Meeting transcript
Planning and Zoning Meeting
January 16, 2024 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
So I will call the Planning and Zoning Commission meeting to order. For the roll call, I see Ann Creme, Steve Nelson, Scott Persson, Leanne Hutchinson, and myself are present as regular members. And I see Susan and Ann Marie present as alternate members. So no alternates will be seated tonight. The next item up is additions to the agenda. I would like to add two items. The first, under due business, would be a letter of interest from Kevin Arneson to seek an alternate commission member on the Planning and Zoning Commission. Received that from him over the weekend. So that would be new business 6D. And also, I would like to add under approval of minutes, approval of the minutes from the November meeting. Unfortunately, I was trying to hurry through a bunch of stuff last month. Didn't do as good a job as I would have hoped for. And if you read the minutes for tonight's meeting, you'll see there were a couple of motions there, one of them being the minutes that we did not second and so. I'll take just a moment to rectify that problem tonight in addition to the discussion of our.
Regulation changes that we approved. Any other items that anybody would like to add to the agenda? Hearing none, I'll make a motion to approve the two items to be added to the agenda. Second.
Thank you, Steve. Any other discussion? Hearing none, I'll call for a unanimous consent. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? So the motion passes five-zero-zero. Any public comment tonight? No public comments. We'll move on to new business, which is three Section eight twenty four referrals from the town. So Eric, at this point, I'll turn it over to you.
Certainly. I'm gonna talk through each of these real quick, and then I'll ask to share my screen, and I'll show you the images. You should have already had them to review. The first one revolves around the town of Andover property that is located on School Road. It is a property that the Andover Elementary School, among many other things, is located on. When we resurveyed the property, there was a slight disagreement between this survey and the survey that was conducted previously by Anchor Engineering that they only surveyed a portion of the property. It is not a big area. It represents 0.023 acres of land. Has no material impact and there's no real implications you know, versus anything in the POCD that I am aware of. So that is number one. The second one is the town of Andover property on Chottie Mill Road. This is the property that the Andover Transfer Station is located on. There is a fairly large discrepancy between a series of surveys and deed descriptions for the various properties. There was an extensive discussion between the Board of Selectmen and the abutter. And those two entities are willing presumably that will be determined definitively at the next planning and zoning meeting which will be tomorrow. But to pursue a lot line agreement between the two properties. You met the board of selectmen meeting, didn't you, Eric? Yeah, what did I say? Planning and zoning meeting. Sorry,
I met the board of selectmen meeting. So this area is within the Western Highlands Open Space Corridor identified in the POCD. This would transfer approximately one acre along Burnout Brook adjacent to the rail trail, which has a scenic vista that was identified in chapter 10.4 I of the P. O. C. D. Which stated the rail trail slash Burnout Brook area is one of the most scenic sections of the rail trail and should be enhanced and promoted as a gateway into Andover Town Center. And we will, in fact, if this goes through and Uptown Meeting agrees with it, that we'll achieve that and the town will then ownership, owner of it. In fact, originally the POCD indicated that open space fund should be considered to add more land if necessary, you know, to that area. So this would give the town ownership of that property. However, the town is giving up potentially fair bit of land in other portions of that property. Now the land the town is giving up is mostly in floodplain, so it's not something that's necessarily developable. But depending on which survey you agree with, there's a fairly large seven plus acres of land that's in contention there. So that is the second eight twenty four referral. And the third is regarding a property that Joshua's
Trust has asked the town to partner on. This is located off of Skinner Hill Road. This parking area and basically what they're asking for and what what the eight 24 referral is for is for a small parking area on town property to accommodate somewhere around four cars. And it would serve as a trailhead for a proposed loop trail that utilizes both town property as well as the Joshua's Trust property. This area is identified in the POCD as part of the Eastern Highlands Open Space Corridor where land preservation and access is important. I can, if you'd like, review the mapping if that's something that's of interest to the Commission. However you would like to proceed at this point, I'm happy to do so.
Yeah, I do think it would be good to just put up the maps very quickly, all three of them there and just kind of very quickly go through where you're talking about. You've got these good maps, we might as well look at them.
Okay. Do you guys see a screen with something that says Andover Town offices, community centers, etcetera? Yep. Okay.
You need to yeah. There you go. Now we're getting there. Okay. That looks So
you are looking at the elementary school, and on the right side of your screen, you can see a boundary between Frank and Kimberly Haw's property which is 45 School Road and the town which is 35 School Road. So there there are are, what amounts to a very small discrepancy between the borders as identified in the two surveys. You know, so the net effect of this is compared to the anchor engineering survey. The town would appear to lose around four or five feet of land along this border. And BCS, the engineering firm that the down hired, thinks that this more accurately represents what's in the deed than what was the anchor survey. It's not material and it doesn't affect land that the school is actually really using. So that's what that re survey is. But by coming up with a boundary line agreement, then, you know, that puts that to bed, puts that to rest, forevermore. So that's essentially what this, this eight twenty four referral is.
Any questions for Eric on this particular map? Eric, just point to the land that the town is going to be I'm losing.
And Okay. Can you see my cursor? Yeah. Put your cursor. Yep. Okay. It's basically this little sex sliver right there. Yep. That's so the public can see that. Yep. Okay, any other questions for Eric on this one?
What will the boundary line agreement document where the pin placements are or the calculated points?
Well, once a boundary line agreement is set, we would probably have, the surveyor come back and set an iron pin there, there, and there because there are no points currently. I see. There's one more additional one. Right?
Yeah. Right there. And that Yeah. I mean, we could potentially that one there also. Okay. Thanks, Eric. Any other Okay. Thanks, Eric. On to number two.
And by the way, the four to five foot discrepancy in a boundary survey for boundaries of that age is not uncommon at all. I have the same thing on my property. You know, in fact, there's a little triangle of no man's land on one border of my property that neither my neighbor nor I claim. Okay. This
is the, property. I'm going to try to view it so you can see it's kind of hard to see the whole thing. I'll zoom back in. So this is property that is owned. If you see where my cursor is, this area in here is owned by the town. This is the property that is part of the transfer station piece. And this property up here is owned by a guy named Stephen King. Now, when Stephen purchased this house, when Mr. King purchased this house, we asked him to resurvey that property because what we had on the books did not come anywhere close to matching the survey data. In fact, if you looked at the old surveys that the town had on file in the assessor's office, you know, this whole barn was on town property as was, this is a separate house lot. This whole house lot was also on town property. So as part of him purchasing the house, first off, the person who did the title search for it said, woah, you got a real problem here. And the town knew it and we went to King and said, If you are going to purchase this house, you really need to survey this because there is a significant disagreement between the surveys that cover this. So they hired a surveyor for the firm Rob Haelstrom's land survey and they surveyed that. So basically this is the agreement that the Board of Selectmen appears to be willing to settle with Mr. King. This is a portion of the property. It's a big enough it's a long narrow piece. So they produced it on two maps so they could meet the excuse me, the one o one over 60 scale and still get it all in the paper.
And then I'm gonna shrink this down just a little bit. And this is the other end of the piece where my cursor is now. This is the Hop River Rail Trail, and this where the cursor is now, this is Burnout Brook Road. As part of the deal, the town acquires this piece of property right here, which starts on where the parking area is roughly on Burnout Brook Road by the rail trail. It extends up the road past Ridge Road approximately to SNP Pole 11 or 925, and then it goes across and then it comes back on the center line of the river to the edge of the property owned by the state of Connecticut as part of the Hop River Rail Trail. So the town will then acquire this piece, you know, in exchange and will probably be giving up, and it's unclear exactly how much we're giving up, but giving up some land up in this area right here based on the we've known that because none of the surveys match and there's such a big difference, this was only really going to be settled by a boundary line agreement in some form or another. Excuse me. So that is the second one. Does anybody on the zoning commission have any questions about this one?
What's the net impact in terms of the number of acres? Are we gaining or losing?
Well, I guess it depends on whose survey you think is correct. We're doing anything from gaining a little bit to losing, what was the number you came up with Scott, 14 acres, something like that? That's assuming that a survey that cuts through right through this property right here and also has this person's property, who the zoning commission gave them you know, a free cut to develop, their property is all on town land, which, you know, is probably not correct.
What's the reference on the map there? It says existing area 32.97 acres, new area 31.97. What does that refer to?
So, their surveyor thought that their property was actually starting off, you know, at around 33 acres, and that was actually losing an acre in the deal. But, you know, I don't know that that's necessarily that interpretation is correct.
