Meeting transcript
PZC Regular Meeting
September 19, 2023 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
My clock shows 07:00. At this point, I'd like to call the regular meeting of the Andover Planning and Zoning Commission to order. For roll call tonight, I see Anne Cremay, Scott Persson, Steve Nelson, and myself as regular members. I see alternates Anne Blanchard, Kevin Arneson, and Susan Englund. And according to my listing, Leanne did tell me that she would probably not be able to join us tonight. And so, next up for the alternates is Anne Blanchard. So, I will seat you in place of Leanne. Sounds good.
Next up is additions or changes to the agenda. Does anybody have any additions or changes to discuss? And I had one. If time allows, and I think it will, I'd like to add new item 7C under new business, the annual report for the Planning Zoning Commission. Any other items to add or change? Hearing none, I'll make a motion to add discussion of the annual report as new business item seven, Charlie. I'll second that.
Thank you, Scott. Any discussion? Hearing none, I'll call for a vote. Anne Cremay? Aye.
Scott? Aye. Steve? Aye. Anne Blanchard? Aye. And I vote aye as well. The motion passes 500. Next up is public comment. I do see that we have a couple members of the public here tonight. Elaine Buchart, you just joined us. Do have anything for us at this point? No. Thanks. Just listening to the POCD discussion.
Okay. And I think I see Catherine Hutchinson. Do you have any comments worse at this point, Ms. Hutchinson? Not at this point.
Okay. If I could be allowed to comment during the gravel pit discussion, please. Absolutely. And
I guess that's next up, moving on to old business. First topic up is the gravel pit discussion, and I will turn that over to Agent Halsey at this point.
Yes. In the minutes, you indicated that I would meet with the owner of Bill Genevieve and his engineer, Chris Bell, on the August 16. That did not happen. It happened later, following week. And I did not make a lot of progress. I tried to skip to the plan, and Bill, the owner, was arguing why another approach is better. Specifically, you don't want to put the low man and was okay with the way the water drained. And I followed up with a letter she was posting basically reiterating what I maintained at that meeting. And Chris Bell submitted a letter, with really a request for a revision plan, eliminating the installation of any additional tile soil and changes to the drainage pattern. I have no further, I mean, this point, the only suggestion I'd have is to approach Mark Bratz, where to go with it, whether he thinks it's appropriate to call a bond, whatever. He's not here to bring it in.
Okay. I don't know if any of the Commission members had the opportunity to see the letter. I just sent it out this afternoon. I think Jim only got it yesterday. So apologize for the late send out on that, but it was sort of a short letter. I can call it up. Well, can try and call it up on screen if we haven't seen it. But essentially, they don't want to put in any topsoil. They think the vegetative growth is good. And he is saying that his as built drawing, although different than what was approved, results in 15% less water drainage to the area on the right hand side of the property. And since based on the discussion that we had when we approved the restoration plan back in August 2022, there was supposed to be no water draining onto property to the right. I don't see how you can reduce that by 15%. But anyhow, at this point, I'll ask if any of the commission members have any questions for Jim about where we are on that.
I I looked at the Asbil that he sent over. There's only really one section there that drains over to the right, and it's a it's a very small section and it drains towards the river, actually. It's not supposed to be draining that way, but I'm saying that it's a very small area that does drain towards.
Agree. It's also not realistic say no water would drain towards towards the south. Right. Exactly. The whole road, which is essentially in the flood floods low flood grid flood zone, which really can't be touched. And the the Ann Arbor Post that that follows that road up back.
It it looks like it's only 30 or 40 feet that drains towards the river. But Yeah. None of it's supposed to.
Well, it's a bridge that's set back from the the Haul Road. Mhmm. There's an area probably 20 feet along that road for for much of it.
Any other thoughts on that, Scott? No. Any other commission members have any comments for Jim at that point? Are you okay with how it is? Who are you asking that to, Scott? Jim. Jim.
I like, I mean, the commission did represent that water would flow certain ways so that, I mean, that would have to be a revision, or a minor correction, which is, I think, very appropriate. As far as the topsoil, I don't see bringing in four inches topsoil for that parcel. I do want to see stabilization. I did request permission to walk the property. I've had some issues in the past, a little volatility. And I did just recently ask permission to walk, take a look at what is on-site as far as stabilization, what has, what seed has taken. I mean, it's sparse. Whether it's going to hold or not, I can't tell. Now, what you would like to see?
Quite honestly, I was hoping that he would come up with some sort of compromise. Don't think his revised proposal was much of a compromise. You got to get him off of something. Right.
The other thing to keep in mind for everybody, and again, I'm not sure that the drainage I guess the problem I have with the drainage is in the email that Jim got that had the response letter in it. He has a drawing that's marked approved 08/15/2022 restoration plan. Yeah, If I can address that Oh, sorry.
But go ahead, Jim. Go ahead and address that then.
Chris Bell submitted with his letter a plan that was different than the approved plan and alluded to it as the approved plan and was posted as such. I was hoping that that was, I tried to correct that. I'm not sure how that worked out, but honestly, I didn't, that was just, I just recently did that and it may have created further confusion. So
we don't need to get into it in too much detail tonight. But if you go back in the archive, the one all the way at the bottom is the gravel pit, I think that's about the first application that we started archiving electronically. And it's got a restoration plan, eightfifteentwenty two, that we approved at a meeting. Subsequent to that, Chris Bell sent and that showed the high point being essentially right at the edge of where it drops off down to the roadway so everything would run back towards the center into a little detention pond. He submitted something that talked about the approved plan later on, And we relabeled that in the archive to the non approved plan of eightfifteentwenty two. That's the one that has a high point ridge somewhere more towards the center of the property than at the edge where it slopes off and has drainage arrows going both ways. So that was not the approved diagram. And I don't know what made him think that was until he submitted it. Some point later, that was the first time I had ever seen that thing, and we had talked about that at the time.
And then he put in the as built, which I didn't really compare in all that detail because I thought it had, I just didn't know of any basis for assuming there'd be 15% less drainage. Now there could have been for what he wrote is the approved plan, but in my mind that was never the approved plan because the approved plan that we talked about in August 15 was a plan that had all arrows running towards the center. And the west side of the boundary was supposed to be at an elevation lower than the east side so that if the detention basin filled in, it would overflow to the west and drain back to the river that way. So this to my point, this is just another poke in the eye that I can understand Mr. Genovese's desire to not bring in a bunch of topsoil, but I don't see any topsoil out there on the lot now. I'm not exactly sure. I got a guess of what happened to the topsoil that was in the storage area. I think that's buried under the new fill that he had to put down to raise it up to the proper elevation. But nothing has gone according to the plan that he presented and we approved since this project started. And I just don't think that's the standard that we can allow to be acceptable. Anyhow, that's my thought on that. And so I think Jim is reaching out to Mark Grant at this point. And I do not necessarily want to be punitive, but I don't know what the right answer is out there. There's some spots that probably need some topsoil.
