November 14, 2025 – Economic Development Committee – Video & Transcript

November 14, 2025 - Economic Development Committee

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Okay, so we will call the order. It is 8.37 a.m. This is the November meeting of the Economic Development Committee. One may watch or may participate remotely with the meeting that can be found on the agenda. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote means in accordance with applicable law. This meeting will be recorded and made available to the public on WACAM as soon after the meeting as is practicable. So with that, we have five members here in person. So we don't have anybody. Just check one last time. Nope, still just like him. Okay. So we have five members in person, Karen Kelly, Needy, do you want me to sing out? And then Katie Herons, and then Jeff Vecchio, myself, Rebecca Stanizzi. So with that, I just wanted to welcome Needy just before we even dive into anything. New member, welcome. So you're like, you want to explain a little bit about your background and introduce yourself? For sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Katie. I actually grew up in Wayland, so graduated from my school here in 2011, actually with David. I left, moved to New York City, lived in and around New York, Philly, and abroad for a couple years. I have an MBA. I grew up in the lead strategy at Battle Farms, which is an ethical egg company. Spent my whole career in management consulting on the strategy and planning side. So Katie, do you want to introduce yourself? Just a quick, who you are, what you do? Just really quickly. Sure. Um, Katie Herons, 30-point-year-old. Um, and, um, I'm on top for the side care of the life, but no job here. Um, mostly the weddings, and that's now even a bad seat to a big mom, and then I have to start in the company with books, but it's important. Oh, it's not easy. Hi, um, I'm Jeff. Um, I'm sorry, I didn't catch your first name. Neetzi. Neetzi. Oh. Um, I've been in Wayland for, she's going on, uh, just over 10 years, and going in the Economic Development Committee about a year, I think. Um, I mean, I'm in real estate, uh, so I kind of, I look at stuff a little bit through that prism, and been working on, um, some stuff with Katie, and just some other initiatives in town, um, under Becky's leadership. So, yeah, welcome. Sarah? Um, I'm Kelly. Um, I am conservative with me. Um, my current venture is going to start on AI, and I'm simply through AI. Um, I serve on the ADC. I got involved a couple years ago when I heard it and sort of fell apart and got back up and picked it. Um, and, uh, I'm working on a lot and really not saying, I don't know what that is, but, uh, barely needed that. So, um, so, um, yeah. Happy New Year. So I'm Becky's Neetzi. So I've been chair for a long time. I'm from the EDC when it started in 2011, which is kind of shocking how long it's been. But my background is also real estate, but real estate development. So more in the building side and typically downtown urban Boston, um, but also suburban as well. So having lived right nearby, um, for 21 years, it was just interesting to watch everything that was going on in the Route 20 corridor and what wasn't happening. And so after town meeting or after town center got approved and it was brutal, um, EDC was started to kind of advocate and talk about different projects and growth and things like that and sort of a productive way instead of, you know, sort of fist, fist to cuffs in a, in a public meeting and, you know, right before town meeting. So, um, got involved in that front and we've been doing, uh, hopefully a lot of good ever since. So, and with that, introduce. Hi, I'm Robert Hummel, town planner. Um, you're reading planning, economic development, to transportation, to housing, to pro plan review, everything. So I am the white person in town for everything. Uh, I'm here with 10 years experience. I've been here with like the last three years, um, and trying to really build up from the ground up. So, and it's a good work plan and it's a part of standard town. Yeah. So, yeah. Thank you. It's kind of a good range of people, you know, David. Um, and so our other member is Valachanko who is, his work schedule is just really ramping up. And so he may have to step down, but we'll kind of, he wants to try to stay in it if he can, but ultimately we're kind of years out for a new member. If anybody hears of anybody who's interesting, who might be, uh, wanting to get involved. So, but yeah. And this is Jalen. Yes. Who you haven't met, have you met? No, but we know. There you go. Does everyone know how anything works? Just ask Jalen. Okay. I'm the communication president of the town manager's office. Yeah. Yeah. So newsletters, social blogs, everyone knows. Yeah. But now you're analyst, right? Didn't you just Yeah. Management analyst and communications coordinator. There you go. There you go. And the new person is Abby. Abby. Yes. I haven't met her yet. So congratulations. Yeah. Congrats. Thanks. I was just staying for public comment. Yeah. So is there, I don't see anyone. All right. So not seeing anyone for public comment. There is none. Um, and so first order business, we have two sets of meeting minutes. I circulated both by email. Um, the September ones are printout. Um, the October ones you should have seen before at all our channels and everything else. So September, any comments to those, anything that we forgot anything to add, they did attach the annual work. That's what we had signed off on. Uh, Karen, have you talked to the, the live up place? Since we had the recording. 80 cents in the email a few days ago. All right. I was just curious how they were doing. It could have been in my mouth. Good. The venue and nice. If you haven't been inside, it's really nice inside. It's really cool. Yeah. It's beautiful. It's really cool. When I drive by at night, it's packed. The legs are on. I just had a picture the other day. So I was like, it's just like the glowing orb of like people and activity. Well, I think it's a point in that, in that closet has something that's not a restaurant or retail, something where people can actually sit, do something and then, you know, linger. I think the whole point is that I think it's the whole point we've talked about before, I don't know, because it was just shared last time. It's like maybe in the future, getting some kind of legal license where you can have beer and people can kind of linger a little bit because you go down the street, you see exit golf and they have a bar or something. So like, how do people keep, how do people stay in the closet? Yeah. Like coming and then leaving. That's, that's the whole goal of that, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I think I should be on that topic because we'll come back to it. So let's, we'll do the quick cleanup. And then jump in because that's one of the topics down below. So, so any, no comments. Do I hear a motion to approve the meetings for September 12th? Motion to approve. Karen, motion. Do I hear a second? Second. 82nd. All in favor? Aye. We're all here. Aye. Approved. And then same for October 17th. You don't have those minutes, but you weren't here anyway. I said that. Actually, you, did you want to abstain? That's it. Should she? Does she need to abstain? She doesn't have to abstain. She doesn't have to abstain. Oh, okay. I don't have to know you weren't there. I usually, what I usually do is, I usually, well, if I, if I miss the minutes, I'll abstain. If I have to, if I can meet quorum, but like, if I don't have to, like, you're not going to hold someone back because that. All you're doing is reading the summary. Yeah. Okay. So, October 17th minutes, do I hear a motion to approve? Keep approved. Aaron, do I hear second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.
Aye. No. 第二. Aye. Yunga,? Aye. No. Amazing. So I, so, we've been having those ones. Er, so. We've been having, we've at least had Tower Manager that most of them. The other one, on the I, was the only one at the Life Check one, but we have Prop interview there. So. Mm-hmm. My thoughts? um i apologize for people who have done this but i don't think i've seen it i'm wondering if they're definitely don't want to add anything more on your jay list like but i'm wondering if it's possible i think i saw some photos in the little post but to also put like a couple photos on a social media on a community forum of just like a rah-rah that's opened like a photo from the opening do you need that photos or for the public forum for the facebook whatever um i i don't know i personally i'm just thinking that that would be a good thing to incorporate i don't know if jaylen jaylen's that's mostly her role i don't know i don't know if she has i don't know she's on those facebook groups because a lot of other groups are like a lot of me have to like log in and they have to like say i live at this address and they will like the admins will say yes you can you can join or not so like if it's something that's bad you would need to you can give me the photos jaylen does take pictures there with like um and if she coves can you then link to it yeah yeah just just just figure out what one of her and figure out what best strategy is to get what do you have one of your messages you want from us we can start right on the ribbon cutting email i think i do want to be cautious of is um like with uh a few of the new businesses in town that are connected i'll get us start getting a stream of emails that are like can you please post this can you please post this we know we post plus and so i think we need to create some kind of internal guidelines yeah for justice we don't want to look like we're supporting my business over here another another um of course any business is free and like and so this is actually the conversation i got into with michael and and the uvc when i said well send it to jaylen and then but michael basically said we can't post about business like this can't send up and to the town that was kind of my solution yeah and the town is there but um for the same kind of reasons they can't and so this is when it all circled back to let's reignite the small business association uh so that's where the um so i reached out to noise structures and also the uh i've been having discussions with the uh separate children of commerce and they're kind of interested to join with the wayland and if there's a kind of like yeah i've been had a meeting with the separate children of commerce president and communication chair what i think that's what she's the title is and they're just kind of interested to try to partner with wayland just knowing that this wayland doesn't have a strong base of like a community base of like an organization that helps local businesses so we're trying to flush that out with what that means and what like that'd be something that potentially we could be working with where wayland businesses could potentially join suffering and get some help potentially i will then they have a strong base yeah but yes they could help us out too and it's you pay like that fee but okay but who knows like if you have businesses that like ran online it's so very you know it could be helpful um do you want to bring me into this conversation for sure just as it is i mean it's very i had one meeting and then the next next one was having me like we're calling for that minute and it hasn't happened yet so okay i can i can let them know yeah just another and then i mean and then i think you can kind of be thinking about doing all it together yeah it's i mean super early but like it's interesting it has to do all the flags that you you see all the bands on the other route 20 and that would be something else like yeah sean brave and run just saying brave and run years yes no i think it's uh we can attach to something that's well established yeah that's a good thing yeah because we also talk to what's true it's going like the whole route 20 corridor not just that very also west and that whole green element so yes even if we're not officially tied with them but having that onward so okay so just to circle back about the photos of the river on facebook it sounds like maybe it's a no go because it kind of is the optics of like preferential treatment right i mean it's a new business so it's like it makes sense that we promote it i just don't i just think we need to kind of just figure it out well like just i would feel more comfortable if we created some parameters about like what we i think it's a good point i do one of those things yeah but i also have seen what happens when like then the requests are coming and it's like okay well we're not like marketing department so maybe it's like one photo of the actual ribbon cutting event that's it yeah on our page on our page yeah okay i'll email michael about that okay thanks i moved the coa to be in anything else what's happening uh any world say planes copy church if you copy church in the carol so they've been really uh stuck in my time it was for that way you know for me on that wednesday i'll give that three yeah three hours that i was the copy church so can i ask where that stands in general i know it's continued to the 7th 3rd but it's getting they both sides are kind of like yeah exactly we need to pull it up to make so we need a decision because you have you haven't used it a deadline that we have to make a decision render a decision like write the decision go down clark and with the afghan we can ask for the afghan for extension so it's you know goes back and forth but at some point the afghan can call the blog which at this point we're not we're not trying to delay it we're just trying to get all the information we wanted us to make issues with some more plans it was just like you know incorrect like my slavery line like eventually we need final plans that are correct so i think we're getting there the church also falls under the dover amendment it does yeah the dover you know what the dover amendment is the dover amendment basically is a state law that's basically anything that's school related or church religious education daycare and religious uses yeah you can the plan board can use reasonable requirements so if the afghan said be your height height is 35 feet but we want 36 feet is that reasonable if the board is signed so it's kind of puts in like a kind of like a judge's seat but they use reasonable requirements height setbacks all that stuff but they're not normally constrained with with typical like they they basically you know the carroll school on waltham road right there's concerns about all this traffic because they're a school there's not as much that we can do to to block it or change it necessarily just because then otherwise every school and every gym like everything would get blocked i want to know that one the care school is about traffic in stormwater and that's a question it always find the use it's just well some some of it a little bit bulk but i mean it's a certain admission to help people to us so it's i don't think it's this yeah
