Guest: Chip Sawyer – Director of Planning & Development, City of St. Albans
Discussion of what is in the near future for the City of St. Albans, as we build upon our unprecedented revitalization and navigate myriad challenges, including water quality, multimodal transportation and infrastructure needs. Also highlighted will be the effort to develop the 2025 City Plan. Recorded on March 06, 2024.
Sorry about that so CH overseas the city’s land use planning and permitting Community Development storm water planning property valuation special projects He previously worked as a program manager to the Center for Rural studies at University of ront as a senior planner at L County Planning Commission he holds master’s
Degree in public administration and natural resource planning from the University of Vermont grew up in the city of St orens who lives here today with his family could you please welcome chip soy thank you John thanks everyone how’s the sound on the mic for local access we’re good good really appreciate being
Invited here today the problem is that in many ways um Dom Cloud took a lot of the fun stuff last week or the week before um but there are as you’re going to see there are a lot of things that the city of St Alvin does we get
Celebrated a lot for some of the transformation things we do things we do that typically municipalities in the state don’t do and I think Dom covered a lot of that about realizing the risk of doing nothing in a crisis and realizing that you have to get involved in transforming
Your community deciding what people want to see and just making sure that it happens um I’m happy to say that one of the things he talked about the Bellview Redevelopment the Tiff bond that supported that passed yesterday along with the city budget and many other things on uh town meeting day and we
Appreciate the voters support for everything we’ve been doing we’ve consistently had the voters support uh 2 to one 3 to one for things like our Tiff bonds and other and other items on the ballot so and that’s been essential and I think that’s been a key toward um a
Key to what we’ve been able to do is that we’ve had the community the city council and the voters realizing the same vision every step along the way and making sure we don’t stick our necks out collectively until everyone’s on board and on the same page and agrees with where we
Should go going forward so my presentation is titled uh planning for the future of the city of St Albin and in many ways I’m going to cover some of the things that a municipality typically does but we still have some exciting projects and we have some things we
Really need to do and that we really need to address in the um mostly in the near future but also looking further out as well um you know I’m going to start with infrastructure and there are many ways in which you might think of infrastructure in a municipality like
The city I remember when we were looking at this plan back in 2011 this was the plan for our streetcap project that we did on Main Street in downtown where it seemed really ambitious with what we were about to do we were going to rebuild all of our sidewalks add more um
Pedestrian safety aspects uh complete streets planning that it’s typically called things like um creating uh bump outs for our cross walks to narrow The Crossing distance and and in many ways just make downtown look a lot nicer and create a new sense of place um the
Bricks and the banners and the trees and all the Landscaping that everyone celebrates every summer and um the street lights and the things that keep it bright during the nights in the winter a lot of that came came out of the streetscape project this was a run-of-the-mill municipal Street and
Sidewalk project but it was transformational for us for our downtown for the community and it and it and it showed you know what we can do and what we can accomplish when we do just typical Municipal projects um but then there are lots of other things that the that the city does
Uh for for our little municipality and then also in the town of St Alvin is we got a Wastewater treatment plant an essential an essential Municipal service an essential piece of infrastructure that we need to make sure that we manage and address and has some problems
Associated with it that I’m going to get to in a little bit but um you know we wouldn’t be able to do we wouldn’t be what we are today if we didn’t have a way of appropriately managing our waste for instance and then you know new things like you know whoever thought
That the city would have a parking garage but we did we built it in 2014 um a member of our design Advisory board at one point suggested that we change the color of the concrete so it’s not just a boring gray and we went with
A pink and I think we ended up with the prettiest parking garage in the state of Vermont um which is interesting but uh you know the parking garage and the streetcape itself get to a couple some of the things we’re trying to accomplish with City infrastructure in in the city
Of St alond um obviously we’re providing city services we’re providing a place for people to walk to drive your car uh you got to make sure there’s water coming out of the faucet when you turn it on you got to make sure that there’s a place for whatever’s in the toilet to
Go when you flush it um but also things like the trees um and uh storm water and other things that’s what we consider to be City infrastructure and we have to provide those services but but also we found that good infrastructure and ambitious projects can attract vibrancy and investment and that private
Investment will follow public investment when a community is ambitious and goes out to improve itself and goes out to improve its real built things and make things look nice uh the private Market will do the same to some extent and then we have to meet regulatory requirements and that’s a challenge and they’re
Always changing I’m going to get a little bit more into um that realm as well but that’s a key thing we need to follow the rules that come down from the state in the feds and sometimes that will change what or the way we do things in the city and it will change
