Planning and Zoning - Special Meeting

We'll begin with introduction of members and seating of alternates. So let's see, we'll start with town staff. Henry?

Henry Colesio, zoning enforcement officer.

Okay, and I think really that's the only town staff. We do have any Petra Zula here. Sorry for that, as a guest. For commission members, I'll say your first name and please introduce yourself. So, Rob.

Robert Taylor.

Chantel.

Chantel Foster.

Carolyn.

Carolyn Freeman.

Tom. Tom Bransfield. Jen.

Jen Talone.

Okay, and this is Bob Ellsworth speaking. So, we are missing Victoria, so I believe it would be, I think, Tom's turn to be seated. So, Tom, would you be seated for Victoria, please?

Certainly.

Okay, thank you. And for our consulting group, we have Jeremy.

Yep, Jeremy DeCarli, Senior Planner with Tykee Planning and Policy Group.

Okay, and Janelle. Hello.

Hello, Janelle Clark, Associate Planner with Tykee Planning and Policy Group.

Okay, thank you. And I think I got everyone. Town staff and commission members, right? Okay, may I have a motion to accept the agenda as presented?

So moved.

Okay, and second? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed say no. Okay, the agenda is accepted as presented meeting procedures. So this is a review of the plan of conservation and development. And I believe Jeremy or will be kind of walking us through this, but. I wanted to open it up for a brief discussion on how we best think this would work, given that we have a pretty lengthy document to go through, and we have a large number of participants who we're looking for input from. So I couldn't remember. Is there a raise your hand function on Zoom? I can't remember that. If someone wants to speak or are we just going to try and, you know, have a normal discussion like we normally would?

So there is a raise your hand feature. I mean, I think, you know, the way we've done this in the past and we do this virtually pretty often is I can share the screen, bring up the document, and what I would say is if you have comments that are, you know, spelling, punctuation, sort of those types of editorial comments, I would say get those to us. We don't need to spend a lot of time going through that sort of stuff. If you've got them, you want to jot them down, or if you have them handwritten on the document, you can scan it and get it to us that way, or you know, however best you want to get it to us. I think we'll take it, but I don't think it's, it's probably not worth everybody's time going through that type of stuff. And what we can do is we'll just sort of scroll through the document and we'll have a, I'll briefly touch on what each section covers. And if there's substantive things, things that were missed, important portions of each section, let us know, and we'll figure out how to wordsmith and get that into the document as we go. Does that make sense?

It does to me. Any objections from commission members or comments on how you'd like to see it run?

Sounds good to me.

Yep. Okay. We'll give it a shot. So let's see. So we'll move on then to item number five on the agenda, which is the draft review of the 2026 plan of conservation and development. So take it away, Jeremy.

All right. So you should have it up on your screen at this point. I'll zoom in so that it's hopefully large enough on whatever screen you're looking at to be able to actually see it. And like I said, I'm just going to kind of keep moving through it. It's, you know, 70-ish pages, I think, and we'll just kind of try to get through it. So chapter one is the introduction. We talk about, you know, this is just an introductory statement talking about where we are in and the purpose of a plan. We get into what is a plan of conservation and development. We talk about the governing statute, which is 8-23, statutory requirements, what the plan of conservation and development needs to include, what it can include. And then we move on to consistency statements. So we analyzed the lower Connecticut River Valley COG plan from 2021. We talk about the major themes of that plan being sustainable, connected, innovative, and community. Talk about consistency. You can see their map here and their development areas, higher intensity development is sort of the purple color, yellow, the lighter yellow is kind of a lower intensity community use, and then priority sustainable areas are those in green. So overall, based on what we've done with this plan, we find it to be consistent. The COG will get a chance to review it themselves and let us know if they disagree with that. We then talk about consistency with the 2025 state plan. And there's the state locational guide map for the town of Portland. And again, it's pretty similar to what you saw in the COG plan in terms of mapping, higher development, higher intensity down by the riverfront where the Aragone comes over and that gets thinner and thinner out until you get into these green areas, which are priority conservation areas. Again, we find your plan to be consistent with the state plan. And this is just an analysis of the consistency there. Then we get into Chapter 2. This is context, so history and background of Portland. This is a historical statement from the town of Portland. We grabbed this mostly from the Portland Town website. We've made some changes based on some of the comments that we've gotten, but this is pretty well-established information. Talk about some of the historical... economic development things that you've had, tobacco farming and quarrying and all of the stuff that Portland's been involved with, shipmaking and everything else. Demographics and background data. This is where we start to talk about your population, where it's been over in the last 10 years. You've decreased by less than 1% in the last 10 years, but you're still expected to grow through 2040, according to Connecticut Data Center. Age distribution, no surprises there. You've seen this chart a few times.

I do have a question, Jeremy, about this. And so I did ask this at our last meeting. This number of residents, 94-21, that includes residents of all age, children included. Okay. So I'm going to have a question on that later. But down a little bit further, population density, 403 persons per square mile on an average. Okay. I haven't, I didn't do the math, but that just sounds awful dense to me. Especially like, you know, out in our country, you know, on the country, I don't, I don't know if we need to recheck that math or I assume, what do we do? We just divided 94, 21 by 23.

I probably relied on the state data for that number, but I'll double check the, I'll double check the math on that. Right. We would do exactly. We do 94, 21 divide by the number of square miles in the town.

Yeah.

So we'll double check that.

Okay.

I took a note and actually what I'll do is, um,

I have up the town profile and it's saying for 2026, it's saying 404. Okay, the population density per square mile. So.

I don't know, it just just sounds very dense to me, but okay.

Yeah, it does. It does sound like a lot, but the math is.

The math is right. The math is man thing.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, you've got a lot of parts of town that have nobody, right? You've got a lot of the Metro Mesa State Forest, and then some of those areas around there are very sparse. So it is, you know, like you said, it's an average number.

So that means in a good part of Connecticut, the number is more than 403 per square mile. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Okay. Yep.

Jeremy, on page seven, and it's kind of, I think I noticed it's something that's frequent across all that with the graphic imaging, the borders tend to get incredibly close to the text and it almost makes it looks imbalanced at times. Like the, you look at it, at least the PDF version I'm looking at, it's like the text, the graphic box is almost covering the peas on like population.

Okay.

But that's a thing that I noticed. Then you have plenty of space at the bottom of the graphics and other parts of the thing.

So it's just trying to get that stuff so it's consistent. So I will say that the final version of this plan will not be formatted in Word. We will use Adobe InDesign. And so all of those graphics will be a little bit easier to control where they end up, whereas in Word, they tend to jump around when you're changing text and whatnot. So a lot of that will be resolved. But yes, thank you. Yeah, but it's important for the draft because I also don't want part of the text covered up so you can't read it. So it is important at this stage, but the final draft will look visually different.

Yeah, I didn't see any text that was actually covered up. It was more like, you know, you have like, you know, six millimeters of space on the bottom and then like zero millimeters of space on the top like this.

Yeah, I see exactly what you mean.

Okay. All right. Just a little bit further at the top of page eight, I guess it is. The town is younger than many of the other towns in the River Cog region, which I found kind of interesting given that, you know, previously we're saying our median age is increasing and pretty high, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, and both things are true. It is pretty high and it is increasing, but the rest of the cog region is older and increasing faster. Not the rest. Middletown is not. Middletown is young comparatively, but compared to some of those southern cog towns and some of your neighbors, you are on the younger side.

Nice. Okay.

Yeah, you're doing well. Keep it up. Okay. I thought I heard somebody starting to say something. Okay. Population projection. These are just state numbers. School enrollment. We all know it's down. Although you've been ticking up a little bit over the last couple of years, but we all sort of know where that's going. And I will say that we've been working on this plan now for close to a year. Some of the data has changed in that time. We will update so that we have the most recent data of all of these numbers available. Some of this stuff still has references 2024 numbers. So those that have changed will bump those numbers up to the 2025 numbers. We talk about affordability, your median household income, statewide median. So your household income is $118,000. Statewide median is $90,000. ALICE, which is Asset Limited Income Constrained and Employed. So these are not always folks that are meet the threshold for affordable housing, quote unquote, but they are sort of living paycheck to paycheck. Statewide, 29% of people are living in that portion or in that Alice segment. And in the Rivercock region, it's 28%. Portland is right at the state average of 29, not unusual. Almost every town across the state that we've worked for is right around that same number. We talk about transportation. You know, no surprise, mostly relying on private automobiles. We talk a little bit about that. We talk a little bit about the bus route, River Valley Transit, as it's known now, and the bus route that you've got that runs through town. A little bit of history there. Primary roads, we discuss what those are and the connections that they make and some of your traffic volume. We do get into that in more detail later in the plan. This is just the intro chapter. Land use zoning and housing, 14,000 acres. Most of it's residential. We discussed the zones that you've got minimum lot sizes. Town center area, you've got the R10, R15, and their minimum lot sizes of 10,000 and 15,000 square feet, respectively. There's your zoning map. You know it well. And I recognize that I need to go through again and make sure that all of my table numbers are accurate and being referenced correctly and all of that. So I think I went through it once, but I probably have a few errors. So if you catch those, let me know. But I do know that there are some issues there. affordable housing units in town. I did update this one as I was going through. So you're at 6.93% affordable as of 2025. You were at 8.56% back in 2020. So you did lose, you've lost a couple of, you've lost some CHFA mortgages. I'm not sure what's going on with the government rented assistance. You went from 185 to 120, which is Somewhat surprising, I'm not sure what that, I don't know where those 65 units went. That's kind of a lot. So just again, a discussion about affordable housing and some of the numbers. And then we get into economy. We talk about your job numbers. You have a fairly large number of jobs for a small community.