so it's always tough when people come in public comment and they they think that it's like a typical project yeah and they think that you know they can drag it out and it's going to be long and prolonged and but it's dover amendment to those types of projects so we're not we're not arguing about the youth we're arguing about how how like set up the party and circulation on that stuff yeah yeah so yeah kind of but there's been absorbing a lot of my time staff time to comments and it's been a lot a lot of work so you think relatively soon it'll pass or you think it's going to keep passing by i mean you have to finish up eventually because of the because the deadline and we don't want to this probably don't want to take forever we're not we're not trying to take this for months and months because we want we want to get off our plate too but we've also want to make sure we always have all the issues before the decision is right and make sure it's clean before we do anything so okay all right any other like new business or anything like not really but but um i think it's i'm not sure what's on the agenda but don't get donors jimmy john they're tearing down the roof down so they're they for a while they were not doing anything and then now they're like doing the construction on so that's good to see do you have any uh any discussion with them in the life of the i'm just curious but terrain at the front building they closed the fixed amount because they closed the property and then they closed the whole property one one at a time and then the front property kind of got to go to the bed so i think i saw we're getting the bridal suite group suite the train properties that the whole group was there with this could be a cafe the retail shop and then the wedding venue so that would be really nice to see something we use at that property tuesday meeting at the va they went to the sign application for the special program for the signs which is pretty reasonable i looked at seeing that being reasonable for that's what they want to do i think based on what we were me and bill's time for the design people i looked at they seen like if they had signs for each business they'd be smaller if they if they maxed out each side for each they they broke it down into different suites so i don't think there's a big thing that would pull that back but and also the cba this week is um townhouse yes oh hopefully they should apparently they you know it sounded good last time but they never weren't so they often struggle they they're down a couple of members and so it's hard if they don't perform they can't it's time townhouse the bistro that's going into yeah it's confusing that it's called townhouse and yeah i went to the new nail plays by the way it's great good really great for clean and bright they did an awesome job so oh so i felt like he said that there was this is burning at send luck so it was interesting yeah does it want to be 20 or 20 lots of intense yeah okay um all right so the goals if you take the first couple of pages the dollar ones so all i did was because i was trying to get through the the point for a fincon meeting i just took it and i highlighted those that were the highest ranked and yellow and then you know kind of one up to two just below two and then the orange are the two so it's kind of like these are just an average because i didn't get it oh you didn't oh sorry there you go you get the whole thing thank you thank you for the agenda uh there you go perfect sorry about that so it's just everybody's individual feedback on the left is the rankings on the right as things to spearhead but this just kind of pops up those issues that were the highest ranked so again yellow is anything from zero to two and then oranges are two um and clearly part of it is you know what people are able to take on and what they're interested in doing and clearly you know a couple of the the highest ranked ones are general categories and not necessarily specific so unfortunately we don't have david here um valley still haven't gotten his inputs yet but everybody else's are on the page and needy thank you for getting that yeah taking a stab and making some guesses that's great and we determine that we do have no tax we do yeah we're not we're not but i'm not directly getting any benefit correct uh yeah we're getting like three hundred thousand dollars well we're not but there's no money blowing from any kind of like etc like line but like it's not like we're getting 300 000 hours or something and like 25 at this point you're like a bank for the he's doing something productive yeah that's that's that's that's an issue yeah it's a major issue so that's one of the recommendations we have to the to the fincom when we meet with them i found that out that we have where i'm like what how's how's this how's this possible how did i not know each one is now i've been using this for years even if you even if you put one away like ten thousand five thousand a year you were at least you know ten years would have had two thousand at least so with this um as we try to perk up and of course without david here but what we need to do is you know this sort of consolidates our thinking a little bit um but we do have a meeting coming up december 1st with the select board kind of a check-in seeing you know any great and any uh larger initiatives that we want to be reviewing with them what do we want to do as goals um in the next few months um kind of going into calendar 2026 so some of these are already in process so you know basically the you know the reviewing with the fincom that's already happening um the kind of the zoning roadblocks um if we kind of go through let's kind of take them really quickly but um so fincom we've already done exploring tax-efficient new housing townhomes as part of it um improving the route 20 quarters below so those are all kind of part of that discussion with the fincom um improving the appearances of the existing commercial districts so that we have kind of several fronts um but ultimately you know katie have been working on getting some of the the visuals you know getting some of the code violations getting people to clean up their properties things like that so that's kind of on the actual physical cleanup side and then ultimately you know improving the route 20 quarter there's a lot of other things down below which we can we can talk about um but improving the appearances so that is that is absolutely a great that we hear a lot from people that they're not happy of how the route 20 corridor looks um but the beautiful thing is we you know you think about in a year it's going to be very different type terrain will be open i mean even next summer duncan will be open something hopefully will be happening at town center all those sorts of things so the first one that's really kind of something that we haven't done uh yet but clearing the zoning roadblocks um high parking requirements gas station community store ban that's also in um kind of how do we take away some of those hurdles to getting some economic development um it's addressed in the finance committee but the question is do we want to actually take some concrete steps so that was one that i wanted to flag as sort of a discussion point that we're not doing that we've talked about it but we're not taking active steps right now um as well as the next one explore one to two excess town land sites to fund town improvements to grow your tax base so again that's also in the fincom packet we'll talk about that but the question is do we want to take some concrete steps um and some of that may come out of our discussion with the fincom and with the select board so we're a little bit kind of chicken and egg and try to figure out some of these but part of it is a greater appetite um since clearly some of it is zoning and there's planning board who wants to typically be at the helm for zoning um so all of these kind of play in uh to some of those discussions on this um the next orange one is the planning for the economic development director role that we don't know when we're going to be getting those those bond funds um as we mentioned last time could be up to five years from when they had announced it so until we know i know it's painful um and given you know now that we're past the government shutdown and you know all this kind of stuff hopefully things will start settling down um but one thing we could be doing is looking ahead to when we do get the funds or for example as robert was just saying if we set aside some of the meals tax and did it which is what ashland did um so we can think ahead to when the money is there when it actually shows up do we you know we do we want to avoid being flat-footed and be able to hit the ground running so um the route 20 corridor so the the playground splash pad i should take the splash pad off of there uh but that's sort of in process uh and so part of that is getting the new owners into it so that's kind of ongoing um route 20 master plan and zoning advocacy or task force part of that is the funding from the the bond bill which would fund re-looking at the plan but right now it's kind of in the wheelhouse of the planning board um until such time is there sort of more consultant funds to be able to do something um if we wanted to um existing corridor cleanup we talked about that that's similar code administration um so a lot of these are ones that are sort of in process um except for those top three down below ribbon cuttings we're already doing highlighting you know profile businesses um in wayland post your social media we were talking about that a little bit we aren't really doing that we're kind of supporting the ribbon cuttings but not necessarily doing the article in the wayland post things like that so that's a question of are we proceeding with that so i'm just going to run these really quickly about flagging the ones that we should talk about and do we want to take action um assisting existing businesses jeff your favorite kind of deal with with lavins but you know ultimately that's kind of similar to also if there are new businesses as well how do we do we help them um surveys clearly that's it was really really useful when we were doing the uh the zoning for last year the question is do we do more of those um as we go forward looking ahead in 2026 do we want to highlight to the select board that we might want to do something like that um and then the other orange is on the next page um streamlining permitting for well-planned well-planned development these are you know helping out some of the the working with developers or proponents we are doing that um the question is the next one do we create post permitting survey to figure out our pinch points that's we haven't done we've kind of been talking with the building department but haven't done anything physically there so that's a question of whether we want to do that um and then some of the other ones are just uh you know the liaisons we should think ahead to 2026 who our liaisons are uh and then ultimately you know so exploring some of the state funding we always kind of have that on our um radar this one's particularly economic development bond bill but you know are there others that we could we could be doing or keeping an eye out for so with that quick broad brush overview there are a lot of things that are sort of in progress so the question is do we want to change who's at the helm of them now that we have media joining media it's a question of what you might be really interested in kind of filling in because typically when we're kind of topic it can't be more than three of us right because otherwise it'd be quorum right so how can we sort of divide and conquer um um and david's not here unfortunately but so we can kind of think through um with the introduction of a new member and potentially another new member um you know how we might want to kind of change some of that around so any thoughts of ones that are not highlighted that you may have thought were important that you know they're not highlighted here but you felt strongly well i'd say that the share street thing is something that the uh new owners are interested in so that might get resolved by as well i know you didn't highlight that but that's like at this point that week you did as much as possible to push it and they seem really excited about the share of streets so yeah if if it happens happens they don't do it i don't know by this point we'd be pushing the other money be asked for more time from the stage just to pull it off yeah and they seem like they're okay fine if it's from your owners well really one time so i haven't heard anything since then yeah so any idea when that information is going to be public when they own owners well i gotta get that get that from june again because she can't be in that one day at the public meeting and she said you can't tell me again like no you'll find out everybody will find out it's together so it should be soon soon we're very soon yeah they will they're buying they are buying it it just hasn't been fully released and it will be exciting when it does happen so i would say um becky the two things that jumped out at me are in the second section advocate for public polling i was just going to say that yeah and then the other one is the interim zoning design environment change it feels like low-hanging