we showed them specific, and everyone was against them. And you know, my observation is very interesting. When you go back to the whole affordable housing project that was proposed a number of years ago, there was going to be the huge issue with traffic. You know, this is a dangerous corner, and people would come out, and there's going to be accidents, and there's just going to be huge traffic Now in the same area that they're building in McMansions, nobody ever brought out traffic. So, you know, it's really interesting that conceptually people like things that don't put it in my backyard.

But I think I hear you, but I also think what I was looking through the minutes. and it's, there were some things just like you said, it makes sense. But then when you see something else you're discussing, it was like, well, that those don't go together. Those don't work. But what I felt was like, there's room for creativity. There's room for spacing homes, like kind of on an angle or something where that's the feedback would really be nice to get from people. It's like, how can we be creative? So it's not a standard side by side or on top of each other. Um, you know, can we angle them? Or can we have a couple of both? Or what would people like to see?

And another thought is the amount of open space that you put aside for any of the buildings that you're building. So should you limit the footprint, even though you may have a lot that's several acres, should you limit the footprint within a certain area of that and then some open space around that? Those are the kinds of ideas that might make it more palatable to people and yet address the various types of housing.

Our biggest stumbling block is going to be the fact that the average home right now, if you want to build a baseline economy home, it's $220 a square foot. So for 600 square feet, it's $132,000 at a bare minimum for the minimum construction. So that's our biggest stumbling block to any affordable housing or any housing for that matter is the cost of goods and costs of everything, right?

In speaking to the design questions, I think that that's another area where I feel like it's important to understand what people are saying yes or no to because I would bet my whole savings, which isn't a lot right now, but I would still bet that a lot of people, it was simply based off of taste. And so teasing out, is it about the footprint? Is it about whatever it's about? And then I would imagine too, your challenge is going to be keeping it broad enough so that, I mean, no matter who builds what, if they're following all of the specs, they're the people that don't like it. It's just not going to be their taste. You know what I mean? So that's the challenge for you all, I think. But I think it's important to understand what's underneath some of these. And you could subdivide these surveys until the cows come home. At some point you have to stop, but you know, I think if you really want to get the gritty, and maybe the current survey that is still up online and still viewable teases a lot of that out for you or us.

Yeah, I think it does a little bit more, but we'll see. But it's definitely the questions we're going to be struggling with. So that's where looking at that, because I do think it's like, is it just aesthetic? You know, so if it's an immediate visceral aesthetic, is there a way to be creative about the aesthetic, but still get what we need. So for example, if you're gonna put in senior housing, let's just say we all decided we needed more senior housing or 55 plus development, but we didn't like any of those, how would you do that from a design aesthetic that makes it work? And is it about, you know, open space zoning or low-impact development zoning or whatever you want to call it?

What would that fall under right now in terms of the zoning mapping? If somebody, like, is it Limewood? What is the zone over there? It's residential something, right? It's got to be an R30 or something.

20 or 30, Limewood.

Over by the lake.

Right. The other scene across?

Yeah, the scene out by the lake.

Yeah, those are federal units.

Yeah, but what's the underlying zone?

Well, I bet it was RU40.

Can you scroll down?

Yeah. I wanted to show here. So if you look at these, the first two units that scored relatively highly They're relatively modest single-family homes on maybe a half acre or something. Lots of grass. And, you know, that bottom house, you know, the upstairs could be a separate unit. It could be a two-family, and you would never know. So it's really aesthetics, I think. What was interesting was they didn't show any large, like, 4,000, 5,000-square-foot homes.

Or 10 or 12.

Upstairs in the group that I was in, to your point, was a comment about access to the larger landscape but also you know with with small homes even close together having that threat access whether you're senior or young to the natural environment the outdoors versus the units that are squished together that don't have that direct

I think a lot of their reaction was buildings and parking lots. And that's all you have. And there are a lot of places in Brantford that are buildings and parking lots. And that's about all they have. And you might get a bush.

Somebody made the comment, because we were in the room upstairs with all the beautiful paintings, and said, look around. The painting, this is a lot. And so everybody's mind, it represented, it was that natural environment. So placing... Again, scale and direct access to that natural environment, that is a lot. I heard that 10 times this year.

I think you wanted to talk about that in moderation.

Yeah, I actually liked that. I know a lot of people weren't in favor of that, but I think that fits into the community, and an elderly person would be absolutely okay in that.

And look at the comments. They're all over the place.

There's a way to design it to where it can be flawed.