I acknowledge there's some vegetation that's growing out there. Looks pretty sparse to me on the different times I've been out there. But we have certainly not he has not complied with his plan that we approved, and I got a bit of a problem with that. So I think Jim's on the right course. And we have certainly been over backwards to try and suit him. Ms. Hutchinson, I know you have been patiently following this saga for the last four years. Any comments for us this evening?
I agree with you that everything that you said with regard to the approved plan. And I also agree that now would be the time to turn it over to Mark Brantz.
Yeah. I know he was supposed to have been complete with the restoration plan last May. We delayed till September with mid September being you know, he's got to have grass seed down about now if we wanted to get anything to germinate before the end of the year and be sure that it got a good start. And it has not. So I'm not sure where to go. Might need some engineering help on the best way to get out of this at this point, but the next step is to engage our land use attorney. And that's what Jim's doing. Okay. Any other comments from anybody on the gravel pit? When did Jim contact Mark?
I just let him know that I shared with him Chris Bell's response plan, which I just got. I was waiting for that
He's see the a fairly aggressive fellow. He'll hop on that. Jim and I just went over the response we got from Chris Bell today, that was the appropriate thing to do. Right. Okay.
Okay. At that point, I'm going to move down to old business 6B, which is proposed revisions to the zoning regulations. And I wanted to talk in general about a couple of things here, one of which was we had talked a couple of times about the accessory dwelling unit, accessory apartments, that sort of thing. And I thought I was zeroing in on what I considered a reasonable approach for the commission to take a look at. I sent that off to Mark Branch, and one of his comments was that he continues to strongly encourage towns to make accessory dwelling units affordable housing, which is a deed restricted thing for 10 as opposed to forty years, which a house would have. Being not the smartest guy in the world on how all the housing things work, I said, Okay, well, that's pretty easy. All that means is that we have to rent restrict what can be charged. And I think that's well below the threshold for what you would charge for an accessory apartment anyhow. I think an accessory apartment would be affordable in terms of what you get there. So last month, when I was meeting with Eric and John, and I was discussing the plan, John's comment, his feedback was, well, you might be discouraging people from building accessory apartments because There's paperwork that you have to do to document that the people going in are eligible for affordable housing. And that was a new thought to me. I never considered the fact that we would have to restrict
who can rent the accessory dwelling unit to those people. My experience in each of the accessory apartments that we've approved so far is that they were all for family members. Right.
And we made arrangements so that when the family member, no longer needed the apartment, it could be rented out. But I didn't recognize the burden on the property owner of going through that. So, I went back to Mark Branch and said, Mark, what do you know about this? Is this the way it works? How does it work? How do you implement that plan? And he said, well, most towns have a housing authority that tracks all that stuff. And we don't have that, so it would be something for Jim to do. And I'll ask John to chime in later on if he's got any experience with any other towns. But Mark Grants' bottom line comment was, are you going to do something about affordable housing or not? And if people want to make an accessory dwelling unit, accessory apartment, and the only way to do that is affordable, then they will probably sign up to that. I was thinking, you know, I looked to the future. At some point, I might want to go into an accessory apartment living at one of my kids' houses. And fortunately, I wouldn't meet the income requirement that's required to live there. And I said, maybe that's not the way we want to go here.
But we could probably go either way in the It's not like we're building a ton of these things, but I was trying to get looking for some feedback from the commission members on whether they thought still requiring affordable requiring an accessory apartment to be affordable was the right way for us to go in an effort to try and make some headway on the affordable housing. And John, before I open it up to the Commission, did you have anything to add? Do you have any experience on managing the admin in there?
Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I've worked with a couple of towns. And again, I mean, Mark France is correct that there's usually an established administrative procedure for this housing authority, which goes through and does annual income verification. But it a burden because in order for those accessory units to count towards the town's eight thirty gs list, its goals toward the 10% state threshold, it does need to be accounted for on an annual basis. So you need to go through those income verification procedures and basically get the tax returns of the tenant, which is kind of a hassle. And most affordable housing landlords or housing authorities sort of have someone that's job is to do that. So, I mean, I think it's worth stepping back and just saying, what is the goal here? Is the goal to promote accessory apartments in general, or to try to leverage accessory apartments specifically as a way to make progress towards the state 10% goal. And if it is that latter thing, the towards the state goal, then we should think about assisting or providing some sort of incentive to those people that are gonna restrict their unit. Because, again, not only is there an administrative burden, but restricting it to those people that are in the lower income bracket means that you will be restricted in what you can rent the thing for. So in theory, you're foregoing some rent, some percentage of market rent. So it's a little bit of insult to injury. So if you're trying to encourage people to do this, should at least try to make it easier for them to do so.
Now it's my impression that whatever rent we would charge for the small unit there is well below the threshold of what somebody making 80% of the median income would be. I know when we did our study, we said somebody on that income could afford to buy a $300,000 house. I figured the rent for any accessory dwelling unit would be well below what you would pay on a four bedroom home. So I don't know that you're giving up rent per se. And again, I was thinking that in most cases, it starts out being housing for a family member, either just starting out or just ending up. But I would hate to preclude somebody from being able to take advantage of that kind of a deal because we can't go through the admin that is required to provide that help to our family members if we chose to do so. I have a question. Yep, go ahead, Anne. If
you go through and make this the affordable thing, does that mean that somebody can't build an accessory apartment for their family member if it's not affordable? I mean, like, we have an in law apartment on our house and we built it not because the in laws couldn't afford a bigger house. It's just that we wanted them close by for being able to help them to prevent going into an assisted living or a nursing home. So, that's why we built it not because it had to be affordable. Would that prohibit building that kind of an in law accessory apartment?
Certainly for the way we were proposing the accessory apartment thing, it would. It just says all accessory apartments will be affordable having ten year rent restrictions on it. Ann, your situation was exactly what I was looking at to say, that was a wonderful plan you had, and would we do that? Now, sounds like John was going to disagree with me there, so I'll go back to him so he can make us all smarter on how we might choose to get around that.
No, sorry, Jed, you're correct. I had forgotten that that's what was on the table was mandating that if you do an accessory apartment, it needs to be restricted. So yeah, if that regulation goes in place or is in place, then Jed's answer is correct. I think what I meant to say is it certainly doesn't need to be that way.
But it gets back to providing an incentive for a guy to put the rent restriction in there, and I wasn't sure how to do that. So anyhow, the bottom line at this point is that's why I'm not bringing the accessory apartment thing that I thought was very close back to you guys is it ran off the rails here within the last month, and I haven't figured out how to get it back on the track yet. So no more discussion on that.
Can I make a possible suggestion? Sure. Go ahead, Eric. Is that you leave yourself an out and you say that as of right, you can build accessory dwelling units in all residential zones as, but they have to be affordable housing. By special permit, you can build one and have it not be affordable housing. That way you put the burden on them prove why they want to not do it as affordable housing. If they want to just do it, it's automatically affordable housing. If they want to argue with you about it, maybe you allow them to do it some other way.
Okay. I like that thought. And I'll take that back and try to build that in for what we're looking at there. Because that's the kind of solution I would you know, I'm looking for is that provide some incentive, and I don't know what that would be, or provide an out. And maybe the incentive is you don't have to do the paperwork of going through a special permit. That might be incentive enough for some people to make it affordable. What does John think about that? John, do want to comment?