I have a question on this chart. Sure. Over on the right side, there's a column headed up share of industry. And I wasn't clear what that meant.

So I'm glad you asked that because I also had to ask that question at one point and we reached out to Advanced CT to get the answer. So the sector is government and then there are various shares within that sector. And in this case, it's local government that's supplying most of the jobs. So there would be state government, federal government, local government. Those would sort of be the three primaries that would fall under government jobs. And in this case, 72% of the jobs in town are local government. So your town, your schools, Those are the primary drivers of that. And then same here, retail trade. Retail trade is any number of things, supermarkets, convenience stores, all of those retail stores. The primary share of the retail trade sector is gas stations and fuel dealers at 29% of the jobs of that.

Okay, good. That helps. Thank you.

And maybe I need to add a little bit of narrative to that. Actually, since you asked that question, I'll make a note and add a narrative about that. Okay. Inflow, outflow. We talked a little bit about where people are coming from, where they're going to.

Before we go further. Sure. Just another question. So page 13, I think. Oh, did I, did I jump ahead too far?

No.

No, page 13, right about in the middle of that chart over on the left side, it talks about municipal revenues of $39.3 million. I think down a little bit, scroll down a little bit, that municipal revenues are $39 million, of which $29.9 is property taxes. Yeah. And the rest comes from intergovernmental revenues. And I didn't know what intergovernmental revenues are.

Mostly grants. So education cost sharing is going to be a big piece of that. Any of those other state grants, federal grants that the town might get.

Okay. Okay.

So I will make a note of that as well, again, because if you're asking, other people won't know what that means. Any other questions on that info?

More on the image itself, because just looking at this at a fairly normal size of a computer, you've got text on there that you can't read. You have to zoom in and it still comes out kind of blurry. So I'm just wondering, do we need that whole map of Portland, that little graphic, versus having the two, the event diagram and the actual numbers being a little bit, just making up two different to blow up and make bigger. So at least people have an idea of what that, all that data means visually.

Yeah, we can do that. I do typically break these apart when I actually format the document for sort of the final draft, but yes, we can certainly do that. And if you think that, I mean, if the group thinks that this image doesn't really do much, we can, we can eliminate it. You know, I think we discuss it somewhere in here anyway.

I think the numbers are interesting. It's just kind of including, like Rob was saying, the whole map of Portland really doesn't add anything to it.

Okay. Yeah, like I like the Venn diagram, and I like the actual, like, you know, the little chart underneath it. It just dilutes the value of those from the big old map thing.

Okay. Yep. We'll strike it. And then this is relatively new community strengths and concerns, so we took this from the survey results and from the public info sessions that we held and just summarize the survey results so that's that's what this is here. So you can see that this is community strengths, strong small town identity and sense of community, natural resources, open space, existing schools and educational foundation, existing community events and traditions, summary of concerns. Downtown appearance, blight, lack of destination activity, development pressure versus preserving small town character, school facilities and educational stability. Obviously, we talk a bit about that in the plan and the town is moving forward with a redevelopment project of the schools.

The one that jumped out at me, number three, under school facilities and educational stability, others viewed Oh, I'm sorry. Facilities is one of the town's biggest liabilities. I thought it was talking about schools. Sorry. Never mind. Facilities is one of the town's biggest liabilities.

I think this is referring back to educational facilities because this whole section is about school facilities. Okay. Mm-hmm. But, you know, knowing that, and it's discussed later in the plan, knowing that the town intends to basically rebuild two of those schools from inside out. Okay. You know, I think that's This is a concern that came out of the survey, which, of course, was, I think, most responses were received before the referendum to approve that project.

So this probably refers to the aging of our schools.

I think so. And I can add a note in this section. Actually, it's probably worth doing that. I'll put a note to myself. Okay. Yeah. Four, limited local amenities and rec variety. Five, transportation, walkability, and traffic. So I don't think any of this comes as a surprise to any of you. It's sort of all the same stuff that we've been talking about internally anyway. And then community goals from the survey. Revitalize downtown and Main Street, sound familiar. Unlock riverfront potential, also sounds familiar. grow rec and community programming, preserve additional open space, encourage thoughtful economic development. So that's...

So, excuse me, on this one, I found it kind of ironic, the third bullet under number five, business growth along Route 66 within existing commercial areas, and yet recent meetings have kind of pointed to some objection to that business growth.

What page are we on? 17. So can we go back then, please? Thank you. Yes, can you hear me?

Yeah. Yep.

Okay, cool. So from page 13, where it says community strengths, You're saying right here, respondents, respondents. So these, so this page 13, 14, 15, where it says community goals, all of these are from the surveys?

Yes.

Okay. So instead, can we just put a different title on community strengths? Or can you just put like a... Data from the community or something?

Yeah, yeah, we can do that. The intro paragraph, if you're reading it.

Yeah, because I didn't, like, I just kept reading.

Okay, yeah, we can certainly do that.

And then are we using, I can send, I wrote a few things on these couple pages. So I could just send these, I could just email them to you instead of going for them?

Okay. Yep, yep, that's perfect.

If they're like typo or grammatical.

No, they're not. It's like rewording. I was wondering if we can reword some stuff. Just sounds a little weird reading it. Number one, I guess the strong small town identity and sense of community. It says, this was the clearest positive theme and many emphasize that neighbors help each other and help each other out and value a longstanding community. I guess that's fine. If you're taking words from what they said, that's fine. But it's like, I was just wondering if maybe we can reword that. You know, Portland has a positive theme that many, many residents have resonated in liking as soon as they walked in town. I don't know. But if you're going to quote right from like the sticky notes that you're getting, then this is fine.

Yeah, this is this is I mean, it's a summary of the responses. So it's you know, it's from it comes from the SurveyMonkey responses. But I mean, we can certainly reword it if you want it to be a little bit clearer. If you've got some suggestions, we can send them to me and we'll put them in there.

I mean, it's OK. Yeah, but that's it. Just a few of those.

OK.

Any other comments on this section?

Okay.

All right, move on. Chapter 3, the vision. This is just your vision statement. We wordsmithed this a while back. Certainly we can continue to change it if there's any concerns, but I think we spent a fair amount of time with this. Everybody comfortable with vision statement?

Okay.

Yeah, I think so. I am. Yep.

Great. Chapter four, this is where we really start to get into the meat and potatoes of it. This is focusing on priority issues. So we have an overview of what the next decade will be like for you and what some of the core priorities in 2016 were and what some of the progress has been made. Some of the progress has been made. Redeveloped downtown, the first piece of this chapter. We talk about Main Street, Marlboro Street. We talk about, you know, maintaining this area. Lack of pedestrian facilities, kind of this need to really focus on the downtown area. We talk about complete streets. Consider revisions and upgrades to Main Street as, you know, that's been discussed quite a bit.

There's parts of it. Yeah, one comment. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Go ahead.

One comment I had here was we've heard reference in past meetings about references to the Route 66 corridor study. And that was a study that was done back, I guess, in 2020, right? That kind of looked at- That's about right. Upgrades to the Main Street 66 intersection was one of them. I didn't know if we should make any reference to that. in here or not? Probably should.

Yeah, that's a good point, Bob. Is there any reference to that anywhere?

There are references to it, but I think we probably want to reference it a little bit stronger in this section. So I think that's a good point.

What is it? I'm sorry, what is it?

I'm sorry, go ahead, Jeremy.

No, go ahead, Bob.

Oh, my understanding is that it was a study that was done back in 2020 looking at the traffic on Main Street and traffic on 66, and specifically at Intersection, right in downtown. And I know one of the recommendations was having a traffic circle there, but there's more to it. There's more to that study than that. I don't know if anyone else has more background on what that study really entails than me.

So I was involved in it when I worked next door in East Hampton. I was a planner over there and I worked on that study. So that was commissioned by the River Cog and DOT. Plus, it was when Susan Bransfield was your first selectman and. Mike Maniscalco, I think, might have still been around. No, it was probably Dave Cox over in East Hampton. Anyway, it was a regional study that the COG paid for, and it covered 66 from the bridge all the way to the Marlborough town line. And it looked at intersection improvements, safety improvements along the corridor, and it was a holistic look. It looked at land uses, and it covered the airline trail as well. And there are a ton of recommendations that came out of it. There we go. Somebody just put the link to it up. It is available. It's on the River Cogs website. There is a lot of stuff in there. I do reference it in, I think probably I reference it more in the transportation chapter, which is further down, but I think it's definitely worth mentioning here as well. So I put a note to myself and we'll reference it. And we can actually include a link to the document in your POCD. So anybody that's reading through this online can get to the corridor study through that. But it was a big study. It was Ty and Bond did it. And we worked on it for, I think, over a year before it was completed. So there's a lot of data in it.

