Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the June 1st, 2026 Planning and Zoning Commission meeting. My name is Paul Leibowitz. I'm the chair of the PZC. And as you may know, pursuant to state law, there's no physical location for this meeting because this meeting is being held electronically and live streamed at westportct.gov. The meeting is also being shown on Westport's Optimal Government Access Channel 79, subject to availability. The public, of course, may attend and offer testimony during the meeting by using the meeting link posted on the agenda prior to the meeting. And that said agenda is available at westportct.gov on the meetings list and calendar webpage. Your written comments may also be received prior to the public meeting and should have been sent to pnz at... westportct.gov by 12 p.m. on the day of the meeting if intended to be distributed for consideration by the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission. Any written comments received after 12 p.m. on the day of the meeting will be entered in the record but not distributed until the next business day. And of course, all of our materials are available at westportct.gov on the Planning and Zoning webpage under P&Z Planning, pending applications and recent approvals. So tonight, I am lucky to be joined by our Vice Chair, Michael Kammeyer, as well as our Secretary, Bree Injeski, along with Commissioners Mike Calise, Patrizia Zuccaro, and Craig Giovanni. We will also be joined as an alternate by Nicole Laskin. And of course, our town staff is being represented by zoning P&Z zoning director, Michelle Pirelli. So with that, Bri, if you will bring us into public hearing and read in item number one.

I would love to. Item number one is text amendment number 866, application number PZ2600119, submitted by the Westport Planning and Zoning Department to modify Section 5, definitions Section 6, nonconforming uses, buildings, and lots. Section 11, residents AAA district. Section 12, residents AA district. Section 13, residents A district. Section 14, residents B district. Section 15, planned residential district. Section 16, mobile home park district. Section 17, Open Space Residential District. Section 18, Residency District. Section 19, Affordable Housing Zone. Section 19A, Residential Affordable Housing Zone Workforce. Section 19B, Residential Rental Housing Opportunity Workforce. Section 19C, Sagataka Village District. Section 20, Municipal Housing Zone. Section 32-12, Inclusionary True Family and Multifamily Dwellings. Section 32-17, affordable and middle-income housing on town-owned property. Section 32-26, adaptive reuse and redevelopment of non-residential buildings to housing. And Section 39A, inclusionary housing overlay district to remove references to the maximum permitted number of stories in various residential and mixed-use zoning districts and to regulate building scale solely by maximum building height in feet. A copy of the text amendment is available online at www.westportct.gov on the Planning and Zoning Office webpage under P&Z, Pending Applications and Recent Approvals. A copy may also be viewed at Town Hall located at 110 Myrtle Avenue in the Town Clerk's Office and Planning and Zoning Office. Applicant's presentation time is 10 minutes.

Thank you very much, Brie. And tonight presenting is our very own Michelle Pirelli.

Thank you. So two nights. Can somebody just cover the waiting room? We saw a lot of people coming in. Thanks. So I just want to go back a little bit as background of... how our zoning regulations have regulated building height. We did do some research and building height has been adopted or part of the regulations from when the original adoption was in 1930. There were some changes over the course of the 80s, but ultimately the regulation has been adopted overall height as well as number of stories as a regulating factor in all zoning districts. So over the course of the year, staff has encountered a lot of ways that the interior of the upper floors of houses and buildings have been manipulated in order to comply with the regulations for number of stories. For instance, steepened or lowered roof slopes to keep portions of the space under the height threshold use of dormers strategically to create usable space while still meeting the technical definitions of the floor area that's above five and a half feet. Use of cathedral ceilings on the floor below for a lower headroom, as well as just breaking up the floor area with angled ceilings or soffits so that the full height stays within the limits. So exorbitant costs are paid by residents so their consultants can confirm the building height, complies with the zoning regulations, and staff spends a great amount of time confirming this regulation, which is primarily regulating interior space of the building. Um, so we have, um, brought this to subcommittee, um, and texts amendment eight 66 proposes, um, amendments to the zoning bags to remove all the references to maximum number of stories in residential and multifamily zoning districts. Uh, the amendment retains and continues to regulate building height and feet to the mid point of all pitched roofs, um, but eliminates the story based limitations. which regulate interior residential spaces. So again, we're still regulating to the midpoint. However, dormers must be set back from the face of the building, at least one foot from the face of the building and two feet on the sides of the building. So this will achieve, still achieve regulating the size of a dormer on the roof. So Basically, my explanatory statement goes through all the benefits, but basically we are just trying to clarify and simplify the regulations while not changing the exterior of buildings, maintaining the thresholds in terms of maximum size, and by adding the dormer controls. Staff comments also go through how this amendment may be considered consistent with the 2017 Plan of Conservation and Development that encourages zoning standards to be maintained, improved, strengthened, and enforced. And lastly, there was no department comments that had any concerns. There were no issues from any town departments. And that's kind of a summary. And of course, I'm here always to answer any questions you have.

Thank you very much. I do appreciate that, Michelle. And we are lucky this evening to have amongst us two of the zoning officials, Mr. Jim Ezzies and Ms. Liz Wong. The reason for them being here is it is actually their department that receives the bulk of the, let's just call it the incoming fire, when it comes to the building height. They are usually the first ones on the firing line, so to speak, to handle these types of pieces. So I'm thrilled to have them here to speak about it. We also have, I believe, Somewhere here, we have several architects who also deal with this on a daily basis. And so all of them are here to provide additional texture and explanation as to why this is a good idea whose time has come. So if I could, I'd like to ask Mr. Eziz and Ms. Wang to weigh in with what they've seen in the field and kind of give us a little texture. Okay, thank you, Paul.

What I thought might be helpful to the Commission is also joining us is Peter Cadu, who also worked with us on this in the last couple of years. Let me give you a little background on how it impacts the ZBA and why it is something that the five of us feel very strongly about. When people come to the ZBA for a variance, for example, down at Campo Beach, Campo, all those side streets, Campo Beach, as we know, is basically a bowl. So all those houses are being lifted for obvious reasons if there's a flood. But what happens when they lift the house and they need a variance? one of the conditions that we impose upon that variance is that they agree to something called the non-conversion agreement. And what effectively that says is that that ground floor, the garage floor, can only be used for cars. There are flood vents so that water can flow in and out if there is a flood, so the house is not damaged, the foundation is intact. But that area except for the garage cannot be used as living space. It can't be heated. It can't have bathrooms. It cannot be anything more than storage. So what people are, you know, by lifting the house, what they're missing is places to put their Christmas ornaments, their luggage, whatever, in a safe spot. So what they're using is that attic space. The current regulation says that they can only use 25% of that as living space. What we're concerned about as a board is if it looks the same from the street, why are we concerned with what they're doing in the attic? And there are certain tricks of the trade to, as Michelle said, they lift the ceilings, they do vaulted ceilings. Our contention is that if the regulation stays as it is, which is 31 to the midpoint, it looks exactly the same as it does today from the street. And the dormers, what Michelle explained also, that dormer regulation will go into effect. So it's not going to look top-heavy. And it gives people more flexibility to use that attic space for living space. And again, it looks the same from the street. We do not regulate what people do in their houses. Saugatuck Shores is also affected by this, because we all know it's Saugatuck Island. And in a flood, those houses are—people are evacuated. They're We have a very competent group of people in town hall and the police and fire departments who get people evacuated and they can move their cars, but they can't get everything else out of the house. It also takes a huge amount of staff time, and I think, Michelle, you can you know, say something about this, to calculate that. So why are we regulating what people can do in the attic if it looks exactly the same from the street, which is we're concerned about the streetscape, not what they're doing in the house. Plus it meets all the technical regulations. It's pretty straightforward. We invariably condition a variance down at Campo and Saugatuck Shores that they agree to a non-conversion agreement. And what that says, it's not happening now for various reasons, but The town was required under FEMA, and Michelle, please correct me if I'm wrong, that once a year, anybody who had a conversion, non-conversion agreement, was subject to a physical inspection by a member of the staff. That is not happening now for whatever reasons. I think it's probably, I don't know if it's a FEMA requirement or just staff time. How much time do they have? But people are... looking to maximize their house. And we want them to be able to do that as long as it looks the same from the street. And that's really what this is effectively doing. It's eliminating the 25%. Liz, I mean, do you want to add something to this? I mean, Liz and I have been together on the ZBA for, as we laugh, we joke and say longer than most marriages in Westport. So it's probably almost three decades. And we've seen this over and over and over. And we're very strict about it. And the staff is very strict about it. And it's just our contention that why don't we give some people relief? It's not going to let them use that ground floor for living space. Can't do it. The non-conversion agreement stays in effect. What this again, what this effectively lets them do is use more of that attic space for living space. Liz, anything you want to, am I missing something?

Liz? She just needs to operate the mute button. There you go.

Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes. Can you hear me?

Yes. Okay.

Sorry. No, Jimmy, you've been thorough and detailed, but I would say over time, the, uh, with the increased flooding and FEMA regulations, the changing, um, you know, amendments and things like that, houses have to, uh, psychosocialists have to be lifted higher and higher. And so, but this, but the height of the structures have not been correspondingly, you know, allowed to be raised higher so that the, um, there's less living space that's usable because the, um, There's more height required to be opened on the bottom for the water and can't have storage or anything or living space on the ground level up to the first floor. You know what I mean? And the lots, most of the lots in flood areas are quite small. So the lots are small, the houses are smaller. And there's less storage and usable space because of FEMA regulations.

One of the things that we look at, and I know the commission looks at, is what the streetscape is. And Peter Kudu, obviously, can jump in on this, too. And this is not going to change that. It's not going to change it. It's only going to change internally. And, you know, what I don't think people down there, and I've heard a number of people told me that people have turned, even though they signed a non-conversion agreement, they have finished those, you know, basically the first floor, the ground floor, into living space. And what's going to happen, you know, and Peter and I were talking about it, you know, this afternoon. we're overdue for a flood. And what they're going to find if they did do that, and it is living space, and they have closed the vents, everything down there obviously will get destroyed. But they're going to put their FEMA insurance in jeopardy. An interesting thing that people don't realize is, in Connecticut, a zoning board of appeals can vary FEMA. We don't have to require people to lift the house. We don't, we've never, and I've been on the board for 30 years. We don't ever do that. We can vary FEMA. And the reason we don't do that is obviously not only public safety, but it's also the fact that if we do it, it affects, the FEMA rate is for everyone. It's not by house, it's by FEMA. So we don't vary FEMA. We never will vary FEMA for that reason, because it affects everybody and public safety. So I don't know if this makes sense. Peter, you want to jump in and add something that I'm missing here?

Peter Cadoux? Hi, Jim. Members of the Commission, Peter Cadoux, Arkansas. So, yeah, much like Jim has already and Michelle have described so far, we've been working on this amendment for several years. Jim, I think, way longer, quite candidly. And I don't know how much more to add from the perspective that by maintaining the midpoint that we've always had, which is not part of the text amendment changes, we'll see very little difference in the volume of a house based on this. Now, those volumes are going to be different because let me start by saying most new construction you see predominantly at the beach area really essentially maximizes the height, as you all know, and it maximizes the amount of attic space. And for them to achieve more attic space, the exterior box wouldn't look much different, but we wouldn't have to manipulate the ceiling heights on the floor below. So I think that's an important feature because unlike the ADUs, which are regulated in a different way, peak elevation, percentages of roof, eaves and rake setbacks. Um, this will have only the even rake setback, which I believe, uh, is a good thing for dormers. But, um, you know, the amount of attic space, even with today's text amendment proposal, uh, also will be different depending on if on a number of different factors. So, uh, it will be helpful in the beach zone, but it's also helpful, um, for properties that are not in the beach zone, but it'll also be effective what you can do by that existing average grade, which on some cases, a sloping property will make very little difference, quite candidly, with this if the existing average grade is so far down. So I just want to reiterate that our calculations suggest that this really is a lot simpler than complex from the perspective that The outside shell won't change, but people have the storage ability, more storage ability and more living space ability.

Thank you very much to the three of you. I do appreciate that. Mr. Eziz, were you going to add something else?

Again, for the members of the commission, what this effectively means in a new house, and we've all gone in them, the first floor, people want nine-foot ceilings, and they can have a nine-foot ceiling, but the second floor will be a standard eight-foot ceiling. The attic may not be, but pretty close to it. It's going to look exactly as it looks today. It just gives people flexibility, and that's really the intent behind it, and that's what we've been talking about for years. Because for the ZBA, we get it over and over and over and over. And we don't grant that variance. We stick to the regs. We have to go by state statutes in the local regs, and there's no hardship for that. You have to justify hardship. It's effectively giving people a little more wiggle room. It's giving them a little more latitude to use the space that they would like to have, a living space.

Fabulous. Thank you to the three of you. Do you also maintain that it will not create some kind of... ugly-looking roofline while people try to game the system, et cetera?

No, I think that's what, I think, Paul, what the staff has done, and Michelle and her staff have done very effectively, is by recommending that we use that dormer regulation, and that's going to, it's not going to look like a shoebox on top of a house. Right. And something else, again, I'm not an architect. I'm certainly not as talented on that stuff as Peter is, but a dormer brings your eye down. It doesn't make it look taller. It makes it actually look lower, makes it visually look slower.

Great. Super. And while we have you here, Peter, do you also agree with what Mr. Aziz is portraying regarding the roof lines and the visual effect?

Pretty much. There'll be some instances, because I think you can't cover all of them, where you would see more dormer with this approved than without it. I think in most cases, it won't change. But having that midpoint stay the way it is, and like Jim said, you really still have to pay attention because In many circumstances, you can't really do a dormer without exceeding the midpoint. You could just do the gable sides of the house, which is what most architects are doing anyway.

Great. Super. Michelle, back to you just for a second. Obviously, this also would have a tremendous impact on your department regarding staff resources, time, effort, et cetera. You want to just go into some of that? Sure.

Yeah. There's many times that staff will ask for, you know, multiple cross sections, attic, attic plans, architects, some architects have a hard time understanding what we're asking for. So there's just tons of back and forth and cross sections and, you know, just, just work that is just, and reviewing and checking that really ultimately we spent a lot of work exorbitant amount of time on and a lot of frustration by applicants with the process and um just overall having to continue to prove these things at the beginning of the project again at the end of the project um we have an architect has to certify that the attic plan complies as as an attic. And then sometimes, you know, it's a different, we just run into a lot of issues with having to provide this documentation. And it's very costly and very frustrating for applicants. And again, very, very waste a lot of time from by the staff standpoint and asking for this to come to confirm that we're complying with this section of these sections of the regulations were ultimately it's gonna look the same from the outside. So we think this makes a lot of sense and we've been working at it for many, many, many years. I think Mary Young, the former PNC director is on the call and I bet she will chime in on the fact that we've been trying to do this for many years in different iterations. So I think this is a good solution and staff is fully supportive.

Thank you, Michelle. You mentioned cost. So a component of this, which sometimes we rarely see in the work that we do, is that it will actually make it cheaper

Yes, we many times at each roof line change, we will ask for cross sections. So with very complicated roofs, this can be very costly. Every time an architect has to do a cross section of a specific roof line, you know, that's that's money that they are spending to confirm that regulation, to confirm that the headroom is the same as what's being shown on the attic floor plan. So again, that's costly as well as the certification at the end of the project also, you know, is costly to the to the applicants.

So in your conclusion in the staff report where you wrote about how this eliminates redundancy, potential conflicts, you talked about clarity, et cetera, we can actually also add, and therefore, this would be cheaper or less cost prohibitive for most people to now actually comply with the new regulations.

Yes, absolutely. We can add that as a reason.

All right, super. All right, super. So what I want to do now is go around the room with our, I almost said panelists, what I meant was our commissioners, and get your feedback so that Michelle knows what you feel about it. Patrice, in order to call on you, though, I'm going to need your camera on. Same with you, Mr. Kammeyer. Mr. Caliste, would you like to weigh in, please?

This is a change that has been a long time in the making. It's probably one of the most positive changes I've ever seen in our zoning regulations. We already have more than sufficient controls, external and internal, by the building department. So that this is a win-win-win for everybody, applicants, staff, and commission members. And I applaud it. And I think one of the positive results that's going to come out of this is better roof design on the part of the applicants. I mean, one of the things that has emerged in the last few years to beat this story requirement is the proliferation of gamble roofs. And I think we'll see a change in that area. I think we'll also see a change in roof which will be positive. So I'm really gung ho for this and excited about it. Thank you.

All right. Motion to approve it. I'm just kidding. No, no, just kidding. Ms. Injeski, would you like to weigh in?

No, I don't really have anything to say other than what Michael said, what you've said. It seems like a very common sense thing that we should do.

Super. Thank you. Ms. Schiavone? I would agree with Michael Embry. Very good. I'd love to call on either Mr. Kammeyer or Mr. Caro, but I've got to have your cameras on. There you go. Sorry about that.

Yeah, look, I think that Jim has been doing this along with Liz for a really long time, and the institutional knowledge that they have along with our office is great, and I'm, you know, all for it. I don't really have much to say, Paul. You kind of said it all, other than a nice shout to Mary for being on the call.

Okay, we're done with the shout outs. Ms. Zuccaro, last chance. Patricia, are you there?

Yeah, I'm here, but you said you didn't want to call me unless I turn my camera on.

I don't know what to say. I'm asking you to please put your camera on. That is, the public has a right to see who they're speaking with. I don't have anything to say. Thanks, Paul. Very good. All right. Let us... Go to the public. Oh, I see Ms. Young has her hand up, very good.

Good evening, Mary Young for the record. It's been so long I forgot how to use my electronic hands, so thank you for calling on me, Chairman Leibowitz. I will try to be concise. Michelle Pirelli said it very well when she said, this will simplify and clarify. If there are no other headlines for this, I think that is the one that should be used. I will confirm Michelle's statement that this has been tried on many iterations many times over during my tenure at Planning and Zoning. I think I lost count after half a dozen times. There always seem to be cause for concern that somehow, some way, somebody was going to get around the regulations if we were to remove a number of stories. And thanks to the work of Peter Kadu and other architects who have offered their insights and knowledge, I don't perceive that there will be any workarounds. I think the I's have been dotted and the T's have been crossed. I am so excited to hear the support of members of the Zoning Board of Appeals, members of the Planning and Zoning Commission. I don't know that I'm actually here to persuade anyone of anything other than to add my voice of support and to offer my thanks to all the zoning officials who have retired or who stay on of planning and zoning as they have been tortured, for lack of a better word, by these regulations, as have the applicants and their architects. And to simplify and clarify is a very good thing, as more zoning permits will then be able to be issued, more money into the affordable housing fund. There are so many benefits that come with this. I said I'd be concise, and apparently I don't know how to do that. Nothing's changed. I will just say thank you to all of you. Thank you, Michelle. If you can get this over the finish line, you've done more than I ever could. And bravo. Thank you, Chairman Leibovitz.

Thank you, Ms. Young. I do appreciate it very much. Other members of the public? Mr. Aziz.

Just to put this in perspective, not to date myself, we've been trying to do this for 25 years. So, and Mary's right, and we've all tried, and we've tried every possible way. I mean, there's questions of whether or not this part of town is zoned wrong, which is not the conversation tonight. But this is, as Michael is very articulate, it's the right thing to do at the right time. and we've all tried to do it and it's not, nobody's can even notice it. They're not even gonna see the change.

Thank you, Mr. Aziz, do appreciate it. Ms. Jacobs, I see your hand is up.

Yes, thank you. For some reason, my button to raise my hand has disappeared on tonight's version of Zoom, so I apologize. I wanna echo everything Mary Young has said and what Mr. Aziz has said. This is long overdue. It's a brilliant idea. I know I spoke about this when I first moved to Westport 20-some-odd years ago, that I didn't really understand why we were fussing about what was inside. It was really what was outside that we should be worried about. I do have one question, though, and I just want one confirmation from Michelle, if possible. This is not going to change the way we're measuring the height on the ADUs, correct? We're not measuring to the midpoint on the ADUs, right? No. no no this wouldn't change that no right i just wanted to be clear about that but um this is um a really really great idea and i think that it will uh make the houses more attractive in westport in the long run so thank you very much for all the to all the folks who worked on this thank you very good thank you uh any other members of the public would like to weigh in on uh text amendment 866

Seeing none, I'm going to come back to the applicant, Michelle.

Thank you. No, I don't really have much to add. I think everybody has said it very clearly that this is going to be an improvement by all parties involved, applicant, staff, commission, everybody. And again, good point that we're potentially will be able to issue more zoning permits because we are going to have less... less confirming to do on new house applications, which we see a lot of. So I think it's a win all around. Thank you.

All right. Very good. I think the saying quit while you're ahead is in order here. Do we have a motion from our group? Motion to close. Thank you very much. I have a second on that. I'll second it. Thank you very much. And let it be closed. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. All right, very good. Thank you to all those who slaved away for years and for those who joined us this evening. Nice to see you, Ms. Young. Okay, Ms. Zinjeski, what do we have on for number two?

Item number two is a pre-application discussion of proposed development at 606 Riverside Avenue, application PZ2600307, submitted by Adam J. Blank Esquire, which seeks feedback from the Planning and Zoning Commission on proposed residential housing with a complimentary mixed use component, including 157 residential units with 10% deed restricted as affordable and 283 parking spaces. Time allotted for the pre-application is 20 minutes.

Thank you very much for reading that out. Who do we have here? Mr. Blank, I see you.

Yes, good evening. Hi, Adam Blank from Wafse Rosen, Land Use Council for Spinnaker on this project. Excited to be here. We hope it'll be a wonderful project for Saugatuck. As a starter, as you know, or may know, that just to let you know, we will be in front of the Architectural Review Board tomorrow night on a pre-app review for them. If I can share my screen. There we go.

Let's see if that...

Very good. Great. You want to make it a little larger so we don't see the side slide?

Yeah, let me attempt to. Or not. I apologize. Oh, wait, maybe I can do it this way. Is that better? Much. Okay. Sorry. I just got a second screen for the first time, and I'm not used to running two screens on my computer. So apologies. In any event, on the team with us tonight, Emma Dignati, who's my colleague here at Wausee Rosen, for our land use consultants in civil engineering, Rick Redness and David Ginter. Architecture, Selin Pather and Christian Gonzalez at Bindfield Architecture. uh traffic uh marissa tarallo and christopher mojica at akrf out of stamford and for the ownership group at spinnaker is uh matt uh edwardson uh who's the president and principal at spinnaker um you're gonna hear from uh the architect in a few moments and then from our traffic engineer uh shortly after that i'd like to right up front though first just ask matt if you don't mind introducing yourself um and uh and a little bit about Spinnaker, and then I'll share again.