I'm sorry. What do I think of what I think of Eric's Of what Eric's suggestion was. Yeah. No. And again, I I think that's if if this commission is of the mindset that you want to do what you can to use accessory apartments as a mechanism for doing more to meet the state threshold, then I think Eric's suggestion is a good one. That, you know, the low hanging fruit, which is to say the as of right, you know, administrative zoning permit would be the restricted unit. And if you want to avoid that, then you would go through a more complicated process of a special permit. So that puts the incentives in the right place. And it doesn't outright prohibit someone like Anne from
doing a unit, you know, an unrestricted unit for a family member.
Right. Yeah. That sounds like a good idea to me too.
Seems like it still discourages people from doing accessory dwelling units. I think it would be better if there was a way to incentivize people to do the affordable housing without putting a burden on them to go through a special permit process if they don't want to do that. There John, do you have any experience with that where there's incentives that we can offer?
Yes. So there's a couple of incentives that could be considered. I'm just giving examples here. I'm not necessarily advocating to spell something specifically for Andover, but some municipalities have considered providing a tax abatement that essentially that the added value of the property or that accessory unit, you know, they add whatever increased value, you know, would be taxable could be abated or the town could offer a tax, you know, rebate or incentive of a couple $100 or something like that a year to do this. And if the town had administrative resources, and this is done primarily by larger towns or towns with a more robust administrative staff or a housing authority, is to basically offer to help people do that paperwork every year. So basically to eliminate those pain points.
I think those are good ideas. I like the tax abatement issue. If somebody goes affordable housing, that's an incentive. I think it's less you know, the approach for it take taking is, I think, more punitive and discourages people from creating accessory dwelling units. I think if you do the tax abatement, it's more of an incentive approach, carrot versus a stick.
I'm not sure, Steve, that, again, I think the rents on most accessory dwelling units are low enough that they meet the threshold for affordable housing right off the bat. It's only a question of getting out of that admin of verifying that your tenant meets the threshold to go in there. And maybe I didn't dig a lot into the tax incentives because I don't think we've got the staff. And I thought that was clearly something that's not in Jim's thing to do. I don't know. I guess I go back to Eric. You know, Eric, does the town have the wherewithal to manage a tax incentive? I know we're trying to get the tax rules up, not down, but we do you know, I always like carrots more than sticks.
I think you would have a tough time convincing the Board of Selectmen that that was an appropriate venue. They've been pretty reticent to allow tax incentives, which is why we have no PA four ninety for farmers in Andover. Yep. So would they do it for affordable housing? You would have to make a really great case for it, And then you might get them to agree to it. But that would be a discussion between the zoning commission and the Board of Select. That's certainly not anything I could influence on.
Okay. Well, we'll consider that. My thought was pretty much in line with Eric that there's a lot of tax incentives that we're not doing, and that's what's going to make the affordable housing thing a tough nut for us to crack as we get into it more. But accessory dwelling units certainly will continue to add to the role of natural affordable housing. We just don't get any credit for it. And so is natural affordable housing good? Yes, I think it is. Is it too bad that we don't get A credit? I wish there was a way we could do that too, because it's certainly easier to just go out and let the market dictate those smaller rents for smaller houses and apartments. Anything else on accessory apartments at this point? The other thing that I just wanted to mention under this item here was, I think it was either last meeting or the meeting before Eric briefed us on a desire to change the sign regulations and the lighting regulations. We're talking about lighting up some athletic fields and that sort of thing and maybe putting some banners over on the fence around the track, and at the same time allowing the banners at the school to be hung higher than 10 feet. I was out for quite a bit of the month since the last meeting here, and so I asked Eric not to submit that one because I didn't want that clock to start yet.
But I'd be happy to entertain a petition to change the regulations from Eric at the next meeting and get that show on the road. I have given it some thought. I do have the biggest thing that I was concerned with and Eric did exactly what I asked him to do was go out and provide an input so I understand what it is that you're looking to do. The input certainly would take care of anything that the Board of Selectmen wanted to do. My concern was it gave too much latitude to the Board of Selectmen, took too much away from being looked at by the Planning and Zoning Commission. So, I'm trying to put some kind of guardrail in there that keeps us from making a public interest sign that's 100 feet by 100 feet or something someplace. And certainly, you don't think you would do that, but every time you have a strategy that starts out, I hope they don't do that, that strategy never lasts very long. So we got to put something in there. I haven't figured out exactly how to go about that yet. But rather than hash that out here tonight, I just wanted to let the Commission know that we can expect to be seeing that from Eric at the next meeting, and I should be ready to provide a little bit of counter to his offer and seeing how the Commission wants to go on that. And if the Commission wants to go with exactly the way you put it in there, that's
all fine and well too. But I want to make sure that we at least discuss having some protections against some wild and crazy ideas that could come at some point down the road. So, any questions on that one? Okay, that gets us to new business. First item up is John with the recap and discussion of the Planet Conservation and Development Survey.
Okay. So first things first, I want to thank everyone both on this commission and some of the other economic development or conservation who went ahead and helped out with the survey, completing the survey online. Whoever is the host, I don't know if it's Jed or the town, if you could allow for screen sharing. I'll go ahead and put the summary on. Everyone has seen the survey itself. But basically, at the end of the 2015 plan, there are two pages that sort of go through the 40 or so implementation. Go ahead and share?
John wants to share? Yes, please. Okay. Hold on one second. Go ahead and try, John.
There we go. Thank you. So hopefully people can see that on the screen. I can make it a little bit shorter, smaller so it fits. Can people see that pretty well? Yep.
Yeah. All right. So these are the final two pages in the plan of conservation and development, which is sort of an implementation task summary. I forwarded this around this afternoon, so people hopefully got a chance to see it. And so based on the results of the survey, which again, here, it was a fairly lengthy survey, 48 questions or 48 implementation tasks. And people were asked to comment on the progress and relevance of the action steps that were identified in the 2015 Plan of Conservation and Development. Each question identified one of the action steps. And in this case, the first one was the the to do list item was adopt the Andover Rural Design Regulation, the ARD. And the options were, you know, is this task that we're supposed to do over the ten year cycle complete? Not complete, but still important. Not complete, but its relevance has sort of diminished. Not sure of of where it stands, but it's still a relevant thing, and then just straight not sure. And so I I went through responses. In the case of ARD, people were fairly confident, significantly so, that it had been completed and could be sort of checked off the list. And then there were a number of others that, let's see, I'm sort of scrolling through. So like I'm making an open space plan that's easily available to developers and landowners. Some people believe it was in progress. Some people believe it was not complete, and those two could be the same, but it's still relevant. And so what I basically looked for
through this survey, again, 48 tasks, was to sort of sort through and identify those items that either were generally by consensus found to be primarily complete or those things that were incomplete and in progress, but still very important. So I've sorted through this list. The blue check marks essentially mean that significant progress has been made or the items are believed to be complete. And I would certainly look to this commission, look to Eric to sort of ground truth those. And then the orange stars were those items that were listed as incomplete or hadn't really gotten underway, but were still very relevant and important to as a task to carry forward. And, Jen, I'll also note we we received sort of a commentary from the Economic Development Commission about these items, and I've incorporated their comments on the task that they've undertaken, and particularly on the second page where we look at Andover Town Center and creating an identity and sense of place, a number of those economic development things and actually, well, it's probably on the
promoting of regulated commercial development. A number of those elements in terms of working with property owners and encouraging economic development. I incorporated their comments there as well. Jed, I will leave it to you if you want me to go through some of the things that people believed were relatively complete, but I think this is a pretty decent summary of where people felt like the town ended up and things that were still important to focus on going forward.