fruit and that that supports cleaning up the route 24 door right and part of the low ranking you know david when he was explaining it wasn't so much you know remember you explained last time it wasn't so much that he wasn't in support of it he just saw that it might be somebody else's purview but it didn't mean that he didn't think it was important so in as much as some of his where he had large numbers that kind of pull down the ranking um those two exactly are that that you know ultimately those without that as a as a condition then they would be one of some of our highest ranked ones so in this yeah in the second second category under improved recording order yeah exactly so there's a the advocate for public polling the fourth one is 3.3 but it's only because david was at an eight um interim zoning you know 3.4 but really only because david was that perfect right so if we threw those out of the sample section then clearly that with those would pop up as well does that work that's already happening so like some of the the public polling and stuff um that's how we got the zoning change for the um through pick up windows drive through news on actually weren't in town for that but um when you we got so that and that all came from a massive poll we got like over 1500 people just allowed one basically a lot of polls about their opinions about drive-throughs through or pick up windows yada yada um but it's very powerful right so when we have the date now let's see that 86 percent of people are in favor but it gets harder for uh opposition to win an argument so so the polling is really really powerful and we have really good reds into the community community we actually have um an email database of over 1600 people ebc specifically so we have a way in addition to social media and things like that so we have a way to reach people um so if there's initiative that we want to know like we think it's a good idea you know does the public think it's a good idea we have a way to do it and so then it's not just folks on boards and their opinions i wonder if that that kind of awesome movie got captured through surveys which did get pulled up orange yeah that specific one uh-huh yeah where are you seeing services and communications the last month on this first page yeah okay yeah let's see oh dave still put that that's definitely a little bit yeah these are killed right so moving forward you know sort of some of this focus is how we want to focus our efforts and that'll come into you know it always kind of evolves for us but in as much as we're meeting with the select board in as much there was a heightened sensitivity to that the first time around if we want to do some of that polling in 2026 we should just disclose that to them and say you know this is where we want to be heading so the question is you know some of those topics what do we want to ask some of those questions um so does it relate to route 20 planning does it relate to the playground does it relate to you know do you do a poll once town center the ownership is named to suss out some public feedback for them to be able to use i think that might be useful but i know karen did you have thoughts in mind you know if we if we want to give specifics to the select board and you may have to think about that a little bit but yeah you know we should just kind of run it past them yeah because that's sort of forward facing to a lot of people i'd also love to know what day questions about what the select board yeah and want to have feedback on
i think it's kind of like correct me if i'm wrong becky but i think we're kind of talking about two different things there's the surveys i totally agree about but the advocate advocate for public polling i think that is more in regards to like the master plan which i think kind of resides to resides with the planning board so it's kind of parsing those two things apart that's true which i think david was saying that the um the master plan kind of isn't with us it's with the planning board right that makes any sense do we want to stay away from that that's the question i mean part of it gets into the dollar value right so if we're trying to grow our tax base how long have you been working on the master plan three years at this point yeah it's like every month that goes by is growth that we're not creating growth that we're not getting moving forward so that's the question of the select board is this time is money right if we had had the master plan done and we already had zoning done you know maybe you'd be seeing more effective change out there right so it's that's a question do we want to prioritize that as a channel so i know you know there's always something there's always projects that come up and you guys get busy right so that was always the debate about having a task force or not that is solely focused on the master plan which typically you see in other towns that's the question could we reach the task force i think that's the main thing like do we want to push for a task force i feel like there was discussion about it and then i don't know where it landed there was some discussion on it part of it is kind of two-pronged one is the curb head sidewalk engineering so that's the more the nuts and bolts and that definitely have it have a working group tab whatever you want to call it working group is more and that's state and that will be a past funds last town meeting to do that and clearly the department of public force they need help because they have so many things on their plate and it's really high high level of involvement so that's that makes total sense to have a working group the question is on the on the master plan side and i think that's the question at the time it was talked through you guys really wanted to pull it back we don't have additional funding right now from the state once but once we do have that funding the question is how do we use that 100 grand to best effect to improve that master plan so again you know do we wait until we get the funds it lands on our door and we're flat-footed or do we think ahead of okay when that comes in do we have a task force when that comes in and even if it doesn't come in for two or three years how do we get that master plan done so that we can start affecting some change like because it takes time you know the zoning will get out and then you know ultimately you can publicize it but it takes people time to think it through and make those investments it's not you know it's not something they flip a switch and suddenly do so so i think that that is just an important like how do we think ahead where is that master plan and how do we move along because clearly from a tax perspective um it's just opportunity sitting there and it's not getting tapped into at this point so so add to select board agenda uh is that correct then yeah so yeah so of those things i mean we i weren't clearly not going to go through this whole list with them but things that we need to perk up and that we see as being important so um and it's you know part of it is not even as much the task force part of it we want to have more voices around the table but part two is just move we just need to get this moving so at this point we're already missing town meeting next year that means it's not going to be on until springtown meeting of 2020 seven seven so do we need to have a town vote to create a task force no no no but if you basically you can work on the master plan but if you change the zoning that takes town meeting vote got it so that's sort of the end result um but even just having a master plan if you know the master plan is sort of approved by the town somebody needs a variance in the meantime i don't know can you can have the zba issue a variance based on a master plan you can even use fans yeah they could i haven't seen here yet some of them but yeah so it's it's just such a process and how do we get that to move a little bit faster so um all right so that's sounds like something that should be picked up to them um finance committee we should definitely talk so as i talked with carol i told her that we were meeting with the fincom and she's like that's great because then you can come to us december 1st and and explain what the conversation was if you guys came to any conclusions all that kind of stuff so that should that's on everybody's radar is our growth right now is flat as a pancake you know so i mean i really want to flash out with them you know because you gave us that really great breakdown of where the town comes from and i want to understand if i just want to that that's something that's i feel like it's important for us to understand if there's other things that we haven't we can't see um and then to be able to again create this kind of pathway to communication to the public about um what is actually what actually creates value for our town how much zoning is actually dedicated towards we can't just endlessly build commercially we also can't endlessly build residential ways right and town center and there's there and right now so there's like such a story there and i want i want this meeting to like i want to make sure we uncover all our questions but also like what can we do of course too right so that's in sort of the looking ahead the question is do we want to discuss with them sort of the cleanup of the corridor i think we probably should because we want to tap into town departments and talking with the building inspector coordinating with drv um talking about the select board meeting or the pin so i'm talking about the select board being okay yeah yeah as we think of our goals again they may evolve but what do we want to get sort of blessing from the select board i also think that just back to the topic of surveys saying hey we would like to run like one survey here like i think that that would be a good goal and obviously we would run it by them get approval but that's what that's like what we're thinking of topics td
and i think the timing of the last one was really well i don't know if we want to go into that level of detail but like we sent it out in september and we were able to analyze all the feedback in time before town meeting okay well they've now kind of scooted it back so since we're advisory board they're now saying any article that we want to advocate to bring to town meeting floor through the select board has to be to them by october 31st so so that may be we haven't really talked about that logistically they just sort of said that right so let's maybe talk about that a little bit and say because you don't want to be pulling the line of August it would be spring then yeah yeah so yeah right so literally you have to sort of have your thinking together for a town meeting a year in advance yeah it makes that october 31st really tough so we might want to just ask them that again it's sort of ultimately if we have close contact with our liaison so our liaison is tom fagg every every board has a liaison
that October 31st may be tough to be able to actually get things done because otherwise because that does mean things have to be happening in the summer and that's hard it's really hard um ribbon cuttings i mean we can update them but i don't think we really need their blessing necessarily i think it's just sort of information that we're doing that um assisting existing businesses talking through so yeah i think of these liaison it was interesting i'm not quite sure why there was some discussion um in our mandate that they were talking about removing uh the idea that we're advising to other boards i'm not quite sure why and so part of that is being liaison to some of these other boards some of the key ones so planning board i think david might want to do that one be the new liaison there having fincom select board clearly you know our key liaison spot cva design review board like having those connections i think are really important um so i don't think they were trying to do that but i was not quite sure why what the genesis of that one was but i mean clearly of all of them we have pretty strong connections with all of them so it it doesn't make sense that we're advising and we're not telling them you know it's like we we are not directing them with what to do but we're definitely giving them advice so that's kind of our goal seems to be move everyone to share data and thoughts and yeah ideas absolutely it's kind of crazy that we haven't had a joint meeting with the fincom i think i mean we've presented to them but we've never really had sort of a joint meeting but crisis will do that to you when you realize that you have your tax base is not growing and all your costs are still growing um let's see yeah so those are kind of the key ones to perk up to the select board um right now i mean sort of your guys's key initiative katie and david was you know to do the playground but it's kind of unclear given the new ownership how or what shape that might take so i guess the question is do we get out a little bit ahead of it just so because it's probably going to be on town property the town clearly really does have to take the lead and so the question is you know do we get sort of their advanced blessing that it's we work with rec or whatever you know i think carol was wanting to know that it sort of drives economic impact which is our you know our reason to be doesn't make sense so we're in the in the mix um and so i think that we talk about that but do you get any sense like some of your conversations with rec or otherwise i mean what do you feel like you you and david would need to be able to move this advances as an issue well i think um karen and i have talked about this the most important thing is just making sure in terms of like the land and raytheon and all that history kind of working with the health department so i guess their blessing that we could actually do it oh so figuring out the environmental now exactly even as we wait for things to settle out i think that that's because it's a waste of effort to do anything else that we can't even yeah i want to say build put stuff on the ground it's not what i'm building yeah it's called the shovel the shovel into a sandbox take two feet into the yeah plant a flower yes yes okay so it's an