better just set do my security settings try to W it off but you know have you been Rec yeah my kids are there now so yeah why there I have we have a winter CH so where are you inck now you us to be well actually we're invol we're at the end of long that's I thought okay hello everybody thank you for attending today's uh land use Summit light where we're gonna have a presentation by horse Ley Wht um of the next steps of the climate resilient Carlile um Grant funded MVP project so um seeing a quorum of the MVP core committee and as chair of the MVP core committee I will call the MVP core committee to order um and I welcome any other boards and committees who have a quorum here to do the same to three um I well we didn't post it though yeah we didn't post it either we won't Del how trust we have three members here um no I posted the MVP cor committee um and then I suggested the other boards and committees post if you thought you'd have Corum um all right so I will let you figure out how what you want to do about that um and in the meantime I will turn this over to Ellie Baker and Gabriella Spitzer they're here from horse Le Wht group and they're going to share presentation on next steps for this project we don't have a for we need great thank you um can you hear me okay in the room and online yes yes great um thank you everybody uh my name is Ellie Baker uh as Julie said I'm with horley Whitten group I've seen some familiar faces here I think there's some new folks too that I haven't met yet I'm gonna um share my screen here and I just have a a brief presentation to go through um today let's see if I can do this properly I think it worked um you seeing the screen great um so today we're we're calling this a sort of kickoff to our deep Dives um and so I guess I just want to make sure a that everybody's comfortable we are recording this the purpose of this is to give all of the different boards and commissions in town uh sort of an idea of of what is coming and what our information request and and interactions hopefully will be uh over the coming uh month or two in particular um so as I said I'm uh Ellie Baker I'm an environmental planner with the horley Whitten group I do have my colleague here Gabriela Spitzer who is also an environmental planner with the horley Wht group and we have been working with Julie and a core team uh to kind of go through the climate resilience project and I want to give you a today just a little bit of background for anybody who isn't totally familiar with that process I know many of you are um but because this is being recorded we wanted to give everybody kind of some context here and then we also want to lay out a plan for how we're hoping to get some uh really solid uh interaction and feedback from the different boards and commissions and others that might be interested in this process as we move forward um so today's agenda as I said is just to give an overview of the climate resilient carile product uh project and process that we're going through uh talk about some what we're calling Deep dive meetings that we'd like to do to dig into some of the um real details of of recommendations and what it means to make resilient Carlile changes to your codes um and some Logistics on those meetings so that folks can have this meeting uh and the PowerPoint that we present as sort of a reference laying out what's coming uh in the next step so quick meeting today this is more of an informational meeting um and we're hoping to learn you know from here on out we're really hoping to learn a lot more about the work that all of you and your boards and committees are doing uh and how you are using your different rules and regulations uh different codes um and how we might make improvements to those that work for you uh that meet your needs um so just a little bit of background on the MVP process for anyone uh who hasn't been too tuned into this uh of late so this is uh some basic information probably many of you are familiar with it but we just wanted to make sure everyone's sort of on the same page here so the MVP or Municipal vulnerability program in Massachusetts is a um program to help communities organize their plans and ideas for climate resilience so it works sort of hand inand with FEMA has a mitigation plan um which you all have which is design which is designed to help community reduce their risks of Hazards um so several years ago carile went through a process uh with the MVP program to kind of do a rapid assessment of your different um resilience vulnerabilities and identify some action items um so out of that you generated lots of goals and actions and ideas that came from that so some of those priorities included things such as protecting Water Resources um supporting farms in town and agriculture promoting Energy Efficiency icy uh protecting some of your critical infrastructure uh increasing resilience to power outages we hear a lot about uh down trees and uh power outage concerns and what can you do about that um there's also uh issues with uh drainage so understanding your drainage issues how that uh interacts with uh infrastructure flooding concerns and how you might address them Forest management so these are just a number of the sort of goals and actions that came out of that mvp process so again that was a couple of years ago and then uh the next question that comes out of that is okay you have these great ideas and goals uh but how do you actually move forward with them so one way to move forward with them um is that Carlile received a grant from the Massachusetts MVP program again to take the next step to kind of go from okay here's some nice ideas to here's what we're going to do about it here's some changes we can make in the code to actually make those improvements so that's where we are now um so this process climate resilient Carlile um has been outlined uh sort of under the guidance of the of a lot of work from Julie and the municipal uh vulnerability preparedness uh sort of core team that's been working with her um but climate resilience Carlile is an implementation project to make sure that carlile's rules regulations and bylaws