Okay. So I know Elaine is with us tonight. And my thought I spoke with Hank Gruner over the course of the last month with the chapter eight on the conservation stuff and told him that I thought what we would be doing was saving the conservation and economic development to next month to invite them all after we had a chance to see how the other sections went and that way not have them sit through a whole thing here. Elaine, you're here tonight. Would you prefer to discuss the economic development topics tonight, or would you prefer to hold those off until next month where you can have some other members join you? Or you think asking them to attend another meeting is just too much to hope for and you're going to take the message back to them?
Well, I'm just going to take the message back to them. Okay. Mean, them is Kathy Palazzi. There's only two of us left, Yep.
Okay. Sounds good. So, John, with that, I think if you could go through, we'll save the natural resources thing for next month, and we'll try to work our way through the rest of them here tonight, seeing how that goes.
Okay. So we'll sort of buzz through these a little bit and we can pause for some comment. So the first several, and I'll tell them we'll go up here, and this is chapter seven, Managing Future Growth, making this a little bigger. The priorities were adopting the Andover Rural District, which people believed were primarily done. Rezoning areas of R40 to R80, and I'll toggle back and forth here, commentary, there was a lot of uncertainty. You know, some people believed it was done and maybe the people sort of on the inside of planning and zoning discussions, but most people weren't really sure where we are. Well, and I knew this would have some
variance in answers because we didn't go to R40 or R80. We made all the R40s in the 1960s. And so there was probably some lack of understanding of how to answer that one best. But I do think we rezoned everything to a common zoning. Why we chose 60 instead of 80, not exactly sure. Eric can chime in if he's got something there, but we did standardize it all to a common lot size.
Yep. That's, yeah, as I recall, that was the case. So we'll add that as a completion of a different type. Then promoting ARD subdivisions by allowing them as of right. That was generally believed to have been completed, including low impact development and future developments. That would, you know, be, I believe, probably a regulatory change that would sort of encourage that sort of design to be incorporated into site planning. And again, most were believed that yeah. They're uncertain or believed that it had been done. And then the last is consider requiring a special permit for conventional subdivision designs, which I suppose would then thereby sort of disincentivize conventional subdivision in favor of conservation or or low impact subdivision.
And I do think that our current regulations require low impact design. We
looked at that pretty hard when we were looking at the new senior community center. So,
John, and and just to be clear, the current regulations. So, what what it is is all residential development is under the Andover Rural Design District. The anything any if you start with any piece of property that's bigger than 10 acres, the as of right subdivision is a conservation subdivision, which is 30,000 square foot lots with 40% designated to open space. By special permit, you can do a conventional subdivision, but you have to prepare a plan both ways and convince the commission why a conventional, you know, subdivision would work better on your particular site. Right. Okay. So I would say that's a check. Definitely. Is. Yeah. That that that has been done precisely as you describe it.
Okay. That's great. All right. So the next one I'm sorry, Jed, you want to skip through the natural resources? Yes. Yeah. We'll cover that next time when we got those folks here. So here we're going on. This is chapter nine, promoting and regulating commercial development. And let me scroll down. This is okay.
Space. Space. Okay. A couple more. Sorry. So business retention and business attraction. People generally Nobody believed that was complete, although obviously business retention and business attraction are ongoing matters. Correct. So people believed it to be, you know, important as an ongoing thing, which I think is certainly fair. That's not something you'd wanna leave off.
I mean, it's definitely our ongoing charge with economic development to continue working on that.
Okay, so the next one is further streamline development process and consider tax abatement ordinances. There was a lot of confusion. Some people thought it wasn't done, but still relevant. Others thought it was not done but also not particularly a major priority. And then there was a little uncertainty. So we kind of had mixed feelings about this. And I'll pause a little bit for comment, but we'll move on in the interest of time. If someone has something to say, please feel free to jump in. Well, I think Eric's comments on the tax abatement
stuff are pertinent to this discussion here, and we've certainly done anything to head down that path. Whether we should or not, don't know. And, you know, I'll let Elaine and Kathy speak to that issue as we put the new stuff in here, if they want to continue to push on that one.
Well, I mean, it's definitely a way of attracting commercial business. It's a way of, you know, boosting up economic development. If we had a tool to give some kind of tax abatement, and as we discussed, if you can give some kind of tax abatement of people who want to do affordable housing units and play by the rules with that, that maybe we should be looking into doing that. But it certainly has to be part of a visionary plan of what direction we're going in. So, mean, certainly it's a very valuable tool, and I know that we have never taken advantage of it here in town, but nobody has really pushed for it. So maybe in the future, we will come up with a reason to push for it. Okay. Thanks, Elaine.
Next being adopted zoning, recommended zoning text amendments in business and industrial zones. A lot of uncertainty, not sure what has been done about this. And so I'd turn to Jed or Eric about this.
Yeah. So we have completed a lot of that. And the other thing we did is we added the ability we added a basically, a floating zone that fits over the entire Route 64 that's a that allows multi use development. Very flexible, multi use development ability for you to come in as a developer and say, hey. This parcel, I think it should it should look like this, and we want to encompass this, and that would mix both residential and or development on the same parcel. And basically, then the zoning commission reviews it as a preliminary design, says yes, changes the zone to that, and then they come back with the development proposal. So we did a lot of what the last planner recommended in terms of the zoning changes that cover the business and industrial zones. Not saying that there's plenty of other changes we could make, we certainly can, but I think we accomplished most of what we were calling for in the last POC. Okay.
Yep, I agree with that. Know, having looked through it a little bit to see more of the detail of what we said we were gonna do and what was done, I thought we came pretty close.
So relative to what was envisioned at the time, that has been undertaken for the most part? I think so, yep. Okay, great. This is great stuff. Carefully evaluate future economic development areas of areas one through six in PDC workshop setting. Those reference Wait, did I miss that? Was that a question? We may have missed a I think that may have been left off the survey with apologies. I don't remember something like that. No.
I'm not sure what that actually refers to. Again, with apologies for leaving that off the survey. That was inadvertent. I'm not sure what areas one through six mean.
So I can answer that in short detail. One of the things we looked at in the last PUC, D, is that we're very limited in that our whole business and industrial zone is a narrow, very narrow strip down the Route 64. And the question became, are there other areas in town that would be amenable to expanded business or industrial areas? And Bill Warner identified six possibilities and laid out kind of the pluses and minuses in that. And the zoning commission, you know, originally talked about maybe taking them parcel by parcel and considering rezoning them, but nothing has ever happened along those lines.