There were people who absolutely know, and there were people who...

We could, I don't know every inch in looking for a table. I don't know that I ever will. We could have a whole community of that. I would never know.

We do have a similar house. I was surprised the one up above how much negative reaction there was to that.

It's the proximity of the other houses.

It's a rather dense neighborhood.

I think it was more about the neighborhood than the housing style. And I think that's one of the things I took away from it.

That's what I think, though, that it was eliciting. Just how dense housing are you liking to see? Yeah, it was about the density.

I think you got a pretty good answer. There's no density here, and it still was not the top of the choice. Yeah.

People just don't like the modern design.

There are some people, no modern.

He needs curtains. No. He doesn't need curtains. He's in the woods.

You need to wear a good job. Okay. All right. This is taking a right-hand turn. Let's move on.

We're finishing at 8.30.

I will say that I think a lot of this discussion was just you know, visceral feelings of like, you know, I like it, I hate it. And without actually understanding what's actually inside that structure. Because you can hide a lot, you can hide density inside a structure and never know it. But it just depends, but people are responding to what they think it is. Yeah.

I think your best bet to get affordable housing is in this section right here. Some sort of prefab, the sort of thing that you can bring in. Absolutely.

Chop off the truck. Go back to the...

and then there was uh two uh two uh remaining categories that yeah and that's a young demographic demographic appeal to that yeah i just think it's when i look at all the cost options that to me is the least cost so i'm trying to appeal to young people that they'll react to this

So the next one was better location of housing, which I think was organic controlled growth rather than large scale. I think maybe this is more speaks to infill potentially as to, you know, instead of large development of hundreds of units that you do smaller infill, smaller developments scattered around as opposed to a large modular development. I think that's what you're saying there. Community centered design, that was the question, what does that really mean? But I think it's houses on small, large cluster around community spaces. Multifamily zones to be reviewed to see if they're meeting the town's needs. Smaller mixed use developments where appropriate. Focused new housing in already developed areas. Direct higher density housing to appropriate locations, which of course appropriate needs to be defined. The consensus seems to be that this should be where there is already infrastructure in place rather than create new dense neighborhoods. uh prioritize redevelopment infill explore transit oriented development um so um yeah what do people are people's thoughts on that is increasing density so infill could mean increasing density it could mean uh building on a vacant lot in an area that's already developed uh it could be um but yes it would be putting more units in an area so whether it is subdividing a lot that's large enough to have two houses on it than one, yes, you would be increasing density.

When you say infill, it's not necessarily increasing the density that's allowed, but it is increasing the density that's there. And that was one of the points that was made, is that if we took our current zoning and did a build-out, So, for example, people look at open space. It's not open space. Somebody owns that 30 acres. Unless it's protected by the land trust or the town open space committee, it's not open space. It's someone's land, and then they have the right to develop that. So, obviously, with constraints of wetlands and, you know, whatever. But if it's one acre zoning, you know, what are we going to get? And so how do we, how do we, do we look at that build out and say like, oh, well, that's not really what we want. So that's, that's where we need to be thinking. And that's what infilling is, can be looking at that. And, but a lot of times we talk about that, particularly in areas where we have already have housing and then we have vacant lots in between. I know in my neighborhood, we have, you know, a vacant lot right now.

Or it could be, let's say you have a, you know, a underutilized or vacant sort of commercial property, and you replace that one-story commercial building with a two-story mixed-use with commercial on the first floor and apartments above, you know, that could also be considered infill. But infill is different than, let's say, taking that 30 acres and building 100 units on it. Infill is more, it's building in the existing built environment and adding adding buildings where they're already developed. But that seems like that's what the discussion here was really, but smaller things sort of fitting in, fitting stuff in existing areas, as opposed to taking a hundred acre farm and turning that into a new subdivision.

And I guess, again, if you take this back, I'll look at it from your commission's perspective. Did the conversation at the meeting the other day capture this, or is this something your commission would like to add to this discussion? Would be something you'd say, like, they captured it, we agree, or, oh, our commission thought of something else. So just think about that. And think about it in relationship to the different zoning areas we have, you know.

And I'll raise your attention to F, which I think is, there's a lot to be thought about. First of all, direct higher density housing to appropriate locations. That's going to be something that the town is going to be tasked with as part of the housing growth plans eventually. So I think that's a really important thing to think about. What is the appropriate locations? What does that even mean in town? And then this other question here, already infrastructure. We talked about the sewer issue, the sewer extensions. and how that might be tapped out from day one. So, so you're only, the only changes that might be able to happen is where, you know, you might be swapping one building for another thing or something like, because it's not, you're not going to be able to.

