Meeting transcript
Planning and Zoning Commission - Regular Meeting
January 24, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Hi, Leigh Ann. Can you hear me? Yes.
Okay. Very good. Well, I've got 07:00, so I will call the Andover Planning and Zoning regular meeting to order. Roll call and seating of alternates. I see Scott is here. Leanne is here. I am not seeing Ann Cremay. And I don't see Steve Nelson. So, at this point, I will seat Susan. And I'm not going to specify who you're seated for. If somebody else shows up, that'll fill the vacancy. But you are seated. Okay, sounds good. Either
Anne or Steve, one of those two. Oops, Steve Nelson just arrived. So you will be seated for Ann Cremay. Steak in ears. Hello, Steve. Okay. You want to unseat me?
Maybe I've got to get, we'll unseat, there we go. Yes, Susan, I will unseat you. We've got it in for me. Steve, your and can you hear us? Yeah, I'm here. Okay,
very good. So that gives us the full regular member quorum for tonight. Third item on the agenda is additions and changes to the agenda. And I would like to add under old business item 5D, alcohol and cannabis regulations. We said we would talk at the last meeting, this meeting tonight, and I've got just a minute or two to go over that. I would also like to add under new business item six, planning and zoning budget. And then I'd also like to add item 10, adjournment. I figure I know you guys just love doing this, but at some point we're going to want to adjourn. Are there any other changes or additions to the agenda? Hearing none, that's it for item three. Item four is public comment. And I think I saw Ms. Hutchinson here earlier. I see three blocks that show me Leanne. I don't see what I saw earlier is Kay Hutchinson. Ms. Hutchinson, are you still with us? Yes, am. But you can't hear me.
I can hear you now. Oh, you can. I'm still here. Yes. Okay, very good. Would you like to make your comment now? Or would you like to wait until we're discussing the gravel pit? I would like to wait until you are discussing the gravel pit. Thank you. Very good. And I don't see anybody else from the public here, so I think that concludes our public comment. At this point, moving on to old business, and we're starting tonight with the update on the affordable housing plan with Bill Warner. And so, well, at that point, I guess the old business is we haven't been together yet this year, so I wish everybody a happy new year and hope you all had a great holiday season. And now we're off and running on a new year. And with that, we'll turn it over to Bill.
Yes, happy New Year. You can hear, you can all hear me? Yes. Working? Okay. I sent you a couple of weeks ago two documents. One was the draft plan. As I do these, I like to just write as I go. So you received a lot of that. I did it in a question and answer format, the first section, because I think affordable housing is one of the most, one of the least understood items in small town America. Everybody thinks of affordable housing as the housing projects in Lomantic or in Hartford. So I really wanted to try and explain the statutes and explain what affordable housing is. And then I also sent you a PowerPoint, which really went into the meat of it and to really explain the numbers of affordable housing. Can share the screen and take you through that or
however you want to proceed. Oh, that would be great, Bill. Okay, if I can share the screen. Everybody can see that? Nope. No. Not yet.
I gave you permission as a cohost, so you should be able to see on your the bottom of your screen a green screen share button. You can select the screen you want to share from there. There you go. That's perfect.
Okay. Yep. We got you now, Bill. Now you can see the screen. Okay. Can we see your PowerPoint?
Yes. Okay, very good. So why are we discussing affordable housing again? It was six or seven years ago. I worked for the town of Andover. We did a 2,000 in 2015 incentive housing zone study, which then was the flavor of the time for the state to how to create affordable housing. We did that study. Got, I believe it was $20,000 from the state to do that study, looked at various areas around town and looked at how those areas could be developed. Lot of good information in that study and certainly a lot of it will be incorporated into this study. But we incorporated a housing zone regulation, so there's an actual regulation in the POCD. Seven years later, it hasn't been utilized even at the peak of the multifamily market. So we will dig into as we progress is why isn't that happening? If you provide the zoning for it,
the thinking was, okay, if you provide zones, then it'll happen. Well, it didn't happen even at the height of the market. So what was the problem? So in 2017, the state decided they were going to change their statutes and they created another statute eight-30J. Eight-30J essentially says every five years you have to adopt or amend an affordable housing plan. So every community in Connecticut has to have an affordable housing plan now. The problem with the statute is that's it right there. That is the statute. This is some stuff about, you know, after it's a proud to approve it and put it on the website, but for the most part, that is the meat of the statute. It's all it says. So there's no, it's not specified what is in what needs to be in the plan or how you do the plan or who adopts the plan. Some towns it's it's board of selectmen are doing it, other towns the planning and zoning are doing it, But there's nothing in there that says the Wetlands Agency can't adopt the affordable housing plan. It just says it has to be adopted. And no public hearing is even required. So you don't even have to communicate with the public by statute. I don't recommend that, but you don't have to.
Bill, when it says that it'll be adopted, what does that actually mean? Does that mean somebody's working on it or they have approved the plan?
The municipality has to adopt every five years a plan,
but that's all it says. Okay, so it doesn't necessarily mean that somebody's gonna actually execute it?
No, no, just that you have to approve it. You could approve it and put it on a shelf. Okay. So the state recognized it as an unfunded mandate. And so two years ago and this last year, they created a grant program of $15,000 grants and I know Andover applied and that's what brought us here. So we're using state money to create this affordable housing plan for Andover. As I said, affordable housing is very misunderstood. So most people think of affordable housing like this, the old fashioned housing projects, but we're not talking about Section eight. You'll also hear, as we progress with this and it becomes more public, you will hear people say the town wants to bring in Section eight housing. Section eight housing couldn't be more further from this truth. Section eight housing is, that's not what Section eight housing is. Section eight housing, there's two types. You could have Section eight vouchers, which means that anyone any any any very low income person can get a Section eight voucher, and they can use that nationwide. They can go anywhere and they can come to Andover tomorrow if they wanted to live in a rental in Andover with a Section eight voucher. What it does is it says this is what that very low income family can afford and the federal government pays the rest. So it's guaranteed rental income to the landlord. And then there's project based section eights where they actually put money in and guarantee
incomes. Those are not going to happen in Andover And even if there was any thought of it, the community would have to support it, the town would have to vote for it. You're not going to see project based Section eight. So Section eight is not what we're dealing with here. It's not state or federal housing. Those are things that were built in late 40s for returning military from World War II, all the way up through the 70s for low income people when there was a lot of federal money for housing projects. And those housing projects are still around, and some of the pictures in the bottom show what they are. A lot of them are being repurposed or torn down. These are the mills in Meriden. Those have all been torn down this past year and building new, very low income housing. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about eight-thirty gs, which I know we've talked about before. It's in your plan of conservation and development. We talked about it in the incentive housing zone, and when they did that in 1989,
their conclusion was towns are the problem. Towns keep denying everything. So if somebody comes in and they want to even try to build affordable housing, towns aren't denying it. So this was the way the state was going to get over that and take away the power of the towns to deny things. Eight-thirty gs says 10% of your housing has to be affordable. And if you don't have 10% of your housing, it shifts the burden to the town to justify a denial. So you really can only deny it if it's a public health or safety problem. Somebody's going to get killed. Somebody's going to get sick. You can't deny it based on, well, it doesn't fit with the character of the town. It's too dense. You can't come up with all kinds of different things that you would traditionally
do what towns do. So that made it very difficult to deny an eight-thirty gs project and the vast, vast majority of projects throughout Connecticut that have been proposed have many have been denied at the local level anyways and the court has overturned almost 90% of them. So essentially in order to doubt which we talked about so that's eight-thirty gs in terms of Andover your housing your eight-thirty gs your 10% you have in Andover in 2020 you have 51 units that are deemed affordable. There are there are government assisted units which means they got some state or federal funding to build them CHFA or USDA mortgages and so the total in Andover is 51 so you're at 3.8% so you do not meet the 10% threshold in eight-thirty gs. Some of you might have noticed that it declined and Jed noticed this and he went to Eric to discuss it. It just turns out apparently some of the senior housing that was government assisted when it was built, for some financing reason, it went down to 18. We haven't determined what it actually was. It must have been some type of refinance on some of the units or something. So you've actually declined in affordable. So the question is what is affordable housing? Affordable housing is housing that is affordable to individuals and families making 80% or less of the area median income. Can be rental or home ownership. A family at that income level cannot spend more than 30% of their income on housing. 30%. It's any of you that have applied for a mortgage is a common banking
criteria that they look at. Mortgage taxes and insurance can't exceed 30% of your gross income. And condos, apartments, single family could be any type of housing. And per state definition, this is the one that is really going to be interesting to you is per state definition an affordable unit must be deed restricted for forty years to limit appreciation to limit appreciating to CPI so you have to limit the appreciation to the CPI so very often you buy a house and it goes up much faster than CPI and that's where you build your equity and make your profit when you sell. State says they have to be limited. The appreciation has to be limited. So is something that makes it very difficult. That's what limits your affordable housing in Andover. These are privately developed affordable housing. These are modern affordable housing. This one here is the most recent one. Was completed last year or maybe the year before. This is in Essex. This is eight-thirty gs housing. They took advantage of eight-thirty gs. So it's 55 units 30% of the units are affordable filled right up did not produce any school children. Is interesting the 55 units only produced one school child and the child was already in the school district. Some of these other ones, this is Farmington, this is Old Saybrook, and these over here are Avon and Farmington again. So those are what privately developed affordable housing look like much more effectively managed and they're in the private market.
Different types of sources of income: Connecticut Department of Housing has grants to build affordable housing. CHFA, the Connecticut Housing and Finance Authority has grants. HUD has funding, has community block grant money. And then the big one is low income tax credits. This Farmington one was low income tax credits. Those are 60% of median income instead of the 80%. Then others take advantage of eight-thirty gs, which allows you to ignore the zoning and you could build at a higher density. It allows you to make your money by building more units than you'd normally be allowed to build. Getting into the numbers, the area median income for the Hartford East Hartford region is what you are in. Not just your Andover median income is a little higher, not a lot. But for the region, is $105,328 So 80% of that, and they base these numbers.
When you look at it, it's not exactly 80. It's based on the number of family sizes. Hudgov, huduser.gov publishes these numbers. So a family of four can make up to $79,900 and qualify for affordable housing. So that's a lot more than the very low income that you see in the cities. This is more of working families with you know, a landscaper or a cafeteria worker in schools or things like that. So those are the figures that you have. One person 55.9, two sixty three, three point seven one and four point seven nine. So those are the 80% limits. So we need to build housing to people at or below that limit to qualify for affordable housing. In terms of the rental, that's a little more difficult because they use for the rental the fair market rent as determined by HUD. So the fair market rent for this region is below. It's a one bedroom eight thirty, two bedroom ten twenty, three bedroom twelve seventy. Not many people are building four bedrooms anymore. So ten twenty that would translate to what would really work is about $2 a square foot. About 500 square feet is about all you could really build for ten twenty, which would be very small for a two bedroom, obviously. Those numbers are very challenging for rental. So what is affordable to families at 80%? So we looked at those figures. If you take those figures and you figure out what the mortgage would be, so a home valued at $250,000 the assessed value, the mill rate, so your taxes would be $5.23, your insurance would be 125. Likewise a home at 300,000 your monthly tax, and your home insurance.