Okay. So the the is it fair to say that the evaluation had been done, the consideration had been done, but but no sort of specific actions have been taken?
Well, so the POCD laid out the possibilities for those parcels. Mhmm. But no real action has been done to really take them on parcel by parcel and say, okay, you know, is this possible? What are the constraints? What does the land actually look like? Those are more like theoretical, hey, these are large chunks, which is away from residential development that could potentially support something, and here's why.
Okay. I that that's well, I think I suppose I I'm I'm gonna take the liberty of of of calling that one at least considered because that's that was the charge, was to consider it and to carefully evaluate, not necessarily take action. And relative to carrying something forward, I think, you know, this this group may wanna take a fresh look at at what's going on in Room 6 and and rethink the the future of those things. So I'm gonna I'm gonna take the liberty of going ahead and saying that that was dealt with. Consider retaining economic development consultants, which is wait. Oh, no. Did I skip one here? I did. Conduct public hearing and rezone future economic development areas if deemed appropriate. This was deemed as not complete. However, I believe the Economic Development Commission in their notes said that, you know, there was hearings and discussions about this, and consideration is still ongoing. So I consider this one actually sort of accomplished and ongoing, you know, in terms of still a priority.
Yeah, that was part of, Don, that was all part of the LADA project that we had for the Route 6 Regional EDC with the four towns. Right. That, and they went ahead and came up with their proposed plans and proposed area of development. And within Andover, we had the village node section over there by the church and the library and public works in that area. And so, we actually have public hearings to go ahead and present those possibilities to the townspeople for economic development. And it was all very favorable. Everybody's like, yeah, that's pretty much a great idea. Nothing else went from that except that planning and zoning then worked on trying to get that special mixed use zoning for Route 6 so that some of these things could actually exist, could come to fruition.
So, it was a series of workshops that were done throughout that whole process. And then when the Department of Transportation went ahead and kind of ran with that plan, and started doing their traffic calming study, which went ahead and, you know, embellished on that whole plan about what changes like medians that can be put on Route 6 to go ahead and slow down traffic, things like that, that also became a public hearing that the stuff that they had come up with, we went ahead and presented to the public. So, and once again, people were very excited about it, but of course, we haven't done anything with it. So that's what I was saying that, well, yeah, we've had public hearings and we've done the rezoning and, you know, we're working on it, but it's kind of an ongoing thing once we have solid plans on what we're going to work on next. Okay.
And John, maybe I could have been well off the mark on this, but, you know, when we talked about getting the part time planner, it was always a hope that that part time planner, you, could help us with the economic development tie in too. And I had that hope with no understanding of what the economic development guy might do other than work to get somebody in here that would want to do something. And then we work with the zoning rigs to make it possible to entice that guy to get here. But I don't know if that's how it works or not. But when you go back to all these things about the economic development areas and PZC workshop and all this stuff, we need somebody out there actually working on that if that's going to come to fruition. And you'll let us know whether or not that can possibly be you or anybody in your outfit or not. We're just starting to figure out how we're going to use a planner.
Sure. And I think that's absolutely fair. I think, you know, a good planner is really a person that is assisting the town actively in implementing those plans, not just writing, but implementing those plans. And a significant chunk of that implementation involves making those economic development elements happen or assisting the town down that road. So, you know, in so far as my scope is obviously first and foremost to assist this commission with this plan, I'm also able to devote a significant amount of time with assistance of Eric, some of Eric's efforts, particularly around grants and economic development. I think that's a perfectly fair portion of my scope of services. So, yeah, I think insofar as the town has retained my services, I think I'm happy to assist with economic development. And, you know, for folks who haven't been aware of this previously, are currently the economic development consultant for the town of Willington and spent several years as the economic development consultant for Hebron as well. So we've done quite a bit of this. Well, sounds great.
Okay. So then we can go ahead and check that next one, economic development consultant, the list, and move on to enter into discussions with owners of desirable parcels for development. And it was generally believed that this was important, but but as of yet, either ongoing or recorded or complete. I think insofar as there are still those properties and the town's economic development is not done, that's still an important effort to carry forward. Yes.
Yep. A good example, John, is that I don't have a clue as to what the guy who owns the gravel pit is looking to do with that piece of property. We certainly know he is looking to economically develop that property or sell it to somebody who is, but we're certainly not working the system to influence what goes there.
Sure. Yeah, so taking up a schedule of these ongoing outreach efforts would be useful. Alright. So next is develop brochure highlighting areas for economic development. Again, most people said not complete, but still relevant. A few basically said not really a oh, no, still relevant. So everyone believed it was relevant but not sure of status. Elaine, I'm not sure if a brochure ever was completed.
No, it was not. It was, we had discussed a lot with planning and zoning about coming up with something to go ahead and explain all the steps of what you needed to do if you wanted, you know, bring a business into town. But that's the only kind of pamphlet or anything we ever really discussed getting done. But yeah, until we know how we're going to market it and what we're marketing, then yeah, no brochure yet. You know, it's just an idea. It's a good thing to have when we actually have something to sink our teeth into. A piece of property, maybe a developer who's interested, and then go out and see if anybody else is interested in doing that in that area and on that property. But we certainly do, like, we have tried to identify along Route 6 anyway, all of the areas for development so that we kind of know where they are. Okay.
So that looks like it's it it wouldn't take that much of a push, but but it's still an important priority. Yeah. And then the the last it's labor related, I guess, is is marketing the best and available parcels to commercial brokers, which I think is sort of probably along the same lines in terms of completion and priority. Absolutely. Right. Okay. Any other thoughts about this section? No? Okay. No. Alright. So now we're on chapter 10, Andover Town Center. Move forward here. Okay. Which is promote, expand, enhance Andover Town Center using Main Street approach. Generally considered, if you look at the two blues, not complete or uncertain, but still very important. I think that's fairly clear, Eric. I mean, a lot of what you work on has been focused on this sort of thing. I don't know if you had any additional commentary here.
No, I mean, I look at the kind of the accessibility aspects of this and try to push that. The the original concept in the last plan of conservation development was to use Center Street, the bed area, and UP 316 as quote unquote the downtown or the town center. While it has some characteristics of the town center, it doesn't necessarily have a lot of the characteristics. We are getting ready to go with the study grant to hopefully make it walkable, the length of that walkable, and connect both the trail and the town hall, But that's that's most of what, you know, we've done. We haven't really been successful necessarily and, you know, turning that area into anything that resembles the true town center.