Okay. So I have a comment about the blue box on the right where it talks about complete streets. If you go to the end, it seems like it's cut off.

Yeah, you're right. I don't know. Thank you for that.

Oh, that was easy.

Just the word community showed up. That's it. I think that was all that was missing. Thank you for finding that. All right. So consider revisions and upgrades to Main Street. We talk about potential narrowing. We talk about Wider sidewalks, parallel parking, bike lanes, additional streetscaping, seating in outdoor dining areas, improving pedestrian crossings. There's portions of it that are 115 feet wide with pavement in excess of 60 feet. It's a challenge to get across. So we talk a little bit about that. We talk about what a road diet is. This is a common type of road diet. This is from DOT.

Oh, I need to go back. Can we go back, please?

Yep.

Page 20. I know. I think, Bob, you're on whatever your computer is doing. It's the Chapter 4, the overview. It says we are largely defined by three major issues. One, two, I understand. And then it says, and the diversification of the local economy through the process of positioning the town as a recreation destination. Can you explain that?

Yeah. So, um, I think the, the, uh, and as you were, as you read it out loud, I really don't like the sentence. So I'll probably read, uh, redefine it. But, you know, one of the things that has come up over and over again is trying to position the town as a rec, as a recreation destination.

So you've got, you've got a lot of that. Can we just say that then?

Yes. Yes, we can. How about we get rid of, um, How about we get rid of everything there?

And just say that.

Positioning the town as a recreation destination.

Jeremy, while we're at it, just before the and recapturing, why don't we just make it the redevelopment of the riverfront instead of recapturing and recapturing? Because it just, like, you got and something, something, and that, you know, multiple ands. It just feels weird.

Anything else there?

No, thank you. Okay.

Okay, so then we get into review uses and design regulations. This is where we start to talk about the fact that you have a village district. It allows you to review and consider design standards. Here's a map of that village district area running on Main Street from the bridge up to you know, just right around the post office. We talk about what it is and what zone it is, some of the uses that are allowed in there. We talk a little bit about village district regulations, but the fact that they're not specific in nature, make the statement that perhaps the commission wants to think about better design standards. and consideration of an architectural review board. And some of the stuff will come out later in the action items. Consider future of community facilities. This is where we talk about what you have for some of your community facilities. We talk about Brownstone Intermediate and some of the potential uses and what you could use it as. It is important. We had to kind of rework this whole section after the referendum. So some of this has probably been changed since the last time we reviewed it. But we talk about the town of Durham nearby. They had an old school. They turned it into a community center. So they've created indoor rec space, indoor location for events. A portion of it was repurposed for the ambulance. So you could probably look at something along those lines for Brownstone. You could look at housing for Brownstone. So we just go through some of the possibilities, knowing of some of the needs in the town, what that building could serve as.

Hold on. Yep. Sorry, I'm on my phone. So I don't I to scroll to get to raise my hand is a little bit cumbersome.

Just talk. That's fine. Interrupt me. I have no problem with that.

So, um, I can't really see that red line that that is outlying outlining the village district.

Yep.

Maybe we can make that a little bit thicker, maybe. I don't know if that's going to screw up scale. I don't know. Just a thought. So it says Village Center. I think we need to stick with the same words. Make sure we get Village District.

You're right.

And then, like, if we could just go through and make sure that we're using the same words. Because I got people, we have people that are saying Village. the downtown area. And then, yeah. So I think if we just keep it the same, it would make it easier.

Yeah. You know, and actually that's a clarifying question because I think I probably do that too in the document. So obviously the village district is a specific area and you see it there.

Yeah. It's not necessarily downtown had people refer to it downtown.

Right.

I think that's where I got confused because this is from the people. This is from us.

Yeah. So that's a question that I have for you all is, is we'll refer to this as the village district, but everything else, how do you want to refer to it? You know, how do, how do you on your, in your daily lives refer to it? Is it the downtown?

It says like, we call it revitalize downtown and main street on page 15, where it says community goals. It's like, I don't know, do we say revitalize downtown and the village district because the village district is within downtown? Am I making this way too complicated? Because I'm coming straight out of aerospace right now. Sorry.

No, I think it's a good point. I think your point about being consistent with referencing the town center village district is a good one.

That's another word, town center village district. So are we using that term too?

That's the way it's referred to in our regulations. It's the TCVD.

So then we should have the Senate reflect in this POCD then, right? Whatever's in the regulations, it should be the same.

i i think that it should be all that stuff should be consistent so yeah all right yep i would agree yep okay so i'll go through and make those changes so that when we refer to the village district we'll refer to it as the town center village district but then the area overall you know outside of the you know when you talk about marlborough street some of those areas surrounding the village district what do you want to be calling that throughout the document

I mean, loosely, it's the downtown area. Yeah. Or it's this, you know, they also refer to it as the 66 and 17 corridors. But I mean, it's essentially the downtown where there's a lot of people activity. That's the downtown area.

I would say, yeah, I would agree with that.

So we'll stick with downtown other than that specific area, which we're calling, I mean, obviously downtown encompasses that. The whole thing is downtown and then we've got the TCVD. Okay. I'll make those changes. That's easy enough. I just, that was, that's something that's been on my mind, not knowing how you wanted to refer to downtown, whether you wanted to refer to it as downtown or town center or, you know, whatever you wanted the words to be. Okay. Yeah.

Hal Hallstein, facilities okay improve connections to downtown, so this is where we talk about.

Hal Hallstein, You know the various ways that people get to downtown right primary obviously is your car. We discuss the airline trail a little bit. We talk about multimodal mobility enhancements. This actually, this clip, here's a reference to the corridor study. This comes out of the corridor study. This is some of the options for getting the airline trail through downtown to the Aragoni Bridge. So we discussed that a little bit. We talk about the bus route that runs through town.

Mm-hmm.

talk a little bit about the configuration of Route 66 and some of the challenges that that presents. Sidewalks are discussed here. Again, the airline trail, as I mentioned. Any questions on any of that?

So on page 25, We referenced the airline trail is a major tourist generator on the eastern side of the state. Is that true?

Last I knew, it was attracting about 100,000 new passengers. you know, they have counting station at a couple of spots. And last I knew it was like 125,000 individual visitors per year. So it's, it's, it's pretty popular. Yeah.

Yeah. But that's for the whole Eastern side of the state, Bob, you know, I mean, it goes all the way to the Massachusetts border.

Okay. I mean, Yeah. Okay. I won't argue the point. Okay.

Change the wording on that if you'd like. I don't, I'm not married.

No, I mean, it's 120.

I think, you know, to your point, Bob, for us, because our trail isn't connected to anything, I don't know that we get the, we get that we're going to get the same kind of action, but And maybe someday we will.

Once it is connected, is it going to be just people riding their bikes through town? You know, or are they going to be hopping off and going to restaurants and stores?

Well, that is, you know, that is actually the hope. And certainly in East Hampton, that has happened. That has definitely happened.

Okay.

Okay. But, I mean, they have a lot more to work with than we have.

Hmm.

I think the reason for pointing out the fact that it's a tourist generator is, you know, kind of making that connection and saying, it's there, we need to get it here, right, into your downtown, because then you can call those people as well.

And to that point, Jeremy, I believe that we had a gentleman come in and speak to us regarding connecting this airline trail, right? I think the board, I'm asking the board, wasn't there a gentleman who came in and spoke to us?

a few months ago.

It was, right?

Yeah, it might be longer than a few months ago, but someone did come talk to us about connecting the bicycle trails.

So I think if this stays in the POCD, I think it'll help them leverage to get the connection going and to make this happen. So I think that's why we kept it in the POCD, right? Am I thinking right? Yeah. That's a good reason to keep it in there. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a big push, I think, still on the state level to get Airline Trail one way or another connected over to the Farmington Valley, whatever it's called, Farmington Heritage Canal Trail, and sort of make that big loop. And then using the Hop River Trail as well so that you have this big central Connecticut loop, I think, is the goal.

Yeah, I believe it is. And there are a lot of crazy biking people out there that will do it.

Mm-hmm.

yeah but all they do is eat bananas and nuts they don't stop and spend $30 on a meal well but I think yeah but I think they actually might it could be like a leisurely bike ride too but like a lot of people like running stuff on there too like a lot of high schoolers they use that trail to run and practice and it's pretty neat that's it okay

Uh, subsection C redevelop and recapture riverfront. Do we want to get rid of and recapture in this too?

I think so. Yeah.

Okay, let's keep it consistent.

Yep.

A little bit of background just on the nine miles of shorefront that you've got.

Excuse me, Jeremy. Is the right word redevelop or is it develop? Develop the riverfront because, I mean, it has been developed as an industrial site and we're trying to turn it into a recreational site. Is the right word redevelop, I guess, is my question. What do people think?

I think redevelop kind of makes sense. As you said, it's already developed, so redeveloping it would mean that we're going to change how it's been developed in the past.

Yeah, we could reclaim it, like reclaim it as

Well, we just removed recapture.

Oh, yeah. So, yeah.

Okay. So people think redevelop is a good.

Yeah.