Sure. Thanks, Adam. Good evening. We appreciate the opportunity to kind of introduce ourselves, and we are excited to finally share our concept vision for 606 Riverside this evening. Matt Everson, as Adam mentioned, I'm principal with Spinnaker. We are locally based in South Norwalk and generally operate regionally, primarily throughout Connecticut at this point. And with a focus on transit, transit oriented development, oftentimes integrating with and strengthen the character of existing vibrant communities. And that's our goal here. Although this is our preliminary discussion with all you, it is a continuation of conversations had with the community stakeholders for over the past few months. We know this site has a long and at times frustrating history for the neighborhood and we spent some real time studying what was previously proposed and the aspects that the neighbors feel didn't work. The plan we are developing reflects that feedback. We believe contextual to Saugatuck substantially smaller in scope than what was previously proposed and grounded in what we believe is practical for the site. Now, Sogduck is an amazing neighborhood that, like many otherwise great places, has an underutilized parcel, that being 606 Riverside, that currently detracts in a number of ways from the livability and vibrancy of the community. I do live in town with my wife and family, and therefore I have kind of a heightened sense, personal stake in getting this thing right. We want this to be a project the neighborhood is proud of and generally glad to have here. And we look forward to your feedback, answering any questions, and engaging in this process with all of you.

that adam you wanna great yeah thanks matt um so uh for the commissioners and also please feel free to uh fire away questions uh as we present this evening um and we'll do our best to respond although admittedly because it is just a pre-app there may be some questions that we don't have answers to quite yet but we will do our best we're going to try to share some numbers with you tonight that will help hopefully help you understand why this project has been selected, why we're proposing what we are rather than a retail or restaurant heavy application or one with a large office component, and try to give you some perspective on this project compared to the prior applications you've seen for this site. And our focus is to try to hopefully make sure you understand first off what's being proposed and why, and then get your feedback on that. And that includes, you know, we are looking obviously for your feedback on everything, but the pedestrian streetscape and feel, the unit count, the bulk, we are proposing 10% affordable, all of those on site. And we'll welcome some discussion on those topics. Hopefully, we get some form of a consensus on any changes that may be necessary for this to be an approvable project while also still remaining a viable project. And once we kind of, our thought is once we, if we can get to a point of consensus and everybody feeling pretty good about what you see. At that point, we will make sure that we have a regulation crafted that fits the development. We're not planning on spending any meaningful time tonight about regulations until we know what's being proposed. But I will tell you that the GBD-SM, that's our current zoning, sometimes I've heard it referred to as the Roan Zone or the Roan Zoning. That doesn't really work for this project. We're not sure that it would work for many projects. We have no issue with the town abandoning that zoning for this site or for anywhere else that we're not involved with. Our preference is for this parcel to be put in the GBDS zone, what you sometimes refer to as the Galt zone or the Galt zoning. But to be fair, that's not going to work exactly for this site either. But we would put... being in the GBDS would make a lot of sense. We would then create a TOD subarea within that zone with some pretty straightforward language and then ask you to put 606 Riverside into that TOD subarea. And you would then retain the ability in the future, if you ever wanted to add any other parcels to that subarea, you could. But for the immediate time, it would be just this parcel. So you wouldn't have to worry about unintended consequences in a broader sort of swath of land. With that, let me just go back to sharing. So the site is, 606. And again, the development that's proposed is limited to 606 Riverside. This is not the Hamlet. We don't own any waterfront parcels in Saugatuck. It's just the one address which sort of avoids the integrated site complications that was prevalent with Hamlet. And there's no waterfront related concerns because there's no waterfront property. The pre-app narrative that we submitted, and I'll take some ownership of this, we referenced 157 market rate units as well as 10% affordable units. And we obviously, after the fact, saw the confusion about how many units that was. We are proposing 175 units. 157 are market rate units. 10% are affordable. That's 18 affordable units with 157 market rate. That gets you your 175 units. As I said to start, Redness and Meat is a consultant in civil engineering on the project. They're not going to present tonight. They're just sort of diving in. But we can assure you that the project will comply with all of the town's engineering standards in that regard. We've already met with the fire chief and fire marshal, the town engineering department. We understand their requirements. We'll design accordingly. We are, in fact, also coordinating with Eversource. I think there's a meeting tomorrow or later this week to ensure the project will comply with any requirements of the utility. We have made, I think, meaningful efforts at community engagement before you've even seen it here at this pre-op. We've spoken with neighboring businesses and property owners, including those along Railroad Place. We've met with the Alliance leadership on numerous occasions, met with various town officials, met with DOT officials, set up a project website. We took this area that you can see in pink or red that's all highlighted. Everyone that's in this area, they were all sent a letter in advance of this was originally going to be a May 18th pre-app. But we sent them a letter detailing what was being proposed, giving them information about the project and obviously contact information for us as well.

And let me just stop the share.

All right. There we go. So I should be off that. So we've provided all of that for our outreach. We've gotten some feedback from our neighbors. In fact, a fair amount of it has been positive. A number of suggestions were raised, some of which has already been incorporated into the plans you'll see tonight. Celan will talk a little bit about those changes that we've made and other further potential changes based on feedback we've received. And obviously, we are going to continue engaging with the community. as we attempt to finalize a plan for submission. I think we've tried very hard to balance that this is a phenomenal TOD site. We've tried to try to balance the unit count and maximizing that site with good planning and context, community preference, and also with project feasibility to arrive at the proposal in front of you. We hope that you'll like it as much as we do. And again, you're going to hear from Celan first, and then we'll let Marissa Tarallo, the traffic engineer, talk. Those are the only two folks that we're going to have you give a formal presentation this evening. Thanks again. Celan?

Thank you very much, Adam. Who's next?

Celan. You're muted, Celan. Are you able to? Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay.

Thank you. I just sent a request to share.

Michel, you want to take care of that for us? Thank you very much. I got it. Thank you.

Okay. Can everyone see my screen? Yeah. Good. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Stephen Butler. I'm a principal at Bindville Architecture. It's lovely to be presenting in Westport again. Our firm is based in South Newark, so just a few exits away down on the 95. We've designed multiple projects in Westport, from single-family homes to restaurants to larger projects like the Sorbetock Center or Gold Project, as it's sometimes called. The Mall on Richmondville Avenue, the recently completed Westport Delamar with a dandelion restaurant inside. We did both those. So we're familiar with the town, the area, and we are vested. We're trying to do something meaningful and additive here. Personally, I was here every weekend on Riverside Avenue for years in the fall as my two boys played Westport PAL football at Pedro Romano. And we have fond memories of grabbing ice cream after at Sunny Days or late lunch at Bar Taco. And part of what we're trying to achieve here, design-wise, is to create some of that wonderful west-forward energy that exists in the northern part of Riverside Ave. On the southern part, between 95 and the train station, with some of that energy, I think we can all agree, dissipates. So with that in mind, I'd like to start with some context. So this is a 95 up here. Here's Metro North below. Here's the train station. I'll zoom in in a second. This is Bridge Street, and Sogatuck Center is right about here. Then that's what I mentioned. There's a great energy in this area here, and if we could get it to this side of the 95, I think we can agree that this might be a success. And that's an important connection into along Riverside. And really, if you're coming off 95 northbound, this is your way to turn towards the water. You can go down the street here, but this is one of the main entries into town. It's one of the gateways. Definitely, if you're coming off a train station, it is a gateway. It is the gateway. This is slightly enlarged. So this isn't like any other site in Westport. Being sandwiched between train tracks and an elevated 95 would suggest that it would be difficult to make a place here. But this is Westport, and places like Tarantino and the Black Duck are as well-known establishments as anywhere in Fairfield County. So there is pacemaking there to tap into. It does have a sense of cool right now, and we just try and understand. So this shows the bounds of the property. We've got Charles Street, Franklin Street, Riverside Ave, and Railroad Place. And it's slightly different from the previous application that you had before you on the land side, that is. I think you call the upland. This property is not part of the application. This corner, by choice, is not part of the application. I'll say a bit more about that when we talk about architecture. And this property here is not part of this application. It's just this side that's bounded in yellow. So this is what you see today in order, arranged clockwise as you come off the 95 and Sargatak driving towards the water. This is the office at 21 Charles Street. That's existing, not part of the project. Hopefully something can be done with that, but as you're driving off, following the analogy of the gateway, this is an important piece, but not part of this project. As you come down, this is the dry cleaners. Come to the corner of Charles and And Riverside, you see the drag kings in the past, sorry, in the background. And importantly, street placemaking and street design 101 requires that you create a street wall. And I think some of your POCD and the concerns you're writing tries to address this. The idea that you line the streets of buildings, you hold a street wall, it energizes the street, and parking on the corner doesn't do that. And that's what that has right now. Then there's the auto body shop. And as you come around the corner, this is the coffee shop. And what used to be no post office, the original use of this building was a post office in Westport, I'm sure most of you know. So we're keeping that. Again, I'll speak to that in the design narrative of why we think that's important, but this is not part of the the project that we're showing you today. Not part of the project as a renewable, but very much as a powerful project as an infrastructure, part of the infrastructure, the urban infrastructure that adds value to the place and to the street and thereby by extension, hopefully our design. And then as you turn on to railroad, As you turn to Royal Place, you know that there's existing retail spaces and you turn to Franklin and there's a few buildings and importantly here, this site was part of the previous application, but it's not part of this application. So this is a view from the corner of Riverside Ave and Royal Place. There are a few central design considerations when we looked at this project. I should say at this point that as a firm, we've looked at this site a few times over the last few years. So we've had time to think about how we should approach this. All our designs were produced with some underlying ideas, and these are them. We're trying to create a sense of place to add the sense of community that exists in the area. This is a central tenet of our office, and I've said this before, and if I've been in meetings with you before, I've said it before, a sense of place and a sense of community. I'm trying to reference imagery of a New England village and draw from some of those rules and guidelines, those design guidance that exist within that vernacular. I want to create a walkable environment that engages the street, this area in Westport, in Westport is the resident amenity. And what I mean by that is we do a lot of these types of buildings and in some areas you have really large amenities because you have to have a reason for people to come. There is no dare there. In this part of Westport, Westport is the dare. Westport is the amenity. So the idea that you can encourage people to walk outside to local bars, to restaurants, to shopping, and of course the train station. that's the amenity, and that's what we want to draw to. And I think it's a symbiotic relationship, the idea that Westport and its downtown provides a vibrancy that people seek, and then people being in this area where density belongs at the train station adds to the value of the place, and they go to the restaurants, they go to the bars and frequent those spaces and make it their own. We believe that our product allows for high retention of tenants. We try not to design apartments for transient living. We try to design places that people create communities in. We'll talk about this more another time, but the idea that you have book clubs and so on, parts of the building that resonate with people, and they don't want to leave. They re-up their lease every year. So it's really important to what we do, but that's a separate idea, and that's way down the line. But it goes more to the idea that people feel like this is their home. So it's really early days here in terms of design, and we'll go more into this on the official review side. But we wanted to keep this old post office building on the corner. In our experience, there's a sense of place and maybe nostalgia that comes from having an identifier building in a prominent place. In this case, the corner of Railroad and Riverside. We think this building adds to the start of this new streetscape and adds value. And I think this rendering shows that. We intentionally scaled the building down to three and a half stories at Riverside. So you see one, two, three, and this is a fourth story here built into the roof. This This roof line is a real roof line, and what I mean by that is sometimes when we do a fourth story, we've done before, sorry, a roof story, a story within a roof, the roof is applied. That's not the case here. It's a true sloping pitch. That means those units would be compromised. They will be smaller, but we thought that was necessary to create an authentic roof line and create a streetscape that's three and a half stories. These four ground buildings, both old and new, this being the new and this being the existing, not old, existing, also serve to control the sight lines. So the building rises to its sixth floor back here on the inside corner of the site only. And I'll show you that in plan. And what's important here is that we've chosen a view here that we were out there photographing this space. That's probably not a true view because you'd be too far back almost at the water to get this exact image, but we want to show you all the architecture. A long way of saying that these buildings control the sight lines to the larger part of the rear mass of the building. So if you're standing here, you would not see this building. If you're standing here, you would not see this. The architecture consists of simple New England forms and detailing. Again, it's early days, but this vernacular allows for a natural and organic modulation of the facade. One of our design tenants also has designed at odd numbers, and you see the windows here in odd numbers, and it scales down the facade. It's smaller, but it doesn't feel forced because that's New England architecture and it's natural, and so a collection of these makes a composition. There's an idea of a base, middle, and cap. There's heavy trim at the first floor. Storefronts, dormers, shutters, cupolas, cupboard siding, shingle siding, all architectural building blocks that we'll use to hopefully create some really good architecture here. But again, it's early days. We're showing you this, and we will get into the detailing. And in this type of architecture, the detailing matters. That's when the building looks authentic or it doesn't. We have experience in executing this type of building, and we'll pay attention to the detail and hopefully get it right. So, this image. is the same view as the previous one, except that we have had, Adam can speak to this more or Matt, we've had I think about four or five meetings with stakeholders. I have, Adam and Matt probably have had more. But one of the comments we got back was that maybe this reapportion that we were initially trying to downplay, because again, we thought the site plans would limit the view to it. Maybe that reapportion of the building was more articulated. So what you're seeing in this view There's an effort at that. He's adding a gamble form and articulating this reapportion with the architectural language that exists in the front. But we're open to your opinion on this. We're open to our particular review's opinion on this. So we'll discuss this with them tomorrow. So this is the corner of Riverside and Charles. This is Charles and Riverside. He has 21 Charles in the distance. salient points on this portion of the design was that we wanted a building to hold a corner, the gravitas to hold a corner, so we went with this form here. It's got a recessed sort of penthouse-looking element at the top, heavy trim at the bottom, and this is the one space that we've anticipated as potential for retail, and you'll see that in the plans. So this could be a retail space. And then a really important element for us, it's really tied to the street in Charles here, but we will have a sidewalk. I'll show you the dimensions on that. And something that we've done with Spinnaker buildings also is create front door stoops to the residential units. So these are regular apartment buildings that have a corridor behind, but they also have stoops at the front. And they're very popular. But for us, architecturally, what it does, it makes the building feel more permeable. It's... rooted in the type of architecture that you see townhouses in urban areas that people live in and they walk straight out into the street and people can do that here. So it gives it a residential feel on the street, engages the street, and adds the idea of vibrancy that I said before that we're looking for. What's really important here is that you can see in this view, you do not see the parking garage. The parking garage, two levels of it are behind this one level of first floor so two levels of parking behind this one level of first floor i'll show you this again in plan but on charles street you're about elevation nine here and you get up to on riverside you get up to about 15 or 16 at this garage entry so we use the natural grading here to enter the garage at two levels so there's two levels of garage behind this one level and here again you see the the uh the goal to set back the upper floors to control the uh to control the perception of height. This is carbon urban planning form-based architecture. A setback at the upper floors is part of most zoning codes because it does control massing fire sightlines. You would have to be on the 95 to see most of what's happening up here. And then the final point on this is that the building height, just for perspective, the highest building height, the highest point of our building, the highest point at the rear corner, is about even with the top of the penthouse of that existing office building at Charles. So I'll go through the plans. Please stop me at any time if I'm going too fast or it needs further explanation. But here's the corner now of I'll zoom in. Here's the corner of Riverside and Charles. Here's your entrance at that low elevation of nine. So you come in and you circulate on the parking and there's 126 spaces here and 15 tandem spaces here. 126 legal, when I say legal, I mean by your zoning regulations allowed to count, 126 spaces and 15 tandem. And just by comparison, We're at grade. The previous application had basement parking that was below grade, so we're at the grade of child at this level. Michael, you want to handle this? Somebody asked me. Please stop me, though, if you need to. And then there's no stackers or anything that existed in the previous plan. It's just South Park, and you go around, and it's, again, all engraved with Charles at this level. Now I'm at what we're calling the first floor. But again, you can imagine two concrete plates behind the high first floor. That's what this is. So you come around now to your higher point, and we're about 15 here. And you get into the second plate of parking in 127 spaces and then 15 tandem spaces here. This is the back of Tarantino is right here. And we're suggesting, so let me, sorry, let me just go through this first. There's a manatee space here and these manatee spaces will have our lobby, leasing, package mail, storage, stuff like that. And probably what we anticipate now, again, it's early days, but a nice lounge. What we do with these amenity spaces is we try to give them life on the glazing side so that when you're walking by, it does look like an activated space. And there's a few examples of that that we've done with Spinnaker just locally. We can look at that if you'd like in next meetings. But the idea that the amenity at the first floor looks like a storefront and it's activity behind. So it's always active. Then a potential retail space in the corner. Here's those units that I said that have direct entry to the outside, even though they have a corridor behind. I should mention that we're suggesting that there's a transformers back here, and then there's a loading space here for smaller vehicles to get in, to be clear, smaller vehicles. But we will have two time loading spaces on the street. The sidewalk is... This was an important note for people when we were showing stakeholders our plans. The sidewalk is slightly wider and will now be 12, just 12 foot 8 inches, I'm showing here, so like 12 to 13 foot. So it's a generous sidewalk and it's enough sidewalk space to create the sense of place, at least for pedestrians, that we're trying to create. Something else here, move up. I'll just say this about mechanical trash and elevator cores and stair cores. We do a lot of this. We do a lot of this with Spinnaker. They have made an art of delivering this product. We've learned through mistakes over the years, and we've learned what people want over the years. So we know how to do the guts, but if we want to get into it, we can get into it, but the guts are there. um now we rise above so if you can imagine there's two plates of parking concrete cap but now you have a residential framing above that that rises of five stories in portions of it and what i mean by that is this is the second floor plan so you have uh essentially a donut with an amenity space for the internal courtyard for residents only and again we curate that and we'll make that special for the residents And you can show examples of that if you'd like. This is the third and fourth floor plan. It's the same diagram. So this is the third floor. I said that the view from Riverside is three and a half stories. This is the third floor. If you're looking at here, the third floor is a full floor. Now you get to the fourth floor. And this is what I've This is the fourth floor, right? Oh, sorry, I'm looking at the fourth floor. I should have, sorry. Next time I'll have the fourth floor for you because it shows how the dorm was cut into these rooms and compromised the rooms, but we still made them work, but the fourth dorm was actually cut into these. But you can see a hint of each year of how these dorms and this roofline cuts into that floor below. And now you're at the the floor and this this entire portion of facade gives way uh of the building gives way there's 56 foot here from this point uh from this rooftop humanity that we're contemplating about 33 feet and now this This is a setback, not from the street, but from the building itself. So there's another 10 or so feet to the property line, but the building here at the first floor sets back five feet from its outermost point, which are those townhouse-looking forms on the rendering. I'll make this note. We had this three-bedroom. We had this building all the way to the edge here. And part of the response, and you'll see on the floor below, was to cut this building back at the highest levels. So if I go to that upper level where that dotted line is, we had a unit here, but one of the strong comments that we had from our stakeholder meetings was to remove that massing from Charles Street, so we did. So this is the highest floor. This is essentially the sixth floor. Again, five residential levels of the one, but you can see now that level is 35 feet essentially away from the front of the building there, 31 there. 56 foot away from the corner. So all the effort of understanding where the sight lines are and making sure that the highest part of the building is obscured from the front views if you're all along Charles and Riverside and the way we're placed. But this is the resultant L-shape. And the concept we're showing here, and we're still trying to figure this out, is that maybe there'll be a product for some people who want to loft from the units below. So we think without compromising any of the architectural approaches I just explained, we can actually provide lofts, not new units, but lofts to the units below in this area. That's what those green elements are. So those are the plans. I can come back to them. But I wanted to just quickly just go over some precedent images. And these are not precedent images from our portfolio. but architectural ideas that we will explore and define as we keep speaking with you in the partnerships. We want to hear your feedback. But just for example, in Darien, we're showing the concept that we understand the assemblage of New England forms, and we understand that the ideas of a base, middle, and cap, and how to make that compelling and vibrant at the first floor. This is a project in the Colton District in Darien. Again, just to exemplify the idea of the detailing of architecture, and I'll go into the small architectural review tomorrow, but the detailing of architecture is pivotal to making this thing look authentic and convincing. This is the Delamar in Mystic, and I think we included that because of the coastal feel. This is a project in New Canaan. It's a small project, but shows that approach to urban planning, that even though this is downtown, just a forest street, that stoops add value to making this feel like it's, the street is energized. So it's not an impermeable blank wall with windows and that for residents behind, it's a place that they can open their, essentially their back door and leave and go into town. This is Darien, this is idea of storefront meeting sidewalk and spaces that we can create. I'll leave it at that. There's a few more images. This is a recent project that we did in Norwalk with Spinnaker. Oh, and I think this is more the scale right here. This is a stoop with sort of Tano's element that we did with Spinnaker in New Haven. The only purpose of the slide is to say that, hey, we've done this before, and I think we can get it right here. So quickly through these, I saw in some of the posts, I guess people were wondering why we did this. And the reason we produced these next few slides is to say that even though we do a pretty picture that is slightly ephemeral and people might put down as eyewash, even in our first takes of design, we're grounded in a very strong design idea that we believe in, that the developer believes in. And more often than not, it results in a building that looks like what we presented the first time. And this is a building in Newark where the images were produced similar to the ones you saw in the same hand. And this is what we built. And this is in East Newark. This is in Fairfield, same concept. Very different architecture on this one, but the only point being that this is a rendering and this is what we built. And this is it. So, you know, we think we're excited about the project. We think it could add value. We think we could add value as a team. We hope to work with you guys to do something special here.

Thank you. Marissa, you want to talk about traffic unless there's questions immediately?

I see Craig has her hand up. Craig, are you... No, you're just trying to block the sun? Yeah. Very good.

Okay, Adam, continue. All right, sure. Marissa, you're up, ceiling. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much. And Michelle, would you allow me to share my screen as well? Yes, of course. Thank you so much. Let's see if it lets me go. Are you seeing the full size slides?

Yes.

