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call us to order good evening and welcome to the tuesday april 5th 2022 regular meeting of the ann arbor planning commission for detailed information on meeting procedures please review the full printed meeting agenda which is available online mr leonard will you please help us with the roll call item number two absolutely commissioner mills here commissioner gib brandel commissioner sovay here commissioner abrams here commissioner hammerschmidt here commissioner dish here commissioner lee here commissioner clark here commissioner wage here full commission excellent um item three is approval of the agenda can i have a commission or move the agenda moved by commissioner white seconded by commissioner dish any discussion of the agenda all in favor please raise a hand or say yes that is unanimous the motion carries item for our approval of the minutes of the previous meeting we have in our packet the minutes from the march 15 2020 to city planning commission meeting moved by commissioner dish seconded by commissioner sovay any discussion or corrections on the minutes all in favor please raise a hand or say yes that's all of the hands so that motion carries um next item five are all of the reports um from city administration and city council commissioner dish could you start us off i have an incredible amount of good news so tc1 is passed yes 350 south fifth is passed with a change to the um i i can't remember what they're called but they're the supplemental use regulations or something like that that require that all of the affordable units be on site and there is a uh i don't i don't know there's not really a plan but there's an understanding that in order to take at least one little piece of this complex puzzle out of the equation uh it would be seen as fine and dandy if the city sold the site to the ann arbor housing commission and allowed us to retire the debt so that that way there's nothing driving us to want to get a high enough price for this site in order that we can retire the debt with it and then there was money for affordable housing site purchases passed in the arpa funds and i can't remember anything else of specific interest to the planning commission in the arpa funds and was there anything else on the agenda yes but okay so sartorius we approved the brownfield use plan which really wasn't ours we didn't see that and we have allowed given them a one month postponement to continue negotiating with the office of sustainability and innovation which is helping them be even more innovative around our carbon neutrality goals and when they are done with that then they will come to city council and ask for their tax abatement very good thank you for that update mr leonard nothing additional all right are there any planning commission officers or committee liaisons that have anything to report out the orc did meet we discussed premiums thank you and yes the next effectively kind of scoping out both the process and kind of the geographic extent of tc1 the next batch of proactive rezoning which staff had recommended b west stadium so because that was something that we talked about as a group before thank you all for contributing to that anything else i'd just say that we did receive communications both over the weekend and then an additional set that was sent uh before the meeting today so we have that all right um item six is uh the first opportunity for public comment persons can speak for up to three minutes about an issue that is not listed on um the agenda as a public hearing so we will have separate public hearings tonight for the maple cove 2 proposal and for the amendments to off-street parking requirements um for any other matters uh now is an appropriate time to speak we'll first call on individuals who are here in council chambers and then to remote participants if you are joining us remotely and have already dialed in you can press star 9 on your phone to indicate your interest in participating in the public comment opportunity if you are watching us through the web link you can use the raised hand feature and if you are watching us on tv you can dial in now that number is 877-853-5247 and our meeting id is 12 977-6634-1226 mr leonard will select those who have uh again raise their hand digitally by pressing star 9 or the raised hand button they'll call on you by the last three digits of your telephone number please move to a quiet area and mute any background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and whether you are speaking in person or uh through remote means please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments is there anyone here in council chambers that would like to provide a public comment now all right mr leonard anybody online no online attendees have indicated a desire to address the commission all right well there's another opportunity at the end of the meeting um so we'll close the public comment opportunity this first one and move to item seven uh the public hearing scheduled for the next business meeting for the april 19th uh planning commission meeting we've got two new uh scheduled public hearings one is for 212 miller avenue a site plan for planning commission approval this is the proposed construction of an eight-unit multi-family residential building uh totaling 13 934 square feet on a 0.2 acre parcel zone d2 downtown interface and then second 2600 pontiac trail annexation and zoning for city council approval this is a proposed annexation from ann arbor township into the city of ann arbor the petitioner of the village of the ann arbor project is seeking to add this 5.7 acre parcel of land to their existing project site area and zone it r4a just uh an additional note you'll recall that the planning commission is considered the annexation for the corresponding properties um but they have not yet been approved by the state the site plan will be uh following after that annexation is complete all right very good uh we are on to item eight a this is regular business uh the discussion or well uh this the first item of business is for the maple cove two which is for city planning commission approval tonight we'll have the project presentation presumably by the petitioners and then our staff report before the public hearing and then our discussion there's mr kowalski joining us we can see him and a petitioner in the flesh very good yeah actually live um so i uh i got brett's email so i guess i'll guide you through is uh going through the slides like this and you can't see that you can't see them um can you see it on the monitor right there at the podium yes i can there you go yep so i am heath hart i'm with midwestern consulting um part of the project team also with me is brad moore who is with the architectural side of the project and joining remotely via zoom is mokasham who is the owner and also the developer so brett if you want to slide to the next next slide [Applause] and the next slide so as you see on the screen this is a project for a piece of land that is located on the northwest corner of miller and maple intersection this is currently zoned office with a very small triangle portion at the very south that's zoned r1c that particular triangle shape was annexed into the city here in the last two years i think so that's why it was has a different zoning than the rest of the site this was identified in the master plan as a preferred use for housing even though its own office across the street on the other quadrants of that intersection is all commercial you have subways and gas stations and a little strip mall and then an office park on the southeast corner next slide brett the existing condition right now it is occupied by what's shown on the side slides is two vacant houses the house on the south has actually been demolished now so that is no longer standing there is a wetland that is in the center of the site so we have an associated wetland buffer around that wetland and then there is a stand of some trees on the southwest and also in that triangle shaped portion located at the very south i will say that south triangle shaped there is no planned um development proposed for that that area so next slide so what we're proposing is three multi-family residential apartment units the the ownership of of these apartments is the same ownership and control as the existing maple cob apartments which is directly to the north so the the thought is to use the same maintenance staff management staff for both apartments and really have this act as a i guess in unison with that that top one we're planning a public or a i'm sorry a shared access easement through both developments so they can share parking share the pedestrian paths share the access as well as site amendment entities that are present so we are proposing two curb cuts one on maple road and one on miller road those will serve for not only circulation within the site but also for emergency vehicle accesses we're also proposing the connection to the existing maple cove apartments to the north therefore it will provide the internal circulation on the site next slide brett uh back one there you go so um there is a total of 70 units that we're proposing we have a proposed 86 parking spaces throughout the complex when we originally submitted this it was under the old um planning ordinance where we were going to city council for approval and since since it's a buy right project now we no longer have to serve that we did however opt to leave the electric vehicle parking that would have been required under the old standards into the plan so we are still going to propose to add that electrical vehicle parking right now we've got a total of 71 spaces proposed to either be the installed capable or ready spaces bikes bicycle parking would be provided with bike hoops outside the buildings as well as a centrally located bike shelter for the class a parking natural features just quickly touch on that we do have seven landmark trees that were proposing to be removed mitigation for those would be on site there is some impacts not to the wetlands but to the wetland buffer and that is primarily associated with the existing garage that sits in that buffer so our impacts to the buffer would be to the removal of that garage there would be a small retaining wall established along the edge of that buffer and then the associated restoration of that buffer with the plantings i also will state that the wetland we are proposing to have a water management budget so that wetland would continue to receive some storm water the amount of that storm water was is we tried to match it to be equal for the existing conditions of what is proposed the rest of that storm water would be in an underground system located on site next slide brett so talking quickly about the utilities you can see here that the uh storm water detention system proposed is an underground system that is located under the paved parking area on drive access trying to take advantage of dual space for that parking structure the outlet is out to a county drain located on the east side of maple road so we do have approvals through the water resources commission for that connection and we'll continue to work with them for the final permit with the construction details each building would have its own water and sanitary connections out to the respective either miller or maple roads for all three buildings and then we do have one fire hydrant that we're adding actually two fire hydrants i'm sorry that we're adding adjacent to the entrances and that's to provide the fire coverages necessary for the buildings so with the next slide i'll turn it over to brad and he can speak about the architecture since this is a continuation of the original maple cove project all the buildings in the nipple cove too have been designed to match those buildings there are a mixture of a variety of masonry exterior materials and also some cementitious siding the buildings are three stories there's some limited basement storage space for the tenants in the buildings and each building has a community patio deck on the roof so that it's a an amenity for every building that they have a rooftop place to go out and get a suntan and enjoy some conviviality the parking spaces for the original maple cove did not include any of the electric vehicle charging stations and they will because of this cross access easements have access to the charging stations in this phase so that everybody uh in the project will have access to charger electric vehicles if you have any other questions he and i are here to answer them thank you thank you very much mr kowalski okay good evening everybody um i i don't really have a lot to add from their presentation a couple of things i did want to point out however um as the petitioner did mention um the 70 units uh and they're a mix of one and two bedroom units really there's about 23 147 two bedroom units and these are ranging in size from about 630 square feet to a little over a thousand square feet um so they're they're smaller there are smaller units which may make them a little bit more affordable by nature of their size and the limited number of bedrooms there um again with a couple of other notable items is the cross access that we wanted to point out with the maple cove one project adjacent to it um that has a couple of benefits obviously for um the pedestrian pedestrian traffic as well to kind of cut through there are some amenities on this site there's kind of a small picnic area they're planning um in in the middle area of the site and again some of the enclosed bicycle lockers those would be available to the residents as i understand it of both sites to be able to use those um again in a couple the other the wetland use permit as you will see on that is that does require the separate motion for approval now as again the petitioner did indicate um there while they're not going into the wetlands uh per se that there is uh some encroachment as it stands right now due to the existing garage which will obviously be removed and there will be some restoration in that area and a little bit of grading um obviously to make the grades work in there as well as to ring uh maintain a lot uh water budget for that wetland so one of the things within the storm water plan obviously the majority of the stormwater needs to be routed to the treatment there is an ability though as as they worked with our natural features coordinator to have some of the water uh maintain the existing uh water budget for that wetland so but because of that encroachment and because of a little bit of use within that wetland buffer area that that is why the wetland uh use permit is required um and again one of the uh items it was mentioned but i think it bears repeating is that although obviously now this is a site plan for planning commission approval so if approved by you all tonight this obviously would be the final stop um so the ev parking is not required however they have maintained the uh the same ratio that would be required as if the plan was going to um city council for final approval and um that really kind of sums up my presentation now i believe the petitioner had covered everything else as i go back through my notes and look here um so yep i think that and staff is recommending approval of both the site plan as well as the wetland use permit and i am certainly available for any questions thank you very much mr kowalski all right i will open up uh the public hearing for this item this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about the maple cove 2 site plan um we will as before first call on folks that are here in council chambers and then those that are online um if you have joined through the web link use the raised hand button to raise your hand if you're watching and need to call in now the number is eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and then enter our meeting id which is nine seven seven sixty six thirty four twelve twenty six once you're in or if you already are on the phone you can press star 9 to raise your hand indicating you're interested in participating in the public hearing this evening mr leonard will call on you by the last three digits of your telephone number or by your name if you join through zoom and when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any background sounds if you could for either method of participation please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and again please keep them to three minutes is there anyone here in council chambers that would like to participate in the public hearing my name is ken garber i live at 28 haverhill court the staff report for this project indicated that the petitioner was prepared to discuss sustainability elements at the meeting so i was very hopeful that in the presentation we just heard we would have heard plans for building electrification and hopefully also photovoltaic panel solar panels on the roof to generate some of the electricity on site what we heard was some information about ev charging stations and bicycle parking both of which either are already required or at this stage pretty much expected of new developments um so i'm disappointed maybe some more will come out during q a but in the meantime i would remind both planning commission and the petitioner that there has been a very strong trend in the last year and a half for new residential developments to come in all electric lockwood senior living last year 211 packard new north town homes mostly and the biggest one was valhalla glenn apartment units and um i know the development team is very familiar with this project because i believe mr moore is the architect on that um so um i'm a little puzzled that this has not been proposed for this project as well so if that's a question i would have for the petitioner if i were sitting in your seats and otherwise you know about all i can say good about this project is it's housing we need housing i suppose the units are smaller and so perhaps more affordable although i hesitate to use use the word affordable for um units that well end up in the first phase are over fourteen hundred dollars a month for a single for a one bedroom apartment um but i guess everything's relative so you can chalk that up in the fair in this project's favor other than that um very disappointing thank you any other participants mr leonard are there any online no speakers who indicated a desire to speak all right i will close the public hearing then and read the two motions i'll read them together the ann arbor city planning commission approves the maple cove 2 site plan at 1605 north maple road dated february 2nd 2022 as the site plan complies with all applicable requirements of the unified development code and other applicable laws ordinances standards and regulations and based upon the following condition that all parcels must be combined before issuance of any building permits the second motion is that the planning commission approves the wetland use permit for the maple cove 2 project site plan can i have a commissioner move that moved by commissioner gbrandle seconded by commissioner lee who would like to kick off discussion or questions go ahead commissioner silvay i think i have a few simple ones um i mean i i appreciate the kind of continuation of the apartments kind of along this block i know we've seen a other parcel just north of here so it's great to see this density of housing for the petitioner every um the vehicle charging stations are all labeled consistently but it is intended to be a phased project as it's noted can you outline which ones might be vc and or installed versus capable within the plan will we see installed in phase one um to be honest i can't give an accurate answer on that um i know the the installation is thought to be associated with each building so um they were in close proximity of the building so as far as the determination of which exact ones would be installed in phase one i probably can't speak on that at the moment um i can't say that they're all would be you know be capable so you know actually choosing the final resting place for those units would have to be determined at that time it'd be nice especially because the other unit hasn't had any and if these are going to be to start with the installed and kind of work your way down the tier through the phases would be you know an ideal preference i know it's the desire of the owner to to have some installed units in phase one in phase one bring them on early that way they would be available for the existing apartment complex also great not just the new buildings stay up here the next question curb cuts the current development uh has one curb cut with two dead end parkings this now has two more curb cuts um and the join so three crops for the whole development and i'm wondering if you did any analysis to see if you could have a dead end corridor you know within this development and still get the vehicular movement necessary without the extra curb cut would you be are you referring to removing a curb cut off the public street yep okay um it could be possible i know we were looking at the the vehicle circulation it was desired to have that access to miller road especially for vehicles leaving so they wouldn't have to go out to maple road and then attempt to you know right turn lane during traffic times so the desire was there to have that that circulation problem i know or that that the process that the one curve cut off of maple road was designed one actually off of both roads because of the height of the buildings those curb cuts the drive vials as you come in are 26 feet wide and that does provide the aerial access required from the fire department so with that aspect yes they will both be required um to be present okay that's just helpful another engineering um for the architect it says on the roof plan optional roof deck patio so can you speak to if what is the plan for that uh since there is limited green space and it's labeled as optional is it guaranteed are we going to see this or if it's optional is the other option solar panels instead so um it has been my discussion with the owner that he intends to put them on the buildings i have no belief that they wouldn't be included in the project we do have him with us on zoom but as far as i know they intend to build them you can go ahead if you want to address it yeah yeah the first phase does have uh both buildings with rooftops completed and we want to keep that consistent in in the second phase with these three additional buildings so the plan is to have a rooftop patio on each building okay and then electric for i think you know the easiest ones that we see pretty consistently is electric stoves instead of gas stoves is that something that you're willing to comply with for this project um so if we're open to it we're not ready to commit at this time i just want to leave the options open [Music] we're not at that point just yet are you seeing any limits to your electric capacity on the site or what are your reasons to not wanting to commit uh to be honest i just i just haven't done a whole lot of research on the two um and i just want to kind of weigh out the two options at the time when we're ready to uh to make that decision i would heavily encourage it um just in terms of you know your renewables and the safety of all of your residents in terms of air quality and it's a very minimal of anything cost to the difference so i would really uh encourage that as the simple lowest hanging fruit direction in moving this building towards electrification so um that if not everything else yeah i definitely will uh look into it very deeply and and make the best choice great those are just my first project questions for now thank you other questions or comments commissioners commissioner weich i just want to pick up from commissioner sovay's comment around the fire truck in the curb cuts on miller was it a requirement of the fire department that you installed the curb cut on miller or are you saying because you've installed the curb cut it meets the specification of the fire department the the fire code which is adopted by the city of ann arbor requires certain accessibility requirements to each building including aerial access for the ladder trucks and this was the this was the only configuration which gave us the required aerial apparatus access to all three buildings okay how did you meet the specification for the first two because you have the same configuration of the building so as i'm looking at the aerial shot you have a building with a parking lot that is identical to what you're proposing in this edition so how did you meet that one but in this one you have to put in a curb cut in order to meet it well it is it is in essence the same configuration there's a curb cut between two adjacent buildings so the aerial apparatus truck can pull off of maple road via the curb cut and the aero apparatus can service either building that's the same case in the first but you don't have you don't have two um can you put up their site plan please mr leonard would you please put up their site plan so that i could refer to it so that we're looking at the same thing and i can get a i might add a little clarity when according to the the fire code that aerial apparatus has to be within 15 or 30 feet of the building so it's the proximity of that 26 foot wide drive lane in order to meet that that code and maybe maybe this is a question for staff then like how did they meet it in the first when because the configuration of the building is the same yeah i'll leave that to uh mr kowalski matt do you have any uh reports on the fire from the fire marshal can that can speak to that i well unfortunately i mean i can't speak directly to the the first approval although i was the planner on that project i'm not aware of exactly the requirements in that area but what i can say is to this effect is that one of my first comments was to uh close or like minimize the curve cuts was to eliminate that the additional curb cut on maple and um it is correct the fire marshal came back and did uh didn't want that required that that access point there so in addition it also helped with the solid waste layout as well the solid waste would have been shifted considerably over in order to get that clearance so unfortunately i can't speak to the first approval but i can speak to this and that is the staff comment that was regarding the curb cut and the fire marshal did um push back a little bit and said that that fire access there would be required or they would have to provide say like a large turnaround that wouldn't kind of fit within that area anyway so okay and i would i would just add if you would like if the commission is interested in more information we of course going to follow up with the fire marshal to provide that inquiry um i i i don't want to reference numbers because and i i can't speak for to the fire code um architects in this in the room probably know this better than i do but there's that 26 foot requirement is accessible to the building or within a distance it may be that that first curb cut provided the distance for the two buildings to be accessible however once you started stacking multiple buildings beyond that you might have gone beyond that dimension but if there's more clarification desired we could always follow that yeah my first question was following up from commissioner sylves question which is was it required or not and it sounds like at least for mr klossy that it was required uh in order to accomplish that to the owner as well as the petitioners who are in the room i'd like to again echo commissioner sovay's comment around electrification um just for the well-being and health of the residents just you know natural gas just creates more carbon that gets put into the home and without adequate ventilation that can cause health problems that are well documented now and so as we are in our climate crisis as we are trying to achieve our climate goals electrification is something that not only helps us with that but it also helps the health and well-being of the residents the other question that i had was around um the crosswalk like is that uh are there issues one putting in these additional units having um residents needing to cross maple i see that there is a crosswalk that's at sort of the south part of the first development was there any conversation either from staff or with the petitioner about addressing um sort of pedestrian safety around the building and being able to cross or pedestrian traffic i think that's still inside our purview from the building to other sites and amenities on uh maple i mean i can i can let the petitioner add to this but um i did that again that was one of the comments that i relate over to the transportation reviewer on this is whether or not she felt there would be a need for a mid-block crossing um and a couple of reasons no she didn't feel that there was a need given the proximity of the one to the south also with other driveways and access points within there um it there was there was not a good point there's not a good access point there so um to that i'm not sure if the petitioner explored that but again i asked a question and it was not recommended so i did not pursue it past that point okay is there um access to that like was that a question or um like a verbal or a written response i'm just interested in why because if people are turning into this new curb cut from a left turn lane that is going to impede the bike lane as well as the pedestrian movement on the west side of maple and so i'm just a little surprised that there wasn't any consideration for how that would impact uh safety there i i yeah i can't i mean i don't have a written risk actually i probably do have a written response just whether or not it's warranted i don't know exactly how many factors that she did look into regarding like cross uh turning lane interference and things like that or across the bike lane i'm not sure how far that analysis analysis went down there but again i know i did have that conversation with her and um that could be again something that's that's worth following up on to see maybe if those other uh items were explored there but again to the initial response was uh that it wasn't um warranted at that area okay we can certainly follow up on that one as well absolutely and then my last question maybe more of a comment is there aren't uh since this was zoned office and just in a survey a quick survey nearby the property there aren't any parks um or sort of like open green spaces for the residents and so since that south corner wedge isn't being developed and if i'm looking at the site plan correctly there's a lot of shrubs but i can see there might be some space in there without having to take out any trees to maybe place a pocket park and so i wondered if the petitioner had considered an amenity for the residents outside of the rooftop patios to create some kind of green space or maybe even a play area if there will be families residing in these units we did have some discussions about doing that very thing we had not advanced the layout of that to a finalized state yet but yes we had already identified that as a possibility those are my initial comments and questions thank you very much mr white commissioner weich don't know why i called you mr weich it's i don't know i'm glad i remembered your last name this time because previous weeks that's not that's not been my cup of tea other questions comments commissioner brandel um i guess this is just part of our own issues within the city um that is is difficult and frustrating to me which is that um if we didn't have that curb cut we still you would have still had to mitigate for it but we could have preserved a 24-inch white oak tree in that place where it's coming out under miller and i realize that we don't you know as petitioners and as staff members within the city that there's often conflicts between different departments about what they want and what their standards are and things like that i know it always defaults to fire health safety welfare all that kind of business but um i guess i'm just pointing out just to us as a body and to the city in general that it's really frustrating to me when there are options that we could maybe have given that it looks like that building is just barely beyond the 26 feet from miller that would allow aerial access that it's just and and obviously i'm sure you have it right sit back and all that kind of thing um i just find it frustrating that we have to take down a huge gorgeous white oak which you can see from the google street view is back in there um i just find it frustrating that we have to make those kinds of choices when something is so close to being potentially workable and again you would have had to mitigate for it anyway because you would have affected fifty percent of critical root zone but maybe it would have made it through the construction process if the rest of it had really been protected i know this isn't your problem i'm just pointing this out i think as a body that it's something i get frustrated with both as somebody who sits here and somebody who puts things through the city as well that uh that we have to make these choices and that i i just would really like it if we could try to figure out how to have a little bit more flexibility with something so that we could make choices that just make sense with some of this stuff so i'm just kind of saying that out loud i'm not expecting anything because i understand that you know you all were responding to staff comments and you know you're going to do what the fire marshal is going to tell you to do but it's it's i just find it hard when there's just these things out there that we have that that are in conflict with one another when i feel like just a little bit of flexibility sometimes could allow us to make better choices around some of those things so um uh in my perfect world you would have designed to run out in the first place so that maybe you had five less parking spaces and you know the way that you configure that whole drive but you know that what's done is done you guys are doing what's within your code so i'm not going to fault you for that um it's the way i wish people started their site plans is thinking about those really amazing resources that we do have and trying to start from that point rather than laying it out and then realizing that we're you're taking out like two big oaks in that area one of which is right in the middle of the building and you probably couldn't have done much about um [Music] uh so i'm just putting that out there for the record i guess um i would also encourage whatever electric you can manage and stoves seem pretty pretty straightforward um there's also induction too we just did this my own house which i know that there's kind of the whole kind of which market you're getting at and you have people tend to think of electric as being oh maybe it's not nice enough for the rents i want to charge and then there's gas but induction is actually getting to be more trendy and so there are ways to do electric that are that are higher end too if that's part of the market that you're going for so that's something also i think that um is an option for people as they're putting developments out there that electric can be something that is high performance as well um for for some of the kitchen appliances um so yeah i i am um less in favor of a park at that busy corner i think it'd be i don't think i'd want to hang out there i think it's too busy um there are some around it's not great i agree um i mean maybe you could plop a bench there but it feels really it's a busy intersection i don't know that i'd want to hang out there if it was in a different part of the site i think i want to hang out there more so that's where i am i guess in terms of the in terms of that maybe you can do some really cool things with the the rooftop areas for people in terms of making them pleasant and nice for people to be in um so uh the other just random thing i would say is that the building to the north i know somebody was doing commissioning with it and there were some issues with moisture and the way the masonry was handled and so i would hope that that would get corrected the second time around there's kind of that white inflorescence that happens on the outside of a brick that says something was wrong in terms of the way that i don't know if it's design or construction or you know what it was but there was some sort of issue with it in terms of uh in terms of how it was handling moisture so given that this is kind of phase two of that overall thing i would hope that that would you'd look into that for this next round and be able to make sure that that gets corrected so that when we do build things they're they're built to last so that's it for now go ahead commissioner hammerschmidt thank you um so we had a neighbor send us some communication and and i wanted to bring up one of the things that she brought up um which is parking i don't specifically have a problem with the number of parking spots that you have proposed but i'm curious i guess how you got there um and it might be that that's what it's required for office but then beyond that um the development the maple cove one i'm wondering about you know what are the demographics of the people that live there like have you seen parking challenges on that site is it the same parking ratio i'm just kind of trying to suss out any sort of concerns about the limited number but perceived limited number of parking spaces for the number of units particularly you know 47 two bedroom units are the people that are going to be living they're going to have two cars are we going to see spillover so uh in in my discussions with the owner the answer is some of the two-bedroom units have a single car and some of them have two cars now the current um or the existing um phase one if you will medvalk cove one had up a ratio of about 1.7 i think uh parking spaces per drawing unit in in this version we've scaled that down to about 1.27 so it is a reduction from the first one but they're they're connected and so they can be shared correct so uh and the other uh consideration is that um the uh in the um installed ev spaces won't be a permanent parking space uh tenants will rotate while charging in and out of those so it's uh so that's why we need to have a more than the one per apartment requirement uh for the office zoning district is so that we have enough spaces not only so that the residents have faced this current project phase two in our my owner's mind have the ability to park but also jockey the people from phase one in and out of the uh that you need sparking spaces okay got it i'll just underscore um the electrification i think you know we can't require it but anything you can do to look into that i would i don't own an induction stove but i really want an induction stove i think people are really would really gravitate towards that as an amenity in the building plus just not putting gas in to the building is actually or is obviously great for um our sustainability goals in the city and i would agree with commissioner gabriel i don't think that corner is right for i see why people would want you know there's a lack of green space it's used to cross roads in order to get to any of the parks but i would really encourage those rooftop at minimum the rooftop open spaces for people to be able to get outside and enjoy that is it thank you others go ahead commissioner abrams no yes that's me that's you it is um i'll just add my voice to the chorus of people urging you to consider full building electrification for this project uh beyond just the stoves um and as uh the public commenter mentioned at the beginning your this architect your architect has worked on projects um and so you have expertise already on the team for full building electrification and i think um you know i would urge you to do it not because it's required of you but because it's the responsible thing to do and the ethical thing to do thanks i'm going to chime in along those same lines but also just to say um the staff report suggested that the petitioner will be prepared to discuss sustainability items at the meeting and i'm curious i um what considerations have been given other than we haven't thought about it entirely we need to look more into electrification uh what discussion are there other elements of sustainability that you have thought about that we that you can share with us um i would i would just default to what moe said earlier and he's is that he is considering all options um and we you know this project is such that he's not anticipating beginning construction documents until next year so it so perhaps it's a long way off in his thinking to make a commitment um but he is not um objecting to doing electrification um it is one option he will be considering i can't say anything more than he's already said okay i sorry i was just thinking that there would have been more more discussion to share with us um along along with electrification again in particularly in parts of the roof where there may not be um if you are not offering that amenity area i think this is a great opportunity for rooftop solar there's also an amenity that could be offered in solar car ports that pair very nicely actually with electric vehicle charging so that's another option and staff can suggest the process if solar car ports were added later i don't act that doesn't require coming back to us so that is uh to let you know about that flexibility that our code offers um those are the the the things that i would rattle off again electrification would be my priority um here um but solar is also something to consider the economics of that are changing so particularly if it's going to be a year from now that's um the the prices have been dropping precipitously um as have exp the experience curve along with building electrification and so kind of what uh electric heating systems might look like today price wise i you know i would expect those prices to come down in the year so um i would not just consider it today but if you aren't going to be fully you know ready to do to break ground for another year give it a look then too um initially as i was reviewing this i was thinking to myself why are these buildings only three stories and not four um and and i think it was because uh this was in the slides tonight that there is an far you're pretty close to maxing out the far um even so i'm curious uh if if you considered consolidating it into two buildings that were four stories um if that was a consideration at all when we did the analysis of putting all of the far into the two buildings we we breached a height limit that would trigger high-rise codes in the building and also push us over the very limited height in the office zoning district okay just for tc1 a whole bit different ball game okay um i was just curious if you know i know that it's limited at four stories but i didn't know if four-story slightly larger building would have allowed for more creativity um in terms of site design um [Music] i would also echo that i am really excited that this is a second phase that these parking lots are connected that there's this opportunity for sharing parking um in an area where you know uh it so that you don't have to make do on your own lot considering like contingencies and building in excess but the idea that we're sharing across lots i think i'm that was one of the um one of the things that when i saw this i was particularly excited about and especially thank you for sharing kind of what the parking ratios are here compared to the neighboring lot um those were my comments other comments questions commissioner lee go ahead thank you um i have some just the clerical thing sheet six um site plan utility plan the outlet control structure just missing a t i was just kind of very very small nuance thing i think there was just a misspelling just wanted to point out to you guys um overall from a neighborhood building continuity standpoint i think it fits the neighborhood pretty well three um three-story low rise i would like to have seen some of the buildings be kind of closer to the street if possible i know there's a wetlands that obviously makes it difficult but as it's a busy intersection and as people have been talking about activation and utility of that corner we all know that the built environment influences you know human behavior so would like to see a little more i guess you know towards the street slow it down a bit create a sense of arrival as you're going down miller towards downtown um but overall you know i think i'm okay with the you know what i'm seeing here uh for clarification there's no elevator in this building i didn't see it on the floor plan on a a horizontal um or i'm sorry a vertical penetration standpoint so okay gotcha um aside from that yeah just the utilization of that corner is something i'd like to you know understand better is to say whether it's a garden or something that you know creates a little bit more beautification because i know this is a big entry point of anybody getting off you know 14 and plenty of reasons that people want to live here good bike connectivity overall in support but yeah go like feel free to respond to that i just wanted to say that one of the companies that my client owns is a landscaping company so yeah i'm sure it will be end up very nice gotcha no that that's great um uh yep and then obviously uh sustainability uh the thing that i will say on behalf of the petitioners that um bringing 70 you know units in town will help you know regional trip alleviation suncog says you know average commute times about 25 minutes so if we can bring more people to ann arbor there's a higher likelihood that they'll engage in using bikes as opposed to you know cars so i think there's a little bit of that element of regional trip alleviation obviously the building form we do hope to see you know greater utilization of electrification i know it's a balancing of affordability so um overall uh 10 million dollars for 78 000 square feet uh 126 dollars a square foot good luck hitting those construction numbers um that's uh you know it seems like a very um optimistic number given the current market but i'm overall in support of what i see i do echo every one sentiment that obviously environmental sustainability and eight to zero plans are pretty important so um other than that those are the you know kind of clerical comments i had with respect to this thank you any others all right this one oh go ahead commissioner get randall um could i ask a question of mr hart so i'm trying to track down one thing i just noticed is that um the soils are seem pretty hydrated from what i don't i was trying to search for the the wwab the huawei or whatever that one is series which is from what i'm remembering it's like pretty hydric which makes sense given that it's right next to a wetland i'm just wondering if you have to do anything sort of special to protect pavements and again just thinking about longevity and thinking about footing drains doing their thing all the time and just are there things that you need to do um to be able to make sure that um you know pavements aren't breaking up and that you know when you are building this thing that it's actually again built to last and that you're not having issues with how i can answer that and very briefly um the one area where we've got the underground detention at of course that's going to be filled with gravel so that's going to be a very well drained well-drained area the drive on the west which does not have the underground detention in it has approximately um i think it's about a four percent slope that comes across that so water is going to be draining off very quickly from that area i'm talking about from underneath from underneath yeah just because if the if it's super hydratic and it's got seasonally high well that area has got about from the the from the property the west to the wetlands there's about 15 feet of fall so it's got a very high slope to it i'm not sure if you'll see the water in those upper upper section of that with that slope but the pavement itself has got a very good slope so the thought is get that water off the pavement very quickly but yes there is no um we don't have any any uh uh storm sewer on that side um it's all surface flow so uh there is no um there is no storm structures to tie in an underdrain to so everything would go into your stormwater system um basically any kind of with anything at the surface going in i guess what i'm just thinking about it and again this is really isn't a planning commission issue i guess it's more just like an awareness of as you move into more specifics and things like that there may be things you need to do to kind of protect that pavement from from just groundwater seasonally high ground water you know that may end up breaking it up faster than it would normally in terms of just method and and how you're handling base material and drainage and all that kind of business so there may be an opportunity to get another drain in that area yeah to help protect that um we'll get into that as far as the detailed construction drawings go so i guess we can take a look at that thank you commissioner weich this is a question for staff mr quasi would it be possible or could you give me a sense of the effort it would take uh staff to produce a sustainability score or an environmental impact score for a development like this so that we would have a sense of if this isn't electrified and it's doing you know natural gas how much you know carbon are we uh approving with this development like it is that something that would be easy for staff to get through osi or is that something that would add a material impact on the staff report commissioner which i'm happy if i could take that um sorry mr quasi you don't get to answer well i might i'll let him answer as well so as part of our standard review of petitions now we do we have the office of sustainability and innovations provide a review of these site plans as well they evaluate the plans according to the city's a2 climate neutrality plan the differential as we've talked about here is we don't have udc standards to hold that to but you will find i think what you're talking about is an evaluation of that in the supporting materials when you review a site plan we are have again we are having them to measure it against that those those plans it is in uh is online available typically we don't we don't attach every staff review if that's something you're interested in though we can definitely start getting that with every development we're talking about the same five things right and if we could just get a sense right away and in the staff report it said that we were going to have a conversation around sustainability and the conversation that we had around state sustainability was no conversation around sustainability so there is no conversation around heat pumps there is no conversation around um geothermal whether in the parking lot there is no conversation around solar mounted car ports and so i just feel like they're it's hard to figure out how to suss this out and then we wind up having these same questions with every practitioner so if osi is already doing that if we could see that if i could if no one else wants to wait there are heads okay if we could see that i think it would just prepare these questions a little bit better especially when the petitioners are saying things around like oh you know we're not sure how in our climate we can add a heat pump we've had that conversation and i know because i reached out to dr stoltz directly and she said you know there are heat pumps that work in our climate that are cost competitive with other heating sources and while we are working on a petition or lobbying efforts with the state to allow us to include these kinds of things in our code while we are on that path we i would like us to signal to developers in our community that this is important and that um they should come to this body with an answer and the answer could be we just don't care but they should have an answer and and i just feel like we did not get an answer tonight and uh that is that is absolutely disappointing yeah and i i need to correct myself i'm as as i'm discussing that i'm looking in uh mr quality can correct me if i'm wrong i don't see osi's review of it um if that's something you'd like to see before you take action that's something that we can definitely to the arrange is that an oversight or do they normally does osi normally review these so it's a relatively new process um we designated a couple of categories of projects that we are sending to osi for that review um i i would probably report back to my instinct as this one should have gone to them for that review so that's something i'm happy to follow up with if you'd like that level of detail about how this specifically relates to the city's carbon neutrality plan and isn't this something that's coming like we're going to be reviewing the buildings right isn't that what osi is planning wasn't that a conversation at council around and the fee structure being around that wasn't that in that so many aspects to the carbon neutrality plan everything from you know advocacy at the state level to update building plans so that communities have the ability to just require these as more standard building permit requirements but in the meantime again because i think it is of interest to commissions that's where we've started that process i i i would speculate that it was an oversight in this case but i want to go back to the decisions that we made about the types of projects that we had flagged for that review not at all don't worry um i mean my sense too is that because this is advisory or it would be informational uh this is my son says chair um but you can certainly disagree with me um and there are not standards associated with at this point it's good information and i agree that this would be fantastic information among those class of uh developments where we are asking for it to share that in this in the plans um including that in this case i wouldn't i do not feel comfortable holding this up because that doesn't change the standards upon which we tonight are being asked to evaluate this proposal but i think it would help our conversation guide our conversation and um provide the additional information um in this again advisory role educational role to some extent elevating that conversation for the future um go ahead commissioner dish yeah in that vein i wanted to be sure that i was following both what osi is providing in these reports currently and what commissioner weich was interested in having because i heard the idea of a score which is interesting i suppose um but i also heard the idea of alternatives if you did this and these alternatives can be done without greater cost or with 10 extra cost or something like that that to me would be a little bit more useful because when we have these conversations that sometimes feels to be the thing that's missing like well we haven't done our research and we're not sure and it might add cost and whatever and so to me the alternatives would be great i guess we could have a score it's a little hard to score when you're not when you don't have standards but over time we would be able to say oh yeah you know the valhalla scores at x for these reasons and your project compares favorably or unfavorably to that project that might be useful but to me for the informational part of our conversation these are the things that you're doing these are some things any one of the menu of which as you began to elucidate chairmills would make your project more green and they exist and their cost they raise the cost of projects on average x or lower it over time because of the energy savings is am i at all making sense you are making sense to me and during commission proposed business or just more education i can tell you a student that i will have working that i will be advising working with mr leonard this summer that i think will help move towards something like that so commissioner give randall i think i think this is a really intriguing idea i'm glad that we're discussing this i think in some ways it could be sort of a similar role to the design review board which also doesn't have any kind of you know we just look at their report they don't they don't pass anything they don't vote on anything but they give us a really good idea of how things fit into the downtown and they have a robust discussion about this and so i think that they do have some standards but it would be an interesting maybe comparison for um how to kind of structure something that they're that again they don't necessarily hang their hat on something specific and they have they're not voting on anything but they are like a recommending or whatever i don't know that just may be some potential way to think about that as a as a role with the office of sustainability if there's some sort of report and again just to be able to advance the discussion because i think that's part of what we're missing here is is to be able to kind of have have something on which we can base the discussion on and the other thing that i'm hearing too though is is just having resources for a developer because this is something that is newer this is not something that mr moore does he's not a mechanical engineer he probably has some sense of how things fit together but that's not his expertise we're not we don't mechanical engineers and people that do these systems are not part of the building process up to this point usually they usually come way later in the process in terms of like when things come through site plan submission the buildings are not very designed at this point even though it feels like they are they're really not i mean there's a lot of changes all the guts have to be created and there's a lot of floor plans and all kinds of things that shift and change so um it's it's just those people haven't even been engaged yet often times in this process and so how can we set up something so that there you know i don't know if it's like recommendations or handouts or guidance or resources or something that can kind of help people think about these general principles early on just to be able to because like you know mr war saying we may not be doing construction documents for another eight months you know and that and that's when you're really getting into the guts of all this design so what can we do as a city to elevate people that don't they're not thinking along these lines but we want them to so how can we help them too how can we i mean without it being crazy how can we help them to be able to because anything new for any of us people anything that we do that's new we're always like just a second i'm not sure about this it's just we're human right i mean it just takes some time to kind of like i'm not sure if i'm ready for that so how can we make this something that isn't so scary and new so that people can get their heads around it and just have some sense of like oh okay just a second there are these other examples of where people are doing this and this kind of climate and they handle it this way and i think what can be tricky about these systems is that it's not a one-size-fits-all thing and that's what gets hard about it um so i guess again during commission um business that proposed business that maybe we just start to think about ways that we can both have the discussion but also just have resources for people so they can have the discussion i mean we want to set people up for success for this not just be like well why aren't you when they're like whoa whoa whoa i don't even know what this is about you know so um so anyway i just want to that's i probably should have saved this for when we had the commission business at the end but i kind of want you all present here too to hear this because i feel and and the developer you know that it is new but it's it's not so new that it's like completely being tested and and nobody's done it before you know so um i get the hesitancy but i also think that nudging from the design team too to kind of say this is these are the things that these people are expecting to be able to have conversations around and you kind of need to get up to speed on some of these things in order to have this conversation so i also want to send that message too go ahead mr leonard um i just want to clarify the sustainable review on this project was not um it was not an oversight the i'm looking at the distribution the the project the typology that we have determined that would be reviewed by sustainability are those that have a discretionary aspect to them um so that's this is a this is a site plan being proposed under the udc uh and so those types of projects have not been flagged for that review so i want to clarify that i would suggest as we talked about let's have this conversation about how to improve our sustainability process outside of this petition thank you all right any other comments on this petition there are two motions again i think that we can take them together all right uh and i think mr leonard we are ready for a vote commissioner gibrandal yes commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner hammerschmidt yes commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark yes commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes motion carries thank you very much all right um we are on to item 8b uh these are the amendments to the off-street parking requirements which will be for city council approval this is business that we have taken upon ourselves and so um but why we've taking upon ourselves i mean we do not have an external petitioner but uh that instead uh staff will help walk us through the kind of choices that we have been making along the way and all of the fantastic work they've been doing to pull this information together so whenever you're ready great my name is jeff khan i've been assisting brett leonard in creating a staff report and proposing amendments to our parking requirements you should have in your packet two items one would be a staff report and two would be the actual proposed amendment language which includes a reference in the a20 plan for carbon neutrality that calls for eliminating parking minimums and setting low parking maximums um i also want to point out that we did provide a summary of what four comparison cities are requiring for parking which is sort of a helpful comparison we also included some local examples of off street parking including parking at three spaces per thousand we did learn a few things from this exercise one is that we we learned that the requiring of or limiting parking maximum to three spaces per thousand would allow quite a lot of parking spaces for residential for retail it would probably come in somewhat lower than we currently have been seeing in place at shopping centers like arbor hills shopping center and here on village shopping center also this list does not include restaurants full-service restaurants of say 5 000 square feet um typically would um generate a need for quite a lot of parking spaces but three per thousand might be 15 parking spaces so we did learn a bit from that exercise i do want to briefly summarize what the proposed amendments are they include eliminating minimum parking requirements for any land use in any zoning district establish a maximum of three parking spaces per 1 000 square feet of floor area in the tc1 zoning district regardless of use those are like those are the big proposed amendments we also are proposing to consolidate parking uses in the udc parking table we're proposing to eliminate uses from the parking table when standards are unlikely to apply such as public schools and government buildings we're proposing to eliminate the provision of required uh bicycle parking from being provided off-site we're proposing to amend the weight limit of vehicles prohibited in driveways we're proposing to add a table to communicate special parking districts such as d1 d2 and tc1 and lastly we're amending requirements proposing to amend requirements uh for electric vehicle um infrastructure uh in in a number of in a number of ways the staff report summarizes all that um and lastly i want to read the recommendation staff recommends that the amendments to the unified development code be approved because the proposed amendments will reduce the amount of underutilized impervious surface surfaces and encourage land uses to be used more efficiently incentivize the construction of new residential dwelling units by reducing construction and land acquisition costs which may result in more affordable housing units being constructed and by using land more efficiently will support transit service these proposed amendments are also consistent with the recommendations in the city's master plan land use element and the a2 zero climate action plan so that that's the conclusion of my staff report summary uh mr leonard and i are here to answer any questions you might have thank you very much mr khan um now i'll open the public hearing for this so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about the proposed changes to the uh unified development code off-street parking requirements we'll first again call on folks that are here in council chambers and then move to remote participants to speak um during this public hearing opportunity if you've joined remotely you can use the raised hand feature if you join through zoom if you're watching us now our dial-in number is 877-853-5247 and our meeting id is 977-6634-1226 you have dialed in you can press star 9 on your phone to indicate your interest in speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and whether you are here in person or joining us remotely please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments is there anyone that's here in council chambers that would like to provide public comment come on up hello everyone my name is nani wolf i live at 125 for don road i've lived in ann arbor my entire life but part of the reason i'm here is i am the planning and zoning administrator for the city of ecorse and we do not have any parking minimums and it's fabulous so i'm really here just to support that we have it for i think one single land use and that's automotive repair shops have to have two it's our max and min and that's it but absolutely nothing else has any parking requirements and it speeds up the development process it's excellent for sustainability the market is naturally sorting itself out where people who have too much parking are able to sell their property whereas other places that need parking can petition for whatever amount they need we do have maximums as well so if you want a really high number you have to go before the zoning board of appeals but yeah so i'm just here to support that i know it's not really usual in michigan yet and just the fact that i'm a planner for one community that is i wanted to come out and say it's great and you know i can't say everything's perfect of course things go wrong sometimes and occasionally there's issues as you figure everything out but the jump is worth it so i'm encouraging you to just make that jump thank you any others go ahead hi my name is josh lurkey i live at 521 snyder uh over by the stadium uh i'm for eliminating parking minimums and i'm excited that it's something we're discussing cars are a wasteful and dangerous transit option that pollute our cities and our lungs and require costly and desolate land uses uh just to cope with the amount of traffic and of course parking but eliminating parking is not just about that it's about making development more affordable high cost of parking spaces per any sort of use it's about reducing sprawl and making it easier for people who aren't in cars whether they can whether they can't use a car can't afford a car don't want a car makes it easier for those people to just live their lives so i'm super in favor of this and i'm just excited thank you thank you any others mr garber yes thank you chair mills ken garber again i'm very pleased to second what miss wolf and mr lurkey said or maybe third um about the desirability of eliminating parking minimums and setting parking maximums i did not have time to review the staff reports so just based on mr khan's summary it sounds like setting a maximum of three spaces per thousand square feet of building space would work for a commercial maybe but not for residential and you would have to set a lower maximum so maybe consider if i'm reading it right or list hearing it right maybe consider separate maximums for residential versus commercial that's my only other comment and i really encourage planning commission to go forward with this and maybe miss wolf if she's still around can talk to what the maximums are at e-course thank you thank you all right any other takers in the audience here mr leonard are there any online we do alex lowe you have three minutes to address the planning commission alex lowe you can go ahead and adjust the planning commission we'll try again let's try it again alex lowe you have three minutes to address the planning commission can you hear me now we can oh wonderful uh hi i'm i'm alex lowe i'm calling tonight from fernwood avenue in support of the citywide removable parking minimum i think this is a wonderful idea that will make infill development far more financially viable and work towards many of the city's goals however i would like to request that you reduce the parking maximum for the tc once three spaces per thousand square feet still results in as much space dedicated to parking as there is total floor space which is contrary to the intended purpose of tc1 from the city of ann arbor's current unified development code this district has been created to facilitate encourage and support redevelopment and infill development to realize mixed-use developments and achieve mixed-use corridors that support and sustain transit sets providing as much space as park for parking as there is space for people will still maintain very much a car oriented development pattern while this is fine in some areas tc1 is not that space need i think a maximum of one maybe two spaces per thousand square feet would likely be amply sufficient maybe up to two and a half if uh if that extra space were dedicated to car sharing facilities reduced parking and car sharing go hand in hand to reduce private automobile ownership and usage which is by far the best way to support and sustain transit usage which is the purpose of tc1 as such i strongly believe the maximums listed are so far too high thank you so much thank you no other speakers all right then i will close the public hearing and read the motion let's see all right the motion reads the ann arbor city planning commission hereby recommends that the mayor and city council approve the amendments to chapter 55 unified development code section 5.19 regarding proposed modifications to the city's off-street parking requirements moved by commissioner hammerschmidt seconded by commissioner lee who wants to start mr leonard can i start discussion please so um i just want to maybe set this set a couple points that maybe would help the commission contemplate this um one i want to i want to be forthright there are a couple of other changes in the ordinance that we will would need to visit if these changes are enacted for example we have some special parking requirements and special regulations for daycare centers and some other places in the in the order so i just want to be forthright that we thought that the discussion of sort of the big ass parking policy aspects was first there might be some subsequent changes that would be incorporated and rolled into that for um just references and the like so um so that's one piece and then i want to talk to a little just a couple of examples about tc1 the proposed changes here in tc1 would result in adding 31 parking maximums to uses permitted in the tc1 district that don't exist now it would also decrease parking maximums for 18 uses in that tc-1 district yep uses in the tc1 district do not currently have parking maximums 18 that do have parking maximums would be reduced as an example city planner khan referenced this we recently had a site plan submitted that has it hasn't been accepted for review yet but in the um south state corridor for a restaurant that proposed restaurant was about a 5 000 square foot restaurant the example is mr khan was indicating so under the tc1 current maximum that would be a maximum of 15 spaces as indicated that site plan was proposing 137 spaces on that site plan so i think one of the tensions and i think you've you're hearing this from from the speakers and i think that you will probably get to this is that by um and i just want to be clear staff has been very forthright trying to build a single standard for that district a d1 and d2 in order to provide flexibility for uses there one of the one of the challenges for adaptive reuse at times is when you are shifting for from a say retail use to a restaurant use and when we have different parking standards in a commercial district for example that can make reuse of that building different i don't i don't necessarily think that we talked about it here at the table the conversion from residential is pretty unlikely the conversion to residential from some types of uses can happen i'm not saying it happens often but i think that that's one of the things that the commission should consider in the context of some of these this specifically the special parking district for tc1 this number is a number that was presented as a means of trying to find a unifying standard so that we could apply that standard not care about what's happening in that floor area and not care to future choices about how that floor area might evolve we don't have to do that we could elect to look at differing standards for residential and non-residential uses or others so i just want to set that stage about um i i guess part of me recognizes that i think that that single standard is imperfect i think to to adequately address one of those uses you're probably not addressing the core the other use correctly so i just wanted to be clear it doesn't have to go in that regard but that was the intention that was presented and discussed at the orc at the working session to now is to provide a single standard to provide ultimate flexibility and utility for the evolution of those buildings in that district i and i would just add into that that the other cap that we have reminding myself the other cap that we have in tc1 is not just about what the multiplier is but the actual area associated with it which means that it cannot exceed even though we are expecting we require multi-family or multi-story buildings the footprint of the parking cannot exceed the footprint of the first floor effectively of the building so um that's another cap that they'll be held to yes that's correct okay so sorry i wanted to make sure that like we're starting our conversation about that particular element with that in mind commissioner abrams um i guess i have a lot of thoughts about this so i don't know where to start but maybe um i mean in terms of a unified standard to avoid constricting adaptive reuse in the future office to residential seems likely but restaurant to residential seems unlikely like i i guess i'm wondering like would it be possible to so that's just one thought like would it be possible to actually pull out a couple of uses which we understand to be exceptions when it comes both to reuse and to parking um pressures um so that would be one thing to consider but i guess my other thought when i hear about this proposed development is that what we are hoping for in these corridors is denser development so the the three per thousand might be very constricting to a restaurant use but if they had residential units above the three per thousand is very generous and the point is that the average should be adequate and responsible and so i guess because we don't know what the ratios and what the i guess i'm wondering like maybe i could use some help from staff or even or other commissioners like without actually like modeling scenario scenarios how or how do we feel reassured that um that it's the right that we're hitting the right target so i think the comparisons in the staff report were very helpful but i observed the same thing that you pointed out in the presentation which is obviously for residential three per a thousand is too high nobody should be building that many that buffer is in there for other uses um but maybe what we want to do is encourage mixed use and dense development and not one five thousand square foot restaurant with a hundred and you know 130 spaces i guess the other thing i'm thinking is the three four thousand fifteen i mean ten would be really really constricted but fifteen is still a fraction of what they are asked what they really would want right you said a hundred and something so in some ways it's like it doesn't if two per thousand made sense in every other use but restaurant i'm not sure we should keep it at three just for restaurant it's like it doesn't solve the restaurant's problem so uh i'm rambling a bit but maybe just to to sum up so that we can get i can get some feedback like density and mixed use versus single single use uh future proofing for adaptive reuse maybe we don't maybe we pull restaurant out of that are there other uses besides restaurants that have that exceptional kind of pre parking need and uh maybe even though it's difficult for the restaurant um i'm not sure moving from three to two actually produces more hardship for them which is maybe a funny way to think about it but because i think two might make more sense for other uses than three per thousand were you bef uh you were putting that out there i think that was there i heard a question for staff which is am i thinking about this right or was that not intended to be a question sorry so i guess there there was a lot in there maybe one question for staff is are there uses other than restaurants that you see being burdened by this maximum that's maybe we start there i can try to answer that um we do know that there are some uses that do generate more parking than one would think they would generate and one would be medical dental office which tends to have a fairly high staff ratio as well as a high number of of patients visiting we also know that grocery stores tend to have a large capture area and people tend to spend quite a lot of time there instead of just going for one item people might spend a half an hour or or or longer so we do know there there are some uses like that that that will generate that kind of demand one of the things i did consider when when you brought up this sort of divergence of demand between residential and non-residential is the a concept of post and i'm going to throw something new in there but it's something to think about the possibility of coming up with a a lower maximum for residential uses and then three per thousand for non-residential uses so you know we can sort of create whatever it is we think is is reasonable and that's just an idea that i had after listening to what what you had said about that deviation mr leonard might have something to add to that yeah i mean i think this is it relates to the question of conversion like i do think like that that type of approach if you were going to come up with two scenarios for example where residential was a different rate and commercial uses were a higher rate um another example of that i think could be office uses i think from uh probably from i i suspect that parking provision is part of office marketability that there are that is one of the factors that people are thinking about when they're choosing to locate an office it is what's going to be available to them and that is it's not something that i profess to know what those numbers are but i would speculate that it's a pretty fluid thing right now between kovid like i think there's been a trend where offices have started to be utilized in a much more dense fashion than they have historically but now over the last couple years i wouldn't i couldn't guess what the reality is going to be so um but uh going so apart from that other example of sort of maybe a more parking intensive use from a market value perspective i think if we were going to establish two different standards that would be pretty really easy to realize obviously in the tc1 we would just establish those we'd count up your residential floor area we'd count up your non-residential floor area maybe apply two different ratios at the end of the day if we're setting them as maximums it's still going to have a limiting factor in that conversion for example if you are providing force four floors of office and four floors of residential and you come back and you want to convert another floor of office to residential if they're truly maximums we can't approve that conversion unless you eliminate that parking so um so that's that's the argument for finding a standard that works but again i want to be clear i we there's very i don't think that i don't know to what extent that we will have that evolution of uses in these corridors like we do in maybe single-story smaller spaces along our commercial corridors in our downtown that's where i think i'm i'm sort of fueled by that experience of trying to reuse old commercial spaces and i want to avoid i just want to avoid making it harder 20 30 50 years down the road from having the same flexibility of what gets realized here commissioner dish then commissioner lee i'm in the lynn song seat and she didn't turn on her mic last night so that's what's happening um so i'm understanding better that indeed you are doing what i'm what i was understanding you to be doing but when i look at these numbers they're they're a little bit hard it's a little bit hard to use them as a guidepost but what i notice is that the disparities between parking at three per thousand and actual parking say in the huron village shopping center it's not that high it's 384 is what it would be at three per thousand and 411 is what they have so that's a difference of about 30.