reflect the important policy goals that were identified um so local laws and regulations get written and Rewritten or adjusted over time right for example electric vehicles are new and there aren't enough charging stations so maybe a community wants to add you know the certain percentage of new parking spots have charging stations that that must be attached to them um sometimes there are there are competing goals so for example maybe there was a community that valued its Street trees and had nice you know really tall trees and then there was a nice St and lots of trees lost limbs people lost power there were houses that got damaged so the community established a policy that all new trees would be smaller varieties no more than 20 feet tall when fully mature so these are just ideas um but in setting those goals they also have a goal for larger tree canopy to cool the community and you can see that as as you sort of think through these examples of changes that different municipalities could make um you can see that some of these goals that you identify may be competing or they may require adjustments in different parts of your code and so what we want to do with with all of the boards and committees and with your help is to kind of think through these goals sort of get them into alignment bring you some suggestions and get your feedback on those suggestions and help us um help you to make decisions um that sort of um prioritize the changes you want to make and sort of align them um so uh the goal of this project as I said is to work together to review carlile's rules regulations and bylaws to make sure that they're aligned with the climate goals that you've already set and where there need to be additional sort of tweaks or adjustments um like adjusting your development standards uh in the example I just gave um we'll make those suggestions so that's what we are doing that's what our horley Wht team is doing with uh Julie and the MVP core team is to come up with these suggest questions bring them to you um and sort of expose any of these competing policy goals and talk through them with all of you so that we can get feedback um so just to give you an idea I know a lot of you uh work with these different whoops work with these different codes uh and policies and are familiar with some of them um but here is sort of a listing of the many codes and policies that guide development and uh just guide the functioning of carile as a community uh you might be super familiar with some of these from your work uh on a given board or a commission or your own personal experience with you know a project or a certain issue in town but there may be others that you're not familiar with at all and so that's part of what we're trying to address in this uh work is that we want to bring people together to look at codes uh sort of across the board uh you may be familiar with some and not familiar with others and it's really helpful to think about things uh sort of across the the whole um umbrella of of codes across town so we're going to be going into more depth with each of these codes uh and uh we'll be we're calling these sort of our Deep dive meetings and that's really what we're trying to get at here is to present and introduce this idea of these Deep dive meetings that we want to have with each of uh your boards and commissions before I go further I just also want to highlight uh in particular um the planning board is sort of the the host of a lot of different uh important development guiding rules and regulations and I want to call some special attention to that um these are some special regulations that um you know guide the permits for development in town and these include the regulations that I've listed here um which describe the permit processes and requirements for various types of development projects in addition you're probably familiar with this but if you've been working with this in any way but the additional design standards for a number of regulations are documented in one single document which is uh referenced as attachment a um this attachment uh the the regulations that have this attachment a are denoted with this asteris on this um slide so you can see what I'm talking about um but we anticipate that a lot or or possibly much of what we talk about is going to impact uh or require some sort of adjustments in attachment a these are design standards that apply as you can see here to subdivisions common driveways conservation clusters and open space Community uh development projects so um we anticipate that these will be an important element in what we're uh you know what edits or revisions we uh recommend and some of the discussions that we have and then the changes made in attachment a um if we do go down that route would also have some Ripple effects that would need to um you know require changes elsewhere or just sort of review Elsewhere for consistency so I just wanted to um make sort of special uh attention to that so I just want to kind of walk you through an example of what we're talking about here um the kinds of questions that we're asking we can say that we're experiencing for example more intense rainfall more frequently car's flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management agency are 10 years old but not only that they're based on data that was gathered even earlier than that and that data reflects the conditions of the past I don't think I'm telling anybody something they don't know this is uh you know kind of an issue with some of the FEMA Maps but a lot of the regulations in Carlile like in uh any community in Massachusetts or elsewhere uh use the FEMA Maps as a reference point uh so FEMA flood maps do not account for anticipated climate projections or changes that we might anticipate in terms of rainfall um flood um flood elevations Etc uh or even some of the changes that we're already experiencing so one suggestion that we might uh look to consider for example might be adding an additional buffer to the FEMA flood plane to make it a little bit larger than what is shown on the maps or another option may be to formalize a process in which the