Eric, the square footage on that map is not, is incorrect also. If, if 31.9 is almost 32, and you know, within an acre or so, and the square footage is off by how many, know,
how many Looks like it's off by about 44,000 square feet,
which is a little over an acre. It's almost a it's almost a double, isn't it? What's that bottom square footage? I can't read that. Does it say 3.9? Yeah. 1,392,723.
One, it says at the one Yeah. And that's about right. That's about four to 4,000 square feet difference.
Yeah. That bottom- Which is about an acre. I can't see it well. Can't see it well. Looks, at me looking at it, it looks like a 3.9, 1.3. Well, it looks like It's
only off by like a 100 square feet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So one point, so I thought that that was a 3Point392723. Yeah. So Are
there any other questions I can answer on this one?
I guess the other comment I would make on supporting this is that the property owner, Stephen King, could have probably built a good case for adverse possession of the land because they've got that barn that's been there forever and been considering it their land and they came to the town wanting to make it right. And the town is benefited by probably one of the most beautiful little waterfall areas along the Bernabeu Brook there that exists. So, they came to the town asking to play Let's Make a Deal. So it wasn't like they were trying to take advantage of the town.
Any other questions on this one? Okay. Here are none. You go on to number three there, Eric.
Okay. Give me a second. Okay. Hopefully, you're looking at the, what's labeled the Joshua's Trust Skinner Hill Preserve property. Yep. Okay.
So the area in P is located on Skinner Hill Road. This is kind of a weird one because the Joshua's Trust is actually that skinny green parcel that then opens up into a much larger parcel when it gets in a little bit. In the blue is all of the land that was donated to the town of not donated, but given to the town of Andover by the state when the DOT finally realized that they were not going to put a highway through there. So what Joshua's trusted approached the town and asked if the town would be willing to partner with them on producing a hiking trail in that area and allow the town to put a small roughly four parking spot parking area there to support that loop trail. And again, that's something that's going to be will be further discussion at the board of selectman meeting tomorrow. But Jed did feel that this should be subject to an 08/24 municipal,
you know, or 08/24 approval because this would be municipal improvement because it will be a new parking area on town property. So that is why it is before this commission.
But we'd also be improving the property with the trail. The trail doesn't currently exist there, does it Eric? Correct.
Yeah, okay. And I think I sent out the Commission letter that we got from the Conservation Commission in support of this plan as well. So any questions from the Commission on this particular plan?
I think it's a great idea. Eric, I was just curious on the other end of the land, does it abut the Nathan Hale land or is there a way to connect the two?
So the answer would be yes. If you ran the dotted line here, there's a little bit of a discontinuity, but you would actually solve that by getting an easement across the top of my property. And then you could theoretically connect up to the town owned property here, or you could connect back in this area here. There's a direct, actually, sorry, you would have to go back to right about here to connect to the Nathan Hale Forest. Nathan Hale Forest, the closest point to the road is right in here. So it's not a direct connection, but a connection could be made fairly simply by just popping out. If any, you probably don't remember, but back in, you know, twenty years ago, the family that lived there was called the Halliburton's. If you popped out right where the old Halliburton house is, you could have a very short road section and then be back in Nathan Hale State Forest. Or eventually, a trail could be continued down there. And basically, I think you can make a connection farther down to Nathan Hale State Forest. It's pretty close. It's not, you know, I think if you go straight out that way, you can just get to Nathan Hale. This parcel of Nathan Hale just touches
in a little spot. I could be wrong on that though. That would be really cool.
Any other questions on this proposal? Okay, Eric, I think you can stop sharing your screen there. I know, Eric, you mentioned you'd be talking about this at the special board of selectman meeting tomorrow night. Is that the purpose of the special meeting is to talk about these proposals or I'm just trying to
figure out It's the really only a special meeting because they changed the date of their regularly meeting, regularly scheduled meeting, number one. And two, they didn't vote on meeting dates for this year yet. So, everything's a special meeting until they do so. Okay. So, this is just their normal Board of Select and monthly meeting.
Understand. Okay, thank you. So at this point, I like the work that Eric has done to try and clear up a couple of boundary things that have been out there. I like the trailhead improvement that he just talked about. And I would be, I will make a motion to approve all three eight twenty four referrals. But I don't know if everybody's comfortable with that or not and we can have that in the discussion after we make a motion. But the motion I'll make, I think they're all good proposals. And I'll make a motion to approve all three. Second that. Okay. Thank you, Anne.
Any discussion? What exactly is the approval for, Jud? We It's
to approve that the Planning and Zoning Commission considers that these proposals are consistent with our plan of conservation and development. And the first with the school boundary thing, I don't know that you could say that that's consistent with the plan of conservation development, but it's certainly good housekeeping. Every time we go out and survey something, we find out that we don't have the boundaries exactly right. And so the town is working to clean those up, especially when it abuts down property. So they're doing the right thing. So I think that's almost a housekeeping one. The Burnab Brook one, I think, is consistent with the plan of conservation development because the POCD specifically talks about that area up there along the rail trail with the Burnett Brook being such an incredibly nice place where we can put some parking to go there, maybe put a picnic table like we did over on Merritt Valley and that sort of thing. So I think that's consistent with the plan of conservation and development. And then the last one I think is consistent as well with establishment of more passive recreation hiking trails in the town. So, and we got the strong endorsement from the Conservation Commission on that last one as well. So, I don't think there's anything that's inconsistent with our BOCD, but that doesn't mean we can't entertain other questions on making sure we're doing the right thing.
All we're voting on is if they're consistent with our present plan of conservation. Yes. Yep.
So just so everybody understands the impact. You as a zoning commission, anytime there's something that's a municipal improvement and a trailhead would be a municipal improvement, potentially acquiring land you know, would be a municipal improvement. Those get referred to the Planning and Zoning Commission to make sure that what the town is doing is consistent with its planning documents. You say yes, then when it comes to a town meeting or meet of whatever board has the final approval authority of that, it requires a simple majority to be accepted. If you as a commission say no, then it can still be done, but it requires a two thirds majority or a super majority for that to be passed at a town meeting. So it makes it far less likely that it will pass at a town meeting. If you say, you know what, the POCD says this, here we are doing this, we don't think that's consistent.
So that's really what this is your authority under the Connecticut general statutes to review everything that the town does in terms of, you know, municipal improvement.
And I thought about not having the school property line adjustment be an 824 referral, but I thought it was so easy. Why not add it in with the other two that we would have had to do? So does that answer your question, Scott?
That's all I'm voting for. Yep. That's consistent with our plan of conservation development. Any
other questions from anybody else on the commission? Hearing none, I will call for a vote. Ian? Aye. Steve? Aye. Scott? Aye. Lee Ann?
Leanne? I don't show that you're muted, Leanne. Okay, I'm going to was that you trying to say something, Leanne? No, I guess that was Eric Coffin. Okay. I vote aye. We'll treat Leanne at this point as an abstention. And the motion passes four zero one with Leanne Abstini. And if we get contact with Leanne again and she changes her vote, we'll consider that. But that'll be that for now. Thank you, Eric. Go ahead, Leanne.
Okay, can you hear me now? I can, yep. Okay, because I unmuted myself using the mute my mute button but when you still couldn't hear me I just pressed star six so I I've never had to do that during our meetings but I'll just keep doing it if I have to tonight. Okay,
very good. So did you vote in favor of the motion? Yes.
Okay, so Marina then the motion passes five-zero-zero. Okay. Thank you. Next up is kind of a strange little topic. Marina, you can let me share my screen. Let's see. Where are you? Okay. Should be good. Okay. Yep.
So this is just a little bit of data. This is what engineers do in their spare time. We had a fairly wet year. And one of the things that we were talking about on the survey that John made for us for the upcoming Planet Conservation and Development was something about resiliency, I think it was called. Was interested in well, goes back in Cremay. At one point in the past, we were talking about collecting stormwater runoff. I can't remember if it was at the community center or somebody else's and the importance of doing that. And while we had a lot of rain in 2023, when we have the big rainstorms like we do, a lot of the rain just runs off. It doesn't have the chance to soak into the ground. And so that leads to a lack of groundwater. The other thing when we get the big storms is that, we saw a lot of flooding with twice. I can't remember if the first big flood was in the end of December or early January, but twice within the last couple of weeks, we've had some significant flooding going on around the Hop River area. So I went back to take a look, and this probably isn't as scientific as it could be because going forward, I'll be more meticulous about does 0.5 go into this category or this category here? And it didn't make a lot of difference. What I was surprised at was we had about as many rain events of greater than an inch as we did less than an inch.