edu on the property to be familiar with environmental law so yeah they basically cleaned it up but because there are some residual contaminants it's an accessory what uh oh what is it it's a big little shit ball yeah activity and use limitation there we go so there are there are clean soils that are on top of it so we should be fine but for example we were thinking about the splash pad splash pad you're excavating and you're doing piping and you know that would probably might be disturbing soils that are otherwise meant to be not disturbed right now so and part of it like the whole reason the community center is there because the prior owners started building a daycare and you cannot build a daycare on an aul property so i didn't realize yeah that's why yeah oh yeah yeah yeah so they literally cut the whole shell up and then they realized they couldn't do it and that's why it's that empty for forever you know yeah yeah so somehow there's some wrinkle that we were able to do a community center because there's not a playground outside or you know there's just things that you need to do and we may need to have you know you often see like rubber liners under you know playgrounds it's just safer kit for kids really but that may be you know sort of required environmentally but i think that's that's a good ask we should definitely ask that we can have a meeting it's a single meeting with our you know our lsp our licensed site professional and get that information with the board of health and just kind of get a good understanding of that yeah and then the question is if it does remain on town property there was some question you know do you start swapping parcels or anything else my guess it'll probably stay there so that you know if you get past the environmental what's the next step is it having the blessing to work with record is that or i even think like is it something that edc does or does the rec department take over because they're the ones that usually handle the building of playgrounds so i think they'd definitely be at the helm yeah i think everyone is so busy like we see this all the time right it's like how do we help them move it along yeah um are they in charge and we're assisting like what's the yeah but i think it's just the blessing to work with katherine i mean we all she's great right so it's just going so you know the select board said yes you should coordinate and help out katherine in that regard and let her take the lead or whatever it is right but then we know clearly that next step if we grab the green light on the environmental or we understand it then what is that next step and just so we can kind of move that along okay can i just ask a quick question on this because i just saw the estimated up with like commercial activity did you guys look into like the seasonality of it like actually we did i don't think we did it's really cold here a lot of you uh and i'm just nervous about like because i'm trying to actually hit through through like the toughest part of the year or based off of how people use playgrounds and outdoor spaces lost town i don't want you to do did you guys have numbers in that report we did have numbers on uplifts and commercial yeah were those pulled from was that pulled from the place that you went like third time yes it was like um i want to say watertown or something like that so there were local numbers
i think it also depends on like is it yeah but i mean the slash pad like i don't know if it's that starting in september you know so that's where i'm just like splash pad isn't going to happen oh
and actually one of the topics of today is changing the name of how we talk about it exactly yeah yeah but i do think just as an aside um i do think that the playgrounds because of climate change they are pretty much in not as much as like you know september and october but i do think that they do get a lot of use december march i'm just watching very february okay my personal thing yeah yeah i think that's right i mean we don't have usage data i'm assuming about it for those seasons yeah boys do you know uh i don't think they've got it but yeah i know it's perfect when i'm busting out all the time yeah yeah i would but i yeah as having kids in town i feel like there are more many people yeah you just need to get out of the house yeah yeah yeah there's a lot of people i also think we talk with it's on here but it's we were always talking about it clearly town center is always front and center i think one of the most important things we can do is being really close with that new owner and helping them in any way shape or form so um it's not necessarily on here but i think that we ask the select board that we make that connection and you know was there there must i don't know if there's going to be a single liaison from the select board um whoever that is like figure that out and then you know how do we make ourselves available which by the way um whoever the new owner is um ideally we'd have them come to our december meeting so you know let's get them plugged in right away they're closing soon we don't know who it is yeah it's not official right it's not public it's not public yeah it's not it's not a corporation so let's put that right it's not a zurich it's not a um rk wait wait what are those it's not a one major organization right okay does it start with bigger than a red box use words is it related to the word it's related to baltimore like no it's like cheap just kind of for like city names i'm like no that's not exactly true so i think it'd be more personal let's put it that way i think if we have some local boots on the ground that'd be really helpful to have someone who can actually drive an hour from the surrounding area to say hey i'm coming to the meeting or i can stop by and meet for you have coffee to kind of go for a town center it won't be like that's how we have to jump on the zoom phone because you know you're in new york city okay well feel more personal i like feel like someone who actually wants to be in the community and actually wants that you could actually see me shopping
um speaking of informational one thing we have had a few infographics and we're waiting for town center one to be able to plug in that name do we do we review what we've done with the select board and that we want to continue doing it or we just want to keep going in terms of the infographics yeah specifically yeah my personal opinion i don't i don't think that we need to spend time on that just because it's it's working we don't really need anything from them okay yeah because i'm just thinking like what are we focusing on so we feel like that's in a good place then i mean maybe we could print them all out and be like here's our forget what you were calling it no just yeah it's sort of there yeah exactly exactly okay anything else from a select board point of view that we should think about
i think i would like to give just like a little bit of thought to like um what surveys we'd want to run next and i would maybe i'll email what when is that meeting it december 1st okay so before our next meeting yes um yeah
you know what um i would i would be curious about is this this low-hanging fruit on the zoning regarding um you know creating some baseline design yeah um standards um i would love to get their opinion on that um at this point they directed phil sterling to work on it right they did they did but there are guidelines right they're only as good as whether people follow them or not right so it's it should be easy to write it into the zoning that's the question like do you push it to that next level or not i think it's really important when i'm thinking about something like that how does that how does the edc factor in on that does that mean that businesses have to take a long time kind of like assessing out what the design guidelines are so they're losing money like how does that affect the the dollars for businesses yeah i agree but i don't think we have to view it through that lens you're saying like the financial impact for them exactly yeah like why are we why are we thinking about design guidelines well and the complexity right yeah like it just is another hurdle that you have to overcome in order to do this somewhere else yes but but part of it is it's so much easier if you know what you have to do because otherwise if it's silent then people say why don't you do that you should do that you should do that like if you just tell them because the worst thing in real estate is if you know you're working on a project and you're told five different times yeah different things to do whereas just give me the guidelines tell me what to do and you'll get the product like just be great i think when you force it just for clarity yeah but even if you but even if you wrote it in as like for existing businesses they have two years or something to comply that this is a big part of why we feel what we feel about wayland and what happens because that route 20 which is the major vein through our town it's not it's not pretty and pin spots and we could fix it if we created some design deadlines for zoning that people have to hear too even if we give them two years pulling out a fence that's not a big deal mowing your lawn it's not a big deal like did you see in front of duncan a couple months ago where they let the grass grow as high as my head like that's not okay you know how does that impact the town financially oh because it attracts other businesses it makes more people want to live here we get higher home values but i think that that has to be the main reason of course of course and also i think too like um does having cleaner guidelines help attract businesses because otherwise they look at wayland they're like i don't even know like what they need so having it does it make it people easier for people to come here if things are clear you know i think wayland has its own struggles that have nothing to do with design guidelines
that that is sort of a bigger topic um like we i think i think most businesses are used to have design guidelines most towns have design guidelines around here or one of the only ones that don't correct no we do oh yeah we do yeah well what are they you can download them and read them yeah that's bill starling i've gone for me and you know it's gone for it because we need to lead the things that need to be deleted there's pictures of stuff like what is that picture of 15 years old oh that picture is where the old new cps is like we need to leave that like no one knows what that is it if you moved in the last five years you absolutely know club but bill is working on that right now they got they got the green light from the select board to do that okay but it's just guidelines that sit somewhere on a wayland like that are brought just like our code like everything else is something you download but it's voluntary but it's not right it's not right right but if you walk in and you say i want to have a sign that's 15 feet tall you can do it you can do it because it may say in the guidelines we like shorter signs but if they want a 15-foot sign on route 20 and zoning they can do it so my question is then do other towns have it in their zoning oh yeah oh that's that's where i'm from absolutely okay so the businesses are used to it yeah i don't think that's what's holding people yeah and it would clean up what doesn't well for those things we have a lot more issues we have we have sign companies that yes other issues just install signs yeah and then we're chasing them down yeah for months and months until we're out of rapid like we're spending hours upon hours chasing apps month by month by month and then we just give up because we don't have time to sit there all right well if it's not if it's there's some penalty yeah well i i don't have that we can but i don't i don't have to afford to do that i i want to get ahead of that so that it's just part of the legal zoning so that we aren't chasing people so that it's very clear cut um i don't know i think that's what prevents especially if there's gonna like we are envisioning more turnover in route 20 in the next five years right which probably will happen it will so like why not get ahead of this stuff i think it's expected i think it's what everyone else does i think these things are real eyesores and i think we can give existing businesses years to apply well part of it necessarily bringing it like so if someone has a sign that's 15 feet tall their grandfathered right so that whole concept but most of it concern is we haven't had a lot of turnover in the years and that's why it looks bad but as soon as terrain goes in like you're going to see that turnover and you want to catch it then because as soon as they put in the sign and it's new and it's 15 foot it's going to stand there for the next 20 years right that's that's why it's important so and it was really simple you know as we were talking through with bill bill sterling to bill steinberg i always do the same thing too but bill sterling they're like they're really brief it's basically the villagey look everybody loves the villagey look it's the signage being modest it's you know masking your hvac it's just doing like four or five things it's really simple it is not a whole rejiggering of our entire zoning code it's just inserting just four or five key things it's very simple but it just gives us that protection because otherwise yeah if there's just in the guidelines then it's not there's no teeth there so for the most part people do but you know when you start getting growth or when you start getting people are just putting up signs and yeah and we need that and we did do a whole thing about the about how people feel about route 20. well i think if you polled people and said should we you know of those five should we be mandating that signs are no higher than six feet should we be mandating that everything is village time should we be and i bet you would get we did we did ask some questions i have to go a little bit yeah yeah so that would be something that we could go on yeah i think it's worth