ready welcome back thank you all those who are here and those who are joining us on the live stream or recorded we would like to come back to number two and begin our work study i'll call this meeting to order and we'll begin it now 3.01 fy 2021 district spending report dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members tonight we have assistant superintendent bonnie betts and director of finance jackie matanin good evening how are you guys good [Music] good evening president ward president ward president wood dr mccord i was mixing the wood and the cord together sorry excuse me governing board members so first i wanted to let you know that the item posted on this particular agenda item is applicable to the action item which is 7.01 we thought as we were making the change that we would show you the exact change from the two percent adding one percent to make it three percent on each individual employees compensation plan so just wanted to get that cleared up and at the end of this meeting we will post that also to action item 7.01 and so to begin um ms matin and i are here to talk about the fiscal year 2021 district spending report which is i believe the last time we will be talking about fiscal year 21 yes and i'm very happy to hand the presentation over to jackie matin it's all yours jackie thank you miss betts dr mccord madam president members of the governing board as ms betts indicated we are here to talk about the fy 2021 district spending report as published by the auditor general's office tonight's report will include the fy 201 2021 district spending highlights and fy 2021 teacher salary information press wrong button here so this pie chart is from the fy 2021 annual comprehensive financial report or acfer which we received in december keep in mind that it's not necessarily apples to apples to the district spending report but this does give us a good indication of where the district spending report will take us because we receive it several months later so we receive the district spending report in march and you can see according to this pie chart from the acfer we are at 60 instruction spend this pie is from the auditor general's district spending report you can see that our classroom spending overall is 75.2 percent of that instruction is 61.6 percent and then non-classroom spending is 24.8 percent also in that pie chart it references peer average and our peer districts are similar in size not necessarily our neighboring districts but they're similar in size here's our five-year district spending history you can see that we have increased in dollars instruction since fy 2017 we've remained steady year over year from fiscal 20 to 21 which is which is okay too dollars in the classroom first let me talk about dollars instructions so these figures are derived from our account code structure and there's an element within our account code structure that defines where the money is spent so the dollar's instruction is from a 1000 function which says that the classroom this spend is in the classroom so it's teacher salaries and benefits paraprofessionals classroom supplies instructional materials and then the classroom dollars also includes the dollar's instruction which is the 1000 function but also support for students so this would include attendance support guidance counselors assessment library media services psychology services speech language and also social workers and social social economic social social emotional support so you can see that from fiscal 20 to 21 there was an increase from the 74.5 to the 75.2 and that is from our the commitments made with our mno override administration is from that percentages from this district and schools so the district office and the principal assistant principal and their administrative assistants are coded here we did come down by one tenth of a percent so we're happy about that i'm going to turn transportation over to ms betts because she is living it thank you so what i wanted to point out here is if you look at 2019 which was our last normal year and you compare that to 2020 you can see that there was a drop in transportation even though in 2020 we also remodeled the transportation facility which would be included as our spend for transportation that year but so you would have expected 2020 to go up however that was the year in which we shut down the last three months of the school year so we were not operating in transportation there were no fuel costs there were salary costs but there were no fuel costs so we would have expected an increase in spend in 2020 but that increase in the building was offset by the decrease in the fuel costs primarily and probably mechanics cost as well our buses weren't running so there weren't needs for repairs so fast forward then to 2021 it's really great news to see the transportation spend go down on a percentage basis which we had hoped as we combined power base and gilbert base but that's also due to the fact that we didn't have the construction spend in transportation facilities in 2021 so i'm just cautioning you all and i'm cautioning myself to not celebrate too quickly the decrease in spend and transportation we will have a better view of what that's going to look like in the long term once we complete the the current year thank you the last category on this slide is non-classroom that includes the administration and transportation also food service and operations so that's the decrease there mr matt might ask miss betts i remember at one point a couple years ago we had we were inefficient in our transportation spend compared to everything else so do you think obviously it's gone down but i liked your rationale but i remember that we were saying when we had um the consultants to help us you know make some changes i i thought that selling the buses that weren't you know consolidating our buses updating the fleet he had a list of things that would help us be more efficient anyways do you feel like we're on that path and have we addressed those things or well definitely in the biggest thing if you recall is that we when we finish the 2019 school year we immediately changed the bell schedules at the end of 2019 which was expected to hugely improve our efficiency during 2020.