So then what we do is then we use just a typical mortgage calculator that you can get on your computer and say what would a mortgage be for a home of $250 $300 or $350,000 So the mortgage we factor that in so here you have it it's a the taxes the insurance and your mortgage your monthly payment so your monthly payment is $18.72 dollars At $18.72 dollars we take the income so let's use a family of four making the $80,000 30% of that is $23.09 divided by 12 is $19.97. So they could afford a housing payment of $19.97. What that translates to is they cannot afford a $350,000 home but they could afford a $300,000 home. So that would be an affordable home. Anything at $300,000 or below would be affordable to a family of four. Same family of two, $15.80 would be a little less than the $250,000 house that they could afford. The CHFA mortgages, the FHA mortgage, VA mortgages, USDA mortgages are all lower interest, less down payments that these people would be taking advantage of to buy. But some in the red certainly problems that are more than just having the right income is the credit history. Do they have a good credit history? Do they have a lot of debt? Can they afford a down payment? So here you can see a down payment
of $300,000 10% down. You'd need $30,000 at a 3% interest rate. So many many people making this kind of income just don't have that level of down payment. So they'd be looking ideally to CHFA or VA for some down payment assistance. So those things are there are programs to help make that happen in the market. So what is in the market? What is really on the ground in Andover that's affordable? So what I did is I worked with the assessor who was incredibly helpful to me to review actual sales from 2018 to 2021. So actual sales under $300,000 As you can see a large percentage, I can't see the percentages because my window is here, but as you can see a large number of the homes up in the 70% in 2018 were under $300,000 all the way up into the most current previous year, which is a very, very strong market. Prices are very high. 32 of the 56 sales were under $300,000 So what does that mean? That means that there are a lot of what everyone now is using naturally occurring affordable units. You did nothing to create these units, but they are just there, whether it's because of their age or their size. You have a number of naturally occurring affordable
units in town. And based on the 2016 revaluation, 71% of the homes in Andover are below $300,000 Those are the 2016 values. The 2021 values will be available at the end of January, and we'll get those to update this slide. But that tells you that there are a lot of naturally occurring affordable units, which really makes you scratch your head and say, well, why are we doing this? Mean I we're not Greenwich, we're not Farmington, we're not Avon or on this side, we're not Glastonbury. Why are we doing this if we do have the majority of the units in town are affordable? In terms of supply, it's a big problem right now. So there may be affordable units, but there's just none on the market. This is what the realtors will tell you. So there's 10 single family homes listed on realtor.com. Six of those are under $300,000 So consistent with your sales, 60% are selling for under $300,000 But of those 10, only seven are under contract. So there's really effectively only three homes for sale in Andover on realtor.com. That supply is the real issue here. Conclusion. There is a sufficient number of homes affordable to those meeting the state's 80% median income limit. The age and size and condition of some of the affordable homes may be an issue. So some of these homes may be only 1,000 square feet in very poor condition. The affordable single family homes are not deed restricted. So this is the one where, regardless of how many homes you have under 300,000, they do not qualify as affordable under the state's definition NA-thirty gs because they are not restricted. The market could continue to improve, improve, improve, and they could escalate in value. So they are not deed restricted,
which has a lot of people saying, well, know, so we have affordable housing, but we also have to build affordable housing that satisfies the state restriction if we want to avoid A-thirty gs. And that is in fact the case. Again the lack of down payment credit student loan debt will be a potential problem for many trying to buy a first time home affordable single family home in Andover. Downsizing residents, young people may not want a single family home on an acre plus lots. So as I put in one of the slides that 90% of your housing single family on larger lots. So if you're in your late 50s 60s and you want to downsize but you want to stay in town that would be very difficult. If you're coming back from college and you'd like to stay in Andover, you like to Andover, again because of the very few rentals in Andover, that might be very difficult. So what's next? Again, eight-thirty gs says
such plans shall specify how the municipality intends to increase the number of affordable housing developments in the municipality. So at the next meeting, will be presenting to you, and before that you'll get it, identifying who we want to serve. So if all of a sudden you intervene and tell me what we want to bring in, want to serve people from lower income people from Hartford or Willamantic, that's a whole different type of plan. If you say we want to serve young residents, potentially kids coming back from school or downsizing the aging population, that's what I'm assuming you're going to think. So what we have to do is we have to look at population growth, population projections, what's happening. Are there going to be a lot of towns, for instance, in Fairfield County are growing very quickly. So what they've done is they said, okay, every housing development, 20 or 30% of the housing must be affordable. So that is called, I can't think of the name of it. There's a term for that where you require all housing projects to create some affordable. Will you have any housing development in Andover to do that? Does Andover have to worry about HS30G? We're going to talk about that. Who does the Andover need to provide for and where and how? Again, the aging population, younger residents, can they live in their hometown? So as we proceed with those numbers, and I provided you with the documentation, we'll start to say, okay, could we, what could we do as a town to encourage affordable housing? So what are the strategies that could afford, encourage affordable housing? We'll start to come up with
probably not the next meeting. The next meeting we're going to actually identify target populations based on income, based on population and demographics, which identifies how many units maybe we should try to create in Andover, and then come up with strategies to create units. So it's starting to pick up some speed and starting to get much more interesting, I think. But I'm certainly open to any questions you may have.
One comment, Bill, is I know in the study that you did, I think it was back in 2017 for affordable housing for the Planet Conservation Development, I can't remember which, it had these big hunks of property that were potential development sites. And in our last meeting, know, a fellow came to talk to us. He was looking at buying the big hunk of property at the corner of Route 87 and Route 6 and maybe looking at putting a winery and event venue and that sort of thing in there. So, I think that takes, I think that was one of those properties that was in the previous study no longer available? There's been a lot before, there's one less now maybe.
Well, was a lot of land. We weren't using, know, it's up to him whether he wants to use it all for a winery or use portions of it, that's true. That definitely was one of them. It was a good, a lot of good sand and gravel.
I guess the other comment some of you may have seen in the River East this week that I made a little presentation to the Board of Selectmen trying to think that, you know, a town planner and an economic development coordinator might be a good strategy to go off and help us get the right kind of things in down. You all remember what the budget discussion was last year, probably going to be tighter this year, so that didn't meet with a lot of rousing success, but I wanted to at least plant that seed out there and talk about that a little bit before the Board of Selectmen got into the actual budget development. So when we came in with this plan in May, nobody can say, well, you didn't talk to us about that when we were getting ready to have the budget. I don't know if that's going be one of the strategies that we end up coming up with or not, but it was in the long term plan that the town put out in 2019, I think, as well as written up in our last plan of conservation and development that we needed, you know, a combined individual on a part time basis to look at guiding the town forward for these things that we might want to do. I did One
argument with that, Jed, that you might want to use is that there is a ton of money out there. The state is very flush with money, but you need to get it. You need to go out and get it. Having a staff person dedicated to that, for instance, pointed this out in Haddam is in the three years that I've been there, brought in 2,400,000 in grants. So there is a tremendous amount of money if you can identify projects that you want to accomplish. It's an obscene amount of money because of COVID and all the federal money that the state has. They're looking for projects to spend. But even if it's through the state legislature, they need presentations of this is what we want to do in the town to get the money. There is a lot of value to having somebody dedicated to that position. I use that in my own hometown here in Middlefield. They just hired a planner but prior to that they really didn't have one and they never got any of the money because of that.
That's good feedback, Bill, and it would have been nice to have had that a week ago, but well, I'm sure we're not done having that discussion with the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance. Yep. Now obviously, I guess the other, you know, just comment is that, you know, inflation's rising, home prices are going up, and probably the interest rates for mortgage loans are going be going up too. So that is going to make all this a little bit more difficult. Absolutely. Bill, are you working for Haddam now? Yes, I am. Do you used to work for Guilford or?
No, I used to work for I was with I was in Middletown for twenty five years and then Farmington for five. Right
now, in half an Adam now. Yep. Yep. And do you ever do any part time work?
I do like what I'm doing right now with Andover, pretty much only Andover. I've worked for a few other towns, but I've been working for Andover for years. Right, right.
So I had a question on your numbers. You seem to count the CHFA mortgages as meeting the affordability requirement? Yep. How can you do that? I mean, that's
That's what the state does. That's right from their table. CHFA and USDA, you have to be income qualified. But it's not 80%.
I don't know. They count it. They count it. Okay, thanks.
Jed, this is Leanne. I have a couple questions if Jim is through. Go ahead, Leanne.
Partly, I was going to ask partly along the lines of what Jim just said. At the beginning of the presentation, which is really interesting to me, you said there's 51 units now that qualify as affordable housing. I didn't think there were quite that many up at the senior and disabled Hop River homes. What else is in that number 51 number currently? Yeah, there's the the government assisted is Hopriver homes. We have 51 units there?
No, you have 20 You have I think a total of 24, but for some financing issue that Eric pointed out and the state noticed, it's down to 18 in 2020. So I think there's 24 total units there, but for counting purposes it's only 18 that count as affordable. And then the other ones are the ones that have CHFA or USDA mortgages. So those are private homes? Yes. Yep. That's what Jim was getting at?
It's somebody that somebody that has a certain income level that qualified for USDA mortgage and bought a private home in town, and so they're qualified Okay. As
And then my other question was about the chart you showed about the income levels. It's maybe a two part question with one, two, three and four member households. Yeah.
It looks like the the it's is it kind of based on the four member family size? Because 70 ninenine looks like roughly 80% of 105?
Yeah, like I said, it's published in huduser.gov how they do it. So obviously 80% for one person is not it's less than 80%, but it's based on how many people are in the household. So this is just published. I don't know how calculate it, but four people roughly is what they say is a family income.
So that's why it's Okay, close because that's to 80 far the closest to what would be like about 80% of $105 That's what I was trying to arrive at. And then just as part of that question, do just out of curiosity, when developers propose something, we have one, two, three and four family size here, does it fluctuate? I mean, there an average number? Like when developers say we want to come in and put in affordable housing, do they usually do a mix of these units that would accommodate these family sizes? Is there any pattern to it?
Yeah, definitely. In the next meeting, we're going to talk about population and demographics, and what you'll see is family size is just declining drastically over the last thirty, forty years. There's very few families that have three or four kids anymore. So family size is declining, the population is aging, so kids are all moving out. So what's happening is the demand, particularly in this kind of market in Andover, Eastern Connecticut market, and again, where I am in Haddam, we're building 120 units right now in two projects. And they're basically 61 of them is 82 units and 60% of the units are one bedroom and 40% are two bedroom and then the other one which is 42 units 40 of the units are one bedroom and two units are two bedroom because it's just, it's really in small towns like this, quite frankly, the market is downsizing people that love their town and don't want to leave, but just can't cut the grass and maintain a two thousand thousand five hundred square foot house.