Um uh it’ll add to the things we have to do looking forward and it’s actually been one of the things that most affect some of our activities in the near future um when we redid the streetscape in the downtown and it went beyond Main Street and includes Lake Street Kingman Street
Parts of Federal Street uh it it really created a new sense of vibrancy and pride in the community and it takes a lot to keep taking care of it and we’re always doing our best and sometimes we need to work a little harder at it but normally in the summer
Downtown you know just explodes with color and in the winter you know we we shine with the lights on the trees and that’s the standard that’s sort of the new standard that we try to meet now and it’s helped create a great first impression uh attract businesses here attract new
Residents here uh when people come from all over the country and Beyond to get their passport dealt with at the passport agency we get so many comments in the businesses and just from folks walking down the to when mayor Tim Smith I guess when he’s walking down the
Street he’ll just stop random people and ask where they’re from which is I guess that’s why he’s mayor and I’m not but um he’ll hear things like why why they came to the city and how much they love it and many of us probably still here today
From folks folks who haven’t been here in a while about how it looks a lot different than it used to uh we’ve got another roadway project uh that we’re working toward it’s a big piece of what I consider the future of what what we’re what we’re going to be
Very active in doing and it’s the Federal Street multimodal connector a project that’s actually older than I am because the idea of bypassing Main Street came about in the 60s and the 70s and it’s not exactly that anymore but uh what we have is an opportunity to make a
Lot of improvements in getting around the city and especially on the uh western side of the city how many people re recognize this project or have heard about it before because we’ve talked about it for many years and it’s always been about um making sure we have the
Money to pull it off and I I think we’re nearly there we got a big Federal Grant $7 million and then we just received some more voter support from the city for Tiff funding yesterday and we’re we’ve restarted the process of planning this project getting back into it with
The engineering and the design and the permitting we’re going to get to a point where we update the plans and we update all the estimates and we see uh if we think we have enough money to get it done in today’s market with construction prices being what they are today but BAS
Basically what the Federal Street project is going to do is pick us up right here at the end of that little State AIS Highway that goes to exit 19 right and put a traffic signal there and then build a new street that goes behind the houses on n and connects with LNA
Drive and then the project goes down LNA Drive crosses lower Welden Allen Street connects with Where We Are we already made some improvements in the area of Lake Street and federal and then it goes down Federal hangs a right at lower Newton and gets you back on Main Street
Now that’s not a great bypass um but what we learned a long time ago is that this project probably this can’t be a Main Street bypass because there’s no way to get traffic past lower Newton with the way the rail Corridor and other private properties are set up but what
It can do it can make a lot of great improvements to areas of the city that need more multimodal function and safety and a lot of people are using this part of the city to get back and forth but it was never really built for that we can f finally solve that
Problem but some of the things that excite me most about this project looking forward into the future is is putting that traffic signal at the bottom of the state AIS Highway means that trucks are more likely to take that left turn to the um Town industrial park
And they’re less likely to do the thing that they’ve been doing which is use upper Welden Street which we don’t like um upper Welden street is not wide enough for even one truck much less much less a truck and your car as you’re coming up upon them uh but
Also this traffic light would make The Pedestrian Crossing at the street much safer we have kids who are walking to St Alvin toown education center alongside South Main Street and they have to cross that crosswalk at the bottom of the state access Highway we also have a lot
Of new residents at the South End of the city and into the town um that hit hit this hit this barrier every time if they’re on that side of the street so I I really one of the thing one of the highlights for the for me for this
Project is being able to put in that traffic light and better manage traffic in that area um providing the new Street means that if you’re coming off of exit 19 into the City and you’re trying to get West into the city um you could now
Make use of a new Street get on the lenda drive and then um go in that way uh but then also a new uh traffic signal here at Federal in lower Newton um talking to the one up at Newton and Maine which needs some improvement um will help both the vehicular traffic but
Also once again you know these signals can stop traffic for pedestrians as well and we have a lot of Redevelopment that we’re planning to do at Fonda housing Redevelopment we got 30 units of senior housing that have already been permitted there and we’re working to partner with
A developer to build 87 more units of Workforce housing we’re going to have more traffic here we’re going to have more Walkers here and this is going to make it safer for them but another one of the plans is to create a new shared use path down Federal Street that will
Connect an extension of the rail trail with downtown the state is planning to extend the misisco valley rail trail right along the Fonda property to stop at lower Newton this is a great opportunity to create a better linkage between downtown and the rail trail and we’ve heard from some walk and bike