school committee to order we will begin with the pledge allegiance one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all i just wanted to remind everybody that this meeting is being reported in your image and your voice may be broadcast public comments [Music] there was much discussion about the school calendar and the half-day professional development as a nurse practitioner tcp professional development and continued education is for me to keep up to date with medical research and medical recommendations it also helps reinvigorate my practice and passion for my job teachers also have to stay up to date with new teaching techniques and also respond to testing results last school coming meeting we heard from all the principals from the ames web results and also the fundamental program that has helped close the gap to national standards to prevent them the teachers learned about those teaching techniques interventions during staff meetings but also professional development duties the principals and the superintendents also mentioned that half-day or two-hour tv sessions seem to be more effective because enable them to check back and see if their new skills are being effective and discuss with their peers how to improve last meeting the comment was made that the pd half days were robbing time on learning from the children and cheating the system i clarified with the time on learning and apparently the time on learning including the half day professional development days is above the state requirements professional development also helps your teachers hire job satisfaction because they're up to date on effective teaching teaching techniques this might be something to pay attention to when teacher burnout is at an all-time high the other issue i wanted to address was the hvac upgrade i sent an email to all the school committee members regarding this concern i know it was in the works question of funding especially for bes being the oldest building of the three schools aside from moving air quality is extremely important to the health of our students and our children there are also hot september and june days where teaching is impossible in the sweltering classrooms i hope hope it is over but we still need to pay attention to what the omicron ba the variant is doing is now 55 of our banking in the us and has already caused a large surge in the uk i hope and praying that does not happen in the u.s but ignoring the trends will not serve us well thank you any other public comments um has anyone received any communications that they would like to share i just wanted to announce that we still have an open seat in berlin um this position is a by the time you're sworn in probably a five-month commitment um and all of our seats are up for re-election in november for our regionalization agreement it's a great opportunity for someone who wants a short-term commitment or someone who's interested in possibly running for election in november if you're interested please send your resume to either myself or christy turjan and you can find our emails on the website is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented second [Music] approve the consent agenda as presented passes and we're on to our election presentation [Music] so so our intention this evening was to just be available over any questions running for the election or want to know more about the election there's been a number of questions i think since overwhelming since the regionalization happened um so tomorrow's enough before anyone who's here i have a couple folks here knowing whether they're here for this or not but that's open to that if anyone here has any questions on the incoming question i think could you give a general overview of what's required for the position yeah good question so i think um you guys could jump in here too you know obviously fairly regularly um you know i think it was more regularly in the last couple of years given some of the challenges that were faced but generally speaking right it's typically one meaning you know the role of the school committee is really critical it's first to set policy for the district second to hire and evaluate the superintendent in order to review and approve the financial budget for the school district so the other day those are the three primary roles we have that we find in the course of a meeting without a lot of other things but they all kind of roll up to one of those three responsibilities as as we as a group are responsible for ensuring the district is cooperated and that we are you know responsible for that folks are waiting for a timeline standpoint on folks who might want to take out papers we expect those to be available sometime this month we're waiting for the secretary of state's office to send the information downtown correct the district christie you're going to get something in the mail from the secretary of state's office i spoke with them a couple weeks ago they did confirm they got for whatever we sent okay so it's just a question and then once people pull papers they need to get signatures [Music] right no not yet i think that will be in the information yeah typically that's what we would hope yeah that somebody wanted to get either from berlin with one of the things that's a little unique i think about this particular election is that those who take on paper are going to have to choose whether they're running for one of the two-year or four-year seats there are two four-year seats in boylston and one two years ago in berlin it's the opposite to a distance or two here one in the season four here and that was done in a way to create a situation every two years thereafter so after this 2022 election in 2024 there will be three seats up for elections the three two-year seats that will be expiring those three vacancies will be for our longer term so from 2024 onward every seat will be a four-year term from a requirement standpoint unless you mean you really want him to be a resident of voter in boylston overall to take out papers so that's good to know as well any questions or comments on the role of school so i would say for anyone who's interested in learning more or potentially becoming a candidate feel free to reach out to mr popping or myself on the subcommittee for elections or obviously glory as well we're happy to answer any questions that you have um to whatever extent we can but we wanted to make sure we were here in the mail for any questions that might come up today even the papers will be available likely before our next meeting in may and so um that will be the opportunity uh into the towns the town clerk will certify the signatures you have to keep your signatures straight if you're collecting from both towns for all in one burling papers poison and boiling papers uh and then once they're certified you know you're responsible for them collecting them and sending them into the secretary of state for the names and that process that deadline i believe is but it's good to know that's not really stupid [Music] to get okay papers going to move on to the report section mr minion did you want to present or did you want to discuss uh so this is my first time uh proposing a field trip so i'm not sure what the protocol is uh but i believe everybody has dread the field trip itinerary um so uh it's a field trip uh which would take place on the 7th of may i believe which is a friday and myself and the 48 students juniors and seniors who are in my economics class uh to include um rebecca hart uh the daughter of one city members uh we would take a flight from worcester airport which leaves at 7 30 a.m and gets into jfk about 8 30 and then take public transportation uh into lower manhattan and visit um the 911 memorial and museum associated with it um we would be in the area of wall street um the new york federal reserve in years past have taken students to the boston federal reserve but because govit's federal reserve is not doing tours right now but we would walk along wall street and get a sense of that area um and then take public transportation up to central park and visit one of the museums and so um i gotta reach out to christy about you know what types of things you might want to know about this trip um and i learned that 37.5 of the students in the class have never been to new york city which is arguably the greatest city in the world um i learned that 87.5 of the students have never ridden the new york subway um which is an experience in itself um and we spoke about her she said did you might be wondering why take a plane instead of riding a bus um the blame is cheaper uh so the cost um fluctuates um you know and whether we once the trip is approved whether it will get off the ground um is you know dependent upon the price of the ticket at that moment um you know so the price when i looked most recently was 82 and a bus to new york city is going to cost um well over 2 000 um so you know it's just it's not it isn't really quicker in that uh we're going to be at the airport um probably at 6 30 to catch the 7 30 flight and then there is you know an hour-ish subway ride from jfk um over to into manhattan and a bus ride would probably take three or so hours as well um but there's an adventure component to it uh that um you know one of the things that i think we've talked about in um public education is making connections with young people and doing things that are notable and memorable um and educational and it strikes me that going to new york city with a teacher that i mean i've known most of these students since i taught them in seventh grade and have had a connection now over five or six years with them to do something unique educational fun you know out of the ordinary all that type of stuff uh strikes me as consistent with what our goal in public education is um so that's the gist of the field trip um i'm happy to answer questions if people have any questions yes i love it i regret it earlier today and i was excited to see the year offering this opportunity um my only question is given some of the recent challenges jetblue has had with their flights together what happened if you're going back to what you get uh so i'm gonna cross my fingers and hope that that doesn't happen uh you know that is it's it's an adventure yeah right so how would we how would we deal with that um you know one of the other goals of public education is overcoming adversity i don't have a specific plan for that uh that hasn't been my experience i fly jetblue quite frequently um so i don't have a good answer uh for what we would do um you know i would sense that if jetblue cancelled the flight that they would be under some obligation to provide some you know yeah you know a hotel or whatever um [Music] but i haven't really thought about that to be honest with you so i can't give you a better answer than that and hopefully that won't happen i would guess there's a lot of flakes back and forth from new york boston well sure so right i mean i think i you know i think that um i don't think that we would be stranded forever you know uh and it would be you know might there be an inconvenience that might be might we have to fly into boston traps and then adapt to that you know that is a possibility um you know like i said i fly jetblue a lot and i've had um very good luck with them um you know but we didn't need to down somehow and figure that so other thoughts yes i think it's great too like i've read about your financial discussions around why would you operate a low-cost airline costs and all that plays into it uh just are all the safety concerns with parents taking care of and liability issues taking care of the subway stories that you know about new york uh so um before i went further in terms of doing those things i wanted to make sure that the school committee was kind of okay and so um once that takes place if that takes place uh then there would be a permission slip that the parents would have to sign um you know sure there are concerns um about offense you know riding the subway um is it a little bit dangerous maybe you know but and i mean is it true that crime is rising in lots of places certainly um you know what i would sort of say to that is i would hope that the parents based on my you know long history of this school and my experience that i've had with um these children in teaching with some of them siblings uh that they would feel confident you know that i'm going to protect their kids and i'm not going to put them in dangerous situations um you know and it's certainly that you take you know when you go on the subway one of the things that i think um you know i went to high school in boston um and my experience as a 14 year old was being in the city and so when i think about the young people that i teach from berlin and boylston uh who aren't in the city you know having that experience of doing that type of thing um um and so hopefully the parents will say yes and if a parent said you know no i don't really feel comfortable with my child doing this then that student obviously wouldn't be able to go but i feel fairly confident um i mean i think that based on um you know the couple of people now the school committee have spoken about it that you seem supportive of it uh and your endorsement of you know the safety of it and my experience as a teacher should convince the parents and there are only eight kids that this is you know not um unduely dangerous i agree i think it's great i did a similar experience when i was a kid you're right it is eye opening changes your outlook on many things and i wish more people do more trips like this coming up yeah it's fun you know something something different um you know unscheduled time to do you know what strikes us you know uh and if the spirit moves us to the candy store right so if it's something different you know um i mean you whatever you're interested in you can find it in new york city [Music] a lot of people are like you know we're coming back or easing into things and there's so much to do and so many great things to learn and you're gonna i really think that this would be a wonderful opportunity it would be cemented in the kids heads and they would remember not only the experience but all of the things that they learned um i i appreciate the fact that you're willing to give up your time as well because that's a lot of personal time that's a labor of life it really is thank you i appreciate it [Music] anyone else having questions okay so what i was thinking is at this time um i would like to move the vote from item eight section k to now as do not pull mr minnigan here so i would like a motion to approve the 200 new york city field trip from may 6 2022.

meeting of the finance committee to order and it's live streamed yes i got it we're live stream all right john and eddie uh you have the floor thank you do you want me to take minutes that would be wonderful terry thank you al hey do you want to start with the report yes um i'm going to share it because i know there's some questions still out there so i'll share it right now which i can share this can everybody see that no no terry you have a roll call on the participants in tonight's meeting oh thank you dear um kate canetta president albert russo here luisa sakota spring here and terry bizet okay all right guys it's not letting me for some reason it's showing that it's sharing here and i i know you guys can't see it but i'll go i'll go through it page one um [Music] so we've begin with uh end of march 31st seven of our ten school months have been completed which about which means 66 percent of our expenses have been used that is the next tab look in the middle you see the 139 that was our budget for uh fiscal year 22.