So they're just downsizing, staying in town and getting a one bedroom or two bedroom apartment. Interesting.
Well, answers my question. Thank you. How many square feet are those apartments, Bill? Between six and one thousand. 601,000. So the one bedrooms are 600?
Yep. 600 square feet. Yeah. Six to 800, you know, in that range. A good rule of thumb for rent for a project that works, and this always works out very well, is $2 a square foot rent can cover all the debt and the maintenance and everything that works. So if you have a 600 square apartment, you need to collect to build it, to finance it, and to maintain it, you need to collect $1,200 in rent. Wow, that's a lot. And that
universally works. I have a whole presentation that shows that, and that has always been pretty works. And so the problem with that is a one bedroom. So one bedroom apartment, even if it was 600 square feet, to be affordable, you can only charge $8.30, but to make it work for a developer, he needs to charge 1,200. How are they making that work?
The I'm talking about are not affordable. Oh. That's why I afford, and we'll get into it at the next meeting, that's why you don't have to worry about eight-thirty gs because the numbers just don't work. If you're in somewhere like, I know when I was in Farmington, the numbers worked, So you could charge a premium. So if you built 100 units and 70% of them were market rate and 30% were affordable, you had to charge less for the 30%, but you could charge a premium because so many people wanted to live in Farmington to cover the loss. In most towns in Connecticut, in small towns in particular,
there's just not a delta between the two. Affordable and market is fairly close. It's a real challenge, it's a real challenge. Any other questions for Bill?
Do you think that the number of the affordable housing that we have down at the elderly housing is changed because they made it they may have taken six off of an income limit or something? They changed My it from
guess would be when those were built they probably had like a thirty or forty year mortgage. It was some kind of federal program that had a thirty or forty year restriction on them. I know in Middletown and Meriden all the Carabetta units were built as affordable and they had a thirty or forty year restriction and those restrictions are expiring. So they probably had to get some refinancing and that might have affected the affordability of them. It's my guess. I know Eric Anderson did know something about it and he said it had something to do with the financing. They refinanced something?
Something like that because like I said, those affordable restrictions, those units are pretty old. Those are what probably the 70s? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so something was probably expiring so they refinanced something without the income restriction. I don't doubt that they still charge an affordable rate, but they may not have that restriction anymore.
I had heard that we had a little apartment house or something over on Shottie Mill Road. Is anybody aware of anything we might have out there? Yeah. I was surprised that that didn't factor into our count for affordability, and maybe it's because they're not, I don't know. I didn't know anything about them. I just heard recently that they were there and you couldn't see them from the road or anything like that. Those one bedrooms over there are like 800 I think or eight and a quarter or something like $8.08 50. Do you know how many units you are Sky? Excuse me? Do you know how many units in the apartment complex?
I think there might be four buildings over there. That?
Yeah, I didn't think it was that many. But the problem with those is they're not they're not deed restricted. So even if they even if they were $300 a month, they have to have that deed restriction to qualify for affordable. Okay, forgot about that. That's the problem with those.
Bill, can you talk about the deed restriction a little more? How do you designate something or how does it, you accomplish getting it deed restricted? Is that something that developer has to commit to right upfront?
What'll happen is there's two ways of doing it. Let's say you get a state, let's say you get some kind of state grant to build them and then you automatically have to build that into it that you agree that you are going to deed restrict them for the forty years. Or if it's just a private developer coming in and building 30% of the units deed restricted, he would prepare a document that would be filed on land records, would deed restrict 30% of the units limiting appreciation to the CPI for forty years. Great, thank you.
Which again, if you stop and think about it, it really is working against the American dream. I mean, the reality is all of us probably bought a house, enjoyed the appreciation, sold with a nice bit of equity, and bought another house. And that's how it works. People now buying affordable are not going to be able to do that because it's not going to appreciate enough for them to really get any significant gain like we all enjoyed. But that is the law.
Any other questions? Well, thank you so much, Bill. Great. Found the presentation enlightening. I had many of the misconceptions that you talked about as we were going through and this certainly tells us what we're up against and looking forward to what you have for us next.
Yeah, I think you'll really enjoy the next one. I've enjoyed putting it together because it really zooms down to, okay, so how many units, what kind of goal should we have to really start to say, okay, in this plan, we're going to create X number of units to service this population. It gets really interesting.
In our next meeting, so you can have it on your calendars, February 28. We'd normally be a week earlier than that, but we moved it a week because of President's Day. Oh, okay. This one is
This one's off because of Martin Luther King. That's what I thought. Okay. So once we get past the first two months, they're all on the third Monday of the month after that. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you. Good night. Thanks, Bill. Good night. Thank you, Bill. Okay, so moving on, the next item up is on the gravel pit. Chris, we'll let you take it away as soon as, I guess, Abby will make you the cohost now. Okay.
Oops. Sorry about that. You should be able to now see your video.
Alright. Good evening, mister chairman and commission members. My name is Chris Bell. I'm the professional engineer from Higginham representing the applicant, William Genovese, who owns the gravel pit property. Back in just to refresh this little bit. Back in November, we had a request for a ninety day extension for the gravel pit so that we could take additional take the material out so we could because we were behind because we didn't have a place to put it over most of the fall. We would like to and at that time, we wanted to ask for permission to to get up to the property line of Martin Marshall, or is it Marshall or Marshall? Marshall Martin. Sorry about that. In order to make the property more more appeasing and as far as getting the hump down between the properties and make it a better site for our property and also for for his property, which made a lot of sense. And of course, we needed his permission to approach the property line since the gravel regulations do not allow within 50 feet of any property line that's not the owners. And that extension was granted at the time and we wanted to talk about extending the property line up. We had permission. We got a letter of permission which we sent in at that in December stating the mister Marshall's views of leaving the property line as it is, not to plant any large trees just to leave the shrubs there, which we were okay with. We'll leave it at grade, what's there, and we'll approach the property line to that point just before the shrubs. And that's pretty much how we had left it.
In November's meeting, for some reason I could not share my screen and I couldn't go over the restoration plan I had developed, which I had tweaked in December and sent the new one in on December 20, which I sent in to Jim, and I can share with you that restoration plan as we have it now. But just to bring you up to date, we I I guess the best thing to do is bring the plan up, and and then I can go from there and better explain what's going on now and what we see, gonna happen in the next month or so. So with your permission, I'd like to share the screen. Yep. Go ahead. There. Not yet.
Oops. Trouble is when I go share the screen, share. Yep, getting close. We see your screen now. All
right. You have it? Yep. Okay. And you see my cursor? Yep. Okay. Alright. This is the plan I sent in on December 20, which was the most updated I had at that time. Since that time, the excavation has proceeded. And basically, I looked at it on Thursday, which was the first time in quite a while since, before November. And the excavation, if you could follow my cursor, has gone from this line up in here with the pile actually removed, that big sand pile is gone, and the line now goes pretty much at this location and it dips in and comes back up out this way. We're still well under, you know, two phases of disturbance for the gravel pit area, and the estimate right now, according to what I looked out there, and also the excavator and hauler, he believes, and I pretty much agree with them, that there's about 4,000 cubic yards left that can be removed. And of course that's leaving a good amount to fill in the detention pond and the trench and to level out the area from the detention pond here all the way back to what has been restored in the past. Is pretty much at grade back here, but we will have some excess material to fill this a little bit.
You know inches to say just to get it level up to where what's already been restored. At this point, the owner has told me recently and up to only a few minutes ago, just want to make sure I got how he felt. Whatever is left of the 4,000 cubic yards that we do not finish before the time runs out, He will most likely not ask for an extension beyond that, whatever materials left he wants to just spread throughout from the restored area through the remaining disturbed area that is going to encompass this area here. Just as a for instance, if he spread out the material that's there right now, it would be probably around 18 inches or around 18 inches to two feet or so of material in this area that's above what's what's there right now, being around maybe 18 inches or so. What elevation are you talking about? From what's there right now, which is about at elevation. It's around 96, because it's about level with the benchmark at 96 out here. I'm sorry, two ninety six. I just I I keep thinking just, you know, numbers are less than a 100, but it's elevation two ninety six. The floodplain
throughout this area is elevation two ninety four and a half, plus or minus a tenth or so, and we want to be above that floodplain elevation anyway. So being at that, like I said, if he he comes short of not getting the full 4,000 out, whatever's left, he'll he'll level out, which is really the goal of the whole project is to get a level lot. His goal was not to do a gravel pit operation where he makes money. I mean, he's probably not even going to break even on this as far as just getting the property level and restored to be a good looking lot to sell either by itself or with the property next door, just to make it viable. And that's about what the purpose of us getting this permission to go to all the way to the property line. This this line here is the 50 foot line from the Marshall property. And again, we'll be going right up maybe five to 10 feet from the property line here with our restoration. The shrubs are located only two or three feet off the line, and we'll be just going right up to that. Again, there's plenty of material to restore the area and there's plenty of material to bring this up a little bit higher than it is right now, and you know to fill the trench in and the detention pond.
And that material is going to go right as you follow this cursor, right around the detention pond, all the way around by the trench, and back again over here. The area of the access road and to the right over here, that is all original grade, that is not going to change, that is in the floodplain. We are not going to be filling any area that's in the existing floodplain, So everything is outside of the floodplain in the original area that was excavated down. That was all above 294.5. So basically that's what I had to bring to this meeting. At his rate of removal, which has been less than 20 truckloads a week, he's going to have to step it up, he's going to be pressured to step up his removal. He's going to have to get up to over 25 loads a week in order to make this 4,000 cubic yard removal. Again, if he doesn't make it by the end of the approval period, they will stop and grade off. And basically he can't, if he grades off, he can't plant until April, but he'll be able to grade off and probably not spread the topsoil until just before he plants, so there won't be any erosion problems. Thread the topsoil with the silt fence put up and then grass it, you know, power mulch it like we did this entire area that's up here. So that's basically what I have to present this evening, and this is my restoration plan. I hope everybody can see it, and has a lot of notes on it basically of what to do, and how things are going to progress as we close the gravel operation.
Chris, how, what will the elevation be after the topsoil pile is distributed across the whole area?
At this point it will be about two ninety six, That's what we plan to shoot for. Well you just said if you, if you,
distributed the rest of the pile it would be two ninety six. It would be higher than that, that's correct. I mean, we're shooting for for about two ninety six, but if we don't finish the 4,000 yards, it'll, you know, so about for every thousand yards or so, it's it's it's gonna go up probably about four inches. So, you know, we could be 96 and a half. We could be 97, in that range. Again, we're not gonna know till we get to the end, and we'll see how much we have left over. I doubt that he's going to ask for another extension. It's not in his realm of patience, I guess I would have to say at this point. He wants to get this project done and over with.