flood plan boundary could be expanded based on observations of flooding there is some element of this already in the wetlands protection act and regulations if you wanted to go ahead and make such uh adjust adjustments let's consider what regulations such a change would impact where in your code would you actually need to go and make that change so this slide shows just some of the regulations that reference the flood plane or relate to storm water management which is also uh vital uh element of determining a flood plane so you might have to look at regulations that address floods flood Hazard districts um septic systems the Board of Health regulations subdivision rules and regulations that um have uh elements of storm water management in them uh open space or Wetlands protection so this just gives you an idea that some of the changes that may be identified or recommendations that may be suggested for improving the resilience in town have sort of a ripple effect and require us to look through various regul rules and regulations for consistency so with that whoops with that I just wanted to uh kind of turn now to a little bit of the logistics uh of this project and we started this project uh with Julie basically back in January and the first stage has been to gain information and learn more about your priorities and goals in Carlile as well as start to review uh we've reviewed quite a lot of your ordinances uh I should say bylaws uh regulations programs policies we've had a public meeting um the public forum that we had back in February uh and we've we've been Gathering a lot of information about how things work and what some of the concerns on the ground actually are in Carlile um so now it's really time to turn to Consulting with staff and Boards so we are looking to uh have meetings with all of you uh over the next few months to really kind of consult with you on how things really work what are your concerns how do you actually use your codes uh on your board and where do you see the opportunities um to go you know one step further or two steps further in terms of improving your resilience so um we will be bringing you recommendations to these meetings but we also and we will be providing them ahead of time so you can take some uh time to look at them but we would really like to have sort of working discussions with all of you these will not be um you know formal meetings informational meetings such as this one this will be much more of a discussion to really understand what might work and understand if there are reasons that some of our recommendations wouldn't work um so just to kind of close out this schedule here you'll see that we're going to be bringing some draft recommendations um and then we will consult again continue to consult basically with with the boards and commissions over the coming year there will be another public forum in early next year uh and then a final report uh next summer so these Deep dive meetings that I've talked about uh we have uh scheduled these so thank you all for your coordination and help in scheduling these um we are basically trying to kick off these discussions with all of you in a way that is open to the public uh we certainly want folks to come if they're interested it's also open to sort of cross-pollination from other boards and commissions to join any of these meetings um but we will be focusing on different issues at different meetings so that we can focus on the issues pertaining to specific board boards uh at specific meetings otherwise it's a little bit um overwhelming to try to cover everything Al together um so some of the discussion will be uh I wanted to give you a sense of sort of how we're going to run these discussions and what it might cover and what you can bring to the table some of the discussions will be more General about sort of how the rubber meets the road for you and your work are you seeing challenges with conflicting values or conflicting policies do you see one board doing one thing and then you're trying to do something a little bit differently or you have a certain resilience goal and um you're you're not seeing that same uh goal coming out of other boards and commissions we'd like to hear about that um but most of the conversation is really going to be pretty specific we're really hoping to bring to you um the preliminary recommendations that we're coming up with and get your real feedback on those um so as I said you will be able to access those ahead of time um so that you can do some thinking um but these will be kind of working sessions so the logistics um we've planned four meetings uh right now so uh resilience is obviously an interdisciplinary topic right it touches almost everything that we do and as we mentioned it can result in competing policies so part of our goal in having these conversations is to make sure that you're all learning from each other so I don't know how often the different boards and commissions in town have a chance to kind of go to a you know another meeting or see how the other boards are approaching things but this is a chance for you all to do some of that um sort of sharing um with that with that in mind everyone is invited to all the meetings that we've listed here um though as I said they'll each be aimed at a different group or or set of groups um one thing that we talked about is the possibility of each board or commission identifying a liaison if you know might not make sense for everybody to go to a different board uh meeting right that's kind of overwhelming but if you have someone who's particularly interested from Board of Health who wants to go to another meeting you could have a liaison that would go to one of those meetings and report back or or report in with ideas um so that that would be helpful um this is a lot of meetings it's a lot of time uh you all are busy and we understand that um so you know if there's something that you wanted to talk through separately you can certainly reach out to us as well and you'll see at the end of this presentation we have our contact information um but we would love to do some of this information sharing at these