You can't add, I mean, that's a fascinating, really the only infrastructure that exists, it would be that sewer. There is no other infrastructure.

The only other infrastructure you could think about is like, you know, areas in town where you might have sidewalks or maybe where the bus route goes, but you're not really talking about very much.

Well, right now, our sound view is included in the sewer project, which is where the little limited commercial we have, that's where it is. So we do have some options there. We can look at some modern septic options. I don't know.

Can you share a stone area with septic?

It's not in the sewer. It's not in the sewer plant.

It's not.

It's important to know.

No, it can't be included.

No. Not in the current one. It could not be built with sewers. I mean, it could not be built with septic.

It could be built with septic. Yes. Right. But just so you know, the Cherry Stones is a separate building lot than the rest of the driving range.

Yeah, it is. But the three things you're going to be looking at is on-site septic, well, we have water supply, and then handling stormwater. Because we have to handle the stormwater. In particular, if there's any local streams or whatever nearby, making sure we handle that stormwater correctly is as critical as that's what creates the flooding, not necessarily in that neighborhood, but downstream. So that's one of the things we'll be looking at. And that's where it's like, okay, That's where it's starting to think about housing a little bit differently where we might say smaller lots, but leaving more open space around it for subdivision. So low impact development, those types of things. There's challenges with that because they still have to have onsite septic. So it's like there's, and then we still have to have wells. So even when you do that low impact, it's not easy, but those are the things that you can look at.

Those are allowed right now.

Yep. You can have, but what I'm saying is it's still not easy. It's not affordable.

Right now, my understanding of this, that commercial area that we're talking about, C-30 along 156, by, let's say, the gun range all the way down to the police station, Right now, if you allow the mixed use into that area, mixed use in a good deal of that area is not feasible because of the retail in the first floor. So we're also saying, well, if you allowed multi-family housing in there, you would have constraints because you really can't use the sewer system. But there's maybe some possibility with looking at some advanced septic systems that might be able to serve something there. But right now it's a commercial or mixed use. So right now you do not allow that type of development, right? So you're not allowing multifamily or cluster housing in that area.

You could have cluster housing.

Excuse me?

You could have cluster housing. They did propose cluster housing a while ago on the golf range and then they scrapped it.

So plus the housing was not permitted under the current zoning.

Yes, it is. We have a cluster regulation. We do have cluster.

For that commercial area?

I don't know about whether it's part. So I don't think the commercial extends all the way back.

It's 400 feet or...

There was a commercial development proposed on the Gulf Range probably 15 years ago, and it was never done. I think we didn't approve it.

Under the current restrictions of commercially zoned property, you can do cluster housing to them?

Not on commercial. And where it was proposed was not commercial.

It's not commercial. That property you're talking about is...

He's talking more about basically from Crosslanes to Breen Avenue. Are you... If you're...

I'm talking, yeah, from, say, Crosslanes all the way down. You're talking about also where Cherrystone is.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's not... C30 at Cherrystone's. And then it transitions to C10, right, at Cross Lanes. And it's C10 from Cross Lanes to Breen Avenue.

So we can look at that. Yeah, I'm saying it is. We're going to be looking to see if there's anything. And if you have recommendations from the Planning Commission.

The whole super thing is interesting because are there any businesses that are also tying in?

Well, yeah, because there is commercial businesses in the C-10 zone.

Because it depends on what business you have, it's going to limit what kind of businesses can be in the future. Roonies.

Teddy Roonies?

Yes. Well, you got Teddy's, Roonies, Dimitri's. You got the police station. There's a commercial shop on the back against the railroad tracks. Just wrap it up. A real property. So there is a few. There is definitely some commercial tenants in there. Very few.

They already kind of. Yeah, I'm just like looking at the last section. Just make sure we touch it on this stuff. I think is actually we kind of covered it. You know section 830 G is you know that 10% is not. It's not a mandate on the town. It's it's just an option for developers and the reality is is that you're not going to make a need that most times will never meet that. And that is not what this public public Act 25 dash one is going to require. attendees were concerned the town's infrastructure was inadequate to serve the needs of a much larger population but i guess the question is are you expecting the town to grow to a much larger population that you would need more infrastructure i guess you know um one of the one of the issues for connecticut and and actually olym is doing a better job of attracting young families but a lot of towns are facing um population collapse because you know they they You know, the schools are having massive declines in enrollment and they're declining population. The state in general is aging. So that was a questionable one. Like, do we really expect Old Lyme to be growing significantly population-wise? And there was a sense of state's requirements to not consider Old Lyme's unique identity or not context. That goes without saying. Statewide zoning is inherently not context sensitive and is the reason why I advocate against it. And the last one is the attendees acknowledge that a better mixture of housing was desirable but seemed uniform in the belief that this was better handled by community. And I agree.