And what's the great elevation of the, you know, the gas station next door? That's around right about $2.94.
Yeah right right here Jed it says Plus or minus? Right about at number three, if you go into the gas station then, it says 294 right there, point 3 Okay, yeah, yeah,
about 294. It's it's right at the flood stage or just below. As you can see, here's the flood elevation over here at 294. The flood elevation over here is 295, so right in the middle of interpolating is 294 And A Half. So, Yeah, okay. That's the numbers we're looking at here as far as flood elevation, and all the elevations out here are, you know, in the 280s and below, two eighty eight up in this area. This is all floodplain, always was. And this area is in the road itself. It's all just out of the floodplain.
Agent Halsey, did you have any comments on the restoration plan?
No, I don't. This plan is the plan that was posted on the website. So okay,
just for the record. I wasn't sure Chris had resent it today.
Yeah, the one I had in November had more area that wasn't removed yet, and this basically just added what was due, what was existing on December 20, plus probably a few more notes, and probably some removal of some old notes that were no longer appropriate anymore.
So in the end, is the elevation across the whole construction site going to be the same elevation?
That is the goal. Yes. From the area just outside the floodplain, which is just above the access road. I mean, where it was existing, this picked up pretty quick in through here, and we put the detention pond in and took this material out and relocated it. But the goal is to get from this elevation here near the pond, which around two ninety four, bring it up a little bit higher than the existing pond to about two ninety six, and then go right across the whole elevation. Again, if we have leftover material that might be two ninety six and a half, Plus or minus. But it's it's going to be from the access road all the way in. The way over to the property line.
If you end up with with excess material and and you're graded basically into the site, will it be graded towards the back?
No. It's gonna be graded on the whole this whole site. Depending how much excess we have, we might, you know, strip some topsoil off and fill this this area. I I don't know if that's a good idea or not. I you know, we may just keep this good because this is high right now. This picks up from 96, and it moves up in a little bit higher elevation before it goes up this slope here. I did not take any final grades on here, but I know it's higher than 96. It just looks it, so we're probably going to be meeting it here in this area, and then the slope just picks up gradually, very gradually, then goes up on a two to one slope. I know that there's some concern should be able to meet it pretty much by the silt fence that's there now.
I know that there's concern about drainage to the right as we as we look at it. I believe it would be the South Southeast. That won't be affected by any any addition any fill that is is graded out of of this stock
that's there. We're really grading towards Towards the river. The front at this point. And the way the grade was, as you can see from the old contours, which are still on here, there was a high point across here, then there was a low point saddle that went back up to a high point here and then back down. So all this area was drainage to the right, and the other one with drainage to the left. Now it's just going to drain across the property sheet flow and go into the soil, you know, the type A soil and head towards the front and head to this area before it dissipates into the wetland. Again when this site is developed, assuming it's gonna be a commercial site, there'll be a building and a parking lot in the detention basin to take up the excess drainage. And What were you trying to say?
I said when the site eventually gets bought and sold, you know, there might be a building on it with a parking lot and probably a detention basin or an underground detention and, whatever gets proposed and planning and zoning approves. So, the drainage will be different then for a new site and it'll be handled I guess at this at that time.
How many more weeks are there left? Do you remember Jed?
What do you mean how many more weeks? Do they have on their extension? So it was a ninety day extension that expires about March 17. And at the last meeting we were talking about once the extension is complete, that's when they go into restoration mode and that should be complete within sixty days of March 17.
I believe that, you know, the initial time from when the plan, the gravel pit operation ends, they'll have a few weeks to get the site graded properly, and you know by the time April rolls around and weather starts getting warm they'll be able to plant the grass and you know we should have grass growing by the time the the time the gravel put operation ends within the sixty days I would imagine that shouldn't be too hard to accomplish.
So they have like six more weeks. There's like 200 more loads to come out of there. They have six weeks. That's, you know, if he's saying two twenty a load, 20 a week, that's only a 100 and Well, 25 a week, I would say. And he may not get 25 a week out. I mean, so it's you know,
he's gonna be pushed to do that. He's he's been warned already. You're supposedly gearing up.
But the plan, Chris, would be to lower that, you know, as we talk about that 50 foot section. Over here, yeah. That
that will be at the end of restoration, that will all be down to grade and spread out over that whole area. That's correct.
You know, the few things we have left to do is contact Hank, the herbologist. Gruden. Thank you, last name escaped me for a second, and talk about what he wants planted, which I guess he has another consultant he wants to bring in and ask that in the spring when it's time to plant, see what kind of vegetation he wants in the turtle area, and that's the only thing that's still hanging out that we have to find out yet. But we do have at least the grass seed for that, not the grass, I shouldn't say grass seed, the planting seed for it, the grass is mixture in the area, it's that tall bluebell plant, and then whatever shrubs that they want to add to that, and that's left to be done. I understand the seed was already purchased and waiting to get spread in the spring.
Any other commission members have any other questions at this point?
Oh, this is Leanne. I just have one. Go ahead, Leanne. Can you hear me? This, according to our minutes of last month, was going be taken up next month, and obviously we're talking about it now. Is there any significance to that, or did it just work out that Mr. Bell was available this month?
It was a point of confusion. Somehow I thought that Jim said that it was going to be done in February. Jim asked me why I wanted it done in February, and I told him I thought it was what you said that was for Chris Bell. So when we had the opportunity to take it up tonight and Chris was ready, we thought that would be a good idea.
Excuse me. Okay, thank you. And I couldn't do it last month.
But there was no reason to wait until February, and so that's why we're talking tonight. Okay.
Yeah, so hopefully if everything works out, they'll be up to that point in February also. So it's a good thing we're talking about.
Miss Hutchinson, I know you had a you had a comment you wanted to make tonight.
My comment has to do with any impact or a negative impact that the final plan would have concerning the property that I own directly to the, I call it, the east of this project. I was not aware that this had been filed back in December, so hadn't contacted Jim until today with regard to getting up to date information, which I will I'm requesting Jim now to set up an appointment with me so that I can get this information and have my people look at it. Bottom line, my concern is is that whatever is done does not negatively impact my land. I heard terms tonight of filling in the retention pond and the spreader, etcetera, will apparently be eliminated. Someone raised the question of where restriction the water would drain. Would it drain toward the river? The answer appeared to be no. It would drain toward the front of the property, I. E. The roadside,
and then some comment about it draining onto my land. Obviously, I'm concerned about any draining onto the land. But as information outlined tonight by mister Bell, it wasn't clear what that would be with regard to the final drainage. Just some comment about it could go to the east. So bottom line, I'm concerned about any negative impact this project has on my land.
Okay. That's certainly a reasonable concern. And I guess at this point, it was good that we discussed it in January instead of February.
I only I only mentioned that in that obviously, the details I'm hearing for the first time tonight because I did not know this had been filed until today. Yep. Understand.
And the other comment that also has to do with filling above whether or not any of the fill, depending on the material removed plus the topsoil, what impact that might have, whether it's gonna be higher than it was previously, and what impact that's going to have on the drainage.
And and you said that you would be having having, you know, your representative evaluate Yeah, yes.
Okay. With that in mind, I was originally going to suggest a motion that we approve the restoration plan. I think I will hold that in abeyance for a month to see if we get any additional feedback from Ms. Hutchinson. It was our intention that, you know, the restoration plan certainly not negatively impact your property. If you're going to have somebody take a look at it, I think we can hold off approval until next month on that. But I do think that tonight we could authorize the removal of material up to what I will call the western side of the property by the gas station over there to get that hump level down, which I think is in everybody's best interest. Unless, Chris, you think you won't be to that point until February 28 at our next meeting where we could do that all at once. I don't want if the guy you're representing thinks he can get that material out of there, I certainly don't want to be slowing him down.
Honestly, I don't know. I mean, if he speeds up the operation, he could well be at that point. But just to step back a second, I can respond to some of Mrs. Hutchinson's concerns. I mean, I can at least give some information on that if you would like the Commission to let me answer some of those comments. I'd be glad to answer some of them. And I'm sure, you know, we can wait till February to hear any independent counsel regarding that. If, with your permission, I'd like to answer some of those. Would that be okay? Yes, be good.
And I think it all has to do with the drainage going on to her property and steps to minimize that. Yeah, absolutely.
From day one of this approval, you know, back in June 2019, it was always the intention to make this, you know, as flat as we possibly could and drain towards the front. You know, initially we had a detention pond with just, actually even moving it as we went along, and that was approved. We only kept it there as we thought that this was a better idea and put in a conveyance trench to convey the water, which worked out fine. As again, it was always the idea to level it. Now as the property was so high in elevation, when it's higher in elevation than the lower ground cover, not as much as would have with a large pasture grass or very thick grasses, meadow grasses,
with the higher elevation you have higher runoff, and the runoff that was going to her property is going to get actually reduced because of the lower slope. Now that it's flat, the drainage water has a much higher chance of permeating and infiltrating into the ground instead of running off. With the better ground cover, it's going to have a lot less, much longer detention times and then be able to seep into the ground. And that's actually quantified the drainage calcs that we did way back when. There's going be a lot less runoff off this property, it's going to affect her a lot less. Affecting and making the drainage run-in a different direction and go towards the front first instead of going directly off to the east, we're making it go a longer distance with very low slope, and it's going to go into the ground much quicker, and by the time it gets towards exiting towards the east, towards the wetland, it'll be a lot less water, a lot more filtered, a lot less debris. And again this drainage is going to change again as they develop the property, and it will have to be looked at appropriately to make sure the drainage doesn't affect her property again. Again, it would drain towards the front to a detention area most likely
and go from there. So, in effect, I mean we should be doing, improving things rather than making things worse through here, you know better filtration and a cleaner type water than that probably existed before and a lot less. Again, when the site gets developed, they will have to make sure and maintain that level of, conservatism and make sure they, detain the water and filter it properly. So, again, we welcome any comments that will come from anybody, and I can address those at that time at the next month's meeting. That would be fine.
And actually, if we get those ahead of time, it it would be a lot easier for me to prepare an answer than to do any calculations if necessary to if if asked to, rather than try to answer those on the spot.
Chris, the grade the grade around that road, along the road, let's say at the number number four line Mhmm. I see a benchmark in there. What that says two eighty seven?
That's correct. That's low because if that that's where I I asked them to put a benchmark where it wouldn't get run over in the access road, and that's where he put it. And, yeah, that's pretty low. That's, I mean, you have to walk down to get to
it. It's pretty low on the ground. So I would assume the property to the east that we're talking about to the right or to the east here is 287 or lower? That's correct.
And the grade you're going to be finalizing is going to be 296?