And in fact, we had 13 rain events over the last year that were greater than two inches. And when we were looking at stormwater runoff with the development of the lake regs in that, we thought a two inch rain storm was an unusual occurrence. And certainly last year wasn't. I went back and looked at the data from 2022 and was '22 was much more as you would expect, but we're starting out 2024 with some pretty good rate events as well. So anyhow, I was doing my engineer thing, going through the data, thought I'd share that with all you guys so that you can see where we are and how the changing rain in Andover, we might want to do something about that as we develop our plan of conservation and development, whether from a flood prone collecting runoff or whatever. And so that's all I had on that, unless there's any questions on that one.
Okay. Everything up to two inches is, you know, fairly reasonably close. What was that, Scott?
Everything up to two inches is, you know, fairly reasonably close. Then when you get to the two inch, a big rainfall, it's way up.
Yep. The other thing I went in, you know, we we talk about the hundred year storm, one hundred year flood, and I didn't know how much rain that was. And to the best of what I can track down, you know, it's a little bit more than six inches in one rainstorm. So I went back and looked at last year and we didn't have anything that exceeded the one hundred year flood level, know, so it's not happening every year, but we did get close a couple of times. We've had a storm, you know, a couple storms of four inches and five inches. So that's getting up there.
I know that we had, like, 12 within two weeks at one point. Yep. So my ring in
Ken. Yes. It's John Gyszkowski. Yep. I just wanted to to me to spin this forward a little bit. Think I appreciate the I appreciate the the research and breakdown, and and that is extraordinary about, like, 13 independent two inch rain events or more. I guess my question for the POCD, and this is maybe something we could talk about another time, but what are the implications of that from a public work standpoint, from a municipal impact standpoint? Like, and maybe this is a question for Eric, is this, you know, with the increased rain we saw last year, has the town seen repeated damage to properties, repeated inundation of certain roads, you know, loss of municipal facility? Like, is it is it, you know, is it just a bunch of rain or has it had a real world impact in Andover that we need to change our thinking about? I think is is sort of what what's the implication here. It's had an impact across all the towns. Oh, sure. A lot of cleanup afterwards, a lot of putting
stone back in the sides of roads, and it's everywhere.
Been terrible. But so, I mean, so the question is, you know, based on that and with the not crazy assumption that this trend will continue or even worsen, is there something fundamental that the town should be doing different about either its maintenance or the way that it builds things new or locates things?
So I think from a public works perspective, it's something we're quite aware of. I mean, we definitely have a couple of roads that flood frequently enough to be of concern. You know, and I think we have kind of changed what we put on the sides of roads to stabilize and handle more severe rain events. But yeah, definitely an issue. And I mean, Jay and I have talked about it and one of the easy things is just pretty much every time you know, we change out a culvert, the intention now is to use a bigger sized culvert than we did before, you know, and just simply increase the capacity. We do know that there's a couple of roads where existing culvert system cannot handle the heavy rain flows. We have one bad spot on Gilead Road, and that is simply it is largely a question of the capacity of the culvert versus the amount of water that inundates it and it floods out the road. So there are a few of those. You know, and the other thing that's been interesting is that as we have gotten a little bit warmer, we're having more storms that are on the ice continuum and less on the snow continuum, which actually tends to increase our salt decrease it. So even though
it's a little warmer, we're still, you know, we've, the last few years, we've been using as much or more salt than when it was colder and you had more storms that were snowy and less in that intermediate stage. So those are really the two effects I've seen. There's one change that was pushed down from the Army Corps of Engineers and that is when you design for a bridge, the span between the banks used to be 1.2 times the average bank width, bank full width is what they called it. And now they're looking for 1.5 times the average bank full width, which means considerably longer spans. And that has a major cost implication to the town. So I think that's something that's a concern. You know, and I think from a monetary perspective, the town really has quite a few, you know, very old culverts and the culverts were put in during the days when, you know, Percy Cook would look at a river and say, ah, you know, put in a 72 inches pipe and be done with it. You know, and now there's a lot more to it to to actually measure and and measure the water basin that flows into it and whatnot.
Okay, that's, yeah, thank you. I guess the other thing from, you know, the planning and zoning perspective, the one regulation change that I haven't completed yet that we were looking to do is, you know, I think it's Chapter 10, the flood prone zone. And we wanted to make it more difficult to build a house in that area. Based on what we're seeing with the flooding in that, I think that is certainly an important thing to discourage building in the flood zone because we seem to be flooding it out more frequently these days. So that's next on my list after I finish getting done with the batch that we've just gone through. Anything else on rainfall? I'll stop sharing that. Next up on the agenda is the budget. And so there were three things that we had to consider in the budget. We did not consider that there was a line in there for somebody's wages in that. Eric handled that part, so I removed it from our little graph here. But last year we had $6,500 in legal and professional. We've used a little over half of that now. And so my recommendation for next year is about the same thing. Last year was the first year that we were all supposed to do some training. I thought there might be a cost associated with that. So last year we bumped up the budget to about $7.50. I think it was 500 before that. We didn't spend any of it. And it looks like any of the required training that we as commission members need to do, There's plenty of opportunities to get that done for free. And so I don't see where that will become a cost to us.
And so I essentially said, well, let's cut that one in half. We put some money in the budget last year for maps. Jim's not here tonight. He's enjoying some time down in The Bahamas, as it turns out. Great week to be gone from here to be down there. But we haven't spent any of that money yet. I'm working with Jim to see if we can go out and we need a new zoning map and I think there was another map or two that if we didn't have it, maybe inland wetlands or conservation needed. But I want to spend that money this year because it's in the budget and then put that back down to what we previously had, which was 300 a year for next year going forward. So that ends up cutting the budget by about $600 The other thought I had was we could just submit the budget the same as last year and that ends up with a little bit more in the rainy day fund, but when we had bumped it up for some specific reasons, I didn't want to keep it there. I thought moving it back down was the most accurate thing to do and is probably where we're at. So that's
my recommendation for a budget. And I'll make a motion to approve the budget. Second.
Thank you, Steve. Any questions or comments on that? Hearing none, I'll call for vote. Anne? Aye.
Steve? Aye. Scott? Scott? Aye. Leanne? Didn't hear you, Leanne. Aye.
Thank you. And I vote aye as well. So the motion to accept this budget passes five-zero-zero. That completes the new business. At this point, we'll go into old business and first up is plan of conservation and development. And I'm going to turn that over to John.
There was an old business, there was a new business discussion of transition. Was that something you could talk about that? Yeah. In the letter of interest from Kevin.
Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. Let's back up to new business 6D. We got a letter of interest from Kevin Arneson about rejoining as an alternate member on the Planning and Zoning Commission. I probably goofed up three different ways here. One, I can't recall that I sent that out. Did I send that out to the Commission? Did anybody see the letter from Kevin? Yes. Okay. I figured as much. Kevin sent us a very nice letter, very nice resume. He's got the experience that he's been on the commission before. He just didn't get his name on the ballot going forward for the election we just had. And I'm reluctant to go back into my email at this point because that's beyond the scope of what I can do without jeopardizing the fact that I'll trip off the line on Zoom here. Kevin, do you happen to have that available that we could let you share your screen and just put that up for everybody to take a look at? What were you looking for, the letter?
Yep. And Marina, you'll probably have to let Kevin share his screen.
Yep. Kevin, you're all set if you want to share.
Yeah. Just grabbing it here. Sorry, have a few things open right now.
Well, Kevin's working on that, just to review why we're asking for alternates, we had two people running at the last election for two openings. One was Anne Marie and I forget the other fellow's name, but another excellent candidate. And, but I guess there is a state rule that you can't have all three alternates be of the same political party. And I had gone through our charter trying to figure that out and I know that we can't have everybody on the commission be of the same political party. You got to have at least one of a different party in there, but I didn't see anything in our charter about that. But when I talked to Carol, the town clerk, she said, yep, that's the way it is. The other guy was Patrick Dougherty he pulled his request to be on the commission because we got very close and it was confusing with the election. I didn't know you going into the election that that was a problem where we should have headed it off ahead of time. But anyhow, we can only have two Democrats. Susan's one, Anne Breeze the other one, and Kevin's a Republican. So this is the letter that Kevin sent expressing his interest in returning to the board. Do we need a motion for that, Jed? Yes,
we will. In fact, I will make a motion that we accept Kevin as an alternate member of the Planning and Zoning Commission. I'll second that. Okay, thank you, Scott. Any other questions for Kevin at this point? Okay, you could stop sharing your screen there, Kevin. All right. And I know it's kind of tacky to vote on whether or not we're going to bring Kevin back in with Kevin sitting here, but I thought that was probably a pretty low risk. I take no offense, Jud. It It is what
is what it is. I reached out, twisted Kevin's arm, tried to get him to reapply because I wanted his expertise back on the commission. I was happy that he was willing to put in his letter of interest to do it so. So made a motion. I think Scott, you seconded it. Was that correct? Yes. Okay. Yep. After goofing that up on the last meeting a little bit, I want to make sure I get all my seconds in there. And with that, I'll call for a vote. Anne? Aye. Steve? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leanne? Aye.