Advocates in the area that they really want us to try and put a shared use path on Federal Street this going to be tough because the green belt there is already pretty narrow but we think we’re going to we’re going to be able to make it
Work that’s one of the things we’re into like we got the new federal funding for Federal Street and we kind of had to get back into it with the with all the designers and the engineers and everyone vtrans and everyone else say all right this is
What we want to do let’s let’s make sure these plans still work and let’s see what we can do with this project um so that’s one of the things that is going to be taking up a lot of our time in the near future we we really are
Intent to build the Federal Street project uh and get it done finally and get it off the books into reality uh any questions about Federal Street yes so will there be a light like how are we going to be able to Cross Lake Street are we still doing the four-way
Stop yeah the four-way stop at Lake Street probably going to remain and what we ran into there is that um when you put a traffic signal so close to railroad tracks you end up having to put another red light out past the railroad tracks because your red light might back
People up and then stop people on the tracks so when we were planning that intersection which we’ve technically already done we did that intersection a few years ago we were into the conversations with vtrans on the Railroad and they started talking about how these are the codes that we have
Have to meet these are the things we’d have to do to put a traffic signal here and so it just got too expensive you end up having to create two traffic signals instead of one so that’s why that intersection um became a four-way stop um and happy to take questions
Throughout also really at any point you can we can have a conversation about any other city project or anything you heard from Dom was it last week or the week before two weeks ago but I’m going to go through a couple other things yes so I’m looking at all the street are
There many students who walk to school be in that room yes I think so I mean a good share of them use all the street okay so um is that into consideration to safety for them going down all the street yeah we built a sidewalk on all
This uh and there is a crosswalk on federal that I believe has a flashing beac right now and you know we’re so we’ve done an improvement there if we find out that more needs to be done that is possible but so far we have we have put a
Sidewalk down we have a Crossing on Federal and then the students can walk down Al this to City School John doesn’t the path need a parking area so I’m meeting with the state in a couple weeks to find out what their plans are that project sort of being
Driven by them the extension of the rail trail one of the things I’m going to say is you know do you have plans for a trail head I think we’re happy to work with them we are going to build a new city street along Fonda that’s one of
The things that we have out to bid right now and we’ll be building this year so we’ll actually have a city street that goes up past Fonda and we’ll be along this new rail trail so there’s potential that we could create a curb cut for a
For some parking for a trail head yeah but there’s not a lot L of room on Federal Street proper to do that because basically it’s houses and businesses and um so something would probably happen up here along Fonda along where they’re doing that extension what I’m interested to find
Out is how they plan on people crossing route 7even luckily I’m not in charge of that I I’m sure we’ll have some opinions but uh that’s going to be an issue is the crossing uh I if most folks probably know the rail trail kind of starts next
To the Maple City Diner you drive up there’s parking and you keep walking on the trail well if they extend the trail people are going to have to cross Main Street there so maybe we can uh maybe we’ll be able to make that whole area safer slow traffic down it’ be I think
It’s good opportunities there how critical is a rail rail trail not the actual rails the actual tracks um you’re talking about are they used the the trail is used no the railro tracks the railroad tracks uh that Corridor was part of the Lao the misisco Valley Line that ended a long time ago
And just hadn’t ever it was still owned by the the the section long Fonda was still owned by the rail rope the state never got that piece that’s why they never built the rail trail there too right so the city brokered the purchase of that stretch along Fonda between
Lower Newton and Route 7 because we need our space for our city street but the railroad wouldn’t sell unless we bought the whole thing because what a rail trail allows you to do is um maintain the railroads right of way along that Corridor otherwise when a railroad stops
Using a rail line they have to give all the land back to to all the adjacent land owners like a set of dominoes and you lose it forever so one of the reasons why rail Trails exist in the United States is so you can you can you’re not using it for trains anymore
But if you build a trail you can maintain that right away you don’t have to give the land back to the land owners and someday if the rail if rail ever becomes more relevant they might put put the rails back but for now it’s just a rail trail and that’s actually the
Status that most rail trails are in in in around the country right now so that’s why we have rail Trails where where where there were once actual train rails and they always say well someday the trains may come back I don’t know about that but um so it’s it’s not
Obviously it’s not a viable rail line we stopped having trains on there a long time ago but you never know does anyone remember when we created the storm water utility in the city the town has one now too it was uh 2016 um what happened around then around