Yeah, but that is to the west of the access road, right now is, I mean was fairly high, it was you know the two way
above. So now there's only going to be a 10 foot elevation change before there was you know 25 or so right? That's correct. Or 30?
Yeah well actually over 30. Yeah. Right. Yeah. This is
elevation two thirty here. Right. And so that whole area is going to be at one elevation, then it's going to drop off to the two eighty seven or lower.
That's correct. Actually, that's elevation three ten. Yeah. So from three ten to, you know, that that was quite a bit of drop. 20, about 25 feet. Yeah.
With the chair's permission, could he run those figures by again where his arrow is?
Oops. That's was this was Elevation 310. Mhmm. It is is now about two ninety seven because this whole hill was brought down and the excavation stopped here at this point, and then these are contour grades going up to existing here. So it was stopped here at this elevation around two ninety seven or so, and then went all the way up to the existing elevation here, which I guess is around 300 or so up here. That area wasn't touched. Right?
From the top of this hill down no. That was it was the trees were removed, but, was not excavated, and it was kept there. And and it was actually, grassed and seeded kind of in a very rough state. There's a lot of debris on the ground here, branches and things. But this was the back side of the property before it got to wetlands. In this area, as you recall, was the area where all the stumps were, those were finally removed. But this area was never touched as far as grading goes. Had to stay 95 feet, I think, from the wetland flag, which we did. Did that answer your question, Ms. Hutchinson?
Not really. I was concerned with the area just below that and coming through where he had indicated the excavation had been, and there would be some spreading of additional material, etcetera.
Yeah. Okay. The I'm sorry. I didn't answer your question, but I I think I know what you're looking at. From the access road here, this is around elevation about two ninety. It's it's it's in the floodplain. The area just to the left of that was when we started going up the hill very quickly. And this area was was from Elevation 294, several feet in, all the way across was excavated down. This is Elevation 310. And this was brought down to Elevation 297. To the right of the access road, to the right of Elevation 298, I'm sorry 290,
which is all the way through here, the access room, just to the right of it drops off fairly quickly down to 287 and below 285. This contour here, if I could, oops. I guess I can't blow that up. Maybe I can blow it up a little bit. Now let me pan across. This is elevation two eighty eight down and through here. Elevation two eighty eight, and then this drops into a kind of a low point here, two eighty six. This is the two eighty six contour here, and then goes back out to two eighty six down in this direction over here. Again, this is all low in the floodplain area all the way out to the road
until you get, this is elevation I believe, to 90 out here, this line in here, again still in the floodplain. But all the road from the access road, which is shown here, all the way to the left of that is going to be restored to about elevation two ninety six to two ninety seven, all in through here, which is now elevation 310, it's about, you know, a good 20 feet above that. What was that originally? What elevation?
A three ten right here. This is the 310 contour line right there. There's the number 310. This elevation here is 310, that's this contour line. This is 312314. So that was Elevation 314 up in here, This area, but again this was brought down and sloped. This is a topsoil pile that's over in this area that is going to be, it's probably about one third gone. The rest of it will be used to spread for this entire area. There is still topsoil up here that's being piled up on top, but there's plenty of topsoil to spread for the entire project there. We did not take any topsoil out at all. That was not allowed to be taken out because all the topsoil is going to get brought back in and used.
So is it your representation that through the entire area other than where you didn't excavate in the rear of the property that through that entire area that the finished products, so to speak, is going to be at or below what it was originally, Or is it going to be above?
Well, it's definitely gonna be below what it was originally. Yes. Yeah. Because this is, you know, this is elevation 300. Now it's around two ninety seven. So this is already, you know, 13 feet below. You know, this entire area is all below. This entire area that's outside these these hatch marks is all below what it originally was. These are all contour lines going up. This is elevation 300 here, so that again, that's like 13 feet lower now. The only area that's in this area that's higher is the topsoil pile, which is quite high, and that will be brought down. So everything to the west or to the left side here of the access road is all going to be brought down to basically one elevation, and it will drain towards the front as originally shown on the original plan, and it still is, would drain towards this direction and outlet in the sheet flow right in this area.
Would you get would you what repeat what you said about the sheet flow.
Yeah. It's it since it's all flat, it's gonna sheet flow. Mhmm. You know, not have any concentrated flows, no channels, and it will sheet flow across this area. What happened to my plan? You
just lost your picture, Chris. I know. I did too. Oh, okay.
I think I think what he's trying to say Mrs. Hutchinson is that the whole place is going to be three feet above the parking lot at the gas station now at the final grade. Three feet above it?
Above the grade of the parking lot at the gas station now. I know what happened to my plan. That's what he's proposing to us. What about on the Easterly
boundary that joins mine? No. No. That's gonna be changed.
Yeah. Easterly. Yeah. That's from the access road east, you know, that's gonna be all original, same. I mean, I know the access road was graded to take the bumps out, but, you know, it's basically, still at the original grade.
I think one of the problems that we might be experiencing, Chris, is if we say it's all going to be level grade, that doesn't necessarily jive with the sheet flow going, I will say, south for using, you know, if we were to look Yeah, at I understand.
I keep using them both synonymous and they're not. I mean Right. When the restoration plan were to show a little bit of an increase, I think, in elevation over towards the east side so that it didn't flow towards Ms. Hutchins' property, I think that would alleviate a lot of her concern.
Yeah, But that too much It could be half a foot
over the course of it. It just needs to show that the water is not going to drain her way.
The intention was to drain towards the front. I talk about level, it's, you know, when you when you have like a six or seven inch drop across three or 400 feet, it's not level, but it's still sheeting across it. And you know, I shouldn't call it level because it's, I'll just say it's extremely low slope. And the intention is not to go have the drainage go across the access road, which it does now. The intention is to have it grade towards the front, which it's doing now. I should say it was graded across the access road in the past, now it's not going to be grading that way. It's going to grade towards the front and, you know, this is low right now. Elevation two ninety, two ninety, it's like two ninety two around the pond. What we would like to do is, you know, maintain this two ninety two across here and you know bring this down across so that we're not, we're almost level. It's barely just draining in that direction and you know we can do that, you know, they can grade pretty closely to a low slope like that and make sure we drain in that direction,
you know, without having pockets all over the place.
Mean, I- You you got a lot of notes on this plan.
Yeah, I can pop a few elevations on there so that it drains That could out be one of them that it'll be graded to
not have flow grow to the east. Think that would be
what we're looking for. I that that's I can show some elevations on there so you can better see that. Right now I think what Jed is saying is how
I feel also that it should be graded so that we don't have any problems with it going towards the east ever. Okay, yeah.
And put that on your print like Jed also said, I believe. Understood. Understood.
Okay. Thank you, Ms. Hutchinson. Anything else for us tonight? And we will hold off on approval of the restoration plan until you have the opportunity to have the plan evaluated. But I think we understand your concerns. Thank you very much. We want to address them. And if
I could request of Jim Hallisey, if he could see that a copy is run, that'll save me catching up with him by the phone. And when it's ready, I'll come in and pick it up and whatever it costs for for doing it. Just let me know. Okay. I'd be happy to do that. Okay.
So, this point, I think we do have one action that I would like to take tonight. And I would like to make a motion that the operation can extract material from the 50 foot buffer zone abutting M Martin's property. I'll second that. Okay, thank you, Scott. Any discussion on that motion?
This is Leanne. Can I ask a question? I hope it's related to this. Yeah, go ahead, Leanne. Have either the Wetlands agent and or Hank Gruner paid any visits in the last X number of months? I mean, we know our own agent is working on it obviously, but does anyone know if either one of those individuals has been keeping somewhat current with this?
Jim, I think you're the only guy that would have the answer to that question.
Yeah, I know that Hank Groner's been out there. It's been a few months as far as the last I knew. I mean, could have been there since, but the Wetlands agent. He was there when?
Probably a few months ago. Okay, I don't have an exact date, but he he has monitored it fairly closely.
Throughout the course of the project, but not the Wetlands agent.
I can't speak for the wetlands agent. He hasn't. I haven't been there with him for a few months.
Okay, so we don't really have a record of whether he's been there or not.
Not that I'm aware of, but the wetlands issues they. They haven't been operating. In the buffered area in quite a while either. In the Upland Review Area.
Okay, We're about 200 feet, more than 200 feet from the wetlands right now. All right, thanks.
Okay. Any other questions? Hearing none, I'll call for a vote on the motion. Anne? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leigh Ann? Aye. Steve?
Aye. And I vote aye as well. The motion passes five-zero-zero. And thank you, Chris. I think we're getting there. Yep. It looks like.
And we'll see you on February 28, is our next meeting.
Yes, I hope by that time we'll have some good news to report on how far we've gotten. You'll be getting your weekly reports. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks Chris. Good night. Okay, that completes item 5B.
This is Catherine Hutchinson again. Could I, because I need to leave the meeting, just thank everyone for extending the courtesy to me to be able to speak what I wanted to speak during your meeting rather than waiting till the end. I really appreciate it.
Oh, you're very welcome. It was our pleasure. Thanks for for coming and sharing your concerns. Alright. Thank you. Good night. Bye. Okay. The next item up is discussion of sign regulations update. And so, I thought I would start by I did send out the clean copy on all the sign regulations. And so hopefully everybody's had the opportunity to go through those. And I thought I would ask if there were any questions on what I had sent out. I do have a couple of areas that I still have concerns that I'll share with you, but I thought I would get your feedback on those first if there was any. Okay, hearing none, I guess, Abby, if you'll allow me to share my screen.
You should be able to. I just need you a cohost.
Okay, so this is, you know, where I'm wrestling with myself right now and I thought I'd share my thoughts with you, see if there was any feedback. Last time we talked signs, I had said maybe we should not regulate signs in windows. It was just too hard looking at the gas station, especially the one at three sixteen, which has all the windows up and we just, I wasn't going to bother with signs. And then I thought some more and I said, that's not the right answer. You know, our regulations, we ought to regulate how we think it ought to be. And sometimes we put into regulations things that we have no intention of ever enforcing. And At least not unless there's a complaint that comes out. And so I had three options on the window signs. We could put them into the regulations, what we would like to see, but not always enforce them because we just don't have the time to go off and enforce that. It doesn't rise high enough on the list.
We could put into regulations what we have currently allowed by non enforcement, which would be what we see at the gas station out at 03:16. And that's where I was headed. But I said, no, I don't like that. That should not be the norm of what we see for window signs in Andor, you know, we can we can do better than that. I'm with you Jed.
And then maybe, you know, one of the things we have is we should expect better enforcement of our regulations to comply with them. I guess one of the other options was I could have been silent on the window signs and just let everybody do whatever they want there, but that that didn't seem consistent with the sign thing either. So anyhow, my my thought was we could put the number that we've used, you know, throughout signs everywhere here is 32 square feet maximum for a window sign. We could put that into our regulations, which is much more generous than we currently have, but it's something that is much less than what we see in some of the gas stations and that sort of thing. And that's where I guess my thinking is tonight. So what's everybody? I hear what Scott said on that. Anybody else have thoughts on should we regulate window signs and should we expect people to follow our regulations and should we limit it at all to like 32 square feet?