And I vote aye as well. Motion passes five-zero-zero. And so at your convenience, Kevin, if you stop by the town hall and get sworn in as an alternate member, that will take care of that. And thank you very much for being willing to serve. Absolutely. Thank you, Kevin.
Okay, now we'll turn it back. Now we're done with new business and thanks for keeping me honest on that. I appreciate it when all you guys do that. I was unhappy when I read through the minutes from the last meeting and Marina correctly had a couple of motions that were never seconded. And so that was just me going too fast. That's bad on me. But if you guys keep me honest, that's always a good thing. So John, your turn. Okay.
Marina, if I could share my screen. So I think we're gonna focus, we don't have to talk too long tonight. We're going to focus on the survey. Hopefully people can see the survey Yes. On So we went through this briefly and I believe Jed sent out the link. Hopefully people got a chance to take a look. I know people didn't, many people actually completed the survey, which I appreciate, taking a look at it and not completing it just in case we have to do any tweaks, then we don't have to delete files or anything like that. So I just wanted to go through and get any additional feedback, you know, questions to be swapped, questions to be added, and then to talk a little bit about best ways to kinda get this out there and in which formats. So with your indulgence, I'll just go very briefly through the survey questions again. You'll see this sort of the survey preview. The SurveyMonkey
bot didn't find any logistical problems with it, which is great. Estimated about eleven minutes to complete. I think Eric did it a little bit quicker because he's been thinking about these planning and development issues kind of nonstop for many years, but hopefully it feel like a burden because obviously, you know, people get overwhelmed by it. That's no way to get good feedback. So the first question is basically living or working in Andover, providing the options for there. The next is ranking of economic development priorities. And again, we have a couple of these ranking categories where you are asked to either drag or slide up and down the priorities. You know, one being the top priority, seven being the seventh. You know, not that any of these things are
not worthwhile, but just forcing a choice. So again, in economic development, no major changes to business development, more small businesses and home businesses, more retail along Route 6, more service professional medical along Route 6, more restaurants along 6, visitor based businesses to leverage the Hop River Trail, etcetera, or focus on growing existing small businesses. I'll pause for a second there if anyone has any any notes. John, can you go back to number, one? Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure. I'm sorry. I buzzed right past that. How about, like, retired and worked part time?
Just a question. I'm not, you know Okay. So we have living and or retired.
Because there's so many retirees now that are you know, go back to, that have gone back to work. Yeah.
I don't know if that means anything on planning for conservation and development, but could mean something. I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll open that up if that's, if that's maybe slicing, slicing too many, Could be too many.
Know, we I don't know. I defer to the group. But we have you know, if you're working but mostly retired, I think you'd probably either choose one or the other, you know, work in Andover or live in Andover and retire. It's to the group that other people have strong feelings about this.
I know I had the same question as I read through there, Scott. I like to think that I live in Andover and am retired, but Eric's working my butt off. Yeah,
you see that fat paycheck from your planning and zoning responsibility. But no paycheck, it doesn't count as work. I guess it's just fun. I guess it's you and me, Dunjett, Yep, yep.
I'm open to it. I don't know if there's value to capturing
that nuance, but I'm happy to add it. There's a lot of retired people that are working. I'm just wondering if capturing it would do any good, you know, maybe it won't.
You do have a question later on, John, about the age demographic, don't we? Yep, yep. Yeah, and so I thought, you know, we were really gonna capture what we were looking for
when we break down by the ages. And Scott, we can also do a crosstab. So, you know, we can get like the basically numbers of people who are say 65 and older who listed that they are not retired, for instance. So we could do, you know, we could do a little bit of crosstabbing that. Okay. All right. Back to number two, economic development priorities. I think we did get one question. Someone asked for maybe a little bit more clarification of what a visitor based business was to leverage the Hop River Trail, which I think is a worthy question if it's not, you know, a small retail shop or if it's not a, like, would you say maybe convenience or if it's not a restaurant, Is there something else that And I really wasn't able to answer that well.
I don't know if anyone had thoughts about how this category visitor based business.
Yeah, thought that was referring to Andover Pizza or, you know, Tom's little breakfast shack kinda thing. Yeah.
Right. The yeah. The and I mean, you know, it's it's to a certain extent, something that can be in the eye of the beholder, reader. And if they think of some of those things and say, yeah, that little pizza place, the breakfast shack, that's the kind of thing that would pop up that would enhance,
maybe that rises to the top and that's okay. Yep, we need a coffee shop and an ice cream stand. I
saw the little arrows on the sides and I was trying to maneuver the thing by the arrows. You can do that too.
Wanted to move the top one down and then I realized later on that I had to keep going down as I was clicking it. I didn't know you could drag it. It didn't say anything about the Okay, perhaps should I I could say that in description. Can either click the arrows Okay. Or
Okay. As a senior who I think I'm sort of adept at the computer, but I never figured that one out.
Good. Thank you. I think that's worthwhile. If you're not used to these, it takes a little bit of
Yep. Did either end. I played with those little arrows at the edge and saw what it was trying to do and I stopped playing at that point. I figured I could get it there, but John showed an easier way to just drag it. Okay. I'll I'll I'll add a little descriptor of what to do. That's great. Above everyone
that you have this, way to do it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Click or drag. Mhmm. Okay.
And I have another question too to do with this kind of a thing, the ranking. I often find, I have like three or four that I want to have on top. I can't decide which one I want to put on top and I would tend to like it more like number seven your question number seven that is, where you can do like strongly agree, agree, neither agree, that kind of thing, or say that you, I really like this idea. I really don't like this idea. Because personally, I have a problem with agree and disagree questions, but I like this or I don't like that. I would have thought of having that kind of a check thing for these so that I could give some of them a really high ranking make them. Alternative
to doing this ranking of the full seven would be choose three. You know? So a limited number of top choices in a non ranked way. If people, you know, if we could say, what are your three top priorities? And then obviously, well, if someone is four, then you're forcing a choice, But that is an alternative to this sort of system where you're ranking all seven. If people like that more, we could certainly know, that forces a choice, and there tends to be a little bit more consensus around a couple of things rather than everything kind of washing out somewhere in the middle on these sorts Yeah, of
because this list looks great and I would tend to say out of those seven choices, I'd probably want five of them. So it's hard to rank them.
So that, but that's, know, that the choices are sometimes meant to be a little bit harder, but I guess the question to back to you, Anne, if you think five of them are real important, if we gave you this question and said, choose your top three, would that be just as hard?
That'd probably be easier to come up with an answer then
for me. So I could convert this to a choose your top three, for instance. I don't know what do others think about that. What does everybody else think?
Wouldn't pick just three because as Ann said, well, for me, the only one I'm not fond of is no major changes to the business development in town. I thought the rest of them were all pretty good ideas, but I've seen it, you get enough surveys through the junk mail that I know that it's always hard to rank those priorities, you know, whichever group sends you, they always word them such that you like them all. And so I figured, well, this wasn't any different. But maybe as you started out with the strongly agree, strongly disagree, you could have a couple that you strongly agree with, a couple that you agree with, maybe one or two that you don't agree with and go that way. That might work too.
Others have any reactions to the format of this question? And I guess maybe other questions of a similar approach?
I don't necessarily get a vote on this, but I think by doing this, you make people actually think and really figure out, it's not a question of what you like and what you don't, but what you like the most. Like if there's one thing you gotta say, this is what I'm for, then you gotta pick that. You know what I mean? Yep.
Yeah, that was kind of the idea. Especially as Jed, you said, a lot of these are, you know, fairly good ideas or that, you know, they're, hey, you know, that would be nice too. That would be nice too. And, you know, if you did an agree disagree, you'd probably get, you know, close to universal agreement on these, but you lose some of the nuance in terms of actual preference.
Well, guess, you know, we'll get a chance to analyze the data once it comes in, and only then will we know whether or not we're smart on the way we did it. So with
repeated appreciation of Anne's input on that, I would say, unless there's, I'm not hearing an overwhelming feeling that we need to change this approach. So I'm going to hang in for right now, and we'll move on.