All right. Okay.

Thank you. So review desired uses. A lot of the riverfront still is zoned for either industrial purposes or lies within the floodplain. Small areas zoned for multifamily. But overall, you've got the riverfront overlay zone, which applies to a lot of it between the Aragoni Bridge and Riverfront Park. But it allows a lot of the underlying uses to continue and then add some additional uses. So I think there's maybe a need to kind of review those uses that you want down there and what your zoning rigs currently allow, because you might find that some of the uses that are allowed may not be so desirable. We talk a little bit about that industrial, that sort of that slow change that's happening. We talk about the Brownstone Quarries, Riverfront Park. The Nordic Spa is mentioned here. And so how it's becoming a kind of a center of conflicting uses when you've got those industrial uses down there and you've got those rec uses.

Yeah, to me, that paragraph at the bottom of page 27 really sums up the issue down in that area. So just one thing. In the very last paragraph, it's referring to Brownstone Drive. And I think people think of that as Brownstone Avenue. That might confuse people. It says Brownstone Drive has become a center of conflicting uses, a mix of industrial and recreational. Bottom of page 27. 27.

I'm going to do a search because I'm not finding it for some reason.

No, because I think the way Bob's is downloading is not his page number. Different page numbers. Here it is. I got it. You're right. Thank you.

Good catch.

So to me, that summarizes that whole challenge that we have down in that area. It's a mixture of industrial and recognition.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I mean, you know, as a, as a, as an outsider, you know, having gone down there a few different times over the process of this plan, you know, you get down there and you've got the park and then you've got the Nordic spot and then you've got a couple of little industrial parcels and then you've got the Brownstone quarry with all of this fun stuff happening. And then you've got oil tanks across the street. So it's, it is, it's, it's, uh, it's definitely changing, which is good to see.

Just cause I'm thinking about it. Um, not necessarily anything we talk about today, but I mean, there might be an appetite of, because of all that mixed, you know, industrial and like uses going on there. If we want to try to start consolidating a bit, maybe we think about expanding the village district to incorporate all that.

Yeah. Or restricting certain uses or, you know, rezoning it from industrial to, Yeah, I'm not sure what, but not industrial.

So that would... You get the oversight that you have by expanding it. We already have it. It already exists.

So we wouldn't have to think of...

It wouldn't require as much hard thinking if we did that.

Yeah, so that's a good point, Rob. Maybe somewhere in here we should put as one of our to-do lists is to review the Town Center Village District and should it be expanded given the goals that the town has. I think Jeremy just added that note.

I think that was something that we had talked about in the past anyway, but my recollection is that we were thinking about expanding it to include the Elmcrest property because Elmcrest property is not part of the village district currently, if I'm not mistaken. And I don't think we ever talked about expanding it down to the industrial area. And so what would that get us really though? I mean, aren't we looking, wouldn't we be looking to really allowed uses and having a village district overlay on a zone, what does that do for, does that really do anything?

Well, I think it tightens the, like a lot of the appearance of the buildings, the way that they should look.

Right. But I mean, you could still have an oil tank down there. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, I think the underlying issue really is the use.

So I think it's probably a combination of two things. One would be to rezone that area and eliminate industrial. And the second might be to include it as in the town center village district. So when development does happen, we have a little bit more control over what it looks like. That's my thought, my two cents.

Okay. I like it.

And, of course, that's for development going forward. Any existing businesses down there would not be or would be grandfathered, so they wouldn't have to make the changes right away. So, anyway.

Are there any, I know I asked this before, are there any ongoing, like, asphalt and oil concerns that are still functioning down there or not?

The only one is the facility, and correct me, Tom Bransfield, if I'm wrong, but the facility closest to the bridge is still a functioning... Yeah, we still have... CSB?

Functioning oil fuel distributors. I guess it would be from Silver Street to the bridge.

Right.

From Silver Street back towards... the quarries or the larger quarry, those businesses are all, are currently inactive. And then as far as we know, they have no intention of restarting up that business across from the quarries. So in fact, Dan is looking into grants to see if we can start cleaning that up.

Yes, okay. Yeah, I think that putting a timeline together for reviewing the list of allowed uses, and maybe that's a separate zone, because as you said, Tom, there are oil places down there that are still there. But maybe the businesses that are now. No longer operating the former oil and asphalt people. That are north of silver street, maybe that's a different maybe that's a different zone or.

Yeah, I agree. We should look at it. Oh, I think we're going to find we have quite a list of things to do once we get, once we finalize this POCD.

I started it already. Well, I started a little bit of it, the list. I got a list.

When you get down to the implementation piece.

We're busy. We're going to be busy.

There's a lot of PZCs.

Yeah.

But anyway. Okay. Okay. Carry on, Jeremy.

Sorry for the... No, this is all good stuff. I'm going to add some of this discussion. I took some notes and I talk about that sort of reviewing the uses, but I'll kind of beef that section up a little bit and talk about expansion of the village center potentially and a possible rezoning down in that area. So I'll add some verbiage to that effect.

Jeremy, the blue box. Yeah. I agree with that, but I guess... I would like to see us expand that to, it's not just the riverfront, but the village district. Wayfinding in our town is lacking. People have a hard time finding some of the places because we don't have signage. And I think it's something we ought to be looking at going forward.

Yeah, for sure.

It does say riverfront and downtown areas, something beyond, beyond that, Tom, are you thinking?

Well, I mean, you got like St. Clements that people come to all the time having signage, you know, saying, Hey, St. Clements is this way or Aragon is this way.

Yeah. Or like all the golf courses. I mean, Am I on mute? No. Okay.

Yeah, I would expand it beyond this, but these two areas definitely make it town-wide.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Sounds right.

Yep. Okay. I love this plan for it.

And I guess not only the golf courses, but the excellent restaurants that are hooked up with those golf courses. Okay.

Yeah, I can change that to town wide. That's easy. Continue to clean up Brownfield areas. Again, just a discussion of some of the things that the town has already done. And just we talk a little bit about the transfer act. that was sunset and the new release-based cleanup regulation being adopted. And so that maybe will help some of the brownfield cleanup that remains to be seen how that legislation will actually play itself out. But folks that I've talked to that are in the brownfield area seem to think it's a good thing. You've probably heard some of that too, just through some of the study that you guys have been working on. improve connections to riverfront from downtown, talk about bike and ped infrastructure and the need to be able to kind of make those connections. This is a map that I threw together, just, you know, sort of outlining Middlesex Ave, Brownfield, I mean, Brownstone Ave, and then Spring Street kind of having a nice pedestrian loop, I think would make sense there. I think something similar was in your last plan. Go ahead, Rob. Sorry. Oh,

No, no, just one comment on that. The heading, instead of saying Portland should create, we should just put in Portland should consider creating. That way it's more broad and not saying you need to do this. It's more of a, you know, hey, consider doing this.

Okay. Fair enough. And this is where I talk a little bit about consistent branding and signage for the entire downtown. So I'll change that to townwide. And then expand economic development opportunities. You have a fairly diverse commercial and industrial base. But, you know, again, continuing to increase the diversity is an important factor in remaining competitive in the market, keeping taxes low for residents. So focus on job creation. We talk about some of the jobs that you've got. I think we talked about this during one of the meetings in that you've got a lot of people that leave town. And I think there's sort of a mismatch between the skill level in town is high. You have a well-educated population. You have a well-educated population, but a lot of folks are leaving to get jobs in the fields that they are working in. So just trying to diversify and bring some of those jobs home.

So I don't understand that. I'm sorry. So our goal as Portland is to create business and manufacturing and all those other businesses to attract people to stay in town and work?

Yes.

And that's what we're focused on?

It's one of them.

Oh, okay. Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. That was it.

Okay.

And I just have a map here of your commercial and industrial zones to kind of show what you've got. All the white areas are residential, but you've got your restricted industrial up here. And then, of course, you know what it looks like. I don't have to tell you. Review existing zones and allowed uses. Again, just kind of a suggestion that over the next 10 years, you kind of work with EDC and review your existing zones and the types of uses that you want in town and make sure that the... The types of businesses and the types of jobs that are being created align with or that are desired align with what your regulations actually allow. It never ceases to amaze me. I work in different communities. We've done plans of conservation and development in a number of towns and we hear all these lofty goals of you know we'd like to have this use or we'd like to have that use and we got to attract x y and z and then you look at the zoning regulations and those things aren't allowed so it's just working with edc and making sure that what you want is allowed and that the path to get there is relatively straightforward goals and actions we went through these last month couple of weeks ago, whatever that was. We don't need to belabor that. Obviously, if you've got any changes there, but we did go through your goals and actions pretty in detail, and I updated based on those conversations that we had.

Yeah, going back real quick just to review existing zones and allowed uses, what we've got to think about is You know, our regulations are pretty static, but the world today is changing very rapidly, giving, you know, artificial intelligence and data centers and distribution centers, right, more online shopping. And so it's things like that that we've got to think about allowed uses that we want to allow in towns. That's all. Okay.

I've seen in other towns, it might not be a bad idea to think about putting on our list for sooner rather than later, maybe considering prohibition of data centers.

Yeah. Right.