It doesn't seem like they have any glass showing down there. They don't, yep, they
are window signed. Every window is completely blocked with signage and then there's a bunch of other signs hanging around too. So even if we just went to enforce the other signs, they'd be coming down a little bit. And I did ask Jim today to pull the files on both of the gas stations because I don't, you know, not even talking about the window signs, you know, signs out there are clearly higher than 10 feet, clearly bigger than 32 square feet. And I'm just wondering if there's anything in the record that shows how we got where we are. And I don't have an answer for that yet.
That's it. That one big sign is over the regulated
sign. It is. It is. And there's and I'm not necessarily opposed to anything there. Right. Just it sticks out like a sore thumb that the two gas stations are nowhere near in compliance with our current regulations. And so we ought to see how did we get there. And I think I know how we got there. And there was a thought in the past, maybe, I had the thought in the past that if you went to a special permit, the regulations were not appropriate and you could do whatever you wanted. And that's not true. When you do a special permit to put in the sign or anything else, you have to continue to comply with all the other regulations. The special permit would require us to have a public hearing where we get input from the public, and maybe there are extenuating circumstances where in this particular location we don't want to allow the maximum. And an example of that would be when we talked about Scott Beebe's kennel. And we were looking at whether or not a Class A kennel should be special permit or not. And we chose to say yes, it should be special permit because there might be a lot that has the right size for a kennel, but it's in, for some reason, it's not the optimum place to put a kennel, and we could not approve it based on that. So it's not, the special permit with a public hearing does not allow us to abandon all the regulations. It allows us to use extra judicial insight. There might be some extenuating reasons why we wouldn't want it where it's going be put. It allows us to act on that.
So anyhow, that's how I think we got there. We said that if we use a special permit, we don't have to comply with the regs. But I don't know that for a fact. That's just a guess. All right. Okay, so I'm going to put 32 square foot window space and we'll let Jim figure out if there's anything in the record that shows how we got there. Next issue, political signs. And as I may have mentioned, I got an email back from Mark Brandt's late this afternoon that apologized profusely for not getting back sooner, but for some reason he'd been completely crazy for the last two weeks. But his thought was that, like I was suggesting, we consolidated a lot of signs into temporary signs. And maybe a political sign isn't a temporary sign. I was going put some regulation where, you know, posted for longer than eighteen months, like it says here, requires a permit. We said that in our current wording for temporary signs. Attorney Branch pointed out that there are some people out there who don't think the twenty twenty election is over yet. And so we are way beyond election day and coming into where it's certainly not a temporary site anymore if we put some kind of length on that. But what we did for the last election cycle that both the political parties seemed to be happy with is we said you can put signs up no more than 10 foot high,
no more than 32 square feet, no more than 50 square feet total, and it could be up for whenever you want to put it up and take it down whenever is appropriate. They mostly all came down within a week or so after the election. One of the things that that was not stressed in the last go around that is not a change, but consistent with our previous regs is the signs can't be posted on, they can be posted on town property like out at the dump town hall and that sort of thing, but not in the town right away. That varies a little bit, but it's generally within 10 feet at the edge of the road. And it also says you can't put a sign within 15 feet of the yard property lines. You know, it's got to be clear that the signs are in your yard. And so I left those that wording consistent with what used to be there, but I think everybody would be happy with that. But instead of having it lumped into the temporary sign category, I wanted to be very clear. You know, shouldn't be having to guess at what the regs are. Here's the rules for political science.
And we get a public hearing before we implement these and I would invite both of the heads of the political parties over here so that they could have their say and we make sure that we hear from them. But I think they would be happy with that.
Why Jed would we want to have a political sign up for more than, you know, a couple months maybe at the very outside I would say.
I wouldn't. But the courts have said that you can't. It's a free speech issue. The courts have said we cannot limit the amount of time that a political sign is up. And how can We can only limit a political sign to the maximum that we allow in our other signs for those areas. And so that's why you get nowhere in our regs do we say a sign could be more than 32 square feet. So that's why the biggest political sign is 32 square feet. And nowhere in our regs do we say that you can have signage in excess of 50 square feet. Now, I think maybe out in the business zone, you might be able to have signage more than that, but that's what we limited it to so that I could say that's the limit for the political signs too. Then we just don't get too crazy with those.
But I would like to have the sign, you know, if I were to make the rules, I would say sixty days before the election, seven days after the election, that's that's your window, but that's been deemed unconstitutional. Because somewhere in our regulations, have eighteen months?
We do. That's what, well, it actually, our current regulations specify that you can't post a political election sign more than thirty days prior to the election. And at the last go around, we agreed that that was too restrictive and we agreed to sixty days. I don't know if sixty days is good enough now. But clearly, more than thirty days is necessary because a lot of people had already voted thirty days prior to the election. They said, why put it up now? Everybody has got their mind made up. That is what and our old reg said that the zoning commission could extend that to ninety days. But ninety days isn't based on anything either. And so that's why I was just going to take out the time limit for it and hopefully, you know, we can be kind of reasonable. I think most of the political signs I see, you know, are down now. There's a couple not to do with any election that are still up, but are kind of political in nature and are protected by free speech.
Well, are some pretty large ones that are regarding a specific candidate, right? And those are longer than eighteen months. So how would we, how would you enforce that? You'd tell them they need a permit and then they'd apply for the permit and they'd still keep it up, right?
Well, and that gets into the rope with the temporary signs. Has been viewed as unconstitutional. I cannot put a time limit on those signs. Now I'm not aware of those signs in Andover right now, but I've seen them other places. And again, my exposure to signs is pretty much as I walk around the lake. But
anyhow, I think, you know, we are on firm footing, limiting the sign to 32 square feet. And I did see a couple of those primarily along Route 6 during election season. But at least it puts an upper limit on what can be out there that's defensible. And same thing with the 50 square feet total. If somebody had a, you know, I think the average little election sign is normally about three square feet. That would give somebody to put like 16 signs in their yard before they exceed the 50 square foot limit if they were all that. And that's plenty. I think the most I saw last year walking around was 10 or 12, but that was plenty of signs. And so that's what I'm thinking on political signs at this point. I'll just put something in, here are the rules for political signs, they meet all the constitutional requirements for free speech. If somebody, again, there have been a couple of signs that have been very offensive. And we cannot go tell them to take it down. We can have somebody go out and talk to them and ask them to take them down, but that's really all we can do in that case. But I wanted to break it out. I think we collected a bunch of signs into temporary signs, pendulum swung a little too far, wanted to back it off just a little bit. You put a special paragraph on political signs in there.
I think it's great, Jed. I just question how enforceable this is gonna be if people don't wanna take their signs down. Well, we can't enforce it. Yeah,
It is unenforceable. That's why I'm going take this thing that says posted longer than eighteen months requires a permit. I'm going to get rid of that part there. You know, we just can't do it. Okay, then the third thing that I wanted to split out, you know, I didn't like the way in temporary signs, and again, now I come down to temporary signs are like tag sale signs, the steak fry dinner at the firehouse sign, selling plants at Easter or over at the firehouse or something, those kinds of things. Temporary signs, I forget whether it was sixty days or whatever taken down seven days after. I think that's good for the temporary signs. I was confused. I didn't like the wording, is it specified to real estate signs? Because some of those signs are up a lot. You you don't know when you're going to sell your place. Right now it sells in two days, but that's not always been the case. And it might be longer than a temporary sign there. I think most of the signs come down within a week of the sale actually going through. And so that's that. And I was going put if longer than eighteen months requires a permit. Because when I talked about getting rid of how long the real estate sign could be up, attorney branch was talking about there are properties over in Glastonbury that are for lease
and there's always something for lease. And so they've had the for lease sign up for years over there and he wanted to have some kind of a bounds on that. And so that's where I was putting the posted for longer than eighteen months requires a permit. And so I don't know that that will do any good. I don't know that we can enforce it, but if somebody makes a complaint that gives us something to cite, and then the guy's got to come in and get a permit, there's a given burden with that, that it might be just easier to take the sign down. And then you're going to see, that's where you're going to get into. He takes the sign down for a week, puts it back up, resets the clock. And so we probably can't win that either, but we can give our best to show what the expectation is. I haven't seen the real estate signs be abused, so yeah, I think not a problem. And that's all that I wanted to talk about on signs. I'll go into build those in there. I think we're getting pretty close. And I'll show you an updated version hopefully a month from now and we can decide if we're good to go or, you know, and schedule a public hearing with it with all this other stuff that we wanted to do.
So, can we just go over something? Just so I understand this correctly. Yep. The gas stations, those signs are well over 32 square feet. The big, the big signs. Yep. So, even if they did come before the appeals board and got a an action that said that they could build their whatever it is, size square foot they're over then their sign limit is up is that what you're saying that there's no more signs to be put up on that premise?
So one of the one of the things that we did change in all the spots in here is that if a special permit, like let's talk about the piece of property by the Ben Franklin Place. They're going to come through planning and zoning with the site plan to build a store. And one of the things that we can ask for on that site plan, we should ask for, is the proposed signage. And so that is where we can make sure that the signage that's proposed is consistent with our regulations. I think there may have been times, and the one that I am aware of that I'll go back to was right after I got on the Planning and Zoning Commission where we had the home occupation for the fella off River Road behind the ball fields over there for his home property. And the way it was explained to me as I started asking questions about the regulations is this is a special permit, the regulations don't apply. And I was new at the time and I said, okay, I didn't like it. But that's what I heard. I won't say that's what was said, I will always say that's what I heard and nobody wanted to talk about the regulations. After I got to be chairman, I studied the regulations a little more and it says that with a special permit, you do have to follow all the regulations,
but you have to have a public hearing. And so that's why I think that those gas stations might be that way. I asked Jim again to pull the file just so we can see if there's any clues in there as to how we got to where we did. But if the Planning and Zoning Commission authorized that, I think they're good to go. I don't think there's anything we can do about it. It's just like if the zoning agent makes a ruling on those things that he has, you know, cognizance over, that's his business. But first is to find out what's in the files to have a clue as to how did we get to where we are today because I can't see how we got there looking at our wrecks.
I think it probably is just improvements over the years. And that could be too. Nobody questioned it.