Perfect. Okay. So thank you so much for having me. I haven't had the privilege to speak before you. So just quickly, I'm Marissa Tarallo. I'm a senior vice president at AKRF. I run our traffic department for the Connecticut region. And specifically, I've spent about the last 15 years doing municipal on-calls for peer reviews and I've actually peer reviewed most of my team here tonight, and I peer review on call for Norwalk, for Fairfield. So I tried to do this in the lens of what I want to see when I'm on the municipal side of this, and also that we really dug into the traffic in that capacity. So first is our study area. And I'm going to go over this briefly in the interest of your time tonight, but please feel free to ask me questions. I'm always happy to talk about traffic, as sad as that is, but I am. So really briefly, study area is 11 intersections. So the start of building our study area as we reviewed the entire neighborhood. We reviewed previous traffic analysis. We reviewed our traffic trip generation that we're expecting to make with our development and how that traffic is going to exit our area. And then off of that, we generate a study area of likely intersections that will have the most traffic going through them and could be impacted by our projects. And that's represented by the 11 intersections here. Once we developed this map, we worked with Michelle and the town's planning and zoning department to make sure that we had captured what would be expected for this. We also make sure when we review this that it complies with the Office of State Traffic Administration, which is a branch of Connecticut DOT and all of their requirements. So that's what this study area represents as a starting point for evaluating the possible impacts associated with this project. existing traffic data. So now that we have these 11 intersections, what are we going to count? A typical traffic analysis is going to count one-day turning movement counts, which is at each intersection in your study area, the lefts, the throughs, and the rights. For the peak periods that we identify, in this case, it's weekday AM, weekday PM, and Saturday midday. And they're going to do that on one typical day. And then they're going to put one tube on the ground that you drive over frequently around town, probably. And it's going to collect 24-7 traffic volumes of what drives over that for seven days. And we're going to use that to make sure that we collected turning movements on a typical day. We took this a much larger step forward, not just for the size of this development, but any traffic study that I've conducted. There's a lot of variability that can happen around 95, around Westport, around many parts of Connecticut. So we went ahead and collected three days of turning movement counts. So those detailed left through rights at each intersection, we collected Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in March. And then you can see on the graph at the bottom, we selected the highest day that we collected as our analysis day for a conservative analysis. We then also compared that we had put two tubes down adjacent to our traffic to our site and had put them down for nine days and made sure that the volumes that we had collected on these turning movement days are aligned with the ATRs. We also monitored to make sure there were no incidents on 95 or in the area on the days we counted schools were in session. In addition, good weather. So we were able to get three straight days in March, which was great. We actually moved our Saturday counts to May 2nd because of a demonstration that was happening in town on the Saturday that we wanted to collect, and then two poor weather days. So we moved it to make sure that we were capturing that good weather, no traffic incident day. I want to talk briefly on the no-build condition because I know it's confusing and it's also a key point of evaluating traffic for a project. So yes, there is an existing condition and there are existing problems. What we need to look at is the no-build condition, that future without our project, and make sure that our addition to that future does not create a traffic problem. So that's that no-build condition. And what we're saying is that our project is projected to be completed in 2030. So we have 2026 counts and we need to get to 2030. We have applied a base background growth rate, which is consistent with Connecticut DOT's policies and procedures. And that's a half a percent per year. to those four years to get to 2030 base traffic volumes. However, we then also look at any project that's been approved that is going to be constructed before 2030. And if it has trips that are higher than that 0.5% growth, then we add those trips exactly as they've been analyzed and assumed to be coming to that road. So in this case, we added the discrete trips associated with that Hiawatha Lane residential development. to that no-build, those background growth traffic volumes. And that is the future without our project volumes that we analyzed as our no-build condition. And then our charge is to make sure that when we add our trips associated with the project, that we are not creating new traffic problems that would not exist without our project. So the proposed application, the proposed application is 175 dwelling units and a small 3000 restaurant component using ITE, which is the Institute of Traffic Engineers Trip Generation Manual, which is the national standard for developing trip generation. We've come up with these volumes that you see here, the calculated trips line. And then we take a transit-oriented credit because of the proximity to the train station. And this is allocated to us by Condot's standards, Connecticut DOT. And that's a 20% TOD credit. To be clear, no credit is assigned to what's in ITE that would also have allowed a transit credit and no shared or sharing between the restaurant, travel to the restaurant and travel to the residential is assumed. So it's just the TOD credit that's applied to this. And that makes our net new trips 57 in the a.m., 88 in the p.m. and 129 on the Saturday. for comparison purposes, just for what could happen on this site from a trip generation perspective, and you have not had the luxury of memorizing ITE like I have. The multifamily housing, the two on the top, the code 221, the multifamily housing and the 930 fast casual restaurant, which is how we've chosen to define the restaurant. On the right, you'll see the total trips that it would generate per 1000 square feet. And we did this as a direct comparison below is kind of anything we envisioned might be reasonable for the site or might be applicable because there is a misconception. Sometimes that residential is a large traffic generator. Um, it. is not, particularly in a TOD district. Office buildings still will generate a lot more trips, very predictably, right at the start of a workday and right at the end of a workday, which you can see from the generation. The medical office is also very high. Hotel is comparable, but definitely higher still than the multifamily housing. And then all of the accessory uses you can see are very, very similar or notably higher than the fast casual restaurant that's being proposed for the site. As far as comparison to there's no new structure built and the existing structure is just released as a common use. So that would be first was envisioned as cafe dining or cafe small grocer. Consistently, you can see here the trips that the current proposed application would generate is 80% less than just re-inhabiting this building with one of those two uses. So it has a notably lower trip generation. The TOD credit that I spoke about before that 20% is applied to all of these across the board. So we're not comparing ours with a 20% credit versus re-inhabiting it without that 20% credit. Everything is applicable. So the only difference would be if I took that credit out, everything that I'm showing you would be 20% higher, but it would be everything. So all of these uses are comparatively lower than the proposed project. Finally, just again, another comparison point, the proposed project versus the previously proposed Hamlet development. Again, consistently approximately 80% less than the trips generated with that project. So the findings, and again, we're working on finalizing our traffic study as this is a pre-application, but we do already have findings to our traffic analysis that I would like to share with you where we're at right now. All intersections of the 11 that we've shown you that we've analyzed operate at a level of service C or better. That's less than 35 seconds of delay for the intersection on average if it's signalized and less than that if it's unsignalized. So less than half a minute of delay. For all peak hours we analyze, so that's the weekday AM, PM, and Saturday, with the exception of the four intersections you're seeing here, Saugatuck Avenue and the 95 ramp southbound, Saugatuck Avenue and Charles Street with the commuter lot, Saugatuck Avenue and the 95 ramps, and Riverside Avenue at Bridge Street. Riverside Avenue at Bridge Street, the first three have levels of service below C in all the peak hours existing through to our project. The fourth one, Riverside and Bridge Street, operates at less than level of service C only in the Saturday midday. quickly stepping through these for Saugatuck Avenue and the 95 south on ramps. Yes, it does currently operate at less than level of service C. However, we are adding no new trips to the one movement that does operate at less than level of service C. So the level of service does not change with the proposed project, nor does the delay or anything because there is no traffic being added to the eastbound left, which is away from our project site. For Saugatuck Avenue at the commuter lot, there is a maximum of 3.2 seconds increase in delay for the eastbound movement, which is in the weekday Saturday peak hour and is shown in the table at the bottom. As you can see, it is still a low level of service D, and this is for exiting the commuter lot. There would be a maximum of three additional seconds of delay, still maintaining the same level of service grade. Saugatuck Avenue at the 95 northbound ramps and Park Street, maximum of 6.6 seconds increase in delay. And that's for the weekday PM peak hour, which is shown in the table. I'm also gonna show you the weekday AM in a second, because this is the more critical of the intersections we had to evaluate. And this is just for the shared eastbound through right lane. So still notably less than 10 seconds in delay, no change in level of service grade, But we do recognize that that is a level of service F today and in the no build condition. And finally, Riverside Avenue at Bridge Street in the Saturday midday only. It's a maximum of a half a second increase in delay for the shared westbound left through lane 38.5 to 39 seconds still level of service D. So in total, the findings, you'll see that all of the maximum delays are well less than 10 second increase in delays. None of these changes in delay actually change the level of service grade. So the level of service grade is maintained for the intersections and the movements from the no build to the build condition. Being the traffic engineer that I am and wanting so badly to look at these traffic signals and Matt and Adam giving me the grace to do so, we did develop some potential improvements to the intersection at Saugatuck Avenue and the northbound ramps because it had, you saw the bottom table before with the level of service F and you can see that Even though the increases in delays are less in the AM, there's a lot of problem movements in the AM. As I mentioned, this project does not change the level of service or degrade this intersection more than six seconds. But the question still became, could it be better? We wanted to evaluate that for you. We did. This intersection can, with just very minor signal retiming, allow for greater time exiting 95 and an overall shorter cycle length. So that's how long it takes to get through every movement and how long you have to wait for that. And what that will do is it'll prevent queues from extending as far back as they do today. And you can really see that in the improvements I'm showing here. Move my mouse over. Where, you know, take the numbers for... For what they're worth, I'm not trying to claim that I can make this 90% better. But what I am showing you is that we are no longer over capacity, which I know is a key concern for many in this 1.0 category. And when we get back down to this 0.9, this 0.88, we're not going to have cycle failures. You're not going to have a green light and be sitting there in a queue and driving toward the light and then having it turn red before you've had your chance to go through it. And that's really what creates driver frustration. It creates a lot of congestion and problems for everyone. And that's what we are able to resolve with this minor signal retiming. So we wanted to present this to you because while it's a DOT intersection, we would really advocate for the town to be able to implement this now without the project because this is an improvement across the board, whether it's with a project or without. And finally, briefly, parking needs assessment. So just to point out, all of our parking is located on site, it's self-parked, and it has two separate access levels for maximum efficiency. The current plan includes 283 parking spaces, which exceeds both the parking ratio proven sufficient at comparable local transit-oriented developments and the parking maximum provided under the new law, the Connecticut HB 8002. So we're showing that first here, our residential is 231 parking spaces as calculated by that new law. And then following Westport's zoning regulations for restaurant space, we have three additional So you can see we actually have an excess of 49 parking spaces, off-street parking spaces, plus the 10 on-street parking spaces that are being provided along the Charles Street frontage. We then also did an ITE parking generation analysis as a parking needs assessment. And you can see that at the bottom using those same trip generation land use codes, you'd have 229 and we'd have an excess of 54. And I will also point out that that bottom parking analysis in ITE does not take any transit credit, nor does the housing law. That law is there whether you are building a TOD or you're not. And so, you know, being close to the train station does impact parking needs. So we really feel strongly that this has a very sufficient amount of off-street parking available.

And I believe that's all I have for you tonight.

So again, happy to answer questions later, but just wanted to provide that context.

Thanks, Marissa. So I think that kind of ends our presentations for tonight, and hopefully you guys want to have a little discussion with us.

Oh, yeah. That's why we're here. All right, thank you. First of all, thank you very much. Very comprehensive. This is our second go-around, so some of this stuff... is easy to understand. But again, there's a lot of new things here. We'll try and tease through them all and see how this impacts the site and the town, etc. So I appreciate that very much. Before I dive into the questions, Michelle, do you have anything that you want to add at this point?

Thank you, Michelle. I just wanted to reference my cover letter that I provided dated May 27th, where I just outlined the proposal and a little bit of the background from previous applications and the history of the regulation, but nothing really specific. I just wanted to make reference to that, and hopefully everybody had a chance to look through it.

We did, and once again, we appreciate a seven-page report because it's packed full of stuff. So thank you. All right, commissioners, this is your chance. Remember why this... why this applicant is here. They're here to discuss in a forum that allows back and forth. So you're welcome to make suggestions, ask questions, talk about what you'd like to see here, how that compares to what they've shown us. And by all means, if you like something, tell them. And if you don't, tell them anyway. So why don't we go around the room? Is anybody brave enough to put their hand up? There we go, Bri, thank you.

Thank you for the presentation. A lot of information in there. And I think I'm going to probably just start with the big one, and that's the affordable housing component. And the question being 10% is lower than what we require. So if you could explain the reasoning there and also some more detail about the affordability, what level of affordability you're proposing.

Matt, do you want to start or you can go if you want?

Yeah, so we understand that a lot of the community and the regulations require slightly greater levels of affordability. We are used to 10%. That's kind of the inclusionary requirement that we typically see and kind of programmed it around that. It will be the calculation of those affordable units will be in accordance with your current regulations that meet 8-30G requirements.

Yeah, and they'll be, and these would be all on-site, which is a more expensive proposition than putting them off-site.

Oh, so it's just because you're used to working with 10% and our 20% requirement. How would you propose to handle that? Because we require 20% and you're coming in at 10%.

So affordable housing has a true cost and it's a tax on the small subset of folks that actually provide housing. And in order to pay for that, you need to make money on the other units. So to be able to pay for those affordable units, you need to build more market rate units. And this is the balance we found that made it feasible for us. Happy to dive in, talk about what's realistic or if it's a hard line, we'll have to kind of adjust our market rate units to pay for enough affordable.

Okay. And as I heard you, the affordability level would be basically the maximum. So they would be the 80%, I believe it is.

Correct. 80% of rents and incomes, you know, affordable and equal to 80% of state median income as adjusted by household size.

Okay. I guess that's the answer that we're going to get out of you about the affordable units. So you would be looking for a text amendment that gives you an exemption. essentially?

Yes, or just a text. We're going to be, you have to have a text amendment for a lot of what's happening here. So it would just, the requirement in the text would be 10%. I mean, I think there's, We're open to hearing what the commission says. And if we're hearing loud and clear that 10% is not the number, we'll look at it. It gets hard if we're hearing 10% is not the number. It should be higher. And we want substantially lower units. Right? And then you're getting it both. We get hit both ways. And that's more problematic. 20%. At 20%, that's hard. I'm not sure that would work. But, again, we want to hear what you have to say, and I guess we're not committing to no or we're not committing to yes, but we would like to see what the consensus is from the commission, for sure.

And I'll add that there are other sources of funds out there, state, primarily some new programs that actually help at different income levels provide additional affordable housing. We're familiar with those. We've implemented those in the past and more than open to looking at those for this project.

Yeah, I mean, for me, at least, I think it would be very difficult to approve something that would be substantially lower than what we required for every other developer in town, without some something that there's a real benefit, we understand that, you know, units and affordable units, then, you know, there is math involved in all of this and profit. But so yeah, I mean, that that would definitely be a sticking point for me, the 10%. And then I guess you would also You mentioned that you would need some other changes to the GBDS code that we currently have for the GALT development. Specifically, which ones, I guess maybe a high level, what you would be looking for that would be different? Because you had initially said you were fine with that set of code, but now it sounds like there's significant changes.

Yeah, I don't think this development doesn't neatly fit into the GBDSM, the current zone, or the GBDS. The GBDSM, the Roman one, I would say is fairly convoluted and kind of designed for multiple parcels and sort of transfers of development rights and It doesn't work super well for us, the GBDS. We don't fit neatly into that, and that's why we're trying to figure out what it is that you like about the project or don't, and then we'll make sure that it fits within whatever reg is crafted. But I couldn't tell you specifically where we match up or where we don't to the GBDS. But truthfully, when we looked at this to start, we started off by saying, okay, it's a TOD site that they're interested in purchasing. What would you build here? And it was, you know, you maximize the density. And how many spaces can we fit? 280 spaces. Okay. What does that translate to in units? That's 225 to 240 units. And traffic engineers, will that work? Yeah, that'll probably work, 225 to 240 units, five stories of residential, no setbacks above the parking. Then we go to sealant and say, you know, and Matt, will this actually look good? Is this what we want? And then between sealant and Matt, they scale it back down to the, you know, knocked off 60 or 70 units to the current proposal, which again, we're open to discussing how we refine further. But that was our process, not what does the zoning say? Because we know it's not going to work.

Okay. Yeah, no, and that's fine. And I mean, as far as like what I did like about the project, I like that you have sufficient, what seems to be sufficient parking for the number of units that are proposed. I think that that That is definitely a plus. And that the traffic numbers that have been presented, that those are also not going to necessarily make traffic significantly worse, especially if there are some of the improvements that will be implemented. Yeah, and so that's what I have right now. Paul, I'll let you go on to someone else.

Thank you, Brie. I do appreciate it. Mike Calise, I see you have your hand up.

Yes, thank you. Like Bree, the first thing that hit me was this 10% affordable. And I'm sure the applicant is aware that our state mandate is that 10% of our housing stuff is affordable. So their contribution at 10% is net zero. It gives nothing to us as a community in terms of providing affordable and beating away at the affordable component requirement that we have in front of us. So as I said, like Brie, it really throws me off culture.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Before you guys jump in for your answer, Mike, I think we lost your camera there. Adam?

No, not to sort of parse words, but I don't disagree with you that us adding 10 percent on the development would not change the overall percentage across town of affordable housing. I think we all know that in no universe are you ever going to hit 10 percent across town. And it would certainly give you points towards a future moratorium. So but you're right. It's not it's not knocking. It's not it's not increasing the percentage townwide.

Well, it just doesn't work. I mean, the reason that communities allow, and this is a massive development, and the reason that communities of our size allow these kinds of developments is to look for the assistance that they potentially provide in terms of cutting down on that affordable requirement or matching the affordable requirement. The other thing that, and without further study, I'm sure I will have many things to say about this, but the other thing that we had a problem with in our last application was the concept of offsite development. using community space. And this does the same thing in a very small way, but as far as I'm concerned, not an acceptable way in their claim that they will use part of their parking count as parking spaces, which already exist. The places don't exist as being laid out, but the space exists and wanting to use that as part of your zoning application and your parking component is a no-no. is not acceptable.

I'm not, maybe we're misunderstanding each other, but I don't believe that we're using any public parking to count for us, or maybe I'm missing your point. But our parking is all on-site, all private property.

That's not what was presented by Miguel, who just gave the report. But nonetheless.

Hang on a second. Hang on a second, Michael. Marissa did mention the parking, that she counted the 10 parking spots on Charles.

I think I think she just pointed out it wasn't in our account. It won't be in our zoning charts, but she did identify that there'd be 10 new net new parking spaces on the public right away based on our design, because we mainly because this project eliminates a number of curb cuts or basically a continuous curb cut down some of these streets that will now allow because cars don't have to go in and out of sight in multiple locations, allow additional public entry parking.

not we wouldn't control it that would be that would be town controlled parking we didn't evaluate what is needed for the site including those 10. i did just want to note to you that 10 additional parking spaces would exist because of the curb cuts to matt's point i apologize it's okay so to michael's point you're not actually counting those into your uh 200 and something 83 no 283 is self-contained completely and we're creating for the public

Thank you. Mr. Calise, back to you.

Okay, fine. This is certainly a massive development in an area that's already highly congested. Just this past week, only a couple of days ago, it took me from the VFW in Westport to get to the other side of the river. which is only a few thousands feet, it took me 17 minutes. We just don't have the infrastructure. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Calise. Craig, I see your hand is up.

My hand is up. I wanna give credit to the developers and the designers from what I can see from the drawings and the renderings, creating, first of all, form-based architecture and a sense of place, a community, synchronicity with the idea of a New England village and a walkable environment. I am concerned as Bree stated and Michael stated that first of all, it is critical at this stage of planning that we talk about increasing the affordable housing to at minimum 20%, which is in line with all our other districts in town. I don't see how this project will be tenable to the town without doing that. The second issue is the mass and scaling of this. The number of units you're proposing, we're going back into the Rhone development, is we're talking about massive units and usage, and it will only have an impact of three or 10 seconds on a traffic light in an already over-congested downtown. And this is what, through most of Saugatuck and a good portion of the town, in opposition to their development. So my question is, is there a way to get from the 10 to 20% affordable and down to probably 120 to 150 units that would be sustainable and manageable from a traffic perspective, Seconds are big down there. If you sit down in Saugatuck, seconds are big. And can you show us, you know, why, if that's not tenable, why that is not tenable or how you could make it tenable for us? Or to find a middle ground.

Very good. Craig, anything else you want to ask and get their feedback on?

Yes, that right now is, as we're starting this project, those are my issues.

Yep. Okay. Very good. You guys want to address that or shall I go to Ms. Zuccaro?

I don't know. Matt, do we want to add anything now or get the finish here? Some more comments and then talk about affordability and unit count.

Yeah, sure. I'm sure we can circle back to that.

All right. Very good. Patricia?

Okay. I just want to say thank you to the applicant for putting this well thought out pre-application together. I appreciate that. I would say I guess outside of the affordability component, the things that I think where important is the things that I would like to see, I guess, is I would like to see a little bit more setbacks. I think the building lines are straight up on the property line, which I think if we're going six feet, and I know you're tailoring it back on the top, it's still going to look like a little bit of an urban environment instead of the town of Westport. I have concerns about the height and how high we're gonna go. I definitely don't want to be as high as the slope building that's existing right now. I also think, unlike maybe some of my other colleagues, or commissioners that I'd like to see a little bit more uniqueness in the design. Because Saugatuck is not like the rest of Westport. And to me, Saugatuck is something that's unique and a gem. And so I don't really want to see downtown Westport in the Saugatuck area. Like, I want to see something unique and fun and cool. And that's what I would like to see there. I also love... And again, I don't know how anybody else feels about it, but I love the fact that there's like a mechanic there because you can drop your car off, head into New York City, come home on the train and your car is fixed. And I don't know any other town that we're near that has that capability. And same with the laundromat. Now, I can't tell you guys what to put in there and whatnot, but to me, those are key features of Saugatuck that are unique about Saugatuck. what it looks like and what it stands for in this community that's different than the rest of the town of Westport and different than neighboring towns that we have. So those are my thoughts. Thank you.

Thank you, Patrice. Matthew or Adam, anything you want to just dive into there?

I don't think so. Matt, you want to add anything?

No, all good points, thank you.

All right, Mr. Kamar.

Hello. Michelle, I have a quick question for you. At the development of Post Road West, how many units is that?

Michelle Prelate, Planning and Planning Director. There are 68 units at 85 Post Road West.

And how many parking spaces are there?

I believe 146.

So what is that math? 146 divided by 68? Yeah. 2.14?

Yep.

And how many, so guys, how many units are you proposing here? 175? Yeah. So that would be 375 parking spaces. And how many parking spaces are you proposing?

No, but 85 times two is 170. And they've got 146 spaces. So it's not over two.

No, it's 85 Coast Road West. There's 68 units. Apologies. Okay. It's okay.

So remind me, how many parking spaces are you proposing? 283. It's above the state maximum.

Well, this other project which was in that direction kind of conformed to this 2.14. So for me, if that works for our town, I'd like to see that work for you. And I think that, so that's one thing that I picked up on. I wasn't sure until Michelle just helped out with that. I don't know how that, you know, fits. But that's something that, you know, if you're looking at bigger projects in our town, that's something that is just about, I think, almost done. Right, Michelle?

Yeah.

Okay. Delivery trucks, as you were going through the presentation, I do have a concern there. That's something that came up. I saw the delivery spots on the road, you know, when you showed where they were in front of the amenity space. But I don't know if, look, I don't know if it's enough or not enough. And then what I'm hearing with my fellow commissioners with the 10%, 20%, if this, you know, you, I understand you're saying 10% pencils for you. But knowing that our town really likes to see 20%, then I don't understand, you know, you want to change the code and spot zone this for you. And I don't understand why you wouldn't try to do it at 20%. If it doesn't pencil, why'd you buy it? Or why'd you like negotiate the right price so it would pencil? And then to me, obviously, you said the sixth floor just seemed to be not, you're still looking into the sixth floor? That's pretty tall. I like the fact that it's set back though. And then it steps back. So you're not really seeing it. On top of you, like a canyon effect. On the other side, on the flip side of like, so those are the issues that I saw potentially with this. On the other side of this, the new development that's in Snorwalk, I think is a similar frontage of three and a half stories. And that doesn't seem to be so bad. And I like that you set it back a little. You created the larger sidewalks. That's nice. So to me, you know, right off the bat, that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about environment. I don't know how far down you have to go for a foundation. I know you're kind of, you're saying on grade is parking, so you're not going down too far. But I believe there were environmental issues there. I don't know if you're going to hit them or not hit them. I don't know how that works, but it's a concern that we'll have to get to down the road. And now there's only, you're adding 175 units, whatever that number winds up being. It seems like right on the corner, you're talking about one spot for something retail. And so we're just bringing a ton of people into this area. And there's not a lot there for them. So now you're forcing them to go get in a car to go somewhere else to get somewhere. So maybe the thought is, should there be more convenience retail something? I don't know. But it seems to me like we'd be, you know, now we're forcing people out. We want to, if it's TOD, you want them to walk and where they, what are they going to get? I don't know. It's just a thought. Um, that's at the surface. I think we do have more work here. Obviously, I'm thankful for you to that you came with pre app, I would love it if as this flushes out more, it was, you know, more dialogue before it goes as a hard application, because I think the more dialogue we get, the less controversial and the less like, you know, it's everybody's trying, I understand you want to be on the same page. And this is a great forum for that. So I thank you for that, and I'll pass the time.