2012 is that we new rules came down from the federal government from the EPA and then that the state had to impose upon us is that we had to start doing more to treat the storm water that goes into our Brooks and into St albin’s Bay does everyone remember back when we were
Talking about St albin’s Bay and water quality around the State and all that great stuff back before other disasters came up and we got distracted um but the city is under a mandate to retrofit ourselves to treat storm water more around around the city and this is a
This is a big challenge it’s another one of the things that City infrastructure has to react to uh and it’s another part of my future and my job is we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to to do this but you all know what happens when
You build a bunch of roads and parking lots and buildings is that you know whenever it rains the water hits those hard things and back before we were here the water would hit some ground and go into the soil and eventually get to the Brooks someday right well now rain hits
A roof or a parking lot or a street and it’s going right to the Brooks and it’s going right now and it’s not going to stop until it hits the brook that’s called storm water and when all that water hits the Brooks at the same time
During a storm we end up with a lot of problems one is it picks up a lot of pollution and gets into the Brooks and then gets into the bay the other thing is that when it hits the Brook at that speed it starts eroding everything so it
Picks up a bunch of sediment and then that all gets into the bay it muddies up the Brooks and it’s just a bad scene altogether in fact storm water is probably one of the first things that we built in the city after we built our streets because you know every time it
Rained our streets were muddy or whatever whatever the heck they were made out of it was just a disaster so we built catch basins and underwater lines and tried to get that water to the Brooks as as quickly as possible during a storm event well now we’re dealing
With the repercussions of that so the city of St Alvin has to reduce how much water rushes into rug Brook during a storm by 16% and we have to reduce how much water rushes into gron Stevens Brook during a storm by 24% and then on top of that we have to
Reduce the phosphorus pollution that’s getting into St albin’s Bay 22% from all city streets and 55% we have to reduce the phosphorus that gets to the Bay from stream erosion by 55% and one of the ways in which we’re going to do that is try and figure out
Places where we can get in between the water and the Brooks and stop the water treat the water do something to it during a storm storm hold it hold it in place for a while before it gets to the Brooks all at once that’s typically storm water
Treatment we um we have this whole area for rug Brook this map’s mostly up in the town see there’s the interstate this is a whole area determined by the state to provide that provides too much pollution or too much flow to rug Brook we have to deal with that
Somehow and then this is the area that feeds into Stevens Brook here are all the city streets on the east side the town up on the hill we got to figure out how to reduce the storm flows that go into Stevens Brook and gbook in this area by
24% um so what we’ve done is we’ve been working with Consultants on figuring out where are places where we can build something that treats water during a storm before it gets to the Brooks um here’s a map for or rug Brook all these little shaded these colored areas are
Sort of little subwatersheds where if we build something here we’ll treat all the water from this area and if we treat enough areas in the city we’ll meet our goals of 16% in 24% but it’s hard in a city like ours to find places where there’s enough space
To actually make this happen cuz we’re built out so when you talk about treating it what are you doing to it um I got a picture of that right here so um some normally it’s called a gravel Wetland and I don’t know how many of you have
Seen one of these but remember there used to be a lot of storm water detention ponds just ponds sitting there with water and just always had water in them and pretty much a bad scene well now we do different things we we build facilities that have a lot of stone and
Have a lot of um Native Wetland plants and sort of have the water Meander around or have to go over this thing before it gets to the the next thing and so storm water treatment normally looks like this this is one right after a storm where there’s still some standing
Water in the system but you see a lot of gravel and you see a lot of uh Wetland plants like um Cattails and things like that we call it a gravel Wetland so this is typically one of the things you would build so it doesn’t look like a wastewater treatment plant it doesn’t
Have a bunch of tanks and pumps and stuff but it is technically a treatment facility and what happens is that the water gets here before it gets to the brook and it gets slowed down and there we find other ways to get the pollutants out of it and then after a
Storm it slowly infiltrates back into the into the groundwater or into a brook so it doesn’t all hit it at the same time during a storm um so we found a lot of places in the city where we think we might be able to build things like this uh one of them
Is for instance you know there’s a this old vacant piece of land off of n let to drive in N Street where we want to build one that’ll treat some water from sech treat some water from the St Almond’s access Highway and sort of you know little by little treat enough of the
Treat enough water from these areas to meet our federal goals we got one on LNA drive that we’re looking to build this might actually be the first one we built you know if you’re on Lema drive and you’re driving by you’ve got all the sort of the warehous is on one side and
Then you’ve got woods and The Rail lines on the other well that those woods that little patch of trees is one place where we could fit something like this for storm water treatment but we’ve got a big one now this is a map that you might