I will be disappointed if 90% of the responses have no change to the business development as the number one item. Other than that, you're probably okay. People
like Andover the way it is, a lot of ways. Okay, question three. If you think more housing options are needed in Andover, for whom do you think they're most needed? And this, we did a select all, so it could be people could check all the boxes. And then, again, we say if you think they're needed, we have a I don't believe we need more housing options choice. You know, hopefully, we don't get too many of those that that say, I don't think we need more housing choices, and then check a bunch of other boxes. But so this is this is a could be an all of the above. Maybe you could Yeah. Highlight the select all that apply, John. Okay. Sure. Make the make the description clearer.
Yeah, I have a question though, John. I was wondering why you specifically picked teachers not other vocations as well. For example, nurses, why not nurses? Why not Firemen, something policemen. I was curious about Yeah.
So I was wondering I if was too, I was just about to ask. If young professionals and young families were sufficient and you didn't really need the teachers.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's a question that's kind of a holdover from some affordable housing surveys that we've done. And in a lot of very small towns, the number of sort of young professional jobs that have to be located in town and, you know, are sort of locally essential jobs that are not fantastically well paid, the teachers kind of came up over and over. Because, know, in many of our small towns, firefighters are volunteers, you know, and other, you know, that a town absolutely needs to have, other tasks are either volunteer or, you know, aren't necessarily in town. But I'm happy to expand that. That's no problem. Think With
the appropriate thing to put there, could it be workforce housing? Does
hit what you're looking at or is that different? I mean, workforce, I think is a little bit vague. Yep, I know it is. Right. And so I guess, you know, obviously the point we were trying to get is, I don't know, teachers and other in town workers or something like that. Because again, you know, because Andover doesn't necessarily need to have a dental hygienist in town. You know, the dentist could be in Columbia, could be in Bolton or could be Mansfield. But you know, Andover does have teachers because Andover has a school. So the I guess, you know, the question is, are is there other other professions of that type that sort of have to be close to Andover by their nature.
But if you follow what you're saying, teachers aren't required to live in Andover, to teach in Andover. No. But but no. But they they
there are jobs. There need to be jobs for teachers in Andover. There don't need to be jobs for a dental hygienist in Andover. You know, there needs to be a town clerk. You know, there needs to be public works crew. You know, the things that that jobs that are needed in Andover, based in Andover. And we wanna provide ideally opportunities for those people who work in Andover, who live there. And, know, that's that was sort of the the idea there. Teachers are sort of shorthand for that, but I perhaps
just You said this. Teachers. So something like housing for people who work in Andover is essentially what you're saying?
Yeah, sure. Something like that. Is that yeah. It's worthwhile point. I'll see if I can expand
that to explain that a little bit better. Okay. Thank you. I think that sounds better. I agree with taking out just simply teachers.
Yep. Yep. That's and it's without any without any sort of description why that's isolated is that's that's an important point. Thank you. Okay. Anything else on that? Three? Okay. Go on for four. What types of housing? And this is again, a check all that apply and that we sort of highlight the direction. And again, this, I think we captured most of them, single family, single family accessory apartments, two family, three or four townhouse, multifamily. Are there other elements of housing we should be considering as well?
So I'm almost reluctant to mention this, but I think we're required to at least make a provision to have maybe mobile homes or something. And right this minute, our regs prohibit that. And I know most people like that that's in there, but
Well, no. I mean, right now, like, a traditional like a trailer park, you are not. You're not required to have regulations, you know, or to allow. You are not allowed to prohibit mobile or, I mean, I'm sorry, manufactured housing with a minimum dimension of 20 feet on one side or something like that. But, you know, just, you're not allowed to discriminate against a type of house just because it's manufactured. But trailers, which are in many cases not, are technically vehicles, and depending on how they're parked and anchored, is a different category. Eric?
Then I probably don't understand you exactly. I know I, when I was in East Lyme, I lived in a manufactured house, and and you could not tell the difference between that and a stick built house. Right.
So I think, you know, there's of towns had attempted to, or sort of had put in place regulations against manufactured housing, thinking that they were talking about just trailer parks essentially. But there a legal and regulatory distinction between those two things.
Okay, well, I'm still a little fuzzy on that, but we'll let it go for now. If somebody thinks we ought to have a trailer park, can put that in the other and specify. Sure. I don't think we'll get too many inputs there. Okay. Next
is another one of these ranking ones, thinking about community resilience sustainability, which again, Jed talked about a little bit earlier. Rank the following as areas for focus or investment from the town. And again, Scott, we'll add a little bit of direction here again about clicking and dragging. Alternative energy infrastructure, upgraded power data infrastructure, road network is friendlier to pedestrians and bicycles, community gardens, and expanding local ag, discouraging new construction and public investment in flood prone or environmentally sensitive areas, or invest in creating access and infrastructure to recreational facilities. Are there other elements here we should we should think about, particularly maybe, you know, when we're talking about some of the rainfall issues that we've had? You know, should we be should we add something like upgrading roads, culverts, bridges to deal with increased storm frequency and intensity? I kinda like that as an idea.
I had a thought. Thinking ahead for development in the future, should we be getting something like including investments for future infrastructure and things like water and sewer and things like that, it's going to take a lot of planning to get those kinds of things in someday maybe, because that would be really helpful in development. And if you can mention that somehow. I
have thoughts about that. I don't know, Jed or Eric, if you guys
Well, I've thought about that too. Certainly, if sewers and public water would be very expensive, last time John, Eric and I got together, we talked a little bit about are there grants to support doing all that? I guess my conclusion was not having sewers in public waters with the exception of commercial stuff and in high density development kind of forces us to stay a little bit the way we are, which I don't know if that's a bad thing. And we may not have the time tonight. I know I was thinking about having John start us running through some demographics of the town. But when I look at Andover, I want to make sure that we can continue to provide the quality of life for the people that work here. We don't want to, we're not in Avon or West Hartford or something like that, but we don't want to be a big city either. And so we're kind of where we are. I'm just trying to see, are we making changes to our regulations that allow us to remain about where we are? Is the population going down and that's a problem? Is the population going up? Several years ago, we put some regulations into effect that slowed down the growth because we didn't want to get too big. Now I don't think we want to get too small. We want to encourage some people to be here. But I don't think, you know, I'm looking for Andover to be all that much different than it is right now. And so after listening to Eric, I thought
probably this is a ten year plan. Probably ten years from now, do we want to see sewers in public water in town? My conclusion was probably not.
No, I mean, I think my sense Eric, do you want to jump in on that first?
That's not something I want to see in town, not at all. I mean, if it's forced on us by the DEP because of Bell contamination issues in the Lake District, we'll deal with it, but we're not gonna, I don't think we're voluntarily going that way.
Yeah, I mean, there's sort of two reasons to invest in public infrastructure like that. The first is, you know, if there's a contamination problem in the Lake and the DEEP forces us, or if there's some kind of drinking supply issue like in East Windsor, for instance, the tobacco fields were poisoned by, you know, by a pesticide. And now all the people in the rural areas of East Windsor have to be on public water just because all the wells are poisoned. So, you know, that's one reason and hopefully we won't get there. And the other reason is if you're going to have growth at such a density that, you know, the available options for on-site wells and septic systems are are just not not possible at all. And that's that's an order of magnitude that it would be really dramatically transformative of Andover. You You you can have a lot of I mean, you know, a town the size of Old Saybrook, you know, eleven, twelve thousand has no sewer lines. You know, a town of the town of Clinton, 13,000, 14,000 has no sewer lines.
So, I mean, you can have a significantly larger population and still avoid public sewer. But I think, unless there is a great deal of sentiment about growing somewhat significantly all over town or growing very significantly in relatively small parts of town, whether that's, you know, the lake or, you know, some immediate areas right off of Route 6 or something like that. Again, I think as Eric says, it's a ten year plan. It's it's it may be not something that we really seriously need to to think about. But if that's not the sentiment of the commission, we can talk about that.
I have a question that maybe you can answer or maybe somebody else can. I look at Hebron in their center. I like the way that has developed, and I would like something along that kind of line in Andover. Do they public water or are they all on private? Do
you know? I do. Main Street coming up from Amston Lake up Route 85 and then taking a left or taking a right onto Route 66 is sewer. They have public sewer, they have public water, and in fact, they have gas. They frankly don't use much of it, any of those. Like it's currently at a density that really doesn't truly need it, but they're primed for growth. I mean, they got their big you know, the the the road, James Horton John Horton Boulevard, that as you're coming, in from, Columbia, on Route 66 East or 6 sorry. Coming west on Route 66 from from Columbia. There's a there's a road that goes off to the south called John Horton Boulevard. That was that was called the road To Nowhere for fifteen years because they built it and they installed sewer lines and then nothing was built there. They got a big senior housing complex with, you know, 130 units or something like that. That was only possible because they had public water, public sewer and natural gas. That attracted the developer. But there's nothing about the current development density of Main Street Hebron that absolutely needs those things. Okay.