Okay. And yeah, so then pursuing that, being prepared to apply for various grants to enhance and create walkable pump centers. Certainly being prepared, the town has done, and as Eric notes, we have a grant in house to develop a master plan for the connectivity of those elements of the town center. So that's well underway. Implement recommended strategy for Andover Town Center. I think that's probably going to be going to be the work of the next five to ten years, I would suspect, Eric. And if we particularly if we're gonna get some designs, you know, done this fall into the winter, I think that's that's probably the the to do list, right? The next thing Go My
thinking on the town center concept is the pendulum swung both ways and is now coming more into the center. When I read through the plan of conservation and development, it had this vision for Center Street being all these multi story buildings with shops on the 1st Floor and apartments on top of it. Since we weren't able to acquire 12 Center Street and the old firehouse got condemned and all that kind of stuff, I said, well, that is never going to happen. But I do like the model, which it was trying to do where retail activity gets taken off of the main Route 6 corridor, like they did over know, they're trying to do on Horton Drive over in Hebron, and build back away from the street a little bit and build out a block, which when the thing that changed my mind on this a bunch was the nice tie in to the rail trail. And so I don't know what the town center thing might look like at this point, But I do think there's a segment that you could probably do something with. And maybe it won't be as big as the pictures currently that are in the POCD would lead you to believe or what we saw the Yukon presentation describe. But that is an area that we could build out away from Route 6 a little bit, tie it into the rail trail. And I think there's something there. I just don't know what it is yet. So I think that's an area that we need to work harder to figure out what is a reasonable and good
use of that little section there. I think you were right. The events of the last ten years have sort of forced a reconsideration of what this could be. But I think that's, you know, again, so we're looking back at what has been done. And obviously, steps were made to partake it, but there were some obstacles that may force a change of direction. So I think, you know, keeping the concept out there but approaching it a little bit differently is probably where we're gonna be moving forward. Okay. The next would be the established blight ordinance to correct issues at 12 Center Street. Vast majority believe that that had been done, I I think. Is that fair to say? Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. Acquiring 12 Center Street to avoid potential negative uses in the guide of future development, a lot of people weren't sure.
That definitely did not happen. Yeah. That's the only big threat, actually, I think we've got so far.
Okay. Well, so we wanna add we wanna add a a new well, the question I guess the question is, is that still a target? Or is it are we sort of abandoning that as a goal? Yeah, I think we've abandoned that as a goal. We
had it available through, you know, at a really good price. People at town didn't want to pay to get it at a really good price, and somebody else bought it.
Is the issue, John, with the town purchasing anything, and we are subject to the town meeting, and it is up to the town's folks to either vote yay or nay, and they said And they said no. Okay. So, there was no money. No money to do it. Though, I think was, there was open space money, there was some open space money, and it was looked at, you know, possibly using open space and just making a park out of it. But that, that really didn't get, it's still the townspeople were pretty much, no, not going to do it, you know, we're not going to acquire that property. Okay. So
best laid plans, but. Of course, it's, yeah, you're not going to, you're not going to go, not gonna bat 1,000 all the time. Right, which does bring up a real issue and maybe we want it in our current POCD,
try to come up with a plan for the town to acquire property. We haven't. The only property we've acquired is property that people have given us. I don't think we've bought a piece of property.
Specifically for the point of reuse, redevelopment, not concrete. Correct. Correct.
When we do the survey of the town, that's probably something to ask the people. But I think that question was asked in the long term study plan back in 2018. Do we want to spend money to buy property to have developed? And everybody said no. I'm going from memory, but that's what I recall reading on that survey.
We we didn't want their tax dollars toward buying property for economic development. Period. Yep. Yeah.
We did get one piece, though, Judd, from the Merits We did. Out on Yep. Out on the highway. That That we kept it is is in commercial. Yep. Good point, Scott. Part of that is commercial. Yeah.
One one piece from the merits that was commercial. Yeah. It's a great little piece out there too. So we can good point. We we need to have as a goal, figure out what to do with that to take advantage of it. Dead drive through liquor store. That must be a cannabis shop.
Alright. So the where we are next is established village district zoning for the area as recommended. A lot of uncertainty. People really don't know where we're at. I could be wrong. I don't believe we have village district zoning at this point. We do not. Nope.
Okay. And I guess, know, so there wasn't a lot of strong feeling that it was a critical element or something that should be carried forward. So I don't know if that's something, you know, that we wanna abandon at this point or reconsider. But we don't have to decide that right now. This is really just a status check.
I guess the question is what is village district zoning?
Generally speaking, what it is is zoning that that has some additional ability to regulate design considerations. The the state has a sort of a carve out within their zoning enabling that allows for the establishment of the Village District with specific design guidelines such that any new construction or substantial renovation would have to satisfy
design considerations and, you know, go before a design review board. Yeah, because I know when we were talking about LADA and the village node, we were discussing appearance of buildings in that area and what the streetlights would look like and things like that. It almost sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about establishing what that particular area would have for an appearance. Yep. Right. I mean, wasn't
discussed, but, you know, but it's still like we don't have a plan yet
to do it. Yeah. So there are a couple of towns in the area. I believe Coventry has a village district in the center, a other couple communities. You go Outreach 6 the other way into Brooklyn, Brooklyn Center, Connecticut has village district, but it's largely, it encourages sort of traditional historic and mixed uses. So it's not strictly residential, it's not strictly commercial, but it is very heavy on design considerations. Okay. So that's probably something to to revisit or reconsider. So now is yeah. That okay. It's important. Hasn't been done? It was a high priority. Yeah. Mhmm. High priority.
At one time, it was a high priority. It was a high priority. So
I guess, I mean, so, yeah, it was. And I guess the question, I mean, the reactions were, you know, you only had a couple of people that responded, yeah, it's still important. You know, most people just had no idea. But, you know, didn't have, you know, no idea, but a sense that it was critical. But again, this is your survey. This isn't binding.
And for the commission, I think it's important that we keep in mind, you know, we're trying to figure out what is it that we want the town to eventually look like and how do we take it there. And I didn't think we were going to head to the endpoint as described in the current POCD, but I think there's still merit in it. We just had to figure out what is it that we want it to be and then point ourselves in that direction. That's the point of the exercise. So, any other members have, you know, overall general thoughts that we ought to be looking at this as a special little section, or should we just let nature take its course on that, or, you know, what's the commission thinking?
I think that the Village District zoning would be good. I already looked at some of the houses both on 316 and Center Street thinking we need a way to encourage people to use some of those to make some small businesses that would be great for a village district. You know, a coffee shop, gift shop, maybe dentist, something you know maybe get a bank in there sometime, get something and I think if it's not zoned to encourage that you're going to have a hard time getting people to consider it even.
I agree. This is the third plan of development I've been involved in, and a key portion of all of them was how do we deal with a town center because that gives Andover a better sense of identity. Because right now you drive down the street and there really isn't anything. You don't know if you're in Andover or not, and even driving around. So, I think this is a critical point that needs to be worked on and not forgotten or let happen to nature.
Okay, so it's something we just need to figure out, you know, what it is we want it to be. We didn't hit the nail exactly on the head in the last POCD, but it's still an important thing that we should be working toward. We just need to refocus it and figure out what it is that we're looking for. Exactly. Okay.
I would say that the town has an adaptive reuse, historic preservation by adaptive reuse section, four dash 15, which is pretty flexible if anybody ever really wanted to use it. So and we've encouraged some people on Route 6 to consider taking some of the older houses that are there and do that. We just haven't never really got anybody to bite. But there's a fair bit of flexibility in the current zoning regulations for that already if you do have a historic, you know, house. So
Okay. We need maybe to get some more help with reaching out to other people, other town other areas that encourage people from other towns to come here and do that kind of thing and not just people that already own the house, like a town planner kind of thing to, I don't know if that's something they could help us with.