Can I just respond a little bit, and I appreciate those comments. And truthfully, on our end, one of the concerns that we have is we saw the Hamlet. We saw what happened with that and how that went. And between your commission and neighbors, we want to make sure that what's proposed, if approved, doesn't provide grounds for an appeal. And adding the retail and the restaurant components further, I think our traffic engineer, maybe we didn't spell it out clear enough, but showed if we didn't build anything, if you literally took the buildings that were there now and added a retail and restaurant component, add a little grocery, add a cafe, the traffic that they generate is significantly greater than the residential that's proposed. We said, well, if we propose that, that's going to open us up and we could be spinning our wheels for a year. So we kind of got pigeonholed into heavy on the residential, which truthfully, you know, Spinnaker does a lot of projects that are heavy on the residential, although a lot of them have other components. The last project in Norwalk had a significant office and retail component. So that's kind of why it's more residential. The loading, we actually added those loading spaces. You don't require loading for this project with your regs. The parking, and I know, respectfully, I get that some of the projects that Westport has seen so far have had greater parking counts. Spinnaker's in a lot of these projects and they keep really good track of what their parking needs actually are. And they're nowhere near two or over two spaces a unit, particularly at a train station. And the other thing that happens is if, because I work with a lot of different developers, not just Spinnaker, if you're at a train station and you park, and if we did all of this at one-to-one, And that was short. What it means is that people that have more than one cars aren't living here. It just takes you longer to lease up the building because you're only leasing it to people that have a car.

That's our experience. It self-selects. Folks that have multiple cars and we don't have a parking spot, they won't live here. And I kind of reiterate Adam's point that, you know, the parking, we're comfortable kind of based on our market knowledge with the parking proposed. I'm not intimately familiar with the other project reference other than I drive by it. I don't know the unit mix. It might skew larger. So maybe kind of if you compare bedrooms from that job to our job, maybe it's more comparable kind of per bedroom parking count. But we can look into that.

yeah we should probably look into that i mean i know that they i think they have three bedrooms i know that they're bigger than 1200 square feet for a three bedroom you know that's you know jamming it in but um i don't know enough i don't know not like you know i i when you i'm trying to look at comps and i don't have a lot right to the i know what the issues were with the prior application being 120 and change units versus 175 units in a much smaller location. But there are challenges to everything. And I'd like to just try to overcome whatever those challenges are way ahead of time. Actually, the last question I have is what's the thought process on 2030? That seems like it would take that long to build this.

I think it's just our kind of typical standard to kind of assume some time to get it approved, get it designed, get it built. And then I don't think Marissa's calcs factor in until it gets fully leased up and stabilized. So that's, I think, how we get to 2030.

It's also a more conservative traffic analysis. So the further out we assume it gets built, the more projects we have to assume and the more background growth we add. So if I did next year, it would have only been half a percent I had added to the traffic. So I mostly do it for a conservative traffic analysis.

So in a perfect world, a perfect environment, how long would this take to build, you think?

Construction, perfect world, 18 to 22 months, and then another year plus to lease it up, most likely. Okay. I'll pass the baton to Paul.

Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it. It looks like I'm last. So first thing I want to do is compliment the Binefield people in Sheelan. I do like what I see. But I do also have some reservations, and I know several of our commissioners mentioned it. And I'm, you know, by way of comparison, I think it's... uh... night and day with what we were presented with last time and certainly way better than a lot of the structures that have gone up in recent memory but when you drive to see the examples of what you guys have achieved locally. First of all, I absolutely love the building-to-building differentiation, and I think that that works, and I think you've done a good job there. Colors, styles, without it being jarring and looking unconnected. But it does rise up quite precipitously, especially the one in Norwalk. That really climbs straight up from the streetscape. And I'm worried about that same thing here. I know you said three and a half stories on the Riverside Park, but Charles Street still could become a canyon. So I want to really look at that and see how you integrate those stoops, etc., But I do like what you've done there. So way better than what we've been presented with in the past. It is interesting. I absolutely like the new sidewalk configuration. Having that extra five feet, that's a winner. I think the eye will be drawn to the negative space or if they're gardens. I don't know if they'll actually plant in there, but the point is it'll make Charles Street look like something it hasn't looked like in years. Many, many years, if you know what it looks like now. So the front door stoops I really like. The parking garage, I really like that. I like what you've done there. I like the way you've hidden it behind. I like the donut, et cetera. I don't mind the in and out entrances. I think you've thought that through. I don't know how that'll work on Charles, but I'm going to trust your traffic engineers as to how that actually works in real life, making a left, making a right, etc. But it's a lot better than trying to force-fit a street into a new one-way or two-way or anything wild and crazy. So the garage I like. I like the setback on the upper floors, but I wouldn't want to see that as just an excuse to get to six feet. I think that really needs to be rethought as to how that looks. You did mention that you believe it'll be the same visual height as the building next door. And you might think... that that's a positive thing. I look at it as a negative because that building next door should never have been that high. And they did it without our permission. And we regret it to this day and wish it was at least a whole floor lower. That being said, I get why you want to make it look integrated all the way across. I like the lobby. I think that that's well thought out. I like the amenity space. I think those are, you know, looking like you're doing the right thing by way of the tenancy there. So that's important. The 12-foot sidewalks. Quite frankly, I was wishing for more, but maybe I was thinking benches and resting area and a place to stop. You know, I'd like to address some of that foot traffic that you guys are, you've talked about and you've heard from some of the commissioners. I, on the other hand, don't believe that this is a place you want to drop your car off, get your dry cleaning or shop for groceries. When I go down to Saugatuck, it's for the experience of the places that are there. It's a trip. It's a destination. I go to fulfill eating ice cream and sitting on a nice evening. So those are all positive things. I'd like to see possibly more of that integrated into your thinking of what to do with the sidewalks. Maybe allow for some sitting and less parking. Don't know. So that fourth floor amenities, the terrace, things like that, the five-foot setbacks, I like all of that. The The traffic study is very interesting. First of all, this flies in the face wildly with what we were shown the last time around. This is the first time that a level of service has been indicated as C anywhere within a 10 block radius of this area. I'm blown away because I've never been in a queue that's a C down there. So I'm not questioning it, I'm just amazed that it actually ended up that way. I'm hoping that the TOD percentage does not, you know, reduction is not counted in there as some mythical way of coming up with good numbers. Because as we all know, people don't drive through good numbers, they drive through those streets. So you know that you have a contingency of people that live, I'll call it, on the other side of the bridge. They travel through that area daily, several times a day. And I would be challenged to have any one of them say that it's a level C. Certain times of the day, maybe, but certainly, as Mr. Khalees said, not at any given time. The three-bedroom, which you talked about, two parking spaces, you know, I'm trying to figure out how that works. And I'm not questioning your math. I understand that the way that we have to account for cars is flawed. I live in an apartment building, and I try to think of the way it works here. And nobody here is allowed to have more than two spaces. But we don't have three bedrooms here. And so I hope you're right that the three bedrooms don't generate that parking need. And I am aware of what's coming down from the state. And so I understand that. I just don't want to do it wrong. I want to make sure our math is correct. The street parking, Mike Calise already picked up on that. I agree with him there. The loading zone is interesting. I was anticipating you were going to come up with an alleyway in the back there, and you kind of did and kind of didn't. Maybe that's a lost opportunity to actually get something off the street while it's still on your property. in order to do the things that are done with a higher frequency today than they were, let's say, 10 years ago. That is the delivery, the drop-off, the packaging, that kind of stuff. It was interesting that you didn't have that. One of the things that disappeared off of your drawing, but is on Michelle's drawing, Is the alleyway between you and Riverside mid-block? And I'm just wondering if that is or is not still being contemplated. I thought it was a good idea. There's one there now. Wouldn't want to lose it. The... it's just, first of all, thank you for including Hiawatha in on your note build. I think that was smartly done. Otherwise, everybody would have picked up on it. But again, you know, Using the ITE numbers is what you have to do. Your traffic engineers are not allowed to not use them. So I get that. But the people like Mr. Calise, who's traveling through there in his personal vehicle, he's not counting the ITE. He's tapping his steering wheel, wondering why it's taking so long. And so I just want to be careful with fulfilling numbers versus what's going on real life. I do agree that residential is far less intensive in terms of its traffic trip generation. I see it here in my own building. And yes, I agree that the restaurant will generate much more. Not even sure whether or not we really need another restaurant down there, but that's not for me to decide. So all of that is a way of saying that I think you've got a good start, but it definitely does avoid the elephant in the room, which the others have already discussed, and that is the 10%. So, you know, the first thing I'm kind of wondering is, is what does a penciled apartment, a penciled unit look like that meets the 20%? I think, Adam, I think you may have spoke about it briefly. I was just wondering if you could revisit that. To get to 20%, how many units do you need? I mean, what's the number here?

Well, if you're talking 10% at that 80% SMI number, and another 10% at the same 80% SMI number. Obviously, it makes a difference what the affordability level is that we're discussing. But I would say one, I mean, maybe Matt and I can talk about it further, but at the 20%, the problem is there's a lot of state incentives that come at 30%, and they don't come at 20%. And so at 20%, at doing... it may never be cost effective to do 20% instead of 30%. Matt, we can try to run the numbers to see. At 15% at SMI of 80, maybe that's doable with 175 units. But I think We can obviously talk. I think we can also come back and figure out what maybe we can pitch to you that maybe we get that 10 percent was clearly not palatable to enough of you to approve this project if you were voting tonight. You made that clear. So we could certainly talk about it and see if there's something else that I think can work.

Right, yeah, we'll come back and share some scenarios that might work and kind of open our book a little bit. But to Adam's point, kind of the gap between 20% and 30%, you know, maybe not a big enough gap to not look at that alternative. And then just a few other small things. We'll get back to you on a bunch of this stuff, but small things. The alleyway, I think you meant to railroad place, and that is, Celia didn't mention it, but that's maintained. And... You mentioned the height between 21 Charles and ours, the visual height. Celia mentioned that absolute height might be comparable, but the visual height isn't based on our setbacks and just the fact that their average grade is much lower than our project's average grade by probably at least a half a story, if not more. And then I think there's just some confusion and maybe Marissa can step in on kind of IT versus actual counts. IT is really just, Marissa, correct me if I'm wrong, just used for kind of generating the proposed or the potential new trips from the project. It doesn't have any impact on or influence on kind of the counts and the actual traffic out there currently. The IT chip generation only gets layered in to see the impacts on the actual current traffic.

Yeah, and I certainly respect the comments and the frustration when it comes to traffic. We deal with it all the time, right? We're looking at an analysis tool for the basis of what's you know, what can be accounted for on that specific project. So our goal is to do apples to apples, but certainly when I tell you, you experienced 30 seconds of July and you know that you get stuck because someone doesn't understand the left turn or they don't move over slightly or something else happens, I can understand the difference in those frustrations for sure. As Matt pointed out, the ITE is strictly to generate how many trips will happen with the units. ITE is very strong in that number because they survey across the entire country. And we also look at comparable projects and make sure that we're using something. For instance, if I was doing a Chick-fil-A, I would not be just using, you know, fast food with drive-through because we know that Chick-fil-A has its own drive and its own propensity. But residential is very, very well documented in ITE. And as I mentioned, we didn't take ITE's trip transit development credit, which is much larger than 20%. We took Connecticut DOT's applied transit credit, which is 20%. And that's amounting to 15 or 20 vehicles. Once I split those out of the site, that will not notably change the findings of my traffic study. It's just what's allowed for any TOD, particularly something that's this close to the train station.

And that credit is only on the proposed new trips generated from the site. We're not taking existing traffic counts and then reducing it by 20%.

It's all as above bar as I can be. But again, I completely understand. I have to create a no-build and a build condition. And they have to be done using a standard software and a standard methodology. But that's actually a big reason that we looked into these improvements, too. Because I think the big... frustration, a lot of people have in this area from driving through it and knowing similar areas and working in norwalk and greenwich and larchmont New York. Is the traffic lights have not been re timed in a long time and they don't all work together, so when you look at your total trip and you are stuck at every single solitary red light for multiple cycles. it adds up to a very long delay. When we look at each intersection and that level of service C you're saying is, I'm telling you on this one movement, you're going to wait 35 seconds, but then the next movement, you're going to wait 35 and the next movement, and that's what compiles. But I need to look at each individual intersection and see by adding five cars to this movement, have I now made this movement not have a capacity? So we're looking at it on a very micro level. But I am looking for macro level improvements like that signal retiming that I suggested to you that would notably cut down on the queue by 100 feet and the delay would be cut in half potentially with what I'm proposing. And it's a minor retiming. It's just a limitation of the people operating the signals and them knowing the problems and connecting all the dots with the technology.

Paul, one other comment I'll say in response to something you said was about the parking. And I could be a little bit wrong, but mostly I'm right on this, which is that in the Spinnaker jobs that I've been involved with, I don't I can't recall a single job where we provided the minimum parking that the town or municipality required. They said, here's what we we we know that our numbers, we know what we're going to need. And Adam, I know you I know we only have to do one to one or whatever it is, but this is what we want. And it's almost always more, if not always more than what's actually required.

Very good. Yeah, that's important. Absolutely. You know, having it on the books doesn't necessarily translate into what goes on down in the parking garage. I get that. This signalized timing, town to do it, etc. You make it sound simple. Is it? I mean, is that is it really something that can be done now and should be done and hasn't been done?

It's absolutely something that can be done now. The biggest issue is if that was a town signal, I'd say, I'll meet you out on the corner on Monday and we'll work on retiming it. It's a state signal. So you do need the state's buy-in on retiming the traffic light. And it's part of the reason the state tries. We just redid the entire Route 1 corridor in Norwalk for them. And it hadn't been retimed in 30 or 40 years. And it's not that they're trying not to do that. DOT is very involved, but they have lots of traffic signals, more than a town does. So oftentimes things happen. This signal is operating free, which means it's not operating the one I suggested to you. It's not operating with any of the adjacent intersections during peak hours. It's operating entirely on its own. I haven't been in the box to see if there's anything broken that's not detecting a vehicle when it's waiting. So I'm sure there's a lot of other nuances that are going on out there that are contributing to your driver. My models can't do someone texting and driving. So that also inevitably happens. But I want to be clear, I am comparing apples to apples. So I'm saying in a perfect world, if the traffic was this, and then if I add mine in that same perfect world, how much am I causing an increase in delay. The cars that we're putting through these intersections, a lot of these movements are less than 10 cars per movement because residential is the lowest generator. So if we go with anything higher than that, and I respect what we want places and I enjoy the restaurants and the things that are downtown, but they do generate notably more. Residential is the best thing you can do for traffic because it is the lowest generator, which is what we were trying to demonstrate.

Thank you. Appreciate that. You know, your discussion of Chick-fil-A begs the question. So what I think, Marissa, what you just said was there are two restaurateurs and one could generate a lot more than the other. And so it really will come down to what goes in there and how it affects those surrounding areas. Yes.

Sure, if you're the first, like I just did the first Wegmans in Norwalk. I mean, at the size, the 3,000 square feet, that's not going to be enough to wildly change the game. They've already, for instance, fine dining would be a little bit less, and they went conservative and did something that's more fast casual to match it. We do have a couple different ones we can use. But if it's the first of its kind somewhere, you need to be cognizant of that. And that's one of the benefits with Spinnaker is they have all of this data on residential. And people don't notably travel differently from one residential type unit to another. You either need to go to work or you don't need to go to work. There's more hybrid and there's less hybrid, but it's more predictable. And then we've minimized our credits with the TOD to be conservative. We took some because we are very close to a train station. There shouldn't be an incredible amount of driving, but we didn't take what ITE would have allowed me to take with how close I am to that train station.

That's super. It wasn't asked, so I guess I should. If you have a fast casual or anything like that, are they parking in your garage?

Yes, it'll come down to the ultimate use and tenant, but yeah, we'll accommodate that and most likely the Riverside Avenue level of the garage.

So you're anticipating needing to think that through, et cetera. That'll be part of the plan. Correct. Okay. You own the boatyard. I call it a boatyard. It's not really a boatyard. You own the parking lot across the street, and you mentioned that you would use it as staging. And I just want to obviously caution you there, and that's a place that's currently being used. I guess you would shut off all the uses that are there now. And you would basically be crossing Franklin Street with all your construction stuff, correct?

Right. I think we use the term stage, and I envision that just kind of contractor parking, which can be kind of function as is. Maybe you can't have the boat storage there, but contractor parking during the day, and maybe it remains open, you know, kind of as is for the evening users. Right.

Yeah, I just wouldn't want to create a problem while we're trying to fix a problem, obviously. Well, I think, listen, the tone and tenor of this discussion is way different than what we ended up with yesterday. call it a year ago. We need to talk about lighting. We need to talk about landscaping. We need to talk about a lot of issues that have to happen. I'll end with the last one that is near and dear to me, and that's the environmental issues that we all know are there. You know, the previous applicant spent a lot of time promising that they would do it right. And I'm hoping that you guys have not only that same attitude, but also the wherewithal, because until somebody puts a shovel in there, we really don't know what's under there. And that one of the other things that was promised through was that it would be way better than what's there now, which is nothing. and that there was an actual plan with where all that water goes. And so those things are very important to me. I want to make sure that that's a thorough job. Maybe I don't need a 300-page report like I got last time. But still, the environmental needs to be addressed, and obviously early on, because you do that first.

Yeah, so those items have been discussed generally kind of in the introductory meetings with the engineering department, and we're aware of it. Sites fairly highly documented in terms of environmental, despite the transatlantic sun setting, we do expect to address those in accordance to all kind of deep and EPA regulations. And pretty much based on kind of the geographies that we work in, kind of in kind of transit districts and former industrial areas, Almost every site we touch has some kind of environmental issue that we address.

You've dug underneath the cleaners before?

We've dealt with dry cleaners, yes.

Okay, good. And I think, again, we're happy to stay and answer whatever questions you have. I think I would... request if you're acceptable to it that you know on on some of the i'll say harder questions that need a little time on our end that we give it a little bit of thought and and through through your staff um maybe ask to be put on it again in the in the near future um with with with some update for you and and some some responses to things that maybe you weren't satisfied with our answers tonight

I think that would be excellent. And I'm guessing that between now and then, we might even get some public feedback, in which case you'll have plenty to answer. Commissioners, anybody else have anything that they've rethought about, want to know about, or haven't heard about? Craig?

Yes, I heard mention of adjusting, researching the adjusting of 30% affordable housing because the increment between 10 and 30% is disadvantageous to a developer and to the economics, and that might be helpful. in reducing the number of units. And I just want to make sure that I understood that correctly. And if that's something that you can be looking into.

Yes, we can. Yeah, like I said, we'll come back with all the different scenarios with different possible finance and structures and kind of rationale for some of our comments tonight.

Thank you.

All right. Very good. Any other commissioners? Anybody? Anybody? Last call, Buehler. All right, Adam, I'll give it back to you. If you guys want to give us your parting thoughts, that would be fine.

Well, thank you for approving us, and we look forward to starting construction. Now, we genuinely, I mean, I recognize we did go significantly over the 20 minutes, so we really appreciate you taking the time to give us feedback and not just platitudes, some stuff that we can hopefully work on and get your support as we move forward with this project. You know, we're excited about it. I know Spinnaker has been all around the Fairfield County but doesn't have a foothold in Westport yet, and Would very much love to have a nice project here at the train station.

Well, thank you, gentlemen. I do appreciate it. And I'm sure I speak with everybody when we say we appreciate the amount of work that you've done so far and that you're willing to do more work and come back and give us some more answers. So thank you.

Okay. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.

All right. So we are at the halfway point. which generally means intermission, which generally means a five-minute break, which generally means... 8.30? Yes, thank you, Michael.

So that being said, before you do that, just because there's a lot of people on this and some people, can we just give a general timeline of what we think we've got? How long do we think the number three will take before we get to number four?

We're going to do some art for a few minutes and then we'll be done.

Okay, cool. So we should be soon.

All right, Mike, Mike, please. 825 back here at 830. Is that good for you?

Fine for me. Thank you, sir.

Mike Felice, you ready to restart your machine there? I assume that's a yes. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. And Bree, if you don't mind, could you read in the next object?

Yes. Item number three is the municipal improvement at 427 Riverside Avenue, application number PZ2600307, request for a report from the Planning and Zoning Commission submitted pursuant to CGS Section 824, municipal improvement by Paul Davis on behalf of the first selectmen for a public art display at the Riverside Park located in the dedicated open space district number 3, PID number B07092000. Applicant's presentation time is 10 minutes.

Great, and who do we have? Mr. Davis, is this your ballgame?

Yes, I'm Paul Davis. I think Kathy Benowitz, who is the curator of the town art collection, is also on the line in case you have a question for her. This application... Let's see. It may be easier if Michelle... brings things up. There are a couple of things that need to be seen. There's one call. Let's do sculpture photos first.

Okay.

Thank you, Michelle.

Sure.

We're looking to install a sculpture called the couple At this location, that yellow house there is actually the house on Riverside Avenue for which you have the address. We are not doing anything at all there. This actually goes in Riverside Park, which is across the street from it. There is an area that appears to have been created by Parks and Rec at some point as a garden. and that it has not really been developed and so we're looking to put a sculpture in that location uh just so you know we do have approval uh from conservation and uh parks and rec has also uh given it's okay uh michelle if you could scroll down you'll see the sculpture itself Okay, there it is. It's called The Couple. It was created by Susan Malloy and donated to the town by her estate. And so it is the property of the town at this point. It has been previously located at Earth Place. We have... removed it, cleaned it, and it's currently in storage. It actually comes apart into smaller pieces, so when it gets moved, it's not all big and bulky. The plan is to relocate it in Riverside Park. It would be placed on a cement base, which itself is anchored to the ground. so that it's unlikely, but if that park ever did get flooded, this isn't going to go anywhere. There are no utilities like electric or water or anything else like that involved. The moving of it, there's an outfit called Holcomb and I was going to say HOS, H-O-W. Holcomb and Hawes, they're a conservation firm. Right. They will actually be moving it. And installing it. Sorry.