And one of the things that we have learned, and Jim pointed out was a concern of his, is that if we approve signage, is the Planning and Zoning Commission, if somebody wants to change the signage, they have to come back before the Planning and Zoning Commission. And we can either decide it's a minor change, zoning agent handles it, or we can have our say on it. We would make that determination and go from there. Anything else on that, Scott? No. Okay. Anyhow, so we'll get our chance out of that 580 Lake Road. That property is with the Wetlands Commission right now. I would expect that they will get approval from wetlands at the early February meeting, so we will probably see an application for that shortly thereafter. Those guys seem to be on the ball and moving it down the field quickly. Next item up was, you know, we talked just a little bit about
alcohol and cannabis regulations at the last meeting. And somebody asked, is there anything in the state statutes that talks about these rules that we have in our current regulations. And I was not able to find anything. That doesn't mean it's not there. That was one of the questions I had for Attorney Branch and he hasn't got back to me on that yet. But what I did do is I went to I just looked at Columbia's regulations. And they don't mention anything about cannabis yet. But well, our regulations talk about 500 feet. Their regulations specify a thousand feet. And this is is a package store consumed off the premises. A thousand feet of another package store or retail outlets selling alcoholic beverage to be consumed off the premises, kind of like a grocery store, I think. Well, no, I take that back. I'm not exactly sure what that means. Nor within a thousand feet in a direct line from property of a public school, I like that, playground, library, or church. The store primarily engaged in sale of groceries, which would be a grocery store, also sells beer, so that'd be regarded as selling alcohol for the purposes of this section. So Columbia doesn't say anything about being near the downline,
which I liked, and they used 500, they used a thousand feet where we had 500. And then I looked at what about the bars and that sort of thing? They call it clubs there, but a business where alcoholic liquor may be sold for consumption on the premises. If any entrance to the premises was in 2,500 feet radius from the entrance of any other building or premise, which shall be used for the purpose of sale of alcohol clicker. And so again, our regulation said 500 feet and they didn't say anything about the town line there for the premises. So we went back to, and I, when I cut and pasted our markup thing on this little document so I could show it tonight, the cut and paste didn't show out, but that was all about the cannabis establish ments and we were pretty good with what we did there. Last week, last month we talked about eliminating the boundary line for the town of Andover, which Columbia doesn't have one, so I think we could. We could eliminate package store, you know, being in the vicinity of the bar or nightclub or tavern.
We could get rid of that because the only place we've got that in town is within 500 feet. And so why have that in there? And that would leave us with a church, school, library, park, playground, or lot having frontage in a residential district. And I kind of liked all those. So my thinking is we would remove A and B and keep C. You know, was looking for any feedback from commission members if you thought that was a reasonable approach or not. Just my opinion, but that sounds good, Jed. Any other thoughts?
Jed, I do note there's a difference between how these distances are measured. In Colombia, they talk about 1,000 feet from the property line. Other regulation, it's tough from building to building. Yes. Well, in up here. They said a straight line.
They said radius from any entrance to any other building premise. Okay, now we got some words down here. For the purpose of this section, premise shall mean only that fractional part of the building used for the sale. So it's not the entire lot. And what I was hoping, I don't think there's a problem, but what I'm hoping to do is we heard last month about the guy wanting to buy the property out Lindholm Corner area. And some of that property is within 500 feet of the Columbia downline. And I kind of like this plan and I kind of would like to make these regulations reflect what we think is right before we see an application from that guy. But again, if based down here, as long as the building where he is selling the stuff is 500 feet from the property line, you know, the Columbia line is all the way to the south end of that property where I think he was planning to put all the vineyards and that sort of thing, with the businesses being up along Route 6, which is well in excess of 500 feet there.
But since I didn't think we had any business regulating within, you know, 500 feet of the downline, I said, let's get rid of it and remove all doubt that he would be able to do what he's thinking to do.
Yeah, that parcel, there's lots with frontage in a residential district there.
Okay, good point. I wasn't able to find a map that I could do very good measurement from. So I will go back and see if I can find something to make sure that the business lots are 500 feet. I did see where there were a couple of houses carved out around that property there. And I forgot about that. That's a good point, Scott.
Jed, I have a question regarding state laws associated I with just have a recall from probably October ago, and maybe this that the gas station by 03/16 had come before planning and zoning and they had wanted to be able to sell beer. Initially planning and zoning was agreeable because it was not within 500 feet of the church or school, but then there was an issue because it was adjacent to state property, meaning a state park which was the rail trail, and that I had this vague recollection that kind of killed the whole thing and I don't know if that comes into play or not. Okay.
Like I say, not I'm remembering clearly, there was some tie in to state parks.
I was, well, I will have to go check to see whether, you know, Andover Pizza is within 500 feet of the rail trail. I know it's, I don't know how far back it is I from the I
was of the impression that Andover Pizza had at least a beer license before that change. But again, I don't recall all the specifics because it was so long ago. Nope.
But the reason for bringing this up tonight was to get feedback on those and I can go out and do a little more checking. Those are both good points. Probably 300 or 400 feet, Jud, I would say. Okay, yeah, because certainly think Andover Pizza, you know, it would be nice to have a little trail running from the rail trail up to Andover Pizza Plaza so that people can stop by on their bikes and go have some pizza or whatever. And I think that would be nice. Don't know how that all plays in there, but I'll go check, that's good. Okay, and again, I need to do the homework on those As far as the boundary line with the town of Andover, if that was a requirement of the state, was going to count on Mark Branch to give us feedback on that. My thought was the commission, we will write the regs the way we want them to be, and then we will pass them by the lawyer and he will tell us if there's a problem with what we want or not. And he's never been bashful about doing that. So that's, I think all I wanted to say about the cannabis thing, but that's a follow-up. And as said, I just reconnected with Mark Branch today, so I didn't get to push him anymore on what he knows about the state regs. Any other questions or comments on the cannabis range, cannabis package store? Okay, we're going to move on to new business,
which is the budget. I Last asked for, oops, last year I asked for, you know, commission approval for the budget. This year I didn't. What happened was the finance folks sent the budget request to all the land use agencies, to the land use clerk, and somehow nothing happened with that. And so over the holiday period, Eric called me up and said, we were talking about things, you got anything for me? He said, yeah, where's your budget input? I said, I haven't got anything to ask for yet. No, that's due. And so, you know, I went over during the holiday period and got together with Eric and we talked through the budget and thought it was appropriate to go through where we were and what we did with you guys. And one of the things that came out kind of as a surprise to me is, so when I talked with Eric on the budget, wages, we have no input in, he'll take care of that and pay the good folks that are helping us out. As much as I would like to give them all lots more money, don't have that authority, so there you go. That will be for the finance committee and the town to figure out. It was interesting to me on the professional and legal fees, and I knew based on when we were preparing the budget last year, number was ridiculously low. It was like we had spent $500 10% as we were going into the budget. I was going to cut it down. And then Jim went over and poked at him and it turned out we were just about exceeding our budget
halfway through the year. And I said, okay, well, we won't reduce it any, we'll keep it the same at $5,000 And I never heard anything for the rest of the year. And I said, well, if we're busting a budget, somebody will let me know. And as I got the input sheet this year, I see we actually spent over $14,000 when we budgeted $5,000 I said, that's not so good. I still, you know, haven't gone back to poke at them. That includes legal fees by the zoning board of appeals and the inland wetlands. Whatever they do, it gets left into this one thing here. And I've got to find out a way so that I have better visibility of what we're spending so I can't get to the end of the year and we've got three times what we budgeted, that's not an acceptable solution there. But what we did do is we increased it by 50% so that we're at the
budget request for this year at $7,500 That might not be enough, but Eric understands that legal fees are money well spent and he was out there covering for us. So thank you for that. I just need to do a better job of trying to keep that number under control, and I will work with the wetlands folks to do the same.
Well, it wasn't broken out, Jed, who used the money?
It is, there's, I can't go to a website and find where the current budget numbers are. And maybe that's just my problem, I'm not smart enough to do that. When I went back last January and asked for an update, they were able to give me one and I was able to track through what Wetlands spent, what we had spent and all that there. And so it probably exists. I would have just thought that somebody in the finance group and there's been a lot of turnover there would have reached out to me and said, you know, you're exceeding your budget. And I would have said, no, I don't know that, but thank you for letting me know. I'll see if I can do better. That didn't happen and I will poke into that some more. But what I did do right off the bat was requested a 50% increase. And as you all know, with the how the budget season is gonna play out, nobody's gonna like to be seeing big increases anyhow. But based on what we did in the past, it's only half of what we spent last year, so we've got to work on that. 100 And you can see where we are halfway through the year, we're right now at 3,066. And again, you double that, that gets us about to this. And that should be how it goes. Training for the planning and zoning. We had budgeted $3.50 so far this year, we've spent nothing. It was last year about this time that several opportunities for training came up and and so we did spend, you know, actual expenses because they were all kind of online last year. I guess we spent $120.
I wanted to jack that up a little bit. So we went from $3.50 to 500, and that's based on the requirement that each member of the Planning and Zoning Commission attend a given number of training hours every two years starting next year. And so that's why I upped it there just to give us the margin to make sure that we start attending that training, which I think is very valuable and we can pay for it. Mapping, left the same, we've got zero expended. I think there are things that we can be updating in our maps that we don't have very good to show exactly where different, when we went through that piece of property next to the post office trying to figure out is it in the business zone or not in the business zone, our maps weren't very good at showing that.
So anyhow, we probably need to start working on maps at some point. In office supplies, we spent nothing and so I was budgeting nothing the same here. But I just thought I would go through with you and show that those legal fees, they do add up. I don't know what kind of bill we're going to get from Mark Branch for helping us out with the signed regs. I'm sure it's going to be, it will be significant, it'll be fair, and we needed the help to try and get through those issues. So that's what we did with the budget and that's all I got for you on that.
Jed, I have a question. This is Leanne. Yep, go ahead, Leanne. Did you, you mentioned salaries, right? I just wanted to make sure I heard it correctly.
Yes. We provide input to the salaries. The DOWN does that for us.
They do? Yep. Has it always been that way? I'm drawing a blank.
It has. At least always been the last couple years.
Okay. Okay. Like I said, obviously, I didn't recall one way or the other. I was thinking that we'd probably done it before. I mean, I'm sure Susan knows too. I would just hope I don't know, maybe I my comment was going to be if we don't put anything in, it's unlikely that the Board of Finance is going to come to us and say, please propose an increase of x percent for your staff. But if you're saying and again, I'm drawing a blank because I've been on here for a while, but unless we did do it differently or we did propose it ourselves
longer ago than you've been on here, it will be nice if the town does it for us. I know everybody wants to keep costs down, but at some point, people do expect a raise, if you see what I mean. Yep, and I think,
Abby, you can tell me, are you a union person? No, I'm not. Okay.
I don't know if, yeah, so that certainly doesn't enter into the discussion there. But I know Eric is trying to take care of our folks. Okay, good.
Oh, so the point I wanted to make, so last year budget season, one of the cost cutting measures was, you know, we eliminated the full time land use admin person, and we were going to time share with the assistant town clerk. That was going to take us from, you know, maybe thirty hours down to ten hours in the land use office. And what's this? What what is the status of that now? So the the status of that now is that did not work. The assistant town clerk left. Yep. And we have a new person down there. And Jim helped me out with the specifics. Think she's sharing time with somebody, but we got many more hours out of it, which I think is a good step in the right direction.