Not be able to see very clearly but this blue line shows that if we build gravel Wetlands where those old cooling ponds are on Lower Welden Street cross from hotton Park we could treat water from half of downtown and down lower Welden Street this is our biggest one this would treat
The most storm water of all of the projects that we came up with so it’s a very important one and it’s one we’re working on right now to take those cooling ponds and turn them into a big gravel Wetland instead and meet some of our storm water goals doing projects like
This um and any questions about storm water well Main Street does have some little pockets so yeah those things along the Park yeah along the sidewalk there yeah they’re storm water detention basins that take some of the water off the street and Tre they not very big
They’re not very big we need so to meet our goals we need to go big and you asked how we’re going to pay for it the storm water utility was actually one of the reasons why we created that is to pay for projects like this so that we
Can go after federal and state funding but then we can use our utility for the local match or for any other right now the utilities being spent on the planning and the design and the engineering for these projects soon enough we’ll start building them um another infrastructure challenge
That we’ve been dealing with and this one folks probably know about CU we hear about it now and then is the combined sewer overflow how many people have heard that term before well so if you look at this map and you look at all these reddish pinkage areas on
The map see them those are the areas of the city where the catch basins are connected to the sewer system now more often than not when you build a storm water system you put your catch basins in the street and they catch the water and then the water goes
Underground and then it flows into a brook somewhere right or a ditch well many communities when they were managing storm water they just put the water into the sewer system instead which is fine because then that water gets treated at our wastewater treatment plant and actually that’s
Great that’s a great way to treat storm water if you have the capacity to take all that water during a storm the problem is we don’t and many historic communities have this problem of a combined sewer Overflow what happens is that during a storm all of that water gets into the
Catch basins gets into the sewers along with everything we’re flushing down the toilet or or putting down the sink and it’s too much for the system and it overflows somewhere which is nasty I mean it’s mostly storm water it’s much more storm water than it is sewage but
It’s not supposed to happen and the feds and the state are clamp in down on communities like us to eliminate this problem we don’t want to have a combined sewer overflow you don’t want to see the word sewer and overflow in the same sentence now this isn’t about our plants
Our wastewater treatment plant does have a uh shoot what’s the word it’s not overflow there’s a different word there’s a word for when there’s too much water coming to the plant where some of it gets diverted and it gets treated before it goes to Lake champ
Plane not as much as it would be treated normally but it gets shot with a bunch of chemicals and the ecoli is killed and all of that during a storm what’s happening in the city is that the actual sewer lines going to the plant they actually sech charge and they can’t
Actually get the water to the plant fast enough so our combined sewer overflow doesn’t happen at the wastewater treatment plant that’s not where it overflows does anyone know here where it overflows in the city hole Yeah there’s a manhole but do you know where it is it’s at the corner of South Elm
Street in lower Welden that is the lowest point in the city sewer system right at the corner of hotton Park that’s where the sewer overflows during a storm now we built something so that it doesn’t overflow into the street it overflows it just goes a little East right into Stevens Brook there right
Where lower Welden Street crosses Stevens Brook there’s a little covert that will overflow directly into Stevens Brook Brook whenever we have an overflow but if you recall like back in July no when did this happen no this happened um oh man I think it was January or December we actually had Flooding at
Lower Welden in South Elm and that’s when our overflow Culvert also overflows and so it does actually come out of the manhole at the intersection we have to shut the intersection down for a bit and then it drains down and you know we’re just back to normal so how do you deal
With a combined sewer Overflow what we really need to do over time is take these red areas in the city or at least enough of them and separate the storm water from the sewer system so that the rain water is not getting into the sewer system but there’s another there’s
Another cheaper way to deal with this and that’s to start building storage for it so we get about um I don’t know maybe a dozen overflow events during the course of a year when there’s a lot of rain or maybe when it rains and the ground is frozen or there are various
Different factors that combine to create an overflow situation and some of them are millions of gallons but most of them are not most of them are under half a million gallons well if we could store that half a million gallons during a storm and then just pump it into the
Sewer system afterward it would never overflow so we have a plan to store the overflows under hotton Park through a series of chambers that would hold half a million gallons put it under hotton Park put the grass back on top of it and you wouldn’t even know it’s there
Except maybe there’s a new manhole over in the corner what we’re working with our Consultants actually pivot this thing so that we don’t uh uh that we limit how much we would disturb the Steelers football field but basically this is the first significant step that we’re going to take towards the