anything else come to mind on the polling necessarily our survey this is i know where we probably need to move on to new topics but i do think one of the main questions that faces wayland is are we a town that is okay with higher property taxes or do we need to make concessions and bring in more townhouses do we want to see some growth i think that's i agree i think that's and it's a real what's that there's definitely a divine talent yeah yeah but let's see what people are saying that i think that's that's the huge question facing our town like what and people need to understand currently right like so i think like where is the money coming from right now it's not coming from commercial yeah and if it and if we are a town that wants more commercial then there's a whole rezoning press it doesn't even happen because you have such a little zoning
and like to becky's a few years ago right storage nobody wanted it i know we should have done a poll back then because with any new project it's always this you know people who are against it who come out and people who are fine with it or in support of they don't know where to show up when to show up and they have lives like they're just busy right so you know with the church right now in rice road it's you know people who are fine with it they're probably not showing up at the meetings right but it's those people who are you know it's just that's just human nature it is what a lot of people who throw up in there yeah oh wait i mean oh wait 80 people it's massive yeah so but it'd be interesting to pull everybody on rice road but that's sort of a separate topic but you know overall with growth i think i think you hit it right on the head i think we need to be asking people are you amenable to have some more you know our growth has been flat show the growth curve are you amenable to have some growth to be able to bend your your taxpayer do you want to have higher taxes yes and it's like if you want to keep it exactly as it is today your taxes are going to go like that right so yeah it's just like the the thing that the trade-off right yeah everyone's gonna say it's right it's like what is the thing that you then need to trade off yeah yeah yeah and the idea too i think the mbta housing and all that right people get their adus and this kind of thing too right where people get have internal resistance to it but they don't understand that actually that residential bills are actually the financial engine of the town and so which i think is really i think that that is goes back to the infographic that we can get that data from the select board is that the commercial no matter how much we try to drop it yeah yeah what 11 oh it's too many percent yeah it's it's a fool's errand to try and focus on yeah you definitely focus on it as a piece in the puzzle but it's never you know we learned that when we started edc 14 years ago and like we're only at that point we're five percent of the tax base now we're 2.8 but that's showing something that's we're going in the wrong direction that that all that burden just shifts onto single-family homes and we haven't been building a whole lot of them so it just means it's all being pushed right are you in agreement that we need some more degree of commercial development in wayland it's part of the puzzle it's not gonna it's not a be-all no no yeah but i mean a complementary piece because i mean i don't see i mean there's zero commercial development in the pipeline you know so that's part of it gets back to the master plan how do we have more density and how do we get i kind of wonder if there's the mahoney site everyone has just talked about it as housing i just wonder if that's better suited as like another commercial plaza you know being on route 20 or at least mixed use which is a question to add in the survey yeah yeah it's private property i wouldn't speculate on the change to use on some of these properties yeah they they're everybody's entrenched in that one do you know the story there jeff some of it yeah i don't know where it stands right now 40b highly contentious it was signed off for the cba but the dispute is with the concom because there's a stream in the back yeah right so there's a hugely expensive wastewater system that's under their their order conditions would have their approvals and it's it it's impossible for them so now they're at the state level and they're duped out it it's gonna go it was really it was rental and then they moved in market rate and it's like all right well made it worse now right right because rental have been every unit would account on the ssi list subsides how the inventory knows now it's getting it's a market it's uh i don't think it's for the 60 60 yeah but that's why we approved saint aunts and say names about 60 units since 2016 probably been going for like at least nine ten years but if you had any commercial development it would have the same resistance that people live behind it right they just don't they like the garden center they like just greenery well you know any change is going to be well it would put a lot less burden on the uh subject in the wastewater depending on what it is as a use i mean if it's a food use it's going to be huge if it's you know so just back to the survey i wonder if that's something that we want to ask then come about that that maybe they would want a partner with us my neighbor is also yeah and i think that they have those same questions like kind of this existential question about our town so i'd like to do something to say yeah maybe they want to do it yeah yeah uh the only thing that we did not tackle it was you know kind of streamlining permitting why is our town difficult we're known to be difficult right well we had we had someone in place that was hook be doing helping with permitting but she had left the town and she didn't quite hit that mark but she was going to be hitting so and so now we have we're not filling her position for lane's coordinator and we're not sure what we're doing with that so it's now building and now building is down a person and then someone's retiring so we're trying to hire back though because we're retiring generate but that was just being straight building admin so so it's really a question of you know part of that is resources part of that's budgeting right so how do we look at that if we're down that person and maybe permanently who knows like wouldn't surprise me how do we spend more of that in how many years that'd be done and i'm in the planning and i'm like day one i was like no this is not okay i'm just thinking like facilities so for people who are coming in to the building department to get a permit right and they have to go to border health and they have to go to the cd like whatever they need to do right so hopefully they would be talking with you and there's not that many of them but you know for example i'll give you a perfect example is saint anne's got their approvals right we're like oh great so when are you starting you're just worrying waiting for your financing to come through it's always a process but they were stuck at concom because there was some weird dispute between the state level and the local concom local concom wanted something the state level wanted another and the developer was stuck in the middle like why is this happening like how do we where are those log jams because it always gets hung up it's not necessarily in the whole process it's always something that somebody didn't realize they had to do or it's just something gets stuck in an issue everybody is wholly focused on getting saint anne's built because we need it for 40b and it's a great project but yet it got stuck in concom like why why why did that disconnect happen so part of it when it was the polling after a project goes through do we pull people after they get their certificate of occupancy because they never want to answer before then right because they don't want to possibly you know piss anybody off but do we pull every project that gets major project that has a ceo how is your process you know do you do that questionnaire then i think that would be the most useful because part of it is having an anary there to help shepherd through but part of it is just the fundamental we're a difficult community to work with we should how do we that's the thing we shouldn't we shouldn't be but i shouldn't be but let's figure it out is that the disconnect is it with you know whether it's for the health agent is a concom agent is the board itself is it the rules like what is it that's getting people stuck there's a lot of reasons structure like a lot of towns will have someone who's on the chain to help conservation planning and kind of like a pyramid pipe that we don't use but but like it goes down the chain we right now we just have all these different department head conservation planning building and now on the same line and they you know go to the town manager else so there's some there's some disconnect there there's a lot of issues we're trying to deal with you saw that one as being really important and given that we've lost an area before we were hoping thinking that that was going to be sort of the glue to help but especially with the loss i would elevate that one because we've got to be able to be a partner to these people who come in the door and yeah we have to hire a good staff recently a lot yeah you know not training we've had good staff you know we said how to feel like how do we elevate and how we motivate and increase that people we have and it's obvious and possibly i think the town is proud of who we hired but we just gotta elevate you down a little bit more yeah i think i probably want to approach that first through listening like conversations and follow it with a more standardized poll that can build that database yeah time yeah i think we should know what that's your point what are those kinds of points yes yeah we've been just putting together the poll all together it's just meeting with you know talking with nate talking with others talking with you everybody right and getting that input to be able to inform that i think absolutely how should it look like how does it look right now right like actually what is what is the process yeah it's not great it's not great yeah we've had issues where things are approved by the planning board and they get a conservation and then they get changed and then i found out at the last minute and i'm like now you come back come back to the planning board because you've changed your plans and this is not being approved and like oh i didn't know that and just like that that's one issue and then other things which like you improve something and then like the government is like almost ready to be you know released and like wait time out they need to do xyz before they get their bank commit and they haven't done so and so it's like it's a lot of communication issues and everything now that it's online do you guys have a portal to see that or no because that was the whole point well that's now that it's online you can but i don't see it when they're going to get a building permit like they have someone say someone building a a house and they would bad example and they have special conditions i don't see the i don't see that building permit for the house and it's the only way i would find out is that after the fact you release that building permit for the house i don't i don't sign i don't sign up on building things digitally or uh and at the time i've been pushing pushing pushing that someone would say just give me give me every birthday i don't care if i if i see a hundred and a hundred of the 200 permits but if i catch that one that we've missed that's that's what's working so we'll work on it okay but like uh one other thing globally and part of it you hear this every single time our zoning code is a mess has there any been any discussion about overhauling it yeah yes like are we trying for funding for that do we need funding for that how do we need funding for that yeah i don't know that on time to go for it but uh i think we just did a whole round of it to clean up things that are like completely wrong yeah the spelling all of that stuff so the whole like eight pages of zoning changes there like things are missing things are needed fixed but the whole site plan area needs to be fixed it yeah and then you can just bring it to another level i mean communities have really done good zoning they have visuals that you know there were visual examples ours is just like you know it's just like a pound of paper just landing on you like it's not very user friendly so you know that's the question is yeah yeah just the last three years i'm trying to slowly modify the zoning by alarm since i've been here so i didn't hear it a lot but i'm trying to take one bite of it that time once it's done is that more like and i don't know where our like talent policy is on ai i feel like that's an area where i feel like ai has come a long way uh and that you could take good examples and be able to feed it into like chat with that and they also even do visuals like there's schools that build you visuals i feel like that's something that expedite through i think right now we need funding we will have the staff and time to do it let me point in the lane 1.5 right now so meals tax you know tax exactly i mean it's like how do we target i mean it's a short funds in the new video i said in hawkington's advisory and by the environmental committee the first thing is here the meal tax we're going to put it into a fund you guys decide how you want to do a bit you got a staff few years you want to fund it you want a staff you want to do upgrades and signs like grants so like the new fund that's exactly what they did they took the fund and said here you go here's your new committee figure it out but you guys want more money and i just it was mind-blowing when i found that we did have that we had no tax and just not a penny it wasn't any touching where does it go and just there's a general fund table i mean we've been i've been down on staff and like we could have been used some of this because like let's we could have we could have had could have helped fund something a planner half a planner in some day it could have been could have found something in the last you know 10 years but at this point there'll be loads to let it go right