And installing it.

Yes. And installing it. The, let's see, is there anything? The Parks and Rec would be responsible for actually installing the concrete base for it. And they've agreed to do that. The cost of the move has been covered by the donors. yeah that's the uh a gis map which shows you also the uh 430 house across the street and the location of the uh that where we want to put the sculpture the so the cost of the installation is being covered we're not the town doesn't have to pay for that uh the cost of the move Going forward as part of the art collection of the town, the cleaning of, periodic cleaning of it and making sure that it's in good order, good working condition is the responsibility of Westpac. I think, Kathy, do you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, I will add that the sculpture is actually by William King and Susan Malloy and her husband commissioned it for their dogwood. Avenue property. And when she died, she actually bequeathed in her estate this sculpture to the town. So it was an actual gift from her estate to the town. Holbrook and Hawes were hired then. to deinstall it, also clean it, and reinstall it. They came up with a very ingenious re-engineering of the mounts so that it can be easily installed and then reinstalled again as it is after 10 years at Earthplace. We find that this is a really beautiful location, increasing a sense of pedestrian traffic in this park that has really gone through a renaissance and will be something that can be enjoyed in this space, but also by those many vehicles that go up and down Riverside Park. So we think it'll really be a beautiful piece. It's by a nationally acclaimed artist and really helps to match and it matches the sighting and adds a figuration that reflects the activity of this park.

Okay, are there any questions from anybody on the commission?

Paul, you're muted.

Oh, I am?

Oh, not you, not Paul Davis.

All right, Michelle, you have a staff report for us?

Yes, thank you. Just wanted to reiterate, this is a report from the first selectmen, 824 report for municipal improvement for the installation of public art at Riverside Park. I wanted to also note that the commission must issue a report by June 30th of this year, that's 35 days. And then also that the sculpture is exempt from coverage requirements due to previous text amendment, which added that exemption, but it's still required to adhere to the setbacks. And I have confirmed that it would comply with the applicable setbacks. And that's all I have.

Okay, super. Appreciate it. Commissioners, let's go around the horn. Anybody have any questions for Mr. Davis or Catherine?

The neighbors chime in?

No, no, no. We go to the neighbors after us, please. No, no, no. Did the neighbor chime in?

I'm sorry? Did you guys talk to the neighbors about placement? That's a question for you guys. The

All of the abutters have been notified, if that's what you're asking. Yeah. Did anybody speak up? Not online. I haven't heard from anybody. Correct.

Anybody else? We did not receive any public notice, public letter from the public.

In that process for all the sculptures we've been placing around town.

We followed the same procedure on this as we did for the installation at the library, the Circle of Peace you looked at a month or so ago. Super. Anybody else?

I'm eternally grateful that you guys have brought this to us and thrilled that you want to place this here and it'll get seen by A lot of people. So I appreciate it very much. Do I have anybody else want to weigh in?

Patrizia, go ahead. I would just say thank you. I appreciate you bringing this forward.

There you go. Do we have the public? All right. I guess we can go. public. It's an 824. Why not? Miss Scott?

T. Hi. So that's good to know. That was my first question. You know, neighbors get to weigh in because I thought the same thing. This is really in someone's vantage point. And just curious if that was always done. And so you say it's always done. And whether it's Imperial or Canal Park, neighbors are always notified.

All of the abutters have been notified by certified mail. Yes.

Cool. And I might have missed in the beginning how tall is it look as it looks really tall. Is it really tall?

Just a second. I can give you that. It's just a moment. It It is, I'm looking on the database. It is 120 inches by 72 inches wide.

So it's six feet tall. And what's the distance from the actual road?

We have figured that out before. So it's roughly... 70 feet, I believe.

Okay, so it's down the slope a little bit. Okay.

Yes, but above where the wetlands line is. Okay. That's why conservation didn't have a problem.

Okay, thank you. Very cool to have all this beautiful art around town.

I can't agree more. Robbie, you have something to add?

Yeah, I mean, did anyone ask Joy and her family who are directly across the street whether they wanted to stare at this every day, every morning they wake up?

I believe that they mailed to...

I know it was a certified letter. I know you kind of put it out the normal path. But in this particular position, it's directly across from their window. So is there a precedence or maybe a conversation with that particular homeowner?

Well, we have had, when we've had other similar pieces, we have had RTM members reach out to us and have had conversations, but nothing was raised as an issue with this.

I'm sorry if I'm interrupting. I apologize. Joy and her family have lived in that yellow house for as long as I've been in Westport. Someone go knock on their door and show them a picture of the art and say, are you comfortable looking at this every morning when you wake up with your coffee?

They received a letter, so they know how to contact us if they had an issue.

Well, my house is four lots, five lots down, and I didn't receive a letter from you guys for it. Now, that being said, I'm digging it. I like the art displays. So I really do think that maybe the commission might want to talk to Joy and her family specifically because of their location and the view of it every single day. Then I'll leave it at that. You do what you want to do, which you always do. But how long is this piece of art going to be on display there?

Is there a time limit? This is part of the collection. This is a piece in the Towns Art Collection.

I totally get that. How long is it?

Well, it's been at Earthplace for 10 years.

I know. I did the playground in the background.

There's not an intent to move it. We have another program where we do a loan program with artists where we're having works come in and they're rotated every five years. That is different than this. There's no perpetuity, but this is intended to be there and installed on site until... you know, there's a reason to move it or to relocate.

It could be for 15 or 20 years.

It could. I mean, but it's not, but it's right, but it's also made and installed so that it can be moved. So it's all permanent. And we went through a lot of this when we could did the text amendment number of years ago about public sculpture.

So building or,

But we don't have a term date for it to be removed.

Okay, so the reason why I say that is let's just say that Joy and her family don't want to look out their window. They're stuck with it for 15, 20 plus years?

I mean, one resident versus the entire town?

That's their home.

I think that if they had an objection, I know her, and they would have reached out.

They're lovely. It's a simple phone call to them. I really think this particular position, being right in front of their home.

Robbie, I get that you want to advocate for the neighbor.

I want to advocate for the art piece, too, but I don't want Joy and her family to be stuck with it forever if they don't like it.

Duly noted. Thank you very much.

All right. Well, this is what you do. Thanks.

Other commissioners, I'm sorry, other members of the public would like to weigh in on the sculpture being installed across from Joy. Janine, you have your hand up again, or is that a continuation?

No, I raised it again. It was funny because I lived at 447, so that's exactly why I asked the questions about where it was situated on the property and the height. I did just remember Joy is, I think, an artist. We're talking about her. She's not here. I feel a little funny about that. But I did have that same thought. It's an unusual sculpture, right? It's people. It's not abstract, like the swan up the street. And I was thinking about the other locations, Imperial Lot, the library. They're all kind of public or not really right around a house. So maybe there's a point to be taken. Maybe, you know, I believe they would have advocated for themselves. But maybe there is a point when if it's very close to residential neighbors to really get some buy in, maybe a location position and include that. So I had the same intention that Robbie had when I raised my hand as a neighbor when I saw whose house it was. So I just I won't leave him hanging out there by himself. But yeah. Yeah.

Again, appreciate it very much. Duly noted. We do have a system.

Can I ask you guys a quick question? What's the person's name who lives there?

I don't know her last name, but she was an art teacher down next to the JR's Deli for a long time in my kid's winter. She's lovely. They're a very nice family. They've been in town for a long time. And I know that there's a path, and I know there's protocol, and I know the certified letter stuff, but this is right in their window. Give them a call. Put a pause on it. Give them a call. She's probably going to say thumbs up. But what if they don't like it and now they have it for 20 years?

Yes.

Well, that's not cool.

Anybody else? All right. Seeing none, I'm going to come back to the applicant. You've heard a couple of comments, one of which asking you to notify a neighbor. Love it if you could do that. But do you have anything else you want to add?

Nothing to add, but I would like to know how other than since I don't know her at all. other than the certified letter which was sent to her, because she's included on the list of abutters provided by Planning and Zoning, by the way, how am I supposed to do that?

Well, you're correct that you followed the rules, so you did right by that. representation was made that somebody knows her personally. And if you can give a call, that's great. You make the effort. That's all we're asking.

Let me add one additional thing. Sure. The letters to the abutters were sent twice because the meeting that we were supposed to have a month or so ago was canceled. which put us outside of the, there's a certain number of days that you guys require things to be resolved by. Correct. And it wasn't happened. So I had to send all the butter letters out a second time. So she's received two copies.

Oh, thank you for your effort. Do appreciate it. All right. Do I have a motion from anybody in our commission?

Are we closing this or continuing this?

Michael. It's an 824, please. Make the extra effort to speak to Joy before you make a decision. All right, I'm going to make a motion that we close this and work on it in work sessions possibly this evening. Do I have a second? I'll second it. Thank you. Can I get a vote? Put your hand up if you signify that you're okay with that. Yes. Okay. Anybody who's not, put your hand up. All right. Very good.

Thank you very much. Did anyone put their hand up against it?

No. No. Everybody put their hand up with it. Thank you very much to the applicant.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your time.

Thank you. Good night. Good luck with the rest of your meeting.

Okay. Bree, we don't have anything left, do we? We're done?

We're done. We can go to bed.

Okay. Feel free to read in the next one.

All right. I know this is unusual, but I happened to quickly look in my phone and I had Joyce's phone number. Her name is Joyce, the neighbor.

Janine, we have the information for who lives next door.

Yeah, she didn't see the letter. She said I can have permission to give her phone number. I'll send it to somebody privately, and maybe they can give it a call.

Please feel free to do that.

Yes.

Coordinate with Michelle in the office.

Okay, I'll send it over to Michelle right now. Thank you.

Thanks.

All right, so now we have the next four, or I guess we'll open the next two, item number four and number five. which item number four is municipal improvement at 70 North Avenue, application number PZ2600361. And then item number five is 70 North Avenue, special permit site plan application number PZ2600275.

Thank you very much. And who is speaking on this?

Kevin?

Michelle, who's playing the applicant in this play?

I believe Carmen Roda and Eric Barbieri.

Okay, I see them now. Okay, gentlemen, it's your show. Ready to go.

Okay, so I think my understanding was that this was kind of a continuance from the last meeting, the information presented. There was a lot of details presented in the last meeting. The town has received some feedback from neighbors. We're taking that into consideration. But the application right now for me is, you know, is what it is. And Carmen can add some color if you need some additional information.

Thank you, everybody. Like Eric said, my name is Carmen Rota, Superintendent for Recreation for Parks and Rec. As Eric indicated, that we understand that this is a continuation of the last meeting with some presentations and more information from surrounding neighbors. There has been several suggestions made by the Commission and some things by the neighbors that we have taken into consideration and have already started to look at. We had a walkthrough, I think it was last week, right, Michelle? Michelle's indicating yes.

Yes, it was last Thursday.

Very productive walkthrough at the site. And we're looking forward to hearing anything else that comes up with tonight's meeting.

All right. Short and sweet. I like that. Commissioners, questions? Things that you've decided you needed to know? All right, seeing none, I will open it up. Oh, Nicole, I see you're here. Thank you for joining. Appreciate it.

Patrizia, your hand is up. Yeah, maybe you guys can help me find it, but I haven't seen a picture of what the installation is.

I'm sorry, can you just give me a little bit more detail what you're asking?

So like, I would like to see a drawing of what you're proposing, what it looks like, what's the height.

Well, the height 70 feet as indicated. I know that. Okay.

I mean, like on a plan, do you have a picture of what you're installing?

We're waiting for that to come in.

Okay. Thanks.

We do have, I will share that. We do have two similar fields that, um, can indicate a picture that best fits, according to Moscow, our property, which I got late after 5 o'clock tonight, so I can get that over to PNZ for the record tomorrow. But they are working on one for us. It's just that the timing was just a little tight for them.

Okay, so there's stuff still to come per Patrizia's question, and that's worth noting. Thank you. Anything else, Patrice?

No. I haven't seen the photo sims either, so I imagine those are coming too.

Okay. I'm sorry, what was that? The photos. What other photos are you asking for, Patrice?

I was hoping for photo simulations to show what the height is going to be in relative to the neighborhood so that we can get a good idea.

That's the one they're working on now. I thought there was additional ones you were looking for.

No, no, no. Just that and then I wanted to understand what it is that you actually are proposing to install, which I guess will be one and the same because you're going to show me a picture with your photo simulations.

Yes. Correct.

I had a couple of questions.

Yes, Nicole, although I do see Mike Calise's hands up, so he'll be right up to you.

Okay. Oh, so I can go?

Yes, please.

Okay. Can you just clarify? I remember seeing somewhere that there was the possibility that the fields were going to be used for even birthday parties at night and possibly something besides practices and games. I just want to make sure I'm not misreading something there. That's the first question. The second question is, I kind of just wanted to get an understanding of when the need came about for the fields. At what point, was it a few years ago? Was it more recent? At what point was Parks and Rec turning down teams for practice sessions? So that's the second question.

Okay. So the two questions, first, I want to make sure I get them before. If there's other ones, I'll be more than happy to answer them. The first one in the application, I do not believe it indicates anything regarding birthday parties, et cetera. Okay, good. Actually, that was not in the application. Okay. We specifically looked at sports games and practices to extend light. I see Ira's on the phone. Ira, we started this in 2000 and it was 20 years, so it had to be 2004, 2005. Yeah, a long time ago. It was over 20 years ago that the need for lights to extend space on our town-owned assets came into light. No pun intended. Actually, at the time that it came, Mary White was the, I think it was Mary who was the director, and there was two properties that had the acreage by the ordinance when that was Staples High School and the Doubleday Complex, which encompasses PJ Romano as well as Doubleday Field. there was a certain acreage and parking and everything else that had to be accommodated. And those were the two spots that were able at that time to have lights. So we're talking well over an age old story of a need to expand our facilities again because we don't have the fields that we need to accommodate what we're doing in a safe and equitable manner. Again, we're just asking to extend natural lighting through the course of some evening hours that will accommodate youth sports games. So it's been well over 20-plus years, and the settlement has been over, Ira, a little over a year now?

No, the Staples Stadium settlement goes back to, I think, 2011. And you could trace that request for lights, football lights, I think back to the late 1970s.

So that even goes further back from my time. So the need hasn't changed in all those years, to answer your questions.

Okay. So you find yourselves turning down teams how often for practices?

Well, I want to clarify what turning down means. So as the person who does the scheduling and I will say that during the fall and spring season, it's well over 30% of my time doing this one task of putting a puzzle together because it is extremely fluid. What I mean by that is if, especially in the spring, we have rain outs, there's cancellations, there's teams that can't show. And what we're trying to do, as we were asked to do as a department, is to try not to let the spaces go, quote unquote, unused. So, you know, there's a lot of last minute cancellations from the high school. Now they're in the playoff game, so they need to have some priority time for their practices and games. And now we are moving and adjusting the youth sports who are trying to get into the final stages of their season. So I will tell you, and I am on my right hand to God, it's not a day that doesn't go by that I don't get a phone call or a text message. And that's the honest to God truth.

That's helpful. I guess a related question is just to talk about the practice times. Do you have set times for practices, scheduled times? Like I know, I remember like the soccer team had only until a certain time. And I'm just interested in what you see those sessions looking like, 4 to 6, 6 to 7.30, 7.30 to 9. So...

Well, I'd like to answer it this way when we use the fields, if it's something that's on school property, there's an agreement with the board of Ed and our department that indicates that we take. Ownership of those fields after 530 and on weekends, however, however. that hard fast rule isn't as hard fast because there's some things that we have to take into consideration, i.e. since this time of school is dismissed later, so things get bumped. You know, people will go depending on, they're given blocks of time and it's putting a puzzle together based on the needs with the in-season sports getting first priority. So if I have a conversation with Vijay and I'm making a Wakeman B's not being used and, you know, they're going to get off at 430, then we could put a piece into that puzzle. And most of the organizations, if not all, are going until it gets dark and they can't participate because of the volume of teams. And the youth sports groups are very, very, very much in tuned and aware that they put the younger kids earlier and they try to put the older kids later, which kind of helps make sense. Everybody a little happier.

Right.

So, you know, most people practice anywhere from an hour, hour and a half up to two hours. It really depends on the age group and the level that they're playing at, whether it's a rec side or a travel side.

I guess I'm only curious about this because in my mind, nine o'clock seems very late for Monday through Thursday. And I'm just wondering if there's any way that eight could be the cutoff time.

So I can answer that very clearly, Nicole. Here's the issue. Unlike the high school, the high school has paid coaches. OK, that's their job. 90%, if not more, of youth sports are volunteer coaches. Okay, so to start a practice time when somebody's coming from the city or a job at 430 might not be realistic, right? OK, and there might be more realistic for a child to go home and do their homework at that time, then go to a later practicing, depending on the age. We can't make this cookie cutter. It's not that, you know, OK, eight's late for everybody because it's and honestly, it's not an eighth, seventh and eighth grader. Eight o'clock isn't late for a practice. It may be for a third grader. Right. So but between, you know, scheduling volunteer coaches, I could tell you one program, the girls lacrosse program for P.A.L. They cannot find coaches that can't get there before six o'clock. It's impossible.

Understood. I wasn't concerned about the late hour for the kids. I was more concerned about the late hour for the community, the neighbors and such. So that was why I was asking that.

Okay. So, Nicole, I could tell you firsthand from running the PAO Youth Football Program for many years, my teams traditionally went from 730 to 9 under temporary lights. And we made it very clear. convenient for the neighbors as we stopped using whistles at a certain time we we did some things a little we we did our practices a little different okay if there was a couple occasional witnesses whistles it wasn't that it was um you know all the ruckus that people think it is and i will say to you even in the last three years of watching the pal program we haven't heard any concerns for noise Because I think there's things that are done that we are putting in place in training of the youth sports groups. Again, I went through this process the first time we went for lights. And it set very strong with me about some of the things that the neighbors have said. And I said that when the ordinance came up. So there is a need. It's been a continuous need. And that need is only going to grow because we can't manufacture fields in this community.

Understood. Thank you.

The lights will give us more stuff. So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Nicole. Mr. Kalise, I see your hand is up.

I'm gonna pass. I think Nicole covered much of what I was concerned about.

Understood. Ms. Schiavone, you have your hand up.

Yes. Before we go to, I guess what's going to be lengthy public comment. Can we review what we had established as kind of ground rules up to this point in terms of music, noise, time, whistles, and bollards and lighting on the Wakeman Field? I don't think they've been written up. We've just discussed them. but if somebody could speak to that.

Well, they were on the application, but Carmen, do you have them in front of you?

Yeah, they're also in the recommendations for Michelle's report.

Yeah, so we looked for lighting. We looked Monday through Thursday till 9 o'clock with no more than a half hour of dim lighting for safely getting people off the field, Friday and Saturday till 10. For high school sports only, it was amplified music up until halftime, if I remember correctly, and that was it.

Carm, I think that Vijay had said that he would be willing to say Amplified Music through the beginning of the game, but the application was the halftime, and then Vijay said they only would want it through the beginning, like a pregame.

Correct.

That's what I understood, yeah.

but that's not but will you ask me i mean i just want to make sure that we were clear that the application has one thing on nvidia did say that you're absolutely correct michael the the you also had asked for amplified sound during practices no so for there was for none for none correct

And then the next one was that there was a commitment that the fields would only be used at night under light for school activities or school practices or games, not for other recreation or adult recreation or parties, as was just mentioned. Just want to confirm that.

I have to pull up the application. I don't recall, to be honest with you.

And the last one was, I know we discussed it. It wasn't in the application, but on the Wakeman fields, the... road lighting and side lighting is non-existent and that we would consider putting up bollards or some kind of low lighting for public safety in the evening hours.

Yes, I think Eric and I have already discussed that and we were looking into low-level lighting for safety purposes. Yep, and I agree that that's necessary.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Craig. Appreciate it. Anybody else?

Question. Carm, what would be the implication of cutting the hours on Friday and Saturday?

It's scheduling of games. Honestly, it's scheduling of games. Again, we're losing time to schedule. So I think one of the ways that we tried to look at it is, again, how do we utilize what we have the most efficient way possible? Without, I mean, and again, I'm not saying not to consider anybody else's concerns. That's not the case within a balance. But it would shun us from being able to take care of some scheduling issues. And again, when we talk about for kids, my experience with, at least on the football side, is some of the night games are, the little later games are for the older kids where now the younger kids have an opportunity to, you know, hit those things during the day rather than at night. It takes, you know, some of those games that we would traditionally schedule at 9, 11, or 1, and we can move them a little later where the younger kids have an opportunity to play earlier in the day.

Yeah, and if I could add to that, Carmen, I think, Given the fact we don't have enough fields, and I think it's important to note that our youth sports groups have said that they would add more teams if they had more fields. And I want to make sure everyone understands what I'm saying. They're turning down teams because they don't have enough field access. So that's really important to understand. They could add other teams, but there's not enough field access. That's what we've been told. But secondarily, when you add lights to a field from 6 to 9 o'clock at night, you're basically adding a field. Because if you look at a natural grass field or another field, we're basically going to have it from 6 to 9. Or, you know, you talk about the sun, whatever you have, probably not even that long. But if you have an artificial turf field that you can add from 6 to 9, that is tremendously helpful in trying to get in what you're trying to get in. And I think 9 o'clock is not too late. I think I've been part of youth sports for a long time. I think that is, you know, for some of the older kids, a 7.30 to 9.00 training is applicable.

So, Eric, wait, just to clarify. Sorry. They would add teams. So... Westport youth athletics would add teams if they had space, which means that more kids could be playing essentially.

Yeah. I mean, I think you're, I think we're talking about with so many kids playing so many sports, but they can only field so many teams. So let's just say Westport youth soccer has, and I'm making this up. I don't want to put words in their mouth, but they have U12 and they have an A team. They could feel the B team. Or maybe even a C team. You know, I'm not sure. But they just can simply, they simply have to say we can't have that number of teams because we don't have enough fields to put them on. That to me is a shame. And we should try to correct that as best we can. And of course, working with neighbors and everything, I totally understand that. But I would hate to use an artificial turf field that can be used 24-7, 365, and not light it. Lighting a field like this is something that can add tremendous value to all high school, youth sports. And so I think it's to not consider this as an option would be foolish. I think it's something that we have to look at. We can work on the times. I know we've worked with, we are talking with some of the neighbors now about what that would look like. But I think it's something that we need to look at hard. The 70 foot lights, I think have less spillage. um there's only four poles if you go down to 60 and six poles um we can work on some of the you know adding some buffer on the perimeter that we talked about at the field trip um but there's a lot that goes on here and i just i think you know carmen has done a good pretty good job of painting the picture but when you come right down to it when you talk about having an artificial turf field that could potentially have lights and add basically in essence adding a field of training from that six to nine period is tremendously helpful for us to do our jobs in providing what we're trying to provide to the community.