And perhaps warehouses, you know, enormous warehouses. So, yep. That's all.

Do you want to add that as an action item or is that?

Yeah, I think that's important, right?

Well, I mean, it's kind of captured under reviewed allowed uses, but we might want to spike it out. You know, giving the rapidly change in our.

Yeah, I'd like to be ahead of the ball this time.

Right. You know, the way the world is changing so rapidly these days, we got to stay current with it.

Or try to, yeah. Yeah.

Try to.

Yeah.

So I don't know if we want to say like more frequent review of regulations or more thorough review of regulations or perhaps both, you know.

Jeremy, instead of saying prohibition, I would just say more broadly consider developing regulations for data centers and large warehouses. That way we're not kind of putting ourselves in a hole to begin with.

Okay.

Who knows? People may come out and say, we want a data center and then we'd have to consider that too. So.

Okay. That works. All right. Move on to chapter four.

Well, the other one was chapter four. That's what I noticed in chapter four.

You're right. And that's because, yeah, that's, thank you. See, these are the things that I don't notice because I look at this too often. And that's because chapter three got added somewhere along the way. The vision state got added. So I'll have to go through and make that. Thank you. Two chapter fours. Deja vu all over again. Protecting important resources, overview natural resources. We talk about the town's water resources, so your streams, ponds, and wetlands. Portland Reservoir, Great Hill Pond, Job's Pond, Kelsey Pond. We also talk about groundwater resources being crucial for your drinking water supply. And we have a natural resources map that kind of outlines what you've got, NDDB areas, your open space. We break that out into state, town, land trust, active rec, private open space and private vacant land, floodplain, critical habitat areas, sort of all those natural resources on one map. And then this is kind of where we talk about sort of all that other stuff know, NDDB, endangered and threatened species. We talk about the Wangunk Meadows Wildlife Management Area. We talk about the Meshamasic State Forest or Meshamasic.

Say that again.

However you want to say it.

Meshamasic. Meshamasic. Meshamasic. Meshamasic.

You got to be a Portlander to pronounce that one.

I haven't said it right yet, so...

Takes practice, Jeremy.

Apparently. I haven't had enough.

Maybe you should hike. You should hike in it a few times. I have.

Oh. No, he's hiked in the Mashamask. That's right.

He can hike it, just can't pronounce it.

Right. So, Jeremy, just one thing I've noticed kind of throughout this, the capitalization of the town is inconsistent. OK, so it's like sometimes it's capitalized, sometimes it's not. I mean, in the same paragraph, it's or sometimes it's, you know, changes. So just a heads up about that.

And that's a question, I guess, for you all. I mean, you know, when we talk about the town as an organization, it should be capitalized. when we talk about sort of the town of the space, you know, I could go either way. Do you want to capitalize throughout just and be consistent?

I mean, that might be more of a discretionary thing. I think just like when we use like phrase the town, it, I think it feels like it should be capitalized. Okay. If you're talking more generally, I guess, I don't know. I mean, it might be just easier to say capitalize anytime you say, you know, you're referring directly to the town of Portland by saying the town.

Right, but I think Jeremy makes a point. Sometimes the town refers to the government in the town of Portland, and sometimes it refers to as the town as the space of Portland.

So in this last sentence, it says the majority of the northeast portion of town lies within, that shouldn't be capitalized.

Yeah, that one's capitalized, right?

Right, shouldn't be, and yeah, in that context, right.

If we're talking about the town of Portland as the government, maybe we just spell it out, the town of Portland. And then talking about town resources, we shorten it. I mean, that would just be me really just nitpicking things on that.

And there are a lot of them on this page, so I don't know. Yeah.

it's not just restricted to this page it's like i've noticed it's all over yeah yeah that's why i'm just saying it so i've got a small little list i'll send you later i kind of just keep it going no that's good and i mean i think if you know if the commission wants and again it's your it's your document if you if you just want to capital and i've seen that in other places we just capitalize it across the board i think that's fine

easier for your editing on your end. If just, you can just do a control F and find all the instances. Right. Capitalized in just about every instance. It makes sense.

Okay. Does that sound good to everybody else? We'll just capitalize the word town everywhere. It shows up.

Okay. Okay.

We can do that. Open space recreation, again, just a discussion of open space, what it is, what you've got in town for open space, some of the benefits, the financial benefits, quality of life benefits. Recreation, this mostly came from your recreation commission. We talk about the facilities that you've got, some of the things that they've done over the last 10 years and then some of their goals moving forward for the next 10 years.

Now, this is talking about preserving open space. I'm having a flashback to two meetings ago when Norm Ward spoke up and was very adamant about a study that he had worked on regarding preservation of open space, which I am not familiar with. Do other people have a recollection of that meeting? I remember the meeting.

I think what Norm was referring to was the fact that he had wanted, he pushed to get a 20%, I think it was, set aside for a subdivision development. That's my recollection.

Okay. So you're understanding it wasn't a complete study that a group did. It was... this push to have 20% set aside when a subdivision is done.

I was unclear what he was.

Yeah.

I was unclear on that.

Okay.

But I know that he was very, I know he was very passionate about making sure, and I think he brought this up in the last POCD thing, Bob. He didn't want that number to go down, you know, which, you know, I appreciate it.

Well, I mean, that might be one of those areas where we can kind of create some sort of carrot for, you know, if you conserve 25% of your lot and you get increased density or, you know, add affordable housing or something, you know, to the development and, you know, kind of find some way to play into that. So there's, you know, a bit more conservation on a smaller portion of the lot. You know, I don't know, something we can think about later.

I guess I'm not sure what we'd add at this point. So I would say let's go with what we have now.

Maybe that could just be a note down the line of like reanalyze subdivision regulations for ways of updating it and for conservation or adding potential development carrots. something like that, but it probably had a lot more professional sounding.

And I may have misspoke. I don't even know that if, I don't know that if it was part of the subdivision regulations, I'm just, I'm getting confused now. I know it's in our regular regulations. It references that. So it's not part of the necessarily part of the subdivision regulations, but. Anyway, I know he was very big on that 20%.

He's been big on that for years. Yeah.

I'm sorry. I'm going to have to take a break and get something to drink. I should have just done it and then I know what I'll do.

I wonder if she's going to grab

Yeah. What flavor, Chantal?

Keep going, or do you want to take a break, Bob?

I'm good, because I just took a break. But if people feel the need to take a break, we can just...

I feel like in this format, it's easy for people just to kind of step away.

Yeah.

Yeah, if people need to step away, go ahead and do it. We'll just carry on.

Yeah, I want to power through this. Yeah, I agree. I know this is always the toughest night when we get the whole document. We're going through it, so I get it. Okay, so recreation, we talked about that. Farms and farming, we talk a bit about the history of farming. We talk about the farm stands that you've got and some of the benefits. You've got 1,000 acres of farmland still in production, but obviously you've lost some Talk about the PA490 program. You should continue doing that. We talk about some of the state programs that are out there, farmland preservation and some other things. Farmland soils map, so you can see where all of your farm soils are. Historic, any questions on farms? Otherwise, I'm just going to keep rolling until somebody interrupts me.

Yep, keep going. We're not bashful.

...to a public act. I'm sorry, Rob?

Page 37, you make a reference to a public act.

Yeah, 490.

Yeah, is that missing the year?

Usually it's like PA 21-490. So it's interesting that you say that this is how it's always referenced. So it doesn't because, I mean, it's not missing a year because it's never referenced when people talk about the PA 490 program. I can dig up when that was enacted.

Okay. I'm just curious because I know whenever you try to look up public act on the legislature's website, it's going to ask you for what year the act was enacted.

Yeah. And there's a whole state page that goes along with the PA 490 program. So I think if you were to just Google PA 490, it's going to bring you right to that information. But I'll see if I can dig up the year because we can reference it. Um, historic and cultural resources. This section was. reworked quite a bit after we got some feedback from the Historical Society. I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago or a month ago or so.

Jeremy. Yep. So I just Googled it. Yeah, I see what you're talking about. It was probably before the legislature changed the current formatting with year dash bill number. It was back in the 60s.

Okay.

Never mind that.

That makes sense why it's 490. We don't get too many public acts that high anymore. Yeah. That, you know, started back in 1638 or whatever. Okay, good to know. Historic and cultural resources. Again, we just sort of, like I said, we updated that. Talk about the Historical Society and some of the things that they've been working on. And then the historic resources map, this is the same map as from your 2016 plan there's no changes to this map. And then resiliency and climate change. And I don't love this map, and I'm probably going to replace it. It's from the Nature Conservancy. It's kind of grainy. It's not all that understandable. So just know that it's kind of a placeholder until I find a better version to put in there. But we do talk about resiliency and climate change in this section. useful map as it is if it was just like full page you might be able to see it a little bit better yeah that's it's probably i may reformat it so that it focuses on in on portland and and it's cleaned up this is a screenshot from uh nature conservancy's website so it's not great I think we talked about this a while back, but flooding obviously is kind of a key, as you know, a key natural hazard that you're dealing with and sort of more frequently, but we also talk about wildland fires and that interface between the forest and the developed areas. Talk about some of the changes that have been made over the last couple of years with the Stormwater Quality Manual. And we do have to reference the natural hazard mitigation plan within these POCDs. The River Cog was working on an updated one. They don't have it. I don't know if it's been adopted yet. I think they're a little bit behind. Once we have their updated plan, we'll link to it in this document. If we don't have their updated plan by the time you adopt, we're just going to link to their existing plan, which is from 2021. I'm not quite sure what's going on there. Yeah, we could do that. Sure. And then goals and actions. Again, we went through this a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not going to belabor the point here. And I did update all of these based on a conversation that we had when we went through the tables. Chapter five. guiding appropriate development. This is a brief overview, housing development, more details on your housing conditions in town, number of permits, number of housing units, more data here than what's in the intro chapter up at the beginning of the doc.