but we're going to have new between terrain and items yeah like that stuff all right so what i'll do is you know all of those that we kind of highlighted top of the select board i'll put an email and send it around we can't talk to each other but if there's something that was missing or if you had another thought or whatever just add it because otherwise we're not going to have a meeting between that and december 1st so um but it is a joint meeting so we'll be posting it as a joint meeting so it's really unusual we have joint meetings usually we just meet once a month but this month we have it with the fincom and then we'll have it with the select board so i think it'd be good if we actually appear in person you can be remembered if you need to but uh ultimately um just plan to be there december 1st so as soon as we know a time i'll let you know uh but yeah so i'll summarize those and we can kind of have our have our talking points as we go to the slide board all right so that took a lot uh the joint finance at edc so that is on monday we are meeting at the council on agent ah so exciting this is so our pass to get in the door so the door will have to be props because we're realizing it's a public meeting yeah so the door will be propped but we're in room e which i'm not sure what that is but i'm sure there's a sign or something but well i'm in room b next week and i i gotta go the monday and figure out where this is how to use this the zoom because that reminds me myself well we can't we don't have a zoom way cam's going to record but we don't have a zoom because so many meetings are on monday yeah yeah so what we do and plan but we have to win hydrate so i'll figure out how to use it oh because you're going to meet over there well unfortunately yeah the only room is available uh cpc 212 yeah conservation but it's a complete package right all right so running through a lot of the other ones clearly the goals was a biggie so that's good that we'll be talking with the select board um so the the joint one i did slide so before i'd given you data and these are kind of slides getting on a page so as the slides um they are kind of stacked as we look at them on a screen i introduce information over time so it's not like everything goes up at once because then you know people are reading and not focusing so i'm walking them through it it's popping up on the screen um but otherwise you know at the end of it at the end of it then they have this 15 slide thing that they can then go toward so you can talk about this a second or so it basically um just walking through it quickly just wouldn't cover so it's just this is our 2.8 percent very depressing which we talked about so we have to think more creatively um river's edge and all the oxbow these are just the metrics of how much of a difference it made like basically creating 40 million dollars worth of value for the town from eight acres that are underutilized like we need to think differently either with our own land or creating that value so the townhomes now has a visual of uh the metrics we were looking at before how it compares to commercial and not what do we do with townhomes so this is the slide so after the the one about the issue economic engine the townhomes how do we change this and so part of it right now and Robert you'd be a good one to comment to this our cluster development guidelines or zoning you know it's special permit right five acres and it's five six things it's very large and it's like it's really like it's long and drawn out you have to literally draw a standard subdivision and then show what you want to do like why are we doing this why are you spending the money to design what would typically be there with single family homes it it just it's so it adds cost and time and it just it's that permitting drag that pulls people back so i know that you have explained this to me several times and can i put it in my own kindergarten terms so that i understand what this actually means because i think it's important um so the zoning right now is that if anyone wants to take existing land land they have and build a townhome they have to design it so that it is bigger than it actually is or so if you have to have a minimum five acres right so you can't just take like a one acre like you know next to i hope it's called luigi's um jindu right and they kind of wedged in next to the clock shop on one acre they waged them like ten you can't do it that was a 40 b like that's highly unusual but if you had if you have five acres and you want to be really responsible with it instead of doing five single family homes that eat up everything and driveways and asphalt and everything you do you know five ten townhomes on one side and the rest of it stays open space right you know a good example is the one on um uh so yeah the one in your clay pit is the house that has a historic house in the front and you have the four like dwelling in the back right so i understand like what it looks like what i guess i'm asking is the zoning right now makes it complicated than anybody very trying to do that i'm trying to understand like how you explain how the zoning needs to change so right now it's x it needs to be y well really the key is really the reason why an mbta and adus they make it as of right so as a right means that as long as you follow the rules it's pretty pretty cool it's predictable if it's special permit it's just a chance then it's up to chance and it's up to whoever's on the board who shows up neighbors show up neighbors and data like you have a great project and a neighbor come next door and says this is terrible and then they side the neighbor and you you lose out like yeah but if you but if you change to what so if you change the zoning so it was as of right but you were very clear in what the rules are again people just need the rules so they design once and they know they can get it done like everyone knows they have to design but if you did your cluster and you said okay it's got to be set back a minimum of 50 feet and we you know remember back when we were doing the self-storage article there was a guy doing the conservation no solar compact closer whatever it was that's what he was trying to do as a right because they struggled they had this property they went to planning board it just didn't fit in any box they just couldn't get it done but if you just the key criteria is typically the neighbors are concerned about what can i see what you know how is it going to affect me on traffic what is you know what is it going to look like in my neighborhood but if you have five acres you can cite those so there's proper setbacks and there's woods and you know like you're not building right on top of your neighbor so if you do those things as following those rules you should be able to build okay i don't think the zone changes you're making as a right regret exactly so the special permit just means that it's a you know long story here um also does that mean additional or is that just uh additional yeah they put a hundred six units that are adds up right and it's easier to meet yeah yes again most people if you're building something just like when you were doing your house just tell me what you want don't have me design it i come in and find out you wanted three other things or you know i just just tell me what you want i'll design it once and i'll build it you lived it right yeah everybody does so it's if we want that as a product nobody's going to do it here if it's so convoluted so expensive so difficult and you might not have certainty you might not get approved and also five years as a right you don't get approved specific as of right zoning for town homes yes okay yes yep so that would be the biggest thing and then you just need to think through okay what are the typical concerns how do you protect against those but as long as they meet those guidelines they should be able to go but that's why the state did mbta all of the zoning has to be as of right that's why when we did river's edge alta oxbow when we were selling permitted land it was way more valuable that it was as of right like they knew there were tons of rules but they knew what they had to do and knew if they did it they would get their permit if you're entering in a process a special permit you might not get your approvals okay and you've lost all that money and all that time and you're like i'll go somewhere else right so that's the as of right is the biggest um and then you know ultimately some of the the requirements within it it's getting into you know that's really getting the minutiae but having to design it as five single-family homes and then show your plan it that's just adding money it's just it's it serves no purpose right so how do we make it easy but most importantly have it as of right okay that's helpful yep so mbta community zoning so with this technically our numbers that was concerning numbers technically by our numbers we can have 904 units the number that will go off but well these are the acreages right and that's what the zone yeah i mean you have to go back to them because they're not completely right but this is this is for acre i mean that's been approved yes so we can't change it like we've we've dictated the zone and we've dictated what the unit for acre is so it's actually quite significantly more than 750. it was more than it was more than it's in the 800 right but it's more than there's more than than we'll we'll first have it's just just the way the map it works out and really that we had to do it but i mean just don't try to come back that much but if so town center comes in they have 11 and a half acres and their zoning says they can do 27 units an acre they can do that right yeah so that means incremental what already exists this is this is incremental but alta oxbow so that gets in the next slide yeah so with this one it really gets into okay that's the you know the 400 units right and then this is what it's roughly worth like it's just spitballing right the average unit value over at alta is 334 000 on an assessed value so this is that means it's worth you know 800 no sorry 300 million so all of the mvta zoning is worth twice our commercial districts just to kind of put there with mvta zoning okay oh we'll we'll do it's a thing it's a thing so the problem is you know we have all this potential value that we could build but we really can't part of it is already built although oxbow is already built right now you know with meanstone it's basically it's theoretical that you could build it but it's highly unlikely it ever would and deed restriction is happening at town center so of all of our mvta districts instead of being able to create you know 3.7 million dollars worth of value we can create less than a million so how do we relocate some of those districts how do we get either we get town center that um deed restriction released or if we can't move that district somewhere else like it's just ultimately there is value there um and it's putting density in the right spot at the right amount right we're never going to build another alta expo it's not going to happen right but ultimately you could have more density on route 20 west over near longfellow versus you know somewhere else in town like you you can it's an average so you can put higher density where it makes sense and you know kind of evens out a little bit lower density somewhere else but so there's a ton of value sitting there in mvta communities which we have not tapped into and right now we are precluding ourselves from tapping into um so a quick question that comes today you're the visioning meeting for the school i wish i know i wanted to know like anyway that's typical like that's some of the arguments are to come up and handle the kid you know the schools and kids and this kind of thing yeah i'm just curious yeah that well part of this like this these townhomes townhomes and alta expo they don't generate the kids they don't generate the kids they really don't how many kids are in all talks where are those stats so that was school committee so i asked before a year ago and there were 16 and that came straight from the school department i was supposed to say but yeah so you know you're not supposed to disclose where people live but you know we had done a study beforehand saying well there might be up to 25 kids that was in the financial impact study yeah there were 16 i've heard right now there's nine okay so overall that's like one kid per grade you're not adding a classroom right you're not adding a teacher it costs this much like there's an average amount you get half of that from the state we're not paying the other side we're actually making money on those kids as long as you're not adding so many more that you're adding on to the schools and the teachers you're actually making money that's what people don't they don't necessarily get but enrollment is shrinking also that's that's something else to bring to the table we gotta get those numbers yeah yeah so you know part of it is that's always the gripe of yeah so that's the beauty of townhomes is that you don't get a lot of kids you get some but majority of it's retirees people want to look close to the grandkids like whatever it is it's you know they're downsizing they want to spend half their time somewhere else it doesn't generate a lot of kids which is exactly where the costs are are you saying strictly with condos or uh apartment units um well i mean mill creek is doing you know rental townhouses i heard they're spending like seven to eight hundred thousand dollars a unit which is insane yeah but they're making their revenue we're gonna get more of a tax bump if they're sold if there's condos you know yes like to like yeah you tax the stuff individually versus one you're gonna get more you're gonna get more tax revenue out of individual condos than one arms oh you're saying whether the townhomes are rental or not or you're saying yeah homes versus apartments no no no i'm saying if the townhomes if you did townhomes if they were rental versus condo you're gonna increase the tax base a lot more by doing condo yeah yeah yeah so this point because it's so expensive to do it they're going to be renting those townhomes