Michael, just, or Paul, I apologize, but just to answer Craig's question, I believe, and I'm just quickly looking at the application that we put in. There's two things I would like to clarify. One, it's very specific on the seasons that we're looking for. Again, taking into consideration some of the concerns that we've heard. And two, it's athletic events. We're looking at the athletic events for practices and games. The spirit of this is to accommodate and address a need that we have for not only our high school sports, our youth sports, you know, and quite honestly, I mean, to me, you know, it's recreation. This is what our department does. And again, I am in full support with what Eric says. We are obviously willing to work with the neighbors to make this some kind of positive experience for all.

But one question Carmen that did come up was was only high school activities until 9. I don't think that's what we're looking for. No we're not looking for that.

Can I interject.

Go ahead.

A second. Only high school you're saying but take the high out of it. Only school events. Can we limit it to that. as opposed to adult rugby or...

I mean, it's something we could talk about, Craig. I think that Some of the feedback we've gotten from the adult, say, soccer players or rugby, they're taxpayers in town, and they wouldn't understand why they couldn't rent a field from 730 to 9 to have a game. Again, something to be discussed. But primarily, and we've said this in the last meeting, there are so many demands for youth sports that to get into the adult stuff on these fields, I don't know when that would become available because there's so much demand on the youth level, even in that later slot.

I think that there should be a clarification, too. There is a pecking order that we have of how people get fields. Whether it's the Board of Ed has the priority, continuing ed, parks and rec, the sports groups that are operated in town, the youth sports groups, then everybody else. Eric was spot on. It's virtually impossible for anybody else to get in there.

So the birthday party concept is really off the table. I know that had come up before, and I don't know where it came up.

Well, I think it came up from the fact that if you want to rent a field and it's available, you can. So if someone wanted to bring 12 girls out there and have a soccer game and have a birthday party than they could. You know what I mean? That kind of thing, it's available to rent. But if it's part of the regulation here that we cannot do that, that they have to be renting the field for youth sports, whether it be part of a nonprofit of the town or something like that, that gets kind of in the weeds. But I think the intention was maybe someone would want to rent the field for something like that. But I'm happy to discuss that option. That's something we could talk about.

Yes, my concern is just the neighbors, the impact on the neighbors. We're already impinging on what the neighbors are normally used to and to add additional activity, which would realistically be of a noisier nature. It should be on the table, either it can or it can't happen, because I think the neighbors have a right to know.

And we are in discussions with those neighbors, for sure.

Okay.

Okay, thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Well, can I interject something as long as there was a little opening there about discussions with neighbors?

I was just going to jump in there, but go right ahead.

Did you want to say something first?

I was going to say what I think you're about to say.

Thank you. Good evening. Ira Bloom, town attorney. You should have seen, I hope, a letter that came from Attorney Joel Green this afternoon. Can I ask if people received it and had a chance to look at it?

It was not posted.

No.

Okay. Well, he wrote a letter regarding discussions with the neighbors, but let me fill the commission in from my own perspective. You may recall that This came up in the first session. Attorney Green has reached out to me a couple of weeks ago and said he wanted to meet with town officials and his clients to see if we could discuss the proposal, perhaps come up with some compromise suggestions. We arranged for that meeting and it took place right after the site visits past Thursday. There were three people that were neighbors, and he was there, Attorney Green. Eric and Carm and Vijay and I were there also. We had certainly a cordial discussion. We did receive about midday or so on Friday a – I'll call it a proposal from Attorney Green. That was passed on to our team, so to speak – over the weekend and through today, actually. So it's being digested and reviewed by the town side, let's say, as well as the school side. And the hope is that we will have a follow-up meeting sometime in the next couple of weeks. So what Attorney Green has asked for, and I support this, is that we continue the hearing from tonight for two weeks until the 15th of June. Now, perhaps you were going to do that anyways, but he has asked for that. I would ask for that also so that at least we can have at least a follow-up meeting and see where we are. I'm not going to characterize where we are or the proposals or anything. I'm not going to do that tonight. But hopefully we will have some information for you at least by the 15th. So I just want to put that out there. I don't know exactly what the plans were in terms of closing the public hearing, but I would suggest we keep it open for at least this two-week period. One other point. One other point, please, if I can, just to put it out there on the record. We had anticipated that Attorney Green, who's not in attendance tonight, We had anticipated that he would have an expert consultant, a light consultant, I believe, available for tonight. He told me that he does not have that expert available for tonight. I don't know what his plans are. I just want to put into the record that The Commission does not have to wait indefinitely for such an expert. We thought it was going to be June 1st. It's not. I don't know if there's a subsequent date. I just want to put that out there that I don't know what the plan is in terms of any other consultants or any other testimony for the record, but we'll see what happens by the 15th. I guess I'll just leave it just like that. So those are my comments for the Commission.

Thank you very much, Attorney Plume. Do appreciate it. And fellow commissioners, obviously, if we get through with our question and answer period with the applicant, and once we've had a chance to have some of the public weigh in, We probably should be coming back in two weeks anyway, in deference to not only what Patricia was asking for with photometrics or photographs and the promise by the applicant that they would be getting it, and also the Joel Green letter, et cetera. I'm going to put it out on the table that we, I think at this point, It would be smart to get as much of this done tonight with the public as we can, but come back here again after more answers are generated by the applicant. And I guess the 15th would be our first real chance to do that. So I'm going to put that out on the table and tell you that after we've heard from some of the public that we are definitely going to take that vote. whether or not to continue, okay? Everybody agree with that plan of attack?

That's a yes.

Any nos? Any I don't cares? All right. Other commissioners? I have a couple of questions because I didn't get a chance to ask. Carmen, you don't have your lighting guy here, do you?

Uh, no. Okay. Our understanding with this was something a little different that we're just waiting for the, uh, for, um, neighbor input. So I apologize for that.

Yeah, no, no, no big deal. And you're absolutely right. We are waiting for neighbor input and we hopefully will be getting it. Uh, Carmen, I'm here. It's Mike.

Oh, Mike. Oh, I'm sorry. I stand corrected, Paul.

Oh, you can sit. All right. Um, So I'm going to actually ask a question. I heard a brief mention of the difference between 60 and 70. Can you tell me what happens if you try to lower the polls? Do you have to put more of them up? Do they work as efficiently? What's the story?

So we talked about this.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just briefly give your name and where you work.

I'm sorry. Mike Mahoney, Musco Lighting, Deer Road, Falls Village, Connecticut. Thank you. Sure. We did talk about six poles at the last meeting. I'll preface this by saying the current design meets International Dark Sky Association's requirements for community-friendly sports lighting. So you would be, the field would be certified dark sky friendly as is. That takes into numerous accounts, among them the impact to the neighboring properties, the amount of light on the field, the amount of light off the field. So with four 70-foot poles, you meet those requirements. If we go to, we could go to six 60-foot poles and re-ascertain whether you would, in fact, meet those requirements. You may, you may not. Sorry, I'm sorry.

I apologize. You may or may not meet the dark skies requirement?

Correct. Because the distance from the pole location to the center of the field, that's set. Whether there's four poles or six poles, that distance isn't changing. So we have to get light from where the poles are located to the center of the field. And to do that right now, we can meet that 27 degree aiming angle. and limit the off-site impact with the 70-foot poles. If we go to six poles, again, sure, we come down 10 feet, but we're flattening out that 27-degree aiming angle to maybe 25, and now... Instead of the neighbors not seeing the lights, maybe they do see the light. So it's certainly something we can look at. Keep in mind also that we'd have to put a pole behind the bleachers unless you wanted a pole right in front of the bleachers, which would make sight lines extremely difficult. So then going behind the bleachers, you're going further away from the field. So that 60-foot pole definitely would not be advantageous and would, again, be detrimental to... Again, we started out this project with one... primary goal of mine, and that was meeting the criteria set forth by the professionals at International Dark Sky to meet community-friendly sports lighting guidelines. That's what we've done. That's what we've presented. And are there options? Sure, but you may then not meet what the original goal was that we set out to do.

Okay, thank you for that. The lights that are in Green Farm School, right across from me. Correct, yep. How tall are those?

Those are 60.

Okay. And are they dark sky compliant?

The guide to community-friendly sports lighting was not... around them just three or four years ago. Would they meet? Probably, yeah.

Okay.

How many poles are there?

There are six.

Okay, got it.

And you're saying that if you lower the height of the pole, you have to flatten out the angle of the light, correct? And that could potentially cause light spillover to either the neighbors or unintended areas.

Yes, and it also, it's detrimental to the playability on the field, creating more glare.

Are those lights that are across, are those the same as the ones that you're advocating for this application?

The ones at Greens Farms?

Yeah, the size and style, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Okay, so they work the same way, they're the same candle wattage, et cetera?

Well, there's, I mean, there's, there's a lot of similarities. I think at Green's Farms, we have, there's 50 foot candles on the infield, but only 30 in the outfield. And we have a combination of wattages there from, there's 1200 watt fixtures, there's 1500, and there's 575, 575 watt fixtures. At Let's see, at Wakeman, we've got 1200 watt fixtures, we've got 1500 watt fixtures, and we've got 900 watt fixtures, again, because the distances and the shape of the field is much different.

Okay, and these lights are designed so that you cannot see anything off the field, as in, when you step away from the field, going in any direction, you are not in the light, correct?

Correct. Yes. There are internal and external visors, and we go to great lengths to mitigate anyone's ability to see the actual light source. Okay.

I got it. And now let me go back to Carmen. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it. Sure. Carmen, let's talk about who turns them off, when they turn them off, and how that works. I watch the lights across from me go on and off on a daily basis, however often they're turned on and off. And you're saying that there's a half an hour? So if you were gonna close up shop at nine, what time would you dim the lights?

So first question to answer, Paul, is that we would use the same technology that we use currently for at Staples and Greens Farms. It's a computer program through Moscow. We put in the start time and the end time. So let's say if you're starting at Greens Farms at six o'clock, the lights will go on in a high fashion for game playability. It'll end at 9 o'clock at that high. And then we put another schedule in from 9 to 930, where the lights go from a high to automatic low. So people could exit the field safely. That's at the that's at the max. That would be the same way that it will be done at the proposed property at Wakeman. And it'll be the same for PJ Romano. So there's two people right now who have control of that access, Vijay Cirillo, the athletic director for Staples, and myself for the Department of Parks and Rec. And what happens if they get done early? Well, what should happen, to be honest, is that they call or send a text that they're not using the lights, and I go on and shut them off.

And what if they need to go later?

No can do. Lights go off. Don't call me.

You mentioned in your... That's for the youth sports.

I can't say that for VJ if they're in overtime or something.

You had mentioned in your application that there are certain times when you might have to go later. I believe you said something like if something forestalled the start time.

Like weather. If there was something to... That's primarily in the spirit of it is looking at the high school. To be honest with you, the high school games, if they go over, for example, like on a Friday night or what the regular schedule is, then VJ makes that decision. I don't anticipate that going for the youth sports.

All right. I don't think I have anything more other than to ask you about the picture that's your background. It seems a little odd that you're sitting on the sidelines and the glare of the lights are in our eyes. Is that how it looks?

Those are temporary lights that we had permission to use at PJ Romano. Yeah, that's the glare.

Okay. 100%. So the ones that you want to put in will not look like that?

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That's a relief. Okay.

Paul, can I add something? Yeah, I think the mention of the playability from Mike Mahoney from Moscow is important for people to understand. When the ball is being thrown, kicked, whatever, and the lights are lower and the ball comes across those lights, it could be... It's very much not conducive to good athletics. So the higher the poll, the better. I also want to state for the record, Captain Obvious on six polls versus four is obviously going to be more expensive. And lastly, you know, us controlling those times of when people are doing it, as I said in the last meeting, and I think Mike had a very extensive presentation last time. I don't know if people... Didn't see it, or maybe they forgot, but he showed exactly where the lights would show and where they wouldn't. It was very clear. But I am very much a policy procedure guy. If the lights aren't supposed to be on, then we need to turn them off. If we're allowed to have them on, then we should be allowed to have them on, that kind of thing. But we will follow whatever is passed, we're going to follow it to the T. And I've told that to Carmen and I've told that to Vijay because that's what we need to do. So certainly appreciate everyone's input tonight. And I think if there's more, if people want to see the presentation from the last meeting, they should take a look if that's possible because it's pretty informative as to where the light actually spills out to.

Yeah, I just got done watching both of those today. Thank you. So this is my third go today. Eric, I actually came up with one last question. You mentioned more children could play more sports if we were to accomplish this, if we were to positively vote for this 8-24. Can you quantify that? And I'm not going to hold you to numbers. I'm just going to say, you know, what are we talking about here? A lot more, a little more, plenty more?

Yeah, no, I would be hesitant to put any kind of number on it, but in my opinion, given the fact that Carmen has told me that he's turning down practices all the time with people wanting to get on, with the fact that the youth sports groups are looking to add more teams, to me, you're talking in the hundreds at a minimum.

Hundreds?

Yeah.

Hundreds. Hundreds more kids locally would be able to avail themselves.

Okay. That's kind of the number I was looking for. And let me just also add, we talk about quality playing surfaces. When our grass fields get rained out, they can't be played on. When our artificial turf fields are playable and we put lights on, they are now playable. So now you're talking about numbers of kids continuing to play where they might have been canceled.

Great. All right. Well, I think it's time to go to the public. And gentlemen, I do look forward to seeing you back here in two weeks with a few more answers. Okay? Sure. Michael, did you keep a list?

Yeah. So I believe we have in no special order since it is late. And I believe there are a couple of students on the call. Maybe we'll have the students go first. So Lowe, Epstein.

Hi. So I'm low Epstein. I'm a student athlete at Staples High School, and I'm here on behalf of the Staples boys soccer team. I'm also here with my peer Ruby, who is representing Staples girls soccer. The first point I want to make is about our academics. With the scheduling of games having to be before the sun goes down so that we can have the light to play, kids are having to leave class early and miss time for education. With warm-ups taking around an hour, in the past students have missed up to three hours of school a day. And they're missing vital learning and important hours that they could be learning. And I know in my past experience, I've been missing tests and important information. The next point I want to make is about gender equality. where even in a more general sense of sports, with the most popular boys sports being lacrosse and football, they both have access to the football field, which is already lit up. It has lights. So these boys sports are able to finish their full day of school and then proceed to their game and play at a reasonable time. However, for girls sports, they don't have that opportunity. They can't play on a lit field. So they're forced to be taken out of school early to get to their home games. and it's really just not fair. So I think that the lights on Wakeman will definitely help increase the accessibility to these high-quality facilities for a lot of teams, not just soccer, but in the bigger picture, many sports. So, yeah. And Ruby, if you want to add on to that about anything that I missed.

No, I think that he said stuff about gender inequality. That was really good. And that was a good point to make. And I think that many people already touched on this, but another benefit to having lights put into Wakeman is how it will support the youth program. So personally, when I was like throughout middle school, I was on the Westport travel teams. And a lot of times like the grass fields would be crowded because the turf fields would have already been used up by the older teams. So it was already crowded, and we couldn't practice to our full potential because we had a lack of... because we had to practice before the sun went down. So there was just a lack of usage. And also this continues through high school because, so I'm a sophomore right now, but as a freshman, I was on JV and I would always want to watch the varsity games. So since when they were home, the varsity had to practice before the lights, before the sun went down and so did we. There was only about 10 minutes I could watch the varsity game, which isn't ideal when like, you obviously want to see like the next level that you're playing at. You want to see where you can go. So, and also seeing, like, you know, in varsity now, like, I would obviously want to go back down and watch the JV games to show my support towards them. So I think that having these lights would allow all three levels of, like, the high school team to attend one of those games and use those sport facilities to its greatest potential. And it just offers more support for, like, a better environment because we obviously want to watch our friends. We want to watch each other and support each other. So, yeah.

Thanks a lot. Quick question for one of you. Lo, you made a point to say that boys lacrosse and boys football have access. Does that mean, so we just want to get this clear, girls soccer, boys soccer, no access to a field of lights?

Yeah, no. Boys lacrosse and boys football, they both have access to the football field, which has lights. So they're able to play, you know, later in the night. But boys soccer and girls soccer, they have no facilities where they can use lights and get out of school at a reasonable time.

What about girls field hockey, girls lacrosse?

I can say something about that. So girls' soccer, girls' lacrosse, girls' field hockey, any really fall-like sports for girls that are outside? We don't have any access to... I'm sure that something could be arranged, but considering that lacrosse is such a big sport and there are other spring sports as well for boys, they get the first choice, I believe. I'm just saying this. I don't know if this is a fact, for the stadium and stuff. So we don't have access to... Like, all the girls' varsity teams, like, when we have home games, like, they're right after school because we have to beat the sundown.

So, yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot. I don't think I have any other questions for you guys. And thank you guys for staying on this so late. I know you guys are students. I know you're studying for finals. So you guys do not have to stay on longer. I appreciate you guys getting on.

Who's next, Michael?

Carl Davis. Thanks, everybody. I guess it's not that late. Their practice might have only wrapped up 15 minutes ago if the lights were up. But before I begin, I just want to say it's a matter of public record that the applicant, unprompted, mentioned the possibility of renting the field to birthday parties during the presentation on May 13th. We can go to the video if we have to, but it was absolutely said, and the reaction was immediate in this House at least. That said, I've spent some time since your last meeting reviewing the town zoning regs, the plan of conservation and development, and Westport Park's master plan, and I have some specific concerns I'd like to highlight for the commission. At the field trip last week, we didn't get to the balloon test we discussed, and I don't think it's possible to conceive how significantly out of scale four 70-foot poles dropped into a residential neighborhood will be without it. But looking at the poll height and configuration at Sacred Heart University a few weeks ago, put it into perspective for me, they have the same configuration there in a Division I football stadium that seats 3,000 people. And, you know, Section 44-6 Item 10 of the zoning regulation says that PNZ must consider whether the application will be in scale with and compatible with the surrounding uses, streets, and open spaces. I don't think this application is anywhere near in scale with the compatible and compatible with the uses of Wakeman Town Park or its proper conservation. The application includes lights as late as 1030 p.m., which is over 90 minutes past what's considered by the regulation, when parks has not been able to provide any data or rationale for student demand past 8 o'clock. I went looking for some and found an estimated field use schedule for Wakeman B on page 62 of the Westport Parks Master Plan, which was published this past July. I also found that that schedule did not include a single block of time for either a practice or a game affiliated with Westport public school teams. It does, however, assume the field will be used by an adult soccer league on Sundays. So why would we need lights after 8 p.m.? Parents don't want their kids competing in sports 12 or 14 hours after they got to school that morning. So who would be using these fields until 1030? Can we infer that Parks is planning to allow for-profit tournaments like other towns nearby, which will strain local infrastructure and no public benefit, or rent time to additional adult leagues whose daytime use of the fields has already led to open containers and public urination, which will only increase after dark? This would put the application in direct conflict with the town's plan of conservation development, which charges the P&Z to protect residential neighborhoods from inappropriate uses, including the intrusion of commercial activities, and insists that special permit requests in residential zones must be carefully reviewed to ensure they are appropriate and suitable for the location. And zoning regulation 32-19.3.d, which requires P&Z to determine the proposal to be consistent with the town plan of conservation and development. Another interesting piece from the master plan says that over 80 percent of the respondents participated in a Westport legal program. So the idea that we heard recently that there are hundreds of kids who are out being held out of sports for the lack of availability is just it's strange credulity. The application calls existing shielding for neighboring residents adequate a decision the town tree warden seems to disagree with. However the day after our last meeting he marked for removal the last half dozen trees that would have shielded john francis home from a direct line of sight of wakeman b i refuse to believe that exposing the homes of septuagenarians to unfiltered whistles yelling and car doors slamming until ten thirty p m has the broad support of westport This puts the application in direct conflict with zoning regulation 44-6 item 3, which requires PNC to conclude that the application will not have a significant adverse effect on adjacent areas, and section 32-19.3.b, which requires PNC to consider and determine the effects of noise that approving this application would have on surrounding residential neighborhoods. Lastly, I want to address what came up about gender equality. Many of your supporters of this plan believe it's the strongest argument on behalf of field lighting and that it's necessary to provide equal access for female athletes. If that is true, that would suggest that we have an extant Title IX violation in this city. But it's false on its face, and when you're subjected to any minimum scrutiny, it becomes a painfully misogynistic argument. If I gave my son 75% of a sandwich and my daughter 25%, I couldn't go back to the deli and demand another sandwich, even though my daughter is understandably hungry. If parks has in fact created a gender inequality in field access based on past decisions regarding which fields to light, how those fields are configured, who has the priority to use them, they must be required to demonstrate the ability to properly and equitably manage their existing resources consistent with federal law before they go and ask for additional resources. I'll close by saying that I'm proudly opposed to this plan, and I believe most of Westport would be on our side. We want Westport to develop in a manner that is consistent with the scale and stated conservation goals. I think it's more than clear that this application cannot be approved as written. I'm more than disappointed in Parks and Rec's failure to meet with their prior commitments during the text amendment process to engage proactively with the community and treat each field according to its specific circumstances by filing two cookie cutter applications and rushing this process. If the application is to survive, the regulations say it must not have a significant adverse effect on adjacent areas, and it must be in scale with and compatible with surrounding uses in open spaces. To me, that means no later than 8.30 lights off, a professional and independent analysis of the impacts of multiple different pole heights, including balloon tests to show the height of lights relative to the tree canopy. renderings with and without leaf coverage and accounting for trees that are planned to be removed, as well as plans for planning and enabling sufficient shielding such that neighboring properties are insulated from increasing evening noise, as well as traffic and safety mitigation approaches to be implemented during lighting events. Thank you.

Carl? Wendy? Thank you.