So can I just ask all of you to consider, because that's why I asked you in the beginning about the beach areas. So the beach areas are served with infrastructure they're the only part of town that is they're also subject to flooding that's also trying to be addressed but only like a minimal patching and this would include the properties north of 95 as well as south so can you please tell us whether or not you really think that's where denser housing should be because it seems a little puzzling to me if that's what the conclusion would be is that you want to have the beach areas be denser than they are already. And then if they're not, then where else would you put it? Because there, there's the constraints of the environmental conditions.

And that's the challenge that we're having, both with the Resilient Committee, but also when we're looking at the environmental folks, and particularly the Flood Diversion Control Board, I almost forgot the name of the board. Flood Diversion Control Board came back with us with some real recommendations from a flood mitigation perspective, which is going to impact the coastal. So just understand we've got the housing, but now we also have the environmental constraint stuff. It's like we're meshing all that together. So I think asking... or really thinking about that. A lot of people think about old life, but that's unique. But when we're doing zoning, we need to be... It's town-wide. It's a challenge.

What the sewer system does to those three communities that are negative. What is going to change there?

The groundwater.

The groundwater is going to improve.

The state has the nitrogen and the sound.

With those communities down the street, It's good that the sewer is going there. After heavy rains, we do get pollution into the south, no doubt. And we encourage the south view area to move towards sewage. I think that might be part of it. So anyhow, there'll be these homes now being served by sewer system. We're thinking that perhaps the density from, number of people living in the area may increase because some of those homes are no longer due just season. So people will be all, you know, they'll have to be there the whole time, the whole year. What does that mean? Well, it probably helps the school situation. And we see it, we see it in the diminishing of the school age in all live schools. So this might help in that now people are living there year round. So you're looking at maybe more

know families within the year round what that means as far as density kind of was good good thing for a discussion you know we should you know we're talking about it well i think what you know i think that's one of the things we'll be looking at in terms of a build out is like are we expecting with the sewers going in all the infilling are there lots that were not built on because of restrictions so are there is with their opportunity for smaller undersized lots that could not meet septic and well, but I mean, but how many are there? I mean, we all know, and it's going to be possibly the neighbor right next door, but Are there, I mean, are we talking...

But have they been in the calculations for the sewer bill? Yeah.

For full-time use, those are all considered. They're all considered. There's not that many available.

That's what I'm saying. There's not that many. I mean, everybody likes to talk about the info, but it's like, I was thinking, I was going to throw out 10, but I wasn't sure what the number was.

I mean, I can think of a couple in Dogwood, Sandalwood.

Yeah, I was thinking it's probably 10 to 15.

So that's what we're looking at. Otherwise...

Interesting to know how many there are.

Not many. And a lot of people bought the lot next door so nobody else would build on it. Right. No. Right.

But that's...

Right. And I'm not sure the people there want denser development. The people who own all those places down there.

Yeah. It's going to be tough. Can't say. I have a property in the old Lime Shores. I have two rented plots.

On which side? North or south?

West.

But on the south side or the north side of Route 1?

Okay, but they're 8,000 square feet.

South of Route 1 or north of Route 1? I think the flood zone. So they're on the north side.

Right, so if you said, well, I think we should go build on those floods, I don't think there's problems with doing that. I know that. I know there's a lot of

you know, granite in the ground and so forth around that area.

It'd be very hard to build something, you know, they had the sewer might make it possible. So if the town allowed it, I'm not sure what I would do. I kind of like the space. There you go.

Well, the problem is you're depleting.

Because the sewers are now taking the water that We're bringing water in 4th of July.

Well, that's going to be a problem. That's going to be a serious problem.

So I don't see how groundwater is coming up with sewers.

No, when I said groundwater, I meant depletion of groundwater. Depletion. Oh, yeah. I didn't mean increase or quality increase. I meant exclusively the aquifer is going to be tapped with no water going back in. I should have clarified that, but...