at a high value which then will get a higher valuation typically it would but like in weston they're doing rental townhomes because they know they can get a ton of money for them so the value will be higher than your typical townhomes somewhere else but but i agree with you so about that and i saw that learned a lot of what's going to drive when they fall all boys drive that we consider them vta and we have been since school that's in here that's that that one is that would be in place right so is this for except that you're proposing this for town-owned town-owned so part of that is that's one of the things is um so our concept so far so the big three right so just we can kind of explain those three but the big three are the altar oxbow lessons townhomes and mvta communities those are the biggies right the other tools and toolbox economic development increasing our tax base by 25 that'd be a lot right from commercial districts increasing your density you're never going to double your commercial districts right but if you can increase the density by 25 and the value by 25 what does that look like and then new revenues talk about meals tax and rooms tax and then creating value by smarter but as we get into then it's the high medium and low impacts and part of the high is orchard lane i give exactly that example alta oxbow we made money because we own the land we permitted and we sold it and then we also make money on the tax revenues right if we use activate one of our land parcels like orchard lane we can get some of those land revenues and then be generating that any controller too so if you set the zoning and or you let's say you take a big huge three spots in town and you put three different spots in your control of it and you put some new multi-family overlay that's not mvta because mvta has its requirements and you create your own whatever you want to follow multi-family overlay you get three properties so your past test of spot zoning these multiple places and then you put on your own dwelling units whatever it is and your own guidelines then you would have full control of it yeah it's going to be a double hit you're going to you're going to fastly improve the value of the land on the open market and then you know you have a fast track to a new tax base exactly exactly so you have to figure out what's the place in this town that you would want to rezone for multi-family for that and i don't know and the mvta it just gets so tricky because you have to like we clock to buy anything and they have their own requirements but if you create your own thing but you can even put mvta on town property why not like it's gifting value but we own the property so we will dictate what we want to see there so orchard lane you can put mvta there it's 15 units an acre take five acres is 75 units no one's ever going to build an apartment building there right but we're the owner and so we can dictate it we can say just like we dictated at ulta oxpo you'll have this many units this much affordable that you know we say exactly what it is and that's how we sell the property and it's a deed restriction right so we can with that value then do that right so we could put mvta district there if we wanted to we don't necessarily have to but your whole spot zoning thing and blah blah blah it just makes it easy that ultimately for us to dispose of land we need to make that vote really decide what to do with it there but like zoning is money why are we just giving our zoning away to private property owners like what are we doing here why are we giving some to ourselves so um so the high and so i just kind of put like summarizing the numbers of you know these sorts of things could generate another 2.9 2.4 you know another million dollars a year like those are the high impact things the medium impact is you know if we're if we added 25 to our commercial districts you're adding 600 000 a year i mean it's just that the needle should move should grow but it's not that's not we're never going to to to equivalent we have to double our tax base for commercial tax it'll never happen and then the low impact is kind of the meals tax and the rooms tax how do we collect some of that money and target it for a signage fund in an economic development officer you know whatever it is like rewriters owning whatever it is like take that money that otherwise just falls in the big dark black hole and actually do something really meaningful with it so you know overall another 60 grand is not going to make a huge difference but if you target it in some you can basically just slingshot that money and make it make it make sense make it have an impact and then the indirect impact is always just in the background is you know generating revenues but then also just thinking differently and how we create things so how do we build smarter we build smarter by not building it's too expensive for us to build right this is why we were talking about buying 14 west plain right this is why you know when we did all to oxbow they we did the permitted land but they did all the cleanup because for them it was so much cheaper than what we would have had cost for us to do it right so if we want to do something at town center instead of building our own town hall then you know the second floor above the hardware store has the ability to have a second floor have the developer build it like whatever we can have somebody else build it just saves us a ton of money right so it's like we just need to be smarter about that make the school as a visioning or be really curious it's like the high school was just done right very technical labs all this stuff you know high schoolers elementary schools are pretty basic things they're pretty basic rooms right why is it that you know if you owned a house you live in your house you lived in your house for many years have you just let it go and not done anything and then it gets in such state of disrepair you're just going to tear it down and build a new one no you renovate what you have right and so how do you actually take something smaller you know if you did orchard lane and you had five million dollars if you cleaned up the entry in the hallways of each of the three elementary schools they would look and feel totally different the classrooms themselves are just boxes they're plastered with paper like as soon as the classes go in like you can't even tell what the walls are because they're just covered up with all the educational stuff right this used to be a school too this used to be a school you know so it's it's just like how do we think differently like we always think when we want something it has to be brand spanking new why do we just need to rethink that because we don't have a huge commercial tax base to be funding that right natick has a whole beautiful new you know fire station and city hall and all this stuff because they have native mall right so we don't have that as a driver so we just have to think a little bit differently maybe so you know do you buy a new car do you buy a used car soon as you buy that new car as soon as we built that new high school a year later it's now a used high school right right it's that what are we spending all that money on right so sometimes you have to because your systems are so bad or because the building is such horrible shape whatever it is but you know can is it being looked at in a very simple way where we need simple things to look at it differently but so how do we save but ultimately you know how do we offset costs when we want our next playing field and carve off a little bit of land do some townhome plots and it probably pays for the playing field and those tax revenues pay for the maintenance forever right how do we do that town offices things like that and then the creative public partner partnerships like the playgrounds how do we not you know not rely on tax revenues necessarily but figure it out so the proposed sports center is another thing how do we share some of our land so a private entity can come in and do something the town pool basically did that because the town didn't have money they sort of did it as a standalone entity they did come back a little bit of money um you could even on school property you could do teacher affordable housing your costs are your personnel your personnel's highest cost is their housing why not do some housing for teachers right it's like how do you do these things that can create value um it's sort of an untraditional way but so that's sort of ending but you know so the conclusions is we have tools in our toolbox what growth do we want to create and where what pace do we want the growth growth to grow at and then how do we educate so it's embraced and we build as a community which is exactly your point because we have to do it together we have to make these decisions together because otherwise it's just we have to have that and that polling will tell you a lot right if you send this ahead of time i'm going to walk through it this is a ton of information you guys have seen it multiple times so i'm going to show it and then hand it to them at the end i'm going to tell them you'll get a print out of this but just to be able to walk through because they don't even you know like the whole townhomes thing it kind of needs to settle in a little bit whereas if you see on the page you're like it's just going to kind of blip past so are you thinking it's so much that they should have it in advance or no i was just thinking it might be good for them to start to digest it a little bit and then we may get a little bit further in the meeting and see the good time but i i don't know whatever's what's typically done and whatever you think is best i was just thinking like that i know it's always that balance yeah i think at this point he knows that we're doing a presentation um and there will be a handout so at this point it's monday so but anything in here that as you were looking at it so now that's a visual um one thing i realized that we forgot was one thing that as i listened to the minutes or listen to the meeting for more time for the minutes was um the whole value per acre like right so i put on that you know at town center there's 21 acres and it generates you know tax year per acre yeah tax value per acre it's huge like townhomes it's just off the charts as opposed to commercial is not the density is just not value and at this point yeah i would be i would be surprised if the assessment the assessment will probably fall yes because i know those are bought of a certain value and i guess it's probably lower so our assessments were to lose some of that going back to some of the stuff too we also have resources where those colleges and and uh programs massive programs from planning they're always looking for projects so that could be also be something too i think tufts came up this last spring i just couldn't figure out exactly what project to propose to them but there's things you could do can always reach out they're always looking for projects they need to have real experiences before they join the workforce so route 20 master plan yeah but i want to like a lot so i don't want to like but northeastern so there's a guy who did mbta tim love at utile so he teaches there and they last year year before last they looked at needham framingham and ipswich and how they looked at and literally approached it as a city looked at it for mbta communities which is a huge undertaking but it's you know you get the you get some crazy stuff students are just kind of all over the place i did that board all the other stuff but tim love is really good nothing ever happened with the project and this western mass town nothing had happened and then it's kind of sat down on the bookcase and it was on the website and i was on the website so like it's it's tough well part of it too is that you get the results and you do something with it we always do our master you do a master plan it's on the shelf nobody no it's like when we were doing self-storage there was a master plan that was done for to do it it had been done 20 years before and nobody knew what was in it you know it's just like you know unless you use it it is a tool but you need to also use it and make it make it happen but i have a nice question yeah um so this is awesome the data is super helpful it's also a bit alarming but i guess my question for the monday meeting is do does the finance committee know that like the vast majority of this is going to talk about how like commercially there's not much to do and then like the vast majority of it is residential uh expecting us to come in with more they want anything that they are agnostic they like how do we grow our tax base correct so that's that's literally the meeting okay so and part of it too i mean you say it's alarming it's the number of units that's alarming i think both adding the number of units is just a lot yeah just doing some quick backing out the path that's like 12 to 20 depending on how many folks per minute 12 to 25 percent so the mvta is 10 so every every every 10 unit you have to give an affordable unit are the mta every sorry say what we're talking about every you're just worried about number of people i know but you're worried about affordable housing i'm talking about we're out and the mta is it's capital 10 is that that 10 so maybe it'd be 10 units you have to give a four unit so a number won't grow won't grow larger it'll just say the same right yeah i think it's more just number of people that's a massive shift well we need more we need more housing because any more housing for people who work down with donors or work at the coffee shop but totally still won't afford you still i know i know it won't change that rubber but to your your point i'm sorry it's to your point this is sort of it's what's possible what actually gets built is a whole nother thing right so we need to pick it so part of it what growth do we want to create and where if you have these tools what tools do you we're not going to use all the tools like so that's the whole point of putting it in context yeah of okay where do we want to be directing our efforts to push that growth it's not we're going to hit every single button and we're just going