Yeah, sure. Well, mean, again, it certainly depends on the nature of the properties involved. You don't wanna force someone out because they're not doing enough with their property or not doing the right thing. It's a matter of identifying goals and then putting in place incentives to create that kind of opportunity. But yeah, so let's okay. I think we're on the same page here. So we're now at the number here. Research cooperative model is discussed to attract, I assume rather than attract, have to attract retail activity in town center. What, you know, sort of a mix, know, not complete or not not complete but still important and then just not sure. I'm I I don't have enough information about the cooperative model to know where we're at with this.
I don't know that we've done anything on that one, John.
Okay. And I guess the question is, I mean, you know, something it's about half the people thought it was relevant, half the people had no idea. I I I don't know if this is something that was pressing enough that we want to revisit as is a cooperative model.
Well, I think with our survey of the town, need to re verify or ask what kind of businesses do people want to bring here and then, you know, build that into the plan for this and maybe try to go out and get one, you know.
But it does, I mean, does throw in the words town center, which is we don't have one yet. We don't have an idea of what the town center is. So to then talk about attractive retail activity in town center is like, and where would this town center be? That's part of the problem with the question. It's like, on center. Yeah.
It all flows from the establishment of that concept in the first place. Correct. Okay. Through the IHZ process, develop detailed concept plans for town hall property. IHZ, I know is something different from what this probably is. I know IHZ has incentive housing, but what what That's what I think this is.
That is. In fact, there's a there was a study done about two years ago. We got a grant, to study incentive housing zones in the town of Andover. Okay. Yeah. Mhmm. So what year? This is probably fifteen years ago.
Probably. So one of the things that came out of that was the town has a large piece of property right behind town of Bolivier that has a lot of potential for, you know, some level of higher density housing, whether it's age restricted or not. But, you know, the the question becomes, is the town willing to look at that? And there's a couple parcels that the town controls right now that may or may not be good for that. So there were some preliminary development plans to look at how it would look, but there wasn't anything that was fully fleshed out.
Okay. Fair enough. And then once consensus is achieved and concept plan is developed, consider formal r p q for town property. Those two would seem to kind of go in in concert. And so not a lot of progress made on those lines. Maybe thoughts have changed about the best use of some of that land, but worth revisiting perhaps in a follow-up survey.
Well, UConn students' plans were using that, you know, there were a few plans that were using that property. And
that was interesting, you know, they were basically informed, they were told to use town property. So that by the town hall was used in a couple of the plans. So, you know, certainly not a throwaway, should take a closer look at consequence. Very important.
Just for my reference, if you don't mind. So here's the, hopefully this is refreshing. Here's the school town hall campus right in here. Which which properties are we talking about that that were examined?
That one with the extra arrow down. You have your cursor on the street. No. The next one up.
To the north. The larger one. Yeah. Okay. 11 School Road. Alright. That goes all the way out to all the way out to the trail. That's the Yeah.
Okay. And it's a big meatball right there. Okay. There is.
So the the town basically has two pretty big chunks of property that it could consider if it was willing to for development. That is one.
The second large parcel is the one is one located off Shawnee Mill Road. That is where our current transfer station is. Oh, right. Sure. Yep. So that is the other one. They're both roughly 80, you know, 80 acre parcels. So, you know, it but it's gonna be an effort to convince the town to be willing to do it and develop. You know, I don't think you know, to me, both of those properties would be amenable to an affordable housing, some sort of affordable housing development, but I'm getting in, and I think today the state is pushing it so hard, it really had a proposal that the town was behind, you could probably get the state behind it and get some significant funding. But the big question is, can you
convince the people in the town, you know, to implement an affordable housing, you know, development in some form? Right. Right. Okay. Okay.
Yes, I do think it's important from the affordable housing and all that. And so we need to keep the priority up on that one. That's one that I think really in the next ten years needs to get some real progress on.
All right, I'll throw a star across both. All right, so now we are So
We're now in I'm sorry, go ahead. No, at this point, John, what I think we've gone through three of the Yes. And in an interest of time and not shortchange everything else, I think maybe we should put the next three for the next meeting so people aren't getting antsy with wanting to head out and shortchange other stuff. But I think we got a good start on that, that gives us
half for next time, and I think that'll work out well too. Yeah, and I'm now the new chairman of the Commission on Aging, so I guess I'm going to be involved in that too.
Oh, congratulations, OAgent. I thought you weren't going to sign up for any new stuff. Yeah, me too. My plan failed.
Okay, yep. Well done. Okay, well, you, John. That's a good start and hopefully something at some point starts coming out of the mist and we see what it is. Moving on to new business item 7B, receive application, set public hearing for zone change, licensed daycare facilities, that sort of thing. I'll turn that over to Eric.
Okay. So there was a change in state law. Well, thousands of changes in state law, but the one we're interested in at the moment is PA 23 dash one forty two. And what that does is that changes the discretion the town had to regulate, you know, child care facilities in residential zones. Before the town had the authority to regulate, decide when and where it was appropriate, Now we do not. It is by law as of right in the state of Connecticut. So the problem comes in is that our current zoning regulations have it as a special permit use in the ARD and don't really mention it in the in the Lake District. So I submitted a recommendation, and the reason this is kind of critical now is part of what the state law did is said this the CEO of the town has to sign an affidavit every single year attesting that we did in fact change the regulations, or if we have to, give the state a date by which we will change the regulations. So I have until, like, January to submit that to the state. So my suggestion was just to go ahead and make the change since it doesn't really matter that it's state law anyway. So it's not like we could enforce our regulations. And that is what I submitted to the commission. I also had a conversation or an email correspondence with Mark Frantz, and I said basically that my concern with that is I really didn't understand
what they're wording, you know, for how what I don't want is this to be an open ended thing where any size child care operation. I mean, you have a, you know, a 500 unit child care center, right next to a residence in the town of Andover? So, so I believe Mark has gotten back to Jed, with his recommendations on how to work that correctly, which are far better than mine. And so at this point, unless you have questions for me, I'm just asking I'm not telling the commission how I want you to word it. That is entirely up to you, and that is that is your decision. Just that, what we're trying to do is comply with state law. It's really kind of that simple.
Okay, that's got everybody excited. So the extent of this change is probably going to be as extensive as what we did when we changed the ARD allowing a municipal building in the ARD. You know, We put that in as a special permit. In this case, we take Child Care Center out of special permit and put it in the as of right section. And so there's probably about three things. Attorney Branch recommended putting a couple of definitions in our definition section to just limit the size of what the day care center is. And if I remember correctly, it's to like five people or something like that. The other thing that I was thinking of doing at the same time is, Marina, can you allow me to share my screen there?
And I'll see if I can
Yes. I'm going to unmake John the cohost and we'll make you a cohost. Okay. Okay, go ahead and try. Yeah.