You know, and again, I hate to keep referring to sort of shoreline towns, but if you're familiar with Downtown Essex, for instance, if you've been if you've been, like, in Main Street Essex, Essex doesn't have sewers. It it does have public water downtown, which helps somewhat, but they they function, you know, more or less on on on private septic systems. You know, even the Griswold Inn of all places. You know, the so it's you can encourage economic development at a density and a scale that doesn't necessarily need that. Certainly it helps larger developers become interested because those things are available and you don't have to worry about building your own septic system and stuff like that. But, from a public health standpoint, from an actual developability standpoint, it's not critical. Okay.
Thank you. I guess the other thing to add on that is the rules on septic systems have made higher densities than what we've been traditionally looking at more possible. So we can significantly increase the density of what we have considered in the past and get away with it with a septic system.
Yeah. You can now do up to 66 bedrooms relatively easily with local approvals with the septic system, assuming your soils are decent. So okay. So a good question. My thought so my thought on question five is perhaps add a question about our discussion earlier or an option about earlier about upgrading roads, culverts, bridges to deal with, like, higher frequency storm events. But otherwise, are we okay with both the question list and and the force ranking for now? Yeah, I think so. Okay,
onto question six, open space and natural resources, another ranked category for areas of focus or investment. Again, keeping that language. So focusing on Andover Lake, focusing on trails, including connecting open space properties and inter town connections, investing in stewardship or management of existing open spaces, investing in active recreation facilities, playground, athletic fields, courts, investing in passive forests for habitat and hiking, or Andover has sufficient open space resources. Is there anything we're missing? Anything that people wanna do? Zip lines. Hot air balloon races. Are there things that we're forgetting? Okay. How about go karts? A Formula One racetrack.
Okay. I would call that active recreation. We wanna add some description there for our teachers during the summer. Think you've been great as there, John. Rename the town Pickleball World.
Absolutely, there's some branding opportunities. I was at the shoe store the other day and I saw socks that were specifically branded for pickleball juice. It's a bold it's a bold market.
Okay. We'll Should we hey, John. Wondering, should we add a line item for the Hop River Trail? I know it's state Yeah. Don't technology, but
So we have focus on trails. Do we wanna specifically focus on maybe Hop River and other trails? Do we wanna call it out there? Well, yeah, I would I would leave the focus on trails the way you have it, but maybe spike out the Hop River Trail because it's such a, know, big part of the town. And Okay. Obviously, investment, you know, we've we've actually been investing in it. Right? Sure. I don't know. I think it would be worth spiking out. So okay. Okay. A separate a separate, priority, like prioritizing the Hop River Trail.
Or what other people think? I think it would make sense.
Maybe upgrades to and connection like, upgrades on and connections to the Hop River because, you know, some of the things we're trying to do right now is connect Yeah, the town like we were just talking about the parking area near Burnett Brook, right? That would be Yeah. Okay, so Hop River Trail amenities, that sort of thing? Okay. Yeah,
no, I agree, Steve, at least in the past, the recognition of the Hop River Trail is one of the primo things in Andover. Hopefully the people that live here think, continue to think that. I think it's only gonna get bigger. And that should be good for us. Great. Okay, great.
All right, go on to seven. Hopefully I can get this all on screen. Please rate, and so this is a different sort of question, rate your agreement with long range planning topics. And a lot of these did come from the long range planning survey, but we're just sort of asking them in a slightly different way. Again, on strongly agree to strongly disagree five point scale. So we're asking about focusing on development of a town center, reestablishing a main street, actively marketing undeveloped property on on Route 6, improvements to 316 for bike and ped, and then focusing less on acquiring open space and more on maintenance and stewardship. Are there any other sort of agree, disagree topics that we wanna look at here? And these are all, you know, sort of in that in that realm of development investment. No. Okay. I'm wearing you down. This is good. Eight, ranking the following services. Oh, I'm sorry.
Hello.
This is Leanne. Yep. Just a comment, not an opinion one way or the other. Just with regard to the first couple of questions about a town center and a main street. I've been here for several other of these updates and it's my recollection maybe Susan can see if she remembers the same thing. When we asked people in the past if they wanted a town center it seems to me that most of the people who said they'd like to have a town center came from another town as opposed to growing up here that had a town center. And as you probably know, we're probably never going to have
a town center like 11 and green type place because Andover is smaller geographically and we have a historic district kind of next to what was our town center on Center Street with the old post office and what was the railroad station one hundred years ago. Then we have the school next to the town office building next to the firehouse. And then we have Route 6, which is they're all different concepts. Again, I'm not disagreeing with this or I'm not saying we should leave it out. I'm just saying this is what might happen again that, you know, we can't do much more than what we have now.
Yeah, I agree with Leanne and I remember at one point the town center was going to be up behind the school, and then we talked about other things as well, and it kind of moves around, but it's always amorphous and never shows up anywhere in the end.
Yeah. And I mean, for those of you who remember the long way planning survey, this was a very mixed, it was kind of fiftyfifty. There's kind of a carryover from that to kind of get, take the temperature of people on that.
So the current POCD talks about developing a town center over on the Center Street area. It had what I thought were some fairly grandiose thoughts about building that up. And at the time, I didn't like it. But when I, but I agree with, I think it was Ann Cremay that talked about the development in Hebron around Johnny Horton Boulevard, which I kind of like. And so I asked myself, where would that be if we were to do something like that? And I think coming right off of Route 6, you go down 316 a little bit to the Center Street area, maybe there's something you could do there. I don't know. If you ask five people what a town center is, they probably have five different answers. But that was one of the things that I thought that might be a potential place to build up like they're doing in Hebron off of Route 66. And I kind of like that there. So I kind of like the question. I'm just not sure that
we need to communicate maybe a little better about what the Town Center really is or what we're thinking about doing it. But that's what I like about a Town Center. Whether that's the Town Center concept or not, I don't know. But I do like what they're doing in Hebron. I see.
So, again, I mean, is just a question. Know, to just remind everyone that these are just survey questions. You know? They they this is not, framed as a binding referendum that will that will force you to action given given any particular response. It's just input. And it's really, you know, it's I don't see a ton of downside just asking the question, and if we get a muddled response, that's fine, you know?
Yeah, I'm not opposed to it at all. I'm just saying from past experience that this might be the result, that there's not too much more can be done on a big scale anyway.
In reading letters in the River East, some people think that Johnny Horton Road is the best thing since sliced bread. Other people think it's the biggest disaster going. And so there's probably not, I don't know what the consensus is over there. I do know there's different opinions.
Yeah. And I mean, I'll note just to close that. So I was the economic development coordinator in Hebrew for seven or eight years. The, you know, the the long, long, long range plan there, ideally, what they'd like to do is is move a lot of municipal function and a lot of other activity down Horton Boulevard, you know, to move the town office building and move possibly educational facilities, allow multifamily down there, allow, you know, maybe do the public works facility or the emergency management facility with police and fire all in that same area and essentially build a new, like, put all of their civic investment down that road. And that's that's probably a forty year plan that, you know, may or may not happen. But, you know, the first step being that senior facility took took fifteen years to happen. So
And
and, John, they had a vote on that last year. The the BPW down in Horton Boulevard, they voted that down. Did they? Yeah. The whole town voted it down. Overwhelmingly
Yeah. That's big money. Yeah. So anyway, you know, by some, you know, Leanne, I think you're absolutely right. If by some quirk, people just wake up when we get the, you know, tomorrow when we send the survey out and decide, wow, you know, a town center would really be the thing, and we get, you know, 80% strongly agree, well well, then we can sort of revisit what our options are. But I tend to agree with your prediction on it.
Okay. I agree with you also, Leanne, that if we come back in a hundred years, that our town is probably gonna look pretty similar to what it looks like. Okay.
What shall we move along? Hey, Scott. I don't think that's a bad thing. No.