I'm going to be a real pain in the butt here and just make sure you change this to chapter six.

Yes, thank you.

I was waiting for that.

Well, no, because every chapter you're going to have to.

Yeah, we probably have lost them all, so that's good.

The funny thing is, Jeremy, the footnote part is actually correct. It says chapter six.

Well, that's because it's on an auto. Whatchamacallit.

That's interesting. That's a me problem, not a word problem.

So, Jeremy, question on this chart, new home construction permits. It's a huge jump in 24. Yeah.

Brainerd Place.

Is that what it was?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's referenced in the text.

Yeah, I saw it. Yeah, it was.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah. It's, I mean, when you look at that, it's remarkable. And there's another town that Janelle and I are working on and they had a similar thing. They're not quite as big as Brainerd Place, but they have a big development. You know, they went from like three permits one year to 85 the next.

Yeah. Because I mean, the chart is labeled new home construction.

Yeah.

Yeah. Each of those units gets its own because it's each one is a dwelling unit. So it gets its own count. Yeah.

Do we want to say that then? New dwelling construction? If that's what it's counting rather than home?

Sure.

So even though they're apartments, they're considered... Dwelling unit.

Yep. Because each one is an individual dwelling unit.

Yeah, I thought it was the building. But...

That actually might be helpful for us going forward with the new laws that got placed. Because I think the way that they're not going to separate it out between housing, whether it's apartments or condos or actual houses. They just count units. So I think that if we kind of mirror some of that language in this, it should help us at least with figuring out things later. for our compliance when it comes to whatever those needs assessments drop on us.

I think that's a good point.

Okay.

Okay. All right. So I changed it in the chart. I changed it down here at the bottom of the paragraph as well.

That's better.

This is housing unit room count. So this comes from census data. It's just a look at the size of the dwelling units that you have in town. You know, one room units, you don't have any two or three room units, 6.4% of your housing stock. And, you know, I won't read the whole thing out, but just interesting information. As you can see, the majority of your housing units, 67.5% are either two or three bedrooms. Not surprising. Almost a quarter of your units are four bedrooms or more. But you're just like everybody else, your average household size has dropped. And so you kind of have that mismatch and that's where Brainerd Place and some of these other developments are starting to fill that gap and build units that are sort of right sized for the family sizes these days. So lots of data on this page. We talk a little bit about the housing market. Your home values, housing cost, housing wage is $28.83 an hour. That is the amount that somebody would need to make in order to afford housing in the town of Portland, not an unusual number. That's pretty typical. We talked a little bit about the impact on housing from the pandemic and the fact that we had some trickle from the cities. Don't really know what that's going to look like going forward, but I think it's worth having a discussion in there. Monthly housing sales, that's what this chart is from. It's from Redfin. And you can see in Portland, you had a pretty big jump in 2022 of housing sales. It's kind of monthly fluctuations, but you're somewhere between five and 15 units sold every month. Discussion on affordable housing, what it is, what your share is, how much money people need to make to afford it. This is just the same, I think we saw this chart earlier in the chapter, in the intro chapter. We're just in more depth here. This is an interesting graphic. This charts the increase in median sales prices of homes from 1985 to 2024 versus the real median income, household income. So you can see this housing cost has gone way out of whack, whereas the real median household income has, you know, it's not stagnant, but it has not kept up with the cost of housing. And I just think that's an interesting chart to include. It is adjusted for inflation. Yeah, it is eye-opening. So again, just a lot of data and discussion of housing in this chapter. Housing authority, we talk about that. Oh, this is an example chart of your area median income. This has just been updated for 2026, and I need to go back through the document and make sure that all the numbers within the text match. Area median income is 129.2. 80% of that is 103. So that's your, you know, 80% is what affordable housing is targeted at. 30% of 80 AMI, so that's what an affordable unit would need to cost per year. That's $2,500 a month is for an affordable unit. And then 120% of HUD fair market rate is $34,000. So this all just comes from the HUD chart. We're not making these numbers up. But again, that's not cheap for a lot of individuals, and that's kind of what we're trying to get at here. I talk a little bit about the age of housing units in town. And I think there's a graphic that goes along with that. This might be up further. A lot of your units are older and those older units cost money. They cost more than newer units, heating and maintenance and all that sort of stuff. So we discussed that a little bit. And then we talk about your affordable housing plan that you adopted back in 2022 and just some of the goals from that. Any questions on housing? Good. All right, commercial and industrial development. So redevelop and infill existing areas. In this, we try to focus on areas that are not the downtown because we focus on downtown in sort of the key priorities chapter back in chapter three or four, whatever it is. Now I don't know the number because I thought I knew it and I don't apparently. So redevelop and infill existing areas. About 3.8% of the town's land is zoned for industrial uses. 2.9% is is zoned for commercial and mixed use. So again, just kind of a brief discussion on what you've got, some of the things that you've got in town, some of the business types that you've got, some of the use types. You've got water and sewer, and just kind of a discussion on trying to infill and redevelop some of those areas. Prioritizing local businesses, some of the things that you can do to try to keep local businesses in town, help them grow. What can you do through your zoning regulations and tax abatements and things like that? Some of the stuff is out of your control, but what can you do to kind of help businesses stay in town and grow rather than losing them to somewhere else? I focus on design elements. I know we've talked a lot about that. Not only in the village center district or the town center village district, and I need to update all those references, but some design guidelines for areas outside of that specific zone as well. So that's kind of what this is all about. And then consider existing zones and allowed uses again. And we talk a lot about Route 66. There's a pretty heavy discussion in here about the Sand Hill industrial area, which is basically undeveloped for the most part. And, you know, maybe the commission wants to think about the future of that area. It's probably undeveloped because of the lack of sewer and water. But, you know, Maybe that's okay. Maybe sewer water needs to be brought down there, or maybe the zoning should be adjusted. And then industrial areas, you know, yeah, this is where that discussion comes in on that Sand Hill area. And then goals and action items, again, we went through this last month, so I won't spend time on that. Questions? Keep going. All right. Infrastructure needs. And this is pretty nuts and bolts stuff, water and sewer. We got most of this information from your Water and Sewer Commission, updated this chapter based on what they had told us. Desire, obviously, to get off from MDC and build out the water system in town and the water supply. Again, sewer, updating as needed, potential expansions. and what that could look like. Here's your water service area map. Existing is this light blue. Pink is that potential future water service area. This green is a private water system that serves, I don't know what's down there. I guess it's a little neighborhood that they have their own water system.

Same boulevard. Same boulevard.

Yeah, okay.

I have a question about as it pertains to water service. This is just something that I remember Deanna Rhodes mentioning years ago, obviously. Something about how people have had issues drilling for water around the Penfield Hill area. Does anybody remember anything like that? And whether that's something that should be referenced at all or considered for expansion, because I see that it's not.

Your memory is better than mine.

You don't remember that at all, Bob? Well, I could have been hallucinating, too.

I don't, but that doesn't say much.

Well, you weren't around. Oh, it was back then? Yeah, it was a long time ago.

Got it. It was before me. Because she left when I came on. Yeah.

I just remember there being some discussion when there were some lots that had been sold and she had made some reference to... to the fact that people had had issues with their wells, their earth. Somebody had drilled a well and then kind of screwed up somebody else's water, you know, one of those types of situations. I was just wondering whether anybody else remembered that and whether that was something that we should be, you know, have on our radar. But if I'm the only one who made that up, then it's okay.

Well, maybe Dan has some information about that.

It's okay. I was just curious if anybody else remembered.

So your point is we should possibly consider Penfield Hill area as a water expansion area?

If it's a real problem. I don't want to make a problem where there isn't already a problem.

I will look through your 2016 plan to see if there's commentary on that in that plan, because Deanna would have been around for the creation of that document. So I'll check that plan. I built this chapter based on that, but I might have missed it. So I'll double check. I wrote a note to myself.

Yeah, I don't think, I'm not sure that it was mentioned.

Jeremy, was this map something you generated or is this something somebody else generated?

I generated this based on a static map that I was given to base this on.

Okay. The surface water area, I think there's a couple other ponds and lakes in town, plus we have the reservoir, which I think Portland is expanding the water service from that, if I remember correctly. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that, but that might be worth adding those. Because I think it's like Job's Pond in the back or Portland Reservoir. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, you're right. That's just a matter of turning on a different layer, so I'll do that.

Yeah, so it looks like Job's Pond is missing, Kelsey's Pond is missing.