further acknowledges with respect and reverence the molecular ohlone people tribe of san francisco barrier or their stewardship of these lands uh we'll go ahead and proceed with the pledge of allegiance if you have a flag near you please face it [Music] i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty for interviewing and selecting bond council funds uh we've got some dialogue but let's go ahead and have the administration remind us of the process that has been uh agreed on so thank you i'm going to be asking mr colbert assistant superintendent of business services to read the process for everybody's benefit great thank you um good evening board president members of the boards and superintendent dr bauer a little bit of a background and also over the process of the interview as you may recall um the district issued an rp for bond council services and receives five proposed in a name uh read the name of the firms that's submitted and these are in no particular order um the first firm is org the second firm is hopkin delafield and wood the third firm is jones hall the fourth firm is straddling attorney of law and the fifth firm is quint timing llp in terms of the process as you can see you invited a representative from each firm to be able to witness um how the order of the interviews will be determined um names of the firms have been placed in this envelope and will be later pulled by ms patricia tovar to determine the order of anything [Music] once the order is determined the first to be interviewed first will remain in the boardroom and all other firms will be placed in a waiting room uh each funds will have a total of 15 minutes for the interview the first part of the interview will be a five-minute interview opportunity for the firm the second part of the interview um where 10 minutes will be allotted uh for the board of trustees to ask the total five questions um each board member will have will ask the total one question each and each board member will ask the same questions to all of the firms in terms of um how to submit their scores the board will have two options they can submit their scores after each firm is interviewed or wait until the end until all the firms are interviewed and submit the score all at once um board member will score each firm between one to five with one being the least desirable and five being the most desirable uh the firm receiving the highest total score total score will be selected as the fine list and will be subject to the girl background checked in the event that there is a tie with the top finalists the board will have will consider two options uh first option is the board members will rescore the finalists that are tied and the second option is to reinterview the tight finalist if the final list is not clear background checks the runner-up will be selected as the finalist and will be subject to a thorough background check this process will continue until the finalist clears background check and at this time i would like to invite patricia to for the names of the firm to determine the order huh which okay number two is [Music] third is total foreign at this point we would um request that other than um to remain in the board room um the rest of the firm can follow patricia to the waiting room can i ask the question president uh well first of all just just fyi i don't know how this is on other people's end but um any of the microphones there in the boardroom are fairly difficult to hear i'm not sure what the public is hearing right now but at least on my end it's pretty difficult just a little fyi um secondly did uh mr chain did you mention that in the event of a tie that we re-interview the tied candidates and if so is that with the same questions the same five questions or do we need to discuss that in the event of the tie the board will have two options the first option will be to rescore the finalists and the second option is to reinterview the tied finalists so that would be the poor decision in terms of how it would like to proceed um i mean if i could i don't know uh board president how you feel about it i know in the past there have been some scores that are kind of close and so um in the name of transparency i think maybe we should just be clear on especially that um reinterviewing process if we do end up getting a tie and if we do re-interview just up front i think we should establish whether it's using the same questions or or whatever that process may be so that if we do get there it's transparent it's clear and it's known to everybody [Music] the consensus here uh uh c3 headshaking uh racecore is anybody really really not interested in responding you want to go through an entire review process can you repeat that president quintet i'm sorry i can't hear three of us over here in the boardroom that uh uh the rescoring process is preferable rather than going back to interviewing so we can if if there's anybody who's opposed to it please speak up now i mean i'm i'm willing to go with it if that's the consensus of everyone there i just i wonder what would be the impetus to change a score in that rescoring process if it's if we have the same information at the end of the interviews i just wonder what we're going to change those scores based upon well it looks like there's a there is a desire to go with risk scoring for i'm assuming the sake of simplicity so unless you want to proceed and make a case to go and reinterview then we'll proceed with rich warren um i mean i don't want to spend any more time on it so can we say that at least i'll agree in principle but can is it possible to leave it open for discussion if we do get there at that time instead of spending time talking about it now of course it'll be the will of the body uh do we have a comment from uh board member travis i i think that once we have done final interviews and if there is a type there's and it stands out most okay so i'm comfortable just scoring it again all right yeah you can always bring it up at that time but at this point we'll proceed with the intention of just one so that we can move forward okay thank you and one more question i couldn't hear the announcement of the the order can you just for now just say the first candidate just so i can get the scoring thing ready yes the first uh firm to be interviewed eric harrington and sutcliffe all right um so we can go ahead and move forward with uh the first um [Music] so [Music] uh the first portion of the interview is a five-minute presentation to the board um as you can see the time clock is on the screen for your reference and when you're ready um for president to take it home all right so ready to start the clock yes good evening and thank you for having me um i thought it was going to be such a great opportunity to watch some of my competitors on this process sent your video in and then i realized that the video is behind me and i'm gonna lose my denial of my thinning hair if i watch it so but uh my name is donald field i'm with laura carrington and sutcliffe close orrick has been in public finance for over a hundred years we've financed everything from the golden gate bridge to school houses all over the state i've been with the firm for 22 years i lead up our school finance practice i work on all kinds of financing that school districts do from tax and anticipation notes i run the csba tran pool program to go bonds to lease financings as well as land secured financings that some school districts do so at broad experience about 85 or 90 depending on the year uh is all school finance i also do some work for some cities and counties in california um i i have to tell you i watched the the uh municipal advisor interviews and i decided that i didn't want to distract you with a a powerpoint presentation because the five minutes goes quick and i really wanted to just talk to you about my approach and helping your school district proceed with your financings um [Music] public finance is a complicated area and school districts typically don't do it every year some don't do it even every couple of years i've worked with all sizes of school districts from the largest being lausd to school districts that have just one or two school houses um and everything in between the very wealthiest community schools to some of the struggling school districts so i've experienced all sort of sizes and and uh financial wealth uh as far as the school districts and um my approach is really to sort of make sure that the school district is fully uh informed and understanding about their finance process because uh as as you probably aware um more and more these days the the communities are they want transparency your process reflects that um but they also want to make sure that they understand things a little bit more in depth and so you as uh board members and also your your cabinet members are gonna often get questions and so my approach is to to make sure that you're comfortable with me asking the questions uh that sometimes you don't want to because everyone thinks they need to they need to understand things um i want to have a uh open conversation and make sure you actually do understand both the uh the legal provisions of your documents but also the the reasons behind them things are getting more and more complicated especially in bond elections the last several election cycles with legislation making things more difficult for um getting bonds passed adding requirements to both the ballot questions and other legal requirements there have also been some quite a few bond measure challenges by uh various taxpayer groups and so i really uh see it as my job just to navigate to make sure that you know you've made a lot of progress in the last uh four years i i noticed that you have you have several years of being qualified but have two successive interim reports as being positive i want to help you with that positive movement going forward to make sure that you don't have any missteps on what you're doing with your bond financings it's a complicated area both for the state laws and also the federal securities laws and tax laws um there's a hundred or so bond lawyers in my firm um so not only do you have me but if something were to come up that is more you know novel or complicated i have 100 other lawyers to look to to help me navigate things um so that is my approach and i think my five minutes is over here so thank you um the second portion of the interview um you will be allotted ten minutes um to answer five questions that will be asked by each board members and at this point i'll turn it over to board president to call on the board members to ask their questions good evening uh so what would you do if you don't agree with the recommendation to the district from the fiscal advisor and can you provide an example of when you've had to do that or when you might have to do that sure that's a great question and often there's a little bit of back and forth if you have a good team you want strong members and all your positions on your team um because uh it's if there's any if there's one member that's stronger than the others then you may not end up in a result that is best for the district um there's a number of times where um [Music] for instance the financial advisor will put out a schedule and we on the legal side will look at the schedule and figure out that something doesn't work we want to make sure that your bonds are going to the market at a time where no new information is coming out because your your obligation is that you don't have any material misstatements in your disclosure or permissions and so if the schedule sets forth a time period where you're publishing your disclosure document but we know your budget is coming out the next week we want to adjust that and usually it just takes a discussion with your financial advisors i've worked with all of the major financial advisors including the dale scott folks and so um who was i think selected at your uh last interview process um so we we have some back and forth but it it ends up in a better result uh both as far as legal issues and other things um that we often run into for example a structuring question where um we could we could do something legally that could help a uh financial advisor structure the thing structure the bond deal so that it it makes it a little bit more efficient or cost effective for the district um so i don't see it as a good thing it's just disagreement among the team members i think it is a positive thing um as long as it's done in this spirit where we're working together uh trust even [Music] okay thank you um has your firm worked with districts that have had challenges similar to alum rock if so what was your approach to set them up for success what if anything would you do differently with alum rock given the specifics of our recent history and our community sure thank you yes i've i've worked with districts that have had um [Music] financial issues coming out of financial issues um getting into sort of positive territory um the key thing for public finance is to make sure that your disclosure is accurate um you want to have comp you want your investors to have confidence that it's accurate and you don't want to run afoul of the the securities laws and so um we always make sure that there's a process in place where we help you draft the disclosure documents but it takes involvement with the school district um there's a lot of times where you'll have a financial team that will tell you that you don't need to do anything to get this transaction done it's not true these these disclosure documents are the responsibility of the school district and so you are the ones that will will be looked at if something is not disclosed something like a settlement with teachers on the salaries and the financial impacts of that could cause problems if it's not fully disclosed and so the process that we go through is just a thorough uh discussion on the securities laws and and how we are going to go about making sure that everyone understands what needs to be disclosed um so that we we have a complete document thank you board rest president okay thank you mr president um well thank you very thank you very much for coming tonight mr field so my question to your firm would be in the current environment of interest rate instability uh what do you see as the most significant legal issue that alan rock will face when the district offers bonds for sale so this is a more of a financial question but um you know as far as when you sell bonds the higher interest rate that you pay [Music] the more interest costs you're paying and so if you're going up against your legal limits on a tax rate for prop 39 bonds the more interest you're paying means the fewer bonds that you could issue for projects up front and so if you're going for a november election you know we're supposed to go through a number of interest rate hikes this year but um if we're still in an interest rate an increasing environment we want to get to the market as quickly as we can and making sure that all the legal requirements are done so that you're getting more dollars for your projects and not spending them on an interest cost thank you very much mr thief thank you board member what are the three biggest mistakes districts do when they do not take the advice of their counsel well the the sort of the the biggest mistakes i think are getting rushed into something that you're you're not fully betting and understanding a lot of consultants will want to get a transaction done that's how they make their money and [Music] school districts once the thing is closed has to live with it sometimes for 30 years including for example a bond election measure your project list is going to be with you for eight maybe 10 years depending on how quickly you could issue bonds to those projects and so vetting it out and understanding that things are going to change over time is very important so the critical thing for me is is making sure you spend the time up front to get things done correctly um so that you don't have to worry about those issues later after the thing is closed and you can't change it uh has your firm ever been the subject of or been involved in an investigation that resulted from your work with the claim no i'll i'll answer this because i know that everyone gave a quick answer at the fas and so i with a firm with 1500 relatives and so we are not aware of anything any investigation with some of our lawyers um but this to be completely uh transparent there are certain things like there's state bars in every state that we practice and some attorneys have like not completed their continuing education or something like that so there have been those types of investigations but no um you know like with the stc or like a government agency we're not aware of any uh investigation of any of our attorneys and i could say for myself that i i have not all right thank you that uh concludes our questions well thank you for your participation in this interview process at this time ms tovar will uh escort you to the waiting room and bring the next firm out um ms toboy the next forum will be hopkins delafield and wood thank you [Music] sorry am i supposed to go now to the thing right him okay all right at this moment i'm going to go ahead and call for public comment while we're in the process of is there a public comment um i do not see anybody um raising their hand for public comment what president i i don't either how do i do it just increase okay so seeing them yeah so right here [Music] good evening again board president um so this next storm to be interviewed is hawking delafield and wood um just to remind you of the process there's two parts to the interview the first is a five-minute presentation to the board uh and i'll hand it off to fort president to allow you to start whenever is the time ready go ahead and proceed when you're ready okay great thank you so much um first of all thank you so much for allowing us to um join you this evening we really appreciate the opportunity to interview my name is diane quan i am a partner in the los angeles office of hawkensteel of field and wood where i've worked for 20 years now literally um 20 years ago april i started at hawkins um before that i was a securities and governance lawyer in the silicon valley so this is a bit of a homecoming for me um so a bit about hawkins we are more than 165 years old our experience covers the entire breadth and depth of public finance we have worked on all manners of financing um in particular trans uh transportation financings education financings of all sorts healthcare financings general fund financings we have worked with issuers large and small i in particular have done have worked on every state deal for at least the last seven years we also work with a number of counties such as l.a county san diego county we do a lot of work with the city and county of san francisco we also work with a number of cities such as san diego la um but i think of particular interest perhaps this evening is our work with education um entities such as the lausd where we have been either a bond or disclosure council for over seven years now um we also work with long beach usd as well as a number of schools in the san diego region so that actually covers three out of four of the largest school districts in the state um but that's not to say that we only work with large entities we also work with much smaller entities with very diverse um student bodies such as compton usd um we work on all types of securities from general funds to land secure deals um general obligation bonds obviously we are keenly aware that you are on a schedule we make ourselves available as you can see we have a pretty deep um and diverse bench that is to say that you are not relying just on me or any one of us you can always call and there will always be someone available who can answer your questions um and and i think that's important for any sort of financing where you're on a schedule and you want to make sure that you get the tax um the you know sort of the interest rate window that you want um last but not least as i mentioned before um we have a very diverse team um we think that it's important to bring different perspectives to financings and we like to mirror in large part um our client base which is also quite diverse um and i you know i'm glad to answer any questions you may have in the meantime i'll turn it to russ who will introduce himself hi my name is russ miller i am a tax player um i'm probably the only tax player that you'll meet tonight uh i have been doing this for close to 40 years um so i am the gray hair or no lack of hair uh and back in the 90s i actually worked on four of your transactions and wrote the opinion for those transactions three geo bots excuse me three cop issues and a geo bond issue um so i do all uh almost all of the work for uh tax work for hawkish delafield west of the mississippi and with that i'll turn it over to kyle hi i'm kyle reynolds uh i'm an associate attorney at hoffman cell field and wood and as you can see i have uh proportionately as much hair we've been practicing around five years but i it's been a good five years at hawkins isis diane and other partners with uh public financing for school districts cities counties other public agencies but i think my day-to-day work regularly do a lot of school district financings again as diane noted many school districts of varying size in san diego in l.a in particular we are a farm council for lausd and i think just throughout that work uh i think we have a very good idea and and i am particular in working with a lot of the school districts i've got a sense for you know the differences in in work style and in in communication and the effort to put into a financing to work with issuers of varying scientists including small issuers biggest viewers and the kind of flavor that you have to put into a financing for um one issue might be different than another and i think you can be very attentive to that just given our experience these various sizes so thank you so the second part [Music] you could give it a total of 10 minutes to answer a total five questions each board member is going to ask you one question each um at this point i'll give it to one president to call on the board members to ask the question all right uh we're going to start with board member [Music] good evening hi what would you do if you don't agree with the recommendation to the district from the fiscal advisor and can you provide an example of when you'd like to do this um so just to clarify you if your municipal advisor um proposed a particular structure or an investment that um and we just agreed with it is that the question um so i will start first and i'll let supplement um in terms of what is a better deal for the district that's really the municipal advisors um you know field um we only speak to the legality of it so so long it's as it's legal when we determine it's legal um you know whether it's a risky proposition not a risky proposition um how great of a decision that is you know we don't make those qualitative determinations we are here to help you determine um the scope of what is legal um and we can tell you because we work with so many school districts who have you know such different backgrounds and we can tell you what we've seen in other deals and what we've found to be helpful in other deals but at the end of the day i don't think we would you know provide any sort of sort of financial advice we would provide sort of the legal background and the perspective from our other deals to help you make a decision um anything you'd like to add well i agree with everything you said however on the other hand i will say as a tax lawyer and working on many different financings for many different issuers and borrowers for many years throughout the country um i feel it's my obligation in fact almost my job to tell you whether or not i agree or disagree with your with the advice that your advisor is giving um i really won't say whether an interest rate is good or bad but if they're suggesting a particular structure that i've examined uh or that i i'm aware that for example the irs is examining i won't hesitate to disagree um i feel it's it's my job to tell you and to give you my opinion uh based on my experience and uh and expertise sorry i couldn't get myself off of a commute okay um has your firm worked with districts that have had challenges similar to alum rock if so what was your approach to set them up for success and what if anything would you do differently with alum rock given the specifics of our recent history and our community right so um we've as i mentioned we've worked with a number of school districts so um perhaps one's a little closer to you i mean so actually in terms of financials in terms of um the challenges whether you're a large school or a small school district they're pretty they're they're pretty uh there are certain challenges that are the same such as reduced ada at the same time that you have a higher av so um for example i have served as underwriters council for the west contra costa unified school district for a number of years now um they have similar issues lausd has similar issues san diego schools have similar issues um i think that that what we have done is similar to what you've done here which is we've looked for ratings from moody's in particular so what moody's does is um instead of having the issue and the issue rating be the same they separate it with the with the understanding that a general obligation bond is repaid from property taxes and so long as your av continues to go up and so long as you're uh and you have a cheater so in this case you're always going to get um the proper property taxes that you're due so in that respect your general obligation bonds are are very secure um and what moody's does is provided you you give them a bankruptcy opinion they uh they do not take the issuer rating which is how they view your finances your general fund your balances they don't use that as your issue rating so i think that in large part that's what we would do um for a general obligation bond we would focus on the security and and we would help um any rating agency understand um right what the risks are attending to that security which are are very low um and we would obviously go into some of the issues that various school districts face like lower adas um you know why are we issuing uh new money bonds when you know student enrollment is going down we address all of that um in the official statements the idea is you don't want to shy away from it because a bondholder is going to ask a potential investor is going to ask and you want your underwriters to be able to point to a particular page to show them that you've given given it thought and that and that you have an answer um and that you were thoughtful about the process um anything anyone would like to add i could just supplement it with just the statement that just to echo just careful careful thoughtful disclosure is is important i think is what we would go through and having conversations with the district and district representatives as far as like making sure the right information comes out making sure that that's incorporated making sure that there are no questions that go unanswered um you know obviously ever you want to tell the district story and you want to tell positively and all the good things that the district accomplishes so like as diane said just focusing on that disclosure and on making sure that you're open and honest and forthcoming with information so uh thank you okay thank you mr president good evening uh thank you for uh you know um putting your application in and you know and being a part of this process uh my question is in the current environment of interest rate instability what do you see is the most significant legal issue that alan rock will face when the district offers bonds for sale right so um we actually um have that issue currently a lot with refundings as you might imagine refundings are wholly based on what the interest rate is right you want to hit a particular interest rate window so that you're able to refinance at a you know sufficiently lower rate so that you meet your debts um debt service policies and and your savings policies i think that would be the same for a new issue bondage a new new money issuance in your case i think it would be very important to ensure that you have your resolutions in place whether you decide to go with a competitive process or a negotiated process i think it's probably best if your resolutions allow for both so that um at the time that we're ready to you know quote unquote push the button you can decide which of the two you would like honestly um there have been various pricing difficulties in the last couple of weeks where um where interest rates had gotten so high that they exceeded the um the ceilings that were put into various board resolutions so i think the notion is given this environment we build in as much flexibility as possible so that and and have your disclosure ready so that when the window hits were able to hit it um and it you know it may be two months after where we're ready with the documents and maybe one day after we're ready with the documents but the notion is to be ready and to provide you maximum flexibility so that you can hit that window thank you very much what are the three biggest mistakes districts do when they do not take the advice of their counsel i'm sorry can you say that again what are the three biggest mistakes districts do when they do not take the advice of their um okay so i'm gonna take it from sort of the bond perspective and then i'll let russ speak to the tax perspective um because honestly from the bond perspective um uh you know the biggest mistake is sort of on the legal front right um what you are able to use as your security the types of structure um i think the the largest mistake you saw was in um you know the richmond school district what is now the west contra costa unified school district where um the structure was deemed to be illegal um and um and they went to court and they lost and it turned into sort of a seminal case um so our our job is really to tell you what the the sort of landscape is and to help you maneuver um within that landscape and to let you know what the risks are um you know to the extent that that it's too risky we will tell you as the rust says um at the end of the day it's your decision um but we want to make sure it's it's it's legal um and and that's the most important part from a bond perspective the biggest mistake a district can make is not to follow the advice of its council but beyond that what particular mistakes do districts often make and that is not following up with their council after the bonds have been issued for example uh you need to follow the rules for the entire period of time that the bonds are outstanding which could be up to 30 years and many things happened over a 30-year period boards change schools are you know their use of schools changes districts expand or contract and the use and ownership of those finance facilities change uh and so it's important and it's imperative for the district to keep in touch with its bond council and tell them in the event anything changes and to follow their advice regarding compliance with tax securities and the bond documents [Music] i'll factor in some of some of the board members questions that'll be a little mine's quick have you have you ever been subject off or been involved in investigation no we have not all right thank you that was your question great thank you so much [Music] thank you uh patricia can you um take the form back to the waiting room and the next room to be interviewed is jones hall yeah thank you just so everyone knows i'm deciding to keep my camera off tonight because i noticed that when i'm turning it on i'm continuing to have those technical problems so unless there's a specific need i'm gonna try to keep it off and not get bumped out of this uh this zoom thank you for letting us now okay sure thank you board president uh the next firms to be interviewed is jones hall um i believe jones hall has a slight deck that will be presented on the screen and shared just as a reminder there's two parts of the interview the first part you will have five minutes to present to the board and then the second part will go after you're done with the presentation thank you good evening president of the board members of the board superintendent and assistant superintendent my name is courtney jones i'm a partner at the law firm of jones hall and it's a pleasure to be here tonight to familiarize you with jones hall and how we can best serve you as your bond council and disclosure council i prepared a short presentation to familiarize you with the expertise and experience of jones hall slide one focuses on a real general overview of jones hall we are a single office law firm based out of san francisco however we service public entity issuers throughout the state we work with school districts throughout the state and in every county of the state but we also work with all types of issuers counties cities housing projects sewer system projects and whatnot we're a group of 12 partners we have four associates and a sufficient staff to support our practice our firm is focused exclusively on public finance we do not have other practice areas so when we collaborate on our deals we are able to focus on the details and the nuances of bond law state law federal tax law and that is our entire practice we are what might you might call the boutique fawn council law firm and we're very proud of the fact that the number of transactions we do annually um even though we have a single office is on par with some of the larger law firms that practice bond law in the state of california um we have we've for example we have a very very high volume of practice we've closed over a thousand financing over the past five years and the name of jones hall is very well known in the bond investing community each bond issue when it's issued must have a legal opinion signed by a law firm confirming the validity and tax exempt status if tax exempt of the bonds and jones hall is a well-regarded law firm in that regard by bond investors which will serve the district well we collaborate with one another um the the district would be represented by myself i have over 25 years practicing bond law at jones hall i would also collaborate with another partner there because we always have a practice of checks and balances and we also collaborate always with our federal tax expert dave walden who has many years in the industry as well as he used to work with the us treasury department and he's drafted several internal memos for them so we would certainly have the expertise to guide the district in its future bond issuances on the third slide tonight i wanted to give you a sense of our school district expertise we have represented school districts throughout california on many many bond measures as you can see myself on the past two election cycles i i represented school districts in california on over 45 bond measures we averaged 10 school bond closings per month in recent years and we have a local presence in santa clara county i've worked for eastside union school district for many years on their disclosure and bond deals along with my colleague chick adams i also work with a grove school district for many years as well and also campbell union high school district mountain view los altos union high school district we're currently working on a financing right now so i know the staff at santa clara county and we um they're very familiar with our offer and finally on the third slide i wanted to spend a little time really on topics that i thought might be relevant to alum rock um or just that are they're hot topics in the school finance area currently obviously covent has really highlighted the importance of facilities and also the new legislation regarding tk instruction so certainly when i'm turning to draft ballot measures with districts i'm always aware of maybe things that we should be thoughtful about in the facilities planning arena as well i don't just focus solely on the bond area i try to really collaborate with the district and raise questions that are thoughtful about what maybe you might consider adding on the project list is at least as a consideration one of our really great achievements over the past few years is the teacher and staff housing bonds that we have led as the count as their council there have been two voter approved geo bond issues in california and we've taken the lead and done the legal analysis for those issues jefferson union high school district um presented to voters a a teacher and staff housing bond and we were the bond council on that we were part of the team nationally recognized for accomplishing that project we were very familiar with the legal analysis for housing bonds we also led soledad unified school district recently on their housing bond and they were successful with that and now they are in the planning stage of their housing project they had a need to fulfill in not enough housing available for their their local teachers and staff so that filled that and for jefferson union high school district it was more of the void of too costly by the cost of having sorry that's very distracting but thank you for your presentation um the second part of the interview you'll be allotted 10 minutes total to answer a total of five questions that will be asked by the board each board member will ask you one question each um at this point i'll hand it off to board president to call on board members all right uh we'll start off with board members good evening uh what would you do if you didn't agree with a recommendation to the district from the fiscal advisor and can you provide an example of when you've had to do that let's see if i um um if if a client's physical advisor you mean the financial advisor or someone within the district for clarity oh your financial advisor um or physical let's say any any advice okay one of the persons on the team um i would be proactive in um brainstorming solutions that the client should be mindful about um and try to present options that would be um legal um and prudent um sometimes things are legal but they might be you know there might be other considerations that need to be taken into account so i i think as a group we would need to vet what what my concerns would be possibly with the proposal think about alternate solutions and really describe the risk ultimately the decisions a client makes are provided that we are 100 competent in the legal analysis we can sign on at the direction of the district and sometimes there's alternate routes to take but there are gray areas in the law at times and we have to present those gray areas to the client and we are clear when we do not feel comfortable giving our legal opinion um so i think it's really important that we communicate and are transparent with our concerns with our clients um trying to think about an example readily when something of that nature has happened well recently i was i was presented with a refinancing opportunity for a client but when i and i was asked to expedite it but when i dug into the documentation i saw that there was a legal issue that i believe was overlooked so even though the client had been given some assurance that we would be proceeding and presenting a documentation to the board i had to call the financial advisor and i said you know this is a legal issue please look at it again because he was an expert he's an expert in the area as well and i think he appreciates that he certainly was gracious that i spotted it early instead of you know maybe after the board had been presented with the information closer to closing or something of that nature would have been not good so we're very good about doing our early due diligence on our deals and try to avoid any um unplanned and unwanted results [Music] thank you has your firm worked with districts that have had challenges similar to alum rock if so what was your approach to set them up for success and what if anything would you do differently with alum rock given the specifics of our recent history and our community yeah that's a great question i'm really glad you asked it because it was one of the bullet points that i didn't quite get to um i uh when i received the rfp i did look more closely at alum rock and i the first thing i noticed was that you hadn't issued since 2016 which for a district of this size and with the bond measures i had to dig a little deeper to understand why that might be although i can understand when i saw the history of the qualified certification and the county um i can see that when um i do know that when um there are qualified or negative interim reports and the finances need some attention with maybe revenues and expenditures deficit spending that legal hurdles then become obstacles because there are restrictions in the education code about issuing debt under those circumstances so um i've had several clients lately have um thick mac proceedings that i've had to review all the all of the reports and write-ups and i've had to um for the purposes of disclosing it to potential bond investors the circumstances i've been working with up late have been not preventing the issuance yet nevertheless it's something that we have to include in investor disclosures so i'm very familiar with reviewing those proceedings honing in on what the material facts are making sure that there's full transparency to investors meeting the securities law standard of disclosing all material information to investors for them to make an informed investment decision and um so i do have experience um in that regard and i was happy to see that the you know that you have a parcel tax measure on the ballot which should um help and that that the recent certifications were positive so it seems like um that will be a positive picture for finally being able to issue these bonds that have been authorized by your voters thank you uh board russ president obama mr president so uh thank you very much for coming here uh today uh my question to you is in the current environment of interest rate instability what do you see as the most significant legal issue that alan rock will face when the district offers bonds for sale well in a raising um in a rising interest rate environment one of the first things i think of um in for geo bonds which is likely to be what the district would issue imminently is the tax rate projection there are certain tests that must be undertaken when bonds are issued and [Music] as as interest rates rise um it will mean that there's a possibility that the principal amount to be issued will have to be constrained a bit if if um by the tax rate limit of thirty dollars per hundred thousand dollar of assessed valuation so um well i don't think the interest rate environment would uh prevent the district or or stop the district from issuing it's just that rising interest rates unfortunately are just will make borrowing more costly for the district and also possibly constrain slightly how much can be issued imminently did that fully answer your question yes thank you very much all right uh what we were traveling what are the three biggest mistakes districts do when they do not take the advice of their counsel the three biggest mistakes um [Music] so i've been very fortunate because i think when uh issues have been presented to me in certainly in recent years of memory um that that typically mark my clients are um interested in the legal advice and generally want to do the right thing um and i think i see my role as as i kind of alluded to earlier of describing the law and when there are gray areas describing the pros and cons of certain interpretations um so um in general they listen if they um if they decide to go another course we obviously if it involved our firm rendering and legal opinion you know and we disagreed with it we would have to um let them know that we could no longer represent them in that regard and there is something called opinion shopping which is not a very good practice so it's nothing i would recommend but we do try to when our clients we try to be problem solvers so um it it seems like most times we can come up with a remedy regarding the financing options that satisfies everybody on the team and that's a real important thing to have a good team and i see you're going through this process with the financial advisor interviews and now tonight's and um it's really great when you have a good team that communicates well and works well together because everyone wants to feel good about the financing and be transparent and um not stay up at night worrying about anything regarding the financing all the t is crossed and all the eyes dotted thank you um has the firm ever been the subject of or been involved in an investigation that resulted from the work with the economy no all right thank you that concludes uh the questions of this process thank you paul for your participation at this time miss patricia tobor is going to take you back to the waiting room and patricia if you can um invite clint and simon um to come to the portland for the interview thank you thank you so much thank you [Music] nice it's like your maintenance i know right i'm like okay just the notes so that i can you know make sure the information every time i went through my morning walk and then i realized all right thank you bro president the next firm to be interviewed is quentin timing um just to refresh you with the process there's a two-part interview process uh the first part is a five-minute presentation that you'll be presenting to the board and then we'll go the second part when we get there um at this time poor president all right uh please go ahead sir okay good evening and thank you very much for inviting us uh to be here my name is brian quint he's my associate adam timmig and we are from the law firm of quentin timmig um our firm just last week celebrated our 25th anniversary so we've been around a little while our firm is a municipal bond council firm we don't have any other subsidiary areas of practice we're not litigators we we don't go to court if we went to court we did something wrong so we we try to not do that our practices is very diversified we are we represent cities counties school districts special districts in all kinds of financings for whatever they need for school districts we are we represent the school districts and financings that are cops or other lease financings general obligation bonds of course uh we have done trans although that's not very popular these days because there's no way to arbitrage your your investments and we've also done some cfds for school districts but not too many of those again our practice is diversified as bond council we also sometimes serve as an orphanage disclosure council my associate um adam here uh generally assists me in doing the disclosure council work he's very um adapted preparing all the necessary disclosure work that rep that deals with the school district about their uh laf llcf information and uh on general obligation bonds relating to this assessed value uh information um we have a staff that is uh what we call closers they help us with the closing transactions they are experts or that what they do is all of the uh logistical work and making sure that documents are prepared and executed by the by the issuer and we as i said for 25 years we've been doing this successfully we have been doing this my job is to do the legal work and one of the key aspects of our firm is that when you hire our firm and you hire me to be your bond counsel i'm going to do all the work i'm going to draft all of the documents i'm going to be on all of the telephone calls and i'm going to be the answer to questions we don't i don't have to go back and consult with anybody else because i'm a partner in the firm and i have the ability to make decisions and this way you're not we're not delegating the work to a a person who's not uh an expert in the in the area um so that that's in a nutshell that's our transact that's our our firms the way our firm operates um adam did you want to add anything to that uh we've just been doing a lot of work with um school districts around this area the campbell uh school district is one of our clients and uh we have a few others including los altos school district a lot of bay area school districts so we keep up to date on all the public finance interests and school districts and everything that's been going on we've reviewed um prior to this meeting a lot of your official statements and audits and continuing to store your obligations as we would if we were selected um but we try to get ourselves familiar with the alum rock school district so we've looked at the outstanding bonds you have a pretty large number of outstanding bonds about 100 million i think um and so we we try to get a little as much information about you as we could before we arrived here so we're you know happy to answer your questions when that time comes up so i i don't have anything else at this point in introduction so i thank you very much well thank you for your presentation um in the second part of the interview you'll be allotted a total of 10 minutes to answer total five questions from the board each board member will ask you one question each and at this point i'll hand it off to board president to call on the trustees all right we're going to get started with uh board member good evening what would you do if you didn't agree with a recommendation to the district from the fiscal advisor and can you provide an example of when you've had to do well obviously the roles are different the financial advisor is has a role to provide financial advice to a district our role is to provide the legal advice to the district so in general we don't get involved in a decision a financial decision because the financial advisor is usually the expert in that area however if the if the financial advisor was advising the district do something that we thought was wrong or not to the advantage of the district or detrimental to the district i believe that we would um raise the issue with it with the district representatives and let them know that we um we disagreed with that with that answer that was given by the financial advisor and when it comes to the securities disclosure side of the practice we believe fully open and transparent explain everything that is absolutely the standard um so if the financial advisor advised against disclosing something about the district that we thought was it was material to an investor we would we would raise that question the the what we've experienced that we've had in the past is the thing that you omitted from the disclosure is the thing that will get you in trouble down the road so if we if the advice from the financial advisor was you know don't put that in the offering document you don't want to tell them about that we would disagree completely in our role as disclosure council because again as adam indicated the idea is to be totally transparent and make sure that all information that an investor might know want to know they know because if the transaction went wrong that one thing that you admitted is what they're going to point to thank you uh thank you has your firm worked with districts that have had challenges similar to alum rock if so what was your approach to set them up for success what if anything would you do differently with alum rock given the specifics of our recent history and our community um we've been working with a city in southern california that was a part of the state's high risk audit program we've obviously been reading the news about ellen rock and in that case we fully disclosed everything we included links to the state audit report in uh the official statement for the bonds and we uh worked with the city to set up a website where investors could come to get updates as the city dealt with the issues raised in the state's high-risk audits so again we fully believe disclose everything the more open and honest you can be and then talk about corrective measures for any issues that might have happened uh we think is the way to go we think the investors will understand and appreciate the candor also with regard to that and that's the disclosure council side of it the mind council side of it is our role is to make sure that your transactions are completely legal and we are we want to be conservative particularly in the area of general obligation bonds because the bonds are being paid by the taxpayers and we want to make sure that everything is absolutely correct as far as that goes and we will let you know where we think something needs to be done that is we would advise you against doing anything that we thought was questionable uh we would always go on the side of conservatism we we are we're known to be um to be uh finding areas to be unique and to find the right way to do it but we would never offer anything that we thought was going to be questionable as far as the legal the law was concerned thank you uh board vice president thank you mr president and thank you for coming here tonight uh my question to your firm is in the current environment of interest rate instability what do you see is the most significant legal issue that alum rock will face when the district offers bonds for sale well the the interest rate environment is quite volatile at the moment although we are still in historically low interest rates uh in the last couple of months uh obviously events of the world whether it be covid or the war in ukraine have affected the markets in general so interest rates have risen recently as a result but again overall rates are still historically low our advice would be if you need to borrow money because you have projects you should go ahead and get into the market we would not recommend you wait and try to see if rates are going to go better or worse if you need the money you should do it you should go into the market and do it so that would be our advice on the other hand if there wasn't any urgent need then i would suggest that you you wait i mean the idea here is that you go to the if the if the district has authorized bonds because it needs projects i wouldn't hesitate to tell you to go ahead and issue bonds in that in this environment thank you very much uh board member travis what are the three biggest mistakes districts do when they do not take the advice of their council well in general in general they take our advice um i don't know that we've had very many experiences where the a district completely ignored our advice um i think that it would depend upon the severity of that that ignoring of our advice i mean certainly we would they do everything that we could to prevent them from going down that road like i said before our job is to make sure that the that our that your bonds are bulletproof to the extent that we can and if we thought that you were doing something that was going to be problematic for you or even illegal i i think we would say don't do it you can't do it and we would not be willing to render our legal opinion which is obviously a critical part of the bond transaction in order to close the deal i i can't tell you that i can think of the situation where a district completely wanted to go against our advice but as you indicated in that example well i think that we would do everything that we could to to talk him out of it and depending on the severity of severity of it we would we would decline to provide our opinion if we thought that it was legally questionable um we would just again we would do everything we could to talk to district out of it thank you uh has the firm ever been the subject of thank you at this time miss patricia toma will be taking you back to the waiting room and patricia if you can invite uh our last firm straddling thank you very much thank you board members dr brewer yes okay um hello everybody [Music] thank you president uh our last firm to be interviewed is straddling um and just a reminder of the process there's two parts to the interview uh the first part uh you'll be allotted a total of five minutes to present to the board uh the second part i'll cover that when we get there and at this point i'll hand it off to what president okay good evening everyone my name is carlos i'm a shareholder at straddling yoga carlson and ralph based in the san francisco office so i'll tell you a little bit about myself a little bit about the firm in our history with the district and then just a few highlights from the rfp response obviously five minutes won't be covering a lot of it um so for myself i've been doing public finance work for 14 years almost all of it exclusively with school districts and community college districts um doing a variety of borrowings for them general obligation bonds leases trans melloroos districts anything really that a school district might do i've done went to school at boston university undergraduate at uc davis i'm a fluent spanish speaker so that's available to the district as well um in terms of the firm uh straddling is a west coast based fund about 100 plus lawyers 32 of which practice public finance and that's representing public agencies of all sizes and shapes and persuasions so cities counties water districts the state of california again if you can think of any type of financing that a public agency might do the firm has experience doing that um we have been bond counsel to alan rock for over 20 years since the early 90s starting with david casinoka who is the head of our education practice and who unfortunately couldn't be here tonight and i myself have been doing work for the district for several years um and in that capacity we did a lot of different types of things for the district we wrote both measure i and measure g and have done general obligation bond issuances refundings leases we wrote your last parcel tax measure and i know that you have a renewal on the ballot so good luck with that as well as doing trainings for your bond oversight committee and sitting through numerous board meetings um so we do have all of the records associated with the district's bond issuances and are able to provide sort of historical knowledge of some of the prior decisions that were made um so in terms of highlighting a few of the things from our rp response really i just wanted to point out some of the rankings that are discussed in here specifically that we are the number two bond council in california based on the number of transactions you might have gotten some other statistics in the way earlier today those might be generated based on something else the size of bond issues or something like that but in terms of the number of transactions we're number two we're number one in disclosure council which is the preparation of the offering document for bond issuances again based on the number of transactions um and based on the number of transactions we also do more deals than any other firm in california the reason why i think that's relevant for you is that our experiences bond council and disclosure council doing so many financings uh has exposed us to a wide variety of school districts of all sizes different types of communities and districts that have different stories to tell every district is different and we do have a lot of experience on the disclosure side communicating the kinds of information that alanaka's likely have going to have to communicate when it does its next bond issue and our ranking as um [Music] underwriters council and bond council and disclosure council means that other participants in the marketplace so underwriting banks bond insurance companies they they understand our expertise in the area and rely upon it and i think in terms of effectuating deals efficiently and working well with the municipal advisor that you selected the underwriters that you might select um i think our experience in our sort of gravitas in the area i think would be beneficial to the district um so we have very much enjoyed serving as bond council to the district for so many years and we hope that we are able to continue to do so thank you for your presentation um the second part of the interview you will be allotted a total of 10 minutes to answer total of five questions okay each board member will ask us uh one question each and at this point i'll hand it over to what president to call on the board members all right we'll start with a board good evening good evening what would you do if you don't agree with the recommendation to the district from the fiscal advisor and can you provide an example when you've had to do this um i don't know that i've ever disagreed with a fiscal advisor um certainly there have been instances where they've recommended more conservative um approaches than perhaps the district was considering um so i think we would seek to inform the fiscal advisor as to what the district's reasons are for selecting a particular financing method or a structure uh because oftentimes um there are nuances associated with you know the legal constraints of districts or under or the types of things that the statute allows you to do that the fiscal advisor might not be aware of so we discussed in our rfp response how we sometimes have to be advocates for the district and we would do our best i think to convince the fiscal advisor that what the district is doing is is sound uh board member thank you has your firm worked with districts that have had challenges similar to alum rock if so what was your approach to set them up for success and what if anything would you do differently with alum rock given the specifics of our recent history and our community so we do have a quite a bit of experience working with districts and i guess i'll call it that have challenging stories to tell sometimes those challenges are fiscal in nature because the district is either facing insolvency or something like that and sometimes it's more operational or practice types issues so for example we represent inglewood unified that's under state trusteeship their principal problems are depleted reserves and declining enrollment we also represent sacramento city unified which right now has uh is potentially facing insolvency and um [Music] um a state trusteeship as well your story is a little bit different but i think the approach would be the same to work aggressively to tell the story from beginning to end so that the official statement that we produce shows not only where you started but what the district has done to remedy its you know practices and procedures thank you uh board vice president bob thank you mr president uh my question to your firm is in the current environment of interest rate instability what do you see as the most significant issue that alum rock will face when the district offers bonds for sale i think it will be uh working to secure a credit rating upgrade because interest rates are going up and so a higher credit rating will mean lower interest rates relative to um you know lower credit ratings so i do think the rating process is going to be critical to communicate effectively to the rating agencies what path the district has set itself on and i know that there was some confusion on the part of the rating ages in the past particularly when the district lost its um fiscal independence status was a lot of confusion about that and what it really meant so i think communicating effectively the rating agencies understanding that communications with them are governed by the same rules as the offering document federal securities laws um i think is going to be you know one of the things that we have to really focus on in issue bonds thank you very much uh what are the three biggest mistakes districts do when they do not take the advice of council oh boy that's a tough one um i would say not understanding that there are different viewpoints um uh on one particular financing so your financial advisor or your underwriter might say it's a great time to sell bonds interest rates are low but do you have the expectation to spend these bond proceeds in accordance with the federal income tax regulations um that apply so not not understanding that there are different viewpoints i think is one relatedly siloing yourself and only running a bond issue through one of the consultants and not involving the team i think lends itself to making decisions that can be a little bit myopic all right and has your firm ever been the subject or been involved in an investigation that resulted from the work with the equipment to my knowledge no the firm has never been uh the subject of a malpractice action or an enforcement action relating to work that we did all right thank you thank you uh at this time miss patricia tomorrow will take you back to the way while we talk about the score so everybody received a link from would you like us to invite the firms back into the boardroom when we reveal the score or after um what's the world board uh do you want to go ahead and proceed with your degrading and then have them come in after we've uh revealed the score they wanted to thank you is that how we've done it in the past good question i think so um i think last time there were some those afterwards uncertainty and so we probably don't want to go ahead and follow that process let's follow the process of the operation [Music] yeah like give them some time to oh got what was the suggestion justin was to go ahead and reveal it uh once again they're here to see it revealed so have them come in and then just do it in like in real time when they're all there that's what i understood yes yeah i like that thank you hmm we'll say i hit submit once and then it didn't give me the did it go twice no okay i hit it once and it's time to do it again i see you've done two three um yes well yes uh-huh i have two more left is that correct yes okay because i hit submit but it didn't on this fourth one well let's see there finally went through and then one left correct okay yes jose can you confirm receipt of my submissions i know there was problems last time okay just let me know if something doesn't go through but i've submitted all of them i think on my end [Music] yeah i submitted my score so i'm just waiting to see helping you know how the scoring will go oh yeah before we reveal it should be here from everyone i i got mine right here it's all right what was that i couldn't hear i can't hear what do you think can you repeat the thing you submitted for um lee southern okay let me try it again and john and jones hall okay i just did them let me know if they go through is going to take you a while to put everything together yeah oh no yeah would you be able to get them that way they can we just need do they have mine from quan hawkins which one is missing i just did the quan one which one is missing okay we're good they got it got all of them yes okay perfect thank you [Music] i'm walking down the hallways it takes one 30th and may 1st i'll send them to all of you guys hopefully you can make it yes they're gonna have us we couldn't we couldn't replicate the world cup because there's all kinds of you know they're they're finding like the biggest trophy they're calling you know [Music] so thank you all again for joining us in the boardroom um we wanted to bring you back in so we can display the scores on the screen right here so you can see for yourself and jose will you do the honor so those are the scores as you can see welcome to move up um it appears that jones hall scored the highest uh with 99 points so again thank you all for for participating in this process [Music] thank you for participating yes thank you thank you everyone thank you everyone all right uh we still have some business to take care of so uh we've taken public comments already during the course of this item and so we will go ahead and move on to item oh well no actually then formally take action to adopt this um the results of the vote do i have a motion to do it um give me a second do i have a motion to uh move forward with uh jones hall as our bond council motion to move forward with the appointment of jones paul as bond council i got a motion by board vice president second second from board member um is there any questions or comments from the board see none then i'll go ahead and call for a vote as i see you on well as i see you physically here on the screen board member uh board restaurant aye board uh member behind them hi uh board member and with myself 49 motion is unanimous all right we'll go ahead and move on to item 2.02 uh previous municipal advisor service to the green contract with yale scott and company dr bauer do you want to go yes uh dear board members this is as a result of the work that the workforce housing um community is doing and i think that dell is here if he i don't know if we can um basically this is a contract to call the community to be able to to see whether there is an interest in the community regarding the work called workforce housing and he is also going to call the staff to see if there's interest and um that's that's the concept for tonight all right so that's a pretty good explanation um let's uh board members want to hear from uh oh there you go um uh do you have anything further down uh than the dr dr powers uh description no i think that was exactly what is going to occur all right um all right i'll go ahead and change uh the comments this time those wishes please go ahead and indicate by raising your hand we're president i don't see anybody um raising their hand for public comment all right given that there's no indication forward uh with comments from members of the board any comments remember to reward on this item uh [Music] uh i think uh it's a great um move you know in the discussions that we've been having i know that um thank you trust me or by uh thank you board president quintero for bringing the idea forward um you know i think it's a great idea but i think it's definitely important to hear from those that you know would be um obviously uh housing or possibly you know um being the ones to to use the service and so i think um for that reason and many more it's important to hear from them early on and so i like this idea thank you um dr bauer and dell for bringing this forward um i will be supporting it uh okay restaurant yes and also yes i i want to concur uh you know let's face it the cost it costs a lot to live here and that we're going to be able to retain talent and you know keep our teachers from uh [Music] you know moving out of the district uh it's very important that you know we do what we can to support our teachers and you know in a sense uh you know do what we can to uh address you know to do the best we can to address the issue of the cost of living you know as a school district though i you know though it is something that uh you know we should have a definitely have a regional solution to it but you know in the absence of that i i think that outreach to our community is something worthwhile as we uh you know take our own steps in addressing a very serious need further comments from members of the board all right so you know that i'll go ahead and wrap up with my own comments i'm very appreciative of the fact that as part of the process in our discussion uh with regard to this item uh topic of teacher and workforce housing that we're uh ensuring that out of an abundance of caution and just out of the principles of transparency that we've adopted as a board that we are going out there and making sure that this isn't something that uh the board is driving but instead it is something that um the public clearly uh uh is supportive of as well as um that our uh personnel or staff for teachers faculty everyone um is uh that they indicate that they actually need it and that they are willing to participate in it and so when the information that we derive we'd be able to go ahead and determine if it's uh why it's important to move forward and so this is the reason why we're moving in this this fashion i and i and it i uh want to make sure that we you know make note of the fact that this is part of a a process that is somewhat different from previous uh actions that the the previous boards had taken in the past and that it's indicative of this new nature and new strategy new style of the almond school board that we're here tonight holding a meeting that in the past would have just been decided in a very very quick fashion uh but i'm very appreciative of the deliberate manner in which we're um we're dealing with things uh and uh making sure that it's being done out here in the public and so thank you uh for the board for for this opportunity to ensure that we have all the information that we need uh so we can know if it's the right decision to make it so looking forward to the findings so that uh the board can make a an informed decision if we choose to make a decision um and so with that said i'm going to go ahead and call you as i see you we'll go ahead and call for a call um yeah is there no okay we've got the public comment already um and so i'm going to go ahead and ask for a motion motion by uh board member uh do i have a second a second second the second by board member uh the motion i haven't been uh i mean and made and then seconded and i'll go ahead and call and call for a vote as i see you um board of vice president pump hi [Music] motion passes 4-1 with chavez voting in dissenting all right i'll go ahead and move over to item 3.10 the approval of school sponsor field trip list dr bauer do you want to go and talk to us about this item uh very briefly um want to we're going back to some normalcy and we're asking the board to support these field trips that our teachers are preparing for our students we are gonna follow uh pretty much you know the the same um requirements in terms of getting you know buzz with a mask and but other than that we really are looking forward for our students to go to some bad back to some normalcy with that all right i'll go ahead and open it up for comments from members of the public do we have comments from members of the public if so please indicate by writing your hat go ahead and give it a few minutes or a few seconds all right seeing none then i'm going to go ahead and move forward with members of conference members of the board well remember yes thank you um i just had a quick question i guess for dr bauer i know there's been um an email or two i think one came in this afternoon that i didn't have a chance to read yet but i'm just wondering um if this particular item covers some of those questions that we've been receiving or are those questions um things that we'll need to handle kind of offline separate from this item uh that is a specific um question that we're going to be addressing with our management team and the principles tomorrow but it's basically along the lines so this is a a different field trip remember that um each school is gonna starting to prepare their own list of field trips as the year progresses so i believe this is um a specific field trip that is going to occur in april 13 which is the day before the board meeting so in order to be compliant and in order to be on time this particular field trip i brought to your consideration to um to adhere to the rules okay so whatever we happen to decide on this one tonight doesn't have any particular impact on the other situation not yet because those are going to be brought to the board later on okay thank you all right uh board vice president yes i'm you know thank you mr president i'm excited to see field trips come back i think it's a testament to the uh you know waning pandemic and you know the fact that we can safely uh allow our students to have uh hands-on learning experiences so i'll be definitely voting in favor of this item thank you all right uh board uh word clerk [Music] thank you um seem to uh vice president fam as a mother of a seventh grader you know i think i took for granted right field trips back in the days and do i go as a chaperone or do i not um so it's great great to be back here um and you know being able to talk about field trips um and you know definitely approving uh grateful for you know the parents and uh ptas and all of those that um fundraise and and you know get together to see what kind of field trips are gonna have and the teachers and administration thank you for your work because it's definitely um i think one of those outside of classrooms right where our kids sometimes learn more um or added to what they're learning um in class you know to have hands-on activities um so i'm happy to support and i'm just for transparency reasons and i know i talked to dr bauer and i know we'll be discussing it um i know uh board um member veterano mentioned already i know there were some questions about transportation and um having options and so i'm glad that we'll be discussing that in the future or that you know management already has that i know i've talked to dr bauer thank you for addressing some of those and thank you um to those who are uh looking out for the best interest of our children and our you know funds um so that we're able to to take our children to as many field trips as we can but yeah i look forward to supporting this as well uh board member travis uh dr bauer could you please um tell the public where the field trips are going to take place this particular one is on your um for the problem i i i just uh the backup and i apologize i'm in uh item port 3.01 which is posted on our website and it's freely available uh to go ahead and determine that uh so i think you have uh mr sanchez knows where the kids are gonna go and i apologize to the public i usually have my board dogs in front of me uh mr president i there's this rise uh you know everybody knows where our children at what time they're going to be there is probably not prudent um and if somebody really wants to know then they should come in and inquire or they can look on the website um and so i'm not sure um okay you know there's there's these are these are children they're traveling out to another site um and so but yeah if uh if there's an interest to disclose this then people can go go to the website it's publicly available there um i'm not trying to keep anything coming from here but you know to to uh to put it out there in in in uh in a manner that's on on the internet um maybe it's not prudent there are children that are going to be traveling out there and we don't know who's interested in finding out where they're at what time they're going to be there i'm not sure what the world's worth it's publicly available if somebody wants to see if they'll go find it thank you for president all right can i apologize uh board member um you know yes i just want i mean you know is it really necessary to do you know given you know given that you know we are talking about our children and there are you know sometimes there is a we don't know how some people will react i mean you know the question is you know this field trip is you know has been made public but you know i mean i'm just trying to wrap my head around why it's why trusty chavez finds it necessary to disclose the time of the field trip also okay can i say something uh yes um i didn't ask for the time the only thing i i guess i want clarification is if it's going to be overnight or just um a regular field trip during the day i didn't want full disclosure and everything like that uh we have to protect the kids my only interest was uh if it's gonna be an overnight one or a local one and if it's gonna be within the same day thank you that i can answer that's what i always wanted i thought you wanted to know where no okay so that is a local one it's not overnight okay thank you that's all i don't know and so just for full disclosure sometimes there's custody battles in their situations yes um necessity to protect their children uh all right um is there any further dialogue or comments questions from the board i've seen them then i'll go ahead and finish it off with some of my comments i'm personally excited for the field trips i've been lobbied by one particular elementary school student who has been uh very very excited about getting back and going on field trips that are you know i've enjoyed the chaperone in the past as well and so uh the energy is um actually you know very very um you know you can feel it you know that that bus is loud and uh it's uh it's it's more when we're we're moving on there especially appreciate the ones that we take full advantage of our local public transportation that you know allow children to sometimes who don't use it to now experience our public transportation here in uh santa clara county and so hopefully we have a variety of opportunities for our children to experience a lot of things that we have here a lot of the um the museums and stuff that sort that we regularly go to as part of our field trip so very excited um was there a motion did i take a motion i think not yet emotional proof motion by the war vice president uh second by uh board member chavez if there's no further questions or comments from the board then i'll go ahead and um call for a vote if they see you uh board vice president aye or uh clerk all right um moving on to item [Music] um item 4.01 the approval of contracts for professional services firms and organizations still have a motion to approve this item motion all right uh there's been a motion in a second i'll go ahead and i'll take my comments from members of the public is there any comments from members of the public if there is so communicate by raising your hand there's no um members of the police that wish to speak for um board president all right there be no members of the public wishes people go ahead and proceed back to comments from members of work any comments seeing none then i'll go ahead and i'll call for well let me let me close off with some comments uh we are approving the need and the use of a firm that provides uh alarm services and is indicative of the situation we face in east san jose and all of san jose that we're having to go out there and get a firm that's providing these services due to the fact that we're under attack our facilities are being uh continually uh burglars and it is leading to some serious issue with regard to our our operations uh the safety and security of our facilities and so this you know i think it uh speaks to the wider issues that we have here in the city and the importance for for the resources to be steered in the appropriate direction uh to ensure that we have a a community that's safe and secure and so um i am i am going to support this item and then we need a a firm that's uh out there looking out for our our facilities to ensure that uh the resources that the taxpayers are putting forward are being protected so with that i'll go ahead and call for a vote as i see um unless there's further comments members of the board female then i'll call you board vice president founder aye board uh clerk aye board uh board members aye board member i don't know hi with myself we're not in motion uh past unanimously thank you so much all right at this point uh i'll go ahead and i'll adjourn this meeting at 8 00 pm thank you have a good one everyone good night everyone