CSO is to build storage for the sewer um and mostly storm water under hoton Park during a storm if we take that half million gallons and we store it we would eliminate more than half of the times that the whole thing overflows and then after a storm you
Just pump it into the sewer system and everything goes where it’s supposed to go Um so and then after this we’ll see when are we getting overflow events and then how do we deal with those to eventually eliminate the Overflow events altogether so that they don’t happen anymore um so that’s another thing we’re working on in the city in terms of infrastructure um any other questions about
Infrastructure stuff y oh sorry expecting climate change to impact the volum uh yeah most likely we’ll have more rain events so it is definitely something we have to address so that would mean staring more water I suppose well you know I think probably it would be you know that we might be maximizing
That site but we might have to find other places to do storage or to pursue the separation in eliminate those red areas from the map that I showed you but this will certainly provide like an immediate an immediate positive impact yeah so we’ve got we’ve been in the
Planning stages in a lot of these projects um looking forward into the future and it seems like we’re getting to the point where we’re going to start we’re really going to start building some of them which is a a nice place to be when when we really talk about
Planning the future of the city the title of the presentation um one of one of the things we’re actually supposed to do is come up with a plan for the city it’s called the city plan every every community in Vermont that has zoning has to have a
Municipal plan you need to go through a process by which you put together this document have some public input your Planning Commission your city council or select board work together to come up with this and then then you can have things like Z we’re actually in the process of
Updating our city plan because we need to adopt a new one in 2025 and by State Statute this plan is supposed to include information on a lot of aspects of community life in the in the city land use housing Transportation health and wellness neighborhoods Economic Development socioeconomic issues equity and natural resources um
Typically most of what comes out of this planning process is are things like zoning and land use but it is a an opportunity to have a conversation get input and talk about what the city supports and what it would like to see happen in all of these Realms which is a
Pretty wide array of what affects quality of life in the community in many ways it’ll say things like the city will have zoning that does this and then in other times it’ll say the city supports whenever someone else in the community wants to do that because we can’t do
Everything but the plan’s a good place to put those that intent that Goodwill those policies and those types of areas of support you know if you look at our plan right now it talks about the way the city’s laid out uh where we think you know how we think the
Neighborhoods should look you know making sure we take care of Transportation talking about some Public Safety Trends I highlight areas like um all this hill that we want to uh preserve for their you know as being a natural place to walk around and recreate and that sort of thing not a
Lot will change but there are some new things that have come up since 2017 when the last plan was done mostly Equity um there are a lot of new socioeconomic issues and housing is a huge issue right now so I think those are some areas of
The plan that will be receiving a lot of attention for the 25 update we did a survey that some of you might have done last fall and we got um responses from folks on questions like what excites them about St alans and what concerns them about the future and what do you
Like about your neighborhood we we received a lot of of support for providing more safety but liking liking our neighborhoods liking our downtown wanting wanting more businesses to come to the community wanting to find solutions for substance abuse and crime and basically what you what you would expect to hear but the Planning
Commission Now is ready to take some of these survey responses and go out to various different stakeholder groups and say okay this is what we heard from our survey but what do you think’s missing in the responses what what are you seeing and the work that you do that
You’re not seeing here because we need to know about all of it so we’re we’re using the city plan survey as a way to then attract even more public input and make sure we’re getting as broad a picture of what’s going on and what people think needs to happen as we can um
Online yeah it’s getting there yeah I think it it would be part of the yeah so that’s a good question let’s talk about the process for a second the way a municipal plan is done is technically T typically your your Planning Commission pulls it together and then there are
Some hearings and then it goes to your so in our case our city council and then there are some more hearings and it’s the city council that finally adopts the plan it’s it’s their plan it’s the city’s plan not just the planning commission’s plan so we’ll be having
Meetings on this and talking about it and slowly pulling it together for the rest of this year and we’ll put things like this up online and you know anyone there’s there’s a actually I put it back here we we have a web page it’s just you
Go to the city city site and you go/ City plan and we’ll have a page that talks about what we’re up to and what stage things are at we’ll be able to put these results there too and everything else that we learn along the way but a
Lot of the work happens at the Planning Commission but they want to talk to they want to talk to a lot of folks and and get a lot of input um we uh we’re trying to make this plan a little less um stuffed with text focus on just