I will say that part of PA 25-1 is a statewide assessment of sewer capacity. And because the one thing that's brought up over and over again when some of these bills are debated at the Capitol is like, well, you should build more because you have sewer, not understanding what is built out capacity-wise and what isn't. And so that has not yet started, but it's going to be an important and really important element because it's sort of tempers people's expectations of what can actually happen and and that you know the sewer extension that you have in town is really meant just yeah i think that that concept of sort of freezing you in time is an important one uh for that for that sewer um are people i guess are required to get rid of their septic systems when they connect to the sewer yeah what you said Huge expense.

And I think that particularly in the shoreline area, when we're talking about density and we're talking about groundwater, it's also going to be saltwater intrusion. So we've got a whole host of things that's happening on the shoreline that complicates what we should be expecting. And that's where it's like, okay, is this where we really should say that, oh, because we already have density there, that's where we should continue to have density. and whatever. We've got constraints, so there's a lot of natural constraints.

And one of Old Lyme's prime natural resources is its shoreline. So is it really a good idea to say, well, this is where we want to crowd everybody down there? Because that's, even though you don't think about it, behind all of those little cottages, there's beautiful beaches. That's why they're there. And so it's something to And there's definitely the Swanbrook problem, which I don't know whether it'll ever be solved. But that's the flooding and the very flat thing.

They're doing the stormwater treatment. Don't like short and close to that.

Yeah, but they don't have any place to put the water.

That'll still be tide focused.

And if the water is rising, then...

What's going to be interesting to me is you drive by the Bradbrook pump station by Rocky Neck right now on a weekly basis, the thing's out of service. Like they have extra pumps brought in. It's always under repair. And I can't only imagine what it's going to look like and smell like once old lime ties into that already failed system, in my opinion. It's going to be pretty scary.

I will just about the issue of stormwater. the COGS. So PA25-1 provided some funding for COGS to help with housing planning and also provided us money to do either stormwater planning or solid waste planning. It was supposed to be Andor, but it didn't work. So this year we are working on the issue of stormwater planning. In particular, we're looking at possibly doing some additional modern work as it met severe rain events. And it's an issue that's, you know, every single town in our region, the inland towns and the coastal towns, all dealing with rain events that are causing flooding in ways that, you know, we're not used to. But the state is taking a much more, I guess, proactive approach towards resiliency. There was a resiliency law that passed this past session that requires them to map out their bridges and culverts and understanding capacity for stormwater. And there's also the municipal stormwater permits, so that's for which the state is trying to encourage the towns to comply with. So there's a lot of focus on where does the rain go in these storms.

Well, this last one was my basement. Mine too. They couldn't handle it anymore.

So do you see what our dilemma is?

I want to thank everybody for coming and just having a great discussion. Again, our intent with these focus groups was not to have this be the end of the discussion. You're the folks who will bring this back to your commissions, talk to them, come back to us with either written comments or, you know, if we need to schedule a meeting with you, we encourage you to attend. Our last forum, which is in September. I can't remember the date of it. September 15th. September 15th. Thank you. The Senior Center. Oh, yeah. And that's going to be so that we can accommodate everybody. That's going to be the Senior Center. That one's going to be on the commercial zones as well. And so that'll be our last community workshop. And then we'll have, you know, the focus groups again on that. um once we get through the end of september early october we're going to be ending the the data gathering and start you know putting out discussions on so our consultant will be thinking like oh well we heard this what do you think about this you know change to the zoning and you know they will probably be looking at that. And if, for example, it comes out that there's something very specific, you know, we'll go back to the focus groups and say like, oh, we talked about this at this focus group. What do you guys think about this? So we'll be getting feedback back and forth on that. And that's our intent. And because we want to keep, again, the dialogue opening with not only, you know, the other boards and commissions, but the staff, So we'll be talking to the Emergency Operations Center folks and the Public Works folks when we talk about things like stormwater management. So just like I said, the idea is to have an open dialogue as we're looking to do this.

When do we extend the survey? I know it was supposed to close on June 30th.

We extended it through the end of July. I know it's still open. He may have decided that. You know, like it's good information and keep it open until we're finished with the community. When we finish the community workshops. I agree.

Yeah, I think the longer you keep it open, the better.

So that's where I think it's just been open at this point.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate your input. And please take it back. Take it back and talk about it. Bring it back.

Oh, motion to adjourn.

From Bonnie, second. Motion second by Denise. All in favor?

Aye.