so that's not bad and um it's a little bit higher but not that much for arbor hills it's parking provided 328 parking at three per thousand 285. that doesn't seem to me to be devastating the um the differences are sometimes six to one in the residential ones that you're citing but the residential examples that you're citing with the exception of the one which is in my neighborhood she says with joy um the uh the the disparities are really high i mean they're really like um the standard at six to one but they're those are downtown and they're primarily students and there are many many disincentives for students having cars we don't give them any place to park them downtown or on campus so why would you drive from the standard to your class when you are not going to be able to park even as close as the standard so i'm not sure how to treat the residential examples that you've given us i don't know if the disparities are really um are as wide but if so if i just took all your numbers at face value i would say we're doing too much to adjust for the shopping center because the disparities are not that great and we are way overshooting the residential need because the disparities are enormous gulf-like cavernous so i don't know if maybe some different examples of parking at places that are a little bit farther out would be helpful or i'm sure you all know just in your heads about how many parking spaces you know what places tend to do you uh mr moore was saying you know 1.3 1.7 those are interesting numbers so you know that pushes me towards couldn't we try 2.5 as the one number fits all or do we think about two numbers as commissioner abrams was was suggesting so it's that is really more of an observation and if but i'm i suppose i'm saying would you want to offer us some different examples of residential because the ones that you have here possibly exaggerate the discrepancy we could certainly do that one of the base standards for minimum parking in multi-family is 1.5 per thousand or 2 per excuse me per dwelling unit or two spaces per dwelling unit and um if you're an apartment community and you're constructing a um a 1 000 square foot unit these standards would require three or you know the these the these standards would um would require three three spaces per um thousand so wow yes because allow hello because no we do not require anything anymore if we pass suggest the approval of this tonight so that seems high for a transit so um commissioner lee then i saw commissioner gbrandle thank you um yeah i could provide a little bit of insight here as far as commercial leases because my my day job is i go through you know 110 of these a year so um first off there are yeah offices definitely a large part of what people are looking for is do i have availability of parking so there are oftentimes max or minimum leasehold interest that they try to dictate saying i want at least 3.6 spaces per thousand i want i told you about the therapist group that we're working with currently we have an loi4 that wanted four per thousand square feet over on the northeast side so um when you look at for example so let me actually rewind just a little bit i think eliminating minimums makes perfect sense i think maximums here's kind of the way i think about it the parking spaces let's let's talk about from a revenue generation standpoint right um the downtown we're looking at 220 a month so let's let's go ahead and you know just i think that's about right right 2 20 or so that's dda rates yep so 220 times 12 you're looking at 2 600 on an annual basis let's call it nine by 20.

so it would have been interesting to see how that would have played if we if we had a normal operating here how that would have played out um but yes and a new routing system and the new the new routing software uh all of those things but yes i do believe that in spite of the complexities we've had we are running extraordinarily efficiently right now but again time will tell on a percentage basis so if we stay at that 3.8 percent then all that work we've done would have been validated for sure well can't you see that you can see the actual spend so it's a little bit it's a little bit hard right now with salary increases with all of the overtime being worked and the price of gas right now is that we are being hit with the fuel costs etc so okay so there's just there's so many moving parts um but on a percentage basis it's very possible that we will be uh you know close to that 3.8 to 4 i'm just cautious about celebrating tours i think that's good thank you i appreciate that anything else members no i pitch i did want to ask if the cost of gas is having an impact on our transportation budget and how that's definitely definitely so we are definitely um probably about 10 higher in fuel than we had been in the past and so is everyone else yeah this slide shows the previous information in a graph form so you can see that we are over five years up in dollars instruction percentage and also dollars in the classroom down in administration slightly student transportation and non-classroom overall this slide shows fy 2021 local district spending so these are our neighboring districts again dollars instruction is 1 000 function this is the money spent in the classroom so you can see gilbert and chandler are pretty competitive there dollars in the classroom instruction included there with instructional support and student support again gilbert is higher because of the prop or the i'm sorry the m override initiatives and then administration you'll notice that the smaller districts are a little bit higher and i can show you on the next slide we've added the adm numbers so you can see that administration is slightly lower in the larger districts obviously and higher in the smaller districts such as queen creek and higley any questions on that information before we move on to teacher salary okay so going into the 2021 average teacher salary um you're gonna drive for me ms madden for the next slide so given the newspaper articles that came out regarding the dollars in the classroom as well as the average teacher salary i wanted to make sure that that we were putting the figures that were reported into context with one another so first of all remember that each school district is required to self-report this is there's no data that verifies the average teacher salary there is no definition of what a teacher is so we do not know which staff members are being included in each individual school district's calculation for their average teacher salary and then in addition if you look in gilbert we just provided the base salary only so we are not including any stipends we are not including performance pay but note chandler right below includes their pay for performance dollars in their average teacher report to the department of ed on their budget every year so i i know that chandler's pay for performances over five thousand dollars per teacher just to give you a perspective of the dollar amount and then note higley includes not just pay for performance but also their stipend pays so even in mesa they indicate salary excludes one-time stipend but it doesn't define the one-time stipend it didn't say it didn't exclude pay for performance and i guess my point is it's just really difficult we're really comparing apples to apples i mean apples to oranges here we just don't know what the what the rationale is or the the um of what each individual school district was thinking when they populated their budget with this information so i just wanted to make sure that we were all taking care of how we use this information um sometimes it is so three so so in so when you say 301 so before in 2021 we still had the three buckets of prop so 11 and 13 were part of base salary yes 11 and 13 are in hours i don't know about the others but but pay for performance is not in hours which is fund 12 but they are in chandler and higley as an example based upon their own self-reporting is that's in terms of and you indicated up front that we don't really know how the other districts classify theirs but our definition of teacher is quite a bit different than many around us do you have any idea of how the other districts have defined teacher so i don't but it's interesting because we had a phone call this morning with our peers and my peers were talking about certified personnel and they were including speech language pathologist otpt's psychologists well they're not theoretically certified they're certificated but they're not teachers so it depends i have no idea at all it's not reported anywhere it might if we publish this anywhere for consumption by our public it might be advantageous for us to reiterate how we define teacher because that is pretty inclusive as far as i'm able to discern as it relates to our peer districts we do and we everyone so in our teacher definition that we've used at least since i've been here the last four years has been truly those that are certified so we include our teacher our technology integration educators they are certified teachers it includes our academic coaches and our instructional coaches whether they're located at the district office or at our schools they are certified teachers so we are very clear about that but they're more than just who is in the classroom but we will we were talking about that as we were preparing the presentation we will define that teacher definition for gilbert in our final budget revision for the current year so it's clear to all of us what our teacher definition includes and then we will continue reporting in that way but thank you for the question so could you i don't know if you could off pan but could you give an example of if you included stipends and performance pay what the average teacher salary how that would change our average teacher salary do do you have that figure jackie last year during fy 2021 on the average stipend for certified staff stipend amount was about 3 300 average and performance pay that includes performance pay okay so it should it would go up about 3 okay so 57 000 would be about equal to what you see is scott's damage okay and this also reflects when there's been retirements so long time teachers have retired and we've seen that happen maybe all other districts have i don't know but we definitely have and so that affects the average salary compared to when we hire new teachers there's a difference in that average salary i think the other important thing is that this is not an indicator of competitiveness i think that's very important that's what i was going to say but i think people look at it that way and that's what's difficult and so that's why these conversations we're having right now are extremely important so we're really mindful and we are working to be competitive as well as our our it doesn't always include the benefits which we have to show total package now there's a law that says that coming out so i know that we're working on that that will help also define you know what other benefits we have compared to other districts offer different benefits that's correct so but that is really important to us is to have really competitive salaries for all of our positions we've worked on that for the last couple years and are dedicated to that so i'm i'm kind of sad that this doesn't reflect that you know yeah for these reasons that we've talked about and if i may you know that that does look rather stark however uh there is because this is published on our website as well this is the figure that we're acquiring you know that there is verbiage that not is not a disclaimer more than it is an explainer the 3300 average stipend amount and the general benefits package dollar amount added together someone could see that and say okay because this really does reflect our not reflect but it does impact our recruitment retention opportunities if you're just looking at a chart like this and somehow or another i want to mitigate that impact because the first glance is well i'm going to go to x rather than to gilbert well and i believe this is the first time that we've actually presented this and really the reason that we did was just because of the newspaper article that presented it so we just wanted to make sure that we had a chance to talk about it with all of you to put it into the right context well i will say when i started on the board that we didn't pay we were not competitive with other districts and we worked very hard especially in these last few years especially since our override election of 2015 and 2019 that has really helped us to be more competitive and so i i do appreciate all the hard work that's been done on this i guess my last question would be should we change how we report it then or you feel like this makes it consistent with what we've done year after year so we can look at our own numbers consistently i'm just saying well i think that's a good question and we haven't discussed it really well as we've been talking i i have some ideas to be accurate but also to paint the entire picture and so i think we could put together a graphic that meets the requirement but at the same time might show two numbers here's the average salary plus boom boom boom boom oh and here's what you get for benefits because i think our benefits are better than most surrounding districts when it comes to insurance well and how long is that what's the average teacher years that they've been in the district because that also makes an impact so maybe add that in i don't know well and i think it's also the work calendar here for every teacher position how many days are you expected to work for that same salary in comparison to all the other school districts in the surrounding area so all those things play a role in what your your salary is yeah contract days like some districts you're working five more days you're getting more money but your average daily uh salary is actually less than probably what you're getting in gilbert public schools that's right the number one district in the state that's right for all those listening come out that's right i'm very happy to be working for the number one school district in the state of arizona thank you very much thank you all right that concludes our work study and we will now move to uh number five on our agenda brief board business meeting i will begin with calling this to order and ask miss wilson 5.02 for a roll call dr charles santa cruz here mr bill parker here miss laurie wood here miss sheila eugetti here miss jill humphreys here madam president all board members are present you have a quorum thank you we will begin with 6.01 the approval of the consent agenda may i have a motion so moved thank you miss humphries is there a second second thank you dr santa cruz it's been moved and seconded that we present that we approve the consent agenda as written all those in favor please vote by saying aye aye aye any opposed with nay thank you the consent agenda is approved 5-0 we will now move to our action items tonight and we have just one 7.01 an additional 1 percent ongoing pay increase to a total of 3 percent dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members we are asking i think a week ago we asked you to approve salary increases across the board at a two percent level and you did that and we appreciate that and thank you and we communicated that out to our staff and then of course probably the next day or so the jlbc came out on march 30th 2022 basically due to the classroom site fund per student amount of seven dollars or 708 dollars for weighted attending student count it has been determined that there will be enough resources available in the classroom site fund and in the m o fund to fund an additional one percent on top of each employee's base salary increasing the fy 2023 ongoing pay increase from two percent to three percent and so that is what we're asking for this evening wonderful board members is there a motion i moved that we approve an additional 1 ongoing pay increase for a total of 3 percent thank you mr parker is there a second second thank you mr jetty it's been moved and seconded is there discussion i just think it's great that we can do this and what a wonderful opportunity that we have that available for our staff i i guess i just wanted to ask miss betts so we did hear a little bit so it will come from the classroom site fund because an increase of a one percent across the whole district is about three million dollars that's correct that includes benefits let's also include the payroll benefits okay and so we can we're going to take about a million more from the classroom site fund and then can you detail the other funds that will sure so keep in mind that we still have a very very favorable budget balance carry forward in mno but also remember that all employees are not funded out of maintenance and operations so nutrition services will bear their own percent increases community ed will bear their own federal grants will bear their own so that will decrease the load on the maintenance operations budget balance carry forward so we feel very confident that we can very well afford the one percent in addition remember that classroom site fund is subject to supplanting so um even though the increase was more than expected by about five to six million dollars due to the supplanting we were only able to really use a million dollars of it to achieve the the three percent uh the one the additional one percent to get us to three percent okay thank you and then it's detailed on the you you included a presentation that it's detailed on and then by each individual employee group by each individual play and you'll you'll send that out to each of the employee groups as well and and yes and then that particular it's a sub uh subset of what was presented to you um last week okay and it will be posted to this agenda item after tonight's meeting okay great and miss betts if if you would if i understood our conversations prior to this and this presentation please reaffirm that you believe that moving in this direction is sustainable for at least the next two years if not three years is that correct yes sir i can confirm that that's wonderful well i'm i'm excited as well that we can recognize our staff and teachers and all who work so hard for each of our students in this way so are there any other any other quick questions or comments scene none i will ask for a vote all those in favor of approving an additional one percent ongoing pay increase to a total of three percent please vote by saying aye aye those opposed with nay it passes five zero we've now come to the adjournment of our brief board business meeting 8.01 is there a motion to adjourn i move to adjourn thank you miss humphries second thank you mr jetty it's been moved and seconded all those in favor please vote by saying aye aye any opposed we are adjourned thank you very much

second discussion all in favor i'm ni field trip may 6 2022 passes thank you thank you uh thank you i appreciate uh having the opportunity to speak um have a great rest of meeting you thank you all appreciate it next on our reports mr zane i just have a couple things the only one that there's still a question about this good friday when i read the the association's comments about the calendar i thought they were asking well there was you know they were ask if if we could have good friday or they were actually i couldn't have gotten bored i was actually asking if they could be a full day of school and there was a piece in the contract that allows them religious help so it is up to you but i thought it was good just to bring it back and say i i misinterpreted um what they were saying so on this calendar it's a full day of school if if if you're good based on what the association wants if that works for you knowing that if they that they keep the contractually they can take a religious holiday if they need one on that day they're that they would be able to use it under friday so we've had we've had some good fridays in school and so on right since i've been here we've had it all and one you have school committing them about um one that changed and so we went to uh school so have there been a lot of absences that way or not that they could handle it nothing that sticks out in my head you can vote on it as is or you can vote on it to have a good friday a day off we'll make the correction but that we've made all the other changes so the only question is on that thread [Music] any more questions so i just wanted to make a couple things clear about this you know based on some of the comments we received um [Music] we this is part about equity working we we sent it out we wanted something that was as thorough as possible we sent it out just simply to current data we're not advocating to any programs nor are we doing that now or exposing any points of view so it was none of that um we just in a survey came from some online work we we went through and um i mean there were some takeaways when we looked at the survey and and so even though we wrote a cover letter a lot of people didn't answer the questions and some but probably you know up to you know 200 people responding and some of those questions up to 50 people would not respond to the question so i get the feeling that they there was a maybe a feeling in the community that this was being done that there was something else behind it like you know there was some kind of program that was going to be introduced as a result of it and so i thought we were clear about that so if if we weren't i'll make that point now there is no program on the horizon because of this is basically every question you see in here is everything we do we just want to formalize it you know if a kid is in need whether they're struggling with one issue or another we we try to address that issue so we just wanted to get the information so we could use it for some further work with them so what we'll do is we have the ability with the new survey tool that we have to break this down by school to break all these responses down by school and so what we plan to do next is to break it down by school meet with the team that's doing the equity work give each school their results and then look at maybe 10 different areas or issues that have been common because then if there are if the bds is having you know they go through their 10 issues to handle and then bms does the same thing we'll see if there's any commonalities because that would indicate that maybe those are the issues you have to sort of deal with um in the district and so you know some of these some of these issues that you can dealt with safety the child feel safe in school you get 12 13 people will say no and 200 respond well i might think it's safe but someone doesn't so those are things we should look at once we find a group of questions that we think in the district we have to look at then we'll start you know that'll that'll generate another survey down the line to ask people some more in-depth questions if your child doesn't feel safe you know can you give us some more information about that so um that's what the survey was about there's a lot of questions there's a lot of good information um do you have any questions about the survey that you wanted to ask i've been interested to know if the kids can take it okay so that's the uh i think about that yeah so the next year so so the work we're going to do right now is with the staff then once we find some areas some common areas that we need that we think we need to work on whether it be safety or whatever it is um you know there's a question in there we asked the kindness um about the curriculum the curriculum is fair and unbiased so there were some indicators in that somehow they don't they don't thank you so maybe that's an area we have to look at we do some work to make sure it isn't we introduce new instructional materials we do work to make sure it is unbiased um that doesn't slim one way or the other but you never know someone you know maybe that's any other kind of publishing once we address that we we drill that a little deep for parents we're going to do some work like that with students we'll put a survey together send it to parents make sure they're comfortable with it you know before we give them to students and this will also go to a superintendent's advisory which has parents and they're the ones that actually went through this first and helped us with these questions and they're all parents and school community so um we want to make sure we're not just putting this stuff together ourselves it's coming from the community so we will do the student some kind of student survey and it'll be next year we want to sort of unpack this ourselves first so before we do anything with them you know and that's you know don't give you the real last year yeah that's what i'm thinking i mean yeah well and some of the questions if you if you look at some of the comments the times would say i don't know what my student thinks about this so you know and that's a very honest answer from the parent and you know ask them i don't i don't know how they feel about it so we will get but it school by school results yes i think um for the school community we could break we i've had this you know it's just a push up above the house what did you guys think of the new survey each group each group answers you know major chances only one time so they don't get those unless you're one so it's a lot more flexible did you find anything else carol about it to you no i think that's exactly and i think you know one of the things we have to try to do maybe there's other students who they're not coming forward that we need to deal with there's some interesting answers yeah no you don't have any comments [Music] just one general theme a lot of these there are a handful of one two less than ten people who said something to the negative the fact that i don't feel compliment based on that race or be included i assume that's not the first time you're hearing from those individuals whenever they're being only one or two people you probably know them so they work with them to figure out what's going on without telling us or identifying anybody but that was kind of shocking is this the first time you're hearing about that or well any of these issues now we don't know who's you know we keep these anonymous yeah one person saying they don't feel comfortable or imagine they've come to you already no i haven't had anybody come to me and well i mean you know i haven't you know my regulars that i talked to uh you know what i'm like this is why i'm here yeah well you know one of the things that occurred to me when i read the results that some of these questions about um you know what gender does your student identify if you asked that maybe ten years ago they thought people would have just answered that question i think in the climate today you know climate content is polarized i think i think that's probably why you get people think well there's something else going on this isn't just trying to get at something else um so to the end of the meeting i wonder perhaps next time this goes out and give people a chance at the end of the survey to say i want to be number he said at the end of the survey you know maybe there's an option that you can say you know do you want you want to be anonymous or do you want to be contacted because because some people might want to thank christmas yeah good suggestion oh yeah yeah i hope some of these people though if they really do feel this way contact i don't know the situation was they felt strong enough to put it that felt that there was something that their child is missing off which would be they're talking to the administrator out there building to make sure that they're being hurt that's a good suggestion to put something there to say when you lost contact [Music] um but i didn't realize i still you know was in the community for a while they said you know that they're not going to come to you and they're just not just not going to come to you and say anything because you know in the country they just just doesn't have to i mean they'll be too afraid that there's some repercussions so you know you know maybe there's some of that too they're afraid there's going to be repercussions if they they speak up you know we this is baby steps since the first time we've been doing this work so we're still learning it ourselves and that's the last question on the survey how long do you expect for you know the data's compiled moves to the different schools they get to be in 12.