So does everybody do you see the screen moving? Sometimes when I'm sharing screens and updated, it stays the same. Yep. We see it. Okay. So I'm trying to go down at submitted pending. Okay, so back at the end of last year, this is after review by Attorney Branch. This was the petition for amendment to regulations that the town gave to planning and zoning. And in that, we addressed the first five items, which were all in the ARD section, maybe even six. So the first six items were all addressed and resolved, but I chose at that time not to deal with Section seven, which is the Lake District, and eight and nine, which is the Industrial And Business District. Since we're going to have to go in and tweak what's as of right in the Lake District, I figure now is also a good time to correct these next couple of things that refer to the Lake District there. And what that does is
it takes right now, we have as of right, you can put a park, playground, or private beach in the Lake District. I don't think that's what we want. I think we would like to have that by special permit. So we'll take it out of there and put it into the special permit section. Same thing with churches, community houses, schools, and all that kind of stuff. So there was a couple of changes that were very similar to what we did to Section five for Section seven that we didn't take care of back then. Now is the time to do that. So coming forward, we will put when I change Section seven to be what Eric's asking for, I'll make those changes in there too. The last thing that I want to do and I don't think we took care of it. We've got a section, if you remember back from the Scott DB kennel application, you could have a small kennel as of right in the ARD District. I don't think that's right. I think it should be by special permit. And so I would put some words in section five, because I'm not ready to change the kennel chapter yet, that kennel can be by special permit. And that should force us to go any kennel, make a special permit. So that's what else I'm trying to incorporate while we take care of these
couple of things that Eric has. And my goal would be to coordinate the public hearings for all these changes, this one, the sign one, the lamppost one, so we're doing public hearings all at the same time. I don't know if Eric is willing to that might preclude us getting it done by the end of this year, but one of the options is that he can the letter that the first selectman signs can just say when it's done. And if we've headed substantially down that path to finish it early in 2024, I don't think that would be a showstopper. Anyhow, that's what I was thinking of as we went through what Eric was just talking about on the change needed for daycare.
Any questions on that? Okay, so I will make that so and we'll talk about that at some future date. If Eric could bear with me, I would like to set the date for public hearing on this at the next meeting when we set the public hearing for those other couple of changes that you wanted to.
Okay, so you're going to wait in next month, you're going to set the public hearing? Yes. Okay.
Any other discussion on that? And I did send everybody out the same little thing that had the petition that Eric requested a change for, the public act that went along with it. And I don't know if anybody opened it up, but it had seven pages of requirements. And I couldn't figure out why we were only addressing one of the many. But that's the one that the first selectman needs to sign that we're in compliance with, so that must be the one that counts. But I didn't want you to spend your time going through all the other stuff in there, which will be work for some future date. Okay, next item up is the annual report. I sent that out to everybody. Anybody got any feedback for me on that? And if nobody had a chance to read it, I understand that too. We're not under the gun to get that submitted yet, so we can follow that up at the next meeting if that's what we want to do. If everybody's happy with it, I'd be happy to take that feedback now. But if you haven't read it, probably should. I did get some good feedback on last year's report. I appreciated that then, and I'd appreciate folks looking at it now. So, hearing that nobody's jumping up and down saying, let's talk about it more tonight, I guess we will put that off until next meeting as well.
Next item up is approval of the minutes from our regular meeting of August 15, And I'll make a motion to approve the minutes of our regular meeting on 08/15/2020. I'll second that. Thank you, Scott. Any discussion on those minutes? And I had no comments on the minutes as they were presented. Any comments? Okay, hearing none, I'll call for a vote on approval. Anne Cremay? Aye. Scott? Aye. Steve? I'll abstain since I wasn't there. Anne Blanchard? I will also abstain.
Okay. And I vote aye as well. Motion passes three-zero-two with Steve Nelson and Anne Blanchard abstaining. I did have one comment on the minutes for Agent Halsey under the new business section for the pickleball courts. It said Agent Halsey gave information on playground possibly needing a special permit. We'll revisit. I don't know if you've got anything on that for us, Jim, but if not, put that on your list so we could talk about that at the next meeting too. Okay, I'll do that.
Okay, yep. Next item up is correspondence. Jim? No. Okay. Moving on to administrative reports.
Yeah, it's been pretty busy, a lot of accessory structures, sheds, collages. This time of year, some enforcement activity. I've not moved on either of houses of worship in the near future. I am dealing with a garage that went up without permits. Really problematic at 357 Lake Grove, promoting property. You may remember the subdivision. It was a little contentious. Anyway, billing that, I did get and I hope to meet with the the owner this week. We're on time today. Didn't hear from you. I'm not gonna open for tomorrow. I did get promised clients, renewables, vehicles on Merritt Valley Road in September. I'll follow-up on that. Other than that, I have some plates, miscellaneous complaints that I'm working on as well. That's all I got. Anything on the over and over application? I'm sorry, yes. I did meet with both Wendy Kopp, and I followed up with some direction. And I strongly suggested that she did site plan approval. And the regulations allow her to pretty much continue to use that for residents and business. What's interesting about that particular property and the application of our regulations is that it's residential uses in business zones, business and industrial are special, I'm sorry, they're safe allowed by safe plan approval of houses that were in existence at the time of the adoption of the regs, which sometime in the 70s. So that's not a nonconforming use. So the abandonment as a residence not really effective. And the site plan approval will really clean it up for
And she also is not using what she has or a lot of patient problems. And none of them really are in effect, none of them really are solid right now. It's not being used as a whole. So the best move, in my opinion, is to to let her a second approval. Great for her to just clean it up and and be done with it. Let her sell the property at at some time such time borrow against it. So I'm working with her on that. Okay. Any questions?
Chad, did we ever get, any information about the well down on Merritt Valley, where the location was for that, home based business?
Yes. That was quite a ways away. That was several 100 feet away. So he was approved for the salt then? Yes. That's good. Any other questions for Jim?
I hope it's in a covered structure. Yeah. It's a concrete Yeah.
I thought he had a pretty decent plan to protect the ground from salt. It looked like it hopefully it will be a short term basis there if he continues to grow his company. He might expand into a different place.
But the regulation was 200 feet or not a regulation? No. Best management practice was was two I 100
forget the exact number, but it was the well was in excess of that number, if you recall. And
I have nothing to report from the Inland Wetlands Watercourse Commission. Next up is public comment. Looking through the list here, I don't see anybody from the public that's still here. I think everybody's gone. Next regularly scheduled meeting is Tuesday, 10/17/2023. At that meeting, we'll talk about dates for next year's meetings, and we will also talk about the type of meeting, in person, hybrid, online, or what have you. I think it might be nice to go online for at least over the winter months there, but we'll talk about that next month. Miscellaneous, anybody have any other items that they would like to talk about here tonight? Okay. Hearing none, I'll make a motion to adjourn at 08:47. I'll second. I'll second that.
I heard Scott second that. Thank you. Just as quick to go through a roll call, Anne Cremay? Aye.
Scott? Aye. Steve? Aye. Anne Blanchard? Aye. I vote aye as well. Motion passes five-zero-zero. Thank you very much, everybody. Appreciate the input. Appreciate you showing up and we'll see everybody next month. Enjoy fall starting this week.