Wendy Bateau, RTM District 8, Chair of Health and Human Services. I take the points that Mr. Davis made. I really wanted to first ask to get a direct answer to Commissioner Laskin's question about which teams were denied field use. The response to it from Mr. Roda was that he works 30% of his time shuffling schedules, but that is not responsive to the question she asked. But before that gets discussed, I have to say that... I find it shocking that people would think that the answer to students skipping academics and missing tests so that they could play sports, the answer to that would be to light fields and give them more sports time. The answer to that is that school, the focus of our schools, is still academics. Yes, sports are important. Of course they're important. If this isn't a case of the tail wagging the dog, I don't know what is. I also feel that there's, in this meeting and in some of our other meetings, we hear an echo chamber of sports coaches and boosters, including some of the people on this meeting and some of the people on this commission. What we don't hear is that there are 27,000 plus people in town. I find it puzzling to think that there isn't a system of prioritizing who uses these fields. The issue of gender equality That's an important issue. Equity is an important issue. The answer isn't to make lighting on the field so that the girls can occasionally go into lighting. The answer is equitable distribution of the time on the fields. Make priorities. Say, all right, the girls get this time. The boys get this time. I mean, it's just remarkable to me that the answer to every question is make more fields or make more field time. Eric mentioned that he had heard that somebody said that some of our sports teams would like, or some of our sports would like to field more teams and couldn't. From that hearsay, we now seem to have a fact that hundreds of kids aren't able to get onto teams. Who are these kids? Are they kids who just want to kick a ball around or are they kids who really want, excuse me, and deserve to be on teams? to be on teams? What are our priorities for these teams? How are the teams divided? And again, to ask Nicole Laskin's question, how many teams don't get to play on these fields. And who are they? Obviously, we have taxpayers in town, and the children of taxpayers and other teams should get to play on our fields. However, I'm a taxpayer in town. I don't get to go to Staples band practice just because I want to. I mean, there are priorities. Public facilities are not simply usable by anybody there are systems set up about who can use what when I had asked some time ago, well, actually, I asked as long ago as nine years ago, could you please tell me, this was not this group of people, which teams play on our fields and which teams are not school or youth sports? I haven't gotten an answer the last time I asked that question about a month ago, I guess, maybe a couple of weeks ago. I was given the same answer I had been given, which is we're working on that information, but we don't have it yet. Somebody pointed out, yes, that there were birthday parties taking place on our fields. There are certainly athletic, somebody mentioned adult beer groups playing on our fields. Are these people playing on our fields? Eric is shaking his head no, but you go back and you listen to the meeting and you will hear it, as well as the adult teams. We need to prioritize our youth and our school teams on our fields. Then the other people get to fill in afterwards. Maybe we do need more sports fields and maybe we do need more lighting. There is a reason I think that the lighting has been asked for for 20 years and denied. And I think that it would be useful to think about what the effect would be on the community rather than on the people who play on these sports fields. For example, and I don't know if this has been taken into account, but traffic has been taken into account in many other of our conversations. Will there be additional traffic on our roads late at night? Maybe, maybe not. Some people in here may remember a few years ago, the behavior on our fields became so rowdy that the police became involved. I mean, we need to have priorities, we need to have rules, and the public needs to know what these are, and the rest of the community needs to be taken into account. This is not just an issue of some people wanting more time on sport fields. That needs to be taken into account, yes, but it needs to be balanced. Anybody have an answer to Nicole's question about how many sports, how many youth sports teams are not able to play on a field on a given day or week?

Thanks, Wendy. We wrote that down.

No answer, huh? Okay.

Wendy, did you hear what I said?

I said you said you would write it down. That's what you said last time.

No, I didn't say that last time. You can check the record. But I'm telling you right now, I will. And the secretary wrote it down last time. We would like an answer for you for next time. Thank you. That would be useful. And you also have a good point to say about the rentals. Great. I like that. So thank you. Ellen.

Hey, hi. I'm Ellen Lautenberg. I am the RTO representative for that area, but I also am a neighbor living on Woody Lane. So I don't want to be repetitive, but a couple of things have sort of cropped up here after also looking at some of the pieces of the record, things like that, things that were submitted. Obviously, as I already mentioned, there was a meeting with Joel Green and some of the residents and neighbors, I should say. However, the last meeting I asked if we could do a site visit with neighbors and if we could be notified about it. So should there be another site visit, it would be great if other than just those people being represented by the attorney would be included in that. And I wish that we had. So I look forward to seeing what his letter, I mean, I read a letter, but what kind of agreements they talked about or what kinds of possible compromises that were discussed at that time. Also, you know, clearly this is both on the part of some of the P&Z commissioners as well as some of the residents. There is some confusion because it's kind of fuzzy and like I don't want to be a dead horse here, but I'm looking at the application narrative, okay, that was submitted project description and where it says Wakeman B, multi-purpose rectangular athletic field for use for school athletics, physical education programming and permitted community sports field is primarily used for soccer, lacrosse, phys ed, phys ed activities, permitted youth athletic programs. I think we really need a lot more specificity, whether it be some kind of graph, some kind of numbers, some kind of idea of, okay, here is how many soccer teams. It sounds like the priority is going to be high school teams, games, things like that. Some high school practices, maybe slightly younger kids practices, et cetera. But I do think that that is really important for us to really pin down here because in terms of both the time, number of days, it sounds like obviously they would like to use these fields seven days a week, it sounds like, if they could, which obviously is going to have a profound impact on the neighbors. hard to imagine that if we backed it up from 9 p.m. to 8.30, for example, or 8 o'clock, that it would have that much impact on being able to add that extra practice. When you're talking about soccer and lacrosse, again, are we talking, there's been a little bit of confusion, are we talking primarily spring and fall and the sports that fall during those seasons? I think so, based on previous conversation. I would like to have that clarified. Um, because again, you know, when you're talking about a seasonal sport, you don't have games every, every night. Um, or, you know, if you're hosting a high school game, maybe it's once a week, maybe twice a week, something like that. So I think it would really help to, to, um, to shed some light on that. Um, and when it says physical, physical education activities, I mean, you're not having phys ed at night that's during school hours. But other youth athletic programs, it would be great to know. Also, as far as the noise goes, I appreciate that there's been some effort to scale back when music could be played and amplification, things like that. But if there's a game, you're also going to have crowd noise. So that needs to be taken into account as well. And you can't really control for that. Like you can't really turn down the crowd if they want to be loud. As far as the lighting goes, if you're going to compare it, the gentleman who was here from the company said that it would be similar to Greens Farms. And yet he said that Greens Farms was a few years old. I was hopeful that the technology was going to be maybe a little bit better than that, because if you drive by Greens Farms at night, it's pretty bright there and over a pretty wide area. So, along with others, I would love a little bit more clarification on what it will really look like. Maybe not just in a picture, but if there's some place that we could see the exact light that they plan to use, that would be helpful. Sorry, I just want to not miss something here. By the way, Conservation Commission approval was based on limited seasonal use that was in their letter of approval. Limited seasonal use. I'm not sure what that exactly means. But the, you know, again, I, and also I'd love to, I understand that it was approved by the Dark Skies Commission or whatever that is. We'll have a little bit more information on that, more specific information. So again, if we could get more clarification on really what that grid might look like, what kind of teams are we talking about, games, practices, et cetera. Also, I know that they don't apparently like to use it, but there is a soccer field behind Staples. We'd love to know how that gets utilized and how that fits into the schedule. And if it doesn't get used, why not? And, you know, how can we bring that up to speed so that it's part of the, in the mix? So I would love to see them perhaps try to back off from, I think 10 o'clock sounds very late. And I realize it's only two nights a week. If we can back down the ending times, that would be greatly appreciated by the neighbors. Thank you.

Thank you, Alan. Appreciate it.

Michael, who's next?

Hi, Michelle.

Hi, Michelle. I just wanted to note that we did public notice, do a public notice for the field trip. It was posted on the, I'm sorry, the 21st, Thursday, the 21st. Right, not the field trip.

I mean the field trip. There was a separate meeting. It sounds like a field trip with the... Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

No, I'm just talking about the field trip that was... Oh, the commission came too.

Oh, okay.

Right.

But that was not public input. Yes. Thank you.

No, it was. I'm sorry. Let's get this straight. The field trip was notified and it was on the books and anybody could have attended.

Yes, you could attend, but it said no public input. It was 4 p.m.

But that's normal on all field trips. You know that.

Yes. No, I'm not having a problem with that field trip. Somebody said that Joel Green and other neighbors met with

Carmen. So just so you know, Ellen, Joel Green represents some of the neighbors and had a meeting with our town attorney to try and find out what were the issues and how they could solve them. That was not a public meeting. We were not involved. We were not invited.

I'm not blaming you for being involved. That message was for them because I asked for a meeting with neighbors on site with the Parks and Rec people. I'm not criticizing PNZ. It's not about you guys. Okay. And then there was some kind of a meeting, but we, other neighbors weren't included. That's all I'm saying.

Right. No, only the ones he represents. Yeah, you're right. Okay. Yes. Correct. Yep. That's correct.

That's all. Tim Leary.

Michael, who's next?

Tim? Leary?

Everyone. Good evening. Um, I appreciate you taking the time. And I think I might be able to shed a little bit of light on some of the needs of the youth program. So I'm a president of the boys lacrosse program through PAL. I've also got a high school freshman who plays at Staples. And so I've got some experience over the last eight years of being involved in the program where, you know, scheduling is a big part of the success and, you know, the ability for kids to participate in town. And so from my perspective, for anybody listening's perspective, when you are scheduling for a youth event, you work around as really the lowest rank in terms of priority after high school. And so we will work closely with Parks and Rec and put in field requests at the same time as other organizations. So we We see exactly what Westport Soccer Association, you know, football, rugby, girls lacrosse, all the girls programming, what the high school requests are, what the Parks and Rec programs town requests are for non-youth programs. And Parks and Rec will take all of that information and do their very best to accommodate as many people as possible. Why these lights are really important for enabling access to all participants in town is that the prime period of time when the most amount of children can participate, when the most amount of parents can volunteer to coach, is that prime time from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Kids can't play right after school, oftentimes, in part because their parents need to get them from school to the practice, and they're not back from work yet. So we can't have coaches leave their jobs early and then get to a field at 4 o'clock to enable using the field from 4 to 5, oftentimes. So while what you really have, what that creates is a window from, say, 6 to 9 p.m., where the peak usage for any during in season. So lacrosse is a spring sport. We would not be prioritized in the fall because football is a fall sport, right? And so the pecking order there um takes precedence so it isn't a function of just how many kids are using it during what season and what season is what sport being played the in-season sport generally speaking takes priority but again it's that peak period of time and so when you add the lighting you're doing a few different things you are enabling a different block of time for more children to participate After school, that allows more coaches to volunteer, which reduces the cost of the programming, that allows parents to participate after they get off the train to get to those practices. There's any number of different aspects of that window that simply due to the fact that the sun goes down, particularly early spring, by 630, you just can't have practice if it's dark out. You know, as it relates to the grass fields that were brought up earlier, Staples uses a great many of the fields and takes priority over youth programs. We coordinate, La Crosse, I can speak on behalf of La Crosse, coordinates with WSA and Rugby and the other users of the Wakeman e-field. Those are played for games, right? They're lined for games. The high school uses it. You know, as it relates to crowd, very valid question. Wakeman and PJ do not have the stadium seating to support large crowds. It's almost impossible to drive large crowds at those venues because there's nowhere for them to sit or stand. There's no speaker system there that would be particularly irritating. Nor do we anticipate or would we ever use speakers at night during the week, it doesn't make any sense to do that. It's a very reasonable ask by neighbors to not include, to be able to prohibit speakers and things like that and loud music. So again, I think just to wrap it up, I guess the point would be one, you're at peak time for the availability of the field space, which is a function of when kids can get there, when parents can get kids there, when coaches can get there. And we have, we're a structural deficit in town, right, particularly with the long-lost school being remodeled. We don't have enough field space that's available when it rains outside in particular, right? This is the same issue as it relates to grass fields being closed when it rains. So being able to access turf fields at night during, that are well-lighted, or well-lit, I should say, makes all the sense of the world. It's something that Every member of the program that we were involved in supports and appreciate your time and if appropriate, I can answer any questions you guys might have.

Thanks, Tim.

Val. Michael, are you going in any particular order?

When I saw some hands go up, but I'm just looking at my screen.

I'm looking at my screen and picking. After Val, would you start from like the upper left and go across? However it, you know, however they start.

Okay.

Go ahead, Val. Don't forget to unmute.

Hi, my name is Valerie Sheeling Jacobs. I live on Campo Parkway. I'm here in two capacities, individually and as co-chair of Save Westport Now, which, by the way, is not a political party, but rather a community organization. I've been contacted by quite a number of moms who are frankly too afraid to come forward and speak up. I had one mom tell me that because her child, and I'm not even going to tell you the gender, plays on a team, the coaches made it known in no uncertain terms that the parents need to support this initiative. And this mom is too afraid to speak up for fear of her child suffering the repercussions when it comes to playing time, et cetera. This is not a good situation in town. I wanted to mention that in my opening because it's not in the letter. I wanted to go that Save Westport Now submitted today fairly late in the game and I'm not sure people had a chance to look at it. But I'm going to mention something that the public is unaware of and I haven't heard anyone else mention even though it is in the letter and that is that the US Fish and Wildlife Organization has specific recommendations about night lighting. And they are very, very concerned about night lighting because of the impact on the birds. And guess when they're most concerned? During the spring and the fall, during the migration periods. And that's exactly when Parks and Rec wants the lights the most. These lights, even if they're controlled so they're down lighting in certain areas, I'm going to come back to that in a minute and tell you about what Greens Farms looks like from the post road, but they create these areas of illumination that confuse the birds, they crash. We have already lost, I'm looking at my notes here, Three billion breeding birds in North America, nearly 30 percent of the entire population. We cannot afford to keep doing this. Something has got to give. And I frankly have not heard hard data on the hundreds of children that are being turned away. Are these the same children who are signing up for four different sports? Are these pay-to-play teams, which frankly shouldn't really be using our public facilities anyway? Kristen Schneemann asked this question at Town Hall during the meeting with the consultants over the long-range plan for our parks and rec facilities and did not get an answer. I heard Wendy Bateau asking it. Other people are asking it. What percentage of the time on these fields is being used by organizations that charge their players to play? Our senator, Chris Murphy, had an essay in The Atlantic less than two weeks ago about the commercialization of our children's sports teams and the danger that this poses by forcing people to pay for these sports and creating this cycle where everything is just more and more and more important and the kids are overscheduled. I want to talk about Greens Farm for a second. Last summer, because my daughter lives in Fairfield, my husband and I would be on the post road a lot, sometimes coming back very late. And I would see the field at Greens Farm School lit up. You could do surgery on that field, practically. You can see it from the post road. And I don't know why the lights were on. There was not a soul in sight. Was it because the weather was bad, because it was raining and no one thought to turn it off? Or was it that the game ended early? Those were two possibilities, I think, that Carmen mentioned. But whatever the fact is, Parks and Rec is not adequately managing the lighted fields it has now. Why in God's name would we give them more lighted fields? It just doesn't make any sense, especially with the environmental concerns. I also want to talk about traffic, which is not really in our letter either. This town is—I just sat through the hearing on the plan for Saugatuck. We sit in traffic all day long. If we open up these fields for another three or four hours a day, We are going to either the kids are going to the teenagers are going to be driving themselves or the adults, if they're pay to play adult teams, are going to be driving themselves or the parents are going to be driving these kids. Either way, we're going to have more cars on the road. And that is something we just don't want as a community. We're trying to figure out how to have fewer cars on the road. And if it's the teenagers driving, it's more dangerous for them to be driving at night. So, you know, in terms of danger, that poses a whole new risk. Um... I also want to mention that I had mothers contact me who are too afraid to come forward because they are concerned that they are never going to have an evening where they can have a family dinner anymore because the teams just keep scheduling and scheduling and scheduling. And the moms don't want to say no because they don't want to be perceived as the party pooper here. They know that I'm unafraid to put my name out there and put my name on letters, et cetera. So they contact me and ask me to speak up. This is really unfair. And the noise for the neighbors cannot be—I can't state this strongly enough. A few years ago, we had a situation with a car dealership where they wanted to expand the lot, and the chirping of the car of the key fobs alone was wreaking havoc with the neighbors. Now we're going to open up these fields. We're going to have all these people parking. We're going to have people cheering. We're going to have whistles. Yeah, maybe they've tightened up the rules a little bit. It's going to be noisy. And, again, the moms contacted me. My kids go to bed at 7 o'clock. What am I supposed to do? We can't open it. We won't be able to open our windows. This is not fair. Go back and look at the Plan of Conservation and Development. Go back and look at your mandate. And I'm not going to repeat all the points that I think his name was Mr. Davies, I don't know him, or Davis said. But legally speaking, you're not on firm ground here. And for the people who are raising the gender issue, you have just handed a plaintiff the facts of a case. Oh, the girls are not being treated equally. OK, it's a total canard to say that this is about gender equality. It's not about gender equality. It's about Parks and Rec wanting more and more and more and more. And it is never going to be enough. Thank you.

Janine. Janine Zagati, 36 Riverside Avenue. I'll go as quickly as I can, but I'll try to be thorough. I coach sports in this town for many, many years before I had my own children, and I can't tell you how frustrating it was as a coach to try to be having a softball practice, but half your team is going to their soccer practice. Because if they don't go to their soccer practice, they're not going to play. So when we talk about the hundreds of kids, I really think it's important that the adults at the steering wheel and the people that are in charge, I appreciate Carmen and Eric trying to accommodate. every single thing that the town who are taxpayers want, but there are limits. And we are not doing families any favors, anxious parents who want their kids to play in high school and college, children who are exhausted with their heads on the desk at Darien High School, who I can see exhausted when we let kids play multiple sports in the same season. And coaching shouldn't encourage that either. And you shouldn't be playing the same sport all season due to injuries. We all know the facts. That was number one. Number two, Valerie said it perfectly, equitable use. I don't know what happens nowadays, but when I was a teenager... If we had a Friday night home game, the boys one week, then the girls had it for basketball the next week. I don't care that you're not as popular a sport. That boy soccer team should be playing on that football team. And so should the girls soccer team. And it should be on a rotation. And that that is not it isn't fair. And it should be fair. And it should be equal for girls and boys. And I hope the parents are listening of the girls because this seems to be a big issue. And when we think about legal bills that cost the taxpayers money and IRAs crew have to go for asking for more money. These are the lawsuits that are coming up. OK, so and the lights, I think, are the least of your worries. I mean, the birds and everything is important, but the noise that results from people leaving and cranking up their stereos and the cheering and all that is a lot. So this is what I say to you in my final words, PNZ. When I go to multiple meetings and I see people who bought a house near a garden or people that bought a house near a field with an expectation or people that have a property and now we have ADUs and you bought a house next to one house and now it might have three buildings on the property where you thought you could see this way out of your backyard. You have a monumental task, PNZ, to control the growth in our town. And I don't know what the right thing is to say. Should people have an expectation that they move somewhere, they're going to get what they thought they were getting, for a long, long time. And if we had a giant lawsuit 20 years ago that or whenever it was that expired, are we going to have do we have to keep doing that to protect? Do people have to keep doing suing to protect their bushes, to protect their flooding, to protect everything? I mean, you guys, I don't I don't I don't I don't know how you do it, but it's a conundrum. So I thank you for your efforts and listening to us. But I think I value that neighbor as much as I value a kid. That's how I feel.

DIRECTOR DEWOLF. Thank you Janine. Michael who's next.

TONY P. Good evening Commission and thank you for the opportunity to speak. It looks like I'm in bed and in fact I am because this is this is my bedtime and thankfully I don't live next to a field that's going to get lights and noise and traffic. I do want to commend Mr. Davis Ms. Bateau Ms. Lautenberg Ms. Jacobs and Ms. Scotti before me. I mean they made all the points that I I firmly believe in everything they said. And I did write a letter to you. I know you read it but I have a few more thoughts to comment on this evening. The point about hundreds more kids, it doesn't seem to me that there are hundreds of kids who are not able to do anything in this town, to be honest. As I said in my letter to you, we have so many resources, such a wonderful community environment, such a great place for kids. It's just unbelievable to me that kids are going wanting for any sort of leisure, cultural, artistic activity, athletic activity in this town. I don't think that's factual. And I do question whether the school programs, the school athletic programs, those directly related and under the purview of our Board of Education and the District of Westport are lacking in playtime. It seems to me that the school athletics has plenty of playtime. Correct me if I'm wrong but I would like to I would like to know that if the school programs are being compromised by a lack of field time that lights would provide to them. I think organized sports is taking over and sucking the oxygen out of the air for youth athletics here creating oversized demand for the facilities that we have. We don't have the capacity for the kind of demand that is being created by the private organized sports. Take to her point Ms. Jacobs' reference to Chris Murphy's column in The Atlantic. Maybe Westport has not gone that far down the line that Chris Murphy discusses, but it looks like we're on the trajectory for that. Girls and women's sports. I take umbrage at the idea that you need lights, to provide equality, as everyone before me has already discussed. That should be a given. And if girls and women are not getting their fair, equal time on the fields, shame on us. Shame on us. I commend the students that spoke up. It takes a lot of courage to come out and speak to this commission and speak before the public. Speak on a televised program. And kudos to you for for having the guts to do that. But I am outraged that you're missing classes and tests to play sports and to practice sports. And Wendy Matto said it best academic should come first and it's the adults in the room that should make sure that happens. Dark skies. I do think there was some waffling on whether the proposal is going to be in compliance with with the criteria of dark skies. It's not clear to me the pole height direction and all of that. So it's not clear that we meet dark skies and to Ms. Jacobs point You know, I turn off my ring light automatic light fixtures during migration season because migration lights, any kind of lights are particularly disturbing to birds as they're migrating in the spring and fall, which is going to be the time you're going to have a lot of these lights on. Let's see. You know, we talk about 20 years ago, this has been going on for 20 years. Well, first of all, 20 years ago, we didn't have initiatives and understandings of dark skies and migratory patterns and how light affects them. Maybe we didn't have as many neighbors around the sports fields and as many games because we didn't have kids playing four and five different sports. So I think times have changed. maybe not always for the better in this regard. So I'm not sympathetic that this has been going on for 20 years. I think it's an inflated artificial priority on the part of the athletics enthusiasts in our town. And God bless you. I love athletics as much as you do, but this is just too much. you know as far as parks and rec goes we have a new parks and rec director and god bless him he is really good he's taking the bull by the horns to get things done and he is really doing that i'm trying paul and um but too much attention on um athletics and not enough attention on other things um that make up the uh the concept of recreation in our town for everybody Finally, the Joel Green's letter, Attorney Green's letter is a mystery. It was mysteriously silent on what this settlement type of agreement is and with whom. So I wouldn't take that to the bank as the answer to all the neighbors anxieties about what's going on as well as the whole community. I'm not a neighbor to an athletic field and I care about this and noise. I think everybody's made the point about noise. There's no getting away from the noise and traffic. I'll leave it there, Paul. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Tony. Always good to hear from you. Michael, who's next? Sheldie.

Everybody.

Thank you for waiting, Sheldie.