we expended uh 92.8 million as of march 31st we've encumbered meaning anything from april 1 until just june 30th 46.6 million the next two tabs or bolts are our reserves which um we requested from the city of danbury for 2.4 million that is the non-lapse reserve which is included in 139 and the next tab sr3 carry forward is the 2.245 million uh theresa if you remember last meeting in february you mentioned or i'm sorry in march for february's financials you mentioned about that 141 um 141 million dollars that was discussed back on june that's part of that carry forward money from sr3 so that's why we we have that in there now moving forward once everything has been uh accounted for we ended march 31st with a unencumbered balance of eighty two thousand four hundred and ninety one dollars i know it was brought up just recently so there's a good way say way to get right into it um so if you guys are looking at the uh budget summary that last line that shows a lot of zeros or uh or minus numbers is uh last month we discussed about transfers leaving them there versus transferring we did uh john myself and the team we uh numerous hours transferred money from other line items and there are some that are in the positive there's only one line item that's in the negative which is that health insurance line so if you can go to page one five should be five correct five if you go down probably about 10 lines down 10 to 12 lines down you'll see object health insurance 52 000 line uh and at the all the way to your right you'll see a minus 872 000 that's the health insurance that uh we've been watching we continue to watch the good news is that uh part of our reserve request guidelines that meet the guidelines our health insurance so the plan is that um we'll continue to watch this all the way to june of course um once we get there we will be um prior to june 30th requesting this from the city to cover this fund if we go in a negative right now as as you can see we have unencumbered balance which brings us into the positive of 82 000 but as we're all aware there are numerous things that will happen spring sports there's a graduation other stipends that would be done so we're watching that so the good news is our bottom line or in the positive um thing is that health insurance is what we're really looking at because it seems we might have under budgeted uh for the health insurance for fiscal year 22.

it's 180 square feet so downtown a parking spot is generating about 14 a square foot on a rental rate basis you know essentially office is going for about 25 30 on a class a building maybe 35. so to a developer or somebody who's looking to build they don't really see parking lots it's something like oh i really want to build this right i don't like heck yeah i'm trying to build more spots they try to cater to what the market is requiring so um i saw the commission or we got some communication about the george and the conversion of those retail units to residential currently right so obviously there's a lot of public that's saying they don't want to see that be converted to residential because they they don't want a food desert they want amenities so one of the things that i look at look at the hyatt that was built on state street there's a lake michigan credit union they tried to lease that forever it was very difficult because there's only like 10 spots so originally the hotel thought i'm getting a restaurant in there just did not happen because of the parking issue no restaurant wanted to touch it so you're right i think segmentation of usus does merit some additional consideration calling it a blanket you know 2.5 i think you'd really have to look at how it really shakes out but my concern would be that retail users office users who do see a certain level i mean like it's what they ask for on lois basically as they're negotiating obviously i don't think any again i mean i think surface parking spots are what 35 thousand dollars a spot underground is going to run 80 000 a spot so from like a cap rate or capitalized perspective of what a parking lot is worth relative to is cost so what kind of revenue generation it has you're just not going to get the kind of level of like return so it's like it's not nobody goes into a project saying yes i'm going to build a ton of parking spots and this is this is going to be i think they look like they don't want to build they only want to build as much as it requires to attract so retail restaurants they look at their sales so retails are completely driven by sales whether you know it's they look at a gross health ratio right what is by total sales relative to by total occupancy cost now when you take a look at total sales it's how many people can they get through that space as quickly as possible so for restaurants i mean you look at garden they literally have those on the table you know checkout machines where they're like i want you to move quicker during you know lunch and so they're trying to get people to move quicker and so grocery stores as you said or certain uses that people tend to take their times as long as they're buying more materials right so that's how retail is going to look at it from a gross sales perspective and to do that they need to have people have access now we obviously want them to be using buses bicycles we want non-motorized or you know larger transit the points that i just wanted to say is that the segmentation of uses does merit additional thought that a blanket may make it more difficult for retail and you know amenitization of spaces and that that's kind of where you know you see how the georgia's really yeah they should be looking at it from let me get somebody in let me take a crack at just percentage rent and they should be taking a much more aggressive stance of how can i get retailers to take a chance here now if we don't have you know if they'll have their parking requirements um i mean if you're trader joe's i imagine they're saying i don't want it at all actually i want to be in the heart but i mean that that's in jest but i do want us to seriously think about you know is there i haven't heard a single builder say i want to build more parking spots for the heck of it it's only to really make sure that they have the marketability they need to create revenue generating space so i wanted to at least you know throw that out there so that there's about clarity so i think segmentation to use is definitely merits discussion uh non-residential versus retail versus restaurant versus office office leases literally have that leasehold restriction where they say i need a minimum of so and so spots and it's generally between 3.4 and 4.

so i guess before the needle starts to move well um so we have this we have a meeting which has scheduled for half the vacation probably early may it will um finalize uh hope i'll work on an equity statement which is my goals and and that meeting will also start to break out work for you know schools and so that would be and then so the goal would be by the end of the year to compile a list of you know out of the 10 10 issues in each school to the top 10 maybe compile a list of five that would be that a manageable if we could stop working on um so so we're hoping to have that by the end of the video i'd answer in terms of a student survey no the parents like i might answer differently next year my child doesn't have the same yeah so are you suggesting another survey like this at the beginning of next year or no i'm just wondering what now happens with that data right it's the point of because you want to do something like this right so now it could change significantly because those kids have now moved on all well that's one of the things we have to find out is is this school specifically is it something that maybe you know was it something that's happening here that's not happening in the elementary school in terms of equities that's all when you break it down by school you'll be able to see that is there something is there something that's happened in terms of faculty when they move up to the sixth grade and wheels that's what we don't know so we'll find that out and break it out by school so [Music] we didn't look that far ahead that's something you you don't even sure what you take out as a community yeah well yeah but i mean in terms of the same kind of survey oh yeah i'm sure you can make please yeah yeah i mean we were hoping to you know eventually distill the questions down and then start sending those surveys i'll just start kind of drilling down more um because you know it's not that everybody doesn't count but you have to start someplace so you start with the areas that most of where most of the issues come from so i've got the only thing i just wanted to add to your question julian you wouldn't know this because what they want to address with their their leaders that meet with us so yeah so could they could be starting to look at me if it's if it's a specific individual if they're seeing patterns i think over time or bigger caps and some of the areas that were often like with it we kind of think in our heads of course we're doing it all the time we're doing these wonderful things large all of ourselves and all of our children they're happy and over and then we see often it's like why questions like that because it often indicates that something like yeah most of the time it's good to hear this thing happens when someone made a comment that there should be a middle ground and i felt the same way that i was taking the survey as a parent because it was always off often rarely and never and there was no like you know i don't even know what that meant what my god yeah well if you get any suggestions anything additional survey wise people will tell you you shouldn't do that you want to keep it even because people will gravitate to the middle and then you'll get a lot of non-useful information that's good that's a good point because they don't want to create anybody any yeah no just if you have any other suggestions we'll we'll certainly implement that one adam that was a great one and if you have anything else just reach out and we'll keep you updated to put in place there was a requirement from jesse um you know it's based on four commitment areas really looked at closing achievement gaps cancer students and it speaks to the equity work that we've been doing as well so i think that i just wanted to see who they see what we were doing um in those areas in case you hear about conversations around student opportunity and we were expected annually to make any amendments to this and to update the state as far of what we've accomplished so far so i'll put that information in there the budget we're spending um the soa also helps us to get awareness requirements we have to do that opportunity i didn't know if you had any specific questions um on this i think i did sometimes in this in this act that we complete this plan we didn't tie in everything we're doing in the district for example in the equity area number one we didn't put in there for the state of 2020 that we're doing an equity survey because we didn't know we were doing 2020 but i had to do an amendment added that piece onto it for this year so they were separated like that so that's that's the srp if you have any questions about specific areas of that and then the other piece that we have to vote on tonight is the acceptance of the grant for literacy grant and accelerating the literacy that we get that i spoke about this last time that amount for our literacy program three through five and wait this what we're telling them we need for our funding is what the publisher said and we have to also have all of the materials in by june 30th so the next so today we heard from jesse that they did they put a lot of quotes that was accepted and so the next step is to put the p.o into order of materials so our teachers will have them in hand and training them to take place in june so a lot happens needs to happen very quickly [Music] truth is uh you have my report um the first item uh is the fy 22 q3 budget update i've summarized it there's a thousand line detail if you care to go through the summary by kind of categories in my school is shown on one page pdf and at the end of the year you'll need to approve the budget transfer so on a quarterly basis we just provide updates so you can see transfers between categories you don't transfer between schools there's no questions on that number one the excess deficiency filing was finally approved by the state they submitted it on italian they tend to prioritize tax rate requests for municipalities first was approved at 405 440.

the next uh paragraph or sentence is explaining that we've transferred some of um line items into the yes or they met the esser guidelines into sr3 for example we did not budget for seven hundred thousand dollars in kelly services uh four hundred sixty three thousand dollars was not budgeted for the overages as we've discussed in many months in the last two months um in january when we had the omicron virus we had a lot of absentees a lot of people out so uh there were overages that teachers were taking so that's why that overages of 463 dollars we were able to move that into an esser to cover uh and then the last tab is our two hundred ninety three thousand dollars from the cares act here's act is our first uh some people call it cares act some call it sr1 that's our first uh relief fund um covet fund we went over 293 thousand dollars so we moved that to sr3 or one of our other essers i'll stop there i know i've dived into a lot of details into these this budget and the budget lines are there any questions uh just a quick question eddie um thank you thank you for this over um this overview of what's going on i just want to make sure that i understand when we're talking about the 66 of our year-to-date budget we're talking about that correct okay but we're really looking at having spent closer to 750 somewhere around there correct okay thank you you're welcome any other questions so what we gonna do with the empty lines the empty lines are those lines are balanced now as of right now oh they're balanced okay so we transfer theresa um if you remember last month we transferred a lot of the lines and i know we went from having a lot of negative lines to now the lines are zero right um so we took anywhere where there was positive numbers and moved them into the negative so we they're called transfers um in other districts prior you know we we meet we discuss about it it's presented and then it's voted on and transferring the funds in this case we transferred all the funds uh due to our discussion back in february okay how many is there are there any other questions right we can do that arbitrarily uh because the city gives us the money and they tell us to do what you want with it is roughly speaking correct everything is in order on on how we're spending our our grant money uh i'm not doubting you're doubting the practices of my finance folks here i'm just uh i saw a headline in new haven and and i thought i would just ask the question that we are doubly sure that we're good yes we're doubly sure yes we are we're we're watching it on a daily basis to be honest and we discuss it three or four times a day so yes thank you you're welcome i'm going to move over to uh the next kind of your final sentence and then um i'm going to pass it over to john it's regarding our head start 214 thousand dollars um reason we bring that up is last year it was in our um when it was voted on by the board of ed the 214 was voted part of the five 137150 um i'm going to turn it over to john explain a little more if you guys can go to your last two pages of the packet um john i'll go into that thank you eddie you're welcome so there are two pages um one is from the the mayor's budget or the city budget uh the other is uh from our own minutes i think i've i've shared this earlier in the year so from the city point of view when they say how much money they're gonna budget for education uh that's not just the our board of education um it's it's two organizations the second being head start so the page you see uh they they consider that education and it is so the page you're looking at that says um city of danbury at the top you can see that um there are two lines uh the first one 136 million 936 and then so that they intended to give to us and then uh 214 000 that they intended to give and they have directly to the head start program they have for many years they write the checks uh it comes out of their appropriations does not come out of the school budget uh however um on on june 8th when we uh set our budget down for this year if you look over at the motion itself it says that we set the second line we set the budget for 2122 in the amount of 137 so we made a mistake we thought we were getting the whole thing and we are not so what that does is it sets up a shortfall uh if nothing changes between now and and june 30th as you can see from our our forecast uh we have 82 000.

so i i had a software tonight who used to bench all of their engineers their requirement was 7 spots per thousand i could not do it for them so they left they left the community they went to kind of on the outskirts uh you know where where they could actually get that so i just it's something that i want to be able to communicate because it's it's relevant information because you know i just i live in this area pretty much so um i'm all in support of the elimination of the minimums i think that is uh it's a no-brainer move um the imposition of you know maximums it's something i think we should think about it merits further discussions i i certainly hear people saying hey like for residential we shouldn't have that much at all uh and again i think it comes down to segmentation of use and i do want to echo what kirk westfall had said was you know something when it's urban or suburban right and so we want to move towards that urban form i also don't want first floor retail being empty for three four years because the retailer is too old school to give this a try so um i just just wanted to throw that out there that uh you know change and and patterns have to be incremental so we have to recognize the current conditions of what we deal with from a sales perspective so hopefully that helps from an insight perspective commissioner that was super helpful thank you so much for that um just because i think that we're guessing at a lot of stuff at this table and to have that kind of data coming at us is really helpful so thank you for that um i have a really hard time with the one size fits all i started looking at different places around ann arbor and and i was just like wow i don't know how i don't know how we do that very easily because they're so wildly different and um if maybe chairmills is the only one that was here but for the um uh for holmes brewery remember that little slip of the that was retail right that was retail at the time because of his escape shop and then they they like basically slipped it under the wire and it became a restaurant and i have heard so many neighbors complaining about all those people parking in their neighborhood and being really loud and so that's you know that's an that's a use next to use issue but it's also just says something about the amount of traffic that comes to restaurants which is real and so and i know part of what we're trying to do is get people to get out of their cars too and i'm a big biker and a big walker but i still drive i do i don't like i occasionally bike to get my big grocery shopping but i don't do that i mean i think that we we need we need to keep our eyes on the prize about where we want to go but we also need to be real about where we are too and think about how we can get there and so right-sizing this so that we're like encouraging making it a little bit uncomfortable but not totally impossible because i think things sitting empty for three or four years i think that's pointless i really do i wish that woman you were talking to was still here because i would love to ask how they solved the parking maximums thing and what issues that they run up against i'd be really curious to see how they right size that so i i kind of meant feeling like we need to get more specific about it because it just feels like it's difficult to find the the goldilocks and have it address the things on the outside of that it seems ridiculously overbuilt if it's residential and then it seems really underbuilt for some of the other uses that we might want to be able to get in there so i'm having a hard time figuring out how we can kind of make this make this work and i totally get the flexibility thing but i'm just not sure how that's actually going to work um i also think we need to be careful like we have this standard of per unit for parking for residential and then we have the standard of per square footage for these other things and it really does make sense on a per unit basis like a multi-family place is going to be totally different in terms of like a single person who's out of school and is you know willing to take the bus and isn't schlepping kids run to soccer practice and stuff like that it's like so there's that whole piece of it too that isn't one size fits all in terms of the square footage way of applying things too so i'm kind of struggling with that as well i'm just curious are there any places that have no maximums and no minimums what does that look like i'm just like just based on what commissioner lee is saying and and i'm i'm not saying this is what i believe i'm just asking the question what does it look like to have is it always going to be the 5 000 square foot restaurant that says i at 137 parking spaces which seems crazy to me um but i don't know that that's really going to happen that often given the cost and the storm water and all the other things that you're going to be required to do that um or is there a way to let there be maximums but have there be incentives that sort of steer you towards doing less i don't know it's just something it's it's something that i i think that's worth it for us to talk about that i don't know i guess i just i think it's worth discussing to see what that what would that really look like are there other places besides hartford what are the issues really we can kind of imagine things but what is it like but what does it really look like i saw hands over here i'll come back to you commissioner hammersmith commissioner weich so uh just so that i'm understanding uh correctly and i think i've been following along we're only considering the establishment of a maximum in the tc1 and the tc1 already has restrictions for parking so that 5 000 square foot restaurant on a single floor would only be able to create a parking lot of 5 000 square feet which at 180 square feet would be 27 spots as opposed to 15 you know based on the the other calculation of three per thousand so that is that really all we're discussing as it exists in this amendment and then so because i'm going to answer that like can i get a yes a no maybe so i think yes just when you're calculating that you gotta you know it's not it's not stacking spaces into that space you're probably not getting there with maneuvering and the like because that's a measure of vehicular use area all right so there there may be a few more um okay great thank you so then would it be beneficial to us to remove this amendment from the cohort so that we could approve what we what i think we are all in agreement with which are the rest of the amendments and then give us time to work through this because it it feels like it's only in the tc1 so if it's only in the tc1 then the issue is about the residential because we don't want to maximize or create more parking because of residential being measured by unit and not by square foot and so there's a give in that so i'm just trying to like really dive into where we are now and and i'd be happy to move that we pull this establishment of a parking maximum out of this proposal so that we can approve what staff has presented to us which i think we're all in agreement with and then we could continue to debate it tonight or postpone it so that we could move ahead so is that friendly to the body or is that not friendly to the body no it is not friendly to the body okay great so so the body wants to have the establishment of the three per square foot or a thousand in this group here if i may yeah my understanding of what you're proposing commissioner weich would actually be moving at least temporarily to a situation that commissioner abrams pointed out is what happens in hartford where they're in that transit district because right now the tc district is based on you know taking the minimums and making them maximums in doing this we would have a time period where in tc1 there would be no maximum at all and so except for the square footage area which is where i started because i similarly i would say that i am not terribly worried about it because i think that from a form perspective we got ourselves covered this is like boot and suspenders and i and i or no no belt and suspenders belt and suspenders not boots and suspenders but boots and i don't know whatever yeah yeah waiters yeah i that's my personal opinion so i actually i'm not i'm i i i'm not so um concerned i i think that there's a lot of merit in that particularly like i don't know if three is too high or too low personally um but i'm not so worried because i do think we have ourselves covered in other ways um but i just want to make that's is that did my interpretation is that right uh let me defer to brett but um that's that's that's what i thought i i thought you were correct yeah commissioner mills you started this i mean another way to do it would be not to have any parking requirements for tc1 have the parking managed by form it's we're limiting we're limiting the footprint of parking based relative to the footprint of construction on the site the layering of the like you you don't have to layer ratios with that we could simply leave that as a requirement that we don't care how many spaces you provide as long as it is in a footprint equal or smaller to the building knock yourself out but but yeah it's it's still a vehicular use area so it's you don't get to double dip by structuring you can put it in a structure to mimic parking demand for the building um so so actually can you clarify that so if uh let's say your lot is i don't know and five acres uh if you uh if your building is two acres you can't have parking that's more than two acres is it what if you stack it up um let me get i'm gonna pull up the language yeah give me a minute right i i believe it's very limiting okay i remember that we talked about this before and the the into the tc1 it says vehicular use area may not exceed 100 or 125 of the area of the building's footprint so it was like the vehicular use area is separate from the footprint so yeah help me understand that because i think that that that each floor is two acres no exactly it doesn't yeah right it limits the area so it is it is uber restrictive the vehicular use area which is the aggregate of your parking area so if it's a surface lot it's the surface lot if it's a two-story parking structure it's going to be the area of both of those levels that cannot exceed depending on the lot width either 100 or 125 percent of the building foot print not foot floor area so the building footprint is limiting you can't designate more square footage to parking than you are per the footprint of the building and further because we require a minimum of two-story buildings that means that your parking area is already is already going to be half of the floor at the most it will be half of the area half of the square footage of your building potentially so the fast math is if you do 250 square feet per spot and it's one spot like four per a thousand but you stack you have two stories of building you're now two per 500 right and so like the four per thousand is more than the three per thousand so it's a separate limiter if you think about that stack right like there's two when you stack there's four when you're flat we're at three right in the middle so quick question so just in mind again if you do if you stack you have to count each floor separately so you can't just say well my foot my my whatever half acre building i'm taking up a half acre of space but i'm just going to go up with my parking structure you can't do it that way the intention was more people and use less cars i mean in some ways it's like it'd be so expensive it's kind of like why even limit it because you're gonna automatically you know so vehicular use area though too the tricky part about that is that that includes your drive so really you know by having the parking area at the back you're making it so that you're really limiting what um what you can get out of that and then then there's the things like the fire marshal is making us do two curb cuts and all of that kind of stuff which are the realities of are we making it is that what does that do i i guess in that scenario what does that really look like in terms of how that lays out because like we're saying it's not it's not per parking space it's all of the other stuff you have to have in a parking lot to be able to make it a parking lot and how are you counting all the parking lot islands is that even though they're internal are they part of your square footage that you can have or no how does that work because you know the sizes are based on you know minimum sizes to be able to get trees in there and all that kind of business so is that part of your vehicular use area too or no the area devoted to a use by or for motor vehicles including parking or storage any paved area used for access um i don't know how have we to we probably typically include interior islands in the overall area but not the perimeter they are they are a requirement of our landscape section of code for all parking lots it's it's a standard requirement i i would include the landscaping but um if if code were silent i i would i would include landscaping because it includes landscaping within the like you here's my half acre building here's my half acre parking you're gonna have to take out you know a fifth of it to be able to put the the parking lot islands into i i would not exclude the parking uh the the landscape islands i i i would include them if i were if i were calculating the size of the of the um of the parking lot this is where i i don't i guess my hesitation is not pull out this piece so that we can move on i feel like we still have to think about this because i would be really curious to see like let's really lay out what that looks like and what does it really mean in terms of an example of of parking just all the stuff we're talking about about how you design these things should you be punished basically for having a large landscape island because you have an odd shaped lot you know i mean it's like that to me i would say the landscape islands yes they're part of the holistic idea of a parking lot but that you shouldn't have those count against you if if we're i mean i would rather pull those out in terms of just like the area because then i think people just make them as tiny as possible and then then the trees aren't happy and you know i don't know too many developers who provide more landscaping than would be required for for a parking lot yeah but there's ways though that i mean we do not everybody does i get that but it's like i just think that um i i would want to like the way that i just feel like we're being pretty course about this in terms of the way that it's laying out and i just feel like we need a little bit more of a here's a real example of how it would actually work and how it would function in terms of what do we end up with you know what's it what's a typical office restaurant below office above you know something like that to see what does this really look like and is this tenable you know in terms of the footprint idea being devoted to something so to be clear i just want to make sure what you are proposing or what you're suggesting you need more information on commissioner gib randle is not actually the edits that are up for that are before us tonight but actually the requirements within tc1 because what you're talking about like and the concern over that is actually within tc1 okay i want to make sure that everybody like the the people know that that's yeah that's not necessarily this but this raises because we're talking about maximums entirely because of tz1 which is raising this in your mind okay um go ahead commissioner silvay i'll just say i'm not concerned about any of this um tell me why so i understand because you're designing too so yes tell me why so i think a lot of it uh when we talk about the single user aspect of this we're trying to incentivize housing if housing is the thing that gives you the most flexibility of the parking account not about the footprint stuff that's the thing that gives developers the most flexibility to build the most in terms of this maximum and then they could share some of that overflow with the commercial sector that feels like a great benefit to incentivize housing i don't think we're doing tc1 to incentivize restaurants i don't think we're doing tc1 to incentivize more retail in these corridors we're trying to incentivize housing and corridors that currently have restaurants in retail so that's where i see this blanket giving the most flexibility for developers to figure out what to do with their building over time without substantial adjustments to site planning being able to do interior remodels without throwing up a bunch of red flags um i think similar like the letters of the george this is all outside of tc1 but what you see is maybe that is a better use as residential but with this talking just about removing parking uh minimum requirements there's a lot along that corridor that could provide more and the 5 000 square foot restaurant is just crazy because our current standards say we just need 50 parking spaces as a minimum so 130 or whatever is just if we turned our minimums into maximums it would be 50 not 130.

as of june 30 2021. kind of the regional school district equivalent free cash it's our cumulative surplus from the beginning of the school district to now we can use that to uh to help subsidize our budget we're using 250 000 in next year's budget i anticipate we'll have a significant surplus this year that will kind of offset what we're using in next year's budget um the next item is uh so there's no questions on the first two or three forward next time is the fy community budget we were able to identify some savings for restructuring elementary dla supports um and through that the savings was basically the amount that we had proposed as an above level service request 42006 2250 that savings however enforces we needed to apply to an unexpected out of district tuition that happened after we presented our budget to you that we became aware of after we last presented our budget to you this will cover a substantial portion of that placement not all of it but we have plans to offset the rest of it at berlin memorial there were no opposition increases so the savings will go towards reducing their budget good news that jeff and i received today we reached out to both towns and we were advised that we had support of both towns on our budget with this 42 000 reduction to berlin so um i did want to publicly thank the towns for their support um we had a fairly substantial increase you know more than most care districts i talked to we certainly had reasons for that and worked hard to manage it so later in this meeting this assignment we respectfully request your support for this and uh please be able to move forward after the challenging budget process um related to the budget i guess both years i want to give a shout out to carol for finding this uh this grant of 134 000.

there are some things that still have to come out of that but if we don't get another 214 000 we won't be able to pay all our bills so there's uh there are a couple of choices that we have one would be to go back to the city and request uh what's called an interim appropriation of 214 000 uh saying we we made an error we plan to spend more and uh we would like additional funding and that would make our budget balance um if it wasn't a second choice if it wasn't so late in the year we could have uh reduced some other plans by 214 thousand uh not done something that we may have already done or planned to do um when you get this late in the year you know all our spring activities are underway all the sports and things like that most of the purchases have been made there are very few places where you might be able to postpone uh 214 000 expenditure and do it uh next year so that's that's not a good option late uh the other thing would be we could go back and and uh look even more carefully at our budget and see if there is uh 214 thousand dollars uh that would qualify for essa reimbursement and move that over to the esser grant we've not looked at that i wanted to get a feel from you first what you think of a might ought to happen in a situation like this and before we discuss it let me point out you heard about um you know for next year uh the mayor is proposing adding 4 million 64 000 to the school budget so they're coming up from the 136 not not from the 137.