Probably not. Because I've because I've been here for a long time and nothing has changed yet, except for the community center and additions to the
Okay. Question eight, ranking town services. And this is, again, forcing a choice, not saying that some of them are not important at all or not choosing just one. So at the public schools, services for seniors, general government, excuse me, general government services, parks and rec, public works, and transportation. Are there other, you know, with deference to Eric, I forgetting some critical municipal services that we want to call out here? Not from my perspective.
But again, so I think a forced choice here is good because it'd be interesting to see. And I think probably particularly on crosstab, how age and income crosstabs with something like this. You know, so if you're, you know, the younger family type people might rank public schools higher. Older retirees might say something like, you know, parks and rec or public works. It'll be interesting to see, I think. Okay. Question nine. Again, sort of the five point ranking from very concerned to not concerned at all about these issues relative to Andover's future, and this is a little bit of a mixed bag. So climate change related concerns, changing demographics and aging of the population, aging infrastructure. And there, I don't know if we wanna add, you know, in parentheses, you know, roads, bridges, buildings, or something like that. Loss of sense of place or character of Andover, overdevelopment,
loss of natural resources, pandemic and repeated public health emergencies, slow economic growth, changing housing and development patterns, and affordability of living in Andover. So there's it kind of runs the gamut. There's a bunch of stuff in here, but but, you know, it would be good to kinda get a sense of how people are feeling about these things. Are there things that we think need clarifying or something we wanna add? I think it's a good list.
I guess I guess another way. Is there something here, something that that that you are worried about in Andover that is not sort of covered by one of these questions? No. Crime. Crime. Okay. That's sure. I don't know. Speeding. Is that two things or one thing? Two. I don't know.
General lawlessness? Sure. I'm just throwing that out there because I mean Yep. No. No. Think about the things that I get complaints about. Yeah. Sure. Right. Yep. I mean, if it were based on zoning complaints over the last year, to me it would be, you know, my neighbor's lawn is draining onto my yard and it's making everything wet. That's
No, I think we ought to put prime in there. I think that's a good idea. Okay. Yeah. Good.
Hopefully we don't get a bunch of people that are very concerned Yeah, about
mean, really wanna clarify that, yeah, relative to and or this future, I think we wanna make sure that we're talking about not sort of the big picture. I'm worried about crime and, you know, immigrants pouring across the border directly into into Andover or something like that. Wanna keep that a little bit more specific. Yep. When the Greyhound bus pulls up the down hall and then loads a bunch people. You know you know where you're gonna to to put them, Eric? You you have a spot for them? Okay.
I'm gonna I drive. Alright. And then we have we have a couple of the open ended. What is something you hope will happen in Andover? What is something you're worried about in in Andover? So that's open ended. And very often, after we get one of these, we can do sort of like a word cloud to to catch the catch the most common phrases or or responses. What's the best way to contact you for future surveys or information? You know, this is a big question. So if there's something I'm leaving out here, we have emails, newspaper notifications, hard copy questionnaires, town website direct mail, other. Oh, so would we wanna what's what are what are the other ways of contacting we should think about? Are, you know, newspaper notifications including ads? Should we look at things like TV or radio? I
About texting. I know Eric, you send out a lot of text. Right?
Yeah. And you might say social media as opposed to just the town website. I might even say town website and social media. Okay.
So and and this is, a best way. So this is a pick one. I don't know if we wanna change that to a what are three good ways or something like that. Top three. Mhmm. That would be better. Top three? Okay. Found website slash social media. Yep. Yep. Okay.
And then the last questions are basically demographic, age, cohorts.
When it says that that'll not be shared, John, I would think we would be looking I don't know what we mean by that because I think the demographic data is important.
I guess, oh yeah, maybe I should change the phrasing to will be personally identifiable. I
mean, the federal government We'd has like to know who's responded to our surveys. I think there's a lot of good data in that demographic stuff.
Okay, so maybe it will not be used to identify individuals or something Yes, that's better. Okay, great. Yep. And then we have owner rent with an option because we do have a do not live in Andover option earlier, and then annual household income. And then another. Other comments. So 16 questions. First couple, the last several should go very, very quickly. So if there are no other thoughts about that right now, I'll make some edits, and I'll I'll run the final edits past Jed and Eric to just sort of make sure that I picked up on this conversation. And then I think the next question is where do we where do we where do we launch this? How do we get this out? And and in what formats? Obviously, it's we'll have a link. That's the main thing. But how do we let people know the link? Where do we put hard copies if we want some hard copies? That's a big question.
Well, like the little lads in the River East. I may be the only guy that reads River East, but I learned a lot about what's going on. And we can put a scannable QR
code in that so people can just point their phone at it and go right to the server. Yep, that'd be great.
Put something on the Andover page because that's what we need where we need things. The Andover page meaning?
Of the Yeah. The town's website. We'll do it on the town's website, town's social media. Mhmm. We'll distribute hard copies to the town hall and library. And then we'll use our push notification system as a community alert and ask people to fill it out. And then River East.
Okay. So, Eric, I can I can put together some language for a for an ad or if want me to do a layout too? I I don't know what if you guys have a typical size or typical public notice template. Size?
No. I don't think we really have. I would just talk to my admin assistant, Kate, because she's the one that normally publishes that. Okay. And she'll be the one that puts it on the website. And I would say that's worth maybe a call Yes. To you or from you to Mike Cincovitz, who's our reporter at the River East. Oh, And I would get him to actually do a story about the POCD, and then with a big notice there to because if you do it as a story, you don't necessarily even have to right? Pay for the Plus it goes in the Andover section, so it's more likely to get seen. Sure.
I'll I'll promise him an exclusive interview on the Jeopardy! Stuff and maybe we'll get we'll get a favor from him. Exciting. Okay. Yeah. I'll reach out. I'll get the I'll get his contact information from you and and coordinate with Kate on on that stuff. So thank you. And so then the idea is we'll roll this out and, you know, there doesn't need to be a specific deadline. Sometimes a deadline helps, but we can do an initial blitz and see how responses come in and maybe report back at the February meeting how we're doing. But I would ideally like to roll this out within the week. When you say roll this out, that means get it out to the public? Yeah, so to begin to alert the public. I mean, again, maybe I'm pushing this, Jed, but there's no reason, I think we're basically there and I think there's no reason to not
start getting responses. So, know, first things we could just put the link on the town website and maybe in Eric's email push and then roll out some of the additional stuff over the next couple of weeks. But there's no reason to keep this under wraps. Can make sure that the link is live. Okay.
I know there's a senior luncheon coming up the first Friday in February. And that might be a good opportunity to alert the attendees that wherever it stands at that point, if it's out, give them a little talk about what it's about.
Yeah, well, could have, I mean, could have, you know, for something like that, if you do get good attendance, we could have little half page flyers or something like that with a QR code and a link. Yep. Okay. That would be good. Would be good. Birthday. Likes passing out stuff like that.
Mhmm. Okay. And so that's what did you say? First first Friday? Yep. I think it's February 2 maybe. Okay. Well, I will make sure we get stuff here for them. Yep. Cool. Okay. Alright. That's my stuff.
Very good. Thank you, John. Back to the agenda here. Next up is the proposed amendments to the following sections of the Andover zoning regulations. And so what happened is that at the last meeting, we did not set an effective date for the regulation changes. And I guess that's a bigger deal than I thought it was. Attorney Brandt says, you know, that makes the approval of the changes null and void. And so we're trying to fix that tonight. Marina, if you can allow me to share my screen again. Okay.
Okay. Now, let's see. Anyhow, what we did here, and I was looking to see if I could change the size of this so you're not getting double. Right this minute, I don't see the way that that happens. Okay. So there were a couple of problems with the approval last time. And when we noticed it in the newspaper, we didn't specify that the Section 4.21 on lighting requirements was removed. So it said that that was approved. And probably the most significant item in there was we didn't put an effective date. And so tonight, I've got a draft motion for consideration and I will make a motion to approve proposed changes to the Andover zoning regulations so as the read as follows. And I sent this out to everybody to take a look through. And I also highlighted in yellow on this copy we're looking at where the changes that we agreed to during the last meeting that I had to follow on incorporated here are so you can see what I changed.