What are the things we want to do a little bit of data and then a lot about what we’ve learned by talking to other people um I want to do most of the drafting this year so that in 2025 we can just focus on holding our hearings make sure that we
Get everything adopted in time that we aren’t under the gun too much but like I said the city council adopts it there’s going to be public input throughout all the meetings will be public and we’ll try and keep people informed Med as as the process goes on
Um what are some key issues that people in this room think should be addressed in the city plan any ideas heard someone talking about the need for senior housing earlier yeah um not not exactly something the city can do right but what we do in in a
Plan like this is we talk about why it’s needed why it’s important we put in statements of support um we identify some of the folks who are involved in it so if there’s ever a chance to go for a grant or to implement a policy that might somehow
Help make more senior housing in the community you can point to the plan and say there it is a l of right right that’s probably probably the section on housing is going to talk about that issue about you know there are a lot of different types of people who need more housing
Um the solution is just to build more of any type of housing doesn’t really right now let’s not get too worked up about if it’s this type or that type right now what we need is more housing because if this new house can be moved into by
These folks then they can free up some housing that might be more uh applicable just to some other folks that also need it that sort of spillover effect this is to what we need but it’s worth announcing that in Yankee Magazine this month I don’t know if you
All know but there’s a section that celebrates where you should live in New England and St alin’s featured y do you did you know that I saw that I don’t know where we can buy the magazine I don’t either but I know that when you go to their website you can see
It you can see it there you got to open the newest issue and you flip through the pages on your your computer and then there we are yeah but it’s pretty spectacular that we progress to the point that we’re getting at least England recog place in Vermont yes that is great I mean Wasn’t it’s it’s nice to get that uh I mean we know we’re on the right track we we know we like what we’ve accomplished um but it is also nice to see see it being recognized by those outside the city and outside the state yeah in adding uh so much housing how
Will that affect schools well you know the school schools are it’s interesting you know a school that a school that could have held a certain number of students when I was a kid now uh would be would seem overcrowded with a smaller amount of children because there are just so many more
Things they have to put into the building which is interesting so we do sometimes hear concerns from the school district about you know more growth and more kids but like we’re at capacity for children but at the same time when it comes to the way the state funds schools
The more students you have the um the more you get from the state toward your budget so um it’s more a matter of you know can you find a way to to serve an additional number of students with the with the facilities that you have and
One of the strengths of the maple run district is since they UniFi they can I mean they have the ability to um make use of all the schools in the district I don’t you know it’s not my not my role to say how it would work but at least
They have the ability to um to direct all the facilities that they have under their control to deal with some of these issues but I do think that you know I I it’s great to have more families with children and more children in general moving into the community but I don’t think it’s
Happening to such a degree that all new housing means many many more kids in many ways what we’re hearing is the folks that need housing are single single household like people who live by themselves so the housing housing is going to be taken up by households that
Have children as well to a high degree any other questions or things we’d like to see in the city plan are we perfect I mean there’s nothing to change we’re good we’re done we don’t really need to plan anymore Rich how about getting the an from to Montreal oh yeah that’s in there
Um you know I I don’t have any update on that I think it’s still some matter of treaty between border control between uh the US and Canada on getting a pre-check facility somewhere in Montreal and I don’t know I don’t know how soon that’s going to come about but
Um you know we we think that Del we think our federal delegation still has it as a priority what about bus bus service we to get some more bus service at some point you know I know that um there are folks who were talking to the city manager about getting Greyhound back into
Downtown I don’t know what the status of that conversation is but I know that there’s interest I don’t know what I don’t know what has to happen on Greyhound’s side to make it work but I think there’s a conversation there John there a passport uh want to
Stay with us we’re going to do everything we can to make sure they do I do know that it takes a long we don’t have that lady on our side anymore right yeah and that’s an issue but we’ve got gotten um we’ve got a lot of support from from
The three members of our delegation right now that they know it’s a huge issue for us they’ll do what they can and if the city has to get involved and build a new place for them then we’ll figure out how to make that happen but that’s a very high priority keeping the
Passport center downtown is a big deal for us so we’re going to work hard on that well we see a lot of people at the Museum yeah right waiting waiting you know they have to do normally 4 hour or more wait before their passport is actually ready for them to come back and
They’re often times directed to the museum yeah and they they got to follow them over St Al with the downtown I know it’s that captive audience I mean every downtown wishes they had people who were forced to be there for four hours it’s a huge it’s a huge uh you