Yeah, the reservoir is missing, as Rob said. Yeah, okay. I don't have all the layers turned on. I'll fix that.

Okay. Jeremy, I don't know if it's important, but you show service on Cox Road and South Road and then gaps.

I'm just looking at the power line.

It looks like the gaps are like the power lines. But I would think the infrastructure is there.

It is. It's parcel-based, so it shows where there is service, but I can adjust that. That's a good point. Okay. Anything else on the map?

No.

Good. Okay. Sewer service areas, and I think this is an important one too. I know we've talked about it once or twice, but I want to make sure that we get it right. Green is existing, yellow is future. Concept being that Great Hill Pond and this area would ship east. And I see that I'm missing some surface water areas on this too. So I'll turn those layers on, on this map as well.

So the area around great hill pond, that's, um, future service area. That's the kind of protect that water, that waterway.

Yeah.

So would the same apply to like Kelsey pond and Job's pond, those would be identified as future service areas as well.

yeah so job's pond is the the water course is not turned on so you can't see the surface water but you can see some yellow going around it okay oh okay yeah oh yes yes i see it yeah right here yes Good with that map.

Yep.

Okay. And then this is sewer service area and soil. So these are the septic potential of the soils in town. So green soils, high potential, not a problem installing septic. Medium is kind of this yellow color. Low is this orange color. And then very low and extremely low are the grays. And then your existing sewer system is this brown color over here. So, you know, kind of just to back up the point in some of these expansion areas, just to show that, you know, the expansion areas are kind of these areas that are relatively low potential for septic suitability. And it's not that you can't build a septic. Of course you can. You just, it becomes an engineered system and it's a lot more expensive to bring the sand in and all of that. Energy, we talk about. The energy needs in town, we talk about the Solarize Portland initiative that took place a while back, current Heat Smart program that's in place, what the town owns for facilities and the potential to add solar to some of those and the town could consider installation of solar as appropriate. Natural gas, we know, is not available widely. There was that expansion that took place to get it out into East Hampton, but it didn't head west into downtown, so we talked a little bit about that.

Excuse me. Jeremy, could we go back under energy needs? It says no Portland facilities are equipped with solar panels. I thought Brownstone had solar panels, no? No.

yeah brownstone and uh brownstone and valley view and aren't there some at the um at the transfer station they're supposed to be they haven't done it yet oh okay so we might want to just change that statement that there are no port this old equipped with solar panels

Got it. I will make that change. Thank you. Wired and wireless communication services. Overall, you're pretty well connected. You can see your service area maps there. I think we actually removed an action item last month when we talked regarding this because your service is really pretty remarkably good for all of the carriers. Congratulations on that.

So I do have one comment on that section. Do we want to add in data about fiber connections? Because like, you know, since we're not like kind of phasing out older technology when it comes to internet connection. And I know Frontier, they get still Frontier. It's been trying to push, you know, building out fiber network in town. Um, I don't know if they still are, but you know, more than a couple of years ago, I remember when it was, it was kind of great when we got an opportunity to get gigabyte service for once. Um, I don't know how far that expands to the rest of the town though. And it'd be kind of nice to see on a map. Maybe. I don't know if that's something we'd be able to get that's accurate, but especially when the FCC is trying to reverse course on building out faster technology.

I can look to see what we can get in terms of mapping for fiber, but certainly we can add a commentary about that. All right, cool. Thank you. Okay. Transportation, commuting patterns and network usage. Just more discussion. We briefly touched on it in the intro, so we get into more data here in terms of the traffic count, traffic volumes, functional classification and traffic volumes. So this map shows the classification of each of the roads and the number of the average annual daily traffic on each segment of road. Hal Hallstein, So I don't know why that does that so that's what this map is showing you and I should probably turn off the airline trail because it's a little confusing so i'll do that. Hal Hallstein, Just a discussion on what functional classifications are and what they mean. Hal Hallstein, discussion on public transportation. Hal Hallstein, discussion on rail and I did add the fact that conduct just announced a major rehab project for the bridge. And fire protection, talk about the fire companies that you have in town that rely on a variety of water sources. We didn't really get a response from fire, so this is mostly taken from your old plan. community facilities. We talk about all the various things that the town owns. We talk about the fact that Waverly Center is undersized and bring in some of that commentary that we heard from the senior center director way back when we first started this process. Talk about Brownstone Intermediate and some of the responses that we heard during the public process about what the town might want to do with that in the future. and upcoming consolidation schools. We'll talk a little bit about that project coming up. And then this is community facilities and infrastructure map. So showing all the various buildings and facilities that are in the town, not only town owned, but community facilities too. So there's religious facilities are on there, the camp is on there, whole host of things. Stormwater. We talk a bit about the issue that you have over there between Buck Foreman and Waverly Center. I talked with Dan and kind of reworded this based on the information that he gave me. And I found a study that was done a couple of years ago as well. And then goals and action items. And then we went through that. So I'll skip over that. And then future land use plan. So I need to build out this chapter based on the actual map. So this map is what you saw, but I would actually, this is mostly just your zoning map. So if I can, I'm going to come back to future land use map in a moment here. And then conclusion chapter. So we just wrap everything up. And then your appendix a is the implementation tables and then after that is that historic buildings inventory that we got from historical society. So that's the document that's your plan. I am going to any any questions comments before I move on to future land use map.

So, appendix B is still alive document, though. Because my understanding was is that they were keeping it a live document, meaning they were adding to it and subtracting from it. So are we putting a live document into this plan is my question.

So, you know, I don't know for sure. Yes, I think the intention is to keep it live. This is what we were given and, you know, asked to include as an appendix. So, you know, I did that, but I think the goal is to keep it updated. Yeah. And maybe we note that this is... Yeah, who's doing that?

Do we have to, like, put, like, who does that?

It's one of the action items in your implementation table. I think it was.

I'm ahead of myself then. All right. Yeah. That's cool. All right.

It's in here somewhere. I mean, the historic society, I think they kind of wanted the P and Z to be involved. And we had a conversation a few weeks back about quarterly versus biannually.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Oh, you're trying to look for it?

I'm trying to find it, yeah, just to make sure that we're good with that action item.

I'm flipping. I just hate to update something every time they change it.

Yeah, I don't think that you would need to update your POCD. I think, you know, as they change that list, you know, they're sort of the holders of that list. And then I think in your next list, you know, your next plan, you can bring the new version of it in if you chose to in 10 years.

Well, if you look at number eight, where, what page, Carolyn? I can't see. 77.

No, yeah. So the action item was using the 1980 historic buildings list as a starting point. Collaborate with Portland Historic Society and maintain an accurate list.

And then it says, number six says to meet with them biannually. Well, I'm going to have to go through these lists again.

So biannually? Mm-hmm. Number six. What's the agenda? Okay. Sure.

And that was the one we had quite a bit of discussion last month about that. I think originally it said quarterly.

And I think I brought up the same question.

Yeah.

All right.

We're good with it? Make any changes?

I am. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I'm only one person. So it is what it is. Fix it later.

Okay. And again, you're not beholden to these action items. So if that meeting doesn't happen biannually, nobody's going to come slap you on the wrist for it. Okay, I'm going to move off from the document. And like I said, thank you to everybody for this time. I know this has been a long discussion. And those of you that have, you know, grammatical stuff and rewordings, please send those my way. You've got my email address. Just forward them over and we'll get that implemented. So I do want to take a few minutes and just look at the future land use map because I've been working on it. And I want to get your feedback so that I can kind of finish it. And... So can you all see that? Do you see a map on your screen?

Yes.

Okay. So this would be your future land use. What I'm trying to do is leave residential areas as kind of a soft white in the background. The dark green are all of your open spaces, just kind of a homogenized open space layer. It doesn't take into account ownership. wetland layer is there that's kind of this blue patterned with an outline. Your natural diversity database areas are these blue outline with the hashing. These orange dots signify critical habitat areas. So all along up here, along the river, and then down the southern portion of town as well. And then commercial zones are shown in kind of a foggy red, industrial zone in pink. And so it's pretty just generic zoning. I didn't specify each individual zone. I just kind of homogenized your zoning layers. And what I'm trying to do is create corridors to kind of focus on some of your action items. So you'll see a bright orange here, kind of along Main Street and along 66. That would be areas of focus for infill and redevelopment. Yellow signifies a corridor for pedestrian and bicycle improvements. So the eastern side of 66 and then, you know, kind of just making that connection over to the airline trail. It's, you know, kind of a big, fat, thick line because we don't know exactly where that airline trail is going to go. But I kind of wanted to note it on the plan. Another bike and ped loop over here, as we discussed by the riverfront. These green corridors would be areas of focus for additional open space, potentially. You know, it's an action item. You talk about your subdivision regulations and we talk about using your fee in lieu of. So just using some of your natural resources, you've got a couple of streams that run through these areas, you've got wetland areas, and you've also got open spaces that, you know, could be sort of connected so these would be areas of focus if a good parcel comes up and the town wants to purchase open space you know these are kind of the areas that you'd focus on this is me spitballing you don't like them we'll take them off um and then this pink bubble is a is a kind of a node uh you know with a note that'll go along with this that kind of discusses focus on this area right this is this this is that industrial zone what can we do to make that industrial zone more productive for the town? So that's where I'm at right now, thoughts, feelings, opinions.