I was not going to read through the entire thing. We talked about it extensively last month. And it will all be in the minutes this month. But just to show where we changed it, we talked last month about making it consistent with the forty year deed restriction and so I did that here. We talked about in the Lake District moving the houses of worship and cemeteries to be a special permit and so I've done that here. For the billboard sign, we said instead of specifically authorized by the Board of Selectmen or its designee, we We added on the fence at the soccer field at Veterans Memorial Field of a size less than 32 square feet. Then under lighting, we added the maximum lumens per square foot will not exceed the value specified in the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America publication, RP six fifteen, Sports and Recreational Lighting, or The USA Pickleball guidelines. So that put some maximum illumination levels there. And down on the definition of frontage, we added such as in a corner lot to the end of that just to make that a little bit clearer. Then we've got down here. So
I expect this to be run-in the River East on January 26. We've got to have 15 to see if anybody wants to appeal any of those. And that gets us out to February 11, not counting the twenty sixth or the eleventh. There's fifteen days in between there. So that would be where we're shooting at for an effective date. And so I will make a motion to approve the changes as we discussed at the last meeting. There was one that we didn't have a second on, so that's going to be corrected here tonight as well. So I'm looking for a second. I second that, Jeff. Okay.
Thanks, Scott. Any discussion on these changes before we vote? Hearing none, I will call for a vote. Anne? Aye. Steve? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leanne? Aye.
And I vote aye as well. The motion passes five-zero-zero. Thank you. Next up is back to John and the topic is update on the town of Andover's Complete Streets program. And I know last time we got together, you had a follow on meeting with Eric and the people from Barton and Lejudas who are working on that for us. And I was hoping that you could just give us a quick update on where we stand on that, John. Sure, thanks.
So in brief, so the town, as you know, received basic as a planning study to do a vision plan, a master plan, and ideally some engineering of a route connecting the school senior center town hall area with the Hop River Trail and the municipal amenities on the other side, on the north side of Route 6, the recreation field library and that sort of thing. There being a couple of potential paths that I'm sure Eric has discussed with you before, the two most promising being essentially on road, on on or a near road multiuse trail that would run along Route 316 and then possibly use part of Center Street to get down to the Hop River Trail. The other being sort of backwoods overland, you know, using the the large piece of property that the town owns behind, town hall and the senior center, to try to connect those those resources. And we had initially thought, that the the study, which we've hired Barton and Lejudas, the engineering firm that used to be known as Anchor Engineering, undertake that study. In conversations with Eric, we and I should say we sort of put a little bit of a rush on the initial engineering and study so that we would be able to hit a grant deadline for state grants called LOTSIP, which is Local Transportation Capital Improvements Program, that could, you know, have a very, very significant state cost share for these transportation improvements. So we wanted to hit that, grant target, which is in February, I believe, and, have Barton and would use his help with that.
So we were sort of putting starting to to do a little bit of a rush on the on the question of visioning, and our conversation basically resulted in the idea that, over time, we're going to want to do both of these things, that both paths, on road and through the woods essentially, have significant merit and will provide important opportunities to connect, people in different modes of travel and for different reasons of connection both ways. And so it's perhaps more important to try to snag the opportunity for funding for the projects that make most sense for the funding stream. And so LOTSIP, and Eric can correct me if I'm wrong, is I think far more amenable and appropriate to on road enhancements. So essentially, you know, using the shoulder of the road off of 316 to connect the town facilities and seek that for LOTSIP funding. And then also
pursue DEP recreation trails money for the Through The Woods path. So essentially, you know, instead of choosing which of these paths we're gonna take, the answer is both, and we're going to seek funding separately for both of them. But in the short term, LOTSIP is due first, and so we are focusing our efforts some of the design and outreach with the property owners who would be most directly affected. Basically, the people with Frontage on Route 316 that this this multiuse path would go past. And Eric has been working with the the Barton and the Judas team to have some of these preliminary conversations and kind of start that that process
to get us well positioned to essentially submit for the for the next round of grants. But not you know? And and we are also going to be submitting for rec trails through the woods, but, again, it's that's all town land, so we don't really necessarily have to talk to neighbors just yet. So that's what we're focusing on. And I think making progress. Eric, I don't know if you wanna add to that.
No, I think you hit the nail on the head with that one. We've met with a lot of the homeowners that would be impacted to get their feedback and then have built that feedback into what we're going to the next stage which is discussion with the DEP or correction DOT because they have obviously a lot of say since we're going, you know, much of the construction will be within the right away of the state highway. So that's ongoing. We've got a very short turnaround because we have a deadline in the middle of February for grant submission for that. But we'll make it. And hopefully that's that's something that's funded. It's been something that was in the last plan of conservation and development as well as the separate complete streets plan, which was then adopted as part of the concert with Planet Conservation and Development.
So this is kind of an extension of what the planning documents had kind of called for, but it's taken me, you know, five or six years to get somebody to fund the initial design studies of it.
Did you get any pushback from the residents on 316? Or was it good?
Yeah, I mean, there's always going to be some pushback and some desire for change in exactly where the route goes and how it interacts with their property. You know in most of those cases, you know we've been able to accommodate, you know, what the residents concerns are. You know, and remember, this is this is all preliminary, you know, when we come back with more detailed three d sketches, you know, we can go from there. But, you know, are we going to have to make, you know, do some things to people's properties to make them happy and keep them on board? Sure. And are we going to incorporate as much of their desires as possible? Yeah, absolutely. So it will definitely be a give and take, but we haven't had any real hard opposition at this point. That's good. That's what I was asking.
Any other questions with respect to that issue? It's another one of those things that the town's been working on at least as long as the senior center. Okay.
We'll move on to Item eight on the agenda, approval of the minutes. And as I said, when I was reviewing the minutes for last month, I see that the minute said Jed Larson motion to amend the proposed changes to place an upper limit on the illumination based on appropriate Woah, wrong spot. Jed Larson motion approved November 21 regular meeting minutes with a spelling correction under new business section seven license decure. No second to the motion. Motion carried five-zero-zero. So to correct that, I'll make a motion to approve the minutes from 11/21/2023. And I'm looking for a second. I'll second it, John. Okay. Any other discussion on the November minutes? Hearing none, I'll call for a vote. Anne? Aye.
Steve? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leanne? Aye. And I vote aye as well. The motion to approve the November 21 meeting minutes 500. Next up is the Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing and regular meeting minutes from Tuesday, 12/19/2023. Any comments on those minutes? Hearing none, I'll make a motion to approve the minutes as presented. Second.
Thank you, Steve. Any other discussion? Hearing none, I'll call for vote, Anne. Anne? Aye. Steve? Aye. Scott? Aye. Leigh Ann? Aye.
And I vote aye as well. The meeting minutes from December 19 are approved five-zero-zero. Next up is the administrative reports. Agent Halsey is not with us tonight. I have no report from the Inland Wetlands Watercourse Commission. Item 10, Commission discussion. Anybody have anything to talk about there? One item, and that is the town is in the process of developing a budget. We haven't had any funding for open space purchasing of land in the budget for several years now. We used to fund about $50,000 a year in the budget to put aside for open space purchase. I thought it would be nice if we added some to the budget this year. Eric seemed to think we could get 25,000 in there relatively easy. We wanted 50,000, might have to go talk to the Commission about it. The justification is that the long term plan,
you know, said that one of the things that the people of the town were willing to pay for was setting aside money for open space purchasing. So any thoughts from the Commission on how much we should ask for there? 50.
Okay. Anybody else have a thought? Certainly with the way the inflation has been the last couple of years, if it used to be 50, it ought to be 50 now. I'm under the impression, Eric, that the budget, it's not going to be a horrible budget season because we've got favorable demographics with the RAM budget there that will keep that in our favor again. You got any other sense on the budget for next year?
No, I think it's too early. You know, I don't know, you you don't know where the two education budgets are coming in yet. There will be some extra money needed for infrastructure. You know, but I don't, I can't give you a definitive right now, you know? Okay.
I guess we'll start out with 50 and if it gets chopped, it'll go to something less than that. But I do think that open space purchasing and open space funding is important. People in the town thought it was important and I want to capture that from the long term plan before it gets too far in the rearview mirror there. Don't we need three eighty eight acres or something?
We do. Yeah. It maybe it was 288, but it's Two eighty eight? Two eighty four or something. It was a big number that and we haven't, been screaming, making a lot of progress heading that way yet. So Okay, that was all I had for Commission discussion. Item 11 is miscellaneous. Anybody have anything at all they want to bring up there? Next up is public comment. Kevin, I think you're our only public guy there until you get sworn in. You got any feedback for us?
At this time, I'm just a member of the public observing.
Okay, very good. Thank you, Kevin. And thanks for volunteering. Date of the next regular scheduled meeting is February 20. And I make a motion to adjourn. Second.
You've got to have seconds out all those motions. Thank you, Steve. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Any
opposed? The motion to adjourn passes five-zero-zero. Thank you everybody for attending. I'm glad we're doing it virtually tonight. The ice out there is probably not all that great and we'll see everybody on February 20. Thank you very much.