We currently have a clerk that works twenty hours a week. We don't share it with anyone. So that's a little twenty. More
we're doing better. We're not doing where we were before. I was willing, you know, I didn't want to make a big issue of what we were trying to do as a town to cut costs. And so I said, well, I'll wait a year and see how it all plays out. That one didn't play out very well. I don't know that that person can do what we need them to do. You know, we have found even having a full time person in there that we had problems where we go look into file and what we were looking to find in the file wasn't there.
And so, and we are looking for this person to be the interface with the public. And Jim has been doing a lot of that as a zoning agent. It shouldn't be Jim, it shouldn't really be the building official who we're sharing with another town, it should be this land use clerk. But the other thought was we were going to see if we could have Abby provide some extra assistance down there doing some of the admin. And we haven't really gotten into that yet either, but we're still working on that, but I think it's headed in the right direction now after what we tried to cut was too much, didn't work, and we're off doing better now and I'm still waiting. There's been an awful lot of turnover in the land use department.
So I'm waiting for us to get our feet on the ground and see how it plays out before I go make an issue one way or the other.
We are moving back in a good direction down there. Yes.
It sounds like it. Does Lynn work every Monday night when the town office building is open later? She does not. Town office building, not the town hall. Sorry. Jim, what? She does not. Do you work there every Monday night? I work there most every Monday. Yeah. Yes. Until seven?
No. I haven't been. No. We haven't had full coverage. No.
So I thought that the point of the town office building being open till seven for any department, including land use, is that somebody is there for the public. And I know there's been a lot of turnover, and that's one reason I'm asking who works when because I think that's the whole point of the town office building being open late one night per week.
I generally am as well, Monday nights from five to 7AM. I just, for the month of December and now January, I've had exposures and I wasn't comfortable for the month of December coming in. But starting next week, I'm hoping all will be back to normal.
So do you expect to work every Monday night during the month from up till 07:00 or regardless of what time you start?
Well, besides Monday nights when I have meetings, I have to leave early, but then, up until seven
Okay. Can you say that again? The nights you do you work for Wetlands too?
Yes. Yes. Whenever there's a Monday night evening say that again.
Do you work for do you clerk for ZBA too? Yes. Okay. So Wetlands has Monday night meetings. Right? When does ZBA meet? Wednesday. Wednesday?
Okay. So are they are you saying that you you expect to be there every Monday night with the exception of available to the public? Well, the meetings start at seven So theoretically, if you were there, you'd be available to the public except you'd be doing a lot of prep for the meeting. But I guess my point is it's my understanding, again, that the point of being open until seven is to have the public can just drop in and somebody is there. I agree with you. Yes. It It sounds sounds It It
what? That's really where we're trying to get back to yes.
Okay so Abby is saying it's moving towards that and she has meeting nights with us in Wetlands that started 07:00 tonight. But, Abby, are you saying that you are you think you're moving toward or the town is expecting that you'll move toward, again, being available for the public every Monday night till seven?
Yes. Yeah. January and December were just an outlier just because I was uncomfortable with COVID. Mhmm. Right. So other than that, I I project I'll be back five to seven every Mondays. I just have to leave early if I have wetlands or planning and zoning. Right. Okay, very good.
But as a follow on to that, Leanne, and I agreed that we should have the office manned during those periods. As I, you know, now that we've talked about it a little bit, I do recall that that was one of the things that Abby was going to do for us, but that's only half the time because she's getting ready for Zoom on planning and zoning in wetlands. So we're only scoring half there. But I was hoping that as we go through the budget process, somebody from the town would get up and say, we're not happy with the service we're getting, but all I heard was we're not happy with the taxes we're paying. And so that's kind of there. I think I am very concerned about the level of service we are providing to our customers, the citizens of the town. But that's not what the complaint is when we go to the budget meetings.
Yeah, I see your point. Nobody wants to pay more in taxes, but I think people understand that, you know, at any given time, services are supposed to be provided, and that's a broad statement of what service is. Yep. But, again, the point of being open till 07:00 is whether it's the land use department or the town clerk or, you know, this office or that office, that you can walk in. You don't have to guess when somebody's gonna be there. You don't have to be turned away more than once, this kind of thing. Yep, I agree.
The plan to have Abby there, I was thinking that we would be back to in person meetings by now and she would finish up in the land use office, come down, get set up for the meeting and she would do any eating or whatever at home before she came over to man the watch at 05:00. That didn't obviously come to be and it slipped through, it slipped my mind. So thank you for mentioning that because I do feel that we need to have a mechanism that is available that one night for that two hour window for those people that are working all day that we can help them out.
Yes, and, you know, I think COVID is just huge, it's supposedly getting better, but it's not going away apparently anytime soon. So, you know, that has to be a huge factor for anybody working anywhere, especially with the public. But I think, you know, that's just my point about availability.
Yep. And my suspicion is that Jim is doing an awful lot to help an awful lot of people out that's not really in his job description. And so we got to get those off of you, but he would certainly never complain about that.
Leanne, wanna add something. One thing that we did sort of at the start of COVID too was made some changes where everything is now online. Paper files that people used to have to come in and look at are now electronic and they're readily visible. In fact, they're a lot easier to read. And Permit Link was independent of COVID, I believe. But nonetheless, people can come in, can access permits from outside the office. So there's a trend to sort of move away from to be able to provide the same level of service with maybe less face time.
But I think Jim, you would agree that most people like a little face time is they don't know where to even start on this zoning wetlands appeals process. They need to have somebody that they can talk to that points them in the direction of where it is to look.
I agree. Yep. I just felt compelled to point that out. Yep.
Nope, thank you for that, Jim. Yep. Okay. Any other questions on the budget? Okay, I'm gonna stop sharing that. Next item up is approval of the minutes. And I move the minutes of the 12/20/2021 meeting be approved. Second.
Thank you, Steve. Any comments on those meeting minutes? And I only had one and I did not look back on the video to check this out. Somebody can help me remember. In the others present at the December meeting, says Chris Bell was there. And I'm pretty confident he was not there and that's why we didn't talk about anything at that meeting. And then at the regular meeting where it starts, another's president, Chris Bell is there. So there's two places where it says Chris Bell is there, and I'm pretty confident that he was not there.
I don't think he was there either, too. Yeah. Yeah, agreed.
Okay, so that would be my only correction is to remove Chris Bell from the list of attendees in both places. Any other comments on the minutes? Okay, hearing none, we'll call for a vote. Anne? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leigh Ann? Aye.
Steve? Aye. I vote aye as well. The minutes are approved, five-zero-zero. Moving on, correspondence, Jim. Administrative reports.
Okay, a couple of applications moving through 480 Lake Road Subdivision at the corner of Route 6 And Lake Road. 580. That was 580, I'm sorry. Did go to wetlands. The application was received. I do expect a site plan application forthcoming in the near future. The folks that came can you still hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. Can't see you, but folks that came before us with the potential meditation center have acquired the property Route 6 there and hope to move forward. We don't know their time frame at all. 320 Route 6 that was discussed at two previous meetings regarding a zone change issue with filing the map. No activity there. I've not heard anything from any potential buyers or or the current owner. I'm working with ZDA to put together a informational workshop for its membership to be held February 2. Just to really clarify their role and better understand what constitutes a hardship under the state statute. I'm also trying to finalize plans for the Pine Ridge Old Farms subdivision plan, meaning that that the plan I'm not finalizing the plans. I am trying to just get them filed. A few loose ends there.
Couple a couple active violations. Center Street 12th Center Street was noted as as being in violation of blight ordinance. I've met with the owner. He has agreed to tear it down instead of go through the which is what he what he intended to do anyway. So instead of closing it up, I'm holding off for the moment, issuing a cease and desist on that. He does have a demo, an application in for a demo permit. Still has to move on that. 64 Long Hill Road, which as many of you know, a little greenhouse at the corner of Bear Swamp and Long Hill Road that's been vacant for thirty five plus years. Somebody finally purchased it. There's some construction debris. I got a complaint. Gentleman has agreed to bring a dumpster in. Getting a couple of complaints about lack of dumpsters, is a separate ordinance, not under the zoning regulations, but nonetheless, they seem to have been dragged into those. What regulation is it, Jim?
It's where I I don't know the name of it, but it's where you're required to have a dumpster on-site if you have a pull a building permit for a project. And it came up up because a lot of people bring landfill material to the landfill, a lot of excess material, contractors and such. It's a few years old, hasn't been in place that long. That's pretty much all I have. I'm happy to entertain any questions. I understand we do now have a hearing officer in place. Is that true? Oh, yes. I meant that was on my list as well. We do have a flight of citation hearing officer. I don't know who it is. They have not been trained as yet, but I can in fact issue a flight a citation because I can now reference the flight officer once I know their name. Very good. Jim? Yes.
Jim, this is Leanne. I think I don't know him. I listened to the Selectman's meeting. I think it's a Mike Wisely. I'm not sure of the last name. Okay.
It was discussed at the meeting, you know, mainly by Eric.
Yeah, I checked with the town clerk shortly after the selectors meeting and she had been. She didn't have that information as of yet, but I'm sure she will at any she will shortly. Okay.
And I know that the county attorney has expressed an interest in providing some training for that individual. Oh, that's really good. Excellent. Any other questions for Jim?
Did 12 Center Street pay the taxes that are due before they get their permit to demo? I
have to check on the stat. I I believe that that in light of the fact that it was being demoed, that that that particular ordinance wasn't going to be applied. But I don't know that for a fact, Scott. I can I can get back to on that one? I'd be happy to. I'm just curious, Jim. I'm I I guess I'd be happy to see it gone even if you didn't I pay the thought that actually went to the board of selected, but I I could be wrong about that as well.
It would have been That's right, Scott. You would know the name of the blight person. Yeah, I can't remember everybody's name.
Okay, well, we're making progress nonetheless. We are. Yep, that's all good. It sounds like you got plenty of irons in the fire there, Jim. Any other questions for Jim?
I just meant that you would have been there the whole time at this license, not that you remember everybody's name, just I was just volunteering that I happened to listen to that portion of your meeting.
Yeah, I brought it up to everyone that we had an ordinance without an official. Ridiculous. Okay,
well, I'm going to move on to our next meetings on February 28. That's Monday, postponed one week due to President's Day. And I'll make a motion that we adjourn. Second that.
Thank you, Anne. And we will vote by unanimous consent. Any opposed say aye. Hearing none, thank you all very much. We're a little later than hope tonight, but not too bad. All things considered, glad everybody's back after the new year happy and healthy and ready to roll. So good night, everybody. And thank you for your help and support. Good night. Good night. Good night, everyone.