to explore the world like it's that that won't happen right so is that the concern that it would be so no i think my macro question is just more of like uh i guess my understanding was the ring that was a little more on the like commercial tax base side and i get that it's a smaller proportionate relative to driving growth and so i just kind of understand the intent of the meeting like more macro everything's on the table everything's on the table okay it's macro because we are we are facing huge tax issues over the next 10 years yeah yeah as well as i'm doing right as well as commercial properties if we did allow like mixed use i'm not sure how much of help but some of these properties could help i don't think it's too little too little you might get a little square foot you might add like 25 percent it might add half a million i'm not saying anything but but some properties that are just i don't realize if they can they can rebuild and have a fair time yeah no i mean as if there's an ancillary benefit with the commercial too it's not just about the tax base it's about like you know do people want to come and live and live in town yes yeah you know i mean look at all the surrounding communities you know they most of them are vastly superior in terms of like retail and commercial amenities and stuff like that so i mean there's an ancillary benefit too like do people just want to come keep in living in town it's just all residential i think there needs to be more commercial development it feels like you mixed use or standalone or whatever yeah but robert my question to you is um where do we stand with the i'm sure becky you know too but where do we stand with the balance of the um current affordable housing requirement in wayland i mean can the can the town support for mark um straight market rate housing right now or is it going to balance about five years away from the extent is which would what we prevent number of down because we want to stay at ten percent because we're at ten percent right now so if we're adding housing we'll want to be sure that we stay at so if we if we're just let's just say a hundred unit market rate project right now because that that would that would trigger the requirement for ten more affordable housing yeah yeah
it's all right you guys have a macro question of like yeah when i look at my brother's been to weston for example um and what he pays his house is 2x the price of mine and he pays 80 percent of my taxes and as we have we have all the same costs like we have all the same infrastructure i don't think of weston as like a native like it doesn't have a native mall like it's got any like community center you know or like center sheriff and so he's trying to figure out like what is driving such a massive deficit and railing relative to a place like weston where their schools are better than ours i would argue um or just as good would help me understand why we're so behind relative to a place like lesson because you have so basically your real estate tax bill is it stressing you out is it stressing your brother out where he bought it's not stressing him out right if you had a two million dollar house like you'd be fine like paying that if you had a two so if you have a million dollar house in wayland he has a two million dollar house in weston and you're paying the same taxes if you have a two million dollar house in wayland you're paying twice the taxes right that's that's the problem i agree and i guess i'm trying to figure out why though when their commercial infrastructure looks really similar to ours because they just have the valuation that support they have more two million dollar houses our average value of house so if you're dividing it across then you're basically having the same burden at a million dollar house right so it's you just don't have that pie to spread it across right so the whole point i was just saying there's a note in here too so if we made our commercial districts better yes you'll have the commercial but arguably it makes your town better so even if you have two percent more value in all the residential homes because it's a better town million dollar house you get twenty thousand dollars more sounds rational right that's like a million six every year but it's not new revenues right everyone's boat has just flowed floated but you're still spreading across the same pie across the same number of people unless you're expanding the number of taxpayers it's still just going to be it's just esoteric yeah i mean you're like if you increase the value of the homes across the entire town that's more than you're ever going to get by building by building new but it doesn't reduce your tax bill that's the problem because you still have the same pie everybody's house is worth that much more your mill rate just goes down you're still paying your same tax bill you're still paying your right right that's two different problems though are we are we trying to make an argument to what can we do for tax relief or what are we doing to increase the tax revenues of the town that's like two different things yeah well i mean tax relief what do you mean well i mean if if we're trying to give tax relief to the residential taxpayers in the town by decreasing the mill rate because we have a bigger tax base but but values aren't increasing so it's not a wash or we have in the discussion we just want to increase revenues for the town you know right so so we're just increasing exactly that so if we're not increase the number of people sharing the pie we still have to pay for our pie right so if 95 of it's residential and five percent of it were 2.8 and commercial side right so if you increase the value in the residential side it just means as a percentage they're paying more of the pie right and right like before when i started commercial was five percent commercial was paying five percent of the tax base and the revenues now it's 2.8 why because our residential homes have increased in value faster than the commercial well there's also been a lot more building on the residential side so you're we haven't grown as a town like you look at our population levels we are flat as a board man but we'll get all to oxpo and that's that's no yeah yeah yeah i mean that's all residential revenue so that's going to make that spread even more um yeah but it's but we're but that expands the pie so there's more people paying that right somebody from the outside this new project is paying that million one not the rest of us yeah i'm just saying as a as a percentage of total revenues for the town i mean commercial is going to keep on shrinking because commercial is not not growing either in value or in square footage well if we do add in square footage then it will right that's how do we get that commercial to be coming back up so it's a more robust one percent but yeah it's just like how do we create that value that then is paying that tax bill instead of just taking the same pie and spreading across the same people i mean like what's the ultimate goal like we want to increase the tax revenues to the town but by not putting that on the individual homeowner exactly exactly right exactly by adding more homeowners right in some targeted reasonable way like ultimately it's i've never heard anybody complaining driving down mainstone and driving down rice road i hate those townhomes are so god awful ugly they're not they're set back they're very tastefully done if we did another pot of 50 somewhere set back from adjacent neighborhoods like whatever it is it'd be fine but i mean are we just assuming that all that housing like let's just say we could build x amount of housing are we just assuming that it's going to be absorbed like that because people want to talk to wayland or you know is there a balance there where you know there needs to be some more commercial development for people to absorb that housing you know that's why you know that's like concrete's a more expensive town because you know it's like they have like beautiful little town centers they have little commercial districts um you know people spend more to live in those areas so it's all part of the puzzle yeah absolutely absolutely i i just i just think that we we need to have some sort of focus on intertwining some commercial you know with and that's in here yeah that's in here without a doubt well i know yeah yeah it's you know i would argue that it's a medium impact i i would say if that can get like intertwined with a high impact you know on the residential side so there's like robert was saying you know have these projects but it's four times the impact on the other side it's like high medium low right like all of all of the whole foods closet is going to look radically different again from now radically more resources and even town center with the new owner is right but i mean at the end of the day terrain is only one tenant but you know your point about like people want to live there because they're like shopping and cool stuff we're going to have some cool stuff like you're now this it's going to look well the town center is going to be it's it you're not going to see the dial move much in that yes it's going to be new ownership but at the end of the day it's going to have the same look and feel there's going to be no i think it'll change yeah i think i don't think to any measurable degree oh i think that's yeah yeah why i mean if it's 90 full like what are you what are you going to do what more can you do to that place unless you put housing like above second floors and stuff well from your impact that you're talking about increasing the appeal to people who live here i think that will radically change i think the tax base is not going to change no i'm saying i don't know how the appeal is going to change oh i think so why what are you going to do it's a brand new center programming curating your tenants bringing in another restaurant oh yeah if we get the play playground well the playground yes but that that's that's more us and i mean we can work with the new owners on that which but if you're thinking about people moving here who are like when they're sitting with the real estate agent they're like what's in white land for me to enjoy and then it's like oh like yeah you know we you know we're running yoga classes outside right now on town green and you know what i mean like they're it'll just i think i think it will be radically different i also think apple plaza that's about to get like completely redone yeah yeah i mean that's going to be nice like i don't i don't know that these new owners are going to like implement all this community programming i think they're coming in to operate it you know we're guessing like just as a commercial shopping center they're not looking to come in and and provide outdoor i mean they might work with us on that stuff but they're not coming in to provide the town an amenity and do outdoor yoga classes and so not yoga but they're i think they're very energized yeah they're really coming with a lot of energy and really yeah this is only a new five-year plan yeah yeah the best retailers know how to bring people there so it never really brought people there yeah like if they get it then it will it will be a place that people have different skill sets they have different like there's different skills that they'll tell us
so if anything pops up in your mind like that you didn't see whatever um but ultimately so we will meet there seven o'clock so the entire fincom will be there so it will not be on zoom because all this there's so many meetings on monday but i did get way cam they'll record it so we'll be able to to do that seven o'clock seven o'clock in ruby wherever it is it's tuesday is the uh townhouse cafe bistro it's easy yeah yeah yeah zoom in line that keeps going on there any of these other any that we need to hit towns how do we talked about existing conditions i have not heard anything about um i do i'm going to start prepping an email to go out to our database yeah um just updates there's been a lot and soon people will hear within who the new owners are exactly so i can leave a blank spot there and also a nice spot for town um um the old comms market what's it called oh townhouse um assuming they get approved yeah it's a townhouse it's now at this point knowing that i was driving there's generally working at like three minutes earlier like there's no way to get coffee correct this is so disappointing it's so disappointing i was driving like i'm not gonna i could drive down the donuts i'm not that very good wayland but like if there's nothing in it close to the townhouse grab a cup of coffee and just like and then they get to work i mean there's no small shop commercial space in wayland that's the problem you know i mean you're not going to get a coffee shop open in santander it's just not going to happen yeah but there's been places that like juice plays that been some interest in that what are your small shop options in wayland if you're a business owner like you're gonna go you know the auction away one town center where the the the the rents leave overhead is too high and you have no visibility from the road like there's nothing else yeah oh it happens it is but it's it's very hard to start a business in wayland if you're a small business owner and you need just like a small shop space and what are you gonna do like even if you wanted to yeah all right so it could have a grant system using using the meal tax yeah there's so many possibilities i just yeah but there's still no space for them to go i mean you give someone a free space but if you don't have the space you know the question is can we even create that space oh it's a question no i mean i think i think it's you know there's got to be some encouragement and developers to like you know invite so our next meeting is december 12th that word for everybody you should have an invite in your phone i think i put you on it yep so that's still good for everybody all right so we should be meeting back in the select board meeting room um so anything else before we adjourn not do i hear a motion to adjourn katie motion terry second i can karen second all in favor i want to be a revival we are adjourned at 10 29