meetings so to get to the details here Monday May 6th we have a hybrid meeting which means it will be in town hall but also uh online with the local emergency planning committee uh so this is at 10:00 for approximately an hour and uh you can get the information I'll go back in a minute but Julie has also created some signage which I'm sure you will be seeing around town that has links to access each of these meetings um there will be a meeting Thursday May 9th at 6:30 which will be uh a big one this is with the planning board Conservation Commission Board of Health and the zoning board so this is uh I think going to be a a busy one um but we again we encourage folks to sort of cross-pollinate here and and come to meetings and understand what the other ones are are uh considering on Wednesday May 15th at 7 o'clock we'll have a zoom meeting with the historical commission and the Housing Trust um and then on Thursday May 16th the next day uh at 7 o'clock we'll have a meeting with the environmental sustainability committee so the environmental sustainability committee uh has been contributing um to this MVP process well before uh horley Whitten the consultant was involved in this um so that may be you know an interesting one for folks to come to and and kind of hear a little bit about what was at you know what's kind of been raised at some of the other meetings uh leading up to that so um as it says here let's break silos uh I don't want to say that there are silos specifically in Carlile and the way that the different boards and commissions work but they kind of exist everywhere and we're all very busy so to the extent that you can you know share information uh and share your time with a different Bard commission uh that would be uh fabulous so with that I would like to um open this up to questions and I also just want to leave our contact information here um your town staff as you know are Julie Mercier and Sarah waserman and Julie and Sarah can be reached you can find them at Town Hall but email them reach out but also feel free to reach out to our team at horley Wht uh Gabriella and me um we'd be happy to um talk through any ideas you have uh or uh thoughts concerns or just Logistics questions so um I will open it up for any questions and stop sharing my screen in a moment here um and really look forward to everybody participation and meeting you and hearing all your ideas uh or complaints about this uh you know project as we move forward so um thank you all very much all right so if you have questions you can raise hand your hand uh in Zoom or just raise your hand like this and I'll try to find you um is anybody in the standard question are we going to be getting a copy of these slides because rather than badly taking notes about the yes I always get a copy absolutely thank you I'm gonna share my screen one more time just to show that um meeting announcement that Julie has so you can keep a lookout for it but while I do that go ahead John okay my question is I I I teach energy and climate stuff so I'm very familiar with all the ipcc scenarios and the ranges of it and so I guess the big question as you look at ranges and impact it can vary quite a lot and you can be very conservative and therefore other words huge impact over the next 20 30 years and therefore you can say you know there'll be floods everywhere and all these other things or you can be just the opposite so I guess how do how do you deal with the ranges knowing there's all this incredible uncertainty and you know I know we can't get rid of the uncertainty till till we're there but uh so right no that's a good question and for the work that we're doing we're really relying on what the state of Massachusetts is developing and the state uh you know that's sort of our primary go-to for information for planning purposes I mean all of this is for planning purposes and the state has a uh resilience Hub they've basically called it where they have you know in the state you're probably familiar John but the state has done a hazard um mitigation and climate adaptation plan where they've kind of identified based on watersheds the different uh sort of climate projections that they're expecting and they're continually adding to that um but for us for planning purposes that's really what we're using as our uh sort of basic reference uh understanding that there is a lot of uncertainty um but for for planning and for uh sort of public education and public information uh it's helpful to kind of guide people in a in one general direction so that's kind of what we're using for our reference well okay you can all get it when the disasters of flooded roads and Back Bay disappearing and these things we'll we'll deal those are sort of the extreme scenarios easily happen right we know that yeah I mean the other part of this John and I think this is a theme that we've been hearing already through this process and also uh I expect we'll hear more about it but there are some things that you know issues that are already occurring in town with regard to you know trees or Swale management or storm water management Etc that regardless of uh you know what you think may be happening in the future uh or the uncertainty of that there are things that can certainly be improved now about maintenance or design or new development or Redevelopment Etc that can help to alleviate some of the issues moving forward and that in and of itself is part of you know sort of resilience uh of the community as a whole and we heard some of that at the public meeting uh that we held also so I think that's really um you know a valid approach to some of this as well does anyone in person have any questions syvia I had a question I'm sort of stepping outside my usual Silo talk about silos I I'm looking at all the different boards that are mentioned here written a number of them down but is a land use group that hasn't been mentioned and that's the Recreation Commission and I didn't know they ever been considered they do have Fels that they like to use I know that some of the Fels have a problem with being unavailable at times because they're out of SOI and as the