Yeah. starting to get a little tired. So I'm going to have a little less energy than I typically do when I'm presenting to this team and Appreciate all of your patience that I'm a little bit less organized than usual. Robbie, I think it's really interesting that you are so concerned about the people being able to see a statue out their window, but don't seem to care that me and my 20 neighbors are going to see four light poles 365 days a year. That's shocking to me. And I was rooting for you when you were saying like, go knock on the lady's door. Yeah, go knock on the lady's door. That's the end of my rant there. But we all are going to see these poults all year long. On the field trip, you saw the best leaf conditions. So what I'm asking for I don't know how often you guys work with vendors. I have to imagine you do. I am shocked at the idea that you are not given multiple options with pros and cons. Moscow is telling you there's one way to do this the right way, and it's the only way. We should have renderings, leaf on and leaf off. Patricia, thank you for just continuing to say that we need to do our due diligence on that. We should do a balloon test. I don't want to hear about stuff being too expensive. Not in Westport. I really don't. I don't want to hear about the lights being too expensive. If you're worried about the expense, don't put up a million and a half dollar lights. And the birthday parties that was discussed on public record, go back to the recording. A lot of probablys, maybes, anytime you're asking for approval in something, you really need the full due diligence and the details. You know, I usually come to this with a sense of humor and a sense of possibility, and you're probably seeing that start to wane now because I'm starting to get really exhausted, but I'm also really inspired by the people who showed up tonight and talked about some of the same things that I've been talking about, which is that parents feel intimidated. They feel like there will be retribution if they do not, if they express any concern. We're hearing that over and over again. I've talked to multiple parents who say that their kids are on a team and there aren't enough kids showing up to the team and they're splitting it. And there is not actual demand for sea travel teams. There is demand for sea travel basketball in the winter, but nobody's talking about finding more auditoriums for that, but auditoriums, gyms. And then it's very simple. Ask, what are the sports? What's the schedule? How many kids? Let's put together a chart. Charts, we do this all the time. This is very, very normal type of advocacy that you have to do at your average private institution. So I would hope that we could have the same level of expectations. And I apologize for my snark tonight. I will come with more positivity in the future. I'll end my time there. Thank you all.

Thank you, Shelby.

Thank you, Shelby. Michael? I did hear we need more basketball courts from Shelby, more indoor space.

Yeah, that's true. Ellis wants a C team. He says, please.

We'll add that to the planning part of the planning and zoning. Emma?

Hi, everyone. So as a lawyer and as someone who sat through all those subcommittee meetings that Michael led, when the lighting regulations are being amended by the town, I'm a little concerned that in some of the things I've heard tonight, that the applicant in particular is forgetting what the regulations actually say. My understanding of this process is the applicant is applying for a permit within the confines of the regulation. The P&C passed their own regulation setting forth the criteria. And it looks to me like the applicant is sort of applying for the maximum. But there's there's particular elements of the regulation. So, for example, the regulation says the lighted field shall only be used for Westport school team athletic practices and games and community athletic events. Having a valid permit from the Parks and Rec Department. or a staples athletic director and will not have any adverse effect on the surrounding residential properties, e.g. youth sports. That's what the regulation says. It either has to be Westport school team games or practices or community athletic events. I don't think a birthday party is a community athletic event. To me, it's the very antithesis of that. It's not open to the community. It's a private by invitation only event. I would love Attorney Bloom's perspective on that. So I'm very troubled to hear, and the Westport Parks and Rec, they've mentioned it more than once, this idea that they could rent out the field at night for a group of 12 girls to have a birthday party, a soccer birthday party under the lights. I don't think that's permissible under the P&Z's own regulations. I also don't understand like the greater good that that's serving. That's not helping the hundreds of kids have access to the fields. It's to me like, you know, it's a private event. There's plenty of venues around here in Fairfield in Norwalk that you can rent for your birthday parties and you don't then have to worry about the weather. So it keeps coming up because it has been mentioned by Westport Parks and Recs. They seem to think it's something they are able to do if they so choose. I don't think renting out lighted fields is permissible under the P&Z's own regulations. I would love to have that clarified. It's clearly something that's bothering all of us and we keep swirling around it. So please, let's perhaps get Attorney Bloom and others to definitively weigh in on that. The other part of the regulation that I wanted to draw attention to, the P&Z regulation says field lights shall be turned off immediately if the field is not in active use, whether during or after scheduled practices or games. And I just want to explain to people the way it works currently. And I think you heard Carmen say it is he, him or Vijay pre-program the lights. And what they've done is they program them to the maximum. So the Staples football field is programmed every night. Well, every Monday through Thursday, you know, or Friday, whatever, to stay on till nine at full capacity. beam and then at 9 9 to 9 30 they dim down to 50 and that's i that was a one-time scheduling event that happened um and that's doesn't take into account actual field usage at all so like i was just over at the field tonight walking my dog it's 8 30 all the lights are on no one's on it I've been snapping pictures for several months now. At this point, I have hundreds of pictures, and I'm only over there two or three times a week that I'm happy to share with you all. But basically, there is no process currently to adapt the scheduled program lighting to actual field usage. And so I think you have to be very careful as... Parks and Rec is, again, they're asking for the maximum. They want to light Wakeman to the maximum that the regulation allows, and then they will program those lights every day to come on to the maximum. But they're not even using the football field On Monday through Thursday, it seems like the usage is done by eight, sometimes even earlier, and yet the lights stay on. So they have to figure out a better way to. um to turn it off i'm sure like carmen's mentioned it i'm sure the scheduling is very complex you might have away games home games uh rain outs i don't know but there's really not even a good faith attempt right now to turn off the lights when they're not being used they're just pre-programmed in a computer and they always stay on to the latest possible time so i really do implore the commission to think about working through that with PNZ either by curtailing the maximum that they're asking for to make sure that they use the fields that you know and it's not just on to the maximum without there being a use case there or figuring out some different process because currently parks and rec is not in compliance with the lighting regulations absolutely not thank you

Thanks, Emma. Seems like a common theme, though, and we are taking notes that they need to do a better job on controlling the lights when the field is not on. And what you said is very helpful. And just, you know, just so you know, we do have the ability to condition approvals based on these things when there is enforcement. So we'll take, you know, thank you. Heather?

Hi, Heather Talbot, 17 Broad Street. I've been here since 2002. We currently have four kids, two at Staples, one eighth grader and a fourth grader. My husband and I have been very involved in coaching or helping to run various of the town sports in town, including basketball, whether it's on a rec or on the field. the PAL travel side. I've coached for WSA soccer on the rec side. I have spent the last five plus years working on the fields for girls, PAL lacrosse. Know Carmen very, very well through that whole process. Happy to answer any questions about scheduling and how all that works. And obviously have been involved through my older kids at Staples as well. So I think there were a couple of questions. I think Vijay answered a lot of these, but right now, Tony mentioned this, like the school athletics are compromised. It's not my question to the high school athletics are compromised, especially those in the fall, which includes field hockey and soccer on the varsity level, boys and girls split. being on Wakeman, um, Loeffler, which I think Tony, you asked or, or it was Ellen asked about that field. It's been unplayable for a long, long time and it's not safe. Um, obviously I think the town is talking about rectifying that with the board of fed and other things like that. So yeah, there, there are many, there are many issues with the fields and making them better and more effective. Um, I think some of the fields are one lit varsity field in town is the football field. It is not large enough to hold a soccer game. So it is unable to play soccer on that field. And it's our only lit field for soccer. varsity sports in this town. It can hold girls and boys lacrosse on there and rugby plays on there, and then obviously track can run, but I think their stuff is a little bit earlier. So there's a lot of things here that the town is going through and looking at after many years of kind of, I think, just passing the buck, so I appreciate that. I think those who spoke before, like... We're looking for a little bit more time for kids to play sports. I think what I've heard from being on many of these meetings is Parks and Rec, the Commission, various folks have spent a lot of time, if they hadn't thought of something, trying to bring into the considerations of the neighbors, I think, that is a very open dialogue there. I guess I'm a little put off by how attacking some of the comments are a little bit earlier on what folks are trying to do here. After working in PAL for many years for the fields, I think people were referring to club programs. All these programs are town run, not all of them, but like Carvin can correct me or Eric at some point, but probably above 95%. These are town rec programs. These are town we call travel programs, meaning they have more teams and they go in the surrounding FCAC pretty much to compete with other teams. And these are town residents programs. who play and required to be a resident in this town, unless you are a town employee and a teacher and have a kid who wants to play or something like that. So we are serving all those who are in town for the field. You know, there are some very few exceptions, but to me, from my experience, that's, that's, that's who we're, we're attesting to here. Um, I would say sunlight is the restriction and how some of the fields are shaped and lined and some of those are restricted by the natural way that they were put in so. It all kids, no matter what level have an opportunity to play so like. If a kid plays a sport that's in season, all my kids have to play a sport in season when they grew up and they liked something better, they get to play a second one if we can fit it in, right? So these are all positive, good things. Sports brings leadership, sports brings all this good stuff. I think I'd love just to see the temperament come down just a little bit. We are lacking, I think Eric said this before, severely in our DERB, especially in the FCAC for those who have lit fields We have very minimum ones here and they're not on that much at all. So I appreciate having. Yeah.

What's the FCI?

The Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletic Conference, I believe. So that is like.

Something that we're lacking compared to every other town in Fairfield County?

Our lights, I haven't done a direct comparison, but Wilton, Weston, New Canaan, Fairfield, I believe Greenwich, Darien has maybe the same as us or a little bit more, but we don't have as much field space as them. But where they have lights and who can play and when is... I just feel like the ask here is, is not, it's different for Westport and respectfully it's in the place where we are perhaps closer to homes and other towns. Although when I go around to all these other towns, I see similar things. I do believe that every folks are here in good faith that we can find an agreement and a balance on the hours and those kinds of things, um, that can, can be done here. And I'm very, um, look forward to those continued dialogues. I just wanna keep like, there's a lot of good questions here. People should talk to Carmen. They should get back on the phone with Vijay. He said some of the few things that folks have asked here. Carmen spends a lot of time managing I, as a volunteer, and now Kyla Sullivan, who's the new incoming president taking over for me for PAL Lacrosse, the amount of time that we spend managing fields, calling, logistically changing things, managing around other sports, we all work together. All those volunteer hours, I don't want to say too much because someone else might not step into the role. in the future, but this is all out of good faith, goodwill and respectability. And we all know what the rules are. We all know who to call if there's a problem and all those kinds of things. So, um, uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of good efforts here. I do think that there is a need here. Um, and you know, as we talk about restrictions on time and who can be on there, I, there's a lot of focus, I think on some, some random, uh, outside things birthday parties and stuff like i have pulled a few i pulled a field permit out of pj for my son in the daylight obviously not needing lights but it took forever i'm a taxpayer i you know i should be able to have rights to those fields but we had to wait and wait till you know everybody looked at that the youth and blah blah blah and i got my field permit um but um to do to do a birthday party there but if the fields are open like that's you know, that's what we can do as taxpayers, but understand if that's something that's restrictive, that's not, you don't want to under the lights, but at the end of the day, I think that's a, I think someone kind of took that off the table. Anyhow, so.

Go ahead. Well, thank you.

Let me just see here if I had something else. Okay. We got to wrap it up.

Okay. Sorry, it's late. Try to hang in there.

All good. Jim. Thanks, guys. Jim Wolf, 311 Greens Farms Road, volunteer president of Westport Soccer Association. So I'll try to be really efficient with this, just given it's late. I thought Lo and Ruby, the students, made great points. Tim and Heather make great points. I made some of these points two weeks ago, so I will not repeat those. I'll try to make some new points. So this Murphy article came up. I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing. Some of the bullet points from it, I think, are just the general cost of youth sports is increasing 46% over the last five years. What can we do to curb that? Are there private organizations that might be private equity-backed making way too much money off youth sports? Some of them, private equity firms own some of the apps that parents use every day and put fees through. So all of that, yes, that should most definitely be examined, 100% in my opinion. But I do want to make a point. I want to be super clear about this. One of the reasons WSA's enrollment is growing at the travel levels is because parents want a less expensive town-focused option. as opposed to paying three times as much for club soccer and having two to three times the amount of travel time. This is what parents want. So we have more teams, more travel teams, and the field situation is just such that I can't accommodate that. So we and I want to be really clear about the Murphy point. We're doing everything we can as nonprofits in town serving kids of Westport to lower the costs of these programs. And Carmen and his team and Eric coming in have done a great job trying to facilitate that. So that is the primary driver of enrollment growth. There was a comment about how many kids get turned down, right? And there's an estimated number. And I probably think that's a pretty decent estimate. But my point, the point I would make about those kids who are getting turned down, those kids are often the kids at the top of the funnel who are the rec kids. Because what we are missing more than anything else is quality, decent grass fields for kindergartners and pre-K to play 4v4 soccer. And I'm not saying it has to be perfect, but the fields need to be safe and playable for them to learn the game. The grass fields are deteriorating. Every season. And it's getting worse. And I've been saying this since the long lots calls. Everybody knows it. So I think just in general, the community, for the most part, accepts that as a fact. And that's going to get worse and worse over time unless we do a couple things. And one of the things that we can do to address that is increasing the utilization of turf fields, which can allow us to rest and reposition grass fields if we want to. I don't know if Tony is still on. Tony can give a thumbs up. But I'm all for having the best irrigated phenomenal grass fields around and having less turf. I would love to have that. But we cannot do that I mean, the best way we can do that is by making some tough choices, right? And I think what makes sense to do, at least from my perspective, is we have all this investment in these turf fields. If we can use them a little longer, especially in the fall, in November, when it's dark at 430, like, And the field situation is that bad and the grass fields are getting that worse. It is something we really need to be doing as a community or things will get progressively worse and worse and worse and long lots is offline and the enrollment is growing. And again, the enrollment is growing because we're trying to provide more affordable solutions for the kids of this town. And, again, I said this on the last call, like, no WSA kid will be penalized for a parent expressing their opinion of this. I will make sure that happens. And there's just no way that that would happen, at least in Westport soccer. And then, yeah, I guess... Let me just see if there are any other points. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of discussion, but I think I would leave it there. But very important to get done. And I am very sympathetic to the neighbors and their concerns. And I'm supportive of finding the solution that puts the right guardrails around this project so everybody can, you know, move forward on an expeditious timeline here. Thank you.

Thanks, Jim. Mariana?

Hi, this is Gary Trieff with Mariana Trieff on Whippoorwill Land. First, I'd like to thank all the people that spoke about the volunteering they do for youth sports. We all get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. So thank you for that. I have some very basic questions on the application itself. Have we defined the definition of a community athletic activity, permitted community athletic activity? It's referenced in the application on the supporting materials, but as far as I can see, it's never been defined.

Michael, you want to see if you can get that answer?

Carm, you want to go there? I mean, my take on that is, you know, anything from high school, youth, any resident wanting to use the field, like that's community, right?

You guys all make good points about other things. So in an application of this size and importance, I don't understand how the public is supposed to evaluate the application without basic definitions. Emma stole a lot of my thunder on this and she made great points, but it doesn't make any sense. The question is, who is actually doing the permitting? Is it defined? No, it's not defined. Are for-profit entities allowed? Is that a community athletic activity? We don't know the answer to that question. That's an important question that needs to be answered. Furthermore, the application conflicts with the supporting documents of the narrative, Section I of the narrative, authorized users, use of lighted fields should be limited to Westport Public School, league required interscholastic contests, and permitted community youth athletic events. That's it. There's no mention of any adult activities. So if that's the case, why are we going for 9 to 1030 or 9 to 10? So that also conflicts with the community athletic activity versus community youth athletic activity. Can I ask you a question? Yeah.

And I'm curious on this, right? If Parks and Rec puts on something for the Westport adults, I mean, by the way, this is on a peripheral basis, and I don't necessarily think that this might be the right thing or the wrong thing. I'm just saying, I'm thinking that that could be a community activity, but you're right. We need a definition. Is that a community activity or not, right?

Exactly. All these hypothetical questions. Like a Parks and Rec sponsored event is what I see it as. Okay. That's not what it does.

Not necessarily like what you just said, not like a for-profit event.

um someone coming in to rent the field from 9 to 10 o'clock at night that doesn't even live in our town yeah i mean just my final comment i want to respect people's time i don't want to talk at length as some others did um i just want to say the application is at best sloppy the terms are not defined and it doesn't make any sense so for an application of this size we need to define the terms and we need a lot more data as well and that's my final comment thanks thank you

You spoke already, Carl, but Julianne has not.

That's fine. I can be brief or I can wait.

You can be super brief because usually we like to give everybody an opportunity, but you didn't have your hand up. So please be super brief and then we'll have Julianne go.

Yeah, Michael, just based on your interaction with Wendy at the end of her comment, I wanted on the record that I spent my entire comment during our last meeting asking for one thing, which was data related to demand. It might jog your memory that I was specifically questioning whether this anecdote of demand we're hearing is organic and sustainable, or could it be tied to the private equity money that several other people have talked about in this meeting, because our teams and fields don't exist in a vacuum. Whether they're town-run or not-for-profit or they're the best thing in the world, they're part of the same ecosystem, which all signs suggest is currently in an unsustainable bubble. So I wrapped up and I specifically called for actual data on who is missing out and who is taking their opportunities today. You said okay and moved on, which I took as a commitment to bring that information. So I think Wendy's point is fair. We've asked again and again. You and the applicant have said we will get that information, and we've received nothing but anecdotes and estimates that simply don't align with the other data Parks has published in its master plan. I just want to reiterate, go look at page 62 of the Parks master plan from January. They didn't allocate a single time slot on Wakeman B to any Staples or other Westport school team in that estimated schedule. If we're to understand from the gentleman in charge of scheduling on this call that they have the highest priority, that means there is zero demand from Westport schools for the use of this field. So who wants it? As they say, follow the money. That's it. Thanks, Carl. Julian.

Hi, I actually wasn't going to speak, but then my slight pet project got brought up. So I'm going to give a little background. I'm Julianne Mulvey. I live at One High Lane. My kids have played travel soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and rugby. My son was the captain of Staples Soccer, and my daughter is a current varsity soccer player. I played soccer competitively well into my 20s, and I now make a living as a fitness professional. I am a huge sports fan and a believer in the value of sports for kids. That said, I would like to very specifically talk about Loeffler Field. I have brought this up in a million meetings, and it has never really amounted to anything. My son graduated last year, and his last game on Loeffler was in 2022. This is a field on Staples campus. Four years ago, Jim Wolf.

For one second, Julian, can you tell everybody where that field is?

It is basically, if you haven't seen the back part of Staples, it is in between Ginny Parker and the football field. So there is a beautiful... Yeah, the baseball field. So you have, if you're going in one direction, you have the football field, then you have the baseball field, then you have Loeffler, which is a soccer field, and then you have Jenny Parker, which is lacrosse and field hockey. So it's a beautiful field. There is cement seating up. You watch from an elevated height. It's a great field to watch soccer from. So Jim Wolfe a little bit made my point for me, and I have been a broken record on this. Why has that field sat dormant and unsafe for four years when we have such an extreme, in quotes, field shortage? is the town's money more prudently spent to refurbish that field instead of putting lights on an existing site. Mathematically speaking, truly, I mean this, like I want someone to put a spreadsheet together. I might do it myself. Mathematically speaking, recovering Loeffler as a usable field will add more practice and game time than any additional hours from adding lights at one field. So I guess I've never really gotten an answer on what is going on with Loeffler. And if the town, and I believe there is a field shortage, I truly do. You don't have to convince me of that. I don't believe there's hundreds of kids who are being turned away. I truly don't believe that. But if this is such a desperate situation, why has that field sat for four years not used? Not refurbished. It's unsafe. Heather said it is.

Can you clarify the not used part just so everybody on this call knows what that really means?

I mean, I haven't.

Varsity sports are not using refilled, right?

I can only speak for, I do not want to generalize in the sense of, I only know my experience. My son played his last varsity game there in 2022 and my daughter has never played there.

So the fact here, from what I understand, is that varsity sports do not play there. And this is the varsity field, right?

I am not going to speak for all... I am not an expert in the sense of who else is using the field. I just know it used to be the crown jewel of the soccer program. It was a big deal. Loeffler was a big deal. And now, all of a sudden, it's just not used anymore. And so I'm not against expanding practice times and increasing enrollment in sports programs. I just, I do not understand why we have assets that are just sitting. Like, why isn't the JV team, why isn't the JV girls team playing on Loeffler? Because it's unsafe. Why is it unsafe? Why isn't it maintained? It is, this is a fundamental question of fiscal responsibility. And I think we need to get to the bottom of it.

I agree.

Okay, good night. Thank you.

Robbie. Robbie. Yeah, I'll make it quick. It's clear we can't give up any field space in this town at all. So anything moves forward from This point to remove any field space is just impossible. Yeah, law firms field is beat up. My girl rolled her ankle on it the other day. It needs a lot of addressing. To kind of chime in on what the value of sports are, 80% of C-suite executives played on team sports. So you want to send your kids to school. You want to send them to higher education. You want them to get a good job. You want them to be an upstanding member of the community. create wealth for their families, sports is a path to do that, along with scholarships to get them into the better schools. So I see it very, I see it equally. Academics obviously are a priority, but I don't think you can afford to give up the value of a good sports program. And yeah, you know, unfortunately, the girls get the short end of the stick. It's always been that way. It's sad. It's true. I'm watching it in real time with my own girls. But I look at this more towards the future. A lot of older folks have chimed in. I respect their opinions, but I think there's a lot of kids that have not yet showed up on the fields to articulate how important it is to them. This is a family town. It's centered around schools. That's why people move here. That's why they pay the prices they do for the houses, and the town gets a big cut of that. I'm not suggesting that you don't go and knock on all the neighbors' doors. You know, I understand the change. I do believe that this is very, very important for the quality of life for the school program, as well as the adults. I like to go out and play rugby myself. So it would be nice to be able to get out there after the kids play and get an hour in. Move slow. Move with intention. Talk to everyone that you have to do to get where you need to go. It's obviously a very heightened topic. But I believe Carmen and Parks and Rec folks have their hand on the pulse of what we really need in this town. And it's not just for opinions and guessing. I'm pretty sure they can give us some data that would back up everything that they've asked for. And again, quality of life is why we're here. Having good schools and good sports programs and good community are all around fields. And if you move next to a school, you should probably consider that school activities are going to be happening in your area. Thanks for listening. Have a good night.

Just on that point, Robbie, on the website posted today after, you know, I'm sure all the commissioners went through everything that's posted. But, you know, there was a, the Staples student that got up, Low Epstein, he submitted a letter and a 370 signature document of the students. There's names, addresses, it's posted on the website.

That's all the kids that are using the fields now. I'm talking about the kids that haven't shown up on the scene yet. They don't have a voice yet, but they're coming. Quality of life moving forward for multi-generations, not just one group of people.

Thank you, Robbie. Paul, I think that's it.

Everybody else who's got their hands up has already spoken. Is there any of the three that have their hands up that are looking to speak again? Shelby, Julianne, or Emma?

Nope, sorry, I should have put mine down.

Okay, thank you. Michael, why don't you take us home on this? You know that we're coming back in two weeks.

We are coming back in two weeks, but Shelby, did you want to just scrap up something quickly?

Just a two-second response. Like, yes, we move next to the schools. We love being next to the schools. If you read our letters, we've said that. But Diana, who moved there 15 years ago, said in the last meeting, we never expected lights until 10.30 p.m. We never expected 70-foot light poles. And to say that we should have, like, been able to see the future is really unfair. Thank you.

Thanks. Okay. Can you, Shelby, put your hand down? Thank you. All right. So you want me to take us out? This would put us at 11.05. We've gotten public comment. We are clearly holding this open. But do we go back to the applicant or Michelle, Paul?

The first thing we need to do is get an understanding from the applicant that we're looking at the 15th. Are they available? Can we put them on the schedule? Do they understand their marching orders, et cetera?