Know we didn’t really know about it actually quite frankly um we didn’t understand what was going on until we started hearing the stories of these people from the passport center and they love it and they’re here to get their passports and we’re like oh and then then we realize we really realize
How much of a how much of a gem it is for our downtown I know when people visit the museum they will of course they told what can I do and people truly at what city looks like they amazed at the Museum they thought small town had a little shed
With a few artifacts people are truly impressed I know when we had a Civil War reenactment people really said I thought you’d have a few artifacts and this is amazing people who have visited from the immigration they say I’m coming back to visit here time and so
That’s yeah that’s great sure you know they said G Liz head down downtown you you’ll notice there are no electric wirers it’s all underr now and a lot of the local communities are trying to follow suit what St has done they come to us for I I live in SW we need your
Help all it takes is a good crisis yeah I’m sorry not to understand this but um what is behind the worries that the customs and immigration might be leaving well we don’t know about the inner workings of how federal Offices get located in different places but what
We do know is that the staff at the passport center has been um told that they’re probably going to be moved to a different location but it’s still it’s very preliminary and we think it can be changed and it no matter what it’s going to take a long time anyway so we have
Time to try and figure out um how to keep them here but when it comes to the immigration processing center that used to be at the bottom of Lura Welden street that we did lose that office it’s gone those workers are gone and the property’s been purchased by someone else to do other
Things and quite frankly like I said don’t waste a crisis um the the houses and the and the building the residential bringing more residents downtown is going to be the key uh postco offices aren’t quite as necessary anymore there aren’t as many people coming downtown for jobs anymore the
Jobs have left downtown to much degree but we have lots of people who are clamoring for housing and would love to live downtown not everyone wants to live downtown but many people do and the projects that we have that we’re working on like the Bell viw Redevelopment and
And the housing at Fonda um they’ll probably get leased up pretty quickly and now we’ll have many new residents and folks we know living living right downtown and wanting to go to a coffee shop or go to a restaurant or walk around in Joy Taylor Park and keep things looking vibrant so what
Is considered downtown oh well downtown the designated downtown is um from the uh the corner of brainer and Main Street to BFA and that then down Lake Street to Holy Angels and then it includes all it includes Kingman Street it includes part of Federal Street and of course it
Includes the park and and Church Street and that’s it that’s downtown but still a good size of the city the his district is what we call yeah includes the historic district and more yeah yeah the city’s a railroad building on Federal Street some hope for some that
Oh yeah something will happen there but I think it’s a matter of the market and you know they’re going to have to lower their asking price or they just haven’t found the buyer who wants it enough to pay what it’s being listed for um and I
Think that if we find an opportunity for the city to help broke or something there then we’re we’re certainly talking to folks it’s just we haven’t found that vision and all the puzzle pieces to to get it to the next step yet but we will someone will Jim Cameron not interested
You can’t get Jim to go after them well he’s kind of busy it’s a big building for Jim I mean if you don’t know any people that don’t know Jim Cameron he’s the person who fixed up the St albin’s house and then he actually renovated
City Hall for us and he uh he purchased the old court and customs house at the bottom of Kingman Street and so he’s the person fixing that building up um commercial on the first floor and eight Apartments that’s nothing to shake a stick at um so he’s he’s uh one of the
People in the area that’s well versed in fixing up historic buildings I don’t know I don’t know if he’s going to be working on that one or not let’s let let’s get that Courthouse fixed up first then he can go into something else is there any plan um or talk at the
City level about St Mary’s Church we’ve had some discussions with the church one of the issues that one of the part of their situation is that the Burlington dices doesn’t have a bishop right now what we’ve been told is that the dicese can’t make property moves unless there’s a bishop to make the
Decision so it’s sort of in limbo until there’s someone who can start making some final decisions the law offic gone and K guess man they’ve moved out of the upstairs and the Main Street yes and so that’s an opportunity for some housing I would think up there yeah um chances are
It’ll be housing when you look at the market I mean that’s where you make your money right now and there are examples of folks who have fixed up their second floors um uh for instance a pocket realy did that in the building that they own put put in some new apartments above
Their office uh it’ll take time you know everyone who’s been looking for a contractor knows how hard it can be but yeah I think that that you’ll probably end up seeing residences in that building as well there’s 22 steps up there there are a long way it’s a long
High ceiling up there that’s a well-known issue you know we have programs that have existed for a while to help with updating historic buildings to a code and dealing with things like elevators and Sprinklers and so there are there are things it could be used to to get it there for
Sure any final questions for chip chip soy thank you very much thanks everybody