T grows who knows they might need more land um but I just a thought that you know they might be interested in participating a little bit with this yeah I appreciate you raising that oh sorry Julie go ahead I was just gonna say I'm happy to make a connection with them and loop them into this oh yeah it's not too late go ahead ell no I was gonna say the same thing that's great put them with this hous TR and hisory available my so this presentation uh is being recorded so that we can sort of share it around and just make sure that folks know about this process um you'll also see these posters around uh I don't know exactly where Julia is posting them but they will have link uh eventually uh you'll be able to get a link to each of these meetings um or come in person so there will be more information coming um and really the purpose of this meeting today is just to make sure everybody is aware and super excited about participating in it so I'll just uh quickly talk about the poster so it's currently out being translated into three other languages um and then you'll see it posted around town buildings at ferns at um some various uh like local gathering places and then also on the MVP website which sits on the planning board page of the town website so um and then individual links for the meetings like we don't have enough space on this one poster to put them all but you can find those um on the town website so on the town calendar or under each um individual boarding committee you'll be able to find the zoom links so are you going to blow this up with the MV for the root of sustainability thank you for the reminder yes I am blowing this up for the root sustainability day as well so you'll see it there if you come it's on April 27th does anybody else have I I'm sorry I I started to go back in I assume at some point you frame this and you probably did this in another meeting in the broader context I'm I'm just thinking around transportation and water flows and everything else and infrastructure that clearly impacts as we know storo Drive get flooded all these other things get FL as do a plenty of of RTS and so the question from a broader infrastructure standpoint in transportation is very much tied to this which affects us you know and so I I mean you're dealing with in each individual Community but there's a broader context I'm just focusing on transportation and you know there's going to be huge impacts in transportation over the next 10 15 years if some of these scenarios you know on hold that costs money as We Know so do you talk about that and sort of frame it in these broader context and rather than each individual Community well yes in General John this project is really focused on Carlile focused on the codes and how the codes can be adjusted and improved to improve the resiliency of Carlile specifically so I your point is totally valid about carile as part of a greater um you know setting and there's uh you're intertwined with Greater Boston you know no doubt about it um I think some of that is a little bit beyond our scope of work for this specific project but there have been and I don't know Julie if you want to talk about it at all but there have been a number of sort of processes like the whole MVP process leading up to this which was a couple years ago certainly I'm sure touched on I mean I know it touched on Transportation I'm sure it talked about Transportation on sort of the regional basis um this is like one action that came out of that process so this project is not necessarily going to focus on such a broad uh setting but your point is well taken and totally valid I think there have been a lot of discussions in town uh about you know sort of the regional issues and and how carile interacts with your neighbors um so I don't know Julie if you want to say anything yeah um I was going to mention too at the public forum in February John there were a lot of comments made by people um regarding our local infrastructure so the importance of maintaining our local roads utilities critical infrastructure um to make us more resilient as part of the bigger context that we're in so um there was a big focus on infrastructure at that meeting um and just a need to kind of put resources behind um what we have currently yeah as well as planning for the future does anybody else on Zoom have any other comments or questions I see a question in the room I believe y Barney hi uh yeah Barney Arn on the select board um I'm just thinking about some of the um um couple of the questions that are going to be on our town meeting agenda in May two of which are about um using CPA funds to conduct hydrologic studies you know Watershed studies for Keno Pond and then um the cranberry blog and so I'm just thinking we should sort of Bear in mind some of the questions that you may be trying to look at or data you're trying to collect whether there's some way right we can include some of that in the study um to be helpful in this larger process of climate resilience consom behind me do you have a sense of the timing of those studies if the funding gets approved summer fall available July July one right the money's available July 1 and then the study would done before Fallen the good news is this grant project goes until June 2025 so we have some time to um get those coordinated with the stuff we're doing here we get them in time right I think we're are there any other last questions comments right so um just want to remind everyone that this is was recorded and will be distributed so that you can share it with your board and committee members who couldn't attend today um and thank you very much for taking time out of your busy days to be here um and please start start thinking about what comments you might want to give um when you come when hopefully when you attend these meetings um in May um start thinking about how what else we can do in town regarding climate resilience and how we can best integrate our different Landy boards and committees um so thanks everybody enjoy the rest of your day thank you Ellie thank you so much for your time everybody thank you have a good day makes them triple the