so i'm throwing that data point out the window and it references frazier and york who both do not meet current parking minimums and so our current parking minimums as maximums in the restaurant example is still too much to what makes a successful neighborhood joint and i think that's what we're talking about here in certain corridors is adding that layer of character and access to housing so that we're not just operating on the downtown so once again that's why i feel like restaurants as an outlier is not actually an outlier we're talking about a different scale of infusion here we're not talking about the big kind of commercial restaurants that need large swaths of space um because my five thousand square foot restaurants don't care about them but we're going to talk about uh tc1 if we want to retalk about the footprint stuff incentivize housing the ratio makes sense to give that flexibility and overall i support the redaction of minimums everywhere to give that flexible reuse and additional corridors so like i have no concerns at this point um that we're going to give a lot more parking to housing and that'll shift to where we have in tc1 we require along uh a hundred feet linear feet of commercial so in those we need to give that buffer and so to keep a higher maximum allows that buffer to offset for those commercial that is required in tc1 as well so i feel good about this like layering restaurants on top of one another we're not layering restaurants you know we might have office on a second floor sort of thing but i actually don't see that uh happening significantly in some of these other corridors i think south state is more substantial but we have a ton of parking there now and it is one of these typologies that could really do the shared parking between office during the day housing at night you know we have that shared timeline and we talk about these more concentrated corridors we actually have closer adjacency to housing and so like the amount of people like that are coming there are coming more locally and again incentivizing those additional loads of transit sort of thing so that's my take i like it how it is and it's a living document the same way we're having a conversation right now that we might go back to tc1 that we just passed if three you know in this interchange we can change three but at least we have a maximum instead of an opening at the end of the evening commissioner hammerschmidt sorry i told you i would come back to you and then i promptly forgot that that is like a perfect segue to just what i wanted what i wanted to sort of bring up is that i believe it's either maybe it's on our work plan to actually like the next step in this parking discussion is to talk about parking maximum city-wide and so if i think through that more deep analysis by type we we learned something that made us think like okay this three per thousand in tc1 doesn't make sense we need to segment it we'll have the opportunity to do that um i also just want to express i'm so excited i told my husband earlier i'm like we're abolishing parking minimums today and i just think i'm super excited about that or we're recommending the abolishment parking um tonight maybe hopefully um i think it's a really huge step forward just you know kind of mimicking so many other cities across the country that have done this and while mr moore is still here this this reminded me while we were going through the previous petition um you guys had proposed evie installed ready and capable but this would change that a little bit so you know more ev ready it's simplifying um that part of the ev requirements that would just be installed and capable and i think that's that'll help um i think clarify a lot of things for petitioners as well in the future so i'm i love this i'm excited let's do it any other comments or questions just one other thing go ahead commissioner gibrandal and then commissioner abrams it's a lot easier to see your hands on zoom honestly than like this back and forth so exactly i um i wish i were part of it had been part of the discussion at rc so i could have my head more in it you know in terms of how you all were talking about it but i'm curious with this footprint thing that we're we've been discussing and with essentially using the fact that we're incentivizing residential to your point commissioner sovay as as basically your your maximum you know what i mean because it is sort of out of whack right um that um it's giving them flexibility what is like what are we going to get height-wise with this i'm just curious if if you all kind of looked at that at all in terms of does this mean that it's sort of a three-story building something in the bottom two above can you do a ten story building you know what i'm saying like i just wonder what effectively this ends up incentivizing in terms of height and then what we're hoping for in terms of height and in terms of density where we're we're limiting it right by having that and so what does that mean in terms of what we may get um i don't i don't think we did that sort of scenario planning with it as you're asking the question i think i suspect that if there is an unintended consequence of this there's going to be one of two things that happen you'll get two-story buildings in the tc1 corridor because that limiter is putting a harder cap on how much parking you can provide so just just think about that regulation if as you add stories you're not adding vehicular use area so if you are if you've got a ten thousand square foot footprint you're gonna have either a ten 000 square foot parking area or 1250 depending on your lot size and so i think the market is going to probably challenge building four stick levels over a podium because of this tension and so i think that to keep to keep the maximums and that footprint is is very much and i think that was the intention of this is change how these corridors are used and so i i think that i think the tensions for these regulations are these are these are saying we want a very high quality sustainable development and we don't want other types of development and so i think that i think that the most likely scenario is probably there's going to be some time where we get potentially slower development while the market is sorting out these parking to square footage or we're probably going to start with two-story buildings it's my speculation but again that's valuable these are big parking areas that we can put to better productive use and over time i think you're talking about incremental over time those stories will start being more they'll probably start penciling out more because they're probably not going to pencil out for the first one but it might pencil out for the sixth or eighth one so um that's sort of my take i i'll leave it to other orc members i'll go we also have like no setbacks so if you do 50 50 it's 100 impervious just to be the bleakest of moments right like i mean you have green roofs and impervious pavement you know if we really want to go sustainable but if you think of 50 50 trade and zero setbacks that really is kind of worst case scenario so i am just kind of if we want to start scenario planning that's what it looks like the other uh potential interim outcome that i think could happen now is that uh by reducing parking minimums and again staff correct me if i'm wrong citywide reducing parking minimums it means that if there is an existing parking lot maybe not the one that's being redeveloped but that is underutilized there is nothing stopping their that kind of parking sharing like we don't have to see those agreements any there's no there's no review of that anymore and so my hope is that the excessive overflow parking that already exists in some of those places by now not holding those individual buildings to those minimums that would allow for some of that transition until people can feel comfortable that yes it is possible to live in this city right along these transit corridors without a car until the market catches up right until things kind of normalize um i think that that's a possibility commissioner dish i wondered if we could just roll back to the two-story buildings scenario i don't think this was the intent right at all actually i think the aspiration on council at least in some people's minds is uh and actually mr moore said earlier if this were tc1 we would get more hype right i think the idea was more units and if we're getting a bunch of two-story buildings part of which has to be retail on the first floor yeah we're getting more than none but we're not getting scale this was supposed to give us housing at scale i'm a little bit worried about this footprint part which i don't think i understood until just tonight so i'm sorry if i was confused previously sounds like there should be more in commissioner proposed business unless we want to take up tc because i don't think that we want to take up tc1 as part of this or maybe we do i guess i would put that back to both commissioner gibb randall and commissioner dish about that particular element within tc1 zoning i would like us to move on parking minimums which we can do i think we have agreement about that and that won't that doesn't affect tc1 i think this maximum discussion is really really complicated and it really does have the potential to not fit with what people's thought was about i mean the people who hate tc1 say you're going to build a bunch of skyscrapers and the people who love tc1 are saying we're going to build at scale and scale now is up it's not subdivisions anymore like it was in the 60s so i am concerned but i don't view this as preventing us from passing the parking minimum part and sending that to council i am concerned that nobody is going to build a five to eight story multi-family unit with i don't know how many parking spaces you would get out of the footprint but it will be you know point two per it but potentially i don't know my ma i'm just crazy so you're shaking so someone who's better at math do it but it's going to be way off but the amendment on the table is not that the amendment on the table is about a like how many you could put in the footprint you can provide adjusting the footprint to do multiple levels is commission proposed business to change the tc1 amendment not the parking standards amendment i think that's what we need like clarity on is we're talking about two separate amendments here parking maximums like if you had enough square footage to do a parking lot up to three spaces per thousand we could probably go five six stories the concern is you can't actually spread out all that parking further than your building footprint so the the parking footprint is probably limiting more so than the three per thousand but the building the parking footprint is not part of this amendment oh i didn't realize that the parking footprint is part of the tc1 ordinance that we already passed and so we need to make a commission proposed business to revisit the tc1 ordinance right tonight we are just passing three parking spaces maximum right and that was a part of what i was suggesting way back exactly where it doesn't make a difference right that we already reject it so so like um yeah i think it's helpful now to see it and in future discussions it might be helpful now that we're all together to see it on a chart so that we can um sort of separate the two things that we're talking about so that we are not conflating them um no no no i'm i'm not i'm not suggesting that i'm just saying um this is the parking maximums is somewhat complicated um in some ways in other ways it's very simple and straightforward especially in the tc one because of the area which you know commissioner solvay is pointed out to us so i'm good um now i think i understand it and the amendments and i i support what we're doing tonight so and then we can pick up the other piece as needed i see go ahead commissioner abrams so i think obviously we need to put the the tc1 or that part of the tc1 ordinance and the on our agenda to talk about in the meantime um i i would i would be in favor of passing what's before us this evening with the tc1 maximum in it um and i just wanted to go on the record to say that i would be interested in reducing that maximum in the future if further study warranted it and i think um i just wanted to maybe like underscore what commissioner survey was saying about acknowledging the kind of development that that will make tc1 unfriendly to certain kinds of development but that that is i think our intention as opposed to an unfortunate byproduct there are certain kinds of development that should not be appropriate and incentivized in tc1 and i think a single-story 5 000 square foot restaurant would be one of those uses i think we want denser use if we want um residential use so uh i would be in favor of voting on what's in front of us without any motion to amend this amendment and then revisiting the tc1 parking in a more holistic way and thinking about maximums and minimum city-wide also in a more holistic way and i personally would be interested in exploring what it would mean to reduce the maximum in the future and just maybe to remind everybody i think the existing maximums for retail and office range from three three point three and a half or three point seven to four so three is a reduction of the existing maximum um but it it's not it's not r it's not rad well i don't know actually i don't know if that's radical or revolutionary in the in the scale of a commercial so i won't say but it is a it is a reduction that's all thanks mr leonard uh just to that last point roughly the those that have maximums the non-residential uses are in the range of four spaces per thousand square feet yep for for retail the maximum is 3.75 4 and 4.25 depending on the size of the center i continue to be confused and that may be because last night was late late but when we started out with these interesting idea that 31 uses in tc1 currently don't have maxes so these would be newly imposed and in 18 uses that have parking maxes these will be reduced those are interesting except that it seems like what's really constraining the parking in the tc1 district is the footprint thing and so these maxes are kind of moot for tc1 because you probably aren't going to be able to get to them in the first place mostly depending okay commissioner lee oh i just wanted to say that i do think the elimination of minimums is such a critical objective for us to chase that um and then really my comments were trying to illustrate kind of the challenges of retailers and how they think about you know commercial leases same thing with office folks but i in this particular instance i believe that the all of the progress that we make in this particular amendment outweighs any kind of considerations that you know and we could always come back and say this is why this wasn't working so um you know i i i have certain levels of concern just looking at it from like a pure um you know restaurateur or a salonist hair salonist you know kind of perspective but um but again i guess the point i'm trying to make is i would be i would be voting in favor of this if it went uh to a vote right now simply because i think the amount of good that comes from this outweighs certainly some of the concerns and misgivings i may have so thanks the only additional note that i had is that i appreciate the staff report mr khan this is great talking about how all of this aligns with our existing plans and there's one additional one which is the moving together towards vision zero the transportation plan this is eliminating parking minimums was something that was specifically called out on that that we were supposed to accomplish this year we did it yay but it also lists that we also need to look at we need to consider parking maximum city-wide so i would further say like we know that's on our work plan um but just to check that off in because that is um while the that is uh one of the documents that is part of our compilation of comprehensive plan documents so um i also have on my list like we joined e-course in eliminating parking minimums amazing uh pulling up what they have on their parking maximums table like there's lots of different things i don't know if you were able to talk to her but there's lots of uh they don't have one single standard so i think it we we know that that one may be the one that takes a little bit more time and understanding that from their perspective i think would actually be really helpful any other things before we vote i have i am effectively hearing moving forward as is with the uh the full set of changes um including the tc1 three per a thousand multiplier or max yes commissioner silvay this is really for you mr khan and if you leave before commission promotes business the thing that would help in all of these metrics that you did provide is if you could do an aerial view footprint analysis and tell us of these projects that you've done the calculations for what would be allowed versus what there is what is the building footprint and what is the parking lot footprint um you know i just like i'll just say i not to distract any more from this footprint thing but the whole foods if we gave a metric of 250 square feet per parking spot it's 106 000 square feet for the parking area the building is 127 000 square feet of retail space but that's the shopping center and i believe there's two stories on one of those buildings sort of thing so though those are you know those are really helpful things that instead of doing quick math if we get to this becoming before us from commissioner proposed business that would be the next metric so we don't kind of see it again decide what the work to do is i'm just going to make that note right now great thank you and yes commissioner gabriel take you back in case you do run away mr khan i would really like to consider that i'm not letting him go anywhere like he's done with his section he wants to go home i understand that um that i would really like to not to disincentivize having robust parking lot islands and aisles between things that have green so that we can shade our parking lots and try to reduce urban heat island effect and things like that so i would like to as part of that discussion or as part of the researcher however that what that looks like to take those islands out of it so that we're not disincentivizing that so great anything else before we vote on the many exciting amendments to udc parking standards mr leonard i think we are ready commissioner g randall yes commissioner sovay heck yes commissioner abrams yes is that a heck yes or just a yes can i say hell yeah commissioner hammersmith i have nothing guys yes two thumbs up commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark yes commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes passes on to city council very good um before we move on to other business can we take a break uh we'll come back in seven minutes at roughly 8 50.

we don't as a small district often get these potentially large grants that are competitive and it was hugely impactful and helpful to whichever year this would have been applied to this is something that's been difficult to pay for but as much needed and so she kept her eye on grant opportunities and it's a big win for the district to get this type of uh this type of brand they're the biggest i've seen here since boston i could just interrupt you for a second you just said you often don't as a small district you don't get those types of grants but yeah i mean i feel like i've been here for one like a little over a year yeah every other meeting carol's bringing us some sort of grant that she got so yeah yeah not this large um but um yeah she has um i was able to to get grand too a couple grants um but 134 000 is kind of a different category yeah i'm saying that you're saying it's rare i'm saying i feel like every month i'm hearing about another that's coming in from here so i think that's awesome yeah yeah so we've been we've had some had a good run so i just uh he was calling out this one specifically because of the amount and hopefully we can keep it up i think you know sometimes you just kind of your name is district's name was heard and had confidence with people submitting the grants so certainly i think when they see carol's name hopefully we can stay on the radar hopefully the catchphrase teams people in the statement too so the next item is just an fyi bid for uh years in the gym in berlin memorial there's an equipment platform that's kind of straight pieces of plywood this is not what you can find it's a security risk we had approval of capital loss to our to bid on that we went out to did it came in a little bit higher than we expected um we had a single bid it was 202 000 credit reputable firm in state um they've met all requirements of the bid awarded a bid we have 130 000 capital funds that were included towards this the additional 72 000 come from ems just that combination of contractor availability and steel prices and tier prices have gone up so it is what it is price-wise that worked what happened um starting just after the end of the school year and i scheduled you completed just before the beginning was i mentioned to our school your number practice will be the right department director too that information is kind of requested as part of the budget process so i just shared that as an fyi to you so you can see how it responds providing information one piece of owner to comment tonight probably um we should talk about it more at a different time i think it's something that i kind of want to leave as a recommendation to the committee as i go there's going to be two things one is reducing school choice one is going to be providing funding for this open we've had very little funding over the years what it is is it's basically the cost of this other post-employment benefits it's health care costs for retirees um then we have an actuary that does a report on the the idea is that over time they want if you think about it we're paying for costs they're not benefiting students in the district these retirees unless they're retired here and there's no benefit to the education in the system the concept is that we should try to get an open up trust funded so that these this trust pays for these benefits and so we're kind of setting aside money during the lifetime during the work a period of employees to pay for these so it's not coming out of budget so that's the concept of trust probably will take you know 20 to 25 years to get to the point we could develop it to fund that the level we're funding it now is fairly small against news started about six years ago we had an opportunity to put more in his mind he was a supreme month of health care um he kind of took that savings and applied it so for fy23 the budget is to put in two and a half percent of um what we've budgeted for the daily benefits um we need to put two and a half percent into the old debt trust what i've proposed as a plan is to increase that two and a half percent by two and a half percent more every year until it gets to twenty five percent at which point it will be on seven thousand a year and i think at that point you can revisit the ten years but you're also going to have investment growth and returns um and i think that does it in a way where um it gets the district to a much better place um in the spreadsheet i provided last time kind of gives you a sense of where it gets to over time honest investment return and then you can revisit it i also think there's variability you can't predict what the market's going to do over the next 10 years if it takes off maybe maybe you know as much but i think to have a plan for 10 years is a good idea i also think that the way they calculate the liability is fairly complicated and sensitive to interest rates and actually as interest rates go up just the way they calculate the liability comes down so um i don't want to go too much more into the weeks now i'm happy that if you think it's worthwhile i think i have been a presentation on it or share something but um i kind of wanted to leave something for the school committee and the district they have with my recommendation and you can digest it so i don't know i'm not going to give you an overview of it now you're going to leave it there for now and if you think it's worth playing on the agenda it's fine in the future or i can just read a memo i think the um you know year-over-year increase to a budget from fy 23 to 14 will be up to 700 so it's not you know way out of the norm out of whack two and a half years makes it manageable um so that's kind of the most important thing i think from that report to berlin so that's information the next item is just an fyi you had the opportunity to provide free meals to students this year that has a noun that's discontinued by the usda [Music] and we will potentially need to look at our price name our meal pricing i know although i've had some communication and seeing some things that say the state is now considering potentially a one-year plan to help continue three meals for a year and there is some discussion i guess there's some at least push maybe from a couple of people that will look at it but there's not as much optimism federally that is at the state level too we don't quite know what the reimbursement rates will be but certainly in terms of impacted families i just wanted to kind of put this out there and be public if we get an update and get big news we'll update you at the next evening and she also shared a letter to the state that i sent to the director of nutrition services [Music] i think there's a petition that i'm going to lift the sun onto just asking for either the federal states who want to continue the program and then my long report here the last item is the student activity guidelines so based on consultation for auditors and i disagree with them but they say that the school committee needs to adopt our student activity i call it procedure manually but it's also meaningful but it's student activity guidelines that has special rules it relates to all the clubs most of them are at the high school like so the different clubs some of them have financial accounts they do fundraising there's a whole set of specific rules that apply these accounts and historically this is where that's financial abuse happens in school districts or just sometimes not intentionally just misuse spending these are intended for students and so this guideline is really developed following the state model so i basically followed that and adapted you know certain things just to make sure they worked for our district so this should get us to be compliant and again we were told that uh school day needs to kind of top this it's alone so i apologize for getting into your short notice this is the first replay tonight if you have any questions in between now and this meeting i'm happy to answer that there is a school company policy uh regarding this that's kind of one page i would i would recommend that even those procedures just leave a very brief policy and immediately as it is and just say add one that one sentence that says more detailed policies we developed at the school of the business office and have been approved by the school committee who just stick a link into this instead of rewriting the whole thing [Music] i think that we shouldn't have thirty five page policies and i think this is more procedural um i've talked to other districts who i've been hearing mixed answers from different districts some districts like well we didn't have to do that we just developed an animal and showed it to the auditors so maybe it's just not otters maybe they're being more diligent i don't know um so but you can only you know at some point and that's it that's my report [Music] um sure so i'm going to just provide an update on the at home testing program the testing program so that continues to be available to all the staff and the students in the district um it's my understanding that that program will be available through the end of the school year i haven't heard anything differently um and so i've just provided you with some updated numbers there um you know talking about overall averages about you know about half of our students are participating and about 75 percent of the staff are participating participating um and so that means that in a testing kit goes home every two weeks to the family or to the staff member and that gives them one test each week and the request is that they self-report any kind of positive results and of course we're continuing to do this dramatic testing in schools as well um so those of the numbers that participation is good it has sort of leveled off it had ramped up um after it had been in place or put into place at the end of january it rammed up quite a bit in february and march but those numbers are pretty stable now um i did add in the vaccination data i know christie uploaded a revised report for me today so we attempted to we really wanted to report this information and share it attempted to use the same methodology that we had used to collect that data using our new snap software program we ran into some technical difficulties in getting consistent results um between february and now so we did end up using a combination of snap data and nurse data to to provide these results and for the most part it seems as though the numbers um the vaccination rates are going up in all three buildings we do have this question mark um around the data around berlin memorial obviously we recognize that can't even be right but we've looked into it to the best of our ability and we can't really understand why it's reporting a a one percent roughly one percent decrease in that number but that's the data on that we have we'll i'll be happy to report on it again next time um and hopefully that little glitch is working um no changes to the reports um of vaccinated staff at the buildings as i had explained before that is done on a voluntary basis there is there aren't any changes there um and then just a quick report of the wellness committee um each year the wellness committee um comes together and they um really identify a focus area for the year and it's you know the second year in a row where it's really about the social and emotional well-being of staff and students following the challenges of a couple of years um they typically each year put together a little a project of some sort maybe selling another grant last year i believe that they they put out some um you know they added some furniture to the outdoor outdoor areas in all three buildings um this year there's an effort to put together a um the exact language is a team-building and joyful event for all of the district's staff in an upcoming month so just a very beginning um part of talking about that and putting that plan together and then this really connects to what bob reported on in terms of the food services update lauren is also part of the wellness committee and she had talked about that initiative of there's a state level effort to extend the free lunch program in massachusetts um and she cited that fact that i have in there that 26 of food insecure families don't meet the threshold for free and reduced lungs and that's really a huge motivation for these groups to be providing those universal free lunches and trying to get that extended in the state of massachusetts yeah the second last line there in the report says that physical education teachers have reported improvement in pe activities since masks became optional yeah so that that's good enough but my follow-up question to that is has any other teachers reported any changes in behavior or anything sort of positive or negative effects since that happens now so yeah and my comment here is under the category of wellness committee um which is um comprised of largely of pe teachers and so i did ask them specifically for their input um you know i have heard anecdotally amongst the schools that you know teachers are are enjoying being able to see their students faces and you know they feel as though they're able to communicate more clearly with their students so i do feel like overall um that's the impression that i've received from staff kids are smiling yeah those facial because because there was a kid that was a senior should she climb into the kid and talk to him like you'll be [Music] so good evening again as you see my report is very brief i really wanted to take just a few seconds um to just reiterate the thank yous that i put in there um was a long-term employee here who helps out with an mcas in high school she's invaluable to diane and sally in terms of the amount of organizations she does and kind of keeps a lot of that running without them having to have a lot of day-to-day interference with what's going on with mcat so again i want to thank dee um for those of you who live in boylston and were part of that wonderful like five second power surge that happened on tuesday you may have heard that definitely interrupted uh mcas it was quite uh quite the day from the tech department um so again i wanted to call out dave mccarthy um you know i think a lot of places would have uh just circled the wagons and called in all kinds of folks and um dave and i were able to handle um you know what would have been a major interruption and get everybody back running in 80 of the building within a few hours and everybody by the following day so um again dave is a fantastic employee i i want to just again help him out as part of keeping this going here with mcas um cdrc um again just a quick note um we were able to compile this event on time um this morning jeff sends me all the emails of uh you know that he forwards everything to me as if i don't get him done but um you know just keeping making sure that we're staying on track we are always probably one of the first in massachusetts that i always submit um and in my last report i kind of mentioned that they never meet their original deadline and there's always software issues um but this is middle and of course this year there was as well we were one of many uh districts trying to submit but um the software couldn't keep up with the amount of data flowing in so we did again submit on time we're submitted and certified it's over 4 000 pieces of information about our schools and our kids and the classes they take and the various breakdowns of um race and ethnicity in in various areas and again i i could not say that uh or with confidence that we would always be earlier on time if i didn't have uh bonnie horn um who does a fantastic job in compiling the data staying on top of um you know she's already starting because of covid we're going to have back-to-back years usually this is uh every other year but because kobe we did not report last year we are going to have back-to-back years and she's already starting um some of the data right for next year so um again a shout-out so sorry get any questions [Music] negotiation subcommittee um we had our first meeting on tuesday march 22nd and we're going to be meeting again wednesday and for the update on the superintendent evaluation subcommittee i actually have with um just a heads up to the committee that on may 2nd you're going to be getting an online link to the self assessment of the committee and it's going to be due by may 10th hopefully in an email for you [Music] and that we will have a report for you um that will be presented on may 24th um and at that meeting mr zane is going to provide a verbal update on his cycle progress including products and goals and performance and at that point he will begin filling out his superintendent evaluation any questions i want to go into business items at this time i would like to entertain a motion to approve the 2022-23 school year calendar second discussion yeah i just want to make sure i understand the changes that we're doing so i don't have of these are professional development days that were located on fridays and put them more towards the middle of the week we made that change to the good friday you know full day of school um [Music] i believe that's it that's definitely generally you just took chiropractic from what you said earlier the teachers had requested the good writing va full day yeah all day school i read it completely the other day and that's how i presented it to you and then so when i talked to him he said nobody so this county they're entitled to two religious objects individuals so they choose to take a certain negative one's holiday they can put into that correct so this is that doesn't include courses [Music] any discussions [Music] you know she kind of appreciated some of the balance that the full half days would give but the police are equally giving that kind of schooling life so thank you all right there's no more discussion um all in favor aye and i as well opposed the motion to approve the 2022-23 school year calendar passes i'd like to have a motion to approve policy ebcfa mike second julie discussion all right all in favor aye all right i'm an eye as well a motion to approve policy ebcfa passes um i have a motion to approve the boylston police department in berlin police department the berlin wilson regional school julie second sorry discussion alan david hi i'm guys well i'd like to have a motion to approve the elementary literacy coach coordinator job description elementary literacy coach coordinator john description passes i'd like a motion to accept the school choice recommendations second sorry discussion which means that we partly because we're not taking in as much um and there's a little bit of a balance to what we're spending versus what we're taking in i mean over time you might not have an option if you keep and i think i mentioned last meeting that a view of the high school and the elementary school has different situations um we have this the scenario where we're seeing students who would expect to matriculate to 9th grade or choosing to go somewhere else and so there's a loss of students at home doing aids in ninth grade so i i understand in terms of how high school operates and those cohorts are set up that it becomes a value to have equal sizes across those um and so i can i can certainly get behind the addition of school choice seats for the hunter i don't even question whether or not if we were to have more churn than we currently expect is there an ability to even bring in additional students into how to do a later date with mine choosing to go somewhere else at this time but just repeat that so right now we're suggesting five additional school proceeds going into ninth grade if ten kids decide to not wear a ninth grade incontinence upcoming year can we increase that five to ten at a later date [Music] but if you if you do the live and you have kids online and then seats that you can you can back help so you would be able to do that so we were to hear that there were 12 applicants and we had five that we let in but they have we think we have one for seven more and then acceptance okay so i guess that's my opinion on that i have trouble in the olympic school one um i i have a lot of trouble having out of district placements at bes given the significant extent to which the bes budget is underfunded compared to bms i understand class sizes i look at this beyond class sizes they look at some of the auxiliary services that we're able to provide to students at that school i think about things like the adjustment counselor or the reading specialist and if we add additional students from other towns we limit the availability of those specialists to spend time with the students who are children taxpaying residents in boylston in particular and so it feels to me like we for a while now rely on the school choice funds especially dps in lieu of having what i think is going to become a continued conversation with finance committee and the people of boylston around but it's a bigger discussion and i think the discussion is you know for example boylston um the town is working on an investment and at some point there has to be a discussion in terms of things like building the district because you know letting in a few students from from out of the amount of building that's you know residential bill that's been done in the town that will affect it and the biggest factor is it's how unpredictable it is you could have one room and have one you know two people you could have five kids and there's no control over that so one of the advantages of school choices one is it doesn't really bring in some revenue and you have complete control over that and i would say that this discussion that you were talking about it has to happen but i think it's a bigger discussion and i think within a year or so it's one of those discussions where you we would have to have and it would and it would sort of balance on whether you're even going to accept school choice kids anymore at all not what are they going to take a couple of years because i don't think that really affects it i think the major focus has to be is it is the building is the amount of building going on in the towns so unpredictable that you can't even you can't even take school choice kids anymore because you don't know what's been happening i think we're there okay i don't know i know i think we're there because some of the bigger projects rental projects you know they those permits haven't been pulled yet and so that's that's about 18 months it's it's within three years that that discussion before those those things that the permits that have been pulled stopped becoming occupied um so the discussion has that i don't think it's this year but within a couple years you know it's it it's not just with us it's and it's not just school choice it's it's it's the rest of it the school choice is a small piece and it actually helps our budget it's the other stuff i i have to disagree you know school choice is a standardized program in the state you know everybody has it for the most part and matter of fact the program is designed in a way that is designed so that if you don't vote for it it stays so everything about the program is designed to be kept in place so for example if you didn't vote on it it would be the assumption is that it goes and if you and if you voted if you vote if let's say you voted to do it and then you said you know we've changed our mind you have to do that vote by june 1.