So that purple area you were just highlighting, is that Sand Hill?

It is. Yeah, that's the intersection with 66 Gospel Lane and San Gil's kind of...

Because personally, I don't quite understand why Sandhill is an industrial zone. If you ride up there now, it's a nice combination of small farms and some larger farms. And I kind of like it that way. So I'm voting to make that non-industrial, personally. There's no water, no sewer. Why try to jam industrial in there? I'm curious, historically, how it got zoned as industrial. But just my two cents worth.

It's planned industrial, right?

I think it's just industrial. I'll pull up your zoning map in the background here and take a look.

dana had said said something about that and it was i think i remember the comment as just being yeah we were looking for some place to put some industrial land that's what i think it is i think it's planned industrial it's designated on your zoning map as ip so which is planned and that's planned industrial yeah

And the way he defined it was, because I asked, what is called industrial?

He said that it was not like a dirty industrial, like more of a, I don't know, a clean industrial. Is that right, Jeremy? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it probably office parks or maybe not office parks, but sort of small industrial complexes, I would think, make sense in there. I'd have to go and look at what your allowed uses are in your zone. But it's, you know, most a lot of towns have something similar to that. So, right. We're not talking about, you know, smelters. We're talking about...

you know uh precision manufacturing and things like that right like making checks or something like that but um but i really my recollection for what it's worth is that it was kind of picked you know that place was just kind of picked as a place yeah

So, so I think, you know, and I think one of the reasons that I put this bubble here is sort of focus on that whole area as a, you know, maybe reconsider uses, reconsider zoning, kind of a focal point for the commission in the future to think about what you want that, what that area to be.

Yeah. Okay. That I agree with. Yes. Yes, for sure. But not with a focus on making it more productive as an industrial area. My focus would be the opposite. But yes, we definitely should pay attention to that.

And you might decide that commercial makes more sense there in the long run. I mean, you've sort of already gone that way, right? You've got that little strip, that strip plaza that the old Dairy Queen came out of and you've got whatever Burger Heaven and, you know, Dunkin' Donuts and a few other things. You've got a gas station now going in next to that across the way, the new Dairy Queen. So you sort of have started to transition that area a little bit. And maybe that's the direction you go in the future, that that'll be up to you.

To me, those are more of the 66 corridor as opposed to up Sand Hill into the farm country there. So let's see, you're looking for other suggestions to the map?

Yeah, any commentary that you might have.

I like your concept on the corridors, where to concentrate on future open space and the continuation of the airline trail, because that's important.

Right. So now what about that stretch of 17A that goes from the post office down to... You know, like Indian Hill Avenue. That's a nice stretch of, I think.

It would be north of that.

Yeah, north.

Yeah.

This is, well, the Middlesex Avenue is here. So there's your post offices right around in here. Yep. From here all the way up to what is that Indian Hill Avenue?

Yeah.

So that whole stretch there to me, there's a, there's a whole bunch of beautiful old homes in that stretch. And should we look at preserving that stretch in some sense as a, as, I don't know, historic district or similar to town center village district.

Or a historic district.

Yeah. Yeah. Just tightening up maybe our housing regulations.

Well, and something where maybe we could set it up where there's incentives to help the homeowners.

Right. I mean, they've recently improved all the sidewalks.

Where are you? Sorry.

So 17A from the post office.

So the main street from the post office to Indian Hill Avenue.

Where's Indian Hill Avenue? Sorry. It's just as it goes down the way.

Do the little hands?

Yeah.

It's down by the firehouse.

Yeah. Package store? Yes.

The spirit shop.

Yeah.

It's a packy.

Yeah, it's a packy.

So that's something we might want to look at. We don't have to come up with an answer tonight, but I would say let's put that on our study.

This is a historic district, you want to put it?

Yeah, something like that. Historic, making it...

There's a lot of old homes. Is there? Yeah. Okay.

yeah so we can highlight that on the map and and you know oh you mean on main street yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah okay i'm thinking like if you're taking a left i'm like no there's not okay yes on main street this is gorgeous yeah make all of main street like all the way down near me get rid of all those Yeah, all those houses are gorgeous.

Yes.

That's a good idea.

So I think we want to encourage the upkeep and maintenance of those homes.

So I'll add that to the map. I can color code a different corridor along there and call it a historic preservation corridor or something along those lines.

That works for me, yeah.

Good idea, Bob.

Yeah, thanks.

We should do that for the rest of the town. My house is pretty historic.

I'm pretty sure you're across the street from my parents' house.

I think that was built in the 1860s. Yeah, yours is 1860s, right? Mine's not too bad. Mine's in 43? 42? I don't know. But yeah, your family's house is awesome.

Yeah, except it has a brownstone base with a dirt board.

Wow, that's so fish posh.

Makes it even better.

Yeah, if you don't live there.

Exactly. I mean, it's a nice house. I wish that basement was finished.

I like that. What can other people think of?

I like it.

This corridor concept I like.

I like it too.

So one of the other things that I could do on this map is I could call out vacant parcels and just note them on the map. That's completely up to you. I generally try to stay away from parcel-specific recommendations. That's why I like corridors, because it's kind of a focal area. We're not honing in on individual properties. But if we call out vacant parcels, then we kind of put it on a map, show them, and then going forward, if the town wants to think about additional open space purchases, you kind of can see where they're linked up and how we can connect those to other areas. other open spaces that exist.

I feel like that might be a map. Maybe we just keep internally rather than putting in this plan because, you know, the last thing we'd want is to have to say in this planet, it's vacant. And then somebody two years develops it. And now we've got a map that says it's vacant and we can't really, you know, we have to then go through the effort of changing it. And it just, that doesn't make sense.

Okay. Is that Let's see.

So, um, Brownstone Avenue.

That's one of the ones we talked about.

That's the yellow, right? Yeah, that's this.

Yeah, so, and yellow is...

Developing that.

Yeah, so that's another area that we really wanted to focus on uses and zoning. Because of our goal to want to develop that area as primarily a recreational use. So I don't know if we want to spike that out in addition to your yellow, you know, for potential rezoning. I don't know. What do people think? That's one of the areas we talked about wanting to focus on.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think there was a lot of questions about that, and that was even one of the tables, you know, at the sessions was, you know, talking about what you'd like to see down there.

Mm-hmm.

I think that makes sense. And it's one of the things that we highlight in the document. So I'll figure out a way to display it so that both the yellow shows up and then some kind of a bubble that, you know, similar to what we did over at Gospel Wayne.

Okay. Yep. And then let's see. So let's talk about further down on 17A where the old fairgrounds used to be. So that's the, you know, so right along the river. So that's open space now, I guess. It's considered open space. Should we be looking at some sort of a Well, actually, I think right along the river are a lot of individual lots that are privately owned, some by Fish and Game, and I think some are private. So do we want to try and keep that preserved as open space? Do we want to look at some other use? Granted, it's in the floodplain, but as we all know, are we just going to let that sit the way it is forever?

A lot of that is always wetland. I mean, how many times is the fair? I mean, they move the fairs because that area floods so much.

Right.

So I think leaving it as open space and farmland, because I mean, it still gets uses out of like hunting and, you know, people who really enjoy skating. I mean, if we get cold enough. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, like, people like taking photography of birds, you know, the river area. I mean, if anything, you know, if we want to do any kind of development down there, we try to find a way of making it more accessible for people to walk or run or stuff like that, but on, like, a minimal, like, not invasive, like, level.

Yeah, it's a turtle crossing area, too.

Unofficially.

A lot of wildlife down there. I guess a lot of rare birds.

I've seen one turtle down there. Very disappointed. You haven't? No, not one.

I've seen turtles. That's crazy.

There was a time where three days in a row where there was one turtle that was trying to cross just past the up that hill on 17 towards Glastonbury. Kept trying to cross it, stopping traffic. at the same exact time every day.

Careful, there are a lot of snapping turtles.

Oh, I wasn't the one getting out of my car to try to bring it back to the side of the road. There's quite a few people who tried, though.

Mm-hmm. Let them.

Exactly.

We need them. Let them.

So going along with Rob's thoughts here, what about making that area more accessible for wildlife observation and photographers and walkers?

Well, that would be something to think about.

It was something I mentioned, I think, when the Board of Selectmen were at the meeting about how the sidewalk ends at Gilderslee Package Store. And we've got a nice park that's just down the street. And the sidewalks end halfway up Bartlett, ends halfway up High Street. So we've got all these resources that are inaccessible to our high school, to Valley View. you know, and extending sidewalks or, you know, expanding the road in a way that, you know, people use it for biking a lot safer, or even adding a small boardwalk section on the bridges along the river, uh, just so people can fish without having, um, to worry about the traffic that's, you know, and the smaller, uh, Mart, uh, you know, sides of the road, you know, it's like stuff like that. Okay.

Those are very good ideas. I think we should really think about how we want to pursue that.

So we can add something to the map to kind of display that. It's sort of along bike ped improvements, but it's something different. So I'll use a different color and denote it a different way. But yeah, I think that makes sense.

Mm-hmm.