i just wanted that to be known and as you hear different numbers bandied about so uh thoughts on the different options strategies maybe what happened would it be less painful it would take it from the grant money the asset funds uh i'd have to say yes but it um that means something less that we had planned to do uh with esther either next year or the following year if you remember there are two esser grants one is 11 about 11 million dollars and the plan was to spend half of that this year and half of that next year and the other register grant was uh almost 25 million dollars and the plan was to spend 8 million this year 8 million next year and 8 million the third year right so i thought go ahead i'm i'm sorry my thought was it might be easier next year yeah it's never easier to shave 214 000 but we can't do it this year though there's a possibility we we could we could shave something in the 2223 budget uh from grant money if we use that money now uh have you got any feeling from the city fathers how they want to go i i haven't i i didn't think uh that would be uh really appropriate until you know we heard from you in in the full board okay that those are my thoughts i have a whole committee here uh terry kate um so mr russo i'm i'm sorry terry i i i just respectfully i'd just like to interject um john talked about two different options and one of those options he included was going back and finding the appropriate line items in other grants to make this work so i i i'm going to say publicly in front of everyone we have 215 000 eligible and other grants to make this work there's no need to go to the city to ask for this money at this time and i agree yes yes we had considerable transition in this office but it's not the city's fault that we had transition in a finance office and it wasn't clear what about that 215 000 budgeted we it's not necessary to go back to the city to ask for that money okay there are eligible lines to find that money in grants to build that too and i can curse her totally unequivocally we are on the same team all right so my my apologies about that next month oh no worries no i'm finding the grant money i'm good with that okay i'm just asking the rest of the committee if they had any thoughts on the subject okay i concur with you sir sorry about the uh interruption always good to see you kevin good to see you mr russo so i'm all set al um that was my that's my our our report um based on march 31st so we're looking good uh overall um we'll continue as you know watching um i'm glad that uh you know us changing those transfers brought questions in a good way so um i'm glad for that that you know teresa thank you for the email today so now it made sense why you couldn't open or you didn't see the the but i didn't understand the last line so now you were seeing zero uh balances where in the past we've seen negative balances so as mentioned um in this meeting it was transfers that we did throughout the month or the last few weeks so and we have thoroughly explained the negative balances and some of the grants yeah okay i will do that right now you guys want to pick one and i have my little notes so well if you have notes start from the top okay i'm sorry so i'll get uh the real big ones um so you have some lines for example you know uh let's see ones that are big in the negative area your your alliance district uh funding carry forward that was allowed for one year or a year and a half really two years due to covet uh that minus 26 will be coming out it'll cover it'll be covered from our alliance grant that we receive every every year so um once the year comes to an end that'll be uh gone alliance you can't carry forward due to the pandemic we were allowed to carry it forward um your you know your title three your bilingual your um immigrant and youth uh those grants are grants that um continue to use um to staff for supplies you know of course as we're coming fully back even though we've been fully back for about say uh half of a year at this point we haven't finished the year out we'll continue you know hiring staff um anything that is needed for the schools uh for the staff for the students um so those numbers your alliance uh construction grant that kind of speaks for itself um that'll stay there um any the real extending learning program you're seeing a negative balance of a million dollars um those are ones that and there's a few of these uh you know you're extended learning you're some of the other ones school readiness uh 21st century um parent trust frc summer those are ones that we have to build once we build uh the you know the agencies we uh basically put it in the budget and it balances out but as the expenditures are coming in we're putting them in so that's why you're seeing these negative balances in the uh in the grants sr3 as we know is a three-year grant um we'll continue to be using that that's the that's really the grant we're uh one of the one of the many grants we keep focusing on just to make sure what we can move what's eligible uh per the cares act ester grant etc um priority school district that's part of a alliance so um what we've noticed is some individuals are in that grant and they will be moved into alliance very similar to what we just did with general fund will need to be done in grants but grants are a little different we can't just move it from one grants to the another uh priority school grant were allowed to because falls under the alliance grant umbrella um adele ed very similar to some of the others we bill them in april and this month we will put in the budgets for them uh we build the city and state so that two forty a hundred ninety one thousand dollars in the two forty seven thousand dollars negative balance once we build the city and state and receive the funds they'll be put on the budget side and then they'll zero out um i'm trying to get the big ones that stand out title two for example uh teacher uh quality that's for uh teachers improvement uh personal development that that money we can roll over um so the cabinet myself the team we're uh identifying what those funds are once that happens we draw down from that and i think that's really the magnet school is one of the other big ones um that goes together with the magnus school tuition whatever we receive from surrounding districts with tuition that goes against the uh magnet score of uh grant one third what grant number is that eddie 130 30 130 and 131 oh thank you okay sorry to scroll down what it's okay um one of the other ones are say coca-cola we'll use that one that's actually uh so in the vending machines we get a portion of the funds it goes into this bucket which is the coca-cola grants if you want to call it so that's that 23 000 right there um and then this the summer school very funny just found out today is a credit card fees john and i found out today those are credit card fees that you know we receive so uh that actually will be going out there was never a budget for that there are funds for it um there was just never a budget entered so we found out about that today so bottom line is um our budgets we our grant budget sorry breakdown is about 54 million dollars is what we have in grants that includes the big ones you know your essers and your alliance um alliance we will continue to get title word to continue that esser is the one that will come to an end come september 2024 which is sr3 and then as of right now if all the lines align as i mentioned we cannot move one grant from another unless it's alliance or title or there's certain ones we can't but we can't do the same thing what we did with general funds but it brings our grant total down to a positive 179 right now all right thanks for sure you're welcome committee members any additional questions i have one kind of off topic do we ever get a list of scholarships yearly scholarships for the graduating students what's your eligible for or what's available through the high school just curious eddie if i could i jump in and answer that um those counselors um have access to all the events there's very there's a ton of scholarships you know available to students so when they meet um and discuss senior planning as well as walk students through the college recommendation process and help with their common app through naviance um scholarships is a component of that and um they do um let the students know which scholarships they're eligible for encouraging them when the due dates are what the application requirements are um and the high school also has some scholarships that they will give out at their senior night closer to graduation uh is there a list of them that can be shared just curious you know what's you're still in the process of assigning them but i'm sure we can get them to you i mean i don't need to know who who's getting them i was just curious you know uh what we have available for our students are you talking about using district funds or just in general things that are available i guess like they they're the uh just general funds that uh you know donated to deserving students for books for college and you know there's a kitty for that you know that type of thing i mean do we have any kind of list like that all of that all that is managed uh at the high school uh under the guidance office um it doesn't go through um the school budget nor the finance department right right they keep all the records of that i can get a list of we can get that for last year for example we could get that i'm sure just curious what our students earn just curious i'll follow up on that thank you john do we have any other items to discuss today well i think that was it okay before we sign off uh i cannot our chair is here uh madam chair do you have anything to add no but i think kate has a question yeah i'm asking just a quick question i'm just looking at the um the esser cares act funds um and it looks like we have a negative balance on that particular um and i just want to make sure i understand that k are you talking about 2.245 um sorry i just had it on my screen eddie i'm looking at uh line 30 under the the grants section at 74 000.

849 depending on your watch i will call us back to order to talk about uh 9a which is the planning commission review of the city council policy agenda yes uh as a reminder the city council um adopts a policy agenda it uses this to instruct staff um representatives like lobbyists to advocate on behalf of the things that matter to the city the city council distributes this to its boards and advisory boards and commissions we had an initial conversation about this i think that there was a lot of agreement uh and some there was some slight modification uh i think commissioner sovay provided some clarification on um uh gender-neutral uh restrooms for building code advocacy and i think the the sort of late in the meeting we got a bit stuck on inclusionary zoning commissioner clark had provided some resources as she had referenced in the meeting and i shared those in a in a memo with my acknowledgedly hopefully somewhat accurate high-level summaries of of what those resources were and would planning commission has two options you don't have to provide any comments to the city council you could adopt the comments as presented or you could make any modifications and adopt proposed comments from a staff perspective i see both sides i think generally i will say that the more state legislative tools we have the better so my inclination would be to leave that in there but i can also see the argument in the context of limited resources maybe this is not something worthwhile that the city council sets as a priority so with that just any uh communication that the planning commission chooses if desired to share with the council we don't have a public hearing for this um is there even like a motion that's at the end of the end of the memo i think there's two options okay um so we kind of have to choose one of those options before we move forward so why don't i why don't i read the first one um and we can ch like normal if we don't like it then we can choose to vote it down so that we can start discussion we got to move it and have it seconded and then we have discussion then we vote on the motion to discuss let me just read it and then we can decide i'm gonna read the first one the planning uh i'm uh this is a motion to recommend amendments to the draft policy agenda as presented um and forward to the mayor and city council that's what we're gonna that's what we're going to be discussing and voting upon and then if people want to make amendments to it then that's what we can do in the process does anybody want to move that motion does this makes go ahead uh commissioner abram seconded by commissioner gibb randall let's open discussion comments go ahead commissioner hammerschmidt so sort of tooth step well i don't know that i like either of these so i think like the the text line changes like the edits that you did are good and i think you know the gender-neutral bathrooms and i think those are good so then i mean to me it's the whole like are we including the inclusionary zoning component of it that's really the meat of this discussion so like i i don't like either of these actions because i think we need to talk about maybe that component of it like i i don't know i'm airing on the side of just like either you know sending these texts like line edits and also i think last time we talked about maybe just coming up with some sort of like language about we don't fully like we don't necessarily support like lobbying to like have inclusionary zoning and like here are some of the reasons why but we're you know we we definitely think like we need more housing i forget didn't we discuss this last time i think he so i my you might be conflating we had a conversation about a proposed resolution for um workforce housing and sort of discussing just some um sort of higher level comments about some of the city's plan policies i think you're right though the the the substantive discussion i think was whether or not to include the inclusionary zoning requirement and so um maybe just to keep it simple is if if the commission is of a mind that that is not a good tool that should be available to communities and not something that the city should spend any resources or advocacy on we just uh remove that and then we could send the recommendations for those changes with with that reflection would we i mean i would be in favor of that and i don't know if we would need to because it's not just sort of like a language edit i don't know if there needs to be some sort of like paragraph explanation of why we're just deleting that or we just yeah i would kind of like what you just said yeah i'd be happy to just i think the my takeaway was that inclusionaries on zoning research has has shown doesn't often doesn't result in the outcomes as desired therefore this planning commission doesn't advise city resources going towards advocating for it okay oh i'm remembering now the thing that i was talking about that i was completely yes sorry but yeah i think some sort of statement about why we would be if we agree that we should just sort of recommend that they take this out some sort of statement as to why i think would be helpful um are you moving to strike that statement i think so i'm i wouldn't yes so this is striking number two well the first number two on page three the numbering of this is not ideal can we not strike the whole line but just the phrase inclusionary zoning practices keep affordability incentives i would just strike the whole thing but we don't want to keep advocacy for affordability incentives that already exists in state legislation from my lungs okay done did we share this with uh teresa gilotti yes i asked if she had any feedback she did not have any specific feedback on inclusionary zoning i don't know if the housing and human services advisory board brought that up my recollection is historically the the that board has been an advocate of keeping inclusionary zoning as a way to uh realize units um but i don't know if they looked at it this time so actually let me go back commissioner hammerschmidt moved that um amendment yes amending the the effect of adopting and passing this on as drafted any one second the amendment to strike that entire line about inclusionary zoning seconded by commissioner lee now we can discuss it we should discuss it and honestly that's what we've been talking about this whole time okay go ahead vote for this um i would have to read that research myself and i have not had time to do that um so just on the bay not because i doubt it but i would really need to read it first and understand what it's saying um so uh but that doesn't matter other discussion about the proposed amendment to strike the advocacy for an ability to incorporate inclusionary zoning and in addition to that with a memo with a short statement about why and i'm trying to i'm just trying to remember the discussion about it in terms of what was that commissioner clark that was explaining that to us before could you just give us a 30 second primer on it again so you can drag my memory yeah i know right so maybe that's unrealistic long story short is it's complicated and there's just a new article with new research that came out a couple months ago in governing magazine not exactly the most like failing read but it's actually really interesting um so yeah there's just basically like it can create if there's not carefully constructed parameters on it you risk creating kind of um depending on the strength of the housing market as well you kind of risk creating a floor that prevents a lot of people you create two markets a really expensive market and then a subsidized market and it's kind of like picking winners and then it can kind of throw off the housing market further um can also raise the uh level so it's like i guess the policy itself is the reason i'm not spoken of earlier i think there's also a point to be made like what's feasible at the state level right now within the current legislature and um if it's worth spending a lot of time debating the merits of the policy if it can be crafted in a certain way and i guess my only concern would be like um the competitive advantage of if it were passed at a state level and allowed and then if um what that might impact on our ability to provide housing compared to neighboring areas if we were to enact such legislation and let's say pittsfield doesn't um if that might have a result in where the development goes um and so there's just a lot to consider there i'm a bit uh sorry it's been a long meeting so i'm probably not being super well spoken but i guess the the bottom line being the state legislature being in the current stages probably doesn't make it such a thing worth spending time on with the lobbying okay thank you at a local level so it's messy go ahead commissioner abrams um i feel like because there is definitely uh sorry i wasn't saying like even if there's not consensus 100 in the affordable housing community about whether it's good practice there certainly is enough research showing that we need to think more carefully about it as a practice i'm comfortable i would support striking it from this so that we aren't proactively affirming support for something that we're worried isn't effective it doesn't mean that it can't happen we're not forbidding it we're just removing vocal support for it and therefore i would be in favor of striking it other thoughts all right let's vote on the amendment then general call vote sure and again the amendment would strike the language commissioner gabe randall yes commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner hammerschmidt yes commissioner dish no commissioner lee yes commissioner clerk yes commissioner white yes commissioner mills yes motion carries all right any other uh um changes that we would suggest on the otherwise drafted marked up red markup agenda policy agenda not our actual agenda okay then i think we can vote on this too mr leonard commissioner good brand yes commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner hammerschmidt yes commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark yes commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes the motion carries um moving on to item 9b this is the calendar year 2022 uh planning commission meeting schedule before turning it over i just want to note that uh next week's working session will still be remote if that notice hasn't got gone out i got a calendar invite that said meeting place had changed but no we will still continue to be only on zoom and so you can expect to have zoom information do we know if that is changing nope it will be remote uh until we hear otherwise the working sessions will continue to be remote and orc will continue to be remote until we hear our otherwise okay anything else to note in the meeting schedule no my apologies i think you got a generous email from mia gayle from our office we keep messing up your first may meeting for a bunch of holidays and we're trying to fix it again so the primary change is that it was rather than being scheduled may 3rd it will be may 4th which is wednesday because there's voting on may 3rd that's the change mr leonard and the fiscal year adding on the rest and adding the rest all right any we have to vote this up is are any is anybody noticing any other conflicts uh while we are quickly looking at this it looks like i will know while you're looking at this one of the things in the past is we have set the meeting calendar on a fiscal year um which only matters to bureaucrats so um part of this is i am hoping to transition that where we will be setting our schedule on a calendar year like most of the rest of the world and for the second half of the next fiscal or the first half of the next fiscal year that's highlighted in yellow that first meeting is like on a wednesday not a tuesday the entire time um and you're asking why that is no it's it's j it's july 6th the it's the little one next to it july august september october and november are all wednesday meetings yes commissioner abrams can i just request that um somebody send us the calendar invites as soon as possible so that they show up in my summer calendar thank you i was gonna say fourth of july i don't know what august is election primary thank you labor day labor day yeah and then another election november first unless you all want to get rid of democracy no all right uh any other discussion this looks right though good like don't plan on wednesday things and yes we will get appointments out thank you all in fake can we just do a voice vote all in favor of this calendar please raise a hand or say yes yes no shoot okay so so commissioner randall moved commissioner seconded and then we all voted yes thank you i did not hear that thank you all right uh let's see next up is public comment this is the final opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about any issue that um is on their minds tonight uh if you are joining us go ahead and use the raised hand button you can call in at 877-853-5247 our meeting id is 977-6634-1226 once you've joined the meeting you can press star 9 on your phone to digitally raise your hand please mute any television or background sound so that we can hear you clearly would you like to provide public comment [Music] wood chair mills since you invited people to speak on any issue that is on their minds it's a bit general um but uh so i'll do that um ken garber again um two major reasons i see why we as a society have completely failed to address the climate crisis is that we don't take the social cost of carbon into consideration in our decisions and that cost ends up being paid usually by those least able at least responsible for the problem to begin with especially those in what we call the third world and and poor people and minority communities in this country the second major reason i think we've failed is that no one knows a relative impact of the different things we do in terms of emissions um and um so this is what i've tried to do in some of my letters to you and some of my comments is to quantify a bit what the consequences are for example you know maple cove too they're going with gas i think that's very fair to assume at this point you know i calculate 910 metric tons co2 equivalent emissions a year if you include upstream methane emissions from that [Music] so i i guess what i'm getting to is is commissioner weiss's very sensible idea of putting of osi providing routinely a report to you and maybe even earlier in the process to staff putting some of these numbers together not that we can require anything along these lines but just so the developers can be can see them and they may not care and i think the one tonight certainly wouldn't but many of them will and they just don't know what the consequences are of what they're doing um you know to me in my personal life maybe you do this too i'm sure some of you do i can guess which ones i calculate my personal carbon footprint um i know that uh every gallon of gas is creates 13.2 kilograms co2 equivalent emissions so i fill up my tank that's 150 kilograms that really gives me pause you know uh 0.8 kilograms per passing passenger mile traveled by air in coach yeah i three that's three thousand that's three metric tons if i fly to san francisco in bag that's gonna really screw up my personal car carbon footprint so i just don't fly anymore um you know and if i didn't know that i wouldn't care and i didn't for the longest time um so osi should obviously provide these reports not even to udc conforming projects not just to others but they should also be more quantitative they tend to be very qualitative and they'd certainly have the staff very capable of doing that you know uh thea jaeger well i'm done i guess you have the you have the uh discretion to let me go longer by the way thank you i was just going to say that theo jagerlander in osi is a very capable analyst he puts together brilliant um greenhouse gas inventories annually that i use as a resource uh many of your calculations so osi can do this and this is obviously something i need to bring up with them not with you and i will but uh some developers are very sophisticated i have my issues with sartorius as you know but they know exactly how much energy they're using and how much emissions they're putting out even though they don't they don't disclose that they they did disclose the energy use intensity of their building which is um energy consumption per square foot per year much higher than i thought it was um so that's another figure that either we should that we should try to pin developers down on um there's a lot we can do in this area and that we should do we just need we need more information um it may not in the end make a difference but it's it's this isn't rocket science this is quantitative information that that we can get from osi um to help us in our decision making so anyway that's all i really wanted to say i really hope that commissioner weiss's idea is pursued thank you thank you mr leonard are there any callers who have indicated an interest in speaking no all right uh then we can move on to item 11 commission proposed business i charted things down but does anybody else want to speak up so what i have what i have is that we ought to have a discussion and probably outside of orc that given this conversation um for tc1 particular looking at the parking footprint um the form based limit uh that is one thing i also think in that conversation as i alluded to before there is a student who didn't find enough people to join her masters project that would be working with the city to help quantify trade-offs between um between uh green space housing and kind of solar and so i think actually bit i wrote down the time print from tonight's discussion where this i think came up in that conversation but um i as a point of information for folks there will be a very capable c's masters student working on this summer on that um to the point though of specifically quantitative assessments from osi i mean this is exactly when you you know the the the energy efficiency labels when you go to buy an appliance like that's not requiring you to do anything it just helps you make informed choices um uh and so i think that you know i think that there's certainly merit there as well and those are the things that i had on my list what else did i miss yeah can we just specify what we're asking for or do we not want to do that right now from osi um because i think it was we we threw around a lot of things which are all valuable and so you can't see mr leonard raising his hand and i'm sure he has a brilliant idea not brilliant i i would observe that the commission spent as much time if not more this evening talking about building operational aspects as planning and land use aspects that well that makes me feel great that you have a lot of confidence in our regulations as it relates to use and area height placement and parking and landscaping and storm water and the like it obviously we've had this discussion quite a bit that we don't and this relates to whether osi provides a report we don't have anything to measure that against i would suggest maybe maybe even at this next working session we start having a conversation as a commission as to what are the things that you would like to require in code in the zoning code from a sustainability i think i hear the city council has been clear in adoption of the a20 policy it's not a master plan but it's a clear direction of the city council i hear it at this table a desire for impacting projects as it relates to their heating source their utility sources these are not things that are in our udc i'm not sitting here saying that to do that we will that i that i think it's appropriate to put all things in the udc but i sort of i am speculating that it's time for us as a commission to start looking at the a20 goals and think about the things that we do want to require if we could require every new building has to be net zero constructed in the city do we want our udc to say that if we want to require no natural gas connection in the city do we want to say that so i sort of think that we should start having a conversation about measurable things that we can put in there so that when osi eventually is doing those reports it is a standard of approval it is not a standard of hey wouldn't it be great if you could do this i think we need to have that conversation yep if we could what do we wanted to say i think we just had this conversation about tc1 is tc1 is uh it is it is trying to get to a very specific typology and a lot of typologies that are happening in the world construction-wise won't won't fit into that and so what do we want to do the same as regards to sustainability aspects so that's not a brilliant idea but maybe it's the time we have that conversation and maybe we started having that sooner it just i just i i feel like it's pent up in the commission in the conversations about these developments and i i think we need to even even if we can't include everything what are the what are what is the i don't know that there's low-hanging fruit but what is the easiest hanging fruit to incorporate and i would tying many of these things together i would offer that we're still we can still scope out a bit of kind of what the student is working on this summer and i think that that's really helpful because i similar to the conversation that we had about inclusionary zoning i worry a bit about unintended consequences of us requiring things that drive maybe some uses we do want to drive to the suburbs because there are suburban uses but other things that may the the the you know don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good to some extent um and so i think that that's something that could kind of be within the remit exploring what some of those unintended consequences might be go ahead commissioner abrams or sovay wrong this might just be a clarification and not be work but uh with the ev parking if it's a phased project can a petitioner elect when and where to place it or is it all required to be placed in phase one or proportional because this evening was a loophole that they just conceded to instead of a requirement so the code's not specific right now the code says when you're the proposed code that you just advanced to city council says when you are adding parking spaces they have to meet these percentages for ev parking so um i would say typically we have required phases to stand on their own like if you want a certificate of occupancy for phase one you have to have all the amenities for faith that is incorporated in phase one for that [Music] i don't i guess i so in short the code's silent on it there might be times that that's really important there might be times that there might be a benefit because of the overall arrangement and distribution that we don't want that you have to do ten percent in phase one and ten percent in phase two of a ten phase project so um i don't know can we look at that when we look at the rest of the parking standards that we're going to go back to if we can just add that to the list of round two parking now commissioner abrams thank you um i just was gonna speak in support of um mr leonard's proposal because i think we do spend a lot of time talking about things that are actually not within our jurisdiction um that are wishlists based on our our principles and values but actually not related to planning and land use and zoning but there are things related to those things that we have not yet discussed and could and should and maybe even would be more impactful um because sometimes it does feel like we we there's a kind of performance we we we kind of like asked the petitioner to to bear with us while we tell them all these things that we wish but actually at the end of the day we vote yes because even if they don't comply with those things because it's not our jurisdiction so it's a kind of awkward position to be in and i think that frustration is what mr leonard is pointing to um so as far as i understand it we could not write into the udc that buildings have to be electric electrified because we're prevented by law from doing it so maybe we should focus on the things that we can um i'm not saying we shouldn't make our principles known we still could communicate those and vocalize our preferences and make it clear that that's what we want but i think there are other levers we should be pulling that we're not so i like that idea commissioner dish we've had this we've gone we've this is another iteration and i am entirely on board with the idea that we should be doing the things we can do but i think what came up in our discussion tonight with this petitioner was i think the desire to inform and just say do you he may know nothing about indoor air quality like most people don't even think about that so i don't know if this is something worth our time except i do know that a lot of projects aren't going to be going to council and so does that mean that we really need to be specific about what's under our purview or does that mean that there's a possibility for us to say but i don't know if osi has time to give us a report for everything where there's no discretion this is a lot of staff time so but i think that what i heard is the impulse which i which i thought was a valuable impulse was just the desire to be able to say you are tending to want to do it this way because this is what you know but there are these things that other buildings are doing that add x percent maybe financial cost to a project but that in a city like ann arbor may get you a market share or maybe the responsible and ethical thing to do and leave it at that you know just we want to inform you and fee we feel like we should do that or we feel we're going to arrogate to ourselves the privilege of doing that i think we should think this through because i don't want us to keep having these wishlist conversations i feel tired when the moment comes for us to all say have you thought about this and they go no okay um and yet you know and and and these are building code things they're not things we can do they can't be in our code they can't even be in our building code but we are the place that is signing off on these site plans and then i am getting email in my mailbox saying you are a hypocrite and i'm not going to vote for your sustainability millage because you don't actually care because you voted for this and that you know and so i don't know what the answer is there and i'm happy to say narrow rather than broaden but i wanted to just say what i thought i heard in the suggestion and you know so similarly based on research of land use and renewables in terms of how people feel about the planning process when we're talking about citing a large-scale renewable project there are some things that we know are outside of the purview of a planning commission but when members of the public are concerned about that rather than them thinking that you're not listening articulating again why it is that like this is our this is something that we care about but these are the bounds of what we have actually is is helpful in that kind of situation when we're talking about large-scale utility projects because they recognize that you're hearing them and we well know that while there are some people that regularly write us letters often times somebody just may write be writing the letter about the thing that's proposed behind them and so they may not this may be the first time that they realize that this is not in our purview and so i do think like i i think we ought to have a conversation but the education i think is not just to the petitioner it's also to the to other interested community members who may be tuning in for the very first time or maybe joining us for the very first time to say we hear you it's not like we're just ignoring you but this is this is what is within our discretion so um commissioner hammerschmidt i think that's a good point it's also going to underscore just i think what i heard from both commissioner weich and from mr garber was like and commissioner abrams and i were talking about this when we were on our break like just this need for that this education of you know land use practitioners that come before us that you know maybe i i could also sort of tell from the petitioner tonight like he probably i don't know what he's gonna end up doing i don't think he's thought about this at all because it is not the way that he's developed other projects that he's worked on and the architect maybe hasn't talked about building electrification or like he doesn't have the right engineers or like i mean we need a fundamental shift and like all land use practitioners but i'm i'm wondering if there's something that osi has already or could create that would come early in a process with a petitioner that planning staff could use to say like here's a guidebook or something here's context of like developers in ann arbor or close by that are like considering these things that you could talk to about like pricing this out i just think that there's so much like status quo that people and then they come you know they've done so much work by the time they come here and then we're like oh solar panels oh building electrification and it's like nobody said this to me before or like nobody's really given me like like my architect hasn't said anything to me about that so i i think there really is this deep need for the education piece really early in the process with a lot of these petitioners so if there's anything that we could help facilitate the creation of that you know once you start working with planning staff or that it gets distributed more broadly in our community so that before you even come to the city you've somehow gotten this or like all the engineers and all the architects in the community like have this it's just sort of a resource otherwise i don't know i mean i don't know how else we're going to really like change the way that people are building things here that they will just if we make it too hard they'll go to the townships but i think like people are i'm hoping that people's values are similar enough to ours that they want to do the right thing they just maybe don't know how or don't know what the options are because nobody has told them so i don't know if that sort of that was a rant i'm sorry but some sort of like educational resource that we could try to help create could be sort of a starting point for some of this this is what we might be getting ourselves into mr leonard for our work session no i i think it just emphasizes why this would be a valuable conversation so you know city council actually directed for example resources about uh embodied carbon and existing buildings so we have been directed to put something on our website as the most important and important thing that you can do is use an existing building don't replace it with something else that has impacts about what you can accomplish on that particular site sometimes that might be a really viable option sometimes it might not be a viable option that resource doesn't say that you must or you can't but that's an example of moving in that direction to the to the notion of sort of a scorecard you know this is a i don't profess to have the knowledge this is a rapidly evolving field but i i just want to share that i have had those conversations with osi staff how can i provide like the way i presented it was i would like to provide with all due respect a dumbed down version of a sustainability score so that it gives us commissioners and the public uh a quick snapshot score grade as to how this might impact and the answer was it's complicated by what natural resources are there the method of construction the extent of construction so there really isn't thus far there really isn't that sort of easily comparative scorecard so so that's why i think find like a conversation we might not we might not get to anything but finding a conversation of something that is measurable that can be eventually incorporated into our code those are the great incremental steps that is it's not that it's not this dance of education it is another standard that we can clearly communicate to the development community that if you meet this you shall be approved period well i think the conversation is how aspirational and how how incremental and how aspirational should those standards be what are those standards i i feel like there is a there's a latent desire of this board to move in that direction with some measurable standards so it moves past that and so i think it's it's time that we start exploring those mr leonard is this for do you think that this will be next week's discussion or are we gonna do it in a month i don't know okay maybe we'll start it next week okay i i retain the right to change my mind all right uh commissioner gibrandal i'm just wondering if we should invite some people to this discussion that no more than we do definitely and and i'm i mean i'm not just thinking about the office of sustainability but like developers that are embarking on this i feel like would be really important to have at that discussion too and so maybe that means it's a month from now or maybe it's like we start it start sorting out chunks of information or whatever so that we know what we how we want to be effective with other people's time but um i i feel like you know we have our own limits for sure um and uh i have a few names of some people that i think would be helpful okay anything else under commission proposed business item 12 is adjournment would anyone like to move that moved by commissioner white seconded by commissioner dish all in favor that is all of the oh that is all of the hands

the reverse case isn't true if you if you decided to do it and then say you know we don't want to do it i mean oh we do want to do it you voted not to do it they say you know i think we do you you have to the beginning of the school to do it so the whole program is really set up to its encourage free choice and and everything like an outlier with it have you ever looked at it doesn't do it we're not an outlier choice in and i'm not saying we don't have the discussion but i'm saying we're not an outline i know that in the state and you know it's one that we do use not saying the discussion doesn't have to be had but it has to be a bigger discussion than justice and it has to involve the time if you can't control what's happening in the town then you'll never be able to control your war yeah yeah i i i would say um longer term there's a difference between longer term and maybe a lot of returns is like not even that far like it might be down by 24.